Ep. #185: John McPhee's Writing Process, Admin Overload, and Filter Bubbles

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 185.

00:00:13.840 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ along with my producer, Jesse.

00:00:20.300 | We were just rock and rolling here briefly.

00:00:22.960 | There's some music blaring, I would say, from the restaurant below.

00:00:28.760 | So we're really feeling the groove.

00:00:30.840 | I don't think it'll show up on our recording because of the heavy gating we have, but it's

00:00:36.560 | going to give us a beat to bounce to.

00:00:38.880 | They're having a good time down there.

00:00:40.760 | They are.

00:00:41.760 | They didn't invite us, but I'm glad they are having a good time.

00:00:44.680 | This is a pretty eccentric studio we record in because we just had an audio engineer out

00:00:50.180 | here last week helping us get rid of this ringing that was picking up in the equipment.

00:00:57.440 | And it turned out that the building itself has a faulty ground.

00:01:04.280 | If you don't properly ground the electrical system in a building, the wires become antennas.

00:01:10.360 | So this entire building is basically RF emitting antennas or RF gathering antennas.

00:01:16.040 | I mean, Joe was able to take a, what do you call it, impedance booster and plug it onto

00:01:21.820 | our mic cable and we could hear AM radio in our headsets because the wire on the mic was

00:01:27.360 | acting as an antenna and the sound was coming in.

00:01:31.360 | So we have our whole building is an antenna and there's techno music playing.

00:01:38.160 | And then the third fun thing is, as it took Jesse a while to get used to this, weird smell

00:01:43.120 | Fridays.

00:01:44.120 | Like every once in a while, just weird smells come from the kitchen below and fill the studio.

00:01:50.160 | Like I don't think in good conscience we could have former president Barack Obama come be

00:01:55.220 | interviewed in here.

00:01:56.720 | This would be my concern.

00:01:57.720 | I was going to suggest he might need to get a cleaning lady, but then I realized it wasn't,

00:02:01.560 | it was from coming from downstairs.

00:02:03.360 | I don't know if that's better or worse.

00:02:05.560 | Yeah.

00:02:06.560 | So anyways, it's, we, we love the HQ.

00:02:09.120 | It's an odd HQ.

00:02:11.720 | We've made some progress on the ringing.

00:02:13.800 | Joe the engineer did some stuff that I think got rid of it.

00:02:18.640 | So I think we're, I think we're okay, but he felt very tentative about it.

00:02:22.960 | You could tell someone at his caliber of audio engineering was very uncomfortable about the

00:02:27.600 | idea of trying to record anything high end in this location.

00:02:32.000 | I think it made him physically uncomfortable.

00:02:34.760 | Well you should explain to the audience about, cause you do everything in one take and how

00:02:39.240 | you were hearing this ringing in the back of your mic or headphones while you were recording.

00:02:45.040 | Yeah.

00:02:46.040 | So I could hear it.

00:02:48.040 | Right.

00:02:49.040 | So we do things one take.

00:02:50.040 | So I could hear it going on.

00:02:53.280 | But then once the podcasts were going out, podcast listeners weren't hearing it so much.

00:02:57.040 | And I, and I think it's because there's so much of the high end frequencies are cut off

00:03:00.760 | in the compression for the podcast apps and then going through the wireless connection

00:03:06.280 | to earbuds that like most people listening didn't really hear it.

00:03:09.320 | But then as soon as we got on YouTube, people listen to YouTube on computers and I think

00:03:13.760 | the sound is less compressed.

00:03:15.200 | They could hear it.

00:03:16.260 | And we started hearing from people, Hey, what's that?

00:03:18.000 | What's that ringing?

00:03:19.000 | What's that?

00:03:20.000 | What's that humming?

00:03:21.000 | So, so basically he did a bunch of stuff.

00:03:22.080 | I don't understand it.

00:03:23.080 | The ringing is gone.

00:03:24.360 | We have a hiss instead, but we have filters in place in theory to take care of the hiss

00:03:28.640 | before you hear it.

00:03:29.680 | So we're, we really got a top of the line location going here.

00:03:33.520 | I mean, I think Jesse, the only answer is we have to build a building somewhere.

00:03:38.080 | And I think the power company is going to come out or the power company could fix the

00:03:40.880 | power in this room.

00:03:42.040 | But I like our second option of we build the building built from the ground up with like

00:03:46.200 | a beautiful power supply and a completely soundproofed, perfectly soundproofed the walls.

00:03:53.080 | And so we can, we can dream.

00:03:54.880 | And if we do that, we have to get Joe the engineer somehow we have to steal him away

00:03:59.000 | because he was fantastic and yeah, he helps solve their problems.

00:04:03.280 | So anyways, this is the wonders of sort of semi-professional audio recording.

00:04:10.880 | All the wonders that we get to deal with, but I am glad to have that ringing gone because

00:04:15.000 | I mean, Jesse knows I'd complain about it.

00:04:16.240 | I was like, I can hear this thing.

00:04:18.920 | It's like a golfer, like having a tick on the back of his swing or something like, you

00:04:22.120 | know, equipment.

00:04:23.120 | So yeah, yeah.

00:04:24.120 | Because you're hearing it while you're recording.

00:04:26.320 | Yeah.

00:04:27.320 | So progress, I feel good.

00:04:28.880 | Progress is being made.

00:04:31.120 | We should mention YouTube.

00:04:32.580 | So for those who haven't heard us say it recently, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia, full episodes

00:04:41.140 | are all going up there and then Jesse is slicing and dicing all the questions and the segments

00:04:45.840 | into their own standalone videos.

00:04:47.620 | So if there's something you want to go back to and save or share or see me say it instead

00:04:52.660 | of listening to it, that YouTube page should have what you need.

00:04:56.780 | We have brand new graphics coming, which is kind of exciting.

00:04:59.840 | Now that we switched the cover art of the podcast, there's going to be new graphics

00:05:06.240 | on the clips, the video clips at the beginning and end.

00:05:08.920 | So progress is being made.

00:05:10.200 | So anyways, check that out, youtube.com/CalNewportMedia to watch individual questions or full episodes.

00:05:19.560 | So I wanted to do a quick deep dive today before we got into our questions.

00:05:25.240 | We do have a good collection of questions, but I wanted to tackle this question, is friction

00:05:30.540 | bad?

00:05:33.080 | And the precipitating event that got me thinking about this question was reading John McPhee's

00:05:40.840 | book Draft Number Four.

00:05:44.240 | So Draft Number Four is a book that John McPhee wrote relatively recently about the process

00:05:51.240 | of writing and things he has learned about the process of writing.

00:05:54.360 | There's a little bit of memoir thrown in there and quite a bit of discussion on things like

00:05:58.360 | structure and what caught my attention among other things when I was reading it is that

00:06:01.880 | he described his research process, how he organized and made use of the information

00:06:08.320 | he collected during research in the pre-computer era.

00:06:11.900 | So McPhee has been active in professional writing since the 60s, so he had a long period

00:06:15.320 | before there were computers.

00:06:16.780 | And here was his process.

00:06:18.520 | He would go out in the field and take tons of notes, both in notebooks and on tape recorders.

00:06:25.480 | And McPhee is a long-term researcher.

00:06:28.840 | It's not unusual for him to spend eight months, 12 months on a single article.

00:06:34.000 | Now, of course, back then they would write articles of crazy lengths, like 40,000-word

00:06:38.640 | articles, which is crazy.

00:06:39.880 | They'd have to break them up over multiple issues.

00:06:41.800 | There are many books.

00:06:43.140 | But he would fill up many notebooks, many tape recorders.

00:06:45.800 | All right.

00:06:46.800 | So how do we get from that?

00:06:48.680 | How does McPhee get from that stack of notebooks, stack of tapes to an article that's coming

00:06:55.280 | out in The New Yorker?

00:06:56.280 | So here's what he used to do.

00:06:57.760 | First, he would painstakingly type up all of those notes.

00:07:03.360 | So he would go through the notebooks and type up on his typewriter—remember, pre-computer

00:07:08.400 | era—type up on his typewriter everything that was in those notebooks.

00:07:13.640 | Then he would go to those tapes, and he would transcribe everything that was recorded on

00:07:19.840 | those tapes, all of the interviews and conversations on those tapes.

00:07:22.880 | He had one of those old-school dictation desks where he had foot pedals, so he could control

00:07:26.840 | the speed of the tape recorder with a foot pedal so that you could slow it down just

00:07:30.520 | enough that you could keep up when you're typing.

00:07:32.440 | This used to be real common back when dictation was used.

00:07:34.920 | So he would type everything up.

00:07:36.120 | And when he was typing it up on his typewriter, separate blocks of notes would be separated

00:07:41.520 | with multiple blank lines.

00:07:44.000 | So okay, here's some notes from one conversation.

00:07:46.560 | Now here's some notes about something else.

00:07:48.280 | He'd put blank lines.

00:07:49.280 | And the reason why he would do that is that after he had laboriously typed up all of this—and

00:07:53.800 | we're talking weeks and weeks of work—he would Xerox copy every one of those pages,

00:07:59.120 | take the Xerox copies, and cut out each of those blocks.

