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Deep Dive with Ali AbdaalDeep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Cal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity

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Ali AbdaalhostCal Newportguest
Jun 6, 20241h 2mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

  1. 0:00 – 11:16

    The Concept of Slow Productivity and Deep Work

    1. AA

      Hello and welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, academics, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is a wonderful, if I say so myself, conversation between me and the amazing Cal Newport. This was the first time Cal and I were meeting in real life. We've been internet buddies for a while. Uh, we have blurbed each other's books. Have we blurbed each other? Yep. [laughs] We have blurbed each other's books, and he has recently released an absolute banger of a book called Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. In this conversation, we talk about the concept of deep work, we talk about productivity principles that overwhelmed people can use to apply to their life, not just if you're an entrepreneur, but also if you have a normal corporate day job or if you're a student, for example. And we talk a lot about how the concepts of slow productivity can help us have more of a chill relationship with life, but also weirdly be more productive because we're not trying to do all of this stuff and be super overwhelmed with all the things that we're doing, but instead taking a slower and more relaxed approach to meaningful accomplishment. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this interview with Cal Newport as much as I did. Cal Newport, welcome to the podcast.

    2. CN

      Hey, it's good to see you.

    3. AA

      We meet in person for the first time.

    4. CN

      I know. I feel like we have been talking for a long time. We've done each other's shows.

    5. AA

      Yeah.

    6. CN

      But, uh, for the first time.

    7. AA

      I've been following your blog since like 2012, uh, Adventure Studying, all, all of the stuff.

    8. CN

      Oh, that's an insider reference right there.

    9. AA

      Yeah. [laughs]

    10. CN

      Yeah, I love it.

    11. AA

      Yeah. So-

    12. CN

      Wait, 2012 is kind of recent though, right? Because that thing goes all the way back to 2007, so you could get the real-

    13. AA

      Oh, shit. Yeah, the real-

    14. CN

      Oh yeah, you get the old stuff.

    15. AA

      Yeah, I think I, I trolled through your back catalog to figure out, has Cal d- said anything like 20 years ago that I can then make a YouTube video about that like [laughs]

    16. CN

      [laughs]

    17. AA

      ... students today may not have heard of. So I've, I've done the, the trolling through the archives.

    18. CN

      I'll tell you what's interesting about that though, by the way, is so when that blog started, it was all student advice because the books I wrote early on were for students. And my memory was, oh, for years, that blog, uh, was student advice, right? And then like eventually as I got closer to my first non-student book in 2012, it shifted over. I went back recently to read the archive. It's student advice for like a year. I didn't realize how early I began talking about things like follow your passion is bad advice. What's going on with careers? Deep work, I named that term, I called it hard focus back then.

    19. AA

      Hmm.

    20. CN

      It was a lot earlier than I thought. So, so I guess I had sort of moved on from the student stuff. Uh, my mind had moved on earlier than I realized-

    21. AA

      Hmm

    22. CN

      ... because, you know, I didn't actually publicly move on in my books for years later. So it was an interesting surprise to go back.

    23. AA

      Um, revisiting a bit of an old classic, why is following your passion bad advice?

    24. CN

      Oh man. Wrote a whole book about this. Yeah. [laughs]

    25. AA

      Yeah, we, we've, uh, we've done a whole video about it as well. [laughs]

    26. CN

      Yeah. Well, now it's the big thing.

    27. AA

      Yeah.

    28. CN

      I think a lot of people talk about it. The latest is, I think Scott Galloway's been talking about this in his new book, and Mark Cuban talked about this. Uh, so let me just set the context though. Like, why I was writing about that was I was finishing up academic work, right? So I'd gone to grad school, got my PhD, was doing the, a postdoc, which is like the holding pattern before you go on the academic job market, right? I had this thought, if I was ever gonna understand what leads people to really love their work, this would be the, the highest leverage point in my life to figure that out. Because if I go on this academic route that the momentum was going towards, that's it. That's job for life, right? It's like, okay, I, I wanna make sure I really understand this question of how people love to work. So it... that's what motivated the book. So I look into the question, the first answer that comes up everywhere back then at least, was follow your passion, right? So I look into that like, okay, so why do we think this is true? The whole thing is nonsense, right? We, we think this is some wisdom that, you know, Plato wrote about and then, you know, Thomas Aquinus then talked about, and the Founding Fathers, and it's this old piece of advice. No. If you go back and look at the etymology, the phrase follow your passion is from the early 1990s.

    29. AA

      Oh, wow. Okay.

