Deep Life Stack 2.0 To Reinvent Yourself: How To Master Productivity & Find Purpose | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So a lot of people right now feel controlled by their technology. When they're at work, it's just email, it's Slack, it's Zoom all day long, jumping from one thing to another. When they get home, they're distracted by just a different category of screens. It's social media, it's video games, it's streaming. These glowing rectangles are keeping your attention and making you feel as if there is no direction to your life, making you feel low energy, making you feel out of shape and unengaged. So longtime listeners know that my general prescription for this problem is not to try to directly treat the symptoms. Don't just go in and say, "Here is my, uh, plan for using my phone less." Don't just go in and say, "Here are my new rules for my email inbox, and I'm going to have an autoresponder and batch my e- my email checks, and that's gonna fix it." You have to actually solve the root of the problem, which means you have to go in and overhaul systematically your life into something that is so directed and intentional and compelling that the allure of these screens dissipates. So you say, "I am not going to just load up this video game or scroll social media all evening because I have things I want to get to that are more important. I am not going to just sit here on email all day in the office because I'm working on something here that matters, and that's getting in the way of it." You overhaul your life to be something deep, and the allure of the shallows becomes a lot less intense. So I call this approach, as you know, the deep life. Earlier this year, I introduced a step-by-step plan for cultivating a deep life. I called it the Deep Life Stack. Since then, I have been gathering extensive feedback from you, my listeners and viewers. I have also been extensively experimenting with this new construction in my own life, and I have a major revision to what we can call the Deep Life Stack 2.0, my new and improved evidence-based approach for how to cultivate a deep life, what you can use as your driving force to get away from a world lost in digital distractions and shallows. So here's the plan. Let me just quickly re-motivate. I'll start by quickly re-motivating why this approach of life changing is important. Second, I'll review what didn't work about the original Deep Life Stack, so what the feedback told me wasn't quite working. And then we'll get into the new Deep Life Stack 2.0. I'll give you your step-by-step instructions for how in a short period of time to make drastic changes to the depth experienced in your own day-to-day existence. All right, so that's our plan. Let's start by motivating this approach. Why do we look at screens too much? Well, as I've said before, it's often because you are trying to fill a hole. There is some sort of psychic pain that the screen is helping to cover over or obscure. So maybe when you're at home after work, there's something about your life you're unhappy about. You're saying, "I'm thirty now. I'm forty now. I feel like I'm-- I've lost direction. What's happening here? I don't, I don't like what I'm doing. I think I could be doing more, but I'm not. I, I feel out of shape. I feel unengaged." Or maybe some specifically hard, bad things happened to you, and you're having a hard time moving past that. Maybe you just have a, um, a really dark view or understanding of the world at the time. Screens can be a really good palliative in this case, right? It's filling in, "I don't wanna deal with that psychic pain of these uncomfortable thoughts, so I have a video game. I have this Instagram feed I'm going through. I'm just TikToking again and again and again," and there's, there's emotions happening. There's chemicals moving. It's a digital form of what a hundred years ago we would have dealt with with a lot of whiskey at a old-fashioned saloon. And then we're at work, there's something similar going on. I mean, knowledge work in particular, it was such a fast-moving field. Uh, it's such the Wild Wild West in terms of systems and processes that a lot of us just look up one day, and it's like we're the character in the Mike Judge movie Office Space, where we don't really know exactly what it is we do other than it involves a lot of screens and forms, and we're constantly moving around. And when that consultant says, "What would you say you really do here?" you don't really have a great answer. You strategize and synergize, jumping on calls in between your email calendar appointments for the doodle meetings. Just busyness, pseudo productivity, and we don't know what else to do, so we just engage in that. I don't know what else work is gonna be, so at least I'm active. And so we just find ourselves on screens all day at work. We're filling, in this case, the psychic pain from, "I don't even really know what my job is. I'm worried about that. I don't build something I can point to. I don't write something I can point to. So I just need to be really busy, and anytime I'm not busy, it's a problem," so screen, screen, screens. So solution is something deeper that gets at that psychic pain and gives us something to focus towards that is more motivating, something that will prevent us from being on email all day because it's already clear what it is you need to be doing, and you want to get after it, and jumping on another Zoom call is going to get in the way of it. So you can say with confidence, "No, this is what I'm doing. Judge me by my results." So at home, you're not zoning out on social media because there are more appealing and important things you are working on in your life and your quest to have depth and make a difference. And that would just be a waste, and it's not that interesting anymore to you. It's the psychological equivalent of in the world of health, where after having really bad eating habits and you change the way you eat and your exercise and your fitness, you look at an Oreo that might have before been impossibly appealing, and to, and then you look at it after that overhaul and say, "This seems weird. It's chemicals and sugary, and I have no interest in it." We want to get to the same place with your screens. So you want to cultivate a deeper life. And again, this is, this was a fundamental understanding for me is that it was difficult for me to be a technology critic without being able to offer to people What it is that they could do instead when they began to unplug themselves from the constant distraction. This took me a while to figure out, that you can't just go to people and say, "Being on email and your phone all day is a problem," because if you take that away, there's nothing else there to replace it. Full anxiety at work, what am I doing here? Full anxiety at home, I don't wanna confront these ideas. That I can't actually talk about things like the hyperactive hive mind and addictive attention engineering, the type of things I talk about in my New Yorker articles, that I talk about in my, my techno-criticism talks, the type of things I talk about in my interviews and magazines and on podcasts. It's hard to just talk about those things without giving people the positive alternative that they should pursue instead. That's where The Deep Life came out of, and that's what we're talking about today. So I invented, earlier in the year, what we call The Deep Life Stack, which was a step-by-step way to cultivate more depth in your life. And I think now that I've had some time to think about it, it has some problems. But let's start with what that original stack was. For those who are watching instead of just listening, I will draw a picture of one of the original stacks on my screen here. Again, for those who are not watching but just listening, everything I'm doing here is beautiful. Uh, I'm drawing layers. These are the layers of the stack. I'm putting five of them on top of each other. Now, there's a couple different small variations of the stack we talked about earlier in the year, but they're all basically more or less in this shape. All right, I'm now gonna write inside each of these layers. At the bottom, the first layer of the stack, the bottom layer, we had discipline. This was somewhat controversial, but this is when I argued you actually have to start by injecting some regular discipline into your life because it changes your self-identity as someone who can do hard things that are important even if you don't want to. Then we had values. Nothing like drawing on an iPad upright to get your best handwriting. Values was when you then next, moving up the stack from discipline, is where you got clear on what was important to you in your life. Then you went to service, fixing in your life how you could serve other people who are around you or important to you. From there then came organization. This is gonna be a long word for a small box. You had to get control over what's happening in your life, organize your obligations, organize your time if you were gonna have any hope of actually really aiming your energy in a good direction. And then finally you had vision, which is where you get to the fun stuff. This is where you build a vision for how to move your life towards something more remarkable. It is when you get to this final stack in the sequence that you do the type of stuff that we like to romanticize, like changing your job or moving to a, a farm somewhere in the country. There was a couple different variations of the stack, but they were all more or less something like this, and the idea was you moved up the stack in order, starting with discipline, moving all the way up to vision. All right, so what was, uh, [laughs] what was the problem with this? Um, it's missing some things. So here's what I discovered. It's missing, uh, explicit mentions of some things that are foundationally important I learned from you, my readers and listeners, for cultivating depth. Physical growth, intellectual growth. These were things that we used to talk about on this show when we had the old bucket-based paradigm for The Deep Life. Keeping your body healthy, keeping your mind engaged. This was not explicitly called out in this particular formulation. What about craft or learning to do things well? Th- this idea of how do you learn to take on something difficult, deliberately practice it, and get better at it? This is key to almost any direction for depth, but doesn't have its own place in this stack. Uh, there was also some pushback on a lack of ambition here, that when we get to vision, we were talking about overhauling parts of your life. But when people think about The Deep Life zoomed out, there's also this notion of some sort of larger scale legacy leaving type of initiative. That's at a scale that was too big for this. And finally, and this was, I thought, something I found when I was just experimenting with this stack, is there's two different related initiatives that are mixed together in this particular stack formulation. There's the initiative where you're getting your life together. Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate The Deep Life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on this show. All right, let's get back to it. Okay, if you don't have your life together and are in control of things, it's hard to do anything values driven or interesting. And then there's the initiative of trying to do really cool things that mark a life as deep. In this stack, they're mixed together. Discipline, that's sort of getting your life together. Values is part of cultivating a vision of the depth. Organization is about getting your life together. Vision is more about how to cultivate depth. And, and so the feedback I was getting from my own experimentation is these are maybe two separate endeavors. Get your crap together. Okay, I'm done with that. Now we'll turn our attention to how do we a- aim this somewhere depth. So these were all things that came up when I was looking at the original Deep Life Stack. So we're gonna try to fix that with our new version 2.0. Maybe I'll even type that. Let's see here. I'm gonna actually write on the screen here. Oh my. Jesse, I have no idea how Notability works. Oh, I see. You know what I've been thrown by? By the way, this is not interesting, but I switched my note-taking software.

