Most Self-Help Advice Is Wrong. Here's The Fastest Way To Transform Your Life | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So I got a lot of strong responses to my recent episode in which I interviewed Arthur Brooks about his book, Build the Life You Want. There clearly is a real hunger out there for transforming your life into something more intentional and more deep. I think this holds whether you're starting from a place of chaos and misery that you wanna escape, or if you're a generally successful, happy person, but are craving something more noteworthy with your life. Uh, the key question for anyone who's interested in this path is what is the first step? So traditional advice here is real clear. Figure s- yourself out. Look down at that nasal, gaze at it, figure out your deepest passion, your values, and let that motivate everything that happens. On my show, I tend to argue, "No, no, start with discipline first. Establish a self-identity as a disciplined person before you do any of the big think or take any of the radical steps." So today, I wanna experiment with a closer, more specific look at this idea of starting the path to a deep life with discipline 'cause I wanna get specific about this. I'm gonna argue in particular for the notion that the very first thing you should do on this path to depth is organize your life outside of work. So get organized about your family life, your personal life, the stuff you do outside of your job, to be in control of your schedule, to feel on top of your obligations, to be able to consistently make time for the things that matter in your life outside of work. Of course, being organized in your job is important too, but that's a very complicated thing. We go into detail about that on the show. Knowledge work is confusing and overwhelming. You essentially need a doctorate in organizational psychology to stay on top of email and chat and meetings, and that's a whole other issue, and it's much more difficult and a longer-term pro- uh, project. But what I wanna argue is you start with your life outside of work, what you can completely control. Get organized there, and this will be the first step towards constructing a more meaningful life. So here's how I wanna do this today. I'll start by expanding on my case for why this should be your target for the first step, and then I'll give you a crash course. I got three ideas. Do one, followed by two, followed by three. That can get you a lot closer to feeling on top of all the stuff that's going on in your life. So let's start with this why question. Why start with non-professional organization on your quest for depth? Well, as you've heard, if you've listened or seen my show before, I do think it's important to get a practice with discipline as one of the first things you do, um, and you're gonna get that by organizing your life. So it's compatible with that idea. It is a particular discipline pursuit that you, uh, could follow. So, so everything I'm saying here is compatible with my old discussions. This is something to do to organize your life that is gonna require discipline. But why this particular a- activity among all of the other experiments you could do to get more used to discipline? Why organization instead of exercise or fitness or reading more books or learning to play the guitar? Well, there's a few specific advantages I think this particular step towards discipline actually has. Number one, it reduces the background hum of stress that makes aspiration and ambition difficult to grow. So if in your life outside of work, you have this chaotic feeling of, "My car needs to go get its emissions inspection, and I know my gutters are in a terrible shape, and I haven't dealt with my flooded basement, and, uh, I haven't decorated the walls in this room, and, um, I, I, I haven't called my sister in a while." Like, you have all these things swirling around just in your head. You have this sense of stress and chaos and reactivity in this time that should otherwise be yours to control. That is not fertile soil for ambition to grow. That is not fertile soil for aspiration to grow. It's not fertile soil for you to develop a clear vision for what you want in your life. So it's a discipline pursuit that's also making your subjective context more hospitable than everything else, for everything else that's gonna follow in the quest for more depth. Uh, it's also gonna give you more mental peace and free time for reflection. So once you're in control of your obligations, so you've reduced the background hum of stress, you then are able to take control of your time, and now can regularly make time for the self-reflective activities, the regular long walks through the woods, the meditation, whatever it might be, in which you're gonna start to have insights about what matters to you. When you have control over your schedule, this is where you're gonna start making time for things like reading good books or exposing yourselves to interesting movies, uh, or series that themselves are gonna have moments of resonance. "Ooh, wait a second. Something in this is really speaking to me. There's an insight. Let me pluck that out. My image of what I want in my life is now clicking a couple more, uh, degrees towards being in focus." So you're gonna have more time and space for the type of activities that are gonna help you get clarity about how to move forward from here. Um, it will support then, it's my third advantage, any of the other discipline pursuits that you might later put into place as part of your quest for a deeper life. So as that vision comes into focus, if you have control of your obligations and your time, your free time, you're now much more easily able to enact the plans you might come up with as you get more specific about where you want your life to go. And finally, it's gonna give you pragmatic insight into what's already going on in your life, and we'll see this as I get more specific, uh, in the second half of the deep dive here. But as you actually confront your schedule and your time and your obligations, you confront where are you spending your time. And when you confront how you're spending your time, you get a sense of do I like what I'm doing here or there? It gives you a really, I would say, objective snapshot of what's actually going on in my life right now, and it allows you to make some better decisions about, wow, I'm really spending a lot of time on my phone or watching dumb shows or, you know, getting blasted with my friends every night. You have to confront that reality if you're gonna try to gain control of your time outside of work. So I really think in general, starting with discipline, yes, I still agree that's the first step towards the deep life, not with deep vision. But if you're gonna choose something that's gonna help you get more discipline, do this one. This is gonna be my argument. Organize your life. Take control of your reins, because you're gonna kill a lot of birds with the same stone. All right, so how do you do this? We talk a lot on this show about organizing your work life, as I mentioned before, and that's its own complicated beast. In some sense, the whole art of modern day digital enhanced knowledge work is figuring out your system that can, uh, ebb and flow with the influx and tame it, and it's, it's, it's like your job. You're a lion tamer, but instead of lions, it's emails, and it's a whole complicated thing. Your life outside of work is a lot different. You still have the same issues of overload and keeping track of things just in your head, the tension between reactivity and proactivity in terms of your schedule, the tendency to be pulled into the simple and r... uh, the simple and passive as opposed to the rewarding but difficult and active. All that's still there, but it's at a much slower pace, and you have a lot more autonomy and flexibility about how you deal with your life outside of work. So it's, it's an easier environment for organization. So I'm gonna pitch you a much simpler to implement system here that is streamlined for exactly this context of life outside of work. So what I'm gonna do is start by describing a dead simple system for life organization. Right? Once I've explained that system, uh, I have two additional steps about what comes next after this system is in place. All right, so here's a, a basic system to get started. It's gonna have three components: a calendar, file storage, and a mail sorter. See if I have that right. Mail sorter, calendar, file storage. All right. That's all you're gonna need. It's much simpler than work. Let's go through this. The particular order I want to go through this in is let's start with file storage, and what I mean here is a, a dual solution, a physical and a digital place that you could store things. The physical, uh, is a filing cabinet. We're talking manila folders in a filing cabinet. If you don't want to buy a cabinet for your apartment, just get a file box. Get on Amazon, nine dollars. Uh, it's like a cardboard box with two metal rods where you can hang hanging file folders in it, right? So you, you... No matter where you are, you can have one of these. Digital, uh, whatever, Google Drive, Dropbox, just a place where you can have digital files all stored. Now, what are we gonna do with the physical storage? Uh, this is where you store anything that is a physical piece of paper you need to hold onto. You have a place to put it. So we're talking receipts. We're talking, I don't know, tax forms, warranty cards, et cetera. This sounds obvious, but most people don't have this, and it creates a lot of stress. So you need a place where I need to hold onto this piece of paper. I know where to put it. I know where to find it. It'll take you five minutes to set this up, but it is going to continually give you rewards in terms of less stress, just knowing where that thing is. Your digital storage then is where you do the same thing for digital artifacts that you know you need to hold onto. Now, here's a tip. Often, the thing you need to hold onto might come to you in the form of an, uh, an email or a web page. You know, you filled out your estimated tax payment for your state in online, and there's a page that says, "Hey, you've done that." You could print all of this stuff out and store it, or little known tip, but I think a useful one, when you go to print... 