00:08:03.200 | So he had space in between each block of notes, and he would cut out strips from these pages

00:08:09.200 | along those spaces between the blocks of notes.

00:08:12.060 | So he would just have endless slips of paper, each piece of paper with a separate piece

00:08:17.040 | of conversation or observation or note that he had took.

00:08:19.960 | And he would sort those strips of papers into topic and put them all into a folder dedicated

00:08:24.400 | to that topic.

00:08:25.400 | So now he would have, after weeks of work, dozens of folders, each dedicated to a particular

00:08:31.040 | event, discussion, or topic relevant to the article.

00:08:35.980 | And the folder would be full of all of his notes he had taken anywhere relevant to that

00:08:41.880 | topic.

00:08:42.880 | Finally, he would then take a card—I'm assuming it would be an index card, he didn't specify—and

00:08:47.520 | for each of these topics, he would write that name on a card.

00:08:49.600 | And he had a piece of plywood in his office—and Jesse and I were talking about this earlier,

00:08:55.280 | but I was gratified to hear that early in his career, McPhee had a deep work HQ-style

00:09:01.000 | office.

00:09:02.000 | It was in Nassau Street, above a store, across the hall from a massage parlor, just like

00:09:07.920 | we're above a restaurant on the main street of our town, across from a physical therapist,

00:09:12.280 | and I don't even know what the other people do.

00:09:16.040 | I think they mainly just glared at us for not wearing masks, but I don't even know

00:09:19.080 | what they do.

00:09:21.600 | And our weird HQ, so McPhee had a weird HQ as well.

00:09:25.840 | And he would lay these cards out on the plywood and move them around, move them around, what's

00:09:29.560 | the structure for this piece?

00:09:30.560 | And he could spend weeks doing that until he finally had figured out this topic, and

00:09:35.440 | this topic, and back to this, and he had all the cards figured out.

00:09:39.340 | Now he was ready to write.

00:09:40.800 | And when it came time to write, he would say, "This is the card I'm on right now.

00:09:43.880 | Let me take the folder corresponding to that card, open it up, spread out all these slips

00:09:47.480 | of paper.

00:09:48.480 | Here's everything I know about that topic so I can draw from these quotes and these

00:09:51.600 | citations and these observations as I'm writing that section of the article."

00:09:55.480 | Then he moved on to the next section, take that folder, lay them out, write that section

00:09:59.480 | of the article.

00:10:00.480 | That is how John McPhee would research and write his articles.

00:10:04.020 | This is an incredibly laborious process.

00:10:06.840 | It's a very time-consuming process.

00:10:09.760 | He would spend weeks and weeks just working with his notes before he was writing.

00:10:14.820 | It is a process that is full of friction.

00:10:17.840 | He's literally cutting paper with scissors and putting them in folders.

00:10:21.160 | I mean, this is a process where there's friction all over the place.

00:10:24.880 | But anyone reading that part of draft number four would say, "That makes complete sense."

00:10:31.160 | What John McPhee was trying to do necessitates slowness.

00:10:37.180 | He has to internalize this information, be exposed to it again and again, marinate in

00:10:44.600 | this information until he really just feels like he is in that world and understands it.

00:10:49.240 | So as he begins trying to structure his piece, he can see how it should all come together.

00:10:53.480 | When it comes time to write a section, he can see what's out there and knows what to

00:10:56.600 | pull from.

00:10:57.600 | The friction is a feature, not a bug in this particular system.

00:11:02.400 | This is common if you study the writing techniques and the research techniques of really acclaimed

00:11:08.840 | nonfiction writers.

00:11:10.220 | They have high friction, slow systems.

00:11:14.560 | There's an early essay I wrote for my newsletter and blog at calnewport.com years ago where

00:11:20.180 | I talked about the historian Taylor Branch's research methods.

00:11:25.120 | So Taylor Branch wrote this fantastic award-winning trilogy, three-part biography of Martin Luther

00:11:31.960 | King, epic project, many, many years.

00:11:36.360 | I believe it won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, one of the two.

00:11:40.320 | Fantastic series.

00:11:41.640 | And he talked about years ago, and I wrote about this, a similarly slow process.

00:11:44.920 | Now, he had computers at the time he was writing this, but he used a Microsoft Access database

00:11:50.520 | and every bit of note he would find anywhere, and he would just read everything.

00:11:57.720 | What are all the newspapers?

00:11:58.720 | Here's a day when Martin Luther King is in this town.

00:12:00.920 | Let me go find all the newspapers from that town on microfiche and go read them and pull

00:12:05.920 | out anything that seems relevant to understanding what was going on that day.

00:12:08.680 | So I mean, he would really read every letter, but would go three, four layers away from

00:12:13.160 | even what King was doing just to find all this tangential information.

00:12:17.240 | And he coded everything with a date and put it into this database.

00:12:22.560 | And then he could spit out, like, okay, here's the period of King's life that I'm writing

00:12:26.960 | about now, and he could spit out, give me everything I have notes on from this week.

00:12:34.080 | Every letter that was written that week, every newspaper I looked at.

00:12:37.040 | And so again, this laborious process of let me just take everything in and put into a

00:12:43.200 | database and time code it so when it comes time to write, I can have a density of information.

00:12:47.440 | What happened on this day and this week and immerse myself in it and then write with confidence

00:12:53.720 | and with that iceberg below the surface of knowledge, supporting the thing that he was

00:12:58.600 | actually writing about.

00:12:59.600 | A slow process, laborious process, but a necessary process.

00:13:04.440 | So we see this with acclaimed writers, high friction, slow systems for making sense of

00:13:09.320 | information where we don't see this as anywhere else.

00:13:12.760 | And that is what I was noting is that that is a problem.

00:13:17.840 | We have made productivity synonymous with low friction and speed.

00:13:23.980 | How do we get this done faster?

00:13:25.580 | How do we get you the information you need quicker?

00:13:27.600 | Can we make connections for you on your behalf?

00:13:30.760 | Maybe the software can show you what you need.

00:13:32.840 | Can we throw machine learning at it?

00:13:34.400 | This would be the new thing to do.

00:13:35.880 | So that the amount of extra effort you have to do really does get minimized.

00:13:41.040 | And when it comes to hard cognitive work, especially creative cognitive work, minimizing

00:13:46.000 | friction, minimizing effort is not necessarily what we want to do.

00:13:50.640 | The example of John McPheen, the example of Taylor Branch is canonical slow productivity

00:13:56.600 | in action.

00:13:58.640 | What they were doing required in the moment, inefficient, slow, thoughtful work.

00:14:07.320 | You look at any one day and you might say this day was not productive.

00:14:09.840 | You cut things with scissors all day, but you fast forward out, zoom out to the looking

00:14:14.080 | at the next year, that full year, you say, wow, this was a fantastic article you produced

00:14:17.880 | that year.

00:14:18.880 | It's a very productive year.

00:14:19.880 | You zoom into a particular day, you say you're just cutting things with scissors.

00:14:22.880 | Zoom out, incredibly productive year.

00:14:25.040 | And this was my observation.

00:14:28.060 | Friction is sometimes something we want to get rid of.

00:14:29.960 | If I'm doing a mindless administrative task, make it easier for me to do it.

00:14:34.520 | Sure.

00:14:35.520 | But sometimes friction is exactly what we need.

00:14:37.120 | If you're doing something deep, taking your time, going slow, having old tools, having

00:14:42.360 | to do processes to take time can be a feature and not a bug.

00:14:46.800 | So I think it's something we just need to keep in mind.

00:14:50.640 | Sometimes going slower, sometimes having things be a little bit harder is what you need.

00:14:56.000 | That's what it sometimes takes to do hard work.

00:15:01.320 | So I admire that process.

00:15:03.080 | By the way, like McPhee goes on and talked about his computer setup once he got a computer

00:15:09.000 | setup and he ran this completely weird old school editing software called K-edit.

00:15:16.160 | It's like a line editor.

00:15:17.380 | It's not a WSYW word processor.

00:15:19.680 | It's someone custom programmed for him and he tried to explain it and I couldn't understand

00:15:24.920 | it.

00:15:25.920 | So like when he got computers, it did not simplify his life.

00:15:28.400 | He did not have a sort of Rome account Zettelkasten system that was automatically putting all

00:15:33.800 | of his notes around.

00:15:35.040 | Somehow his computerized system seemed even more complicated to me than what he was doing

00:15:39.720 | with the note cards.

00:15:40.720 | >> Your buddy Ryan has a similar process too, right?

00:15:43.400 | With the note cards and folders and stuff.

00:15:45.200 | >> Yeah, Ryan will write down, Holiday will write down everything of interest from the

00:15:49.520 | books he's reading and then put them away into boxes of note cards.

00:15:54.400 | And he takes his time.

00:15:55.400 | And then when it comes time to write a book, he'll go through and pull out the note cards

00:15:58.440 | he thinks are relevant to that book and the information is all there.

00:16:00.840 | Yeah, it takes a lot longer to do the reading, but he would say that's the point.

00:16:04.880 | It's like, yeah, I want to take long.

00:16:05.880 | I want to pull out the ideas.

00:16:07.360 | I want to think about them.

00:16:08.360 | I want to store them so I can use them later.

00:16:10.600 | You know, slowness is underrated, especially in our current world of work.

