(upbeat music) I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 167. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. No, Jesse again. No, I actually just talked to Jesse and he gave me permission to update you on what's going on. He's fine, here's what happened. Last week, he came for our weekly recording session.

We do rapid COVID testing here at the Deep Work HQ. At least we're doing it now during the period where Omicron is high in the DC region. And our courageous esteemed producer tested positive, so he had to go home. He's almost done with his isolation period. So we considered, why don't we just record a little bit late this week, so that he could be here.

But my schedule was such that I needed to stick with the existing schedule. So it just was bad timing that, we record two episodes at a time. Last week's recording session was actually pretty close to this week's recording session. So one COVID isolation period covered two weeks worth of recording sessions.

But anyways, he will be out of isolation soon. He'll be back in the studio for next week's episodes. He's fine by the way, he feels fine. He's exercising all the time. I just saw him today. We had a weekly production meeting outside. So we're nice and safe, but I can attest that he is looking and feeling fine.

Just working remotely on the show and we'll be back next week. All right, speaking of the show, we have an exciting announcement. Early on, early on in the history of the show, I began talking about this dream of we need video. And it became almost a running joke on the podcast because week after week, I would say video is coming soon.

I'm recording things, video is coming soon. And it never did because it turns out actually, it's quite difficult to get this right. And I wanted to get it right, but we are finally there. As you hear this episode, Deep Questions video is available. You can go find it right now.

Now I'll explain what video recording, why we're recording it, our philosophy, the plans for the video, but just so to get the logistics out of the way, right now the videos are being hosted on YouTube. We don't yet have a personalized URL because you have to, it's a chicken and the egg problem.

I think you have to be around for a certain number of days and have a certain number of subscribers before they'll give you a simple URL. So what we've done is two things. One, there's a link in the show notes for this episode for the YouTube page that contains the Deep Questions videos.

Also, there's a post on my blog. So if you go to calnewport.com/blog, you'll see a post there that has a link to it. All right, so what are we doing with video? Well, the idea was to videotape basically every question and deep dive, and then release each of those as a standalone video.

Now, the reason why we're doing this, and I really wanna emphasize this, is that I am not a YouTuber. I have no interest in being a YouTuber. If I did, I would probably spend a lot more time on this podcast talking about Minecraft. I do not need people to smash the subscribe button and click the bell and to get notifications.

I have no interest in making a living on YouTube. I have no interest in trying to use YouTube ads to make money. The whole point here is that I picked up pretty quickly into being a podcaster, that for this format of show, where I cover a lot of different material, so it's not just interviews, but as we do a lot of different questions, the biggest issue is that it is difficult to bookmark, save, pull out, come back to just one piece of content from the show.

If there's a particular question, you say, you know what, that really applies to me, and I really like that answer, and I wanna remember that, or I wanna send that to someone. It's very hard when all you have is an hour-long audio recording file. So my whole idea was if we have a standalone video for every question, now you can go and save a question.

You bookmark it. You can email it to someone, like, oh, hey, remember how we were talking about Zettelkasten? Well, Cal just did a thing on it, here's the clip. You can keep whatever you wanna do with it, but I just think it's a way of extending the podcast technology so that it's more useful to you.

So our goal is every question to have a standalone video, and we'll see if we meet that. Also, every deep dive, let's make those separate, and we're recording full episodes as well. So if you're interested in what does it look like here in the Deep Work HQ, what does Jesse look like, what does Cal look like, what's actually going on, we are releasing the full episodes as video too, because it turns out that some people prefer to watch podcasts instead of listening to them, which makes sense to me.

There is something oddly compelling about watching people talk. You think it would be boring, but if there's a video of a podcast they like, and I have the time to see it, I like to watch the video. So we're recording the whole thing. That's why we have shifted the format to a live format more recently so it's not cut up so we can actually film the whole thing.

Right, so anyways, that is the idea, is that you can now grab any question, any question you hear on this podcast today that you like, or from recent episodes, you should be able to go and find it. You know, it takes a little while to edit, so probably what we'll be doing is videos from each week's episodes will be trickled out a few at a time until they've all been released.

Okay, second point about this. I have a mixed relationship with YouTube. I don't know YouTube well. I don't spend a lot of time on YouTube, but I know some people have trouble with it. It's not the same as social media where you are posting stuff and people are reacting to it.

It doesn't necessarily have that same, I'm gonna make you feel, chemically speaking, just terrible at a moment's notice in the way that Twitter can do, in the way that Facebook can do, but it has an addictive nature, so I hear, because of these recommendation links. I went to watch a Cal video, and then I saw a recommendation that was interesting, and then I saw another recommendation that's interesting, and it's Nazis, right?

So you go down these rabbit holes of recommendation links, and they bring you to weird places. So some people don't care about that. They go on YouTube to, like, I'm looking up this thing. They have no problems. Like I talk about in my book, "Digital Minimalism," use YouTube like a library, not a TV channel.

"Hey, I heard a question I liked "in episode 167 of Cal's podcast. "Let me go just get that episode." But some people have a hard time with it. So let me tell you about phase two of this vision. Concurrently, with all the work we were doing to get video ready, which among other things, meant we had to rebuild out this studio, light this studio, have the cameras going through switchers.

I discovered at some point, no way I was gonna do this on my own. It's a big part of why we brought Jesse on, so we have someone who can actually produce, watch the videos in real time, produce them, et cetera. A lot went into that. Concurrently to all of those efforts, which have been going on pretty seriously since the last summer, I've also been working with a fantastic branding web development technology company that actually does quite a bit of work with the music industry.

But anyways, they have been working with me also since last summer. We're developing a portal, a standalone website. So not calnewport.com, but a different website that is going to be a collection place for all of this content. So it's where the podcast will live. Each podcast episode will have its own dedicated page where there'll be a player for that podcast.

