Ep. 231: Fighting Burnout With Work Cycles

00:00:00.000 | And the conclusion I made from that is,

00:00:02.720 | it's a fair guess that through most of our species history,

00:00:05.960 | work pace was incredibly varied.

00:00:09.520 | Intense periods followed by relaxed periods

00:00:11.680 | at all sorts of different scales.

00:00:13.640 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

00:00:25.760 | The show about living and working deeply in a world

00:00:28.720 | increasingly beset by distraction.

00:00:32.080 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:38.320 | joined as normal by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:41.920 | So Jesse, it's official.

00:00:43.920 | As of two days before the recording of this episode,

00:00:47.840 | I submitted my manuscript for my new book,

00:00:51.280 | Slow Productivity, to my publisher.

00:00:54.480 | For the last two days, I have had no writing to do.

00:00:57.280 | No morning writing sessions, no trying to get my edits in,

00:01:00.960 | no where's my hours, I gotta get my hours.

00:01:03.880 | I am on a break from writing temporarily.

00:01:06.120 | That manuscript has been submitted.

00:01:08.360 | - So what's temporarily mean?

00:01:10.560 | Well, like another half a day?

00:01:12.800 | - All right, if I'm gonna be honest,

00:01:16.360 | we're gonna be honest about this.

00:01:17.440 | The day after I submitted the manuscript,

00:01:19.400 | I had a phone call with my editor at The New Yorker,

00:01:21.480 | and we were already planning out the next piece,

00:01:23.600 | which I've started on.

00:01:24.560 | But I'm free from the, the thing about book writing

00:01:27.520 | is to make my schedule,

00:01:29.040 | because I had to do this in about six months,

00:01:31.400 | every day mattered.

00:01:32.900 | So there was that constant pressure.

00:01:34.920 | You don't have that constant pressure

00:01:36.200 | if you're working on one article,

00:01:37.880 | 'cause you might be in a phase where you're researching it.

00:01:40.720 | You're like, yeah, I'm waiting to hear back from some people.

00:01:42.440 | I'm reading about it, I'm thinking about it,

00:01:44.080 | and then three days, you'll just write it.

00:01:46.400 | A book is every single day,

00:01:49.240 | because you got a lot you have to build up.

00:01:51.840 | Now, submission, for those who don't know

00:01:54.400 | how the nonfiction book publishing process works,

00:01:57.160 | there's a lot of steps.

00:01:58.280 | So submission is actually not that important

00:02:02.200 | of an official step.

00:02:03.720 | From a contractual perspective,

00:02:05.360 | the thing that matters is acceptance of the manuscript.

00:02:08.560 | That happens after back and forth editing.

00:02:10.920 | So submission, for some people that might be like me,

00:02:14.960 | here's the whole thing,

00:02:15.880 | but you could be submitting things along the way.

00:02:19.400 | You could have worked with your editor

00:02:20.840 | to finish chapter one,

00:02:22.080 | and then worked with them to finish chapter two.

00:02:23.320 | There's no real, the contract says nothing about that.

00:02:25.840 | What matters is the acceptance of the manuscript,

00:02:29.000 | and that's after all editing has happened

00:02:30.640 | and everyone's pretty happy with it.

00:02:31.840 | There's actually typically advance money tied

00:02:34.000 | to when the manuscript's accepted.

00:02:36.720 | And then after that, you shift into the production phase.

00:02:38.880 | So now a whole different set of editors get involved,

00:02:41.440 | and this is where you get things like the copy editing

00:02:43.320 | followed by the production editing.

00:02:45.200 | You start caring about commas,

00:02:46.560 | you start caring about the proper capitalization of titles,

00:02:50.520 | et cetera, like that.

00:02:51.360 | So it's a really long process,

00:02:52.840 | but getting a full version of the manuscript done

00:02:57.280 | is for the writer, psychologically speaking,

00:02:59.400 | a big milestone.

00:03:00.240 | So I'm glad to be past that milestone,

00:03:04.160 | and I really am gonna try to slow down this semester.

00:03:07.600 | - So when do you start your next book?

00:03:11.040 | 'Cause I know you're under contract.

00:03:12.440 | - Yeah, that's a good question.

00:03:13.320 | I'm under contract for two, TBD.

00:03:16.600 | So we have to figure out that timing,

00:03:18.360 | but I just wanna take a break

00:03:19.320 | from even thinking about that.

00:03:20.960 | - Yeah, I guess I just keep on thinking,

00:03:22.400 | I think I was listening to a holiday interview

00:03:25.160 | with Tyler Cohen, and he was talking about

00:03:27.800 | how he's always writing a book,

00:03:29.560 | and I just figured, I just, for some reason,

00:03:32.040 | was thinking that's what you're gonna be doing now.

00:03:34.280 | - I mean, I will more or less,

00:03:36.680 | but I'm trying to take a few months off.

00:03:38.720 | - Okay.

00:03:39.560 | - Like to me, so this is,

00:03:40.400 | and it's gonna bring us back to the theme

00:03:42.280 | of today's episode.

00:03:44.120 | Now for me, taking time off means, you know,

00:03:47.720 | two jobs instead of four or something like that,

00:03:49.600 | but I see this as this wonderfully relaxing period

00:03:53.560 | coming up, because I'm gonna be

00:03:54.720 | just like a normal professor for a while.

00:03:57.080 | You know, I've got my classes,

00:03:58.400 | I'm teaching two classes this semester.

00:04:01.400 | I'm teaching, I'm dealing with students.

00:04:03.240 | I plan to have at any one time,

00:04:05.080 | one academic article, and maybe one New Yorker article,

00:04:08.720 | sort of in the hopper, rotating back and forth.

00:04:12.200 | But that's really different than having a book

00:04:13.880 | you're trying to get done,

00:04:14.720 | because if you do nothing on Wednesday, not a big deal.

00:04:18.080 | You know what I mean?

00:04:18.920 | It's yeah, but maybe I'm thinking about this,

00:04:21.360 | I'm working on proofs for this,

00:04:22.640 | and oh, now I'm gonna write a draft of this.

00:04:24.400 | So it's just like normal load.

00:04:25.960 | It's like a normal professor life for a while,

00:04:28.480 | which to me seems like it's gonna be wonderfully relaxing.

00:04:32.120 | We'll see if that actually works.

00:04:33.120 | Then my plan is as the semester begins to wind down,

00:04:36.280 | then I'll wind up the new book.

00:04:39.200 | I think at the very least,

00:04:40.160 | I wanna get past manuscript acceptance for the current book

00:04:43.560 | before I'm doing anything too serious for the next,

00:04:45.800 | 'cause I don't wanna mix those two worlds together.

00:04:48.880 | Once we're in production for the current book,

00:04:51.240 | then maybe I can actually start working in earnest.

00:04:54.240 | So we'll see how that goes.

00:04:55.600 | That does, however, bring us to the deep question

00:05:00.760 | I wanna tackle in today's episode.

00:05:02.960 | So I'm interested in this idea of temporarily slowing down

00:05:07.800 | on a regular basis as a strategy

00:05:10.720 | for achieving sustainability in your career,

00:05:13.160 | especially if you have an ambitious

00:05:14.920 | or elite knowledge work career.

00:05:16.800 | How do we make that sustainable?

00:05:18.240 | How do we make that something that is deep in the long run?

00:05:22.200 | So that's the deep question I wanna tackle today.

00:05:24.520 | How do I avoid working all out all the time?

00:05:28.840 | So here's how we're gonna tackle this in today's episode.

00:05:32.160 | We're gonna start with a deep dive

00:05:35.760 | on a topic very relevant to what we're talking about,

00:05:38.120 | to the deep question this show's all about.

00:05:39.840 | After the deep dive,

00:05:40.760 | we'll go on and do some listener questions.

00:05:43.480 | I've pulled questions that are all related

00:05:45.880 | one way or to the other to this general theme

00:05:48.200 | of trying to slow down, balancing relaxation with work.

00:05:53.200 | So how do you get that back and forth balance going?

00:05:56.440 | They're all related one way or the other,

00:05:58.120 | so we can take these ideas out for a spin with real issues.

00:06:01.440 | I also have a case study in there

00:06:03.440 | of someone who has found sort of a nice way

00:06:05.280 | to get that balance into their lives.

00:06:07.000 | And then we'll end this episode as I like to

00:06:09.160 | whenever possible discussing something interesting.

00:06:13.320 | All right, that sounds like a plan.

00:06:15.520 | Does that sound good, Jesse?

00:06:16.800 | - Sounds great.

00:06:17.640 | - You know what we've forgotten to do

00:06:18.560 | and I feel bad about this?

00:06:20.280 | Books.

00:06:21.320 | - Yeah.

00:06:22.140 | - We keep forgetting to talk about

00:06:23.160 | the books I read in December.

00:06:25.040 | - Yeah.

00:06:26.200 | - We will do that soon, folks.

00:06:27.520 | That's just me.

00:06:28.360 | I actually had it on my calendar.

00:06:30.060 | I had on my calendar, bring in the books

00:06:33.000 | for today's episodes, but I'll tell you what happened.

00:06:35.600 | A school event got added for one of my kids

00:06:38.000 | at the last minute.

00:06:38.840 | So like I was at that school event,

00:06:40.400 | that's why I'm a little late today.

00:06:41.800 | And that went right into a two hour meeting

00:06:43.880 | that went right into me finishing my prep

00:06:45.960 | and coming over here.

00:06:46.800 | If I get knocked off my routine at all,

00:06:49.040 | the whole house of cards begins to fall

00:06:52.140 | because I'm scrambling to get to my kid's school,

00:06:54.400 | which means I'm not building my time block plan properly.

00:06:57.040 | It all falls apart with just a little bit

00:06:59.320 | of an obligatory wind right there.

00:07:02.960 | - Yeah, we'll get in the books though.

00:07:04.280 | - We'll get them in.

00:07:05.120 | We'll get them in.

00:07:05.940 | I read some good ones.

00:07:06.780 | All right, let's do a deep dive.

00:07:08.600 | I wanna talk about the topic of work cycles.

00:07:12.800 | And in order to get to this topic,

00:07:15.320 | let me back up a little bit and set the stage.

00:07:18.800 | So what's the issue

00:07:21.080 | that this strategy is gonna try to solve?

00:07:23.440 | Well, I wanna pull a quote

00:07:27.220 | from a New Yorker piece I wrote a few months ago.

00:07:29.420 | We've talked about it on the show before.

00:07:31.260 | This was the New Yorker piece where I went back

00:07:33.080 | and said, "What does the research about work

00:07:37.840 | in our deep history?"

00:07:39.260 | So we're talking about the Paleolithic period,

00:07:41.360 | roughly 300,000 years,

00:07:43.040 | 300,000 years where Homo sapiens were anatomically modern,

00:07:47.060 | but we were living pre-agricultural,

00:07:49.760 | mainly hunter-gatherer lives.

00:07:50.920 | So the longest period of our species' existence,

00:07:53.820 | what did work mean then?

00:07:55.500 | And the whole point of that essay, as you'll probably recall,

00:07:59.140 | is that I then compared that to modern knowledge work,

00:08:02.220 | looking for places where there was a real discrepancy.

00:08:05.440 | And seeing these might be sources of friction

00:08:07.200 | where what we're doing today is not meshing

00:08:10.240 | with the wiring that was set into place

00:08:12.280 | over many years in the past.

00:08:14.700 | So in that article,

00:08:16.600 | one of the particular topics I looked at

00:08:19.320 | was the pace of work.

00:08:22.040 | And here's a quote from a paper written by Mark Dybul,

00:08:27.040 | among others, he was the lead author,

00:08:28.560 | that was comparing a extant hunter-gatherer tribe's

00:08:32.960 | work rhythms to a nearby tribe that was still,

00:08:36.320 | oh, I shouldn't say tribe.

00:08:38.040 | That's not the word to use, I learned.

00:08:39.680 | Community, community.

00:08:42.320 | So this is from a research paper that came in Nature

00:08:45.880 | about they were studying the work rhythms

00:08:49.800 | of a largely hunting and gathering community

00:08:51.680 | compared to a nearby community that was agricultural.

00:08:54.480 | And here's what was said in the article.

00:08:57.560 | "The pace of the forager schedule was more varied,

00:09:00.400 | "with breaks interspersed throughout their daily efforts.

00:09:03.360 | "Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest,

00:09:05.460 | "so you'd be out all day, but you'd have breaks,"

00:09:07.360 | Dybul told me.

00:09:08.780 | "With something like fishing, there are spikes,

00:09:10.800 | "ups and downs, only a small percent of their time

00:09:13.100 | "is spent actually fishing."

00:09:15.900 | And the conclusion I made from that is,

00:09:19.320 | it's a fair guess that through most of our species history,

00:09:22.540 | work pace was incredibly varied.

00:09:26.120 | Intense periods followed by relaxed periods

00:09:28.280 | at all sorts of different scales.

