All right, so what I want to talk about today is how to get organized in a world where all of the digital incoming, this email, the Slack, the digital meaning invites seem to be doing their best to drown you in obligations. Now, this is a common topic on the show, but what's different, what I want to focus on right now that is different is what to do on the very first day on your journey from disorganized to organized.

So it's the day one steps I want to focus on today. My plan is I have five steps to go through. The first four steps are highly technical. What to do in the first four to six hours on the quest to become a more organized person. The fifth step will then give you the maintenance activities to do for the 30 days to follow to make sure that everything you do this first day actually sticks.

So this is not about having the most advanced ongoing system, but instead taking the biggest possible steps on the very first day. Before we get into those details, though, let's start by briefly discussing the psychological obstacle that we have to get past before we can hope to succeed in this quest to become more organized.

Here is what I think the main problem is that people have is a misperception about the reality of their workload. So I'm actually, again, with great trepidation, going to draw a picture here for those who are watching instead of just listening. I want to draw a picture about how most people think about their workday.

This is just sort of implicitly in their mind. So we have here a very happy stick figure, and he's sitting, I don't know, he's sitting at his desk, and there we go. He's sitting here at his computer, expertly drawn. So let's draw a little computer here. Perfect perspective. All right, so there he is, happy at his computer.

Because in the world of the way most people just sort of imagine their work is, what's going on? Well, there's maybe a couple phone messages to return. I have three little phone messages over here, and there's two projects. Let me choose one of these projects to make progress on, and there's a few phone messages that you might want to return.

And in fact, our happy person here, I'm going to give them a notebook. And in this notebook, with colored pencils, kind of have this nice little plan for the day. Work on project A, and then return these calls, and go for a nice walk, and then take lunch. This is sort of the implicit assumption people have about what their work life is like.

I have some stuff I'm working on, some things I have to get back to people. All right, what's the reality? Well, I'm going to draw a picture of what I imagine, this is what I think the reality is for most people. So what I have here is our same person, now very unhappy, running as fast as he or she can, because there is a giant cloud of an overwhelming quantity of projects, and requests, and tasks, and things that people need from them.

And it's chasing him or her, I'm going to say, for whatever reason, it's shooting lightning bolts at this person. Huge cloud chasing after the running person, there's lightning bolts. For some reason, things are on fire, because I don't know, that's kind of what it feels like, so there's just flames everywhere.

This is the reality. Most people think, "Oh, I use my color pencil, so that I can differentiate my phone call from when I work with a nice cup of tea on project A." Reality, running from fire as there's this giant swarm chases after you, firing lightning bolts at you.

All right, why is it important that we have this misconception? It's because when you think, "It works not so bad," two things happen. One, you don't think you really need to do much to get more organized. Work is not that hard. I just need to maybe draw out a to-do list in a nice format, be a little bit careful, or just buy, like I bought this nice-looking Japanese paper planner online, and we'll write it, and it's going to make our lives a little easier.

You don't see the urgency of actually taking major action. The second issue that's generated by this misconception is that if you do begin wandering towards some more systematic organization, it's you open the door to this reality, and my God, it's so terrible that you just slam that door shut and say, "Let's just pretend that doesn't exist." Denial.

"I don't want to confront the reality of how much stuff is going on." Here's the thing, though, and this is the first step of the five steps I want to talk about today. The very first step on your very first day of becoming organized is preparing yourself to face this reality.

So it is a psychological preparation step. There is a term of art that I used to use in the early days of this show, and that was called "facing the productivity dragon." The idea behind facing the productivity dragon is that you confront the reality of everything that is on your plate, even if it is terrifying and overwhelming and shooting lightning bolts at you and lighting the world around you on fire.

It is better to confront the reality than to pretend it doesn't exist. So step one is to prepare to face this productivity dragon. Now this is not a new idea. If we go back to the OG of digital age productivity, that is David Allen, he wrote about what was involved in trying to get your arms around for the first time, the step of getting started on being organized.

He wrote very clearly in his 2001 classic, Getting Things Done, how much is involved in taking that first step from chaos towards calm. I'm going to read you from chapter five of his book here. Here's a short excerpt. Just gathering a few more things than you currently have will probably create positive feelings for you.

But if you can hang in there and really do the whole collection process 100%, it will change your experience dramatically and give you an important new reference point for being on top of your work. When I coach a client through this process, the collection phase usually takes between one and six hours, though it did once take all of 20 hours with one person.

All right, so what Allen is teaching us here is this very first step of confronting the productivity dragon takes time. It takes hours because there is more in there than you probably want to admit. So the concrete advice that comes out of this first step is that you need to put aside a full day for this day.

When I say, what do you do the first day of becoming more organized? I don't mean here's something you can do for 30 minutes in the morning and then you'll be more organized. You actually are going to need a full day to do this right. So you could take a put aside a day that was otherwise quiet or put aside a weekend day or a vacation day if you need to.

We have plenty of those coming up. But you need to prepare yourself that you're going to need something like a full day to actually make the transition I'm going to talk about right now from chaos to calm. All right, step two, let's get technical. You need to set up your first storage system.

The place that is going to gather and make sense of all of these things that you actually have to do. Now, if you go back and read David Allen, one of the things you're going to notice is that he relies a lot on a embodied physicality in the obligations in people's lives.

So he sort of imagines that many of the obligations in people's lives have a physical embodiment. There's a receipt that has to be submitted. There's a phone slip for a call that has to be returned. There's a printed report that was given to you that you have to do your revisions on.

And so his process of collection from getting things done is all about having these physical inboxes, literal boxes. And you're going around your space and collecting these artifacts and putting them into these inboxes. You're building piles of your stuff. And for the small number of things that don't actually exist in the real world, he says you write down a pointer to it and put that piece of paper in the physical box.

So it's a very physical process. I'm going to suggest something different. I think that the difference between the late 90s and early 2000s when Allen was putting together this methodology and now in the 2020s is that the vast majority of professional obligations in your life as a knowledge worker are digital.

Very few of them are embodied. Maybe you printed something, but the thing you printed has a digital counterpart for which it began. Most stuff is actually implicitly in an email somewhere. It's a request that was in a slack. It's a, it's a appointment that's lurking on your digital calendar for which work has to be done.

So to try to translate now that the vast majority of our obligations are digital, to try to somehow translate those into the physical world, the gathering back into the digital would be inefficient. So our storage systems is going to, we're going to start digital and we're going to remain digital.

All right. So no physical inboxes. What is going to be the digital system in which we're going to store everything? It's going to require three things, a collection of lists, the ability to rapidly add, update, or move items between these lists, and the ability to efficiently append information such as links or notes or texts copied out of emails to individual items on these lists.

These are the three capabilities we're going to need in our storage system. This clearly is going to have to be digital. You're not going to be able to get all of those features in a purely analog system, the quickly moving things with back and forth, the pending information and things.

So we're going to need a digital system here that can satisfy those three things. Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on the show.

All right, let's get back to it. I'm going to give you three options here from simple to most complex. The simplest way to implement a system that has those three properties would just be with word processing or text files. So just imagine you have a text file, you can just have a bold header for each of the lists that we're going to find, and then just write below it, separated by white space, different items of the list.

If you want to append information to an item in this particular implementation, you can just put a bullet point or a collection of bullet points under the item and just copy and paste whatever information you need. It doesn't have to be neat. So you could just get going with Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Any number of online task programs let you do this easily as well. A favorite of mine is WorkFlowy. All it is, is list that you can indent. Press enter, you get another item, press tab, it indents over. What's nice about this is you can hide indentations. So if you have a bunch of things, extra information, there are tasks, you can click assign to have it all collapse, and then you can just open it again when you want that information.

So for our three properties, text files will be fine. Next more complicated solution for implementing this system is going to be something like Trello. This is what I use. It's just very well set up for what we're talking about here. Each list can be a column on a Trello board, each item can be a card on a Trello board, extra information can be appended to the back of the cards, and the cards are easy to move back and forth between different columns.

The more advanced solution would be to build something more custom, perhaps using a task view database system like Notion. I would not start here for your very first day of becoming organized, unless you're already a pro at one of these systems, and it's as easy for you to put together as it is for someone else to set up WorkFlowy.

This is the type of thing you can think about down the line. Once we've made this initial leap from chaos to control, chaos to calm, down the line, you might think about if you're more tech oriented, building a more advanced system, but I wouldn't start there. Okay, so we now know what a system broadly speaking needs these lists that you can update and move stuff behind between an append information.

We know what tech tools you can use to actually store these lists. What are the actual lists we need in our initial system? I'm going to suggest six for your starter system. Again, whether this is in Docs, Trello, or Notion. Ready, Backburner, Waiting, To Discuss, Clarify, and Scheduled. So in fact, I'll even write these on the screen so we can be on the same page.

I want to talk a little bit about each of these. I always try to type on here, Jesse, but it always just creates, makes the world just fall apart. By the way, see that issue with the trying to type on here? That's why I had to stop using this in my classroom.

