Okay, let's let's try to one more question, Jesse, what do we got here? Okay, the next question we got is about deep procrastination with students and non students. Hi, Cal, what advice would you give to people grappling with deep procrastination? And specifically, how does that advice change between students and professionals?

I work with both. And I think knowing how you would approach the question differently between students and professionals might give some additional insight into the idea. Thanks. All right, so deep procrastination is an interesting, complicated topic. So deep procrastination is a term I coined back in those halcyon days of my study hacks blog, and we all were just writing for RSS feeds.

And I was mainly doing student advice. And it described the phenomenon that I would see frequently, which would be undergraduates at these elite schools. So I was at MIT at the time, but I would also work with some students at Harvard and other nearby schools, students at elite schools, losing their capability of doing schoolwork, like completely losing the capability to the point where they would have to do leaves of absences, right?

Because it would be your final paper is due and you just couldn't do it. And your professor say, Okay, well, look, I'll give you a week extension. And you just want to do a lick of work, like you just lost the ability to do schoolwork. And I called that deep, deep procrastination.

And typically, where that came from for students was a fritzing out or a burning out of the their cognitive motivational systems. And so you usually would have two ingredients would come together to cause this extrinsic motivation. So they were just high achievers, just you gotta get good grades, grind for grades, you know, to get the good college grind for grades, like do three majors and take on all these clubs and grind through so you'll be impressive so you can get the right job.

Just kind of like extrinsic motivation of just my family and town think I'm talented, and I got to do impressive things. So it's not coming deeply from an intrinsic place of extrinsic motivation. And then you combine it with difficulty, like, is this hard? Like this, this cognitive toil, like the work is just really hard.

You're doing a lot of you have a lot of majors, a lot of clubs, it's really mentally demanding, you're at MIT, trying to do two majors, and it's really difficult, right? When those two things come together, extrinsic motivation, plus a consistent toil, cognitive toil, you can fritz out the system, and your mind's like, no more, no mas, we're not going to work anymore.

And that would cause deep procrastination. It's important to try to differentiate this from depression. They're similar, but it's not quite the same thing. So with depression, it's much more broad in its impact. So with with depression, which also, of course, is common among students, especially at these elite schools, you go a hedonic, so you can't imagine finding pleasure or happiness in anything.

That's why depression is so insidious. Deep procrastination is more focused. Like you're still other things in your life you're really into, you just like can't do the schoolwork. In fact, there might be things you really love doing. You're like, I don't know, I'm reading instead and going to these movies, and why am I even in school?

And you still have motivation, and you still can find pleasure in life, you just can't do schoolwork. Whereas depression is more of a fritzing out of the entire ability to have optimism or hope or feel like you're ever going to enjoy anything ever again. And depression tends to come more from, you go through a period of heavy negative self-talk and rumination.

So there's sort of a different path to depression that you're down on yourself, down on yourself, obsessing over like things going on in your life that are bad, and that conversation was bad, and I'm bad. And again, there's overlap here, but it's typically fritz out your, the pleasure centers, the ability to have any happiness or optimism gets fritzed out by heavy rumination, where deep procrastination was very specifically schoolwork.

Again, they can overlap. If you're depressed, you're not going to do schoolwork. But if you have optimism and enjoy things in your life, just can't do the schoolwork, that's deep procrastination. All right, so they're two different things. When it was clearly deep procrastination for students, the key was to reduce both of those instigating factors.

Extrinsic motivation, large cognitive toil, it's just physically really demanding the cognitive work you're trying to do. So this is where I started writing about, at first, the Zen valedictorian philosophy on my blog, and then later, the romantic scholar philosophy, which was all about taking your college career, moving the locus of control from the extrinsic end of the spectrum back to the intrinsic, so you take back control of what you're studying and why, and then reducing, changing, and modifying your approach to the schoolwork so it's not nearly as, it's not a toil, so you get rid of that negative affect, the friction of actually doing the work, you make your work easier.

Intrinsic motivation make the work easier. Deep procrastination goes away, because those are the two things that cause it. Now again, if it's depression, you need clinical help, there's a whole different way you deal with depression, but if it's just deep procrastination, that would be my cure for people who had it, it would also be my preventative for people who worried about it.

