So, let's use for today's Deep Question the following, "What happens when you cut your work day in half?" I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So I'm joining you once again from the Deep Work HQ North up in Hanover, New Hampshire, joined by my producer, Jesse, who is down south in our DC version of the HQ.

Jesse, how's it going down there? It's going well. It's good to be here. I'm excited about your comment last week about the new desk that you want to put in the office. Yes, yes. I am looking forward to my vision of a custom-built three-wall wraparound desk. It's great to daydream.

I'm actually podcasting right now. You can't see it from the camera because the camera is just on me. You just see a wood panel background behind me. But I'm actually podcasting right now from, I guess I would describe it as a conference room. So the house in which I'm staying that this fellowship program put me up on has a walkout basement conference room where they really do run conferences down here and other types of events.

And I'm facing three massive arched paned windows, probably 10 feet tall that are looking out over Ockham Pond beyond this. But I'm at a table that must be, it made me think about our desk, I don't know, 15 feet long, a giant solid wood conference table that I'm sitting at right now.

So maybe this is what got me thinking about our solid built-in desk in the HQ. It's a big sturdy piece of wood. I feel like a diplomatic negotiation is happening every time I sit down here, the podcast. So I like it. Big solid, big solid piece of wood. And I will say, here's the danger of today's podcast, not to open the curtain a little bit, but we're recording this one a full week in advance.

So this is coming right after the weekend of the 22nd and the 23rd. I'm very tempted, Jesse, to talk just watching Nationals baseball. We had our first series sweep since 2021 against a playoff contending Giants. I think we could fill an entire episode easy with trade deadline discussion. So let me just say, everyone out of the audience should be thankful that I am resisting my urge right now to go really deep on the controllability of Lane Thomas or Kandee's third base defensive run scored or whether or not CJ Abrams is going to break one war on the season, which I think he definitely will.

All of the instincts in my body, Jesse, are saying, do not go serious on baseball. But I'm in a good mood because the baseball team has been playing well recently. Yeah, really good series win for them. Yeah, yeah, can't go wrong. Can't go wrong. I still have not succeeded in convincing either the Lerner family or Mike Rizzo that they need deep work taught to their players to really get to the next level.

And the right way to teach this is to have the person who wrote the book be in the club box because you see, you need me there, I think, to really get a feel for it. You need me in the club box, probably in the clubhouse, let's be honest, so I can really get a sense of what's going on there.

So again, my call goes out, you really need me in the clubhouse for the team to get to the next level. I mean, I think honestly, me being there on game day is like a three win above replacement bump. I'm a three war player. Okay, that's enough of this, Jesse, we're gonna lose all of our listeners.

Speaking of our listeners, though, one thing I've noticed, and I don't know if you've seen the same thing, but it seems to me the links and ideas that people have been sending to us at interesting@calnewport.com have been unusually good recently. I'm getting lots of really interesting articles and links and case studies that people are sending to me.

It's really kept me rich in ideas to think about. And it's actually something that someone sent to me recently that I want to make the focus of our deep dive today. It's an article from friend of the show, Oliver Berkman's newsletter. So Oliver Berkman is a columnist and writer from the UK.

He wrote most recently 40,000, is it weeks? I always get it wrong, 40,000 weeks, which is his time management for mortals. So it's this very popular book, rethinking time management about we only have so much time you're not gonna be able to do most things you want to do.

Now what? And it really hit a chord. There is vibes of slow productivity in there. There is vibes of Jenny O'Dell in there. I think it really hit a chord and it's done very well. The paperback version is coming out in the US right around now. So certainly check that out if you haven't bought it yet.

But anyways, he has a newsletter called The Imperfectionist. And he wrote recently about an experiment he conducted with his own time management where he dealt with feeling overloaded by actually drastically cutting back how much he worked. So it's an experiment that really touches on the fixed schedule productivity strategy we talked about recently and the slow productivity philosophy more generally.

And I thought what we would do is let's go through it. I want to go through his newsletter and react to certain pieces about why he did it and what he learned because I think there is some lessons we can identify in that as well. We'll now just set up the experiment that Oliver decided to conduct.

So he said, "Something I've long understood about myself is that whenever I get stressed about the number of things on my plate or anxious about the challenges of a specific project, it's an excellent idea to do the opposite of what comes naturally to me." So scrolling down here he says, "And so recently when I felt myself on the brink of overwhelm, I thought I'd try pushing this principle one step further.

It had started to feel as though even 20-hour workdays would be insufficient, frankly, to get a handle on my to-do list. So what if I were to deliberately limit myself to a preposterous, clearly insufficient four-hour workday instead?" All right, so that's our setup. He was feeling overwhelmed and said, "I'm going to run this experiment.

What if I do the opposite of my instincts?" I want to point out here before we even get farther into Oliver's particular experience, as I've talked about on the show, I did something similar, though for different reasons, during my years as a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Now I wasn't feeling overwhelmed.

I actually had the opposite problem, which is I felt as if I didn't have enough work to do, which is very common for a postdoctoral position, especially in theoretical computer science. And since, in part, those positions are a holding pattern while you go out to do your academic interviews to try to get an academic job.

And also you just don't have classes, you don't have a dissertation to work on, your research is mature. So typically you are just continuing research projects that you already started but haven't yet finished. You want to get those finished in time to go on the academic job market. So you can feel, especially in theory, a real drop in your time obligations.

And I got really worried at that point because I knew that that was going to shift dramatically in the other direction when I became a professor. Professors have a lot more on their plate. You have to teach classes, you have to research, you have to supervise students, you have to find grant funding, you have to do service.

And so I did something similar to Oliver when I was a postdoc. I slashed my working hours down because I wanted to get used to working on my research in a much smaller amount of time because I knew that was the only amount of time I would actually have available once I became a professor.

So I'm familiar with this setup, but I came at it from the exact opposite angle. I came at it from when I was not busy enough. Oliver is trying this when he was too busy, which I think is interesting. All right, so let's keep reading here to see what happens.

