Skip to content
Modern WisdomModern Wisdom

The Delicate Art Of Mastering Work-Life Balance - Cal Newport

Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University, a productivity expert and an author. If you’ve ever felt that you’re not as productive as you could be, you’re not alone. But what if the goal isn't to be more productive, but to let go of the goals that aren't serving you? What if the power of saying no to more things is the most important skill you can learn? Expect to learn what our current problem with being productive is, why pseudo-productivity is a catastrophe, the advantages to what Cal calls Slow Productivity, how to better organise your communication, the best strategies for implementing a productivity schedule, how to stop saying yes all the time and much more... - 00:00 Our Current Definition of Productivity 03:08 The Evolution of Productivity Advice 12:58 Most People’s Relationship With Productivity 20:31 Typical Days of Historical Figures 26:19 How to Work at a Natural Pace 37:00 Dealing With the Increased Workload of Success 43:41 The Insane Output of Brandon Sanderson 50:16 Creating a Productive Work Environment at Home 53:29 Getting Better At Saying No 1:02:55 The Benefit of Quotas & Templates 1:10:10 Being Busy Vs Producing Success 1:20:40 How to Optimise for Quality 1:25:59 Slowing Down the Rate of Communication 1:31:23 The Price You Need to Pay for Slow Productivity 1:36:29 Steps to Begin Unwinding Bad Work Habits 1:43:58 The Importance of Writing 1:49:51 Where to Find Cal - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Chris WilliamsonhostCal Newportguest
Mar 30, 20241h 50mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:08

    Our Current Definition of Productivity

    1. CW

      I was saying, I'm really impressed with what you've done with, uh, your podcast.

    2. CN

      Oh, yeah. Thank you.

    3. CW

      Really cool. You know, for a one-stop shop for understanding productivity and where it's at, and-

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... your history. I was hearing you try and use some example of the Cretaceous period-

    6. CN

      (laughs)

    7. CW

      ... for how email got introduced or something.

    8. CN

      Oh, I was geeking out on that one. Yeah.

    9. CW

      Yeah.

    10. CN

      Yeah, the KT boundary.

    11. CW

      Yeah, that's it.

    12. CN

      And email.

    13. CW

      Yes, y-

    14. CN

      Dinosaurs and email, yeah.

    15. CW

      Dinosaurs and email as it-

    16. CN

      I was having some fun with that one.

    17. CW

      As it always does. Talk to me about what the problem is with our current definition of productivity.

    18. CN

      Well, it's a bad one, right? I mean, I think that's what's going on is that in knowledge work, what happened is, now, I went back and dug up this history, right, to try to understand. You get the knowledge work as a major sector, begins to emerge roughly mid-20th century. When it emerges, there's this question of, okay, how are we going to measure the productivity of people? I mean, in other words, how are we gonna actually manage people? This is a harder question than you would think, right? Because before the knowledge sector arose as a major thing, what did you have as the major thing in the economy? It's the industrial sector, right? And product- uh, it's gonna be productivity in the industrial sector, it's quantitative. It's Model Ts produced per labor hour input, right? You had a number you could measure, you could change the way you did it, right? Let's move from the craft method to the assembly line and see that number go up and say, "This is better." You go to knowledge work, none of that works anymore, right? Because I'm working on seven different things, it's different than what you're working on. How I'm doing the work is kind of up to me. I have my own private sort of organizational system, so there's no clear thing that we can improve or mess around with. So we don't have a good old-fashioned definition of productivity. So what do we do in that space? We said, "Well, we'll just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort." It's like if I see you doing stuff, that's better than you not doing stuff. And if we need to do better, let's do more stuff. Like, get there earlier, let's work later. Uh, I call that pseudo-productivity. That's implicitly been what has been driving knowledge work activity for at least 70 years.

    19. CW

      You asked your readers or listeners, I think, to try and define-

    20. CN

      Yeah.

    21. CW

      ... productivity. This is a community of people that have come together to watch a show specifically on productivity, and they failed to come up with a good synthesis for what they meant by the thing they're interested in.

    22. CN

      No, they couldn't do it. Here's what most people did when I asked them. They basically just summarized what their job was. It's like, "What is productivity?" And they're like, "Well, it's, you know, doing my DevOps responsibilities well." (laughs) You know, they would just, they would just parrot back what their job was and say, "I guess that's productivity." So that's the, that's the, the issue with pseudo-productivity is it's unnamed. So we don't actually recognize or admit this is what we're doing, which is just activities better than non-activity. Uh, so we can't fix it, because we don't know there is something to fix. But, you know, my big argument is that pseudo-productivity went off the rails once we had computers and networks and emails and laptop, and work could follow you anywhere, and you could demonstrate activity anywhere you were at any time. Uh, you see this in the productivity literature. We talk about productivity completely different in the '90s than we do in the early 2000s.

