All right, Jesse, let's do some deep life related questions. Who do we have first today? - All right, first question's from Mark, a 38 year old sales director. I spend many hours a week taking care of my kids, cooking, cleaning, gardening, doing chores, fixing up my house and so on.

Between this and my work, I have little to no free time. The same applies to my wife. When we do have free time, we are generally tired. The idea that we could each find energy and time to consistently take long walks, work out, or read for hours seems fantastical.

Do we need to be able to afford to outsource mundane tasks to cultivate a deep life? - Well, Mark, we could reword this question to say, is it possible for a family with, and he gave a little more details about his work, but a family with lower, upper middle class jobs to take walks or exercise or read?

I don't think that's a fantastical goal. I think there's a lot of families in similar professional situations where people still take walks, still exercise, and still read. I think that is definitely possible, but what I also recognize that right now in your life, it doesn't. I think that's important.

And this is where I think the fuller deep life stack we introduced earlier is much more helpful than the way we used to talk about the deep life where we would just focus on the final changes because what's happening here, and I'm very empathetic to this. I've been in this situation before.

Many of our listeners are in the same situation where your time just feels completely out of your control. And it puts you in a defensive mood. It puts you in a mood where you're just sort of down on the prospects for doing anything with any control. We're exhausted all the time.

We're working all the time. When are things gonna happen? How could I possibly think about carefully overhauling other parts of my life? So let's go back to the deep life stack. What I'm gonna suggest here is actually working the deep life stack. Even though this might seem like I'm giving you more work, it's going to help.

So I'm gonna think about the stack. I have it here in front of me. Jesse, may let's load this back up on the screen. - Okay. - All right, let's think this through. All right, Mark. So what would this mean for you? Well, one, discipline. Well, the key thing here is really gonna be, here's my place, my drawer, my folder.

We're gonna keep track of everything we're about to do. That doesn't take time. Here's a folder, here's a desk drawer, that's fine. And we're gonna throw something into our life here. Not super time consuming, but kind of hard. And maybe you're gonna have to stretch a little bit. Okay, I can do this during my lunch hour every day, or before I go to work, it's gonna be maybe a fitness thing or something else, but just something.

Something that is optional, but meaningful to you, that you're just gonna commit to, whatever it takes, I'm gonna find time to do this. I think that's worth doing. 'Cause we're gonna start changing that mindset. And once that succeeds, you're gonna say, okay, at least it's possible. I am the type of person that's possible that I can find time to make something happen that's important to me, even though my life is busy.

Then we get up to values. You're clarifying what's important to you and your wife, and you should do this together. And we'll talk more about that in a later question. What's our code? What are the rituals? What are the routines? Keep the rituals and routines very simple right now because you're feeling overwhelmed.

But they can still be in there. There can still be that moment of prayer every day. If you're religious, there can still be that meditative moment, the gratitude journaling routines. There can still be something you do, even if it's just, look, it's Saturday morning. There's a one-hour volunteer thing or a charitable thing.

You just have set up, I give money to this cause, not a lot of money, but I do it. And every month we do it. And it's not very time-consuming, but it's concrete, and it's driven by your code. And you get that in place. We're not adding a lot of things in your schedule yet.

Now you're ready for the thing I think is gonna help you most, which is the calm layer of the stack. So now, buoyed by your discipline, so the idea that you can make changes and have control over things even when it's difficult, buoyed by your values that are really pushing you towards what matters and what's not, so you have a compass that gives you a very strong north reading, you can start to put in place some organizational system.

What's on our plate? How do we manage our time? What is this load? And then more crucially, where should we start pruning or simplifying? Driven by your values, driven by your discipline, you piece by piece try to take what sounds like a whirlwind in your life right now and make it into a much more orderly flow.

We do this on these days, not this. We finish here, we do this in advance. We get all the paperwork for the kids done in a, you know, over lunch on Thursday. You would be surprised, Mark, when you're driven by a sense of self-efficacy, when you're driven by values you trust, by how much control and breathing room even a standard busy middle class or upper middle class life can seem, how much room you can find, how much breathing room you can find.

And I don't want you to go right to this. I mean, I want you to follow the stack. I think there's a, the discipline stack is key because you have to have the sense of, I'm able to do things that are hard and I have a place I keep track of them and I follow what I write down.

