I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 185. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ along with my producer, Jesse. We were just rock and rolling here briefly. There's some music blaring, I would say, from the restaurant below. So we're really feeling the groove. I don't think it'll show up on our recording because of the heavy gating we have, but it's going to give us a beat to bounce to.

They're having a good time down there. They are. They didn't invite us, but I'm glad they are having a good time. This is a pretty eccentric studio we record in because we just had an audio engineer out here last week helping us get rid of this ringing that was picking up in the equipment.

And it turned out that the building itself has a faulty ground. If you don't properly ground the electrical system in a building, the wires become antennas. So this entire building is basically RF emitting antennas or RF gathering antennas. I mean, Joe was able to take a, what do you call it, impedance booster and plug it onto our mic cable and we could hear AM radio in our headsets because the wire on the mic was acting as an antenna and the sound was coming in.

So we have our whole building is an antenna and there's techno music playing. And then the third fun thing is, as it took Jesse a while to get used to this, weird smell Fridays. Like every once in a while, just weird smells come from the kitchen below and fill the studio.

Like I don't think in good conscience we could have former president Barack Obama come be interviewed in here. This would be my concern. I was going to suggest he might need to get a cleaning lady, but then I realized it wasn't, it was from coming from downstairs. I don't know if that's better or worse.

Yeah. So anyways, it's, we, we love the HQ. It's an odd HQ. We've made some progress on the ringing. Joe the engineer did some stuff that I think got rid of it. So I think we're, I think we're okay, but he felt very tentative about it. You could tell someone at his caliber of audio engineering was very uncomfortable about the idea of trying to record anything high end in this location.

I think it made him physically uncomfortable. Well you should explain to the audience about, cause you do everything in one take and how you were hearing this ringing in the back of your mic or headphones while you were recording. Yeah. So I could hear it. Right. So we do things one take.

So I could hear it going on. But then once the podcasts were going out, podcast listeners weren't hearing it so much. And I, and I think it's because there's so much of the high end frequencies are cut off in the compression for the podcast apps and then going through the wireless connection to earbuds that like most people listening didn't really hear it.

But then as soon as we got on YouTube, people listen to YouTube on computers and I think the sound is less compressed. They could hear it. And we started hearing from people, Hey, what's that? What's that ringing? What's that? What's that humming? So, so basically he did a bunch of stuff.

I don't understand it. The ringing is gone. We have a hiss instead, but we have filters in place in theory to take care of the hiss before you hear it. So we're, we really got a top of the line location going here. I mean, I think Jesse, the only answer is we have to build a building somewhere.

And I think the power company is going to come out or the power company could fix the power in this room. But I like our second option of we build the building built from the ground up with like a beautiful power supply and a completely soundproofed, perfectly soundproofed the walls.

And so we can, we can dream. And if we do that, we have to get Joe the engineer somehow we have to steal him away because he was fantastic and yeah, he helps solve their problems. So anyways, this is the wonders of sort of semi-professional audio recording. All the wonders that we get to deal with, but I am glad to have that ringing gone because I mean, Jesse knows I'd complain about it.

I was like, I can hear this thing. It's like a golfer, like having a tick on the back of his swing or something like, you know, equipment. So yeah, yeah. Because you're hearing it while you're recording. Yeah. So progress, I feel good. Progress is being made. We should mention YouTube.

So for those who haven't heard us say it recently, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia, full episodes are all going up there and then Jesse is slicing and dicing all the questions and the segments into their own standalone videos. So if there's something you want to go back to and save or share or see me say it instead of listening to it, that YouTube page should have what you need.

We have brand new graphics coming, which is kind of exciting. Now that we switched the cover art of the podcast, there's going to be new graphics on the clips, the video clips at the beginning and end. So progress is being made. So anyways, check that out, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia to watch individual questions or full episodes.

So I wanted to do a quick deep dive today before we got into our questions. We do have a good collection of questions, but I wanted to tackle this question, is friction bad? And the precipitating event that got me thinking about this question was reading John McPhee's book Draft Number Four.

So Draft Number Four is a book that John McPhee wrote relatively recently about the process of writing and things he has learned about the process of writing. There's a little bit of memoir thrown in there and quite a bit of discussion on things like structure and what caught my attention among other things when I was reading it is that he described his research process, how he organized and made use of the information he collected during research in the pre-computer era.

So McPhee has been active in professional writing since the 60s, so he had a long period before there were computers. And here was his process. He would go out in the field and take tons of notes, both in notebooks and on tape recorders. And McPhee is a long-term researcher.

It's not unusual for him to spend eight months, 12 months on a single article. Now, of course, back then they would write articles of crazy lengths, like 40,000-word articles, which is crazy. They'd have to break them up over multiple issues. There are many books. But he would fill up many notebooks, many tape recorders.

All right. So how do we get from that? How does McPhee get from that stack of notebooks, stack of tapes to an article that's coming out in The New Yorker? So here's what he used to do. First, he would painstakingly type up all of those notes. So he would go through the notebooks and type up on his typewriter—remember, pre-computer era—type up on his typewriter everything that was in those notebooks.

Then he would go to those tapes, and he would transcribe everything that was recorded on those tapes, all of the interviews and conversations on those tapes. He had one of those old-school dictation desks where he had foot pedals, so he could control the speed of the tape recorder with a foot pedal so that you could slow it down just enough that you could keep up when you're typing.

This used to be real common back when dictation was used. So he would type everything up. And when he was typing it up on his typewriter, separate blocks of notes would be separated with multiple blank lines. So okay, here's some notes from one conversation. Now here's some notes about something else.

He'd put blank lines. And the reason why he would do that is that after he had laboriously typed up all of this—and we're talking weeks and weeks of work—he would Xerox copy every one of those pages, take the Xerox copies, and cut out each of those blocks. So he had space in between each block of notes, and he would cut out strips from these pages along those spaces between the blocks of notes.