And this is where I would have people, for example, take control over what they major in, and I didn't care how they made the decision, but just so it was theirs, and not their parents, or not something I think would impress their aunts and uncles at the family reunions.

This is where I would get the students to be very heavy on lifestyle-centric career planning, where they put out a vision of their life one year after college, five years after college, 15 years after college, that resonates with them deeply. I live here, this is what my days are like, here's the role of work, here's the activities I'm involved with, like they can taste and feel and smell what this lifestyle is like.

And then they're working backwards from that to figure out, what should I be doing in school now to help move me closer to that? So now you do those things, now it's intrinsic motivation. The work you're doing is part of this vision you created that resonates with you, motivation's intrinsic.

Now to get rid of the overwhelming just toil of the work, I say, and again, I tell these students again and again, get rid of all these stupid majors, get rid of all these stupid activities. You have this mindset that somehow there's going to be an admissions officer in your future that's going to say, this looks like a really hard schedule.

You are very impressive for doing that hard schedule. You get to have this job. I would tell them, no one cares. Like, where'd you go to school? What'd you major in? What are your grades? That's about all I care about. So get rid of all these majors, just have one major.

Make your schedule easy. Complement the required courses for your major with very different style of courses and easy courses. If you have all these, like all these kids did, advanced standing credits from AP courses or whatever, use them to take less courses. Do independent studies, like make your schedule easy so you have more than enough time to work.

I used to go give talks at colleges back in the day where I had this student named Tov and he was my case study. And I would show his calendar because he used the time machine function on his Mac to go back and show me a calendar from a typical day and it was full of junk.

He had all these majors and activities. He was so stressed out. And I would tell the story about how he ended up drastically simplifying his life. And I would cut to his current calendar. And it went from a kaleidoscope of colored appointments to mainly white space. Course, course, low schedule, basically no extracurricular jobs.

And how he just came alive once he had breathing room. And so I would say you make your life easier. And then once you have more than enough time to handle the work you're doing, use good time management, use good study techniques. You're spreading it out. You're not staying up late.

You feel like you can easily control it. And then I have people invest, okay, go to talks, buy books, like get really into your major subject so that your mind begins to think about this as something you care about. And it's not just a means to an end. You do all these things.

You don't worry about deep procrastination. And so that was deep procrastination for students. That was its cause. That was my suggestion. The same thing applies, I think, for the professional world. And again, we differentiate between depression and deep procrastination. In the professional world, deep procrastination is, hey, I run this company and I just can't do the work.

I know this thing is due. I got to get this report to the client. I got to whatever. I just can't do it. But I have all these other plans and I'm daydreaming about what I wish I could do instead. And I'm daydreaming. I'm reading a lot of Tim Ferriss.

And like, this is all a sign that it's deep procrastination, not depression. Okay, so what do you have to do? You got to solve those two problems. So you got to get the motivation back to intrinsic, which means what's your lifestyle centric career vision, work backwards and reshape your working life to be aimed towards that.

Now you're in control to get rid of the toil. The biggest cause of toil for professional jobs is chronic overload. You have more on your plate than you can easily imagine getting done. If you go back and watch my core idea video on slow productivity, you can find it youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

I'll get into this. But basically, if you have chronic overload, it's a huge drain on your brain. So do less, take stuff off your plate, switch from push the pole, I will pull something new on my plate when I'm ready for it. You can't just push on my plate, drastically change your work if you have to so that you have a reasonable amount of stuff to work on at any one time.

Get rid of the chronic overload and then apply good habits, time block planning, weekly planning, quarterly planning, full capture, organized to do systems, the low hanging fruit to get rid of that extra friction. Do those things. So your work is now oriented towards a vision that you believe in and resonates and you reduce the actual difficulty of your work by getting rid of overload and being smart about your habits.

That's how you get back. That's how you get around deep procrastination. The same thing that worked for students, I think works really well for professionals. So I'm glad you asked this question because I think it's a really interesting impact. It gets confused with other mental health issues, but it's very focused and I think it has a really clear solution.

And so I'm glad to have a chance to actually review those ideas.