How To Design Your Life (My Process For Achieving Goals) | Cal Newport

1. 0:00 – 30:28

   The Deep Life Hardware

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      So here's a common problem. You're tired of being listless or distracted just by screens in your life, and you come up with some plan for regaining some intention and some depth, some idea to make your life much more focused, and you go flying out of the gate with the new plan, your guns blazing, but then things just sort of peter out, and before you know it, you're back to TikTok binging while watching Netflix in the background. So today, I wanna diagnose one of the major causes of this type of failure to get your ambitious plans off and running. We'll then use this new understanding to try to come up with some systematic advice for overcoming it and having more success introducing more intention into your life. All right, so we're gonna get started in a perhaps unexpected place, a example that will soon make sense once I explain how it connects to this topic. I'm gonna bring this up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. Um, I wanna go back to the 1800s. I wanna go back to Charles Babbage, the mathematician, and these crazy machines he thought up. What's on the screen here is a picture of one of his so-called difference engines. So if you're listening, what you see here is a pile of, uh, brass gears arranged in interlocking columns. The difference engine was a mechanical machine, right? We're talking 19th century, that you could use to, uh, solve certain mathematical problems, in particular problems that had to do with, uh, repeated arithmetic and subtraction, right? Uh, addition and subtraction. It took an a- the type of algorithms that a mathematician might execute, and it mechanically implemented them. Here's another close-up view. Okay, so then what happened, why this is relevant, so stick with me here. He came up with a design for a more advanced machine called the analytical engine, and unlike the difference engine, the analytical engine could be, uh, programmed to solve different problems. Here is a scene. He didn't build one in his life, but, um, a full one, but here's a scene from a p- part of a prototype he built in 1871. Here, I'm loading up on the screen. This is a, a schematic he had of the analytical engine. You could actually specify to the machine what mathematical operations you wanted it to do using punch cards, an idea that he borrowed from Jacques Jacquard's and his powered programmable looms. Interestingly, Ada Lovelace, Ada Lovelace heard about... You've probably heard this story, but Ada Lovelace, who was, uh, related, of course, to the poet John Byron, heard about Babbage's analytical engine in, uh, an article and designed a program for it, like, "Oh, here's how you can use it to solve a particular math problem involving the Bernoulli numbers." This was probably the first example of a, uh, what we would think of as, like, a computer program in history. She was designing, "Okay, this series of instructions on the punch cards can take this machine that Babbage designed and solve this particular problem that might be interesting, the, the Bernoulli number problem." Okay. So why is this interesting? Well, like, up until this point, when we think about machines, we think about machines being constructed to do very specific things. I designed this machine to solve this problem. There could be some variability in the machine. I mentioned, uh, the Jacquard loom, where you could use punch cards to specify the pattern that this machine loom would actually weave, but that's still just a machine meant to do one thing, and you're just, uh, changing the parameters of how it does this thing. What made this idea with the Babbage analytical engine and Ada Lovelace's program so interesting is that it introduced a new split into the world of machine operation, the split between hardware and software. So we have, uh, hardware, which is gonna be the machine itself, and you have software, which is what you give the machine to actually run. So now when we think about a hardware-software split, you have two different initiatives that have to go on simultaneously. And I think, actually, Jess, we can bring this down off the screen now. I think I've shown what I need. You have two initiatives that, that go on, uh, simultaneously, people trying to make the hardware better, people trying to write software. You have Babbage trying to build this analytical limit, this, uh, analytical engine. How do we get the gears to actually mesh? And we have Ada Lovelace thinking about what's something we can do with this engine. How about the Bernoulli numbers? So we have these, uh, this two separate worlds. This, of course, became the foundation of digital computation. Fast-forward to the 1940s. Uh, we get this famous memo that John von Neumann writes saying, like, "Hey, we should do something like this architecture with digital computers. We should have the, uh, program be its own thing that you input that, uh, runs on the hardware. You build the machine once, and then the program you want the computer to run, we can put into the memory. We program it in." This was a big deal. Like, one of the first large electronic digital computers, the ENIAC, didn't have this capability. You had to actually adjust the way the thing was wired to get it to do different things. John von Neumann was saying, "Okay, with this new computer, the EDVAC, why don't we just have the program be something we put into the memory just like the data? It's completely separate from the machine." A, a couple other people suggested this. Turing had a similar suggestion for a machine, uh, for the ACE, the Automatic Computation Engine, around the same time. Uh, there's a debate about who came up with this idea first and how much they were influenced by Babbage. The details don't matter. What matters is our current digital age is dominated by this idea of hardware, software. The hardware better can make the software better. Now, here's something that quickly made sense for people in the computational world. Uh, the hardware determines what you can do with the software. The better your hardware, the more capability it had, the cooler software you could run. Like a great example of this, let's go to the world of video games, was the Atari 2600, one of the first widely sold at-home video game players. The games on the Atari 2600, they look kind of weird. Why do they look weird? Well, it turns out that the hardware that the Atari 2600 was based on was, uh, essentially a Pong playing machine, Pong being the original Atari game where you're trying to knock the ball back and forth between the paddles. So what had happened is they had commissioned a, a chip, sort of like microprocessor type chip, uh, to bring a Pong to TVs at home, like an at-home Pong playing machine. So it was a chip that, like, was meant to play Pong. And then Atari realized, "Wait, we should probably have, uh... If we had lots of different games, this would be a big market, but we don't have the time or money to go build a different chip. So hey, game designers, you're dealing with a Pong playing chip." So all of these other games that we think of with the Atari 2600 are dealing with a Pong architecture, where you have, uh, paddles and a ball and a field, and you mirror one half of the game field onto the other half because it's two sides of, of, uh, of Pong, um, and one avatar. Like everything in the, the constraints in how you program that Atari game is you are taking a machine that was meant to play Pong and you're, you are, uh, tricking it and subverting it and stretching it to try to make these other games, uh, that don't look like Pong at all, but underneath the covers they are. There's a fantastic book about this called Racing the Beam, which, uh, computer scientists know about, uh, SDS-style people know about, about how the constraints of the Atari hardware really determined what you could produce. Then the Nintendo Entertainment System came along and said, "Oh, you know what? We have a graphics chip, and it's meant just to make games, not just to play Pong. And you can just put whatever graphics you want in here, and suddenly, oh my God, we can make any type of game," and it was like a revelation, right? So the hardware matters. The Atari 2600, the hardware really limited what video games you could produce. All right, let's connect this back to our original question. We want to succeed with our plans. I think of, like, the cool goals you have in your life. Here's the way I want to get deeper and get away from just being distracted. Uh, I think of that like software. The cool flashy stuff. It's the video game. It's the, like, I am going to get really good at this or start a podcast or move to the woods or whatever it is. That's like your software. This has to run on hardware. So what is the hardware in your life? Uh, it's your background habits and routines. It's the control you have over your time and schedule. It's the internal sense of discipline you have, your, your, or efficacy, your belief that you are able to actually execute things that are non-urgent but might be important in the long term. This is the hardware on which all of the software of your big plans and visions run. What I think happens to a lot of people is that they neglect the hardware and go straight to the really cool software. They wanna run Super Mario World 3 in their life, and yet they're still living an Atari 2600 existence. So what you have to do once we're, once we apply this metaphor and use this, what we have to do is focus first on upgrading our metaphorical hardware before we get too caught up in the possibilities for the much more visible software. We have to get the boring stuff, the foundations of our life humming before we worry too much about the really cool idea that we wanna run, the really cool place we wanna actually move our life. So we've talked about this before on the show, but let's, let's just get into it again. Let's get into what might be involved in upgrading your, uh, personal hardware. Okay, uh, first of all, we've talked about before the importance of discipline. Um, let's, uh, let's apply discipline to this metaphor here. I like to think about discipline as something like the, uh, the instruction set on your computer hardware. Like, if you have convinced yourself, you've written the story that I am capable in different parts of my life of making progress on things that are important, even if it's not urgent or no one's forcing me to do it and it's hard. If you've convinced yourself you're able to do this, it's like you've added more possible instructions to your metaphorical processor. Y- y- you're increasing the scope of what you can use when you then write your programs. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. So this, this identity of discipline is a great place to start. And again, this is, uh, s- uh, not the way most people think about this. Most people, again, wanna jump to the big change. The change will redeem me. I'm gonna quit my job and move and buy my podcasting microphone and, and, and that, this, the, the change is gonna redeem me. They don't like to think about just the building up this ability to do things that are hard and being convinced I can, but you need that discipline first. It's a good place to start. How do you do that? Well, as we like to-- we've said this before on the show, the best way to do this is to identify the different areas of your life that are important. We've called these various things like buckets, areas. If we wanna use our computational metaphor, these could be like processing units. But you got to identify the areas that are important for your hardware. Um. We often use the alliterative Cs when thinking about this. Craft, of course, should be on here. That is like what you do professionally. Contemplation should be on here. This is gonna be sort of theology, philosophy. Uh, you should probably have community. Well, you should definitely have community, your connection to others. Constitution, that's your health. Celebration, that is like your, the, your interest, the things you find great pleasure in that are outside of just your professional demands. That's a good place to start. But you find the areas that are important in your life, and you have a, identify a daily discipline in each. These should be things that are tractable, right? So not impossibly hard to do consistently, but also not trivial. So just hard enough that you have to do a little bit of effort, and you should track this and mark it down on a piece of paper. I'm doing my daily disciplines daily. That is all about improving and increasing the instruction set available to your hardware 'cause your mind begins to tell itself the story. All of these parts of my life are important, and in each of them, I am willing to do something that's not required and non-urgent but is pushing me towards, uh, something that I find important. So you wanna start building up your instruction set with daily discipline. Next, you need some sort of control over the obligations in your life. If it's all haphazard, all the stuff professionally, non-professionally I need to do, I, I try to keep track of it, I forget. People are bothering me, "Hey, what happened to this thing? You're late," and now I'm scrambling to get it done. This is like having in our computational metaphor, like a poorly devi- dev- uh, designed data bus, and the, the instructions move slowly and get bottlenecked and stuck, and it's, it's hard to move data instructions around. You need control over the stuff going on in your life. So you need a place where this stuff is stored. You need some sort of capture system to, to use the Dave Allen methodology, where all the things you need to do and the information related to the things you need to do are in a system that you trust and look at frequently. It's not just being stored in your head. I've talked about using Trello boards. You could do this in notebooks. You could do this in a Google Doc. It doesn't really matter. Uh, but having some sort of collection for tasks in the different areas of your life. I have one Trello board for each of the different roles in my life, and then within there, you have cards for the different obligations. The columns have to do with the status, back burner, waiting on, waiting to hear back, actively working on, et cetera. Information relevant to each of these obligations is on the cards, and you're looking at these things on a regular basis. We'll get into that more here in a second. But you have a place where everything is stored and organized that you need to do or you've committed to do. You gotta get that outside of your head. Again, this is the boring stuff, but the important stuff, getting the hardware upgraded so we can do the cool stuff later. Now you need a good scheduler. Any piece of good computational hardware, any, is gonna be based off of, uh, there's gonna be at the core of it some sort of scheduler. The, the schedule's what are we doing next? Let me get the data I need. Here's the instruction. Let's get this to the right processing unit. Let's execute. You need a good scheduler in your own metaphorical hardware, which means some planning discipline that allows you to actually be intentional about what you're doing. I'm, of course, a big proponent of multi-scale planning. You should have a big-picture plan for the current season or year. You can look at that big-picture plan each week when you make a weekly plan. When you make your weekly plan, this is when you can move around and tweak things on your calendar, uh, check in on things, cancel things, consolidate things to make your weekly make more sense for what you wanna work on. And then daily, have some sorta plan for what you wanna do that day. This is a scheduling discipline. Now I've control my obligations. I have some control of my time. What do I wanna be working on? When am I gonna get this done? Now your hardware's beginning to get some more functionality. Finally, we wanna sort of clean out to the degree necessary the, the junk that's junking up the system. We wanna streamline our data. We wanna streamline our instruction set, and what does this mean in practice? Uh, now that you have control over your obligations and you're actually planning at multiple scales, you can find out pretty soon what's clogging up the system. You know, this obligation over here keeps really getting in the way of other things. It's not that important to me. Uh, why am I spending time doing this so inefficiently? You can start removing things from your plate. You can also start using autopilot scheduling for the things that remain. Okay, this is something I do regularly. Why don't I just say I always do this Monday? I always do it right after lunch. Let me consolidate this here. So this is all about getting efficiency in the system. I wanna get out the stuff that's clogging the system I don't need to be doing. I wanna take the regular routines and give them a sort of like dedicated time they run, so I don't have to waste cycles thinking about them or have them show up in inopportune times. So this is all about getting the system to run smoothly. So this is boring but critical. So we... I'm gonna summarize them all right here. You in- you in- increase your metaphorical instruction set by developing, uh, an identity, a discipline. Daily discipline in the different areas of your life is a great way to do it. You gain control over your obligations. This is like having smart data management by having places where everything is stored by role and by status, so you don't have to keep track of this in your head. You have easy access to all the possible things that need to be done. Use multi-scale planning to get your metaphorical scheduler working well, so you know what's on your plate. You know what's coming up with your time. You're making some intentional decisions about what to do with your time, and you're cleaning up your code and your instruction set by getting rid of stuff that you don't really need to be doing, simplifying your life and making automatic the regular things that can be made automatic so that they're not taking up core processor cycles. Let's get some special circuitry going for those things. All right. You do all of that. You upgrade your hardware in this way. Now you can run some pretty cool software Now when you say, "Okay, I wanna make a major professional change," you can act on that now. You've got your act together, you're planning, you can figure out what you're gonna do, you can make regular time for it, you can pick up this new skill, you can use that skill to make, to leverage a new position, you can then go through what's necessary to, like, move to a different location and, and just start to pick up this other hobby. Whatever it is you're trying to do, your hardware can handle this much better than if your life is just haphazard. If you're just, I don't know, I just roll through things, I'm distracted all the time, I get inspired by something, and I hope this inspiration carries me through to executing this, good luck. Your hardware is old. Your hardware is simple. Inspiration doesn't matter. I could be the most inspired Atari programmer possible, I'm not gonna be able to have a side-scroller video game like Mario Brothers, just, like, the hardware can't handle it. So anyways, we've talked about this in different ways before, but I think the hardware-software split, which is a fundamental idea in computation, really gives us a useful handle here. Work on your hardware before you work on your software. If you're not working on your hardware, there's a reason why your software might be failing. It also gives us a new motivation for these type of, uh, hardware-type activities because, you know, sometimes these get scrutiny. We, we have a good question coming up about this. But sometimes these get scrutiny. Like, well, why are we bothering to try to, like, control our obligations, and what are we doing here with this, uh, time management and discipline, and, like, why do we care about this? Are we sort of just trying to, like, optimize ourselves? Are we distracting ourselves? Like, no, we're upgrading our hardware so we can do the cool stuff. We- if we want the schedule where we, like, watch birds all the time and have all this flexibility, uh, that's a really cool program. We need better hardware to get there. So we, we get a much more functional approach to these type of things. It's not doing them for the sake of doing them. It's upgrading our potential so that we can then take advantage of that potential and, and run some pretty cool, run some pretty cool games. So anyways, I think that's a useful metaphor, and I think it gives us a, a, a new way to think about engineering depth in a distracted world. You know why they call that, that book Racing the Beam, Jesse, is... Man, Ataris were so hard to program. But there, there was, uh, an incredibly limited amount of video memory.