So he would just have endless slips of paper, each piece of paper with a separate piece of conversation or observation or note that he had took. And he would sort those strips of papers into topic and put them all into a folder dedicated to that topic. So now he would have, after weeks of work, dozens of folders, each dedicated to a particular event, discussion, or topic relevant to the article.

And the folder would be full of all of his notes he had taken anywhere relevant to that topic. Finally, he would then take a card—I'm assuming it would be an index card, he didn't specify—and for each of these topics, he would write that name on a card. And he had a piece of plywood in his office—and Jesse and I were talking about this earlier, but I was gratified to hear that early in his career, McPhee had a deep work HQ-style office.

It was in Nassau Street, above a store, across the hall from a massage parlor, just like we're above a restaurant on the main street of our town, across from a physical therapist, and I don't even know what the other people do. I think they mainly just glared at us for not wearing masks, but I don't even know what they do.

And our weird HQ, so McPhee had a weird HQ as well. And he would lay these cards out on the plywood and move them around, move them around, what's the structure for this piece? And he could spend weeks doing that until he finally had figured out this topic, and this topic, and back to this, and he had all the cards figured out.

Now he was ready to write. And when it came time to write, he would say, "This is the card I'm on right now. Let me take the folder corresponding to that card, open it up, spread out all these slips of paper. Here's everything I know about that topic so I can draw from these quotes and these citations and these observations as I'm writing that section of the article." Then he moved on to the next section, take that folder, lay them out, write that section of the article.

That is how John McPhee would research and write his articles. This is an incredibly laborious process. It's a very time-consuming process. He would spend weeks and weeks just working with his notes before he was writing. It is a process that is full of friction. He's literally cutting paper with scissors and putting them in folders.

I mean, this is a process where there's friction all over the place. But anyone reading that part of draft number four would say, "That makes complete sense." What John McPhee was trying to do necessitates slowness. He has to internalize this information, be exposed to it again and again, marinate in this information until he really just feels like he is in that world and understands it.

So as he begins trying to structure his piece, he can see how it should all come together. When it comes time to write a section, he can see what's out there and knows what to pull from. The friction is a feature, not a bug in this particular system. This is common if you study the writing techniques and the research techniques of really acclaimed nonfiction writers.

They have high friction, slow systems. There's an early essay I wrote for my newsletter and blog at calnewport.com years ago where I talked about the historian Taylor Branch's research methods. So Taylor Branch wrote this fantastic award-winning trilogy, three-part biography of Martin Luther King, epic project, many, many years. I believe it won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, one of the two.

Fantastic series. And he talked about years ago, and I wrote about this, a similarly slow process. Now, he had computers at the time he was writing this, but he used a Microsoft Access database and every bit of note he would find anywhere, and he would just read everything. What are all the newspapers?

Here's a day when Martin Luther King is in this town. Let me go find all the newspapers from that town on microfiche and go read them and pull out anything that seems relevant to understanding what was going on that day. So I mean, he would really read every letter, but would go three, four layers away from even what King was doing just to find all this tangential information.

And he coded everything with a date and put it into this database. And then he could spit out, like, okay, here's the period of King's life that I'm writing about now, and he could spit out, give me everything I have notes on from this week. Every letter that was written that week, every newspaper I looked at.

And so again, this laborious process of let me just take everything in and put into a database and time code it so when it comes time to write, I can have a density of information. What happened on this day and this week and immerse myself in it and then write with confidence and with that iceberg below the surface of knowledge, supporting the thing that he was actually writing about.

A slow process, laborious process, but a necessary process. So we see this with acclaimed writers, high friction, slow systems for making sense of information where we don't see this as anywhere else. And that is what I was noting is that that is a problem. We have made productivity synonymous with low friction and speed.

How do we get this done faster? How do we get you the information you need quicker? Can we make connections for you on your behalf? Maybe the software can show you what you need. Can we throw machine learning at it? This would be the new thing to do. So that the amount of extra effort you have to do really does get minimized.

And when it comes to hard cognitive work, especially creative cognitive work, minimizing friction, minimizing effort is not necessarily what we want to do. The example of John McPheen, the example of Taylor Branch is canonical slow productivity in action. What they were doing required in the moment, inefficient, slow, thoughtful work.

You look at any one day and you might say this day was not productive. You cut things with scissors all day, but you fast forward out, zoom out to the looking at the next year, that full year, you say, wow, this was a fantastic article you produced that year.

It's a very productive year. You zoom into a particular day, you say you're just cutting things with scissors. Zoom out, incredibly productive year. And this was my observation. Friction is sometimes something we want to get rid of. If I'm doing a mindless administrative task, make it easier for me to do it.

Sure. But sometimes friction is exactly what we need. If you're doing something deep, taking your time, going slow, having old tools, having to do processes to take time can be a feature and not a bug. So I think it's something we just need to keep in mind. Sometimes going slower, sometimes having things be a little bit harder is what you need.

That's what it sometimes takes to do hard work. So I admire that process. By the way, like McPhee goes on and talked about his computer setup once he got a computer setup and he ran this completely weird old school editing software called K-edit. It's like a line editor. It's not a WSYW word processor.

It's someone custom programmed for him and he tried to explain it and I couldn't understand it. So like when he got computers, it did not simplify his life. He did not have a sort of Rome account Zettelkasten system that was automatically putting all of his notes around. Somehow his computerized system seemed even more complicated to me than what he was doing with the note cards.

>> Your buddy Ryan has a similar process too, right? With the note cards and folders and stuff. >> Yeah, Ryan will write down, Holiday will write down everything of interest from the books he's reading and then put them away into boxes of note cards. And he takes his time.

And then when it comes time to write a book, he'll go through and pull out the note cards he thinks are relevant to that book and the information is all there. Yeah, it takes a lot longer to do the reading, but he would say that's the point. It's like, yeah, I want to take long.

I want to pull out the ideas. I want to think about them. I want to store them so I can use them later. You know, slowness is underrated, especially in our current world of work. I will, however, Jesse, tell you about something that is not underrated. And that is a product that I have been enjoying.

