I think that the deep pain point relates to sort of the envy of often husbands, fathers who have a setup that is more conducive to longer stretches of work time. What's ironic though, I think, is that part of why it's hard as a mom, and I'm saying this with a lot of stereotypes in hand and I recognize that and I apologize, is that part of what makes it hard to have those long stretches is the guilt that interrupts.

I'm Pal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 221. If you're new to this program, it's where I answer questions from my audience about the struggle to work and live deeply in an increasingly distracted world. If you want to submit your own questions, there's a link right in the show description.

I'm here at my Deep Work HQ. I'm joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I got a couple pieces of administrative work to do here, a couple announcements to make, but I wanted to talk first about what's coming up in the show because I'm kind of excited about it. We have a guest.

Nice. And we're going to actually integrate a guest into a fuller episode. We're trying something new here. So we have a deep dive coming up. After the deep dive, we have a guest, which I'll tell you about in a second. And then after the guest, there is a little bit more to do.

We are going to talk about the guest and one extra issue that I wanted to bring up. So the guest we have today coming up a little bit later is Yael Schonbrunn from Brown University. Yael is an assistant professor of psychology and she has a new book out. I'm holding it up to the camera for those who are watching called Work Parent Thrive.

It takes a psychological approach to the issues that arise from being a working parent. We hear about this a lot. Jesse, would you say this is like one of the, I don't know, top five topics we hear is from people who are confused, emotional, frustrated, or looking for help on the struggle of having a career while also having kids.

It's definitely one of our top issues. A hundred percent. And Yael has a fantastic approach that's rooted in acceptance commitment therapy. As we'll talk about in this interview, it's different than the existing approaches to this issue. It doesn't supplant them, it complements them. But as you'll see, it's incredibly aligned with the deep lifestyle, values-driven, lifestyle-centric, career planning style approach we take to the show.

Now we have a bonafide PhD psychologist who actually knows the research, who's going to help you tackle these issues of being a parent and work in a way that we talk about, but with much more professional gravitas. So I'm really looking forward to that. A couple of administrative announcements.

We got the event coming up, the live event for those of you in the DC area. Next week, it's Monday, November 14th at 7 p.m. I think I have that right, at East City Books in Washington, DC. I will be moderating a conversation with David Sachs about his new book, The Return of Analog, or The Future is Analog.

Do I have that wrong, Jesse? Let me see. Let me look it up here. The Future is Analog. I said that wrong. His first book was The Revenge of Analog. His new book is The Future is Analog. There we go. David is really pleased with this promo right now.

David somebody has a book that's called Analog Something. I don't know. Sometime in November, I'm going to talk about it somewhere, so whatever. David Sachs' new book is The Future is Analog. He is doing a bookstore appearance on November 14th at 7, in which I will be moderating a conversation with him.

Jesse is going to come, too. We're going to kind of treat it like a live episode of the Deep Questions podcast. I'd love to see you. The other administrative thing I want to point out is we've been doing interesting things with the YouTube page. So youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. In addition to full episodes being on there and clips from the episodes, we've done now four weekly update videos where I talk about some of my personal struggles as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster to do deep work and balance that amidst all the demands of the shallow.

So you get a sort of inside look into my life and my work, which I don't always get in that much detail on the show. I don't always get in that much detail about myself in my articles. So if you're interested in my struggles and my strategies and how I try to make my life work, you should check out those videos over at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

Discussion of the interview and one extra point that I wanted to bring up. So I think it's a good game plan. Let's get started now with the deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is the 20% paradox. Now I wanted to choose a topic that was going to be relevant to the interview that follows in this episode.

So stick around for the interview that follows because you're going to see some deep connections between what my guest has to say in this topic I wanted to tackle here up front in the show. So what is the 20% paradox? It is the observation that if you take a knowledge worker who is burnt out or stressed about their work, which let's be honest is a large percentage of knowledge workers right now, and you measure how much work are they doing above the threshold of sustainability.

So the level where if your work is below this volume, it's pretty sustainable. You're not super stressed about it. Your job is just what it is. How much work are they doing above that threshold? What you find consistently is that it's going to be somewhere around 20% too much work.

Not 60%, not 200%, not 100%, but it's always right around 20%. Now there are people who do, let's say 100% too much work. So if we just for the sake of round numbers, say nine to five, five days a week, if your work fits comfortably in there, that's pretty sustainable.

We're used to that. We'll be okay with it. It's possible. Some people work a hundred hour weeks and they need all a hundred hours to get things done. I know some people like that. That's very rare, right? Most people, it's about 20%. It's like me today. I'm a little stressed out today because I have probably one hour too much stuff on my schedule.

If there was one hour worth of work removed, like an appointment removed from today, from my schedule, then we would be okay. I'd have time to get everything done. I'd have some margin. The day would end at the normal time and I'd be okay. I don't have quite enough time after I record today's episode.

I'm running out the door. 20% too much. And this is what you find more or less when you study stressed out knowledge workers. So why do we fall? Why is the source of stress always coming from this relatively narrow quantity of overwork? The wrong answer, the answer we tell ourselves when we interrogate our burnout is that I'm being asked to do the amount of work I'm being asked to do is about 20% too much.

I just look, I can't just say no to my boss. This is what's on my plate. And what's on my plate is about 20% too much. It's I'm being asked to do too much. The reality is though, in almost every case, you're saying no to most things that you're asked to do.

Most people don't realize this, but you're turning things down implicitly or explicitly through direct conversation or indirect action all the time. And this kind of makes sense, right? Like what, what are the chances that of all the different people in your life, in your professional life who could make requests of you, who can put work on your plate?

What are the chances that it just works out that all of the different requests that they throw your direction in an ad hoc manner with just slaps, checks and grabbing you at a meeting or emails? What's the chances that when you add up all that work, it ends up to be exactly about 20% too many hours.

That's not going to happen. That would be a cosmic coincidence. That's rolling 17 dice and having them all come up threes. What's really happening is that you're getting asked to do things all the time. If you really added up the work of all the things you could be doing and all the things you could be accepting, it would be more hours than there are in the week.

It would be impossible. You're saying no to most things. The things you say yes to ends up being about 20% too much. The reason why I think this happens, and I've talked about this before on the show, but let's make it really clear here, is not about the logistics of work.

It's not about administrative philosophies. It's not about time management strategies. It's about psychology. It is difficult for humans to say no to other humans that are making a request of them. This would make complete sense if we want to put on our somewhat suspect pop evolutionary psychology hat. This makes sense.

I want to avoid just those stories here, but this makes sense because we're a tribal species. We're used to living in a small tribe of people who are related to us that we're fiercely loyal to. In the tribal context that dominated for the first 300,000 years of our species existence, requests were probably pretty serious and there would be a real social consequence to saying no.

When your tribe member says, "I need you to watch my back as I attack this mammoth," if you say no, that's a problem. You're going to get a rock to the back of the head. As you can tell, I know a lot of really good details about Paleolithic life.

All right, so we take requests from people we know in our tribe seriously, so it's very difficult to say no. Okay, this is a mismatch, of course, for a world of 700 other employees in your organization and human resources and other types of groups within your company that all need different things from you and who can make requests with basically no friction by sending you a quick email.

That brain, that Paleolithic brain is a mismatch here because here it's not life and death. Someone asking you to come participate in a panel is something that it's not a big deal if you say no to. No one's going to get a rock to the back of their head.

No one's going to get gored by a mammoth, but our brain is concerned. So we have a hard time saying no. It's a psychological problem. What helps if we feel overloaded and stressed? This gives you, from an internal psychological perspective, coverage to say no. Not coverage to the other person, coverage to yourself, your brain, your Paleolithic brain.

