(upbeat music) I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 198. I'm here as always in the Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, 198, 200's kind of sneaking up on us. - Yeah, two away, two weeks. - Yeah, I didn't really think about it. For whatever reason, working on the script for today, I was like, wow, we're almost there.

I mean, I assume it's probably too late for us to plan something special. We didn't really get our act together on that. - South Africa trip? - We may be a little bit late for two weeks from now to be recording South Africa. Maybe though we can get you out on the sidewalk in front of the Republic Restaurant here in Tacoma Park with one of those flippy signs.

- Yeah. - You spin. - That's a good idea. - Free podcast show, free podcast show. We can get a little audience together. Can have like six confused parents. On the way to the playground with their toddlers, just standing around looking upset in the background in the HQ. That's gonna be our 200th anniversary.

I'll tell you, here's the best venue in town. I've done a lot of stuff in DC. I would say the best venue in town for something, if you're gonna do a big live show, is Sixten Eye. You know the Sixten Eye Synagogue? - No. - So it's at Sixten Eye in DC.

It's a historic synagogue, but they have this, it's a fantastic performing space. And all of these famous music acts have come through and comedy acts have come through. This was the old school where they would actually build rooms for the acoustics. And so the acoustics in this room, this giant synagogue room, are just perfect.

And it's a cool looking room and they do a lot of performances there. And I got a chance to perform there a couple years ago. It was the Minimalist, you know those guys? - Yeah. - Yeah, they were in town. They were doing a tour. So they used to do these tours where they do their podcast live in different cities.

And they came to DC and Joshua got real sick, like hospital sick, you know, just like caught something and was not doing well. You know, they're huggers. That's their thing. Like they hug everyone they meet in the audience afterwards. So, you know, you get all sorts of god awful bugs, you know?

I mean, forget monkey pox, he probably had crocodile pox or something like that. So they were down a man and Ryan was like, can you take his place? Like just, you can pretend to be Joshua for an episode. And they were doing it at 6 and I. So I got out my black t-shirt, 'cause if you're gonna do the Minimalist, you have to be wearing a black t-shirt.

And we had a great show. Anyways, I just remember my one night filling in for Joshua Fields Milburn, enjoying the venue. - How did it go? - It was good. Yeah, they do a good show. They have a musical act. I mean, they get it down to a science.

I'll tell you, you wanna grow a show, you wanna grow your audience, you gotta work and those guys work. They have done multiple US tours where they do every state. Like that's how they grew the podcast. At some point, they're like, we're just gonna go to every single state and do a performance.

And they did that like twice. And then when they had that documentary that's on Netflix, they toured movie theaters in every single state, bringing in their crowds, premiering it. And they did that before Netflix bought it. That's what built up the energy that led Netflix to bought it. So these guys really are Minimalist.

In a sense that they focus on what's important. Like, okay, we wanna grow our audience. And they give it their full laser like attention, which actually is a good lesson about minimalism. Like this is the idea for my book, "Digital Minimalism." It's not about not doing things. It's not about taking away things for the sake of taking things away.

It's about focusing on a small number of things that really matter. Getting the clutter out of the way that gets in your way. So actually working that hard is actually pretty Minimalist for them. All right, well, anyways, we should get into the show. Two annoying PSAs I wanna do real quick.

One, someone pointed out the other day that the reviews of the podcast on iTunes are really out of date. I mean, I don't really talk about it much 'cause I find that annoying. But it's to the point now where someone who discovers our podcast might say, "Why are there no reviews here since February?" So annoying PSA, if you're an iTunes type, if you like the show, maybe leave a review so that it's more up to date.

That is if you like the show. If you don't like the show, I just got a notice that the review feature on iTunes is broken. And if you try to use it, you will have a virus on your computer. So keep that in mind. Other annoying PSA, if you like the show, you listen to it, you'll probably like the YouTube channel, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

Full episodes, video of full episodes, which now increasingly have visual elements from drawing on tablets, et cetera, available on YouTube just a couple of days after it comes out. And we also release standalone clips of individual segments from the show as well. So check that out, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. All right, let's do a quick writing update.

As you know, I'm working on a new book, "Slow Productivity." This is the first time that I have been starting a book from scratch during the era of my podcast. So I'm trying to do brief updates. You get a window into the writer's life. Jesse, here's the update from last week.

Last week I wrote 5,000 words focused on one particular section in one particular chapter. I have cut or rewritten at least 2,500 of those words. - Really? - Yeah, I've been a cutting machine recently. I've been a rewriting machine. Here's what's working. Here's what I'm finding is going on with this book is I do what I can to come with a reasonable outline for a chapter.

I think this going to this going to this is gonna make the most sense, but I can't really tell how well that plan's gonna work until I do the actual writing. And so then I have to just step back and say, is this really my strongest possible swing at what I'm trying to say?

The trap I'm trying to avoid is writing for the sake of writing. This is a coherent section. It makes sense. It's written well. It's not enough. It's gotta be the biggest, clearest, most impactful possible swing against the target I'm trying to hit. So I've been doing a lot of that where I write and then I have to go back and say, cut this, cut that, tighten this.

We need to add better examples, putting myself into the shoes of the reader. So there has been a lot of cutting. I think, Jesse, that actually my New Yorker experience is leading to more cutting than I'm used to because the New Yorker has really built up my muscles for deep dive research.

So like what the New Yorker demands, if you're gonna talk about something even briefly, it has to be the tip of an iceberg. You clearly know everything about this and you're picking and choosing a few choice things and it comes from a place of expertise. So there's like a deep research that goes into that type of writing.

