(upbeat music) I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 178. I'm here at my Deep Work HQ, joined as usual by my producer, Jesse. Now, Jesse, do I look more tanned and relaxed? - You look very tan. - Given that-- - Like Mark Sisson. - Like Mark Sisson.

I look like a 65-year-old man, like Mark Sisson. I just got back from Mark Sisson's home stomping grounds of Florida just a few days ago. And let me tell you what the important thing was about that trip. I didn't work. All right, and that's rare for me because when I go on any type of vacation, now this was a short one, but when I go on any type of vacation, I pretty soon get antsy.

If I don't have things to think about, if I don't have progress to be making. So I'm usually working on a writing problem, a writing project, or a math problem I'm trying to solve. And I'll walk the beach and I'll try to make progress. And I didn't bring anything like that.

I didn't write and I didn't try to solve anything. I mean, I did a little writing in my head, but I wasn't actually typing and making progress. I wasn't trying to solve anything. It was nice. - How many books did you read? - 12. - No, one and a half, one and a half.

So, oh yeah, by the way, what are we now? The 25th or 6th? So yeah, we got another book episode. Next time we record, we'll have books. I will admit, so we're recording this on February 25th, and I finished my five books in February early in that trip. So now I'm working on two books concurrently that I'll finish in March.

So I'm sort of on my way. And I'm working on a really big book in the background too. And I don't know how to report that because it's gonna take me, it's an 800 page beast. And so I just work on it a little bit at a time in the background.

And so it doesn't get captured in my monthly reports, but that thing's rolling along as well. So a lot of good reading got done. Saw some sun, saw some dolphins, did not see Mark Sisson, but it was all in all a good trip, but not working is a big deal for me.

Just actually wrangling family and looking at the ocean and doing what one does. So it was a good trip. - Good to hear. So I figured we'd do a little deep dive and then get into some listener calls. I was thinking this might be a good time to remind people, Jesse, that if they go to calnewport.com/podcast, there's a link on there about how to submit listener calls.

You can do it straight from your browser. It's easy to do. And we use those and appreciate those. We use those right in the show. Also, I guess I should remind people, I always forget to do this, but YouTube page is up. So if you want to see videos of full episodes or videos of each individual question and segment we do, all of that is on the YouTube page.

We finally have our own URL. So you don't have to just look in the show notes. You can just remember youtube.com/calnewportmedia. One word, right? - Yep. - What was the one? We couldn't get Cal Newport, right? - Yeah, somebody has it, I guess. - Yeah, it makes me nervous.

- But then when you try to go to it, it doesn't go to anything. - Yeah, it makes me nervous. There's a Twitter account. So there's been a lot of fake Cal Newport Twitter accounts off and on, and usually they're fine. We had to get one taken down because it was getting pretty inappropriate.

It was my picture and my name, my bio. But there's one now that's actually doing pretty well. I think they're up to 800 followers that they're clear in the description, at least, that this is not Cal Newport. He's not on social media. But as far as I can tell, the Twitter account is just my quotes.

And I think the guy's doing pretty well with it. So there we go. So hopefully, youtube.com/calnewport is not that weird. Remember we found that Professor Cal erotic ASMR guy. Hopefully it's not gonna be that, with a picture of me, a big prominent picture of me, and just a bucket load of erotic ASMR.

It's possible, so I'll pre-warn people. So it's Cal Newport media. That media might end up being critical. It could get rough, it could get dicey. All right, but let's do a deep dive. So I wanted to talk about this topic of tips for doing hard things. And what's gonna be different about this deep dive versus past deep dives is I'm not giving my advice for doing hard things.

I actually wanna relay some advice that I saw in an interesting video that a reader sent to me from 2020 of an author giving a talk about this topic. And I recently wrote an essay about this talk, and I published it in my email newsletter, which if you don't get, you probably should.

You can sign up for that at calnewport.com. But I figured I just wrote that this morning before we started recording. I said, I wanna talk about this on the show. So I brought in some of my notes from it. So here's the setup. The video is from 2020. It's from the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson, who wrote a bunch of best-selling series.

I've read some of his books. I read "Name of the Wind" and whatever the second book was in that particular trilogy. And it's really good. And I'm actually now, one of the books I'm reading right now is, I decided I wanted to read some Ursula K. Gwynn. And I was going back and reading some of her "Earthsea Chronicles," which has, that's from the '60s, but it has some ideas about the true names of elements being critical to the magical system that Sanderson plays with.

Anyways, think big, successful fantasy novelist. And he gives a talk in 2020 that was titled, let me have it here, "The Common Lies Writers Tell You," but this was not really what the talk was about. The talk was about doing hard things. And Sanderson comes right out, and you know I'm gonna appreciate this.

He comes right out up front and says, he dislikes the fact that the media keeps telling young people that you can do anything you want to, and you should follow your dreams. And he said, "Look, that is way too simplistic. "That's not the way it works. "That's not gonna help anyone to say that." It's definitely a perspective you would hear, for example, in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." And he says, "Okay, here is the more realistic claim." And I'm quoting him here.

"I can do hard things. "Doing hard things has intrinsic value, "and they will make me a better person, "even if I end up failing." He said, "That's the right way to talk about ambitious goals, "is there's value in doing hard things. "You are able to do hard things, "and you're gonna get value out of it, "no matter what actually happens, "whether it makes you a famous novelist or not, "or whatever that dream happens to be." And that this is better than telling people, "No, of course you'll succeed, "and you can do whatever you want." And then for the remainder of his talk, he said, "So let's talk about doing hard things." And he gave three tips, three tips for the reality, reality-based tips for dealing with hard things.

So I thought what I would do here is I wanna go through these three tips, I'll tell you what he said, and then give a little bit of my own commentary on each. So the first tip he gave was make better goals. So when it comes to doing hard things, he thinks we are not good at setting the right goals, and we don't help people set better goals.

So he mentioned, for example, that in an AP literature class in high school, he won a minor contest for a story he wrote, and decided, "Oh, my goal is to be a successful novelist." And he said that was not a good goal. It was way too long-term, vague, and grandiose.

How do you make progress on that particular goal? In particular, what are you supposed to do tomorrow to make progress towards that goal and become a successful writer? He said what you should do instead is make goals that you have control over. And what Sanderson ended up doing was writing 13 manuscripts before he actually had a book he could sold, and he said his goal should have been focused on producing a certain number of manuscripts as an act of practice and having a commitment with each manuscript to be more ambitious than the last to push and develop his skills, because that's a goal he could make progress on.