    30. CN

      It's like a very new idea, right?

  2. 11:16 – 28:02

    Challenges of Following Your Passion

    1. CN

      right? So like every active project that you're working on is gonna necessarily bring with it overhead, right? Like we have to talk about it, we have to have meetings about it, we have to have emails about it. Which isn't bad, like projects require collaboration. I'm more and more realizing the problem then is when we aggregate too many of those projects because all that overhead adds up.

    2. AA

      Hmm.

    3. CN

      Right? So if there's six different active projects going on, it's really, really difficult to find time for deep work because that's six projects worth of administrative overhead that all just overlap now, right? And it's all, all competing for the same time. So I've really never found a better general solution than reducing the number of things that I'm working on.

    4. AA

      Yeah. [laughs]

    5. CN

      Which, which I'm like you. I mean, I, I have so many interesting ideas and opportunities, and so I don't know if you do this, I go cyclical, right? So I'll, I'll, I'll have a bunch of ideas and I'll start doing things.

    6. AA

      Hmm.

    7. CN

      And then I get really overloaded and like, "This is not good. I can't do deep work anymore." And then I really scale back, and then I get bored. And then I start, like, adding things back in. So my, my last overload was pandemic, right? So, like, pandemic hits, I start to get kind of in a entrepreneurial hustle mode because, look, I'm a professor and a writer, right? Uh, in those early months of the pandemic, it was, are the universities gonna shut down? Like, I mean, it w- they were, "We have to freeze parts of your pay." It's because, you know, the money wasn't coming in. And then at the same time there's all these rumors that the publishing industry was gonna start clawing back, uh, advances and, like, slashing and the w- and that, you know, Barnes & Noble was gonna go out of business and all this type of stuff. And so I went into a mode of, "I gotta get more irons in the fire. I gotta..." whatever. And then you fast-forward a year and a half and I'm like, "Oh, no. [laughs] Uh-oh. Like, I have too much. I can't..." The overhead, so that's the killer.

    8. AA

      Mm.

    9. CN

      The projects are awesome. It's the overhead that comes with the projects that, that adds up. So you either reduce the number of projects or, uh, y- you find a way with the projects you have, you have to be really careful about controlling that admin overhead.

    10. AA

      Mm.

    11. CN

      Like, this is when we talk about it. This is the processes for, like, where the information goes. Like, you have to liberate those pro- those, uh, those projects from just send me a message when you need something. Let's just have a ad hoc back-and-forth communication to figure things out. So you either have to get super structured or you have to simplify.

    12. AA

      Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh... There was a time, I think last year before your book had come out, uh, you had done a casual episode on Tim Ferriss. I mean, to the degree that any episode on Tim Ferriss is casual.

    13. CN

      [laughs]

    14. AA

      But it's like the book hadn't quite come out and you were, like, exploring the idea of slow pr- slow productivity.

    15. CN

      Yeah.

    16. AA

      And you mentioned this, the, the, this overhead thing, and it, it sort of clicked something in me where, wh- where I realized kinda like in, in, in physics, you know, like, uh, parallel versus series circuits.

    17. CN

      Yep.

    18. AA

      It's like you assume a parallel circuit is actually better because I... Oh, if I have these three things, then doing them all three at the same time-

    19. CN

      Yeah

    20. AA

      ... the whole, like, consistency th- thing. You know, I thought that the best way to write a book is work on it a little bit each day.

    21. CN

      Yeah.

    22. AA

      And if you work on the book a little bit each day and work on your YouTube videos a little bit each day and work on the business a little bit each day, surely everything gets done.

    23. CN

      Yeah.

    24. AA

      No, it doesn't get done. [laughs]

    25. CN

      [laughs]

    26. AA

      Like, basically zero gets done. [laughs]

    27. CN

      Yeah.

    28. AA

      And instead, what I found super helpful was doing things in series rather than parallel.

    29. CN

      Yep.

    30. AA

      This week I'm just going to intensely focus on just the book.

  3. 28:02 – 31:30

    Managing Multiple Projects

    1. CN

      I will spend... Like, I'm in the early stages of a new book idea right now that I'm, I'm not really talking about yet, but, like, I like to work on the ideas of a new book when I'm publicizing a past book-

    2. AA

      Mm

    3. CN

      ... so I can just sort of get out of my head about what's going on and be like, "No, there's something else coming." Um, I've spent probably 50 hours so far just outline- just outlining ideas. Not even book outlines, idea outlines, right? Um, like, because I just, this isn't quite right. This works. Okay, how does this fit to here? So when it comes time for me to write, now I really can focus on a chapter because I know, like, what this chapter is about and how it fits into the broader thing, and so I don't have to load up the entire framework of all the ideas I'm trying to write and make sure it all fits together. Um, I have that working before I write any words, and then that allows me to be like, "Okay, so how do I then write a chapter on this piece of the puzzle that's really good?" And then that's a, that's, like, a smaller scale for me.

