Ep. 213: Saying No! | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

The topic I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the art of no. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 213. On this show, I answer questions from my audience about the theory and practice of living and working deeply in an increasingly shallow world. If you want to submit your own questions or case studies, there is a link in the show notes for this episode, or you can go to calnewport.com/podcast.

Video of the full episodes, as well as highlighted clips, is available at youtube.com/calnewportmedia. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, it's good to see you. Good to see you, too. I got to say, in the last week, I have fully transitioned back after my summer relaxed approach.

I was going to say hiatus, but let's say my summer relaxed approached the organization. I am back now, among other things, into my full daily planning habit routines, the sort of middle of the school year, hardcore Cal Newport planning everyday routines. It takes me about a week or two to get back into it, but I'm back into it.

I use my time block planner. First thing in the morning, I go in and check my weekly plan. I look at my calendar, sort of figure out what am I working on today? Sketch out my initial plan. I do a shutdown complete at the end of my workday where I'm processing any tasks that have been captured in the planner throughout the day.

I bring it then back upstairs. So it's upstairs in my room. I bring it downstairs to my study, do that initial planning. It comes back up to my room because then at the end of the night, when I'm getting ready for bed, all the relevant metrics for the day go in the metric planning space.

When I'm at full throttle, that's all the things I'm doing. And I'm back to it after a summer of, you know, I always pull back a little bit in the summer because I have like seven jobs. And it's pretty intense to keep it all running. And so I pull back when I can.

But now I'm back to it. I feel good. Do you still have morning writing blocks every morning? Yeah, every morning. Well, six days a week. The plan is six days a week. I'm writing in the morning. That's still rolling. Some mornings I can write a lot. Some mornings I can't write as much.

This morning I got in 75 minutes. That's on the short side. But it was 75 good minutes. I was writing about Georgia O'Keeffe. That's cool. In case you're wondering. You know, given my career in writing, I sort of have an ear for story that highlights interesting points. And Georgia O'Keeffe has a really interesting story.

This is my slow productivity book I'm writing about seasonality, having different seasons throughout the year where you do different times with your work. And I wrote about how through the first eight years of her adult life, starting when she was 21, job after job, after job all over the place.

She would be in Texas teaching and then TAing back in New York in the summers and taking some courses, then teaching in South Carolina, like all over the place. Her art was developing, but really slow. She had a period in there of four years where she'd even pick up a paintbrush.

Then she meets Alfred Stiglitz, the famous photographer who runs it was running this famous gallery in Manhattan that was showing a lot of the early modernist. And he saw her work and exhibited it. They became friends. And he's like, you got to come out to my family's property near Lake George.

So Stiglitz's dad in 1880 had bought 36 acres right north of Lake George Village on the western shore of Lake George. And so she leaves the bustle of the city, goes up there. They lived a little farmhouse on the property. And in doing that, it like unlocks all of her all of her productivity.

I mean, for the next however many years it was probably 1918 to 1934. She's just writing, painting every summer, doing studies of the lake, studies of the mountains, studies of the barn, studies of the flowers, studies of the leaves. This is the stuff she starts exhibiting in the 1920s in Manhattan.

It's what makes her name is what makes her famous. It's the most prolific period of her career. And it's because she changed what she did during that part of the year. So, you know, that's the type of thing I'm working on. That's cool. Yeah. So I'm back into it.

But back to my planner. So anyways, the thing I was thinking about this morning is every summer, when I come back to full-time block planning at the end of the summer, I, it's, I struggle. There's always resistance. And the, the, the point this brought up for me is there is a real mismatch.

I'm guessing there's a real mismatch between our brains and the type of planning and motivation that they're wired to do and the complexity of the highly artificial type of organization we have to do for modern complicated knowledge, work, family existences. So the, the brain, my brain, when it thinks about, wait a second, we have to pull out this planner every morning.

We have to stop. We have to take five minutes. We have to write down our plan for the day and we have to record metrics in there. We have to follow the plan. This seems like constraint. It seems like energy that's being spent without an immediate reward. It seems like options being taken away.

There's this resistance to doing it because the part of the brain, the motivational center that gets you going to do something does not understand. This structure over the course of a month is going to two X the amount of valuable knowledge product that we produce. It does not understand that.

So it just generates resistance because it's confused by it. So I feel that resistance every time. However, once you've done it for a while, the brain is pretty adaptable. And it's like, oh, this is part of our routine. Something good is happening. There's a structure to our days. We feel good about it.

And then it's easy to keep going. So there's some sort of interesting science of habit formation going on here. But every, at the end of every summer resistance at first to get all the systems up and running, give it two weeks and the brain's like, yes, what we do, man.

We didn't have our planner. We weren't doing the things like we'd be all adrift. And so I don't know. There's an interesting commentary in there about what it takes to get our brain on our side for doing things that our brain doesn't really know much about in terms of evolutionary instinct.

That's my brainstorm. All right. So how's our, uh, how's our show look today, Jesse? We got a good show today. We have two blocks of questions. There's some, something in there about hobbies, career anxiety, and then people want your advice on leaving a job. Uh, we also have some calls and then we have, uh, a picture that you're going to take a look at that involves a closet, a little case study.

I like it. I like it. All right. Sounds good. All right. So we have all that coming up. Uh, let's start however, as I like to do with the deep dive, the topic I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the art of no. So saying no is a major part of my own professional life because I'm someone who has multiple jobs with multiple demands and am somewhat in the public eye.

So I have to spend more time saying no and thinking about how to say no and the ramifications of saying no, I would say than probably the average person. So it's something that I have thought a lot about. Uh, there's a couple of observations I've always had about saying no.

Number one, I think the average person creates this false binary between either you're someone who basically says yes, or you are a disagreeable person who says no. And they say, well, if those are my two choices, I don't want to be the disagreeable person that seems stressful and emotionally taxing.

So I'm just the person who, who says yes, I kind of have to say yes, but it seems at all like it would be difficult to say no. The reality though, is that everyone says no a lot, whether they know it or not, whether it's implicit or explicit. But if you think about it, most knowledge workers, you know, they have a full schedule, usually about 20% more full than they want it to be, but not impossibly full.

