You're Not Lazy — Your Life Was Designed Wrong (Here’s How To Take It Back)

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is In-Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people

00:00:07.120 | about the quest to cultivate a deep life.

00:00:10.740 | I'm excited about today's guest.

00:00:13.100 | It's my longtime friend, David DeWayne.

00:00:16.400 | Now, if you've read Deep Work, you might recognize this name.

00:00:20.900 | David, who is an architect, is featured in that book for his idea of what he called the

00:00:27.200 | Eudaimonia Machine, a design for a theoretical office that maximizes deep work over distraction.

00:00:35.880 | So after my book came out, this idea, this design of the Eudaimonia Machine became a bit

00:00:40.540 | of a sensation.

00:00:41.360 | As David talks about in our interview, he got a lot of press about it.

00:00:44.820 | Eventually, someone even built a version of his Eudaimonia Machine, so it had a life of

00:00:50.080 | its own.

00:00:50.520 | Since then, David has gone on to make these type of buildings a reality.

00:00:53.960 | He works with a cutting-edge firm that tries to design the offices of the future for knowledge

00:00:58.740 | work.

00:00:58.940 | So keep it in mind, not just the physical spaces, but how they interact with how people think

00:01:02.820 | and distractions.

00:01:03.420 | Probably one of the most creative thinkers out there about the interaction of space and the

00:01:08.520 | ability to do things with your mind.

00:01:10.380 | So we talk about this in my interview.

00:01:12.540 | We get into it, this sort of interaction between offices and spaces from a massive office to how

00:01:17.660 | you design your home office to be more conducive to deep work.

00:01:20.760 | But the other reason why I have David on the show is that among the people I know, few spend

00:01:27.640 | as much time as he does systematically thinking about what he wants in his life and how to make

00:01:33.660 | his life deeper.

00:01:34.300 | He is very good at life engineering and engineering his life towards depth.

00:01:41.180 | So we get into that journey as well.

00:01:42.940 | In this interview, we talk about his current life right now, which is really cool the way

00:01:47.840 | he has it set up and how he got there, including key turning points and the specific tools he

00:01:53.220 | used and has invented to help make his life better.

00:01:55.600 | Keep a particular eye out for our discussion of the Collins score, which is something I learned

00:01:59.960 | from him and he uses to great effect in his life.

00:02:03.040 | So anyways, if you're interested in either more focus in your current spaces or more depth

00:02:07.500 | in your life going forward, I think you're going to love this wide ranging conversation

00:02:10.220 | that I had with David DeWayne.

00:02:12.520 | But before we get into it, I want to mention our presenting sponsor who is making it possible

00:02:17.840 | for us to present this interview with no commercial interruptions.

00:02:22.460 | And that is our friends at done daily.

00:02:26.240 | Done daily helps you break free from the noise of shallow tasks and focus on the deep, meaningful

00:02:31.860 | work that really matters.

00:02:34.080 | Now, I know the people who created done daily.

00:02:36.300 | They were behind another company called my body tutor, which has been a longtime sponsor of

00:02:41.840 | the podcast.

00:02:42.480 | They're experts at online coaching.

00:02:46.020 | So having real people coach you, but using the internet to try to keep things affordable.

00:02:49.680 | And that's what they're bringing to the world of productivity with done daily.

00:02:52.860 | You're assigned a coach to work with, but this coach is going to work with a proven productivity

00:02:58.180 | system.

00:02:58.800 | So they will help you build a quarterly plan, lay out your weekly plan, and then organize a

00:03:03.380 | daily plan to stay on top of what matters most.

00:03:05.780 | You check in on your plan daily with them for accountability and then debrief on your plan

00:03:10.700 | every week to see how things are going.

00:03:12.320 | I don't work for this company, but they, they know my ideas.

00:03:16.580 | And a lot of the type of ideas I talk about on the show, like multi-scale planning are

00:03:20.880 | integrated into their system.

00:03:22.420 | And I was happy for them to do that because I I've known them for a long time.

00:03:25.500 | And I think it's really cool to bring the idea of online coaching to the types of productivity

00:03:30.740 | ideas we talk about here.

00:03:32.360 | I think that's probably the future, especially for very high performers is to have a coach

00:03:36.540 | on board and online coaching is much more affordable than trying to have like an executive

00:03:40.540 | coach actually show up at your office.

00:03:42.000 | So anyways, um, I thought this was a cool company.

00:03:44.420 | I've known these guys.

00:03:45.600 | I said, look, I want to tell people about it.

00:03:47.220 | So, uh, done daily, just go to done daily.com D O U N E daily.com to find out more.

00:03:54.220 | All right.

00:03:54.800 | With that, let's get into our interview with David Dwayne.

00:03:58.920 | All right.

00:03:59.200 | I'm here with David Dwayne.

00:04:00.160 | David, I think you're best known to my audience.

00:04:02.380 | As I mentioned in the introduction for your idea of the eudaimonia machine, which was in

00:04:07.580 | my book, deep work.

00:04:08.940 | Now my memory is correct me if I'm wrong.

00:04:11.820 | That began as a architect sketch.

00:04:15.400 | You literally sketch this no cliche on a napkin at a bar at a bar.

00:04:21.000 | Yeah.

00:04:21.340 | What's the backstory?

00:04:22.980 | So the backstory is that, you know, I found out about your stuff at between so good.

00:04:31.620 | They can't ignore you and deep work.

00:04:32.900 | And if I remember right, you're blogging chapters out to deep work, right?

00:04:37.360 | Or like you were, you were talking about the concept in some way, shape or form.

00:04:40.920 | I used to use the term hard focus.

00:04:42.800 | And then at some point I evolved that over to the word deep work.

00:04:45.780 | Yeah.

00:04:46.020 | So a mutual friend of ours, Brian Chappelle was deep working to accelerate his dissertation.

00:04:53.540 | And he turned me on to the concept of deep work because I was teaching architecture at

00:04:57.700 | the time and I was trying to accelerate my paper output.

00:04:59.720 | And so Brian and I were just having lunch one day and he's like, well, you're architect.

00:05:04.560 | Like, well, it'd be the ultimate space for deep working, you know, because we were each doing

00:05:09.100 | all these workarounds.

00:05:09.940 | Like, I don't know if I described this to you before, but I actually had to get an office

00:05:15.820 | in a different school on campus so that I could focus.

00:05:19.620 | Like, I got an office in the religious studies department, even though it had nothing to do

00:05:22.800 | with me and nobody knew who I was.

00:05:23.940 | Just to get away from distraction.

00:05:25.780 | Exactly.

00:05:26.380 | And Brian was writing his dissertation in his basement, right?

00:05:29.280 | And he had that like super regimented 5 a.m.

00:05:31.840 | 4 a.m.

00:05:32.720 | 4 a.m.

00:05:33.320 | Something crazy, yeah.

00:05:34.100 | And so we were, we were kind of in like a little bit of a support loop.

00:05:38.280 | And then I just sketched it out at lunch and he had the idea.

00:05:43.120 | I think he emailed you without even telling me.

00:05:45.800 | And then you replied and you're like, yeah, let's get together and talk about.

00:05:49.600 | And I remember like really distinctly taking this seriously and being like, okay, here is,

00:05:58.960 | here's like a description of how this should work, you know, and I put it on one page and

00:06:03.220 | sent it to you.

00:06:03.680 | And that was like, it was very impactful in my, in my whole vector since then.

00:06:09.960 | I mean, it showed up in a lot of places.

00:06:12.680 | It would come up in magazines or I would see it and you referenced like, I don't know that

00:06:18.680 | world well, but it seems like it had a bit of a half-life.

00:06:20.420 | It had a little cult following there.

00:06:22.100 | Yeah.

00:06:23.580 | Yeah.

00:06:23.940 | Somebody built a version of it in Chelsea in New York.

00:06:27.320 | I didn't realize this.

00:06:28.740 | Okay.

00:06:28.940 | In Chelsea.

00:06:29.460 | Okay.

00:06:29.840 | Yeah.

00:06:30.160 | Yeah.

00:06:30.320 | Full size?

00:06:30.860 | No.

00:06:31.140 | It was like a store.

00:06:32.120 | It was like a retail store, but it was, that's what I remember.

00:06:34.240 | Reorganized.

00:06:34.960 | Like it was organized along these lines.

00:06:37.140 | And then, um, yeah, it was there that, you know, a couple of people, like Seth Godin

00:06:43.040 | was there, a chip cutter from the wall street journal was there.

00:06:45.920 | And that was the consequential one.

00:06:47.000 | Cause he wrote up in the future of, uh, work, the wall street journal does this every year.

00:06:51.740 | They have their future work kind of section.

00:06:53.420 | And that's where my current CEO read about it.

00:06:56.000 | And he's like, boom, here's my guy.

00:06:58.340 | So you would say now, I think this is what's interesting is back then it was a sketch you

00:07:01.660 | were teaching architecture.

00:07:02.500 | Now your day job in some sense is making these types of spaces a reality.

00:07:06.800 | Do I have that more or less right?

00:07:07.840 | Yes.

00:07:08.760 | So I'm an architect, uh, and the, uh, the chief experience officer of a company called

00:07:15.320 | Genient.

00:07:15.640 | And what we do is, uh, we try to build workplaces that help people, um, have great experiences

00:07:25.460 | and do their jobs better.

00:07:26.540 | You know, I would like the whole project grew out of, I think your, your critique was that

00:07:32.820 | the whole world of work is in a, in a way suffering.

00:07:36.760 | Cause we're so distracted all the time.

00:07:38.860 | I was looking at it purely from the slice of the experience of the physical space architect

00:07:43.900 | and thinking like the space is damaged in the, um, or the space is faulty or whatever lacking.

00:07:50.940 | And there are other people looking at it from like the technology standpoint.

00:07:54.200 | And so now like where I'm, I'm privileged to be in a position where like, that's my job

00:08:00.340 | is to try to figure out how to enable companies to take a totally different approach.

00:08:05.820 | I can totally elevate it evolved approach and it, it keys together.

00:08:09.840 | Like it reinforces in a ton of ways your, your whole gestalt, you know, a question I'm

00:08:16.340 | often asked is people who are doing a lot of remote work.

00:08:18.620 | So they're setting up their own space at home.

00:08:21.220 | They're wondering, okay, if I wanted to get, take advantage of my physical space, have

00:08:25.720 | something like the eudaimonia machine type of advantage, but it's not an office for a lot

00:08:29.520 | of people.

00:08:29.920 | It's how I think about the physical spaces when I work, when I'm at my own home.

00:08:33.760 | Have you thought about this?

00:08:35.520 | Like if you really wanted to go, not radical, but you really wanted to get into it with someone

00:08:41.380 | who was working from home into changing the various spaces you work in, having multiple spaces,

00:08:45.380 | what's possible here?

00:08:47.960 | Okay.

00:08:48.300 | So I think about this every day, you know, I think about it a lot.

00:08:51.620 | Yeah.

00:08:51.780 | Um, I think that we've become so used to languishing, you know, flourishing is the highest state of

00:09:01.740 | wellbeing.

00:09:02.400 | Yeah.

00:09:03.000 | Depression is the opposite.

00:09:04.060 | Linguishing is the middle.

00:09:04.920 | I'm just getting by, you know?

00:09:06.540 | And I think that the open office kind of just generic world out there is largely about

00:09:15.880 | languishing.

00:09:16.440 | And so when you compare that to my house, I like, where would I rather languish in my

00:09:22.020 | house or here?

00:09:22.560 | It's just easier to languish at home.

00:09:23.840 | I don't think a lot of people are flourishing at home because I think in order to flourish,

00:09:28.720 | you have to be exposed to other people.

00:09:31.660 | You have to give resources.

00:09:32.800 | You have to like, you have to, or for a lot of knowledge workers, I think you really need

00:09:36.720 | to engage in some sort of reciprocal, like energizing dialogue.

00:09:43.640 | And zoom is a poor proxy for this.

00:09:46.260 | Yeah.

00:09:46.680 | The reason I'm sitting in the HQ right now, talking to you in person is because if this

00:09:51.220 | was on zoom, I don't think the conversation quality would be as good.

00:09:55.260 | Yeah.

00:09:55.720 | So where you're going here is actually the key is to making the non-home office better.

00:10:01.140 | that will prefer remote work.

00:10:02.900 | If all we're doing at the office is we're in a cubicle on email and like, I might as well

00:10:07.580 | be at home because I don't have to commute and I have other, I can go to do my Peloton over

00:10:13.600 | lunch.

00:10:14.260 | If you want to make something remarkable with other people, I think you have to do it in

00:10:20.020 | an environment that is set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity, you

00:10:26.840 | know, and that kind of, that's, that triggers our kinds of relationships.

00:10:30.280 | So this is the whole switch from functional to performative, you know, like if there's one

00:10:34.780 | kind of just switch I want to flip in your head, is that like, and I'm stealing this from

00:10:39.180 | Rem Kulass, the greatest living architect, probably a Dutch guy.

00:10:44.100 | Is that like almost anything can function as a, let's say a school, a trailer can function

00:10:51.180 | as a school, right?

00:10:52.300 | If you're a school is too crowded, you can put people outside, but like what performs as a

00:10:56.900 | school, you know, what, what, what gets those students in the right mindset?

00:11:00.160 | What like connects you to like history?

00:11:02.980 | This is like the Georgetown campus with its, it's, it's ornate buildings and the greens with

00:11:09.220 | the old trees.

00:11:09.640 | They don't need it.

00:11:10.280 | Georgetown could function on any, in, in a commercial office building downtown.

00:11:13.940 | You could put every single student, every single professor in a tower downtown and they

00:11:17.080 | could function.

00:11:17.380 | But like, what, if you want to get, break into that next tier, it's about performance, you

00:11:22.100 | know, and like what performs as a workplace, you know, what gets us in the right state of

00:11:27.020 | mind, what puts us in the right kind of relationship.

00:11:29.160 | And that is, it's a tricky thing.

00:11:32.100 | Like a great experience is a tricky thing to build.

00:11:34.240 | It's like a spell.

00:11:35.360 | Like, uh, like you, you kind of conjure it.

00:11:38.720 | It's like a bubble or something and it's easy to break it.

00:11:40.940 | It's got like concentration.

00:11:41.980 | Like as soon as your phone buzzes or somebody taps you on the shoulder.

00:11:46.720 | Go on.

00:11:47.780 | Here's a, okay.

00:11:48.580 | So here's a followup going on a rabbit hole here, but it's a fascinating one to me.

00:11:52.200 | Does this make sense to you by the way?

00:11:53.700 | It absolutely does.

00:11:54.240 | Yeah.

00:11:54.420 | So my followup is I had this idea I wrote about in the early days of virtual reality where

00:11:59.400 | I had done the first demos.

00:12:00.440 | One of my students had brought an early vibe to Georgetown and I wrote this article on what

00:12:05.220 | I called immersive single tasking.

00:12:06.640 | And my idea was because of exactly this theory you're talking about, I said space matters.

00:12:11.000 | I was thinking about Cambridge, think about Oxford.

00:12:13.480 | I mean, space matters, the, the symmetry of those greens, the, the fireplace and the wood

00:12:17.720 | panel offices for, you know, CS Lewis is in there.

00:12:20.020 | It matters for certain creative production.