So let's go on here. All right, he's very clear about this. I'm not talking about the three to four hour rule for getting creative work done. Now, as an aside, Oliver has this principle of, you know, work on something creative for three hours, maybe four, and then stop. That's about how much time you can make progress on something creative.

But what he's emphasizing here is this is more than this. He said, no, this was more of a shock tactic. Just for a while, I dedicate no more than four hours to any kind of work. So this was not just about work deeply for three hours and don't do any more.

He's going to do no work after four hours. So he said he was going to then make myself stop and use the extra time to do fun things instead. Not that I expected them to feel fun. I expected to find it seriously uncomfortable to walk away from work like this.

And reader, it was. He then goes on to give the caveats. He says, look, here's the obvious caveat. I'm well aware of an unusual degree of autonomy over how I portion my time. This specific experiment won't be feasible for many, though there's a caveat to the caveat. It's worth asking if you might have more autonomy than you realize.

I do think that is a important caveat to the caveat. He's saying, yeah, of course, I'm a writer. I can do this. A lot of people can't do this. But do keep in mind, you might have more autonomy over time than you think. And really, the spirit of this experiment is reducing artificially your work hours to see what happens.

Not that you specifically maybe reduce it to exactly this many hours or exactly the way he did it. OK, that's the setup. He's overwhelmed. Four hours, then he has to go try to do fun things. He had three observations, three observations that came out of this experiment. So let's go through these one by one, and I'll give you my take.

All right, so the first-- I'll load it up on the screen here for those who are watching. The first thing he noticed. Just by making the activity a smaller part of your day, you'll find yourself looking forward to it more. It shifts from being something you have to do for hour after hour to something you get to do.

This chimes with the research of the psychologist Robert Boyce, quoted in 4,000 Weeks, who found that the most productive writers were those who made writing only a modest part of their schedules rather than letting it dominate. Motivated to return to it day after day, they produced more output over the long haul.

All right, so this is a classic slow productivity principle right here. So he's saying when it comes to the deep stuff you do, when it comes to the skilled stuff you do, putting a limit on your time is not bad. You do better work when you actually work, you look forward to it more, and over time this quality output is going to aggregate into a quality final product.

So this is classic slow productivity for high-quality efforts. Slow but steady is how people produce masterpieces, not in frenzied bursts of activity. So I think that's important, but what we're missing is what about all the other stuff you have to do? It's not all just sitting there and writing.

So let's keep going, get his second of three observations. All right, second. There's a palpable shift in your experience of agency, of being in charge of your life. It's easy for a major project or a long to-do list to start to feel like an angry god you must ceaselessly placate, and that the best you can hope for by the time evening rolls around is to have held it at bay for one more day.

Even on the days you manage that, it's a horribly oppressive way to live. Radically restricting your hours flips this picture completely. Merely by deciding on strict limits, you're putting yourself in the driver's seat, which brings a totally different energy to the situation. Now instead of resentfully grinding away or procrastinating in a stubborn attempt to defy your oppressor, you're choosing to dedicate time to the task.

And four hours spent in this manner, I can attest, is vastly more effective than eight hours spent in the other way. Well here I think is an insight that is new to me and I think is a smart one. The psychology of your workload. Personifying your workload as an enemy against which you are essentially doing battle.

So by saying, "I am going to not just stop working when I'm just so exhausted it becomes impractical to do anything else," because that's the workload monster winning. Say, "I'm going to choose when I work and it's going to be less than that." And now you feel like you're in charge.

And Berkman is pointing out, when you feel like you're in charge, like you have autonomy, you bring a fresh energy to that work. It's something you're choosing to do. You are going to feel more motivated about how you work. Now look, I've seen something similar to this back when I used to work with college students.

When I would find college students, especially at elite schools, begin to have massive procrastination problems, almost always what was going on was a short-circuiting of their motivational system. They're grinding, grinding, grinding. Especially if the work was for classes, they didn't even sure why they were taking them. It was because they were pre-med, because their parents said they should be a doctor.

They're grinding, grinding, grinding. What would eventually happen is their motivational system would fry out. When their system fried out, they couldn't do any more work. Berkman gives us an interesting insight into understanding what's going on there. In some sense, it is your oppressor finally just crushes your spirit. So simply by saying, "I have control.

I'm going to work a lot, but on my terms, and not as much as I might otherwise do," you feel like you're doing this on your own motivation. That this is intrinsic instead of extrinsic motivation, and that's much less likely to fry your motivational system. You're much less likely to burn out.

So I think that's a really insightful way of looking at it. By working less, you actually feel better about your work, and again, the results you produce might therefore end up not being less than if you had tried to put in more hours, something that he keeps coming back to again and again.

We got one last conclusion from Oliver here. "Finally, you learned a crucial lesson that the sky doesn't fall in when things get neglected. We 'insecure overachievers' drive ourselves so hard thanks to an unconscious sense that if we don't, some catastrophe will occur. And look, it's really good to meet deadlines, keep commitments, answer messages promptly, and so on, but for almost everyone in almost every context, it isn't actually essential in this existential life-or-death sense to do so.

When you put a hard limit on your work hours, it's inevitable that on any given day, you'll fail to do everything you think needs to get done. In fact, that's true whether you limit your hours or not. The limit just makes it impossible to ignore. And what happens? The world doesn't end, which is liberating because it allows you to accept your finite capacities rather than living in fear of them, and because you get to spend less of your work time feeling like you're forestalling catastrophe and more of it making a calm, empowered choice about what would be wisest to prioritize.

The miraculous result, once more, is that you end up neglecting less of what truly matters." So I think again, we have some interesting psychology being brought up here. So he has this term "insecure overachievers" for this idea that I have to keep working because if I neglect something, it's going to be a problem.

People are counting on me, they need this to get done. And so you push yourself longer hours to try to each night get to this place of, "Okay, I think I've taken care of every open loop." We see this a lot in inbox insecurity. This idea that if there's an email in that inbox from someone I work with that needs something, that's a problem.