The description show notes will be there and separate videos for every single question will be right there on the page as well that you can just watch right there. All of the videos that we record and release to YouTube will also be accessible through this portal when we launch it.

And they're gonna be arranged in Netflix style horizontal carousels. So it's a place you can go that is free from the YouTube algorithm. It's just the video setup and carousels in exactly the way that Jesse and I want them. This portal when it launches is completely mobile responsive. So you can load it up on your iPad, you can load it up on your phone and it's just like you're using the Netflix app on your phone.

You can just scroll through the different categories, their horizontal carousels, oh, I wanna watch that video. On the back end, the videos are still for now hosted on YouTube, but they get sucked into this custom built ecosystem we're creating. So you can listen to the podcast, watch videos, et cetera, read my newsletter, all that stuff.

You can do it in a environment that we're custom building to be free of those distractions, to be free of the addictive impulse. And so we're probably about, look, I hate to predict, I'm always so wrong with predictions. Right, how many times did I say, okay, we're gonna have video next week, cut to six months later, but we're probably one to two months out from the portal launching.

All right, if that makes sense. Most of it's built, then we had to get the videos up and running and then we can do the final testing. So knock on wood, that portal will be up soon. All right, so anyways, that's the exciting announcement. I think this is a important step forward for the podcast.

The ability to view, save, and share with other people individual questions or deep dive discussions, I think is needed. It was needed. And so keep your eyes out for that. Link in the show description. You can also find a link for the videos at calnewport.com/blog. All right, so that's enough announcements.

I would want to move on now with our questions. And as always, we will start with questions about the deep work. The deep work, man, I'm tired. I need some more sleep. Deep work. All right, question number one. Question number one about deep work. This comes from Joshua. Joshua asks, how do I decide how much work is enough?

He elaborates that he works in software engineering and he feels like there is always more work to do, some new goal to push forward, something to optimize, something to improve. Well, Joshua, it's a good question. I've been thinking about this recently, and actually I want to test out with you in my answer a new idea about this.

So an experimental system, and we can see if it actually works. It'll be a sort of breaking news advice I want to offer you. But here's the big picture that sets up this advice. Maximizing output is not sustainable. It almost always leads to some notion of burnout or some notion of pain.

If your goal is how can I get more done? Can I add even more onto what I'm doing? You're trying to maximize that amount. This is not a road that long-term is going to lead somewhere good. In the short term, it's not necessarily a counterproductive play. In the short term, in certain jobs or certain positions, hustling on lots of different things and trying to maximize that output can be impressive.

It can open up new opportunities. It can accelerate the pace at which let's say a business is able to find its footing or figure out what works well. So it's not that it's entirely negative in the short term, but long-term, I think it is negative. Two things happen. One, long-term you burn out.

You burn out and then long-term that significantly hurts obviously what you're able to produce. If you go strong for two years and then completely burn out and basically leave the industry, your lifetime productivity obviously is much lower. Two, I think the quality goes down. So the issue with maximizing output is that when you do more and more things, you're context switching more, you're burning up through more energy so that the care with which you're able to approach each individual thing goes down.

I'm a big believer that your best lever, if your interest is impact or interestingness in your life, your best lever is doing the thing you do best better. It's almost always the right lever. Almost always gonna open up more opportunities, create more impact and lead to a more interesting professional life.

If your focus is what do I do best, how do I make that better? Now that's different than the approach that you're talking about that you're tired of, which is the approach of how can I do more? It's a quantity over quality mindset. Now again, short-term maybe it looks impressive, short-term maybe it opens up opportunities, but focusing on a small number of things, doing them really well, that's gotta be the sustainable play.

I've long believed that. All right, so let's test out as promised a new system and this is preliminary. So, take all this with a grain of salt, but here's one way to think about limiting your work without let's say crippling your ability to actually do anything of value. Let's break up the work on your plate into three categories, small, medium, large.

The extremes here are the interesting ones from the planning perspective. Small is administrative work and tasks. These are small things, most of them don't take very long to do. There's a certain baseline of small tasks that are unavoidable. You're a software developer, you have to submit your TPS reports or Lumberg is gonna yell at you.

On the other extreme, you have large work. And I think this, as the projects that require more than a week or two to complete, this tends to be the category where you find the things that really move the needle. It's the producing the next release of the software, it's writing the next book, et cetera.

And then you have medium, which is, it's an important in between. These are things that aren't tasks in the sense that, give me 20 minutes and I'll be done. They might take multiple sessions or an afternoon, but they can typically be completed in less than a week. Hey, Cal, we need you to process these faculty applications and put your feedback into this spreadsheet before our meeting on Thursday.

That was my, that's my week this week, for example. I have a meeting later today, we're discussing faculty applications and I had to read through a bunch of applications and put my notes into a spreadsheet. And that's not a large project. It's not something that's gonna take weeks and weeks.

It's not a core, like this really moves the needle on your career, but it's also not a small task. I can't say, hold on, I'll be right back. I just need to go over there and look at these applications. That took about four hours. So less than a week, more than 10 minutes.

All right, now we have categories. How do we tame it? First things first, let's get real serious about the small. I'm a big believer that if you do not tame the small administrative, it can be a background hum of overload and anxiety that makes almost everything else difficult to do.

So let's get our handle around the small. And I don't wanna go too much into detail here because we could do a whole episode on taming the administrative. And this is something that I still need to think about some myself, but you wanna eliminate some things, you wanna automate things, you wanna have better communication processes for things.

So it's not just emails arriving randomly. For more on that last idea, see my book, "A World Without Email." But really the goal here is to get your small administrative task automated/corraled. There are set times when I work on these things and do a better systems engineering and do batching and do elimination.

