The Optimal Morning Routine For 2025

00:00:00.000 | I want to talk today about morning routines.

00:00:04.900 | This is a tricky topic.

00:00:06.360 | For critics of online productivity culture, overly complicated morning rituals that often

00:00:12.440 | seem to rely on confident citations of shaky science have come to represent a lot of what

00:00:20.200 | people dislike about online productivity spaces.

00:00:24.720 | But as I'll explain as this deep dive unfolds, you know, I feel like my mornings recently

00:00:29.080 | have been getting off to a sort of a shaky start and I want to revamp what I'm doing.

00:00:33.560 | So with some trepidation, I recently waded into the online productivity world to read

00:00:38.920 | articles, social media feeds, and YouTube channels about morning rituals.

00:00:44.760 | What is this thing that's happening online?

00:00:47.000 | What I've done is I've broken them down into three categories.

00:00:49.640 | I'm going to go through these categories, tell you what I found, what's good about each

00:00:53.280 | of these categories, what's bad, what my takeaway lessons are, and then I'll end by saying what

00:00:56.540 | changes did I make in my own life based on all that I discovered.

00:01:02.440 | All right, so let's get into it.

00:01:06.000 | First of all, why do I need this?

00:01:08.560 | What I have been finding in my own morning, so my morning starts very predictably because

00:01:14.640 | I have three young kids.

00:01:17.040 | They all take the same school bus.

00:01:18.900 | We have to be out the door about 730 to make the walk to the bus stop.

00:01:23.800 | The bus stop's about half to three quarters of a mile away.

00:01:27.180 | So our morning is very much like get up, wrangle, wrangle, wrangle out the door, get the kids

00:01:32.000 | to the bus, walk back.

00:01:34.240 | Now by the time we're back, it's 810, maybe 815.

00:01:40.280 | This is where I'm shaky.

00:01:43.400 | I just eat up too much time between finishing the morning family ritual, getting the kids

00:01:48.800 | out the door, and getting a tightly time block planned day unfolding.

00:01:55.560 | Just to get ready often takes me way too much time.

00:01:58.400 | I don't know why.

00:01:59.400 | I've talked about this before on the show.

00:02:00.400 | It's just some weird block I have.

00:02:01.680 | But just to go get showered and dressed, like if I have to go to campus or come to the podcast

00:02:05.120 | studio, it just takes way too much time.

00:02:07.960 | I often find myself before my schedule really gets going, I might actually get sucked into

00:02:13.880 | some sort of administrative chore or task that is in list.

00:02:18.280 | What ends up happening is by the time my day gets going, I'm cursing how much time has

00:02:21.400 | already passed.

00:02:22.400 | When I look at face the productivity dragon and time block my day to follow, it's like,

00:02:25.440 | "Well, there's not enough time in here to do the things I really want to do.

00:02:28.060 | I'm almost to my first appointment of the day."

00:02:31.400 | I want to tighten that up.

00:02:32.640 | This is where I was hoping by looking at popular morning routines online, I would find some

00:02:38.600 | ideas.

00:02:40.560 | As I mentioned, I've roughly categorized this content that's out there right now in popular

00:02:45.560 | into three categories.

00:02:48.760 | The first category, type one of the morning routine rituals, I'm going to call this the

00:02:52.460 | embrace the suck videos.

00:02:55.960 | Embrace the suck being a term out of the special forces that basically says when going gets

00:03:01.160 | hard, the idea with that term is lean into the hardness.

00:03:05.680 | That's great.

00:03:06.680 | Hardness is good.

00:03:07.680 | There's a certain type of person talking online that really pushes this for their morning

00:03:14.160 | routine.

00:03:15.160 | The whole point should be do something really hard.

00:03:18.640 | Here's a classic example of that.

00:03:20.720 | This is probably the originator of the embrace the suck morning routine.

00:03:23.920 | It's Jocko Willink.

00:03:24.920 | If you're watching, instead of just listening, I've loaded up Jocko's Twitter feed here on

00:03:29.840 | the screen.

00:03:31.320 | His Twitter feed, he's been doing this for, God, I think he started doing this in 2015,

00:03:36.640 | but famously like most of what he does on here, and I have it on the screen, is every

00:03:40.600 | morning he takes a picture of his watch when he wakes up.

00:03:45.200 | Here's a picture from four hours ago, and it says it's 428 in the morning.

00:03:51.200 | What's his caption?

00:03:52.200 | You know what you have to do, in caps, do it.

00:03:55.000 | Here's the day before, 433, caption, stay in the fight.

00:03:58.240 | Then he will accompany it with a video, a picture straightly later of where he exercised.

00:04:03.720 | He does brutal exercising.

00:04:05.040 | He's a sort of a monster of a man, so 428 picture of the watch right now, and then a

00:04:09.600 | picture of a Bulgarian bag, which is like a, was that just like a weighted bag you carry

00:04:14.440 | or something like that?

00:04:15.440 | Probably.

00:04:16.440 | Yeah, something terrible, and it says aftermath, move, right?

00:04:20.480 | That's like the originator of the embrace, to get up really early and do something really

00:04:24.600 | hard.

00:04:27.160 | This has evolved, so if we look at online circles and we look at examples of the embrace

00:04:32.040 | to suck morning routine, a new aspect that's emerged in sort of like the post Jocko world

00:04:38.800 | is the cold plunge.

00:04:40.720 | So here I have a clip that Jesse will play from TikTok of Joe Rogan, who helped popularize

00:04:46.400 | this, talking about his morning routine.

00:04:48.280 | See if we can play this here.

00:04:49.960 | Morning, I don't dress warm, I wear my underwear, and I go outside, and it's 40 degrees this

00:04:55.280 | morning, and I walk out, and I lift the lid on that Marasco cold plunge, and I see the

00:05:00.560 | ice floating up in there, and every day I climb in, and I just get in there for three

00:05:06.000 | minutes in the morning, and then I work out.

00:05:08.400 | So that's how I start my day now.

00:05:11.040 | All right, so that has also become popular.

00:05:15.200 | So I often feel like Rogan, because he's in comedy, so he's out late, is not going to

00:05:22.040 | wake up at 4.30 in the morning, so his equivalent of something that is over the top hard to

00:05:26.440 | get the day started is let's go into an ice-encrusted outside cold plunge for three minutes.

00:05:31.840 | There's a lot of people who talk about doing this in the morning as well.

00:05:35.840 | So this is all the same type of morning routine, do something super hard first thing in the

00:05:40.400 | morning.

00:05:41.400 | All right, so let's do the bad and the good.

00:05:43.920 | The bad, one of the places we see a bit of a problem is when people try to justify some

00:05:51.440 | of this behavior through ill-sighted science.

00:05:55.000 | So for example, I'm not an exercise medicine person, but my friends who are, I'm thinking

00:06:00.180 | in particular like my friend Brad Stolberg will tell me that there's a lot of people

00:06:04.400 | citing science about cold plunges that try to justify that there's this really large

00:06:09.780 | therapeutic benefit.

00:06:10.960 | And he's read all of these studies, and he says these effect sizes are teeny.

00:06:15.520 | It's like the same effect size you get from having a cup of coffee in terms of improvement

00:06:20.600 | to well-being in the moment or like seeing something funny, like there are these minor

00:06:25.240 | like therapeutically irrelevant impacts.

00:06:28.400 | It's easy to oversell, you know, like hey, your body is, you're going to live for 20

00:06:34.680 | more years.

00:06:35.680 | It's easy to do that.

00:06:36.680 | I don't think the big players do, but a lot of the secondary people do.

00:06:40.800 | The other bad I'd say with this is that not all of these activities are sustainable for

00:06:46.000 | all people.

00:06:47.000 | In particular, we know there's a small percent of the population.

00:06:49.920 | I don't know what the percent is.

00:06:50.960 | I think it's 10% or less who just don't need as much sleep.

00:06:55.760 | We don't know why, but it's like there's a small group of people that like fine with

00:06:59.520 | four hours of sleep.

00:07:01.400 | Jocko Willink is one of those people, and he talks about this, like he will actually

00:07:04.400 | talk about it if you listen to him, is that like he doesn't recommend that his kids wake

00:07:09.800 | up at 430 because they need more sleep than he does.

00:07:13.320 | You know, he's self-selected as someone who doesn't need a lot of sleep, made it easy

00:07:16.000 | for him to go through, easier for him to go through Navy SEAL training, et cetera, like

00:07:19.520 | it kind of makes sense that he had this successful Special Forces career.

00:07:22.560 | But that's not necessarily a sustainable model for everyone.

00:07:25.920 | Both him and Joe Rogan do really intense like exercises in the morning as well.

00:07:31.680 | And like those routines are routines, you know, for someone, they've been doing this

00:07:35.420 | for decades.

00:07:36.420 | And so their body and they have trainers and they've been building up this sort of base

00:07:41.120 | or whatever.

00:07:42.120 | So, you know, it's not all translatable.

00:07:45.520 | But what's the good in the Embrace the Suck morning routines?

00:07:49.120 | I mean, I think the main advantage that we get with someone like Jocko or Joe in their

00:07:53.160 | row in their rituals is psychology, psychological.

00:07:58.260 | By doing something really hard, you are signaling to yourself that you're the type of person

00:08:03.500 | who does really hard things.

00:08:05.040 | I'm elite in this way.

00:08:06.600 | Most people avoid discomfort.

00:08:08.360 | I'm bringing in crazy discomfort.

00:08:09.860 | I'm waking up at 430.

00:08:12.040 | I'm getting into an ice encrusted bath.

00:08:14.800 | I don't know if there's like a physical therapeutic benefit.

00:08:16.880 | But what I'm telling myself is, you are someone who does hard things.

00:08:21.200 | We've talked about this on the show before, that discipline is largely an identity and

00:08:26.280 | not a trait that you have or don't have.

00:08:28.480 | So it's a good way to build is what I think they're doing here is maintaining a narrative

00:08:34.660 | of a self-narrative of exceptionality, which then fuels the other things you want to do

00:08:40.680 | during the day.

00:08:41.840 | You just you just have that more belief in yourself.

00:08:43.640 | All right, so the lesson I'm drawing from this first category of popular morning rituals

00:08:47.480 | online is that finding ways to signal to yourself that you're disciplined is probably a good

00:08:51.920 | thing.

00:08:52.920 | It doesn't, however, have to be in the guise of extreme physical acts.

00:08:57.760 | In fact, it probably doesn't have to be physical at all.

00:09:00.520 | I can imagine other ways that people could signal to themselves that they do extreme

00:09:04.600 | things and they're disciplined and maybe have nothing to do with physicality at all.

00:09:08.200 | It's an extreme intellectual endeavor, for example, or a religious endeavor, et cetera.

00:09:13.720 | So I think that the general lesson here is there is power in reminding yourself you're

00:09:18.240 | able to do optional hard things, even if the thing is arbitrary, because that will put

00:09:23.000 | you in the right mindset to do non-arbitrary things that are also hard, but not urgent

00:09:26.920 | as the day goes on.

00:09:27.920 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:09:28.920 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:09:33.820 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:09:41.280 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:09:46.700 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:09:52.080 | I know you're going to like it.

00:09:53.880 | Check it out.

00:09:54.880 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:09:56.200 | All right.

00:09:57.400 | The second category, broad category of these morning rituals I found online, I didn't really

00:10:02.040 | know what to call this category, self-discovery or recentering your soul.

00:10:07.040 | I'm not quite sure what the right way to describe this category, but the canonical example of

00:10:12.680 | this category is Hal Elrod's 2012 bestselling book, The Miracle Morning.

00:10:19.840 | This was very influential in how people were thinking about morning routines, especially

00:10:23.840 | in this early social media period, 2012 to 2016 or so, and we see a lot of variations

00:10:29.800 | of what Hal suggests in that book online, especially in social media spaces.

00:10:35.000 | I'm going to pull up an article here from 2019 where a reporter, I think this is from

00:10:41.720 | NBC News, tried the Miracle Morning and kind of talks it for a month and talks about how

00:10:49.880 | it went, but it gives us a good summary of what actually this ritual means.

00:10:52.760 | The article I'm pulling here is titled, I Tried the Miracle Morning Productivity Routine

00:10:57.720 | for a Month.

00:10:58.720 | Here is what happened.

00:10:59.720 | This is by Locke Hughes from 2019.

00:11:04.960 | So what I'm going to do here is just scroll down.

00:11:06.080 | What I like about this article is the reporter summarizes the six practices of Hal Elrod's

00:11:12.880 | Miracle Morning.

00:11:14.320 | So Elrod abbreviates the six practices as S-A-V-E-R-S, acronym SAVERS.

00:11:20.560 | So the S stands for silence.

00:11:24.340 | When you wake up, the first thing you do is you sit silently.

00:11:28.560 | This could be, for example, doing a mindfulness meditation.

00:11:32.160 | The reporter used Calm meditation app to sort of run through a morning meditation.

00:11:36.760 | All right.

00:11:37.760 | The second piece of the Miracle Morning is A for affirmations.

