The Productivity Paradox: The Harder You Try, The Worse It Gets...

00:00:00.000 | So today, I want to talk about a curious paradox. Often some of the most interesting,

00:00:06.560 | remarkable people that we can think of, the people who seem for many of us to personify

00:00:13.360 | the deep life we want to pursue, aren't that busy. So why is this? Because most of us who feel like

00:00:20.480 | we have not gotten close to living a remarkable lives are often overwhelmed and busy all the time.

00:00:25.360 | How is it possible that the people who are most impressive are also often the least busy

00:00:31.280 | among the people we know? I want to tackle that paradox today because I think there are

00:00:36.160 | some lessons for any of us trying to be more remarkable. So I have three ideas I want to

00:00:41.440 | present. The first idea I'm going to actually pull from an article I wrote in 2011. So this is a

00:00:51.200 | classic essay from my newsletter blog. It was very popular at the time, but it has a seed that I want

00:00:56.400 | to plant here because it's going to help grow into my bigger point. So for those who are watching,

00:01:01.040 | you will see this on the screen now. And I should say, if you're listening to this podcast,

00:01:05.760 | this is episode 285. So just go to the deep life.com/listen, find episode 285,

00:01:12.240 | and you can get the video. All right. So here's the article. It's called,

00:01:16.240 | if you're busy, you're doing something wrong. The surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers.

00:01:23.360 | Now, this article is getting into what is now a over-cited, over-referenced, over-simplified study

00:01:32.560 | from the journal Psychological Review that at the time when I was writing this was still new

00:01:36.800 | and still interesting. This was a study where they looked at violin, professional violin players.

00:01:44.320 | They looked at their training habits. If this sounds familiar, it's because Malcolm Gladwell

00:01:49.840 | wrote about it in Outliers. It was one of the canonical examples about the reality of deliberate

00:01:57.840 | practice. Deliberate practice being the main way that people get better at demanding skills. They

00:02:05.680 | have to practice in a way that's deliberately designed to stretch their abilities past where

00:02:10.960 | they're comfortable. So in the study, they're watching how these elite musicians actually

00:02:17.680 | practice. All right. So I have a few bolded lines from this article I'm going to read now.

00:02:22.800 | All right. First line, the time diaries reveal that both groups spent on average the same number

00:02:29.840 | of hours on music per week. So this is looking at elite musicians and good, but not elite musicians

00:02:37.040 | and comparing them. The elite players were spending almost, I see, the elite players were

00:02:45.760 | spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice. All right.

00:02:50.000 | So this is the setup. Average players, elite players practice a lot. The elite players do

00:02:55.280 | almost entirely deliberate practice. So that means they're not just playing stuff they already know.

00:03:00.880 | They're specifically doing exercises to get them better. So they're, for example,

00:03:06.320 | taking a section of song that they can't quite play full speed and increasing the speed they're

00:03:12.480 | practicing at to be a little bit more than where they're comfortable to sort of stretch their

00:03:15.840 | ability. All right. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day.

00:03:24.560 | The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. The

00:03:31.760 | elite player slept an hour more per night than the average players. The elite players were

00:03:37.360 | significantly more relaxed than the average players. So this is interesting. The elite

00:03:45.120 | players do really hard practice, but not, they don't do the other stuff. They also don't practice

00:03:50.640 | all day. They consolidate their practice into two concentrated chunks. And outside of that practice,

00:03:58.800 | they were more relaxed and had more sleep than the average players. So I'm going to read here

00:04:04.960 | my summary. So I said, this provides, this study provides, empirical evidence that there's a

00:04:12.960 | difference between hard work and hard to do work. Hard work is deliberate practice. It's not fun

00:04:21.520 | while you're doing it, but you don't have to do too much of it in any one given day.

00:04:25.600 | Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false

00:04:32.560 | busyness that leaves you just like the average players from the study, feeling tired and

00:04:37.840 | stressed. I then conclude if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion

00:04:43.680 | should be your enemy. All right. So this is really interesting. Like what we're finding here is this

00:04:50.800 | idea that what it takes to get good at something, really good at something is hard, but not hard to

00:04:58.800 | do. It's hard in the moment, but there's only so much of it you can do per day. And what happens

00:05:05.840 | with the rest of your time is irrelevant to whether you become really good. The three to four

00:05:13.360 | hours that these professional musicians practice every day, that's it. That's what's important for

00:05:19.040 | them. There's not more they can do. That's about the limit. So the rest of that day is free.

00:05:24.160 | So getting good, getting really good can be unrelated to being busy. And at the highest

00:05:32.240 | levels, like these elite musicians, busyness actually gets in the way of getting good

00:05:36.720 | because it distracts you from the practice activities that matter. It exhausts you and

00:05:41.440 | takes away energy that you could later put into the actual activities that are going to make you

00:05:45.680 | better. All right. So what's my second idea here? Building on that, I'm going to say rare skills

00:05:54.880 | fuel remarkability. So what I mean by that is, OK, why get really good at something?

00:06:02.160 | Well, getting really good at something gives you leverage over your professional life.

00:06:09.680 | It gives you options and opportunities. It is the primary fuel you have for crafting your life to be

00:06:17.200 | more remarkable. And my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which actually came out

00:06:23.680 | soon after that article we just read, right? So these ideas are actually replicated in my book,

00:06:29.440 | So Good They Can't Ignore You. In that book, I introduced this term called career capital

00:06:35.200 | that captures this reality. So career capital is a metaphorical substance that captures your rare

00:06:44.320 | and valuable skills. The more rare and valuable skills you have, the more career capital you have.

00:06:48.320 | Your career capital is what you invest into your working life to make it better.

00:06:52.560 | The more career capital you have, the more investments you can make into taking control

00:06:56.880 | of your life, where you live, how much you work, the impact of your work, the conditions under

00:07:01.520 | which you work, the pace and rhythm of what you work, the specific projects you work on or not.

00:07:06.240 | The better you are at something, the more control you have over that. The more ability you have to

00:07:10.880 | craft those type of professional lives that seem to the outside world to be quite remarkable.

00:07:16.880 | So as you get better at something, you get more options to make your life remarkable.

00:07:21.680 | Not to make more money, not necessarily just to be straight up more successful,

00:07:27.520 | but more remarkable. So idea three is to put these two things together. Let's follow this

00:07:33.680 | syllogism through to its conclusion. So if rare and valuable skills doesn't require busyness

00:07:42.560 | to develop, but rare and valuable skills fuel remarkability, we put those together and we get

00:07:50.000 | remarkable lives don't require busyness. A implies B, B implies C, A implies C.

00:07:57.840 | Little propositional logic there for discrete mathematics fans.

00:08:01.440 | This then is why we see people whose lives often hit us remarkable aren't busy,

00:08:06.800 | because the core of that remarkability is their rare and valuable skills. And actually,

00:08:11.200 | busyness is orthogonal. Use some linear algebra here, as long as we're using math terms,

00:08:16.560 | is orthogonal to busyness. Busyness is not needed to get good, and it can even get in the way.