I am able to just know here's when I work on administrative stuff happens. And some of this is just simple, your batching email. Some of this is way more complicated. I have an office hours on this time. And this is when you come to me if you have quick questions and that's when I deal with those quick questions.

In a recent New Yorker article, I even suggested sort of off the top of my head, imagine a system and most people can't get away with this. I just love this idea. Imagine a system in which you have a couple administrative blocks pre-assigned on your calendar, maybe three times a week, one hour each.

And you have slots. I don't know how many, 10 slots on a shared Google Doc for each of these sessions. You say, okay, if you need me to do something quick, answer a question, fill out a form, get back to you, that's great, I'm happy to do it, I wanna be useful.

So you just have to go find one of my upcoming administrative blocks where there's a free slot, enter the information from what you need from me, where to find the files, et cetera. And when I get to that session, I'm gonna go down that list. The number of slots I have on this document are such that I should have time to get through everything.

And that's when that work will get done. And oh, if all those slots are filled this week, that means I don't have time for this this week, you'll have to find a future slot. Like imagine a world like that, as opposed to our current world where that person will just shoot you an email and be like, take care of this and give you none of the information.

The stress of how much email we have really seems to dumb down the detail and sophistication with which we talk. I mean, if you were to come to me and talk to me in person, you need something from me, you would get into it. You'd be like, yeah, yeah, let me tell you about this thing.

Here's this form, don't worry about these two things. And then once you get it signed, actually why don't you just put it in my mailbox. I don't need it till Friday. We'd have a very normal conversation. In an age of email overload, instead what we get is, you have six seconds at the keyboard, you form fill good, think good with a typo.

And then like a signature under it that says, sent from an iPhone, excuse the typos, right? It's just crazy. Imagine a world where you had to go find a slot that I had free. And if the information was not there that I needed to do it, you would just see a note at like insufficient information and you'd have to find another slot.

All right, that's extreme because it would annoy people, but man, I think we should annoy people more. That'd be great. Stepping back, the point here is small work, I want you to have corralled. This is when it happens. I know how much time it takes and where that time falls.

All right, step two in my experimental system. Look at the time that remains. Now how much time remains depends on how much you wanna work. If you're in a normal nine to five office job, it's clear, you're working backwards from roughly 40 hours, but hey, if you're a small business owner, you're a freelancer, you can set this number to whatever the hell you want.

And it could be like, okay, I work 20 hours a week, let's see what I can do with that. So whatever the hour is, whatever hour amount it is, you work backwards to say how many hours are left. The next thing I want you to do is figure out how do I partition these remaining hours each week between medium and large?

Is it 50/50? Is it 10/90? Again, this really depends what your job is. If you're a novelist, for example, that should probably be 10% of the remaining time, medium, 90% large. Because mainly what you should be doing is writing your novel. And the 10% is like, okay, I have to do, get back some interview questions or fill out this thing for publicity.

Like there's not that much stuff and 10% of your time should get it done. But if you're in a project manager job, you might have a very different equation there. Where you're like, actually, maybe 80% of my time is medium. It's gonna be sort of short-term things that need to be dealt with to keep my team going.

We have to figure out, get this report together for this client. We have to figure out how to deal with a, someone's on leave and how we're gonna reassign to work. A lot of what you do is medium. And then maybe you have 20% of your time for large.

You're like, I need to be working on one large project at a time because there's some big swing ideas I have and the medium is gonna keep my job. But this one large thing I'm working on is what's gonna get me to my next job or let me start my own business.

So you figure it out. What's my division between medium and large? All right, now you have a number. Yeah, I have this many hours a week to work on medium. I have this many hours a week to work on large. And then you just work backwards and say, okay, so how many large things can I sustain with that many hours a week?

And there's your answer, Joshua, for that question. Then you look at medium things. Well, how many with this many hours a week, how many is sort of these medium one week size projects can I handle at a time? There's your answer. And then those are the slots you have free for work.

And as you finish something, you pull something else into it. Now, what do you do with this other work? Again, this is another whole discussion, but essentially either your company or your team or just you on your own need some sort of external system in which incoming work is filtered.

Then once it's in there, it's stored. And people understand that this is not being worked on. It's being stored. And you pull work out of that system to fill in these slots. And again, that's a whole other discussion. Let's not get into that right now. But basically what I'm suggesting here, Joshua, is that you're very carefully figure out based on how much I wanna be working, how much time do I have available?

What then does that allow in terms of how much I can do? And that's just a reality check. That like actually like this is how much you can do if you wanna stick to roughly that amount of work working. And this is after you're being very efficient, right? But the main thing you're doing here that's super productive in the old school sense is that you're taming all these small tasks, you're getting them consolidated, you're automating things, you're improving processes.

You're being very careful with your time. What remains, you're just being very honest. How much of this, how much stuff can I actually do? Now, if you don't like that answer, there's two things you can do. One is you can change your ratios. You might say, I gotta be doing more large things.

Like what am I doing with myself here? I'm doing too many TPS reports. So change that ratio. Or you might be saying, this is not enough medium stuff. I can't keep up with what my job requires if I only have this much time to work on medium projects. Then you have to just face the reality and say, I just don't do large projects.

Or I spend very little time on large projects. And that's just reality. Two, you can change the hours. I'm gonna add more hours to it. I'm gonna start work early. I'm gonna work Sunday mornings. I'm gonna add another hour every day. And that extra hour lets me do like one large project.

Those are your options, but you're facing the productivity dragon, and you're facing the productivity dragon. Here's my new twist in a quantitative fashion. You don't just see it as this general mess of smoke and fire. You're measuring its weight and how far its flames can go and its strength and coming up with like, what can I do with this year?