I've been running an interesting experiment recently. It's called Magic Mind. And it is a new sponsor of the show, and I'm happy that they are. Here is how it works. You get these shots. So they're in little bottles, right? So like shot size bottles. You can take it real quick.

And you take it in the morning, either in place of your morning coffee or you do it alongside your morning coffee, but it prevents you from having to drink a lot more coffee. And it is a productivity elixir, essentially. That is their pitch. You get a non-jittery, sustainable energy after you take it.

And it prevents you from having a caffeine high and crash. It prevents you from having, like I typically do, drinking five or six cup of coffees in a row. And I tried it out. And I can definitely tell the difference. You know, I think I can tell the difference because I don't have to immediately get that second or third coffee.

You get that more sustained. I think I'm locked in. Now I don't know how it works. It's complicated. They were trying to explain to me, I talked to the founder of the company, he was trying to explain to me the 12 functional ingredients. And I'm not a sophisticated enough biochemist.

There's something called matcha in it, which I think works really well. It has our adaptogens in it that help fight stress. It sort of is in a smoothie, you know, fruit smoothie colored type form. But I have become a Magic Mind convert. You know, they gave us a code.

So if you go to magicmind.co/deep, that's our special page, and then use the code DEEP20, they are going to give everyone 20% off. I mean, Jesse, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much coffee I will drink if I'm unchecked. I mean, it can't be healthy. It's pots with an S.

And I'm not exaggerating that. And when I take the shot of Magic Mind, along with that first cup of coffee, I can de-pluralize pots in terms of how much coffee I drink. I think that's probably better for me. And I'm not literally shaking the equipment off the walls. So I'm glad to have Magic Mind as our sponsor.

So don't forget, go to magicmind.co/deep and use that discount code DEEP20 to get 25% off. Magic Mind is the best choice when it comes to getting more done in less time through the power of neurotropics. So that's an exciting one. I also want to talk about MunkPak, and in particular, the MunkPak Keto Nut and Seed Bars.

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MunkPak, delicious, nutritious food you can count on. All right, Jesse, that's making me hungry. I'm thirsty. I feel like I need some Magic Mind of MunkPak to get going. But let's dive into some questions. Our first question of the episode comes from Worried Housewife who writes, "How can a housewife implement deep work into her life or is it only for advancing in career work or for creator/writers, etc.?

I love your book. However, I am mostly a housewife and I feel a bit anxious because the self-help books seem to imply unless I am writing books or working towards business, my life is mediocre. I want to be among those who feel accomplished and productive. What would your advice be for someone implementing the deep life in this situation?" So I don't know, Jesse, is housewife a word we're not supposed to use anymore?

It doesn't feel like that's the word we're supposed to use anymore. I mean, she listed it, so I guess you... Yeah, it's her self-description. I'm reading verbatim. I'm thinking stay-at-home parent is probably the word of choice. So well, for those who are concerned, I'm reading verbatim. I'm reading verbatim the question.

All right, so this is a good question. First of all, I think there's a semantic issue that we often have on the show, let's get back to, which is what exactly do we mean by deep work? Because again, I talk about this all the time. I think deep work gets generalized into areas in which it was not meant to originally apply.

So really, the intention behind the phrase deep work is very focused. It is when you're doing a specific type of cognitive heavy work, it is a mode of doing that work in which you minimize back and forth context switching. So you give the thing you're working on full attention with minimal back and forth context switching.

The main argument being that if you have a hard cognitive task to do, giving that sustained attention without context shifting is going to be more effective than trying to work on that task while also switching your attention back and forth. So that is functionally what deep work is. And then the larger hypothesis in the book Deep Work is that this is broadly valuable in a lot of knowledge work fields, and it's becoming more valuable in a lot of knowledge work fields, especially in the American context.

And we're not paying attention to it. So that we're setting up work systems that have an accidental side effect of requiring lots of context switching, requiring lots of time fragmenting, make it very difficult to actually work on cognitive tasks in this manner. So we execute those tasks worse. And so the argument is we should actually prioritize in that work context, giving people unbroken time to work without distraction.

That's very narrow. So that would have very little relevance if you're asking about, I'm at home, I'm at home with the kids. So you're not working in a knowledge work job that's asking of you to do these sort of very specific cognitively demanding work tasks. So these worries aren't relevant to that situation.

But I think this is just a semantic issue because later in the question you say, what's your advice for someone implementing the deep life in the situation? And there I think we're getting to the fruitful question. I think this is what you're actually asking about is the deep life and perhaps the role of work or focused work in the deep life.

And I think this is a critical question. Because we often extrapolate deep work to mean the deep life, but they're two different things. Deep work can have a place in a deep life, but they're two different things. So I'm glad we have a chance to actually talk about this and to try to make a distinction.

So in the theory of the deep life, which is something that was not developed in the book Deep Work, I introduced the term in the book Deep Work, but don't really get into it. I wasn't ready to get into that yet. But in the theory of the deep life that we've evolved on my newsletter and here on this podcast, the idea is you identify the areas of your life that are important.

And in each of these areas, you focus intensely on the things that are high value and try to minimize time wasted on the things that are not important or of lower value in that area. So it's really triaging your time and attention towards the things that really matter. There's a core component to the deep life that says for the things that really matter in this type of calculus, you might even want to make radical moves to support them.

So make radical changes to how you live your life to really invest in the small number of things that are most important to you. That is the underlying concept of the deep life. Craft is just one piece of the different areas of your life that might be important. And it's important depends on what you're doing, what your actual situation is.

So I think regardless of whether you're working in an office or you're at home taking care of kids or you're in between jobs and single, whatever the situation is, the calculus of the deep life is relevant. What matters to me in my life? Am I investing in those on things that really matter and not wasting too much time on things that don't?

That's always relevant. And I think that is critical. If you don't have that framework, you're going to be completely adrift. And so there's nothing about being at home with kids that says that framework's not going to work. If anything, it's going to be even more important. It's that framework that's going to make sure that you don't get so caught up in X that you forget to actually think about this other piece of your life, the community involvement, constitution, your health and fitness.