So now every little subsection of the section I'm writing is gonna have this deep research behind it. And so I overwrite everything. And then I come back and I cut this, cut that. Okay, now let me just take out these three choice paragraphs. It's turning out sometimes to find the tip of the iceberg, you have to build the whole iceberg and see the whole thing before you know what to put under the surface.

So I think it's actually leading to more cutting, but I'm hoping what it leaves behind is more confident. - Yeah, so how does that go? So for instance, on Monday you wrote and then you re-read that on Tuesday and then you cut some of it? - Yeah, yeah. I did a lot of writing.

Sometimes I'll cut right after, sometimes I'll keep going, then I'll go back. I mean, this one section is now at a good tight 4,000 words. And as of an hour before we started recording, I think, okay, it's the right structure. Still needs polishing, but I think I've cut it down to the next things.

But now I'm stepping back and looking at where it fits into the outline of the chapter and rethinking the outline of the chapter because every time you get a piece of that outline filled in, you have a better understanding of that chapter. And I'm looking at it now and thinking, I think I need something else on topic X or topic Y.

So it's a very live process back and forth. You read and you write and you come out of it and you cut and you read and you write, like, good, this is done. Then you step back and say, is this chapter working? Is this whole section working? So that's where I am.

Still enjoying it though. - Do you know how many chapters the book is gonna be? - Probably six plus an intro. So part one is the kind of motivating the problem and the approach. Right now I have that down to three chapters. And then part two is the philosophy of slow productivity, which I've talked about on the show.

Do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. Those are the three principles. You put those three principles together and I think we get a much more humane approach to work, something that is much more aligned with our wiring, something that's more sustainable, something that makes work more meaningful, something that avoids a lot of the issues that we have today with work.

So I'm doing one chapter for each of those principles. But look, that 4,000 words, that's one of six sections in one chapter. Now, some of those sections are much shorter, but yeah, so those are kind of beastly chapters right now. Anyway, so that's where I am. Still writing. Going to California this weekend, so I have plane rides.

- So does that mean more writing? - More writing. Time to kill at hotels. More writing. Going to Northern California, giving a talk, going to a wedding. It's gonna be good. I'm gonna get some good writing done. All right, let's do some questions. I'm gonna do something new. Why don't we start with a call?

We usually start with written questions. Let's actually start with a call. I saw one I liked from Alex. Let's see if we can find that one lurking in there, Jesse. - Yep, here we go. - Hi, Cal. My name's Alex. I listen to your podcast often. I've tried to follow your advice and get all of my important information out of my inbox and into some sort of trusted system, task list, et cetera.

Here's the problem. You do that, you make up a task list, but there's more granular information that you need for each task than you're gonna put in a task list. And where that granular information lives is in the email trails that gave rise to the task. So you're going back to the emails anyway, and you're still living out of the inbox half the time to try to figure out what to do.

What's your advice on this? Really appreciate your help. Love your podcast. Thank you. - Well, Alex, this is where Trello is gonna do a lot of good for you. So there's three reasons why I like using Trello when it comes to organizing obligation. I like that I can have different boards for different roles so that you don't have to context switch between different professional and personal roles.

You can just be looking at obligations that has to do with what you're doing right now during your day. Two, I like the categories. Categories are everything. Things I don't know what to do with, things I'm waiting to hear back on, things I'm gonna bring up at the next staff meeting.

You can have such creative categories. It really helps organize this information. But the third thing I like about Trello, and this is very relevant for your issue, is the cards can hold large amounts of information. This is how you get relevant information out of emails and into a more trusted system, is you put them on the virtual back of Trello cards.

So when you click on a card in Trello, you can flip it over, and on the back of it, you can add notes. And I will just copy and paste emails, text of emails out of Gmail, right onto the back of a Trello card. And if there's a thread of emails that are relevant, paste one, put a few horizontal dashes, divide, paste another, few horizontal dashes, divide, paste another.

You don't have to format it nice, don't waste much time, just get it all in there. You can attach files to these cards. So people are passing back and forth drafts of the report that you're working on, attach it to the card. That's where it lives. It lives in Trello.

You can even put checklist. So maybe I'm looking at a thread of emails about a visitor coming, let's say to campus, and I'm in charge of their visit, and I've been doing a back and forth with someone about, what do I need to do? What do I have to arrange for this visitor?

I might extract out of that exchange a list. You can do checklist on the back of cards in Trello, one, two, three, four, five, where you can actually check things off and see where you are. That third benefit of Trello is a huge one, because again, what it allows you to do is that when it comes time to work on a certain role in your life, so your role as manager, your role as copywriter, whatever, you go to that board, and all you are seeing is information related to that board.

And you see everything you need to do under the categories to capture where it should live into your current scheme of obligation. So the zeitgeist there is really clear and instantly graspable. And all the information you need for the various things on this board are attached right to those cards.

No need to load up email, no need to see completely unrelated requests, no need to induce those cognitively devastating context shifts. So that's why I'm a big fan of Trello. Other tools can do this well. I'm not sponsored by Trello, I don't have any skin in the game. I met once, I believe, the CEO of the company that bought Trello and expressed my admiration, but there's no formal relationship there.

If you have another tool that does those three things, that's fine. I mean, you can simulate this in something as simple as a Google Doc. I've seen people who do this, different docs for different roles, different bolded headings for different categories, bullet point tasks below it, information just indented and pasted right underneath the corresponding task.

People certainly do this. One group that does this for sure is developers. We talked about this in a past episode. We were talking about plain text productivity, but we mentioned that the original term life hacking came from this idea, it was Danny Lewin talking about it, that developers would put everything in their life in one big Emacs file, just with indentation and numbers.