Speaker 11:47 To what?

Cal Newport 11:49 GoodNotes I think it's called.

Speaker 11:51 You switched it off of...

Cal Newport 11:53 Notability I was using to teach my lectures, and then it developed some bug where when it was projecting on the screen and I was typing into it, it would, uh, continually jump up and down where it was on the screen. So I liked the program, but it had this weird bug in projection, so I had to switch Huh. All right, here we go. I'm typing on the screen the Deep Lipes... Deep Life Stacy. The Deep Life Stack version 2.0. All right, so what are we gonna do here to fix all of those mista- not mistakes, but we'll call them shortcomings that we were missing in the prior stack? And let me, uh, highlight this to show you how good I am. Look at that. Woo. I highlighted the word the Deep Life Stack.

Speaker 12:31 It looks good.

Cal Newport 12:32 Yeah, doesn't it look good? It's a professional operation here. All right, so how are we gonna update the Deep Life Stack, our systematic plan for escaping the shallows? To take in mind those flaws we had with the original version, I'm gonna break it into two stages. So in the, the first stage, call it stage one, this... Oh, man, that's not how you spell stage. Stage one is where you learn to become a capable human being. We're gonna make this its own stage. So we're gonna say, "Become a capable human being." And we're gonna isolate this. Let's do this stage, do everything involved in this stage first before we move on to what we'll call stage two, surprisingly enough, which is then cultivate depth. So we're not gonna mix these together anymore. Let's get our act together. Let's become a capable human being, or what Jocko Willink called in his book, The Code, imminently qualified human. I like that. Jocko talks about becoming an imminently qualified human. Well, we're gonna talk about becoming an imminently capable human being. This is gonna have its own collection of four stack layers. Once you're done with that, stage two, four more stack layers, cultivate depth on top of that foundation. All right? So this is the first place we're changing things. All right, so let's actually draw our four stacks, our four stack layers over here for becoming a more capable human being. So we're gonna have four here and then four for cultivating depth. You do stage one first, then you do stage two. All right. So we're gonna start as before with discipline, but now, again, this is coming from, uh, feedback, we are going to specify the three places where we're gonna pursue discipline as the foundational layer of the Deep Life Stack, and that's gonna be body, mind, heart. So as before, what does it mean, discipline? We're gonna have you select some keystone habits, habits you return to every single day, habits that you track whether or not you actually accomplish them. They should not be trivial, but they should also be tractable. Unlike before, I'm gonna tell you specifically what the three categories are. You should have three habits, and they should follow these three categories. Body, you need a fitness habit, something about making your body more healthy. This could be exercise. This could be involving food and drink. The second category is mind. This is gonna be making your mind sharper. You have an instrument here, but you have to train it how to think, so we need to lay down a foundational habit probably built around reading is gonna be our best bet here, where this becomes a regular part of your life that you're tracking. And then heart, by this I mean other people. There's something you're doing on a regular basis, and it could just be calling or texting or emailing a different friend or family member every single day. It could be checking in with, you know, your partner or your kids every day and having a conversation with them. Body, mind, heart, keystone habit for each. As we iterate through this stack, you can make those challenges harder and harder. So if you're just getting started with this, your body habit might be pretty simple. It's this 20-minute walk that you do to the, a coffee store and back each morning followed by 20 push-ups. It might be simple, but you're doing it every day. As we iterate over time, that's gonna get more and more potentially, uh, aggressive in its ambition. It could eventually end up, uh, a really rigorous workout routine, for example. All right, we go from here now straight up to control. This is what we used to call organization. Same idea. Control your time. Control your obligations. Want to do this right away. Lay down this foundation of discipline. I'm practicing doing things that are important to me that aren't urgent. The very next thing you do, let's get control of our obligations. Let's get control of our time. This is where you're gonna deploy things like my multiscale planning methodology. It's where you're gonna, uh, deploy things such as full capture, David Allen style full capture. Every obligation is written down in a trusted system, not just in your head. You're time-block planning your days. Those are based on weekly plans, which are based on quarterly plans. No open loops, nothing you're just keeping track of in your head. You have a plan for your time. You have your obligations captured. You have a plan for executing the obligations that need to be done. As a big part about becoming a capable human, I only have so much energy and time to deploy each day. I want to do so with intention. So I'm moving this right up front in the Deep Life Stack. Right after you got a taste of discipline, you're getting your crap together. On top of this, I'm then gonna put craft, just learning how to do something really well. This, again, is gonna be at the core of almost any reasonable vision of the deep life is gonna be quality. You learning how to do something really well and/or you learning how to really appreciate someone else doing something really well, but an embrace of craftsmanship and quality. So craft is where you're gonna begin practicing two things. One, getting better. And you could jump right in with a work-related skill here as you go through this stack. Let me choose a skill that I am going to deliberately and systematically improve on. But maybe it's gonna be a hobby You know, I think some of the, the more, uh, bro-oriented, really big podcasters that are out there have gotten some flack because they all seem to be picking up the same sort of seemingly anachronistic or arbitrary hobbies, such as bow hunting. Why is Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink and, uh, all these people bow hunting, and it seems so random. But you know what? There's a logic behind that, which is learning to do something really well teaches you how... what it takes to do things really well. You can then translate that to other things that come up that are more important. In other words, learning, uh, even if it's learning how to play guitar or shoot an arrow, but systematically building up that skill gives you the type of muscles you need mentally speaking to say, "Okay, now when there's something else I wanna learn to help transform my career, there's something else I wanna learn to make a big impact over here," you know what that feels like and what that takes. So when it comes to this craft stack, uh, when you first get there, you're gonna learn a skill. It could be a hobby, it could be professional. I also want you to appreciate other people who do skilled work because that helps motivate you to get better. I write about this a lot in my book coming out in March, Slow Productivity. This idea of being exposed to people doing really good work makes you wanna do really good work. So as part of your first time through this craft layer, I am gonna recommend that you build up an appreciation of some sort of craft. So I'll put two arrows here. Get better, and then we'll say appreciate better. All right. So then our final building block we're gonna put for the first stage, simplification. Final step to get ready to cultivate depth, we gotta clear out the dead weight. So this is where you go through, now that you have some discipline, you're in control of your time, you have an appreciation for, and trust in craft as the way forward, now you can say, "Let's start slashing some of these