And so I got to empty out this inbox, I got to answer all these messages, and I have to keep checking even after the workday is over because it makes me really stressed that there's a message in there waiting for me. You see this a lot when you have interactions with people who are maybe new to knowledge work or aren't as inculcated in a world of knowledge work, and you will see this sort of desperate quick responses to your messages that are almost always apologetic, and it's because they're still conceptualizing this communication like they would an in-person interaction.

"Oh my God, it's rude to ignore someone. Every minute I have not answered this message is a problem. That's a minute where that person is just sitting there seething. Where is my response?" So you see this inbox insecurity as a concrete instantiation of insecure overachievement. I actually have a—I come to a similar issue sometimes from a different direction.

So I have this weird worry where I'll think, "Okay, I have these various things that I need to get done. What if I am sick tomorrow, or what if equivalently I don't sleep well? I'm going to have a hard time getting some of these things done. So if I can actually get this all done today, even if I have to push really hard and skip a meal, I will get some relief knowing that tomorrow I'm not dependent on feeling good.

I'm not dependent at being at my full power." This of course is another Sisyphean mindset because there's always another day. There's always more work to be done. Days are short. Days are long. It's much better to say, "Let's just take each day as it comes and does a reasonable amount of work, and there'll be good days and bad days, but overall things will get built up." But it's very easy for me to think at the moment, "If I could make tomorrow easier by working harder today, I'm going to get some relief." And of course I get to tomorrow and then say, "Well, if I could make today harder to make the next day easier, then I'm going to get some relief." And the reason why you never catch up of course is that there's always more work you can pull in.

There's always someone else with a message you could get back to. There's always another project you could initiate. So I think these subtle psychologies of overwork are all very interesting. There is now that we're stepping back, okay, so we're stepping back from Oliver's article. There is an overlay I want to add onto this that he doesn't talk about, but we talk about a lot on this show, and I think it is really critical, and that is the overlay of workload management.

So a lot of what happens when you add, let's say, a four-hour workday, right? So you're adding an artificial limit. The reason why that works, like the reason why you don't, in Oliver's case, end up spiraling out of control, the reason why you don't end up with people constantly irate at you and on the phone is because all work limits, be it the eight-hour workday, a ten-hour workday, a four-hour workday, they're all artificial.

They're all just lines in the sand of, "This is how much time I have to work, and I stop working after this time is over." In almost every non-entry-level knowledge work job, there is way more available tasks than you'll ever have time to do, so you're always at some point drawing a line and saying, "No more after this." This is why Oliver finds that his whole thing doesn't fall apart, because we're already implicitly doing this all the time when we stop working at six, or when we stop working at seven, or when we decide, for example, that we're not going to work until 4 a.m.

every morning. And all of this is possible. Now, by the way, I do have a friend who does this, who will work to 3 or 4 a.m. most days. You might say, "Well, wait, if I'm working until 7 p.m., there's no more time to work. That's filling my whole time." No, you could be working many hours after that.

It's all kind of artificial where we draw these lines. What happens is when we draw these lines is that becomes our implicit workload management system. This is how much time I have. If I have way more work than I can actually stay on top of in this much time, that's back pressure.

And that back pressure says, "I'm going to say no to more things. I'm going to take some more things off of my plate. I'm going to spread out how long I spend to work on things." So the back pressure of your artificial work limits really determines what your workload is like.

If you switch down to four hours, and you're able to get away with that, let's say you're highly autonomous, you're not going to break the norms of your company, what's going to happen is that back pressure will just adjust your workload. If Oliver's stuck with four hours of work a day, give it six months, and you will see these implicit but notable shifts in what's on his plate because you adjust.

I'm not able to keep up with this many things, and I'm working this many hours. So I said no to this. I took this off my plate. I'm spending twice as long for this. You would adjust to that new workload. And the thing is what he's noticing, and I think this is true, is even a relatively drastic shift in your workload, so down from what you can fit in eight hours to four hours, in the end will likely not seem to have a major difference on your impact as a professional, the quality work that you produce that actually moves the needle because often when we're pruning back this workload, we're pruning stuff that's less important, and we're working more efficiently and more quality deeply on the stuff that does matter.

So we do have a lot to give. So why don't we see more experimentations like this? It's typically norms. And that's what it really comes down to, and that's probably the piece that's missing from Oliver's essay the most is it is very difficult in most knowledge work situations to be saying no or turning things down when you could be saying yes.

You're not doing things in the afternoon because you don't work in the afternoon. It's a time people normally work. It's an amount of work people normally take on. It is very hard to walk back from that. So norms will drive us towards your workload, level of busyness, the schedule you use should fit something we're more or less used to.

So we end up with a particular artificial limit around eight or nine hours, which is okay but kind of stressful depending on the work, even though it could be much less, just like it could be much more. Now, of course, my answer to all of this, and it's hard, but my answer to all of this is we should just move workload management away from the implicit.

We should move it away from just the outcome of back pressure on your time limits, and then that just leads you naturally to say no to more things. I think we should just be much more explicit with workload. How much should you be working on? What are you working on?

When does that do? This is a reasonable load. You're not going to put something else on it. And we can tune that up and down, and that should be something negotiable. That should be something you could say, here's the salary ranges for this job, depending on which workload you're comfortable with.

And I can come in and say, great, you know what, I have some young kids at home. I'm going to do this for our workload, and we actually manage it that way. And it's somewhat less money, but it's worth it. And then I can tune it up later in life.

I think workload management should be explicit. But outside of a few small knowledge work fields like software development, we do not do this. And I think that's ultimately my takeaway message is this whole piece gets to the way that we implicitly deal with our workload right now, which is just, I don't know, I'm out of time.

I feel like I can't fit any more. So this back pressure will lead me to change my habits. It should not be so implicit. It should not be so emergent. We should have a better way of keeping track of what are you doing and how much you want to do.

And use that to not only prevent overload, but to allow us to fine-tune this in ways that it has a more diversity of loads and is a lot more sustainable. It's not the sexiest of topics, workload management, but I do think it's actually at the core of a lot of what a lot of people care about inside knowledge work.