    4. AA

      Nice. That's really good. Oh, by the way, quick thing. In case you are interested in starting and/or growing and/or monetizing a YouTube channel, then you might like to check out my Part-Time YouTuber Academy. It is a course that has dozens and dozens of hours of content in it, along with templates and worksheets and resources that basically open source absolutely everything that me and my team have learned about growing my YouTube channel and also this podcast YouTube channel over the last seven-plus years. So you can check that out at academy.aliabdaal.com. That'll be linked down below in the video description and the show notes as well. Feel free to check out the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. When I read Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money, it's like 20 chapters, each are the length of a short blog post.

    5. CN

      Yeah.

    6. AA

      And that was... I was like, "Oh, how nice must it be to be able to turn [laughs] -

    7. CN

      Yeah

    8. AA

      ... to write a book where you've got 20 chapters, each that are the length of a short blog post?"

    9. CN

      He, he sold a, he sold a couple copies of that book too.

    10. AA

      Oh, yeah. He wrote-

    11. CN

      From what I understand, yeah

    12. AA

      ... that, that are all, like, self-contained with really interesting stories. It's really good. I felt good listening to it on Audible 'cause he, you know, it didn't take long to get through. I was like-

    13. CN

      Yeah

    14. AA

      ... "Wow." And, like, a handful of ideas stuck with me. I'm like, "Wow, why did I spend all this time trying to-

    15. CN

      Oh, God. Really

    16. AA

      ... architect a whole-

    17. CN

      Oh, my God

    18. AA

      ... 70,000-word thing when-

    19. CN

      Yeah

    20. AA

      ... actually, had I just chunked it down a little bit more and thought of it as self-contained ideas, almost like YouTube videos maybe-

    21. CN

      Yeah

    22. AA

      ... things might have worked better. Yeah.

    23. CN

      Yeah. He, he, he's ahead of the game. I had that same thought once when I read, I don't know if you know Jaron Lanier, sort of, uh... He's a techno critic, computer scientist, invented VR.

    24. AA

      Okay.

    25. CN

      Interesting guy, right? Brilliant guy.

    26. AA

      Yeah.

    27. CN

      Um, uh, but I remember reading... And he just has, like, ideas, right? I remember reading one of his books when I was working on Maybe a World Without Email, and he's like all these ideas, and I looked in the back and like there's no footnotes. I was like, "Oh, I didn't know you could do that."

    28. AA

      [laughs]

    29. CN

      He's just like, "Look, guys, I have ideas and I'm just gonna give you..." Here, if you look at my books, because I'm an academic, I mean, it's, like, laboriously endnoted. It's all blind endnotes so it doesn't get in the way of the reading, but it's, like, a big chunk of the back and it's endnotes. There's footnote, I got this from here, but some sources disagree with this or whatever. His techno idea books, he just rock and rolls. He's like, "I don't know, something like this is right." [laughs] I was like, "I didn't know you could do that." And I bet he wrote those books. He could write those... They're brilliant because he's a smart guy. He probably spends like a month just like-

    30. AA

      Mm.

  4. 31:30 – 31:59

    The Evolution of Creative Processes

    1. AA

      [laughs]

    2. CN

      You're, you're convinced that like all these-

    3. AA

      [laughs]

    4. CN

      ... all these, uh, professors are gonna like pull their pipe out and be like, "Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, oh, I don't know about this citation right here." Like, some sort of alarm's gonna go off and no one cares.

    5. AA

      Yeah.

    6. CN

      There are stuff people get upset about, but it's never the citations.

    7. AA

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      It's like, I don't like the word productivity's in your title.

    9. AA

      Yeah.

    10. CN

      Which is, yeah, I'm sure something we've both dealt with. [laughs]

    11. AA

      Oh, yeah. No, exactly. I, I kind of play, flip-flopped between different, uh, like over the la- over the last like four years, like especially during the pandemic, there was a very anti-productivity wave.

    12. CN

      Yeah.