I could write another manuscript. I can for sure make this next manuscript be even more ambitious in this way, this way, or that way. Those are achievable goals. Saying, "Be a successful author," that was too vague. All right, now my take on this is I write about something similar in my book, "Deep Work." In that book, "Deep Work," I talk about this methodology, this business methodology called 4DX, the four disciplines of execution.

And I talk about how this methodology, which was designed to help teams and companies do better, gives us some insight into accomplishment when we apply it to individuals. And one of the core ideas from that methodology is lead versus lag indicators. A lag indicator is the big goal you eventually want to accomplish.

I want my next academic paper to get into a top-tier journal. And the problem with lag indicators, according to 4DX, is that it doesn't give you a clear action. So they said instead, you should focus on what they call lead indicators, which are things you can track and do and control.

And they should be chosen such that if you do well with those lead indicators, you're likely to have success with the lag indicators, but it gives you something concrete to focus on. And so for that example, the right lead indicator might be, I'm going to do 15 hours of deep work per week on the paper I'm writing.

Well, that I can track. That creates friction I can push back against. Now I can actually make real changes in the intentional application of my energy, cancel things, move things, wake up early, progress can happen. So I like Sanderson's idea there, and I've talked about variations of that. All right, his second tip, learn how you work.

So Sanderson, when it comes to writing, thinks it's a real disservice when he hears people say things like, real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write. And that if you don't have that compulsion, you should do anything else. And only people who just can't help but write, and that's all they can do, should be people who should be writers.

He thinks that's nonsense. He says, writing is hard, and it's hard work to figure out how to get yourself to do it. He is a professional writer, and I'm quoting him here, "I love writing, "but I have a hard time sitting down and writing." So even for this very successful professional writer, he says, writing is hard.

So his advice is, when it comes to doing hard things, you have to put in a lot of effort to figure out what works for you to basically get yourself to do that type of effort. And it could differ from person to person. Sanderson uses daily word count tracking in a spreadsheet.

It's like a game for him. He likes that, but he says, other people thrive under the social pressure of a writer's group. Other people need a deadline. Now, I talk about this a lot in my own work. I talk a lot about how deep, cognitively demanding efforts are unnatural.

It uses a lot of energy. More ancient parts of our brain cannot immediately see what benefit they're going to get from this energy. What's the threat we're escaping? Where's the food or mate source that this thinking is gonna give us right away? And it doesn't have an answer for that.

You try to convince your brain, for example, that your 460,000 word epic fantasy novel is going to help you in mate selection, your brain's not gonna buy it. It's gonna see that you're talking a lot about wizards with names like Gargamel, who are passing wind spells on elves. And it's gonna say, this is not gonna get us children.

This is not gonna get us food. Why are we doing this? And this is generally true when it comes to doing cognitively demanding work. It's unnatural. So a lot of effort is required to trick yourself into doing it. So I like what Sanderson talked about. I would also add scheduling philosophy and ritual.

That's why this plays such a big role. Get rid of any decision your mind has about when you're gonna do this work instead you have a philosophy. It's always these days at these times. Or at the beginning of the week, I put it on my calendar and it's right there in the same color as meetings I know I can't skip, that time is protected.

I don't always feel like I wanna go to a meeting, but if it's on my calendar, I'd go. I don't always feel like I wanna write, but it's there on my calendar, that's what I'm doing next. And this is also why ritual matters. Writers will build out these spaces that seem over the top or go to weird places like I wrote about in my New Yorker piece last summer about working from near home, where writers will leave perfectly nice and good homes to go to weird eccentric locations to write just because they associate that transit.

They associate that new environment just with writing. That's why Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage home on East Welland Avenue there. Actually, no, he's on Curliss Avenue. Curliss Avenue there in Pennington, New Jersey to work in the back room of a furnace factory. That's why Steinbeck would balance a legal pad on a boat in Sag Harbor.

It's why Maya Angelou would go to hotel rooms and take everything off the walls so there is zero distraction. And Wright laying down on the bed, propped up on an arm, doing this so often that she built up deep calluses on that arm that she was supporting herself because it's hard to do this work.

You gotta figure out how to get your mind into there. So scheduling philosophies and rituals, especially over-the-top rituals, play a big role. And I'll say when it comes to writing, there's a quote I've said a few times, has bounced around a few times, which is basically what some people call writer's block.

By some people, I mean amateurs, is actually just the physiological feeling of what writing, the writing experience is. That feeling of I don't know what to say, I don't feel inspired, I don't know what to say, I'm stuck. It's like, great, now you've started writing. That's what it feels like.

All right, Sanderson's third tip, break it down. Maybe his most prosaic tip out of the three. But basically, if you have a big goal, break it into manageable pieces so you have something to go after. He noted that the book he was writing at that time was longer than the entire Hunger Games series put together.

So he's saying that's such a big, hairy, epic goal because he'll write 400,000 word plus books, which is crazy. By comparison, my books are usually 70 to 90,000. So it's like five deep works. He's like, you gotta break that down. That can't be your goal. I'm writing this book.

It's no, no, I'm trying to finish the chapter cycle that establishes the backstory for the wizard Gargamel that passes the wind spells on the elves, or whatever it is. I obviously know a lot about fantasy books. So I think that's good work. I think the key part about this final tip is that he says in figuring out what those goals are, that's where all the magic happens, is that we don't give people enough training, especially in creative fields, to figure out what those smaller goals are.

He said this is a particular problem in writing where if you talk to a professional writer and say, look, I really wanna do what you do, what's your advice? They'll just look at you and say, well, you gotta write. He says, that's too vague. No, no, what you need to tell me is it's gonna take about six manuscripts before you get your chops down.

And those manuscripts have to be successively harder in this way. And here is the level, type, and source of feedback you need on each to make sure that you're gaining particular skills. You do one on your own. You do one with two with a writing group. For the fourth, maybe you wanna hire an editor a day of their time to come back and give you a harsher.

The fifth, you wanna submit and get notes from the publisher that you submit to. We need that type of detailed roadmap. It's non-trivial and it's non-obvious. You don't just tell people, if you wanna write, write. If you wanna be a musician, play music. You wanna be an artist, paint.

No, these are big, hairy goals that you need to break down and it's not obvious how they break down. And the thing I talk about a lot on this show in particular is that if you're going to get this information, you have to go get it. And by what I mean by that is you have to go to people who know what they're doing and don't just say, what's your advice?

