time block planning for a lot of people just becomes a productivity Felix Felicitas potion. Where it's like, wouldn't this be great if this only took a half hour and then this 20 minutes between these two meetings I took this off my plate and then this hour I finished that memo.

And you look at this plan you're like man that would be awesome and like nine minutes into your day your laptop's on fire, the company just went out of business, you know your child just gave lice to your pediatrician who's now left the left the industry altogether and you know seven new projects just fell on your plate and also you forgot you were supposed to be writing a book and it's due on Friday like it takes about nine minutes before this like miraculous plan you have where you're like this is great everything will take 20 minutes and I'll have all this energy.

So be realistic don't make a wish list you'll feel better actually being able to get a reasonable plan done with time to spare in the end it's going to make you feel much better than that 10 minutes of like this would be great. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions episode 223.

I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my producer Jesse who just got back with me from what I think we can call our first live podcast event I think that's fair it wasn't really about us the event was for author David Sachs and his new book The Future is Analog and it was me moderating a conversation with him but that's like a podcast interview so I feel like it was like a live event we had a lot of our people there in the audience and so I don't know about you but I enjoyed that.

I liked it a lot we had to bring a lot of equipment so it seemed like it was live I had like four bags. Yeah yeah Jesse had a lot of because cameras and mixers and Mike one of our fans thought that I was a homeless guy walking into the thing he said that to me when I saw you show up I thought you were homeless.

Homeless or podcast producer that actually would be a pretty good game show homeless or 1990s I think a lot of podcast producers actually look more like like hipsters from the early 2000s a lot of strain of hipsterness anyway the event was good David was great my audience loves the type of stuff he writes about this was a natural fit so if the name sounds familiar he wrote in 2016 The Revenge of Analog which I talked about a lot in Digital Minimalism my book and then this new book The Future is Analog is a follow-up to a 2016 book essentially his argument is that the pandemic gave us a sneak peek of this easy access push button all digital future that Silicon Valley has been pitching and his argument is we saw that sneak peek and didn't like what we experienced and so he's predicting a future that's going to integrate more authentic higher quality analog experiences across many domains of life from schooling to work to even the nurturing of our souls.

It's a very interesting book he's really the guy for talking about this tension between the analog and the digital and we had a great conversation I walked through some questions the audience had some questions for him however I couldn't help think while I was on stage asking about his book that we need to get him some deep questions style questions the type of stuff we talk about on this show so I don't want to spoil too much about what's coming up in this episode but I will say this later in the show David Sachs himself will be joining us in the studio and answering some of your questions type of questions we get to in deep questions so stay tuned some point later in the show David will join us here take Jesse seat and we will be able to get some wisdom from him on some of the type of issues we talk about here.

Jesse who's the most interesting person you met at the event? Well I spent the most time with Mike. All right. He reads 10 books a month but he has a different formula than you. Is this Mike who gave me the Lincoln recommendation? Yes. Oh excellent. 10 books a month.

Mike Kelly. What's Mike's formula? Well like for instance I didn't see the formula we didn't talk that much about but that's what he talked about initially but I think if like a book's 1200 pages and he reads 400 of it that might consider more than one book according to his formula.

I see. Right so he's normalizing he's an engineer. Yeah. He's normalizing. Well he's actually not an engineer but he deals with missiles and rockets. Excellent. So he's not an engineer by trade but he's an engineer by heart. So we also met did you meet the artist? We met an artist who works in sculpture.

No I didn't that's cool. Yeah she listens to deep questions while she sculpts and then goes and tries to convince her standard zoom addled knowledge work husband that he too should listen to the show because he's on the computer all day. Some folks drove three hours. Yeah yeah they were great yeah yeah I had a good conversation with them.

Good crowd. There's also a couple c-suite types who had good stories about using world without email type ideas implementing at their company including someone shout out to Mike who's the CTO of a company that he aggressively put in place a lot of my ideas about communication and protocols the company grew quite large quite fast in that period and they just sold it for 250 million.

So is he going to retire now? That's a good question. Go live a deep life. Yeah now he can now he can. Yeah this is the this is my issue people would agree is some of these ideas I have for the workplace I could be actually out there like in the workplace world helping people implement them and could also probably retire quite early but instead I choose to just create new ideas instead of cashing in I could be a high price consultant.

Yeah you could but then you have to travel around a lot you want to be a right. My soul would die. Yeah but anyways that was fun. One other announcement before we get into the show today we forgot in last week's episode was when we would have normally done my summary of the books I had read in the previous month so the books are in October we forgot to do it so Jesse and I recorded a books I read in October segment and posted it on the YouTube channel so for October you can you can see the book segment on the YouTube channel calnewport.com slash no no that's not right youtube.com slash calnewportmedia.

All right so later we have David Sachs joining us in the studio to answer some questions but first I wanted to do a deep dive on an interesting study that a tech company did about meeting so we haven't talked about meetings recently so let's do a deep dive on the question could this meeting have been an email is this article I have this up on the screen for those who are watching on YouTube the title of this article is we intentionally canceled every meeting for a week here's what happened and it is a recent article it's from the 6th of November the quest the company in question here is Zapier so I think hardcore sort of world without email fans will know that name Zapier is used for digital workflow automation one of these cool nerd productivity companies all right so let me point out a few things from this company first of all I enjoyed the opening sentence of this article it reads as follows I do my best work when I'm interrupted every 30 minutes for a meeting said no one ever that's just writing that's a funny way to open an article all right so the author of this article goes on to talk about the types of meetings so the the ontology of meetings that pulls at her attention this list includes project kickoffs syncs retrospectives recurring team meetings and one-on-ones I don't even know what most of those terms mean but it gives you some sense on the proliferation of meetings especially within these type of high-tech knowledge work firms so what they decided to try at this company is a peer was something they called get stuff done week gsd for short the quote here says the idea was that by moving from live calls to a synchronous communication people could spend more time on deep work you gotta love I love the references the commonplace references to deep work because that means it's it's pervaded the cultural lexicon and yes get stuff done all right so this was the idea they're gonna just say let's try this one week basically no meetings what are the logistics uh they just encourage everyone the leadership says everyone should cancel their internal meetings so yeah if you have client meetings you'll have to do those and move the conversations async instead it's engineer talk for asynchronous so instead of live back and forth documents email task systems etc all right they did this for one week here is some examples of what this particular person did to replace these meetings so let's get specific so she said instead of her weekly one-on-one which by the way I don't even know what that is again I've never had a real job so a lot of this is sometimes new to me but instead of her weekly one-on-one she consolidated questions for my manager and sent them to her in a direct message on slacks okay so I'm assuming a one-on-one is where you get together with your manager and say what are we doing this week Jesse's nodding his head so I have that right yep okay instead of a project check-in all team members shared their updates in the relevant asana tasks all right asana is a task board I talk about task boards a lot in a world without email a centralized transparent place where all ongoing tasks can be seen organized and have relevant information attached to them so asana is just a one of these task board systems that's liked by computer programmer types instead of a one-off strategy call stakeholders shared their thoughts in a coda doc all right I don't know what a coda doc is but I get what they're saying here is instead of like let's just get on the call and talk about this particular new thing we need a strategy for they instead wrote down their thoughts in some sort of shared document situation and finally instead of our project kickoff call our project manager sent a slack message that shared the project charter timeline and next steps that's probably the most relevant information from those kickoff meetings anyway so let's just get that information posted why do we have to spend 30 minutes talking about it all right so what was interesting here is this particular employee who is not a manager said hey this went well I normally spend between six and 10 hours in meetings so that's six or 10 hours she got back but look at this she says from what I can tell it was even more impactful for managers at Zapier who sometimes spend half their week or more in meetings so for the technical employees this is 10 hours back which you can get a lot done in especially when you think about the way that the meetings is not the total time that's not the only toll it's also the fragmentation of time so these meetings might be short 10 hours might be 20 half hour meetings and those are sprinkled throughout your week breaking up long stretches of time so they could eliminate almost any long stretches of time so the so the damage of 10 hours worth of meetings is bigger than just 10 hours of work but look at this managers at Zapier could spend 50% or more 20 plus hours in meetings so this particular employee talked to her manager and got some quotes so her manager Caitlin said things such as zoom calls tend to rule my calendar especially doing check-ins the manager said the most surprising part of not having these weekly check-ins was that I actually didn't feel disconnected from my team at all you're still working and communicating just differently the manager also said instead of cramming task into my short stints between calls like usual I was able to focus on my responsibilities that require deeper thinking like long-term strategy team planning and cross-functional processes also the manager said a week without meetings gave us space for more curiosity and experimentation encouraging us to look at the problems we're trying to solve from a different angle for us a meeting less week was far from a meaningless week I feel like the manager maybe practiced that line before talking to her subordinate for this for this article I think that's just think about this though for a second I mean I think this