"We can't say no. We can't say no." You're like, "I am so stressed." You're like, "I mean, we got to say no. We're overloaded. I mean, look, this is an extreme circumstance. I normally would say yes, but there's these other factors like our cortisol is up, our schedule's packed.

With reluctance, we have to say no." I really do think this is a big source of the 20% rule is that we implicitly engineer the volume of our acceptances to get us a workload that's just heavy enough that we're in a persistent state of low-grade stress. And then that is where we then feel comfortable saying no to what follows.

The reason why we don't curve our workload 20% less below the sustainability threshold is because when our work is sustainable, we don't have the psychological cover to say no. It's a self-reinforcing feedback network that has a convergent steady state at the stressful side of that threshold. So I think this is really important.

The other person doesn't care as much as you think when you're politely saying no, because you've already said no to them probably seven times for other things. You just didn't realize it. They don't care. They don't know the difference. Your CV, your resume, your bosses, you think they really would know the difference between if you spent 20% less time.

That's not going to show up. There's so much noise and how many things get accomplished or this thing took this much more time than this thing. It's all a little bit apples to oranges. 20% less work doesn't necessarily even show up in a way that anyone is ever going to notice.

The outside world can't see things at that granularity, but it can make all the difference to your personal sustainability, your personal satisfaction. It's a small epsilon that if you close it, lots of good things happen, but it's psychologically difficult to do. So partially this is just expository. It's a theory.

We're all stressed, but not like completely 100-hour week overloaded because it's a coping mechanism. Partially this is also advisory. If we understand the 20% paradox, maybe we will be a little bit more emboldened to just shave that extra epsilon of work off and fall back to a more sustainable place.

When we understand that we actually say no implicitly all the time, we do not have 60 hours of work exactly being put on our plate. We have 200 hours being put on our plate and we say no to most of it. Then saying no a couple more times is not so fraught, but it's going to make all the difference in the world.

It's going to be one less meeting today, ending your day and moving to a shutdown ritual one hour earlier than normal, starting your day one hour later, one more project off your plate, one more year in between book projects. I don't know. Whatever adds up to 20% in your particular professional world, it can make all the difference.

So anyways, keep the 20% paradox in mind. It's a big driver of stress. It's largely psychological. Psychological problems have internal solutions. So we have some hope here that we can make a difference. All right. Now coming up next is our interview with Yael Schonbrunn. Before we get there, let me first briefly mention a sponsor that makes this show possible.

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If I understand correctly, we have you on your book launch date. So your new book, I'm holding it up here, Work, Parent, Thrive, that we'll be talking about came out on the day we're recording this. So by the time you're hearing this podcast, it is widely available. So as I mentioned before, I hope this is a nice distraction from the internet pulling at your attention every five or 10 minutes.

So we're appreciative to have you here. Yeah, I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. Appreciate it. So our plan is I want to get into your book and the big approach and some of the nitty-gritty details later, time permitting. We're going to get your expert opinion on some relevant issues we talk about a lot here on the show.

But we should start off by just getting people up to speed with who you are. So let me know what I'm missing here. Assistant professor, psychology at Brown University, also mother of three children. Okay, that's correct. And your book, Work, Parent, Thrive, where did this come from? Well, it came from my own challenges as a working parent.

I think what most authors say is they write the book that they wished was available at some point in their life, and that was definitely the case for me. Like many people, I struggled a lot when I first became a working parent. And I really wanted something that was positive and where I could use the resources that I already had to guide me through what felt really challenging.

And most of what I found in the bookstore felt pretty negative, like talking about the structures of society that weren't adequate and policy and workplace and marital inequalities. And while all of that may be true, I sort of wanted something where I could actually today start to create a better existence for myself.

And so instead of relying on the bookstore, I started diving into the academic literature as people like you and I do. And I found some really cool concepts. The first and most important one is this concept of work-family enrichment. So we usually talk about work-family conflict, but there's this other side where there's actually a lot of evidence.

And most people, if they think about it, can actually identify some of these kinds of experiences for themselves. But work-family enrichment is this idea that our two roles help each other out. And then once I had that in mind, I started diving deeper into science of creativity, science of rest, stress research, relationship research.

And I found all of this different evidence that really our roles can help each other out. And we're so focused on the conflict between them that we're really missing the ways that our roles work better together. And so I decided to write a book about that. And the result is what you're holding in your hands.

Well, I mean, it's one of the things I love about this book is I think your approach on this issue of working parenthood is something new. And so maybe we'll step back and lay the foundation of what is new about this approach. Let me tell you my theory about books about work and parenthood.

And then you can tell me if I have it right. And then we can see if this makes sense for your book. Because I get a lot of questions about this because we talk about work and productivity night. So many questions, so much emotion, curiosity, frustration, anger on this topic.

It's a huge topic, especially with my audience, which is all sort of aging into parenthood right now. Let me know if this is right. Before your book, it seemed like the spectrum of work parenting book was the, I call it the Laura Vanderkam, Bridget Schultz spectrum. And you can tell me if I have this right or not.

But at Laura's side, it's like practical time management. Like, okay, it's hard to be a working parent. So like, here's some things that might help. Bridget's side is more, we need to emphasize the essential impossibility of this task as a way to motivate more systemic reforms. And there's kind of mutual suspicion.

Like if you give concrete time management advice, you might undermine the message that this is hard enough that requires systemic change. And on the other way around, well, if all we're focusing on is emphasizing how impossible this is inventing, people could be less stressed if they would ever. Your book seems to be, it's like triangulate.

It's a different, it's not on the spectrum. It's doing its own thing because you're applying psychology. So you described the book as taking an inside out approach. So maybe we could get into that. So what is this approach? I think it's different than either of those two approaches. Yeah, exactly right.

And so I do want to emphasize, I think that the Bridget Schulte kind of mentality of the structures being inadequate and progress being necessary is absolutely right. And Laura Vanderkam's idea about, that we can get more out of our time if we're deliberate about it and strategic about it.

That's all absolutely correct. But I think what it does miss, and this is kind of what you're pointing to, that my book tries to do is this psychological piece that there's this huge element of working parenthood and why it's hard. That is just fundamentally human. Like as humans, we're drawn to different roles.

We want to love deeply. We want to contribute meaningfully. And that is a part of what makes for a human, like a fulfilling human life. But inherent in that is if you're drawn to multiple roles that demand a lot of you, there's going to be conflict and it can't be fixed in the way that we might fix a machine, in the way that we might fix something in our house, because it's a human problem.

And so what is so, I mean, if you think about it, it's almost surprising that it's missing because it's such a human problem. And yet there's nothing in the literature before my book that really addresses the psychology of this, of how we are drawn to lots of different roles and that actually being drawn to lots of different roles and participating in them is good for us.

And yet it comes along with this tension that exists between demands. And so what I talk about is that a lot of what's out there offers these outside-in approaches of we got to make changes to the structures around us, to our workplaces, to our marriages, to social policy. And that includes time management.

That's kind of like an outside approach, outside-in approach. And what I talk about is drawing on research and practices from clinical psychology to change how we think about working parenthood and how we approach it sort of from more of a psychological perspective. And so I do think it's a pretty different approach.

And what's interesting is, and you're sort of saying like there's tension between the Laura Vanderkam and the Bridget Schulte camps, is that I think there's going to be tension between my camp as well, because people are so invested in sort of defaulting to this narrative because it's been so dominant for so long.

And so I think it can be uncomfortable to think about this as a human problem because we so badly want this to be something that can be fixed. And I argue that it can't, not at least in the traditional way that we think about fixing problems. Yeah. And I'll tell you why part of why this resonated is I saw this reflection too early in my own writing career where I was writing student advice books.

