So today, I want to talk about a curious paradox. Often some of the most interesting, remarkable people that we can think of, the people who seem for many of us to personify the deep life we want to pursue, aren't that busy. So why is this? Because most of us who feel like we have not gotten close to living a remarkable lives are often overwhelmed and busy all the time.

How is it possible that the people who are most impressive are also often the least busy among the people we know? I want to tackle that paradox today because I think there are some lessons for any of us trying to be more remarkable. So I have three ideas I want to present.

The first idea I'm going to actually pull from an article I wrote in 2011. So this is a classic essay from my newsletter blog. It was very popular at the time, but it has a seed that I want to plant here because it's going to help grow into my bigger point.

So for those who are watching, you will see this on the screen now. And I should say, if you're listening to this podcast, this is episode 285. So just go to the deep life.com/listen, find episode 285, and you can get the video. All right. So here's the article. It's called, if you're busy, you're doing something wrong.

The surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers. Now, this article is getting into what is now a over-cited, over-referenced, over-simplified study from the journal Psychological Review that at the time when I was writing this was still new and still interesting. This was a study where they looked at violin, professional violin players.

They looked at their training habits. If this sounds familiar, it's because Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in Outliers. It was one of the canonical examples about the reality of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice being the main way that people get better at demanding skills. They have to practice in a way that's deliberately designed to stretch their abilities past where they're comfortable.

So in the study, they're watching how these elite musicians actually practice. All right. So I have a few bolded lines from this article I'm going to read now. All right. First line, the time diaries reveal that both groups spent on average the same number of hours on music per week.

So this is looking at elite musicians and good, but not elite musicians and comparing them. The elite players were spending almost, I see, the elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice. All right. So this is the setup. Average players, elite players practice a lot.

The elite players do almost entirely deliberate practice. So that means they're not just playing stuff they already know. They're specifically doing exercises to get them better. So they're, for example, taking a section of song that they can't quite play full speed and increasing the speed they're practicing at to be a little bit more than where they're comfortable to sort of stretch their ability.

All right. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. The elite player slept an hour more per night than the average players. The elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players. So this is interesting.

The elite players do really hard practice, but not, they don't do the other stuff. They also don't practice all day. They consolidate their practice into two concentrated chunks. And outside of that practice, they were more relaxed and had more sleep than the average players. So I'm going to read here my summary.

So I said, this provides, this study provides, empirical evidence that there's a difference between hard work and hard to do work. Hard work is deliberate practice. It's not fun while you're doing it, but you don't have to do too much of it in any one given day. Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining.

It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you just like the average players from the study, feeling tired and stressed. I then conclude if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. All right. So this is really interesting.

Like what we're finding here is this idea that what it takes to get good at something, really good at something is hard, but not hard to do. It's hard in the moment, but there's only so much of it you can do per day. And what happens with the rest of your time is irrelevant to whether you become really good.

The three to four hours that these professional musicians practice every day, that's it. That's what's important for them. There's not more they can do. That's about the limit. So the rest of that day is free. So getting good, getting really good can be unrelated to being busy. And at the highest levels, like these elite musicians, busyness actually gets in the way of getting good because it distracts you from the practice activities that matter.

It exhausts you and takes away energy that you could later put into the actual activities that are going to make you better. All right. So what's my second idea here? Building on that, I'm going to say rare skills fuel remarkability. So what I mean by that is, OK, why get really good at something?

Well, getting really good at something gives you leverage over your professional life. It gives you options and opportunities. It is the primary fuel you have for crafting your life to be more remarkable. And my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which actually came out soon after that article we just read, right?

So these ideas are actually replicated in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. In that book, I introduced this term called career capital that captures this reality. So career capital is a metaphorical substance that captures your rare and valuable skills. The more rare and valuable skills you have, the more career capital you have.

Your career capital is what you invest into your working life to make it better. The more career capital you have, the more investments you can make into taking control of your life, where you live, how much you work, the impact of your work, the conditions under which you work, the pace and rhythm of what you work, the specific projects you work on or not.

The better you are at something, the more control you have over that. The more ability you have to craft those type of professional lives that seem to the outside world to be quite remarkable. So as you get better at something, you get more options to make your life remarkable.

Not to make more money, not necessarily just to be straight up more successful, but more remarkable. So idea three is to put these two things together. Let's follow this syllogism through to its conclusion. So if rare and valuable skills doesn't require busyness to develop, but rare and valuable skills fuel remarkability, we put those together and we get remarkable lives don't require busyness.

A implies B, B implies C, A implies C. Little propositional logic there for discrete mathematics fans. This then is why we see people whose lives often hit us remarkable aren't busy, because the core of that remarkability is their rare and valuable skills. And actually, busyness is orthogonal. Use some linear algebra here, as long as we're using math terms, is orthogonal to busyness.

Busyness is not needed to get good, and it can even get in the way. Right? So this seems like a pretty interesting connection. You don't need busyness to have remarkable life. The problem is, however, there's two traps that are lurking here. So we can think of this as our fourth idea.

There's two traps here that are lurking. All right. One, as you get better at things, you will be given more interesting opportunities that will bring with them the requirement that you become more busy. There's a trap here, a great remarkability. I got to get that by being good at things.