You need the value stack because it's hard to prune. It's hard to take things back when you don't have the bigger values driving you. But once this column is in place, then and only then do I think you're ready to think about the planning step. And I think by the time you get to the planning step, you're now gonna have the control and breathing room necessary to make the changes that right now seem impossible.

And they might not be major, but it might be some sort of routine. You're walking, you're exercising, you're reading more. I think that's gonna be completely on the table. More importantly, you're also now well set up. If you discover what's really holding us back here is maybe the nature of our jobs.

Maybe the demands of this jobs, maybe that's making things impossible to really overhaul the other areas of my life the way I want. Or maybe it's to have these jobs, we have to live here. The schools here aren't good. So our kids have to go over to this private school.

The private school means we have to work more and the private school is really difficult to get to and we're driving back and forth. And that's what's stopping us from overhauling these other parts of our life. Oh, this is all really clear now. And we're driven by our values and our sense of self-efficacy and our control over what's going on.

So we really can understand what's causing our time famine, what's causing our issues with our schedule. With all of this in place, you might get clarity that you wouldn't have right now. We should move and take a different job. Oh, we need to leave the city. Let's go here.

They could go to this public school. They could walk to the middle school and the cost of living here is cheaper. And actually I could go down the halftime and do my old job remote while my wife still did full-time. But now we have a lot more. Now there's someone here after school.

Oh my God, all the pieces fit in the place. And I can overhaul these other parts of my life and everything is deeper. But you can't get to that type of clarity without the other pieces first. So I feel your pain, Mark. I also think that you can find more depth and by control and intention and satisfaction with your life, you can find it and you should.

And I think work to full stack. My apologies for presenting this earlier in past episodes as just start overhauling your fitness routine. Work the whole stack and have confidence. More intentional, satisfying, meaningful life is absolutely available to you and in your situation. This is not something that's unovercomeable. You're not a refugee in a war torn nation.

You're not scrambling for jobs just to try to keep the heat on. You actually have a foundation more leveraged than you think, but it's also much harder than we often let on to take advantage of that leverage. So hopefully the stack there is gonna help. By the way, send me a note.

If you start making some changes, I wanna hear what's going on. You can send the note right over to interesting@calnewport.com, keep me posted. - In terms of the mundane tasks, like outsourcing those. - I mean, that's all gonna happen in calm. But I think his point is he's frustrated that I have no time, so I can't imagine anyone reading or exercising or doing anything else unless I suppose there's just someone I hired to do all these things.

And my point is most people don't outsource all that stuff. And yet many, many people who don't have, I don't even know who you outsource most of this stuff to, they still exercise and walk. It could feel as if your obligations are leaving no time right now. And it could be the case that without having to majorly change your material situation, you could feel three times better by just how you control and track the situation and keep track of things with some strategic pruning.

So I don't think, I mean, maybe in the calm step, they'll realize, because again, having this precision understanding of where your time goes and how different things interact with each other allows you so precisely to see where the pain points are. So if there is gonna be a little bit of outsourcing that happens, the calm layer is what's gonna give you that precision to say, the thing that's screwing this all up is driving back and forth to school across town.

Or the thing that's making the schedule impossible is this terrible giant yard we have with all these beds and we're always out there. And if we stop doing this and use that money for a yard crew, everything else becomes possible. Or that's where you say, we need to move, we have to get a different job.

It's again, an interesting point that doesn't come up as much in lifestyle design is organizing yourself, tracking your time, being intentional about the deployment of time. Getting that sophisticated awareness of your time is often critical for actually making decisions about what you wanna change in your life. People really don't realize, when you're chaotic, they don't really realize what actually is causing the trouble.

And they might flail in different directions or think I have to have a nanny and a full-time whatever to ever get anything done. And they don't realize, no, the problem is actually the commute. The problem is actually you live in the wrong house. Why do you have two acres?

And whatever it is, you don't live near your parents, you're always having to drive over there. We don't always know the problem until we actually get a good awareness of how our time's actually being spent. I mean, that's one of my insights is a book on the deep life actually has to talk a lot about time management, which for me was a bit of a breakthrough to think about.

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