Everything going on, everything they had to do, just indent things, have all the information. So you can do whatever tool. I just think Trello or Trello-like tools make that easy. But the key is, Alex, out of your inbox. Get the information out of there and into a system that does not force you to have to confront everything else just to work on one particular task.

All right, let's see here. Let's move on to an old fashioned written question. This one is from Arvid. Arvid says, "How do I find out what skills are rare "and valuable before choosing a master's program? "I am a mechanical engineering student in my bachelor year. "I have a hard time deciding which master's program "I am going to attend.

"I don't have any clear methodology "for finding out what is rare and valuable. "What do you recommend?" Well, Arvid, I appreciate this question. I used to come to this topic quite a bit early in the podcast, my advice about graduate school. We haven't talked about it in a while.

So you have given me an opportunity to return, as long time listeners know, to one of my favorite mini-rants, which is graduate school. So here's the TLDR form of my advice, Arvid. Do not start a master's program until you have to. And here's what I mean about it. In almost every situation, here's what I mean by have to.

You are working in a job you like. There is a step you wanna take in this career, clearly defined, that clearly demands that you have a master's degree to do it. So, okay, I'm doing this. I wanna jump over to this position. This position will require me to have a master's degree.

And not only that, but it requires the type of master's degree you're gonna go get from the quality or type of program from which you're going to get it. So for example, you're in banking. You wanna become a managing director. It's very clear in banking, after year three or four, you have to get your MBA in order to move to the managing director position.

That is a standard path. You know the quality of school you have to go to. They mainly go to Harvard or Stanford for these MBAs, sometimes Wharton. So that's why I'm getting my MBA, because I specifically wanna do this. I specifically know for sure I need to get this type of master's degree to do that.

Or maybe you're in a federal government job. This often happens. They get the GS whatever. And Jesse, you probably know about this better than I do. But to get from this level to that level in this particular department, you have to have this level of education. You say, great, I want that job.

I need to get that, this level education. This master's degree will satisfy it. Good, let's go do it. That's why you go to graduate school. You do not go to graduate school because you think in general, having a master's degree will open up more options. You don't go because you say that might be an interesting thing to do.

And maybe vaguely this will let me go into this other career field. You have to have specificity. This degree from this program will get me this job. Without it, I can't get it. That's when you go to get a master's program. If you're going just because you think it might open up options, let me give you an easier way to accomplish the same thing that that will accomplish.

A way to accomplish the same thing that will accomplish without you having to waste so much time. Just make a sizable philanthropic donation to that school. Because that's what you're accomplishing. If you say, I'm gonna go do this master's program because I like policy and maybe it'll open up some doors for me.

The school welcomes your money, but you could just cut out the middleman and give them that money without having to waste your evenings for two years. All right, so Arvid, get a job that you like. Wait until you get to an obstacle where a specific master's degree is clearly the way past it.

Then think about going back to school. All right, I appreciate that. Jesse, it was before your time when I used to rant more about master's degrees. - A lot of coaches need to get their master's and get head coaching jobs. - Yeah, that's a real clear thing. Well, how's it work?

You would be, what is the path for head coaching of a program? Do you come out of assistant coaching? - Most of the time, yeah. - Right, and then what do you have to have a degree in for the jump to head? - They're just, a lot of the ones that I've come across are just, you need to have your master's, not necessarily in any specific degree, but just like athletic directors like to see that you have your master's and then that gets you the qualifications to be interviewed and stuff.

- So there's a lot of things like that. I think there's a lot of positions like that where, okay, now you see you need this degree at this point to move on. And to me, that's the time that you actually do it. All right, we've got another question here.

This one is from Rick. Rick asks, how do you know what is enough for the next step of your career? I'm a PhD student in biomedical sciences, studying cancer biology at a well-known university in the US. I would be the first person even in my extended family to get a PhD and I'm also the first woman in my immediate family to go to college.

I'm not sure if these things factor in, but I constantly find myself either in a panic zone or in a comfort zone. It's hard for me to identify the growth zone for my career. I started my PhD after gaining years of research experience, but I think that was not really necessary now that I'm here and I'm looking at my classmates.

It's really frustrating. How can I better identify what's enough and required? I'm clearly passionate. That's why I end up doing a lot without realizing it, but this also leads to burnout and frustration. Well, first of all, I should apologize. It's possible I messed up the name on this question.

'Cause I'm calling this person Rick, but it's also the first woman in her family to go to college. Rick is not one of those names that's used both ways, is it? - I think we probably messed up the name. - So, okay. So Rick, first of all, I apologize for getting your name wrong, but let's just pretend we're doing that for anonymity reasons.

Well, second of all, A, congratulations. What you're doing is very hard. And that was my B, was gonna be what you're doing is very hard. And the reason why it's hard, it's not just that it's hard to get a PhD. Yes, it is. But we often underestimate how much value is extracted from having informal networks of knowledge that help you structure your professional pursuits.

These go a huge long way to helping people navigate through particular professional paths, friends, family, peers, who have gone through similar things. There's information that you'll get through osmosis or information you will get explicitly about how properly to navigate this. And it is a huge advantage in moving through career paths.

So you're trying to do this without those informal structures of knowledge. And I think that's exactly what you're hitting up against is you're having to guess, well, maybe I should go do more of this. Maybe I should do research before PhD. Maybe in PhD, I should focus on being really good at this instead of that.

