Busy People vs Productive People: What It Takes To Achieve Mastery & Avoid Burnout

00:00:00.000 | All right, so what do I want to do in my deep dive?

00:00:02.800 | Let me start first by just briefly talking

00:00:04.960 | about what this book is about, so we're on the same page.

00:00:08.200 | And then I want to dive a little deeper

00:00:10.600 | into a decision I made writing the book,

00:00:12.920 | and then an example of that decision put into action.

00:00:17.380 | So what is the book actually about?

00:00:18.840 | Well, the book is in response to something

00:00:21.360 | that had become increasingly apparent starting

00:00:23.880 | around the early 2000s in a particular sector

00:00:28.080 | of the economy known as knowledge work.

00:00:30.680 | So knowledge work has a sort of precise definition.

00:00:33.440 | It's often defined as a job in which you are adding value

00:00:37.560 | to information using your brain.

00:00:39.840 | But you can more informally think of it as a job

00:00:42.080 | where you probably look at a computer screen,

00:00:44.820 | or if you have a distaste for Microsoft teams,

00:00:48.320 | you're probably a knowledge worker.

00:00:51.920 | So there's something that began to happen

00:00:53.400 | in knowledge work starting around the early 2000s,

00:00:56.480 | which was a growing sense of overload, exhaustion,

00:01:01.640 | and then after a while, almost a creeping nihilism

00:01:06.520 | with work itself.

00:01:08.040 | This idea of I'm here and I'm doing all these things,

00:01:12.120 | but I don't even know what a lot of the stuff I'm doing means.

00:01:14.880 | It's a lot of email.

00:01:15.880 | It's a lot of meetings.

00:01:16.800 | I feel like I'm not even really making much traction

00:01:19.000 | on the thing that I'm ultimately hired to do.

00:01:22.160 | This effect became pronounced in the early 2000s.

00:01:25.240 | It got obfuscated by all

00:01:26.960 | of the other forces happening during the Great Resignation,

00:01:29.200 | but then picked up a clear visible signal again

00:01:31.720 | at the end of that.

00:01:32.840 | Really reached a peak in the beginning of the pandemic.

00:01:35.320 | That's when we began to see it, not just anecdotally,

00:01:38.360 | but also in the survey research data as well.

00:01:41.760 | So one of the things I wanted to do

00:01:43.040 | in this book was explore why.

00:01:46.040 | And there's a few different major answers to this.

00:01:49.560 | I tried to uncover an answer

00:01:51.320 | that I thought wasn't being included

00:01:53.480 | as much in the conversation.

00:01:54.760 | So it's not a totalizing answer

00:01:56.760 | to why knowledge workers began burning out,

00:01:59.160 | but it was an important piece.

00:02:01.320 | And at the core of this explanation I looked

00:02:03.880 | at was a definition combined with a technology story.

00:02:09.600 | So the definition that was relevant here was the definition

00:02:12.280 | of productivity itself.

00:02:14.840 | So when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector

00:02:17.800 | in the mid-20th century, right,

00:02:19.320 | the term knowledge work was coined in 1959,

00:02:23.560 | they had a problem, which was the definitions of productivity

00:02:29.040 | that had been dominant starting in the agricultural sector,

00:02:32.840 | followed by the industrial sector.

00:02:34.760 | These definitions of productivity weren't applying

00:02:38.000 | well to this new type of work.

00:02:40.480 | The definitions of productivity that were reigning supreme

00:02:43.240 | in agriculture and then later

00:02:44.520 | in industrialization were quantitative,

00:02:48.040 | and they were ratio-based.

00:02:50.160 | We have an input, we have an output,

00:02:51.840 | we have a clearly defined production system in between.

00:02:54.520 | We have this many acres of land,

00:02:56.520 | we produce this many bushels of wheat,

00:02:58.480 | here is the crop rotation system we're using.

00:03:01.560 | If we change that crop rotation system and that number goes up,

00:03:05.760 | that's a better crop rotation system, so let's do that.

00:03:08.160 | Same thing in factories.

00:03:09.800 | We're producing this many Model Ts per paid labor hour.

00:03:13.840 | If we change our production system from the craft system

00:03:16.320 | to the continuous motion assembly line

00:03:18.000 | and that number jumps up by a factor of 10, oh,

00:03:20.520 | that must be a more productive way of building cars.

00:03:23.720 | So we had this quantitative notion of productivity

00:03:26.360 | which reigned supreme since Adam Smith first pointed it out,

00:03:29.800 | did not apply to knowledge work, because in knowledge work,

00:03:33.680 | there's not one thing we're producing.

00:03:36.240 | I could be working on seven different things.

00:03:38.240 | Those could be different than what Jesse is working

00:03:40.120 | on at the same time, and they could be different

00:03:41.800 | than what I was working on a month ago.

00:03:44.120 | To make matters worse, from a measurement perspective,

00:03:47.240 | we don't have clearly defined production systems.

00:03:50.280 | In knowledge work, unlike other types of work,

00:03:52.760 | how you manage your time, how you organize your workload,

00:03:57.000 | how you collaborate with other people,

00:03:58.720 | or even decide what to do during the day,

00:04:01.200 | this is all individualized and obfuscated.

00:04:05.040 | How I manage my work is different

00:04:06.480 | than how you manage your work.

00:04:07.800 | There are no central levers to pull or buttons to press

00:04:10.880 | and see what happens when we do that.

00:04:12.320 | It's much more ambiguous.

00:04:14.080 | It's much more haphazard than that.

00:04:17.360 | So traditional economic notions

00:04:19.160 | of productivity did not fit well to knowledge work.

00:04:23.040 | And so what happened is we fell back on a heuristic,

00:04:27.040 | and I call this heuristic in the book pseudoproductivity.

00:04:30.760 | And the core of pseudoproductivity is saying,

00:04:32.400 | look, we will just use visible activity

00:04:36.600 | as a proxy for useful effort, right?

00:04:39.640 | So we'll gather in buildings, we'll make office buildings,

00:04:42.480 | we'll work factory shifts, and this way,

00:04:44.760 | we can just sort of see that people are working.

00:04:47.040 | And if we need to be more productive,

00:04:49.920 | come earlier, stay later.

00:04:52.000 | So pseudoproductivity was a band-aid.

00:04:54.640 | It was an answer to this question of like,

00:04:56.440 | well, how do we even manage

00:04:57.800 | if all of these sort of super quantitative

00:04:59.720 | Adam Smithian style notions of productivity

00:05:01.760 | no longer apply at the Don Draper marketing firm

00:05:04.880 | in the 1960s, what do we do?

00:05:06.720 | Pseudoproductivity became the emergent answer.

00:05:09.000 | So my argument in the first part of the book

00:05:12.400 | is that was OK until we got the front office IT revolution,

00:05:18.080 | until we got network computers followed by mobile computing

00:05:21.720 | and laptops followed by smartphones.

00:05:23.920 | And the combination of these two things, is my argument,

00:05:27.280 | played a major role in sparking the overload, exhaustion,

00:05:30.600 | and burnout crisis that began right around the same time

00:05:33.360 | that the front office IT revolution really hit its stride.

00:05:37.200 | Because when you have personal computers at your desk,

00:05:40.040 | one of the things that happens is the amount of possible work

00:05:42.960 | you could do greatly accelerates.

00:05:45.280 | There was a whole process of despecialization

00:05:47.480 | where the diversity of different roles

00:05:49.600 | in these knowledge work firms were reduced.

00:05:53.160 | Because now any one person could do almost any job

00:05:56.120 | using their computer.

00:05:57.000 | And so we could just have smaller numbers

00:05:58.720 | of people doing more things.

00:06:00.680 | Low friction digital communication

00:06:03.400 | now made visible activity something

00:06:05.360 | that happened at a frenetic pace and a very fine grain.

00:06:09.120 | Now all day long, I have to worry about visible activity.

00:06:13.240 | I have to worry about an email that just arrived

00:06:15.360 | and making sure I respond to that in time

00:06:17.080 | so they see that I'm actually doing something.

00:06:19.960 | This is why when knowledge work went largely remote

00:06:23.120 | during the beginning of the pandemic,

00:06:25.460 | the sense that I'm busier than ever before became prominent.

00:06:28.200 | Because we have low friction digital communication,

00:06:30.600 | which was an even better way of demonstrating visible activity,

00:06:33.440 | but it's also exhausting.

00:06:35.800 | So this combination of the computer revolution

00:06:38.440 | in the office plus pseudoproductivity

00:06:41.520 | as this heuristic that we were just using by default,

00:06:45.400 | I think that's what began to lead to the overload, which

00:06:48.720 | led to the exhaustion.

00:06:50.360 | Also led to the sense of all I'm doing

00:06:52.600 | is performing around my work, but don't have enough time

00:06:55.200 | to get to the work itself.

00:06:58.000 | So if that's one of the big problems,

00:06:59.540 | what do we do about it?

00:07:00.760 | We have to replace pseudoproductivity.

00:07:03.160 | We need a more sophisticated notion

00:07:06.480 | of what we mean by productivity in knowledge work.

00:07:09.940 | It's going to have to be a definition that's less

00:07:12.000 | about activity and more about quality results produced

00:07:16.400 | over time.

00:07:18.160 | And I make a whole argument in the book

00:07:19.740 | that this alternative that I call slow productivity, which

00:07:22.560 | I detail, could be more sustainable.

00:07:26.040 | It could be work that is more meaningful.

00:07:28.300 | And it could also be work that produces lots of value

00:07:30.720 | and is profitable if you're a for-profit organization.

00:07:33.600 | The pseudoproductivity really was so poor of a choice

00:07:38.360 | that we have a lot of options to replace this

00:07:40.320 | with something better.

00:07:42.440 | All right, so that's sort of the theory

00:07:44.060 | at the beginning of the book.

00:07:45.480 | In the second half of the book, I explore lots of ideas

00:07:48.440 | for how to actually put that theory into action.

00:07:51.760 | So this brings me to the decision

00:07:53.200 | I made that I wanted to discuss when I was writing this book,

00:07:57.680 | that I don't know, I think it's interesting.

00:08:00.440 | So I had this problem.

00:08:01.560 | OK, part one is the theory.

00:08:02.760 | Part two is the advice.

00:08:04.760 | I want to give advice.

00:08:05.680 | What can we do?

00:08:06.580 | What can entrepreneurs do?

00:08:07.660 | What can people who work for a boss do?

00:08:09.320 | What can small teams do?

00:08:10.320 | I wanted to give concrete advice.

00:08:12.280 | But I wasn't happy with what the most common modes

00:08:16.520 | for this type of advice had become in books.

00:08:18.680 | I was just sort of--

00:08:19.520 | not that they're wrong, I'm just kind of bored with them.

00:08:21.520 | I would say one of the dominant modes

00:08:23.280 | for giving this type of advice right now

00:08:25.480 | is I'm going to cite organizational psychology

00:08:28.600 | studies.

00:08:30.000 | Researchers from the University of Michigan looked into this,

00:08:32.280 | and they found, paradoxically, that actually slowing down

00:08:34.760 | means you do better.

00:08:35.720 | I mean, the research is interesting,

00:08:37.220 | but I was sort of tired of building a lattice of advice

00:08:40.660 | on top of just organizational psychology reports.

00:08:44.320 | So I decided not to do that.

00:08:46.000 | Another common approach would be, well, let me just profile

00:08:49.040 | very specific people in knowledge work

00:08:51.840 | right now who are doing things differently.

00:08:55.280 | But there, I kept running into a problem, which

00:08:57.680 | was the uncanny valley problem, where if I come in and say,

00:09:01.160 | let me tell you about this particular knowledge worker,

00:09:03.520 | the fact that their job is very similar to yours

00:09:05.480 | but not quite yours actually can be an obstacle that's

00:09:07.800 | hard to get past.

00:09:08.920 | Like, that's too familiar.

00:09:10.440 | So now I can really notice the ways

00:09:12.060 | this job is different than mine.

00:09:13.400 | And now I can't bring the advice out of that case study

00:09:17.720 | because I just know that field too well,

00:09:19.360 | and that job's not quite mine.

00:09:21.800 | So the decision I made, which was a little bit unusual,

00:09:24.680 | was, why don't I go and look at knowledge workers

00:09:28.440 | from times past who didn't work in offices

00:09:32.040 | and didn't work at computer screens

00:09:34.320 | and whose working lives in the concrete details

00:09:37.360 | actually look quite different than our jobs today?

00:09:39.880 | So no uncanny valley.

00:09:41.760 | Traditional knowledge workers, we even went back historically.

00:09:44.880 | We could talk about Mary Curie.

00:09:46.840 | We could talk about Galileo.

00:09:48.280 | We could talk more contemporaneously

00:09:49.820 | about non-office working knowledge workers

00:09:51.640 | like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mary Oliver.

00:09:53.480 | I talk about all of them in the book.

00:09:55.040 | Hey there, I want to take a quick moment

00:09:57.200 | to tell you about my new book, Slow Productivity,

00:10:00.880 | The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:10:05.440 | If you like the type of things I talk about on this channel,

00:10:08.420 | you're really going to like this book.

00:10:10.800 | It distills all of my ideas into a clear philosophy

00:10:14.720 | combined with step-by-step instructions

00:10:17.240 | for putting it into action.