    23. CW

      Oh, yeah, you...

  2. 3:08 – 12:58

    The Evolution of Productivity Advice

    1. CW

      Didn't you track productivity advice from the '50s through until the modern day or so-

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      ... like an archeologist of, of productivity advice?

    4. CN

      (laughs)

    5. CW

      So take me through what, what, what were we being told about how to be more productive in the '50s up to today?

    6. CN

      Yeah, I, I wrote this for The New Yorker recently, and this was all from my own shelf because I geek out on this stuff. So I have a historical collection of sort of vintage (laughs) productivity. Yeah, so you see, uh, you're gonna see a big change when we get to the 2000s, but starting in the '50, uh, the 1950s, the very first book... So in the very first book on what we would think of as modern time management, and it's called The Management of Time, right? It came out in the 1950s.

    7. CW

      Good title.

    8. CN

      Yeah, it was a good t- title, right? But it's not at all what you would expect. It's almost entirely psychological, right? So knowledge work is a n- uh, it was new. These large organizations in which you are sitting at desks, a lot of this was new. So most of the management of time is actually just grappling psychologically with this new reality. It's, you know, how do you even, uh... What's the mindset to even have to deal with a world in which you're no longer turning a wrench on an assembly line, but there's all this stuff coming at you? All right, 1960s, definitive book, The Effective Executive, right? Peter Drucker.

    9. CW

      Still read today.

    10. CN

      Fantastic book, right? And Peter Drucker, by the way, coined the term knowledge work. So he was really a, a, a key figure in understanding knowledge work, why it's different. That book is all space age optimism, right? It's all like, "Okay, we can optimize the... We can optimize the hell out of this." It's, you know, "Okay, executives, you need to keep a log of, like, what you're doing every minute of the day. And then we're gonna go back and we're gonna study this log, and we're gonna find the inefficiencies, and we're gonna remove those, and you're gonna figure out, like, the optimal set of act-" So it's very space age, you know, we're just gonna throw a lot of engineering at work and we're gonna make it optimal. The '70s, everything gets depressed, right? Because the American economy in the '70s is, it's stagflation, it's, it's Jimmy Carter and the great malaise, right? Uh, so everyone is in a bad mood. And so the, the '70s book I have is just A, B, C, through Z. So it's alphabetical. And for every letter, it just has some things relevant to the office that start with that letter, and then they give you a couple paragraphs. Like B, briefcases. Well, this is what you should look for-

    11. CW

      (laughs)

    12. CN

      ... in your briefcases. A, alcohol, 'cause they-

    13. CW

      Pro, anti.

    14. CN

      Well, it's clear from that entry that they were drinking a lot at work (laughs) when you see the advice. It was, you know-

    15. CW

      Hell yeah.

    16. CN

      It was like, you know, "I don't know, maybe not have that third martini at lunch."

    17. CW

      That was the advice?

    18. CN

      Yeah, something like that.

    19. CW

      Wow.

    20. CN

      W, this is not... I'm not making this up. Waste basketry. Waste basketry. (laughs)

    21. CW

      Waste basketry?

    22. CN

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      Right, like the art of building waste baskets and where they should be positioned.

    24. CN

      How many waste baskets to have, like what... Yeah, so anyways, there was no, there was no, uh, ambition in the '70s.

    25. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      So it was just like, let's just, all right, how do you, how do you keep your-

    27. CW

      Procedural.

    28. CN

      Procedural, yeah. Uh, then you get to the '80s and '90s, now it's Stephen Covey.Right? So '80s and '90s, right now we're thinking Wall Street, right? We're thinking the American, uh, consumer boom, the economy starts booming, right? And so now you get, uh, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's in the '80s. First Things First in the '90s. These are all about work as self-actualization, right? And so Covey is like, "Here's what we're going to do." It's incredibly optimistic. "You're going to figure out what matters to you in life and all your different roles, you're going to write those down. And then we're going to, we're going to optimize everything you do in the day, all aimed towards, like, actualizing your biggest goals in life, right? When we're going to figure out these complicated systems for selecting and tracking your time, all aimed at, like, accomplishing your deepest ambitions. And not just in work, but, like, at home and in, and in, like, your religious communities." Covey was a religious Mormon, et cetera. Then we get to the 2000s, and this is where the shift happens. So the, the big book of the early 2000s is David Allen, Getting Things Done.

