Ep. 259: The Four-Hour Work Day

00:00:00.000 | So, let's use for today's Deep Question the following, "What happens when you cut your

00:00:06.760 | work day in half?"

00:00:14.840 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in

00:00:21.120 | a distracted world.

00:00:23.680 | So I'm joining you once again from the Deep Work HQ North up in Hanover, New Hampshire,

00:00:30.120 | joined by my producer, Jesse, who is down south in our DC version of the HQ.

00:00:36.800 | Jesse, how's it going down there?

00:00:39.280 | It's going well.

00:00:41.800 | It's good to be here.

00:00:44.360 | I'm excited about your comment last week about the new desk that you want to put in the office.

00:00:51.520 | Yes, yes.

00:00:53.160 | I am looking forward to my vision of a custom-built three-wall wraparound desk.

00:01:01.040 | It's great to daydream.

00:01:02.040 | I'm actually podcasting right now.

00:01:03.400 | You can't see it from the camera because the camera is just on me.

00:01:07.200 | You just see a wood panel background behind me.

00:01:09.800 | But I'm actually podcasting right now from, I guess I would describe it as a conference

00:01:14.720 | room.

00:01:16.120 | So the house in which I'm staying that this fellowship program put me up on has a walkout

00:01:21.360 | basement conference room where they really do run conferences down here and other types

00:01:25.720 | of events.

00:01:26.840 | And I'm facing three massive arched paned windows, probably 10 feet tall that are looking

00:01:35.000 | out over Ockham Pond beyond this.

00:01:37.240 | But I'm at a table that must be, it made me think about our desk, I don't know, 15 feet

00:01:43.720 | long, a giant solid wood conference table that I'm sitting at right now.

00:01:49.600 | So maybe this is what got me thinking about our solid built-in desk in the HQ.

00:01:53.040 | It's a big sturdy piece of wood.

00:01:57.080 | I feel like a diplomatic negotiation is happening every time I sit down here, the podcast.

00:02:03.480 | So I like it.

00:02:04.480 | Big solid, big solid piece of wood.

00:02:07.360 | And I will say, here's the danger of today's podcast, not to open the curtain a little

00:02:13.920 | bit, but we're recording this one a full week in advance.

00:02:17.700 | So this is coming right after the weekend of the 22nd and the 23rd.

00:02:23.600 | I'm very tempted, Jesse, to talk just watching Nationals baseball.

00:02:28.400 | We had our first series sweep since 2021 against a playoff contending Giants.

00:02:34.320 | I think we could fill an entire episode easy with trade deadline discussion.

00:02:39.240 | So let me just say, everyone out of the audience should be thankful that I am resisting my

00:02:44.160 | urge right now to go really deep on the controllability of Lane Thomas or Kandee's third base defensive

00:02:55.600 | run scored or whether or not CJ Abrams is going to break one war on the season, which

00:03:01.040 | I think he definitely will.

00:03:02.600 | All of the instincts in my body, Jesse, are saying, do not go serious on baseball.

00:03:07.360 | But I'm in a good mood because the baseball team has been playing well recently.

00:03:10.960 | Yeah, really good series win for them.

00:03:13.360 | Yeah, yeah, can't go wrong.

00:03:14.920 | Can't go wrong.

00:03:15.920 | I still have not succeeded in convincing either the Lerner family or Mike Rizzo that they

00:03:20.680 | need deep work taught to their players to really get to the next level.

00:03:26.800 | And the right way to teach this is to have the person who wrote the book be in the club

00:03:32.160 | box because you see, you need me there, I think, to really get a feel for it.

00:03:37.520 | You need me in the club box, probably in the clubhouse, let's be honest, so I can really

00:03:40.720 | get a sense of what's going on there.

00:03:43.680 | So again, my call goes out, you really need me in the clubhouse for the team to get to

00:03:47.680 | the next level.

00:03:48.680 | I mean, I think honestly, me being there on game day is like a three win above replacement

00:03:56.440 | bump.

00:03:57.440 | I'm a three war player.

00:03:58.920 | Okay, that's enough of this, Jesse, we're gonna lose all of our listeners.

00:04:02.160 | Speaking of our listeners, though, one thing I've noticed, and I don't know if you've seen

00:04:05.120 | the same thing, but it seems to me the links and ideas that people have been sending to

00:04:09.900 | us at interesting@calnewport.com have been unusually good recently.

00:04:15.540 | I'm getting lots of really interesting articles and links and case studies that people are

00:04:20.640 | sending to me.

00:04:21.640 | It's really kept me rich in ideas to think about.

00:04:25.000 | And it's actually something that someone sent to me recently that I want to make the focus

00:04:29.760 | of our deep dive today.

00:04:32.280 | It's an article from friend of the show, Oliver Berkman's newsletter.

00:04:39.080 | So Oliver Berkman is a columnist and writer from the UK.

00:04:42.800 | He wrote most recently 40,000, is it weeks?

00:04:47.240 | I always get it wrong, 40,000 weeks, which is his time management for mortals.

00:04:53.280 | So it's this very popular book, rethinking time management about we only have so much

00:04:58.360 | time you're not gonna be able to do most things you want to do.

00:05:01.760 | Now what?

00:05:02.760 | And it really hit a chord.

00:05:04.680 | There is vibes of slow productivity in there.

00:05:06.720 | There is vibes of Jenny O'Dell in there.

00:05:08.280 | I think it really hit a chord and it's done very well.

00:05:11.600 | The paperback version is coming out in the US right around now.

00:05:14.720 | So certainly check that out if you haven't bought it yet.

00:05:17.560 | But anyways, he has a newsletter called The Imperfectionist.

00:05:21.780 | And he wrote recently about an experiment he conducted with his own time management

00:05:29.300 | where he dealt with feeling overloaded by actually drastically cutting back how much

00:05:34.360 | he worked.

00:05:35.360 | So it's an experiment that really touches on the fixed schedule productivity strategy

00:05:40.720 | we talked about recently and the slow productivity philosophy more generally.

00:05:46.260 | And I thought what we would do is let's go through it.

00:05:47.760 | I want to go through his newsletter and react to certain pieces about why he did it and

00:05:51.480 | what he learned because I think there is some lessons we can identify in that as well.

00:05:56.360 | We'll now just set up the experiment that Oliver decided to conduct.

00:06:02.280 | So he said, "Something I've long understood about myself is that whenever I get stressed

00:06:06.320 | about the number of things on my plate or anxious about the challenges of a specific

00:06:10.120 | project, it's an excellent idea to do the opposite of what comes naturally to me."

00:06:16.480 | So scrolling down here he says, "And so recently when I felt myself on the brink of overwhelm,

00:06:21.640 | I thought I'd try pushing this principle one step further.

00:06:25.840 | It had started to feel as though even 20-hour workdays would be insufficient, frankly, to

00:06:31.120 | get a handle on my to-do list.

00:06:32.920 | So what if I were to deliberately limit myself to a preposterous, clearly insufficient four-hour

00:06:41.320 | workday instead?"

00:06:42.320 | All right, so that's our setup.

00:06:44.660 | He was feeling overwhelmed and said, "I'm going to run this experiment.

00:06:48.520 | What if I do the opposite of my instincts?"

00:06:50.440 | I want to point out here before we even get farther into Oliver's particular experience,

00:06:55.920 | as I've talked about on the show, I did something similar, though for different reasons, during

00:07:01.440 | my years as a postdoctoral associate at MIT.

00:07:05.480 | Now I wasn't feeling overwhelmed.

00:07:06.680 | I actually had the opposite problem, which is I felt as if I didn't have enough work

00:07:10.400 | to do, which is very common for a postdoctoral position, especially in theoretical computer

00:07:15.920 | science.

00:07:16.920 | And since, in part, those positions are a holding pattern while you go out to do your

00:07:23.240 | academic interviews to try to get an academic job.

00:07:26.700 | And also you just don't have classes, you don't have a dissertation to work on, your

00:07:30.480 | research is mature.

00:07:31.480 | So typically you are just continuing research projects that you already started but haven't

00:07:36.480 | yet finished.

00:07:37.480 | You want to get those finished in time to go on the academic job market.

00:07:40.140 | So you can feel, especially in theory, a real drop in your time obligations.

00:07:45.680 | And I got really worried at that point because I knew that that was going to shift dramatically

00:07:49.360 | in the other direction when I became a professor.

00:07:51.760 | Professors have a lot more on their plate.

00:07:53.600 | You have to teach classes, you have to research, you have to supervise students, you have to

00:07:57.000 | find grant funding, you have to do service.

00:07:59.480 | And so I did something similar to Oliver when I was a postdoc.

00:08:03.120 | I slashed my working hours down because I wanted to get used to working on my research

00:08:07.800 | in a much smaller amount of time because I knew that was the only amount of time I would

00:08:12.320 | actually have available once I became a professor.

00:08:15.240 | So I'm familiar with this setup, but I came at it from the exact opposite angle.

00:08:20.120 | I came at it from when I was not busy enough.

00:08:23.480 | Oliver is trying this when he was too busy, which I think is interesting.

00:08:27.400 | All right, so let's keep reading here to see what happens.

00:08:32.600 | So let's go on here.

00:08:33.600 | All right, he's very clear about this.

00:08:35.400 | I'm not talking about the three to four hour rule for getting creative work done.

00:08:39.360 | Now, as an aside, Oliver has this principle of, you know, work on something creative for

00:08:43.800 | three hours, maybe four, and then stop.

00:08:45.960 | That's about how much time you can make progress on something creative.

00:08:48.860 | But what he's emphasizing here is this is more than this.

00:08:53.680 | He said, no, this was more of a shock tactic.

00:08:56.500 | Just for a while, I dedicate no more than four hours to any kind of work.

00:09:01.800 | So this was not just about work deeply for three hours and don't do any more.

