And this will be our, our look at the issue of life after school to give to all of our recent graduates or graduates to be who are out there in the audience. I'm Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

Here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, hear me stumble a little bit on the line because I was getting in my head about getting rid of in an increasingly distracted world, and I was getting ahead of that. Don't forget to do that.

I stumbled over the earlier words. I noticed. Yeah. It's kind of a sectarian battle right now amidst our listeners about the pro in increasing people and the anti in increasing people, the audience is about split. I listen to a lot of talk radio, so I'm always listening to the way they enunciate and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was not a masterclass. The way I just pronounced that, that subhead, but I'll tell you what, you know what, I just picked up, speaking of unrelated topics, I just picked up my faculty academic regalia. Is that a robe? It's the robe and the weird puffy hat, the medieval dress of the faculty member with a doctorate in the.

So for graduation? For graduation. Cause you have to go to every graduation. I actually have never been to graduations. I don't, I don't normally go to graduations, but I have a doctoral student. Oh, he's got a doctoral student's graduate, just got his PhD or he got it earlier in the year, but this is the commencement and there's a, there's a tradition when you get your PhD or your advisor is called hooding and your, your advisor, it's like, it's passing on the mantle and everyone dresses up in these, these fancy regalia.

My last student didn't go to that. Cause of COVID? No, that was before. Um, for whatever reason, I guess he had already, he had, you know, I think often what happens is you, you graduate when you're done, but the ceremonies happen during graduation week. So a lot of times the students are, he had already moved on and got a job and, uh, he moved back to China.

Um, but this, my current student graduated closer to this. He lives nearby. So, so we're going to do it. So I have regalia. It was, I bring it up because it has always been a tradition in my writing. And I guess now in my podcasting that when we get to graduation season, I want to give some sort of commencement address type advice to the new graduates and a particular advice about entering the job force and thinking about your career.

It was actually, and this is a little insider Cal Newport detail. It was attending a graduation, one of my sister's graduations, where I wrote a blog post, it's a long time ago. And that's where I first introduced the idea of Lifestyle-Centered Career Planning. That's what first got me thinking about careers and led to my first general audience book in 2012, which was So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And so it's been this tradition that when graduation season comes, I like to give advice about what, how to think about work, how to think about life outside of school. And I'll say, Jesse, sometimes I forget that not everyone has spent their entire adult life on a college campus like I have.

So to me, these seasons, like a course is graduation season. It's all that's happening, but for most people, it's not, it's just May or whatever. So I have to remember that, okay, not everyone has lived their entire adult life on a college campus, but for us, it's, it's, it's in our bones.

So here's what I was going to do today. Coincidentally, fortunately, and coincidentally, an author I know, a fellow author at the same imprint that I published my books at at Penguin, Simone Stolzoff has a book that just came out. It came out, I believe it comes out the day this podcast airs or day before the day after, but right around you're hearing this podcast, this new book is coming out.

The book is called The Good Enough Job Reclaiming Life From Work, which I think is, is provocative and interesting. And I read it and I blurbed it and I liked it. And I said, you know what, Simone, why don't you come on the show? We'll do our deep dive together.

I can talk to you about your book and your ideas, and this will be our, our look at the issue of life after school to give to all of our recent graduates or graduates to be who are out there in the audience. So I asked him, if he'd come on the show, if he would call in and he said he would.

So I'm looking forward to talking with Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job. All right. So Jesse, let's see if we can get Simone on the line. Sounds good. All right. Simone, thank you for calling into the show to talk about your new book. I have to say, when I heard from your editor about this book and, Hey, do you want to see an early copy?

This is one of those ones where the title is all I needed to say a hundred percent. Yes. The Good Enough Job. I was on board at that point already. I said, of course, I know, I know we're speaking the same language here. I'm going to like it. And I wasn't disappointed.

But thanks for coming on. You are going to help us help mold young minds. This is our commencement era, the commencement period episode where we dive into the element of how does work fit into a fulfilling life? And I think your book's got a lot of great ideas. So I wanted to start before we got into the ideas of the book is just briefly your story.

I'm going to give you the rough bullet points I know. And then you tell me the reality or you fill in the gaps there, because I think there's probably a lot captured here. So from what I understand, you were a design lead at IDEO, the sort of fantastic design shop.

Then you moved on, I guess, on your own. So doing design and business consulting and then decided to write this book. Those are the big level bullet points. What are the interesting details I'm missing here? Yeah. I mean, thankfully for maybe some of our listeners, I graduated college a little bit more recently than you did.

But I spent my 20s really playing Goldilocks with careers. So I graduated. I was studying poetry and economics. So you could already see this sort of tension between art and commerce in my life and moved back to my hometown of San Francisco. And I worked in advertising for a few years and then I worked in tech for a few years.

And then I started working in journalism. And really the impetus for the book was this moment where I was reached out to by a recruiter at this design consultancy called IDEO. And it really sent me for an existential loop. It felt like I was choosing not just between two jobs, but between two versions of me.

You know, one path being the journalist and the other path being the designer. And maybe for some of our recent grads that are listening to this episode, they've been at a similar kind of career crossroads. And so I couldn't make up my mind for the life of me. On one hand, it's like, oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job paths.

But on the other hand, you know, how we spend those hours matters as a polymath like you very much knows. And so the question of the book was sort of how did work become so central to our identities, to our sense of self-worth and what to make of it?

And that's what I'm excited to chat with you about today. Right. So even the fact that that was a fraught crossroads is itself telling, you're saying. The fact that it felt so important in the moment as if you were making decision about the definition of yourself as a person or the core of your lifestyle was about to be determined by do you follow more of the journalistic path or go to go to IDEO.

So then how did you end up freeing from that mindset or getting that distance to say, wait a second, I think there's something that's malformed in the way our culture deals with this? Yeah, I mean, I think it was out of necessity. You know, I was I was suffering, thinking that I had made the wrong choice.

And, you know, short story is that I ended up leaving journalism and the trendy magazine that I was writing for to join IDEO. And it felt like I had turned off part of who I was and I had made this irreconcilable mistake and that the journalism industry would never have me back.

And, you know, spoiler alert, leaving the newsroom was actually the best thing that happened to my writing career. But obviously I couldn't have foreseen that. But I think, you know, what ultimately helped was just having a healthy level of detachment, a level of of distance from rising and falling with my professional accomplishments.

And I think it's particularly true here in the U.S. where what you do is often the first question we ask each other when we meet, where our productivity and our self-worth are so tightly bound. I think what I was missing was perspective to understand that work is part of who I am.

That's one source of meaning in my life, but it is not the entirety of who I was. And that realization was ultimately what helped me develop a healthier relationship to work moving forward. Now, that happened after you left IDEO or at some point while you were there. When did that come?

I think while I was there, you know, in the first few months I was insufferable. You know, I was thinking, oh, I've made this awful mistake. Is the journalism industry ever going to let me back in? Will all of my former colleagues think I sold out? You know, and I think one insight from a career's perspective is that the decisions we make in our careers are much more reversible than we might think.

You know, you think you go on one path and there's never going to be an opportunity for you to do what you once did again. And that's simply not true. You know, some of the most interesting people and professionals that I know have had more of meandering paths, you know, look at you like you have always maintained a few different professional identities.

And for me, I've learned that switching between these different modes of working has actually helped me, you know, scratch all these different itches of my interests and also conceive of a job as what it is, you know, a job and not the entirety of who I am. Right. This is an interesting opportunity right now.

Here is why X, Y and Z. Let's do this for a while. Like this will fit in well with this other image of the city it's in. I want to live there. There's some interesting people. The income maybe is going to open up some other options. And and then a few years from now, if you need to reconsider that, you can reconsider it.

I mean, yeah, I would say it sounds like a European perspective, which I mean, mainly as a diss against America, because we have we do have I have very international, a very international audience and it is very regional specific how people think about how people think about careers. I joke the German version of my career book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

I love the German version because it's it's a newspaper with a fake headline and it's the the dream job lie. But in like really stark German, it's great. It's all one word. Yeah, it's all one word. They have a word. Funnily enough, yeah, it's a job for how I am.

That definitely has played a part. You know, I am multicultural. My mom's side of the family is Italian. You know, my name is Simone Luca. And I think there's just a different conception of workplace in our life. I've loved one thing that you've talked about in the past, which is the difference between treating work as sort of the central axis around which the rest of your life orbits and starting with your vision of a life well lived and thinking about how your work or your career can support that vision.

You know, I think in the United States we often miss the forest for the trees. We often think that, you know, what you do for work is the most consequential decision you make. And then the rule is that you have to shove your life into the margins. But I think, you know, in the town that my mom grew up in, for example, in Puglia in southern Italy, you know, it's a very different conception.

