Why Working Fast Makes You Less Productive: Work Slowly But Relentlessly Instead

00:00:00.000 | I'll tell you what I do want to talk about today though.

00:00:02.760 | This was a cool idea, something I had heard something about, but a listener sent me a

00:00:09.280 | longer article about it.

00:00:11.440 | It's an idea from antiquity that I think actually captures a lot of the ideas we've been talking

00:00:19.540 | about on this show about slow productivity.

00:00:23.000 | So I'm going to load up an article on the screen here that I'm going to be talking about

00:00:28.160 | So let me do a little bit of a share here.

00:00:29.600 | So for those who are listening, you can see the article on your screen if you go to youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:00:38.100 | This is episode 260.

00:00:41.200 | You can also find this episode 260 at thedeeplife.com.

00:00:46.960 | So I've loaded up this article on the screen from Big Think.

00:00:49.440 | Here is the headline, "Fastina Lente, a Roman Emperor's Guide to Getting Stuff Done."

00:00:57.420 | So start from the top of this article, then we're going to get into it.

00:01:00.400 | So that Roman emperor in question here is Octavian Caesar Augustus.

00:01:05.920 | And this opens by saying, "Like all historical legacies, the one of Octavian Caesar Augustus

00:01:10.600 | is open to interpretation."

00:01:13.160 | Right?

00:01:14.160 | So he steered Rome through tumultuous times and ushered in a centuries-long period of

00:01:17.140 | order and stability known as Pax Romana.

00:01:19.560 | On the other hand, he delivered the killing blow to the Roman Republic and established

00:01:23.060 | a position so powerful that it gave subsequent emperors such as Caligula and Nero carte blanche

00:01:27.280 | to indulge their whims.

00:01:29.320 | So you know, you got the good and you got the bad.

00:01:33.600 | But here's the key point here.

00:01:35.000 | Whatever your take on Caesar Augustus, you've got to give him this, "The man knew how to

00:01:40.200 | get things done."

00:01:41.520 | The article mentions a lot of things that Caesar Augustus did as emperor, a lot of projects

00:01:47.880 | to improve Rome after its many wars, his new tax and census systems.

00:01:52.600 | He created police forces and fire brigades.

00:01:55.980 | He built roads, instituted a postal service.

00:02:00.200 | All right?

00:02:01.200 | So this is a guy who was effective.

00:02:02.840 | All right, so let's return to the article.

00:02:05.680 | That's one heck of a curriculum vitae.

00:02:07.760 | He managed all of this not only by being clever, ruthless, and politically savvy, but by following

00:02:12.400 | a modest yet powerful Roman principle, fastina lente, which is often translated, "Make haste

00:02:21.240 | slowly."

00:02:22.240 | All right.

00:02:24.000 | So this is an idea that I've seen.

00:02:27.420 | I looked into this idea when I was researching my book, "Slow Productivity."

00:02:31.380 | This is coming out in March.

00:02:33.380 | And so I've gone down this rabbit hole before, but it was interesting to see this take on

00:02:36.620 | it.

00:02:37.620 | This notion of fastina lente, "Make haste slowly," comes up all the time in antiquity.

00:02:45.160 | So you see it, it wasn't just Caesar Augustus, but it actually comes up all the time.

00:02:49.680 | So let me jump back to this article here for a second.

00:02:51.660 | There's some graphics to share with you here.

00:02:54.860 | All right, so let's look at this.

00:02:56.820 | The history of this phrase.

00:02:58.500 | They say here, "The history of an august oxymoron."

00:03:01.140 | An ad here.

00:03:02.940 | All right.

00:03:03.940 | Did I say Roman principle?

00:03:04.940 | Well, not exactly.

00:03:05.940 | Like most things Roman, fastina lente is Greek in origin.

00:03:09.540 | It's a caulk or loan translation of the phrase, which I'm not even gonna try to pronounce,

00:03:14.140 | but it's a Greek phrase.

00:03:15.140 | The Romans simply borrowed it, gave it a Latin polish, and then invoked the time-honored tradition

00:03:19.260 | of no backsies.

00:03:21.460 | But while Augustus didn't originate the principle, he did devote himself to it in a history,

00:03:27.380 | in a biography of the first Roman emperor, the historian, Suetonius, described how Augustus

00:03:32.500 | changed the military following the final civil wars in the Republic.

00:03:35.580 | He notes how Augustus thought nothing more derogatory to the character of an accomplished

00:03:38.900 | general than precipitancy and rashness that caused such impulses.

00:03:44.140 | Augustus trained his generals to instead make haste slowly, and that the cautious captain

00:03:48.460 | is better than the gold.

00:03:50.140 | How serious was he about this?

00:03:51.300 | Augustus minted a Roman coin known as an aureus with his personal branding of fastina lente.

00:04:00.540 | On the side that didn't include his face, he imprinted the image of a crab hoisting

00:04:05.700 | a butterfly.

00:04:07.420 | The butterfly represented speed, the crab, caution, and deliberateness.

00:04:12.660 | Here's another graphic here.

00:04:15.260 | This is another fastina lente graphic.

00:04:17.340 | You see here a dolphin around an anchor.

00:04:20.860 | I have this on the screen now.

00:04:22.900 | This was Aldus Manutius, a Renaissance humanist who revolutionized the publishing industry,

00:04:30.940 | adopted fastina lente as his business ethos.

00:04:33.900 | So this was his publishing imprint.

00:04:35.740 | So in the Renaissance, they rediscovered this idea.

00:04:38.780 | Cosimo de' Medici also illustrated this with a turtle sporting a sail on top of its shell.

00:04:46.460 | So there's, I'm seeing there's one more image in here.

00:04:48.460 | Anyways, there's a lot of images.

00:04:49.700 | What I'm trying to say is this idea of fastina lente showed up a lot.

00:04:54.540 | So we see it, the Greeks came up with it.

00:04:56.500 | The Romans were really into it.

00:04:57.820 | It was minted on coins.

00:04:59.220 | The Renaissance humanist rediscovered it.

00:05:01.300 | They used it.

00:05:02.460 | Medici had artwork commissioned around it.

00:05:05.140 | A famous publisher in the Renaissance period had it as the imprint, a dolphin on an anchor.

00:05:12.660 | If you look online, you can find all sorts of other artifacts from the ancient world

00:05:16.540 | and from the Renaissance period where we see exactly this phrase captured in imagery.

00:05:22.420 | So it was a very powerful, popular phrase.

00:05:26.300 | Now, the question is what is meant by this and why is it relevant to us today?

00:05:30.580 | Well, I think the literal translation, make haste slowly, is a little bit hard to follow.

00:05:38.340 | There's a, as noted in that article, a bit of an oxymoronic element to it.

00:05:41.780 | How can you be making haste if you're going slowly?

00:05:45.860 | Haste is fast.

00:05:47.820 | Slowly is slow.

00:05:48.820 | So I'm going to offer here, let's call it an interpretive translation.

00:05:53.540 | So it's not a literal translation of what do these words mean, but an interpretive translation,

00:05:59.060 | a way of rephrasing this phrase, which I think gets to the core of what the ancient world

00:06:03.900 | and the Renaissance scholars who studied it thought about it, what they thought it meant.

00:06:08.420 | All right.

00:06:09.420 | So here's my interpretive translation of Festina Lente.

00:06:14.300 | Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

00:06:20.580 | Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

00:06:24.220 | So let's go through the three parts of that one by one, and I'll elaborate what I mean

00:06:29.020 | here.

00:06:30.020 | So slowly in this context means, of course, obviously don't go fast.

00:06:34.720 | This is certainly what Caesar Augustus had in mind when he worried about his generals

00:06:38.980 | in the field being rash in their decision-making.

00:06:41.300 | When you're too rash in your decision-making, you act in the moment, you act on instinct.

00:06:45.880 | This can create problems.

00:06:47.980 | And if we bring this forward to the modern context, we can imagine it saying, don't let

00:06:52.540 | busyness and frenetic activity distract you from what actually matters to keep you from

00:06:58.900 | your best work.

00:07:00.220 | It could be reassuring in the moment, like the general that wants to make a decision

00:07:04.020 | and send their archers over there.

00:07:05.780 | It can be reassuring in the moment to do things.

00:07:08.860 | Let me do this and send this email and hire this consultant and publish this thing and

00:07:14.340 | start using this new tool.

00:07:15.500 | You feel like the activity is action, and action is better than inaction.

00:07:20.740 | But Faustina Lente is saying, slow down.

00:07:23.660 | Don't act hastily.

00:07:24.660 | Now, the cost in the modern context is not you're going to lose the battle, but it might

00:07:28.380 | be you're going to lose time, that you're going to get distracted, that your energy

00:07:32.640 | is going to be redirected from the types of activities that might have been most important

00:07:37.300 | for what it is you're trying to get done.

00:07:40.060 | We can think about this call to slowness also as a call to craft.

00:07:44.580 | Slow down, focus on what matters, work on your craft.

00:07:50.340 | That's what's going to matter.

00:07:51.340 | Okay.

00:07:52.340 | So that's the first part.

00:07:53.340 | Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

00:07:54.340 | What do I mean by relentlessly in this interpretive translation?

00:07:57.340 | Well, this is where we get to my take on the haste piece from the original translation.

00:08:04.220 | Don't delay or procrastinate, don't overanalyze.

00:08:07.580 | So Augustus didn't want his generals, Caesar Augustus did not want his generals to act

00:08:12.420 | hastily, but he also wanted them to act.

00:08:16.140 | Make the right moves when they need to be done.

00:08:18.900 | Don't react in the moment to your instincts or your fear, but when you see this is the

00:08:22.700 | right move, all right, I slowed down, I'm looking at the battlefield, that's a faint,

00:08:29.020 | here's their weakness.

00:08:30.020 | Okay, we need to flank.

00:08:32.260 | Once you realize the right thing to do, because you slowed down, do it.

00:08:37.140 | Don't overanalyze it, don't procrastinate on it.

00:08:39.180 | So this is where we get that oxymoronic tension.

00:08:42.020 | Slow down, don't just be busy and frenetic, but be relentless on working on what you're

00:08:45.700 | working on.

00:08:47.140 | This is the next thing to do, do it, do it well.

00:08:49.900 | Take a beat, what's the best thing to do next?

00:08:51.740 | Do that and do that well.