They're not working until 2am, but maybe they're working until 6pm. It is highly unlikely that the exact volume of things that was put onto their plate that they said yes to just happened to exactly match an eight or nine hour day. Right. Almost certainly there was many more things coming at them and they had the, they had the sorted through and they basically were implicitly or explicitly saying no, just enough to keep a day full.

So we're already all saying no, even if we don't realize it, we just do it somewhat haphazardly. And I wrote a New Yorker piece about this last fall, where I said my theory about how most people informally handle the goal of saying, no, they don't have a plan, they don't have an intention, they don't have a vision for what they're trying to accomplish.

They instead wait until their level of experience stress is high enough that they feel emotionally justified turning someone down. So it's like, I am so overwhelmed right now. I feel justified saying no. And until that point, I don't. And what I argued in that New Yorker piece is that this is a terrible way to go about this because it ensures that you remain at a persistent level of elevated stress.

If you have to be sufficiently stressed to feel comfortable saying no, then you're never going to start saying no until you're sufficiently stressed. So you're going to stay at this level of being sufficiently stressed, basically persistently. So when we are not intentional about how we filter what we do and don't do, we end up in this default purgatory, this productivity purgatory of having just enough, just enough on our plate that it is bearable, but uncomfortable.

And we persist there. So we burn out and don't produce what we want and all the other negatives to come. So what we need to do is be more specific with ourselves about how we figure out what's a reasonable workload, what that workload should be made up of, how we're going to go about dealing with requests to fit that load and not overload.

We need to be more specific about it. That's why I was happy to see an article that someone sent to me, an alert listener sent to me, that appeared in a, it's a column in the journal Nature, and it is written by 4Scientist. And it is titled "Why 4Scientist Spent a Year Saying No" and it is an article that gets into the tactical weeds about the challenges and proper strategies for declining or turning away stuff that's going to overload you.

Turning away work. So I want to go through this article because I often harp about this. Hey, you got to be more intentional about how you say yes or no, but we don't necessarily get into enough tactics about, well, how do I actually say no without feeling really bad or annoying people?

All right. So I have the article here. So those who are watching on YouTube, so you can find this at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. You'll see on the screen that we have the date highlighted. This is from August 25th. So this is recent. Now the, the 4Scientist who wrote this column, their names don't show up in this version I have here, but, but probably relevant to this article, I believe all four are women.

So let's just, that'll come up a little bit later. All right. So I want to highlight a couple of things here. First, just to start, let's give the premise for what they were doing here before we get to their specific advice. So the premise is the following. Last May, I'm quoting the article here, "Last May, facing pandemic and career burnout, this member whimsically suggested..." So member of these four scientists have a group that meets regularly to discuss just their career and the challenges of being scientists.

All right. So back to the quote, "a member of the group whimsically suggested we make a game out of saying no by challenging ourselves to collectively decline 100 work-related requests. Thus, we spent a year tracking and reflecting on our decisions to say no." So they started in May of 2021.

They finished in March of 2022. So they got systematic about saying no and had four observations. They call them here four insights about what they learned saying no systematically a hundred times over the course of a year. So let's go through these four insights real quick. All right. The first insight, "Tracking helped make no an option.

So they started keeping track of all the things they said yes or no to just a simple list. So this is separate from whatever other organizational system you have for organizing your time or projects. Let's just have a yes, no list. So as they pointed out, first of all, it helped them understand how much they'd already said yes.

It's easy to forget. It also induced the gamification motivation of, well, how many no's do we have? I want to get a couple more no's this week. Maybe I do want to say no. What they then talked about is that once they started tracking no, this got them in the tracking mindset, which helped them in other ways as well.

So reading from the article here, they say, "We logged completed tasks to counteract imposter syndrome. We kept a running count of active projects and tracked how we were spending time each day." This is all the type of stuff I recommend when you actually start tracking your time, your projects, what you're doing, what you're not doing.

When you actually confront what we talked about in the show, the productivity dragon of what's really on your plate, what you've slayed in the past. This is all very important for you getting your arms around your work and making confident plans for how you want to go forward. As long as you exist in this liminal space of emails coming in, you're saying yes or no, you're jumping in and out of meetings and just always scrambling, but you're not really sure, what am I doing?

How much am I doing? What have I gotten done? What am I saying yes to? If you don't know these things, you're a fireman. You're putting out fires. And people who put out fires eventually get burnt. All right. Number two, second thing they observed from this experiment, say no more often and to larger asks.

So when they were reflecting, they said, "We declined too many little things, such as reviewing journal articles and not enough big tasks." I think that's a good point. They were saying, "You could rack up the no's, but you could also rack up the no's quicker if you're aiming on the little things, the things that might take you a couple hours of the afternoon." But they're noting the things that caused the most stress were the big asks.

And they give some examples here, leadership opportunities, the chance to help write large grant proposals, et cetera. By the way, all of this is giving me cold sweats because this is too close to home. Jesse knows this. Okay. So what they ended up doing is coming up with a series of questions, a series of questions to help evaluate when to say yes and when not.

So here's their questions. They have five of them. This is what they started asking to try to figure out, "Okay, is this something I should say yes to? One, does it fit to my research agenda and identity? Two, does it spark joy? Three, do I have time to do a good job without sacrificing extra commitments?

Four, does the opportunity leave space for my personal life? Five, am I uniquely qualified to fill this need?" Right? So that made it easier for them to say no because they had, eventually they had these criteria. So when something big would come along, they would say, "Look, there's two of these criteria.

It doesn't pass. So now I have a reason to say no." Three, and this is an important one, maybe sometimes overlooked, saying no is emotional work. It really is. I have to say no a lot. I just earlier this week got out, you know, said no to a speaking thing that I sort of went down the road with it because I thought it would be interesting, but it logistically was going to be a pain.

I knew I would regret it later on and it's hard. And sometimes the other people get upset. I would say nine times out of 10 people aren't really upset. They just need an answer and they're moving on. But just emotionally, the lived experience of saying no because of the way it plays on our interpersonal social network wiring in our brain, the lived experience is often quite stressful.

This hits different people differently. So here's the authors here I'm reading. "In myriad ways, we saw how our cultural conditioning as women, academics and public servants contributed to our difficulty with setting boundaries. Tracking not just how often we said yes or no, but also our emotional responses made the emotional labor of saying no visible.

