Overload Is Ruining Your Life - How To Take Back Control Of Your Time & Mental Clarity

00:00:00.000 | So it is the holiday season, and even though on the show we often talk about productivity in the

00:00:05.920 | age of distractions, one of the things that this particular season is known for is overload.

00:00:12.000 | This is a topic that I think is as worth talking about as how to get more done. So what should

00:00:19.440 | your immediate next steps be when you get hit by that sinking feeling that you have taken on

00:00:25.040 | more than you could possibly reasonably accomplish? That's what I want to discuss today.

00:00:30.080 | I have three concrete ideas, each follows one after the other, 1, 2, 3, that I should suggest

00:00:36.720 | that you deploy in response to overload, whether this is overload in your professional life or your

00:00:42.640 | personal life, something that can deliver relief right away and help make sure that this type of

00:00:48.080 | overload becomes less common in the future. So I have three concrete steps to offer to you about

00:00:54.800 | how to get through overload. But first we should take a moment to understand why overload in the

00:01:02.480 | first place is so hard to avoid. Why is it something that even when we're conscientious

00:01:06.880 | and we use Cal Newport style systems for organization and planning, why do we still

00:01:11.200 | find ourselves at times like the holiday season with too much to do? I want to do a brief bit

00:01:16.800 | of theory here. I'm going to, for those who are watching instead of listening, I'm going to draw

00:01:21.600 | this beautifully on the screen. This is a chart, right? Because I'm a scientist here. So I'm going

00:01:28.000 | to draw a chart here. We have a y-axis and an x-axis. I'm actually going to label this chart.

00:01:34.640 | So let's label the y-axis, the vertical axis here. I'm going to put, let's see here,

00:01:45.200 | obligations. That's pretty small. And then I'm going to put on the x-axis time. All right. So

00:01:53.040 | what am I going to do with this chart? Well, what most people have, whether they know about it or

00:01:57.600 | not, is a limit. And I'm drawing this as a dashed line going across the chart here. They have a

00:02:07.120 | limit for how much obligations they can be dealing with at the same time without feeling overloaded.

00:02:14.320 | So we'll even label that here. We'll call this Max Obligations. This is crude, but gives us the

00:02:23.280 | general idea. We have a maximum of obligations we can handle before we begin to naturally feel

00:02:27.520 | kind of overloaded. The actual position of this line on the y-axis, so the number of obligations

00:02:34.240 | you can handle before feeling overloaded, this has to do in part with what type of work we're

00:02:38.800 | talking about. It also has in part to do with your particular personality. Some people like me are

00:02:43.760 | very attuned to overload. It really stresses us out. Other people feed off of it a little bit more,

00:02:47.920 | but that line exists for most people. Now, here's the problem. We have a broken mental model

00:02:52.880 | for how overload actually operates. Most people think here's what you do. You select a workload

00:03:00.400 | and you want it to be close to but below the max obligations. So maybe I'm putting a red line here

00:03:06.320 | across. You say, yeah, I'll just make my workload here. Keep it steady over time right below that

00:03:11.200 | max obligations dotted line threshold. So I'll be getting a lot done without feeling overloaded.

00:03:17.600 | The reason why this doesn't work is that in reality,

00:03:20.560 | your obligation count is like a giant super tanker on the ocean, right? When you get it moving in a

00:03:29.120 | given direction, you can't just stop it on time. You can't just stop where you are and make a quick

00:03:34.400 | turn. If you want to start turning, you're going to slide for a long time in one direction until

00:03:39.040 | you can finally turn the directions. If you want to stop because you don't want to hit an iceberg

00:03:43.280 | in front of you, it could take you, and I've seen these numbers before, miles before that big mass

00:03:48.720 | comes to a complete stop. So you get moved in a direction that takes a lot of time, even after

00:03:53.680 | you want to change it for you to move back in the other direction. As a result, when you try to keep

00:03:59.120 | your obligations around a certain level, what you're going to get is oscillations above and

00:04:04.560 | below. So I'm going to draw this. I'll draw this here. I'm going to select another color. I'll use

00:04:10.000 | black. All right, so I'm going to draw this here. I guess I'll use orange. It becomes something more

00:04:15.520 | like this. So if you're watching this instead of just listening, you'll see I have an oscillating

00:04:19.840 | sort of sine curve that is going above where you're trying to keep it, then it falls below.

00:04:27.120 | So what's really happening here is that when you realize you have too many obligations,

00:04:30.320 | you start to try to pull back, but it takes a while, and more stuff comes in, and you get much

00:04:34.880 | higher than you want to be. And then finally you go too far in the other direction, you fall lower

00:04:38.160 | than you need to be. So you start bringing stuff on, and you go higher than you want to be. And

00:04:41.680 | if we look at this here, we see there are these points above our max obligation line, periods of

00:04:49.280 | overload. This is difficult to deal with. Now one thing you could do is say, okay, I'll recognize

00:04:54.800 | this reality, and I will build my wave. I'll start it lower. I'll have my target lower so that my

00:05:04.160 | peaks stay below my max obligation line. So I drew another curve here that's trying to indicate that.

00:05:09.760 | You could do that, but here's the problem. In order to keep your peaks below your max

00:05:15.280 | obligation line, look at these valleys now. These are really low. So if you're trying to make sure

00:05:22.560 | that you never have too much to do, you're going to have, at a frequent point, way too little to do.

00:05:27.920 | This might be so little to do that it's very notable. Your boss is like, "What's going on

00:05:31.760 | here?" Your clients aren't getting service. You're not making enough money. The stuff in your

00:05:35.840 | household that just has to get done, not all of it is getting done. So in order to average ourself

00:05:42.400 | around a reasonable area, it feels like overload can be somewhat inevitable. So I think that's

00:05:46.560 | what's going on from a theoretical perspective. That's why it's difficult to avoid overload while

00:05:51.360 | still feeling like you're being reasonably productive. So what do we do about it? Well,

00:05:57.040 | I have three steps to recommend. These feed off each other. One after another, you do them in

00:06:03.200 | this order. Step number one, reduce what you can right away. So you have that moment of, "Oh my

00:06:12.160 | God, I have too much on my plate. I'm stressed out." Typically, this comes after you're confronting

00:06:16.640 | some reality of your calendar. You're like, "My God, how am I going to get this all done? I feel

00:06:20.080 | so busy." To get some relief right away, say, "What can I take off my plate?" And it doesn't

00:06:27.440 | have to be related to the final thing that pushed you over the edge. You say, "Where can I simplify

00:06:31.920 | here?" Well, look, I agreed to volunteer at this thing. They have a lot of volunteers. It's going

00:06:36.960 | to take up a lot of time. This is eating up a whole afternoon. I'm going to step out of that.

00:06:42.080 | I have some social plans that on paper sound good because I want to see these people,

00:06:46.480 | but it means it's going to be five nights in a row where I'm going out and doing things.

00:06:49.840 | So I'm going to actually cancel this social plan. I'm going to cancel that social plan.

00:06:53.120 | I agreed to help with this on work, among other things. I'm going to say I have to step back from

00:06:57.760 | that. I'm sorry. I apologize. I just have too much on my plate. I just agreed to give a talk

00:07:01.680 | yesterday. Let me pull back and say, "Actually, I know we just talked about that, but I wasn't

00:07:05.920 | looking at my schedule right." I'm going to try to push a meeting. I have a meeting with someone

00:07:10.400 | that's going to require me to travel halfway across the city. It's really not that urgent.

00:07:13.920 | It made sense at the time when I scheduled it because the calendar was empty, but now that

00:07:17.680 | I'm there, I have much more intractable things. So you begin to reduce what you can reduce.

00:07:22.480 | Move, cancel, defer just to earn yourself a little bit more breathing room.

00:07:28.560 | A lot of people skip this step because there's almost a morality to being the person that's

00:07:35.840 | always there and always doing things and can handle the busyness. So we have this sense of

00:07:40.160 | pulling back is somehow a failure or a moral mark upon us, but it really isn't. It's just

00:07:47.200 | the reality of this sine wave up and down nature of work that sometimes when the sine wave pops

00:07:53.040 | above, we have to start pulling it back down right away to keep things reasonable.

00:07:56.800 | So if you're doing this with care and in response to overload and not laziness,

00:08:01.840 | not procrastination, but in terms of, "I need to pull down my workload," it is the right first step.

00:08:09.520 | All right, step number two, systematize the workload that remains. So, okay, here's what

00:08:16.000 | I have to do after I've simplified what I can. I now need a plan for how this work is going to get

00:08:22.720 | done. Having a plan for how the work is going to get done does not reduce the amount of work you

00:08:28.720 | have to do. It does not even reduce the total number of hours when you add it up, you spend

00:08:33.200 | on the work, but it can make the psychological experience of facing and executing this work

00:08:38.960 | much improved. So instead of just randomly throwing a lot of hours of what remains,

00:08:44.160 | here are some ideas here. Look ahead on your calendar for however long this period of

00:08:50.960 | overload is lasting and start blocking out the work. When is this going to get done?

00:08:55.840 | I'm going to start putting aside time. This is what I'm going to be working on this conference.

00:08:59.360 | This is what I'm going to do, the gift shopping that is starting to stress me out. Maybe there's

00:09:05.040 | an administrative load you have because you agreed to help organize an event and it's just generating

00:09:09.680 | more and more back and forth emails and crises and you autopilot schedule 35 minutes every morning.

00:09:15.920 | Nothing but work on that, like really thinking through process centric emails,

00:09:21.440 | not just shooting things off of your inbox, but really thinking through here's what I think we

00:09:25.600 | should do. Here's the steps. Here's the next thing you should do. Don't just respond to me in email.

00:09:29.200 | You're working on it every single day, autopilot it. So you have some autopilot scheduling going

00:09:34.160 | on for the things that happen. Add big blocks into your calendar that you might not normally have.

