The Procrastination Cure Nobody Tells You (How To Be Productive & Get Work Done)

00:00:00.000 | A common issue for those trying to cultivate a deeper life in our current world of constant

00:00:04.320 | distraction is that of procrastination.

00:00:08.920 | You have a big idea, something that can make a major change to your working life or your

00:00:13.400 | life outside of work.

00:00:15.040 | Maybe it's a side hustle that could become something bigger.

00:00:18.440 | Maybe it's a new serious commitment to fitness.

00:00:21.080 | Maybe it's a major change of location where you actually live or a hard skill that if

00:00:26.200 | mastered would give you a lot of leverage in your job.

00:00:30.360 | You're inspired, you're excited, but you're having a hard time getting going.

00:00:35.840 | You find yourself putting it off or having a lot of false starts and it fizzles.

00:00:40.500 | I want to talk about procrastination today because it's important, especially for those

00:00:43.760 | interested in the deep life.

00:00:45.480 | In particular, I want to talk about a new way of thinking about procrastination that

00:00:49.160 | I think makes it potentially easier to figure out what it is holding you back and will offer

00:00:53.780 | some new ideas about how to fix things.

00:00:58.720 | So to start with, here is a realization I had recently in my own thoughts about procrastination.

00:01:06.380 | It's not a singular phenomenon.

00:01:09.600 | There are different types of procrastination, which have different causes and different

00:01:16.360 | solutions.

00:01:17.360 | So if you mix up the solutions for the wrong type of procrastination, it might not actually

00:01:21.900 | help the issue that you're facing right now.

00:01:24.280 | I want to focus in particular on two major types of procrastination.

00:01:28.640 | We'll go through the first one, I think is what we more commonly think about with procrastination.

00:01:34.960 | And then the second one is going to be this new one that I realized more recently is a

00:01:38.620 | big deal and it's going to have unique solutions.

00:01:41.740 | So let's start with the more common type of procrastination.

00:01:44.500 | For our purposes, let's call this tactical procrastination.

00:01:49.200 | This is where most of the advice you hear about procrastination is actually aimed.

00:01:54.400 | Tactical procrastination is the result of not sufficiently having your act together.

00:02:01.020 | If you do not sufficiently have your act together, it can be difficult to get going or make progress

00:02:05.780 | on a hard project.

00:02:06.780 | Now let's be a little bit more specific here.

00:02:09.340 | What are the specific causes?

00:02:12.480 | What are the specific types of not having your act together that can cause tactical

00:02:15.980 | procrastination?

00:02:16.980 | One, potentially your brain does not trust your plan.

00:02:21.420 | You haven't really thought this through.

00:02:24.580 | Your brain says you don't know what you're doing.

00:02:26.580 | And as we've talked about multiple times on the show before, if your brain doesn't trust

00:02:31.640 | your plan, it's not going to give you motivation to take action.

00:02:37.700 | Another cause of practical procrastination could be that your brain is so bathed in distraction

00:02:45.300 | that you can no longer summon the ability to overcome even the most modest chemical

00:02:51.100 | obstacles to activity.

00:02:52.900 | Now, if you're wondering what I mean when I say chemical obstacles to activity, you

00:02:56.980 | should listen to last week's episode on discipline.

00:03:01.020 | But if you are constantly looking at this phone, you're constantly looking at your computer,

00:03:05.420 | you're so used to just bathing yourselves in dopamine, your mind is like, "What are

00:03:09.380 | you talking about?"

00:03:11.140 | Just any optional effort you show me is going to be much less exciting than just looking

00:03:16.560 | at distraction.

00:03:17.780 | The final source of tactical procrastination is just you're too disorganized.

00:03:22.220 | You're in reactive mode.

00:03:23.220 | You have too much stuff going on.

00:03:24.740 | You don't have control of your obligations.

00:03:26.600 | You don't have control of your time.

00:03:29.620 | And because of this, you just can't find the time to make regular progress on the particular

00:03:35.140 | problem.

00:03:36.140 | All right.

00:03:37.900 | Tactical procrastination has obvious solutions.

00:03:39.980 | They're not easy to implement, but you have obvious solutions.

00:03:43.620 | If your brain doesn't trust your plan, learn more about it.

00:03:47.140 | You need to learn more about what it is you're trying to do.

00:03:50.220 | And in doing so, you have to face the hard truths about how the particular world in which

00:03:57.460 | you're trying to act.

00:03:58.460 | You have to face the hard truth about how it actually works.

00:04:01.580 | The example I give so often on the show is people who want to rewrite how the publishing

00:04:05.500 | industry works instead of actually learning how you actually publish a book.

00:04:09.000 | They want their plan they came up with to somehow give an end run around how the industry

00:04:13.460 | actually works.

00:04:14.820 | Don't do an end round around how things actually work.

00:04:16.900 | Figure out how it works.

00:04:17.900 | OK.

00:04:18.900 | If you're too distracted to make progress, you need to break your dopamine addiction.

00:04:22.020 | We talk about this all the time on the show.

00:04:24.780 | Go back a couple episodes and you'll hear more about that.

00:04:27.800 | You probably have to stop using social media.

00:04:30.700 | It is not necessary.

00:04:32.460 | You're not an influencer that people really care about.

00:04:34.740 | It is not the core at what's making your business run.

00:04:37.620 | It is you clocking into the invisible factory so that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Byte

00:04:42.700 | Dance can add another zero to their net worth.

00:04:45.820 | You have to simplify your phone.

00:04:47.620 | You have to rewire your phone, which means you plug it in when you're at home.

00:04:50.540 | You don't keep it with you.

00:04:51.760 | You have to practice spending time alone.

00:04:53.400 | We talk about this stuff on the show.

00:04:55.500 | That will solve that problem.

00:04:56.660 | Finally, if you're just too disorganized to find the time to get going, you've got to

00:05:01.300 | get organized.

00:05:02.340 | Go back and listen to my episode called "Productivity Basics" from a few weeks ago.

00:05:08.020 | You need to do full capture.

00:05:09.020 | You need to do multiscale planning.

00:05:13.020 | You need to have autopilot scheduling.

00:05:15.660 | You just need to be on the ball with what's going on in your life and your time.

00:05:20.260 | These are solvable problems.

00:05:23.140 | Tactical procrastination has solvable problems.

00:05:26.700 | There's another type of procrastination that I think we talk about less often.

00:05:30.100 | This was sort of my recent insight.

00:05:33.020 | I call this strategic procrastination.

00:05:35.700 | I'm calling it strategic procrastination because we are at another level of scale here.

00:05:45.380 | Let's say you're in control.

00:05:47.220 | You're organized.

00:05:48.220 | You understand the field in which you're trying to act.

00:05:52.860 | You're not addicted to your phone.

00:05:54.940 | The issues of tactical procrastination just aren't there, and yet you're still reluctant

00:05:58.580 | to make progress.

00:06:00.700 | The solution when it comes to strategic procrastination is a little bit unexpected.

00:06:07.180 | Consider giving up.

00:06:08.180 | Now, let me be a little bit more specific about this.

00:06:11.100 | There's two things I could mean by this.

00:06:13.060 | One, give up on the idea that you're procrastinating on, or two, give up on something else major

00:06:20.020 | so that you have room for the new project that you're going to execute.

00:06:24.780 | This advice is coming from an underlying truth, which I think we often try to avoid, especially

00:06:28.980 | those of us who actually go through the hard work of getting our act together.

00:06:32.660 | Major initiatives to be executed sustainably require a lot of time.

00:06:38.620 | They require a lot of time within your week to make progress, and they require a lot of

00:06:43.540 | weeks so that that progress can add up into something significant.

00:06:49.620 | We can't avoid this reality.

00:06:52.300 | If your schedule is reasonably full, you might not just be able to add the new thing.

00:06:56.860 | You just might not have time for it.

00:07:00.020 | In this case, you can either say, "You know what?

00:07:02.140 | This was an inspiring idea, but I have these other things I've been working on for a while,

00:07:07.100 | and I want to keep working on them," or you say, "We got to change something to make room

00:07:11.460 | for this.

00:07:12.460 | I'm not going to squeeze it in."

00:07:14.140 | Major initiatives are not very susceptible to being squeezed in.

00:07:19.660 | They require time, they require flexibility.

00:07:23.060 | We talked about this actually in last week's in-depth episode with Oliver Berkman.

00:07:27.900 | I think Oliver's pretty good, or I would say really good actually, at emphasizing what

00:07:32.420 | he calls finitude, finititude.

00:07:34.900 | You're finite.

00:07:35.900 | Your time is finite.

00:07:36.900 | There's only so much you can do.

00:07:39.580 | The earlier you embrace that, the better, and this is exactly an instantiation of that

00:07:46.500 | principle.

00:07:47.500 | There's only so many major projects you can do.

00:07:49.960 | How do you know if you have enough time?

00:07:51.140 | Well, I say, "Look, if you have a major new thing you want to work on, add it to your

00:07:55.140 | weekly template."

00:07:57.540 | This is when each week when I work on this, this time is set aside, it's protected, and

00:08:01.700 | I've set aside more than enough time for this.

00:08:03.540 | It has buffer in it, right?

00:08:04.740 | It's not like I have to fill every minute of these small little gaps.

00:08:08.220 | I got good chunks of time set aside.

00:08:11.100 | If you can do that, you can make progress on something.

00:08:13.140 | If you're having a hard time fitting that into your weekly template, then you don't

00:08:16.740 | have time.

00:08:17.740 | So you have to remove something else or you do have time or you have to move on.

00:08:21.860 | So giving up is actually a key strategy when it comes to strategic procrastination.

00:08:28.140 | Now, I have three advanced points to make about this idea.

00:08:32.820 | One, in general, when in doubt, even if you're feeling inspired about a new initiative, when

00:08:38.100 | in doubt, it's usually better to polish or improve efforts on existing initiatives than

00:08:43.260 | to add a new one, especially when you're feeling antsy, maybe a little bored.

00:08:48.860 | Maybe you've been hit with a rush of inspiration that you want to act on.