00:08:53.980 | So it's the constant activity done intentionally with care aggregates to really big results.

00:09:00.860 | And I think that's the takeaway of the second piece for the modern context.

00:09:05.860 | Working slowly but relentlessly builds up.

00:09:09.460 | And if you do that long enough, you do end up with really interesting results.

00:09:15.340 | Even if in the moment it looks slow, if you don't stop, if you keep making progress, you

00:09:20.580 | keep putting out one podcast after another, very carefully trying to improve each episode

00:09:25.760 | from the last.

00:09:26.760 | You keep putting down another page of the book you're working on, and maybe it takes

00:09:30.100 | you longer than someone else, but you give enough time, you have a book that you're really

00:09:34.280 | proud of.

00:09:35.280 | This work relentlessly, don't stop, keep making progress is the key counterbalance

00:09:41.320 | to the slow.

00:09:42.860 | And then I added the matters piece.

00:09:44.500 | So go back to my translation, work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

00:09:51.360 | So what I mean by what matters is, okay, making sure you're focused on the right things.

00:09:56.940 | So slow down, don't just be reactive.

00:09:59.900 | But when you do keep making progress, relentlessly, don't stop and make sure you're aimed in the

00:10:04.020 | right direction.

00:10:05.680 | So the generals for Caesar Augustus hearing Faustina Alente, they know what they're trying

00:10:11.340 | to do.

00:10:12.340 | We're trying to take this high ground, we're trying to take this city back from the barbarian

00:10:16.260 | hordes.

00:10:17.420 | They know what matters and they don't lose sight of that.

00:10:19.780 | That's what we're trying to do.

00:10:20.860 | And then they slow down so they're not being too reactive.

00:10:23.600 | And they make the relentless progress on the right decisions in the moment that push them

00:10:27.640 | in the long term towards what matters.

00:10:31.860 | So work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

00:10:34.780 | That is an ancient piece of wisdom.

00:10:36.860 | As we saw, the Greeks talked about it, the Romans stole it from them, the Renaissance

00:10:40.860 | humanists that rediscovered the Greeks and the Romans stole it from them.

00:10:44.040 | So everyone who has encountered this idea has adopted it with enthusiasm, which from

00:10:50.020 | a mimetic standpoint tells us there's probably something in this idea that fits well with

00:10:55.600 | human nature.

00:10:57.060 | And I think this is really exciting because once we see it elaborated in this way, this

00:11:00.860 | concept dovetails nicely with the philosophy of slow productivity that we talk about so

00:11:06.360 | often on this show and that I elaborate in the book I have coming out in March.

00:11:10.100 | Now it's not an exact match to slow productivity, but it's in the spirit of the slow productivity

00:11:15.700 | mindset.

00:11:16.940 | That spirit of slowing down, doing less, being more careful about your decisions, staying

00:11:21.160 | focused on the things that matters, but also keep making progress.

00:11:24.320 | You keep moving down the path.

00:11:27.260 | You keep making progress towards what matters.

00:11:30.180 | Trusting in the short term, you're just focused on making a good decision and building something

00:11:33.220 | a step you're proud of.

00:11:34.420 | And in the long term, you end up at a cool destination.

00:11:36.580 | That's classic slow productivity.

00:11:38.700 | So I think this shows that there is no ideas, no ideas are new, right?

00:11:43.660 | So the reason why I think slow productivity resonates with me and is resonating with so

00:11:47.060 | many of you is because there's actually an ancient idea here that we're hitting upon.

00:11:51.700 | So fastina lente, make haste slowly, or to put it my way, work slowly.

00:11:57.100 | How do I say it?

00:11:58.980 | Work slowly, but relentlessly on what matters.

00:12:01.500 | A little bit less pissy, but I think that gets to the core of what all who have rediscovered

00:12:05.960 | this advice really liked.

00:12:08.660 | We should get a coin made, Jesse.

00:12:11.140 | Ryan Holiday has coins, you know.

00:12:12.900 | He has the memento mori, the stoic coins.

00:12:15.300 | I think we need our own-

00:12:16.300 | Yeah, a coin or a bookmark.

00:12:19.580 | That would be really nice.

00:12:20.580 | Because you read a lot of books.

00:12:21.580 | And do you think it would be a step too far in the narcissistic direction if I minted

00:12:25.860 | gold coins where it was my face on one side and fastina lente on the other side?

00:12:33.140 | People could just look at ... And like a general, you know, like I would have a garland.

00:12:37.820 | They were garlands of plants.

00:12:39.220 | I don't know which one.

00:12:41.060 | Like in the Sopranos when he got that painting commissioned of him on the horse?

00:12:45.780 | Which I ... Exactly.

00:12:47.780 | And I think viewers, listeners don't know this, but there is a giant mural of me dressed

00:12:53.060 | like a Roman emperor on a horse inside the Deep Work HQ.

00:12:57.900 | And I'm just pointing forward and it says fastina lente.

00:13:01.300 | Maybe that would be a step too far.

00:13:05.180 | Anyways, that was cool though.

00:13:07.780 | Because the only sad thing is I came across like my fastina lente rabbit hole was after

00:13:13.300 | the manuscript for Slow Productivity was already done.

00:13:16.180 | So it's actually not in the book.

00:13:18.100 | So this is ... It's validation of the ideas in the book that came later.

00:13:22.740 | But it came too late to actually make it into the book itself.

00:13:24.880 | So I don't know if that's sad or cool, but there we go.

00:13:28.220 | All right.

00:13:29.680 | So what I want to move on to is some questions that are going to be roughly associated with

00:13:36.580 | this Slow Productivity, Slowing Down, Working With What Matters theme of this episode.

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00:15:57.400 | I also want to talk about our good friends at the oh so easy to pronounce Zocdoc.

00:16:04.360 | Zocdoc is one of these apps that make so much sense it's hard to believe that it wasn't

00:16:09.540 | around before.

00:16:10.540 | All right, so here's how it works.

00:16:13.160 | Let's say you need a new doctor.

00:16:15.720 | You know, like in my case, my old doctor left or you're looking for a new type of doctor

00:16:18.840 | you didn't have one before.

00:16:20.300 | How would you normally do this?

00:16:21.720 | I don't know.

00:16:22.720 | No one knows.

00:16:23.720 | You start asking friends, "Hey, what doctor do you use?"

00:16:26.080 | And then you call the doctor and if you live in a city like I do, they're like, "No, we

00:16:28.920 | don't have any availability.

00:16:30.520 | If anything, we're mad at you for even asking."

00:16:32.960 | Of course we don't.

00:16:34.040 | Or you find a doctor with availability but they don't take your insurance or they turn

00:16:37.180 | out to not be so good.

00:16:39.720 | There's a painting of them on a horse like a Roman emperor in the waiting room and you

00:16:42.800 | didn't know about this.

00:16:44.240 | This is where ZocDoc enters the scene.

00:16:48.080 | It is an app that allows you to search for the type of doctor you're looking for that's

00:16:54.860 | in your area, that takes your insurance, that has available appointments, and you can read

00:16:59.720 | reviews right there to see, okay, do they have weird paintings in their hallway?

00:17:04.960 | It's what makes it easy to find a new healthcare provider.

00:17:11.440 | So I think this is just a great idea.

00:17:14.160 | I need some sort of doctor, I need a dentist, I need this specialist.

00:17:17.560 | ZocDoc, search, looking for this area, availability, this insurance, boom, here's some options.

00:17:23.960 | What's the reviews?

00:17:24.960 | Ooh, this one looks good.

00:17:25.960 | Maybe I can even book it online using the app itself.

00:17:30.040 | So there are thousands of top-rated doctors on ZocDoc and it will help you find them.

00:17:34.960 | So it's a free app where you find these amazing actors and in most cases, doctors, not actors,

00:17:39.200 | and in most cases can book the appointments right there online.

00:17:43.120 | Man, actors and opponents, that's a separate type of app right there, and act.

00:17:48.400 | My God, Jesse, I said actors, opponents, and act, all of those, I mean, essentially what

00:17:53.920 | I think I really want to do here is fight a screen actor and somehow that's overtaking

00:17:59.360 | me as I think about ZocDoc.

00:18:01.760 | Now forget all that, it's a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments

00:18:07.280 | online.

00:18:08.280 | We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top-rated patient review doctors

00:18:12.680 | and specialists, filter for the ones, take your insurance, the ones that are located

00:18:16.040 | near you, they can treat almost any condition you're searching for.

00:18:19.040 | It's just a smart way to find healthcare providers.

00:18:22.640 | All right, so go to ZocDoc.com/deep and download the ZocDoc app for free.

00:18:31.520 | Then you can find a book, a top-rated doctor today.

00:18:33.440 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep.

00:18:40.280 | You know why I'm thinking about actors, Jesse?

00:18:41.800 | It's because our listeners are aggressively shaming me about the fact that there is no

00:18:49.320 | large format movie theater near Hanover, New Hampshire, and they are aggressively shaming

00:18:54.240 | me, and I'm talking a dozen messages at least, that I am not driving 90 minutes to get to

00:19:01.560 | an IMAX screen to see Oppenheimer.

00:19:04.120 | Really?

00:19:05.480 | And I wish I could.

00:19:06.840 | I wish I could.

00:19:08.360 | But the issue is they got me booked pretty seriously up here, up in Hanover.

00:19:14.480 | Dartmouth has me doing a lot of events in addition to my class, a lot of talks, a lot

00:19:18.040 | of classroom visits.

00:19:19.040 | I'm all over the place.

00:19:20.400 | So I can't just take a day off in the middle of the week, and now we have visitors up here,

00:19:23.680 | and I don't know that I'm going to make it to an IMAX while I'm still up here.

00:19:26.840 | I am going to go see it in the next couple of days in 35mm.

00:19:30.700 | It leaves the local theater here in Hanover on Thursday.

00:19:33.740 | So I have to go find it.

00:19:34.740 | I am going to go see it in 35mm, and then I'm just going to hope one of the specialty

00:19:38.800 | theaters in DC is doing an extended run or will bring it back and play it in large format.

00:19:44.200 | But man, they're really telling me...

00:19:46.060 | Let me tell you this.

00:19:47.060 | There's one listener who said they flew back from Bavaria to the States so they could see

00:19:52.580 | Oppenheimer in the IMAX.

