Ep. 236: Hacking Remote Work

00:00:00.000 | That's today's deep question.

00:00:01.080 | The deep question we're gonna explore today,

00:00:03.260 | how can I significantly decrease the footprint

00:00:05.360 | of my remote job without anyone noticing?

00:00:10.360 | (upbeat music)

00:00:12.940 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions,

00:00:19.880 | the show about living and working deeply

00:00:21.840 | in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:28.600 | I'm here at my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:31.400 | joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:34.900 | Jesse, we're coming up to a milestone,

00:00:36.400 | a random milestone for the show, but one nonetheless.

00:00:39.920 | 10 million downloads.

00:00:41.320 | Really? Yeah.

00:00:42.680 | Wow.

00:00:43.920 | We'll be there in a month or so.

00:00:46.440 | That's a lot.

00:00:47.840 | Yeah, I mean, I don't know,

00:00:48.840 | these numbers are kind of arbitrary,

00:00:49.980 | but as someone who was on my publishing team,

00:00:52.960 | they needed updated numbers for internal whatever,

00:00:56.640 | 'cause my book, and I was sitting along the numbers,

00:00:58.920 | and they said, "That's a lot of zeros."

00:01:00.300 | So we're adding, we're about to add a new zero

00:01:02.840 | to our list of downloads.

00:01:04.820 | Wow.

00:01:05.660 | Little known fact,

00:01:08.360 | podcasts monetize at about $10 per download,

00:01:10.900 | so we've made $100 million off of this show.

00:01:15.040 | That's how it works.

00:01:16.040 | Oh, well.

00:01:19.700 | Anyways, I saw something.

00:01:22.160 | I saw something in the newspaper recently

00:01:24.760 | that was doing what we could think of as a reality check

00:01:28.840 | on some predictions I've been making,

00:01:30.760 | and I think it's good for us to hold ourselves accountable,

00:01:32.920 | so I wanted to load this up real quick.

00:01:34.520 | I saw this in my hometown paper, "The Washington Post,"

00:01:39.320 | and this was, I don't know, a week or two ago

00:01:41.240 | that I saw this.

00:01:42.080 | I've loaded it on the screen,

00:01:43.000 | so if you're watching this at youtube.com/calnewportmedia,

00:01:47.640 | this is episode 236, you'll see this on the screen,

00:01:50.720 | but I'll narrate it for those who are listening.

00:01:52.880 | It was a cover article, actually, in the paper version,

00:01:55.880 | the business section of the paper version of the paper,

00:01:58.440 | and the headline is,

00:01:59.280 | "America's offices are now half full.

00:02:01.960 | They may not get much fuller."

00:02:04.320 | It's based off new data about office occupancy,

00:02:08.560 | and then they talk to some experts

00:02:09.660 | about what they think this means and what's gonna come.

00:02:11.860 | This is a good chance to hold myself accountable,

00:02:14.320 | so starting in May of 2020,

00:02:17.360 | I began making predictions

00:02:18.640 | about what I thought was gonna happen with remote work,

00:02:21.320 | and the trajectory of my predictions was twofold.

00:02:23.960 | Early in the pandemic, in May of 2020,

00:02:26.680 | I had one prediction that I then refined as time went on,

00:02:30.160 | and my refined prediction,

00:02:31.080 | which I talked about for about a year or a year and a half,

00:02:33.480 | was that as the acute phase of the pandemic wound down,

00:02:38.480 | remote work was gonna reduce significantly.

00:02:42.200 | In the, I called it five to 10-year window,

00:02:44.520 | but probably not 10, maybe a five to seven-year window,

00:02:46.800 | we were gonna see returns aggressively

00:02:49.440 | towards pre-pandemic in-person work,

00:02:52.880 | and then I had a more speculative prediction

00:02:55.560 | that that was then gonna shift again,

00:02:57.320 | maybe seven to 10 years in the future,

00:02:58.800 | where we were gonna see a new breed of company

00:03:01.960 | that was native remote,

00:03:03.760 | using ideas that were spawned by companies

00:03:06.300 | that innovated during the pandemic,

00:03:07.480 | these were gonna start to rise

00:03:08.680 | and spread new methods of remote work,

00:03:10.800 | and we were gonna see a return back towards remote work,

00:03:13.520 | so it's gonna be a up the remote high,

00:03:16.240 | back down towards in-person,

00:03:17.600 | and then a sort of slow gradual shift

00:03:19.640 | towards a more advanced and sophisticated approach

00:03:22.160 | to remote work in the future.

00:03:24.920 | So I had this whole theory about it,

00:03:26.400 | I wrote an article in "The New Yorker" about it

00:03:28.080 | a year or so ago,

00:03:29.840 | where I espoused this theory that was first proposed

00:03:33.400 | by an entrepreneur named Chris Hurd, H-E-R-D,

00:03:36.800 | this theory about tech companies

00:03:39.120 | that started during 2020 and 2021,

00:03:42.160 | were gonna figure out from scratch

00:03:43.600 | how to be remote really well,

00:03:45.560 | and it would take about five to 10 years

00:03:47.000 | for those ideas to spread to other industries

00:03:49.320 | and larger companies,

00:03:50.320 | and then we're gonna see really stable remote companies,

00:03:52.440 | but in the short term,

00:03:53.560 | my prediction was we're so bad at remote work

00:03:57.640 | because we let the hyperactive hive mind

00:04:00.320 | rule our collaboration strategy,

00:04:02.960 | and when you take a hyperactive hive mind controlled company

00:04:05.360 | and makes it remote, a lot of friction arises,

00:04:07.680 | and people work more,

00:04:08.960 | and they're in Zoom all day,

00:04:10.000 | and email goes out of control,

00:04:11.160 | that we were gonna end up having to stumble back

00:04:13.680 | to in-person work.

00:04:14.520 | All right, so we can look at the data,

00:04:16.140 | how would we grade my prediction?

00:04:18.760 | Where are we now?

00:04:19.600 | About maybe a year to two years out,

00:04:21.320 | depending on what timeline we're going on

00:04:24.120 | for when I first started making these predictions,

00:04:25.520 | and according to this research here,

00:04:27.540 | the office occupancy has hit a post-pandemic milestone

00:04:32.440 | of 50%.

00:04:34.680 | This, I guess this would have been in January.

00:04:37.360 | All right, so that is a non-trivial return

00:04:41.360 | towards in-person work, like I predicted.

00:04:45.400 | However, according to this article,

00:04:48.320 | experts say this could be the new normal.

00:04:51.920 | So in other words,

00:04:53.260 | the experts cited in this Washington Post article say,

00:04:56.820 | "But we're not gonna get higher than this."

00:04:58.960 | Got two points here.

00:05:01.920 | One, if they are correct about that,

00:05:05.640 | I would give myself maybe a B.

00:05:08.760 | I don't know what you think is fair here, Jesse.

00:05:10.500 | We did for sure return significantly towards remote work.

00:05:14.740 | I think this number was down in the 30s

00:05:16.520 | at their nadir in the summer of 2020.

00:05:19.760 | And so we've gone back to more than half of them.

00:05:21.840 | So we could say the majority of companies are now in person,

00:05:24.200 | but we're not 80%, we're not 90%,

00:05:27.760 | which is the numbers pre-pandemic were very high.

00:05:30.400 | There was not as much remote work going on.

00:05:33.040 | So I would maybe give myself a B

00:05:35.780 | if these numbers were accurate.

00:05:37.320 | My second point,

00:05:40.080 | I don't know that that prediction is accurate.

00:05:42.840 | So I have a graph on the screen here

00:05:44.500 | from the article.

00:05:47.660 | It looks like, okay, I was wrong.

00:05:48.960 | The nadir was actually,

00:05:50.560 | looks here like 15% in person.

00:05:53.960 | And this would have been in 2020, the spring of 2020.

00:05:57.000 | It looks like it's been raising pretty steadily.

00:05:59.400 | And there's a pretty steady line raising

00:06:02.720 | this 50% higher than any other time before.

00:06:05.580 | I think these experts might be a little bit too quick

00:06:09.900 | to say this may be the new normal.

00:06:12.580 | And I believe it's probably from bias.

00:06:15.720 | I think for certain sectors of our economy right now,

00:06:20.720 | especially those who are involved

00:06:21.900 | in sort of elite discourses, elite media discourses,

00:06:24.500 | or elite academic discourses,

00:06:26.380 | an idea took hold in the last year or so

00:06:29.160 | that remote work was a progressive labor policy

00:06:32.800 | and was in some sense,

00:06:34.700 | the only humane way to run knowledge work.

00:06:36.880 | And the very idea that someone would want

00:06:39.980 | to run their office in the way

00:06:41.900 | that we've been running offices basically until yesterday.

00:06:45.340 | So for decades and decades of yesterday,

00:06:46.660 | the very idea that we'd want to do that again

00:06:48.400 | is itself contemptible.

00:06:49.760 | So there's this strain of thought

00:06:51.180 | that has now associated remote work

00:06:55.100 | with this is obviously the thing that we should be doing

00:06:57.880 | and is almost aghast, if not completely flabbergasted

00:07:01.620 | that anyone would not just let their employees

00:07:03.180 | be fully remote.

00:07:04.060 | So I think from that mindset,

00:07:05.260 | which by the way, I'm not fully dismissing.

00:07:07.100 | I wrote this whole New Yorker piece

00:07:08.820 | that tried to understand where that came from.

00:07:11.220 | And I think there's deeper layers

00:07:12.340 | underneath supporting that,

00:07:13.420 | that are worth unpacking that we won't do that now.

00:07:16.420 | But if that is your mindset

00:07:17.940 | and that's what you're seeing on Twitter,

00:07:19.240 | and that's the conversation you see in the Washington Post

00:07:21.940 | every time you open it up or in the New York Times,

00:07:23.760 | if that is your mindset,

00:07:25.260 | I think it's hard to believe

00:07:26.300 | that the number would keep going up.

00:07:27.340 | You're surprised it's even at 50.

00:07:29.980 | So you say, well, surely it would go no higher than this.

00:07:31.900 | And this is essentially what the expert quotes,

00:07:33.780 | at least by my ear, is what it sounds like in here.

00:07:36.940 | It's not like there is evidence for a significant slowdown

00:07:40.600 | and we're reaching a derivative of zero now on this graph.

00:07:43.980 | If you look at what's going on here,

00:07:45.540 | the experts are just saying things like,

00:07:47.820 | it's unlikely to go much higher

00:07:49.820 | because flexible work is becoming entrenched.

00:07:52.500 | Some employees have resisted hard mandates.

00:07:54.340 | It's just sort of, hey, we're used to this now.

00:07:56.300 | I can't imagine it's gonna go higher.

00:07:57.340 | So I don't know, the reality I bet

00:07:58.720 | is probably higher than that,

00:08:00.060 | but still probably not as high as I predicted.

00:08:02.360 | So we can put aside whether that's good or bad.

00:08:06.740 | I've tried to take a relatively value agnostic stance

00:08:10.680 | in my predictions.

00:08:12.240 | So when I'm trying to predict what I think is happening,

00:08:13.920 | I just wanna try to get it right.

00:08:15.640 | Whether it's good or bad, what's gonna happen,

00:08:18.080 | that's a separate strain of argument,

00:08:19.560 | which I have other thoughts on.

00:08:20.980 | But I think we have a little bit more in person

00:08:23.020 | to go going forward.

00:08:23.940 | And again, my argument for why that is the case,

00:08:26.040 | and I'll just take this one piece of my argument

00:08:27.720 | and rearticulate it one more time.

00:08:29.540 | If you do not have good processes

00:08:33.040 | or systems for collaboration,

00:08:34.640 | if you rely on ad hoc unscheduling back and forth

00:08:37.240 | interactions to get things done,

00:08:39.440 | remote work makes work harder.

00:08:41.440 | You get rid of the incredibly efficient

00:08:45.600 | impromptu let me grab you after a meeting

00:08:47.780 | or in a hallway type discussions.

00:08:50.080 | You lose transparency in the people's workload

00:08:53.060 | or evident exhaustion.

00:08:54.760 | You break down the boundaries much more severely

00:08:57.360 | between at work and not at work.

00:08:58.960 | You get rid of that commute time,

00:09:01.000 | psychological phase shift that helps you shift

00:09:03.160 | from work to at home, increasing burnout, increasing stress.

00:09:07.240 | A lot of remote knowledge workers are not working less.

00:09:09.840 | If anything, they're working more,

00:09:11.440 | even though there's less physical surveillance

00:09:14.200 | and they don't have to spend time to commute.

00:09:15.840 | So there's a lot of issues

00:09:16.680 | with just taking bad collaborations styles

00:09:20.440 | and then moving them remote.

00:09:21.920 | And so my prediction is that friction

00:09:23.360 | was gonna bring people back

00:09:24.640 | because it just works a little bit better.

00:09:27.400 | That doesn't mean remote work is not a good idea,

00:09:29.600 | but it has to be done with much more structure and strategy.

00:09:32.360 | And that's what I think is gonna arise

00:09:33.640 | five, six years in the future.

00:09:34.680 | That's being worked out now

00:09:36.040 | and this sort of remote work V2,

00:09:38.360 | that is gonna have it spread.

00:09:40.840 | It's gonna be a little more gradual

00:09:41.760 | and we'll have a much more sophisticated approach

00:09:43.320 | to remote work than simply just do what you were doing,

00:09:45.720 | but now we're on Zoom a lot.

00:09:46.880 | So that was my thoughts on that.

00:09:48.920 | And I think I'm, according to this article,

00:09:52.040 | have a B, if trends continue the way I think they might,

00:09:55.080 | maybe I'll edge myself up to a B plus.

00:09:57.920 | So we'll see.

00:10:00.120 | But I wanted to take advantage of this topic

00:10:04.040 | and say, putting aside what's gonna happen in the future,

00:10:08.120 | let's talk about what we can do

00:10:09.960 | with what we have right now.

00:10:11.960 | So if you were one of the 50% or more of knowledge workers

00:10:15.520 | who is working remote right now,

00:10:17.320 | let's take this reality out for a little bit of a spin.

00:10:22.160 | I mean, what are we experts on here in this show?