00:08:53.080 | It's tempting to add something new.

00:08:55.860 | And what I want to argue is, it's often better to say, "Let me go back to this thing I've

00:08:59.680 | already been working on.

00:09:00.680 | I've been becoming a better writer, I'm becoming a better coder, I've been trying to get in

00:09:03.860 | better shape.

00:09:05.020 | Let me improve the thing that I already have regular time set aside for.

00:09:09.220 | Let me get more out of that time than trying to fit something else in."

00:09:15.760 | My second point is, the quest to find time for a major initiative can actually be useful

00:09:22.820 | as a way of cleaning up some of the clutter in your schedule.

00:09:25.740 | So you get committed to this new initiative, you're trying to find time for it to sidestep

00:09:32.700 | strategic procrastination, and you might find, "Oh, the issue is I have all these little

00:09:37.260 | small commitments I've made.

00:09:40.220 | I'm working on this thing, which I don't really care about anymore, but it's eating up a lot

00:09:43.140 | of my day, and I have these calls, and I'm taking this online course kind of half-heartedly,

00:09:47.540 | and look at all these days that it's taken up this time I could have."

00:09:50.780 | And it's a good forcing function for you to realize, "Oh, if I canceled this and got rid

00:09:53.780 | of this and cleaned up some of these smaller things, I could fit in something else major."

00:09:56.940 | So this process of finding time can actually be useful.

00:10:00.820 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:10:01.980 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:10:06.480 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:10:13.940 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:19.360 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:24.740 | I know you're going to like it.

00:10:26.540 | Check it out.

00:10:27.540 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:28.940 | Third point, sometimes it's helpful to work on something seasonally.

00:10:35.180 | All right, I am going to temporarily stop working on this thing and give three months

00:10:42.300 | to this new initiative.

00:10:44.460 | That's how I'm going to clear up time to give it more than enough time, to give it some

00:10:47.140 | breathing room, to give it the attention it deserves, to see if it gets legs, to see if

00:10:51.780 | it unfolds, to see if it's something worth adding to my life.

00:10:57.220 | So like you're podcasting, and you go on a summer hiatus to work on another side hustle

00:11:05.060 | project, like a newsletter, you're not sure if you want to do this or not, give yourself

00:11:08.540 | more than enough time to do it by putting something temporarily on hold.

00:11:12.380 | And then if that new thing goes really well, then you can make some decisions.

00:11:14.980 | Oh, I want to permanently add this, I'm going to have to take something else out, I'm going

00:11:18.140 | to have to change something about my schedule.

00:11:20.940 | So temporarily clearing the decks can sometimes be a good approach as well.

00:11:25.540 | All right?

00:11:26.540 | So when it comes to procrastination, again, just to summarize, we think a lot about tactical

00:11:30.100 | procrastination, which is like, get your act together, so you can make more progress.

00:11:35.500 | But sometimes that procrastination is strategic.

00:11:38.820 | And the real problem is, you don't have enough time.

00:11:41.940 | It's not your systems, it's not your organization, it's not your willpower.

00:11:46.980 | It's a reality that you're finite, and there's only so much you can do.

00:11:50.780 | There you go, Jesse, strategic procrastination.

00:11:54.380 | I deal with that a lot.

00:11:55.380 | I was going to say, did you have a bout with it recently?

00:11:57.780 | Yeah.

00:11:58.780 | I mean, I deal with this all the time, really, because I have my act together, and there's

00:12:02.700 | lots of tempting big projects for me.

00:12:07.060 | But I don't really have time for anything new.

00:12:09.660 | And I often do put things on hold.

00:12:12.220 | It's like going on book leave, the work on a book, you put something else aside, or this

00:12:18.980 | podcast took a long time to get added to my schedule because I had to find a way to find

00:12:24.300 | a regular time for it.

00:12:25.460 | And I didn't have it until a few years ago, and then I did.

00:12:29.220 | So yeah, strategic procrastination, I didn't have a name for it, but it's a big part about

00:12:32.660 | how I think about accomplishments.

00:12:34.060 | All right, anyways, we've got some good questions coming up on all sorts of topics.

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00:16:02.860 | All right, Jesse, let's get to some questions.

00:16:07.740 | Who do we got first?

00:16:10.380 | First question is from Mrs. Exhausted.

00:16:12.780 | I've been a pre-K and first grade teacher for six years in an elementary public school.

00:16:17.260 | I love the students and I have amazing coworkers, but my district has been horrible with annual

00:16:22.020 | changes.

00:16:23.020 | Should I switch counties to teach fifth grade with only one subject?

00:16:26.100 | Well, I'm going to use this as an example to talk about two general keys to keep in

00:16:32.020 | mind when considering a job change.

00:16:35.660 | The first key, and this comes from my book So Good They Can't Ignore You, is to be careful

00:16:40.300 | when making a change that you're not throwing out hard-won career capital.

00:16:45.420 | So career capital is my term for rare and valuable skills.

00:16:48.460 | It is your main leverage for controlling the day-to-day reality of your job.

00:16:51.780 | It's your main leverage for making your job sustainable and fulfilling.

00:16:55.980 | An often-made mistake is to chase the content of the job and leave your career capital behind,

00:17:05.140 | and it's a mistake because career capital makes much more difference than the content

00:17:08.260 | of your job.

00:17:09.940 | So if you were leaving teaching to go work at ESPN because you love sports, that would

00:17:17.220 | be probably a mistake because you're getting rid of all the career capital you had built

00:17:21.100 | up for teaching just to go after a job whose title or content is more appealing to you,

00:17:25.500 | but you'll soon realize the main thing that matters is not what your job is, but what

00:17:29.400 | you can do with your career capital.

00:17:31.180 | You don't have this problem in the scenario we're discussing.

00:17:34.040 | You're moving from teaching to teaching, so that would take your career capital with you.

00:17:38.740 | The second thing to keep in mind when thinking about changing your job is to make sure that

00:17:42.620 | if you're unhappy with something about your current employer, you're not making a move

00:17:49.420 | to sort of protest or express your anger at the current employer.

00:17:53.860 | They don't care.

00:17:55.180 | They won't notice.

00:17:56.700 | Your new employer will have other things that annoy you.

00:18:00.100 | The main reason to make a move from one place to another within the same industry is that

00:18:05.980 | the job-related lifestyle factors are better.

00:18:09.180 | So if you're doing lifestyle-centric planning, you have a vision of a life well lived, the

00:18:14.740 | elements of what you want in your life.

00:18:16.500 | You have this clear vision, including sort of like the feel and rhythms of your job.

00:18:20.340 | If the new job is moving you notably closer towards this vision, that's a good reason

00:18:26.020 | to change.

00:18:27.220 | If you're just annoyed with the way that your current job is handling some things, that's

00:18:31.300 | much less of a good reason to change, right?

00:18:34.520 | Because here's the thing.

00:18:36.380 | Let's say, for example, you're annoyed with how your current district is handling annual

00:18:40.020 | changes.

00:18:41.020 | You go to this other district to teach fifth grade.

00:18:42.300 | They'll do something else that annoys you, and you certainly never want to make a change

00:18:46.880 | to try to make a point because, again, no one cares.

00:18:50.660 | In your mind, you imagine when you change districts because you don't like the way

00:18:57.260 | they handle annual changes, that there's like some war room somewhere in the school administration

00:19:02.180 | building where they're like, oh, no.

00:19:04.840 | We just had a teacher leave for the fifth grade.

00:19:06.500 | Why did they do it?

00:19:07.580 | She didn't like the annual changes, and they're like, ah, she was right.

00:19:10.940 | What have we done?

00:19:12.020 | What have we done?

00:19:13.020 | They're rending their clothes, and like, we knew it.

00:19:15.420 | We knew this was bad.

00:19:17.720 | She really showed us, and there's someone just hitting the table.

00:19:21.000 | Why?

00:19:22.000 | Why?

00:19:23.000 | No one notices.

00:19:24.000 | So don't make a change to spite someone.

00:19:25.960 | Don't make a change to make a point.

00:19:28.020 | Don't make a change because you're annoyed because you will be annoyed in almost every

00:19:30.960 | job, especially if you have a job in the public sector like public school teaching.

00:19:36.720 | Public sector bureaucracies are going to annoy you.

00:19:40.520 | Spoiler alert.

00:19:41.520 | So if you're going to change, bring your career capital and make sure that you're changing

00:19:45.200 | because the lifestyle implications are positive.

00:19:48.640 | Now, that could be the case for you right here.

00:19:50.080 | It sounds like it might be, so that would be a good reason to change if you're clear

00:19:53.320 | that this new position would get you closer to your ideal lifestyle.

00:19:56.140 | But those two points, I think, apply to any potential job change.

00:19:59.760 | All right.

00:20:00.760 | Who do we got next?

00:20:02.640 | Next question's from Kevin.

00:20:04.600 | Coding can be used to automate a lot of tasks if you properly set up on the front end.

00:20:08.720 | Do you use coding to automate tasks, or are there tasks that you recommend trying to make

00:20:12.720 | time to automate with scripts?

00:20:17.120 | Here's the thing about automating personal shallow work, as opposed to what most of these

00:20:24.960 | tools were created for, which is like automating processes that an organization or a team does.

00:20:31.800 | To me, it's a hobby.

00:20:34.080 | If you're a coder, it could be fun.

00:20:36.600 | If you like it, like, "This is cool.

00:20:38.360 | I got Zapier to connect to this API over here, and it does this automatically," it could

00:20:43.600 | be fun.

00:20:44.600 | If you're into it, go for it.

00:20:46.740 | It's not going to make your working life significantly better, and it's far from a necessity for

00:20:51.520 | people in general to do.

00:20:54.640 | This is just an extension, I think, of the productivity prong movement, which arose in

00:20:59.800 | the early 2000s, which has always sold this promise that with the right technology and

00:21:07.400 | the right technological skills, work can become significantly easier.

00:21:12.040 | If you just deploy the right tool in the right way, work will become significantly easier

00:21:16.160 | just from a subjective experience.

