Is the genius of Kurt Gerdl like the genius of a lot of great thinkers who have made a big impact throughout history? required structure and Intentional thinking about how do I approach my life? I'm Cal Newport and this is deep questions the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world So I'm up here in the deep work HQ North in Hanover, New Hampshire joined in the deep work HQ South by my producer Jesse Jesse how's it going down there?

What is the weather I am missing in Washington DC right now? Yesterday it was 90 degrees and with high high humidity Well, I'm not gonna say I missed that too much. I think the high tomorrow is 78 We did have some humidity up here with this unstable system of rain, but that's past and I forgot what low humidity New England summer is like spoiler alert.

It is very good. So I thought I would just check in briefly Okay, what have I learned so far? Living up here in New England in this very scenic college town of Hanover where Dartmouth College is living right off Campus on Ockham pond and this cool house. They put us up in where I am right now looking Past the camera and out a large arched window onto a pond with with Pine trees beyond it.

So the question is this is a question I had coming into this experience How much is location going to make a difference? Will I really feel when in the day, you know, the actual work is work Writing is on the same computer screen as it is in DC I'm in a classroom just like I would be you know in DC I'm in an office sometimes just like would be in DC does the location around where the work happening being different?

Am I finding that that actually makes a difference and I think my report is yes, I Think it has made a notable difference. There's a few attributes. I was taking notes on this earlier today There's a few attributes about this new location that I think has been demonstrably impactful on the mindset when it comes to me doing work, I think a the The calmness and by calmness.

I just mean lack of people DC is a big city. There's a lot of people in DC if you go anywhere There's going to be a lot of people you're driving through if the place is worth going to the parking lot is going to Be full if you have to get on the beltway, it doesn't matter if it's 3 a.m.

On Christmas for some reason There's a lot of people Driving on that road, which is fine because you do appreciate that energy, but I am noticing this escape from that actually is Having an impact on my mood. So there's a certain Calmness I'm noticing that the mind has when it's not constantly seeing other people around or constantly feeling crowded And there's a lot more nature up here and this too seems to be having a positive impact on my professional mindset this house where they put us up in here on the pond is Right down the road from what used to be the golf course, which they they closed down So that's now a park surrounded by woods and you can walk or trail run through these woods It's two minutes down the road.

So every day you can be in the woods or walking across Rolling fields, you know how it goes Jesse when these golf courses they stop keeping them Like a golf course really tightly mowed they begin to look like st. Andrews they begin to look like those old Scottish style courses with the Yeah, a lot of cool fescue a lot of cool fescue is exactly I hear that word so often as I'm walking around people just saying like look at this fescue this very Scottish Very Scottish fescue.

So it's what a well fescue park. Anyways, that seems to also be having a calming and focusing mindset as well, so I think it's a successful this part of my experiment of Bringing the family up to New England seeing what it's like to be there for an extended period of time during the summer I would say so far that experiment is successful if I was to try to now Imagine my ideal summer setup.

So take the best of what I'm seeing here and combine it with other things. I'm missing I think probably what I would do in a world where just Money was accessible and not a problem and anything is possible I think probably what I would do from just what would be the best working environment status would be probably have a house I like this general latitude is fine Probably a little bit more remote.

I think the house itself being remote could be a really interesting final twist I really love the town here But I live in a really cool small town already So it's not that different So I already can just walk into a really cool small town and know the people at the coffee shop and and so I love that But I don't necessarily need to simulate that if I'm away for the summer So I was thinking if I was really creating my ideal summer situation this type of region But maybe up in the hills or the mountains a little bit more a property that was just big enough You could have a trail so you have a trail you could walk on with your coffee just to get the thinking going but not Being too far from civilization one month the six weeks starting in July put those together.

I think it would be an ideal deep work Accelerator, so if you have a really cool property that you've been thinking I would really like to just get rid of this really cheap I Don't like money So I just wanted to sell this much cheaper than it's worth and it's up here and it's in the hills and it has its Own trail on it or something.

Let me know because I do think There's a reason why so many writers who have this type of flexibility in their schedule do retreat to other locations in the summer It's a nice reset. It's been a nice cognitive reset. So I would say Jesse so far so good when we build our compound up here, though.

We're gonna have a high-end podcasting studio Because that's how good that's the one that's the one thing I miss is I don't have my high-end podcasting studio Actually, it's two things I miss. There's not a high high capacity podcasting studio and to the nearest IMAX size movie screen is A hour and a half away from here.

Oh Really and we have Oppenheimer comes out today Chris Nolan. I want to see that Barbie came out today, but I'm thinking a particular Oppenheimer, you know, he filmed that thing on a combination of 65 and 70 millimeter I'm probably end up seeing this at the Nugget Theatre, which is fine.

I remember it fondly. It's down I can walk to it I remember going there fondly as a college student, but let's just say the screens of the Nugget Theatre are not exactly Like the AFI theater where they'll actually have a 70 millimeter projector, you know near my house in Silver Spring So that's the one issue you do not come up here to be a cinephile not a lot of good Movie opportunities nearby, but I think we could put up with that We could put up with one of the requests is I think you should put a putting green in the backyard of the podcasting studio With this request this request is coming from a Jay Miller.

Just anonymously Jay Miller, you know work on my golf. You know work on my three-footers Yeah, a little chip little chip and putt the backyard of the studio. Yeah, that's the key What I learned is that means though by the way the studio This property would have to be in Vermont because Vermont has way more fiber High-speed fiber than New Hampshire, New Hampshire is way behind Vermont on high-speed Internet So I'm enjoying being in Hampshire now, no offense, New Hampshire rights, but just for the sake of our podcast studio slash putting green Slash deep work north.

We're gonna have to probably do that in Vermont So anyways, I want to talk a little bit about the today's show So so for the deep dive I'm gonna go into something that a Listener sent me that I thought was so cool that I thought we have to discuss this on the show So we'll get into that in a second We'll do some questions after that that are vaguely related just as a spoiler alert for later in the show I have heard your request and I will check in later in the show on My remarkable to tablet and I will give you an update on how things are going With my remarkable to what my review is so far.

So we have all that going in the show So let's let's start with the deep dive. What I want to do is actually highlight Some scans that were sent to me from a lister named Alexander from Serbia And these scans came from a book that I am going to actually I'm gonna bring on the screen for those who are watching at youtube.com slash Cal Newport media, this is episode 258 so if you're watching you can look there go to the deep life comm and look for episode 258 I'm gonna bring up on the screen for those who are watching a book that these scans I want to discuss are from All right, so this book is I'll read in the English is the philosophical notebooks of the famous logician and mathematician Kurt Gerdl so this was translated into English by Merlin Carl so you can it's his girdles notebooks his personal notebooks They've been translated Multi-volume and you can actually go through and see the type of things that Kurt Gerdl was writing This listener Alexander sent me some really interesting pages excerpted from these notebooks that all focus on we can think of as the Deep life time management life management These the thoughts girdle was having about how to structure his life make best use of his time push his life Push his life in the right direction.

So that's really cool to see a true genius. We have a snapshot on how he was thinking about Structuring his life to make it as deep as effective as possible. Now if you don't know who Kurt girdle is What you need to know is he's a 20th century logician and Mathematician did a lot of his work when he was young in the this would been like the 1930s died in the 1970s He's probably best known for his incompleteness theorems These were considered very important I had John von Neumann called this at some point like one of the most important things that was ever done in logic He's been compared to Aristotle in terms of other comparable figures in terms of their impact on the study of logic and the incompleteness theorems are are beautiful and Mathematically insightful and basically what they show and I won't I won't get into too much nerdy detail here But basically what he proved was any sufficiently complicated system of logics of axioms and inferences is Going to have statements That you can express that are true But cannot be proved true using that system So this was the notion of incompleteness theorems is that there was no this is a big deal because at the time Motivated by the challenge set forth by the German mathematician David Hilbert There is this idea that we can just create we can reduce all of mathematical knowledge everything is true or not true to a Finite system of axioms and inferences from which everything true can be generated and girdle came in and said no Every every sufficiently complicated system be it math or any type of logical system.

