I'm trying to decide whether a ditch postpone a side hustle idea in order not to overwhelm myself versus adopting a slow part productivity mindset and see how progress compounds over time. So, Jonas, what you need is extreme clarity. And this is where the productivity perspective is going to help you.

You have to get your arms around the job that's making you feel busy right now. Capture, configure, control. See where you can get that. You reduce the stress, take control of your time, begin with the configure step to be more aggressive about workload management. See where you can get that line in a place that's allowing you to do what you need to do without feeling overwhelmed and then.

Step back and say, where would the side hustle fit and answer that question honestly? And now, Jonas, knowing what I know about you, because in your elaboration, you talked a little bit more about your busyness and you have a lot of going a lot of things going on with your family and young kids.

When you step back, you might say. There is not time for me to execute a reasonable plan for this side hustle. And you know what? That's fine. Don't do the side hustle. But you're going to get that answer with clarity. Or after you capture, configure, control, you might really tame your job.

And so you know what? I could work on this two days a week, three hours in the morning is my remote work days. Nothing really gets going until noon or whatever. And this would allow me and here's my plan. And I could actually make pretty good progress on this.

And then you might find like, OK, now I see exactly where I'm going to work on this. And I'm looking at exactly I'm going to work on this. And this is enough time. And this is worth it enough to me. Let's do it. But you cannot get to these answers with confidence unless you really know what's going on with your current work obligations.

And so that's what I want you to do. Pull out, capture, configure, control until you are a master of your job, then work through what are the reasonable scenarios for me to make progress on the side hustle and evaluate those. Will it work? And is it worth it? Is where the achievement, the side hustle will generate, is it worth it for what I would have to do and be very honest with you, answer it.

And especially at this stage of life, you have young kids at home. It's completely fine for your answer there to be. No, it's not worth it. I've controlled my job. I like having this flexibility. I want to just use this to do more things in my family or a hobby.

I think that's a completely reasonable solution as well. But you don't get those options until you know what's going on. You're just haphazardly busy. Good luck. You're just going to start doing the side hustle that in a way that you don't have time for this going to cause stress.

You're going to let it peter out. So, again, the productivity perspective here says once you have control, you get autonomy. Autonomy gives you options. I actually thought when I first read the question, I thought that he had already started the side hustle and, you know, was working on it for a while.

And then, you know, it's a little hard to tell. I read the longer one. He talked a lot about the various things that were. He was worried about, like his busyness. And there definitely was a sense of haphazard busyness. Yeah, but it was a little unclear if he had started and was feeling overwhelmed by it already, or if he was pretty sure that if I just started this, I'd feel overwhelmed.

I mean, the slow productivity approach, it can work with a side hustle, but you really got to evaluate it. Right. So you could say, like, at some point, it's too slow. If it's I'm going to work once a month, I'm going to have an hour session. Like that's too slow.

Yeah. I mean, to me, slow productivity also involves obsessing over quality. It also involves the reduction of things. You can give more attention to something. It's not just about you can fit another thing into your schedule, because if you stretch it out long enough, you can find little pockets of time to make progress.

I mean, slow productivity is it's a lot of it's about simplification. So it can take more of your attention. Yeah. Obsession over quality so that you can really come at it again and again. I think just trying to spread something out. So you touch it here and there. It's not really a slow, productive approach.

I think it's just a fragmented approach. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's try to fit in one more question here. All right. Next question is from Andrew, 51 year old biology professor. I'm a professor because research production is not a shared goal. I have difficulty getting my colleagues to think creatively about system changes, even if we might benefit from it all.

It's always easier to do what is easiest in the immediate moment. Other folks productivity be damned. What should I do? Well, I include this question in part just because I like professor questions, but it's another good example for us to apply the productivity perspective. So what Andrew's talking about is the type of collaboration systems I detail and motivate in my book, A World Without Email, where I talk about in the knowledge work context.

There's many informal collaboration styles that are built mainly around haphazard back and forth messaging that are actually really unproductive for everyone involved in the long term, even though in the moment it's easier just to shoot off a quick email than it is to actually implement some sort of collaboration system like whatever.

There's a shared document where the thoughts go. And on Monday night, I review that and then I put the notes using track changes. And you have till Wednesday, close a business to react to them. And then we have a standing meeting on Thursday morning. Those type of systems get you away from constant back and forth messaging.

But they're a little bit more work in the moment. Andrew is saying, I can't get fellow professors to do this because we're not all working towards the shared same goal. It's not everyone in my department is working on getting this new product out. We're each working on our own thing.

And so we're not that interested in being collectively focused on improving how we collaborate. So, Andrew, my productivity perspective here is you have to shift the scope that you're thinking about productivity. If you are a professor at a research institution, you need to think about yourself as a standalone business and the other professors in your department and other professors that you interact with and other departments, you know, the H.R.

department, the whatever, like other whatever you would call them, groups within university, like their own businesses with which you have various professional relationships. You're Ford and you work with Firestone Tires, they're two separate businesses, but you know, you guys have a contract and a relationship to get the tires for your car manufacturing plant.