You're essentially just guessing at what might be important. And because you're first generation to do this, you're probably leaning towards overworking on some of these things as well. So not only are you sometimes spending time on things that aren't that important, but you might be spending a lot of time on those things.

And that's where I think your frustration is coming from. So here's what I think you need to do. You have to recreate those informal networks of knowledge about your career. You're gonna have to go out of your way to get that information in a way that the son of a prominent professor, who's one of three siblings to get their PhD, would not have to do.

So it's not fair, but it's the reality. Let's make sure we're doing the best with the reality that you have right here. So I would recommend treating your career partially as a PhD student, partially like you're a journalist or book author, writing a book about how to be a successful PhD student.

And by that, I mean, you actually have to now go out there and really be doing research about your job. It's not as hard as this might make it seem, but you need to be trying to learn from those around you what matters, what doesn't. Now, some of this can be observational, right?

Passive observational. Let me look at the senior students in my group. Which ones are crushing it? Like which ones are the stars and they're getting the opportunities that they want upon graduation and try to figure out what was key, what are they doing? What's key about it? Is it publication rate?

Is it the type of technique they learned? Do differential analysis if possible. I did this as a professor. I wrote a sort of well-known blog post about this where when I was a new professor, I took graduates of the same research group. So I tried to control for other variables.

It was graduates from PhD programs who had the same advisor. And then I went to their CVs and I studied which of these went on to quickly get tenure and which ones struggled to get tenure. Either it took them a long time or maybe they left academia without getting tenure at all.

I was like, look, they're starting from the same place. They train under the same advisor at the same top school. And then I said, let me just analyze these two people or these two groups rather and see what's different between them. And in that case, what I discovered is that the cohort who got tenure easily, the main thing that differentiated them from the other was not publication count.

Both groups published a lot of papers. It was citations of their five most cited papers. So the difference was I discovered was, oh, it's not how much you're publishing. It is publishing things that other people cite, which means you have to be up to speed on the actual literature.

What's actually gathering people's attentions and that's where you need to be working. Got to get in the game where people are actually working. Now that's just for my field, but whatever. This is an example of differential analysis. You should be doing something similar within your group. Which students in my group are getting good job offers, which aren't, what's the difference?

Let me analyze them. And the answer might not be what you suspect. Like it might have to do with productivity. It might have to do with technique. Oh, these people mastered a technique that's really hot right now. These people are working on an older technique that no one cares about or a new technique that no one didn't pick up steam.

Whatever, you'll figure out what the difference is. Or they write a lot of review papers and these people did it. So you might be doing passive observational research to try to figure out what really matters. Then you can also do active interrogatory research. I am going to talk to people, take out professor or postdoc for coffee, say, look, I'm first generation to do this in my family.

I just want to learn. What have you learned? What's important? What's not? What should I focus on? What should I not? Like you're a journalist trying to write the definitive book on how to do well in a PhD program at the school where you are in the program that you are.

You are recreating these informal structures of information that really does help people navigate through career paths. Again, it's why kids are professional athletes are more likely to be professional athletes. Yes, there's genetics there, but there's also, it's a really unusual path. Like what's required and what it takes. And they can learn that from their parents.

Kids are professional musicians, more likely to be professional musicians. Kids of actors, more likely to be professional actors. Maybe they have some acting gene, but a big part of it is they can actually learn firsthand how Hollywood works. So you see that again and again. So that's what I would recommend.

You are doing something very hard. I want you to get as much information as possible about how that field actually works so that you're not wasting. I don't want you to waste any more of your effort. I want your effort going towards the things that really matter. All right, well, we have a habit tune-up docked in the docket here on seasonality.

So I'm looking forward to that. But before we get there, let me do a quick word from the sponsors that make this show possible. I wanna talk first about Kion Aminos. So you probably know that the human body is mostly made of water. What you probably don't know is that everything that's in the water is made of water.

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When I walk into the HQ, usually the first thing Jesse says to me is, "Hey man, how's your aminos doing today?" - It's true. - I don't always have an answer. And I'll say, "I'm embarrassed." So this is why Kion Aminos is a fundamental fitness supplement. I have been trying these out.

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So that's G-E-T-K-I-O-N.com/cal to get Fundamental Supplement for Fitness. Kion Aminos. Yeah, I should note, as long as we're talking about fitness accomplishments, as Jesse knows, I hit my goal announced on the podcast. Of getting under two minutes split times for a 2000 meter row. And then I made the mistake of going to the Concept2 website and looking up average times for my age for 2000 meter rows.

- What is it? - Well, let's just say my sub two minutes split time moved me from the beginner status to novice status. - Really? - Yeah, so I'm out. But here's the thing, rowers are crazy. So the times on Concept2 are from crazy rower types. So I was so proud of myself that I realized like, oh, that just makes me a novice.

So now I have a new goal, Jesse, that is I wanna get to the split times that makes me intermediate. - What is that? - I forgot exactly what it was, but it's like 150, 150 something. So I did 158 was my split time on my record-breaking novice, it's a 2000 meter row.

And I think 150 something. - And what's advanced probably like in the 140s? - In the 40s, yeah. That's what I used to do as a kid. - How'd you feel after the? - Wasn't too bad. Yeah, wasn't too bad. I think the weak spots probably not cardiovascular, just like leg strength.

I think that's, honestly, what I need to bring it down is probably just work on the leg strength. My lungs held out okay. I wasn't, it wasn't running out of air. I think I'm just not getting quite enough power out of the legs. But I'll keep pounding the Keone Aminos until, if I get the intermediate, I'm happy.