00:09:05.640 | He's going to do no work after four hours.

00:09:09.040 | So he said he was going to then make myself stop and use the extra time to do fun things

00:09:14.080 | instead.

00:09:15.900 | Not that I expected them to feel fun.

00:09:17.220 | I expected to find it seriously uncomfortable to walk away from work like this.

00:09:21.500 | And reader, it was.

00:09:24.740 | He then goes on to give the caveats.

00:09:26.540 | He says, look, here's the obvious caveat.

00:09:28.100 | I'm well aware of an unusual degree of autonomy over how I portion my time.

00:09:31.780 | This specific experiment won't be feasible for many, though there's a caveat to the caveat.

00:09:37.540 | It's worth asking if you might have more autonomy than you realize.

00:09:42.380 | I do think that is a important caveat to the caveat.

00:09:46.380 | He's saying, yeah, of course, I'm a writer.

00:09:47.700 | I can do this.

00:09:48.900 | A lot of people can't do this.

00:09:50.140 | But do keep in mind, you might have more autonomy over time than you think.

00:09:53.020 | And really, the spirit of this experiment is reducing artificially your work hours to

00:09:59.020 | see what happens.

00:10:00.020 | Not that you specifically maybe reduce it to exactly this many hours or exactly the

00:10:03.700 | way he did it.

00:10:04.700 | OK, that's the setup.

00:10:07.180 | He's overwhelmed.

00:10:08.420 | Four hours, then he has to go try to do fun things.

00:10:11.320 | He had three observations, three observations that came out of this experiment.

00:10:15.980 | So let's go through these one by one, and I'll give you my take.

00:10:20.060 | All right, so the first-- I'll load it up on the screen here for those who are watching.

00:10:24.500 | The first thing he noticed.

00:10:28.740 | Just by making the activity a smaller part of your day, you'll find yourself looking

00:10:32.480 | forward to it more.

00:10:34.400 | It shifts from being something you have to do for hour after hour to something you get

00:10:38.720 | to do.

00:10:40.220 | This chimes with the research of the psychologist Robert Boyce, quoted in 4,000 Weeks, who found

00:10:44.660 | that the most productive writers were those who made writing only a modest part of their

00:10:49.460 | schedules rather than letting it dominate.

00:10:51.740 | Motivated to return to it day after day, they produced more output over the long haul.

00:10:58.500 | All right, so this is a classic slow productivity principle right here.

00:11:02.700 | So he's saying when it comes to the deep stuff you do, when it comes to the skilled stuff

00:11:05.580 | you do, putting a limit on your time is not bad.

00:11:09.500 | You do better work when you actually work, you look forward to it more, and over time

00:11:13.420 | this quality output is going to aggregate into a quality final product.

00:11:20.780 | So this is classic slow productivity for high-quality efforts.

00:11:24.620 | Slow but steady is how people produce masterpieces, not in frenzied bursts of activity.

00:11:31.460 | So I think that's important, but what we're missing is what about all the other stuff

00:11:35.220 | you have to do?

00:11:36.420 | It's not all just sitting there and writing.

00:11:39.540 | So let's keep going, get his second of three observations.

00:11:42.740 | All right, second.

00:11:45.940 | There's a palpable shift in your experience of agency, of being in charge of your life.

00:11:52.540 | It's easy for a major project or a long to-do list to start to feel like an angry god you

00:11:56.740 | must ceaselessly placate, and that the best you can hope for by the time evening rolls

00:12:01.100 | around is to have held it at bay for one more day.

00:12:04.660 | Even on the days you manage that, it's a horribly oppressive way to live.

00:12:08.620 | Radically restricting your hours flips this picture completely.

00:12:11.140 | Merely by deciding on strict limits, you're putting yourself in the driver's seat, which

00:12:15.140 | brings a totally different energy to the situation.

00:12:18.380 | Now instead of resentfully grinding away or procrastinating in a stubborn attempt to defy

00:12:23.020 | your oppressor, you're choosing to dedicate time to the task.

00:12:26.420 | And four hours spent in this manner, I can attest, is vastly more effective than eight

00:12:30.900 | hours spent in the other way.

00:12:32.740 | Well here I think is an insight that is new to me and I think is a smart one.

00:12:36.340 | The psychology of your workload.

00:12:39.780 | Personifying your workload as an enemy against which you are essentially doing battle.

00:12:45.700 | So by saying, "I am going to not just stop working when I'm just so exhausted it becomes

00:12:50.220 | impractical to do anything else," because that's the workload monster winning.

00:12:54.660 | Say, "I'm going to choose when I work and it's going to be less than that."

00:12:58.700 | And now you feel like you're in charge.

00:13:02.020 | And Berkman is pointing out, when you feel like you're in charge, like you have autonomy,

00:13:05.900 | you bring a fresh energy to that work.

00:13:07.860 | It's something you're choosing to do.

00:13:09.460 | You are going to feel more motivated about how you work.

00:13:13.460 | Now look, I've seen something similar to this back when I used to work with college students.

00:13:18.780 | When I would find college students, especially at elite schools, begin to have massive procrastination

00:13:24.060 | problems, almost always what was going on was a short-circuiting of their motivational

00:13:29.420 | system.

00:13:30.420 | They're grinding, grinding, grinding.

00:13:33.100 | Especially if the work was for classes, they didn't even sure why they were taking them.

00:13:35.820 | It was because they were pre-med, because their parents said they should be a doctor.

00:13:38.860 | They're grinding, grinding, grinding.

00:13:40.220 | What would eventually happen is their motivational system would fry out.

00:13:43.980 | When their system fried out, they couldn't do any more work.

00:13:48.420 | Berkman gives us an interesting insight into understanding what's going on there.

00:13:50.980 | In some sense, it is your oppressor finally just crushes your spirit.

00:13:54.320 | So simply by saying, "I have control.

00:13:56.140 | I'm going to work a lot, but on my terms, and not as much as I might otherwise do,"

00:14:00.860 | you feel like you're doing this on your own motivation.

00:14:04.300 | That this is intrinsic instead of extrinsic motivation, and that's much less likely to

00:14:08.020 | fry your motivational system.

00:14:09.460 | You're much less likely to burn out.

00:14:10.780 | So I think that's a really insightful way of looking at it.

00:14:13.780 | By working less, you actually feel better about your work, and again, the results you

00:14:17.240 | produce might therefore end up not being less than if you had tried to put in more hours,

00:14:22.820 | something that he keeps coming back to again and again.

00:14:26.740 | We got one last conclusion from Oliver here.

00:14:30.780 | "Finally, you learned a crucial lesson that the sky doesn't fall in when things get neglected.

00:14:37.740 | We 'insecure overachievers' drive ourselves so hard thanks to an unconscious sense that

00:14:44.380 | if we don't, some catastrophe will occur.

00:14:48.020 | And look, it's really good to meet deadlines, keep commitments, answer messages promptly,

00:14:51.920 | and so on, but for almost everyone in almost every context, it isn't actually essential

00:14:57.940 | in this existential life-or-death sense to do so.

00:15:00.540 | When you put a hard limit on your work hours, it's inevitable that on any given day, you'll

00:15:03.860 | fail to do everything you think needs to get done.

00:15:07.240 | In fact, that's true whether you limit your hours or not.

00:15:09.300 | The limit just makes it impossible to ignore.

00:15:11.500 | And what happens?

00:15:12.940 | The world doesn't end, which is liberating because it allows you to accept your finite

00:15:17.820 | capacities rather than living in fear of them, and because you get to spend less of

00:15:21.940 | your work time feeling like you're forestalling catastrophe and more of it making a calm,

00:15:25.980 | empowered choice about what would be wisest to prioritize.

00:15:30.140 | The miraculous result, once more, is that you end up neglecting less of what truly matters."

00:15:36.580 | So I think again, we have some interesting psychology being brought up here.

00:15:41.080 | So he has this term "insecure overachievers" for this idea that I have to keep working

00:15:45.160 | because if I neglect something, it's going to be a problem.

00:15:49.600 | People are counting on me, they need this to get done.

00:15:52.620 | And so you push yourself longer hours to try to each night get to this place of, "Okay,

00:15:57.780 | I think I've taken care of every open loop."

00:16:01.700 | We see this a lot in inbox insecurity.

00:16:04.460 | This idea that if there's an email in that inbox from someone I work with that needs

00:16:08.700 | something, that's a problem.

00:16:11.080 | And so I got to empty out this inbox, I got to answer all these messages, and I have to

00:16:14.020 | keep checking even after the workday is over because it makes me really stressed that there's

00:16:17.820 | a message in there waiting for me.

00:16:20.340 | You see this a lot when you have interactions with people who are maybe new to knowledge

00:16:25.300 | work or aren't as inculcated in a world of knowledge work, and you will see this sort

00:16:31.040 | of desperate quick responses to your messages that are almost always apologetic, and it's

00:16:35.420 | because they're still conceptualizing this communication like they would an in-person

00:16:39.900 | interaction.

00:16:40.900 | "Oh my God, it's rude to ignore someone.

00:16:42.660 | Every minute I have not answered this message is a problem.

00:16:45.260 | That's a minute where that person is just sitting there seething.

00:16:47.900 | Where is my response?"

00:16:48.900 | So you see this inbox insecurity as a concrete instantiation of insecure overachievement.

00:16:56.540 | I actually have a—I come to a similar issue sometimes from a different direction.

00:17:02.260 | So I have this weird worry where I'll think, "Okay, I have these various things that I

00:17:07.700 | need to get done.

00:17:09.840 | What if I am sick tomorrow, or what if equivalently I don't sleep well?

00:17:15.900 | I'm going to have a hard time getting some of these things done.

00:17:19.200 | So if I can actually get this all done today, even if I have to push really hard and skip

00:17:23.300 | a meal, I will get some relief knowing that tomorrow I'm not dependent on feeling good.