obligations. Let's, uh, let's change the way, you know, what we're doing at work, and I'm gonna put all my chips onto this over here and no longer get involved in this, or I'm gonna simplify or shift laterally to something that's more focused or is more accountable." It is also critically where you can do your first attempt to simplify your technological life. It's the first time you can step back and say, "Okay, I'm starting to get my feet under me. Why am I on TikTok all the time? Why am I on Instagram? What tools do I really need here? Maybe I should do some digital minimalism, work backwards from what's important to me, use those to select value." So you can start simplifying out your habits. Like, the single most important techno simplification small step you could take at this step would be let's do phone foyer method. When I'm at home, the phone's plugged in. If I need to look something up, I can go to the phone and look at it. It's not with me when I'm in front of the TV. It's not with me when I'm trying to read. It's not with me at the table when I'm trying to eat dinner. I do not have the option of just looking at that. So you can begin to simplify these parts of your life as well. All of this sets the stage for stage two, which is now let's start cultivating depth on top of this foundation. So we're gonna have four boxes over here as well. This is where the fun stuff happens. This is where the stuff that catches people at, people's attention happens. You do the first stage, people are gonna say, "Yeah, you got your act together. Yeah, they got their act together." Stage two is where people say, "Wow, this person is interesting." All right, so I'm gonna put as the... Let me draw arrows, by the way, so we see the order here. Beautifully drawn arrows. Bob Ross does happy trees. I do crappy arrows. All right, so first, first, uh, stack layer over here in stage two, now we get to the values. You figure out your code, what you're all about. You figure out the rituals that connect you on a regular basis to these things you care about. This is where, uh, if you're religious or interested in being religious, is you really lean into that. It's where you really recognize that faith traditions actually depend on action for you to gain insight. You can't just figure out in advance, is this religion right? You do the religion and say, "How does it make me feel?" All that happens here. Now, this feels really late, but again, I, I, I'm convinced that when you come to these higher order decisions in your life from a foundation of capability, it's more meaningful and it's more effective. So I, I, I push this later. People often say, "Let's just start with this," but if you, if you have no foundation in a code or rituals or a faith-based tradition, it's hard to start there. You're throwing darts at a board. You don't even know what you're capable of or, or, or have the, the capacity to follow in a disciplined way what's required to actually gain insight. So let's become capable first. Now we're getting to the bigger stuff. So values now comes next. This is followed by service. You need to be a leader. You need to serve other people. Community, without it, you're nothing. Now you're ready to actually be a leader. Before, you weren't capable enough. You could kinda be a leader, but you're gonna drop the ball, and people weren't, you weren't gonna have a big effect on people. You weren't gonna move the needle. Now you're an exceptionally capable person. Let's put that to work. Serve other people. Non-trivial sacrifice on behalf of other people that are important to you, family, friends, community, larger, uh, civic society at large. You can move up these layers as far as you want. Make this a key one thing, uh, uh, a tier one thing now that you're starting to work at in your life. Then we get transformation. The crazy thing is, of all of these stacks, this is what the one place most people think when they think about cultivating a deeper life is this one stack. Transformation's where you make the big values-based changes. You get a clear vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like, and you begin making concrete changes to move you towards this lifestyle. Preferably, there's some element of remarkability in these visions. It's where you change your job. It's where you move to the countryside. It's where you become the surf instructor in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It's where the big, kind of cool stuff happens. But look at how many layers, how many layers we had to go through. I even have a laser pointer I can show you, right? Woo. All the way up, all the way up before we move to Vancouver Island, before we, we quit our job. Because you're not ready for that yet. When you're not capable, if you try to make a big change, God knows what's gonna happen. And if you are capable, but you're not, have a, a sense of your values, if you're not sacrificing on behalf of other people, filling that deeply social leadership itch that all humans have, then your transformation's gonna be shallow. It's gonna be selfish. It's not until this point that you're finally ready for that. And then we can add the final thing, which is legacy, and that's where you begin thinking about, what's the impact I wanna leave on the world even after I'm gone? The sort of bigger picture orienting mission for your life. This is so big, I would say you could probably go all the way through this stack and stop at transformation the first time through. And you might go through this stack a few times, iterating, tweaking, and improving each of these layers before you really get into legacy. You don't have to get there right away. In fact, you probably aren't ready to get there right away, because you haven't done all this other cool stuff yet. So how do all these pieces come together? Well, you actually move through this stack and give yourself one to three weeks for each of these layers to get that part of your life going and making sure it's going well, and you move your way through the stack. You could end at transformation if you want at first. Legacy can come later. Then live with this for six months to a year, then come back and iterate. All right, let's go back through the stack. How are things going with discipline? I wanna up-charge this. I want more aggressive physical discipline. I wanna do better with my relationships. What's going with control? Well, it was going well, but I left finances out of there. I wanna fix that up. So you iterate six months to a year. You iterate through, go through each layer, give it time to improve what's happening there. You iterate every six to 12 months and improve on each of these layers again and again. Each time you make it through to transformation, maybe you're thinking about a different thing you wanna transform in your life. After you've done this five years in a row, you may have had several major transformations. You've also tightened up all these other things, and now your life is really humming. And now the idea that you're just gonna go to a cubicle and check email all day and then be on TikTok all evening might seem laughable. And maybe you're ready to even really jump into this legacy stack at this point and start to have some really exciting long-term visions about what you're gonna leave in the world. So this is the Deep Life Stack 2.0. Stage one, become a more capable human. Stage two, cultivate depth. Then iterate and repeat, iterate and repeat. As mentioned, it seems very far away at first from the, the proximate concerns of, "I'm distracted by my screens," but if you don't have a shining destination to aim towards that's more interesting than the glow coming off those pieces of glass, those pieces of glass are gonna win. And so we have to talk about our lives if we're gonna talk about our technology. So this is Deep Life Stack version 2.0. Let me know how it goes with you. You can submit a question or case study or question at thedeeplife.com/listen, or you can send us, uh, an email at jesse@calnewport.com if you wanna tell us about it. I'm working with this new version of the stack right now in my life. I wanna hear about how it goes with you as well. Let's all get deeper together. We gotta get, like, a graphic artist, Jesse. That's the... [laughs]

