So when it comes to cultivating a deep life in a distracted world, one of the most important factors is your job. Most people, however, don't think strategically enough about their work and how they want it to help build their life to be more intentional. Today, I want to talk about that.

I'll start by sharing four common traps that people fall into when it comes to thinking about their jobs. Then I'll offer an alternative model that will help you put your work to work on making your own life deeper. And don't worry, at some point in here, I will throw on my technology theorist hat and rant a little bit about technological distraction.

We'll always get that in there in an episode of the Deep Questions podcast. We're talking jobs today, so let's get started. All right, so what is the first trap that people fall into when they think about their jobs? I call it the passion trap. If you're a longtime fan of mine, you know about this.

I wrote a whole book about this back in 2012 called So Good You Can't Ignore You. The passion trap is when you believe that if you match your job to your true passion, you'll be happy and satisfied in life. So this idea that if you just follow your passion professionally, you'll be happy is something that was invented by the baby boomers in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, here's what happened. The baby boomers had two different experiences with work within their same lifetimes. Early in their working careers in the 1960s, they had this experience of countercultural life. There's this idea that work doesn't matter. Go live on a commune. Find meeting through alternative ways of living.

That didn't work out too well. That sort of began to—it was idealistic, but that was not sustainable. Then in the 80s, there was this economic boom when they were having kids, and they all made a lot of money. Their stocks went up. They bought houses. And that was good because they had money, and money is good.

But it was also kind of over the top, and they felt sort of bad about it because it was kind of greedy. It felt sort of financially rapacious. So what they did for their own kids is they said, well, let's just—let's try to combine these two worlds. Money is good.

We remember from the 60s, living in the mud with, you know, your friends at the commune is not great, but greed gets it out of control. So what if we say you should work, you should care about your job, you should make money so you can buy a house, but the job should also fulfill you and be your source of meaning like our countercultural ideals were.

They tried to combine the idealism of the 70s with the economic opportunities of the 80s. They put this all into one phrase, follow your passion, which messed up the generation to follow. Here's the reality. Regardless of the content of your job, that is, what field you're in or what your job does, the day-to-day is pretty similar between most jobs, especially in the knowledge sector.

You can work in the front office of the Washington Nationals and love baseball, but you know what your day-to-day is going to be? Spreadsheets in a cubicle. It's not going to look that different than if you were in claims processing and AGI, right? Most jobs in the end are answering emails, looking at PowerPoint slides.

So the idea that the subject matter of your job is going to give you all this happiness and satisfaction doesn't work for most people. All right, trap number two. Call this the grand goal trap. The idea here is that if you can just make it to a sufficiently impressive grand goal or level of achievement in your job, be this becoming a law partner or a full professor or a best-selling author, then you'll find happiness.

If I can just make it to this level, everything is going to work out. The reason why this is a trap is that often the pursuit of grand goals tramples other areas of your life. So when you're trying to pursue becoming a law partner, that might be taking away so much time from, for example, your family or your friends or other things that are important to you that overall net-net your quality of life is actually much lower.

Grander goals tend to balance the rewards of the accomplishment as well with more work and more stress. So simply thinking if I can make it to this level of achievement, then I'll be happy is often a trap. All right, the third job-thinking trap is what I call the FU money trap.

The FU money, of course, being a term, I believe James Clavel maybe introduced it, but it's the idea of having so much money that you don't have to worry about work. You can do whatever you want to do in your life. So the FU money trap says the key to professional happiness is making so much money that you can live like a baller without ever having to work another day again.

Now, here's the problem with this way of thinking that, like, look, I'm suffering now, but if I can just kill it in the stock market or kill it in selling my company or just save up so much money that I never have to worry about earning money again, here's the problem with that belief.

A, it probably won't happen. It's very difficult to earn FU money. There's a lot of luck involved, and there's a very narrow number of fields in which it's even a possibility. Also, it turns out not having to work doesn't automatically solve your problems. It doesn't necessarily make your life much more intentional, right?

A lot of what you're looking for to make your life better has nothing to do with whether you're working to not. Also, there are aspects of people's work that's important to their sense of satisfaction. So you can actually go backwards by removing work from your life too haphazardly. And there's also a lot of, and this is crying me a river, but there are a lot of unique stresses that come with having a lot of money.

So just this idea that if I get the big payday, then I'll be happy. Look at all the miserable kind of weird Silicon Valley billionaires and centimillionaires, and you'll see it's not so simple. All right, the final trap in thinking about money is what I call the bohemian trap.

It's kind of going the other way here in terms of accomplishment and ambition. The bohemian trap says, look, regular jobs, W-2 jobs are poison. You will be happier if you can cobble together one-off jobs, freelance jobs, various types of 1099 income, just kind of cobble together different things, do a little consulting here, do a little working over here.

That somehow is going to be this much more romantic, freer, flexible style of professional lifestyle. Here's the problem with the bohemian trap. It's hard to make enough money to be comfortable cobbling together these types of jobs. Regular W-2 employment has a lot of nice features that we overlook. One, you get paid an expected amount of money on a regular schedule.

And two, there's often benefits like health benefits, health insurance that's just taken care of as part of your employment package. The amount of sort of freelance or cobbled together work you have to do to be able to simulate that much steady income and that level of health coverage is actually a lot.

It tends to be much harder than just having a job that could provide that for you. So that's a problem with the bohemian trap. In general, you've got to think about entrepreneurship, like doing your own thing. That's best when you're making a real swing at being an entrepreneur. That is, you have something unique to offer the marketplace and you have the chance of building a successful business around it.

That is where being on your own makes sense. When it's more like, I'll just kind of do the sort of medium or low skill thing I was doing in a regular job. I'll just sort of do that on a piecemeal basis. That's a recipe to really get taken advantage of and you're going to have a hard time replicating what you were doing before.

