A common issue for those trying to cultivate a deeper life in our current world of constant distraction is that of procrastination. You have a big idea, something that can make a major change to your working life or your life outside of work. Maybe it's a side hustle that could become something bigger.

Maybe it's a new serious commitment to fitness. Maybe it's a major change of location where you actually live or a hard skill that if mastered would give you a lot of leverage in your job. You're inspired, you're excited, but you're having a hard time getting going. You find yourself putting it off or having a lot of false starts and it fizzles.

I want to talk about procrastination today because it's important, especially for those interested in the deep life. In particular, I want to talk about a new way of thinking about procrastination that I think makes it potentially easier to figure out what it is holding you back and will offer some new ideas about how to fix things.

So to start with, here is a realization I had recently in my own thoughts about procrastination. It's not a singular phenomenon. There are different types of procrastination, which have different causes and different solutions. So if you mix up the solutions for the wrong type of procrastination, it might not actually help the issue that you're facing right now.

I want to focus in particular on two major types of procrastination. We'll go through the first one, I think is what we more commonly think about with procrastination. And then the second one is going to be this new one that I realized more recently is a big deal and it's going to have unique solutions.

So let's start with the more common type of procrastination. For our purposes, let's call this tactical procrastination. This is where most of the advice you hear about procrastination is actually aimed. Tactical procrastination is the result of not sufficiently having your act together. If you do not sufficiently have your act together, it can be difficult to get going or make progress on a hard project.

Now let's be a little bit more specific here. What are the specific causes? What are the specific types of not having your act together that can cause tactical procrastination? One, potentially your brain does not trust your plan. You haven't really thought this through. Your brain says you don't know what you're doing.

And as we've talked about multiple times on the show before, if your brain doesn't trust your plan, it's not going to give you motivation to take action. Another cause of practical procrastination could be that your brain is so bathed in distraction that you can no longer summon the ability to overcome even the most modest chemical obstacles to activity.

Now, if you're wondering what I mean when I say chemical obstacles to activity, you should listen to last week's episode on discipline. But if you are constantly looking at this phone, you're constantly looking at your computer, you're so used to just bathing yourselves in dopamine, your mind is like, "What are you talking about?" Just any optional effort you show me is going to be much less exciting than just looking at distraction.

The final source of tactical procrastination is just you're too disorganized. You're in reactive mode. You have too much stuff going on. You don't have control of your obligations. You don't have control of your time. And because of this, you just can't find the time to make regular progress on the particular problem.

All right. Tactical procrastination has obvious solutions. They're not easy to implement, but you have obvious solutions. If your brain doesn't trust your plan, learn more about it. You need to learn more about what it is you're trying to do. And in doing so, you have to face the hard truths about how the particular world in which you're trying to act.

You have to face the hard truth about how it actually works. The example I give so often on the show is people who want to rewrite how the publishing industry works instead of actually learning how you actually publish a book. They want their plan they came up with to somehow give an end run around how the industry actually works.

Don't do an end round around how things actually work. Figure out how it works. OK. If you're too distracted to make progress, you need to break your dopamine addiction. We talk about this all the time on the show. Go back a couple episodes and you'll hear more about that.

You probably have to stop using social media. It is not necessary. You're not an influencer that people really care about. It is not the core at what's making your business run. It is you clocking into the invisible factory so that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Byte Dance can add another zero to their net worth.

You have to simplify your phone. You have to rewire your phone, which means you plug it in when you're at home. You don't keep it with you. You have to practice spending time alone. We talk about this stuff on the show. That will solve that problem. Finally, if you're just too disorganized to find the time to get going, you've got to get organized.

Go back and listen to my episode called "Productivity Basics" from a few weeks ago. You need to do full capture. You need to do multiscale planning. You need to have autopilot scheduling. You just need to be on the ball with what's going on in your life and your time.

These are solvable problems. Tactical procrastination has solvable problems. There's another type of procrastination that I think we talk about less often. This was sort of my recent insight. I call this strategic procrastination. I'm calling it strategic procrastination because we are at another level of scale here. Let's say you're in control.

You're organized. You understand the field in which you're trying to act. You're not addicted to your phone. The issues of tactical procrastination just aren't there, and yet you're still reluctant to make progress. The solution when it comes to strategic procrastination is a little bit unexpected. Consider giving up. Now, let me be a little bit more specific about this.

There's two things I could mean by this. One, give up on the idea that you're procrastinating on, or two, give up on something else major so that you have room for the new project that you're going to execute. This advice is coming from an underlying truth, which I think we often try to avoid, especially those of us who actually go through the hard work of getting our act together.

Major initiatives to be executed sustainably require a lot of time. They require a lot of time within your week to make progress, and they require a lot of weeks so that that progress can add up into something significant. We can't avoid this reality. If your schedule is reasonably full, you might not just be able to add the new thing.

You just might not have time for it. In this case, you can either say, "You know what? This was an inspiring idea, but I have these other things I've been working on for a while, and I want to keep working on them," or you say, "We got to change something to make room for this.

I'm not going to squeeze it in." Major initiatives are not very susceptible to being squeezed in. They require time, they require flexibility. We talked about this actually in last week's in-depth episode with Oliver Berkman. I think Oliver's pretty good, or I would say really good actually, at emphasizing what he calls finitude, finititude.

You're finite. Your time is finite. There's only so much you can do. The earlier you embrace that, the better, and this is exactly an instantiation of that principle. There's only so many major projects you can do. How do you know if you have enough time? Well, I say, "Look, if you have a major new thing you want to work on, add it to your weekly template." This is when each week when I work on this, this time is set aside, it's protected, and I've set aside more than enough time for this.

It has buffer in it, right? It's not like I have to fill every minute of these small little gaps. I got good chunks of time set aside. If you can do that, you can make progress on something. If you're having a hard time fitting that into your weekly template, then you don't have time.

So you have to remove something else or you do have time or you have to move on. So giving up is actually a key strategy when it comes to strategic procrastination. Now, I have three advanced points to make about this idea. One, in general, when in doubt, even if you're feeling inspired about a new initiative, when in doubt, it's usually better to polish or improve efforts on existing initiatives than to add a new one, especially when you're feeling antsy, maybe a little bored.