00:16:17.040 | I will, however, Jesse, tell you about something that is not underrated.

00:16:21.400 | And that is a product that I have been enjoying.

00:16:24.720 | I've been running an interesting experiment recently.

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00:16:35.120 | Here is how it works.

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00:16:42.620 | So like shot size bottles.

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00:16:45.240 | And you take it in the morning, either in place of your morning coffee or you do it

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00:17:13.320 | It prevents you from having, like I typically do, drinking five or six cup of coffees in

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00:17:21.600 | And I can definitely tell the difference.

00:17:25.160 | You know, I think I can tell the difference because I don't have to immediately get that

00:17:28.800 | second or third coffee.

00:17:29.800 | You get that more sustained.

00:17:31.720 | I think I'm locked in.

00:17:33.880 | Now I don't know how it works.

00:17:36.480 | It's complicated.

00:17:37.480 | They were trying to explain to me, I talked to the founder of the company, he was trying

00:17:39.800 | to explain to me the 12 functional ingredients.

00:17:43.120 | And I'm not a sophisticated enough biochemist.

00:17:46.800 | There's something called matcha in it, which I think works really well.

00:17:50.120 | It has our adaptogens in it that help fight stress.

00:17:53.640 | It sort of is in a smoothie, you know, fruit smoothie colored type form.

00:18:00.720 | But I have become a Magic Mind convert.

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00:18:19.360 | I mean, Jesse, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much coffee I will drink if I'm unchecked.

00:18:25.280 | I mean, it can't be healthy.

00:18:27.800 | It's pots with an S. And I'm not exaggerating that.

00:18:32.160 | And when I take the shot of Magic Mind, along with that first cup of coffee, I can de-pluralize

00:18:38.760 | pots in terms of how much coffee I drink.

00:18:41.120 | I think that's probably better for me.

00:18:43.240 | And I'm not literally shaking the equipment off the walls.

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00:21:15.880 | I'm thirsty.

00:21:16.880 | I feel like I need some Magic Mind of MunkPak to get going.

00:21:21.240 | But let's dive into some questions.

00:21:24.360 | Our first question of the episode comes from Worried Housewife who writes, "How can a housewife

00:21:35.360 | implement deep work into her life or is it only for advancing in career work or for creator/writers,

00:21:41.240 | etc.?

00:21:42.240 | I love your book.

00:21:43.240 | However, I am mostly a housewife and I feel a bit anxious because the self-help books

00:21:46.500 | seem to imply unless I am writing books or working towards business, my life is mediocre.

00:21:51.540 | I want to be among those who feel accomplished and productive.

00:21:53.700 | What would your advice be for someone implementing the deep life in this situation?"

00:21:59.780 | So I don't know, Jesse, is housewife a word we're not supposed to use anymore?

00:22:02.900 | It doesn't feel like that's the word we're supposed to use anymore.

00:22:05.060 | I mean, she listed it, so I guess you...

00:22:08.260 | Yeah, it's her self-description.

00:22:09.620 | I'm reading verbatim.

00:22:10.620 | I'm thinking stay-at-home parent is probably the word of choice.

00:22:16.540 | So well, for those who are concerned, I'm reading verbatim.

00:22:20.740 | I'm reading verbatim the question.

00:22:22.860 | All right, so this is a good question.

00:22:25.420 | First of all, I think there's a semantic issue that we often have on the show, let's get

00:22:29.380 | back to, which is what exactly do we mean by deep work?

00:22:34.540 | Because again, I talk about this all the time.

00:22:36.820 | I think deep work gets generalized into areas in which it was not meant to originally apply.

00:22:44.260 | So really, the intention behind the phrase deep work is very focused.

00:22:48.300 | It is when you're doing a specific type of cognitive heavy work, it is a mode of doing

00:22:54.980 | that work in which you minimize back and forth context switching.

00:22:58.380 | So you give the thing you're working on full attention with minimal back and forth context

00:23:02.860 | switching.

00:23:03.860 | The main argument being that if you have a hard cognitive task to do, giving that sustained

00:23:09.020 | attention without context shifting is going to be more effective than trying to work on

00:23:12.700 | that task while also switching your attention back and forth.

00:23:15.380 | So that is functionally what deep work is.

00:23:18.580 | And then the larger hypothesis in the book Deep Work is that this is broadly valuable

00:23:26.180 | in a lot of knowledge work fields, and it's becoming more valuable in a lot of knowledge

00:23:30.020 | work fields, especially in the American context.

00:23:34.460 | And we're not paying attention to it.

00:23:36.020 | So that we're setting up work systems that have an accidental side effect of requiring

00:23:40.540 | lots of context switching, requiring lots of time fragmenting, make it very difficult

00:23:45.260 | to actually work on cognitive tasks in this manner.

00:23:47.940 | So we execute those tasks worse.

00:23:49.980 | And so the argument is we should actually prioritize in that work context, giving people

00:23:56.220 | unbroken time to work without distraction.

00:24:00.900 | That's very narrow.

00:24:01.900 | So that would have very little relevance if you're asking about, I'm at home, I'm at home

00:24:07.740 | with the kids.

00:24:08.740 | So you're not working in a knowledge work job that's asking of you to do these sort

00:24:12.740 | of very specific cognitively demanding work tasks.

00:24:17.020 | So these worries aren't relevant to that situation.

00:24:19.240 | But I think this is just a semantic issue because later in the question you say, what's

00:24:23.860 | your advice for someone implementing the deep life in the situation?

00:24:27.620 | And there I think we're getting to the fruitful question.

00:24:30.820 | I think this is what you're actually asking about is the deep life and perhaps the role

00:24:36.700 | of work or focused work in the deep life.

00:24:38.980 | And I think this is a critical question.

00:24:41.060 | Because we often extrapolate deep work to mean the deep life, but they're two different

00:24:46.220 | things.

00:24:47.220 | Deep work can have a place in a deep life, but they're two different things.

00:24:51.460 | So I'm glad we have a chance to actually talk about this and to try to make a distinction.

00:24:58.100 | So in the theory of the deep life, which is something that was not developed in the book

00:25:01.740 | Deep Work, I introduced the term in the book Deep Work, but don't really get into it.

00:25:05.540 | I wasn't ready to get into that yet.

00:25:07.660 | But in the theory of the deep life that we've evolved on my newsletter and here on this

00:25:12.180 | podcast, the idea is you identify the areas of your life that are important.

00:25:17.420 | And in each of these areas, you focus intensely on the things that are high value and try

00:25:23.520 | to minimize time wasted on the things that are not important or of lower value in that

00:25:29.140 | area.

00:25:30.140 | So it's really triaging your time and attention towards the things that really matter.

00:25:33.780 | There's a core component to the deep life that says for the things that really matter

00:25:36.920 | in this type of calculus, you might even want to make radical moves to support them.

00:25:41.660 | So make radical changes to how you live your life to really invest in the small number

00:25:47.580 | of things that are most important to you.

00:25:49.020 | That is the underlying concept of the deep life.

00:25:53.140 | Craft is just one piece of the different areas of your life that might be important.

00:25:59.460 | And it's important depends on what you're doing, what your actual situation is.

00:26:03.320 | So I think regardless of whether you're working in an office or you're at home taking care

00:26:08.180 | of kids or you're in between jobs and single, whatever the situation is, the calculus of

00:26:15.260 | the deep life is relevant.

00:26:16.980 | What matters to me in my life?

00:26:18.340 | Am I investing in those on things that really matter and not wasting too much time on things

00:26:21.960 | that don't?

00:26:23.620 | That's always relevant.

00:26:24.620 | And I think that is critical.

00:26:25.620 | If you don't have that framework, you're going to be completely adrift.

00:26:30.080 | And so there's nothing about being at home with kids that says that framework's not going

00:26:33.020 | to work.

00:26:34.020 | If anything, it's going to be even more important.

00:26:35.020 | It's that framework that's going to make sure that you don't get so caught up in X that

00:26:38.860 | you forget to actually think about this other piece of your life, the community involvement,

00:26:42.780 | constitution, your health and fitness.

00:26:45.260 | You're seeing the different parts of your life and making them important.

00:26:48.380 | The family commitment, the family there is going to be really critical when you do that

00:26:52.420 | deep life calculus.

00:26:53.420 | I mean, this is a, we talk about radical moves to align your life with your current values.

00:26:58.220 | If you're, you're dedicating your time to trying to help your kids raise in a stable,

00:27:03.900 | loving environment and cultivate the type of attributes and values you would want in

00:27:08.740 | leaders and adults who in the future we're going to look to with respect, that's an incredibly

00:27:13.440 | important endeavor.

00:27:16.340 | And so when you're thinking about things that deep life work is just a piece of it.

00:27:20.020 | And the importance of that depends on what you're doing in your life right then.

00:27:23.460 | So I wouldn't worry about that at all.

00:27:24.700 | I would focus on the deep life and making sure that each of the areas of your deep life

00:27:27.860 | are getting attention.

00:27:29.740 | That let's say the kids needs aren't swapping other needs that are also important to you

00:27:34.020 | or to the other people in your life.

00:27:37.100 | Deep work by itself is not that interesting.