You're seeing the different parts of your life and making them important. The family commitment, the family there is going to be really critical when you do that deep life calculus. I mean, this is a, we talk about radical moves to align your life with your current values. If you're, you're dedicating your time to trying to help your kids raise in a stable, loving environment and cultivate the type of attributes and values you would want in leaders and adults who in the future we're going to look to with respect, that's an incredibly important endeavor.

And so when you're thinking about things that deep life work is just a piece of it. And the importance of that depends on what you're doing in your life right then. So I wouldn't worry about that at all. I would focus on the deep life and making sure that each of the areas of your deep life are getting attention.

That let's say the kids needs aren't swapping other needs that are also important to you or to the other people in your life. Deep work by itself is not that interesting. It's interesting if you're a knowledge worker who works with your brain to try to add value to information, then yeah, you want to be doing deep work because if you do it with a lot of context shifting, you're not going to be doing it as well.

But that's just a particular job. That's just a particular endeavor. I don't want to put a moral valuation on deep work that basically focus cognitive work is somehow high value and anything else isn't high value. No, it's high value in the context of knowledge work. Deep is better than distracted.

But you leave the context of knowledge work, it's not relevant. So anyways, I hope that's helpful. Let's use the deep life as the framing, the thing that has some sort of moral valence to it. That this, that's a structure to your life that's trying to intentionally focus on what matters versus those things that don't.

That is universally important. And let's narrow in deep work to say this is an approach to doing a certain type of activity that a lot of people do and it's relevant and we need to care about it, but it is not by itself the necessary foundation of a good life.

We get that a lot, Jesse, don't we? Like I think the deep work becomes a stand in for like much bigger. Yeah, we've been getting a lot of those questions lately, especially from folks who are maybe retired or at home. This question, yeah, it's been coming up a lot.

Yep. Yep. So good. I'm glad we had a chance to jump into that. All right. So now we have a question from Darcy. Darcy asks, how do you get to do things you need to do with an ever increasing administration or administrative overload? Administrative creep is a massive problem.

Every service you hire, activity you perform, product you buy comes with an ever increasing administrative burden. For example, you buy a washing machine, it doesn't work properly. You request a refund. The supplier needs X form completed. They then deny the refund. You then turn to a government agency to assist in enforcing your consumer rights.

They require a form to be completed. Each interaction is by email. Finally you arrive at a tribunal. They give you a refund. Each process requires time and skill. This is all time away from doing deep work. And again, Darcy, I would modify that to say this is all time that would keep you away from the intentional points that you are identifying in your deep life plan, the things you want to be spending time on, whether they're work or non-work related.

All right. So that is a good question because administrative creep, that is the growing burden of small tasks is a big problem. I think we underestimate it. We in particular underestimate it in the world of work, the actual burden of administrative creep on our ability to get things done that actually have value for the organization.

So I have three ideas, Darcy, that I want to share here. All right. First, I think you need to be more comfortable wasting more money. All right. Yes, your washing machine didn't work right, but man, this is crazy. You ended up in a tribunal with the government to try to get the refund back.

I mean, part of fighting administrative creep is to the extent possible, doing less things that generate administrative creep. And if you can just spend some money or waste some money and not have to deal with something, to the extent you're able to do that, it's a good investment in time.

I don't know if that refund was really worth all the time you actually just spent there. So that's the first thing I would suggest is try to reduce what you can in your life, even if it's not optimal. Like, oh man, I really should return this thing I got from Amazon.

It's the wrong size, but I just, I'm going to have to go to the UPS store and print this label. I don't know what to do. It's like, or you just eat the $20. So we got to value time and context shifting. That's a real cost that we weigh against things like money.

Idea two is to automate. So I'm a big believer in this when it comes to small tasks is there's two conditions that a small task can be in, cognitively speaking. The impact of these two conditions is very different on your brain. The first condition is that it can kind of be hanging.

It's on a to-do list somewhere, but that's it. It's something that needs to get done. It's going to have to, time's going to have to be found. Things are, information's going to have to be gathered and it's sitting there as this sort of weight of something that's needs to be done.

You're not quite sure when and how it's going to get done. The second condition a small task can be in is not hanging. This is when it's getting done in this time, in this place, here's where the information is. You don't have to, it's not on your list of things that you have to actually exert any additional planning energy towards.

Automation, when I say automate, I mean moving as many of your small tasks as possible into that second condition. There's a few things you can do here. One thing is for recurring tasks, you have a way they always get done. They always get done the same way. This day, on this week, every month, here's the spreadsheet I go through and I pay these bills and I do the budget or whatever it is, but it's the same times, the same days.

You don't have to think about it. It's just you get to that day, you see the calendar notice and you execute. It's no longer sitting there as something that is going to require planning energy. The other thing you can do is have set times put aside for doing these type of tasks in general.

And maybe what you're actually doing is assigning tasks to these buckets. Tuesday and Wednesdays, I have a 90 minute block in the afternoon in which I'm doing, I don't know, student related, class related issues as a professor. So students have questions, they need to know their grades, there's issues with problem sets or whatever.

Maybe you have 90 minutes twice a week. That's when you do that work. So when any of these questions pop up, you can just throw them on a list in a shared document somewhere. And you just know that list gets processed when you get to Tuesday. And again, when you get to Thursday.

Again, what you're doing here is moving those small tasks into the second condition where they require no further planning energy. The final thing is you can have some sort of system put in place for some of this type of work so that when a request comes in, it's not just hanging there loose.

Here's how we handle it. Okay, so if this issue comes up, you have to do this, you have to put it on my shared calendar. There's a each week I put the notes, whatever it is, but you have some system in place. What I'm trying to do here with automation is get things out of that condition in which planning energy still needs to be applied.

And the reason is, is that if you give me 20 tasks, and in scenario A, each of those 20 tasks is going to require at some point, planning energy applied, it's not clear to you exactly how they're going to get executed. And over here, you have the same 20 tasks.