00:08:23.600 | Right? So this seems like a pretty interesting connection. You don't need busyness to have

00:08:27.760 | remarkable life. The problem is, however, there's two traps that are lurking here.

00:08:32.400 | So we can think of this as our fourth idea. There's two traps here that are lurking.

00:08:38.000 | All right. One, as you get better at things, you will be given more interesting opportunities

00:08:45.360 | that will bring with them the requirement that you become more busy. There's a trap here,

00:08:51.920 | a great remarkability. I got to get that by being good at things. But as you get good at things,

00:08:56.640 | a lot of outside forces will try to hijack your life from your streamlined

00:09:01.520 | platonic remarkability that you had in mind. An example I think about here sometimes is the

00:09:07.360 | YouTuber and engineer Mark Rober, who, if you don't know, because maybe you don't have kids

00:09:12.800 | of a certain age, he does these really elaborate engineering-based projects and then does very

00:09:19.600 | catchy YouTube videos about it. This is the guy that built those glitter bombs that catch porch

00:09:24.080 | pirates. You steal the box off the porch, and he had all these elaborate traps built into them.

00:09:28.960 | And he's done a lot of other things. They do these engineering videos.

00:09:31.440 | One of the things I've noticed is as he got more successful, so his YouTube channel is very big,

00:09:36.640 | he became friends with the host of ABC's late night show. I'm blanking on that name.

00:09:42.960 | Who is that, Jesse, from way back when he was on The Man Show?

00:09:49.200 | Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate

00:09:56.640 | the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description.

00:10:04.160 | This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on the show.

00:10:09.520 | All right, let's get back to it. Well, whatever.

00:10:13.760 | Yeah, I'll look it up. Yeah, look it up. Okay. But anyways, he became friends with him.

00:10:18.160 | Uh, and kept going on to, I'm going to recognize this name so hard when you say it,

00:10:22.240 | we're not going to get invited on his show, ABC late night show.

00:10:26.160 | I'm doing it right now. Jimmy Kimmel.

00:10:29.120 | Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah, I know that. All right. Jimmy Kimmel.

00:10:31.760 | Uh, so he started going on Jimmy Kimmel show, uh, and got really successful.

00:10:36.800 | It seems to me that Mark Rober, who was doing really well with these videos,

00:10:42.240 | you can just crunch the numbers because the overhead was low. It would take three months

00:10:45.840 | to make one of these videos. Uh, but it would be like him and his brother typically.

00:10:49.680 | And then you could calculate the money he was making on the 20, 30 million views or whatever.

00:10:54.240 | He's doing very well. Right. He got busier and I don't know this for a fact. I don't know anything

00:10:59.600 | about him, but you know, he, he bought this big warehouse space for filming fine. Um,

00:11:05.360 | but then he launched a, a pro a company, a subscription box company, which is a cool

00:11:09.840 | company. My kids do it crunch box where, you know, you get the box of stuff and build it,

00:11:14.480 | but that's a really time consuming thing to do is to run a company that sells a physical

00:11:18.480 | product that has to be boxed and sent out. And then he signed this deal with max HBO max

00:11:24.400 | to do all these shows for them. I mean, it just seems like his life is very, very busy now

00:11:29.360 | in a way where just five years ago, it's like, I bake these videos, it's me and my brother.

00:11:37.440 | And like someone edits them and I do really well. And I can focus on what's really good

00:11:41.680 | because opportunities arise. Hey, we can build this company. You can do shows on this network.

00:11:46.640 | Opportunities arise as you get better, which can pull you away from a really remarkable life and

00:11:53.200 | into just a more standard, like very successful, but probably very busy life. The other trap

00:11:58.560 | is that as you get better, you get opportunities for a larger and more time consuming instantiations

00:12:08.640 | of the thing you're doing. So even if you are careful to avoid the Mark Rober trap of,

00:12:13.600 | let me add this company and add another, I can do TV. In addition to videos,

00:12:18.240 | even if you avoid that trap, as you get better, the time required to do things,

00:12:22.720 | the things you've always been doing, uh, can also get up, could also go up.

00:12:26.720 | So we see this it's Oscar season. We see this with directors. I think about like Greta Gerwig,

00:12:31.520 | how much more time was involved trying to direct Barbie versus probably like Francis Ha.

00:12:38.800 | Just because of the scope, the giant, uh, sets and all the actors and everything that was involved

00:12:44.800 | in it and the marketing that's involved in that she's doing the same thing, making really good

00:12:49.440 | movies. But now it takes a lot more time or Chris Nolan and Oppenheimer versus Chris Nolan with a

00:12:55.440 | crew of four making memento. They're doing the same thing, but as you get better, the stakes

00:13:00.800 | increase. I mean, even my own life is like this. What goes into me publishing a book today

00:13:08.000 | is way more time consuming than what it was when I was publishing, you know, even so good,

00:13:12.880 | they can't ignore you. And certainly my student books where I was like, yeah,

00:13:16.000 | I'll do a few interviews when it comes out. Hey, books out. All right, back to work.

00:13:20.160 | I don't like that anymore. It's months of months of stuff because I got better at what I was doing.

00:13:24.800 | So I didn't change what I'm doing, but the size and therefore busyness induced by the standard

00:13:32.400 | thing you've always been doing gets bigger as you get, as you get better. So how do we avoid those

00:13:37.920 | traps if we don't want to be busy? We want to be remarkable, but not busy. The first trap, I think

00:13:43.920 | you just have to try to avoid it or be really, really open about the trade-off you're making.

00:13:51.360 | I think we should just have more willingness as a more willingness to say, I know I could do that

00:13:59.680 | show on HBO, but I'm not like this is working well. I just want to keep doing this. Well,

00:14:04.080 | that should be an option. That's more on the table. A more sophisticated hack you can do here

00:14:10.000 | is like, okay, maybe an opportunity arises. You want to explore, give it a tight time gate. I'm

00:14:16.720 | going to stay within these time bounds on this so I can explore something without it taking over

00:14:21.840 | my life. I think this is the way I think about the new media aspects of what I do. I thought

00:14:26.080 | podcasting, for example, and everything that surrounds it, I was like, this, this is important.

00:14:31.520 | I think this is the way to talk to an audience. But what I've done, and Jesse can attest to this,

00:14:38.000 | is I have a half day limit. I spend a half day a week. It has to live in there. That's where

00:14:45.280 | all this stuff has to live in a half day a week to show we actually do. If we want to add something

00:14:50.960 | new to it, either I have to make time for it or find someone who can do that for us. We released

00:14:55.920 | this on YouTube now, but I wasn't going to spend a lot more time for that. We had to find a good

00:15:00.800 | partner and figure out how we were going to do this. That's the other way you can do it. I do

00:15:04.560 | have to expand some. Let me put very careful boxes around where that exploration happens. It's going

00:15:10.480 | to stay in there. For the second trap, that's unavoidable. As you get better at things,

00:15:16.240 | you're going to have opportunities to do it at a bigger scale. It's going to take more time.