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. You can select, oh, what I want to print to is a PDF. And anything you could normally print to your printer, you can print to a PDF file, which you can then drop in your Google Drive, drop in your, uh, Dropbox, right? So digital things that you need. Here's a record. Here's the email saying that you're confirmed for this house reservation. Digital, throw it in. So you got two places, digital, physical. Stuff goes in there that you know you need to keep track of. All right, that's gonna be the easiest of our three components of the basic system. Now let's move on to the second, uh, calendar. I'm gonna suggest a digital calendar, and I'm gonna suggest when it comes to your life outside of work, that you make your calendar the engine of your organization. You are going to run your life outside of work from your digital calendar. So this calendar is gonna have, of course, uh, meetings or appointments. I'm supposed to go to the doctor. We're, you know, going over to the cousin's house for dinner. Sure. But you should also use it for one-time tasks and regular occurring activities. So where are your workouts? You have them on your calendar. This is when I do them. It's on the calendar. Um, let's say you have a one-time task. Ah, I gotta change the tires on my car. I'm kind of sliding around a little bit. Don't put it on a to-do list. I'm gonna suggest calendar, specific day, specific time. This is when I am going to change the tires on my car. I gotta fill out paperwork for my kids' summer camp, for example. Uh, if you don't wanna choose a specific time for it, choose a specific day and add that as an all-day event at the top of the column corresponding to that day in your digital calendar. So what I'm suggesting here is quite different than what I suggest in the world of work. I am not gonna suggest when you're getting, uh, when you're new To personal life organization, I'm not gonna suggest complicated to-do list. Everything lives on your calendar, you live off your calendar. What's going on today? Or I'm at work, but outside of... Or see, on the way to work, I'm doing this, um, and during work at some point today, I gotta fill out this paperwork, and then I'm leaving work early because I see from 4:00 to 5:00 I'm stopping by, uh, whatever the party supply store. It's on your calendar, the things you need to do. Now, here's the key. Everything's there. Anything you need to remember to do exists on a day, so it's not in your head. Now you're able to get a little bit of peace. You just trust your calendar. You see what you're supposed to do on a particular day. Things will get done. You don't have to remember it. You don't have to look in a personal inbox on your email and see someone bothering you about something. You know it's being taken care of. Now, of course, if you have a very complicated life, you can move on and use a business style to-do list. But for a lot of people, this is, this is enough. Now, here's the secret advantage, the sort of beneficial side effect of using the calendar to drive your personal life, is you now have control over optional important things. Because you're just used to this idea of what's on my calendar for today outside of work, okay, that's what I'm doing. Those things can be unmissable appointments like your dentist, but it can also be things that you have optionally decided are important. Yeah, I'm going to the gym, and this is when I'm doing it. You know, uh, I'm going for a long walk because I wanna have a period each week to be more meditative, and I work from home, and I do this in the afternoon on Friday because we don't usually have meetings then. It's something that's optional but important. It's on your calendar. You treat it the same as the dentist appointment. So now you have the ability to mix and match optional high value activities into your day. So you've gained more control over how your time is being, uh, invested in a way that you wouldn't have if you do what the default chaotic approach is, which is you get home from work and say, "What do I wanna do next?" "I'm not in the mood to walk," and, "Oh my God, this thing is due. My kids' camp forms are late. I just got an email about it, so let me, like, stay up late and desperately do it." When you're just, "Hey, what do I want to do tonight?" you don't have a lot of control. When you have everything on your calendar in advance, you gain a lot more control. Now, what you want to do with details for these activities, so, you know, you're meeting someone, where are they going to be and what's the instructions for getting to their building? Or, you know, you're, you need to go to the mechanic, and you have some notes about what the problem is and what, you know, you want to look for. On your digital calendar, you just add this to the event. You click on the event. In any digital calendar, you have a big info thing, Details it's usually called. You just paste any information right in there. So not only do you know when I get to something on the calen-- when I need to do something, I'll get to it on my calendar, you also know that the details I need for doing that thing will be right there in the event. We're getting clarity. We're getting peace here. Now, what if it's a lot of paperwork or something that's too voluminous to actually have, uh, connected to a calendar event? Well, then that thing will be in your file storage system that we talked about in part one. It'll be a PDF in a Google Drive, or it'll be printed papers in your filing cabinet. So you would just put a pointer to that in the event. Yes, all the paperwork for summer camp is in the filing cabinet under Summer Camp twenty twenty-four, and the paperwork's there. So what we're going for here is you know where everything is, everything is taken care of, uh, is accounted for in your schedule. You simply just run your day off of what's there on your calendar. This is how you're going to start to get mental peace. This is how you're going to start to escape the sense of chaos. All right. The final piece of this system is what I'm calling the mail sorter. And I'm going to get traditional here. And by traditional, I mean straight out of our gospel of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Have a physical mail sorter. A mail sorter is just a open box. Three sides of the box, no top, no front, uh, or sometimes it's just one big open box. Uh, it traditionally was where you would actually put mail into it before it, it came in, before you would actually sort through it. We are going to use a physical mail sorter that is a-at your house, and I suppose if you work at a different office, you could have a mail sorter related to your personal life there as well. This is going to be the incoming filter for everything that shows up during your day relevant to your life outside of work that you need to handle at some point. Now, this is straight up David Allen. Put it in the mail sorter, and we'll deal with it at regular intervals. In my business productivity, my professional productivity advice, one of my core arguments is the mail sorter, as David Allen talks about in Getting Things Done, can't keep up with digital professional life. If I'm getting a hundred fifty emails a day, a mail sorter, well, this is not really relevant anymore. But it is still appropriate for most people's personal life, where, A, you're still dealing with a lot of physical paper. I got mailed something from the IRS or a bill from my doctor. I got mailed it I need to deal with. Put it in the mail sorter. My kid brought home some paperwork from school I have to fill out. Put it in the mail sorter, right? So you get more, you have more physical artifacts corresponding to your obligations in your personal life. So as things show up in the day, you put them in your mail sorter. What if something comes to mind that doesn't have a physical artifact? Uh, maybe you notice something. I gotta get the, a landscaping team to come and whatever. I just noticed it when I walked in, and, and our, our bushes are crazy, and I don't know how to trim them. Or someone tells you something on the street, like, "Hey, do you know it's, like, back to school nights coming up," or something like this. So you don't have a physical artifact. Well, next to your mail sorter, have a stack of paper or a stack of index cards and a pen, and this is pure David Allen, jot it on the thing, throw it in the mail sorter. It becomes a physical thing. Same thing with emails that come in in your personal email address. Oh, here's