A Pocket Notebook To Replace Your Phone - Be More Productive & Change Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So my recent book tour, uh, I didn't have room in my bag.

00:00:05.100 | So I was packing for two weeks.

00:00:07.080 | I didn't have room to bring my normal, remarkable digital notebook, but I knew

00:00:13.080 | there was a particular idea that I wanted to work on related to a new book that

00:00:17.720 | I'm just starting to ideate about.

00:00:20.080 | So at the last minute, as I was running out the door, I grabbed the fields, note

00:00:24.840 | notebook, say a small pocket size notebook that I had lying around the first 10

00:00:30.980 | pages were already taken up with actually sketches from my kids, but I just grabbed

00:00:35.400 | this and I brought it with me to work on and it worked remarkably well.

00:00:39.960 | I brought it with me in my pocket.

00:00:42.520 | Almost everywhere I went, I worked on this book idea in bars, at hotel

00:00:47.400 | breakfasts, waiting in recording studios to start recording interviews in my hotel

00:00:52.960 | room, uh, on the beach in Santa Monica, as well as walking next to Ladyburg Lake in

00:00:59.040 | Austin, um, I ended up capturing some really interesting thoughts in here.

00:01:03.640 | I thought it was very successful.

00:01:04.920 | So this idea of a small notebook dedicated to a single creative idea, what I'm calling

00:01:12.340 | a single purpose notebook is something that's now starting to fascinate me.

00:01:16.480 | So I want to explore it in today's deep dive.

00:01:18.360 | What's going on with this idea?

00:01:20.360 | Why does it work?

00:01:21.160 | Where does it not work and what should you take away?

00:01:23.400 | So I want to start by noting, I'm not the first to discover this, this idea of having

00:01:30.160 | single purpose notebooks that you use to develop particular ideas is quite common.

00:01:35.040 | I have a couple of visuals here for those who are watching.

00:01:37.160 | So I'm pulling up on the screen right now.

00:01:39.940 | These are notebooks from Picasso.

00:01:42.520 | He had these sketchbooks.

00:01:44.300 | I have one loaded on the screen right now.

00:01:46.520 | He's doing a, uh, an ink sketches of a workers in the water with some annotation.

00:01:52.120 | Here's another Picasso sketch page.

00:01:55.240 | He would bring a Moleskine style notebook, Moleskine being a sort of, it's a brand

00:02:00.120 | now, but it was a general type of notebook.

00:02:01.760 | It was a, especially in Paris was available with an oil skin cover.

00:02:04.920 | He just had these notebooks with him.

00:02:07.400 | To develop his artistic ideas, to work through sketches.

00:02:12.240 | Um, let me try this.

00:02:14.040 | Let me try that.

00:02:14.640 | Let me annotate this.

00:02:16.160 | All right.

00:02:16.440 | Now he wasn't alone in that.

00:02:17.840 | Here's another example.

00:02:20.120 | Bruce Chatwin, the famous British travel writer, actually very dashing.

00:02:26.240 | So I get a picture of him here, sort of like a dashing adventurous guy.

00:02:29.920 | I want to read some Bruce Chatwin.

00:02:31.080 | Um, but he famously carried around these style of notebooks as well.

00:02:35.960 | I have a picture of one loaded up here.

00:02:38.000 | Uh, he would get them from a particular notebook store in Paris

00:02:42.960 | and he would buy them in bulk.

00:02:44.120 | And he would bring them on his, his adventure travels and

00:02:47.280 | just take notes on the trip.

00:02:49.080 | And then we convert these into his sort of famed books.

00:02:52.160 | So we see one of these notebooks here.

00:02:54.480 | Here's another picture of some, uh, Chatwin style notebooks, or

00:02:58.600 | these might be his exact notebook.

00:02:59.760 | Some of these are in museums you can see.

00:03:01.360 | So again, you have this idea, this romantic idea of the traveler.

00:03:05.360 | You know, his first book was on journeys through Patagonia with his

00:03:08.360 | small notebook, just working on this one idea, what I am encountering

00:03:12.520 | in learning a single purpose notebook.

00:03:14.360 | Uh, perhaps the most famous example, Miles Finch from the movie

00:03:20.600 | Elf, the Will Ferrell movie Elf as portrayed by Peter Dinklage.

00:03:24.840 | I'm showing here on the screen, he had this famous idea notebook.

00:03:28.560 | It's right there.

00:03:29.240 | I, you can kind of see it on the screen.

00:03:30.840 | Uh, I'll zoom in.

00:03:32.160 | This was the notebook that was contain all of his ideas for children's book.

00:03:36.720 | So the Miles Finch character was this, uh, hired gun that you could

00:03:41.760 | bring in to write fantastic picture books.

00:03:44.040 | And so he had this notebook where all of his ideas were.

00:03:46.560 | I actually found Jesse, an analysis of online from a notebook

00:03:50.400 | enthusiasts website, where they actually went through and tried to

00:03:54.680 | understand from these still footages, exactly what sort of notebook Peter

00:03:58.200 | Dinklage was using in the movie Elf.

00:03:59.800 | But then again, here's the point though, single purpose.

00:04:02.600 | It's just ideas for a children's book.

00:04:06.280 | I have a single purpose for the notebook.

00:04:07.920 | All right.

00:04:09.120 | So I didn't discover this idea.

00:04:11.000 | Um, it's also not the only type of way to take notes.

00:04:15.040 | Obviously we've, we've talked about this on the show before.

00:04:17.400 | Uh, it's one of multiple ways to take notes.

00:04:20.680 | So I'm going to draw some, let's draw these here.

00:04:23.920 | Throw caution to the wind here.

00:04:25.160 | All right.

00:04:25.560 | So we have this way we just talked about, which I'll illustrate on the

00:04:29.880 | screen by drawing a sort of field notes style notebook expertly drawn.

00:04:36.400 | Um, but there's other ways to take notes as well.

00:04:39.160 | So like an episode 287, I'm just trying to put this single purpose notebook

00:04:42.680 | in a larger context of note-taking.

00:04:44.240 | In episode 287, I talked about how I take notes professionally,

00:04:50.080 | like the main way I take notes.

00:04:52.320 | And I'm drawing a laptop here because the, the key idea about how I take

00:04:57.800 | notes for articles, books, or academic, academic, uh, research as well, is

00:05:04.440 | my whole argument in episode 287 is you really should just go straight

00:05:08.040 | to the tool you use to do that work.

00:05:09.720 | So for books or New Yorker articles, like capture notes in the research

00:05:15.120 | folder in a Scrivener project that you're going to eventually use to

00:05:18.800 | write that book or write that article for an academic article, go straight

00:05:22.480 | to the late tech and mark it up and have it straight in the collaborative

00:05:25.560 | document you're going to use to write the paper for various reasons.

00:05:28.600 | That's what I recommended there.

00:05:30.280 | There's also this whole other approach, which is popular.

00:05:34.000 | The sort of Zettelkasten based second brain approach.

00:05:37.720 | So I'll just kind of draw a brain here where you have a sort of all powerful

00:05:42.640 | system that captures all notes on all things.

00:05:45.320 | And, and if, uh, the Zettelkasten inspired versions of second brain

00:05:48.960 | systems, you can also have serendipitous discovery of new ideas

00:05:53.400 | from this like collection of notes.

00:05:54.800 | So there's, there's other dominant ways that people think about taking

00:05:57.960 | notes in our current digital world.

00:06:00.040 | Uh, Jesse, would you say that picture of a brain is something detailed enough

00:06:04.120 | that you could do like anatomy studies on?

00:06:06.600 | I think it's pretty much it's that accurate.

00:06:08.200 | I've seen you write a brain before.

00:06:09.520 | And that one is, um, average average.

00:06:11.920 | You make a better one.

00:06:12.840 | Yeah, it's not my best brain, not my best brain.

00:06:15.400 | Um, so we have different approaches for taking notes.

00:06:18.320 | I want to put this in context, right?

00:06:19.880 | And each of these approaches have their own.

00:06:22.080 | Uh, they have their own context in which they make sense, right?

00:06:25.200 | So this, my professional note system, I'm going to label it.

00:06:28.400 | You know, this is good for big projects.

00:06:31.520 | I'm working on a project.

00:06:32.600 | I'm writing an article or a paper or a book.

00:06:34.600 | I'm working on a project.

00:06:36.120 | I got to have to collect a huge amount of information relevant to this project and

00:06:39.240 | then eventually make, uh, make sense of it.

00:06:40.960 | Professional note-taking is, uh, about organization, right?

00:06:45.520 | The actual thinking about this information is going to occur

00:06:49.120 | in a very structured way.

00:06:50.080 | You're going to have like long, deep work blocks put aside

00:06:52.920 | for you to work on this project.

00:06:54.480 | I'm going to go for a long walk to do nothing, but think about how to

00:06:57.560 | make sense of all this information.

00:06:59.000 | So it's note-taking as organizational system.

00:07:02.800 | The, uh, second brain, you know, I think this approach is, there's

00:07:06.520 | two things it's good for.

00:07:07.600 | One is if you collect a lot of unstructured information, meaning

00:07:13.120 | stuff that's interesting, but you don't know what to do with it yet.

00:07:16.080 | Something like a second brain system could be beneficial because

00:07:19.200 | that's, what's really good at like, just put this in here.

00:07:21.600 | We'll find connections between information.

00:07:23.440 | Um, so if you're someone who sifts through a lot of information, wants

00:07:26.400 | to hold on to a lot of information, maybe wants to serendipitously

00:07:29.840 | surface ideas, something like a second brain system makes sense.

00:07:33.160 | It's also good for people who like that technology.

00:07:35.320 | Like some people really like building these sort of digital

00:07:39.000 | information management systems.

00:07:40.240 | It's a hobby and it's a cool one.

00:07:41.400 | So it's good for that.

00:07:42.720 | So what is the single purpose notebook method we're talking about today?

00:07:46.200 | What is it good for?

00:07:47.840 | And I'm going to label this creative exploration.

00:07:51.160 | I'm going to write that right here on the screen.

00:07:52.600 | As an aid for exploring a single idea, that's going to require extended

00:08:01.800 | thinking and creative insight to come together.

00:08:03.880 | This is where I think the single purpose notebook can play a big role.

00:08:08.640 | So why is this method just having one notebook dedicated to a single

00:08:13.040 | thing you're trying to understand better or think about or have creative insight?

00:08:16.040 | Why is this method work so well?

00:08:18.160 | Well, there's a couple of things you get working with a dedicated notebook.

00:08:21.280 | One is neuroscientific is focuses your context, your cognitive context.

00:08:27.200 | Everything in this notebook will be related to the one thing you're

00:08:31.120 | trying to develop.