is really important these managers if you're spending more than half of your hours on zoom this is not consolidated this is not man every day I have to do meetings from one to five no no no these hours are sprinkled throughout the days so that you probably have never more than about 30 minutes free maybe occasionally you'll have an hour free without another meeting showing up somewhere on your schedule so basically these managers were in a state of constant context shifting from one meeting to another with these small areas in between to try to do tasks but let's be honest tasks mean slack tasks means trying to keep up with the deluge in the inbox so you're you're wrenching your cognitive context away from this meeting which probably generated lots of open loops you don't have time to get to because you have to answer 15 urgent slack messages before the next meeting puts you into a different context from a psychological perspective that's an almost impossible demand the exhaustion that would engender is going to be pronounced and from a productivity perspective it's got to be a terrible way to take these high power highly trained minds and say help us organize all of these brains that are organization and create new original things what a terrible way to actually try to harness that energy so i think this is a fantastic insight of the impact meetings had been having all right so zapier didn't want to just rely on anecdotes they did an internal survey here's some statistics 80 of respondents want to do this again 80 of respondents achieved their goals for the week 89 respondents found communication to be as effective during that week as during a typical week there's some goals this writer gives okay if you want to succeed with something like this there are four goals or four pieces of advice we should say one set goals so having specific goals for what you'll achieve during these weeks these meeting free weeks makes it much more likely that you'll use those hours productively by the way that's super telling i think we're so used to this react to incoming in between meetings absurd structure of work that actually being given open time is something we don't necessarily know what to do with like i have meetings and i'm doing email so what am i supposed to do when i have two hours free i think that's interesting that that one of the the number one goal was plan what you're going to do with that time by the way we have some advice here on this podcast for you uh right about how to plan your time all right uh piece of advice number two go async so they're big on using asynchronous channels so that's you know where you write something that someone else can come read it later future proof your work is the third tip so she used extra hours to help put in place systems that in the future will make it easier to not have to use meetings more on that in a second and her fourth piece of advice is figure out which meetings matter so actually do reflection if you do one of these weeks look back and say what was really a problem that we missed and what did i not miss at all and so when you come out of it if you're still going to have meetings in your schedule you have some insight on which of those meetings to prioritize all right so i think that's an interesting insight into the reality of life and the sort of a modern high-tech knowledge work firm i think it's an interesting insight into what happens when you step away from meetings 90 of the employees at this company said nothing bad happened and yet i am sure zapier is back to what how things were before and this gets to the broader issue with the type of advice i talk about with the type of advice like a meeting free gsd week why if these ways of operating are universally beloved way more effective way less psychologically draining why don't we do this more often why aren't these the standards and i think the answer is because it's hard just rock and rolling with email slack and be able to throw a zoom invitation to anyone at any point is in the space of possible productivity configurations a low energy state it is very easy it does not take much energy it's very flexible the overhead of implementing that is very small because it's just on the fly let's go organizations will collapse towards this low energy state unless there is a huge amount of external energy continually pumped into the organization to try to maintain an alternative configuration the gsd week at zapier was complicated they used many more asynchronous tools more structures were needed they were talking about in this one one person's example they were talking about annotating a sonatas they were talking about these coda documents they're talking about an alternative kickoff procedure for new projects none of this is easy and it would require buy-in from the top down as well as from the bottom up and a lot of consistent energy being put into this is how we do it now we don't do these type of meetings so it is easier to just be ad hoc and i think we we underestimate the power of easy easy is often bad easy is often inefficient easy often exhaust people easy is often a terrible way to make the most of the assets that a knowledge where company has but it's also very very difficult to dislodge so to conclude this discussion i want to throw in three random pieces of advice about meetings we haven't talked about meetings a lot so let me throw in three random pieces of cal newport meeting advice i'll sort of throw this into the mix along with the advice given in this article we just reviewed number one to me the the overarching message of what they experienced at zapier is that all regular collaboration needs a structured process that everyone understands and all relevant stakeholders had a hand in crafting structured process that says here's how the collaboration happens here's the information here's how the information moves here's how decisions are made these can be a pain to construct but once constructed can be way more effective than just saying we'll throw in a zoom meeting an email or slack in between so we saw some structured processes arise in this zapier example for example the annotation of asana tasks that are reviewed every day as opposed to having check-in meetings the construction of a kickoff document with the project charter and goals etc that is uploaded to a particular tool called coda instead of having a kickoff meeting so these are structured collaboration processes all regular collaboration you should try to put in place a process like this that's very clear about here's how the interaction happens and to the extent possible the answer to that question should move away from unscheduled communication that requires you to check an inbox as much as possible this should move away from having large blanks of unstructured meeting time we'll just figure it out when we all get on zoom you want more structure than that my second piece of advice to make any of this type of structured collaboration philosophies work you need a catch all this is the biggest thing i saw missing from the discussion the zapier article and probably the biggest source of friction that would bring an end to this gsd experiment if they try to just extend it week after week is that there will be small things that pop up that require back and forth interaction that will probably be best dispatched if we could just talk and if we're in a remote environment we need to set up a meeting and because it's hard to set up meetings that are less than 30 minutes it's probably going to eat up 30 minutes of our time so you need catch-alls for the ad hoc discussion requiring issues that will inevitably arise outside of your structures and i think the best catch-all is office hours every day every person has a clearly posted time my door is open my phone is on i have a zoom room activated and i'm in it short discussions get deferred to office hours if someone tries to email you or hit you up on slack with something that's going to require more than just one message back and forth you say great come to my office hours we'll talk about it and if that doesn't work i'll come to your next office hours to talk about it if someone throws a zoom meeting invite at you you say why don't we just grab me at a nearby office hours let's really see what we're dealing with here and then if we need a longer meeting we can set it so you need these catch-alls the effect of these is significant and finally reverse meetings say a term i coined in an earlier episode reverse meetings often generate better insight than standard meetings so in a standard meeting i gather all of the people that are relevant to something that i'm working on into one place and we talk about it i want to know what you guys think about it let's make a plan in a reverse meeting me as the initiator instead of summoning five people to come meet with me i go and talk to each of those five people one-on-one and in an environment with catch-alls like office hours that means i'm going to go to each of your office hours one by one and talk to you about this issue much greater insight is extracted from reverse meetings because you get rid of the the crowd social dynamics of having a lot of people in the same room you're able to fully extract the thoughts the feelings and the expertise of each individual person you have more time to synthesize this information you'll probably come to a better decision having done a reverse meeting and your overall impact on people's schedule is greatly minimized if i go through five people's existing office hours i have added nothing to their calendar that wasn't already there if i instead make the five of them get together in a half hour meeting or an hour-long meeting outside of that that's five worker hours i've now sucked out of the system so it's not only more efficient but i also think they gain more insight so those are three random pieces of advice all regular collaboration has to be structured have a catch-all like office hours for what doesn't fit in those structures depend more on reverse meetings than standard meetings for complicated decisions where expertise is needed or nuanced political emotional issues are at play you're going to get much better results with the aggregate of one-on-ones instead of getting a lot of people into one room thoughts on meetings so with office hours so say you're waiting around and nobody's there is that just a good time to do like an admin block yeah yeah yeah just be like okay i'm gonna go through email or do something lightweight and waiting to see who actually shows up yeah i'm hearing from more people who are doing these by the way i've heard from more entrepreneurs who are working on these it used to be the big example was jason freed and base camp like they were big on the office hours and and you know when i did a kickoff event for a world without email it was me and jason in conversation and and we got into that but i've heard from other readers since then it really is effective you know it really is effective every day set time it can it can consume so many things that otherwise would have been an email or a meeting uh and it's an intermediate between this email meeting synchronous asynchronous dichotomy that we often see so the phrase is often this meeting could have been an email people really don't like i have to spend 30 minutes or an hour in a meeting for something that could have been dealt with an email but if everything goes to email you get the hyperactive hive mind there really is an efficiency to real time back and forth you and i can figure something out in five minutes that would otherwise take 5 to 15 messages each of which generates five inbox checks and there we have 50 to 75 context shifts created by this conversation or we could talk for five minutes office hours mediates between those two so you get all the advantage of real-time interaction all that efficiency without the schedule devouring overhead of having every conversation have to have its own meeting that that holds time on your calendar so it's like one of the number one strategies for an organizational environment that i think uh one of the most effective single pieces of advice i have for organizations is put office hours in place all right well we uh we have a special guest host