    29. CW

      Been on the show. He's a Modern Wisdom alumni. He's a legend.

    30. CN

      Exactly. Now, if you go back and you read Getting Things Done, this is not an ambitious, optimistic book.

  3. 12:58 – 20:31

    Most People’s Relationship With Productivity

    1. CW

      I... how would you, uh, w- how do you frame, or what do you think about most people's relationship with productivity? Like, how do you think that they conceive of that?

    2. CN

      Well, it's shifting a lot, right? Because what seems to be happening is, uh, pseudo-productivity's been around. It begins to become increasingly unbearable, uh, in the 2000s. Um, what we then get, starting maybe five or six years ago, is an emergent anti-productivity movement, right? Because a- and again, this is coming out of a place that makes sense. People are increasingly burnt out. It's also coming out of the tail ends of, uh, the first decade of the 2000s. There was a whole techno-productivity revolution. This was the whole what they would call the productivity-prone revolution. This is some leetspeak, but basically it was this... there was this moment in the early 2000s where people were really, uh, optimistic about this idea that productivity implemented by smart software was gonna-

    3. CW

      Quantified self.

    4. CN

      It was gonna, yeah, it was gonna revolutionize work. That- that it was like, "Okay, if we get the right system..." And remember, David Allen had kind of introduced this idea of being more systematic and, uh, engineer-y in your systems. That, plus the right software, was gonna bring us to this utopia where work was, like, effortless, like, "Do this now, do that now," and you were just gonna be cranking widgets, and the software was gonna do it. I- I s- I interviewed some of the people who worked on these, uh, these electronic GTD systems back in the day. Um, so there's this big optimism that kind of faded by the end of the 2000s. Now we're even more burnt out than before. We begin to get anti-productivity, right? So th- this begins to emerge. It's- it's picking up some steam 2018, 2019, right? These are when some of the first big books on this emerge, and then the pandemic really accelerates that. So- so by the time I'm actually, you know, writing the- the new book, there's a really big anti-productivity movement. So- so we now have, uh, an emerging an- antagonistic relationship with the concept of productivity, which what it really is is an antagonistic relationship with pseudo-productivity, because the demands of that are deranging, right? I mean, especially when now you're at home, you're working remotely. The work never ends. At every moment, you have to be internally arguing with yourself, "Should I work or do this other thing?"

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CN

      "I could be working..." Now you're in this constant internal battle. There's no boundaries anymore between work and non-work. So, like, that was the defining relationship with productivity of the last five years, I would say, is this anti-productivity movement.

    7. CW

      And where are we now? Are we still in the throes of that or is there something new coming up?

    8. CN

      Well, I'm trying to put something new in. So slow productivity, in my mind, is a, uh, it starts from the same place as the anti-productivity movement. It goes somewhere different, 'cause the problem with the anti-productivity movement is they're- they're starting from the right place, which is, "We're burnt out from this," but their- their response is typically, uh, anti-work, right? So then the answer they often come to is, um, "Work itself is tainted." And typically, they'll bring more of like a, uh, more like left-wing labor politics, so maybe like more of a Marxist frame, right? "This is, this is an inevitability of the exploitative nature of late-stage capitalism." It's very s-

    9. CW

      "We need cooperatives."

    10. CN

      And they won't even go that far. They'll just be like, "Don't try so hard," right?

    11. CW

      Oh, right, okay.

    12. CN

      Right? "Do Nothing," "The Art of Doing Noth- How to Do Nothing." These are titles of- of- of really good-selling books.

    13. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CN

      Uh, Quiet Quitting was sort of a... you could think of as like an anti-productivity move. It... so it- it recast... it sort of recast what's going on away from, "Our definition of productivity doesn't work well," to, like, "Let's put this back into more of like an early 20th century labor politics context of, no, it's exploitative managers trying to- trying to exploit labor from you, and now we're in a zero-sum fight. And the way we're gonna fight back and do less work, there's more to life than work." Uh, so that was largely the- the answer. That didn't really catch on, in part because a lot of people that were, um, preaching, "Work less," were, like, working really hard to (laughs) pr- you know, that's not-

    15. CW

      Luxury beliefs.

    16. CN

      Yeah. Uh, I'm... Subscribe to my Substack I'm writing every day about why you shouldn't work hard, that I'm working-

    17. CW

      Yes.

    18. CN

      ... hard on, right?

    19. CW

      Yes.

    20. CN

      Um, and also people, uh, they don't hate work, right? Like, they... a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, are like, "No, I wanna do this well." Like, "I wanna, I wanna-"

    21. CW

      "They just don't wanna be killed by it."