00:11:40.520 | An affirmation is a sentence or two in alignment with what you want to accomplish and who you

00:11:45.220 | need to be to accomplishing it.

00:11:48.400 | Elrod suggests your affirmation should make an impression on your subconscious mind, transform

00:11:56.200 | how you think and feel so you can overcome your limiting beliefs.

00:12:00.200 | The reporter in this article's affirmation was, "I'm an accomplished, successful writer,

00:12:05.120 | author, and speaker.

00:12:06.680 | My work helps others feel less alone and empowers them to make the choices and decisions that

00:12:10.140 | lead them to their best life."

00:12:11.320 | You say that to yourself a bunch of times.

00:12:14.420 | Then in your Miracle Morning, you go to V for visualization.

00:12:17.600 | You train your brain to see things as you would like them to be instead of as they are.

00:12:22.680 | Elrod's suggesting this for five minutes.

00:12:25.440 | Visualize living your ideal day, performing all tasks with ease, confidence, and enjoyment.

00:12:29.200 | Then comes E for exercise.

00:12:31.120 | Again, you're still in your morning ritual here.

00:12:36.420 | You don't need to run eight miles or even go to the gym unless you want to, but exercise

00:12:39.840 | can be something as simple as a 10-minute yoga routine or set of bodyweight exercise

00:12:42.920 | you do in the living room floor.

00:12:43.920 | You just need to get moving and the blood and oxygen flowing to the brain.

00:12:48.500 | Then comes R for reading.

00:12:50.460 | Just practice fast checks, transformation at any part of your life.

00:12:53.340 | Elrod explained, "Don't reinvent the wheel."

00:12:55.340 | He reminds us, "The fastest way to achieve everything you want is to model successful

00:12:58.300 | people who have already achieved it.

00:13:00.340 | Read 10 pages per day."

00:13:02.580 | Finally, the final S is for scribing.

00:13:07.380 | Scribing just means writing, but a W would have ruined the acronym.

00:13:09.760 | This means journaling, jotting down ideas, making a gratitude list, putting whatever

00:13:13.860 | is on your mind on paper.

00:13:17.860 | That was the Miracle Morning.

00:13:19.940 | I see a lot of variations of this when I'm looking at morning routine content where people

00:13:25.100 | have a relatively, I would characterize it as a relatively long list of morning checklist

00:13:32.500 | activities.

00:13:33.500 | There's usually journaling involved.

00:13:34.500 | There's usually some sort of meditation involved, some sort of light exercise.

00:13:39.180 | All these things you do, they're sort of self-centered on yourself, yourself, your understanding

00:13:44.900 | of yourself, preparing for your day, rediscovering yourself.

00:13:49.620 | Any variation like that, I put that into that same category.

00:13:54.380 | All right, so let's go for the bad and the good of this sort of re-centering, morning

00:13:59.580 | re-centering approach.

00:14:01.940 | The bad is, well, first of all, it can be a lot of time each morning.

00:14:07.780 | You're sort of navel gazing.

00:14:09.260 | You're thinking about yourself, but none of this is actually making traction.

00:14:12.340 | It's not making traction on something that, I don't want to use the word productive here,

00:14:17.180 | but something that has an output that you need.

00:14:21.780 | Even an exercise routine, that exercise is part of what I need to do for my body or work

00:14:28.180 | or whatever it is.

00:14:29.540 | There's kind of that sense of frustration of I'm doing semi-arbitrary seeming activities

00:14:33.540 | and it takes a while.

00:14:34.540 | You're going through this checklist.

00:14:35.720 | What happens is I think a lot of people get impatient and you're like, "Ugh," kind of

00:14:39.580 | fake meditating visual.

00:14:41.260 | It becomes a rote, right?

00:14:44.340 | I'm scribing thoughts.

00:14:45.340 | I'm just going to jot something down.

00:14:46.540 | I'm visualizing my day like, "Come on, let's just roll past this."

00:14:50.780 | I also think it's very personality-driven, right?

00:14:54.500 | If you told Jocko Willink, "All right, here's your six-step thing you have to do in the

00:14:58.460 | morning and you're going to have to sit there quietly and then visualize your day being

00:15:02.900 | successful and then say positive affirmations about yourself," he's going to throw a kettle

00:15:07.580 | ball through the wall, right?

00:15:09.440 | It's just not his personality.

00:15:10.440 | He's like, "I would rather do squats with a Bulgarian bag," whatever that is.

00:15:16.420 | It's also very personality-driven.

00:15:19.180 | The good about this approach, because again, I think in each of these approaches there's

00:15:23.020 | a hidden value.

00:15:24.020 | It might not be explicitly what they talk about, but it helps explain their popularity.

00:15:28.260 | Here I think the good is our brain can be ungrounded in the morning.

00:15:32.020 | By our brain, I mean in particular our conscious thoughts.

00:15:34.940 | They can go everywhere, stressful, distracting, diverting.

00:15:39.420 | They can bring us into weird rabbit holes.

00:15:41.940 | If you pull out a phone early in the morning, your brain and your thoughts can really get

00:15:45.860 | captured in weird places that it takes a long time to escape from.

00:15:49.420 | It gets harder and harder to ground it in something useful.

00:15:53.260 | Having this immediate series of cognitive internal things you do grounds your brain

00:15:57.340 | in the morning.

00:15:58.340 | It prevents you from the alternative of an ungrounded brain just rattling off into whatever

00:16:02.480 | thought, stressful or otherwise.

00:16:04.300 | I really think probably 80% of the value this approach generates for people right now is

00:16:08.660 | it prevents them from looking at their phone first thing.

00:16:11.540 | And any alternative to looking at your phone first thing is probably positive regardless

00:16:16.580 | of the details.

00:16:17.580 | Again, it could be just reorganizing your Jocko-approved Bulgarian bags in order.

00:16:23.940 | If you just have something to do that's not your phone, I think that is positive.

00:16:30.300 | That's the lesson I'm pulling from that second category is that having some sort of cognitive

00:16:34.900 | plan in the morning matters.

00:16:37.940 | Something where it directs what you're thinking about early in your day so you don't start

00:16:44.300 | your day with your thoughts being ungrounded.

00:16:46.580 | There's probably real benefit in that.

00:16:50.340 | The third category of morning routines I call the MIT abbreviation for most important thing

00:16:59.460 | style morning rituals.

00:17:03.260 | I think Andrew Huberman's rituals is a good example.

00:17:08.420 | He has some other stuff in it, but let's start there.

00:17:10.740 | My example here is I have a clip from the goal guys where one of the goal guys says,

00:17:15.700 | "I'm going to try Andrew Huberman's routine and see what happens," but I think it's a

00:17:19.140 | good way of summarizing Huberman's routine.

00:17:21.540 | So here I'm going to play this on the screen for those who are watching.

00:17:24.940 | What is Andrew Huberman's morning routine?

00:17:26.980 | For me, I tend to wake up sometime around 6am, 6.30, and I write down the time in which

00:17:33.580 | I woke up.

00:17:34.580 | The second thing I do after I wake up is I make a beeline for sunlight, so getting outside

00:17:40.020 | for a 10-minute walk or a 15-minute walk is absolutely vital to mental and physical health.

00:17:46.420 | We get back, I start craving caffeine, but I purposely delay my caffeine intake to 90

00:17:52.420 | minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up.

00:17:55.060 | So for me, I just drink water.

00:17:57.020 | I also put a little bit of sea salt in the water.

00:18:01.700 | And I also drink my athletic greens, which is compatible with fasting.

00:18:05.580 | So I don't eat anything until about 11am or 12 noon.

00:18:11.020 | Next I would do a 90-minute bout of work, and that's typically phone off and out of

00:18:15.900 | the room.

00:18:16.900 | You'd be amazed how much you can get done in 90 minutes if you are focused.

00:18:21.260 | After I finish that cognitive work bout, I do some form of physical exercise for about

00:18:25.740 | an hour.

00:18:26.740 | Very last, but certainly...

00:18:27.740 | So now we're kind of in mid-morning now, so it's no longer talking about his morning routine.

00:18:34.940 | I was actually surprised looking up Huberman's routine, because the sense I had gotten about

00:18:40.780 | the way people talk about Huberman's protocols is that they are always overly complicated

00:18:47.840 | and super scientific, right?

00:18:51.100 | I actually was surprised.

00:18:52.700 | To me, you could simplify this routine.

00:18:57.520 | Basically there's two pieces to it.

00:19:00.280 | Piece one, wake up, get outside right away, and then do work, something important right

00:19:04.940 | away.

00:19:05.940 | That's where the MIT or most important thing of the day acronym comes from.

00:19:09.140 | And then step two, there's a nutritional piece on it, but the nutritional piece is really

00:19:14.420 | he fast until lunch, which is not a crazy nutritional strategy.

00:19:19.700 | Peter Atiyah talks about this in his book.

00:19:21.180 | He's like, "Look, if you need to...

00:19:23.580 | There's different ways to control the calories you consume to prevent overnutrition.

00:19:28.160 | One of the easy ways to do it is restrict the time in which you eat."

00:19:31.380 | So from just a practical manner, getting going and waiting until lunch to have your first

00:19:36.420 | food of the day is a reasonable strategy for keeping the total calories in the day more

00:19:40.820 | reasonable.

00:19:41.820 | So that's not that crazy of a thing.

00:19:43.580 | The part that is crazy, and I think this completely exposes Andrew Huberman as the most dangerous,

00:19:52.660 | worst type of charlatan, not drinking caffeine right away, I'm not on board with that.

00:19:57.220 | Jesse, that's got to be wrong.

00:19:59.140 | He's got to be wrong on that.

00:20:01.740 | You got to get your coffee going right away.

00:20:03.660 | Okay.

00:20:04.660 | So I've seen variations of this sort of Huberman plan, some variations all over the place,

00:20:10.700 | the elements being you get going on something important right away without doing anything

00:20:14.980 | else professionally and with some combination of getting some sunlight or getting outside.

00:20:21.980 | We'll call that the MIT strategy.

00:20:24.180 | I mean, I've seen it different ways.

00:20:25.400 | Some people use sunlamps and some people do work and then go outside and then do work,

00:20:29.420 | but just getting going with something hard before you engage with the world and getting

00:20:34.220 | outside.

00:20:36.900 | And I guess from a nutrition standpoint, waiting until that first block of work is done before

00:20:40.180 | you even think about like food or breakfast or something like this.

00:20:45.260 | Okay.

00:20:46.340 | So what's the good and the bad with this morning routine strategy?

00:20:50.860 | On the bad side, mornings can be tricky schedule-wise if you have other people in your life.

00:20:55.960 | So this adds some complexity to MIT strategies because, you know, hey, you have to get the

00:21:00.860 | kids up.

00:21:01.860 | You got to get the kids to school.

00:21:03.180 | And now if you really want to try to like get up, go outside and get something done

00:21:07.980 | before that, you're getting up so early that unless you have Jocko circadian rhythms, you're

00:21:11.420 | going to be super tired.

00:21:12.420 | So it can get kind of complicated.

00:21:14.940 | There's also a danger to the most important thing methodology in general.

00:21:18.100 | It's a danger that I've talked often about like throughout sort of my history of dealing

00:21:21.380 | with these issues.

00:21:22.640 | And that is it's easy to fall into the trap that like once you've worked on your quote

00:21:25.660 | unquote most important thing of the day that you then just fall into like reactive sludge

00:21:30.780 | for the rest of the day.

00:21:31.780 | Hey, that's my scheduling for the day.

00:21:34.460 | I worked for 90 minutes on X and now it's like whatever.

00:21:38.180 | Inbox is open.

00:21:39.180 | I'm kind of slacking.

00:21:40.180 | I had this debate with Oliver Berkman when he was on the show last fall.

00:21:44.660 | And where we landed is if you have a very autonomous relatively non-crowded job, so

00:21:52.500 | like a writer like Oliver, that's probably fine.

00:21:56.060 | Like you get your pages in in the morning and then you kind of do your best with some

00:22:00.700 | like reactive stuff, answer some emails, have some calls, like you don't really have to

00:22:03.900 | be on point.

00:22:04.900 | You'll be fine.

00:22:05.900 | But for a lot of knowledge work jobs because of pseudo productivity, because of the issues

00:22:09.620 | I talk about in my book Slow Productivity where we have too much on our plates and we

00:22:13.460 | have inefficient communication protocols, that's not going to work for most people.

00:22:17.940 | If you just do one thing with focus and then just anything goes, list reactive method for

00:22:22.260 | the rest of the day, you're going to fall behind.

00:22:24.240 | You're going to be stressed.

00:22:25.240 | You're going to exhaust your brain.

00:22:26.240 | You'll probably end up worse.

00:22:27.240 | So you don't want the most important thing of the day to be the only scheduling of the

00:22:32.760 | day.

00:22:33.960 | You probably still, if you have a sort of standard overloaded knowledge work style job,

00:22:38.880 | you still want to probably time block the rest of your day so that you're getting the

00:22:41.800 | most out of that without the work unduly taxing you or your brain or becoming unsustainable.