When you're in projection or screen sharing mode, in Notability, the text does, the typing doesn't work very well. All right, I can just write though. I got beautiful handwriting. All right, so what are these things? Ready was number one. What we mean by ready is going to be, think of it as like a ready for action.

These are things, items that need to be worked on as soon as we can get to them. I typically think about something under a ready list as something that I want to try to complete in the given week. Different people do that slightly different ways. Next we had Backburner.

These are things that they need to get done. You've committed to them, but you're not working on them right now. So we have them on the Backburner, so we're not going to forget about them. We have a place, and here it is on this list. If we get more information about this thing that we've committed to, but it's not coming up yet, we have a place to put that information.

Someone emails us more details about the workshop we've agreed to set up, and we're not really working on that yet. We can copy that text from the email and put it on the back of this Trello card or an indentation under this item. So that's what's going on the Backburner.

Waiting, this is critical. I think this is the most important type of list that people do not typically keep. This is things that you are waiting to hear back about. All right, so this is I'm working on this workshop. I sent an email to the administrator about trying to get a room reservation.

I am waiting to hear back from that person about whether or not we can get that room. That item can be now under the waiting list. So it's waiting as in waiting to hear back. Another critical list that most people don't use in their systems, but is very efficient is to discuss.

So it's where you keep track of things where I'm going to be meeting with this person or team at some point in the near future. What do I want to discuss with them at that next meeting? Now you have two options here. You can just have one list to discuss and every item on it, the very first thing in the title of the item in bold is to discuss with Jesse.

So you can clarify for each item, who is this for? So it's for people or teams you meet with on a regular basis. And the idea here is if you have things you need more information on, instead of just throwing an email into the ether, you can kind of collect lists of, okay, next time I talk to Jesse, I have four things on here to go through.

If there's people you have a lot of things to discuss things with and you talk to them on a regular basis, they can get their own to discuss list. You might have multiple to discuss lists with team, with boss, with department chair. That's fine as well. Clarify these are placeholders.

All right. I have this obligation, something I'm supposed to do something about this. I don't yet know what that means. In other words, like, I don't know what I should do right now to make progress on this thing. I just know I'm committed to it. I need to think through or learn more about what this actually means.

You know, I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll handle the secret Santa in the office this week or this month. And I don't really know what that means. Like, I don't know how that works or what I need to do, but I just committed to it. I don't want to forget it.

It can go to the clarify list. So that means this is an obligation that is pending more clarification on what it actually is going to require us to do. So we have a place for it and then scheduled. So if there's a non-simple task that is scheduled on your calendar, so it's a task that requires some explanation or maybe has some information that gets appended to it.

Here's what people emailed me. Here's the list of steps I need to do on this. I'm supposed to file this report. I put aside time to do this on Friday morning, but here's the step someone told me about how to do this or how to submit it. This gives you a place for that item to live in your system.

So all that information can live somewhere. So a item under scheduled is also on your calendar somewhere, but the item on your list can hold all the extra information you need. Not everything on your calendar needs to be under the scheduled item. You don't need appointments for the most part under there.

You don't need small things under there, you know, pick up whatever, someone from the train station, you know, you probably don't need an item there, but if it's complex, there's information you need to remember about it, then it can live there under the schedule item. All right, so you have six lists and that's your initial collection system.

So we've set up six lists in some sort of digital system. All right, step three, here's the face in the productivity dragon part made real, dump everything on your mind, in your inbox, in the world, everything that you are obligated to do gets on these lists. All right, so what does this mean?

Everything you can think of. So just start, like, what can I think of that I'm supposed to be working on or I should be doing? Maybe I told someone I would do it, or I've just been thinking to myself, this is something I should make progress on. I should update the website.

Get everything you can out of your head, get it onto an item in these lists. Go through your inbox and process every single email. Get the inbox empty. This doesn't mean reply to every email. This doesn't mean take care of every email. You're translating these emails into task items that go into your system.

So for this initial collection phase, you want to clear everything out of your inbox. And it might mean you might have things showing up on your list. It's just like reply to send Jesse the information he requested about skeleton manufacturing, right? Like just whatever it is, you're just translating emails and items on this list.

You're, you are denying your email inbox to be a secondary task management system at this point. You're putting all your faith into this collection system. Look at your calendar, they're complicated things on there, reminders that should be translated into tasks that are on this list. Then go back and think some more about what else am I forgetting?

What else is just in my head? Let me give you a couple advanced tips for going through this collection process. Number one, it does help sometimes to use a working memory dot txt file as an intermediary in this process. So just have a plain unformatted text file on your computer.

As you're going through one of these categories, you can just dump things into that text file and then go from that text file into your system. It helps, right? It feels like this is an extra step, but it actually helps, especially if you're cleaning out an inbox because you can type really quickly into a text file and you don't have to be organized or really think it through like reply to Jesse about this, send back dates to so and so.

You can just type really, really fast and just fill in this text file really fast. I call it working memory dot txt because this text file is like an extension of your working memory. Our brain can hold five or six things at a time with a working memory dot txt file.

You can have 20 or 30 things. It's like you're extending your working memory and then you go from that text file into your system. It takes a little bit more time to put things into your system. You have to choose the list, you have to create the card or do the font formatting if you're using something like Microsoft Word.

More importantly, as you go from this very fast to fill in plain text file to your system, you see things to consolidate or to simplify. Actually, I don't really need to respond to these people or now that I look at this, I have eight different emails on here from Jesse about merchandising Jesse Skeleton.

I could just combine this into one item on my list, which is set up intervention to talk to Jesse about his obsession with Jesse Skeleton. You actually get some on the fly organization and consolidation simplification as you go to this extended working memory and then into your system. Advanced tip number two, when you're going through this initial dumping of everything in your life into this system, lean heavily into the clarify list.

Don't try to work everything out during this process. There's too many things. Don't try for everything you come up with like, well, what's going on with this project? Well, let me follow up with so and so about this and let me look at this a little bit of when might I be able to do this.

You don't have the time or energy to actually clarify all of the ambiguous obligations that are on your plate. Right now, we're just trying to get everything into our system. So at first, your clarify list might be really long. You just don't want to forget it. So you just have, you know, workshop plan.

God, I don't even know what that means, but I'm not forgetting it. I'm just throw it in the clarify list for now. We'll deal with this in the next step. So don't worry about that. The key role to maintain as you're initially populating your list in your system, and this is the rule that you should maintain going forward, is that every obligation gets one item in the system.

It can move between lists. It cannot exist on multiple lists. You do not have, okay, under ready, workshop, you know, next steps for this workshop project. And then if that generates an email to an administrator, you don't keep that item under the ready list and add a new item to the waiting to hear back list.

You move that full item over to the ready, the waiting to hear back from list and just update the status up top. I'm waiting to hear back from so-and-so about this. All of the information about a given obligation lives in the system, but it moves around to what is the status of this obligation right now?

So think about these lists as the statuses of various obligations. If you are actually building a notion-based system to keep track of this stuff, this would be a lot more explicit because it's, these are database entries that can have a single status. It's here, then it's there, then it's here.

So everything just lives in one place. All right. This will take a while, one to three hours probably. We've really spent a lot of our day here getting everything into this list. But now symbolically, when you're done, everything is captured. Your inbox is empty. There's nothing in your head.

There's nothing just sitting there in your calendar. You don't know what it means. It's all in this one place, this collection of lists, this system of yours. That brings us to step four, to do your initial configuring. Moving forward, configuration of your list, of your system is something you're going to do on a semi-regular basis.

We'll get to that soon, but we're going to do our very first configuration step during this very first day that you're making your leap from chaos to calm. This is a big thing that was always missing from David Allen's methodology, but I think is really important. This is where you make sense of all of the things in your system and you clarify and optimize, remove redundancies.

It's where you sit and move and work around and make more sense of this huge mess of stuff that's on your plate. This means a few things. One, start going through your clarifying, the items under the clarify list and try to clarify as many as you can. The stuff that's not particularly urgent, you can skip for now, but the things you think like, "I need to do something about this," now you can clarify it.

You don't want to clarify as you're filling in your list and doing your dumping everything in your life because that's too much friction. But now that you've done that, now we can focus just on moving through this clarify list and say, "What are the things that really I should be making progress on?" And start doing the clarification.

Now, this might mean you discard it. "I don't really need to do this." Or it might mean you're sending a clarification email. This is often the case with stuff that ends up on clarifying when you go through a configuration step. Often the reaction is, "I got to write this someone to say, 'What the hell does this mean?'" How do I set up the secret Santa?

You did it last year. Can you tell me about it? That's fine. You moved over to the waiting to hear back from list. Other things that might be obvious, "Now that I think about it, what I need to do is set up a meeting with my team and we need to make a plan." So either I can send that doodle pool now to do that, or move this over to the ready list and change the actual description of the item to set up meeting with team to discuss this project and all the information about it is attached to this card.