    22. CN

      "I don't wanna be killed by it," yeah. So then that became the central question for my book, was, "Okay, so here's the question. How do we, uh, produce stuff that's good, like that we're proud of, we can support a family, um, without burning out and without having work take over more and more of your life?" Like, that's the real question, right? The question is not, "How do we, uh, deconstruct capitalism?" Like, that's not the right response to the burnout crisis, right?

    23. CW

      (laughs)

    24. CN

      As they capitalistically sell their books on this. Uh, the right question is this, "How do we, uh, produce stuff and be proud and ambitious about what we're doing, but also not burn out?"

    25. CW

      I did a- an annual review, and I've used the same process every year for, uh, a- a while now.

    26. CN

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      Uh, and I redid it this year, and I tried to ask myself more kind of introspective, artsy questions, stuff like, um, "What would eight-year-old me, uh, look back on and wish that I did more and less of?"

    28. CN

      Yeah.

    29. CW

      Um, "What do I think is productive but isn't and what isn't productive but I think is?"

    30. CN

      Interesting.

  4. 20:31 – 26:19

    Typical Days of Historical Figures

    1. CN

    2. CW

      What was the typical day of some of these favorite famous people from history like?

    3. CN

      That question wouldn't make sense to them, right? So it's a very, uh, modern notion that we have uniform work days, and so we need to have like a typ- here's how, here's what I do during work days, and I work five days a week, and I work this many weeks, uh, this many weeks a year. They were way more variable about when and how they were working, right? So it'd be like, okay, uh, this two months, I'm working really hard on something, and then I went away and traveled for four months and did nothing, right? There is no typical work day. They had a lot more variation, right? So Georgia O'Keeffe, for ex- the painter, right, what kickstarted her productivity as a, an artist is, you know, she began dating, uh, Stieglitz, and he had land in the Adirondacks. And he's like, "Okay, you gotta come up, we're gonna go up there in the summers." And she figured out this rhythm of they go up there in the late summer into the fall, she has this shack by the lake, and that's where she, she has inspiration, she's doing her nature paintings. And then she brings them, she's there for months, and then she brings them back to Manhattan, and then she finishes them and exhibits them and does the stuff. Uh, and then they go back to, up to the Adirondacks and she gets her creative input. So it's like no typical day for Georgia O'Keeffe, but there's a typical year, and it has different seasons she's doing things. Uh, I opened the book on John McPhee, and I'm like, okay, for five days, uh, it opens on five days of John McPhee's life in the late '60s lying on his back on a picnic table, 'cause he was trying to find his way into a New Yorker piece, and it was, it comp- he couldn't figure it out, right? Like, how, I have all this research, uh, how am I gonna start this piece? And as someone who's written my share of New Yorker pieces, I can tell you, this is like an impossible problem. Like, how do I get into this article? Five days he's laying on his back just to try to figure out how am I gonna make sense of this stuff? Like, what's a typical day for John McPhee, like that? You could look, if you zoomed in on that day, you would say, "He did nothing, he's lazy." You know? And on another day he would be, you know, up in his office next to a Swedish, uh, massage parlor in Princeton where he has this really, um, kind of eccentric way that he would cut up all of his notes and Xerox them and put them on these boards, and he might be in there for hours, and- and another day he might just be doing nothing or doing research, right? So they didn't have typical days, you know? So this idea that there's a work day...

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CN

      ... how do you structure your work day, we invented that, you know, for knowledge work in the 1950s, and it was an idea we borrowed from factories, 'cause that's how factories ran. You had shifts. And so it's not even the right question for creative work.

    6. CW

      Every time that I read, whether it's, uh, Digital Minimalism or Deep Work or- or any of your books, uh, oh, and some of Ryan's stuff as well, it's this, it almost feels like a nervous system reregulation. It's like a reminder of a slower time, it's a reminder of a different time. And so much of the stuff that we take for granted about the rhythm of modern life, about the ferocity and velocity that we go through these things with, we realize is just a creation, a- a- maybe not even a creation, maybe a- a- a malignant bug or a byproduct or a side effect...

    7. CN

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      ... some weird externality of a thing that no one really designed. You know, it's the second, third, fourth order effect of some shit that happened 50 years ago. And then reading stuff like that or reading about how much, uh, Isaac Newton or Einstein loved to walk.

    9. CN

      Yeah.

    10. CW

      I feel like that was in one of your books at some point, like the- the- the power of walking and- and how important that is. And you think, God... I- I came up with this idea, the productivity purgatory is- is one of those where, uh, all of the things that you do, even the things that you're supposed to do for leisure, you do because you once saw an Andrew Huberman documentary that said 15 minutes of walking improves your dopaminergic response by whatever, whatever, that there's nothing that isn't done in service of productivity, even the things that ostensibly are supposed to be for leisure.