00:08:32.080 | So when you open this notebook and flip through it and start writing, all

00:08:36.320 | your brain associates with this notebook is that one topic you're working on.

00:08:39.680 | So I was working on a book idea in this notebook.

00:08:42.400 | That's what my brain associated it with.

00:08:44.680 | So when I pulled out this notebook, that's what I'm thinking about this

00:08:49.320 | project, and I can slip into that cognitive context quicker, meaning I can

00:08:53.680 | get insights that are higher quality faster.

00:08:55.960 | This is different, for example, than pulling out your phone and

00:08:59.080 | talking to the notes application.

00:09:01.520 | Your phone represents all sorts of cognitive context.

00:09:04.440 | There's email, there's games, there's social media on there.

00:09:06.680 | Your brain starts going all over the place, right?

00:09:08.640 | It's the dog salivating when the digital feed bowl is being

00:09:12.240 | brought in from the kitchen.

00:09:13.360 | Same thing when you go into a professional note taking system.

00:09:18.080 | You know, you associate this with work and all the different

00:09:22.040 | types of things you work on.

00:09:23.160 | It puts you in a work mode, but maybe that's not where you want to be.

00:09:25.800 | We're trying to develop an idea creatively.

00:09:27.560 | You're trying to be original.

00:09:28.600 | Same thing with the second brain system.

00:09:30.400 | It puts you in this sort of, not just brainstorming mode, but a mode

00:09:33.960 | that's associated with everything.

00:09:35.160 | There's so much unstructured information.

00:09:36.800 | Single purpose notebook.

00:09:38.520 | This is for this one thing.

00:09:39.840 | So it puts your brain into the right mindset for not just capturing

00:09:44.720 | thoughts, but developing them.

00:09:45.800 | It's also extremely low friction.

00:09:48.680 | So when you're working on a new idea.

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00:10:24.680 | All right.

00:10:25.080 | Thanks.

00:10:25.400 | Let's get back to it.

00:10:27.200 | That's non-trivial.

00:10:28.120 | Serendipity plays a big role.

00:10:30.680 | I'm walking, I'm in the car and ooh, I just had a flash.

00:10:34.120 | The friction in getting that idea into this notebook is minimal.

00:10:36.880 | You take it out of your pocket, you open it, you write.

00:10:38.840 | Nothing's turned on.

00:10:40.800 | You're not opening any apps.

00:10:41.880 | You're not typing with your thumbs.

00:10:43.160 | And so it's very well suited for exactly the information flow that describes

00:10:48.760 | this type of creative development of a focused idea, which has these moments

00:10:51.720 | of serendipity and quick capture.

00:10:55.280 | The third reason why this method works well is ritualistic.

00:10:58.520 | There's a ritual around it, right?

00:11:01.520 | I mean, the shape of the notebook, the associations you have between

00:11:05.840 | this and Bruce Chatwin, you know, on an iceberg somewhere in Patagonia,

00:11:10.680 | romantically writing his thoughts down.

00:11:12.920 | It's a ritual of pulling out a notebook, a well-worn notebook that you, you

00:11:17.840 | just like the shape and the feel of, and a pen that you really like.

00:11:21.840 | That ritual also helps puts you in a mindset for, in this case, creative

00:11:27.320 | exploration in a way that just loading up your laptop does not, or taking

00:11:31.680 | out your phone does not, or looking into an interface for unstructured

00:11:36.320 | information storage system does not.

00:11:39.080 | Right.

00:11:40.240 | There is, it's a ritualistic aspect of this that puts you into that mindset.

00:11:44.920 | So when you put these three things together, the focus, cognitive

00:11:47.240 | context, the ritualistic aspect, the extremely low friction, it becomes

00:11:50.840 | a very effective tool for the creative exploration of a single topic.

00:11:54.360 | Something you deploy for a single topic.

00:11:57.880 | It works very well for them.

00:11:59.000 | All right.

00:12:00.680 | So what's the protocol here?

00:12:01.760 | Well, if you do creative work as part of your job or your leisure life, things

00:12:07.600 | that require extended thought and creative insight, buy a bunch of notebooks.

00:12:11.520 | Small, like moleskin or even, I like these field note ones even better

00:12:15.400 | because it's flexible, very thin.

00:12:17.960 | So it fits right in your pocket.

00:12:20.200 | Get a pen you like that writes really well on the paper.

00:12:22.480 | I still use my Uniball micros 0.3 millimeters, but whatever you like.

00:12:26.160 | And start bringing them with you to tackle a particular problem.

00:12:30.120 | This is my notebook for this.

00:12:32.480 | I want to wrap my mind around this new idea and maybe write an article about it.

00:12:37.720 | I will carry this notebook with me until I have something smart to say about it.

00:12:41.360 | I need to figure out a product doesn't feel right.

00:12:44.440 | A product market fit here is not right.

00:12:46.480 | I'm going to bring a notebook with me until I feel like I have my arms around it.

00:12:51.240 | There's something going on.

00:12:52.200 | This not might be nonprofessional.

00:12:53.440 | You know, there's something about my life.

00:12:54.840 | That's not feeling good.

00:12:57.240 | I it's what's happening in my career.

00:12:59.440 | I feel this is something non-deep here.

00:13:01.320 | This is, I don't, I'm not resonating here.

00:13:03.280 | Something is not right.

00:13:04.160 | I'm going to bring this notebook with me until I have an idea about what is.

00:13:07.320 | Right.

00:13:08.520 | That's the protocol.

00:13:09.320 | You have a stack of these.

00:13:10.400 | When a problem comes up that requires extended thought and creative insight,

00:13:13.960 | you grab one, dedicate it to that.

00:13:16.240 | And when you're done, you're done with that notebook.

00:13:17.680 | Don't use it for multiple things.

00:13:19.280 | Don't say, well, I only use five pages.

00:13:21.520 | So now I want to use the rest for another problem.

00:13:23.880 | That's like, no, this notebook is for this idea.

00:13:27.240 | That's what it is.

00:13:28.040 | It is a, in the end will be an artifact reflecting my thinking on that particular

00:13:32.920 | idea.

00:13:33.320 | It is a, a hack for extracting more creative insight out of the human brain.

00:13:40.680 | We are by far not the first people to think of it, but this idea, which

00:13:44.840 | used to be common, I think is being less common in an age of digital tools.

00:13:48.560 | And a lot of these digital tools just don't serve the same purpose.

00:13:52.480 | Picasso on an iPad or Bruce Chatwin, you know, type it into obsidian would not be

00:14:00.120 | the same as just having the, the single purpose notebook that you can romantically

00:14:04.640 | and creatively just pull out as needed and develop your thoughts.

00:14:09.000 | So I like this idea.

00:14:11.480 | I'm gonna do more of it.

00:14:12.200 | I'm going to buy a bunch of field notes.

00:14:13.920 | I'm going to have a stack and I'm just going to grab them.

00:14:16.240 | Hey, this week I'm using this notebook for this idea one at a time.

00:14:18.800 | I'm excited about it.

00:14:19.960 | I've done this off and on before, but I'm excited to have an official

00:14:22.800 | protocol here to actually pull from.

00:14:24.440 | Actually, I was going to ask you about that.

00:14:26.400 | So if you have multiple things you're thinking about, you'll just kind of think

00:14:30.320 | about one per week with that notebook.

00:14:32.880 | Yeah.

00:14:33.520 | Or I'd have two notebooks in your pocket.

00:14:35.720 | Yeah.

00:14:36.320 | But maybe I'd only bring, I'd probably just bring one with me at a time, you

00:14:39.680 | know, Hey, I'm going to be gone all day doing X.

00:14:42.560 | This is the idea I'm going to work on.

00:14:44.000 | So let me pull that notebook with me.

00:14:45.400 | Yeah.

00:14:46.000 | Yeah.

00:14:46.320 | That's what I would do it.

00:14:47.040 | I wouldn't have two notebooks with me at the same time.

00:14:49.000 | I always carry around a notebook to like write down things I forget and I have it

00:14:53.440 | in like an old golf holder, but it actually has a slot for like two.

00:14:57.040 | So I can possibly put another one in there for like an idea for like a separate one.

00:15:00.440 | Yeah.

00:15:00.680 | I think a capture notebook's another good idea.

00:15:02.800 | Um, that's a David Allen idea, right?

00:15:06.440 | Like you, you want to have something to capture stuff you have to do as soon as

00:15:10.080 | you think of it so that it's not just in your head.

00:15:12.920 | Uh, they're not as common now because most people spend so much of their day near a

00:15:17.760 | digital device where they can do that capture that it doesn't come up that

00:15:21.840 | often, but if you spend a lot of time away from such a device, I think, I think

00:15:25.120 | that's a great idea.

00:15:25.720 | So you could definitely have two of these things, capture and a idea notebook.

00:15:29.760 | The other question people often have is when do I read it?

00:15:32.160 | And I would say weekly plan, right?

00:15:35.240 | So if you're using a single purpose idea notebook, when you do your weekly plan

00:15:39.360 | each week, that's a good time to sort of go through this, take stock.

00:15:43.080 | Where am I that I reached some conclusion that I now want to put into my strategic

00:15:47.160 | plan, or do I want to put aside time now to actually like take the ideas and build

00:15:52.160 | a plan and start a new project, just confronted every week.

00:15:55.360 | And it might just be.

00:15:56.240 | Nope, still working on it.

00:15:57.760 | Uh, had some ideas, nothing great yet, and there's nothing else to do, but knowing

00:16:02.200 | that you will look at these active ideas, single purpose idea notebooks, knowing

00:16:06.680 | that you will look at them each week will also give you confidence to let these

00:16:09.680 | ideas leave your mind or they will otherwise be a source of stress, like,

00:16:14.080 | don't forget, don't forget, don't forget.

00:16:15.600 | We had this great idea about this book.

00:16:16.880 | Don't forget.

00:16:17.360 | Don't forget.

00:16:17.880 | You really need a way to offload that into a notebook that you trust you will

00:16:21.200 | check.

00:16:21.520 | So I would say use your weekly plan as we just checked in on whatever notebooks

00:16:25.400 | you were actively using that week.

00:16:26.840 | And if you're ready to act on it, that's a great time to actually

00:16:30.120 | figure out what you're going to do.

00:16:31.280 | This might be a task goes into your Trello board.

00:16:33.880 | Time is put aside on your calendar, a project to started, but you really need

00:16:37.840 | the trust that the notebooks won't be forgotten, that the ones you're using

00:16:42.760 | will be checked.

00:16:43.320 | So I think the weekly scale is probably the right scale.

00:16:45.280 | And Isaacson book about Da Vinci.