00:09:40.400 | I think we talked about this in, this might've been the episode we did with Laura Vanderkam,

00:09:46.080 | where she talked about, it was an assistant professor who was working, feeling overloaded

00:09:51.920 | because of her schedule, working towards tenure. And one of the things she realized is like, oh,

00:09:56.160 | I could hire childcare for work coverage. Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide

00:10:05.200 | with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas

00:10:13.840 | or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of

00:10:19.760 | things we talk about here on this show. All right, let's get back to it. That would enable me on a

00:10:25.440 | regular basis, at least during this period, to get in a really large block of work that I otherwise

00:10:30.960 | would not be able to do. So in this particular example, the issue was it was a day in which this

00:10:35.520 | professor, it was her turn, not her husband's that pick up her kids from elementary school at three,

00:10:40.880 | but it was a day in which she was done with her teaching by 12. And she realized a babysitter that

00:10:45.920 | picks up the kids and takes them till six means six unbroken hours on those days that she could

00:10:51.840 | really make progress on something. So think about how you can add new blocks, large blocks to your

00:10:58.400 | schedule by doing a little bit extra, putting in a little bit of extra effort to protect time.

00:11:03.200 | And this is, you know, hiring childcare or making a deal with your partner. Sunday mornings,

00:11:08.960 | I need a four hour block on Sunday mornings. Let's figure out something to do with the kids.

00:11:12.400 | So you add in the time you need. So you're proactively making a plan for how is this work

00:11:16.640 | going to get done? And by blocking time in advance, generating more time and putting in autopilots for

00:11:21.920 | the ongoing work, more and more of this gets executed without you just in a stressful manner,

00:11:26.640 | trying to find hours late at night or early in the morning and getting feeling worse about it.

00:11:31.280 | It really is. There's an immediate stress reduction impact. Once you have this plan in

00:11:39.120 | place, even before you've done any of the work, because your mind says we have a plan. This makes

00:11:43.840 | sense. I can go back to thinking about whatever. I don't have to have this as a background hum of

00:11:50.160 | anxiety that's added on top of the actual stress of doing the work. So step one, just reduce what

00:11:56.560 | you can from your schedule right away to get some breathing room. Step two, have a systematic plan

00:12:02.080 | for how the heavy work that remains is going to be executed in this period of overload.

00:12:07.600 | And then step three, and this is one that is often missed and it surprises some people,

00:12:13.440 | but it works really well. Plan to prevent similar overload in the future.

00:12:19.520 | So right now as you're facing an overload period, before you even make significant progress into

00:12:28.640 | that overload, you spend some time thinking through how do I make sure this doesn't happen

00:12:34.240 | so frequently in the future? It seems like at first, isn't this a waste of time? Shouldn't you

00:12:41.040 | just be working on the stuff you need to do? Why would you waste time thinking through new systems

00:12:47.280 | and plans for the more distant future to prevent overload in the future? And the answer is it's a

00:12:52.000 | huge psychological boost. I face this hardship, but you know what? I have some ideas now about

00:12:59.040 | how to prevent this type of overload from happening so often in the future. Makes you feel better

00:13:03.520 | about the overload you face right now. And makes it feel like you have efficacy. I'm in charge of

00:13:09.360 | the situation. I can make progress. Yeah, this is going to maybe suck a little bit for the next

00:13:13.840 | three weeks, but I feel better about it knowing that it's probably not going to happen again

00:13:18.240 | after that for a while because I have, I've learned from it. How did I get in the situation?

00:13:22.800 | What can I put in place to help minimize similar overloads in the future?

00:13:30.000 | Now, before we get into the specifics of how do you prevent overloads in the future,

00:13:34.000 | let's return briefly to my diagram from before, because you might be saying, Cal, you said, look,

00:13:39.040 | work oscillates. You can't keep your workload easily as just a straight line. It oscillates

00:13:46.880 | up and down. So how are we going to have any success trying to reduce overload in the future?

00:13:52.720 | Well, the things I'm going to explain to you now, it's not about stopping the oscillation. What it

00:13:57.600 | is, is going to be about squeezing the space between the top and the bottom. So what you can

00:14:03.280 | do, and this is a great time to do it when you feel overload in the moment, is figure out how

00:14:08.320 | do I get those oscillations tighter? So the overload is not as bad, or perhaps I can actually

00:14:14.640 | fit underneath the limit without my troughs being too low. So how do we squeeze the amplitude of

00:14:23.360 | this workload sinuous curve? Well, here's a few ideas. One, quotas. Certain type of work that you

00:14:32.880 | need to do as part of your position, but that you have an unlimited supply of this work coming in.

00:14:37.360 | So at some point, you're going to have to say, no, you decide in advance what your limit is.

00:14:41.440 | This is very common with college professors with, for example, peer review. Something you need to

00:14:47.760 | do. You can't just say, I don't do peer review as a college professor. At a certain level, you will

00:14:52.880 | have more requests to do peer review than you have time to do. So you might as well set the quota on

00:14:56.880 | your own terms. Four papers per semester. When I hit that quota, I tell people I've hit my quota

00:15:02.160 | for the semester. So I can't do this review right now. You're still doing the thing that's important,

00:15:06.560 | but you are controlling the appropriate level given what's going on. So you might think about

00:15:11.360 | quotas on regular work you have, events you agree to help organize, client lunches you agree to go

00:15:17.120 | do. This is a very good excuse to surround a no, because you're explaining, I like doing this work.

00:15:23.680 | I know it's important. I have a limit for how much I do per unit of time, per semester, per

00:15:28.640 | quarter, wherever you, whatever's relevant to where you work. I'm past that already. It's a

00:15:33.440 | very hard thing for people to push back against because they would have to say your quotas wrong.

00:15:38.560 | You should be doing more of this. And often quotas are very reasonable. So it's a very reasonable way

00:15:42.560 | to say no. Another thing you can consider doing, especially when you feel like there's a lot of

00:15:48.560 | incoming that's novel. This is not work I normally do. I don't have a great instinct for how much

00:15:53.440 | time it's going to take, but I feel pressured to say yes, is future time blocking. This is something

00:16:00.640 | I talk about a little bit, I believe in the introduction to my time block planner, or I talk

00:16:04.720 | about the discipline, but it's a very powerful tool. Or what you do is for when new things are

00:16:08.240 | coming in, you say, I'm going to go and block in advance on my calendar. So it's like I'm time

00:16:14.240 | blocking days that are still way in the future when this work is going to get done. I could be

00:16:19.520 | crude. You don't have to be super precise, but you're like, I don't know. I figure I'm going to

00:16:22.240 | need five or six long sessions to actually write this report I'm about to agree to do. Let me go

00:16:27.600 | find and block those two to three hour sessions, five or six of them in the next three weeks.

00:16:31.760 | I'm going to put them on my calendar. You can mess around with that schedule when you actually

00:16:35.680 | get to the week. But what you're doing is saying, I need to actually find and identify enough time

00:16:41.200 | in my future to actually do this. Now, the advantage of future time blocking is that

00:16:46.960 | pretty soon you see when you don't have enough time to get something done, it makes the

00:16:50.560 | unreasonability of your workload obvious because you're starting to have a hard time finding the

00:16:56.400 | time in the weeks ahead to block off to actually accomplish what needs to be accomplished.

00:17:01.440 | And it gives you a really clear indicator of, okay, I should say,

00:17:04.960 | no, I don't have the time. I'm looking at my calendar, keep very careful track of my time.

00:17:10.880 | I can actually easily find the time for this. So something has to go, or I have to say no to this.

00:17:15.840 | Now, future time blocking is not something you want to do for everything all the time,

00:17:20.880 | right? You don't want to be building a time specific schedule in advance for every obligation.

00:17:25.840 | But if you do this for a while, especially during times where you fear overload,

00:17:29.360 | it protects you during that period. But more importantly, it trains you.

00:17:32.560 | You gain a better understanding of how long things take and how much time you actually

00:17:39.680 | have free once you factor in these standing meetings, I usually have to do this and that.

00:17:43.360 | And after a while, when you get to these potentially busy or overloaded periods,

00:17:48.480 | you don't actually have to do the future time blocking because you just have a good instinct.

00:17:51.840 | I know how much this type of thing takes. I have a good feel for what the month ahead looks like.

00:17:56.800 | I know I don't have time now. You become a sort of time allocation scheduling ninja in the sense

00:18:01.360 | of I just have this really good instinct for what's going on in my calendar.

00:18:06.080 | You can also have automatic no list. Definitely people in the public eye like myself have this.

00:18:14.560 | These are things I just automatically say no to. I don't even have to think about it.

00:18:18.480 | You can also practice hard nos. If you are going to say no, just say no. You can be apologetic,

00:18:24.640 | but don't give wiggle room. Don't say, I don't think I can do this. But I mean,

00:18:28.800 | you know, I mean, unless like we could find a way to work it around, or maybe there's somewhere else,

00:18:32.560 | some other way can be helpful in organizing this, then people just go right back around

00:18:36.400 | and throw a bunch of work on your plate anyways. If you're going to say no,

00:18:39.440 | give people the courtesy of a hard no, so they know to move on.

00:18:43.760 | Consider having a default of deferred yeses. So even if you think you are going to say yes

00:18:53.360 | to something, or you're not sure, but you have to get back to someone,

00:18:55.920 | say, look, that sounds interesting. Let me get back to you on Monday. That's when I go over my

00:19:02.400 | schedule and plan, and I'll see what's going on. I'll get back to you.

00:19:06.240 | It's an easy response to have, because you're not saying no to someone in the moment.

00:19:10.400 | It also shows and signals to the other person that you are a conscientious scheduler. You know what's

00:19:17.360 | going on with your time, that you're responsible and reliable. So you've planted that seed,

00:19:22.160 | and you've bought yourself some breathing room. This breathing room gives you a few different

00:19:25.920 | things. One, it just allows you to escape the social pressure of the moment, which says people

00:19:30.800 | want some sort of positive response. I don't want to disappoint people. You've given a non-disappointing

00:19:34.960 | response. Now you can get some space away from that acute feeling of social pressure and more

00:19:41.360 | clinically say, do I really have time to do this? At a time where you don't feel like in the moment,

00:19:44.800 | I just want to make this person feel good. That sounds silly, but it's a really strong effect.