00:19:56.260 | I haven't seen it yet.

00:19:57.260 | Oh man, they're going to be mad at you now, Jesse.

00:19:59.860 | If you don't see it in large format...

00:20:00.860 | Mad Dog has talked about it.

00:20:02.700 | Yeah.

00:20:03.700 | I hear it's really good, but I heard it's probably 25 minutes too long.

00:20:08.980 | Yeah.

00:20:09.980 | Well, I think there's a long 70mm sequence of just fire from the main explosion scene

00:20:19.580 | where they show the Trinity test, and they built a super high-speed IMAX camera so they

00:20:24.740 | could film real fire.

00:20:26.100 | Anyways, I'm excited about it, but that's why I have actors on my mind, because man,

00:20:29.620 | I've been oh so seriously shamed by our listeners.

00:20:33.100 | I do miss that about DC.

00:20:34.620 | I'm very much looking forward to getting back to movies.

00:20:37.380 | Nice movie theaters, big format, seeing really interesting movies.

00:20:40.740 | That's not what you do up in rural New Hampshire.

00:20:44.220 | So it's a nice break, but I am looking forward to getting back to seeing some serious movies.

00:20:48.900 | All right.

00:20:49.900 | We should get back to some questions is what we should do, because we have some interesting

00:20:52.400 | ones to get into today.

00:20:53.900 | Jesse, start us off.

00:20:55.140 | Who do we have here?

00:20:56.580 | Hi.

00:20:57.580 | First question is from Trent.

00:21:00.060 | I feel like my team is suffering from a fast productivity bias.

00:21:04.420 | We use Scrum, but our schedules are overloaded and too many items being prioritized haphazardly

00:21:09.600 | leading to me and my team feeling burned out.

00:21:12.860 | How can I help my team and client move towards slow productivity and avoid them feeling anxious

00:21:17.460 | about not delivering enough work?

00:21:19.780 | Well, I think the good news here is that you do actually have in place a workflow management

00:21:26.100 | system that is very compatible with a more sustainable slow productivity.

00:21:30.540 | So for the unknowledgeable listener, the listener who doesn't know about Scrum, this is a methodology

00:21:39.080 | used commonly in software development for keeping track of and organizing work on software

00:21:44.260 | projects.

00:21:45.260 | And there's a bunch of key ideas to it, but essentially you work in short iterative sprints.

00:21:51.300 | So instead of trying to plan a very large software development project out from scratch,

00:21:57.460 | we'll do this and it'll take one week and this will take two weeks and you have a six-month

00:22:00.820 | plan.

00:22:01.820 | The Scrum mindset says, okay, what's the next thing we want to add?

00:22:04.220 | Let's just focus on that.

00:22:05.220 | This person's doing it.

00:22:06.380 | Spend two days, get it done.

00:22:07.940 | Let's test it and then see what should come next.

00:22:10.260 | So it's a more iterative way of building software.

00:22:12.740 | Now often the work being done in Scrum is itself tracked using a metaphor of cards pinned

00:22:20.620 | up on a board under columns.

00:22:22.540 | So this is a technique that comes from a related system called Kanban, not to confuse everyone,

00:22:27.460 | but Scrum often uses Kanban boards to keep track of the work.

00:22:32.820 | But the way to imagine this is you have a card, be it virtual or physical, for all the

00:22:37.040 | different features you might want to add to your software and they're in a sort of holding

00:22:40.300 | tank column.

00:22:41.300 | And then there's a column for, okay, this is being worked on and you move something over

00:22:45.660 | there when one person is working on it and then that's what they focus on until they're

00:22:49.740 | done and then it gets moved to the testing column typically and into the this is done

00:22:53.420 | column.

00:22:54.420 | Okay.

00:22:55.420 | So this is the setup that Trent has.

00:22:57.340 | And he's saying the issue is we have this setup, but we're just moving too many things

00:23:01.060 | to the working on column.

00:23:03.580 | And we're going really fast to keep up with all these different things we want us to get

00:23:07.540 | done and we're working all the time and on multiple things at a time and we're burning

00:23:10.580 | out.

00:23:11.580 | So technically all they need to do is just slow down the pace.

00:23:13.620 | They have the structure there.

00:23:14.900 | They need to say, let's spend more time on each of these things.

00:23:18.300 | So when we move a card to the working on column, let's give that person more time to get it

00:23:22.140 | done and they have to reduce overlap.

00:23:25.100 | Let's not put four things in the working on column for the same person.

00:23:29.360 | Let's put one thing at a time or two things at a time and let them finish that before

00:23:33.120 | the next thing comes.

00:23:34.660 | So there's a knob here you can turn to slow down the workload.

00:23:38.860 | Now the two questions are, is this going to make you worse?

00:23:43.260 | Is your team going to be less capable if you do this?

00:23:45.140 | And then the second question is, regardless of that, is your client going to accept it?

00:23:49.740 | And let's tackle those both separately.

00:23:51.940 | Is it going to make your team worse?

00:23:53.260 | Are you going to actually be slower?

00:23:54.860 | The answer there is almost certainly no.

00:23:56.860 | It's one of the key ideas in slow productivity.

00:23:59.660 | The first principle is do fewer things.

00:24:01.420 | And one of the key explanations for that is doing fewer things does not necessarily mean

00:24:06.060 | that you produce at a slower rate.

00:24:10.640 | Anything that is on your plate in the moment to work on brings with it an overhead.

00:24:17.460 | Some of this overhead is just purely cognitive.

00:24:19.420 | I have to think about this and I'm working on this both consciously and unconsciously.

00:24:23.860 | And some of it is actual logistical or administrative.

00:24:26.500 | Once I'm working on something, I might have to talk to other people about it.

00:24:29.420 | I might have to have conversations about it.

00:24:31.620 | There's email or Slack messages going back and forth about it.

00:24:34.100 | So there's actual literal overhead that takes up time.

00:24:39.180 | So when you put more things on your plate in a given period of time, you have more overhead.

00:24:43.960 | When you have more overhead, it means you have less time to work on the work itself

00:24:47.680 | and you have less cognitive capacity capable to dedicate it to it when you actually do

00:24:52.720 | the work.

00:24:53.720 | What does this mean?

00:24:54.720 | It takes longer to get those things done.

00:24:57.580 | So if you put three things on your plate on your Kanban board as part of your Scrum protocol,

00:25:01.840 | if you put three things on your plate instead of one, you're not working three times faster.

00:25:07.200 | You're not getting three times as much done this week or this month because those three

00:25:10.340 | things are going to take longer to get done.

00:25:12.340 | And the quality will probably be lower as well.

00:25:14.540 | If you put those things one after another, the time required to execute them if they

00:25:18.780 | got your full focus would be less because there's less overhead getting in the way.

00:25:22.860 | So going one after another might end up taking less time than putting all three on your plate

00:25:27.000 | and trying to finish them.

00:25:29.480 | So no, you're not going to be a worse producing team if you start to pull back a little bit

00:25:34.980 | on how many things you're moving from this collective coming up column into the individualized

00:25:41.380 | working on column.

00:25:42.660 | All right, so what about your clients?

00:25:44.540 | Well, here's the thing with your clients.

00:25:45.900 | Two things can help.

00:25:46.900 | One, let them just see the results.

00:25:49.980 | Things are getting done.

00:25:51.820 | When they zoom out to the weeks or monthly scale, they say things are getting done.

00:25:56.300 | Features get added.

00:25:57.340 | We're happy with the work.

00:25:59.260 | So have some faith that because you aren't actually producing at a slower rate, your

00:26:04.740 | client will notice this.

00:26:05.740 | The second thing you can do is just have a good transparency, right with the client.

00:26:11.340 | All right, thank you.

00:26:13.020 | Here's the feature.

00:26:14.020 | It's on our list of things to work on.

00:26:15.460 | In fact, we'll give you some visibility into our Kanban, not the exact Kanban board, but

00:26:20.100 | some sort of lower fidelity collection of it where you can see yes, this is exactly

00:26:24.020 | where this feature is.

00:26:25.380 | It's in our holding pin.

00:26:26.420 | Here's the ones we're working on now.

00:26:27.700 | Okay, these are done.

00:26:28.740 | These are the next ones we're working on.

00:26:29.860 | Hey, you can see here on priority.

00:26:31.820 | This is probably four or five features back, but it's moving down the list.

00:26:35.940 | Clarity can give you all sorts of grace when it comes to client work.

00:26:43.660 | Being very clear to a client.

00:26:44.780 | They see what you're working on, how you're working on it.

00:26:46.380 | They see the speed with things are getting done.

00:26:47.780 | They see your system.

00:26:49.060 | That is going to get you a lot of grace from the client.

00:26:52.280 | The thing that gets clients upset, the things that get clients demanding that you answer

00:26:56.220 | their emails at all time, the things that gets clients saying, "Just do this now.

00:26:59.260 | I don't want to wait," is not trusting you.

00:27:01.440 | Not trusting, "I don't know when this is going to get done or who's going to work on it."

00:27:04.740 | As long as the client feels like it's essentially up to them to badger an individual with email

00:27:10.300 | or Slack until they can get that person to do something, that it's on the client's plate,

00:27:14.260 | it's on their head.

00:27:15.260 | They have to keep track of it until it gets done.

00:27:16.980 | They have to keep bothering you until it does.

00:27:18.820 | Then you're not going to have any grace.

00:27:19.820 | They're going to say, "Just do it.

00:27:21.140 | I don't know.

00:27:22.140 | Work on it."

00:27:23.140 | When they see that transparency, it's in the system.

00:27:26.140 | Here it is.

00:27:27.140 | I see it moving down the list of priorities.

00:27:29.540 | I see things are being executed well and fast.

00:27:33.400 | Then they're going to give you a little bit more breathing room.

00:27:35.740 | I think you're half of the way there, Trent, because you have the system in place.

00:27:39.520 | Now you just need to turn the knob down on workload, give a little more transparency

00:27:42.940 | to your client, and trust they'll see that the way you're doing this is actually producing

00:27:46.400 | results and I think you will be able to slow things down.

00:27:48.880 | All right.

00:27:49.880 | What do we got next, Jesse?

00:27:52.320 | >> All right.

00:27:53.880 | Next question is from Ben.