I'm stretching that metaphor. All right, but anyways, that's what I'm thinking, Joshua. Maximizing, just generically speaking, is gonna burn you out, make you less productive in the long run. You should have a number for how many big projects and medium projects you can do at a time. Stick to that number and figure out that number systematically.

All right, let's move on now. We have a question from Steven. By the way, a quick, now that we're doing video, I think about these things. This isn't a side, but there is a guy on YouTube that some of you have been sending me his videos, and he's very popular, 2 million subscribers.

And his name is John Campbell. And he's, I think, a doctor in the UK, and he does COVID update videos. Like, here's what's going on, mainly like UK-centric. Here's the numbers, here's whatever. And they're insanely popular. And the two things that make them so popular, it's not that there is like some sort of new content or something like that.

He has a great accent, but two, he has a camera that aims down at his notes, and he literally just cuts to this camera, and you see him underline words or put check marks next to things he just talked about. So I just checked off Joshua's question on here.

You would think, objectively speaking, that that would be the least interesting visual content that you could imagine, especially in this cable news age of graphics and chyrons and sweeping whatever. It's incredibly compelling. He has 2 million subscribers. It is really compelling to watch someone just sort of cross off and underline things they're talking about.

So my point is, Jesse, when you hear this and you're editing it, I think we gotta get an overhead cam in here so people can watch me check mark off and underline things with the questions. If it works for Campbell, it works for us. All right, that's an aside.

Let's get to Stephen's question. Stephen, my apologies. Stephen asks, "Why don't you show overhead camera shots "of your notes?" See, Stephen knows it. Stephen knows what's going on. No, I'm joking. Stephen really asks, "I've really gone all in "on time blocking, and it definitely works. "Now though, it feels like I have even more to do, "and I find myself feeling as though "I am forgetting something, "even though I do a shutdown ritual and weekly plan.

"Is this normal? "And with time, does this feeling go away?" Stephen, it does go away. The thing you need to lean into to make it go away is the shutdown ritual. I created the shutdown ritual for exactly this issue. I was suffering from this as a grad student at MIT.

I was having a hard time shutting down. Like I'm forgetting things, or I need to keep making progress on a problem. I've talked about this before on the show, but at the time there was like a key theorem for my PhD dissertation, and it was not working. I was like, "Oh man, I gotta keep thinking about it, "'cause if it doesn't work, "the dissertation's not gonna work, it's a problem." And I was like, "I need a way to just kind of shut down, "like shut down, here's what I worked on today, "this didn't work, here's why, "here's the next avenue of attack I'm gonna do tomorrow, "and write that down as part of my shutdown ritual "so I could just trust it.

"All right, I don't have to keep thinking about this tonight." And aside about that, by the way, just a tip to aspiring doctoral students, because I was bored and antsy in general, I was writing books and doing things like this, I had a ton of publications, what you normally do in theoretical computer science, is say, "Yes, it's time to write a dissertation." Of course, I'm gonna draw from these mini publications I've spent a lot of time on, and I'm gonna pull together ideas I have already published and presented and has peer reviewed, and I'm gonna expand upon it, and this is what I'm gonna do for my dissertation.

That is what you should do. Instead, I said, "I don't know, I'm kind of bored, "I'm just gonna do something from scratch. "I'm gonna come up with a brand new idea, "pull it out of the air, "and do a whole dissertation in a six month period "on mathematical concepts that I'm just gonna invent.

"I haven't published, I haven't gone through them, "I have no collaborators on them, just because I was bored." It worked out, the thesis was fine, but it was nerve wracking, because exactly what I'm talking about here, I'm halfway through this thing, like, "Wait, maybe my idea doesn't work here, "because I'm doing it from scratch, "as I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation." So it was quite stressful.

Anyway, so I invented the shutdown ritual. It works, it takes some time. Let me just briefly review what you have to do to make the shutdown ritual work properly. Mechanically, the idea with the shutdown ritual is that you go through and you review every potential open loop. All right?

Loose notes have been processed. There's no critical email that needs an urgent response that I missed. I've looked at my weekly plan on my calendar. I know what's coming up. I know what's coming up tomorrow. I see a plan for tomorrow. If there's some things I need to do tonight, non-professional things that I need to do tonight that I see in my calendar, my weekly plan, I've written them down, so I can see them right there.

There is no open loop, there's nothing I am forgetting. I've taken notes on the conversations, I've sent the follow-up emails. Now I say a phrase that is unique, like schedule shutdown confirm, or if you use a time block planner, I'm gonna cross out the shutdown complete checkbox. That's the mechanical thing you do.

You have to couple that with the psychological addendum, and this was what made the shutdown ritual really work for me as a grad student, is that after you do that shutdown, when your mind then wants to keep thinking about work, which, Steven, I'm telling you, until you get really used to this, it 100% will.

That's what you're experiencing. When your mind says, forget that, I wanna think about the email we just sent to Joshua about why doesn't Cal have more overhead shots of his notes and maybe I need to send a different email or word that differently, or I need to talk to my boss tomorrow, let's think that through, your mind's like, we gotta keep thinking about work.

And you can't blame it. You just spent eight hours with work-related circuits firing left and right. And so, yeah, that's active in your brain. That's what's popping up. What you do, this is the key psychological addendum to the mechanical shutdown, is you say, I hear it, but I'm not gonna get into the details, mind, of what you want me to get into.

I'm not gonna get into the details of the email to Steven. I'm not gonna get into the details about the meeting with the boss tomorrow. Instead, what I'm gonna say is, we did the shutdown. I said the phrase, or I checked that box. I would not have said that phrase and I would not have checked that box if I had not gone through everything on our plate and closed down all the open loops and made sure that we had a plan I trusted for tomorrow.

