And the conclusion I made from that is, it's a fair guess that through most of our species history, work pace was incredibly varied. Intense periods followed by relaxed periods at all sorts of different scales. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show about living and working deeply in a world increasingly beset by distraction.

I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as normal by my producer, Jesse. So Jesse, it's official. As of two days before the recording of this episode, I submitted my manuscript for my new book, Slow Productivity, to my publisher. For the last two days, I have had no writing to do.

No morning writing sessions, no trying to get my edits in, no where's my hours, I gotta get my hours. I am on a break from writing temporarily. That manuscript has been submitted. - So what's temporarily mean? Well, like another half a day? - All right, if I'm gonna be honest, we're gonna be honest about this.

The day after I submitted the manuscript, I had a phone call with my editor at The New Yorker, and we were already planning out the next piece, which I've started on. But I'm free from the, the thing about book writing is to make my schedule, because I had to do this in about six months, every day mattered.

So there was that constant pressure. You don't have that constant pressure if you're working on one article, 'cause you might be in a phase where you're researching it. You're like, yeah, I'm waiting to hear back from some people. I'm reading about it, I'm thinking about it, and then three days, you'll just write it.

A book is every single day, because you got a lot you have to build up. Now, submission, for those who don't know how the nonfiction book publishing process works, there's a lot of steps. So submission is actually not that important of an official step. From a contractual perspective, the thing that matters is acceptance of the manuscript.

That happens after back and forth editing. So submission, for some people that might be like me, here's the whole thing, but you could be submitting things along the way. You could have worked with your editor to finish chapter one, and then worked with them to finish chapter two. There's no real, the contract says nothing about that.

What matters is the acceptance of the manuscript, and that's after all editing has happened and everyone's pretty happy with it. There's actually typically advance money tied to when the manuscript's accepted. And then after that, you shift into the production phase. So now a whole different set of editors get involved, and this is where you get things like the copy editing followed by the production editing.

You start caring about commas, you start caring about the proper capitalization of titles, et cetera, like that. So it's a really long process, but getting a full version of the manuscript done is for the writer, psychologically speaking, a big milestone. So I'm glad to be past that milestone, and I really am gonna try to slow down this semester.

- So when do you start your next book? 'Cause I know you're under contract. - Yeah, that's a good question. I'm under contract for two, TBD. So we have to figure out that timing, but I just wanna take a break from even thinking about that. - Yeah, I guess I just keep on thinking, I think I was listening to a holiday interview with Tyler Cohen, and he was talking about how he's always writing a book, and I just figured, I just, for some reason, was thinking that's what you're gonna be doing now.

- I mean, I will more or less, but I'm trying to take a few months off. - Okay. - Like to me, so this is, and it's gonna bring us back to the theme of today's episode. Now for me, taking time off means, you know, two jobs instead of four or something like that, but I see this as this wonderfully relaxing period coming up, because I'm gonna be just like a normal professor for a while.

You know, I've got my classes, I'm teaching two classes this semester. I'm teaching, I'm dealing with students. I plan to have at any one time, one academic article, and maybe one New Yorker article, sort of in the hopper, rotating back and forth. But that's really different than having a book you're trying to get done, because if you do nothing on Wednesday, not a big deal.

You know what I mean? It's yeah, but maybe I'm thinking about this, I'm working on proofs for this, and oh, now I'm gonna write a draft of this. So it's just like normal load. It's like a normal professor life for a while, which to me seems like it's gonna be wonderfully relaxing.

We'll see if that actually works. Then my plan is as the semester begins to wind down, then I'll wind up the new book. I think at the very least, I wanna get past manuscript acceptance for the current book before I'm doing anything too serious for the next, 'cause I don't wanna mix those two worlds together.

Once we're in production for the current book, then maybe I can actually start working in earnest. So we'll see how that goes. That does, however, bring us to the deep question I wanna tackle in today's episode. So I'm interested in this idea of temporarily slowing down on a regular basis as a strategy for achieving sustainability in your career, especially if you have an ambitious or elite knowledge work career.

How do we make that sustainable? How do we make that something that is deep in the long run? So that's the deep question I wanna tackle today. How do I avoid working all out all the time? So here's how we're gonna tackle this in today's episode. We're gonna start with a deep dive on a topic very relevant to what we're talking about, to the deep question this show's all about.

After the deep dive, we'll go on and do some listener questions. I've pulled questions that are all related one way or to the other to this general theme of trying to slow down, balancing relaxation with work. So how do you get that back and forth balance going? They're all related one way or the other, so we can take these ideas out for a spin with real issues.

I also have a case study in there of someone who has found sort of a nice way to get that balance into their lives. And then we'll end this episode as I like to whenever possible discussing something interesting. All right, that sounds like a plan. Does that sound good, Jesse?

- Sounds great. - You know what we've forgotten to do and I feel bad about this? Books. - Yeah. - We keep forgetting to talk about the books I read in December. - Yeah. - We will do that soon, folks. That's just me. I actually had it on my calendar.

I had on my calendar, bring in the books for today's episodes, but I'll tell you what happened. A school event got added for one of my kids at the last minute. So like I was at that school event, that's why I'm a little late today. And that went right into a two hour meeting that went right into me finishing my prep and coming over here.

If I get knocked off my routine at all, the whole house of cards begins to fall because I'm scrambling to get to my kid's school, which means I'm not building my time block plan properly. It all falls apart with just a little bit of an obligatory wind right there.

- Yeah, we'll get in the books though. - We'll get them in. We'll get them in. I read some good ones. All right, let's do a deep dive. I wanna talk about the topic of work cycles. And in order to get to this topic, let me back up a little bit and set the stage.

So what's the issue that this strategy is gonna try to solve? Well, I wanna pull a quote from a New Yorker piece I wrote a few months ago. We've talked about it on the show before. This was the New Yorker piece where I went back and said, "What does the research about work in our deep history?" So we're talking about the Paleolithic period, roughly 300,000 years, 300,000 years where Homo sapiens were anatomically modern, but we were living pre-agricultural, mainly hunter-gatherer lives.

So the longest period of our species' existence, what did work mean then? And the whole point of that essay, as you'll probably recall, is that I then compared that to modern knowledge work, looking for places where there was a real discrepancy. And seeing these might be sources of friction where what we're doing today is not meshing with the wiring that was set into place over many years in the past.

So in that article, one of the particular topics I looked at was the pace of work. And here's a quote from a paper written by Mark Dybul, among others, he was the lead author, that was comparing a extant hunter-gatherer tribe's work rhythms to a nearby tribe that was still, oh, I shouldn't say tribe.

That's not the word to use, I learned. Community, community. So this is from a research paper that came in Nature about they were studying the work rhythms of a largely hunting and gathering community compared to a nearby community that was agricultural. And here's what was said in the article.

"The pace of the forager schedule was more varied, "with breaks interspersed throughout their daily efforts. "Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest, "so you'd be out all day, but you'd have breaks," Dybul told me. "With something like fishing, there are spikes, "ups and downs, only a small percent of their time "is spent actually fishing." And the conclusion I made from that is, it's a fair guess that through most of our species history, work pace was incredibly varied.