Maybe you've been hit with a rush of inspiration that you want to act on. It's tempting to add something new. And what I want to argue is, it's often better to say, "Let me go back to this thing I've already been working on. I've been becoming a better writer, I'm becoming a better coder, I've been trying to get in better shape.

Let me improve the thing that I already have regular time set aside for. Let me get more out of that time than trying to fit something else in." My second point is, the quest to find time for a major initiative can actually be useful as a way of cleaning up some of the clutter in your schedule.

So you get committed to this new initiative, you're trying to find time for it to sidestep strategic procrastination, and you might find, "Oh, the issue is I have all these little small commitments I've made. I'm working on this thing, which I don't really care about anymore, but it's eating up a lot of my day, and I have these calls, and I'm taking this online course kind of half-heartedly, and look at all these days that it's taken up this time I could have." And it's a good forcing function for you to realize, "Oh, if I canceled this and got rid of this and cleaned up some of these smaller things, I could fit in something else major." So this process of finding time can actually be useful.

Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. 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. Third point, sometimes it's helpful to work on something seasonally. All right, I am going to temporarily stop working on this thing and give three months to this new initiative.

That's how I'm going to clear up time to give it more than enough time, to give it some breathing room, to give it the attention it deserves, to see if it gets legs, to see if it unfolds, to see if it's something worth adding to my life. So like you're podcasting, and you go on a summer hiatus to work on another side hustle project, like a newsletter, you're not sure if you want to do this or not, give yourself more than enough time to do it by putting something temporarily on hold.

And then if that new thing goes really well, then you can make some decisions. Oh, I want to permanently add this, I'm going to have to take something else out, I'm going to have to change something about my schedule. So temporarily clearing the decks can sometimes be a good approach as well.

All right? So when it comes to procrastination, again, just to summarize, we think a lot about tactical procrastination, which is like, get your act together, so you can make more progress. But sometimes that procrastination is strategic. And the real problem is, you don't have enough time. It's not your systems, it's not your organization, it's not your willpower.

It's a reality that you're finite, and there's only so much you can do. There you go, Jesse, strategic procrastination. I deal with that a lot. I was going to say, did you have a bout with it recently? Yeah. I mean, I deal with this all the time, really, because I have my act together, and there's lots of tempting big projects for me.

But I don't really have time for anything new. And I often do put things on hold. It's like going on book leave, the work on a book, you put something else aside, or this podcast took a long time to get added to my schedule because I had to find a way to find a regular time for it.

And I didn't have it until a few years ago, and then I did. So yeah, strategic procrastination, I didn't have a name for it, but it's a big part about how I think about accomplishments. All right, anyways, we've got some good questions coming up on all sorts of topics.

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Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today, shopify.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's get to some questions. Who do we got first? First question is from Mrs. Exhausted. I've been a pre-K and first grade teacher for six years in an elementary public school. I love the students and I have amazing coworkers, but my district has been horrible with annual changes.

Should I switch counties to teach fifth grade with only one subject? Well, I'm going to use this as an example to talk about two general keys to keep in mind when considering a job change. The first key, and this comes from my book So Good They Can't Ignore You, is to be careful when making a change that you're not throwing out hard-won career capital.

So career capital is my term for rare and valuable skills. It is your main leverage for controlling the day-to-day reality of your job. It's your main leverage for making your job sustainable and fulfilling. An often-made mistake is to chase the content of the job and leave your career capital behind, and it's a mistake because career capital makes much more difference than the content of your job.

So if you were leaving teaching to go work at ESPN because you love sports, that would be probably a mistake because you're getting rid of all the career capital you had built up for teaching just to go after a job whose title or content is more appealing to you, but you'll soon realize the main thing that matters is not what your job is, but what you can do with your career capital.

You don't have this problem in the scenario we're discussing. You're moving from teaching to teaching, so that would take your career capital with you. The second thing to keep in mind when thinking about changing your job is to make sure that if you're unhappy with something about your current employer, you're not making a move to sort of protest or express your anger at the current employer.

They don't care. They won't notice. Your new employer will have other things that annoy you. The main reason to make a move from one place to another within the same industry is that the job-related lifestyle factors are better. So if you're doing lifestyle-centric planning, you have a vision of a life well lived, the elements of what you want in your life.

You have this clear vision, including sort of like the feel and rhythms of your job. If the new job is moving you notably closer towards this vision, that's a good reason to change. If you're just annoyed with the way that your current job is handling some things, that's much less of a good reason to change, right?

Because here's the thing. Let's say, for example, you're annoyed with how your current district is handling annual changes. You go to this other district to teach fifth grade. They'll do something else that annoys you, and you certainly never want to make a change to try to make a point because, again, no one cares.

In your mind, you imagine when you change districts because you don't like the way they handle annual changes, that there's like some war room somewhere in the school administration building where they're like, oh, no. We just had a teacher leave for the fifth grade. Why did they do it?

She didn't like the annual changes, and they're like, ah, she was right. What have we done? What have we done? They're rending their clothes, and like, we knew it. We knew this was bad. She really showed us, and there's someone just hitting the table. Why? Why? No one notices.

So don't make a change to spite someone. Don't make a change to make a point. Don't make a change because you're annoyed because you will be annoyed in almost every job, especially if you have a job in the public sector like public school teaching. Public sector bureaucracies are going to annoy you.

Spoiler alert. So if you're going to change, bring your career capital and make sure that you're changing because the lifestyle implications are positive. Now, that could be the case for you right here. It sounds like it might be, so that would be a good reason to change if you're clear that this new position would get you closer to your ideal lifestyle.

But those two points, I think, apply to any potential job change. All right. Who do we got next? Next question's from Kevin. Coding can be used to automate a lot of tasks if you properly set up on the front end. Do you use coding to automate tasks, or are there tasks that you recommend trying to make time to automate with scripts?

Here's the thing about automating personal shallow work, as opposed to what most of these tools were created for, which is like automating processes that an organization or a team does. To me, it's a hobby. If you're a coder, it could be fun. If you like it, like, "This is cool.

I got Zapier to connect to this API over here, and it does this automatically," it could be fun. If you're into it, go for it. It's not going to make your working life significantly better, and it's far from a necessity for people in general to do. This is just an extension, I think, of the productivity prong movement, which arose in the early 2000s, which has always sold this promise that with the right technology and the right technological skills, work can become significantly easier.