00:10:19.360 | So to find out more about the book,

00:10:21.200 | check out calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:25.120 | Everything you need, you can find there.

00:10:27.360 | All right, thanks.

00:10:28.200 | Let's get back to it.

00:10:29.760 | And my idea was, okay,

00:10:30.760 | we'll take these traditional knowledge workers

00:10:32.400 | who had all of this flexibility to figure out and experiment

00:10:35.000 | what works and what doesn't

00:10:36.160 | when you create value with your brain.

00:10:37.920 | And then we could isolate those principles.

00:10:40.780 | What did they discover?

00:10:41.920 | And we can't mimic how they work,

00:10:44.520 | and we'll get to that in a second,

00:10:45.520 | but we can isolate these principles

00:10:46.980 | and then use those principles

00:10:48.960 | to generate very concrete advice

00:10:50.400 | for people who work in offices, for entrepreneurs,

00:10:52.400 | for people who work in small teams.

00:10:53.880 | So I was trying this sort of historical case approach

00:10:56.640 | in this book because I thought

00:10:58.280 | that principles could be more powerfully isolated

00:11:01.560 | if the context in which we were isolating them were novel,

00:11:05.240 | that we weren't going to get tripped up

00:11:06.440 | in the Yonge County Valley.

00:11:07.520 | So I want to tell one of those stories now.

00:11:10.360 | We're going to test out this method.

00:11:12.440 | I'm going to tell one of those stories now.

00:11:14.420 | We're going to extract a principle out of it,

00:11:16.800 | and then we'll try to get some concrete advice

00:11:19.480 | out of that principle.

00:11:20.300 | So we'll sort of do one example here.

00:11:22.200 | So one of the stories I really enjoyed looking at

00:11:25.280 | when I was working on this book was Jane Austen.

00:11:28.180 | So I had always heard about Jane Austen,

00:11:32.280 | this idea that she wrote her books

00:11:35.560 | in small scraps of time on small scraps of paper

00:11:39.180 | in between all this other stuff that was going on.

00:11:41.640 | It turns out this story, which is cited a lot,

00:11:45.920 | I tracked it down.

00:11:46.980 | It comes from a biography, and I have the quote here.

00:11:49.840 | It comes from a biography that her nephew, James,

00:11:52.460 | wrote 50 years after she died.

00:11:54.840 | Here's the actual quote.

00:11:56.240 | In his biography, James said about his aunt, Jane,

00:11:59.920 | "She was careful that her occupations

00:12:01.640 | "should not be suspected by servants or visitors

00:12:03.840 | "or any persons beyond her own family party.

00:12:06.360 | "She wrote upon small sheets of paper

00:12:08.400 | "which could easily be put away

00:12:10.300 | "or covered with a piece of blotting paper.

00:12:12.420 | "There was, between the front door and the offices,

00:12:14.660 | "a swing door which creaked when it was opened,

00:12:17.200 | "but she objected to having

00:12:18.480 | "this little inconvenience remedied

00:12:19.940 | "because it gave her notice when anyone was coming."

00:12:22.960 | This story got widely repeated.

00:12:26.000 | Here is, for example, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.

00:12:30.240 | "Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked

00:12:32.820 | "so that she might hide her manuscript

00:12:34.480 | "before anyone came in."

00:12:36.680 | You can find similar quotes throughout.

00:12:38.400 | I mean, I came across this story

00:12:40.200 | as recently as Mason Curry's 2013 book, Daily Rituals.

00:12:44.840 | The problem with it is it turns out James made that all up.

00:12:48.460 | That wasn't true.

00:12:50.920 | She didn't write on scraps of paper.

00:12:52.960 | She didn't hide her writing when people came in.

00:12:55.760 | If you go back and read the more recent definitive

00:12:58.000 | biographies based on primary sources,

00:13:00.560 | a completely different picture arises.

00:13:02.660 | Jane, it turns out, was way too busy to write.

00:13:08.480 | And it really was a problem and a frustration in her life.

00:13:11.440 | They weren't, she writes about these genteel houses

00:13:15.080 | where the visitors would come and give their calling cards.

00:13:17.860 | They lived on a parsonage.

00:13:19.140 | They were running a boys' school out of their own house.

00:13:22.280 | She was milking cows and making jelly and jam

00:13:25.980 | for the boarders in their house.

00:13:27.640 | They were very busy and she was frustrated

00:13:30.720 | she would write about this.

00:13:32.120 | "I have all this stuff going on

00:13:33.300 | "and I can't find time to write."

00:13:35.800 | This went on for decades, right?

00:13:37.340 | She wanted to write.

00:13:38.400 | She had these ideas for books that she had started.

00:13:40.440 | She could not finish them.

00:13:42.200 | What finally happened with Jane Austen

00:13:44.040 | is after her father died, her, her mom, her sister,

00:13:47.740 | and a family friend said, "We're tapped out.

00:13:51.760 | "We're tapped out from the social life.

00:13:54.300 | "We're tapped out from the work.

00:13:56.620 | "We need to take a break."

00:13:58.420 | And they moved to a small cottage, Charlton Cottage,

00:14:01.040 | which was on some land that her brother inherited.

00:14:04.240 | They moved to this small cottage.

00:14:05.640 | They're like, "We're out of the social scene.

00:14:08.140 | "We're just going to sit here and just take a breather."

00:14:11.220 | Her mom started gardening

00:14:12.960 | and this was considered very scandalous

00:14:14.740 | because she wasn't a gardener.

00:14:16.180 | Why would a normal person garden?

00:14:17.940 | But they were done.

00:14:19.740 | They were done.

00:14:20.580 | This is when she was able to write books.

00:14:24.160 | So now that after almost everything was removed,

00:14:26.380 | this busyness was removed,

00:14:27.540 | I'm going to read here from my book here.

00:14:30.140 | "Austen, for the first time in over a decade,

00:14:32.220 | "had gained real and meaningful space

00:14:34.180 | "to think and work creatively.

00:14:36.280 | "It's here, working at a modest writing desk

00:14:38.300 | "by a window overlooking the road,

00:14:40.200 | "that she finally finishes the manuscripts

00:14:41.940 | "for Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

00:14:45.080 | "before moving on to compose Mansfield Park and Emma.

00:14:48.700 | "Austen's nephew may have popularized the story

00:14:52.040 | "of an over-scheduled Austen,

00:14:53.480 | "prim and proper in her sitting room,

00:14:55.080 | "working in frenzied bursts between incessant distractions,

00:14:58.580 | "but the reality of her remarkable years at Charlton

00:15:01.360 | "is clearly quite different.

00:15:03.560 | "Far from glamorizing a surreptitious disciplined busyness,

00:15:06.720 | "Austen's story, when told properly,

00:15:08.760 | "seems to promote the opposite of this approach.

00:15:11.580 | "Austen was not able to produce creatively

00:15:13.740 | "during the crowded periods of her life.

00:15:15.160 | "It was only when, through circumstance and contrivance,

00:15:17.900 | "her obligations were greatly reduced,

00:15:20.100 | "that Austen was able, finally, to complete her best work."

00:15:24.160 | She basically wrote all of her books

00:15:25.780 | in like a period of five years and then died.

00:15:29.340 | So it was sort of a tragic ending.

00:15:32.460 | So what do we take away from that?

00:15:34.200 | So now we have our challenge.

00:15:35.680 | It's an interesting story.

00:15:36.800 | It's historical.

00:15:38.320 | It deals with productivity.

00:15:40.400 | How do we now apply that to my job

00:15:43.360 | working at a marketing firm or EPA or a professor?

00:15:47.080 | Well, clearly the takeaway message shouldn't be

00:15:49.960 | move to a small cottage in rural England

00:15:52.120 | and just on your brother's land.

00:15:54.040 | Okay, that's not a story that most of us can replicate.

00:15:57.920 | So what we need to do is actually zoom out a little bit,

00:16:00.000 | like what's the key principle here?

00:16:02.700 | Well, the key principle in that story

00:16:04.580 | is that when you have too much going on,

00:16:06.660 | it can sometimes be hard to really do anything.

00:16:09.020 | When you're busy, that doesn't necessarily aggregate

00:16:14.640 | to the things I really care about are getting done.

00:16:17.940 | Austen was busy,

00:16:18.780 | couldn't produce the things she wanted to produce.

00:16:21.860 | Well, it turns out this exact same effect

00:16:23.620 | is, of course, afflicting the modern knowledge worker

00:16:25.780 | because what's happening to the modern knowledge worker?

00:16:27.700 | Well, if we decompose it,

00:16:29.040 | here's what I think one of the big issues is.

00:16:32.080 | We say yes to a lot of things

00:16:34.160 | because knowledge work is ambiguous.

00:16:36.400 | We don't have systematic ways of managing workloads

00:16:38.720 | and people just email us and we don't wanna,

00:16:40.520 | you know, we wanna show that we're pseudo-productive

00:16:42.720 | and we say yes.

00:16:43.600 | But what happens when we say yes too many times?

00:16:46.160 | Each of the things that we say yes to

00:16:48.800 | brings with it administrative overhead, right?

00:16:52.120 | Once I say yes to this,

00:16:53.000 | there's emails that have to be sent,

00:16:54.160 | meetings that have to happen.

00:16:55.160 | We have to talk about the work, right?

00:16:57.220 | So if I've said yes to many different things,

00:17:00.780 | what's gonna happen to all of this administrative overhead?

00:17:05.040 | It's gonna pile up in my day.

00:17:07.640 | And now the fraction of my day

00:17:08.960 | spent on administrative overhead

00:17:10.440 | versus actually working on the things that I agree to

00:17:13.820 | begins to grow and grow.

00:17:15.480 | And it gets to the point where your schedule

00:17:16.960 | is so fragmented with meetings and emails and chats

00:17:19.620 | that there's very little time to get anything done

00:17:21.360 | and you have to work late at night

00:17:22.880 | when the administrative overhead dies down.

00:17:24.640 | And the whole thing can be very exhausting,

00:17:26.800 | make you feel like what am I really doing here?

00:17:29.240 | So there's a modern equivalent of Jane Austa being too busy.

00:17:32.280 | So now that we understand that's the issue,

00:17:34.640 | we can think about solutions.

00:17:35.920 | And the solutions clearly becomes,

00:17:37.400 | oh, we wanna reduce the administrative overhead

00:17:40.280 | we're facing at any one time.

00:17:42.440 | Well, one way to do that is to reduce the number of things

00:17:45.800 | that we're actively working on at any one time.

00:17:48.400 | So with less administrative overhead,

00:17:51.400 | we can actually finish those things faster

00:17:53.720 | and with less frustration.

00:17:56.060 | So if you're an entrepreneur,

00:17:56.960 | that could be relatively straightforward to do.

00:17:59.320 | Sequence things, work on this and do this.

00:18:02.220 | Don't put them together.

00:18:03.880 | If you work for someone else, it gets trickier,

00:18:05.620 | but we have chapters in this book

00:18:09.000 | walking through how you can set up in a normal office job,

00:18:13.320 | a workload management system

00:18:15.200 | where you just differentiate between

00:18:16.700 | I'm actively working on this,

00:18:18.200 | this stuff is queued up for me to work on.

00:18:19.880 | And as I finish these things, I pull in the next thing

00:18:22.180 | and there's ways to do this, it's very transparent.

00:18:25.320 | And what it means though is that you have greatly reduced

00:18:28.120 | the number of things generating overhead.

00:18:30.560 | It seems like an impossible dream,

00:18:32.040 | but then we find people who have tried this

00:18:34.200 | and they actually get away with it.

00:18:36.640 | Their bosses say, the problem you're solving for me

00:18:39.440 | is taking this off my plate.

00:18:40.640 | I need the trust you can do it.

00:18:41.840 | Great, you have a system that works.

00:18:43.400 | I can watch it march along.

00:18:44.760 | I don't need to hear about Jane Austen.

00:18:46.640 | You're just, you're not a source of stress for me.

00:18:48.640 | Great, I gotta move on over here.

00:18:50.360 | So I use that just as a small case study,

00:18:53.440 | but what it captures is this historical method

00:18:55.560 | of we can actually start with the story

00:18:58.660 | that evokes a sort of intuition of something right

00:19:01.800 | or inspirational or interesting happening.

00:19:03.960 | We can isolate the principle.

00:19:07.000 | Then we can use the principle as a lodestone

00:19:09.520 | to actually navigate modern work

00:19:12.240 | with all of the difficulties we face in these normal jobs

00:19:15.340 | and then use that to try to come up with ideas or tactics

00:19:18.480 | to escape the burdens of pseudo productivity

00:19:21.080 | that we care about.

00:19:23.380 | So that's what I do in the book,

00:19:24.360 | is a lot of principles isolated in that way,

00:19:27.960 | translating into a lot of tactical advice

00:19:32.000 | that can then be sort of sifted through

00:19:33.440 | and seeing what might work.

00:19:34.800 | So anyways, let me leave my deep dive there.

00:19:39.280 | As Jesse knows, I could talk about this book for hours.

00:19:42.320 | Jesse has literally heard me talk about this book for,

00:19:45.200 | and I'm gonna, I'm not gonna exaggerate here.

00:19:46.920 | I would say probably 750 hours.

00:19:49.560 | Would that be?

00:19:51.860 | He does know all the principles.