All my cousins, you know, they don't leave town for college. They tend to work in the industry that their parents worked in. And work is more of a means to an end than an end in and of itself. And not to say that any particular path is better or worse than the other.

But I do think that Americans could learn a thing or two about less work centric cultures. Right. And that's why you're in a good position to think about that, not just your personal experience, but you have your family experience. So in pulling out this thread a little bit more about what led to the book.

So what was the I guess you went back and started writing more. Do I have this right? So you returned to journalism to some degree, writing for a lot of interesting, a lot of interesting pieces for a lot of top publications. Talk about that transition back towards introducing more writing and then how that eventually led to the idea maybe I should actually write a book.

Yeah. So it started as a desire to keep my writing muscles from atrophying. You know, maybe this is relatable in periods of your life when you're doing more research or more teaching. You know, writing is a skill and you need to practice it in order to keep it up.

And so I was working this design job and was looking for a way to have some commitment to continue to have to write. And so I was a freelancer for places like the Atlantic and Wired. And I was really writing about work culture from a broad sense. And a colleague of mine, Derek Thompson, coined this term "workism," which I loved so much.

It's the idea that a lot of Americans and particularly college educated Americans are treating work akin to a religious identity. So instead of looking to work just for a paycheck, they're also looking to work for community and purpose and transcendence. And, you know, Derek argues that this is a burden that our jobs are just not designed to bear.

And that resonated with me so deeply from both the personal standpoint, but also from what I was observing in the labor market. You know, in our country, we treat CEOs like celebrities and we plaster "always do what you love" on the walls of our co-working spaces. And, you know, I think there's a few risks to this.

For one, as many people have found out in the past few years, your job might not always be there. You know, if your job is your identity and you lose your job, what's left? And then the second is, you know, just the expectations that places on our job. I like thinking about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality.

And if we have these sky high expectations of what a job can deliver, it just leaves a lot of room for disappointment. And the third is, you know, what I get into towards the end of the book is that by centering work, we can neglect other aspects of who we are.

You know, we are not just workers. Our purpose on this planet is not just to produce economic returns for corporations. We are also neighbors and parents and siblings and friends and citizens. And on the other side of sort of prioritizing work is the ability to prioritize other aspects of life, other aspects of who we are, other things that can bring meaning to our lives.

Yeah. Well, where do you think and when thinking about it, we can use the workism term when you're thinking about that pervasive influence. There's no doubt that it is beneficial to employers. So if your employees really subscribe to work as their sense of transcendent meaning, then, well, I mean, of course I'm going to stay late because this is what my life is about.

But what's your thought? What's your take on where this originates from? Because it often seems to me that it's advantageous to employers, but there's a more complicated cultural story here, maybe even a more haphazard cultural story than there was, you know, a conference room where a bunch of mustache twirlers got together and said, let us invent this culture and then we'll get longer hours.

It seems there's probably it's a complicated story. So what you did all this deep reporting. We're going to get more into the guts of the book here in a second, but I just want to preview that it really goes its deep profile style. So it actually spends time with different characters and their interactions with their job and their disappointments.

And so you've really been been sort of deep into the cultural matrix here. So what's your what's your take when you're trying to detangle where American workism what its actual roots are? What are the different forces that contribute to it? Yeah, I mean, there's a few ways in, you know, there are historical factors, cultural, economic, political.

You know, one is just the foundation of our country. If you think back to the early days, the Protestant work ethic and capitalism were really the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA. But, you know, this trend of workism and or you might want to call it the culture of overwork in America is really pronounced in the past 40 or 50 years.

So that begs the question, you know, what happened? What has changed in the past 40 or 50 years? In the 1970s, the average American and the average German worked almost the exact same number of hours each year. And now the average American works about 30 percent more. So how do we get here?

You know, I think the argument that I focus on in the book is the sort of subjective value that Americans give to work. So with the decline of other sources of meaning and community, like organized religion, like different sorts of neighborhood groups, the desire for purpose and belonging and meaning remains.

And many Americans have just transposed that to the workplace where they spend the majority of our time. I mean, you can look at other factors like the fact that we tie health care to employment in this country. You know, like one of the reasons why our relationship to work is so fraught here is because the consequences of losing work are so dire.

You know, I'm thinking about, you know, former colleagues of mine who were on visas where their ability to even live in this country was contingent on them maintaining a W-2 job. But, you know, there's lots of different factors that play into it. And I think as you've so eloquently documented in the past, we're sort of seeing the pushback to the work centricity movement of the early aughts and, you know, girl bossing and hustle culture.

And now everyone, for better or for worse, is renegotiating their relationship to work coming out of the pandemic, which is why I'm so excited to be chatting with you, who has also thought so deeply about these things. Do you think the pandemic, as part of what's going on here, is that remote work done from your apartment, for example, transforms the activity into an abstraction and almost something like an absurdity?

Like, once it's actually reduced, you're sitting at home and maybe like your partner's there and you can hear what they're doing and it's just on email. And it's something about removing yourself from the physical location of work, emphasize the sort of absurdist or somewhat abstract nature of a lot of white collar work in particular, and that there's some sort of then theological, like a crisis of faith of wait a second.

This is what I'm pinning my self-worth on. I mean, I know the pandemic was an accelerant. This is where we got the great resignation. I think Derek has written well about really trying to pick apart what's really happening there. But there's trends in there that are useful. Quiet quitting then came along.

All this is pandemic induced cultural change. So we know the pandemic had an issue. I'm interested in that idea that the inherent absurdities of digital knowledge work became hard to miss. And that was, you know, that was the Wizard of Oz curtain got separated a little bit. Wait a second.

It's the mayor moving, moving, you know, whatever. Like there was a bit of a broken, the illusion was broken. I don't know. What do you think about the pandemic? What about the pandemic helped magnify this long festering, sort of 20 year long festering unease that was growing? Yeah, I think, you know, what you just said reminds me of Marx and sort of the alienation or the atomization of work, you know, back when work moved from a craft based economy where people were either farming or making things with their hands into an industrial economy where people were making things in factories.

One of Marx's biggest fears was that we would become divorced from what we're actually creating. You know, if you're just on an assembly line, adding one part to a widget, it's very different from, you know, getting in touch with the natural ebb and flow of the seasons and making something for someone who you know will be using it.

I think that's to a certain extent what's happened in the pandemic, too. It's revealed some of the, you know, quote unquote bullshit jobs that a lot of us do. You know, I'm reminded of this one woman, Aubrey, who I talked to in the middle of the pandemic, who had just quit her job.

And she said, you know, the pandemic for me was an existential slap in the face. It made me question, you know, is my worth in this world really my ability to, you know, contribute to my sales goal number for some tech company that I don't care about? And so I think that's one side of it is just the kind of the absurdity that a lot of people felt when you remove all the other elements of work, like the social side of it or the ability to interact with people on a day to day basis.

A lot of people found themselves for better, for worse, pushing numbers around spreadsheets. I think the second is just the ability to face our own mortality. And, you know, people were looking in the news and death was all around us and people were questioning, wow, is this is this how I'm going to spend my time?

And the third is people were able to see a different way. You know, people who hadn't been able to spend quality time with their children during the middle of the day were able to see what a more sort of balanced life between work and home is that to the extent that, you know, commuting two hours each day bordered on the absurd.

And now we're, you know, we're picking up the pieces and people are trying to make sense of where we are now with, you know, remote work or hybrid work. I think the one thing that we can say is true across the board is everyone's work changed a certain degree.

You know, at the extremes, people were laid off or furloughed and forced to figure out who they were without their job. But even people who are able to maintain their work, I'm sure lots of the listeners to your podcast and sort of these knowledge economy jobs, work isn't the same today as it was in twenty nineteen.

And people are rightfully so questioning what role they want work to have in their lives moving forward. You know, one of the things I like you did with your book, because it gets a nice complimentary point to what we just discussed. So right now we're talking about how the pandemic, among other things, maybe point out some of the absurdities of some of these spreadsheet and email jobs.

I like how in your book you also talked and spent time with people who represented the, I guess, traditional response to that, which is what I need is if the if the content of my work is radically different or engaging enough, then the work can be meaning. I'm thinking in particular about the chef you spent time with because that's that's the classic counterpoint.

OK, yes, I'm on email that you write. This job is terrible. I'm going to throw away my tie and become a chef or, you know, whatever the the visions or professional full time novelist or something like this. And that's often a storyline. So if we radically change our work, it will radically change these issues.

We have these holes we have in our life. And this is what I think was I enjoyed about you cataloging the again, the existential issues with a quote unquote dream style job. A Michelin starred chef is like it's also a it's a hard job and has and you end up with the same sort of questions and its content of your work cannot save you from trying to figure out a full life that includes work and is not dominated by it.