And my first books on student advice were very just purely tactical. Let's talk about the strategies for how you study, how you manage your time. And then once I actually started advising students, so over email and in person, I just met with real students, there was a shift in my work where I realized the human side was so fundamental that there was this big shift where the psychological reality of the role that school played in people's minds and ambition and burnout and the human side really opened a lot up.

And so I'm already predisposed towards adding the human side so important. And I think that's why I like this. So let's go back then to the, you mentioned before, and this is early in your book, we think now as working parents that we have a parent role and a work role and they're in conflict and we just wish they could both be optimal as if they're done in isolation.

And we see it as a problem when one pulls from the other. You say psychology tells us something different. Multiple roles could be good. They can enrich each other. So, so walk us through that because I think this is, this gave me some optimism. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty cool when you think about it.

So it's sort of, there's these two competing models and one is the scarcity model where like we have a finite amount of time and energy and attention. And this is where work family conflict thinking comes where we think, you know, if we're working, then we're not parenting. And so we're dropping the ball on parenting.

And if we're parenting, then we're really screwing our work life over. And that there is some evidence to that, right? There is finite time and energy and you got to sleep for some of the hours of the day, but there's this other theory called role accumulation. And the idea there is that each role can kind of feed each other.

And I think about this in three distinct pathways. So we can think about the skill transfer. So we have multiple roles, but whenever we're in a given role, we're probably building a skill. So Cal, when you're on this podcast, you're thinking deeply, you're asking provocative questions, you're paying attention to technology.

So you're building skill. And in some ways that feeds back to your parenting role. You can ask your kids deep questions. You can teach them about technology. When you're parenting, you're certainly building skills. You're building skills and empathy and perspective taking and being incredibly patient. And guess what? All of those skills tend to be really beneficial in the workspace.

So that's skill transfer. Then there's the buffer effect. And this is the idea that when we have a stressor in one area of our life, it can sort of be buffered by positive experiences that we might have in another. So if you have a rough day at work, you get to go home and hug your kid.

If your kid is going through a super rough developmental stage, you can go to work and have a positive experience of mastery. The final pathway is the additive effect. And that's the idea that happiness in at least one definition that psychologists use is built on a meaningful life. And the more roles we have, the more opportunities that we have to build meaning, to have a sense of purpose and contribution.

And so in that way, having lots of roles, although they might sort of take time that takes us away from the other role, can actually offer us opportunity to build more meaning, more purpose. And so in these various pathways, there's opportunity for the roles to kind of help each other and help us sort of grow bigger.

So it's this kind of Taoist idea where you have the yin and the yang pressing against each other. And if you sort of zoom out, the yin and the yang together are greater than the sum of their parts. And that's the idea of work family enrichment. So we're stepping away from the scarcity model and into this accumulation enrichment model.

And that's the mindset shift that I'm hoping to leave people with through the book. I mean, I love that mindset. It's like an implication of what you're saying, for example, is, you know, when you're the working parent and you're frustrated that I have something taking my time away from work, I have to leave early to pick up my kid, you tell yourself a story that if I had no kids and I only had this job, I'd be doing so much better.

Man, I'd really be killing at this job if I just had more time. But the counterfactual might not be that. Well, you would have more time, but there's these skill transfers you're missing. Also, would you really be happier? So OK, if you could add an extra two hours a day and maybe even there's like some promotions that happen faster if you had a more monolithic source of meaning in your life, that's very unstable.

I mean, this is an implication, I guess, right? Like the counterfactual, if I could just be a parent and do nothing else or if I could just have a job and do nothing else, it's not so clear that that would be a better parenting experience or that that would be a better professional experience.

Right. And the other point I'll just kind of add on is that the mindset that we take impacts how we engage. So if I think to myself, my work is so bad for my kids, then I'm going to be really sheepish and ashamed when I'm with my kids or when I tell them that I have to go and they're going to pick up on those cues.

And it's probably going to I'll actually back up a little bit. There's this very interesting study on low wage earners and the early years of parenting. And one analysis that the researchers did was comparing different cultural populations. So they looked at beliefs about the impact of work among African-American moms and among Latina moms.

And this is just a statistical finding. Obviously, this is not always true, but on average, African-American moms were more likely to think that work was something to be proud of and that it was good for the family, whereas Latina moms were more likely to think that work their work was going to cause irreparable damage to their kids.

And what the research study found is that those differences in the beliefs about the impact of work on their kids were associated with depression symptoms over the first year of their child's life. And those depression symptoms were associated with how the parents interacted with the kids. And so you have parents working and this is sort of controlling for supervisor support and number of hours and various other things.

The mindset that we have about work really changes the way that we participate in our work and also the way that we participate in opportunities to engage with our kids. And so it's even more than just sort of like on the face of it, what you're doing, it's like the how you're doing it.

And the mindset can really contribute in ways that I think are beyond what we fully understand. Interesting. And then how does labeling play into that? Something else you talk about is distancing from unhelpful labels. Is labels the cognitive, whatever, signifier of an underlying mindset? What do you mean by that advice?

Yeah, so labels are kind of like the specific words that your mind spits out that are sort of based in mindsets. Mindsets are sort of like this filter and the labels come out of the filter. So if you sort of walk around the world thinking, you know, work is so bad for my kids, then you're probably going to spit out the words like bad working parent, neglecting parent, or you know, failure in some way.

And so it's sort of like the broad filter generates, helps you to generate the specific words. And what we understand about the way that people connect to words is that, you know, if you're connected to I'm a bad working parent, it's more likely to again, contribute to how you feel and also how you engage in the world.

So they're all connected, but they're sort of, you know, at different levels of processing. What about like self descriptions as busy, I'm overloaded, I'm stressed out, the knee jerk, how are things going? Oh, it's completely crazy. It's completely busy. Does that fall into that same category of labels? Yeah, it does.

And I think the important thing is to recognize that like the human brain labels, that's just something the human brain does. You know, we categorize, we have to understand a very complex world that has input coming in from internally and from externally in such high abundance that it's hard to process it unless we sort of categorize things.

And labeling is one of the ways that we categorize. And labels, therefore, aren't bad. They're not good or bad. They just, it's just what our brain does. The thing that I try to call attention to, and this is based in the kind of therapy that I practice, which is an evidence-based therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy, is that there are times when connecting to certain words or certain stories can really drive unhelpful behavior that is sort of the antithesis of how you want to show up in whatever the role is.

So if, you know, there's really interesting studies that, you know, stereotype threat, like if a woman is taking a math test and they've been exposed to some words like, you know, women are bad at math, your mind getting consumed with that really interferes with your performance. And so in that way, the labels that we connect to can be really problematic.

But then there are some labels that are quite helpful. Like if before I get on a podcast, I'm feeling kind of nervous and I connect to a label of, you know, I'm articulate, like that might actually help me perform better. So the labels themselves aren't good or bad. It's more just figuring out what labels are helping us to live in accordance with how we most want to live and which ones are interfering.

And when we notice labels that are interfering, and often it's those negative, rigid, really extreme black and white kind of labels, that's when it's useful to notice them, unhook from them and connect with labels that are more value aligned. So like, what are some examples of common negative labels that working parents get stuck on?

I think any, you know, failure, falling short, overwhelmed, unfair, those kinds of labels can be really problematic for performing. I'm trying to think of other ones that are common, but those are the ones that pop to mind. And we've talked about, because I'm a fan of acceptance commitment therapy, we've talked about on the show some, and Stephen Hayes' book was inspirational to me.