00:19:49.200 | We mind read, we mind simulate. When that email is there in your inbox, it says, "Hey,

00:19:53.360 | can you come give this talk?" You're simulating the mind in that moment of the person who sent

00:19:59.040 | you that email. When you consider writing no, you imagine that mind being disappointed and upset in

00:20:04.640 | you. That's a very powerful force. So if you have to respond to that email, it's going to bias you

00:20:08.880 | towards a positive response. So if you instead say, "Oh, this sounds great, but let me get back

00:20:13.040 | to you on Monday after my planning," you're not simulating their mind being disappointed. They're

00:20:17.440 | like, "Great, we'll hear from them on Monday." Then later, when you're away from that inbox and

00:20:21.920 | that simulation of the mind of the sender has completed, you're now able to analyze this much

00:20:26.640 | more clinically. "Oh, I don't really have time for that. That's not a good time."

00:20:30.080 | Second, because you have planted the seed that I'm a conscientious scheduler, when you do get

00:20:35.360 | back to them on Monday, if the decision is, I don't have time for it, they take that seriously.

00:20:40.320 | It does not seem knee-jerk. This seems like someone who knows about their schedule and

00:20:44.320 | don't have time for this. So it's much harder for them to say, "Well, can't you just do it?"

00:20:48.720 | Because that's a repudiation of your demonstrated ability to actually control your schedule.

00:20:54.560 | So deferred yeses is a great way to... You could have a whole, by the way, just column of this in

00:20:59.520 | your Trello board for the relevant roles. Deferred yeses, get back to people, next planning meeting.

00:21:03.680 | It's a great way to just sort of break free of the social pressures, give yourself some space,

00:21:08.240 | signal your conscientiousness, and make much more intelligent decisions.

00:21:13.600 | The final thing you can think about when you're in this mode of, "How can I prevent this type

00:21:17.120 | of overload from happening again?" is bigger shifts. We don't enough think about work positions

00:21:24.960 | in terms of the controllability of workload. There's a lot of things we use to measure the

00:21:31.600 | desirability of work positions. The two most obvious ones being content of the work. This

00:21:39.280 | is probably, in the American context, the most dominant way we judge work. Does this match my

00:21:44.320 | "passion"? Do I like the sound of this job or working in this position or the eliteness of

00:21:52.240 | this position? So we put a lot on the content of the work. What is the job itself? What field is

00:21:57.360 | it in? We put a lot of emphasis on that. We also put a lot of emphasis in location too. All right,

00:22:02.400 | so where is this? Is this a part of the country that I want to live? But there's other things

00:22:06.560 | you should care about too. Things that have a huge impact on your day-to-day subjective well-being and

00:22:11.840 | workload controllability could be that. So maybe it's the case that this job, it's hard to subdue

00:22:18.240 | the sine waves, the up and down movement of workloads. I'm constantly above my workload max

00:22:22.480 | and it's just the way this job works. Take that seriously as a signal for maybe I need to shift

00:22:30.400 | my position within this company or within this field or into another field. Take the pain of

00:22:36.560 | overload seriously. So doing this planning in the moment for the future makes you feel better about

00:22:43.120 | the present because the present becomes attractable. I'm going to get through this. I have

00:22:46.480 | my plan, I reduce things, and I've made steps to prevent this from happening again. If you don't

00:22:51.840 | make those steps to help prevent it from happening as often again, you can feel, to use motivational

00:22:57.840 | psychological terms, that the locus of control has shifted towards the extrinsic, that you have

00:23:03.040 | no control over this negative thing. It's not doing hard things that bothers us. It's the sense

00:23:08.320 | of I can't control this hard thing from happening and it's going to keep happening. That bothers us.

00:23:12.880 | That's what leads us to burnout. That's what leads us to just giving up. This notion of this is hard

00:23:19.760 | and it's arbitrary and it's just going to keep happening again and again. That breaks our spirit.

00:23:25.040 | They're like, "This is hard. I've fixed it so this won't happen as much. So let's just get

00:23:29.040 | through this now." That we can do. You give me weights in the gym and an exercise plan I've

00:23:35.120 | created. Yeah, it's hard to lift weights, but I know why I'm doing it and I feel motivated.

00:23:41.280 | You instead just put a lot of heavy stuff on the path from my parking space to the building and

00:23:45.200 | I'm just always having to move this stuff. I'm just going to get really frustrated about it.

00:23:48.640 | I mean, that's a secret way to get people stronger, Jesse. You have to do Olympic lifts

00:23:54.640 | to get into the building. So those are my three ways. Those are my three responses.

00:23:59.280 | Overload is hard to avoid because of the reality of work, but if you have a good response,

00:24:05.040 | it could be better. So let's just summarize. Reduce everything you can right away. So just

00:24:08.480 | find a breathing room where you can get it so you can take deeper breaths. Two, build a systematic

00:24:12.320 | plan for the overload work that remains. It doesn't reduce the hours, but it does reduce

00:24:16.480 | the footprint of it. And three, even before you get started, help making a plan to prevent this

00:24:20.960 | scale of overload from happening again. Compress the highs and lows of that workload count sine

00:24:26.880 | wave that we drew before. You do those three things. It's a pretty strong response to overload.

00:24:31.600 | You know, I mean, sometimes it's about how do I get more done? Sometimes it's about how do I get

00:24:36.720 | through the period when I have too much that I have to do? This seemed like the right time of

00:24:41.520 | year to talk about that second piece. So dealing with the negative I think can be just as important

00:24:46.960 | as trying to seek out more positives. What's an example of a plan that you put in place to

00:24:54.480 | prevent overload during the holiday season, like in years prior? Well, I know for example,

00:24:59.600 | in personal life, I have a pretty early set schedule in which we're dealing with gifts

00:25:08.000 | because we have not just the standard holiday gifts, but birthdays, two kids' birthdays that

00:25:16.800 | fall right around the beginning of the holiday period as well. It's a lot of stuff. And so we

00:25:22.800 | start very early. I figured this out a long time ago is like you're way early. You're buying,

00:25:30.080 | here's the birthday gifts, here's Christmas gifts, you know, by the time you get to December,

00:25:35.120 | you're done. So I kind of figured out how to not have that just be something that was

00:25:39.520 | hanging overhead. It was going to cause a lot of stress. I often try to be careful about the two

00:25:47.360 | weeks or so I have after Georgetown's academic schedule ends and the end of break, being really

00:25:55.120 | careful about not scheduling talks or trips or things that require me to go somewhere or do

00:26:01.200 | something professionally. We do a lot of social things. I see a lot of friends. I see a lot of

00:26:05.760 | movie, like that type of stuff. Yeah. Like that's the emphasis, but like, I'm not going to,

00:26:09.760 | let's not do, I'm going to come to your office or like, let's have, like get to know you meetings.

00:26:14.560 | I try to keep that period because I've learned keeping that period light on those appointments

00:26:19.840 | is psychologically easier as I'm finishing up other things. So those things work well.

00:26:24.400 | Definitely the deferred yes strategy has been very helpful. And again, everyone should just

00:26:30.240 | have in the, if you're using Trello, just have a column in each context. If you have one for,

00:26:35.040 | you know, waiting to discuss for different meetings, just have one waiting to get back

00:26:39.120 | to people after next planning. And just on Mondays, you just go through those and get

00:26:42.960 | back to people. That, that space is so important, especially if people corner you, Hey, Jesse,

00:26:48.000 | like grab you in the hallway. Can you, can you do this for me? Like, Ooh, tell me about it. That

00:26:51.520 | sounds great. Let me get back to you on Monday. That's when I do my planning. I'll see if I have

00:26:54.640 | time that, that one has been a new addition to my playbook. That really makes a difference.

00:27:00.560 | Something I have to do. This is more unique. I think to my, the, the part of my professional

00:27:05.360 | life, that's more public facing at a certain level. And this is very common. It's something

00:27:09.600 | that people have to do at some point after a certain level, because of the volume of incoming

00:27:14.000 | is the notion of an automatic. No list includes a, an automatic, no reply.

00:27:21.120 | Like it, you just, at, at some point, there's a lot of communication that comes to you,

00:27:25.440 | that gets around the filters that really the best thing to do is not to reply.

00:27:28.960 | You know, and it, it, I re I had a hard time with this when I first got to that level of

00:27:34.640 | sort of public notoriety, but you get to a point eventually where there's certain things where

00:27:38.640 | people are just asking you for things. And what about this? And can't we talk about this? Where

00:27:42.720 | really the right thing to do for them and you is just not to reply. They actually are sort of just

00:27:47.600 | throwing a dart out there. Hey, maybe this will work. They like to start a conversation, kind of

00:27:51.200 | gives them false hope and it takes up your time, but that's a place where you have to build pretty

00:27:55.280 | clear filters. What falls under this threshold of like, it's probably best. I just don't reply to

00:28:00.720 | this versus, you know, let me get into it. Most people don't have that, but if you're public

00:28:05.040 | facing at all, or you're a, I learned this originally from prominent MIT professors had

00:28:10.800 | to do this where you just, you have to figure out where this threshold is of, um, public incoming

00:28:17.600 | that you respond to and public incoming where it's better for everyone just not to reply.

00:28:20.880 | So I've been learning. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Every time I have a new book come out. So like

00:28:28.640 | right now the book coming out in March, we're starting to do publicity preparation and reach,

00:28:34.960 | reach out to people I know who have like big podcasts and stuff like that. But it's interesting

00:28:38.880 | to see, cause I've known a lot of these people, these are like big names now, but I've known them

00:28:42.320 | for a long time and their shows are just getting bigger and they're getting bigger. So it's

00:28:46.800 | interesting to observe book by book, how just the experience of talking to them and trying to see

00:28:52.480 | if we can set something up, how it changes as they just get bigger and the incoming gets really

00:28:58.000 | more and more and you really notice it and what it comes down to and trying to just, you know, where

00:29:03.280 | three years ago, it might've just been like a text, like, Hey, when can I come on your show?