00:15:19.840 | Greta Gerwig is happy that she gets to do Barbie in part because I think she had good profit

00:15:26.880 | participation and the movie did 1.5 billion. She's probably very happy about that. That's harder to

00:15:34.480 | avoid, but you have to be really careful about it. I'm going to pull an idea out of my book,

00:15:38.240 | Slow Productivity, here. You have to have real variations in intensity. Movie directors do this

00:15:43.120 | very well. All right, I'm working on my big movie. There's going to be an eight-month period where

00:15:48.080 | it's just all in, but the eight months that follow everything being done, I'm doing nothing.

00:15:55.680 | I'm just sitting and thinking and trying to figure out what I want to do next.

00:15:59.360 | We see that with creatives like movie directors. It's very intense when they're working on a movie,

00:16:03.680 | but they'll also take a lot of time off. Chris Nolan worked really hard on Oppenheimer,

00:16:08.160 | but also he doesn't have a smartphone and doesn't use email. He's like, "Okay,

00:16:12.160 | I'll do this hard thing, but it's really the only hard thing I do. Then I can take a complete break

00:16:17.120 | from that before I work on my next project." This natural variation in intensity, that's an idea

00:16:22.320 | for my book, Slow Productivity. That's a way of dealing with, as you get better and your projects

00:16:27.520 | get harder, you also at that same point have the leverage to say, "Great, but then I'm going to

00:16:31.520 | take time off after this," or, "I'm not going to do anything else unrelated, so I could just do

00:16:35.280 | this one really hard thing as well as I can." All right, so there's our paradox. That's the

00:16:40.480 | explanation. Why do people with remarkable lives sometimes seem less busy than us? Because

00:16:45.600 | busyness is unrelated and sometimes even an obstacle to being really good, and being really

00:16:52.720 | good is where remarkability almost always comes from. If you find yourself adding more and more

00:16:58.720 | onto your plate in the pursuit of a remarkable life, you're doing it wrong. If you're busy,

00:17:05.120 | there could be other psychological advantages to that, but you're not deploying a useful strategy

00:17:11.280 | for building a remarkable life. Remarkability is not something that alchemizes from an abundance

00:17:17.840 | of action. It's something that is instead crafted by the main tool of skill, and skill and busyness

00:17:26.240 | do not play well together. So that's how we can separate those two things.

00:17:31.280 | Just see, I have this phantom article on this topic that is referenced in the very earliest

00:17:39.840 | essays I ever wrote for my newsletter and blog, but I can't find the actual article.

00:17:45.120 | So I know at some point I wrote this thing called The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar,

00:17:52.240 | and it was back when I was writing student books. It was about this idea that road scholars,

00:17:57.200 | who you have to be very accomplished, are often way more relaxed than the average student on the

00:18:01.520 | dean's list, and it's because to do something really impressive, impressive enough to become

00:18:06.400 | a road scholar, you have to be really good at something which really requires a focus,

00:18:10.960 | and so they're not busy in the way that other people are. I can't find the article. In fact,

00:18:16.480 | I can find... It's like the third or fourth post at the very beginning of my blog says,

00:18:21.440 | "As we discussed last week in The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar," and it references

00:18:29.200 | case studies, like Daniel, Acosta, blah, blah, blah. I can't find it. I don't know where the

00:18:34.880 | article is. It's like disappeared into the gaps of the internet, or maybe I emailed it

00:18:41.520 | but never added it to the blog, and I don't know, but it's lost. It exists out there somewhere.

00:18:49.440 | I'm sure a fan will find it.

00:18:50.800 | I still remember that phrase, though, The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar. It's a phrase I use

00:18:55.440 | all the time, but I can't find... There's nothing for me to cite there. All right, anyways, that's

00:18:59.120 | all we have for our deep dive. I want to move on here to questions, but before we do, let's talk

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00:25:12.240 | All right, Jesse, I think it's time to do some questions.

00:25:15.200 | Sounds good. First question's from A World Without Baseball. Good name. I really, well,

00:25:23.920 | depending on how you look at it. I like this name. I really like a lot of the parts of your

00:25:29.520 | productivity system, the time block daily plan, the quarterly plan, the core values and Trello.

00:25:35.120 | I am confused about the weekly plan. How does this interact with other parts of your system?

00:25:40.240 | Well, I'm hoping A World Without Baseball is wistful, right? Like we're temporarily in A World

00:25:45.520 | Without Baseball because it's the off season. If he's promoting A World Without Baseball as a good

00:25:51.520 | thing, well, then we got other problems, my friend. Got other problems. All right. Good question.

00:25:57.200 | People ask a lot about the weekly plan and how it fits into my multi-planning methodology. So

00:26:04.960 | let's talk about that briefly. A quick plug, by the way, in the final segment of this episode,

00:26:10.560 | I'm going to be talking about a new article of mine where I go into detail and multi-scale

00:26:14.320 | planning. So, you know, stay tuned for that for a deeper dive, but let's just get specific here.

00:26:19.360 | So what does a weekly plan do? Well, you build it every week,

00:26:23.440 | probably on Monday or maybe at Friday before the week is done. When you build your weekly plan,

00:26:30.800 | you reference at a higher scale, your strategic plan, your plan that you update once every

00:26:36.800 | quarter or season with your bigger goals at that timescale. So when you build your weekly plan,

00:26:42.720 | you want to look up a scale and say, what are the big projects that I'm working on

00:26:48.080 | this quarter or season? Then you want to look at your calendar for the week ahead and say, okay,

00:26:54.320 | where is there time for me to make effort on these big objectives that aren't reflected by an urgent

00:27:01.440 | email, or there's no one pushing me to do it. And you look to find time. I suggest you probably want

00:27:07.040 | to actually block off some of the time you find for working on these big objectives,

00:27:11.440 | add it to your calendar, like any other meeting or appointment. So it's protected and it gets done.

00:27:15.280 | This is also a time when you can rearrange your calendar. This is the

00:27:20.880 | hidden magic of weekly planning is you look at your calendar and you realize, man,

00:27:25.920 | all these days have just enough stuff that I can't really make progress on this big project.

00:27:30.960 | But if I look at Tuesday, the first thing is optional. I could cancel that. And the second

00:27:37.200 | thing I could move to be right after this meeting on Thursday, because it's with the same people.

00:27:41.280 | And if I do that, I free up four hours and now I can make progress on the technical report I'm

00:27:47.200 | writing. It's part of the magic of weekly planning is not just finding time for big objectives,

00:27:52.080 | but also making time for big objectives. And you'll never do this if you're just reactive.

00:27:57.200 | Hey, what do I need to work on next? Let me look at my inbox and calendar. Oh,

00:28:00.720 | there's another meeting, right? You're never going to free up that time if you're just going

00:28:03.840 | moment to moment. The final thing you can do during weekly planning is look at your task systems,

00:28:08.800 | remind yourself of what's important. This is a good time during your weekly planning to update

00:28:15.680 | and clean up your task systems. If you use a structured system, like I recommend with roles

00:28:20.960 | and statuses, you can move things around. OK, I'm not this I heard back from. Let me move that. Let

00:28:26.320 | me clarify this. You're kind of cleaning up your your task system and identifying if there's any

00:28:31.280 | really important tasks that definitely need to get done. I'll often write a reminder about those

00:28:36.800 | in my weekly plan. So I'll go back to my task system just during a normal task block just to

00:28:44.000 | knock off a bunch of stuff. But if there's a few big things in that system that are really important,

00:28:48.400 | I'll jot it down. I might even find time on my calendar when I'm going to do those specific

00:28:53.200 | tasks and protect it in advance. So you can work with your task system as well.