00:27:39.740 | It's interesting if you're a knowledge worker who works with your brain to try to add value

00:27:43.820 | to information, then yeah, you want to be doing deep work because if you do it with

00:27:46.980 | a lot of context shifting, you're not going to be doing it as well.

00:27:49.160 | But that's just a particular job.

00:27:52.300 | That's just a particular endeavor.

00:27:54.700 | I don't want to put a moral valuation on deep work that basically focus cognitive work is

00:27:59.940 | somehow high value and anything else isn't high value.

00:28:02.500 | No, it's high value in the context of knowledge work.

00:28:05.300 | Deep is better than distracted.

00:28:07.020 | But you leave the context of knowledge work, it's not relevant.

00:28:12.220 | So anyways, I hope that's helpful.

00:28:14.980 | Let's use the deep life as the framing, the thing that has some sort of moral valence

00:28:19.980 | to it.

00:28:20.980 | That this, that's a structure to your life that's trying to intentionally focus on what

00:28:25.900 | matters versus those things that don't.

00:28:28.780 | That is universally important.

00:28:30.740 | And let's narrow in deep work to say this is an approach to doing a certain type of

00:28:36.540 | activity that a lot of people do and it's relevant and we need to care about it, but

00:28:40.660 | it is not by itself the necessary foundation of a good life.

00:28:50.100 | We get that a lot, Jesse, don't we?

00:28:51.100 | Like I think the deep work becomes a stand in for like much bigger.

00:28:55.420 | Yeah, we've been getting a lot of those questions lately, especially from folks who are maybe

00:28:59.660 | retired or at home.

00:29:01.460 | This question, yeah, it's been coming up a lot.

00:29:04.540 | Yep.

00:29:05.540 | Yep.

00:29:06.540 | So good.

00:29:07.540 | I'm glad we had a chance to jump into that.

00:29:08.540 | All right.

00:29:09.540 | So now we have a question from Darcy.

00:29:13.060 | Darcy asks, how do you get to do things you need to do with an ever increasing administration

00:29:21.020 | or administrative overload?

00:29:24.160 | Administrative creep is a massive problem.

00:29:25.860 | Every service you hire, activity you perform, product you buy comes with an ever increasing

00:29:29.620 | administrative burden.

00:29:31.360 | For example, you buy a washing machine, it doesn't work properly.

00:29:33.820 | You request a refund.

00:29:34.820 | The supplier needs X form completed.

00:29:36.980 | They then deny the refund.

00:29:38.720 | You then turn to a government agency to assist in enforcing your consumer rights.

00:29:42.780 | They require a form to be completed.

00:29:44.460 | Each interaction is by email.

00:29:45.900 | Finally you arrive at a tribunal.

00:29:47.780 | They give you a refund.

00:29:49.080 | Each process requires time and skill.

00:29:51.900 | This is all time away from doing deep work.

00:29:55.580 | And again, Darcy, I would modify that to say this is all time that would keep you away

00:30:01.880 | from the intentional points that you are identifying in your deep life plan, the things you want

00:30:08.780 | to be spending time on, whether they're work or non-work related.

00:30:11.500 | All right.

00:30:12.500 | So that is a good question because administrative creep, that is the growing burden of small

00:30:19.940 | tasks is a big problem.

00:30:23.820 | I think we underestimate it.

00:30:25.280 | We in particular underestimate it in the world of work, the actual burden of administrative

00:30:29.100 | creep on our ability to get things done that actually have value for the organization.

00:30:35.760 | So I have three ideas, Darcy, that I want to share here.

00:30:38.580 | All right.

00:30:40.060 | First, I think you need to be more comfortable wasting more money.

00:30:43.820 | All right.

00:30:45.740 | Yes, your washing machine didn't work right, but man, this is crazy.

00:30:49.660 | You ended up in a tribunal with the government to try to get the refund back.

00:30:55.140 | I mean, part of fighting administrative creep is to the extent possible, doing less things

00:31:00.340 | that generate administrative creep.

00:31:01.860 | And if you can just spend some money or waste some money and not have to deal with something,

00:31:06.700 | to the extent you're able to do that, it's a good investment in time.

00:31:10.540 | I don't know if that refund was really worth all the time you actually just spent there.

00:31:15.980 | So that's the first thing I would suggest is try to reduce what you can in your life,

00:31:21.320 | even if it's not optimal.

00:31:22.320 | Like, oh man, I really should return this thing I got from Amazon.

00:31:27.100 | It's the wrong size, but I just, I'm going to have to go to the UPS store and print this

00:31:31.300 | label.

00:31:32.300 | I don't know what to do.

00:31:33.300 | It's like, or you just eat the $20.

00:31:35.100 | So we got to value time and context shifting.

00:31:38.740 | That's a real cost that we weigh against things like money.

00:31:43.820 | Idea two is to automate.

00:31:44.820 | So I'm a big believer in this when it comes to small tasks is there's two conditions that

00:31:52.020 | a small task can be in, cognitively speaking.

00:31:56.740 | The impact of these two conditions is very different on your brain.

00:31:59.420 | The first condition is that it can kind of be hanging.

00:32:01.860 | It's on a to-do list somewhere, but that's it.

00:32:04.580 | It's something that needs to get done.

00:32:06.060 | It's going to have to, time's going to have to be found.

00:32:08.660 | Things are, information's going to have to be gathered and it's sitting there as this

00:32:11.860 | sort of weight of something that's needs to be done.

00:32:14.820 | You're not quite sure when and how it's going to get done.

00:32:16.860 | The second condition a small task can be in is not hanging.

00:32:20.820 | This is when it's getting done in this time, in this place, here's where the information

00:32:24.820 | is.

00:32:26.300 | You don't have to, it's not on your list of things that you have to actually exert any

00:32:31.700 | additional planning energy towards.

00:32:34.460 | Automation, when I say automate, I mean moving as many of your small tasks as possible into

00:32:39.700 | that second condition.

00:32:42.500 | There's a few things you can do here.

00:32:44.220 | One thing is for recurring tasks, you have a way they always get done.

00:32:48.220 | They always get done the same way.

00:32:49.940 | This day, on this week, every month, here's the spreadsheet I go through and I pay these

00:32:55.540 | bills and I do the budget or whatever it is, but it's the same times, the same days.

00:33:00.140 | You don't have to think about it.

00:33:01.500 | It's just you get to that day, you see the calendar notice and you execute.

00:33:06.580 | It's no longer sitting there as something that is going to require planning energy.

00:33:11.100 | The other thing you can do is have set times put aside for doing these type of tasks in

00:33:15.460 | general.

00:33:16.460 | And maybe what you're actually doing is assigning tasks to these buckets.

00:33:20.300 | Tuesday and Wednesdays, I have a 90 minute block in the afternoon in which I'm doing,

00:33:25.780 | I don't know, student related, class related issues as a professor.

00:33:30.260 | So students have questions, they need to know their grades, there's issues with problem

00:33:34.580 | sets or whatever.

00:33:35.580 | Maybe you have 90 minutes twice a week.

00:33:37.100 | That's when you do that work.

00:33:38.700 | So when any of these questions pop up, you can just throw them on a list in a shared

00:33:43.540 | document somewhere.

00:33:45.420 | And you just know that list gets processed when you get to Tuesday.

00:33:48.220 | And again, when you get to Thursday.

00:33:49.660 | Again, what you're doing here is moving those small tasks into the second condition where

00:33:53.260 | they require no further planning energy.

00:33:55.660 | The final thing is you can have some sort of system put in place for some of this type

00:34:00.660 | of work so that when a request comes in, it's not just hanging there loose.

00:34:05.180 | Here's how we handle it.

00:34:06.180 | Okay, so if this issue comes up, you have to do this, you have to put it on my shared

00:34:09.220 | calendar.

00:34:10.420 | There's a each week I put the notes, whatever it is, but you have some system in place.

00:34:14.220 | What I'm trying to do here with automation is get things out of that condition in which

00:34:18.300 | planning energy still needs to be applied.

00:34:20.380 | And the reason is, is that if you give me 20 tasks, and in scenario A, each of those

00:34:27.500 | 20 tasks is going to require at some point, planning energy applied, it's not clear to

00:34:32.540 | you exactly how they're going to get executed.

00:34:34.020 | And over here, you have the same 20 tasks.

00:34:36.980 | No planning energy is required.

00:34:38.500 | They're all in one of these types of pre existing systems or processes, etc.

00:34:43.360 | That second scenario is going to have a much smaller negative impact on your mind on your

00:34:51.200 | sense of busyness on the sense of what load is lurking above me, it's going to be work

00:34:58.400 | that's going to get done, but almost for free.

00:35:00.600 | It's like it doesn't add up to that quota of how much work, how much work can you have

00:35:04.400 | on your plate before your brain fritzes out and says I have too much.

00:35:07.440 | It doesn't add up to that quota, because it's not work you have to think about and plan.

00:35:12.880 | It's like, you know, you mow the yard on Saturday morning.

00:35:14.720 | So you don't think about that as oh my god, this is something in my plate, I have to figure

00:35:17.520 | out.

00:35:18.520 | So the more you can move tasks in that condition, the least negative impact they're going to

00:35:23.000 | have actually on your brain.