like the complicated instructions for your kid's, uh, spirit week or something like that. Print it, put it in the mail sorter, or, uh, jot down a note, and you can put that in your digital filing cabinet. You know, jot down a note, make a plan for our spirit week. So everything that shows up of, "Oh, my God, I gotta take care of this in my life," goes into this one box. And then on a semi-regular basis, you process this box, and you go through, and you gotta put aside time for this, but you go through, and I would suggest having enough time when you sort through this box that you can actually deal with the short duration obligations right there. I'll just pay this doctor bill. Let me just fill out this paperwork. Now, you can do the short things real quick, and some things you might come to and say, "This is actually not relevant," or, "Let me just file this away." And for the bigger things that require more time, goes on your calendar. Well, let me find a time when I am going to call the landscaping company to have them come out. I'll put this on my calendar over here. Let me find time when I'm gonna do the camp paperwork. This is more complicated. All right, I'm gonna add this to this sort of task block I have on my calendar for, you know, an upcoming Sunday. And you make your way through, either doing it or scheduling it on your calendar. Now, you may ask, "Well, how do I know to go through the mail sorter?" That too is scheduled on your calendar. See how everything kind of connects together here? So you're driving your life on your calendar. So one of the regular things you have on there once or twice a week, go through the mail sorter, and you give yourself thirty to forty-five minutes on your calendar. So all of these things connect together, and now you can handle stuff that's coming at you from all directions. It gets collected. It gets processed. It gets executed with all the information needed, you know, clear where it is when it comes time to execute it. For most people's personal lives, this basic system is enough to keep up with what's going on, to give you the peace of mind of stuff that needs to get done, gets handled. I'm not feeling chaotic. I'm not forgetting or losing things. So start with that basic system if you don't already have any system in your personal life. All right, now I have two more steps about how to build on top of the foundation of this system. Step two, now we're gonna get a little more advanced, automate what's important. So now we're going to, now that we're living our life on this calendar, we're gonna take more advantage of this. So what you need to do is set up automatic schedules on your calendar for things that are important and happen more than once, right? So this might mean household stuff that ha- happens semi-annually. Um, this is when I need to clean my gutters. Let me have a note on my calendar recurring for those three times a year or two times a year I do it, so it'll just show up when I get there, call and set up gutter cleaning. Put the information right there in the reminder. Okay, here it is. Here's the, here's the number to, to, for the gutter cleaning people that we like. Car maintenance, it just shows up. This is when I do it. This is when I go in to get my car looked at and my oil changed. Now, if you're doing something for the first time, I just bought a car, it's fine to just put the first car maintenance on there, and then when you get there, that task is gonna require you to find a mechanic and figure out what needs to be done. But then you can update that information for all future occurrences of that task. So the, the information in these recurring tasks can get richer as you learn more. Exercise, make this regular. It should just show up regularly on your calendar when you want to do it. Think about things like time outdoors. I need that time to help me unwind from the, the chaos of the, the digital urban world. Make that regular. Yeah, Friday morning I go and do this. Since, after I drop off the kids, I, I start my workday a little late. I, I walk this path. It's on my calendar. It happens regularly. So you want to spend more time with friends. Say, "Here's what I'm going to do. Two evenings a week are always blocked off." So I don't schedule anything else during those evenings from, like, six to nine, maybe Thursday and Friday. And my plan is, at the beginning of every week, just try to invite someone. Whoever I kind of run into early in the week, say, "Hey, do you want to grab something Thursday night or Friday night?" Because you know those days are always free. You always have time held aside for doing something with friends. And now you just have to have the heuristic of, okay, when I, next friend I run into, if I don't yet have plans for this week, I say, "Let's just do X, Y, and Z. I have the time, uh, free." This time is being regularly protected, as you're automating what's important to you. Don't worry about getting a perfect set of activities to automate. What's the complete set of things I need to remember to do? What's the complete set of things that I want to do that's going to make my life deeper? You'll get better at that as you advance through the process that follows of making your life deeper. All this will be refined. Just get in the habit now of automating what's important. If you're going to live your life off the calendar, get all the stuff that you want or have to do on there. All right, step three, and this is sort of the secret sauce that is really going to set you up for building a deep life. Reduce what's not important. One of the key side effects of living your personal life off your calendar is that you will get a very clear understanding of where your time goes. Because you are putting these things on your calendar. You are seeing what you don't have time for, or when you don't have time for something, what parts of the week, and why you don't have time for it. What is it that's getting in the way? Is there a particular activity that's eating up a lot of time and not leaving much left? Is it your work? You know, now that I'm being honest, like, I have to usually work a couple hours in the evening. I don't have enough time to do almost anything else. That's an incredibly important realization to have and confront if that's true. Maybe your energy is not there. You find, like, I scheduled this ambitious ninety-minute CrossFit workout every evening at seven because in my mind, on paper, that's an open time, but I never really have the energy to do it. That's clear feedback. That's not the right time of your day to be doing this. So you can now go through and reconfigure and reduce what's in your life based on your knowledge. So you should be doing this maybe a month into running this system. Give yourself a month to get a sense of what's going on. Then come through and say, "No more of this. I'm gonna stop doing this activity. My plan here is, uh, not working, so I'm gonna reconfigure it. Yeah, fitness, actually, here's what I need to do. I need to do this first thing in the morning. Let me change how I do my work. Let me have, uh, no meetings before 10:00." Like you could, y- I'm gonna reconfigure, and I'm gonna reduce. So this is where now you get in and start monkeying around with your life to make it work better. And this is where you begin to really get that exposure of crafting and cultivating intentionally what your life to be. None of this is possible if you don't yet have this foundation of the basic system where things are captured and scheduled, you run your life on your calendar, the important stuff shows up regularly. If you don't already have that foundation, it's hard to monkey with your life. You're like, "Ah, I wanna go to the gym more, and let me, uh... Why is this not working? I j- I signed up for this thing, and, and it's sporadic, and it's, and it's, uh, haphazard, and some things stick and some things don't." You get to this step three about a month into what I'm suggesting here. It's gonna be a completely different picture. You will feel like you're firmly at the wheel of the car that is your life and can actually aim it in different ways and have a good sense of what's happening on the road, if we're gonna stretch that metaphor. So all three steps of these together, that's to get control. So yes, generally speaking, organizing your life in this way will give you exposure to discipline, and you'll feel more efficacious, so anything else you wanna take on, you'll have a more disciplined self-identity. "Yeah, I can actually do stuff that's hard." But more importantly, you have the concrete tools in place that directly affect how you spend your time. And it's from there that almost everything else is gonna seem possible. So anyways, this is experimental. I'm trying to get specific here. I'm, I'm toying with this idea of being specific about organization, getting control of your life as being the first step towards depth, the first layer, details for th- the first layer of The Deep Life Stack. But let me know what you think about it as well. I'm interested in feedback here and case studies. You can always send that to jesse@calnewport.com. But I think the, I think we're onto something here, Jesse. I think someone feeling organized, how could you not then be better prepared to make changes? And on the flip side of that, if your life is chaotic, that's difficult. Almost... I mean, you can do things in fits of inspiration, but what's gonna stick?