But you're not the same company. So you have to think of yourself almost as like a standalone silo. So when you're thinking about systems internally is where you're really trying to get a handle on what is my work, what do I work on? What are my quotas? What do I not do?

When do I get this work done? How much time do I have available? How do I want to use this time? And you're keeping track of all that and have all your complex systems. Then when you're interacting with the rest of the world, it's well, you have sort of interfaces with interacting with these other standalone entities, and I don't know, they're bothering you with emails.

You could just do what you need to do with that. Just process centric emailing might work there, where you never formally develop a new collaboration system with someone else. You just sort of tell them in your response. Yeah, great. We should think about this. Put any thoughts you have in this Google Doc that I started.

I will review it if I have any questions because you're a professor. I know you have clearly posted office hours. I will actually just come to your office hours next week and we'll talk about it. Let's sort of put a process into the communication. And there it is. You're not calling it a process.

You're not negotiating about it. You're just saying it. Certain types of work like this is very disruptive. This person just constantly wants to email things. OK, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to work on that person. I'm going to leave that committee. You have all this autonomy. This is like a company saying we're going to get out of selling at souls because there's not a lot of profit there.

We're going to focus more on, you know, selling Ford focuses or whatever. You think of yourself like a standalone business that interfaces with other organizations and you do your best to keep those interfaces as non disruptive as possible. So you need to be more ruthless, Andrew. That's, I guess, what I would say.

Your department is not your team members. They're your colleagues. You're collegial to them. You enjoy them, but you're all your own standalone entities trying to figure out how to exist in the same academic sphere while still accomplishing your internal objectives. So I don't know, maybe it maybe I'm being a little bit Darwinian there, but I think it's the best academia really is.

It's entrepreneurial. Yeah. You're trying to produce original research. That's the whole game. If you don't, you get fired. That's the whole game. And you work with other people. There's other things you have to do and service you have to do. But but it's just like Ford has these other things they have to do.

But ultimately, if they're not selling cars, they're out of business. You kind of have to keep that in mind. The five books I read in February 2023 as longtime listeners. No, I try to read five books a month and I report on what those books are here on the podcast.

All right. So what did I read in February? Number one, the Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. This was roughly speaking, a popular history of the Royal Society in London. More generally speaking, it was a book about the rise of the Enlightenment scientific mindset. So Dolnick makes this point, but a lot of other authors to make this point as well.

Isaac Newton was at a turning point. Isaac Newton was born and came up in a world that was connected more to Greek thought and mythological thought. And by the time he died, we were in a world that had a more empirical mathematical approach to understanding the world. I love these type of histories.

It's a very readable book, short chapters. It moves pretty quick. Not as deep as some other histories I've read on this, but had a lot of good information. So a lot of London in this episode. Yeah. Two questions from London. A book about London. Yeah. You know why? It's because I am that article we talked about last week.

And oh, yeah, Times. Obviously, that's a London based publication. So last week I was killing it in the UK. So this podcast, number one technology podcast in the UK, like number 30 overall podcast, you know, in the UK. Deep Work at Amazon UK was ranked like 60. That's so good.

Right. So we've been killing in the UK. So as you can see, we're we're pushing all of our content to be UK centric. A lot of good golf courses around London. Yes, true. We need we need a podcast out of there. All right. I also read Wandering Home by Bill McKibben.

I read that years and years ago, but I had a copy of my library. So I went back and read it and loved it. Very nostalgic. I really remember reading that book in grad school. Bill McKibben, who I really like, I interviewed him for a New Yorker piece a couple of years ago.

He wrote this cool book where he walked from his house in Ripton, Vermont, which is sort of one valley over from Lake Champlain in western Vermont to his house in the Adirondacks. So the McKibben story is that he quit the New Yorker and moved to a cabin. It was really like a rundown house.

Him and his wife, Susan Halperin, who's an excellent journalist. They moved to this house in the Adirondacks. And then once they had their kid, they decided they realized like kids need a school to go to. So they moved across Lake Champlain to Ripton, Vermont, which I actually visited there last summer.

It's these cool it's one south of Lincoln. It's these these cool green mountain towns that are up at elevation. And really quaint. Anyways, he walked from Ripton to the old house. He had a Rondex. He had someone to roam across Lake Champaign, Champaign, Champlain. And in doing so, he got a he visited all these places and talked a lot about, you know, the type of things he writes about in deep, deep, deep economy that the book, deep economy, sustainable commercial endeavor, et cetera.

It was really cool book, really nostalgic. Makes you want to just move to Vermont and drink Otter Creek beer and hang out at Middlebury. I know the book I read, you'd appreciate this one, Jesse. America's Game by Michael McCambridge, the history of the NFL. The long book, I read it for I'm in a a dad book group that only reads sports books.