00:17:29.100 | I'm not dependent at being at my full power."

00:17:32.040 | This of course is another Sisyphean mindset because there's always another day.

00:17:36.180 | There's always more work to be done.

00:17:38.180 | Days are short.

00:17:39.180 | Days are long.

00:17:40.180 | It's much better to say, "Let's just take each day as it comes and does a reasonable

00:17:42.260 | amount of work, and there'll be good days and bad days, but overall things will get

00:17:45.220 | built up."

00:17:46.220 | But it's very easy for me to think at the moment, "If I could make tomorrow easier

00:17:50.180 | by working harder today, I'm going to get some relief."

00:17:52.820 | And of course I get to tomorrow and then say, "Well, if I could make today harder to make

00:17:58.100 | the next day easier, then I'm going to get some relief."

00:18:00.700 | And the reason why you never catch up of course is that there's always more work you can pull

00:18:04.620 | in.

00:18:05.620 | There's always someone else with a message you could get back to.

00:18:08.220 | There's always another project you could initiate.

00:18:10.020 | So I think these subtle psychologies of overwork are all very interesting.

00:18:16.220 | There is now that we're stepping back, okay, so we're stepping back from Oliver's article.

00:18:19.740 | There is an overlay I want to add onto this that he doesn't talk about, but we talk about

00:18:23.260 | a lot on this show, and I think it is really critical, and that is the overlay of workload

00:18:27.700 | management.

00:18:30.140 | So a lot of what happens when you add, let's say, a four-hour workday, right?

00:18:34.660 | So you're adding an artificial limit.

00:18:36.820 | The reason why that works, like the reason why you don't, in Oliver's case, end up spiraling

00:18:41.380 | out of control, the reason why you don't end up with people constantly irate at you and

00:18:46.860 | on the phone is because all work limits, be it the eight-hour workday, a ten-hour workday,

00:18:53.300 | a four-hour workday, they're all artificial.

00:18:57.100 | They're all just lines in the sand of, "This is how much time I have to work, and I stop

00:19:01.820 | working after this time is over."

00:19:04.500 | In almost every non-entry-level knowledge work job, there is way more available tasks

00:19:09.480 | than you'll ever have time to do, so you're always at some point drawing a line and saying,

00:19:13.780 | "No more after this."

00:19:16.900 | This is why Oliver finds that his whole thing doesn't fall apart, because we're already

00:19:21.020 | implicitly doing this all the time when we stop working at six, or when we stop working

00:19:24.580 | at seven, or when we decide, for example, that we're not going to work until 4 a.m.

00:19:29.220 | every morning.

00:19:30.220 | And all of this is possible.

00:19:31.220 | Now, by the way, I do have a friend who does this, who will work to 3 or 4 a.m. most days.

00:19:37.700 | You might say, "Well, wait, if I'm working until 7 p.m., there's no more time to work.

00:19:42.020 | That's filling my whole time."

00:19:43.020 | No, you could be working many hours after that.

00:19:45.100 | It's all kind of artificial where we draw these lines.

00:19:49.600 | What happens is when we draw these lines is that becomes our implicit workload management

00:19:53.780 | system.

00:19:54.860 | This is how much time I have.

00:19:56.900 | If I have way more work than I can actually stay on top of in this much time, that's back

00:20:01.560 | pressure.

00:20:02.560 | And that back pressure says, "I'm going to say no to more things.

00:20:04.660 | I'm going to take some more things off of my plate.

00:20:06.540 | I'm going to spread out how long I spend to work on things."

00:20:09.660 | So the back pressure of your artificial work limits really determines what your workload

00:20:13.660 | is like.

00:20:14.660 | If you switch down to four hours, and you're able to get away with that, let's say you're

00:20:19.460 | highly autonomous, you're not going to break the norms of your company, what's going to

00:20:23.220 | happen is that back pressure will just adjust your workload.

00:20:26.060 | If Oliver's stuck with four hours of work a day, give it six months, and you will see

00:20:33.420 | these implicit but notable shifts in what's on his plate because you adjust.

00:20:39.740 | I'm not able to keep up with this many things, and I'm working this many hours.

00:20:43.860 | So I said no to this.

00:20:44.860 | I took this off my plate.

00:20:45.860 | I'm spending twice as long for this.

00:20:47.140 | You would adjust to that new workload.

00:20:49.940 | And the thing is what he's noticing, and I think this is true, is even a relatively drastic

00:20:54.540 | shift in your workload, so down from what you can fit in eight hours to four hours,

00:20:59.060 | in the end will likely not seem to have a major difference on your impact as a professional,

00:21:05.900 | the quality work that you produce that actually moves the needle because often when we're

00:21:10.400 | pruning back this workload, we're pruning stuff that's less important, and we're working

00:21:14.940 | more efficiently and more quality deeply on the stuff that does matter.

00:21:19.540 | So we do have a lot to give.

00:21:22.020 | So why don't we see more experimentations like this?

00:21:24.660 | It's typically norms.

00:21:27.260 | And that's what it really comes down to, and that's probably the piece that's missing from

00:21:31.020 | Oliver's essay the most is it is very difficult in most knowledge work situations to be saying

00:21:38.980 | no or turning things down when you could be saying yes.

00:21:43.620 | You're not doing things in the afternoon because you don't work in the afternoon.

00:21:45.960 | It's a time people normally work.

00:21:47.780 | It's an amount of work people normally take on.

00:21:50.300 | It is very hard to walk back from that.

00:21:54.780 | So norms will drive us towards your workload, level of busyness, the schedule you use should

00:22:02.180 | fit something we're more or less used to.

00:22:03.940 | So we end up with a particular artificial limit around eight or nine hours, which is

00:22:07.420 | okay but kind of stressful depending on the work, even though it could be much less, just

00:22:11.100 | like it could be much more.

00:22:12.300 | Now, of course, my answer to all of this, and it's hard, but my answer to all of this

00:22:17.460 | is we should just move workload management away from the implicit.

00:22:21.620 | We should move it away from just the outcome of back pressure on your time limits, and

00:22:25.980 | then that just leads you naturally to say no to more things.

00:22:29.020 | I think we should just be much more explicit with workload.

00:22:31.900 | How much should you be working on?

00:22:33.600 | What are you working on?

00:22:34.780 | When does that do?

00:22:35.820 | This is a reasonable load.

00:22:36.980 | You're not going to put something else on it.

00:22:38.700 | And we can tune that up and down, and that should be something negotiable.

00:22:41.740 | That should be something you could say, here's the salary ranges for this job, depending

00:22:46.940 | on which workload you're comfortable with.

00:22:49.060 | And I can come in and say, great, you know what, I have some young kids at home.

00:22:52.260 | I'm going to do this for our workload, and we actually manage it that way.

00:22:56.880 | And it's somewhat less money, but it's worth it.

00:23:00.120 | And then I can tune it up later in life.

00:23:01.660 | I think workload management should be explicit.

00:23:04.240 | But outside of a few small knowledge work fields like software development, we do not

00:23:08.580 | do this.

00:23:09.580 | And I think that's ultimately my takeaway message is this whole piece gets to the way

00:23:15.720 | that we implicitly deal with our workload right now, which is just, I don't know, I'm

00:23:19.580 | out of time.

00:23:20.580 | I feel like I can't fit any more.

00:23:22.020 | So this back pressure will lead me to change my habits.

00:23:25.460 | It should not be so implicit.

00:23:27.760 | It should not be so emergent.

00:23:29.100 | We should have a better way of keeping track of what are you doing and how much you want

00:23:33.820 | to do.

00:23:34.940 | And use that to not only prevent overload, but to allow us to fine-tune this in ways

00:23:38.800 | that it has a more diversity of loads and is a lot more sustainable.

00:23:42.220 | It's not the sexiest of topics, workload management, but I do think it's actually at the core of

00:23:48.700 | a lot of what a lot of people care about inside knowledge work.

00:23:53.360 | It's at the core of a lot of the sources of unhappiness that I think people have in their

00:23:59.760 | jobs these days.

00:24:01.520 | So there we go.

00:24:03.160 | Oliver, thank you for that enlightening article.

00:24:06.320 | I'm jealous.

00:24:07.320 | I'm thinking about I would like to do something similar.

00:24:09.320 | And I think you let us hit on some really interesting points.

00:24:15.440 | You kind of work similar hours anyway, right?

00:24:19.600 | I mean, it's hard for me to say because I— I guess if you don't include your teaching

00:24:23.480 | stuff.

00:24:24.480 | Yeah, because I have multiple jobs.

00:24:28.960 | If I focused on any one job, if I was just a writer or if I was just a professor, I'm

00:24:34.560 | probably already doing something like that.

00:24:37.160 | It's a reduced workday compared to what my peers are doing.

00:24:42.880 | And it helps me manage my workload and it improves the quality of what I work on.

00:24:47.240 | And actually, I think most people don't notice.

00:24:48.960 | So I think you're right.

00:24:49.960 | If you pull out my individual jobs, you see I'm doing something like Oliver is doing.

00:24:54.400 | And I do fine.

00:24:55.400 | No one really notices.

00:24:57.640 | It does work out okay.

00:24:59.680 | All right, so I pulled some questions that all I would say roughly have to do with work,

00:25:08.440 | the amount you work, the trade-off between work and going off to have fun.

00:25:12.720 | So sort of all within the same Berkman style, how do I control my work and my workload and

00:25:19.280 | its relationship to other parts of my life?

00:25:23.320 | Before we get to that though, I want to briefly mention one of the sponsors that makes this

00:25:26.840 | show possible and that is our friends at Shopify.

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00:26:24.800 | Jesse I've long said this, if and when we open up our deep questions with Cal Newport

00:26:30.120 | shop for sure Shopify is how we would do that e-commerce experience.

00:26:34.640 | I mean I know so many people who are running their merch that goes along their online media

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00:26:45.920 | It takes all of the different credit cards and payment sources.