00:22:47.840 | All right, so that would be the potential bad there.

00:22:52.820 | The good, I think Huberman and everyone else is right on track based on my own experience.

00:22:59.600 | Get outside right away matters.

00:23:00.880 | I mean I do this because I walk my kids to the bus stop.

00:23:03.080 | I've been doing this forever.

00:23:04.360 | Even when my kids were young, we had a dog at the time.

00:23:07.720 | I would take the dog out very early because my wife would go, she would go to work early.

00:23:15.660 | We had a shifted thing.

00:23:17.040 | She would go to work on the early side so that I could get the kids up and fed and wait

00:23:21.160 | till the nanny was there.

00:23:23.020 | Then she would come home on the earlier side or leave the nanny and then I was going to

00:23:26.640 | work later and I would come back later.

00:23:28.320 | I had to walk the dog before she left for work early so I got very used to like, "Oh,

00:23:32.440 | you're out there."

00:23:33.440 | Actually, it's great just seasons.

00:23:37.360 | It's cold.

00:23:38.360 | It's hot.

00:23:39.360 | It's somewhere in between.

00:23:40.360 | The sun is starting to come up now.

00:23:41.360 | I don't know.

00:23:42.360 | It really does ground you.

00:23:43.360 | I do think that's really great.

00:23:44.360 | Yes, I do this.

00:23:46.360 | I fall out of it but I've always experienced getting right into something deep is like

00:23:52.440 | the best way to aggregate a lot of deep work.

00:23:55.340 | That's just like a well-known heuristic from anyone who's had deep work being a regular

00:24:00.200 | part of their job responsibilities.

00:24:01.520 | Being able to just get into something deep right away before anything else, you get the

00:24:04.840 | clearest focus on your brain.

00:24:06.600 | Why?

00:24:07.600 | Because when you open up the neurological black box there, what you see is a minimum

00:24:11.920 | of conflicting cognitive semantic networks activated.

00:24:15.320 | If I haven't looked at any emails yet, if I haven't looked at any other projects, this

00:24:19.320 | is the first thing relevant to my job I'm doing.

00:24:22.380 | There is very little cognitive conflict.

00:24:24.600 | You have these abstract reasoning centers of your brain can so much quicker and so much

00:24:30.040 | more totally turn their focus to the task at hand.

00:24:34.840 | It's the purest deep work you can generate in the day is that first time of the day.

00:24:39.520 | To me, some way of like get outside and get after it and then deal with the rest of your

00:24:43.240 | day that makes a lot of sense to my experience, the experience of people I talk to.

00:24:48.040 | All right.

00:24:49.040 | So how did I draw lessons from this for my own life and for my own morning attention

00:24:52.360 | issues?

00:24:54.160 | When it comes to exactly what I'm doing in the morning, given my setup, the MIT Huberman

00:24:58.560 | style approach makes the most sense for me.

00:25:02.620 | What does this really mean for me?

00:25:03.800 | It just means a recommitment to the simple rule of as I walk in the door, so I'm already

00:25:09.440 | getting the outside walking part because I'm going to the bus stop.

00:25:12.880 | As I walk back in the door, it is right to a desk and into deep work.

00:25:19.600 | Just that simplicity of that rule is what I need.

00:25:23.600 | A variation of that rule I've been considering, I think this might be even better for getting

00:25:28.240 | the effects of it, is what I really should do is on the way back, don't come back to

00:25:34.320 | my house, come back to the coffee shop Bevco, get my coffee from Bevco, walk down the block

00:25:41.680 | right up to the deep work HQ.

00:25:44.360 | So now it's a completely different cognitive context.

00:25:47.140 | I have an office two minutes from my house and next to a coffee shop.

00:25:51.680 | That's really what I should do.

00:25:52.680 | That should be the routine.

00:25:54.240 | And I come in here and it's just right in the pre-stage.

00:25:58.240 | Here's what I'm doing.

00:25:59.240 | I'm writing deep work, like whatever it is.

00:26:02.640 | Then I start thinking about, just so I can walk you through like how I think about these

00:26:05.220 | type of weekly template type scheduling rules.

00:26:08.360 | Now the issue is some days, I try to keep my first half of my days as empty as possible.

00:26:13.680 | Some days, if it's like a non-teaching day, hopefully I've kept my morning clear till

00:26:17.600 | at least noon.

00:26:18.600 | In those days, I should just rock and roll for three hours plus during a semester.

00:26:21.640 | In the summer, I could do this like every day.

00:26:24.240 | On other days, if I have something scheduled in the morning, still do this even if it's

00:26:29.920 | symbolic.

00:26:30.920 | So let's say I have to get in for a 10 a.m. meeting or something like that.

00:26:39.800 | Still do like 20 minutes or 30 minutes of deep work so that that connection is strong.

00:26:43.280 | That's what I'm thinking about.

00:26:44.280 | I just do this every morning.

00:26:46.400 | Bus stop to my office, sit down, do something deep, even if it's symbolically 20 minutes

00:26:50.840 | and then I have to go and get ready to go, just so that my mind says that's what I always

00:26:54.040 | do.

00:26:55.760 | The goal should be on like every day possible, make that an hour to 90 minutes with the three

00:27:00.840 | to four hour blocks.

00:27:02.400 | You really want those like at least for my case, at least twice a week.

00:27:04.760 | So I'm just sort of walking you through and then what I would do after that is like as

00:27:08.280 | soon as that block is done, then I time block plan the rest of the day and then for me that's

00:27:11.280 | just like the juggling match with my normal, I got my five jobs, I want to finish my five

00:27:14.880 | and now I need to make the most of the time that follows to be very careful.

00:27:20.440 | What about the other lessons though from watching the other morning routines content online?

00:27:26.200 | I actually think those lessons can be integrated and to some degree I already do integrate

00:27:31.120 | them into my life, just not in the morning.

00:27:35.280 | So if we look at the embrace the suck type idea, that doesn't have to be first thing

00:27:41.720 | in the morning.

00:27:43.080 | If my analysis is correct, that what matters there is the psychology of telling yourself

00:27:48.800 | on a regular basis and demonstrate yourself on a regular basis, I can do hard things.

00:27:53.880 | It's not so critical that's first thing in the morning.

00:27:56.080 | So for me, like I've typically exercise post work pre dinner.

00:28:02.680 | That's a place to start the embrace the suck methodology would say, yeah, start making

00:28:06.940 | that more brutal or interesting or crazy.

00:28:09.520 | You know, it doesn't have to be the morning, but you have one thing every day where you're

00:28:13.000 | doing something that's like really hard and optional, right?

00:28:15.840 | So that lesson would say upgrade or update or get more extreme in what I'm doing during

00:28:19.720 | my exercise block, even if that's not, doesn't happen to be first thing in the morning.

00:28:25.540 | That sort of self-reflection that like that one advantage you get out of the Hal Elrod

00:28:31.240 | sort of recentering your soul type morning ritual that also doesn't have to happen in

00:28:36.160 | the morning.

00:28:37.160 | Again, I find my self-reflection is not good in the morning until I've warmed up my brain

00:28:42.880 | circus and I've had some coffee and again, no offense to Andrew Huberman, but I'm not

00:28:47.800 | going to drink salted water instead of my first cup of coffee.

00:28:52.920 | I don't care what it's doing to my biochemistry.

00:28:55.300 | Come on.

00:28:56.300 | I will, I would give up a couple of years of life for that.

00:28:59.380 | I'm not, I'm not good at self-reflection end of the day though.

00:29:01.580 | It can be better.

00:29:02.580 | In fact, like what I like to do with the self-reflection is go for a walk to do it.

00:29:06.740 | And I find when a day is over and I've exercised, my brain can now reflect on myself better.

00:29:14.460 | If I'm going to journal, if I'm going to, you know, maybe seek some meditation, I don't

00:29:18.220 | really have a monkey brain problem in the morning because I don't use social media.

00:29:21.560 | I don't, my phone isn't super attractive to me.

00:29:23.840 | Like I, and I'm, my brain doesn't work till I get coffee.

00:29:26.340 | So I'm just sort of in a stupor until I'm like 20 minutes into my first deep work block.

00:29:33.020 | So I, I figure maybe I should be a little bit more systematic about the self-reflection.

00:29:37.300 | I've been working with single purpose journals a lot more recently.

00:29:40.060 | I've been dealing with some, you know, recovering from an injury.

00:29:43.020 | I've used that as a, an excuse to single purpose journal on some like life planning stuff and

00:29:48.420 | the more systematically get in thinking walks.

00:29:50.840 | And so again, I think the value of some of those morning routines can be spread to other

00:29:54.380 | types of your day.

00:29:56.460 | But the value of like doing deep work first thing in the morning and going outside first

00:30:00.540 | thing in the morning to wake up your body, that, that was the bit of everything I learned

00:30:05.020 | in this experiment.

00:30:06.460 | That was the bit that was actually anchored to morning.

00:30:08.500 | And that's the bit that I'm sort of leaning into and clarifying into my, into my own life.

00:30:13.380 | And again, these type of weekly templates, it just depends on the season of life and

00:30:16.340 | the semester and what's going on and the, the summer is a completely different beast

00:30:20.860 | for me.

00:30:21.860 | I'm not going to the bus stop in the morning.

00:30:22.860 | I'm not teaching my schedules empty or I'll rethink that.

00:30:25.900 | But right now that's what I took away from my journey into the morning routines.

00:30:29.900 | And I will say, Jesse, that I was expecting more snake oil or more hustle culture stuff

00:30:40.140 | and it, some of it was kind of hustle culture, but like, honestly, I was often pretty commonsensical

00:30:45.860 | with like a couple random and take this supplement here or something like there'll be a couple

00:30:50.780 | random things thrown in that are maybe they're out over their skis.

00:30:54.060 | I mean, maybe the biggest example was like how, how Elrod stuff, like that's a lot of

00:30:59.260 | stuff to do, like those six different things.

00:31:02.340 | Like that's a long morning.

00:31:04.940 | So maybe, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel hustling to me.

00:31:07.020 | I don't know.

00:31:08.020 | I was expecting, I was expecting worse.

00:31:10.260 | So have, did you start going to Bevco and then come to the HQ?

00:31:14.660 | Well, I mean, I just figured this out this morning.

00:31:16.260 | So does Brad go on cold plunges or no, after his research, Brad is not a, I don't want

00:31:24.100 | to speak on his behalf, but I think I can confidently speak on his half that he's not

00:31:27.380 | a fan of cold plunges.

00:31:28.380 | It is not against them, but he thinks it says arbitrary.

00:31:32.060 | If he was here, he'd probably tell you it says arbitrary as, you know, I'm going to

00:31:35.540 | do 20 somersaults in the morning.

00:31:37.460 | Like that there's not a, a specific therapeutic mechanism from cold plunging that is non trivially

00:31:44.500 | different than sort of any number of sort of like minor things you could do.

00:31:48.760 | I tried the cold showers for a little while, then I just didn't make sense of me.

00:31:53.340 | I'm like, I mean, I think we have hot water now.

00:31:55.340 | I think it's all about, I think all of these things are all about the, the just signaling

00:32:00.540 | to yourself about discipline.

00:32:01.980 | It's like Rogan.

00:32:04.020 | I don't think he does the cold plunges as much anymore.

00:32:06.180 | I think a lot of people move to saunas in part because I just think it's more reasonable.

00:32:11.300 | Like it's just not as painful, like you're still like I'm in the sauna and it's really

00:32:15.220 | hot and but it's just not as terrible as the cold plunging.

00:32:20.260 | So I mean, I think it's, I'm, I'm less of a cold plunge partisan because I never, I

00:32:25.820 | never listened to scientific reasons anyways, right.

00:32:28.860 | You know, I think people got like a lot of motivation out of it.

00:32:31.100 | I think that's fine.

00:32:32.100 | I mean, they've had ice baths and professional sports locker rooms for a long time.

00:32:36.980 | Yeah.

00:32:37.980 | But from a motivation standpoint, it, it really works, right?

00:32:40.620 | Like if you're, everything's inflamed because you're like always kind of injured and yeah,

00:32:45.820 | that's true though.

00:32:46.820 | I don't think people are using them therapeutically in that way, but I'm all for it.

00:32:50.540 | I think if like, if I had like, I like saunas, if I, if I had room for a sauna at my house,

00:32:56.220 | I don't need the science on it.

00:32:57.340 | I'd be like, this is great.

00:32:58.340 | Like it kind of resets you.

00:33:00.220 | It makes you feel like, okay, I've, I've, you know, you like shocked your body.

00:33:03.620 | I think it's the same thing that people go for, you know, runs when it's cold outside.

00:33:07.620 | It's like bracing and then you come back and everything feels sort of reset.

00:33:10.540 | So you know, I'm not a partisan on it, but yeah, Brad has taught me that the science

00:33:15.220 | of the benefits is not super impressive.

00:33:17.100 | All right.

00:33:18.100 | So we've got some good questions coming up, but first let's take a brief break to hear

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00:38:07.380 | All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.

00:38:10.820 | All right, who do we have for our first question of the day?