If you just deploy the right tool in the right way, work will become significantly easier just from a subjective experience. This was the big push, for example, in the early 2000s in the Merlin Man 43 Folders community. People thought, "Look, if we take David Allen's getting-thing-done methodology and we connect this with Mac-based computer tools, we can basically have the computer take over most of the hard stuff of work, and we'll just be cranking widgets, and work will get easy." And it didn't, because work is hard, and you can't automate in the end having to actually do the thing, figure out what email to write, do the reading, producing the new code, producing the words that need to come into the strategy memo.

That's the hard stuff that's going to be hard. The context switching is going to be hard. You can't automate that away. Most of what you do automate is actually not big of a footprint. It's not the problem. The problem is not, "How do I get these proposed dates from this email and onto my calendar?" It doesn't take long.

You open up a calendar over here, and you put the dates in, right? The hard thing is I have to think about which of these dates works when I was just working on something else, and now my mind is context shifted over. You can't automate your way out of work being hard.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with it. I think it's cool. If you're kind of like a geek or a programmer like me, yeah, have at it, but if you're not, don't worry about it. This is not somehow necessary for making your work much better. All right, who we got next?

All right, next question is from Tanner. "When reading for pleasure, I have no problem, but when it comes to reading with the goal of retaining information for a project, I struggle. Specifically, I have several biographies, classic texts, and self-help books I just can't seem to get through, sometimes only reading 15 pages in an hour." Some of this is just practice, right?

I think you're jumping ahead into books that you're not that interested in, and you're not that used to reading, and your mind is like, "What are we up to here?" That's not a big deal. Here's what you do. In these genres where you are struggling, put in the work to find books in those genres that you are super psyched about and love, all right?

Instead of, let's say you're not used to biography, don't jump straight into saying, "I'm going to read all four extant volumes of Robert Carroll's Lyndon B. Johnson biography," right? But find a shorter biography of someone who's really interesting to you and is really motivating. Maybe what you read instead is something maybe even more memoir-like.

Let's read Rich Roll's Finding Ultra, something where it's getting into someone's life, and they're doing something inspirational or whatever it is, but find something you love in self-help. That's its own genre. Find a self-help book that's like, "Put it in my veins. This is exactly what I'm interested in.

This exactly talks to what I care about." You're going to zip through that book really quick. As you get used to those genres, then you can kind of wander a little bit farther from the things that you absolutely love, and you get more used to reading other types of things.

I think that's fine. You can also experiment with audio. Some people really like listening to biographies on audio. Maybe you want to try that as well, and you'll get more used to it. A related point here, part of your problem might be dopamine addiction. The problem might be, in addition to you not being used to these type of books, is that your mind is used to looking at your phone.

Every hint of boredom, I get a quick hit of algorithmically optimized distraction. If that's the case, you need to work on that as well, because your brain could basically be saying, "This is boring." If you're only getting through 15 pages in an hour, your brain keeps disengaging from what you're doing, probably because it's seeking dopamine, and probably you're feeding it.

Probably you're getting 25 checks of your phone in that hour where you're only reading 15 pages. There might be a deeper problem here where you need to reduce the noise in your life, and that's probably going to mean stepping away from social media. My apologies again to Musk, Zuckerberg, and ByteDance, but you probably have to step away from social media.

You probably have to what I call rewiring your phone, which is plug your phone in when you're at home and keep it in that one location. It's not with you as a default. When you're reading, your phone's not there. If you need to look something up, you have to go where your phone is plugged in and look it up and then go back to where you're reading.

You've got to rewire your phone and spend more time alone, outside, walking, just with your own thoughts. As you reduce a dopamine addiction, you'll also probably have an easier time keeping your mind focused on the abstract for longer periods of time. The final thing, if you really want to try to train this here, if you really think it's an attention issue, do interval training.

Don't sit down for an hour and have your mind start wandering, you only get through 15 pages. Instead, say, "I'm going to sit down with this hard book for 10 minutes and I'm going to read the hell out of it for 10 minutes." As soon as my mind wanders, like, "No, back.

Let's just do this. Let's move and focus and concentrate. It's just for 10 minutes. I can do that." After you get comfortable with that, which may take a few weeks, you make it 15, then you make it 20. You can also directly interval train the specific focus that is induced when you're reading a book.

Again, your brain will get more used to this. All of this, I'm just giving you all these different ideas to help prepare and train your brain for reading these books. It's all casting reading books like you would cast shooting free throws or playing the guitar. It's not at all surprising, it means very little to me that you say, "Look, I just started trying to shoot the basketball and I'm not really making very many free throws or I just picked up a guitar and it sounds pretty terrible." I say, "Yeah, of course.

You got to train. You got to get your fingers stronger. You got to find the muscle memory for the shot. You're going to have to throw 1,000 free throws before it starts coming easier. You're going to have to—it's going to take a lot of times trying to play that D chord before your fingers are able to hit it cleanly, but you will get better, of course.

It's not impossible, but it's not trivial." That's what I'm trying to point out here is you can get better at this, and that's kind of the big point here. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from W. "My company operates using the hyperactive high mind approach.

I've implemented all your tactics and I was promoted last spring, but I'm unfulfilled. Should I return and finish my PhD to pursue academic work or lean more into my hobbies?" All right. Well, this is a—you got the special question here because the answer here is going to deal with lifestyle centric planning, perhaps not surprisingly, but I want to use this excuse to show off for those who are watching instead of just listening the latest piece of Deep Questions podcast sartorial gear.

We've got new hats. I'm going to put mine on here. Hold on one second. These are our new and improved Deep Questions hats. So for those who are listening instead of watching, this is my VBLCCP hat now based on our feedback. Our man, Zachary Davey, who made these hats for us, has given me a smaller—I had them resized and put in the corner like a surfer hat—VBLCCP values-based lifestyle centric career planning.

This is an awesome looking hat. Jesse is showing off a Deep Life hat. Looking good. So I figured I'd put on my VBLCCP hat if we're going to give an answer about VBLCCP. I do want to shout out Zachary Davey at CompanyOutfitters.net. That's who did these hats for us, so hit him up.

He's got this company called Say It With Stitches. So go to CompanyOutfitters.net if you want to get your cool gear. All right. So with the hat on, Jesse, I am ready to go all lifestyle-centric planning. The hat messes with my earphones. It's interesting. It all sounds weird. All right.