We often do ignore the emotional side of some of this otherwise seemingly dry technical productivity, uh, strategery. That there is an emotional side to it. I talk about in a world without email, there's non surprising, but well done surveys of workplace behavior that says if you start to categorize what they call non-promotable behavior.

So these are behaviors that aren't directly projects, activity tasks, not directly tied to being promoted. So I will help organize the birthday party for Jesse, you know, next month. Women were way more likely than men to be doing those like they were, they were disproportionately spending more hours on it.

So there's these, these subtleties in terms of just the emotional exchange and saying no, not wanting to let someone down. Uh, women are much less likely just to be straight up jerks. The guys can kind of get away with that. In academia, you have a lot of guys that are barely in some fields, barely fit for social, like human social interaction.

If that makes sense, you can ask my wife about this. She's been throughout grad school. I brought her to a lot of, uh, computer science parties. You get some of that. You get out of a lot of work when you don't even want to have a conversation with someone.

So I think that's a good point. They're pointing out. Um, so what they say here is we need less logistical advice and more emotional advice when it comes to thinking about yes or no. So let's acknowledge that. I think that's a very important point. All right. In the same piece, they pulled out.

I want, there's one other thing I want to highlight in the same section here. They were looking, what's the terminology here? Soft no or little no. So they had heard something called little no, which is where like you agree to a little bit or to do a lesser thing.

So it's not as emotionally taxing. And they described that strategy. That strategy for reducing the emotional toll of saying no to be a slippery slope that led people to ask for a greater commitment later on. They went on to say only a firm no truly reduced our commitments. That is so true to my experience.

I, you know, I become a master of that in my time. You can't, can't try to soften the blow. You have this sense of like, maybe there's a way I can say no here that I'm not really saying no, but I don't have to do the work. It doesn't work.

You have to be incredibly clear. And, you know, I I've learned this through experience where I'll say, I really appreciate this invitation. I'm honored. You thought of me. Um, however, because of X, Y, Z, I have to say no to this request. Like you have to have that piece.

It's I unfortunately are with regrets. I have to say no to this request. You have to have that piece. It can't just be like, yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm pretty busy. I'm not sure if this is going to work out and X, Y, and Z, and just hope that they're going to come back and say, you know what, you seem too busy.

Don't worry about it. They won't. They, their life will be easier. If you say yes, as long as there's any opening, they're going to keep going. You owe them and yourself clarity. So that's, you have to have in there somewhere. I've definitely learned this specifically. I am saying no period.

And then you can add regrets and stuff like that. That's fine, but don't give any wiggle room. The other thing to say is don't say, well, I'm really busy right now. Um, so I don't think I can do it this semester or this month because they will be like, great.

How about January? So it has to be, uh, because of busyness or because of whatever I have to say no. So you can answer back like, okay, but maybe you mean, yes. All right. Fourth thing, they, these authors, the fourth insight practice makes no easier as they did it more as they got closer to 100, it got easier to do.

So anyways, I like that article. Uh, and I liked the topic. You, you, you have to control what is on your plate. You are doing this, whether you have a plan or not, you are saying no to things. You're turning things down. You're probably just doing implicitly. You're probably just waiting until you're stressed and then lashing out randomly and trying to get out of things until people see you're so exhausted that maybe they stopped bothering you.

All right. That's not a good plan. It's a plan, but it's not a good plan. You need a better one. And I think this article is a, uh, a pretty good treatment of the topic. So get more systematic about saying no, recognize the difficulty of doing so. And it'll make your life in the long run, uh, a lot easier.

I say no all the time, Jesse, like my whole life. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine you get a lot of requests. I do. I do. I mean, it helps. I don't, this is why I don't have a general purpose way for people to reach me. It's why there's, there's, um, if you go to my contact page, so if you're interested in speaking, here's my speaking agent.

If you have like a publicity thing, here's my contact page. Here's my publicist. If you have like a question about rights or translations or something about the books, here's my literary agency, right? It's like. Your question has to get moved to someone who is not me. If you want to send us links, which I love, here's the address, but, uh, requests won't be answered.

Like we just make that clear on the site. Like there's just too many of the messages that come through. I love that you guys send me things, but I can't say I can't actually respond to it. So there's not actually a general purpose place. Yeah. I mean, and then if people make their way, sometimes people make their way to my.

Georgetown address, but then I just feel fine. Like if you're using that for a non-academic purpose, like you already know, like I don't, I'm not expecting to get a response. I don't respond to those. Yeah. You know, it, it, it works. I mean, it's, it's hard because it's nice to talk to people.

And I used to interact with all of our, all my different readers and would answer every email and it took all my time and then I couldn't do anything else. Yeah. So it's, it's, uh, it is hard. Uh, and then I still get a lot of requests. I have to say no to, you know, I'll tell you the hard ones.

Sometimes they come from friends. You know, it'll be, uh, the, the hardest ones and then, and then I'll, I'll leave it. But I'll just say the hardest ones are, let's say it's a friend of the family. Are, you know, who doesn't know much about me, but just like comes across something.

And then is like, oh, I know him. Like I know his wife, I know his mom or something like that. And like, Hey, can you, uh, it's so exciting. I saw you like, um, can you come like down to our office and like, come give a talk and like, you know, come join this webinar, do this and that.

And those are kind of the, those are the, those are the hard ones. Yeah. You know, it's hard to say no, which I do, but it's just hard to do. Yeah. But you just have to, we just have to rip off the bandaid. Yeah. Yeah. My wife's got used to that.

Just saying to people who know her and she's like, he just, he's not doing things right now. And she has some phrase, she says, like, he's not, he's not taking on new things right now or something. She's got the script optimized. She's got the script optimized. All right. Well, speaking of optimize, this is not a great transition.

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All right, well, I'm refreshed, Jesse. So let's do some questions. What do you think? Should we start with a call? Is that what we're doing here? Yeah, let's start with a call. We got a call from Erica and she's going to talk about anxiety and time block planning. Hello, my name is Erica.