Intense periods followed by relaxed periods at all sorts of different scales. We're out hunting, but the sun is hot, and we're gonna rest for three hours till it gets a little less. Where spear fishing, like the Ajta people that we're studying in this particular paper, but there's gonna be long periods.

How long can we actually be underwater, holding our breath? There's long periods where we're just resting in the boat. Now, if we look at the history of work, we can understand that in part as a long march away from this widely varied work pace. So as we shifted from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, so as we had the introduction of agriculture, and now we're talking between 15 to 10,000 years ago, we saw the first shift.

We began to get, during the planting and harvesting seasons, days of continual effort without break. So if it is October, and you're trying to get that harvest in, you're not taking long naps during the day. Those are long days, sun up to sun down. However, in the early Neolithic, through almost up to the modern period, you had months that were incredibly relaxed, lower-paced work versus months that were more intense.

We still had a seasonality at the literal scale of seasons. In January, there was not much to do, whereas in October, you might've been really busy. All right, now let's fast forward all the way to the rise of factory work, followed by factory-style office work, by which I mean nine to five, you show up like you would to a factory.

There, we got the consistently hard days year-round. There is no, "Oh, January, you don't work much, "but October, you work more." No, no, you're working all day long, without long breaks, every week of the year, but whatever, a vacation exception, and there's somewhere or the other. We still had, however, clear shutdowns.

So if you worked at Ford, building cars, that's hard work from when you start to when you finish. There is no seasons that are less hard work, but when you go home, there is nothing for you to do. There's no work related to building Model Ts that you can bring back to your house and continue doing, and this was true, of course, of early office-style, or factory-style office work as well.

When you weren't at your desk, where your papers were, and whatever, your assistant was, and the typing pool was, when you weren't at your desk, there was very little work you could actually do. So you had at least clear shutdowns within the day binary, work, non-work. Finally, we get to where we are today, which is office work in the age of computer networks, and now work is always available.

You always have access to work. There's always more work for you to do. It's being delivered via email. It's being delivered via Slack. The tools you need to actually make progress on this work are with you. They're mobile. They're with you at home. They're with you on vacation. They're with you when you're in the car.

So work is now always available. This is where we're really getting into trouble because we've created an environment where work is always available, and then we combined it with what we talk about often on this show as the unstructured approach to productivity, unstructured productivity, where we say in knowledge work, we don't have a particular system we use for assigning work or tracking work, or keeping track of who's working on what, or figuring out when you're gonna work on things.

It's just up to you. Productivity is personal. Just do what you think is useful for the company. We're not gonna tell you how to do your work. This combination, work is always available. You're always able to do work, and there's no real structure to how work gets done. It's just left up to you.

Hey, do what you're going to do. This has led to a much increased rate of just continual effort. Now, it's not that we work every waking hours. What we do instead, and again, we talk about this often, what we do instead in this combination of always available work and unstructured productivity is that we just let stuff pile up until we are so stressed from the work that we feel like we have psychological cover to say no to what comes next.

So we just push ourselves till we're overloaded, and that gives us justification to say, well, this is why I'm stopping, because I'm exhausted. I'm up late working, and this is why I feel okay stopping until the next morning, because I already worked till two in the morning. So we let our own sense of overload and stress be the governor.

That ensures by definition that we're always working too much. Unstructured productivity, always available work. So really what we have here is a collision of two different types of factors, a cultural factor, unstructured productivity, and a technological factor, always available work. That's a technological thing. Unstructured productivity, that's a cultural thing.

I'm always interested where technological forces hit cultural forces is. Unexpected outcomes often arise, and this is one. Knowledge workers are often now in the state of always working too much. This is a recipe for burnout. You can only sustain that so long. Some people get the burnout faster than others.

There's different reactions to the stress of this overwork, but it's not good. It's not good. So what do we do about this? Well, we have to find ways to structure productivity more to get us away from the setting where we just sort of go at it until we're so stressed we feel like we have cover to say no.

There is many different ways to solve this problem. We might even wanna say there's many different things you can do to help make progress on this problem. I wanna talk about one particular strategy today that I came across when I was writing the book I'm working on now on slow productivity, and I wanted to share it with you.

So I'm actually gonna jump over now on the screen. For those who are watching this at YouTube, youtube.com/calendarportmedia. This is episode 231. For those who are watching on YouTube, you will see this on your screen, but I'll also narrate it for those who are just listening. What I have loaded up here is the chapter nine of the Basecamp Employee Handbook.

So Basecamp is a software development, product development tech company. It's co-founded, you may know, it's co-founder and CEO, Jason Fried. Him and I did an event together when I launched my last book, "A World Without Email." So we've crossed paths a few times. They're very innovative in thinking about work.

So Jason, the co-founder, has co-authored multiple books about rethinking knowledge work, including "Rework" and one that's called "Work Doesn't Have to Be This Way." So it's a company in which the principals do a lot of thinking about how can we make work better, even if it requires radical changes.

So their handbook is actually itself a fascinating business advice read because you're exposed to all of these experiments they're trying. Well, in chapter nine of this handbook, and it's what I have loaded on the screen now, they talk about cycles. Now I'm gonna read from the handbook right now.

We work in six to eight week cycles at Basecamp. There are typically six cycles to a year. Two are eight week cycles during summer hours and the rest are six week cycles. This fixed cadence serves to give us an internal sense of urgency, work as a scope hammer to keep projects from ballooning and provide a regular interval to decide what we're working on.

The idea is not that everything we ever decide to work on has to take six to eight weeks or can be completed in that time, but rather that we think about how we can break big projects into smaller ones that can be done in that amount of time. And that we bundle smaller things into a presentable scope of work that can be discussed.

All right, now I'm gonna skip forward a little bit. This is what I like about the cycle strategy. This next section called "Cool Down." In between each cycle, we spend two weeks cooling down. That's the time to deal with bugs or smaller issues that come up, write up what we worked on and figure out what we should tackle next.

It's sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cool down period to fit in more work, but the goal is to resist this temptation. I think this is a brilliant strategy. It matches the natural rhythm of work for which human beings are better suited. So this idea of work intensely for a while, then cool down for a couple of weeks.

Okay, let's just, everyone chill. Let's just hammer out some final bugs and kind of have some brainstorming type meetings about what comes next. We wake up, we come to work a little late. We're not staying late. The inbox is reasonable. And then once that two weeks is over, let's get after it again.

Okay, now we speed back up and we're working urgently on something we're all in. Then we cool down again. That general pattern on, off, on, off is very effective. It is a much more sustainable way of having a profession where you have to create value using only what's happening in between your ears from your brain.

It's a much sustainable way to create value with your brain than what most people do, which is keep saying yes till you're so stressed that you feel like you have cover to say no and hope you don't burn out too soon. So I really like this cycle idea. There's a couple of different ways that you could actually implement this.

If you're running a team or running a company, you could do what Basecamp did. This is how we actually operate. You could make this your culture. I don't care what lengths you do other than the cooldowns need to be non-trivial, longer than a day. But you could say this is how we do it.

