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Deep Dive with Ali AbdaalCal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity
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Cal's Old Blog and Early Student Advice
Ali introduces the episode and Cal Newport, and the two joke about following each other's work. Cal reflects on rereading his early blog archive and how soon he began questioning passion and talking about deep focus.
- •Ali has followed Cal's blog since around 2012, and it goes back to 2007
- •The early blog was mostly student advice
- •Cal was talking about follow-your-passion being bad advice very early
- •He called deep work "hard focus" back then
Why Following Your Passion Is Bad Advice
Asked why following your passion is bad advice, Cal explains the research behind his view. He says passion is cultivated by getting good at something and gaining control, and that natural inclinations only lower the threshold for choosing.
- •The phrase "follow your passion" dates from the early 1990s
- •Job satisfaction research points to autonomy, mastery, connection and importance, not matching a specific passion
- •Famous people who say it usually stumbled into their work and grew passionate
- •Getting good at something gives control, which you can use to craft your career
- •The hard part is the ten years of work after choosing, not picking the perfect thing
How Deep Work Became a Slow-Burn Hit
Ali asks whether people know Cal coined "deep work." Cal says he wanted the vocabulary to spread, then describes the book's quiet launch and slow growth to nearly two million copies without ever hitting a bestseller list.
- •Cal's goal was for people to separate deep work from non-deep work
- •The term has appeared in places like Microsoft Outlook
- •The book launched quietly after a lowered advance
- •It grew slowly through word of mouth and podcast invitations
Overload, Admin Overhead and the Active List
Ali asks how to make time for deep work, and Cal names overload as the key villain because each project brings administrative overhead. They discuss working in series rather than parallel, and Cal describes an active/waiting list that limits active projects to one to three.
- •Every active project brings meetings, emails and other overhead that adds up
- •Cal cycles between overload and scaling back, as in the pandemic
- •Ali found working on projects in series better than a little each day in parallel
- •Keep one to three active items and put the rest on a transparent waiting list
- •Big projects get broken into smaller chunks
Time-Boxing Podcasts and YouTube Channels
Cal and Ali compare how they contain their own shows. Cal gives his podcast half a day a week and lets it grow slowly, while Ali films two videos in one day a week and says his growth held up with far less effort.
- •Cal's podcast has a half-day-a-week footprint, and he treats it as an ongoing service obligation
- •Cal's growth came by building a pipeline and hiring help within that limit
- •Ali films two videos in a day with his producer and same-day prep
- •Ali says cutting from seven days a week to one made basically no difference
- •A zero-prep video of Ali's got a million views while heavily prepared ones did worse
Steve Martin, Relentlessness and Scaling Work Intensity
Cal draws on Steve Martin's rise to argue that hard work takes time and can't be compressed. Ali asks how to balance steady effort with bursts of intensity, and Cal says projects of different sizes need different scales of focus.
- •Steve Martin's "be so good they can't ignore you" line inspired Cal's book title
- •Martin's rise took about ten years, with diligence including saying no to distractions
- •Relentlessness is about returning to the work, not being stressed or busy
- •A YouTube video takes half a day, a chapter a week or two, and a book a month
- •Cal spent about 50 hours outlining ideas for a new book before writing
Making Books Fun and Skipping the Citation Anxiety
Ali brings up Morgan Housel's short, self-contained chapters and asks what a book would look like if it were fun. They agree that fear of citation criticism is overblown, and that the criticism they actually get is about the word "productivity" in titles.
- •Ali wishes he had chunked his book into self-contained ideas
- •Cal cites Jaron Lanier's books as lightly footnoted and idea-driven
- •Both agree no one really cares about citations
- •Cal chose "slow productivity" in the spirit of the slow movements
- •Some elite media disliked the word productivity
Cal's Path to Writing and Cultivated Passion
Asked how he makes writing fun, Cal tells how he became a writer after a heart condition ended his rowing. He says he learned to like the difficulty over two decades, and points out that Ali's enjoyment of YouTube is also cultivated passion.
- •Cal began writing in university after a heart condition ended his rowing
- •He first tried to outwrite everyone through effort, then came to see writing as a craft
- •He signed with his agent at 20 and has written professionally for two decades
- •Ali says he doesn't enjoy writing as much but loves chill, question-driven videos
- •Passion follows doing something, as with Ali's early exam videos
Slow Productivity Through Galileo, Curie and Jane Austen
Cal explains that the book draws on historical knowledge workers rather than studies or modern case studies. He tells the Jane Austen story, in which she wrote her famous books after becoming less busy rather than by squeezing writing into a busy life.
- •Cal studied Galileo, Marie Curie and Jane Austen because their autonomy let them experiment
- •He then adapted the timeless principles to modern jobs with Slack and email
- •The popular story of Austen hiding her writing was largely invented by a nephew's biography
- •Austen wrote her five famous books in about two years after her family withdrew to a cottage
- •The lesson is that sometimes doing less is what lets you do something good
Saying No in a Corporate Job
Ali relays his audience's objection that they can't simply do less in a corporate job. Cal offers tactics for managing workload, including not answering in the room, quotas, scheduling commitments and making your workload transparent, and explains why bosses respond well to organization.
- •Never give a hard yes or no in the room; go back with a schedule-based answer
- •Quotas let you say yes until you hit a stated limit
- •Put commitments on your calendar and be transparent about when you can do them
- •Bosses mainly want their stress taken away, and organization does that
- •Cal also walls off things like open reader email and strongly quotas talks
Summer Hours and Designing the Week
Cal describes his summer schedule and Ali describes his own week, with Mondays and Fridays protected. They discuss how guest requests and social obligations push against protected time.
- •Cal takes no summer salary, so he has no academic administrative work then
- •Summer hours are big deep work pushes on Monday and Friday, afternoons only Tuesday to Thursday, and weekends off
- •Ali has Wednesday filming, Tuesday team meetings and Thursday afternoon for ad hoc items
- •Podcast guests are hard to fit, so Ali records in the evenings
- •Cal tries to see flexibility as something the schedule rewards him with
Good Clutter, Welcome Distractions and Family
Cal and Ali discuss keeping professional productivity mindsets out of personal life. They distinguish good clutter and welcome distractions from the destructive kind, and Cal suggests that being stressed by a child knocking on the door signals an off-base notion of productivity.
- •Cal had to avoid carrying work productivity mindsets into family life
- •Good or productive clutter is important things you can make room for
- •Ali distinguishes welcome distractions from unwelcome ones
- •Stress at a child's interruption suggests overload and pseudo-productivity
Avoiding the Push-Now-Chill-Later Trap and Closing Advice
Ali asks how to apply slow productivity when he fears becoming irrelevant without constant output. Cal says he favors only sustainable hard work and warns that "later" never arrives, then closes by urging people to define and modify the word productivity.
- •Ali worries about pushing hard now so he can chill out later
- •Cal says "later" keeps getting replaced by something else, as with students grinding toward the next goal
- •Cal approaches books by giving them a great swing, a good push, then moving on
- •His parting advice is to define your terms rather than use "productivity" alone
- •He calls the current implicit definition pseudo productivity and says modifiers like slow are the right direction
Publisher timestamps
- 0:00The Concept of Slow Productivity and Deep Work
- 11:16Challenges of Following Your Passion
- 28:02Managing Multiple Projects
- 31:30The Evolution of Creative Processes
- 31:59Redefining Productivity
- 38:29Balancing Work and Life: Setting Boundaries and Managing Distractions
- 43:21Challenges and Insights of The Art of Writing