No planning energy is required. They're all in one of these types of pre existing systems or processes, etc. That second scenario is going to have a much smaller negative impact on your mind on your sense of busyness on the sense of what load is lurking above me, it's going to be work that's going to get done, but almost for free.

It's like it doesn't add up to that quota of how much work, how much work can you have on your plate before your brain fritzes out and says I have too much. It doesn't add up to that quota, because it's not work you have to think about and plan.

It's like, you know, you mow the yard on Saturday morning. So you don't think about that as oh my god, this is something in my plate, I have to figure out. So the more you can move tasks in that condition, the least negative impact they're going to have actually on your brain.

And then the third thing I'm going to recommend is don't ignore the impact of attached overhead. So any significant project or initiative you agree to do, so the main grist of whatever you do, you know, in your job or whatever you do, the big things that really matter, like getting this committee together and making a hiring decision, updating the newsletter software that our church uses, whatever it is, right, any non-trivial commitment or project is going to bring with it a fixed overhead of administrative work.

And once this is on your plate, there's going to be this fixed overhead of we have to talk back and forth with the other people involved, there's going to have to be some meetings, there's going to be a background drip of emails that are going to require answering as you're trying to figure things out.

And you don't want to ignore that fixed amount of overhead because it does not take much of that until your schedule is overhead dominated. And again, I think this is another issue that people have is they just look at the project itself, try to get the software updated for our newsletter, we're trying to do a hiring decision and I've agreed to whatever, put together a new white paper that we send the clients.

And you look at just the project in isolation, you're like, well, I kind of imagined this taking a few days and this taking a few days and this taking a week. And these are the three things I'm working on for the next two weeks, there should be plenty of time.

But what you don't have in mind is that each of these projects is bringing with it this attached overhead. So now each of these three projects is bringing with it multiple Zoom meetings a week. Each of these projects is bringing with it, let's say, 10 to 20 back and forth emails per week.

So now you have 60 back and forth emails, and that's going to translate to something like five to 600 inbox checks to keep up with these back and forth conversations. And the overhead with just these three projects in a two week period, this overhead itself can eat up almost all of your time.

And now you feel administrative creep and now you feel overloaded. So we have to be really careful about how many projects we have on our plate at once. I'm a big believer of pull systems, should be working on a very small number of big projects at a time when one is at a stopping point.

Only then do you pull in something new to work on, because if you bring them all on your plate and say, I'll figure it out, the overhead comes with them. And whether you're working on this project actively today or not, the overhead doesn't care. It's making demands of you.

So that's the other big source of administrative creep. So have much fewer things on your plate because it's not the time required to write the paper or update the software that's going to kill you. It's the 60 emails and the seven Zoom meetings. That's what's going to end up killing you from a scheduling perspective.

So be very wary about that administrative attached overhead. Those three things, be less efficient, waste money, automate small tasks, so get them in that condition where they require no further planning attention and being very careful about the overhead that comes with projects. So keep your active project queue low at any one point, I think goes a long ways towards keeping administrative creep feeling more reasonable.

That's a good question. That's the bane of my existence, administrative creep. I do what I can, but we all struggle with it. All right. So we've got a question here, not really a name. This person's name is supposedly Deep Work versus Study and Recall. So I don't know, maybe it's a foreign name.

Oh, no, here's a name. It's down here. Arnav. Okay. He signed the message. That's better. All right. Arnav says, "Hi, Cal. In the book Deep Work, you said that working for hours with high intensity is necessary for producing, thriving, and learning new things. But in your Red Book, which is How to Become a Straight A Student, you said, 'Don't work for more than about an hour, 50 minutes at a time.' These ideas have confused me.

I want to know when to use Deep Work in a student life." Well, Arnav, the key to understanding this discrepancy, the 50-minute to an hour suggestion from Straight A Student and all the case studies of people doing Deep Work for long periods of time is that Deep Work for long periods of time have a natural ebb and flow of intensity.

So there's periods in which you're like really locked in, and then you let the intensity ebb, and then you lock back in again really hard, and you let the intensity ebb. I mean, if you sat there and could monitor the mental exertions of a computer programmer, for example, this is what you would see.

There's going to be periods where they're really trying to hold all the pieces of this algorithm together so they can, "I want this to work, right? So I've got to do this just right." And that's really high intensity. And then there's the, "I'm running, compiling the code, waiting for the debugging messages," and the intensity drops.

And Straight A Student, that 50-minute to an hour rule is talking about the specific, highly intense activity of doing active recall studying. It's a really intellectually demanding thing where you're trying to replicate from scratch whatever the information is that you're trying to learn. You replicate it from scratch without looking at notes as if you were lecturing a class.

That's at the core of how I recommend in that book cementing knowledge. That's super high intensity. That's the computer programmer trying to get the, writing the algorithm, has to get it just right. And there I was recommending about 50 minutes to an hour because you have to give your brain a break.

You would give it 10 minutes, then come back into it again. So if you're a student that's studying for three hours, what you're probably doing is 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low, 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low. And that's how you put those two things together.

So deep work in general ebbs and flows, active recall is a particular deep work activity that is incredibly focused. And so you can only sustain that for so long without having to have a breather. The key thing to remember though, is what do you do when you're energy, you're in an ebb?

You've been doing active recall for 50 minutes. Now you're taking a 10 minute break. You're coding, you were focused in really hard, but now you're waiting for your code to compile and you have five minutes. The thing I always come back to is if you're going to have to take a break from what you're doing, make sure that whatever you consume, whatever you encounter, make sure that it's not emotionally salient.

So something that's going to get you emotionally activated and not very specifically related to the type of work you're doing. So in other words, no Twitter, no email. If you go on Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or what have you, while you're waiting for the code to compile, you might see something that really activates your emotions.

And that's going to induce a much more severe context switch, which means it's going to take longer to get back to your code. Similarly, if you go and check your email, you're going to see a lot of open loop obligations that are related to work, but not exactly what you're working on.