So we've talked some about on the show, I'm assuming some of the same strategies that come out of ACT, like the labeling the label as a way to distance, like, "Oh, all right, mind, there goes the, you know, I am a terrible parent. I'm never around. All the other parents are better than me story.

All right, I know that story. Thanks mind. I'll get back to that later." Is that same strategy? That's exactly right. Yeah, there's a number of those, but that's the simplest one is I'm having the thought that you thank your mind. I mean, often this is kind of what you're pointing to, your mind needs to be thanked because it's trying to do you a favor.

And that is actually one of the functions of labels is like, if you've identified that parenting well is important to you, which probably is, then your mind is trying to prompt you to do better. So calling you out as not doing well is an effort to sort of get you to put in a little bit more energy.

The problem is that it sometimes doesn't work very well because when we feel ashamed of ourselves that actually isn't when we do our best work in any role. And so thanking your mind for caring enough about the role and then connecting to a different kind of strategy. So unhooking is called diffusion and acceptance and commitment therapy is one strategy.

You can also do different imagery techniques of like seeing the words on a screen or you can write them down and fold it up and sort of put it to the side. Or you can do this very cool strategy called that is this practice called milk, milk, milk, where you repeat the word over and over again until you kind of realize that words are just kind of sounds and it helps you to kind of unhook from the meaning that we attach to it.

So there's all these very cool strategies in the act that are really fun to use and very helpful. Yeah. So I want to get to what I think one of the core issues is on this topic with my admittedly narrow audience, but this is just the the core sub issue that I would say underlies a lot of the correspondence I get from people, which is ambition.

Right, because there is this fundamental reality and I'm struggling with this. A lot of my audience is struggling with this. If you're a high achieving, ambitious person, there's no way to avoid if you have a family, you will it will reduce the number of things you can accomplish per whatever unit time.

I mean, so we can talk academia since we're both professors. I mean, for sure, I would publish more papers if I if I didn't have kids like just in most fields, if you're very ambitious, you have something like that. A lot of what I'm hearing from people in their 30s who are just starting families is coming to grips.

Well, how do you deal with this reality? I'm an ambitious person, high achieving person in my professional life that is being curtailed some. So how do we address that specific subfield with the type of ideas we've been talking about so far? Yeah. Well, so I have to share that my first entry into popular press writing was a 2014 New York Times piece that I wrote and the title was A Mother's Ambition.

And it was all about my own struggle with becoming a parent and sort of drawing back on my ambitious academic pursuits to be more the kind of parent that I wanted. And it was and is a challenge because ambition is it's it's like a personality trait. It's pretty static and that's definitely a trait that I hold.

And yet, I mean, I have just written a book. So on some level, I am ambitious, but on many other levels, I've really drawn back because of the parenting role that I've adopted and the way that I do it. And I think the answer that I have to what do we do with ambition if we've decided to participate in lots of roles is clarify your values.

So this is a practice that's really central in ACT, which is to identify what how you most want to show up in the world in whatever role, in whatever context you're sort of looking at. So values are different than goals. So if you think about the metaphor of climbing a mountain, a goal would be the destination of getting to the top of the mountain, whereas values describe the quality of action, how you're taking the journey.

So you could do it ambitiously, right? You could like try to get a really good workout and get to the top of the mountain as quick as you can and beat all your friends. Or you could take it slowly and enjoy the sights and the sounds. And you might decide to bring your kids along and then you're going to go really slowly, but it might be really fun.

And then if the weather changes, you've got to shift your value and prioritize safety if there's a storm over getting to the top of the mountain. So values shift based on context. And you may still want to get to the top of the mountain, but decide to take the journey differently based on what's going on around you and inside of you.

And I think being able to do that values clarification work can be really helpful. And again, that doesn't mean it's not uncomfortable to sort of draw back on ambitious pursuits in the service of participating in more roles. But it does help you transcend that discomfort because you're clearer on what you want to stand for.

So for me, I have really slowed down my academic trajectory. I've been lapped many times over by colleagues who started at the same time as me and who I thought I'd be moving along with. But because I've been really clear on what's important to me and what kind of a meaningful life I want to be living, I have been able to tolerate it.

But it doesn't mean that it's been easy. There's been lots of moments that are and continue to be pretty uncomfortable for me. Well, this has basically become a personal therapy session for me. So I do appreciate this. I mean, I just got back from I don't know if you have the same experience, but when you go to academic conferences, the interactions with the people who have just sprinted beyond you, who you were together with, like you went to grad school together, and it's always a good shaking.

So then what about, OK, this is great. The two elements you mentioned that I want to highlight here that makes this hard is the peer comparison and then unfairness. So there's all these like systematic unfairness in all of this. So no kids versus kids, you have a leg up in a lot of things.

Men versus woman, dad versus mom, the mom almost always is going to have the bigger hit than even their partner or the dads that you know. So there's all these different field versus other fields. Some fields are more flexible and can deal with parenthood and other fields. It's no, it's unrelenting.

Professors have it easy compared to law partners. You say, well, wait a second. You can like just go home if you need to. And there's not someone who's clocking your hours. So how do we psychologically deal with peer comparison and unfairness? So I mean, what I think peer comparison does is it triggers envy, jealousy, and I'm a psychologist, so I always think about the function of emotions.

How are emotions serving us? Most emotions are wired in for self-protective purposes in some form or another, survival, reproduction, belonging to the group, protecting our kin. Jealousy I think is one of these emotions that is less about survival and more about highlighting what's really important to us. So I think it's one of those really useful emotions because it tells you like, I really, this thing is really important to me.

And so when you engage in a peer comparison, you see somebody lapping you or sprinting past you. I think it's a moment to pause and say, you know, I'm not doing that. Do I want to be doing that? Like is that a choice that I would make even if it means giving up on these other things that are the reason that I'm being lapped?

So for me, and maybe for you too, it's really identifying, like I decided not to be hardcore in academia so that I could pursue popular press writing and so that I could be a more engaged parent. Would I choose to go back in full throttle so that I could stay in line with my peers?

And that helps me to clarify my values. Like what do I really want? Right? Because it's easy to sort of get caught up in the jealousy and instead to kind of unhook from it and get curious about it and use that as an opportunity to reconnect to what really matters to you.

And if you decide, you know, I'd give it all up for that, you know, a CV that looks like my colleague who's so impressive, then that's really good information. I imagine that for most people, like you gave up whatever you gave up for a reason and reconnecting to that reason can be really helpful in transcending the discomfort of that envy.

Does that make sense? Yeah. And is it similar for unfairness? So, you know, COVID lockdown and you're watching colleagues without kids doing better than normal because like, great, I can just focus on my work while those with kids, the term we kept using on the podcast is this is a dumpster fire and I don't think people are recognizing like how impossible it is.

And everyone's just pretending like, well, we're on Zoom. It's okay. It's not okay. We have three kids in the house and it's chaos and it's terrible. Is that a similar thing? So how do you deal with that type of fairness? Like, man, it's not jealousy, but it's frustration. Yeah.

I think unfairness is sort of a really important emotion, right? This feeling of injustice because it points to the fact that there's a wrong that needs to be righted or action that needs to be taken to make things better. And I can very much relate to what happened during the pandemic and being home.

And I actually, my husband has a very static schedule and he needed to be on calls from nine to five. So I would parent and then I was under contract to write this book. So starting at like five o'clock after I had just done a day of homeschooling and parenting and making the meals and not having any reprieve, that's when I would start my writing.

It was really painful. And I would get really angry with my husband. How unfair is it that you can read an email and talk to adults and I have to sort of be at the service of three small little beasts who I love, but also I need a break from.