00:29:08.000 | And like, yeah, whenever you want to do it now, it's like a whole thing. Like

00:29:11.520 | eventually, you know, it's, you know, the publicist are involved, there's teams and it's,

00:29:16.240 | you know, um, it's interesting to observe people I know get famous, sir. Yeah. It's just the moats

00:29:22.160 | get wider and the passages in get narrower, which I, it's just completely unavoidable.

00:29:27.440 | Completely unavoidable. Oh, well. All right. So we, uh, as we usually do, we, we have some

00:29:33.840 | questions coming up from, uh, real listeners that deal with people, uh, that have these concrete

00:29:39.680 | issues. But before we, uh, before we get to those questions, let us first hear from our sponsors.

00:29:48.400 | So I want to talk first about our long time friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that

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00:33:21.360 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we have first?

00:33:27.120 | First question's from Arjan. What do you think of the book and underlying methodology,

00:33:31.760 | building a second brain? In earlier episodes, you mentioned that systems don't make a huge

00:33:36.000 | difference in your productivity. Well, I think it is important that you have a good, stable,

00:33:41.120 | trusted place to store information that is relevant to your life or your professional

00:33:46.560 | endeavors. Your primary brain, your first brain, if we're going to use this terminology,

00:33:52.400 | is not great at storing large amounts of complicated information, often information

00:33:58.720 | that you don't yet have a use for, but you might in the future. It's very difficult for it to keep

00:34:02.400 | track of all of that and to remember where it comes from. You know, oh yeah, I read at some

00:34:07.680 | point this article about the developers for Mario having a new technique and what was that and where

00:34:13.680 | was that. You can remember some of that stuff, but a lot of it you're going to forget. So the idea of

00:34:18.320 | a second brain in the sense of having some sort of external system to keep track of stuff, ideas

00:34:24.160 | and information that might be useful completely makes sense if you work in the knowledge industry,

00:34:31.280 | if you work in an industry where the keeping track of an application of ideas and knowledge

00:34:36.080 | is important. The thing is, the system doesn't have to be super complicated for you to get most

00:34:43.440 | of its benefits. I, for example, right now make a lot of use out of my remarkable notebook. It's

00:34:50.800 | a digital notebook that inside it, I right now have like 20 or 30 different notebooks all in the

00:34:54.960 | same physical package. I have notebooks for all sorts of different things, book ideas, article

00:35:00.880 | ideas, things that are happening within my media business. So I always have a place to take notes

00:35:05.680 | on something and I know they're all in there. And I have to remember that those digital notebooks

00:35:09.920 | exist in there, but I usually do. So it's like, okay, what's going on with the video on our

00:35:14.000 | podcast? I know there's a notebook digitally in my remarkable somewhere where I've been keeping

00:35:17.840 | thoughts on that. And I can go there and see what's going on. When I'm working on an article

00:35:22.560 | or a book, I'm typically going to have a Scrivener project for that book or article, and I'll just

00:35:28.320 | collect relevant files, papers, articles into the research folders in that Scrivener. So they're

00:35:33.920 | just right there. So as I'm just sort of thinking about the background, collecting, collecting,

00:35:37.920 | collecting the, when it comes time to write that information is right there. There are better ways

00:35:42.640 | I could do all of this from a strictly technical standpoint. I could have a system that had all of

00:35:47.280 | this, that tagged it and cross-connected it, or I could do searches or explore connections.

00:35:52.560 | But in my experience, that extra element of complexity in the storage and connection of

00:35:58.000 | information doesn't pay off much. And in the end, if you work in the creative production,

00:36:04.160 | thinking is thinking. The idea that a system is going to do thinking for you or make that

00:36:09.440 | thinking more simple, it's not usually how it works. Typically for those of us who think for

00:36:13.760 | a living, the ideas that are important emerge in our brain, sort of festered and begin working on

00:36:19.840 | it. And then you want to be able to look up, you know, Oh yeah, I've read this article could be

00:36:22.720 | useful here, but it's just old fashioned grinding intellectual work of the type we talked about in

00:36:27.600 | last week's episode, where I talked about what goes into being a serious thinker.

00:36:31.200 | It's just your brain doing stuff. Now, does that mean having any more complicated systems,

00:36:36.640 | something built in notion in which everything is a database entry that could be cross-listed?

00:36:40.640 | Is this bad? No. I mean, for a lot of people, it's actually quite enjoyable. I think

00:36:45.760 | building custom information systems, if you're of a certain type of developer CSE mindset,

00:36:52.800 | can be an actual really rewarding and fun activity. I like doing that type of stuff.

00:36:57.680 | I don't have a lot of time to do it right now, but it fits with my personality.

00:37:01.680 | Ooh, I built this notion system that connects us. I like that stuff.

00:37:04.640 | Like Jesse and I have, uh, in our connection with our, our advertising agency, right? Jesse,

00:37:10.480 | it's, um, they built out a whole notion based system where the episodes have their own notion

00:37:15.840 | elements and we have different views where you, all the information, it's a really cool system.

00:37:19.520 | Actually. Yeah. Uh, I like that type of thing, but it's just not necessary. So that's the way

00:37:25.360 | I think about second brains is you do need a way to collect stuff. That's not just in your head.

00:37:29.680 | The complexity of that system is more about what you enjoy

00:37:32.800 | than it is about having a big impact on the value you get back from the brain

00:37:37.360 | and what you don't want to do. And I, and you know, this happens in online culture

00:37:41.600 | and extreme examples of online culture is you don't want to put too much faith into the brain itself.

00:37:45.840 | You don't want to downplay the importance of just good old fashioned, hard

00:37:50.960 | thinking. I'm walking and thinking, what idea do I keep coming back to you? Let me develop,

00:37:54.960 | let me polish that idea. Uh, just coming back to that. And I got to tell you, as a professional

00:37:59.520 | writer, I can't tell you how often I've collected articles forever and books and papers when I'm

00:38:05.440 | working on a book chapter or New Yorker piece. And in the end, when you get the writing,

00:38:09.600 | you still end up just in the moment using Google and like, I don't have exactly what I,

00:38:15.600 | now that I'm writing, this is what I really need. And you end up just going and finding it in the

00:38:19.280 | moment anyways, right? Like I've never had, I've never been able to collect enough information

00:38:23.920 | that it's all just there because you don't know where the idea is going to go. Once you start

00:38:27.280 | actually pulling that thread out, you don't know what particular example or where it's going to

00:38:32.000 | wander once you actually start recording and structuring it. So even for all that work,

00:38:35.920 | writing still ends up being a lot of writing, stopping, thinking, looking something up,

00:38:39.840 | writing some more, it's tedious. It's hard. You're not going to have these associative

00:38:43.200 | connections that make a brilliant ideas just fall out. You're not gonna be able to just click

00:38:46.880 | buttons. You have all the information you need. I mean, intellectual work is hard and the second

00:38:50.240 | brain can't make it less hard, but you got to have something beyond that. You know,

00:38:56.080 | it just varies on what you as the user find enjoyable. All right. What do we got next?

00:39:03.520 | Next question is from Brandon. I'm supposed to work 40 hours of billable time each week.

00:39:09.280 | I usually do deep work sessions of 90 to 60 to 90 minutes, then take a 20 to 30 minute break.

00:39:15.680 | I do personal admin tasks in these breaks. So to bill 40 hours, I would have to work

00:39:20.000 | over 50 hours each week. Should I take longer to do tasks during my deep work sessions

00:39:25.200 | to bill more? I'm afraid if I ask for more work, I'll get overloaded.

00:39:28.640 | Yeah, I hear this a lot. I'm assuming Brandon's a lawyer. I hear this a lot from lawyers.

00:39:33.040 | It always seems very reasonable to the outside when the lawyers of the big firm say I have to

00:39:37.840 | bill 40 hours a week, but they don't realize this often can take them 60 hours of work to actually

00:39:43.120 | get to the 40 billable hours. Brandon, I would say do not ask for more work. I think you will

00:39:48.960 | get overloaded. I would reduce these non-billable breaks. I mean, it makes sense on paper after 60

00:39:58.880 | to 90 minutes of deep work on a client, let me spend 30 minutes doing a personal thing so my

00:40:02.800 | mind can recharge and then go back to 60 more minutes working on a client. I would find a way

00:40:09.680 | to introduce more billable deep breaks. So deep breaks, this is something we talked about,

00:40:16.000 | and I got an essay I wrote years ago, but it comes up occasionally on the show.

00:40:21.040 | And what it says is in deep work, there's ways to throttle back the cognitive intensity of what

00:40:26.960 | you're doing without having to stop altogether what you're doing. So you're not changing your

00:40:31.200 | context completely to something unrelated, but maybe you're working on a hard piece of a client

00:40:36.320 | brief. And then you pull back to just, I'm gathering and organizing notes for the next

00:40:43.040 | section I'm going to write. It's less of a lift. Or I'm doing communication now. I've batched

00:40:47.520 | together a lot of communication related to this client. Or I'm going to write these more careful,

00:40:52.080 | process-oriented emails, where I don't just shoot things out, but say, okay,

00:40:55.440 | here's what we're working on. I'm going to suggest here's what the next three steps are.

00:40:58.560 | Let me outline, get me those responses, put them in this folder, et cetera, like take time.

00:41:04.400 | So I have these deep breaks where it's still billable, but it's less cognitively intense,

00:41:09.280 | where you're organizing what you're doing. You're carefully, but slowly maybe

00:41:13.600 | filing away what you just did and communicating what you're doing.

00:41:18.160 | Because what I want for you here, Brandon, is to have less total hours of work.

00:41:21.040 | I would like your total work count to get closer to the 40 hours that you're billing.

00:41:25.760 | And then when you're done work, be done with work and very efficiently work on personal stuff.

00:41:29.920 | It's going to be much more relaxing to just be done with work and then tackle the personal stuff.