I am a return caller and general asker of questions. Today, my question is regarding anxiety and time block planning. So one side of me loves to have my schedule set so I don't have to think about it. But when I get to the day where I have something planned at a certain time, I get anxiety because there's this other side of me that loves flexibility.

I do like schedule throughout my day some unstructured time. But and once I start an activity, I'm usually happy with doing the activity. But I just get a lot of inertial pre-event anxiety and just a feeling of not wanting to do a certain thing at the time I have it.

So I'll give a good example. Like I schedule a reservation at a restaurant, you know, like a month in advance or something that I'm really excited for. But when the day comes, I just don't like feeling boxed in and having to be at the restaurant at a certain time.

But then I get there and I love it. So do you have any like tips or thoughts on how I might be able to just get over this? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the right term for it. I guess pre-inertial anxiety towards a structured schedule of it.

All right. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye. Well, I mean, Erica, this is similar to what we were chatting about at the top of the show about the the resistance I feel to restarting my full time block planning system at the beginning of the fall. You're feeling this, but basically on the scale of individual scheduled events or blocks, same underlying mechanisms and is quite normal.

Our brain does not understand by understand. I mean, has not been evolved over deep history time to last two to 300,000 years where modern homo sapiens have walked the earth. It has not evolved to work with scheduled events. It's not evolved to work with. I am now going to start doing this task because it's drawn up in a box on a piece of paper.

I am now going to head over to a restaurant to eat because it's in my planner that that's what happens next. That is not how our motivational loops are evolved to actually function. They're, they're functioning. They're, they're, they're meant to function on much more immediate and clear stimuli. We need more food.

We're going for a hunt. This person who's in front of me, who I can see. So all of the social networks that take up so much of my neuron, neuronal space in my brain are all fired up and looking at this person in front of me, who's a part of my tribe.

Who's asking for my help. Oh yeah. We're going to go help that person. We, we expect these more acute stimuli. The brain does not understand a small box written in one of these or a little green glowing screen box on your screen, your Google calendar for an appointment. It doesn't understand that.

So we have some trouble literally getting the motivational system to put the right chemicals into our system that gets us up and actually moving. There's something called the ventral striatum that's involved in this. The neuroscience gets complicated. Details don't matter. We can, we'll get Andrew Huberman on the line if we really want to get into this.

Uh, but let's just rest assured. That's what our brain does. Different people, Erica have different reactions to this mismatch. Right? So some people it's yeah, whatever. Yeah. You have to just kind of. Bull rush into the task. Then you get going. It's like, it's minor other people like you, Erica, uh, the mismatch triggers anxiety, which again, chemicals like anxiety is a physical feeling.

There's a constriction in the chest. There's a, a difficulty in the breathing. You can, you can do some self scanning and say, this is just physical. Hormonal chemical driven reaction. The autonomic immune system or a nervous system rather is involved in this. And so for you and a lot of other people, this mismatch can create a literal anxiety.

The thing we have to do about this, uh, uh, put bluntly is sort of ignore. I mean, we can recognize my brain does this just like my knee hurts when a storm is coming. But beyond recognizing it, we still go forward. We still go forward because let me tell you, let's say you get rid of your time block planning during the day, like let's just rock and roll.

So I don't have to have the anxiety of having something scheduled. You're opening yourself up to a much more existential anxiety because you're going to just ping pong back and forth. Randomly putting out fires, not making progress on things that are important for getting about things, having to scramble at the last minute to get things done.

This is not from a physiological perspective or a psychological perspective, a better subjective experience. It's a deeper existential anxiety you're going to feel. So you're trading one for the other. Same thing. If you don't go to the restaurant, you don't go to the party. Uh, you're not going to feel better.

You'll get like relief in the moment because you're resolving the mismatch, but you're not around friends. You're not doing interesting things. And, you know, I get that too, Erica, I don't get, I don't get anxiety around blocks if it's just work I've put aside. I just get normal resistance.

When you throw a, there's different aspects. Sometimes there's social aspects. So this might be what you have. There might be like a social aspect in there where there's a little bit of social anxiety, so that could exaggerate it. Um, I don't have that so much, but I have, as I've talked about on the show, these weird, deep rooted issues with surrounding sleep.

And so I'll sometimes get this around events. If they're at night, like, you know, it's, I don't know how late it's going to go and what my sleep and, and you know, what I've learned to do is say, okay, thank you. Welcome anxiety. I'm glad you're here. Chemicals you'll pass soon.

Uh, and I'm going to go on and keep doing this thing. So that's what I say, Erica. Um, it's natural. It's not that you shouldn't find it that interesting in the sense of like, yeah, here, this comes, it'll go. And you make the plans that are good. You execute the plans and find pride in your action and not give so much attention to the physiological.

It's going to do its thing. And then Erica, you're going to do your thing. Because more often than not, it's going to be like an enjoyable experience to like going to the party or going to the gym or go to a game or something. That's what I'm trying to separate here is like how much, how much we're dealing with the, the planning mismatch with Erica, which is a real thing.

I mean, people sometimes anxiety, a lot of times it's just procrastination. It's like really hard for people to get started on things that are just, that are planned in some sort of abstract or arbitrary system, and there's also social anxiety and she's mentioned both. In the call. So I'm, I'm assuming they're kind of all mixed together.

Yeah. I mean, social anxiety is its own, its own thing, which again, is completely natural because our brain is so attuned to the sociality that it, you know, a lot of what, you know, 20 years, first century social life is not exactly what our brain expects. It expects like, this is my tribe that I am around all day.

Yeah. I'm with them all day. That's why I'm miserable when I'm alone. But if it's strangers and some people I don't know, and it's in like a bar I haven't been to the brain is like, I don't know about this. Some people care more than others. You have negative social anxiety as far as I can tell.

You love people and you love doing things. Well, I'm around a lot of people a lot, like in various, my other jobs and stuff. And yeah, I do a lot of things too, I guess. That's a spectrum. See, like probably for you, um, the way that wiring is set up is you see the, the, the potential opportunity in a novel social environment.

Like, Oh, something cool could happen. I could meet someone interesting. Maybe I'll see something interesting. Yeah. For other people it will be, but what happens if I get there? And like, I can't find the, I can't find the person or like, as I, as I walk into the, as I walk into the room, like I'm immediately, you know, caught catch on fire or whatever it is, the waiter spills water on me.