00:10:25.160 | One of the things we're expert on

00:10:26.840 | is really understanding how work unfolds

00:10:30.400 | and then building very intentional or intelligent systems

00:10:33.040 | to allow us to take advantage of these realities,

00:10:35.160 | to take control of our work and our workloads

00:10:37.040 | and how things unfold.

00:10:38.400 | Working remotely in theory

00:10:40.960 | massively increases your flexibility and autonomy

00:10:43.920 | if you're able to take advantage of that.

00:10:48.040 | And so I figured, let's look into that a little bit.

00:10:51.360 | Let's look into how we can hack a remote work job

00:10:55.840 | with the goal of significantly decreasing

00:10:59.840 | the amount of time you work.

00:11:00.720 | So that's today's deep question.

00:11:01.800 | The deep question we're gonna explore today,

00:11:04.000 | how can I significantly decrease the footprint

00:11:06.080 | of my remote job without anyone noticing?

00:11:11.080 | So like always, we'll deep dive on that question.

00:11:14.240 | Then in the second segment of the show,

00:11:15.520 | we're gonna do five questions from you, my listeners,

00:11:17.440 | that all relate to this general topic of today's episode.

00:11:20.360 | And then the third segment, we'll do something different.

00:11:22.000 | And today that's gonna be me reviewing

00:11:23.880 | the five books I read last month.

00:11:26.480 | All right, so that's our goal.

00:11:28.560 | You know, Jesse, I'm not the first to do this.

00:11:30.800 | This was at the key of Tim Ferriss' "4-Hour Workweek,"

00:11:34.640 | 2007 bestseller.

00:11:36.360 | "4-Hour Workweek" gets into

00:11:39.240 | how do you shift your job to remote?

00:11:41.680 | And then once you're remote,

00:11:42.960 | how do you best take advantage

00:11:44.920 | of the potential flexibility there

00:11:47.840 | to build something really cool?

00:11:49.240 | And I think what Tim was right about,

00:11:51.520 | and this is influencing what I'm talking about today,

00:11:53.200 | is that it's actually non-trivial

00:11:55.760 | to take advantage of that potential.

00:11:57.880 | It's not just because my job is remote,

00:11:59.680 | suddenly I'll have more flexibility,

00:12:01.000 | autonomy, and things will be better.

00:12:02.040 | It's actually hard work to take advantage

00:12:03.640 | of the potential for the remoteness to make your job better.

00:12:06.200 | So in some sense, we're upgrading Tim's original thoughts

00:12:10.000 | from 2007 to the reality of 2023 knowledge work.

00:12:14.680 | All right, so I have two points to make

00:12:16.480 | before we get into our tactics here.

00:12:18.760 | Point number one, what do I mean

00:12:20.800 | when I say significantly decrease

00:12:24.040 | the footprint of your remote job?

00:12:27.680 | Here's the definition I wanna use

00:12:28.920 | for the sake of today's discussion,

00:12:31.040 | that you've reduced the time you spend

00:12:32.440 | on your remote job enough that you could, in theory,

00:12:36.240 | fit a significant second endeavor

00:12:38.600 | into your standard work hours.

00:12:41.260 | Right, so that's what we mean by significantly decrease.

00:12:44.480 | What are examples of the type of significant second endeavors

00:12:48.040 | that you could put in?

00:12:49.840 | Well, there's always what we've talked about

00:12:51.120 | on the show before, the phantom part-time job.

00:12:54.600 | This is where you're essentially working on something else

00:12:57.080 | at the same time that you have your normal job.

00:12:59.840 | You have some side hustle

00:13:01.120 | that you're putting some time into.

00:13:03.240 | Now, we've gotten feedback on this before

00:13:05.360 | that in a lot of professions,

00:13:06.920 | there's some ethical issues around that.

00:13:09.440 | But for a just in case, or for instance,

00:13:12.720 | I think this is a good example of the magnitude of time

00:13:15.880 | we're talking about saving here,

00:13:17.920 | that significant, significant second endeavor

00:13:20.680 | could be a personal pursuit,

00:13:22.760 | something very important that you're doing in your own life

00:13:25.020 | that is non-professional.

00:13:28.220 | So you are rich role style while he was still a lawyer

00:13:32.580 | and training to do his Iron Man endurance events, right?

00:13:36.560 | Or you're building a massive animatronic Halloween display

00:13:41.560 | that's going to move and walk down the street

00:13:47.760 | just bringing this up from a friend.

00:13:49.640 | That's definitely not my intention,

00:13:51.600 | but something that takes a lot of time.

00:13:53.520 | I've seen some of these guys on YouTube.

00:13:55.400 | It could also be just, you want a lot of cushion

00:13:58.080 | because the pandemic was exhausting and you have young kids

00:14:01.240 | and you just wanna be able to like Ginny Odell,

00:14:03.160 | just sit outside in a garden for a couple hours

00:14:05.480 | on a semi-regular basis,

00:14:06.580 | because we don't have to be pushing it to the limit

00:14:10.440 | all the time that exhausts us as humans.

00:14:13.480 | It could even be mastering a new skill

00:14:16.040 | that is relevant to your current job.

00:14:17.920 | What I'm gonna do is free up a lot of time,

00:14:20.500 | which I'm gonna use to master the skill

00:14:23.560 | that if I bring it to my current job,

00:14:25.560 | then I'm gonna be really killing it, right?

00:14:28.660 | I am going to learn this advanced machine learning,

00:14:32.480 | modeling language and come back with the ability

00:14:36.120 | to completely overhaul the way

00:14:38.720 | our client recommendation systems work.

00:14:40.760 | So this is gonna take me months of study

00:14:43.320 | and it's gonna take a lot of time and I can do it

00:14:46.680 | because I freed up a significant amount of time.

00:14:48.280 | So that's what I mean, that's the goal.

00:14:49.920 | That's how much time I wanna talk about freeing up here.

00:14:52.680 | Point two, this is not quiet quitting.

00:14:56.920 | Quiet quitting reduces the time

00:15:01.680 | and the amount of things you get done.

00:15:02.880 | It reduces the time you spend working by disengagement.

00:15:05.720 | It says, you know what?

00:15:06.920 | I'm working too hard and so I'm gonna work less hard

00:15:10.560 | because I don't owe you work that's hard.

00:15:13.000 | I don't owe you that magnitude of hard work.

00:15:15.440 | So quiet quitting is you pulling back essentially

00:15:19.120 | what it is you're offering to your employer.

00:15:22.600 | As you'll see with the advice I wanna give,

00:15:24.340 | this is actually quite different.

00:15:25.520 | We're gonna be squeezing out inefficiencies.

00:15:28.080 | We're gonna be squeezing out wasted time.

00:15:30.800 | Time waste that was injected into your life

00:15:33.020 | because of the negative externalities of remote work

00:15:36.280 | that when you reclaim that back,

00:15:37.720 | you're not actually reducing the amount of useful work

00:15:39.960 | you're able to do for your employee.

00:15:41.540 | You're just reducing the amount of time

00:15:42.920 | that same good work requires.

00:15:45.480 | So this is not about you saying, wait a second,

00:15:48.400 | I'm giving you too much.

00:15:50.080 | I'm now gonna do less.

00:15:51.560 | You know, what are you gonna do about it?

00:15:52.880 | It is, we are doing this poorly.

00:15:55.680 | If I get rid of the wastage,

00:15:57.200 | I'm still getting the same work done, but I'm done at two.

00:16:01.400 | So I'm gonna build a giant animatronic Halloween display

00:16:05.520 | outside of my house.

00:16:07.240 | All right, so those are my two points.

00:16:08.280 | All right, so given those two caveats,

00:16:10.560 | I have a collection of ideas here.

00:16:11.720 | Let me look at my notes, five ideas.

00:16:13.720 | If you're a remote worker,

00:16:15.840 | how to significantly decrease the footprint

00:16:17.560 | of your remote job without anyone noticing.

00:16:20.380 | All right, idea number one, create synchrony traps.

00:16:26.300 | Now this is new terminology for an idea

00:16:30.000 | that you hear in different forms all the time in this show,

00:16:32.920 | but it is a critical idea nonetheless.

00:16:37.560 | Your number one enemy

00:16:38.960 | to significantly decreasing your time

00:16:41.200 | is the need to have to monitor back and forth communication

00:16:45.280 | throughout all your business hours.

00:16:47.560 | So if the way your collaboration unfolds

00:16:49.760 | is through back and forth Slack and email,

00:16:51.580 | it is very difficult, for example,

00:16:54.080 | for you to stop work at two

00:16:55.560 | to go work on your giant animatronics

00:16:57.200 | because there's all of these ongoing conversations

00:16:59.300 | that you keep having to dip back into.

00:17:01.060 | In fact, you probably have to keep dipping back

00:17:03.080 | into those beyond normal work hours and into the weekend.

00:17:05.540 | So we have to kill as much as possible

00:17:07.780 | the need to have these unscheduled

00:17:09.680 | back and forth conversations

00:17:10.900 | at the core of your collaboration.

00:17:13.440 | You need to defer these asynchronous conversations

00:17:18.440 | to easy to access synchrony.

00:17:22.100 | A few ideas I've mentioned before,

00:17:24.360 | number one, office hours.

00:17:26.260 | You know I'm a huge advocate of this.

00:17:28.320 | Every day this hour, my phone is on, Zoom is on,

00:17:32.200 | I monitor this very specific Slack channel.

00:17:34.040 | It's like my name, office hours.

00:17:37.160 | And you just tell people as soon as an email

00:17:39.720 | or a conversation looks like it's about to instigate

00:17:43.560 | a long back and forth discussion

00:17:45.240 | that's just gonna happen asynchronously and haphazardly,

00:17:48.200 | you say, let's get into this.

00:17:50.480 | Any one of my upcoming office hours,

00:17:52.000 | just swing by, shoot me a call, jump on Zoom,

00:17:55.080 | and we'll go back and forth and figure this out.

00:17:56.880 | You could probably defer 50%

00:17:58.640 | of what would otherwise be ongoing asynchronous conversations.

00:18:02.680 | 50% you could defer to these pre-scheduled office hours

00:18:05.880 | and dispatch with them.

00:18:07.720 | And again, if we wanna clear up a lot of time,

00:18:10.080 | we have to concentrate when this interaction happens.

00:18:12.720 | Standing group meetings is also important.

00:18:16.240 | This is an idea that's adapted from agile methodologies

00:18:19.440 | where they have this standing meeting every single morning.

00:18:21.880 | You don't need that, but if you work in a team or a group,

00:18:24.240 | have twice a week, a standing meeting, one hour long,

00:18:28.120 | where you deal with all your group issues,

00:18:29.600 | and you should have a shared document

00:18:32.160 | where people write down as it occurs to them,

00:18:34.960 | things that need to be discussed,

00:18:36.160 | decisions that need to be made,

00:18:37.760 | questions that need to be answered.

00:18:39.120 | They write it into the shared doc.

00:18:40.760 | And when you get to your next standing group meeting,

00:18:44.720 | you just go through that thing.

00:18:46.120 | All right, I wanna ask you about this, and what about this?

00:18:47.920 | And what are we doing about this?

00:18:48.800 | Can we check in on this?

00:18:49.680 | And I'm worried about that, and what happened to this report?

00:18:51.600 | And who's working on this, and what do you need?

00:18:53.680 | And everything gets taken care of.

00:18:56.120 | That's like another 30% of your otherwise

00:19:00.400 | asynchronous haphazard back and forth email conversations.

00:19:02.720 | Another 30% are out of your inbox,

00:19:04.760 | out of your chat channels,

00:19:06.280 | if you have a standing group meeting twice a week.

00:19:09.960 | Finally, ad hoc processes.

00:19:11.600 | This is the core idea in my book, "A World Without Email."

00:19:16.600 | Collaboration happens on a regular basis.

00:19:19.760 | You should have a process that everyone agrees on,

00:19:22.640 | and everyone will have a part in constructing

00:19:25.520 | that explains how information moves,

00:19:26.960 | and how you communicate,

00:19:28.320 | and prevents you from having to have unscheduled messages.

00:19:30.640 | So if something happens a lot,

00:19:31.880 | you eventually have to bite the bullet,

00:19:34.200 | and figure out that system

00:19:35.560 | where there's a shared spreadsheet,

00:19:37.120 | and you update the cell when you've updated the file,

00:19:39.640 | and the file goes into Google Drive somewhere,

00:19:42.320 | and on Wednesdays is when the designer takes the file,

00:19:45.120 | and edits it, and whatever.

00:19:47.040 | You figure out those processes that prevent you

00:19:49.080 | from having to wait until a message comes in,

00:19:51.600 | and then send a response.

00:19:54.160 | So synchrony traps, critical.

00:19:57.120 | All right, idea number two.

00:19:59.440 | Control your meeting availability.

00:20:02.240 | You are still, in most knowledge work jobs,

00:20:05.640 | even after you put in place sufficient quantity

00:20:08.440 | of synchrony traps, are gonna have one-off meetings.

00:20:11.160 | Hey, we need to talk about this new initiative.

00:20:14.480 | This client wants to have a conversation.

00:20:17.400 | Your boss needs to go over the new marketing request.

00:20:20.840 | I mean, these one-off meetings are, of course, unavoidable.

00:20:24.400 | If they can just metastasize all over your schedule,

00:20:27.400 | all over the place, that is the other major killer

00:20:31.000 | of the ability to reduce the footprint of your job.

00:20:34.020 | You'll wanna leave at two to work on those animatronics,

00:20:36.260 | but there's always that stupid three o'clock meeting

00:20:38.180 | that shows up.

00:20:39.020 | So we have to control the meetings,

00:20:40.160 | but we have to do so in a way that does not make you seem

00:20:44.140 | like a time miser or a curmudgeon,

00:20:46.000 | because that just annoys people,

00:20:47.160 | and then they're gonna throw more meetings at you

00:20:48.560 | just because you're on their nerves.

00:20:51.000 | So how do we do this?

00:20:52.880 | How do we control when our meetings happen

00:20:54.640 | without being annoying?

00:20:57.120 | You become overly helpful in setting up meetings.