If I can be at the intermediate level for my age group on the Concept2 website, I'll feel like my cardio fitness is in a reasonable place. - Yeah, I agree with that. - Yeah, 'cause those guys are animals. And by the way, rowing is completely genetically weird. Like the stroke of the boat I was in freshman year was a great 2000 meter rower.

So he won his category at Crash B's. So if you're a rower, you know what this means. It's an erging competition, National Collegiate Erging Competition. And he's about my height, a little shorter, six foot, skinny guy, skinny dude, and just crushes rowing machines. - Really? - He eats them up, spits them out.

It's like that, man. There's so many stories about that, where people just walk in, hungover, and blast out a 620, 2000 meters. There's just some freak of genetic nature. Well, I'll tell you this though, and here's a professional transition. All of that rowing is gonna make you hungry. You're gonna want something good to eat, but you don't wanna take in the junk that's gonna get in your way of breaking new records on the rowing machine.

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Remember, get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com/cowl and use the code COWL to save $5 off. Thank you, Magic Spoon, for sponsoring this episode. All right. Let's do some habit tune-ups, Jesse. - Sounds good. - So, for those who don't know, habit tune-up is a segment in which I take a piece of advice from my advice canon and walk you through it.

So, today I wanna talk about what I sometimes call multi-scale seasonality. So, I've been reading a lot recently about what I sometimes think of as natural productivity. What I mean by that is the way as human beings we are wired to work. So, clearly, through most of our history, before culture could rapidly intercede with what our day-to-day lives were like, we had time for our brains and bodies to evolve for whatever it was we had to do to survive day-to-day.

And I'm really interested in what that is 'cause it gives us some, I'm approaching this with care, but it gives us some notion of what our natural inclinations for work actually are. So, actually, as we finish recording this, Jesse, my research assistant, Caleb's coming over. He's bringing a big stack of research he's been doing on my behalf on this topic.

So, a couple hours from now, I'm about to really increase my knowledge of how did we think about work in the Paleolithic. So, one of the things, though, that seems to be clear from the work I've done so far is that our minds are not used to this idea of being pegged at all-out work relentlessly day after day, week after week, month after month.

Our natural sense of productivity is way more rhythmic on different scales. There's intense periods and recharge periods. There's up and down periods. There's a variability to what work means. We get frazzled. We get this chronic background hum of anxiety when it's every single day, wall to wall, email, Zoom, email, Zoom, email, Zoom, Slack, Slack, Slack, email, email, email, quick break, dinner, go to sleep, repeat.

Again and again and again. We can handle intense situations. We're not meant to live in that all of the time. So, one of the things I have been recommending, one of the things I've been experimenting with is what I call multi-scale seasonality, which is about inducing more breaks into your working life at different scales to give yourself some freedom from the sense of I'm always on.

Now, at the scale of a year, most people will take vacation. So, that's good. One or two weeks, maybe twice a year, people will take off work and that's good. But what I wanna recommend with multi-scale seasonality is that we replicate this at shorter timeframes. So, if possible, I would say take one day off every two months or so.

So, if you're in a job where you build up like a federal government job, where you build up a bunch of personal days and vacation days, use one, once every two months. Take that day off and don't work. Do something kind of over the top that signals to yourself that this is a self-care relaxation type of day.

Next, again, if possible in your job, take one half day off every two weeks or so. Now, this I would recommend if you're in a knowledge work job, just doing unofficially. Let you follow my advice. You're on top of things. You're organized, you're time-block planning, you're multi-scale planning. You get your stuff done.

You can set things up so that on Friday, you're really clocking out of work at 1.30 instead of going all the way to five. You can figure out how to basically do that. If you're working from home, you can literally go somewhere else. If you're working in an office, you can kind of informally shut down and kind of be relaxing, working something else and then leave the office early, a little bit earlier than normal.

So, you can do this a little bit unofficially. That's like a half day where I'm going to see a movie. I'm going to catch a day game at the baseball stadium. Do that every two weeks or so. Look, if you're an organized person, this will have zero impact on how much you produce, but it is really good for your psychology.

It's not that this adds up to a ton of time off, but psychologically, it adds up to regular breaks from what's going on. You're never too far away from a half day that you're taking off out of the normal, where you'd normally be working. You're never more than a month or so away from taking a full day off and doing something else.

You're never six months away from taking two weeks off for a vacation. So, having breaks on multiple scales serves a really useful psychological trick, and it gets your brain into a mode of, we worked and we're off, and it can really help short circuit that background hum of anxiety that happens if you feel like you're constantly picked.

Now, in the big picture, I think multi-scale seasonality can be way more aggressive than that. I have a lot of thoughts about that. I think work should be way more varied than that. We'll get to that. The whole chapter of my new book's going to be about that, but for now, this is a simple thing that you can do right away that will make a big difference to your psychology.

- So, do you practice that? - Yeah, well, I practice more extreme versions, but again, I have a very flexible job. I have seasons that are different than other seasons. I'm in writing mode for three months now. That's a big change. Yeah, I do weeks off, not weeks off, days off on a very regular basis.

I'll do that, protect days way out in advance. Makes a big difference. - But you still write six days a week? - Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, what I'm talking about days off is usually from Georgetown stuff. - Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, writing's on a different type of scale.

I'm working on a book for the six months, and then the next six months, I'm doing nothing. So, like, writing goes back and forth on that scale. But I'm coming to it. This is the working at a natural pace piece of slow productivity. This is what this is starting to get to.

Is work should not necessarily be, I'm just pegged eight, nine hours a day with a few extra checks after, 'cause there's always stuff piled up, always stuff I'm working on. Anytime I barely get away, if I am, it's an issue. We're not wired for that. All right, so I wanna try something, some trepidation, let's try something new here.