So W, I'm going to harness the power of the hat and give you an answer here about lifestyle-centric planning. Before you run out the door and sign up for a PhD program, let's get more strategic. You need a broad vision for your ideal lifestyle. This broad vision should be based on your values.

There's the V in VBLCCP, and it should cover all aspects of your life. What does a typical day look like? What's the rhythm of your day? What does it look like around where you are? How does your work fit into this day? What is the feel of what your work is doing?

Are you stepping out of a rural home, the walk to a pond in the woods where you're going to be writing in a notebook with a coffee, or is it you're heading to like a galley loft in the city where there's all sorts of high-energy creative work going on?

Is it a vision that's really centered around taking your kids to school and being there to pick them up on the way back and being plugged into your town life? Is it being a master of a universe type that's moving numbers and making bank? You got to get this vision.

Don't be specific about, "I live in this town. I have this job." Get the vision that resonates, this vision of your ideal lifestyle. Working backwards from that vision is the whole ballgame. That's how we figure out what you should do for your job. And when you have this vision of the different aspects of your life and what it feels like, and you start thinking through all of the many different options you have to get closer there, a lot of options will come up for your job.

It might turn out that, "Wait a second. My job is a fantastic engine for moving towards this vision. It's contained. Maybe it's hyperactive, but I can change that a little bit or it's okay because it's just 9 to 5 and I like where we live and it opens up these other opportunities." Or maybe you realize, "Oh, this job is almost right, but the hyperactive hive mind element is making it really draining work.

Why don't I use my career capital to switch over to this lateral move within the organization? It's not going to make me more money. In fact, maybe I'm going to lose a little money, but it's going to be more autonomous and the hyperactive hive mind aspect goes away, but otherwise we can still live here and the income and it allows me to work remote and my vision works out." Or maybe when you do this exercise, you realize like, "Oh, I got to get out of this job altogether.

We got to move to a different part of the country. I need a completely different structure of work." All of these decisions become clear when you're working backwards from an ideal vision, a vision of the ideal lifestyle. What you don't want to do is be reactive to feelings in the moment.

All right, so if you say, "Look, I don't know. I'm unhappy. I think I feel unfulfilled." That leads to grand goals and this myth that a grand goal can solve everything. So if I just quit and get a PhD, this will solve everything. If I just like switch to a different job, maybe that'll solve everything.

Pursuing a singular grand goal rarely is going to fix all the issues because your vision of the ideal life has all these different attributes. When you focus on just one thing, you're not only just ignoring a lot of those attributes, you might actually be making them worse. Now, people don't like this.

Grand goals are fun because they're inspirational and we want to ride the inspiration like you ride a drug. So it's romantic. I'll get my PhD. You don't want to think anything more about it, but follow through the storyline. Pull this thread a little farther. Where does it go? Does it lead to?

What's the lifestyle this leads to? What is it? You're going to be teaching somewhere? Well, it's not going to be probably a great teaching job if later in life, you're going back to a PhD, right? I mean, the tenure track types of romantic professor jobs like I have typically require that you're a hot shot out of college and go to a number one program like I did and really bust it for six or seven years and become a real force in your field and publish all these papers or whatever.

So you might just end up doing adjunct teaching and that's going to be frustrating maybe at this stage of life and not have the income you need. Like you got to pull these threads and the best way to avoid again falling into this trap is to work backwards from the ideal vision of a life well lived and not forwards towards a singular grand goal.

The other advantage of doing values based lifestyle centric career planning or as I typically in my book, Jesse, I'm just calling it lifestyle centric planning. It's a bit of a mouthful. I love it on the hat, which I am going to wear because this is how I'm going to find my tribe.

Probably so many people will know this, though I am kind of simplifying it. The key to this is it gives you a sense of autonomy and improvement in your life right away and it might turn out as you work on all these other aspects of your life that you're fine.

That like actually your unhappiness was not coming from the email frequency of your job, but there's all these other things that matter to you that were not being expressed. But your connection to community, maybe nature, maybe a sense of your mind and being able to be engaged in interesting ideas or a sense of productivity.

Maybe your job is very abstract and you have no sense of making my intentions made manifest concretely in the world and you feel unmoored. Maybe it's just something about the neighborhood you live in and the rhythms of it and moving a mile away could change all of that. It might turn out that your lack of fulfillment has nothing to do with your job.

Again, you can't figure this out until you figure out what it is I actually want. So you need to do some lifestyle centric planning. All right. Now that we have these hats on, Jesse, I think every question I have to bring back to this. I feel like in a way it's kind of like golf in terms of because he alluded to the fact that he does lifestyle centric planning.

But even with golf, you figure one thing out and it's like, oh, well, but maybe this part of this wing isn't going to do something. Yeah. I mean, I would like to talk to him about what planning he's doing because when I hear someone say maybe I should go get my PhD, I know they're not doing lifestyle centric planning right.

Right. I mean, unless it's, again, someone who is on the hotshot academic track. That is the epitome of I don't know what to do and maybe this will fix me. And it almost never does. I mean, look, I say my my rules for grad school, I say all the time, let me repeat them one more time.

Do not get a graduate degree unless there is a specific position that you want. You have good reasons for wanting it. And you have concrete evidence that the specific degree you are going to get at the specific place where you're going to get the degree will make that position available.

And if you don't, it's not right. You have to have here is the concrete thing I want to do and why. And I have evidence that if I get this degree from here, I can I could probably do this and I can't without. Sometimes this is obvious. Like I wanted to be a professor when I was at the end of my undergrad degree, I was trying to figure out what I want to do.

And I said, you know what? I think I want to be a professor if possible. I want to make a run at that because I think the autonomy, the intellectual engagement, the focus on results, not pseudo productivity. That's what I really wanted. That met me well. You'd have to have a Ph.D.

to do that. So it made plenty of sense for me to go to graduate school. And I had the hard evidence. Right. I mean, I talked to my professors at Dartmouth, like, what does it take to become a professor at a place like this? And they're very clear about it.

Like, yeah, look, you've got to go to you're not at like a top five graduate program and killing it. It's probably not going to work. They get we get 300 applications, you know, newly minted doctorates for every position. You got to be going to a top place. Right. It's like, OK, I got into MIT so I can go to a top place.