00:28:58.000 | So you look up to your strategic plan, reflect those objectives into your weekly into your week,

00:29:05.680 | moving things if needed. Then you look, I guess we could say sideways to your task system and

00:29:10.480 | clean that up and see what are your priorities and make sure that you've made a note of that

00:29:14.320 | somewhere. Now you're ready to tackle your week. Weekly plans. So your task systems, your Trello.

00:29:20.880 | For me, it's Trello. Yeah. One board per role, one column per status. And people ask like, oh,

00:29:28.000 | so are the tasks leaving your task system and going out your weekly plan? No, they live in

00:29:32.000 | your task system. You can remind yourself in your weekly plan. You can actually schedule time for a

00:29:37.520 | task on your calendar for the week. But think of that as a reminder as well. It lives in your task

00:29:41.760 | system until done and then you remove it. All right. What do we got next? Next question is

00:29:47.200 | from Mario. What counts as work in fixed schedule productivity? Does it include errands like getting

00:29:53.360 | groceries and going to the pharmacy? Does it include mentally demanding things, but not related

00:29:58.560 | to your job, such as reading books? Well, just as a reminder, fixed schedule productivity is the

00:30:05.120 | meta productivity strategy where you fix in advance. These are the hours I'm going to work.

00:30:10.000 | And then you do whatever you need to, to make your work fit into there.

00:30:14.160 | Now, I call it a meta productivity strategy because it's going to force you to innovate

00:30:19.840 | different strategies for how you agree to work and schedule work and how efficiently you tackle work

00:30:25.360 | because you have this back pressure coming from the need to fit all your work into a given

00:30:30.000 | constraint. I was thinking about a variation on this, but I'm not going to go there right now.

00:30:42.560 | Let's keep this simple. So let's just summarize. You fix the time in advance and you work backwards

00:30:47.600 | to do whatever you can to make your work fit. So you'll invent a lot of tactics for how you do that

00:30:52.160 | and also just forces you to be more reasonable about how many things you have on your plate at

00:30:57.440 | the same time, because it has to fit. It's really a good strategy because of

00:31:01.680 | the Parkinson's law style effect of schedules. In an age where work is always available because

00:31:09.040 | of mobile computing, your phone, your laptop, your tablet, and there's always more work to do,

00:31:13.840 | right? There's a new email, a new idea, a new request. There's always something to do.

00:31:17.520 | Work can fill any space that you give it. So especially in today's world, it's not a bad

00:31:24.480 | idea to say, "This is when I want to work. How do I work backwards and be successful within those

00:31:28.720 | constraints?" And you'd be surprised by how effective you can be without having to work

00:31:32.880 | a huge amount of hours. So Mario is asking, "What about non-professional tasks like errands,

00:31:39.040 | going to the grocery store, going to the pharmacy, or things like reading?"

00:31:43.520 | Fixed-scale productivity is work hours. That's what it's for. This is when I'm working. I don't

00:31:49.120 | work beyond there. So it has nothing to say about what you do outside of work. That's a different

00:31:54.720 | type of thinking. If you want to do a non-professional task during your fixed schedule

00:32:01.760 | hours, well, it's just taking some of the time, right? So that's just less time you have to get

00:32:06.720 | the work done, but that schedule doesn't shift. So if you say, "Look, I work from nine to four

00:32:10.880 | and I have to make it fit. So I got to triage things and have systems for checking with clients

00:32:17.920 | so they don't expect to call at five or whatever." You can go to the grocery store in the middle of

00:32:21.600 | that, but you still only have 10 to four to get your work done. So it just depends on how you

00:32:26.160 | want to do that. One thing I used to do when I had a dog and I was a postdoc is my fixed schedule

00:32:32.400 | was in two blocks. And I had a midday portion where I didn't work. I would go for a run with

00:32:37.760 | my dog and do some errands. So that's one thing you might do here is a fixed schedule doesn't

00:32:42.560 | have to be one big block of time. It can be block, unblocked, block, and then you can move more of

00:32:49.120 | the non-professional stuff in between those blocks. But the basic idea is simple. This is the

00:32:54.000 | time when I work, I don't work beyond it. That's the non-negotiable that you're starting with.

00:32:58.960 | All right, who do we got next? Next question's from Amit. "With respect to slow productivity,

00:33:06.400 | should I, as a grad student, perform my limited amount of tasks sequentially or spend every day

00:33:10.960 | doing new research for a couple hours? My tasks include managing my time between new research,

00:33:16.640 | paper reviews, and coursework." The things that are most important you want to do most often.

00:33:22.320 | So as a grad student, assuming you're a doctoral student, your research is the most important thing

00:33:29.040 | you do. So you should work on it regularly. All the other stuff you figure out how to spread out

00:33:35.040 | on the time that remains. So that might mean for you, nine to noon, that's research. And then noon

00:33:42.880 | to four is like the other stuff, coursework, paper reviews, administrative stuff. And you

00:33:48.240 | kind of figure that out and rotate through and you do one thing one day and nothing another day,

00:33:52.880 | however you want to do that. But the research always gets done. It's like me with my writing.

00:33:56.720 | I just always write. I don't say, okay, I'm going to write till I'm done. And now I'm going to work

00:34:02.720 | on a course. Now when I'm done doing that, I'm going to work on a research paper. I'm just always

00:34:07.040 | writing. That's the non-negotiable because it's the core engine of what I do best. And then I

00:34:12.880 | make the other stuff fit however I need to in the time that remains. So as a grad student, I mean,

00:34:17.600 | research every day. That'd be my recommendation. - So your weekly plan has just writing daily on it?

00:34:24.080 | - Yeah. If I'm writing a book, it's basically every day. Yeah. And even if I'm not because

00:34:28.720 | of my New Yorker tempo, it usually is non-teaching days. I'm just writing. And on those days as well,

00:34:35.200 | sometimes as well. Yeah. So some stuff can be sequential. The core stuff you should do

00:34:40.400 | as much as possible. All right. Who have we got next? - Next question is from Lisa.

00:34:46.320 | With slow productivity, how do I gauge if I'm doing enough on a short-term scale?

00:34:52.080 | Business and exhaustion are no longer markers of productivity. If anything,

00:34:56.240 | they indicate the opposite. But I don't have enough experience and success with a slow

00:35:00.320 | productivity approach to trust that my quarterly plan is good and on track.

00:35:04.480 | - All right, Jesse, I'm thinking we should name this question

00:35:07.360 | our slow productivity corner question of the week.

00:35:10.880 | So we want to make sure at least one question a week is related to my new book, Slow Productivity.