This is what I mean by clarify. So it's moving things off of that clarify list to where they should go. This is also a good time to triage. Go through and triage the back burner. Do I really need to do this? I was excited about this, but I'm thinking now I don't need to do that.

So you can kind of go through like what's on the back burner. Let me triage things out of this. What do I really want to stick with? This is where you might send some sorry triage messages. "Hey, sorry. I know I said before I could help you with this, but actually I think my schedule is too crowded." That creates like seven seconds of annoyance on the recipient's end, but for the sender that email, it can create seven hours of freedom.

So those are very powerful. Whenever I get those type of messages from someone, not right before something is due or after it's due, "Hey, I didn't do this. I can't really get to this," but like three weeks in advance, "Hey, you know how I said we should record this thing?

Honestly, I was misreading my schedule. This is probably not the right time for it." I know that someone who has their act together, that someone who's looking and configuring their whole schedule and seeing what makes sense and what doesn't, you'll actually earn respect if in advance you're stepping back from things.

Now, if you wait until it's due and just don't do it and then step back, that's a different thing when you look out of control. Another part of configuring is adding things to calendars that need to be on calendars. "Okay, this is pretty urgent. Let me find time for this and get that on my calendar." If there's information associated with this task, I'll move this over to scheduled.

If it's a one-time thing like set up doc dentist appointment and I get it on my calendar, then I just delete the item from my list. I don't need it there. It's also a good time, and this is an advanced tip, to look for batching opportunities. I have this, this, this, and this.

All of these things I could really make progress on if I talk to Jesse about them. So what I really want to do is take all of these five things and put them all on the back of my Trello card for the item of set up meeting with Jesse to discuss many things.

And you kind of have these things below. And then I send the email to Jesse saying, "Let's do this meeting." And that whole card gets moved to waiting to hear back from. Or I'm like, "Oh, we meet every week when we record our podcast. Let me batch a bunch of these things and put it under the to discuss list, Jesse's to discuss list." So it's in this configuring step, you get all these great batching opportunities.

Let's wait to do this here. Let's do all these things at the same time. I'm going into work on Friday. And so let's put aside a big group of time and we're going to squash through 20 things that need to get done. This is really productivity ninja stuff when you begin to do these batching opportunities.

Something that really doesn't happen when you're just reactive and chaotic. "Oh my God, what do I need to do next? My inbox is on fire. Oh my God, this thing is due." You're never going to see those type of opportunities. All right. So at this point, you have your system fully set up.

You're about four or five hours into your first day of trying to be more organized and you have everything in a intelligently designed digital system in the six optimal list. And you've done your initial configuring. So stuff that's important has been clarified. You batch stuff, you remove stuff, you've moved things where it needs to go.

Some things are on the calendar. So you kind of have your arms around what's on your plate. The fifth and final step is how do we then make the use of this system stick? If you stop trusting this system, it will fall apart. If you find yourself unwilling, for example, to move something out of your inbox and onto an item in these lists, that means you don't trust yourself for this system.

It means you say, "I know I'll check my inbox." Because I get yelled at if I don't. I don't trust myself to look at this system. So let me just keep this in here. If you're writing notes to yourself, you're not trusting your system. So how do we actually get you into the habit now of actually making this system part of your workflow?

Well I'm going to suggest two things you do daily and one thing you do weekly for the next four weeks after this very first day of getting organized. So the first daily thing, review this system every morning when you look at your calendar. Use it to help make your plan for the day.

I won't even get into now how you're making your plan for the day. This is more advanced stuff. But however you make your plan for the day, and again, the brightly colored pencils on your fancy planner or you're just jotting stuff down on a text file, I don't care.

For now, I look at my system every day before I make this plan. I see what's on that ready list. I remind myself who am I waiting to hear back from. I remind myself on the to discuss list, "Hey, do I have a meeting coming up today that I need to discuss things on a to discuss list?" We're talking five minutes, but you see it all.

You see the mess of stuff in Clarify that you haven't got to. You see the big back burner. You see everything. Number two, at the end of every day, when you're finishing the shutting down your work, you have to go back and review the system again. Here the goal is to make sure that anything that is floating gets nailed down back into the system.

"Oh yeah, you know, I said in this meeting I would do this. Let me make sure that's written down in my system. This thing came in, this request in a Slack. Let me get that into my system." You're closing the loops, making sure that there's nothing just in your head.

Should you at this point empty everything in your inbox into your system like we did on the day one? It's probably not practical because it just is too time consuming. You might not always have that time. So let's put that aside for now. But otherwise, anything else that's loose or urgent, you want it in your system.

You look at your system, make sure there's no obvious changes or updates to do. Typically, if the day moves fast, there's updates you need to make to your system you haven't gotten around to. "Oh, I sent that email about this. I need to move that over to waiting to hear back.

Or I heard back from this thing. So I need to move this back from waiting to hear back to over here and then copying what I heard about it." So just do that final cleanup so your system, everything is back in it and the system is up to date.

Do that every day, first four weeks. The weekly thing I want you to do for the first four weeks is return to that step four configure step at the beginning of each week for the next four weeks. You can do it Monday morning, you can do it Sunday. Some people do it at the end of the day, Friday, so they can go into their weekend, less stressed.

I don't care when you do it, but go back and do something like that configure step, which remember, it means you're going to the clarify items and trying to like, "Okay, which ones can I actually make progress on?" You're triaging, you're batching, you're moving things, your calendar are off.

This is like a 30 minute process of just getting the system fully up to speed. Critically, when you do that configure process, this is a time to return to your inbox and empty it. That's why it's good to do on the weekend or before the week really gets going.

The stuff that's piled up to my inbox that I didn't really have time during the days or my daily reviews to get to, I want to get that back down to zero and everything back into my system. So it's a more thorough configuring than what you're doing at the end of each day.

Do this thing, you're going to be much more organized and you're going to be ready for the much more advanced ways we talk about of maintaining depth in a world of these increasing digital distractions in the workplace. There's all the more advanced stuff we talk about. This will give you the foundation.

Those first four steps will take you two to four hours. You put aside a day to do this. You'll be exhausted after this, not want to do much else work, but that is worth it. Two to four hours, you have a fully set up and configured task collection system.

That's a huge difference. And then do the twice daily, once weekly routine for four weeks and your use of this system is going to stick. That alone, even if you do nothing else in my advice and have completely idiosyncratic ways of planning your day or doing long-term planning or anything else, or how you do your email communication, all the other stuff we talk about, even if you ignore everything else I say, this will be a night and day difference.

You will no longer feel like there is this cloud of ambiguous, overwhelming obligations chasing you and shooting lightning bolts at your head. You will say, I've got this. And even if what you've got is difficult and impossible and you're completely overloaded, you're facing the productivity dragon, you know exactly how overloaded you are.

You know, what is the very best thing I can do given my circumstance? I can't get this all done. Something's going to have to change until then though. What can I, what's the best I can do with my time? It gives you confidence. It gives you a sense of efficacy and it can really reduce that sense of stress that comes from my God.

I know I'm forgetting things. So there's my five steps. It's not going to make you the most organized person in the world, but it's going to make you more organized than 99% of the people who work in this world. So it's a great place to get started. Do you have those six lists in every board in Trello?

Yeah. So that's a more advanced tip. So as you get more advanced in the system, what you then do is clone the six list system for the different roles in your life. So we've talked about this on the show. Sometimes I have different roles in my life, writer, researcher, teacher, professor, media company related.

Each of those has its own board. All six of those lists are in each board. So that's one of the more advanced things you can get to. And there, if you have multiple roles, like so many of us in complex jobs do, you can just deal contextually with one role at a time and not mix together tasks from different things.

Like I don't want to think about Jesse Skeleton at the same time that I'm thinking about grading, get my grading post for my discrete mathematics class. So sort of having those worlds separate is one of these advanced tips you can get to. But just start with the six list.

All right. So there we go. Nitty gritty. I like to balance the big picture with the nitty gritty. We got now some practical questions to get to about these type of ideas and how you put them in practice in real people's lives. But first let's hear from our sponsors.

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First question's from William. I find it much more feasible and fulfilling to create and stick to a plan for my personal life than my job. I love working towards these daily and big picture goals as they seem to give me purpose. I do love the company that I work for and feel that engineering is a good fit for me.

So how can I make my career a more important part of my life? Well, William, there's three things I'm going to suggest because you're heading down from a psychological perspective, a somewhat dangerous road. This idea of my work is not what I'm excited about, these other things are. That can really lead you to despair or job hopping or radical changes that are not well justified.

Well, why don't I just make canoes full time as my job? I don't need to be an engineer. And then you realize that for the most part, people don't want to buy canoes. So I have three things to suggest for you. One, and this is not going to surprise longtime listeners, lifestyle-centric career planning.