Speaker 27:46 You got it down, though. It's from your professor stuff.

Cal Newport 27:49 I do write... I use a tablet to teach.

Speaker 27:51 Yeah.

Cal Newport 27:52 Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, you know, I like... This is geeky, but it's a control, control layer of the stack. I really like writing on my Remarkable much more than on an iPad.

Speaker 28:04 Mm.

Cal Newport 28:04 'Cause Remarkable was... One of the big things they engineered was friction. So you get friction. iPad's very slippery. There is a way, I think, to project your Remarkable onto a screen. But I like having colors and-

Speaker 28:19 Yeah

Cal Newport 28:19 ... the other types of things, but anyway.

Speaker 28:20 That laser pointer was cool.

Cal Newport 28:22 Oh, the, the other note-taking program I'm using now, the laser pointer leaves a trail for a couple seconds. It's like if you circle something, it, like, stays circled for a couple seconds, and then it, it kinda fades out. Future is now, Jesse. [laughs] Officially arrived. All right, so we got a bunch of questions, calls, and case studies about all this type of deep life, deep work type issues. Uh, before we get there, though, let us hear from a couple sponsors that makes this show possible. [whooshing sound] Wanna start with our friends at Rhone. In particular, I wanna talk about their Commuter collection, the most comfortable, breathable, and flexible set of products known to man. Rhone helps you get ready for any occasion with this collection. It has the world's most comfortable pants, dress shirts, quarter zips, and polos, so you never have to worry about having the right thing to wear. It is four-way stretch fabric, it is breathable and flexible. This means it's gonna take you everywhere from giving a talk at the boardroom to playing golf or, in my case, lecturing. I really love the breathable, flexible fabric for lecturing, where I'm all over the classroom and I'm moving all the time, and I, um, it's hot, and, uh, I'm in an old building, and I want that really light, flexible fabric. I really love that. Um, also, if you're traveling, it has wrinkle release technology. Wrinkles disappear as you stretch and wear the product. So I like bringing the Commuter collection with me if I'm going on the road, because it's gonna look fine coming out of my briefca- or my suitcase. I put it on, it's not gonna get real wrinkly. Uh, it's also odor-free 'cause of their Gold Fusion anti-odor technology. You have a long day, you're at a conference all day, put on your Commuter collection. Uh, look, guys, if you don't wanna think a lot about your wardrobe, and you have one of our standard type of knowledge worker jobs, it's an easy way to solve your problem. Just buy a bunch of Rhone Commuter collection clothes. It has what you need. The Commuter collection can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. Head to rhone.com/cal and use the promo code CAL To save 20% off your entire order, so that's 20% off your entire order when you head to rhone.com/cal and use that code Cal to save 20%. It's time to find your corner office comfort. Also wanna talk about our friends at Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth's mission is to help you find sanctuary in your daily life. Their luxury bedding and loungewear transforms your life by offering the softest, most luxurious and responsibly sourced products in the world. Here's the thing, I use Cozy Earth sheets. I love Cozy Earth sheets. I've talked about this on the show. We got a free pair when we were considering, uh, taking on Cozy Earth as a sponsor, and we liked them so much that my wife and I went and bought several other pairs so that no matter which pair was being... or set, I guess not a pair, set, whatever set of sheets was being washed, we would always have Cozy Earth sheets on the bed because we hated the weeks when they weren't on the bed. That's how much we, we, uh, we love our Cozy Earth sheets. They're made from viscose, which comes from bamboo. They're temperature regulating. They feel cool. They only get softer with every wash. Uh, I really love it. My wife even bought Cozy Earth. You can get, like, shorts and loungewear so you can have the feel of those really comfortable sheets when you're just sitting around and not even in bed. So they got this 100%, uh, viscose bamboo fabric, which feels fantastic. It regulates temperature, easy to wash in the machine, durable. Uh, and they pride themselves, Cozy Earth prides themselves in ethical production of all their products. And here's the thing, all Cozy Earth products can be returned or exchanged within 100 days, and they include a additional 10-year warranty against defects. So you can try these, uh, with no questions asked. They have also been included in Oprah's Favorite Things five years in a row. Jesse, you think we should start a Cal's Favorite Things?

Speaker 32:17 Yeah.

Cal Newport 32:18 I think it'd be as popular as Oprah's.

Speaker 32:19 Yeah.

Cal Newport 32:20 Problem is I'm so, like, curmudgeonly and don't really buy a lot of stuff. So it'd be, like, a list of 25 books and, like, Cozy Earth sheets and a pen. Oh, and the seltzer water you, you, you get us for the studio.

Speaker 32:33 And the Remarkable.

Cal Newport 32:34 The Remarkable, and the cherry flavored Poland Spring seltzer water. Jesse keeps our fridge stocked with a very particular type of seltzer water, so that would be... I don't think it'd be as popular as Oprah's. Oh, man. Anyways, um, so here's my gift for you- oof ... this holiday season. If you go to cozyearth.com and enter the code Cal, you can now save up to 40%. You absolutely wanna do that. These are premium products, so 40% off makes a big difference. Uh, that's cozyearth.com with the code Cal. Cozy, C-O-Z-Y, earth.com. Use that promo code Cal. [laughs] The world's boringest most favorite things. It's like, I like this type of seltzer water. This pen over here is pretty neat. I got these, uh, shoelace cap. So if you have a hard time getting your shoelace through the hole on your shoes, use this shoelace cap.

Speaker 33:34 They're easy to put on.

Cal Newport 33:35 Yeah. And also Cozy Earth sheets. That would be my favorite things. All right, let's... enough of that. Let's do some questions. Who do we have

Cal Newport 33:43 first?

Speaker 33:44 All right, first question is from Alan. I'm always excited to see how you guys, how you answer these questions, 'cause I'm always sure, but this one I'm excited about.

Cal Newport 33:51 Keep it interesting.

Speaker 33:53 "It seems like prioritizing deep work means that to-do lists can only increase as time passes because deep work can never be completed faster than shallow work. If you agree that this is true, how should we respond to this reality?"

Cal Newport 34:07 I think we have a couple questions like this this week, that when we're thinking about deep work as part of the, our vision of a deep life, it comes to mean some pretty weird things for people. It becomes this, um, amorphous, extra, demanding, almost, like, selfish commitment that's in addition to all of your other normal work. It comes through that way. So you hear a question like this, it's like, "Well, if I'm doing deep work, uh, then that's taking away time for all these shallow tasks people need me to do, that those will pile up." Here's the thing about deep work. It's not an extra thing you add on your plate. It is an approach to how you execute the things that are already on your plate. If you have a non-entry level job in knowledge work, there are some things that are cognitively demanding, like writing a report or analyzing data or coming up with a new marketing campaign. There's some things you do that are not so cognitively demanding. It's, you know, answering emails or filling out forms. Uh, what's the right way to do the cognitively demanding stuff? The deep work hypothesis says, uh, you should give it your full attention. So when you're working on something cognitively demanding, give it your full attention and you'll be able to do it faster and better than if you instead interleave your cognitively demanding task with a shallower task. If you keep going back and forth, it slows everything down. So to say I, uh, I'm committed to deep work, it doesn't mean I am now adding to my job these extra activities I call deep work. It just says I'm gonna be much more aware of how I tackle my work. I'll do the shallow stuff all together, deep work all together. It'll all take less time. So your, your to-do list will get smaller if you context shift left- less and better segregate different types of cognitive demands, uh, in your daily schedule. All right? So deep work is not some extra thing you're adding to your normal life. It's a way of taking what you're already doing in your working life and doing it more efficiently and doing it better. Man, the deep, deep work really becomes a boogeyman for people sometimes.

Speaker 36:05 Yeah.

Cal Newport 36:06 It's like, you know, "I'd love to do deep work, but I have to feed my children," or something. You know? [laughs] Like, people are like, "Uh, it's this thing." I think people see it as, like, some ritual where you put on a hood and, like, your kids are crying hungry at home because you're, you're around the fire in the woods with your hood, like, chanting, uh- Making chants about whatever, Hemingway's writing strategies. I mean, it's weird. It, it, it represents for a lot of people a lot of stuff that I think is kind of boring. I mean, it's... Don't switch your attention back and forth when working on the hard stuff. You'll do it faster and it'll be better.

Speaker 36:39 Yeah.

Cal Newport 36:39 It's a better way to do the hard stuff than to switch it back and forth. All right. Well, we got... Let's do... I think the next question's similar, so let's, let's handle that one.

Speaker 36:46 Yep. Next question's from Eric: I want to ascend to a management position in order to have

Speaker 36:51 more complex challenges and responsibilities. I've been told that I need to work on my soft skills. Are deep work principles potentially harmful to collaborate the soft skills needed to get to the next level, and that they encourage a mon- monk-like individualistic approach to work?