It's at the core of a lot of the sources of unhappiness that I think people have in their jobs these days. So there we go. Oliver, thank you for that enlightening article. I'm jealous. I'm thinking about I would like to do something similar. And I think you let us hit on some really interesting points.

You kind of work similar hours anyway, right? I mean, it's hard for me to say because I— I guess if you don't include your teaching stuff. Yeah, because I have multiple jobs. If I focused on any one job, if I was just a writer or if I was just a professor, I'm probably already doing something like that.

It's a reduced workday compared to what my peers are doing. And it helps me manage my workload and it improves the quality of what I work on. And actually, I think most people don't notice. So I think you're right. If you pull out my individual jobs, you see I'm doing something like Oliver is doing.

And I do fine. No one really notices. It does work out okay. All right, so I pulled some questions that all I would say roughly have to do with work, the amount you work, the trade-off between work and going off to have fun. So sort of all within the same Berkman style, how do I control my work and my workload and its relationship to other parts of my life?

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We probably could have just brought these, Jesse. I probably should have just brought our sheets up here. I didn't think that through. I was actually thinking that while you were talking about it. Yeah, I know. You got a lot of things to bring. Camera equipment, you know. Exactly. Yeah, I got all these lights.

Kids, that's another thing I had to bring which took up a lot of space it turns out. All right, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? All right, first question, Natasha from New York. I was hoping you can spend more time elaborating on what the celebration bucket may include.

One of the most recent episodes you mentioned hobbies but do you also include actual celebrations like birthdays or graduations or even vacations? Yeah, celebration is maybe not the most descriptive term but let's just step back and set the stage. So our old way of conceiving of cultivating the deep life just focused on these buckets.

Identify the different areas of your life that matter and overhaul them one by one supported by habits. One of those buckets we would often give was celebration. That was one of the example buckets. Now if we want to put this into the context of our deep life stack, the new way we think about cultivating the deep life, these buckets or areas of your life are relevant in the final layer of the stack.

That's the vision layer, the layer in which you plan for the remarkable and it's where you take different areas of your life and try to overhaul them in a remarkable direction. So that's how this maps onto our new way of thinking about the deep life. Celebration, that term was being used because it started with a C.

And I was trying early on to try to make all of our sample buckets I gave, sample areas of your life to alliterate and I'll start with Cs. But this I think is a good point that Natasha makes. When you hear celebration, you think about literal celebrations, birthdays, graduations, or vacations.

What I actually meant when I talked about the celebration area of your life was more celebrating the nice aspects of life. So other terms here that might be appropriate would be gratitude or enjoyment or appreciation. And if we want to be a little bit more specific here, we think about this area of your life in which you were doing things for non-instrumental reasons.

So activities or experiences that don't have some other goal, like this is going to help grow my business, it's going to help me make more money, this is going to put me in better health or fitness. But things you do for no other reason than just the pure enjoyment or appreciation of the experience.

So types of activities that this area of your life might entail include high-quality leisure. So you really get into the craft of building something or writing or painting where it's woodworking. It's just the appreciation of the craft. You're not selling it. You're not trying to use this as a way to get over here.

You just appreciate the craft of something and you can be lost in that. Adventures fall into this. You know, we're going to go hike one of the high peaks of the White Mountains just for the experience of being above the tree line and what it's like and it's dramatic up there and it's meditative and just there's gratitude for life and the world when you're up there.

That's a classic celebration bucket type activity. Other well-engineered experiences, even if they're not adventures, count in here. I mean, for the gourmand to go to a restaurant where they just really appreciate the food or for the cinephile to go to see the movie of a director and just to really appreciate the cinematic experience.

So this brings us to connoisseurship more generally. That really falls into this area of life as well. Developing over time a real expertise in something just so you can enjoy the quality of something. You can appreciate what makes this good versus bad. Why is that car such a cool classic car?

Why is that book such a well-written novel? All of that falls into this area of your life. So when you get to that plan level, the vision level layer of the deep life stack and you're looking for areas of your life to overhaul, I think this is a fun one.

It's how can I inject into my life in some really intentional ways much more of this really just sort of appreciating non-instrumental quality experiences. And I think this is a good one for almost every phase of life. When you're in that hard charging phase of life in your 20s, your professional ambitions might start to drown that out and that could be an issue.

So I need to make sure I have this in my life in an intentional way. Having kids can kind of push this out of your life at first and you really want to try to claw it back into your life as soon as you can. There's sort of the upper middle age malaise as your kids are getting older and you're sort of ossifying in your career.

How do I inject something new, something new I'm learning how to do? Something new I'm mastering, the adventures I'm going on. I'm thinking a lot about this now. I'm trying to think about how to get more of this in my life as I leave that, okay, I have a bunch of young kids all hands on deck stage to have a little bit more breathing room being able to do things with them, just moving on in my career where it's more stable.

This is definitely an area when I get that layer of my stack each year that I'm starting to think about more. So I think celebration is probably not the right term anymore. Let's now say when you get to the deep layer stack, the one area of your life that you might think about is we could call it quality or enjoyment.

Maybe that terminology is going to work better. I'll tell you, Jesse, people up here understand that. By up here I mean New Hampshire. I think especially because two things, the winters are hard and the summers are beautiful. I think there's this sense of in a way that you can't get away with, you could get away with this in DC or New York where you could just be, yeah, I'm just, my job and I just work and we kind of work late and because we go to like a cool restaurant or whatever.

Around here, I think people are much more intentional about these non-instrumental things in their life. It's like the winter is coming. Someone told me at dinner the other night, if you're not skating or skiing, you're going to be in trouble. Like you need to lean into the winter. When the summer comes, you better have things that have nothing to do with your work that you're taking advantage of the weather.

And I think in the cities you can get away without this. It's whatever. I don't have a hobby. I work a lot and because we go to cool restaurants and bars, there's like stuff going on, you can be distracted and you don't need the systematic intentional development of areas of your life that are non-instrumental and high quality.