00:19:53.300 | (laughing)

00:19:55.060 | He knows the principles.

00:19:56.440 | So here's what we're gonna do.

00:19:57.280 | Let's switch over now.

00:19:58.520 | Imagine sound effect, transition music.

00:20:00.540 | Let's switch over the questions.

00:20:02.120 | All right, I wanna take a quick break from our live show

00:20:04.160 | to talk about one of the sponsors

00:20:05.500 | that makes this podcast possible.

00:20:08.440 | That's our friends at Cozy Earth.

00:20:10.840 | As I've talked about often on the show,

00:20:13.200 | my wife and I absolutely love the Cozy Earth bedding.

00:20:17.720 | We have multiple pairs,

00:20:19.080 | so we never have to go without Cozy Earth sheets

00:20:22.280 | while one pair is being washed.

00:20:25.360 | We were actually just on a trip

00:20:27.440 | and it was the number one thing we were looking forward to

00:20:30.320 | was actually getting home to our Cozy Earth sheets.

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00:20:38.440 | but man, the fabric that they make these sheets with,

00:20:41.840 | I absolutely love it.

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00:21:19.480 | So if you don't like it, you can send it back,

00:21:21.680 | but you will love it.

00:21:23.080 | We now have not just the sheets.

00:21:25.400 | My wife has some, I think, pajamas.

00:21:27.600 | I got a Cozy Earth, I don't know what you would call it,

00:21:30.480 | like a sweatshirt, but made out of the same

00:21:33.600 | viscose bamboo material their sheets are made out of.

00:21:35.560 | I love that.

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00:21:37.320 | That's fantastic.

00:21:38.160 | So anyways, go over to CozyEarth.com.

00:21:40.720 | Use the promo code CAL.

00:21:42.540 | So after placing your order, oh, this would be useful.

00:21:45.600 | After placing your order, select podcast in the survey

00:21:48.000 | and select my show, and they'll know you came from me,

00:21:51.440 | and then they'll keep allowing, keep sponsoring me.

00:21:54.820 | So if you use that promo code CAL,

00:21:56.360 | also select podcast after you order,

00:21:58.960 | select my show, CozyEarth.com.

00:22:01.160 | If you don't have those sheets, you're sleeping on garbage.

00:22:04.660 | I made up that tagline, that's not theirs.

00:22:07.560 | Also wanna talk about our longtime sponsors

00:22:09.400 | and good friends at ExpressVPN.

00:22:12.340 | You need to be using a VPN.

00:22:15.600 | Here's why, when you are accessing websites or services,

00:22:18.920 | people can see what sites and services you're accessing.

00:22:22.280 | So even if the content of your packets,

00:22:25.320 | if I'll use the technical term, is encrypted,

00:22:27.700 | the header is not.

00:22:29.040 | So if I'm in a coffee shop browsing the web wirelessly

00:22:32.520 | with my laptop, anyone there with the right software

00:22:35.240 | can see what sites and services I'm talking to.

00:22:37.440 | If I'm at home browsing the web or watching something,

00:22:41.100 | my internet service provider can see exactly what sites

00:22:43.480 | and services I'm talking to and they can sell that data

00:22:46.380 | to advertisers and you better believe they do that.

00:22:48.840 | VPN protects you from that prying.

00:22:51.220 | The way it works is as follows.

00:22:52.680 | Instead of directly connecting to a site or service,

00:22:55.640 | you take that request, you encrypt it

00:22:58.160 | and you send it to a VPN server.

00:23:00.440 | The VPN server then unencrypts the request,

00:23:03.480 | talks to that site or service on your behalf,

00:23:05.640 | encrypts the response and sends it back to you.

00:23:07.940 | So as far as anyone who is snooping

00:23:11.000 | on your communication knows,

00:23:12.800 | you're talking to a VPN server.

00:23:14.160 | They have no idea what site or service

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00:23:20.000 | If you're gonna use a VPN,

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00:23:24.080 | which is ExpressVPN.

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00:24:16.840 | That's expressvpn.com/deep.

00:24:19.520 | All right, let's get back to the live show at People's Book.

00:24:22.120 | - Thank you, Jesse.

00:24:22.960 | Perfect.

00:24:23.940 | Thank you, Cal.

00:24:25.160 | Longtime fan, also a Tacoma Parker.

00:24:28.400 | So, you know, love the hometown vibes.

00:24:30.880 | I have two questions.

00:24:32.240 | I hope that's okay.

00:24:33.840 | So the first one is, in full transparency,

00:24:36.520 | I work at LinkedIn.

00:24:38.240 | I am a big follower of digital minimalism,

00:24:40.960 | and I see you kind of almost like a pioneer, rebel, right,

00:24:45.960 | against our modern work system.

00:24:49.440 | And I do feel like your voice is missing

00:24:52.080 | on the LinkedIn platform.

00:24:53.960 | I see some people.

00:24:55.220 | Cue for laughter.

00:24:57.760 | - I'm not signing up for LinkedIn, is that?

00:25:01.720 | - But, and I know why, right?

00:25:06.000 | I've read digital minimalism.

00:25:07.400 | These are algorithmically curated,

00:25:09.640 | you know, attention-grabbing machines.

00:25:11.680 | They're excellent at it.

00:25:13.940 | I see your YouTube videos, though,

00:25:15.720 | and I've seen the Mr. Beastification of your thumbnails,

00:25:19.960 | right, like I've seen it.

00:25:21.480 | - We don't do our thumbnails.

00:25:22.800 | - Oh, you don't?

00:25:23.640 | Oh, someone else doesn't.

00:25:24.460 | Got it, got it.

00:25:25.300 | So I do see you playing the YouTube game.

00:25:27.400 | So I guess my question was like,

00:25:29.420 | the YouTube game is being played, right?

00:25:31.440 | And I'm just curious, like, why not LinkedIn, right?

00:25:34.960 | So, so.

00:25:36.160 | - I'm still not signing up for LinkedIn.

00:25:38.000 | - Dang, okay, I tried.

00:25:41.400 | Number two, listen to all your episodes.

00:25:45.440 | First one, I'm a new father,

00:25:47.680 | just had my second daughter two weeks ago.

00:25:50.260 | And there was, in your first episode,

00:25:53.560 | there was a question about busy parents, right?

00:25:55.680 | And essentially the takeaway was,

00:25:58.040 | leave your house messy, that's okay.

00:26:01.120 | I'd love more resources,

00:26:03.640 | just some deeper answers on that.

00:26:06.720 | - Yeah, all right, two good questions.

00:26:08.880 | All right, so we'll do YouTube first.

00:26:11.020 | So here's our YouTube strategy.

00:26:12.980 | So to us, and by us, I mean Jesse and I,

00:26:17.000 | so we thought about YouTube.

00:26:18.400 | I think video is important,

00:26:21.120 | and it's gonna be the future of podcasting.

00:26:23.920 | YouTube is kind of a weird place.

00:26:25.660 | But there's an audience on YouTube.

00:26:27.300 | So what we've been told,

00:26:28.840 | the audience on YouTube is different

00:26:30.200 | than the audience listening to the podcast.

00:26:31.980 | So it's a new audience, right?

00:26:33.600 | It's not, YouTube audiences do not carry over to,

00:26:37.440 | for example, podcast listeners.

00:26:39.040 | It's a younger audience, for example.

00:26:40.640 | And my audience, I like younger people.

00:26:42.840 | So we have a YouTube consultant, Jeremy.

00:26:46.020 | And the way we work is we say,

00:26:47.280 | look, we're gonna, we just record our podcast.

00:26:49.640 | We record it on video.

00:26:51.640 | He says, I will put titles and thumbnails on them.

00:26:54.340 | They're crazy stuff, right?

00:26:55.740 | Never stuff I would think to do.

00:26:57.160 | And he said, this is how it works is,

00:26:59.560 | this, the way young people use YouTube is like they,

00:27:03.120 | it recommends things or something,

00:27:05.000 | and you gotta get in front of their eyes

00:27:06.180 | so they can know what you're doing.

00:27:07.440 | He's like, just trust me, we'll do thumbnails and titles.

00:27:10.820 | They're pretty crazy.

00:27:12.200 | But what I try to do is not,

00:27:13.780 | I don't even wanna know what's going on over there.

00:27:16.120 | Like whenever I, YouTube,

00:27:17.460 | I don't like the YouTube algorithm.

00:27:19.560 | If I pay too much attention to YouTube,

00:27:21.320 | and let's say like my goal

00:27:22.960 | was to try to get YouTube views up,

00:27:25.240 | every one of my, here's what I would have to do.

00:27:26.900 | Every one of my episodes, according to the data,

00:27:29.140 | should be about notebooks or why social media is bad,

00:27:33.160 | because those get a lot of views.

00:27:34.240 | So if I was being driven,

00:27:35.660 | if YouTube was my primary platform, God forbid,

00:27:37.960 | there'd be a lot of like very fancy notebook discussion.

00:27:40.840 | Fortunately, we see the podcast as our platform.

00:27:43.600 | And so we give him our podcast to say,

00:27:45.840 | you can put that out there,

00:27:47.400 | but we hope it doesn't go back the other way.

00:27:50.120 | LinkedIn, okay, so the other question I wanna see parents,

00:27:51.880 | by the way, Reid Hoffman, he blurbed one of my books.

00:27:54.080 | We're, I feel like I'm close with Reid Hoffman.

00:27:56.200 | So we're okay, I think that's okay.

00:27:57.920 | - I agree, I think parenting and productivity

00:28:01.460 | is a fantastic space.

00:28:03.100 | I think there's room there for books just on that.

00:28:08.100 | The thing is, I need to read that book.

00:28:10.540 | I don't yet feel qualified to write that book.

00:28:12.620 | So I'm hoping someone who has made it through

00:28:15.940 | to the other side of parenting and figuring out like,

00:28:18.920 | how do you run a household?

00:28:20.060 | I mean, Jesse, you know,

00:28:20.900 | we'll occasionally have these episodes

00:28:21.860 | where I'll bring on a guest expert and be like,

00:28:23.380 | just teach us about like,

00:28:25.500 | how do you run a family and a household?

00:28:27.460 | You know, how does those systems work?

00:28:29.140 | Those are just for me, those episodes, yeah.

00:28:31.480 | We pretend like the audience is interested.

00:28:33.700 | So I agree, it's a fascinating topic,

00:28:36.200 | but I don't feel like I'm the expert on that yet.

00:28:38.480 | Excellent, all right.

00:28:39.840 | - Hi, Cal, I'm Clara Fang,

00:28:41.480 | and I live in Germantown, Maryland.

00:28:43.720 | Love your work.

00:28:44.840 | I think one thing that sticks with me

00:28:48.160 | and I repeat to myself is your advice to do less, right?

00:28:51.320 | Do fewer things and do them well.

00:28:54.260 | And I find that so challenging.

00:28:57.600 | In this society time where we're just told

00:29:00.900 | to do more and more, you know,

00:29:02.580 | and no matter how much you're already doing,

00:29:04.620 | you can still do more.

00:29:06.200 | I see you do quite a lot.

00:29:08.820 | I don't know how you do all the things that you do,

00:29:11.660 | but I'll just use my life as an example.

00:29:15.540 | I don't have kids even, I would be even busier if I did,

00:29:18.500 | but you know, I'm running a consulting company.

00:29:21.460 | I'm working with a environmental racial equity

00:29:24.740 | nonprofit organization that has,

00:29:27.400 | where I'm playing all the roles.

00:29:28.800 | Like I'm the only staff person, so I do everything.

00:29:31.500 | And then there are so many committees to be on.

00:29:36.020 | You know, so you have to like be on the steering committee

00:29:38.800 | of this other organization,

00:29:40.200 | be on the board of this other organization.

00:29:43.080 | So it just seems like it proliferates

00:29:46.160 | and it's hard to figure out how do you do less things

00:29:51.160 | when everything seems important?

00:29:54.480 | You know, and plus like I also try to write

00:29:56.580 | and like Jane Austen, just not finding the time

00:30:00.060 | and don't know how you find the time to write so much.

00:30:02.740 | I have ideas for books.

00:30:03.860 | I've been writing poetry since I was 20,

00:30:05.860 | but you know, it just seems like the time to do that

00:30:09.180 | gets less and less as I get older.

00:30:11.860 | - Yeah, oh, I mean, it is the number one problem right now.

00:30:14.960 | I would say it's like my number one thing

00:30:17.180 | I'm constantly fighting in my own life.

00:30:19.660 | Like an important thing to know about this book

00:30:21.380 | is it's in part response to my audience,

00:30:26.240 | we're burning out, we gotta do something about this.

00:30:27.640 | Also part in response to me just entering my 40s

00:30:30.000 | and be like, okay, I gotta tighten up the ship, right?

00:30:33.080 | Almost all of my books have that reality to it, right?

00:30:36.600 | If you look at "So Good They Can't Ignore You,"

00:30:38.720 | a book about how do you cultivate careers you love,

00:30:41.560 | that's what I was going on the job market

00:30:42.880 | for the first time.

00:30:43.920 | "Deep Work" I wrote as I was trying to get tenure

00:30:46.120 | at Georgetown.

00:30:46.960 | So I was like, okay, how do you do this well?

00:30:49.360 | You know, digital minimalism,

00:30:50.560 | I didn't have much of a problem with my phone,

00:30:52.160 | world without email was after I had tenure

00:30:54.240 | and all the service obligations fell on me.