00:35:24.560 | And then the third thing I'm going to recommend is don't ignore the impact of attached overhead.

00:35:34.440 | So any significant project or initiative you agree to do, so the main grist of whatever

00:35:40.980 | you do, you know, in your job or whatever you do, the big things that really matter,

00:35:46.560 | like getting this committee together and making a hiring decision, updating the newsletter

00:35:51.280 | software that our church uses, whatever it is, right, any non-trivial commitment or project

00:35:56.360 | is going to bring with it a fixed overhead of administrative work.

00:36:01.160 | And once this is on your plate, there's going to be this fixed overhead of we have to talk

00:36:05.920 | back and forth with the other people involved, there's going to have to be some meetings,

00:36:08.960 | there's going to be a background drip of emails that are going to require answering as you're

00:36:13.680 | trying to figure things out.

00:36:15.440 | And you don't want to ignore that fixed amount of overhead because it does not take much

00:36:20.300 | of that until your schedule is overhead dominated.

00:36:24.400 | And again, I think this is another issue that people have is they just look at the project

00:36:29.440 | itself, try to get the software updated for our newsletter, we're trying to do a hiring

00:36:34.440 | decision and I've agreed to whatever, put together a new white paper that we send the

00:36:41.560 | clients.

00:36:42.560 | And you look at just the project in isolation, you're like, well, I kind of imagined this

00:36:45.760 | taking a few days and this taking a few days and this taking a week.

00:36:49.040 | And these are the three things I'm working on for the next two weeks, there should be

00:36:51.440 | plenty of time.

00:36:52.440 | But what you don't have in mind is that each of these projects is bringing with it this

00:36:54.840 | attached overhead.

00:36:56.400 | So now each of these three projects is bringing with it multiple Zoom meetings a week.

00:37:00.040 | Each of these projects is bringing with it, let's say, 10 to 20 back and forth emails

00:37:04.040 | per week.

00:37:05.040 | So now you have 60 back and forth emails, and that's going to translate to something

00:37:08.560 | like five to 600 inbox checks to keep up with these back and forth conversations.

00:37:12.440 | And the overhead with just these three projects in a two week period, this overhead itself

00:37:16.920 | can eat up almost all of your time.

00:37:19.800 | And now you feel administrative creep and now you feel overloaded.

00:37:22.540 | So we have to be really careful about how many projects we have on our plate at once.

00:37:27.680 | I'm a big believer of pull systems, should be working on a very small number of big projects

00:37:32.240 | at a time when one is at a stopping point.

00:37:35.440 | Only then do you pull in something new to work on, because if you bring them all on

00:37:38.480 | your plate and say, I'll figure it out, the overhead comes with them.

00:37:42.240 | And whether you're working on this project actively today or not, the overhead doesn't

00:37:45.880 | care.

00:37:46.880 | It's making demands of you.

00:37:48.160 | So that's the other big source of administrative creep.

00:37:50.500 | So have much fewer things on your plate because it's not the time required to write the paper

00:37:54.560 | or update the software that's going to kill you.

00:37:56.880 | It's the 60 emails and the seven Zoom meetings.

00:38:00.040 | That's what's going to end up killing you from a scheduling perspective.

00:38:03.140 | So be very wary about that administrative attached overhead.

00:38:06.480 | Those three things, be less efficient, waste money, automate small tasks, so get them in

00:38:11.040 | that condition where they require no further planning attention and being very careful

00:38:14.380 | about the overhead that comes with projects.

00:38:16.000 | So keep your active project queue low at any one point, I think goes a long ways towards

00:38:21.220 | keeping administrative creep feeling more reasonable.

00:38:24.760 | That's a good question.

00:38:27.680 | That's the bane of my existence, administrative creep.

00:38:29.640 | I do what I can, but we all struggle with it.

00:38:33.960 | All right.

00:38:34.960 | So we've got a question here, not really a name.

00:38:38.800 | This person's name is supposedly Deep Work versus Study and Recall.

00:38:42.840 | So I don't know, maybe it's a foreign name.

00:38:45.680 | Oh, no, here's a name.

00:38:47.240 | It's down here.

00:38:48.240 | Arnav.

00:38:49.240 | Okay.

00:38:50.240 | He signed the message.

00:38:51.240 | That's better.

00:38:52.240 | All right.

00:38:53.240 | Arnav says, "Hi, Cal.

00:38:54.480 | In the book Deep Work, you said that working for hours with high intensity is necessary

00:38:59.520 | for producing, thriving, and learning new things.

00:39:02.800 | But in your Red Book, which is How to Become a Straight A Student, you said, 'Don't work

00:39:08.600 | for more than about an hour, 50 minutes at a time.'

00:39:13.360 | These ideas have confused me.

00:39:14.960 | I want to know when to use Deep Work in a student life."

00:39:19.040 | Well, Arnav, the key to understanding this discrepancy, the 50-minute to an hour suggestion

00:39:26.920 | from Straight A Student and all the case studies of people doing Deep Work for long periods

00:39:30.720 | of time is that Deep Work for long periods of time have a natural ebb and flow of intensity.

00:39:38.840 | So there's periods in which you're like really locked in, and then you let the intensity

00:39:43.000 | ebb, and then you lock back in again really hard, and you let the intensity ebb.

00:39:47.440 | I mean, if you sat there and could monitor the mental exertions of a computer programmer,

00:39:51.440 | for example, this is what you would see.

00:39:52.840 | There's going to be periods where they're really trying to hold all the pieces of this

00:39:56.280 | algorithm together so they can, "I want this to work, right?

00:39:59.320 | So I've got to do this just right."

00:40:01.160 | And that's really high intensity.

00:40:02.620 | And then there's the, "I'm running, compiling the code, waiting for the debugging messages,"

00:40:06.880 | and the intensity drops.

00:40:09.060 | And Straight A Student, that 50-minute to an hour rule is talking about the specific,

00:40:12.960 | highly intense activity of doing active recall studying.

00:40:15.920 | It's a really intellectually demanding thing where you're trying to replicate from scratch

00:40:21.400 | whatever the information is that you're trying to learn.

00:40:24.400 | You replicate it from scratch without looking at notes as if you were lecturing a class.

00:40:27.800 | That's at the core of how I recommend in that book cementing knowledge.

00:40:31.680 | That's super high intensity.

00:40:33.880 | That's the computer programmer trying to get the, writing the algorithm, has to get it

00:40:36.880 | just right.

00:40:38.200 | And there I was recommending about 50 minutes to an hour because you have to give your brain

00:40:41.600 | a break.

00:40:42.600 | You would give it 10 minutes, then come back into it again.

00:40:45.680 | So if you're a student that's studying for three hours, what you're probably doing is

00:40:48.280 | 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low, 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low.

00:40:52.760 | And that's how you put those two things together.

00:40:54.420 | So deep work in general ebbs and flows, active recall is a particular deep work activity

00:41:01.060 | that is incredibly focused.

00:41:03.800 | And so you can only sustain that for so long without having to have a breather.

00:41:07.520 | The key thing to remember though, is what do you do when you're energy, you're in an

00:41:11.400 | ebb?

00:41:12.400 | You've been doing active recall for 50 minutes.

00:41:14.520 | Now you're taking a 10 minute break.

00:41:16.960 | You're coding, you were focused in really hard, but now you're waiting for your code

00:41:20.520 | to compile and you have five minutes.

00:41:22.520 | The thing I always come back to is if you're going to have to take a break from what you're

00:41:27.440 | doing, make sure that whatever you consume, whatever you encounter, make sure that it's

00:41:32.640 | not emotionally salient.

00:41:35.320 | So something that's going to get you emotionally activated and not very specifically related

00:41:40.020 | to the type of work you're doing.

00:41:42.820 | So in other words, no Twitter, no email.

00:41:45.280 | If you go on Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or what have you, while you're waiting for

00:41:50.360 | the code to compile, you might see something that really activates your emotions.

00:41:53.840 | And that's going to induce a much more severe context switch, which means it's going to

00:41:56.840 | take longer to get back to your code.

00:41:58.680 | Similarly, if you go and check your email, you're going to see a lot of open loop obligations

00:42:03.160 | that are related to work, but not exactly what you're working on.

00:42:05.560 | And that's going to hijack your brain.

00:42:07.200 | It's going to take a long time to context switch away from that as well.

00:42:10.920 | So during those ebbs, nothing that's emotionally salient, nothing that is sort of highly relevant,

00:42:16.760 | but not quite the same as the work that you're currently doing.

00:42:20.600 | I recommend looking at baseball news.

00:42:22.800 | That's been my go-to.

00:42:23.800 | I'm glad baseball is back and it is not emotionally salient and it is not related to work.

00:42:29.560 | And that has been good for me, for sure.

00:42:33.680 | Jesse, I'm in a sort of news break right now because I have like a lot of work going on

00:42:39.720 | and sort of high, like scheduling anxiety, but it raises my anxiety floor.

00:42:45.680 | And so I'm basically saying the only news I'm consuming right now is baseball news.

00:42:50.000 | And it's been great.

00:42:51.920 | Actually it's really kind of helped tamp down the sort of anxiety floor a little bit.

00:42:57.840 | When you have that instinct of, I want to just see what's going on, they say, let me

00:43:01.120 | just go look at how this prospect is progressing.