   2. SPSpeaker20:16

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CNCal Newport20:17

      Not to geek out here, but w- with a modern graphics chip, like you would have on a NES, you could just say, uh, there's a, like, a byte for every pixel on the screen, and I can say, like, "This is what I want each pixel to be," and you put that in graphic memory, and the graphic chip draws that on the screen. Not so with the Atari. With the Atari, you can, uh... First of all, the pixels are grouped into groups of four, so you can only say what color you want each group of four to be. And there's only memory for, like, a little bit of, like, one row. Like, part of one row-

   4. SPSpeaker20:49

      Mm

   5. CNCal Newport20:49

      ... is all you could specify. So what you have to do is, uh, in your code, because this is all one chip, you have to keep track of exactly where the electron beam is that's going across scanning the TV screen, right? And, and because that's how TVs worked. An electron beam would, would scan across the screen and turn off and on pixels. Um, and you would, you would say, "Here's the... The electron beam's about to go across this part of the screen," and you quickly write in the memory, like, exactly what to draw there, and it would draw those things. And you had to then, uh, quickly change it, so you, you were, you were telling the electron beam, uh, right before it got to each part of the screen, "Okay, this next chunk, do this. This next chunk, do this." And it was the same chip that does everything else. So then if you have other calculations you need to do, like what should we draw, like is the ball moving, what's the enemy doing, you would wait until the, uh, electron beam was moving back up to the top again, and you could get some instructions in there.

   6. SPSpeaker21:42

      [laughs]

   7. CNCal Newport21:42

      And you had to count, like, exactly how many microseconds each of these instructions took because you only had so much time before you had to start telling the beam what to do again. So it was, like, impossible to program.

   8. SPSpeaker21:53

      How old were you when you read that book?

   9. CNCal Newport21:56

      Oh, I don't know. I read that, uh, not super recently, but it was a, a, a... I'll give a... A professor I know. I was a professor. Um, a professor I know at Yale. We were at a conference. I remember this. God, where was that conference? I don't know, but this must've been 10 years ago or more.