00:30:56.480 | And I was like, why am I on email so much?

00:30:58.440 | So there's a lot of, I'm redefining self-help

00:31:01.440 | in a much more literal way, I guess,

00:31:03.000 | when I think about working on these books.

00:31:05.680 | I'll mention a few things I do with mixed success

00:31:09.240 | in my own life, and then maybe some of that will be useful.

00:31:13.320 | One thing I try to do is sequencing, right?

00:31:15.920 | So there's a difference between looking like,

00:31:19.840 | doing a lot of things over a decade

00:31:21.920 | versus doing a lot of things on Tuesday, right?

00:31:24.360 | So like in my own life, I sequence,

00:31:26.880 | like I'm in book tour mode right now,

00:31:28.920 | so I'm not doing other things.

00:31:30.440 | I'm not writing a book right now,

00:31:32.000 | I'm not working on like a major academic project.

00:31:34.560 | There's periods of my life

00:31:35.880 | when I'm really all in on book writing,

00:31:38.600 | but like I'm not going on podcast,

00:31:40.440 | I'm not, I say yes to a lot fewer

00:31:43.600 | of sort of like service obligations.

00:31:45.240 | There's periods where it's like department building periods.

00:31:48.160 | Okay, this is like just working on,

00:31:49.840 | I'm the director of this at my department,

00:31:52.400 | and like I'm giving that my attention right now.

00:31:54.600 | I'll often stack my classes, for example.

00:31:57.200 | I'm teaching multiple, all of my classes in this semester

00:32:00.480 | and none in that semester.

00:32:01.760 | So in this semester, all I can be focused on

00:32:04.720 | is like I want to be a good teacher.

00:32:06.680 | And then in this semester, I can be writing a book

00:32:10.160 | or working on, you know, an article.

00:32:11.520 | So that type of thing has helped,

00:32:12.680 | the sort of sequencing helps.

00:32:15.120 | Over time, as different things finish,

00:32:17.960 | you get a lot of things that rack up.

00:32:19.920 | And then there's a thing,

00:32:21.080 | there's like sort of a temporal collapse that happens

00:32:23.640 | when you hear about, oh, this person did these five things.

00:32:26.200 | In your mind, you collapse and imagine those things

00:32:28.200 | all being worked on simultaneously.

00:32:29.840 | But I try to sequence to a degree.

00:32:33.200 | I also try to be really explicit about workload management.

00:32:39.240 | Like one of the big issues with overload,

00:32:41.040 | especially in sort of the types of,

00:32:43.180 | there's like knowledge work type jobs,

00:32:44.920 | which are much less very strictly defined,

00:32:47.920 | is we don't have set philosophies

00:32:50.760 | for how do we keep track of what we're working on

00:32:53.280 | and determine how much we should be working on.

00:32:55.280 | We don't have these agreed upon ways of doing this.

00:32:57.480 | Other fields do.

00:32:58.920 | Like if you're a computer programmer,

00:33:00.040 | they have these systems already

00:33:01.680 | where you really should only be working

00:33:03.280 | on one thing at a time and it's on a board

00:33:05.060 | and the other things go over here

00:33:06.240 | and we move the index cards around.

00:33:07.720 | Like they really have thought about that.

00:33:08.920 | But we don't do this in a lot of other knowledge work jobs.

00:33:10.920 | And I try to do it.

00:33:12.160 | And I try to do it with things like quotas.

00:33:14.520 | So with quotas, there might be a,

00:33:16.240 | this type of thing is important for me to do,

00:33:18.600 | like paper reviews.

00:33:20.200 | But the number of potential paper reviews

00:33:21.800 | I'm gonna be asked to do is too many for me to do.

00:33:23.840 | So I need to determine in advance,

00:33:26.340 | I do five of them per semester.

00:33:28.280 | Like have a quota.

00:33:29.120 | So it's like I'm doing this important thing,

00:33:31.300 | but I'm trying to think in advance

00:33:33.360 | how much of that am I gonna do?

00:33:34.860 | Same thing with sort of involvements with activities,

00:33:38.600 | boards and committees, like outside of work.

00:33:40.880 | These are important, I wanna do 'em.

00:33:42.600 | But why don't I say I do two of them, right?

00:33:44.480 | So just starting to think through

00:33:46.760 | what is the load that I wanna do, that matters.

00:33:49.920 | So that helps as well.

00:33:51.960 | And then finally, this is the idea I mentioned briefly,

00:33:54.820 | but really having a dual category way

00:33:58.560 | of thinking about commitments.

00:33:59.920 | Like the things I've said yes to.

00:34:01.940 | Dividing them between I'm actively working on these two

00:34:06.100 | and these 10 I'm waiting to work on.

00:34:08.360 | And as I finish something here,

00:34:09.800 | you bring the next thing in

00:34:10.800 | from the list of things you're waiting on.

00:34:13.200 | You still have agreed to do these things.

00:34:15.520 | But then if someone involved in one of these things

00:34:17.680 | is like, hey, let's check in on this or whatever,

00:34:19.320 | you can say like, oh yeah, it's not on my active list,

00:34:21.920 | but it's moving towards it.

00:34:22.880 | And I can actually show you exactly where it is.

00:34:24.980 | So the idea is to prevent everything you've agreed from

00:34:28.520 | from concurrently generating overhead

00:34:30.460 | and trying to isolate the overhead

00:34:32.080 | to the small number of things I'm actively working on.

00:34:34.880 | You throw all of these ideas at it,

00:34:37.060 | you still have too much to do.

00:34:38.640 | But at least you feel like

00:34:40.160 | there's a bit of a handle around it.

00:34:42.200 | So hopefully that's helpful.

00:34:43.720 | The other thing I'll say is I just cycle on this

00:34:46.200 | and I end up having too much going on

00:34:48.640 | and then I get overloaded

00:34:49.720 | and then I take everything off my plate

00:34:51.080 | and then I get in trouble and then I bring stuff back on.

00:34:53.360 | So we all struggle with it.

00:34:55.160 | I struggle with it more than anything else.

00:34:56.760 | But anyway, it's a good question.

00:34:58.400 | Yeah, thank you.

00:34:59.240 | - Hi Cal, my name's Allison.

00:35:03.680 | I am a burned out government lawyer at EPA actually.

00:35:08.240 | I kind of have a question about the intersection

00:35:10.360 | between deep work and slow productivity.

00:35:12.800 | I time block my day, I do my flow state in the morning,

00:35:16.320 | just like you say, and everything.

00:35:18.060 | I have trouble getting out of the flow state

00:35:22.280 | and we can't completely eliminate

00:35:24.960 | our administrative overhead, especially in government.

00:35:27.640 | And so I find myself in the afternoon spacing out

00:35:32.000 | when I'm supposed to be doing my meetings and stuff

00:35:34.620 | because my brain is still rubrics cubing

00:35:36.700 | what I was working on that morning.

00:35:39.440 | Is that a feature or a bug?

00:35:41.240 | And if it is a bug, how can I,

00:35:45.920 | I've tried taking walks between my time blocks,

00:35:49.240 | but I can't get out of the flow state.

00:35:51.720 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:35:52.560 | Oh, it's a very common problem.

00:35:53.800 | It's a good question.

00:35:54.640 | It's a very common problem.

00:35:55.880 | The main thing that helps there

00:35:58.960 | is actually the ritual you have

00:36:00.560 | for completing the deep work block, right?

00:36:04.120 | So if you're good about, okay,

00:36:06.880 | I'm capturing everything I did.

00:36:08.880 | Here's where, I call it recording state

00:36:11.200 | in my own practice.

00:36:13.080 | Here's where I was,

00:36:14.560 | here's what I'm gonna be working on next.

00:36:16.440 | Like here's the next thing I have to figure out.

00:36:19.280 | Sometimes this takes up to 20 minutes

00:36:20.840 | just to deactivate working on something

00:36:23.600 | that's cognitively demanding.

00:36:25.840 | That helps because your mind then trusts,

00:36:29.480 | we got everything down, right?

00:36:31.360 | It's here, here's the state where we left off.

00:36:33.680 | Here's what we're gonna work on next.

00:36:34.720 | Here's what we need to know about it.

00:36:36.500 | You know, Hemingway used to do this famously

00:36:38.240 | with his writing.

00:36:39.080 | He would try to, he would leave it at a place

00:36:40.720 | where like he knew exactly,

00:36:42.160 | he knew where to pick it up next time.

00:36:44.240 | He didn't like to finish his writing

00:36:46.000 | at the end of a chapter for the day.

00:36:48.080 | He liked the idea of, okay,

00:36:50.400 | I know exactly where I'm gonna pick it up the next day

00:36:51.940 | so I can just get started.

00:36:52.880 | So a lot of people think about these shutdown routines.

00:36:55.480 | I have to do that.

00:36:56.440 | I have to record all the state about what I'm working on.

00:36:58.960 | That helps.

00:37:00.580 | It's still hard.

00:37:01.560 | So then what I have to do is have a way

00:37:04.480 | to dump the ideas that pop up uninvited

00:37:08.880 | that are relevant to what you're working on.

00:37:10.580 | I keep a plain text document open on my computer.

00:37:14.360 | It's called workingmemory.txt.

00:37:16.220 | And I just drop stuff into that.

00:37:18.560 | And then at the end of the day, when I shut down my day,

00:37:20.380 | I can deal with it.

00:37:21.220 | Like, what do I wanna do with this text?

00:37:22.680 | So I just have a place that like,

00:37:23.980 | when I'm in the middle of trying to do something else,

00:37:25.600 | my mind's like, but what about this?

00:37:27.440 | I could just get it out of my mind right away.

00:37:30.240 | But what you're talking about is very, very common.

00:37:33.120 | Yeah, it's a good question though.

00:37:35.360 | Oh, I've gone in the back.

00:37:36.660 | - Hello, my name is Brielle Harbin.

00:37:40.680 | I'm a fellow faculty member,

00:37:42.680 | and I'm saying hello and thank you on behalf of myself.

00:37:45.200 | And also I have a writing group of there,

00:37:47.960 | about 20 of us across the country who are all black women

00:37:50.640 | who are faculty members at universities across the country.

00:37:55.160 | And we all have read "Deep Work."

00:37:57.760 | And I'm about to go up for tenure next year.

00:38:01.000 | And part of how I'm going to get through it

00:38:03.520 | has been through "Deep Work."

00:38:04.660 | So thank you so much for that.

00:38:06.840 | I read "Slow Productivity,"

00:38:08.800 | and we are actually gonna talk about it tomorrow

00:38:11.560 | in our group.

00:38:12.940 | And one thing that stuck out for me is,

00:38:15.480 | one, I didn't know as much about "Jewel" as you.

00:38:18.920 | As you told me a lot about what I know about "Jewel."

00:38:21.240 | - "Jewel" is an interesting story.

00:38:23.460 | - But I did know 5% of what you wrote.

00:38:27.000 | And so one of the things that stuck out to me

00:38:30.120 | was so thinking about the principle

00:38:32.120 | of obsessing over quality and the story of "Jewel"

00:38:35.680 | and how she didn't take the million dollar bonus,

00:38:39.520 | sign on bonus, instead perfected her craft.

00:38:43.120 | But in that narrative, the story that you told,

00:38:45.680 | she ultimately was more interested in the art

00:38:48.600 | than in the fandom and the superstardom.

00:38:52.320 | At the same time that I was reading your book,

00:38:54.640 | I was also listening to Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter."

00:38:58.480 | And so I was thinking a lot about how that anecdote

00:39:03.280 | would have been different

00:39:04.440 | if you were talking about Beyoncé instead of "Jewel."

00:39:07.960 | If you are an artist, a creator,

00:39:11.040 | someone who doesn't want just a modest career,

00:39:14.960 | you actually want to break boundaries

00:39:17.540 | and you want to pioneer in your fields.

00:39:20.380 | How do you manage?

00:39:21.560 | So you have given us the piece

00:39:23.080 | about obsessing over quality,

00:39:24.960 | but how you feel about it

00:39:26.360 | when your quality product is received differently

00:39:29.480 | and you keep going and you remain productive

00:39:32.040 | even when people might not receive it

00:39:35.040 | as you have created it.

00:39:36.560 | So I wondered if you could talk a little bit

00:39:38.280 | about more of that emotional affective component of that.

00:39:41.280 | - Yeah, it's a fantastic question.

00:39:43.120 | I mean, first of all, I just want to mention,

00:39:45.240 | I'm not surprised that the group was reading "Deep Work"

00:39:48.640 | or you find residence of that as you come up the tenure

00:39:51.120 | because I wrote that book

00:39:53.160 | as I was worried a lot about tenure.

00:39:55.680 | So that like secretly a book about how do I get tenure.

00:39:59.480 | Professors really resonate with that book.

00:40:03.460 | I don't think it's a, it's not a coincidence.

00:40:05.520 | It's a fantastic question, Beyoncé,

00:40:07.600 | and how we compare that with "Jewel."

00:40:10.160 | So for people that very briefly,

00:40:12.320 | the story there was that "Jewel"

00:40:14.520 | had this super rapid ascent, right?

00:40:17.560 | She was living out of her car in San Diego

00:40:20.080 | and just doing these concerts at a coffee shop.