And that's going to hijack your brain. It's going to take a long time to context switch away from that as well. So during those ebbs, nothing that's emotionally salient, nothing that is sort of highly relevant, but not quite the same as the work that you're currently doing. I recommend looking at baseball news.

That's been my go-to. I'm glad baseball is back and it is not emotionally salient and it is not related to work. And that has been good for me, for sure. Jesse, I'm in a sort of news break right now because I have like a lot of work going on and sort of high, like scheduling anxiety, but it raises my anxiety floor.

And so I'm basically saying the only news I'm consuming right now is baseball news. And it's been great. Actually it's really kind of helped tamp down the sort of anxiety floor a little bit. When you have that instinct of, I want to just see what's going on, they say, let me just go look at how this prospect is progressing.

Actually I want you, one of your guests online to be Scott Boris. I want to hear you talk to him. We should get Scott. Scott should represent us. Scott Boris is going to represent us to our sponsors maybe. Like, Hey, this would be Scott. All right. All right, Monk Pack.

I see your offer. You're offering 30 CPM. Here's my return offer. $20 million. $20 million if you want to be on the show. And if you don't want to pay the $20 million to be on the show, we'll walk. I'm sure there's other bar companies out there that would gladly pay it.

And so $20 million. And also our only sponsor would be the Washington Nationals. So that's basically just only moves clients to the Washington Nationals. Baseball insider chat. All right. So here's a non-baseball related question. We got Marguerite who says, "What lessons can be learned from how modern Orthodox Jews who are found in every field navigate their Saturday Shabbat to abstain from any electronic inputs?" Well, I'm a big believer in the practice of Shabbat.

I don't care as much about the super specifics of the rules, right? Like exactly what you can use or don't use. And does a combustion engine, is that going to count as creating energy? And can you turn on the light or not turn the light? So I'm not too caught up in the specific rules that maybe if you were a modern Orthodox Jew, you might think about how do we interpret this versus a different level of observance.

But the thing I'm a big believer in is the underlying idea here of having this day of rest for your mind to reset and to connect on other things that are important that aren't related to work and aren't related to the news. I think this is a fantastic ritual.

What I think is important, this is what I more or less do, no work, no email, no digital news. So just all of those stimulating things, the outside world stimulating and trying to capture your mind, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, take them out of your life. I think everyone could use that and everyone could find some relief and not just being away from that, but rediscovering the things that that keeps them away from.

Friday night, it can be family, you're connected to your family. The next day it's activities, you go and do things, you read, but you're not in that peak state of anxious information consumption. So we do that. We do something like that, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, and maybe we'll even refine that practice.

But I think there's great wisdom there. And this should not be a surprise. It's something I talk about a fair amount, that wisdom traditions have a lot of wisdom to offer because it is not just an arbitrary book. Wisdom traditions often, what you have here is ideas and thoughts and rituals and techniques and practices for living that have been battle tested in harder situations than you live in now.

And a lot of stuff didn't survive, but the stuff that has survived, the stuff that we will consider revelation, give it that moniker, is the things that actually seem to work, the spiritual technologies that actually seem compatible with the way that the human mind and the human soul actually operates.

There's a reason why the books stick around. It's why the Tanakh is still here 2,800 years later, is because there's something deeply true about a lot of these ideas. So we shouldn't be surprised that in one of our oldest wisdom traditions still surviving, we find this idea, this idea that is laid down in Genesis.

I mean, we're talking very old. God took the seventh day and he rested. There is wisdom in it that makes complete sense when now today in 2022, you put down the phone on Friday night and there is no Twitter and there is no Instagram and you're not scrolling for things and you're not checking through emails.

There's a perspective, there's a peace, there's a calmness. I'm a big Shabbat fan, so I recommend it. All right. I think we have time for a couple more questions. Let me just talk briefly about a couple of the other sponsors that help make this show possible and thanks to Scott Boras for negotiating great terms for these sponsors.

It's $20 million well spent. But let's talk stamps.com. All right. Here's the thing. Time is money. You do not want to waste either traveling to the post office, parking, waiting in those long, long lines at the post office just to discover that you left the other thing at home and you have to go all the way back and get it.

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I'm a believer in stamps.com. We're near the post office right here. I've talked about this before, but during the pandemic, they social distanced the line and there's no room in the post office. The line would stretch down the street because everyone was distanced out. It just was a reminder every day of, man, it takes a long time to go to the post office.

I'm glad stamps.com exists as an alternative. They've been around for more than 20 years. They've been used by over 1 million businesses. They give you access to all the post office and UPS shipping services. You can do it right from your computer. They give you huge discount rates on that shipping services.

So even though you pay a small monthly fee for stamps.com, if you ship more than just a minuscule amount of things, you're actually making money, not spending it. So stop overpaying for shipping with stamps.com. If you sign up with promo code "DEEP", you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments, no contracts needed.

Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter that code "DEEP". I also want to talk about Headspace. I've actually been using Headspace. I just was telling you about this before. I was using some of their anti-anxiety breathing related mini meditations. There was a period where I was just feeling really, there's just so many things going on that I was feeling kind of peak, peak shaky energy, right?

And I was like, okay, I got to, I got to try to calm this down. And Headspace was my go-to. They had some great mini meditations for it that focused on breathing to bring down the sympathetic nervous system. And it worked quite well. I like it because it's guided meditations.

So it's not just, I'm going to have to be 30 minutes sitting in quiet, hearing all my thoughts. They help you. It's a great, they have a couple of great narrators that walk you through it. And so that made me a Headspace believer. And I don't think I'm the only one who needs that.

I mean, we all say that we're fine, even when we don't mean it, but fine is not really an emotion. And how many times have you just told the world, oh, I'm fine. And what you really feel is anger or sadness or nerves. This is where Headspace can come in.

It is scientifically proven to help you manage your feelings and mental health. In fact, a recent study proved in just two weeks, Headspace can reduce your stress by 14%. I believe that whether you want to relieve stress and anxiety, sleep better or improve your focus. And yes, by the way, that's another type of meditation Headspace now has.