It's going to be incomplete It can't fully describe everything about itself That's true, and he did it in a really cool way, and I don't want to get too much into the nerd weeds here I teach this sometimes in my graduate class, but but basically what he did was he he embedded He embedded whatever system you give him that sufficiently complex He showed how to embed certain logical statements into that system, and I'm really bastardizing this a little bit, but in essence he showed you give me a sufficiently complex system I can basically embed a statement that says something like This statement is false now.

I'm not exactly that of course, but one of these sort of self a recursive self-referential statement that was Possible to prove one way or the other as it is a big simplification, but it was a really cool feat of logic and it showed this whole program of Unifying all logical truths with one system was never going to happen if you were into that at the time If you were Bertrand Russell in the 1920s or 30s this was like a bomb going off And then he came to the US.

He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He had some issues later in life Interesting guy Turing met him he was there at the same time as Einstein and von Neumann so anyways this is all to say Kurt Gödel is a very smart guy and we have in his notebooks How he was thinking about structuring his life and work, so I'm gonna load up I'm gonna load up some of these pages, and I'll read them out loud and put them on the screen And we can react to them all right, so here's the The first page I want to load here from his notebook Let's see No interesting one second here by the way people are watching Interesting okay if people are watching here, they're seeing Me try to learn how the screen sharing works, so I let me share a different screen here.

This is fascinating audio I'm sure for everyone who's listening Let's see here there we go All right, so I want to start there we go. This is what I want to start with all right I'm learning how this works Jesse. This is not our normal setup some What people don't know is in our normal setup usually?

Jesse can manipulate what's on the screen or not using a switcher and and in our deep work HQ North. I'm doing this Manually okay, so here's what I have on the screen now This is a table of contents for the notebook from which we're we're pulling more of these notes So we get a sense of the type of things girdle cared about So the content of this notebook he labeled this notebook as you'll see on the screen time Management and then under time management here are these scales he has for each day separately for each week precisely Roughly for several months Now let's stop right there because what we immediately see and I didn't know this This is the first time this week that I've seen these notebooks from girdle He was exactly thinking about what we call multi-scale productivity on this podcast He was exactly thinking about okay You need to manage your time on the day on the week and on the several month or what we would call a semester or quarterly Scale so Kurt girdle back a hundred years ago was actually thinking this exact same way now He adds a little bit more if we look at this outline.

He says also Time management should also be thought about for the next year The highest objectives to be reached so he has daily weekly monthly Annually, and then his final Subsection for this notebook is labeled. What should I do? And how should I do it? That is how should I behave with regard to certain matters and situations parentheses maxims?

So we can think of that as discipline. So this is the structure of the way He's thinking about managing himself in his time Multi-scale planning from day week the month to year which again is very congruent with what we talked about You know I talked about once a year at your birthday sort of working out your vision for the year and that he moves down the time Scales and then he has something like daily disciplines So that's what he has here That's what he has here Says contents, let's look at some of the actual content now.

Let's look at once he looks at these questions What are some of the things he comes up with? So I'm going to load first I'm looking through a couple options here. These are out of order. So this is interesting All right, here we go All right, so here is a random page from this time management notebook and he says general principle better to plan less and Actually carry it out So don't try to schedule too much.

It's better to have a realistic schedule He then sketches in words if you're looking this on the screen a particular time block plan I'm gonna skip from the time block plan that he is describing in words here I'm gonna skip to one that he actually drew a diagram from so let's see what one of these time block plans Actually looks like so I'll put this up on the screen here.

We've seen he has blocked off various times. So before noon He has Continuum lectures Princeton comma Notre Dame. So this is nine to I see nine to one o'clock Working on these lectures for Princeton and Notre Dame one to two o'clock lunch two to three or four o'clock mail budget life plan four to five o'clock stroll and Then he has for Monday and Wednesdays two o'clock errands Below that he says in spare time theology read mathematical papers continue own work resume time management on a small scale So what we're seeing here, which is pretty cool.

Is that girdles coming up with a time block? Template he's saying roughly this is what I should be doing. I think this was a plan for a particular week He's like most days I should be working in the morning on this until I get the lunch then do tasks in the afternoon have an evening stroll on Two days out of the week.

There's instead I'll do errands starting at two o'clock and that might take longer So what I love about this is that this is so Contemporary. I mean, this is the way we talk about it that controlling your time Figuring out when do I want to do work looking at the whole plan?

Oh, I'm gonna do errands on these two days. Let me get my hard work done in the mornings What am I working on hard this week while I'm working on? These lectures in that particular case. No, see as general heuristics. Okay, what should I do if I have free time outside of this?

well, here's the things for my attention should be shared so what we're seeing there is a Real intentionality and how he's thinking about his schedule, right? Here's another one. I wanted to show you here another notebook page So here okay, this is labeled program it says and he's instructing himself here.

It's from 1937 Draw up a preliminary program for next week Once or twice per week in particular how much time is to be spent on various disciplines? I'm gonna focus in on that one part there because here we have him Clearly talking about his weekly planning discipline Once or twice a week figure out your plan for the week So why is he saying twice a week because he's saying fix it so you make a plan for your week Maybe by Wednesday you're off your plan.

So update that plan so we see here a real commitment to Weekly planning in addition to what we're seeing before with some more daily time block planning. I mean, this is stuff that Productivity nerds like us can really geek out on We get a couple more General things as well, which I find interesting some remarks and some plans about Directing his life more generally.

So consider for example this page. I'm putting up there. He labels this remark and here's what he says The microstructure of my mental state is that I do not properly focus my attention on anything But rather already looked the next thing while dealing with another one of the reasons I am slow by nature But do not carry out my mental work with natural slowness Why?

So here we have Kurt Gerdl certified genius Complaining about the same sort of things that most of us who have an intellectual job do I can't keep my focus. I Wander on to think about something else. I need to be working slowly But my mental work is jumping around too fast.

My mind is quickly moving This is him writing in the 1930s So could you imagine if he had email and Twitter to actually look at as well? But I just think it's so interesting to see these great minds are struggling with the same issues And again, this is something we've talked about to focus intensely on something abstract Like logic or writing or strategy is not a natural behavior for the human brain It is something that we have to really deploy quite a bit of artifice To do successfully and here we're seeing this so take out of the equation even modern distractions There's great mind working at the peak of his powers is Struggling to corral his brain.

How do I keep focused on the thing? I'm doing it. I need to work slowly this stuff is hard, but my brain wants to move ahead fastly It's always as he says here Looking ahead to the next thing while dealing with another So these issues are timeless and these issues around Distraction are not something that is just new to our era.

All right. Here's another Cool general life insight he has He labels this Maxim more haste less speed One should take one's time with everything Do everything at one's own pace if a decision is to be announced in a letter better to give a preliminary answer to be polite deciding and acting are two different things All right, so there's a couple interesting things going on here One is a seems to me a slow productivity commitment more haste less speed so don't Procrastinate this is what I'm reading this more haste don't procrastinate don't put things off But don't actually rush the thing you're doing so give things the time it requires one should take one's time with everything but Do the things that need to happen?

Maybe this is how I'm reading this maximum I think it's a maximum that puts a lot into it now Now his second example here if a decision is to be announced in a letter Better to give a preliminary answer deciding and acting are two very different things. So again what I interpret there.

This is very practical We're getting very practical here. He's saying if there's something you need to do that's really complicated or time-consuming You want to take your time to do it? You want to give it the time it requires? So so maybe just answer someone say hey, I will do this.

Don't worry I will do this so that they're you're being polite but take your time to actually do it More haste less speed. So you don't want to procrastinate You you don't want to put things off needlessly tell some if you're gonna do something commit to doing it But when it comes time to actually executing take the time it requires Slow and steady.