00:21:02.120 | You have a scheduling system that's incredibly easy to use,

00:21:07.840 | and all of your availabilities are in it,

00:21:09.880 | and you just have to click a button,

00:21:11.280 | and you're good to go.

00:21:12.860 | That meeting, you'll be there.

00:21:13.840 | That meeting is booked.

00:21:15.080 | And you act incredibly felicitous when people ask you,

00:21:18.640 | like, "Hey, can we do a meeting?"

00:21:19.480 | You're like, "Of course.

00:21:20.320 | In fact, I have all of my availabilities in this system."

00:21:22.840 | You just, any time that works for you,

00:21:24.600 | you just click on whenever it's gonna work best for you.

00:21:27.680 | And if you need to coordinate with Bob,

00:21:29.040 | you guys just pick any of these things.

00:21:30.400 | I'm open all these times.

00:21:31.640 | I wanna, let's definitely meet.

00:21:33.200 | I've got the best system.

00:21:34.200 | I'm Mr. Bring me to a meeting.

00:21:36.080 | Here's the thing, though.

00:21:37.240 | You control, then, what those available times are

00:21:40.600 | from the outset.

00:21:41.920 | So then you seed this meeting system

00:21:44.840 | to keep major swaths of your day protected from meetings.

00:21:49.500 | Now, what you have to do, and here's the stealthness,

00:21:53.040 | if you're too consistent,

00:21:55.320 | if it doesn't look sufficiently random,

00:21:57.680 | it will attract a red flag.

00:21:59.720 | So if you say, and this is a simple rule,

00:22:02.440 | meetings until one, no meetings after one,

00:22:05.120 | because I'm training for my marathon

00:22:08.320 | or building my Halloween animatronic,

00:22:10.240 | that's too noticeable of a pattern.

00:22:12.260 | So now I'm your boss.

00:22:14.040 | I'm always suspicious people are trying

00:22:15.360 | to pull one over on me.

00:22:16.840 | And you say, "Oh yeah, please, I'd love to meet you.

00:22:18.600 | Pick a time."

00:22:19.440 | You say, "Wait a second.

00:22:21.560 | Every single afternoon has no times.

00:22:24.320 | I call shenanigans.

00:22:25.720 | I am in meetings in the afternoon.

00:22:27.120 | You should be too, you know, what is this?"

00:22:29.180 | So what you do is you take two days and you flip it.

00:22:32.200 | So maybe Monday, Wednesday, Fridays,

00:22:34.820 | you only show availabilities in the morning.

00:22:36.680 | Tuesday, Thursdays, you show availabilities

00:22:39.020 | mainly in the afternoon.

00:22:40.180 | You throw a rogue meeting here and there.

00:22:43.020 | Maybe on a morning where you're not scheduling meetings,

00:22:44.880 | you throw a rogue one kind of later in the morning.

00:22:47.500 | That looks sufficiently random that it's,

00:22:49.120 | "Hey, this guy's got a lot of availability

00:22:51.000 | and there's no particular pattern here."

00:22:52.320 | But you are absolutely controlling it.

00:22:53.880 | So by taking control of getting out in front of,

00:22:57.360 | "I wanna schedule this.

00:22:58.440 | I love it.

00:22:59.280 | Let's meet.

00:23:00.100 | I love meetings, you know, and here's all my availability.

00:23:02.800 | I'll just show you for the next month."

00:23:04.200 | And you just choose all the times you want.

00:23:05.720 | It actually gives you, ironically,

00:23:07.840 | allows you to way reduce the impact of meetings

00:23:10.400 | if you make it easier to schedule one with you.

00:23:13.120 | All right, idea number three,

00:23:15.000 | you really have to sell processes.

00:23:18.840 | So we mentioned this in the synchrony trap

00:23:20.320 | that any type of collaborative work you do regularly

00:23:22.960 | should have some sort of system or process in place.

00:23:25.480 | Well, idea three says you should really focus

00:23:27.640 | on selling this to the people you work with.

00:23:32.120 | It is easier to just rock and roll on email and Slack.

00:23:36.840 | In the moment, that is always easier

00:23:38.880 | because if I just type this nonsense,

00:23:41.680 | ambiguous soup of email annoyance and hit send,

00:23:46.240 | this may be injecting, you know,

00:23:49.000 | a syringe full of headache into everyone else's life

00:23:51.280 | for the next week, but in the moment,

00:23:52.720 | it gets the thing off my plate.

00:23:54.600 | It's out of my mind.

00:23:56.000 | You know, it's, "Uh, client bad meeting.

00:23:59.440 | No good thoughts, question mark, lol, emoticon, send."

00:24:04.360 | And like that thing is out of my head,

00:24:06.360 | even though I've just created a huge headache

00:24:07.680 | for everyone else.

00:24:08.520 | 'Cause like, I don't know what to do with this.

00:24:09.360 | I mean, are we gonna do a meeting?

00:24:11.120 | When are we gonna do a meeting?

00:24:11.960 | What's the actual issue?

00:24:13.040 | And so it's always easier for everyone in the moment

00:24:15.200 | to just, let's just rock and roll on Slack, come on.

00:24:17.720 | So you have to sell processes as an alternative.

00:24:21.040 | You gotta get buy-in from people.

00:24:23.600 | Let's work on this together.

00:24:24.800 | Here's what I think.

00:24:25.640 | If we use the shared doc and agree that Wednesday nights

00:24:27.840 | is when we review the documents, whatever.

00:24:29.840 | You gotta get buy-in from everyone involved.

00:24:32.520 | Make it seem like they were a part of that process.

00:24:34.520 | Do not just come in and say, "This is what we're doing now.

00:24:37.160 | This would be better."

00:24:38.640 | Don't brandish my book and just say, you know,

00:24:41.200 | "Father Cowell says that we should use Trello."

00:24:44.080 | Get buy-in.

00:24:45.520 | That's part of selling processes.

00:24:47.280 | Two, offer escape valves.

00:24:50.240 | Psychology 101.

00:24:52.400 | People are worried about processes that move them away

00:24:55.320 | from the hyperactive hive mind

00:24:56.720 | because they will come up with scenarios.

00:25:00.560 | Hey, we have this system now where we process client requests

00:25:04.640 | on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

00:25:06.520 | But what if a request comes in on a client on Monday

00:25:10.520 | that says, you know, "I'm being held hostage by a terrorist

00:25:14.800 | that has surrounded the local orphanage with a bomb

00:25:18.040 | and will explode it unless within the next hour

00:25:21.160 | we get responses to this doodle pool."

00:25:24.600 | And they're really worried about these scenarios.

00:25:26.040 | And if we have to wait till Tuesday,

00:25:27.160 | the orphanage blows up and all the kids die.

00:25:29.080 | So what you do is you say, "Yeah, but we have an escape valve.

00:25:32.200 | Here's my number. It's my cell number.

00:25:34.240 | It's with me all the time."

00:25:36.040 | You just call that if there's something that we can't --

00:25:38.760 | we have to get out of the process.

00:25:40.040 | Something is urgent. We gotta get out of here.

00:25:41.640 | You just call that number and I'll answer it.

00:25:43.520 | You don't have to worry. We will save those kids.

00:25:45.960 | They will never call it.

00:25:47.880 | No one wants to call, like,

00:25:49.280 | "I'll just wait till the next meeting."

00:25:50.600 | But it gives psychological cover.

00:25:53.240 | Even if something bad happens,

00:25:55.000 | this process won't force us into an unforced error.

00:25:58.800 | So escape valves are a great part of selling processes.

00:26:01.400 | So you don't just need alternatives

00:26:04.120 | to the hyperactive hive mind.

00:26:04.960 | You got to put in a lot of effort

00:26:06.760 | to sell them to the people around you,

00:26:08.240 | the people who are going to use them with you.

00:26:10.800 | All right, idea four,

00:26:12.960 | trade accountability for accessibility.

00:26:17.880 | All right, so this is where

00:26:20.200 | you are essentially making a trade,

00:26:22.120 | and it's not a costless trade.

00:26:23.280 | There's some risk here.

00:26:24.440 | But you're making a trade with your employer

00:26:26.720 | where you say, "I'm going to work on this important thing.

00:26:30.360 | My success or failure on this effort

00:26:32.160 | is going to be easy to measure.

00:26:33.600 | So if I fail, you know it, and we'll have a problem.

00:26:36.040 | But if I succeed, it'll be good.

00:26:38.040 | And so I will be accountable for this,

00:26:39.960 | but you're going to have to give up some accessibility.

00:26:43.200 | I'm going away to work on this big, important thing.

00:26:46.040 | And if I fail at it,

00:26:47.040 | then maybe I'm going to have some issues at this job.

00:26:51.000 | But as long as I'm succeeding,

00:26:52.640 | you're going to let me go off and do this thing."

00:26:55.400 | So one of the nice things about the alternative

00:26:57.120 | of just being plugged into the hyperactive hive mind

00:26:58.920 | is you don't really have that accountability.

00:27:00.760 | You have the sense of stability.

00:27:02.360 | As long as you're willing to just,

00:27:03.320 | I'm in here, I'm jumping on Zoom, I'm doing doodle polls,

00:27:05.720 | I'm answering emails in Slack,

00:27:07.120 | and it just seems like, look, Cal is here, he's busy,

00:27:10.640 | he's always involved in things.

00:27:12.200 | So I guess he's doing fine.

00:27:13.920 | Like your job feels secure.

00:27:16.120 | When you instead say, "I'm going to give that all up,

00:27:18.320 | but hold me accountable

00:27:19.520 | on actually producing something that sells,"

00:27:22.240 | you're leaving the obfuscating comfort of the hyperactivity

00:27:27.240 | to make you and your activity very clear.

00:27:29.600 | And you're trading that.

00:27:31.280 | You're trading the risk involved in that

00:27:33.520 | for less accessibility.

00:27:36.520 | So a couple advanced tips

00:27:37.680 | about how you trade accountability for accessibility.

00:27:40.120 | This is often a good parry of a potential promotion.

00:27:44.360 | So if you've been doing really well,

00:27:46.040 | maybe you've read my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You,"

00:27:47.960 | and you're deliberately practicing

00:27:49.200 | and building up career capital.

00:27:51.000 | If you've been doing really well and like,

00:27:51.840 | "Look, we want to promote you.

00:27:52.960 | Like, you're killing it."

00:27:54.600 | That's a great time to parry into an accountability play.

00:27:57.200 | You say, "Actually, I don't want to move up

00:27:58.600 | to the next level and put up to three people

00:28:02.680 | working under you."

00:28:03.520 | That's an OfficeSpace reference

00:28:04.520 | for those who recognize the movie.

00:28:08.600 | You don't want to move up and have more responsibility,

00:28:11.200 | but you do want to get some return

00:28:12.920 | off of this career capital that you've acquired.

00:28:15.200 | This is a great parry.

00:28:16.360 | No, I don't want to take that next management role.

00:28:18.440 | What I want to do instead is really focus my attention

00:28:20.640 | on this type of work that we do,

00:28:23.640 | and we'll set up a one-on-one relationship

00:28:26.080 | with one particular supervisor.

00:28:27.480 | I'll check in every week,

00:28:28.360 | and here's how it's going to happen.

00:28:29.320 | And you've just freed yourself from the normal flow

00:28:32.000 | of seven different projects

00:28:33.520 | and all the different meetings and communication

00:28:35.080 | that comes with it.

00:28:36.840 | Another advanced tip ties extra salary to performance.

00:28:41.480 | So it's a way of saying,

00:28:42.880 | "If I do really well, I get paid better."

00:28:44.640 | That's a better way for your salary to go up

00:28:46.640 | in some circumstances than instead just, again,

00:28:48.840 | doing a generic promotion where you have to,

00:28:50.640 | I have to work up this ladder and have the salary increase

00:28:53.680 | with the hyperactivity of my life.

00:28:55.640 | Instead, you say, "If I kill it, I'll kill it in my salary.

00:28:58.520 | And if I don't, I might have a tough year."

00:29:01.520 | People like that.

00:29:02.360 | They feel like skin's in the game.

00:29:04.080 | Somehow from the employer's perspective,

00:29:06.080 | risk seems mitigated.

00:29:07.600 | Advanced tip number three,

00:29:09.480 | you might even consider the management consultant schedule.

00:29:14.280 | So the management consultant schedule

00:29:16.040 | is typically you're on site Monday to Thursday,

00:29:18.640 | and then you're back at the mothership office on Fridays.

00:29:21.880 | That's what if you work at McKinsey, for example,

00:29:24.800 | is what your schedule's often like.

00:29:26.820 | If you've made one of these plays,

00:29:28.360 | I want to trade accountability for accessibility,

00:29:30.300 | this could be part of what you offer.

00:29:32.840 | On Fridays, I'll be around at the office.

00:29:35.480 | Any type of meetings that need to happen

00:29:37.080 | that might be tangentially relevant,

00:29:38.960 | like we can do them on Fridays,

00:29:40.160 | you can come chat with me in my office.

00:29:41.760 | I'll be there on Fridays.

00:29:43.880 | But Monday through Thursdays, don't really expect much.

00:29:46.000 | I'm working on whatever,

00:29:47.560 | building out the new marketing engine

00:29:50.360 | for our Halloween animatronics.

00:29:51.600 | Leave me alone, but I'll be here on Friday.

00:29:53.960 | So you might even suggest a very specific schedule

00:29:58.440 | of accessibility, make that all really plain.

00:30:01.680 | All right, now idea number five

00:30:04.380 | for significantly decreasing the footprint

00:30:05.900 | of your remote work job, crush one thing per month.

00:30:10.040 | Systematic, deliberate, relentless, deep work day after day,

00:30:16.100 | maybe just one or two hours a day

00:30:17.860 | on something really valuable.

00:30:19.360 | So on a regular basis,

00:30:21.420 | you're actually producing something great.

00:30:23.900 | Why is this important for gaining more time?

00:30:26.620 | Because you get so much breathing room.

00:30:30.060 | They give you so much rope to work with

00:30:33.420 | when you're crushing it.

00:30:35.580 | When you're producing really great stuff,

00:30:38.580 | you gain much more autonomy over how your job unfolds.