Focus, you do the guided meditation. So you're ready to lock in on the work you're about to do. So deep questions, listeners take note. So regardless of what you're trying to do, anxiety, focus, sleeping better, Headspace is your everyday dose of mindfulness for real life. So however you're feeling, I recommend that you try Headspace at headspace.com/questions and you will get one month free of their entire mindfulness library.

This is the best Headspace offer available, but you have to go to headspace.com/questions today to get it. That's headspace.com/questions. All right, we've got time for a couple more quick questions. We have one here from Cindy. Cindy says, "I'm starting my fourth try to do a digital detox. I just can't seem to make it the 30 days.

What is your advice?" Well, first of all, Cindy, I think we might diagnose part of the problem in just the words you were using. You called what you're trying to do a detox. I don't use the phrase digital detox. If you read the book, Digital Minimalism, where I'm assuming you're extracting this plan to spend 30 days away from optional technologies, I call it a digital declutter.

There's a reason why I make that distinction is because in the context of digital tools, detox has taken on this very specific and I think very weird meaning. It means I want to white knuckle separate myself away from these services that I spend too much time on because I don't like that I spend so much time on them, and I want to detoxify my addictive urge to use them.

The reason why I say that's a weird application of the term is that, of course, in the substance abuse community, where the notion of detox or the relevant notion of detox comes from, the whole idea is not taking a break, but to completely change your life. It is the first step as part of transforming your life so that you don't use that substance anymore.

In the digital world, we just say, "It's a break. I don't like this thing, so let me just be away from it, and that will somehow make my life better." Declutter, on the other hand, says, "No, we're not just staying away from that closet that has too much stuff in it.

We're going to take everything out and just put back the stuff that matters. We're going to make the closet permanently better, and that is what I think you need to do for your digital life." The key thing that separates a declutter from a detox is that you don't just white-knuckle it.

You don't just sit there and say, "Don't use Instagram. Don't use Instagram. Don't use Instagram," and hope you make it 30 days. You instead have to be incredibly active, aggressively reflecting and experimenting to rediscover the things that you really care about in your life. These 30 days should be busy.

You should have lots of plans, lots of things you're doing. You're going over here. You're going with friends here. You're going to this museum. You're reading these books. You're going to this club. You're doing a new online class," because what you're trying to do is get back in touch in the absence of all these distractions with what you really care about.

And then when you're done with the 30-day declutter, you rebuild your digital life from scratch. You don't go back to what you were doing before. You don't never use technology again. Instead you say, "Okay, now that I've rebuilt my life around activities that are important to me, initiatives that are important to me, what tools will help me with this?" And you very intentionally bring technology back into your life, but you deploy it very strategically to support the things you care about.

And everything that doesn't support something you care about, you just ignore. And the stuff you do bring back in, you put nice gates around, nice fences around, you have rules about when you use it, how you use it, et cetera. That's the digital declutter. So the reason why I would diagnose you are probably having trouble with these detoxes is that you're just trying to white knuckle it.

And that's not very successful. And I've seen that in the large number of people who have gone through these experiments on my behalf and told me about how it went, is that the people that just try to stay away from the technologies they don't like, struggle. Those that instead say, "While I'm staying away from those technologies, I'm rebuilding my life and rediscovering what I care about," don't struggle.

Change that is built around an aspirational positive vision of your life is always way more sustainable than change built around just avoiding things that you're assessing to be negative. So Cindy, that's my advice. Go back and read that chapter in digital minimalism and focus on the active part, the stuff you have to do instead, the replacements, the discovery, the reflection.

I think that's where you're going to find a key to succeeding with your declutter. All right, let's do one last question. This one comes from Glenn. Glenn asks, "How do you think about thinking?" Glenn goes on to elaborate, "I was intrigued by a recent podcast where you described how when COVID started, you sent out daily emails to your family, helping them think about what you and they were experiencing.

You mentioned a couple of reliable sources for news about COVID, people you had learned to trust. Selfishly, I'd be interested in hearing who your trusted sources are. And for the purposes of your podcast, I would love to hear about how you think about thinking. What I mean is, how did you decide what was and was not a trusted source?

How do you distinguish between conspiratorial thinking and good thinking? When do you trust the science and when is it proper to have some skepticism?" Well, it's a good question, Glenn. So I did do that newsletter for my family. It was positive news surrounding the COVID pandemic. It was trying to counteract all of the negativity out there.

I stopped that after vaccines. So after my family had been vaccinated, after it was clear from the statistics that our risk was small, comparable to other things that we face on a daily basis and don't care about, I wanted to shift my focus away from COVID. And the reason is, of course, I mean, life is a gift and you don't want to waste it.

You don't want to waste parts of your life that you could avoid not wasting. And it seemed to me that an excessive concentration on COVID as a unique threat, once we knew statistically that it wasn't a unique threat for us compared to other things, was in some sense felt like we were dismissing the beauty that was life.

To remain, I think, stuck and obsessed and anxious about just this one thing longer than we had to. It was completely reasonable at some point, but to do that any minute longer than was necessary seemed like it was wasting this resource that we had been gifted. We wanted to see people experience art, enjoy experiences, get back to the things that make human life human.

So once we were no longer in that period of acute threat, I stopped that newsletter. And I see it, I would say the bubbles in which people are excessively anxious about COVID have really shrunk. It was everyone, and then it shrunk. This is very crude. At some point, it shrunk to, I guess, just blue states, and now it has shrunk to certain like metropolitan areas.

And there's only a handful of them left. Our Deep Work HQ is in one of those areas. There's a surprising amount of people walking by themselves with high filtration mask on. And I just have a lot of empathy. I mean, I understand anxiety and something about viruses can tap something primal and create a really hard loop to break.

And I am fortunate enough that we were able to break out of that loop and be able to go and basically live the best life we can in whatever the constraints were at the moment. But let's get to the bigger question here. How did I convince myself of that?