So a lot being packed into some of these some of these maxims here. All right. Let's see. I think I have one more That I thought was interesting Alright another maxim Again, all from Kurt Gerdl's Notebooks. All right. Here's what he writes here to achieve certain abstract parentheses mental spiritual Things one needs to adhere to a certain purely external parentheses physical rules For example get up at a certain time Sit down at your desk to do work.

Do not lie down Have a notebook and scratch paper and pencils in front of you come up with time management Every evening take along a note when going out and take it out and look at it after any errand spend a certain amount of Time on something even when and he goes on from there so what he's saying here, which again is a point we've stumbled across ourselves on this show more than once is disciplines To make practice on these sort of abstract goals have daily disciplines that you just do that move you towards those abstract goals Have the physical to support the mental and the spiritual don't just think about how I want to be a great thinker Have a discipline of when I get up when I go to my desk.

What is on my desk? All the materials is right there Have a plan make a plan for what exactly you're gonna do with your time each evening for the day that follows next So he has this very again Rich philosophically rich idea being packed into a small amount of text here The structured physical unlocks the less structured more impressive mental and spiritual The other thing I want to point out about this is the way that time management as a term.

This is a very early a Very early occurrence of the term time management. This is very interesting. I mean I have in my personal library collections One of the earliest business books to actually talk about time management I have a first edition of it on a display case up in my library and It's from the 1950s and this has been written in the 1930s, but notice back then I don't know if this is just standard or Just the way he's using here, but notice time management is being used differently here So it's being used almost like a noun come up with time management every evening.

So the term there is being used like a scheduler plan Come up with the time management like a time schedule Whereas it became a verb so by the 1950s time management is something you do I practice time management It could also become an adjective. I have a time management system, but it's interesting just to see this here as Now come up with the time management not practice time management, so anyways These are just some random excerpts that Alexander pulled out from those notebooks and the summarize what I'm taking away from this is The genius of Kurt Gerdl like the genius of a lot of great thinkers who have made a big impact throughout history required structure and Intentional thinking about how do I approach my life?

How do I make use of my time? How do I make sure my activities are actually supporting what matters and he had a lot of ideas and a lot of those ideas Correspond with what we talked about on this show. He was a believer. It's clear here in multi-scale planning He planned his time on many different levels.

He was a believer in Disciplines having these regular disciplines that you do automatically but help you make progress Over time on the bigger less more abstract things that are important in your life, but broader than any of those specifics or the particular Congruence behind between his ideas and what we talked about on the show is just the grappling with it we have all this energy that's being expended out into the Entropic universe and the key is how do we how do we aim that?

How do we harness that and aim that and the people who end up really doing? interesting things with this potential tend to be people who do grapple quite a bit with How best do I make use of this energy and it's a complicated question? Gertl is a smart guy and he's wrangling with it and making notes to himself and expressing frustrations Coming up with plans probably changing these plans, you know It's easy to look at those type of activities and say why are you fiddling with all this productivity?

You have such an optimization mindset or whatever it is whatever the critiques are but ultimately some degree of this wrangling is necessary if you actually want to Create value out of what's going on Between your ears to take thought matter and make it into something interesting So so for that, I think this was a great example that yeah Even the great thinkers we think about is just wandering and being brilliant and it just comes to them Automatically, they're wrangling with the same stuff.

The rest of us are wrangling with So Alexander from Serbia. Thank you for passing along that particular notebook I'll probably have to buy a copy of those English translations of those notebooks That might be cool to have in the HQ or my library at home. But that was yeah a lot of fun to see that Was the time management every evening is that equivalent of your shutdown essentially I Might be an interesting way of thinking about it.

Yeah sit down to make a plan for the next day Could be the his shutdown routine. There's some other I didn't put him in here there's some other time block plans in here where he talks about the evenings and he definitely had a System for his evenings like when he I mean his evenings were all spent You know, I should have made put one of those in a lot of his evening plans were focused on Adele This person named Adele who I'm assuming is his wife.

I should probably go look that up So that's what he was talking about. He was talking about time management for what he does in the evening not the next day Well, no No I think what he was saying there was make a plan for the next day in the evening so that you can hit the ground Okay, but he does have elsewhere in the notebooks a lot of thought about spending time with his His wife and going for a walk and doing this and what time is gonna go to sleep?

And so I think he did think a lot about That time outside. So it did I mean those those plans did seem to have an implicit transition If you look in the notebook of you know My work is done by 5 and then I'm really thinking about what I want to do with my time and my family else after Work is over.

So he clearly gave that gave that a lot of thought as well This is why maybe I should be I should be keeping all my notebooks because maybe one day we can have The trans the cows collection cows philosophical notebooks. I think it'd be less interesting but maybe one day people could look at my time management strategies and wonder Anyway, so I want to go and do some questions that are Vaguely related just in general the questions I pulled out for today are vaguely related to just Systematically planning how you manage your time in your life So just sort of in this general sense of what girdle was trying to do Before I get to that though.

I want to mention some of the sponsors to make this show Possible in particular this show is sponsored by better help now I think Kurt girdle was a An interesting example to use before we got to this ad because sort of famously later in life girdle struggled with mental health What girdle did not have access to which we have access to today in our modern worlds is professionals who can actually help us?

With our mental health when there is patterns in our thinking that I've moved to a direction that is Adding more hardship than good to our life. There are experts who can help you figure out what's going on and come up with strategies to gain back control of the cognitive aspect of your life and to help keep you on track for really aiming your life in the Direction that you want it to go.

There are probably no bigger obstacles to the the dream of Making your life deep than really struggling with what's going on between your ears Now this is where better help enters the scene because if you're thinking about starting therapy Better help is a great way to do this. Here's why it's entirely online It's designed to be convenient flexible and suited to your schedule You just fill out a brief questionnaire and you'll get matched with a licensed therapist And if it's not quite the right fit you can switch therapist anytime for no additional charge So if there's some struggle that's going on in your life right now, that's really being Causing some issues really holding you back Talk to a therapist and use better help to get into this because it's it's the easiest most convenient flexible way I think to actually enter into Getting some professional assistance on getting this part of your life Working properly.

So let therapy be your map with better help visit better help.com Deep questions That's a better help help.com deep questions Don't forget the slash deep questions as it will get you 10 off your first month. That's better help help.com Deep questions By talking about deep questions, I also want to talk about our friends at 80,000 hours So 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their career So look we've been talking about in this show How do you structure your life in a way that is intentional and deep and one of the things you might care about?

is taking the thing you probably spend the most of your waking hours doing which is your job and Aiming that to have as much positive impact as possible. This is what 80,000 hours helps people do now This number is not arbitrary. Where does 80,000 hours come from? You work 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years that multiplies out to 80,000 hours So the whole point is how do you take those 80,000 hours effort and make sure that you are getting?

the most impact out of them 80,000 hours will help you do that. They've spent the last 10 years conducting research alongside academics at Oxford University to figure out how to Do this I have known these guys at 80,000 hours since the early days of this nonprofit getting started This is back when I was writing about career satisfaction was so good They can't ignore you and we had huge overlap in the ways we were thinking about things.

So I've known the 80,000 hour people For probably a decade now so I can tell you from a personal perspective They really align with the way I think about jobs They push really away from this mindset of just there's one job. You're meant to do and follow your passion and have this much more instrumental Cal Newport style vision for deploying your job Towards certain ends tweaking the attributes of your jobs being more systematic when you think about how your job fits into your bigger goal So there really are on board with the type of things I think about so if you go to 80,000 hours org You will find all of their research.

You will find all of their guides About forming a high-impact career They also have a podcast where they host unusually in-depth conversations with experts on the world's most pressing Problems, they really get some smart people on there. Check out the David Chalmers interview on Artificial consciousness if you're interested in AI you have to listen to that one and they have a job board But they have a curated and constantly updated list of hundreds of active job openings That they think might have a particularly big impact so 80,000 hours We are on the the same wavelength here When it comes to how to think about jobs and the way we actually think about things So I'm going to suggest you go over to 80,000 hours org add a slash deep to the end of that Go to 80,000 hours org slash deep That way they'll know you came from me Everything there is free It's a nonprofit.