00:30:42.820 | If you're, by contrast, unreliable,

00:30:45.300 | if things fall through the cracks

00:30:46.700 | when they hand them to you,

00:30:48.160 | if you haven't really done anything of note

00:30:49.740 | in the last two or three years,

00:30:51.340 | you're under suspicion,

00:30:53.080 | and the leash is gonna be tightened.

00:30:55.340 | And every time you're late answering an email,

00:30:57.500 | every time you go an afternoon

00:30:58.660 | without them hearing from you,

00:30:59.500 | they get more and more worried and suspicious.

00:31:01.100 | And what is this guy doing?

00:31:02.020 | Is he building animatronics?

00:31:03.060 | What's happening here?

00:31:03.940 | But if you're crushing it every month,

00:31:05.180 | they're like, this is great, Cal's on it.

00:31:08.540 | So ironically, by working harder,

00:31:10.820 | at least on one project a month

00:31:13.020 | and giving intense attention,

00:31:14.320 | you can actually reduce the total amount of time

00:31:16.660 | you have to work.

00:31:18.100 | My friend Adam Grant,

00:31:18.980 | the Wharton professor and business author,

00:31:20.620 | calls these idiosyncrasy credits.

00:31:23.500 | If you do things really well,

00:31:25.100 | you gain the ability to be more idiosyncratic

00:31:29.100 | about how you work.

00:31:30.860 | If you're not doing things really well,

00:31:32.740 | you lose those credits.

00:31:34.020 | And so if I'm super valuable,

00:31:37.460 | and I wanna focus on just one area

00:31:39.900 | and only come in on Fridays

00:31:41.340 | and have these weird processes

00:31:43.540 | for the few other things we do,

00:31:45.060 | if I'm killing it, like whatever.

00:31:46.820 | If I'm not, you say, yeah, right.

00:31:49.380 | So you kinda earn your way,

00:31:52.100 | you'll work your way into working less.

00:31:55.020 | Now, I think the issue people often have here

00:31:57.420 | is they do the first part,

00:31:59.300 | they work really hard and do the really good things,

00:32:00.900 | but instead of using that as leverage

00:32:02.060 | to take control of their career

00:32:03.260 | and shape it towards what resonates for their full life,

00:32:05.500 | they just say, great, now I'll work even harder.

00:32:07.460 | Well, this will give me the next promotion

00:32:08.820 | and now I'll have to do even more hard work.

00:32:10.860 | And they just ratchet up, ratchet up

00:32:12.220 | until they're completely burned out.

00:32:13.340 | So you can't forget that second part.

00:32:15.220 | Once you do something really good,

00:32:16.460 | become so good you can't be ignored,

00:32:18.380 | you gotta take that out for a spin

00:32:19.940 | and say, what do I want?

00:32:21.340 | Not just what more will this earn me?

00:32:23.860 | How much more money can I make?

00:32:25.420 | How much more prestige can I gain in just being promoted?

00:32:28.020 | You need a much broader view,

00:32:29.860 | not when things are going bad,

00:32:31.100 | but when things are going well.

00:32:32.660 | I think that's something that people often miss.

00:32:35.660 | I suggest to you, those are my five ideas.

00:32:37.180 | I'll say all five names again.

00:32:39.220 | Create synchrony traps, control your meeting availability,

00:32:42.260 | really sell your processes,

00:32:44.180 | trade accountability for accessibility

00:32:46.300 | and crush one thing per month.

00:32:48.940 | You do those things,

00:32:49.820 | if you're one of the 50% who has a remote job right now

00:32:53.260 | and you can, if you want,

00:32:55.460 | significantly decrease the number of hours

00:32:57.740 | during the standard workday that you're spending

00:32:59.900 | actually dedicated to that job.

00:33:02.340 | - That's really solid advice.

00:33:04.780 | Well, I got a lot.

00:33:07.180 | - It's interesting, Tim's book,

00:33:08.740 | what he focused on, and I talked to him about this

00:33:11.780 | when I interviewed him for his show.

00:33:16.100 | So I interviewed him and then we aired that on his show.

00:33:18.860 | One of the things we talked about is

00:33:21.100 | that section of his book got really out of date

00:33:23.300 | for a good reason.

00:33:24.740 | Most of the advice is how in the world

00:33:26.980 | are you gonna convince someone to let you work remotely?

00:33:30.060 | That was like the challenge in 2007.

00:33:31.980 | How in the world am I gonna convince someone

00:33:33.620 | to let me not be in the office?

00:33:35.980 | Today, that's not the problem at all.

00:33:37.420 | That's, if it's not a default,

00:33:39.900 | it is obviously now a very well understood mode of work

00:33:43.700 | because two years ago, according to that graph,

00:33:46.660 | 85% of people were working remote in the knowledge sector.

00:33:49.740 | So that whole challenge of how do I convince people

00:33:52.020 | that remote work is even feasible,

00:33:54.220 | that whole challenge has been solved.

00:33:56.180 | And so now we can actually put all that planning

00:33:58.340 | and hacking energy into,

00:34:00.340 | so what do I do with the remote job?

00:34:02.060 | So we're making progress.

00:34:03.620 | - And then establishing the front end

00:34:05.740 | with the definitions was helpful.

00:34:08.500 | - Yeah. - To grasp it all.

00:34:09.820 | - Yeah, like what are you actually trying to do?

00:34:11.180 | - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

00:34:12.100 | What are the, what do we mean by this?

00:34:14.140 | What do we, yeah, so there we go.

00:34:15.700 | I don't always do hack stuff,

00:34:16.860 | but I feel like we haven't done some hacks in a little bit.

00:34:18.500 | And I figured let's get in there, hack the job.

00:34:21.420 | All right, so what we're gonna do

00:34:22.260 | in the second segment of the show

00:34:23.380 | is I have questions from you, my listeners, all about this,

00:34:25.900 | all about figuring out how to maneuver remote work

00:34:28.460 | to be more towards your advantage.

00:34:29.740 | So we can see real life examples of this advice

00:34:32.900 | and similar issues at play.

00:34:35.580 | First, however, I wanna briefly talk about

00:34:37.940 | one of the sponsors that makes this show possible,

00:34:40.820 | and that is BetterHelp.

00:34:42.300 | So this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:34:45.300 | Now we talk about often on the podcast

00:34:47.740 | about the five areas of your life,

00:34:50.460 | what we call the deep life buckets.

00:34:52.060 | You have these five areas.

00:34:53.060 | You need to concentrate on all five

00:34:55.340 | to have a fully deep life.

00:34:57.060 | I sometimes feel like there should be a sixth,

00:34:59.360 | cognitive hygiene.

00:35:01.460 | If you aren't building, we could think of it

00:35:06.460 | as an amicable functional relationship with your own brain,

00:35:10.540 | your efforts in the other five buckets of the deep life

00:35:13.900 | are gonna go for naught.

00:35:16.100 | If you're wracked by anxiety,

00:35:17.760 | if that anxiety has developed into depression disorder,

00:35:20.460 | if there's other types of issues or compulsive thinking,

00:35:23.380 | it makes it very difficult for you

00:35:25.020 | to enjoy other parts of life

00:35:27.340 | or make progress on shaping other parts of life

00:35:29.740 | to be truer to your values.

00:35:31.280 | So cognitive hygiene really should be also

00:35:34.360 | one of the buckets that you care about

00:35:36.840 | in forming a deep life.

00:35:39.600 | A therapist is like a highly trained physical trainer

00:35:43.700 | for your mind.

00:35:45.460 | It is an expert that can help you figure out

00:35:47.820 | how do I actually live with this wondrous,

00:35:51.420 | catastrophic, wonderful, terrifying thing

00:35:55.180 | that I call my brain.

00:35:56.180 | Therapist is like your trainer,

00:35:57.640 | your expert to help you build that relationship

00:36:00.760 | with yourself.

00:36:02.240 | This is where better help enters the scene.

00:36:06.420 | If you've always thought about this,

00:36:07.800 | like maybe I should talk to someone,

00:36:09.020 | but again, it seems daunting.

00:36:10.060 | I mean, where do I find this person?

00:36:11.500 | I've heard that it's very hard to find therapists right now

00:36:13.740 | because after the pandemic, they're highly in demand.

00:36:15.980 | Better help is your way into this world.

00:36:18.100 | So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try,

00:36:20.100 | better help is a great option.

00:36:21.820 | It is convenient, flexible, affordable,

00:36:25.900 | which is no small thing.

00:36:27.420 | And here's their big thing, entirely online.

00:36:32.100 | You just fill out a brief questionnaire

00:36:33.460 | to get matched with a licensed therapist.

00:36:35.580 | You can even switch therapists anytime you like

00:36:38.600 | for no additional charge.

00:36:40.680 | So if you wanna live a more empowered life

00:36:43.380 | and get that cognitive hygiene,

00:36:44.740 | deep life bucket into shape,

00:36:46.180 | therapy can get you there.

00:36:48.060 | Visit betterhelp.com/,

00:36:52.340 | what's our slash here, Jesse, deep questions?

00:36:53.900 | - Yep. - Deep questions.

00:36:55.460 | To get 10% off your first month,

00:36:57.360 | that's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com/deepquestions.

00:37:02.360 | Don't forget the slash deep questions

00:37:04.540 | so they know you came from me.

00:37:07.340 | One of the sponsors I wanna briefly talk about

00:37:09.060 | is ExpressVPN.

00:37:12.300 | As I've explained before on a show,

00:37:13.460 | a VPN is a critical tool for anyone who uses the internet.

00:37:18.460 | It is a tool that allows you to interact with the internet

00:37:23.020 | with privacy and with security.

00:37:25.780 | How this works is instead of just going to the service

00:37:28.660 | or the website directly that you wanna talk to,

00:37:31.900 | you instead establish a encrypted secure connection

00:37:34.940 | with a VPN server.

00:37:36.420 | You tell that VPN server

00:37:37.740 | through this encrypted secure connection,

00:37:39.860 | this is the website I really wanna talk to.

00:37:42.040 | This is the service I'm really using.

00:37:43.860 | And then the server goes and talks to that site

00:37:46.780 | and service on your behalf

00:37:47.700 | and passes the response back to you

00:37:49.780 | through your protected connection.

00:37:51.660 | Why does this matter?

00:37:52.620 | So people can't see what you're doing.

00:37:55.220 | So let's say you're on a wireless access point

00:37:58.520 | at a coffee shop somewhere.

00:37:59.760 | People who are sniffing your packets out of the air,

00:38:01.940 | all they know is Cal is talking

00:38:04.220 | on an encrypted connection to a VPN server.

00:38:05.820 | They have no idea where you're going.

00:38:07.120 | More importantly, your phone carrier

00:38:10.080 | or your internet service provider are allowed to

00:38:13.580 | and probably are keeping track

00:38:16.260 | of what sites and services you're using,

00:38:17.860 | potentially even selling that information to advertisers.

00:38:20.580 | If you're using a VPN, they're out of luck.

00:38:23.140 | All they learn about you is he was talking

00:38:25.900 | through an encrypted connection to a VPN server.

00:38:27.620 | I have no idea who that VPN server was talking to.

00:38:31.300 | So as a computer scientist,

00:38:32.380 | I can tell you, you should use a VPN.

00:38:35.020 | And if you're gonna use a VPN,

00:38:36.260 | use the one I use, which is ExpressVPN.

00:38:40.060 | They've got the great server coverage.

00:38:41.560 | They've got the great bandwidth available

00:38:43.320 | and they have the really easy to use app,

00:38:45.120 | which means you just click a button and boom, it's on.

00:38:47.100 | You don't even realize you're going through a VPN anymore.

00:38:49.640 | So use ExpressVPN if you're gonna use a VPN.

00:38:54.000 | To find out more, go to expressvpn.com/deep

00:38:58.280 | to get the same VPN I use.

00:39:01.080 | So take back your online privacy today

00:39:02.640 | and use my link to get three extra months free.

00:39:05.160 | That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-VPN.com/deep,

00:39:09.440 | expressvpn.com/deep.

00:39:12.200 | All right, I am excited.

00:39:14.420 | We get a lot of questions about remote work, Jesse.

00:39:16.220 | So I am excited to get our hands dirty

00:39:19.800 | with some real life remote work situation

00:39:22.080 | and see if we can help make people take advantage

00:39:24.520 | of that situation and make their work life a little better.

00:39:26.240 | What's our first question today?

00:39:27.740 | - All right, first question's from Ian,

00:39:29.600 | a 35 year old engineer from San Francisco.

00:39:32.600 | My family has the opportunity

00:39:33.840 | to make a cross country move next year

00:39:35.540 | that has a potential to radically realign our lives

00:39:37.940 | closer to our values.

00:39:39.360 | More time with children, each other, out in nature.

00:39:42.620 | I'll be shifting to a full-time remote work

00:39:44.600 | in my engineering role.

00:39:45.900 | Any advice on how to navigate this change

00:39:48.160 | with reverting back to our old, busier ways?

00:39:51.040 | - So Ian, what I think is critical here

00:39:52.680 | is you are recognizing just the fact

00:39:55.400 | that your new job is remote does not mean

00:39:57.360 | that automatically it is gonna be a lot of flexibility

00:40:00.240 | and autonomy and you're gonna be able

00:40:01.560 | to spend a lot more time on the other things you care about.

00:40:04.720 | Remote work gives you that potential.

00:40:08.480 | Harvesting that potential is your job and it's hard work.

00:40:11.320 | So go back, for example, to the five ideas we talked about

00:40:16.180 | during today's deep dive and give those serious consideration

00:40:19.100 | that is the type of concentrated effort you'll need

00:40:22.720 | to shape this new role into what you want it actually to be.

00:40:27.720 | Two other things I wanna mention beyond that deep dive,

00:40:31.080 | two, you might consider this change of job

00:40:34.720 | as a good opportunity to renegotiate your role.

00:40:39.040 | So we talked about during the deep dive

00:40:40.760 | that a promotion, for example, was a good time

00:40:44.240 | to renegotiate towards an accountability

00:40:47.920 | versus accessibility type shift.

00:40:50.000 | So gaining more accountability

00:40:52.380 | to lose the need to be so accessible.

00:40:55.020 | I'll be more remote now.