00:38:15.340 | First question is from Joseph.

00:38:16.660 | I'm a big consumer of online content, podcasts, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds.

00:38:21.980 | I'm trying to reduce my content consumption.

00:38:24.100 | I struggle with selecting which podcast episodes are worth my time.

00:38:28.340 | Most podcasters I follow are very interesting and upload once a week.

00:38:31.340 | Do you have advice on how to determine which episodes are worth watching and which I should

00:38:35.420 | skip?

00:38:36.420 | Well, I mean, I think the preferred thing to do here is what you want to do is get at

00:38:40.440 | least four or five complete listens of deep questions with Cal Newport per day, but you

00:38:45.180 | want to use a different device for each of those listens so that it counts as a different

00:38:49.620 | listener.

00:38:50.620 | So all I'm suggesting here is you buy like 20 to 30 iPhones and spend most of your day

00:38:54.180 | just generating fresh downloads.

00:38:56.780 | Joseph, here's my bigger advice here.

00:38:59.340 | The theme to my advice to you, first of all, is we can kind of chill out.

00:39:04.620 | The stakes here are low, right?

00:39:07.060 | So we want to release this idea that there's some optimal way to listen the podcast that

00:39:13.300 | you can miss out on.

00:39:15.900 | You're not going to get anything wrong here.

00:39:17.420 | The stakes here are very low.

00:39:19.440 | So then when we think about how we should think about podcast content, here's the way

00:39:22.540 | I like to think about it.

00:39:24.060 | There's two modes I'm normally in when I'm playing audio content.

00:39:30.540 | Either it's a high energy mode, you know, like it's early in the day, I'm out walking,

00:39:37.020 | I'm driving to work, my energy is high, in that type of mode, I want to hear something

00:39:44.120 | interesting or engaging.

00:39:45.320 | For me, I'm often looking for like an interview that is going to like spark ideas for me like,

00:39:49.900 | "Hey, there's something in here maybe I could write about or it's a world I want to learn

00:39:53.500 | about an interesting world or I'm looking for motivation."

00:39:56.180 | And then there is the second state, which is low energy.

00:39:59.040 | I'm doing the dishes, it's nine o'clock at night, I'm tired, I'm stressed out by work,

00:40:03.860 | I do not have the energy or interest right now in getting like excited about ideas and

00:40:09.660 | I want something just entertaining.

00:40:12.460 | And so then you're looking at like I want something funny, I want to just kind of get

00:40:16.740 | lost in something, you know, I'm just doing something boring and I'm out of mental energy.

00:40:21.060 | So those are the two modes.

00:40:22.460 | So your only goal is to have more than enough stuff to pull from for both of those modes

00:40:30.960 | so that you're just avoiding the null situation of having nothing to listen to in those circumstances.

00:40:35.260 | And when you think about it that way, you're like, "Oh, it's fine.

00:40:39.260 | There's an abundance of things I could pull from when I'm looking for like an idea generating

00:40:43.420 | podcast and there's an abundance of like fun or funny podcasts I can pull from when I'm

00:40:46.720 | low energy.

00:40:48.060 | And so I don't have to stress about it."

00:40:49.380 | So you subscribe to, you know, you discover podcasts the way you discover podcasts, you

00:40:52.540 | got 20 or 30 you subscribe to and then you just see like which one's catching my attention.

00:40:56.460 | Once you stop worrying about, "Oh, am I missing something?

00:40:58.880 | Am I doing this suboptimally?"

00:41:00.880 | It just becomes a lot easier.

00:41:02.080 | This is how I often engage with podcasts.

00:41:04.000 | It's very random.

00:41:05.000 | I kind of subscribe to things as I hear about them or I follow an author or a thinker to

00:41:09.880 | a podcast just to hear that author be interviewed.

00:41:11.880 | I'm like, "Oh, I like this interviewer.

00:41:13.960 | Maybe I'll just subscribe to it."

00:41:15.400 | And then I'm just, I'm in this mode.

00:41:17.120 | Let me look at podcasts that match that mode.

00:41:19.840 | First thing that catches my attention, I go, "No regrets."

00:41:23.080 | You know, so I hear what I hear.

00:41:24.920 | Like, Jesse, you're always asking me like, "Hey, did you hear so-and-so interview or

00:41:27.460 | that interview?"

00:41:28.460 | It's just random.

00:41:29.460 | Like sometimes I did, sometimes, you know, I didn't.

00:41:31.260 | So I don't, especially like interview podcasts, I don't serially consume a lot of podcasts.

00:41:36.380 | All right.

00:41:37.380 | I then have, the exception to all of this is what I think of as the like scheduled podcast.

00:41:42.500 | So like our podcast, I know this sounds self-serving, but our podcast, our schedule is invented

00:41:48.680 | for this to come out at a certain time where it solves a certain problem, where a Monday

00:41:52.180 | morning podcast, we're meant to be a part of your ritual, like Monday morning on your

00:41:58.080 | way to work, you listen to it to sort of get back into the mindset of, you know, deep work

00:42:04.620 | and the deep life.

00:42:05.620 | To come out of the weekend, start thinking again about being careful about how you navigate

00:42:11.300 | the modern digital environment, careful about how you're going to approach the morass that

00:42:15.100 | is your knowledge work job, careful in how you think about like what's working and not

00:42:18.520 | working or changes you want to make.

00:42:20.120 | It's like a wake up for the week type podcast.

00:42:22.520 | There's a bunch of them out there that are, that are tied to like a certain time to have

00:42:25.720 | a certain purpose.

00:42:26.720 | And so of course, those I think of as like, I know when I consume those, that's like ritualistic

00:42:31.520 | podcast consumption.

00:42:32.560 | So we put these all together.

00:42:33.560 | You've got your ritualistic podcast, always listen to this day, this time, this day, every

00:42:37.920 | week.

00:42:38.920 | Because they like, it's just a nice part of my routine and they serve some purpose.

00:42:42.520 | Then you're just pulling from these two other poles depending on your, your energy.

00:42:46.040 | Like I've got a hold for that second category, low energy.

00:42:48.120 | I love comedy in particular, it's not so much stand up comedians, it's interesting.

00:42:54.720 | I like improv style comedians doing like interview shows like, you know, it's like the obvious

00:43:01.700 | things.

00:43:02.700 | Conan.

00:43:03.700 | He was like an improv master.

00:43:04.700 | I like the smartless guys because well, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman are actually like

00:43:08.560 | a fantastic like improv duo.

00:43:12.640 | Sometimes like when I'm in my lowest energy state, it's a little bro-y sometimes, but

00:43:16.720 | sometimes when my lowest energy state, I love how does this get made?

00:43:21.440 | Which is Paul Scheer and Jason Manzoukas and June Diane Riefeld who are like all three

00:43:26.160 | like very famous accomplished improv comedy actors and they just review movies basically.

00:43:31.720 | I have to be in like a certain state for that, but when I'm in my certain state, like I was

00:43:35.440 | there the other day and I was like, I just need to listen to them talk about Con Air

00:43:39.600 | and it was like exactly what I needed and it was exactly what you would expect.

00:43:45.120 | And it is a fantastic movie and it all makes sense and it all checks out.

00:43:49.120 | The reason why I said it was bro-y, they're not bro-y, but years ago, Julie and I went

00:43:54.740 | to see them live and they're at Constitution Hall, Jesse.

00:43:59.400 | That's a big venue.

00:44:03.240 | And the audience was very bro-y.

00:44:05.340 | That's what caused, like they're not, they're, you know, whatever famous comedic actors from

00:44:11.000 | like the Hollywood left who are in their 50s, but the audience was very, we're like, oh,

00:44:15.400 | this is a lot of 24-year-olds who like just still go back to their frat sometimes.

00:44:20.680 | It's like the audience is bro-y, but I love them.

00:44:22.400 | I think they're very funny.

00:44:23.920 | And then for the Idea Podcast, it's, I mean, it's often shows I've been on.

00:44:28.760 | This is not a replicatable strategy, but if I've been on a show and like the interviewer,

00:44:32.320 | I'll often subscribe to it and there it's all like topic hunting.

00:44:36.120 | There's very few of those shows I listen to everything, I see who they have on.

00:44:39.960 | It's like, if I like who Sam Harris has on, on Making Sense, if I like the topic, I know

00:44:45.920 | Sam's going to give a really interesting like interview, you know, and I'll listen to that.

00:44:51.000 | I like, like we like the Acquired Podcast for me, it depends on like what the company

00:44:55.040 | is.

00:44:56.040 | But if I like the company, sometimes like that's what, you know, that's what I really

00:44:58.840 | want to do.

00:44:59.840 | You know, all of the main interviewers, I'm going to subscribe to those podcasts and just

00:45:03.800 | I see what I'm in the mood for.

00:45:05.440 | All right.

00:45:06.440 | I don't have much thinking about podcast listening, but there you go.

00:45:10.160 | I love the Con Air's statement.

00:45:12.980 | It's a fantastic, look, that's my, that's our, we were, that's, we would have been like

00:45:19.360 | junior high, high school in that Nicolas Cage era, Con Air, The Rock, The Rock is a fantastic

00:45:26.320 | movie.

00:45:27.320 | Here's the thing about these movies.

00:45:28.320 | They're all rated R because I want to show my kids, it's like, why, why were all these

00:45:31.920 | movies?

00:45:32.920 | They didn't have to be rated R. Everything was rated R in the nineties.

00:45:36.160 | Like movies you would not think, I think this was a marketing thing.

00:45:40.160 | Like think about the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, remember this movie?

00:45:47.000 | Yeah.

00:45:48.000 | Like what's the guy's name, Rodchenko, separatists from Rodchenko, whatever.

00:45:52.560 | There's always like Eastern vaguely like Russian, ex-Russian sphere of influence, terrorists

00:45:58.120 | taking things over in these movies.

00:45:59.560 | A great movie, right?

00:46:00.560 | It's the, they take over Air Force One, terrorists take over Air Force One, Harrison Ford's the

00:46:04.320 | president fights back.

00:46:06.720 | Perfect premise.

00:46:07.720 | It's a rated R movie.

00:46:08.720 | Like why is it?

00:46:09.720 | It doesn't have to be a rated R movie, right?

00:46:11.360 | It's not like in the middle of this movie, there's like a gratuitous, you know, basic

00:46:16.240 | instinct style sex scene or anything.

00:46:17.880 | It's just like, they would just make these things R rated.

00:46:21.760 | Crimson Tide.

00:46:23.820 | Love that movie.

00:46:24.820 | The submarine one, right?

00:46:25.820 | Submarine one.

00:46:26.820 | That's awesome.

00:46:27.820 | Tony Scott.

00:46:28.820 | So like the camera's like always moving.

00:46:30.040 | By the way, and I don't mean to rant about this, but my brother was in the submarine

00:46:33.840 | service and I had to ask him about this.

00:46:36.120 | There are, maybe I've talked about this on the show before, but there are several, it's

00:46:41.040 | crazy the things, some of the, some of the submarine stuff I would say was not deeply

00:46:44.760 | researched.

00:46:45.760 | Let's say Tony Scott did not care.

00:46:47.720 | So for example, and I'll leave it at this, but when it's time to get the order to fire

00:46:52.200 | the missile, spoiler alert, right?

00:46:54.120 | The whole job of these boomers is to be deadly silent holes in the water.

00:46:59.440 | And so they can just come out of like nothingness and then suddenly fire their missiles when

00:47:04.240 | they get to.

00:47:05.240 | And on these subs, my brother tells me about this, like you drop a wrench a hundred miles,

00:47:10.920 | you can be heard, right?

00:47:11.920 | So they wear a new balance tennis shoes and it's all like very careful.

00:47:16.600 | How does Tony Scott portray, okay, it's time to fire the missiles in real life.

00:47:20.840 | What would it be?

00:47:21.840 | It'd be like, okay, so what we're doing is what we trained for quiet, calm.

00:47:26.240 | He has clacks and sirens go off in the submarine, clacks and sirens, just like really loud sirens

00:47:33.240 | and everyone is running.

00:47:34.600 | Everyone's always running up and downstairs.

00:47:36.160 | Anyways, interesting thing about crimson tide though, uncredited screenwriting help

00:47:41.240 | for that movie came from Quentin Tarantino.

00:47:43.880 | So you'll see that like where they have that weird sort of like racially charged conversation

00:47:48.440 | about the, the lip stallion stallions between Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington.

00:47:53.480 | That's all Quentin Tarantino.

00:47:55.000 | You weren't happy about the nuclear sound stuff in that book too, that came about the

00:47:59.200 | nuclear war book.

00:48:00.440 | Yeah, they had the same, the same thing as, so maybe they watched.

00:48:04.920 | So I'm thinking Annie Jacobson who did tons of research for that book when it came time

00:48:09.100 | to do the submarine scene, I think she just watched crimson tide.

00:48:14.260 | I love Tony Scott movie.

00:48:15.260 | My six year old loves Tony Scott's, because I show my kids, yeah, I love movies.

00:48:21.840 | Tony Scott's unstoppable, Chris Pine, Denzel Washington, freight train full of deadly chemicals.