So no, I'm not gonna get into it, psychologically, ruminatively speaking. And you do that again and again and again. The progress is made every single time that your mind wants you to get into a specifics about work and you say instead, I did the shutdown routine, so we don't need to get into that.

I did the shutdown routine, so we don't need to get into it. I like to use the metaphor when I think about my own crazy mind of grooves that get, you get these grooves that your thoughts want to fall into and you're filling in the grooves, each rejection at a time.

Each time you say, no, I did the routine, I did the routine. You're filling in the groove, filling in the groove until it's shallow enough that your thoughts don't get stuck in it and they move on to something else. So how long does this take? I don't know, two to three weeks, maybe.

Give it a month to be safe. But if you're rigorous about this, this is the miracle of the shutdown routine. The thoughts slow down and you become much better at not thinking completely about work after work. And it is a huge positive difference. The only other thing I would add is have a capture notebook, right, accessible in your house and really have a serious routine of the first thing you do in the morning when you look and make your daily time block plans.

You look at that notebook and anything you wrote down in that notebook, you process and look at. You gotta really be very diligent about that. If you do that, if a new thing pops to mind during the evening after a shutdown routine, you write in the notebook. So you don't have to open up your computer, you don't have to go into your email, you don't have to write a note to yourself and put it by your bathroom mirror so you don't forget it.

You just write in the notebook. And if your mind trusts, like that's part of my time block planning is I look at that capture and process it. That will prevent that when that happens, when something legitimately new comes to mind, oh man, I forgot to send a message about Cal using overhead camera.

You can jot that down and your mind's like, okay, I'm okay with it. All right, so you do those two things, you're gonna be able to have a lot more presence with your brain after work. All right, this is where if we, again, if we had the overhead cam, you would see coming in, whoo, crossed off a name.

I can see it, it's very compelling to see. All right, let's move on here. Check out our timestamp. It's one of the things we miss about Jesse being here is I have to mind my own time here. Okay, let's keep moving here. Our question number three is from TooMuchRest.

He asked, how do I come back to work after taking a lunch break? Yeah, it's hard. It's easy to fall down distractive rabbit holes after lunch breaks. I suffer from this too. Three things I'd recommend, and I would combine all three of these things. Number one, ritual, have a post-lunch ritual that you always do to prepare you to get back into work mode.

A walk works really good here. I'm talking like five to 10 minutes, but you do a certain walk or whatever so that you are teaching your mind that this means we're shifting out of the much more wandering mindset that we're in when we're at lunch and just thinking about things and reading things and watching things back into a work mindset.

Two, no email right after lunch, no Slack either. That just has to be a hard and fast rule. Do not start your first session after lunch going down a context switching rabbit hole. Like, let me see what's going on in my inbox or what's going on with Slack because your mind will never, well, get back to work mode, but you're gonna really slow it down.

And you've just added 45 minutes of wandering if you do that. So never, ever, ever start your first moments after a lunch break with email or Slack. And then three, and this is critical, before lunch, figure out and set up what you're gonna work on right after lunch. And again, it shouldn't be email, it shouldn't be Slack.

So do email and Slack right before lunch. So like, okay, I'm not missing something urgent. And then set up, I'm gonna work on this report right after lunch, get it loaded up, get it in Word, get the documents that you need to draw from, get that all loaded up.

Take a look at it, kind of, all right, I get it. I see what's going on. I've sort of swapped it in. I think I'm ready to go. Good, let me go eat lunch. When I come back, it's all there, it's all got prepped and you can get right into work.

Those three things, I think, do those three things and you can tame lunch breaks. My lunch break recommendation, by the way, is read during your lunch breaks if you can. It's great for your brain. It's a great time to get some reading in. And it has a much more minimal impact on your cognitive energy for the remainder of the day as compared to what most people do, which is they open up the internet and their phones and are basically saying, "Put it in my veins," and just go frenetic crazy.

And then they're like, "Okay, time to go work on something deep." Yeah, good luck. Crossing off. Let's see here. Oh, here's another, let's do this question here. This one comes from Aaron. Aaron says, "Why don't you do Zettelkasten?" So I talked about Zettelkasten last week's episode. Got a lot of feedback from listeners from it.

Aaron's asking about it. So I thought I'd put in another Zettelkasten question here because it seems to be a topic that people are interested in. Let me just really briefly give a slightly better description of how this system works. So with the kind of pure Zettelkasten system, and I'm talking about the how to take smart notes system.

This is the Nicholas Luhmann system explained in the book, How to Take Smart Notes. The way it works is, just to be a little bit more precise, is that instead of trying to have a hierarchical note setup where it's, you know, here's the top level and there's folders under there, and then there's subfolders and those subfolders, it's more loose and it allows for more connections.

And the way it works is you take notes on a slip, piece of paper, an X card or whatever. You take all your notes on there. And so if you're reading a book, you'll generate a lot of these notes, like for every independent idea in the book you wanna keep track of or think of.

And then what you do is you go through the box, it's called a slip box in the traditional system. You go through the box and find an existing note that is relevant to it and you put it behind it. That physical proximity implies a connection in classic Zettelkasten, in physical analog Zettelkasten.

So I'm reading this book and I took some notes on Concord, Massachusetts in the early industrial period. And so maybe I put it, I have like some notes over here about colonial New England or something. And I'm gonna put it back there, like this is connected. The physical proximity is a connection.

The other thing you can do, if there's other notes you wanna connect it to, in analog Zettelkasten, there's a numbering system. Every card is uniquely numbered. You can actually just jot down on their links, just the numbers of other cards that this relates to. So maybe you have another thing about industrialization.

Maybe you have another thing about new social history, case studies or something. And like, you just write those numbers. So now if you're reading that sequence of notes that this thing falls into, you'll come across that information, but it also will link the other things. And there's other details here.