00:27:55.840 | One challenge I still have with time blocking is knowing how much time to allocate to a

00:27:59.280 | specific task or project.

00:28:01.520 | For example, as a product manager, I can spend hours or days doing customer market discovery

00:28:06.680 | to decide if a new feature is worth pursuing or I can spend two hours and get a good enough

00:28:11.400 | answer.

00:28:12.400 | Does it make sense to allocate time to a task or project based on your appetite versus how

00:28:17.900 | much you can afford to give it?

00:28:20.800 | >> How much you can afford to give it, I think, is the right starting place.

00:28:25.760 | If you have an open-ended task or project that you need to work on, you say, I don't

00:28:30.520 | really know how long I'm supposed to spend on this because maybe there's not a clear

00:28:34.880 | done point.

00:28:35.880 | Like the example given here Ben gave was researching and you can always keep researching.

00:28:40.440 | I think the right thing to do here is to fix a reasonable amount of time, block off that

00:28:45.400 | time when you work on it, use the scarcity of that time to push you to really focus.

00:28:51.800 | Okay, when I'm working on this, okay, I have two hours, I really want to get a lot done

00:28:56.520 | in those two hours.

00:28:57.520 | I want to be very careful about it.

00:28:59.320 | And then when you're done, you're done.

00:29:01.360 | And then here's the thing, let negative feedback change you.

00:29:05.940 | So if it turns out this is too short of time, it's not enough research, and in the end the

00:29:10.400 | report was not good, we didn't land the client, wait until you have that negative feedback.

00:29:14.300 | Let that negative feedback change what you do.

00:29:16.780 | Don't proactively guess.

00:29:17.780 | Let me do five hours, let me do six hours.

00:29:19.520 | Do what the time you hope from a scheduling perspective it might actually take.

00:29:22.960 | Two hours would be great.

00:29:24.400 | That's reasonable given how many of these discovery reports I have to do.

00:29:28.220 | And do your best to make that time work.

00:29:29.840 | And if you get negative feedback, then change something.

00:29:32.320 | But even there, so even there, if you get the negative feedback of I didn't spend enough

00:29:36.100 | time on this, before you simply make your response be more time next time this comes

00:29:41.640 | up, focus first on process.

00:29:44.920 | Well, what did I do during those two hours?

00:29:48.600 | I was just on the internet, I was just gathering stuff.

00:29:51.520 | Maybe there's a better way to have done this.

00:29:53.280 | Okay, what would have been better?

00:29:55.240 | Oh, I see.

00:29:56.560 | If I knew specifically working backwards from the report I was going to write, I could get

00:30:00.480 | the three big points I want to make, and then I could systematically search in this example

00:30:05.360 | for five sources for each of those points.

00:30:07.640 | Because I want to quote three things and give a summary.

00:30:11.200 | You start thinking through how could I have better organized my approach during the time

00:30:15.560 | I gave this to get the better result.

00:30:18.120 | Eight times out of 10, that's what you need.

00:30:20.120 | And then the other two times out of 10, it might be some combination of I need a better

00:30:23.520 | process and I need more time.

00:30:25.680 | But at least it's an evidence-based increase of the footprint of this task on your schedule.

00:30:31.080 | Where this used to come up in my early work was actually helping students with how they

00:30:36.600 | studied for tests.

00:30:38.320 | This was very common, where students would just say, I'm going to study open-ended.

00:30:45.080 | I have a test.

00:30:46.640 | It's a math test.

00:30:47.720 | I'm just going to study as much as I can because I don't want to feel guilty.

00:30:51.120 | I'll stay up all night.

00:30:52.640 | And then let's say they didn't get the result.

00:30:55.280 | And sometimes their instinct would be maybe I just have to study more.

00:30:57.480 | And I would say, no, no, no.

00:30:58.480 | We need to go back.

00:31:00.200 | First of all, we need to restrict your study time.

00:31:01.880 | You should not be staying up all night.

00:31:02.880 | And they get really worried about this.

00:31:04.680 | And maybe they try this and they get an even worse grade.

00:31:06.520 | And they say, OK, now let's go back and figure out how do we change this.

00:31:09.360 | And almost always the answer was process.

00:31:11.880 | I used to call this back in the early days of my newsletter and blog the post-exam, post-mortem.

00:31:18.120 | I would say, man, it's the important thing to do.

00:31:20.240 | If you worried, I studied for three hours and I got a bad grade.

00:31:23.360 | Before you just say, let me study all night again, do a post-exam, post-mortem.

00:31:27.820 | Look at the exam questions you got wrong and answer the question for yourself, what should

00:31:32.480 | I have done differently to get a better grade?

00:31:35.680 | Specifically, what activities during the hours I spent preparing were a waste of time?

00:31:39.960 | And what activities did I not do that would have really helped?

00:31:43.200 | And this is how you evolve over time if you're a student, much more time efficient and effective

00:31:48.480 | study habits.

00:31:49.560 | You realize, for example, reading over the notes was meaningless.

00:31:54.360 | I needed to be doing active recall.

00:31:56.240 | The best way to do active recall is on index cards.

00:31:58.600 | I should just build those index cards like right after every class.

00:32:01.320 | So I have my study index cards growing.

00:32:03.680 | And here's exactly what I should be putting on them.

00:32:05.700 | You begin to innovate based on what's actually effective.

00:32:08.480 | This same thing holds for other types of work as well.

00:32:12.380 | So take a guess.

00:32:13.380 | Here's a reasonable amount of time.

00:32:14.380 | If it doesn't get you the results you want, do a post-mortem.

00:32:17.600 | How could I have changed what I did in that time to have gotten more?

00:32:20.320 | Because I'm telling you, this evidence-based upgrade of process, eight times out of 10

00:32:28.320 | is going to solve your problem.

00:32:29.320 | If anything, you might even be able to reduce, say, hey, if I do this right, two hours was

00:32:32.720 | too much.

00:32:33.720 | An hour is fine if I really know what I'm supposed to do here.

00:32:36.960 | So that's what I would suggest.

00:32:39.600 | Start optimistically.

00:32:40.780 | Start ambitiously.

00:32:41.780 | And then aggressively adjust and evolve what you do in that time to get better and better

00:32:46.320 | results.

00:32:47.320 | I think you'll find this open-ended wandering of, I don't know, I spent all day working

00:32:50.980 | on something, that'll go away pretty quick.

00:32:54.000 | All right.

00:32:55.560 | What do we have next?

00:32:58.600 | All right.

00:33:00.100 | Next question is from Nathan.

00:33:02.720 | From Cal's image on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players, Cal's right adjustable headband

00:33:08.080 | is a little longer than the left.

00:33:10.200 | Please help.

00:33:11.200 | Oh, yes.

00:33:12.200 | Okay.

00:33:13.200 | Let's be honest.

00:33:14.200 | This has nothing to do with slow productivity and Festina Linte, but it's an interesting

00:33:19.280 | question that I think we should...

00:33:21.520 | I want to address because there's an interesting answer to it.

00:33:23.520 | So I'm actually going to load up...

00:33:25.800 | Let's load this up on the screen here.

00:33:27.520 | Let's see.

00:33:28.520 | All right.

00:33:29.520 | I'm going to the deeplife.com.

00:33:32.400 | That has a big picture of the album art.

00:33:34.640 | All right.

00:33:35.640 | Let's share this.

00:33:36.640 | I'm going to share this on the screen.

00:33:39.480 | This is a bit of a tangent, everyone, but I think it's interesting.

00:33:44.680 | Okay.

00:33:45.680 | So let's get to the bottom of this.

00:33:46.680 | I've heard about this before.

00:33:47.680 | All right.

00:33:48.680 | Here's the album cover art.

00:33:49.680 | For those who are watching on youtube.com or the deeplife.com, episode 260.

00:33:55.000 | Okay.

00:33:56.000 | Here's the album cover art.

00:33:57.000 | So which ear is he saying is longer, Jesse?

00:33:59.280 | The right?

00:34:00.280 | The left.

00:34:01.280 | Cal's right adjustable headband is a little longer than the left.

00:34:05.000 | Okay.

00:34:06.000 | Now, Jesse, do you remember the explanation for that?

00:34:08.000 | Because I remember this.

00:34:09.800 | No.

00:34:10.800 | All right.

00:34:12.120 | So my memory, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, my memory is...

00:34:15.200 | Here's the issue.

00:34:16.200 | The image that they used, the photo they used to make this cover art had right over on the

00:34:22.920 | right side a microphone.

00:34:26.080 | Because when I'm doing the podcast, I have a microphone over there, right?

00:34:29.240 | And we didn't want the microphone in this picture.

00:34:32.080 | So my memory is that the team, our web team or design team that worked on this copied

00:34:38.640 | the left side and moved it over to the right side.

00:34:42.520 | So I think like the headphone and part of my face on the right side, they copied from

00:34:47.320 | the left side that was not obstructed by the microphone.

00:34:49.920 | So they could have a picture of me without a microphone.

00:34:53.320 | Because typically I'd have a microphone right on my right side.

00:34:56.840 | I think that is why the headphone look a little bit weird in the cover art is because they

00:35:01.480 | copied and pasted and just flipped over the left side to the right side.

00:35:04.560 | And in doing that, they didn't exactly line it up.

00:35:08.240 | So yes, my headphones are...

00:35:09.560 | I never noticed it until now, actually.

00:35:11.360 | Yep.

00:35:12.360 | I don't know why I remember that, but it's a little tidbit.

00:35:15.320 | I mean, of course, the easier thing to do is just to take a photo without the microphone,

00:35:19.600 | which is what we do for our thumbnails now.

00:35:20.960 | But I think at the time, they had the photo and they wanted to keep moving.

00:35:25.280 | So there you go.

00:35:26.400 | This is critical information for the masses, but I thought that'd be fun to do.

00:35:30.880 | All right, let's keep rolling.

00:35:31.880 | What do we have next?

00:35:32.880 | All right.

00:35:33.880 | Next question is from Natalie.

00:35:36.680 | My partner and I have very different understandings of time.

00:35:40.380 | Something that could take me 10 minutes, for example, watering houseplants might take him

00:35:44.520 | an hour.

00:35:45.520 | Not because he's not capable of doing it faster, just because he moves slowly.

00:35:50.080 | He often complains there's not enough time in the day.

