I feel like I have two different personalities, one who's very productive and intentional, another who wants to be a slob, scroll social media, play video games and watch TV all day. How do I stop falling into the slob state? Well, Fahad, it's a good question. It's not a original question.

And I mean that in the good sense of your issue is not unusual. Your issue is not something very specific to you. And in particular, your issue here has nothing to do with some sort of intrinsic character flaw that has been overcome. I think we often miss when we talk about tales of people who diligently and disciplinedly work through big accomplishments, we often miss the subtlety that goes into setting up a lifestyle or work environment in which you actually are able to maintain motivation and accomplish something big.

That is a lot more subtle than we give credit to. It's not just about some people are able to white knuckle it and some people are weak. It's much more complicated than that. There's a couple of things I want to focus on here as being important. One has to do with how you choose what you work on.

One has to do with how you build a lifestyle or approach actually working on it. So let's start with the choice question. And then the second piece will cover more. That's going to overlap more with the central theme of today's episode about cultivating discipline as a mindset. But let's start first with the choice of project.

Oftentimes, especially for young people and for how you say here, you're 21 years old. So that that counts as you, you're half Jesse and I's age, which is its own psychological issue for Jesse and I to deal with. But don't worry about that. For someone who's young like you, you have to be very careful in what you choose to work on.

So there's a couple of things that is going to potentially short circuit your motivation. One is you just set too much stuff on your plate. Yeah, I'm going to do this and this and this because I can't wait to get started and I want to work on all these things.

And I just want to get really motivated and go for it. And your mind gets exhausted and says, we can't be starting a business and AC in our classes and writing a book and training to be in really good shape. It's just too many things. The energy involved in trying to keep up with these things is too much.

And it just seems intractable and forget it. Motivation is gone. The other type of issue that happens here is that your mind, you maybe have one or two things. It's not the quantity, but your mind doesn't trust your plan for execution. You're like, yeah, I want to look like Thor, but all you're doing is sort of just randomly going to the gym and sort of lifting weights.

And your mind's like, you don't know what this is not going to lead the Thor. We're not going to look, we're just doing random stuff. Or you say, I want to be a famous writer and you're sort of writing every day. And your mind says, this is not how this works.

Just you're writing kind of random stuff or with no guidance, no structure. What's going to happen with this? We're not going to become a famous writer doing this. So once your initial, just general excitement about being a writer dies off, we're going to withhold motivation. And then you're going to find yourself falling off.

So being careful about how you choose what you work on a reasonable load, and then study what you work on and make sure that your plan for approaching it is evidence-based and logical that your mind will trust. Yeah, we're going to get results with what we're doing. And to get there, especially if you're young, might mean bringing your ambition down and aiming at a much closer milestone.

So it's not, I want the Pulitzer Prize. It's, I want to be a regular contributor to the college magazine. So you bring it down to a more proximate goal. You have a plan to get there that your mind trusts. So the choice of things matter if you want to have your motivation be sustained.

All right. The second big category here comes to that mindset we talked about earlier during the deep dive earlier in the show. Does your mind think of yourself as someone who is able to handle and stick with internally motivated goals? It sounds like right now, no. So when I hear I get going, I'm reading you here, I'm very productive and intentional.

And then it sort of falls off and I become a slob. If I had to guess this productivity and intentionality might be aimed in part at externally powered goals. You're working because you're very motivated about some particular outcome. You got yourself excited about it, watching YouTube videos or reading something, and something got captured you and got your attention going.

And that's what's motivating you to do the work, to return to the books, to return to putting in effort. And when that external power begins to dissipate, then social media TV comes back. So seeing yourself instead as someone who finds pride in sticking with internally powered goals, you're going to have less ups and downs.

How do you do that? I'd go back to the deep life stack. I would start with the discipline layer. I would choose two to three daily disciplines covering a couple of different areas in your life that are non-trivial, but are also tractable and start marking on a sheet, on a time block planner, on a calendar, on your wall, wherever you want to do it.

Did I do each of these each day? And really do that for a whole semester. Then return to, okay, what's my more ambitious goals for what I'm gonna do with my time? You will find that it's easier to stick with it. Your mind is much more comfortable with, we believe in this, these are carefully chosen.

We stick with things even when they're hard. That is what Fahad does. That is who we are. You change your self-conception by training your mind to think about what you're doing differently. All right. So there's nothing wrong about you Fahad. What's wrong is some of the details of your approach towards your very admirable goal of doing intentional, remarkable things with your time.

So choose carefully and spend some time developing a mindset of discipline, a comfort with internally powered goals. And I think you're going to find that this up and down whip sign between I'm working 10 hours a day and I'm on social media all day, that's going to start to even out.

All right, Jesse, what do we got next? Okay. Next question is from Jacob, a 20 year old from Colorado. I seem to have contracted a case of what I call seasonal discipline, where I'll be very actively disciplined on following my habits and systems for a few months at a time, and then fall off really hard for a few months in an endless agonizing loop.