  5. 31:59 – 38:29

    Redefining Productivity

    1. AA

      And, or initially there was a very pro-productivity wave.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. AA

      Then there became a very anti-productivity wave.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. AA

      So at the time we were thinking about titles, we were like, do we not have the word productivity in it because people don't like the word? How did, how did you decide to lean into the word productivity?

    6. CN

      Well, this, I, I mean, this is the phrase I like, right? I think this is right, uh, and I think this could stick.

    7. AA

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      And I think it, I think it describes right what I'm trying to do, and I'm actually following the framework of the slow movements in general here. So like, I think it's appropriate. There's slow food-

    9. AA

      Yeah

    10. CN

      ... there's slow cities. Uh, and so I think, you know, for the broader audience, it's the right... I think the term is self-explanatory in a way. I think it's the right thing to do. The sort of more elite media did not like this term.

    11. AA

      Oh, really?

    12. CN

      Oh, yeah.

    13. AA

      Yeah. How so?

    14. CN

      Uh, they just were not happy. [laughs] 'Cause I, I don't know, it, it, I don't know if you had the same experience, but the, the, the, the people who are unhappy about the book are, they're, they're like, "We're unhappy with the word productivity. Um, and here's like the acceptable way to talk about it," which is essentially, uh, productivity is a construction of capitalist narratives, and we have to like, take down capitalism.

    15. AA

      To all that kind of idea.

    16. CN

      If you're willing to make that critique, we're willing to like take you as a serious think- thinker. If you're not, we are not gonna be happy. So, [laughs] it's interesting, I definitely got, I definitely got some of that.

    17. AA

      How do you personally find ways to make writing fun?

    18. CN

      I mean, writing is my number one thing.

    19. AA

      Hm.

    20. CN

      Yeah. I mean, I've been d- I've done it my entire adult life. It's my, that's my art form, that's my, you know, the thing I admire, the thing I wanna do. I, it's, it's my s- my sport, if I was a professional athlete. Like, I... So I've just always done it.

    21. AA

      Mm.

    22. CN

      I started in university. You know, I, I'd been a good writer in, uh, school and knew it was hard, and I went to university and said the one thing... This is true, I said to myself, "The one thing you cannot do when you're here is become a writer."

    23. AA

      [laughs]

    24. CN

      It's like too hard. Did anything else, but do not become a writer. So in about a year I, I started writing, right? [laughs] I didn't listen. I tried to become an athlete actually, right? So I, uh, was rowing crew, um, and was like doing well at that, and I was like, "This is great." I was like, "I'll be like a, like a jock and-"

    25. AA

      [laughs]

    26. CN

      "... it's like fun." Like a, you know, hang out with all of these... 'Cause I'm not, I'm not, you know, crew is not like a big thing in the States except for at, you know, like the Ivy League schools, and I, I was just from like a public school, but I went to an Ivy League school where they had the boat houses-

    27. AA

      Yeah

    28. CN

      ... and the regattas. I was like, "This is great. This is what I assume college people do, is they row boats and stuff." And I developed a heart condition, uh, completely idiopathic or, um, you know, just was there congenital, I guess would be the term. Is that... You're the doctor, right?

    29. AA

      [laughs]

    30. CN

      Uh, you were born... It's just, well-

  6. 38:29 – 43:21

    Balancing Work and Life: Setting Boundaries and Managing Distractions

    1. CN

      those principles. So the stories are of like timeless figures in the past. The advice is like needle accurate for I have exactly this job-

    2. AA

      Mm-hmm

    3. CN

      ... you know, in a modern company, and I'm dealing with this dynamic for, with my-

    4. AA

      Yeah

    5. CN

      ... with my boss.

    6. AA

      I found it, I found it really, um, engaging in a way that most nonfiction self-help books rarely are because I was, I was like, "Oh, I didn't know this about Jane Austen or like John McPhee or like Galileo or-"

    7. CN

      Yeah. It's timeless stuff.

    8. AA

      "Oh, that's cool." It's like, oh, it, it, it sort of made me imagine like, oh, how nice it would be to, you know, go to the meadows and just sort of lie on the park bench thinking for, uh, seven days or-

    9. CN

      Well, that was my thought.

    10. AA

      Yeah.