But as you get good at things, a lot of outside forces will try to hijack your life from your streamlined platonic remarkability that you had in mind. An example I think about here sometimes is the YouTuber and engineer Mark Rober, who, if you don't know, because maybe you don't have kids of a certain age, he does these really elaborate engineering-based projects and then does very catchy YouTube videos about it.

This is the guy that built those glitter bombs that catch porch pirates. You steal the box off the porch, and he had all these elaborate traps built into them. And he's done a lot of other things. They do these engineering videos. One of the things I've noticed is as he got more successful, so his YouTube channel is very big, he became friends with the host of ABC's late night show.

I'm blanking on that name. Who is that, Jesse, from way back when he was on The Man Show? Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description.

This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on the show. All right, let's get back to it. Well, whatever. Yeah, I'll look it up. Yeah, look it up. Okay. But anyways, he became friends with him. Uh, and kept going on to, I'm going to recognize this name so hard when you say it, we're not going to get invited on his show, ABC late night show.

I'm doing it right now. Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah, I know that. All right. Jimmy Kimmel. Uh, so he started going on Jimmy Kimmel show, uh, and got really successful. It seems to me that Mark Rober, who was doing really well with these videos, you can just crunch the numbers because the overhead was low.

It would take three months to make one of these videos. Uh, but it would be like him and his brother typically. And then you could calculate the money he was making on the 20, 30 million views or whatever. He's doing very well. Right. He got busier and I don't know this for a fact.

I don't know anything about him, but you know, he, he bought this big warehouse space for filming fine. Um, but then he launched a, a pro a company, a subscription box company, which is a cool company. My kids do it crunch box where, you know, you get the box of stuff and build it, but that's a really time consuming thing to do is to run a company that sells a physical product that has to be boxed and sent out.

And then he signed this deal with max HBO max to do all these shows for them. I mean, it just seems like his life is very, very busy now in a way where just five years ago, it's like, I bake these videos, it's me and my brother. And like someone edits them and I do really well.

And I can focus on what's really good because opportunities arise. Hey, we can build this company. You can do shows on this network. Opportunities arise as you get better, which can pull you away from a really remarkable life and into just a more standard, like very successful, but probably very busy life.

The other trap is that as you get better, you get opportunities for a larger and more time consuming instantiations of the thing you're doing. So even if you are careful to avoid the Mark Rober trap of, let me add this company and add another, I can do TV. In addition to videos, even if you avoid that trap, as you get better, the time required to do things, the things you've always been doing, uh, can also get up, could also go up.

So we see this it's Oscar season. We see this with directors. I think about like Greta Gerwig, how much more time was involved trying to direct Barbie versus probably like Francis Ha. Just because of the scope, the giant, uh, sets and all the actors and everything that was involved in it and the marketing that's involved in that she's doing the same thing, making really good movies.

But now it takes a lot more time or Chris Nolan and Oppenheimer versus Chris Nolan with a crew of four making memento. They're doing the same thing, but as you get better, the stakes increase. I mean, even my own life is like this. What goes into me publishing a book today is way more time consuming than what it was when I was publishing, you know, even so good, they can't ignore you.

And certainly my student books where I was like, yeah, I'll do a few interviews when it comes out. Hey, books out. All right, back to work. I don't like that anymore. It's months of months of stuff because I got better at what I was doing. So I didn't change what I'm doing, but the size and therefore busyness induced by the standard thing you've always been doing gets bigger as you get, as you get better.

So how do we avoid those traps if we don't want to be busy? We want to be remarkable, but not busy. The first trap, I think you just have to try to avoid it or be really, really open about the trade-off you're making. I think we should just have more willingness as a more willingness to say, I know I could do that show on HBO, but I'm not like this is working well.

I just want to keep doing this. Well, that should be an option. That's more on the table. A more sophisticated hack you can do here is like, okay, maybe an opportunity arises. You want to explore, give it a tight time gate. I'm going to stay within these time bounds on this so I can explore something without it taking over my life.

I think this is the way I think about the new media aspects of what I do. I thought podcasting, for example, and everything that surrounds it, I was like, this, this is important. I think this is the way to talk to an audience. But what I've done, and Jesse can attest to this, is I have a half day limit.

I spend a half day a week. It has to live in there. That's where all this stuff has to live in a half day a week to show we actually do. If we want to add something new to it, either I have to make time for it or find someone who can do that for us.

We released this on YouTube now, but I wasn't going to spend a lot more time for that. We had to find a good partner and figure out how we were going to do this. That's the other way you can do it. I do have to expand some. Let me put very careful boxes around where that exploration happens.

It's going to stay in there. For the second trap, that's unavoidable. As you get better at things, you're going to have opportunities to do it at a bigger scale. It's going to take more time. Greta Gerwig is happy that she gets to do Barbie in part because I think she had good profit participation and the movie did 1.5 billion.

She's probably very happy about that. That's harder to avoid, but you have to be really careful about it. I'm going to pull an idea out of my book, Slow Productivity, here. You have to have real variations in intensity. Movie directors do this very well. All right, I'm working on my big movie.

