I want to talk today about morning routines. This is a tricky topic. For critics of online productivity culture, overly complicated morning rituals that often seem to rely on confident citations of shaky science have come to represent a lot of what people dislike about online productivity spaces. But as I'll explain as this deep dive unfolds, you know, I feel like my mornings recently have been getting off to a sort of a shaky start and I want to revamp what I'm doing.

So with some trepidation, I recently waded into the online productivity world to read articles, social media feeds, and YouTube channels about morning rituals. What is this thing that's happening online? What I've done is I've broken them down into three categories. I'm going to go through these categories, tell you what I found, what's good about each of these categories, what's bad, what my takeaway lessons are, and then I'll end by saying what changes did I make in my own life based on all that I discovered.

All right, so let's get into it. First of all, why do I need this? What I have been finding in my own morning, so my morning starts very predictably because I have three young kids. They all take the same school bus. We have to be out the door about 730 to make the walk to the bus stop.

The bus stop's about half to three quarters of a mile away. So our morning is very much like get up, wrangle, wrangle, wrangle out the door, get the kids to the bus, walk back. Now by the time we're back, it's 810, maybe 815. This is where I'm shaky. I just eat up too much time between finishing the morning family ritual, getting the kids out the door, and getting a tightly time block planned day unfolding.

Just to get ready often takes me way too much time. I don't know why. I've talked about this before on the show. It's just some weird block I have. But just to go get showered and dressed, like if I have to go to campus or come to the podcast studio, it just takes way too much time.

I often find myself before my schedule really gets going, I might actually get sucked into some sort of administrative chore or task that is in list. What ends up happening is by the time my day gets going, I'm cursing how much time has already passed. When I look at face the productivity dragon and time block my day to follow, it's like, "Well, there's not enough time in here to do the things I really want to do.

I'm almost to my first appointment of the day." I want to tighten that up. This is where I was hoping by looking at popular morning routines online, I would find some ideas. As I mentioned, I've roughly categorized this content that's out there right now in popular into three categories.

The first category, type one of the morning routine rituals, I'm going to call this the embrace the suck videos. Embrace the suck being a term out of the special forces that basically says when going gets hard, the idea with that term is lean into the hardness. That's great. Hardness is good.

There's a certain type of person talking online that really pushes this for their morning routine. The whole point should be do something really hard. Here's a classic example of that. This is probably the originator of the embrace the suck morning routine. It's Jocko Willink. If you're watching, instead of just listening, I've loaded up Jocko's Twitter feed here on the screen.

His Twitter feed, he's been doing this for, God, I think he started doing this in 2015, but famously like most of what he does on here, and I have it on the screen, is every morning he takes a picture of his watch when he wakes up. Here's a picture from four hours ago, and it says it's 428 in the morning.

What's his caption? You know what you have to do, in caps, do it. Here's the day before, 433, caption, stay in the fight. Then he will accompany it with a video, a picture straightly later of where he exercised. He does brutal exercising. He's a sort of a monster of a man, so 428 picture of the watch right now, and then a picture of a Bulgarian bag, which is like a, was that just like a weighted bag you carry or something like that?

Probably. Yeah, something terrible, and it says aftermath, move, right? That's like the originator of the embrace, to get up really early and do something really hard. This has evolved, so if we look at online circles and we look at examples of the embrace to suck morning routine, a new aspect that's emerged in sort of like the post Jocko world is the cold plunge.

So here I have a clip that Jesse will play from TikTok of Joe Rogan, who helped popularize this, talking about his morning routine. See if we can play this here. Morning, I don't dress warm, I wear my underwear, and I go outside, and it's 40 degrees this morning, and I walk out, and I lift the lid on that Marasco cold plunge, and I see the ice floating up in there, and every day I climb in, and I just get in there for three minutes in the morning, and then I work out.

So that's how I start my day now. All right, so that has also become popular. So I often feel like Rogan, because he's in comedy, so he's out late, is not going to wake up at 4.30 in the morning, so his equivalent of something that is over the top hard to get the day started is let's go into an ice-encrusted outside cold plunge for three minutes.

There's a lot of people who talk about doing this in the morning as well. So this is all the same type of morning routine, do something super hard first thing in the morning. All right, so let's do the bad and the good. The bad, one of the places we see a bit of a problem is when people try to justify some of this behavior through ill-sighted science.

So for example, I'm not an exercise medicine person, but my friends who are, I'm thinking in particular like my friend Brad Stolberg will tell me that there's a lot of people citing science about cold plunges that try to justify that there's this really large therapeutic benefit. And he's read all of these studies, and he says these effect sizes are teeny.

It's like the same effect size you get from having a cup of coffee in terms of improvement to well-being in the moment or like seeing something funny, like there are these minor like therapeutically irrelevant impacts. It's easy to oversell, you know, like hey, your body is, you're going to live for 20 more years.

It's easy to do that. I don't think the big players do, but a lot of the secondary people do. The other bad I'd say with this is that not all of these activities are sustainable for all people. In particular, we know there's a small percent of the population. I don't know what the percent is.

I think it's 10% or less who just don't need as much sleep. We don't know why, but it's like there's a small group of people that like fine with four hours of sleep. Jocko Willink is one of those people, and he talks about this, like he will actually talk about it if you listen to him, is that like he doesn't recommend that his kids wake up at 430 because they need more sleep than he does.

You know, he's self-selected as someone who doesn't need a lot of sleep, made it easy for him to go through, easier for him to go through Navy SEAL training, et cetera, like it kind of makes sense that he had this successful Special Forces career. But that's not necessarily a sustainable model for everyone.

Both him and Joe Rogan do really intense like exercises in the morning as well. And like those routines are routines, you know, for someone, they've been doing this for decades. And so their body and they have trainers and they've been building up this sort of base or whatever. So, you know, it's not all translatable.

But what's the good in the Embrace the Suck morning routines? I mean, I think the main advantage that we get with someone like Jocko or Joe in their row in their rituals is psychology, psychological. By doing something really hard, you are signaling to yourself that you're the type of person who does really hard things.

I'm elite in this way. Most people avoid discomfort. I'm bringing in crazy discomfort. I'm waking up at 430. I'm getting into an ice encrusted bath. I don't know if there's like a physical therapeutic benefit. But what I'm telling myself is, you are someone who does hard things. We've talked about this on the show before, that discipline is largely an identity and not a trait that you have or don't have.

So it's a good way to build is what I think they're doing here is maintaining a narrative of a self-narrative of exceptionality, which then fuels the other things you want to do during the day. You just you just have that more belief in yourself. All right, so the lesson I'm drawing from this first category of popular morning rituals online is that finding ways to signal to yourself that you're disciplined is probably a good thing.

It doesn't, however, have to be in the guise of extreme physical acts. In fact, it probably doesn't have to be physical at all. I can imagine other ways that people could signal to themselves that they do extreme things and they're disciplined and maybe have nothing to do with physicality at all.

It's an extreme intellectual endeavor, for example, or a religious endeavor, et cetera. So I think that the general lesson here is there is power in reminding yourself you're able to do optional hard things, even if the thing is arbitrary, because that will put you in the right mindset to do non-arbitrary things that are also hard, but not urgent as the day goes on.

Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right. The second category, broad category of these morning rituals I found online, I didn't really know what to call this category, self-discovery or recentering your soul.

I'm not quite sure what the right way to describe this category, but the canonical example of this category is Hal Elrod's 2012 bestselling book, The Miracle Morning. This was very influential in how people were thinking about morning routines, especially in this early social media period, 2012 to 2016 or so, and we see a lot of variations of what Hal suggests in that book online, especially in social media spaces.

I'm going to pull up an article here from 2019 where a reporter, I think this is from NBC News, tried the Miracle Morning and kind of talks it for a month and talks about how it went, but it gives us a good summary of what actually this ritual means.

The article I'm pulling here is titled, I Tried the Miracle Morning Productivity Routine for a Month. Here is what happened. This is by Locke Hughes from 2019. So what I'm going to do here is just scroll down. What I like about this article is the reporter summarizes the six practices of Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning.

So Elrod abbreviates the six practices as S-A-V-E-R-S, acronym SAVERS. So the S stands for silence. When you wake up, the first thing you do is you sit silently. This could be, for example, doing a mindfulness meditation. The reporter used Calm meditation app to sort of run through a morning meditation.

All right. The second piece of the Miracle Morning is A for affirmations. An affirmation is a sentence or two in alignment with what you want to accomplish and who you need to be to accomplishing it. Elrod suggests your affirmation should make an impression on your subconscious mind, transform how you think and feel so you can overcome your limiting beliefs.

The reporter in this article's affirmation was, "I'm an accomplished, successful writer, author, and speaker. My work helps others feel less alone and empowers them to make the choices and decisions that lead them to their best life." You say that to yourself a bunch of times. Then in your Miracle Morning, you go to V for visualization.