00:35:53.040 | Are there people in the world that really just operate on a different plane of time

00:35:56.080 | because of their mindset about responsibilities and adulting obligations?

00:36:00.240 | Well, I think there's two possible things going on here, and it's probably some combination

00:36:07.800 | of the two.

00:36:08.800 | So first of all, I want to take this point.

00:36:11.300 | Is it possible that some people on certain type of work just are fundamentally slower?

00:36:17.760 | And this might be controversial, but I think the answer here is yes, and because I'm using

00:36:21.480 | myself as an example here.

00:36:23.040 | There are certain things in my life I cannot do fast.

00:36:27.280 | In particular, getting ready in the morning to go to work, or getting ready in the morning

00:36:31.600 | to go to an event, or to prepare for the podcast.

00:36:36.720 | I cannot do that fast, and I try.

00:36:40.040 | I mean, I have systems I've tried with timers and different steps, and I lay things out,

00:36:46.640 | and I don't know why.

00:36:48.480 | I just can't get ready for anything in under 15 or 20 minutes.

00:36:54.880 | It just takes me forever.

00:36:55.880 | I don't know where these inefficiencies are coming out, and I've really tried to squeeze

00:36:58.520 | them out of my life, and I don't know why I can't do those logistical steps fast.

00:37:03.720 | It's not even hard logistical steps.

00:37:05.040 | It's not like I have to put on elaborate makeup or do a complicated hairdo.

00:37:08.680 | It just takes me a really long time.

00:37:10.600 | My wife, by contrast, when it comes time to get ready for something, it's like Superman

00:37:15.780 | in the phone booth.

00:37:16.780 | She's like, "Hold on one second.

00:37:18.560 | The door will kind of swing shut and then swing back open, and she's completely ready."

00:37:22.320 | I have no idea how she does that, and I've tried for years to be faster, and I don't

00:37:26.720 | know where these inefficiencies are coming from.

00:37:29.160 | I just can't do that particular thing fast.

00:37:32.400 | So there may be, in our response here, there may be something to this that some people

00:37:37.500 | for some types of things, it's just the inefficiencies aggregate, and they are just slower, and that's

00:37:42.840 | just who they are, and it's not due to lack of trying.

00:37:48.020 | On the other hand, we have this other potential issue which you hint at here, which is a mindset

00:37:54.560 | issue.

00:37:56.000 | A mindset issue about this word, which I don't always love, but adulting.

00:38:01.980 | So this mindset issue of, "This is not the type of stuff I should have to do or the type

00:38:07.220 | of stuff I want to do," and almost like the toddler not wanting to put their shoes on

00:38:12.680 | and, "All right, I guess I'll water the plants."

00:38:17.280 | This mindset of someone is putting an obligation on your shoulder that you're like, "I shouldn't

00:38:22.720 | have to deal with this, and I'm for sure not going to give this any alacrity."

00:38:26.800 | That is also a common thing, especially with younger adults.

00:38:31.020 | So you're making this transition from a sort of less structured, less urgent student life

00:38:36.740 | to a professional life, where now we own a house and I have a job and I have to do these

00:38:39.880 | various things.

00:38:40.880 | Now, for most people, if you end up having kids, that pushes the adulting woes right

00:38:45.280 | out of you because it's, "No, you got to just do everything fast and it's hard and there

00:38:50.120 | is no, 'I don't want to change the diaper.'

00:38:53.360 | The kids scream, you're going to have to do it."

00:38:54.640 | But in that key adult period where you're no longer a college student, but you're not

00:39:00.160 | a middle-aged father of three, this type of mindset does happen.

00:39:05.160 | So there is a slowness that can come simply from not wanting or being fully on board with

00:39:11.800 | having to do the things you have to do.

00:39:14.560 | If that's what's going on here, Natalie, with your partner, then here he probably just needs

00:39:21.720 | to grow the hell up.

00:39:24.000 | This is a place where the answer is, "Hey, you are an adult.

00:39:27.920 | A hundred years ago when you were 18, you'd be running a household.

00:39:32.480 | Get over it.

00:39:33.480 | You have to do stuff.

00:39:34.480 | Organize, get things done, be responsible.

00:39:37.680 | It's no one's fault that life has a lot of things you have to do.

00:39:41.640 | There's no one for you to complain to or gripe to that life requires you to fill out paperwork

00:39:46.080 | and pay bills and do your taxes and you actually have to water plants and you have to dust

00:39:50.760 | things because otherwise they get really dusty.

00:39:52.640 | Just, okay, get over it.

00:39:54.160 | Look, you haven't been drafted to fight in a war and we're not losing 30% of our population

00:39:58.560 | to the plague, so things could be worse.

00:40:00.200 | Grow the hell up."

00:40:01.280 | I think that's a perfectly sound reaction if that's what's going on.

00:40:05.040 | I think it's some combination.

00:40:06.400 | There might be very specific tasks that he is just slow at.

00:40:10.360 | Again, I can attest from personal experience, some people just can't do fast.

00:40:16.520 | Again, it's time to get ready in our house.

00:40:19.440 | Ten minutes later, I'm pondering the reality of the socks I'm holding where my wife has

00:40:26.520 | not only gotten ready but has gone to the event and come back already.

00:40:30.320 | I'm trying but I'm like, "Okay, brown.

00:40:32.880 | But what is brown?

00:40:33.880 | Is this a brown sock?

00:40:35.320 | Where do socks come from?"

00:40:37.680 | Meanwhile, she's finished building a deck.

00:40:41.160 | So there are some things that we just go slower on.

00:40:44.080 | But if you sense the mindset is, "I shouldn't have to do this work and that's why I'm being

00:40:49.560 | slow," you can tell him, Cal says, "Grow the hell up."

00:40:51.800 | Yeah, life is complicated.

00:40:53.640 | Now what?

00:40:54.640 | That needs to be the motto especially of people who are just entering adulthood.

00:41:01.640 | All right.

00:41:02.640 | What do we got?

00:41:04.040 | Let's do another question.

00:41:05.040 | All right.

00:41:06.040 | What do we got next?

00:41:07.040 | All right.

00:41:08.040 | The next question is from Steve.

00:41:10.360 | "Hi, Cal.

00:41:11.980 | How has using the Remarkable 2 tablet changed or influenced how you use your working memory.txt

00:41:19.520 | file, if at all?

00:41:21.380 | Has your working memory file habits usage evolved over time?"

00:41:25.260 | So again, this question is also not directly related to slowness or slow productivity,

00:41:30.500 | but we talked about my Remarkable tablet in a recent episode.

00:41:34.220 | So I figured this would be a good follow-up.

00:41:36.940 | All right.

00:41:37.940 | So what is Steve referencing when he says my working memory.txt file?

00:41:42.020 | This is a long-time habit I've talked about a bunch of times on the show where on the

00:41:45.220 | desktop of my computer, I keep a plain text file, no formatting.

00:41:50.060 | This is just straight up text edit on my Mac.

00:41:52.680 | It's called working memory.txt.

00:41:55.820 | And I really do, when I'm on my computer, use it like an extension of my memory.

00:41:59.060 | I can type notes, ideas I'm trying to organize, keep track of things.

00:42:03.500 | It's taking my working memory and extending it.

00:42:08.120 | And so the question is, now that I have a Remarkable 2 tablet, do I use that for my

00:42:11.860 | working memory instead of the text file on the computer?

00:42:15.720 | And Steve, here's what I found works best for me, at least in the last few weeks of

00:42:19.740 | experimenting with this.

00:42:21.180 | When I'm doing work on my computer itself, I use the working memory.txt text file on

00:42:27.100 | my computer.

00:42:29.060 | And the reason is I can type faster than I can write.

00:42:33.220 | So I really can capture so much information in this working memory.txt file.

00:42:37.580 | I mean, I'm looking at it right now on my screen.

00:42:41.100 | Earlier when I was prepping this podcast, for example, when I'm grabbing questions I

00:42:44.740 | want to answer on the show, I just paste them into working memory.txt so that I have a place

00:42:48.780 | for them.

00:42:49.780 | And then I delete some I don't like, and I copy them from working memory.txt eventually

00:42:53.680 | to my script.

00:42:54.820 | I have a list on here now called Major Admin.

00:42:57.980 | So I'm keeping track of a few major things I really want to get done in the week ahead.

00:43:01.140 | I'm kind of keeping track of this on here for now.

00:43:04.660 | I have some notes on, now that my new time block planner is back, I can do daily metric

00:43:10.180 | tracking again.

00:43:11.860 | So I've thrown some notes on here about the codes I'm using for the metrics that I've

00:43:17.260 | been tracking up here at Dartmouth this summer.

00:43:19.540 | So all of this is just on this file.

00:43:22.060 | It grows and expands and contracts as I work on my computer throughout the day.

00:43:25.940 | It's just so fast.

00:43:26.940 | It can hold so much information.

00:43:28.380 | It's so easy to scroll through and see.

00:43:30.300 | I love it as a tool.

00:43:32.520 | And I still use that when I'm on my computer.

00:43:35.180 | However, one of the advantages of my Remarkable is when I'm away from my computer, I can use

00:43:43.260 | the Remarkable as my working memory file.

00:43:46.400 | What I actually use, if you're a Remarkable user, there's something called a quick sheet.

00:43:49.580 | So it's a notebook that's very easy to get to.

00:43:53.540 | So it's always there.

00:43:55.060 | It's called a quick sheet.

00:43:56.060 | I always just have a page in the quick sheets for my daily non-computer working memory.txt.

00:44:02.500 | And this has been really helpful if I'm out walking or thinking.

00:44:07.260 | I can jot things down on there.

00:44:08.500 | It's been very helpful during class, during the lecture for the course I'm teaching up

00:44:11.700 | here to be able to take notes on things.

00:44:14.260 | Or if we're having a discussion, I can keep track of some points, remember to come back

00:44:18.420 | to this.

00:44:19.420 | Or I can quickly sketch out the structure I want for the class that day.

00:44:23.180 | So there's been many occasions where I'm not at my computer where having a notebook to

00:44:27.240 | use as a substitute working memory.txt has been useful.

00:44:31.020 | I wasn't really doing that as much before I got my Remarkable.

00:44:34.180 | But now the Remarkable is always with me.

00:44:35.660 | So now I have a dual format working memory, we could call it discipline.