And here's what it will take. Here's what you have to do. And I was like, OK, so I know what I have to do when I get there. Like, I have the plan. I might not succeed. It's very hard, but at least it was possible. That makes sense. Here in D.C., both in the government and in companies that work with the government, there are often just formal requirements.

You have to have a master's degree in one of these subjects. We don't really care where it's from, but you have to have a master's degree in order to get X, this position or this contract. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You're like, OK, in my career, I want to go from here to there.

I need to get one of these degrees. And I know getting these degrees necessary. And I know if I get this degree, it'll make it possible. Yeah, of course, I'm going to go do that. That makes a lot of sense. If you're in banking or consulting, to get to a certain level, you have to get an MBA.

That's just how it works. So that makes a lot of sense. This is why I'm going to get my master's degree, because I want to be managing director at Salomon Brothers or whatever, and I've been there for four years, and this is like the thing you have to do.

That makes sense. But if you're bored and unfulfilled and say, I don't know, I kind of like college, you know, my frat was fun. Let's go get a PhD. That's not the right reason to do it. All right. We should get a hat. Here's my new thing, and I think this would be great for YouTube.

We should have a hat for every single topic we deal with and just constantly switch them. That way you're never-- there's no mystery around what we're talking about, just everything we put on, put another hat. All right. What do we got here? Do we have a slow productivity corner?

We do. All right. Let's hear that theme music. All right. Each week we like to identify one question that is specifically relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you haven't bought that book, buy it now. It is the cheat sheet for at least half of what we talk about here on the show.

All right. What's today's slow productivity corner question? Questions from Yuri. I'm a director of an innovation at a university in the Ukraine. After three months here, I have a team of three and 37 open projects. We joke that our goal is to choose what project not to start. What's a good way to handle the pressures of our university to complete projects while also not overgrowing my team and causing burnout?

All right. Well, this is a great example of a key principle from the book, Slow Productivity, where I talk about doing fewer things. What I mean about that is exactly, actually, what we see here is don't do too many things at once. Now, IT teams, innovation teams, project-based teams, like the team being discussed here in this question, they're actually pretty good at this.

I'd love to hear—we have a—oh, oh, I see. Oh, okay. Actually, I've got to—I'm going to revise myself here. Here's what I thought you were saying, Yuri. So I'm going to tell you what I thought you were saying, and it's not what you're saying. But then the thing I thought you were saying I'm very happy about, so I'm going to push you towards it.

So what I thought you were saying is that you're working—your team is working on three projects right now, and you have a backlog of 37. That's what I wanted to hear, right? Because the key principle is I don't care how many projects the university has pushed in your direction.

I don't care if it's 37. I don't care if it's 307. What I care about is how you decide how many you're going to be actively working on. And with a team of three, you should be working probably on three projects at a time, right? And so the key here is your workload, your daily workload for the members of your team should be the same no matter how many projects are in your queue, because the number of things you work on at once is fixed, and it's the same whether there's 500 things waiting or 10.

All right? That is the way you have to deal with this. Now, in slow productivity in particular, in Principle 1, this shows up in Chapter 3, where I talk about the principle of doing fewer things, I discuss a team at a—this is at the Broad Institute in Cambridge—and I talk specifically about, here's this team that is given all of these projects by the Broader Institute, their technology projects, tools they want them to build, systems they want them to innovate, that's going to make the institute run better.

It's a very similar situation, Yuri, to what you're talking about here. And what they did that was very successful is that every potential project, they wrote on an index card and they put it on the wall, in a column they had marked off, like, waiting to work on. Next to that, they had a column of currently working on.

And they had a note on each of the things in the currently working on, who's taking the lead on this, who's working on this. And the key was, you couldn't have too much stuff in the currently working on. You could lead one thing yourself, so if you have three team members, maybe you can have like three projects going on.

As soon as a project finished or hit a break point, like, okay, now we have to wait for feedback or whatever, they would move it out of that column and bring something new from the waiting to work on into the currently working on project—column. As I report in the book, the number of projects they completed went up.

When they were working on a fewer number of things at a time, they could give it their full attention, complete them well, and complete them fast. The rate at which projects were completed went up because they weren't having the overhead of trying to switch between too many things. That's what you need to do, Yuri.

You need to have a wall where you have all the things we've been asked to do, and you have the wall of here's what we're working on, and all that matters is your limit for how many things can be in that here's what we're working on. And the pressure from the number of things you've been asked to do should not affect the number of things you work on.

Work should feel like work, no matter how much stuff is queued up. You should not be trying to work on more things at the same time. There's no other real answer here. Like, you can't work on 37 projects—it might as well be 3,000. You can't work on 37 projects at the same time, right?

There's only so many hours in the day. So like, once you're past four or five projects, there's no more—you can't sustain an approach where you're like, "We'll just work on everything that's been pushed our way." So be clear about it. Be clear to the university. Be clear to anyone else who's giving you pressure.

Here is how we work. Here's our list of things we're queued up to do. Here's the things we're working on. We work incredibly hard and efficiently and with focus on the things we're currently working on. As we finish, we bring more things over. There is no way to go faster.

You know, this is how fast this team can finish things. You're welcome to give us feedback about prioritizing the stuff we're waiting to work on. You're welcome to come in at any time you want and cross things off this list. Forget about this. Forget about that. Forget about this.

But we cannot change the number of things we're working on concurrently. That's like squeezing blood out of a turnip, out of a rock, whatever the expression is. Our time is our time. We've saturated it. This is how we produce the best work. The big thing I try to advise in that section is like, we should do this even if you're not in a team, like really where knowledge work needs to get is that individuals are doing this as well.

You can push as much stuff at me as you want, but I work on three things at a time and as I finish things, I bring more things in. That is the key, that sort of workload management, that binary differentiation between active and waiting is like the number one key for reducing burnout and it maximizes the rate of completion, which has to be the metric you care about, right?

If I run an organization, it does not matter to me how many things you're working on at once. It does not matter to me how many things people say they're working on. All I care about is the things to finish. The rate at which things finish, how many things do we finish this month?

How many things do we finish this quarter? That's what matters. And if you want to maximize that, you have to reduce and constrain the number of things you're working on at any one point, right? So look, I get into that in depth and slow productivity, but it's a critical point to making productivity more sustainable.

