- "How can I balance robust routines and plans "with enjoying the present moment? "Is it possible to be an ambitious high achiever "without a baseline level of anxiety?" - You know, it's an interesting question because coincidentally, I listened to two different podcasts in the last few days that I think of as giving two different perspectives on this question, both podcasts by people I know and respect.

So let's start with these two perspectives I heard, coincidentally, just in the last few days. So the first was from Oliver Berkman, who wrote "4,000 Weeks," "Friend of the Show," he blurbs "Slow Productivity," I blurb "4,000 Weeks," and he really has made a name for himself with this sort of much more like British, sort of relaxed re-appraisal of time management and productivity.

I was listening to Oliver recently on Chris Williamson's podcast, "Modern Wisdom," and Berkman was sort of giving this kind of ideal, he was like, here's his approach to personal productivity, how he thinks about these things right now, and I'm paraphrasing, but his system was like, have a few things you wanna get done, but also be willing to let your interests guide you.

If you don't really have energy for this thing you wanna do, but there's something else you're kind of excited about, maybe work on that instead, and you'll be okay. That's a paraphrase, but that's sort of a classic, like "4,000 Weeks" approach. Let's call that the humanistic, call this humanistic personal productivity.

It's sort of, what are we as humans, like what really kind of like fits the way we operate best? All right, then, soon after this, sort of coincidentally, I was listening to Scott Galloway, who we talked about earlier in the show, I was just on his Prof G podcast, and then I was listening to a bunch of Galloway, and I was listening to him on Dan Cenor's podcast, "Call Me Back," and they were talking about, at the end, Galloway's new book, "The Algebra of Financial"- - Of Wealth.

- Of Wealth, right. And he was sort of giving his take on life and advice, and he sort of, Galloway had this take, which is like, look, in your 20s in particular, your biggest resource is your time. Like, what you wanna be doing with this is really getting after getting good at something valuable.

'Cause he's like, here's the end game. He's like, look, this is a reality that's not good, but it's a reality, especially in America, we are not kind to poor people. And if you can build up a skill, whether it's like knowledge work or in trades, you can use this as a foundation of financial security, and that's what you want.

You wanna be able to, when you're upper middle age, to be able to take care of your kids, to be able to help your parents when they get older and sick, to not have to worry about, to go pursue things you're interested in, to not be worried about money, it's like, that's the game, and it's hard, and you need to take all this free time you have in your 20s, and you need to focus on, I am gonna get good.

So we'll call that sort of pragmatic personal productivity. And there's some tension between these two, right? Oliver's like, just have a few things to do, and also, it's okay if you don't do those, like if your interests take you somewhere else. And Galloway is basically like, look, if you don't sort of get after it, and work really hard to master some good stuff, your life's gonna be miserable.

So we kind of have these two different approaches, idealistic, humanistic, and pragmatic. So I think what's going on here is that Berkman's approach, I think, matches the human brain. Like, this is ideally how humans are wired. Like, this is really what productivity is to humans, is this much looser, sort of, what am I gonna do right now?

Well, I need to go hunt this thing, or we're gonna go forage. You're sort of doing one or two things, you don't have complicated plans, and those plans are also contingent. Well, I don't know, it's kind of raining, so I'm not gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, or there's a new urgent thing that came up, let me work on that before.

Like, I do think you would be happier with the Berkman personal productivity. On the other hand, I think Galloway is right, that it is really hard to be financially secure, and like, you do have to build up skills, and it's hard, and especially when you have a lot of free time in your 20s, like, you probably have to do some grinding, right?

I mean, because it's hard. It's hard to, in a modern economy, it's hard to convince other people to give you money. But you really want people to give you money, because without money, things are hard. And so, we have to construct a sort of artificial relationship with time, just for a sort of financial survival, for a sort of basic economic security.

So, I don't know, maybe our goal is you wanna get to a place in life where you can have a Berkman-style personal productivity, and that's gonna require a Galloway-style pragmatic personal productivity along the way. Maybe Berkman's given us the goal, and Galloway's giving us the path you have to take to be able to get to something like that goal.

But I think, back to the original question, the Galloway-style pragmatic personal productivity can be, it doesn't have to be super anxiety-provoking, but, you know, it's hard. And you have to care about, what am I doing? Am I making progress on what matters? You have to sort of fight back distractions.

You have to make time for what's important. There's a sort of defensive time management in here. I can't let all these distractions encroach so much that nothing gets done. There's a sort of urgency of, I have to keep working deeply on the things that matter. This is my time to start to get good.

And some of that's stressful, and some of that's sort of anxiety-producing. One thing I wanna suggest, not to bring this back to me, but that my new book, "Slow Productivity," maybe gives us like a reasonable roadmap for walking this tightrope, right? For like, okay, we need to do something like Galloway-style personal productivity just to survive, but we're attracted to the Berkman-style personal productivity.

Slow productivity sort of helps you split the difference. It says, we gotta do the work, we gotta get better. But let's make sure along the way that we're not doing too many things at the same time. That gets counterproductive, and it's particularly stressful. Let's make sure along the way that we're giving ourselves a reasonable amount of time.