But up here, I think there's less to go do. There's not 50 interesting bars and restaurants you can move between. There's not restored historic movie theaters where you can just go see the latest thing. There's not museums and all these readings going on. So you have to get careful.

What am I doing with my time outside of work to really lean into it? I do appreciate that. >> That's a good point. Yeah. >> You're good at that, Jesse. I think you have a good, you typically have a pretty fair collection of things. You think through pretty intentionally of outside of work.

>> Yeah. >> Golf, tennis. >> Big difference between, yeah. And then I don't have kids yet. So I have a little more time on that end. But yeah, in terms of even sports like tennis and golf that you have to play if you want to get any better. And then you have to fit that in.

>> Right. But then it's probably for the better that you do, right? Because it's a nice counterpoint to other things. Because you have to be outside. >> Yeah. I mean, it keeps you. >> You have to be outside. You're moving. It's social. >> Yep. And it's like you're thinking the entire time.

So it's like a, you know, it's a test of like your mental ability to focus for a while. Especially if you're playing in matches and stuff. >> Yep. Yep. >> At any level. At any level of like either sport. >> Yep. I got to just be focusing on this.

I can't let my attention wander. Yeah. So there you go. >> Yeah. Because it's really easy to do in like either sport. Like you could all of a sudden like look ahead to the next point or something like that. I remember Michael Jordan said like never look ahead. Just like play like now.

>> Yeah. Make this fast. >> Which is hard to do. Yeah. >> Yeah. All right. So good. There we go. All right. Let's move on. What do we got next? >> All right. Next question. JT from Texas. Cal often talks about individuals who make big changes in their lives in pursuit of depth.

What's a useful way to think about when a big change is appropriate versus attempting smaller optimizations around the edges? >> Yeah. I thought this was relevant to that same top layer of the deep life stack we were just talking about. You plan for the remarkables. You take areas of your life and overhaul them when possible trying to push them to be more remarkable.

This is where you would make major changes often. I'm going to completely change my work. I'm going to move. I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail. This is when you're aiming towards the remarkable is when big changes actually come through. So I think it's a really good discussion to have.

When is it appropriate to make a big change versus smaller changes, optimize around the edges, just changing parts of your life? So I thought we'd start by saying what's the wrong reason to do something dramatic? I would say the wrong reason to do something dramatic is because you think just the drama or boldness of the move itself is going to be invigorating.

I think this is pretty common. I mean, I see this a lot where people get interested in the change itself. I'm going to feel like I'm shaking up my life. I'm going to feel excited. I'm going to feel a sense of possibility when I move to the woods. But you're making the move not because of concretely where it's going to lead or what it's going to change, but just because you like the idea of making a move itself.

And often when people do this, they will take off the table other factors that really matter in their life. What's the side effects of this going to be? They say, I don't care. What's important is I just need to do something big. It's the change itself that's going to break me loose from my ossification.

Now that's the wrong reason to do it because the energy and excitement of a big move wears off once the move is done. You change, you quit your job, you move to the woods, you begin hiking on the Appalachian Trail. And if you're just doing it for the sake of doing, okay, fast forward two weeks, that excitement is gone.

You're now in a new reality. Is that new reality, the new lifestyle configuration this has generated, is it much better? And if it's not demonstrably better, you've made no progress, you may have burned bridges, you may have made other aspects of your life worse. So I think the right reason to make a major change is when it is part of a considered plan that moves you closer to your vision of an ideal lifestyle.

And when I say considered, I mean there's two things going on here. One, it is pushing you towards something you do care about. So it's taking something you do really care about and making that remarkable. So it's not just a change itself, it's the change is actually signaling to yourself that something that's core to you is something you take seriously.

So you're making the move to this new location so that you can be closer to your family. Now you're doing that to perhaps signal to yourself that family and family connections are important. So you want A, to have an actual value that's being amplified by this big change. And two, you've thought through its side effects.

You've thought through holistically when I change this part of my life, what's going to happen to other parts of my life? And am I net-net going to be much closer to my ideal lifestyle or is it a wash or is it perhaps even worse off? Again, I mentioned this before, but it's worth reemphasizing.

There is a blinders effect that I see often when talking to people where they get so in love with the idea of changing something that they will purposefully obfuscate the negative side effects. I don't want to think about that. That might talk me out of it. I just love the romance of we're moving to Spain.

I love the romance of I'm quitting my job to row across the ocean or whatever it is. You're now thinking through, well, what about the other parts of my life? And what about family? What about my kids? What about financial stability? What about what I get by living in a city?

All these other aspects of your life you put blinders on is problems. A big change really should be something where you've thought through all the different side effects for all the different areas of your life and you like where all of it ends up. So let me give you two case studies.

I'll give you two case studies, one where a big change is a good idea and one where just blindly making a change would be a bad idea. So an example that's a good idea, this is a story I elaborate in my slow productivity book that's coming out in March.

I told more of the story of Paul Jarvis, who we've talked about before on this show. I know Paul because he wrote a book once called Company of One that argued for not growing your business, but instead keeping your business as you get better at it, keeping it purposefully small and leveraging your increasing value as you get better at what you do to actually work less.

Oh, I can make the same amount of money in less time now. So to actually use skill to buy flexibility, not to generate more money. It was a really cool book, but I learned more about his story. And I'll give you the bare bones version of this, but essentially he was a web developer living in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a big city. He was living in a high rise. He described it as a glass cage. So just up in this high rise, this expensive real estate, working really hard to try to pay the rent. And him and his wife decided at some point, "Well, we don't like this.

We don't like living in the city. We like nature. She likes surfing in particular." So you know, good thing she lives in Canada. And they didn't mind the web development stuff, but they had no real interest and you don't want to be an entrepreneur with a big company. You don't want to make a lot of money.

And so they moved to Vancouver Island, which is very rural outside of Vancouver in the water there. They moved to the west side of Vancouver Island to a property in the woods near a small town. I think it's called Tolfino, where there's actually a surf break. It's like the best Canadian surf break is on this small town on the western coast of Vancouver Island.