00:21:18.520 | This was the big push, for example, in the early 2000s in the Merlin Man 43 Folders community.

00:21:25.560 | People thought, "Look, if we take David Allen's getting-thing-done methodology and we connect

00:21:31.040 | this with Mac-based computer tools, we can basically have the computer take over most

00:21:36.400 | of the hard stuff of work, and we'll just be cranking widgets, and work will get easy."

00:21:41.160 | And it didn't, because work is hard, and you can't automate in the end having to actually

00:21:46.340 | do the thing, figure out what email to write, do the reading, producing the new code, producing

00:21:51.920 | the words that need to come into the strategy memo.

00:21:54.240 | That's the hard stuff that's going to be hard.

00:21:56.040 | The context switching is going to be hard.

00:21:58.480 | You can't automate that away.

00:22:00.480 | Most of what you do automate is actually not big of a footprint.

00:22:03.400 | It's not the problem.

00:22:04.400 | The problem is not, "How do I get these proposed dates from this email and onto my calendar?"

00:22:11.480 | It doesn't take long.

00:22:13.540 | You open up a calendar over here, and you put the dates in, right?

00:22:16.800 | The hard thing is I have to think about which of these dates works when I was just working

00:22:20.360 | on something else, and now my mind is context shifted over.

00:22:23.440 | You can't automate your way out of work being hard.

00:22:26.520 | That being said, there is nothing wrong with it.

00:22:28.720 | I think it's cool.

00:22:30.440 | If you're kind of like a geek or a programmer like me, yeah, have at it, but if you're not,

00:22:35.720 | don't worry about it.

00:22:36.720 | This is not somehow necessary for making your work much better.

00:22:40.040 | All right, who we got next?

00:22:42.800 | All right, next question is from Tanner.

00:22:45.160 | "When reading for pleasure, I have no problem, but when it comes to reading with the goal

00:22:48.840 | of retaining information for a project, I struggle.

00:22:51.640 | Specifically, I have several biographies, classic texts, and self-help books I just

00:22:55.480 | can't seem to get through, sometimes only reading 15 pages in an hour."

00:22:59.640 | Some of this is just practice, right?

00:23:03.400 | I think you're jumping ahead into books that you're not that interested in, and you're

00:23:08.960 | not that used to reading, and your mind is like, "What are we up to here?"

00:23:12.180 | That's not a big deal.

00:23:13.560 | Here's what you do.

00:23:15.280 | In these genres where you are struggling, put in the work to find books in those genres

00:23:21.760 | that you are super psyched about and love, all right?

00:23:25.520 | Instead of, let's say you're not used to biography, don't jump straight into saying, "I'm going

00:23:33.520 | to read all four extant volumes of Robert Carroll's Lyndon B. Johnson biography," right?

00:23:40.600 | But find a shorter biography of someone who's really interesting to you and is really motivating.

00:23:47.440 | Maybe what you read instead is something maybe even more memoir-like.

00:23:52.720 | Let's read Rich Roll's Finding Ultra, something where it's getting into someone's life, and

00:23:56.680 | they're doing something inspirational or whatever it is, but find something you love in self-help.

00:24:03.560 | That's its own genre.

00:24:04.560 | Find a self-help book that's like, "Put it in my veins.

00:24:07.560 | This is exactly what I'm interested in.

00:24:09.840 | This exactly talks to what I care about."

00:24:11.640 | You're going to zip through that book really quick.

00:24:14.840 | As you get used to those genres, then you can kind of wander a little bit farther from

00:24:19.480 | the things that you absolutely love, and you get more used to reading other types of things.

00:24:22.720 | I think that's fine.

00:24:24.100 | You can also experiment with audio.

00:24:26.080 | Some people really like listening to biographies on audio.

00:24:28.240 | Maybe you want to try that as well, and you'll get more used to it.

00:24:32.960 | A related point here, part of your problem might be dopamine addiction.

00:24:41.400 | The problem might be, in addition to you not being used to these type of books, is that

00:24:45.160 | your mind is used to looking at your phone.

00:24:47.880 | Every hint of boredom, I get a quick hit of algorithmically optimized distraction.

00:24:52.620 | If that's the case, you need to work on that as well, because your brain could basically

00:24:56.680 | be saying, "This is boring."

00:24:58.600 | If you're only getting through 15 pages in an hour, your brain keeps disengaging from

00:25:02.060 | what you're doing, probably because it's seeking dopamine, and probably you're feeding it.

00:25:06.160 | Probably you're getting 25 checks of your phone in that hour where you're only reading

00:25:09.480 | 15 pages.

00:25:10.480 | There might be a deeper problem here where you need to reduce the noise in your life,

00:25:14.720 | and that's probably going to mean stepping away from social media.

00:25:18.200 | My apologies again to Musk, Zuckerberg, and ByteDance, but you probably have to step away

00:25:23.140 | from social media.

00:25:24.460 | You probably have to what I call rewiring your phone, which is plug your phone in when

00:25:27.480 | you're at home and keep it in that one location.

00:25:29.280 | It's not with you as a default.

00:25:30.800 | When you're reading, your phone's not there.

00:25:32.080 | If you need to look something up, you have to go where your phone is plugged in and look

00:25:36.320 | it up and then go back to where you're reading.

00:25:37.900 | You've got to rewire your phone and spend more time alone, outside, walking, just with

00:25:42.480 | your own thoughts.

00:25:44.020 | As you reduce a dopamine addiction, you'll also probably have an easier time keeping

00:25:47.700 | your mind focused on the abstract for longer periods of time.

00:25:51.880 | The final thing, if you really want to try to train this here, if you really think it's

00:25:54.720 | an attention issue, do interval training.

00:25:58.600 | Don't sit down for an hour and have your mind start wandering, you only get through 15 pages.

00:26:03.600 | Instead, say, "I'm going to sit down with this hard book for 10 minutes and I'm going

00:26:07.640 | to read the hell out of it for 10 minutes."

00:26:09.600 | As soon as my mind wanders, like, "No, back.

00:26:11.920 | Let's just do this.

00:26:12.920 | Let's move and focus and concentrate.

00:26:14.880 | It's just for 10 minutes.

00:26:15.880 | I can do that."

00:26:17.760 | After you get comfortable with that, which may take a few weeks, you make it 15, then

00:26:22.520 | you make it 20.

00:26:23.520 | You can also directly interval train the specific focus that is induced when you're reading

00:26:29.280 | a book.

00:26:30.280 | Again, your brain will get more used to this.

00:26:33.480 | All of this, I'm just giving you all these different ideas to help prepare and train

00:26:36.160 | your brain for reading these books.

00:26:38.800 | It's all casting reading books like you would cast shooting free throws or playing the guitar.

00:26:44.600 | It's not at all surprising, it means very little to me that you say, "Look, I just started

00:26:48.180 | trying to shoot the basketball and I'm not really making very many free throws or I just

00:26:52.000 | picked up a guitar and it sounds pretty terrible."

00:26:53.960 | I say, "Yeah, of course.

00:26:54.960 | You got to train.

00:26:55.960 | You got to get your fingers stronger.

00:26:56.960 | You got to find the muscle memory for the shot.

00:26:59.400 | You're going to have to throw 1,000 free throws before it starts coming easier.

00:27:02.640 | You're going to have to—it's going to take a lot of times trying to play that D chord

00:27:06.720 | before your fingers are able to hit it cleanly, but you will get better, of course.

00:27:10.320 | It's not impossible, but it's not trivial."

00:27:13.880 | That's what I'm trying to point out here is you can get better at this, and that's kind

00:27:18.880 | of the big point here.

00:27:19.880 | All right.

00:27:20.880 | Who do we got next?

00:27:23.200 | Next question is from W. "My company operates using the hyperactive high mind approach.

00:27:27.960 | I've implemented all your tactics and I was promoted last spring, but I'm unfulfilled.

00:27:32.820 | Should I return and finish my PhD to pursue academic work or lean more into my hobbies?"

00:27:37.800 | All right.

00:27:38.800 | Well, this is a—you got the special question here because the answer here is going to deal

00:27:44.000 | with lifestyle centric planning, perhaps not surprisingly, but I want to use this excuse

00:27:51.560 | to show off for those who are watching instead of just listening the latest piece of Deep

00:27:57.520 | Questions podcast sartorial gear.

00:28:02.960 | We've got new hats.

00:28:03.960 | I'm going to put mine on here.

00:28:05.040 | Hold on one second.

00:28:11.840 | These are our new and improved Deep Questions hats.

00:28:17.280 | So for those who are listening instead of watching, this is my VBLCCP hat now based

00:28:24.720 | on our feedback.

00:28:26.240 | Our man, Zachary Davey, who made these hats for us, has given me a smaller—I had them

00:28:31.240 | resized and put in the corner like a surfer hat—VBLCCP values-based lifestyle centric

00:28:37.920 | career planning.

00:28:40.140 | This is an awesome looking hat.

00:28:42.080 | Jesse is showing off a Deep Life hat.

00:28:45.400 | Looking good.

00:28:46.400 | So I figured I'd put on my VBLCCP hat if we're going to give an answer about VBLCCP.

00:28:52.280 | I do want to shout out Zachary Davey at CompanyOutfitters.net.

00:28:56.080 | That's who did these hats for us, so hit him up.

00:28:59.360 | He's got this company called Say It With Stitches.

00:29:01.760 | So go to CompanyOutfitters.net if you want to get your cool gear.

00:29:05.600 | All right.

00:29:06.600 | So with the hat on, Jesse, I am ready to go all lifestyle-centric planning.

00:29:11.640 | The hat messes with my earphones.

00:29:12.640 | It's interesting.

00:29:13.640 | It all sounds weird.

00:29:14.640 | All right.

00:29:15.640 | So W, I'm going to harness the power of the hat and give you an answer here about lifestyle-centric

00:29:22.240 | planning.

00:29:23.960 | Before you run out the door and sign up for a PhD program, let's get more strategic.