00:12:22.580 | That's like the Seinfeld thing about space, you know, it's cataclysmically relevant.

00:12:25.900 | Yeah.

00:12:26.300 | You remember that?

00:12:27.420 | So I was saying, okay, so at home, I was like, maybe something virtual reality is going to

00:12:31.020 | bring to us is workspaces that are inspiring in that way that you're single.

00:12:37.460 | I call it immersive single tasking because you'd be working on a single thing.

00:12:40.120 | And I think my example was, you know, you're in the Hogwarts dining hall, which is based

00:12:45.840 | off King's college or whatever with a whiteboard you can draw on with like the virtual reality

00:12:50.580 | and you're working on a proof there is going to be a completely different mindset than

00:12:54.340 | at your kitchen table.

00:12:55.220 | And people built these things, right?

00:12:57.160 | I mean, I said, okay, here's the limitations.

00:12:58.780 | It was resolution.

00:12:59.620 | I'm like, you need a good enough resolution that you can actually read and see text and

00:13:02.720 | be able to write.

00:13:03.200 | And people have built these things.

00:13:04.700 | It really has not caught on.

00:13:08.340 | So is this just, we're not there yet?

00:13:10.220 | Or is there something about the physicality?

00:13:12.060 | So I think we're not there yet.

00:13:13.520 | Okay.

00:13:13.980 | I, I will, my, I was totally blown away when I did my first demo of the vision pro, the

00:13:20.400 | apple vision pro.

00:13:21.000 | Yeah.

00:13:21.320 | I'm like, oh my God, you know, um, there's a, have you done it?

00:13:26.980 | Uh, I haven't done the vision pro though.

00:13:28.980 | I've done other AR.

00:13:29.700 | Yeah.

00:13:29.980 | I mean, you know, it makes it, it makes it, it makes old ARs to me, in my view, look like,

00:13:35.980 | uh, toys.

00:13:37.240 | Yeah.

00:13:37.860 | You know, and what'd you do in it?

00:13:39.200 | Okay.

00:13:40.140 | So there's a couple of simulations that you walk through, which are kind of like, okay.

00:13:44.760 | And then there's this whole deep experience they do at the end where they're like, basically

00:13:48.780 | play like a reel of like, um, uh, it starts like it fades out of black and like Alicia keys

00:13:56.620 | is standing from media away, like singing to you, you know?

00:13:59.540 | And it was so shocking to me that I made the guy play like three times, but this is just

00:14:05.020 | like a virtual reality demo at this point.

00:14:06.560 | This is what the past two completely turned off and now it's in virtual reality.

00:14:09.660 | Well, what's weird about the vision pro too, is that your peripheral vision is intact.

00:14:13.080 | So you can kind of look to the side and see real world stuff.

00:14:15.940 | But then there's like, it takes you to like a, you know, Greek, um, ruins in Turkey.

00:14:21.760 | And then it takes you to like little kids playing soccer in Nairobi or something.

00:14:25.760 | And I've been to Greek ruins in Turkey and I've seen little kids play soccer in Africa.

00:14:30.000 | And that's exactly what it feels like.

00:14:31.580 | It, you don't have the dusty bus ride to get you there, but it's like 80, 90% of the

00:14:37.020 | way.

00:14:37.220 | So like immediately after I had that demo, I emailed a guy I know who runs like a software

00:14:43.260 | company for architects.

00:14:44.120 | And I'm like, you got to do captures of like all the great buildings in the world and

00:14:48.700 | sell them to architecture schools.

00:14:49.640 | Yeah.

00:14:50.020 | You know, because like now you don't have to go to, you know, uh, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

00:14:56.760 | Like you could get most of it, you know, uh, just like sitting in your couch in your living

00:15:04.140 | room or something.

00:15:04.840 | Now, why hasn't it caught on yet?

00:15:06.180 | And like the sports stuff is actually awesome too.

00:15:07.960 | Like you'd really appreciate the baseball one where you're sitting on like the first baseline.

00:15:11.000 | I did, uh, I did one recently of the SNL 50th anniversary show.

00:15:16.300 | They put a 3d, uh, 360 degree camera and you could sit next to the cameraman while they were

00:15:22.320 | doing one of the skits.

00:15:23.300 | And like, they were here and you can look over and the cameraman was right there and

00:15:25.980 | you can look behind you and the audience.

00:15:27.480 | Yeah.

00:15:27.820 | But do you buy this?

00:15:29.520 | My, my argument has been the way into this world is what I've observed reporting on it

00:15:32.840 | is going to be screens.

00:15:34.840 | So the number one productivity app in the Oculus store during the pandemic was this company

00:15:40.440 | called immersed.

00:15:41.260 | And what they found was everyone else was trying to jump straight into a full virtual experience.

00:15:46.340 | Typically with like group meetings, we'll all meet at the ruins of whatever.

00:15:50.620 | And it was friction was the problem.

00:15:52.360 | People like, I don't want to go through that.

00:15:54.020 | I don't want to put on my thing and log into a room.

00:15:56.200 | And like, I could just do zoom on the computer I'm already at.

00:15:58.420 | So what immersed did is they said, you know, you're in a virtual world, but here's what you

00:16:01.640 | care about.

00:16:02.100 | We give you monitors.

00:16:04.080 | And at, at home, you only own one extra monitor, but in the virtual world, we give

00:16:07.960 | you four.

00:16:08.400 | And so it's like a more useful workspace, right?

00:16:11.500 | You have more monitors.

00:16:12.480 | So I'm working from home and I can have three big monitors because I don't own three big

00:16:15.880 | monitors, but they're virtual, but you're surrounded by, you're on top of a mountain or this or that.

00:16:20.620 | And they found this got people into the virtual world because it was convenient.

00:16:25.280 | It's a better screen than they physically have at home.

00:16:27.620 | Yeah.

00:16:27.920 | But then they were in a virtual world and then other things could happen.

00:16:31.640 | My personal test for these kinds of things is when you forget and you're, there's like

00:16:35.520 | a slip in your mind and you forget that you're in a Apple store or whatever.

00:16:39.600 | And you think you're in Turkey, you know?

00:16:42.340 | And I guess it'll be exciting when that's readily available to everybody.

00:16:52.180 | But man, the, the bar is so high for making all that content and stuff.

00:16:57.340 | And it's, it's, it's the adoption is got to really be agonizing for Apple and the companies

00:17:04.020 | that are invested in this because, you know, no, you haven't even tried it.

00:17:07.820 | Yeah.

00:17:07.900 | The, when I think about these things instead, when I think about great experiences, you know,

00:17:14.000 | I am like maybe oddly satisfied with the real world, you know?

00:17:20.920 | And, uh, like my favorite digital experience is the Apple pay.

00:17:26.580 | I didn't ask for it.

00:17:27.800 | It's invisible.

00:17:28.920 | It was free.

00:17:29.880 | It just showed up one day and it makes my life easier, you know?

00:17:32.520 | So I don't have to think about extra stuff.

00:17:36.160 | I can focus more on, you know, uh, what I care about that day.

00:17:41.780 | Like what I set out to do that day.

00:17:42.940 | Did you read, um, Rick Rubin's creativity book?

00:17:46.460 | Some of it.

00:17:47.580 | It's not a book you really read through.

00:17:50.300 | Yeah.

00:17:50.460 | He modeled it on the Tao Te Ching kind of, so you can kind of pick it up and put it down

00:17:53.920 | wherever you want.

00:17:54.460 | But there's one part in there that I thought you'd like a lot where he, he encourages you

00:17:59.880 | to plan your day with a concentration that you're like landing an airplane, you know?

00:18:04.280 | And so like, yeah, the first 15 minutes of my day when I'm like time blocking and stuff

00:18:08.540 | and going through like my kind of core daily metrics, it like, I have it written right next

00:18:13.140 | to it in my planner.

00:18:14.340 | Like take the same seriousness to those 15 minutes as though you're landing an airplane.

00:18:18.740 | What does that mean?

00:18:19.540 | What does it mean to be serious about planning?

00:18:21.040 | Um, be really, uh, focused on like the two or three really important, like for me in the,

00:18:30.660 | my rhythm and my daily life right now, I can probably achieve two or three really important

00:18:35.480 | things in a day, you know?

00:18:37.020 | And so I just need to, and I, I like carefully segment creative time out from normal time,

00:18:44.480 | a shallow work time.

00:18:45.620 | And so I really carefully budget because if you don't do it, the world just sweeps in and

00:18:52.360 | steals your time.

00:18:53.280 | I'll tell you something interesting about it.

00:18:54.800 | Cause I was just writing about exactly this idea this morning.

00:18:58.800 | So I'm working on a chapter in my new book and it's about organizing your time as a prerequisite

00:19:05.480 | for changing your life.

00:19:06.560 | And I was writing about exactly this idea and I was looking back historically, where did

00:19:11.060 | this idea of MIT's most important tasks, like make sure that you figured out the most important

00:19:16.700 | thing and get that done first.

00:19:18.220 | Right.

00:19:18.500 | It seems like a timeless idea.

00:19:19.880 | It arose early two thousands.

00:19:21.800 | Right.

00:19:22.960 | So there's just that phrase, that phrase, but not just that phrase, that phrase came a little

00:19:27.500 | bit later.

00:19:27.980 | I think that was, uh, Gina Tapani at life hacker invented MIT's, but it was, you had Brian Tracy

00:19:33.560 | eat that frog was sort of getting around that idea.

00:19:36.900 | If you eat the frog, eat a frog first thing in the day, everything else won't seem so bad.

00:19:41.600 | And his, his idea was do your most important thing first.

00:19:44.260 | Then Julie Morgenstern in the early two thousands wrote, never check your email in the morning.

00:19:49.560 | And her idea was before you do anything else, spend one hour on the most important thing

00:19:55.320 | because you're going to, you're not going to get to it.

00:19:56.920 | And then the bloggers took over Leo Babuda.

00:19:59.020 | That's where I first came across it as his inhabitants.

00:20:01.060 | And then I wrote about it.

00:20:02.220 | This, by the way, is like one of the issues I'm having now when I'm using AI asking about

00:20:07.000 | the origins of different productivity ideas, my articles keep coming back.

00:20:11.160 | So it's become oddly circular.

00:20:12.560 | I wrote about this back then, but this idea emerged sort of concurrently with email culture.

00:20:17.580 | And I wonder if it wasn't as relevant in 1992.

00:20:21.540 | It was, I have time.

00:20:23.200 | I have two meetings today.

00:20:24.600 | And my problem is like filling my day, but you get to the early two thousands.

00:20:28.200 | We introduced this idea of make sure that you do the thing that matters first,

00:20:33.520 | because that might be your only chance to get to it.

00:20:37.920 | Yeah, no, I could see that.

00:20:39.620 | I like, I like Ferris's kind of idea of make before you manage.

00:20:43.880 | I just think that, yeah, the, the, the, the sort of situation I've carved out for myself

00:20:53.400 | is that I have the, I have decent amount of control over my time, especially like I know

00:20:59.640 | the hours of the day where I'm pretty productive and I try to really focus on taking things off

00:21:05.940 | my master task list, like, I don't have to go looking for stuff to do.

00:21:09.340 | It's all there.

00:21:10.100 | Like I've captured it or configured it or whatever.

00:21:11.980 | And, uh, like I kind of tee it up and I go for it.

00:21:15.820 | Um, but man, I look at other, like, cause people share their calendars and stuff, you know?

00:21:21.380 | And I mean, you, you, you're done now.

00:21:23.280 | You, you get a lot of communication, like you're, you're in it, right?

00:21:25.520 | Like there's emails, there's meetings all the time or whatever.

00:21:27.900 | Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:28.720 | But I have to, I look at other people's calendars and this is jammed all the way.

00:21:35.260 | And I'm like, man, how do you get anything done?

00:21:37.440 | You know?

00:21:38.200 | Um, but how do you resist that?

00:21:42.020 | Um, I try to not, I personally tried to just focus on doing fewer things, but doing them

00:21:53.280 | well.

00:21:53.660 | And I try not to, I, uh, I try not to show up or like volunteer to show up to meetings

00:22:01.240 | where I'm not contributing.

00:22:02.220 | Yeah.

00:22:02.960 | Um, unless there's something like there's, there's a series of meetings that are within my company

00:22:07.800 | that I'm not participating.

00:22:09.060 | Other people are like presenting forecasts and stuff like that, that I love because I can

00:22:13.300 | feel like the pulse of the company and stuff.

00:22:15.160 | But, um, I just, I don't have a lot of meetings that aren't mission critical and most of my

00:22:21.080 | meetings are external to like with, you know, um, people that control workplaces for other

00:22:26.580 | companies that I'm trying to sell my services to.

00:22:29.600 | So, uh, you don't like, I think the, the biggest thing that helped me have a under scheduled

00:22:38.320 | calendar is just like, just killing the pseudo productivity dragon and be like, don't like,

00:22:48.380 | don't assume that you're more valuable to the company because your calendar is full.

00:22:53.600 | Yeah, I just met last weekend.

00:22:57.060 | He just retired, but he was a president of a relatively large company and had been for

00:23:01.800 | most of his professional career.

00:23:02.860 | And the story he told me is he said, look, my calendar was filled because of exactly what

00:23:07.900 | you're saying.

00:23:08.260 | This is what makes me useful is people want to talk to me and I can talk to them and give

00:23:12.660 | them guidance or help them make decisions.

00:23:14.440 | This is why I'm useful.

00:23:15.080 | Then he hired a new CFO and a really high level executive assistant.

00:23:18.800 | And they, they kind of put their heads together and came back and said, you have too many

00:23:23.120 | meetings and here's what we're going to do.

00:23:24.920 | We're going to block off a non-trivial amount of time every day.

00:23:27.580 | And the executive assistant is like, I'm going to protect that.

00:23:29.940 | Like you're at your daughter's wedding.

00:23:31.660 | So this is time that I'm not going to, we're not going to let meetings go into.

00:23:34.920 | And he's really worried.

00:23:35.540 | Like, but that's like three or four meetings.

00:23:36.880 | And he said, after that change, it was, you know, night and day, he felt like he was five

00:23:42.660 | X more useful, not productive, but useful.

00:23:45.400 | He had time to sit and think and strategize.

00:23:48.640 | And it turned out that there was this back pressure in meetings that would fill every minute.

00:23:52.380 | Anyway, there's no, you know, into it.

00:23:55.180 | Right.

00:23:55.340 | So it's not like those three extra meetings was the difference between success or not.

00:24:00.240 | And then the story I told back, I tell this in a world without email is that, uh, general

00:24:04.540 | Marshall, chief of staff of the army during world war two, that the, the, uh, person in

00:24:10.080 | charge of the entire war effort, essentially right back here in DC didn't work past five

00:24:15.560 | during world war two because he had a heart condition.

00:24:17.840 | And like back then the doctor's advice was don't work past five.

00:24:20.920 | So you don't have a heart attack.

00:24:21.720 | So he ran world war two fixed schedule.

00:24:25.500 | Not where it was fixed schedule.

00:24:26.760 | He had to get congressional approval that completely changed the lines of communication within the

00:24:32.160 | war department.

00:24:32.680 | So there's too many people reporting to me.

00:24:33.940 | Here's what we're going to do.