Yeah. You know, wherever you go, there you are. And I think that's particularly true in the work world. And and I think some of these jobs that are, quote unquote, greater or dream jobs have some of the greatest problems in them because there is this sort of perceived halo effect of the privilege of being able to do the work itself that keeps people from advocating for what they need or or knowing their own worth.

There's this concept in the book that I talk about called vocational awe, and it was coined by this librarian. But I think it's very applicable to teachers and health care workers and people in the nonprofit sector, anyone whose job has a sort of social mission. And this woman, Fobazi Itar, coined it.

She was a school librarian. And basically the term refers to the perceived righteousness that some of these different fields have, you know, even fields like ours, like being able to write or being in academia. There's this sort of idea that, OK, these these fields are doing God's work and therefore they are beyond critique.

But, you know, as a colleague of ours and Helen Peterson says, often all that passion for your work will get you is the ability to get paid very little. You know, people can use the sort of good brand of some of these jobs to obscure a lot of the exploitation and malpractice that exists within these factories.

You know, we saw in the education world in the same breath, people were told you're doing God's work and make do with what you have. You know, there's sort of like speaking out of two sides of our mouth when we talk specifically about dream jobs or jobs that others might seem might think are cool or might think are prestigious.

They can they cannot always be as shiny as their veneer. Yeah, I love that term, by the way. Vocational awe, because I think you're right, especially among highly educated knowledge workers. That is a that's a common trap. And then you have the flip side, which is, for example, you know, Mike Mike Rose, semi famous Ted talk about he's pushing back against the notion of passion and vocational awe.

And he's talking about his time on the Discovery Discovery Channel that did the show Dirty Jobs that was called. And he went on and talked about a lot of people in these maybe it was a septic tank cleaner, for example. And you would say, well, the content of that job is, you know, well, in this case, literally crap.

Right. So you're like, how could that possibly be a job that you're going to be happy in? And but he would say, but this person was way happier than someone that maybe had a job that had traditional awe, but they had well, it was well paid. But also it was there was autonomy.

It was their own business. They you know, they they could grow it as they wanted. They could control their own hours. They had a nice house at the lake because it's you know, it's actually highly skilled work and and in demand. And and because there is no there's no vocational awe in septic tank cleaning.

So it's like completely expected. Right. You say, I'm going to sort of craft how I want this business to run. And no, I'm not going to do things on Sundays and whatever. So I think it's a cool I think it's a good way of getting at a trap that certainly professors have this.

So, yeah, totally. I mean, there's a study there's a study that I write about in the book that is pretty famous. And it's about this idea of job crafting. And, you know, these two researchers study how people make meaning in different lines of work. And so they went to a place that you wouldn't think of as particularly meaningful.

They were interviewing custodial workers at a hospital. And what they found is that among these workers, people who had the exact same job description and daily duties, there was a huge variation in how meaningful or fulfilled people felt from their jobs. And what they found was, you know, the workers roughly broke into two groups.

There was the first group who did not feel like their job was particularly high skill. They sort of went through the motions, didn't really interact with many people that they worked with, and ultimately didn't really like their jobs very much. And then there's a second group who, you know, thought their job was pretty high skill.

They interacted with the patients and their colleagues. But the most important part was workers in the second group attached their job to a greater mission. They saw themselves as part of this system, that job was to heal the sick. And by associating their work with this like larger social mission, they were able to, you know, get by in the more menial and routine things that exist in any line of work.

And in some ways, this is sort of a counterpoint to the argument that we were just making, because we do individually have the ability to craft our jobs to create the meaning that we want to get to a certain extent. But the risk is that when work becomes your sole source of meaning or your sole identity, it becomes a very narrow platform to balance on.

And as we saw in the pandemic, people were very susceptible to be being blown away by, you know, say, a strong gust of wind. Yep. Well, what is, let's get prescriptive. All right. So if we sort of accept this notion of what we should avoid, the centering of work as the main source of meaning in life, practically speaking, then how should we think about approaching the choice of job and then what we do once we have a particular job?

Yeah, you know, the main thing that I advocate for in the book is to diversify your identity. So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. And this is borne out in the research.

You know, research shows that people with greater what they call self-complexity, which just means sort of cultivated other sides of who they are, are more resilient in the face of change, which makes a lot of sense. You know, if your boss says something disparaging and your work is your only source of self-worth, it can spill over to all the other facets of your life.

And people with more interests and hobbies and passions tend to be more creative problem solvers. And especially in the knowledge economy, where there isn't always a direct relationship between how many hours you put in and the quality of the output, that's really important to be able to have space in your day so that ideas can bounce off of each other so that you can synthesize all of the inputs that you're taking in.

And I know you talk about this a lot with timeboxing and thinking about ways that you can have some unstructured time in your day for your body to marinate all the things that are coming in. And so then the question is, how do you diversify your identity? And I think there's really just two steps and it's pretty straightforward, might seem simplistic, but I've been surprised by how few people actually put this into practice.

The first is just to carve out space where you're not working. Right now, I think so many knowledge workers in particular exist in the sort of perpetual state of half work where they're swiping down at email to see, swiping down at dinner to see if new emails have come in.

And they're kind of like sharks sleeping with one eye open. But one of the problems with this work centric point of view is that at the end of the workday, you don't have time or energy to do much else. Esther Perel, the psychologist, has this great phrase where she says, too many people bring the best of themselves to work and then bring the leftovers home.

And that's always resonated with me. And the second part is, you know, it might sound straightforward, but if you want to have other sources of meaning in your life beyond work, you have to do things other than work, not turn on Netflix or turn off your brain at the end of the day, but try and find ways that you can actively invest in your relationships, invest in your community, invest in your interests and hobbies.

You know, there's a direct relationship between the time and energy that we give to things and the meaning that we're able to get from them. And, you know, identities are sort of like plants. You know, they need time and energy to grow. And right now, too many people are giving not only their best hours, but their best energy just to one thing in their life, which is their jobs.

So then how do we grapple with productivity in this context? By which I mean, there's this tension that is coming through in a lot of the writing about these issues right now, that to to make the space to do other things, to have the confidence to shut down your work and not feel that you need to check the email, that you're still delivering, that you're not scrambling late at night because, oh, God, this thing is due and I forgot about it.

You need to really have your life, professionally speaking, organized. Right. And this is where we would traditionally use the term like productivity systems. You know, you're you have capture and control and you're time blocking or something like this. And then there's the other valence of productivity, which is more of the economic metric that the maximizing of production, they're trying to produce more.

So let's talk about that. How do we do? Am I right in saying we do really need to care about the mechanics of work in order to attain work? And if that's true, how do we care about the mechanics of work without falling into the trap of, well, now that I can control these mechanics, why don't I produce more Model T's?

How do we deal with productivity in this? And when we think about this framework? Yeah. So there's sort of like the individual or the micro scale. And then there's the macro scale. You know, I think a lot of the data coming out of some of these four day workweek trials is showing that productivity and hours put in are not always directly related.

You know, in some lines of work, yes. And in many ways, this is a holdover from the industrial age where the more hours you spend on the assembly line, the more Model T's get produced. But in a knowledge economy, when the output is more often an idea or a piece of writing or a headline for a marketing campaign, not all hours are created equal.

And we still live in a world that tries to impose a lot of these industrial era schedules onto our knowledge economy lives. So this is something that you and others have written about a lot. One of the benefits on the individual and the personal scale of being organized and planning out when you're going to do what is that it can create firmer boundaries around when you're not going to do the thing that is hanging over your head.

You know, I've always found that the best productivity hack is presence. It's just your ability to unitask and do one thing at a time. And, you know, yes, there are apps and ways to design your environment that might optimize for presence. But when you boil it down at the end of the day, the best way to be productive is to, as you would say, do deep work is to rid yourself of some of those distractions and be more attuned to when you have the energy to do certain types of work throughout the day.

And I think that's one of the great pieces of potential of our current, you know, remote world or hybrid world is people have a lot more autonomy and agency to work on tasks at times that best suit their energy levels. And so whereas, you know, work might on one moment on one task when you're feeling super low energy, expand like a gas and just take up however much space you a lot for it in a more intentional or, you know, autonomous world.

Maybe if you're not being very productive on what you're doing, you can put it to the side and, you know, go for a walk or do something more routine and mundane that doesn't require you to think hard or think critically about what you're doing. Right. And then schedule or slot that work in that requires you to really think deeply into a time in your day when you are feeling like you're firing on all cylinders.

Well, now I'm theorizing on the fly. So here's my new theory based on exactly what I just heard you say that helps explain, you know, I have an uneasy relationship with the the anti productivity world out there. And, you know, I put and whose work I really respect is definitely, you know, in that world.