Really? I had a friend, we used to joke about that. We'd be anxious about like going to a bar we'd never been at before. And we try to one up each other on our predictions for what was going to happen. And it would usually end up with like, as the door open, just three or four people already at a full sprint are just charging you to take you down and to beat you with some sort of like bats or blackjack.

So then we'd see like how, how, how exaggerated we could make the story that would, you know, explain some social anxiety. Like, as soon as you're in the door, it's just going to be like fire boys. And like immediately there's someone with a flamethrower and, you know, you go over the top.

All right. Let's do another question. What do we have next? All right. Next question's from Olivia. Olivia is a product designer from New York city. She also feels anxious about choosing which hobbies to spend time on because she has lots of interest. More specifically, she likes to write short stories and her most recent story was accepted from the slush pile on a top literary journal.

Now she feels pressure to pursue that hobby like alone versus dabbling in her other hobbies, which she considers mediocre, like drawing, cooking, exercise, and volunteering. All right. So a hobby question. Um, so Olivia, I would say what's going to help you here is to introduce the deep life buckets into this conversation.

I think you're, you're lumping together too many things under the rubric of hobby. So you're lumping together your amateur writing, which you're doing at a high level. Right. If you've made into a top literary journal, you're lumping that in with drawing, cooking, exercising, volunteering. You see this as one thing and like, which of these do I do?

Which of these do I have time to, if we look at this through the perspective of, uh, the deep life buckets and let's go with the standard default buckets here, we'll do craft constitution, uh, community contemplation and celebration. Let's do the default buckets. You'll see that these now, these examples you gave, they fall out into these buckets in a more diverse way, right?

So the writing you're doing, that's at the level of getting published in top literary journals, that's going to fall under craft. It's not your paid job, but that is craft that it's, it's something where you are, uh, honing a skill at a high level to produce things of value.

So I would, I would deal with that when I'm dealing with the craft bucket of my life. Volunteering. Now that's going to be under community. I would deal with volunteering as one of the things on the plate when trying to craft right now, what makes the most sense for me in the community bucket of my life.

Exercising. Well, that's going to fall into the constitution bucket. When you're contemplating, what do I want to do with a constitution in my life right now, my health and fitness exercises going to play in their cooking. You could see coming into the celebration bucket, the bucket where you're trying to have gratitude and appreciation and of things in the world and experiences and things that you do that are sort of celebrating life and all the things that makes life interesting and good.

So these things fall in the different buckets, not just. I have to have a hobby. What's my hobby going to be? Then how do you figure out which of these you have time for? Well, now you're working the buckets in the standard way, right? You, you have a vision for each of these buckets that fit together to make sense for your life right now and are aiming you towards whatever vision you have for an ideal lifestyle in the future.

So you're looking holistically at your whole life. You want to make sure that all of these buckets are represented. You know, the system, if you've listened to the show, you start with Keystone habits and you give six to eight weeks to each of the buckets one by one to overhaul that part of your life.

That's when you deal with these things. So when you're dealing with the community part of your life, you can say with where I am right now and the decisions I've made for the other buckets and what I'm trying to do at this stage of my life. Community is important.

How am I going to integrate community in my life in a way that makes sense? And maybe that involves volunteering. Maybe it does it. You know, if you're deployed in the military. This year, then when you're thinking through community, that's going to be focused much more on, you know, connections with the people important to you back home, maybe you're thinking I'm going to write a long letters once a week.

They're going to post publicly. So all my friends can see what I'm up to. It's going to focus on the people that you're deployed with and being there for them and mentoring to people below you. It's not going to be volunteer opportunities. On the other hand, if you're home and you're working part time and you have more time than you have before, then maybe that community piece is going to super expand and volunteering is going to be big, but this gives you a systematic way of thinking about that.

Same with celebration. What do I want to do in there? And you're just, you're thinking through what, what actually fits into your life. So that's the way I would actually think about it. All right. Now, what you're trying to do is come up with answers for these five buckets that fit together, make sense, and is tractable and be happy about that.

Now, what that looks like will depend on what phase of life you're in, what you're going after. So, you know, when I was looking at your elaboration of your question, you mentioned, for example, that you are getting a part-time graduate degree in addition to your job. Like this might be a period of one or two period where craft is really focused on like your job and trying to get this graduate degree.

And you're in very minimalist deployments of the other buckets, keeping those part of your life alive, but you have to keep them pretty minimalist because you don't have much time. And then maybe when you're done with that graduate degree and you have more time, you reassess those buckets. And now suddenly maybe you're reclaiming that time you were spending for your graduate degree to systematically work on your writing craft as a, as an outlet for your creative energies.

So this, this can morph and change over time, but you have to see all of the pieces as part of a big picture. And that's why I think. Splitting into these buckets, making sure each bucket is dealt with, but that they all add up to something that's tractable. That is the way to think about these, not in this much more simplified way of what hobby should I choose?

You know, what is my hobby? I mean, that type of terminology is not that useful. I mean, it's only recently that I've spent. Any sort of systematic time on anything that you might qualify as a hobby, because I have a whole mess of kids and the youngest is now four, but that means until quite recently, I've always had someone between the ages of one and three, essentially in my household.

Like it's been really busy and I have seven jobs and that's fine. So my bucket definitions were really heavy on craft and community. And then there wasn't the other stuff I had to just have bare minimum. So I respected them and prove to my point myself they're important, but they had to be very low impact.

I mean, kids are getting older. Kids are at school every day. I can rejigger the buckets. So anyways, that's the way I would think about it, Olivia. All right. What's our next question here? So we have a follow-up question from Olivia as well, and she took advantage of the new question survey because we get to answer two questions from her back to back.

Yes. If you're early, if you're early in answering, filling in that survey, you're much more likely to get your question answered than a few months from now. So yeah, good, good advertisement for filling out the question survey. So in her book, and she says in your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, you give the following as a reason for leaving a job.

It presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. She worries that in her job as a product designer, she's repeating the same work instead of getting better. She studied literature in college. And as we talked about, she did a part-time master's and well, she's doing a part-time master's in economics right now.