00:40:23.460 | She just met the owner of this coffee shop.

00:40:25.080 | The coffee shop was about to go out of business.

00:40:26.920 | She's like, let's just try this.

00:40:28.120 | I got to do these concerts here.

00:40:29.640 | And it just clicked, right?

00:40:31.640 | And the crowd did this exponential doubling thing.

00:40:34.360 | You know, it's two people, then four people.

00:40:36.320 | And within six months, it was record executives

00:40:39.720 | were flying her around

00:40:41.000 | and one of them put a million dollars on the table

00:40:44.160 | and she turned down the million dollar bonus, right?

00:40:46.360 | So what was going on there is that her ascent was so fast

00:40:50.200 | that she realized she didn't yet,

00:40:51.880 | she hadn't polished the performing skills

00:40:55.360 | to where it needed to be

00:40:56.640 | to have a successful enough album out of the gate

00:40:59.600 | to make back that million dollars fast enough

00:41:01.440 | that they wouldn't drop her.

00:41:03.040 | She knew, okay, I have to work on this craft

00:41:06.400 | because she looked it up and she realized,

00:41:07.640 | they're not just giving me a million dollars.

00:41:08.960 | It's an advance on royalties.

00:41:10.280 | It's basically a loan

00:41:11.520 | and I'm going to have to record an album fast

00:41:13.600 | and it has to be a hit right away.

00:41:14.920 | And I don't think I'm going to be able to do that

00:41:16.240 | because six months ago, you know,

00:41:18.160 | I wasn't even performing professionally.

00:41:20.600 | So she instead took a,

00:41:22.120 | she said, don't give me a big signing bonus.

00:41:24.000 | She very cleverly got more back in though,

00:41:26.360 | which ended up being worth a lot of money

00:41:28.800 | so that she would have time on the label

00:41:31.320 | to perform and get better,

00:41:33.000 | to re-record songs, to try to find her voice.

00:41:35.680 | And she had that time and then she got good enough

00:41:37.800 | that when she did take off finally,

00:41:39.960 | she was ready to take off.

00:41:41.920 | Beyonce, now I don't know Beyonce's story very well,

00:41:44.160 | but I think Beyonce, by the time, you know,

00:41:47.440 | she was really making her artistic moves,

00:41:50.680 | she had this very, like a much longer sort of apprenticeship

00:41:55.160 | in some sense, right?

00:41:56.000 | I mean, she had a super talented

00:41:58.600 | and performing in the group,

00:42:01.200 | the multi-singer group, Destiny's Child.

00:42:04.040 | She got, she had a lot of time to get really good.

00:42:07.640 | Like she was very, very good.

00:42:09.240 | And she was working,

00:42:10.280 | she was performing at a high level

00:42:11.800 | from like a pretty young age

00:42:13.400 | and got really good and knew it.

00:42:15.800 | So I sort of think about when she went solo

00:42:17.840 | and she made that move,

00:42:19.640 | it was from a position of, I really got this.

00:42:23.000 | Like I've been doing this, I've been on the road,

00:42:24.760 | I know how this works.

00:42:25.680 | I can tell I'm really talented.

00:42:27.360 | I know how, I've figured out what I'm gonna do.

00:42:30.080 | I have the experience for it.

00:42:31.840 | And so Jewel would say like, once she got better,

00:42:34.720 | that's sort of what she did

00:42:36.000 | is she just decided what did she wanna do

00:42:37.480 | and then she started making those sort of, those decisions.

00:42:39.800 | So, I mean, I don't know if you buy this or not,

00:42:42.680 | but I would say that's maybe a shared feature

00:42:44.720 | to both of those stories.

00:42:45.880 | It's this idea of developing craft

00:42:50.000 | opens up opportunities to do all these

00:42:51.760 | like really interesting or effective or important things.

00:42:55.040 | And Jewel just didn't, she didn't get the apprenticeship,

00:42:59.160 | the lengthy apprenticeship before suddenly

00:43:01.120 | she had the attention of the recording industry on her.

00:43:04.360 | So like her, I guess her great insight was to realize that

00:43:07.000 | and say, look, I kind of need another year here

00:43:08.760 | before I even know how to be on stage.

00:43:11.240 | The real lesson here is that my idea

00:43:14.160 | is to make my next book a advice from the life of Beyonce.

00:43:17.480 | Maybe I keep pitching that to my publisher.

00:43:21.240 | They don't want me to write that.

00:43:22.880 | - Hi Cal, thanks for what you do.

00:43:27.680 | Name's CJ Overly, fellow Hoya and a project manager

00:43:31.640 | where in my role, I'm typically have three to five

00:43:35.680 | large long-term projects going at one time.

00:43:38.320 | These are multi-year type of projects.

00:43:40.160 | So they're throwing off smaller projects.

00:43:43.400 | And I was hoping sort of, you could talk a little bit

00:43:46.160 | about applying some of the principles

00:43:47.880 | in that kind of a setting

00:43:49.440 | where it's a little more challenging.

00:43:51.760 | So for example, trying to make my workload more visible,

00:43:56.160 | right, externally, as you talk about.

00:43:58.280 | Well, the project team on project A

00:44:00.920 | might not care so much about the workload

00:44:03.280 | being generated by project B, right, and vice versa.

00:44:07.040 | So making that visible to them

00:44:09.000 | may or may not be super relevant,

00:44:11.400 | but of course it's part of the overall macro picture

00:44:14.920 | from where I sit or another example would be

00:44:19.920 | thinking about how in that setting,

00:44:24.680 | you pick top three priorities

00:44:27.440 | when you sort of have to have three per project

00:44:29.800 | and they all kind of have to keep moving

00:44:31.840 | over the course of a given week.

00:44:33.440 | So it makes doing things sequentially

00:44:35.760 | a little bit more challenging.

00:44:37.200 | - Yeah. - Some examples.

00:44:38.960 | - That's a good scenario

00:44:41.040 | because it gives us some interesting things to look at.

00:44:43.560 | In that scenario, I'm just thinking out loud here,

00:44:45.040 | but in that scenario where you have more

00:44:46.520 | of a long-term engagement with these groups,

00:44:48.920 | like a bunch of different priorities are going to get spun up

00:44:51.280 | but we're going to be working together.

00:44:52.800 | These are all being spun out of the same major objective.

00:44:55.800 | This might be a place where actually

00:44:57.240 | the book that's closest to you on the stand there,

00:45:00.120 | A World Without Email,

00:45:01.880 | this book actually might have

00:45:03.960 | specifically relevant things to say here, right?

00:45:06.120 | Because in A World Without Email,

00:45:08.680 | what it focuses on is if you have, you know,

00:45:11.440 | the time and space to actually think about it,

00:45:13.560 | and when you have long-term projects, this is easier.

00:45:15.960 | It's about how do you craft sort of collaboration protocols

00:45:20.520 | for whatever it is you're working on

00:45:22.160 | in these long-term projects

00:45:23.800 | to reduce the cognitive footprint.

00:45:26.120 | And the main metric in that book,

00:45:27.840 | the key idea there is like,

00:45:29.280 | you want to figure out how to collaborate

00:45:30.760 | with your long-term collaborators

00:45:32.560 | in a way that minimizes unscheduled messages

00:45:35.920 | that require responses.

00:45:37.480 | Like, so what you're trying to minimize

00:45:38.840 | is having to keep switching your attention back and forth.

00:45:41.040 | I have to be on four Slack channels for four projects

00:45:43.920 | and we're going back and forth.

00:45:45.040 | So it documents the neuroscience

00:45:46.800 | of why our brains can't do this well.

00:45:49.200 | Trying to switch back and forth briefly

00:45:50.800 | between a lot of projects is cognitively exhausting

00:45:53.120 | and you run out of steam by like two in the afternoon.

00:45:56.320 | We all know the effect where you're in here,

00:45:57.920 | you're trying to clean out your inbox

00:45:59.680 | and you just eventually freeze.

00:46:01.760 | And then you start looking for like really easy

00:46:03.560 | to answer emails.

00:46:05.000 | It's because your brain is exhausted.

00:46:06.360 | It can't switch context that quickly, right?

00:46:09.040 | So that book is about put in place collaboration protocols.

00:46:12.960 | And it's all sorts of things about,

00:46:14.440 | here's like the process by how we do this.

00:46:16.440 | It's office hours.

00:46:18.680 | It's, you know, this is,

00:46:20.120 | we have a particular like an email address for a project

00:46:23.200 | instead of using individual people's email addresses,

00:46:25.280 | all sorts of ideas.

00:46:26.520 | And those can all work really well.

00:46:28.760 | The relationship between that book and this book

00:46:31.160 | is that a lot of people who read that book said,

00:46:33.880 | I wish I could do this,

00:46:34.880 | but I have so many things going on.

00:46:37.400 | I don't have any time to actually sit down

00:46:38.920 | and talk to people and say,

00:46:39.840 | what are our protocols are going to be?

00:46:40.920 | I'm just drowning in all the stuff I said yes to.

00:46:43.240 | So if you have a smaller number of very long-term projects,

00:46:46.200 | it's probably worth taking the time to say,

00:46:48.600 | how are we going to actually collaborate

00:46:50.360 | when we work on these?

00:46:51.200 | And it's like a pain and it's friction

00:46:52.640 | and people want to just rock and roll

00:46:54.000 | on their slack or whatever,

00:46:55.680 | but it's very, very worth it.

00:46:56.920 | If you're going to be working

00:46:57.760 | for more than a couple of weeks with people.

00:46:59.760 | So that, I think that book might have a lot of useful things

00:47:02.160 | for your issue right here.

00:47:03.760 | - Yeah, it's an interesting study.

00:47:05.400 | - Double makes heart.

00:47:08.800 | - It's weird, right?

00:47:09.640 | - Yeah, but I just wanted to say thank you

00:47:11.640 | for the books you write and the podcast as well.

00:47:14.080 | Been listening to it since I came back from parental leave

00:47:16.600 | and it's a great just weekly reminder,

00:47:18.040 | like keep family and work in balance.

00:47:20.360 | So thank you for that.

00:47:22.200 | More of a writing question,

00:47:23.800 | the kind of the getting things done first question,

00:47:26.400 | but when you're writing these books,

00:47:28.360 | do you come up with your framework first

00:47:30.680 | and then find all these great examples

00:47:32.120 | or are you kind of collecting all these examples

00:47:34.040 | as you go along and then you form that framework?

00:47:35.760 | So I think just the number and variety of examples

00:47:38.000 | is so unique to your books.

00:47:40.360 | - It's circular.

00:47:41.200 | It's a good question.

00:47:42.560 | So how do I, do I come up with the principles first

00:47:44.640 | or do I come up with the examples first?

00:47:46.840 | Typically I'm drawing from examples

00:47:49.800 | I've already come across

00:47:50.760 | 'cause I'm always reading and encountering

00:47:52.400 | and filing things away.

00:47:53.600 | Out of those begins to emerge sort of fledgling versions

00:47:57.880 | of the principles.

00:47:58.920 | Then I go seeking specifically examples

00:48:01.800 | to further try to understand what's going on.

00:48:04.040 | So like if you did a deep dive

00:48:06.600 | into the concept of slow productivity,

00:48:08.320 | you start to see inklings of it show up 2020, 2021,

00:48:13.320 | you'll start to see inklings of it.

00:48:14.720 | I think I used a term like this in a blog post

00:48:18.000 | where I had read about Galileo

00:48:21.320 | and about like, wow, he really took a long time

00:48:23.640 | to do the stuff we think about him being famous for doing.

00:48:26.080 | Like he sort of slowed down.

00:48:27.880 | And then I had a New Yorker essay that was,

00:48:30.600 | I used a title, like it's time to embrace slow productivity,

00:48:34.160 | but it was really just talking about workload management.

00:48:36.960 | Like just that, I had a couple of examples there

00:48:39.040 | I was playing with.

00:48:40.760 | The jewel, I had definitely gone on a deep dive

00:48:44.120 | in jewel before.

00:48:45.160 | That example was just back there

00:48:46.760 | and I was sort of trying to figure out what that meant.

00:48:48.480 | So it's very circular.

00:48:49.720 | So they don't come ex nihilo, right?

00:48:51.280 | It's not just, I just have these ideas for three principles.

00:48:54.000 | They come out of like things I've been looking at.

00:48:56.360 | But then as I seek out many more examples,

00:48:58.640 | that's when I refine them.

00:49:00.680 | And so you kind of get that circular refinement.

00:49:03.240 | Yeah.

00:49:04.080 | And the one thing I always tell people is I spend,

00:49:06.360 | frameworks are hard.

00:49:07.280 | And like often I'll spend years thinking about them.

00:49:10.080 | You know, it takes me about a year

00:49:11.360 | or like eight months to write a book,

00:49:12.920 | but often it's like two or three years

00:49:14.840 | of kind of playing with a concept,

00:49:17.360 | testing it on the podcast,

00:49:18.800 | trying to see like, is this resonating,

00:49:20.400 | testing it in my New Yorker pieces,

00:49:22.360 | like trying to see if it's resonating or not before.

00:49:24.760 | So it could really take me years before I feel like

00:49:27.080 | something is ready to capture.

00:49:29.400 | Yeah.

00:49:30.440 | It's an interesting process.