There's going to be an eight-month period where it's just all in, but the eight months that follow everything being done, I'm doing nothing. I'm just sitting and thinking and trying to figure out what I want to do next. We see that with creatives like movie directors. It's very intense when they're working on a movie, but they'll also take a lot of time off.

Chris Nolan worked really hard on Oppenheimer, but also he doesn't have a smartphone and doesn't use email. He's like, "Okay, I'll do this hard thing, but it's really the only hard thing I do. Then I can take a complete break from that before I work on my next project." This natural variation in intensity, that's an idea for my book, Slow Productivity.

That's a way of dealing with, as you get better and your projects get harder, you also at that same point have the leverage to say, "Great, but then I'm going to take time off after this," or, "I'm not going to do anything else unrelated, so I could just do this one really hard thing as well as I can." All right, so there's our paradox.

That's the explanation. Why do people with remarkable lives sometimes seem less busy than us? Because busyness is unrelated and sometimes even an obstacle to being really good, and being really good is where remarkability almost always comes from. If you find yourself adding more and more onto your plate in the pursuit of a remarkable life, you're doing it wrong.

If you're busy, there could be other psychological advantages to that, but you're not deploying a useful strategy for building a remarkable life. Remarkability is not something that alchemizes from an abundance of action. It's something that is instead crafted by the main tool of skill, and skill and busyness do not play well together.

So that's how we can separate those two things. Just see, I have this phantom article on this topic that is referenced in the very earliest essays I ever wrote for my newsletter and blog, but I can't find the actual article. So I know at some point I wrote this thing called The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar, and it was back when I was writing student books.

It was about this idea that road scholars, who you have to be very accomplished, are often way more relaxed than the average student on the dean's list, and it's because to do something really impressive, impressive enough to become a road scholar, you have to be really good at something which really requires a focus, and so they're not busy in the way that other people are.

I can't find the article. In fact, I can find... It's like the third or fourth post at the very beginning of my blog says, "As we discussed last week in The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar," and it references case studies, like Daniel, Acosta, blah, blah, blah. I can't find it.

I don't know where the article is. It's like disappeared into the gaps of the internet, or maybe I emailed it but never added it to the blog, and I don't know, but it's lost. It exists out there somewhere. I'm sure a fan will find it. I still remember that phrase, though, The Paradox of the Relaxed Road Scholar.

It's a phrase I use all the time, but I can't find... There's nothing for me to cite there. All right, anyways, that's all we have for our deep dive. I want to move on here to questions, but before we do, let's talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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They're increasing capacity, and this is fantastic and it's worth waiting for. So that's Mauinuivenison.com/deepquestions to get 20 percent off. We also want to talk about our sponsor, MOSH, M-O-S-H. So here's the thing. As I get older, I don't really always need the big three square meals, especially if I'm on the go and drink a lot of coffee.

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First question's from A World Without Baseball. Good name. I really, well, depending on how you look at it. I like this name. I really like a lot of the parts of your productivity system, the time block daily plan, the quarterly plan, the core values and Trello. I am confused about the weekly plan.

How does this interact with other parts of your system? Well, I'm hoping A World Without Baseball is wistful, right? Like we're temporarily in A World Without Baseball because it's the off season. If he's promoting A World Without Baseball as a good thing, well, then we got other problems, my friend.

Got other problems. All right. Good question. People ask a lot about the weekly plan and how it fits into my multi-planning methodology. So let's talk about that briefly. A quick plug, by the way, in the final segment of this episode, I'm going to be talking about a new article of mine where I go into detail and multi-scale planning.

So, you know, stay tuned for that for a deeper dive, but let's just get specific here. So what does a weekly plan do? Well, you build it every week, probably on Monday or maybe at Friday before the week is done. When you build your weekly plan, you reference at a higher scale, your strategic plan, your plan that you update once every quarter or season with your bigger goals at that timescale.

So when you build your weekly plan, you want to look up a scale and say, what are the big projects that I'm working on this quarter or season? Then you want to look at your calendar for the week ahead and say, okay, where is there time for me to make effort on these big objectives that aren't reflected by an urgent email, or there's no one pushing me to do it.

And you look to find time. I suggest you probably want to actually block off some of the time you find for working on these big objectives, add it to your calendar, like any other meeting or appointment. So it's protected and it gets done. This is also a time when you can rearrange your calendar.

This is the hidden magic of weekly planning is you look at your calendar and you realize, man, all these days have just enough stuff that I can't really make progress on this big project. But if I look at Tuesday, the first thing is optional. I could cancel that. And the second thing I could move to be right after this meeting on Thursday, because it's with the same people.

And if I do that, I free up four hours and now I can make progress on the technical report I'm writing. It's part of the magic of weekly planning is not just finding time for big objectives, but also making time for big objectives. And you'll never do this if you're just reactive.

Hey, what do I need to work on next? Let me look at my inbox and calendar. Oh, there's another meeting, right? You're never going to free up that time if you're just going moment to moment. The final thing you can do during weekly planning is look at your task systems, remind yourself of what's important.

This is a good time during your weekly planning to update and clean up your task systems. If you use a structured system, like I recommend with roles and statuses, you can move things around. OK, I'm not this I heard back from. Let me move that. Let me clarify this.