All right, so those are my four traps that people fall into. Let me just review them. The passion trap, the grand goal trap, the FU money trap, and the bohemian trap. These are all traps involving thinking about your jobs and its connection to living a meaningful and intentional life.

So I want to give you here an alternative model for thinking about your job and your life. We'll call this, for the lack of a better term right now, the job hacking model. All right, so here's how it goes. You start with, and you've heard me say this before on this show, but it's the starting point for this way of thinking.

You start with a clear vision of your ideal lifestyle, all right? And as we talk about often on this show, this lifestyle vision needs to be holistic and cover all the parts of your life, how you're spending your time, who you're around, what's the rhythm of your day, what do you see, smell, and feel around you?

How do you feel on a daily basis? You're building this narrative image of what your ideal life is like day to day. It's not getting specific. I have this job and I live in this city, but it's getting into the feel, like what rhythm of life? Am I walking on the nature trails every morning with my dog before settling into a quiet shed by the pond to do some work?

Or is it I'm at like a bustling coffee shop in a city and there's a lot of energy going on? What's happening socially? What's happening spiritually and philosophically? What's happening intellectually? How do you build this really rich image of your ideal lifestyle? This is what we want to move towards.

We will now think of your job as one of the more important tools you have in your toolbox for building a life closer to this ideal vision. So we've now instrumentalized your job to a tool. From this perspective, here are the three properties of your job that's going to matter most.

One, how much money it generates. Two, how much time it requires. And three, how much flexibility it provides you in terms of when you work or where you work, et cetera. Those are the three aspects of your job that matter most when you're trying to achieve your ideal lifestyle.

So once you understand those are the three tools that matter, I mean the three properties that matter, it gives us some more creative ways for thinking about how to actually work with our job as a tool. Hey, it's Cal. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. Okay. Okay. So here's what I'm going to suggest. Here's a good way of hacking these three properties. Start by fixing your number. All right. So what do I mean by number?

The quantity of money you need to support your ideal lifestyle vision. Fix this number. What happens if you don't fix this number? Then all you're going to be doing is trying to increase that again and again. You will never get the property two or three. You'll never get to the time your job requires of you.

That will always be high. You will never get the much flexibility of your job. It will always be low if all you're pursuing is trying to raise the money that your job makes. But if you have a number, this is how much we would need for this vision of our lifestyle.

If we lived here and here's what the schools would cost and the housing and here's what we would need to be comfortable. Once you have a number, it gives you the following way forward. With your number in hand, start increasing your unambiguous skill relentlessly and with focus. Here's where digital distractions enter the scene.

I promise you we would get to that. Do not let your phone distract you from this. Do not let the news, do not let social media. This is where you say the most important thing I can do right now is dedicate my energy to getting better at the thing I do that's most valuable.

Okay. At first, as you're building up your skill relentlessly and with focus, trade that skill in for higher income. Keep doing that until your income hits your number. Once your income hits your number, keep trying to get better. Keep relentlessly improving your skill with focus. But now, what you do with this increased career capital that you build is you trade it in for the next two properties.

Not asking for a lot more money, but instead trying to reduce the time you have to work and or increasing your flexibility. We give this example in my book, Slow Productivity, where I talk about a web developer that once his web development skill was paying enough to hit their number and him and his wife lived like relatively cheaply.

As he got better, instead of trying to expand his business, oh, there's more demand. Why don't I hire more developers? Let's try to make this a bigger revenue business. He instead said, great, I'll just increase my rates. And because my number is fixed, that means as my rate goes up, I'll just work less total hours.

This is how much we need. I can now ask more than what's required to do this in 40 hours. Now in 30 hours, now in 20 hours, I can make the same amount of money. Now I can take the summers off and we still make the same amount of money.

Same things happen with flexibility. If you work in a big organization, there's probably those people that you're really both perplexed by and jealous of who have these crazy situations. They don't come into the office. They live up in the seacoast of Maine. They seem to have these really plush setups, right?

Where they disappear and they come in twice a year to like visit with the higher ups. How did they get there? They probably got better and better at something and said, here's what I want to do to stay. I don't want a lavishly bigger salary. I want the ability to only work on this.

Hold me to my numbers and I'm only going to come in once a month. I'm going to move somewhere else. I want to be completely remote. I had some friends who did this during the pandemic. DC area jobs traded their value during the pandemic to be able to move the places that were closer to family, much more closer to outdoor sports, stuff they felt much better, locations they were much happier with.

These were places that did not have a policy of doing this, but they were trading their ability. They were trading their abilities to be able to do this, right? So this I think is a really key strategy because it allows you to avoid all of the traps. If you don't think about increasing your trading in your skills for money at all, you'll fall into the bohemian trap.

Like I'll just kind of like cobble stuff together and it's not going to work. You're not going to make enough money. It's too stressful. But if all you do is just keep trading skill for salary, you are going to get just increasingly overwhelmed and stressed. Now you have the F you money trap.

Now you have the grand goal trap as well. So this idea of trade skills for money until you have enough money and then switch over to trading it for time and or flexibility. This is the deep life sweet spot. And it's something that we often get wrong. The other cool thing, once you start thinking about things this way, the other thing that becomes cool about this is your number now becomes interesting.

So if your number is too high, now you see like, oh, if I, if I lowered my number by 50%, I am now all, I'm past the threshold of skill I need for that number. And I can automatically start trading for other things in my life. Right. So now it gives you incentive to play around with that number.

Like, well, if we, if we, if we moved over here, it'd be cheaper to live. And now this number comes down and I can get more flexibility right away. There's interesting types of mathematics that begin to happen. The other thing that's key about this as well is it gets you thinking strategically about skills as fuel, valuable skills is the fuel I'm going to use to drive my life where I want to go.

This is often missing, right? Where people just say, I don't know, I have a job. I think my employer sort of owes it to me, like stuff I want to make my life better. Why aren't they giving me these things that are going to make my life better? I want to work with my dog and not have to work on Fridays.