waiting right in the wings but first let me briefly talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible that is our friends at eight sleep who produce the eight sleep pod the ultimate sleep machine it allows you to control the temperature of your mattress you can have a separate temperature for both sides of your mattress you control it right from an app you can keep your bed as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees fahrenheit as listeners know i am an eight sleep addict it has ruined me to hotels it has ruined me to visiting other people because i am so used to having the eight sleep on my bed at home and let me be clear i'm a negative one guy so eight sleepers know what i'm talking about there's a scale of negative to positive for your temperature setting i flirted with negative two negative three before too cold no no too cold negative one i am a negative one guy and let me tell you now that it's winter negative one is a beautiful place to be with your eight sleep because you can put on all of those comforters and blankets that you want when you first get in the bed during the winter and you can wake up five hours later you're not hot because the eight sleep takes all that heat you're generating and whisks it away so that that feeling you get when you first get into a bed a warm bed on a cold night you can maintain that all night no overheating no joke i love my eight sleep and i have a hard time now sleeping other places so it says here the pod is not magic but it feels like it i would say the pod will change what you think the comfort of sleeping can be but again is my warning you will be ruined to sleeping on other beds if you get one so go to eight sleep.com slash deep and save 150 on the pod eight sleep currently ships within the usa canada the uk select countries in the eu and australia that's eight sleep.com slash deep remember to do the slash deep to get that 150 off let's also talk about our good friends at blinkist as i always say ideas are power in our current culture and books are the absolute best source of high quality ideas the hard part is figuring out which books to read and which books not to that's where blinkist enters the picture there's a subscription service that gives you 15 minute text and audio explainers called blinks of over 5 000 non-fiction titles spread over 27 categories so in 15 minutes just listening while you do the dishes or reading quickly in between meetings you can get all the main ideas of over 5 000 non-fiction books what this means is that if you're interested in a book but you're not sure if you should buy it you can get an answer to that question it's how i use it 15 minute blink what are the main ideas 80 of the time i come away with that's all i need to know like i know enough about this book to understand how it enters the conversation of ideas 20 of the time i say this is i gotta read this and so my hit rate with books goes way up because i use blinkist they've also added now uh something called shortcast which gives you short summaries of podcasts as podcast gets longer it's nice to get these short summaries to figure out is it worth loading up to listen to so blinkist has been a long-time sponsor of the show and i think it is not surprising why right now blinkist has a special offer just for our audience go to blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25 off a blinkist premium membership that's blinkist spelled b-l-i-n-k-i-s-t blinkist.com/deep to get 25 off and a seven-day free trial blinkist.com/deep all right now replacing producer jesse in the producer's chair is our special guest host who's going to help me answer the next batch of listener questions that is friend of the show david sacks cal audience good to see you all right well david i've got a collection of questions from our listeners that i thought you would have some particular insight to shed as the listeners might remember from prior appearances of david on the show you might know him from his books the revenge of analog and the future is analog he is going to help us understand this uneasy tension we have between the digital and between the real all right david our first question comes from ara a 30 year old phd student from london ara says hey cal have you heard of the light phone is it worth the money or is dumbing down a regular smartphone a better option in your opinion so let's start first uh david with the meta question here what is the role of dumb down digital in this digital analog divide i think dumb down is kind of a good segue tool um to help wean people off digital addiction or digital overuse or maybe even sometimes just uh being stuck with digital being the standard sort of modernized digital being too effective right like some people like to work on an older version of software because it gives them fewer options um uh you know i i reluctantly accept the ms word updates every i use word star and i don't know there's a deep pull for you for it's word perfect for all you canadians out there like i read word perfect corral word perfect word perfect i remember ended in scandal that company the guy had a golden house the word perfect guy had a golden house this is a final corral it's a five-part podcast investigative series i think it actually was one but in the early days of podcasts but no one was listening yeah so so i think you know these these phones are are purpose-built right phones like the light phone or the punk phone or other sort of stripped down basic phones they're purpose-built for that reason or the the ones that national geographic sells to invade advanced stage jitterbugs exactly it's like it's a press help button yeah and that's it i have one of these by the way so someone sent me i have in my uh the supply closet behind you one of these and i think it was a sponsor at some point early on in the early on in the podcast and it wasn't a jitterbug i love the jitterbug with the like i've fallen and i can't get up yeah or i don't know where i am like there's these sort of simple buttons i think you shake it to call your grandkids i'm like my question how it works we could all use that um but i think for for asa's um purposes uh you know the the problem with a stripped down smartphone like you get your apple iphone and you know you don't install the programs on it's still very tempting it's it's design is built to engage you more and more and more so you're talking about like an iphone but you've stripped it down it's an older model iphone but it still has a browser yeah you can still get apps on it you're you're wary of just having the phone be older being effective in terms of changing behavior i think um i think so from what i've observed anecdotally from members of my own family um you know my wife is like my sister-in-law is like you know scrolling with their fingers bleeding because the glass is broken like serena just get a new phone this is this is this is getting show and tell time show and tell time all right here we go david zacks would you consider this to be a oh yeah this is uh this is an old this is an old phone right old small cracked screen does that but i mean it's but it's you know like hold it up for the user days of getting the new iphone and it being so amazing that that's done like it's each one is just like it's like another super outback i buy it's just like it's another level of like the same functionality in middle-aged dad mediocrity david owns four subaru subaru alpha i have fyi at the same time yeah he has a monday that's how i'm rolling with all of his public affairs publishing money this one's for driving the kids to hebrew school and this one's for swimming yeah um but i think it also depends on your own level of of self-control right and uh what we are talking about is you know digital addiction and distraction and how much self-control do you have if you need that extra tool to really bring you out of it and shift your mindset and rewire your neural pathway so that you're not entirely dependent on this thing for so much time and effort and thought and activity then yeah trying something out yeah is going to be more effective than the sort of dumbed down version of it so you're on board you know go all the way for the light phone if you're having this issue you want to shake things up don't just get an old iphone but but yeah like the jitterbug yeah i get something like the light phone i like the light phone i've talked to those guys the founders of that you know interestingly it the original model of the light phone light phone one was a tether model so it was you have your uh regular smartphone and you could leave it at home but the light phone was somehow tethering through that account so it was actually the calls coming to your normal phone was coming to the light phone and uh you could call from the light phone and it was actually going as far as people were concerned because they thought at first like people are going to want that um and they shifted because people said no like if i'm going to get something that's different than my phone i want to go all in well and i think this is what you and i were talking about uh earlier today was that once you're off these things you don't really miss them yeah no one's like oh man i really miss that iphone i really miss being on insta if only i could just like click a like on some surfing longboard video i think donald trump might miss twitter yeah well i don't think that's the metric for how we should measure ourselves in this world what what wwdg t wwdg djt d that's my motto i just saw that here driving up onto your house and watching it yeah yeah and by the way my life is in shambles um no but i i think that's that that is a good point we talked about it's almost an issue if you were the light phone guys is it works too well and if i used a light phone for six months if r uses the light phone for six months um they could just go back to their iphone after that probably have no problems which is different we were you know it's different than cigarettes it's different than alcohol like if you had trouble with alcohol and you kicked it don't go back to friday beers if you know you had the the meth problem don't go back to just whatever social math uses or whatever yeah you'll end up in the gas station parking lot exactly missing the teeth but but with with digital you're right like people it's a like a matrix type thing they take whatever pill we were talking about this the other day we couldn't get it straight which pills work once you leave the metaphor of either politics or literally being in a robot simulation yeah the red pill blue pill simulate metaphor is kind of hard to apply but it's a evolution people get off these things they don't get as tempted so it's bad news i guess for light phone very bad news for the social media companies yeah because as people get older and say what am i doing on this thing well you know what it's analogous to it's analogous to tvs in the bedroom right tvs in the bedroom or you know anyone who's a sleep consultant or doctor is like don't have tvs in the bedroom anyone is a sex consultant or sex expert i guess those other podcasts that people listen to is like yeah worst thing you can do tvs in the bedroom anyone with you know childhood rearing um expertise or just is like yeah you do not you know not a good thing to have um and so i know a lot of kids who grew up with tvs in the bedroom and it was just on constantly and and they're all in the gas station parking lot now exactly okay they're all in la trying to be stars that's how it works yeah but okay we'll follow this through so tv in the bedroom your friends are math addicts because they grow tvs in the bathroom and uh in the bedroom how does this how does this lead now to uh let's let's close the the analogy loop here the leaving social media is is um and it's not just social media it's it's all the things that we do you leave social media you look at more news online you read more articles in the new york times or or you know whatever you get rid of that or you cut that down and you're just texting more you're like i find myself sometimes just like googling random things because i'm like i have this device in my hand so it's it's separating you from the thing that's tempting you yeah you know whatever