You're kind of cleaning up your your task system and identifying if there's any really important tasks that definitely need to get done. I'll often write a reminder about those in my weekly plan. So I'll go back to my task system just during a normal task block just to knock off a bunch of stuff.

But if there's a few big things in that system that are really important, I'll jot it down. I might even find time on my calendar when I'm going to do those specific tasks and protect it in advance. So you can work with your task system as well. So you look up to your strategic plan, reflect those objectives into your weekly into your week, moving things if needed.

Then you look, I guess we could say sideways to your task system and clean that up and see what are your priorities and make sure that you've made a note of that somewhere. Now you're ready to tackle your week. Weekly plans. So your task systems, your Trello. For me, it's Trello.

Yeah. One board per role, one column per status. And people ask like, oh, so are the tasks leaving your task system and going out your weekly plan? No, they live in your task system. You can remind yourself in your weekly plan. You can actually schedule time for a task on your calendar for the week.

But think of that as a reminder as well. It lives in your task system until done and then you remove it. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Mario. What counts as work in fixed schedule productivity? Does it include errands like getting groceries and going to the pharmacy?

Does it include mentally demanding things, but not related to your job, such as reading books? Well, just as a reminder, fixed schedule productivity is the meta productivity strategy where you fix in advance. These are the hours I'm going to work. And then you do whatever you need to, to make your work fit into there.

Now, I call it a meta productivity strategy because it's going to force you to innovate different strategies for how you agree to work and schedule work and how efficiently you tackle work because you have this back pressure coming from the need to fit all your work into a given constraint.

I was thinking about a variation on this, but I'm not going to go there right now. Let's keep this simple. So let's just summarize. You fix the time in advance and you work backwards to do whatever you can to make your work fit. So you'll invent a lot of tactics for how you do that and also just forces you to be more reasonable about how many things you have on your plate at the same time, because it has to fit.

It's really a good strategy because of the Parkinson's law style effect of schedules. In an age where work is always available because of mobile computing, your phone, your laptop, your tablet, and there's always more work to do, right? There's a new email, a new idea, a new request. There's always something to do.

Work can fill any space that you give it. So especially in today's world, it's not a bad idea to say, "This is when I want to work. How do I work backwards and be successful within those constraints?" And you'd be surprised by how effective you can be without having to work a huge amount of hours.

So Mario is asking, "What about non-professional tasks like errands, going to the grocery store, going to the pharmacy, or things like reading?" Fixed-scale productivity is work hours. That's what it's for. This is when I'm working. I don't work beyond there. So it has nothing to say about what you do outside of work.

That's a different type of thinking. If you want to do a non-professional task during your fixed schedule hours, well, it's just taking some of the time, right? So that's just less time you have to get the work done, but that schedule doesn't shift. So if you say, "Look, I work from nine to four and I have to make it fit.

So I got to triage things and have systems for checking with clients so they don't expect to call at five or whatever." You can go to the grocery store in the middle of that, but you still only have 10 to four to get your work done. So it just depends on how you want to do that.

One thing I used to do when I had a dog and I was a postdoc is my fixed schedule was in two blocks. And I had a midday portion where I didn't work. I would go for a run with my dog and do some errands. So that's one thing you might do here is a fixed schedule doesn't have to be one big block of time.

It can be block, unblocked, block, and then you can move more of the non-professional stuff in between those blocks. But the basic idea is simple. This is the time when I work, I don't work beyond it. That's the non-negotiable that you're starting with. All right, who do we got next?

Next question's from Amit. "With respect to slow productivity, should I, as a grad student, perform my limited amount of tasks sequentially or spend every day doing new research for a couple hours? My tasks include managing my time between new research, paper reviews, and coursework." The things that are most important you want to do most often.

So as a grad student, assuming you're a doctoral student, your research is the most important thing you do. So you should work on it regularly. All the other stuff you figure out how to spread out on the time that remains. So that might mean for you, nine to noon, that's research.

And then noon to four is like the other stuff, coursework, paper reviews, administrative stuff. And you kind of figure that out and rotate through and you do one thing one day and nothing another day, however you want to do that. But the research always gets done. It's like me with my writing.

I just always write. I don't say, okay, I'm going to write till I'm done. And now I'm going to work on a course. Now when I'm done doing that, I'm going to work on a research paper. I'm just always writing. That's the non-negotiable because it's the core engine of what I do best.

And then I make the other stuff fit however I need to in the time that remains. So as a grad student, I mean, research every day. That'd be my recommendation. - So your weekly plan has just writing daily on it? - Yeah. If I'm writing a book, it's basically every day.

Yeah. And even if I'm not because of my New Yorker tempo, it usually is non-teaching days. I'm just writing. And on those days as well, sometimes as well. Yeah. So some stuff can be sequential. The core stuff you should do as much as possible. All right. Who have we got next?

- Next question is from Lisa. With slow productivity, how do I gauge if I'm doing enough on a short-term scale? Business and exhaustion are no longer markers of productivity. If anything, they indicate the opposite. But I don't have enough experience and success with a slow productivity approach to trust that my quarterly plan is good and on track.

- All right, Jesse, I'm thinking we should name this question our slow productivity corner question of the week. So we want to make sure at least one question a week is related to my new book, Slow Productivity. Find out more about the book, read an excerpt, get a bunch of pre-order bonuses at calnewport.com/slow.