And it actually, like for many people, it helped me to say, you know what, this isn't working. We need to renegotiate some of the responsibilities within our constraints, right? Like we need his job. We need my job. We love our kids. We're not going to toss them out. But within what is possible, we needed to renegotiate how we did things in our home.

Sometimes that's not possible, right? Because there's these social policies and workplace rules and some marriages aren't as lovely as mine. I'm totally unprivileged. But I do think that injustice points to some action needs to be taken or we need to find a different way to handle what is. And that's where some of the tools, again, from psychology can be really helpful.

Like if you can't make changes, can you change how you tolerate what is unjust, right? Can you sort of use it as a learning experience for you or sort of like make meaning out of your suffering? This idea from Viktor Frankl's wonderful book, Man's Search for Meaning. So there are different ways to tolerate it, even if you can't make changes.

But often that sense of injustice or anger is a prompt to try to pursue some change. Right. That makes sense. There's a two-pronged approach there. Yeah. Let that point you towards changes you can make. If it's within your own family, maybe it's we need to renegotiate these rules or renegotiate.

I've heard this a lot. Renegotiate careers in the family, like this notion of is the default just going to be that you get to do your career without change and I'm going to sort of make some changes and maybe we both should. I know a lot of people who do.

Maybe we should both make some changes in our careers to make this more so there's the prompt for change or within a workplace. Like the way we have this set up is that these guys over here get all these advantages that aren't really serving the company. It's just arbitrary.

Can we change something about how we do this? And then for the unfairness that's never going to go away or what's residual, then we have working on how we react to it too. And then it kind of overlaps some of what we're talking about with jealousy. And there's also going to be some stuff that's just annoying and we can't change.

Don't let it consume because we have our values. We know what we're doing. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's make this concrete. Let's say we have an assistant professor. You know, like my scenario is probably similar to yours. I started having kids after my first year as a professor.

So it was sort of like early on. If we're putting all this advice into practice, like one thing you might say to that professor is figure out your values as a parent in academia. Figure out a vision for your life and career that's very meaningful and is tractable and serves those roles and then pursue that.

And it might be like, I love being an academic. I want to do important work on this topic. I want to be a parent and I want to be around my kids during this age. And there might be a very tractable way to do that, which maybe tenure comes a little later.

Maybe it's less awards as some of the hard charging peers. But in the end, if I'm getting you correct, it doesn't matter. You were doing really important academic work. You could be a professor. You could be a parent. Like you could, you know, it's in the end, you're able to hit your values.

You have a lot of ways to get there. And that's somehow separate from have I maximized some sort of utility function. If I maximize the number of papers, am I the best? You know, in my group that these sort of superlatives don't really have a bigger, as big a role to play as a value driven vision that is tractable to pursue.

And I think, you know, in essence, what you're doing there is you're separating out the outcome from the process. And that is what values work helps you to do too. So we can have sort of outcome goals. Like I hope to have X number of papers or to have achieved full professor by whatever age or to have my kids launched in a certain way.

Those are sort of like end goals that we want to get to. And those are important to have because they kind of give us a direction to move in. But even more important, I would argue, is the process is like how we get there. So if what it takes to get to a CV, as long as, you know, you would ideally want, you know, this sort of maximized outcome requires you to never be around for your kids, you know, that is that a quality of action you want to embody over the next 10 years while your kids are still in the house.

And one way that I think is really useful to think about this is like thinking for this is like a perspective taking exercise. So think forward to 30 years if you've gotten to somewhere in the realm of, you know, what your goals are. You know, I'm a full professor and doing well and happy and my kids are doing well and very healthy.

How would I like to look back on this phase of life? What would I be most proud of having done in this stretch? What would I regret having done in this stretch? And you can think about it as it relates to the balance of working parenthood or the balance of whatever roles you participate in.

Because it helps to sort of unhook from like what sort of emotions are driving you to say like, oh, my God, but what if I pass this up by taking that future perspective of yourself? Now, of course, you still want to get to that future perspective, that future position that feels desirable.

So you do have to consider opportunity costs, right? Like if you're doing one thing in a given moment, you're probably not doing the other. Or if you're doing both, you're not doing either well. So there are opportunities and costs to consider. And again, this is where values come in handy because you can sort of decide, you know, in what way do I want to participate in work so that I can also participate in parenting?

What would that look like? How would I describe the quality of action? So whenever I mentioned values on this show, which I usually do in an ACT context, people always ask, OK, but how do I articulate those? So what's the guidepost we have for if I'm sitting down, I'm a frustrated working parent, I want to start from scratch with your approach.

How do you approach values? Like what does that mean? You break it down by areas of your life. Is it vision based? Walk us through that. Yeah, so it is based on specific domains of life. There's some exercises that I can share. One is called the bullseye exercise. If you do a Google search, you can find it.

One is called the eulogy exercise. And they help you to sort of like narrow in, like, you know, on your work life or on your family life or on your leisure or on your spirituality. And you sort of think about, you know, what are the qualities that you embody moment to moment?

You can get even more specific. So I do a lot of couples therapy and the values exercise that I have actually breaks relationships down into 10 different domains. So like, how do you fight? How do you manage finance? How do you manage your intimate life? How do you manage co-parenting?

How do you manage in-laws? Things like that. And so in each of those more specific domains, you think about, you know, what are sort of like the high level ways that feel important to show up moment to moment. So for example, when I we all fight with our partners, right?

If a couple doesn't fight, they probably don't have a lot of intimacy. The goal is not to avoid fighting. The goal is to fight in ways that are value aligned. So for example, respectfully or productively or with curiosity. So it's sort of like quality of action. Do you think about like adverbs that describe how you do something?

But there also needs to be a lot of nuances. You identify values because for example, you might say, you know, in my friendships, I just want to be kind. It's so important to be kind. But what if a friend is taking advantage of you? So you kind of want to build in some qualifiers.

So you know, kind and when I'm in a relationship where somebody is being respectful of what matters to me. And same thing goes, you know, for the most uncomfortable moments of life. Those are the one, those are the areas. So like when work and parenting conflicts, how do I value showing up?

So my value might be, you know, to pause and get curious and to try to keep the ball rolling in both domains, even if it's going to be more slowly than if I only was participating in one domain. So that's a lot of words to describe my value, but that's, that pretty much nails it for me.

So it doesn't have to be one word, but you sort of want to get at the gestalt of like, how do you most want to show up in this particular area that matters to you? And again, you know, values clarification is most important for the areas that are tricky, like the role tension that most of us experience.

You're speaking our language. I'm smiling here because we talk about this on the show a lot, that this notion of the deep life and developing the deep life. And it's very breaking things down into roles, establishing values for roles. My listeners, you can now see that there is a commonality of acceptance, commitment therapy behind both of our thinking, because there's so much alignment with what you're saying and things I've been talking about.

You know, I have a couple out of left, not out of left field, but just sort of assorted issues that come up specific to this topic. What do you think about this? There's an interesting tension maybe between shifting the nature of your work to something like part time versus just shifting the role that your job plays in your life.

And I have this pet theory I want to get your expert take on, that especially with ambitious people when they feel there's the conflict and they want to get rid of the conflict and reorganize their work and family life around values, that they want there to be a dramatic thing that happens.

So to get a dramatic improvement, I need something dramatic. So I need to reconfigure my job, quit this job, do something else part time, become a freelancer, formally negotiate a much reduced hours. Whereas in a lot of cases, probably the right thing, you could just internally reconfigure your engagement with that job in a way that is completely satisfactory with the employer.