00:44:43.860 | Here for when I'm on the computer, the quick sheet on my Remarkable when I'm away from

00:44:49.060 | the computer.

00:44:50.060 | But the key thing here is having a place unstructured, easily accessible, where you can work through

00:44:55.500 | your thoughts, capture things, move things around is really critical.

00:45:00.040 | And it is really useful.

00:45:01.600 | And all you have to remember to integrate this into a reasonable organizational system

00:45:06.140 | is that when you do your daily shutdown, if you have like a time block planner, you'll

00:45:10.640 | have the shutdown complete checkbox to check every day.

00:45:14.940 | One of the things you have to review is your working memory sources.

00:45:18.140 | And this means throughout the day, not only can you use this just to temporarily hold

00:45:21.620 | things you don't want to keep in your mind or temporarily organize information, you can

00:45:25.420 | take notes on things that you don't know what to do with in the moment.

00:45:28.380 | And it's just one of your David Allen inboxes that you look at at the end of the day.

00:45:32.220 | So you have this peace of mind throughout your day that as you capture things on there,

00:45:35.260 | it's not going to be forgotten.

00:45:36.540 | And you look over at the end of the day and say, okay, is any of this I need to move into

00:45:39.740 | one of my more permanent systems or put something on my calendar?

00:45:43.020 | Or in some cases, I'll just leave it on there.

00:45:44.620 | So yeah, I use this thing every day.

00:45:46.220 | And I need to see this tomorrow.

00:45:47.400 | So I'll just leave it on there.

00:45:48.720 | As long as you add a review of your working memory, inboxes, be them on your computer,

00:45:54.660 | be them on a paper notebook, be them on something like a remarkable, as long as you add that

00:45:58.500 | review to your shutdown routine.

00:46:01.080 | This becomes a very powerful system for expanding your ability to remember and organize things.

00:46:06.300 | I think it's a good question, because it gets to this sort of cybernetic complexity about

00:46:11.620 | what type of tools to use in what type of situations to extend your actual ability to

00:46:17.100 | organize things.

00:46:19.980 | What do you do on the weekends in terms of because you don't have a shutdown on the weekends,

00:46:24.180 | right?

00:46:25.180 | I don't have a shutdown on the weekends.

00:46:27.580 | The new so that the new time block planner, I redesigned the weekends into I call them

00:46:32.740 | the weekend pages.

00:46:34.460 | And so now my new time block planner has, and I'll show this next week on the show when

00:46:39.180 | I bring one down to the studio.

00:46:42.660 | So Saturday and Sunday has a, like a column that you can use for both metric tracking

00:46:48.220 | if you want to track metrics on the weekend, and roughly structuring notes, right?

00:46:52.920 | So you know, my Sunday box for this weekend is where I had the reminder that you know,

00:46:56.780 | we were recording at 10am.

00:46:59.740 | Under that I have pretty extensive weekend capture.

00:47:03.820 | So you there's space for you to capture ideas and thoughts to come up during the weekend.

00:47:07.980 | And then the idea is when you get to the next week, and you're making your weekly plan,

00:47:12.020 | and the weekly plan now faces the weekend pages, the captures right there.

00:47:16.980 | And you can see and process all those things when you set up the weekly plan.

00:47:20.360 | So I actually I rewrote or updated the introduction to the planner to talk about this new weekend

00:47:25.460 | pages discipline.

00:47:26.740 | But now it's great, you can have this rough plan for your weekend, you can do metric tracking

00:47:30.340 | if you want, and you can capture things that happen throughout the weekend in the planner

00:47:34.780 | on those pages.

00:47:35.780 | And then when you build your weekly plan, so Monday morning, or whenever you do it,

00:47:39.860 | you see all the stuff you captured, and that's when you integrate it.

00:47:42.340 | Got it.

00:47:43.340 | Because it was a key thing for me is having a consistent place for capture.

00:47:48.380 | For the weekend, I felt it was better.

00:47:49.980 | What I was doing before with the old planners, I would often write these notes on the Monday

00:47:54.300 | page, so that when I got the Monday, I would see them, but I prefer them to be on their

00:47:58.500 | own weekend page, so that you know, this is where these thoughts came from.

00:48:01.980 | They came from the weekends, the Monday task list can be for Monday.

00:48:05.900 | So yeah, again, all this stuff you tweak.

00:48:11.820 | But this works well for me.

00:48:13.180 | Alright, so I wanted to end today, this segment, at least with a case study.

00:48:18.020 | So I always appreciate when when readers send in their own experiences with this advice.

00:48:22.860 | Alright, so this case study, and this is very relevant.

00:48:25.060 | I mean, I think this is very relevant to slow productivity.

00:48:28.420 | Because this is a case study, this is from Joni from Trinidad.

00:48:32.980 | And she's offering, she thinks, a perspective about slow productivity and motherhood that

00:48:40.740 | is not always emphasized.

00:48:43.300 | I think it's important to get different experiences in on these issues.

00:48:49.540 | So I want to read this case study that was sent to me from Joni from Trinidad.

00:48:54.300 | She says, "I'm a 37-year-old single mother and researcher in Trinidad.

00:48:57.620 | I was performing poorly as an undergraduate student until an unplanned pregnancy at age

00:49:04.780 | 21.

00:49:06.300 | At this point, the time constraints of motherhood pushed me into what I now understand is self-enforced

00:49:10.740 | blocks of deep work.

00:49:12.100 | I went on to graduate with a 3.96 GPA, was valedictorian, and received a full postgraduate

00:49:19.060 | scholarship to do my PhD in the States, where I ended up having my second child and completed

00:49:25.540 | my PhD at age 30.

00:49:27.500 | I'm currently active in research and teaching in my country and applying to do a postdoc.

00:49:33.100 | I am disappointed at the lack of female perspectives about deep work.

00:49:37.900 | There are gender inequities in academia, not just between men and women, but in particular

00:49:42.100 | between mothers and non-mothers.

00:49:45.180 | I've also always been intrigued at the ways in which I am less productive when my children

00:49:50.260 | go to visit their father.

00:49:51.580 | In my experience, care work does not necessarily detract from deep work, but with the right

00:49:56.900 | approach enforces and enhances it.

00:50:00.460 | Care work provides a rich and insightful depth of perspective that adds to the quality of

00:50:04.660 | deep work and a powerful impetus for an alternative identity outside of motherhood.

00:50:09.860 | I would argue that a life entrenched in deep work alone is one that is out of touch with

00:50:13.780 | humanity, reality, and meaningful research objectives.

00:50:17.540 | With the current anti-natalist trends, especially in academia, and the prevailing narrative

00:50:22.700 | that motherhood leads to career suicide and an unfulfilled life, I think it is really

00:50:26.380 | important to present and discuss a more balanced perspective on deep work.

00:50:30.900 | I love your work, Cal."

00:50:33.780 | That kind of makes it seem like I wrote that.

00:50:35.500 | I love your work, Cal, not I love your work from Cal.

00:50:38.700 | I thought that was really interesting because there is, you know, I think this is a trend,

00:50:45.540 | right?

00:50:46.540 | There is often a trend of seeing various things like care work, be it with kids or be it,

00:50:51.780 | you know, sick relatives, maybe parents, aging parents at home, to always see that as antagonistic

00:50:59.020 | to the production of meaningful work or your ability to produce work.

00:51:04.140 | And so I think Joni gives an interesting alternative note, which said that's not true for everyone.

00:51:08.540 | In fact, for her and for others, you know, care work can actually help focus and enhance

00:51:14.500 | and add more depth to your other work, and your other work can add more depth and meaning

00:51:20.100 | to your identity with care work.

00:51:21.420 | And I think that's a really interesting perspective.

00:51:23.580 | We discussed that some in my interview with Yael from Brown.

00:51:29.700 | This was in the spring sometime, so I don't know how far back that was, but we talked

00:51:33.980 | about this where she went into, was it Yael Showborn?

00:51:38.660 | I don't know if I'm getting her last name right.

00:51:40.780 | I'm trying to remember this right off the cuff.

00:51:42.980 | But you go find this interview back from a few months ago, and she got into this, I think,

00:51:47.940 | about because she studies the psychology of work, and in particular, its intersections

00:51:53.580 | with other identities like care work.

00:51:55.820 | And I think she had some good points about backing up what Joni said here, that it actually

00:52:00.860 | can lead to a more sophisticated approach to your work.

00:52:05.460 | It can lead to a more sophisticated and durable self-identity.

00:52:08.820 | So I think it's a really cool thread to actually pull on there.

00:52:13.220 | Different people have different experiences, but I think that's worth saying.

00:52:16.620 | This is not a zero-sum time game.

00:52:19.620 | So it's not whoever has more time to dedicate to intellectual work will have a better result

00:52:26.940 | than those who have less.

00:52:28.220 | And that's the entire zero-sum game.

00:52:29.980 | And so if someone has more time than me, especially for reasons I can't control, then all I should

00:52:34.500 | have is upsetness or bitterness towards that person.

00:52:36.740 | I think Joni gives us interesting alternative perspectives here.

00:52:40.540 | It's complicated.

00:52:41.540 | What produces really interesting work is not just time.

00:52:44.340 | It's not just complete lack of other commitments in your life.

00:52:47.620 | So I thought that was a cool perspective.

00:52:49.620 | Also Trinidad.

00:52:52.340 | I really like seeing, Jesse, the different places where we have listeners write or call

00:52:57.820 | in from.

00:52:58.820 | I think we're getting pretty international.

00:53:00.540 | Trinidad, I don't know if we've had Trinidad before.

00:53:04.500 | We've been hearing more from various African countries that I don't think we had listeners

00:53:08.460 | before.

00:53:09.860 | Certainly India, there's a big listenership in India, a lot of different European places.

00:53:14.540 | Brazil, we have a good listener group I've learned in Brazil.

00:53:18.180 | So I do like the international.

00:53:19.900 | I think that's really interesting.

00:53:20.980 | And I love learning the different ways that different countries think about these concepts

00:53:26.220 | because it really can differ.

00:53:28.700 | Yeah, the audience is very, very diverse, like all sorts of countries.

00:53:33.700 | Okay, so what I want to do is we have a final segment.

00:53:37.180 | I want to get to the books I read in July as we do when we get to the new month.

00:53:43.540 | Before we do, though, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that helps make this

00:53:46.300 | show possible.