It's one month on, one month off. The semester on, then we take a month that's a little more relaxed. At three months, three weeks, however you wanna do it. But having a regular rhythm of on, off, on, off is something that you should consider. Now I think the managers out there are saying, wait a second, think about all of the wasted productivity during the cooldown period.

We're gonna be getting that much less work done. My response to this is the same response Basecamp would have, which is nonsense. The amount of high quality work you get done during the intense period of the cycles is going to add up to much more quality results if you balance those with cooldowns than if you instead just try to push through all out, all year round.

Because what happens if you just try to push all out, all year round? That energy flags. And the amount of effort you're doing six months into the year is a lot worse than it was earlier. A lot worse than it would be if you actually had regular cooldown periods.

You're gonna get more done, it's gonna be higher quality, people aren't gonna burn out. Now what if you don't have control of a team? What if you don't run your own company? Do this stealthily on your own. Internally, without telling other people, I have cycles. And during this bit of the cycle, I'm all on, this week or this two weeks, I'm pulling back.

You can do this without having to make any declarations, without having to get anything signed off on by a boss without really attracting that much attention. It's just a matter of making your weekly plans sparse during the cooldown periods. Just don't put much stuff into those weekly plans. Being really careful about scheduling things during cooldown periods.

To the degree you can get away with this without it being notable, punt. Well, yeah, I was talking, I'm not really available that week, but the next week, or let's get back to this after the break. So you sort of move things around. And for the things that you have to schedule during the cooldown period, have multiple days that are meeting free.

Don't tell anyone you're doing this. But just for that two weeks, it's like, well, Tuesday and Thursday, you're not offering up. So you have multiple days in these cooldown weeks where you have no Zoom and no calls and no meetings. Be careful about your larger projects. If you have a project that's gonna end and another one's gonna start, don't start that one during a cooldown period.

Be strategic about when you bring things on. So these stealth cycles with stealth cooldown periods can be just as effective as working at a company like Basecamp that has this built right into their handbook. Now what's gonna happen is, not only is this gonna make your work more sustainable, I think you are gonna become more valued in your company because the intensity of your intense periods is better.

The quality of what you produce is better when you know that cooldown is coming and you get the benefit of that cooldown. So what are your managers gonna notice? Not that, you know, I really was crunching the numbers. And statistically speaking, in these two weeks out of the last six, it seemed to me that Cal was not scheduling meetings on Tuesdays as much as he did during the other one.

We need to do something about this. That's not what they're gonna notice. What they're gonna notice is your peaks. Wow, like he really, this was great. This thing he produced, you know, last month was very good. This is someone that we really value. So I'm a big believer in cycles, whether they be institutionalized or happening surreptitiously.

It is one way among many, I think, to feed into this natural inclination we have for up and down. We're chasing the gazelle. Now we're taking a nap under the sun. This natural seasonality on all sorts of scales is useful. Cycles gives us this on the scale of weeks.

So, you know what, Jesse, I take it for granted. As a professor, we naturally have these type of cycles on that scale built in because semesters end, you know. And we know this in academia, we're in between semesters. Everyone is taking a beat. You don't schedule meetings. You don't expect people to respond to emails.

And then it ramps back up again. And then you get the biggest cycle of all, which is summer. And then summer is, so it's great. That rhythm works well. I take it for granted, but seeing Basecamp's handbook helped me understand this idea that instead of just saying, "Too bad you're not a professor," like a lot of people could have something similar to work in life.

It just takes a little effort. - I know that you coined a lot of terms. Did you come up with the term unstructured productivity? - I think so. - It's a good term. - Yeah, we need a glossary. - Yeah, we do need a glossary. - I invent terms frequently.

- Yeah, I know you're very good at it. - Some stick, some don't. - You might have to do a whole article on unstructured productivity. That's good. - Yeah, it's kind of an evolution. It's an evolution of my thinking that shows up a lot more in my book, "Slow Productivity," because I, not to give too much of the book away now, there's so much to talk about when the time comes, but I really get an upfront, a deep history of productivity and how things sort of spun off their axis in knowledge work because you have to set up, like what is the issue we're trying to solve?

And that's a big deal. I think in knowledge work, there's a lot of people who correctly have the instinct that something is going wrong with productivity in knowledge work. Like this push to do more is not generating more. It's not sustainable. It's stressing us out, but they're jumping past the what's going on to let me just start blasting at enemies 'cause that's the whole tone, I think, of online discourse right now.

So it's mustache twisting managers and capitalism and these sort of vague cultures of overwork. It's all very vague. It's just so that you can kind of attack it. And in my book, I'm like, yeah, great, but let's actually understand, like where do these, where's our notions of productivity come from and unstructured productivity plays a big role in that storyline.

The rise of unstructured productivity, I've been developing this whole framework, which you'll hear more about in the future about, because I'm a tech guy, how unstructured productivity kind of worked, wasn't great. And then you get computers, it's body blow number one. Then you get networks, body blow number two, and the whole thing collapses.

So it's this cultural idea of, God, I don't even know what productivity means in knowledge work. I'll just like leave it up to the individual. That was okay in like 1977. You get to like 1997 and the whole thing falls apart. And I think we're still on the mat right now trying to figure out what to do about it.

And so there's a whole interesting thing out there, but it's an evolution because in my last book, I talked specifically about one implication of unstructured productivity is the hyperactive hive mind. So if productivity is unstructured, collaboration in particular is gonna be ad hoc and back and forth with messages on Slack and email.

And so I wrote that whole book, "World Without Email" about just collaboration in the context of unstructured productivity is a brain melter. It's a killer of like actually being able to get things done and it makes us all miserable, but that's just one issue of unstructured productivity. So in my writing for "The New Yorker" and in this book, the bigger issue in my mind is not just collaboration goes awry, but it's workload.

This like, you're always working, there's always more work to do. There's performativity. You're trying to signal value through low value actions, through busyness. Like this is the bigger, broader issue. And that's the evolution of my thinking is like unstructured productivity. You can't understand any complaint about modern knowledge work without starting with that issue.

- It's really cool. - Yeah. - It's really well explained too. All right, so what I wanna do is I have a collection of questions that are all roughly speaking about this tension between business and relaxation, getting after it and trying to recharge. First, let me mention a sponsor that helps make this show possible.

That is my friends at 80,000 Hours. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their career. If you're wondering where that number comes from, let's do a little math. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years of work, you get the 80,000.

Now, when I say these are my friends, I didn't mean that in the informal colloquial sense of, oh, it's people that work with us. I've known these guys from the very beginning. Right, so I've known that they're based out of Oxford. When they started this nonprofit, I was working on what became my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," which is a book about career advice that pushes back on this idea that you should just follow your passion.

And so we were really simpatico. So I know these guys, we talk back and forth. They've written some guides about my work. I've been talking about their work for a long time. So I was really happy to have the opportunity for them to become one of our sponsors 'cause it's people I already pitch positively.

So here's the idea behind this nonprofit, 80,000 hours. It's what you spend the majority of your time doing is working. So it is your biggest tool you have to make a difference in the world. Now, most people who even bother to think about this question, like what can I do with my work so that I leave the world a better place?