00:41:35.520 | So I often tell lawyers that you have to be careful about making more things billable,

00:41:42.320 | not in a false way, but just being able to ride the ups and downs of cognitive intensity so you

00:41:49.120 | can go longer in billable work. And if you're careful about what you do in the down periods,

00:41:53.920 | you can actually make your work higher quality and more useful. It's I'm organizing stuff better,

00:41:58.480 | I'm communicating better. And so that's what I would recommend.

00:42:01.040 | All right, who do we got next? Another B.

00:42:05.040 | Yep. Next question is from Bob. As part of a big organization,

00:42:08.720 | I don't have much control over IT systems, but in my role, I do have a reasonable say in how

00:42:13.360 | multiple teams spend their time, short of buying them all deep work and making them watch your

00:42:17.840 | capture configure control videos. What do you think? That's a good question. That's the wrong

00:42:24.480 | book. You should have them all by how to be a high school superstar. And don't explain it, Bob.

00:42:31.200 | It just insists that they all read it. For those who don't know, that was a book I wrote

00:42:35.360 | years ago, how to be a high school superstar. Actually, a really cool book. I like that book

00:42:39.280 | a lot. All right. I know you were joking some about like, look, I'm not just going to buy them

00:42:44.400 | all a copy of a book, but maybe you should. The book I would have people read, the people in the

00:42:51.120 | team you can control. If you're going to have them read a book of mine, I would have them read

00:42:54.640 | A World Without Email. So A World Without Email, what this book does is shifts the way you understand

00:43:02.640 | your world when you're in one of these big knowledge work organizations. It comes in and

00:43:07.840 | it's the fish that doesn't even know what water is and explains what water is. So you know better

00:43:11.680 | how to deal with it. I increasingly think in big organizations, A World Without Email is how you

00:43:17.440 | change the vocabulary with which people even understand their work. Now, changes to behavior

00:43:23.120 | will be possible. So what are they going to learn if they read A World Without Email? Well, first,

00:43:27.600 | it's going to come in and say, wait a second. Work is not just work. In knowledge work, you have a

00:43:33.120 | bunch of brains that have to collaborate and share information with each other to add value

00:43:36.480 | to existing information. How do you do this is specific and has an impact. And how you're doing

00:43:42.480 | it right now, you don't realize this, but in your workplace where it's constant emails and Slack and

00:43:46.160 | people throwing meeting invites back and forth, is you're using a very specific collaboration

00:43:50.480 | strategy that the book names. It calls it the hyperactive hive mind. Everything gets worked out

00:43:55.280 | on the fly, unscheduled back and forth messaging. And for a lot of people, that's just synonymous

00:44:00.720 | with work. That's what work is. And the reason why they think that's synonymous with work is

00:44:04.720 | because when they try to imagine life without the hyperactive hive mind, what they imagine is just

00:44:11.760 | shutting all those services down with no response in return. If I didn't have email and Slack in

00:44:17.680 | these meetings, all this work I'm doing using email, Slack in these meetings just would stop.

00:44:22.320 | So it just seems like a fantastical fairy tale. But when they understand this is one way among

00:44:29.600 | others, you could be collaborating. There's other ways to collaborate that don't require

00:44:33.200 | unscheduled messages. Yes, you would have to actually define these new ways of collaborating.

00:44:37.600 | It's not just turning off Slack, it's putting in its place. Here's our process for this type

00:44:42.320 | of work. Here's our process for that type of work. It's doing proactive work, not just turning things

00:44:48.160 | off. But when they understand there's different options, they begin to say, well, should we be

00:44:52.400 | using those other options? And when they read the whole first part of the book that lays out

00:44:56.080 | with clinical precision, why the hyperactive hive mind just beats us down and exhausts us and burns

00:45:00.160 | us all out, they'll become increasingly motivated for if there are other options, well, sure, we

00:45:03.920 | should go after them. Then they're going to get principles in that book about how do you design

00:45:08.560 | options that are better than the hyperactive hive mind. And you learn about what makes a good

00:45:13.440 | process or not, how you create these things in the organization. It's an important book for any

00:45:17.920 | organization that feels overloaded. The members feel overloaded and they feel like there's no

00:45:22.080 | way to actually change it. Now, if you're in a smaller organization or you're a freelancer,

00:45:27.760 | or you're just wondering what you can do as an individual, deep work is an important book.

00:45:31.200 | It says concentration is important. But at the organizational level, the question is,

00:45:35.520 | how do we free up this time for concentration? And that's what it gets into. So I am,

00:45:40.320 | and this is self-serving, of course, I can say you read that book, you buy that book for everyone

00:45:44.320 | else. So everyone's speaking the same vocabulary and has the same toolkit. Then I think you're

00:45:50.480 | ready to start talking about making some systemic changes, not just individuals getting better

00:45:57.120 | habits, but how as the systems we use as an organization, how do we improve those

00:46:02.160 | so that work is not so draining and doesn't generate so much overload.

00:46:05.600 | It's an important book, Jesse. It's harder to, you know, it doesn't, though it does give a lot

00:46:11.760 | of advice to individuals. It's not so just clear cut to individuals. There's more management theory

00:46:15.840 | in it. So I have to sell it a little harder, but I really think the ideas in there are important.

00:46:20.720 | So that's where Bob should start. - I remember when I was reading it

00:46:23.840 | back in 2020, when did it come out? - 21. - 21. I had the hard copy and at various

00:46:30.320 | copy shops, people would ask about it. - Oh, they'd see the cover?

00:46:33.840 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:46:34.560 | - I remember I was in Miami once and had it. - Yeah.

00:46:37.840 | - That's what we're asking. - Yeah.

00:46:38.800 | So keep your cover on if you're going to read it.

00:46:41.360 | Ooh, okay. So Jesse, I have labeled our next question here. This is potentially a slow

00:46:49.680 | productivity corner question. This is the one quarter question per episode that relates to

00:46:55.520 | the philosophy of slow productivity. So in celebration of my book on slow productivity

00:47:00.240 | that comes out in March, though it's available for pre-order right now, anywhere books are sold,

00:47:04.720 | we like to have one question per episode that touches on slow productivity.

00:47:09.280 | We like to mark this with some theme music. Jesse, let's hear the slow productivity corner

00:47:13.360 | theme music, if you would. - Here we go. - I'm excited about this.

00:47:21.920 | All right, what's our slow productivity corner of the day, Jesse?

00:47:27.200 | - This question is from Patrick. When I'm collaborating with other researchers,

00:47:31.200 | projects often grind to a halt due to uncontrollable factors. For this reason,

00:47:35.360 | I adapted a barbell strategy after Nassim Taleb. For example, I have a pool of potential projects

00:47:40.960 | from which I hope that at least one will be where every collaborator is available.

00:47:46.560 | I'm a bit annoyed about the overhead it requires to rekindle the fire for each halted project,

00:47:51.280 | not to mention that since I am working in machine learning, time is often a critical factor.

00:47:55.200 | What should I do? - Well, I'm calling this a slow productivity

00:47:59.440 | quarter question because there is a principle of slow productivity that I think could be relevant

00:48:05.040 | here. That is principle number two, work at a natural pace. So some of what might be happening

00:48:13.280 | here is that there is an impatience with not being able to just get after it with one of these

00:48:19.360 | projects. Let's just all work on this 10 hours a day, let's give it a week and have this cool

00:48:25.440 | thing to show. Often things that are a very high quality and very intellectually demanding

00:48:33.120 | are complicated fields. So in this case, research on machine learning takes time to get right.

00:48:39.040 | And that pacing then as you work on it goes up and down. There's periods where you're working

00:48:44.400 | on it pretty intensely and periods where it's fallow and then you're back to it again.

00:48:47.920 | Things take time. Now, in my book on slow productivity, I have a real example of this

00:48:53.040 | principle where I follow the playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda through the seven-year odyssey.

00:48:59.840 | It took him from his initial performance of In The Heights, a college performance of In The Heights,

00:49:06.400 | to that show debuting on Broadway seven years later. And I go through like,

00:49:10.320 | look during this period, I reconstructed a TikTok of how that play came together.

00:49:15.120 | There was periods where they were working intensely on it, periods where he wasn't,

00:49:18.400 | it just took a long time. So some things that are good just take a lot of time.

00:49:21.200 | So this is a slow productivity principle, increase the scale at which you're measuring

00:49:27.280 | your productivity. So don't be frustrated you didn't work on this project this month.

00:49:30.800 | What you want to be happy about is over the last two years, I had three really

00:49:35.040 | impressive projects come through. So we just get better with not just slowing down,

00:49:38.800 | but varying our pace. There's also a pragmatic answer here. This is just one academic to another.

00:49:44.880 | You might just need better collaborators or a better style of collaborating.

00:49:48.400 | This happens as well. Sometimes you have a group of collaborators you're used to working with

00:49:52.240 | because maybe you went to grad school with them or you met them at a conference and they're

00:49:55.360 | overloaded and they're busy and they just stall on things and it's very frustrating

00:50:00.240 | for you in the project. This could just mean they're disorganized or it could mean

00:50:05.200 | they are prioritizing your work with them lower than other things they're working on.

00:50:09.520 | Find better collaborators. So that means in particular, maybe collaborators who you can

00:50:15.360 | work with more regularly, they're at your university. So you could just work regularly

00:50:20.880 | without having to wait to try to organize meetings that are going to happen.

00:50:25.200 | This was one of the great advantages of MIT. I noticed when I was there is there were so many

00:50:29.840 | great people there that you could just be working with people. They were all there in person.

00:50:34.480 | Two, find collaborators for whom the work you're doing with them is their tier one project.

00:50:39.680 | Once you're working with someone and they see this as their second or third tier project,

00:50:45.200 | they're going to ignore it more. So you want to work with people who see at the same level of

00:50:50.320 | you in terms of how they're seeing that work. That could help as well. And maybe do more work

00:50:54.240 | that's solo or at least have something going on where it's just you and your insight and you can

00:50:58.640 | control your own time. So we have the slow productivity answer, which is slow down.