00:24:34.560 | I'm going to talk to these five people and then these people will handle these people.

00:24:37.280 | And if you're going to have a meeting with me, you're going to bring all of this stuff

00:24:40.700 | in advance.

00:24:41.180 | That meeting is going to be 10 minutes.

00:24:42.360 | And most of this stuff I'm not going to do anymore.

00:24:44.080 | And it turned out it was all a knob you could turn and you could turn that knob to fill

00:24:46.960 | every minute of your day.

00:24:47.820 | You could turn the knob to work till five.

00:24:49.400 | And he was just as effective.

00:24:50.460 | There was just a element of intentionality.

00:24:52.680 | I mean, you sort of just have me now on a workflow tangent.

00:24:55.720 | I still want to get to the main thing I want to talk to you about, but all right.

00:24:58.940 | So the main thing I want to talk to you about is I do think about you as someone who's very

00:25:02.120 | intentional about your life.

00:25:03.160 | Thank you.

00:25:04.240 | And I, I want to break down some of the things you've done to get there because I think it's

00:25:08.720 | useful for my listeners who care about the deep life, but I want to paint the picture

00:25:12.720 | a little bit more.

00:25:13.180 | We've talked about your job.

00:25:14.040 | We know you're an architect.

00:25:14.720 | Now you have this job where you're helping to design sort of the workspace of the future.

00:25:19.840 | Yeah.

00:25:20.340 | That's like a Disney Epcot term, but you know.

00:25:21.920 | Right.

00:25:22.160 | Yeah.

00:25:22.480 | But you also have, tell us about the farm.

00:25:24.720 | Epcot was pretty radical, by the way.

00:25:26.380 | Okay.

00:25:27.940 | So yeah.

00:25:29.200 | One of the things that I feel happy about in this conversation is that I do kind of feel

00:25:37.400 | like a representative of the audience.

00:25:40.460 | Like I'm not a famous person.

00:25:41.940 | Nobody, like, I don't have a, I'm not an author of some other book that's coming here to kind

00:25:45.360 | of do that.

00:25:46.100 | Like I, and I'll give you your flowers just once really quickly that I attribute a lot

00:25:52.900 | of the things that make me a kind of, um, an intentional person to the fact that I've

00:25:58.960 | like, I've taken a lot of your lessons really seriously and applied them over a long period

00:26:03.340 | of time, like a decade.

00:26:05.540 | This is why I'm having you on.

00:26:07.120 | We want to hear that story.

00:26:08.080 | Yeah.

00:26:08.300 | Yeah.

00:26:08.480 | Right.

00:26:08.720 | So, um, so where do you want to start at the farm right now?

00:26:13.440 | Tell me, yeah.

00:26:14.100 | Tell us about the farm.

00:26:15.220 | Okay.

00:26:15.760 | Like where you, you live normally in the farm and then I, and then I'm going to wind you

00:26:19.140 | back to like how we ended up there.

00:26:20.500 | So I'm from a small town in Wisconsin and, uh, but I live in Chicago and my wife and

00:26:26.160 | I are from the same small town and we decided during COVID that, you know, and we'd been

00:26:32.600 | thinking about it for like a while, but we wanted a country spot that is a kind of a compliment

00:26:37.440 | to our city spot.

00:26:38.240 | Cause our jobs depend on being in the city.

00:26:40.380 | And so, and your city spot's really a city spot, row house.

00:26:45.360 | Like, you know, all the people, you know, I live in a great neighborhood, right close to

00:26:50.400 | university, Hyde park, South side of Chicago.

00:26:52.160 | It's kind of like Tacoma park or Georgetown.

00:26:54.280 | Um, but yeah, it's great.

00:26:56.360 | And it's like a working class neighborhood.

00:26:59.240 | And, um, but we found, uh, we, we, we were looking and looking for like a country spot and

00:27:07.660 | we finally found a, a really interesting one.

00:27:09.880 | Um, that is like five acres right in Lake Michigan, you know, like, uh, 10 minutes outside my hometown.

00:27:16.260 | And so an orchard nonetheless.

00:27:19.240 | No, it didn't have an orchard.

00:27:20.280 | Oh, you planted that.

00:27:21.060 | Yeah.

00:27:21.320 | All right.

00:27:21.580 | So it was just five acres when you got it.

00:27:23.140 | So we, um, yeah, we, we bought it and it wasn't expensive.

00:27:27.680 | It was like, I think we paid 170 grand.

00:27:29.420 | Yeah.

00:27:30.140 | Cause the house was, it was an old barn from the 1870s.

00:27:34.780 | And then it had a two car garage attached to it.

00:27:37.200 | And so we converted the car, the garage into a thing, but we had to put in a well, we had

00:27:41.580 | to put in gas, we had to put electric and those weren't bugs for me.

00:27:45.040 | Those were features.

00:27:45.700 | Yeah.

00:27:46.140 | Cause I got like, we got to design everything.

00:27:48.440 | I like building stuff.

00:27:49.780 | And so it was cheaper.

00:27:51.400 | Like I could never have afforded to hire a contract to do all that stuff.

00:27:55.320 | And so, um.

00:27:56.900 | And how far is it from your house in Chicago?

00:27:58.720 | Two and a half hours.

00:27:59.960 | So we can migrate there on the weekends and stuff.

00:28:02.460 | And the pragmatically, the way that we did it is that we will like, well, Airbnb it when

00:28:07.900 | we're not there.

00:28:08.360 | And, um, that worked out perfectly.

00:28:10.960 | You know, we kind of have a push down pop-up system where if there's a big event in Chicago,

00:28:15.420 | we can Airbnb our place in Chicago and go to the farm and it works out.

00:28:18.340 | So like, we're not rich people, you know, very middle, middle income folks.

00:28:23.760 | And, um, like, but we really wanted this to work and we came up with like an imminently

00:28:31.440 | practical solution.

00:28:32.880 | But now it's like, uh, every, like I joke around like with you probably, but like every day I'm

00:28:40.660 | there is a plus two.

00:28:41.280 | Yeah.

00:28:41.900 | You know, every day I'm working there for sure is a plus two.

00:28:44.820 | Well, you have, you have the writing and stuff.

00:28:46.500 | What do you call it now?

00:28:47.200 | The writing, my writing cottage, yeah.

00:28:49.800 | Or I love this part of it.

00:28:52.380 | Yeah.

00:28:52.720 | So, um, I, we have three little kids and, um, it's a lot of noise.

00:29:02.900 | And when I'm there, you know, sometimes you want to get away from that.

00:29:06.120 | So I copied Mark Twain's writer's cottage and like other people have had these, you know,

00:29:10.100 | like we've probably jumped around about, uh, project Douglas had one, you know, these other

00:29:15.100 | writers have them.

00:29:15.700 | And so, and I, I do like writing.

00:29:17.880 | I'm working on a book project that I will get to, uh, at some point here.

00:29:21.500 | Yeah.

00:29:21.900 | I think the writer's cottage, like building a writer's cottage was the ultimate act of procrastination

00:29:25.500 | on this book project.

00:29:26.780 | Uh, but, well, the, the ultimate move is what Michael Pollan did where he wrote a book

00:29:30.680 | about writing, building his writer's cottage.

00:29:32.960 | That's the meta move right there.

00:29:34.360 | Yeah.

00:29:35.080 | Touche.

00:29:35.940 | Um, so anyway, no, it's a, it's like a octagon building about the size of this room and

00:29:41.600 | it sits in the field, like beyond the orchard, looks right.

00:29:44.920 | Lake Michigan.

00:29:45.400 | And it is like my favorite place in the world, you know?

00:29:49.820 | And I, it costs $2,000 in materials from Lowe's and you built Craig's list.

00:29:59.400 | You know, it's, it's not like these things are not, but it took a lot of time.

00:30:03.660 | It took a lot of hours.

00:30:05.080 | But again, that's a feature, you know, it was fun to build.

00:30:07.640 | Your schedule is like most weekends, most weekends you would head out there.

00:30:10.980 | Yeah.

00:30:11.440 | And then sometimes if there was something going on in Chicago, you would bail Airbnb and go

00:30:16.260 | out there longer.

00:30:16.720 | Yeah.

00:30:17.020 | And we just got comfortable Airbnb in our house too.

00:30:18.900 | Yeah.

00:30:19.460 | You know, so I was like, yeah, a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows at that, but Hey

00:30:23.600 | man, whatever like makes it possible, you know?

00:30:27.180 | And it's really great for the kids.

00:30:29.000 | It's, it's like my life is this really beautiful kind of two alternating currents where

00:30:35.060 | on Friday I can get out of the city.

00:30:38.080 | I have a couple afternoon calls that I can take on the road and then I pull up to the

00:30:43.680 | farm.

00:30:43.880 | It's like I get out and it's just quiet and you know, I can notice little changes in the

00:30:51.480 | landscape.

00:30:51.860 | Like I'm so attuned to that landscape now that day to day, especially in spring, it's like

00:30:58.300 | I can see things changing and that's really exciting to me.

00:31:01.700 | And then like Sunday evening, I, you know, pack up, go back to Chicago and I turn by 94

00:31:09.520 | or whatever.

00:31:09.960 | And I see the skyline and I feel like seven feet tall.

00:31:13.020 | Yeah.

00:31:13.580 | And I'm like, all right, let's get back into this, you know?

00:31:16.400 | And it's so, it's such a great way to live at least at this stage in my life.

00:31:21.880 | But there's one other thing in the, in my drawer at the writer's cottage.

00:31:27.280 | I don't know if I told you about this, but I hacked your time block planner and I have my

00:31:34.580 | own like a version of it, but I built a life time block planner.

00:31:38.260 | So you mean like on a year scale?

00:31:41.220 | Yes.

00:31:41.680 | Ooh.

00:31:42.180 | So it goes a hundred, it goes from now till I'm a hundred years old and each spreads like

00:31:46.880 | a year.

00:31:47.240 | Yeah.

00:31:47.660 | And so there are projects that I have that I know I don't have the bandwidth to work on

00:31:52.500 | them now, but I don't want them rattling around in my head.

00:31:54.740 | So I put them in my life block planner years out, you know, and you look at it and I look

00:32:00.900 | at it all the time.

00:32:01.440 | Yeah.

00:32:01.740 | Yeah.

00:32:02.460 | Yeah.

00:32:02.740 | Well, from a lifestyle centric planning perspective, what was, so the farm is a solution to a vision

00:32:09.980 | that, because we talk about this a lot on the show that in lifestyle strict planning, you're,

00:32:13.940 | you're, you don't work towards a particular, you don't start with the goal.

00:32:16.360 | Like I want to buy something here.

00:32:18.180 | You start with the vision of the lifestyle.

00:32:19.560 | Like, here's what I want in my life that we don't have.

00:32:21.300 | And then you look for creative solutions that gets that there.

00:32:23.480 | So what was, what was the goal that eventually the farm became the solution to?

00:32:31.260 | I think just like, what were you, what were you thinking when envisioning your lifestyle?

00:32:36.860 | This is what's missing.

00:32:38.440 | I think it's just the pace, you know, like years go by like that, you know?

00:32:44.440 | And I think that there was something else about like returning to our, like our roots, you

00:32:55.280 | know, like, cause your hometown was nearby.

00:32:56.920 | Well, not just that.

00:32:58.020 | Yeah.

00:32:58.420 | Like my hometown was nearby.

00:32:59.480 | My parents are kind of aging and they're there.

00:33:02.500 | Um, I want my kids to have a relationship with them, but I was, I was, you know, tucking

00:33:07.100 | my middle kid in when we were at the farm one day and I was telling her, I'm like, you know,

00:33:11.540 | when our people immigrated here, they came right to this County.

00:33:14.780 | Yeah.

00:33:15.080 | And she's like, what really do we have a photograph?

00:33:18.620 | And it's like right after the civil war, potato famine, Irish people.

00:33:21.640 | And I'm like, yeah, we got a picture.

00:33:23.460 | And she's like, I want to go put a picture on the guy's grave tomorrow.

00:33:26.640 | And so we found the picture, made a copy of it, put it in a little frame.

00:33:30.180 | It took it out to the cemetery and found the guy's grave.

00:33:32.240 | And so your relatives, there's a cemetery nearby that has like your relatives are there.

00:33:37.280 | The first guy from Ireland.

00:33:38.120 | Huh?

00:33:38.480 | So he's born temporary.

00:33:39.500 | Now there he is.

00:33:40.760 | You know?

00:33:41.180 | And so every successive generation has kind of come up there.

00:33:43.860 | And so, I mean, that's different than when you're in Chicago and it's kind of like anonymous

00:33:49.160 | in a way you're absorbed into this larger thing.

00:33:52.520 | So what, like what, when you, when you first were thinking about those general goals, I

00:33:56.100 | want to slow things down.

00:33:57.120 | I want some connection.

00:33:57.980 | You're probably thinking generally like the country, have some part of our life that's

00:34:01.000 | slower back to our roots.

00:34:02.120 | Was there, I'm imagining there.

00:34:03.960 | I was like, okay, let's look at the obvious options.

00:34:05.920 | Like the orchard was also a really big deal that you planted the orchard.

00:34:10.280 | Yeah.

00:34:10.620 | Yeah.

00:34:10.940 | And their cider apples, their hard cider apple.

00:34:13.040 | Was that part of the original plan?

00:34:14.520 | Well, so my wife and I, uh, she did it.

00:34:19.060 | We lived in Paris briefly when she was doing a study abroad.

00:34:22.060 | And, um, we, we discovered like in the French countryside, you know, like they have this

00:34:29.640 | like a Normandy has this champagne, like apple cider.

00:34:33.420 | And we're like, Oh my God, we should make this.

00:34:35.440 | How long ago was this?

00:34:37.280 | Uh, 2010.

00:34:39.500 | So it had been lurking.

00:34:41.440 | Oh yeah.

00:34:42.120 | It'd been like a detail that became a part of your life.

00:34:44.340 | It was like romantic.

00:34:44.840 | You and your wife are bumming around rural France and you're like, we should get a country

00:34:48.880 | spot and plant an apple orchard.

00:34:50.920 | Yeah.

00:34:51.100 | You know, meanwhile, you're in DC, then you're in Chicago and you're buzzing around and you're

00:34:55.580 | getting jobs and getting promoted and all that stuff.

00:34:57.620 | But then eventually it's like, we got to get serious.

00:35:00.200 | And so we, as a kind of forcing mechanism, we used our 20th anniversary as like, that's,

00:35:06.120 | we're going to have a reunion or like a kind of a reunion of the people that came to our

00:35:10.620 | wedding, you know, and we're going to do it at this farm.

00:35:12.860 | And we did.

00:35:13.540 | We did.

00:35:14.140 | I heard it was awesome.

00:35:15.120 | Yeah.

00:35:15.280 | Well, but when you first, so practically speaking, I'm assuming when you first like, okay, we

00:35:20.000 | have this deadline, we know we want country connection to roots orchard.

00:35:24.580 | Probably the first thing you did was what?

00:35:26.400 | Well, fire up Zillow and you're looking at vacation homes for sale and it's like super expensive.

00:35:31.940 | And that might be a place where we were even looking when we were here, you know, we looked

00:35:37.020 | at an orchard actually in like a, by Roanoke or something.