You train your brain to see things as you would like them to be instead of as they are. Elrod's suggesting this for five minutes. Visualize living your ideal day, performing all tasks with ease, confidence, and enjoyment. Then comes E for exercise. Again, you're still in your morning ritual here.

You don't need to run eight miles or even go to the gym unless you want to, but exercise can be something as simple as a 10-minute yoga routine or set of bodyweight exercise you do in the living room floor. You just need to get moving and the blood and oxygen flowing to the brain.

Then comes R for reading. Just practice fast checks, transformation at any part of your life. Elrod explained, "Don't reinvent the wheel." He reminds us, "The fastest way to achieve everything you want is to model successful people who have already achieved it. Read 10 pages per day." Finally, the final S is for scribing.

Scribing just means writing, but a W would have ruined the acronym. This means journaling, jotting down ideas, making a gratitude list, putting whatever is on your mind on paper. That was the Miracle Morning. I see a lot of variations of this when I'm looking at morning routine content where people have a relatively, I would characterize it as a relatively long list of morning checklist activities.

There's usually journaling involved. There's usually some sort of meditation involved, some sort of light exercise. All these things you do, they're sort of self-centered on yourself, yourself, your understanding of yourself, preparing for your day, rediscovering yourself. Any variation like that, I put that into that same category. All right, so let's go for the bad and the good of this sort of re-centering, morning re-centering approach.

The bad is, well, first of all, it can be a lot of time each morning. You're sort of navel gazing. You're thinking about yourself, but none of this is actually making traction. It's not making traction on something that, I don't want to use the word productive here, but something that has an output that you need.

Even an exercise routine, that exercise is part of what I need to do for my body or work or whatever it is. There's kind of that sense of frustration of I'm doing semi-arbitrary seeming activities and it takes a while. You're going through this checklist. What happens is I think a lot of people get impatient and you're like, "Ugh," kind of fake meditating visual.

It becomes a rote, right? I'm scribing thoughts. I'm just going to jot something down. I'm visualizing my day like, "Come on, let's just roll past this." I also think it's very personality-driven, right? If you told Jocko Willink, "All right, here's your six-step thing you have to do in the morning and you're going to have to sit there quietly and then visualize your day being successful and then say positive affirmations about yourself," he's going to throw a kettle ball through the wall, right?

It's just not his personality. He's like, "I would rather do squats with a Bulgarian bag," whatever that is. It's also very personality-driven. The good about this approach, because again, I think in each of these approaches there's a hidden value. It might not be explicitly what they talk about, but it helps explain their popularity.

Here I think the good is our brain can be ungrounded in the morning. By our brain, I mean in particular our conscious thoughts. They can go everywhere, stressful, distracting, diverting. They can bring us into weird rabbit holes. If you pull out a phone early in the morning, your brain and your thoughts can really get captured in weird places that it takes a long time to escape from.

It gets harder and harder to ground it in something useful. Having this immediate series of cognitive internal things you do grounds your brain in the morning. It prevents you from the alternative of an ungrounded brain just rattling off into whatever thought, stressful or otherwise. I really think probably 80% of the value this approach generates for people right now is it prevents them from looking at their phone first thing.

And any alternative to looking at your phone first thing is probably positive regardless of the details. Again, it could be just reorganizing your Jocko-approved Bulgarian bags in order. If you just have something to do that's not your phone, I think that is positive. That's the lesson I'm pulling from that second category is that having some sort of cognitive plan in the morning matters.

Something where it directs what you're thinking about early in your day so you don't start your day with your thoughts being ungrounded. There's probably real benefit in that. The third category of morning routines I call the MIT abbreviation for most important thing style morning rituals. I think Andrew Huberman's rituals is a good example.

He has some other stuff in it, but let's start there. My example here is I have a clip from the goal guys where one of the goal guys says, "I'm going to try Andrew Huberman's routine and see what happens," but I think it's a good way of summarizing Huberman's routine.

So here I'm going to play this on the screen for those who are watching. What is Andrew Huberman's morning routine? For me, I tend to wake up sometime around 6am, 6.30, and I write down the time in which I woke up. The second thing I do after I wake up is I make a beeline for sunlight, so getting outside for a 10-minute walk or a 15-minute walk is absolutely vital to mental and physical health.

We get back, I start craving caffeine, but I purposely delay my caffeine intake to 90 minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up. So for me, I just drink water. I also put a little bit of sea salt in the water. And I also drink my athletic greens, which is compatible with fasting.

So I don't eat anything until about 11am or 12 noon. Next I would do a 90-minute bout of work, and that's typically phone off and out of the room. You'd be amazed how much you can get done in 90 minutes if you are focused. After I finish that cognitive work bout, I do some form of physical exercise for about an hour.

Very last, but certainly... So now we're kind of in mid-morning now, so it's no longer talking about his morning routine. I was actually surprised looking up Huberman's routine, because the sense I had gotten about the way people talk about Huberman's protocols is that they are always overly complicated and super scientific, right?

I actually was surprised. To me, you could simplify this routine. Basically there's two pieces to it. Piece one, wake up, get outside right away, and then do work, something important right away. That's where the MIT or most important thing of the day acronym comes from. And then step two, there's a nutritional piece on it, but the nutritional piece is really he fast until lunch, which is not a crazy nutritional strategy.

Peter Atiyah talks about this in his book. He's like, "Look, if you need to... There's different ways to control the calories you consume to prevent overnutrition. One of the easy ways to do it is restrict the time in which you eat." So from just a practical manner, getting going and waiting until lunch to have your first food of the day is a reasonable strategy for keeping the total calories in the day more reasonable.

So that's not that crazy of a thing. The part that is crazy, and I think this completely exposes Andrew Huberman as the most dangerous, worst type of charlatan, not drinking caffeine right away, I'm not on board with that. Jesse, that's got to be wrong. He's got to be wrong on that.

You got to get your coffee going right away. Okay. So I've seen variations of this sort of Huberman plan, some variations all over the place, the elements being you get going on something important right away without doing anything else professionally and with some combination of getting some sunlight or getting outside.

We'll call that the MIT strategy. I mean, I've seen it different ways. Some people use sunlamps and some people do work and then go outside and then do work, but just getting going with something hard before you engage with the world and getting outside. And I guess from a nutrition standpoint, waiting until that first block of work is done before you even think about like food or breakfast or something like this.

Okay. So what's the good and the bad with this morning routine strategy? On the bad side, mornings can be tricky schedule-wise if you have other people in your life. So this adds some complexity to MIT strategies because, you know, hey, you have to get the kids up. You got to get the kids to school.

And now if you really want to try to like get up, go outside and get something done before that, you're getting up so early that unless you have Jocko circadian rhythms, you're going to be super tired. So it can get kind of complicated. There's also a danger to the most important thing methodology in general.

It's a danger that I've talked often about like throughout sort of my history of dealing with these issues. And that is it's easy to fall into the trap that like once you've worked on your quote unquote most important thing of the day that you then just fall into like reactive sludge for the rest of the day.

Hey, that's my scheduling for the day. I worked for 90 minutes on X and now it's like whatever. Inbox is open. I'm kind of slacking. I had this debate with Oliver Berkman when he was on the show last fall. And where we landed is if you have a very autonomous relatively non-crowded job, so like a writer like Oliver, that's probably fine.

Like you get your pages in in the morning and then you kind of do your best with some like reactive stuff, answer some emails, have some calls, like you don't really have to be on point. You'll be fine. But for a lot of knowledge work jobs because of pseudo productivity, because of the issues I talk about in my book Slow Productivity where we have too much on our plates and we have inefficient communication protocols, that's not going to work for most people.

If you just do one thing with focus and then just anything goes, list reactive method for the rest of the day, you're going to fall behind. You're going to be stressed. You're going to exhaust your brain. You'll probably end up worse. So you don't want the most important thing of the day to be the only scheduling of the day.

You probably still, if you have a sort of standard overloaded knowledge work style job, you still want to probably time block the rest of your day so that you're getting the most out of that without the work unduly taxing you or your brain or becoming unsustainable. All right, so that would be the potential bad there.

The good, I think Huberman and everyone else is right on track based on my own experience. Get outside right away matters. I mean I do this because I walk my kids to the bus stop. I've been doing this forever. Even when my kids were young, we had a dog at the time.

I would take the dog out very early because my wife would go, she would go to work early. We had a shifted thing. She would go to work on the early side so that I could get the kids up and fed and wait till the nanny was there. Then she would come home on the earlier side or leave the nanny and then I was going to work later and I would come back later.

I had to walk the dog before she left for work early so I got very used to like, "Oh, you're out there." Actually, it's great just seasons. It's cold. It's hot. It's somewhere in between. The sun is starting to come up now. I don't know. It really does ground you.

I do think that's really great. Yes, I do this. I fall out of it but I've always experienced getting right into something deep is like the best way to aggregate a lot of deep work. That's just like a well-known heuristic from anyone who's had deep work being a regular part of their job responsibilities.