00:09:30.520 | We're out hunting, but the sun is hot,

00:09:33.080 | and we're gonna rest for three hours

00:09:34.400 | till it gets a little less.

00:09:35.400 | Where spear fishing, like the Ajta people

00:09:38.220 | that we're studying in this particular paper,

00:09:40.200 | but there's gonna be long periods.

00:09:41.240 | How long can we actually be underwater,

00:09:42.800 | holding our breath?

00:09:43.640 | There's long periods where we're just resting in the boat.

00:09:46.420 | Now, if we look at the history of work,

00:09:48.080 | we can understand that in part as a long march away

00:09:52.760 | from this widely varied work pace.

00:09:56.680 | So as we shifted from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic,

00:10:00.660 | so as we had the introduction of agriculture,

00:10:03.440 | and now we're talking between 15 to 10,000 years ago,

00:10:08.400 | we saw the first shift.

00:10:09.400 | We began to get, during the planting and harvesting seasons,

00:10:14.300 | days of continual effort without break.

00:10:17.740 | So if it is October,

00:10:19.160 | and you're trying to get that harvest in,

00:10:21.480 | you're not taking long naps during the day.

00:10:23.200 | Those are long days, sun up to sun down.

00:10:26.060 | However, in the early Neolithic,

00:10:29.240 | through almost up to the modern period,

00:10:31.360 | you had months that were incredibly relaxed,

00:10:35.520 | lower-paced work versus months that were more intense.

00:10:37.860 | We still had a seasonality at the literal scale of seasons.

00:10:41.800 | In January, there was not much to do,

00:10:44.240 | whereas in October, you might've been really busy.

00:10:47.060 | All right, now let's fast forward all the way

00:10:48.500 | to the rise of factory work,

00:10:51.040 | followed by factory-style office work,

00:10:54.720 | by which I mean nine to five,

00:10:56.160 | you show up like you would to a factory.

00:10:58.480 | There, we got the consistently hard days year-round.

00:11:01.480 | There is no, "Oh, January, you don't work much,

00:11:04.400 | "but October, you work more."

00:11:05.840 | No, no, you're working all day long,

00:11:08.540 | without long breaks, every week of the year,

00:11:12.000 | but whatever, a vacation exception,

00:11:14.200 | and there's somewhere or the other.

00:11:15.680 | We still had, however, clear shutdowns.

00:11:18.800 | So if you worked at Ford, building cars,

00:11:22.800 | that's hard work from when you start to when you finish.

00:11:26.680 | There is no seasons that are less hard work,

00:11:29.000 | but when you go home, there is nothing for you to do.

00:11:32.280 | There's no work related to building Model Ts

00:11:35.040 | that you can bring back to your house and continue doing,

00:11:37.800 | and this was true, of course, of early office-style,

00:11:40.440 | or factory-style office work as well.

00:11:43.240 | When you weren't at your desk, where your papers were,

00:11:47.180 | and whatever, your assistant was, and the typing pool was,

00:11:49.640 | when you weren't at your desk,

00:11:50.480 | there was very little work you could actually do.

00:11:52.520 | So you had at least clear shutdowns within the day binary,

00:11:55.480 | work, non-work.

00:11:56.700 | Finally, we get to where we are today,

00:11:59.320 | which is office work in the age of computer networks,

00:12:02.080 | and now work is always available.

00:12:06.180 | You always have access to work.

00:12:08.800 | There's always more work for you to do.

00:12:10.920 | It's being delivered via email.

00:12:12.120 | It's being delivered via Slack.

00:12:13.540 | The tools you need to actually make progress on this work

00:12:15.820 | are with you.

00:12:16.660 | They're mobile.

00:12:17.500 | They're with you at home.

00:12:18.320 | They're with you on vacation.

00:12:19.360 | They're with you when you're in the car.

00:12:20.640 | So work is now always available.

00:12:24.680 | This is where we're really getting into trouble

00:12:26.720 | because we've created an environment

00:12:28.580 | where work is always available,

00:12:30.400 | and then we combined it with what we talk about

00:12:32.960 | often on this show as the unstructured approach

00:12:36.200 | to productivity, unstructured productivity,

00:12:38.280 | where we say in knowledge work,

00:12:41.360 | we don't have a particular system we use

00:12:43.820 | for assigning work or tracking work,

00:12:45.720 | or keeping track of who's working on what,

00:12:47.600 | or figuring out when you're gonna work on things.

00:12:49.600 | It's just up to you.

00:12:50.740 | Productivity is personal.

00:12:53.800 | Just do what you think is useful for the company.

00:12:57.560 | We're not gonna tell you how to do your work.

00:13:00.640 | This combination, work is always available.

00:13:04.540 | You're always able to do work,

00:13:08.240 | and there's no real structure to how work gets done.

00:13:10.880 | It's just left up to you.

00:13:11.700 | Hey, do what you're going to do.

00:13:13.600 | This has led to a much increased rate

00:13:16.800 | of just continual effort.

00:13:18.560 | Now, it's not that we work every waking hours.

00:13:20.420 | What we do instead, and again, we talk about this often,

00:13:22.840 | what we do instead in this combination

00:13:24.740 | of always available work and unstructured productivity

00:13:27.240 | is that we just let stuff pile up

00:13:28.840 | until we are so stressed from the work

00:13:30.920 | that we feel like we have psychological cover

00:13:33.160 | to say no to what comes next.

00:13:34.840 | So we just push ourselves till we're overloaded,

00:13:37.040 | and that gives us justification to say,

00:13:38.960 | well, this is why I'm stopping, because I'm exhausted.

00:13:41.720 | I'm up late working, and this is why I feel okay

00:13:46.280 | stopping until the next morning,

00:13:47.800 | because I already worked till two in the morning.

00:13:49.440 | So we let our own sense of overload and stress

00:13:51.460 | be the governor.

00:13:52.300 | That ensures by definition

00:13:55.800 | that we're always working too much.

00:13:57.600 | Unstructured productivity, always available work.

00:14:00.240 | So really what we have here is a collision

00:14:03.760 | of two different types of factors,

00:14:05.860 | a cultural factor, unstructured productivity,

00:14:09.120 | and a technological factor, always available work.

00:14:12.880 | That's a technological thing.

00:14:14.420 | Unstructured productivity, that's a cultural thing.

00:14:17.120 | I'm always interested where technological forces

00:14:20.040 | hit cultural forces is.

00:14:22.120 | Unexpected outcomes often arise, and this is one.

00:14:25.520 | Knowledge workers are often now in the state

00:14:28.660 | of always working too much.

00:14:30.180 | This is a recipe for burnout.

00:14:31.920 | You can only sustain that so long.

00:14:33.920 | Some people get the burnout faster than others.

00:14:36.740 | There's different reactions to the stress of this overwork,

00:14:39.100 | but it's not good.

00:14:40.760 | It's not good.

00:14:41.600 | So what do we do about this?

00:14:43.980 | Well, we have to find ways to structure productivity more

00:14:49.320 | to get us away from the setting

00:14:51.560 | where we just sort of go at it until we're so stressed

00:14:54.420 | we feel like we have cover to say no.

00:14:56.280 | There is many different ways to solve this problem.

00:14:59.480 | We might even wanna say there's many different things

00:15:01.320 | you can do to help make progress on this problem.

00:15:03.960 | I wanna talk about one particular strategy today

00:15:07.040 | that I came across when I was writing the book

00:15:09.720 | I'm working on now on slow productivity,

00:15:11.400 | and I wanted to share it with you.

00:15:13.000 | So I'm actually gonna jump over now on the screen.

00:15:15.800 | For those who are watching this at YouTube,

00:15:18.360 | youtube.com/calendarportmedia.

00:15:20.480 | This is episode 231.

00:15:23.640 | For those who are watching on YouTube,

00:15:24.640 | you will see this on your screen,

00:15:26.360 | but I'll also narrate it for those who are just listening.

00:15:28.960 | What I have loaded up here is the chapter nine

00:15:32.320 | of the Basecamp Employee Handbook.

00:15:37.120 | So Basecamp is a software development,

00:15:39.680 | product development tech company.

00:15:42.300 | It's co-founded, you may know,

00:15:43.480 | it's co-founder and CEO, Jason Fried.

00:15:46.240 | Him and I did an event together

00:15:47.440 | when I launched my last book, "A World Without Email."

00:15:49.680 | So we've crossed paths a few times.

00:15:51.720 | They're very innovative in thinking about work.

00:15:56.120 | So Jason, the co-founder,

00:15:57.440 | has co-authored multiple books

00:15:59.280 | about rethinking knowledge work,

00:16:00.720 | including "Rework" and one that's called

00:16:02.960 | "Work Doesn't Have to Be This Way."

00:16:04.360 | So it's a company in which the principals

00:16:07.740 | do a lot of thinking about how can we make work better,

00:16:10.040 | even if it requires radical changes.

00:16:11.960 | So their handbook is actually itself

00:16:14.880 | a fascinating business advice read

00:16:16.800 | because you're exposed to all of these experiments

00:16:18.880 | they're trying.

00:16:19.720 | Well, in chapter nine of this handbook,

00:16:21.120 | and it's what I have loaded on the screen now,

00:16:23.940 | they talk about cycles.

00:16:26.340 | Now I'm gonna read from the handbook right now.

00:16:30.280 | We work in six to eight week cycles at Basecamp.

00:16:33.600 | There are typically six cycles to a year.

00:16:35.600 | Two are eight week cycles during summer hours

00:16:37.560 | and the rest are six week cycles.

00:16:39.360 | This fixed cadence serves to give us

00:16:41.200 | an internal sense of urgency,

00:16:43.720 | work as a scope hammer to keep projects from ballooning

00:16:46.120 | and provide a regular interval

00:16:47.600 | to decide what we're working on.

00:16:49.760 | The idea is not that everything we ever decide to work on

00:16:51.960 | has to take six to eight weeks

00:16:53.240 | or can be completed in that time,

00:16:54.320 | but rather that we think about how we can break big projects

00:16:57.000 | into smaller ones that can be done in that amount of time.

00:17:00.520 | And that we bundle smaller things

00:17:01.920 | into a presentable scope of work that can be discussed.

00:17:05.180 | All right, now I'm gonna skip forward a little bit.

00:17:06.640 | This is what I like about the cycle strategy.

00:17:09.340 | This next section called "Cool Down."

00:17:12.400 | In between each cycle, we spend two weeks cooling down.

00:17:16.960 | That's the time to deal with bugs or smaller issues

00:17:19.060 | that come up, write up what we worked on

00:17:20.680 | and figure out what we should tackle next.

00:17:23.280 | It's sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles

00:17:25.560 | into the cool down period to fit in more work,

00:17:27.340 | but the goal is to resist this temptation.

00:17:31.100 | I think this is a brilliant strategy.

00:17:37.320 | It matches the natural rhythm of work

00:17:40.760 | for which human beings are better suited.

00:17:44.720 | So this idea of work intensely for a while,

00:17:47.880 | then cool down for a couple of weeks.

00:17:50.480 | Okay, let's just, everyone chill.

00:17:51.920 | Let's just hammer out some final bugs

00:17:54.220 | and kind of have some brainstorming type meetings

00:17:56.960 | about what comes next.

00:17:59.000 | We wake up, we come to work a little late.

00:18:01.160 | We're not staying late.

00:18:02.200 | The inbox is reasonable.

00:18:03.680 | And then once that two weeks is over,

00:18:05.200 | let's get after it again.

00:18:06.200 | Okay, now we speed back up

00:18:07.360 | and we're working urgently on something we're all in.

00:18:09.120 | Then we cool down again.

00:18:10.360 | That general pattern on, off, on, off is very effective.

00:18:15.360 | It is a much more sustainable way of having a profession

00:18:21.760 | where you have to create value

00:18:23.200 | using only what's happening in between your ears

00:18:25.240 | from your brain.

00:18:26.080 | It's a much sustainable way to create value with your brain

00:18:30.000 | than what most people do,

00:18:31.660 | which is keep saying yes till you're so stressed

00:18:33.520 | that you feel like you have cover to say no

00:18:35.000 | and hope you don't burn out too soon.

00:18:36.840 | So I really like this cycle idea.

00:18:39.880 | There's a couple of different ways

00:18:40.840 | that you could actually implement this.

00:18:43.680 | If you're running a team or running a company,

00:18:45.520 | you could do what Basecamp did.

00:18:46.640 | This is how we actually operate.

00:18:48.000 | You could make this your culture.

00:18:49.760 | I don't care what lengths you do

00:18:51.000 | other than the cooldowns need to be non-trivial,

00:18:53.360 | longer than a day.

00:18:54.960 | But you could say this is how we do it.

00:18:56.160 | It's one month on, one month off.

00:18:57.680 | The semester on, then we take a month

00:18:59.800 | that's a little more relaxed.

00:19:00.800 | At three months, three weeks,

00:19:02.760 | however you wanna do it.

00:19:03.600 | But having a regular rhythm of on, off, on, off

00:19:06.240 | is something that you should consider.