00:16:47.680 | He had a lot of notebooks.

00:16:48.720 | Yes.

00:16:49.760 | And that's all they had back then.

00:16:51.080 | Yeah.

00:16:51.480 | Yeah.

00:16:51.880 | Yeah.

00:16:52.720 | I mean, I, it's interesting as part of integrating the digital, like we're in

00:16:58.680 | this new digital age, we're trying to live deep lives.

00:17:02.040 | Half of this is I can do halves.

00:17:05.480 | Let me do thirds.

00:17:06.040 | Like a third of this is like knowing what not to use.

00:17:08.240 | Don't get stuck using tech talk all the time.

00:17:11.800 | A third of it is knowing what to use, right?

00:17:14.120 | That, okay.

00:17:14.600 | I need to take advantage of the opportunities that new technologies make

00:17:18.920 | possible.

00:17:19.360 | This is like us with a podcast.

00:17:20.840 | This didn't exist 15 years ago.

00:17:22.560 | And now it could be like the cornerstone of me reaching an audience and making a

00:17:25.960 | living.

00:17:26.280 | Um, and then like the other third is like knowing the analog stuff to really

00:17:30.480 | embrace the, make sure that the digital isn't completely pushing you around.

00:17:34.120 | And this is like one of those cases for ideating.

00:17:37.880 | This is much better than what we're doing.

00:17:39.240 | Digital.

00:17:39.600 | So like the intentional use of analog is really critical when you're trying to

00:17:43.360 | analyze the digital, we forget the analog when we think about what to do or don't

00:17:47.520 | do in the digital, but you know, having the right analog bulwarks against the

00:17:51.440 | digital incursion is just as important as just focusing on the incursion itself

00:17:55.520 | and trying to pick and choose what you're getting involved with.

00:17:57.400 | Also, it's cool.

00:18:00.200 | Bruce Chatwin's a cooler writer than I am.

00:18:01.800 | That's what I'm thinking.

00:18:02.520 | Oh, he probably did it longer than you.

00:18:05.000 | You're getting there.

00:18:05.680 | I need to wear a cool leather jacket more often.

00:18:07.480 | He's going to obsess over quality.

00:18:08.880 | Wear, wear aviator glasses and like a leather jacket.

00:18:11.680 | Let's play kids, smoke, smoke, Marlboro reds.

00:18:16.720 | I think that's, what's going to do it.

00:18:17.800 | Stay deep, stay deep in my first smoking my cigarette, French accent, a lot of

00:18:23.960 | French, a lot of berets.

00:18:24.720 | All right.

00:18:25.320 | So there's, uh, we got a lot of questions coming up.

00:18:27.520 | It's going to be a slow productivity corner takeover.

00:18:30.080 | Uh, before we get there, let me first mention one of the sponsors

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00:19:22.360 | But the sheets, I gotta tell you, I have never thought about sheets and now it's

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00:20:17.880 | Also want to talk about our friends at notion.

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00:20:44.440 | Notion is how you build smart tools and access to your information.

00:20:50.120 | So, you know, that we've talked about notion, a lot of deep

00:20:53.240 | question users use notion.

00:20:54.600 | We've used notion with our ad agency to keep track of our ads.

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00:22:00.920 | All right, let's, uh, move on to some questions.

00:22:06.080 | Now, my temptation and Jesse, you, you talked me out of this was that we should

00:22:10.880 | play the slow productivity theme song the entire time because every question in

00:22:16.360 | today's Q and a is slow productivity themed.

00:22:19.560 | All right.

00:22:20.720 | You talked me out of it, but can we at least get the theme song at the beginning

00:22:24.280 | of our, our Q and a segment for today?

00:22:26.400 | For sure.

00:22:27.120 | All right, here we go.

00:22:34.760 | All right.

00:22:35.160 | Every question today will be slow productivity themed.

00:22:38.080 | All right, Jesse, what's our first one?

00:22:39.200 | First question is from Sam.

00:22:40.960 | You define pseudo productivity as the use of visible activity as the

00:22:45.040 | primary means of approximating actual productive effort with this being so

00:22:49.560 | common.

00:22:50.120 | What are your thoughts on how all these knowledge work businesses are still

00:22:53.040 | profitable with all these workers kind of pretending to work?

00:22:56.000 | Yeah, that's a great question.

00:22:57.480 | I mean, this is the key argument of part one of my book is that what happened in

00:23:01.480 | knowledge work is it emerges as a major economic sector in the mid 20th century.

00:23:06.840 | They have this problem of how do we measure productivity in the industrial

00:23:12.080 | sector was quantitative products produced per input hour.

00:23:15.200 | The agricultural sector was quantitative.

00:23:17.520 | How much bushels of crop that we produce per acre of land and the cultivation

00:23:21.960 | that ratio quantitative ratio approach did not apply to knowledge work because

00:23:27.400 | now there's not a single thing you're producing.

00:23:29.840 | Individuals produce many different things and those sets are dynamic and often

00:23:33.280 | incomparable.

00:23:34.000 | What I'm working on is different than what you're working on and the systems by

00:23:37.680 | which I'm organizing to manage my work are internals.

00:23:40.240 | There's no clear or consistent workflow system that you can even optimize to see

00:23:46.720 | its impact.

00:23:47.360 | So, so we couldn't use traditional productivity.

00:23:51.280 | So what do we do instead?

00:23:53.680 | We fell back on this rough heuristic pseudo productivity, which says we will

00:23:57.640 | use visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.

00:24:01.880 | So I just going to, let's, let's all gather in the same office.

00:24:05.000 | I want to see you working work while you're here and at least something useful

00:24:08.440 | will be getting done.

00:24:09.080 | All right.

00:24:10.240 | And this worked okay until we got the front office, it revolution until we got

00:24:14.640 | networks and mobile computing.

00:24:16.080 | And then suddenly pseudo productivity plus the ability to demonstrate fine tune

00:24:20.480 | work on your phone or laptop at any moment, that was a, a toxic combination

00:24:24.840 | that sparked the burnout crisis that we're all facing now.

00:24:27.160 | All right.

00:24:27.400 | So that's the whole setup.

00:24:28.160 | Sam is saying, well, pseudo productivity is such a crude heuristic.

00:24:31.320 | Um, how are companies still surviving?

00:24:34.920 | Well, there's a couple, there's a couple answers here.

00:24:37.800 | One is this notion of managerial capitalism.

00:24:41.640 | It's a notion that I really came to understand from Alfred Chandler's, uh,

00:24:45.680 | Pulitzer prize winning book, the visible hand, where he looks at the rise of large

00:24:50.800 | companies with managers, which is newer than we think huge companies with managers

00:24:56.880 | is not something that was really widespread until the 20th century.

00:24:59.400 | And one of the things that Chandler argues in this book is that once you

00:25:04.000 | have a manager based company, a large company that does different things

00:25:08.960 | managed by managers, as opposed to a smaller shop, just sort of run by the

00:25:12.760 | owner, you begin to get a separation between how it internally

00:25:17.440 | operates and market signals.

00:25:19.560 | So the managers inside these companies, uh, they optimize for things different

00:25:25.440 | than just what's going to produce the highest value overall, they optimize

00:25:29.280 | for things like stability.

00:25:30.320 | They optimize for things like risk reduction.

00:25:33.040 | They optimize for things like convenience or efficiency or flexibility

00:25:36.840 | in, in sort of how they run their own jobs, how they manage their employees.

00:25:40.320 | Cause that's their incentive.

00:25:42.080 | It's not some vague bottom line that has a complicated dynamic connection between

00:25:46.320 | what their individual employees are doing and how much money the company makes.

00:25:49.720 | Their incentive is like, I want to keep this job stable and understandable.

00:25:53.000 | And I keep my arms around it.

00:25:54.960 | So managerial capitalism, I believe is what helps keep things like pseudo

00:25:58.360 | productivity and it's sort of, uh, terrifying stepchildren, like the

00:26:04.400 | hyperactive hive mind, email workflow, the zoom all day, remote work, uh,

00:26:09.680 | strategies like the things that would, that seems so absurd and

00:26:12.560 | terrible and distracting today.

00:26:13.760 | They can survive because they're also simple.

00:26:16.600 | They're stable.

00:26:17.360 | It's, uh, easy to deploy.

00:26:20.240 | You're not going to rock any boats by saying everyone should have an email

00:26:23.440 | address.

00:26:23.800 | We all have a shared calendar.

00:26:24.640 | Let's just rock and roll.

00:26:25.480 | Right?

00:26:27.160 | So you can have, uh, operations within knowledge work companies, especially

00:26:31.440 | large ones that are somewhat insulated from market signals.

00:26:35.080 | The second reason is in these complicated knowledge work organizations, most people

00:26:41.200 | are not directly connected to the bottom line in the same way that you might have.

00:26:45.000 | If it's just, here's an assembly line.

00:26:46.680 | And if like one person on the model T assembly line is really slow, it directly

00:26:52.880 | affects the number of model T's we're producing.

00:26:54.520 | Like you're really slow putting steering wheels on, and it's really slowing down

00:26:59.040 | the rate at which model teas are produced.

00:27:00.840 | Knowledge work is not like that.

00:27:02.720 | In fact, in a lot of knowledge work, what you find is a small number of people

00:27:08.360 | actually producing the bulk of the cognitive capital on which the money

00:27:15.880 | itself is actually made.

00:27:16.920 | Right?

00:27:17.120 | So, so in the book, I would call this like the Anthony Zucker effect from a story I

00:27:21.120 | tell in part one of the book about CBS, the television network, um, how they

00:27:26.800 | turned around their fortunes in the late nineties, early two thousands.

00:27:30.480 | Right?

00:27:30.720 | So the story talks about how they were in third place among the major networks.

00:27:35.200 | They hire Les Moonves.

00:27:36.840 | You got to turn this ship around and Les Moonves turns up.

00:27:40.240 | He's a pseudo productivity guy.

00:27:41.840 | Uh, and he says, here's the problem.

00:27:44.040 | I am here at like three o'clock on a Friday and the offices are half empty.

00:27:50.200 | We need more visible activity.

00:27:52.280 | And he sends out this memo at ABC, you better believe they're probably still in

00:27:56.560 | their offices at three o'clock on a Friday at, uh, NBC, you better believe

00:28:00.560 | they're, you know, in their offices at three o'clock on a Friday.

00:28:03.120 | You better be as well.

00:28:04.640 | Like that was his approach to turning around their fortunes.

00:28:07.240 | And within a few years they were number one.

00:28:09.080 | But the argument I make is they, they were not number one because, uh, Zucker

00:28:13.200 | told the employees at television city to spend more hours in the office.