Speaker 27:10 Yeah. Um, do you find that you still use your physical filing system as much as you did in the past now that so much stuff is digital?

Cal Newport 27:19 We have... Yeah, we do. We do. In fact, uh, our, our problem is it's on my task list. So if I was using this basic system, it would be on my calendar. And I'm probably gonna go back. I've merged too much of my task management in life outside of work with my work system, which is this, like, very complicated system. I might go back to the calendar system because, like, for example, one of the things I need to do is I have, I have to clean out... Our filing cabinet's full, and I have to go through and clean out stuff we don't need because now we're having a hard time, w- we meaning my wife and I, um, just being able to, like, o- fit the folder in because there's so many things in there. I definitely have learned this. As we get older, as we've had a whole mess of kids, there's a lot of physical filing.

Speaker 28:01 Mm.

Cal Newport 28:02 Yeah, w- there's a lot of physical filing. I mean, a lot of it's financial, you know, too. It's just, like, taxes and receipts, but there's paperwork. The kids generate a lot of paperwork.

Speaker 28:11 Yeah. That makes sense.

Cal Newport 28:13 I-

Speaker 28:13 I don't use my physical one as much as I used to in the past 'cause-

Cal Newport 28:16 Are you doing more digital? Do you stor- do you have a, a set place you like to store your digital artifacts?

Speaker 28:22 Yeah, for the most part.

Cal Newport 28:23 Yeah.

Speaker 28:23 Yeah. I use an external hard drive and then some stuff in the cloud.

Cal Newport 28:27 Yeah. Okay. Smart. Um, so anyways, we got a bunch of questions coming up that all kinda roughly are gonna orbit this general topic of constructing the first steps or the steps involved in constructing a deep life. But first, let's hear from some sponsors. So I wanna talk about our friends at Cozy Earth. This is absolutely a true story, Jesse. So our house cleaner came yesterday, and as I went up to get in bed, uh, last night, yesterday night, I called out, "Oh, no." And my wife was like, "What's going on?" Thinking that, you know, like, something broke or something like that. Here was the issue: we had forgot to put out the Cozy Earth sheets for her to switch onto the bed, and she put on normal sheets.

Speaker 29:11 [laughs]

Cal Newport 29:12 And I said, and this is a, this is a word for word quote-

Speaker 29:15 [laughs]

Cal Newport 29:15 ... which shows how I'm certainly not pampered or privileged. I said, "This feels like sleeping on sandpaper." Because comparitive, comparatively speaking, we love our Cozy Earth sheets so much, uh, that it was, you know, essentially a tragedy that we didn't have our Cozy Earth sheets on. That's how much I enjoy Cozy Earth sheets. For those who don't know, I guess I should probably, uh, tell you, um, Cozy Earth was founded to transform lives by offering the softest, most luxurious, and responsibly sourced bedding in the world, a brand that made Oprah's Favorite Things five years in a row. Their bedding is ethically sourced using premium viscose, which is extracted from highly sustainable bamboo. This fabric is naturally temperature regulating and breathable. It's also, and I'm just saying this directly, super comfortable. It is really, really comfortable. That is why our normal sheets to me now feel like sandpaper. Um, if you don't believe me, try it out. They have a 100-night sleep trial, which means you have up to 100 nights to sleep on them, wash them, try them out. If you're not completely in love, you can return them within 100 days for a full refund. Uh, so I highly recommend Cozy Earth sheets. It's one of my favorite things. So if you've never tried Cozy Earth, I've got awesome news. Ooh, you can save up to 35% Off Cozy Earth right now. You have to hurry because this offer won't last. Go to cozyearth.com and enter the promo code CAL at checkout to get that up to 35% off on your first order. That's cozyearth.com, and use the promo code CAL, C-A-L, at checkout, cozyearth.com. Another product that I'm actually very happy to sponsor because it's something I use is LMNT, L-M-N-T, a zero-sugar electrolyte drink born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations. So it's a, a powder in a little s- uh, stick that you open up and add to your water bottle and then you shake up. Each stick delivers a meaningful dose of electrolytes free of sugar, artificial colors, or other dodgy ingredients. It's formulated for anyone on a mission to restore health through hydration and is perfectly suited for athletes, folks who are fasting, or those following keto, low-carb, whole food, or paleo diets. I'm actually, uh, reordering now. We just, just ran out, Jesse, because this time of year when my classes start back up again, this is actually a time that I need LMNT, and here's why. So, so the people they talk about, and I don't need to mean to nerdify myself, but in the ad copy, they talk about the people who have endorsed and use LMNT, US Olympic athletes, professional athletes, Navy SEALs, uh, FBI sniper teams. Here's why I use LMNT, is because on a typical teaching day at Georgetown, what's gonna happen? I'm up, and I'm getting after it right away because I, you know, I'm trying to get my writing in first thing in the morning. Um, and then, you know, I'm jumping to campus and doing meetings and teaching, and it's a lot of talking, which is very dehydrating. And what am I doing? I'm just drinking a lot of coffee. A lot of coffee, a lot of water. So I'm just sort of flushing my system, you know, hitting the head all the time because I'm drinking, and this is a conservative estimate, all the coffee, and I'm dehydrating myself speaking all the time. When I get home from a day of teaching, I need to get those electrolytes back in my body, and I use LMNT. So it's almost as cool as having to take some LMNT after your FBI sniper team mission. But it actually does help me. Um, also after my workouts, um, I'll even titrate. I'll do a half or a full depending on, you know, how dehydrated and, and how little salt I've been getting recently. So here's the good news. Members of our community here can receive a free LMNT sample, sample pack with any order if they purchase through drinklmnt.com/deep. So that's drinklmnt.com/deep. If you order through that URL, you get this free sample pack where you can try all sorts of different flavors. They also have this cool new product, which is great for the winter, called LMNT Hot. So we have, uh, flavors like chocolate, metally. Let's see. Their chocolate metally flavors include chocolate mint, chocolate chai, and chocolate raspberry. It's a LMNT drink designed to be, uh, have hot. So if you're out, like let's say exercising, running, it's cold, you want a hot drink, but you also want the LMNT advantage, that works really well. Um, you can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, just give away what you have, and LMNT will send you a money-back refund, uh, no questions asked. So go to drinklmnt.com/deep. That's LMNT, L-M-N-T, drinklmnt.com/deep to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order. All right, Jesse, let's get moving with some questions. All right, who

Cal Newport 34:27 do we have first today?

Speaker 34:28 First question's from Gonzalo. "How can I maintain a deeper life when I'm about to experience major changes in my personal and professional life? I'm going back to school, changing countries with a different language and culture. How can I maintain a deep life without being overwhelmed?"

Cal Newport 34:43 Um, we gotta talk about the definition of deep here. So I think if I'm reading your question properly, you're using a specific definition of deep that corresponds to maybe simplicity or corresponds to a very aggressive, carefully constructed leisure schedule. You know, um, I've built out this life where I'm, I'm doing this reading and this exercising and have these important hobbies and, um... So it's either simplicity or that. You think this is all gonna get broken up. It's gonna be chaotic, so how can I have this really carefully constructed set of activities, or how can I enjoy, like, a deep simplicity when I have all the chaos of moving and having the extra work of school and trying to learn a different language? But I wanna step back and say let's use a different definition for deep here and have it mean intentional. So to live a deep life means you're being very intentional about how you live. So during a period of transition, your intentions might be different than during a period of stability. So you have to ask, "What am I trying to focus on or preserve or get out of this transitional period?" And it might be about immersing myself in this new culture and, and in the academic program that I'm following and, and find meaning in that and not just have it be, uh, like a chore that I'm trying to overdo. Your intention might be trying to avoid a sense of overload or stress and, and be able to just have gratitude for where you are and not overdo it. You clarify your intentions, and you figure out how to structure a life around those intentions, and it might then look very different during this period than it might otherwise look, uh, during another stage of life. So I think if you, you think about this, depth is intention. Intentions have to match what's going on in your life. You have a big thing happening. It's a cool thing happening. But what you have to worry about during this time might be very different than what you have to worry about before. So clarify your vision for this period, make it realistic, make it values aligned. But also go easy on yourself. Don't put too much on your plate. This is not the time to pick up seven extra hobbies and try to train for the triathlon. Make your intentional plan, and then go after it. All right, what do we got next, Jesse?

Speaker 37:03 Next question's from Megan. "I work full time as a teacher, but I find

Speaker 37:07 it hard to balance personal and work obligations. There's never enough time. I work all week and then spend Sundays trying to catch up on all the needs that need to be done at home. I want to relax, but often can't because I feel overwhelmed."