that is right yeah um and it's like okay i'm not gonna have sweets in the house because i'm on a diet uh you know if there's sweets in the house i'm gonna go sneak in those sweets it's it's it's regaining that sense of self-control and then judging whether you're able to sort of readmit you know the tempting technology back into your life in some way with limits yeah and that's the good news about technology addiction is that i've used that sweets analogy and i think it's a good one it's like if the donuts are out in the break room at the office if you have the halloween candy at home while you're working from home it is very hard not to eat it but if you take it out of the home you're not going to sneak out in the middle of the night to go buy donuts at an all-night bakery you're not going to sneak out like i'm going to go buy candy so it's a moderate behavioral addiction was the term i ended up using in digital minimalism it's the closest accurate term i could get to but that was the the cornerstone of it was if it is around you will use or partake in the activity more than you know is healthy but if it's not around you're largely okay which is which is different than other addictions i think that's the good news about about digital so all right we're on board light phone works uh for people who don't want to do a light phone but want to follow uh david's advice i always talk about the phone for your method so you you have the charger by your front door that's where the phone gets plugged in when you get home if you need to look something up you go to the front door and look it up while it's plugged in if someone's going to be calling you you put the ringer on this is 1980 style the phone is ringing i have to go to where the phone is and i have to hold it and talk to them there if you're waiting for a text you have to go check it uh get the uh the proverbial tv out of the bedroom and the phone out of the bedroom oh yeah for sure yeah i mean if the tv's been in the bedroom the phone's got to be all right we got gabriel here gabriel says i am convinced by your argument in digital minimalism to significantly reduce my phone use all right relevant um but i'm worried about being able to identify enough high quality leisure to make up for it how do i get started so as you may or may not know david and that part of digital minimalism where i argue that people need to have high quality substitutes for what they were doing on the phone don't just white knuckle it i talked a lot about examples from your book the revenge of analog you spent time touring the the continent uh going to different pockets of analog be it record manufacturing the board games snakes and ladders i talk about in the book these different resurgences of analog activity so what is your game plan for gabriel he's been digitized for so long he wants more analog he doesn't know where to start gabriel there is a wonderful world out there full of interesting things to do that are going to be a hell of a lot more exciting than whatever your phone can deliver so that's good and i think it's just a question of identifying what that is trying those things out um i think the easiest way to start is thinking about the thing that you love or that occupies your time on a phone and then looking for the analog non-digital real world equivalent so let's say you love watching sports clips on your phone right of football all right so like go find a football team to watch um and even you know i'm not saying like sit in front of a big screen tv on a giant couch and that's that's a replacement for it's a pretty bad thing like is there a local league or like a high school team or a high school thing that you can go and and watch you know them play once a week or something like that um if you're into video games are there activities that you can do that's going to get you you know give you that same thing but actually give you so much more the camaraderie the the socialization the competition the competition right structured so it's like okay you like playing playing call of duty like there's got to be somewhere near you that does paintball you like playing you know strategy game world of warcraft well why don't you get together with some friends or go find a place where people are doing settlers of katan yeah um you know if you like words with friends you're gonna love this game called scrabble um uh you know if you love listening to music on spotify and streaming you know go check out a record store right right so like if you like if you love twitter yeah stand on a street corner and just berate passerbys is that if we're looking for analogs no go to a bar with your friends and actually like talk about things in the world but that's not twitter twitter would be going into the bar and immediately looking at someone and be like hey you know what i think about you your shirt is stupid do better go to a bar and get beat up yeah i think that's if you like twitter go to a bar and get beat up if you like facebook go to a family reunion and annoy everyone exactly if you like instagram go to a forever 21 and just kind of preen in front of the mirrors yeah um yeah and then go to a bakery and like you know take um film photos of a croissant yeah uh and if you like tiktok i really don't know what to do take a bunch of speed um do a bunch of speed and be like look at me look at me go to a go to a like a random kids bar mitzvah like it's just like loud music lots of dancing lots of tweens you don't really know what's going on try to get people to look at you it's kind of confusing but they can't look away yeah like why is this reporter whose book i read at the dershowitz bar mitzvah doing a weird dance i don't know him i can't look away you know what i gotta say they still play house of pains jump around at bar mitzvahs so what could be better than that show me the residuals it's funny i mean you joke about being beat up at the bar but uh you know a friend of mine who's been on the show before the comedian jamie kilstein who he's on the show off and on we talk about his ups and downs with social media and when he was going through a really hard time with twitter he said it was the exact same physiological response when he would walk out on the street he had the physiological response of i am about to be attacked because the brain has a hard time it's so artificial it's it's people that are being very aggressive and almost violent towards you in this textual medium the brain doesn't know about pseudo anonymity and large-scale distributed networks that's how he described it it's like he would walk on the streets and feel the physiology of uh the punch is coming and i think you know when we say we're joking obviously uh gabriel like if you're engaged with twitter you're not engaged in it i mean unless you're a real troll and if you're a real troll you're not going to be coming writing to cal and saying how do i get off this you're like this is the greatest thing in the world yeah starting to fight right you get some pretty good troll questions to me yeah like yeah true yeah um but i think i think it's people who go into twitter they want to go because they want to find out about something or engage in the quote unquote conversation yeah so you got to seek out what those conversations are if it's politics there's gonna be a group of people or a way to get involved in it actually maybe getting involved in politics in your politics by definition there's politics near where you are and and it is because we have in this show david the small town where i live today small town politics are really local yeah it's not twitter it's not this is voldemort and you know uh i don't know who the good guy is this is harry potter well no no i was thinking of like yeah okay i'm a daughter dumbledore there we go it's not dumbledore and and and voldemort right it's like well you know this person knows these people and these people uh they're i don't really like their positions on development but like i also know them from the market it's like a very interesting thing yeah and i disagree with people but it's you know the people it's social you're you're you learn about yourself you're challenging yourself you're building relationships um so yeah what is the real world equivalent because all these things are doing is kind of you know simplifying and simulating and condensing activities that are in the real world and um by definition if they're appealing there's got to be some underlying long adapted human desire that they're pulling on it's not creating new human desires from scratch it's got to be playing with the piano it's given exactly yeah um and you know listen there's certain things there's no equivalent for like my kids just got into you know my brother has and um whatever it is uh not switch nintendo switch yeah we're like we were spent a good hour a week ago you know crushing some mario kart like there's no real world equivalent of mario kart we're taking my oldest to a go-kart right there is you can go and you're like and you're like and here's eight turtle shells yeah we're arming them yeah but you know that's what he's used yeah go-karting or biking like because here's the thing when you're doing anything outside of the house outside of the screen that's an enjoyable pursuit if you're reading a great book if you're going to a concert if you're eating at a restaurant if you're you know having a good conversation with a friend even in their podcast studio you're not missing i'm not like oh man but i wonder what's going on twitter right now like this is this is fun being in cal studio yeah it's freezing cold it got so i i tried to cool it down folks but i set that too cold and it all right tangent time but quick tangent we were uh the a reporter the reporter you met um the other night uh there's a reporter who was here while we justin ever recording and she was observing blah blah blah and it was actually cold so i was like oh let me go uh turn off the or it's like i was turning off the h back just so the sound would be off it was already cold um and i accidentally went too far and turned it to cold and it got so cold but we were doing live calls and so like i couldn't stop what i was doing and i just watched her getting colder and colder and i felt bad about it you're like oh do you miss the office exactly do you miss exactly what it's like being a woman in the office i run so hot i don't care it could be we could we could be outside in 40 degree weather and rain i'd be happy and caliente caliente newport you know the brain puts off a lot of heat okay that's that's your next book heat yeah um all right well this is great because this is actually a different take on this than i've ever had before so i like it uh consider i'm just paraphrase you consider starting with what you're actually doing digitally already find a high quality analog alternative so something that gets out the same underlying yeah pleasure uh but is analog and is high quality let that be a starting point yeah like you know the final thing is like if you're like oh i really want to get into this vr metaverse like just take a whole bunch of mushrooms uh that's how you do it all right honestly though if that was if my first mushroom experience was similar to a mark zuckerberg promotional video for the metaverse i would never touch them again i mean i think it would be terrifying you're like oh there's some nerd without legs in here i know i wrote about this in the new yorker and i kind of feel bad about it i was being a little bit i don't like being caddy but i feel like towards mark it's okay and i don't think he's as much of the anti-crisis of the people i may have described in this article as it was something like uh his delivery was like an android where there are still some bugs in the code because he has kind of a weird stilted like they programmed him to be human but haven't quite cracked the code it's like an episode of star trek next generation where like like data data but it's like it's kind of taken over by the boy it's data going to the holodeck yeah but i do remember writing this article about is like that this was what he chose to show off the potential of the metaverse was and i the whole humor in the piece was literally just describing without exaggeration or