00:28:17.040 | Um, I mean, Moonves, they were number one because of this eccentric showrunner,

00:28:20.920 | Anthony Zucker, who came up with the idea for CSI and CSI plus, uh, Mark Burnett,

00:28:27.480 | this crazy Australian producer who came to them with an idea for a show called

00:28:31.520 | survivor, those two ideas turned around the whole, the whole, uh, network, huge

00:28:36.960 | ratings hits pushed them up to number one.

00:28:38.920 | So the reality here is, okay.

00:28:41.000 | The, the core cognitive capital on which the ultimate success of CBS

00:28:44.520 | depended was like the brains of two people.

00:28:46.320 | Those shows executed well, produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of

00:28:51.960 | value, everyone else was sort of involved with just the logistics of how you

00:28:55.320 | actually, since some sense gather that money, you know, we have to, we have to

00:28:58.760 | keep the budgets of the shows running and the advertiser service and have to make

00:29:02.280 | sure that the memo here goes there.

00:29:04.640 | Right.

00:29:05.000 | So it's, it's a, a lot of what happens in knowledge, work as support and

00:29:08.320 | administrative, even if it's not directly an administrative role, you're like, no,

00:29:11.280 | I'm the assistant sales of West coast, you know, marketing directing, but the

00:29:15.000 | marketing itself, the ad sales, this is all sort of supporting the core

00:29:20.280 | capitalization, the knowledge work equivalent of the model T that's

00:29:23.200 | actually being sold in the end.

00:29:24.480 | So you have these huge asymmetries and knowledge work as well.

00:29:27.240 | The small number of 10 X minds are producing the actual proverbial model T

00:29:33.000 | and everything else is, is around servicing, you know, um, making sure that

00:29:36.920 | then you're competently putting that thing to market and harvesting the

00:29:41.160 | money that comes back in extend.

00:29:42.600 | So that also weakens the connection between how you're working

00:29:45.560 | and the ultimate bottom line.

00:29:46.840 | Like it doesn't super matter if the West coast ad team at CBS is super

00:29:52.440 | efficient in the ultimate question of, are they number one in the ratings?

00:29:56.800 | It could be annoying if they're really inefficient, but if they're efficient

00:29:59.720 | enough, which you can get with pseudo productivity, it's like,

00:30:02.320 | you're not a problem.

00:30:03.080 | That's fine.

00:30:04.560 | So I think those are two of the reasons why this, uh, this, uh, non-optimal

00:30:09.560 | way of work has persistent knowledge.

00:30:13.880 | Work is complicated.

00:30:14.680 | That's like the theme of my, almost a decade now I've spent studying digital

00:30:19.080 | age.

00:30:19.240 | Knowledge work is knowledge work as a complicated system.

00:30:22.280 | Um, we underestimate how complicated it is.

00:30:26.040 | We look for simple stories, but it's a complicated system.

00:30:28.320 | All right.

00:30:29.360 | Who do we have next?

00:30:30.080 | All right.

00:30:32.120 | Next question is from Carol.

00:30:33.840 | Can you please elaborate on the connection between limit missions, limit

00:30:37.920 | projects, and limit daily goals from your new book specifically for limit daily

00:30:42.440 | goals?

00:30:42.840 | How do you determine what to focus on each day?

00:30:44.840 | Do you only work on a specific project each day?

00:30:47.160 | So this comes from, uh, part two of the book in the chapter dedicated to the

00:30:53.520 | principle, do fewer things.

00:30:56.040 | And one of the propositions in that chapter.

00:30:58.360 | So I have these things called propositions, which each has a, an idea related to

00:31:02.960 | the principle that I then discuss all sorts of concrete tactics for putting into

00:31:06.520 | action.

00:31:06.880 | And so one of these propositions is about limit what you work on.

00:31:11.080 | And, uh, I get more specific about that and said, think about your work at three

00:31:15.240 | scales.

00:31:15.840 | So you have at the high scale, your mission, like what, what's the thing I'm

00:31:20.960 | trying to do?

00:31:21.640 | I'm Lin-Manuel Miranda.

00:31:23.000 | I want to be a celebrated playwright, you know, on the West coast, ad

00:31:28.040 | director for CBS.

00:31:29.440 | I want to have, you know, the highest ad rate sales of, uh, each of the regions.

00:31:35.800 | I've trying to whatever, make a modernized shop here.

00:31:38.480 | You have missions at the top that then leads the projects.

00:31:42.280 | Okay.

00:31:42.520 | Here's the specific projects I'm working on now that advance my mission.

00:31:46.960 | And then the underneath the projects, you have daily goals.

00:31:50.240 | Here's what I'm doing today.

00:31:51.520 | That is advancing the projects, which themselves are advancing my higher level

00:31:55.600 | mission.

00:31:55.880 | So we have these three levels.

00:31:56.680 | And what I argue is, um, you want to limit each of these levels.

00:32:01.280 | Now the problem is, and this was the point of this section of the book.

00:32:06.040 | The problem is when we feel like we're too crowded, we want to solve overload.

00:32:11.200 | We tend to focus only at the bottom level.

00:32:13.440 | We say I'm working on too much each day.

00:32:15.480 | So let me just cut back and work on fewer things each day.

00:32:18.800 | I'm too busy.

00:32:19.520 | I need more breathing room.

00:32:20.920 | I need more time in my schedule.

00:32:22.880 | But the problem I point out is that that will prove difficult if you don't also

00:32:26.760 | limit the levels above.

00:32:28.080 | So if you have a ton of ongoing projects, it's very difficult to limit how many

00:32:33.560 | goals you're making progress on each day, because you have all these projects that

00:32:37.200 | you need to make progress on.

00:32:38.200 | I have six things I'm doing these six big projects.

00:32:41.480 | And if I only work on one per day, that's too slow because then I'm, I'm only, I'm

00:32:46.560 | not even touching on every project each week.

00:32:48.200 | Of course I have to work on multiple ones each day.

00:32:50.240 | So you have to reduce your projects before you can reduce your daily goals.

00:32:54.280 | But if you have a ton of missions, like here's my four things I'm trying to do.

00:32:57.400 | Well, any mission is going to have at least some projects going on if

00:33:01.200 | it's really one of your missions.

00:33:02.120 | And so if you have too many missions, you'll have a hard

00:33:03.720 | time limiting your project.

00:33:04.800 | So I see you have to start at the top, focus your missions down to like, this

00:33:07.920 | is the one or two things I'm trying to do.

00:33:09.520 | That'll then allow you to reduce the number of active projects you're working

00:33:12.840 | on because there's less missions to service and with fewer projects.

00:33:15.800 | Now you can be more selective each day and not be running around.

00:33:18.680 | So phonetically, so Carol, when it comes to, you're asking about limiting daily

00:33:22.520 | goals, make sure that's the final thing you do, start with the mission,

00:33:27.080 | then reduce the projects.

00:33:28.280 | How do you know you've done enough that when you then say, I'm only going to

00:33:32.120 | work on one major goal per day, that's not hard.

00:33:34.360 | You don't say, oh man, this is not going to work.

00:33:36.920 | That's how you know, you've limited things enough.

00:33:38.760 | How do you choose which daily goal to work on?

00:33:41.040 | Your weekly plan will help this, right?

00:33:43.960 | Cause where are these projects?

00:33:45.480 | Where are these missions captured in your, your semester or

00:33:47.720 | strategic or quarterly plan, whatever you want to call it.

00:33:49.680 | So when you do your weekly plan and you review that, like, what am I

00:33:52.600 | going to make progress on this week?

00:33:53.800 | Like these two things.

00:33:54.920 | All right.

00:33:55.560 | So maybe the first half of the week, I'll work on this.

00:33:57.440 | The second half I'll work on that.

00:33:58.640 | So you can kind of figure this out during your weekly plan.

00:34:00.760 | When you're able to take in the whole landscape of the week ahead of you and

00:34:05.080 | your big picture vision for the current, the current quarter and beyond that,

00:34:10.240 | don't sweat it too much, right?

00:34:11.160 | There's no perfect choice.

00:34:12.160 | Like this is the exact right project to work on.

00:34:13.960 | You just want to be making progress on one serious thing per day.

00:34:18.560 | So what then happens with the rest of your day?

00:34:20.160 | Well, that's all the administrative overhead stuff, right?

00:34:23.720 | So you make one deep progress on one thing is pretty good.

00:34:26.760 | The rest of your day is going to be meetings and emails and talking about

00:34:30.080 | projects that are going to generate daily goals in the future, but like one

00:34:34.720 | substantial deep work per day is good.

00:34:37.320 | Sometimes maybe two, and you should be happy with that.

00:34:41.200 | If you're not happy with that, you need to move up the chain of

00:34:44.120 | limiting because all these things connect together.

00:34:46.840 | So yeah, that's a cool part in the book.

00:34:48.120 | Um, so Carol, thanks for asking that question.

00:34:49.920 | All right, what do we got next?

00:34:52.320 | I have Thomas in slow productivity, you discussed your $50 notebook

00:34:57.960 | and how it provided inspiration.

00:34:59.440 | Can you elaborate on investing in tools and how that can help,

00:35:02.760 | but also be taken too far?

00:35:04.240 | I found that notebook too.

00:35:06.120 | I should have brought that in my $50 lab notebook.

00:35:08.520 | Yeah.

00:35:08.880 | I talked about it in some, one of the mini podcast interviews

00:35:13.080 | they did recently.

00:35:13.640 | We got into it.

00:35:15.280 | I can't remember who it was now though.

00:35:16.920 | I've been doing too many of these, Jesse.

00:35:18.280 | Yeah, I was reading the book.

00:35:19.560 | I, yeah, I will bring it in.

00:35:22.080 | So for people who don't know, I talk about how at MIT during my

00:35:25.920 | postdoc, I bought a lab notebook.

00:35:28.000 | Uh, lab notebooks are very expensive because, uh, maybe I

00:35:31.640 | talked about this with Adam Grant.

00:35:32.680 | Well, whatever.

00:35:33.600 | Um, lab notebooks are very expensive because they're archival, right?

00:35:37.520 | So for like patent disputes, et cetera.

00:35:39.440 | Um, this is how you, you, uh, record.

00:35:43.080 | This was the day when I had this idea, right?

00:35:45.480 | So like you end up inventing the telephone.

00:35:47.280 | You have your lab notebook will actually be how you establish priority.

00:35:51.280 | So it's, um, very, that's thick paper.

00:35:54.080 | They're all stamped with numbers, uniquely stamped, very thick covers.

00:35:59.200 | Cause these are meant to be stored for potentially decades,

00:36:01.400 | really good spiral binding.