Being able to just get into something deep right away before anything else, you get the clearest focus on your brain. Why? Because when you open up the neurological black box there, what you see is a minimum of conflicting cognitive semantic networks activated. If I haven't looked at any emails yet, if I haven't looked at any other projects, this is the first thing relevant to my job I'm doing.

There is very little cognitive conflict. You have these abstract reasoning centers of your brain can so much quicker and so much more totally turn their focus to the task at hand. It's the purest deep work you can generate in the day is that first time of the day. To me, some way of like get outside and get after it and then deal with the rest of your day that makes a lot of sense to my experience, the experience of people I talk to.

All right. So how did I draw lessons from this for my own life and for my own morning attention issues? When it comes to exactly what I'm doing in the morning, given my setup, the MIT Huberman style approach makes the most sense for me. What does this really mean for me?

It just means a recommitment to the simple rule of as I walk in the door, so I'm already getting the outside walking part because I'm going to the bus stop. As I walk back in the door, it is right to a desk and into deep work. Just that simplicity of that rule is what I need.

A variation of that rule I've been considering, I think this might be even better for getting the effects of it, is what I really should do is on the way back, don't come back to my house, come back to the coffee shop Bevco, get my coffee from Bevco, walk down the block right up to the deep work HQ.

So now it's a completely different cognitive context. I have an office two minutes from my house and next to a coffee shop. That's really what I should do. That should be the routine. And I come in here and it's just right in the pre-stage. Here's what I'm doing. I'm writing deep work, like whatever it is.

Then I start thinking about, just so I can walk you through like how I think about these type of weekly template type scheduling rules. Now the issue is some days, I try to keep my first half of my days as empty as possible. Some days, if it's like a non-teaching day, hopefully I've kept my morning clear till at least noon.

In those days, I should just rock and roll for three hours plus during a semester. In the summer, I could do this like every day. On other days, if I have something scheduled in the morning, still do this even if it's symbolic. So let's say I have to get in for a 10 a.m.

meeting or something like that. Still do like 20 minutes or 30 minutes of deep work so that that connection is strong. That's what I'm thinking about. I just do this every morning. Bus stop to my office, sit down, do something deep, even if it's symbolically 20 minutes and then I have to go and get ready to go, just so that my mind says that's what I always do.

The goal should be on like every day possible, make that an hour to 90 minutes with the three to four hour blocks. You really want those like at least for my case, at least twice a week. So I'm just sort of walking you through and then what I would do after that is like as soon as that block is done, then I time block plan the rest of the day and then for me that's just like the juggling match with my normal, I got my five jobs, I want to finish my five and now I need to make the most of the time that follows to be very careful.

What about the other lessons though from watching the other morning routines content online? I actually think those lessons can be integrated and to some degree I already do integrate them into my life, just not in the morning. So if we look at the embrace the suck type idea, that doesn't have to be first thing in the morning.

If my analysis is correct, that what matters there is the psychology of telling yourself on a regular basis and demonstrate yourself on a regular basis, I can do hard things. It's not so critical that's first thing in the morning. So for me, like I've typically exercise post work pre dinner.

That's a place to start the embrace the suck methodology would say, yeah, start making that more brutal or interesting or crazy. You know, it doesn't have to be the morning, but you have one thing every day where you're doing something that's like really hard and optional, right? So that lesson would say upgrade or update or get more extreme in what I'm doing during my exercise block, even if that's not, doesn't happen to be first thing in the morning.

That sort of self-reflection that like that one advantage you get out of the Hal Elrod sort of recentering your soul type morning ritual that also doesn't have to happen in the morning. Again, I find my self-reflection is not good in the morning until I've warmed up my brain circus and I've had some coffee and again, no offense to Andrew Huberman, but I'm not going to drink salted water instead of my first cup of coffee.

I don't care what it's doing to my biochemistry. Come on. I will, I would give up a couple of years of life for that. I'm not, I'm not good at self-reflection end of the day though. It can be better. In fact, like what I like to do with the self-reflection is go for a walk to do it.

And I find when a day is over and I've exercised, my brain can now reflect on myself better. If I'm going to journal, if I'm going to, you know, maybe seek some meditation, I don't really have a monkey brain problem in the morning because I don't use social media.

I don't, my phone isn't super attractive to me. Like I, and I'm, my brain doesn't work till I get coffee. So I'm just sort of in a stupor until I'm like 20 minutes into my first deep work block. So I, I figure maybe I should be a little bit more systematic about the self-reflection.

I've been working with single purpose journals a lot more recently. I've been dealing with some, you know, recovering from an injury. I've used that as a, an excuse to single purpose journal on some like life planning stuff and the more systematically get in thinking walks. And so again, I think the value of some of those morning routines can be spread to other types of your day.

But the value of like doing deep work first thing in the morning and going outside first thing in the morning to wake up your body, that, that was the bit of everything I learned in this experiment. That was the bit that was actually anchored to morning. And that's the bit that I'm sort of leaning into and clarifying into my, into my own life.

And again, these type of weekly templates, it just depends on the season of life and the semester and what's going on and the, the summer is a completely different beast for me. I'm not going to the bus stop in the morning. I'm not teaching my schedules empty or I'll rethink that.

But right now that's what I took away from my journey into the morning routines. And I will say, Jesse, that I was expecting more snake oil or more hustle culture stuff and it, some of it was kind of hustle culture, but like, honestly, I was often pretty commonsensical with like a couple random and take this supplement here or something like there'll be a couple random things thrown in that are maybe they're out over their skis.

I mean, maybe the biggest example was like how, how Elrod stuff, like that's a lot of stuff to do, like those six different things. Like that's a long morning. So maybe, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel hustling to me. I don't know. I was expecting, I was expecting worse.

So have, did you start going to Bevco and then come to the HQ? Well, I mean, I just figured this out this morning. So does Brad go on cold plunges or no, after his research, Brad is not a, I don't want to speak on his behalf, but I think I can confidently speak on his half that he's not a fan of cold plunges.

It is not against them, but he thinks it says arbitrary. If he was here, he'd probably tell you it says arbitrary as, you know, I'm going to do 20 somersaults in the morning. Like that there's not a, a specific therapeutic mechanism from cold plunging that is non trivially different than sort of any number of sort of like minor things you could do.

I tried the cold showers for a little while, then I just didn't make sense of me. I'm like, I mean, I think we have hot water now. I think it's all about, I think all of these things are all about the, the just signaling to yourself about discipline. It's like Rogan.

I don't think he does the cold plunges as much anymore. I think a lot of people move to saunas in part because I just think it's more reasonable. Like it's just not as painful, like you're still like I'm in the sauna and it's really hot and but it's just not as terrible as the cold plunging.

So I mean, I think it's, I'm, I'm less of a cold plunge partisan because I never, I never listened to scientific reasons anyways, right. You know, I think people got like a lot of motivation out of it. I think that's fine. I mean, they've had ice baths and professional sports locker rooms for a long time.

Yeah. But from a motivation standpoint, it, it really works, right? Like if you're, everything's inflamed because you're like always kind of injured and yeah, that's true though. I don't think people are using them therapeutically in that way, but I'm all for it. I think if like, if I had like, I like saunas, if I, if I had room for a sauna at my house, I don't need the science on it.

I'd be like, this is great. Like it kind of resets you. It makes you feel like, okay, I've, I've, you know, you like shocked your body. I think it's the same thing that people go for, you know, runs when it's cold outside. It's like bracing and then you come back and everything feels sort of reset.

So you know, I'm not a partisan on it, but yeah, Brad has taught me that the science of the benefits is not super impressive. All right. So we've got some good questions coming up, but first let's take a brief break to hear from one of our sponsors. I want to talk about one of my favorite products you hear me talk about all the time, Cozy Earth.

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I only, by the way, wear clothes that have luxurious drape. I demand that when I go into the store, I say, yeah, but is this drape going to be luxurious? And then the guy says, sir, I don't know, this is a Costco, like the socks cost a dollar for 30.

I'm sure it's luxurious. But anyways, we love the sheets so much, wearing the pajama sets, like having the sheets with you at all times. I have the sweatshirt kind of made out of similar material, which I love as well. So anyways, Cozy Earth's goal is to help you turn your home into a sanctuary, a place where you can escape the outside world's demands and truly unwind.

Life gets hectic and finding comfort and calm is so important. Your time outside the nine to five should be all about relaxing, recharging and soaking in a sense of peace. We're talking about morning routines. We'll start your morning right. What's the right way to start it? Right. Have the sheets, have the PJs.

So anyways, I'm a big fan. A better year starts with better sleep. Wrap yourself in Cozy Earth. Don't wait. Head to CozyEarth.com/deep now and use my exclusive code DEEP and you can get up to 40% off. That's a serious discount. You're going to want to use that. That's CozyEarth.com/deep.

And if you get, this is a favor I'm asking you. If you get a post-purchase survey, take a second to say you heard about Cozy Earth from the Deep Questions podcast because then they know you came from me. All right. Speaking about sleep, I also want to talk briefly about our friends at Lofty, L-O-F-T-I-E.