00:35:25.120 | Find out more about the book, read an excerpt, get a bunch of pre-order bonuses at

00:35:28.320 | calnewport.com/slow. All right. Good question here. Lisa wants to know if I'm not using

00:35:36.320 | busyness and exhaustion as my marker of doing enough, how do I know if what I'm doing is good?

00:35:44.320 | This question is important for two reasons. One, the specifics of my answer, but two,

00:35:50.000 | the setup. One of the core ideas in my book is a look at how we currently implicitly think about

00:35:58.480 | productivity in the knowledge work space. And what we do now, even if we don't know

00:36:03.840 | this terminology, what we do now is we embrace a concept I call pseudo productivity.

00:36:08.720 | Pseudo productivity is exactly what Lisa mentions here. It's the idea that we should use visible

00:36:15.760 | activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more you're doing, the more useful you are.

00:36:23.040 | Now, this isn't an accurate measure of the value you're producing, but it's like a reasonable

00:36:28.960 | heuristic that we fall back on. More is better than less. Activity is better than non-activity.

00:36:34.480 | So how do you as a knowledge worker, therefore, feel like you're doing all you can for your

00:36:39.680 | organization? Because you're busy all the time. You're doing a lot of activity to the point where

00:36:43.760 | it feels like too much. And then you get some sort of psychological piece of, well, at least I'm not

00:36:48.160 | slacking off. Now, I think it's a terrible way to actually manage work because A, busyness can

00:36:54.000 | be completely unrelated from producing stuff that matters. And B, in an age of ubiquitous wireless

00:37:01.280 | internet and mobile computing, there's never any end to how much work you can do and when you can

00:37:06.800 | do it. So the footprint of work in the pseudo productivity regime combined with modern

00:37:12.240 | technology, the footprint is unending. You always feel guilty when you're not working.

00:37:17.360 | You're always going to do more work than you should be doing. You always are going to be in

00:37:21.040 | the zero sum internal tug of war between the demands of pseudo productivity and the demands

00:37:25.200 | of being a human. And it's a terrible internal turmoil that we're all quietly suffering through

00:37:30.720 | because we have this insufferable definition of productivity. So slow productivity says,

00:37:36.400 | forget that. Pseudo productivity does not work anymore. That's not how we should measure it.

00:37:41.040 | Here's an alternative way of thinking about producing great stuff in a way that doesn't

00:37:44.800 | burn you out. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.

00:37:50.480 | So then Lisa says, okay, but this is hard. Psychologically, this is hard

00:37:54.960 | because if I am going to be doing fewer things and I can't fall back on stress

00:37:59.600 | as a way to assuage my fear that I'm being lazy, what do I do with that anxiety?

00:38:06.640 | And partially, Lisa, I'm going to say, sit with it for a little bit.

00:38:10.320 | Do this for a couple of quarters and you'll get that feedback. Oh, I'm doing fine. Yeah,

00:38:18.000 | I'm doing fewer things, following the systems I talk about in my book, which allows you to do

00:38:21.680 | that without blowing up your job or walking into your boss's office and saying, I quite quit.

00:38:27.200 | No, it's way more nuanced than that, way more subtle than that. But you can, if you're careful

00:38:33.120 | about it, drastically reduce how much you're working on. And if you follow my advice properly,

00:38:37.360 | as laid out in the book, you're going to get more stuff done. This is the thing that people

00:38:41.040 | miss. When you have a lot of things on your plate, it generates busyness very well.

00:38:46.800 | It doesn't generate productive output very well because you spend more and more of your time

00:38:51.920 | servicing the administrative and overhead needs of these obligations. That takes away time from

00:38:56.240 | actually producing the stuff that matters. So having fewer things on your plate,

00:39:01.440 | you move through those things at a faster rate so that the total number of things you accomplish in

00:39:05.760 | a given quarter is actually more than when you were "busier." But it's going to take a quarter

00:39:10.880 | or two before you believe that. So just take that quarter or two. What's the worst that could

00:39:16.240 | happen? You feel a little anxious, like, am I doing enough? Just sit with that. Don't try to

00:39:21.440 | assuage that anxiety by being busy again. If you're really miscalibrating and you're not doing enough,

00:39:28.800 | OK, so you had a quarter where you didn't really do as much as you should, and now you're going to

00:39:32.160 | have to adjust. That's not a bad thing. That's basically like a little vacation you probably

00:39:36.960 | needed anyways. Nothing terrible is going to happen. People are busy. Don't be negligent.

00:39:41.360 | Don't be unreliable. But no one's going to really notice. So just sit with the anxiety.

00:39:46.800 | Don't let it push you into overwork. Give it a quarter. Give it two. And you're saying, OK,

00:39:54.320 | this is working. I'm impressing my boss. I'm getting really good stuff done. I'm no longer

00:39:59.440 | stressed out. This slow productivity thing, there's something to it. So it's OK to be anxious.

00:40:04.480 | But sit with it. Don't let it push you into too much overwork.

00:40:08.720 | All right. I think that was a pretty good slow productivity corner.

00:40:20.000 | Now, of course, as we talk about this topic more, we have more and more questions about it. So it's

00:40:24.400 | no longer this is the only question. But we choose one question per episode to actually get the theme

00:40:29.680 | music, even if we have more than one question about the topic of slow productivity. Speaking

00:40:34.160 | of which, what's our last question here, Jesse? OK, last question is from Brian. Do you think a

00:40:39.200 | smart and committed young knowledge worker can succeed with a slow productivity approach

00:40:44.160 | if they're not also notching up bigger short-term wins along the way? Could you have? In prior

00:40:49.040 | episodes, you talked about your conquer the world mindset of your younger years.

00:40:52.320 | Was that needed to be where you're at today? Well, Brian, it's a good question. First of all,

00:40:59.200 | though, I'm going to reject the premise of bigger short-term wins along the way.

00:41:05.440 | If a win is short term, something you can produce in a non-slow productivity approach, so just by

00:41:14.400 | lots of activity, it's not that big of a win. How impressive can it be if it didn't require

00:41:22.080 | the long development of a rare and valuable skill? So I think what you're counting as

00:41:27.440 | bigger short-term wins is more like the effluvia of busyness. I don't know. I'm on

00:41:36.000 | Instagram and emails and this and that and doing these conferences and jumping over here.

00:41:40.800 | It's that sort of short-term feeling of like I'm doing stuff and getting these sort of pseudo

00:41:44.800 | recognitions and serendipitous moments of virality. But none of that really aggregates

00:41:49.520 | to anything all that impressive. There are no short-term big wins outside of the lottery.

00:41:56.320 | Big wins require time. They require long term. So you're not missing out on anything deeply

00:42:05.840 | important if you're spending your 20s focused relentlessly on getting good at something really

00:42:10.720 | valuable. Now, you talked about my conquer the world mindset from my younger years, which I did

00:42:16.480 | have. But here's the thing. I did achieve a lot of my vision of conquering the world, right?

00:42:23.600 | A lot of that was so academically speaking, it was I want to get a professorship at a good

00:42:31.920 | university and get tenured early, like be a tenured professor and publish good stuff in my field.