It's also our excuse, Jesse, to hear that theme music one more time. All right. Now I feel relaxed. You know what other music I find relaxing? So if you haven't, if you like that theme music and you have not listened to either of our in-depth episodes yet, our semi-regular Thursday episodes, listen to it for no other reason than the theme music.

And it's the same, let's give credit where credit's due, Kieran, who did the main theme for the podcast, the sort of techno nerd theme, which I love so much. He did our kind of cool in-depth theme as well. So for no other reason, you should listen to those episodes just to hear the cool guitar music.

I think it'd be, so it's like guitar chords. I think it'd be cool if like when you watched it on YouTube, it was just me rocking out on a guitar, just playing those chords and putting my guitar aside. That would be, that's how you get views, Jesse. Hats. A lot of shredding your axe.

All right. Let's get, let's get a call in. Sounds good. Hey, Cal. Long time listener. Love the podcast. My question for you is this. I drive between 30 and 45 minutes each way to school every day. That's plenty of time in the car. Normally I like to listen to audio books, music, podcasts, but I feel like I'm wasting this perfectly good time that I could be working my brain towards learning the material that I'm studying at the time.

So my question for you is this, as an engineering student, how can I maximize my productivity in this time while I'm driving when I can't necessarily just listen to an audio book on physics where it's more of a understanding conceptual formulas and that kind of thing? I love the show and I can't wait to hear your answer.

Thank you so much. Well, I have a similar length commute to Georgetown. It's like 35 minutes. So I can speak from personal experience of a couple suggestions here. One, what I like to do is the morning commute, so the commute into school where you have your coffee and your energy is high, is a commute that I want to be productive with quotation marks.

I'll define what I mean by that, right? But usually my drive home, I'm like, no, this is like unwind time, you know, especially if I can do a schedule shutdown ritual before I leave to come home. Now it's podcasting, you know, let me listen to a podcast. Let me listen to like an interesting book on tape and just take that unwind, especially after a hard day of school.

So first of all, I like that productive morning, relaxing afternoon. All right. Now what do I mean by productive? You're not going to make progress on your engineering studies while you're driving. Like, I don't see that happening. So by productive, I mean intellectually engaging, interesting, like an exercise that if you did it, even if not in the car, you'd be like, oh, this added value or meaning or depth to my day.

There's several things I do, so I'll just list them all and maybe some of these will resonate with you. One thing I've done before is I've gotten a book on a, not a book, a course, an audio course like The Great Courses, right, on a topic I'm interested in, but not, this is dead right in the middle of my research, right?

So maybe I'll get a book on the big ideas of Western civilization or the history of Rome or something like this. And what I would do when I'm going through one of these books is typically the lesson would fit with The Great Courses, the lessons would fit pretty well in like a 30 to 40 minute commute.

I'm like, I'm going to pay attention to this on the drive. When I get to my parking space, I am on my laptop in the car going to take notes on everything I just listened to. When I build out this document of notes on like the course I'm taking, the notes will cement it.

But knowing that you have to write those notes is also going to get you to pay attention better to what's going on. So that's one thing I would do. The other thing I would do is I'll give myself like a particular problem I want to make progress on in my head.

Like, so for me right now, this will often be, I'm thinking about a book chapter that's coming up. I'm like, how am I going to make this work? And I'll just, I'll think through as I drive and I'll think through different options. What about this? And I'll let my thoughts unfold.

And then again, when I get there, I write down my thoughts before I leave the car. So like you can do interesting brainstorming in the car. Like you have your coffee, your motivation is high. I'll do that. I've outlined in my head podcast episode, deep dives, for example, I've done, I've worked on that.

If I'm working on an article, like a New Yorker piece, I might say, great, I'm going to try to figure out a structure here. I don't like the way I'm getting in. Let me try to figure something out. And then when I get there, I'll take my notes. If you have a hard time doing thinking in the car, there's easy practice for this is productive meditation.

Go for a walk. You try to make progress on one idea just in your mind. When your attention wanders, you bring it back to what you're thinking about. This is a great way to sharpen your brain's ability to be facile with his working memory, to keep something in your working memory, to explore a piece of it and come back and update the working memory, what you need to think in your head, to write in your head, to structure in your head, to come up with ideas just in your head and remember them.

That's just practiced. So just do a bunch of productive meditation, you'll get better at it. And then there's more you can do while you're actually driving. So that's what I'd suggest. You don't have to make progress on your engineering studies, but you can make progress on interesting ideas and thoughts in the morning.

And then the afternoon should be listening to the deep questions podcast. So when you take out their computer after you park, you're just like, use like a word file or your notes file. Yeah. Yeah. Word files. Yeah. I mean, you should have a bunch of word files or whatever you use for like ideas.

You're working on things you're trying to understand. I mean, this is something I often preach, especially ideas like, okay, this feels important to me. Something going on in the world feels important to me and I want to clarify my thoughts on it. Write it down. Otherwise, especially if it's important to you, you're going to just be repeating stuff you've heard, be reactionary, or just sort of deal with group activation.

What do I think my group is supposed to think about this? Which is not like a bad thing, but like if something matters to you and you really want to have a considered understanding of it, begin recording your thoughts. And you should be doing this about like a lot of different things in your life.

Like if you're a meditator, you should have a document somewhere where you're like, "Why? Why am I meditating? What am I trying to achieve here? Why do I think this is important?" If there is like a political issue that pushes your buttons, don't just let your buttons be pressed.

Really try to understand it, right? If you're thinking about like the U.S. presidential election and you're a Democrat and don't really understand Trumpism, articulate like what the core principles here are, right? What is it that upsets you? If you're a Republican, you don't like like the progressive left. Like what is the core thing?

What is the core principles here you dislike and why and what's your alternative? Otherwise, what you're going to deal in is just particular anecdotes and examples, exaggerations. This happens so often, the gap between feeling and understanding, this gap is so common that you'll see this often where there's someone who feels very strongly about something but it's like a gut feeling.

My group hates this and I agree. And they're just sure. They get put in a situation where you're like someone challenges them. And they're so sure of like, "Oh man, like this is so wrong, I'm going to wipe the floor with this person." And then they find themselves, they're really struggling like, "Well, what about this?