00:48:29.920 | It's our unmanned runaway train.

00:48:32.600 | If it hits the city, it's going to explode and kill like all these people, 70 miles per

00:48:36.280 | hour.

00:48:37.280 | The break is broken.

00:48:38.520 | And the, and so how do you stop it?

00:48:40.720 | That's the whole movie.

00:48:41.720 | And it's just constantly swooping by the train with Tony Scott helicopters.

00:48:44.760 | It awesome.

00:48:45.760 | It's a great movie.

00:48:47.080 | And that's, but see, like that's not our, they stopped making all these movies are rated

00:48:51.080 | at some point in the 2000s.

00:48:52.080 | Like, well, this is stupid.

00:48:53.080 | It wasn't, it's just, it's two guys in a train, you know, just, we can, they'll curse a little

00:48:58.240 | bit and why we don't have to make it R. All right, Joseph.

00:49:02.060 | Your kids will be old enough soon enough to watch radar movies.

00:49:04.560 | My, I mean, I selectively show my 12 year old just because I know the movies really

00:49:08.520 | well and sometimes I do some edits, but yeah, the R rating is not stopping me with him.

00:49:14.120 | All right.

00:49:15.120 | So Joseph, I hope that answers your question.

00:49:16.800 | All right, who do we got next?

00:49:20.120 | Next question is from Paula.

00:49:21.920 | How does Cal track daily steps?

00:49:24.040 | I imagine he doesn't use a smartwatch.

00:49:26.120 | I have a love-hate relationship with my Apple watch.

00:49:28.240 | I've tried to turn off notifications, but I'm curious about alternative approaches.

00:49:32.680 | Yeah.

00:49:33.680 | I mean, everyone uses Apple watches.

00:49:35.280 | I'm not a big Apple watch fan.

00:49:38.080 | I remember writing about the Apple watch when it first came out.

00:49:41.520 | So it's worth going back and finding this article at calnewport.com from when the Apple

00:49:45.040 | watch first came out because it captures a reality about that product's launch, which

00:49:49.920 | is when the Apple watch was released, they had no idea what it was for.

00:49:53.200 | This was like one of Tim Cook's first move was a post jobs after Steve Jobs died.

00:49:58.720 | One of the first big product deployments that Tim Cook oversaw, if I'm remembering this

00:50:03.440 | time, like history was the Apple watch and they had no use case for it.

00:50:07.680 | They're like, we have a watch, like a lot of people bought it.

00:50:11.280 | And I remember writing an article saying it's not our job to figure out what the Apple watch

00:50:15.800 | should be used for.

00:50:16.920 | That's Apple's job.

00:50:17.920 | Like they have to tell us, like make a pitch, here's how you're going to use it.

00:50:21.060 | After like a year or so, it kind of shook out like their planned work.

00:50:23.680 | People just used it and they said, what did people like about it?

00:50:26.160 | It shook out that people wanted it for like fitness stuff.

00:50:28.340 | And so then it became more of like a fitness, fitness aid.

00:50:31.760 | But no, I don't use an Apple watch.

00:50:34.000 | I have my, my day-to-day watch is actually a Zen 105, which is a full automatic.

00:50:40.240 | So there's no electricity or batteries in this beast.

00:50:42.520 | It's just a sort of German workhorse of a watch that harnesses my arms motion.

00:50:48.160 | And it's, it's pretty accurate.

00:50:49.600 | I can stick within a few minutes.

00:50:51.200 | The movement, it's a Salido movement customized by Zen.

00:50:53.760 | I can get, I don't know, stay with some like three minutes per week without any winding.

00:50:58.600 | So cool watch.

00:50:59.600 | Steps.

00:51:00.600 | All right.

00:51:01.600 | So what I did for a long time and I might go back to is I just bought a watch battery

00:51:09.240 | powered pedometer that's you've seen it, Jesse.

00:51:12.880 | It's like, I don't know, for those who are watching like that big.

00:51:16.240 | So I kind of the size of like a lighter, you know?

00:51:21.320 | And all it did, I love single purpose technologies.

00:51:24.440 | All it does is you, you have to press these buttons.

00:51:27.720 | It's very hard to set the time, but you set the time and then all it does is keep track

00:51:32.000 | of your steps just based on its motion.

00:51:33.920 | And it resets at midnight.

00:51:34.920 | Just like pull out your pocket.

00:51:37.160 | How many steps have I done today?

00:51:39.200 | The problem is I kept losing them because you forget to take it out of your pocket and

00:51:42.160 | then like they're in the hamper.

00:51:43.160 | So then I ended up with like two or three of them and I would, I lost this one.

00:51:48.000 | I'd find another one, but I love the single, the single use technology.

00:51:50.960 | It wasn't super accurate to be honest, but none of these technologies are.

00:51:54.440 | Michael Easter wrote about this last year, some research where they, they, it was actually

00:51:58.160 | pretty cool.

00:51:59.160 | They tested like all these pedometers and like none of them are accurate, but it doesn't

00:52:01.720 | really matter.

00:52:02.720 | It's kind of relative to itself.

00:52:05.400 | So I haven't used those recently.

00:52:06.640 | The batteries all died and I haven't been step counting as much recently.

00:52:10.040 | I started step counting more as part of recovery, this injury recovery I'm doing.

00:52:13.660 | And I just was using my, my phone is often in my pocket and it just has, it just automatically

00:52:18.280 | tracks stuff in the fitness app.

00:52:20.520 | I don't know how accurate that is, but that's what I've been doing.

00:52:24.760 | I think I'm going to go back to a standalone pedometer again.

00:52:27.600 | I'm wondering if there's, I think there's better ones.

00:52:29.600 | I think there's really good.

00:52:30.600 | I think the best ones, you like clip on your belt and I think it's going to make me look

00:52:35.120 | awesome.

00:52:36.120 | Unless you're wearing sweatpants.

00:52:37.120 | Well, I, which I am, well, I think what I'm going to do, and this is more reasonable and

00:52:43.040 | accurate is, you know, the wheel things, it's like a wheel on a stick.

00:52:47.000 | It's how you like accurately.

00:52:48.000 | Yeah.

00:52:49.000 | Yeah.

00:52:50.000 | Let's walk around with one of those constantly like pushing my, my wheel on a stick.

00:52:53.200 | Anyways, I love standalone pedometers.

00:52:54.800 | If someone knows of a really good one, small, it's very accurate.

00:52:59.280 | You don't have to use an iPhone.

00:53:02.520 | Tell Jesse, jesse@calnewport.com because I'm, I'm in the market.

00:53:06.280 | It's funny.

00:53:07.280 | I just finished the Michael Lewis SBF book and he was talking about when he was in high

00:53:10.160 | school, he brought a roller bag to high school.

00:53:12.080 | You feel it everywhere.

00:53:13.080 | That's exactly what I was thinking when you were talking about the Lewis.

00:53:15.440 | SPF did or Michael Lewis?

00:53:16.440 | SPF did.

00:53:17.440 | Yeah.

00:53:18.440 | Michael Lewis seems like a cool guy.

00:53:19.440 | Yeah.

00:53:20.440 | That tracks.

00:53:21.440 | That tracks.

00:53:22.440 | Now, you know, now everyone has to carry, it's different than when we were kids.

00:53:24.760 | Now, um, you carry like a middle school, these like briefcases basically, it's like a trapper

00:53:31.960 | keeper with a handle.

00:53:33.720 | It's like this thick and like all the kids, you just, what you carry and then you have

00:53:37.960 | a backpack.

00:53:38.960 | So, so you don't need to roll or you carry this thing and you have your, and you have

00:53:43.300 | your backpack.

00:53:44.300 | All right.

00:53:45.300 | Who do we got next?

00:53:46.300 | All right.

00:53:47.300 | Next question is from Lindsay.

00:53:48.300 | Is it okay to have different office hours throughout the week depending on my schedule?

00:53:51.600 | So sometimes higher up schedule meetings that I have to accept, how should I manage office

00:53:55.920 | hours in those cases?

00:53:57.400 | Well, first of all, congrats for doing the office hour strategy.

00:54:00.800 | For people who don't know very briefly, this is the strategy where you have set times on

00:54:04.000 | set days in which you are available for incoming communication, office door open, your phone

00:54:08.760 | is on.

00:54:09.760 | If you, if there's a chat service, your company uses like Slack, you're in a channel ready

00:54:12.760 | to chat and you use this to defer, uh, as much as possible, any sort of back and forth

00:54:18.680 | communication that requires more than you just responding to a message with a single

00:54:22.000 | message.

00:54:23.000 | You say, why don't you just grab me at my office hours?

00:54:25.120 | And this actually breaks up or eliminates a bunch of ad hoc back and forth exchanges.

00:54:29.880 | And those are the real killers.

00:54:30.880 | We always talk about the real killers of your, your energy and concentration is having to

00:54:35.280 | monitor inboxes for these back and forth conversations.

00:54:37.440 | So you want to try to eliminate those with office hours.

00:54:40.760 | Uh, okay.

00:54:42.120 | It's okay if your office hours shift a little bit, right?

00:54:46.600 | Because like typically what's happening is no one knows what your office hours are.

00:54:50.040 | So you're, you're typically telling people when you were diffusing one of these back

00:54:55.040 | and forths.

00:54:56.040 | Like it's often, Hey Jesse, what do you think about, like, what should we do for the timing

00:55:02.360 | for the upcoming client conference?

00:55:03.600 | Like, Oh, this is a back and forth.

00:55:04.600 | It's usually you're replying to that.

00:55:05.840 | Like, that's a good question.

00:55:07.200 | We should get into this.

00:55:08.300 | If you can just like swing by, you know, call me during one of my office hours this week

00:55:12.360 | and we can figure it out.

00:55:14.280 | Paste what those are.

00:55:15.280 | Like just have a text file on your desktop with here's where they are this week.

00:55:17.680 | And you just like paste that in, right?

00:55:20.360 | And then they just like, okay, great.

00:55:21.360 | I'll, I'll call them at one of those times.

00:55:22.880 | So if you see something gets scheduled and you're kind of shifting them around, it doesn't

00:55:26.320 | really matter.

00:55:27.600 | Um, because, because people are hearing about your office hours sort of on demand.

00:55:32.240 | So that's one thing to keep in mind.

00:55:34.200 | A second thing to keep in mind is protect the office hours like other meetings.

00:55:37.360 | So like, especially if there's a shared calendar system, more and more companies do this because

00:55:42.360 | we, we, we over meet.

00:55:43.760 | Why do we over meet?

00:55:44.840 | Because we have a workloads that are too high, but more and more companies like Georgetown

00:55:49.600 | will do this.

00:55:50.600 | For example, you'll have a community shared calendar that's communal.

00:55:53.320 | So that when a higher up, like a fancy person in your company wants to set up a meeting

00:55:58.440 | with people more and more, what'll happen at these companies is they'll have one of

00:56:01.360 | their assistants.

00:56:04.480 | Look at everyone's calendar, find a time that works and then send out an invitation.

00:56:09.720 | This has become like the new way that higher ups deal with calendars, right?

00:56:12.040 | Because a higher up is not going to waste his or her time with like, and well, when

00:56:17.320 | are you available?

00:56:18.320 | What about this?

00:56:19.320 | Or what about that?

00:56:20.320 | And so there's like more and more of this is going on.

00:56:21.840 | So all you have to do is your office hours just go on your calendar like any other meeting.

00:56:26.240 | So when these meetings are being set up automatically, those times just aren't considered.

00:56:30.080 | So you have to like show respect to your office hours, treat it like if you already had a

00:56:33.800 | meeting with like your team lead and then your, your boss is like, Hey, can we meet

00:56:39.000 | at blah, blah, blah time?

00:56:40.000 | And you're like, well, no, I'm already have a meeting then, but I'm free after before

00:56:42.680 | and you like give all the other times you're like, we're, we're kind of used to that convention.

00:56:45.360 | So it's okay if your office hours have to shift because most people are finding out

00:56:50.640 | about them as they need them and to treat the office hours like a meeting that's already

00:56:54.800 | on your calendar.

00:56:55.800 | And then you can kind of protect that time.

00:56:57.440 | Like you would protect any other meeting that was on your calendar, then just follow the

00:57:00.920 | same conventions.

00:57:01.920 | Like, let's say like the CEO of your major company, you know, chief of staff is like,

00:57:07.480 | she needs to meet you at three on Monday.

00:57:09.240 | You know, I get these summons sometimes, not summons, but like at the university level,

00:57:13.680 | this will be typically like the provost or the president.

00:57:15.680 | If the provost or the president wants to talk to me, typically they're just telling you,

00:57:19.120 | uh, Hey, can you come by at like blah, blah, blah, because their schedule is so full.

00:57:24.320 | It's like, this is the slot.

00:57:25.480 | Okay.

00:57:26.480 | So if it's something where you would, you would overwrite or reschedule an existing

00:57:30.560 | meeting with someone else, then you would overwrite it and cancel your office hours.