Cal Newport 37:21 Well, let's see here. Uh, you're overwhelmed. So if I'm reading this correctly, your work is taking up a lot of time, which is common for teachers. It, it's one of the only jobs where nowadays you still have a lot of the reactivity that a normal knowledge worker has, emails and things you have to do, but you're given no time to actually do it during the workday because you're in the classroom, and you have to figure out how to get that done. So how do you find relaxation when you're always so busy? I'm going to move your focus away from time, and I'm going to move it towards psychology. So having an organizational system really tuned up for your professional life with capture and obligation list and the, the way you keep track of things that... So nothing is in your head. You're multiscale planning. You're in control of your time. Nothing's being held in your head. Having a tip-top organizational system is going to be important, not because it's going to find a way to fit all of your work into less time and you're going to have all this more free time, but because of the psychological benefit of you not having to bring home the stress of your work. The sense of control over your job makes it much easier to step away from your job when you have the chance. The second thing that I'm going to add, and this is related, is lean into your shutdown ritual. When your work is done, and it might be later than you would hope it to be, you have a clear shutdown ritual, which when working in conjunction with your, your system during work, which means I actually trust that I'm on top of things, your mind can trust shutting down. So the shutdown ritual is basically going to train your mind it's okay to let go. The organizational system is going to make that even feasible. But just being organized and having your, uh, systems tip-top shape for your work is not enough by itself for you to be able to clear your mind because there's just a psychological nag of, "I don't trust myself." So that's where the shutdown ritual then helps. You put these two things together, and you get the psychological benefit of separation. Regardless of what you do with that free time or how much free time you have, it's much more restorative because it's not being shared with work. And when those things remain blended throughout all of your waking hours, that's where the burnout enters the scene. Clear separation makes this a lot easier. At that point, then you might want to have a more careful approach about how you think of your life outside of work. Look at the system we talked about in the Deep Dive. My three-component system, storage, calendar, sorter. Uh, get that going. Do some automation. All that's going to be important. Just be completely honest with yourself that there's not much you might be able to fit in on a regular basis, and be completely okay with that. Maybe really lean into that third step of reduction or rem- or taking things out of your life. And you're going to have to get a lot out of a little. A lot out of on, you know, Friday you don't work on lesson plans. You go right from the school and go for this 45-minute hike, and that's how you reset your mind every week. It's the before you do the household tasks on Sunday, you go to the coffee shop with your book and spend an hour reading it. You, you have these really intentional things once you control your life. You might have to get a lot out of a little. The goal here is not to fit in a Herculean amount of things outside of work, but just to give you, uh, to get your hands on the wheel. "Okay, I can navigate this. I may not be able to drive as fast as I want, but I can navigate this. It's not just haphazard." You put those two things into place, and I think you're going to feel a lot better. All right, let's move on. What do we got next?

Speaker 41:00 Next question is from Alice. "I like the concept of the deep life stack, but I did get a bit stuck on defining my rituals and routines. Could

Speaker 41:08 you elaborate on the differences between these two?"

Cal Newport 41:11 All right, Jesse, I think I'm going to choose this question as this week's Slow Productivity Corner. [slow music] So as longtime listeners know, each week we designate one question as the Slow Productivity Corner question because it deals with a theme that will also be in my upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out on March 5th. If you want to get a free excerpt from that book, actually, it's the introduction of the book, so you can act- read the whole summary of what slow productivity is and where it came from, go to calnewport.com/slow to find out more. So why is this question about rituals and routines and how they fit into the quest for the deep life, why is this my Slow Productivity Corner? I talk about rituals and routines in the book. And in particular, I talk about them, uh, in the chapter that captures the second principle of slow productivity, which is work at a natural pace. The elaborated definition of that principle, so there's a sort of the callout box, "Here is the second principle," where I, I give a more detailed definition of the principle, has a second component. Work at a natural place, uh, pace in settings conducive to brilliance. So you got two parts going on to the second principle. Uh, the pace part says don't just do full intensity eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. You want ups and downs at all sorts of different time scales. M- Take longer on things that are important. Don't rush things. Offset really intense periods with relaxing periods is what we're wired to do, but then the location piece matters as well. That's the settings conducive to brilliance. One of the things I talk about in the book is leveraging rituals and routines to extract, uh, more out of your work sessions, out of the settings where you work. I also talk about these in our discussion of the deep life stack here on the show, so let's dive into the difference. What is the difference between a ritual and routine? Well, rituals, roughly speaking, I think of them as activities you do with the specific goal of changing your mindset in the moment or reminding you of something that's important to you. So it's entirely self-reflective or psychology shifting. A routine, on the other hand, might be something about how you structure or spend your time, um, that impacts how you actually do things that have real output, real outcome. So let me make this a little bit more specific. One of the contexts in which I talk about rituals and routines is when we talk about deep work. Uh, this is o- one of the main contexts in my book. I talk about rituals and routines around working on things that are important to you. So in the context of deep work, a ritual might be, for example, uh, I walk around my property once before I sit down to do deep work because it helps put my mind into a state conducive for thinking. Or, you know, in my home office, I, I clear the desks, and I turn off most of the lights, but just a, a bright desk spot, and it's a ritual that tells my mind it's time to concentrate. A routine relevant to deep work, by contrast, might be something like I do deep work the first two hours of every day. This is my routine I've built up to support deep work, uh, so I know when to expect the work to happen, and it's a time that's going to be most effective for me. Or it's the writer who goes to their writing, writing cabin on Friday mornings to write and overnight and then, uh, come back on Saturday. It's a routine. It's shaping the schedule or structure of your work, uh, in an intentional way. Another place in the deep life stack where we talk about rituals and routines is in the context of the values layer. We are trying to, um, build up some sort of deep foundation of values from which you can further direct your life. And I often talk about there briefly, use rituals and routines to support your values. So there, of course, rituals is gonna be things you do just to sort of directly reconnect you with the things that you value. Um, so for example, we might find these pretty commonly in the religious context. So if you're a Muslim, it might be the five daily prayers. It's something you do specifically to reconnect you to your conception of the divine. Uh, if you're Jewish, it might be wearing the tallit, where you have the four-cornered garment that has the precise numbers of tassels with knots. Um, this is meant to remind you of the divine. There's some complexity. I was reading about the tallit recently. It's comp... I don't know all the, the details, but somehow the number of the fringes that hang off of this, uh, if you multiply them or add them to the number of knots in some sort of complicated ways, it equals the total number of mitzvot in the Torah, so the total number of commandments in the Torah for how to live. So by seeing it, that you're wearing it, it keeps reminding you to, you know, uh, puts me in the mindset of follow Torah, right? Um, in a secular context, this might be, uh, walking meditation outside. You know, um, I'm just going to walk and observe the seasons and the weather around me. It's just a way to, like, reconnect. I used to do this, actually. I don't know if I've told this story before, my nature walking meditation. I, I don't know if I've talked about this, Jesse. When I was a postdoc at MIT, so postdoc at MIT and was reading some Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Speaker 46:54 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 46:54 So Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote this famous book, Full Catastrophe Living. Uh, he was one of the early big supporters of using mindfulness meditation in medical context. So, okay, you're, you have pain, um, from an injury. You have extreme trauma or stress. Uh, let's bring in mindfulness meditation into psychological practices, medical practices. And I read this book, so I went through a phase where I was sort of really into it. And so I started doing it, and this was actually really, uh, effective. I used to walk the campus from Beacon Hill to-

Speaker 47:30 Mm.