You can also take other notes and add links to those back to this new thing you added. So you have notes kind of show up in a physical proximity, like in the Dewey decimal system, but much more ad hoc. Near other notes that are similar, but then you also have these links between notes.

This goes to this note, this note goes back to here, this goes over here. So you begin to get this rich connection of lateral links between notes. And a lot of the magic of Zettelkasten is in those links. Now, of course, the worry is what if you forget where something is?

Well, the other piece you have in Zettelkasten is an index. And the idea is you should be able to get to any card starting from the index. Not meaning that every card is listed in that index, because that would be too long. Upon his death in the late 1990s, the sociologist Nicholas Luhmann, who helped really work out the details of the Zettelkasten system, he had 90,000 index cards in his boxes.

So no, you don't have a 90,000 item index, but you should be able to get to any card in your system, either by directly seeing it in the index, or by going from the index to a related topic, and then flipping through all the cards that are next to each other related to that topic, finding it in there.

And this is how you can also figure out where to put it. You can look at your index and say, oh, it's related to this topic. So I'll go look up where that card is and put it behind that stack of cards. But I also see these other related topics on the index, so maybe I'll put those links down.

It's something like that. Now, Zettelkasten hardcore people are gonna yell at me because I'm not getting this quite right, but that's the system. All right, and then we talked about it last week. So I don't wanna dwell on the details of my assessment, but basically, one of the claims of Zettelkasten, like I mentioned last week, is that it can essentially automate writing.

That once you have all these rich lateral connections between ideas, you can just surf these connections and you'll just come across ideas you stitch together, and that will give you an article, that will give you a book. As I said last week, I don't buy that. I think it's incredibly narrow writing context in which that would work.

I do not think that matches with my understanding of the writing process as someone who's been a professional writer my entire adult life. So I don't buy that. But I do wanna emphasize what I do like about Zettelkasten, maybe a little bit more clearly, which is if you're in my line of work, I come across and deal with a lot of ideas, and I don't really have a great way of keeping track of them.

And I've tried to do this hierarchically before in Evernote, but it gets pretty much out of control. I like the flexibility and low friction nature of Zettelkasten, this idea that I can, especially using a digital tool, quickly make a note, write through all of my ideas on it, and link it to a category, link to a few other categories, drop something in an index, and just know it's in there.

It's not gonna be forgotten. And that some interesting connections to it might build up over time that might spark some ideas. It's not going to automate writing, but things aren't gonna get lost. You can find things, you can store things. I do like that aspects of it. So anyways, I'm working on it.

I mean, I'm using Rome, as I mentioned. I have a lightweight implementation of Zettelkasten going on, and I'm trying to make it more heavyweight. I'm also thinking about moving some more academic work into Zettelkasten, so proofs and theorems and citations. Some of you have sent me some useful information about how to do that with Rome.

So I'm Zettelkasten-curious, ZC. And not that I think it's gonna automate my writing, but I do think it might actually be a better way to store information. So there we go. This has now become like our weekly Zettelkasten update. All right, let's do one more question about Deep Work here.

This last one comes from Noah. Noah says, "How do I limit activities that aren't important "for the long-term at a new job?" So he goes on to explain about how in his past job, he was a chemical testing engineer at a pharmaceutical company. They're very a world without email style in their approach to work.

They had unified task boards to see who was working on what, do you have a free slot for this? They prioritize the primary value producing activity, which for them was actually performing lab tests on chemicals as this is all that matters. You gotta make sure you're doing that. Everything else is about what you do at the time that remains.

Pull things off this task board as you have free time. Fantastic setup. He says now he's a grad student in chemistry and it's not so organized. And in particular, he's working on doing, he's a teaching assistant. It says things just get thrown at him and he feels like he can't ignore them because it's part of his job, but it's haphazard and out of control and it's getting in his way of doing the main work.

So what should he do about it? Well, who is this, Noah? Noah, yes, professor types are in general, quite disorganized. They will just throw stuff at you because their whole life is chaotic and they just need to get it out of their brain because their brain is exploding with all these different demands they're placing on it and you can't just ignore it.

But what you can do in most cases as a teaching assistant is take control of the processes. Professor doesn't care. They just don't wanna have to worry about these things. So if you say, here's how I'm working with the students. Here's how I think we should work with this.

Here's the different processes to get the problem sets in, to get them graded, to get notes back, to get whatever. Come up with processes that are much more structured, much less haphazard and just implement them on your own and talk them through with your professor and say, here's some ideas I have.

I think we should run it this way. It's gonna keep it simpler for you and it's gonna be more controlled. Nine out of 10 professors are like, whatever. That one sentence you just told me is already taking up more time than I have available. Just whatever, whatever we need to do.

They don't care. So leverage the fact they're too busy and hairy to now to control the care to shape the job. That's my main advice for teaching assistants is that you have more control here than you think about how you want your job to unfold. The professors don't care.

They're happy for you to take the reins and then make this more structured. They're not gonna do it because they're terrible at this stuff. If they weren't terrible at this stuff, they probably would have left academia and made a lot of money anyway. So, okay. I'm gonna get yelled at now by professors and Zettelkasten people.

Great. But this is what I would say. I remember, I vividly remember having this revelation as a graduate student. I was TAing, I did a ton of TAing at MIT. I TAed a few courses, distributed algorithms with my advisor. I also TAed security course with Ron Rivest, who is the R in RSA.

He invented RSA public key encryption. That was interesting. And I remember at some point in one of these TAing, I think that when I was TAing first for my advisor, just having this insight of like, this is kind of haphazard how we're doing this. And there's a lot of structure we could bring to this that would have basically zero impact on the students or the advisor.