Cal Newport 37:07 Well, as, as I point out clearly in the book Deep Work, I say, okay, principle one of deep work, uh, when you're working, you now have to make a, a long pilgrimage to a monastery or a monastic-like location. It needs to be not unlike Luke Skywalker, that island he goes to in whatever that Star Wars movie is, where they filmed it on Skellig Island in Ireland. So you're on some deserted island where you need to go, and you need to be wearing a robe. And you need to be there minimum, and I just wanna be realistic here, minimum 135 days. And during that time, you may not speak or communicate with the outside world. You can drink warm water and bread crust as all of your attention is focused on just summoning, summoning from the spiritual depths the Excel spreadsheet that you're trying to write. So yes, I mean, if you're gonna do deep work, we're talking about hundreds of days living on Skellig Island eating only bread crust because that's what the principles demand. Now, clearly I'm being, uh, very [laughs] very, very sarcastic because, again, deep work is about how do you handle cognitively demanding tasks. When working on those tasks, give them your full focus. Don't context switch back and forth. Now, I think this is actually relevant here because there's a flip side to it, that if you're giving work, let me categorize my work into different types of cognitive categories so I can tackle work, each type of work with the right type of environment or approach, it goes the other way as well. So the flip side of, okay, when I'm working on this complicated Excel spreadsheet, I'm just gonna focus just on that without context switching. The flip side is, okay, but then when it comes time to do, uh, talk to people in the office, let me give that my full attention and just focus on the soft skills and doing that really well. Let me consolidate all of the sort of walking around and talking to people and planning so that I'm not doing that in a, a, a harried way in between other hard things, or I'm just trying to clear my inbox. I can actually give the attention necessary to come sit down with people and look them in their eye. So when you give each type of task its own time, and therefore you can treat each type of task in the way that it best needs to be treated, you do everything better. So not just deep work stuff gets done better, but the soft skill stuff can get done better as well. And the logistical stuff, it's less mistakes and it goes faster. Okay, this is the time I'm doing logistical stuff. Now that's all I'm doing. I'm in that context, and I can, I can go quicker and I can build some systems and, and I can realize I don't need to do this. I mean, everything is better when it's done in its own context and not all mixed together. And that's really what's being pushed for in deep work, is the cognitively demanding stuff needs to be isolated from the other stuff, and you need to do that because it's the stuff that ultimately is gonna matter in your career more to almost anything else, because if you're not producing something valuable, then where is your value for the organization? So have a equivalent to the deep work mindset for your soft skills is what I would ultimately advise here. I actually talked to someone I know, let me be very specific here, who did this recently, this exact situation, uh, Eric. I forgot, I forgot the name of the person who asked the question. Eric, uh, someone I know was telling me about this the other day, where they got this specific feedback. They're very good at the skills they, the cognitively demanding skills they do. They work... Their soft skills were lacking. You gotta, you gotta talk m- you gotta be, uh, better connected to the people in the office, 30-man office. So he got systematic about it, and I don't remember all the details, but I believe he was doing something like, um, he was working remotely most days, and now he's like, "Actually, I'm gonna come into the office three days a week. And every time I come into the office, these people, this is a checklist." And this is the way I would handle it too. I'm very introverted. "I'm gonna talk to each of these three people. I'm gonna have a conversation with them." And yeah, it's a checklist. Uh, I'm coming into the office these days, and during this time I'm gonna go talk to people. But it's day after day, week after week, those soft skills are getting better. Those relationships are getting better. So by giving each type of task its own isolated context where you can tackle that task with exactly what that task needs to be done well, you can get better at all the different parts of your job. So not just your deep work gets better, but your soft skills get better, your logistical work gets done faster, you find more efficiencies. So no, deep work will not keep you from your soft skills. Treat it with the same respect that you treat the, the cognitively demanding work, uh, and I think you'll do better. I could probably use some soft skills help. Professors are not known for soft skills, 'cause we have no feedback function.

Speaker 41:35 Well, you talk to the students all the time.

Cal Newport 41:37 That's true, but we don't have to be good at that. I mean, here, we don't have a feedback function, right? So if you're in like a normal job and acted in the way, let's say, 50% of professors act in a faculty meeting, the boss would be like, "My God, you're fired."

Speaker 41:51 [laughs]

Cal Newport 41:52 "This is, this is a crazy way to b- behave as, like, a grown adult." But you have tenure, you're a professor, there's no feedback function, right? You, you, you're not being hired, so there's no one to fire you, so people just get weirder and weirder.

Speaker 42:03 [laughs]

Cal Newport 42:05 Professors get strange. Let's put it that way. Not all of them. I think I'm a pretty normal guy, but we get strange, let's be honest. All right, let's keep rolling here.

Speaker 42:13 All right, next question's from Josh: How do

Speaker 42:16 I deal with having to stop working on something that is still in progress and not a clean checkpoint, or not at a clean checkpoint? In my job, I work on longer term, less well-defined, larger tasks, which means that on many days I find at the end of the day when I'm still very much in the middle of solving a particular problem, I'm stuck and don't know what to do

Cal Newport 42:36 Josh, I feel your pain on this because I was in that same spot earlier in my career. The same spot where I found myself with essentially endless cognitively demanding work to do that had no clean shutdown points and the evenings were difficult. The particular spot where this happened for me, and I remember this clearly, is when I was working on my doctoral dissertation at MIT. That's-- It's a very large sort of mathematical project, and I made the, uh, in retrospect maybe not so smart decision that when it came to my doctoral dissertation, I was just gonna do all new work. So typically in computer science, if you're a doctoral student, you're publishing a lot of papers, and I was, and when your dissertation comes around, you're taking, you know, these five papers in which I explored this theme, I'm gonna build my thesis around it. I didn't do that. I said, "I already wrote those papers. I wanna do something new." So my doctoral dissertation was all new mathematics I was doing from scratch because I thought it would be boring just to go back and stitch together papers I already did. So it was, uh, happening again and again. I would get to the end of the day, I'd be in the middle of a proof. Like, the big thing for me is, "Ah, I'm not getting this proof to work." Really hard to shut down there, 'cause imagine the train of thought. I don't have this proof working. What if I never get this proof to work? If this proof doesn't work, this whole approach for this chapter, my thesis will fall apart. If I don't have that chapter, I'm not gonna be able to submit this thesis. I'm not gonna get my degree. You could see how the do right down the line. So I was like, "Man, I need some way of quieting my brain when I'm ready to stop working for the day." There was n-- Very rarely would I finish a nice proof at five o'clock. That is when I invented my shutdown ritual. The shutdown ritual we talk about all the time on this show, the shutdown ritual that is encoded into my time block planner, uh, the shutdown ritual that I talked about in my book, Deep Work. I invented it for exactly this issue. So there's two aspects to a shutdown ritual. One, I think is the more common thing we talk about, and it's gonna be less relevant for you, Josh, but that's the thing where you just close open loops. This is, uh, was there stuff that came up today that I need to write down or put on my calendar? Is there like an urgent email I need to answer? It's the making sure there's not something that you're just keeping track of only in your mind. You get that all into a system. It's where you check on your plan for the next day, like, "Okay, everything is good. I'm not missing something." But the other aspect of my shutdown ritual, which was very big for me then, but I don't talk about as much now, was reflecting on the work in progress, putting a cap on it for the day. Okay, here's where I am. Here's where I'm stuck. Here is two things I'm gonna try tomorrow that might get me unstuck. Doing that work, which could take anywhere between ten to twenty minutes, and when I shut down the work, it's not that I had solved it, but I had built from scratch a hasty checkpoint. I-- This isn't working, but let me write down... I remember this so clearly, writing down, "Here's why this is not working. You know, the summation has a, a Zeno's paradox issue. Here are two things I might look at tomorrow. Go read the, the proof from such and such paper. They did something similar. Maybe there's something there that could help me or see if there's, you know, talk to so-and-so about if there's like a simple, uh, concentration bound I could put here instead." Like you write down a couple things you could do. You can't do them right now. They'll take an hour or so, but you're writing down, "This is what I'm gonna do next." That's all you need to get a clean checkpoint, and your brain says, "Okay, we know where we are. We have a plan. We'll get back to that plan tomorrow. It's just as good starting that plan in the morning as it is doing it right now," and it will release that ongoing work. In fact, it's not even a bad thing to do this. It's-- I mean, it's not, "Okay, I'm dealing with a bad situation. It's a bad situation that I'm not at a clean checkpoint, and I have to invent this hasty checkpoint. I wish it didn't have to happen, but it did." That's actually not the situation. It's beneficial to have these hastily created checkpoints. A lot of writers do this. We, we joked about Hemingway earlier, but, but this is something that Hemingway himself actually did, is he liked to be in the middle of... He was in a roll writing, kind of in the middle of a paragraph, even in the middle of a sentence, and shut off, so that the next day he would be picking up in the middle of something where there was some momentum that was already going. He could just read up to that point and get going. Much easier place to start than at the start of a new chapter. So if anything, what you're gonna get by stopping in the middle of ongoing work is a, uh, fresh legs or fresh arm the next morning, so you're gonna be able to continue working on that with a fresh brain instead of trying to drag it through and perhaps some unconscious processing. You've clarified the problem, what you're gonna work on. You're not thinking about it because you have a clear shutdown routine, but your brain might in the background, and you get there the next morning, you're like, "Man, actually, yeah, this works pretty well." So see this as a feature, not a bug. Do a clean shutdown routine every day. Work is done when the shutdown routine has been completed. If your mind bothers you, say, "I'm not going to get into your rumination. We're not gonna think about work because we did the routine. I'll see you in the morning." That routine should close open loops, but also create temporary checkpoints where needed. Here's where I'm stuck. Here's what I'm gonna work on the next day. Let your mind take a breather. You'll hit the ground running the next day. Josh, it saved me so much anxiety that it turned off, made the rest of my ill-fated decision to write a dissertation from scratch a little bit less onerous. I was also writing a book at this time. Don't get me started. The shutdown ritual really helped. So add that component to it, Josh, and I think you'll find it's going to, uh, it's gonna make a big difference. All right, let's see. We have some calls, right? Yeah. All right, I'm excited about calls. Uh, here we go.