00:29:31.700 | You need a broad vision for your ideal lifestyle.

00:29:36.560 | This broad vision should be based on your values.

00:29:38.560 | There's the V in VBLCCP, and it should cover all aspects of your life.

00:29:43.600 | What does a typical day look like?

00:29:45.080 | What's the rhythm of your day?

00:29:46.660 | What does it look like around where you are?

00:29:48.440 | How does your work fit into this day?

00:29:51.060 | What is the feel of what your work is doing?

00:29:54.000 | Are you stepping out of a rural home, the walk to a pond in the woods where you're going

00:29:58.680 | to be writing in a notebook with a coffee, or is it you're heading to like a galley loft

00:30:03.880 | in the city where there's all sorts of high-energy creative work going on?

00:30:07.680 | Is it a vision that's really centered around taking your kids to school and being there

00:30:11.400 | to pick them up on the way back and being plugged into your town life?

00:30:15.680 | Is it being a master of a universe type that's moving numbers and making bank?

00:30:22.560 | You got to get this vision.

00:30:25.080 | Don't be specific about, "I live in this town.

00:30:26.880 | I have this job."

00:30:27.880 | Get the vision that resonates, this vision of your ideal lifestyle.

00:30:32.560 | Working backwards from that vision is the whole ballgame.

00:30:36.320 | That's how we figure out what you should do for your job.

00:30:38.720 | And when you have this vision of the different aspects of your life and what it feels like,

00:30:43.520 | and you start thinking through all of the many different options you have to get closer

00:30:46.840 | there, a lot of options will come up for your job.

00:30:50.120 | It might turn out that, "Wait a second.

00:30:52.520 | My job is a fantastic engine for moving towards this vision.

00:30:58.960 | It's contained.

00:30:59.960 | Maybe it's hyperactive, but I can change that a little bit or it's okay because it's just

00:31:05.960 | 9 to 5 and I like where we live and it opens up these other opportunities."

00:31:10.040 | Or maybe you realize, "Oh, this job is almost right, but the hyperactive hive mind element

00:31:14.400 | is making it really draining work.

00:31:16.720 | Why don't I use my career capital to switch over to this lateral move within the organization?

00:31:21.000 | It's not going to make me more money.

00:31:22.080 | In fact, maybe I'm going to lose a little money, but it's going to be more autonomous

00:31:25.080 | and the hyperactive hive mind aspect goes away, but otherwise we can still live here

00:31:29.200 | and the income and it allows me to work remote and my vision works out."

00:31:33.400 | Or maybe when you do this exercise, you realize like, "Oh, I got to get out of this job altogether.

00:31:36.920 | We got to move to a different part of the country.

00:31:38.480 | I need a completely different structure of work."

00:31:41.360 | All of these decisions become clear when you're working backwards from an ideal vision, a

00:31:46.320 | vision of the ideal lifestyle.

00:31:48.880 | What you don't want to do is be reactive to feelings in the moment.

00:31:52.120 | All right, so if you say, "Look, I don't know.

00:31:54.520 | I'm unhappy.

00:31:55.520 | I think I feel unfulfilled."

00:31:57.400 | That leads to grand goals and this myth that a grand goal can solve everything.

00:32:03.160 | So if I just quit and get a PhD, this will solve everything.

00:32:08.600 | If I just like switch to a different job, maybe that'll solve everything.

00:32:12.680 | Pursuing a singular grand goal rarely is going to fix all the issues because your vision

00:32:18.440 | of the ideal life has all these different attributes.

00:32:21.360 | When you focus on just one thing, you're not only just ignoring a lot of those attributes,

00:32:24.200 | you might actually be making them worse.

00:32:26.640 | Now, people don't like this.

00:32:28.680 | Grand goals are fun because they're inspirational and we want to ride the inspiration like you

00:32:32.080 | ride a drug.

00:32:34.200 | So it's romantic.

00:32:35.200 | I'll get my PhD.

00:32:36.200 | You don't want to think anything more about it, but follow through the storyline.

00:32:41.800 | Pull this thread a little farther.

00:32:43.440 | Where does it go?

00:32:45.480 | Does it lead to?

00:32:46.480 | What's the lifestyle this leads to?

00:32:48.320 | What is it?

00:32:49.320 | You're going to be teaching somewhere?

00:32:50.320 | Well, it's not going to be probably a great teaching job if later in life, you're going

00:32:53.120 | back to a PhD, right?

00:32:56.600 | I mean, the tenure track types of romantic professor jobs like I have typically require

00:33:02.240 | that you're a hot shot out of college and go to a number one program like I did and

00:33:07.000 | really bust it for six or seven years and become a real force in your field and publish

00:33:10.660 | all these papers or whatever.

00:33:12.160 | So you might just end up doing adjunct teaching and that's going to be frustrating maybe at

00:33:16.880 | this stage of life and not have the income you need.

00:33:18.800 | Like you got to pull these threads and the best way to avoid again falling into this

00:33:23.440 | trap is to work backwards from the ideal vision of a life well lived and not forwards towards

00:33:28.320 | a singular grand goal.

00:33:31.400 | The other advantage of doing values based lifestyle centric career planning or as I

00:33:34.880 | typically in my book, Jesse, I'm just calling it lifestyle centric planning.

00:33:37.600 | It's a bit of a mouthful.

00:33:39.000 | I love it on the hat, which I am going to wear because this is how I'm going to find

00:33:42.880 | my tribe.

00:33:44.640 | Probably so many people will know this, though I am kind of simplifying it.

00:33:47.960 | The key to this is it gives you a sense of autonomy and improvement in your life right

00:33:51.300 | away and it might turn out as you work on all these other aspects of your life that

00:33:58.640 | you're fine.

00:33:59.640 | That like actually your unhappiness was not coming from the email frequency of your job,

00:34:04.220 | but there's all these other things that matter to you that were not being expressed.

00:34:08.840 | But your connection to community, maybe nature, maybe a sense of your mind and being able

00:34:17.840 | to be engaged in interesting ideas or a sense of productivity.

00:34:23.440 | Maybe your job is very abstract and you have no sense of making my intentions made manifest

00:34:28.040 | concretely in the world and you feel unmoored.

00:34:31.520 | Maybe it's just something about the neighborhood you live in and the rhythms of it and moving

00:34:34.640 | a mile away could change all of that.

00:34:37.440 | It might turn out that your lack of fulfillment has nothing to do with your job.

00:34:40.280 | Again, you can't figure this out until you figure out what it is I actually want.

00:34:43.680 | So you need to do some lifestyle centric planning.

00:34:46.640 | All right.

00:34:47.640 | Now that we have these hats on, Jesse, I think every question I have to bring back to this.

00:34:53.720 | I feel like in a way it's kind of like golf in terms of because he alluded to the fact

00:34:59.040 | that he does lifestyle centric planning.

00:35:03.440 | But even with golf, you figure one thing out and it's like, oh, well, but maybe this part

00:35:08.120 | of this wing isn't going to do something.

00:35:09.920 | Yeah.

00:35:10.920 | I mean, I would like to talk to him about what planning he's doing because when I hear

00:35:14.200 | someone say maybe I should go get my PhD, I know they're not doing lifestyle centric

00:35:18.240 | planning right.

00:35:19.240 | Right.

00:35:20.240 | I mean, unless it's, again, someone who is on the hotshot academic track.

00:35:27.040 | That is the epitome of I don't know what to do and maybe this will fix me.

00:35:32.800 | And it almost never does.

00:35:33.800 | I mean, look, I say my my rules for grad school, I say all the time, let me repeat them one

00:35:37.460 | more time.

00:35:38.740 | Do not get a graduate degree unless there is a specific position that you want.

00:35:46.000 | You have good reasons for wanting it.

00:35:48.160 | And you have concrete evidence that the specific degree you are going to get at the specific

00:35:53.980 | place where you're going to get the degree will make that position available.

00:35:57.680 | And if you don't, it's not right.

00:36:00.700 | You have to have here is the concrete thing I want to do and why.

00:36:05.380 | And I have evidence that if I get this degree from here, I can I could probably do this

00:36:09.080 | and I can't without.

00:36:11.620 | Sometimes this is obvious.

00:36:14.000 | Like I wanted to be a professor when I was at the end of my undergrad degree, I was trying

00:36:19.600 | to figure out what I want to do.

00:36:21.900 | And I said, you know what?

00:36:22.900 | I think I want to be a professor if possible.

00:36:25.560 | I want to make a run at that because I think the autonomy, the intellectual engagement,

00:36:30.840 | the focus on results, not pseudo productivity.

00:36:34.160 | That's what I really wanted.

00:36:35.160 | That met me well.

00:36:36.160 | You'd have to have a Ph.D. to do that.

00:36:39.440 | So it made plenty of sense for me to go to graduate school.

00:36:43.280 | And I had the hard evidence.

00:36:44.280 | Right.

00:36:45.280 | I mean, I talked to my professors at Dartmouth, like, what does it take to become a professor

00:36:48.920 | at a place like this?

00:36:50.720 | And they're very clear about it.

00:36:51.720 | Like, yeah, look, you've got to go to you're not at like a top five graduate program and

00:36:55.080 | killing it.

00:36:56.080 | It's probably not going to work.

00:36:57.080 | They get we get 300 applications, you know, newly minted doctorates for every position.

00:37:01.640 | You got to be going to a top place.

00:37:02.800 | Right.

00:37:03.800 | It's like, OK, I got into MIT so I can go to a top place.

00:37:06.080 | And here's what it will take.

00:37:07.640 | Here's what you have to do.

00:37:08.640 | And I was like, OK, so I know what I have to do when I get there.

00:37:10.760 | Like, I have the plan.

00:37:12.000 | I might not succeed.

00:37:13.000 | It's very hard, but at least it was possible.

00:37:14.160 | That makes sense.

00:37:15.240 | Here in D.C., both in the government and in companies that work with the government, there

00:37:22.720 | are often just formal requirements.

00:37:25.880 | You have to have a master's degree in one of these subjects.