00:57:36.640 | If it's something where you want it, you would say, no, no, I'm already busy then, then,

00:57:39.920 | and then, but here's what I'm available.

00:57:41.600 | Then don't reschedule your office hours.

00:57:42.600 | So just treat it like you would any other meeting on your schedule.

00:57:46.040 | I get burned with this shared calendar thing all the time, Jesse, because I have multiple

00:57:50.800 | calendars, right?

00:57:51.800 | You know, I have my Georgetown calendar, but like so much of my life has run, my writing

00:57:54.720 | life has all this other obligations and I don't keep that on my Georgetown calendar.

00:57:59.600 | So what'll happen is with higher ups, they'll often just get this meeting invite.

00:58:03.440 | We'll just show up and they'll be like, yeah, we looked at your calendar.

00:58:06.600 | And so as far as they're concerned, these assistants must think I'm so lazy because

00:58:09.600 | I don't, there's nothing on my Georgetown calendar.

00:58:11.800 | Otherwise you'd have to go through your Georgetown calendar and put fake things in that codes

00:58:16.240 | like for your other calendar.

00:58:17.240 | Yeah.

00:58:18.240 | Which would be like a, yeah.

00:58:19.240 | So instead what happens, I'm just constantly having to be like, I'm sorry, like I don't

00:58:21.200 | actually use this Georgetown calendar, but I'm not available any of these times.

00:58:25.080 | Maybe I should consolidate my calendar, but the issue is it's complicated because I share

00:58:29.200 | my calendar with my wife and she doesn't need to see all the Georgetown things.

00:58:32.880 | And I, I have things I don't want, I, you know, as I use three calendars, it's the moral

00:58:38.480 | of the story.

00:58:39.480 | You probably could spend like two to three minutes and put in those like blocks of meetings,

00:58:44.040 | you know, as just like fake code.

00:58:45.720 | There's probably a way to, I can import my other calendar to my Georgetown calendar and

00:58:53.040 | have a show up automatically.

00:58:54.800 | But yeah, I don't, I just annoy people.

00:58:58.320 | All right.

00:58:59.320 | Who do we got next?

00:59:00.320 | Next question is from Luke.

00:59:01.320 | I'm 25 and a post-production producer at a large marketing agency.

00:59:04.760 | My long-term goal is to make feature films, but I took this job to build career capital

00:59:09.560 | and expand my experience beyond my video production skills.

00:59:12.720 | My role involves no creative work, just managing emails, coordinating teams, and ensuring client

00:59:17.160 | deliverables.

00:59:18.160 | How do you know if I'm staying in this role is, I don't, how do I know if I'm staying

00:59:21.280 | in this role is worth it for career capital or if it's time to quit and pivot towards

00:59:25.000 | something more aligned with my aspirations?

00:59:27.320 | Well, I think there's a couple of things going on here, Luke.

00:59:30.320 | So one is your specific aspiration for feature films and two is just a more general question

00:59:34.280 | of how do you decide, like, is this job right for me and whether, despite the specifics

00:59:40.280 | of the job.

00:59:41.280 | When it comes to feature films, I was actually just, you know, I like movies.

00:59:44.600 | I read a lot of books about movies.

00:59:46.520 | I was just reading or listening to a book, maybe this was in the book we talked about

00:59:50.980 | from December Books on the 1989, the sci-fi movies from 1989.

00:59:57.000 | And maybe it was Ridley Scott.

00:59:58.000 | I don't quite remember which director was talking about this, but basically they had

01:00:02.040 | this advice, which stuck out to me that I think is relevant here as well.

01:00:05.360 | They said when it comes to like feature film directing, there's not a ladder, like, so

01:00:12.680 | this idea of like, well, let me just get my foot in the door in like that industry.

01:00:18.240 | And then I'll slowly kind of like move my way up and work my way up these, like, that's

01:00:21.280 | not how it works.

01:00:22.940 | You have to just start directing.

01:00:25.160 | This might've been Chris Nolan who was talking about this.

01:00:27.240 | Like you got to just as quickly as possible, find a way to make a movie and make it good.

01:00:31.280 | Like I got the money from here and there.

01:00:33.280 | It's small.

01:00:34.280 | It's a short, but like makes, you gotta be making movies.

01:00:37.200 | Like the directors just come in directing, like I'm a director, I'm directing, you know,

01:00:42.960 | here's a movie I did.

01:00:43.960 | Here's a short.

01:00:44.960 | Sometimes this could be commercial directing, like Ridley Scott came out of commercial directing,

01:00:47.680 | like that's where he could get work, you know, okay, but I'm, I'm directing stuff and now

01:00:50.840 | I want to do movies.

01:00:52.560 | Don't they're saying there's not, don't become an AD and then work your way up to be an assistant

01:00:55.960 | director and we're like, that doesn't work.

01:00:58.880 | There's a talent mindset in Hollywood that says like, if you're meant to be a good director,

01:01:02.800 | you should just come onto the scene guns blazing, like directing cool stuff.

01:01:06.520 | Oh, look at all this talent.

01:01:07.560 | Let's like give them a bigger movie to try.

01:01:09.240 | It's not a, like you worked your way up type of thing.

01:01:11.520 | So no post-production producing at large market agency, when it comes to your aspiration to

01:01:17.840 | be a feature film director, I mean, you might as well be at like a computer software firm

01:01:23.280 | or a truck driver or something.

01:01:24.280 | It's just not related.

01:01:25.280 | It's not going to make a difference.

01:01:27.520 | The bigger question here though is like, how do you know in general, if staying in a place

01:01:30.880 | is worth your career cap, is it worth it?

01:01:32.840 | Are you, are you acquiring enough career capital?

01:01:35.160 | Should you be switching to another job?

01:01:36.440 | Is this not, is this not going to support a vision you have, you know, how do you actually

01:01:43.400 | do that?

01:01:44.400 | There's two things that matter.

01:01:46.280 | Lifestyle centric planning and evidence-based planning, right?

01:01:49.840 | So lifestyle centric planning means, you know what it is you're aiming towards and it's

01:01:52.920 | not a specific job so much as like, here's all the aspects of the life I want to have

01:01:56.240 | in five years and 15 years.

01:01:58.280 | That type of specificity now allows you to say, am I acquiring the right type of career

01:02:04.040 | capital at this particular job that I see how, like I have the path in mind that if

01:02:10.600 | I get better at this, I'll be able to change my position to be this and this position will

01:02:14.040 | be compatible with this and that's going to match like a lot of the stuff I want in my

01:02:16.800 | lifestyle.

01:02:17.800 | So you're, you're, you're working towards a particular goal.

01:02:21.120 | Now you can get very clear about specifically what you're doing, is specifically what I'm

01:02:25.000 | doing going to help me get there.

01:02:27.280 | Evidence-based planning says when it comes to like particular stuff you're doing as part

01:02:32.100 | of these lifestyle plans, do you have evidence from real people who know what they're talking

01:02:35.520 | about that the thing you're doing will work?

01:02:38.560 | Like lifestyle centric planning is how you figure out like this is what I'm aiming towards

01:02:42.520 | and I'm working backwards from that and building plans of like how do I get closer to that

01:02:46.120 | giving my unique opportunities and obstacles.

01:02:48.320 | The evidence-based component is making sure you're not telling yourself stories as part

01:02:52.600 | of that effort.

01:02:54.520 | Make sure you haven't written your own story about what you think matters as opposed to

01:02:57.720 | learning from people what really matters.

01:02:59.760 | Like the advice I gave you earlier in my answer about how people become feature film directors.

01:03:04.280 | That's like an example of evidence-based planning.

01:03:07.180 | You might want the story to be, I'm doing production at a marketing company which will

01:03:11.760 | lead to this, which will lead to this and then finally I'll get my shot as being a director.

01:03:14.920 | You might want that to be the right story but then you talk to real people who know

01:03:17.560 | what's going on and you get, you Sandy check your plan, they say that's not going to get

01:03:20.320 | you anywhere near where you want to go.

01:03:22.580 | Now evidence-based planning, you say why would people avoid this step?

01:03:25.840 | Well, they avoid this step because you sometimes get an answer that is not what you want to

01:03:32.320 | hear.

01:03:33.320 | Sometimes you get the answer of like, oh, that's how people do this?

01:03:36.120 | I'm not going to be able to do that or I tried that and it didn't go well, right?

01:03:40.460 | So there can be some reality checks that happen with evidence-based planning.

01:03:44.200 | I may want to get to this place.

01:03:47.960 | I may want this plan, this piece of my plan to work.

01:03:51.320 | But what I'm doing is not going to work and what I would have to do, I'm not capable of

01:03:54.320 | doing or I tried and I failed.

01:03:55.560 | I don't have that talent.

01:03:56.600 | I don't have that access.

01:03:57.600 | It's too late.

01:03:58.920 | So evidence-based planning can be pretty scary because it reality checks you.

01:04:02.460 | But those reality checks are often liberating because you say, okay, well, what's next?

01:04:05.480 | And the thing you want to fall back to is your lifestyle-centric vision and you say,

01:04:08.840 | okay, there's other ways to get to that.

01:04:10.280 | That's why I love about lifestyle-centric planning.

01:04:11.920 | You might have a whole lifestyle, creative lifestyle vision that your plan to get there

01:04:16.200 | is built around being a director and maybe you find like that's not reasonable.

01:04:21.160 | Well, you still have that lifestyle image.

01:04:23.480 | Oh, I'm sorry.

01:04:24.480 | I just moved your camera, Jesse.

01:04:26.000 | All good.

01:04:27.000 | Speaking of directors, that was like a, you know, you know what they call that what I

01:04:31.120 | just did there, Jesse?

01:04:32.120 | So people who are watching, I had to laterally move the camera back on Jesse's head.

01:04:38.240 | That's called a swishpan.

01:04:39.240 | Is it?

01:04:40.240 | Yeah, there you go.

01:04:41.240 | Swishpan Jesse.

01:04:42.240 | What I'm trying to say is I should be a director, but we have lifestyle-centric planning.

01:04:46.240 | We're like, okay, this, I had this way of getting to this lifestyle that's built on

01:04:50.400 | like, you know, directing for whatever reason, that's not, I got some evidence-based reality

01:04:55.120 | check.

01:04:56.120 | That's not going to work.

01:04:57.120 | Well, what were the aspects of this lifestyle?

01:04:58.120 | I really liked, you know, I could, I could still capture those with this other way.

01:05:02.720 | Okay.

01:05:03.720 | Maybe I'm not going to be a feature film director, but I could be X, Y, and Z because actually

01:05:07.160 | this is what was important to me and you, you, you find other ways to get there.

01:05:10.800 | It's the, it's the most flexible planning methodology I know, because you have all of

01:05:14.680 | these possible routes forward in your life.

01:05:16.240 | Your life forward is all of these branching trees that, that exponentially grow and covers

01:05:20.300 | all this land.

01:05:21.360 | You see each of those as paths.

01:05:22.360 | There's so many paths to navigate there.

01:05:24.280 | You always have so many more options.

01:05:25.560 | It's so much more freeing than grand goal-based planning in which you're just fixated on a

01:05:29.520 | particular path.

01:05:30.520 | And if that path doesn't work, you're out of luck.

01:05:32.000 | And if that path does work and you discover it doesn't fix everything, you're even more

01:05:35.360 | out of luck.

01:05:37.020 | So embrace the flexibility of lifestyle centric planning, and then use evidence-based planning

01:05:41.260 | to make sure that your, your ideas for how you're going to move forward actually makes

01:05:45.500 | sense.

01:05:46.500 | All right.

01:05:47.500 | What do we got next, Jesse?

01:05:49.700 | We have our corner.

01:05:50.700 | Ooh, this is where each week we take a question related to my new book.

01:05:54.060 | I can't say new book anymore, Jesse.

01:05:55.620 | It's been out for 10 months now.

01:05:57.100 | Yeah.

01:05:58.100 | We came up with some good rules on the last episode.

01:05:59.100 | Yeah.

01:06:00.100 | What did we decide?

01:06:01.100 | One year mark.

01:06:02.100 | One year mark.

01:06:03.100 | Okay.

01:06:04.100 | So we, okay.

01:06:05.100 | So for, I'm going to call it my new book until we stopped doing the corner.

01:06:06.100 | Okay.

01:06:07.100 | So my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

01:06:09.540 | Every week we do a question relating to it and we do it so that we have an excuse to

01:06:12.260 | play the official theme music for the segment, which we'll hear now.

01:06:17.780 | All right.

01:06:22.660 | What's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

01:06:25.260 | It's from Christy and it's about office hours again.

01:06:28.220 | So she says, I'm a software engineer and recently read Slow Productivity.

01:06:32.040 | I set up office hours twice a week.

01:06:34.140 | I've also blocked off Wednesdays as meeting free days.

01:06:36.740 | However, people disregard these and still schedule meetings on Wednesdays.

01:06:39.940 | I'm fed up.

01:06:41.060 | How can I politely and effectively communicate, reject meetings on these days?

01:06:46.100 | Again, I think this goes back to, and office hours I should say is discussed in more length

01:06:51.560 | and slow productivity because principle one, doing fewer things.