And I don't know like that or this." They struggle to articulate their feelings and you can see that frustration in their face. It's because you haven't worked through your underlying feelings. I think it's really important. If you're religious, you should have a document that works through your theology. Don't avoid it.

If you're political, you should have a document that understands, "Here's my political principles." If there's a practice like physical, you're really into, you know, I know someone was telling me the other day how going into extreme, awe-inspiring, natural settings is like at the core of their philosophy of life.

Work that out. Work out the principles. Write it down. Write it down, have word files. So you should have a sort of this I believe folder somewhere that you're constantly working on because it gives you a more sophisticated understanding. Your understanding evolves better. You can build off it better.

You understand the world gets better. So yeah, I think in general, that's a good exercise. So just like one logistics question in terms of that. So if you're using the Word files on your laptop, say people use like Google Drive or something. Yeah. Do you like merge them? Yeah, you can merge them.

So like if you really want to write after your commute in the parking lot, which I think works because like I just want to shut this down, you can write that in Word and then later on copy it like into a Google Drive if that's what you're doing or a Google Doc.

If you want to keep it accessible from different devices, some people will use the diction, the auto translation like in their iPhone and just like let me just say all the thoughts, all my notes about this now in the car and it like auto translated and like I email that to myself and then like later I'll actually put that into something else.

So I think all that's fine. Or if you do it on your phone, you probably have internet on there already. So like from the parking lot, you can dictate right into a Google Doc. So yeah, I don't care about the tech. But anyways, in general, it's good to have idea this I believe documents and more specifically, that's a good use of a morning commute.

It's coming up with a way to update one of those documents. All right. Let's see here. I think we have a case study. So this is where people write in to talk about how they have put my advice to work within their own life. If you have a case I share, you can send it straight to jesse@calnewport.com.

All right, today's case study comes from Amy. Amy says for various reasons, I'll be attending a graduate program at the Berklee School of Music at 34 years of age. My plan to succeed inspired by your advice is as followed. Time block planning and fixed schedule productivity. Being a fan of CALS for years, I've been time blocking off and on for a long time.

Mostly on because when I do time block, my life is infinitely better than when I don't. It's less about getting everything done and more about structure in my day-to-day life. Two specific places for specific work. Even after taking social media off my phone, I still noticed I was checking my email too much.

I took that off as well and now check my personal email on my computer at home. Number three, no social media. I've had problems with Facebook and Instagram in the past. In fact, I set up a contract with my boyfriend to keep me accountable. I believe that contract said if she violated it, she had to wear a VBLCCP hat for one week.

What's this, one, two, three, four, four. Only have my school email on my phone, five, keep my phone on do not disturb or airplane mode during class. If someone really needs me, they can call the school, that is true. Six, the iPad I had to buy for my program is used only for schoolwork, practice materials and writing.

Seven, use the phone for your method, that's where you keep your phone plugged in, not with you while you're at home. And eight, planning assignment, study and practice time way in advance. Amy goes on to say, "I don't want to work past 6 p.m. and I plan to do most of my work on campus.

Since I'll be commuting to Cambridge from Quincy via the red line in the commuter rail, I will use the inbound time to prep and prime myself for the day and I will use my commute home as my schedule shut down complete, I'll report back later in a year." Oh, that's a flashback.

Commuter rail to Quincy station, red line from Quincy into Cambridge, just that's like me old Boston days. She mentioned that. Oh, I love the T. I might be going back to Boston soon, I'm looking forward to it. Harvard Yale football game? It's not the Harvard Yale football game. Go Big Green, Dartmouth fan.

It is a podcast, I won't say what name because whatever, but a major podcast, surprisingly records out of Boston. So we're trying to find a time for me to go up there. My guess is something with Alex Cora, why the Red Sox need help. I wish. I wish. Yeah, I could help them out.

They need these hats. This would be the home run celebration hat, should be VVLCCP. They just don't hit many of them. It's still, yeah, I know. Let me tell you this, and I don't, look, I'm no expert in baseball, I believe in data. I was in Boston from 2004 to 2011, Red Sox won two World Series.

That's all I'm going to say. I don't say I get complete credit for that, but let's just say they have had much more World Series success when I was in Boston than not. So- You were responsible for breaking the curse. The curse was broken soon after I arrived, and I'll leave it at that, I don't want to get too much into it.

We'll leave it at that. Big Poppy loves Deep Work. Big Deep Work fan. All right, Amy, you're going to crush it. You're going to crush it. That type of structure to your life, you are going to find that grad school is not that hard, and you're absolutely going to crush it.

I was very structured in grad school. I got bored. I wrote books simultaneously with all the other stuff I was doing. We were going to do great. This is what it looks like. I mean, let's bring this back to last Thursday's conversation with Oliver Berkman. Oliver is rightly worried about obsession over productivity and trying to get more and more done and trying to deny the reality that we're finite.

Those are all really good points, but I think the band of people that fall into that problem is relatively narrow. What I'm talking about with sort of humanistic productivity is exactly what Amy's talking about here. This type of structure to her time and attention is going to make her time at Berkeley so much more sustainable and interesting and productive.

She's going to kill it in the program, and she's not going to be running around and be reactive and then get really sort of resentful about school and how everything's unfair. She's going to be able to enjoy that commute, like as the red line gets near Quincy and you can see the water and that's all really nice.

After I fix the Red Sox, she can go to games at Fenway. It's just going to be her life will be happier and better than if she was just instead being like let's just rock and roll. For students in general, that's the case for most people. That is a case study, I think, of humanistic personal productivity.

It's taking control of your time and obligations so that you can steer your life somewhere good. She's not trying to optimize. She's not trying to be the best. She's not trying to get after it. She's not trying to like, "I'm going to graduate early and I'm going to be the best musician ever." It's like, "Look, I want to do this thing well and not have it control my life.

So me controlling my life first is going to help." So I think it's a great example of humanistic personal productivity. Productivity to make your life better, not to try to turn your life into an optimization puzzle. All right. We've got a cool final segment coming up. I want to react to an author admitting what her greatest regret is.

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That's policygenius.com/deepquestions. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. So in our final segment, I often like to react to interesting stuff I have seen in the news. Today I want to react to an article from the New York Times, an op-ed that many of you sent to me.

I have it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. There's an op-ed from October 15th by the novelist Ann Patchett. Here is the provocative headline, "The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret." Now when I saw this headline, I thought it was going to be something grim.