00:37:28.680 | We don't really care where it's from, but you have to have a master's degree in order

00:37:31.400 | to get X, this position or this contract.

00:37:34.160 | So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:37:36.120 | You're like, OK, in my career, I want to go from here to there.

00:37:41.200 | I need to get one of these degrees.

00:37:44.280 | And I know getting these degrees necessary.

00:37:45.920 | And I know if I get this degree, it'll make it possible.

00:37:48.000 | Yeah, of course, I'm going to go do that.

00:37:49.720 | That makes a lot of sense.

00:37:50.760 | If you're in banking or consulting, to get to a certain level, you have to get an MBA.

00:37:59.600 | That's just how it works.

00:38:00.600 | So that makes a lot of sense.

00:38:01.600 | This is why I'm going to get my master's degree, because I want to be managing director at

00:38:05.560 | Salomon Brothers or whatever, and I've been there for four years, and this is like the

00:38:08.560 | thing you have to do.

00:38:10.000 | That makes sense.

00:38:11.000 | But if you're bored and unfulfilled and say, I don't know, I kind of like college, you

00:38:15.200 | know, my frat was fun.

00:38:17.400 | Let's go get a PhD.

00:38:18.400 | That's not the right reason to do it.

00:38:21.760 | All right.

00:38:23.720 | We should get a hat.

00:38:24.720 | Here's my new thing, and I think this would be great for YouTube.

00:38:27.360 | We should have a hat for every single topic we deal with and just constantly switch them.

00:38:33.280 | That way you're never-- there's no mystery around what we're talking about, just everything

00:38:39.360 | we put on, put another hat.

00:38:40.360 | All right.

00:38:41.360 | What do we got here?

00:38:42.360 | Do we have a slow productivity corner?

00:38:43.360 | We do.

00:38:44.360 | All right.

00:38:45.360 | Let's hear that theme music.

00:38:46.360 | All right.

00:38:54.120 | Each week we like to identify one question that is specifically relevant to my new book,

00:38:58.260 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:39:01.180 | If you haven't bought that book, buy it now.

00:39:03.440 | It is the cheat sheet for at least half of what we talk about here on the show.

00:39:08.000 | All right.

00:39:09.000 | What's today's slow productivity corner question?

00:39:12.040 | Questions from Yuri.

00:39:13.200 | I'm a director of an innovation at a university in the Ukraine.

00:39:17.160 | After three months here, I have a team of three and 37 open projects.

00:39:21.360 | We joke that our goal is to choose what project not to start.

00:39:25.160 | What's a good way to handle the pressures of our university to complete projects while

00:39:28.720 | also not overgrowing my team and causing burnout?

00:39:32.080 | All right.

00:39:33.080 | Well, this is a great example of a key principle from the book, Slow Productivity, where I

00:39:40.080 | talk about doing fewer things.

00:39:42.920 | What I mean about that is exactly, actually, what we see here is don't do too many things

00:39:48.520 | at once.

00:39:49.520 | Now, IT teams, innovation teams, project-based teams, like the team being discussed here

00:39:55.120 | in this question, they're actually pretty good at this.

00:39:58.560 | I'd love to hear—we have a—oh, oh, I see.

00:40:03.920 | Oh, okay.

00:40:04.920 | Actually, I've got to—I'm going to revise myself here.

00:40:07.960 | Here's what I thought you were saying, Yuri.

00:40:09.440 | So I'm going to tell you what I thought you were saying, and it's not what you're saying.

00:40:14.640 | But then the thing I thought you were saying I'm very happy about, so I'm going to push

00:40:17.000 | you towards it.

00:40:18.000 | So what I thought you were saying is that you're working—your team is working on three

00:40:23.500 | projects right now, and you have a backlog of 37.

00:40:29.060 | That's what I wanted to hear, right?

00:40:31.560 | Because the key principle is I don't care how many projects the university has pushed

00:40:36.040 | in your direction.

00:40:37.640 | I don't care if it's 37.

00:40:39.720 | I don't care if it's 307.

00:40:42.580 | What I care about is how you decide how many you're going to be actively working on.

00:40:48.200 | And with a team of three, you should be working probably on three projects at a time, right?

00:40:54.720 | And so the key here is your workload, your daily workload for the members of your team

00:41:00.640 | should be the same no matter how many projects are in your queue, because the number of things

00:41:05.200 | you work on at once is fixed, and it's the same whether there's 500 things waiting or

00:41:10.000 | 10.

00:41:11.000 | All right?

00:41:12.520 | That is the way you have to deal with this.

00:41:14.200 | Now, in slow productivity in particular, in Principle 1, this shows up in Chapter 3, where

00:41:18.640 | I talk about the principle of doing fewer things, I discuss a team at a—this is at

00:41:23.320 | the Broad Institute in Cambridge—and I talk specifically about, here's this team that

00:41:29.200 | is given all of these projects by the Broader Institute, their technology projects, tools

00:41:34.360 | they want them to build, systems they want them to innovate, that's going to make the

00:41:37.780 | institute run better.

00:41:38.780 | It's a very similar situation, Yuri, to what you're talking about here.

00:41:41.940 | And what they did that was very successful is that every potential project, they wrote

00:41:46.880 | on an index card and they put it on the wall, in a column they had marked off, like, waiting

00:41:52.060 | to work on.

00:41:54.580 | Next to that, they had a column of currently working on.

00:41:58.580 | And they had a note on each of the things in the currently working on, who's taking

00:42:01.960 | the lead on this, who's working on this.

00:42:04.940 | And the key was, you couldn't have too much stuff in the currently working on.

00:42:09.560 | You could lead one thing yourself, so if you have three team members, maybe you can have

00:42:12.480 | like three projects going on.

00:42:14.720 | As soon as a project finished or hit a break point, like, okay, now we have to wait for

00:42:18.480 | feedback or whatever, they would move it out of that column and bring something new from

00:42:24.280 | the waiting to work on into the currently working on project—column.

00:42:29.200 | As I report in the book, the number of projects they completed went up.

00:42:34.600 | When they were working on a fewer number of things at a time, they could give it their

00:42:36.880 | full attention, complete them well, and complete them fast.

00:42:39.640 | The rate at which projects were completed went up because they weren't having the overhead

00:42:45.540 | of trying to switch between too many things.

00:42:47.480 | That's what you need to do, Yuri.

00:42:48.520 | You need to have a wall where you have all the things we've been asked to do, and you

00:42:51.200 | have the wall of here's what we're working on, and all that matters is your limit for

00:42:55.460 | how many things can be in that here's what we're working on.

00:42:58.600 | And the pressure from the number of things you've been asked to do should not affect

00:43:01.840 | the number of things you work on.

00:43:03.600 | Work should feel like work, no matter how much stuff is queued up.

00:43:08.780 | You should not be trying to work on more things at the same time.

00:43:12.080 | There's no other real answer here.

00:43:13.640 | Like, you can't work on 37 projects—it might as well be 3,000.

00:43:17.220 | You can't work on 37 projects at the same time, right?

00:43:20.240 | There's only so many hours in the day.

00:43:22.440 | So like, once you're past four or five projects, there's no more—you can't sustain an approach

00:43:27.840 | where you're like, "We'll just work on everything that's been pushed our way."

00:43:29.880 | So be clear about it.

00:43:30.880 | Be clear to the university.

00:43:31.880 | Be clear to anyone else who's giving you pressure.

00:43:33.920 | Here is how we work.

00:43:35.920 | Here's our list of things we're queued up to do.

00:43:37.800 | Here's the things we're working on.

00:43:39.920 | We work incredibly hard and efficiently and with focus on the things we're currently working

00:43:43.120 | on.

00:43:44.120 | As we finish, we bring more things over.

00:43:45.280 | There is no way to go faster.

00:43:48.320 | You know, this is how fast this team can finish things.

00:43:53.760 | You're welcome to give us feedback about prioritizing the stuff we're waiting to work on.

00:43:58.680 | You're welcome to come in at any time you want and cross things off this list.

00:44:02.160 | Forget about this.

00:44:03.160 | Forget about that.

00:44:04.160 | Forget about this.

00:44:05.160 | But we cannot change the number of things we're working on concurrently.

00:44:08.080 | That's like squeezing blood out of a turnip, out of a rock, whatever the expression is.

00:44:12.880 | Our time is our time.

00:44:14.520 | We've saturated it.

00:44:15.880 | This is how we produce the best work.

00:44:19.040 | The big thing I try to advise in that section is like, we should do this even if you're

00:44:23.600 | not in a team, like really where knowledge work needs to get is that individuals are

00:44:28.840 | doing this as well.

00:44:30.840 | You can push as much stuff at me as you want, but I work on three things at a time and as

00:44:35.680 | I finish things, I bring more things in.

00:44:37.920 | That is the key, that sort of workload management, that binary differentiation between active

00:44:42.720 | and waiting is like the number one key for reducing burnout and it maximizes the rate

00:44:50.560 | of completion, which has to be the metric you care about, right?

00:44:55.400 | If I run an organization, it does not matter to me how many things you're working on at

00:45:00.480 | once.

00:45:01.480 | It does not matter to me how many things people say they're working on.

00:45:03.520 | All I care about is the things to finish.

00:45:05.960 | The rate at which things finish, how many things do we finish this month?

00:45:09.120 | How many things do we finish this quarter?

00:45:11.000 | That's what matters.

00:45:12.320 | And if you want to maximize that, you have to reduce and constrain the number of things

00:45:17.360 | you're working on at any one point, right?

00:45:20.180 | So look, I get into that in depth and slow productivity, but it's a critical point to

00:45:25.520 | making productivity more sustainable.

00:45:27.720 | It's also our excuse, Jesse, to hear that theme music one more time.

00:45:33.520 | All right.

00:45:40.520 | Now I feel relaxed.

00:45:41.520 | You know what other music I find relaxing?

00:45:45.800 | So if you haven't, if you like that theme music and you have not listened to either

00:45:49.580 | of our in-depth episodes yet, our semi-regular Thursday episodes, listen to it for no other

00:45:54.940 | reason than the theme music.

