Alright, let's see here. We got a question from Mark. Mark, who describes himself as from Utah, the gateway to Colorado. What's, Jesse, is that like, uh, Utah, self-hating Utah? What is that, like, self-deprecation? Is there, like, an-- I couldn't tell. I was thinking maybe he goes to Colorado a lot.

I mean, maybe he drives. This is like a pro-- this is like a pro-Colorado partisan, anti-Utah guy. Alright, so here's what he asks. "What are you learning from people who apply your work? You have to be hearing good things from people who are reading and applying the principles in deep work.

I'd love to hear them. Also, what are the important things that you can learn from your book that you wish your fans/cultist could learn?" Well, the only place I have cultish followers, I think, is in that Utah. Because they-- it just really-- they really suck. If only-- here's what I always say, and Jesse knows this.

If only Utah could just be more like Colorado. Then we'd see-- what I'm doing here, Jesse, is I'm pandering to, uh, to this question asker. Okay, so what-- what have people learned from deep work, and what-- what did they not learn that I wish they-- what have I learned about the book?

It's a good question. Well, Jesse, you're-- you do some deep work. What have you learned? What's your real-world experience with trying to be deeper? I think it goes hand-in-hand with all the podcast episodes that you put out in the other books. I mean, working on stuff, you know, without distraction.

You get-- you get a lot more done. Essentially, closing down your email. Yeah. Not checking that all the time. You know, just having certain times where you check that. I would say that's pretty consistent. Like, people will say, when-- however I do it, when I'm able to be more sequential, and when I do hard things, just do the hard thing without context switching until I'm done.

You hear this a lot. They say, "I get so much more done." I-- I would say that's pretty consistent. Your "Face the Dragon" motto is really solid, too. Like, that hit home with me. I have it on my board at home, so I see it and-- Yeah. And that's relevant, right?

I mean, with "Face the Dragon," what I'm-- what I'm saying is, look at everything on your plate. Like, don't run away from it. Look at everything on your plate, and I call it the "Productivity Dragon." "Face the Productivity Dragon." And here's the thing. If it is inconquerable, then you have to see it and confront it.

And-- and for a lot of people, that's why I'm glad you brought it up, Jesse, what that leads to is they face the Productivity Dragon. So they've written down everything. A lot of times what'll happen is they write down everything, and then they try to come up with a strategy for, "How do I deal with all of this?" They start trying to build out their autopilot schedule, and, "I'll work on this here and this here," and it just doesn't work because it's just way too much stuff.

And what that leads them to do is to say, "Oh, I'm going to cut out half of this stuff." Yeah. And then the other thing that's great is, with your time block planner, you showed how, if certain things go over, you cross out your existing plan and just start a new one, you know, on the same day.

Yeah. So there's oftentimes where I'll be doing stuff and run out of time, and it's-- as slow productivity as you talk about, you just wait till the next day. Yeah. And then try to factor it in. I like that. You had a plan, you were intentional, you've won the game.

Yeah. I mean, no, there is no gold stars for, "Wow, you came up with a time block plan, and you hit it exactly." Or, "You came up with a weekly plan or a-- or even worse, a quarterly plan about how this thing was going to unfold, and you hit it exactly." No one comes along and says, "Great, you get extra money, you get extra sales for your book, you get, you know, gold bars," or something like that, right?

It doesn't matter. What matters is, are you being intentional with your time? Because who cares? If you get it right or not, is-- all that tells you is it's a little bit of luck, and how good are you at guessing how long something takes? But in the end, it's going to take however long it takes.

And so the key thing is that you're working on something consistently and with intention until it's done, and it gets done well. Whether you guessed properly how long that was going to take or not is not that important. The automate-- the automation stuff and finding different environments for different work is awesome.

Like, I'm taking Spanish lessons right now, so I know like certain days I'm going to do my homework, you know, in a different spot. All right. And it's just, you know, done. All right, so good. So we have three things so far about applying deep work in the real world, what people have learned.

So in particular, what Jesse has learned. Facing a productivity dragon is important. Intention trumps accuracy. The key is that you have plans. Don't beat yourself up if you don't have plans. And then three, Jesse is saying the idea of having set times and places you do set work is a hack that really works pretty well.

Where's your Spanish lesson environment or ritual? It depends on the day. This Saturday, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it tomorrow morning at, you know, at a separate desk in my house and then not at the same desk that I do something else. Which is a good point.

Sometimes it's minor. We talked about this in a recent episode. Yeah, we were telling someone to put a second desk in the same room. It doesn't have to be dramatic. Yeah, you don't have to fly down to Mexico every Saturday to do your Spanish lessons. It's just this is the place I go to do my Spanish lessons, even if it's a different desk in my same house.

Yeah, and then even listening to your interview with Ferris yesterday and you were talking about going down to DC, going to the Botanical Garden, stuff like that. I mean that type of stuff I've factored into to like the way I do things like going to like the local library or going to some other things that do going to different coffee shops to do something and then if you do that for an hour it adds up, keep on doing it.

That's one of the, that's a slow productivity plug as well. It's one of the things that goes in my life when I get near that chronic overload threshold. Like right now I'm near that chronic overload threshold because I'm helping with a few university initiatives, which I think are very important.

So I'm doing this by choice, but it's a lot of stuff I don't typically like involving Zoom and PDF files, right? It, the overhead of that gets to the point where you no longer have those half days free or those full days free where I would say I'm going to go down to DC and like think about one problem for most of the day and that's a real slow productivity thing that when you, when your load is reasonable, you can do things like I'm going to go down to a museum and work and then go walk through the galleries to get inspired and then go work some more and move around the city and make a whole day about it.

You can't do that anymore when you're overloaded, but when you can do that, you're going to produce something cool at the end of that year. When you can't do that, you're going to get a lot of Zoom meetings done and get a lot of PDF files read, but it's like me right now, month whatever of working on my book proposals, they're still not done, which what I probably need is just a couple days at the botanical garden.

So yeah, it's an argument for slow productivity. If you don't have the space to take a slow day to work on one project, you probably have too many projects. All right, so that's good. So there we go. That is, there is straight from, straight from the mouth of someone who's working with these ideas.

These are some of the things that we have learned or people have learned about putting deep work into practice.