Cal Newport 47:31 -MIT. I'd walk across the Longfellow Bridge, which the, the old stone bridge. It looks like big salt shakers. Walk across that, and I just had this routine of, as I turned off of Charles Street, uh, onto the bridge until I got to, uh, across the bridge and turned a corner towards the Stata Center at MIT, walking meditation. All I was allowed to do was notice, and the only thing to notice was, uh, the plants and the snow and the n... Okay, the, there's some buds coming now, or the snow is built up this high, or look what's happening with the ice, 'cause I was also reading Thoreau at this time, so all this stuff was coming together.

Speaker 48:05 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 48:05 Uh, classic sort of, you know, New England transcendentalist sort of identity stuff. It was really great, actually. It, it would be cold as sin, basically.

Speaker 48:14 Yeah.

Cal Newport 48:14 But you're just, this is, like, what you're, ah, I'm focusing on and this, and the seasons are changing. I was really connected to what was going on. That's a ritual. It's not directly structuring other stuff I do. It's done just to put me in a particular mindset that, uh, in this case, would give me, keep me true to my values. A routine in this case would be something that you do regularly that reinforces or is informed by your values. So, you know, maybe you wear the tallit to remember the mitzvah of the Torah, but the routine might be, "I volunteer at the soup kitchen." So I'm going to do a thing regularly That is aligned with my values. So it's not just reconnecting me mentally with my values, but is now, um, uh, there's a specific activity I'm doing. So rituals and routines, it's a porous border, um, that's the best way I could break it up. All right, so that's our Slow Productivity Corner. [gentle music] All right, let's keep rocking and rolling. Who do we got next?

Speaker 49:18 Next question's from Victor. "Do you think playing video games can be part of a deep life? In another

Speaker 49:23 episode, you said that video games are fine as a distraction if they're not played online. Does that mean that you guys should focus on other t- activities instead in order to cultivate a deep life?"

Cal Newport 49:32 Do you do video games, Jesse?

Speaker 49:34 No. I played, like, when I was, like, eight for, like, a year.

Cal Newport 49:38 Yeah. See, I think it's generational. Like, you and I grew up with 8-bit Nintendo, which was like, "This is kinda fun."

Speaker 49:47 People played it a lot, though.

Cal Newport 49:49 People played it a lot, but a lot of people, the reaction was, like, uh, certain people it caught. They're like, "I gotta beat, like, speedrun Mario."

Speaker 49:57 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 49:57 Like, for most people like you or I, we're, you know, it's, it's weird that the graphics aren't great, and it's these beeps and boops, and you're like, "This is, you know, it's okay, but whatever." And-

Speaker 50:06 Madden, Madden Football came out when we were young, and that was big.

Cal Newport 50:10 Yeah. We're a little older though, right? Because that was more like Sega Genesis.

Speaker 50:14 No, it came-

Cal Newport 50:14 Was there a Nintendo?

Speaker 50:15 Yeah, I had a Sega too.

Cal Newport 50:16 Yeah. But we were a little older by then. See, this is what...

Speaker 50:19 Yeah.

Cal Newport 50:19 You know, we were a little older by then. It's like our, in our impressionable years, we had Super Tecmo and, uh, Tecmo Bowl, where, uh, my memory was... What, what was the player? I think it was Bo Jackson.

Speaker 50:29 Yeah.

Cal Newport 50:29 The game was out of balance. Remember Tecmo Bowl? So if you just chose Bo Jackson, you could just score a touchdown, like, endlessly.

Speaker 50:36 [laughs]

Cal Newport 50:37 Um, but yeah, then I remember Madden. I had Joe Montana Football-

Speaker 50:40 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 50:41 ... for the Sega. And the key there, it turned out, was just to, um, punt block. That's the only defensive scheme you had to do was just punt block [laughs] because it just overwhelmed the, overwhelmed the quarterback almost every time. Anyways, our point is I think our generation, like, was exposed to video games, and we're like, "Yeah, this is okay," so only people who had a real affinity got into it. Younger generations are being exposed to much better video games. I think that's part of the problem. Like, their games are awesome, you know? Um, and so I think especially young men are more likely to have a problem with, "These are better than my life. Like, this is a lot of fun. It's hyperrealistic." Um, I feel that human instinct we all have for getting better at things and mastery, that we're, we're, we have that wired into us to try to push us, evolutionarily speaking, to become leaders within our tribe so that we can spread our genes better. Uh, this just subverts that. You're like, "Yeah, man, in, uh, Redemption," I don't know what these games are called or, or whatever, Call of Duty, like, "I'm getting better and better," and it, so it kind of subverts those drives, and the games are hyperrealistic, and they're really fun. No one in 1989 was gonna say, "The world of Super Mario Brothers is better than the real life." It's, it's these little graphics, and it's weird, and there's a plumber going down these tubes and this weird sound, right? It was like a, it was a, a very specific thing to be into, but now video games can be better than life. So I think you and I, our generation doesn't really have a problem with that. But the generation before us, you know, we really do have an issue where you get exposed to these games as kids, and now you're 26, 27, 30 years old, you're playing a lot of video games. And your energy and your self-worth is coming out of those instead of what you probably should be doing at that age, which is, like, getting your act together as a man and building up your economic autonomy, building up, you know, your, your, uh, your position of prominence inside your relevant tribes. It's like none of this is happening because you're like, "Hey, I'm, you know, level 37 now." I don't know the games, but whatever. "I'm level 37 now in Wizard Quest," or whatever, how it goes. So we have to be careful about video games if they become an alternative world in which you're living. Now, is it a problem just abstractly if there's a video game you like to play and it's just, like, one of your hobbies, one of the things you do? No. I mean, a deep life, what? It's something that's lived with intention and aims towards something remarkable. There's nothing wrong with having leisure activities in there that are fun. You know, for some people, it's fishing. For other people, it might be, you know, playing a video game. That's fun. But the thing to be wary about, again, is the game itself becoming an objective in your life, the game itself notably crowding out other things that are important. And I think there's big portions of our audience, women, men over a certain age, et cetera, they're saying, "What are you talking about?" But for a particular group, this is a real fear, that this is how I'm going to satisfy my urge to make something of myself, to get better, to have standing. Because you know what I have standing in this game? I cast a bunch of spells, and that was hard, and I get respect in this world. But that's not a real friction. It's a simulation of the friction of getting better. It's not the same of actually dealing with things in the real world with real, actual competitive structures and building up prominence in measurably, objectively difficult ways. It's not the same. When you're playing a video game, all the rough edges have been sanded off. When you're playing a video game, it is set up to make sure that you keep making progress because it's pressing that button, where in the real world progress is not guaranteed. It requires that you actually go after something harder than other people, that you feel the dissatisfactions in the moment, the discomforts of deliberate practice. It's not the same thing. It's a simulation of the same thing. It's the difference between having a mate and pornography. It's the difference between, uh, a drug and actually feeling really good about something that you accomplished or a real compliment. It's a low-fidelity simulation that satisfies that itch enough that if you're not careful, it keeps you completely away from the real thing. So Victor, I'm not against video games- completely. I'm against video games becoming a, a totem or an idol in your life that brings a lot of your attention and subverts a lot of your potential energy. So just be really honest about it and what role it plays, especially if you're above a certain age, just be wary, right? No one's gonna yell at a 37-year-old who plays Scrabble on their phone or something, but the 37-year-old who spent seven hours in World of Warcraft, those eyebrows are gonna start raising pretty high. All right. Let's do... Oh, we got more time. Let's do another question. Who else do we have here?