01:06:58.120 | Part of that principle talks about how you reduce just the load of what you're juggling

01:07:02.060 | in any one moment and office hours is a fantastic strategy in there, along with many others

01:07:06.060 | including like pulling versus pushing, et cetera, et cetera.

01:07:08.940 | All right.

01:07:09.940 | This goes back to do not treat office hours differently than other meetings.

01:07:14.380 | It lives on your calendar in the same way that, you know, meet with Bob from marketing

01:07:19.620 | lives on your calendar.

01:07:21.440 | And deal with meeting requests the same way you deal with meetings.

01:07:23.660 | It's all homogeneous now.

01:07:25.820 | Hey, let's meet on Wednesday.

01:07:27.940 | How about two?

01:07:28.940 | You're like, no, I'm busy from one to three, but I'm free from three to five.

01:07:33.740 | I'm free from two to whatever.

01:07:34.740 | You just deal with it like the way you would deal with any other meeting.

01:07:39.460 | And again, the rules I talked about before apply here.

01:07:43.180 | You would only preempt that meeting, your office hours for another meeting, if you would

01:07:47.540 | have preempted a meeting with Bob from marketing for that new meeting.

01:07:50.340 | So again, if it's super urgent and a higher up and you would normally cancel another meeting

01:07:55.180 | that was already in place to do this new meeting, then do the same for office hours.

01:07:59.460 | But if you would not cancel an existing meeting, right, for this new meeting being proposed,

01:08:06.180 | don't do that for office hours either.

01:08:07.560 | Treat it with parity to how you would treat existing meetings.

01:08:14.260 | If you're struggling, it might be the case that your office hours are too long.

01:08:18.260 | That's like a common issue is that people will say, I'm going to have three hours on

01:08:22.100 | Wednesday afternoons and that's office hours and then people can come in.

01:08:24.660 | And that might be too much time to consistently have blocked off, right?

01:08:28.980 | Because if someone, if Bob from marketing said, we should just have a three hour meeting

01:08:31.500 | every Wednesday, you'd be like, no, that's too many meetings, right?

01:08:33.620 | So that could be the other problem here is that your office hours are too long.

01:08:36.340 | Make them shorter.

01:08:37.340 | Make it an hour.

01:08:38.420 | People can come in and out.

01:08:39.420 | You can get a lot done in an hour.

01:08:41.300 | And then it won't be so hard.

01:08:42.300 | It won't step on people's toes too much time, right?

01:08:45.460 | So just whatever you would do with a normal meeting, do that with your office hours.

01:08:50.920 | I like office hours.

01:08:51.920 | I'm back.

01:08:52.920 | So I'm teaching again this semester.

01:08:54.100 | So I have like legitimate office hours again.

01:08:56.180 | That's really nice.

01:08:58.260 | Call me in my office hours.

01:08:59.260 | All right.

01:09:00.260 | What do we got?

01:09:01.260 | We got a call.

01:09:02.260 | So you want, normally the last episode you said you wanted the theme music twice.

01:09:04.540 | Do you want to hear it again?

01:09:05.540 | Oh, I forgot the rules.

01:09:06.540 | Yeah.

01:09:07.540 | Let's hear it one more time.

01:09:08.540 | I'm going to miss it when we get to the, when we get to the one year, two more months.

01:09:17.940 | Play it four times.

01:09:19.100 | Because your book came out early March, right?

01:09:21.580 | Early March.

01:09:22.580 | Yeah.

01:09:23.580 | You basically have two months from today.

01:09:24.580 | Yeah.

01:09:25.580 | Yeah.

01:09:26.580 | We're getting there.

01:09:27.580 | I can put it on MP3.

01:09:28.580 | You can listen to it on your walks.

01:09:29.580 | I'm just going to.

01:09:30.580 | With your new pedometer.

01:09:31.580 | I'm going to look.

01:09:32.580 | So yeah.

01:09:33.580 | I'll be wheeling my pedometer wheel and listening to slow productivity music on a Walkman.

01:09:39.180 | It'll be fantastic.

01:09:40.180 | All right.

01:09:41.180 | We got a call this week?

01:09:42.180 | We do.

01:09:43.180 | All right.

01:09:44.180 | Hi, Cal.

01:09:46.260 | My name is Emil Folino and I've been a lecturer within computer science at the Swedish Higher

01:09:51.540 | Education Institute for the past eight plus years.

01:09:54.740 | I've used some of your approaches to deep work and time management to become great at

01:09:59.180 | teaching, and was promoted to expert lecturer a couple of years ago.

01:10:05.460 | I've now invested some of my career capital and will start doctoral studies in January,

01:10:11.020 | but with my lecturer salary.

01:10:13.980 | To be able to obsess over quality, I will need to develop a new set of skills related

01:10:17.860 | to research.

01:10:19.500 | As an experienced researcher, what general and specific skills would you recommend that

01:10:24.380 | I hone in on?

01:10:25.380 | All right.

01:10:26.380 | That's a good question.

01:10:27.380 | All right.

01:10:28.380 | So this is someone who knows the field well.

01:10:30.580 | They've been doing lecture and is going back to doctoral work while maintaining their lecturer

01:10:34.340 | position or salary, which is well played, by the way.

01:10:37.300 | Right?

01:10:38.300 | That's a good move.

01:10:39.300 | What do you need to know to do computer science research at a doctoral level or above really

01:10:45.740 | well?

01:10:46.740 | Here, I usually come back to a couple things.

01:10:50.380 | One, it's really hard to find good problems.

01:10:55.740 | There's like a real skill to that.

01:10:57.540 | This is the right problem to look at next.

01:11:01.340 | People have been looking at this, and this is like a natural follow up that applies some

01:11:05.820 | special skill our group has.

01:11:07.580 | There's like a pattern to this.

01:11:08.780 | It's usually in the adjacent possible.

01:11:11.760 | So when you're a doctoral student, defer to more senior people for problem selection.

01:11:19.020 | So if you're in a group that research is often done with your advisor, your advisor's going

01:11:23.120 | to have that sixth sense you don't have yet.

01:11:25.720 | Right?

01:11:26.720 | If you're working with other research groups, you kind of defer to more senior people.

01:11:30.360 | Let them find or suggest what the problem, what the really interesting problem is.

01:11:36.540 | You can be kind of selective here.

01:11:38.720 | Maybe people are, hey, do you want to work on this?

01:11:39.920 | Do you want to work on that?

01:11:40.920 | It's scary if people just sort of like spitballing, like this could be interesting, that could

01:11:43.440 | be interesting.

01:11:44.440 | I would tie my ship closer to ideas that are coming out of existing research that's catching

01:11:48.440 | attention.

01:11:49.440 | It's a good place to be in your doctoral program.

01:11:51.840 | There's some heat going on over here with this issue.

01:11:53.640 | There's been a couple of big papers on it.

01:11:56.520 | Like what are the natural follow up papers on this topic?

01:12:00.480 | What's the natural next step?

01:12:01.480 | Like get in where there's already some heat while you're still a doctoral student.

01:12:05.860 | The second thing I would say is more important than anything else is understanding existing

01:12:08.840 | research.

01:12:09.840 | Look at the relevant papers and take the time to really understand them.

01:12:12.800 | The most valuable doctoral students in most computer science groups are those who are

01:12:16.080 | reading and understand the literature relevant to the problems that they're supposed to be

01:12:19.480 | working on.

01:12:20.480 | If you want to make yourself really useful to your advisor, you come back and like I

01:12:24.280 | spent the week reading these three award winning papers from the conference that's relevant

01:12:31.720 | to our field.

01:12:33.720 | And here's what's going on and here's what they did and here's what they found and here's

01:12:37.960 | what their questions like you want to be.

01:12:40.640 | You want to be an expert.

01:12:41.640 | I mean I remember this when I was post-docing.

01:12:43.320 | So I'm a theoretician but I post-doced at MIT in a systems group, network and mobile

01:12:48.760 | systems group.

01:12:49.760 | Hari Balakrishnan's group.

01:12:50.760 | And I remember like one of the students, so they were doing a lot of work on wireless

01:12:54.320 | because I was doing theory about wireless distributed algorithm theory and sort of wireless

01:12:59.080 | environments.

01:13:00.080 | And so I was going back to a systems group to bring some theory know-how but also to

01:13:03.480 | bring back some more systems know-how back to theory it was etc, etc.

01:13:08.200 | I remember one of the students in this group when the new 802.11n standard came out which

01:13:13.720 | was new at the time.

01:13:14.720 | This would have been 2009, 2010.

01:13:17.240 | They just disappeared and came back like a week later.

01:13:19.960 | Okay, I have mastered, I've read all this, the impossibly obtuse opaque I should say

01:13:28.020 | technical documentation and read the early papers on it.

01:13:31.240 | I now know exactly how this works and what the options are and what's happening here

01:13:34.720 | and I can, I'm an expert on this now and then we were able to or my advisor was able

01:13:39.800 | to harness that to say great, now let's find an interesting problem to look at.

01:13:44.680 | This new standard came out, let's really understand it.

01:13:47.840 | What is like an experiment we can run or an interesting thing we can follow?

01:13:51.040 | So like that student had made himself very useful by mastering that knowledge.

01:13:56.000 | In theory, this is even more clear.

01:13:58.000 | The best papers come out of understanding the already good papers and it's really hard

01:14:02.040 | to understand papers in theory because again, they're complicated proofs and only some of

01:14:05.560 | the steps are shown.

01:14:06.560 | I mean it's really, it's one of the hardest things I ever do intellectually is really

01:14:09.560 | understanding existing proofs in existing papers because you have to fill in a lot of

01:14:13.440 | gaps on your own.

01:14:15.000 | But when you teach yourself the mathematics and the logic and understand a really complicated

01:14:18.520 | proof and you really internalize it, it opens up all of these options.

01:14:23.080 | You take that same mechanics and you apply them over here.

01:14:26.000 | You see a natural way to follow up.

01:14:27.960 | Well, their results were here.

01:14:29.480 | I really understand this.

01:14:31.520 | I'm also good at this like, I can bring in like whatever, like Martingale analysis, which

01:14:35.440 | they probably didn't know much about.

01:14:36.640 | But if we can get away from being dependent on churn offs and throw in some like Martingale

01:14:40.600 | bounds, we can actually deal with these troublesome dependencies over here and lose that log factor.

01:14:44.800 | Great, I'm going to take that hammer, I'm going to apply it over to this nail and now

01:14:47.740 | you have a follow-up paper and it's technical and it moves the state of the art forward.

01:14:51.840 | All of this comes back to understanding papers.

01:14:54.800 | So defer to the experts on like what are the good problems when you're still new and make

01:15:00.500 | yourself useful by reading what's already good and spending the time to understand what's

01:15:04.640 | already good.

01:15:05.640 | It's all about the reading.

01:15:07.520 | All right, let's see.

01:15:10.120 | We got a case study here.

01:15:12.680 | We could, Jesse, instead discuss Martingale bounds instead of the case study.

01:15:15.560 | I don't know what people would prefer, my misspent youth doing probabilistic analysis.

01:15:20.000 | I've got a case study here.

01:15:21.360 | This one comes from Justin.

01:15:22.760 | This is where people write in the jesse@calnewport.com and talk about how they use the advice we

01:15:28.340 | discuss on the show in their own lives.

01:15:30.320 | So Justin says, most of my career has been in people work, adults with disabilities,

01:15:35.960 | trauma-informed work with teens, and now as a pastor in a church.

01:15:39.860 | The transition to pastoring was a significant adjustment and was hugely helped by your book's

01:15:44.160 | deep work in So Good They Can't Ignore You.

01:15:46.400 | I was in my late 20s with a second kid on the way when I decided I did some, to do some

01:15:50.520 | lifestyle-centric planning that included no more shift work and the chance to be more

01:15:55.520 | open about my faith in my work with my people.

01:15:59.160 | My intention was to be a pastor with time and energy for my wife and kids, living close

01:16:02.620 | to my family and the mountains here in Alberta, Canada.

01:16:05.880 | So I quit my highly demanding youth and family counselor role to do a MA in seminary while

01:16:11.080 | working halftime as a church youth ministry director.

01:16:13.720 | My undergrad five years earlier was really challenging with a little more prefrontal

01:16:17.280 | cortex and a lot more awareness of autopilot scheduling and deep work blocking.

01:16:20.940 | I was able to do well in seminary, become licensed as a minister, grow my position at

01:16:25.640 | the church into a full-time role, get back into CrossFit and backcountry camping and

01:16:30.160 | be a present father and husband.

01:16:32.720 | Pastoring has a ton of variety and flexibility and infinite opportunities.

01:16:35.800 | So your MSP teaching has been huge and taming what could have been overwhelming.

01:16:40.480 | MSP, he means multi-scale planning, by the way.

01:16:43.600 | And weekly templates are helping me grow in specific areas of study.

01:16:46.960 | Keep up with administrative demands, grow our church and plan family and personal rhythms

01:16:50.900 | that are life-giving and make me glad I made the switch five and a half years ago.