Now here's my question. We're talking about sleep. We're talking about mornings. What if your mornings didn't have to start with an annoying jolt, but with calm, focus and energy? Lofty is here to change the way you wake up and help you sleep better while you're at it. If improving your sleep routine is a top priority for 2025, meet the Lofty Clock, a bedside essential engineered by sleep experts to transform both your bedtimes and your mornings.

So what you do, and by the way, these are really good-looking products. It's a sort of like nice modern design and you don't see the numbers sort of glow out. They're really good-looking products. What happens is that it helps you wind down at night, but more importantly, wakes you up gently with a two-phase alarm, so you get a soft wake-up sound to ease you in the consciousness, followed by a more energizing get-up sound to help you start your day so you kind of aren't just jolted out of a deep sleep.

They have sound options for everyone, including sound machines. You have a sound machine built into the clock with over 100 options, including white noise or nature sounds, and it looks beautiful. No reason to have your phone sitting by your bed to act as your alarm clock. You should get a Lofty.

You know, Jesse, I learned doing my research on morning rituals for the deep dive. I learned who really needs a Lofty is Jocko Willink, because what Jocko does, I now know too much about Jocko Willink right now. What Jocko does for his morning routine is he found a specific song that starts kind of gently and then gets more progressively rocky and loudy, and so he somehow sets up his phone to start playing the song at a certain time to try to simulate what you get much more precisely with a Lofty, which does like this soft sound.

You kind of get these soft sounds that sort of brings you out of sleep, and then it sort of gets louder. So Jocko needs a Lofty. He's trying to simulate this with a phone, and then he has the phone there, and now you're checking it and use the Lofty.

So you can join over 100,000 blissful sleepers who have upgraded their rest and mornings with Lofty. Go to buylofty.com, B-Y-L-O-F-T-I-E.com and use DEEP20 for 20% off orders over $100. That's buylofty, B-Y-L-O-F-T-I-E.com and use that code DEEP20 to get that discount. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.

All right, who do we have for our first question of the day? First question is from Joseph. I'm a big consumer of online content, podcasts, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds. I'm trying to reduce my content consumption. I struggle with selecting which podcast episodes are worth my time. Most podcasters I follow are very interesting and upload once a week.

Do you have advice on how to determine which episodes are worth watching and which I should skip? Well, I mean, I think the preferred thing to do here is what you want to do is get at least four or five complete listens of deep questions with Cal Newport per day, but you want to use a different device for each of those listens so that it counts as a different listener.

So all I'm suggesting here is you buy like 20 to 30 iPhones and spend most of your day just generating fresh downloads. Joseph, here's my bigger advice here. The theme to my advice to you, first of all, is we can kind of chill out. The stakes here are low, right?

So we want to release this idea that there's some optimal way to listen the podcast that you can miss out on. You're not going to get anything wrong here. The stakes here are very low. So then when we think about how we should think about podcast content, here's the way I like to think about it.

There's two modes I'm normally in when I'm playing audio content. Either it's a high energy mode, you know, like it's early in the day, I'm out walking, I'm driving to work, my energy is high, in that type of mode, I want to hear something interesting or engaging. For me, I'm often looking for like an interview that is going to like spark ideas for me like, "Hey, there's something in here maybe I could write about or it's a world I want to learn about an interesting world or I'm looking for motivation." And then there is the second state, which is low energy.

I'm doing the dishes, it's nine o'clock at night, I'm tired, I'm stressed out by work, I do not have the energy or interest right now in getting like excited about ideas and I want something just entertaining. And so then you're looking at like I want something funny, I want to just kind of get lost in something, you know, I'm just doing something boring and I'm out of mental energy.

So those are the two modes. So your only goal is to have more than enough stuff to pull from for both of those modes so that you're just avoiding the null situation of having nothing to listen to in those circumstances. And when you think about it that way, you're like, "Oh, it's fine.

There's an abundance of things I could pull from when I'm looking for like an idea generating podcast and there's an abundance of like fun or funny podcasts I can pull from when I'm low energy. And so I don't have to stress about it." So you subscribe to, you know, you discover podcasts the way you discover podcasts, you got 20 or 30 you subscribe to and then you just see like which one's catching my attention.

Once you stop worrying about, "Oh, am I missing something? Am I doing this suboptimally?" It just becomes a lot easier. This is how I often engage with podcasts. It's very random. I kind of subscribe to things as I hear about them or I follow an author or a thinker to a podcast just to hear that author be interviewed.

I'm like, "Oh, I like this interviewer. Maybe I'll just subscribe to it." And then I'm just, I'm in this mode. Let me look at podcasts that match that mode. First thing that catches my attention, I go, "No regrets." You know, so I hear what I hear. Like, Jesse, you're always asking me like, "Hey, did you hear so-and-so interview or that interview?" It's just random.

Like sometimes I did, sometimes, you know, I didn't. So I don't, especially like interview podcasts, I don't serially consume a lot of podcasts. All right. I then have, the exception to all of this is what I think of as the like scheduled podcast. So like our podcast, I know this sounds self-serving, but our podcast, our schedule is invented for this to come out at a certain time where it solves a certain problem, where a Monday morning podcast, we're meant to be a part of your ritual, like Monday morning on your way to work, you listen to it to sort of get back into the mindset of, you know, deep work and the deep life.

To come out of the weekend, start thinking again about being careful about how you navigate the modern digital environment, careful about how you're going to approach the morass that is your knowledge work job, careful in how you think about like what's working and not working or changes you want to make.

It's like a wake up for the week type podcast. There's a bunch of them out there that are, that are tied to like a certain time to have a certain purpose. And so of course, those I think of as like, I know when I consume those, that's like ritualistic podcast consumption.

So we put these all together. You've got your ritualistic podcast, always listen to this day, this time, this day, every week. Because they like, it's just a nice part of my routine and they serve some purpose. Then you're just pulling from these two other poles depending on your, your energy.

Like I've got a hold for that second category, low energy. I love comedy in particular, it's not so much stand up comedians, it's interesting. I like improv style comedians doing like interview shows like, you know, it's like the obvious things. Conan. He was like an improv master. I like the smartless guys because well, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman are actually like a fantastic like improv duo.

Sometimes like when I'm in my lowest energy state, it's a little bro-y sometimes, but sometimes when my lowest energy state, I love how does this get made? Which is Paul Scheer and Jason Manzoukas and June Diane Riefeld who are like all three like very famous accomplished improv comedy actors and they just review movies basically.

I have to be in like a certain state for that, but when I'm in my certain state, like I was there the other day and I was like, I just need to listen to them talk about Con Air and it was like exactly what I needed and it was exactly what you would expect.

And it is a fantastic movie and it all makes sense and it all checks out. The reason why I said it was bro-y, they're not bro-y, but years ago, Julie and I went to see them live and they're at Constitution Hall, Jesse. That's a big venue. And the audience was very bro-y.

That's what caused, like they're not, they're, you know, whatever famous comedic actors from like the Hollywood left who are in their 50s, but the audience was very, we're like, oh, this is a lot of 24-year-olds who like just still go back to their frat sometimes. It's like the audience is bro-y, but I love them.

I think they're very funny. And then for the Idea Podcast, it's, I mean, it's often shows I've been on. This is not a replicatable strategy, but if I've been on a show and like the interviewer, I'll often subscribe to it and there it's all like topic hunting. There's very few of those shows I listen to everything, I see who they have on.

It's like, if I like who Sam Harris has on, on Making Sense, if I like the topic, I know Sam's going to give a really interesting like interview, you know, and I'll listen to that. I like, like we like the Acquired Podcast for me, it depends on like what the company is.

But if I like the company, sometimes like that's what, you know, that's what I really want to do. You know, all of the main interviewers, I'm going to subscribe to those podcasts and just I see what I'm in the mood for. All right. I don't have much thinking about podcast listening, but there you go.

I love the Con Air's statement. It's a fantastic, look, that's my, that's our, we were, that's, we would have been like junior high, high school in that Nicolas Cage era, Con Air, The Rock, The Rock is a fantastic movie. Here's the thing about these movies. They're all rated R because I want to show my kids, it's like, why, why were all these movies?

They didn't have to be rated R. Everything was rated R in the nineties. Like movies you would not think, I think this was a marketing thing. Like think about the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, remember this movie? Yeah. Like what's the guy's name, Rodchenko, separatists from Rodchenko, whatever.

There's always like Eastern vaguely like Russian, ex-Russian sphere of influence, terrorists taking things over in these movies. A great movie, right? It's the, they take over Air Force One, terrorists take over Air Force One, Harrison Ford's the president fights back. Perfect premise. It's a rated R movie. Like why is it?

It doesn't have to be a rated R movie, right? It's not like in the middle of this movie, there's like a gratuitous, you know, basic instinct style sex scene or anything. It's just like, they would just make these things R rated. Crimson Tide. Love that movie. The submarine one, right?