Most people who try to think about this question feel like there's not very many options. I think our normal discourse on this says like, what? You can become a doctor or go work for a nonprofit. Like we have these really limited options and that's kind of it. And so we have all of this generations of smart kids.

Like I don't wanna work for a nonprofit, become a doctor, and then they all become lawyers. 80,000 hours says, let's go deep on this question. How do we help you connect your work, the 80,000 hours you spend work into actually doing good for the world? They've spent at least 10 years now conducting research on this topic.

As I mentioned, affiliated with academics at Oxford University. They know that our generation faces issues of historical importance, and they wanna help more of us dedicate their 80,000 hours of work to solve them. So what you can do is you can go to their website, 80,000 hours, the number 80,000, followed by the word hours, 80,000hours.org/deep.

And they will send you a free copy of their in-depth career guide. So this will just get you started on the 80,000 hours way of thinking about work. In it, you will learn about what makes for a high impact career. You will get new ideas for impactful paths. It will also help you make a plan based on what you learned, a plan that will help you put those ideas into action.

So in addition to getting that guide, which will get you started, it will sign you up for their newsletter, which is gonna give you regular updates on their research and tell you about high impact job opportunities. More recently, they've also started a podcast, which is fantastic. They've had a lot of great guests on there.

I mean, I'm just looking at some of their recent topics here. So they had, for example, a recent podcast on successful careers, even if you have depression, anxiety, or imposter order. They had David Chalmers on. So if you know anything about AI or ethics, you know David Chalmers, on the nature and ethics of consciousness.

So you get this mix of practicality and big think. They also have a job board at 80,000hours.org helping you find high impact jobs. So look, if you wanna do something to make the world a better place, your job is the best way to do it. And going to 80,000hours.org/deep is how to get started figuring out how to inject impact into your working life.

So go to 80,000hours.org/deep to start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling, and helps solve one of the world's most pressing problems. It's really full circle, Jesse. I mean, I knew those guys years ago. - Yeah. - I had my newsletter and they were just getting started and that was kind of it, you know?

And now full circle, we have podcasts, I can advertise them. It's cool, I enjoy that. I also wanna talk about my favorite URL to say, Zocdoc.com, Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com. This is one of those services that makes so much sense that it almost doesn't even have to be pitched. Like here's the situation, here's the problem that Zocdoc solves.

You need to go see some sort of medical professional. Your tooth hurts, you need to see a dentist. Your leg hurts, you need to see a doctor. You don't have a doctor. And you're like, what do I do next? It's classic adulting for all of the young ones out there.

Or for those of us like my age who have been up to their ears in kids and are like, I haven't had time to think about getting a cardiologist, how do I do that? What do you do? And most people Google or just start texting friends. Do you have a doctor that you can recommend?

This is a problem that would be well solved by an app. And that is what Zocdoc does. It is the only free app that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviews, take your insurance and are available when you need them. So you can immediately find, okay, I need a dentist.

Where are there dentists nearby that take my insurance and are looking for new patients? And let me sign up. Oh wait, maybe before I sign up, I wanna see like, do I like this dentist? Well, here are real reviews. Independent service Zocdoc. Here's real reviews from real patients. Ah, they really like her.

All right, and she's available and she takes my insurance. Done. You get the tooth pain taken care of. So it's one of these ideas that just makes sense and Zocdoc does it well. As I've mentioned before, I have two different healthcare providers right now where they use Zocdoc to handle all of their paperwork.

So when I'm going in, I can just do it online before I go in. I can fill out whatever new forms they need, click a button. I love it. So Zocdoc plays a big role in my life as well. So go to zocdoc.com/deep and download the Zocdoc app for free.

Then find a book, a top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep. Zocdoc.com/deep. Was it? Last time we figured out, Jessie, we're trying to figure out how can we get more ox into the URL? What was our winner? The winner was if Dwayne Johnson did a podcast about building berths for your boats.

And so he had the promo code. His vanity URL would be rockstock. So you get zocdoc.com/rockstock. I think that was the best we got to. We need one more in there. One more in there. But anyways, zocdoc.com. All right, let's do some questions. As mentioned, these are all roughly speaking about the theme of this week's episode, which is how do I stop working all out all the time?

All right, Jessie, what do we have as our first question here? - Oh, we got some good questions here. First is from Fork in the Road. I'm currently working in higher education administration at a rural university. My lifestyle is slow and I have a lot of free time, which I enjoy.

However, my income is quite low. Many of my peers with similar degrees have moved on to data science or software engineering, live in big cities and have fast paced lives. They are definitely pros and cons of both lifestyles. And I don't really see a good way of choosing. - Well, first of all, and I think data scientists, I think fast paced lives.

- Yeah. - They're just slinging hundreds, you know, cocaine all hours of the night, pulling up in their Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles, slapping five. The data scientists do it in the standard deviation. I don't know, I'm trying to think what's on their shirt. I'm pretty clever. So here's what I'm doing here, Jessie.

This is an inversion, right? So we were talking about people who were working too much and wondering how they can maybe make that more sustainable. Let's invert that with this question. Someone who's not working enough or not working that much at all and wondering if they should be working more, but how do they do that in a way that's not going to overwhelm them?

So how do they find that? How do they get to that mean we're looking for? They're coming out from another direction, but trying to end up in that same place, having the right level of work. So as long-time listeners know, my standard answer to any of these should I change my job questions usually comes back to lifestyle-centric career planning.

I say, look, you should have this clear vision of your ideal lifestyle, all aspects of your life, not just work. It should be tangible. You can smell it, taste it, see it, feel it. And then you figure out how do I work backwards from that to make it happen, given whatever opportunities, skills, existing career capital I have in place.

And then you sort of build a reasonable plan to get closer to that vision. This question brings another element into that discussion, which I think is important, which is the notion of an income floor. So lifestyles and lifestyle-centric career planning are abstracted away from details of this is your particular job.

This is your particular income. But we cannot abstract income completely out of these discussions because if your income is below a certain level, there are issues that could arise that will destabilize any aspirational lifestyle goal. There's a stress generation factor that happens. If you feel like you don't have enough discretionary income to handle the things that come up in the normal course of life, it is a constant source of stress.

And it doesn't matter if, yeah, but my house nearby, this rural university has a nice yard and it's scenic. And if you're worried about money all the time, that stress is going to outweigh that. Also, if discretionary income is low enough, so many of the different options you have for actually investing in and fulfilling visions for different areas of your life are gonna be cut off to you.

I can't take this time off. I can't afford to do this. I don't have the money to buy the mountain bike for my dream of mountain biking. So there's something that I call the income floor, which is important. And that's where you take, and I'm using this term discretionary income.

What I really mean by that is your income after fixed expenses. So now we're trying to normalize for like how much does your house cost? You know, how much, you have to pay tuition for private school for your kids because of where you live, that's the best option, et cetera.

So the money you have left over, if that's below a certain floor, which you can conceptually figure out, then a particular lifestyle plan, we can think of as being unsustainable. So it's like, you wanna say, here's my lifestyle vision. How do I, using my existing opportunities and skills and options, how do I get closer to this lifestyle while staying above my income floor?