So when your job, what you're doing in your job, and more importantly, what you're trying to get to in your job is part of a vision of a lifestyle that resonates with you, you're excited about and feel really strongly about, your motivation for what you're doing professionally raises because it's not just an arbitrary thing.

I just have this job. It's no, no, here's what I'm doing. I work at this engineering firm. This income is part of this larger vision we have for our lifestyle. And I have goals for what I'm trying to do professionally. I want to actually move over to this type of work within engineering.

And once I master this, then move to contract basis, which will allow us to move over to this small town in Cape Cod, which is actually part of this bigger lifestyle vision we have of sort of living in Truro in the pine forest and working remotely and living cheaply.

And we have this whole plan. And my work is building us towards that in a very concrete, tangible way. Now you're going to be motivated about work. Because your episodic future thinking center of your brain is saying, yes, this is leading us towards this bigger vision that we have really inculcated in ourselves, psychologically speaking as being highly resonant.

So you need to have that bigger plan and see how work fits into it. I think a lot in this case, when I think about these examples, I think a lot about Mike Rowe from that old Discovery Channel job that showed dirty jobs where he went and spent time with people doing "dirty jobs." So these were more not knowledge work jobs, but more manual jobs, manual but non-knowledge work.

So, you know, septic tank cleaners or roadkill picker uppers. And he gave this great talk. It's a TEDx talk. This was from years back. And he gave this great talk about the people he profiled on dirty jobs. And he said about him, a lot of these people are very happy.

He said, you know, I knew a roadkill picker upper who would whistle on his way to work. He knew multiple, he had spent time with multiple septic tank cleaners who are incredibly fulfilled. And why was this? It's because they own their own business. They were making good money. They had their arms around their finances.

This was supporting their family. They had a nice house by the lake. They were, they had a vision of their lifestyle and how they fit into their family, their community life, that this work and this business they created was part of. The content, and this was his big point, the content of the work is not what's important.

It is the role of the work in their lifestyle, the role of their work in the life that they think is worth living. When what you're doing fits with that, it can be incredibly fulfilling. It is much more of a recent conceit, a conceit, conceit. Talk to the Jesse.

I thought I was going to look that word up. More recent conceit. Well, you always use a lot of like, a lot of vocabulary. So I'm always like looking stuff up. Yeah. In this case, I'm just mispronouncing things. It's a more recent conceit that the content of your job really matters.

This really emerged. I mean, I wrote a whole book about this. So good they can't ignore you. It came out in 2012. This really emerges in the 1990s with the whole follow your passion movement. It's not a timeless movement. It's a movement that arises in the 1990s that suddenly puts a lot more emphasis on the content of your work.

The content of your work matching intrinsic passion is the source of happiness. This was the idea here. And Mike Rowe was saying that's nonsense. The content of your work is often not important. It's not that I like the physical act of cleaning the septic tank, but I like running my own business and the flexibility and the money and the respectability and the ability to support myself and my family.

And I like the people I work for. So lifestyle-centric career planning gets you away from just, do I like the specific task I'm doing today in my job? Because there be dragons. That's not anywhere good. Number two, you need to connect more with the people you work with, connect more with the mission of the company.

Extroverts tend to be happier in their jobs. They're really into the life of the different people they work around. Those of us who are introverts have to do this work systematically. My dad was an extrovert. So when I would go to his office, he knew the life story of every single person who worked for him and was legitimately interested into it.

That makes a big difference in your experience of work when you're really connected to all the people around you and what's going on. Us introverts have to make that effort, especially now in the era of these higher level jobs give you huge autonomy in terms of when you want to come in or not.

And it's possible to barely come into your office. You can completely isolate yourself from other people and you have to fight that systematically. I'm going to go into the office. I'm going to talk to multiple people. I'm going to put time in my schedule, get lunches with people. It really changes your relationship to your work.

I mean, I can feel this difference even in my own life. The sort of pre-pandemic, there's an era where I was going to Georgetown five days a week. I just would go every day like a normal job because I don't want to be at home. When we had young kids, we had a nanny and I was like, I don't want to be home with the nanny.

I just went in every day and I was like, let me commute. And this is what I did. And compare it to like now post-pandemic where now I'm coming in more, but there was definitely a period where it was like people just weren't coming in that you're coming in to teach.

That was kind of it. It's a huge difference. I have all these nostalgic memories of that earlier time at Georgetown where I was not just connected to the people there, connected to the campus. Just I knew, hey, they decorate the courtyard behind Healy. This is when like the Christmas decorations go up and here's the view of the river, just walking the campus and working in different libraries.

And it had a real strong connection to place that in say 2021, I didn't feel because it was almost, you know, how elite universities were. They're almost apologetic about being open. And it was like, you don't even want to be here. And just was very different. It was very transactional.

And now we're coming in much more and it's, it feels a lot better again. So these things make a difference. Three, get organized. So the stuff we talked about at the deep dive of this episode also makes a difference. When you have your arm around work, you feel efficacious.

When you feel efficacious, you actually feel more motivation and satisfaction about your work. Having your act together makes work more enjoyable. Not having your act together makes it seem like an impossible intrusion. You kind of hold other people responsible for why is everyone bothering me? I'm too busy. And it is a negative force in your life.

Whereas if you act together, like, man, I'm on top of this, it becomes a positive force in your life. So I think that's kind of that key word out of motivational psychology, efficacy, sense of being effective and actually making progress towards your goals. You feel efficacious, you feel much better, more motivated.

Being organized makes you feel more efficacious. All right, William. So let's get hardcore about lifestyle centric career planning. Let's start connecting to our work and the people who work, who are there and the mission, like get more involved in the company. And let's get your act together organizationally. I think all of that is going to help you feel more motivated to do your actual work.

All right, who do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Esteban. I've been struggling with the Z garnic effect in college due to group work projects. I'm a software engineering student and it is common that almost everyone leaves everything to the last minute. I've tried to tell my friends about time management, but they don't seem to hear me and I always have to correct what they did.

The situation takes up incredible amounts of time that I could spend doing other things more valuable to me. How can I solve this problem? Oh, Esteban, I feel your pain. Welcome to my, welcome to my college experience. Imagine this, that the guy, the kid who was writing books about time management and being organized in college while still in college.

Imagine how I felt whenever group projects came along. College students are terrible at being students. If people worked in other jobs the way that college students worked at their jobs, we would be living in a Mad Max hellscape. The power system would shut down, animals would be running wild.

College students are very terrible at being college students. Now this has been to my advantage in two ways, if I can digress into my own stuff. I'll come back to you, Esteban. But in two ways, this was to my advantage. Number one, by being someone who was not really, really bad at being a student, I could really dominate.

Because you don't have to be brilliant, you just have to be like, in the world of work, what you would be considered to be a generally organized person. In the context of college, you're Thor, you're Wonder Woman. It's like, my God, this is someone who can move things with their mind.

When I got more organized over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I went from mixed grades to 4.0 every quarter, except for one quarter I got A-. It makes such a big difference. It was also to my advantage because I've sold hundreds of thousands of copies of books to students about how to be more organized because it makes such a big difference.

So I feel your pain. I hated group projects too because college students are terrible at doing work. You kind of have to grin and bear it. You get away from group projects when you can. If you're looking for groups informally, like to help you work on your problem sets, be incredibly selective.

This happened at college. I actually heard from this guy a couple of years ago. He heard me somewhere and was like, "Hey, do you remember me from college?" I was a pretty good computer science student, as you might imagine. MIT, went on to do all this other stuff. I was a pretty good computer science student.

There was one kid that I could do problem sets with that was useful. I found the one guy. We worked on our algorithms problem sets together. We worked on our theory of computation problem sets together. We could keep up with each other and it was useful. I realized, be in no other groups because it just wasn't that useful.

You got to find the people that you should actually work with. When you're stuck doing group projects, it just kind of sucks, but also it's college. What do you do? You try to set things up so that the work is kind of clearly set up. Give yourself the work, even if it's more work, that you can get it done ahead of time and not have much to do.

Then finally, you got to stay up the day before projects are due. This is just college life. It's like fraternity hazing. We're going to stay up late to work on this thing. We could have got this done before, but just assume that's what's going to happen. Trust me, as you get older, the standards for organization go up and things will get somewhat easier.

>> Yeah, you never would have done a problem set with me. I always had to track down. I had this one guy that I would use for the first couple of years and he pretty much dumped me. Then I had to find a new one for the software. >> He dumped you because you were too lazy or because you were too smart?

>> No, I wasn't too smart. He was really smart. I just needed help with a lot of stuff. >> You got to find someone who's right at your level. Then you're pushing each other a little bit. And that are willing. For me, it was the organization. They're willing to, I'm saying, I know this problem set is due on Friday, but in my autopilot schedule Tuesday afternoon is the right time to work on this.

They're willing and able to say, "I'll work on this Tuesday afternoon." Some people just can't do that. >> I was good about maybe doing that. So I helped to a certain degree. And I needed to see them work through some of the problems so I could do them. And then.