And sometimes we don't feel like we're talking about different things. We're talking about productivity organization. But here's my theory that reconciles all of that. If you take and you're going to tell me if I'm crazy or not, if you take productivity techniques and I'm talking organizational techniques and you throw it into a life that has the work as my sense of transcendent meaning in that context, it's almost impossible to prevent those tools from doing anything but actually just increasing effort.

Because if work is my defining meaning and what I do, if I'm given the tools that actually allows me to produce more with more time, I am going to produce more. And because that's the context most people are in, there is a fair critique from the anti productivity movement of I don't even want to talk about to do list or organizational tools or I want to castigate that as it's all it's all productivity bros talking about it because they're rightly pointing out in the professional context I see around me that the tools is throwing dynamite onto the shaky train car.

Whereas if someone has adopted your framework already, though, and is saying, OK, I have a diverse identity work as part of it. But are these other things that are important to me? You throw productivity tools in that context. They say, oh, great. This is what's going to allow me to get this done by three so I can get my bike rides in before the sun goes down.

It's so it's maybe it's the context dependent. Valence of productivity is the key, this is I'm making up terms on the flags, it's what I do is the key to explaining how sort of the anti productivity crowd is touching on something absolutely right, but at the same time, also these types of thinking could be absolutely critical to a better way of work and all of it's true at the same time.

It's not actually a contradiction. It's all contextual. I totally agree. You know, it depends on what your North Star is. You know, if work is the lens through which you're viewing your life, then everything can become grist for the mill. You know, all your inputs are in service of your ability to create commercial output.

But if you take a more zoomed out picture and think about work as part of what you do, it's similar to budgeting with money. You know, the goal of budgeting isn't to be pinching pennies and contemplating every single purchase you make. It's actually to free yourself from having to negotiate every single decision anew.

And I think the good side of productivity is just that is understanding what is the ways in which you're going to schedule and budget your time so that you can feel free when you're off the clock to actually be off the clock and then know when you're on the clock what you're going to be doing with that time as well.

And then when thinking about this framework, the other thing that comes up is this idea of I've written about before, like in So Good They Can't Ignore You, that often in a job, instrumentally speaking, skill is your best leverage. So the better you are at something that's valuable, the more potential control you have over what your job is like.

If you're recognized that and willing to actually deploy it. So now there's kind of a balancing act here, right? We want to find a we want to find a path between quiet quitting on one side and all in overload on the other side, a path in which you are deliberately building up skill because it's going to give you more and more options to craft work to fit with other identities.

But that that's a kind of an ambitious pursuit. And you don't want that to fall into into overwork. So how do we how do we navigate? You know, I don't want to just give up because that's not going to end up well. But I don't want the ambition of I'm going to get better at this new thing because it's going to give me two years from now the ability to now I'm going to be fully remote and can dictate my terms.

How to not allow that to push you into back to overload. I'm back to like, let's just this is let's keep going. Yeah. I mean, that's the million dollar question, right? How do you pursue meaningful work without letting your work subsume who you are? And if I might, I'll offer a term, which is the good enough job.

You know, I think what I like about the framework is that it's intentionally subjective. You get to choose what good enough means to you. Maybe your version of good enough is making a certain salary or making a certain amount of money, or maybe it's having a certain title or working in a certain industry or getting off at three o'clock so you can go pick up your kids from school or go on your bike ride.

But what I encourage people is to recognize when they have it, because the default is just more, more, more, more, more. And that's what leads to a lot of the restlessness or the lack of fulfillment is when people don't know to what end they're working for. I think getting very clear on your values and understanding how work can support your vision of a well-lived life can help you understand what your version of enough is.

And I think that's the key in threading that needle. I do agree with you where on the side of, you know, quite quitting or, you know, nihilism, it's not necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either. I remember you talking on a past episode about how you think a lot of this sort of like anti-capitalism rhetoric and anti-work rhetoric is a red herring.

And it's true. We live in a material world as much as we might want to deny it. You know, right now there's a lot of cultural cachet in being against work. But at the end of the day, everyone still has to pay rent. And so just kind of chalking work up to a necessary evil, I don't think is ultimately a recipe for happiness either.

Do you have any faith or optimism about there also being systemic changes in organizations themselves that makes these type of jobs more generally sustainable? And I'm coming at this from, you know, my my thread of critique, the thread I'm always trying to throw into this conversation and sort of the thread I hold on to, and I'm kind of alone in this sometimes, is I, of course, as a computer scientist, take this technological thread looking into this, that there is this unintentional side effects of introducing low friction communication tools.

The collision of digital with knowledge work spun work habits and directions that were particularly unsustainable. I mean, I like to think of it as it takes this mindset you're talking about. Work is my meaning. More is better. And then it was upping the marijuana to heroin, right? These tools then made it possible to, oh, I can now easily work all the time.

Right. So it it it enabled this existing mindset to really spiral out of control. So I have this sort of technological thread is that just this haphazard approach to collaborating where we say, here's Slack, here's email, figure it out, has made things 10 times worse or whatever. But that also opens up the idea of, oh, so if in part things are incredibly unsustainable because of this techno social loop, that's not really helping anyone is making workers more miserable.

People stay up till midnight checking emails is not really making, you know, sale forces revenue better because those people are distracted from whatever writing better code or something like that. So do you have any optimism that even market forces and this is the late capitalism club, late stage capitalism really hates this idea.

And I'm not saying this is going to happen. I'm just going to throw it out there that even market forces could potentially play a role in making work more sustainable as at some point there might be some recognition of we need some more structure here. Like, this is crazy.

We can't just send emails all day long and just out of control throwing work back and forth like this isn't helping anyone. So is there systemic changes that might happen that might complement the sort of individualized strategies you're talking about here? Yeah, I think there have to be, because right now the default is the hyperactive hive mind.

It's everyone running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to respond to a million different Slack notifications. And, you know, obviously, like my disposition, I tend to lean toward the moral case as opposed to the business case for the value of working less or investing in other sides of work.

But I do think there are things that companies can do. And I think it's incumbent on companies to do them, because right now, too often the onus is placed on the individuals to find better work life balance or to practice self care. And I really think that companies in their own best interest have the responsibility to design systems that make work more, as you would say, sustainably productive.

So some things that I've seen that I think work really well, first and foremost, hiring enough people so that there's enough people to do the work. I think part of what I've noticed through my reporting is that some of these companies, there's no Slack built into their system so that when one employee takes time off, they have to be available because there aren't the right systems in place to be able to delegate that work to other people that work there.

The second is, you know, managers and bosses need to model the type of culture and behavior that they want their companies to have. You know, I've talked to so many different leaders or CEOs that say, yeah, you know, we want to try and cultivate more of a healthy relationship to work here.

And, you know, of course, I'm on Slack at 11 p.m. answering emails and my green dot is always available. You know, culture trickles down from the top. And if your boss is answering emails on their honeymoon in the Sahara Desert, like what, of course, you should be doing so, too, is the kind of implied message.

And then I think it's just about being more clear about expectations. So there's a section in the book where I talk about a more transactional approach to work, which might seem crass, especially in our current culture that loves to think of jobs as callings and vocations and passions. But what I mean when I think about a more transactional approach to work is just being clear on both sides of the equation.

What is this contract that we're entering into? I think it can free both employers and employees. Employers can focus on defining what good work looks like and employees can know what the expectations are for success and more importantly, treat their job as part but not the entirety of who they are.

You know, I think like questions around the ability to advocate for fair compensation all come back to this idea that work is more than an economic contract. But at the end of the day, fundamentally, definitionally, what a job is, is an exchange of a worker's time and energy for a paycheck.

I think the more clear sighted we can be about that, the better. I'm 100 percent on board with you. I mean, I think that idea is straight on. The more you can actually surface the implicit transaction, everything gets better. And then it's about I'm doing this for you in exchange for this income.

And maybe as the skill gets higher, the amount of income for the same amount of effort, maybe that goes up or whatever. But this is what I'm doing and I did it well and I'm doing it well. And so the fact that I'm not here at three because I'm with my kids or doing something else doesn't matter.

What matters is I'm delivering next month this package that I said I was going to deliver. I am a big believer in that, whether that is an explicit thing or it's more implicit. I've written about it. I mean, people have tried this internally. This is like results only work environments, tried to make that tangible inside big environment.

And where that did work, it worked really well. My friend Ben Kastnoka years ago wrote a book called The Alliance. He might have co-authored that with Reid Hoffman, but it was about... I actually went to high school together. Oh, you know? OK. You know Ben? Yeah, we're both San Francisco natives.