I'm wondering if you have any tips for cultivating a more consistent commitment to discipline. You got a lot of young people today, Jesse. I know, I was thinking the same thing. Makes us feel old. You know, when you were doing the Henson Reed, I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved in two days and I was like, mine, I go back and forth a lot, but mine's white now.

Oh, mine is too. Yeah. Yeah. I don't mind it. I don't mind it, but my beard is, well, it's salt and pepper. Yeah. But it's definitely white and I can see it at my sideburns as well. Yeah. My hair is still mainly brown, but, oh, that's coming. That's coming.

We need to balance these 20 year old questions. I'm telling you, Jesse, next we'll get, I don't know, a 41 year old question is going to be like a combination of wanting to know about tax filing. You know, I'm doing my schedule C deductions and wondering if this is the right line item to put that deduction, some mixture of talking about, yeah, tax filings.

And then also, I don't know what else to- Potential hair surgery. And like, yeah, hair surgery. I'm thinking about getting like this hair surgery for that hair surgery. And I would kind of a tax question and also I'm tired all the time. And I need to, should I get like testosterone treatment?

Yeah. Meanwhile, these young kids are, yeah. I was up 12 hours, 20 hours straight working on my screenplay and we're like, I only get two hours of working in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap. All right, Jacob, I'm sorry. Let's get back to your question.

Seasonal discipline. You, some periods do well, some periods you do not so well. All right. Very similar to Fahad. So I'm going to have, again, two solutions here where this is going to overlap with what I talked about with Fahad is just the mindset training piece. So the very same thing I recommended Fahad that I recommended at the beginning of the show, I'm going to recommend as a starting point for you as well, that discipline layer, that very first layer of the deep life stack.

Two to three, non-trivial and tractable, non-trivial, but tractable daily disciplines covering multiple areas of your life that you track every single day and put most of your productivity, intentionality, focus, all that willpower on just doing those every day, not breaking the chain. You want to mark it every day on a calendar.

It's a good tune up just to get your mind back in shape as I don't need external power to do things. I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited or things are going well to make progress on important things. I can also make progress in the hard seasons, in the proverbial winters when other things are going on or the work itself is not going so well.

So there's a mindset tune up and I think that returning to that discipline layer can help with that. And then just like with Fahad, but with slight differences in specifics here, I would say, let's also think about what this, what you're calling here, habits and systems, what these habits and systems are.

So even if you have the right internal conception of yourself, it is still the case that if the particular habits or systems you've put in place, if those particular habits and systems aren't sustainable, or if they have a lot of friction, they work, but they have overhead that don't need to be there and your mind senses that, you are going to accumulate stress fractures, right?

You're going to accumulate over time, this friction and grinding of the system's not quite right. It's too big, it's too hard. It has steps we don't need to do. It's like the system's going to start building up these stretch fractures until the whole thing eventually breaks apart. And that's maybe why you can only make a few months.

This is very common in the world of productivity systems, that if the system is not compatible with your life and streamlined and believable, you can last with it for a while. But after, it gets this clunky, I'm typing these notes and it goes into this note system that then automatically populates these types of systems.

And every day I have a generative AI bot take these and generate a schedule. And then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours. These types of high overhead, high friction systems, they begin to just accumulate too much wear and tear until all of the gears get jammed.

And then you just say enough with this and you fall back to doing nothing until doing nothing after a while gets you so stressed out or overwhelmed by being disorganized that you go and build a new system. And that starts generating friction until its gears mesh. And then that could also be the source of what you're seeing here.

One season up, one season down, one season up, one season down. So you also want to really check out your systems here, streamline them. The simplest possible thing that actually helps you get your work done sometimes is the right thing to do. Get rid of unnecessary things, have a core document where you keep track of here's what I do and how I do it.

So you're not just trying to keep track of things in your mind and you can see where there's overlap or redundancies or your systems are sort of out of control. You want something that fits very naturally into your life. So if you're starting from scratch here, I would say something like multi-scale planning.

You have a strategic plan, a weekly plan and do some sort of daily time block plan during work days, but not the weekends. Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks so that you don't have to keep track of those things in your head. Put those two things together, maybe mixed in with some sort of fixed schedule productivity mindset of this is my work hours and everything else has to fit into it.

That's a good start for organizing all the professional things in your life. Use very simple tech tools for implementing this. I'm talking, you know, you have a paper time block planner and then a couple of Google Docs to keep track of strategic plans and weekly plans. You could use Trello to keep track of tasks or even just a long text file where you're typing things.

Simple technologies that are easy to get in and easy to get out that you can access from multiple platforms. That makes a big difference as you add in other structures or goals around your personal life. Keep it simple, you know? So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility. Let's try to minimize friction.

Let's just make the general rhythm of your life something that's very sustainable. That'll help too. So I don't know in your case, Jacob, which is the bigger problem. So I don't know if it's a mindset issue, that your systems are fine, but your mindset just needs right now, external fuel for you to work on hard things.