>> So here's my just outright brag. And I loved working with this guy. And he wrote me a few years ago. It was like, "Hey, remember we used to work together." >> Yeah, you mentioned him in the show before. >> Yeah. And his thing was, it was something like working with you on those problem sets.

It was something like, whatever. It was very complimentary. That's why I realized maybe he was like, "I'm not going to go to grad school." Or whatever it was, like, "I thought I was really smart on this stuff and then working with you." So it was like some big compliment of like, he should have told me that at the time because it would have gave me more confidence.

But anyways, I thought he was very smart because. >> But then it's pretty wild because then when he went to MIT, you're like, "Oh my God, I'm in a different game." Right? >> They're so good. >> I know. >> They're so good. Now I will say I aced MIT.

So from a class perspective, I did ace MIT and I did pretty well. But man, there was people there that were beast. >> Yeah. >> The beast at MIT, especially among the faculty. Faculty in particular, but there are just some real beast. Yeah. So it's, I mean, I see it completely like you're playing high school ball.

>> Yeah. I was just, I was thinking about like a draft pick. I was like, you're around all in like top 10 draft picks. >> You're playing high school ball. You're like, "I'm, this is, come on, I'm dominating these games." Like basketball or football is not so bad. You're playing football.

You're like, "It's not so bad. I like this. I like this game." And then, you know, Alabama recruits you. And you're like, "These guys are 350 pounds and they can jump over me. Like what the hell is going on?" Right? It's like a completely different, it's a completely different game.

And then like a few people percolate up to be the stars in that game and, you know, become famous. And it was like, I'm the guy who got drafted, got picked at Alabama, but did not go on to be the star NFL quarterback. That's like the way, the way I see it.

There's always like a level up. Always a level up. All right. Enough, enough, humble bragging without the humbleness. Let's move on. What's the next question? All right. Next question is from Felipe. How should I organize my deep work time? Should I spread a big task over four days for one hour each day versus blocking off a four hour block on a single day?

Ooh, Jesse, I'm going to consider this our slow productivity corner. We get some sound effects, please. Beautiful and professional. I love it. So as, as listeners know, in honor of or in celebration of my book, Slow Productivity that's coming out in March, in every episode, I like to have one question that is somewhat related to concepts of slow productivity.

We call it the slow productivity corner. I'm going to count Felipe's question as today's slow productivity corner because he's talking about should I spread out deep work? What seems to be relevant to principle two of slow productivity, which is work at a natural pace, ups and downs of intensity, taking more time, et cetera.

Now this is a reverse a roo, if I can use the technical term here, because what we're seeing is something that seems like a good example of this idea of working at a natural pace, but is actually organizational foos gold. There is a trap here. It is a, uh, an artificial slowing down that I think actually makes things worse.

So let me explain. So in Felipe's case, I would say work one four hour block. Don't spread that out over four one hour blocks. Now why is that right? If I'm, if, if the slow productivity mindset says be more, let's chill out and be more natural at our pace.

Why is that? Well, because when we get to the details of this type of artificial slowing, what we have to account for is the cost of overhead. So when I look at my time block planner and I say, I'm about to do one hour of work on this larger project, I don't just flick a switch and now I am all in on that project.

And over the next 60 minutes, I get 60 minutes of intense work done. No, there's huge overhead. All right. What am I working on now? I got to clear out of my head what I was working on before. I got to bring in the context of what's happening here and remember all the different things.

And where was I when I was last working on this, then I have to build up that intellectual head of steam where you sort of get that intellectual momentum and your mind is focusing in more. You get those first initial results, which gets your motivational system going, which allows you to actually capture more energy into your cognition.

And you get that head of steam going and now you're working all cylinders, but you're 30 minutes into your block. So then you end up getting about 30 minutes of all high cylinder work and then you're done. So when you spread this work out over four sessions, you're paying that overhead cost on each of these sessions.

You're not getting four deep hours of work out of those four sessions. It maybe is going to take six sections to get that same amount of work done. Not only does it take longer, because again, slow productivity is not about just winning the game of in the end, how many total minutes were required.

Those are worse minutes. It's like the ratio of sort of, I'm not in the zone to time I am in the zone. That ratio is not very good on the project. And that's just mentally more difficult and taxing. You do the four hour block, okay, 30 minutes into it, you're going full cylinders.

And then you get three and a half hours at full speed, you can start to do some damage, especially if this is really creative or interesting type of work. So this notion of sort of slowing down and working at a natural pace scale really matters here. So we are talking about like a particular chunk of work, just getting after that chunk of work might be the right thing to do.

If you're talking about at a bigger scale, many, many chunks of work. So the difference between I want to finish a draft of this book chapter, and I want to write this book. Now you want that pacing to be more natural. Now you don't want it's just every day, six hours for six weeks, we're going to write this book, it's like now spend the year to write the book and, and work on it and then take breaks and come back to it and let that let that be more natural in the pacing.

So the idea of natural pacing works at a bigger scale, when you get to the small scale, you have to be careful about these nitty gritty details, like the overhead involved, like the cognitive reality of working on specific things. So Felipe, that is our slow productivity corner of the day.

I appreciate the question, because it allowed us to talk about this common trap when it comes to work pacing. We still need our music, Jesse. I was just thinking that I got to get the music. We need slow productivity. People have been sending in suggestions. Oh, they Oh, can you send me?

I should people have been emailing not songs, just suggestions for like what the music should be like. Okay, so no mp3. No mp3s. Send if you have an mp3, by the way, you think we should use as our slow productivity corner of the theme music, send that to Jesse at calnewport.com.

Yeah, just make sure it's like, you know, five seconds. Yeah, but you do not send a well, but slow. So we should have like, three minute song, a Brahms concerto. It takes 17 minutes. Let's keep rolling. What do we got next? Next question is from Martin. Currently I'm enrolled in a part time online program and due to various issues, I do not know yet if I'll be continuing with the program during the next semester.

Consequently, my quarterly plan is somewhat open ended. How do you structure your plans to accommodate such situations? Well, Martin, write two plans. One that makes sense if you end up continuing with this online education program the next semester and one plan for if you do not, and then you can just switch to whatever one fits.

So I wouldn't overthink it two plans and switches needed. All right, let's roll. What do we got, Jesse? Next question is from Tracy. I'd love to know where the book where your book reading fits in your day. Is it time blocked? Or do you just keep a book near you at all times when you get some free time?

I have an ever increasing list of books I'd like to read, including now the ones that you just mentioned. It's a good question, Tracy. I don't time block reading for the most part because I'm doing my reading outside of my work day and I don't time block my time outside of my work day.

I have a few things I do. I do keep books around. So I do have downtime, like a meeting lunch, for example, to have a book to read. I will do that. Our family often has a reading block in the evening. It's just not every day, but it's not an uncommon post dinner activity.

Like let's let's all go do some reading. I will sometimes add an impromptu reading block during the workday itself, not necessarily a time block, just if something got done earlier, if I have some time to kill. And I read every night after the whole family goes to bed. And so depending on how into I'm in a book, I might stay up later than other days.

That gets through a lot of books. And then I combine that with finishing sprints. Hey, I'm into this book. I did this the other day. It was 100 pages into a 300 page book. I'm like, you know what? I have some time. Let's just go for it. And I read for like two hours that evening, another hour that night after I went to bed and just like this, knock this book out.

So finishing sprints also help there. My fastest book reading recently, actually, Jesse, is I got a book to thirst. Someone recommended it to me on a Thursday at a two thirty meeting. So as a meeting at two thirty, someone mentioned this book and finished it by Friday, Friday, Friday evening.

So sometimes I just go for it. Like I just stayed up late tonight, got up, read, put aside time to read. So sometimes if I'm really into a book, I just rock and rolled. I had a pretty cool sprint the other day because my loan was ending at the library on Kindle.

Yeah. And then so I was like, I got to finish this in a day. Now, you know, the trick, if you leave that the book open on your Kindle, it will it won't take it back unless you actually leave that book and go somewhere else. Oh, really? Yeah. So if you have a loan from the library on your Kindle, my wife does this a lot.

If you accidentally click out of the book and go somewhere else, it sucks it back. It can't suck it back when it's literally open. So just leave it open on your Kindle. You can you can buy yourself some extra time. How is the technology not advanced enough to be able to do that?

I don't know. It seems weird, doesn't it? And maybe it's different because you'd be D.C. or Virginia. This is Montgomery County Public Library, but they're probably all using Libby. Libby. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And now that we've said that publicly, they're going to close that loophole. My wife's always bragging to me about, like, I got this from the library and could keep it open.

I got that from the library. And I'm like, you know, you're married to a writer who makes his money off people buying his books. Like, why are you always bragging to me about how much little little money you've managed to spend to read books? I am a maximalist. I buy books just because I I'm not even going to read it.