We can't procrastinate forever, but let's not try to squeeze everything into the smallest timeframes. Let's work consistently on getting better, but we can have variations in intensity, and we don't have to have super unrealistic timeframes. Slow productivity says, okay, if we really care about quality in a very specific way, what's the craft that matters?

And let me actually work specifically on training that craft like I would train to get better at an instrument. We're gonna get to that Galloway goal of security much easier, we'll get there much faster. We're gonna gain much more control over our schedule, much more autonomy quicker, if we're not just working really hard, but working hard at the specific goal of getting better at something that matters.

Slow productivity, we can think of, in other words, as a way to navigate Galloway-style personal, his pragmatic personal productivity in a way that minimizes the exhaustion and burnout. There's still probably gonna be some anxiety there. It's hard to do hard things, and the pressure is on. But slow productivity gives us a way to navigate that where not only are we more likely to be successful with getting to the Berkman promise land, but we are going to get there without it having to be an impossible or unsustainable slog.

I don't believe that we have to grind it out in a miserable sort of way to get to a sort of security later in our professional career. I do think we have to be careful about our time. I do think we're gonna have to prioritize like the deep efforts to get better.

I do think we have to have defensive time management to make sure that other things don't come in and take over and prevent us from making progress. And I do think all that's kind of hard, but it doesn't have to be miserable. So I'm gonna throw slow productivity in here as the way to follow the Galloway path as nicely and sustainably as possible on route to getting to the Berkman promise land.

Both good interviews, actually. - Yeah, I'll check 'em out. - I did "Modern Wisdom" as well. If you're looking for another podcast interview with me, I did Chris's show. I recorded down in Austin, but that came out kind of recently, so check that out as well, my interview on "Modern Wisdom." All right, who do we have next?

Next question's from Adita. I currently work in a startup with long hours. I struggle to find time to sharpen my problem-solving and programming skills. How do I plan weekly and daily sessions such that I can follow my interests pragmatically without hampering my performance at the company? So my best advice here is combine the two objectives.

So you're in a startup, a big-hour startup. You're gonna exhaust yourself if you're trying to have a sort of non-trivial, deep work-requiring, skill-building sessions outside of all the hard work you're already doing for your startup. Again, going back to the Galloway vision, maybe if you're in your 20s, you kind of have the energy to do this, but I don't know, I'd rather spend the time you do have doing other things that are rewarding, servicing the other buckets of the deep life.

So I think the right thing to do here is start to find ways that you can take on professional challenges that are useful for the startup in your career that require, in order for you to succeed with them, for your skills and strategic ways to get better. This is almost always the optimal way to do this.

When you're trying to develop a professional skill, if you can integrate that into your existing professional life, that's almost always gonna be better, as opposed to I'm studying to do this on my own, and then over here I have my job. And there's two reasons why it's better, typically, to integrate them.

One is it's just more manageable. You're not requiring extra time. It's what you're already doing for your job. Your work to get better at this is directly helping something you're supposed to be doing. Getting better at the skill will give you immediate rewards. There's a course, an online course I do with Scott Young called Top Performer about getting better in your career, and this is one of the key ideas in the course, is we have you design a professional activity that is straight up useful for you and your boss and your job, but also is gonna make you get better at something that's useful to your job.

So when you combine it, it's much more manageable. You're not having to find extra time. And two, it's much more effective, right? There's a general rule of learning new skills that is the more close you can get your practice to the actual application of the skill you're learning, the better.

I had this conversation on a podcast the other day where they were saying, hey, should I meditate to improve my ability to focus on hard work problems? And I said, well, if you wanna improve your ability to focus on hard work problems, practice focusing on hard work problems. Don't do something similar and hope that some of these skills transfer over 'cause this transference can often be low fidelity and not that useful.

Practice the thing you wanna get better at. So if you wanna learn how to program or whatever, program-specific things that are useful for your company don't take abstract programming classes, right? So you wanna try to connect what you're doing the training to the actual application. So that's my advice there is make what you're doing an implicit training session.

And I think that'll solve a lot of your problems and give you the goal of as you build these new skills, giving you more leverage and control. You know, it's what we always talk about. You get more control and leverage over your working life and you can really take that out for a spin.

- For those interested in the course, it's through your newsletter and it opens twice a year, right? - Yeah, I announce it in my newsletters twice a year. Scott actually has a new book coming out in May all about how to learn things, like how to learn hard things.

And I'm setting up for him to come on the show. One of the ideas I have is to have Scott be a sort of like a guest question answerer with me. We could do a bunch of questions about learning skills and him and I can try to answer them together.

So I'm having Scott, I've known Scott forever. I do two courses with him. This new book is awesome. So anyways, we'll get more on that with Scott soon on the podcast. - All right, who we got next? - Next question is from Lily. I have lived under a controlling family environment for most of my life where I wasn't allowed to have any hobbies or many friends.