embellishment or commentary what was going on in the scene of this promotional video and this is where there's no legs they had no legs um someone was floating upside down for some reason and there was a bear and they're playing cards i i would be done with if that was my trip straight as an arrow for the rest of my life this was terrifying i had nothing to do with the legless guy the upside down guy in the bear um all right so i got a question from me as long as i have you in the studio from me on behalf of my listeners so you've spent most of your career as a journalist and freelance journalist writer of books you're on this is four or five five five okay five books you've got cool stories right i mean you reported from talked about earlier you were stationed in argentina earlier in your career you did a book about jewish delis where you were traveling the seaboard trying out different delis for revenge of analog you went to all these cool places it was first person journalistic a lot of the article this is i think romantic to a certain subset of my listeners the idea the autonomy and the adventure of being a writer traveling going to interesting places being able to write books about it then to be able to travel and like you're seeing me now because you're traveling talking about the book right this is romantic um and we know that this is romantic it's well yeah we've been talking about the sex spurts and now we're going to talk about the romance of david and i being in the same room um so what i'm wondering here is like let's let's say two answers what's the reality checks like what's the elements that okay it's not as romantic as you think but so that we're not too dour maybe give us a taste of what actually is as cool as you might think about this sort of full-time autonomous writer's lifestyle yeah so the the the negative side because you know i get this a lot i'm i'm a mentor at my old university so i have all these students and they don't have a writing program or journalism so they send them to me right the wayward souls um it's look it's it's it's a difficult way to make a consistent living uh financially speaking um you know the financial rewards are not steady and and consistent and i'm someone who's successful at it relatively speaking um but you know it took me a while to get where i am and that happened as the sort of industry especially the magazine and newspaper industry has has imploded as the sort of ad sales it's the reality now you really need is books and speaking what's going to be the the primary income source is the is the freelance writing fee small enough now if you're going to make a go at this you can't imagine it's just going to be from the magazine piece of what's no yeah that that those days are done yeah i think there are people who who still manage to eke that out but they're doing other things um books are relatively consistent and steady yeah um and the speaking you know relates to the success of the books or or the topics of them and that's always that's always sort of good um so that's that's the downside and then there's of course all the downsides of being a writer um the roller coaster of emotions and you know self-hatred and you know my book came out today and last night was amazing we did a great event you you the the the the the sun god of cal newportness just brought all these wonderful people from dc who were friends of yours fans of yours listeners ears hometown crowd hometown crowd yeah you you brought it you brought it and uh and it was a wonderful way to kick off this book tour and then it was today was like oh someone isn't responding to my email about an op-ed and when like you know i'm like well maybe i'll just click on the amazon it's like you don't click on the amazon ranking on your first day i'm like well my book's 124 000 so that's oh no forget it um but it was 126 000 so i think that's what's important it's on the up and up yeah it's a mover it's a mover and shaker so that's you can get infinitely discerning by the way that with your amazon like well it moving in shakers in this category on tuesdays was actually in the top 1000 there you go there's always a one uh a number one thing right but up and down up and down yeah but i think you know that the the thing that i always tell people is like when you if you're able to do it in a way that you're able to support yourself and like i'm not advocating that like you should do it and lose all your money that's ridiculous but like you gain the ultimate freedom and access you've never had a normal job is that right i've never had a normal you've never gone into an office building on a regular basis i had one job when i was in my first summer of university um that was a regular job i got a job at a office that made newsletters for dentists in toronto so you've had two different dream careers yeah what you're saying my job i went the first day i'm like okay like i want to be a journalist i'm going to write these stories about dentists you're like nope you're going to go in this room here's a stack of the newsletters here's a printout of like um the addresses you're going to tape the address onto the newsletter here where it says or the name of the dentist dr calvin newport you know 606 whatever way um you're going to place this on this canon image runner copier and you're going to make 200 copies of that one and you make 300 copies of that one and you can do this all day eight hours a day seven days a week in this windowless room until the day when you notice smoke coming from the cam and gin runner because you've been running it so hot and so much you've been slamming those copies that it catches on fire and the guy from canon comes in he's like i have never seen anything like it and then you're moved to data entry by the way i love your dream denied in this story is writing articles about dentist i would probably still be at that company this is what was taken from you so anyway that yeah yes so i've never had that right so so what have i gotten out of out of my career when you know other friends of mine have had more steady jobs or even steadier careers in journalism like my friend mike came out to the bar last night he works for reuters he's like a beat reporter on defense right and he's like i he was like you know i i loved i would love to do what you do it's i have the freedom to go anywhere and do what i want and as long as someone is willing to let me go there and say yeah you can come to my restaurant interview me yeah you can come to the the record pressing plant in nashville and walk around with us yeah you know you can you can come to jack white's recording studio and and talk to his people and and see how he does all that stuff um then i'm good to go and no one's telling me what to do i can ask whatever questions i want i get to have conversations with anyone i want anywhere in the world um and without limitations on them so so so what's the game plan then if let's say game plan undergraduate yeah i'm invite i do advice here you get specific let's say you're not a college student and the goal is i want to write non-fiction books that allow me to go to interesting places and report an interesting thing so so like the books you write um how do you maximize the chance you're like okay i want to give you a game plan no guarantees but let me build from pull from david my david sacks wisdom and like this is what you should this is the steps here's what you should focus on what are you telling that student this is what i tell um the students that i mentor so the same thing right is uh there's many different paths to it so there's no one way um don't go to journalism school uh because you're just going to spend a lot of money sort of doing stuff that you could learn as a trade um right wherever and however you can so if you can get an internship or you can sell stories to your local hometown paper or website or you know some other thing do it right the more you write start a blog start a sub stack thing um right right right because first you're going to just have to learn how to do that and learn how to pitch your ideas to people which is the most important part and then you're going to have to figure out what you're actually interested in writing about and what you're good at it like you're going to have to develop some sort of niche or expertise and that doesn't mean you have to spend like 20 years studying you know etruscan ruins um but you're going to have to develop a knowledge around a certain area so that you see an idea that's big enough for a book when it comes to it right so when you're when you're selling that book if you can point to your journalism profile and even if it's a lot of small things and maybe a bigger thing here and there if there's a a clear thread through it you know i'm writing about outdoor adventure sports a lot like i'm yeah i'm in these places then when you pitch the book on that like okay this makes sense this tracks it makes sense that this person is but you you have to give them that thread why does it make sense that this person is writing this book exactly yeah and sometimes you know you have to convince them right like i my first book was about um it's called save the deli and it was about you know why were jewish deli disappearing and and why why did that matter and what were the cultural forces i mean i i came up with the idea when i was in university and it was a paper i wrote for a class um and when i pitched it i was i don't know 25 26 years old and it was like well why is this guy doing it well i'm like look i'm interested in food here's a few things i've written but it was like okay well he understands this idea enough we can see in his writing that he knows how to write this or we're going to take a chance on it um it actually gets harder as you get more successful because you have a track record and they're like oh cal newport you're the digital minimalism digital work guy what do you mean you want to write a book about like 19th century ballet look man like that's yeah we'll give you a flyer or whatever but um you know this is the goods like you're you this is the industry one right yeah no it's hard i mean i remember when ryan holiday years ago i first heard that he was going to write a book on stoicism i was like come on this why you write a book on stoicism your last book was about marketing you're in the marketing world you just growth hacking ebook like that is your world this is a crazy idea and this is why i'm terrible at giving advice to people but he had a hard time i asked about that on the show exactly what you're talking about his publisher's like i guess we'll publish this we're not going to pay you much for it kind of annoyed about it because we want to get back to what you're no quantity for but i think and that's the thing about the freelance writer like just as soon as you get that sort of success around and people like oh good you're the analog guy i'm like yeah but i'm gonna throw your curveball now because like i don't want to be put in some sort of hole where i'm writing the same book over and over and over and over and over again yeah right um and and you see that and there's people who are successful at kind of weaving through that like you know rich cohen uh name sounds familiar rich cohen's written many books um he's also written for vanity fair whenever and he's always just like something that interests him and something different and he's like some stuff sells more and some stuff sells less he's like but i'm following the thing that i want to write about and that's the that's that has to be the definition of success because the commercial success is so out of your control it's very hard it's very hard and then try to like consistently have high commercial so that's like a whole different that's a whole different type of career i'm like half in that world and it's a it's a lot of baby it's a lot of hard but i mean it's a lot of managing uh it reminds me of film film directing yeah it's like a kind of a complicated thing for the film director so you know like this movie was very successful and having to navigate the projects and if this movie doesn't do well i have one more i can do to try to prove it it's a complicated and it's not a straight linear thing right and i think the