Like I don't know. I was like, okay, this is going to be maybe like a, like a health thing or like a big moral quandary. I was like, am I about to read that, you know, Ann Patchett murdered a hobo 30 years ago and hid the body there in Tennessee in like an oil drum and is now regretting it and is admitting it?

Like I thought it was going to be dark. That's not exactly what she was regretting. And I was sort of surprised and pleased to see her answer. All right, so here we go. I'm reading from the third paragraph, "I signed up for email in 1995." She goes on to explain how email was signed up for an innocent reason.

She could communicate with friends. She did it on AOL and now she regrets it. Email is the thing she regrets most from the last 30 years. Let me read you a quote here, "Because I do regret email. Even though I've turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions.

I regret all the times I look only to find there's nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping the check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I've never met, explaining why I can't speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel.

I regret how every person who hits reply all to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up." Then she says, "Could I manage without it?" She says, "Well, look, people with smartphones look at me as if I'm the last of the carrier pigeons." So Ann Patchett does not use a smartphone, right?

But she's okay. So maybe the same is true for email. So she's considering this article. Do I really need email? And she says she is going to practice or potentially experiment with giving it up. I like this article because it underscores a key point of my personal philosophy about technology which I call techno-selectionism.

I wrote a New Yorker essay about this last year called "It's Time to Fight Back Against the Technopoly." You can look that up if you're a New Yorker subscriber. But here's the point about techno-selectionism. Technologies have impacts that are hard to predict in advance. And accordingly, the only sensible way to live in a world in which technology is going to play a big part of our advancement as a species is to be willing to continually re-evaluate and investigate the impact of technologies and be willing to step away or radically modify technologies after they were brought into your life.

We have to get away from what I call techno-fatalism, where once the genie's out of the bottle or Pandora's box has been opened, we can't go back. Smartphones exist. We started giving them to our kids because we didn't know how could we go back. Kids need social media. We introduced email because the fax machine stunk, and this was better than voicemail.

And now it's taking over our lives and making work unsustainable and actually impeding the growth of productivity at a macroeconomic level. What could we do? We can't just stop using email. Ampatch says, "Why not? I hate it. Let's change. Yeah, it's hard, but this stuff's hard, too. Let's do the Wayne." That's techno-selectionism.

We need to be willing to say, "Regardless of why we introduced this, regardless of the reality that this technology exists, what is it doing it to us now? And if the answer is something really bad, let's be willing to make radical changes." And when it comes to email, yeah, novelists like Ampatch can aggressively scale back.

You can't do that tomorrow in your job. I get that. But I wrote a whole book called The World Without Email that gets into what it would look like to build a workplace that was not dependent on all of this unscheduled back and forth messaging. It's absolutely possible. There's particular knowledge work sectors that actually do this.

Anyways, that's the type of thinking we need. The current movement to take smartphones out of schools, that's techno-selectionism. It's stepping backwards from what we did after we observed the impact. Adults deactivating their social media account, that's techno-selectionism. Yeah, it was fun or interesting in 2014. It's a source of darkness in 2024.

I'm going to change. Adults who are giving up their smartphones, techno-selectionism, adults that are rewiring their phones. Okay, I have a smartphone, but it stays plugged in when I'm at home. It's not with me. I don't take it when I walk the dog. That's techno-selectionism. And we need more of that, especially as technologies have the ability to have impacts at population-wide scales and at very fast rates.

So anyways, good essay to read, Ampatch it. My hat's off to you. We got to get a copy. We got to get a copy of A World Without Email to Ann. She's got a great bookstore in Tennessee. She's got to feature that book. She's got to know about it.

So look, if Ann Patchett's agent is listening, I want to send her some signed copies of World Without Email. I think we're on the same page. But the broader message here is techno-selectionism. We have to keep evaluating the impact of technologies that we've already admitted to our lives and be willing to make changes even after the fact.

What about in terms of like personal email and work email? Do you think she has it combined into one? She said earlier, it's a good question. She said earlier in the essay she gets them separately. And even then, it was still a problem. So she took them both off her phone?

Yeah, I guess so. We should get Ann on the phone. You think she'd come on the show? Sure. I think. You're in Parade Magazine. I am in ParadeMagazine.com, which means I'm guessing when the Premier Magazine Power 100 Hollywood list comes out, I'm probably going to be top 10. I mean, how many people are featured in ParadeMagazine.com?

Come on. We should have her on the phone. I think this is true. It's possibly true. So I've talked about this. Actually, I think I've talked about this more on Tim Ferriss's show than this show. But when I got started professional writing in college, I talked to an agent who was like a family friend to just figure out how the industry worked and what it would take for someone like me to get a book contract at the age of 21.

And it was a fiction agent. So I was like, look, I'm not trying to sell myself to you, but just explain the world. And once I knew the world, how it actually worked, I was able to get the book contract. My vague memory is it might have been Ann Patchett's agent.

I'm not sure. You know how you forget? It's been over two decades now. Wasn't she a family friend? The agent was. Yeah. Yeah, the agent. My uncle knew her. We can look that up. I don't know how I'm going to look up here. I'm looking up one thing here.

This is there's nothing is more scintillating audio than someone looking something up on Google Live. But let me look up one thing. I have one one clue I'm pulling here. Yeah, I think so, because here's my memory. My memory that very vague is they had just had a big hit with Bel Canto, which was Ann Patchett's like big breakthrough novel.

So I think Ann Patchett's agent is responsible for me being a professional writer. So there we go. I should thank her. And we should get Ann on the show to talk about email. All right. What I need to do, obviously, is save my voice. I'm sort of losing my voice today.

And I have to go on national radio in Canada pretty soon, so I guess I got to go brew some tea. Yeah. Welcome to the life of a podcaster and author. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Remember, if you want to volunteer for the organization's studies, send a note to jessie@calnebrook.com.

We'll be back next week with another episode, and until then, as always, stay deep. If you like today's discussion of tactical and strategic procrastination, I think you'll also like episode 312 when I talk about productivity basics. These are the key tools for fighting tactical procrastination. They're a key partner to this episode.

I think you'll like it. Check it out. So what I thought I would do here would be to review five of the biggest ideas I've had about finding productivity in a distracted world.