00:19:09.520 | Now I think the managers out there are saying,

00:19:11.240 | wait a second, think about all of

00:19:14.080 | the wasted productivity during the cooldown period.

00:19:16.280 | We're gonna be getting that much less work done.

00:19:19.520 | My response to this is the same response

00:19:22.400 | Basecamp would have, which is nonsense.

00:19:24.740 | The amount of high quality work you get done

00:19:28.500 | during the intense period of the cycles

00:19:31.400 | is going to add up to much more quality results

00:19:35.320 | if you balance those with cooldowns

00:19:37.240 | than if you instead just try to push through

00:19:39.920 | all out, all year round.

00:19:41.480 | Because what happens if you just try to push

00:19:42.840 | all out, all year round?

00:19:44.400 | That energy flags.

00:19:45.600 | And the amount of effort you're doing

00:19:48.480 | six months into the year is a lot worse

00:19:51.280 | than it was earlier.

00:19:52.400 | A lot worse than it would be

00:19:53.440 | if you actually had regular cooldown periods.

00:19:55.360 | You're gonna get more done,

00:19:56.320 | it's gonna be higher quality,

00:19:57.240 | people aren't gonna burn out.

00:19:58.560 | Now what if you don't have control of a team?

00:20:00.160 | What if you don't run your own company?

00:20:02.360 | Do this stealthily on your own.

00:20:06.640 | Internally, without telling other people,

00:20:09.080 | I have cycles.

00:20:10.800 | And during this bit of the cycle,

00:20:11.880 | I'm all on, this week or this two weeks,

00:20:14.600 | I'm pulling back.

00:20:15.680 | You can do this without having

00:20:18.720 | to make any declarations,

00:20:19.760 | without having to get anything signed off on

00:20:22.040 | by a boss without really attracting

00:20:24.600 | that much attention.

00:20:26.920 | It's just a matter of making your weekly plans

00:20:30.160 | sparse during the cooldown periods.

00:20:32.520 | Just don't put much stuff into those weekly plans.

00:20:35.860 | Being really careful about scheduling things

00:20:37.960 | during cooldown periods.

00:20:39.320 | To the degree you can get away with this

00:20:40.720 | without it being notable, punt.

00:20:43.080 | Well, yeah, I was talking,

00:20:44.560 | I'm not really available that week,

00:20:45.640 | but the next week,

00:20:46.480 | or let's get back to this after the break.

00:20:48.680 | So you sort of move things around.

00:20:50.800 | And for the things that you have to schedule

00:20:53.000 | during the cooldown period,

00:20:54.320 | have multiple days that are meeting free.

00:20:57.680 | Don't tell anyone you're doing this.

00:20:59.200 | But just for that two weeks,

00:21:00.320 | it's like, well, Tuesday and Thursday,

00:21:01.480 | you're not offering up.

00:21:02.400 | So you have multiple days in these cooldown weeks

00:21:04.480 | where you have no Zoom and no calls and no meetings.

00:21:08.960 | Be careful about your larger projects.

00:21:10.840 | If you have a project that's gonna end

00:21:13.120 | and another one's gonna start,

00:21:14.720 | don't start that one during a cooldown period.

00:21:17.040 | Be strategic about when you bring things on.

00:21:19.440 | So these stealth cycles with stealth cooldown periods

00:21:23.240 | can be just as effective as working at a company

00:21:26.340 | like Basecamp that has this built

00:21:27.880 | right into their handbook.

00:21:32.000 | Now what's gonna happen is,

00:21:33.960 | not only is this gonna make your work more sustainable,

00:21:37.040 | I think you are gonna become more valued in your company

00:21:40.760 | because the intensity of your intense periods is better.

00:21:44.520 | The quality of what you produce is better

00:21:46.160 | when you know that cooldown is coming

00:21:47.560 | and you get the benefit of that cooldown.

00:21:49.600 | So what are your managers gonna notice?

00:21:52.320 | Not that, you know, I really was crunching the numbers.

00:21:55.220 | And statistically speaking,

00:21:56.960 | in these two weeks out of the last six,

00:21:58.940 | it seemed to me that Cal was not scheduling meetings

00:22:02.000 | on Tuesdays as much as he did during the other one.

00:22:04.400 | We need to do something about this.

00:22:05.720 | That's not what they're gonna notice.

00:22:06.800 | What they're gonna notice is your peaks.

00:22:08.960 | Wow, like he really, this was great.

00:22:11.960 | This thing he produced, you know, last month was very good.

00:22:15.160 | This is someone that we really value.

00:22:16.400 | So I'm a big believer in cycles,

00:22:18.220 | whether they be institutionalized

00:22:21.560 | or happening surreptitiously.

00:22:23.120 | It is one way among many, I think,

00:22:26.080 | to feed into this natural inclination we have

00:22:29.760 | for up and down.

00:22:31.200 | We're chasing the gazelle.

00:22:32.320 | Now we're taking a nap under the sun.

00:22:34.040 | This natural seasonality on all sorts of scales is useful.

00:22:39.040 | Cycles gives us this on the scale of weeks.

00:22:42.760 | So, you know what, Jesse, I take it for granted.

00:22:45.040 | As a professor, we naturally have these type of cycles

00:22:48.440 | on that scale built in because semesters end, you know.

00:22:51.620 | And we know this in academia, we're in between semesters.

00:22:56.620 | Everyone is taking a beat.

00:22:59.560 | You don't schedule meetings.

00:23:01.000 | You don't expect people to respond to emails.

00:23:03.360 | And then it ramps back up again.

00:23:05.000 | And then you get the biggest cycle of all, which is summer.

00:23:07.720 | And then summer is, so it's great.

00:23:09.520 | That rhythm works well.

00:23:10.360 | I take it for granted, but seeing Basecamp's handbook

00:23:13.600 | helped me understand this idea that instead of just saying,

00:23:17.000 | "Too bad you're not a professor,"

00:23:18.960 | like a lot of people could have something similar

00:23:20.480 | to work in life.

00:23:21.320 | It just takes a little effort.

00:23:23.120 | - I know that you coined a lot of terms.

00:23:24.720 | Did you come up with the term unstructured productivity?

00:23:28.400 | - I think so.

00:23:29.920 | - It's a good term.

00:23:31.320 | - Yeah, we need a glossary.

00:23:32.880 | - Yeah, we do need a glossary.

00:23:34.800 | - I invent terms frequently.

00:23:38.400 | - Yeah, I know you're very good at it.

00:23:39.720 | - Some stick, some don't.

00:23:41.040 | - You might have to do a whole article

00:23:43.000 | on unstructured productivity.

00:23:44.920 | That's good.

00:23:46.000 | - Yeah, it's kind of an evolution.

00:23:48.680 | It's an evolution of my thinking that shows up a lot more

00:23:50.760 | in my book, "Slow Productivity,"

00:23:52.280 | because I, not to give too much of the book away now,

00:23:56.000 | there's so much to talk about when the time comes,

00:24:00.320 | but I really get an upfront,

00:24:02.320 | a deep history of productivity

00:24:04.640 | and how things sort of spun off their axis in knowledge work

00:24:09.520 | because you have to set up,

00:24:10.360 | like what is the issue we're trying to solve?

00:24:13.120 | And that's a big deal.

00:24:13.960 | I think in knowledge work,

00:24:15.560 | there's a lot of people who correctly have the instinct

00:24:18.920 | that something is going wrong with productivity

00:24:21.080 | in knowledge work.

00:24:21.920 | Like this push to do more is not generating more.

00:24:24.600 | It's not sustainable.

00:24:25.720 | It's stressing us out,

00:24:27.240 | but they're jumping past the what's going on

00:24:30.200 | to let me just start blasting at enemies

00:24:33.160 | 'cause that's the whole tone, I think,

00:24:35.120 | of online discourse right now.

00:24:36.560 | So it's mustache twisting managers and capitalism

00:24:40.280 | and these sort of vague cultures of overwork.

00:24:44.240 | It's all very vague.

00:24:45.160 | It's just so that you can kind of attack it.

00:24:47.800 | And in my book, I'm like, yeah, great,

00:24:49.400 | but let's actually understand,

00:24:51.520 | like where do these,

00:24:52.560 | where's our notions of productivity come from

00:24:54.760 | and unstructured productivity plays a big role

00:24:56.600 | in that storyline.

00:24:57.440 | The rise of unstructured productivity,

00:24:59.520 | I've been developing this whole framework,

00:25:01.720 | which you'll hear more about in the future about,

00:25:05.560 | because I'm a tech guy,

00:25:07.280 | how unstructured productivity kind of worked, wasn't great.

00:25:11.600 | And then you get computers, it's body blow number one.

00:25:14.520 | Then you get networks, body blow number two,

00:25:16.720 | and the whole thing collapses.

00:25:18.280 | So it's this cultural idea of,

00:25:21.400 | God, I don't even know what productivity means

00:25:23.560 | in knowledge work.

00:25:24.400 | I'll just like leave it up to the individual.

00:25:26.160 | That was okay in like 1977.

00:25:29.960 | You get to like 1997 and the whole thing falls apart.

00:25:33.320 | And I think we're still on the mat right now

00:25:35.200 | trying to figure out what to do about it.

00:25:36.640 | And so there's a whole interesting thing out there,

00:25:38.920 | but it's an evolution because in my last book,

00:25:41.360 | I talked specifically about one implication

00:25:44.200 | of unstructured productivity is the hyperactive hive mind.

00:25:47.320 | So if productivity is unstructured,

00:25:49.880 | collaboration in particular is gonna be ad hoc

00:25:53.160 | and back and forth with messages on Slack and email.

00:25:55.240 | And so I wrote that whole book, "World Without Email"

00:25:57.200 | about just collaboration in the context

00:25:59.800 | of unstructured productivity is a brain melter.

00:26:03.200 | It's a killer of like actually being able

00:26:04.960 | to get things done and it makes us all miserable,

00:26:07.140 | but that's just one issue of unstructured productivity.

00:26:11.120 | So in my writing for "The New Yorker" and in this book,

00:26:14.160 | the bigger issue in my mind is not just collaboration

00:26:17.140 | goes awry, but it's workload.

00:26:19.000 | This like, you're always working,

00:26:20.200 | there's always more work to do.

00:26:21.200 | There's performativity.

00:26:22.680 | You're trying to signal value through low value actions,

00:26:27.200 | through busyness.

00:26:28.040 | Like this is the bigger, broader issue.

00:26:30.480 | And that's the evolution of my thinking

00:26:32.560 | is like unstructured productivity.

00:26:34.220 | You can't understand any complaint

00:26:35.640 | about modern knowledge work without starting

00:26:38.680 | with that issue.

00:26:39.520 | - It's really cool.

00:26:40.360 | - Yeah.

00:26:41.180 | - It's really well explained too.

00:26:42.520 | All right, so what I wanna do

00:26:43.360 | is I have a collection of questions

00:26:44.480 | that are all roughly speaking about this tension

00:26:48.960 | between business and relaxation,

00:26:51.520 | getting after it and trying to recharge.

00:26:53.720 | First, let me mention a sponsor

00:26:55.580 | that helps make this show possible.

00:26:58.400 | That is my friends at 80,000 Hours.

00:27:02.240 | 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people

00:27:04.800 | have a positive impact with their career.

00:27:09.000 | If you're wondering where that number comes from,

00:27:10.240 | let's do a little math.

00:27:11.880 | 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years of work,

00:27:16.520 | you get the 80,000.

00:27:18.080 | Now, when I say these are my friends,

00:27:20.120 | I didn't mean that in the informal colloquial sense of,

00:27:22.800 | oh, it's people that work with us.

00:27:24.280 | I've known these guys from the very beginning.

00:27:27.240 | Right, so I've known that they're based out of Oxford.

00:27:30.160 | When they started this nonprofit,

00:27:32.040 | I was working on what became my book,

00:27:33.920 | "So Good They Can't Ignore You,"

00:27:35.160 | which is a book about career advice

00:27:36.920 | that pushes back on this idea

00:27:38.200 | that you should just follow your passion.

00:27:40.000 | And so we were really simpatico.

00:27:41.720 | So I know these guys, we talk back and forth.

00:27:44.040 | They've written some guides about my work.

00:27:45.880 | I've been talking about their work for a long time.

00:27:47.960 | So I was really happy to have the opportunity

00:27:50.200 | for them to become one of our sponsors

00:27:52.160 | 'cause it's people I already pitch positively.

00:27:55.280 | So here's the idea behind this nonprofit, 80,000 hours.

00:27:59.080 | It's what you spend the majority of your time doing

00:28:01.040 | is working.

00:28:02.280 | So it is your biggest tool you have

00:28:05.280 | to make a difference in the world.

00:28:08.280 | Now, most people who even bother

00:28:10.000 | to think about this question,

00:28:11.040 | like what can I do with my work

00:28:13.260 | so that I leave the world a better place?

00:28:15.720 | Most people who try to think about this question

00:28:18.400 | feel like there's not very many options.