Because they'll just say, write. They'll just say, paint. Say, I wanna hear your story. How did you get there? What was the first thing? Then what was the next thing? Oh, oh, Sanderson, you wrote 13 manuscripts? Oh, I didn't realize that. So you mean I can't just do National Novel Writing Month and have the name of the win be the book that comes out of it?

Oh, okay, now I get that. I don't like that that's reality, but that's reality. Okay, I have to write 13 manuscripts. How long is that gonna take? You know, maybe I'm gonna need much more time on this than I think. You get the reality, not what you wanna be true.

You get the reality of what actually matters for the endeavor you wanna do. You get that reality from people who came before. Not by asking for advice, but asking for their story. You look at that and you find out what really matters. I talked about this. If you wanna see a more extensive conversation about this, when I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast earlier in, whenever this was, January, I guess I was on his podcast, we get into how I got started in writing.

And I go into detail of the story about how, through connections with my family, I got in touch with an agent, a literary agent, who I promised, I'm not gonna try to sell you a book. And I had that agent walk me through step by step what exactly would a 20-year-old need to do to get a book deal with a major publisher.

And she walked me through, here's what matters, here's what doesn't, here's the process, here's the steps. And it was not at all what I would have guessed, and it's not at all what most young people I've met who say, I wanna write a book do, but it was the reality.

And it took me two years, but I followed that plan and sold that book and wrote that book as a senior and everything else unfolded from there. So that's my advice there is, yes, you need to break down your goals into more manageable goals. It's not always obvious how to do that.

Ask the experts, but not for their advice, but for their story, and you can extract from their story the reality of what matters. All right, so Sanderson, thank you for giving that talk. Excuse me for my wizard elf jokes. Obviously, you're very good at what you do and I am of great awe, but that's good advice.

Don't just follow your dreams. Focus on doing hard things for the meaning of doing hard things and treat doing hard things like a complicated endeavor that requires a lot of nuanced feedback. There we go. Are you a fantasy guy, Jesse? - Yeah, yeah, I am. - Do you read fantasy books?

- I read a lot of science fiction right now. - Oh, I see. I feel like I should be more into fantasy. And I've read some, like the classics, but I think I should be a huge fantasy fan just given my demographics. It's like a semi-nerdy, computer science, whatever, guy who reads a lot.

And I don't know, I lose steam. But I've read the classics. I've done "The Lord of the Rings." I'm doing Ursula Gwynn's "Earthsea Cycle." Oh, I'm reading at least the first one. Just why not? I like "Name of the Wind," so I like Brandon Sanderson's book. I mean, man, it's long.

But I like that. But I've tried a lot of other things that I've just, I don't know, I can't get in. I tried Robert Jordan. - How is "Lord of the Rings?" - I reread that again at some point, and it's cool. It's written in a mythological meter, if that makes sense, right?

So he writes it almost like you're reading, because he's an expert in Old English, like it's mythological, where now things are more boldly expository. Like I'm the third-person observer just explaining everything that's happening. But this had a more, especially the first "Lord of the Rings" book, I don't know, there's more of a mythological than I remembered meter to it.

The language is a little chewy. It kind of sets the scene, and it's not all just pure action, and sometimes the description feels more mythological than modern, just objective description of what's happening. So it's a very impressive, very impressive book. - Did you like the movies? - I kind of get bored in the movies.

I don't know, do you like them? - I did, yeah. - Yeah, I just, that's my memory. I re-watched some of them recently. It's my memory in the theater was getting a little antsy. Here's my, okay, here's the "Lord of the Rings" question about the movies, because no one else seems to agree with this.

But to me, and this is probably unavoidable because of budgets, the world seems so uninhabited. It's all just empty fields and mountains, and then they'll eventually come to a city with a king, but it'll be 70 people in the middle, like a giant empty field or this or that.

It just feels like there's no people in that world. And so is that supposed to be because after ancient warfare, it's largely depopulated, or it's just a very sparsely populated country? But nowhere in the "Lord of the Rings" universe, in the visual movie universe, you ever have this feel of medieval England or something, where there's big cities and villages and stuff.

It's just, everything is so empty. - Was it that way in the books? - You know, I'm trying to remember. Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember. It's a good question. I mean, I think the, I read a book about "Lord of the Rings." This part, a couple of years ago, I read a book about the making of the movies.

That was actually kind of an interesting book. Like what, everything that went through, like the movie rights and how Peter Jackson got them and how they filmed it and where they found it. Like, to me, that was actually more interesting. And I think the reality is like, they can't afford to, you can't make medieval England.

It's just too many people. So it's easier for it to be sparsely populated. - Yeah. - But let's add this to our list of directions for us not to go with this podcast. Next to, we had from last week, becoming like a hardcore sports talk radio show, but the premise is I know nothing about sports, but I'm very enthusiastic about it.

And like Pat McAfee, where a tank top and stand up and yell, but know nothing about sports. And then two, let's not become a like hardcore fantasy discussion podcast. This is gonna be a lot of like, I don't know. I didn't like it. I didn't read it. I don't know.

Those are on the list. Our list is growing, Josie. Our list of things we should not try to discuss on this show is, is growing, growing with each week. Fantasy book reviews with Cal and Jessie. Like, oh no, seems kind of nerdy. What's next? We out of here in like a crisp five minutes.

Oh man. All right. Well, we have calls, call an episode, looking forward to it. But as always, let's talk about this week's sponsors. And we'll start with Blinkist, longtime friend of the show. You heard me talking about them in Monday's episode, the subscription service in which you can get these 10 to 15 minutes summaries of thousands of the best, most important nonfiction titles that are out there.

If you want to know what this book is about 10 to 15 minutes later, you will have that information. I recommend that people use Blinkist to help learn about ideas and figure out which of many books written on a topic they should read. I like that idea. Jessie, let me put you on the spot here.

You have your computer there. Let's go to Blinkist.com. Let's see what's popular. So what's popular right now. So we can get a sense of what it would be like, what value you could get out of Blinkist. If like me, you're curious about books and curious about the world of ideas.

And so we're doing this unprompted. All right. So if we go to Blinkist.com, what do we, what books are they showing there that are popular? Now this is where Jesse should lie and say, deep work, digital minimalism, a world without email, or in a category at the top called can't miss modern classics, deep work, digital minimalism, a world without email, the Bible.

Those are in their own box, but be under that box, Jesse, what do we got? - Well, I actually just signed up for my Blinkist account last week. So on a different computer. So when I'm going to this one, it's making me sign in. - Oh, it's about you.