And we wanna throw that into the discussion here fork in the road, because you said, my income is also quite low. So this is actually gonna be the crux of what you do next is figuring out does low, quite low mean below your income floor. And it's another bit of planning you have to do.

How much money would you need after you pay for your housing expenses, et cetera? How much discretionary income do you think you would need to feel non-stressed and like you have interesting options and the various things that matter for you in your life? If in your current job, you're below that, getting above that income floor is a necessary component of your lifestyle vision that you're trying to move towards.

Now you might find that you're already above it. Yeah, you don't make a ton of money, but where you live is cheap and it's fine. Good benefits, you're not really worried about calamitous whatever health occurrences. So you might be fine, or you might feel that you're close to it, but everything else about your lifestyle where you live is good.

Well, that's fine. Now you're just trying to close an income gap and you can make a plan to do that. I wanna move up to this next level in the administration. I'm gonna do this thing on the side because I have a data science background and I'm gonna do some side work and we can easily push that above.

Or you're gonna have to make a change and say, you know what, I'm well below it. There's nothing I can really do here to get above it. So I'm gonna have to make a change. So the income floor, I think is really important. If you do make a change, I wanna assure you that there is a middle ground between being the administrator in the rural university and big city, fast paced, cliched data scientists doing Coke off the stomach of a stripper vision that we all have of you data scientists.

There is an in-between ground. And how do you access that? What is the map you use to find the in-between ground? It's again, it's this lifestyle center, career planning augmented with the income floor. If you have software engineering skills, if you have data science skills, you can figure out, okay, I don't need to make all of this money.

I need to get above this floor. Oh, you know what? I could go to Boise and work at the tech sector there that's burgeoning. And this is actually a pretty reasonable job, but it gives me above that floor and it still has some of the aspect I like of rural living over here.

When you have a lot of options is what I'm saying. There might be remote work options. Well, I could take this remote work job or I could do contract work. And you know what? If I had five clients doing contract work, I'm above the floor, but I could live wherever I wanted, but the income is better.

You have a lot of options. And this is why I always come back to working backwards from your vision is because that's what allows you to navigate the territory of options. Without that, we fall back on cliches. We fall back on extremes. Without that sort of guidance, we think I either become a lawyer or I become a teacher.

This is a standard Ivy League graduate thing. Or you think I either move to the big city to be a software engineer and I have to somehow like afford to live in the Bay Area, or I have to stay in a very low income administrator job in this rural county.

We think about extremes. We think about cliches. If we don't have a specific compass to navigate us through that territory. So lifestyle vision, career planning with an income floor as a non-negotiable component of wherever you end up, I think you have many more options than you think. You have many more knobs to turn with the degree you have to build that lifestyle than you might at first imagine.

- Mr. Money Mustache sent out an email kind of like moving or he was visited San Francisco and talked about some of those issues. - What was his, he came away from visiting San Francisco saying the lifestyle here is so expensive, why would you live here? Or he came away saying, I'm moving to San Francisco.

- He came away saying he did some research and he's like, there's still a lot of cool things you can do in the city. The food is actually not that much more expensive if you buy it in a grocery store. - Oh, interesting. - Because there's a lot of free places you can go and he took pictures of him in the parks and certain places and walking around, not paying for gas, that sort of thing.

- Here's my, I'm gonna give a deep poll here for like really long time denizens of online culture, especially old blog culture. I'm talking early 2000s here. This reminds me of it. Leo Babuda, Zen Habits. Did you know Zen Habits? - No. - So this was really, he helped kick off this.

So there's this online minimalism movement that really kicked off pre-social media. So these were, when I was getting started, these sites like Zen Habits were a couple years ahead of me. In fact, Leo of Zen Habits actually had a program where you could sign up and he would mentor you as an early blogger.

He mentored me for a while and gave me some advice. So I remember being in grad school at MIT in the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, reading Zen Habits. This is when the minimalists got started a little later, but this was also the time of becoming minimalists. And I don't remember all of them.

They all had minimalism in the name, basically. Courtney Carver, I'm trying to think of the different names. Anyways, it was this whole movement about simplifying. And it really was, I wrote about this in my quiet quitting piece for the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, about, briefly I mentioned, to the millennials like us, this minimalism movement that arose after 9/11, during the financial crisis of 2008, that whole first decade of the 2000s was really millennials trying to grapple with work and life.

And it's when we were moving away from follow your passion. We were the first generation raised on that, to trying to figure out, how do I put work to work on behalf of what I want my life to be? But anyways, Leo was one of the original guys. Zen Habits was about simplifying your life, slowing down.

And he lived in Guam, six kids, was in debt, and was out of shape and smoking or whatever. And through Zen Habits, he began chronicling. He got in better shape, he stopped smoking, built up this audience, and wrote a guide. I forgot even what it was called, but like a PDF guide, and started selling it.

And that did really well by 2005 standards. Today, when you think about someone doing well, we're like, oh, that's great. Jordan Harbinger signed a $5 million podcast deal. This was more like, man, I made $70,000 or something. But he paid off all of his debts. And what made me think about this story, based on what you're talking about, is they moved to San Francisco.

All his six kids, he quit his job, he could make just enough off of this, and they lived really cheaply. So it reminds me exactly what Mr. Money Mustache was talking about. He wanted to live somewhere interesting. So they moved to a row house in San Francisco, they homeschooled their kids, and just went to the parks and to the ocean, and just walked around, and just loved, their whole life was built around just being in an interesting place.

So it made me think about that. He was living cheap, and made a really cool life. So he's like, if we're gonna live cheap, we wanna live somewhere that's fascinating. Zen Habits, that guy was awesome. You would read that, and you would just be like, man, I gotta simplify my life.

That's a good movement. All the older, I have listeners out there who know what I'm talking about, but that was a cool, little cool period in our culture. That then morphed into fire culture, into Mr. Money Mustache. So fire was the follow-up to the online minimalism movement. So fire was more like a geeky version of that.

So the minimalism movement had the Minimalist, and Leo, and Courtney, and Joshua Becker, and these guys were, they're kinda cool. It was kinda, they're cooler guys, like we're gonna just hike with our backpack, and live simply, and Josh and Ryan moved to a cabin for a while. And then we got the new version, which Mr.

Money Mustache helped kick off. And now it's more geeks. Here, my spreadsheet tells me that if I get a 3.6 return post-tax on my SEP IRA, I'm gonna be able to retire. So then there was this kind of geek version of it, but it was all the same idea.

And then the fire movement kinda got shut down, because, I mean, it's still around, but they got super shamed. So then they got super shamed of like, you guys all are privileged, and this and that, and they all got worried about it, and so a lot of them kinda disappeared.

And I don't know what's gonna come next, but that's a whole other conversation. All right, let's do another question here. - Daniel, do you think there's a need for a place where people can go for prolonged periods to perform deep work? A space close to nature, where you have your dedicated habitat, are surrounded by like-minded individuals, and have some things taken care of for you?