00:28:20.640 | I think our normal discourse on this says like, what?

00:28:24.120 | You can become a doctor or go work for a nonprofit.

00:28:27.400 | Like we have these really limited options

00:28:29.360 | and that's kind of it.

00:28:30.520 | And so we have all of this generations of smart kids.

00:28:32.880 | Like I don't wanna work for a nonprofit, become a doctor,

00:28:35.540 | and then they all become lawyers.

00:28:37.960 | 80,000 hours says, let's go deep on this question.

00:28:41.040 | How do we help you connect your work,

00:28:42.880 | the 80,000 hours you spend work

00:28:44.360 | into actually doing good for the world?

00:28:47.320 | They've spent at least 10 years now

00:28:49.000 | conducting research on this topic.

00:28:51.200 | As I mentioned, affiliated with academics

00:28:53.340 | at Oxford University.

00:28:56.360 | They know that our generation faces issues

00:28:58.040 | of historical importance,

00:28:59.140 | and they wanna help more of us dedicate

00:29:02.020 | their 80,000 hours of work to solve them.

00:29:06.340 | So what you can do is you can go to their website,

00:29:09.360 | 80,000 hours, the number 80,000,

00:29:12.680 | followed by the word hours, 80,000hours.org/deep.

00:29:17.680 | And they will send you a free copy

00:29:20.440 | of their in-depth career guide.

00:29:22.040 | So this will just get you started

00:29:24.920 | on the 80,000 hours way of thinking about work.

00:29:28.440 | In it, you will learn about what makes

00:29:29.860 | for a high impact career.

00:29:31.520 | You will get new ideas for impactful paths.

00:29:33.820 | It will also help you make a plan

00:29:36.600 | based on what you learned,

00:29:38.760 | a plan that will help you put those ideas into action.

00:29:42.640 | So in addition to getting that guide,

00:29:44.000 | which will get you started,

00:29:45.320 | it will sign you up for their newsletter,

00:29:47.580 | which is gonna give you regular updates

00:29:49.920 | on their research and tell you

00:29:51.340 | about high impact job opportunities.

00:29:55.320 | More recently, they've also started a podcast,

00:29:58.200 | which is fantastic.

00:30:00.480 | They've had a lot of great guests on there.

00:30:02.760 | I mean, I'm just looking at some of their recent topics here.

00:30:07.960 | So they had, for example,

00:30:09.800 | a recent podcast on successful careers,

00:30:12.600 | even if you have depression, anxiety, or imposter order.

00:30:15.580 | They had David Chalmers on.

00:30:17.540 | So if you know anything about AI or ethics,

00:30:20.700 | you know David Chalmers,

00:30:21.980 | on the nature and ethics of consciousness.

00:30:24.740 | So you get this mix of practicality and big think.

00:30:27.880 | They also have a job board at 80,000hours.org

00:30:31.600 | helping you find high impact jobs.

00:30:33.400 | So look, if you wanna do something

00:30:35.440 | to make the world a better place,

00:30:36.700 | your job is the best way to do it.

00:30:38.600 | And going to 80,000hours.org/deep

00:30:40.880 | is how to get started figuring out

00:30:42.580 | how to inject impact into your working life.

00:30:45.880 | So go to 80,000hours.org/deep

00:30:48.680 | to start planning a career that is meaningful,

00:30:50.360 | fulfilling, and helps solve

00:30:52.080 | one of the world's most pressing problems.

00:30:54.240 | It's really full circle, Jesse.

00:30:56.600 | I mean, I knew those guys years ago.

00:30:59.800 | - Yeah.

00:31:01.300 | - I had my newsletter and they were just getting started

00:31:04.240 | and that was kind of it, you know?

00:31:05.520 | And now full circle, we have podcasts,

00:31:07.700 | I can advertise them.

00:31:09.500 | It's cool, I enjoy that.

00:31:10.820 | I also wanna talk about my favorite URL to say,

00:31:16.380 | Zocdoc.com, Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com.

00:31:21.380 | This is one of those services that makes so much sense

00:31:24.980 | that it almost doesn't even have to be pitched.

00:31:28.040 | Like here's the situation,

00:31:29.260 | here's the problem that Zocdoc solves.

00:31:31.920 | You need to go see some sort of medical professional.

00:31:35.060 | Your tooth hurts, you need to see a dentist.

00:31:37.340 | Your leg hurts, you need to see a doctor.

00:31:39.400 | You don't have a doctor.

00:31:40.700 | And you're like, what do I do next?

00:31:43.780 | It's classic adulting for all of the young ones out there.

00:31:48.300 | Or for those of us like my age

00:31:49.880 | who have been up to their ears in kids

00:31:51.520 | and are like, I haven't had time to think about

00:31:53.240 | getting a cardiologist, how do I do that?

00:31:55.700 | What do you do?

00:31:56.540 | And most people Google or just start texting friends.

00:31:59.820 | Do you have a doctor that you can recommend?

00:32:01.900 | This is a problem that would be well solved by an app.

00:32:05.300 | And that is what Zocdoc does.

00:32:07.500 | It is the only free app that lets you find

00:32:09.500 | and book doctors who are patient reviews,

00:32:11.720 | take your insurance and are available when you need them.

00:32:16.560 | So you can immediately find, okay, I need a dentist.

00:32:19.500 | Where are there dentists nearby that take my insurance

00:32:22.820 | and are looking for new patients?

00:32:24.320 | And let me sign up.

00:32:25.300 | Oh wait, maybe before I sign up,

00:32:27.080 | I wanna see like, do I like this dentist?

00:32:29.180 | Well, here are real reviews.

00:32:30.860 | Independent service Zocdoc.

00:32:32.780 | Here's real reviews from real patients.

00:32:34.060 | Ah, they really like her.

00:32:35.500 | All right, and she's available and she takes my insurance.

00:32:37.540 | Done.

00:32:38.460 | You get the tooth pain taken care of.

00:32:40.140 | So it's one of these ideas that just makes sense

00:32:41.980 | and Zocdoc does it well.

00:32:44.340 | As I've mentioned before,

00:32:45.340 | I have two different healthcare providers right now

00:32:48.480 | where they use Zocdoc to handle all of their paperwork.

00:32:52.760 | So when I'm going in,

00:32:54.100 | I can just do it online before I go in.

00:32:56.380 | I can fill out whatever new forms they need,

00:32:58.300 | click a button.

00:32:59.820 | I love it.

00:33:00.720 | So Zocdoc plays a big role in my life as well.

00:33:02.940 | So go to zocdoc.com/deep

00:33:05.380 | and download the Zocdoc app for free.

00:33:07.700 | Then find a book, a top rated doctor today.

00:33:09.780 | Many are available within 24 hours.

00:33:11.820 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep.

00:33:15.060 | Zocdoc.com/deep.

00:33:18.740 | Was it?

00:33:21.500 | Last time we figured out, Jessie,

00:33:22.660 | we're trying to figure out

00:33:23.500 | how can we get more ox into the URL?

00:33:26.060 | What was our winner?

00:33:26.900 | The winner was if Dwayne Johnson did a podcast

00:33:31.900 | about building berths for your boats.

00:33:36.760 | And so he had the promo code.

00:33:39.840 | His vanity URL would be rockstock.

00:33:42.440 | So you get zocdoc.com/rockstock.

00:33:45.060 | I think that was the best we got to.

00:33:47.280 | We need one more in there.

00:33:48.700 | One more in there.

00:33:50.560 | But anyways, zocdoc.com.

00:33:51.880 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:33:53.640 | As mentioned, these are all roughly speaking

00:33:55.120 | about the theme of this week's episode,

00:33:56.640 | which is how do I stop working all out all the time?

00:34:00.160 | All right, Jessie, what do we have

00:34:01.200 | as our first question here?

00:34:02.440 | - Oh, we got some good questions here.

00:34:04.400 | First is from Fork in the Road.

00:34:06.320 | I'm currently working in higher education administration

00:34:09.020 | at a rural university.

00:34:10.240 | My lifestyle is slow and I have a lot of free time,

00:34:12.600 | which I enjoy.

00:34:13.760 | However, my income is quite low.

00:34:15.880 | Many of my peers with similar degrees

00:34:17.560 | have moved on to data science or software engineering,

00:34:20.200 | live in big cities and have fast paced lives.

00:34:23.760 | They are definitely pros and cons of both lifestyles.

00:34:26.140 | And I don't really see a good way of choosing.

00:34:28.440 | - Well, first of all, and I think data scientists,

00:34:32.420 | I think fast paced lives.

00:34:34.200 | - Yeah.

00:34:35.040 | - They're just slinging hundreds, you know,

00:34:37.800 | cocaine all hours of the night,

00:34:40.260 | pulling up in their Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles,

00:34:46.060 | slapping five.

00:34:47.720 | The data scientists do it in the standard deviation.

00:34:50.360 | I don't know, I'm trying to think what's on their shirt.

00:34:51.680 | I'm pretty clever.

00:34:52.600 | So here's what I'm doing here, Jessie.

00:34:54.660 | This is an inversion, right?

00:34:56.040 | So we were talking about people who were working too much

00:35:00.760 | and wondering how they can maybe make that more sustainable.

00:35:03.920 | Let's invert that with this question.

00:35:06.180 | Someone who's not working enough

00:35:08.540 | or not working that much at all

00:35:09.900 | and wondering if they should be working more,

00:35:11.340 | but how do they do that in a way

00:35:12.420 | that's not going to overwhelm them?

00:35:14.700 | So how do they find that?

00:35:15.940 | How do they get to that mean we're looking for?

00:35:18.380 | They're coming out from another direction,

00:35:19.540 | but trying to end up in that same place,

00:35:21.220 | having the right level of work.

00:35:24.760 | So as long-time listeners know,

00:35:26.100 | my standard answer to any of these

00:35:27.780 | should I change my job questions

00:35:30.140 | usually comes back to lifestyle-centric career planning.

00:35:32.560 | I say, look, you should have this clear vision

00:35:34.160 | of your ideal lifestyle, all aspects of your life,

00:35:36.860 | not just work.

00:35:38.540 | It should be tangible.

00:35:40.780 | You can smell it, taste it, see it, feel it.

00:35:43.540 | And then you figure out how do I work backwards from that

00:35:46.020 | to make it happen, given whatever opportunities, skills,

00:35:49.260 | existing career capital I have in place.

00:35:52.140 | And then you sort of build a reasonable plan

00:35:54.180 | to get closer to that vision.

00:35:55.760 | This question brings another element into that discussion,

00:36:00.100 | which I think is important,

00:36:01.580 | which is the notion of an income floor.

00:36:03.780 | So lifestyles and lifestyle-centric career planning

00:36:07.700 | are abstracted away from details of

00:36:10.780 | this is your particular job.

00:36:12.500 | This is your particular income.

00:36:14.100 | But we cannot abstract income completely

00:36:16.900 | out of these discussions

00:36:18.140 | because if your income is below a certain level,

00:36:23.220 | there are issues that could arise

00:36:24.900 | that will destabilize any aspirational lifestyle goal.

00:36:29.900 | There's a stress generation factor that happens.

00:36:33.060 | If you feel like you don't have enough discretionary income

00:36:37.980 | to handle the things that come up

00:36:39.460 | in the normal course of life,

00:36:40.980 | it is a constant source of stress.

00:36:44.020 | And it doesn't matter if, yeah, but my house nearby,

00:36:47.620 | this rural university has a nice yard and it's scenic.

00:36:50.380 | And if you're worried about money all the time,

00:36:53.300 | that stress is going to outweigh that.

00:36:55.980 | Also, if discretionary income is low enough,

00:36:58.840 | so many of the different options you have

00:37:00.460 | for actually investing in and fulfilling visions

00:37:03.780 | for different areas of your life

00:37:04.700 | are gonna be cut off to you.

00:37:06.540 | I can't take this time off.

00:37:08.420 | I can't afford to do this.

00:37:09.900 | I don't have the money to buy the mountain bike

00:37:12.880 | for my dream of mountain biking.

00:37:14.100 | So there's something that I call the income floor,

00:37:16.060 | which is important.

00:37:17.300 | And that's where you take,

00:37:18.460 | and I'm using this term discretionary income.

00:37:20.460 | What I really mean by that is your income

00:37:23.140 | after fixed expenses.

00:37:25.000 | So now we're trying to normalize

00:37:26.300 | for like how much does your house cost?

00:37:28.580 | You know, how much,

00:37:29.500 | you have to pay tuition for private school for your kids

00:37:32.740 | because of where you live,

00:37:33.580 | that's the best option, et cetera.

00:37:34.740 | So the money you have left over,

00:37:36.700 | if that's below a certain floor,

00:37:39.220 | which you can conceptually figure out,

00:37:42.660 | then a particular lifestyle plan,

00:37:46.260 | we can think of as being unsustainable.

00:37:47.620 | So it's like, you wanna say, here's my lifestyle vision.