00:26:49.280 | It helps you with all of that.

00:26:51.320 | So we have our e-commerce partner, Jesse.

00:26:53.240 | We just need to figure out what our merch is going to be.

00:26:56.800 | I think that's the hard part.

00:26:58.280 | It all, Shopify also does a good job of pre-populating your existing information like your name and

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00:27:12.920 | So if you've shopped at any Shopify site when you come to the deep question store we're

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00:29:37.300 | We probably could have just brought these, Jesse.

00:29:41.660 | I probably should have just brought our sheets up here.

00:29:43.820 | I didn't think that through.

00:29:44.820 | I was actually thinking that while you were talking about it.

00:29:49.340 | Yeah, I know.

00:29:50.340 | You got a lot of things to bring.

00:29:52.060 | Camera equipment, you know.

00:29:54.060 | Exactly.

00:29:55.060 | Yeah, I got all these lights.

00:29:57.260 | Kids, that's another thing I had to bring which took up a lot of space it turns out.

00:30:01.380 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:30:02.700 | Who do we got first?

00:30:04.380 | All right, first question, Natasha from New York.

00:30:08.020 | I was hoping you can spend more time elaborating on what the celebration bucket may include.

00:30:13.220 | One of the most recent episodes you mentioned hobbies but do you also include actual celebrations

00:30:18.140 | like birthdays or graduations or even vacations?

00:30:21.740 | Yeah, celebration is maybe not the most descriptive term but let's just step back and set the

00:30:26.960 | stage.

00:30:27.960 | So our old way of conceiving of cultivating the deep life just focused on these buckets.

00:30:35.060 | Identify the different areas of your life that matter and overhaul them one by one supported

00:30:38.960 | by habits.

00:30:40.620 | One of those buckets we would often give was celebration.

00:30:43.880 | That was one of the example buckets.

00:30:46.020 | Now if we want to put this into the context of our deep life stack, the new way we think

00:30:50.420 | about cultivating the deep life, these buckets or areas of your life are relevant in the

00:30:54.900 | final layer of the stack.

00:30:57.460 | That's the vision layer, the layer in which you plan for the remarkable and it's where

00:31:01.020 | you take different areas of your life and try to overhaul them in a remarkable direction.

00:31:04.700 | So that's how this maps onto our new way of thinking about the deep life.

00:31:09.740 | Celebration, that term was being used because it started with a C. And I was trying early

00:31:15.280 | on to try to make all of our sample buckets I gave, sample areas of your life to alliterate

00:31:20.820 | and I'll start with Cs.

00:31:22.200 | But this I think is a good point that Natasha makes.

00:31:24.680 | When you hear celebration, you think about literal celebrations, birthdays, graduations,

00:31:30.080 | or vacations.

00:31:31.240 | What I actually meant when I talked about the celebration area of your life was more

00:31:35.680 | celebrating the nice aspects of life.

00:31:40.920 | So other terms here that might be appropriate would be gratitude or enjoyment or appreciation.

00:31:47.000 | And if we want to be a little bit more specific here, we think about this area of your life

00:31:51.740 | in which you were doing things for non-instrumental reasons.

00:31:57.000 | So activities or experiences that don't have some other goal, like this is going to help

00:32:02.400 | grow my business, it's going to help me make more money, this is going to put me in better

00:32:07.920 | health or fitness.

00:32:09.280 | But things you do for no other reason than just the pure enjoyment or appreciation of

00:32:15.400 | the experience.

00:32:16.640 | So types of activities that this area of your life might entail include high-quality leisure.

00:32:24.060 | So you really get into the craft of building something or writing or painting where it's

00:32:29.780 | woodworking.

00:32:30.780 | It's just the appreciation of the craft.

00:32:32.580 | You're not selling it.

00:32:33.580 | You're not trying to use this as a way to get over here.

00:32:36.280 | You just appreciate the craft of something and you can be lost in that.

00:32:40.900 | Adventures fall into this.

00:32:43.020 | You know, we're going to go hike one of the high peaks of the White Mountains just for

00:32:49.220 | the experience of being above the tree line and what it's like and it's dramatic up there

00:32:54.500 | and it's meditative and just there's gratitude for life and the world when you're up there.

00:33:00.660 | That's a classic celebration bucket type activity.

00:33:03.980 | Other well-engineered experiences, even if they're not adventures, count in here.

00:33:07.940 | I mean, for the gourmand to go to a restaurant where they just really appreciate the food

00:33:12.260 | or for the cinephile to go to see the movie of a director and just to really appreciate

00:33:17.660 | the cinematic experience.

00:33:19.100 | So this brings us to connoisseurship more generally.

00:33:22.820 | That really falls into this area of life as well.

00:33:26.220 | Developing over time a real expertise in something just so you can enjoy the quality of something.

00:33:31.340 | You can appreciate what makes this good versus bad.

00:33:34.360 | Why is that car such a cool classic car?

00:33:37.740 | Why is that book such a well-written novel?

00:33:40.020 | All of that falls into this area of your life.

00:33:43.700 | So when you get to that plan level, the vision level layer of the deep life stack and you're

00:33:48.780 | looking for areas of your life to overhaul, I think this is a fun one.

00:33:53.940 | It's how can I inject into my life in some really intentional ways much more of this

00:33:58.780 | really just sort of appreciating non-instrumental quality experiences.

00:34:02.260 | And I think this is a good one for almost every phase of life.

00:34:06.660 | When you're in that hard charging phase of life in your 20s, your professional ambitions

00:34:10.800 | might start to drown that out and that could be an issue.

00:34:13.860 | So I need to make sure I have this in my life in an intentional way.

00:34:18.780 | Having kids can kind of push this out of your life at first and you really want to try to

00:34:21.860 | claw it back into your life as soon as you can.

00:34:25.420 | There's sort of the upper middle age malaise as your kids are getting older and you're

00:34:29.140 | sort of ossifying in your career.

00:34:31.100 | How do I inject something new, something new I'm learning how to do?

00:34:35.900 | Something new I'm mastering, the adventures I'm going on.

00:34:39.700 | I'm thinking a lot about this now.

00:34:41.260 | I'm trying to think about how to get more of this in my life as I leave that, okay,

00:34:44.740 | I have a bunch of young kids all hands on deck stage to have a little bit more breathing

00:34:49.780 | room being able to do things with them, just moving on in my career where it's more stable.

00:34:54.820 | This is definitely an area when I get that layer of my stack each year that I'm starting

00:34:59.520 | to think about more.

00:35:01.380 | So I think celebration is probably not the right term anymore.

00:35:05.880 | Let's now say when you get to the deep layer stack, the one area of your life that you

00:35:09.020 | might think about is we could call it quality or enjoyment.

00:35:13.220 | Maybe that terminology is going to work better.

00:35:14.780 | I'll tell you, Jesse, people up here understand that.

00:35:19.300 | By up here I mean New Hampshire.

00:35:20.300 | I think especially because two things, the winters are hard and the summers are beautiful.

00:35:26.340 | I think there's this sense of in a way that you can't get away with, you could get away

00:35:30.500 | with this in DC or New York where you could just be, yeah, I'm just, my job and I just

00:35:35.220 | work and we kind of work late and because we go to like a cool restaurant or whatever.

00:35:38.980 | Around here, I think people are much more intentional about these non-instrumental things

00:35:46.100 | in their life.

00:35:47.100 | It's like the winter is coming.

00:35:49.380 | Someone told me at dinner the other night, if you're not skating or skiing, you're going

00:35:53.260 | to be in trouble.

00:35:54.260 | Like you need to lean into the winter.

00:35:56.080 | When the summer comes, you better have things that have nothing to do with your work that

00:36:00.140 | you're taking advantage of the weather.

00:36:02.180 | And I think in the cities you can get away without this.

00:36:04.580 | It's whatever.

00:36:05.580 | I don't have a hobby.

00:36:07.780 | I work a lot and because we go to cool restaurants and bars, there's like stuff going on, you

00:36:11.660 | can be distracted and you don't need the systematic intentional development of areas of your life

00:36:16.860 | that are non-instrumental and high quality.

00:36:18.500 | But up here, I think there's less to go do.

00:36:21.500 | There's not 50 interesting bars and restaurants you can move between.

00:36:25.260 | There's not restored historic movie theaters where you can just go see the latest thing.

00:36:30.840 | There's not museums and all these readings going on.

00:36:33.500 | So you have to get careful.

00:36:35.820 | What am I doing with my time outside of work to really lean into it?

00:36:40.860 | I do appreciate that.

00:36:41.860 | >> That's a good point.

00:36:42.860 | Yeah.

00:36:43.860 | >> You're good at that, Jesse.

00:36:45.500 | I think you have a good, you typically have a pretty fair collection of things.

00:36:49.160 | You think through pretty intentionally of outside of work.

00:36:52.540 | >> Yeah.

00:36:53.540 | >> Golf, tennis.

00:36:54.540 | >> Big difference between, yeah.

00:36:58.220 | And then I don't have kids yet.

00:37:00.020 | So I have a little more time on that end.

00:37:02.700 | But yeah, in terms of even sports like tennis and golf that you have to play if you want

00:37:10.940 | to get any better.

00:37:12.180 | And then you have to fit that in.

00:37:13.180 | >> Right.

00:37:15.080 | But then it's probably for the better that you do, right?

00:37:16.920 | Because it's a nice counterpoint to other things.

00:37:19.620 | Because you have to be outside.

00:37:20.620 | >> Yeah.

00:37:21.620 | I mean, it keeps you.

00:37:22.620 | >> You have to be outside.

00:37:23.620 | You're moving.

00:37:24.620 | It's social.

00:37:25.620 | >> Yep.

00:37:26.620 | And it's like you're thinking the entire time.