00:35:41.560 | But like, yeah, like you, you look in a non-serious way for a while and then you kind of get more

00:35:47.260 | serious about it.

00:35:47.920 | And COVID was sort of like, okay.

00:35:49.940 | And then also it's like, shit, you know, we're running out of time.

00:35:53.040 | Yeah.

00:35:53.520 | What are we going to do?

00:35:54.140 | And so.

00:35:55.020 | But you got, you got creative, right?

00:35:56.440 | Because a lot of people might've got stuck with like, okay, I'm looking up like nice houses

00:35:59.920 | on the lake and they're all $800,000 and I don't have $800,000.

00:36:03.060 | So I guess that plan's not going to work, but you kept working.

00:36:06.040 | We found it the day it came on.

00:36:07.300 | Yeah.

00:36:07.680 | And we put an offer in like a week later.

00:36:09.760 | Yeah.

00:36:10.200 | And also, I mean, like from the financial standpoint, I just traded my 401k for that.

00:36:15.800 | Basically, I cashed my 401k early.

00:36:17.860 | Yeah.

00:36:18.260 | Absorbed all the penalties and stuff.

00:36:19.640 | And it didn't really hurt my feelings too much because I want to work.

00:36:23.560 | I love working.

00:36:24.500 | Yeah.

00:36:25.020 | So I want to work till I die anyway.

00:36:26.360 | Yeah.

00:36:27.880 | But it like, and plus I like, it's a good investment too, even though I didn't mean we

00:36:32.320 | don't want to sell it or anything, but, um, you're thinking about the next 20 years.

00:36:36.220 | Like I had, I had to make a non-trivial choice about like, should I, should I risk this thing

00:36:44.120 | on that?

00:36:45.040 | And, uh, it's the best decision I ever made in my life.

00:36:47.700 | Yeah.

00:36:48.480 | I'm one of them, you know, you, I don't want anybody.

00:36:51.620 | You're prioritizing the next 20 years, like making those, making those as good as possible

00:36:57.560 | as opposed to just maximizing 30 years or whatever, that period of life.

00:37:02.460 | Yeah.

00:37:02.880 | Um, tell me about the Collins score.

00:37:05.280 | How do you use those?

00:37:06.500 | Yeah.

00:37:06.840 | I threw out this thing that like every day at my farms, a plus two, you know, that was a

00:37:11.680 | subtle note.

00:37:12.080 | Yeah.

00:37:12.100 | We got a, we got a, I talked about it briefly on the show about a month ago, but it's,

00:37:16.220 | it's worth, bring, bring to the speed again.

00:37:18.740 | Yep.

00:37:19.420 | So, uh, about six years ago, uh, Ferris interviewed, Tim Ferris interviewed, uh, Jim Collins, the

00:37:26.300 | guy, the author of good to great and a handful of other like landmark books.

00:37:30.180 | I consider him like the Peter Drucker of the 21st century.

00:37:32.480 | Yeah.

00:37:32.880 | I told you I got, I met him at some point after that.

00:37:34.820 | He gave me some advice.

00:37:36.000 | Nice guy.

00:37:36.420 | He's a super, like, I just have to imagine how I got in touch with him.

00:37:40.360 | He's hard to get in touch with.

00:37:41.240 | Yeah, I know.

00:37:41.940 | I have, uh, I'm not really a star chaser like that, you know?

00:37:45.920 | Uh, but I, if I, I look, I look forward someday to hopefully meeting him.

00:37:51.080 | Um, we have a lot of things in common.

00:37:53.040 | If you go to his website and you go to his further reading, he's like the only person I've

00:37:55.920 | ever met who's listened to more great courses series than I have, you know, so we can have

00:38:00.700 | a fun laugh about that.

00:38:01.740 | But, um, he, he said something on, uh, you know, uh, Ferris's show that really stuck with

00:38:07.560 | me or caught my attention.

00:38:08.660 | And then I implemented it right away, which is he, he tracks every day, three things.

00:38:14.240 | He brings up a spreadsheet and he, he does a little bullet points of like the things that

00:38:18.460 | happened that day.

00:38:19.000 | And then the second column, he records the amount of creative time, what he calls creative time.

00:38:23.980 | You'd probably call it deep work.

00:38:25.400 | She sent me high.

00:38:26.460 | We'll call flow, whatever.

00:38:28.360 | Uh, like heads down, focus work.

00:38:30.100 | And then the third column is a rating, uh, like a daily rating, like a grade.

00:38:37.820 | And it's highly subjective.

00:38:39.020 | It's just a body feeling out of my day go.

00:38:41.140 | And it's on this very specific scale, which I think is the, probably the, the most genius

00:38:46.400 | part of it, which is negative two, negative one, zero plus one, plus two.

00:38:50.080 | Yeah.

00:38:50.660 | So you have like zero is languishing, like a zero is literally languishing.

00:38:54.620 | And I think like, well, I'll ask you, what do you think that score is actually measuring?

00:38:58.580 | Subjective assessment of your subjective field of the day.

00:39:04.420 | Like, did you, like a zero to me, I think it's measuring Jim Collins, individual flourishing.

00:39:09.460 | Yeah.

00:39:10.160 | But like zero would be pretty consistent for people.

00:39:13.320 | I would imagine zero is, I don't even really know what happened today.

00:39:16.940 | Yeah.

00:39:17.460 | It wasn't bad.

00:39:18.020 | Like I wasn't sad.

00:39:19.180 | I wasn't like stressed out, but like nothing also got me all that fired up.

00:39:22.800 | I, you know, I had some emails, I had some meetings.

00:39:25.360 | I think people's, if you're not paying attention, if you're not measuring this, I think that the

00:39:29.460 | default that hovers around zero.

00:39:30.940 | Yeah.

00:39:31.320 | Because if you're in the negative territory too long, you're probably going to want to make

00:39:34.200 | some changes.

00:39:35.440 | Yeah.

00:39:35.760 | But what you, people don't do is push themselves to the positive territory.

00:39:39.820 | That's flourishing.

00:39:41.120 | Yeah.

00:39:41.720 | And so I started tracking.

00:39:43.580 | How long, how long to set this up?

00:39:45.140 | How long?

00:39:45.480 | This is a while for you.

00:39:46.300 | Right after I heard about it.

00:39:47.280 | So six years ago.

00:39:48.080 | Yeah.

00:39:48.500 | And I started doing it with my mentor.

00:39:50.060 | And like, so we would start out in our days, time blocking.

00:39:53.800 | And then we would like text each other our, our schedule for the day.

00:39:58.600 | And then at the end of the day, we'd text each other a rating.

00:40:01.600 | Okay.

00:40:02.420 | And you used to call and scale.

00:40:04.040 | And we used the con score.

00:40:05.260 | Yeah.

00:40:05.500 | Like that exact rating.

00:40:06.760 | And so a couple of things occurred to me, like immediately, like one, or the first thing

00:40:12.880 | is that I knew what got me into negative territory.

00:40:15.920 | Okay.

00:40:16.860 | And I deleted that.

00:40:18.500 | What was it?

00:40:19.020 | It's going to sound strange, but fighting with people, you know, like just beating people

00:40:25.740 | up on the street is stressful.

00:40:27.320 | I grew up in a family of Jesuit lawyers and we would just fight for fun.

00:40:33.040 | They can argue.

00:40:33.680 | Yeah.

00:40:33.980 | Jesuits can argue.

00:40:34.700 | Everybody fights for fun.

00:40:35.920 | Uh, you know, and, but, uh, and I think I used to be more aggressive like that.

00:40:42.920 | And then I just realized it was actually emotionally draining, you know, and family members or people

00:40:47.560 | you work with, work with.

00:40:48.300 | Yeah.

00:40:48.640 | Like be more confrontational about things like push on people and stuff, you know?

00:40:52.140 | And I just realized like, man, that's not helping.

00:40:54.180 | And, uh, the other thing was, um, certain people kind of trigger, you know, if I was

00:41:00.960 | in like meetings too long or if I expected a certain kind of feedback from somebody and

00:41:05.120 | I wasn't getting it, like it would bring me down.

00:41:06.980 | And so I just kind of avoid that.

00:41:08.440 | There's like negative score people in your life.

00:41:10.500 | Kind of interesting.

00:41:11.500 | Yeah.

00:41:11.800 | Yeah.

00:41:12.180 | And so, or like people that can kind of trigger negative score stuff if I asked them for the

00:41:17.540 | wrong thing.

00:41:17.960 | Anyway, uh, so probably two or three other.

00:41:22.080 | Oh, actually, I'll like, I'll tell you right now what triggers negative, which is I have

00:41:29.140 | very specific goals that I'm responsible for.

00:41:31.980 | And if I look at where I spent my time that day, you know, look at my goals and they don't

00:41:37.420 | match.

00:41:37.740 | That's a problem, you know, professionally.

00:41:40.200 | Yeah.

00:41:40.740 | Unless I had like a really good excuse, you know, like some, somebody came to me with a

00:41:46.240 | problem that was urgent and they turned to me and I addressed it in a fine way.

00:41:50.360 | So like, uh, maybe that was like apart from my responsibilities, but I handled it and good,

00:41:57.780 | you know, so I'll give myself a, like a plus for that.

00:41:59.960 | But the other thing that was actually probably more positive than eliminating the negatives

00:42:03.540 | was, you know, taking the things, uh, and like setting daily realistic goals.

00:42:12.920 | Well, what could I do today to get to a plus one?

00:42:15.200 | What might I stretch to, to get to a plus two?

00:42:17.660 | You know, did you know what, you didn't know what those were, I'm assuming until you've been

00:42:21.820 | measuring.

00:42:22.240 | Like, in other words, did you have to discover what works pretty consistently for a plus two

00:42:27.520 | day?

00:42:27.580 | You know how you feel at the end of that, you know?

00:42:29.500 | And, but like, did you discover something you wanted to prioritize before?

00:42:33.440 | Totally.

00:42:34.020 | So like, what's, what, what's something you discovered that would reliably deliver like

00:42:37.920 | a plus one or plus two day manager, just manager expectations and then don't waste time.

00:42:42.980 | Don't just like, don't allow time to just bleed away.

00:42:46.700 | You know, like, I think it's like you, you, you, you, you contain the leaks and, and like

00:42:53.740 | you, you do get a sense of, um, it just a sense of accomplishment from like knocking that

00:43:01.780 | one thing.

00:43:02.240 | Like I've become very, I try to be very particular about the things that make it onto my master

00:43:08.720 | task list, master task list.

00:43:11.560 | But then aggressive about getting them off, you know, things that linger on that list,

00:43:17.500 | you know, these are like at the project scale.

00:43:20.740 | Yeah.

00:43:21.720 | At the project scale.

00:43:22.700 | Exactly.

00:43:23.200 | So, so, um, not wasting time for you means you made non-trivial progress.

00:43:28.080 | Yeah.

00:43:28.660 | And, and so, yeah, and I will, um, so my quarterly or my planner, my time block planner, I do it

00:43:37.120 | quarterly.

00:43:37.700 | And so I set quarterly goals that I review basically every day, you know, because they

00:43:43.760 | don't take long to review.

00:43:45.060 | And then I just make sure that the, the part that I'm actually struggling the most with is

00:43:52.220 | taking the time on Monday to really lay out the week.

00:43:55.660 | Yeah.

00:43:56.180 | I look, if I like review my old ones, those, those week spreads are, um, uh, under cooked.

00:44:04.960 | I keep trying to convince myself to do this end of day Friday, which makes sense on paper,

00:44:11.580 | right?

00:44:12.240 | Because that's, it's actually the slowest part of the week and you have, and you get the

00:44:17.620 | benefit of the weekend of being like, I know what's going, but it's really hard.

00:44:21.500 | It's like, you're done by Friday afternoon.

00:44:24.600 | Like that, that, and, but the problem is Monday morning is everyone's rock and rolling and it's,

00:44:28.340 | it's difficult to take the 90 minutes.

00:44:30.480 | It can take a while to really get your arms around things.

00:44:33.300 | So I've been struggling with that too.

00:44:34.240 | I think on paper, Friday, end of day makes all the sense in the world, but I psychologically,

00:44:38.720 | yeah, it's difficult.

00:44:40.080 | Monday makes more sense, but it's hard to give it the time Monday morning.

00:44:43.340 | It's an important link in the multi scale chain though.

00:44:46.240 | Yeah.

00:44:46.620 | You got to get that week in there because you can't just go from quarter to day.

00:44:49.720 | Like I think that you, you, yeah, the week, the week really unlock, you can build a lot

00:44:54.220 | more momentum.

00:44:54.940 | I want to finish the conscore thing really quick is that I think actually like what I'm

00:44:59.620 | experimenting with at work right now is trying to promote this as a broader metric, not just

00:45:05.400 | within my company and my work, but like within the field of architecture, you know?

00:45:10.640 | And well, I've told you if people had to do this every day in a normal office job, you

00:45:15.600 | couldn't hide from the fact like we would have to burn down the building where they make

00:45:20.040 | Microsoft Outlook.

00:45:20.860 | Yeah.

00:45:21.200 | Like people are like, well, this is just, wait a second.

00:45:23.080 | Oh my God.

00:45:24.000 | What I'm doing in this job is making me miserable.

00:45:25.980 | There's no metrics in knowledge work.

00:45:27.440 | I call it the metric black hole, you know, in deep work.

00:45:29.380 | It's like if people were actually measuring that, they'd be like, I am upset.

00:45:32.340 | I did email and meetings all day.

00:45:34.000 | That's not a plus one day.

00:45:35.260 | So now I have access to within my company, I have access to real researchers, anthropologists

00:45:40.060 | and ethnographers and people with like masters and this stuff and PhDs in social

00:45:44.600 | sciences and like my, my personal background is in like high performance buildings from

00:45:52.900 | an energy and resource standpoint, like zero energy buildings, buildings that use very

00:45:56.900 | little water or have a little carbon footprint.

00:45:58.440 | That was really easy and objective because those metrics are counted.

00:46:02.980 | Here's how many volts you can build a model.

00:46:05.480 | Yeah.

00:46:05.740 | You know, but if you ask somebody build me a high performance workplace that makes my

00:46:11.360 | people happier, more productive, you can't look at a mechanical engineer and they're going

00:46:15.780 | to be totally worthless, you know, but you can ask a social scientist, you know, and they

00:46:20.220 | can give you some metrics.

00:46:20.960 | But like, I think that this con score thing, like if you had, so this is what I'm, uh, I

00:46:26.500 | want to experiment with within my own office is get a series of my colleagues tracking.

00:46:31.660 | Okay.

00:46:32.060 | Yeah.

00:46:32.460 | And we have some underutilized parts of our office, like a couple like conference rooms

00:46:36.460 | and old offices that aren't really used for anything.

00:46:38.540 | And, um, so I want to get a group of people tracking and then anonymize and pool the Collins

00:46:46.300 | score.

00:46:46.540 | And to be clear about it, practically speaking, you're putting down the score number and then

00:46:52.620 | a sentence or two without overthinking it.

00:46:54.660 | Just in the moment, why did you put down that score and that he leaves vague, right?

00:47:01.000 | And it's one sentence, two sentences.

00:47:02.540 | So my tracker that I'm designing is a slight modification on Collins based on my own sort

00:47:07.560 | of, how dare you?

00:47:08.300 | Yeah, I know.