   10. SPSpeaker22:13

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CNCal Newport22:13

       And he was telling me about this, this book, and then I went and read it. Yeah, I sort of geeked out on it. It's really cool. And then the NES, like, made it much better. I had to do, not graphic programming, but I did some microcontroller programming when I was in college. It was, like, my summer job to make money. And we also... I remember I was controlling the, the... I built a system that... I coded up a system for a... It was a complex piece of optical machinery, so you had, like, m- lasers and films, and things have to move very precisely. But I remember having to count, like, look up in the reference manual the number of microseconds per opcode because the, you had to time things exactly. Like, exactly how many microseconds would it take to execute this code?

   12. SPSpeaker22:52

       [laughs]

   13. CNCal Newport22:54

       I think, Jesse, the people are figuring out I'm a nerd.

   14. SPSpeaker22:56

       [laughs]

   15. CNCal Newport22:57

       I don't know. I think the secret's out. All right. Anyways, enough of that. Uh, hardware, software, I think it's a great way to think about engineering, uh, the deep life. All right, so we got a lot of cool questions, but first, let's talk about some sponsors. Our first sponsor is actually not just a friend of the show but a friend of mine, Tim Ferriss. The Tim Ferriss Show podcast crossed the one billion download mark in 2023 and is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this month. Tim has a bunch of cool things in store for 2024. Here's the thing. I've been on Tim's show I think three times now. Uh, we... I- Tim was my, my first interview I did for Slow Productivity. I arranged for him to be the, uh, the very first interview I was gonna do on the book because Tim really is the best in the business when it comes to this sort of advice-oriented interview format. He invented it. He's been called the Oprah of podcasting, and I think for good reason. A couple things that are impressive about this show is that h- he's has this long track record of getting first-time podcast appearances on his show. So Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Jocko Willink, Rick Rubin All of them did their first podcast, uh, appearances ever on Tim Ferriss' show. Little known fact, in the Jamie Foxx interview, they talk about my book, Deep Work, so I appreciated that. Uh, he also just gets other fantastic guests, including Seinfeld, LeBron James, Jane Goodall, Brené Brown, Terry Crews, Neil Gaiman. He gets everyone. You know, it's... You've probably heard of the show. I just wanna tell you directly, if you like this show, I'm sure you would like the Tim Ferriss Show as well. If for some reason you're not listening to that show yet, uh, you have to check out the Tim Ferriss Show. He has only cooler guests planned and all sorts of interesting stuff coming up for the year ahead. You can find the Tim Ferriss Show wherever you get your podcasts. You can learn more about the podcast as well as 5-Bullet Friday, Tim's newsletter that has nearly two million weekly subscribers, at tim.blog. That's tim.blog. I also wanna talk about our friends at Rhone, R-H-O-N-E, and talk in particular about their Commuter Collection, which is a, a clothing collection that I very much appreciate. Why? Because, look, men's closets, uh, are due for a radical reinvention. Rhone stepped up to this challenge. Their Commuter Collection is the most comfortable, breathable, and flexible set of products known to mankind. We're talking about, uh, pants, dress shirts, quarter zips, polos, right? So everything you might need for a business environment or an after-business-type environment. But the clothes themselves not only fit great, but they're comfortable. They have four-way stretch fabric. They're very breathable and lightweight. I like the Commuter Collection because I can have a very busy day where I'm, like, lecturing or doing interviews, and I know even if I'm running hot, this clothes is gonna be lightweight and keep me cool. Uh, it also has wrinkle release, so it's fantastic for traveling. You don't have to worry about ironing these things. As you wear it, the wrinkles fall out, so you're gonna look good all day long. You're gonna stay comfortable all day long, whether you're playing golf or doing a podcast interview or teaching a class. It even has Gold Fusion anti-odor technology, so you'll remain smelling fresh, and it's 100% machine washable. You don't have to bother with dry cleaners. Throw the stuff in the washing machine, boom, you're good, right? So if you're a guy in my audience that's like, "I need good clothes that looks good, that can handle, like, a really hard day, and I'm gonna be comfortable. I can travel with it," Rhone Commuter Collection is what you need. So the Commuter Collection can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. So head to rhone.com/cal and use promo code Cal to save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E... I said that weird.

   16. SPSpeaker26:51

       [laughs]

   17. CNCal Newport26:51

       R-H-O-N-E.com/cal and use the code Cal. It's time to find your corner office comfort. Finally, wanna mention our friends at Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing however you cha-ching. There's a reason why you've heard the name Shopify. It's because it is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from your small online shop, to your massive in-person store, to your million dollars in orders, uh, e-commerce behemoth. Whatever it is you're doing, Shopify has a best-in-business tool for you. Uh, they also help you turn your browsers into buyers using the internet's best converting checkout, 30% six, uh, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. 10% of all e-commerce in the US is already powered by Shopify. It's the force behind brands like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen. Uh, this is what Jesse and I are gonna use when we open our long-awaited Deep Questions Podcast store. We still haven't figured out exactly what's going to be in the store. Uh, most of our ideas have been shot down so far, but when we open the store, we will f- be sure using Shopify. It will make selling whatever we sell that much easier. So you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but you have to type that all in lowercase to get the deal. So go to shopify.com/deep now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. That's shopify.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

   18. SPSpeaker28:40

       Now that you're using, uh, Rhone clothing, are you gonna pick up golf?

   19. CNCal Newport28:43

       Uh, I should because I want to, and I'm just... This is just a phrase that's coming to my head out of nowhere. Uh, I wanna find my corner office comfort.

   20. SPSpeaker28:51

       [laughs]

   21. CNCal Newport28:53

       And I think that, that will help me. Uh, I'll tell you what I like about golf. It'll, it'd be nice to be outside.

   22. SPSpeaker28:58

       Yeah.

   23. CNCal Newport28:58

       I'll tell you what I would dislike about golf, the part where you have to hit that ball and try to get it to go near a hole. I, I feel like that would be frustrating because I would want the ball to go towards the hole, but because I'm trying to hit it with a small metal stick, it would not go towards the hole. So I don't know if you've heard this analysis before, but I watched Tiger Woods over the weekend shoot a plus 10-

   24. SPSpeaker29:19

       [laughs] Yeah

   25. CNCal Newport29:20

       ... in one round. I was like, "Golf is a hard sport." [laughs]

   26. SPSpeaker29:24

       And then the other thing is, too, you'd probably be contemplating, like, when you're walking up the fairway, then you get in trouble for slow play 'cause you'd be writing in your journal. [laughs]

   27. CNCal Newport29:30

       Everyone would be mad at me. Yeah. If, if I... I was th- like, if I was, you know, like, okay, you know, Cal Newport's gonna, is gonna play a round at the Masters. Like, "Oh, this is kind of exciting. We know Cal." Like, here's what would happen. It'd be, like, the first, uh, the first hole. All right, like, here we go. I would swing. You know, like, okay, I'm gonna knock this ball. I'm swinging at the ball. Um, what's gonna happen is, like, uh, as I swing down, immediately the ball is gonna go exactly 90 degrees to the left-

   28. SPSpeaker29:56

       [laughs]

   29. CNCal Newport29:56

       ... like smashing an old lady in the face while my club goes out of my hand and, like, breaks the arm of Ro- Rory McIlroy. Like, that's first, that's the first swing.

   30. SPSpeaker30:05

       McIlroy.
2. 30:28 – 38:38

   Does personal productivity make us anxious?

   1. SPSpeaker30:28

      present moment? Is it possible to be an ambitious high achiever without a baseline level of anxiety?"

   2. CNCal Newport30:34

      You know, it's an interesting question because coincidentally, I, I listened to two different podcasts in the last few days that I think of as giving two different perspectives on this question, both podcasts by people I know and respect. So I- let, let's start with these two perspectives I heard coincidentally just in the last few days. Uh, so the first was from Oliver Burkeman, uh, who wrote Four Thousand Weeks, friend of the show. Uh, he blurbed Slow Productivity. I bl- I blurbed Four Thousand Weeks. And, uh, he's really has made a name for himself with this sort of, um, much more like British sort of relaxed re- appraisal of time management and productivity. I was listening to Oliver recently on Chris Williamson's podcast, Modern Wisdom, and Burkeman was sort of giving this i- this kind of, uh, ideal... He's like, here's his approach to personal productivity, how he thinks about these things right now, and I'm paraphrasing, but his system was like, have a few things you wanna get done, but also be willing to let your interest guide you. If you don't really have energy for this thing you wanna do, but there's something else you're kind of excited about, maybe work on that instead. Like you'll, and like you'll be okay. That's a paraphrase, but that, that's sort of a, a classic like Four Thousand Weeks approach. Um, let's call that the humanistic, we'll call this humanistic personal productivity. It's sort of what are we, you know, as humans, like what, what really kinda like fits the way we operate best? All right. Then soon after this, sort of coincidentally, I was listening to Scott Galloway, who, you know, we talked about earlier in the show. I was just on his Prof G podcast, and then I was listening to a bunch of Galloway. Um, and I was listening to him on Dan Senor's podcast, Call Me Back, and they were talking about, at the end, Galloway's new book, uh, the, we talked... The Algebra of Financial-