00:49:31.840 | - I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more

00:49:37.120 | about the team element of this

00:49:40.120 | and how to put these practices and principles into play

00:49:45.120 | in the context of a team where it might be that

00:49:48.680 | everyone says, yes, we need collaborative agreements.

00:49:52.840 | And then maybe there's a little bit of motivation

00:49:56.560 | to have that first conversation,

00:49:58.560 | but it is a very tangly process.

00:50:01.600 | And I'm wondering if you can share some insight

00:50:03.480 | on how to keep moving that process forward

00:50:06.720 | and to get it to a place where you close the loop

00:50:09.640 | and actually start implementing the practices

00:50:12.720 | and principles on a team,

00:50:14.000 | whether it's sequencing throughout a day or a week,

00:50:16.880 | and maybe particularly in the context of a remote

00:50:19.360 | or hybrid team stretched across many time zones.

00:50:23.760 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:50:24.600 | So with teams, there's a couple of things that can help,

00:50:28.480 | but they're all built around the same idea of get a win.

00:50:31.720 | Like once there's one win, like we did this,

00:50:34.280 | we all really love this.

00:50:35.760 | Now the floodgates are open.

00:50:37.040 | Like, all right, let's get together.

00:50:38.680 | What are we gonna do next?

00:50:40.200 | So it's all about breaking that barrier

00:50:41.640 | to the first intentional change that moves you away from,

00:50:45.800 | the term I use for the standard collaboration workflow

00:50:48.960 | is hyperactive hive mind.

00:50:50.520 | So like the default is just,

00:50:52.280 | we'll figure things out on the fly

00:50:53.640 | with ad hoc communication.

00:50:55.640 | So like when you get your first intentional practice

00:50:59.560 | that everyone agrees on, that's not a step away from that,

00:51:03.360 | it makes people really happy, right?

00:51:04.880 | And then like a lot of other things can follow.

00:51:06.960 | So there's a couple, I'll give you two options

00:51:09.080 | for like potential first things to try.

00:51:11.920 | One that I think, I profile a knowledge work team

00:51:14.360 | doing this in the book, is this idea of,

00:51:17.920 | let's have a difference between stuff the team agreed to do

00:51:21.560 | and what individuals are doing, right?

00:51:23.560 | So instead of just having everything that needs to be done

00:51:27.040 | has been just distributed among people kind of informally,

00:51:29.840 | like, I guess I'm working on this now

00:51:31.240 | because you emailed me and you're working on this,

00:51:33.640 | have a central place where like,

00:51:35.200 | when something needs to be done

00:51:36.720 | or we think it needs to be done, this is where it goes.

00:51:39.000 | And the example in the book,

00:51:40.160 | they actually were pinning these things on a wall.

00:51:41.920 | They had a wall where their team met,

00:51:44.160 | this was at the Brood Institute in Cambridge.

00:51:47.560 | And they just put on index card, put it on the wall.

00:51:49.240 | Like, oh, we should do this, we should do this.

00:51:50.560 | Like if someone, if something came up,

00:51:52.480 | you'd have to just send a CCD email, like,

00:51:54.320 | hey, what do you all think about this?

00:51:55.440 | Which is like, oh my God, like, what do I answer this?

00:51:57.440 | Like, yes, I mean, yeah, I hate that.

00:51:59.640 | Put it on the wall, right?

00:52:01.440 | Then there's like what each person's working on.

00:52:03.440 | And he made that separate.

00:52:04.960 | And they put that on the wall as well.

00:52:06.960 | Like, okay, here's like the things I'm working on right now.

00:52:10.080 | Oh, I finished this thing.

00:52:11.440 | Let's look at this big pile or like, what should I do next?

00:52:13.760 | Like, what do we think about this?

00:52:14.840 | Like over time, it was like a good way of trying to see

00:52:17.360 | like, what should we really be working on or not?

00:52:20.040 | It got rid of that anxiety of like,

00:52:22.160 | whatever happened to this thing

00:52:23.280 | and I have to email each other.

00:52:24.640 | But it significantly reduced administrative overhead

00:52:27.080 | because individuals were only working

00:52:28.760 | on a small number of these things at a time, right?

00:52:31.760 | So I've seen that one work because it's pretty clear.

00:52:34.640 | It's like, we have a Trello board and it's like,

00:52:37.160 | anyone can add to it.

00:52:38.320 | Or we have like a Google Doc, like, let's work on this,

00:52:40.040 | let's work on that.

00:52:41.080 | And like, here's the main things I'm working on.

00:52:43.400 | So that could be a really big win

00:52:45.120 | because that feeling of reduced administrative overhead

00:52:47.200 | can be really good.

00:52:48.200 | Another thing that I've seen work for inducing changes,

00:52:52.560 | this actually comes from my book, "Deep Work."

00:52:54.560 | But then I mentioned it as an aside

00:52:57.680 | and then lots of people tried it.

00:52:59.120 | And then they come back and tell me

00:53:00.120 | and it was surprisingly effective.

00:53:02.600 | Was this idea, which this was more for working for bosses,

00:53:05.240 | but it could work for teams as well, was measuring, right?

00:53:09.080 | So like in "Deep Work," there was this idea

00:53:10.760 | of talking to your team or talking to your boss

00:53:13.560 | and saying, okay, like for my role,

00:53:16.680 | what do you think the optimal ratio, for example,

00:53:19.920 | like focused work and administrative work would be?

00:53:22.080 | For my role, it's gonna be different for different roles,

00:53:23.600 | but like what ratio is going to like produce

00:53:26.920 | the most value for us, right?

00:53:28.640 | And you get a number, 50-50, whatever, two to threes,

00:53:31.520 | whatever it's gonna be.

00:53:33.360 | And then you measure and you come back like,

00:53:35.400 | oh, like we're kind of way off of that.

00:53:36.880 | It's like, what can we do to get the ratio

00:53:38.240 | where we agreed was gonna produce more value?

00:53:40.480 | This turned out to be like a wonder drug

00:53:42.040 | for a lot of people where they were,

00:53:44.360 | person after person would tell me

00:53:46.000 | that they were convinced that the way they worked,

00:53:48.040 | like we're always on Slack,

00:53:49.520 | you have to answer everything right away.

00:53:51.120 | This was entrenched, this could never change.

00:53:52.760 | And they did this exercise and the boss,

00:53:55.160 | the team lead was like, oh yeah,

00:53:56.520 | so why don't we just no meetings or emails in the morning?

00:53:59.400 | No, like just drastic changes, seemingly out of nowhere,

00:54:03.640 | because there's like a number they're working at

00:54:05.200 | and it's positive.

00:54:06.040 | It's framing it like, how do I produce more value

00:54:08.240 | and not like, will you stop bothering me or whatever?

00:54:11.040 | So those two are, I think, good first steps.

00:54:13.640 | Centralizing teamwork and measurement.

00:54:17.400 | Like, okay, what shouldn't we be trying to do?

00:54:20.080 | Oh, we're not there.

00:54:21.840 | Like what ideas do we have to actually change this number?

00:54:23.960 | And that actually can spur a lot more flexibility

00:54:26.640 | and innovation than people often expect.

00:54:29.280 | Yeah, it's a very good question.

00:54:30.880 | - Thank you.

00:54:35.320 | Hi Cal, I'm also a big fan.

00:54:37.160 | So the Zoom apocalypse has been my life,

00:54:39.640 | working remotely for tech startups since the pandemic.

00:54:42.760 | And so my question is,

00:54:44.800 | given that humans are bad at estimating knowledge work

00:54:48.440 | or mental tasks,

00:54:49.680 | and two, we can't apply assembly line metrics

00:54:53.680 | to knowledge work,

00:54:54.520 | and three, executives and managers won't like hearing,

00:54:58.080 | oh, I put three hours of deep work into it

00:55:00.560 | as a metric, a success metric.

00:55:02.320 | How can we measure progress when using slow productivity?

00:55:08.680 | - Yeah, all right, good question.

00:55:11.000 | So Zoom apocalypse, for those who don't know,

00:55:12.680 | it talked about in the book

00:55:14.480 | where when all knowledge workers went remote

00:55:16.400 | during the pandemic,

00:55:17.960 | we had this problem where the efficiency of collaboration

00:55:20.960 | got suddenly much worse because we lost all of the,

00:55:23.920 | let me grab you for five minutes and we'll figure this out.

00:55:27.040 | And everything got turned to the Zoom meetings

00:55:28.880 | or Teams meetings.

00:55:30.080 | But the smallest granularity

00:55:31.520 | that people could easily stretch a meeting

00:55:33.080 | on their calendar was 30 minutes.

00:55:34.520 | So everything needed a 30 minute meeting.

00:55:36.600 | And I began to hear from people that were saying,

00:55:38.480 | you know, I have eight hours back to back.

00:55:40.320 | Like we had this question on the show, I think, Jesse,

00:55:42.160 | where like the question was literally,

00:55:44.320 | when do I go to the bathroom, Cal?

00:55:45.920 | Because like I have these eight hours of meetings

00:55:48.200 | with no, there's no like 20 minute breaks in there

00:55:50.280 | or anything like that.

00:55:51.120 | So like that was the Zoom apocalypse.

00:55:53.240 | I mean, a couple of things.

00:55:54.680 | One, you'd be surprised about, especially in the tech sector,

00:55:57.760 | if you say I got three hours of deep work done,

00:56:00.320 | that they might be happier about that than you think.

00:56:02.600 | You know, that term is in Microsoft Outlook somewhere.

00:56:07.600 | There's some mode where they say this is for deep work.

00:56:10.880 | Yeah, so you're basically being over-meated.

00:56:13.160 | So there's a couple of things to do

00:56:14.840 | I talk about in the book, right?

00:56:16.260 | So like these are a little, they're not sneaky,

00:56:19.800 | but I think they're kind of clever heuristics.

00:56:22.240 | A good one is the one for you, one for me heuristic, right?

00:56:25.600 | So like if you're in a business

00:56:27.000 | that lives and dies by the calendar,

00:56:29.160 | you have to have a meeting, your calendar is shared,

00:56:31.080 | like let's find a time or like whatever.

00:56:33.200 | You can have a metric of every time I schedule a meeting,

00:56:36.280 | I find an equivalent amount of time that week

00:56:38.160 | and I block it off for a meeting with myself.

00:56:40.800 | And then another person schedules a meeting,

00:56:42.240 | I find an equivalent amount of time somewhere else

00:56:44.160 | and I block that off, right?

00:56:46.040 | It preserves flexibility in meeting scheduling.

00:56:48.640 | So like in a heavy meeting culture,

00:56:50.200 | it's hard to have rigid rules

00:56:51.800 | like I don't meet in the morning

00:56:53.440 | or I don't meet on Monday and Fridays

00:56:54.880 | because it's, you know, you keep getting these situations

00:56:56.840 | where like, no, that's the only time that works.

00:56:58.400 | So you're not taking anything off the table,

00:57:00.560 | but you're just artificially filling your calendar

00:57:02.580 | faster than it was otherwise filling.

00:57:04.400 | And so if you do a one for you, one for me,

00:57:06.040 | you're going to end up with like a 50/50 ratio of meetings,

00:57:08.600 | but you can tune that, right?

00:57:10.280 | If it's a heavy meeting role, it could be,

00:57:12.480 | if I put two hours in meetings,

00:57:14.800 | I put one hour of time for me,

00:57:16.280 | or you could go the other way

00:57:17.280 | if you're like in a heavy development role or something,

00:57:19.960 | you know, every hour of meeting, I find two hours.

00:57:22.440 | And so you just use the calendar that's your enemy,

00:57:25.000 | it can become in that scenario in some sense,

00:57:27.000 | your savior as well.

00:57:29.820 | Or you can do the deep to shallow work ratio method.

00:57:32.720 | I mean, a lot of the examples I heard

00:57:34.460 | were from tech companies where the people said,

00:57:36.640 | this is just a culture, like you gotta just be responsive,

00:57:39.720 | you gotta just jump on calls or whatever.

00:57:41.400 | And they were surprised,

00:57:42.400 | like when they had this conversation,

00:57:44.720 | so what is the right ratio of a contract work

00:57:47.520 | and collaboration, like talking about work,

00:57:49.560 | like what's the right ratio for my job?

00:57:51.480 | Time and again, people will report,

00:57:53.200 | they're talking to their leader, their CEO or what have you.

00:57:55.840 | And they immediately see in the room

00:57:57.800 | would be ridiculous to say,

00:57:59.000 | no, I want you like 100% doing,

00:58:01.700 | talking and clap meetings and emails or whatever, right?

00:58:05.160 | In the room, it seems like it doesn't make sense.

00:58:07.040 | So they sort of like, okay,

00:58:07.880 | we have to figure out some ratio that makes sense.

00:58:09.600 | Like maybe half and half,

00:58:10.720 | that's like typically what they say.

00:58:12.480 | And then you have this number to measure.

00:58:14.680 | And like, again and again, people would come back

00:58:16.880 | and the tech leader, the CEO is like, all right,

00:58:18.960 | well, I mean, I guess we're not hitting this 50/50.

00:58:21.520 | I guess it does make sense.

00:58:22.640 | Like, you shouldn't be spending all your time in meetings.

00:58:24.540 | Okay, great.

00:58:25.380 | These two hours and these two hours,

00:58:26.680 | I'll just tell your team you're unavailable or whatever.