And then why can't they just give me these things? They're, they're evil capitalist or whatever. And this changes the frame to say, well, look, get better, get better. As you get better, you have leverage. As you get better, you have the ability to say, pay me more. As you get better, you have the way to say, you should pay me more.

But instead, I don't want to work on Fridays. And like, well, yeah, we can see the dollars and cents of the value you're bringing to us. So it's a, maybe it's a little bit more of a sophisticated way of thinking about your jobs. But increasingly, I think this is important.

Now, I want to throw a quick caveat on the end of this. While you're doing all this job hacking, the other thing I would recommend doing is investing in relationships related to your job, the people you work with, the people you work for. Just from a social psychology perspective, feeling connected to the people you work with is itself going to be a huge booster.

You're going to, it just makes you enjoy life more. And I have to make this caveat. This was something that was like clear in an older job model of just get your job, work for 40 years and retire. When you're job hacking, it's easy to kind of cut other people out of your life.

Like all that matters is I'm trying to hit my number. Here's what I want in my life. Don't forget the relationships because actually this is, as you're going through this process of building skills and trading it in, the more connected you feel to other people, the happier you're going to be going through this whole process.

So I want to throw that caveat in there. We're turning our jobs into an instrument, but we don't want to instrumentalize all aspects of our job. All right. So those are the traps, avoid the traps, consider this alternative model instead. When you were talking about the jobs of most people being on the computer, have you seen the Tom Brady commercial at the NFL and he's like going back to work?

No, is he going back to like a cubicle or something? He's on the computer, like doing stuff. And then he's like, I could think about checking email. It is true. So many jobs are that I guess active athletes aren't, but they spend a lot of time watching film on the computer.

That's true. So they are on the computer and iPads a lot. That's true. And it's like weight room and iPads. Yeah. A lot of meetings. Yeah. There's a lot of meetings. Yeah. You know, I've, I've been invited to some of those meetings. I've never gone, but holiday does a lot of those where you go and like, they have so many meetings, like people go and speak to a lot of professional sports teams because they have like endless meetings.

Yeah. It's a lot of studying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're on your iPad a lot. I mean, even during games, it's like MLB. You're not allowed to have any technology in the dugout. I didn't know that. Yeah. So it's, it's, you can't, you can't have a phone. You can't have like, you have to, because of cheating or this in the game, but now you can iPads, but only iPads that have film on it.

But so they're in there now studying film of like, if a reliever comes in, they can study on the iPads, like look at his pitches and stuff like that. Yeah. So there's no escaping it, no escaping it. Yeah. I hear this from a lot of different jobs. Like Naval officers is another one.

They're like, yeah, you think this is going to be like hunt for red October when you're deployed? It's like, no, you're on Microsoft outlook. You're on a destroyer in the South China sea and you have Microsoft outlook open. You're answering emails. So there's no, no escape, even some Navy seals.

I know like, yeah, there's like a lot of email, like not when you're obviously on a mission, but they also spend a lot of time doing email. So yeah, your passion can't save you. All right. So we got, uh, I think most of our questions are in this theme, people who are struggling with their jobs or succeeding with hacking their jobs in interesting ways.

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That's oracle.com/deepquestions. That's oracle.com/deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at Land Rover. I'll be honest. I had not for about a decade thought a lot about cars. We bought some cars when our kids were young and didn't think about them. Now they're braking. And now we're in the market looking for new cars.

And suddenly, in a way I wasn't when we were just first buying cars for our kids and interested in this market. I'm like, "Oh, cars are interesting." And different cars are interesting in different ways. Well, I'll tell you one of the cars out there that's doing something really cool.

And it's the Defender line of Land Rover. We're talking about the Defender 90, 110, and 130 family of vehicles. These are really cool, right? They're taking the off-road capability, that ability to go adventure, to go do interesting things, that connection to that long history of being out there in interesting, wild, motivational places.

They take all that performance, but they have thoroughly redesigned it for the modern world. So now that great off-road capability is going to be coupled with a great on-road capability as well. It's like a nice car to drive on the road, and you can take this car off-road to do fun things as well.

It's a great representation of the deep life, right? And this idea that you have these different aspects of your life that matter. You want them all to be important. The Land Rover Defender family of cars fits in there. So you get this legendary off-road performance, but now you also have these new luxury, just really useful tools.

Like the 3D surround cameras here now have this new thing called ClearSight Ground View. So you can see even what's under your car as well when you're looking at this view. So you know where the obstacles are or in the parking lot environment. And this is actually really useful where that concrete curb is.

Is it about to hit the wheels or not as you go over it? The ClearSight rear view allows you, even with a full back of your car, to still have a clear view of what's going on behind you, a virtual mirror. You've got the next-generation Pivot Pro infotainment center system that works really well.

Intuitive driver displays. So we've got this great mix of exploration and legendary performance and modern luxury. So design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com. Build your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com. Visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender. All right, let's move on, Jesse. Here's some questions. Who we got first? All right, first question is from Alan.

I work $12 a day as a managing engineer at a big social media company. It's too much as of a young family that I risk losing. I also think I've breached my ceiling in the company. I'm lost on how to systemize, automate, and reduce my time I'm spending on all my obligations.

Well, Alan, it might be impossible to systematize, automate, or otherwise strategically reduce your time enough in this job to make it something that's reasonable. Right? You're using the, let me, two terms I want to point out that you're using here. You're working 12 hours a day. The stress is such that you risk losing your young family.

Some companies just have this culture. You're a managing engineer at a big social media company. Yeah, some of these big social media companies have this culture. It's the like, look, we can burn the candle brighter than everyone else. It's the way they sort of justify their valuations. A lot of it actually comes from the venture capital culture of when these social media companies are new, and they're bringing on these big venture capital investments.