   3. SPSpeaker32:25

      Of Wealth

   4. CNCal Newport32:26

      ... Of Wealth, right. And he was sort of giving his, uh, his take on life and advice, and he sort of... Galloway had this, this, this take, which is like, look, in your 20s in particular, your biggest resource is your time. Like what you wanna be doing with this is, uh, really getting after getting good at something valuable. 'Cause like, uh, 'cause he's like, "Here's the end game." He's like, "Look, this is, this is a, this is a reality that's not good, but it's a reality, especially in America. Uh, it, it, you know, we are not kind to poor people. And if you can build up a skill, whether it's like knowledge work or in trades, you can use this as a foundation of financial security, and that's what you want. You wanna be able to, when you're, you're, you're upper middle-aged, to be able to take care of your kids, to be able to help your parents when they get older and sick, to not have to worry about... To go pursue things you're interested in and not be worried about money." He's like, "That's the game, uh, and it's hard, and you need to take all this free time you have in your 20s, and you need to like focus on, uh, I am gonna get good." So we'll call that sort of pragmatic personal productivity, and there's some tension between these two, right? Oliver's like, "You know, just have a few things to do, and, and also it's okay if you don't do those, like if your interests take you somewhere else." And Galloway is basically like, "Look, if you don't sort of get after it [chuckles] and like work really hard to master some good stuff, like your life's gonna be miserable." So we kind of have these two different approaches, idealist- humanistic and pragmatic. So I think what's going on here is that Burkeman's approach, I think, matches the human brain. Like this is ideally how humans are wired. Like this is really what productivity is to humans, is this much, uh, s- looser sort of, um, what am I gonna do right now? Well, I need to go hunt this thing, or we're gonna go forage. You're sort of doing one or two things. You don't have complicated plans and that those plans are also contingent. Well, I don't know. It's kinda raining, so I'm not gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. Or there's a new urgent thing that came up. Let me work on that before. Like I do think you would be happier with the Burkeman personal productivity. On the other hand, I think Galloway is right that, uh, it is really hard to be financially secure, and like you do have to build up skills, and it's hard, and especially when you have a lot of free time in your 20s. Like you probably have to do some grinding, right? I mean, because it's hard. It's hard to, uh, in a modern economy, it's hard to convince other people to give you money, but you really want people to give you money because without money, things are hard. And so we have to construct a sort of artificial relationship with time just for our sort of financial survival, for, for our sort of basic economic security. So I don't know. Maybe our, our goal is you wanna get to a place in life where you can have a Burkeman-style personal productivity, and that's gonna require a Galloway-style pragmatic personal productivity along the way. Maybe Burkeman's giving us the goal, and Galloway is giving us the, the path you have to take to be able to get to something like that goal. Um, but I think back to the original question, the Galloway-style pragmatic personal productivity can be... It doesn't have to be super anxiety-provoking, but, you know, it's hard, and you have to care about what am I doing? Am I making progress on what matters? You have to sort of fight back distractions. You have to make time for what's important. Uh, there's a sort of defensive time management in here. I can't let all these distractions encroach so much that nothing gets done. There's a sort of urgency of I have to keep working deeply on the things that matter. This is my time to start to get good. Uh, and some of that's stressful, and some of that's sort of anxiety-producing. One thing I wanna suggest, not to bring this back to me, but that my new book, Slow Productivity, maybe gives us like a reasonable roadmap for walking this tightrope, right? For like, okay, we need to do something like Galloway-style personal productivity just to survive, but we're attracted to the Burkeman-style personal productivity. Slow Productivity sort of helps you split the difference. It says you gotta do... Oh, look, we gotta do the work. We gotta get better. But let's make sure along the way that we're not doing too many things at the same time. That gets counterproductive, and it's particularly stressful. Let's make sure along the way that we're giving ourselves a reasonable amount of time. We can't procrastinate forever, but let's not try to squeeze everything into the smallest time, time frames. Let's like, let's work- Consistently on getting better, but we can have variations in intensity, and we don't have to have super unrealistic timeframes. Slow productivity says, okay, if we really care about quality in a very specific way, what's the craft that matters? And let me actually work specifically on training that craft like I would train to get better at an instrument. We're gonna get to that Galloway goal of, of security much easier. We'll get there much faster. We're gonna gain much more control over our schedule, much more autonomy quicker if we're not just working really hard, but working hard at the specific goal of getting better at something that matters. Slow productivity we can think of, in other words, as a way to navigate Galloway-style personal- his pragmatic personal productivity in a way that minimizes the exhaustion and burnout. There's still probably gonna be some anxiety there. It's hard to do hard things, and the pressure is on. But slow productivity gives us a way to navigate that, where not only are we more likely to be successful with getting to the Burkeman promised land, but we are going to get there without it having to be, uh, an impossible or unsustainable slog. I don't believe that we have to grind it out in a miserable sort of way to get to a sort of security later in our professional career. I do think we have to be careful about our time. I do think we are gonna have to prioritize, like, the deep efforts to get better. I do think we have to have defensive time management to make sure that other things don't come in and take over and prevent us from making progress, and I do think all that's kinda hard, but it doesn't have to be miserable. So I'm gonna throw slow productivity in here as the way to follow the Galloway path as nicely and sustainably as possible on route to getting to the, the Burkeman promised land. Both good interviews, actually.

   5. SPSpeaker38:15

      Yeah. I'll check them out.

   6. CNCal Newport38:16

      I, I did Modern Wisdom as well. If you're looking for another podcast interview with me, I did Chris's show. I recorded down in Austin. But that came out kinda recently, so, so check that out as well, um, my interview on Modern Wisdom. All right, who do we have next?

   7. SPSpeaker38:28

      Next question's from Adita. "I currently work in a startup with long hours. I struggle to find time to sharpen my problem-solving and programming skills. How do I

3. 38:38 – 42:22

   How can I build skills without getting in the way of my existing work?

   1. SPSpeaker38:38

      plan weekly and daily sessions such that I can follow my interests pragmatically without hampering my performance at the company?"

   2. CNCal Newport38:45

      So my best advice here is combine the two objectives. So you're in a startup, a big-hour startup. You're gonna exhaust yourself if you, if you're trying to have a sort of non-trivial, deep work requiring skill-building sessions outside of all the hard work you're already doing for your startup. Again, going back to the Galloway vision, maybe if you're in your 20s, you kinda have the energy to do this. But I don't know, I'd rather spend the time you do have doing other things that are, that are, uh, rewarding, uh, servicing the other buckets of the deep life. So I think the right thing to do here is start to find ways that you can take on professional challenges that are useful for the startup and your career that require, in order for you to succeed with them, for your skills and strategic ways to get better. This is almost always the optimal way to do this. When you're trying to develop a professional skill, if you can integrate that into your existing professional life, that's almost always gonna be better, as opposed to I'm studying to do this on my own, and then over here I have my job. And there's two reasons why it's better typically to integrate them. Um, one is it's just more manageable. You're not requiring extra time. It's what you're already doing for your job. Your work to get better at this is directly helping something you're supposed to be doing. Getting better at the skill will give you immediate rewards. There's a, a course, an online course I do with Scott Young called Top Performer about, uh, getting better in your career, and this is one of the key ideas in the course, is we have you design a professional activity that is straight-up useful for you and your boss and your job but also is gonna make you get better at something that, that's useful to your job. So when you combine it, it's much more manageable. You're not, you're not having to find extra time. Uh, and two, it's much more effective, right? There's a general rule of learning new skills that is, like, the, the more close you can get your practice to the actual application of the skill you're learning, the better. You know, I had this conversation on a podcast the other day where they were saying, "Hey, should I meditate to improve my ability to focus on hard work problems?" And I said, "Well, if you wanna improve your ability to focus on hard work problems, practice focusing on hard work problems." We, we... Don't do something similar and hope that some of these skills transfer over 'cause this transference can often be, uh, low fidelity and not that useful. Practice the thing you wanna get better at. So, like, if you wanna learn how to, like, program or whatever, uh, program specific things that are useful for your company. Don't take abstract programming classes, right? So you wanna try to connect what you're doing, the, the training to the actual application. So that's my advice there, is make what you're doing an implicit training session, and I, I think that'll solve a lot of your problems and give you the goal of as you build these new skills, giving you more leverage and control. You know, it's what we always talk about. You get more control and leverage over your working life, and you can really take that out for a spin.

   3. SPSpeaker41:40

      For those interested in the course, it's through your newsletter and opens twice a year, right?