Submarine one. That's awesome. Tony Scott. So like the camera's like always moving. By the way, and I don't mean to rant about this, but my brother was in the submarine service and I had to ask him about this. There are, maybe I've talked about this on the show before, but there are several, it's crazy the things, some of the, some of the submarine stuff I would say was not deeply researched.

Let's say Tony Scott did not care. So for example, and I'll leave it at this, but when it's time to get the order to fire the missile, spoiler alert, right? The whole job of these boomers is to be deadly silent holes in the water. And so they can just come out of like nothingness and then suddenly fire their missiles when they get to.

And on these subs, my brother tells me about this, like you drop a wrench a hundred miles, you can be heard, right? So they wear a new balance tennis shoes and it's all like very careful. How does Tony Scott portray, okay, it's time to fire the missiles in real life.

What would it be? It'd be like, okay, so what we're doing is what we trained for quiet, calm. He has clacks and sirens go off in the submarine, clacks and sirens, just like really loud sirens and everyone is running. Everyone's always running up and downstairs. Anyways, interesting thing about crimson tide though, uncredited screenwriting help for that movie came from Quentin Tarantino.

So you'll see that like where they have that weird sort of like racially charged conversation about the, the lip stallion stallions between Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. That's all Quentin Tarantino. You weren't happy about the nuclear sound stuff in that book too, that came about the nuclear war book.

Yeah, they had the same, the same thing as, so maybe they watched. So I'm thinking Annie Jacobson who did tons of research for that book when it came time to do the submarine scene, I think she just watched crimson tide. I love Tony Scott movie. My six year old loves Tony Scott's, because I show my kids, yeah, I love movies.

Tony Scott's unstoppable, Chris Pine, Denzel Washington, freight train full of deadly chemicals. It's our unmanned runaway train. If it hits the city, it's going to explode and kill like all these people, 70 miles per hour. The break is broken. And the, and so how do you stop it? That's the whole movie.

And it's just constantly swooping by the train with Tony Scott helicopters. It awesome. It's a great movie. And that's, but see, like that's not our, they stopped making all these movies are rated at some point in the 2000s. Like, well, this is stupid. It wasn't, it's just, it's two guys in a train, you know, just, we can, they'll curse a little bit and why we don't have to make it R.

All right, Joseph. Your kids will be old enough soon enough to watch radar movies. My, I mean, I selectively show my 12 year old just because I know the movies really well and sometimes I do some edits, but yeah, the R rating is not stopping me with him. All right.

So Joseph, I hope that answers your question. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Paula. How does Cal track daily steps? I imagine he doesn't use a smartwatch. I have a love-hate relationship with my Apple watch. I've tried to turn off notifications, but I'm curious about alternative approaches.

Yeah. I mean, everyone uses Apple watches. I'm not a big Apple watch fan. I remember writing about the Apple watch when it first came out. So it's worth going back and finding this article at calnewport.com from when the Apple watch first came out because it captures a reality about that product's launch, which is when the Apple watch was released, they had no idea what it was for.

This was like one of Tim Cook's first move was a post jobs after Steve Jobs died. One of the first big product deployments that Tim Cook oversaw, if I'm remembering this time, like history was the Apple watch and they had no use case for it. They're like, we have a watch, like a lot of people bought it.

And I remember writing an article saying it's not our job to figure out what the Apple watch should be used for. That's Apple's job. Like they have to tell us, like make a pitch, here's how you're going to use it. After like a year or so, it kind of shook out like their planned work.

People just used it and they said, what did people like about it? It shook out that people wanted it for like fitness stuff. And so then it became more of like a fitness, fitness aid. But no, I don't use an Apple watch. I have my, my day-to-day watch is actually a Zen 105, which is a full automatic.

So there's no electricity or batteries in this beast. It's just a sort of German workhorse of a watch that harnesses my arms motion. And it's, it's pretty accurate. I can stick within a few minutes. The movement, it's a Salido movement customized by Zen. I can get, I don't know, stay with some like three minutes per week without any winding.

So cool watch. Steps. All right. So what I did for a long time and I might go back to is I just bought a watch battery powered pedometer that's you've seen it, Jesse. It's like, I don't know, for those who are watching like that big. So I kind of the size of like a lighter, you know?

And all it did, I love single purpose technologies. All it does is you, you have to press these buttons. It's very hard to set the time, but you set the time and then all it does is keep track of your steps just based on its motion. And it resets at midnight.

Just like pull out your pocket. How many steps have I done today? The problem is I kept losing them because you forget to take it out of your pocket and then like they're in the hamper. So then I ended up with like two or three of them and I would, I lost this one.

I'd find another one, but I love the single, the single use technology. It wasn't super accurate to be honest, but none of these technologies are. Michael Easter wrote about this last year, some research where they, they, it was actually pretty cool. They tested like all these pedometers and like none of them are accurate, but it doesn't really matter.

It's kind of relative to itself. So I haven't used those recently. The batteries all died and I haven't been step counting as much recently. I started step counting more as part of recovery, this injury recovery I'm doing. And I just was using my, my phone is often in my pocket and it just has, it just automatically tracks stuff in the fitness app.

I don't know how accurate that is, but that's what I've been doing. I think I'm going to go back to a standalone pedometer again. I'm wondering if there's, I think there's better ones. I think there's really good. I think the best ones, you like clip on your belt and I think it's going to make me look awesome.

Unless you're wearing sweatpants. Well, I, which I am, well, I think what I'm going to do, and this is more reasonable and accurate is, you know, the wheel things, it's like a wheel on a stick. It's how you like accurately. Yeah. Yeah. Let's walk around with one of those constantly like pushing my, my wheel on a stick.

Anyways, I love standalone pedometers. If someone knows of a really good one, small, it's very accurate. You don't have to use an iPhone. Tell Jesse, jesse@calnewport.com because I'm, I'm in the market. It's funny. I just finished the Michael Lewis SBF book and he was talking about when he was in high school, he brought a roller bag to high school.

You feel it everywhere. That's exactly what I was thinking when you were talking about the Lewis. SPF did or Michael Lewis? SPF did. Yeah. Michael Lewis seems like a cool guy. Yeah. That tracks. That tracks. Now, you know, now everyone has to carry, it's different than when we were kids.

Now, um, you carry like a middle school, these like briefcases basically, it's like a trapper keeper with a handle. It's like this thick and like all the kids, you just, what you carry and then you have a backpack. So, so you don't need to roll or you carry this thing and you have your, and you have your backpack.

All right. Who do we got next? All right. Next question is from Lindsay. Is it okay to have different office hours throughout the week depending on my schedule? So sometimes higher up schedule meetings that I have to accept, how should I manage office hours in those cases? Well, first of all, congrats for doing the office hour strategy.

For people who don't know very briefly, this is the strategy where you have set times on set days in which you are available for incoming communication, office door open, your phone is on. If you, if there's a chat service, your company uses like Slack, you're in a channel ready to chat and you use this to defer, uh, as much as possible, any sort of back and forth communication that requires more than you just responding to a message with a single message.

You say, why don't you just grab me at my office hours? And this actually breaks up or eliminates a bunch of ad hoc back and forth exchanges. And those are the real killers. We always talk about the real killers of your, your energy and concentration is having to monitor inboxes for these back and forth conversations.

So you want to try to eliminate those with office hours. Uh, okay. It's okay if your office hours shift a little bit, right? Because like typically what's happening is no one knows what your office hours are. So you're, you're typically telling people when you were diffusing one of these back and forths.

Like it's often, Hey Jesse, what do you think about, like, what should we do for the timing for the upcoming client conference? Like, Oh, this is a back and forth. It's usually you're replying to that. Like, that's a good question. We should get into this. If you can just like swing by, you know, call me during one of my office hours this week and we can figure it out.

Paste what those are. Like just have a text file on your desktop with here's where they are this week. And you just like paste that in, right? And then they just like, okay, great. I'll, I'll call them at one of those times. So if you see something gets scheduled and you're kind of shifting them around, it doesn't really matter.

Um, because, because people are hearing about your office hours sort of on demand. So that's one thing to keep in mind. A second thing to keep in mind is protect the office hours like other meetings. So like, especially if there's a shared calendar system, more and more companies do this because we, we, we over meet.

Why do we over meet? Because we have a workloads that are too high, but more and more companies like Georgetown will do this. For example, you'll have a community shared calendar that's communal. So that when a higher up, like a fancy person in your company wants to set up a meeting with people more and more, what'll happen at these companies is they'll have one of their assistants.

Look at everyone's calendar, find a time that works and then send out an invitation. This has become like the new way that higher ups deal with calendars, right? Because a higher up is not going to waste his or her time with like, and well, when are you available? What about this?

Or what about that? And so there's like more and more of this is going on. So all you have to do is your office hours just go on your calendar like any other meeting. So when these meetings are being set up automatically, those times just aren't considered. So you have to like show respect to your office hours, treat it like if you already had a meeting with like your team lead and then your, your boss is like, Hey, can we meet at blah, blah, blah time?