- Daniel, these things very much do exist. In fact, it's one of my great hobbies, when I'm feeling stressed out, is to track down or luxuriate in examples of exactly these type of settings, places that are designed to help people do deep work in the most scenic or novel possible environment, with distractions minimized as much as possible.

So these exist all over the place, aimed at different people for different situations. I thought I would take advantage of this question to do a little bit of deep geeking, as I like to call it. I pulled up on my tablet here, just a few examples of these places among many.

So if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see these pictures, but I'll describe what I'm showing for people who are just listening. All right, so this first example I brought up here, BMC, this is the Blue Mountain Center. This is near Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks. So those who are watching see a beautiful Adirondack lodge, that's logs with ceilings that come down low, that's part of a 1,600 acre estate.

So here it says, "Life at BMC is centered "around our guest work, rejuvenation, and communal life. "The atmosphere is informal, cooperative, and curious. "People come here to write. "They get away from everything." I know about this particular center because Bill McKibben, one of my icons, my hero, the writer Bill McKibben, he went here.

I discovered this when I interviewed Bill for a New Yorker column a year or so ago. I was asking him about how he ended up, because his story, if you don't know it, is that he was a writer, lived in Manhattan, was a writer for the New Yorker, living in this small apartment downtown.

And it wasn't a super safe area, right? It was definitely a living in a city experience. And he told me about his apartment getting broken into at some point, and there was nothing for them to steal. Like they broke in, or like, "What am I taking? "There's nothing here." So he was living the city life, and he was on track to be an editor at the New Yorker.

In fact, Bill Shawn had even hinted at the idea that he may be even replace him as the editor-in-chief. So he was on this fast track, and he quit and moved to a cabin in the Adirondacks. And him and his wife, Susan Halpern, who also writes for the New Yorker, still to this day, great writer, they moved up to the Adirondacks, and he wrote a book about nature.

He's like, "I wanna do nature writing, "and I'm gonna live cheaply." So speaking of minimalism, speaking of fire, his whole thing was, "We can live up here for almost nothing. "So with just book advances and random freelance work, "we can support ourselves, and we just live this simple life." And he's still up there today.

He moved across the Lake Champlain to Vermont, but same idea. Anyways, why did he move to the Adirondacks? I interviewed him about this. He said, "I didn't know anything about the Adirondacks "until a year before that quitting event, "a friend of his had a spot at the Blue Mountain Center "in Blue Lake Mountain in the Adirondacks "for a multi-week writing retreat, "and the friend dropped out and said, "Hey, Bill, do you wanna take my spot?" So he just took his spot.

It showed up at this place sight unseen. For those who are watching, I'm showing other aspirational photos here. A lake that the house is looking over, people baking bread. Here's a whole thing about, oh, look at this. Oh, Jesse, look at this. Cell phones are not allowed at Blue Mountain Center.

I'm loving this place more. If I disappear for a few months and you can't find me, go to the Blue Mountain Center. It's probably gonna find me. Here's riders hiking. You see, they all have sort of the pasty skin of riders that have been inside too long. Here they are sitting by a dock.

Here is, now, Jesse, you can correct me if in my description here is a forest, and there's a silhouetted figure, I believe that's Sasquatch, right? There's a silhouette. It looks like a bear standing on his hind legs. I mean, do I have that right? Is that just me? It looks like a bear, right?

- Yeah, it does. - Yeah. So like downside of Blue Mountain Center, you may be eaten by a Sasquatch, but upside, there's good bread, no cell phones. Anyways, that's one example among many. Let me show another quick example here. I love this one. I don't know if they're doing this anymore.

The pandemic might've killed it, but for a while, I thought this was really cool. And this is the Amtrak Riders Residency. So it was a program where as a rider, you apply, you say, "I'm stuck on my book." And what they give you is a berth on a sleeper car for Amtrak from New York to Portland, Oregon.

So a multi-day Amtrak train. I'm showing some photos of this on the screen. And so there's no distractions. You're just in a cross-country Amtrak train, and all you can do is sort of write and think. You're literally stuck on this particular train. - It's quiet the entire time? - Quiet the entire time.

- Quiet cabin the entire time? - Well, you have your own room. - Oh, okay. - You got your own car. Yeah. I just took the Amtrak. I went up to New York real quick for a photo shoot. Was not in the quiet car. The person next to me, and like, I don't, it's not the quiet car.

And I get if you have a phone call to make. This person was just straight up watching content on their phone with no earphones. Just straight up, the volume, like, I don't know what they're, the video or something like that. - Did you move? - Yeah, it was a full train.

- Full train. - Yeah. - So what are you gonna do? - I don't mind. I just read. It was nice. All right, one more example to give. This is near us. Most people don't know about this in DC. So there's a Franciscan monastery associated with, I think with Catholic University here in DC.

And they have this, if you look on the screen, it's like a teeny house, like a modernist small structure in the woods. This is on the grounds of a monastery right here in this inside DC, inside the Beltway, maybe like 20 minutes from where Jesse and I are right now.

Anyways, you can book time to just go stay in this thing. So it's in the city, but in the woods, they have all this land. It's like in the woods, but in the middle of the city. And they say you can enter into deeper communion with God through prayer and solitude.

It's an urban retreat for one person nestled behind a historic Franciscan monastery of the Holy Land in America. But I'll tell you what, a lot of writers go here. So you can commune with God, but you can also get some writing done. It has one bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and an outdoor deck.

And that's it. There's a video about it you can watch. Anyways, people don't know about that, but right here in DC, one to seven nights, you just write the monks and they're like, "Hey, I want to come and do this." And if they approve it, you just in this box, this modernist box with a bed.

And it's like, you can be like a monk for a while and get writing done. So Daniel, there are lots of options. And there should be more, but there's a lot of options out there. If you're looking to get away, especially if you're a writer or an artist, there are a lot of options and I think they're cool.

All right, let's move on. What do we got next, Jesse? - All right, next question is from TJ. How do I find time to work deeply when I'm a busy college student? - So, I mean, this is a college student question, but I think it's relevant to everyone. So I don't do, I try not to do student specific questions anymore where it's just relevant to students.

But I think actually this issue that is being brought up here by TJ is relevant to more than just students, which is this idea of I am too busy to do deep work. All right, here's the thing. You have the core work you have to do. So TJ, you're a college student.

So there's assignments that have to be done, papers have to be written, studying that has to be completed for quizzes and exams. That work is your work you need to do. So the question is just how are you gonna do it? Now, if you do it in the deep style, which is let me focus without distraction when I'm doing that work, and when I'm not doing that work, not be doing that work, or you could do it in a shallow style where you mix it in with lots of other things.

The deep style will take less time. So I don't really understand the underlying premise of I'm too busy to do deep work if that's actually the most efficient way just from a pure time consumption perspective to get things done. So let's reinterpret this question another way, which is I have too much going on to get my core work done.

This is sometimes what people say when they say I'm too busy to do deep work. What they really mean is I'm too busy, my schedule is too crowded with the shallow to actually make progress on the core things I need to do in my job, whether it be a college student having to study for a test, or it's you're working in a business and it's doing your core business strategy, whatever it is.