There's this culture of if the VC is driving by the headquarters at nine o'clock on a Friday, they better see a light on because they just wrote a $10 million check. And I think that culture permeates these companies as they grow. They begin to think this is the key to why we're successful is because we hire smart people who just outwork everyone else.

And it can get really ingrained in the culture. And there's only so much time blocking and processes and office hour strategies that can work here. So I think you probably have two options. A, it might be possible that there is another position in this company that would be better.

Here's what you would be looking for. Significantly more autonomy, significantly less reactivity. So managing engineers have to monitor so many different things that is very reactive. You have very little autonomy. You can consider switching your position into one where maybe you are working on a project yourself, not managing projects.

It's something that you report on like once or twice a week. You have very few people underneath you. It's a small team you're working with or just you on yourself. This will solve a lot of the problems that you're currently having with the job. It's probably less money. It's probably less stock options.

If you listen to the job hacking philosophy that we talked about during the deep dive, however, that's okay, right? Because once you have your number, once you're hitting your number with your job, you can begin trading your skill for other things like time and flexibility and be completely comfortable with it.

And why should you be comfortable with this? Because, again, the goal is trying to hit your ideal lifestyle, not grand goal pursuing, not can I become an executive VP because, wow, I'd really be rolling in it and my stock options would be worth a lot. That's not going to make your life better, especially if you lose your family and your health along the way.

Your other option here is to pick up your skills and go to a different playground. Hey, I'm really good. I worked at a big company. I don't like the culture here. I'm going to go somewhere where I can cash this in to hit my number and have more flexibility and have less time requirements.

All of these type of decisions become less scary when you have the right mindset about the role that your job plays, hitting my number and then being a source of time and flexibility. So you're a great case study for this, Alan. I don't think there's any tactics that could save this particular busy job.

So if you're hating it, it's time to make some changes. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Thomas. I've developed a habit of starting my work day with at least 30 minutes of reading or studying something related to my work, such as an online course or documentation useful for my job.

I found this to be a helpful discipline. It makes me feel good to set aside time every day for learning, and it directly impacts my performance. I use the time block planners metric section to keep track of this. I'm considering adding a couple more habits. For example, I have an ankle injury that I want to stretch more.

I'm worried, though, I'll add too many and then not follow through with any. Well, when it comes to these sort of metrics that you track daily, I'm generally a believer that you can have more of these than you think. There's two schools of thought about this. There's the school of thought that says, oh, this is worrisome.

If you have a bunch of different things you track every day, did I get my steps? Did I get my 30 minutes of training? Did I have two conversations with someone who is important with me? Did I do a workout? Like if you have too many of these metrics that you're over-optimizing.

Or that your life is going to become too structured. I don't worry about that as much. What I worry about is getting a sustainable set of daily metrics. I call this a core set. So it's a set of metrics that you can hit on a regular basis. They're non-trivial, but they're still tractable.

If it's too simple, who cares? You know, I touch my nose once a day. I touch a rabbit foot before I get in my car. Like you can have a lot of those metrics and they don't do much, right? But on the other hand, if it's like I'm working out four hours a day, like, come on, how many days can you actually do that?

So finding a sweet spot of a group of metrics you can hit on a consistent basis. I think for a lot of people, it's great. It gives structure to your life. We're pretty bad with our time. So this is a good way of making sure that this time is actually going towards things of value to us.

There's also we reap the benefits, right? The fitness-related metrics, they build up over time and you're in better health. Some of the professional metrics, like I want to do this 30 minutes of training every day, that adds up. You look back six months later, you've picked up a new skill.

The key here is just to be willing to have to experiment and be flexible. Okay, it's very hard to get if you want to have more than one or two metrics. It is hard at first. This one's not working. I'm really not consistently doing this one. That's probably a problem with the metric design.

There's too many obstacles to it. It's something that, you know, there's too many things that you have to go right for this metric to be successful. You need flexibility. You need repeatability. So experiment until you get a metric set that's sustainable, a real core set. But I think it's okay if you have six of these or seven of these, right?

I mean, having structure to your life like this makes a big difference. I've seen this. A lot of people who do interesting things. You know, life have this type of structure. An interesting place you see this. I've been writing about monasteries for my new book on the deep life I'm working on.

And they have like these very structured lives actually, right? But the structured lives are all serving a bigger purpose. In their case, it's trying to get closer to God. But it's this idea that having some structure in your day-to-day can actually be a fantastic intermediate step towards some sort of larger vision for your life.

You can have two metrics, no, you can have six, no problem. You can have six, no problem. Some people have 10 daily metrics they track. Just get a sustainable core set. Be flexible. Find something that mainly works. Be okay when it doesn't work for a day or two. That's why I have a big metric planning.

That space in my time block planner for daily metrics is pretty large. There's room in there definitely for you to grow your daily metric habit. All right, let's move on. Next question is from Chris. I'm an entrepreneur who works out of my car. I'm envious of the deep work environments you describe.

Do you have any thoughts or resources that might help someone in my situation manage deep work and improve productivity despite these challenges? A couple things come to mind. One, you could actually take advantage of the mobility of your job, the fact that you're going from place to place in your car all day.

Define novelty in environment. Right? Because you're all over the place in your car. If you get good at finding interesting places to work, you can have an enviable level of novelty in your deep work environments. And novelty can really help. When you're in a situation in which your brain has no prior experience or associations, your brain is much more likely to not be stuck in loops of distraction.

It's more activated. Right? It's more energized. And it's much less likely to fall into some sort of trap. Right? Like, oh, yeah, this reminds me I have to do X. I have to do Y. Just be creative, though. Right? A picnic table at a park is a potential location.

A museum is a potential location. Different types of coffee shops or restaurants that you come across, those are potential locations. Interesting things in nature, those are interesting locations. Even a scenic overlook on, you know, the drive from A to B can be an interesting location to get work done.

So lean into the potential novelty of deep work environments. Also lean into ritual. So when it comes to trying to create a context that's more conducive for deep work, environment matters, so does ritual. I do the same thing every day before I do deep work. It's about getting a certain type of coffee.