   4. CNCal Newport41:45

      Yeah. I, I, I announce it in my newsletters twice a year. Scott actually has a, a new book coming out in May all about how to learn things, like how to learn hard things. Um, and I'm setting up for him to come on the show. One of the ideas I have is to, to have Scott be a sort of like a guest question answerer with me. We could do a bunch of questions about learning skills, and him and I can try to answer them together. So, so I'm having Scott. I've known Scott forever. I do two courses with him. This new book is awesome. So anyways, we'll, we'll get more on that with Scott soon on the podcast. All right, who we got next?

   5. SPSpeaker42:18

      Next question's from Lily. "I have lived under a controlling family environment

4. 42:22 – 49:06

   How can I build a deeper life after years of neglect?

   1. SPSpeaker42:22

      for most of my life where I wasn't allowed to have any hobbies or many friends. I'm now living on my own, and I'm struggling to create my own routine. I want to live a deeper life, but I feel that it's empty. How can I begin to build a deeper life after years of neglect?"

   2. CNCal Newport42:36

      Well, Lily, it's a, it's a great question, and I love your thinking about this You know, I, I love the self-awareness of, "This might be hard for me, but it's important." And, and I think it's im- before we get to the details, the reason why that self-awareness is important is because when and if it's hard, and it will be hard, because again, you, you were not used to the sort of more expansive vision of the deep life growing up. When you struggle at first with it, you'll know the struggle is expected and you're pu- persist. Like, you'll know this is gonna be hard. You're more likely to persist in pursuing depth as opposed to when the first obstacle's coming up, just saying, "Maybe I'm not worthy of this," or, "Maybe this is just not something that's gonna work for me." So I love the self-awareness. I'm gonna give a preamble to my advice here. My general preamble to this advice is probably the, the biggest danger throughout this process of finding more depth, the biggest danger everyone should be wary of is your phone. 'Cause what you're, what you're trying to do here in building a more expansive depth into your life is you're gonna try to be servicing more of these areas that make life meaningful and important, the contemplation, craft, community, celebration, constitution. There's gonna be these broad areas, these, these, uh, elements that make the human life interesting and important. The phone can offer you a sort of low, high-sugar, low-quality simulacrum of satisfaction for a lot of these areas, right? Of like, "Oh, you really, like, desire community. You, you don't have a lot of experience having friends. We can just kinda simulate having friends on the phone." Like, there's people and social media, and they're commenting, and they're clicking on things, and, and, like, that's close enough, and it's easy, you know? Um, you wanna seek out, you know, uh, beauty and interesting things. You wanna, like, get engaged in, like, the world of, like, what humanity can create. The phone's like, "We got interesting stuff on here. Just, like, scroll this thing, and, like, it'll just, it'll look interesting, and, and binge on these shows." You know, like, what you're looking for, the phone can give you a cheap version of. You wanna be, uh, y- you have a call to a moral intuition. You know, I wanna be involved. I have a moral intuition. The phone's like, "We can just, like, punch outrage buttons. Just, like, look at these tweets." So the phone is gonna subvert every human instinct you have as you try to build a more expansive depth. So now is the time you need to be super wary of the phone, right? Be very careful what's on there. Be very careful what services you're doing. You might consider temporarily taking social media off your phone. You should consider using something like the phone foiler method. When you're at home, you have it plugged in in a set place in your house, and that's where it stays, or in your apartment, and you can go there to reference it, but it doesn't stick with you as a constant companion. Do things on a regular basis without your phone, just so you become comfortable being alone with your own thoughts. You have a lot of actual introspection you're gonna have to do here, um, Lily, a lot of sort of building out your schema and your understanding of the world and how you fit into it. This is gonna be a lot of just you with your own thoughts. So I'm talking about once or twice a week, long walks without your phones, errands without your phone. You have to be very wary of this thing in this very important but vulnerable moment you find yourself in. All right. With that in mind, how do we make progress here? Let's go back to the deep dive from earlier in the episode. Work on your hardware first before you get too caught up in the software, right? You've had a very limited, powerful, but very limited type of hardware you've been running on because of what your, uh, y- what it was like growing up. You now wanna build out this more expansive hardware. Let's focus on the, the boring hardware before we get into the sexy software. So this means you wanna get some control over your obligations and time, like we talked about. I, here's what I'm working on. Here's my planning. I know what I'm doing, uh, and I have control over what I do and when I do it. Work on your discipline instruction set. I have daily disciplines in these areas of my life, including areas that I've never given any attention to before, but now I am because I wanna tell myself I can do things that are non-urgent but are important in the long term. Uh, simplify stuff that's clogging things up. Autom- uh, get automation on the stuff. I don't think that's your big problem, that piece, because you're just getting started out. But get that hardware going. Trust yourself. I have discipline. I can do things in different areas in my life. I have control over my obligations. I have a pretty reasonable control over my schedule. Now you can start working on your software. And here what I'm gonna suggest is take one processing unit at a time, by which I mean one area of your life at a time, and give it a few months to do an overhaul on it, right? All right, let's start with maybe not community. Maybe we'll start with something like contemplation. Okay, I wanna overhaul that part of my life, like a regular reading habit, meditation habit, rediscovering a sort of, uh, religious connection and integrating that into my life. Let me spend a few months just working on that. Okay, now I'm sort of feeling like there's meaning in life, and I have, I can direct myself towards things that are important. All right, now I'm gonna focus on community for a few months. How do I start getting a service to my community, the friends I do have? How do I actually, how do I improve those relationships or meet new people? And you slowly go area by area and kinda build up beta versions of very basic software in each of these areas. And then after a year, go back, and let's do version one. You know, now you're gonna iterate on this and make it better, and you can start building up really cool software. So be wary of your phone, upgrade your hardware so it's ready to handle this full expanse of the human experience, and then start working on your software in one area of your life at a time. The stakes are low here at first. That's why I said beta, beta software. I just want some sort of cool program after about a year of work running each of the areas of my life, and now I'm ready to try to come up with the new version. And this is gonna take time, but I, I'm absolutely convinced that, that you will get there because you care about it, you know about it, you know it'll be hard, and you're committed to actually making change. All right, who do we have next?

   3. SPSpeaker48:30

      Next question, Slow Productivity Corner.

   4. CNCal Newport48:32

      Uh, let's get our theme music. [gentle music] So as you know, we try to find one question per episode that's related to my book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Find out more about that book anywhere books are sold or at calnewport.com/slow. If you like this show, you need to have that book because we reference it all the time. All right, Jesse, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day?

   5. SPSpeaker49:00

      Uh, it's from Matt. "Sam Sulek has a massive YouTube following with over 3.27

5. 49:06 – 59:00

   How has Sam Sulek’s stripped down YouTube channel doing so well?

   1. SPSpeaker49:06

      million subscribers. His channel lacks clickbait thumbnails, uh, YouTube Shorts, and fancy editing. Can you articulate why Sam's slow approach is garnishing such praise in a content media forum that usually amplifies anything but deep?"

   2. CNCal Newport49:20

      Sam Sulek. All right, let's load this up. For those who are watching, I have his YouTube channel. Um, let's load up one of these videos here. Let's see what we got here. All right, so here's the name of this, this video. This is from two days ago. The video title is not clickbait. It's Spring Cut Day 16-Cardio, and has been viewed 100,000 times. It came out a couple days ago. All right, here's Sam Sulek. He's just talking in his car, no fancy editing. Let me zoom forward. Now he's shirtless. I guess he's showing the spring cut day. So he's showing what, like, how his cut looks? Like, because he's a bodybuilder.

   3. SPSpeaker49:59

      Yeah.

   4. CNCal Newport49:59

      He's a bodybuilder is what we're seeing here.

   5. SPSpeaker50:01

      Yeah.

   6. CNCal Newport50:01

      Yeah.

   7. SPSpeaker50:01

      Showing weight.

   8. CNCal Newport50:02

      Yeah. He's a muscular man picture on there. Um, okay, it's a good question. I mean, one of the reasons why I'm glad Matt's asking this question is because, as you would imagine, Jesse, I'm often mistaken for Sam Sulek.

   9. SPSpeaker50:14

      [laughs]

   10. CNCal Newport50:16

       Right? Like, "Hey, Sam, I love your... Oh. Oh, sorry." Because we have, like, I would say, like, kind of a comparable... You're laughing too much about this, Jesse.

   11. SPSpeaker50:24

       Oh, it's so good.