They lived real cheaply. They built greenhouses and gardened in their property they had here. This was not a fancy property. It was sort of isolated. And he said, they worked it out and he said, "I could do client work remotely." And that's what he did. As he got better, he charged more and had less clients.

And then he eventually added in some products he would build because he wouldn't have to talk to clients at all to see how they would go. And they just lived cheaply. That was a change moving to the woods that made sense. And all the aspects of their life they cared about, their ideal lifestyle, this image of this is, we want to be near a small town and surfing every day and working on our gardens and only working just enough to make ends meet.

And my skills are lucrative enough that we could do that. It was a move that made sense. That big change made sense because all of the other aspects of their life were thought through and it helped them. And it really leaned into the central value of he didn't care that much about work outside of just doing enough to get by.

Let me give you another example where a massive change would probably not make sense. Use myself. What if I just said, like right now, you know what? I'm tired of, I have too much on my plate, which is true. I have too much on my plate, so enough of this.

I'm just going to quit academia and move to Vermont and just write full time. Now, again, it's one of these things that on paper you say something like that, you're like, ooh, yeah, that's exciting. You could see someone like me getting swept away in the excitement of just, we're moving to Vermont and everything's off my plate and I'm just going to, whatever, just write books.

And it feels like a solution to your problems in the moment and the drama is very romantic. But let's think that through. In my case, we say, okay, how would a change like that, what's the impacts going to be on other parts of my life? What's the impacts going to be on my vision for myself and my work?

And suddenly all these issues try to come up. I mean, first of all, I enjoy academia. I enjoy old universities. I like the fact that Georgetown where I am is an 18th century university. Dartmouth where I am right now is an 18th century university. These are places that George Washington visited, old buildings.

I love that history. I love professors and being around the classrooms. I really like that. What about my kids, for example, the school they go to that we're really closely connected to, all the friends we have around there. What about financial stability? Writing can be hit or miss. You can have drought periods and it's not nearly as stable as, okay, I also have a paycheck with health insurance and benefits.

What about separation from family? We live in a place that's close to our family. What about the reality of full-time living in Vermont? I mean, it's great in July, but call me in February. It's a different type of picture, right? So if you step back from the romance of let's make a big change, this situation we say, I don't know.

I don't have an ideal lifestyle vision in which just living somewhere completely new and cut off from this type of work I've done my entire adult life, a lot of that would start to suffer. And so that would be a place where you say there are smaller optimizations to make that would get you closer to your ideal lifestyle.

There's any number of flexible moves you can make within the umbrella of academia and within the realm of your own habits that could reduce the burden of I have too much to do. You could reduce what's on your plate. You could lean into sabbaticals and off semesters. You could, if you needed to, perhaps even change your situation somewhat within academia, this would be a case study where small intentional changes could help dampen down what was causing the problem while still making your overall lifestyle image largely be matching the things you care about.

So anyways, these are off the top of my head, but I wanted to give two examples where in one a radical change led to an overall better life and another one, a radical change wasn't going to solve the problem and it causes many issues as benefits and there's probably smaller fixes to get you closer.

So I don't know, that's maybe a little bit specific, but that's the type of mindset I have when I'm thinking through throw it all and move, throw it all, change your job, or I think working within the system is going to be better. All right. All of Vermont's realtors just cried.

All right, let's keep rolling, Jesse. What do we got next? All right. The next question is from Deep Name. I read in your deep workbook and in your Tim Ferriss podcast that you rarely work past five or 6 p.m., but you didn't mention what time you start your workday.

2 a.m. No, not really. So in the normal school year, my workday, it can't begin until after I drop the kids off at the bus stop. So that's 8.30ish, I would say. So yeah, no, I rarely work past five or 6 p.m. I don't start early. I'm not an early riser.

It doesn't make sense to work before we get all the kids fed and packed and out the door to the bus stop. So usually the earliest I'm working is probably thinking on my walk back from the bus stop after dropping them off. I might start thinking in my head about the first thing I'm going to work on so I can hit the ground running when I get back.

So yeah, my day actually does stay pretty reasonably 9 to 5. All right. Picking up speed here. What do you got next, Jesse? All right. Next question, Buzz from Vancouver. I'm 35 and live in Vancouver and work as a communications manager. I live a very fun, lifestyle-centric life centered on outdoor sports.

The problem is that I'm only managing to save small amounts of money every month, but every time I research the next pay grade in my profession, it entails more responsibility in the management of bigger teams. I'm not saving enough for retirement, but I don't want to disrupt my current lifestyle to do so.

Well, there's two levers you can push here. So one lever is to spend less. You reduce the cost of your lifestyle, and therefore you're able to save more of the money that you are already making. Other related sub-paths in this general journey would also be to generate other sources of passive income.

So this could be a situation where you rent out the house you currently have and buy a different cheaper house, and now you have that rental income. All of these type of things, you could probably find more specific examples in the FIRE community. Financial Independence Retire Early. They're all about reducing their expenses so that they can save much more of the money that they're actually making.

Now what you would be talking about here in the FIRE community would probably be what they refer to as "fat FIRE" because your goal here is not necessarily, "I want to save a huge amount of money very quickly and retire in 10 years." Your goal here is just, "I want to make sure that I'm saving enough money for my job, not that I want to retire early, but that I can retire when the time comes." So fat FIRE is what they refer to as, "You do cut your expenses back so that you can save an unusual large percentage of your salary, but you're not trying to save 75% of your salary.

You're still living a relatively full life. It's not this sort of Spartan, let's really batten down the hatches and not spend any money lifestyle." So that's probably where you would fall. You would check out Mr. Money Mustache, would be a good source. Maybe check out the Frugalwoods. That's another good source.

I think right now the Frugalwoods, who actually don't live far from where I am right now, neither of them work full-time jobs anymore. They use their house from Cambridge, right outside of Boston. They kept that house and they rent it. And I think they're living largely off of that rental income and Liz's freelance writing income.