00:40:57.520 | I'm away from the office,

00:40:58.440 | so I'm gonna be harder to reach,

00:40:59.700 | but you really are gonna hold me accountable

00:41:01.040 | for the big projects I'm working on.

00:41:03.080 | A move to a new remote position is a great time

00:41:05.840 | to make that type of shift as well.

00:41:08.240 | The second point I wanna make here

00:41:09.560 | goes a little bit off book

00:41:11.000 | because I'm drawing from the full version of your question.

00:41:15.320 | And in the full version of your question,

00:41:16.960 | you mentioned that your spouse is a professor

00:41:20.140 | at an R1 research institution.

00:41:21.880 | So this move is actually being driven by your spouse

00:41:25.360 | going to a new academic job.

00:41:26.920 | So that's an in-person job.

00:41:29.160 | So you shifted remote so you could follow them to that job.

00:41:32.160 | They're at an R1 university.

00:41:34.080 | If your interest is, and I'm reading this here,

00:41:36.560 | to spend more time with your children

00:41:38.400 | and with each other and out in nature.

00:41:41.080 | The other thing I would suggest

00:41:42.340 | as soon as you're making this shift,

00:41:43.560 | and this is a little bit of insider baseball

00:41:45.080 | for non-academics, but I think it's important,

00:41:48.000 | is set your cost of living such

00:41:51.280 | that your spouse does not have to take

00:41:53.640 | summer salary out of grants.

00:41:55.100 | I made this shift three or four years ago,

00:41:59.360 | and it was phenomenal.

00:42:01.180 | And you guys, I want you to try the same thing.

00:42:03.200 | So what this means for people who are not academics

00:42:05.200 | is most research positions at an R1 research university,

00:42:08.760 | if you're a professor,

00:42:09.880 | they'll pay your salary for 10 months.

00:42:12.540 | The other two months of the year,

00:42:13.720 | typically June or July or July and August,

00:42:16.160 | that's your summer months.

00:42:17.460 | Now you can either not get paid during those months,

00:42:21.240 | or you can get research grants

00:42:24.060 | where part of the money in your budget

00:42:25.920 | for that research grant is to pay your salary

00:42:28.680 | in those two months.

00:42:30.800 | If you do not do that,

00:42:31.980 | if you do not ask for summer salary in your research months,

00:42:35.660 | you basically have that time to yourself.

00:42:38.020 | No one is paying you,

00:42:40.540 | and so they cannot expect much of you.

00:42:42.060 | And you'll see this, universities are pretty good

00:42:44.020 | about actually following this.

00:42:45.200 | There's not meetings and committees

00:42:47.060 | and things happening in the summer

00:42:48.180 | because that's your time.

00:42:49.740 | So that's my other suggestion.

00:42:50.820 | If you are following my advice, Ian,

00:42:53.420 | and gaining a lot of flexibility and autonomy

00:42:56.580 | and significantly decreasing the footprint

00:42:58.620 | of your remote job on your life,

00:43:00.380 | if your spouse can do this with his or her summers,

00:43:03.540 | you combine those two things,

00:43:05.740 | and it's gonna unlock all sorts of cool adventures

00:43:08.760 | or way more time together with your values

00:43:11.000 | during those summer months.

00:43:11.840 | So that's an extra bespoke hack

00:43:14.740 | that I wanna add onto your shift that you're doing here.

00:43:17.420 | All right, let's keep rolling.

00:43:20.800 | - All right, next question is from Catherine,

00:43:22.680 | a 33-year-old office manager.

00:43:25.600 | I'm the office manager at a small remote company.

00:43:28.520 | As the office manager, a lot of my work is reactionary,

00:43:31.600 | involves being available for people most of the day.

00:43:34.400 | For instance, my boss is pinging me

00:43:35.840 | anytime something comes to mind.

00:43:37.680 | How can I practice deep work at my job?

00:43:40.060 | - All right, well, Catherine, first of all,

00:43:43.680 | I don't know if deep work is the right thing

00:43:46.480 | to be talking about here in the sense of

00:43:49.420 | an office manager position might not require

00:43:53.400 | regular extended periods of unbroken concentration.

00:43:56.720 | It's not really in the job description.

00:43:58.320 | That doesn't mean, however, that you should be forced

00:44:02.840 | to sacrifice yourself to the travails

00:44:05.880 | of the unbridled hyperactive hive mind.

00:44:09.040 | So in my book, "A World Without Email,"

00:44:10.560 | I talked about this specifically.

00:44:12.000 | I broke knowledge work jobs up

00:44:13.540 | into multiple different categories.

00:44:16.080 | And this was one of the categories I talked about.

00:44:18.960 | I called it support, but mainly what I meant by this

00:44:21.960 | is the major part of your job description

00:44:24.320 | is reacting to requests to come in

00:44:27.220 | and trying to satisfy them.

00:44:28.800 | And what I said in email, the goal there is not

00:44:32.000 | to get very long periods of time where no one bothers you.

00:44:35.080 | The goal there is to achieve a workflow

00:44:37.780 | in which you can execute one thing at a time

00:44:41.560 | without interruption.

00:44:43.260 | So I'm doing this thing someone asked me to do

00:44:46.040 | fully until it's done.

00:44:48.560 | And now I can expose myself to, okay,

00:44:49.840 | what else is going on?

00:44:50.680 | What am I gonna do next?

00:44:51.500 | And then I'm doing this thing until I'm done.

00:44:53.240 | And then I shift on to the next.

00:44:55.040 | The alternative to this is what most people

00:44:56.920 | in these type of positions do,

00:44:58.160 | which is a constant background hum

00:45:00.520 | of tending to the back and forth conversations

00:45:02.560 | about the things going on or they're about to do

00:45:04.360 | while they're actually trying to do the work themselves.

00:45:06.280 | And it puts you into this terribly cognitive

00:45:08.680 | fatiguing cycle where you're trying to actually execute

00:45:11.440 | the tasks that are coming to as the office manager

00:45:13.720 | while context shifting like a madman

00:45:16.200 | while you're executing the task

00:45:17.600 | because you're keeping up with these conversations

00:45:19.240 | about other things going on,

00:45:20.560 | your brain gets completely fried

00:45:22.680 | because it can't shoot back and forth like that.

00:45:24.640 | And the job becomes exhausting and you burn out.

00:45:27.520 | So we don't need four hours every day

00:45:29.840 | for you to work on your novel,

00:45:30.920 | but we need you to have the ability to work 40 minutes

00:45:34.560 | on getting this report together

00:45:36.840 | before you look at any inbox, before you look at any Slack.

00:45:40.520 | So one thing at a time,

00:45:42.360 | completing it before moving on to the next.

00:45:44.260 | That's how our mind is wired.

00:45:45.840 | That is what I want to achieve for you.

00:45:47.820 | So Catherine, I'm gonna get super tactical here

00:45:50.240 | 'cause it's kind of the mood we're in,

00:45:52.220 | I think for today's episode.

00:45:53.800 | And I'm gonna, took some notes here.

00:45:55.800 | I'm gonna walk through how you can essentially simulate

00:46:00.400 | without any extra visible technology,

00:46:03.980 | how you can simulate something

00:46:05.440 | like an informal ticketing system

00:46:09.460 | that help keep track of all of this incoming

00:46:11.440 | in a way that allows you to actually be sequential

00:46:14.060 | in how you exercise.

00:46:16.280 | All right, so here's, I'm gonna walk you through this.

00:46:19.200 | Set up a task board using a program like Trello.

00:46:22.520 | This is gonna be the base of your informal ticketing system.

00:46:25.520 | Here are the five columns I want you

00:46:27.120 | to add to that task board.

00:46:29.040 | To process, ready to execute,

00:46:32.120 | scheduled to execute, waiting to hear back and done.

00:46:38.040 | Now, here's how you're gonna go forward.

00:46:41.280 | You will check inboxes, be them email, voicemail,

00:46:44.680 | if people still use that or Slack, in between tasks,

00:46:47.720 | but never during a task.

00:46:49.220 | And if a task is very long,

00:46:50.720 | well, then you need to break it up into reasonable size.

00:46:52.760 | Like I'm gonna break it up into a chunk

00:46:54.680 | that'll take about 30 to 45 minutes.

00:46:56.400 | And that's one task, okay?

00:46:58.520 | So you're never too far from checking in,

00:47:01.820 | but you're not switching away from what you're doing,

00:47:04.360 | checking and switching back.

00:47:05.980 | So you're only checking in between reasonably sized tasks.

00:47:10.000 | Things that come into your inboxes,

00:47:12.080 | you are going to immediately get them out of there.

00:47:14.600 | Your email inbox is not a knowledge management system.

00:47:17.920 | It is not a task management system.

00:47:19.680 | It is a literal mailbox.

00:47:21.160 | You gotta take the mail out of there

00:47:22.240 | and put it somewhere else.

00:47:23.140 | So for you, what that's gonna mean

00:47:24.360 | is when you do these checks,

00:47:26.360 | you're gonna move everything out of there to a card

00:47:28.880 | on your to process column in Trello.

00:47:32.760 | And you can even just copy the text of the email

00:47:36.060 | and paste it on the back of the Trello card.

00:47:38.040 | So all the information is there,

00:47:39.480 | quick summary of what's going on on the front.

00:47:41.360 | You don't have to make sense of it.

00:47:42.280 | You don't have to make a plan for it.

00:47:43.960 | It's in your system.

00:47:44.800 | It's no longer in your inbox, all right?

00:47:47.440 | So you're constantly grabbing things in between tasks,

00:47:50.320 | adding to your to process column.

00:47:52.820 | They're gonna play the role of a ticket here

00:47:54.280 | in our informal ticketing system.

00:47:56.600 | All right, now what you need is regular sessions

00:48:00.080 | throughout each day.

00:48:01.260 | I would say maybe two, one mid morning, one mid afternoon

00:48:04.840 | for working through those process columns.

00:48:08.360 | I would schedule this time on my calendar,

00:48:10.100 | give yourself about 45 minutes for each of these sessions

00:48:12.200 | and schedule on your calendar and protect it.

00:48:14.160 | Maybe at 10 and three.

00:48:17.120 | As you go through everything that's built up

00:48:19.040 | in the to process column,

00:48:22.080 | you have a few options for each item.

00:48:24.440 | If it's a very quick thing,

00:48:25.480 | someone has a question you can easily answer

00:48:27.960 | or you have to just go on their behalf and whatever,

00:48:31.240 | add their requests to buy paperclips

00:48:33.280 | to the list you keep of what to buy in your next order,

00:48:35.780 | just do it, move that card to done.

00:48:37.520 | If you need more information

00:48:41.480 | from the person who sent you the request,

00:48:44.440 | which is often the case

00:48:45.960 | and part of what makes the support roles really annoying

00:48:48.200 | is that the people you work for, the managers are often,

00:48:51.360 | me need pewter good and just send,

00:48:53.880 | you're like, I don't know what this means.

00:48:55.760 | They're just trying to get it off of their head

00:48:57.320 | using you as like a reminder system, very frustrating,

00:49:00.120 | but it happens all the time.

00:49:01.560 | So you need more information from the respondent.

00:49:04.320 | You can request that they clarify

00:49:08.320 | maybe by calling you during office hours.

00:49:10.120 | Remember office hours, I always come back to that.

00:49:12.040 | If you run, if you're an office manager,

00:49:14.100 | you should have probably twice a day office hours.

00:49:16.840 | You say, yeah, just call me, blah, blah, blah,

00:49:19.520 | at any of these days, and we'll figure out in more detail

00:49:21.480 | what I can do for you.

00:49:22.580 | It's all about how I can help you.

00:49:23.880 | You gotta play that, you gotta play that game.

00:49:26.720 | Or if you need to send a request to someone else

00:49:29.160 | to answer their question,

00:49:30.080 | they're asking you me want computer good.

00:49:32.080 | So you have to talk to the IT department

00:49:34.000 | about the computer replacement cycle.

00:49:35.440 | So if you have to request something else on behalf of them,

00:49:38.920 | you're gonna move that card

00:49:40.400 | to the waiting to hear back column.

00:49:43.880 | And you just write right there on the card

00:49:45.460 | under the description of what it is,

00:49:47.680 | who you're waiting to hear back from.

00:49:49.480 | I asked Jesse to stop by office hours at some point

00:49:53.360 | and clarify the question.

00:49:54.480 | I sent this request over to IT on Monday,

00:49:57.680 | waiting to hear back.

00:49:59.000 | So you have it, lost it.

00:50:00.100 | It's not in your inbox, it's not in your head.

00:50:02.280 | It is right there.

00:50:04.040 | The other thing that you might be doing

00:50:06.520 | as you're going, the other options

00:50:07.680 | you're going through this to process column

00:50:10.240 | is clarifying specifically what needs to be done.

00:50:14.600 | So again, you're translating from the informally type thing

00:50:17.320 | into here's what really has to happen.

00:50:18.860 | A request has to go over here

00:50:20.440 | and then we have to file this form, wait to hear back.

00:50:23.140 | You're clarifying, okay, this is specifically

00:50:25.800 | the work that needs to be done here.

00:50:27.920 | And so for complex tasks that are in the two process column,

00:50:30.240 | this is what you're doing with them.

00:50:31.160 | You're clarifying what really needs to be done.

00:50:34.200 | If it is something that needs to happen on a specific day,

00:50:37.240 | put it on your calendar,

00:50:38.480 | move the card to the schedule to execute column.

00:50:42.240 | If it's something that's big enough

00:50:43.400 | that it doesn't have to happen on a particular day,

00:50:45.260 | but if you don't put aside time for it,

00:50:46.880 | it's not gonna get done.

00:50:48.020 | Go schedule that on your calendar.

00:50:49.900 | This morning, this afternoon,

00:50:51.040 | I'm working on this big request that came in

00:50:53.360 | and move the card to schedule to execute.

00:50:55.760 | Otherwise move the card to ready to execute,

00:50:58.460 | which is just things, do them next time you get a chance.

00:51:02.020 | You know, you clarified what it is

00:51:03.680 | and it's do them next time you get a chance.

00:51:08.280 | In all cases, this is what really

00:51:11.760 | simulates a ticketing system.