   12. CNCal Newport50:25

       We have a comparable physique is what I was trying to say. Okay, he's a strong gentleman. [laughs] Make that full screen. I mean, come on. That's sort of... Is that, is that much different? [laughs] He's a very big guy. Um, I've... A lot of people have actually been writing me about Sam, uh, and asking, is he an example of, like, a slow, a slow YouTube movement, right? Like, it's forget all of the whatever, just gonna have me on there. Um, here's what I think is happening with Sam is he has rediscovered a format that, uh, used to be in early YouTube days incredibly popular, which is the vlog, the video log. This was, like, a big, uh, a big part of independent video early in YouTube days. I remember, uh, a lot of writers had these. Um, John Green, for example, had, like, a really, uh, big one, and it really was just people, it was Web 2 indie talking to camera, and you would build up these parasocial relationships with the vlogger, the video blogger, because they would just talk about their life and what's going on, and you, over time, had this connection with them. Again, a parasocial connection. You felt like you really knew them, and you're like, "I just, I just wanna check in and see what these people are doing." Um, and it's a powerful format. Typically for it to work, there had to be something sort of unusual or interesting about the person. That's kinda like the hook. So, like, that's why I was saying John Green, if I'm remembering this bro- uh, correctly, had, like, a big, uh, vlog because he was, like, a well-known writer and f- uh, and he wrote for young audiences, and young audiences were watching these things, so there was a connection they had. Uh, and I think there's something similar here because Sam Sulek is clearly, like, a, um, very successful bodybuilder. Like, what, this... Uh, is this bodybuilding, Jesse, or is this something different?

   13. SPSpeaker52:15

       I think it's bodybuilding.

   14. CNCal Newport52:16

       Is it bodybuilding? Yeah, I don't know if he's, like, a competitive... There's a difference, I guess, between, like, I compete, and just, like-

   15. SPSpeaker52:23

       Yeah

   16. CNCal Newport52:23

       ... I wanna look as big as possible, but, you know, he's very successful at that, so there, there's kinda like a hook into it, and then you build up this parasocial relationship, and then you don't care what the, the thumbnails are. You don't care, you know, what the, the titles are. You're like, "I just, I wanna be connected to this person." So yeah, I think Sam has rediscovered vlogs, and vlogs, I think, is a really cool format because it's like an ongoing novel. You really get in the mind of another person. The hard thing here, I think, is the chicken and the egg. Like, this is why I'm, I'm... My vision of the future of independent video, I think video is critical for independent media because we just know this from TV eating radio's lunch. Video ultimately is way more powerful than audio by itself. So, like, I do think video is the future. The problem with video right now is, uh, YouTube is sort of the platform that works. They have the best tech, but it's an algorithmic recommendation environment, and it doesn't even really matter if you have a lot of subscribers. It's like it decides what people are being recommended and, and how it decides this is sort of arbitrary. It's these algorithms you kinda have to chase if you want anyone, including your own subscribers, to see your video. So somehow, you know, Sam has gotten around this. I think, uh, a couple other YouTubers who've gotten around this, like Andrew Huberman. You know, so he does not have fancy thumbnails and does not have, uh, clickbait titles. Doesn't matter. They still crush it. Lex Fridman, uh, just very simple thumbnails. His titles are just, I'm talk- the person's name and, like, what we're talking about or whatever. So there, there is some critical mass. If you have a big enough audience, they will, uh, somehow, and I don't know how this works. I don't know if it's, if they're getting notifications or they just check to see when does Sam have the newest video. You can get around the algorithmic world and still have people see your videos on YouTube if you get past a certain critical mass. The question is how you do that, and maybe Sam did it by being so successful at bodybuilding and, uh, Huberman had audio podcasts. Those audiences were huge, so that could kinda carry people over. So I don't know. I don't know exactly how that works, but I do like the trend. I do like the trend where we think about the video platforms as hosting technologies. And how people curate and find that this becomes more person to person, this becomes less algorithmic, this becomes more trust-based. I really like that, that movement forward. Um, we're messing around on that with, with our channel. You know, we, we just have someone, uh, we record our podcast, and then we have someone who puts it on YouTube and puts on thumbnails and titles that are supposed to make sure that the people who actually subscribe, like YouTube will actually show it to them so they'll remember, "Oh, Cal has a new video," and then they'll watch it. But they're like, "Eh, it's a little clickbaity." So like we're, we're experimenting now with how can we, you know, still have the people who want to see my videos be shown the fact my new video exists without having to have the titles be like over some sort of cringe barrier or maybe without having to have like a surprised face thumbnail. And so like we're experimenting that with, uh, with that ourselves. Um, how does this work? How can we, how can we have a, a video presence for independent media that does not require us to have to either like play ball with an algorithm or B, be either metaphorically or in Sam's case physically, literally big enough that it doesn't matter? That's the cool question. The question right now I think in independent video is getting around the curation problem because I- the vlog format's great. People have a real relationship with this guy. I remember this from, you know, Hank Green maybe. John Green, Hank Green, I might get these names wrong. This was all like big YA writers in the early 2000s, but whatever. Um, I like this. I like slow YouTube if that's what we're gonna call it. The key is how to crack this code so that like more people can have YouTube just be the tech that hosts their videos. We need better ways of curation and finding videos, better ways for people to get videos. I mean, some equivalent of like RSS that we have for audio where it's just I actually subscribe to people and there's like a custom channel that's created for me and there's no algorithm involved and, uh, I find those people through other people's videos. I don't know. There's a, there's a solution to this that hopefully doesn't involve, you know, everyone has to be like 50% MrBeast in order for just people who already subscribe to their videos to even see them. So I'm keeping an eye on this and I think Sam is a good example. Um, I think it's a good example of, of the, the alternative things going on. [gentle music] What would my, my version of a Sam Sulek vlog? Because he's mainly in the gym because that's what he does.

   17. SPSpeaker57:18

       Yeah.

   18. CNCal Newport57:19

       So would my version just be like, uh, it would just be me sitting quietly at a keyboard typing for an hour?

   19. SPSpeaker57:24

       It would probably be you walking down the 18th fairway at Augusta, you know?

   20. CNCal Newport57:28

       With the crowds following me.

   21. SPSpeaker57:29

       While you're r- journaling.

   22. CNCal Newport57:31

       Yeah, yeah, just like everyone's like, "Get out of the way." My, my, uh, deep work is not as visually gripping as Sam Sulek's work I guess I would say.

   23. SPSpeaker57:42

       Oh, by the way, with your Huberman interview he wanted to do deep work with you. Did, was there ever any-

   24. CNCal Newport57:47

       Oh, yeah

   25. SPSpeaker57:48

       ... coordination on that?

   26. CNCal Newport57:49

       I, I have not coordinated with Andrew Huberman on that, but we did talk about it like-

   27. SPSpeaker57:52

       He wanted to.

   28. CNCal Newport57:53

       Yeah, he was like, "I would, I wanna do deep work in like a Zoom room with you so I would be motivated to keep doing it." Yeah.

   29. SPSpeaker57:59

       That would be a good-

   30. CNCal Newport58:00

       There, that's my Sam Sulek-
6. 59:00 – 1:02:31

   How can I convince my husband that I’m not a time management snob?

   1. SPSpeaker59:00

      husband prides himself on living without any structure. How can I begin to build deeper lives for both of us if we both have such conflicting views?"

   2. CNCal Newport59:09

      Uh, I like this inversion by the way 'cause we usually get like the husband is annoying the wife with all of his like Cal Newport dom.

   3. SPSpeaker59:15

      Yeah.

   4. CNCal Newport59:15

      But I like the inversion. That's good. Uh, your husband prides himself on living without any structure. I definitely imagine, uh, like the dude from The Big Lebowski. [laughs] That's what I'm imagining for the husband. He's just sort of like he has a bathrobe on just sort of big beers or going through the room like grabbing, "Hey, do we have any, uh, cream left for my White Russians?"

   5. SPSpeaker59:36

      [laughs]

   6. CNCal Newport59:37

      While... And for some reason like I imagine his wife has like on a green accountant's visor as she like works on her planners. Um, all right, it's a good question though, right? Uh, I would say, yeah, this is why it's complicated because you need the hardware. Let's bring this all back to the deep dive. Like you kinda need the hardware in place before you do the cool software stuff. So you wanna do cool stuff with your, your, your life as a married couple. It's helpful to have the hardware in place. Like yeah, we, you know, we, we have a sort of disciplines to different areas. We can control our obligations to have some control over our time. Now we can take this out for a spin and do kinda cool things. So it does limit the software you can run if the underlying hardware is not working that well and, uh, it certainly can be a problem if one part of a partnership is trying to do all the time management and the other partner like doesn't wanna have anything to do with this. That creates a lot of tension. It's like having a dual processor machine where one of the processors is not working well. It's, that's gonna make it frustrating to try to run software as well. Um, and I'm torturing this metaphor [laughs] but I have to keep going. Um, what I would say is probably you need to ease him- Into having slightly better hardware. And by ease him, I mean if you're a time management snob, you're probably way too advanced on stuff, and that's intimidating, and it's scary and annoying. And, uh, so you can't jump him in at, "Here is my rooted productivity system with, like, my Notion-powered multi-scale planning system." It's gotta be the basics. You know, we talk twice a week about, like, what's coming up, and we look at the calendar together. We have, like, just a list on the refrigerator of, like, stuff we need to do, so we can be like, "Oh, let's do this this weekend or that this weekend." Like really, really kinda simple stuff. Like, we have a shared calendar where the ongoing stuff is on there and people can add stuff to it. So I think just getting simple stuff going matters. It'll upgrade your hardware. So, like, at least, like, we, we look ahead, we kinda know what's going on, we have a list of where things are. Uh, not trying to force him too much beyond there. That might be enough for you to start planning interesting stuff for you to do in your life. And then at that point just be okay with it. Like, as long as you have, like, a basic competency here and, like, at least I kinda know what's going on and I can see when things are coming up. W- if he has that basic competency, like, that's enough. You don't have to make him as good at time management as you are. You can put my podcast on in the car sorta subtly when you guys are going places. See how that goes. But you do need... He, he... I, I mean, I'm with you in the fact that, like, he needs some basic hardware, but I'm also gonna say basic might be as far as you can get, and don't preach about it. You know, simple is fine. Simple is better than nothing. Uh, not everyone's gonna like really complicated time management. Uh, do we got a call?