00:45:57.140 | And it's the same, let's give credit where credit's due, Kieran, who did the main theme

00:46:04.160 | for the podcast, the sort of techno nerd theme, which I love so much.

00:46:08.400 | He did our kind of cool in-depth theme as well.

00:46:11.860 | So for no other reason, you should listen to those episodes just to hear the cool guitar

00:46:17.560 | music.

00:46:18.560 | I think it'd be, so it's like guitar chords.

00:46:20.600 | I think it'd be cool if like when you watched it on YouTube, it was just me rocking out

00:46:24.040 | on a guitar, just playing those chords and putting my guitar aside.

00:46:28.520 | That would be, that's how you get views, Jesse.

00:46:31.520 | Hats.

00:46:32.520 | A lot of shredding your axe.

00:46:34.080 | All right.

00:46:35.080 | Let's get, let's get a call in.

00:46:36.080 | Sounds good.

00:46:37.080 | Hey, Cal.

00:46:38.080 | Long time listener.

00:46:39.080 | Love the podcast.

00:46:40.080 | My question for you is this.

00:46:41.080 | I drive between 30 and 45 minutes each way to school every day.

00:46:42.080 | That's plenty of time in the car.

00:46:43.080 | Normally I like to listen to audio books, music, podcasts, but I feel like I'm wasting

00:46:54.800 | this perfectly good time that I could be working my brain towards learning the material that

00:46:59.720 | I'm studying at the time.

00:47:02.560 | So my question for you is this, as an engineering student, how can I maximize my productivity

00:47:10.640 | in this time while I'm driving when I can't necessarily just listen to an audio book on

00:47:17.240 | physics where it's more of a understanding conceptual formulas and that kind of thing?

00:47:23.320 | I love the show and I can't wait to hear your answer.

00:47:25.880 | Thank you so much.

00:47:26.880 | Well, I have a similar length commute to Georgetown.

00:47:29.100 | It's like 35 minutes.

00:47:30.160 | So I can speak from personal experience of a couple suggestions here.

00:47:36.520 | One, what I like to do is the morning commute, so the commute into school where you have

00:47:42.880 | your coffee and your energy is high, is a commute that I want to be productive with

00:47:47.320 | quotation marks.

00:47:48.320 | I'll define what I mean by that, right?

00:47:50.480 | But usually my drive home, I'm like, no, this is like unwind time, you know, especially

00:47:56.300 | if I can do a schedule shutdown ritual before I leave to come home.

00:48:01.720 | Now it's podcasting, you know, let me listen to a podcast.

00:48:05.080 | Let me listen to like an interesting book on tape and just take that unwind, especially

00:48:10.440 | after a hard day of school.

00:48:11.640 | So first of all, I like that productive morning, relaxing afternoon.

00:48:15.480 | All right.

00:48:16.480 | Now what do I mean by productive?

00:48:19.240 | You're not going to make progress on your engineering studies while you're driving.

00:48:24.560 | Like, I don't see that happening.

00:48:27.160 | So by productive, I mean intellectually engaging, interesting, like an exercise that if you

00:48:33.800 | did it, even if not in the car, you'd be like, oh, this added value or meaning or depth to

00:48:37.880 | my day.

00:48:38.880 | There's several things I do, so I'll just list them all and maybe some of these will

00:48:42.200 | resonate with you.

00:48:43.200 | One thing I've done before is I've gotten a book on a, not a book, a course, an audio

00:48:50.920 | course like The Great Courses, right, on a topic I'm interested in, but not, this is

00:48:57.720 | dead right in the middle of my research, right?

00:49:00.340 | So maybe I'll get a book on the big ideas of Western civilization or the history of

00:49:05.740 | Rome or something like this.

00:49:07.740 | And what I would do when I'm going through one of these books is typically the lesson

00:49:11.100 | would fit with The Great Courses, the lessons would fit pretty well in like a 30 to 40 minute

00:49:15.580 | commute.

00:49:16.580 | I'm like, I'm going to pay attention to this on the drive.

00:49:19.980 | When I get to my parking space, I am on my laptop in the car going to take notes on everything

00:49:26.060 | I just listened to.

00:49:28.180 | When I build out this document of notes on like the course I'm taking, the notes will

00:49:33.020 | cement it.

00:49:34.760 | But knowing that you have to write those notes is also going to get you to pay attention

00:49:38.820 | better to what's going on.

00:49:39.900 | So that's one thing I would do.

00:49:41.980 | The other thing I would do is I'll give myself like a particular problem I want to make progress

00:49:47.260 | on in my head.

00:49:48.980 | Like, so for me right now, this will often be, I'm thinking about a book chapter that's

00:49:53.260 | coming up.

00:49:54.260 | I'm like, how am I going to make this work?

00:49:57.060 | And I'll just, I'll think through as I drive and I'll think through different options.

00:49:59.980 | What about this?

00:50:00.980 | And I'll let my thoughts unfold.

00:50:01.980 | And then again, when I get there, I write down my thoughts before I leave the car.

00:50:05.820 | So like you can do interesting brainstorming in the car.

00:50:08.140 | Like you have your coffee, your motivation is high.

00:50:10.700 | I'll do that.

00:50:11.900 | I've outlined in my head podcast episode, deep dives, for example, I've done, I've worked

00:50:16.900 | on that.

00:50:17.900 | If I'm working on an article, like a New Yorker piece, I might say, great, I'm going to try

00:50:22.420 | to figure out a structure here.

00:50:24.860 | I don't like the way I'm getting in.

00:50:25.980 | Let me try to figure something out.

00:50:27.100 | And then when I get there, I'll take my notes.

00:50:30.100 | If you have a hard time doing thinking in the car, there's easy practice for this is

00:50:35.460 | productive meditation.

00:50:37.740 | Go for a walk.

00:50:38.740 | You try to make progress on one idea just in your mind.

00:50:42.700 | When your attention wanders, you bring it back to what you're thinking about.

00:50:46.140 | This is a great way to sharpen your brain's ability to be facile with his working memory,

00:50:51.460 | to keep something in your working memory, to explore a piece of it and come back and

00:50:54.380 | update the working memory, what you need to think in your head, to write in your head,

00:50:58.740 | to structure in your head, to come up with ideas just in your head and remember them.

00:51:03.820 | That's just practiced.

00:51:04.820 | So just do a bunch of productive meditation, you'll get better at it.

00:51:07.420 | And then there's more you can do while you're actually driving.

00:51:10.420 | So that's what I'd suggest.

00:51:12.700 | You don't have to make progress on your engineering studies, but you can make progress on interesting

00:51:16.700 | ideas and thoughts in the morning.

00:51:19.020 | And then the afternoon should be listening to the deep questions podcast.

00:51:23.160 | So when you take out their computer after you park, you're just like, use like a word

00:51:26.660 | file or your notes file.

00:51:28.660 | Yeah.

00:51:29.660 | Yeah.

00:51:30.660 | Word files.

00:51:31.660 | Yeah.

00:51:32.660 | I mean, you should have a bunch of word files or whatever you use for like ideas.

00:51:37.220 | You're working on things you're trying to understand.

00:51:38.900 | I mean, this is something I often preach, especially ideas like, okay, this feels important

00:51:45.300 | to me.

00:51:46.300 | Something going on in the world feels important to me and I want to clarify my thoughts on

00:51:49.060 | it.

00:51:50.060 | Write it down.

00:51:51.060 | Otherwise, especially if it's important to you, you're going to just be repeating stuff

00:51:55.820 | you've heard, be reactionary, or just sort of deal with group activation.

00:52:04.980 | What do I think my group is supposed to think about this?

00:52:06.940 | Which is not like a bad thing, but like if something matters to you and you really want

00:52:09.980 | to have a considered understanding of it, begin recording your thoughts.

00:52:14.700 | And you should be doing this about like a lot of different things in your life.

00:52:17.100 | Like if you're a meditator, you should have a document somewhere where you're like, "Why?

00:52:21.600 | Why am I meditating?

00:52:22.600 | What am I trying to achieve here?

00:52:24.540 | Why do I think this is important?"

00:52:27.140 | If there is like a political issue that pushes your buttons, don't just let your buttons

00:52:31.180 | be pressed.

00:52:33.380 | Really try to understand it, right?

00:52:35.060 | If you're thinking about like the U.S. presidential election and you're a Democrat and don't really

00:52:40.980 | understand Trumpism, articulate like what the core principles here are, right?

00:52:48.320 | What is it that upsets you?

00:52:49.320 | If you're a Republican, you don't like like the progressive left.

00:52:51.300 | Like what is the core thing?

00:52:53.380 | What is the core principles here you dislike and why and what's your alternative?

00:52:57.100 | Otherwise, what you're going to deal in is just particular anecdotes and examples, exaggerations.

00:53:03.740 | This happens so often, the gap between feeling and understanding, this gap is so common that

00:53:11.540 | you'll see this often where there's someone who feels very strongly about something but

00:53:15.580 | it's like a gut feeling.

00:53:16.580 | My group hates this and I agree.

00:53:20.220 | And they're just sure.

00:53:21.220 | They get put in a situation where you're like someone challenges them.

00:53:24.580 | And they're so sure of like, "Oh man, like this is so wrong, I'm going to wipe the floor

00:53:28.020 | with this person."

00:53:29.100 | And then they find themselves, they're really struggling like, "Well, what about this?

00:53:32.220 | And I don't know like that or this."

00:53:34.260 | They struggle to articulate their feelings and you can see that frustration in their

00:53:37.700 | face.

00:53:38.700 | It's because you haven't worked through your underlying feelings.

00:53:40.460 | I think it's really important.

00:53:41.500 | If you're religious, you should have a document that works through your theology.

00:53:45.580 | Don't avoid it.

00:53:46.580 | If you're political, you should have a document that understands, "Here's my political principles."

00:53:51.560 | If there's a practice like physical, you're really into, you know, I know someone was

00:53:55.380 | telling me the other day how going into extreme, awe-inspiring, natural settings is like at

00:54:03.460 | the core of their philosophy of life.