00:36:03.000 | They're very high quality notebooks.

00:36:04.160 | And so I had this experiment at MIT where I bought one of those.

00:36:07.600 | And I think it was $50.

00:36:08.920 | It might've been $70.

00:36:09.920 | I don't remember, but I bought one because my thought was I'm going

00:36:13.920 | to take this notebook more seriously.

00:36:15.680 | So when I'm working on proofs, um, I'm going to, it's going to make me

00:36:19.480 | be more careful because I don't want to just scribble in something

00:36:21.720 | that costs so much money.

00:36:22.680 | And in the book, I talk about how I went back recently and I went through

00:36:27.000 | that $50 notebook and counted up every idea in that notebook that either

00:36:31.520 | became a peer reviewed published paper or an NSF grant, and it was a really big

00:36:36.360 | number, I forgot exactly what it was.

00:36:37.720 | I think it was like seven or eight different papers and grants

00:36:40.160 | came out of this one notebook.

00:36:41.760 | And it's all very, all my handwriting is very uncharacteristically

00:36:45.360 | neat and the diagrams are careful.

00:36:47.080 | So the idea here, the bigger idea is when it comes to the most important

00:36:52.160 | thing you do, if you're a knowledge worker, so the, the, the most value

00:36:55.800 | producing skilled cognitive labor that you do invest in your tools, spend

00:37:02.360 | money on your tools because this signals to yourself, I take this really seriously.

00:37:08.000 | And then your mind is like, this is for real.

00:37:10.480 | Let's go, let's rock and roll.

00:37:12.280 | Like we're doing something really serious here, right?

00:37:14.800 | It's like a radio people.

00:37:17.480 | I used to hear radio.

00:37:19.600 | People had a hard time at first when they shifted to the podcast format, even when

00:37:24.080 | they were getting bigger audiences on their podcast, because when they were

00:37:28.280 | doing radio, it was a much more expensive studio setup and here's the soundproof

00:37:34.120 | room and the engineer and the big soundboard and the, just the seriousness

00:37:39.200 | of the context made it seem like a more serious endeavor than when they just

00:37:44.880 | had, you know, an SM seven in their attic.

00:37:48.840 | It's the tools can really matter.

00:37:50.960 | So this means, for example, don't use free software, pay for the full

00:37:55.280 | version of whatever you're using, get the best tool.

00:37:58.440 | If you're, if, if screenwriting is what you do, you should have the final,

00:38:02.240 | whatever the, what are they called?

00:38:03.840 | What do they use?

00:38:04.280 | Final draft?

00:38:05.000 | I don't know what the big screenwriting software is.

00:38:07.400 | Uh, final cut.

00:38:08.680 | It's final cut.

00:38:09.880 | Isn't that editing?

00:38:11.360 | Yeah.

00:38:11.720 | It's like an editing.

00:38:12.320 | Yeah.

00:38:12.600 | Well, whatever, you know, like have the good software, right?

00:38:14.920 | Use Scrivener if you're doing nonfiction or novel writing, like, and pay for it.

00:38:19.200 | You know, uh, if you're a scientist, have a really good late, you know, late

00:38:23.800 | tech or editor, like markup editor that you use really good notebooks.

00:38:27.960 | If you're podcasting, once your audience starts to grow, get a really good, you

00:38:31.280 | invest that money back into your sound equipment to make it better.

00:38:33.920 | Um, it's psychological as much as it is practical.

00:38:36.960 | So Thomas is asking, you know, how do you know if you're taking this too far?

00:38:41.920 | Um, invest in port.

00:38:44.360 | I was going to say, invest in proportion to the value you're creating,

00:38:47.440 | but I actually want to edit that.

00:38:50.280 | Invest in proportion to the value you could credibly be

00:38:54.800 | creating in the near future.

00:38:56.680 | Right.

00:38:58.720 | So, uh, I want it, for example, if I was just starting a podcast by a $700

00:39:03.080 | microphone, cause you're like, I'm probably not going to be generating, you

00:39:07.080 | know, enough value, enough ad revenue, et cetera, to really justify that yet.

00:39:11.440 | But maybe I will buy, uh, the new sure product that has the built in D to A

00:39:18.240 | converter, the thing I use, you know, when I'm on the road, it's like 130 bucks.

00:39:22.280 | And like, I don't know, I think the audience I might grow over the next six

00:39:25.240 | months is big enough that it's like worth having spent, you know, 150 bucks

00:39:29.280 | on the mic and 50 bucks on good headphones.

00:39:31.560 | And because it signals I'm taking this seriously, but it's kind of in

00:39:33.640 | proportion to what I'm doing, but I'm not going to spend $2,000 a month on a

00:39:38.320 | studio lease and have a, you know, $5,000 worth of equipment yet.

00:39:41.240 | Now, on the other hand, if your show is starting to produce a thousand dollars a

00:39:46.800 | month, $500 a month in ad revenue, you're like, this is in proportion, actually,

00:39:51.400 | let me like make this investment to be six months worth of the ad revenue.

00:39:54.360 | That's in proportion to what I'm doing.

00:39:55.920 | So you want to keep it.

00:39:56.600 | The investment in the proportion to the value you are creating or conceivably

00:40:01.440 | will be creating in the near future.

00:40:03.280 | And it's not always a clear cut number.

00:40:05.280 | Of course, you could be working for a large organization, um, investing in a

00:40:09.280 | new tool.

00:40:10.000 | You might not have a specific revenue number.

00:40:12.800 | They say you generate it, but you're like this, this thing I'm doing in this

00:40:15.840 | company is really important.

00:40:17.160 | And it's moving my, my stock, my proverbial stock higher in this company.

00:40:20.400 | So I'm going to invest in getting a better version of this tool.

00:40:22.760 | I'm going to get a better, whatever it is.

00:40:24.920 | Right.

00:40:25.200 | Um, so yeah, you don't want to just go crazy.

00:40:27.920 | What's the most expensive thing I can get, but you also don't want to go free.

00:40:32.160 | So stay in proportion, whatever that means to you with the value you could

00:40:35.960 | credibly be creating now or in the near future.

00:40:38.360 | I think office space is a tool, you know, like having.

00:40:45.480 | A studio for podcasting, but also if you're a knowledge worker, like you're a

00:40:50.400 | writer or something like this, and, and you're, you know, you're doing well at

00:40:53.920 | it, like investing in, I have a place to go to write.

00:40:56.440 | I think that's like investing in a tool that makes sense.

00:40:59.440 | You and humor, man.

00:41:00.960 | We're talking about that a lot on your podcast where you were mentioning

00:41:03.840 | like you're working writing space.

00:41:05.400 | And yeah, he was asking a lot of questions about that.

00:41:07.640 | Yeah.

00:41:08.000 | He loves the details.

00:41:08.800 | Right.

00:41:09.080 | And I was saying like, this is a, a reasonable, if you can afford it, it's

00:41:11.960 | a reasonable investment and afford it means, I mean, I sometimes

00:41:14.760 | use the 5% number, like if you're a, especially if you're a creative, like

00:41:18.400 | you, all you do is creatively produce stuff that is then sold for money.

00:41:21.960 | You should be in reinvesting 5% at least of your take home pay

00:41:28.360 | and your tools and context.

00:41:30.680 | You know, like, uh, when I see someone who has like a pretty successful

00:41:35.160 | podcast or they're, they're a successful writer and they're still like

00:41:39.080 | working in difficult circumstances, I was like, no, this is part of the

00:41:42.520 | business of what you're doing.

00:41:44.080 | Yes, it's true.

00:41:45.040 | You can, you can, in theory, do all of your writing at the kitchen table or

00:41:48.800 | do your podcasting in the closet.

00:41:50.400 | It's fine.

00:41:52.600 | Right.

00:41:53.640 | And you're just, I watched one every dollar to come, but you have to think

00:41:58.080 | the spend money to make money type of mentality, don't take five to 10% of

00:42:01.200 | what you're earning and say, how can I use this to make my situation, my

00:42:03.680 | tools and situations better.

00:42:04.840 | If a lot of people did that, they would have coworking spaces.

00:42:07.680 | They would have, you know, I write here, not just here.

00:42:10.720 | I have better tools.

00:42:11.880 | I'm going to, um, podcasts.

00:42:13.720 | I'm going to rent the studio for my podcast each week at four, as

00:42:17.760 | opposed to doing it in my house.

00:42:18.760 | Like it, it, it, it will lead you ultimately to producing better stuff and

00:42:23.480 | also just enjoying the process of doing it better.

00:42:25.480 | So maybe that's another rule, five to 10% of your take-home income.

00:42:28.680 | Uh, if you're a high level, creative producer should be reinvested in all the

00:42:35.040 | tools and context you use to produce that work.

00:42:37.000 | I think Brandon Sanderson followed that rule, right?

00:42:41.080 | Because he makes a lot of money.

00:42:42.120 | His books are very successful and he built the underground layer

00:42:44.920 | that we've talked about.

00:42:45.720 | Yeah.

00:42:46.120 | Like the hidden underground Victorian Gothic layer where he goes to write.

00:42:49.000 | Might've been more than 5%.

00:42:50.120 | Well, it depends.

00:42:50.680 | I don't know, man.

00:42:51.160 | I think he might be making millions.

00:42:53.520 | I mean, how much do you think it would cost to make, it was completely

00:42:56.880 | underground, it's gotta be expensive, right?

00:42:58.320 | Uh, and it's completely look like custom furnished with woodwork.

00:43:02.240 | You think a million, I was going to say like half a million dollars.

00:43:05.720 | I was going to say 300 K at first, depending on where it was.

00:43:08.800 | But then when you said those numbers, maybe a little bit more than 300.

00:43:11.440 | Yes.

00:43:11.800 | I mean like how it was in New York.

00:43:13.400 | Yeah.

00:43:13.720 | So that's probably more than 5%.

00:43:16.440 | I'm trying to think about that.

00:43:17.840 | If you spent $500,000, I don't think it makes $10 million a year.

00:43:21.680 | All right.

00:43:22.000 | So he's spending a little bit more, but you know, he might make.

00:43:24.680 | The other thing that you got me thinking of was, um, in last week's episode or

00:43:28.760 | last week's episode, you were talking about how much money Jewel had because

00:43:31.600 | their mom was stole $200 million from her.

00:43:33.880 | Yeah.

00:43:34.320 | Yeah.

00:43:34.760 | That popped in my mind.

00:43:37.600 | I hope she has an awesome workspace.

00:43:39.080 | She followed this rule.

00:43:41.120 | All right.

00:43:42.960 | Who do we got next?

00:43:43.600 | Next question is from Sula.