   7. SPSpeaker1:02:22

      We do.

   8. CNCal Newport1:02:23

      All right.

   9. SPSpeaker1:02:24

      Here we go.

   10. SPSpeaker1:02:24

       [guitar playing]

7. 1:02:31 – 1:07:27

   Obsessing over quality

   1. SPSpeaker1:02:35

      Hey, Cal and Jesse. My name is Corey, and I live in Chicago. Um, I'm writing because I have a problem. I have a rare and unvaluable skill. You see, I'm a professional guitar player, and I typically play guitar in musical theater orchestras. Um, I've actually played in some pretty big level productions, including the musical Hamilton. I've applied a lot of the deep work and digital minimalism ideas into my own life and into my musical practice, and I have to say that it's worked really well and I'm very grateful for many of the ideas you've helped to put out there. So I wonder if you have any advice about how to circle the square here between scratching the itch of wanting to put something out that's my own, but also recognizing that money probably won't be a useful indicator of the value. And maybe another way of asking this is, you know, would you still write books yourself, Cal, if the financial incentive completely changed for the worse?

   2. CNCal Newport1:03:33

      Uh, pretty little cool question. Cool caller.

   3. SPSpeaker1:03:36

      Yeah.

   4. CNCal Newport1:03:36

      Plays guitar in, like, productions of Hamilton. Yeah.

   5. SPSpeaker1:03:39

      I always like the questions because I never know what the answers are gonna be.

   6. CNCal Newport1:03:43

      Uh, that's true. Yeah. Um, like I'm gonna surprise everyone now by saying, uh, you need to become a private equity investor.

   7. SPSpeaker1:03:50

      [laughs]

   8. CNCal Newport1:03:50

      That's the... See, this is the key. Greed makes the world go around. Uh, I'm embarrassed by your lack of money. That makes you lesser. No, I'm [laughs] joking with that. Uh, it's a good question. Right. So, like, I think the core of this question is, uh, he's really good at guitar. Uh, he has a career with the guitar, but he, he also wants to... There's things he wants to do with it. He wants to produce new stuff in the world. It sounds like he wants to record his own music. And the question is like, how much should that take up, and how much does he, like, focus on that? Uh, how much income can that put in? All right. I'm gonna give a couple of sorted thoughts here. One, uh, you do have to get your financial house in order. Like, this c- goes back to the sorta Scott Galloway tough love from earlier. You know, y- you need to support yourself. You need some financial security. You need to make sure that you don't have to deal with the stresses of, like, it's hard to make, uh, ends meet. You do not wanna chase an interest to, uh, financial difficulty, right? So that's gotta be a baseline here. So this might mean... And, and we didn't get into the details of this. Uh, maybe if you have a good unionized pit job, like, that's fine. Like, playing in the orchestras and stuff, and if you, if you do that work well, then that's, like, fine financially. If that's the case, great. You need to keep doing that as your foundation. If that's not a good enough foundation, you have to find a way to expand that foundation. Like, it's not sexy, but it's like you gotta get, uh, you gotta get the, the, the financial house in order. And then so this could be music related. It could, it could be, um, whatever it is, uh, lessons, instruction. I don't know the world well. I don't know the world well. Sound engineering, sound design. Uh, but make sure that financial house is in order. If that's in order, and then there are sort of related pursuits that are not greatly remunerative, but, like, are, are interesting and really scratch an itch, have those in there as well. I think that's fine. Even if it's difficult and you have to fight to make time, I think that's fine. Let me give an example in my own life. You ask about books, like what would I, would I write books if it wasn't super financially rewarding. No. Here's the actual case study that's relevant for my life, for example. Uh, writing for The New Yorker. Right? That's not, like, a super financially lucrative thing, and it certainly, uh, takes a lot of time and takes a lot of, uh, z- you know, focus, right? It's, like, really hard to write those articles. But I really, really like doing it. I've been a writer my whole life, and it's a fantastic venue for creating new writing at a level that... Uh, uh, my books tend to be more broad audience. Uh, you know, I like to do the smart self-help style where I, I have prescriptive advice with ideas. That's, like, its own thing. And my academic writing is very narrow audience, and The New Yorker is just... It, it's a creation that hits an audience in a way, uh, and it makes me a better writer and it's creatively very fulfilling. So that could be the, the, the equivalent of in your own life to having, like, a musical pursuit that is, uh, y- you know, it's impressive and important and pushes your skills and has impact, but is not, you know, gonna make you wealthy. It's not gonna be how you pay your mortgage. I think that's absolutely fine So that is fine. The trap to avoid, and I always tell people, is don't follow an interest into poverty. Don't follow an interest into a difficult situation. You have to solve the... Solving the difficult financial situation has to be s- the foundation. And then you can kind of go out of your way to make the, this other part of music in your life a major part of your life, and that's fine. But just make sure the foundation is very stable first. I like that you played. We should get more people, like, playing music on their calls.

   9. SPSpeaker1:07:19

      Yeah.

   10. CNCal Newport1:07:20

       Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right, uh, we got a case study. Actually, Jesse, at the event we did last

8. 1:07:27 – 1:14:14

   Shifting a mindset to do more deep work

   1. CNCal Newport1:07:27

      week, one of the people who came to get their book signed says, "I love the case studies. Make sure, like, you keep getting Jesse to put those in."

   2. SPSpeaker1:07:33

      Okay.

   3. CNCal Newport1:07:34

      So this is, for whoever that was, here's our case study. This is where people send in some notes about their personal experience putting this type of advice we talk about into practice. This one comes from Don. Don said, "I just wanted to share details about the end result of the deep work and time block planning practices I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain. At the time, I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race, and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work. Your Time-Block Planner and podcast were regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note, the book just received a starred review from Kirkus, and the review noted the book's, quote, 'meticulous research.' That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions, and I can't thank you enough." And this book, which just came out, is called Astrochimps: America's First Astronauts. And it's a cool case study, right? I mean, we get, we get flack for the sort of hardware portion of the pursuit of the deep life. This idea of, like, you kind of have to, like, get your crap together and be organized and, and be control, have control over your time and, uh, control of your obligations and be a little defensive in your time management so you can make sure that you're making progress on the stuff that really matters. Um, yeah, it's a little constraining, but it also is, like, what produces, like, a cool new book. It's what, like, allowed Don to take this potential to produce something new in the world that's really interesting that wasn't there before and actually act on it. Like, that's not gonna be something that just, you know, you're gonna stumble into, or I'll work on it when I'm interested. Like, at some point you gotta control your time to some degree. You gotta put in the deep hours, even the days you don't wanna do it, you know? So I think that's a, that's, that's a cool example of, like, what we're going for here. We're not trying to optimize something. We're not trying to science bro out and be like the superhumans and live for 150 years. We're not trying to do this type of thing. But we wanna finish the book and get a starred review, you know. We wanna be able to move to this cool place, uh, and have the freedom to mountain bike half the day. Like, the, the, the, the things that make, like, the standard deep life deep, it's hard to do without some good hardware in which you're running. That does require that, like, I control my time. I, I control my obligations. Like, I, I have to have some say on this chaos if in it I'm gonna form something that's really cool. So I thought that was a cool case study. I'll check out that book, Astrochimps, and Don, thanks for sending that in. All right, we got a final segment, but first, Jesse, let's do a couple more sponsors. [whooshing sound] Wanna talk about our friends at Policygenius, the country's leading online insurance marketplace. It will save you time and money as you provide your family a financial net starting today. With Policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for up to a million dollars of coverage. Some options offer same-day approval and would allow you to avoid unnecessary medical exams. The thing is, life insurance is one of these things that, you know, if there's people who depend on you, you know you need, you know you probably don't have enough. What's holding you back from doing this is just the logistics. How do I get life insurance? That sounds complicated. That's why I like Policygenius. Uh, you go online. It helps you compare options from top co- companies. There's licensed experts to help answer your questions and help you through it, and you figure this out quickly. Great. This one, this one, this is a great price. I like this. I like the insurer. Click the button, and you're rock and rolling. It just makes it easy to get the life insurance that you know you probably need. It takes the ambiguity out of the process. Um, and I love the fact that y- Policygenius is the broker, so they are giving you unbiased opinions about this is a good one, that's a good one, here's how much this one costs. So, you know, you, you're not just going straight to one life insurer. You get to see multiple different options. So check life insurance off your to-do list in no time when you use Policygenius. You have to head to policygenius.com/deepquestions or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and to see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com/deepquestions. I also want to talk about our longtime sponsors at Grammarly. We talk about this all the time on the show, but no matter what kind of work you do, the clarity of your communication is key. This is how you present yourself to the world. The more clear and professional your communication, the more capable and professional people will assume that you are. Grammarly can help you make your communication clearer. It is your AI writing partner to help you communicate more effectively and efficiently so you can make that bigger impact. Grammarly, here's the thing. It works across 500,000 apps and websites, right? So you can use this wherever it is that you're already doing your writing, uh, for- What is it now? Fourteen years they've been using different AI strategies to help you figure out not just what's going on with my grammar, but to help you do much more, uh, sophisticated things like figuring out a better way to write something, to give you ideas for what you're about to write. Tone detection is a feature I really like. Here is the tone of this, what you just wrote. How professional is it? Can we adjust the tone on it? Is there a better way to say what I'm saying? Uh, Grammarly keeps getting better and better as they up the AI background, uh, engine behind what they're doing, and it really is like having a partner that looks over your shoulder and just like, "Well, let's change that. This could be a little bit better. Why don't we rewrite it this way? This is, this is reading as non-professional or too professional." You use it wherever you write to make your writing clearer and to make your writing more professional. That's why ninety-six percent of Grammarly users reports that it helps them craft more impactful writing. So make a bigger impact at work with Grammarly. Sign up and download for free at grammarly.com/podcast. That's G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/podcast. Easier said done. All right, let's do our final segment. [whooshing sound] All right, final segment. Uh, one of the things I like to do is react to interesting things in the news that are relevant to our quest here to find more depth in a world full of digital distractions.