- So then I need to get my password. - Well, what's the first blink? What's the first blink you considered? Once you signed up for Blinkist. - I read, what'd I read? I read two of them earlier this week. There were a couple of like philosophy things. What was the name of it?

- Philosophy is a good topic for Blinkist, right? Because it's, let me see what this is before I get into the book. - Yeah. Well, let me ask you this though, for either of those two philosophy books you read blinks on, did either of them then pass the bar of like, I should buy this or were they both like, I know what I need to know from this book and I'm kind of glad I did it.

- The cool thing with that is I have a Scribd account. Do you know what Scribd, you might have. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think Ryan Holiday talked about it. So it's like $10 a month for books. So I just, I went to the Blink and then added to the Scribd.

- That's a good one to punch right there. Yeah, so then you can dive in. All right, so Jesse has invented, I think a really good one to punch there. So now you can really, you can move quickly through a lot of blinks and then Scribd the things that catch your attention.

And then the things that really last after that, you can put it into your library if you really want to get into it. - The other thing, cool thing with the Blinkist is you can listen to the audio. - Yeah, so you can listen or read now, right? - Yeah.

- Yeah, I like the listen option. Yeah, the listen option is great because in my commute, it's about 35 minutes to no problem. Yeah, no, I like to listen. So there you go. So Blinkist, use it to get that information quickly about what some of these books are about.

So you can figure out the lay of the land and decide if you want to read further. The good news is right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com/deep to start a free seven-day trial, they will give you 25% off your Blinkist premium membership.

So 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. Let me talk about one other sponsor. Now, Jesse, this is an absolute true story. And I think you'll recognize when you hear it that it's an absolute true story. Not long ago, I decided, I think I might be missing some nutrients that I might need, some minerals I might need.

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And the staff at GNC ran up and they beat me with crates of Jocko fuel. Beat me with them because they could tell that I did not know my way around that store. They beat me with crates of whatever. And that's when I discovered, this is an absolutely true story, as they drew me out the door to the gutter, I saw going by in the gutter, in the water going towards a drain, there was a travel pack wrapper from Athletic Greens.

So I said, "I gotta find out more about this." Right here, I'm bloodied in there. I gotta find out. And here I am in the gutter bleeding. Take out my phone, let me look up Athletic Greens. Absolute true story. I think everyone will recognize when they hear this, it's absolutely true.

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But after I healed, I picked up my habit of athletic greens every morning. Which actually that part is true. I do take my athletic greens every morning. They convinced me when I talked to them. So that is how I came across athletic greens. But if you wanna make sure you're getting all the right stuff, just do the AG every morning.

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And they figured out the vitamin D can't be in powder form. It needs to be mixed with vitamin K and an olive oil suspension if it's gonna work. So you have to add that. And I add it every morning 'cause it's cold and flu season. And I have three young kids in three different congregate settings every day, which means I get roughly 17 colds a week.

I believe my kids are probably the source of the evolution of COVID because there are so many coronaviruses going back and forth. So I care about this. So I take my vitamin D. So you get your vitamin D and you get five free travel packs. So when you travel, like when I went to Florida, you can bring it pre-portion.

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True story. I've told you that story before, right, Jesse? - I've heard it, yeah. - Yeah, that's why I have the limp. (Jesse laughs) That's why I have the limp. All right, let's do some calls. All right, so what are we starting off with today? - All right, so we got a call.

The first call is basically about the different types of people and how they go about planning. - Hi, Cal. My name is Johan van der Putte. I'm a Belgian psychologist. And I've been thinking that there's probably a continuum. At one end of it, you have people who are skilled at planning or they have become skilled at it.

And then you have people who, a bit like me, aren't so skilled at it. I guess planning involves dividing up life into tasks and then allocating these tasks to pockets of time. I guess it requires some spatial skill. I think I'm not very good at it. It is hard for me to do.

And it makes me sometimes stressed and a bit anxious when I try to do it. You have any suggestions of how people who maybe aren't so talented at it, how they could move in this direction without attempting to become very good planners in the short time? Thank you. - Well, I think it's an important question.

And I am gonna give you what I think of as planning baby steps, like a way to ease yourself into something that looks more like my time management philosophy. And for those who are interested about that, we did a core idea video about my time management philosophy that you can find at the YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia YouTube page.

You can find that core idea video on time management. So I do have some baby steps to help you get into that. But let me just first emphasize that, yes, planning is anxiety producing. And that that shouldn't come across if this happens to you. Should not come across as if there's something wrong.

It's just the reality of planning is that it's anxiety producing. And the reason is, is because you are confronting, you are confronting this typically too large stack of things that you have been committed to doing. You can't easily imagine how they're gonna get done. The planning centers of your brain short circuit when they're faced with this type of overload scenario, that short circuiting causes anxiety.

I'm simplifying this. There's a lot of other things going on, but that's a simplified way of understanding what's happening. So in particular, when you do weekly planning, this is my experience. When I am looking over all of my to-do lists, when I'm looking over my calendar, when I'm looking over my strategic plans and I'm trying to figure out what am I gonna do this week?

I get very anxious. It is a natural reaction. It's similar to having your heart rate increase when you're running on a treadmill. So don't fear that. Don't think that's a problem. That anxiety then fades once you're done planning. When you go day to day and do your daily time block planning if you follow my system, that's much less stressful.

'Cause now your weekly plan has already confronted the productivity dragon. It's already confronted the short circuit inducing overload of tasks and come up with an idea for your week that makes sense. And now you can just look at that idea for your week when you do your daily planning, it should be less stressful.

So let's start with that. It is supposed to cause anxiety. Now, what I'm gonna suggest is for your baby steps is essentially have low granularity plans. Plans that don't get into a lot of detail, but are more structured than just what's next to my inbox. What do I feel like doing next?

So if we're talking about daily planning, I want you to do some time blocking. This is when I'm working. When I'm working, I wanna have some say in advance about what I wanna do with my time. Get you out of the mindset of the list reactive method where you just react to things that come in and occasionally glance at to-do lists.

But to get started with time blocking, make your time blocks very large and quite generic. Here are my meetings. Well, I might as well copy those down into my time block plan. Let me take this big chunk of time here, not get too specific about it, but just say, catch up on email and small tasks.

And let me just find one block in that day I'm gonna say work on something specific. All right, this is where I'm gonna work on that report. And any other time you might just say, whatever, email and small tasks. So like when you're starting off, you're really trying to have maybe one block each day where you specifically say, even though it's not on my calendar, even though no one's forcing me to do it, even though I might wanna do something else, I'm gonna work on a long-term cognitively demanding task during that time.