They only want to aim to help you out. So go check it out at 80,000 hours org slash deep If you're there join their newsletter, you might as well because they will send you a free copy of their in-depth research led career guide That's 80,000 hours the number dot org slash deep All right, Jesse.

Let's go deep now on some questions we will now put on our Kurt Gerdl hat and try to figure out how we two can Systematically structure our life to if not solve the incompleteness theorems at least do something worthwhile. Who's our first question today? All right first questions from Rito Rito says outside of work.

I keep jumping from one thing to another without gaining much progress I start with a lot of excitement and when the rubber hits the road after a short while I lose interest and jump to another Thing because that's exciting. How do I keep doing what I start? Well, Rita, this is a very common issue.

So I'm glad you brought it up. There's nothing unusual that you're struggling with this the fact that we're talking about Projects outside of work makes this problem even more acute because when you're working on a project a course for your job There's a real natural incentive to keep going which is my boss wants me to do this And if I don't do this, it's going to be a problem and I don't want it to be a problem because they give me Money for this job.

I need the money to live in work motivation can be much easier For projects outside of work the type of things we talked about in so many of the deep life buckets. We tackle on this show Motivation gets harder. So I have a couple things to suggest for you here first.

I'm gonna say let's get smarter about how you choose These non-professional projects, especially if you are having trouble right now Following through I'm gonna suggest you move to smaller projects that are more tractable you understand how to accomplish them and What it means to finish them and it's not that far away three weeks.

I could be done two weeks. I could do this This is something I'm going to do this weekend and you want to focus on projects early on that having a tangible Immediate benefit it's gonna take me a week when I'm done. I will have built this thing. I will have Finished this running route.

I will have Started this new workout routine, whatever it is. It's it's a very tangible. I've done it. Here's the benefit Because what I'm gonna suggest here is that at first you want to stack these smaller more self-contained projects on top of each other to make progress in a direction you care about as opposed to as an alternative trying to come up with just one massive project So if there's an area of your life you say You know, I want to get really into making DIY making with printers and laser cutters or this or that you could set some big project Of okay.

I'm gonna go rent the space and build a big lab I get really good at making things and be like Adam Savage in his cave But that's a huge project and if you're already struggling with non-professional motivation, that's gonna Peter out. It seems endless It's difficult to get stuck.

So what you want to do instead is stack smaller projects I want to buy these two very specific pieces of supplies and buy it and build this thing and it's gonna take me a week All right. Now this weekend I'm going to go to the garage and I want to clear out a corner I'm gonna set up this desk and buy a task light and make a sort of small little space in there.

Okay, that's tractable That's done. All right. Now I'm gonna build this more elaborate project. It's gonna take me another week, right? So you're doing these Smaller self-contained projects that you can push through and finish pretty quickly and they're stacking up to push you Continually in the direction of what you more broadly want to accomplish like in this example to be Someone who has DIY making as a bigger part of their life.

So you're stacking smaller tractable Projects not trying to take on giant projects. You could see the same thing when fitness You could say okay. I want to I want to look like Chris Pratt in Jurassic World My boys and I watched that last night. That's a huge goal Right, right.

That's like very difficult to do and it's three hours a day of training and you know And you're not you're probably not gonna get there and you lose interest in it. That's too broad But what you could do is take the first step towards getting into better shape okay, like so this is what I want to do is I don't know I want to have a cardiovascular habit so I'm gonna like research and buy the right shoes and get a route and get some baseline time for that route and have a Thing up on the wall where I keep track of what my times are and like you do that after a week You're like, okay I've done that thing and now I I know how to run of the ability to run I can keep track of my route times That's just like a step in the right Direction or it's okay.

I'm going to buy this particular Type of fitness equipment and see if I can do like one week of this program So like I have a routine for that. So these are smaller things that again can stack and move you Move you in the right right direction Okay Now once you have these smaller projects you're stacking smaller projects deploy pre-scheduled time and daily disciplines to help make it automatic If you fall back on am I in the mood to run today?

Am I in the mood to work on my DIY project today too often? The answer is going to be no so you want that time when you're doing your weekly plan to be pre-scheduled Put it on your calendar. This is when I do it if possible make something special around it.

I'm coming home from work early I'm taking an extended lunch hour I'm going into work late this day so that I can get this run in or work on this project, right? So you're especially protecting the time not putting into the whatever dregs happen to be available Daily disciplines are great.

If it's like this is just what I do. I exercise I go for a run right after work every day I Come in the door change do that and then that's really when my day is over and I'm back home for my family So daily disciplines plus pre-scheduled time don't leave it up to your own motivation in the moment Now here's the thing Rito if you do this for a while As we talked about I think two episodes ago, or maybe this was even last episode Your sense of yourself will change in particular your sense of yourself as a disciplined person who can Make consistent project progress on a hard project that sense of yourself will develop Discipline is not we've talked about this before on the show discipline is not a Approach you can decide to take it's not an attribute you can turn off and on.

Oh, I think I should be more disciplined It's an identity It's something you feel about yourself I'm a disciplined person or I'm not and the only way to develop that identity is to actually make progress on completing things you make things that you contractively complete You schedule that time on your calendar you do daily disciplines do this for six months You're gonna find yourself in the future saying you know what?

I don't need to break it up so much. I See myself as someone who can take on and follow through on big projects. So that will get easier anyways Great great question though Rito. I do appreciate that I will say Jesse Chris Pratt was muscular in that movie. That was my main takeaway Yeah, were you following his work hours?

That's somebody else That was someone else though I was doing That was Thor right Thor Chris Hemsworth. I did his program I got his app sinner and I did go through its it was three or four months And he had a program for you could do with dumbbells only so I like to home gym And I finished it up here because I have membership of the gym.

So I did I did go through that program. I Liked it nice. Here's the thing. It's not what he's doing The other thing I found out about the you know doing the weird stuff for the movies is So much of that is diet too. It's Thor Hemsworth talked about this the amount of food it They're adding 40 pounds of muscle.

It's like a huge amount of food They have to eat at the same time that they're doing super intense working out the developed muscle But they have to eat a huge amount of food to actually just literally Have the mass that they put in there at the same time.

They're also cutting and sure so they're they're cutting body fat Well consuming just huge amounts of boring food It doesn't sound fun I'm sure those guys that have to do those roles are like, oh my god six months and six months of this All right, but I digress I'll do another question what we got All right.

Next question is from Lily. I noticed Cal bringing more focus on the issue of setting up one's environment and was wondering if he thinks that Environment is something we should think of as a bucket like craft or contemplation or is it more like a major project? Well, you know clearly I have been thinking about environment being up here in the deep work HQ North as we talked about the opening Of the show I have been finding Being in this different quieter more natural location.

That's different than my normal routines as I predict is making a big impact. I I do think it does support clearer thinking I do think it does Support more insight. I do think it does support sense of cognitive recharge. So yes, I'm as Lily's pointing out a Big believer in environment.

I don't think we don't think enough about it. So where does this fit into our Contemplation of the deep life. Well, I think it fits more neatly when we switch to the deep life stack So we've been shifting from this conception of the deep life on the show as Just being made made up of buckets that you address and we've instead changed to this notion of the deep life as being a stack with different layers that build on each other and you work your way Through and establish each layer till you get to the top and you can iterate and go back through again and again And that's the iterative process of forming the deep life now in our deep life stack.

What's the topmost layer? It's the vision layer It's the layer in which you plan for the remarkable So below this you have all the other things that help you get there and also just give you a strong foundation in your life Remember you start with discipline re-establishing discipline then you move on the values Here is my code and here is the for how I live my life at good times and bad and here's the rituals that I Have in my life to help keep me constantly Reconnected to the core elements of that code.