Speaker 48:09 Hey, Cal. An issue that I often have during periods

Speaker 48:12 of deep work or attempted deep work is, um, dealing with intrusive thoughts about, you know, other things that I could be doing with my time. So I might be reading an academic paper and, you know, these thoughts keep popping in my head like, oh, I, I should be working out, or I, I should be practicing piano, and it just feels that I'm always, um, you know, thinking about the next task or something else that I should be doing. So I don't know if part of the problem is that I haven't You know, properly prioritize my activities during the day, but, um, you know, it, I would describe it almost as FOMO for all my, uh, given, given tasks and activities in a day. So just curious what, you know, your thoughts are and, um, you know, if this is something that's common for people trying to engage in deep work. Thank you.

Cal Newport 48:59 I'm glad you bring, you bring this up because I, I, I think it's a common issue that we don't talk about enough. We talk about here's the mechanisms you use to plan your day, but we don't necessarily talk about, well, how you figure out the plan for your day. That's almost always a given, right? Like, yeah, you know what to do. It's just a matter of sort of marshaling your activity better. It's actually really hard, especially when you're new to it, especially if you're a student or you're new to the working world. It's an endless array of things that you're trying to pull from, both in work and both in life outside of your work. And, and this idea of productivity FOMO, if I can coin a term, is a real one. So there's two different parts to my answer here. One is just clarity, right? So I have a time block plan for my day. That gives you clarity. You thought about the plan, you made the plan. Now your mind says, "It's not my job to do any more planning. My job for the rest of the day is to execute this plan." So clarity really helps. It's why I'm a big proponent of time block planners. It's why I have college students do this, where they, they schedule out all the schoolwork they're gonna do on a regular basis. I don't want you planning any more than you have to. Ten minutes in the morning should be enough. That's fine. Here's my plan, and then all you're focusing on is following the plan the best you can, fixing it if you need to. So when you're writing the paper, you're writing or reading the paper, like in your example, you're doing so because that's what the current block says on your schedule. Doesn't say workout. Workout is later or it's not on this day. Now, if you couple time block planning with weekly planning, and if you couple the weekly planning with quarterly or semester planning, then you're gonna get even more confidence in your clarity because you're looking at multiple timescales. Because your weekly plan is where you figured out, "Here's when I'm gonna work out this week," so that when you get to Tuesday and it's Tuesday at three thirty and you're writing your paper, there's no reason for you to say, "Should I be working out right now?" Because you already know you're working out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and when you're doing it, that's a part of your weekly plan. And when you have the bigger picture FOMO, like, "Should I be, uh, working on a different research topic? Why am I even reading these papers?" Your quarterly plan kicks in and says, "No, that's what I'm doing this season. We're, we're, we're trying to learn this area of machine learning and see if we can write a paper, and we'll check in at the end of the season." So clarity at multiple scales gives you confidence in the moment of, "The thing I'm doing is as reasonable a thing as, as there is to do. I don't need to be thinking about it again right now." The second thing I wanna throw in here is grace. Grace for yourself. You say, "Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm building a reasonable plan. I wanna execute it. Maybe it's the best, maybe it's not. Sometimes it'll be better than others. Sometimes it's a dead end. It's okay. I don't have to be a scheduling genius. I'm not, you know, pushing ten in an air traffic control center somewhere where if I make a mistake, a seven forty-seven's gonna crash into the Golden Gate Bridge." You're building a schedule for a college student. You're building one week's schedule for a forty-year career you're gonna have in the world of work. So you, you do your best with multi-scale planning. Some, some days are gonna go better than others, some plans will work better than others. You'll get better at it through experience, and just give yourself some grace. The binary flip here that matters is reactive, proactive. Disorganized, intentional. That's the binary flip you should be proud of. I'm marshaling my energy. I'm not letting it dissipate randomly or in other people's agendas. I have a plan at different scales. I do my best to execute it, sometimes better than others. The plans will get better as I go along, and now I've done my shutdown routine, uh, and I'm gonna have a margarita, get out of my face. You know, you just can relax a little bit about it. So clarity plus grace, and just trust over time you'll, you'll be fine. You'll g- you'll do better at this. Just by having a plan at all, you're doing much better than ninety-eight percent of the other people around you. You're gonna get that, uh, cumulative... It, it's like having, you know, aggregate compounding interest over time. That advantage is gonna build and build and build. Twenty years into your career, you're just gonna have control over everything, where other people are still bouncing around frenetically from thing to thing and mad at everyone, everything's not fair. You're just gonna be like, "I control my life," you know? You're gonna have compounding interest of that intentional aim of your energy, even if it's not always super accurate, is better than random dissipation. So it's a good question. I'm glad you asked it. Clarity plus grace, you'll be fine. All right, we have another call?

Speaker 53:23 We have another call.

Cal Newport 53:24 Two call show.

Speaker 53:25 Yep, two calls. Here we go.

Speaker 53:28 Hi Cal,

Speaker 53:29 I'm Brett. I'm an adjunct instructor at a private university in the southeastern United States and a longtime acolyte of your approach to productivity. I'm hoping you can answer this question with the speed of Hermes. You've mentioned the working memory.txt file you use for impromptu ideas while concentrating on other work. The question: Do you clear out everything in this file every day and start new the next day, or is the file a semi-permanent collection of those ideas?

Cal Newport 53:57 Uh, good question. Also good Greek reference. Jesse, I don't know if our new listeners know about this.

Speaker 54:03 No.

Cal Newport 54:03 I mean, that's, this is like a deep pull back when I used to do the call-in show once a week. Um, I don't know how to describe it other than the callers, back when we did a lot of calls, decided that the more superfluous references to Greek mythology, the better.

Speaker 54:18 [laughs]

Cal Newport 54:19 So this is like a pull from the past. I, I really do appreciate that. It makes no sense to people listening now, but that's okay. That's between us and the, uh, the old-timers. Also a really good question. Um, if I'm able to do a full shutdown, which is my goal almost every day, some days I don't get there, part of my shutdown routine's clearing my working memory.txt So I am a huge believer of the working text.t- working memory.txt file. Just have a blank, unformatted text file on your desktop that you add to things throughout your day. No matter what you're doing, it is where you offload stuff out of your brain temporarily because you can only store so many things. You're on a call, it's where you're taking notes. You're, you're going through your inbox, it's where you're writing the, the things over here, like the dates that you go to your calendar, and then you can see if those dates are free. You're creating a task list for a task block, you do it right there. You're, you're copying text that you're gonna paste into something else, you copy it into the working memory.txt. It's the most useful, most commonly used digital tool I, uh, in my life in terms of my professional life, and it's a, it's a blank text file. But yes, you should clear it down to empty. This is an extension of your brain. It is not a storage system. It's not a planning system. You should have a separate place to keep track of obligations, your priority obligation list. You should have a calendar for appointments. You should have planning documents for plans, planners, daily planners for daily plans. It's not, it's not part of your permanent storage, uh, systems. Think of it as like sand that's gonna get shaken fresh at the end of every day.

Speaker 55:47 And Monica can use that when she's in deep work sessions too, right?