So they're living very cheaply. So that direction you would check out FIRE. The other direction is to make more money. Now, of course, what you're saying here is, "Well, to make more money, if I just kept going on my current job path, the next level up is more work and more responsibility, and then I can't do this other stuff I love about being in Vancouver.

I can't do all the outdoor sports." All right, so you have a couple options here. One, you can throw at this issue of gaining more money but not wanting to give up too much autonomy. Or you could throw much more advanced self-management, self-organization tactics. So you could throw at it pure Cal Newport, multi-scale planning, hyperactive hive mind busting processes.

I mean, you could just come at it, "I know how to organize myself and my work. So even though you add more responsibilities, I can still keep control of my schedule in a way that I could still do the fun outdoor activities." Now, you might be surprised by what you can get away with.

Most people are really bad at this. If you're not really bad at this, then you might gain a lot of autonomy over your work. The other way you could make more money without losing your autonomy is to say, "I have to be more creative than just simply what's the next promotion at my particular job." And there you need to start thinking about career capital theory, the type of thing I talk about in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

Right now, there might not be another option for you, other than just taking the next rung up and having to manage teams. But is there a skill you could develop that is sufficiently rare and sufficiently valuable that it would give you enough leverage that you could shift your situation to be more money without having to give up a lot of autonomy?

Is there a skill you could develop that would allow you to, let's say, trade more accountability for accessibility? Judge me on my work, and I am going to do this work at a high level because I'm really good at this now. But you're not going to expect accessibility. You're not going to expect I can reach you at any time.

It's instead going to be, "We'll see what you do. Do good work. As long as you're producing good work, we don't care that you're not available at three on Thursday because you're out mountain biking." So career capital, that is building up rare and valuable skills, can give you leverage for a lot more creative ways forward.

So we have two different directions here. You can spin less, and there we said, "Look at the fire community, especially the fat fire community." Or you could make more without unnecessarily giving up more of your autonomy. And there you're going to want to care about being better organized, about how you manage your obligations and attention, and also thinking about career capital theory, building up skills that you can then cash in for gaining more autonomy.

The right answer is probably some sort of combination of the two. So probably what you're going to want to do is think through your finances more carefully, find some ways, and again, the fire community will be very helpful here to increase the amount of money you're saving to maybe generate some other source of passive income that can all go towards savings.

And then mix that with some sense of, "How do I make more money without giving everything up?" And again, some notion of, "I'm more organized than most people," or, "I'm working now very intensely on skills so that three years from now I can change my situation into one that is going to allow me to have more options.

I can make more money without having to completely give up my autonomy." I would look at both of those paths at the same time. If you're serious about both those paths, you will find some combination where I think you're going to feel financially pretty secure and still be able to do those other things you care about.

And the main thing I appreciate here is that you are looking at the full lifestyle holistically, and you know for you right now at your stage of life, these outside sports, these adventure activities are a key part of what earlier in the show we used to call the celebration bucket and now we said we should rename to something else.

That you know that's important and you're trying to build a lifestyle that includes that and includes work. This is what this more holistic lifestyle-centric planning looks like. You're trying to make changes where pushing this doesn't drop this, or we can improve this while not hurting this. And I think it's a great example of exactly those types of trade-offs.

All right, so what I want to do instead of a final question is actually a case study. This is something a listener sent in and it felt very relevant to the type of issues we've been talking about on the show. So let me read this here. I'm obfuscating a little bit, obfuscating a few details here because I don't know how much anonymity is being expected.

So I'll obfuscate a few details here. All right, so here's the message and I'll read this here. I am the "exhausted professor" from episode 197. A little more than a year has passed since Cal answered my question about how to plan my time during my sabbatical. Not only had it been a decade since my previous sabbatical, but I was also recovering from having been department chair for the previous five years, so I was at that time exhausted.

Cal advised me to operate at the 30% level, recharge my batteries, work on things that are interesting to me, and make myself as scarce as I had been back when I was doing field work in Antarctica. Turns out that's exactly what I needed to do. And I'm so glad I had Cal's blessing to do it.

I read a lot of interesting books, hung out with my friends and family, and spent lots of quality time with my dog during the final few months of her life. I also gave my career some serious thought, did a little lifestyle-centric career planning, and ultimately left my 10-year position at my state university for a different career at a top-10 school.

While I was sad to leave my old colleagues and students, I needed a new adventure. I started my new job in May, and I totally love it. I have wonderful new colleagues and students, and my work is very fulfilling. I am ever so thankful to Cal for imploring me to recharge, not worry about being productive.

Many thanks to you for choosing my question and for your great work on the show. So I thought this was a great case study for a couple reasons. I think one, this shows the slow productivity philosophy in action to just always be going full bore. I am busy, I am filling every hour of the day.

Not only is it not sustainable, but it becomes an obstacle to actually evolving yourself and evolving your life by taking more time, having seasonality here. When we come off a busy period to go to a slow period, this listener was actually able to gain the insight needed to not only recharge, but make some interesting career decisions, to do a really thorough lifestyle-centric career planning analysis that led her to leave tenure to take another type of job in academia, which she's really liking.

So I like this idea of slowing down sometimes. Not everything should be full bore. Figuring out what's going on, getting reconnected with the things that really matter, and seeing what decisions you might or might not make, what course corrections you need to do that really thoughtfully. Not to just lash out, not to just in year five of your department chairmanship to say, you know what, enough of this, I'm quitting and moving to Vermont.

And say, okay, hold on a second, this is almost over, then I have a sabbatical, let's give this some space, let's slow things down and think more critically about what I want to do. And recognizing in general that life is long, days and seasons are short. In the long scheme of things, no one's going to notice that you didn't do a lot of work during your sabbatical, but for this particular person, it made a really big difference.

So I thought that was a great ending case study for our discussion today of Berkman's idea of doing less on purpose and seeing what you discover. Because in this case, what she discovered was a lot about herself and what she cared about and made some big changes. That was a cool case study.

All right, so I want to jump on to a final segment here where I react to something that's either happening on the internet or someone sent to me. But before I do, I also want to take the opportunity to talk about another one of sponsors that makes this show possible.

