But before we get into all of that, I want to do a quick deep life slow productivity themed reaction and In particular the the article I want to react to here is my own So I published this just on my my newsletter yesterday July 5th the day before we were recording this episode and this is based off of a Article that many different readers sent to my interesting at cal Newport comm email address All right, so the title of this of this article It's I wrote for my newsletter and if you don't subscribe to that newsletter cal Newport comm you should it's once a week I've been doing it since 2007.

All right, so the title I had for the article was the three-hour Fields metal little Tim Ferriss nod Colon a slow productivity case study, but really what I'm doing here is reacting to this article and again if you're listening I'm showing this on the screen So if you watch the episode at youtube.com slash cal Newport media, you'll you'll see what I'm talking about, but I'll walk you through it This essay was in reaction to this profile from quantum magazine about June Huh?

Huhu a June is 39 year old Princeton professor Why we care about him is that yesterday he was awarded the 2022 Fields medal this is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. It's given out once every four years, I believe it's given out to the mathematical professional 40 or younger whose work done to date and promise for future work is the let's say most impressive among all Working mathematicians.

So it's really one of the highest honors you can win in Mathematics and he won it for work. He's doing on geometric combinatorics All right. So this profile which was quite long quantum magazine is great This profile is quite long had some interesting points in it. So for example, if you look at June's Trajectory, he did not get serious about mathematics until late in his undergraduate career.

He went to College University in South Korea where it's a six-year system It wasn't till his sixth year that he even got serious about mathematics and that's because he took a class from a well-known Eccentric Fields Prize winning Fields medal winning mathematician Japanese mathematician. Hey, Suki Hironaka who was teaching a class where it wasn't Well established results.

He was actually teaching stuff. He was working on June falls under his sway Applies to graduate school. He's applying to graduate school having only been serious about math for one year So he applies for around a dozen schools. Everyone rejects them except for one Urbana-Champaign lets him in They're glad they did because within a year or two he solved Reed's conjecture.

So he immediately solves a 40 year 40 year open problem for the nerds out there You can you can bound the chromatic number of graphs with certain characteristic polynomials the chromatic number of Undirected graph being the minimum number of colors by which you can color the vertices such that no two adjacent vertices have the same color All of my hopefully all my algorithms and discrete mathematics students know what I'm talking about here You can bound the chromatic number with a polynomial the polynomial has coefficients the coefficients of these characteristic polynomials have certain properties that had long been observed such as their log concavity, but it had never been proved that that was unavoidable Reed's conjecture said it was June proved it All right.

So there you go. There's a summary of the first thing he proved He then went on to generalize those results to something called matroids blah blah blah long story short It was it's a very innovative approach that showed that I mean again, I don't know how to summarize this Too succinctly but but essentially a technique that before people thought only applied to problems where there is a Geometric grounding like the chromatic number of a graph.

He showed you could apply this technique to a much broader Class of objects called matrix. Let's just Let's just leave it at that. Anyways, it won him a Fields Medal. It was a really good result I also found that interesting that after he solved Reed's conjecture the schools who had rejected him Came back and courted him.

U Michigan actually convinced him to transfer from Urbana-Champaign to Michigan after he solved Reed's conjecture So they they sort of realized they made a mistake on that one anyways, the reason why I Wanted to talk about this profile of this young professor was the following quote That came from the profile on any given day.

Poe does about three hours of focused work He might think about a math problem or prepare to lecture a classroom of students or schedule a doctor's appointment for his two sons Then I'm exhausted He says doing something that's valuable meaningful creative or a task that he doesn't particularly want to do like sketching those appointments Takes away a lot of your energy This guy's doing productive work about three hours a day Not even just three hours of deep work on math and I do the rest of the stuff later in the day He spends about three hours a day actually exhausting energy from his mind Now I thought that was really telling because it provides an extreme example of one of these principles That is a part of my emerging philosophy of slow productivity And that principle is that busyness and exhaustion that sense of overload and frenetic Movement is often quite unrelated to producing valuable work These are two unrelated things the the pace and effort required to do things of note to prove things about matroids or to solve Reed's conjecture Those efforts do not require and have very little to do with I am overloaded.

I'm burnt out I'm burning the midnight oil. I am working all day long. I'm frantic. I'm frenetic to unrelated to unrelated states a little bit of intense work done at a natural pace Given the breathing room to aggregate over time can lead to really big results So that got me thinking Why are we then in so many roles, especially even specialized knowledge worker roles?

We're producing complex things out of our minds is ultimately what moves the needle Why in so many of these roles are we so busy and why are we so overloaded? And I think there's two different things going on here One is I talk about a lot on the show and in my writing the way we organize work Especially knowledge work today is haphazard Anyone can grab anyone's attention at any time.

We have no sort of systematic thinking about workload We have no systematic thinking about collaboration or communication how this should actually unfold It is a free-for-all of obligation hot potato where everyone's just shooting things off to everyone else You put something on my plate. I send you a clarifying question So I don't have to worry about it for a couple hours Something pops up.

I say why don't you handle this? It's a world without specialization where we say why can't everyone just handle all of the various administrative logistical tasks that are relevant to them? Because then we don't have to hire support staff. It's a chaotic haphazard world And that creates overload that creates busyness the second reason why we feel that is uh, we don't have a good definition of productivity So we we create this new world of work Create this new world of work in which you're using your mind instead of building things With your hands.

So we have to think what does productivity mean and i'm talking now mid 20th century What does productivity mean if we're not counting? The time required to produce a model t What does it mean? Well, we leaned into industrial metaphors. Why well, where were the first big? Offices, where were the first big collections of hundreds or thousands of people in the same place doing work with their mind and not their Hands, it was the front offices of large industrial corporations the early 20th century you get the rise of the mega corporation you get the Efficiencies of scale of acquiring competitors and building up very large companies this this this idea of the very large company Emerges in the early 20th century.