I buy books. I will on multiple occasions. I'll buy a book. I'm excited to read like from Amazon and then like, oh, there's not going to get here for four days. I'll buy the Kindle version and read it while I'm waiting for the heart. Really? Physical copy to come.

I'm like, I'm into this book and I'll probably want to have a physical copy for my library. I've done this twice now in the last two weeks where I bought two copies of the book. I'm a book buying maximalist because it was one of the things when I was coming up in grad school, I had no money.

A lot of student loans, no money. I was a grad student and was, you know, starting to make some money from the blog just like a little bit to me, like the greatest thing of any financial windfall I've ever have is where the Amazon associate links on my blog at calnewport.com.

Oh, you mentioned this before. Allowed me to basically buy books. And we're talking, it was like $200 a month in Amazon credits. But I was like, basically I could buy any book I wanted. And to me that was the greatest. All other financial milestones I've passed. The ability to not have to worry about buying the cost of buying books has always been the greatest.

So because I'm a writer, I'm just always, I just buy books left and right. I want the authors to have the money. So if you ever have to move, you're gonna have to pack up a lot of books. Yeah. Um, but I, so I, the way I deal with that, I talked about this on the show is I have my various shelves.

So like my study at my house has a bunch of built in shelves and then our family room has a bunch of built in shelves. And then we keep two bookshelves here at the HQ. That's my space. So things have to rotate out. So as new stuff comes in, I'll just take the worst stuff off the shelf to replace it with stuff I like better.

So like over time, the, your number of books, once you reach stasis doesn't increase, but the quality of your collection goes. So then you just donate those to the library? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Or wherever. I do the same thing with my closet actually. Yeah. You donate it to places that'll take them.

Yeah. And then that way over time you get like a better and better collection. And so like now I'm in the process of getting rid of books. You're like, yeah, I kept this, but like it's not so great. Um, all right, let's do a call. I always like those.

Sounds good. Hi, my name is Sahil. First, I just wanted to thank you for your books. Your book, Deep Work has had a profound impact on my life. It motivated me to return to school in computer science. After having not been a great student for most of my life, I've been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA and was recently awarded a job at a Fang tech company, which has been amazing.

My question now was the way I was able to achieve all these results was through a lot of shallow work where I followed your advice, the removing distractions where I removed video games, I removed social networks, I removed a lot of my friends and hangouts that I was participating in and just completely focused on school.

Unfortunately, I also was not able to focus deeply. So a lot of times I was zoned out during class or have to watch lecture recordings three, four times before truly understanding the material. So I was just working for ridiculously long stretches of time in order to achieve these results.

I realized that's not going to be possible going into my career, nor do I want it to be possible because it takes a huge toll on my life. So my question is how can I actually train those deep focus muscles to actually get tasks done in less time and actually focus deeply?

Thank you. Well, Sahil, I appreciate this because it's a mix of a case study and a good question. It was a nice case study there. This goes back to what we were just talking about with students being terrible at being students and how if you're not terrible at being a student, you have this huge advantage.

Here is another example. Sahil said, I was not a good student. I returned to work actually caring about the mechanics of being a student and got a began getting four O's, perfect GPAs and got a job at a Fane company, Fane company. These are the big tech companies, so Facebook, Amazon, Google.

And what's the in in Fane? I think Microsoft, but that's an in. Netflix, right? Netflix. Yeah. So see, it works. Caring about how you work works. By the way, the same thing happens in the world of work as well. It's a little bit less pronounced because the floor is higher.

So in the world of students, of college students, the floor on people's work habits is so low, so low. Like, I'm surprised that like you aren't walking in the walls low, that if you're a little bit organized, you have this huge relative gap in the world of work. The floor is higher.

If you worked at a normal job, like most college students work at their at their work, you would get fired pretty quickly. But the floor is not super high. And a lot of people are just throwing stress and anxiety and just hours at raising the floor. So again, being systematic about how you organize yourself in the world of work, it still opens up a gap with most people that you can get a big reward out of.

Let's get to the actual question, though. So Sahil worries, we're not very comfortable with long periods of intense focus. So as a student, he could just take a lot of time doing half focus. He's not going to do that in his job. How do you get better at actually training your ability to concentrate for long periods of time?

So I'm going to give you three pieces of advice. One is interval training. You literally practice hard concentration using a timer. So you take a piece of work you're going to do. You set a timer maybe for 30 minutes and you say for that 30 minutes, this is full out intense concentration.

If my mind wanders or I zone out, I stop that time. I'll come back and try this again later. So you have a clear indicator of success or failure. Success means I maintained full concentration for basically the whole period. Once you're comfortable with a given duration, you up the time by 10 minutes.

You're just straight up practicing hard concentration. If you're roughly at a rate, which is what I've observed when I've done this with students of increasing the duration roughly once every week or two, you can in about two or three months significantly improve your comfort level with intense concentration. So practice directly what you want to practice.

Two, reading. That's your cognitive calisthenics right there. Reading hard books, books that have difficult information or complex theories. You could read a complicated primary source like I'm going to read Nietzsche concurrently with a secondary source about that primary source. You can kind of go back and forth and have this framework for trying to understand the primary source that you're trying to read.

Reading is just direct exercise with sustained concentration on abstract symbolic concepts. Big thinkers are big readers. So that needs to be your training. And then three, you need to spend a regular time completely away from distractions. This gets your mind very comfortable with itself. Combine this with something interesting.

I would suggest hikes, walking through nature, long walks. Your phone is turned off in the back of your backpack just for emergencies. There's nothing in your ear. It's just you and the world around you and the world between your ears. It's just comfort. Your mind gets more comfort just being with its own self-generated thoughts and not just reacting to digital inputs.

That's a slower gear. It gets comfortable with that slower gear. It gets more comfortable than when it comes time to do concentration on something hard because that's a slower gear than what you get when you get a bunch of those distractions. Just combine that then with the digital hygiene you already said you're doing, which is being careful about not having too much of algorithmically engineered distraction.

Be sure not to have too much of that in your life. That is your metaphorical equivalent of smoking cigarettes while you're training for the marathon. It's kind of productive to what you want to do. So continue to be very wary about, "I'm on my phone all the time. I'm looking at TikTok.

Stay away from TikTok." Use the phone foyer method. Don't have your phone with you when you're at home. Have it at the foyer. You can go there if you need it. It's not a constant companion. All the stuff we talk about, keep up that digital hygiene as well. And it's practice.

You will get better. You will get better at deep thinking the more you practice. At first, you'll catch up to good deep thinkers around you. Then after a while, you'll be notably deeper with your thinking than other people around you and you'll reap those rewards. Before we get to our final segment, I want to do a quick case study.

This is where someone sends in a brief summary of how they've used my advice. This case study comes from Don. Don says, "I just wanted to share details about the end result of deep work and time block planning practices that I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain.

At the time, I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race. Your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work.

Your time block planner and podcast were regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note, the book just received a starred review from Kirkus and the review noted the book's meticulous research. That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions and I can't thank you enough." Jesse, he also sent around the citation.

So the book, which comes out in February, is called The Astro Chimps, America's First Astronauts. Well, Don, I appreciate that case study. What that gets to, and I think this is important, is that we have to, and this is one of the whole points of the book, Deep Work.

You have to value the intensity of concentration. Intense concentration is itself an intrinsically valuable activity and it produces extrinsically much more valuable results than less concentrated focus. So just saying, "I want to make sure I write a thousand words or I spend three hours on my book," is not the same as saying, "I want to spend three hours concentrated deeply on my book." When you're doing high level knowledge creative output, like creating a book, you're doing, this is alchemy, right?

You're trying to have this brain take in information and congeal it into something that is more valuable than the information that came in. The harder you concentrate, the better this result is. And so the intensity of concentration should be a really key variable when we think about doing high level knowledge work, but it's often not.

And we know it's not because in the same companies that we make our money off of people doing high level knowledge work, we also say you should be on Slack. You should be contact shifting the email back and forth. You should be doing seven or eight meetings a day because that makes my life more convenient as a manager.

A complete disregard for the actual goal of trying to get intense concentration, even though intense concentration is behind almost any major value production in knowledge work. So I appreciate that case study, Don. Not just words, it's not just hours, it's not just task list, it's concentration and the quality of the concentration that matters.

We should talk about that more. All right, we have a final segment coming up where I'll talk about the books I read in November, but first let's hear from another sponsor. In particular, I want to talk about our friends at Blinkist. The Blinkist app enables you to understand the most important things from over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcasts in just 15 minutes.

These short summaries are called Blinks. You can read them on the app or you can listen to them in your ear if you're doing something else. Thousands of these top nonfiction books have these summaries available through the Blinkist app. The way that Jesse and I use Blinkist is to triage what we want to read or not read.

The back jacket of a book gives you a sense of what's in a book, but it's typically not super detailed. Reading a blink of a book, a 15-minute summary, which covers the actual main ideas, gives you a much better sense of what is this book about and is it really worth reading.