Cal Newport 55:51 Yeah.

Speaker 55:51 Yeah.

Cal Newport 55:52 Yeah, so if you have thoughts during deep work sessions, like, "Oh, what about this? What about that?" Uh, it's a great use for it. Drop, drop, drop, drop, drop, and then once you're done with your deep work session and, and shutting it down, you can process, "Hey, what did I write down during the session?"

Speaker 56:03 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 56:04 Yeah. It's a, it's a fantastic tool. All right, let's, uh, let's do a case study. Haven't done one of these in a while. Well, we've been doing these more recently, is what I mean to say. We have done

Cal Newport 56:13 these more recently. A case study is where one of you, my listeners, sends in a story of how they've been using this advice in their specific details of their own life. This case study comes from Logan, and Logan says, "My wife and I moved from suburbs, the suburbs of the Denver metro area, to build a house on my parents' land in the foothills in a relatively rural environment. We did this to have a deeper life and focus on raising our children in a slow and outdoor environment. There's a lot of interesting deep life-related trade-offs that went into making that choice, but the actual interesting case study that to me relates to slow productivity. In order to reduce cost and be able to afford the house, uh, build without a mortgage, we reduced the contractor scope to stop at texture drywall with us doing, uh, painting, final electric, final plumbing, flooring, door install, cabinets, kitchen, all the trim ourselves. An avid listener of your show, I decided last minute to take a, a slow productivity approach. That is, for the month of April, I am taking two hours off of work every day and have drastically reduced my other hobbies and commitments. This has enabled me to get about four hours of construction done each day with my h- wife helping for two to three of that. Granted, we are only halfway through April as I write this, but I'm shocked and pleased at how much progress we have been able to make with this approach and how little exhaustion or burnout I have felt. Consider me a slow productivity convert. One thing at a time, no individual day is incredibly important, and let the results stack up." It's okay. Um, I love this because it is an example that is relevant to the world of work that's coming from the world, uh, outside of work, the world of housework. This is a very common experience among people who do big projects outside of their professional life. Man, it was so fulfilling to just work slowly but steadily on this thing. And I, I really love the way that Logan described this. No day is important, but every day adds up. So i- it's not, there's no stress in this particular Wednesday I'm spending three hours working on trim. You could be sick and not do trim for three hours on that Wednesday, nothing bad happens. But you have enough of those Wednesdays, and all the trim gets done, and you have this concrete accomplishment. That is what we are wired to appreciate as humans, the slow, sustainable aggregation of effort towards well-done, high-quality results that we're proud of. Now fast-forward to the typical computer knowledge work job. It's the opposite. All day long, frenetic back-and-forth activity. We've taken all these different projects that we interweave with each other, and we're just trying to keep the plate spinning by answering this email and sending off this, just in turn you can respond to this, and jumping on Zoom over here and back and forth, and it's just this frenetic, "I can't even tell you all the things I'm working on. Uh, I'm barely working on it. It... Work has been devolved to, like, emails back and forth where sometimes some, you know, decisions get made in a meeting and some drastic writing." It is the opposite of the slow but sustainable work. Uh, it's not slow. It's very fast. It's not clearly defined. We have multiple things that we have un-, uh, specified roles on that are, they're s- coming in and out of our, our scope of activity. And it's not sustainable. If I, if I'm sick and I have these 10 projects I'm emailing all day, it's a real big issue. Everything grinds to a halt. So it's a constant source of sort of background anxiety. So Logan working on his house is the epitome of slow productivity. My idea, this is the idea in my book, Slow Productivity, that comes out in March, is we need to port this over to work. The world of our jobs, the world of knowledge work, this is what work should be, slowly but steadily on wildly important stuff. It's like, this is what we're wired to do. It's how you can maximize the value you produce for yourself and for the world. We're so far from that right now, and we shouldn't be. So I really appreciate that case study, Logan. Slow productivity is the future. I'm really excited for my book to come out too, because I wanna talk a lot more about it. I want all these details to be out there so we can go big on slow productivity. All right, we have a final segment coming up where I wanna react to something I read about that I thought was quite interesting. But first, let's hear from another sponsor. 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Cal Newport 1:03:39 This is where I react to something that I came across on the internet or in my email inbox. Uh, in particular, I wanna talk about a book, the book that came out in February, uh, but it's, it's proven popular. The author has done a lot of interviews, so people have been sending me, uh, clips of this author. Very interesting story, very interesting book. Uh, I wanna talk about some of the ideas in the book and give you maybe my own take on these same themes, which is a little bit different than where he comes down. So I'll load the book here up on the screen for those who are watching at home. The book is called Burn the Boats: Toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential. It is written by Matt Higgins, who has a really cool story. Let me read you a little bit from the book jacket. "In this gripping rags-to-riches instant classic, Matt Higgins provides the blueprint he used to go from a desperate 16-year-old high school dropout caring for a sick mother in Queens, New York, to a shark on Shark Tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School. Told with raw emotion and radical transparency, Higgins writes the definitive tome on the oldest life hack in history, burn the boats. From Sun Tzu to Julius Caesar, the ancient Israelites to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky..." Well, it's Vladimir Zelensky. I always say that wrong. "There's a bold and highly effective tactic seen throughout history. When leaders want to motivate their troops for success, they destroy all opportunities for retreat and fully commit to the mission. They burn their boats. It's win or perish, and the clarity of sheer desperation propels them to victory." Skipping ahead here, the book jacket says, "Burn the Boats is the manifesto for anyone looking to level up their life while navigating risk. Each chapter includes clear, actionable advice that readers can immediately start applying to their own lives. This book will give you the courage to confidently go all in on your life's true purpose." So Matt has a, he's a very impressive guy and has a very cool story, really came out of a hard situation to a lot of success, and he used this idea, and he's been telling this idea a lot, and it's been getting a lot of play. So I wanted to talk about this because a very similar concept came up as a major theme when I was working on my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So So Good They Can't Ignore You was a book that was looking at career advice, and so the idea that I was en- uh, engaging with from the world of career advice in So Good They Can't Ignore You, one of the big ideas I was engaging with is what I called courage culture. And at the time, so this is the, the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s when I was working on this, courage culture had a really big footprint in the career advice space, and the, the theory behind courage culture was straightforward. It said the most important thing in terms of transforming your work into something that you're passionate about is having the courage to go after that thing you love. So courage culture, uh, prioritizes courage as the, the key issue. So look, I'm gonna draw a picture here, and again, my apologies for people who [chuckles] who are actually seeing this. Um, but in, but in courage culture, I'll, I'll draw this, this rough picture. Um, what it's saying is, okay, the, the, the path. All right, so I'm drawing a squiggly line here. At the end of the squiggly line is a person smiling, Jesse will tell you for the listeners, expertly drawn, holding their hands in the air triumphantly. Um, and what is the, what is the obstacle here is you have this, this obstacle up front, this big... I drew it as like a, a red squiggle, um, and it's fear. So this, this great illustration on the screen. So courage culture said here's the issue is if you can overcome that fear, which is built, and there's all sorts of sources of it, parental expectation, conformity to society. Uh, you can overcome that fear, you have a pretty easy path to being very happy. So we have to build up courage to find happiness. I pushed back on this as I went out there and I studied people who, uh, were very passionate about their careers, and I studied their actual lives, not just what they said. And what I saw was a different picture. So the path that they took, if you're looking at the, uh, screen now, you'll see this, the path they took was, uh, uphill. So now my picture, it's a pretty arduous uphill path, right? So it's like going up a mountain. And so what is, uh, what is stopping them here, so what's in the way of this uphill path is an expertly drawn brain. Oh, God, I'm getting creative here, Jesse. An expertly drawn brain that is seeing... Oh, man, changing color. This is getting... My... I'm really impressed by my drawing. Uh, is seen as drawn by these orange dots the hardness of this path. And saying, "Okay, I'm gonna preserve energy." Pretty good, right, Jesse?

Speaker 1:08:41 Yeah. It's great.