Maybe there's a psychological impact like, well, I'm in the same job, I'm not doing as well as my peers. Have you thought about this at all? Or what's your thoughts on this tension between the dramatic transformation of your job versus transforming the role your existing job plays in your life when you're going through this type of thinking?

It's an interesting question. And what I think is actually interesting is I went through a pretty dramatic shift when I became a parent where I went pretty part time. And one thing that I just want to point out is it did not eliminate the conflict, right? Because now I was an ambitious person who was working part time and that was deeply uncomfortable.

So I think one thing that you're pointing to is a lot of the time, these dramatic changes that we might pursue in order to eliminate the conflict doesn't actually eliminate the conflict because, again, that's an outside solution for an inside problem, mismatch. When we apply an outside solution to an inside problem, we tend to make the initial problem worse.

And I think that's one of the main tenets of acceptance and commitment therapy is that that which we resist persists and grows stronger, at least from a psychological perspective. So trying to solve internal problems with those kinds of solutions tends to make the problem worse, not better. What this makes me think, by the way, is sometimes dramatic changes are actually the best thing to do, but you need to do the inside out work first.

And that, I would assume, would make it way clearer if there's some sort of big change that you want to make in your working situation. You would be doing that from a foundation of great internal clarity if you've already clarified your values, changed your psychology, really understand work and other things in your life.

And if you've done all that work, I assume you can probably be much more accurate and strategic and effective in making changes. Then you really realize, oh, yeah, I got to quit this job. This is never going to work for me. Or, oh, this job's fine. I just need to change this.

But without the inside out work, sometimes it feels like from the listeners I hear from, they are, before they do that work, are just trying to shake up the Rubik's Cube or whatever. That's not a good metaphor. But you know what I mean? I just want to do something dramatic because I feel like there's dramatic issues.

And that can go really awry if you're not coming from a foundation of, I know exactly why I'm doing this. Yeah. And sometimes, I mean, you're kind of pointing to this, but sometimes shaking things up can give you greater clarity. And maybe part of the clarity is, I was trying to solve this thing that I'm unhappy with from the outside.

And actually, what I really need is to reset what I'm thinking and feeling and what my expectations might be so that whatever changes on the outside actually have the kind of impact that I'm looking for. Again, though, I just want to make clear, it isn't likely that we're going to get rid of the conflict, especially if you're an ambitious person, especially if you want to participate in multiple roles.

So being clear that whatever change you make probably isn't going to undo that, but that your goal is to sort of create a life where you can have more satisfaction. So there are outside-in changes that are going to be helpful. And if you sort of in tandem do this inside-out work, it tends to be much more effective.

And from the example that I was sharing of my own history, I made this dramatic change to my professional life. I was still deeply unhappy because now I was home more with my kids who I adore, but also feeling so unsatisfied with how I was progressing in my work life.

And it required me to really think through how did I want to proceed in my work life. And that was work that actually really was helpful. I still am not as involved in academic work as I was when I first became a parent, but I feel good about it because I did the values clarification work and sort of am constantly reconnecting to what matters and how do I want to show up given that these are the choices that I've made.

So it's a little bit like you have to make the right choices and then you have to make the choices right for you. I mean, that's sort of, we have to do both sides, right? Not every situation is going to work, but lots of situations can work if we make them work for us.

Oh, excellent. So yeah, if you've made the choice with a clear value-based reason, there will still be hardship. It's not going to eliminate hardship. It's not going to eliminate tensions, but you'll be much better able to get through these hard moments and difficulties because you know why you did it.

So it's not about eliminating hardship. Oh, everything's fine now. And I'm just happy and feel really good. It's about you're in a position where when these various hardships come, you are resilient. You say, yeah, this is hard. This has been a hard six months. But I knew this when I signed up for this setup and I believe in why I did it.

And so I'll get through this or it's not going to be existentially destabilizing. Exactly. I mean, they've done randomized control trials of acceptance and commitment therapy for things like addiction. And when you are clear on your values, it doesn't mean that you don't have an urge to use, but it means that you're better able to transcend that discomfort because you're connecting to a value of taking care of your health and getting clean and being a good partner to your partner and being a good parent to your children.

And again, it's still deeply uncomfortable, but by using your values as a guide rather than your emotions or even your thoughts, you're better able to stay the course and transcend those discomforts that you can't avoid. So let me, I'm going to get your take on, you can be a proxy for my audience here, on a complaint I get a lot that I feel that I don't fully understand it, though I'm very empathetic to it.

And I'm going to ask you to sort of on behalf of half of my audience, maybe unpack what's going on here. So I talked about this on the show, but I get this complaint a lot about the concept of deep work in particular. And it's typically from working moms.

And it's typically either the form of the complaint is either, I can't, how can you do deep work if you're a parent? Or easy for you to say, but like deep work is only possible if you have a partner doing all the labor. And there's a lot of like emotion behind these complaints.

And so at first, in my typical sort of guy, technical mindset, I was, well, logically speaking, I do not understand these complaints. Deep work is just talking about the relevant, in the hours that you're normally working already, regardless of your situation, just allocating the email checks and minimizing context shifts and making optimal use of cognitive.

It says nothing about how much you should be working or whatever. But I quickly learned, now there's something much more deeper and emotional and true going on here. So I'm going to put you, you can help me proxy for this. Yeah, I mean, so maybe educate me a little bit on where's the pain point?

Because I want to understand well, when there's a real sort of visceral pushback to the idea of deep work from the context of being a working parent, in particular, working mom. Yeah. I think that the deep pain point relates to sort of the envy of often husbands, fathers who have a setup that is more conducive to longer stretches of work time.

What's ironic though, I think is that part of why it's hard as a mom, and I'm saying this like with a lot of stereotypes in hand, and I recognize that and I apologize, is that part of what makes it hard to have those long stretches is the guilt that interrupts.

I could put my children in much more childcare and my husband would be fine with it, but I feel really uncomfortable about it. And I certainly felt desperately uncomfortable about it when my children were infants. And that wasn't something he struggled with. Now, whether that's socially driven by the lessons that were taught as young women and young men as we age, or whether it's biological, I think is a really complicated question to answer.

I think there's evidence on both sides, but the fact of the matter is moms tend to feel more guilty about time away from their kids than dads do, just on average. This isn't always the case. So I think that's one of the tricky points. And so when you use the word deep work, people automatically think it's many hours, although you define it in a much more nuanced way that you can do deep work in shorter chunks of time.

And that's really what I advocate in my book is figuring out how to more mindfully drop into work, how to use some of the behavioral science that we know is really helpful for getting into the mode of deep work more quickly and efficiently. And also recognizing that while task switching or role switching does cost us something in terms of the energy that it takes, that the more we do it, the more we practice doing that role switching, the more facile we get at it.

But also, it's a both and. Also we don't want to do it too much because then we really do end up with what Bridget Schulte calls confetti time, time confetti, I think it's the term. So it's complicated. It is emotional. And it can feel like an injustice. Like why do I feel so guilty when you can sort of be free to go to work?

And I think that is the part that I'll at least just speak for myself that I used to get very, very hung up on. That's really useful, actually. I mean, I really appreciate that. I mean, just to echo it back, but I think I understand what you're saying is, no, it's not about the physical act of deep work, which is just, oh, I have an hour to work.

Like why don't I focus on one thing for the first 45 and then do the small things at the end instead of interleaving it? Yeah, anyone in whatever their situation is can change their ratio of deep to shallow work. But it's the reality, which I point out. So fair enough.

Like I make this point in my book that the more deep work you can do tends to be correlative to career success. So more deep work is better than less. Men have an easier time doing more deep work than women for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual ability to do the work.