00:43:06.880 | Actually I want you, one of your guests online to be Scott Boris.

00:43:09.800 | I want to hear you talk to him.

00:43:11.560 | We should get Scott.

00:43:12.880 | Scott should represent us.

00:43:15.640 | Scott Boris is going to represent us to our sponsors maybe.

00:43:20.360 | Like, Hey, this would be Scott.

00:43:23.080 | All right.

00:43:24.080 | All right, Monk Pack.

00:43:26.040 | I see your offer.

00:43:27.400 | You're offering 30 CPM.

00:43:29.960 | Here's my return offer.

00:43:31.680 | $20 million.

00:43:33.080 | $20 million if you want to be on the show.

00:43:36.680 | And if you don't want to pay the $20 million to be on the show, we'll walk.

00:43:40.160 | I'm sure there's other bar companies out there that would gladly pay it.

00:43:44.080 | And so $20 million.

00:43:45.580 | And also our only sponsor would be the Washington Nationals.

00:43:47.880 | So that's basically just only moves clients to the Washington Nationals.

00:43:53.440 | Baseball insider chat.

00:43:55.280 | All right.

00:43:57.880 | So here's a non-baseball related question.

00:44:00.280 | We got Marguerite who says, "What lessons can be learned from how modern Orthodox Jews

00:44:08.120 | who are found in every field navigate their Saturday Shabbat to abstain from any electronic

00:44:15.760 | inputs?"

00:44:16.760 | Well, I'm a big believer in the practice of Shabbat.

00:44:21.760 | I don't care as much about the super specifics of the rules, right?

00:44:27.200 | Like exactly what you can use or don't use.

00:44:30.160 | And does a combustion engine, is that going to count as creating energy?

00:44:34.680 | And can you turn on the light or not turn the light?

00:44:36.580 | So I'm not too caught up in the specific rules that maybe if you were a modern Orthodox Jew,

00:44:41.280 | you might think about how do we interpret this versus a different level of observance.

00:44:46.580 | But the thing I'm a big believer in is the underlying idea here of having this day of

00:44:53.240 | rest for your mind to reset and to connect on other things that are important that aren't

00:44:58.260 | related to work and aren't related to the news.

00:45:01.620 | I think this is a fantastic ritual.

00:45:04.060 | What I think is important, this is what I more or less do, no work, no email, no digital

00:45:12.460 | news.

00:45:13.460 | So just all of those stimulating things, the outside world stimulating and trying to capture

00:45:18.780 | your mind, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, take them out of your life.

00:45:24.460 | I think everyone could use that and everyone could find some relief and not just being

00:45:30.140 | away from that, but rediscovering the things that that keeps them away from.

00:45:34.300 | Friday night, it can be family, you're connected to your family.

00:45:37.220 | The next day it's activities, you go and do things, you read, but you're not in that peak

00:45:42.820 | state of anxious information consumption.

00:45:46.980 | So we do that.

00:45:48.060 | We do something like that, Friday sundown, Saturday sundown, and maybe we'll even refine

00:45:52.860 | that practice.

00:45:53.860 | But I think there's great wisdom there.

00:45:55.340 | And this should not be a surprise.

00:45:59.020 | It's something I talk about a fair amount, that wisdom traditions have a lot of wisdom

00:46:04.820 | to offer because it is not just an arbitrary book.

00:46:12.100 | Wisdom traditions often, what you have here is ideas and thoughts and rituals and techniques

00:46:18.380 | and practices for living that have been battle tested in harder situations than you live

00:46:25.820 | in now.

00:46:27.180 | And a lot of stuff didn't survive, but the stuff that has survived, the stuff that we

00:46:31.620 | will consider revelation, give it that moniker, is the things that actually seem to work,

00:46:36.900 | the spiritual technologies that actually seem compatible with the way that the human mind

00:46:40.500 | and the human soul actually operates.

00:46:42.980 | There's a reason why the books stick around.

00:46:46.620 | It's why the Tanakh is still here 2,800 years later, is because there's something deeply

00:46:54.300 | true about a lot of these ideas.

00:46:56.620 | So we shouldn't be surprised that in one of our oldest wisdom traditions still surviving,

00:47:01.380 | we find this idea, this idea that is laid down in Genesis.

00:47:04.140 | I mean, we're talking very old.

00:47:07.460 | God took the seventh day and he rested.

00:47:09.860 | There is wisdom in it that makes complete sense when now today in 2022, you put down

00:47:15.300 | the phone on Friday night and there is no Twitter and there is no Instagram and you're

00:47:20.580 | not scrolling for things and you're not checking through emails.

00:47:23.420 | There's a perspective, there's a peace, there's a calmness.

00:47:25.620 | I'm a big Shabbat fan, so I recommend it.

00:47:29.260 | All right.

00:47:30.260 | I think we have time for a couple more questions.

00:47:33.820 | Let me just talk briefly about a couple of the other sponsors that help make this show

00:47:38.300 | possible and thanks to Scott Boras for negotiating great terms for these sponsors.

00:47:44.940 | It's $20 million well spent.

00:47:47.140 | But let's talk stamps.com.

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00:47:55.380 | You do not want to waste either traveling to the post office, parking, waiting in those

00:48:01.660 | long, long lines at the post office just to discover that you left the other thing at

00:48:07.460 | home and you have to go all the way back and get it.

00:48:11.380 | With stamps.com, you can skip that trip and focus on how to take your small business to

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00:48:18.260 | Put your energy where it matters, not to wrangling with post office lines.

00:48:23.020 | Stamps.com lets you print official postage right from your computer and saves you money

00:48:27.280 | in the process.

00:48:28.280 | You can spend not just less time at the post office, but you can actually save the money

00:48:33.240 | you were spending on shipping before.

00:48:36.780 | I'm a believer in stamps.com.

00:48:38.660 | We're near the post office right here.

00:48:41.540 | I've talked about this before, but during the pandemic, they social distanced the line

00:48:46.980 | and there's no room in the post office.

00:48:48.620 | The line would stretch down the street because everyone was distanced out.

00:48:51.740 | It just was a reminder every day of, man, it takes a long time to go to the post office.

00:48:56.260 | I'm glad stamps.com exists as an alternative.

00:49:00.340 | They've been around for more than 20 years.

00:49:03.660 | They've been used by over 1 million businesses.

00:49:07.900 | They give you access to all the post office and UPS shipping services.

00:49:12.940 | You can do it right from your computer.

00:49:14.980 | They give you huge discount rates on that shipping services.

00:49:17.740 | So even though you pay a small monthly fee for stamps.com, if you ship more than just

00:49:21.940 | a minuscule amount of things, you're actually making money, not spending it.

00:49:27.140 | So stop overpaying for shipping with stamps.com.

00:49:30.260 | If you sign up with promo code "DEEP", you will get a special offer that includes a four-week

00:49:35.180 | trial free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments, no contracts needed.

00:49:40.100 | Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter that code

00:49:46.060 | "DEEP".

00:49:47.060 | I also want to talk about Headspace.

00:49:51.780 | I've actually been using Headspace.

00:49:53.300 | I just was telling you about this before.

00:49:55.580 | I was using some of their anti-anxiety breathing related mini meditations.

00:50:01.940 | There was a period where I was just feeling really, there's just so many things going

00:50:06.100 | on that I was feeling kind of peak, peak shaky energy, right?

00:50:10.700 | And I was like, okay, I got to, I got to try to calm this down.

00:50:13.140 | And Headspace was my go-to.

00:50:14.140 | They had some great mini meditations for it that focused on breathing to bring down the

00:50:18.820 | sympathetic nervous system.

00:50:21.060 | And it worked quite well.

00:50:22.940 | I like it because it's guided meditations.

00:50:26.820 | So it's not just, I'm going to have to be 30 minutes sitting in quiet, hearing all my

00:50:32.100 | thoughts.

00:50:33.100 | They help you.

00:50:34.100 | It's a great, they have a couple of great narrators that walk you through it.

00:50:37.660 | And so that made me a Headspace believer.

00:50:40.660 | And I don't think I'm the only one who needs that.

00:50:42.140 | I mean, we all say that we're fine, even when we don't mean it, but fine is not really an

00:50:46.940 | emotion.

00:50:47.940 | And how many times have you just told the world, oh, I'm fine.

00:50:50.340 | And what you really feel is anger or sadness or nerves.

00:50:53.480 | This is where Headspace can come in.

00:50:54.820 | It is scientifically proven to help you manage your feelings and mental health.

00:50:59.420 | In fact, a recent study proved in just two weeks, Headspace can reduce your stress by

00:51:05.140 | 14%.

00:51:06.140 | I believe that whether you want to relieve stress and anxiety, sleep better or improve

00:51:09.700 | your focus.

00:51:10.700 | And yes, by the way, that's another type of meditation Headspace now has.

00:51:14.820 | Focus, you do the guided meditation.

00:51:17.180 | So you're ready to lock in on the work you're about to do.

00:51:19.440 | So deep questions, listeners take note.

00:51:22.380 | So regardless of what you're trying to do, anxiety, focus, sleeping better, Headspace

00:51:25.740 | is your everyday dose of mindfulness for real life.