00:37:50.500 | How do I, using my existing opportunities

00:37:53.260 | and skills and options,

00:37:55.140 | how do I get closer to this lifestyle

00:37:57.460 | while staying above my income floor?

00:38:00.540 | And we wanna throw that into the discussion here

00:38:03.620 | fork in the road, because you said,

00:38:05.780 | my income is also quite low.

00:38:07.460 | So this is actually gonna be the crux of what you do next

00:38:10.860 | is figuring out does low, quite low

00:38:12.580 | mean below your income floor.

00:38:14.660 | And it's another bit of planning you have to do.

00:38:17.300 | How much money would you need

00:38:18.420 | after you pay for your housing expenses, et cetera?

00:38:20.700 | How much discretionary income do you think you would need

00:38:22.700 | to feel non-stressed and like you have interesting options

00:38:26.500 | and the various things that matter for you in your life?

00:38:28.460 | If in your current job, you're below that,

00:38:31.420 | getting above that income floor is a necessary component

00:38:36.260 | of your lifestyle vision that you're trying to move towards.

00:38:39.380 | Now you might find that you're already above it.

00:38:41.020 | Yeah, you don't make a ton of money,

00:38:42.140 | but where you live is cheap and it's fine.

00:38:44.260 | Good benefits, you're not really worried about

00:38:46.220 | calamitous whatever health occurrences.

00:38:49.220 | So you might be fine,

00:38:50.180 | or you might feel that you're close to it,

00:38:52.880 | but everything else about your lifestyle

00:38:54.600 | where you live is good.

00:38:55.440 | Well, that's fine.

00:38:56.260 | Now you're just trying to close an income gap

00:38:57.420 | and you can make a plan to do that.

00:38:59.020 | I wanna move up to this next level in the administration.

00:39:01.220 | I'm gonna do this thing on the side

00:39:02.580 | because I have a data science background

00:39:05.460 | and I'm gonna do some side work

00:39:06.980 | and we can easily push that above.

00:39:08.820 | Or you're gonna have to make a change and say,

00:39:11.500 | you know what, I'm well below it.

00:39:13.820 | There's nothing I can really do here to get above it.

00:39:15.620 | So I'm gonna have to make a change.

00:39:17.620 | So the income floor, I think is really important.

00:39:20.500 | If you do make a change,

00:39:22.320 | I wanna assure you that there is a middle ground

00:39:27.340 | between being the administrator in the rural university

00:39:30.740 | and big city, fast paced,

00:39:33.220 | cliched data scientists doing Coke

00:39:35.940 | off the stomach of a stripper vision

00:39:38.740 | that we all have of you data scientists.

00:39:41.000 | There is an in-between ground.

00:39:43.140 | And how do you access that?

00:39:45.180 | What is the map you use to find the in-between ground?

00:39:47.420 | It's again, it's this lifestyle center,

00:39:48.860 | career planning augmented with the income floor.

00:39:51.360 | If you have software engineering skills,

00:39:53.060 | if you have data science skills,

00:39:55.060 | you can figure out, okay,

00:39:56.260 | I don't need to make all of this money.

00:39:58.280 | I need to get above this floor.

00:39:59.620 | Oh, you know what?

00:40:00.460 | I could go to Boise and work at the tech sector there

00:40:04.900 | that's burgeoning.

00:40:05.740 | And this is actually a pretty reasonable job,

00:40:08.160 | but it gives me above that floor

00:40:09.500 | and it still has some of the aspect I like

00:40:11.020 | of rural living over here.

00:40:12.100 | When you have a lot of options is what I'm saying.

00:40:14.000 | There might be remote work options.

00:40:15.500 | Well, I could take this remote work job

00:40:17.460 | or I could do contract work.

00:40:18.920 | And you know what?

00:40:19.760 | If I had five clients doing contract work,

00:40:21.060 | I'm above the floor, but I could live wherever I wanted,

00:40:22.900 | but the income is better.

00:40:24.220 | You have a lot of options.

00:40:26.600 | And this is why I always come back to working backwards

00:40:29.100 | from your vision is because that's what allows you

00:40:31.540 | to navigate the territory of options.

00:40:33.780 | Without that, we fall back on cliches.

00:40:35.820 | We fall back on extremes.

00:40:37.620 | Without that sort of guidance,

00:40:38.780 | we think I either become a lawyer or I become a teacher.

00:40:43.380 | This is a standard Ivy League graduate thing.

00:40:45.680 | Or you think I either move to the big city

00:40:47.540 | to be a software engineer and I have to somehow

00:40:49.660 | like afford to live in the Bay Area,

00:40:51.920 | or I have to stay in a very low income administrator job

00:40:54.860 | in this rural county.

00:40:56.260 | We think about extremes.

00:40:57.460 | We think about cliches.

00:40:58.580 | If we don't have a specific compass to navigate us

00:41:01.260 | through that territory.

00:41:02.300 | So lifestyle vision, career planning with an income floor

00:41:05.960 | as a non-negotiable component of wherever you end up,

00:41:09.260 | I think you have many more options than you think.

00:41:11.980 | You have many more knobs to turn with the degree you have

00:41:15.100 | to build that lifestyle than you might at first imagine.

00:41:17.900 | - Mr. Money Mustache sent out an email kind of like moving

00:41:22.060 | or he was visited San Francisco

00:41:24.700 | and talked about some of those issues.

00:41:27.060 | - What was his, he came away from visiting San Francisco

00:41:29.900 | saying the lifestyle here is so expensive,

00:41:33.300 | why would you live here?

00:41:34.140 | Or he came away saying, I'm moving to San Francisco.

00:41:36.980 | - He came away saying he did some research

00:41:38.860 | and he's like, there's still a lot of cool things

00:41:40.620 | you can do in the city.

00:41:41.460 | The food is actually not that much more expensive

00:41:43.740 | if you buy it in a grocery store.

00:41:45.140 | - Oh, interesting.

00:41:45.980 | - Because there's a lot of free places you can go

00:41:46.940 | and he took pictures of him in the parks

00:41:48.380 | and certain places and walking around,

00:41:51.340 | not paying for gas, that sort of thing.

00:41:53.640 | - Here's my, I'm gonna give a deep poll here

00:41:56.220 | for like really long time denizens of online culture,

00:42:01.220 | especially old blog culture.

00:42:05.220 | I'm talking early 2000s here.

00:42:06.540 | This reminds me of it.

00:42:07.980 | Leo Babuda, Zen Habits.

00:42:11.220 | Did you know Zen Habits?

00:42:12.300 | - No.

00:42:13.140 | - So this was really, he helped kick off this.

00:42:15.660 | So there's this online minimalism movement

00:42:18.020 | that really kicked off pre-social media.

00:42:20.900 | So these were, when I was getting started,

00:42:23.340 | these sites like Zen Habits were a couple years ahead of me.

00:42:27.100 | In fact, Leo of Zen Habits actually had a program

00:42:30.340 | where you could sign up and he would mentor you

00:42:32.060 | as an early blogger.

00:42:33.100 | He mentored me for a while and gave me some advice.

00:42:35.700 | So I remember being in grad school at MIT

00:42:38.820 | in the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, reading Zen Habits.

00:42:43.180 | This is when the minimalists got started a little later,

00:42:46.100 | but this was also the time of becoming minimalists.

00:42:49.780 | And I don't remember all of them.

00:42:51.820 | They all had minimalism in the name, basically.

00:42:53.580 | Courtney Carver, I'm trying to think of the different names.

00:42:57.540 | Anyways, it was this whole movement about simplifying.

00:43:00.620 | And it really was, I wrote about this

00:43:02.160 | in my quiet quitting piece for the New Yorker

00:43:04.420 | a couple of weeks ago, about, briefly I mentioned,

00:43:07.020 | to the millennials like us, this minimalism movement

00:43:10.180 | that arose after 9/11, during the financial crisis of 2008,

00:43:15.060 | that whole first decade of the 2000s

00:43:16.900 | was really millennials trying to grapple with work and life.

00:43:20.980 | And it's when we were moving away from follow your passion.

00:43:24.700 | We were the first generation raised on that,

00:43:26.540 | to trying to figure out, how do I put work to work on behalf

00:43:30.080 | of what I want my life to be?

00:43:32.020 | But anyways, Leo was one of the original guys.

00:43:33.900 | Zen Habits was about simplifying your life, slowing down.

00:43:38.420 | And he lived in Guam, six kids, was in debt,

00:43:43.420 | and was out of shape and smoking or whatever.

00:43:46.980 | And through Zen Habits, he began chronicling.

00:43:50.780 | He got in better shape, he stopped smoking,

00:43:53.020 | built up this audience, and wrote a guide.

00:43:57.300 | I forgot even what it was called,

00:43:58.420 | but like a PDF guide, and started selling it.

00:44:00.740 | And that did really well by 2005 standards.

00:44:05.100 | Today, when you think about someone doing well,

00:44:06.740 | we're like, oh, that's great.

00:44:08.580 | Jordan Harbinger signed a $5 million podcast deal.

00:44:11.180 | This was more like, man, I made $70,000 or something.

00:44:14.020 | But he paid off all of his debts.

00:44:15.140 | And what made me think about this story,

00:44:17.340 | based on what you're talking about,

00:44:19.180 | is they moved to San Francisco.

00:44:20.680 | All his six kids, he quit his job,

00:44:23.380 | he could make just enough off of this,

00:44:25.100 | and they lived really cheaply.

00:44:26.700 | So it reminds me exactly what

00:44:27.900 | Mr. Money Mustache was talking about.

00:44:29.820 | He wanted to live somewhere interesting.

00:44:31.220 | So they moved to a row house in San Francisco,

00:44:33.700 | they homeschooled their kids,

00:44:35.180 | and just went to the parks and to the ocean,

00:44:37.340 | and just walked around, and just loved,

00:44:39.640 | their whole life was built around

00:44:40.980 | just being in an interesting place.

00:44:42.500 | So it made me think about that.

00:44:44.300 | He was living cheap, and made a really cool life.

00:44:47.500 | So he's like, if we're gonna live cheap,

00:44:49.340 | we wanna live somewhere that's fascinating.

00:44:52.260 | Zen Habits, that guy was awesome.

00:44:53.900 | You would read that, and you would just be like,

00:44:56.060 | man, I gotta simplify my life.

00:44:58.860 | That's a good movement.

00:44:59.860 | All the older, I have listeners out there

00:45:02.340 | who know what I'm talking about,

00:45:03.180 | but that was a cool, little cool period in our culture.

00:45:05.780 | That then morphed into fire culture,

00:45:07.220 | into Mr. Money Mustache.

00:45:08.460 | So fire was the follow-up to the online minimalism movement.

00:45:13.460 | So fire was more like a geeky version of that.

00:45:18.380 | So the minimalism movement had the Minimalist,

00:45:21.640 | and Leo, and Courtney, and Joshua Becker,

00:45:25.060 | and these guys were, they're kinda cool.

00:45:27.420 | It was kinda, they're cooler guys,

00:45:29.220 | like we're gonna just hike with our backpack,

00:45:31.260 | and live simply, and Josh and Ryan

00:45:33.620 | moved to a cabin for a while.

00:45:35.300 | And then we got the new version,

00:45:36.820 | which Mr. Money Mustache helped kick off.

00:45:38.480 | And now it's more geeks.

00:45:39.780 | Here, my spreadsheet tells me that

00:45:43.000 | if I get a 3.6 return post-tax on my SEP IRA,

00:45:47.460 | I'm gonna be able to retire.

00:45:48.300 | So then there was this kind of geek version of it,

00:45:49.780 | but it was all the same idea.

00:45:51.100 | And then the fire movement kinda got shut down,

00:45:53.460 | because, I mean, it's still around,

00:45:55.420 | but they got super shamed.

00:45:57.100 | So then they got super shamed of like,

00:45:59.020 | you guys all are privileged, and this and that,

00:46:00.820 | and they all got worried about it,

00:46:01.980 | and so a lot of them kinda disappeared.

00:46:03.540 | And I don't know what's gonna come next,

00:46:04.900 | but that's a whole other conversation.

00:46:07.460 | All right, let's do another question here.

00:46:09.700 | - Daniel, do you think there's a need for a place

00:46:12.780 | where people can go for prolonged periods

00:46:14.820 | to perform deep work?

00:46:16.100 | A space close to nature,

00:46:17.540 | where you have your dedicated habitat,

00:46:19.540 | are surrounded by like-minded individuals,

00:46:21.600 | and have some things taken care of for you?

00:46:24.620 | - Daniel, these things very much do exist.

00:46:28.100 | In fact, it's one of my great hobbies,

00:46:31.740 | when I'm feeling stressed out,

00:46:33.540 | is to track down or luxuriate in examples

00:46:36.100 | of exactly these type of settings,

00:46:38.600 | places that are designed to help people do deep work

00:46:41.300 | in the most scenic or novel possible environment,

00:46:45.500 | with distractions minimized as much as possible.

00:46:48.460 | So these exist all over the place,

00:46:50.180 | aimed at different people for different situations.