So, Jesse has prepped three calls, each with a quick question. I have not heard these calls. I don't really know what they're about. So, we're gonna call this rapid fire. We're gonna do three calls in a row. After each call, I'm gonna try to, without having done any prep, give a quick answer.

So, we're gonna do three calls with three rapid fired answers, and we'll see how that goes. - Sounds good, here we go. First call from Amy. - Hey, Cal, my name's Amy, and I have a quick question about your evening wind down routine, in that I'm curious as to what it is these days.

Thanks so much. - Well, Amy, I think you need to start drinking heavily at four, and really bring that in for a landing right about 11, as you slip into unconsciousness. Now, my evening wind down routine, schedule shutdown confirmed. You do the shutdown ritual, you close the open loops, you look at your plan for the rest of the week, and make sure that you're on track to complete it.

You check that check box in your time block planner that says the schedule is shut down. And then what I do is I try to make a rough plan for the night ahead. I think if there's some interesting or productive things I can do during the evening, I enjoy it more.

Yesterday as an example, I reconfigured my closet. I like having something like that to do. I'm gonna work on the yard, I'm gonna reconfigure my closet, I'm gonna take the kids to go see this thing, there's a special show we're looking forward to watching, there's something I'm gonna research.

So having productive, interesting things to do, family oriented, unwork oriented. So shut down hard, have a ritual, check the box, and then have a completely new, rough, but active plan for the evening. And if that fails, again, start drinking at four, coming for a landing at 11. - What did you do to your closet?

- Oh, this is riveting stuff. I had one hanging bar, and I reconfigured it to have two. So I could have the shirts up high, and the pants down low, and I cleaned it out. And man, I had-- - Do you purge a lot? - I have recently. I just went through a big purge.

It was a lot of clothes. Yeah, a lot of clothes. So now I am down to mainly just things I actually wear, and they're like hung up properly in a closet. So I like it. If you don't have things to do in the evening, you fall back on the screens.

- Yeah. - And it just feels, yeah. Like you're just kind of upset and bored and sad, basically. So you gotta have something to do. All right, what do we have next? - All right, next call. Here we go, from Andy. - Hey, Cal, Andy here. Thank you very much for your wonderful podcast.

I've been enjoying going deep, and dropping that into every sentence I use. So question for you today is quite simple. How do you take deep holiday? Thanks, Cal. - Jesse, I think if I had that accent, we would have three X more listeners. - Probably. - Probably. I mean, everything would sound so smart.

People would be like, that's just imminently reasonable. - Well, you do have your one accent. - I have a fantastic French accent. - Yeah. - Yeah. But people don't take advice on productivity from the French. It's not what they're known for. It's not, how do I crush it? How do I crush it this week?

You don't ask a Frenchman, how do I crush it? They'd be like, what you crushing? You take the baguette, you get the wine, and the work will be the next week. Deep holidays. Yeah, it's a good question, Andy. I used to try to completely get away from work when we'd be on vacation, and it would make me unbearable.

I would get anxious and unhappy and weird. And so actually, I add intentional structure to our vacations and they become much better. Now, what I wanna stay away from is email. I wanna stay away from Slack and calendars and hyperactive hive mind coordination and context shifts. But what I do wanna have is some sort of important project, non-urgent but important project that I'm making progress on.

So typically, it's gonna be a writing project for me. I'm either gonna be writing, or I'm gonna be reading or doing research for a writing project. I also add some other structure to it. Put a little structure to the day. Like, when am I gonna exercise? When am I gonna write?

Let's have a couple of plans. I feel better with structure. I think we tell ourselves the myth that what we really want is nothing to do, nothing planned, anything goes, and then we will feel relaxation. But our mind doesn't actually like that. Our mind likes having things to do.

So the key to a vacation is just to have a fun structure. Like, oh, I'm in this cool place, and it's really scenic, and I write by the lake. And then in the evening, I like do exercise over here. We have drinks on the patio. That's structure, but it's fun structure.

So that's what I've learned. Holiday is not about avoiding things to do. It's about having a structured life that's more fun and relaxing, entertaining than your structured life back home. And we do longer holidays now. So we're doing two weeks in Vermont. We'll have to figure out what to do with the show, Jesse.

I'll have to record. Maybe I'll record from the, we're staying in the mountains. I'm just gonna be riding, right? We're living by the woods with some hiking trails. I can walk and do deep walks. Maybe I'll bring up some recording equipment to the mountains. - Nice. - Yeah, do some deep questions on location.

I mean, ultimately my vision would be to spend the entire summer up north. - I mean, the weather's perfect. - Yeah, we're doing a couple, we do a couple of weeks at a time right now, but that's the plan. - Yeah. - The Deep Work Cottage, somewhere up there.

So we'll see. All right, we got one more, rapid fire. What do we got? - Here we go. It's about books. - Hi Cal, my name is Brittany. I was wondering, how do you organize your books at home? What categories or subcategories do you use? Thank you. - Well, I don't organize them in any sort of logical fashion.

I mean, a lot of my books, a lot of my personal library books are actually here in the HQ. I moved them here when we converted the study into a classroom during that year of COVID when the schools were closed and we were homeschooling. So we moved them all to the, I moved them all to the HQ.

So my personal library is actually here and I don't organize them. And the only organization you'll see if you look on those shelves is I, I have a bunch of copies of my books, like from different languages and this and that. I mean, for whatever reason, the stuff I write about does well overseas.