00:37:27.620 | So it's like a, you know, it's a test of like your mental ability to focus for a while.

00:37:36.260 | Especially if you're playing in matches and stuff.

00:37:38.380 | >> Yep.

00:37:39.380 | Yep.

00:37:40.380 | >> At any level.

00:37:41.380 | At any level of like either sport.

00:37:42.940 | >> Yep.

00:37:43.940 | I got to just be focusing on this.

00:37:45.460 | I can't let my attention wander.

00:37:47.100 | Yeah.

00:37:48.100 | So there you go.

00:37:49.100 | >> Yeah.

00:37:50.100 | Because it's really easy to do in like either sport.

00:37:51.100 | Like you could all of a sudden like look ahead to the next point or something like that.

00:37:55.940 | I remember Michael Jordan said like never look ahead.

00:37:58.620 | Just like play like now.

00:38:00.180 | >> Yeah.

00:38:01.180 | Make this fast.

00:38:02.180 | >> Which is hard to do.

00:38:03.180 | Yeah.

00:38:04.180 | >> Yeah.

00:38:05.180 | All right.

00:38:06.180 | So good.

00:38:07.180 | There we go.

00:38:08.180 | All right.

00:38:09.180 | Let's move on.

00:38:10.180 | What do we got next?

00:38:11.180 | >> All right.

00:38:12.180 | Next question.

00:38:13.180 | JT from Texas.

00:38:14.180 | Cal often talks about individuals who make big changes in their lives in pursuit of depth.

00:38:17.620 | What's a useful way to think about when a big change is appropriate versus attempting

00:38:21.700 | smaller optimizations around the edges?

00:38:24.660 | >> Yeah.

00:38:25.660 | I thought this was relevant to that same top layer of the deep life stack we were just

00:38:30.180 | talking about.

00:38:32.140 | You plan for the remarkables.

00:38:33.740 | You take areas of your life and overhaul them when possible trying to push them to be more

00:38:38.900 | remarkable.

00:38:39.900 | This is where you would make major changes often.

00:38:42.340 | I'm going to completely change my work.

00:38:43.980 | I'm going to move.

00:38:45.100 | I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail.

00:38:47.980 | This is when you're aiming towards the remarkable is when big changes actually come through.

00:38:52.860 | So I think it's a really good discussion to have.

00:38:54.740 | When is it appropriate to make a big change versus smaller changes, optimize around the

00:39:01.420 | edges, just changing parts of your life?

00:39:03.540 | So I thought we'd start by saying what's the wrong reason to do something dramatic?

00:39:08.180 | I would say the wrong reason to do something dramatic is because you think just the drama

00:39:13.020 | or boldness of the move itself is going to be invigorating.

00:39:17.420 | I think this is pretty common.

00:39:18.420 | I mean, I see this a lot where people get interested in the change itself.

00:39:24.500 | I'm going to feel like I'm shaking up my life.

00:39:28.300 | I'm going to feel excited.

00:39:30.460 | I'm going to feel a sense of possibility when I move to the woods.

00:39:35.100 | But you're making the move not because of concretely where it's going to lead or what

00:39:38.780 | it's going to change, but just because you like the idea of making a move itself.

00:39:42.660 | And often when people do this, they will take off the table other factors that really matter

00:39:47.700 | in their life.

00:39:48.700 | What's the side effects of this going to be?

00:39:49.860 | They say, I don't care.

00:39:50.860 | What's important is I just need to do something big.

00:39:54.060 | It's the change itself that's going to break me loose from my ossification.

00:39:57.620 | Now that's the wrong reason to do it because the energy and excitement of a big move wears

00:40:03.220 | off once the move is done.

00:40:05.380 | You change, you quit your job, you move to the woods, you begin hiking on the Appalachian

00:40:10.060 | Trail.

00:40:11.060 | And if you're just doing it for the sake of doing, okay, fast forward two weeks, that

00:40:13.900 | excitement is gone.

00:40:14.900 | You're now in a new reality.

00:40:16.400 | Is that new reality, the new lifestyle configuration this has generated, is it much better?

00:40:20.860 | And if it's not demonstrably better, you've made no progress, you may have burned bridges,

00:40:24.860 | you may have made other aspects of your life worse.

00:40:27.340 | So I think the right reason to make a major change is when it is part of a considered

00:40:32.340 | plan that moves you closer to your vision of an ideal lifestyle.

00:40:37.660 | And when I say considered, I mean there's two things going on here.

00:40:41.740 | One, it is pushing you towards something you do care about.

00:40:44.300 | So it's taking something you do really care about and making that remarkable.

00:40:47.400 | So it's not just a change itself, it's the change is actually signaling to yourself that

00:40:51.820 | something that's core to you is something you take seriously.

00:40:55.040 | So you're making the move to this new location so that you can be closer to your family.

00:41:00.940 | Now you're doing that to perhaps signal to yourself that family and family connections

00:41:04.940 | are important.

00:41:06.000 | So you want A, to have an actual value that's being amplified by this big change.

00:41:11.340 | And two, you've thought through its side effects.

00:41:14.980 | You've thought through holistically when I change this part of my life, what's going

00:41:19.060 | to happen to other parts of my life?

00:41:20.660 | And am I net-net going to be much closer to my ideal lifestyle or is it a wash or is it

00:41:24.620 | perhaps even worse off?

00:41:27.060 | Again, I mentioned this before, but it's worth reemphasizing.

00:41:30.620 | There is a blinders effect that I see often when talking to people where they get so in

00:41:35.240 | love with the idea of changing something that they will purposefully obfuscate the negative

00:41:41.240 | side effects.

00:41:42.620 | I don't want to think about that.

00:41:44.140 | That might talk me out of it.

00:41:45.260 | I just love the romance of we're moving to Spain.

00:41:48.540 | I love the romance of I'm quitting my job to row across the ocean or whatever it is.

00:41:52.580 | You're now thinking through, well, what about the other parts of my life?

00:41:55.500 | And what about family?

00:41:56.660 | What about my kids?

00:41:57.740 | What about financial stability?

00:41:59.860 | What about what I get by living in a city?

00:42:03.300 | All these other aspects of your life you put blinders on is problems.

00:42:06.620 | A big change really should be something where you've thought through all the different side

00:42:10.220 | effects for all the different areas of your life and you like where all of it ends up.

00:42:15.700 | So let me give you two case studies.

00:42:18.060 | I'll give you two case studies, one where a big change is a good idea and one where

00:42:22.940 | just blindly making a change would be a bad idea.

00:42:27.300 | So an example that's a good idea, this is a story I elaborate in my slow productivity

00:42:31.580 | book that's coming out in March.

00:42:34.780 | I told more of the story of Paul Jarvis, who we've talked about before on this show.

00:42:41.620 | I know Paul because he wrote a book once called Company of One that argued for not growing

00:42:47.300 | your business, but instead keeping your business as you get better at it, keeping it purposefully

00:42:52.500 | small and leveraging your increasing value as you get better at what you do to actually

00:42:58.460 | work less.

00:42:59.460 | Oh, I can make the same amount of money in less time now.

00:43:02.900 | So to actually use skill to buy flexibility, not to generate more money.

00:43:06.580 | It was a really cool book, but I learned more about his story.

00:43:09.500 | And I'll give you the bare bones version of this, but essentially he was a web developer

00:43:13.500 | living in Vancouver.

00:43:14.500 | Vancouver is a big city.

00:43:16.380 | He was living in a high rise.

00:43:18.460 | He described it as a glass cage.

00:43:21.400 | So just up in this high rise, this expensive real estate, working really hard to try to

00:43:27.340 | pay the rent.

00:43:28.340 | And him and his wife decided at some point, "Well, we don't like this.

00:43:33.180 | We don't like living in the city.

00:43:35.440 | We like nature.

00:43:36.440 | She likes surfing in particular."

00:43:39.460 | So you know, good thing she lives in Canada.

00:43:42.140 | And they didn't mind the web development stuff, but they had no real interest and you don't

00:43:46.060 | want to be an entrepreneur with a big company.

00:43:47.860 | You don't want to make a lot of money.

00:43:49.580 | And so they moved to Vancouver Island, which is very rural outside of Vancouver in the

00:43:55.020 | water there.

00:43:56.020 | They moved to the west side of Vancouver Island to a property in the woods near a small town.

00:44:01.820 | I think it's called Tolfino, where there's actually a surf break.

00:44:04.340 | It's like the best Canadian surf break is on this small town on the western coast of

00:44:09.620 | Vancouver Island.

00:44:11.300 | They lived real cheaply.

00:44:12.900 | They built greenhouses and gardened in their property they had here.

00:44:16.460 | This was not a fancy property.

00:44:17.980 | It was sort of isolated.

00:44:20.140 | And he said, they worked it out and he said, "I could do client work remotely."

00:44:25.860 | And that's what he did.

00:44:26.860 | As he got better, he charged more and had less clients.

00:44:28.660 | And then he eventually added in some products he would build because he wouldn't have to

00:44:31.780 | talk to clients at all to see how they would go.

00:44:33.980 | And they just lived cheaply.

00:44:35.300 | That was a change moving to the woods that made sense.

00:44:39.300 | And all the aspects of their life they cared about, their ideal lifestyle, this image of

00:44:43.580 | this is, we want to be near a small town and surfing every day and working on our gardens

00:44:48.620 | and only working just enough to make ends meet.

00:44:50.660 | And my skills are lucrative enough that we could do that.

00:44:54.180 | It was a move that made sense.

00:44:56.060 | That big change made sense because all of the other aspects of their life were thought

00:44:59.780 | through and it helped them.

00:45:01.660 | And it really leaned into the central value of he didn't care that much about work outside

00:45:06.500 | of just doing enough to get by.

00:45:08.260 | Let me give you another example where a massive change would probably not make sense.

00:45:14.820 | Use myself.