It just helps me live and understand that Then on top of that depending on which version of the stack we have you either go right to calm Where you control your your time and obligations for calm or you can add in which I've been doing more recently my thinking a service layer serving people around you so you want to make sure that you're connecting to other people and leading other people and serving other people because that's at the core of our species then you get the Calm layer we are finding calm by controlling your time and obligations.

So now you have the breathing room to actually do things you have the breathing room to actually have insight and on top of all of that is planned for the remarkable the vision layer and In that layer is where you take a particular Target and say I want to push this part of my life to something more remarkable and building off all these other layers below I'm much more well suited to do that.

I'm much more well suited to understand what's important to me and I'm much more Well suited to succeed With the goal of pushing a part of my life to be more remarkable Overhauling parts of your environment would be one of these types of projects you would do at that top layer So at this time you're constantly coming back to this top layer and as you iterate and say what's another part of my life?

I want to push towards being remarkable. That's where I think that happens And so it might mean okay as I'm working on my top layer I'm going to take a portion of my house and I'm going to completely change it to be Much more dramatic as a place for doing work or it could be something much broader like I want a deep deep work HQ North I want property that I go to for six six weeks a year and how am I gonna make that happen?

I have to start thinking through it would be really remarkable. But how am I gonna make that happen? So I think with the deep life stack these type of things make more sense The place you're gonna spend your most time once you've really got these other layers locked in Is gonna be that top layer where you're just systematically taking parts of your life that are important to you and making it more remarkable things about your job things about your fitness things about Intense leisure very serious leisure habits you have and things like the spaces you're in So I'll say Jesse for example, I'm I've been motivated.

I think this academic year I Have a couple spaces in mind back Back in DC where I want to start doing some work and I think one of them is I want to do another Update to the HQ. Let's keep pushing this thing I think the office the office of the HQ let's I think we could make that cooler Like I'm thinking about I think the desks we have in there Are a little rickety Like let's get how really don't you think what if we got some?

Really solid maybe just custom-built wood all the way around the room that you could just thump down on that thing And and it's not you know, this shaky thing. I want to there's nothing on the walls there I want to cover the whole yeah, we should hang that we should hang that one picture Yeah, we have this great piece of artwork that the grandkids of the art is as an artist whose whose work hangs in MoMA With this great piece of artwork That is she was taking a circuit schematics in the 1950s and 60s and building abstract artworks out of them We have a great frame piece of artwork her grandkids sent us and we just have to hang it I want to put a whole pegboard on the wall across from the 3d printer Like in a workshop from which we can hang tools and all the all the different stuff that's being used in the the the maker portion Of the office so we have like tools and things hanging off of the hanging off the wall there That'll I'm gonna be cool.

Yeah, I think it'll be cool. Yes. I mean Yeah, the desk idea is good, too Yeah, I get real all the way around the room Kind of really cool custom. So it's really solid so you could just have one chair and just be rolling like here's the here's the Monitor you can go over to the printers or stuff and go over to the the workbench side and have like task lights It was I want to make that room really cool So I've that I have that type of thought in mind Continuing to work on some of the spaces and in my house.

So I'm thinking about it I think spaces is cool. And I want to I want to when I'm planning for the remarkable I want to have more of More focus more focus on spaces You know what? I want. I think would be cool. I think we need an on-air light outside our studio It's a small thing.

I think that'd be cool Yeah, that would be cool. Just uh, yeah, just just turn that turn that thing on. All right, let's uh, let's keep rolling What do we got? All right next questions from anal in the show You talk about lifestyle centric career planning and this fully resonates with my way of thinking about life And I see it as the best way to building a life you want to have but how do I find?

examples of the lifestyles I desire Another good question obviously with lifestyle centric career planning What we're talking about with that is that you begin by fixing? The vision of your ideal lifestyle and then you work backwards to figure out practically speaking How do I get as close as possible to that lifestyle image?

The key thing in this planning is the lifestyles not just career It's it's all aspects of your life. What type of place do you live? I mean, it's it are you on a mountain? Are you in a small town? are you in a high rise in the city and going to Coffee shops where there's a vibrant discussion or is it more you're going for walks in the woods?

Is it you're near family and they're all coming over and it's like in the opening of that old NBC show Parenthood with sort of lights cafe lights hanging in this yard and people are sitting around picnic tables. Like what are you imagining? What is resonating you you're surfing out in the waves each morning or it's more of a Masters of the Universe type I'm controlling these businesses or making moves and breaking things and I have all these people who are working under me all these type of visions So you're making this this concrete tactile vision of a lifestyle that really resonates and then you figure out Okay, how do I get there and a big part of that answer is going to be the job portion Well, okay.

How am I gonna for this location? What type of job would have there? What flexibility do I need? What level do I need to be at so really helps you make career decisions pragmatically, but other things as well What am I doing with the rest of my time? How am I structuring my life?

Where am I living location decision? So that's lifestyle centric Planning and of course the hard part is how do you figure out that lifestyle? And I think the issue here is it sounds like you're looking for perhaps an individual To be the exemplar of everything you're looking for This guy I want to be Kurt Gerdl, you know, and so let me just try to mimic Mimic everything he has in his lifestyle that sometimes works and it's great If it does what I think is more common is that you're going to pick and choose Aspects of lifestyles from different people that you're going to then put together into your own image So what you're really looking for is you want to encounter real-life case studies of real people and it could be people You know or they could be famous people or people you see on YouTube where you watch a documentary about or read about in books and You've listened for this sense of resonance It's a really clear feeling where there's something about this person.

You're seeing in a video Or in a book that just feels right And what you want to figure out is what exactly about? What I'm looking at here is Causing that sense of resonance and I would suggest you have a place to write this down Everyone should have a notebook that's dedicated to just their life The quest for a deeper life.

This was you know for me famously my moleskins I'm now doing this in my remarkable which we'll talk about later But you should have a notebook dedicated to this where you can keep track of these notes and over time You'll see certain things will come up again and again this book this documentary this person I met in all cases that resonated with me because of this one aspect of their lives You'll see that thing show up again and again.

So you say great. This should be a part of my ideal lifestyle and you have to keep in mind sometimes these examples will be unusual right that the Broader details of these examples that are spurring residents might be completely foreign to anything you might want to do Like let me just give you a very concrete example.

A lot of my listeners Have sent me Links to the documentary Jiro dreams of sushi It's a great documentary about this. I think he's a three-star Michelin Chef it's a sushi master and his restaurant is in a subway station in Tokyo There's nothing fancy, but his entire life is just obsessively mastering the art of Doing sushi at the highest possible level and people travel from all around the world to try to come to this small Restaurant and sit at the counter Inside a subway station now that resonated for example with a lot of my listeners not because they want to be sushi chefs Not because they want to work long hours in a subway station.

What was resonating? craft They were they were sensing look this person is really focused on mastering a craft and out of that is getting significant personal satisfaction That is an element you can pull out of that example that you can then apply to your lifestyle vision that you okay I want to be working on something be really good at something and have a craft that can really take some pride in That's a really good insight and it came from an unlikely place It's like I for whatever reason find various residences when I watch things about the big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, I have no interest in being a big wave surfer.

I don't trust going into the ocean I don't trust making myself in the shark food. I don't even like going in boats, but there's just aspects about the The intentionality especially where he lives on the old pineapple plantation in Maui or Kauai I'm not sure exactly where it is.

There's just aspects of his life that resonated about a sort of intentionality and location really mattering and he also has a sort of dedication to his work as being a source of interestingness and Challenge and not just as trying to climb some type of ladder He did not go the professional surfing route and did this own thing.

There's real lessons in there that resonate with me even though I Don't wear board shorts. I don't live in Hawaii and I you know, I hate I'm terrified of the ocean essentially so what I'm trying to say here is You're deconstructing things to cause sense of resonance to figure out what the small elements are and you write this all down and you do That long enough a pretty clear image will arise of these are the things that matter to me and then the fun part comes The planning for the remarkable part where you begin shaping your life towards those things now you have some actual now you have some actual direction Laird Hamilton, so, you know him at all.