All right. Good question here. Lisa wants to know if I'm not using busyness and exhaustion as my marker of doing enough, how do I know if what I'm doing is good? This question is important for two reasons. One, the specifics of my answer, but two, the setup. One of the core ideas in my book is a look at how we currently implicitly think about productivity in the knowledge work space.

And what we do now, even if we don't know this terminology, what we do now is we embrace a concept I call pseudo productivity. Pseudo productivity is exactly what Lisa mentions here. It's the idea that we should use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more you're doing, the more useful you are.

Now, this isn't an accurate measure of the value you're producing, but it's like a reasonable heuristic that we fall back on. More is better than less. Activity is better than non-activity. So how do you as a knowledge worker, therefore, feel like you're doing all you can for your organization?

Because you're busy all the time. You're doing a lot of activity to the point where it feels like too much. And then you get some sort of psychological piece of, well, at least I'm not slacking off. Now, I think it's a terrible way to actually manage work because A, busyness can be completely unrelated from producing stuff that matters.

And B, in an age of ubiquitous wireless internet and mobile computing, there's never any end to how much work you can do and when you can do it. So the footprint of work in the pseudo productivity regime combined with modern technology, the footprint is unending. You always feel guilty when you're not working.

You're always going to do more work than you should be doing. You always are going to be in the zero sum internal tug of war between the demands of pseudo productivity and the demands of being a human. And it's a terrible internal turmoil that we're all quietly suffering through because we have this insufferable definition of productivity.

So slow productivity says, forget that. Pseudo productivity does not work anymore. That's not how we should measure it. Here's an alternative way of thinking about producing great stuff in a way that doesn't burn you out. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. So then Lisa says, okay, but this is hard.

Psychologically, this is hard because if I am going to be doing fewer things and I can't fall back on stress as a way to assuage my fear that I'm being lazy, what do I do with that anxiety? And partially, Lisa, I'm going to say, sit with it for a little bit.

Do this for a couple of quarters and you'll get that feedback. Oh, I'm doing fine. Yeah, I'm doing fewer things, following the systems I talk about in my book, which allows you to do that without blowing up your job or walking into your boss's office and saying, I quite quit.

No, it's way more nuanced than that, way more subtle than that. But you can, if you're careful about it, drastically reduce how much you're working on. And if you follow my advice properly, as laid out in the book, you're going to get more stuff done. This is the thing that people miss.

When you have a lot of things on your plate, it generates busyness very well. It doesn't generate productive output very well because you spend more and more of your time servicing the administrative and overhead needs of these obligations. That takes away time from actually producing the stuff that matters.

So having fewer things on your plate, you move through those things at a faster rate so that the total number of things you accomplish in a given quarter is actually more than when you were "busier." But it's going to take a quarter or two before you believe that. So just take that quarter or two.

What's the worst that could happen? You feel a little anxious, like, am I doing enough? Just sit with that. Don't try to assuage that anxiety by being busy again. If you're really miscalibrating and you're not doing enough, OK, so you had a quarter where you didn't really do as much as you should, and now you're going to have to adjust.

That's not a bad thing. That's basically like a little vacation you probably needed anyways. Nothing terrible is going to happen. People are busy. Don't be negligent. Don't be unreliable. But no one's going to really notice. So just sit with the anxiety. Don't let it push you into overwork. Give it a quarter.

Give it two. And you're saying, OK, this is working. I'm impressing my boss. I'm getting really good stuff done. I'm no longer stressed out. This slow productivity thing, there's something to it. So it's OK to be anxious. But sit with it. Don't let it push you into too much overwork.

All right. I think that was a pretty good slow productivity corner. Now, of course, as we talk about this topic more, we have more and more questions about it. So it's no longer this is the only question. But we choose one question per episode to actually get the theme music, even if we have more than one question about the topic of slow productivity.

Speaking of which, what's our last question here, Jesse? OK, last question is from Brian. Do you think a smart and committed young knowledge worker can succeed with a slow productivity approach if they're not also notching up bigger short-term wins along the way? Could you have? In prior episodes, you talked about your conquer the world mindset of your younger years.

Was that needed to be where you're at today? Well, Brian, it's a good question. First of all, though, I'm going to reject the premise of bigger short-term wins along the way. If a win is short term, something you can produce in a non-slow productivity approach, so just by lots of activity, it's not that big of a win.

How impressive can it be if it didn't require the long development of a rare and valuable skill? So I think what you're counting as bigger short-term wins is more like the effluvia of busyness. I don't know. I'm on Instagram and emails and this and that and doing these conferences and jumping over here.

It's that sort of short-term feeling of like I'm doing stuff and getting these sort of pseudo recognitions and serendipitous moments of virality. But none of that really aggregates to anything all that impressive. There are no short-term big wins outside of the lottery. Big wins require time. They require long term.

So you're not missing out on anything deeply important if you're spending your 20s focused relentlessly on getting good at something really valuable. Now, you talked about my conquer the world mindset from my younger years, which I did have. But here's the thing. I did achieve a lot of my vision of conquering the world, right?