00:47:08.760 | Oh, it's, it's funny.

00:47:10.080 | Usually I try to default towards Collins, but, um, and he actually, I think folds his personal

00:47:14.760 | life and his work life together.

00:47:15.920 | That's a tough decision for me.

00:47:17.100 | I'm trying to just separate it and just focus on work stuff.

00:47:19.620 | Yeah, but he, to him, it's all the same thing.

00:47:20.960 | Yeah.

00:47:21.100 | Yeah.

00:47:21.300 | Um, but, uh, in the morning, uh, the, the tracker would ask you two questions.

00:47:26.980 | One, what time are you going to shut down?

00:47:28.940 | Two, which is helpful because then it reminds you to shut down.

00:47:31.920 | And then two, it, uh, what would you have to achieve today to get a plus one?

00:47:35.380 | And then at that time you set, it comes back to you and says, how'd you rate your day?

00:47:40.400 | In your vision, this is an app.

00:47:42.060 | Uh, yeah.

00:47:42.580 | On your phone.

00:47:43.080 | Yeah.

00:47:43.300 | Uh, and then how would you rate your day?

00:47:45.560 | Why would you rate it that way?

00:47:48.780 | And then how much hours of creative time or a heads down focused time did you have?

00:47:54.400 | And so what, from the research standpoint, what you would get every day is two, uh, quantitative

00:48:03.620 | metrics and one qualitative metrics.

00:48:05.440 | And that's really the magic because the qual and the quant together create the full picture.

00:48:10.640 | A lot of times people just track quantitative stuff and you can tell like what's going on,

00:48:15.040 | but you have no idea why the qualitative stuff tells you why.

00:48:17.940 | What, what are you going to tell a manager though?

00:48:19.480 | Let's say you do the research, you're doing it at someone's office and you find like, look,

00:48:22.160 | when, when people look at the qualitative and quantitative, when they're able to spend three

00:48:26.180 | hours heads down or something I think is important, they're plus one days.

00:48:29.900 | And when they can't, they're negative days.

00:48:32.420 | You're jumping ahead.

00:48:33.060 | Yeah.

00:48:33.300 | We'll jump ahead.

00:48:34.060 | So like, um, what I want to do with my team is get everybody tracking or get like, this

00:48:41.240 | is opt in.

00:48:41.700 | I'm not going to force anybody to track stuff, you know?

00:48:44.080 | And I think everybody just keeps their own data, but like pools the number anonymously.

00:48:48.440 | Um, but this, so it's accurate.

00:48:51.620 | That's important.

00:48:53.120 | And so, uh, but then what I want to do is I want to take some of these underutilized

00:48:56.540 | spaces and get everybody together and say, okay, Hey guys, and this is a architecture group.

00:49:01.260 | So we, we know about designing space, but I want to be really intentional and say, what,

00:49:06.780 | how could we reallocate these spaces that give us the best chance of upping our collective

00:49:12.180 | con score?

00:49:12.680 | What would we turn these into that would make us even happier or more productive and more

00:49:17.800 | effective architects?

00:49:18.720 | Would you then measure it?

00:49:19.860 | That's the idea.

00:49:20.300 | And then we just keep tracking and you can, through the qualitative data, you should be able to

00:49:24.920 | point to these things.

00:49:26.220 | And you know, the, the, the subjectivity piece, some people view it, uh, I think fairly as a,

00:49:33.200 | as a vulnerability because you're like, well, what if you get a nasty text from,

00:49:36.500 | somebody, you know, from your spouse, is that going to affect your con score that day?

00:49:41.320 | But like the, the, the constant day after day, after day, after day, like you build trends

00:49:47.880 | really fast, you know?

00:49:49.540 | And, and so I, I'll tell you, I've become so effective at this that I changed my own personal

00:49:57.300 | scale from negative one, zero one, 1.5 and two, because I'm so, I, I reserve twos for really

00:50:05.540 | exquisite days, but I'm so regular at one that I'm trying to push it a little further,

00:50:12.220 | you know?

00:50:12.640 | And I've never had a negative two.

00:50:14.740 | Well, so, so what, what have you changed in your life?

00:50:18.160 | Because of this?

00:50:19.520 | Yeah.

00:50:19.840 | Um, I think I, I take on less for sure.

00:50:25.400 | So when you're, when you're busier, you had a harder time getting good scores.

00:50:29.520 | Yeah.

00:50:29.920 | Because you always feel inadequate.

00:50:31.520 | Yeah.

00:50:32.180 | You're always feeling like you're chasing or you're on the hamster wheel or whatever.

00:50:36.660 | I mean, or you're, you're, you're too ambitious about the amount of things you take responsibility

00:50:41.500 | for.

00:50:42.000 | Whereas if like, I would rather get half the number of things done, but do them as like at

00:50:48.160 | a really high level.

00:50:49.200 | It's just an example of like my theory of administrative overhead aggregates.

00:50:53.120 | So the more things you're doing, the more, the bigger fraction of your day has to be spent

00:50:58.160 | not doing things.

00:50:58.840 | That sort of ironic cycle.

00:51:00.520 | Yeah.

00:51:00.720 | Yeah.

00:51:01.400 | I think that's true.

00:51:02.200 | And like there's a, I think you, you would probably understand this and be able to articulate

00:51:07.320 | this better than me, but there's an inherent risk there that if I'm doing less, I'm going

00:51:13.760 | to be perceived as not as interesting or not as well-rounded or not as comprehensive or whatever,

00:51:19.360 | you know?

00:51:20.080 | Whereas if you focus on the things that you're really interested in and curious about, and you

00:51:25.900 | maintain like a long commitment to those, they blossom into, uh, something that's authentically

00:51:33.320 | interesting and exciting and people like, uh, are attracted to that.

00:51:39.640 | A satisfaction engine.

00:51:40.920 | Yeah.

00:51:41.680 | Yeah.

00:51:41.980 | You know, like for what, like they take you seriously.

00:51:43.780 | Like what, what's an example in your life?

00:51:45.560 | Um, so for me, I mean, it is, well, even this conscore thing, you know, like I didn't come

00:51:53.220 | upon that by accident, I came upon that because I'm obsessed with the concept of flourishing

00:51:57.860 | and how to help other people flourish, you know?

00:52:00.140 | And so I'm trying and like, I had developed rare and valuable skills in the high performance

00:52:05.900 | buildings from like an energy resources stuff standpoint.

00:52:09.320 | Yeah.

00:52:09.760 | And now I'm trying to like take what, apply what works over here or to this other place.

00:52:15.780 | Yeah.

00:52:16.220 | You know, that is, that's right on the very edge of what's, you know, innovative in

00:52:22.700 | my field right now.

00:52:23.860 | Right.

00:52:24.120 | So you're saying you're, you're playing the long game on the idea you were just explaining

00:52:27.460 | to us, for example.

00:52:28.220 | Yes.

00:52:28.580 | But working on that and continuing to work on that might be a big innovation in the field.

00:52:33.720 | And that is a choice versus you could be much busier with many more smaller projects,

00:52:38.180 | which like in the moment would make it feel like you had your finger in a lot of pies and

00:52:41.580 | we're getting after it and et cetera, et cetera, but I can take that concept.

00:52:45.660 | I mean, I've got a, there are a series of conferences that are influential in my field and I want

00:52:51.680 | to use, I have, I have the vision for a slide to start the talks that are coming this fall.

00:52:58.000 | That is like 0.012 and then arrow and like 1.15.

00:53:04.820 | And like, that would be like my office's count score moving from like hovering around zero to

00:53:10.900 | like plus ones.

00:53:12.380 | This is like, that's going from languishing to flourishing objectively, you know?

00:53:17.820 | Right.

00:53:18.160 | So if you can have that slide, if I can just work towards that slide, man, baby, we, I spent

00:53:22.980 | like we tried this in the physical space, then it changed the score.

00:53:26.300 | And then we tried this and it made a big difference.

00:53:27.900 | Yeah.

00:53:28.380 | It's whatever it is.

00:53:29.340 | And it might not work.

00:53:29.960 | Yeah.

00:53:30.280 | You know, and I'm like a little bit probably in a kind of a petty way, afraid that I'm going

00:53:37.820 | to try this thing and people are going to reject it or whatever.

00:53:40.220 | But, um, I don't care that much.

00:53:42.460 | Like my ego has been diminished.

00:53:44.360 | Like through, do you think the score keeping the score helped motivate the farm in the sense

00:53:50.380 | that now when you're thinking about your life in this way, you're thinking this is going

00:53:53.400 | to be a plus two generator.

00:53:55.160 | Well, I know for a fact that I was, I didn't know that it would be as effective as plus

00:54:00.320 | two generator as possible.

00:54:01.720 | And like, I literally, I was like, I remember, it's funny that you mentioned this, this memory

00:54:08.040 | kind of flashes back, but, um, you know, like chest notation, like how they give like exclamation

00:54:15.060 | points next to good moves.

00:54:16.100 | And like, if it's a really good move, it gets two exclamation points.

00:54:18.980 | It's kind of similar to the plus, plus two thing.

00:54:20.860 | I know this from you.

00:54:21.560 | You explained this to me once.

00:54:22.420 | Yeah.

00:54:22.560 | Yeah.

00:54:22.800 | And in all the chest notation I've ever seen, I saw one three exclamation point move, which

00:54:28.580 | was Bobby Fisher's game of the century.

00:54:30.160 | Uh, and like, uh, Ruben finds like, uh, commentary on that game.

00:54:34.500 | But like the day we actually got the farm was the only plus three day I've ever had.

00:54:39.160 | You mean the, when you're walking through the property, like we signed the contract at the

00:54:42.520 | bank and we went over and it's like, oh, you know, that was plus three day, you know?

00:54:46.800 | And I was just so happy, but what I didn't anticipate was that, and we got it in January

00:54:53.800 | in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan during a winter that was cold as hell.

00:54:57.720 | Right.

00:54:58.040 | So it's not like a beautiful, a beautiful spring day that the birds were chirping.

00:55:01.760 | Yeah.

00:55:02.080 | No, no, no.

00:55:02.440 | And, uh, so our initial wave of work to get it kind of going, I was working out there when

00:55:08.180 | it was like 10 degrees every day, every single day in that first month that I was there was

00:55:15.500 | a plus two.

00:55:15.900 | Did you, you spent like a whole month out there?

00:55:17.660 | Yeah.

00:55:17.900 | Yeah.

00:55:18.280 | Every day plus two.

00:55:19.760 | And I like, I'd never expected or experienced anything like that.

00:55:24.300 | It was just, you know, and now they're not all plus two days out there.

00:55:27.320 | But like, it was so great, you know?

00:55:30.440 | And, um, uh, yeah.

00:55:33.820 | Wow.

00:55:34.620 | But, uh, that's not the, that's not the, I don't think that's the point.

00:55:40.780 | The point isn't huge string of plus twos.

00:55:43.060 | The, the point is trying to get from trying to just live a flourishing life, you know?

00:55:50.860 | And that's why I think, I think the days that are, you know, for a lot of people who zeroes

00:55:59.860 | are the days where you just feel what happened.

00:56:03.920 | Yeah.

00:56:04.880 | Where did today go?

00:56:05.580 | Yeah.

00:56:06.060 | You know, and what happened is that, you know, your device still had your concentration

00:56:10.600 | and you spent too much time worrying about things that you can't control and reading about them

00:56:15.040 | in the New York times, you know, and letting people live rent free in your head, uh, instead

00:56:20.140 | of just getting control of your, your own situation.

00:56:23.140 | Yeah.

00:56:24.060 | I mean, what's interesting to me, to me about it is like, if we look at your life,

00:56:28.000 | for example, it's not built on some radical decision.

00:56:31.780 | It's not built on, I was miserable.

00:56:35.320 | This is the cliche.

00:56:36.260 | And we moved to a sailboat and whatever.

00:56:39.060 | And it's some very like, and through the radicalness of it, this way I like the call and score idea

00:56:43.440 | is I feel like it allows you to explore the landscape of possibilities in your life more

00:56:47.000 | systematically and build out a flourishing life, which is different necessarily than a life

00:56:52.740 | built around some sort of central radical decision.

00:56:55.580 | So it's built, my life is built on the ashes of a failed radical decision, you know, and the,

00:57:03.460 | uh, but like it was a youthful, you know, indiscretion, let's say where like when I was an undergrad,

00:57:10.400 | I tried to do, um, a sort of a heroic, uh, you know, design build project in Central America,

00:57:17.600 | you know, the poor community.

00:57:19.460 | And I didn't have a sustainable skillset.

00:57:22.720 | So even though it was like really deeply aligned with my mission and my values and even like

00:57:26.900 | the skills I was building, I didn't have the ability to execute.

00:57:30.100 | But this was a thing back then, right?

00:57:32.280 | I remember this.

00:57:32.980 | There was like the, the late nineties, early thousands, this idea of, it's like project water.

00:57:38.520 | It was like this fall, your passion to be useful though.

00:57:42.200 | Right.

00:57:42.440 | And it was like the ideas you would go somewhere and build a school is a big thing.

00:57:46.620 | Right.

00:57:46.940 | Pencils and promise.

00:57:48.820 | Yeah.

00:57:49.300 | Project water.

00:57:50.080 | Like this was, I was right in the mix.

00:57:51.760 | Three cups of tea.

00:57:53.200 | Yeah.

00:57:53.740 | Yeah.

00:57:54.120 | Yeah.

00:57:54.360 | And even design for, or architecture for humanity.

00:57:56.580 | Um, so a lot of it, what, this is actually what like the Dalai Lama calls sloppy sympathy.

00:58:03.700 | You go to a place where you, you see a problem, you want to help, you throw a little energy

00:58:10.040 | at it.

00:58:10.460 | But if you really want to be helpful, you have to move there and you have to like transform

00:58:15.120 | your whole life and, and be extremely humble.

00:58:18.440 | Yeah.

00:58:19.280 | You know, and accept a lot of failure before you probably get successful.

00:58:22.980 | And I did not take that approach.

00:58:24.840 | Some people do take that approach and they like, they're, they, they do really impressive

00:58:28.940 | work, but like, I felt the sting of taking the leap before I was ready.

00:58:34.100 | And what happens is you get alien.

00:58:39.620 | You, the failure alienates you from the thing that you really love, you know?

00:58:43.860 | So, um, I think the goal got confused with the thing, the goal was the, the vision here's

00:58:50.340 | something that's important to me.

00:58:51.320 | Yeah.

00:58:51.760 | We often confuse it with the radical goal.

00:58:53.500 | Well, if I do this radical goal, which was inspired by this feeling of whatever it is,

00:58:58.580 | I want to be helpful or whatever it is, but then the radical goal becomes the thing.

00:59:01.500 | And so when that fails, you, you lose the connection.

00:59:04.820 | We talked about lifestyle-centric planning, the difference between the, the properties you're

00:59:09.060 | looking for in your life and the particular things that might generate those things in

00:59:12.580 | your life.

00:59:12.940 | Yeah.

00:59:13.840 | I'm with you.

00:59:17.180 | I'll, I'll give you another example that's contemporary for me.

00:59:21.320 | But what happened?

00:59:21.900 | Finish the story though.

00:59:22.600 | So what happened?