Have you seen any of his stuff Jesse? Yeah, I um, he's been on Ferris a couple times. So I listen to those I've listened to Some of the episodes with his wife. I have this coffee creamer that I occasionally use. I like that creamer Yeah, yeah, I like it at times Yeah times did I had the turmeric one?

For a while. I talked about branding. That's entirely something. Why did I buy that brand that it just layered? Yeah, imagine him With his like, you know in Maui With a tree trunk legs like we're gonna go like invent some new thing to surf some cool wave You're like I just want in what are you selling?

Yeah, that's great. You know, that's like pure That's pure sort of the Olympic athlete on the Wheaties box marketing and I love it. I'm here. I'm here for that You know, that was definitely I still have it. I gotta use it again. I haven't yeah, I haven't used in a while Yeah, he's interesting guy.

He lives he lives full speed, you know, which which I he does a lot Workouts in the pool with like dumbbells like at the bottom. Yeah, he invented that I've seen it for sure. I forgot what it's called. But yeah, he invented a whole new way of working out Yeah, just terrible but awesome.

Yeah, well you work out underwater Which is such a dumb thing to do. Yeah, but have you heard there's there's actually Some NBA players got into it, right because they could you could really practice Like vertical leap and jumping and stuff like this with no impact on your legs And so coming off of injury you could actually do a lot of training, but he's basically a crazy person.

He's just What Jesse is describing here is what you would think he is in the bottom of a swimming pool in Malibu with like heavyweights exercising underwater Because there's no resistance so like you can do I don't know. He also has brought he got really into Saunas and ice baths, right?

Yeah, I seem to be right now. And so he brought This terrible piece of exercise equipment. So people are saying look I'm gonna sit in the sauna for 20 minutes and this is so hard So he wanted to one-up everyone so he brought in one of these attack bike things.

Have you seen these it's like Oh, yeah, so bikes assault. Yeah. Yeah, which is a very hard cardio workout, right? It's like impossible It's your arms your legs. So he brought an assault bike into the sauna. So he said I'm not just gonna sit in the sauna I'm gonna do the hardest possible like cardio exercise in the sauna He wears oven mitts because the the the handlebars are too hot.

They could burn his hands. So he's wearing oven mitts Oven mitts in a sauna doing the hardest possible exercise before getting into an ice bath bath afterwards. He's a crazy man He's a crazy man and what I've learned about all that stuff and the saunas and the ice baths and all the craziness is you know It's not so much about like what exactly can we measure some particular?

physiological effect I just think for these elite level Athletes and training they just they need the they need discipline and challenge I think this is partially why really extreme sauna ice bath challenge have worked our ways in the routine It's a lot of these people are just looking for Discipline and challenges and moving their body through more.

I think it's as much psychological as probably it is physiological Yeah Yeah, but maybe we'll need to get so I'm adding this to the list for our property for the HQ North so we have professional assault like or a sauna Sauna ice bath. No, no assault bike Maybe no, you can't have a swimming pool up here So we're not gonna do underwater weightlifting and then we have your putting green.

So we're making The list is growing I would love that That's what Hamilton had by the way speaking of deep work HQ North is he has this I don't know if you still have it probably does he bought this cool property near That wave he made famous jaws Piappi or whatever.

It's called. He bought this old pineapple plantation Near where this giant wave was that he sort of helped innovate big wave riding on and he just does all these projects in the offseason he has all this equipment and You know back hose and ATVs and because he gets bored.

They're all there's it's this huge property with all these vehicles They're always like kind of doing cool stuff while they're waiting for the waves to come Yeah, the deeper case you north is gonna be like a a much less physically fit Version of that so instead of like a TV to dig a trench will be you know Strolling to read a book by like a bench, but whatever a lot of a lot of things going on All right enough this nonsense.

Let's keep rolling. What do we got next? All right next questions from Anna. I Have worked very hard to get my current job by ruining to get to my current job by Removing distractions and focusing on rare and valuable skills because I'm good at time management I can now realistically work about 20 hours a week and do more than enough to keep my boss happy Recently, I've been presented with the chance to move to a late-stage startup where I'd be more stimulated in terms of role But would need to work a lot more hours I'm sort of bored of my current job, but I have a lot of free time.

I could spend on other things Should I switch jobs? Well, first of all, there's a case study aspect to this embedded which is for those who who look at the type of Time and task management strategies we talked about sometimes on this show and see them as somehow ways to do more work who will cast multi-scale planning and task capture these type of things we talked about for the the calm layer of the deep life stack and say well that's just about optimization and you're just turning yourself into a Machine of profits to do ever more work.

This shows you the counterpoint Because this is the other thing you can do when you can control what's on your plate You can decide what you want to do with that And yes It is possible to say like I do sometimes to my regret and say great now I can fit four jobs into nine to five Instead of one that's one thing you can do and I've done that at times But you can also do what Anna did is say great I work takes about 20 hours a week and everyone thinks I'm a superstar that's the flip side of Controlling your time and obligations as you actually get control over The workload you have knobs you can turn now.

Let's get that Anna's particular point. She's so good at this that she's bored Right. She's working 20 hours doesn't really have anything else going on and saying should I go to another job? There's gonna be much more time. It's gonna be much more intensive. It's gonna take much more hours She elaborated we didn't we didn't put it all in here But she elaborated more about what that new job would be like There'd be new skills to pick up and she was saying she would have to prove herself.

So, you know late-stage startups It's definitely a place where you just need to demonstrate Energy and value no 20 hours. That's gonna be not no 20 hour weeks there. It's gonna be 60 hour weeks So should she switch jobs? Well, Anna the issue what that's gonna come down to is your lifestyle vision This is we're having clarity on this is what I want my lifestyle to be like all aspects work and non work is going to be really important Because getting that straight is going to give you clarity about okay, what role does my career play here?

So if you go through this vision and you're saying okay where I want to be in this vision and I could be here in Three years is one where you know, maybe it involves your you're starting a family or you're writing novels or you want to Live in nature and be able to like spend long times Hiking or like surfing or something like this then you would say great I'm bored right now at this 20 hour a week job But this is the right foundation for this lifestyle image that I'm trying to get towards Let me keep that and I'll be Systematic right now in the other parts of my life moving me towards that setting me up for the move setting me up for learning This skill changing from you know in person to remote you have work to do now.

This is the right engine Professionally, let me work towards getting towards this lifestyle image on the other hand maybe when you do this lifestyle centric career planning your thing like I'm bored and the image I have in mind of where I'd like my lifestyle to be is one where I'm more in the thick of things and I'm plugged into I've seen Her current job.

She didn't we cut this out for for length, but she's working as a chief of staff for a Sort of a more well-known figure. So maybe she's thinking that well-known figure That life is what I'm looking for You know, like you've had a successful company and that was really hard but now you're doing some investing and maybe you're also you have a vision of I'm oscillating back and forth between just sitting back and investing and then building up companies from scratch to make an impact and I want to live in the thick of things and Be on stage with a thousand people as I give a talk about what I've learned like maybe that's the image that resonates It's really clear.

Yeah, I got to leave this 20 hour a week job and go to the late-stage start up and crush it over There I got to figure out how to really make myself known orient my whole life there about using all of my time management skills to just be a superstar and I have that I can put up with that for two years be really hard because I think I'm gonna be able to jump from There to doing my own startup and you could have a whole different vision Your lifestyle is what matters here.

The lifestyle vision you're aiming towards is what allows you to make all of these Decisions in the absence of that bigger picture vision that really resonates the decisions become arbitrary You'll focus in on one thing. I don't know. I'm bored right now I don't want to be bored and then six months later.