It's a lot of like journalists and stuff that we just don't want to. We we don't want to read anything that's too close to our work. Mm hmm. Anything is too close to home. So we read sports books. I like that. Yeah. I know a lot about the history of the NFL now, at least up until 2005.

It's when this book came out in the early days, like back during Lombardi, the Canadian Football League was a big, you know, like it was a definite competitor, like people would go over there. And that's not mentioned at all in this book. Really? Yeah. That's an ad. His historian on early in the week, and they were actually talking about that because somebody died.

Michael McCambridge, man, you missed. You missed the big storyline here. I also read a of the conquest of happiness by Bertrand Russell. The philosopher, mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote this book. This would have been in like 19. I think it's like 1919 or something like that. Maybe 1930, somewhere in that period.

Maybe a little later than that. I might be messing it up. I mean, he died in the he died remarkably late. He lived a long time. I'm going to say the 1930s. It was there's a really nice new edition of this book that I found that Barnes and Noble and says, OK, I got to read this.

It's like a kind of like a self-help book, but written before people wrote self-help books and written by an eminent philosopher, mathematician. And it's him trying to deconstruct and understand the the sources of human happiness, as well as the things that pull away from human happiness and trying to lay out some sort of program for how you can maximize it in your life.

This is what philosophers used to do. This is why I really dislike this tendency we have for, especially the very online types to be very dismissive about. Well, they're self-help. They're a guru where you have to like throw this disclaimer at the front of everything you write. We're like, oh, I'm no guru.

I'm not. In fact, I'm I'm terrible and I'm I can barely walk and I'm not giving any advice. And you really think people are going to applaud? Like there's all these gurus who are, you know, preying on people. But look, it used to be professional thinkers and philosophers were like, this is one of the things I want to do is try to think through big questions from life and take my swing.

So good for Russell for doing it. Very readable. There's some anachronisms in it, but actually otherwise reads as a pretty modern book. A lot of similar concepts to the deep life stuff that you talk about. There's some. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I get like getting outside and just that stuff, but also a lot of psychological stuff like jealousy and pride and trying to understand.

It's interesting. So it's kind of mental healthy. A lot of it, the habits of mind that can really pull you down. I mean, it actually reads pretty relevant, but it is an issue of mine. Is this like. I'm not impressed by people who have to put these long disclaimers about like, I'm not a guru who's going to tell you exactly how to live your life.

I mean. Where are these gurus who are trying to tell people exactly how to live their life? I think smart people should take swings at. Here's a big question. Let me take a swing at like how you might answer it. People are smart. They will adapt it to their own circumstances.

They will discount the obvious caveats. This weird whatever it is. Negative reaction that sort of very online elite types have to. Trying to be instructive or like to tackle big questions, I don't think it's I don't think it's healthy. It's similar in sports, how they always say, oh, the naysayers say.

Yeah. XYZ. I think in online culture, it's very safe to be a naysayer because you'd be applauded for your world, weary critiques. People like, oh, that's a good I didn't see that angle of critique. And there's no real risk. Yeah. Being a little bit too critical. I like, well, you know, sophisticated people are critical, but you're really opening yourself up if you say this is my thoughts about this or like this is my philosophy for how you should do something.

I mean, I think it's, you know, it's why I've sold a lot of books is because I'm not online, so I don't care. Since like, look, I think this is interesting. I loved reading this stuff. I love books like Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness. Like, let's just get after it.

And I don't care. So I guess more books for me, if everyone else is afraid of it. A lot of smart people who could be writing really interesting, cool, reflective books aren't because they don't want to get yelled out on Twitter. So, hey, more books for us. Final book I read, part of us kind of a holdover from Thriller December Rising Sun by Michael Crichton.

I'm sure I read that at some point when I was a kid, but I found the paperback in a newspaper back, and so I read it. Well, constructed sort of murder mystery thriller. It's two detectives. They made a movie about this with Sean Connery and. God, who was the other person was it Wesley Snipes?

I think it was. I saw that movie like 30 years ago. Yeah. I have to go back and watch the movie. I mean, essentially, there it's it's a detective thriller. These are detectives and they're trying to figure out a murder. And then there's some like Crichton high tech stuff.

The thing I I didn't really realize this about Crichton until more recently. He got really reactionary. This is like a pretty like reactionary kind of anti Japanese book. Oh, really? Yeah. Like you're very worried, clearly very worried about the economic influence of at the then, I guess, the Japan had this massive, like outsize economic influence.

Not very nice to Japanese people. I'm thinking about disclosure. I'm thinking about state of fear. I was like, oh, he kind of became curmudgeonly his 90s. So it's it is pretty reactionary. He just works this stuff into his book. But but still a good murder. Good murder mystery. But, you know, it's interesting layer.

Any of these books, audio? I'm sure they're all. No, none of these were audio. So you read them all? I read them all. Yeah. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of audio books recently.