Well, enough of that nonsense. All right, what do we got? Let's keep rolling. See, I'm getting quicker now, Jesse. OK. I'm picking up the pace. So next question is from Sam. He's a 28-year-old PhD student. And he says, "I found the 500 words a day formula for slow productivity to be a useful frame.

However, as a PhD student in computer science, a lot of my work doesn't involve much writing. How would I adapt the 500 words a day target for my research?" So the context of the 500 words a day reference there from Sam is at some point, I don't know, maybe a few months ago, on the podcast, I talked about John McPhee.

I think I was probably talking about an essay I wrote for my newsletter, whatever. The point is I was emphasizing that John McPhee is seen in the context of his entire career as being very productive. He's written all these books. He has the Pulitzers. He has the National Book Award and a huge bibliography.

But he doesn't actually work that much on any given day. In fact, his target is he admits just to write 500 words a day. So this was a classic example of slow productivity. This working at this natural, sustainable pace over time can produce great stuff. So if we expand the timeline at which we're evaluating productivity to be a career or the last 10 years, as opposed to having a narrow timeline of today or the last week, you get this much more sustainable rhythm of work.

You don't have to be busy or killing yourself every day with work to produce stuff that you're proud of. Okay. So Sam is saying, "What is the equivalent of 500 words a day if you're not a writer?" And I think that's a good question. So we could address this first of all, just specifically in terms of Sam's particular context, which is a PhD student.

And you look, I see that, I feel your pain there, Sam. I used to do a lot of appearances at boot camps, graduate student dissertation boot camps. I used to do this at Georgetown. I would also do it at a nearby Catholic university when I knew some professors over there.

It's very common that you would do these once a year gatherings, they're called dissertation boot camps, where grad students get together to hear talks and motivate each other to work on their dissertations. And I was a broken record at these boot camps because all of the advice was always centered on write every day, get your writing done.

Don't forget to write because in a lot of disciplines, writing is the actual primary activity that pushes a thesis forward. Not the case of mathematics, not the case in computer science. You write papers eventually, but research is not writing. It's solving math equations, trying to figure out theorems, running experiments.

And so I used to come to these boot camps and I was a broken record. I would say, stop saying writing is your generic verb for working. For a lot of people, the core of their work has nothing to do with actually writing. So I feel your pain, Sam.

Writing is, should not be seen as a universal verb for doing deep work in graduate school. But what I want to do here is generalize out and answer this for people in general. I don't want to get too academia specific. So let's just be in general. How do we translate this general philosophy of 500 words a day to other types of work?

What I think is key here is this notion of slow and steady and timeline expansion. If you expand your timeline on which you are evaluating your productivity to something at the scale of years, then often a varied slow and steady approach is going to work quite well. And when you're evaluating your production on what you really care about at that type of expanded timeline, you begin to see the futility or the performative unnecessity of really hard days.

You know, I'm just burning the midnight oil. I've been writing all day. I'm going to write till midnight tonight and wake up really early to write. You could do that. And maybe in the moment you'll be like, man, I know I'm being productive because look how hard I'm working.

But when you're talking about what do I produce over the next five years, that's not sustainable. It also doesn't really matter. Working quality work again and again in the right setting, giving the work the respect and the support it needs to be good. Going up and down in intensity.

You know what? I'm taking a week off. I didn't get there. I was sick today. I didn't write. I didn't do my homework. Did you produce something that you're proud of? And that is going to be best served by slow, steady quality. So I think that's how we generalize John McPhee is 500 words a day is you don't have to be exhausted or frantic today to having ended up produce something great next year.

You need to slowly accrete good quality work at a reasonable rate. And that also happens to be a much more sustainable way to live and work. So that's what I would say. Slow steady don't not work, but don't be so proud of yourself for staying up real late. That just means you forgot a deadline and you will guaranteed win a Pulitzer Prize like John McPhee.