00:51:32.900 | So however you're feeling, I recommend that you try Headspace at headspace.com/questions

00:51:40.260 | and you will get one month free of their entire mindfulness library.

00:51:45.540 | This is the best Headspace offer available, but you have to go to headspace.com/questions

00:51:52.740 | today to get it.

00:51:53.740 | That's headspace.com/questions.

00:51:54.740 | All right, we've got time for a couple more quick questions.

00:52:01.680 | We have one here from Cindy.

00:52:05.500 | Cindy says, "I'm starting my fourth try to do a digital detox.

00:52:10.580 | I just can't seem to make it the 30 days.

00:52:14.740 | What is your advice?"

00:52:15.740 | Well, first of all, Cindy, I think we might diagnose part of the problem in just the words

00:52:21.340 | you were using.

00:52:23.120 | You called what you're trying to do a detox.

00:52:26.620 | I don't use the phrase digital detox.

00:52:28.540 | If you read the book, Digital Minimalism, where I'm assuming you're extracting this

00:52:32.900 | plan to spend 30 days away from optional technologies, I call it a digital declutter.

00:52:39.780 | There's a reason why I make that distinction is because in the context of digital tools,

00:52:44.260 | detox has taken on this very specific and I think very weird meaning.

00:52:48.220 | It means I want to white knuckle separate myself away from these services that I spend

00:52:53.020 | too much time on because I don't like that I spend so much time on them, and I want to

00:52:56.420 | detoxify my addictive urge to use them.

00:53:00.140 | The reason why I say that's a weird application of the term is that, of course, in the substance

00:53:05.860 | abuse community, where the notion of detox or the relevant notion of detox comes from,

00:53:11.220 | the whole idea is not taking a break, but to completely change your life.

00:53:15.380 | It is the first step as part of transforming your life so that you don't use that substance

00:53:19.540 | anymore.

00:53:20.540 | In the digital world, we just say, "It's a break.

00:53:22.860 | I don't like this thing, so let me just be away from it, and that will somehow make my

00:53:25.820 | life better."

00:53:26.820 | Declutter, on the other hand, says, "No, we're not just staying away from that closet that

00:53:32.020 | has too much stuff in it.

00:53:33.860 | We're going to take everything out and just put back the stuff that matters.

00:53:36.500 | We're going to make the closet permanently better, and that is what I think you need

00:53:39.860 | to do for your digital life."

00:53:41.700 | The key thing that separates a declutter from a detox is that you don't just white-knuckle

00:53:45.660 | it.

00:53:47.340 | You don't just sit there and say, "Don't use Instagram.

00:53:50.540 | Don't use Instagram.

00:53:51.540 | Don't use Instagram," and hope you make it 30 days.

00:53:53.460 | You instead have to be incredibly active, aggressively reflecting and experimenting

00:53:58.020 | to rediscover the things that you really care about in your life.

00:54:00.900 | These 30 days should be busy.

00:54:02.540 | You should have lots of plans, lots of things you're doing.

00:54:05.500 | You're going over here.

00:54:06.620 | You're going with friends here.

00:54:07.620 | You're going to this museum.

00:54:08.620 | You're reading these books.

00:54:09.620 | You're going to this club.

00:54:10.620 | You're doing a new online class," because what you're trying to do is get back in touch

00:54:13.620 | in the absence of all these distractions with what you really care about.

00:54:16.660 | And then when you're done with the 30-day declutter, you rebuild your digital life from

00:54:21.820 | scratch.

00:54:22.820 | You don't go back to what you were doing before.

00:54:24.780 | You don't never use technology again.

00:54:27.540 | Instead you say, "Okay, now that I've rebuilt my life around activities that are important

00:54:32.700 | to me, initiatives that are important to me, what tools will help me with this?"

00:54:37.020 | And you very intentionally bring technology back into your life, but you deploy it very

00:54:41.920 | strategically to support the things you care about.

00:54:44.380 | And everything that doesn't support something you care about, you just ignore.

00:54:47.460 | And the stuff you do bring back in, you put nice gates around, nice fences around, you

00:54:50.980 | have rules about when you use it, how you use it, et cetera.

00:54:55.180 | That's the digital declutter.

00:54:56.180 | So the reason why I would diagnose you are probably having trouble with these detoxes

00:55:02.860 | is that you're just trying to white knuckle it.

00:55:05.180 | And that's not very successful.

00:55:07.060 | And I've seen that in the large number of people who have gone through these experiments

00:55:11.180 | on my behalf and told me about how it went, is that the people that just try to stay away

00:55:14.700 | from the technologies they don't like, struggle.

00:55:20.360 | Those that instead say, "While I'm staying away from those technologies, I'm rebuilding

00:55:23.740 | my life and rediscovering what I care about," don't struggle.

00:55:27.620 | Change that is built around an aspirational positive vision of your life is always way

00:55:31.380 | more sustainable than change built around just avoiding things that you're assessing

00:55:35.340 | to be negative.

00:55:36.340 | So Cindy, that's my advice.

00:55:38.060 | Go back and read that chapter in digital minimalism and focus on the active part, the stuff you

00:55:43.420 | have to do instead, the replacements, the discovery, the reflection.

00:55:47.860 | I think that's where you're going to find a key to succeeding with your declutter.

00:55:51.740 | All right, let's do one last question.

00:55:56.020 | This one comes from Glenn.

00:55:57.740 | Glenn asks, "How do you think about thinking?"

00:56:04.100 | Glenn goes on to elaborate, "I was intrigued by a recent podcast where you described how

00:56:08.460 | when COVID started, you sent out daily emails to your family, helping them think about what

00:56:14.020 | you and they were experiencing.

00:56:15.900 | You mentioned a couple of reliable sources for news about COVID, people you had learned

00:56:19.300 | to trust.

00:56:20.300 | Selfishly, I'd be interested in hearing who your trusted sources are.

00:56:25.940 | And for the purposes of your podcast, I would love to hear about how you think about thinking.

00:56:30.900 | What I mean is, how did you decide what was and was not a trusted source?

00:56:34.140 | How do you distinguish between conspiratorial thinking and good thinking?

00:56:37.780 | When do you trust the science and when is it proper to have some skepticism?"

00:56:41.580 | Well, it's a good question, Glenn.

00:56:45.560 | So I did do that newsletter for my family.

00:56:47.420 | It was positive news surrounding the COVID pandemic.

00:56:52.220 | It was trying to counteract all of the negativity out there.

00:56:55.860 | I stopped that after vaccines.

00:56:58.940 | So after my family had been vaccinated, after it was clear from the statistics that our

00:57:04.780 | risk was small, comparable to other things that we face on a daily basis and don't care

00:57:09.060 | about, I wanted to shift my focus away from COVID.

00:57:13.620 | And the reason is, of course, I mean, life is a gift and you don't want to waste it.

00:57:19.820 | You don't want to waste parts of your life that you could avoid not wasting.

00:57:23.300 | And it seemed to me that an excessive concentration on COVID as a unique threat, once we knew

00:57:30.220 | statistically that it wasn't a unique threat for us compared to other things, was in some

00:57:35.180 | sense felt like we were dismissing the beauty that was life.

00:57:39.740 | To remain, I think, stuck and obsessed and anxious about just this one thing longer than

00:57:46.540 | we had to.

00:57:48.660 | It was completely reasonable at some point, but to do that any minute longer than was

00:57:52.060 | necessary seemed like it was wasting this resource that we had been gifted.

00:57:56.020 | We wanted to see people experience art, enjoy experiences, get back to the things that make

00:58:01.780 | human life human.

00:58:02.780 | So once we were no longer in that period of acute threat, I stopped that newsletter.

00:58:09.020 | And I see it, I would say the bubbles in which people are excessively anxious about COVID

00:58:13.260 | have really shrunk.

00:58:15.780 | It was everyone, and then it shrunk.

00:58:18.860 | This is very crude.

00:58:19.860 | At some point, it shrunk to, I guess, just blue states, and now it has shrunk to certain

00:58:24.380 | like metropolitan areas.

00:58:25.700 | And there's only a handful of them left.

00:58:28.740 | Our Deep Work HQ is in one of those areas.

00:58:32.740 | There's a surprising amount of people walking by themselves with high filtration mask on.

00:58:38.620 | And I just have a lot of empathy.

00:58:39.620 | I mean, I understand anxiety and something about viruses can tap something primal and

00:58:45.260 | create a really hard loop to break.

00:58:47.260 | And I am fortunate enough that we were able to break out of that loop and be able to go

00:58:52.500 | and basically live the best life we can in whatever the constraints were at the moment.

00:58:57.420 | But let's get to the bigger question here.

00:58:59.740 | How did I convince myself of that?

00:59:01.900 | How did I navigate the sea of COVID information?

00:59:04.380 | And more generally, how should people find good sources when it comes to any sort of

00:59:09.800 | issue that is important to you?

00:59:12.020 | How do we burst out of the filter bubbles that can put us into some sort of intellectual

00:59:17.140 | isolation and in doing so perhaps lead to a narrowing of options or a dimming of what's

00:59:24.900 | possible in life?

00:59:27.380 | My big recommendation here is to luxuriate in the dialectic.

00:59:33.820 | You have to clash smart, convincing good people on different sides of issues together.