    11. CN

      It like trigger that response-

    12. AA

      Yeah

    13. CN

      ... and then follow it with, and here's how you could kind of simulate that same effect-

    14. AA

      Yeah

    15. CN

      ... in your actual life right now. I thought that would be like an interesting pairing. But I, I'll give you an example though. So like the Jane Austen example is a good one, right? Um, 'cause I, I thought this was a really interesting story. So you know, Jane Austen, the novelist, um, there's lore about her, right? There's this lore that Jane would write surreptitiously while she was in like the sitting room, and when people would come, like visitors or whatever, she had a, a creaky hinge on the door, and when they would hear that creak, that would warn her, like, "Let me hide what I'm working on." So it was like this story of her like fitting in work like wherever she could. Like, and then-

    16. AA

      Yeah

    17. CN

      ... I would fit it in whenever I had these moments, and then like that's how she wrote her books, right? And everyone told this story, uh, Virginia Woolf references this in A Room Of- A Room Of One's Own. Um, Mason Currey tells the story in Daily Rituals, like it's been around. It turns out, like I'm looking into this, like it's all completely made up, right? It was her nephew James wrote a biography of her decades after she died, and basically just made a lot of stuff up that like he thought would help the story of his aunt and it would be interesting. Uh, but now there's more recent biographies that look at primary sources. That's not at all what happened. Um, Jane was too busy to write and was super frustrated about it. She had these ideas, but they had so much going on she could not make progress on them. And it was like a huge source of frustration in her life. She was not fitting in the writing into little open spaces. Um, she didn't have the open water to get things done. Later in her life, uh, her father dies. Her, her mom, her sister, and a family friend are like, "We're tapping out of this whole busy life and the social scene and all of this type of stuff we're doing," and they move into a cottage that her brother owned. Uh, he'd inherited land, and they had a cot- they, they moved in this cottage and just no more, no more active life, and then free time for the first time.

    18. AA

      Mm.

    19. CN

      Jane writes all five of her famous books in like two years.

    20. AA

      Hmm.

    21. CN

      Not by, by squeezing it into little free time in a busy life, but by becoming much less busy, right? So I thought this was a really cool story. So like what's the principle there? It's like, well, okay, um, sometimes to do something good you have to do a lot less, right? Like, uh, good things require time and space, and sometimes simplifying what's going on is what actually allows you to break through and do, not pushing more stuff in. Well, we could easily adapt this over to knowledge work. Like that goes back to like what we were talking about before. I said yes to 10 projects as a knowledge worker. They each have administrative overhead. That's clogging up my schedule. Now I can't finish my proverbial novel. If I cleaned out what I was working on, uh, you know, worked on fewer things at the same time, built my own version of Jane Austen's Chawton Cottage, now I can start finishing Emily and Sense and Sens- Emma, I should say, and Sense and Sensibility, right? I can start making like actual progress on stuff that matters. So it's like a timeless principle, and then we can give really tactical advice for leveraging it in a modern job.

    22. AA

      What... So I... So a, a few hours ago, I was, I was, I was teaching a live session for our, our productivity lab, and loads of people in the, in the, in the Zoom chat were asking this thing of like... 'Cause we were planning, um, you know, the, the, the ideal week, like blocking out-

    23. CN

      Yeah

    24. AA

      ... what would your dream week look like? And everyone's kind of realizing, "Shit, my dream week, th- th- there are not enough hours in the week to do all of the things that I would like to do."

    25. CN

      Oh, interesting. So they were reacting to that question by enumerating lots of different things they wanted to do.

    26. AA

      They were like, "Oh yeah, you know, you know, you know, in my dream week I would have time for this and this and this."

    27. CN

      Yeah.

    28. AA

      "And I'd also spend 10 to 20 hours a day on my hobbies and blah, blah, blah. I'd have time for the kids, I'd have time for the wife, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Um, and then they're like, "Wait a minute. There's like... There just aren't enough hours in the day."

    29. CN

      Yeah.

    30. AA

      And so I found myself saying that like, "Yeah, well, you know, you just need to do less and stuff." But then they were like, "Well, easy for you to say. You're a YouTuber. You can do what you want. What about those of us with a corporate job?" And so I wonder if... What would you say to like the corporate employee who's like, "Yeah, but Cal, I can't just not do these 10 things."

  7. 43:21 – 1:02:41

    Challenges and Insights of The Art of Writing

    1. CN

      like, really important. That sounds, um, like a really high priority. Um, I'll tell you what, I, I will go back, like, right away and, because I keep track of my time very carefully, and I'll get right into my schedule right away and get right back to you about, like, wh- when I can do this or how it's gonna fit in." Now you've bought yourself some time, and you've established, "I'm very organized," right? And you've escaped the social pressure of I'm in the room and the hands on my shoulder and like, "What are you gonna say, yes or no?" And then a few hours later you can come back and be like, uh, "You know, look, I take... I, I keep track of this stuff really carefully. I have like four things, like, I'm actively working on. It's eating up basically, like, most of the time. Honestly, it would probably be, like, six weeks till enough of this stuff is cleared that I could give this attention, right? So, no, I, I, I wouldn't be able to turn this around." That is, like, an effective no because it's not in the room.