00:51:13.600 | Whenever something moves from one column to another,

00:51:16.280 | send the note to the original source of that task,

00:51:19.700 | keeping people up to speed.

00:51:22.240 | So that means when you first add something to two process,

00:51:24.620 | it's Jesse, I got your note.

00:51:27.440 | It's in my queue, I'm gonna get to it.

00:51:29.400 | I'll keep you posted.

00:51:30.320 | So they know that you saw it.

00:51:31.920 | When you realize you have to ask IT something

00:51:34.240 | and you move it over to the waiting to hear back,

00:51:35.720 | hey, Jesse, just to let you know,

00:51:37.600 | I put in a request to IT, we're gonna figure this out.

00:51:40.160 | I'll keep you posted and I'll let you know when I hear back.

00:51:42.560 | They know what's going on.

00:51:43.680 | If you move it over to, you know, schedule to execute,

00:51:46.180 | you can say, hey, I got your request.

00:51:48.280 | It's on my calendar.

00:51:49.240 | I'm tackling it on this day.

00:51:50.600 | I'll let you know when I'm done, right?

00:51:52.000 | So you're always keeping people up to speed

00:51:55.320 | with what is going on.

00:51:57.720 | So that's the system.

00:51:58.560 | And then in all of your other time during the day,

00:52:00.720 | when you're not doing any of these things

00:52:01.760 | I just talked about,

00:52:02.580 | you're just pulling something off that ready to execute list

00:52:05.280 | and just doing it, send in an update.

00:52:07.360 | You put all that together

00:52:08.200 | and you have something like an informal ticketing system.

00:52:11.400 | People are up to speed on what you're doing

00:52:13.360 | and what the status is.

00:52:14.200 | So they won't demand this minute to minute accessibility.

00:52:16.880 | Like, I don't even know if you got this.

00:52:18.040 | You better answer me right away.

00:52:19.440 | You've gained yourself the breathing room

00:52:20.800 | you need to actually work on things until they're done

00:52:22.800 | before moving on to the next thing.

00:52:24.640 | This all might sound like a huge headache,

00:52:26.820 | a lot of overhead, but I'm telling you, Catherine,

00:52:29.840 | if you're able to work on one thing at a time

00:52:32.840 | with no interruption,

00:52:34.200 | if you're able to have captured everything

00:52:36.040 | that needs to be done and all the relevant information

00:52:37.800 | in one place,

00:52:38.840 | where you're not at all stressed about open loops

00:52:42.160 | or things you're forgetting,

00:52:43.920 | the cognitive drain of your job

00:52:45.880 | will be significantly reduced.

00:52:47.080 | In fact, you might even actually rediscover some joy for,

00:52:49.880 | hey, I like this company.

00:52:51.240 | I play a key role in this thing operating.

00:52:54.360 | I'm valued by people.

00:52:56.080 | And I feel good about what I'm doing.

00:52:57.600 | You can get back to that if you achieve those properties.

00:53:00.600 | Now you don't have to use this particular system.

00:53:02.880 | I just came up with these particular details.

00:53:04.880 | But my point is,

00:53:06.200 | this is what high-end elite knowledge work

00:53:10.480 | management systems look like.

00:53:11.880 | These are the type of things

00:53:13.840 | that you probably need in place

00:53:15.080 | if you have a high churn job.

00:53:16.920 | If you have a job where things are coming at you really quick

00:53:18.760 | and you don't wanna just completely burn out,

00:53:21.200 | this is what these systems look like.

00:53:22.680 | There's not just one tool

00:53:24.080 | that's gonna solve this for you.

00:53:25.520 | You gotta engineer information flow

00:53:27.360 | and task flow and time flow.

00:53:28.520 | It's non-trivial, but this effort is worth it.

00:53:30.680 | These type of things make a huge difference

00:53:32.600 | once you get them right.

00:53:34.800 | It's like my old days, Jesse.

00:53:36.360 | The systems and hacking.

00:53:38.000 | - Yeah.

00:53:38.840 | - That's like an old pitch you don't lose.

00:53:41.320 | It's like a knuckle curve.

00:53:43.080 | You asked me to build a system

00:53:44.720 | around information or task flows.

00:53:46.880 | - I'll do it.

00:53:47.720 | I love it.

00:53:48.560 | - Yeah.

00:53:49.400 | All right, let's keep rolling here.

00:53:50.400 | - All right, next question.

00:53:51.440 | Jason from Louisiana.

00:53:53.240 | I've recently accepted a job as an editor

00:53:56.040 | at a major Christian publishing house.

00:53:58.280 | It's a remote position with autonomy and flexibility.

00:54:02.040 | I'm wondering what advice you have

00:54:03.440 | on how to balance this job

00:54:04.640 | while maintaining my own research and writing projects.

00:54:07.400 | - Schedule first reasonable time

00:54:12.680 | for your individual research and writing projects

00:54:15.600 | in a way that's not gonna grossly infringe

00:54:18.800 | on your normal jobs.

00:54:19.640 | Don't say, well, from 10 to two,

00:54:21.040 | Monday through Friday, I work on my book.

00:54:23.040 | In the morning, the afternoon,

00:54:24.720 | you put it in reasonable time

00:54:28.040 | and build some good rituals around that.

00:54:29.960 | Where do I go and what do I do?

00:54:31.560 | Right before I start working.

00:54:33.160 | Then consider that time off limits

00:54:34.440 | and work around it for the rest of your job.

00:54:36.800 | There's a little fixed schedule productivity.

00:54:38.760 | I write these mornings and it's one afternoon.

00:54:41.040 | Now I gotta figure out how to make the rest of my job work.

00:54:43.520 | And just use all the different types of ideas

00:54:45.040 | I've talked about.

00:54:46.720 | The same enemies that we talked about in the beginning,

00:54:48.760 | this shows your enemies here.

00:54:49.840 | The more that all your work unfolds

00:54:51.520 | with informal back and forth,

00:54:52.680 | the harder it is to ever be away from it.

00:54:54.200 | The more that meetings can happen

00:54:55.720 | at any time at any place,

00:54:56.840 | the harder it is to get away from that.

00:54:57.960 | So you can put those type of ideas

00:54:59.240 | into the hopper, but just work backwards from,

00:55:02.840 | this is time I'm writing.

00:55:04.560 | And so let me work around it.

00:55:06.240 | You would be surprised.

00:55:07.800 | This approach, which I call fixed schedule productivity,

00:55:10.480 | you would be surprised about how innovative it makes you.

00:55:13.400 | It's like my rule that I try not to work

00:55:15.920 | outside of a standard roughly nine to five

00:55:18.400 | or nine to five 30 work hours,

00:55:20.280 | even though I have nine jobs.

00:55:22.360 | The power of just knowing this is my constraints

00:55:25.280 | and I make my work fit in those constraints

00:55:27.360 | has generated untold productivity innovation.

00:55:30.320 | So the simplest ideas can generate

00:55:31.880 | the most complicated responses.

00:55:33.160 | So just schedule that time, Jason,

00:55:34.320 | be reasonable about it, work around it.

00:55:36.280 | All right, what do we got?

00:55:39.080 | - Next question is from Courtney,

00:55:40.720 | a 40 year old from the Bay Area.

00:55:42.880 | My remote software job has a lot of things I like,

00:55:45.280 | autonomy, flexible schedule, and pretty good pay.

00:55:48.360 | Now that I'm more senior, however,

00:55:49.840 | I don't feel like I have much room to grow.

00:55:52.200 | The only option would be going to management,

00:55:53.760 | which is a hundred percent hyperactive high mind

00:55:56.160 | and miserable.

00:55:57.400 | Should I go back to the drawing board with a new career?

00:56:00.200 | - Well, Courtney, here's my follow-up.

00:56:03.400 | Why do you need room to grow?

00:56:05.800 | And I don't mean that to be dismissive or facetious.

00:56:09.360 | I actually think this is a common assumption

00:56:13.160 | that we should examine.

00:56:16.800 | So what I can tell from your question

00:56:18.200 | and the more elaborated version that you sent me

00:56:21.240 | is there's this baseline assumption

00:56:22.680 | that I need to be continually growing in my job,

00:56:26.360 | meaning salary, prestige, responsibility

00:56:29.080 | has to keep going up,

00:56:30.400 | much in the same way that economic growth has to continue

00:56:33.400 | or we're not gonna be able to pay back the loans

00:56:35.200 | that we just took out and the whole economy will collapse.

00:56:37.480 | And so we often have this growth mindset

00:56:41.080 | around our careers.

00:56:42.120 | Now, this is a good mindset, especially early on.

00:56:45.440 | You know, when you're in a knowledge work job

00:56:46.840 | and you're 22,

00:56:48.120 | it's not a very good knowledge work job, right?

00:56:50.680 | And if you just said, why do I need to grow?

00:56:52.920 | I'm perfectly happy in this entry-level knowledge work job.

00:56:55.800 | I'm very good at getting the coffee to my boss

00:56:58.680 | and Xeroxing or whatever.

00:57:00.560 | It's probably low salary, low autonomy.

00:57:02.960 | You don't have a lot of career capital.

00:57:04.040 | That's not so great.

00:57:05.040 | But when you've got to a point

00:57:06.560 | and in your 40s, you can get there, no problem.

00:57:09.280 | When you get to the point

00:57:10.280 | where you have a lot of career capital,

00:57:11.880 | meaning you have a lot of leverage in your job

00:57:13.480 | and your essay and how that job unfolds,

00:57:16.120 | you can craft something that fits really well

00:57:18.880 | with your vision for the other bucket of money

00:57:20.480 | and buckets of your deep life.

00:57:21.800 | Now we have to be careful

00:57:24.040 | about growth for the sake of growth.

00:57:25.680 | Now we're thinking about how does my work fit

00:57:27.800 | into my bigger vision of my life?

00:57:29.120 | And that might mean I need to get here.

00:57:32.280 | I'm here, but if I could get here,

00:57:33.560 | it unlocks all these other visions I have

00:57:35.080 | for these other parts of my life.

00:57:36.040 | And then, yeah, then that's what we're doing.

00:57:37.120 | We're getting after that, figuring it out.

00:57:38.760 | But it might be with, this is great.

00:57:40.720 | I like my job. I'm good at it.

00:57:42.040 | It's flexible. It's autonomous.

00:57:43.520 | I like where we live.

00:57:44.720 | The other buckets, constitution, community, contemplation

00:57:49.240 | are all, I'm developing those.

00:57:50.320 | I'm giving more time into those.

00:57:52.000 | Maybe my parents are aging and we live near them

00:57:54.680 | and I want to spend more time around them

00:57:56.120 | or have young kids or something.

00:57:57.440 | It's completely fine.

00:57:58.280 | I say, this job is great.

00:57:59.400 | I love it and it pays well and they like me.

00:58:02.400 | And I don't want to go into management

00:58:03.920 | and I don't want to start over.

00:58:05.440 | Most employers are happy if you're like,

00:58:07.600 | look, I just want to kill it at this for a while.

00:58:10.760 | I have other things going on in my life

00:58:12.160 | and this is really good for me and let's just do that.

00:58:15.560 | So I want you to consider that, Courtney.

00:58:19.640 | The good enough job, which is actually the name of a book

00:58:23.400 | that's not out yet, I don't think, but I blurbed it

00:58:25.800 | and I liked it.

00:58:26.640 | I read it and I blurbed it.

00:58:27.840 | It's called "The Good Enough Job", great title.

00:58:30.120 | Is sometimes the best option, at least for a while.

00:58:34.920 | So I don't know if that's your situation, Courtney,

00:58:36.880 | but I'm using your question as an excuse

00:58:38.960 | to talk about this idea more generally.

00:58:43.280 | That the goal is not continual growth.

00:58:45.960 | The goal is building a deep life

00:58:48.080 | in which each of the buckets is humming

00:58:50.440 | close to whatever your vision is for it.

00:58:52.800 | And so, especially for these sort of high-powered

00:58:55.000 | Bay Area engineering type jobs, people get there.

00:58:58.320 | They can get there by their late 30s, early 40s

00:59:00.920 | and have a lot of flexibility.

00:59:03.000 | So consider that, Courtney.

00:59:04.960 | Maybe that's just what you do for a while.

00:59:06.640 | I think your bosses would probably be ecstatic about it.

00:59:10.480 | And I think you're right to not want to go

00:59:11.960 | into a management role at a job

00:59:13.560 | where that means 100% hyperactive hive mind.

00:59:15.880 | To me, that's the equivalent of it's a game show

00:59:18.280 | where someone says, "Look, we are gonna give you

00:59:22.280 | "it's Fear Factor.

00:59:23.880 | "We're gonna give you this bag with a 50% salary increase,

00:59:28.880 | "but we're also gonna kick you in the groin every hour."

00:59:32.280 | I'm not gonna enjoy the 50% salary increase

00:59:39.120 | if Fear Factor host Joe Rogan,

00:59:41.760 | who used to be a national kickboxing champion

00:59:43.840 | is kicking me in the groin every hour.

00:59:45.640 | I think I'd rather just not have the 50% salary increase

00:59:48.800 | and keep my groin less kicked.

00:59:50.920 | This is a very important metaphor, Courtney, very precise.

00:59:56.000 | So sometimes getting a promotion can be Joe Rogan

00:59:59.680 | kicking you in the groin.

01:00:00.520 | That's what I'm trying to say here.

01:00:01.360 | That's what everyone has been trying to say.

01:00:04.000 | They just haven't been able to articulate it as well.

01:00:05.440 | So keep that in mind.

01:00:06.360 | Do you need growth?

01:00:07.200 | Maybe just chill for a little bit.

01:00:08.080 | There's other parts of life that are cool as well.

01:00:10.760 | All right, we've got one last thing here.

01:00:14.200 | It's actually, it's a case study, not a question.

01:00:17.200 | So occasionally someone will send in a question

01:00:18.800 | that I think is more, the question itself

01:00:20.880 | is actually just an interesting case study

01:00:22.480 | of the modern world of work and issues we care about.

01:00:25.400 | So I'm gonna read this one here.

01:00:27.000 | This is from Peter, a 35 year old software engineer.

01:00:32.200 | So here's what Peter wrote.