It's very effective. You get a really clear intuition if you listen to a 15-minute summary of like, "Oh, I see what type of book this is. Never mind." Or, "Yes, yes, yes. I want to hear details on all of those ideas." So if you're a reader, if you're a believer in deep work, you should be.

Blinkist is a great, think of it as an assistant or booster to the reading life. Here's the good news. Right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your seven-day free trial and you will get 25% off a Blinkist Premium Membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.

Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off on a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com/deep. And now for a limited time, you can use Blinkist Connect, a special promotion that will allow you to share your premium account. You will be able to get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. We also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

If you do not use a VPN, you should. If you don't use a VPN, people can see what websites and services you're communicating with. If you're at a wireless access point, people nearby can sniff those packets right out of the air. If you're at home, your internet service provider can see your packets and gather this data and sell it to advertisers, which they do.

So even if the content of your messages is encrypted, the headers that say who you're talking to, what website, what service are not. And so everyone can know what you're using with your internet time. VPN saves you from that and gives you privacy. The way a VPN works is that you write down who you really want to talk to in an encrypted message.

You send that to a VPN server. The VPN server then talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back. So the people who are watching you know nothing beyond the fact that you're using a VPN. They have no idea what site or service you're using.

If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN because they make this process so simple. You put their software on the devices you use, you click one button, it turns on and you use your apps just like you would normally. All this happens in the background seamlessly. They have servers all around the world.

So wherever you are, there is probably an ExpressVPN server nearby. So you can have a very fast connection or a little hint, you can purposely choose to connect to an ExpressVPN server in a part of the country that a country that's different than yours in order to access information that's only available to people in that country.

I know people for example, who will in the US connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK and then watch Netflix because there's shows like The Office that are on Netflix in the UK. As far as Netflix is concerned, because they're just hearing from the VPN server, you're from the UK.

So there's these little hints you can do with it as well. ExpressVPN also has good bandwidth. So again, very fast, very fast connection. So if you're looking to gain some privacy, or maybe check out some shows that aren't available in your country, give yourself the gift of a VPN, go to ExpressVPN.com/deep right now, and you will get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.

That's ExpressVPN.com/deep ExpressVPN.com/deep to learn more. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment, where I talk about the books I read in November. Those who don't know, I try to read five books a month and the first podcast or so of each new month, I talked about the books I read in the month before.

All right, so the first book I read in November was The Identity Trap by Yasha Monk. Interesting, I talked to Yasha more recently after I read this book. It turns out when I was up at Dartmouth last summer on a fellowship, he was also up at Dartmouth on a fellowship, but we never crossed paths.

We didn't realize it. We're both from the DC area. At some point, some of my students talked about, "Oh, I just went to see Yasha Monk give a talk." I didn't realize we were both there simultaneously, and we just didn't know it. He doesn't listen to the show? I guess not.

Dude. Yeah, that's on you, Yasha. You should have known. That's how we know you don't listen to the show. Yasha's an academic. He's at Johns Hopkins, works a lot in international relations. The Identity Trap is taking a look that has two goals. Goal number one is to try to just give a scholastic history of the modern progressive thought, the collection of theories that will sometimes be crudely summarized as woke, what I often call on the show postmodern critical theories.

The first half of his book is academic history. Where did the particular collection of ideas that make up this collection of beliefs that the modern progressive left have, where do they come from? Yasha calls it the identity synthesis. The second part of the book is then him making an argument for, "Do these ideas work for accomplishing the goal that they have, which is justice?

And if not, what works better?" So we've heard of history, then an analysis of what we have, is it actually working? I know these histories pretty well because I've been an academic my entire life. I watched a lot of these ideas come together. I've read multiple books on this as well.

Yasha's was really good. I thought it was really accessible, but also really accurate. There's a lot of complexities because academic theories are complicated. This begets this, and this is similar to this, but not quite this. It's easy to get lost in that complexity. I think Yasha did a great job of saying, "Let me cut through.

Here's basically, here's the through lines you need to care about." So if you're wondering about where did all these ideas we hear today from modern progressives that are everywhere, where do they come from? This book is the best one I've read to give a sort of objective story. The short version of his story, and I think this is probably right, is that the two big theories emerging in the '80s and '90s on which a lot of the current, what he calls identity synthesis came from, is he really says the two main ones that begat most of the other important ones would be post-colonial theory, as in particular initiated by Edward Said.

So when I was in grad school in the early 2000s, post-colonial theory was the thing. Everyone was choosing, all the humanities students were choosing Arabic as their language so that they could do Edward Said-style studies of post-colonial theory. And then the other big progenitor of the modern thinking would be Derrick Bell's critical race theory.

Most of these drew heavily from postmodernism, and in particular Michel Foucault's notions of postmodernisms and the way various discourses create and maintain power imbalances. Now there's this, and I won't go too long on this because I'm an academic and I'm a nerd and most people aren't nerds and don't like nerds, I won't go too long on this, but I just love academic theories.

There's an irony in this because the postmodernism of Foucault was a reaction to the grand theories of Marxism and basically these French intellectuals were disillusioned. Marxism kind of fell apart because it turned out like, "Eh, the Soviet Union wasn't so great." So like the ideas, these radical ideas got put into action in a lot of places and it didn't go well.

And so a lot of steam fell out of Marxism as a sort of foundational theoretical family that a lot of academics were drawing from. And the postmoderns were very nihilistic and existential. And they didn't think that any sort of grand political theory of like, "This explains the world and it's going to improve the world if we just do this." They gave up on all of that and they talked about, so it was a deconstruction, right?

It was all about deconstructing these theories. They hated the idea of grand narratives. Well, you get Sayeed, you get Bell, they're taking these ideas from the postmoderns in particular about how language can construct and be used to reinforce power dynamics. And they said, "Let's use this to create grand narratives.

Let's use this to actually create political movements, explain the way the world works and suggest actual action." So they're using postmodernism to do the exact opposite of what the postmoderns thought that you should do. So there's a little bit of irony embedded in that. But anyways, from postcolonial theory and from critical race theory, you get a lot of branches of related descendant theories and connected theories and almost all the ideas that you would hear today in a DEI seminar or in a march at a college campus, where you're like, "Where do these terms come from?" All of it comes back there.

So it was a really, I think, focusing on postcolonial theory and critical race theory, in particular Sayeed and Bell's initial movements in these worlds and all the ideas they collected afterwards, it's right. I think it reads right. It is a good history. So it's a really good book and it's accessible.

He writes it much more accessible than even I just talked about it there. What is his analysis? Well, he's a big believer in what he calls philosophical liberalism, which is not sexy. It doesn't have complicated theory. It doesn't draw from Foucault. Its core ideas have been around for three millennia.

Its core ideas have been at the core of essentially every major justice movement in the history of humanity. We're thinking just even more recently, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movements, a lot of these recent, even the recent big wins we've seen in the fight for justice all came from philosophical liberalism.

It's not exciting and it's in opposition to the ideas in the identity synthesis, which actually try to deconstruct a lot of the key ideas behind philosophical liberalism. It's more utopian and dystopian at the same time. And Monk makes a pretty good argument of like, I know it's not exciting, but philosophical liberalism, which is, it's flexible, but also matches our moral intuitions that go back to our very earliest emergence of ethics in the very earliest books of the Hebrew Bible.

This idea is what works. So there's this nice sort of polemic as well of, let me analyze these. I don't think the identity synthesis is going to lead us to more justice. I think we have these, these older ideas do. So I think it's a great treatment. It's not that long.

It seems very informed. It seems very even handed. And so I think it's useful, especially if you're young or sort of new to this, like something that happens with grand theories is the problem is if you're like 19 and you go to college and you encounter whatever grand theory is big at the time, the dialectic in your mind is, or the binary in your mind is no theory in theory.

And so you just think of it as like, most people just don't realize that there's theories that explain the world and we can use these theories to figure out better ways of living. But I do understand that. So you just see it as this binary between no theory and theory.

The good thing about books like monks is it steps back and says, no, there's many different theories. So you can't just look at the connection between, I see the world theoretically, or I don't, you have to say, why do I see it through this theoretical framework? There's other ones.

Like for example, if you're on a college campus, this is something I think people get wrong about the modern identity synthesis or postmodern critical theories, outside observers think that, oh, everyone on a college campus is just completely locked into this and thinks that's the way the world works. It's how you get the sort of Ron DeSantis of the world being like, we have to just like defund colleges and it's all crazy.

If you go to a college campus and go to a philosophy department, philosophers hate that stuff. They're like, no, no, no, no, no. Well, hold on, hold on. We have been studying philosophy forever. This is our expertise. Like these theories, these are wonky. It's not good philosophy. They're intellectually inconsistent.