Yes. Oh, excellent. Good. Well, we have a lot we could talk about. But so you know Ben and you remember his company in high school. But that book is proposing a future of work that hasn't quite come, but it was kind of a good idea that it was you might imagine a future, especially highly skilled workers say, I'm going to have a contract with you to do this for the next two years.

And this is what our relationship is going to be. Is this I'm doing this work for you and I'm good at it and you're paying me well for it. And and you know, when we're done, we'll shake hands and I'm going to sign a contract somewhere else. You know what?

And there could be more of that within all of it seems to me a pushback against the no, no, you're just a cognitive cog in this giant machine. And we just want to just keep pumping as much. You just pump out as much out of your brain as possible.

Just always be doing stuff. The more stuff, the better. And yeah, you have work life balance. But remember, every time you choose life over work, you're kind of letting us down. So you always have to deal like every moment you have to be negotiating that and that that sort of there's no upper limit.

We're giving it to you. We're saying, figure it out. Just doesn't work. Yeah, it's just just misery making. And then the pandemic, especially those of us who had kids at home to like trying to go to school. I think that was another another breaking point where it's like, you know, yeah, we acknowledge that, but also just still do all your work.

And I think some of the systems within companies are directly in opposition to the ability to move to this more enlightened future. Like I'm thinking of lawyers, for example, like lawyers are forced to track their job, their work in like six or 15 minute increments. And it's just this perverse incentive that rewards time spent working over the quality of the work.

And I remember talking to this litigation associate in New York, and he basically told me that like I have no incentive to do work efficiently or produce high quality in a shorter amount of time. My only incentive is to, you know, build my billable hours that are expected of me.

And for as long as we have systems like that in place, we're never going to be able to achieve the life of work life integration that so many people desperately want. Yeah, like estate lawyers have figured this out, this idea of, OK, we have packages, we will plan your estate and here's how much it costs.

And that's the negotiation, not ours. And I'll tell you one, I want to be respectful of your time, but I'll tell you one positive alternative model I came across recently here in D.C. is there's an increasing number of law firms. These are typically women run law firms because it's reacting in particular to the impossibilities of advancement in that model.

If, let's say, for example, you have kids and the model of these new law firms is we have a much lower cap of hours. And they say, because you know why it we bill at a high rate and this generates a good amount of money and everyone makes a good income and we have that cap low.

We don't have the the unbounded upper end model of the standard big law firm of like the more the better. And how do you differentiate yourself? You outbill someone else. And so these new firms are coming out and saying, our goal is not to try to, you know, it's OK.

We don't need the one point seven million dollar salary as the top equity partner. Actually, what if we do this social contract? We work 40 hour weeks. We bill 30 out of those 40 and everyone's making, you know, whatever it is. I don't give numbers, but, you know, whatever it is, like a very healthy, like in the middle of the six figure salary or something like that.

And that's considered radical. But I love that type of thinking of like, well, what are we actually trying to accomplish here? What if it's not just maximizing the income scorecard, you know, for our equity partners or something like this? So I like that. I love to see that type of that type of innovation.

You know what it sounds like those lawyers know? They know their definition of good enough. They have a sense of what they need and not just this endless desire for more. Yeah. And if only there was a book that could teach this mindset. Oh, there is. So we got the good enough.

Job. Let's see if I get the subtitle right from memory. Reclaiming life from work. Exactly. Just right. All right. Well, Simone, thank you for calling in and helping giving us some some deep ideas here. I really recommend the book. And again, it's very humanist. It's it's stories into the lives of real people.

It's not, shall we say, Cal Newport esque of here's 17 definition terms and framework. So I appreciate that. I think my readers will as well. They get enough frameworks and new terms for me. Absolutely. Money. Thank you for calling in. Good enough job. Thank you. Yeah. It's out tomorrow and you can learn more at the good enough job dot com.

Oh, yeah. I'm see. You know what? I'm terrible at this because I'm terrible at marketing. I have social media. Tell us. OK, the good enough job dot com. Is that the book website? That's the book website. And socials. What should we know? My social media. OK, first name, last name.

Simone Stolzoff. Yeah. So much for having me on. All right. Thank you. All right. Well, that was great. I think we really got into some interesting wisdom there. There we go. That's my my sort of virtual commencement address for the year. So what I want to do next is tackle a collection of questions from you, my listeners, that will all be more or less roughly themed about this idea of finding meaning in your job, figuring out what role your job should play in your life.

We get a lot of questions like that. So I called I called three or four for us to tackle before we get there. However, let me talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, a sponsor that is very appropriate given the theme of today's episode, and that is our friends at 80,000 Hours.

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their career. Now, think about this. As we were just discussing with Simone, if you adopt a mindset that says my entire identity worth and happiness doesn't have to come from my job, job is just one part of my life, then that opens up a lot more options for what you want to do with your job.

And if it's just going to be something that helps support me, it's not the end all and be all. Might as well consider making it a job that is useful to the world. This is where 80,000 Hours comes in. Now, let's talk about this name. Where does that come from?

Where does that number come from? It is the length of the average career. This is 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year, times 40 years, gets you to 80,000 hours. As the folks at 80,000 Hours like to say, that's a lot of time. So if your job is something that is useful to the world, you'll end up putting in a lot of effort towards improving the world because of how much time you actually spend working on your job.

Most career advice doesn't really address social impact or how to make a positive difference. So 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that is focused on exactly that goal. They've spent the last decade conducting research along academics at Oxford University to figure out how to optimize the impact of your career on the world.

I have known the 80,000 Hour people since my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, came out. I remember that they were just getting this nonprofit up and going and we shared a simpatico view that there is more of an instrumental way of understanding jobs as opposed to instead being our identity or the thing that's going to make us most happy.

So I've known the individuals involved at 80,000 Hours for over a decade now. So what you can do is go to their website, 80,000Hours.org/deep. That's where you'll find all of their research and guides about having a high impact career. They also have a excellent podcast where they have unusually in-depth conversations with experts in the world's most pressing problems.

What you can do to solve them so you get expert views on different careers that are useful to the world. If you've been enjoying my discussions of AI, I would suggest checking out their somewhat recent interview with David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness. He's an expert on machine consciousness.

Very interesting. 80,000 Hours also has a great job board where you can find listings for jobs that make a difference. They even offer free one on one career calls with their impartial advising team. Everything they provide is free. They're a nonprofit and their only aim is to help you find a high impact career.

So if you go to 80,000Hours.org/deep, and don't forget that slash deep, because if you go to the include the slash deep, you'll get sent a free copy of their in-depth career guide, which will help you learn about what makes for a high impact career, help you get ideas for choosing an impactful path and then create a plan to put what you found into action.

So head to 80,000Hours.org/deep. That's the number 80,000 followed by the word hours.org/deep. Start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling and help solve one of the world's most pressing problems. I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. They solve a different problem, but one you should worry about, which is your internet privacy.

When you connect to the Internet, be it through a wireless access point when you're out and about or through your home internet connection, people can see who you're talking to. If you're talking, going wirelessly to a router, they can actually sniff your packets off the public radio waves and see what websites or services is this person talking to.

Even if you're within the privacy of your own home, talking to your private internet subscription with a cable company, for example, that internet service provider can watch who is he talking to, who is she talking to and sell that data. To a data brokers, a VPN helps you get around that.

Here's the way it works. Instead of directly connecting to a site or service, you instead make a secure encrypted connection to a VPN server. You then tell that server with encrypted messages, here's who I really want to talk to. That server talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back to you.

People sniffing your wireless packets, your internet service provider, all they find out is that you're talking to a VPN server. They learn nothing about your actual internet habits. You need to use a VPN. If you do use a VPN, I suggest ExpressVPN. It is easy to use. You turn it on and just use your website, your web browsers or services like normal.

They have servers in over 90 countries. So no matter where you are, you'll you'll be able to find almost certainly a server that's geolocated near where you are. They have good bandwidth. It is just a top of the line VPN service. So it's a no brainer. You want to keep your internet privacy secure.

Go to ExpressVPN.com/deep. Don't forget to use my link so you can get three extra months free. That's ExpressVPN.com/deep to learn more. All right, let's hear some of your questions about fitting your career into a deep life. Jesse, who's our first question today? All right, first question is from Confused.

How do I figure out what kind of job I want to do? I'm 42, totally confused. I can't even I can't even go back to school as I don't know what I'm interested in. Well, Confused, it's a good question. It's not too late. We are going to help you out here.

I'm glad you're not just defaulting to go back to school. But the very fact that you brought that up to say, I don't think I can do that. I think that is very telling. And I want to I just want to focus on that for just a second, because I think that underscores the degree to which is just expected.