00:51:02.800 | You have ups and downs. That's fine. That's actually how really good creative stuff typically

00:51:08.960 | is produced, not in a big frenzied push. And we have the pragmatic academic answer,

00:51:14.160 | which is find better collaborators, find a better collaboration style.

00:51:20.800 | And that is our slow productivity corner. Should we do the music again, Jesse?

00:51:25.120 | Yeah.

00:51:26.000 | Yes.

00:51:26.320 | Do you have any slow productivity projects that you work on, say, two hours a week?

00:51:39.120 | Or is that too little?

00:51:41.920 | That's possible. It's possible, right? I think it's possible to have something that you're really

00:51:46.640 | back-burnering that you just kind of return to. I mean, I've had this before where it's a big

00:51:52.320 | thought about a major change or a major new idea. Or I might just for a long period just come back

00:51:57.360 | to it maybe one walk per week and just think about it. Like, I'm OK if this whole year I'm just sort

00:52:02.640 | of mulling this with no pressure. When I feel inspired, I'd say first cup of coffee, have a

00:52:08.320 | clear morning. That could actually aggregate sometimes into really good insight because

00:52:12.320 | you're exploring the space. And over time, things stick. And especially for really big ideas or

00:52:17.680 | projects or changes to your life, you can't force it. You can't sit down like, I'm going to figure

00:52:22.400 | out how to overhaul my life this weekend. So I think even one session a week over a year,

00:52:28.240 | that's not an unreasonable pace for certain types of slow projects.

00:52:32.880 | I should also say, relating to the book Slow Productivity, someone emailed and said,

00:52:37.760 | hey, is there going to be incentives for pre-ordering? Like, hey, do we get something?

00:52:43.120 | And I'll say, yes, we have really cool stuff we're developing. We're going to announce it

00:52:46.320 | all in January, in the new year. But if you ended up, if you've already pre-ordered the book or

00:52:50.560 | pre-order it now, it's fine. Just you'll have your Amazon receipt or whatever digital receipt you have

00:52:54.960 | from wherever you bought it. You will be able to submit that when we announce the pre-order

00:52:59.520 | incentives in January. But we've got some really cool stuff that is bubbling. So buy the book

00:53:04.640 | whenever cool stuff is coming. All right, let's do another question. What do we have?

00:53:09.120 | Next question is from Matt, but it's actually for his wife. My wife was promoted last year,

00:53:14.720 | is now an HR executive at a large company. Her new position is all the trappings of the

00:53:19.120 | hyperactive hive mind. She's got email overload, frequent Teams messages, never-ending business

00:53:24.880 | hours, context switching, asynchronous communication, the whole nine yards,

00:53:29.200 | not to mention an insane number of meetings. I think she's making herself sick from overworking

00:53:33.920 | stress and I'm worried. I've suggested office hours and time blocking, but she says it's not

00:53:38.240 | feasible or else she'll just fall behind. She's a rising executive, but not quite senior enough to

00:53:44.480 | set the tone and the culture of her company. Any recommendations? Well, first of all, I'm shocked

00:53:50.000 | to hear that you go into your wife and saying, let me give you advice for how to do this based on

00:53:55.440 | what this guy, Cal Newport, told me. I'm shocked that didn't work. There are so many partners out

00:54:02.000 | there who have had their husbands tell them at some point, let me tell you what Cal Newport says

00:54:08.000 | you should be doing. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It can't come from you. So what can we do

00:54:14.960 | here? So in these situations, here's the problem. There is stuff you can do to make your life

00:54:20.000 | somewhat better. This is where deep work and in particular a world without email, those books

00:54:24.720 | would be relevant at a high-level HR position like this, a high-level executive position,

00:54:29.920 | probably a world without email would be the better book for someone like your wife to read because

00:54:34.160 | you need a very complicated, precise understanding of exactly what these workflows are, how they came

00:54:38.880 | from, how to sidestep or replace them in a way that's going to be even more productive. You can't

00:54:44.000 | handle this ad hoc. You can't just throw random heuristics and tactics at it. So your wife could

00:54:50.320 | improve her situation somewhat and maybe get near a copy of a world without email or something and

00:54:55.440 | somehow be like, look, I don't know, just maybe you'll find something useful in here. Maybe like

00:54:59.680 | say, I'm too dumb to understand this, but I think you're smart enough to understand it. Just don't

00:55:02.640 | make it seem like it's you giving advice. She might find some useful things there.

00:55:06.080 | The other problem here is that this life of extreme hyperactive hive mind is fundamental

00:55:12.160 | to a lot of executive positions. It's just the way these organizations run. If you're a new

00:55:18.000 | executive, it's very difficult to massively change this. I don't have any good examples of a very

00:55:23.360 | large company yet moving away from the hyperactive hive mind. I've seen this successful at smaller

00:55:29.440 | sized companies where there's still some agility. There could still be a leader effect where a

00:55:34.240 | leader can say we're changing things, but at a really huge company, it's really hard to change

00:55:39.120 | this. There's an interesting source for why this is. There's a book I was reading recently. It's

00:55:45.760 | by Alfred Chandler. It's from the seventies. It's called The Visible Hand. I think it won

00:55:52.080 | the National Book Award. It might've even won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an economic history book,

00:55:57.360 | and he looks at the rise of large organizations in the wake in particular of the railroad boom,

00:56:03.280 | late 19th, early 20th century America, where we get really big office buildings full of people.

00:56:07.920 | One of the things he argues in this book that was very influential is that we shifted into the rise

00:56:13.520 | of the large organizational era. We shifted into a new type of capitalism that he calls managerial

00:56:19.120 | capitalism. No longer like it would have been in the time of Dickens, where you have small firms

00:56:24.560 | run by a person, and it's their company, and they're in charge of the company. You had these

00:56:28.960 | massive organizations where no one person can run it. So you had to bring in a class of managers

00:56:34.320 | because there's just too many people and too much going on. The railroads created this because to

00:56:38.400 | run a railroad profitably, you had to consolidate and it's very complicated. And you can't just have

00:56:42.880 | a guy like with the monopoly hat on. This is, I know everything that's happening on my railroad.

00:56:46.800 | So you had to have classes of managers. And Chandler argues the way that managers operate

00:56:55.600 | internally is free from direct market pressures. In other words, it's not, we have a direct

00:57:03.200 | pressure on, is the way we're running this internally the best way to run it? And if it's

00:57:07.920 | not, another company is going to take over and we're going to go out of business. In really

00:57:13.200 | large organizations, you're buffered from those type of market forces. This allows managers in

00:57:18.960 | a managerial capitalist economy to actually prioritize other factors than just what's

00:57:25.760 | most productive or what's most efficient in producing value. They can prioritize instead

00:57:31.440 | things like stability. What's going to keep this me in my position and the organizations functioning

00:57:37.200 | like most stable? What's going to keep me most secure in my position? What's going to require

00:57:42.800 | substantial increases of energy? What's going to reduce risk? Risk is very dangerous.

00:57:49.200 | So you can actually have these forces on how organizations run that are disconnected from

00:57:54.560 | the market pressure to just run better. This is why I'm more and more convinced that large

00:58:00.160 | organizations, the hyperactive hive mind gets entrenched because in managerial capitalism,

00:58:04.400 | to move away from the flexible accessibility and easiness of just everyone can talk to everyone,

00:58:09.440 | my worth is indicated as much as anything else by me just replying to things really quickly.

00:58:13.440 | It is risky to move away from that. It is complicated to move away from that.

00:58:17.760 | It's the opposite of stability to try to build new systems from scratch. These type of things

00:58:23.680 | cannot come from the managerial class. Just like no number of floor managers in Henry Ford's

00:58:31.520 | Red River automobile manufacturing plant in the early 1900s, no number of those managers,

00:58:37.120 | no matter how smart they are, were ever going to spontaneously change that factory over to an

00:58:41.920 | assembly line. That required Ford saying, "I don't care that this is a pain. Trust me. This is going

00:58:47.040 | to be better." That's where we are right now. So these executives, it's sort of like the managerial

00:58:53.280 | class. There is no internal pressure to change. Actually, a system in which grinding out bigger

00:58:59.360 | hours is rewarded is good. I know this. It's also stable. It's easy. There's less risk if

00:59:06.560 | everyone just has to respond to me all the time. So it's somewhat fundamental to these

00:59:10.720 | organizations. Now, ultimately, the solution has to be the leaders of the organizations,

00:59:14.400 | the business owners themselves have to come in and say, "We're building our equivalent of the

00:59:18.560 | assembly line. We're changing things. I don't care if it's risky and I don't care if it's unstable."

00:59:22.320 | That's what ultimately has to happen. But until that happens, Matt, your wife's position is going

00:59:26.960 | to have this element to it that is not pleasant. And I think people need to properly assess the

00:59:32.160 | negative cost of a extreme hyperactive hive mind association. It is the psychological equivalent

00:59:38.480 | of working in a coal mine with bad ventilation. It's bad for you, bad for your health. It's not

00:59:44.080 | pleasant. And so you have to keep that in mind. So what can you do about that? Well, you have to

00:59:50.480 | be willing to say, "Is this trade-off worth whatever benefits I'm getting?" And you better

00:59:55.360 | be pretty clear about that trade-off. Sometimes what happens is people say, "I don't know what

01:00:00.240 | else to do, but moving up the ladder seems prestigious. And I like the momentary feeling

01:00:05.040 | of prestige. So I'm going to move up into this position and now my life is terrible."

01:00:07.920 | That happens a lot. So it's important that you and your wife have clarity, a lifestyle-centric,

01:00:13.680 | career-planning-style clarity of what you want your life to be like in all aspects.

01:00:17.120 | Does this job support that? Is there something you could do with this job to better support that?

01:00:23.040 | Maybe it's giving you much more money and it allows you to move to the place you want to move

01:00:28.080 | and you have some vision for it. Great. But I would have some clarity here and make sure that

01:00:31.840 | she hasn't just stumbled into this because it's the next thing to do, because it's not going to be

01:00:36.240 | changeable by her to a massive degree. And it can be really negative. The life of an extreme

01:00:43.680 | hyperactive hive mind organization can be really negative, have a heavy toll. So we just got to

01:00:47.440 | face those tolls as a family and figure out what actually is our goals here. And it might be,

01:00:52.720 | "This is fine. It's a fair trade. We're getting this money for this. Maybe it fits her personality."