It's about laying out a time block and shutting down my phone. So lean into the ritual aspect as well. So, yes, you're not going to have, like, some sort of beautifully constructed deep work environment you come back to again and again. And, by the way, spoiler, in our third segment today, we're going to talk about kind of a cool deep work environment that a famous author has created.

But you can still take advantage of context to try to make your deep work better. All right. Let's keep rolling. Next question is from Anne. During the workday, it's challenging to not check my phone as I have three kids. I have to be accessible in case daycare calls. Every time I do this, I get very distracted by other text messages and e-mails.

How can I remain accessible without falling into a 30- to 40-minute distraction break every time I pick up my phone? Well, I mean, Anne, I think your question kind of have the answers in it. Why does the ability for your daycare to call you mean that on a regular basis you have to spend 30- or 40 minutes checking e-mail and text?

Right. These are kind of two unrelated things. The technical answer here is very simple. One of the standard do-not-disturb modes on both iOS and Android is one that says hide notifications, including text notifications, let calls come through. All right. So just put that on and your ringer on. All right.

If your daycare calls, you'll hear it. And then start time block planning and stop looking at your phone for distractions. Here's what I'm doing. Here's my time to check e-mail. A particular block should do it. I'll do it on my computer and not my phone. If I need to check my phone for a break, I will schedule that.

Maybe over lunch, I'll check in on my phone or what's going on. But just get rid of that excuse. And it's so easy to do. Calls come through. Text messages, notifications don't. So there is no reason for me to pick up my phone unless I hear a ringing happening, unless I hear a call coming through.

You can also use this technique for work communication as well. Sometimes you're working on a project or maybe you're dealing with a client that could potentially have a time sensitive issue. A great thing to do in those situations is to say, here is the phone number. If there's something urgent, don't e-mail me, don't text me, call.

And then again, you can turn off the notifications on your phone except for calls to come through. Here's the secret. No one's going to call. It's very rare that anything is actually urgent enough that people call. A lot of time when clients or colleagues are sending you urgent e-mails, it's urgent because they need an answer to something.

They are disorganized. So they've sent you this request for information and they are storing it in their head. They have to remember in their head that they sent you this message until you respond and then they can close that loop. That's like 80% of urgency in communication. So when you tell someone like, hey, if there's an emergency, you can call.

They're not going to call because it's not really an emergency. The fact that they're disorganized is not an emergency and they're just going to have to get over. They're not going to get an answer right away. So I love using calls. In my book, A World Without Email, I call it an escape valve.

You give people this escape valve. Like I know I'm not super on e-mail and text, but I'm always accessible if there's an emergency. So you don't really have an objection to that, right? You can't give me the objection, but what if there's an emergency? Because you can reach me if there's an emergency.

And there aren't emergencies very often, and now you don't have to get an e-mail and text all the time. So I really love using calls because they're high enough friction to not be abused too much. Use calls as your way for important stuff to get through so that you don't have to encounter the less important off of your own decisions about when you actually want to do that.

And people hate calling. Yeah. It's great. Like it really has to be they are actively on fire, you know? And even then, like especially if it's like a 23-year-old, even then they're like, can I just email them? Can I just like text them about this? Like, I'm on fire.

Can you come put it out? Like they'd rather than have to actually pick up the phone and call. With a fire emoji? Yeah, just like a fire emergency. Yeah, and the problem is because they're 23, you think they're saying like, I'm fire is like a positive affirmation, right? Because fire is slang, and then they emulate.

This is the problem. Yeah, so use phones as an escape valve. All right, what do we got next? We have our corner. Ooh, slow productivity corner. All right, let's hear some theme music. All right, if you're new to this show, the Slow Productivity Corner is where we take a question that is relevant to my most recent book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

If you have not yet read Slow Productivity, you need to. It is like the source material for 60 or 70% of what we talk about on this show. So if you like the show, buy that book. All right, Jesse, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week?

All right, this question is from O. I am moving to a new European country and starting an MBA after years of being a lawyer. How can I organize my processes at school in accordance with the principles of slow productivity? Well, look, student life is its own organizational challenge. The good news is it's an easily conquerable challenge and will only require some of the ideas from slow productivity.

All right, so here's what makes it a unique challenge. One, it has very clear objectives. This assignment needs to be done by this point. This exam is going to happen on this day. So be prepared for taking this exam on this day. There is no expectations of pseudo productivity.

This is one of the big ideas for my book is that many knowledge work jobs uses this notion of pseudo productivity where it uses visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. This does not exist in the student context. No one cares about your visible activity. They just care about these clear objectives.

Where is your assignment? How good is the assignment? So you don't have to combat pseudo productivity like we have to in a normal knowledge work context. You also have full autonomy in how you execute, right? So in a student process, a student environment rather, the professor doesn't care how you study, when you study, how you manage your time.

They just say, where's the thing I'm owed? It's up to you to how to actually do it. And the workloads are actually reasonable, especially if you're coming from a standard job environment like a lawyer like you are. The workloads are not that hard when compared to a typical full-time job, right?

So this is a much more conquerable challenge, much more conquerable sort of work challenge. If anything, actually, I wish more normal knowledge work jobs shared these properties of student life. Clear objectives, no pseudo productivity, no one cares when or how you're working, full autonomy in how you execute and reasonable workloads.

Like, that's actually almost like a slow productivity dream right there, if only more jobs were like that. Okay, so then what do you do in this context, given those constraints? You should read, for example, my book, How to Become a Straight-A Student. I get into a lot of this.

Let me give you the really quick rundown of the things I think matters for conquering these student environments. One, always use active recall instead of passive. Never just read something quietly to yourself as a mode of review that doesn't work well. You need to produce the information from scratch as if lecturing a class without referencing any notes.