00:45:16.860 | What if I just said, like right now, you know what?

00:45:19.980 | I'm tired of, I have too much on my plate, which is true.

00:45:24.100 | I have too much on my plate, so enough of this.

00:45:25.860 | I'm just going to quit academia and move to Vermont and just write full time.

00:45:30.300 | Now, again, it's one of these things that on paper you say something like that, you're

00:45:35.020 | like, ooh, yeah, that's exciting.

00:45:37.260 | You could see someone like me getting swept away in the excitement of just, we're moving

00:45:40.900 | to Vermont and everything's off my plate and I'm just going to, whatever, just write books.

00:45:45.140 | And it feels like a solution to your problems in the moment and the drama is very romantic.

00:45:49.820 | But let's think that through.

00:45:51.300 | In my case, we say, okay, how would a change like that, what's the impacts going to be

00:45:55.700 | on other parts of my life?

00:45:57.420 | What's the impacts going to be on my vision for myself and my work?

00:45:59.860 | And suddenly all these issues try to come up.

00:46:02.100 | I mean, first of all, I enjoy academia.

00:46:04.460 | I enjoy old universities.

00:46:06.740 | I like the fact that Georgetown where I am is an 18th century university.

00:46:12.860 | Dartmouth where I am right now is an 18th century university.

00:46:15.860 | These are places that George Washington visited, old buildings.

00:46:19.100 | I love that history.

00:46:20.100 | I love professors and being around the classrooms.

00:46:23.180 | I really like that.

00:46:24.740 | What about my kids, for example, the school they go to that we're really closely connected

00:46:30.860 | to, all the friends we have around there.

00:46:32.780 | What about financial stability?

00:46:35.100 | Writing can be hit or miss.

00:46:37.900 | You can have drought periods and it's not nearly as stable as, okay, I also have a paycheck

00:46:44.260 | with health insurance and benefits.

00:46:47.180 | What about separation from family?

00:46:49.380 | We live in a place that's close to our family.

00:46:51.740 | What about the reality of full-time living in Vermont?

00:46:54.860 | I mean, it's great in July, but call me in February.

00:46:58.420 | It's a different type of picture, right?

00:47:00.100 | So if you step back from the romance of let's make a big change, this situation we say,

00:47:05.860 | I don't know.

00:47:06.860 | I don't have an ideal lifestyle vision in which just living somewhere completely new

00:47:11.980 | and cut off from this type of work I've done my entire adult life, a lot of that would

00:47:15.980 | start to suffer.

00:47:17.660 | And so that would be a place where you say there are smaller optimizations to make that

00:47:21.620 | would get you closer to your ideal lifestyle.

00:47:23.580 | There's any number of flexible moves you can make within the umbrella of academia and within

00:47:28.380 | the realm of your own habits that could reduce the burden of I have too much to do.

00:47:33.680 | You could reduce what's on your plate.

00:47:35.540 | You could lean into sabbaticals and off semesters.

00:47:38.020 | You could, if you needed to, perhaps even change your situation somewhat within academia,

00:47:42.220 | this would be a case study where small intentional changes could help dampen down what was causing

00:47:48.140 | the problem while still making your overall lifestyle image largely be matching the things

00:47:54.620 | you care about.

00:47:55.620 | So anyways, these are off the top of my head, but I wanted to give two examples where in

00:47:58.620 | one a radical change led to an overall better life and another one, a radical change wasn't

00:48:03.260 | going to solve the problem and it causes many issues as benefits and there's probably smaller

00:48:07.320 | fixes to get you closer.

00:48:09.660 | So I don't know, that's maybe a little bit specific, but that's the type of mindset I

00:48:14.420 | have when I'm thinking through throw it all and move, throw it all, change your job, or

00:48:20.820 | I think working within the system is going to be better.

00:48:24.780 | All right.

00:48:28.740 | All of Vermont's realtors just cried.

00:48:30.220 | All right, let's keep rolling, Jesse.

00:48:32.020 | What do we got next?

00:48:33.020 | All right.

00:48:34.020 | The next question is from Deep Name.

00:48:37.300 | I read in your deep workbook and in your Tim Ferriss podcast that you rarely work past

00:48:42.500 | five or 6 p.m., but you didn't mention what time you start your workday.

00:48:47.260 | 2 a.m.

00:48:48.900 | No, not really.

00:48:52.140 | So in the normal school year, my workday, it can't begin until after I drop the kids

00:48:56.660 | off at the bus stop.

00:48:58.100 | So that's 8.30ish, I would say.

00:49:01.380 | So yeah, no, I rarely work past five or 6 p.m.

00:49:03.540 | I don't start early.

00:49:04.540 | I'm not an early riser.

00:49:05.540 | It doesn't make sense to work before we get all the kids fed and packed and out the door

00:49:11.820 | to the bus stop.

00:49:12.820 | So usually the earliest I'm working is probably thinking on my walk back from the bus stop

00:49:18.260 | after dropping them off.

00:49:19.540 | I might start thinking in my head about the first thing I'm going to work on so I can

00:49:24.340 | hit the ground running when I get back.

00:49:26.120 | So yeah, my day actually does stay pretty reasonably 9 to 5.

00:49:30.980 | All right.

00:49:32.540 | Picking up speed here.

00:49:33.540 | What do you got next, Jesse?

00:49:35.540 | All right.

00:49:36.860 | Next question, Buzz from Vancouver.

00:49:39.420 | I'm 35 and live in Vancouver and work as a communications manager.

00:49:44.220 | I live a very fun, lifestyle-centric life centered on outdoor sports.

00:49:48.940 | The problem is that I'm only managing to save small amounts of money every month, but every

00:49:53.580 | time I research the next pay grade in my profession, it entails more responsibility in the management

00:49:58.780 | of bigger teams.

00:50:00.860 | I'm not saving enough for retirement, but I don't want to disrupt my current lifestyle

00:50:05.100 | to do so.

00:50:06.740 | Well, there's two levers you can push here.

00:50:12.260 | So one lever is to spend less.

00:50:15.380 | You reduce the cost of your lifestyle, and therefore you're able to save more of the

00:50:19.260 | money that you are already making.

00:50:24.020 | Other related sub-paths in this general journey would also be to generate other sources of

00:50:31.100 | passive income.

00:50:32.400 | So this could be a situation where you rent out the house you currently have and buy a

00:50:38.500 | different cheaper house, and now you have that rental income.

00:50:41.660 | All of these type of things, you could probably find more specific examples in the FIRE community.

00:50:47.900 | Financial Independence Retire Early.

00:50:49.820 | They're all about reducing their expenses so that they can save much more of the money

00:50:55.420 | that they're actually making.

00:50:57.740 | Now what you would be talking about here in the FIRE community would probably be what

00:51:01.980 | they refer to as "fat FIRE" because your goal here is not necessarily, "I want to save a

00:51:09.020 | huge amount of money very quickly and retire in 10 years."

00:51:11.940 | Your goal here is just, "I want to make sure that I'm saving enough money for my job, not

00:51:16.060 | that I want to retire early, but that I can retire when the time comes."

00:51:21.420 | So fat FIRE is what they refer to as, "You do cut your expenses back so that you can

00:51:26.180 | save an unusual large percentage of your salary, but you're not trying to save 75% of your

00:51:31.260 | salary.

00:51:32.260 | You're still living a relatively full life.

00:51:35.140 | It's not this sort of Spartan, let's really batten down the hatches and not spend any

00:51:39.140 | money lifestyle."

00:51:40.380 | So that's probably where you would fall.

00:51:42.940 | You would check out Mr. Money Mustache, would be a good source.

00:51:45.840 | Maybe check out the Frugalwoods.

00:51:48.220 | That's another good source.

00:51:49.500 | I think right now the Frugalwoods, who actually don't live far from where I am right now,

00:51:53.780 | neither of them work full-time jobs anymore.

00:51:56.500 | They use their house from Cambridge, right outside of Boston.

00:52:03.060 | They kept that house and they rent it.

00:52:05.140 | And I think they're living largely off of that rental income and Liz's freelance writing

00:52:10.540 | income.

00:52:11.540 | So they're living very cheaply.

00:52:13.020 | So that direction you would check out FIRE.

00:52:15.820 | The other direction is to make more money.

00:52:17.980 | Now, of course, what you're saying here is, "Well, to make more money, if I just kept

00:52:22.140 | going on my current job path, the next level up is more work and more responsibility, and

00:52:26.580 | then I can't do this other stuff I love about being in Vancouver.

00:52:29.020 | I can't do all the outdoor sports."

00:52:31.020 | All right, so you have a couple options here.

00:52:33.940 | One, you can throw at this issue of gaining more money but not wanting to give up too

00:52:39.720 | much autonomy.

00:52:40.720 | Or you could throw much more advanced self-management, self-organization tactics.

00:52:45.780 | So you could throw at it pure Cal Newport, multi-scale planning, hyperactive hive mind

00:52:51.740 | busting processes.

00:52:52.740 | I mean, you could just come at it, "I know how to organize myself and my work.

00:52:56.940 | So even though you add more responsibilities, I can still keep control of my schedule in

00:53:00.740 | a way that I could still do the fun outdoor activities."

00:53:03.900 | Now, you might be surprised by what you can get away with.

00:53:06.340 | Most people are really bad at this.

00:53:08.200 | If you're not really bad at this, then you might gain a lot of autonomy over your work.

00:53:12.940 | The other way you could make more money without losing your autonomy is to say, "I have

00:53:16.620 | to be more creative than just simply what's the next promotion at my particular job."

00:53:23.140 | And there you need to start thinking about career capital theory, the type of thing I

00:53:26.380 | talk about in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:53:29.900 | Right now, there might not be another option for you, other than just taking the next rung

00:53:33.460 | up and having to manage teams.