And you're like, well, no, I'm already have a meeting then, but I'm free after before and you like give all the other times you're like, we're, we're kind of used to that convention. So it's okay if your office hours have to shift because most people are finding out about them as they need them and to treat the office hours like a meeting that's already on your calendar.

And then you can kind of protect that time. Like you would protect any other meeting that was on your calendar, then just follow the same conventions. Like, let's say like the CEO of your major company, you know, chief of staff is like, she needs to meet you at three on Monday.

You know, I get these summons sometimes, not summons, but like at the university level, this will be typically like the provost or the president. If the provost or the president wants to talk to me, typically they're just telling you, uh, Hey, can you come by at like blah, blah, blah, because their schedule is so full.

It's like, this is the slot. Okay. So if it's something where you would, you would overwrite or reschedule an existing meeting with someone else, then you would overwrite it and cancel your office hours. If it's something where you want it, you would say, no, no, I'm already busy then, then, and then, but here's what I'm available.

Then don't reschedule your office hours. So just treat it like you would any other meeting on your schedule. I get burned with this shared calendar thing all the time, Jesse, because I have multiple calendars, right? You know, I have my Georgetown calendar, but like so much of my life has run, my writing life has all this other obligations and I don't keep that on my Georgetown calendar.

So what'll happen is with higher ups, they'll often just get this meeting invite. We'll just show up and they'll be like, yeah, we looked at your calendar. And so as far as they're concerned, these assistants must think I'm so lazy because I don't, there's nothing on my Georgetown calendar.

Otherwise you'd have to go through your Georgetown calendar and put fake things in that codes like for your other calendar. Yeah. Which would be like a, yeah. So instead what happens, I'm just constantly having to be like, I'm sorry, like I don't actually use this Georgetown calendar, but I'm not available any of these times.

Maybe I should consolidate my calendar, but the issue is it's complicated because I share my calendar with my wife and she doesn't need to see all the Georgetown things. And I, I have things I don't want, I, you know, as I use three calendars, it's the moral of the story.

You probably could spend like two to three minutes and put in those like blocks of meetings, you know, as just like fake code. There's probably a way to, I can import my other calendar to my Georgetown calendar and have a show up automatically. But yeah, I don't, I just annoy people.

All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Luke. I'm 25 and a post-production producer at a large marketing agency. My long-term goal is to make feature films, but I took this job to build career capital and expand my experience beyond my video production skills. My role involves no creative work, just managing emails, coordinating teams, and ensuring client deliverables.

How do you know if I'm staying in this role is, I don't, how do I know if I'm staying in this role is worth it for career capital or if it's time to quit and pivot towards something more aligned with my aspirations? Well, I think there's a couple of things going on here, Luke.

So one is your specific aspiration for feature films and two is just a more general question of how do you decide, like, is this job right for me and whether, despite the specifics of the job. When it comes to feature films, I was actually just, you know, I like movies.

I read a lot of books about movies. I was just reading or listening to a book, maybe this was in the book we talked about from December Books on the 1989, the sci-fi movies from 1989. And maybe it was Ridley Scott. I don't quite remember which director was talking about this, but basically they had this advice, which stuck out to me that I think is relevant here as well.

They said when it comes to like feature film directing, there's not a ladder, like, so this idea of like, well, let me just get my foot in the door in like that industry. And then I'll slowly kind of like move my way up and work my way up these, like, that's not how it works.

You have to just start directing. This might've been Chris Nolan who was talking about this. Like you got to just as quickly as possible, find a way to make a movie and make it good. Like I got the money from here and there. It's small. It's a short, but like makes, you gotta be making movies.

Like the directors just come in directing, like I'm a director, I'm directing, you know, here's a movie I did. Here's a short. Sometimes this could be commercial directing, like Ridley Scott came out of commercial directing, like that's where he could get work, you know, okay, but I'm, I'm directing stuff and now I want to do movies.

Don't they're saying there's not, don't become an AD and then work your way up to be an assistant director and we're like, that doesn't work. There's a talent mindset in Hollywood that says like, if you're meant to be a good director, you should just come onto the scene guns blazing, like directing cool stuff.

Oh, look at all this talent. Let's like give them a bigger movie to try. It's not a, like you worked your way up type of thing. So no post-production producing at large market agency, when it comes to your aspiration to be a feature film director, I mean, you might as well be at like a computer software firm or a truck driver or something.

It's just not related. It's not going to make a difference. The bigger question here though is like, how do you know in general, if staying in a place is worth your career cap, is it worth it? Are you, are you acquiring enough career capital? Should you be switching to another job?

Is this not, is this not going to support a vision you have, you know, how do you actually do that? There's two things that matter. Lifestyle centric planning and evidence-based planning, right? So lifestyle centric planning means, you know what it is you're aiming towards and it's not a specific job so much as like, here's all the aspects of the life I want to have in five years and 15 years.

That type of specificity now allows you to say, am I acquiring the right type of career capital at this particular job that I see how, like I have the path in mind that if I get better at this, I'll be able to change my position to be this and this position will be compatible with this and that's going to match like a lot of the stuff I want in my lifestyle.

So you're, you're, you're working towards a particular goal. Now you can get very clear about specifically what you're doing, is specifically what I'm doing going to help me get there. Evidence-based planning says when it comes to like particular stuff you're doing as part of these lifestyle plans, do you have evidence from real people who know what they're talking about that the thing you're doing will work?

Like lifestyle centric planning is how you figure out like this is what I'm aiming towards and I'm working backwards from that and building plans of like how do I get closer to that giving my unique opportunities and obstacles. The evidence-based component is making sure you're not telling yourself stories as part of that effort.

Make sure you haven't written your own story about what you think matters as opposed to learning from people what really matters. Like the advice I gave you earlier in my answer about how people become feature film directors. That's like an example of evidence-based planning. You might want the story to be, I'm doing production at a marketing company which will lead to this, which will lead to this and then finally I'll get my shot as being a director.

You might want that to be the right story but then you talk to real people who know what's going on and you get, you Sandy check your plan, they say that's not going to get you anywhere near where you want to go. Now evidence-based planning, you say why would people avoid this step?

Well, they avoid this step because you sometimes get an answer that is not what you want to hear. Sometimes you get the answer of like, oh, that's how people do this? I'm not going to be able to do that or I tried that and it didn't go well, right?

So there can be some reality checks that happen with evidence-based planning. I may want to get to this place. I may want this plan, this piece of my plan to work. But what I'm doing is not going to work and what I would have to do, I'm not capable of doing or I tried and I failed.

I don't have that talent. I don't have that access. It's too late. So evidence-based planning can be pretty scary because it reality checks you. But those reality checks are often liberating because you say, okay, well, what's next? And the thing you want to fall back to is your lifestyle-centric vision and you say, okay, there's other ways to get to that.

That's why I love about lifestyle-centric planning. You might have a whole lifestyle, creative lifestyle vision that your plan to get there is built around being a director and maybe you find like that's not reasonable. Well, you still have that lifestyle image. Oh, I'm sorry. I just moved your camera, Jesse.

All good. Speaking of directors, that was like a, you know, you know what they call that what I just did there, Jesse? So people who are watching, I had to laterally move the camera back on Jesse's head. That's called a swishpan. Is it? Yeah, there you go. Swishpan Jesse.

What I'm trying to say is I should be a director, but we have lifestyle-centric planning. We're like, okay, this, I had this way of getting to this lifestyle that's built on like, you know, directing for whatever reason, that's not, I got some evidence-based reality check. That's not going to work.

Well, what were the aspects of this lifestyle? I really liked, you know, I could, I could still capture those with this other way. Okay. Maybe I'm not going to be a feature film director, but I could be X, Y, and Z because actually this is what was important to me and you, you, you find other ways to get there.

It's the, it's the most flexible planning methodology I know, because you have all of these possible routes forward in your life. Your life forward is all of these branching trees that, that exponentially grow and covers all this land. You see each of those as paths. There's so many paths to navigate there.

You always have so many more options. It's so much more freeing than grand goal-based planning in which you're just fixated on a particular path. And if that path doesn't work, you're out of luck. And if that path does work and you discover it doesn't fix everything, you're even more out of luck.

So embrace the flexibility of lifestyle centric planning, and then use evidence-based planning to make sure that your, your ideas for how you're going to move forward actually makes sense. All right. What do we got next, Jesse? We have our corner. Ooh, this is where each week we take a question related to my new book.

I can't say new book anymore, Jesse. It's been out for 10 months now. Yeah. We came up with some good rules on the last episode. Yeah. What did we decide? One year mark. One year mark. Okay. So we, okay. So for, I'm going to call it my new book until we stopped doing the corner.

Okay. So my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Every week we do a question relating to it and we do it so that we have an excuse to play the official theme music for the segment, which we'll hear now. All right. What's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

It's from Christy and it's about office hours again. So she says, I'm a software engineer and recently read Slow Productivity. I set up office hours twice a week. I've also blocked off Wednesdays as meeting free days. However, people disregard these and still schedule meetings on Wednesdays. I'm fed up.