Active recall is more psychologically demanding, but it is by far the most efficient and effective way to ingrain information into your mind. Your study system. Number two, your study system should be clearly defined. If I ask you, how are you preparing for this exam, you should have a very detailed answer.

If I ask you, how are you working on this paper, you should have a very detailed answer. And then after every grade event, right, so after you get back a grade on something major, always do a post-mortem. What worked and what didn't? How should I change how I work on these type of assignments going forward?

So you have to evolve your study techniques based on evidence on the ground. Too often, students create approaches to studying that they like. They feel what studying should be like, or it's what they've seen other people do, and they don't send any check that it makes no sense half of what they're doing.

So you have to keep evolving how you study. Number three, anything that is regular work, so an assignment you know is going to be due on a regular basis, or reading that has to be done every week by a certain day, all needs to be autopiloted. That is, on your calendar, you need to pre-schedule in a repeated fashion when that work happens and where it happens.

So when and where is vital. I don't want you thinking about, hey, when should I work on my reading? It should be super clear. Tuesday from 9 to 10 Thursday, 10.30, and like Wednesday, 12 and 2 in these libraries, that's when I get the reading done. It's very regular, so you shouldn't have to think about it.

And finally, at the beginning of every semester, look up all of your major deadlines. So this is exams and papers and projects. And right then, at the beginning of your semester, not only put those deadlines on your calendar, but work backwards and start scheduling the time you're going to work on those projects.

Make those decisions at the very beginning of the semester. That time, claim and protect that time right away. The goal of this should all be, there's very little time management decision-making that you end up having to make as a student. You come to your day and you're like, okay, I have some autopilot work this day.

And then I also see I have a block already scheduled to begin work on this paper that's due in three weeks. And how do I know to start working on it three weeks earlier? Because I looked at my calendar at the beginning of the semester and I saw I was going to have to spread this out because my days are pretty full.

Those are the key ideas. Do those ideas you can conquer student life. I really just wish more actual jobs were like student life because, you know, man, this is conquerable. Give me autonomy. Give me clear objectives. Give me a reasonable workload. I can do really well. I can get straight A's.

So more jobs I wish were like that, but alas, they are not. So if you have a normal job, read slow productivity. Do you ever use active recall now? Not on your teaching duties? Yeah. I mean, for example, if I'm preparing for a talk or a panel or something like this, I practice talking about producing information.

I practice answering questions. I practice like what's my introduction for this talk going to be? And I do that all without notes. That's what ingrains it. That's what ingrains it in my head. So I use a lot of it in that context. If I know I'm going to have to go perform, active recall is the way I start locking ideas into my head.

All right. I think we should hear that music one more time to end our slow productivity corner. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's load this up. Hey, Cal. My name is Stephen. I've been a huge fan of your work since the early days.

Your book, how to become a straight A student actually helped me a lot during law school. And it was a game changer. Fast forward. I'm now a father to a soon to be three year old daughter. And I was wondering how do we apply the principles that you talk about in your podcast and slow productivity with family life?

It just seems to me that there's this endless pressure to enroll our kids into countless activities from baseball to cooking to piano to swimming. I know you're a parent yourself and with three kids. How did you navigate this during the early days? Love to hear your thoughts on this, Cal.

Thank you so much. Well, it's a good question. I mean, the early days aren't the problem. If the problem we're talking about here is crowded schedules, if the problem we're talking about here is violating the principle of doing fewer things with all the things you're doing with your kid, when they're young, it doesn't really matter.

It's just kind of time filling. You're like, I don't know. We should do. We should take them to story hour because it's interesting and on board or, hey, let's put them on like one of these soccer teams where like the kids like run around in clumps. And that's like I wanted to get some fresh air.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't take much time. It doesn't matter if you're doing that or not. It becomes more of a problem elementary school into middle school, which is the phase I'm in now. And that's where you begin to get a big variance in things like activity load. It's complicated, right?

Because part of what happens is kids need to do things, but it's possible for kids to do too many things. And it's a hard balance to actually try to figure out, right? So part of it depends, for example, on school. If your kid, for example, is in like a college prep school, right?

Like one of the big three private schools in the D.C. area, they're going to be slamming them with homework starting middle school and onwards. And then you want to be really careful about how much time they're being taken up. But on another school, the schoolwork might be minimal. And it's like, yeah, I want to make sure that they're they have something to do during each season, for example.

So you kind of have to find that balance, but they're going to have to do stuff. And the more kids you have, the more it multiplies. My wife and I like to think about kids should be doing some sort of sport three seasons because we have boys. And if they don't get outside, they're going to they take a sledgehammer to our walls, right?

I mean, they're just going to they're just going to smash through all the windows. And it's good discipline and it's good for them to have coaches and other adult role models around them that they can model off of. We like our kids to try to play some sort of instrument, but it's pretty casual, right?

Our school doesn't have an orchestra or orchestral music program. So it's like my oldest son plays guitar and, you know, take some lessons and sometimes plays with a rock band of his friends. Like that's important, but I don't want to go beyond that too much because to us, that feels like multiplied by three is too crowded.

All right. So what's like the generalized lessons to pull here? Some amount of crowdedness is unavoidable. You want to avoid it getting excessive. It's okay to bring into the equation your life. Like, wait a second. This is like too much for me. Like this matters as well. Like not everything is oriented towards the kids having like the perfect setup.

But there's also a situation where if your kids are completely not involved in things, their social skills being missed and they're going to be bored and kind of bouncing off the wall. So it's kind of a hard thing to balance out. And it's definitely something that we're still thinking about as well.

One thing though that I will say is true, and I'm going to give you a warning here, right? So I have three boys. I feel like my time requirements as a parent, and not just raw time, but like engaged time is way higher now than it was before. Right?

It's like these three boys are in this mode. I've been talking about this in the last couple of years. They're in this mode where like the more dad time, the better. They're at this sort of male development stage where they need time with their dad. And so I am cutting back on things to make significantly more time available because they need lots of time with me right now.