00:59:40.460 | You have to do that.

00:59:42.260 | As soon as you stop doing that, you're in great danger of falling into a filter bubble

00:59:49.420 | where this is super true and this is super wrong.

00:59:53.580 | And I can't even believe those people can wake up in the morning knowing how wrong they

00:59:57.460 | are.

00:59:58.540 | And I just think as soon as you fall into a filter bubble, life narrows, options constrict,

01:00:03.940 | anger and anxiety raises, and you can fall into these negative loops.

01:00:08.740 | Like the people who like right now could be embracing what is good about life and still

01:00:15.340 | is very nervous about having someone into their home.

01:00:19.380 | So filter bubbles can be a problem.

01:00:20.380 | So the dialectic is how you get out of this.

01:00:23.820 | Let me get someone who's convincing on the other side of this thing that kind of feels

01:00:26.460 | like right or what I've been hearing.

01:00:28.300 | Let's put them together.

01:00:29.460 | Let's collide them.

01:00:30.460 | And every time you do that, you get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what's true.

01:00:34.060 | I did that all throughout COVID.

01:00:35.860 | And you know what?

01:00:36.980 | The experts shifted.

01:00:39.100 | There was a time very early in COVID where there were certain commentators who were coming

01:00:44.140 | more from the conservative end of the spectrum that had critiques of lockdown policies.

01:00:49.580 | And I would steelman them and steelman their lockdown policy justifications.

01:00:53.700 | And I'd hit them together.

01:00:55.260 | And I'd come away and be like, hmm, there's something a little bit weird going on here,

01:00:59.460 | I think.

01:01:00.460 | And it's a complicated issue.

01:01:01.460 | But I was like, let me keep some of these sources in my queue of things I'm listening

01:01:05.580 | to because I think the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, there was

01:01:09.980 | things that was-- there was angles that were being purposefully ignored, information that

01:01:15.500 | was being emphasized.

01:01:16.500 | I was like, OK, this is kind of-- there's something interesting going on here.

01:01:19.100 | Those same sources that maybe I was looking at as the convincing counter examples to the

01:01:23.420 | lockdown policies later on became much less convincing when it came to things like vaccines.

01:01:30.140 | There's certain specific sources I can think about who they, for whatever reason, had a

01:01:36.020 | particular thought on vaccines.

01:01:38.020 | And when I would steelman that against the best other thought, they were just blown out

01:01:42.300 | of the water.

01:01:43.300 | It was like, oh, this is incredibly non-convincing and selective.

01:01:47.340 | And I can see you're ignoring this.

01:01:48.700 | And I'm reading the other side.

01:01:49.740 | And so it was the same people.

01:01:50.740 | Then they were no longer that trusted for me.

01:01:52.300 | Then there were sources that I thought were very useful early in vaccination that were

01:01:55.420 | very good about immunity and the immune system.

01:01:58.380 | These were often sources that came out of HIV medicine.

01:02:01.100 | People that came out of HIV were very useful in this sort of immediate post-vaccine moment

01:02:07.980 | because they-- first of all, HIV knows a lot about harm reduction policies, which is quite

01:02:13.340 | different than what we were doing with COVID, which was more about risk elimination policies.

01:02:16.500 | And they knew a lot about the immune system.

01:02:18.580 | So here's what's going to happen with a vaccine or prior infection.

01:02:22.100 | And that felt really useful.

01:02:23.900 | And when I was pushing them against other people who had different views on the vaccine,

01:02:29.740 | it's like, oh, I really understand more about immunity.

01:02:31.660 | That was very useful.

01:02:33.100 | And now there's other doctors who-- I don't follow the news on COVID as much anymore now

01:02:36.460 | because, again, I'm trying to live life.

01:02:38.780 | And I think I can not think as much about it.

01:02:40.860 | But the point is dialectic, collision, collision, collision.

01:02:45.900 | And you get this nuanced view.

01:02:48.740 | And so early on, it's like, I see what's going on with the lockdowns.

01:02:51.940 | But I have these points of skepticism.

01:02:53.740 | It's because I was putting these two things together.

01:02:56.540 | And if you looked at either of those sides in isolation, you'd be in a real extreme.

01:02:59.860 | You'd be-- you're either in the extreme of, like, why can't we do what China's doing?

01:03:03.780 | If we could do that, COVID would go away.

01:03:05.900 | Or you're on this other extreme that was like, this is all a plot to, I don't know, some

01:03:12.580 | great reset plot.

01:03:13.740 | And there's no reason to be doing any of this.

01:03:15.780 | But you nail the most convincing people from both sides together.

01:03:18.260 | You get nuance.

01:03:19.980 | And you feel settled.

01:03:21.740 | You feel confident.

01:03:22.900 | With immunity, with all these different issues.

01:03:25.060 | Always hit them together.

01:03:26.420 | And here's my-- the big point I want to make about this general filter bubble bursting

01:03:30.540 | approach is that you're not going to be tricked.

01:03:34.500 | Exposing yourself to the other side of an idea, the other side of what seems instinctually

01:03:38.300 | right or what your tribe supports, is not going to trick you into the wrong information.

01:03:42.780 | As I talked about just multiple times here in these COVID-specific examples, there is

01:03:46.380 | people that I was once kind of listening to that wilted, wilted under this exercise as

01:03:52.940 | time went on.

01:03:53.940 | I mean, it is a great identifier of true intellectual depth, intellectual honesty, accuracy.

01:04:00.500 | It really works very well.

01:04:01.820 | And it's not-- you're not going to be tricked into some weird conspiracy.

01:04:04.480 | It's actually going to make your beliefs and the things you believe in stronger.

01:04:07.060 | It's going to give you more confidence.

01:04:08.900 | It's probably why today I'm an extreme moderate with COVID, because I've been doing this the

01:04:13.140 | whole time.

01:04:15.180 | And I feel confident in my risk assessments.

01:04:17.060 | I'm not super alarmist.

01:04:18.060 | I'm not super dismissive.

01:04:19.500 | And I think we've done the right things to keep our family risk low.

01:04:21.980 | But also, I'm living life.

01:04:24.420 | And I think it's statistically valid that I am.

01:04:26.500 | And it's because I kept hitting these things against each other.

01:04:28.980 | And I didn't get captured by either side.

01:04:30.620 | I actually ended up in a sort of alt-middle position that would end up, I think, being

01:04:34.460 | pretty useful.

01:04:35.460 | So I think that's what we need to do in this age of information abundance.

01:04:41.780 | If everyone is going through the same homogenized interface platforms like Twitter or Instagram,

01:04:45.980 | and so the crazy guy down the street, his tweet looks the same as the scholar of 50

01:04:50.940 | years.

01:04:51.940 | And we're trying to sift through this and figure out what makes sense and what doesn't.

01:04:55.100 | That's the best thing you can do.

01:04:56.900 | Take the thing that sounds most convincing.

01:04:58.380 | Take the thing that sounds most convincing on the other side.

01:04:59.980 | Hit them together and repeat.

01:05:01.940 | That is how you burst out of filter bubbles.

01:05:04.300 | That's how you find what you really believe in.

01:05:05.620 | It's how you find nuance.

01:05:06.620 | I really think it's the way to go.

01:05:08.980 | And in doing that, the final thing I would say is be very wary of complete tribal allegiance.

01:05:14.380 | If you see in someone you're looking at as a source of information an incredible, consistent,

01:05:21.300 | whatever that tribe says on the opposite, and even if it contradicts itself down the

01:05:26.500 | line, you see that going on, then don't even bother with that person in a dialectical collision.

01:05:34.060 | When I say convincing, you want someone who looks like they at least appear to be intellectually

01:05:37.700 | honest.

01:05:38.860 | If you see complete tribal allegiance, like I will keep, what does my team believe?

01:05:45.340 | That's what's right.

01:05:46.340 | What does that team believe?

01:05:47.340 | We're the opposite.

01:05:48.420 | That should be a, you could filter those people out right away.

01:05:50.980 | But for the people who remain dialectic, dialectic, dialectic, I think we all should be doing

01:05:57.180 | that.

01:05:58.180 | And if you do that, I don't know, you get a much more sophisticated, nuanced view of

01:06:00.740 | life.

01:06:02.380 | You won't end up at extreme.

01:06:03.420 | You won't end up tricked and you'll probably end up in a better place.

01:06:06.420 | All right.

01:06:07.420 | So that's our place for us in this episode.

01:06:08.820 | I think is to wrap it up as we went a little bit long here.

01:06:11.980 | Thank you everyone who sent in their questions.

01:06:15.780 | As I like to say, if you like what you heard, you will like what you see at the show's YouTube

01:06:22.500 | channel, youtube.com/cownewportmedia.

01:06:23.500 | Full episodes and clips of every question and segment done on the show can be found

01:06:28.980 | there.

01:06:29.980 | You'll also like what you read at my long running newsletter.

01:06:32.180 | You can subscribe at cownewport.com.

01:06:34.340 | We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode.

01:06:37.820 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:06:40.260 | (upbeat music)

01:06:42.840 | (upbeat music)

Ep. #185: John McPhee's Writing Process, Admin Overload, and Filter Bubbles | Deep Questions Podcast

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