You're stressed out of your mind Working till 11 every night because people wonder why the lights off if you're not there and think why did I do this? Like I solved the boredom problem and created a whole nother problem, you know other parts of my life are falling apart, right?

So we don't want to be making knee-jerk or arbitrary decisions And again having that ideal lifestyle that you're looking towards is really helpful Now if you're struggling to do that, there's a couple things you can do There's the advice we just gave before of in a previous question Look for things to resonate figure out what parts of the resonate write that all down and see what emerges This is also we're working through the full deep life stack matters So part of the value of moving through the deep life stack before you get to this final layer where you make these big changes Where you change your career where you pursue big projects So one of the reasons why you go through all these layers is that it prepares you for better identifying these visions that matter when you become a establish your discipline when you figure out what your values your code and you have rituals that connect you deeply and intuitively to the things that really matter that you build your life on top of when you're serving other people on a Regular basis when you have control, which you probably already have of your time and obligations It's much easier than to say with confidence.

This matters. This doesn't this is important to me There's a core calmness and clarity that comes from that So get that lifestyle image really clear move through all the deep life stack layers and start keeping a notebook of what resonates if you don't have that lifestyle image and then use That to make your decisions do not allow this to be a knee-jerk decision All right, so what I want to do now is I'm gonna jump forward to Talk about my own experience With my newest gadget to juror, which is my remarkable to tablet Before we get there.

I just want to mention another one of the sponsors that makes this show possible And that is our friends at element LM in T Now element is I've mentioned this before this is a product It was an early sponsor of the show and I liked it so much that I was just using it in The years since then and so when they came back and said they want the sponsor again I said well, I'm glad because I already own it because I've been using this product already now what it is is a electrolyte drink mix That's everything you need and nothing.

You don't so it has lots of salt, especially if you're sweating Which if you live in DC means basically all the time But no sugar So you have this science-backed electrolyte ratio a thousand milligrams sodium 200 milligrams potassium 60 milligrams magnesium Without sugar without coloring without artificial ingredients. No gluten.

No filter. No BS so you have the ability to keep up with electrolyte needs Even if you're a keto or low car or paleo or just don't want all of the weirdness that's in typical other sports drinks so this is the way I use it is when I exercise I Put element in my water afterwards because I sweat a lot because it's a roughly and I'm again I'm looking at the National Weather Service here a billion percent humidity and terribly hot.

That is the forecast in DC basically from June through September stupidly hot and humid I think is the official term if I go hiking for a long walk I'm gonna drink it if I wake up feeling dehydrated which often happens, you know, I didn't get enough I probably just didn't drink enough last night put element in the water You can feel it that it's giving you something you need and it tastes great doesn't have all that junk in it What I do is I titrate So if I just had a like a real sweaty workout, I'll do a full packet But maybe it's just a morning and I'm just feeling a little Dried out.

I might put half a packet into the water. So I'll sort of titrate with the packets Anyways, I've tried a lot of different electrolyte mixes Again as a sweater. I need these and This is the one this is by far my favorite. So right now element is offering a free sample pack with any purchase That's eight single serving packets free with any element order This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share element with a salty friend get yours at drink element comm slash deep This deal is only available through my link.

You must go to DRINKLMNT.COM/DEEP And notice you're trying it totally risk-free If you don't like it, you can just share it with a friend and element will give you your money back No questions asked you have nothing to lose. That's drink element LMNT.COM/DEEP Jesse when I ran out of the element I brought with me up here.

I Bought and I regret this I bought this at a supermarket. It's like, oh, here's an electrolyte thing. It was like tablets. I was like, I could put this in my water It's the worst thing because you put that you put it in your water bottle, right? And the idea is this competitor I won't say its name and you're like great that'll give me electrolytes It takes like 10 minutes for this thing to dissolve like Alka-Seltzer It just sits there in your water bottle so you can't drink your water So you finish your workout you're super sweaty and you put one of these tablets in the water Like I guess I'm just gonna stare at my ice water for 10 minutes before like the electrolytes are like who invented this thing Anyways, the point is I really missed my element.

I was like, okay, I gotta get back to my element I need to just throw in that packet and get the job done All right. I also want to talk about our our good friends at Henson shaving this is the razor that This is the the razor that I use.

Okay. So what's going on with? Henson, this is a family-owned Aerospace parts manufacturer. This is someone who was making precision parts For the International Space Station for the Mars Rover who brought their experience with doing incredibly precise engineering to the problem of getting a good shave so a Henson razor is this beautifully milled piece of aluminum into which you just put a standard 10 cent safety razor blade and you screw it on and it's precisely milled so that you have just 0.0013 inches of blade extending past either side of the razor What this means is when you shave you're not going to get the diving board effect Where the blade goes up and down that's what caused nicks That's what caused clogs you instead get this Really clean shave and you get it without having to have 15 different razors in some plastic monstrosity that you bought at the drugstore because if you have one really well manufactured if you're if your razor is really well manufactured you Just need one blade to get a good shave So this actually makes this an affordable way to get a good shave because yeah you pay more up front for the razor But then you're just using these super cheap to buy blades so it doesn't take long before the upkeep of your Henson is Significantly cheaper than if you're using a subscription service and significantly cheaper than if you're trying to buy The big plastic packed blades at the drugstore.

It is what I use. I love the shave I also love how this thing works and as someone who cares about technology I'd love nothing more than just a really well-built thing that solves a problem well and does so efficiently So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime visit Henson shaving comm slash Cal Depict a razor for you and use code Cal and you will get two years worth of blades free So the way you do this is just to add the two year supply of blades to your cart And then when you type in Cal as your promo code the price of those blades will drop to zero That's 100 free blades when you head to H en SON sh av ing Comm slash Cal and use that code Cal All right, Jesse the the fans have been asking.

I'm gonna load up the website here. They've been asking about my experience with my remarkable 2 tablet I'm gonna load it up. They have Now let's see here. I'm loading up the website here so for those who are watching again. This is Cal new Youtube.com slash Cal Newport media.

This is episode 258 or at the deep life comm episode 258 Let's load up this home page for those who are watching so we can remember all right meet remarkable the paper tablet All right, and as we watch this video before we see a very well-dressed contemplative Woman holding her remarkable.

Here's some pictures of it as close to paper as it gets so as you can see in this image here the the remarkable for those who don't know is a Electronic notebook So you have it's a one page that you can write on it's a Kindle style e-ink So you write on this page and you see what you're writing like handwriting I'm showing some of this on the screen right now and You can have endless pages essentially and endless notebooks all in this one thing you hold all of it being backed up To the cloud as well All right, so what is my experience been with the remarkable the headline is I really like it I'm really liking my remarkable - and here is why I Had a lot of notebooks in my life because I have so many different things I do these each had their own notebook So I had a notebook for example for my moleskin for keeping track of just my general Life thoughts the pursuit to have a deeper life, right?

I would have notebooks for Theory I'm working on computer science papers. I need notebooks to work on Ideas mathematical equations this or that I would have multiple notebooks like this. I would have notebooks for Planning around the business the the media company we run here. So thinking through how what's our strategy?

What's happening? What's our vision for the future? I have notebooks to keep track of like my specific What is my what's the specific plan strategic plan? I'm working on for you know a particular part of my life and I want to keep notes on it I'll have a notebook for that as well I'd have notebooks for book ideas and then a notebook for each particular book I was working on and then just a scratch notebooks because I need to just keep track of ideas.

I'm at a meeting I'm sketching out a plan a lot of different notebooks were in my life and I was constantly grabbing different notebooks and Using some for other purposes the remarkable solve that problem. I Just have a lot of notebooks. I counted there's nine. I've started so far.

They're all on the same device So I can use the stylus go over select any notebook. I want start taking notes And it's just there and then if I want to do something else I can switch over to that notebook and it's right there So I've really been I've really been enjoying that it really has been solving the problem.