Cal Newport 1:08:42 Yeah? All right. So if you look at these two different interpretations, you get two different ways to go forward. So courage culture says this first picture is what's happening. So you gotta just get really inspired so you can have this moment of courage and overcome your fear, and once you leap over to the other side, you have this easy path that was, that was waiting there all along, just gonna get you to happiness. This other, uh, approach, which I said was more realistic, is the reason why you're, you're hesitating to get going is that often it is really, really hard to get th-this, uh, success with something really cool, and your brain recognizes that, and it sees how hard it is, and it says, "Hey, buddy, I like the guy at the top of the mountain with their hands in the air, but you're not ready to do this. You don't really understand how to hike this long. You don't know how your compass works. You don't have enough water. I checked your boots. They're pretty bad. You haven't checked the weather. Do you have a jacket?" And so your brain says, "We're not going to engage on this long-term plan until I'm more confident that you know what the hell you're doing." Now, last week on the show, we got into the neuroscience of this. This actual process is called episodic future thinking, or EFT. It is your brain actually trying to, uh, project into the future an understanding of what's gonna happen based on your experience and expertise that ex- that you already have stored in your hippocampus, and seeing what it projects, and if it likes what it projects, then it's gonna give you motivation. And if it doesn't, it's gonna withhold it. So if when your brain, the, the centers that are working on the EFT, the episodic future thinking, are looking at what you understand and your plans and your past experiences and says, "You don't know how to get up that proverbial mountain," you're not gonna get motivation. So my approach was it's not about getting a, a, the courage to, to just go for it. It's filling up that hippocampus with enough evidence-based expertise and understanding of what you wanna do that your brain, when it projects in the future, says, "Yeah, I see how this is gonna happen. That's cool. We're gonna get up that mountain. That guy's hands in the air, that's gonna be us. That, uh, ties to our values. Let's get after it." And you're not at war with your brain. You're co-opting your brain to get on your side. I think we, we overemphasize this idea of, uh, part of ourselves being afraid and we're trying to overcome that. I think we've, we've given that too much power, and we have not given, in our culture, enough power to how effective EFT really is at helping us make decisions about what to do in the future. And when we switch our attention from the courage culture to the episodic future, uh, thinking approach, it really changes the way we th- w- the way we, uh, strategize to go after something cool. We don't burn the boats. We say, "How quickly can we learn enough about this, make enough little bets, get enough expertise, talk to people who know what they're doing? How quickly can we convince our brain that this is something we can do?" There's still a little courage after that that might be required. If what you wanna do is quite different than what's expected, people are correct to point out, as they did when I was researching my book, that, you know, it could be hard. Don't leave your law job. Don't leave your tenure track position. Don't become an artist when you should become a doctor. You know, that, that is hard, but not nearly as hard as we think when your mind is on board with a plan that leads to something that's true to its values. It takes a little courage to tell your parent, "I'm not going to med school," but it's not as much as you think if your brain is really on board with the alternative that you're gonna do. So this idea that you're gonna burn your boat so you have no plan B, that that's gonna motivate you, motivation doesn't get you up the hill. Equipment does, skill does, training does. So you're, you're, you should not be looking to get rid of plan Bs. You should be looking instead to build better plan As. A little bit of courage might still be involved, but it's not gonna be that hard if you've gotten your mind on your side. So see your mind not as an arbitrary obstacle, but as your ally. It is really good at saying, "Hey, do we have a good plan for what we're doing?" That's why humans are so successful as a species. It's why we can invent things and build the pyramids and everything else we've done. Uh, trust the human brain. Don't avoid plan B. Write a better plan A. That's, uh, that's what I have, I have seen to be successful. I don't know if you remember that rhetoric from, like, the '90s and 2000s, Jesse, but man, it was everywhere.

Speaker 1:13:00 You see it a lot in sports too.

Cal Newport 1:13:02 Yeah, just have the courage to go for it.

Speaker 1:13:04 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:13:04 Yeah. Well, it's... Okay. Can I, can I... I'm gonna bring up an old man rant. This- nothing makes me seem older than this, and I've, I've said it before on the show, but I'm gonna bring it up again. Cars 3, the Pixar movie Cars 3, [laughs] 'cause the, the whole plot line of Cars 3 centers on the fact that the, the one car, the anthropomorphic car, who's helping whatever his name is, Lightning McQueen, Lightning McQueen, um, train for his return. Because h- so Lightning McQueen's an old style stock car, and now they have these new, uh, sort of computer designed cars. They're just faster, it's better technology.

Speaker 1:13:42 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:13:42 And he's going to train, like, "I wanna train to, like, overcome these technologically more superior cars, cars." The, the whole plot line is the person training, you know, Lightning, was someone she always wanted... And I don't know how you gender a car, but s- whatever, it's a she in the show. Um, she had always wanted to be a race car driver, but had, you know, didn't have the courage to do it because, you know, i, I guess w- she was a girl car. I don't know how this... I don't know how car gender works. Um, so that was kind of the plot line. Like, okay, that's, you know, that's interesting, right? There's this interesting dynamic of, like, this is something she always wanted to do, but couldn't. Um, and now she's helping this other person do it. The way the movie ends is they're on the racetrack and there's these super computer designed cars. Er, Lightning McQueen, by the way, is like, was one of the top stock car racers, like top of the heap before this new technology came in, so like whole life training to do this. And at the very end, the, uh, the, the trainer gets the courage to say, "I'm just gonna get on the track. I don't care what people tell me. I'm gonna race," and she beats all the high tech cars. No training. No, like how does, how did her old technology overcome it? No. Like, so it was the courage culture personified, that the only thing that was holding you back from beating these, like, super precision cars that had been trained this really well, was just having the courage to compete for it. And they're completely missing the part where you actually have to become good, good at the thing. So it was like courage culture personified was the trainer from Cars 3 beating the high tech hyper cars because she had the courage to actually get on the track. Like, what message are we teaching? [laughs] What message are we teaching kids? It's like rookie of the year, you know? Like, the secret... You could be pitching in the Major Leagues. It's if you broke your arm in a weird way, then that's it, and then you're gonna [laughs] you're gonna throw 100 mile per hour fastball. It's like, where's the training? So I'll tell you, I mean, I stood up and gave that room full of kids in that theater an earful.

Speaker 1:15:30 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:15:30 I'm like, "Let me tell you about deliberate practice. You know how many hours it took on average for a chess grand master to get there? It's not just about overcoming fear. You have to learn, like, how to be the world's best race car. Like, most people can't be, and even if you wanna be, your whole life has to be dedicated to it."

Speaker 1:15:47 And while you're at it, let me tell you about Dr. No in Fleming's, like, missed plot. [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:15:51 Yes. And like, and let me tell you about the torture tunnel in Dr. No. All right, kids? I got a problem with that as well. So they stake this broad to the, to the volcanic rocks so the crabs would eat her. But crabs don't eat people. You see what I'm saying?

Speaker 1:16:08 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:16:10 I'm not welcome back in that theater again. Uh, yeah, th- that's the, that's the moral of that story. I'm not welcome back in that theater, nor have my applications to join the writing staff at Pixar been responded to or approved. I want, like, dark, gritty movies where they train really hard, and in the end, it's like you really, you gave it your best, but, like, you don't have the right VO2 max for the sport.

Speaker 1:16:31 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:16:32 And that's kind of the ending of it.

Speaker 1:16:35 Oh.

Cal Newport 1:16:36 Oh, my goodness. All right. Enough of this nonsense. All right, thank you everyone, uh, for listening or watching to this week's episode. Uh, we'll be back next week with, uh, another show. And until then, as always, stay deep. So if you like today's discussion about the new version of my Deep Life Stack, you might also wanna go back and check out episode 252, where I introduce the original version of this tool for transforming your life. Check it out. But I thought this would be a great time to beta test my, my more complete understanding of the deep life. So we'll call today's deep question: How do I rebuild my life into something deeper?