00:54:04.900 | Work that out.

00:54:06.580 | Work out the principles.

00:54:07.580 | Write it down.

00:54:08.580 | Write it down, have word files.

00:54:09.580 | So you should have a sort of this I believe folder somewhere that you're constantly working

00:54:13.900 | on because it gives you a more sophisticated understanding.

00:54:17.060 | Your understanding evolves better.

00:54:18.380 | You can build off it better.

00:54:19.460 | You understand the world gets better.

00:54:20.460 | So yeah, I think in general, that's a good exercise.

00:54:23.780 | So just like one logistics question in terms of that.

00:54:27.080 | So if you're using the Word files on your laptop, say people use like Google Drive or

00:54:31.780 | something.

00:54:32.780 | Yeah.

00:54:33.780 | Do you like merge them?

00:54:34.780 | Yeah, you can merge them.

00:54:35.780 | So like if you really want to write after your commute in the parking lot, which I think

00:54:40.900 | works because like I just want to shut this down, you can write that in Word and then

00:54:44.860 | later on copy it like into a Google Drive if that's what you're doing or a Google Doc.

00:54:50.660 | If you want to keep it accessible from different devices, some people will use the diction,

00:54:55.900 | the auto translation like in their iPhone and just like let me just say all the thoughts,

00:55:00.660 | all my notes about this now in the car and it like auto translated and like I email that

00:55:04.240 | to myself and then like later I'll actually put that into something else.

00:55:07.760 | So I think all that's fine.

00:55:09.660 | Or if you do it on your phone, you probably have internet on there already.

00:55:12.380 | So like from the parking lot, you can dictate right into a Google Doc.

00:55:15.140 | So yeah, I don't care about the tech.

00:55:17.280 | But anyways, in general, it's good to have idea this I believe documents and more specifically,

00:55:23.660 | that's a good use of a morning commute.

00:55:26.060 | It's coming up with a way to update one of those documents.

00:55:29.440 | All right.

00:55:32.180 | Let's see here.

00:55:33.180 | I think we have a case study.

00:55:35.720 | So this is where people write in to talk about how they have put my advice to work within

00:55:41.820 | their own life.

00:55:43.260 | If you have a case I share, you can send it straight to jesse@calnewport.com.

00:55:47.380 | All right, today's case study comes from Amy.

00:55:51.920 | Amy says for various reasons, I'll be attending a graduate program at the Berklee School of

00:55:55.660 | Music at 34 years of age.

00:55:59.640 | My plan to succeed inspired by your advice is as followed.

00:56:04.680 | Time block planning and fixed schedule productivity.

00:56:08.380 | Being a fan of CALS for years, I've been time blocking off and on for a long time.

00:56:13.140 | Mostly on because when I do time block, my life is infinitely better than when I don't.

00:56:18.060 | It's less about getting everything done and more about structure in my day-to-day life.

00:56:23.660 | Two specific places for specific work.

00:56:28.340 | Even after taking social media off my phone, I still noticed I was checking my email too

00:56:32.020 | much.

00:56:33.020 | I took that off as well and now check my personal email on my computer at home.

00:56:37.740 | Number three, no social media.

00:56:39.780 | I've had problems with Facebook and Instagram in the past.

00:56:41.900 | In fact, I set up a contract with my boyfriend to keep me accountable.

00:56:46.900 | I believe that contract said if she violated it, she had to wear a VBLCCP hat for one week.

00:56:53.420 | What's this, one, two, three, four, four.

00:56:57.580 | Only have my school email on my phone, five, keep my phone on do not disturb or airplane

00:57:01.500 | mode during class.

00:57:03.340 | If someone really needs me, they can call the school, that is true.

00:57:06.940 | Six, the iPad I had to buy for my program is used only for schoolwork, practice materials

00:57:11.460 | and writing.

00:57:12.540 | Seven, use the phone for your method, that's where you keep your phone plugged in, not

00:57:16.060 | with you while you're at home.

00:57:18.220 | And eight, planning assignment, study and practice time way in advance.

00:57:23.660 | Amy goes on to say, "I don't want to work past 6 p.m. and I plan to do most of my work

00:57:28.340 | on campus.

00:57:29.340 | Since I'll be commuting to Cambridge from Quincy via the red line in the commuter rail,

00:57:34.180 | I will use the inbound time to prep and prime myself for the day and I will use my commute

00:57:39.340 | home as my schedule shut down complete, I'll report back later in a year."

00:57:44.340 | Oh, that's a flashback.

00:57:46.620 | Commuter rail to Quincy station, red line from Quincy into Cambridge, just that's like

00:57:51.540 | me old Boston days.

00:57:52.700 | She mentioned that.

00:57:53.700 | Oh, I love the T. I might be going back to Boston soon, I'm looking forward to it.

00:58:00.380 | Harvard Yale football game?

00:58:02.260 | It's not the Harvard Yale football game.

00:58:04.340 | Go Big Green, Dartmouth fan.

00:58:06.860 | It is a podcast, I won't say what name because whatever, but a major podcast, surprisingly

00:58:14.060 | records out of Boston.

00:58:15.620 | So we're trying to find a time for me to go up there.

00:58:17.460 | My guess is something with Alex Cora, why the Red Sox need help.

00:58:21.220 | I wish.

00:58:22.220 | I wish.

00:58:23.220 | Yeah, I could help them out.

00:58:25.460 | They need these hats.

00:58:27.660 | This would be the home run celebration hat, should be VVLCCP.

00:58:32.220 | They just don't hit many of them.

00:58:33.540 | It's still, yeah, I know.

00:58:34.540 | Let me tell you this, and I don't, look, I'm no expert in baseball, I believe in data.

00:58:40.460 | I was in Boston from 2004 to 2011, Red Sox won two World Series.

00:58:47.220 | That's all I'm going to say.

00:58:49.060 | I don't say I get complete credit for that, but let's just say they have had much more

00:58:54.180 | World Series success when I was in Boston than not.

00:58:56.660 | So-

00:58:57.660 | You were responsible for breaking the curse.

00:58:59.500 | The curse was broken soon after I arrived, and I'll leave it at that, I don't want to

00:59:04.100 | get too much into it.

00:59:05.100 | We'll leave it at that.

00:59:07.780 | Big Poppy loves Deep Work.

00:59:12.220 | Big Deep Work fan.

00:59:13.500 | All right, Amy, you're going to crush it.

00:59:18.100 | You're going to crush it.

00:59:20.960 | That type of structure to your life, you are going to find that grad school is not that

00:59:24.860 | hard, and you're absolutely going to crush it.

00:59:27.500 | I was very structured in grad school.

00:59:28.740 | I got bored.

00:59:29.740 | I wrote books simultaneously with all the other stuff I was doing.

00:59:32.060 | We were going to do great.

00:59:34.520 | This is what it looks like.

00:59:35.520 | I mean, let's bring this back to last Thursday's conversation with Oliver Berkman.

00:59:41.100 | Oliver is rightly worried about obsession over productivity and trying to get more and

00:59:46.180 | more done and trying to deny the reality that we're finite.

00:59:50.900 | Those are all really good points, but I think the band of people that fall into that problem

00:59:56.020 | is relatively narrow.

00:59:57.620 | What I'm talking about with sort of humanistic productivity is exactly what Amy's talking

01:00:01.340 | about here.

01:00:02.340 | This type of structure to her time and attention is going to make her time at Berkeley so much

01:00:07.600 | more sustainable and interesting and productive.

01:00:10.100 | She's going to kill it in the program, and she's not going to be running around and be

01:00:12.860 | reactive and then get really sort of resentful about school and how everything's unfair.

01:00:19.300 | She's going to be able to enjoy that commute, like as the red line gets near Quincy and

01:00:23.980 | you can see the water and that's all really nice.

01:00:27.500 | After I fix the Red Sox, she can go to games at Fenway.

01:00:29.940 | It's just going to be her life will be happier and better than if she was just instead being

01:00:36.060 | like let's just rock and roll.

01:00:39.380 | For students in general, that's the case for most people.

01:00:41.660 | That is a case study, I think, of humanistic personal productivity.

01:00:46.480 | It's taking control of your time and obligations so that you can steer your life somewhere

01:00:50.100 | good.

01:00:51.100 | She's not trying to optimize.

01:00:52.100 | She's not trying to be the best.

01:00:53.100 | She's not trying to get after it.

01:00:54.280 | She's not trying to like, "I'm going to graduate early and I'm going to be the best musician

01:00:58.980 | ever."

01:00:59.980 | It's like, "Look, I want to do this thing well and not have it control my life.

01:01:02.280 | So me controlling my life first is going to help."

01:01:04.220 | So I think it's a great example of humanistic personal productivity.

01:01:08.980 | Productivity to make your life better, not to try to turn your life into an optimization

01:01:12.820 | puzzle.

01:01:13.820 | All right.

01:01:14.820 | We've got a cool final segment coming up.

01:01:16.740 | I want to react to an author admitting what her greatest regret is.

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01:05:15.740 | All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment.

01:05:22.500 | So in our final segment, I often like to react to interesting stuff I have seen in the news.

01:05:28.020 | Today I want to react to an article from the New York Times, an op-ed that many of you

01:05:31.220 | sent to me.

01:05:32.220 | I have it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening.

01:05:35.220 | There's an op-ed from October 15th by the novelist Ann Patchett.

01:05:41.140 | Here is the provocative headline, "The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret."

01:05:47.220 | Now when I saw this headline, I thought it was going to be something grim.

01:05:54.700 | Like I don't know.

01:05:55.700 | I was like, okay, this is going to be maybe like a, like a health thing or like a big

01:05:59.500 | moral quandary.

01:06:01.780 | I was like, am I about to read that, you know, Ann Patchett murdered a hobo 30 years ago

01:06:09.260 | and hid the body there in Tennessee in like an oil drum and is now regretting it and is

01:06:13.700 | admitting it?

01:06:14.700 | Like I thought it was going to be dark.