9. 1:14:14 – 1:22:07

   Is the Al Pin the End of Smartphones?

   1. CNCal Newport1:14:14

      Um, I wanna bring up on the screen here for those who are watching, here's a review from The Verge of this new product that people have been talking about, the AI Pin, um, the Humane AI Pin. Let me read the first paragraph here of this review. "The idea behind the Humane AI Pin is a simple one. It's a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system Humane calls CosOS," like cosmos. "Want to make a phone call, send a text message, calculate the tip, write something down, or learn the population of Copenhagen? Just ask the AI Pin. It uses a cellular connection to be online all the time and a network of AI models to try to answer your questions and execute your commands. It's not just an app, it's all the apps." Right? So what they're pitching here at Humane, that for the Humane AI Pin is that this is like a, uh, a bridge to a post-smartphone world. I just talked to this thing that looks like the Star Trek communicator pin. You actually touch this thing to turn it on, and you just ask it things, and it can give you back information. One of the weirder features of this is... I'm gonna show this to you, Jesse. There's a picture of it later. Uh, it has a laser... I don't even know what you call this. Yeah, here we go. Laser projector. It's like, how do you get numbers and information from this pin? Like, instead of it talking, and you, you can see this if you're looking on the screen, it will... You can hold your hand in front of this thing, and it uses like a laser to like draw monochromatic numbers and letters, like it can like print on your hand. So like here's a picture of it like actually printing some information on someone's hand. So it's the, the AI Pin. Um, all right. Does this work well? Oh, here's another picture of that. Does this work well? Uh, no, not yet. That's the review here in The Verge is like, it does everything terribly. [laughs] It's just, it just doesn't work very well. It's, it's seven hundred dollars. Um, no, the, the technology's not quite there. That's the review that The Verge... I haven't tried it. That's the review The Verge gets it. Why, what do I think is interesting about this though? 'Cause if you read this review and you read the marketing materials for the, the, the pin, like this question comes up. Like here is my first question. Like isn't this a problem that it's already solved with like our smartphones and Siri? Like what... Can't you just have like an AirPod in and just like, "Hey, Siri, what's the population of Copenhagen? Hey, Siri, can you, uh, add to my to-do list to do whatever?" I mean, look, this technology with these tools is becoming better, especially as they can use large language models. Uh, what's the problem here? Why do we want to be talking into a Star Trek communicator and having it use a laser projector to put low fidelity monochrome on our hand? I mean, look, if it... We thought Google Glass was gonna get you beaten up. I mean, this is gonna get you thrown in a river. Here's what's interesting. It becomes clear when you read this that the problem they're solving is not, oh, there's no way to actually just have like a voice interface with a computer to get things done, because our, our phones do this. The problem is people don't wanna look at their phones. It's such an attention landmine for so many people that they might consider talking into this sort of dork pin and looking at laser projections on their hand just so they don't have to turn on their phone and be grabbed by all the stuff on there that's like grabbing their attention and manipulating them and making them unhappy and miserable. It's like we're going through great lengths with this product to avoid using a product that already does all this thing really well. So to me, the real story here is not the Humane Pin's technology, but the technology that, uh, it is helping us flee, which is our existing phones. So what's the solution here if you want something like the Humane Pin technology is take that junk off your phone. Remove from your phone any app where a multi-billion dollar company makes money the more you look at the app. You don't wanna have to fight that battle every time you need to know the, the population of Copenhagen. Take all that off your phone. Make your phone boringer. It has your calendar and your email and text messages, and you can look up stuff, have Siri look stuff up for you, or you can look it up on like the Safari browser, and like that's it. You l- use it to listen to audio and like to send text messages to your friends and like to, to, maps. Make your phone like the, the Steve Job version of the iPhone from two thousand and seven, and now the problems that the Humane AI Pin are solving are already solved. You could just look at your phone when you need something, or if you don't wanna take your phone out, talk to Siri. That's the takeaway I'm, I'm, I'm coming from this, is that people are drowning in their phones, and instead of trying to build alternatives to the phones, I think we just need to make the phone experience better that doesn't require new technology, that requires the elimination of technology that's on there right now. Like, just to have the boldness to say, "Just because TikTok exists doesn't mean it needs to be on here. Just because people are talking about things on Twitter doesn't mean I need to be on Twitter seeing what they're saying. Just because, like, YouTube has, like, these interesting Sam Sulek videos, I don't need, like, the YouTube app on my phone to watch it. I can watch things on TV when it comes time to watch things on TV." We can fix this problem by fixing our relationship to the technology instead of trying to come up with these weird technologies that are doing an end run around it. It's the same way I feel about, uh, these sort of dumb phone technologies, which I think are, are great for things like my kid needs a phone, I don't want them to have access to the internet. That's a fantastic use of a dumb phone. If it's I don't trust myself as a grown-up to use my phone, then it becomes more of a, like, you need to grow the hell up moment. Get the junk off your phone. Focus on the stuff that matters. Sto- if... Don't use this stuff that is making you not even trust yourself with your phone. That's a problem. Solve the problem. You shouldn't have that problem, you know? Don't, don't go through the elaborate routines to try to, like, not be exposed to alcohol if you're an alcoholic. Uh, you know, get your addiction under control, right? So that's where I am on this. Um, we don't need to end run around our phones. We need to just actually transform our phones to be much more boring, and then Siri or whatever can answer our questions about Copenhagen and book a... put something on our to-do list and sh- tell us what's on our calendar. If we need to see something, we can just look at this beautiful high-res screen as opposed to a weird monochromatic laser trying to draw it on our hands. It all works fine. We just have to repair the relationship with this thing. We can't avoid it forever. It's like that weird aunt you have. You're eventually gonna see her at Thanksgiving anyway, so you might as well fix the relationship. That's the way that I think more people need to think about their phone. So, uh, uh, I'm not rushing out to buy an AI Pin. I'm not bullish on this technology because I think we already invented this technology. We just have to make it less something that we're, uh, afraid of. $700 too. Yeah. Yeah, not cheap. You could buy a fridge for that. You could buy a fridge for that. [laughs] I just had to buy a fridge for that. I see. I was like... [laughs] I was gonna say. I was like, "That's true-" [laughs] "... but also a little non sequiturious." Okay. Yes, you could buy a fridge with that. That's our review. Save your money and buy a refrigerator instead of buying the AI Humane. All right. Well, speaking of which, I think that's all the time we have. Uh, thank you everyone who sent in their questions and calls and case studies. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed today's episode about getting the hardware in your life upgraded, you might enjoy episode 292, where we talk about using single purpose notebooks as a great tool for exploring interesting ideas. Check it out. So at the last minute as I was running out the door, I grabbed the Field Notes notebook

Episode duration: 1:22:08