All right, Jesse, that's making me hungry, thirsty. I feel like I need some Magic Mind of Monk pack to get going. But let's dive into some questions. Our first question of the episode comes from Worried Housewife, who writes, "How can a housewife implement deep work "into her life, or is it only for advancing in career work "or for creator, writers, et cetera?

"I love your book, however, I am mostly a housewife "and I feel a bit anxious because the self-help books "seem to imply unless I am writing books "or working towards business, my life is mediocre. "I wanna be among those who feel accomplished "and productive. "What would your advice be for someone implementing "the deep life in this situation?" So I don't know, Jesse, is housewife a word we're not supposed to use anymore?

It doesn't feel like that's the word we're supposed to use anymore. - I mean, she listed it, so I guess you-- - Yeah, it's her self-description. I'm reading verbatim. I'm thinking stay-at-home parent is probably the word of choice. So, well, for those-- - You're probably right. - For those who are concerned, I am reading verbatim.

I'm reading verbatim the question. All right, so this is a good question. First of all, I think there's a semantic issue that we often have on the show, let's get back to, which is what exactly do we mean by deep work? Because again, I talk about this all the time.

I think deep work gets generalized into areas in which it was not meant to originally apply. So really, the intention behind the phrase deep work is very focused. It is when you're doing a specific type of cognitive-heavy work, it is a mode of doing that work in which you minimize back-and-forth context switching.

So you give the thing you're working on full attention with minimal back-and-forth context switching, the main argument being that if you have a hard cognitive task to do, giving that sustained attention without context shifting is gonna be more effective than trying to work on that task while also switching your attention back and forth.

So that is functionally what deep work is. And then the larger hypothesis in the book "Deep Work" is that this is broadly valuable in a lot of knowledge work fields, and it's becoming more valuable in a lot of knowledge work fields, especially in the American context, and we're not paying attention to it.

So that we're setting up work systems that have an accidental side effect of requiring lots of context switching, requiring lots of time fragmenting, make it very difficult to actually work on cognitive tasks in this manner, and so we execute those tasks worse, and so the argument is we should actually prioritize in that work context, giving people unbroken time to work without distraction.

That's very narrow. So that would have very little relevance if you're asking about, I'm at home, I'm at home with the kids. So you're not working in a knowledge work job that's asking of you to do these sort of very specific cognitively demanding work tasks. And so these worries aren't relevant to that situation.

But I think this is just a semantic issue because later in the question you say, what's your advice for someone implementing the deep life in the situation? And there I think we're getting to the fruitful question. I think this is what you're actually asking about is the deep life and perhaps the role of work or focused work in the deep life.

And I think this is a critical question. 'Cause we often extrapolate deep work to mean the deep life, but they're two different things. Deep work can have a place in a deep life, but they're two different things. So I'm glad we have a chance to actually talk about this and to try to make a distinction.

So in the theory of the deep life, which is something that was not developed in the book "Deep Work", I introduced the term in the book "Deep Work", but don't really get into it. I wasn't ready to get into that yet. But in the theory of the deep life that we've evolved on my newsletter and here on this podcast, the idea is you identify the areas of your life that are important.

And in each of these areas, you focus intensely on the things that are high value and try to minimize time wasted on the things that are not important or of lower value in that area. So it's really triaging your time and attention towards the things that really matter. There's a core component to the deep life that says for the things that really matter in this type of calculus, you might even wanna make radical moves to support them.

So make radical changes to how you live your life, to really invest in the small number of things that are most important to you. That is the underlying concept of the deep life. Craft is just one piece of the different areas of your life that might be important. And it's important depends on what you're doing, what your actual situation is.

So I think regardless of whether you're working in an office or you're at home taking care of kids, or you're in between jobs and single, whatever the situation is, the calculus of the deep life is relevant. What matters to me in my life? Am I investing in those on things that really matter and not wasting too much time on things that don't?

That's always relevant. And I think that is critical. If you don't have that framework, you're gonna be completely adrift. And so there's nothing about being at home with kids that says that framework's not gonna work. If anything, it's gonna be even more important. It's that framework that's gonna make sure that you don't get so caught up in X that you forget to actually think about this other piece of your life, the community involvement, constitution, your health and fitness, you're seeing the different parts of your life and making them important.

The family commitment, the family there is gonna be really critical when you do that deep life calculus. I mean, this is a, we talk about radical moves to align your life with your current values. If you're dedicating your time to trying to help your kids raise in a stable, loving environment and cultivate the type of attributes and values you would want in leaders and adults who in the future we're gonna look to with respect, that's an incredibly important endeavor.

And so when you're thinking about things, the deep life, work is just a piece of it. And the importance of that depends on what you're doing in your life right then. So I wouldn't worry about that at all. I would focus on the deep life and making sure that each of the areas of your deep life are getting attention.

That let's say the kids needs aren't swapping other needs that are also important to you or to the other people in your life. Deep work by itself is not that interesting. It's interesting if you're a knowledge worker who works with your brain to try to add value to information, then yeah, you wanna be doing deep work because if you do it with a lot of context shifting, you're not gonna be doing it as well.

But that's just a particular job. That's just a particular endeavor. I don't wanna put a moral valuation on deep work that basically focus cognitive work is somehow high value and anything else isn't high value. No, it's high value in the context of knowledge work, deep is better than distracted.

But you leave the context of knowledge work, it's not relevant. So anyways, I hope that's helpful. Let's use the deep life as the framing, the thing that has some sort of moral valence to it. That this, that's a structure to your life that's trying to intentionally focus on what matters versus those things that don't, that is universally important.

And let's narrow in deep work to say, this is an approach to doing a certain type of activity that a lot of people do and it's relevant and we need to care about it, but it is not by itself the necessary foundation of a good life. We get that a lot, Jesse, don't we?

I think the deep work becomes a stand in for much bigger. - Yeah, we've been getting a lot of those questions lately, especially from folks who are maybe retired or at home, yeah, this question. Yeah, it's been coming up a lot. - Yep, yep, so good. I'm glad we had a chance to jump into that.

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