expectation that it should be that success is this straight linear thing of like this thing's going to do this and then the next one's going to do better and the next one's going to do better it doesn't work like that and so you know there is an element of like artistry to it and i don't mean we're artists but it is this type of thing where it's where it's like at the end of the day that the goal the goal is not to lose money you still want to make enough money to like afford the subaru and its gas um uh but you know you you you don't want to give up that independence because that's the thing that got you into it in the first place yeah um so it's like the non-fiction action i say non-fiction like selling seven figure copies of a book is like hitting a major league fastball it's like one of the most difficult things to do and no one can do it all the time yeah there is a handful of writers out there you know non-fiction like malcolm gladwell michael lewis but you know they're not moving seven figures okay then no yeah how about it's hard well but then some people do it's this one's so hard like it's it's very feast or family like a james clear will move four million copies see i don't even know who that is atomic habits okay yeah right mark man 18 million copies the business book yeah but like no one can consistently celebrities don't count yeah that's right but celebrities don't consistently write books so like it's very in fiction you can do it you can be grisham in the 90s and you're gonna move a lot but he wasn't yeah i guess he was moving seven figures pretty consistently uh units units units skews skews of skews of southern lawyers yeah so you can go crazy you can go crazy chasing that like it but it's out of your control right i don't think stephen king's like things like that yeah and i'm sure his books are up and down i mean they also a lot of copies but like i think some kill it and some sadaris so they're probably the same way no i think sadaris just gets out there tells some crazy stories about his family and then goes on tour and you know charges like 50 bucks a ticket to go see him and that's why he doesn't care about like the books have to do well and they do well yeah but like he loves touring and he makes a lot of money yeah and what does he have to spend his money on but like a new stick to pick up garbage with in england like it's i mean don't they have doesn't him and you have like a they have many french countryside house and an english house all day here yeah i've been trying to get him on the show i can't imagine what no i'm joking it's like huh productivity digital culture this is right i'm sure he he does write about how he works and uh he has a very specific way about it yeah yeah great yeah but you wouldn't get him all right so that's good advice so um the summarize then i always paraphrase so you're saying uh the book writing it's hard financially hard but you can make a living at it it has its pluses and minuses if you want to get into it write journalistically write articles anywhere you can develop a niche then have to be super tight but i will say the other thing there's the other path to it too yes go live your life go have another career and then write on the side right for you know a magazine for a hobby you have or a blog or something like that and then later on when you feel like you have an experience or something to tell you're going to have that lived experience that's that is it so it's not just writers who get to do that yeah that's true yeah or and if you want to write pragmatic non-fiction then do something that's useful and then you can write about it that's easier yeah if i want to give advice on something uh go do that thing well it's like a much easier formula than if you want to report on jewish delis like what can this person write and this you know as it makes sense he'll be right on that yeah yeah exactly all right well david this is uh this has been great this has been useful thanks for stopping by the studio and help me tackle some of these questions and um i think we have to go find a deli i think we do it's a pleasure great to be here i'm freezing turn the heat up the brain puts off 80 of the body's heat my brain is like a heater november 2024 heat by calumny all right thanks david all right well that was great uh while we get jesse back in his producer's chair so that we can do uh the next segment which is where i will one-on-one answer more of your questions let me just briefly take this transition moment to mention another sponsor that makes this show possible and that is zoc doc zoc doc is a free app that shows you doctors who are patient reviewed take your insurance and are available when you need them you can find every specialist under the sun whether you're trying to straighten those teeth fix an achy back get that mole checked out or anything else zoc doc has you covered so just like you would use an app on your phone to figure out what restaurant do i want to eat at what are the reviews can i make a reservation zoc doc lets you do that for all of your medical needs i now have two different doctors who use zoc doc my dentist and my primary care physician so not only that helped me find them but it makes it easy to do things like the 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feedback the next day going well oh do you have a question about this here's my answer you build a relationship with this online coach and that leads to the consistency that actually gives you results so if you want to get in better shape you want to get healthier my body tutor is the way to do it so go to my body tutor.com and if you mention deep questions when you sign up they will give you 50 off your first month that's my body tutor.com mention deep questions and get 50 off all right well i enjoyed having david here for the last segment i want to get in a few more questions uh just me and jesse here before we end the show so jesse what do we have here on the question docket to kick things off all right first question is from aaron a 21 year old software developer i've started writing a technical blog where it's about programming concepts however i found writing about technical stuff is completely different than writing a normal blog i want my blog structured like a lesson but can't figure out how to make it work how would you approach writing a technical blog well so aaron what you're seeing here is a writer challenge you have a particular topic and audience you don't know how to make it work you're not sure what format is actually going to work you have this idea which i think is interesting that there's some way to make the technical writing you want to do compelling now in the elaboration to this question aaron gives some more ideas about thinking about introducing common errors and walking them through but that wasn't quite working he's trying to figure out how do i make this interesting my answer is i don't know but i want you to work really hard at finding the finding the what works this is a challenge it's a big challenge to figure out a new style of writing to figure out a new voice that hasn't been done before but the fact that this is a challenge that's not obvious to you is the good news that means there is a a large first mover obstacle that if you can get over you're going to have a few advantage you're going to have a big advantage if you put in the effort the experimentation the thinking the reading lots of stuff what's working what's not does this voice work not quite what if i do it this way if you put in that effort and if it's hard and if it takes you six months to really figure out a new style a technical blog in your space that seems to really sing you will have this giant gap of a competitive advantage you did all that work that most people aren't willing to do so i would say take this obstacle and say what a great opportunity i have no idea how to do this but i believe it's possible so i'm going to work on this really hard i'm going to experiment until i find a really cool voice that actually works here that happens all the time in writing people put in the effort to do something new to find a new way of doing something that really sings and they are greatly rewarded for being the first person into that new space so how do you actually figure out if you found the right format partially experiment put stuff out there see what works but i think mostly what this is going to come down to is trusting your gut when you write something you're reading it you have to think is this interesting to me is this catching my attention or is it just writing for the sake of writing it's just yeah technically all the information is here is it's conversational in some sort of faux way is there rhetorical questions and filler you know your gut will tell you is this really interesting to me or is it just i completed the assignment this is technically an article on this topic and has information trust that gut and let that help guide you get to a place where your your visceral reaction to the essay is like oh this is interesting i like this here and that's probably going to be your best way of knowing that you're on to something new so do that work can you take a step further and elaborate how how that goes about like finding people to like professionally critique the work because if you're just writing for the blog and nobody yeah well this is why i mean it's a good question so it's why i think uh aaron in this case is going to need to rely heavily on his gut because it's a chicken and the egg problem if you put out writing onto a blog that no one's reading you're not going to get the feedback needed to make it better so you're going to have to rely pretty heavily on your gut and when you really think something is working then commit to it and give it the 30 40 posts that it might take before you actually begin to find begin to find some traction and i went through this with my own blog back in the days like finding finding my voice you know like one of the big things i figured out the early days of study hacks was um i had to have a movement like whatever whatever the main topic i was talking about i had to have a movement that had clearly defined elements to it that was somewhat contrarian and then i had to be proselytizing for that movement this is kind of what i figured out so even in my early student advice days i had this movement based on my early books it was all about we don't take seriously enough the mechanics of how you actually translate information from textbooks and lectures into problem sets papers and tests that do really well and we need to be more technical about this and see this like a like a business advice writer would think about the right systems for marketing or tracking hr and so i had this um this this philosophy a very clear philosophy that was aspirational because it sold this promise of like hey if you get more thoughtful about how you approach your school work you could do better and and spend a lot less time like your your student life could be transformed so there's a philosophy that made sense and then everything i was writing was pushing this philosophy and then what happens is if i'm a reader what do i want well i bought into this philosophy and i want uh i want you to to juice this every week i know i'm on board with you and now i want to just hear you preaching that's how you build a community often with this type of writing and as the topics of my blog and then eventually as it transformed into a newsletter as they evolved over time so at first it was technical student advice then it was more about uh student stress and engineering a student career that was meaningful and not overwhelmed get away from grind culture and overwhelming stress and then it was about careers and how to build a career that was meaningful and the the trap of follow your passion as a too simplistic piece of advice and then from there is where i moved into the world of technology and uh all the different ways that technology impacts our our our stretch to try to live more meaningful lives and social media and distraction in the workplace and our smartphones all along the way what i learned was develop a philosophy that's clear and aspirational and then preach that philosophy every week because that