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00:54:07.780 | summaries of all of these nonfiction books and podcasts.

00:54:10.520 | They're called Blinks.

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00:54:16.140 | Jesse and I use Blinkist.

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00:54:37.420 | Use a tool like Blinkist to aid you.

00:54:39.400 | And the way that I use it and the way Jesse uses it is to triage potential books to read.

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00:54:51.360 | Jesse tends to listen to them.

00:54:52.360 | I'll either, I mean, read them, I should say.

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00:55:04.440 | I need to know from it.

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00:56:16.920 | I also want to mention my longtime friend Adam Gilbert and his company, My Body Tutor.

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00:56:47.560 | How are you going to eat?

00:56:48.740 | What specific types of exercises, routines are we going to do to match your specific

00:56:52.860 | goals and your specific lifestyle?

00:56:54.880 | Then here's the key thing.

00:56:56.300 | Using the app, you check in every day.

00:56:59.900 | How did it go with the, you know, did I eat today?

00:57:01.320 | How did it go with the fitness routine?

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00:58:05.920 | All right, let's move on now to our final segment.

00:58:10.580 | Today I wanted to review the books I read up here in New Hampshire in July of 2023.

00:58:18.840 | So the first book I read in July was Shadow Divers by Robert Kirsten.

00:58:25.040 | I had read this book before, back when it first came out.

00:58:28.640 | Whatever the context was, I was just looking for a fun, fast read that would be distracting.

00:58:33.920 | It's a fantastic nonfiction book.

00:58:35.960 | It's a classic of the narrative nonfiction genre.

00:58:40.320 | What it does is it follows a group of deep sea wreck divers from New Jersey.

00:58:46.000 | These are people who dive very deep, close to 200 feet deep.

00:58:50.120 | It's very, very dangerous to try to look at or explore shipwrecks.

00:58:54.100 | They find a U-boat, a Nazi U-boat that no one knew about, sunk off the coast of New

00:58:58.720 | Jersey.

00:58:59.920 | The book is about their quest to figure out which U-boat is this.

00:59:05.040 | They have to do these very dangerous dives, 200 feet down, going into the twisted corridors

00:59:11.800 | of this old submarine.

00:59:13.400 | It's one of these stories as a nonfiction writer you dream about coming across.

00:59:17.160 | I'm not going to spoil too much, but let me just say multiple people die and there's multiple

00:59:23.320 | sort of hair-raising undersea disasters that people have to try to escape from.

00:59:30.040 | It reads like a Clive Kustler book, but it's all real.

00:59:32.960 | I'd read it before, but it had been a long time, and it was just as good as I remembered.

00:59:38.600 | The next book I read was Power in Progress, the new MIT Press book by Darren Osmoglu and

00:59:45.640 | Simon Johnson.

00:59:46.640 | What I've been trying to do up here is every morning I read a chapter from an academic

00:59:53.480 | press book, sort of like kind of an intellectual book.

00:59:56.200 | This is part of my Dartmouth disciplines up here, is I'm always working on just a straight-up

01:00:01.640 | academics writing about ideas book.

01:00:03.920 | This was the first one.

01:00:04.920 | I read this the week I was up here alone.

01:00:08.200 | I read it mainly the week I was up here alone in June, but I finished it in July, so I put

01:00:12.480 | it up there.

01:00:13.880 | This was a really interesting book.

01:00:15.000 | This is a philosophy of technology book.

01:00:17.280 | These are two MIT professors, Power in Progress.

01:00:20.440 | Essentially their core point, it's kind of a thick book, but essentially their core point

01:00:25.920 | is the impact of technologies, a lot of the impact of new technologies has to do with

01:00:32.640 | the choices we make socially and politically about how we are going to allow those tools

01:00:39.200 | to function and spread.

01:00:42.680 | There are alternative, we look at, hey, this tool came along and it had this economic impact.

01:00:47.480 | There's often alternative ways that tool could have, its impacts could have unfolded if we

01:00:52.280 | made different choices about how we're going to allow this tool to be used or not used,

01:00:56.720 | how we're going to integrate it into our lives.

01:00:59.160 | So it's sort of an extension of the social construction of technology, direction of thought

01:01:06.960 | on philosophy of technology.

01:01:09.800 | Well argued, we could probably do a whole show on it.

01:01:12.240 | There's some points where I had some disagreement, some points I thought were super compelling.

01:01:18.160 | I think some of the historical examples maybe were very, very good, whereas some of the

01:01:22.200 | applications to very modern technologies, it's just hard when they're new, but felt

01:01:26.640 | like it didn't quite have its finger on the pulse or didn't quite feel accurate.

01:01:31.320 | But overall, it's a very powerful theory.

01:01:37.000 | These types of theories are well known in philosophy of technology, but this is very

01:01:41.960 | well articulated, very forcefully delivered and very relevant right now.

01:01:46.640 | I think this is what's happening right now with generative AI.

01:01:49.680 | There are a lot of people who are thinking, wait, we have some choice here about what

01:01:55.240 | we want this technology to do or not do.

01:01:57.600 | We're not just passive, sitting back and this technology is going to do what it is going

01:02:02.040 | to do.

01:02:03.280 | The Authors Guild, for example, has this big petition out right now, 8,000 authors, including

01:02:08.360 | many, many big names signed it.

01:02:10.640 | It was an open letter to the artificial intelligence companies saying, essentially, don't use our

01:02:15.420 | books to train your models.

01:02:16.920 | It is not important for society or culture that we have generative AI models that can

01:02:23.080 | write books in the style of various existing authors.

01:02:26.020 | You don't have our permission to use your books to train your models.

01:02:28.560 | It's a very interesting application of the ideas from Power and Progress put into action.

01:02:34.920 | If you study technology, you've probably heard of this book.

01:02:36.840 | It's been splashy, but I really enjoyed it.

01:02:39.800 | Next book I read, this I read on the ... Essentially, two of these books are plane ride books.

01:02:44.880 | This I read largely flying back to DC from New Hampshire.

01:02:48.400 | It was River of the Gods by Candice Millard.

01:02:52.960 | She also wrote, she's known for River of Doubt about Teddy Roosevelt's track, post-presidency

01:02:58.160 | track to South America that almost killed him.

01:03:00.840 | River of the Gods is about the quest to find, for the Europeans to find the source of the

01:03:07.520 | Nile.

01:03:08.520 | Basically, very well written.

01:03:10.920 | I love Candice's style.

01:03:12.720 | She's a very good writer.

01:03:14.360 | She adds a narrative thread to these otherwise complicated research histories.

01:03:19.440 | Main takeaway you get from this, not a great job to be a 19th century explorer.

01:03:29.320 | This is what you come away from is, man, it was rough out there just condition wise and

01:03:34.360 | what they went through.

01:03:36.440 | The one character in this book, among other maladies to happen to him is getting a spear

01:03:43.000 | stuck through his mouth.

01:03:44.000 | I think it got stuck into the palate of his mouth.

01:03:47.300 | That's not great.

01:03:48.300 | There's another period where he just got swarmed by beetles, including one that went into his

01:03:52.800 | ear and he couldn't get it out.

01:03:55.440 | He tried anything he could to get it out.

01:03:58.720 | It finally, it burst his eardrum and finally over weeks and weeks, it died in there.

01:04:04.040 | It got broken up by the earwax and pieces came out and he could never hear out of that

01:04:06.960 | ear again.

01:04:07.960 | It's not fun.

01:04:08.960 | Let's put it that way.

01:04:10.400 | It's not fun to be there.

01:04:11.880 | Did he find the source?

01:04:13.720 | This one, yeah.

01:04:14.720 | They did.

01:04:15.720 | They did finally find it.

01:04:16.720 | It was interesting.

01:04:17.720 | They knew so little.

01:04:18.720 | The Europeans knew so little about the interior of Africa until surprisingly late.

01:04:23.540 | This is in the mid 1800s that they're doing this exploration.

01:04:28.940 | The big lake there, which they named Lake Victoria, but now I think the name has gone

01:04:31.980 | back to the indigenous name, which I don't have on the tips of my fingers, is huge.

01:04:36.100 | It's like the second largest lake in the world or something like this.

01:04:39.420 | They had no idea it existed.

01:04:42.100 | What I learned, this is cool about it.

01:04:43.340 | I guess the Nile flows north to south.

01:04:45.580 | No, no, south to north.

01:04:48.460 | You would think why not just get to the Nile in Egypt, where it empties into the Mediterranean,

01:04:55.340 | and just take a boat up until you got to the source.

01:04:58.720 | Why couldn't you just do that?

01:05:00.580 | The issue is there's this region of the Nile, if you follow it south into Africa, where

01:05:06.700 | it's this massive, essentially swampy marshland.

01:05:11.620 | It's not just a clear river all the way up to its source.

01:05:14.900 | That's where you get lost.

01:05:15.900 | There's this huge period.

01:05:16.900 | You just get lost.

01:05:17.900 | In fact, you can't even get boats through it because it's so choked with vegetation

01:05:22.140 | and this and that.

01:05:23.140 | It's huge.

01:05:24.140 | You can't just take a boat easily.

01:05:25.780 | People tried that.

01:05:26.780 | You just get lost in this swamp.

01:05:27.900 | You can't even navigate with a boat.

01:05:29.180 | You had to come in.

01:05:30.180 | They came in over by the Arabian Peninsula in East Africa, by the Horn of Africa.

01:05:37.820 | I guess that's maybe Somalia now.

01:05:40.160 | They hiked in from the east.

01:05:42.260 | That's how they eventually found it.

01:05:44.320 | There's a cool Lincoln Childe book.

01:05:48.340 | Lincoln Childe's a thriller writer who sometimes writes with Douglas Preston, who's also a

01:05:53.900 | New Yorker writer and who wrote that, is the head of the Authors Guild, which wrote that

01:05:58.160 | letter we just talked about when we talked about Power and Progress.

01:06:00.540 | He's the source of the letter to the AI companies.

01:06:03.340 | Anyways, Lincoln Childe often writes thrillers with him, and Lincoln Childe also writes thrillers

01:06:07.880 | on his own.

01:06:09.380 | He has a thriller that takes place in that swamp part of the Nile.

01:06:14.580 | The premise is there's this tomb, this lost tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh that's under the

01:06:21.780 | waters of this swamp.