00:43:45.320 | I've been reading your new book, slow productivity.

00:43:48.320 | I also read something about mental models and first principles.

00:43:51.680 | I think I heard you mentioned these concepts before.

00:43:54.040 | How does slow productivity relate to these concepts?

00:43:56.920 | Well, Sula, you can think about it both in terms of a new mental model.

00:44:00.560 | You can also think about it in terms of a collection of new first principles.

00:44:05.000 | So mental model for those who don't know, at least the way I use the term is a

00:44:09.120 | cognitive structure you use for understanding a concept.

00:44:12.080 | So when you shift your mental models, it can give you a whole new understanding.

00:44:16.400 | Of how some part of the world or your life actually works, which can completely

00:44:20.600 | change the way you approach it principles or first principles I think of as core

00:44:24.880 | ideas that are generative from these ideas, you can generate new decisions

00:44:31.520 | about what to do and what not to do.

00:44:33.840 | So it's, it's a core principle from which I can then derive action.

00:44:36.600 | I should stop doing this.

00:44:37.520 | I should do more of that.

00:44:38.320 | So you use it to judge or evaluate potential actions.

00:44:41.960 | So I think of that as like a generative idea.

00:44:44.320 | I sometimes call those.

00:44:45.240 | So the mental model shift embedded in slow productivity is this

00:44:51.120 | idea that pseudo productivity.

00:44:52.800 | The thing that we have been implicitly referring to when we talk about being

00:44:58.440 | productive and knowledge work, it's not actually that productive.

00:45:03.280 | If we really mean by productive production of stuff that matters, right.

00:45:07.600 | That's a big mental model shift.

00:45:09.320 | The prior mental model shift, I think the mental model we have for knowledge

00:45:14.120 | work is we try to, without realizing it, adapt the industrial agricultural

00:45:18.880 | ideas of productivity to knowledge work, even though they don't fit.

00:45:23.080 | Now, remember the agricultural and industrial notions of productivity

00:45:27.240 | are all about output per input.

00:45:29.080 | So to be more productive is to more efficiently transform inputs in the

00:45:33.000 | outputs, the assembly line increase the model T's per labor hour by a factor

00:45:37.840 | of 10, for example.

00:45:38.880 | So then when we thought about being productive and knowledge work, we had

00:45:42.880 | this model of trying to squeeze more model T's out, which meant that in an

00:45:47.240 | assembly lines, more efficient way of putting together a model T.

00:45:49.480 | So it was a mental model of productivity based on efficiency and speed.

00:45:53.360 | It's why when we, we, we hear, you know, critiques of hustle culture

00:45:58.640 | for magazine writers, they're always talking about Frederick Winslow

00:46:02.040 | Taylor, the creator of scientific management, which is the, the

00:46:06.880 | epitome of industrial productivity.

00:46:08.800 | How do we get the, the movements that are producing the thing that

00:46:13.520 | this foundry or factory produces as efficient as possible.

00:46:16.480 | And so we just assume, well, that's what productivity is.

00:46:19.040 | And so if we say, I want to be productive and knowledge work, it's

00:46:21.360 | about efficiency and optimization and hacks and all these types of things.

00:46:24.480 | But it's not really right.

00:46:26.720 | So my book, Slow Productivity shifts the mental model.

00:46:29.160 | That's not actually what we've been doing because we don't have,

00:46:31.880 | we, we, we can't bring Frederick Winslow Taylor into a knowledge work office.

00:46:36.480 | What is he measuring with his stopwatch?

00:46:38.600 | How fast you type when you answer emails, you know, like how you

00:46:42.960 | put stuff on your calendar, there's no clear thing you're doing.

00:46:45.560 | And so this mental model shifts is like, no, what we were, what we've been

00:46:49.160 | doing instead of pseudo productivity, which is just activity, you just need

00:46:52.000 | to demonstrate that you're here and doing things, which in the model world

00:46:54.880 | means sending emails, replying to Slack, jumping on calls and going to meetings.

00:46:59.240 | This is how, what we mean by productivity is it has very little to do with like

00:47:02.440 | efficiency or, um, squeezing, increasing the speed at which we do things.

00:47:07.160 | And it has, it's not good, right?

00:47:10.160 | So that's the mental model shift.

00:47:11.040 | We're not doing Winslow Taylor.

00:47:12.600 | We're doing pseudo productivity.

00:47:13.720 | Pseudo productivity doesn't actually produce a lot of valuable

00:47:16.520 | stuff in the end anyways.

00:47:17.560 | Actually a slower approach to work with more careful workload management

00:47:21.680 | and variation and a real care for quality that'll produce in the

00:47:24.800 | end, more stuff that matters.

00:47:26.200 | That'll push CBS from number three to number one.

00:47:29.600 | Not how active we are.

00:47:30.680 | So that's the key mental model shift.

00:47:33.120 | What are the key first principles for achieving that shift?

00:47:35.800 | Well, that's my three principles of slow productivity, do fewer things, work

00:47:40.440 | at a natural pace, obsess over quality.

00:47:43.320 | These are generative first principles.

00:47:46.480 | Uh, I introduced the concepts in the chapter dedicated to each.

00:47:50.400 | And then from that principle, we, we moved to a wide variety of practical advice.

00:47:56.320 | So they're generative principles from which actionable specific ideas,

00:47:59.600 | suggestions, and filters can be derived.

00:48:02.560 | It's a good terminology.

00:48:04.320 | So I appreciated that.

00:48:05.240 | It's a good way of trying to capture what's new and what's

00:48:08.240 | interesting about this concept.

00:48:09.480 | All right.

00:48:11.280 | Um, let's do one more question here.

00:48:12.840 | This looks like a long one.

00:48:14.000 | Yeah, go.

00:48:15.240 | All right.

00:48:15.480 | What do we got next questions from Peter?

00:48:17.200 | I'm wondering if you have any tips on how to approach

00:48:20.120 | reading and applying the lessons.

00:48:22.040 | I know the temptation will be to devour it like Cerberus on a bacon flavored

00:48:27.280 | Twinkie while furiously taking notes in hopes of sifting through

00:48:31.400 | and acting on all of it someday.

00:48:32.960 | However, I have sometimes had more success when I limit myself to one

00:48:36.600 | chapter per week, which allows me to slow down and make sure I understood

00:48:40.800 | and applied the information to each chapter before moving on.

00:48:43.600 | Do you think that the information in slow productivity needs to be

00:48:46.640 | understood and applied in order?

00:48:49.800 | Which is presented or would it work to read the whole thing and then go

00:48:53.440 | back and try to piece it together?

00:48:55.280 | That's a good question.

00:48:56.640 | Peter, good Greek mythology reference.

00:48:58.920 | That's like old school, old school, deep questions.

00:49:01.640 | I appreciate that.

00:49:02.360 | Um, all right.

00:49:04.040 | So here's how I would recommend reading slow productivity.

00:49:06.160 | There's part one, part two.

00:49:07.840 | Part one is the, this whole concept of pseudo productivity.

00:49:10.720 | How do we get here?

00:49:11.560 | What's the real problem?

00:49:12.360 | The mental model shift part two, here's the three principles.

00:49:14.880 | Let's explain each and break them down in the concrete action.

00:49:19.080 | I would read both parts all the way through first.

00:49:22.680 | Uh, don't, I don't particularly care on the speed, but I would

00:49:27.560 | read the whole thing first.

00:49:28.440 | Why the principles relate to each other.

00:49:31.040 | Like when we get the principle three obsess over quality, I sort of end up

00:49:35.480 | revealing, this is actually the glue that holds the first two together.

00:49:38.160 | And like, without this, the first two are not going to do well in isolation.

00:49:42.200 | So I would just read the whole thing, completely shift your mental model.

00:49:46.600 | And then you can go back through more carefully and say, okay,

00:49:49.320 | so where do I want to start?

00:49:50.560 | And you actually might start with principle three and you might go back to that.

00:49:53.800 | Let me, let me go back to it this week and look through the advice and

00:49:57.480 | like, where do I want to start?

00:49:58.320 | What do I want to actually try here?

00:49:59.640 | And, and maybe get that going for a few weeks and then say, okay, now

00:50:02.240 | I'm going to work on the workload, the doing fewer things.

00:50:04.960 | Now I'm going to go back to that chapter.

00:50:06.160 | Let me give it a few weeks to experiment with it.

00:50:07.840 | So I would read the whole thing.

00:50:09.480 | And then I would go through principle by principle in the order that

00:50:13.240 | makes most sense to what resonates with you.

00:50:15.840 | And you could spend a month per principle, really, because

00:50:18.560 | a lot of it's experimental.

00:50:19.680 | Let me try this.

00:50:20.480 | Let me get some feedback.

00:50:21.360 | Let me adjust this.

00:50:22.360 | You're sort of experimenting with each of these principles.

00:50:25.200 | Once you've done that for all three, it's now we're like three months

00:50:28.560 | out from you first getting the book.

00:50:30.680 | That's when you're going to start to feel the synergy.

00:50:33.440 | Oh, this stuff's starting to click.

00:50:35.320 | Like my obsession over quality is helping me do fewer things.

00:50:39.280 | And the natural pace now feels inevitable as opposed to contrived you.

00:50:43.600 | And everything starts to work together.

00:50:45.760 | And you're going to begin to get that that feeling of relief,

00:50:48.880 | that slow productivity advantage.

00:50:50.400 | So that's a good question, Peter.

00:50:52.080 | That's how I would do it.

00:50:53.000 | All right.

00:50:55.120 | We have a call.

00:50:58.040 | Yeah. All right. Let's hear that. OK.

00:50:59.560 | Hi, Cal, this is Kyle.

00:51:04.400 | I run a large nonprofit mindfulness center, and I've been a big fan

00:51:07.320 | of your work for many years.

00:51:08.600 | I've read all your books, listened to all your podcasts

00:51:10.600 | and use your principles in classes, workshops and executive coaching.

00:51:14.000 | So thank you so much for putting so much good content out into the world.

00:51:17.320 | I love your ideas.

00:51:19.280 | But as a busy CEO, a father of several kids and a mere mortal,

00:51:22.760 | I struggle to implement them consistently.

00:51:25.080 | And I find myself intimidated by the degree to which you seem to have

00:51:28.600 | everything so perfectly dialed in in your life and your seven jobs.

00:51:32.000 | One of my favorite moments in your podcast was an episode

00:51:35.440 | when you admitted how long it takes you to get ready for evening events

00:51:38.400 | compared to your wife, Julie.

00:51:39.840 | It was such a wonderful humanizing moment to learn that for all his erudition

00:51:44.480 | and success, Cal Newport may have areas of his own life

00:51:47.320 | that stubbornly resist submitting to his systems.