    11. CN

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      Uh, and then, yeah, uh, to me and maybe to a lot of people listening, it sounds like hearing Galileo or- or Georgia O'Keeffe, you know, wanking off for four months and then dicking about and then coming back and, oh, I'll do a little bit of work, it sounds bohemian. It sounds new age. It sounds hippie.

    13. CN

      Yeah.

    14. CW

      Uh, because our framing is only within the last, we only know the last 100 years of work. We only know that. Before that, it was just people hoeing the- the ground, right? It was just ag- Yeah. ... agrarian shit.

    15. CN

      And-... changed drastically by the seasons, right? Like, you, you, uh, talk about like the German ritual Yule. 'Cause they had nothing to do, right? It was a pagan ritual, they're like, "We're going to have bonfires for a month because, like, what are we going to do? There's no... It's the winter, there's no crops to whatever." And then in the fall, like, they're really busy. So the agrarian lifestyle was up and down. I went back and looked really deeply into forager, hunter-gatherer life, which is the 270,000, the first 270,000 years of our species. Uh, nature dictated everything, right? I mean, it was, "Today we're on this hunt. Th- the other day it rained, we did nothing. We're in the middle of this hunt, but it's hot in the middle of the day, so we just stop for a while." The only time, uh, in human history, like the first time we really had "Just work hard all day long" was when mills and factories were invented. And it was so unbearable, it was so terrible, they tried to take humans who were used to all of this variation and autonomy in their approach to work, to say, "You have to work all day long as hard as you can." Uh, we had to invent labor unions, we had to invent regulatory frameworks. We had to put all of these huge apparatuses in place just to make that type of incredibly unnatural work tolerable. But the knowledge work emerges, like, "All right, so how are we going to organize our workday, guys?" Like, "Ah, let's do what the factory guys are doing."

    16. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CN

      We just grabbed that. Like, the least natural, uh, in terms of our human wiring choice that we had, because it was simple and it was what we were used to and it was what was big right now, and we're like, "Well, let's just do that."

  5. 26:19 – 37:00

    How to Work at a Natural Pace

    1. CN

    2. CW

      Yeah, one of the principles of slow productivity is work at a natural pace.

    3. CN

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      W- what is that for humans?

    5. CN

      Well, there's, there's two parts to it. So for humans, it's what we just talked about, uh, variations in intensity. And it's not just on one time scale, but basically all time scales, right? So, so when I went back and looked at how humans worked before, within a day, you're going to have some periods that are more intense than others. In a week, some days will be more intense than others. Uh, when you're looking at a season, you know, uh, some seasons might be more intense than others. The fall harvest is way more intense than the winter. Uh, even at a bigger time scale, you might have busier periods and less busier periods. "I'm writing a book for two years, and then for the next year, I'm going more fallow," right? So variations. That's much more natural. Then the other principle that came out of that, and this was just from directly studying the great traditional knowledge workers of time past, they take much more time. So we try to go too fast, and a lot of these thinkers who were very productive in the sense of they produced, you know, uh, new scientific work that changed the way we understood the universe, they worked very slowly. Like, their notion of, "How long should I take on this project?" was way slower than what we do today. So we're always trying to charge ahead right away, "What's the quickest way I could get this done?" They took their time, right? They were happy to take their time. Even contemporary traditional knowledge workers do this. Lin-Manuel Miranda was one of the examples I gave. His first play before Hamilton, In The Heights, was a big hit, right? Eight Tony's. He spent seven to eight years working on that play. Uh, not procrastinating, he didn't put it aside for eight years, he just was working slowly on it for eight years. Kept coming back to it, they were doing readings with real actors, then he would go away and do some other stuff and think about it and, and try to get something better, and then he'd come back and do another reading. Year... just this, like, slow process, but that's, like, pretty typical with traditional knowledge workers. We think, in the pseudo-productivity culture, it's like now fast as possible. "I want to do a play, I'm going to, like, go away for a weekend and grind this thing out. Like, let's rock and roll." Uh, that's not the way people used to do things.

    6. CW

      What are the industries or job types for whom this changing of the pace doesn't work quite so well? 'Cause there may be people listening who say, "Well, that's all well and good if your goal is to create, over the next however many years, a really great play, but it, that's not the world that I live in, that's not the profession that I have access to."