00:53:35.020 | But is there a skill you could develop that is sufficiently rare and sufficiently valuable

00:53:40.440 | that it would give you enough leverage that you could shift your situation to be more

00:53:44.920 | money without having to give up a lot of autonomy?

00:53:48.880 | Is there a skill you could develop that would allow you to, let's say, trade more accountability

00:53:53.540 | for accessibility?

00:53:55.880 | Judge me on my work, and I am going to do this work at a high level because I'm really

00:54:01.120 | good at this now.

00:54:02.920 | But you're not going to expect accessibility.

00:54:05.000 | You're not going to expect I can reach you at any time.

00:54:08.200 | It's instead going to be, "We'll see what you do.

00:54:11.160 | Do good work.

00:54:12.160 | As long as you're producing good work, we don't care that you're not available at three

00:54:14.680 | on Thursday because you're out mountain biking."

00:54:17.560 | So career capital, that is building up rare and valuable skills, can give you leverage

00:54:21.040 | for a lot more creative ways forward.

00:54:23.540 | So we have two different directions here.

00:54:25.080 | You can spin less, and there we said, "Look at the fire community, especially the fat

00:54:28.000 | fire community."

00:54:29.000 | Or you could make more without unnecessarily giving up more of your autonomy.

00:54:34.200 | And there you're going to want to care about being better organized, about how you manage

00:54:39.340 | your obligations and attention, and also thinking about career capital theory, building up skills

00:54:42.920 | that you can then cash in for gaining more autonomy.

00:54:46.680 | The right answer is probably some sort of combination of the two.

00:54:49.680 | So probably what you're going to want to do is think through your finances more carefully,

00:54:55.400 | find some ways, and again, the fire community will be very helpful here to increase the

00:55:00.080 | amount of money you're saving to maybe generate some other source of passive income that can

00:55:04.800 | all go towards savings.

00:55:06.440 | And then mix that with some sense of, "How do I make more money without giving everything

00:55:10.360 | up?"

00:55:11.360 | And again, some notion of, "I'm more organized than most people," or, "I'm working now very

00:55:15.280 | intensely on skills so that three years from now I can change my situation into one that

00:55:20.760 | is going to allow me to have more options.

00:55:22.920 | I can make more money without having to completely give up my autonomy."

00:55:26.200 | I would look at both of those paths at the same time.

00:55:28.880 | If you're serious about both those paths, you will find some combination where I think

00:55:32.680 | you're going to feel financially pretty secure and still be able to do those other things

00:55:36.600 | you care about.

00:55:37.600 | And the main thing I appreciate here is that you are looking at the full lifestyle holistically,

00:55:43.160 | and you know for you right now at your stage of life, these outside sports, these adventure

00:55:47.880 | activities are a key part of what earlier in the show we used to call the celebration

00:55:53.120 | bucket and now we said we should rename to something else.

00:55:55.400 | That you know that's important and you're trying to build a lifestyle that includes that

00:55:58.360 | and includes work.

00:55:59.760 | This is what this more holistic lifestyle-centric planning looks like.

00:56:03.720 | You're trying to make changes where pushing this doesn't drop this, or we can improve

00:56:09.360 | this while not hurting this.

00:56:10.680 | And I think it's a great example of exactly those types of trade-offs.

00:56:13.400 | All right, so what I want to do instead of a final question is actually a case study.

00:56:19.200 | This is something a listener sent in and it felt very relevant to the type of issues we've

00:56:25.480 | been talking about on the show.

00:56:29.600 | So let me read this here.

00:56:32.080 | I'm obfuscating a little bit, obfuscating a few details here because I don't know how

00:56:38.160 | much anonymity is being expected.

00:56:39.520 | So I'll obfuscate a few details here.

00:56:41.840 | All right, so here's the message and I'll read this here.

00:56:45.660 | I am the "exhausted professor" from episode 197.

00:56:51.680 | A little more than a year has passed since Cal answered my question about how to plan

00:56:55.960 | my time during my sabbatical.

00:56:58.640 | Not only had it been a decade since my previous sabbatical, but I was also recovering from

00:57:02.740 | having been department chair for the previous five years, so I was at that time exhausted.

00:57:07.840 | Cal advised me to operate at the 30% level, recharge my batteries, work on things that

00:57:13.520 | are interesting to me, and make myself as scarce as I had been back when I was doing

00:57:17.500 | field work in Antarctica.

00:57:21.240 | Turns out that's exactly what I needed to do.

00:57:23.520 | And I'm so glad I had Cal's blessing to do it.

00:57:26.320 | I read a lot of interesting books, hung out with my friends and family, and spent lots

00:57:30.040 | of quality time with my dog during the final few months of her life.

00:57:34.080 | I also gave my career some serious thought, did a little lifestyle-centric career planning,

00:57:39.560 | and ultimately left my 10-year position at my state university for a different career

00:57:44.680 | at a top-10 school.

00:57:47.200 | While I was sad to leave my old colleagues and students, I needed a new adventure.

00:57:51.440 | I started my new job in May, and I totally love it.

00:57:54.320 | I have wonderful new colleagues and students, and my work is very fulfilling.

00:57:57.720 | I am ever so thankful to Cal for imploring me to recharge, not worry about being productive.

00:58:02.560 | Many thanks to you for choosing my question and for your great work on the show.

00:58:07.880 | So I thought this was a great case study for a couple reasons.

00:58:12.080 | I think one, this shows the slow productivity philosophy in action to just always be going

00:58:19.240 | full bore.

00:58:20.360 | I am busy, I am filling every hour of the day.

00:58:24.220 | Not only is it not sustainable, but it becomes an obstacle to actually evolving yourself

00:58:29.120 | and evolving your life by taking more time, having seasonality here.

00:58:34.680 | When we come off a busy period to go to a slow period, this listener was actually able

00:58:39.600 | to gain the insight needed to not only recharge, but make some interesting career decisions,

00:58:45.240 | to do a really thorough lifestyle-centric career planning analysis that led her to leave

00:58:49.880 | tenure to take another type of job in academia, which she's really liking.

00:58:56.160 | So I like this idea of slowing down sometimes.

00:59:00.500 | Not everything should be full bore.

00:59:03.120 | Figuring out what's going on, getting reconnected with the things that really matter, and seeing

00:59:05.960 | what decisions you might or might not make, what course corrections you need to do that

00:59:09.440 | really thoughtfully.

00:59:11.920 | Not to just lash out, not to just in year five of your department chairmanship to say,

00:59:16.880 | you know what, enough of this, I'm quitting and moving to Vermont.

00:59:19.320 | And say, okay, hold on a second, this is almost over, then I have a sabbatical, let's give

00:59:23.400 | this some space, let's slow things down and think more critically about what I want to

00:59:27.960 | do.

00:59:28.960 | And recognizing in general that life is long, days and seasons are short.

00:59:32.280 | In the long scheme of things, no one's going to notice that you didn't do a lot of work

00:59:35.640 | during your sabbatical, but for this particular person, it made a really big difference.

00:59:39.240 | So I thought that was a great ending case study for our discussion today of Berkman's

00:59:45.040 | idea of doing less on purpose and seeing what you discover.

00:59:49.560 | Because in this case, what she discovered was a lot about herself and what she cared

00:59:53.040 | about and made some big changes.

00:59:54.920 | That was a cool case study.

00:59:58.480 | All right, so I want to jump on to a final segment here where I react to something that's

01:00:03.360 | either happening on the internet or someone sent to me.

01:00:06.440 | But before I do, I also want to take the opportunity to talk about another one of sponsors that

01:00:12.680 | makes this show possible.

01:00:14.800 | And that is our longtime friends at Grammarly.

01:00:20.680 | And in particular, I want to talk about their new product, Grammarly Go.

01:00:27.080 | So Grammarly Go harnesses the power of generative AI to help you produce better writing.

01:00:37.360 | Now there's two elements here that go back to what I talk about a lot.

01:00:40.760 | First of all, writing I've talked about a lot, being able to communicate clearly and

01:00:44.840 | effectively is critical to success in our current world.

01:00:49.080 | And then when I've talked about AI, I've often said this is where we're going to see the

01:00:52.400 | difference, especially with generative AI is in these narrow application to specific

01:00:57.920 | parts of our life that are linguistic, where it can help.

01:01:01.440 | And so Grammarly Go, this new product offered by Grammarly is the collision of these two

01:01:06.320 | ideas that I have talked about a lot.

01:01:09.760 | So what can you do with Grammarly Go?

01:01:11.760 | Well, let me give you some examples here.

01:01:14.260 | So one thing you could do, for example, is their reply feature, the Grammarly Go reply

01:01:18.360 | feature, which will summarize when you're working with your inbox, when you're working

01:01:24.980 | with email, it will summarize the email and give you suggestions on how to reply so you

01:01:30.960 | can get through your inbox quicker.

01:01:32.400 | So you sort of get a first draft of what you are going to reply.

01:01:36.480 | It can also help you with ideas.

01:01:40.040 | Give me ideas for decorating a taco truck.

01:01:42.280 | That's something you can ask Grammarly Go.

01:01:43.960 | It'll give you some ideas.

01:01:44.960 | You can use that to help write the thing you need to write.

01:01:46.880 | Give me 10 possible taglines for this video thumbnail.

01:01:49.440 | It will give you ideas, starting point for your creative process.

01:01:53.200 | Let me go with this one and let me polish it.

01:01:55.720 | It will also help you rewrite for different tones or styles.

01:02:00.920 | So you could write out something pretty quick and then say, "Okay, the Grammarly Go, make

01:02:04.200 | this sound more professional."

01:02:05.440 | It will rewrite it in a more professional tone.

01:02:08.000 | Make this sound more exciting.

01:02:09.400 | It will rewrite it in a more exciting tone.

01:02:12.600 | The large language models behind generative AI are very good at working with styles.

01:02:17.960 | So this is just examples of the type of things you can do with Grammarly Go.