These feel much more challenging, like something that you can truly develop expertise in at the same time. She gets paid a lot as a product designer in tech. So maybe the skill is valuable. How can I, how can she decide if the first disqualifier applies to her career? So just to put this in context, Olivia is referring to in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

I lean heavily on this idea that stop worrying about if you have the exact right job for you, or that you have a passion that has to be matched to your career. And if you don't exactly match it, then you're going to be miserable. I argue that many different professional pursuits can be the foundation for a working life that's a great source of satisfaction, but I did give three disqualifiers, said, wait, here's three things that tell you that this might not be a job you should stay in.

So the first was what Olivia mentioned. You don't really have options to build up skills that can then be used as leverage to shape your career going forward. That was disqualifier number one. Uh, I believe disqualifier number two, was it conflicted with values? So, you know, you're working for Philip Morris and, uh, the idea of so many people getting sick from smoking is like against your values.

And then three, I think was, you don't like the people, like these people are just, I can't stand them. You know, like, uh, I don't mind being an investment banker from a, from a values perspective. I, you're going to have lots of options. Cause I'll make a lot of money, lots of options if I get really good, but you know what, I can't take the, these people I work with at Goldman, right.

So that'd be number three. All right. So she's asking, do I think that first disqualifier applies to her job as a product designer in tech? She's worried, you know, is this something I can keep getting better and getting options, or is it something that I'm just going to eventually have to move on from?

What I would suggest in this situation is, and this is a evolution from the way I talked about this back in so good, they can't ignore you. So it's been 10 years since that book came out. So this is a bit of an evolution. I would lean a little bit heavier on a lifestyle centric career planning approach to this question, as opposed to remaining more narrowly focused on just the aspects of the career.

So in lifestyle centric career planning, you have your vision for what you want. Your daily experience, what you want your life to be like in all different aspects, not just professionally. And then you can work backwards and figure out how your work can help get you to that lifestyle.

So if you have this lifestyle fixed, the question then becomes, does this technology product design career that I'm in, do I see a way to use this, to grow in this, do I see a trajectory here that is going to support this lifestyle I have, this vision I have of my lifestyle?

All right. And in answering that question, you probably want to look for role models, case studies, and examples, people at your company or other companies, freelancers, people on their own, but people within the same orbit of general skills that have done interesting things with it. This will elaborate your understanding of what is possible with this job.

As you get good, what are the different options of what you can do with this? You mentioned in your elaboration, I'm looking at it now. You say some pretty stark things like only people in their twenties can be a product designer while their mind is fresh. There are no product designers in their thirties.

Your only chance, your only option is to become a manager, but then even then you can only do that during your forties. That's probably not true. I mean, I think you probably need to be more systematic at learning what the different possibilities are for this general constellation of skills and not just, okay, within the company you work for and you know, what's the promotion chain here, but for product designers in generally people who work in different industries on product design, people who'd go out on their own, people who do freelance is there people who do this for this type of company and they do it.

Six months out of 12 and make a pretty good living at it. And using that, they can live somewhere that's kind of cheap, but exotic and interesting on a farm somewhere. I don't know. You got to get out there. You got to get the information and then figure out seeing all these different options.

Do I see a way of deploying any of these to get to my, my image of ideal lifestyle? And if yes, go for it. If no, then yeah, you can say this disqualifier applies. So that's my evolution. Let's, let's use lifestyle more and be a little bit less narrowly focused on just what is this job?

What am I going to get from this job? We're going to go for this job because ultimately. What does that matter if it's not serving the life that you're actually aiming to achieve? That comes back to when you talk about being a reporter for your own job, essentially, you talk about that a lot.

Yeah. Act as if you're a reporter and figure out what the steps are to do X, Y, Z. Yeah. Like you're writing a book or an article about how people get here in my career, go talk to people, look up people's resumes online, read profiles of people in your industry.

Yeah. You got to be like, I'm going to write a book about product design and the career possibilities of product design. So it's a, yeah, a research mindset. All right. What do we got next? Uh, next we have a question from Jackson, 25 year old in Vermont. For the past two years, I've been working for an ambulance service running a COVID testing site, which was shut down in late June.

I'm searching for more technical work and I'm struggling to break into the field of knowledge work. I have a degree in philosophy and I'm looking mostly at work with, within Vermont. Well, I mean, Hey, first of all, good news embedded in that question. The COVID testing site was a shut down.

So, Hey, there we go. We get some like positive pandemic news and, uh, Oh, wait, I'm looking at an update here. It shut down because, um, everyone involved was hospitalized with COVID. Oh, so you can see, I thought it was positive. I thought it was positive. And Oh no, this guy, this guy was not.

So one person, uh, Oh, but he got monkey pox. You know, see, I thought, I thought we had something positive here. Every time we think we're this close to something positive, something negative happens. Um, all right. Well, Jackson, I have, I have a, a, uh, an answer to your specific question, then a more general suggestion to tack onto the end of it.

So for your, your general question, um, if you want to work for the state, not a bad idea. Actually, when I was in Vermont last summer, Jesse, we met several people who worked for the state in Vermont. There's a whole thing where like you work for the state and maybe you go to Montpelier sometimes and they all ski all the time.

And they seem like they're outside all the time and like a really stable job and they're always outside. And it's actually, it seems like a, a, a cool state to work for the state because you can, there's a lot of these jobs. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I'm in charge of the like mushroom management program, whatever that takes like nine hours.

And then they cross country ski the rest of the day. So Jackson, what I'm saying is you have an interesting plan here. Um, so I think what you need to think about is not the specific job you're going to get right away, but the department or program in which that job lives, because once you're inside that department or program, if, and when you prove yourself to be so good, you can't be ignored.

You can move within a department or program relatively easily. So with that in mind, maybe you need to aim at something that you're not interested in, but you need to aim at something that's temporary, something that's more entry level than you might be looking for long-term and have the plan of give me a year and I'm going to move up to something cooler.

I'm going to be moved to something more interesting. I just need to get my foot in the door. So lower your standards for the very first job you're going to get in the state. With the plan of that will be far from your last. And the way you do that, this is my advice.