00:46:53.260 | I thought I would take advantage of this question

00:46:55.760 | to do a little bit of deep geeking, as I like to call it.

00:46:59.220 | I pulled up on my tablet here,

00:47:01.940 | just a few examples of these places among many.

00:47:04.180 | So if you're watching this on YouTube,

00:47:05.380 | you can see these pictures,

00:47:06.380 | but I'll describe what I'm showing

00:47:08.220 | for people who are just listening.

00:47:09.980 | All right, so this first example I brought up here, BMC,

00:47:12.740 | this is the Blue Mountain Center.

00:47:16.100 | This is near Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks.

00:47:19.380 | So those who are watching see a beautiful Adirondack lodge,

00:47:24.260 | that's logs with ceilings that come down low,

00:47:29.080 | that's part of a 1,600 acre estate.

00:47:32.720 | So here it says, "Life at BMC is centered

00:47:35.460 | "around our guest work, rejuvenation, and communal life.

00:47:38.700 | "The atmosphere is informal, cooperative, and curious.

00:47:40.800 | "People come here to write.

00:47:42.180 | "They get away from everything."

00:47:44.460 | I know about this particular center

00:47:46.060 | because Bill McKibben, one of my icons,

00:47:50.440 | my hero, the writer Bill McKibben, he went here.

00:47:54.260 | I discovered this when I interviewed Bill

00:47:56.220 | for a New Yorker column a year or so ago.

00:47:59.700 | I was asking him about how he ended up,

00:48:01.660 | because his story, if you don't know it,

00:48:02.940 | is that he was a writer, lived in Manhattan,

00:48:04.540 | was a writer for the New Yorker,

00:48:05.680 | living in this small apartment downtown.

00:48:09.520 | And it wasn't a super safe area, right?

00:48:11.500 | It was definitely a living in a city experience.

00:48:14.060 | And he told me about his apartment getting broken into

00:48:16.300 | at some point, and there was nothing for them to steal.

00:48:19.280 | Like they broke in, or like, "What am I taking?

00:48:20.700 | "There's nothing here."

00:48:21.580 | So he was living the city life,

00:48:23.020 | and he was on track to be an editor at the New Yorker.

00:48:26.580 | In fact, Bill Shawn had even hinted at the idea

00:48:30.340 | that he may be even replace him as the editor-in-chief.

00:48:35.340 | So he was on this fast track,

00:48:36.880 | and he quit and moved to a cabin in the Adirondacks.

00:48:41.100 | And him and his wife, Susan Halpern,

00:48:43.380 | who also writes for the New Yorker,

00:48:44.500 | still to this day, great writer,

00:48:46.180 | they moved up to the Adirondacks,

00:48:48.100 | and he wrote a book about nature.

00:48:49.540 | He's like, "I wanna do nature writing,

00:48:50.960 | "and I'm gonna live cheaply."

00:48:52.400 | So speaking of minimalism, speaking of fire,

00:48:54.660 | his whole thing was, "We can live up here for almost nothing.

00:48:57.680 | "So with just book advances and random freelance work,

00:49:00.620 | "we can support ourselves, and we just live this simple life."

00:49:03.460 | And he's still up there today.

00:49:04.900 | He moved across the Lake Champlain to Vermont,

00:49:07.420 | but same idea.

00:49:08.440 | Anyways, why did he move to the Adirondacks?

00:49:11.780 | I interviewed him about this.

00:49:12.700 | He said, "I didn't know anything about the Adirondacks

00:49:14.900 | "until a year before that quitting event,

00:49:19.500 | "a friend of his had a spot at the Blue Mountain Center

00:49:22.980 | "in Blue Lake Mountain in the Adirondacks

00:49:24.460 | "for a multi-week writing retreat,

00:49:26.400 | "and the friend dropped out and said,

00:49:27.580 | "Hey, Bill, do you wanna take my spot?"

00:49:29.300 | So he just took his spot.

00:49:31.020 | It showed up at this place sight unseen.

00:49:33.380 | For those who are watching,

00:49:34.340 | I'm showing other aspirational photos here.

00:49:37.240 | A lake that the house is looking over,

00:49:40.060 | people baking bread.

00:49:42.260 | Here's a whole thing about, oh, look at this.

00:49:43.860 | Oh, Jesse, look at this.

00:49:46.260 | Cell phones are not allowed at Blue Mountain Center.

00:49:50.140 | I'm loving this place more.

00:49:51.360 | If I disappear for a few months and you can't find me,

00:49:54.340 | go to the Blue Mountain Center.

00:49:55.460 | It's probably gonna find me.

00:49:56.620 | Here's riders hiking.

00:49:58.860 | You see, they all have sort of the pasty skin of riders

00:50:01.980 | that have been inside too long.

00:50:02.880 | Here they are sitting by a dock.

00:50:05.100 | Here is, now, Jesse, you can correct me

00:50:07.220 | if in my description here is a forest,

00:50:11.140 | and there's a silhouetted figure,

00:50:12.900 | I believe that's Sasquatch, right?

00:50:16.620 | There's a silhouette.

00:50:17.440 | It looks like a bear standing on his hind legs.

00:50:19.860 | I mean, do I have that right?

00:50:20.700 | Is that just me?

00:50:21.520 | It looks like a bear, right?

00:50:22.360 | - Yeah, it does. - Yeah.

00:50:23.380 | So like downside of Blue Mountain Center,

00:50:25.940 | you may be eaten by a Sasquatch,

00:50:27.380 | but upside, there's good bread, no cell phones.

00:50:30.060 | Anyways, that's one example among many.

00:50:32.420 | Let me show another quick example here.

00:50:33.800 | I love this one.

00:50:34.640 | I don't know if they're doing this anymore.

00:50:35.620 | The pandemic might've killed it,

00:50:37.460 | but for a while, I thought this was really cool.

00:50:39.980 | And this is the Amtrak Riders Residency.

00:50:43.540 | So it was a program where as a rider, you apply,

00:50:47.860 | you say, "I'm stuck on my book."

00:50:49.300 | And what they give you is a berth on a sleeper car

00:50:54.300 | for Amtrak from New York to Portland, Oregon.

00:50:57.900 | So a multi-day Amtrak train.

00:50:59.540 | I'm showing some photos of this on the screen.

00:51:02.580 | And so there's no distractions.

00:51:04.380 | You're just in a cross-country Amtrak train,

00:51:07.060 | and all you can do is sort of write and think.

00:51:09.740 | You're literally stuck on this particular train.

00:51:12.180 | - It's quiet the entire time?

00:51:13.780 | - Quiet the entire time.

00:51:14.900 | - Quiet cabin the entire time?

00:51:16.140 | - Well, you have your own room.

00:51:17.380 | - Oh, okay. - You got your own car.

00:51:18.820 | Yeah.

00:51:19.740 | I just took the Amtrak.

00:51:20.580 | I went up to New York real quick for a photo shoot.

00:51:23.700 | Was not in the quiet car.

00:51:25.220 | The person next to me, and like, I don't,

00:51:27.100 | it's not the quiet car.

00:51:28.520 | And I get if you have a phone call to make.

00:51:31.180 | This person was just straight up watching content

00:51:33.740 | on their phone with no earphones.

00:51:35.260 | Just straight up, the volume, like,

00:51:36.900 | I don't know what they're, the video or something like that.

00:51:38.900 | - Did you move?

00:51:40.060 | - Yeah, it was a full train.

00:51:41.180 | - Full train.

00:51:42.380 | - Yeah.

00:51:43.460 | - So what are you gonna do?

00:51:44.940 | - I don't mind.

00:51:45.780 | I just read.

00:51:46.600 | It was nice.

00:51:47.440 | All right, one more example to give.

00:51:48.260 | This is near us.

00:51:49.100 | Most people don't know about this in DC.

00:51:52.700 | So there's a Franciscan monastery associated with,

00:51:56.080 | I think with Catholic University here in DC.

00:51:58.420 | And they have this, if you look on the screen,

00:52:00.120 | it's like a teeny house,

00:52:02.540 | like a modernist small structure in the woods.

00:52:05.220 | This is on the grounds of a monastery right here

00:52:07.140 | in this inside DC, inside the Beltway,

00:52:10.260 | maybe like 20 minutes from where Jesse and I are right now.

00:52:13.060 | Anyways, you can book time to just go stay in this thing.

00:52:16.340 | So it's in the city, but in the woods,

00:52:17.720 | they have all this land.

00:52:18.560 | It's like in the woods, but in the middle of the city.

00:52:21.140 | And they say you can enter into deeper communion with God

00:52:25.560 | through prayer and solitude.

00:52:27.040 | It's an urban retreat for one person nestled behind

00:52:29.620 | a historic Franciscan monastery of the Holy Land in America.

00:52:32.720 | But I'll tell you what, a lot of writers go here.

00:52:35.780 | So you can commune with God,

00:52:36.800 | but you can also get some writing done.

00:52:38.940 | It has one bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom,

00:52:42.080 | and an outdoor deck.

00:52:43.680 | And that's it.

00:52:45.620 | There's a video about it you can watch.

00:52:46.580 | Anyways, people don't know about that,

00:52:47.720 | but right here in DC, one to seven nights,

00:52:49.980 | you just write the monks and they're like,

00:52:51.100 | "Hey, I want to come and do this."

00:52:52.860 | And if they approve it, you just in this box,

00:52:56.380 | this modernist box with a bed.

00:52:57.780 | And it's like, you can be like a monk for a while

00:52:59.380 | and get writing done.

00:53:00.220 | So Daniel, there are lots of options.

00:53:02.060 | And there should be more,

00:53:04.580 | but there's a lot of options out there.

00:53:06.380 | If you're looking to get away,

00:53:08.540 | especially if you're a writer or an artist,

00:53:11.240 | there are a lot of options and I think they're cool.

00:53:13.580 | All right, let's move on.

00:53:16.180 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:53:17.260 | - All right, next question is from TJ.

00:53:19.300 | How do I find time to work deeply

00:53:21.020 | when I'm a busy college student?

00:53:22.660 | - So, I mean, this is a college student question,

00:53:25.260 | but I think it's relevant to everyone.

00:53:28.140 | So I don't do, I try not to do

00:53:30.180 | student specific questions anymore

00:53:32.260 | where it's just relevant to students.

00:53:33.540 | But I think actually this issue

00:53:34.900 | that is being brought up here by TJ

00:53:36.940 | is relevant to more than just students,

00:53:39.380 | which is this idea of I am too busy to do deep work.

00:53:44.380 | All right, here's the thing.

00:53:48.580 | You have the core work you have to do.

00:53:50.160 | So TJ, you're a college student.

00:53:51.440 | So there's assignments that have to be done,

00:53:53.180 | papers have to be written,

00:53:54.140 | studying that has to be completed for quizzes and exams.

00:53:56.740 | That work is your work you need to do.

00:53:58.980 | So the question is just how are you gonna do it?

00:54:01.860 | Now, if you do it in the deep style,

00:54:03.260 | which is let me focus without distraction

00:54:05.820 | when I'm doing that work,

00:54:06.660 | and when I'm not doing that work, not be doing that work,

00:54:08.380 | or you could do it in a shallow style

00:54:09.660 | where you mix it in with lots of other things.

00:54:12.560 | The deep style will take less time.

00:54:15.140 | So I don't really understand the underlying premise

00:54:17.800 | of I'm too busy to do deep work

00:54:19.560 | if that's actually the most efficient way

00:54:21.860 | just from a pure time consumption perspective

00:54:24.300 | to get things done.

00:54:26.260 | So let's reinterpret this question another way,

00:54:29.020 | which is I have too much going on to get my core work done.

00:54:33.100 | This is sometimes what people say

00:54:35.020 | when they say I'm too busy to do deep work.

00:54:36.340 | What they really mean is I'm too busy,

00:54:38.500 | my schedule is too crowded with the shallow

00:54:42.560 | to actually make progress on the core things

00:54:44.420 | I need to do in my job,

00:54:45.300 | whether it be a college student having to study for a test,

00:54:47.300 | or it's you're working in a business

00:54:49.440 | and it's doing your core business strategy, whatever it is.

00:54:52.260 | Well, in that case, here's what you do.

00:54:54.940 | You take out your calendar,

00:54:56.980 | you build an autopilot schedule.

00:54:58.500 | This is what I tell students and it works for everyone else.

00:55:00.340 | Everything that occurs regularly,

00:55:01.980 | I always have to do reading each week.

00:55:03.260 | I always have to do a problem set.

00:55:04.140 | You find a time for it this day, this time,

00:55:08.020 | week after week, and you block it off on your calendar.

00:55:10.100 | So everything regular gets time.

00:55:12.020 | And when you get to the beginning of your week,

00:55:13.220 | you do a weekly plan for that week.

00:55:15.060 | And if you're having trouble fitting things,

00:55:17.940 | do a weekly plan that's very heavy on time allocation.

00:55:20.780 | Let me actually find time on my calendar

00:55:23.060 | for all the major things I have to get done.