00:51:49.920 | So my question is whether you might be able to share any stories

00:51:53.880 | about the pain and failure points in your life where you really struggle

00:51:57.640 | to implement your best practices, maybe where you feel like a hypocrite,

00:52:01.400 | where you fall down and have to keep trying.

00:52:03.640 | It would be such a relief to know that even you can't perfectly

00:52:07.000 | engineer things or execute your plans as well as you'd like.

00:52:10.400 | Thanks so much.

00:52:11.560 | There's nothing I can say, I'm perfect.

00:52:14.800 | All right, so what do we got next?

00:52:16.800 | That's a good it's a good question.

00:52:19.520 | I think people often get me backwards.

00:52:21.400 | So they think like I have all of these

00:52:25.200 | perfected systems and this goes back to our mental model discussion

00:52:29.640 | that I have these like perfected systems that like optimize what I produce.

00:52:35.680 | It is the exact opposite.

00:52:37.920 | The philosophies I deploy in my life are trying to deal with.

00:52:43.200 | All of the sort of imperfections and stubborn

00:52:48.360 | inefficiencies that are intrinsic to me as a person, so I'm not just

00:52:52.080 | slow to get ready, though, that's definitely a big thing.

00:52:55.400 | I don't I'm not fast with stuff.

00:52:59.000 | I really deal poorly with having a lot to do like a crowded calendar day.

00:53:05.240 | I talked about this some on Andrew Huberman's podcast

00:53:07.600 | that in grad school, I developed this acute insomnia that would episodic.

00:53:12.680 | It would come and go right.

00:53:15.240 | And it was a real it really shook me up because it was, oh, I don't control this.

00:53:18.360 | So like something else can just come in and like take away

00:53:22.400 | my ability to, you know, do work.

00:53:25.000 | So I'll just be like really tired or something like this.

00:53:27.800 | And a lot of my ideas and strategies, for example, a case in point

00:53:31.600 | is dealing with that reality.

00:53:34.120 | Like a lot of my my slow productivity approach, it was was dealing

00:53:37.440 | with this idea of, well, I can't be someone that just gets after it every day,

00:53:41.600 | because what if I'm really tired or I'm not sleeping?

00:53:43.640 | And so I reoriented my whole creative life around pursuits

00:53:48.160 | where it doesn't really matter what you do tomorrow,

00:53:51.600 | but it does matter that over the next few months you do make a lot of progress.

00:53:54.960 | So I began to get this allergy to crowded schedules

00:53:58.320 | because if I have crowded schedules every day, what happens when I'm tired

00:54:00.800 | or I'm sick? It's a problem.

00:54:02.640 | But if I'm writing a book over like a four month period,

00:54:05.320 | I can have periods in there where I'm not I didn't write for two days is fine

00:54:08.680 | and I can come back on the other days when I'm doing better.

00:54:11.440 | Right. Why do I why do I have a shutdown routine?

00:54:15.040 | Because the anxiety of thinking about my doctoral dissertation

00:54:18.680 | was keeping me distracted me in the evening.

00:54:20.920 | I had to invent the shutdown routine to try to tame that.

00:54:24.040 | Why do I have fixed schedule productivity to make sure that I don't work too much

00:54:28.080 | like that and to keep things to keep things reasonable? Right.

00:54:32.360 | Why do I limit the number of projects I work on?

00:54:34.400 | I know we joke I have seven jobs, but what do I do?

00:54:36.480 | I'm a professor and I write and I even made those the same thing now

00:54:39.200 | because now I write about the things that I study as a professor.

00:54:41.720 | I don't use social media.

00:54:43.560 | It took me 10 years to start a podcast.

00:54:45.200 | I only give it a half day a week.

00:54:46.600 | And even that stresses me out.

00:54:49.080 | So like my whole life is dealing with.

00:54:50.760 | I'm not someone that can work 15 hour days.

00:54:53.120 | I'm not the smartest person in the room.

00:54:55.240 | Stuff takes time.

00:54:57.080 | I'm not always the best visionary.

00:54:58.560 | I come to insight slow.

00:55:00.240 | And so my whole idea is like, don't do too many things.

00:55:03.360 | Give yourself flexibility and just try to work very steadily

00:55:07.520 | on the things that matter.

00:55:09.240 | This is Steve Martin's advice.

00:55:10.480 | You know, be be so good.

00:55:11.520 | They can't ignore you. Eventually good things will come.

00:55:13.280 | That's my whole motto.

00:55:14.200 | So all of my systems are really trying to deal with an imperfect reality.

00:55:19.040 | You know, because I can't.

00:55:21.160 | Sit there and crank on math equations all day or write 15 hours a day.

00:55:26.640 | So you shouldn't think about things that way.

00:55:29.000 | It should be about there's only so much I can do.

00:55:31.840 | Let me like and we're imperfect and we're variable.

00:55:34.480 | So how do I make sure, given all that reality and all that chaos,

00:55:38.040 | how do I make sure that I'm still making forward progress

00:55:40.800 | on the things that matter so that even if last week was a disaster?

00:55:43.600 | Last year will be something that I'm proud of.

00:55:47.600 | And all this idea is what I've been working on for 20 years

00:55:49.720 | now is all sort of consolidated in slow productivity.

00:55:52.040 | That's where that philosophy came from.

00:55:55.000 | It's like how to produce cool stuff if you're a human.

00:55:59.440 | So I appreciate the appreciate the call.

00:56:02.640 | Let's do a quick case study.

00:56:06.480 | Let's see. All right.

00:56:08.080 | So the case study is not slow productivity theme.

00:56:10.040 | So let's let's call this the end of the slow productivity takeover

00:56:12.880 | and get that theme music one more time, Jesse.

00:56:14.560 | All right, that was great.

00:56:21.680 | Slow productivity case over by the book, if you haven't read it.

00:56:24.640 | Review the book, if you read it and liked it.

00:56:27.000 | All right. Case studies from M.

00:56:29.200 | Hi, Cal, I'm a diplomat with the U.S.

00:56:30.840 | Department of State, currently stationed overseas.

00:56:33.400 | I use your ideas to plan my next career move within my organization.

00:56:37.400 | In the Foreign Service, we rotate assignments every two to three years,

00:56:41.280 | and I had been feeling a bit burnt out with my current position

00:56:44.960 | and not motivated to start looking for my next job.

00:56:47.720 | Using your lifestyle centric career planning, I set criteria

00:56:51.920 | for the types of positions I would target.

00:56:54.760 | I wanted to move back to D.C.

00:56:56.360 | and avoid positions involving emergency or after hours duties.

00:57:00.360 | I had accepted that this could be a career detour and not great for promotion.

00:57:04.160 | But to my surprise, I found many intriguing positions that match my criteria.

00:57:07.720 | Last month, I happily accepted an offer at the State Department's

00:57:11.680 | Diplomatic Training Institute.

00:57:14.080 | I will be leading a medium sized team, so it will still be a substantive role,

00:57:19.000 | but it offers an element of seasonality, flexibility

00:57:21.800 | and hopefully no after hours emergencies.

00:57:24.040 | I think this position will be a great fit as I transition back to the U.S.

00:57:28.080 | with my family.

00:57:30.160 | What I like about this case study is that it really does highlight

00:57:33.360 | the power of lifestyle centric career planning too often,

00:57:37.520 | especially if you're high achieving.

00:57:39.920 | You just let the criteria of like what is objectively the most impressive

00:57:43.600 | job of my options be what drives you.

00:57:48.080 | You imagine it's going to sound great when I say I'm now the senior diplomat

00:57:52.320 | in the such and such consulate.

00:57:54.400 | But it turns out the opportunities you have to say that and receive praise,

00:57:58.680 | you know, it's like seven times in the year.

00:58:00.520 | And then you're stuck with the reality of that job,

00:58:04.440 | and it might have elements to it that you hate.

00:58:06.480 | So by far, the more sane thing to do if you're trying to build a sustainable

00:58:11.960 | career is to say, what do I want in my lifestyle in general?

00:58:16.520 | What type of place do I want to live in?

00:58:18.200 | What is the rhythm of my day like?

00:58:19.720 | What's the feel of my work like?

00:58:21.040 | What else is going on in my life?

00:58:22.600 | And work backwards from that to figure out your career.

00:58:24.960 | This is a great example of that.

00:58:27.000 | So our correspondent here has a good sense from the State Department

00:58:31.600 | Foreign Service what it's like to have these after hours or emergency duties.

00:58:35.160 | He knows he doesn't want that.

00:58:36.960 | He wants seasonality, flexibility, the type of stuff I like,

00:58:40.120 | more of a slow, productive,

00:58:42.760 | compatible role, knowing that working backwards from that lifestyle

00:58:47.200 | led him to choices that want to just be the obvious next thing to choose.

00:58:50.640 | And I think this is a really cool choice he made.

00:58:53.640 | You know, I became a professor in part because of lifestyle

00:58:55.880 | centric career planning.

00:58:56.800 | I wanted the flexibility, the ability to write and have seasonality.

00:59:00.480 | There's less money in this than going to the tech jobs

00:59:04.360 | I had offers for out of college.

00:59:06.520 | But I wasn't trying to do the most impressive thing.

00:59:08.240 | I was trying to do the thing that fit my lifestyle vision better.

00:59:11.920 | So I think it was a great case study

00:59:13.720 | of lifestyle centric career planning and action.

00:59:16.080 | If you're new and you want to know more about that,

00:59:18.200 | probably the best book of mine to read is So Good They Can't Ignore You from 2012.

00:59:22.160 | That's my contrarian take on building a career that you love.

00:59:26.560 | We have a final segment coming up, we're going to react to something interesting.

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01:01:32.000 | Also want to talk about our friends at Mint Mobile.

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01:01:38.240 | and getting ripped off by overpriced wireless providers,

01:01:40.760 | if you've learned anything, it should be that there's always a catch.

01:01:43.800 | So when I heard that for a limited time, all Mint Mobile

01:01:47.240 | wireless plans are fifteen dollars a month.

01:01:49.800 | When you purchase a three month plan, I thought, what's the catch?

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01:01:56.600 | Mint Mobile's secret sauce is that they sell wireless service online.

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01:02:18.040 | You can use your own phone with your Mint Mobile plan.

01:02:20.760 | Bring your phone number along, bring along all your existing contacts.

01:02:24.200 | All you're cutting out is the price.

01:02:26.320 | I've been talking a lot about Mint Mobile recently in my interviews

01:02:31.520 | when people are asking me about kids and smartphones.

01:02:35.000 | I'm a believer.