I always give the people who are in their, their young twenties and new to some of the things that I've said, once you have the job, don't let things drop through the cracks, if you agree to it or it's put on your plate, you will not forget it. It will get done to deliver things when you said you would.

And three consistently deliver at a high quality, do those three things. You will become indispensable. And if you are indispensable, you're going to get more and more freedom and flexibility because people were going to want you there. They're going to want to keep you there. They're going to want you on your projects.

They're going to want you to be there. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it.

And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it.

And you're going to be a part of it. And you're going to be a part of it. >> Hello, Cal. My name is Connor Beck. And I am a copywriter and content marketing specialist from St. Paul, Minnesota. I really enjoy your show and all of the amazing insights that you provide.

So thank you for that. My question has to do with project management tools, specifically Wrike and other related project management tools. My company, my current company, and the past two that I've worked at have used Wrike. And I've seen it work well and I've seen it work not so well.

And it seems to be less effective when it gets overly complicated. So my question is how would you suggest companies and teams use tools, project management tools like Wrike or Monday.com, in order to facilitate deep work rather than create unnecessary distractions and waste of time? Thanks again for your insight, Cal.

And yeah, keep up the good work. >> All right. Well, right off the bat, I'll admit I know Monday.com. I don't know Wrike. I'm actually going to load it up. Let's see here. This could be -- I'm loading up on our tablet here, Jesse. I'll tell you when I have it.

>> Okay. >> Wrike. Let's see what we're dealing with here. Wrike project management. Hold on. All right. I have this loaded up on the tablet here. Wrike, W-R-I-K-E. It says managing multiple projects shouldn't be a struggle. Sounds good to me. Trusted by 20,000 happy customers. Oh, Lord, this is looking complicated.

All right. Build a path, it says. Streamline your process and gain visibility at every stage. You can use custom workflows. Create custom workflows to help your team stay on the same page. Easy to implement. Simple to use. We have animation here. Man, there's a lot going on here, Jesse.

You see this? They're like clicking four deep into this. They click on a thing to a submenu to a submenu to change the color of the status. There's a blinking light. All right. You can set timelines. Here's a Gantt chart that they're dragging things on. Prioritize and visualize. They're dragging pictures between -- oh, this is like a Trello board.

You've got to have an obligatory photo of someone in an office that's all white. White shelves, white walls, a few books. They're always very happy. Look at this person in this picture. She's like, "I'm so happy to be using Wrike.com in my white office." It's never like the disheveled guy with the five o'clock shadow, the giant Starbucks cup that's like, "Ugh." Like a kid got sent home from school with headlights.

I've got to get out of here. All right. Look, here's my thing. Here's my thing, Connor. The issue with project management tools, be it Wrike or Monday.com or what have you, or methodologies like Scrum or Kanban, the issue becomes when you think that the tool or the methodology itself is the solution.

If we can just do this thing right, it is going to solve our problem. Like, "Hey, we're disorganized. We're seeing too much email. We're having a hard time keeping up with projects at our company. What tool will solve this problem?" This is the way they market themselves. It's this clear CTA.

You send us this money to subscribe to Wrike and then your problems go away. But no tool or methodology on its own is guaranteed to solve the problem. What I recommend doing instead is you have to figure out before you think about technology, how do we actually want this type of collaborative effort to unfold?

What type of work we're doing? Who is involved? What's involved in our specific work? Let us come up with a process or workflow here to get this done in a way that is not only organized, but as I like to harp on, minimizes the need to receive and respond to unscheduled messages.

And then you can say, "Okay, now what tools are going to help us do this?" And here's the thing. When you do this type of planning, where you plan the process first and then go looking for the tool to implement it, more often than not, the tools become the easy part.

You use more simple, versatile, multifunction tools to implement the process you designed. This is why you're going to see more use of Google Docs or Trello boards or Google Sheets, like Dropboxes, just simple things, because the smarts is in the custom process you came up with for the specific work you do with the specific people you work with.

The promise of something like Wrike or @Scrum or Monday.com, it's all the complexities of how the work unfolds is already figured out and baked into their software. So then you have to fit what you're doing to their particular system. It's like a totem that you trust is going to deliver freedom from stress, and that's much less likely to work.

And it does lead to, as Connor pointed out in his call, especially in technical circles, so when technical workers start using these systems, obsessions with details. I mean, programmers tell me this all the time about Agile. Use Scrum, like an Agile methodology like Scrum. There's some basic ideas here that make a lot of sense.

But people get so in the weeds of like, "If we don't exactly right have the Scrum master second lieutenant, use the appropriate every other Thursday tribal council session after intermission to do its Scrum message circle delivery of this point, I'm not going to get enough experience points to kill the ogre in the dungeon." They get really obsessed about these details as if like there's this magic system, and the reason why it's not working is that you're not satisfying the gods of Scrum properly.

There's some sloppiness in your implementation, and then it just gets so annoying that nothing happens. So this is why I always say forget the tools, get the process, and then implement with the tools, because that puts your focus on, "Hey, us, people, team, how do we want to do this work?

Like, what makes sense? Let's not just email each other. I mean, I think what we should do here is have a place where we collect the client questions, and twice a week we get together and go through the client questions, and we'll just throw them in a Google Doc, and we can just mark right there.

What's the easiest way to do this? Just mark right there, and you're like, "Okay, Jesse's going to work on this," you know, put the notes there, and then we'll check it. You know, just figure this stuff out. Like, the intelligence is in the custom, informal, flexible, interpersonal plans you've made with other people that make sense for exactly your context, and then use tools to implement it.

My main analogy I use for making this point, like when I give talks about this, is when you look at a really effective system from times past, like the first efficient continual motion assembly line that Henry Ford put together at the River Rouge plant up in Michigan. The way this happened was not Ford was at some industry conference and saw this assembly line system and methodology and said, "Let's buy that and install that in our car factory." No, he invented it from scratch.

What's the right way to actually build cars? And then he brought in existing technology, invented a lot of new pieces of technology to implement the thing that he came up with as the right way to build cars. So you start with the process, then you gather the tools to implement it.

And maybe something like Wrike or monday.com is like, "Oh, this is great. This has all the pieces we need for our plan. We can turn off these features. We can use these features." That's great, and that's a good way to use those tools. But you got to start with the process first before you get anywhere near giving your credit card number to a software service company.