00:42:37.280 | And from a writing perspective, I wanted big idea books. I always just say to my agent,

00:42:44.480 | I want a hardcover idea book, like the ones I love, not just the student guides I'm writing now.

00:42:48.400 | And I wanted them to be important and sell a lot of copies. And my other dream, and my agent will

00:42:55.040 | tell you this, early on in my career was I wanted to write for the New Yorker. I want to be also

00:42:58.960 | just like writing stuff that requires real craft. And I accomplished all those things, right?

00:43:03.200 | I got tenured early after just four years and got a good professorship. My books are

00:43:10.480 | very successful, right? And millions of copies, 40, 45 languages. And I write for the New Yorker.

00:43:15.120 | Here's the thing, though. All of that happened in my 30s.

00:43:19.440 | My mindset was in the 20s. That's when I hatched this vision. All this stuff happened in the 30s.

00:43:26.080 | Most of it happening in my mid-30s to 40. That whole period in my 20s, I was relentlessly working

00:43:34.560 | on being a better computer scientist and a better writer. That's what I was doing. And I wasn't

00:43:38.480 | doing social media, and I wasn't launching companies, and I wasn't giving a lot of talks,

00:43:43.600 | and I wasn't trying to create conferences, and I wasn't traveling a lot. I had a lot of friends

00:43:49.360 | who were into that back then. It was like, you should have a travel budget and go to five or

00:43:53.280 | six of these conferences they used to hold every year so you could just meet interesting people.

00:43:57.360 | I didn't do any of that. Write, write, better writer, better writer. Each book was done,

00:44:01.200 | how do I make the next one better? How do I get better? How do I become a better researcher? Let

00:44:04.800 | me write a better paper. Let's go. Let me get that H index up. Let me get those publications up.

00:44:10.240 | Once I had my professorship, how do I win an award? How do I get those papers better? Let's

00:44:14.480 | push, push, push. Very focused. I stayed focused on those same two things for well over a decade.

00:44:21.120 | And then I began conquering the world that I had in mind.

00:44:24.240 | So your 20s are an exciting period if you want a remarkable life, but they're exciting not because

00:44:31.760 | you're likely to unlock the remarkability and reap its benefits while still in the 20s. Your 20s is

00:44:37.040 | your time where you focus on your craft. Your 20s are your time where the most important thing you

00:44:41.760 | can do is say no. They're the time when the key is coming back to your core pursuit again and again,

00:44:50.720 | even as really shiny objects are hung in front of you. Like, nope, nope, nope. It's boring. I'm

00:44:57.440 | just coming back. And there's frustration involved and you get impatient. But then when you end up

00:45:04.400 | conquering your definition of the world later on, that's when all of that seems worth it.

00:45:09.440 | And the scale of those goals, like for me to be like the tenured professor with the awards and

00:45:14.800 | the books and the New York or whatever, there's nothing I could have done in my 20s. No, quote,

00:45:20.640 | unquote, big short-term win that would have aggregated to anything like that. It would have

00:45:24.400 | been a lot of nonsense. I gave this show, I did this, and I had this video thing, and I did this,

00:45:30.000 | but like all these little things that in the moment would have felt busy and would have added

00:45:33.520 | to nothing now that I'm 41. So I think slow productivity is the cool way to go. It's also

00:45:39.840 | psychologically more sustainable. That's a much more healthy 20, psychologically speaking,

00:45:45.120 | for someone who's ambitious and talented to just be focusing on craft for a while and not having

00:45:50.240 | to be like out there in the public eye or trying to, why is this thing not working? Why I'm trying

00:45:55.680 | to land this or whatever. I mean, it's kind of nice to just get to know yourself as an adult

00:46:00.320 | and build your skills. And so I wouldn't worry, Brian, slow productivity all the way. All right,

00:46:06.960 | Jesse, let's do an actual call. Sounds good. We've got Warren. Warren, all right.

00:46:11.200 | Hi, Cal. Love to pop. I'm a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and I share episodes

00:46:17.840 | with my students pretty often. So here's my question and situation. I'm pretty well organized

00:46:23.520 | already, especially at work. I've got a tiered system of planning. It includes a Gantt chart

00:46:28.800 | for annual high-level planning, a few Trello boards for implementing my plan, and a daily

00:46:34.640 | task and time boxing system for my rather busy job. But the best laid plans of mice and men go

00:46:41.600 | off the rye and leave us nothing but grief and pain. To wit, I find myself often looking back

00:46:47.680 | at a week, month, or quarter, and anxiously realizing that my well-organized system wasn't

00:46:54.400 | well-executed at all. So my question for you is, do you have any thoughts or recommendations

00:46:59.840 | for improving execution without completely uprooting a pretty good system of planning

00:47:05.600 | that I have in place already? Thanks, Cal. All right. Thanks, Warren. Jesse, he shares

00:47:12.800 | my episodes with his class at Rutgers. Yep. I don't want to look this up and figure out that

00:47:18.960 | his class is listed as something like travesties in media, or the death of good journalism,

00:47:27.440 | case studies in embarrassingly bad new media productions, or something like that. The Nazis

00:47:33.600 | among us, the crypto-fascist from the whatever, productivity bro-sphere. Hopefully, that's not

00:47:42.800 | the course. So Warren, my general rule of thumb here is, as you move up in scale from daily to

00:47:48.240 | weekly to quarterly or semester, the tightness and specificity of your plan should reduce.

00:47:56.560 | So when you're doing a daily time-block plan, that's a very constrained plan because you're

00:48:00.480 | dealing with an interval of time that you actually have a chance of structuring and

00:48:05.760 | constraining. It's like eight hours. What am I doing in each of the hours of my day?

00:48:09.440 | Even then, it's hard. You're probably going to redo that plan once or twice as the day unfolds.

00:48:14.240 | Move up in scale to the weekly plan, you should be less strict.

00:48:17.040 | We talked about this earlier in the episode, but hey, I want to make progress on this objective

00:48:23.040 | this week. Thursday, I got a lot of time free on Thursday. Let me just protect this morning.

00:48:28.240 | This is when I'm going to work on this report. It's more loose. Let me write down that I really

00:48:33.120 | want to get these two things done when I get a chance. Then when you go up to your quarterly

00:48:36.880 | plan, it's even looser. It's like, okay, I want to see if I can finalize this journal article.

00:48:44.640 | Maybe it would be a real success if I could come out of this semester having refined a

00:48:51.600 | book proposal idea. It's getting really high level here. Then when it gets to the scale of

00:48:56.960 | multiple semesters or years, I probably don't have any planning at all.

00:49:00.880 | Let me just get through the fall, and then I'll see what I want to do in the winter.

00:49:05.040 | So what might be happening here is you're trying to Gantt chart at the highest level,

00:49:10.320 | multiple months and seasons, and this project is going to overlap this project.

00:49:14.880 | There's a reason why they stopped using Gantt charts in software development. It's impossible

00:49:18.480 | to predict at that scale. You're much better to have a much more loose and ambiguous semester

00:49:23.520 | plan, work on this paper, try to get this proposal together that has lots of breathing room.