I'm now living on my own and I'm struggling to create my own routine. I want to live a deeper life, but I feel that it's empty. How can I begin to build a deeper life after years of neglect? - Lily, it's a great question and I love your thinking about this.

You know, I love the self-awareness of this might be hard for me, but it's important. And I think it's, before we get to the details, the reason why that self-awareness is important is because when and if it's hard, and it will be hard, because again, you were not used to the sort of more expansive vision of the deep life growing up.

When you struggle at first with it, you'll know the struggle is expected and you'll persist. Like you'll know this is going to be hard. You're more likely to persist in pursuing depth as opposed to when the first obstacle's coming up, just saying maybe I'm not worthy of this or maybe this is not something that's going to work for me.

So I love the self-awareness. I'm going to give a preamble to my advice here. My general preamble to this advice is probably the biggest danger throughout this process of finding more depth, the biggest danger I want you to be wary of is your phone. 'Cause what you're trying to do here in building a more expansive depth into your life is you're going to try to be servicing more of these areas that make life meaningful and important, the contemplation, craft, community, celebration, constitution.

There's gonna be these broad areas, these elements that make the human life interesting and important. The phone can offer you a sort of low, a high-sugar, low-quality simulacrum of satisfaction for a lot of these areas, right? But like, oh, you really like desire community. You don't have a lot of experience having friends.

We can just kind of simulate having friends on the phone. Like there's people in social media and they're commenting and they're clicking on things and like that's close enough and it's easy, you know? You wanna seek out beauty and interesting things. You wanna like get engaged in like the world of like what humanity can create.

The phone's like, we got interesting stuff on here. Just like scroll this thing and like it'll just, it'll look interesting and binge on these shows. You know, like what you're looking for, the phone can give you a cheap version of. You wanna be, you have a call to a moral intuition.

I wanna be involved, have a moral intuition. The phone's like, we can just like punch outrage buttons. Just like look at these tweets. So the phone is gonna subvert every human instinct you have as you try to build a more expansive depth. So now is the time you need to be super wary of the phone.

Right? Be very careful what's on there. Be very careful what services you're doing. You might consider temporarily taking social media off your phone. You should consider using something like the phone for your method when you're at home. You have it plugged in in a set place in your house and that's where it stays or in your apartment and you can go there to reference it, but it doesn't stick with you as a constant companion.

Do things on a regular basis without your phone, just so you become comfortable being alone with your own thoughts. You have a lot of actual introspection you're gonna have to do here, Lily. A lot of sort of building out your schema and your understanding of the world and how you fit into it.

This is gonna be a lot of just you with your own thoughts. So I'm talking about once or twice a week, long walks without your phones, errands without your phone. You have to be very wary of this thing in this very important but vulnerable moment you find yourself in.

All right, with that in mind, how do we make progress here? Let's go back to the deep dive from earlier in the episode. Work on your hardware first before you get too caught up in the software, right? You've had a very limited, powerful, but very limited type of hardware you've been running on because of what it was like growing up.

You now wanna build out this more expansive hardware. Let's focus on the boring hardware before we get into the sexy software. So this means you wanna get some control over your obligations and time, like we talked about. Here's what I'm working on, here's my planning. I know what I'm doing and I have control over what I do and when I do it.

Work on your discipline instruction set. I have daily disciplines in these areas of my life, including areas that I've never given any attention to before, but now I am because I wanna tell myself I can do things that are non-urgent, but are important in the long-term. Simplify stuff that's clogging things up, get automation on the stuff.

I don't think that's your big problem, that piece, because you're just getting started out, but get that hardware going. Trust yourself, I have discipline. I can do things in different areas in my life. I have control over my obligations. I have a pretty reasonable control over my schedule. Now you can start working on your software.

And here, what I'm gonna suggest is take one processing unit at a time, by which I mean one area of your life at a time, and give it a few months to do an overhaul on it, right? All right, let's start with, maybe not community, maybe we'll start with something like contemplation.

Okay, I wanna overhaul that part of my life, like regular reading habit, meditation habit, rediscovering a sort of religious connection and integrating that into my life. Let me spend a few months just working on that. Okay, now I'm sort of feeling like there's meaning in life and I can direct myself towards things that are important.

All right, now I'm gonna focus on community for a few months. How do I start getting a service to my community, the friends I do have? How do I actually, how do I improve those relationships or meet new people? And you slowly go area by area and kind of build up beta versions of very basic software in each of these areas.

And then after a year, go back and let's do version one. You know, now you're gonna iterate on this and make it better. And you can start building up really cool software. So beware of your phone, upgrade your hardware so it's ready to handle this full expanse of the human experience, and then start working on your software in one area of your life at a time.

The stakes are low here at first. That's why I said beta software. I just want some sort of cool program after about a year of work, running each of the areas of my life. And now I'm ready to try to come up with the new version. And this is gonna take time, but I'm absolutely convinced that you will get there because you care about it, you know about it, you know it'll be hard, and you're committed to actually making change.

Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.