01:06:22.780 | It's like a classic Lincoln Childe techno thriller.

01:06:25.460 | I forgot the name of this particular book, but they bring in all this fancy equipment

01:06:29.380 | to the giant swamp land to find this thing.

01:06:33.540 | They build these caissons and bring the water out.

01:06:37.380 | They're trying to get access to this ancient buried tomb that's under these massive swamps.

01:06:42.060 | It's a cool book, but not one I read.

01:06:44.820 | Why do they want to know the source of the Nile so much?

01:06:47.700 | I don't know.

01:06:48.700 | People like to know these things.

01:06:49.700 | It was just a question.

01:06:50.900 | It's like this huge open question, like, "What's the source of the Nile?"

01:06:53.500 | No one knew.

01:06:55.140 | People had asked this question since antiquity.

01:06:57.100 | Yeah, it's not that it was practical.

01:07:00.860 | It's not useful outside of just ... This was the heyday of the British explorer and the

01:07:10.060 | royal geographic ... I'm Googling it right now.

01:07:11.740 | There's a blue sign that says the source of the Nile.

01:07:14.220 | It's like a stop sign.

01:07:16.780 | Here it is.

01:07:17.780 | This is the source.

01:07:18.780 | Well, okay, so that's the other question.

01:07:20.860 | It's this big lake, but people then pushed it further to say, "Well, where are the headwaters

01:07:26.640 | that feed into this lake?"

01:07:29.580 | You can go beyond the lake and say, "Okay, here's the farthest source of water that pours

01:07:33.320 | into this giant lake."

01:07:35.580 | It's a cool ... There's these huge falls there.

01:07:37.580 | Yeah, I'm looking at the pictures.

01:07:39.460 | Lake Victoria.

01:07:40.460 | There's these huge falls.

01:07:42.100 | There's a riff in the earth, and the lake pours over it with these massive waterfalls,

01:07:48.220 | huge.

01:07:49.220 | It's really, really cool.

01:07:50.220 | I would love to see that at some point.

01:07:52.340 | That beetle thing sounds horrible.

01:07:53.660 | It was just horrible.

01:07:56.860 | The next book I read was called The Last Action Heroes by Nick the Selmier.

01:08:04.700 | I really like this book.

01:08:05.700 | You know, Jesse knows this.

01:08:06.740 | I love books about the movie industry.

01:08:09.020 | This is a book about the heyday of the 1980s action movie stars, Stallone, Schwarzenegger,

01:08:15.660 | Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme.

01:08:19.300 | It tells their stories, and then the stories of what was happening in the movie industry.

01:08:23.340 | I just thought it was fascinating.

01:08:25.900 | If you like movie stuff, this is really fascinating.

01:08:27.800 | These guys were so larger than life.

01:08:29.260 | It was a very interesting, very episodic ... I listened to this on Audible, because these

01:08:33.860 | type of books are great for it, because each chapter is, "Okay, now we're going to Jean-Claude

01:08:37.580 | Van Damme.

01:08:38.580 | Now we're going to spend the chapter on Steven Seagal."

01:08:40.860 | They're self-contained.

01:08:41.860 | Really interesting to hear about ... The thing I came away with this from is what ended this

01:08:48.020 | era was basically Jurassic Park.

01:08:51.140 | The reason why Jurassic Park ended this era, because the last action hero, this massive

01:08:55.020 | Schwarzenegger movie that bombed, came out the same weekend as Jurassic Park.

01:08:59.780 | The reason why that ended it was we're very used to spectacle right now in a post-Jurassic

01:09:05.580 | Park world that are delivered via special effects.

01:09:09.740 | But in a pre-Jurassic Park world, we're talking the '80s, special effects were ... The best

01:09:13.520 | things we could do is we could blow things up, but we didn't have computer effects.

01:09:17.300 | These super-muscled guys were, in some sense, the spectacle.

01:09:24.820 | Movies larger than life.

01:09:25.820 | Oh my God, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Salon as Rambo is so muscled and over the top that

01:09:31.340 | it was a spectacle.

01:09:32.900 | Nowadays, we get the spectacle by having really cool special effects done by computers.

01:09:37.460 | We can see the Transformers jumping over buildings and stuff like that.

01:09:41.140 | But when you couldn't do that, how do you make a movie larger than life?

01:09:43.620 | You put larger than life people into it and blew things up.

01:09:46.420 | It was like this was the special effects before there was really cool, spectacular special

01:09:51.460 | effects.

01:09:52.680 | It was these guys that were completely ... Either they were muscle-bound to a degree that was

01:09:58.900 | completely attention-catching because it was so novel.

01:10:01.940 | It's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

01:10:02.940 | It's just novelly strong.

01:10:04.080 | Or they were doing crazy martial arts stuff.

01:10:07.620 | So like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Seagal doing the Judo.

01:10:11.860 | They're doing crazy throwing people and doing splits and kicks in the air and all these

01:10:16.340 | type of crazy stuff.

01:10:18.460 | It was spectacle.

01:10:20.620 | So we had to rely on larger than life humans doing larger than life things to get spectacle,

01:10:25.460 | blowing things up around them.

01:10:27.340 | Once Spielberg came along with Jurassic Park, we said, "Oh, we can make spectacle without

01:10:31.460 | having to just have a person be crazy to look at.

01:10:34.560 | We can now make a dinosaur.

01:10:36.140 | We can have robots."

01:10:37.480 | And that was the end of relying on larger than life people just on their own to make

01:10:42.860 | a movie worth watching.

01:10:43.860 | It just wasn't as interesting anymore.

01:10:45.100 | Yeah, Schwarzenegger's strong, but the T-Rex, I have to look, it's a T-Rex.

01:10:48.940 | That's more interesting.

01:10:50.460 | More interesting than Schwarzenegger's biceps.

01:10:52.620 | So I thought it was cool.

01:10:53.620 | If you like movies and you grew up in that era like Jesse and I did, you'll probably

01:10:57.740 | like that book.

01:10:58.740 | Were you big in those?

01:11:00.620 | I mean, I saw all that stuff growing up.

01:11:04.340 | I just saw the Arnold documentary on Netflix and watched through a lot of that stuff.

01:11:10.780 | I recommend the Arnold autobiography.

01:11:13.860 | I recommend that to everybody.

01:11:14.860 | I read that.

01:11:15.860 | Yeah.

01:11:16.860 | Isn't that good?

01:11:17.860 | Yeah.

01:11:18.860 | I was like, "Oh, I'm going to watch that stuff."

01:11:19.860 | Like when I was talking about working out and stuff.

01:11:21.940 | I thought it was better than...

01:11:22.940 | Your first half of the book.

01:11:23.940 | Having read the book, I was somewhat disappointed in the documentary.

01:11:25.940 | The documentary was fine.

01:11:26.940 | Yeah, I knew all the stuff in the documentary.

01:11:27.940 | It was cool to see the things.

01:11:29.620 | I knew it already and it was a little bit less...

01:11:31.180 | It was more cursory.

01:11:32.180 | All right, final book I read.

01:11:33.180 | This was another plain book.

01:11:34.180 | So this was...

01:11:35.180 | I bought one book with one flight, the other book with the other.

01:11:39.760 | It's The Island by Adrian McKinty.

01:11:43.020 | It was like a big splashy thriller from last year, I think.

01:11:47.020 | A lot of fun.

01:11:49.020 | One of these books is all third act.

01:11:51.140 | So it's set up in a thriller premise and then it's just 100% go until the book is over.

01:11:58.960 | So in this case, it's a family ends up stuck on this island in Australia with deliverance

01:12:08.680 | style Australian hillbillies.

01:12:12.220 | And they accidentally kill someone, run someone over with their car.

01:12:16.940 | Anyways, long story short, they realize they're going to kill them.

01:12:21.540 | And so it's this mom and her stepkids are trying to escape on this island, escape being

01:12:28.060 | killed by this whole family on this island.

01:12:29.820 | And they're the only people on the island is this family.

01:12:31.660 | There's no way off.

01:12:32.660 | It's surrounded by shark infested waters.

01:12:34.660 | They set this up early on when they bring the boat over.

01:12:36.820 | You can see the sharks just surrounding the boat, surrounded by shark infested waters,

01:12:41.580 | full of all these crazy Australian hillbillies with all these weapons and motorcycles and

01:12:45.940 | the sun is beating down on them and they're just trying to escape and survive.

01:12:49.380 | And that's it.

01:12:50.380 | And it just goes and it just goes and the stakes are high and they're doing terrible

01:12:53.940 | things to the people they capture.

01:12:55.220 | And that's the book.

01:12:56.220 | And it just goes, goes, goes, goes, goes until the end.

01:12:59.620 | And then that's it.

01:13:00.940 | That's hard to pull off those full third, only third act type books.

01:13:04.300 | Like it's in the exciting climax the entire time.

01:13:06.740 | This one did it right.

01:13:07.740 | And it got a lot of acclaim.

01:13:08.740 | Well, well done.

01:13:09.740 | I had a lot of fun with it.

01:13:13.900 | Don't read if you're squeamish, but it was cool.

01:13:15.900 | It was cool.

01:13:16.900 | I mean, I wonder if you could probably do a movie about it.

01:13:19.700 | It's hard to do these movies that are all third acts.

01:13:22.460 | Nolan did it with Dunkirk.

01:13:23.780 | Dunkirk is all third act.

01:13:25.020 | If you watch that movie, it's just whole thing is the kind of you're in the climax.

01:13:31.340 | Everything's happening for the whole movie.

01:13:33.020 | Hard to do this book.

01:13:34.020 | Does it?

01:13:35.020 | So anyways, I liked it.

01:13:36.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:37.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:38.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:39.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:40.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:41.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:42.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:43.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:44.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:45.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:46.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:47.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:48.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:49.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:50.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:51.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:52.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:53.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:54.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:55.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:56.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:57.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:58.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:13:59.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:00.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:01.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:02.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:03.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:04.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:05.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:06.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:07.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:08.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:09.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:10.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:11.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:12.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:13.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:14.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:15.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:16.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:17.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:18.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:19.020 | I think it's a good book.

01:14:20.020 | I think it's a good book.

Why Working Fast Makes You Less Productive: Work Slowly But Relentlessly Instead | Cal Newport

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