Or if it's a systems problem, your mindset's fine, but your systems have too much friction. So look at both. But between those two things, I think you're going to find the seasonality of following systems is going to go away. One epilogue I will add to this as well is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue.

I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal. I stop being organized during some months versus others. I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal. In fact, in my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, there's a whole principle is about working at a natural pace and it really gets into seasonality and how natural and well suited humans are for that.

So I do want to throw that in there. You might just be getting exhausted, right? Like a professor, by the time a professor gets to the end of spring, traditionally, they're exhausted because they've gone through a full school year. So to actually pull back some in the summer makes sense because you need to recharge.

If you try to go all out in the summer after a hard spring and after a hard fall before that, you might just run out of steam altogether. So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well. So let's throw that in here, not just as an epilogue, but I'm going to throw this in, Jacob, as my third part of my answer.

Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same. You're still multi-scale planning, but when you get to some months of the year, the amount of stuff you're putting into your week, the complexity of your daily time block schedules are much easier. And you get that relief of, man, this feels great.

I can really control my time. I'm taking Thursdays completely off because why not? I'm using planning so I can move pieces around. This is great. I can actually extract a lot more relaxation and recharging because I have some structure. So I think a seasonal workload could be excellent, but you don't want your systems to come and go seasonally.

And you want to make sure that your mindset is one that doesn't require external power. So there we go. I upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob, and hopefully you will find that useful. All right. Let's keep going here, Jesse. Yeah. And then the time management video on our YouTube channel is definitely something you should check out.

Yeah. So look under the, what's it, core ideas is the playlist. Right. So youtube.com/calnewportmedia. Look at the playlist. There's a playlist called core ideas. There's one titled, a video titled time management, where I talk about that multi-scale multi-scale planning. Yeah. It shows up, shows up right in there. It's a good place to start is something interesting.

This is where we talk about something interesting that you, my listeners have sent into my interesting@calnewport.com email address. So I want to load my password. So I'm going to load up now a short post that one of you sent in that I thought was interesting. Okay. So here we go.

Here's the post. This was posted on, I suppose, LinkedIn. I have it up on the screen. So if you're watching youtube.com/calnewportmedia episode 256 or the deep life.com episode 256. All right. This is about Harrison Ford. I thought this was appropriate because there's a new Indiana Jones movie in the theater.

So I'll be taking my boys to shortly. Here's what this post says before he was Han Solo or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford was a carpenter in 1964, Ford moved to Hollywood to become an actor, but I arrived on a metaphoric bus full of people who had the same ambition, he said.

So he came up with this plan to prevail over the competition. As Ford spent time around the other aspiring actors on that metaphoric bus, he became aware of something. Most of them were in a hurry. They're in a hurry to make it or to make lots of money or to prove something to someone, whatever the reason most run a tight timeline.

So forms plan was to do the opposite, the length of his timeline to do so. Ford said, I had to have another source of income. So I became a carpenter by doing carpentry. He explained, I was able to wait it out as the years went by the attrition rate eliminated many of those people from the competition pool until finally there are only a few of us left on the bus from the entering class.

I always saw life that way. You just have to find a way to stick it out to prevail. All right. I like that story because it's a great vignette of slow productivity in action. There's something that's both effective and sustainable by working on a small number of things over a long period of time consistently.

This is the definition of internal powered goals. The theme that unifies this episode. I'm sticking with this, even if I'm not excited about it every moment, even if my motivation goes up and down, even if my success or failures have periods where one is big and the other's down and that's flops back and forth.

I'm going through a hard period. Now I consistently make progress and not just working blindly, but really getting feedback, adjusting. You can imagine Harrison Ford struggling with roles early on, pivoting when he sees a different type of role, seeing he's a special type of training. It's this relentless return.

What can I improve here? What's not working? How can I adjust my trajectory? You're making adjustments. You're letting evidence come in. You're learning more, but forward momentum always, always continues steps every day. So you're moving in the right direction, adjusting your path, always moving. This more often than not is what unlocks really interesting impact and interesting opportunities.

A slow productivity approach, a small number of things that through internal power, you keep pursuing over time, just relentlessly. I'm sticking with this, updating how I do it, but sticking with it over time. Small number of things done really well, reasonable, sustainable pace really is, I think a very sustainable strategy for a deep life, a very sustainable strategy for eventually doing, achieving deep accomplishments.

So I thought that was a good story to end on. Productivity doesn't have to be fast. Productivity doesn't require constant intakes of motivation, inspiration. Productivity doesn't require these 10 hour YouTube productivity, YouTuber style, binges of I'm just out white knuckling everyone else. Sometimes it's as boring as Harrison Ford said, I'm just going to take my time and keep working on this craft, taking feedback, adjust, taking feedback, adjust, having a second trade to support myself until finally American graffiti happens.

Then Star Wars happens, then Indiana Jones happens and the whole thing breaks open. So sometimes slowing down is the right way to actually make it farther down the path as paradoxical as that can seem.