00:58:30.120 | So don't be too pessimistic

00:58:32.920 | about that ratio technique working

00:58:34.960 | because I keep getting notes from people who are surprised

00:58:37.280 | when they're convinced it wasn't gonna work.

00:58:39.120 | But mainly I just feel your pain

00:58:41.040 | because like a lot of people got out of the Zoom apocalypse

00:58:43.600 | because they were like uncle and people got tired of it.

00:58:45.680 | But there are people still stuck in like,

00:58:48.200 | well, everything has to be a meeting.

00:58:50.260 | And it's my whole calendar's available till it's full.

00:58:53.600 | It really is a kind of deranging state

00:58:56.200 | because it's like, I'm not working.

00:58:57.920 | All I can do is talk about the work,

00:58:59.240 | but when do we do the work?

00:59:00.200 | I mean, it's part of what made what's going on

00:59:02.640 | so frustrating for people.

00:59:03.640 | So there's a lot of empathy coming from over here.

00:59:05.960 | All right, let's take another quick break

00:59:08.800 | to talk about another sponsor

00:59:09.960 | that makes this show possible.

00:59:11.460 | That's our friends at Element, L-M-N-T.

00:59:15.760 | I actually just had some Element this morning.

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00:59:22.480 | and it puts into your water the electrolytes that you need,

00:59:27.480 | the sodium, the potassium, the magnesium

00:59:30.960 | at the right levels you really need

00:59:32.540 | if you have dehydrated yourself,

00:59:34.760 | you've been exercising or like me,

00:59:36.400 | I was at the live event you're hearing now.

00:59:39.000 | I recorded that the night before.

00:59:40.720 | So I was talking for like two and a half hours,

00:59:43.600 | came back with a big headache, dehydrated.

00:59:45.480 | The first thing I did was mix some Element

00:59:48.040 | into a big Nalgene water bottle.

00:59:50.040 | Had some more this morning

00:59:51.040 | because I have to get back everything I sweated out.

00:59:53.740 | It's not just the liquid.

00:59:55.400 | The reason why I like Element is that A,

00:59:57.200 | they get the ratios right.

00:59:58.600 | They know how much of these electrolytes you actually need

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01:00:14.180 | no other dodgy ingredients.

01:00:15.620 | So I don't feel like I'm drinking a soda

01:00:18.880 | when I'm trying to rehydrate after a big event

01:00:21.240 | or after a long workout or after a day's full of lecturing.

01:00:25.180 | I know there's no sugar in here.

01:00:26.720 | There's no junk in here.

01:00:27.700 | It's just the stuff I need to add to the water

01:00:30.160 | to make sure that I get hydrated.

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01:00:40.200 | You can actually mix, I've heard about this,

01:00:42.480 | their flavor chocolate salt tastes good

01:00:44.320 | if you mix it into a morning coffee.

01:00:47.480 | I'll tell you this, I won't name names,

01:00:49.120 | but I've been on a podcast tour.

01:00:50.520 | I was recently to promote my new book

01:00:52.480 | and I can tell you multiple podcasters

01:00:55.680 | who promote this Element on their podcast

01:00:59.460 | are drinking it right there when I'm there.

01:01:01.820 | This is like one of these products that we all use.

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01:01:25.060 | That's drinkelement.com/deep.

01:01:28.840 | I also wanna talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist.

01:01:32.620 | Oh, Blinkist.

01:01:33.740 | They just added actually the slow productivity blink

01:01:36.620 | to the Blinkist app.

01:01:37.540 | So I'm excited about that.

01:01:38.500 | So what is Blinkist?

01:01:39.620 | It's an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries

01:01:43.920 | and expert led audio guides to read and listen to

01:01:47.220 | in just 15 minutes per title.

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01:01:51.700 | from 27 categories, such as productivity, psychology,

01:01:54.300 | and more on the go and get entertained at the same time.

01:01:58.100 | The way I use Blinkist is to triage potential book purchases

01:02:02.260 | like, oh, I'm interested in this topic.

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01:02:06.760 | Let me listen to the blinks.

01:02:08.060 | I like to listen to them.

01:02:08.980 | Jesse likes to read them, whatever.

01:02:10.300 | It's a short summer.

01:02:11.560 | Let me listen to the blinks

01:02:13.340 | and get a sense of the main ideas from the book.

01:02:15.900 | This really gives me the information I need to say,

01:02:18.340 | ah, I get what this book's about.

01:02:20.260 | I don't need to read 250 pages.

01:02:22.160 | Oh, this book is going somewhere interesting.

01:02:24.900 | Let me buy that one.

01:02:26.200 | So I use Blinkist as a triage mechanism.

01:02:30.460 | Other people use it other ways.

01:02:31.580 | I know some people who just use it like a pod.

01:02:33.220 | It's just entertaining.

01:02:35.140 | It's like a really awesome podcast, right?

01:02:37.700 | Any author you want to be a guest on a podcast,

01:02:39.820 | you can just listen to the blink summary of their book

01:02:42.760 | and sort of get the main ideas of the book.

01:02:44.480 | And so some people just use it

01:02:45.540 | for straight up entertainment.

01:02:47.440 | You know, I love it.

01:02:48.280 | Some people use it to actually learn things.

01:02:50.740 | I kind of want to know about crypto,

01:02:52.360 | but I don't want to read a lot of books.

01:02:53.640 | I'll listen to five blinks

01:02:54.680 | and I'll know enough to be conversational.

01:02:57.380 | It's a great tool,

01:02:58.220 | a great accompaniment to those who are interested

01:03:02.860 | in the reading life.

01:03:04.500 | Here's another cool thing to have going on right now

01:03:06.180 | called Blinkist Connect.

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01:03:17.900 | So if you like Blinkist,

01:03:18.740 | you can bring someone else into the Blinkist fold.

01:03:21.260 | So I mentioned they just released the Blink

01:03:22.840 | on my new book, "Slow Productivity" and it's great.

01:03:25.700 | So I'll say that's my favorite blink

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01:03:59.040 | All right, let's get back to the live show

01:04:02.120 | at People's Books.

01:04:03.060 | - Hi Cal, Roy from Berkeley, California,

01:04:07.600 | a long time fan of your stuff.

01:04:09.100 | I understand the first principle about we're doing less.

01:04:13.760 | It's not easy to do, but I get that.

01:04:15.300 | I should also add I'm a recovering perfectionist.

01:04:17.760 | Where I struggle sometimes is I see a conflict

01:04:20.100 | between working at a natural pace

01:04:22.860 | and obsessing over quality.

01:04:24.620 | Especially because I've seen some of the techniques

01:04:26.520 | you recommended for obsessing over quality,

01:04:30.060 | you know, like get an investor, work less, you know.

01:04:33.680 | But these sort of strike me as an external forcing function

01:04:37.140 | that might conflict with me working at my own pace.

01:04:40.700 | Also like, you know, when you were doing tenure,

01:04:42.980 | you have an external deadline, right?

01:04:44.700 | So you may want to do insights that take you 10 years,

01:04:47.460 | but tenure is gonna say, oh, you got five, right?

01:04:50.020 | So how do you address that sort of conflict

01:04:52.740 | between those two principles?

01:04:54.180 | - Yeah, it's a good question.

01:04:55.620 | So these stakes in the ground,

01:04:59.740 | like, okay, someone is, I told someone this is coming.

01:05:03.780 | Or like the example in the book

01:05:04.980 | was talking about the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper

01:05:07.420 | where they released a single.

01:05:09.460 | So like, okay, we kind of have to,

01:05:11.500 | we have time, we're taking a lot more time than before,

01:05:13.520 | but we kind of have to finish this

01:05:14.740 | because otherwise the single's gonna go stale.

01:05:18.100 | That's all about walking that tightrope

01:05:20.260 | between perfectionism and like really caring about craft

01:05:24.740 | because perfectionism is a real issue

01:05:26.500 | and that's one of the ways you can sort of get around it.

01:05:28.780 | So working at a natural pace has a couple of components.

01:05:31.580 | One is variation in intensity.

01:05:34.620 | So don't try to be all on all intensity every day

01:05:38.120 | all year round, right?

01:05:39.340 | So that's fine, that's compatible

01:05:40.500 | with, you know, stakes in the ground.

01:05:41.940 | And then the second piece is taking longer, right?

01:05:43.940 | Don't try to rush work.

01:05:46.340 | We see this time and again when we look at people

01:05:48.300 | who really care about craft, that they spend,

01:05:51.180 | they take their time on things, right?

01:05:53.260 | They sort of, they don't try to do it

01:05:54.620 | the fastest possible way.

01:05:56.240 | The stakes in the ground is making sure

01:05:57.660 | that time doesn't become forever time, right?

01:06:01.320 | So it's like, that's the protection against the like,

01:06:03.820 | look, slow down, don't try to rush everything,

01:06:07.580 | be okay to have some quieter periods

01:06:09.220 | and some harder work periods.

01:06:10.820 | You know, how do you have that plus a commitment to craft

01:06:13.980 | and not just say, look, my novel will be done next year

01:06:16.460 | and you say that for the next 50 years.

01:06:18.300 | And so that seems to be these type of stakes in the ground,

01:06:21.420 | committing the people, I'm going to do this,

01:06:23.020 | I took on money, whatever it is.

01:06:24.920 | Those stakes in the ground seem to be the best way we have

01:06:26.940 | of like walking that tightrope between them.

01:06:29.220 | Yeah, it's a very good question.

01:06:30.360 | Also as an excuse, I really went deep on the Beatles.

01:06:32.420 | That was like a fun part of the book as well.

01:06:34.500 | - So Nick Becks, I've been a personal trainer

01:06:37.620 | for about seven years.

01:06:39.060 | Actually recent listener to the podcast as well.

01:06:41.360 | So not too much involved,

01:06:43.200 | but I'm loving everything that I'm hearing.

01:06:45.560 | But seven years in personal training,

01:06:47.520 | I basically been on the ground,

01:06:50.200 | listening to everybody in the corporate life struggling,

01:06:53.200 | and I'm pretty much committed to kind of providing

01:06:57.200 | some solutions towards that.

01:06:58.480 | So me and a lot of partners have been working towards

01:07:00.640 | building a corporate wellness solutions company.

01:07:04.360 | And we're struggling to try and vocalize

01:07:08.280 | basically all of these principles to higher up the chain,

01:07:11.840 | because a lot of individuals that are working

01:07:14.300 | lower down the chain, they want this,

01:07:16.560 | they're desperate for it.

01:07:17.640 | But the people higher up the chain

01:07:19.040 | are all about just trying to get the outcome.

01:07:21.940 | So how do we do that?

01:07:23.720 | - It's a really hard challenge.

01:07:25.040 | And it's one that I'm relatively nihilistic about, right?

01:07:29.840 | Like a big decision I made in this book

01:07:33.080 | was to focus mainly on the individual.

01:07:35.200 | 'Cause I've tried to focus higher up before,

01:07:38.160 | it's very difficult,

01:07:39.440 | especially like mid to large size organizations.

01:07:41.980 | It's very difficult to get drastic changes

01:07:45.000 | in the way work unfolds coming from the top down.

01:07:48.960 | And there's whole theories about why this is.

01:07:50.960 | There's this book I keep talking about,

01:07:52.720 | Alfred Chandler's book, "The Visible Hand."

01:07:55.560 | It's from the 1970s as an economic historian,

01:07:58.200 | won a bunch of prizes, Pulitzer, National Book Award.

01:08:00.900 | But he talks about the rise of the big organization.

01:08:03.600 | And one of his ideas in this book

01:08:05.600 | is as we switched over to big organizations,

01:08:08.320 | which really didn't exist pre-railroads for the most part.

01:08:10.360 | As we switched over to big organizations

01:08:12.040 | with many layers of management,

01:08:13.740 | it's really a new type of capitalism

01:08:15.360 | that he calls managerial capitalism.

01:08:17.520 | And one of the things that characterizes

01:08:19.800 | managerial capitalism is the way

01:08:22.040 | that the organizations internally operate.

01:08:25.800 | Like the way like the managers operate internally

01:08:28.280 | are relatively buffeted from market signals.

01:08:31.300 | So like it's fine for them to stay ossified

01:08:34.520 | in a way of organizing work.

01:08:35.760 | It's like not a really good way of working.

01:08:38.000 | When they're big enough,

01:08:39.880 | the signals that they begin optimizing for

01:08:42.400 | are more like things like stability, like risk reduction.

01:08:46.520 | I don't want to lose my position in the C-suite

01:08:50.000 | or as a high-level manager, et cetera.

01:08:53.560 | And I really think that's a strong force

01:08:55.640 | that's preserving a lot of these ways we work

01:08:57.540 | that's just objectively like a terrible way

01:08:59.120 | to take human brains and produce value, right?

01:09:01.200 | It's like running a car factory,

01:09:03.120 | but you have all like the lights off to save money

01:09:05.620 | and people are putting steering wheels

01:09:07.000 | where the wheels are supposed to go.

01:09:08.640 | It doesn't really make sense.

01:09:10.620 | But in these like large organizations

01:09:12.260 | where things are more ambiguous,

01:09:13.840 | I've talked to a lot of C-suite people.

01:09:15.680 | I've talked to a lot of well-known CEOs.