00:59:22.980 | Oh, so what happened is that it was a, the project was a failure.

00:59:25.840 | I felt humiliated, but I kind of nursed that wound for a long time.

00:59:30.720 | But then I, you know, I, that's when I came across so good.

00:59:33.260 | They can't ignore you.

00:59:34.000 | And I like, I started like connecting dots.

00:59:37.580 | Oh, rare and valuable skills.

00:59:40.560 | Okay.

00:59:41.100 | So there are rare and valuable skills you would need to be successful in that environment

00:59:44.540 | rather than just an architect working in Tacoma Park.

00:59:47.100 | Um, oh, career capital.

00:59:49.200 | You know, maybe I shouldn't have like skipped steps here.

00:59:52.560 | Maybe I should have become an effective human being first and then gone on to those types

00:59:57.300 | of things.

00:59:57.940 | So, um, that, that was really, uh, that was really meaningful in terms of, you know, creating

01:00:08.920 | a structure where I had like greater patients, a different set of expectations about what was

01:00:14.040 | possible.

01:00:14.420 | And so like a big project that I'm, uh, gearing up to take on right now is writing a book,

01:00:21.140 | uh, on spaces of hyper-creativity, which I think is a good idea, the architecture of hyper-creativity.

01:00:27.620 | But the reason that you think it's a good idea probably is because it checks, I've taken the

01:00:33.700 | time to check the other boxes about like, um, is writing something I can even do or like writing

01:00:41.140 | for editing something I can do.

01:00:42.120 | Is this an interesting idea?

01:00:43.920 | But I could see a lot of people that are listening to this that might be nursing book projects of

01:00:47.480 | their own being like, okay, I'm going to throw a ton of energy at this.

01:00:50.720 | And then if it fails, they're going to feel shitty about it, you know?

01:00:54.340 | And that's unfortunate.

01:00:56.000 | And it doesn't have to kind of be that way.

01:00:58.120 | You can take a more measured methodical approach into like Brad Stahlberg's kind of thing.

01:01:02.840 | It's like the consistency and like owning up to the fact that like the consistency is more

01:01:07.600 | important than the intensity.

01:01:09.640 | And I would say with that early project of mine that was a failure, it was intensity

01:01:13.600 | over consistency for sure, you know?

01:01:15.360 | Um, and then acknowledging upfront that every single day you sit down to write, it's going

01:01:22.120 | to probably be painful.

01:01:23.060 | Yeah.

01:01:23.620 | You know, and just being, or sometimes it's not.

01:01:25.820 | And if it's not, uh, enjoy that and ride that wave as long as you can.

01:01:29.100 | Uh, but if, if, if, if it's not going well, that's okay.

01:01:33.160 | Just keep grinding.

01:01:34.020 | It's like building something.

01:01:35.460 | Yeah.

01:01:36.040 | Some days it's a pain.

01:01:36.940 | Yeah.

01:01:37.260 | And the joints don't fit that day.

01:01:39.000 | Your cuts aren't great.

01:01:39.840 | It's tedious that day.

01:01:41.680 | And if, man, it helps if you enjoy building stuff, you know, like if people look at this

01:01:47.000 | farm project and you know, they're like, was that fun?

01:01:51.620 | And I'm like, yeah, for me, it was great.

01:01:53.940 | Really fun.

01:01:54.940 | You know, so if you can figure out a way to like, and my wife is different.

01:01:59.020 | She doesn't like to do construction stuff.

01:02:00.600 | So it's not plus two days for her if she's swinging a hammer or sawing stuff.

01:02:05.040 | Yeah.

01:02:05.600 | For me, it's great.

01:02:06.180 | Yeah.

01:02:06.660 | Yeah.

01:02:07.020 | Yeah.

01:02:07.460 | Yeah.

01:02:08.260 | Yeah.

01:02:09.940 | Yeah.

01:02:10.540 | Well, so you came out of, I always, when I talk to you, I internalize a lot.

01:02:20.760 | Yeah.

01:02:21.120 | Yeah.

01:02:21.560 | What do you mean?

01:02:21.920 | I do.

01:02:22.220 | Well, about, about your, your, your approach.

01:02:24.980 | I like the intention of it, but I like that you're, you act on it.

01:02:28.780 | You know, you make, you make choices, you make changes.

01:02:33.760 | It's easy to get stuck in the zeros or to get stuck in, this isn't quite working.

01:02:39.820 | There's a lot of negative ones happening, but it seems difficult to change.

01:02:43.360 | And I think you're better at, you're not scared of change.

01:02:47.040 | Would you say this is fair?

01:02:49.320 | Like the difference between you back then and now is you're not afraid of change.

01:02:51.840 | It's just your change is more evidence-based now than it was before.

01:02:55.880 | It's not on a vibe.

01:02:57.080 | You have data, personal data, insight data.

01:03:01.580 | You're like, okay, this is going to be better.

01:03:03.660 | So why wouldn't I do it?

01:03:04.660 | I feel like the core skills are so strong that even if whatever I'm currently focused on was

01:03:11.400 | a failure, I can reapply the same skill set to the next challenge.

01:03:15.480 | And I'm like, I feel like a very effective person, you know, I think, I think the, the positive

01:03:22.940 | thing about a lot of the systems that you have, you know, invented or aggregated or whatever

01:03:29.920 | clarified for people is that they get things out of your head so that you're not spending

01:03:36.020 | time circular thinking about something, you know, and you, you're able to then be more present

01:03:45.100 | in the moment so that when you're working on something, you're applying your whole consciousness

01:03:52.320 | towards it so that it like, and then like life is just easier, man.

01:03:56.520 | I mean, how do you, I think what's interesting also about your story is you have a job that

01:04:02.720 | it's like a traditional knowledge work, like high skill job, but you still have this life

01:04:08.660 | that's very like intentional.

01:04:09.480 | So how do you bring that thinking to a job where you have an email address, you have a calendar

01:04:14.100 | because often people think, look, if I really want to change my life in a way that's going

01:04:17.200 | to be like plus one plus twos all the time, I have to be like a novelist.

01:04:21.620 | I got to leave my job there.

01:04:23.160 | I can't also have a calendar and zoom and email.

01:04:28.120 | Your job could be overwhelming and distracting and languishing.

01:04:33.100 | So I can just look side to side and see my peers.

01:04:36.040 | So how do you keep it different?

01:04:38.140 | What's the key, the David DeWayne's approach to knowledge work?

01:04:41.140 | I think it's about managing, becoming really good at managing expectations and becoming really,

01:04:56.040 | really good about managing time.

01:04:58.620 | I consider, like when I, when I show somebody like my time block planner, I describe it as

01:05:05.840 | the most essential mental health tool I've ever had.

01:05:11.460 | Yeah.

01:05:12.320 | You know, and like, I think that, um, I think like I'm an ambitious person, you know, like

01:05:20.640 | I want to achieve something, you know, that's meaningful in my field, but I don't.

01:05:28.360 | So I take it seriously, but I like at the same time, if like I, I view the effort more

01:05:35.000 | important than the rewards, you know, and this is like just classic philosophy stuff, you

01:05:39.860 | know, try to disassociate the fruits of the laborers and the labor itself, you know, but

01:05:43.660 | it doesn't let, it lets you slow down to slow productivity principle is you, it's like the

01:05:48.920 | project you're working on this vision you have for using these numerical scores to change

01:05:53.260 | architecture.

01:05:53.720 | Yeah.

01:05:54.180 | It's not really going to matter in the longterm until we have this right.

01:05:57.080 | It's like my Apple pay for architecture.

01:05:58.760 | Yeah.

01:05:59.100 | And if that happens six months from now or a year from, it doesn't matter to you.

01:06:03.180 | It doesn't have to be done as fast as possible.

01:06:04.860 | What matters is you're working on it gets done.

01:06:07.280 | And like the hyper creativity book, which would be great because then it would be, it would

01:06:12.400 | put into people's path, uh, principles that are like they could apply.

01:06:18.140 | Yeah.

01:06:18.480 | You know?

01:06:18.940 | And I think I just have this personal kind of feeling that as we go into the AI, uh, kind

01:06:25.520 | of an era that creativity is going to become a coin of the realm.

01:06:30.640 | Yeah.

01:06:31.280 | You know, human creativity is going to be really, really important when it be, because a lot

01:06:36.120 | of the, a lot of the grinding work is going to be relieved.

01:06:43.520 | And the, what should we do?

01:06:46.820 | Why should we do it?

01:06:48.460 | You know, it's going to be, um, is going to surface.

01:06:51.540 | So like when you study the, the environments around creative people and the process of creativity

01:06:57.340 | itself and get that out there into the public domain, like, man, that's, that's, if I could

01:07:01.600 | just do that, I would be pretty happy.

01:07:04.000 | But to be more concrete, like how do you avoid, for example, in your position, you have a team

01:07:07.820 | not, let's say, check an email every five minutes.

01:07:10.420 | I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll,

01:07:11.980 | I'll check email probably too much.

01:07:13.380 | Yeah.

01:07:13.980 | Yeah.

01:07:14.660 | It's, it's not something I feel great about, but, uh, you know, the, the tools are powerful.

01:07:21.380 | The, the, the, and the grip that they have on your consciousness is really powerful.

01:07:25.060 | What about meetings?

01:07:25.840 | Um, again, I, I, I think, I think a lot of people, I, I think the thing that's kind of

01:07:40.880 | freed me up a little bit is not being paranoid that like my calendar looks empty to other people

01:07:46.520 | that are sharing my calendar with me.

01:07:47.820 | Yeah.

01:07:48.140 | Partially because I, I have a physical planner, so I, I don't write a lot of this.

01:07:53.520 | I don't take the step of putting everything I do into Google calendar, but also, um, like

01:08:02.100 | I don't equate it with value.

01:08:04.240 | My value comes from a totally different realm and I am like laser focused on trying to create

01:08:09.680 | value in the way.

01:08:10.720 | And like my, the people that I report to understand what I'm trying to do and they've given me the

01:08:16.020 | time and to a degree, maybe I've earned the, the, the, the permission to get control of how

01:08:22.140 | I do that.

01:08:23.760 | Um, but that means practically saying no to more meetings, uh, periods of inaccessibility,

01:08:27.680 | uh, shutdowns.

01:08:30.280 | There's so, there are people that I look at all around me that are probably in too many

01:08:34.620 | meetings.

01:08:35.040 | Yeah.

01:08:35.480 | You know, and if you really just buckle down and say like, Hey, you know, I, like, I can't,

01:08:41.060 | I can't go to everything.

01:08:42.320 | Can I skip this one and just go ahead?

01:08:44.420 | I don't know.

01:08:45.760 | The, when people trust you, have your act together on your time.

01:08:48.340 | Yeah.

01:08:48.920 | They give you leeway.

01:08:49.720 | Just out of curiosity.

01:08:50.820 | Did you look at the, uh, planes of marathon thing?

01:08:52.960 | Which one?

01:08:54.720 | The planes of marathon.

01:08:55.680 | The email I sent you the other day about, um, cause I was, I was captivated by your Elon

01:09:01.080 | Musk conversation with Brad Stahlberg and, uh, Clay.

01:09:04.100 | Was the guy's name?

01:09:05.160 | Yeah.

01:09:05.500 | Clay Skipper.

01:09:06.200 | Yeah.

01:09:06.480 | And it was about like, and I think this is another thing where people, I would imagine

01:09:10.400 | people in your audience and even me, like you look at somebody like Elon Musk and you're

01:09:13.560 | so enamored, at least pre Twitter with like the stuff that this person was able to accomplish.

01:09:19.900 | And that's like, you kind of hold that up as this is what success looks like.

01:09:23.580 | Right.

01:09:23.800 | Yeah.

01:09:24.300 | And me though.

01:09:25.660 | Trust me out.

01:09:26.200 | But yeah, I did this exercise, uh, as a kind of like, and again, like this is, I did

01:09:33.540 | a kind of a private writing project that was a buildup to my real attempt at like, uh, commercial

01:09:39.900 | writing and, but just to get in the habit of day after day after day writing.

01:09:44.200 | And so this project was, it was very personal.

01:09:47.260 | It was a letter to my daughter and it was about the, like painting a picture for her about like

01:09:53.900 | the really beautiful moments in my life and what it felt like to be me at these different

01:09:57.860 | times, you know?

01:09:58.920 | And I collected a handful of maybe 20 vignettes.

01:10:03.440 | And after that conversation where you're talking about Elon and like our, our society

01:10:11.420 | or our culture's sense of status and sense of accomplishment and sense of success, I look

01:10:17.620 | back at that list and they're very Monday moments.

01:10:22.280 | There's nothing in there that's about like a huge professional accomplishment.

01:10:25.480 | There's nothing in there that's about like brushing up against a celebrity, you know,

01:10:30.320 | it's all just like, it's like a moment on the farm, like working in the orchard, you know,

01:10:36.240 | or like working on a building project.

01:10:37.880 | It's about, um, an early morning writing session and my daughter sneaks up on me, you know, and

01:10:46.380 | I have this like nice moment with her, you know, when she's little and I, you know, um,

01:10:51.240 | you know, or like the, like a child's birth or something like when you really think about

01:10:57.160 | like deep life for me, it's like those moments, like enjoy what you have.

01:11:05.140 | Don't peg so much of your sense of self-worth on like a grandiose accomplishment, like on

01:11:15.900 | revolutionizing the electric car industry in America, you know?

01:11:20.560 | And like, I think if you, if you connect or if you were able to peer into the lives of people

01:11:27.940 | that have done those things, I bet you would find that they made a lot of personal sacrifices

01:11:34.900 | that would be pretty grim.

01:11:37.460 | Yeah.

01:11:38.000 | Lonely.

01:11:38.500 | Yeah.

01:11:39.200 | Alienating.

01:11:39.900 | Yeah.

01:11:40.700 | Yeah.

01:11:41.020 | So like when I think about deep life, I mean, I think about like, I've lost one day, you know?

01:11:50.120 | Yeah.

01:11:50.480 | I mean, it's engineering your life.

01:11:51.780 | That's one way to look at it.

01:11:52.640 | Engineering a life so that you have more plus ones.

01:11:54.880 | And it's not too hard to avoid the negatives.

01:11:57.840 | Yeah.

01:11:58.660 | It's the trend.

01:11:59.960 | Yeah.

01:12:00.380 | It's the big trend, you know?

01:12:02.000 | Yeah.

01:12:02.340 | And being, um, yeah, like being super intentional about it.

01:12:08.360 | Yeah.

01:12:08.920 | Yeah.

01:12:09.240 | Yeah.

01:12:09.720 | So, so this is what, this is what bugs me or you'll, we can, we can jointly crack on

01:12:15.500 | these people, but there are a lot of people that look at scans at self-help, you

01:12:19.700 | know, and the, this whole like advice and like productivity and like that, this whole

01:12:24.400 | subculture, you know?

01:12:25.440 | Yeah.

01:12:25.900 | You mean like the reviewers at the New York times book review?

01:12:28.260 | Perhaps.

01:12:29.360 | They don't seem to appreciate it.

01:12:31.720 | I've learned.

01:12:32.100 | Yeah.

01:12:33.060 | But, um, I think if you, like, if you really, I feel like I've been on both sides of this.

01:12:42.900 | I've been on the, I've been on the, um, sort of hapless.