01:02:22.640 | So anyways, I think this is a very interesting tool.

01:02:26.800 | You're already doing a lot of writing in your job and you want this writing to be as good

01:02:29.480 | as possible and you want to be efficient in all this writing.

01:02:32.800 | This is like having an assistant looking over your shoulder that has one goal, to make you

01:02:37.700 | more effective at communicating.

01:02:40.680 | You'll be amazed at what you can do with Grammarly Go.

01:02:42.920 | Just go to grammarly.com/go to download and learn more about Grammarly Go.

01:02:49.400 | That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/go.

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01:04:48.440 | All right, let's go to our final segment now where we talk about something that I've encountered

01:04:57.580 | in my week that I thought was worth discussing.

01:05:00.600 | I'll say today's thing I want to react to is connected to a deeper dilemma I have.

01:05:10.440 | And so maybe I'll solicit, Jesse, the comment of our audience here to help me answer this

01:05:15.880 | dilemma.

01:05:16.880 | The thing I'm going to show today, I would say, 12 different readers sent to me.

01:05:22.240 | It's about the director Christopher Nolan's technology habits.

01:05:25.920 | I thought I would feature this today because his new movie Oppenheimer is out now in theaters.

01:05:32.200 | I'm a big Chris Nolan fan.

01:05:35.080 | I think Dunkirk is a masterpiece.

01:05:37.640 | I'm very excited about what he did here.

01:05:40.280 | But before we get to this quick news hit about Chris Nolan's technology habits, here's my

01:05:45.080 | dilemma.

01:05:47.040 | Do I see Oppenheimer up here?

01:05:49.320 | Yeah, Jesse knows.

01:05:51.880 | Do I see it up here in New Hampshire?

01:05:54.200 | Or do I risk waiting until later in August when I'm back in DC and I can actually see

01:05:59.760 | a large format projection?

01:06:01.560 | What's the risk?

01:06:04.720 | What if it's no longer in theaters when I get back?

01:06:06.680 | It will be in theaters.

01:06:09.000 | You think so?

01:06:10.000 | Yeah.

01:06:11.000 | That's only like a month away.

01:06:13.320 | Well, I think I should wait because Nolan filmed most of this in a combination of 70

01:06:19.040 | millimeter and IMAX format, which is a 65 millimeter format.

01:06:24.440 | I don't want to disparage the Hanover Nugget movie theater.

01:06:29.360 | Because again, I have good experiences there.

01:06:31.280 | I went here when I was a college kid.

01:06:33.360 | Their screens are not massive.

01:06:35.800 | Their projectors are not large format projectors.

01:06:38.600 | The one nice thing about DC is there's plenty of IMAX theaters that can project this capacity

01:06:43.160 | also the AFI theater, non-profit theater in Silver Spring, not far from where I live has

01:06:48.320 | a 70 millimeter projector as well.

01:06:50.200 | In fact, I saw Dunkirk.

01:06:51.480 | When I saw Dunkirk for the first time, I went to see the 70 millimeter projection.

01:06:55.840 | So Oppenheimer is filmed in large format.

01:06:58.880 | So this is what I'm trying to weigh.

01:07:00.760 | Should I risk it?

01:07:01.760 | I'll wait.

01:07:02.760 | Okay.

01:07:03.760 | Yeah.

01:07:04.760 | If it's out of the theaters though, Jesse, I'm going to be upset.

01:07:07.760 | Yeah.

01:07:08.760 | If I get back.

01:07:09.760 | Fire me.

01:07:10.760 | Yeah.

01:07:11.760 | Like Mad Dog and Steve Torrey.

01:07:13.600 | Just like Mad Dog and Steve Torrey.

01:07:14.760 | I'll be like, Jesse, you're out of here.

01:07:16.600 | Now what we'll have to do after we convince the Washington Nationals that deep work consulting

01:07:23.200 | is worth three wins above replacement for their season, we then have to convince Chris

01:07:27.800 | Nolan and his team that deep work is somehow going to be critical to their work.

01:07:32.960 | And then I'll be able to go see a print with him in his personal projection room.

01:07:37.160 | Yeah.

01:07:38.160 | Yeah.

01:07:39.160 | All right.

01:07:40.160 | So if you get the Nats job and they want you there, you have to get there early so you

01:07:44.760 | have plenty of time to read.

01:07:46.200 | So you can read for like 90 minutes before you have to do your thing.

01:07:49.320 | I want to do.

01:07:50.320 | I want to be up in the owner's box reading, having a cigar with Mike.

01:07:55.040 | And then it's like time for me just to get the team kind of fired up.

01:07:57.720 | I'm telling you.

01:07:58.720 | I'll hang out with Charlie Schlose and Dan Colco.

01:08:02.760 | It'll all be fun.

01:08:04.440 | All right.

01:08:05.440 | Let's get to this actual news item.

01:08:06.440 | By the way, you can chime in if you think I'm making the wrong risk in waiting to see

01:08:09.560 | the Oppenheimer in large format, but I'll tell you, I looked it up.

01:08:12.520 | The nearest IMAX to Hanover that I could find was an hour, 20 minutes.

01:08:18.080 | So it's another reason, another issue with living up here full time.

01:08:21.200 | You got to have your large format.

01:08:22.200 | All right.

01:08:23.200 | So let me show you this, this small thing I found.

01:08:25.440 | I've actually written about this before on my blog, but this is just an honor.

01:08:28.800 | This is an honor of Mr. Nolan.

01:08:31.200 | A lot of people sent this to me.

01:08:32.960 | All right.

01:08:33.960 | This is from the Hollywood Reporter.

01:08:36.280 | I'll load it up on the screen here.

01:08:39.880 | So here's the article.

01:08:42.680 | It's about Nolan from mid-July.

01:08:45.640 | The headline is "This can't be safe.

01:08:47.680 | It's got to have bite.

01:08:48.680 | Christopher Nolan and cast unleash Oppenheimer, the director and star Cillian Murphy, Emily

01:08:54.840 | Blunt and Matt Damon on the stakes of making an R-rated three-hour CGI-free summer flick

01:08:59.000 | about the Godfather, the atomic bomb.

01:09:00.640 | It's got to be beautiful and threatening in equal measure."

01:09:02.760 | This is why I have to see this thing in IMAX.

01:09:04.440 | They actually built a practical, it's not actually an atomic bomb, but the bomb explosion

01:09:09.280 | is real.

01:09:11.680 | They built from scratch a 65mm black and white camera, which did not exist, a black and white

01:09:16.760 | IMAX camera, and then a super high-speed camera of the same type they had originally developed

01:09:23.760 | for the Trinity test in Los Alamos.

01:09:26.000 | So a camera that can record at super high speeds.

01:09:28.680 | And they did a real massive explosion and really filmed it with this camera they built

01:09:33.400 | from scratch to simulate the cameras they used to record the original atomic explosion

01:09:38.040 | so they didn't have to use computer graphics.

01:09:40.080 | It's all really cool.

01:09:41.080 | But here's a quote.

01:09:42.080 | I don't know where it is in the article, but I do have it just written down in my note.

01:09:46.080 | So later in this article, there is a quote.

01:09:49.240 | Let me see.

01:09:50.240 | I think I wrote it in here.

01:09:51.640 | Here we go.

01:09:52.640 | All right.

01:09:53.640 | So later in the article, and I'll stop the sharing here.

01:09:54.640 | There's a quote that reads, "It's not just in his filmmaking that Nolan prefers to rely

01:10:01.040 | on analog methods.

01:10:02.240 | He doesn't use email or carry a smartphone.

01:10:05.720 | And when he writes his scripts, he does so on a computer that isn't connected to the

01:10:08.960 | internet.

01:10:10.120 | My kids would probably say I'm a complete Luddite," he says.

01:10:12.720 | "I would actually resist that description.

01:10:14.400 | I think technology and what it can provide is amazing.

01:10:16.560 | My personal choice is about how involved I get.

01:10:20.080 | It's about the level of distraction.

01:10:21.920 | If I'm generating my material and writing my own scripts, being on a smartphone all

01:10:25.000 | day wouldn't be very useful to me."

01:10:29.640 | That is, of course, music to my ears.

01:10:30.880 | I think there should be many more professions in which that's really normal.

01:10:34.760 | You say, "Why would I have a smartphone?

01:10:37.840 | I'm training an elite athlete.

01:10:41.080 | Why would I have a smartphone?

01:10:42.360 | I'm a full-time writer, and that's only going to get in the way of what I do."

01:10:47.680 | I love those types of examples.

01:10:50.040 | I think the more we see people doing incredibly focused activities where they're intentional

01:10:54.800 | about their technology, the more we'll see that bleed into maybe less attention-catching

01:10:59.800 | roles.

01:11:00.800 | We'll see more of that bleed in from movie directors, and we can have more of that in

01:11:04.440 | just your life as an executive or a teacher.

01:11:08.160 | But mainly it's just cool, and I think Chris Nolan is cool.

01:11:11.000 | I think his movies are cool, and I love the fact he doesn't use an internet-connected

01:11:14.760 | computer and he doesn't own a smartphone because he's trying to build $300 million movies.

01:11:20.440 | He doesn't have time to be following the latest attention economy distraction.

01:11:25.000 | Nolan, good for you.

01:11:27.280 | I'll have to find another way to convince you to hire me to come watch Oppenheimer with

01:11:30.880 | you in person.

01:11:31.880 | I can't email you, so we'll try to go through your people, but don't worry.

01:11:35.320 | Jesse's on it.

01:11:36.320 | He'll work it out.

01:11:37.320 | And if he doesn't, I'll fire him.

01:11:39.320 | All right.

01:11:40.880 | That's all the time we have for today.

01:11:44.680 | Thank you, everyone, for listening.

01:11:47.280 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

01:11:52.920 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

Ep. 259: The Four-Hour Work Day

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