If you don't know what to do. Burn 30 or 60 thousand dollars on a degree and that'll kill time and maybe that'll open something up new that has become so expected that you felt the need to have a disclaimer because you expected that might be the advice you get.

You had to disclaim it right up front so that I want to you want to hear that advice because it wasn't going to work for you. That shows how ubiquitous that idea has become. As longtime listeners know, I do not think randomly going to school is a great idea for graduate degrees.

I do not think you should use it as a time killer or use it speculatively. Hey, I have to imagine if I get this degree, interesting jobs will arise. My theory about grad degrees, which I talk about every couple of months here on the show, is you should get a graduate degree when the specific path you're on, you get to a block in that career path that says this degree from this school allows me to move forward to this next step on the career path.

And I really want to go there when you have a specific reason to get the degree and trusted evidence that the degree you're getting from the place you're getting it will take you to that next location. So degrees should be deployed for very specific reasons, not as a speculative investment in opportunities that are yet undiscovered.

It's like me going to get a Ph.D. That was very clearly on the step to becoming a professor. But I really want to become a professor. So there's a really clear reason why I did that. All right. So we put school out of the way. What should you do?

You're not going to be surprised you're confused. My listeners aren't gonna be surprised here either. When I say lifestyle centric career planning, when I hear how do I figure out what type of job I want to do, I'm totally confused. I would say that question is the wrong one.

What job do I want to do? What does that mean that you want to do the job because it's going to mat some innate passion, because it is going to make you happy every day, because you're going to feel an unshakable drive and motivation and happiness to work. That doesn't mean anything to me.

What does it mean to want to do a job? I think that is too vague. I think you're probably putting, as we talked about with Simone earlier, you are probably putting way too much emphasis on the job must be fulfilling some fundamental need I have. Lifestyle centric career planning is a great way to flip that around.

What you're aiming towards is a fully featured vision of your lifestyle, not just your what type of work you're doing, but where you're living, what your day is like, what your time is like. Is it heavily scheduled or open? Are you in the woods or in the city? Are you reading first edition Faulkner by a creek somewhere in the woods or checking out the latest post-punk band in an underground club in the Lower East Side?

You just have these clear visions of what resonates, what lifestyle resonates, what are the different elements of that lifestyle? And then you say, great, how do I work backwards from that to achieve those elements? And what you then start looking for is decisions in your life that move you as far forward as possible towards that vision.

Your job will be a huge part of that vision, but now you're deploying your job towards something specific, not answering the question, what do I want to do? But instead answering the question, what is the right package of decisions that will move me closest to this vision that I have articulated?

It's a pragmatic problem. It is a practical problem. The job becomes, in the same way that Simone talked about, quite instrumental. So you're 42, right? So we're not 22, where you might be more prone to thinking my job is going to be everything. And at 22, by the way, you probably have no idea really what you want in your lifestyle anyways.

You have self-reflection, now you have self-awareness, you have quite a bit of experience as an adult. So you can form, I think, a realistic, pragmatic lifestyle that really does resonate. And then you just get tactical. All right, well, this lifestyle is really built around, I don't know, autonomy and being outside in the country.

So, OK, it's got to be remote work. Maybe if I live cheaper, that will then open up the salary range that would work for me. I know I don't like this type of effort. So let me look at this category of jobs. And what I think about, I'm confused, I have a very specific example in mind.

I remember meeting someone up in Vermont when we were there last summer who had some job for the state government in Burlington and skied every day on the way to or from work. They lived in between him and his work was a ski hill. A lot of what he did, he could go out, he had to go and do surveying in the woods.

And so there's lots of sort of being outside. And the job was like fine. But it was like what he was building was this great Vermont lifestyle. The job was so weird and specific and government specific. There's no way that he sat down and said, what do I want to do?

Well, I want to have this particular position in this bureaucracy in the Vermont state government. No, no. He had a lifestyle vision. And it involved living in a place like Vermont and having this flexibility and these engagement with the outside. And then he went and as part of putting together that picture, found this job that made that work.

It was a good enough job to use Simone's term. All right. So lifestyle, career planning confused and don't go get a random graduate degree. All right, Jesse, what do we got next? All right, next question is from M. What advice would you give somebody who is currently in a role that meets every job satisfaction criteria but is struggling with motivation?

I consistently lack motivation to do deep work and have to force myself to focus. This at times feels almost physically impossible, especially when working from home and leads me to cycling between burnout, stress, boredom and guilt. Well, and this is common, especially right now, especially post pandemic. There's two potential forces that might be at play here that is causing this a motivation issue.

I don't know which of these that play. It's likely that both are maybe at play and they're mixed together. But let's talk about both separately. The first is what I call deep procrastination, which is an issue I wrote about originally back when I focused my blog just on students because it was in the student population that I first observed this issue.

Deep procrastination is where you find yourself unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. And for students, it'll be a paper that has to be submitted or a take home exam that has to go back and they just can't do it. They cannot muster the internal motivation to even get started.

Deadlines will be passed. Professors will give them extensions. Oftentimes they maybe end up even having to withdraw from that semester. They just can't push themselves to work. So I observed this when I was especially at MIT, where I was at the time among high achieving students. It was different than depression because in other aspects of their life, they were not a hedonic.

So it wasn't an overall flattening of their ability to have sort of excitement or hope or positive feelings. There's other things are still very exciting to them, but they couldn't do schoolwork. So deep procrastination could be at play here. I'll talk in a second about how to service that, but let me let me mention the other possible force at play here, which would be the idea that your mind might be dopamine sick.

So dopamine sick is where you have. So frazzled your brain. With constant targeted distraction at the slightest hint of boredom delivered through your phone, delivered to your computer screen, that is now unable to work up the proper motivation to do something that's longer form, deeper and more complicated, that is so frazzled from just being stimuli bombarded with all of these algorithmically expertly aimed sources of stimuli, these digital darts right to the base of your brainstem that give you that metaphorical electrical charge that when it comes time to do something that is comparably more stayed, that's comparably more boring, like let's start gathering sources and writing this memo.

Your brain just can't do it. And there's been a uptick anecdotally, an uptick in dopamine sickness, especially post-pandemic because of how much and how many people fell into a pattern of much more hyperactive exposure to distraction that they would have before. Because maybe they're now at home and they're working remotely so they can have the phone out and things feel more haphazard.

Maybe also there is an escape was happening. You're anxious about things that are happening in the world and you can't confront them. And so let me just look at the phone. Let me just look at these these distractions and get that numbing in the moment. So I think we have a lot more dopamine sickness than we had before.

Students are getting this very strongly because they got so embedded with their devices that now their brains are struggling. When you say here's a senior thesis you have to write as a high school student and their brain is tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. How can I go from seven seconds before I swipe to spending hours trying to research Charles DeGreat or something like this?

So both of these things might be a play. Deep procrastination, dopamine sickness. Let's talk about solutions to both. And you can mix and match these solutions as they seem to fit. So what I learned about deep procrastination is that its source tends to be a combination of the locus of control and motivation being away from the internal and more towards the external.

So extrinsic motivation. You're like, I don't really this feels arbitrary to me or it's not something I really want to do. But it's being for a student, it might be, I don't know, my parents wanted me to be a pre-med major and this chemistry class is really hard. I never even wanted to be a doctor.

And this class is not something I went after because I was excited about it. And in work, it could be I don't even understand why I'm writing this self-assessment report. So I just put it on my plate. No one's even going to read this thing. So you have this lack of intrinsic motivation for the work, coupled with the work being hard.

So the chem class is really hard and I never want to be a doctor in the first place. This report is going to be a real pain. I don't even really know. There's a lot of ambiguities around how do I even do this? And I wasn't my idea to do this in the first place.

No one's really going to read it. That combination can trigger. Deep procrastination. So a couple of things you can do here. One, you have to reduce the hardness that does help lock it in your organizational system. Here is how I keep track of what's on my plate. Here's how I plan my time during the day.

Maybe I'm doing capture, configure, control style system of professional workplace management. I have processes in place for common collaborations. There's a sense your brain gets of I am in control of how I approach my work that gives it more confidence and reduces the sense of this is some ambiguous, hard, impossible task.

So when the hard thing gets reduced to time blocks that show up in time block plans for the days and you sort of execute your time blocks for the days, it's not as hard to execute. So that can help. Simplifying obligations also helps. So there's a sense of hardness that sometimes come here from just you're overwhelmed, you're overloaded and your brain says this is enough.

Like, I don't even know what all this stuff is. This is impossible, uncle. I'm going to do deep procrastination. So it's a good time because it's a serious problem. And we're not able to to just get normal work done. It's causing you real subjective distress. You have to be ready to make some actual big changes here and a real simplification on what's on your plate, even if it ruffles some feathers, may be what you need here.