Well, in that case, here's what you do. You take out your calendar, you build an autopilot schedule. This is what I tell students and it works for everyone else. Everything that occurs regularly, I always have to do reading each week. I always have to do a problem set. You find a time for it this day, this time, week after week, and you block it off on your calendar.

So everything regular gets time. And when you get to the beginning of your week, you do a weekly plan for that week. And if you're having trouble fitting things, do a weekly plan that's very heavy on time allocation. Let me actually find time on my calendar for all the major things I have to get done.

You don't always do this in weekly planning in general, but if you're feeling busy and overwhelmed, let's do this for a little while. So now you're placing, okay, I gotta work on this term paper. I gotta get these notes cleaned up, whatever. Getting that all in your calendar. And either fits or it doesn't.

If it doesn't fit, you only have two options. You can make more room by quitting things. So if you're a student, this might mean forget this club. I can't be involved in these six things. If you have another type of job, it might be your project load. I gotta leave this committee.

I gotta get off of this project. I have to postpone this until the summer because it's just a reality, right? You need more time. You gotta clear up more time. The second option you have is to get the work you have done more efficiently. So if you're a student, you could start using the more efficient study techniques I talk about, for example, in my book, how to become a straight A student, or in the archives of my blog at calnewport.com.

You can go back to 2007, 2008, get a lot of articles on it. That makes things take less time. You can take things off your calendar to free up more time. Those are your two options. You gotta face the productivity dragon here and figure out what your strategy is gonna be.

There is no other third option where the work gets done by just you ignoring it and saying, stop bothering me about things like deep work. I'm just too busy. So you gotta face the reality of your schedule by autopiloting and doing heavy time allocation weekly plans. Look at what you're facing.

If it doesn't fit, you have those two weapons and you have to deploy them to whatever extent is required to make this schedule reasonable. Keep in mind that might entail radical changes. The college student equivalent of, I can't be a double major and I'm gonna use these credits so I can reduce my course load and I gotta quit three clubs.

It might be whatever equivalent that is for your job, but your schedule is your schedule. And getting to the theme of this episode, if you just say, I'll just get after it, I'll work late, I'll work on the weekends, we'll somehow make this work, you're gonna burn out. Sustainability is the key.

And this is how you begin to fight more for sustainability at the scale of the schedule. If this doesn't fit in a reasonable way, I have to make changes. All right, I wanna do a case study. So when you send in your questions for the show, you can also opt to send in case studies of advice working well.

All right, well, this case study comes from Ayaz, a 28 year old engineer. Ayaz writes, "My wife is a surgical resident and as part of her training, she had to complete a five week rotation in Anchorage, Alaska. My company was open to me working remotely on a temporary basis, so I went with her.

While there, instead of working from home, I decided to rent a coworking space 1.5 miles away. This was around May to June. And I remember you talking about the concept of working from your home, and this is exactly what I was doing. Separating work from home made intuitive sense to me.

Boundaries are important. They allow you to give shape to life. The cowork was a quiet 15 minute walk away. This allowed me to get in the mindset of working. You know, some parentheses, I would often listen to deep questions on these walks. That's a smart thing to do. The slow walk in your podcast would help prime my mind to focus intensely while working.

Between meetings to transition from one product to another or relax my nerves, I would also walk in the downtown Anchorage and grab a cup of coffee. It was a perfect way to get some thinking done or mentally shift focus from one project to another. I also realized the profound impact mountains have on my experience of depth.

The short stay in that city and working from your home has convinced me my vision of the deep life includes living close to the mountains and preferably walking to work. So I like this case study for a particular reason I want to emphasize, but first I want to fact check something here, Jesse.

I'm reading IS as saying he's 1.5 miles from his office and then he gets there in 15 minutes walking. - He's walking pretty fast. - That's a fast walk. - Yeah. - I think that might be an impossibly fast walk. A moderate paced walk is about 20 minutes to a mile.

1.5 miles. I think he maybe he meant 0.5 miles or and I think this is equally likely he's 11 feet tall. Good if you've figured out the stride length, I actually think that would work out just about right. I mean, I think the engineers among us can figure that out, but I think that would, having a double length stride would probably get you down to roughly a moderate walking pace of a 10 minute mile.

So 1.5 miles, 15 minutes. So IS is 11 feet tall. The thing I wanted to point out from this is the theme of this episode, which is trying to combat burnout by having, finding this balance between intensity and non-intensity. It's not just about time. I have busy periods and non-busy periods.

I have this many hours of work versus that many hours of work. I'm looking at my schedule like with TJ and I'm figuring out does it fit or not? And if it doesn't fit, I need to take things out or make things smaller. Location also plays a role in the intensity of your work.

Finding the separation that I has found. Here's my home, here's my office. And I have a ritual about how I transition from one to another. And during the day, I can leave the office and see the mountains and walk in the downtown Anchorage and get a cup of coffee.

The location can shift, location to recharge, location to transition from home to work. That will have a huge impact on the feeling of intensity of your actual effort. So location can matter just as much as time. This is something I don't think we thought enough about during the knowledge workers who had to go remote during the pandemic, especially those who lived in places where that remoteness lasted for a really long time.

We didn't think enough about location. We said, technically speaking, my laptop in my bedroom gives me all I need. And what we should have been saying is, but what is my soul need to actually get this work done in a sustainable way? I need to get out of this house.

I need to be in whatever, a deep work shed in the backyard, or this is a time, you know, because I'm lucky enough to have a stable knowledge work job that's not going away during the pandemic. We're not spending money on anything else. We're not going on vacation. Great, I'm gonna lease an office space for this year.

So I have some place to go. Like we should have cared more about that. And I wanna hear what IAS does once they get back to where they are before. Are they gonna move somewhere with mountains? Are they gonna have a walk to work? It's exciting to me. Lifestyle-centered career planning is unfolding here, Jesse, he had experiences that built a richer understanding of what he wanted his lifestyle to be like.

And now he has this crystal clear image, which he can use to guide. So he needs location matters, where they live, like that really is gonna narrow down their search and open up some really interesting opportunities. So we got two things out of this, an emphasis on the importance of location, and injecting some slowness into your life, and a cool case study in how really good lifestyle-centered career planning plans emerge.

Let me do one more quick question here before we move on to something interesting. This one comes from Anonymous. Oh, you should read this, Jesse, I'm sorry. I'm stepping on your toes here. - No problem. This comes from Anonymous. Can you elaborate more on the celebration bucket? Is it definite?

Its definition seemed more elusive to me. - Right, so we talked about the deep life. We talk about, you have to focus on all aspects on your life when trying to find depth, focusing on what's important and minimizing or limiting things that aren't. And we often use the term buckets to talk about the different aspects of your life that are important.

I like to alliteratively refer to C, words that begin with C, when naming my buckets, and we had craft, and we had community, and we have contemplation, and we have constitution. And the last one I often talk about is celebration. Anonymous is saying, what does that mean? So roughly speaking, Anonymous, when I think about celebration, I think about cool things in the world, appreciating cool things in the world unrelated to your work.

