All right, part two of the show, we're gonna do some questions about living a deeper life. We haven't had a call yet, so we'll start with a call. We'll kick things off with a call from Michael. All right, here we go. Hey, Cal and Jessie. First off, thanks for all that you guys do.

Big fan of your work. I recently quit my job as a product manager in tech to find more meaning in my work and really just become self-employed. I have a few main areas that I want to grow in and would like to know how you suggest balancing efforts on a macro and micro scale.

Just for context, the three areas are, first off, my main project is a website for runners, training plans and such. I have one business partner and we plan to launch it soon. I've been working on that for about a year. Secondly, I'm taking a course to build out a skill set as a UI designer.

I want to do UI design for my own projects and perhaps freelance someday. And then thirdly, I just want to create more online blogging videos, using social to connect with others and really just make useful content around my interests. Speaking of my interests, I'm just a super curious person, have a lot of hobbies as it is, so guitar, action sports, music making, photo video, and all of these interests pull for my time and attention as well.

I have tried to do day theming and use systematic time blocking really to attack all of these different areas and interests, but it just felt too rigid and formulaic to me. So yeah, my key question is how do you suggest I focus on a macro and micro scale to have progress in these multiple areas, which all feel important to me?

Thanks guys. Well, the issue is if you're trying to make progress on all of those things at the same time, you will make meaningful progress on almost none of them. This is a principle that's on my mind because I write about this actually in the slow productivity book we were talking about before in my chapter on doing fewer things and not to give away too much, but I have a whole chapter section in that chapter about this reality that the function that mediates the relationship between effort and reward, we often incorrectly think about that as a linear function, no matter what we spend our time on.

So you sort of spend 10 hours working on things, you get 10 hours worth of reward, but that's not actually how it works. It tends to be more nonlinear. So if you spend a lot of time on one thing, the reward you begin to get for that time takes off and gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.

So you kind of have these moments, these discontinuities where the reward you get after you've really focused on something for a while really jumps up. That reward curve really jumps up. So the reality of this is it is not the same to take a set pool of hours and split it among multiple things or put all that time on the one thing.

You do not end up with the same reward in the end. If this function was simply linear, then spending one hour on 10 separate projects would give you the same reward as 10 hours on one project. You might as well do the 10 separate projects because it's interesting, it keeps your options open, etc.

But if it's not linear, which is what I argue is true, then putting 10 hours on one project could give you a massive reward. We're putting one hour in each project might not get you much at all. All right, so that's kind of technical here, but it all leads to I think the obvious conclusion, which is you need to do less.

Now that's scary because you're thinking, well, these things are important to me. There's different aspects of my life. There's different options I want to pursue. I can't just stop everything. So I'm going to give you a two-step process here. One, I do think you need to simplify, especially in that world of hobbies, etc.

This is what you're going for in your professional life. And maybe outside of your professional life, you cut this down to two things, maybe three. Next, you want to have one point of major focus that is getting most of your time and everything else you want to baseline. Baseline means you have some sort of maintenance ritual or habit.

So it's not forgotten, but it's not getting much of your time. And most of your time is on one thing. So like professionally, maybe most of that time is going into the new website, though I might recommend that sounds like this UX, you need a job, right? You quit your job.

So if UX is going to be your career, that might be the thing you're really putting your time into. And you're just baselining the website. Let's put that on hold for now or just make very small progress. I'm going all in on the UX design. Choose one thing I go all in on.

You might again with your hobbies have something similar. You have a background fitness routines, you stay in shape for various action sports you're interested in, but you're not doing any training for those sports. And all of your hobby time is going into guitar. So like you baseline almost everything, and a very small number of things you put time into because again, you put enough time into something, that's when you get these discontinuity, these discontinuity, these big jumps in the rewards you get.

And then once you focus on something for a while, and have had a big jump in reward, then you can turn your attention to something else and do something similar for the next six months, next year, the next two years, whatever it takes. So you have to you have to simplify.

And then even once you simplify, only one or two things should be getting any sort of serious attention at a time, that in the end is going to unlock way more reward than trying to keep switching back and forth really quickly. So that's what I recommend. What I'm saying here is pretty similar to my deep life buckets, Keystone habit type advice.

We'll get to that in a second, that sort of more, I would say more philosophical thinking, which covers not just work, but your whole life. We'll get into that more in a future question. But it is similar. And that's on purpose, because I think this idea of baselining what's important, but putting huge energy into a small number of things at a time, that's the right formula.