Makes your workload seem manageable or possible to your mind. And then finally, I think you need some sort of target that your professional life is serving. This goes back to something like lifestyle centric career planning. So here's the chain of influence I want here. I want you to have this vision you're excited about for your life that you're not there yet, but a lifestyle that's different, that resonates.

There's some things I need to change. You need to figure out how your work fits into there. And this may require some changes, I need to shift over from this work to that work or change my change, my focus within the organization, because that's going to open up these options, which lets me get closer to my lifestyle.

But what you're trying to get here is a chain of influence from a motivating image of a desired lifestyle and have that chain of influence come all the way back to the work you're doing right now. And it seems like that's arbitrary, but for the motivational sensors in our brain, that makes a big difference.

Now you get intrinsic motivation. This self-assessment report is going to be a pain to write, but it's part of my plan to get this next promotion, which I'll then negotiate to shift over to this type of work, which I'll negotiate to do remotely. And then I'm going to move to the upper peninsula of Michigan as my plan all specifies I should do.

Now the hard, hard effort deployed towards a goal you believe in is not, not hard. It's not going to cause deep procrastination. We appreciate hard things if we know why we're doing them. So you have to, you have to fit a why in there. If you're just going through your job, this should be a good job.

I'm paid well, it's satisfying. I like the people, but it's just a job. Then doing the effort could fall into this deep procrastination trap. So you have to connect it to a bigger positive vision. All right. So what about dopamine sickness? If that is the issue here? Well, you need boredom therapy.

I talk about this in my book, deep work. This means a regular periods throughout your day where your mind craves distractions and you do not give those distractions to your mind. This includes, for example, going on at least one walk or errand a day without your phone. So you have no option of looking at your phone or listening to something.

I would also suggest the phone for your method. My phone gets plugged in by the front door in the kitchen. When I get home, if I need to look something up or check text messages, I have to walk over there and read it there. It is not with me on the couch.

It is not with me at the dinner table. God forbid. It's not with me in the bathroom. So you still have the phone in your apartment, in your house. You still have the conveniences of, Oh, I need to look up what time this thing is tomorrow or text someone on meeting later, but it's not on your person.

And that makes all the difference. So now your brain is getting used to this idea. Sometimes we get distraction when we're bored. Sometimes we don't. And this is a withdrawal period. Give that a couple of weeks and your brain will get much more comfortable with it. You can also do interval training with your ability to concentrate on hard things.

Let me just do 20 minutes. 20 minutes with a timer. And if I break and check email or my phone, I have to reset the timer. Your brain says that I can do. I might freeze when you say, right, this thing is going to take five hours, but 20 minutes I can do, and you start with that 20 minutes with a timer, intensely working on things until you can do that pretty regularly without it being too horrified.

20 minutes doesn't seem too bad. And then you add 10 more minutes. And then once 30 minutes becomes comfortable, you add 10 more minutes. So you might literally need to retrain your brain for longer and longer intervals of focus as you escape dopamine sickness. Finally, I think you need to care about location.

You need to care about rituals for your work. So you mentioned that working from home is a big part of work seeming very hard for you to get started with. This is a tricky thing. When your home environment, your work environment is the same. You're trying to wrench your mind from a domestic context into a professional context.

It's hard to do. Your mind is still largely ensnared in the domestic context. It's hard. Therefore, you don't have as much resources to actually focus on the thing ahead. It messes with your motivational sensor senses. So, Em, I would say go radical here. You need a really different location.

You do your work, renovate the garden shed, rent some office space in a small town, spend money on this. You have a big problem. And you're unable to get work started. So you have to see this as an issue that might require big solutions and build much more elaborate rituals around your work.

This is my work day. I have a big walk I do to get coffee where I think I plan my day at the coffee shop. And when I get back to my desk and my exotic location near my house, I immediately start working at the end of the day.

I go to that same coffee shop and do a shutdown routine and then do another walk to switch my mindset. You need radical rituals. You need radical locations to help your mind separate work from non-work to help your mind more automatically generate the motivation it needs to get going.

You're not just forcing it, white knuckling it. Hey, let me just put this laundry basket down, walk past my kid over here who's homesick and just say, concentrate now. And you're staring at the computer amidst all of that chaos. So I don't know if you have deep procrastination. I don't know if you have dopamine sickness.

I don't know if it's some mix of those two things, but think about those solutions and the types of solutions that seem to resonate with you. Go with those. That'll probably point you towards what the real problem actually is. Did you go over the term dopamine sickness? Uh, I think so.

Yeah, I think you did. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it might be around. I just made it up, but I like it. It's, um, you come up with a lot of terms. I like terms. Well, there's a show about the opioid crisis called dope sick. Either is. Yes. That's probably what that's probably what I'm implicitly playing off of.

Uh, I do, I do come up with a lot of terms. All right, let's do another question. All right. Next question is from Will. I'm having a hard time finding an academic position in a location. That's good for my family. I received a suggestion that I should be more flexible and exploring other jobs outside academia, but I'm hesitant because I'm afraid of landing in a job that's not my cup of tea.

It also feels like a waste of career capital. I'd like to ask your suggestion on how to apply lifestyle, career centered planning, career capital, and other principles you teach in this context. Well, yeah, well, I mean, academia is rough. Let's, let's start with that. Academia can mean different things.

So we should be clear about what it is. What is the target lifestyle you're looking for in academia? What do you have in mind? You have in mind a sort of one, one R1 tenure track research type professorship. This would be that the classical in the U S system, the classical notion of professorship.

So one, one means you teach one course in the fall and one course in the spring that most of your focus is on research and tenure track, meaning that you're, you're in a position where your goal is to get tenure in the position based off your research contributions, when you think about famous professors, this is what they are.

One, one, usually at R1 research universities on the tenure track. There's another thing. Academia could mean academia could mean a tenure track position, but at a two, two or three, three at a more of a teaching focused institution where you. Will produce research like a book every now and then, but not at the same expected rate or quality as someone at a research institution where you have a lot more time and that's a different type of feel.

And there it's often more about the, the academic community, the school, the grounds, the tradition, the pedagogy. And then there's another trance that academia could mean, which is sort of non-tenure track. Typically the money's not great. It's a, it's a lot of teaching more adjunct style. And that's a, that's a different option.

These are sort of all three options you get if you're coming out of an academic focused PhD. So first of all, be clear, which of these you're looking for. You know, which of these you are happy with and, and for the and each of them can be made into a, a component of very deep life, each of these can also be.

Poisonous to a deep life, depending on what you're really going for and how you actually approach it. Once you know what you're looking for, will, then you got to be realistic, is that accessible to me? And this is where academia is rough. That's what I mean by it's tough.

That, that first tranche of jobs, the, the one, one tenure track at a research institution, those are very hard. And you have to be coming out of essentially a top program a top PhD program with a good research track record. And people will then assume if I hire this person, they're going to be able to do similar types of research when they come here.

If you, if you're not coming out of a top program with the top research record, those are very hard positions to get. And that's, you will know that right now, if you're in that position or not, these are not jobs that you typically work your way into later, you don't work your way up to these jobs, you typically fall down into them.

So you, you're at a very good institution and then you can get one of these jobs at a good institution. Right. So you would know right now, if that's on, on the table, same thing that these elite teaching institutions are, are hard. And you know, you get a sense right away at the job market is, is my combination of, of experience, what they're looking for or not.

The adjunct positions are more available, but you got to be very careful that you have a clear lifestyle vision for what you want to do with those adjunct positions and not trick yourself, for example, into thinking, well, if I just do that long enough, I'll be able to then jump up into one of these other categories.

It, it tends to be more of a separate track. So we got to start with a reality check. I don't know what the answer is because I don't know your circumstances will, but I think you need to face that reality check. Even if in the end, you don't like the answer.

Even if you say I've spent so much time on this academic path, but the, the tranche of academia I want, honestly, is not accessible to me. That can be frustrating, but we have to face that, that career reality, right in the face. So if you find out academia is not possible or not plausible for me, I think lifestyle centric career planning is the right frame.

I think lifestyle centric career planning will integrate career capital theory. So here's what I mean by that. So we've talked about lifestyle centric career planning already on this episode, but work out the full lifestyle, your family, where you want to live, what you want your time to be like, other things, community involvements, philosophical, theological involvements, different aspects of your life and say, great.

Now we need a package of decisions that gets us as close as possible to that lifestyle, and that's going to involve jobs. But now you're looking for jobs that are getting you closer to the lifestyle that you desire, not some sort of intrinsic fulfillment that it gives you. Career capital is just at this point, a factor in this decision.

So the career capital you have by getting the, this graduate degree is just an opener up of options. It puts on the table options that otherwise would not be on the table without the career capital. Those options are probably better than options that don't at all take advantage of the training that you got in your academic path, but it doesn't mean necessarily those are the options you're going to go with.