All right, let's do another question. What do we got, Jesse? We got a question from Andrew. He's a 33-year-old teacher in London. And he says, "In episode 211, you laid out your system for organizing your life. I was wondering how quarterly plans link to the system. Are they the same as strategic plans or something else?" They're the same.

Quarterly plans, strategic plans, semester plans. I'm going to say that because I'm a really great clear communicator, have used all three of those terms to mean more or less the same thing over time. They all mean the same thing. A plan that is focusing in particular on the next three to five months and what your goal is and your approaches, everything you need to know about what your vision is for that upcoming quarter, that upcoming semester, whatever you want to call it.

I think strategic plans, if we want to get into the etymology, strategic plans, I introduced that term because before it was business people think in terms of quarters, so they call this the quarterly plans. Academics think in terms of semesters, so they call this the semester plan. And so both are valid.

I don't want to keep going back and forth or using both. So strategic plans was supposed to be a general term that captured both. So thanks for that question, Andrew. That does help clarify things. Let's do one more, Jesse. What do we got? All right. Final question is from Allison.

She's a 29-year-old software developer in Washington, D.C. She says, "Hi Cal. In your previous podcast, you talked about how you organize your life and your core documents. How did you create your values document? How do you know what values are important to you?" Well, first of all, I'll say I'm distracted by our tablet here with the Reich animation I'm looking at right now.

My Lord, there's a histogram, a stacked histogram of task completion per person stacked by the different categories of tasks moving up and down. Man. Okay. Sorry, Allison. I'm entranced by the visual complexity that is these project management tools. Wait till they see our whiteboard, Jesse. We're too simple. We have a whiteboard and Google Docs.

Dropbox. We do use Dropbox. Yeah. No stacked histograms. All right, Allison, I'm sorry. This is an important question. Okay. How do you come with your values document? Here's the key thing about values documents, which again, for people who didn't hear episode 211, my suggestion is you have a document that has your core values that you review on a regular basis.

It becomes the foundation for everything else you do. So when you write your strategic plans for like, what am I doing for the next semester? All this stuff comes back to, am I serving my core values? The key point about that is there's not a single right answer to that, that you have to get just right before the document can be used.

Your notion of what your values were will evolve over time with experience and exposure to other systems of thought. What's important is that you have something that makes sense and aligns with your experience intuition at the moment and that you're using it. This gives you intention and direction with your life.

Even if that direction shifts over time, you're still always better moving at any one moment in an intentional direction, as opposed to just wandering around. So otherwise I'm going to try to say here, Alison, is lower the stakes here. I wrote my original values document. I was in my twenties as a grad student.

I remember for some reason, I remember this. I have a weird memory for certain things. I wrote in my Moleskine and it was, we were waiting to go to sit Shiva with a friend of ours, a friend of ours who was at Harvard grad student, whose dad had died.

So his dad had died, you know, young and we were going to go sit Shiva and it gets you thinking about things. And I remember that's when the very first draft and I'm sure I have that Moleskine somewhere. I have a stack this high of these old Moleskines where I keep track of ideas about my values and living the deep life.

That's why I worked out my first value plan. And this just evolved since then. Getting married changed that. I mean, I was married at that point already. Having kids changed the values plan. Career shifting changed the values plan. When you, if you encounter or discover systems of, organized systems of moralistic thinking, be it philosophical or theological.

Now you're tapping into really ancient wisdom going to affect your value plan. So the thing will evolve, but you do, you got to start. You want to have something. So that's the way to think about it, Alison. Having something is better than not. Don't sweat if you have the right thing because that will evolve with your, with your life experience.

So you keep all your Moleskines? Yeah. For century twenties? Yeah. I keep Moleskines. I guess if you go back and look, you can kind of see it's like a diary, you know. I keep a lot, not all of them. I also have a lot of time blocking. So I have a lot of these old planners and then the ones I was a lot of black and reds from before.

I don't keep all of those. I realized like I don't need all of these, but I have a fair number of those. Yeah, but the Moleskines I keep. I've gone back through before. There's some, I've done blog posts from now and then or email newsletter articles every once in a while where I'll take a picture of like the teetering stack.

Yeah. I last went through them for digital minimalism. I was writing about journaling in digital minimalism. And so I actually went back and cited a bunch of things from old Moleskines. It's kind of cool to go back. Yeah. Go back and read. I mean, you, you get older, your thoughts mature is what I would say.

That's my, that's my experience going back and reading my 20, 21 year old Moleskines. But there's cool things. I mean, the coolest thing I found was the transition in my writing life when I was leaving student writing and trying to make that decision because I'd written three books for students.

My newsletter slash blog was called study hacks and it was just for students. It had traction. I was probably one of the top people writing on that topic. I was like, I can just own this topic. Like I'm owning it now. I brought some new things into that world.

I was working. And then also I was thinking I can't just do this for the rest of my life though. Like I'm not going to be a student forever. And like, do I want to just keep doing this? And I worked a lot of that out in my Moleskine.

And I have a weird, my wife knows this. I don't have a fully memetic memory, right? Like I don't have photographic memory, but I do for certain things like books. I can remember like almost every book where I read it where I was anytime I'm writing or reading. So I have a very clear memory.

And this must've been God, 2008, very clear memory. Coolidge corner movie theater, Brookline, Massachusetts because my wife, I used to see every movie, literally every movie. And we were there to see, it was a Disney nature documentary about lions and lion cubs. Cause we just saw it. Like we've seen everything what's playing.

Right. And I remember being in the main theater at Coolidge corner, the main, the nice one that has the old fashioned theater with the curtains or whatever. And we were watching that movie. And I remember sitting there with my Moleskine and working through. So if I see those notes, I can remember where I was when I took them.

- That's great. Yeah. - All right. Well, anyways, we have gone on long enough. Let's wrap this up. So thank you everyone who sent in your questions. Go to the show notes has a link for how you can submit new questions. You can also go to calnewport.com/podcast for instructions.

Go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode and clips from this and past episodes. We'll be back next week with the next installment of the deep questions podcast. And until then, as always stay deep. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Ep. 213: Saying No! | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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