And that is our longtime friends at Grammarly. And in particular, I want to talk about their new product, Grammarly Go. So Grammarly Go harnesses the power of generative AI to help you produce better writing. Now there's two elements here that go back to what I talk about a lot.

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Make this sound more exciting. It will rewrite it in a more exciting tone. The large language models behind generative AI are very good at working with styles. So this is just examples of the type of things you can do with Grammarly Go. So anyways, I think this is a very interesting tool.

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That's policygenius.com. All right, let's go to our final segment now where we talk about something that I've encountered in my week that I thought was worth discussing. I'll say today's thing I want to react to is connected to a deeper dilemma I have. And so maybe I'll solicit, Jesse, the comment of our audience here to help me answer this dilemma.

The thing I'm going to show today, I would say, 12 different readers sent to me. It's about the director Christopher Nolan's technology habits. I thought I would feature this today because his new movie Oppenheimer is out now in theaters. I'm a big Chris Nolan fan. I think Dunkirk is a masterpiece.

I'm very excited about what he did here. But before we get to this quick news hit about Chris Nolan's technology habits, here's my dilemma. Do I see Oppenheimer up here? Yeah, Jesse knows. Do I see it up here in New Hampshire? Or do I risk waiting until later in August when I'm back in DC and I can actually see a large format projection?

What's the risk? What if it's no longer in theaters when I get back? It will be in theaters. You think so? Yeah. That's only like a month away. Well, I think I should wait because Nolan filmed most of this in a combination of 70 millimeter and IMAX format, which is a 65 millimeter format.

I don't want to disparage the Hanover Nugget movie theater. Because again, I have good experiences there. I went here when I was a college kid. Their screens are not massive. Their projectors are not large format projectors. The one nice thing about DC is there's plenty of IMAX theaters that can project this capacity also the AFI theater, non-profit theater in Silver Spring, not far from where I live has a 70 millimeter projector as well.

In fact, I saw Dunkirk. When I saw Dunkirk for the first time, I went to see the 70 millimeter projection. So Oppenheimer is filmed in large format. So this is what I'm trying to weigh. Should I risk it? I'll wait. Okay. Yeah. If it's out of the theaters though, Jesse, I'm going to be upset.

Yeah. If I get back. Fire me. Yeah. Like Mad Dog and Steve Torrey. Just like Mad Dog and Steve Torrey. I'll be like, Jesse, you're out of here. Now what we'll have to do after we convince the Washington Nationals that deep work consulting is worth three wins above replacement for their season, we then have to convince Chris Nolan and his team that deep work is somehow going to be critical to their work.

And then I'll be able to go see a print with him in his personal projection room. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So if you get the Nats job and they want you there, you have to get there early so you have plenty of time to read. So you can read for like 90 minutes before you have to do your thing.

I want to do. I want to be up in the owner's box reading, having a cigar with Mike. And then it's like time for me just to get the team kind of fired up. I'm telling you. I'll hang out with Charlie Schlose and Dan Colco. It'll all be fun.

All right. Let's get to this actual news item. By the way, you can chime in if you think I'm making the wrong risk in waiting to see the Oppenheimer in large format, but I'll tell you, I looked it up. The nearest IMAX to Hanover that I could find was an hour, 20 minutes.

So it's another reason, another issue with living up here full time. You got to have your large format. All right. So let me show you this, this small thing I found. I've actually written about this before on my blog, but this is just an honor. This is an honor of Mr.

Nolan. A lot of people sent this to me. All right. This is from the Hollywood Reporter. I'll load it up on the screen here. So here's the article. It's about Nolan from mid-July. The headline is "This can't be safe. It's got to have bite. Christopher Nolan and cast unleash Oppenheimer, the director and star Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon on the stakes of making an R-rated three-hour CGI-free summer flick about the Godfather, the atomic bomb.

It's got to be beautiful and threatening in equal measure." This is why I have to see this thing in IMAX. They actually built a practical, it's not actually an atomic bomb, but the bomb explosion is real. They built from scratch a 65mm black and white camera, which did not exist, a black and white IMAX camera, and then a super high-speed camera of the same type they had originally developed for the Trinity test in Los Alamos.

So a camera that can record at super high speeds. And they did a real massive explosion and really filmed it with this camera they built from scratch to simulate the cameras they used to record the original atomic explosion so they didn't have to use computer graphics. It's all really cool.

But here's a quote. I don't know where it is in the article, but I do have it just written down in my note. So later in this article, there is a quote. Let me see. I think I wrote it in here. Here we go. All right. So later in the article, and I'll stop the sharing here.

There's a quote that reads, "It's not just in his filmmaking that Nolan prefers to rely on analog methods. He doesn't use email or carry a smartphone. And when he writes his scripts, he does so on a computer that isn't connected to the internet. My kids would probably say I'm a complete Luddite," he says.

"I would actually resist that description. I think technology and what it can provide is amazing. My personal choice is about how involved I get. It's about the level of distraction. If I'm generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all day wouldn't be very useful to me." That is, of course, music to my ears.

I think there should be many more professions in which that's really normal. You say, "Why would I have a smartphone? I'm training an elite athlete. Why would I have a smartphone? I'm a full-time writer, and that's only going to get in the way of what I do." I love those types of examples.

I think the more we see people doing incredibly focused activities where they're intentional about their technology, the more we'll see that bleed into maybe less attention-catching roles. We'll see more of that bleed in from movie directors, and we can have more of that in just your life as an executive or a teacher.

But mainly it's just cool, and I think Chris Nolan is cool. I think his movies are cool, and I love the fact he doesn't use an internet-connected computer and he doesn't own a smartphone because he's trying to build $300 million movies. He doesn't have time to be following the latest attention economy distraction.

Nolan, good for you. I'll have to find another way to convince you to hire me to come watch Oppenheimer with you in person. I can't email you, so we'll try to go through your people, but don't worry. Jesse's on it. He'll work it out. And if he doesn't, I'll fire him.

All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.