It's not gonna make their life harder. They don't care, the professor doesn't care, but it's gonna make my life significantly easier. Like, oh, if I do it this way, it's gonna make life much easier. Just no one's thinking about it because no one cares because it doesn't directly affect them.

And I remember I really began to structure, here's our systems for how you hand in problem sets and how we grade them and how we hand things back. And it made a big difference. I don't remember all the details here, but I vaguely remember that it was just like a casual idea my advisor had, which made sense on paper, which was we should Xerox copy the problem set submissions.

So that if we lose one, we have a copy. And because I guess it happened like once, like we lost the problem set, like, ah, we can't grade it, but if we have a copy backup, that would help. Sounds good on paper. It's impossibly time-consuming because these are all coming in in different types of papers.

They're mainly stapled. They're mainly stapled. So like, it's impossible to, you have to like, take staples out. And it was like hours just Xeroxing these things. I think at some point, and again, I don't remember the exact details, but I just remember thinking, how often does this happen? Like it happened once four years ago.

Let's just, we'll give you all the points if we lose it. And we're going to save ourselves all this time. Like, and it costs like no time. Like I made that case. She was like, fine, that sounds fine. But I was just thinking through like, what can we do here?

I also remember, and again, I don't have the details here, Noah, so I'm sorry I don't have more specifics, but I also remember realizing at some point the big class and lots of problem sets when we had graders and everything, having the students alphabetize when they hand it in like made a big difference.

So like, okay, here's the stack. When you come up to hand your problem set, find where your name actually is in alphabetical order and put it there. 10 extra seconds when you submit it, saves a huge amount of time for us on the backend. It made it much easier for us to split it up.

Other things I remember figuring out is like dealing with the undergraduate graders is just automating some of the process. These come to me already in alphabetical order. I just put them in a mail sorter outside of my office. I split them in half in the middle of the names or whatever, and you come and grab them.

And there's stuff I told the students about format, like make sure that they're in this format, which again had very little impact on the students. It was very easier than the change to format. Just like, what do you want me to do? Fine. But it made like a huge difference in how we could consistently grade it.

So these types of things made a big difference. So know how to do that. Put in place your own processes and people will be fine with it. And more generally, even if you're not a teaching assistant, there's a teachable moment here, which is add processes. Even if the work is coming from someone else, people often don't care.

They're too busy. All right. So that's it for questions about deep work. We're running a little long here, but let's put in a few questions here as always about the deep life. Oh man, look at this one. All right, question number one. Here's a dangerous one from Duck and Cover, appropriate name.

Duck and Cover asks, how do you stay focused and productive on campus when there is so much attention paid on wokeness? Jesse, that's where we put in the dun dun dun, like a musical cue. Then he or she goes on, I wanna focus on writing papers and teaching, but everyone's so focused on gender and race issues and how do we navigate all this exaggerated wokeness, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm gonna punt a little bit on this question, Duck and Cover. And focus on just one aspect of it right now. I've talked about other aspects of this in other episodes, which is probably one of the best things you can do to stay productive on campus is in a climate of so much wokeness is stopping on the internet so much.

There is obviously a hermeneutic impact of the internet in other words, to use, let me avoid using purposely obfuscated philosophical terms. The internet, what you're experiencing on the internet has a real phenomenological impact on how you actually perceive and understand the world. So I use phenomenological to try to avoid using philosophically complex terms.

Let me try this again. What you see online shapes how you understand the world around you. So if you are taking in news that is specifically looking at finding and isolating and promoting and amplifying sort of outrageous instances of wokeness or political correctness or what have you, pretty soon it will seem like this is what the whole world is like.

This is all that's going on is the biggest issue. I don't even see how we can go on and do research anymore. I talk about this somewhat in deep work, not in the context of this particular topic, but I quote the science writer, Winifred Gallagher from her book "Wrapped" about attention in the brain where she says, basically, let me just still a bunch of neuroscience, a bunch of psychology.

Your world is what you pay attention to. And we think about it, oh no, there's like this objective world out there. And like, I see some of it, I don't see other, but I'm seeing the objective world, but no, the way we experienced the world is very shaped by what we experience online.

So this is a good case study of that. If this is mainly what you're experiencing online, then it's gonna seem like this particular issue is intolerable and pervasive everywhere and it's difficult to go on. Compare that to someone like myself who doesn't use social media, who's not online, who doesn't watch cable news.

And this is not at all my experience, at least at Georgetown University. I rarely feel like I am faced contentious issues surrounding wokeness in my day-to-day life as a professor. I think if I was on Twitter all the time, it would feel like different. None of this is to minimize that there's not real debates to be had here.

There's not real discussions to be had here. There's not real concerns on either side of these issues. Of course there are. All I'm saying is you're gonna amplify, you're gonna amplify the role of these issues in your perception of the world if you are bathed in these issues. And so that's why I say the number one thing you can do is just stop using Twitter and Facebook.

Stop looking at comments, stop looking at tweets, stop looking at campus outrage report.gov. I don't know, I don't know websites. Just take a break from all that. And what should you do instead? Deal with real people. Let me talk to real people. I'm gonna meet and hang out with my colleagues and real people.

People have all sorts of different views and it's a college campus. So some people will be real extreme over here and some people might be real extreme over there and just have empathy and talk to people and know people and exist in the real world for a while. And I think you're gonna feel calmer and things aren't gonna feel so bad.

I know this is a talking point sometimes of the sort of like elite discourses. There's a talking point of like all of this stuff is invented and it's just because of the internet. And no, I mean, obviously I think there's real issues here but you're gonna have a much better appreciation of what's really going on and what, if anything, you need to do about it or how you should engage these debates.