is what an audience wants is i'm a convert and now i want to hear the sermon and i think it's probably the biggest issue with people in the blogging space is that if there's not a point a philosophy that you're preaching that people can be on board with if you're just delivering information it's very hard to build an audience you know because i don't care unless it's very specific information but anyways erin that's one thing i discovered in the technical blogging space it might be a different thing but the point is that is a i discovered that through experimentation that type of writing hit me viscerally it was what i like to read the first decade of the 2000s was this web 2.0 blogging boom and i was thinking about the blogs i like to read and they were all hitting me in that deep aspirational place like they were they had a philosophy it's like the early minimalism blogs had a philosophy and it was aspirational and it was good just to hear it flogged week after week so that is an example of my advice being put into action again it might look different in technical blogging what hits you viscerally might not be what i'm talking about here aspirational philosophy that you're preaching to but this general method is what i want you to think about do the hard work of figuring out what works it's worth doing that work up front because that's how you're going to get the biggest return on your efforts down the line all right let's keep rolling here what do we have next jesse all right next question is from elinor a 35 year old professor i've developed a habit of listening to podcasts in the background as i work i'm aware that this is a distraction i would like to break the habit however if i go without it i've noticed that i take much longer to get started with the real research work and tend to get more easily and quickly distracted so the issue here is that elinor is used to now podcast playing and she has a hard time starting work without them but then of course having a podcast playing while you work makes it hard to do your work at a sufficient level of depth so elinor you've accidentally created a deep work ritual as i talk about in the book deep work getting into a mode of concentration so you're going to do symbolic reasoning on a cognitively demanding task is unnatural our brain doesn't like it it burns a lot of energy and there's not an obvious reward that it's going to generate in the moment i'll burn energy if we're chasing down this impala that we're trying to hunt and kill i have a harder time burning energy if you are writing a related work section in a academic anthropology paper your brain doesn't understand that as being connected to your survival so deep work is hard to initiate a lot of people who do this regularly therefore build rituals if you have a ritual where you do the same type of thing before you start deep work every time your brain eventually begins to uh connect that ritual with the state of concentration and you can bypass a lot of that resistance and slip more easily into the that mode of concentration so elinor you've accidentally created a ritual around the podcast listening and the point i want to make to you is that the fact that as podcast doesn't really matter it's arbitrary it's just the hook this is the hook that your brain has learned to associate with concentration this is why when you remove this ritual you have a harder time getting in the concentration so if you don't like this particular hook you have two options one you can just modify this existing ritual to minimize its impact so maybe you modify this ritual so it's like put on a podcast as i i load up all of my tools and i get my notes for my last session and i i write a quick outline of what i want to do first and then at that point i turn off the podcast and go right so that's modification of the existing ritual so you still let the podcast get you into the work mode and get you over the threshold and then once you have a little momentum you turn it off or you could spend three weeks and build a new ritual i mean the reason why podcast is working here is just it's a a clearly defined hook it's a audio hook audio visual taste all of these are great things to build deep ritual hooks around but you could have just as easily built this around going for a long walk or brewing a particular type of coffee that you then bring back to your desk you could honestly could have just like a certain song you play you know i i play the song it could be the adjustment of your location could be the adjustment of your lights i clear my desk i turn off all the lights except for one bright desk lamp anything that has some sort of pronounced visual audio or even uh smell based olfactory based elements can be a great hook for building a deep work ritual you just have to do it for two or three weeks so that your brain gets the idea so i think it's a great example of deep work rituals in action either make this existing ritual a little less negatively impactful or take three weeks and build up a new one all right what do we got next next question is from marathon sprinter my company does a two-week sprint starting in the middle of the week thursday should i switch my weekly plan to a two-week long sprintly plan probably yes so in my multi-play multi-scale planning philosophy where you do quarterly semester plans weekly plans and then daily plans the weekly has a little bit of give you know it is important to have a scale of planning where you can see multiple days in a row that's what allows you to figure out how to move these bigger chess pieces around that's what gives you the insight to move things to open up bigger time that's what allows you to see oh early in the week i need to really push on this because later in the week is is worse you need some sort of planning scale that looks at multiple days at a time if you go all the way to just say what do i want to do today you're missing some of this bigger structure to your available time and your available opportunities to get things done exactly one week isn't so critical so if your company has a two-week cycle i think two weeks would be fine build it around the sprints in fact you should probably put some specific structure into your weekly plans to take into account this is sprint work and then this is the non-sprint administrative work and i keep track of okay you know these days i do the administrative work and then here's the sprint and you could even have like a special format built around it if you went much longer than two weeks you're going to start to get into trouble i do know people who do monthly plans monthly plans aren't that useful it's not enough time to do the big picture quarterly semester planning it's too much time to meaningfully like move around appointments or think about when you're going to work is this too many days two weeks fine three weeks iffy one month too much one week fine if you're doing just a couple days at a time not enough so let's give like a one to two ish week window that window of scales i think i think that would all be fine but jesse you were telling me before the show you had a a recent breakthrough in your weekly plans yeah so i think everything is iterative and the more you know you're just talking about you know once you're a convert then you just hear the preaches so i hear you talk about weekly plans a lot and i was looking at mine and it was getting jumbled and there was a lot of stuff in there that should have been over in trello for instance just because there were stuff that i wasn't actually going to get to that particular week so then when i went to the plan i see all this stuff and i like for whatever you're talking like uh tasks related or objectives related to a bigger project yeah for like a certain job that i have were you were you carrying these over yeah so you put a you know here's the six things this project needs done onto your weekly plan yeah and maybe just one of those gets done you just carry over yeah and rewrite or copy and paste as opposed to just sticking it over in trello and then pulling it and then be like all right this week i'm just going to do this and then because then that kind of gets along with the slow productivity stuff that you're doing and then you're actually making some progress on like a certain job or a task or whatever it is that you have in that plan do you focus now each week on the i'm going to do one project or two projects like you hone in on exactly which projects you're going to make progress on yeah well i have it divided into different jobs so then yeah for like those whatever specific job then it would be this one thing yeah that i wanted to like make progress on as opposed to like for instance to say job a i didn't want to like i would have three things in there and then wouldn't necessarily make great progress but now like with one thing in there doing a few things it's like the slow productivity mindset and like getting some stuff done and do you pull over so you've identified a particular job you're working on this week do you pull in from trello this is the one or two tasks i want to get done or is it you're identifying this is the job i want to do as you work on it in the week keep pulling stuff from trello so what do you i pulled in one in the beginning of the week and then if that gets done early you might update the weekly plan yeah um usually it's something that's going to take it hasn't gotten done early yet so usually it'll take the whole week based on my other schedule it's like a common experience people have let's see if you had the same experience a common experience people have is let's say they have three or four major projects going on they're really worried about the idea of just working on one per week because they think i can't look i'm not going to get to this other project for another three weeks like it's impossible i need to make progress but what they realize if they do that they end up getting things done just as quickly as if they instead try to sort of quixotically do a little bit of every project every week that when you slow down and do one thing at a time it doesn't actually necessarily slow down completion times for each of these projects on average and it tends to raise quality so was it was it stressful at first or a little anxiety producing to say let me just choose one thing because when you're making that plan like i'm only putting one project on this and it feels was that anxiety producing at first um it was it reduced like anxiety actually after i looked at the weekly plan and had less stuff on there i was like oh this is very doable interesting yeah so and you've had no problem getting these things done um because it's not like because it's not like you were actually getting all these things done each week you were just writing them down yeah and it was carrying over and i was like making my weekly plan jumbled yeah so that's good i like that they're concise and better be realistic in your weekly plan yeah don't use your weekly plan to store things it's actually exactly store things store things of elsewhere weekly plans what you actually want to get done um and don't use it as a wish list because there is that little burst you get this is like the such a devilish little burst of pleasure you get when you're making a weekly plan if you put a bunch of stuff on it for 10 minutes you get the little pleasure that comes from imagining man if i got all of these things done this week wouldn't that be great yeah and then you trade that like 10 minutes of like enjoying this fantasy you created for five days of stressfully coming nowhere near close to actually getting it done yeah it's so well said so much planning don't make it a wish list don't make it a wish list yeah the same with time block planning early time block planners do this when they're planning their day they first they plan the day you know the perfect day it's um if you'll excuse a nerdy reference it's harry potter in harry potter and the half-blood prince when he takes the felix felicious potion jesse's looking at me like what the hell are you talking about it's a it's a potion that uh it gives you good luck like everything goes just the best way possible when you take this potion so if you take this potion and i think time block