(upbeat music) All right, who do we got? - All right, next up we have Shane McGrath. I'm pretty sure he's submitted a question before and he's basically got a lot of jobs. He's doing a lot of juggling and he's got a specific question about that. - Hi Cal, my name is Shane and I work as an operations analyst in the medical device field.

I'm a big fan of your work and credit the embrace of Deep Work principles as a catalyst for my last two promotions. So I first and foremost just wanna express my utmost gratitude to your work and I look forward to your future work as well. What I wanna ask you is your advice and strategies for shifting gears between multiple domains.

I have several interests including writing, learning to code, investing, data analysis, cooking and playing guitar, which I all tend to. They all feel rewarding in different ways and I guess I just operate as a right-brained guy who loves to throw coals in the fire. Assuming I keep this juggling act going, do you have any tips or strategies that help to shift gears between work in different domains?

When I write, it seems like the optimal state is quite different than when I'm coding in JavaScript for example. They just seem to hit different. I just wonder how I could do a better job with managing this juggling act I'm in the middle of. Much appreciated, Cal, thanks a lot.

- Well, I mean, Shane, my advice here is if you're struggling juggling lots of balls, the best solution is to take out a bunch of the balls. That's much easier than trying to learn how do I juggle five balls? That's hard to do. Two balls is easier. So instead of trying to figure out how to juggle five balls, you could get rid of three and that's what I think is the issue here.

That's too many things. That's too many things. The overhead of having that many things is probably counterbalancing a lot of the value. So if we wanna see what's a more reasonable load, and we're talking here, these are all sort of out of work, leisure type pursuits. There's a few different things.

If we're looking through the different deep life buckets, there's like a few different things that are pulling at your time, especially outside of work. I mean, first of all, there's the community bucket. I mean, serving your family, serving your friends, being a leader in your community. Enjoying and savoring times with people you care about.

Like that actually needs a lot of time. That's a default. That's already taking up a lot of time. We have constitution. You gotta take care of your body. It's the best way also of keeping anxiety low, especially during difficult times. And it keeps you with more options for doing things with your life going forward.

And that takes time. So now we don't have a ton of time left. Then you wanna throw in there, if we wanna have the celebration bucket or under contemplation, you wanna throw in there just having high quality present leisure experiences. Just really enjoying a movie, really enjoying a dinner, really enjoying a sunset while you're out for a walk and that type of just present gratitude generating moment.

Now we're really getting down to a small amount of free time, which honestly I think the right load there is there's a primary hobby that you work on over time. So you get the satisfaction of mastery and of developing a really refined taste in one area. So if you get really good at guitar, you don't just get the benefit of the mastery of playing your guitar well, you get the benefit of really being able to appreciate and understand other good guitar players.

So it's a gift that keeps on giving. And then maybe have a secondary hobby that you're messing around with. I'm learning how to cook this season. And then I'm really busy and I'm doing no secondary thing. And then I'm messing around with code. I'm gonna make like a video game for my kids.

And then I'm doing nothing because I'm busy. And you have that secondary slot. I honestly think that's really what people more or less have time for. And my worry is if you try to have five different leisure activities, those other core deep life areas like community, like constitution, like just present celebration, they're gonna get squeezed out and that's to your detriment.

And the overhead of just switching back and forth between these things are gonna make you more anxious than you get benefit from them. So I'm not sure if that's the answer you wanna hear, but that's the answer I am gonna give right now is if you do less, this might sound paradoxical, but if you do less, you're actually going to experience more good things in your life.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)