And the rest is like by default, like let's do, you know, shallows, let's do email, let's do tasks. Then you might get a little bit better. The way you get a little bit better is add in a focused admin blocks. You do this for a couple of weeks. Now you say this block right here, I'm gonna go run those errands.

You know, I have an hour between this meeting and this meeting, so I'm gonna eat lunch and then I'm gonna swing by the drug store and the bank. So now you're getting used to like, let me be a little bit more conscientious about admin, certain times being better for certain tasks.

And then just do that for a while. I have a simple time block plan. There's like one big block in there somewhere for focusing on something deeply. There's one block in there for like a specific type of admin task and everything else is like, whatever, let's react of email, looking at to-do list.

You'll just get used to that after a while. And then you can begin to add more granularity. And I get into a lot of details about this in the front of my time block planner in particular, I actually have a chapter all about, there's like a book chapter at the front of my planner.

That's just all about the mechanics of doing time blocking at a much higher level of detail and getting really good at it. So you can find out about that planner at timeblockplanner.com. And I really get into it, but that's how I would start. And the same thing with your weekly plan, do a weekly plan and feel the anxiety and trust that's gonna go away, but you can make that weekly plan kind of bad at first.

You know, it's like, I'm looking at my calendar, you know, let me just write down a few notes about this week. Like I need to get started this week on this report that's doing two weeks, because next week is busy or something like this. Or Friday is gonna be a good day for catching up on something.

Like just make a couple decisions and maybe have a reminder for some habits. Like don't do anything that complicated, but get in the habit of doing it. And that's the main advice I'm gonna give here is the binary from doing none of this planning to doing some of this planning bad is the key binary.

That's the hard shift. I do a weekly plan. I don't care if it's terrible, I do it. I do a daily time block plan. I don't care if it's pretty terrible. There's only a few meaningful blocks, I do it. That's the shift that matters. Going from that to doing those things well, that'll come later, it's not too hard.

You'll get used to it. You'll feel that impulse. Like after you've done this for a while, like, well, I might as well make this better. That's not a big deal. It's going from zero to one. That's the flip that's gonna matter. And don't mind, again, don't mind that anxiety around weekly plans.

That's just your brain doing what your brain is supposed to do. So let's say, I don't know how much I can talk about it, Jesse, but we are deep in discussions about version 2.0 of my time block planner and what it's gonna be like. I have a lot of upgrades in mind because as I told people, like if you, the time block planner, you're not buying a single thing.

You're buying into a system because, you know, you have to get new ones when it fills up. And like over time, it's gonna keep improving. And probably the longest cycle of improvement is this one we just went through because we printed a bunch up front. So it's like, okay, until we sell, we have to sell the ones we have before we do new ones.

And we've done that. So now we're working on the next one. And as we print them in smaller batches, making tweaks going forward will be cool. So I can't talk about any specifics yet because I gotta tell you, in a global supply chain crisis moment, it's surprisingly hard to design new paper product type things, stuff you wouldn't even think about being potentially scarce, like glue can be.

So it's been a bit of a journey, but I should have announcements to make soon about new and improved time block planners. - Exciting stuff. - Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, definitely. Let's move on. What do we got? - Okay, moving on here. We got a question.

Basically, he has a question about, he thinks your mom might be a computer scientist and she-- - She was a computer programmer. - Okay, so he's got a question about that and types of values she instilled in you. All right. - Hey, Cal, this is Michael from Falls Church, Virginia.

I recently read in one of the magazine articles of yours, I think it was in New Yorker, you said your mother was a computer scientist. So I can imagine she must have instilled some values and habits into you that are different from most mothers your generation growing up. Could you possibly share some of these values and habits that she instilled in you that helped shape who you are today?

Thanks, and I hope to see you at an in-person event or a talk or a bookstore around DC one of these days. - Well, yeah, first of all, to your second point, yes, we should hope to see you in person at some point once Jesse and I get our act together to organize something.

Falls Church is not too far from here, so that would be great. Yeah, so my mom. The article you're talking about was an article I wrote early in the pandemic about remote work. She wasn't a computer scientist, she was a computer programmer, COBOL programmer on series seven IBM mainframes for the Houston Chronicle back when we was born and raised in Texas.

And so, yes, so I talked about in that article the fact that she was one of the first remote workers and they had set up a terminal, but that's important for your question because what it meant was is we had computers, personal computers in our house in the '80s at a relatively early period, because again, as a very early remote worker, she had a personal computer that she could connect into the mainframe and program from home there in Houston.

So we had computers in our house at a very early age. So that had an impact on my interest in computers and eventually in computer science because I could ask her what she's doing and she'd tell me what computer programming was. I knew what computer programming was. We had computers in the house.

So at a pretty early age, I started computer programming. And I got pretty deeply into that and that set up my whole computer science career. Of course, ironically, as soon as I got to MIT in grad school, I said, "I'm done with computer programming. "I want to be a theoretician." And I haven't programmed a computer since, more or less, but that was very useful.

The other influence here, and I'm going to say right now, I'm just focusing on influences relevant to my public professional life. Obviously, there's very important influences on my values and me as a person and character, but I don't want to get into all of that right now. But in terms of things that are publicly visible in my professional life, the other important thing that I got out of my mom is that when we moved, we moved to New Jersey, and I have three siblings, so there's four of us.

And we moved to New Jersey, she stopped working for the Houston Chronicle and was just helping to raise the kids because we were at an age where it's four kids. It's a really hard job. And we generated a lot of chaos. There's a lot of paperwork and things that happen when you move.

And my memory was it was quite overwhelming until one of her friends sold her on a Franklin Planner. It was like the Franklin Planner is a productivity organizational system that was in particular quite popular in the '80s and '90s. And she got very organized, and it made all the difference in the world.

And it went from chaos, like a completely organized household to completely organized childhood in a way that was very impressive and very comforting. So I had been exposed all throughout my childhood to the power of being structured and organized in terms of your calendar, your to-do list, your days, your plan for what should happen.

There's a lot of ideas from that original Franklin Covey system that permeate the time management systems I talk about today. Looking to the week ahead, figuring out in advance when things were gonna happen, full capture of things. You had all the information in place. Avoiding the chaos of what do I wanna do next, and instead having the structure of what's my plan for the day.

A lot of that I saw happening as we were growing up, and it meant a very stable, structured household. Oh, it's this holiday happening, those decorations come out, there's these events we do, everyone gets their, we gotta get clothes for the kids. That was a big thing, because you grow out of your clothes so fast.