01:00:33.760 | "I worked for a remote only tech company

01:00:36.600 | "where everything about the way they worked

01:00:37.800 | "was very intentional.

01:00:39.000 | "They embraced almost exclusively asynchronous deep work

01:00:41.680 | "from the CEO down with a particular emphasis

01:00:45.200 | "on only work on one thing at a time,

01:00:47.200 | "only have one top priority at a time.

01:00:48.680 | "In many ways, it was great.

01:00:50.680 | "However, everything centered around

01:00:53.440 | "the company-wide project tracker

01:00:55.480 | "that served as a knowledge base,

01:00:57.120 | "a documentation layer, and a status tracker.

01:01:01.280 | "I could go read the latest draft

01:01:02.640 | "of the marketing company's upcoming blog post

01:01:05.840 | "or look at how the backend team

01:01:06.960 | "was tackling a new challenge.

01:01:08.120 | "I tried to prune my intake,

01:01:09.800 | "but it became clear that the people that excelled there

01:01:12.280 | "were the ones that involved themselves

01:01:13.680 | "in many things at once.

01:01:14.760 | "These people were subscribed to many different initiatives

01:01:18.360 | "across the company and could inhale mass amounts

01:01:20.520 | "of constant project updates,

01:01:22.520 | "remember many of the little details

01:01:24.400 | "about where everything was.

01:01:25.800 | "In short, hooking into the hive mind

01:01:29.280 | "was seemingly at odds with the one top priority mantra.

01:01:32.320 | "I used to think I was good at this sort of thing,

01:01:34.320 | "but somewhere between COVID and the birth of my second kid,

01:01:36.640 | "I seemed to have lost the ability

01:01:37.680 | "to keep tons of statuses in my head.

01:01:39.840 | "I wanted to excel, but I quickly learned

01:01:41.280 | "that I couldn't keep up and ended up burning out.

01:01:44.200 | "This was all with a virtually free calendar

01:01:45.880 | "and lots of autonomy in my day-to-day work.

01:01:48.400 | "Should I have done something differently?

01:01:49.440 | "Should this company have structured

01:01:50.480 | "or encouraged something else?"

01:01:53.120 | So I wanted to use this as a case study

01:01:54.680 | instead of a question because it pointed out

01:01:57.200 | something critical about even an intentional

01:02:01.440 | remote work environment.

01:02:02.960 | So we talked about how to make remote work work,

01:02:05.640 | get away from the hyperactive hive mind

01:02:07.760 | of things happening with unscheduled

01:02:09.720 | back and forth messaging.

01:02:11.640 | Tons of emails, tons of Slack, tons of meetings.

01:02:14.040 | This company that Peter's talking about

01:02:16.440 | actually had accomplished that.

01:02:18.040 | I think it's inaccurate.

01:02:19.000 | He referred to this behavior of inhaling information

01:02:23.400 | from the project management system

01:02:25.040 | as quote, "hooking into the hive mind."

01:02:27.040 | This is actually different than that, I think, Peter.

01:02:29.000 | The hive mind to me is very specific

01:02:30.560 | about collaboration unfolding

01:02:32.000 | with these unscheduled back and forth messaging.

01:02:33.680 | So you have to constantly be keeping track of these things.

01:02:36.560 | This was a little bit different.

01:02:37.560 | This was making the ability to follow

01:02:40.920 | and be a part of many different projects low friction.

01:02:43.520 | This is what was going on there.

01:02:45.120 | And this points out even an intentionally designed

01:02:48.920 | remote work company can fall into traps

01:02:52.640 | beyond the hyperactive hive mind.

01:02:54.480 | So the trap that is being illustrated here

01:02:56.480 | that I wanna just quickly highlight

01:02:58.200 | is controlling workload per project,

01:03:00.120 | but not the number of projects.

01:03:02.920 | So you have a philosophy, and this I think is common,

01:03:05.080 | especially in tech oriented remote first companies.

01:03:07.480 | You have a mantra of one thing at a time, it's scrum boards.

01:03:10.960 | Like this is your task.

01:03:12.800 | And when you're done, you can pull another one in.

01:03:14.640 | That's all great, but then they don't restrict

01:03:16.640 | how many different projects you're involved in.

01:03:18.440 | And it's up to you.

01:03:19.880 | And like, well, I could subscribe to this one.

01:03:21.240 | It's right here in the system.

01:03:22.160 | And this one, I could be involved in this one and that one.

01:03:24.000 | And no single project maybe has you doing

01:03:25.840 | more than one thing at a time, but you have seven projects.

01:03:27.880 | And it's the same as having one project

01:03:29.200 | giving you seven different things to do,

01:03:30.600 | and you end up burned out.

01:03:32.400 | And if there is no systematic way

01:03:34.600 | to control your overall workload,

01:03:36.360 | then you're just thrown into a situation where it says,

01:03:38.600 | hey, it's up to you, but you know,

01:03:40.160 | if you're doing more projects,

01:03:41.320 | we're gonna look at you a little bit more positively.

01:03:43.160 | And then what happens?

01:03:45.000 | The young ones with all their energy

01:03:47.040 | start to climb the ranks, and the rest of us,

01:03:49.880 | like Peter, who were exhausted by COVID

01:03:52.680 | and have kids at home, we fall behind.

01:03:55.280 | And then you begin to just create the split.

01:03:57.320 | And then all the young people,

01:03:59.240 | they get promoted much faster,

01:04:01.400 | and they start saying things like fire and cap and base,

01:04:04.840 | and they shift all of the operations

01:04:06.440 | to TikTok and everyone dies.

01:04:08.000 | That's not great.

01:04:11.000 | So you have, this is a common mistake

01:04:12.600 | where you feel like you're a smart remote work company,

01:04:14.160 | but you're not.

01:04:15.000 | You control workload for project, but not project workloads.

01:04:18.480 | The other issue, this was not in Peter's message,

01:04:20.400 | but I'll just mention it 'cause I've heard about it a lot,

01:04:22.800 | is you get too obsessive about the details.

01:04:25.320 | I think this plagued a lot of people

01:04:26.880 | who adopted agile methodologies like Scrum

01:04:30.000 | with their common task boards and standing meetings,

01:04:32.120 | is that because engineers like me are sometimes

01:04:35.560 | on the nerdier end of the social spectrum, let's say,

01:04:40.360 | we get obsessive.

01:04:41.800 | And then it's, what matters is as the third degree

01:04:46.040 | Scrum master on an alternative Wednesday,

01:04:49.720 | I have to roll 2D12 to see if we're able

01:04:52.920 | to advance the pull methodology one more layer

01:04:56.680 | towards the dungeon of despair.

01:04:58.040 | It just becomes obsessing about the rules

01:04:59.880 | for the sake of obsessing about the rules.

01:05:01.680 | And then that's terrible too.

01:05:03.160 | So those are two traps that you can get away

01:05:04.720 | from the hive mind, but still be in a dangerous territory.

01:05:07.960 | So you have to control the overall workload,

01:05:10.640 | not just per project, and be worried about obsessing

01:05:13.840 | over the details of your systems.

01:05:15.360 | They're just a guide to help you get away

01:05:17.800 | from constant back and forth.

01:05:19.120 | It's not the Talmud.

01:05:21.840 | We do not have to pour over the Scrum master guide

01:05:24.720 | to make sure that we're using the right terminology.

01:05:29.160 | All right, Jesse, so that's basically what I have to say

01:05:30.960 | about remote work and hacking remote work.

01:05:32.960 | So again, if you're one of the people who is still remote,

01:05:35.840 | keep those ideas in mind.

01:05:37.800 | I like to end every episode

01:05:38.920 | with a something interesting segment.

01:05:41.360 | We do something different today.

01:05:42.760 | I'll report on the books I read last month.

01:05:45.520 | First, I wanna briefly mention another sponsor

01:05:48.040 | that makes this show possible.

01:05:49.120 | That's our friends at ZocDoc.com.

01:05:53.340 | So this is pretty common.

01:05:55.760 | Let's say you have a health issue.

01:05:58.360 | You don't have an established relationship

01:06:00.160 | with a doctor for that type of health issue.

01:06:02.500 | Your foot hurts.

01:06:03.340 | You don't know a podiatrist.

01:06:04.480 | You don't have a primary care physician.

01:06:06.040 | How do you find a doctor?

01:06:07.280 | A lot of people, especially people my age

01:06:09.840 | or a little younger, get stuck.

01:06:11.000 | Like, I don't know.

01:06:11.820 | I asked my friend.

01:06:12.760 | I walk down the street and look for one of those two snakes,

01:06:18.580 | Hippocratic snakes biting each other,

01:06:20.160 | and just say, "That must be a doctor's office."

01:06:21.520 | Like, we don't know what to do.

01:06:22.360 | So we get stuck, and we invent annoying words like adulting

01:06:26.240 | to explain why we're not actually making progress.

01:06:28.680 | What's really happening is it's difficult.

01:06:30.080 | This is where ZocDoc comes in.

01:06:32.160 | It is a free app, in fact, the only free app

01:06:35.720 | that lets you find and book doctors

01:06:37.680 | who are patient-reviewed, take your insurance,

01:06:39.440 | and available when you need them,

01:06:40.560 | and treat almost every condition under the sun.

01:06:44.220 | You look up doctors.

01:06:45.360 | Here's nearby doctors.

01:06:46.360 | Here's reviews from real patients.

01:06:47.620 | Do they take my insurance?

01:06:48.640 | Yes.

01:06:49.480 | Let me just book a meeting with this doctor

01:06:50.900 | all through the same app.

01:06:52.160 | This is the right way to do healthcare.

01:06:54.800 | You should be using ZocDoc.

01:06:56.200 | This is true, Jesse.

01:06:57.040 | It says in my ad notes here,

01:06:58.580 | it says in my ad notes that younger people

01:07:02.160 | are using TikTok to try to figure out

01:07:06.240 | medical care decisions.

01:07:07.580 | - Yeah. - That's a problem.

01:07:11.200 | That's a problem.

01:07:12.020 | You need ZocDoc.

01:07:12.920 | If you're using TikTok to figure out

01:07:14.680 | your medical conditions,

01:07:16.400 | you're gonna be giving yourself a prescription

01:07:18.640 | of a fire dance, and you just start dancing.

01:07:22.040 | And about halfway through the dance,

01:07:23.700 | your friend is like, "Yeah, but you still got

01:07:24.920 | "that six-inch rebar going through your spine."

01:07:27.480 | And you're like, "Yeah, you're right.

01:07:28.320 | "I probably should use ZocDoc.com."

01:07:30.080 | So you need ZocDoc, the only free app

01:07:33.600 | that lets you find and book doctors.

01:07:35.440 | Now, we do have a little bit of a contest.

01:07:37.000 | I should mention this.

01:07:37.820 | We do have a little bit of a contest.

01:07:38.880 | We like ZocDoc.com because there's a lot of ox in it.

01:07:41.640 | So we have a kind of informal contest

01:07:44.200 | of what could be an even cooler ox-centric URL.

01:07:49.200 | And you remember this, Jesse, 'cause I sent it to you.

01:07:52.240 | Someone sent us the idea of,

01:07:54.280 | what was it, like, what if the Dwayne Johnson,

01:07:57.420 | was this right?

01:07:59.200 | Dwayne, or was this mine?

01:08:00.160 | Dwayne Johnson has a website

01:08:03.060 | where he helps you make model-size docs

01:08:06.960 | for like model train displays.

01:08:09.760 | And his website was rockmockdoc.com.

01:08:12.800 | That was a good one.

01:08:14.480 | Now it's got zocdoc.com, but rockmockdoc.com.

01:08:17.040 | I like that.

01:08:17.920 | So anyways, go to zocdoc.com/deep

01:08:20.400 | and download the ZocDoc app for free.

01:08:22.240 | Then find a book at top-rated doctor today,

01:08:24.240 | many available within 24 hours.

01:08:26.160 | For God's sake, stop using TikTok to diagnose yourself.

01:08:28.880 | That's zocdoc.com/deep, zocdoc.com/deep.

01:08:33.880 | I also want to mention our friends at Ladder.

01:08:39.720 | So we're talking about things you should be doing,

01:08:41.400 | but you're not because you don't know how to get started.

01:08:43.840 | Life insurance is the other big one.

01:08:47.280 | If there is anyone who depends on you,

01:08:48.880 | a spouse, a partner, kids, you need life insurance.

01:08:51.920 | Why don't you have life insurance?

01:08:53.600 | Because you don't know how to get it.

01:08:55.280 | So I'm going to tell you how to get it very easily.

01:08:58.320 | You go to Ladder.

01:09:01.480 | Ladder is your solution to doing this.

01:09:03.400 | It's 100% digital.

01:09:05.760 | You don't have to do any doctors or needles or paperwork.

01:09:08.260 | If you're applying for $3 million in coverage or less,

01:09:10.280 | you just answer a few questions

01:09:11.400 | about your health and an application.

01:09:13.260 | There's smart algorithms working real time.

01:09:15.120 | You'll find out if you're instantly approved,

01:09:17.040 | no hidden fees, cancel anytime,

01:09:19.160 | get a full refund if you change your mind in 30 days.

01:09:21.880 | These are all policies that are insured by insurers

01:09:26.400 | rated A or A+ by AMBEST, they're high quality.

01:09:29.600 | So you just go to the website, ladderlife.com/deep,

01:09:32.640 | type, type, type, done.

01:09:33.840 | It's off your to-do list.

01:09:36.000 | This thing that you have no idea,

01:09:37.200 | you know you're supposed to do it,

01:09:38.040 | you have no idea how to do it, it's off your to-do list.

01:09:39.760 | You should do this right now.

01:09:41.240 | So go to ladderlife.com/deep today

01:09:45.440 | to see within minutes if you're instantly approved.

01:09:47.920 | That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep.

01:09:51.660 | Ladderlife.com/deep.

01:09:54.640 | All right, Jessie, we like to talk about each month,

01:10:00.040 | the books I read the last month.

01:10:02.040 | Long-time listeners know,

01:10:03.240 | my goal is to read five books per month.

01:10:05.640 | So we're in February now,

01:10:07.400 | so we will talk about the five books I read in January, 2023.