00:49:29.360 | And each week you're like, okay, let me just remember this week that maybe go on a couple

00:49:35.040 | walks, think about my book proposal, and let me try to find some time to work on the paper.

00:49:39.920 | And you know what? I'm having a hard time. I think I'm going to make Monday and Wednesday mornings.

00:49:44.400 | I'm going to regularly start blocking that off for the paper because I've had a couple of weeks

00:49:47.680 | in a row here where I don't have enough time to get things done. So let me jump into the future

00:49:51.600 | and set this up for a month. You want that planning and insight at that granularity to happen,

00:49:57.360 | not these six months I'm working on this and starting one and a half months into this interval,

00:50:01.520 | I begin working on the second initiative, which will finish after exactly four months.

00:50:05.680 | You're being too precise. So loosen up your planning, be a little bit easier on yourself.

00:50:11.840 | This is all about aiming your energy, not about exactly predicting how your energy will unfold.

00:50:18.880 | This is a line in the article we're going to talk about in the third segment,

00:50:23.360 | my latest New Yorker piece. I have a line about the idea that this type of planning,

00:50:26.720 | your goal here is not prescience, but instead just intention. You don't want your energy to

00:50:32.800 | just be dissipating without direction into the ether, but you're also not trying to be

00:50:38.400 | Nostradamus about, okay, three months from now, I will be at exactly this point on this project.

00:50:43.440 | That's a fool's errand. A lot of big, that's why software development doesn't try to do waterfall

00:50:48.560 | plans anymore. It's just too hard to predict. I want to do a quick case study. This was in

00:50:55.280 | response to episode 283, where we were talking about video games and living a deep life. So

00:51:00.960 | this case study short one comes from a nameless. No, no, Tom, he signed it. Okay. All right. Just

00:51:07.920 | from Tom. I've just listened to your discussion on video games and episode 283 based on Victor's

00:51:14.960 | question. If video games can be part of an intentional life, I practice intentional living

00:51:19.920 | as much as possible. And I also love games. One thing that has helped me is playing the right

00:51:25.360 | kind of games. Intricately crafted award-winning single-player stories can be an art form on par

00:51:31.760 | with high quality films. Playing the stories of the, of well-written complex characters is in

00:51:38.080 | visually original worlds is a very different experience to the slot machine style of other

00:51:43.840 | mainstream video games. Firewatch, Inside, Her Story, and Red Dead Redemption 2 are just a few

00:51:52.720 | examples of superb storytelling and games as an art form. I tend to block out an hour or two of

00:51:58.560 | my calendar to play like watching a high quality television drama. I hope that helps. As you both

00:52:04.720 | said, you're unfamiliar with the gaming landscape today. Love the show. It's helped a lot.

00:52:08.640 | I think that's useful, Tom. I completely agree with you.

00:52:12.320 | High quality single-player video games, whatever they call them, class A games where they spend,

00:52:18.560 | you know, $150 million developing them is like, or can be like art. Also they're self-limiting.

00:52:25.360 | They're hard. And they're also, the goal is not addiction, right? The goal is just gameplay

00:52:32.480 | duration, right? This needs to be a beautiful experience for whatever is typically like

00:52:36.800 | 40 to a hundred hours of gameplay. There's no benefit that gets you to like play it more.

00:52:43.760 | If anything, if it's like super addictive, you're going to finish the game too fast. And that might

00:52:48.240 | even be a problem because you just paid $60 for it. So it's not their incentives to addict you.

00:52:52.400 | So I think that's fine. Play it an hour or two a day if you like that. I don't think that's a big

00:52:56.480 | deal. Be wary more of the persistent online massively multiplayer games. I think that can

00:53:02.880 | really be a problem. They do want you to play it as much as possible. And those can be really

00:53:06.800 | addictive. They can begin to become a replacement for other parts of your life, especially if

00:53:12.320 | there's other players involved. You're kind of on teams. You're getting this poor granularity

00:53:18.080 | this poor fidelity simulacrum of collegiality and relationships, and you're making progress,

00:53:23.120 | and your levels are going up. That's where you look up seven hours later and realize, you know,

00:53:27.680 | you soiled your chair. Be careful about those games, especially if you're a grown man.

00:53:32.560 | Let's just put it this way. If you find yourself wearing a headset over the age of 25, a headset

00:53:40.640 | with a boom microphone, and you don't work for a NASCAR stock racing team, be careful about your

00:53:46.960 | life choices. Or an NFL team. Or an NFL team. That's right. Yeah. If you're an OC. If you're

00:53:54.160 | an OC for an NFL team, that's also okay. You can wear a headset. But otherwise, just be wary,

00:54:00.560 | because that can suck away your energy to do anything else, because it just presses the

00:54:07.120 | buttons of what drives us to do meaningful things. It presses those buttons enough that we don't feel

00:54:12.880 | motivated to get up. But the thing we're doing, the video games, doesn't actually fulfill those

00:54:19.520 | needs. And that's the problem. It's like eating really bad junk food will, in the moment, address

00:54:24.960 | your hunger sensation. But over time, it's not really what that hunger sensation was trying to

00:54:29.600 | get us to do. It's trying to get us to eat food in the way that our bodies recognize from our

00:54:33.280 | evolution. And so you're subverting a natural instinct with something that actually doesn't

00:54:38.240 | give you, it's lower what you need, and you're going to end up worse. Same thing with social

00:54:42.000 | media and social snacking. That's the phenomenon that social psychologists identified, where you

00:54:47.200 | feel in the moment, like the text messages going back and forth in your text thread or Snapchat

00:54:53.120 | or comments on your social media posts. In the moment, you feel like you're scratching the itch

00:54:57.440 | to be social, but that's not enough sociality. The information stream is too low fidelity,

00:55:04.720 | and you end up feeling more and more lonely. So you think in the moment, I'm doing this because

00:55:09.520 | I want to be connected, but this doesn't really connect you and end up worse off. So just be

00:55:12.480 | careful about the highly addictive games. Red Redemption 2, Zelda, Breath of the Wild on the

00:55:18.320 | Switch, all this stuff. That's fine. Those are beautiful games, and I have no problem with you

00:55:24.800 | playing that. All right. We have a final segment here. Before we do, I want to mention briefly

00:55:30.720 | another sponsor, longtime sponsor. That is our friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that

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00:58:02.800 | to a store? Like are they going to make you do feats of endurance to see like whether you qualify

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00:59:11.440 | policygenius.com/deepquestions. All right, let's go on to our final segment.

00:59:18.960 | This final segment, I often like to take something that's out there in the world of the internet or

00:59:25.040 | the news and react to it. So what I'm going to do is I want to load a article here that is by me.

00:59:36.800 | So I have this on the screen. For those who are watching episode 285 at thedeeplife.com or at

00:59:42.400 | Cal Newport Media on YouTube, I have loaded my latest article for the New Yorker. It is called

00:59:48.960 | How to Have a More Productive Year. The subhead, knowledge work is always changing and our

00:59:56.880 | approach to it needs to change too. So I just want to summarize a couple of points from this piece.