Doing various things. I don't know how, why, I don't know what the developmental psychology is of this. It's just what I've sensed as a parent. So like you also have to be ready. There are seasons in life. And this is a season where I realized like that's a big thing going on, which was different more than when the kids were young and it's more survival mode, just making sure they get, you know, we know where they are and they're fed and aren't too bored.

It'll be different than when they're older and they're much more autonomous and want to have nothing to do with us. But like I'm in a stage right now that feels like they need a lot of time. You have to be ready for that as well, making those adjustments along the way.

The main thing to be wary about, especially if you live in a city is like, this is the big trap of high achieving people, high achieving people that have kids look at their kids' lives and say, if you could take my brain and experience as like a 42 year old and put it in the brain of a 12 year old, I would clean up.

It's actually not that, look, I could be great. It's not that hard to do this studying as like a 42 year old. Like I could clean up in these classes. Like it's not that hard to like be doing pretty well in sports. If like you really train this and that, like you could, you could figure out how to do this, right?

Like it's, it's easy to think about, um, porting your adult mindset to the kids. But the problem is kids aren't adults, not so obvious. They're not used to, or probably able yet to have their whole life structured towards the deliberate practice of things that are important. Some kids are, and they do a lot of things, but most kids aren't there yet.

So you have to avoid trying to say like, man, uh, it's hard to succeed as an adult. This is very competitive. The kid world looks easier. So can I use my kid as a proxy for me and try to enjoy in those successes? And, you know, that's a way to, you could steal a bit of a childhood from, from a kid.

You definitely see some of that, some of that going on as well. All right. Uh, we got a case study. All right. So case studies is where people write in to talk about their experience, putting the type of things we talked about on the show into practice in their own life.

Uh, if you have a case study, you can send it to Jesse at Jesse at Cal Newport.com. Today's case study is from anonymous. All right. So anonymous says, I'm enrolled in a fairly difficult PhD program at Hebrew university in Jerusalem, and I'm still in the writing stage. Uh, I assume he means the writing stage of his PhD.

When the war broke out, I moved my family to Austria and then eventually back to the U.S. Once back in the U.S., I was very distracted texting friends back in Israel. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take three days at the library of the institution where I got my master's degree and really push hard on the writing.

I wanted to see how much I could get done. While I'm not yet facing a scary deadline, since my dissertation is not due until 2026, the clock is still ticking. One of the things that has kept me going over the years is an exploratory approach to my workflow and to knowledge work in general, to never get stuck in a rut, but to always ask, how can I do this better and try new ways of working?

So when I went out on the writing retreat, I decided to implement one technique that you often allude to or mention in your podcast, blocking my time in 60-minute chunks. I decided to see if I could hold my concentration on writing for a 60-minute block and then repeat that three or four times and see how much progress I made.

When we lived overseas, I simply did not have that kind of time more than perhaps twice a week. Using some of the excellent software that's out there, I locked down my computer to make it impossible to check email or search library databases, and then I started writing using the material I had already collected and cataloged.

I did one chalk, got to the end, and it felt great. The first day, I did five of these blocks. I totaled the material I had written in that first day, and it was over twice my average amount that I had written on days before when I was filled with intense burst of writing between distractions.

The second day, I did five blocks again and wrote slightly more. Let's see if I got any more of this. Slightly more than the first day. And the third day, I did five blocks again and wrote slightly more than the second. It was quite a surprise. I am now sold on this technique.

It's something I had known about since I first read Deep Work in 2021 but never put into practice. I'm not going to stop now. All right. So what I want to pull out of Anonymous's case study is less his specific techniques for writing a dissertation because that's like a really specific thing.

I mean, most people don't have the ability to do five intense blocks on anything in a given day. What I want to pull out of there is a general mindset. Right? He says in there, I never just settle for the idea that how I work is just what it means to work.

I am always experimenting. I'm always saying, why am I doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it? I don't want to get stuck. And I'm quoting him here in a rut. This is really critical with work habits in general. We talked about this actually in the previous question that was from a student, the person going back to get their MBA.

And I said, one of the key things you have to do as a student is postmortems. After every evaluation event, you have to go back and said, how did I prepare for this? How did I study or write my paper? What worked? What didn't? So what am I going to fix going forward?

This is how students pretty quickly develop very powerful study techniques that are custom fit to the type of stuff they're doing in their program. Well, we can generalize this activity to almost anything we do in our professional lives. To get stuck in a rut means you're just working the way you've always worked and lamenting the results.

To get stuck in a rut is to be like, okay, I don't know, I come in, I do email all day, then we have meetings, and there's too many meetings, and I don't have time to get deep work done, and I'm just trying to do it at night. That's a rut.

You could step back and say, well, why am I doing it this way? Why am I checking email first thing in the morning? Do I have more control over my meetings? What if I don't schedule meetings before 11 a.m.? Would that be a problem? What would I have to do to make that not a problem?

How would I earn the ability to get that permission from my supervisor? What's going on in these deep work blocks? I'm really just getting lost online. Why don't I do non-computer deep work blocks? Maybe I need to sit down with printouts and really study. The more you begin thinking about what am I doing, why am I doing, and how could I do it better, the more improvement you're going to actually feel.

And the closer you're going to get to your working life actually unfolding in the way that you want it to unfold. So I love that general idea of not getting stuck in a rut. So Anonymous, I like that. So thanks for sending that case study. All right, we have a final segment coming up.

I have something that someone sent me online I want to react to. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. You've heard me talk often on this show about Notion, one of the sponsors of today's episode. We have used Notion here for various different reasons. It's just a fantastic system, especially if you want to build a custom way of storing and viewing and updating data that's relevant to things that you do.

There's a period, for example, where we had a cool Notion system we used with our advertising agency for this podcast where it allowed us to see, for example, what sponsor reads are coming up and then click on one of those and say, show me all the sponsor reads that we're doing for that particular sponsor.