01:09:17.940 | It's really difficult to try to affect that change.

01:09:21.960 | So with this, I went back to

01:09:24.680 | what can you do as the individual

01:09:26.920 | to begin to integrate some of these principles

01:09:29.320 | into your life or your team's life

01:09:31.280 | in a way that you can make things much better,

01:09:33.400 | knowing that that's much easier

01:09:36.060 | than getting the person 10 levels up

01:09:38.260 | to say we're going to get rid of email.

01:09:40.200 | Yes, it could be frustrating.

01:09:43.360 | The knowledge work is a weird space.

01:09:45.160 | - Hi, my name's Josh.

01:09:49.900 | I'm Perry.

01:09:50.740 | I'm a local to this area.

01:09:52.640 | I followed you through all your podcasting friends,

01:09:54.960 | Ryan Holiday, Scott Young, all those people.

01:09:57.400 | But my question is, so your Kanban system,

01:10:02.040 | I implemented it like in my work

01:10:05.920 | 'cause I work in cybersecurity

01:10:07.320 | and we have a research project.

01:10:09.660 | So like we have the needs doing column,

01:10:12.680 | the in progress and the finished, right?

01:10:15.900 | I think the issue that we're running into is like,

01:10:19.940 | if we get stuck on any technical problem,

01:10:22.840 | like it throws you down a rabbit hole

01:10:25.120 | and you end up spending like too much time

01:10:27.520 | on that like one issue.

01:10:29.640 | And like, we have to be really efficient with our hours

01:10:33.280 | 'cause we have like a limited number of hours

01:10:35.320 | because of budget constraints, right?

01:10:38.200 | Like we can only spend like 400 hours on the project

01:10:41.760 | and we've already spent like 150 hours on the project.

01:10:44.940 | So each hour is like extremely important to how,

01:10:49.940 | so like, I guess like how do you make the,

01:10:55.000 | those three columns work in a team setting

01:10:59.200 | if some problems like you get stuck

01:11:03.160 | because of like technical constraints?

01:11:05.440 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:11:06.280 | So when you're getting stuck is,

01:11:08.840 | so what's happening is then it takes a long time

01:11:11.960 | to try to figure out what's going on.

01:11:13.440 | Yeah.

01:11:15.000 | Well, first of all, I think that term,

01:11:17.080 | I guess I should define for other people.

01:11:18.320 | So Kanban, a lot of what I'm talking about

01:11:21.080 | with like centralized workloads

01:11:22.960 | and keeping track of like who's working on what

01:11:25.000 | and you work on a smaller number of things.

01:11:27.280 | This is a well-known methodology.

01:11:28.920 | So people in cybersecurity,

01:11:30.220 | people in computer programming, development shops,

01:11:33.960 | know these methodologies very well.

01:11:35.720 | And so Kanban's like one of the names

01:11:37.320 | that comes out of industrial manufacturing.

01:11:39.280 | You may have heard of agile methodologies.

01:11:41.000 | Most of those borrow these metaphors

01:11:43.580 | of different work and different statuses.

01:11:45.720 | So I have one suggestion.

01:11:48.320 | This is probably not gonna be maybe like

01:11:49.560 | the killer suggestion,

01:11:50.600 | but one thing I've seen work well in these type of firms

01:11:54.160 | is having sort of more of these pre-scheduled,

01:11:58.600 | they're short, but sort of all hands on deck

01:12:01.560 | kind of check-ins, like even throughout the day, right?

01:12:04.720 | So it's like at noon, all right, everyone,

01:12:07.880 | let's all stop what we're doing.

01:12:09.920 | Okay, who's stuck, who needs what?

01:12:11.840 | And it's like you have, everyone's there.

01:12:13.760 | Okay, I don't know what to do here.

01:12:14.800 | Oh, I know about this.

01:12:15.680 | I read about this.

01:12:16.520 | You get all the brains together

01:12:17.840 | and you swat all the problems you can right away.

01:12:20.600 | And if you can't swat them right away,

01:12:22.340 | you're able to figure out a plan right there.

01:12:24.280 | Well, who's well suited to figure this out?

01:12:27.160 | Go do that, do that now.

01:12:28.760 | And we can check back in again

01:12:29.840 | when we have this meeting again.

01:12:31.200 | It's like trying to prevent there being

01:12:33.280 | really like long or ambiguous amounts of time

01:12:35.720 | where like someone is just starting to work

01:12:37.240 | on trying to figure this out

01:12:38.320 | and a couple of days go by

01:12:39.960 | and then they email someone else like I'm stuck on it.

01:12:42.440 | So that might help a little bit

01:12:44.460 | because I've seen that model

01:12:45.920 | of not just like the morning meeting,

01:12:48.040 | like morning, midday, late afternoon,

01:12:50.960 | especially when like a lot of collaboration

01:12:53.520 | like has to happen for solving problems.

01:12:55.960 | Yeah, but cybersecurity, like computer programming shops,

01:12:59.680 | they're so far ahead of everyone else.

01:13:01.240 | I feel like when it comes to workload management,

01:13:03.240 | like they already know these ideas.

01:13:04.760 | At least they think about these ideas

01:13:06.440 | of externalizing work and having a system.

01:13:09.800 | I mean, even that question is a question

01:13:11.360 | that wouldn't be relevant to most knowledge workers

01:13:13.120 | because they don't have even a notion of like work

01:13:15.680 | and what status it is.

01:13:16.720 | It's just email, like things are just flying back and forth.

01:13:20.320 | And so I take a lot of inspiration

01:13:22.640 | from those sectors, actually.

01:13:23.640 | There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there.

01:13:26.840 | - Hi, thank you for being here.

01:13:30.120 | I'm curious about in the question

01:13:32.440 | that was just asked before me,

01:13:33.520 | you answered it a little bit,

01:13:34.460 | but I'm curious about being early career

01:13:37.600 | and on teams where,

01:13:39.400 | I'm pretty much able to balance my workload.

01:13:42.760 | I have, I work at a big law firm,

01:13:45.400 | so I have a number of any partners

01:13:47.320 | that could possibly be assigning me work at any time.

01:13:49.800 | And I've gotten to a point where I'm comfortable in my work

01:13:52.600 | and comfortable to be able to say,

01:13:54.120 | you know, I have this assignment.

01:13:55.200 | I'm happy to get to this next week and that's working well.

01:13:57.680 | I'm curious if you have thoughts

01:13:59.000 | on managing peer relationships with folks that are on teams.

01:14:02.980 | And if you don't respond on teams,

01:14:05.720 | send an email a couple of minutes later

01:14:08.280 | and sort of balancing that teamwork

01:14:12.040 | where the teams are more nebulous and super fluid.

01:14:15.520 | - Yeah, yeah, it's a great question,

01:14:17.120 | especially early career.

01:14:18.920 | One thing that definitely helps is to,

01:14:20.680 | as quickly as possible,

01:14:22.480 | develop a reputation for being incredibly organized.

01:14:27.120 | Like develop a reputation early on

01:14:29.680 | as a time management nerd, you know?

01:14:32.120 | Like a partner comes to you to ask you questions about,

01:14:35.160 | hey, are you using like a time blocker?

01:14:37.040 | Like, what do you know about this or whatever?

01:14:38.320 | They sort of know.

01:14:39.800 | That reputation gains you,

01:14:42.560 | Adam Grant has a term for this.

01:14:43.800 | He calls it idiosyncrasy credits.

01:14:45.800 | It gains you flexibility

01:14:48.640 | because there's a trust there, right?

01:14:51.120 | So for example,

01:14:53.240 | if they don't know if you're organized or not,

01:14:55.000 | or if you have a reputation of being disorganized,

01:14:57.880 | there's going to be an expectation of like,

01:14:59.600 | I would rather you just do this right away

01:15:01.120 | and respond right away because I can't let this go.

01:15:04.360 | I can't trust you to do it necessarily.

01:15:06.000 | So now I have to keep it in my head until you're done.

01:15:08.480 | So I would really just rather you do this right away.

01:15:10.640 | But if on the other hand, it's like,

01:15:12.840 | I wish you would stop talking about Cal Newport

01:15:14.720 | and these time blocking and all this type of stuff,

01:15:17.440 | you're still solving the problem of like,

01:15:19.160 | oh, she'll get it done, right?

01:15:20.960 | So I don't, it doesn't matter to me as much of, you know,

01:15:25.000 | is she on teams right away responding

01:15:26.880 | if you have that reputation.

01:15:28.720 | If they're like, did she really just send us

01:15:30.400 | like an IT ticket for like whatever?

01:15:33.160 | They're like, okay, she's got it handled.

01:15:35.120 | So that it can earn you so much breathing room.

01:15:37.680 | Like the more you develop that reputation,

01:15:39.320 | the more people trust you,

01:15:40.680 | the more like they know you have these idiosyncratic systems,

01:15:43.200 | but they work well, it helps.

01:15:45.120 | And then you begin to get some flexibility

01:15:47.240 | and like, yeah, I don't always like respond right away,

01:15:49.920 | but also you always get a response within two hours.

01:15:51.800 | I sent you these updates.

01:15:52.840 | And there's a couple of examples in the book you'll like

01:15:55.560 | along those lines where it's like really almost over the top.

01:15:58.120 | Like you're sending these like these update emails

01:16:01.360 | to the stakeholders of like the status of your task

01:16:03.680 | has just shifted to over here.

01:16:05.400 | It all seems crazy.

01:16:06.400 | But what it does give you is like a lot of breathing room.

01:16:09.240 | - You came back.

01:16:12.080 | - I'm back, yeah.

01:16:13.440 | - Are we tight on time?

01:16:15.680 | - I think so, yeah.

01:16:16.520 | - Okay, all right, well, excellent.

01:16:18.960 | Well, thank you everyone for coming out.

01:16:20.880 | These questions, this deep dive,

01:16:22.640 | we're gonna clean that up

01:16:24.080 | and we're gonna release it on the podcast feed.

01:16:26.760 | So if you wanna hear yourself and your questions,

01:16:29.800 | the podcast is called Deep Questions.

01:16:33.400 | I think we're gonna use AI to just alter all the questions

01:16:36.240 | to be just mainly very positive.

01:16:38.040 | (audience laughing)

01:16:39.520 | I knew you were smart, Cal,

01:16:40.600 | but I didn't know you were in that good shape.

01:16:41.960 | Oh, well, thank you, Congressman Raskin.

01:16:45.360 | So we're just gonna really work with,

01:16:47.280 | we're really gonna deep fake the heck out of this now.

01:16:49.280 | I'm joking, we will.

01:16:50.720 | But thank you very much for coming.

01:16:52.120 | I love the questions

01:16:53.200 | and I love "Tacoma Park" in people's books.

01:16:55.480 | So this was great.

01:16:56.720 | Thank you.

01:16:57.840 | (audience applauding)

01:17:00.880 | - All right, it's Cal here again, back in the Deep Work HQ.

01:17:03.520 | I thought that was a lot of fun.

01:17:05.580 | I really enjoyed the questions at that live show.

01:17:07.840 | I was there for another hour.

01:17:09.560 | So after what you heard ended,

01:17:11.280 | I was there for another hour just talking with people.

01:17:13.640 | We were signing books and just talking with people.

01:17:16.200 | People had come from all over.

01:17:18.060 | I think one of the coolest things

01:17:19.200 | was there was multiple couples there

01:17:22.040 | from somewhere from Canada,

01:17:25.080 | somewhere from California, I believe,

01:17:27.880 | who just coincidentally were vacationing in Washington, DC

01:17:31.160 | and just saw me mention I was gonna do this show.

01:17:33.080 | So they were able to bop over and be like,

01:17:34.440 | hey, what's going on?

01:17:35.280 | Let's see Cal.

01:17:36.100 | So it was cool.

01:17:36.940 | I got to see people from all over.

01:17:39.320 | I got to see someone who I talked to years ago

01:17:41.660 | and had given him advice to go ahead with a book idea.

01:17:44.940 | And he told me at the show afterwards,

01:17:46.920 | that book is now coming out.

01:17:48.860 | It's now gonna be published.

01:17:49.780 | That was really cool.

01:17:50.660 | So anyways, that was a lot of fun.

01:17:51.740 | It was great to see everyone.

01:17:53.400 | I love those questions.

01:17:54.540 | Got a lot of good feedback, got a lot of good support.

01:17:57.300 | So thank you, everyone who came.

01:17:59.540 | Thank you, People's Book,

01:18:02.180 | favorite bookstore in Washington, DC.

01:18:05.280 | Again, you can buy a signed copy of "Slow Productivity"

01:18:07.840 | straight from them.

01:18:09.120 | We'll put a link in the show notes.

01:18:10.640 | Great way to support independent bookstores.

01:18:13.600 | And that's it for today.

01:18:14.480 | We'll be back next week with a standard NDHQ episode

01:18:18.720 | of the "Deep Questions" podcast.

01:18:20.660 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:18:23.600 | Okay, so if you enjoyed our discussion today,

01:18:25.880 | I think you might also like episode 275,

01:18:29.600 | which gives a general system for achieving hard goals.

01:18:34.600 | So check that out.

01:18:35.720 | So the question I wanna dive into today

01:18:38.140 | is how do you follow through on transformative goals?

Busy People vs Productive People: What It Takes To Achieve Mastery & Avoid Burnout | Cal Newport

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