It's like philosophers don't tend to like the identity synthesis. And these are people on the same campus, professional ethicists don't tend to like it. So it's not, you have to evaluate these things and not just say it's binary verse, no theory or theory. But when you first go to college, so if you went to college 50 years ago, it would have been classical economic class-based Marxism was everywhere.

Every professor seemed like they were talking about it and that would be the big thing. But then that fell out of favor. And so now we have the identity synthesis and some other things are competing with it and those will fall out of favor eventually. So you have to have some epistemic humility when thinking about theories and not just see it as dumb people don't know about theories and I know about the capital T theory.

There's lots of different theories. So it's important to step back and say, where did this one come from? What does it say? What are the alternatives? How do I feel about these different alternatives? Why is this the right one versus the other right one? And of course, be very suspicious if the proponents of a particular theory say, wait, asking questions about it is that's wrong.

Don't don't don't ask questions. Always be nervous about that with any particular theory. Of course, you can ask those in Soviet Russia who ask questions about does this make sense and found themselves quite cold in Siberia. So you have to be, you do have to be careful about that particular strain.

So anyways, I like these type of discussions. What I told Yasha about is when I was up at Dartmouth, there'll be a final thing I'll say on this. When I was up at Dartmouth, I was reading books from people who had had the same fellowship over the decades earlier, right?

The Montgomery Fellowship had been around for a long time and they buy the books of the fellows and put them on the shelf. And so they had a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which he wrote in the late 50s, early 60s. And so I was reading that just because it was there on the shelf.

And Galbraith had come through in the 70s or something like that to be a fellow. And I have to go back and find this quote, but he has this. He was writing this at a time when Marxism was really big on college campuses. It was like the unifying framework of a lot of different departments on campus.

And this is sort of the classic kind of class-based Marxism. And it was really big. And there was a sort of Marxist critical theory from the 1930s. It greatly expanded where you could apply Marxism, not just economics. It was everywhere. So that was the big theory of the time.

And Galbraith has this throwaway line where he's like, "This is really popular right now." And he didn't, obviously he was not a Marxist, but he's like, "This is really popular right now on college campuses. Why is this so popular among so many thinkers?" And this interesting line, he said, "I don't think most of these thinkers are fully on board with all of the actual implications of these theories." Because a lot of them, when it goes back and studies, it can be kind of kooky.

He says, "The real issue here is that these theories are complicated. To understand them means you're smart. The fear is that if you don't demonstrate you understand them, people might think you're not smart. And that's a huge motivator." And it was John Kess, Galbraith's analysis. So why did this theory spread?

It's not because all of these anthropologists and all these economists and all these social scientists, they all were really on board with the really intricate proposals of Marxism, but it was complicated. And to be involved in that theory meant you're with the smart kids table. And to not meant that maybe people would think you couldn't keep up.

So that's just something to keep in mind whenever a grand theory is sweeping through intellectual worlds. It could be that everyone has studied this thing and read Yasha's book and said, "This is right." It could also be that people want to seem smart. Simple questions, all were raised by a book.

That's the sign of a good book. So good work, Yasha. Definitely worth checking out. All right. So then moving on. The next book I read was Israel by Martin Gilbert. Really steering towards a controversy in my books this week. What else? The next book we read is Apple Pie is Bad.

And a book that is, I think like what all the, oh God. Anyways, Israel by Martin Gilbert. This was part of my, I mentioned this last week. I got three books about that part of the world to read back to back to back after October 7th. This book's written by Martin Gilbert.

This is not an Israeli book. This is a book written by a British historian. So it's just more of, I just wanted a TikTok view of like 1850. This goes up to about, I think the second Intifada. So like early 2000s, just TikTok history, right? This is not someone, it's not a Palestinian writer.

It's not an Israeli writer. Just like, let's get the six. This is a tome too, as you might imagine. Big tome. Hard book to write just because it's a lot of history to fit in the six or 700 pages. And I thought Gilbert did a really good job in his redaction.

What things to talk about and how not to get lost in the details. So just as a work of history, I thought it was good. I mean, it's not edgy or seed excitement. It's long. We're talking about like, it's straight up history. But I thought it was, you know, I do now have the TikTok history of this happened in this year and that happened.

And here is who this person was and who that person was and how the rise of the PLO and Arafat and how that changed the PLA and just getting the on the ground details. So if you're looking for a sort of non-polemical history of that part of the world, I learned a lot, especially as compared to Noah Tishbe's book, which is much, much more, I think, polemical and has an actual goal, like a sort of pro-Israel goal.

This book just felt comparably speaking, let's just get the facts. So it's useful. I know a lot more about that history. I know a lot more about those names. Moving on. I also read letters to my Palestinian neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi, who I really like. Actually, he went on Ezra Klein's podcast recently.

I think that episode is worth listening to. This book is interesting. You need to get the current edition because it's actually two books in one. So it's the original, the original book, letters to my Palestinian neighbor, followed by a bunch of responses from Palestinians to the original book. So you read the original book and then you get a bunch of responses that were sent back.

And so it's almost like a dialogue, though you get this book and then the responses. But I thought that was really interesting to get those responses. Yossi is a very interesting character. Again, I mentioned before, he was someone who was on the Israeli right wing, who over time moved to the Israeli left wing.

So he has sort of an interesting self-reflective view on Israel and Palestine and the peace process. And so I thought this book with those two parts, his letters and then the letters back, was really interesting. Also kind of hopeful. It was an interesting book. He has a podcast, by the way, the Hartman Institute produces it called For Heaven's Sake.

And it's every week or twice a week. It's him and another host. It's like 20 minutes an episode. And it's if you really want to understand what's happening inside Israel right now, it's like really good. It's an English language podcast where they're really bring you up to speed on what the mood is in the country and the dynamics and the political factions.

So it's a useful podcast. All right. Then I changed gears because that was a lot of hard reading and read two books that are maybe a little bit less intellectually sophisticated. Be Useful by our friend Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was, I guess it's a self-help book. It has like seven ideas and he gives his advice.

I think my recommendation, I think Arnold is an interesting person and in a lot of ways an inspiring person and has good advice to give. My advice would be to instead of reading this, read his autobiography, Total Recall. And you will extract for yourself a lot of these same ideas, but it's just his story is so interesting.

When you read Be Useful, you're just going to want more of his story. So just read his story. Total Recall is a fantastic autobiography. And I would say every lesson in Be Useful, you will extract for yourself as just a consequence of reading his autobiography. So that would be my recommendation.

And then finally, I read John Grisham's newest book, The Exchange. It was okay. Not much happens. It's a follow-up to The Firm. It mainly just helped remind me how good The Firm was. It's interesting. I mean, these hit books early on, the books that follow don't have to be so good.

Like there's no way, The Exchange is a fine book, but if this was a debut book, there's no way it would grab a lot of attention. I mean, not that much happens in it. It just reminded me of how good The Firm was. So I'm not giving that my Roger and Ebert two thumbs up, I suppose.

Which by the way, I'm thinking about because I'm reading a book about Siskel and Ebert. I'm reading a book about Siskel and Ebert right now, which is kind of interesting. But it was fine. If you like Grisham, it's fine, but it's not The Firm. So there we go. Those were my books, a real mix of high and low this week, from academic theories to political conflict to Arnold Schwarzenegger giving- The identity trap explanation was spot on.

That was good. I love academic theories. I love academic theories. I just, well, it's probably not a fair hope for the world that everyone has time to, not everyone's professional academics, to deeply engage in ideas and theories. But it's water for me, it's deeply engaging with ideas and theories.

Yasha did a great job of summarizing these particular theories, what's good, what's bad. He makes a pretty compelling case for philosophical liberalism. I've made a case for philosophical liberalism in so many words, many times before on the show as well. So he's an interesting guy. I want to go up there and spend some time with him.

Is he up there full time? Yeah, he's at Hopkins. Oh, right. Yeah, it's not far. Yeah. Baltimore's not far. Yeah. I was thinking about Dartmouth for a sec. No, he was just up there for the summer. You know, because everyone who lives in the mid-Atlantic, if we're given the excuse to go to New England during the summer, we'll go to New England in the summer.

We could be like, "Hey, we want you to be a fellow at our water park outside Durham, New Hampshire, where what we mainly need you to do is help make sure we don't have people go down the slide too soon after each other. But also, you can lecture on artificial intelligence." We'd be like, "Yeah.

Durham, what's the average high in July? All right, we'll be there. We all want to get out of the swamp town for the summer." All right, speaking of which, that's enough time. I think we've spent enough time talking today. Thank you for listening, subscribe, and leave a review. That really does help.

If you want to leave a question, go to thedeeplife.com/listen. The links are right there. And we'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. So if you enjoyed today's episode about how to get started on being more organized, I think you will also like episode 272, where I go on to list the essential tools for having a sustainable organizational system.

My friend, David Epstein, joins me halfway through that episode to help as well. So it's definitely worth watching. Check it out. The goal for today's deep dive is to go through four essential tools that you need to build your productivity toolkit.