And my mom would bring down the catalogs, be like, "Okay, you have to go through "and circle what you want." And there would be the day she called and ordered it. And that, I think I took to heart for sure. And that would lead me to be someone that had productivity and productivity systems instilled in my DNA.

So those are my two things I will say in terms of my mom's influence on my public professional visible lifestyle. Me as a computer scientist, and me as someone that does some productivity guru-ing, that goes back to her. - Yeah, that's a good question. All right, what do we have next?

- Okay, our next question is about weekend planning. - Weekend planning, okay. - Hi, Cal, my name is Lucia, I'm a law student from Spain. Thank you for your writing on your student advice, it has helped me a lot. My question is this, you recommend that people don't time block their weekends because it may lead to burnout.

However, we students often need to work on weekends in order to live up to the study load. How do you recommend that we approach weekend planning? Thank you so much. - For a student, what I would rely on is my autopilot schedule philosophy, which is where you figure out all the work that regularly needs to be done, and you get the days and times in which that work is actually accomplished.

So I always use whatever, Thursday mornings is when I do the problem set that's due on Friday, and I do my lab write up right after my lab on Monday. I have a two hour window where I just stay in the science library right there, and I do the lab write up that's due every week.

And so you just have fixed on your schedule, here's the times when this work gets done, this work I know that always has to happen. So that gives you a realistic vision of how much do I really have to do, and where does it fit? And now if you're already filling that up, autopilot the weekends.

So you might have autopilot things scheduled on the weekends, right? So I don't have to think about it, I'm working on the weekend, but I don't have to think about when or how I do it, this is just what I do on Sunday afternoon, this is what I do on Saturday morning.

So when you're building your autopilot schedule as a student, feel free to just use the weekends as well. And this is different than time blocking, autopilot scheduling is different than time blocking because you just get used to, I always do this work on this point, and that's very different than I'm wrangling a whole day, beat by beat what I'm doing, I have to keep turning my attention from one thing to another, a complicated, intricate schedule where you're locked in until you're done.

Now on the weekend, it's like, look, I do Sunday mornings and Saturday afternoons, I just always do that, I go to the library, I don't have to think about it, it's not gonna burn you out the same way. So you write the note that students often do make use of the weekends, but let your autopilot schedule do a lot of that work.

Now, what about the one-time things, papers and exams, studying for exams, writing papers? For that, what I used to recommend in my books on this, and also my writing on the Study Hacks blog, is that you are going to create a plan for prep and execution for these one-time big things at least a month in advance.

And you figure out what really needs to be done to study for an exam, what is gonna be involved in writing this paper? And you get that work onto your calendar far in advance. And I would even suggest, when I used to talk about this to students, I would say at the beginning of every semester, go through your syllabus for each class, find a major one-time things, find the exams, find the papers, go back one month from each and put a note on your calendar that says, make a plan for this.

So you do that at the beginning of the semester. Now, as you're going through your semester, execute your autopilot schedule, everything's fine, you're not time blocking every minute of your day, you're just executing the schedule that's the same every day, every week. And when you get to this note that says, hey, time to start thinking about the midterm, then you make a plan and you put that work on your calendar like doctor's appointments or other classes.

And now you're back to just them executing. Autopilot schedule, oh, my autopilot schedule, plus today I have a block of time on my calendar, so let me do that. Oh, today I only have it Saturday, I have my Saturday afternoon where I always work on my CS problem set, but you know what?

This Saturday I have a study session in the morning on my calendar because I have a midterm coming up, so let me just do that too. And when you're starting a month out and really spreading this stuff out, what you avoid is this thing is due on Monday, it's Saturday morning, I now have to work all day and all night and all day the next day and all day the next night to try to get something done because you're spreading work out, so you have plenty of breathing time, plenty of time to recharge.

And it does not feel the same. An autopilot schedule augmented with these pre-planned sessions for papers and exams does not feel the same as let's say my situation where I will say, okay, I have eight hours I'm working today and I need to get everything out of those minutes.

Let's go. Because as a student, you do not have that chronic overload issue of people are just piling work on you, you have more on your plate than you could ever imagine actually doing. No, you can actually wrap your arms around your work as a student. You autopilot schedule the regular stuff, you pre-plan the one-time stuff.

If that's too crowded, get an easier schedule, make sure you don't have too many extracurriculars, you can control this. And it's not gonna be nearly as stressful as time-block planning, even if this work is happening on weekdays and weekends. - The good news about that question, that collar we should say, is that she's thinking about this.

That's the biggest issue with college kids in these issues and with student stress in college is that most students that are doing the traditional, I'm 19 doing a four-year residential college, those type of students is they don't wanna hear it. I don't wanna hear study advice. It's gonna make me uncool or something like that.

I'm fine, I can just do it. And it's so needlessly stressful and overwhelming. College, if you do it right, if you keep your schedule reasonable and don't do the 70 extracurricular nonsense and don't do the triple major nonsense and you autopilot schedule and pre-plan your exams and papers you don't have to work at night.

And you rarely have a busy day. It's not that much work. It all changes when you get out there in the real world if you follow and have an ambitious, difficult job. So it doesn't have to be that hard. But the main thing is thinking I'm actually going to be systematic about how I approach my job as a student.

Like that's the zero to one binary for college life that makes all the difference. It did for me. All right, well, let's do a, before we do a final call, I'll talk about a couple other sponsors here real quick. This next ad comes to you from a company that's cooking the best omelets you'll have all year all while changing the world one egg at a time.

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The one thing I'll say, Jesse, that I'm not sure about Just Egg and it worries me because I haven't tested it yet is what if I want to throw this at someone that I am trying to jeer or indicate my displeasure? 'Cause this is one of the key uses of eggs is throwing them at people, right?

You egg people when they're saying something you don't like, you suspect they might be a witch or a sorcerer, or if they are trying to push some sort of unpopular cause. And I gotta say, this is something I think we need to test out. We need to pelt people with Just Egg.

It's not actually a, it's liquid form, so I don't know how it's gonna work. So we're gonna have to figure out how to actually take that product and turn it into something that we can actually pelt at someone. But once we have solved that problem and combine it with the fact that this is a cholesterol-free plant-based egg that tastes great and helps the plant 'cause it's good for you, I think we'll really be onto something.

I think like a disposable sling or something like that. I'm trying to think, because it's liquid, but we could get it into some sort of thing so that you could throw it at someone that you're jeering. - All I can think about is you in the field in Lord of the Rings doing that.