That is very frustrating. I mean, if someone said, OK, here's the thing, people from most states get to work their jobs normally, but people from Maryland have to whatever, call in to the department or whatever, every hour or so. And there's all these other things that they put on citizens of Maryland.

It's like taking up our time. I would be really frustrated. Like, look at all these people in Virginia. They're getting more done. They're not as interrupted. It's not fair just because I live in Maryland. So I'm echoing that back. Right. And I could imagine that being, I can empathize.

I mean, I can kind of understand as best I can in my position. That kind of sucks. I think it does. The other thing to think about is, you know, how, what do we reward in our society? And what we do reward tends to be, you know, accolades and more lines in your CV and more money.

And one of the things, one of the gifts I think of working parenthood, and this is particularly true for mothers because they tend on average to be more involved in the parenting role is that we tend on average to be stronger in the relational department, in the empathy department, in the perspective taking department, in the patient's department.

And those skills are really useful at work. They just tend not to be rewarded or acknowledged as being as important. And so I think that is another piece that can get under people's skin. And I think for very good reason. And I don't really know what to do about that other than to recognize that they have inherent value, even if they aren't acknowledged with a promotion or a pay raise.

Although I think that they should be. Concurrently to all of that, this inside out psychological approach of figure out your values in all of your roles, build a vision of your life that tractably satisfies these values. Be very careful from an ACT perspective about unhealthy mindsets or destructive labels.

Look, you know, you find the enrichment between conflicting roles, not just what's negative about it. And then be willing to ride out the ups and the downs, the oh my God, like me not publishing a paper during the pandemic year was very traumatic for me. But being able to get through that because you're like, but I have this vision of my life and how academia fits in with my family.

And that that's actually a very sustainable approach. I mean, to me, that's very optimistic because I think that's very useful. I mean, there's a lot of people in my audience who that type of specifics that's in your book, I should say the name again, work, parent thrive for everyone who is listening.

That psychological approach is I think it's what people are missing. It's and as you say, it's not replacing the Schulte approach. It's not replacing the Vanderkam approach. It's adding a third point in that triangle. And we can we can abuse metaphors and say, yeah, we close in the shape now so that we have a whatever, a region of solutions or something like that.

But that is very optimistic to me. I think that's also very useful to me. And I definitely got things out of this that's going to I'm going to use the the tune, my approach. So, yeah. Thank you for coming on the show. I think you've done a lot of us a lot of good today.

Thank you so much for having me. It was so fun to chat with you. What an honor. All right. So remember, work, parent thrive, everyone. By the time you hear this interview, it's available everywhere. Go get your copy today. All right. So there we go. That was our interview with Dale Schoenbrum.

So Jesse, I enjoyed that video. I want to interview, I should say, I want to talk with you about some observations I had, some takeaways. I also have a news item I want to briefly review that a listener sent in and it seemed right up our alley. So I want to go over that real quick.

But first, I want to briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. That is our friends at Policy Genius. This is a true story. Right before I came to the studio today, I had a meeting with our family's financial advisor. One of the things he told me is that we need more life insurance.

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That's policygenius.com. Speaking of living a long life and maybe not needing that life insurance for a little while, let's talk about our other sponsor, which is My Body Tutor. This is a online coaching program started by my friend Adam Gilbert. It solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency.

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All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join. So go to mybodytutor.com, mention Deep Questions when you sign up, and they will give you $50 off your first month. All right, so let's talk about this interview, Jesse. The thing I noticed, and I mentioned this in the intro to the interview too, but it's really in my head right now, was the similarities between Yael's advice for dealing with being a working parent and the way we talk about the deep life here.

It seemed really similar. You break it down into areas, you get your values, you build a value-driven plan, you pursue that plan, you don't get caught up in comparisons or just arbitrary goals. This is what I have a vision of my life that work fits in and my family fits in, and I'm going for that vision, and I'm going to stick to that vision.

I'm not going to get too caught up in, "Well, I could have got a better promotion," or, "I could have spent more time." It's that lifestyle-centric, that vision-driven approach to career, speaking our language. Well, I think she did a pretty good job explaining a couple of things, especially when she was talking about the outcome versus the process.

You hear that a lot in sports. I coach myself, and a lot of professional college sports talk about enjoying the process and stuff like that. She was talking about that as well in terms of work and jobs and balancing all that stuff. The other thing I thought was really interesting, she talked about revisiting, checking back in.

I think what you say, she was talking about dealing with the internal, like doing inside out work. Then she was saying you need to check back in with the internal, and that goes directly in line with what you're talking about with your values document. You check in with it all the time because you look at it in your time management process, which makes a lot of sense.

When you hear her talk about it that way, it suddenly makes it clear how volatile it would be to be going through life, especially in the situation of a working parent, where you weren't checking in. You didn't have a value-driven vision of what you're trying to do. If you were just bouncing from how you felt or events or crises day to day, that's got to be exhausting.

You're like, "My God, here's another thing I didn't finish in time. Here's another potential project I could have done that I couldn't take on. This person's probably mad at me. I didn't get the cupcakes to my kid's school. I was late on getting this paperwork back." You just constantly be probably tearing yourself apart, which is the tone, I think, of a lot of reflective writing on working parenthood.

It's very much this sort of Bridget Schulte, like everything is so stressful. It's all impossible. It gave me some optimism of if you have this value-driven plan, it's not going to seem impossible. It's not going to seem terrible. On the other hand, and that's the way I push this, and I think she was frank about it, it's hard when you're ambitious.

You cannot do as much if you have kids. That's really hard for people. Even if you have a value, like I have a plan, it's a completely tractable plan. It respects multiple things I value. It's a great plan for a deep life. It's still kind of hard because that guy got a promotion, and I'm smarter than that guy.

>> DAVE Yeah, she did a pretty good job of explaining the emotions of jealousy and giving a good definition for that too. >> DAVE Yeah, I think there's some great clarity. I think the reason why my deep life discussions sound so similar to what she's saying about working life, the common thread is acceptance commitment therapy.

I guess I didn't realize how influential reading Stephen Hayes' book, etc., how influential that had been on my thinking about the deep life until I heard her framework that's built off that same thinking. I say, "Oh, that's very similar." So I'm having this revelation that, "Oh, I have a psychological approach in my work, an implicit psychological approach.

We talk strategy, but we also talk a lot about the psychology, especially with the deep life stuff." I'm not explicitly thinking about that as psychological, but it really is. How you actually build an understanding of yourself and your life and what you're trying to do, she's much more rigorous about it.

But it's interesting to know there's that psychological underpinning. I also thought it was interesting, her explanation for why people, when they write me and are like, "Easy for you to say," or, "How can you do deep work if you have kids?" And I was having such a hard time understanding it for so long because, again, I was so logical about it.

The way she explains it, it's like, "Oh, that makes complete sense." The underlying thing is not, "I have my kid with me at the office," or something, and "He's interrupting me when I'm trying to do deep work," or something. That always just confused me. I was like, "Well, when you work, you work.

When you're at your office, you're at the office. Do more deep than shallow work. What does that have to do with..." And the way she explained it, like, "No, it's especially for moms. You're being distracted by your kids and your families, even when you're not there with your kids and your families." Due to the guilt, right?

The guilt. Yeah. Dudes don't have that as much. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, this is probably wiring stuff. We're like, I don't know, we're out there dragging back elk carcasses to the cave and we've like, "That's what we're supposed to be doing." You know, it's, we're wired in some way, we don't feel that guilt.

So they're there even when they're not there. So that was a big confusion I had because I was like, "Is everyone, are people working..." This was pre-pandemic. Now this is a different situation. I was like, "Is everyone working at home without childcare? This doesn't make sense." But no, the guilt follows you even when you're at the office.