01:00:58.800 | Some people like that, the strom and drong of all of the activity. Or maybe it's, "You're right.

01:01:06.080 | I'm thinking about this. Why are we doing this? This makes me miserable. And to what end? Other

01:01:10.960 | than I'm impressing the three people who promoted me and they forgot about it already." So there's

01:01:15.920 | a lot going on here, Matt. I don't mean to throw too much at you. It's an excuse for me to preach

01:01:19.600 | about managerial capitalism. But your wife could read a role without email. There's changes she can

01:01:25.600 | make that'll help some. But you have to confront that this may be, in a lot of ways, a really tough

01:01:31.840 | job. All right. Do we have a phone call? Yeah, we do. Let's do a phone call. Then I have a case

01:01:41.040 | study loaded for after that phone call is over. Hey, Cal. Hey, Jessie. Now it's the holiday season.

01:01:49.280 | I wonder what you're gifting. What do you want to get? And do you have any holiday traditions

01:01:56.320 | or rituals that you'd like to share?

01:01:59.280 | Well, it's a good question. I'll say what. I don't think he listens to this podcast. I think

01:02:07.520 | it's okay. I can share what I did for my brother from a gift perspective. He doesn't listen?

01:02:14.080 | I don't know. He hasn't mentioned it. If he's listening, I'm about to spoil his present.

01:02:18.800 | Because what we do in our family is we draw names in my extended family so that you have one person

01:02:26.320 | you're buying a gift for. So you can buy a nicer gift as opposed to, because I have a bunch of

01:02:29.440 | siblings and they're all married. So it's a lot of people. So we draw names. So I drew my

01:02:37.360 | brother's name. So I won't give the details of exactly what title this is, but it's something

01:02:41.680 | I've gotten into more recently. There's a book he really likes, an author he likes, and books he

01:02:48.320 | likes. He talks about them a lot. So I tracked down at a rare book dealer, first edition. The

01:02:54.240 | first English language edition is a Russian writer. They claim it's also a first printing

01:02:59.440 | of the first edition, but it's a stated first edition, which means it says in the book first

01:03:03.760 | edition. Printing is more complicated. So they claim it's a first printing as well.

01:03:08.400 | So from the sixties, this was the very first copies of this book available in the English

01:03:16.400 | language. I think first edition stuff is cool because books are so influential. When you have

01:03:22.640 | a first edition of an influential book, it's like a historical artifact. In 1968, this was one of a

01:03:30.560 | certain number of copies that people were reading and it was changing the new sphere. It was changing

01:03:35.200 | our collective understanding of this part of the world. So I think it mixes ideas and respect for

01:03:39.920 | ideas with historical artifacts, and you can display them, or it's just cool to have for your

01:03:43.920 | collection. I don't know if he's going to like it or not, but I thought it was a cool idea. I'm

01:03:48.400 | increasingly interested in doing this myself. So that was my new gift strategy. It's something I

01:03:54.400 | was trying to do this year. That's cool. In terms of rituals, I like lighting and decorations or

01:04:00.720 | whatever. So we switched up. We have a winter wonderland theme this year. In your home office?

01:04:07.360 | Outside my house. Oh, nice. Yeah. So not Christmas because I want it to be relevant in the January

01:04:15.760 | winter wonderland. So it's icicles. I'm using spots. I've been using more spotlights in my

01:04:22.160 | lighting display. I think you can paint with color with spotlights and change the objects

01:04:26.560 | already in your yard. Do you guys code them like you talked about? I coded my Halloween lights. I

01:04:31.440 | didn't code my holiday lights because I'm going for more of a tasteful aesthetic. The coded stuff

01:04:39.040 | is usually like crazy, more crazy stuff. So no animatronics, no program lights. Though I did buy

01:04:48.160 | a chip-controlled lighting, like a lighting controller. I had been using a relatively

01:04:54.880 | somewhat complicated system. I had two circuits that both ran through light sensors,

01:04:58.560 | where you then had a timer. When it gets dark, turn on for this much time and then turn off.

01:05:04.800 | And I've now moved that past. I have a single circuit where everything is controlled off a

01:05:08.560 | programmable chip. So I can say exactly on each day, exactly when to turn on the lights, exactly

01:05:13.120 | when to turn them off. That I've really appreciated. I really like to be able to fine tune

01:05:16.560 | that and not just depend on these light sensors coming and going.

01:05:20.720 | That's so good.

01:05:21.520 | Yeah. So there we go. Good question. All right. Let me do a case study. Then we'll get to our

01:05:29.840 | third segment here. A case study is where I just read a story that one of you, my listeners have

01:05:34.400 | sent in about applying the type of things we talk about to the specific circumstances in your life.

01:05:39.040 | I thought this one was interesting. It's from Austin. So here's what he said.

01:05:44.400 | I'm a long time listener of your podcast and reader of your work. And I have finally quit

01:05:48.400 | the Twitter habit so I can build a better life. The straw that finally broke the camel's back

01:05:54.240 | after seven years of heavy Twitter use was a disturbing experience here in my city of Houston.

01:05:58.800 | My partner and I went to a restaurant a few weeks ago, a nice place in a nice neighborhood near a

01:06:03.360 | top tier university. At the table next to ours, an older, well-dressed, well-groomed gentleman

01:06:08.640 | was dining with a friend of his. I could not help but overhear their conversation. The older man

01:06:13.280 | spent almost the entire time loudly regurgitating conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory,

01:06:19.520 | from the 2020 presidential vote tabulation to the efficacy of COVID vaccines, while his friend tried

01:06:25.120 | to gently steer him back to the present. The older man was so anxious and agitated that it was

01:06:29.920 | uncomfortable to sit near him. The experience seemed a little less surreal, though, when the

01:06:34.320 | older man asked his friend for some technical support for an app on his smartphone. He wanted

01:06:38.880 | help with Twitter. I felt like a young smoker watching an old smoker who was pulling on a lit

01:06:44.240 | cigarette in his stoma while dying of lung cancer. That older man was probably well-educated,

01:06:48.880 | well-respected, and financially well-off, but with the help of Twitter, he had turned his

01:06:52.160 | mind into mashed potatoes. When I left that restaurant, I knew I'd thrown away my digital

01:06:57.520 | Marlboros. While I still jones for a smoke every day, I remind myself every time of that older man

01:07:02.000 | at the restaurant and refuse to light up. Of course, not smoking by itself is not enough,

01:07:06.000 | and now I have to build a digital life that doesn't need that drug. I think your recent podcast

01:07:10.880 | episode about becoming a serious thinker will help with that. Well, Austin, I appreciate that.

01:07:18.720 | I appreciate that story. I mean, I think we're at a time now in our culture where we've moved past

01:07:24.240 | where I was, let's say, when I recorded my 2017 quit social media talk, where I said at that point,

01:07:32.080 | "Hey, this should be an acceptable option." That's where we were in 2017. I gave a talk where I said,

01:07:39.120 | "More people should feel comfortable doing this. Not using social media should not be weird.

01:07:43.360 | It should be like a standard thing that some people do." That's where we were in 2017.

01:07:48.320 | In 2023, I think for tools in particular, Twitter and TikTok, it should be just no one should use

01:07:54.000 | these. They've proven themselves to be a digital fentanyl, as some people are calling TikTok.

01:08:03.760 | The highs are absolutely not worth it. The lows are worse than we thought.

01:08:08.640 | The negative impact on individual people's lives, like that older person you saw in the restaurant,

01:08:12.800 | or the way our entire civic cultures execute, it's so negative and so terrible, and the crisis is so

01:08:17.920 | big, find another high. I think we've shifted from 2017 to 2023, where beyond just normalizing not

01:08:25.840 | using social media, say some of these tools, just say no. We need McGruff the crime dog.

01:08:32.400 | Just say no. More people need to just say, "I am done. I think they've proven themselves bankrupt.

01:08:39.360 | I think these tools are just not worth use." Find another way to connect to interesting people,

01:08:46.480 | or hear about the news, hear even baseball rumors. MLBTradeRumors.com, that's fine.

01:08:55.120 | Actually, reading the articles posted by Nats bloggers and beat writers, that's fine. Even me,

01:09:00.960 | I'm not using Twitter for baseball news. I think it's time to move on. It's just like smoking in

01:09:06.000 | the '80s. At some point, we're like, "All right, it's not just kids and pregnant women shouldn't

01:09:09.360 | do this. Maybe really we just shouldn't smoke." I think that's where we're getting with some of

01:09:13.200 | these tools. All right. Well, we've got a third segment coming up where I react to the news,

01:09:19.280 | but first I want to take a brief moment to talk about another set of sponsors.

01:09:22.640 | Particular this show today, our show is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays is one of these times

01:09:32.320 | where a lot of people really enjoy it, but for a lot of people, it can be from a mental perspective,

01:09:37.120 | very difficult. It help brings out or emphasize things that aren't going well in your life.

01:09:42.720 | It can supercharge the negative ruminations or self-incriminations that really can help you

01:09:48.080 | live the life you want to live. This is where therapy enters the scene. Of course, the issue

01:09:54.160 | with therapy, even if you recognize, yes, my brain is the most important organ on my body. If it's

01:09:59.440 | not working right, I want to get fixed. What's difficult is figuring out how do I get started?

01:10:03.280 | Where do I find a therapist? What if the therapist nearby is not good? What if they're good,

01:10:08.320 | but they're full and I'm never going to get in? This is where BetterHelp enters the scene.