- It would be counterproductive because there's no one else there. It would just be me alone. And eventually, a Brandon Sarensen-type character would come by and cast a wind spell on an elf, and I would pelt them with Just Egg. There we go. So that's what's gonna happen. But no, keep your eyes open for Just Egg.

This has been an important part of my routine. I love throwing it in there 'cause I'm an egg guy. - Hi, Kevin. All right, let's also talk briefly about, oh, New Relic. Yeah, so I'll tell you, if there's a topic that Jesse won't stop bothering me about in just casual conversation, it has to do with getting transparency into debugging for your entire software stack.

It just bothers me about this. He's like, "Cal, I..." No, this is not in Jesse's wheelhouse, but it's in my world as a computer scientist, and I'm around a lot of computer engineers, people who run computer companies, and I can tell you, New Relic is one of these critical products in that world, right?

So if you're running one of these complex software stacks and something breaks, you need to figure out where the issue is. And what a lot of people do is they just start calling people and using ad hoc tools and going onto their cloud interface and seeing what's going on with their processes.

That is a chaotic way to deal with problems. The better solution is New Relic, which combines 16 different monitoring products that you'd normally buy separately that allows engineering teams to see across the entire software stack in this one place. You can pinpoint issues down to the single line of codes.

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I don't know why you want it. So whether you run a cloud native startup or are a Fortune 500 company, it takes just five minutes to set up New Relic in your environment. So the next time, the next issue is what I mean to say. See, I'm thinking about pelting wizards.

This is my problem. Now I have that in my head, pelting wizards with liquid egg. The next issue is just waiting to happen. So you should get New Relic before it does. You can get access to the whole New Relic platform and a hundred gigabytes of data free and forever.

No credit card required. Sign up at newrelic.com/deep. That's N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C.com/deep. Newrelic.com/deep. All right, Jesse, I think we have time for one more call because I'm running late today, but let's get one more call in. Who do we have here? - All right, sounds good. We got a question, a call about living a deep life.

- There we go. - Hi Cal, this is Karan. And I took a break from my 33 jobs to retreat to a cabin in the woods and think about who am I, what is identity and how is it crafted? And I came up with this heuristic that I would love your thoughts on.

And I have a question that I put a lot of thought and research into. First part of this heuristic that I came up with is identity. Who am I and how do I live a deep life? And I go very descriptive into that area. Next is philosophy. Digital minimalism helps back up that identity.

Then we have framework. We use digital minimalism as that framework for living a deep life, but we also have the atomic habits by James Clear. And I use that as part of the framework category. After that, we have behavioral techniques. And this is like where like the nitty gritty, I leave my phone at home and I go for a walk.

I enjoy solitude. And then we have outcomes, which is really important because we gotta know how do these behaviors, what outcomes do they have? I back on how my anxiety goes down. Now I'm reading Brad Stolberg's book on this idea of how I wanted to keep improving and this idea of always trying to optimize everything.

And this is where my question comes in. 'Cause the last part of my heuristic is feedback. I wanna make sure I do better at living the deep life. But this compound 1% interest that you and James talk about and that this idea that Brad talks about, it can be like, how do I, if I keep trying to optimize living a deep life, how do I get rid of this background of anxiety?

- Well, Karan, I appreciate the thought you put into this. And let me just preface my response by saying just the fact that you were putting this much intentional thought into how you want to structure your life is 80% of the battle. Most people don't do that. Most people go from one distraction or moment of chemical pleasure to another and hope to string along enough of those to get later on in life.

It's not the way to do it. You need a plan, you need to be intentional. The second thing I'm gonna preface it is these type of plans evolve over time and that's great. The goal is not to figure out the one true plan that's absolutely optimal and then you have it all figured out, then you execute it.

You don't want paralysis by analysis here. You come up with something, you live with it, check in twice a year, check in at your birthday to make changes. So you wanna make sure that you're spending a lot of time living life and not just thinking about how you're gonna live life.

So those are some prefaces. All right, now let me start with your last point about beating back the background anxiety so that you can live a deep life. These are unrelated. Anxiety will do what anxiety does. You will feel anxiety sometimes, other times you won't. There will be periods where it's heavier, there'll be periods where it is not heavier.

Your goal is not to make that go away. Your goal is to live a deep life even though you live in a world in which you sometimes feel the physical symptoms of anxiety. Constriction of the chest, a little bit difficulty of breathing. There's very specific physical symptoms. That comes and goes.

Great, what's next? How do I still build a deep life? So I don't want you to think about banishing that which you cannot fully control from your life as a precondition for it being good, for it being enjoyable. And I'm gonna recommend the book here. So there are, I don't know how much you know about modern psychotherapy, but there's, roughly speaking, people think about there being three waves of modern psychotherapy.

You have the first wave where you have talk therapy, which sort of came originally out of Freudian modalities. Let's talk things through and try to understand the source of issues. Largely, this was non-evidence-based therapy modalities. Then the second wave really is like cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was one of the first major approaches to issues like anxiety in which they were using studies and evidence and saying this type of thing worked.

In the core book, the canonical public-facing book in second wave psychotherapy is "Feeling Good." And I believe this came out, so the '70s or '80s, and it introduced cognitive behavioral therapy to a larger group. Third wave psychotherapies is built more around what is sometimes called acceptance commitment therapy or ACT, A-C-T.

There's some other things in there, but it pulls more from some Eastern philosophies as well. This is where I want to turn your attention, and I want to turn your attention to a book that popularizes ACT, and that is the book, I believe it is called "The Happiness Trap." Actually, Jesse, can you look that up and tell me what the author's name is?

I want to make sure I got that name right. But it's a book that introduces acceptance commitment therapy to a broader audience. And this is a evidence-based methodology. It's something that's studied pretty well, and I like it a lot. I think it's what I want to preach to you right now.

Because at the core, I can tell you what's at the core of acceptance, if you'll excuse this digression into psychotherapy, but at the core of this is this notion that, oh, we have a name here? Yeah, Russ Harris, that's right. And it is "The Happiness Trap," Jesse, did I get that right?

- Yep. - That's right. So at the core of acceptance commitment therapy is they look back at cognitive behavioral therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy directly addresses ruminations. Ruminations, these insistent, hard-to-control conversations you have with yourself in your head are at the core of both major anxiety and depressive disorders.

Because if you're obsessively worried about, so you have these talks, these conversations in your head about bad things that could happen, it's anxiety. And if you have these hard-to-control, consistent voices, conversations in your head about what you've done that's bad and why you suck, that's the foundation for depression.