00:55:24.980 | You don't always do this in weekly planning in general,

00:55:27.660 | but if you're feeling busy and overwhelmed,

00:55:29.020 | let's do this for a little while.

00:55:30.420 | So now you're placing,

00:55:31.580 | okay, I gotta work on this term paper.

00:55:34.780 | I gotta get these notes cleaned up, whatever.

00:55:39.140 | Getting that all in your calendar.

00:55:41.140 | And either fits or it doesn't.

00:55:43.340 | If it doesn't fit, you only have two options.

00:55:45.340 | You can make more room by quitting things.

00:55:48.780 | So if you're a student, this might mean forget this club.

00:55:51.500 | I can't be involved in these six things.

00:55:53.940 | If you have another type of job,

00:55:55.020 | it might be your project load.

00:55:56.940 | I gotta leave this committee.

00:55:58.300 | I gotta get off of this project.

00:55:59.860 | I have to postpone this until the summer

00:56:01.500 | because it's just a reality, right?

00:56:03.140 | You need more time.

00:56:03.980 | You gotta clear up more time.

00:56:05.820 | The second option you have is to get the work

00:56:07.500 | you have done more efficiently.

00:56:08.900 | So if you're a student,

00:56:09.740 | you could start using the more efficient study techniques

00:56:12.940 | I talk about, for example, in my book,

00:56:15.020 | how to become a straight A student,

00:56:16.780 | or in the archives of my blog at calnewport.com.

00:56:20.420 | You can go back to 2007, 2008, get a lot of articles on it.

00:56:24.700 | That makes things take less time.

00:56:26.740 | You can take things off your calendar to free up more time.

00:56:29.140 | Those are your two options.

00:56:31.380 | You gotta face the productivity dragon here

00:56:33.900 | and figure out what your strategy is gonna be.

00:56:35.340 | There is no other third option where the work gets done

00:56:38.620 | by just you ignoring it and saying,

00:56:40.420 | stop bothering me about things like deep work.

00:56:42.300 | I'm just too busy.

00:56:43.340 | So you gotta face the reality of your schedule

00:56:45.220 | by autopiloting and doing heavy time allocation weekly plans.

00:56:48.420 | Look at what you're facing.

00:56:49.420 | If it doesn't fit, you have those two weapons

00:56:51.060 | and you have to deploy them to whatever extent is required

00:56:54.900 | to make this schedule reasonable.

00:56:56.780 | Keep in mind that might entail radical changes.

00:57:00.780 | The college student equivalent of,

00:57:02.180 | I can't be a double major and I'm gonna use these credits

00:57:05.780 | so I can reduce my course load

00:57:07.700 | and I gotta quit three clubs.

00:57:09.180 | It might be whatever equivalent that is for your job,

00:57:12.060 | but your schedule is your schedule.

00:57:13.860 | And getting to the theme of this episode,

00:57:15.500 | if you just say, I'll just get after it, I'll work late,

00:57:19.100 | I'll work on the weekends, we'll somehow make this work,

00:57:21.260 | you're gonna burn out.

00:57:22.340 | Sustainability is the key.

00:57:25.740 | And this is how you begin to fight more for sustainability

00:57:28.740 | at the scale of the schedule.

00:57:29.820 | If this doesn't fit in a reasonable way,

00:57:32.020 | I have to make changes.

00:57:33.220 | All right, I wanna do a case study.

00:57:37.620 | So when you send in your questions for the show,

00:57:39.580 | you can also opt to send in case studies

00:57:41.980 | of advice working well.

00:57:43.380 | All right, well, this case study comes from Ayaz,

00:57:46.660 | a 28 year old engineer.

00:57:48.580 | Ayaz writes, "My wife is a surgical resident

00:57:53.100 | and as part of her training,

00:57:54.060 | she had to complete a five week rotation in Anchorage, Alaska.

00:57:58.180 | My company was open to me working remotely

00:57:59.820 | on a temporary basis, so I went with her.

00:58:01.420 | While there, instead of working from home,

00:58:03.980 | I decided to rent a coworking space 1.5 miles away.

00:58:08.560 | This was around May to June.

00:58:10.820 | And I remember you talking about the concept

00:58:12.340 | of working from your home,

00:58:13.340 | and this is exactly what I was doing.

00:58:15.180 | Separating work from home made intuitive sense to me.

00:58:17.140 | Boundaries are important.

00:58:18.900 | They allow you to give shape to life.

00:58:21.140 | The cowork was a quiet 15 minute walk away.

00:58:24.520 | This allowed me to get in the mindset of working.

00:58:27.940 | You know, some parentheses,

00:58:28.940 | I would often listen to deep questions on these walks.

00:58:30.940 | That's a smart thing to do.

00:58:32.540 | The slow walk in your podcast would help prime my mind

00:58:35.300 | to focus intensely while working.

00:58:38.160 | Between meetings to transition from one product to another

00:58:40.400 | or relax my nerves,

00:58:41.340 | I would also walk in the downtown Anchorage

00:58:43.060 | and grab a cup of coffee.

00:58:44.460 | It was a perfect way to get some thinking done

00:58:46.660 | or mentally shift focus from one project to another.

00:58:50.060 | I also realized the profound impact mountains have

00:58:52.240 | on my experience of depth.

00:58:54.040 | The short stay in that city and working from your home

00:58:55.860 | has convinced me my vision of the deep life

00:58:57.900 | includes living close to the mountains

00:58:59.460 | and preferably walking to work.

00:59:02.040 | So I like this case study for a particular reason

00:59:05.740 | I want to emphasize,

00:59:06.580 | but first I want to fact check something here, Jesse.

00:59:09.800 | I'm reading IS as saying he's 1.5 miles from his office

00:59:15.740 | and then he gets there in 15 minutes walking.

00:59:20.220 | - He's walking pretty fast.

00:59:21.100 | - That's a fast walk.

00:59:22.220 | - Yeah.

00:59:23.040 | - I think that might be an impossibly fast walk.

00:59:25.940 | A moderate paced walk is about 20 minutes to a mile.

00:59:28.840 | 1.5 miles.

00:59:31.580 | I think he maybe he meant 0.5 miles

00:59:34.420 | or and I think this is equally likely he's 11 feet tall.

00:59:38.500 | Good if you've figured out the stride length,

00:59:41.860 | I actually think that would work out just about right.

00:59:43.860 | I mean, I think the engineers among us can figure that out,

00:59:45.860 | but I think that would,

00:59:46.980 | having a double length stride would probably get you down

00:59:50.340 | to roughly a moderate walking pace of a 10 minute mile.

00:59:53.500 | So 1.5 miles, 15 minutes.

00:59:54.980 | So IS is 11 feet tall.

00:59:57.940 | The thing I wanted to point out from this

01:00:00.580 | is the theme of this episode,

01:00:04.020 | which is trying to combat burnout by having,

01:00:08.320 | finding this balance between intensity and non-intensity.

01:00:10.740 | It's not just about time.

01:00:14.360 | I have busy periods and non-busy periods.

01:00:17.220 | I have this many hours of work

01:00:18.320 | versus that many hours of work.

01:00:19.500 | I'm looking at my schedule like with TJ

01:00:21.940 | and I'm figuring out does it fit or not?

01:00:23.660 | And if it doesn't fit, I need to take things out

01:00:25.540 | or make things smaller.

01:00:27.260 | Location also plays a role in the intensity of your work.

01:00:32.260 | Finding the separation that I has found.

01:00:35.340 | Here's my home, here's my office.

01:00:36.740 | And I have a ritual about how I transition

01:00:38.640 | from one to another.

01:00:39.480 | And during the day, I can leave the office

01:00:41.960 | and see the mountains and walk in the downtown Anchorage

01:00:44.500 | and get a cup of coffee.

01:00:45.620 | The location can shift, location to recharge,

01:00:48.780 | location to transition from home to work.

01:00:51.140 | That will have a huge impact on the feeling of intensity

01:00:54.980 | of your actual effort.

01:00:56.140 | So location can matter just as much as time.

01:00:59.640 | This is something I don't think we thought enough about

01:01:01.600 | during the knowledge workers who had to go remote

01:01:04.740 | during the pandemic, especially those who lived in places

01:01:08.100 | where that remoteness lasted for a really long time.

01:01:10.980 | We didn't think enough about location.

01:01:12.940 | We said, technically speaking,

01:01:14.200 | my laptop in my bedroom gives me all I need.

01:01:16.580 | And what we should have been saying is,

01:01:18.020 | but what is my soul need to actually get this work done

01:01:20.820 | in a sustainable way?

01:01:21.660 | I need to get out of this house.

01:01:23.140 | I need to be in whatever, a deep work shed in the backyard,

01:01:26.100 | or this is a time, you know, because I'm lucky enough

01:01:29.180 | to have a stable knowledge work job

01:01:30.340 | that's not going away during the pandemic.

01:01:31.760 | We're not spending money on anything else.

01:01:33.420 | We're not going on vacation.

01:01:34.300 | Great, I'm gonna lease an office space for this year.

01:01:36.340 | So I have some place to go.

01:01:38.380 | Like we should have cared more about that.

01:01:39.940 | And I wanna hear what IAS does

01:01:42.420 | once they get back to where they are before.

01:01:43.900 | Are they gonna move somewhere with mountains?

01:01:45.340 | Are they gonna have a walk to work?

01:01:47.620 | It's exciting to me.

01:01:48.840 | Lifestyle-centered career planning is unfolding here,

01:01:50.760 | Jesse, he had experiences that built a richer understanding

01:01:55.760 | of what he wanted his lifestyle to be like.

01:01:57.900 | And now he has this crystal clear image,

01:01:59.240 | which he can use to guide.

01:02:00.280 | So he needs location matters, where they live,

01:02:03.160 | like that really is gonna narrow down their search

01:02:05.520 | and open up some really interesting opportunities.

01:02:07.080 | So we got two things out of this,

01:02:09.040 | an emphasis on the importance of location,

01:02:11.100 | and injecting some slowness into your life,

01:02:13.960 | and a cool case study in how really good

01:02:16.520 | lifestyle-centered career planning plans emerge.

01:02:19.160 | Let me do one more quick question here

01:02:22.080 | before we move on to something interesting.

01:02:23.800 | This one comes from Anonymous.

01:02:25.780 | Oh, you should read this, Jesse, I'm sorry.

01:02:27.040 | I'm stepping on your toes here.

01:02:28.440 | - No problem.

01:02:29.360 | This comes from Anonymous.

01:02:30.720 | Can you elaborate more on the celebration bucket?

01:02:33.400 | Is it definite?

01:02:34.240 | Its definition seemed more elusive to me.

01:02:36.760 | - Right, so we talked about the deep life.

01:02:38.080 | We talk about, you have to focus on all aspects on your life

01:02:42.360 | when trying to find depth, focusing on what's important

01:02:44.480 | and minimizing or limiting things that aren't.

01:02:47.240 | And we often use the term buckets to talk about

01:02:49.960 | the different aspects of your life that are important.

01:02:52.560 | I like to alliteratively refer to C,

01:02:55.720 | words that begin with C, when naming my buckets,

01:02:59.680 | and we had craft, and we had community,

01:03:01.400 | and we have contemplation, and we have constitution.

01:03:03.200 | And the last one I often talk about is celebration.

01:03:06.080 | Anonymous is saying, what does that mean?

01:03:08.120 | So roughly speaking, Anonymous,

01:03:11.480 | when I think about celebration,

01:03:12.780 | I think about cool things in the world,

01:03:15.840 | appreciating cool things in the world

01:03:17.280 | unrelated to your work.

01:03:18.680 | I think you can break that down

01:03:20.640 | into two specific subcategories, hobbies and gratitude.

01:03:25.640 | So this is, celebration includes things you do

01:03:28.400 | just for the pure non-functional value of doing them.

01:03:33.160 | I'm really into film.

01:03:35.120 | I hike, I'm into whatever, alpine, ice climbing,

01:03:41.400 | whatever it is, these interests you develop

01:03:43.580 | that you can appreciate and find great value in

01:03:46.220 | that have nothing to do with your job.

01:03:47.660 | It's non-instrumental.

01:03:48.780 | Also captures gratitude.

01:03:51.460 | So celebration is about, do I have on a regular basis

01:03:55.020 | gratitude for things that I'm looking forward to

01:03:56.900 | or enjoy about my life right now?

01:03:58.740 | Do I have that in my life on a regular basis?

01:04:01.460 | I think it's important, for example,

01:04:02.740 | to regularly engineer experiences of gratitude

01:04:05.880 | into your life.

01:04:06.880 | I'm actually putting aside time.

01:04:09.800 | I'm gonna go for a walk.

01:04:10.640 | I'm gonna get home from work a little early.

01:04:12.440 | I'm gonna go for a walk with the sunset.

01:04:15.720 | And I'm gonna think about some things

01:04:17.440 | I really am grateful for right now

01:04:19.520 | and this nice, relaxing weekend that's coming up.