01:10:15.120 | It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just

01:10:19.920 | fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. You can switch therapists

01:10:23.600 | at any time for no additional charge. Do it right now. If you're thinking about or worried

01:10:29.280 | about your mental state, do it right now as the holidays are ramping up. You can start down the

01:10:35.680 | road to a better relationship with your brain right away. Hit the new year already en route to

01:10:42.160 | fixing what could be the most important relationship in your life, which is the relationship with your

01:10:46.080 | mind. So in the season of giving, give yourself what you need with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions

01:10:56.000 | today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/deepquestions. You also do not

01:11:06.960 | want to go into your holiday season with a bad looking shave. This is where Hinson Shaving

01:11:14.000 | enters the scene. This is the razor that I use. So what I like about the Hinson razor is that it's

01:11:22.080 | this beautifully manufactured aluminum artifact. Precision milled so that you can take a 10 cent

01:11:29.840 | safety razor blade, put it into this beautiful razor, screw it in, and because it's so precisely

01:11:34.320 | milled, you get this .0013 inches of the blade extends beyond the body, allowing you to get a

01:11:40.960 | clean shave without the up and down diving board effect. So no nicks, no clogs. This beautiful

01:11:48.160 | razor takes standard blades and makes them into something capable of giving you a really great

01:11:52.960 | shave. It is what I use. It is also a great gift idea. It's a great gift idea. You give someone

01:12:01.840 | a Hinson razor, what you're giving them is not only a better shave, but you're freeing them from

01:12:06.480 | the expense of having to go to the drugstore every month and buy those super expensive disposable

01:12:11.120 | blades. You're freeing them from the expense of having to have a subscription service that every

01:12:15.440 | month is charging them again and again to send them these plastic coated blades that are milled

01:12:20.560 | wherever. You're giving them a beautiful artifact that's actually over time going to save them money

01:12:25.760 | as well. So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime.

01:12:30.960 | Visit hinsonshaving.com/cal to pick the razor for you and use code CAL and you'll get two years

01:12:37.600 | worth of blades for free with your razor. Just make sure you add the blades to your cart and

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01:12:47.360 | h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com/cal and use that code CAL. All right, Josie, time for the third segment.

01:13:00.640 | All right, the third segment is where I like to bring up something that's happening

01:13:06.720 | in the world around us and react to it. The thing I want to react to today, it's a chart

01:13:12.160 | that was tweeted by Derek Thompson. I actually did his show not too long ago. I think over the summer,

01:13:19.920 | maybe it was. I think it was over the summer. It was a good episode. He has a really good podcast

01:13:24.800 | on the Ringer Network. And so you can check that out. So I did Derek Thompson's show in the summer.

01:13:29.920 | Anyways, writer for the Atlantic, covers technology workplace trends. He tweeted,

01:13:34.640 | and I have the tweet up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening.

01:13:38.080 | He tweeted recently a chart that is showing standardized scores in mathematics, reading,

01:13:48.320 | and science. This is not just for the US. These are trends across the entire developed world.

01:13:54.800 | What do we see? They're going down in each of these areas. So you see some stability or growth

01:14:01.040 | and then a quick fall in a lot of these areas. Now, let's look at the timing here. These charts

01:14:07.200 | start 2003, and we begin to see these drops depending on where you're looking. In all these

01:14:14.720 | cases, like right around 2012. So predating COVID related learning losses, we begin to see these

01:14:23.680 | sharp drops. Here's what Derek says. Between 2012 and 2023, it appears that average OECD reading,

01:14:32.240 | math, and science scores have declined consistently. This is not just about pandemic

01:14:37.120 | learning loss. It's not just about one US city. It's not even just about the US.

01:14:40.400 | This is the entire developed world. So what is going on here? Well, a couple people had some

01:14:50.080 | answers. In particular, both Matt Iglesias and John Haidt chimed in in response to Derek's post

01:14:58.960 | and said, well, hmm, what happened around 2012? Smartphones. That is the big transition that

01:15:07.040 | happened around 2012. It was the point where we had more than 50% of the US population owning

01:15:12.720 | a smartphone. Those who work with students and children's will say that's roughly right around

01:15:17.120 | the point where it became much more common to see adolescents starting at 12, 13 years old,

01:15:24.160 | having their own smartphones. It was a tipping point. There's all sorts of trends that got worse

01:15:30.080 | around 2012 that could be conceivably linked to smartphones, especially trends around

01:15:34.720 | mental health. We see those trends start to go down. We see trends around loneliness that starts

01:15:43.840 | to explode right around the time the smartphones come out. There's a lot of different things that

01:15:49.200 | happen right around 2012. So here's the thing about these 2012 trends. Yes, it's complicated.

01:15:57.040 | Yes, there's other factors, but sometimes the obvious thing is just the obvious thing.

01:16:00.400 | There's a lot of this going around more elite intellectual circles right now. There's a

01:16:05.200 | knee-jerk skepticism surrounding this idea that smartphones are causing issues. In this case,

01:16:10.800 | the hypothesis would be they distract the hell out of kids. It's harder for them to concentrate,

01:16:16.240 | so they do worse on hard academic subjects that require them to concentrate.

01:16:19.520 | We like to have, if you're an elite intellectual type, you like to have more complicated answers

01:16:25.920 | that show that you understand more than other people. If you're an elite academic, maybe you

01:16:30.160 | like to have some contrarianism. This seems too common. This seems like something that just like

01:16:35.040 | an average parent who's not a writer for a fancy publication or not a professor just noticed,

01:16:40.880 | like my kids are using phones, they're getting dumber. You want to signal that you're smarter

01:16:44.160 | and more sophisticated than that. There's this knee-jerk skepticism. Well, you know,

01:16:49.040 | there's other factors going on, but that's just about signaling to other people that you're smart.

01:16:52.720 | Maybe it's time that people doing that signaling can just wear a Harvard shirt and not have to

01:17:00.640 | screw around with what's happening with smartphones because I think sometimes the

01:17:03.360 | obvious trends are actually just right. There's a reason why they're obvious.

01:17:07.120 | I think this is one on a mountain of other trends that show similar inflection points.

01:17:12.080 | It has been a big deal to give a generation of kids at a very young age, unrestricted access

01:17:16.800 | to the internet through a device they have with them at all times. We could even use the term,

01:17:21.200 | it has been a disaster. And so I think we're ready to maybe move past the knee-jerk skepticism

01:17:26.400 | while acknowledging complexity surrounds the issue and get more serious as I'm getting more

01:17:31.680 | and more reports, by the way, in my inbox, readers are sending it to me of more and more countries

01:17:36.000 | and school systems and states. They're starting to take much bigger stances.

01:17:40.720 | You can't have these in the school. We don't want you to use these phones.

01:17:44.560 | By getting away from this, it's complicated. And here's an example of someone who by using

01:17:51.120 | their phone is like help to overcome some sort of circumstance and we don't want them to feel bad.

01:17:55.600 | It's cigarettes. The 14-year-old shouldn't smoke. And I think we're increasingly seeing this about

01:18:02.080 | smartphones. So this is just the latest impact. We don't have to look too hard to come up with

01:18:07.360 | a hypothesis here because of course something that makes you terrible at concentrating is going to

01:18:11.600 | immediately hurt your performance on things that require concentration. And that's exactly what

01:18:15.440 | we're seeing in those numbers. So this evidence continues to come in, Jesse. I think, again,

01:18:20.320 | I was quoted in GQ back in 2019, maybe. This is where they took the Marlboro box, then changed

01:18:28.240 | into an iPhone. And the headline was, Calum report says, "One day we will look back on teenage phone

01:18:35.760 | use or social media use like we look back now on teenage smoking." I think that's bearing out.

01:18:40.240 | Give us another 5, 10 years and we're going to say, "Why in the world were we letting 13-year-olds

01:18:46.720 | just be on these phones all day and just shrugging our shoulders saying, 'Kids these days are more

01:18:51.120 | tech savvy. What can we do?'" So more evidence piles up. I also saw there's a chart in response

01:18:58.080 | to this about average GPA. I think it was at Harvard. Average GPA at Harvard. Wow. These

01:19:05.040 | things have really... It's an interesting chart. >>The average GPA went up.

01:19:09.120 | >>Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's like perhaps a grade inflation in part in response to people getting

01:19:16.400 | worse. As people get worse at the primary intellectual skills, you kind of get away

01:19:21.920 | from being able to do competitive grading. And so you just maybe grade inflate. So of course,

01:19:26.960 | I immediately looked up where was the average GPA. I didn't go to Harvard, but I was like,

01:19:30.320 | "Where was the average GPA when I graduated?" Because I had a very high GPA and I want to

01:19:33.920 | take credit for that. So I looked it up. I was like, "Okay, back in 2004, the average Harvard

01:19:38.720 | GPA was like 3.2. So my 3.95 feels better. Now it's like 3.8." It was hard to get a 3.8 back in

01:19:47.840 | the day. So I don't know. I think it's impossible that we're not inflating grades because we don't

01:19:52.240 | see GPAs going down. But certainly, deep six in your ability to concentrate has to have a huge

01:19:59.040 | impact on academic work. >>Are you going to have any

01:20:01.440 | social media questions on your exam today? >>No, but now I'm in a mean mood. So now I'm

01:20:07.840 | just gonna make the questions even harder. This is your own fault for using too many smartphones.

01:20:12.320 | Be really mean about it. Speaking about that exam, I have to upload it in four minutes.

01:20:17.680 | So we should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you everyone who sent in your questions or calls.

01:20:24.880 | If you're listening and you want to see everything you just heard,

01:20:27.840 | go to thedeeplife.com/listen. This is episode 279. There'll be links to the videos at the bottom of

01:20:33.760 | that page. There's also links there for submitting stuff. We'll be back next week with another

01:20:38.400 | episode. Really going to be a holiday-themed episode. We are getting close to the holidays.

01:20:42.160 | And until then, as always, stay deep. >>Hey, so if you enjoyed today's discussion

01:20:47.840 | about reacting properly to overload, I think you will also like episode 254, The Laws of Less,

01:20:57.040 | where I go much deeper on building a life in which overload is much less common. Check it out.

01:21:03.120 | >>So let's make that today's deep question. Why should I do less?

Overload Is Ruining Your Life - How To Take Back Control Of Your Time & Mental Clarity | Cal Newport

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