And then go to a particular episode and let me enter in the information about that particular read. This is classic Notion. You can get get at data from different custom views, build these tools that are really useful. It allows you to combine your notes, docs, and projects in the one space that's simple and beautifully designed from just a personal productivity system to an advanced workflow for a big company.

You can do that all in Notion. All right. Well, here's what I like what they've been up to. They have been really careful about integrating the power of AI into their already very useful product. So this fully integrated Notion AI can help you work faster, write better, think better, doing tasks that normally take you hours in seconds.

And this is fully integrated, right? This is not let me copy and paste from some tool I'm using into some web-based interface for a chat bot. The AI is fully integrated into Notion, right? So if, for example, you're trying to find information in your system or you want a quick summary of something over here and you want help summarizing it or have some bullet points about what you want to enter here, generate it for you automatically.

All of this is integrated right into Notion's already fantastic system. You can use Notion AI to handle the first draft, jumpstart a brainstorm, or turn your messy notes into something more polished. You can automate tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps. Notion AI does all of this and more, freeing up time for deep work.

So Notion is already used by over half of the Fortune 500 companies, and teams that use Notion send less email, cancel more meetings, saving time searching for their work, and reduce spending on their tools. And now with this integrated AI, all of this has become even easier. So try Notion for free when you go to Notion.com/cal.

That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com/cal to try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you will be supporting our show. That is Notion.com/cal. I also want to talk about our friends at Mint Mobile. Look, here's the thing: I love a great deal as much as the next guy, but I am not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals to save a few bucks.

I'm trying to think what my equivalent of crawling through a bed of hot coals would be. It would probably be spending an hour on TikTok. I'm not going to spend an hour surfing TikTok just to save a few bucks. It has to be easy. We're talking no hoops, no BS.

So when Mint Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for $15 a month with the purchase of a three-month plan, I called them on it. And it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for $15 a month. The longest part of this process is just the time you have to spend breaking up with your old phone provider.

They make it simple to get that deal. We're actually going to use Mint Mobile now. We've been procrastinating on this, but we have this flip phone we bought on Amazon for my oldest son, so that when he's taking the bus to baseball practice, he can let us know if there's a problem.

And the question was, how do we get wireless service on this phone we bought for like $50 online? Oh, it's Mint Mobile. $15 a month? That's no problem, right? And so for us, Mint Mobile is going to solve a big problem. So if you want to get started, go to MintMobile.com/deep.

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Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to MintMobile.com/deep. That's MintMobile, M-I-N-T, MintMobile.com/deep. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at MintMobile.com/deep.

$25 upfront payment required, which is equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. So I want to load up an article.

This is actually a blog post about an article that a lot of people sent me. The article is behind a paywall, but this article, this blog post gets us some extra information. I have this on the screen now for those who are watching instead of just listening. There was a recent profile done of the writer Robert Caro, who is a very well-known American historian who is famous for spending years and years on these books.

There's been kind of a resurgence right now, I think, in interest in his older book, The Power Broker. But he wrote and is continuing to write sort of the definitive series on Lyndon Johnson. Anyways, here's what's cool about this article. I have a picture here on the screen. That's Robert Caro in a shack in his backyard.

And here's what's cool about it. I'm going to read this. This is from a profile of Caro. He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300 after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed price to build one. "30 years and it's never leaked," he says.

"This particular shed was a floor sample bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business's owner demurred. So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work. I can't lose the days." She gets up, sort of pads around the corner and I hear her calling someone and she comes back and says, "You can have it tomorrow." So what's cool about this, and if you can't see the shed, it's look, it's one of these prefab sheds that you would put in your yard and put your lawnmower in it.

But he's put inside of it and you can see he has a desk in there and he has bookshelves in there. Like a comfortable desk and bookshelves, I think another angle showed, I think he has some sort of like air conditioning unit put in the side as well because it gets hot in the summer.

What I like about this is Robert Caro does very deep work. He's kind of famous for this, like the depth of the work that he does. He didn't need a super fancy way to do this. What he needed was a place that was novel. What he needed was a place where he could get away from the other distractions in his life and tell his brain, "It's time for us to concentrate." Nothing about that requires, for example, like Neil Gaiman did when he bought an estate on the Isle of Skye off of Scotland to go concentrate.

You don't have to do that to be able to fall into really deep work. None of this requires like the novelist Brandon Sanderson, who as Jesse and I know is famous for "Name of the Wind," most well-known book. He built an underground lair hidden under a cul-de-sac in his suburban Utah town, suburb where he lives, a massive evil villain underground lair that you don't even know is there to go do his work from.

That's really cool, but you don't have to do that to fall into a state of real deep work. You just need a place you associate with work that's free of distraction is novel and interesting. So even a prefab shed that cost, you know, Robert Caro two thousand dollars just placed in his yard he got the same day has allowed him to produce when he's working at that house some really cool, interesting, deep work.

So I just love that idea that it's novelty that matters. It's uniqueness that matters. It's freedom from distraction that matters when you want to get the most out of your head and none of that necessarily needs to be too expensive. Maybe we should build an underground lair still. I don't know.

You think I'd get the Tacoma Park permits? I don't know. It costs a lot to park in Tacoma Park, so the permits are probably really expensive. What about that parking lot you park in? I feel like we could put an underground lair underneath that thing. Probably. That'd be pretty cool.

Like, no one knows. You just go into like Olive Lounge, and if you pull one of the beer taps, like a little hidden staircase opens up and we could go under there. That's the plan. We got to sell a few more slow productivities, but that should be fun. All right, everyone.

Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you liked today's episode, you might also like episode 302, which was called Re-Enchanting Work. It plays with a lot of the themes that we got into today, especially at the end of the show.

I think you'll like it. Check it out today. I want to change course a little bit and talk instead about where you do your work.