How can I politely and effectively communicate, reject meetings on these days? Again, I think this goes back to, and office hours I should say is discussed in more length and slow productivity because principle one, doing fewer things. Part of that principle talks about how you reduce just the load of what you're juggling in any one moment and office hours is a fantastic strategy in there, along with many others including like pulling versus pushing, et cetera, et cetera.

All right. This goes back to do not treat office hours differently than other meetings. It lives on your calendar in the same way that, you know, meet with Bob from marketing lives on your calendar. And deal with meeting requests the same way you deal with meetings. It's all homogeneous now.

Hey, let's meet on Wednesday. How about two? You're like, no, I'm busy from one to three, but I'm free from three to five. I'm free from two to whatever. You just deal with it like the way you would deal with any other meeting. And again, the rules I talked about before apply here.

You would only preempt that meeting, your office hours for another meeting, if you would have preempted a meeting with Bob from marketing for that new meeting. So again, if it's super urgent and a higher up and you would normally cancel another meeting that was already in place to do this new meeting, then do the same for office hours.

But if you would not cancel an existing meeting, right, for this new meeting being proposed, don't do that for office hours either. Treat it with parity to how you would treat existing meetings. If you're struggling, it might be the case that your office hours are too long. That's like a common issue is that people will say, I'm going to have three hours on Wednesday afternoons and that's office hours and then people can come in.

And that might be too much time to consistently have blocked off, right? Because if someone, if Bob from marketing said, we should just have a three hour meeting every Wednesday, you'd be like, no, that's too many meetings, right? So that could be the other problem here is that your office hours are too long.

Make them shorter. Make it an hour. People can come in and out. You can get a lot done in an hour. And then it won't be so hard. It won't step on people's toes too much time, right? So just whatever you would do with a normal meeting, do that with your office hours.

I like office hours. I'm back. So I'm teaching again this semester. So I have like legitimate office hours again. That's really nice. Call me in my office hours. All right. What do we got? We got a call. So you want, normally the last episode you said you wanted the theme music twice.

Do you want to hear it again? Oh, I forgot the rules. Yeah. Let's hear it one more time. I'm going to miss it when we get to the, when we get to the one year, two more months. Play it four times. Because your book came out early March, right?

Early March. Yeah. You basically have two months from today. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting there. I can put it on MP3. You can listen to it on your walks. I'm just going to. With your new pedometer. I'm going to look. So yeah. I'll be wheeling my pedometer wheel and listening to slow productivity music on a Walkman.

It'll be fantastic. All right. We got a call this week? We do. All right. Hi, Cal. My name is Emil Folino and I've been a lecturer within computer science at the Swedish Higher Education Institute for the past eight plus years. I've used some of your approaches to deep work and time management to become great at teaching, and was promoted to expert lecturer a couple of years ago.

I've now invested some of my career capital and will start doctoral studies in January, but with my lecturer salary. To be able to obsess over quality, I will need to develop a new set of skills related to research. As an experienced researcher, what general and specific skills would you recommend that I hone in on?

All right. That's a good question. All right. So this is someone who knows the field well. They've been doing lecture and is going back to doctoral work while maintaining their lecturer position or salary, which is well played, by the way. Right? That's a good move. What do you need to know to do computer science research at a doctoral level or above really well?

Here, I usually come back to a couple things. One, it's really hard to find good problems. There's like a real skill to that. This is the right problem to look at next. People have been looking at this, and this is like a natural follow up that applies some special skill our group has.

There's like a pattern to this. It's usually in the adjacent possible. So when you're a doctoral student, defer to more senior people for problem selection. So if you're in a group that research is often done with your advisor, your advisor's going to have that sixth sense you don't have yet.

Right? If you're working with other research groups, you kind of defer to more senior people. Let them find or suggest what the problem, what the really interesting problem is. You can be kind of selective here. Maybe people are, hey, do you want to work on this? Do you want to work on that?

It's scary if people just sort of like spitballing, like this could be interesting, that could be interesting. I would tie my ship closer to ideas that are coming out of existing research that's catching attention. It's a good place to be in your doctoral program. There's some heat going on over here with this issue.

There's been a couple of big papers on it. Like what are the natural follow up papers on this topic? What's the natural next step? Like get in where there's already some heat while you're still a doctoral student. The second thing I would say is more important than anything else is understanding existing research.

Look at the relevant papers and take the time to really understand them. The most valuable doctoral students in most computer science groups are those who are reading and understand the literature relevant to the problems that they're supposed to be working on. If you want to make yourself really useful to your advisor, you come back and like I spent the week reading these three award winning papers from the conference that's relevant to our field.

And here's what's going on and here's what they did and here's what they found and here's what their questions like you want to be. You want to be an expert. I mean I remember this when I was post-docing. So I'm a theoretician but I post-doced at MIT in a systems group, network and mobile systems group.

Hari Balakrishnan's group. And I remember like one of the students, so they were doing a lot of work on wireless because I was doing theory about wireless distributed algorithm theory and sort of wireless environments. And so I was going back to a systems group to bring some theory know-how but also to bring back some more systems know-how back to theory it was etc, etc.

I remember one of the students in this group when the new 802.11n standard came out which was new at the time. This would have been 2009, 2010. They just disappeared and came back like a week later. Okay, I have mastered, I've read all this, the impossibly obtuse opaque I should say technical documentation and read the early papers on it.

I now know exactly how this works and what the options are and what's happening here and I can, I'm an expert on this now and then we were able to or my advisor was able to harness that to say great, now let's find an interesting problem to look at.

This new standard came out, let's really understand it. What is like an experiment we can run or an interesting thing we can follow? So like that student had made himself very useful by mastering that knowledge. In theory, this is even more clear. The best papers come out of understanding the already good papers and it's really hard to understand papers in theory because again, they're complicated proofs and only some of the steps are shown.

I mean it's really, it's one of the hardest things I ever do intellectually is really understanding existing proofs in existing papers because you have to fill in a lot of gaps on your own. But when you teach yourself the mathematics and the logic and understand a really complicated proof and you really internalize it, it opens up all of these options.

You take that same mechanics and you apply them over here. You see a natural way to follow up. Well, their results were here. I really understand this. I'm also good at this like, I can bring in like whatever, like Martingale analysis, which they probably didn't know much about. But if we can get away from being dependent on churn offs and throw in some like Martingale bounds, we can actually deal with these troublesome dependencies over here and lose that log factor.

Great, I'm going to take that hammer, I'm going to apply it over to this nail and now you have a follow-up paper and it's technical and it moves the state of the art forward. All of this comes back to understanding papers. So defer to the experts on like what are the good problems when you're still new and make yourself useful by reading what's already good and spending the time to understand what's already good.

It's all about the reading. All right, let's see. We got a case study here. We could, Jesse, instead discuss Martingale bounds instead of the case study. I don't know what people would prefer, my misspent youth doing probabilistic analysis. I've got a case study here. This one comes from Justin.

This is where people write in the jesse@calnewport.com and talk about how they use the advice we discuss on the show in their own lives. So Justin says, most of my career has been in people work, adults with disabilities, trauma-informed work with teens, and now as a pastor in a church.

The transition to pastoring was a significant adjustment and was hugely helped by your book's deep work in So Good They Can't Ignore You. I was in my late 20s with a second kid on the way when I decided I did some, to do some lifestyle-centric planning that included no more shift work and the chance to be more open about my faith in my work with my people.

My intention was to be a pastor with time and energy for my wife and kids, living close to my family and the mountains here in Alberta, Canada. So I quit my highly demanding youth and family counselor role to do a MA in seminary while working halftime as a church youth ministry director.

My undergrad five years earlier was really challenging with a little more prefrontal cortex and a lot more awareness of autopilot scheduling and deep work blocking. I was able to do well in seminary, become licensed as a minister, grow my position at the church into a full-time role, get back into CrossFit and backcountry camping and be a present father and husband.

Pastoring has a ton of variety and flexibility and infinite opportunities. So your MSP teaching has been huge and taming what could have been overwhelming. MSP, he means multi-scale planning, by the way. And weekly templates are helping me grow in specific areas of study. Keep up with administrative demands, grow our church and plan family and personal rhythms that are life-giving and make me glad I made the switch five and a half years ago.

Justin, I appreciate that case study. Two things I want to point out. One, for all the students out there, notice how Justin said he found his undergraduate education to be challenging, but when he returned half a decade later with a little bit more prefrontal cortex and a little bit more systematic approach to his time and efforts, it wasn't so hard.

Yeah. Being a student is not that hard as long as you don't approach your work like a student. When people come back to school later in life, they often have a much easier time doing well because it's not that hard of a job if you're good at managing your time and being sort of reasonable about when you get things done.