I mean, you might find for this lifestyle vision we have, there's this completely sort of unrelated job. It just cares that I'm a smart college graduate, but we could really build that lifestyle around it. That might actually be the right thing. Maybe when you're looking at the options that are specific to your specific academic training, yeah, these are higher level options or interesting options, but none of them fit with the lifestyle you have.

So this is how I would put career capital in there. It opens up more options for you to consider, but your goal is not just the maximization of career capital. How do I make sure I'm taking as much advantage as possible of my existing training? Your goal is to get as close as possible to your ideal lifestyle.

You have a lot of career capital. You have a lot more options about how to do it, but it doesn't mean that the path you end up taking needs to involve you leveraging very specific skills that you bought. And I recognize that it's annoying if you end up taking a path that did not directly pull from your training.

It does feel like a loss, but it's not. A lot of people do that. That's not uncommon. People take big swerves. That's not the issue. I'm not typically worried about someone making a big swerve if the reason why they're swerving is they know where they want to head and there's an obstacle in the way.

And so they're swerving to get around that obstacle so they can stay on the path towards what they're heading towards. So if you know what you're doing, if you're intentional about your life and you end up having to do a big swerve, then you end up having to do a big swerve.

I'm not worried about that. If you know where you're heading, I worry about it. As I talked about in So Good They Can't Ignore You, if you're swerving for the sake of swerving, if you're serving, serving, swerving, because you think just doing something radically different maybe will make your situation feel radically better.

If you're swerving to chase after a elusive happiness delivered from just the details of a particular job, then I get a little bit more worried. I tell a lot of those tales on So Good They Can't Ignore You where people try to fix a fundamental emptiness in their life by radically changing their job.

And the spoiler is it doesn't. But a radical change that is intentional, not because you think change is good, but because you're trying to get closer to that destination on the horizon and there's a ravine in front of you. Not a big deal. So I wouldn't worry about it will as much as you are.

Just stay clearheaded and intentional. All right, let's see here. Let's do, I think we'll do one more question. We'll do four instead of five today, Jesse, because we had a bit of a longer deep dive, but let's do one more question. Sounds good. Next question is from Jenny T.

My last job did not support any type of deep work. Quick examples. I watched colleagues and my team place their IMs on do not disturb and then get in trouble from higher ups when they didn't respond within 10 minutes and would then bombard them with emails and phone calls.

My superior would frequently take two meetings at one time. Yes, you read that right. He would listen to one meeting with earbuds and another one coming through the computer, I'm considering taking an old job at half the pay and no hope for advancement so I can stay far away from this type of culture.

Is this crazy? It'd be funny if it turned out that Jesse had sent this. This was Jesse's question. He had just done it under a pseudonym. I'm just like, if I don't, if I put my IM and do not disturb, Cal is emailing and calling me, taking two meetings at once.

So Jenny, let's put aside this idea about whether you should, you have to take a job at half pay or not to get to what I think is the fundamental point here, which is the environment that you describe. A hyperactive hive mind environment pushed to the extreme is a massive problem.

And we need to enable people to see that type of culture as a big issue. The same way you might see a workplace that is not safe. You know, these mill gears are crushing people's hands. The same way you would see a workplace where you feel that you are harassed or disrespected because of who you are.

We're used to those two things as saying, oh, this is a huge issue. I mean, yes, of course. There shouldn't be work cultures like this, and it's an absolutely good reason to avoid a place. I think we should add extreme hyperactive hive minds to this list of giant workplace red flags.

I get into this in my book, a world without email. The context shifting torture, essentially, this induces on our brain when you're constantly having to service everything all the time, the constant stress of maybe someone needs something from me and I haven't given it to them. There's a boss who sent me an email and I don't know it.

That constant stress and anxiety that plays upon our social circuits in a sort of sadistic insidious way is then coupled with the mental fatigue and cognitive crazy making of having to keep switching your context back and forth. You're never actually able to get any work done. It's like the, the actual torture methods that, uh, I think even our own country deployed of not letting someone sleep.

You just keep putting on loud music every time they're about to fall asleep. It's a kind of a cognitive equivalent. I can never actually let my mind settle and actually focus on something. It's a big deal. It is subjectively and physiologically bad for you. You're going to feel bad.

It's going to make you unhealthy. It's not a, not a healthy work environment. So what I'm, what I want to validate here, Jenny is yeah, get out of there and don't feel guilty about it. Just like you're not going to feel guilty about, Hey, the ceiling kind of collapses every once in a while and people get piled in rubble or, you know, these people are really disrespectful or they're harassing me.

There's a complete culture of disregard. You're like, yeah, I'm going to get out of there. Feel the same way about a extreme hyperactive hive mind workflow, especially if that really clashes with, with what you like, I want it immediately though. Just say. My only option is to cut my pay in half and go back to an old job with no hope for advancement.

I think we can be a little bit more broad and expansive about this. I think you can look at your career capital. What are my skills? Okay. And what are my options for deploying these skills in other places that maybe have a better version of this culture? I, I think most places don't necessarily have a culture this extreme.

And so there might just be a lateral jump lateral in terms of salary and job responsibilities. But forward a jump way forward when it comes to the subjective enjoyment of the actual work by just going to a similar job in another place, there might be also, as you mentioned, another jump towards a different structure of work that for sure will free you from that.

I'm moving towards freelance and moving towards consulting. I'm moving towards a relationship where it's accountability based and not accessibility based. And that might not be a bad idea that, that guarantees you that you're not going to have those issues, but it also could be more risky. And I essentially, what I'm trying to say here is don't believe that any job, like the one you have now is going to have that bad culture, a lot of places don't.

And so you don't necessarily have to make an extreme change to get away from that, but you do, you do need to get away from this particular job. It's not working for you. It's not working for most people as well. So anyways, that's, that's the bigger point I want to make here is to validate people who feel that the hyperactive hive mind hum of their company or their team is a real source of negativity in your life.

It is. And I validate that. And it's a, a completely reasonable justification for making major changes. All right. So what I like to do at the end of the show is switch gears to talk about something interesting that you, my listeners have sent in first. I want to mention a, another sponsor that makes this show possible.

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This is where I take an email that you and my listeners have sent to my interesting@calnewport.com email address. And I find something that caught my attention and we talk about it. Today, I want to look at an article that was published on May 12th in the wall street journal.

Now, if you're watching this, you can see the article on the screen. If you want to watch this is episode. What do we have? Jesse two 49 episode two 49@youtube.com/calnewportmedia or episode two 49@thedeeplife.com. I will of course narrate what I'm reading as well. If you're just listening, all right, here's the article.

It's I'm going to warn everyone. We're going to temporarily return to tech nerd territory, but we won't stay there long. Uh, here's the article. Apple is breaking its own rules with a new headset. Apple soon to be revealed mixed reality device will likely cost $3,000. Requires a separate battery pack and is still experimental.

Jesse, I'll show you a picture of this mixed reality headset. That's not it. That's Oculus. That's magic leap. Ooh, maybe they don't have it on here. Well, I'll put up another pair. All right. So I don't know. This is a magic leap I'm showing on there. The, the Apple one looks sort of similar to that as well.

So if you're watching this, it's not exactly the coolest thing, but here's why I'm talking about this. This article is a little bit dismissive. They say this is a Apple is breaking its own rules because it's putting this thing out there that's not a fully polished product, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple watch.

Typically Apple's MO is this a fully polished, a beautiful consumer product, and once it's out there, it's ready to go here, there being a little bit more experimental. They say, we think the mixed reality is going to be important. We're releasing our product. It's not a fully polished, ready to go.

This is the version that a hundred million people are going to buy yet, but we want to put in the market even in this early state. So that's a little bit different for Apple. Now the article is a little dismissive. It's just, yeah, it has this battery pack. It looks kind of nerdy.

They don't really know what to do with this technology. I'm bringing it up, however, because I think this is an important development in the technology world that no one is talking about at the moment. And this comes back to my theory about what the biggest disruption, the consumer technology space is going to be over the next 15 years.

I'm not convinced as I've talked about before that the mantle of biggest disruption is going to get placed on generative AI. It might. I do think AI is going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

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And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space.

And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the consumer technology space. >> All right, thanks, John. >> All right, thanks, John. >> All right, thanks, John.

>> I think we have a couple of questions. I'm going to go ahead and get started with one. I think we have a couple of questions. I'm going to go ahead and get started with one. I think we have a couple of questions. I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

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I'm going to get started with one. I'm going to get started with one. I'm going to get started with one. I'm going to get started with one. I'm going to get started with one. (upbeat music)