01:12:49.280 | Don Quixote style, passion driven mindset, follow your passions guy.

01:12:54.640 | Um, and ridden that wave.

01:12:57.600 | Um, but I've also been on the, like very regimented, very disciplined, very patient, very slow, um,

01:13:06.140 | very focused side of this.

01:13:08.280 | And it's just better.

01:13:09.420 | You know, it's not fancy.

01:13:11.800 | It's not, um, it hasn't made me rich.

01:13:14.520 | Yeah.

01:13:15.000 | Like in terms of money, but it's made me extremely rich just in terms of like my overall life

01:13:18.940 | satisfaction.

01:13:19.440 | Yeah.

01:13:19.880 | You know?

01:13:20.480 | Yeah.

01:13:20.980 | I mean, I, I have this argument often with, with the anti-productivity crowd, many members

01:13:26.720 | of whom I really like and respect because I think they're onto something and, uh, but they,

01:13:31.700 | they often, I think the setup, which I don't buy is look, if there's structure in your life,

01:13:36.860 | then you're somehow internalizing capitalist narratives or Protestant work ethic, or it's

01:13:43.540 | some sort of exploitative relationship from a cultural superstructure to your life that's

01:13:47.160 | benefiting other people.

01:13:48.240 | And that the true, I can see that, but like, it doesn't, it doesn't take a lot of thinking

01:13:52.880 | to, to just realize that you don't deep work to do more for the man deep work to work less

01:13:59.160 | and to make your work better.

01:14:00.520 | If I could, if I could go back in time, I mean, I went to, uh, punishing graduate program

01:14:07.480 | like architecture.

01:14:08.920 | Yeah.

01:14:09.300 | Yeah.

01:14:09.640 | Um, it was, it was so, the culture was so intense that I think there were 24 people in my graduating

01:14:17.220 | class, 17 of them were medicated for anxiety and depression because we were in our like studios

01:14:25.280 | constantly, you know?

01:14:27.460 | And the people that weren't there were sort of like marginalized a little bit socially,

01:14:32.500 | not serious.

01:14:33.160 | Yeah.

01:14:33.480 | Like, why are you, why did you even take up somebody else's, somebody else could have gotten

01:14:37.920 | that spot and been here with us, you know, man, if I could go back in time and, uh, I think

01:14:46.980 | I could have done better work, been such a, like a much healthier person and worked less time.

01:14:57.340 | Just simply by having like better time management, better, like the ability to concentrate, you

01:15:05.460 | know, and also not like, and, and readjusted my expectations and not tried to like do everything.

01:15:11.940 | Yeah.

01:15:12.540 | You know?

01:15:13.020 | So, yeah.

01:15:14.520 | I mean, people don't, what they don't often get, like people who will look at deep work,

01:15:17.980 | for example, and, and be like, well, this is all about maximization.

01:15:23.380 | Right.

01:15:23.820 | So I often get the critique of like, man, this is all about just like squeezing everything

01:15:28.500 | out of the day.

01:15:29.300 | And what about people who can't squeeze as much out of the day?

01:15:31.620 | And what's often missed is like that book was the followup to so good they can't ignore

01:15:35.200 | you.

01:15:35.420 | Like it was the answer to the question.

01:15:37.500 | So good they can't ignore you said, if you have valuable skills, you can create your own

01:15:41.000 | life.

01:15:41.260 | And, and clearly you could see the bias in that book, that the visions I had of life

01:15:45.020 | was like yours right now.

01:15:45.980 | I was, you know, you have autonomy, you have control over your time.

01:15:49.360 | I was very stressed and I remain very stress sensitive.

01:15:52.820 | So it was a big, uh, motivating factor of that book is why do I want control?

01:15:56.900 | Cause I don't want a life that looks like Elon Musk, right?

01:16:00.380 | I don't want, I'm running three companies and a master of the universe and have meetings

01:16:04.420 | all day.

01:16:04.740 | I want control and you can get control by being good at things that are rare and valuable.

01:16:07.580 | And deep work was like, well, how do you do that?

01:16:09.220 | And like, well, okay, uh, focus, focusing on stuff, deliberate practice, get better, do

01:16:14.840 | the stuff that really matters.

01:16:15.980 | You don't have to be busy.

01:16:17.200 | Right.

01:16:18.020 | So it's kind of ironic that for some people, deep work is seen as some sort of like hustle

01:16:22.640 | culture bro manifesto of, of like crushing it and getting after it, where to me, that was

01:16:27.320 | the skeleton key for unlocking, being able to go to the farm on the weekend.

01:16:31.020 | When I think about deep work, I just think about eudaimonia.

01:16:34.060 | It's another, it's a synonym.

01:16:36.040 | Yeah.

01:16:36.860 | You know, and you know, for those of your audience that don't know what eudaimonia is,

01:16:42.280 | look up the Wikipedia entry, but it's, it's a old term that, uh, the Greeks had just like

01:16:47.780 | many Greek terms.

01:16:48.620 | I'd always say flourishing would be my translation.

01:16:50.420 | Yeah.

01:16:51.300 | Deep human flourishing.

01:16:52.800 | But like, what's also cool about eudaimonia is that it like the weak translation is happiness,

01:16:57.520 | but like in contemporary culture, happiness comes and goes like you could be unhappy in this

01:17:03.040 | meeting and happy in the next meeting and then unhappy again.

01:17:05.580 | Eudaimonia was not that.

01:17:06.560 | Eudaimonia was like, um, like, uh, uh, uh, it was the trend.

01:17:15.000 | Are you, are you on the trend?

01:17:16.920 | Yeah.

01:17:17.320 | The right trend.

01:17:18.020 | And so like, uh, yeah, I think about, but it's also like the feeling, it's like the flow

01:17:23.180 | feeling or like, like a highly, you know, concentrated feeling.

01:17:26.760 | And like, if you're applying that to, you know, like the, uh, what was cool about eudaimonia

01:17:32.420 | eudaimonia in the way that Aristotle describes it in the ethics is that even an inanimate

01:17:37.940 | object could express eudaimonia.

01:17:40.140 | So like for a knife, uh, I think is the example he uses it's to be sharp and cutting something.

01:17:46.480 | Yeah.

01:17:46.700 | It's very teleological.

01:17:48.040 | Yeah.

01:17:48.260 | So it's like, uh, it, like the easiest way to think about that is like for you, what is

01:17:53.900 | the best version of yourself and how are you engaged?

01:17:57.140 | You know?

01:17:57.780 | And so I think like, you know, something like deep work, it's, it's not about, yeah,

01:18:04.480 | it's not about piling up more capital.

01:18:06.420 | It's about being sharp and engaged, you know?

01:18:10.940 | Yeah.

01:18:11.200 | So, yeah.

01:18:12.360 | Yeah.

01:18:12.900 | And that was my, my program was different than yours.

01:18:14.660 | Like my grad program experience, the theory group over there at MIT, working too much would

01:18:20.320 | be bad.

01:18:20.820 | Like they had their own pathologies, but if you are working too hard, that might mean you're

01:18:24.380 | not smart.

01:18:25.520 | And like for them, the ultimate was coming up with a brilliant idea, like a math insight,

01:18:31.400 | solving a theorem, being smart, being a monster mind.

01:18:34.600 | And so it was not a, it was a high stress place in the sense that huge imposter syndrome.

01:18:38.700 | But if you could get over that, it was completely reasonable.

01:18:41.800 | You're like, yeah, I'm not here.

01:18:42.480 | I'm, I, I want to come in and stare at the whiteboard and like solve a proof and then go

01:18:47.140 | play bongos or whatever.

01:18:48.100 | Like that would be like, that's really impressive.

01:18:50.000 | It had its own pathologies, but I think that also laid an interesting idea in my mind.

01:18:54.020 | It was like, yeah, focusing could be very valuable.

01:18:56.300 | It's very human.

01:18:56.920 | I mean, Aristotle thought that was ultimately the theology of all people was deep thinking

01:19:01.680 | because only humans can do that.

01:19:02.780 | That must be human purpose.

01:19:04.380 | But they really didn't value busyness.

01:19:07.640 | Yeah.

01:19:08.400 | And that really stuck.

01:19:09.840 | And I think that stuck with me as I was writing my books and thinking about things.

01:19:13.860 | It's like, I came up in a place where busyness, like what value is there in busyness?

01:19:17.840 | Like, what does that have to do in their lingo?

01:19:19.840 | What does that have to do with solving proofs?

01:19:21.620 | Like that could only get in the way.

01:19:23.660 | And so there was something nice to see that purity.

01:19:27.300 | It's also brutal because you're always being judged if you're smart or not, but it was simple.

01:19:33.620 | Yeah, I think, you know, like for whatever reason, this is where my mind's going when you're talking about this,

01:19:40.060 | is that like I think a good life is where you're, I mean, I talked earlier about the alternating,

01:19:46.100 | like my sort of, my charmed life of being alternating between like city life where I feel really engaged and charged or charged up

01:19:55.920 | and then country life where I feel very slow.

01:19:58.400 | I think in like a, in a more day-to-day zone, it's like the ability to,

01:20:05.060 | and the ability to concentrate on something and go kind of internal and grind

01:20:11.660 | and then come out of that and share it with somebody and get, and feedback, you know?

01:20:16.800 | And like, it's the, it's the kind of rhythm between highly social, highly focused, you know?

01:20:21.640 | And my, for my longstanding critique on open office spaces is that instead of those things being intentional

01:20:29.960 | and putting like a logical barrier, like visual, audio, proximity barrier between those things,

01:20:35.900 | you're all supposed to, you're supposed to do all that stuff at the cubicle.

01:20:38.900 | Yeah.

01:20:39.500 | And at any second, somebody could tap you on the shoulder.

01:20:43.140 | At any second, somebody could send you an email that you have to respond to instantly, you know?

01:20:48.420 | And it is just, it is no way to live effectively.

01:20:52.700 | I've always thought open office is the physical correlate to an email inbox.

01:20:56.120 | The email inbox was like, can't we just have everything come through here?

01:20:59.300 | It always feels like a blender.

01:21:00.440 | Yeah.

01:21:01.040 | It takes your brain, puts in like a Vitamix or whatever and just like, you know?

01:21:05.820 | But this is the cybernetic vision of like the Silicon Valley inspired office, right?

01:21:09.100 | It's like, this is what email and later Slack is.

01:21:10.960 | Like, can't we just be in this hive mind and we're just all talking to each other all the

01:21:14.940 | time.

01:21:15.240 | Things are moving back and forth.

01:21:16.500 | I'm answering your question.

01:21:17.440 | You're answering me this.

01:21:18.040 | You're sending me this file.

01:21:18.820 | What about this?

01:21:19.540 | And our minds will be melded together.

01:21:21.040 | And out of that will come sort of distributed intelligence, which of course misses the way this

01:21:25.660 | wetware actually works in our head because we can't actually, we're not bees.

01:21:29.000 | We can't be plugged into constant unrelated conversations at all time and also flourish or

01:21:35.800 | produce good thoughts or not be completely stressed out.

01:21:38.020 | I pay a social cost at work for resisting Slack.

01:21:41.080 | And I do like, I, I tell people like I only check Slack every once a day or something, you

01:21:47.380 | know, and it annoys people.

01:21:50.040 | Well, it's convenient if everyone's on it.

01:21:53.400 | I, like I, I would have to take a different approach if I was like more in the trenches

01:21:58.340 | on like a project day to day and that's like how the team was communicating and then I would

01:22:01.440 | change my behavior.

01:22:02.160 | But for me right now, it's like, how many more tools do I need to do the exact same thing?

01:22:07.180 | You know, like, uh, let's say it's email versus no email solve some problems.

01:22:13.280 | Fax machines were slow.

01:22:15.500 | Couriers were even slower.

01:22:16.960 | Voicemail was annoying.

01:22:17.960 | It's like email kind of solve those problems.

01:22:20.320 | Yeah.

01:22:21.040 | Okay.

01:22:21.260 | We're good.

01:22:21.620 | Yeah.

01:22:22.260 | Um, and we don't need to use it as constant conversation and we don't need, I mean, I've

01:22:25.780 | always argued Slack is just the, they built the right tool for the wrong way to work.

01:22:29.820 | Like if this is what you're going to do is use email, which was supposed to be a voicemail

01:22:33.940 | fax machine replacement as like an ongoing back and forth conversation machine.

01:22:38.120 | Well, that's not a great tool for doing that.

01:22:40.860 | Slack does that better.

01:22:41.780 | If what you want to do is let's just have everyone be in touch at all times so that there's no

01:22:46.200 | friction and we can keep things moving.

01:22:47.600 | Email has some shortcomings.

01:22:49.240 | So Slack will solve those shortcomings.

01:22:51.180 | So a great tool for implementing that way of collaboration, terrible way of collaborating

01:22:55.300 | outside of like a small team working together on something.

01:22:59.020 | So it was, it's like, that's, it's a love, hate relationship.

01:23:01.960 | I've always said, because if that's the way you're collaborating, like, I love this.

01:23:04.900 | It's better than email, but also you hate that way of collaborating.

01:23:07.880 | So it's like, I don't know what to do.

01:23:09.660 | Yeah.

01:23:10.200 | You know?

01:23:10.920 | Yeah.

01:23:11.380 | Yeah.

01:23:11.880 | Like, uh, yeah, if we're going to use Slack, then let's just get rid of our emails.

01:23:16.900 | Yeah.

01:23:17.560 | You know, there's, I've heard of the architecture office.

01:23:19.660 | One of my colleagues works in where they don't have individual email accounts.

01:23:23.120 | They just have project email accounts.

01:23:24.580 | I've been advocating for this.

01:23:26.120 | Yeah.

01:23:26.680 | Yeah.

01:23:27.120 | It's a cool idea.

01:23:28.220 | It's arbitrary.

01:23:28.820 | The fact that it's a name at domain.com or whatever.

01:23:33.900 | I mean, that's just a, just a happenstance that the original email programs, the mail

01:23:37.260 | demon on Unix was from timeshare computers.

01:23:40.660 | So in timeshare computers, you had to have a login so they could bill you for the time

01:23:45.860 | you were using in the original email.

01:23:47.400 | What it would really do is just leave texts in a text file in someone else's account.

01:23:50.360 | And then you could read it when you came into your account.

01:23:52.980 | And so that's where it was your username for timeshare computers became your de facto email

01:23:57.740 | addresses.

01:23:58.120 | But there's a counterfactual I've talked about where, yeah, you have emails for projects and

01:24:02.660 | that like completely changes by the way, how the tool is used.

01:24:06.420 | Because as soon as I think about an email being your name, I imagine a interpersonal interaction

01:24:12.320 | that you're someone, there's someone on the other end of this.

01:24:15.060 | And I want something from that person.

01:24:16.460 | And if you're not answering me, there's a person who is slighting me.

01:24:19.420 | And I imagine you're there and you saw it and you're ignoring me.

01:24:22.000 | You get all the interpersonal dynamics.

01:24:23.400 | If it's a project, all that goes away.

01:24:26.640 | Like, yeah, I'm sending a request over to this project and, you know, they'll get back to me.

01:24:30.540 | I'm sure multiple people are looking at this.

01:24:31.620 | Yeah.

01:24:31.920 | And they, they, and they have a standard.