01:16:54.640 | Justin, I appreciate that case study.

01:16:58.000 | Two things I want to point out.

01:16:59.920 | One, for all the students out there, notice how Justin said he found his undergraduate

01:17:06.120 | education to be challenging, but when he returned half a decade later with a little bit more

01:17:11.080 | prefrontal cortex and a little bit more systematic approach to his time and efforts, it wasn't

01:17:16.640 | so hard.

01:17:17.640 | Yeah.

01:17:18.640 | Being a student is not that hard as long as you don't approach your work like a student.

01:17:23.840 | When people come back to school later in life, they often have a much easier time doing well

01:17:29.240 | because it's not that hard of a job if you're good at managing your time and being sort

01:17:34.240 | of reasonable about when you get things done.

01:17:35.920 | So just keep that in mind if you're stressed out as a student.

01:17:38.480 | I also love the example of lifestyle-centric planning.

01:17:41.600 | He figured out the attributes he was looking for in his life, and some of this had to do

01:17:45.880 | with who he was around, what he was around in terms of physical features, the mountains,

01:17:50.960 | etc., but also some characteristics of his work, in particular that he was open about

01:17:55.800 | his faith and that the hours weren't crazy, that he had lots of time with his family.

01:18:00.680 | Then he worked backwards with opportunities and obstacles and said, "Okay, I could go

01:18:04.200 | back and get this MA.

01:18:05.200 | This timing works out.

01:18:06.200 | If I keep this job over here, that'll pay for that.

01:18:10.040 | Youth ministry director will help keep the lights on while I'm getting this MA, but it'll

01:18:13.560 | have to be the foot in the door to move to a pastor role and set the right type of church,

01:18:17.680 | and I throw the right sort of Cal Newport-style organizational strategies at my work.

01:18:23.200 | I can keep it tamed enough to have the time with my family.

01:18:27.240 | There's an opportunity to do this near where I want to be."

01:18:28.800 | You see how all these pieces fit together.

01:18:31.480 | The final point I want to make here is notice how he was deploying the sort of quote-unquote

01:18:36.360 | productivity strategies we talk about, like multiscale planning, weekly templates, and

01:18:39.880 | autopilot scheduling.

01:18:41.800 | He was deploying them to help execute his vision of having a job that had a spiritual

01:18:48.300 | meaning to it but had a reasonable time footprint so he could do other stuff, that he could

01:18:52.480 | be present for his family and spend time in nature.

01:18:56.280 | It's why I get frustrated when people take what we do here, for example, and somehow

01:19:01.080 | lump it into some sort of undifferentiated hustle culture.

01:19:05.000 | When people say talk about organization and productivity is somehow the embodiment of

01:19:09.660 | some sort of bourgeois embrace of capitalist dynamics, as if there's some better alternative

01:19:16.220 | world in which we all sit around and do nothing and just snout pithy substacks and are lauded

01:19:22.520 | or something like this, and work is all sort of contrived.

01:19:25.640 | How are people in the real world using these type of ideas?

01:19:30.280 | Often they're using them so that they can keep their work contained, the same way I

01:19:32.780 | use them.

01:19:34.000 | I get super stressed with crowded calendars.

01:19:36.680 | I get super stressed if I have to work outside of a nine to five on any sort of consistent

01:19:41.800 | basis.

01:19:42.800 | I get super stressed if I don't get seasonality, times that are low key to offset times that

01:19:46.520 | are higher key.

01:19:47.640 | The only way I know how to sort of keep my work reasonable is to deploy these type of

01:19:52.520 | ideas, multi-scale planning, weekly templates, autopilot scheduling.

01:19:57.120 | I love the shift in thinking.

01:19:58.960 | You deploy these tools to make your life more sustainable, not as a means to make it more

01:20:03.280 | stressful.

01:20:04.280 | What is the reality?

01:20:05.280 | Facebook's slow productivity.

01:20:06.840 | Most of the knowledge work sector right now is dominated by this broken notion of pseudo

01:20:10.800 | productivity where visible activity is used as a proxy for useful effort.

01:20:15.040 | So if what you want to do is hustle, what you want to do is keep getting more and keep

01:20:18.960 | getting more recognition, you could just work really hard, just work all hours, answer emails

01:20:24.600 | all the time, just be visibly busy all the time.

01:20:27.700 | You don't need.

01:20:28.700 | Why would you need careful planning of your time?

01:20:31.600 | Why would you need weekly templates or autopilot schedules or multi-scale planning?

01:20:35.860 | If you're in the pseudo productivity regime trying to get attention, just be on your email

01:20:39.460 | all the time.

01:20:40.680 | That's what's rewarded right now.

01:20:42.160 | If anything, the stuff we talk about is sort of counterproductive to the things that get

01:20:47.520 | people in a superficial sense noticed and moved ahead, especially early in their career.

01:20:53.880 | So anyways, I use that, Justin, as an excuse for a bit of a rant.

01:20:57.840 | I think of what we call productivity, I think about that if you increase what you can produce

01:21:04.160 | per unit time, you can now reduce the unit time and keep the production the same and

01:21:11.120 | work less.

01:21:12.760 | That is the flip side to I can increase how much I produce.

01:21:16.560 | You can also decrease how much you work in a way that is sustainable.

01:21:20.400 | So we've got two sides of the coin there.

01:21:22.880 | We've got a quick tech corner coming up, but first I want to talk about another sponsor.

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01:23:51.120 | Oh, I'm traveling, you know, for the holidays.

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01:24:37.320 | All right, Jesse, let's do our last segment.

01:24:40.040 | So we're going to do a Tech Corners where we talk about some sort of interesting element

01:24:45.680 | or idea from the world of technology.

01:24:47.640 | Today I want to talk about what I'm going to conservatively assess to be the most important

01:24:53.680 | article of the last decade.

01:24:54.880 | You say that's fair, Jesse?

01:24:57.160 | Yeah.

01:24:58.160 | Most important article.

01:24:59.160 | I haven't read it yet, though.

01:25:00.160 | Well, you know.

01:25:01.440 | I think we know.

01:25:02.440 | It's the most important.

01:25:03.440 | What I've got is my latest article for the New Yorker.

01:25:05.360 | I've loaded this up on the screen here for those who are watching.

01:25:09.720 | The article is called A Lesson in Creativity and Capitalism from Two Zany YouTubers.

01:25:16.600 | So here's the point of this article is I spent time with two DIY maker YouTube YouTubers.

01:25:26.560 | So the people who build, they build sort of crazy contraptions on YouTube.

01:25:32.120 | One of them was James Hobson, who runs a channel called The Hacksmith, and they do a lot of

01:25:35.720 | like taking things from Marvel movies and then building real life versions of them.

01:25:41.240 | Wolverine's Claws or Captain American Shield, or they built the bulletproof suit from the

01:25:45.320 | John Wick movies.

01:25:46.820 | And then I also looked at Colin Furze, who also builds crazy things.

01:25:50.800 | Right now his current project is he's digging out a secret underground garage in front of

01:25:54.520 | his otherwise nondescript suburban England house, and it's going to have a DeLorean.

01:25:58.560 | It'll be a button he presses that summons this DeLorean from underground and the front

01:26:03.540 | yard opens and it's going to come out.

01:26:05.120 | He's working on that right now.

01:26:06.760 | So I spent time with both of them.

01:26:08.360 | I recommend you read the article if you have a New Yorker subscription.

01:26:11.000 | But here's like the point from the article that I want to emphasize here.

01:26:16.520 | They started the same way, both James and Colin, right?

01:26:21.800 | Early YouTube, they got started, they started doing these type of videos, they built up

01:26:24.280 | an audience, found sponsors, suddenly they could do this full time.

01:26:27.360 | Then their paths diverged, creating an interesting natural experiment.

01:26:32.960 | James decided, "I want to get big."

01:26:36.120 | Now it turns out like what he was really motivated by here is he just loved the idea of having

01:26:39.200 | a giant space with all these people.

01:26:41.880 | He just had this, "I want to get big."

01:26:44.200 | So he began aggressively investing money in the channel.

01:26:48.320 | He went from his garage to a 13,000 square foot warehouse that they were leasing, and

01:26:53.880 | then he took out a multi-million dollar mortgage to go to like an 18,000 square foot warehouse

01:26:58.840 | on this large corporate campus, and they remodeled the whole thing.

01:27:03.400 | It's called the Hacksmith something, like Research Center, HERC, and he modeled it after

01:27:09.840 | Stark Industries from Iron Man, 30 employees, a burn rate of a quarter million dollars a

01:27:16.160 | month.

01:27:17.160 | He really blew this thing out big.

01:27:18.640 | Colin Furze did none of that.

01:27:21.080 | He just filmed some edits to videos on his own.

01:27:23.160 | James's wife like holds the camera for him, just like does it on his own.

01:27:26.520 | He has a barn that's not air-conditioned, which horrifies James.

01:27:30.800 | He's like, "Why aren't you air-conditioning your barn?"

01:27:32.960 | And Colin's like, "Eh, whatever.

01:27:34.280 | It's too hot.

01:27:35.280 | I'll just work in my garage.

01:27:36.280 | It's fine."

01:27:37.340 | I went through, so I tell you two stories.

01:27:38.520 | You go through.

01:27:39.520 | They're making the same type of videos.

01:27:41.720 | Colin's channel's doing just as well.

01:27:42.880 | Actually, it did more views than James's channel did in 2024, and so I get into why in this

01:27:47.960 | article, and the short summary is that I point out that there is a specific type of media

01:27:54.080 | that's happening in some online spaces, parts of YouTube, in podcasting, in sub-stack newsletters,

01:28:01.360 | where the typical dictum that you should just keep growing doesn't necessarily apply, and

01:28:07.600 | that there's a sweet spot where trying to grow bigger you're not going to.

01:28:11.800 | There's an authentic sweet spot where you can make a very good living for yourself.

01:28:14.800 | I'm talking probably like doctor or lawyer money.

01:28:16.880 | You're not Elon Musk, but you're making more money than a computer programmer.

01:28:21.280 | There's this sweet spot you can get into in podcasting, in sub-stack, and in certain corners

01:28:26.000 | of YouTube where it's low overhead, you do really well, but you don't have a lot of other

01:28:31.920 | people you're paying, and actually, it's not easy to break out of it.

01:28:34.640 | I get into why James's approach to scale didn't work and why these type of media are resistant

01:28:41.040 | to throwing in a lot of money and scaling really big.

01:28:43.680 | The conclusion is this is like a cool reality of the current internet.

01:28:46.680 | It's a good counterpoint, I think, to sort of consolidated social media culture where

01:28:50.080 | everyone is just a digital sharecropper for a small number of big companies and just creating

01:28:55.120 | free content so they can make a lot of money so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy bigger chains.

01:28:59.500 | It's like a counterpoint to all of that where you can have a non-trivial size creative middle

01:29:04.760 | class of people who make a really good living creating interesting stuff, and it's not part

01:29:11.940 | of a massive company, and it's not a winner take all, only six of these people exist in

01:29:15.600 | the end.

01:29:16.600 | So as I get into the details in this article, but the creative middle class is something

01:29:21.360 | I've been following, and I think as social media's cultural grip has begun to become

01:29:26.000 | more shaky in the last few years, the opportunities for this creative middle class, these genres

01:29:31.160 | that can support a large number of people doing well, not starting massive companies,

01:29:35.080 | but individually doing well, the opportunities for this is growing, and it's a trend to follow.

01:29:38.880 | I think it's a very positive trend for the internet, and it's a very positive trend to

01:29:42.680 | follow for just the state of the creative arts in general.

01:29:46.360 | So anyways, check out this article.

01:29:47.800 | I'm actually writing like four articles in a row for The New Yorker.

01:29:50.840 | I'm sort of taking over Kyle Chakra's column for a month.

01:29:54.360 | So we'll have more to talk about.

01:29:56.560 | I'm writing one about TikTok right now, so I'm kind of doing a bunch of tech thinking

01:29:59.800 | right now.

01:30:00.800 | But anyways, check out this article if you have a New Yorker subscription because it

01:30:04.600 | illustrates a cool point that I think is worth keeping track of.

01:30:07.240 | All right, well, that's all the time we have for today.

01:30:09.920 | Thank you for listening.

01:30:10.920 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show and until then, as always, stay

01:30:17.480 | deep.

01:30:18.480 | Hey, if you enjoyed today's discussion, you might also enjoy episode 333.

01:30:23.540 | It's called New Year's Course Correction, and it gives some small things you can do

01:30:27.840 | right now.

01:30:28.840 | It'll have a big positive difference on the year ahead.

01:30:31.680 | I think you'll like it.

01:30:32.960 | Check it out.

01:30:33.960 | It'll have four simple ideas.

01:30:37.800 | We can call them mid-year course corrections that are all designed to do two things.

01:30:44.700 | One, help you reclaim some depth in areas where our currently distracted world might

01:30:49.640 | be robbing that depth, and two, be something that you can execute right away.

The Optimal Morning Routine For 2025 | Cal Newport

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