So it's the same thing as the voices. And cognitive behavioral therapy, again, if you'll excuse the lecture here, focused on directly confronting ruminations. And so you would say, wait a second, this is the thing I keep talking about. Let me actually point out the ways in which that thinking is distorted, because often in anxiety and in depression is very distorted thinking.

There's names for the distortion. This is black and white thinking. This is predicting the future. And you call it out and you push back at it and say, this is the problem with this rumination. And over time, that can actually diminish the power of that rumination to keep cycling faster and faster.

And this can be quite effective for a lot of things. In fact, I use this quite successfully. If you want a personal story, when I was first having bad insomnia problems early in grad school, and there's a whole backstory to that, but basically there's very little I get anxious about in my life, even as I do pretty ambitious, big things that should be scary.

And my theory has always been, all these things I'm doing that should be really anxious, anxiety producing, all that anxiety just got funneled into this random weird thing, which was I got very anxious about sleep and I felt physical anxiety every single day. I was sleeping, but the anxiety about not sleeping was every single day.

And I read "Feeling Good." I read the book about cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was a case where that worked really well because the ruminations that were creating this anxiety about not sleeping were disordered. They were clearly exaggerating. And I could call out the distortions. And I had a system where I said twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, I'm gonna address these thoughts and point out the distortions, but not in between.

And in between, my mind's like, let's think about sleep and why we're worried. I would say, I thought about this, went through it in the morning and wasn't that impressed and I'll do it again in the evening. So just wait till then, and then we'll get back to it in the evening.

And that actually worked. And the day-to-day anxiety, and for this particular anxiety, it took a long time, but it went away, it was very effective. ACT came along and said, there are certain things for which that doesn't work. Right, because what if the thing that you're anxious about, what if the story there is accurate?

What if it's not distorted? And the key thing that really, the key thing that led to the divergence of ACT, my understanding of ACT from cognitive behavioral therapy, were panic attacks. So even with panic attacks, you get a rising sense of panic leads to a place where you kind of tip over an edge and have your heart goes, it feels like a heart attack, you can become faint.

And it could be like a really just disturbing public thing. And what the ACT people pointed out was, that's not a, if you're anxious about that happening, you're gonna go on stage, you're anxious about that happening, it's not a distorted thought. Like it really could happen. And maybe this has been happening to you quite a bit.

So you can't look at yourself and convince yourself, oh, it's just distorted, of course you're not gonna have a panic attack. It's like, I just had three, I very well could. So cognitive behavioral therapy didn't work as well for panic attacks. And so acceptance commitment therapy was about, okay, you're not trying to challenge the thought, you make space for the thought, but instead of getting into it, like let's really get into it, you say, despite that, I'm gonna go commit to doing something that's value driven.

Because what matters is living true to your values. And like, that's ultimately what matters, I'm gonna commit to do that, even though something bad could happen. And ACT is all about, and you'll read this in "The Happiness Trap", you're able to separate from the feeling of anxiety. It's there, it's the Eastern part of it.

But it's just a sensation. It's just physical. Great, I'm feeling that. It's like my knee hurts. Great, what's next? And you learn to separate from the part of your mind that wants to tell the stories. We gotta think about this, but what if there's a panic attack? And what if this happens?

And what if you, this or that happens, right? And you say, I see that story there, and I'm not mad at that part of my mind, and it's like a character and I give it a name, and maybe this is the patron of panic attacks. And I'm not mad at that person, that character in my mind, but I'm not gonna get into it with them.

What I'm gonna do is this thing right here, because it's important to me, and I wanna live true to my values, regardless of what happens. And so you go do it anyways. And so when they would deal with people with severe anxiety, they'd say, you go to the party anyways, and you give the talk anyways, and you do whatever.

And I like that. And I would say this is a very long way around to saying the deep life is about living in a value-driven way, despite everything else that happens. Not about creating a life that these specific good things happen, and there is no bad. That's called the fantasy life.

That's not a life that you're gonna achieve. No one achieves that life. We all have our issues. I had to deal with the anxiety with the sleep thing. I don't have, I have not classic panic attacks, but I've gone through, I have weird stuff happens to me. I have whatever, automatic, autonomic, nervous system panic attack style reactions.

I've had this all the time. Faint. I'll have a severe, I'll get lightheaded, and my whole body will break out in sweat. Look, man, I've been through all this stuff. And you wanna talk about high stakes, how about, okay, you're about to go on air on this network, or you're on stage in front of a huge number of people, or you're here sitting next to the dean.

And so I've gone, so we all have this stuff we go through. And because the point is, our goal is not to avoid bad things from happening, avoid bad sensations, and have only good things happen to us. The goal is to live deeply, to live true to your values, despite it, it's the ACT mindset.

It's the mindset that Russ Harris talks about in "The Happiness Trap." So that's the piece I really, Karan, wanted the focus on here, is focus on what you can control in building this good life. The stuff you can't control will come and go. It'll do what it does. Whatever, and you can't, a lot of that you can't control.

Be happy when it's, hey, I'm not feeling this thing I don't like, great, I'm happy. But when it's there, don't be devastated. Be like, crap, but I'm still doing this thing I really find important. So I think that's good. Now, onto your framework. I mean, look, I nerd out on this stuff all the time.

So yes, I like what you're doing here. You're building out a system of different layers. You're thinking things through. I think of what you're doing as called a personal operating system that has these different stack layers that meet together. My only word of warning would be, make sure that the fiddling of the knobs doesn't take over the actual living.

In the end, you actually, life is hard and complicated, and some days you're anxious, and some days you get sick, and you're out of commission for two weeks, and you can't follow your system. And you wanna make sure that in the end, you're present and have gratitude, and are doing interesting things and enjoying good moments, and that you're not spending all your time thinking about your system.

But I'm glad you're thinking about it. I like your heuristics. Try 'em. If they don't work, change 'em. Feel free to simplify them if you feel stressed by just the complexity of your system. I think that's all fine. But let's go back to this original point, is the goal of the deep life here is not to avoid the bad.

It is to live good, even when the inevitable bad comes and goes. All right, Cron, well, talking about going, I am running late, so we should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their listener calls. If you like what you heard, you will like what you read in my email newsletter.

Sign up at calnewport.com. You'll also like what you see on the YouTube channel, youtube.com/calnewportmedia. We have videos of these full episodes, as well as individual videos for each individual question and segment we cover. I'll be back next week, and until then, as always, stay deep. (upbeat music)