Speaker 55:30 Next question's from Phil: Do you contemplate how each deep life bucket supports your strategic plans? For example, a well-functioning constitution

Speaker 55:38 bucket would support both professional and personal activities, or do the strategic plans support the deep life buckets? For example, maybe a personal strategic plan would be all those activities that are devoted to the constitution, community, and contemplation buckets, while the professional strategic plan contain exclusively craft related items.

Cal Newport 55:57 Well, there's a, there's a key question here. Now, let's, let's put aside for now the specific discussion of buckets and, and these, uh, particular names like craft and constitution, because I talk about the pursuit of the deep life with multiple different metaphors. I talk about it with buckets. I talk about it with stacks. So let's put aside the specific metaphors and just talk about these two general topics, which we often touch on this show. On one hand, the pursuit of a deep life. And on the other hand, systems for organizing what's going on in your life in a world of distraction. What is the relationship between these two things? This is the real question Phil has. Are they separated or are they related? The answer is they're completely related. The tools that we talk about for organizing your life professionally and personally, including the whole system I laid out during the deep dive portion of this episode, including the complex systems we've discussed for organizing your professional life in a world of knowledge work, these are deeply intertwined with your overall goal of living a deeper life. Your job, for example, plays a very big role in your life, so any conception of a deep life has to have a really clear understanding of your job. So whatever systems you're using to planning and direct your energy for your professional life needs to be completely aware of your big plans for your vision for your life, uh, your vision for a path towards something deeper. So for example, when we get to the technical side of things, I often talk about multi-scale planning, where you have a, a strategic plan or a semester plan or a quarterly plan, whatever you wanna call it, that informs a weekly plan, that informs a daily time block plan. On my strategic plan for my work, at the very top of that plan is the vision where I want my work to go as part of my conception of the deep life. And, uh, the way I do it is I've, I've, I break out five properties. So I'm saying, "Here's what I want to get to in my world of work. I want these five properties," and I have a little explanation about what I mean for each of them. That's at the top of my strategic plan that I update every semester. So when I'm updating what do I wanna focus on this semester as I'm at this higher level of, uh, altitude making plans for where I wanna spend my energy, I have to confront my vision of the deep life and how it overlaps my job so that I, I can say in whatever plan I come up with for the semester, I wanna make sure I'm making progress on that vision. The personal organizational type systems, like I talked about earlier in this show, I mean, that's directly controlling how you spend your time and attention in your life outside of work. That's completely informed by the efforts you have to understand what's important to you. So as you go through these different parts of your life and figure out how to make them deeper, it is in your personal organizational systems and the nitty-gritties of your calendars and file storage systems and mail sorters that you actually put these ideas into practice. So these two topics, these two magisteria of Deep Questions discourse are not as they might be as, as, uh, Stephen Gould might say, "They're not distinct. They should actually be mixed together." The highly technical organizational talk needs to be connected to the highly abstract philosophical thoughts about where your life should be. All this comes together in pursuing the central goal of this show, which is trying to live deeply in a world that is distracted. All right, let's, um, let's do a call. Let's hear, let's hear someone's voice. Who do... Do we have a call, Jesse?

Speaker 59:32 Yep.

Cal Newport 59:32 All right. Who do we got?

Speaker 59:32 Here we go.

Cal Newport 59:33 Let's listen.

Speaker 59:34 Hey, Cal and Jesse. First off, thanks for all that you guys do. Big fan of your work. Um, I

Speaker 59:41 recently quit my job as a product manager in tech to find more meaning in my work and really just become self-employed. I have a few main areas that I want to grow in and would like to know how you suggest balancing efforts on a macro and micro scale. Um, just for context, the three areas are, first off, my main project is a website for runners, training plans, and such. I have one business partner, and we plan to launch it soon. I've been working on that for about a year. Secondly, I'm taking a course to build out a skill set as a UI designer. Um, I wanna do UI design for my own projects and perhaps freelance someday. And then thirdly, I just wanna create more online, blogging, uh, videos, using social to connect with others, and, uh, really just make useful content around my interests. Um, speaking of my interests, I'm just a super curious person, have a lot of hobbies as it is. So guitar, action sports, music making, photo/video, um, and all of these interests pull for my time and attention as well. I have tried to do day theming and use systematic time blocking, um, really to attack all these different areas and interests, but it just felt too rigid and formulaic to me. So yeah, my key question is: how do you suggest I focus on a macro and micro scale to have progress in these multiple areas, which all feel important to me? Thanks, guys.

Cal Newport 1:01:04 Well, it's a good question. Uh, I like the framing you have, micro and macro. So on the micro scale, I'm gonna suggest that you have what I would think about as a foundation of depth, commitments that you do and track every day, every week, that make sure that for, uh, the key things in your life and your conception of the life well-lived are actually getting efforts, right? So this is different for different people, but it might be, just to give you a case study here, it might be, okay, uh, I have this aggressive fitness health routine, um, I'm reading a certain amount every day, which is, like, a lot more than I would do if I didn't actually have this plan, um, I, you know, call one person every single day. Maybe if you're religious or philosophical, there's some sort of prayer or reflection or something else you're doing there. You have a foundation. "Okay, this is stuff I just do, and I never not do this, and this makes sure that I always have this foundation of depth that aligns me with the things I care about." At the macro scale, you have the bigger projects. These are gonna change over time. You can't necessarily work on a lot of these at the same time, right? So w- when we're thinking about your, your, uh, discretionary time, we have macro, micro. I wanna suggest an idea here that coincidentally, I was just discussing on email earlier today, earlier the day that we're recording this, and I don't think he'll mind me discussing this. But I was emailing back and forth with the writer Steven Johnson, and he mentioned, he said, "You know, back in, uh..." I think the book was maybe Where Good Ideas Come From, which is this really important book that I talk about at length in my book So Good They Can't Ignore You, and if it's not this book, Steven, I, I apologize. But he, he said, "Hey, there's this concept from that book that reminds me of your new book, Slow Productivity." And I don't know if this is the exact words he used to call it. This might be the name I added. But I think he might have actually used these exact words. He called it slow multitasking, which he had identified studying people that produce cool ideas, he had identified as a really important strategy. And he said, "What slow multitasking is about is multitasking, but at the scale of months." And what it means is I spend the next six weeks working on this big project, and then... So it, it's, it's like the back and forth context switching we do on a normal day. Slow down. And then I spend four weeks really focusing on this project, and then I go back to that other project, give it two months. So it's you're tackling one big thing is getting your focus at a time, at the end of which it just maybe is doing a little bit of bookkeeping or background work to keep it running. So you're multitasking multiple things, but each thing gets your focus for a while before you switch to something else. That's a classic slow productivity type of move here. I talk about this a lot in my own book, Slow Productivity. Uh, less things at once, so you're slowing down the timeframe at which you're actually making progress on these projects. But you're always working on something important, and you're able to give it a lot of time and attention and have gratitude for what it's giving to you in your life and what you're giving back. And when you zoom out to the 10-year period, you look back and you're like, "Hey, my running website, uh, the, the project thing I was working over here," like all these things ended up in interesting places where they're really useful. In the moment, it feels like, "Oh my God, I, I'm letting this thing languish." But when you zoom out, they're all getting time. So the slow multitasking approach, I'm sort of going from one project to another and then back again in increments of multiple weeks, if not multiple months. It takes some realigning of your definition of productivity to be comfortable with this because it's not boom, boom, boom, I touched on everything today. But it's a more effective way to work on things and a more sustainable way. You don't feel so up against it. You really can get lost in something and really learn about it. It just requires that the scale at which you e- evaluate your productivity, it just needs to be expanded. So maybe give that a try. Foundation of the micro habits you do every day, things that remind you of what's important to you. Slow multitasking on the big. Right, before we get to our final segment, I also want to do a case study. It's where we read a account sent in by one of my listeners about them putting the things we talk about here on the show into practice. We can see what this stuff looks like out in the wild. Today's case study comes from Alex. Alex says, "I've been listening to the podcast since twenty twenty-one. I used to be very disorganized, always late, and overwhelmed. Over the past few years,