01:00:03.120 | It begins with an interesting question. I look at my bookshelf and I see I have productivity

01:00:10.400 | guides on here because I collect these. The date all the way back to 1959, the earliest modern

01:00:18.160 | style business productivity guide I have is James T. McKay's book, The Management of Time. And then

01:00:25.200 | I have books from there covering every decade up until our current moment in my own books.

01:00:31.040 | And so early in this article, I actually go through each decade and I look at all these

01:00:34.880 | books and I say, OK, here's the motivating question. We've been looking at this question

01:00:39.200 | of how to manage your time as a professional since 1959 or before. Why don't we have it figured out?

01:00:45.280 | Why isn't there just this is the right way to do it? We've been writing about this forever.

01:00:50.240 | And so as I go through these books, an answer emerges, which is the challenges of work

01:00:56.800 | keep changing. And if we look at the advice in 1959, it looks different than the advice that

01:01:01.520 | Peter Drucker gives in 1967, which looks different than the advice that Edwin Bliss gives in the

01:01:07.200 | 70s, which is different than the advice that Stephen Covey gives in the 80s and 90s,

01:01:10.880 | which is quite different than the advice that Alan, David Allen gives in the early 2000s.

01:01:14.560 | Because the demands of work and our relationship with work keeps changing. You read Peter Drucker

01:01:23.120 | in 1967. It's a space age optimism. Yeah, you can optimize how you work. Of course,

01:01:29.200 | let's get data. Keep a time log of everything you do. Go back and study it. Look for what he calls

01:01:35.520 | time wasters. Eliminate those from your schedules. Optimize your time allocation and you'll be great.

01:01:40.160 | Space age optimism. Jump ahead to the 1970s and the book, Edwin C. Bliss's Getting Things Done,

01:01:47.280 | the ABCs of Time Management, all that optimism is gone. The economic malaise was stagflation of the

01:01:54.480 | 1970s and the books is it's bloodless and technocratic. And it's an alphabetical list of

01:02:00.800 | different aspects of office life with some advice for each. But then by the 80s, where we get

01:02:06.560 | hypercapitalism and navel gazing, self-actualization, we get Stephen Covey that's like, no, no, no,

01:02:12.240 | here's what we're going to do. The point of all this work is to satisfy your deepest values.

01:02:18.400 | And we're going to have this really complex system all built around self-actualization.

01:02:22.160 | Here's my roles and they're important to me. And everything aims towards like fulfilling

01:02:29.120 | my values there. But then you jump to David Allen, Getting Things Done, 2001.

01:02:37.440 | And suddenly you have a reversal. All of that self-actualization ambition is gone again,

01:02:42.800 | because what's happening in the world when Allen's writing this book,

01:02:45.360 | network computers in the office, email, and the explosion in work volume and distraction that

01:02:52.800 | has just begun. So Allen's way more nihilistic. He says, forget self-actualization. We just want

01:02:58.640 | to automate the hell out of work so that we can just find some mental peace. There's no purpose

01:03:03.680 | to our work. We're a machinery gadget, just cranking out widgets. And all we want to do is

01:03:10.400 | just try to get some peace among us. He doesn't even care. Let's just have a mind like water

01:03:16.000 | moments of zen. He's responding to the issues of the time. So then the piece says, what are the

01:03:22.880 | issues of our current time? And I would say in the pandemic and pandemic aftermath, too much to do,

01:03:30.960 | nihilism about our work, like what's all this busyness for, and communication overload are the

01:03:35.200 | defining features. And I say, so what's the right advice for right now? And then I give

01:03:39.360 | classic Cal Newport advice, right? So if you want to see classic Cal Newport advice,

01:03:44.400 | Trojan horsed into the New Yorker, you will find that in this article,

01:03:48.640 | I talk about structured task systems, Trello boards with roles and statuses and columns.

01:03:55.760 | I talk about multi-scale planning, daily, weekly, quarterly, or strategic, whatever you want to call

01:04:02.720 | it. And I talk about communication rules, office hours, for example, things you can put in place,

01:04:07.920 | reverse meetings, things you can put in place to take the interactions you have to do in your job

01:04:13.760 | and prevent them from unfolding in these asynchronous back and forth all day long.

01:04:18.560 | So it's like the core gospel of Cal Newport. I sort of elaborate these ideas for a new audience.

01:04:25.520 | And then the end, I do some conclusion. I don't want to give it all away. You should read the

01:04:28.880 | article. But anyways, I thought this was an interesting point. We're never going to be done

01:04:35.040 | with the question of how to be organized in work. And it's because the target shifts.

01:04:40.880 | So we have to be okay with that. There is no canonical system we'll ever arrive at

01:04:46.400 | that we can say, now we know how to work. We are going to have to keep updating.

01:04:52.320 | The key is doing this without making that updating of our system all we ever do.

01:04:56.800 | So I'm going to read from my conclusion here to sort of summarize how I'm thinking about that.

01:05:01.840 | How do we keep reappraising the way we work without getting lost in endless tweaking and

01:05:08.800 | upgrading of our organizational systems? Not maintaining any type of to-do list is a bad idea,

01:05:14.480 | but so is the quixotic chase of a perfect system that doesn't actually exist.

01:05:20.480 | The challenge in cultivating a sustainable approach to modern knowledge work is to locate the space

01:05:24.800 | between productivity fetishism and the knee-jerk rejection of productivity thinking as toxic or

01:05:30.880 | unnecessary. To achieve and hold a position of leadership in this age of innovation, a man must

01:05:36.640 | spend a part of every day in self-development, James McKay writes in the preface to his 1959

01:05:42.400 | advice guide. He was more right than he likely realized. We're never free from the need to keep

01:05:48.400 | reassessing how we work, but we cannot let this become the entire story. It's a bit of meta advice

01:05:54.400 | for everything we do here. It is important to keep thinking about in our current technological

01:05:59.520 | work moment, what's the right way to work. You don't want to be haphazard, but once you have

01:06:04.560 | a plan that works, execute and get on with the other stuff. Check in every once in a while,

01:06:09.440 | keep up with what you need to change in the world of work, but don't make thinking about how you

01:06:15.440 | work be your primary activity. It's easier said than done, but I think that's the challenge we

01:06:19.520 | all face. That's the challenge hopefully I'm helping you with on this podcast. All right,

01:06:24.320 | Jesse, I think we should wrap it up there. We did about two and a half hour of podcasting right

01:06:30.160 | before this. I read an audio book all last week, so I don't know how much of my voice is left.

01:06:34.720 | Let's call it quits now, but thank you everyone for listening. I'll be back next week with another

01:06:39.760 | episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay deep. If you liked today's episode about the

01:06:45.440 | productivity paradox, I think you'll also like episode 283 about how to organize your life.

01:06:53.120 | Check it out. There clearly is a real hunger out there for transforming your

01:06:57.760 | life into something more intentional and more deep.

The Productivity Paradox: The Harder You Try, The Worse It Gets... | Cal Newport

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