I mean basically the only the only paper notebook that this has not replaced is Time block planning and I tried this I was like, I wonder if I could just like build time block plans or mark Well, I didn't like it right so that was the one place where I wanted spiral binding like the new time block planner has I Wanted something tactile that I could I could write in and see next to me and lie flat next to me And work on throughout the day as I was working on other things That's the only real paper notebook that's left in my life right now is my time block planner I really do need that to be analog and with me in all places But I've had no problem moving my work notebooks by planning notebooks, even my moleskin notebooks all that's worked Well moving to the remarkable now.

I talk a little bit about How I function with it The writing I think is great. It took me a little while to get used to it. Like what's the right pressure? I used to fine liner at narrow But once I got used to it, it really for me feels very much like a notebook writing on paper My handwriting is the same as writing on paper.

It's it's really identical I really like that. I really like that experience. I've learned to use the highlighter a lot as well. So I'd like that I can highlight To emphasize things I can I can highlight text. So just from an operational point. That's been great It has endless scrolling so you can make your page you can scroll it down as long as you need And then you can add pages So you can scroll the particular page you want to put more on it You can just keep writing longer and longer and then it's very easy just to jump to a new page One thing I found myself doing is editing notebooks, which I can't do with paper notebooks, but I do like to do this here So for example, I have a notebook where I'm working on the deep life stack the ideas around the deep life stack and My particular iteration through the deep life stack right now and one of the things I did was You know I had an early version of it on a new page a better version of it than a couple pages with a lot of notes on it in that case I actually went back and Deleted some of the older pages and consolidated and rewrote like a okay.

Here's the here's the right The right way to do the stack right now. I've tried a bunch of versions I don't want to keep trying I deleted those and added a page and rewrote it, right? so I find myself doing that sometimes with planning notebooks is Going back and deleting pages and re-summarizing them as I get better ideas around it.

So that that's an interesting twist I didn't expect myself to do The backing up features work great. So the way it works is you have an app on your computer that if you open it it mimics exactly the navigation of your remarkable and If you go to any of the notebooks in that navigation all your page You can just read it all on your computer and you can export any of those pages to PDF I've done that sometimes to print some things So can you when you go on the desktop?

Can you go in there and type in there? No, so all you can do is See backups and you can read what you wrote in the notebook So you can't type in remarkable either right or is it all just right? Well, I'll get to that in a second because you can and I'll tell you my experience with that But the way that app works the desktop app works It just shows you it's a backup of all of your notes And so the main useful thing for that is a if you lose your remarkable you have all your notes if you buy a new Remarkable, I'm sure you can transfer it over but you can print those things Now if there is something else you so I haven't used these features yet though though it's a It's activated.

It does now have integration with Google Drive and with Dropbox Because you can bring files. I haven't done this yet, but I want to do more of this You can bring PDFs onto the remarkable read them on the remarkable mark them up on the remarkable and so this is a place where you can be more interactive as you can hook up a particular folder on the remarkable with let's say a Dropbox folder and Now if you just put a document like a PDF file into that Dropbox folder, it will automatically appear on your remarkable and if on your remarkable you you write it you annotate it an Annotated version of that document shows shows up in your Dropbox folder So that's kind of cool same with Google Drive as well So that's kind of cool If you're for example need to edit some papers or something you can just throw Throw papers or articles into a Dropbox and then you're on a train somewhere They've all synced up onto your remarkable so you can read them and mark them up and then you know later all that annotation is Resynchronized back up with your Dropbox so you know at home on your computer You can print things out with the marks and stuff like that.

So I think that's That's that's a nice feature But really the thing is you can't so we're gonna talk about shortcomings three things to mention This really is about using the notebook so you can see the stuff you did on your computer But you can't you're not really supposed to be it doesn't go back and forth You can't update things on your computer and have that show up on your remarkable If you annotate a PDF file that syncs back to your Dropbox, it's going to be a new version of the file with the annotations Right because it's its own proprietary world of marking and drawing and stuff like that that the computer doesn't speak.

I Got the fancy Folio that has a this really cool built-in keyboard So you can type on it, right? so it's actually the the case can become like a Surface thing where it a keyboard comes out and it's up like a screen you can type on it I I'm not been using it.

I Used it a little bit But the typing experience is not great because you don't have a lot of control over where the text is going to go and you Can't do much with the text once it's on there And now at any time you want on a remarkable page you can put in a text cursor and type either on an on-screen keyboard Or with the built-in keyboard.

I don't like doing it because I don't really know how I don't know how to move the text around There's weird things about deleting the text. I mean so I what I've been doing is Really dealing with just handwriting and just saying this is a this is my paper notebook I just have 20 paper notebooks in one form.

That's how I've been personally using it I have not been using the typing because you know, it's not a word processor It's like the text is going right over here and you can't do anything with it Once you type it it kind of makes me nervous So I don't know if I would pay for the keyboard folio or if you do you would have to have a better use case For it.

So that's the the second downside The third downside is it's just really expensive Once you buy the remarkable you buy the fancy folio you buy the nicer stylus for it I was in $500 plus Which is a lot of money now I could kind of justify it because well It's you know, I talked about on the show and it's you know It fits the type of things we do It is really expensive So that would be the other downside But in the end so far I've been doing this for a couple months now as a replacement for my stack of random notebooks It has been successful and I think I'm probably capturing more notes than I otherwise would And I love the experience of using it and as long as I think of it as just these are notebooks that I write in With a pen and that's it and I don't care too much about the computer integration and I don't try to do writing on it I just think of it as notebooks I've been very happy with the experience.

I love single-purpose Purpose application gadgets things to do one thing and they do that one thing really well. There's no distraction when you're on there There's no internet when you're on there. There's just this is me Writing in a notebook and so I'll count myself as a as a remarkable to fan But with those caveats that it's it's just for writing and it's expensive.

It's expensive as all get out Can you carry it around in your pocket? No, it's the size of like a normal eight eight and a half by eleven piece of paper So I guess my only question is before when you had kind of that life Notebook for the moleskins that you carry around your pocket.

How do you capture those thoughts if you're I think but I want to care You could you could put a moleskin in your pocket, but I want it right because then you would have a big thing in your pocket So I was a bigger one for some reason. I thought I was a little one It was a little one, but I don't the little ones I don't like having in my pocket still like it fits in your pocket, but it's weird to have you know It's like having a big wallet in your pocket still, you know, I wouldn't walk around with that in my pocket I don't like having things in my pocket.

So I my moleskin was small, but I kept it in my bag Okay, so it'd be in it would be in the front pocket of my backpack So nothing changed. Yeah, this is the size of like a composition notebook So it's a size of a normal piece of paper and maybe like a half-inch thick.

It's heavy Which I actually kind of like about it. It's actually kind of heavy. It's very substantial But so that hasn't been a problem Because I I want it. I want it moleskin in my pocket. I would always moleskin in in my my bag anyway So now I just throw this thing Throw this thing to my bag.

That's the other downside. These are small things the stylus like magnets onto the side, which is cool So it just sticks on to it, but you can't put in your bag that way because it'll get knocked off Maybe injured so like you keep the stylus separate like in my backpack.

It'll be with my my pins and The thing will be in the back. These are these are minor points, but I'm a big fan I think it's a beautifully engineered product for notebook heads if you keep a lot of notebooks You know worth considering We messed up that we should have asked him to be a sponsor Jesse because I had to give it a really really good endorsement We should do more of that find things I love and then work backwards and ask the people to be like you really need a sponsor I've discovered a lot of things I love from sponsors approaches in us, but I thought that'd be cool I mean we should at least we should tell remarkable like look.

I love your thing So you should be our sponsor and also we need 20 remarkables. I Want to give them out like candy oh well, all right well speaking of Remarkable so I should probably go take some notes, which is my way of saying we should probably wrap up this episode So thank you everyone for listening Remember if you like what you heard you will like what you can see you can watch these full episodes and clips at youtube.com Slash Cal Newport media will be back next work with another new episode filmed right up here in the deep work HQ north and until Then as always stay deep