Cal Newport 1:05:43 I've listened to the podcast and done my best to implement the ideas and live deeply. As a spiritual leader, I'm always trying to do my best to live a meaningful life. I'm not always super consistent with everything and don't feel that I plan as well as I could. On the scale of days and weeks, it can be easy to feel like I'm not doing as well as I could be, but looking back on the scale of a few years, I realize that things are much better than the week before, or they were before. I'm much more consistent now, and people trust that I'll get back to them and deliver on my promises. Over this time, I've developed habits, kept a task list, and started each day with intention. This year, I've read more than 30 books. I don't use social media and have a deep and fulfilled life. Slow productivity works. I would encourage everyone to commit to a deep life for the long haul and not focus on hacks and tricks. It may not always be perfect, but you will look back in three years and realize how far you've come." Well, Alex, I appreciate that case study. That is perfectly distilled slow productivity. It's not about trying to get everything done all the time, being busy all the time, trying to alchemize freneticism into impressiveness. It says to slow down. First things first, take care of the things that are important. Make progress on the big optional things that are gonna leave your legacy, and trust that even if you don't feel super busy or exhausted today, you will look back in a couple years and say, "Hey, I'm pretty proud of what I did." I mean, it's, it really is just a, a fundamental rewiring of how we think about accomplishment. So I think it's a great case study. I wish I had heard this before I wrote my book. I could've put it in there. Uh, there's a... If you wanna read a- another case study of this mindset in action, the excerpt you can get at calnewport.com/slow tells the story of John McPhee. So it gives a, a fantastic case study of slow productivity in action from the life of John McPhee. So if you wanna read that, grab that excerpt over at calnewport.com/slow. All right, so we're moving on now to a final segment where we react to the news, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. [whooshing sound] I wanna talk about our friends at Mint Mobile. On average, it takes about 30 days for a person to break their New Year's resolution, so if saving money was on your 2024 list, your odds aren't looking great already. Luckily, I have a 100% guaranteed way to save you money this year. Just switch to Mint Mobile. For a limited time, wireless plans for Mint Mobile are only $15 a month when you purchase a three-month plan. That's unlimited talk, text, and data for $15 a month. 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Don't forget the /deep if you want this offer. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/deep. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. I also wanna talk about our friends at My Body Tutor. An equally as common New Year's resolution to saving money is getting in shape. This is where My Body Tutor enters the scene. It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, lack of consistency. They do this by simplifying the process of getting healthier into practical, sustainable behaviors and then give you daily accountability and support to help you make this happen. The way My Body Tutor works is that they actually assign you to a coach, and you interact with this coach digitally, allowing you to get the benefits of a trainer or nutritionist without actually having to have the expense of going to a specialty gym or have them come to your house. 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Cal Newport 1:11:39 is interesting. Today, I wanna talk about an article from The Washington Post. For those who are watching instead of listening, you'll see this on the screen here. Uh, this article is titled How Many Books Did You Read in 2023? Are You in the Top 1%? This was written by Andrew Van Dam. So this is based off of survey research of 1,500 Americans that was asking, among other things, about reading habits. In particular, how many books did you read in the last year? There's a chart here I'm gonna load up that connects your answer to this question to what percentile of Americans that puts you in. If you read two books a year, you are already in the 51st percentile. If you read just one book a year, you're in the 46th percentile. That means 46% of respondents had read zero books over the entire preceding year. This is the type of number that gives nightmares to professional writers by me. By the time you get to somewhere between 20 or 30 books, you're gonna hit the 90th percentile. Uh, I read five books a month, so that puts me over 50-plus books, so in the 99 cents, percentile. Here's what I wanna point out here. You should read. Reading is like a superpower. If you're in that forty-six percent that doesn't read any books, change that and start reading. Why is it like a superpower? Well, there's two things you're gonna get out of it. One is mind reading. To read a nonfiction book is to be able to read the mind of an expert on a topic who spent years thinking about and shaping their thoughts on the topic, and you get to take that complicated, hard-won structure and [clicks] transplant it to your own mind. It's a mind meld that gets you fantastic knowledge. If you're reading fiction, you get to bring the complicated experience of a different person in different circumstances and [clicks] understand it. There's no better source of empathy than reading novels. [coughs] So books can give you that superpower. The second thing books give you is sharper thinking. When you're exposed to structured information, your own thinking becomes more structured. [coughs] You get used to organizing information in a stronger, more intentional manner. So if you read a lot, you become a better thinker. So books really are one of the best cognitive medicines you can take in the twenty-first century. It gives you this huge advantage. So how do you read more if you're not a big reader? Well, there's some simple things you can do. One, select books, especially early on in a reading habit, select books that you just are super excited about. Don't worry about being smart. Don't worry about, "I wanna cover the most complicated nonfiction topics," or, "I wanna read the fiction that's winning all the awards." Get things that you are excited to read and are easy to read. Next, put in some reading habits into your day. So the easiest thing you can do is lunch and breakfast, you read instead of using your phone. Second, have a regular reading block every afternoon or evening. Okay, I spend twenty minutes, and I sit and I read. Just do those two things. A little bit of breakfast reading, a little bit of lunch reading instead of going on your phone, and one reading block per night. You will start getting through books. If they're books you really love, you'll probably start reading about one book per week or two. So if I'm looking at this chart here, that will already get you to the eighty-plus percentile. So you're getting more of the reading advantages than eighty percent of your peers if you just start with books you love, breakfast, lunch, and one reading block. So if you're not a reader, if you're in that forty-six percent, don't even think twice about it. This is not a major lift. This is not gonna be unpleasant. This is not gonna require huge amounts of time out of your day, but the benefits will add up. Transition towards a reading habit. And if you're already a reader, think about, "How do I join that ninety-nine percent? How do I make reading a much more regular part of my life? How do I get an hour plus per day aggregate reading?" That'll get you to that ninety-nine percent place. The higher you go up this chart, the more of those benefits in terms of the mind reading, the empathy, and the clear thinking, the more of those benefits you're gonna get. So basically, I'm using this article to be a PSA. It's an entirely biased PSA because I make a living off people buying books, but hey, who are you gonna trust when it comes to reading? Who are you gonna trust more than someone who makes a living trying to, uh, get other people to read? All right, Jesse, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you everyone, uh, who watched or listened. If you're listening and wanna see today's episode, this is episode two eighty-three. Go to thedeeplife.com/listen. Look for episode two eighty-three. The video will be at the bottom. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an interview episode with a guest you've probably heard of. It's gonna be a cool one, so definitely come back. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you liked today's discussion of organizing your personal life, you might also like episode two fifty-two, where I first introduced my concept of the deep life stack. I think you'll like it. Check it out. So we'll call today's deep question, how do I rebuild my life into something deeper?