01:06:16.300 | That's not exactly what she was regretting.

01:06:18.940 | And I was sort of surprised and pleased to see her answer.

01:06:21.900 | All right, so here we go.

01:06:25.260 | I'm reading from the third paragraph, "I signed up for email in 1995."

01:06:32.140 | She goes on to explain how email was signed up for an innocent reason.

01:06:36.940 | She could communicate with friends.

01:06:38.180 | She did it on AOL and now she regrets it.

01:06:44.300 | Email is the thing she regrets most from the last 30 years.

01:06:48.180 | Let me read you a quote here, "Because I do regret email.

01:06:54.980 | Even though I've turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret

01:06:58.780 | how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions.

01:07:02.820 | I regret all the times I look only to find there's nothing there.

01:07:06.800 | I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after

01:07:10.620 | stopping the check.

01:07:12.300 | I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I've never met, explaining

01:07:15.940 | why I can't speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel.

01:07:20.580 | I regret how every person who hits reply all to the holiday message sent to a hundred people

01:07:24.660 | shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives.

01:07:27.420 | Those seconds add up."

01:07:31.140 | Then she says, "Could I manage without it?"

01:07:33.140 | She says, "Well, look, people with smartphones look at me as if I'm the last of the carrier

01:07:38.420 | pigeons."

01:07:39.420 | So Ann Patchett does not use a smartphone, right?

01:07:42.260 | But she's okay.

01:07:43.980 | So maybe the same is true for email.

01:07:47.260 | So she's considering this article.

01:07:49.420 | Do I really need email?

01:07:52.620 | And she says she is going to practice or potentially experiment with giving it up.

01:07:56.860 | I like this article because it underscores a key point of my personal philosophy about

01:08:02.260 | technology which I call techno-selectionism.

01:08:05.620 | I wrote a New Yorker essay about this last year called "It's Time to Fight Back Against

01:08:11.300 | the Technopoly."

01:08:12.300 | You can look that up if you're a New Yorker subscriber.

01:08:13.820 | But here's the point about techno-selectionism.

01:08:17.900 | Technologies have impacts that are hard to predict in advance.

01:08:22.380 | And accordingly, the only sensible way to live in a world in which technology is going

01:08:27.180 | to play a big part of our advancement as a species is to be willing to continually re-evaluate

01:08:34.660 | and investigate the impact of technologies and be willing to step away or radically modify

01:08:39.580 | technologies after they were brought into your life.

01:08:43.860 | We have to get away from what I call techno-fatalism, where once the genie's out of the bottle

01:08:50.940 | or Pandora's box has been opened, we can't go back.

01:08:55.300 | Smartphones exist.

01:08:56.420 | We started giving them to our kids because we didn't know how could we go back.

01:08:59.620 | Kids need social media.

01:09:01.980 | We introduced email because the fax machine stunk, and this was better than voicemail.

01:09:07.160 | And now it's taking over our lives and making work unsustainable and actually impeding the

01:09:12.780 | growth of productivity at a macroeconomic level.

01:09:17.980 | What could we do?

01:09:18.980 | We can't just stop using email.

01:09:20.700 | Ampatch says, "Why not?

01:09:22.620 | I hate it.

01:09:23.620 | Let's change.

01:09:24.620 | Yeah, it's hard, but this stuff's hard, too.

01:09:26.460 | Let's do the Wayne."

01:09:28.180 | That's techno-selectionism.

01:09:30.180 | We need to be willing to say, "Regardless of why we introduced this, regardless of the

01:09:35.500 | reality that this technology exists, what is it doing it to us now?

01:09:40.500 | And if the answer is something really bad, let's be willing to make radical changes."

01:09:43.780 | And when it comes to email, yeah, novelists like Ampatch can aggressively scale back.

01:09:51.780 | You can't do that tomorrow in your job.

01:09:53.140 | I get that.

01:09:54.180 | But I wrote a whole book called The World Without Email that gets into what it would

01:09:58.180 | look like to build a workplace that was not dependent on all of this unscheduled back

01:10:03.260 | and forth messaging.

01:10:04.260 | It's absolutely possible.

01:10:05.360 | There's particular knowledge work sectors that actually do this.

01:10:08.100 | Anyways, that's the type of thinking we need.

01:10:10.740 | The current movement to take smartphones out of schools, that's techno-selectionism.

01:10:15.460 | It's stepping backwards from what we did after we observed the impact.

01:10:21.020 | Adults deactivating their social media account, that's techno-selectionism.

01:10:27.140 | Yeah, it was fun or interesting in 2014.

01:10:31.460 | It's a source of darkness in 2024.

01:10:33.860 | I'm going to change.

01:10:35.260 | Adults who are giving up their smartphones, techno-selectionism, adults that are rewiring

01:10:38.580 | their phones.

01:10:39.580 | Okay, I have a smartphone, but it stays plugged in when I'm at home.

01:10:41.780 | It's not with me.

01:10:42.780 | I don't take it when I walk the dog.

01:10:44.200 | That's techno-selectionism.

01:10:47.700 | And we need more of that, especially as technologies have the ability to have impacts at population-wide

01:10:52.820 | scales and at very fast rates.

01:10:54.740 | So anyways, good essay to read, Ampatch it.

01:10:58.380 | My hat's off to you.

01:10:59.620 | We got to get a copy.

01:11:00.620 | We got to get a copy of A World Without Email to Ann.

01:11:03.540 | She's got a great bookstore in Tennessee.

01:11:06.020 | She's got to feature that book.

01:11:07.160 | She's got to know about it.

01:11:08.160 | So look, if Ann Patchett's agent is listening, I want to send her some signed copies of World

01:11:12.900 | Without Email.

01:11:13.900 | I think we're on the same page.

01:11:14.900 | But the broader message here is techno-selectionism.

01:11:17.700 | We have to keep evaluating the impact of technologies that we've already admitted to our lives and

01:11:21.820 | be willing to make changes even after the fact.

01:11:25.300 | What about in terms of like personal email and work email?

01:11:28.580 | Do you think she has it combined into one?

01:11:31.900 | She said earlier, it's a good question.

01:11:33.460 | She said earlier in the essay she gets them separately.

01:11:36.420 | And even then, it was still a problem.

01:11:37.580 | So she took them both off her phone?

01:11:39.340 | Yeah, I guess so.

01:11:40.660 | We should get Ann on the phone.

01:11:42.460 | You think she'd come on the show?

01:11:43.940 | Sure.

01:11:44.940 | I think.

01:11:45.940 | You're in Parade Magazine.

01:11:47.740 | I am in ParadeMagazine.com, which means I'm guessing when the Premier Magazine Power 100

01:11:56.060 | Hollywood list comes out, I'm probably going to be top 10.

01:11:59.100 | I mean, how many people are featured in ParadeMagazine.com?

01:12:04.340 | Come on.

01:12:05.340 | We should have her on the phone.

01:12:08.220 | I think this is true.

01:12:10.300 | It's possibly true.

01:12:12.340 | So I've talked about this.

01:12:13.340 | Actually, I think I've talked about this more on Tim Ferriss's show than this show.

01:12:16.700 | But when I got started professional writing in college, I talked to an agent who was like

01:12:22.260 | a family friend to just figure out how the industry worked and what it would take for

01:12:27.580 | someone like me to get a book contract at the age of 21.

01:12:31.260 | And it was a fiction agent.

01:12:32.780 | So I was like, look, I'm not trying to sell myself to you, but just explain the world.

01:12:35.620 | And once I knew the world, how it actually worked, I was able to get the book contract.

01:12:41.060 | My vague memory is it might have been Ann Patchett's agent.

01:12:44.420 | I'm not sure.

01:12:45.420 | You know how you forget?

01:12:46.540 | It's been over two decades now.

01:12:48.620 | Wasn't she a family friend?

01:12:50.100 | The agent was.

01:12:51.100 | Yeah.

01:12:52.100 | Yeah, the agent.

01:12:53.100 | My uncle knew her.

01:12:54.100 | We can look that up.

01:12:55.100 | I don't know how I'm going to look up here.

01:12:58.160 | I'm looking up one thing here.

01:12:59.160 | This is there's nothing is more scintillating audio than someone looking something up on

01:13:04.420 | Google Live.

01:13:05.420 | But let me look up one thing.

01:13:08.180 | I have one one clue I'm pulling here.

01:13:11.540 | Yeah, I think so, because here's my memory.

01:13:15.940 | My memory that very vague is they had just had a big hit with Bel Canto, which was Ann

01:13:21.980 | Patchett's like big breakthrough novel.

01:13:23.800 | So I think Ann Patchett's agent is responsible for me being a professional writer.

01:13:28.940 | So there we go.

01:13:29.940 | I should thank her.

01:13:30.940 | And we should get Ann on the show to talk about email.

01:13:31.940 | All right.

01:13:32.940 | What I need to do, obviously, is save my voice.

01:13:34.740 | I'm sort of losing my voice today.

01:13:36.340 | And I have to go on national radio in Canada pretty soon, so I guess I got to go brew some

01:13:41.020 | tea.

01:13:42.020 | Yeah.

01:13:43.020 | Welcome to the life of a podcaster and author.

01:13:44.020 | Thank you, everyone, for listening.

01:13:45.020 | Remember, if you want to volunteer for the organization's studies, send a note to jessie@calnebrook.com.

01:13:48.500 | We'll be back next week with another episode, and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:13:56.720 | If you like today's discussion of tactical and strategic procrastination, I think you'll

01:14:01.080 | also like episode 312 when I talk about productivity basics.

01:14:06.040 | These are the key tools for fighting tactical procrastination.

01:14:08.720 | They're a key partner to this episode.

01:14:11.320 | I think you'll like it.

01:14:12.600 | Check it out.

01:14:13.840 | So what I thought I would do here would be to review five of the biggest ideas I've had

01:14:20.540 | about finding productivity in a distracted world.

The Procrastination Cure Nobody Tells You (How To Be Productive & Get Work Done) | Cal Newport

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