A lot of that was so academically speaking, it was I want to get a professorship at a good university and get tenured early, like be a tenured professor and publish good stuff in my field. And from a writing perspective, I wanted big idea books. I always just say to my agent, I want a hardcover idea book, like the ones I love, not just the student guides I'm writing now.

And I wanted them to be important and sell a lot of copies. And my other dream, and my agent will tell you this, early on in my career was I wanted to write for the New Yorker. I want to be also just like writing stuff that requires real craft.

And I accomplished all those things, right? I got tenured early after just four years and got a good professorship. My books are very successful, right? And millions of copies, 40, 45 languages. And I write for the New Yorker. Here's the thing, though. All of that happened in my 30s.

My mindset was in the 20s. That's when I hatched this vision. All this stuff happened in the 30s. Most of it happening in my mid-30s to 40. That whole period in my 20s, I was relentlessly working on being a better computer scientist and a better writer. That's what I was doing.

And I wasn't doing social media, and I wasn't launching companies, and I wasn't giving a lot of talks, and I wasn't trying to create conferences, and I wasn't traveling a lot. I had a lot of friends who were into that back then. It was like, you should have a travel budget and go to five or six of these conferences they used to hold every year so you could just meet interesting people.

I didn't do any of that. Write, write, better writer, better writer. Each book was done, how do I make the next one better? How do I get better? How do I become a better researcher? Let me write a better paper. Let's go. Let me get that H index up.

Let me get those publications up. Once I had my professorship, how do I win an award? How do I get those papers better? Let's push, push, push. Very focused. I stayed focused on those same two things for well over a decade. And then I began conquering the world that I had in mind.

So your 20s are an exciting period if you want a remarkable life, but they're exciting not because you're likely to unlock the remarkability and reap its benefits while still in the 20s. Your 20s is your time where you focus on your craft. Your 20s are your time where the most important thing you can do is say no.

They're the time when the key is coming back to your core pursuit again and again, even as really shiny objects are hung in front of you. Like, nope, nope, nope. It's boring. I'm just coming back. And there's frustration involved and you get impatient. But then when you end up conquering your definition of the world later on, that's when all of that seems worth it.

And the scale of those goals, like for me to be like the tenured professor with the awards and the books and the New York or whatever, there's nothing I could have done in my 20s. No, quote, unquote, big short-term win that would have aggregated to anything like that. It would have been a lot of nonsense.

I gave this show, I did this, and I had this video thing, and I did this, but like all these little things that in the moment would have felt busy and would have added to nothing now that I'm 41. So I think slow productivity is the cool way to go.

It's also psychologically more sustainable. That's a much more healthy 20, psychologically speaking, for someone who's ambitious and talented to just be focusing on craft for a while and not having to be like out there in the public eye or trying to, why is this thing not working? Why I'm trying to land this or whatever.

I mean, it's kind of nice to just get to know yourself as an adult and build your skills. And so I wouldn't worry, Brian, slow productivity all the way. All right, Jesse, let's do an actual call. Sounds good. We've got Warren. Warren, all right. Hi, Cal. Love to pop.

I'm a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and I share episodes with my students pretty often. So here's my question and situation. I'm pretty well organized already, especially at work. I've got a tiered system of planning. It includes a Gantt chart for annual high-level planning, a few Trello boards for implementing my plan, and a daily task and time boxing system for my rather busy job.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go off the rye and leave us nothing but grief and pain. To wit, I find myself often looking back at a week, month, or quarter, and anxiously realizing that my well-organized system wasn't well-executed at all. So my question for you is, do you have any thoughts or recommendations for improving execution without completely uprooting a pretty good system of planning that I have in place already?

Thanks, Cal. All right. Thanks, Warren. Jesse, he shares my episodes with his class at Rutgers. Yep. I don't want to look this up and figure out that his class is listed as something like travesties in media, or the death of good journalism, case studies in embarrassingly bad new media productions, or something like that.

The Nazis among us, the crypto-fascist from the whatever, productivity bro-sphere. Hopefully, that's not the course. So Warren, my general rule of thumb here is, as you move up in scale from daily to weekly to quarterly or semester, the tightness and specificity of your plan should reduce. So when you're doing a daily time-block plan, that's a very constrained plan because you're dealing with an interval of time that you actually have a chance of structuring and constraining.

It's like eight hours. What am I doing in each of the hours of my day? Even then, it's hard. You're probably going to redo that plan once or twice as the day unfolds. Move up in scale to the weekly plan, you should be less strict. We talked about this earlier in the episode, but hey, I want to make progress on this objective this week.

Thursday, I got a lot of time free on Thursday. Let me just protect this morning. This is when I'm going to work on this report. It's more loose. Let me write down that I really want to get these two things done when I get a chance. Then when you go up to your quarterly plan, it's even looser.

It's like, okay, I want to see if I can finalize this journal article. Maybe it would be a real success if I could come out of this semester having refined a book proposal idea. It's getting really high level here. Then when it gets to the scale of multiple semesters or years, I probably don't have any planning at all.

Let me just get through the fall, and then I'll see what I want to do in the winter. So what might be happening here is you're trying to Gantt chart at the highest level, multiple months and seasons, and this project is going to overlap this project. There's a reason why they stopped using Gantt charts in software development.