planning for a lot of people and this is the type of like really cool gritty analogy that gets us like a really cool fan base time block planning for a lot of people just becomes a productivity felix felicity's potion where it's like wouldn't this be great if this only took a half hour and then this 20 minutes between these two meetings i i took this off my plate and then this hour i finished that memo and you look at this plan you're like man that would be awesome and like nine minutes into your day your laptop's on fire the the company just went out of business you know your child just gave lice to your pediatrician who's now left the left the industry all together and um you know seven new projects just fell on your plate and also you forgot you were supposed to be writing a book and it's due on friday like it takes about nine minutes before this like miraculous plan you have where you're like this is great everything will take 20 minutes and i'll have all this energy um so be realistic don't make a wish list you'll feel better actually being able to get a reasonable plan done with time to spare in the end it's going to make you feel much better than that 10 minutes of like oh this would be great all right i think we have time for one more question what do we got here jesse all right sweet so one more question from anonymous my wife and i recently had our first child and this is really lit a fire under me i currently work at a large corporation as a senior data engineer when i actually have work to do it's trivial bet it's trivial at best i have so much free time i thought to create my own side business or taking on a second fully remote data related role in the model of of the over-employed community do you think this is a fool do you think this is foolhardy so i'll be honest i had to look up over employed so this engineer is saying like a lot of jobs at big old corporations he doesn't have a lot of work to do and he's like i don't know should i start another should i start a company on the side should i follow the over-employed community and get another job or maybe should i just spend more time at home so he gave me a link this the person anonymous who sent me this question gave me a link to a reddit for the over-employed community i don't know anything about this so i figured we should find out more before i answer this question so i've loaded up here on the tablet for those who are watching this on the youtube channel this episode 223 i've loaded up here now uh the reddit over employed one word i'm just actually looking at this this is i'm learning about this uh i'm learning about this as along with you so let's just see here's the opening message comes from isaac let's see hello from isaac founder of over employed hello over employed nation uh this is details we invite you to uh to go on a discord we invite you to go to the subreddit oh but there's a there's an faq so here we go we're leaving reddit to go to the over employed faq at overemployed.com all right here's the type of questions are on here job hunting what do i put on my resume is working multiple jobs even legal what about non-compete clauses do i work for look for a larger or smaller company can i look for a second job in another country what counts as potential conflicts of interest so all right i'm getting the i'm getting the impression here that the over employed movement is about getting a second job without maybe letting your primary employer know that you have let's look at a couple posts on here just to get a feel of the atmosphere of this movement so here's a post back on the reddit from uh alex a software engineer at google who said whether it's amazon meta or twitter in 2022 we learned you don't keep your job by working late nights leading a team staying loyal to a company going above and beyond dot dot dot it seems like the most critical important factor is working on a critical business need it's depressing to remember that companies will always put business first this means you should never put the company first all right so we're seeing some uh anti-company rhetoric here this is interesting they're saying look they'll these companies can just fire you whenever you don't worry about being loyal to them another post here says y'all need to keep your mouth shut as the title says i'm starting to see more and more videos and posts on social media about people boasting they are over employed followed by some trending news sites picking it up and blasting it all over the front page for boomers to see i get it i really do living this lifestyle making the most out of it is an incredible thing but you really have to keep your mouth shut about it elsewhere boomer employers will catch on and either start investigating those who are practicing over employment or even worse stop allowing remote work in general oh jesse we're helping the boomers find out about this this is by the way is a bugaboo of mine we have precise demographic terms for different generations i'm tired of like millennial meaning young people and boomers meaning middle-aged people boomers is a very specific thing the older boomers now are close to 80 years old okay the youngest millennials are well into their 30s 25 year olds are not millennials that's gen z we got to get this all straight but that's a side issue uh let's see what else we have here some more anti-work stuff the hypocrisy of the modern ceo that's one post here uh there's some dissections of employee handbooks can i legally work another job here's an interesting one jesse sees it on here expletive deleted exploit deleted wants a list of my daily tasks so okay uh oh j1 wants a list of my daily tasks i guess that means job one anyways uh success with oe when you have an in-office role so here's what i'm getting by looking at this over employment and uh okay and here's a summary of it on the side work two remote jobs earn extra income reach financial freedom all right so it seems like the over employment movement says take advantage of remote work and the fact that you have a job that doesn't really have that much for you to do to get a second remote job don't tell each other about it now you're getting twice the income for the standard work day and if you leverage this right i guess you can get the financial independence quicker all right interesting deep dive jesse i didn't know much about that so let's get back to this question his job is trivial he wants to know if he should start another company or if he should get another job well i would say anonymous second jobs uh starting a company or let's say just spending a hell of a lot more time with your family because you're remote and you have a new kid and your job is trivial and so you could spend four or five hours a day like going on trips with your family and just doing a couple emails from your phone all of these are tools in a toolbox you can use to build your professional life the key is getting the blueprint for what you want to build and that's where you need something like everyone's favorite roll off the tongue acronym vblccp value space lifestyle centric career planning jesse there's at least one person at our live event who came up and said vblccp forever i think i heard that yeah we're spreading it's spreading but just to expand on this briefly anonymous figure out your values which probably have shifted a little bit recently you just had a kid figure out an ideal vision for your lifestyle what are the things that are important to you the role of work and impact community activity nature family character leadership i'll just you you build this image of like what lifestyle do i want in the near future where do i want to be in 10 years from now let's say when my kids about to go to middle school get this clear image that resonates you can feel it in your bones this is this is what i want out of the general character of my life and then look at this whole tool of professional options you have and say which ones do i want to pull out what's going to most effectively get me towards this lifestyle the thing i want you to avoid and i i want people in general to avoid is haphazard deployment of these sort of mega shifts or changes in their career this idea of i vaguely know i'm not happy with this so let me just do something demonstrative something radical and then maybe i'll be happier it's a it's a sort of scattershot random deployment of things let me start a company let me just get another job you know i i was reading this reddit and it felt kind of cool when i do this this sort of random haphazard radical shifts to your lifestyle situation are very unlikely to lead you to a configuration that maximizes your personal definition of depth you need to be more structured in this pursuit so if you do this visioning and what you really end up thinking about is uh you're with your family and maybe you're like homeschooling this kid and you have land and you're reading by the lake and you're there's like a a local community that you you take your you go into uh where the you're really plugged into the church and it's you know in vermont somewhere like if this is this image strikes you as like really resonant then you would think here like this is great let me make sure my job is permanently remote uh let's move to like one of these locations it's a cheaper location let me be very careful about corralling my work and leverage all of this free time i have to pursue these other parts of my lifestyle that are important maybe you have another image where uh you've built something big it's more vibrant energetic you you you have a team that's this with you and you're building up something large and you sell it for a lot of money and you're able to you know uh take care of your family for generations to follow maybe that's what you're missing in your trivial job you're missing the energy of actually putting your skills in some sort of more aggressive use that's going to be a completely different plan and then maybe you are going to start something on the side once your kid gets to this age and and you're going to systematically try to build that and shift to that position once it gets to this type of growth there's all sorts of options the over-employed you know maybe you're you're doing a financial independence calculation and you realize if you can make this much money at this spend rate for this many years you could maybe move to vermont and actually not work at all or something like this and that might be a situation where the over-employment makes sense all right this job cuts to years and a half we can do this in four years instead of seven but it's in this scenario you're deploying it for a reason and that's what i'm coming back to now there is a lot of tools out there especially in this current moment of disruption this current moment of remoteness this current moment where we are more accepting of more radical work reconfigurations there are a lot of options out here for those who are looking to adjust craft or re-aim their working life but you got to know what you're aiming for and that's where you need values-based lifestyle-centric career planning so now it's the time to do that anonymous rethink what what resonates you might be surprised you might be surprised by what actually hits you post first kid what resonates might be very different than it was three years ago do that exercise make a plan and then say what tools do i have to best implement best implement this plan over employment well there's a reddit for everything jesse though i guess this is over now you and i boomer jesse and boomer cal have revealed to the world the over employment underground is no longer secret and we are going to uh quickly put it into this us and our boomer friends are going to quickly put it into this because um we don't understand you kids but we know like and we you have to do what what we do so there we go another movement ruined all right jesse well i think we've had a pretty good show here i think we should wrap it up thank you everyone who sent in your questions thank you david sacks for coming in to sit in and help me answer some of those queries remember to read his book the future is analog available everywhere we'll be back next week with a new episode of the podcast and until then as always stay deep