    7. CN

      Right, so the whole goal is then, how do we take these principles that the, the, the great traditional knowledge workers, uh, excavate, and then how do we apply them to just normal knowledge jobs, right? So all the advice is for knowledge work jobs, right? Basically, if you work on a computer screen for a living, if you send a bunch of emails, you're probably a knowledge worker. All right, so what does it look like to start adapting these ideas to a regular job where you have bosses or this or that? Well, now it becomes a little bit more subtle, but you get the same effect. So now when a boss asks you, "Hey, can you put together this report?" Instead of you saying, "Sure, I'll have it done," and then you, you plug in the most optimistic possible estimate. You know how we do? Like, you fall in love with the idea of getting it done that fast. Uh, you instead take that estimate and you double it. Like, yeah, uh, you don't say one month, you say two months. So you're giving yourself more time to work on it. Then what about, like, the seasonality? Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you can just start actually wiring this into, uh, your actual work rhythms, right? Like, I talk about an entrepreneur in the book, she takes two months off in the summer. She just works it out, like the way her contracts and the clients and she's just not around in that summer, earns about 20% less revenue. She'll happily take that hit to be able to take two months off in the summer so she's getting, you know, variation. And then we talk about people who work in jobs where they can't do that, now they start doing them subtly, right? "Okay, so here's what I do. I don't really schedule meetings on Mondays. I don't tell people I'm doing this." Like when they say, "Hey, when are you available?" I give them lots of times, they just don't happen to have any on Mondays. Now we have, like, a slower start. And I know in December, because we're going to lose the last week anyways for Christmas, I'm kind of careful, I don't tell anyone about this, but I'm pretty careful to have projects set up to finish before that and start after it, but nothing gets really due into it. And I am turning down that intensity dial for those three weeks. And it's not long enough for my boss to really notice, but for me, it's a big deal knowing that I can wind down that wee- uh, that month I'm wound down versus another month, right? So people can start implementing these principles, but like more surreptitiously. So we see them really flashily done in these historical stories, but then when we jump to implement them in practice, it's, like, more subtle. But it's the same principles. You're taking longer, you have variations in intensity on different times. This starts to add up, starts to make a difference.

    8. CW

      Yes. Your first insight around do fewer things, which is...E- essentially impossible for people to do, because you look at a calendar and there's room in it, and you fill th- well, there's a gap.

    9. CN

      Yeah.

    10. CW

      The gap should be filled, sh- should be doing things. And I think a lot of people feel like do fewer things is accomplish fewer things.

    11. CN

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      That's the conflation.

    13. CN

      Yeah, and they're wrong. Yeah. Because w- if I add two words, it becomes clear, do fewer things at once. Right? Because here's what I think is going on, and this is, like, the case I make in the book, is that when you agree to something, the big problem is when you agree to it, that is going to bring with it administrative overhead, right? So whether I'm ready to work on this thing or not, now the team needs to... "Hey, how's it going?" There's emails I'm going to have to answer. There's meetings going on to the calendar, right? You're like, "Oh, we got to check in on this. How's this doing?" I call it overhead tax. Everything you say yes to generates overhead tax. So the problem is when you say, uh, yes to a lot of things, you're not just trying to ke- uh, "I'm keeping my queue really full so I always have something to do." That's not just what's happening. You're generating a lot more overhead tax. So the more things you've said yes to, the more things are generating administrative overhead, which means the more meetings go into your calendar and the more emails that are coming that you have to answer, right? So where do those meetings come from that are filling up your calendar? They're not just random, right? It's not just, "Hey, let's, let's just... you guys want to do a meeting?" You know? No, no. It's related to things you've agreed to do.

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. CN

      So the more things you've agreed to do, the more of your time gets devoted to the administrative overhead of the things you need to do, which means you have less time available to actually accomplish the things. And to make it worse, this administrative overhead does not coalesce into, like, one nice big batch. It jumps all over your calendar.

    16. CW

      Fractures your day-

    17. CN

      Fractures it. Yeah.

    18. CW

      ... in- into... What's the quote from Deep Work? I must have shared it a million times. Uh...

    19. CN

      Shatters the-

    20. CW

      Shatters, shatters your day into fragments so small that you get nothing meaningful done.

    21. CN

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shatters your... Yeah, something like that. Your schedule into fragments so small, like, insufficient for concentration.

    22. CW

      Yes. Whatever.

    23. CN

      Nothing gets done. Yeah.

    24. CW

      Yes.

    25. CN

      So n-

    26. CW

      I think about that all the time.