So just keep that in mind if you're stressed out as a student. I also love the example of lifestyle-centric planning. He figured out the attributes he was looking for in his life, and some of this had to do with who he was around, what he was around in terms of physical features, the mountains, etc., but also some characteristics of his work, in particular that he was open about his faith and that the hours weren't crazy, that he had lots of time with his family.

Then he worked backwards with opportunities and obstacles and said, "Okay, I could go back and get this MA. This timing works out. If I keep this job over here, that'll pay for that. Youth ministry director will help keep the lights on while I'm getting this MA, but it'll have to be the foot in the door to move to a pastor role and set the right type of church, and I throw the right sort of Cal Newport-style organizational strategies at my work.

I can keep it tamed enough to have the time with my family. There's an opportunity to do this near where I want to be." You see how all these pieces fit together. The final point I want to make here is notice how he was deploying the sort of quote-unquote productivity strategies we talk about, like multiscale planning, weekly templates, and autopilot scheduling.

He was deploying them to help execute his vision of having a job that had a spiritual meaning to it but had a reasonable time footprint so he could do other stuff, that he could be present for his family and spend time in nature. It's why I get frustrated when people take what we do here, for example, and somehow lump it into some sort of undifferentiated hustle culture.

When people say talk about organization and productivity is somehow the embodiment of some sort of bourgeois embrace of capitalist dynamics, as if there's some better alternative world in which we all sit around and do nothing and just snout pithy substacks and are lauded or something like this, and work is all sort of contrived.

How are people in the real world using these type of ideas? Often they're using them so that they can keep their work contained, the same way I use them. I get super stressed with crowded calendars. I get super stressed if I have to work outside of a nine to five on any sort of consistent basis.

I get super stressed if I don't get seasonality, times that are low key to offset times that are higher key. The only way I know how to sort of keep my work reasonable is to deploy these type of ideas, multi-scale planning, weekly templates, autopilot scheduling. I love the shift in thinking.

You deploy these tools to make your life more sustainable, not as a means to make it more stressful. What is the reality? Facebook's slow productivity. Most of the knowledge work sector right now is dominated by this broken notion of pseudo productivity where visible activity is used as a proxy for useful effort.

So if what you want to do is hustle, what you want to do is keep getting more and keep getting more recognition, you could just work really hard, just work all hours, answer emails all the time, just be visibly busy all the time. You don't need. Why would you need careful planning of your time?

Why would you need weekly templates or autopilot schedules or multi-scale planning? If you're in the pseudo productivity regime trying to get attention, just be on your email all the time. That's what's rewarded right now. If anything, the stuff we talk about is sort of counterproductive to the things that get people in a superficial sense noticed and moved ahead, especially early in their career.

So anyways, I use that, Justin, as an excuse for a bit of a rant. I think of what we call productivity, I think about that if you increase what you can produce per unit time, you can now reduce the unit time and keep the production the same and work less.

That is the flip side to I can increase how much I produce. You can also decrease how much you work in a way that is sustainable. So we've got two sides of the coin there. We've got a quick tech corner coming up, but first I want to talk about another sponsor.

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Well, where this all came from is this famous online product, My Body Tutor, T-U-T-O-R. They've been at this for 20 years using online coaching to help you become healthier. You have an online coach that you work with to help you figure out like what you're doing with your diet, what you're doing with your exercise as this is customized to you.

And then you check in with the coach every single day. That is the magic of the My Body Tutor service is accountability. The second bit of magic is because you have this coach you're working with, I know you're accountable. If you need to adjust, they help you. Oh, I'm traveling, you know, for the holidays.

I'm worried about my diet. Like, great, let's come up with a plan. I'm going on this corporate retreat. I'm not going to have my normal exercise. What should I do so I don't sort of lose momentum? They'll help you come up with a plan. So you can adjust the things and then you have the accountability.

That really is the most effective way I know of to get healthy short of actually having a nutritionist and physical trainer come to your house like the Hollywood stars do. But that costs all the dollars in the world. My Body Tutor, because it's delivered online, you get that same sort of concierge daily service, but you get it at a much more affordable price.

So go to My Body Tutor, T-U-T-O-R to learn more. If you mention you came from the Deep Questions podcast, they will give you $50 off your first month. So go to BodyTutor.com and mention Deep Questions. All right, Jesse, let's do our last segment. So we're going to do a Tech Corners where we talk about some sort of interesting element or idea from the world of technology.

Today I want to talk about what I'm going to conservatively assess to be the most important article of the last decade. You say that's fair, Jesse? Yeah. Most important article. I haven't read it yet, though. Well, you know. I think we know. It's the most important. What I've got is my latest article for the New Yorker.

I've loaded this up on the screen here for those who are watching. The article is called A Lesson in Creativity and Capitalism from Two Zany YouTubers. So here's the point of this article is I spent time with two DIY maker YouTube YouTubers. So the people who build, they build sort of crazy contraptions on YouTube.

One of them was James Hobson, who runs a channel called The Hacksmith, and they do a lot of like taking things from Marvel movies and then building real life versions of them. Wolverine's Claws or Captain American Shield, or they built the bulletproof suit from the John Wick movies. And then I also looked at Colin Furze, who also builds crazy things.

Right now his current project is he's digging out a secret underground garage in front of his otherwise nondescript suburban England house, and it's going to have a DeLorean. It'll be a button he presses that summons this DeLorean from underground and the front yard opens and it's going to come out.

He's working on that right now. So I spent time with both of them. I recommend you read the article if you have a New Yorker subscription. But here's like the point from the article that I want to emphasize here. They started the same way, both James and Colin, right?

Early YouTube, they got started, they started doing these type of videos, they built up an audience, found sponsors, suddenly they could do this full time. Then their paths diverged, creating an interesting natural experiment. James decided, "I want to get big." Now it turns out like what he was really motivated by here is he just loved the idea of having a giant space with all these people.

He just had this, "I want to get big." So he began aggressively investing money in the channel. He went from his garage to a 13,000 square foot warehouse that they were leasing, and then he took out a multi-million dollar mortgage to go to like an 18,000 square foot warehouse on this large corporate campus, and they remodeled the whole thing.

It's called the Hacksmith something, like Research Center, HERC, and he modeled it after Stark Industries from Iron Man, 30 employees, a burn rate of a quarter million dollars a month. He really blew this thing out big. Colin Furze did none of that. He just filmed some edits to videos on his own.

James's wife like holds the camera for him, just like does it on his own. He has a barn that's not air-conditioned, which horrifies James. He's like, "Why aren't you air-conditioning your barn?" And Colin's like, "Eh, whatever. It's too hot. I'll just work in my garage. It's fine." I went through, so I tell you two stories.

You go through. They're making the same type of videos. Colin's channel's doing just as well. Actually, it did more views than James's channel did in 2024, and so I get into why in this article, and the short summary is that I point out that there is a specific type of media that's happening in some online spaces, parts of YouTube, in podcasting, in sub-stack newsletters, where the typical dictum that you should just keep growing doesn't necessarily apply, and that there's a sweet spot where trying to grow bigger you're not going to.

There's an authentic sweet spot where you can make a very good living for yourself. I'm talking probably like doctor or lawyer money. You're not Elon Musk, but you're making more money than a computer programmer. There's this sweet spot you can get into in podcasting, in sub-stack, and in certain corners of YouTube where it's low overhead, you do really well, but you don't have a lot of other people you're paying, and actually, it's not easy to break out of it.

I get into why James's approach to scale didn't work and why these type of media are resistant to throwing in a lot of money and scaling really big. The conclusion is this is like a cool reality of the current internet. It's a good counterpoint, I think, to sort of consolidated social media culture where everyone is just a digital sharecropper for a small number of big companies and just creating free content so they can make a lot of money so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy bigger chains.

It's like a counterpoint to all of that where you can have a non-trivial size creative middle class of people who make a really good living creating interesting stuff, and it's not part of a massive company, and it's not a winner take all, only six of these people exist in the end.

So as I get into the details in this article, but the creative middle class is something I've been following, and I think as social media's cultural grip has begun to become more shaky in the last few years, the opportunities for this creative middle class, these genres that can support a large number of people doing well, not starting massive companies, but individually doing well, the opportunities for this is growing, and it's a trend to follow.

I think it's a very positive trend for the internet, and it's a very positive trend to follow for just the state of the creative arts in general. So anyways, check out this article. I'm actually writing like four articles in a row for The New Yorker. I'm sort of taking over Kyle Chakra's column for a month.

So we'll have more to talk about. I'm writing one about TikTok right now, so I'm kind of doing a bunch of tech thinking right now. But anyways, check out this article if you have a New Yorker subscription because it illustrates a cool point that I think is worth keeping track of.

All right, well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show and until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you enjoyed today's discussion, you might also enjoy episode 333. It's called New Year's Course Correction, and it gives some small things you can do right now.

It'll have a big positive difference on the year ahead. I think you'll like it. Check it out. It'll have four simple ideas. We can call them mid-year course corrections that are all designed to do two things. One, help you reclaim some depth in areas where our currently distracted world might be robbing that depth, and two, be something that you can execute right away.