01:24:33.620 | They'll get back to you by the end of the day, if it comes before whatever.

01:24:35.900 | And you don't think twice about it.

01:24:37.320 | Like all the interpersonal dynamics are gone.

01:24:38.880 | Yeah.

01:24:39.900 | Yeah.

01:24:40.660 | Well, I'm excited, man.

01:24:41.800 | I'm excited about deep, uh, deep life.

01:24:44.960 | Yeah.

01:24:45.880 | Uh, I'm, I'm curious.

01:24:47.620 | How is that?

01:24:49.380 | How is actually working on that project changed your, your outlook or change your habits anyway?

01:24:55.300 | We'll see.

01:24:56.040 | Yeah.

01:24:56.720 | We'll see.

01:24:57.160 | I'm, I'm in the first part still, which is like how to become, how to get your act together

01:25:01.320 | before you try to change your life.

01:25:02.460 | I sense you being more like discerning about bigger things in your life, you know?

01:25:08.400 | Yeah.

01:25:08.940 | I, and I think working on the second part, which is much more about like what we're talking

01:25:12.380 | about today.

01:25:12.980 | Yeah.

01:25:14.160 | I'm worth, there's changes coming probably.

01:25:16.100 | I'm thinking about changes.

01:25:17.480 | I think it'll probably lead to some changes.

01:25:19.740 | I mean, I, it's just a stage of life where I'm going through, you know, how your forties

01:25:23.400 | are.

01:25:23.680 | Yeah.

01:25:24.300 | Yeah.

01:25:24.620 | It's a different stage of life.

01:25:25.600 | And it like, but it like, it feels like, uh, on the vector, like a logical conclusion

01:25:36.680 | to the vector you've been on for several books now.

01:25:39.300 | I think so.

01:25:40.220 | I think so.

01:25:40.900 | Yeah.

01:25:41.200 | Yeah.

01:25:41.700 | Yeah.

01:25:41.840 | I mean, you can imagine, yeah.

01:25:43.520 | Slow productivity is getting at, well, what does it really mean to be productive at work?

01:25:48.560 | And this, let me, let me articulate my approach, which is it's slower.

01:25:52.100 | It's like you talked about.

01:25:53.140 | Let's, I want results over time, but my busyness in the moment, it's not that important.

01:25:57.000 | And if anything, that's going to be counterproductive.

01:25:59.940 | It's going to make me feel worse.

01:26:01.080 | And so that book is trying to articulate that a world without email was my attempt

01:26:04.020 | to be like, for God's sakes, do we have to be communicating all the time?

01:26:07.480 | Completely failed, by the way.

01:26:09.000 | It did not.

01:26:09.700 | A world without email.

01:26:10.280 | I mean, it failed to change the world.

01:26:11.720 | Do you think it was a victim of timing?

01:26:12.980 | It's a little bit of victim of timing.

01:26:14.400 | The pandemic was not when people wanted to think about that, but also it's just a victim

01:26:19.280 | of difficulty, right?

01:26:21.120 | I mean, it's, it's.

01:26:21.740 | I always thought about world without email is just deep work for companies.

01:26:24.640 | Yeah.

01:26:25.420 | Deep work for teams.

01:26:26.520 | And maybe that's just a smaller market if it's something you can't put into place.

01:26:30.320 | But I've talked to a lot of C, it's just hard.

01:26:32.380 | It's hard to move away.

01:26:33.720 | Deep work.

01:26:34.440 | Yeah.

01:26:34.580 | All these books are kind of on these trajectory.

01:26:36.080 | I see.

01:26:36.920 | I mean, I'm rethinking, you know, I'm in a different phase of life now.

01:26:39.460 | You've always been good at that too.

01:26:41.260 | You always write about the phase that you're in.

01:26:43.120 | That's the only way I know how to do it.

01:26:44.460 | Because if I don't care, it doesn't come through.

01:26:45.800 | But I mean, I'm in a different phase.

01:26:47.440 | I've talked about this.

01:26:48.360 | It's, you know, after college, what were my two goals?

01:26:50.980 | Writing academia.

01:26:52.040 | And let me just focus, go deep on those, not be busy, want to do those well.

01:26:56.000 | And I've done those well, right?

01:26:59.560 | I've been in academia.

01:27:00.700 | I'm a full professor.

01:27:01.500 | There's no more promotions left to give.

01:27:02.960 | Published papers.

01:27:03.660 | Won the awards.

01:27:04.500 | You know, I did well there.

01:27:06.360 | Writing, I've done well there.

01:27:09.060 | I think my, you know, I've sold a lot of books.

01:27:10.620 | It's, it's, that number is large.

01:27:12.520 | You've been in this one genre.

01:27:13.800 | Yeah.

01:27:14.480 | There are other genres.

01:27:15.280 | Yeah.

01:27:16.040 | You know, you think about, um, you're talking about my romance novel, I assume.

01:27:21.320 | That's what, that's what people are waiting for.

01:27:23.800 | Fifty Shades of Cal.

01:27:25.800 | Fifty Shades of Cal.

01:27:26.940 | Um, no.

01:27:29.240 | Like, do you ever think about what Michael Crichton would be writing about right now?

01:27:32.040 | I wrote a piece.

01:27:33.360 | Like, oh, did you?

01:27:34.440 | I wrote a piece for the New Yorker a couple months ago.

01:27:36.180 | About AI or something?

01:27:37.760 | Yeah.

01:27:38.400 | Yeah.

01:27:38.860 | It was like, what?

01:27:39.380 | And he would, he would be going crazy.

01:27:40.780 | Well, he would be going crazy.

01:27:42.960 | Yeah.

01:27:43.220 | And, and I wrote, it was interesting piece.

01:27:44.940 | I was like, okay, what are the real lessons from Crichton?

01:27:46.660 | And I'll just, my, my takeaway was actually unexpected.

01:27:49.200 | My, my, but my takeaway was because I know Crichton well, um, his work well.

01:27:53.660 | And I know a lot about it more than I probably should, but it's like, you know, really my

01:27:56.660 | takeaway is what Crichton really understood, um, was the issue was not so much to people

01:28:02.740 | when it came to technology.

01:28:03.980 | And I told the story in the front of that article where, you know, when he was trying to write

01:28:07.420 | the Adronomist strain, it wasn't working.

01:28:09.000 | And his editor, Robert Gottlieb was like, here's the problem.

01:28:12.040 | You're trying to write like an actual novel and get into the psychology of the characters

01:28:16.860 | and what's going on inside their head or this or that.

01:28:19.260 | And he said, stop that.

01:28:20.220 | Write it like a New Yorker piece.

01:28:22.560 | Like what Matt, the people aren't that important.

01:28:24.460 | What matters is the technology and the unexpected outcomes from the technology, write it like

01:28:30.100 | you're like Richard Preston in the hot zone 30 years later, like you're reporting on something

01:28:34.660 | that happened.

01:28:35.080 | And then the book took off and that became his MO is that the, the really what, what mattered

01:28:41.440 | in these books was the technology and the unexpected ways they unfold, not the characters.

01:28:46.500 | Right.

01:28:47.400 | And I was saying this actually kind of relevant for today because it's, it's right now.

01:28:51.460 | We like to snag our technological storylines onto people and actors and villains.

01:28:57.060 | And it's this person and this person, this is the villain in the play.

01:29:00.120 | And this is the hero or whatever without getting, and just anxiety generally.

01:29:03.820 | Yeah.

01:29:04.260 | Without getting at the actual issue.

01:29:05.900 | Right.

01:29:06.120 | So we want to demonize Elon Musk, but we don't get to introducing global conversation platforms

01:29:12.840 | might've been a wrong idea.

01:29:13.860 | Right.

01:29:14.560 | Because like Hammond was like a nice guy in Jurassic Park.

01:29:17.800 | He was, he had good intentions and he got his liver eaten out by copies at the end of that

01:29:22.500 | book.

01:29:22.720 | It wasn't because he was flawed.

01:29:25.720 | Um, I talked about Frankenstein.

01:29:27.220 | I went back to the original Mary Shelley and I was like, let me, let me read.

01:29:31.740 | I re replicated the passage in Frankenstein where the animated, the monster, the technology

01:29:36.860 | is completely unspecified.

01:29:39.220 | It was the vitality flowed from the machine to the monster and the monster came alive.

01:29:43.940 | The whole thing was about the people.

01:29:45.320 | It was about the characters and the flaws and Dr. Frankenstein's ambition and, and how

01:29:50.000 | that his fatal flaw broke them.

01:29:51.400 | And you go over to Jurassic Park, Richard Hammond's a cardboard cutout.

01:29:54.560 | What matters is the specific type of gene sequencer they were using too.

01:29:58.320 | So anyways, I thought there was a lesson there about, uh, the, the technologies themselves are

01:30:03.500 | often creating the impacts and we want to blame or care about the people.

01:30:06.540 | Yeah.

01:30:07.040 | But then that obscures the fact that cloning the dinosaurs is the problem.

01:30:10.900 | Even if like a better person was running Jurassic Park, it might've still been a problem.

01:30:14.100 | Yeah.

01:30:14.800 | Do you know where the word sabotage comes from?

01:30:16.480 | Do we ever talk about this?

01:30:17.660 | No.

01:30:18.320 | So French or something word for like the French peasant wooden shoe is called a sabbat.

01:30:24.480 | Ah.

01:30:24.940 | And so when the initial machines during the industrial revolution, the agricultural machines showed

01:30:31.400 | up, uh, like it freaked the peasants out or whatever.

01:30:35.420 | And they took their wooden shoes and like jammed it into the gears and it would like break the

01:30:38.960 | machine.

01:30:39.340 | So this is like go back to work.

01:30:40.560 | Like a Ned Ludd type of mythology.

01:30:42.340 | Yeah.

01:30:42.720 | Yeah.

01:30:42.820 | Yeah.

01:30:42.980 | Yeah.

01:30:43.520 | And so like, it was literally the act of like destroying the menacing technology, you

01:30:49.200 | know, that was coming after your job or whatever.

01:30:50.820 | Yeah.

01:30:51.220 | So it seems like there's, there's, you know, history rhymes, right?

01:30:54.840 | Yep.

01:30:55.340 | All right.

01:30:56.040 | Well, we, we have run over, but I, it's hard not to cause I always like talking with you.

01:31:00.120 | Um, yeah, I really appreciate this conversation.

01:31:02.800 | So, so, so, um, I think we covered a lot of interesting ground here and I would summarize

01:31:07.040 | it all as, you know, it's like architecting the deep life.

01:31:09.940 | There's a, there's a, there's a lot that goes into it and it's not as simple as the one grand

01:31:15.900 | plan, but it's, there's, there's a lot in here that I think is interesting.

01:31:19.240 | Also, we got a nerd out about some work issues like we always do.

01:31:22.100 | Yeah.

01:31:22.200 | There's a Buckminster Fuller quote that's useful or that I've returned to sometimes where he

01:31:26.280 | talks about, or he just states we're called to be the architects of the future, not its

01:31:30.400 | victims.

01:31:30.720 | Yeah.

01:31:31.380 | You know, I like it.

01:31:32.340 | And I kind of think like you're called to be the architect of your life.

01:31:35.100 | Not, not the victim of circumstance, you know, and like what you have put out there in a

01:31:41.560 | series of tools and books and so forth is like, here are like a suite of tools, apply them.

01:31:49.040 | Yeah.

01:31:49.560 | You know, and, and life just gets easier.

01:31:51.580 | Yeah.

01:31:52.100 | And they're content agnostic.

01:31:53.560 | Right.

01:31:54.280 | I'm not going to tell you, and this is how I'm writing my book right now.

01:31:56.840 | It's not, here's the five things you need for a deep life.

01:32:00.440 | This mix of friendship with this mix of adventure, this or that, like, okay, you can figure that

01:32:04.740 | out, but how do you have the tools to act on it once you figure it out?

01:32:07.580 | Yeah.

01:32:08.200 | So like architects.

01:32:09.080 | And just don't, don't expect immediate results.

01:32:10.940 | Yeah.

01:32:11.420 | So architecture, you have to learn how to design and build a building and then like the great

01:32:17.000 | architects use those tools to build falling water or whatever, but you got to learn the

01:32:22.000 | tools first.

01:32:22.560 | Yeah.

01:32:23.260 | Like where that's going.

01:32:23.880 | Yeah.

01:32:24.240 | Like, yeah.

01:32:24.820 | And for architecture, I mean, last, last word, I guess, is that, you know, it's, it's a kind

01:32:31.000 | of a cliche in architecture that unlike rock and roll, you don't become successful when

01:32:36.580 | you're like 20, you can become successful when you're like 50 and you just like, it's

01:32:42.860 | again, it's an expectations management game.

01:32:45.120 | Yeah.

01:32:45.520 | It takes a long time.

01:32:46.380 | Anyway.

01:32:47.000 | All right, man.

01:32:47.480 | All right.

01:32:47.740 | Hey, David, thanks for coming.

01:32:48.860 | Yeah.

01:32:49.160 | Thank you.

01:32:49.560 | All right.

01:32:50.960 | So that was my conversation with David DeWayne brought to us by done daily.com.

01:32:57.040 | I really enjoyed that.

01:32:58.780 | Here's the, here's the context.

01:33:00.560 | I talked to David a lot, right?

01:33:02.780 | We've known each other for a long time.

01:33:04.180 | I knew him back before I even wrote deep work.

01:33:07.300 | He's featured in that book.

01:33:08.520 | He lived in DC for a long time.

01:33:11.120 | So we used to see each other more often, but he often comes through DC.

01:33:13.560 | He used to live in Tacoma park.

01:33:14.660 | And we always have these sort of interesting conversations when he's coming through town and we have these

01:33:19.120 | wide range of conversations.

01:33:20.180 | So to be able to capture one of those conversations on air, to record it, to share it with other people,

01:33:26.500 | that was kind of fun because I'm used to all these cool ideas about depth and focus and concentration

01:33:31.720 | and the deep life.

01:33:32.520 | And it's good to be able to share them with other people.

01:33:36.380 | I also like, I'm going to try to do this more when I have these conversations.

01:33:40.340 | I think I did this a little bit with Michael Easter as well.

01:33:42.480 | I like people who are doing cool things with their life and just to hear more about it,

01:33:46.720 | as opposed to just having on experts to talk about their ideas.

01:33:50.440 | Now, David had both of these things.

01:33:51.860 | He's an expert on space design for concentration,

01:33:53.960 | but he's also an expert on his own life being really cool and having that farm and the orchard

01:33:59.080 | with the writing gazebo that he built out there.

01:34:01.820 | I think all that's so cool and romantic.

01:34:03.360 | So I like this idea of like specific people

01:34:06.040 | living really specifically deep lives and just hearing how they did it.

01:34:10.500 | How better to learn than to talk to real people.

01:34:13.020 | Anyways, I'll probably end up putting some of this ideas on my book on the deep life

01:34:16.160 | because he, he has too many good ideas about this topic.

01:34:18.680 | So this was fun.

01:34:19.820 | Thanks for listening.

01:34:21.060 | Uh, be back on Monday with a normal episode and until then stay deep.

01:34:25.040 | Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

You're Not Lazy — Your Life Was Designed Wrong (Here’s How To Take It Back) | David Dewane

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