    27. CN

      Well, but think what happens now, though. This is why I think people are so burnt out, because it really is deranging. Think about this. So you say yes to too many things. Now your schedule is, like, completely full, not doing the things, but jumping on calls and answering people's emails about the things, right? Um, now you don't have time to really get them done. So what happens? You fall behind. So new things come in. So now, the things you have to do get longer and you fall even farther behind. Um, and then eventually, you get to a place where most of your time is now taken up, uh, just dealing with talking about work. Nothing gets done. You feel like you're making no progress. You have to start getting up at 4:00 or working in the evenings, you know, and now you're completely frustrated because you said, "I'm on Zoom all day long, and now I'm working instead of being at my kid's basketball game." Like, what was the point of the day? And this is what's making knowledge workers cry uncle. So when I say do fewer things at once, this is not at all about accomplishing fewer things, because if you can save most of your schedule from all this administrative overhead, what happens? You start just executing. So now, the rate at which you're finishing things and finishing them at really high quality levels, that skyrockets, right? So doing fewer things at once will make you actually accomplish many more things. That's not the only reason to do it. The main reason to do it is because it's entirely deranging to have your whole schedule be taken up by administrative overhead. I mean, it just makes life bearable not to be overloaded, but you have this bonus, you're also gonna start producing, right? So if you can just bootstrap, and I have a lot of ideas how to do this, but if you can just bootstrap into doing fewer things, get over that initial fear, you're going to pretty quickly earn your ability to keep doing fewer things, 'cause you're going to be out-shipping everyone else in your organization.

    28. CW

      Yeah, the, uh, Zoom apocalypse that everybody went through when the overhead of having meetings and this, I guess, pain from management of, of coordination. You know, if you can't see what someone's doing when they're in the house, 'cause they're no longer in the office-

    29. CN

      Yeah.

    30. CW

      Oh God, I mean, that's anxiety-inducing, isn't it? So why don't we start looking at Slack dashboards and a- a- activity time and then, you know, a response to this, you know, the anti-productivity movement was that law, was it France that brought it in, where bosses can't message their workers after 5:00 PM, I think?

  6. 37:00 – 43:41

    Dealing With the Increased Workload of Success

    1. CW

      podcast, and it's been interesting, I guess, that you've been in the arc, you've been involved as... on the guest side in, in arc, seeing it from... I know ep- episode s- 200s, you were in one of the first ones, and then maybe like 300s and then 600s and now. And, uh...... operationally, it's so complex behind the scenes, you know, to coordinate something of this size. And increasingly, I find myself doing more and more of being an operator as opposed to being a creator or a visionary or, or, or a researcher or just a learner. Uh, it's all coordination all the time. So much coordination. And you don't like that, it's the thing from Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited, that lady that starts a bakery and then soon enough she can't remember what it's like to bake a cake.

    2. CN

      Yes.

    3. CW

      All that she's doing is on Zoom meetings, organizing factories to start, where's the wheat coming from and have we, what's the new machine that we're going to have to grind the flour and stuff like that. Um, so yeah. I'm, you know, I'm very much living a, um... And, and I can remember when the operation was simpler because the business was simpler and because the, the actual production itself was simpler.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      But I'm observing even within my own life this trajectory, go from simplicity and purity to, uh, much more success and, and, and I'm very, very grateful and it's amazing to do all of this stuff, but there are all of these side effects that come along with it, that build, that build things out. And there are a million opportunities. There's a million things to say yes to, but there's a million things to say no to that you would have begged to have the opportunity to say yes to only two years ago.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. CW

      So you're permanently readjusting the sensitivity on what constitutes a hell yeah.

    8. CN

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      And like that's the one thing that with Siv's hell yeah or no, uh, rule, which is fantastic, the problem is that-

    10. CN

      You lag.

    11. CW

      Yes.

    12. CN

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      What you would have begged for yesterday is something you now need to learn to say no to today.

    14. CN

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the guy who has it all figured out, we all have to just nod our heads to Ferriss, because I was on his show in February and, you know, he had this like headset, like NASCAR-

    15. CW

      He's old school, man.

    16. CN

      ... headset, whatever. I was like-

    17. CW

      He's old school.

    18. CN

      ... "What's going on with this thing, man?" And he's like, uh, "If I, if I, uh, do video well, if I build a studio, then I have to stay where the studio is. Then I have to have people to run the studio. And, uh, I want to travel and I have this headset." He's like, "Look at this thing. This is a pretty good microphone. I could just be anywhere, anywhere in the world." And so maybe Ferriss figured this whole game out.

    19. CW

      He's, I mean, he's the guy that did it.