    2. AA

      Yeah.

    3. CN

      Uh, you've established that you're very organized, which is, like, gives you credibility in the conversation. You've social proofed the, "I, I have... This is my workload. I'm not complaining. I'm just being really, like, uh, effective about organizing my time." So that works well. Quotas work well. There's a common type of thing you get asked to do, and it's not something you can always say no to as a part of your job, but you get asked to do it way more than you have time to do. Have a quota. Like, "I do three of these a month. I do five of these each quarter." And so you say yes until you hit the quota, and then you say, "I would love to do it. These are important. I do a quota of, like, three of these per month. I already hit the quota, so I can't do this one."

    4. AA

      Nice. Yeah.

    5. CN

      Now they're in a position where if they're complaining, all they can complain about is, "Oh, your quota's wrong."

    6. AA

      Hmm.

    7. CN

      You know? Like, "Well, maybe, like, your quota should be four." But they're not gonna do that. They're like, "No. Look, you, you've thought about this," or, "You do this." Like, what, what you're validating what they're afraid of is that, like, you're lazy and you don't wanna do work, and you're just like, "I'm just gonna say no to things. I don't wanna do things." But, like, these type of things, uh, make a big difference. Another thing you can do, schedule the time for your commitments on your calendar. And it's there, and now the time is blocked off, and if something else comes in, let me find time to do this. And now you can just be super transparent with people. Like, "Okay, uh, happy to do it. Uh, I think this'll take about 10 hours. Uh, I actually pre-schedule all my work on my calendar. The next time I can get 10 hours in, like, reasonably large chunks is, you know, it's gonna be three or four weeks from now. So I can do that in three or four weeks and take up that time." So what you, what you're doing in that example is making your workload transparent.

    8. AA

      Yeah. Nice.

    9. CN

      Making the reality of your... All of these things are sort of making your workload transparent, making your systems transparent. Uh, this works, right? Like, you think your boss is a mustache twirler that's like, "I'm gonna catch you," and you know, it's not the way it works. People think their bosses are evil, that, um, they, they wanna make your life hard, and that they're looking for an excuse to fire you. That's not the case. First of all, if you're good, they stay up at night worried about you leaving.

    10. AA

      Yeah.

    11. CN

      The hardest thing in business, you know this, right, is hiring good people.

    12. AA

      Hmm.

    13. CN

      Right? They are not looking for an excuse to fire you if you're good. They're, uh, desperately afraid you're going to leave. What does your boss really want from you then, right? What they want is for you to take stress away from them.

    14. AA

      Yeah.

    15. CN

      So when they come to you with a thing-

    16. AA

      Yep

    17. CN

      ... it's a source of stress for them that they have to keep track of this thing right now.

    18. AA

      Yep.

    19. CN

      It's their responsibility.

    20. AA

      Yeah.

    21. CN

      They want that stress to go away. If they know nothing about how you organize yourself, if they know nothing about your workload, um, just giving you the project is not enough to take their stress away. They still have to worry about it till you tell them it's done. So what are they gonna say? "Do this right away, because I want my stress to go away right away."

    22. AA

      Hmm.

    23. CN

      If you're organized, you're showing them your queue. You're showing them, like, where, okay, here's... This takes this many hours. Here's when I have time. I... You know, you're giving them this type of information. They're like, "Of course he's gonna get this done. I trust him. That also takes my stress away right away. I don't need it done tomorrow. I need my stress to go away by tomorrow." [laughs]

    24. AA

      Yeah. Nice.

    25. CN

      Right? So you can get away with a lot more than you think if you're really on your game and you're organized and you're not complaining and your whole focus is on, like, because I wanna be super effective, and I'm very realistic about my time so that I can do really good work. You get away with a lot more than you think.

    26. AA

      Mate, that's great. Um, that's, that's golden advice. Um, what sort of quotas or stuff have you got in your life?

    27. CN

      So as an academic, uh, peer reviews is a big one.

    28. AA

      Hmm.

    29. CN

      Right? Because you get more review requests than you have time to do. It's an important part of your service to your academic community. You can't say no to all reviews, but you can't do all the reviews, right? Program committees is another thing. This is very, like, insider baseball. Um, book blurbs-

    30. AA

      Oh, yeah

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