If you come at it separate from the internet, you have to break the hermeneutics of the digital addiction stimulating panopticon. Trying to use as many trendy philosophical terms as I can right here. If you surface the underlying transnational tensions, if you see your online existence as the digitally mediated palimpsest that it is, if you don't know the word palimpsest then you're not in a modern humanities discipline, you haven't read a humanities paper in the last 10 years.

If you do all of that, I think you just have, it's just like a calmer, more interesting, more engaged, more fluid, more nuanced understanding of the world. I gotta tell you, it's just a lot less stressful to not be filtering your world through the internet. So there you go, duck and cover.

I ducked a little bit, I covered myself a little bit. I jumped over to an argument about internet in general, but that's where I land. Take a month away from all of that and then reassess. All right, another deep life question here. This one is from Penelope. Penelope asks, "What's it like to be a published author "and how do you keep sane amid all the competition "and obsession with book sales and contracts?" Penelope, you can't pay much attention to it.

Writing is weird, especially if you're doing big scale professional nonfiction writing like I do. It's weird and stochastic. Some books blow up, some don't, it's complicated. No one can understand necessarily why. It's like a confusing world. Sometimes you come across a book, you're like, I get it, it's a really interesting story or it's really original or it's Danny Kahneman is writing "Thinking Fast or Slow" and it's his life's work and he's finally putting it into a book.

I kinda get that. And then sometimes it's random. It's like, I don't know. Why does James Clear's book on habits, 5X outsell Charles Duhigg's book on habits? I don't know. Why is Mark Manson's first book, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving Enough Word," why did that sell 12 million copies?

It's a great book, but there's a lot of great books that don't, he doesn't know, I've asked him. It's like, I don't know. So you can't worry about it. So how do you not worry about it? Well, I'll tell you what I do is I never signed up for the author portals.

I don't know how to look up sales numbers on my books. My agent will mention things to me. My editors will sometimes mention things to me. I'm like, that sounds great. But I mainly find out how well my books are doing twice a year when I get my royalty statements.

I'm like, ah, that's great. And I think that has done really well. Contracts, don't worry about book contracts. That's such a small percentage of your time where that's relevant. Like, oh, I'm working on a book contract now, great. And then there'll be two years again until you're working on another book contract again.

You're just sort of writing at that point. So I don't worry about that. But Penelope, that's my advice. It's not that you're gonna be able to do this perfectly, but you just can't compare. It's like a weird stochastic world. Why one book does well over here tells you nothing about how your book should do over here.

Maybe this book should do really well and it doesn't, or it's going really slow and then it does really well later. What I always do is just focus on the next book. So like when I have a book out, I don't look up at sales numbers 'cause I don't know how.

And I always just get to the mindset of like, well, forget that book. This new one, this is the one that's gonna be a home run. I was rushed for that one, but this one's gonna be the home run. I just get my attention towards what's happening in the future.

Interesting story. I mean, I've talked about this before. I've had a lot of books that seem slow and then sold a lot later. So, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." That came out in 2012. That was my first major hardcover release. I'd written those three student books. It was my first sort of major hardcover idea book, got a reasonable advance for it.

A lot of energy behind it. And nothing really happened much when it came out. And so I think it was considered, I'm assuming it was considered a failure because a couple of years later when I sold "Deep Work," they knocked $50,000 off the advance that I got for "So Good They Can't Ignore You." Like, yeah, I don't think this book worked, right?

It's 2012. Fast forward to today, that book has sold 300 plus thousand copies. Like it's a very successful book, but you never would have known it. "Deep Work" has sold a million copies, but I was worried when "Deep Work" first came out, I was like on the phone frustrated with my agent.

Like my friends can't even find this in Barnes & Noble. Like no one cares about this book. So, you know, sometimes it's random. You think something's not gonna do well and then it does really well later. Or you think something's gonna do really well and it never does. So write the next one.

Don't look at sales numbers, write the next one. All right, we've got a question here from Taylor. Taylor says, "How do you count time that is in between "Deep Work" and "Deep Leisure?" Well, before I even get your elaboration, my quick answer is like, why are you counting time?

Does it matter? Let's look at the elaboration, see if we get some more clarity here. "I have a practice of deeply reading and taking careful notes on books that have no immediate relevance to my scholarly research." He's a tenured professor. "Because I file my notes into a Zettelkasten system." Oh man, here we go.

Zettelkasten corner, take two. "There is always a chance that my irrelevant notes may one day prove useful for my day job. Should I count this note-taking time as "Deep Work" or do you consider it "Deep Leisure?" "Wondering for the purpose of budgeting my time and meeting "Deep Work" quotas." I mean, I don't know.

Taylor, I'd say don't care so much about that. I don't think you have to like precisely account for this time. You know, is this exactly work or is this exactly leisure? What does matter? That you are making regular progress on the things that really matter and obsessing over quality.

We talked about this earlier in the show, like how you have a certain, a reasonable number of projects you're dealing with concurrently. You're giving those like good attention, working on each thing till a natural stopping point before switching on to the next. You feel like you're really exercising your intellectual muscles.

You see the progress being made. You have the right amount of your time focused on the stuff that really matters. Do that and don't worry so much about like, should that 30 minutes of messing with my Zettelkasten slip box, does that count in some ledger book as deep work or deep leisure?

Don't worry about that. When you work, when you work, when you're done, when you're done, where it overlaps, it overlaps. All right, so let's, I'm looking at the time here. Yeah, we're at an hour. So I think it's a good place to wrap it up. Thank you everyone for sending in these questions.

And remember, videos are now available. Link in the show notes. I'll post a link on my blog and pretty soon we'll have a personalized URL you can use, but go check out those videos. We'll be putting up the videos of the questions you heard today. We'll trickle those out throughout the next week or two.

And until next time, stay deep. (upbeat music)