01:04:21.840 | And I'm really looking forward to it

01:04:23.320 | and just generate that sense of gratitude.

01:04:26.680 | I do that a lot.

01:04:27.780 | I started doing that in grad school.

01:04:30.800 | So I even refer to these experiences now internally

01:04:33.280 | as Cambridge moments.

01:04:35.120 | 'Cause I used to engineer gratitude a lot

01:04:37.160 | when I was in grad school at MIT.

01:04:39.760 | But then I picked that up,

01:04:41.360 | especially in the winter, I like to do this a lot.

01:04:44.000 | As the days get a little bit longer,

01:04:45.800 | I like, look, we still have sun in the sky

01:04:48.000 | and it's only gonna get brighter as the season goes on.

01:04:50.360 | And the snow is kind of scenic.

01:04:52.060 | And engineered gratitude,

01:04:53.440 | that's part of the celebration bucket as well.

01:04:54.940 | So your hobbies and gratitude,

01:04:56.800 | that all falls on the celebration.

01:04:58.280 | Those are two aspects of your life that require emphasis.

01:05:02.680 | Start with a habit and then when you get around to it,

01:05:06.080 | overhaul that whole part of your life.

01:05:07.920 | I'm answering that question in this episode

01:05:10.720 | because the celebration bucket is a great bulwark

01:05:14.300 | against the craft bucket

01:05:15.760 | pushing you towards too much busyness,

01:05:18.180 | towards too much intensity.

01:05:19.920 | It is a bulwark against overwork and burnout

01:05:22.160 | because it is things that are non-instrumental, enjoyment.

01:05:26.440 | There's something fundamentally slow about a hobby

01:05:28.800 | while enjoy something slow

01:05:29.960 | about an engineer gratitude experience.

01:05:31.440 | So I think if we're gonna think about

01:05:33.840 | how to inject more slowness

01:05:36.120 | into an otherwise overloaded life,

01:05:38.400 | keep the celebration bucket very much in mind.

01:05:41.360 | All right, we're gonna conclude things

01:05:44.040 | with something interesting

01:05:46.020 | where I talk about interesting things

01:05:47.400 | that people sent to the interesting

01:05:48.520 | at calnewport.com email address.

01:05:50.040 | First, let me mention another sponsor

01:05:51.460 | that makes this show possible.

01:05:54.160 | And that's our longtime friends at Blinkist.

01:05:57.580 | You've heard me talk about Blinkist a lot

01:05:59.900 | because I think reading is the best way

01:06:03.680 | to gain high quality ideas

01:06:05.520 | and high quality ideas are the currency

01:06:08.080 | to success in our current culture.

01:06:11.080 | If you're into reading,

01:06:12.980 | you need to be a Blinkist subscriber.

01:06:16.400 | When you subscribe to Blinkist,

01:06:18.160 | you get access to 15 minute summaries

01:06:22.040 | called Blinks of over 5,000 nonfiction books.

01:06:26.960 | You also can get 15 minute summaries of podcasts.

01:06:30.800 | So they call those shortcast.

01:06:32.960 | This allows you to very quickly figure out

01:06:36.560 | what the big ideas are from a book

01:06:38.220 | and make that decision.

01:06:39.060 | Do I know what I need to know?

01:06:40.760 | Or am I intrigued enough I wanna buy this book?

01:06:42.800 | So it is like having a sidekick for the reading life.

01:06:46.460 | Jesse, you were telling me before we went on the air

01:06:50.320 | that you have a pretty particular Blinkist process, right?

01:06:53.480 | You're a long time Blinkist user.

01:06:54.400 | What's your Blinkist process?

01:06:56.680 | How do you use Blinkist?

01:06:57.840 | - Yeah, it's pretty cool.

01:06:59.240 | So for instance, Ryan Holiday sent out his books email

01:07:03.360 | last week, I think.

01:07:04.480 | So I went through those books and then went into Blinkist,

01:07:08.700 | put them on some of those on my save list.

01:07:11.280 | And then about twice a week, I go into the app

01:07:13.920 | and read some of my save ones and then take them off saved

01:07:17.000 | and then it keeps it honed.

01:07:19.100 | - Are you more a fan of the written Blinks

01:07:21.420 | or the audio Blinks?

01:07:22.600 | - The written ones.

01:07:23.440 | - The written ones.

01:07:24.400 | So if I didn't clarify before,

01:07:26.240 | you have two options with the Blinks.

01:07:27.940 | If you're on the go, you can listen to them

01:07:29.800 | or in the app, you can just read them real quick.

01:07:32.780 | So I like Jesse's habit.

01:07:34.200 | Every time you hear a book you're thinking about,

01:07:36.600 | throw it in the Blinkist in the app

01:07:38.540 | and then just turn through those.

01:07:40.800 | What a great way to keep up with all the books,

01:07:42.840 | all the big ideas and figuring out triage

01:07:45.320 | you want you wanna buy and what you don't.

01:07:46.760 | So if you're gonna be a reader and you should be,

01:07:48.600 | if you're a fan of the deep life,

01:07:50.260 | you should have a Blinkist account.

01:07:53.020 | They have a nice special feature

01:07:54.420 | I wanna mention real quick right now

01:07:55.840 | called Blinkist Connect that allows you

01:08:00.280 | to share your premium account.

01:08:02.000 | So you can get two premium subscriptions

01:08:03.120 | for the price of one.

01:08:04.380 | So you can give a Blinkist account to a friend

01:08:07.120 | that you think needs it when you sign up for one.

01:08:10.780 | All right, so right now Blinkist has a special offer

01:08:13.040 | just for our audience.

01:08:13.880 | Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven day trial

01:08:17.180 | and you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

01:08:20.960 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.

01:08:24.280 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off

01:08:26.480 | and a seven day free trial.

01:08:27.680 | That's Blinkist.com/deep.

01:08:30.040 | And don't forget this limited time,

01:08:32.240 | for a limited time you can use this Blinkist Connect program

01:08:34.840 | to share your premium account.

01:08:36.200 | You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

01:08:40.260 | I also wanna talk about another one of our sponsors, Ladder.

01:08:44.480 | January for me, like for other people

01:08:48.360 | is a time where you realize you're starting

01:08:50.000 | to put things off until the last minute.

01:08:51.960 | For me, it's for example,

01:08:53.040 | when my accountant asks for tax information

01:08:55.880 | and I begin furiously procrastinating

01:09:00.280 | because I'm sure there's something in there,

01:09:01.720 | I don't know how to do it,

01:09:02.640 | some documentation I'm missing,

01:09:03.900 | I'm sure everyone else has their own new year example

01:09:06.080 | of putting things off.

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01:09:12.240 | But the one thing you really can't afford to wait on

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01:09:23.920 | you need life insurance,

01:09:25.040 | it should be term coverage life insurance.

01:09:27.380 | You know you need it.

01:09:28.400 | So why don't you have it if you don't?

01:09:29.880 | It's probably because like me worrying about

01:09:32.560 | where am I gonna find all my tax documents?

01:09:34.640 | You're not quite sure where to start.

01:09:37.980 | So I will give you the solution to that problem, Ladder.

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01:10:05.360 | These are policies that are insured by insurers

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01:10:12.920 | So this makes it easy to get life insurance.

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01:10:19.880 | fill out the information.

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01:10:29.720 | That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep,

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01:10:38.060 | All right, our final segment, something interesting.

01:10:42.040 | People send me cool things from around the web

01:10:44.080 | relevant to living a deep life

01:10:45.340 | to my address at interesting@calnewport.com.

01:10:48.240 | I like to share things when I can.

01:10:50.380 | All right, today's example I wanna share

01:10:52.920 | is an article from, this is from CBS News.

01:10:56.280 | So I saw this and people sent this to me from a few places.

01:10:59.240 | If you are watching at youtube.com/calnewportmedia

01:11:03.560 | episode 231, you'll see this on your screen,

01:11:06.280 | an article where the title is

01:11:07.760 | This Tokyo Cafe Serves an Antidote to Writers Block.

01:11:12.200 | So here is the idea behind this cafe in Tokyo

01:11:16.960 | is that you don't just go in there and work,

01:11:19.960 | which you do, you pay $2.50 an hour,

01:11:21.480 | there's wifi, an air-cooled computer stand,

01:11:24.180 | but you fill out a registration slip

01:11:27.680 | where you tell the proprietors of the cafe

01:11:30.320 | what you're trying to do

01:11:31.320 | and how often you want them to come check on you

01:11:33.600 | and make sure you're actually doing it.

01:11:35.920 | So you don't just get a place to work,

01:11:38.360 | you get pressure to actually get that work done.

01:11:42.000 | So like there's an example here, I'm reading,

01:11:45.660 | here's someone who has to write a lecture due tomorrow.

01:11:47.980 | So on his registration slip, he asked to be checked in on,

01:11:52.160 | as they put in parentheses,

01:11:53.520 | gently harassed every half hour till he's done.

01:11:57.400 | I have a couple other examples in here,

01:11:58.520 | a lot of writers come in here.

01:12:00.720 | So they'll say, I wanna make sure

01:12:01.560 | I get this many words written.

01:12:03.760 | Here's a writer who says they wanna get 24 pages done

01:12:06.680 | and they wanna be checked on every half hour about that,

01:12:09.120 | et cetera.

01:12:09.960 | Anyways, that's interesting.

01:12:12.680 | You wanna get things done,

01:12:14.240 | spend your money to try to get someone to harass you

01:12:17.120 | into actually doing that work.

01:12:20.680 | Now, the question is, what is my advice

01:12:22.440 | if you don't wanna go to that cafe in Tokyo?

01:12:24.480 | I would say it has to do with rituals and systems.

01:12:27.520 | This is when and where I do my deep work

01:12:29.260 | and this is the rituals I do before and after

01:12:30.840 | that work is actually getting done.

01:12:32.480 | That's probably the more consistent way

01:12:33.840 | to actually get really hard cognitive work done.

01:12:36.480 | But what my advice shares with the strategy

01:12:39.880 | of this Tokyo cafe is a recognition

01:12:41.720 | that deep work is difficult

01:12:43.360 | and our brain will try to get out of it

01:12:44.600 | if you approach it casually.

01:12:47.020 | You gotta have something else.

01:12:48.980 | You gotta have structure.

01:12:50.240 | It could be pain someone to bother you

01:12:52.840 | or it could be a nice schedule and a writing shed,

01:12:55.220 | but don't just think I'll get to it when I get to it.

01:12:57.800 | All right, one last thing I wanna mention

01:12:58.880 | before we sign off for today.

01:13:00.760 | Readers of my last book, "A World Without Email"

01:13:02.920 | know how much research I pulled

01:13:05.480 | from the UC Irvine informatics professor, Gloria Mark.

01:13:09.280 | Gloria Mark is one of the, I would say the, not one of,

01:13:13.200 | the leading researcher on the impact of distractions

01:13:16.640 | in the workplace.

01:13:17.460 | So as you can imagine, I'm quite familiar with her work.

01:13:20.440 | Anyway, she has a new book out.

01:13:22.800 | So I'm giving this an unsolicited plug here on my show.

01:13:26.900 | I'm loading it up on the screen as well.

01:13:29.520 | The book is called "Attention Span,

01:13:32.000 | A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance,

01:13:35.600 | Happiness and Productivity."

01:13:37.360 | So I just wanna give this my thumbs up.

01:13:40.160 | She really is the leading researcher

01:13:42.000 | on doing these office ethnographies

01:13:44.200 | where they go in and study people in office environments.

01:13:47.740 | How often do they check an email?

01:13:50.080 | How often do they go back to their inbox?

01:13:51.960 | They did research with thermal cameras

01:13:53.840 | and heart rate monitors.

01:13:54.840 | What happens to their stress levels

01:13:56.420 | when they see a message coming in?

01:13:58.240 | So she is the expert, so I'm glad she finally has this book.

01:14:01.920 | The only thing, Jesse, if you're gonna buy this book,

01:14:04.320 | you are gonna have to look past this rube

01:14:07.360 | they got the blurb in on the cover here.

01:14:09.480 | I don't know if you can see that.

01:14:11.040 | So there's a Cal Newport blurb on the cover of this book.

01:14:13.800 | So that's how you know I recommend it.

01:14:15.680 | So "Attention Span" by Gloria Mark,

01:14:17.440 | despite the fact that my name's on it,

01:14:20.960 | you should really give that book a try.

01:14:22.920 | All right, Jesse, I think that's all the time

01:14:24.920 | we have for today.

01:14:25.760 | Thank you everyone for listening or watching.

01:14:28.800 | If you wanna submit your own questions or case studies,

01:14:30.440 | see that link that's right in the show note description

01:14:33.040 | of this episode.

01:14:33.920 | We'll be back next week.

01:14:35.680 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:14:38.240 | (upbeat music)

01:14:40.820 | (upbeat music)

01:14:43.400 | (upbeat music)

01:14:45.980 | (upbeat music)

01:14:48.560 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 231: Fighting Burnout With Work Cycles

Chapters