So let me, I'm going to get your take on, you can be a proxy for my audience here, on a complaint I get a lot that I feel that I don't fully understand it, though I'm very empathetic to it. So I'm going to ask you to sort of, on behalf of half of my audience, maybe unpack what's going on here.

So I talked about this on the show, but I get this complaint a lot about the concept of deep work in particular. And it's typically from working moms, and it's typically either the form of the complaint is either, how can you do deep work if you're a parent? Or easy for you to say, but deep work is only possible if you have a partner doing all the labor.

And there's a lot of emotion behind these complaints. And so at first, in my typical sort of guy technical mindset, I was, well, logically speaking, I do not understand these complaints. Deep work is just talking about the relevant, in the hours that you're normally working already, regardless of your situation, just allocating the email checks and minimizing context shifts and batches, making optimal use of cognitive.

It says nothing about how much you should be working or whatever. But I quickly learned, now there's something much more deeper and emotional and true going on here. So I'm going to put you, you can help me proxy for this. Yeah, I mean, but what, so maybe educate me a little bit on where's the pain point?

Because I want to understand well, when there's a real sort of visceral pushback to the idea of deep work from the context of being a working parent, in particular, working mom. Yeah. I think that the deep pain point relates to sort of the envy of often husbands, fathers who have a setup that is more conducive to longer stretches of work time.

What's ironic though, I think is that part of why it's hard as a mom, and I'm saying this with a lot of stereotypes in hand, and I recognize that and I apologize, is that part of what makes it hard to have those long stretches is the guilt that interrupts.

I could put my children in much more childcare and my husband would be fine with it, but I feel really uncomfortable about it. And I certainly felt desperately uncomfortable about it when my children were infants. And that wasn't something he struggled with. Now, whether that's socially driven, by the lessons that were taught as young women and young men, as we age, or whether it's biological, I think is a really complicated question to answer.

I think there's evidence on both sides, but the fact of the matter is moms tend to feel more guilty about time away from their kids than dads do just on average. This isn't always the case. So I think that's one of the tricky points. And so when you use the word deep work, people automatically think it's many hours, although you define it in a much more nuanced way that you can do deep work in shorter chunks of time.

And that's really what I advocate in my book is figuring out how to more mindfully drop into work, how to use some of the behavioral science that we know is really helpful for getting into the mode of deep work more quickly and efficiently. And also recognizing that while task switching or role switching does cost us something in terms of the energy that it takes, the more we do it, the more we practice doing that role switching, the more facile we get at it.

But also, it's a both and. Also, we don't want to do it too much because then we really do end up with what Bridget Schulte calls confetti time, time confetti, I think it's the term. So it's complicated. It is emotional. And it can feel like an injustice. Like, why do I feel so guilty when you can sort of be free to go to work?

And I think that is the part that I'll at least just speak for myself that I used to get very, very hung up on. So. - That's really useful, actually. I mean, I really appreciate that. I mean, just to echo it back, but I think I understand what you're saying is, no, it's not about the physical act of deep work, which is just, oh, I have an hour to work.

Like, why don't I focus on one thing for the first 45 and then do the small things at the end instead of interleaving it? Like, yeah, anyone in whatever their situation is can change their ratio of deep to shallow work. But it's the reality, which I point out. So fair enough.

Like, I make this point in my book that the more deep work you can do tends to be correlative to career success. So more deep work is better than less. Men have an easier time doing more deep work than women for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual ability to do the work.

That is very frustrating. I mean, if someone said, okay, here's the thing, people from most states get to work their jobs normally, but people from Maryland have to, whatever, call in to the department of whatever every hour or so. And there's all these other things that they put on citizens of Maryland.

It's like taking up our time. I would be really frustrated. Like, look at all these people in Virginia. They're getting more done. They're not as interrupted. It's not fair just because I live in Maryland. So if I'm echoing that back, right, that actually is very helpful. And I could imagine that being, I can empathize.

I mean, I can kind of understand as best I can in my position. That kind of sucks. - I think it does. The other thing to think about is, what do we reward in our society? And what we do reward tends to be accolades and more lines on your CV and more money.

And one of the things, one of the gifts I think of working parenthood, and this is particularly true for mothers, because they tend on average to be more involved in the parenting role, is that we tend on average to be stronger in the relational department, in the empathy department, in the perspective-taking department, in the patients department.

And those skills are really useful at work. They just tend not to be rewarded or acknowledged as being as important. And so I think that is another piece that can get under people's skin. And I think for very good reason, and I don't really know what to do about that, other than to recognize that they have inherent value, even if they aren't acknowledged with a promotion or a pay raise.

Although I think that they should be.