It's impossible to predict at that scale. You're much better to have a much more loose and ambiguous semester plan, work on this paper, try to get this proposal together that has lots of breathing room. And each week you're like, okay, let me just remember this week that maybe go on a couple walks, think about my book proposal, and let me try to find some time to work on the paper.

And you know what? I'm having a hard time. I think I'm going to make Monday and Wednesday mornings. I'm going to regularly start blocking that off for the paper because I've had a couple of weeks in a row here where I don't have enough time to get things done.

So let me jump into the future and set this up for a month. You want that planning and insight at that granularity to happen, not these six months I'm working on this and starting one and a half months into this interval, I begin working on the second initiative, which will finish after exactly four months.

You're being too precise. So loosen up your planning, be a little bit easier on yourself. This is all about aiming your energy, not about exactly predicting how your energy will unfold. This is a line in the article we're going to talk about in the third segment, my latest New Yorker piece.

I have a line about the idea that this type of planning, your goal here is not prescience, but instead just intention. You don't want your energy to just be dissipating without direction into the ether, but you're also not trying to be Nostradamus about, okay, three months from now, I will be at exactly this point on this project.

That's a fool's errand. A lot of big, that's why software development doesn't try to do waterfall plans anymore. It's just too hard to predict. I want to do a quick case study. This was in response to episode 283, where we were talking about video games and living a deep life.

So this case study short one comes from a nameless. No, no, Tom, he signed it. Okay. All right. Just from Tom. I've just listened to your discussion on video games and episode 283 based on Victor's question. If video games can be part of an intentional life, I practice intentional living as much as possible.

And I also love games. One thing that has helped me is playing the right kind of games. Intricately crafted award-winning single-player stories can be an art form on par with high quality films. Playing the stories of the, of well-written complex characters is in visually original worlds is a very different experience to the slot machine style of other mainstream video games.

Firewatch, Inside, Her Story, and Red Dead Redemption 2 are just a few examples of superb storytelling and games as an art form. I tend to block out an hour or two of my calendar to play like watching a high quality television drama. I hope that helps. As you both said, you're unfamiliar with the gaming landscape today.

Love the show. It's helped a lot. I think that's useful, Tom. I completely agree with you. High quality single-player video games, whatever they call them, class A games where they spend, you know, $150 million developing them is like, or can be like art. Also they're self-limiting. They're hard. And they're also, the goal is not addiction, right?

The goal is just gameplay duration, right? This needs to be a beautiful experience for whatever is typically like 40 to a hundred hours of gameplay. There's no benefit that gets you to like play it more. If anything, if it's like super addictive, you're going to finish the game too fast.

And that might even be a problem because you just paid $60 for it. So it's not their incentives to addict you. So I think that's fine. Play it an hour or two a day if you like that. I don't think that's a big deal. Be wary more of the persistent online massively multiplayer games.

I think that can really be a problem. They do want you to play it as much as possible. And those can be really addictive. They can begin to become a replacement for other parts of your life, especially if there's other players involved. You're kind of on teams. You're getting this poor granularity this poor fidelity simulacrum of collegiality and relationships, and you're making progress, and your levels are going up.

That's where you look up seven hours later and realize, you know, you soiled your chair. Be careful about those games, especially if you're a grown man. Let's just put it this way. If you find yourself wearing a headset over the age of 25, a headset with a boom microphone, and you don't work for a NASCAR stock racing team, be careful about your life choices.

Or an NFL team. Or an NFL team. That's right. Yeah. If you're an OC. If you're an OC for an NFL team, that's also okay. You can wear a headset. But otherwise, just be wary, because that can suck away your energy to do anything else, because it just presses the buttons of what drives us to do meaningful things.

It presses those buttons enough that we don't feel motivated to get up. But the thing we're doing, the video games, doesn't actually fulfill those needs. And that's the problem. It's like eating really bad junk food will, in the moment, address your hunger sensation. But over time, it's not really what that hunger sensation was trying to get us to do.

It's trying to get us to eat food in the way that our bodies recognize from our evolution. And so you're subverting a natural instinct with something that actually doesn't give you, it's lower what you need, and you're going to end up worse. Same thing with social media and social snacking.

That's the phenomenon that social psychologists identified, where you feel in the moment, like the text messages going back and forth in your text thread or Snapchat or comments on your social media posts. In the moment, you feel like you're scratching the itch to be social, but that's not enough sociality.

The information stream is too low fidelity, and you end up feeling more and more lonely. So you think in the moment, I'm doing this because I want to be connected, but this doesn't really connect you and end up worse off. So just be careful about the highly addictive games.

Red Redemption 2, Zelda, Breath of the Wild on the Switch, all this stuff. That's fine. Those are beautiful games, and I have no problem with you playing that. All right. We have a final segment here. Before we do, I want to mention briefly another sponsor, longtime sponsor. That is our friends at Blinkist.

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That's policygenius.com/deepquestions. All right, let's go on to our final segment. This final segment, I often like to take something that's out there in the world of the internet or the news and react to it. So what I'm going to do is I want to load a article here that is by me.

So I have this on the screen. For those who are watching episode 285 at thedeeplife.com or at Cal Newport Media on YouTube, I have loaded my latest article for the New Yorker. It is called How to Have a More Productive Year. The subhead, knowledge work is always changing and our approach to it needs to change too.