We've sold rights to, now it's 40 different countries. It's crazy. There are versions of my books in places that would surprise you. You can get a Mongolian version of "Deep Work." That is true. Whatever, we're all over the place. So I put those all together on a shelf 'cause I don't know what else to do with them.

But then otherwise, I mainly don't categorize books. Occasionally I'll put together a cluster of books about the same theme if I'm writing something on it. So there's like, there's a cluster. If you go look at it, my shelf right in the other room, it's like a cluster of books on solitude from digital minimalism research days.

I think I've clustered my techno criticism books together on that shelf as well, but I don't really think it through too much. Anyways, those will move back though. We're having the bookcases built. We're having bookcases built in the study now that my kids are at normal school again. And so all the books will move back from the HQ to my study at home pretty soon.

And I probably am not gonna organize them that much. I use them so much. I just kind of know what I have and I get used to where to find them. And so I should do that. Though I know people who go the other way, like Dewey Decimal. I know people that go straight up library with their home libraries.

Like it is organized by Dewey Decimal systems and they have the card thing sticking out of the bookshelf, you know, where you can see like what numbers are passed here where you can actually like literally go and look books up. But yeah, I'm not there. I'm not there yet.

Jesse, we're gonna have to re renovate this whole thing. I mean, A, it's kind of a mess, but B, when all the books go, we're really, we're gonna have empty bookcases. The spare office is kind of like a garbage dump slash storage room. - Yeah. - I think we got, we have some summer projects ahead of us.

We're gonna make this place look- - Probably gotta get a cleaning lady. - We gotta get a cleaning person. Yeah, yeah. See how patriarchal and crude you are cleaning lady. I'm not gonna guess the gender of who's gonna- - True. - Who's gonna clean it. So, no, I wanna make this place cool.

It's just time and laziness. But it would be cool if we had, I don't know, some nice chairs to sit in, hang some artwork on the wall. - Yeah. - It's gonna look good. All right, so I have a news reaction I wanna get to that's actually one of the kind of more heartening things I've seen about social media in a long time.

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So that's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, zockdock.com/deep. If you say it five times fast, I'll give you another 10% off. All right, I made that part up about saying it five times fast. I just enjoy saying zockdock.com. All right, I wanna do a news reaction here. Brief, it's an article that a Canadian listener of the show sent me.

And I thought it had something positive in it about what we can do and what we are doing about some of the travails of social media and our culture. So here's the article right here. It's written by Sira Agrell, who is a politician in Toronto. And the title of this article is, Sira Agrell explains why she's embracing tech but not Twitter in her run for public office.

So there's a couple of things I wanted to point out. And for those who are listening, the YouTube version of this segment actually will show you the article as I go through it. All right, so a couple of things I wanna point out. Here's where the first big point is of the article.

She says, "Last week I announced that I'm running for Toronto City Council, the Parkdale High Park." So this is someone who is running for city council in a major city. And this was the big part of the announcement. And I'm quoting from the article here. "But as a candidate and a councillor," so if elected, "I will not be using Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

I deactivated my accounts this morning." This is something that is very rare to see. "A political candidate announcing I will not use social media during my campaign. I will not use social media once I'm elected." All right, so Sira gives two main reasons why she dislikes these services. Let me just briefly summarize both.

Number one, and I'm quoting here, "It is well-documented that social media has subjected people to intense vitriol and abuse with the highest levels of harassment and threats directed towards women, LGBTQ2+, those who aren't white, and people at all the intersections of these identities." All right, so vitriol and abuse.

Number two, and again, I'm quoting, "These platforms contribute to much wider harm, including radicalization, polarization, deteriorating mental health, the undermining of democratic beliefs and institutions." All right, so those are two clear issues we've talked about before. These are harassment machines, and they are causing all these negative psychological impacts even beyond harassment.

All right, so what do we have so far? Politicians saying, "I'm not gonna use social media," and giving two well-known but very strong reasons for why not. All right, now we get to the part that gave me hope. I think this is very interesting. She says, "This does not mean I'm not using technology." She goes on to talk about all the ways she will be using technology to connect with people.

So they built out this fancy website, and I'm quoting here, "That will make it easy for people to share information with their friends and neighbors on whatever platform they like, and I hope you will share this article too. I'll be engaging directly both online and off through the site, email, text, newsletter, virtual calls, face-to-face interactions, and events where we can actually talk to each other and not just tweet at each other." This is the thing that I like.

Sierra Agrell is making the observation that is true, but that is often missed in media discussions about social media and its ills, that social media does not equal the internet. To say, "I'm not gonna use social media," is not the same as saying, "I am not going to use the modern internet to connect with people, to hear from my constituents, to hear what their issues are, to know what's going on." She is saying these tools are not the only way to do that, and in fact, they're a pretty bad way to do that.

"I have all of these other existing tools, my website, email, text, newsletter, virtual calls, face-to-face interactions, and events. This, I think, is one of the most important moves we can make to get around some of the ills of social media, and that is to move away from the platforms.

But to not just move away from the platforms, but to declare with confidence and embrace with confidence digital alternatives. The internet was around before social media. The internet will be around after social media. There's plenty of innovation out there. There's plenty of novel tools out there where the internet can help you, the democratic process and connection." So I like this.

You can walk away from social media without walking away from technology. Searock concludes by saying, "I wanna use technology, but in a way that builds connections and allows people to understand what I'm trying to do and why." All right, so there we go. There is some positive vision of our future with social media.

We can embrace technology without having to be clicking on those stupid icons and doing those little 240-character threads and emojis, grown adults using emojis. This politician has it right, and I hope other people follow suit. That was a good article. I should mention, if you wanna send me things, interesting@calnewport.com, that's where I got this particular article.