01:10:12.400 | The first one was called "Sitting by the Mini Bay,

01:10:20.280 | My Life in Building Model Docs" by Dwayne Johnson.

01:10:23.380 | So that was a surprising twist, surprising turn by him.

01:10:28.380 | It has over 50 pages of photos.

01:10:30.980 | He's shirtless in most of them, interesting.

01:10:33.020 | He builds his mock docs shirtless.

01:10:36.220 | So there you go.

01:10:37.780 | Now, what did I read?

01:10:38.620 | All right, let's go through this quickly.

01:10:39.620 | Book number one, "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins.

01:10:43.980 | So this is a new theory about how the cortex

01:10:47.500 | helps create human consciousness and intelligence.

01:10:51.500 | Jeff Hopkins is a former tech executive

01:10:54.000 | who put all of his fortune

01:10:55.140 | into trying to figure out how the brain works

01:10:57.180 | and then build intelligent machines using this research.

01:11:00.980 | This is his latest book with his latest findings.

01:11:04.200 | If ever there's like Reese Terminator-style character

01:11:07.780 | who comes back from the future

01:11:08.660 | to prevent Skynet from going online,

01:11:10.740 | he's probably gonna be looking for Jeff Hawkins,

01:11:12.300 | let's be honest about that.

01:11:13.620 | All right, I also read "The 90s" by Chuck Klosterman.

01:11:17.780 | So Klosterman writes these books where,

01:11:20.260 | I don't know if you've ever seen a Klosterman book,

01:11:21.620 | but he's been doing these more recently.

01:11:23.060 | Like the 90s is just looking at the 90s

01:11:25.020 | and it's just all these different smart cultural critiques

01:11:28.980 | about different aspects of the 90s,

01:11:30.280 | which is when you and I were kids.

01:11:32.860 | It was good.

01:11:33.960 | Yeah.

01:11:34.800 | I've heard it was really good on tape.

01:11:35.620 | I read the physical version.

01:11:37.420 | I enjoyed it.

01:11:38.240 | I mean, it helps that I grew up then,

01:11:39.340 | but actually I might lend it to you.

01:11:40.620 | I think you would like it.

01:11:41.460 | Any examples?

01:11:43.020 | I mean, I think the music stuff is interesting.

01:11:46.740 | Yeah.

01:11:47.580 | Like he gets really deep on really

01:11:49.660 | what was happening behind the scenes

01:11:51.140 | with grunge and these musicians

01:11:53.980 | and the whole selling out culture that Gen X had created

01:11:56.820 | and how that clashed against the commercial imperatives

01:12:00.900 | of music.

01:12:01.740 | I actually learned a lot about,

01:12:03.100 | like Kurt Cobain, for example.

01:12:04.600 | Interesting.

01:12:06.620 | It doesn't make me think of,

01:12:07.540 | I don't look back after I read this book and say,

01:12:09.100 | "Man, I wish I could go back to the 90s."

01:12:11.740 | It's an interesting time.

01:12:12.740 | And it's interesting to think about,

01:12:14.700 | but it doesn't make me want to go back.

01:12:15.700 | But you know what I found out?

01:12:17.780 | You remember the 70s show?

01:12:18.940 | So when we were growing up in the 90s,

01:12:20.740 | there's a show called the 70s show,

01:12:22.260 | which was a sitcom about life in the 70s.

01:12:24.260 | Yeah.

01:12:25.080 | Well, now we're 30 years,

01:12:26.560 | 20 or 30 years out of the 90s.

01:12:27.820 | They're doing a new show called the 90s show.

01:12:29.980 | Yeah.

01:12:30.820 | Because when we were growing up in the 90s,

01:12:32.160 | the 70s was as far from us as the 90s are far

01:12:36.100 | from people who are kids today.

01:12:38.220 | So our childhood is now going to be the target

01:12:41.020 | of the nostalgic retrospective show.

01:12:44.020 | It was a good time to be a New York Yankee fan if you were.

01:12:46.580 | Yeah, late 90s.

01:12:48.220 | Yeah.

01:12:49.060 | All right.

01:12:49.880 | Then I read a quite a good thriller actually.

01:12:52.140 | Robin Cook's very first thriller, "Coma"

01:12:55.100 | from the 1970s, straight up,

01:12:59.340 | one of the first medical thrillers.

01:13:01.020 | So him and Crichton were both working on this,

01:13:02.520 | but Cook was, I believe he got to the punch first.

01:13:06.680 | And it's, you know, it's creepy as hell.

01:13:09.180 | Like in the end there's coma patients.

01:13:10.640 | They're being put into comas surreptitiously

01:13:13.460 | so they could harvest their organs, not the spoiler alert.

01:13:17.080 | Really well-written.

01:13:17.920 | The interesting thing about it,

01:13:19.500 | unlike some modern thrillers is it's,

01:13:22.980 | I don't know, the last third

01:13:25.260 | before you get to any actual, I am being chased.

01:13:29.020 | Like any, I mean, the first two thirds of the book

01:13:30.980 | is really this new resident sort of starting

01:13:33.340 | to unravel the conspiracy and doing investigations.

01:13:37.060 | And the main stakes are, you know,

01:13:39.920 | her supervisors at the hospital are mad at her

01:13:42.120 | or that if she's not at round, she might get in trouble.

01:13:44.000 | So it's such, and yet it still works.

01:13:46.240 | Nowadays, a modern thriller, it's, you know,

01:13:48.580 | the second page, the shark is being shot at you

01:13:51.760 | from the cannon and you have to kill it with a laser sword.

01:13:54.880 | You know, it gets right into it.

01:13:56.060 | So different time, but great book.

01:13:57.560 | - When you read thrillers, do you breeze through them?

01:14:00.080 | - I'm not a fast reader.

01:14:03.240 | My wife is a fast reader.

01:14:05.800 | When she reads novels, she's like,

01:14:07.760 | I'm just, because I read a lot of nonfiction

01:14:09.400 | and write a lot of nonfiction, it's hard for me to speed up.

01:14:11.880 | So I'm the guy reading that's thinking,

01:14:14.080 | okay, well, interesting.

01:14:15.280 | They referenced the computer mainframe in chapter two

01:14:18.440 | and they noted that it was using hexadecimal.

01:14:20.920 | And now we're in chapter four and I'm wondering,

01:14:22.880 | you know, I'm reading these thrillers

01:14:25.440 | like I'm studying Proust,

01:14:27.920 | which is probably not the fastest way to do it.

01:14:29.600 | - When you say you're not fast, are you really fast?

01:14:32.280 | - I don't read these books very fast.

01:14:34.240 | I'm not a speed reader or not.

01:14:36.360 | I'm not even like a fast reader.

01:14:37.280 | I go too slow because my mind always wants

01:14:39.520 | to understand everything and fit everything into,

01:14:42.240 | I'm gonna, what Jeff Hawkins at a thousand brains

01:14:44.600 | would call reference frames.

01:14:45.480 | My brain, that book helped me understand my own brain.

01:14:48.280 | I have like an overactive reference frame system.

01:14:50.680 | Everything I encounter has to be fit into these frames

01:14:53.080 | and I'm incredibly unhappy until it is.

01:14:54.640 | So I can't read things fast.

01:14:55.960 | I can't have loose ends.

01:14:57.560 | I need to, okay, here's this person, here's the building,

01:14:59.440 | here's the rooms in the building.

01:15:01.120 | Like it's very useful when it comes time

01:15:02.720 | to solve math proofs or write things,

01:15:05.160 | but I can't, I'm just physically uncomfortable.

01:15:09.200 | If it doesn't bother my wife at all.

01:15:12.120 | If she's like, oh, I don't remember if like,

01:15:14.840 | oh, who is this guy?

01:15:15.840 | Was he dead?

01:15:16.680 | Or, you know, I'm like, no, no,

01:15:17.560 | I need to know like exactly his,

01:15:19.200 | like who did he connect to?

01:15:20.640 | How is this house laid out?

01:15:22.400 | So I can't read fast.

01:15:23.520 | I mean, you're right, maybe it's fast compared to,

01:15:27.280 | depends on the relative.

01:15:28.880 | - One more quick question about this.

01:15:30.320 | When you read a 10 page New York article,

01:15:33.280 | how long does it usually take you?

01:15:34.360 | - A while.

01:15:35.840 | If I read like a standard, because you know,

01:15:37.480 | I always try to read at least one article

01:15:38.960 | from the magazine each week when it comes out.

01:15:41.760 | - Half an hour?

01:15:42.760 | - Yeah.

01:15:43.600 | Like I'll read it in the morning sometimes

01:15:44.720 | for the kids get up and it will take the whole time.

01:15:47.080 | And sometimes I'll have to come back to it.

01:15:48.760 | Yeah, because I'm like every,

01:15:50.640 | because, but I'll come away and be able to tell you

01:15:52.040 | everything that happened in that New Yorker article,

01:15:53.520 | some of the stylistic choices of the author,

01:15:55.960 | you know, and I pulled out like two second order theories

01:15:59.280 | that we could potentially talk about on the show.

01:16:01.040 | So it's like a very cognitively involved process for me

01:16:04.080 | when I'm reading.

01:16:04.920 | I'm a machine for turning text into connected,

01:16:10.160 | internally consistent theories and ideas.

01:16:12.080 | Like that's what I am.

01:16:13.560 | I've been like bred in a lab to do that.

01:16:16.000 | All right, next, this is not really a book.

01:16:19.200 | Neither of these are really books,

01:16:20.160 | but I just read them back to back

01:16:21.400 | because one influenced the other.

01:16:23.040 | I read this over Martin Luther King weekend

01:16:26.880 | was Thoreau's on civil disobedience.

01:16:29.560 | And then Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail,

01:16:32.840 | the latter of course, inspired by him

01:16:35.160 | pulling from the former.

01:16:36.080 | So I thought it'd be interesting to read those,

01:16:38.040 | read those back to back.

01:16:39.240 | MLK's I think is much better than Thoreau's.

01:16:42.280 | I mean, I get Thoreau's at the time,

01:16:44.040 | I mean, obviously it was an innovative thought.

01:16:46.280 | Gandhi pulled from an MLK pulled from it,

01:16:48.280 | but it doesn't age as well.

01:16:50.960 | And in part because he created a world

01:16:52.640 | that's been more normalized.

01:16:53.640 | So it doesn't seem as retroactive, but it's, you know,

01:16:57.480 | I'm not gonna pay my tax until my friend comes

01:17:00.360 | like three hours later and pays for me

01:17:02.480 | to get out of my small jail in the town

01:17:04.280 | where I'm related to everybody.

01:17:05.240 | It just feels very different.

01:17:06.600 | I'm an MLK as a rhetorician is so good.

01:17:11.600 | Just his ability to make an argument

01:17:14.320 | and to inject a sort of a humanity into it.

01:17:17.720 | Yet it's still just rock solid.

01:17:19.880 | This clicks to this,

01:17:21.920 | this sort of inevitable logic with emotion.

01:17:24.560 | I mean, just absolute once in a century type ability.

01:17:29.120 | So you read these back to back and Thoreau,

01:17:31.560 | I mean, I love Thoreau.

01:17:33.360 | Thoreau's very influential to me,

01:17:34.920 | but you see the person who's really throwing

01:17:38.360 | the 105 mile per hour fastballs MLK there.

01:17:41.840 | Yeah, not Thoreau.

01:17:42.680 | And then the last was, well, I don't know how many people

01:17:47.560 | are gonna follow me up on this recommendation.

01:17:49.440 | The Feynman lectures on computation.

01:17:52.800 | There's a book form collection of a series of lectures

01:17:55.240 | that Richard Feynman gave at Caltech about computation.

01:17:58.800 | And I've pulled from it before for various classes I taught,

01:18:01.240 | but I read that right at the beginning of January

01:18:04.200 | because I didn't teach last semester.

01:18:06.400 | I was on leave.

01:18:07.240 | And then before that was summer.

01:18:08.080 | So I hadn't been in the classroom since May, 2020.

01:18:11.320 | And I wanted to get back in the mood.

01:18:12.840 | So I was like, all right,

01:18:13.680 | I'm gonna read Feynman's lectures on computation.

01:18:16.040 | Just to get back in the computer science,

01:18:18.520 | he pedagogical, Feynman's a physicist,

01:18:20.680 | not a computer scientist.

01:18:21.600 | And he just, so he comes at these things

01:18:23.360 | like with really originality and new takes.

01:18:25.800 | I just thought it would put me back in the mood of,

01:18:28.440 | you know, hey, let's explain things to people

01:18:30.600 | in useful ways.

01:18:31.880 | It was pretty good.

01:18:32.720 | I would say like 50% of the stuff

01:18:33.720 | I really loved reading about, 20% I'd know it so well.

01:18:38.120 | I teach it and the fields advanced since Feynman wrote it.

01:18:41.160 | I'm like, this is like a worst version of it.

01:18:42.920 | And then the other, whatever percent is left

01:18:45.280 | was really just physics stuff I didn't care about.

01:18:47.840 | The stupid reversible circuit stuff.

01:18:51.360 | It's like, I don't need to hear any more

01:18:52.360 | about reversible circuits,

01:18:53.200 | but like his information theory

01:18:55.200 | and coding theory chapter is fantastic.

01:18:57.000 | So there you go.

01:18:57.840 | I don't know how many people will take me up

01:18:58.680 | on that last recommendation,

01:18:59.600 | but the Feynman lectures on computation

01:19:01.640 | doesn't move as fast as coma by Robin Cook.

01:19:06.760 | It's not the similar genre, but I enjoyed it.

01:19:09.520 | All right, I got to run.

01:19:11.080 | Thank you everyone for listening.

01:19:12.920 | If you want to submit your own questions or case studies,

01:19:14.800 | there is a link in the show notes.

01:19:16.360 | If you want to watch what you just heard today,

01:19:17.800 | it's episode 236.

01:19:19.120 | Go to youtube.com/calendarportmedia.

01:19:21.480 | I'll be back next week.

01:19:22.400 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:19:25.240 | (upbeat music)

01:19:27.840 | (upbeat music)

01:19:30.480 | (upbeat music)

01:19:33.080 | (upbeat music)

01:19:35.660 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 236: Hacking Remote Work

Chapters