How did I navigate the sea of COVID information? And more generally, how should people find good sources when it comes to any sort of issue that is important to you? How do we burst out of the filter bubbles that can put us into some sort of intellectual isolation and in doing so perhaps lead to a narrowing of options or a dimming of what's possible in life?

My big recommendation here is to luxuriate in the dialectic. You have to clash smart, convincing good people on different sides of issues together. You have to do that. As soon as you stop doing that, you're in great danger of falling into a filter bubble where this is super true and this is super wrong.

And I can't even believe those people can wake up in the morning knowing how wrong they are. And I just think as soon as you fall into a filter bubble, life narrows, options constrict, anger and anxiety raises, and you can fall into these negative loops. Like the people who like right now could be embracing what is good about life and still is very nervous about having someone into their home.

So filter bubbles can be a problem. So the dialectic is how you get out of this. Let me get someone who's convincing on the other side of this thing that kind of feels like right or what I've been hearing. Let's put them together. Let's collide them. And every time you do that, you get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what's true.

I did that all throughout COVID. And you know what? The experts shifted. There was a time very early in COVID where there were certain commentators who were coming more from the conservative end of the spectrum that had critiques of lockdown policies. And I would steelman them and steelman their lockdown policy justifications.

And I'd hit them together. And I'd come away and be like, hmm, there's something a little bit weird going on here, I think. And it's a complicated issue. But I was like, let me keep some of these sources in my queue of things I'm listening to because I think the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, there was things that was-- there was angles that were being purposefully ignored, information that was being emphasized.

I was like, OK, this is kind of-- there's something interesting going on here. Those same sources that maybe I was looking at as the convincing counter examples to the lockdown policies later on became much less convincing when it came to things like vaccines. There's certain specific sources I can think about who they, for whatever reason, had a particular thought on vaccines.

And when I would steelman that against the best other thought, they were just blown out of the water. It was like, oh, this is incredibly non-convincing and selective. And I can see you're ignoring this. And I'm reading the other side. And so it was the same people. Then they were no longer that trusted for me.

Then there were sources that I thought were very useful early in vaccination that were very good about immunity and the immune system. These were often sources that came out of HIV medicine. People that came out of HIV were very useful in this sort of immediate post-vaccine moment because they-- first of all, HIV knows a lot about harm reduction policies, which is quite different than what we were doing with COVID, which was more about risk elimination policies.

And they knew a lot about the immune system. So here's what's going to happen with a vaccine or prior infection. And that felt really useful. And when I was pushing them against other people who had different views on the vaccine, it's like, oh, I really understand more about immunity.

That was very useful. And now there's other doctors who-- I don't follow the news on COVID as much anymore now because, again, I'm trying to live life. And I think I can not think as much about it. But the point is dialectic, collision, collision, collision. And you get this nuanced view.

And so early on, it's like, I see what's going on with the lockdowns. But I have these points of skepticism. It's because I was putting these two things together. And if you looked at either of those sides in isolation, you'd be in a real extreme. You'd be-- you're either in the extreme of, like, why can't we do what China's doing?

If we could do that, COVID would go away. Or you're on this other extreme that was like, this is all a plot to, I don't know, some great reset plot. And there's no reason to be doing any of this. But you nail the most convincing people from both sides together.

You get nuance. And you feel settled. You feel confident. With immunity, with all these different issues. Always hit them together. And here's my-- the big point I want to make about this general filter bubble bursting approach is that you're not going to be tricked. Exposing yourself to the other side of an idea, the other side of what seems instinctually right or what your tribe supports, is not going to trick you into the wrong information.

As I talked about just multiple times here in these COVID-specific examples, there is people that I was once kind of listening to that wilted, wilted under this exercise as time went on. I mean, it is a great identifier of true intellectual depth, intellectual honesty, accuracy. It really works very well.

And it's not-- you're not going to be tricked into some weird conspiracy. It's actually going to make your beliefs and the things you believe in stronger. It's going to give you more confidence. It's probably why today I'm an extreme moderate with COVID, because I've been doing this the whole time.

And I feel confident in my risk assessments. I'm not super alarmist. I'm not super dismissive. And I think we've done the right things to keep our family risk low. But also, I'm living life. And I think it's statistically valid that I am. And it's because I kept hitting these things against each other.

And I didn't get captured by either side. I actually ended up in a sort of alt-middle position that would end up, I think, being pretty useful. So I think that's what we need to do in this age of information abundance. If everyone is going through the same homogenized interface platforms like Twitter or Instagram, and so the crazy guy down the street, his tweet looks the same as the scholar of 50 years.

And we're trying to sift through this and figure out what makes sense and what doesn't. That's the best thing you can do. Take the thing that sounds most convincing. Take the thing that sounds most convincing on the other side. Hit them together and repeat. That is how you burst out of filter bubbles.

That's how you find what you really believe in. It's how you find nuance. I really think it's the way to go. And in doing that, the final thing I would say is be very wary of complete tribal allegiance. If you see in someone you're looking at as a source of information an incredible, consistent, whatever that tribe says on the opposite, and even if it contradicts itself down the line, you see that going on, then don't even bother with that person in a dialectical collision.

When I say convincing, you want someone who looks like they at least appear to be intellectually honest. If you see complete tribal allegiance, like I will keep, what does my team believe? That's what's right. What does that team believe? We're the opposite. That should be a, you could filter those people out right away.

But for the people who remain dialectic, dialectic, dialectic, I think we all should be doing that. And if you do that, I don't know, you get a much more sophisticated, nuanced view of life. You won't end up at extreme. You won't end up tricked and you'll probably end up in a better place.

All right. So that's our place for us in this episode. I think is to wrap it up as we went a little bit long here. Thank you everyone who sent in their questions. As I like to say, if you like what you heard, you will like what you see at the show's YouTube channel, youtube.com/cownewportmedia.

Full episodes and clips of every question and segment done on the show can be found there. You'll also like what you read at my long running newsletter. You can subscribe at cownewport.com. We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)