I do like the links that people send me. If you have thoughts about the show, send those to jesse@calnewport.com. He actually reads them. Am I right? Yeah. Do we get comments? - Yeah, we do. - Yeah. - Some good ones. - All right, well, I think we have time for one last question.

This one comes from, I'm gonna use the name Brian. This is not the real name. This was actually emailed instead of submitted to our normal question submission form. So I'm hiding some details here since I'm using it publicly. All right, here's the question. I'm 38 and working abroad as a diplomat.

As surprising as it sounds, I don't like my job for various reasons, financial security issues, professional capital. I built up throughout the past 15 years. I don't have the intention of changing my career. Okay, because of financial security, professional capital, though he doesn't like the job, he has no intention of changing his career.

Besides my work, I study philosophy, which is my true passion. Therefore, I almost have two careers to run. The problem is my girlfriend is turning 35 and feels the urge to have a baby. I love her and do not wanna break with her, but I am now at a crossroads.

As I see it, building a family would mean getting rid of my passion and finding a job back home to live with my girlfriend. Hence my question, do you have views on this? How to conciliate, well, I think he means how to figure out the tensions between deep life, family life and a demanding career.

Do you have reading recommendations to help me solve this dilemma? The dilemma of being signal and enjoying the deep life and building up a family with the risk of being overwhelmed and losing any hope for personal and professional development. Well, Brian, there's a few things in your question that catches my attention.

You're talking about not liking your job, but having no intention of changing it. You're using the term true passion to describe philosophy and this idea that you share that starting a family will mean that you have no hope for any personal and professional development. So all of those things that catch my attention, to me that all adds up to the conclusion that you're lost my brother, you're lost.

I think what's happening now is that you are just being batted around by concerns and thoughts and fears and emotions in the moment. There's no systematic attempt here to understand what's going on. And I'm gonna say at 38 now is the time to figure this out. And the way to figure this out is to step back for a second.

All right, reset time. Let's step back for a second and figure out what we are trying to do here. Because again, this is you're all over the place. This is fear and randomness talking. But I'm gonna recommend that you do, which I often recommend to these questions is to do some serious lifestyle centric career planning.

What do you want your life to look like five, 10, 15 years from now? All aspects of the life, where you lived, you have a family, what's your day like? What type of stuff are you doing? Are you among the pine trees reading Seneca? Are you in the city jumping to the art premiere?

Are you throwing the ball with the kid? Like really have some of the friends coming over with the cafe lights. Like have this clear image of what the day feels like, where you are, what the rhythm of the day is. You have to figure out what resonates. And then you have to work backwards from that to figure out how do I build towards that with my career, with my family life outside of my career, with my hobbies and interests, with my health, whatever.

All the buckets, all the deep life buckets. How do I build towards that vision? That's the exercise you need to do. You need to be building towards a vision you believe in, not just reacting to fears about various things, which may or may not be valid. Now, here's something I want you to keep in mind.

As you do this, as you work backwards from the vision that really resonates, it might not be obvious what is the way to get there. It might not be, oh, clearly I leave the diplomatic corps and take up this job and that will get me there. It might be kind of complicated, especially you're figuring out intellectual pursuits like philosophy, the career capital you actually have.

Be willing and comfortable with the fact that you might get the lifestyle fixed down first before you're able to figure out the reasonable path that gets you there. And you might actually have to go out and do some research. You might have to go out there and find different people and expose yourself to different things that people have done.

It might take you a year or more to really figure out what is that reasonable path? What is that reasonable path that preserves my career capital but gets me over to these other parts of my lifestyle? You can't always force it. I've been going through a little bit of this myself.

I've been trying to figure out recently in my current lifestyle image, I would say the role of writing versus other type of academic and especially academic administrative work. That's not properly in sync for me right now, but I'm also comfortable with the fact that it's tricky to figure out how to move forward to fix that.

And I'm taking my time with that. I'm trying to understand different options and different types of reconfigurations of my academic career that are reasonable, that makes sense, that leverage existing capital and set me up for interesting things in the future. I'm talking to people, I'm having conversations. I've learned a lot, but it's an example where I have a clear lifestyle image fixed, but I'm still doing the work of figuring out how exactly to get there.

That might be where you're gonna be because you have a complicated setup. That's okay. Fix what resonates and then begin the work of figuring out what type of alterations to your career can get you there. You're gonna get a lot of the benefit just by having the vision and know you're making progress towards it, even if it takes you a while to actually get there.

All right, so it might not be obvious what to do. Also be ready to test these assumptions. You long-time listeners know true passion is not something I believe in. As you might suspect, this idea that having a family means you lose any hope for personal and professional development is nonsense.

You're not gonna be the first person in history to do that, and it can be deep and fulfilling in its own ways. And the idea that you have no intention of changing your job, again, I would take my foot off the gas on these absolutes. Let's figure out the image of the lifestyle that deeply resonates and then start the long work of figuring out how to get there, being willing to test assumptions along the way.

I think you're lost right now, but the thread can be found. Deep life is possible for you, and it might be not at all what you might imagine once you actually start systematically trying to build it. All right, Brian, so thanks for that question. Thanks to everyone else who sent their questions.

Go to calnewport.com/podcast. I haven't told you this in a while, but calnewport.com/podcast is where the instructions are on how you can do calls and how you can submit your written questions. As always, I say, if you like what you heard, you will like what you see on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/calnewportmedia for full video of these episodes and individual segments.

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