And then just the unequal distribution of household work. The women do more than the men. And even if you're not doing that while you're at the office, it takes away from the energy and ability to do that extra, like that extra hour in the evening to like, "I can put my email off until the night and get more deep work done at the office." And so I think that was useful.

I get why people are emotional about the topic. Yeah, for sure. So that's good. So I'm glad we had her on. Yeah. She, you know, just making that kind of comparison to sports. I have a couple of buddies that coach in the NFL and I always kind of ask them about, you know, and they talk about how like even professional athletes need to constantly be coached, you know, I mean, NFL coaches do that.

And what she was saying, like revisit your values. I mean, that's like kind of coaching yourself and you constantly need to coach yourself to like stay grounded and true to your values. You got to keep coming back to that. You got to do it in partnership with your partner.

Like that makes a big difference. Like you have to be on the same page. I've seen that not rip apart families, but it's definitely a anecdotally a source of stress that some families have come across or they've sent me messages have is if you and like your husband or your wife are doing your own thing.

And the idea is like you're each your independent fiefdom, your careers, each your own thing. And we're each just trying to like, we shouldn't interfere with each other. It's not fair or stuff like that. It doesn't really work out as compared to like we're on the same page trying to figure out like what, how is our family going to make money?

How are we going to find fulfillment? How are you find actualization? How does work fit into this bigger picture? Because otherwise you get through this weird sort of tit for tat situation of like, well, wait a second, how many hours did you spend versus me? Or like now, if I'm going to spend two years doing this in my career, then it'll be your two years, like this weird sort of accounting and resentment that happens.

And that kind of comes out of this as well. It's an implication of what y'all was saying is like, you probably need to be building a common vision for your family, that work is going to be a big factor in because it's going to be the source of income and a one among several sources of personal satisfaction for both of you.

So we got to figure out how work enters a bigger picture that you're trying to shape. But when you, maybe this is a millennial thing. We've talked about this on the show before, where we were presented when we were young with the idea that work should be your passion and the main source of your meaning.

And it's like, no, work first and we figure everything else out. Bad things seem to follow. Or if it's like, I've seen this a lot of times, like this is a big opportunity. We got to just do this job wise and we'll figure everything out later, even if it's basically like devastating for the family, because there's this mindset of like, well, I'm not going to turn down a work opportunity.

Yeah. Like she said, when she, you know, counsels couples, she has 10 different buckets that they go through. Yeah, man. I was thinking about that. I was like, that's a lot. I know. You need a spreadsheet to keep track. A lot of topics. Yeah. We're going to need a spreadsheet to keep track of it, but that's great.

And so my, my, my, like one of my big takeaway messages I came from this is like, uh, I like to get these really practical, ideal takeaways. It's like just thinking a lot of it is like comfort in, you know, if you're a professor, you know, I have a plan that's going to get me tenure and have me do interesting work on things I think are important in a way that's sustainable with other things are important to me in my life.

If I have a plan to do that, I should be happy with it. Even if that tenure comes three years later than this person, even if like you're like an associate for a while, even if these other people are getting, you know, more fetid. Um, and, and I'll talk about this in a later episode, but I'm realizing how much of my slow productivity philosophy is coming out of a reaction to entering this phase of parenthood for me, where my boys need so much time for me way more than when they were younger and slow productivity in some sense is a partially a tool for this type of situation.

You're like, I can't, I actually have to temper my ambition. Some, I have less hours and slow productivity is a productivity philosophy. That's okay with that. It's like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. You have less hours, but wait. Do stuff you're proud of, you know, uh, at a reasonable pace at a natural pace.

Don't overload yourself. You want to look back 10 years and say, I did this, this, this, and this, which I'm very impressed by. Uh, it doesn't matter that you're spending 30% less time than you were five years ago. Like who cares? Like in the end you can come away 10 years from now having produced a lot of good stuff.

So slow productivity maybe is really just my way of dealing with, I just have a lot less time than I used to. Plus when they get to high school, they're not going to hang out with you anyway. So yeah, then I'm advantage of it. Yeah. I'm going to be doing a lot less productivity to drown my sadness of them ignoring me.

I'm going to be shooting emails off at six in the morning so that I can distract myself from my grief. Um, all right. So I want to real briefly before we, before we wrap up, uh, a listener sent a article to the interesting account, new product, com email address.

I just want to talk about it briefly. I just, it seemed timely. Elon Musk just took over Twitter. Recently we've covered social media, Elon Musk, the role of social medias in people's lives. I just want to point out one factoid from this audience that I find to be optimistic and validating some of my predictions.

So this is a Reuters article. I have it on the screen here. If you're watching on the YouTube channel, that's from October 25th. So it's from a week or so ago. Um, all right. So this is an article about what they call heavy tweeters and they note heavy tweeters account for less than 10% of monthly overall users, but generate 90% of all tweets.

So we've heard this about Twitter before a small group of people do most of the tweeting. Uh, there's a report that leaked that showed that heavy tweeters are in absolute decline. So I think that's interesting. They had a, here's a slightly more extended definition of heavy tweeter. Uh, someone who logs in the Twitter six or seven times a week and tweets about three, uh, four times a week.

So honestly heavy tweeter here, it's not really that heavy, but still, um, and they're in absolute decline. And so they did a little bit of a deep dive and said, part of it is that interest in world news as well as liberal politics showed spikes during major events, but the categories have since lost the highest number of heavy Twitter users and have shown no signs of recovery.

So, so basically, uh, I think this is positive. What we're finding is, you know, people who were doing a lot of political tweeting really had lots of takes on things that were going on are leaving Twitter, uh, and aren't coming back. I think that's positive for Twitter, positive for our nation's mental health.

If I have to guess what's going on there, it's, you know, uh, it rhymes with brump. You know, we had a certain president leave office who I think was a big generator of tweets, uh, from both sides. And I think the early pandemic generated a lot of, uh, tweeting as well about pandemic stuff and policy and everyone was at home.

And so with Trump out of office and people no longer up to their eyeballs and pandemic stuff because everything's open and they're going on with their lives, they're leaving this platform. It's been, it burnt them out. It hasn't been super positive for them. I think that's a really good sign.

The other group of heavy users who are leaving are, uh, a group that is users who are interested in fashion or celebrities such as the Kardashian family. They're just going to other platforms that are more visually appealing. They're going to tick talk, they're going to Instagram. So I care less about that, but I think, I don't know.

I think this is positive that the, the, the very online people who are on there about political issues all the time, they're done. I think they're burnt out. Plus pandemic, they're like, okay, uh, let's move on with life. You know, the bars are open again. Let's go get a drink.

Bad news for Twitter. Sure. But who cares? Cause that's the point I've been making again and again on the show. Uh, Twitter is being covered by the media as if it is at the core of our democracy, but that's mainly because media types use Twitter all the time. It's at the core of their lives.

That's a narrow demographic. Most of the country doesn't care about Twitter. It's not that important. Um, it's only important to reporters. I'm generalizing a course. So, you know, when I see these sort of shifts happening, heavy political Twitter users leaving Twitter, I think that's probably better for the mental health of the country, better for the mental health of social media users, better for the future of social media.

So I, I filed this under, uh, good news for most people, unless I guess your last name is Musk. So I don't know. Good news, right? Jesse, less people using Twitter. They can do other things with their time. Twitter melts people's brains. No one's happy on Twitter. Read more books, read more books.

Um, sounds good to me. All right. Also sounds good as wrapping up this episode. Thank you, uh, to Yale for coming on and thank you for the listener who sent me this news article. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep.

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