So I just want to summarize a couple of points from this piece. It begins with an interesting question. I look at my bookshelf and I see I have productivity guides on here because I collect these. The date all the way back to 1959, the earliest modern style business productivity guide I have is James T.

McKay's book, The Management of Time. And then I have books from there covering every decade up until our current moment in my own books. And so early in this article, I actually go through each decade and I look at all these books and I say, OK, here's the motivating question.

We've been looking at this question of how to manage your time as a professional since 1959 or before. Why don't we have it figured out? Why isn't there just this is the right way to do it? We've been writing about this forever. And so as I go through these books, an answer emerges, which is the challenges of work keep changing.

And if we look at the advice in 1959, it looks different than the advice that Peter Drucker gives in 1967, which looks different than the advice that Edwin Bliss gives in the 70s, which is different than the advice that Stephen Covey gives in the 80s and 90s, which is quite different than the advice that Alan, David Allen gives in the early 2000s.

Because the demands of work and our relationship with work keeps changing. You read Peter Drucker in 1967. It's a space age optimism. Yeah, you can optimize how you work. Of course, let's get data. Keep a time log of everything you do. Go back and study it. Look for what he calls time wasters.

Eliminate those from your schedules. Optimize your time allocation and you'll be great. Space age optimism. Jump ahead to the 1970s and the book, Edwin C. Bliss's Getting Things Done, the ABCs of Time Management, all that optimism is gone. The economic malaise was stagflation of the 1970s and the books is it's bloodless and technocratic.

And it's an alphabetical list of different aspects of office life with some advice for each. But then by the 80s, where we get hypercapitalism and navel gazing, self-actualization, we get Stephen Covey that's like, no, no, no, here's what we're going to do. The point of all this work is to satisfy your deepest values.

And we're going to have this really complex system all built around self-actualization. Here's my roles and they're important to me. And everything aims towards like fulfilling my values there. But then you jump to David Allen, Getting Things Done, 2001. And suddenly you have a reversal. All of that self-actualization ambition is gone again, because what's happening in the world when Allen's writing this book, network computers in the office, email, and the explosion in work volume and distraction that has just begun.

So Allen's way more nihilistic. He says, forget self-actualization. We just want to automate the hell out of work so that we can just find some mental peace. There's no purpose to our work. We're a machinery gadget, just cranking out widgets. And all we want to do is just try to get some peace among us.

He doesn't even care. Let's just have a mind like water moments of zen. He's responding to the issues of the time. So then the piece says, what are the issues of our current time? And I would say in the pandemic and pandemic aftermath, too much to do, nihilism about our work, like what's all this busyness for, and communication overload are the defining features.

And I say, so what's the right advice for right now? And then I give classic Cal Newport advice, right? So if you want to see classic Cal Newport advice, Trojan horsed into the New Yorker, you will find that in this article, I talk about structured task systems, Trello boards with roles and statuses and columns.

I talk about multi-scale planning, daily, weekly, quarterly, or strategic, whatever you want to call it. And I talk about communication rules, office hours, for example, things you can put in place, reverse meetings, things you can put in place to take the interactions you have to do in your job and prevent them from unfolding in these asynchronous back and forth all day long.

So it's like the core gospel of Cal Newport. I sort of elaborate these ideas for a new audience. And then the end, I do some conclusion. I don't want to give it all away. You should read the article. But anyways, I thought this was an interesting point. We're never going to be done with the question of how to be organized in work.

And it's because the target shifts. So we have to be okay with that. There is no canonical system we'll ever arrive at that we can say, now we know how to work. We are going to have to keep updating. The key is doing this without making that updating of our system all we ever do.

So I'm going to read from my conclusion here to sort of summarize how I'm thinking about that. How do we keep reappraising the way we work without getting lost in endless tweaking and upgrading of our organizational systems? Not maintaining any type of to-do list is a bad idea, but so is the quixotic chase of a perfect system that doesn't actually exist.

The challenge in cultivating a sustainable approach to modern knowledge work is to locate the space between productivity fetishism and the knee-jerk rejection of productivity thinking as toxic or unnecessary. To achieve and hold a position of leadership in this age of innovation, a man must spend a part of every day in self-development, James McKay writes in the preface to his 1959 advice guide.

He was more right than he likely realized. We're never free from the need to keep reassessing how we work, but we cannot let this become the entire story. It's a bit of meta advice for everything we do here. It is important to keep thinking about in our current technological work moment, what's the right way to work.

You don't want to be haphazard, but once you have a plan that works, execute and get on with the other stuff. Check in every once in a while, keep up with what you need to change in the world of work, but don't make thinking about how you work be your primary activity.

It's easier said than done, but I think that's the challenge we all face. That's the challenge hopefully I'm helping you with on this podcast. All right, Jesse, I think we should wrap it up there. We did about two and a half hour of podcasting right before this. I read an audio book all last week, so I don't know how much of my voice is left.

Let's call it quits now, but thank you everyone for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay deep. If you liked today's episode about the productivity paradox, I think you'll also like episode 283 about how to organize your life.

Check it out. There clearly is a real hunger out there for transforming your life into something more intentional and more deep.