We we see it Uh with the the robber barons the late 19th century early 20th century by the 1940s you have, you know General motors as this massive consolidated company that has all these different verticals Well that requires a huge amount of administrative support. They were all put into the same big buildings there You have the first big knowledge worker Setting so of course when the same ceo that is overlooking 700 clerical workers administrative workers and managers is also overlooking industrial assembly lines We're going to adopt by default industrial productivity metrics effort time spent working Uh minimizing idleness the things you would care about with an assembly line So we have adopted sort of by default these industrial metrics and then as we begin to get some separation We get the rise of knowledge work that's completely Disconnected from industrial production.

We do have a chance to try to evolve our understanding of productivity But then we get the computer revolution and it completely shakes up the whole proverbial snow globe. Suddenly we have networks and email And everything gets thrown up into the air again All these revolutions sort of get in the way the disruption gets in the way of maturity and stabilization of work philosophy So we end up where we are today with this weird mix of industrial notions of productivity that's based around You're a worker on an assembly line.

And uh, if you're idle that's wasted money I want you to be here for set hours and doing those hours I want to see activity that mixed in with the haphazard freneticism of uncontrolled digital communication and we get this weird world we have today So we have these notions of productivity around I can't see you're working.

You're not Productive maybe you're you know, something's going on. You're screwing me, you know idleness And so we want you to be working for these hours we want to see that you're working if you're not going to be in the office and we want to see that you're responding to slack and email because Activity is value inactivity is wasted value very old notion.

So we need new notions of How do you productively create value in a skilled cognitive environment? And that's where something like slow productivity is trying to fill a void. Let us evolve our notion of productivity Away from what you would want with factory workers and towards something that actually makes sense For people trying to add value to information using their mind So it's an extreme example three hours a day And you have a fields medal by 39 But the extremes are often great for highlighting the underlying realities Busyness and overload is unrelated to producing things that actually matter Three-hour fields medal I saw something jesse.

No, I forgot who it was. I think a reader sent it to me It was a writer who Has simplified their writing down to one day a week Really? Yeah, and they're a pretty productive writer It's a non-fiction I forgot exactly what space he's in but just one day a week.

He writes I think it's thursdays And over time he's built up this like really nice collection of books that he's written I mean again overload busyness that sense of like I don't have enough time if anything gets in the way of Producing stuff that matters not that not the recipe for it You like writing every day though, don't you?

I do i've been writing in the morning We we finally have all the different uh workmen out of our study And my desk isn't there yet, but there's a table in there And so I go in there each morning and that's where i've been writing. So like two hours a day I'm trying to two to three.

Yeah, I mean i'm making progress on here's my quick writing update If you're interested i'm working now in my slow productivity book that i'm writing On the the principle about doing fewer things Looking like this is going to come in at a 15 15 to 20k word section So there's these three big sections one for each of the principles and they're going to be pretty big maybe about 15 000 words each and I've been stuck for a little while on this Particular section and I feel like I have some traction going and so that's what i've been working on When I was on my trip, I was getting unstuck which means figuring out What is my path through this particular section?

What are the examples? How do I want to streamline this? I did not I was trying to force what I had before to work and I had cognitive friction I knew it wasn't working the the examples I wanted to use when I dive deeper into the source material weren't what I wanted Didn't seem like it's what I needed And over this trip to Tennessee, I I reworked it.

I streamlined and now it's rolling now it's rolling So i'm not far into the section i'm writing, but I have forward momentum So so hopefully i'll finish that up this week when you do your weekly plan When you do your weekly plan, do you map out like What you're going to write about each day like for instance because you have your new yorker stuff you have your books you have Yeah, I have to figure that out.

Yeah, I mean that's that's what happened I'm in a confusing writing landscape right now because I was I've been working on this big principle of the book Then I shifted over to a magazine piece new yorker piece that was going to serve double duty as a Piece for the new yorker, but also for a chapter earlier in the book Then something else came along And it was sort of more of a topical article.

I said, yeah, I want to short. Let me write that So like all of that got put on pause so I could I wanted to write a shorter sort of topical piece um And that was like the week before my trip So everything got put on pause for that finish that that's an editing and when I came back Now i'm close enough to finishing this principle That i'm i'm going to do that and then turn back to finishing The original piece i'm working on the details here Not that important the bigger point being uh, jesse's right to ask about that.

It's a complicated picture i'm sort of concurrent Writing things and moving around what am I going to work on now put this on side put this on hold now? So I write this it's not always an obvious formula how you make those decisions And and it's something that requires some thought like right now the way i'm thinking about it is because i'm in Editing with this one Uh magazine piece.

I don't want to work on another magazine piece while i'm editing a current one It's it too close to home. We're going to cross the circuit So that's why I while i'm editing this piece. I want to write It's essentially more of an advice-y type section of my book, which is quite different So these are the type of chess pieces you move around Um, yeah, but at the weekly planning stage i'm thinking what am I writing this week?

Where am I going to try to get and then and what I like to? I like to get to the point where I can see a milestone Coming up because then you can go after it like oh I want to get there by this weekend Then you'll add extra hours and really push and and when you're in the stages where you're Planning and trying to make something work.

You can feel like days are going by And not much progress is happening But then when you start to see you have 5 000 words away from wrapping this whole thing up You see that finish line, then you can really lock in And it can be pretty you get these really productive locked in sessions But anyways, that's all just to give the impression of the writing life can be more complicated It seems simple, but it can be complicated figuring out What I should be writing now Is is not always obvious (upbeat music)