I think you can break that down into two specific subcategories, hobbies and gratitude. So this is, celebration includes things you do just for the pure non-functional value of doing them. I'm really into film. I hike, I'm into whatever, alpine, ice climbing, whatever it is, these interests you develop that you can appreciate and find great value in that have nothing to do with your job.

It's non-instrumental. Also captures gratitude. So celebration is about, do I have on a regular basis gratitude for things that I'm looking forward to or enjoy about my life right now? Do I have that in my life on a regular basis? I think it's important, for example, to regularly engineer experiences of gratitude into your life.

I'm actually putting aside time. I'm gonna go for a walk. I'm gonna get home from work a little early. I'm gonna go for a walk with the sunset. And I'm gonna think about some things I really am grateful for right now and this nice, relaxing weekend that's coming up.

And I'm really looking forward to it and just generate that sense of gratitude. I do that a lot. I started doing that in grad school. So I even refer to these experiences now internally as Cambridge moments. 'Cause I used to engineer gratitude a lot when I was in grad school at MIT.

But then I picked that up, especially in the winter, I like to do this a lot. As the days get a little bit longer, I like, look, we still have sun in the sky and it's only gonna get brighter as the season goes on. And the snow is kind of scenic.

And engineered gratitude, that's part of the celebration bucket as well. So your hobbies and gratitude, that all falls on the celebration. Those are two aspects of your life that require emphasis. Start with a habit and then when you get around to it, overhaul that whole part of your life.

I'm answering that question in this episode because the celebration bucket is a great bulwark against the craft bucket pushing you towards too much busyness, towards too much intensity. It is a bulwark against overwork and burnout because it is things that are non-instrumental, enjoyment. There's something fundamentally slow about a hobby while enjoy something slow about an engineer gratitude experience.

So I think if we're gonna think about how to inject more slowness into an otherwise overloaded life, keep the celebration bucket very much in mind. All right, we're gonna conclude things with something interesting where I talk about interesting things that people sent to the interesting at calnewport.com email address.

First, let me mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. And that's our longtime friends at Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkist a lot because I think reading is the best way to gain high quality ideas and high quality ideas are the currency to success in our current culture.

If you're into reading, you need to be a Blinkist subscriber. When you subscribe to Blinkist, you get access to 15 minute summaries called Blinks of over 5,000 nonfiction books. You also can get 15 minute summaries of podcasts. So they call those shortcast. This allows you to very quickly figure out what the big ideas are from a book and make that decision.

Do I know what I need to know? Or am I intrigued enough I wanna buy this book? So it is like having a sidekick for the reading life. Jesse, you were telling me before we went on the air that you have a pretty particular Blinkist process, right? You're a long time Blinkist user.

What's your Blinkist process? How do you use Blinkist? - Yeah, it's pretty cool. So for instance, Ryan Holiday sent out his books email last week, I think. So I went through those books and then went into Blinkist, put them on some of those on my save list. And then about twice a week, I go into the app and read some of my save ones and then take them off saved and then it keeps it honed.

- Are you more a fan of the written Blinks or the audio Blinks? - The written ones. - The written ones. So if I didn't clarify before, you have two options with the Blinks. If you're on the go, you can listen to them or in the app, you can just read them real quick.

So I like Jesse's habit. Every time you hear a book you're thinking about, throw it in the Blinkist in the app and then just turn through those. What a great way to keep up with all the books, all the big ideas and figuring out triage you want you wanna buy and what you don't.

So if you're gonna be a reader and you should be, if you're a fan of the deep life, you should have a Blinkist account. They have a nice special feature I wanna mention real quick right now called Blinkist Connect that allows you to share your premium account. So you can get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

So you can give a Blinkist account to a friend that you think needs it when you sign up for one. All right, so right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven day trial and you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off and a seven day free trial. That's Blinkist.com/deep. And don't forget this limited time, for a limited time you can use this Blinkist Connect program to share your premium account. You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. I also wanna talk about another one of our sponsors, Ladder.

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So that's ladderlife.com/deep. Go there today to see if you're instantly approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep, ladderlife.com/deep. All right, our final segment, something interesting. People send me cool things from around the web relevant to living a deep life to my address at interesting@calnewport.com. I like to share things when I can.

All right, today's example I wanna share is an article from, this is from CBS News. So I saw this and people sent this to me from a few places. If you are watching at youtube.com/calnewportmedia episode 231, you'll see this on your screen, an article where the title is This Tokyo Cafe Serves an Antidote to Writers Block.

So here is the idea behind this cafe in Tokyo is that you don't just go in there and work, which you do, you pay $2.50 an hour, there's wifi, an air-cooled computer stand, but you fill out a registration slip where you tell the proprietors of the cafe what you're trying to do and how often you want them to come check on you and make sure you're actually doing it.

So you don't just get a place to work, you get pressure to actually get that work done. So like there's an example here, I'm reading, here's someone who has to write a lecture due tomorrow. So on his registration slip, he asked to be checked in on, as they put in parentheses, gently harassed every half hour till he's done.

I have a couple other examples in here, a lot of writers come in here. So they'll say, I wanna make sure I get this many words written. Here's a writer who says they wanna get 24 pages done and they wanna be checked on every half hour about that, et cetera.

Anyways, that's interesting. You wanna get things done, spend your money to try to get someone to harass you into actually doing that work. Now, the question is, what is my advice if you don't wanna go to that cafe in Tokyo? I would say it has to do with rituals and systems.

This is when and where I do my deep work and this is the rituals I do before and after that work is actually getting done. That's probably the more consistent way to actually get really hard cognitive work done. But what my advice shares with the strategy of this Tokyo cafe is a recognition that deep work is difficult and our brain will try to get out of it if you approach it casually.

You gotta have something else. You gotta have structure. It could be pain someone to bother you or it could be a nice schedule and a writing shed, but don't just think I'll get to it when I get to it. All right, one last thing I wanna mention before we sign off for today.

Readers of my last book, "A World Without Email" know how much research I pulled from the UC Irvine informatics professor, Gloria Mark. Gloria Mark is one of the, I would say the, not one of, the leading researcher on the impact of distractions in the workplace. So as you can imagine, I'm quite familiar with her work.

Anyway, she has a new book out. So I'm giving this an unsolicited plug here on my show. I'm loading it up on the screen as well. The book is called "Attention Span, A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity." So I just wanna give this my thumbs up.

She really is the leading researcher on doing these office ethnographies where they go in and study people in office environments. How often do they check an email? How often do they go back to their inbox? They did research with thermal cameras and heart rate monitors. What happens to their stress levels when they see a message coming in?

So she is the expert, so I'm glad she finally has this book. The only thing, Jesse, if you're gonna buy this book, you are gonna have to look past this rube they got the blurb in on the cover here. I don't know if you can see that. So there's a Cal Newport blurb on the cover of this book.

So that's how you know I recommend it. So "Attention Span" by Gloria Mark, despite the fact that my name's on it, you should really give that book a try. All right, Jesse, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thank you everyone for listening or watching. If you wanna submit your own questions or case studies, see that link that's right in the show note description of this episode.

We'll be back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)