01:02:36.680 | I'm in John Heights camp that really unlimited Internet

01:02:39.440 | access through a smartphone is something you should be

01:02:41.600 | probably 15 or 16 before you get.

01:02:43.640 | So parents are saying, how do I stay in touch with my kid

01:02:46.600 | if I don't want to just give them?

01:02:47.920 | An iPhone or add a phone to my expensive wireless plan,

01:02:51.280 | I say, here's how you do it.

01:02:52.880 | You buy them a cheap, dumb phone on Amazon.

01:02:55.040 | You go to Mint Mobile, $15 a month, get that SIM card, plug it in.

01:02:59.440 | Boom, they can text you and call you.

01:03:01.200 | Now you've solved the logistical problems

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01:03:06.040 | Fortnite pornography or whatever kids are doing on the phones these days.

01:03:09.600 | So Mint Mobile gets it done.

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01:03:16.680 | go to MintMobile.com/Deep.

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01:03:36.800 | Additional tax fees and restrictions apply.

01:03:38.560 | See Mint Mobile for details.

01:03:39.800 | You know, Jesse, I think Mint Mobile is going deep on Georgetown spokespeople.

01:03:44.560 | How so?

01:03:45.720 | Well, another prominent Mint Mobile spokesperson,

01:03:50.360 | some might even say more prominent than me, that's debatable,

01:03:52.920 | is Bradley Cooper, who is a Georgetown alum.

01:03:56.880 | So Bradley Cooper and I are representing Georgetown on the Mint Mobile team.

01:04:00.320 | He might get paid a little bit more than me to do the spots.

01:04:04.040 | I don't know for sure, but.

01:04:06.200 | You should have your agent negotiate a new deal for you.

01:04:09.160 | Let me say between Bradley Cooper and me.

01:04:11.400 | So like the Georgetown spokespeople for Mint Mobile between us,

01:04:16.280 | we earned three Academy Award nominations.

01:04:19.280 | So that's pretty good.

01:04:21.960 | Look, I mean, that's three more than a lot of people.

01:04:23.800 | All right. Enough of that nonsense.

01:04:25.360 | Let's do our final segment.

01:04:27.160 | So for our final segment, I like to react to something interesting

01:04:30.600 | I've encountered recently, and today I want to talk about an article

01:04:33.800 | that many of you sent me from The Wall Street Journal.

01:04:35.880 | I'll bring the headline up here on the screen.

01:04:39.000 | Cool graphic here of the TikTok logo with a cage below it

01:04:42.400 | and someone walking out of the cage.

01:04:45.240 | The article is written by a reporter who has an awesome name

01:04:48.360 | for writing tech articles, Julie Jargon.

01:04:50.760 | It's an awesome name.

01:04:53.680 | The article is titled Why Some 20 Somethings Are Saying No to TikTok.

01:04:58.840 | I also wrote about this article in my newsletter.

01:05:02.240 | So if you don't subscribe, you should at calnewport.com.

01:05:05.120 | So here's the thing they're talking about.

01:05:07.440 | The news hook for this article is that TikTok reported a near 10 percent drop.

01:05:11.840 | In users between 18 and 24.

01:05:15.920 | That's a lot for one year to lose 10 percent of a user group,

01:05:18.840 | especially when you're a service that is advertising yourself

01:05:21.600 | to investors as being on the rise.

01:05:24.600 | So Julie Jargon went to talk to some of these users,

01:05:27.840 | some of these young 20 something users of TikTok and say, why did you quit?

01:05:31.120 | What she found was they were getting uneasy

01:05:34.840 | with their addictive relationship to the tool.

01:05:38.640 | She profiled one reader in particular who couldn't put it down.

01:05:44.000 | So he would hold it.

01:05:46.360 | He could only take garbage bags to the outside, to the can one at a time

01:05:49.680 | because he had the whole tick tock while he's putting out the garbage that cook.

01:05:52.640 | He would hold the phone with one hand and chop with the other.

01:05:55.320 | Like he literally couldn't have it out and be watching it.

01:05:58.720 | And at some point he realized, like, this is probably not great.

01:06:01.560 | Like this is probably not maximizing my chances of a full and healthy life.

01:06:06.200 | And and he got off of it.

01:06:07.400 | It's hard.

01:06:07.960 | And a lot of them say like the addictive thing meant they had to try multiple times.

01:06:11.600 | It was very much

01:06:13.040 | reminiscent of the way you hear people talking about quitting smoking.

01:06:17.000 | The fourth time it stuck, the sixth time it stuck.

01:06:20.520 | So it's interesting.

01:06:22.200 | There was definitely the terminology of addiction

01:06:26.080 | when people are talking about leaving the service.

01:06:29.200 | But what I thought was relevant about this

01:06:32.120 | was it is a demonstration of the idea

01:06:35.520 | that I talked about in this article.

01:06:38.520 | We look at in The New Yorker from 2022.

01:06:41.360 | Jesse, it's a similar graphic.

01:06:42.520 | I'm looking at this.

01:06:43.760 | Interesting.

01:06:45.200 | My article is first, ladies and gentlemen.

01:06:46.800 | So this article also has a graphic of people leaving curved cages.

01:06:49.680 | So I wrote this article in the summer of 2022 called Tick Tock

01:06:53.000 | in the fall of the social media giants.

01:06:54.960 | And I'm going to argue that in this New Yorker piece,

01:06:56.880 | I predicted a dynamic that we are now seeing reported on

01:07:00.120 | in this more recent Wall Street Journal piece.

01:07:01.800 | What I said in this New Yorker piece.

01:07:04.600 | It's Tick Tock is making a bit of a Faustian bargain.

01:07:07.160 | They're going all in on being as addictive as possible,

01:07:11.000 | which means the straight up algorithmic curation of the most addictive

01:07:15.200 | possible content they can give for each possible user.

01:07:17.960 | As a result, they got very fast user growth and their users use it a lot.

01:07:21.720 | But in doing so, they abandoned

01:07:25.640 | the model of the legacy social media giants

01:07:29.080 | in which their value proposition depends on a hard one social graph.

01:07:34.680 | Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

01:07:38.200 | A big part of their value proposition was over the years.

01:07:42.320 | Their users have painstakingly built up these social graphs

01:07:45.240 | of who their friends are and who they follow.

01:07:47.640 | There is a huge first mover advantage here.

01:07:49.640 | No other company will ever get users to spend so much time creating these graphs.

01:07:53.440 | So only they have these giant social graphs.

01:07:55.480 | No one else will have them again.

01:07:57.520 | So the legacy social media players.

01:08:00.440 | Have the social the social graphs that are a first mover advantage

01:08:03.640 | that they can entrench on.

01:08:04.720 | Now, Tick Tock said those are great, but but depending just on a social graph

01:08:10.360 | doesn't give you the most addictive possible experience.

01:08:12.080 | So we're going to give you the most addictive possible experience.

01:08:14.000 | Here's the Faustian bargain.

01:08:15.240 | The social graph might not give you the most addictive possible experience,

01:08:19.040 | but I have a hard time leaving that service.

01:08:21.880 | Because it's not just providing me an abstract stream of distraction,

01:08:25.520 | it has all my friends on there that I've said it has these follower networks.

01:08:28.720 | I've clicked. I don't want to leave that behind.

01:08:30.520 | There's something there of value that doesn't exist elsewhere.

01:08:33.800 | Tick Tock doesn't have that.

01:08:36.320 | So what it's saying is people can walk away without losing anything.

01:08:40.320 | Now, it's hard because it's addictive.

01:08:41.560 | But once they break the addiction, they have not left behind

01:08:44.880 | a social graph, a collection of followers, people, friends that they've indicated.

01:08:49.960 | It's just an abstract stream of brainstream stimulation,

01:08:53.320 | which they could replace with any other stream of brainstream stimulation.

01:08:57.000 | They get with a video games or with podcasts or with high,

01:09:00.160 | high end streaming things or drug use. Right.

01:09:02.360 | I mean, it's all kind of doing the same. It's all interchangeable.

01:09:07.600 | This is the direction that the social media market's going in

01:09:11.000 | because you get more engagement with addiction, but it makes it more dynamic.

01:09:15.040 | It makes it more tenuous.

01:09:16.240 | And that's what I argued in this twenty twenty two article.

01:09:18.360 | I said we're going to start to see a more tumultuous

01:09:21.480 | attention economy, digital attention economy landscape

01:09:24.400 | with services coming to go and and big sweeps.

01:09:27.200 | And as people jump around the various things and I think with this

01:09:30.360 | migration of twenty something's away from tick tock all at once,

01:09:34.720 | we're seeing that thesis start to play out.

01:09:37.080 | So I think those are the key dynamics to understand.

01:09:39.200 | Social graph is a entrenched advantage

01:09:44.200 | that produce content that was more addictive than just straight news,

01:09:47.800 | straight production,

01:09:50.520 | pure algorithmic distraction is even more addicting and compelling,

01:09:54.000 | but doesn't have the entrenchment of the social graph.

01:09:56.160 | And so we're seeing the sort of endgame, I think, of the longstanding

01:10:00.200 | legacy players where you get lots more dynamic shifting in the market.

01:10:03.040 | Ultimately, I think that's good

01:10:05.720 | because when you don't have a small number of things

01:10:07.480 | that everyone feels compelled to use you as a pursuant of the deep life,

01:10:12.280 | have a lot more social flexibility to construct the online life that you want.

01:10:16.440 | The more variety there is out there.

01:10:19.480 | The more easy and acceptable it is for you to create something

01:10:22.520 | that you really like.

01:10:23.640 | So I think ultimately, it's good news and it's cool to see

01:10:26.120 | the theories I predicted starting to actually play out in reality.

01:10:30.600 | All right, Jesse, that's it.

01:10:34.120 | I think that's our episode for today.

01:10:36.400 | Thank you, everyone, for listening and or watching.

01:10:38.800 | We'll be back next week

01:10:39.600 | with another normal episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

01:10:42.280 | Remember to send your ideas

01:10:44.160 | for topics you like or want to hear about to jesse@calmedeport.com

01:10:47.480 | and otherwise I'll see you next week.

01:10:49.040 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:10:51.000 | Hey, so if you enjoyed today's episode about single purpose notebooks,

01:10:57.800 | I think you'll also like episode 287, which is about my

01:11:01.920 | professional note taking systems.

01:11:04.360 | You can compare the two.

01:11:06.120 | I think you'll like it. Check it out.

01:11:08.280 | We live in a distracted world.

01:11:09.520 | We're bombarded by information, so we need some way to efficiently

01:11:13.200 | keep track of the information that matters.

A Pocket Notebook To Replace Your Phone - Be More Productive & Change Your Life | Cal Newport

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