    20. CN

      Uh, but there's a, there's a deeper thing in there though, right? Which is like, that is the central tension when, with slow productivity, when things start going well. Like, this is partially why I wrote this book is because things were going well for me, right? You know? Like, this is not a book that would have been relevant to me as a 23-year-old at MIT doing, uh, you know, theoretical computer science. But now it's like things are hitting well. Like I can... My, my books get read and I'm a tenured professor and there's opportunities and there's e-... You know, and I have a podcast, these other things are going on now. And it was that same fear of, okay, so how do I keep and crystallize the principles of just slowly producing stuff that matters?

    21. CW

      Mm.

    22. CN

      Even with different stuff going on. And it's led actually me to be pretty careful or thoughtful thinking about the different aspects, like what I do and what I don't do. Like when I started a podcast in the pandemic, uh, I was really worried about the footprint because the footprint can get big, which is fine for, you know, um, like a tier one show like this. But this was something I was doing in addition to being a professor, in addition to writing. So I made a rule, I said half day a week, that's what you get. This podcast gets a half day a week. And if I want to grow or add something or whatever I want to do, I got to figure out a way to do that such that the podcast doesn't leave a half day a week. So I'm going to have to hire... You know, and, and that's what happened. And so it developed slowly. Eventually, I hired a producer to touch the computer for me, because that saves a lot of time, right? Like, okay, I don't have to touch any computers and we have, you know, the master and... Okay, so he talks to all of them. So now I can just show up and do the show. Now I have more time to think about, you know, what am I going to say or what are we going to do? Then we want to do video. Well, how are we going to make this fit within a half day a week? Well, it took a long time. We had to find the right person-

    23. CW

      Mm.

    24. CN

      ... to set something up that was super turnkey. Like, we have the studio set up where, like, it's all just installed and my producer can just, like, turn on these lights that en- and these cameras are always in the same place.

    25. CW

      Send me home, yeah.

    26. CN

      Yeah. Uh, with these big C-stands that, like, never move, that the cameras are, you know-

    27. CW

      Locked off.

    28. CN

      ... locked into and everything like that. So, okay, great. That, that's... So everything has been very, uh, slowly... But it also means though, right? There's impacts. Like, if I wanted to have a lot of guests, probably wasn't going to work with a half day a week rule because, you know, guests can do it when they can do it and it's not going to fit. And so I'm not doing that, right? Like it, it... So it's made some, had some impacts-

    29. CW

      You pay a price.

    30. CN

      ... what you can... Yeah, what you can and can't do. Um, but it allows me... But it's slow and it's growing and slow productivity. So, like, the show is growing and it's like, "Actually, this does pretty well." And it generates more money than like my professor salary. This is interest-... Like, it's starting to get interesting. It's probably going slower than maybe it, it could, but it's a slow productivity play, you know. This- I... This is important, but I want to take my time with this and not let it metastasize.

  7. 43:41 – 50:16

    The Insane Output of Brandon Sanderson

    1. CW

      Brandon Sanderson's output?

    2. CN

      Yes.

    3. CW

      Yes. I mean, so there's a, I think it's in the r/Fantasy subreddit. And if you have a look at that, the number of words that that guy writes per year is terrifying.

    4. CN

      It is t- but I worry about him.

    5. CW

      Me too.

    6. CN

      Because he's adding other things. He started adding a- he's, he's, he's building out more of a company.

    7. CW

      A merch wing and-

    8. CN

      Merch. Wer- well, and yes, exactly, merch, and, uh, fulfilling their own, the- their own po- uh, printer now. They do some of his books, they print themselves, uh, as opposed to going through, like, a standard publisher. And he has a big team now, and like, his whole thing, like everyo- he's famous in writing circles for exactly this. Like, he just sits and writes, and he generates, like, a lot of words. Like, that's what he d-

    9. CW

      I think it's, I think it's, uh, maybe 300,000 words a year.

    10. CN

      Yeah. It's, it's crazy.

    11. CW

      Yeah.

    12. CN

      It's crazy. I mean, you, you saw his video, his whole surprise video thing in the pandemic, where he was like, "I have a surprise for you. I wrote five extra books and I'm going to, like, sell them directly."

    13. CW

      Yes, yes, yes, yes.

    14. CN

      He just wrote five extra books. Yeah.

    15. CW

      I did see that, yeah, yes.

    16. CN

      The thing he did, which I do admire (laughs) because it's crazy, but I love it. It's a deep work thing. So he lives in, like, a normal cul-de-sac in Utah, right? So it's just, like, a cul-de-sac of houses. Um, eh, he bought the lot next to his was empty, right? What he did was, instead of building, like, a cool workspace there, he dug down and built an underground lair, right? So he built it, uh, uh, a whole Victorian Gothic underground lair-

    17. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CN

      ... where there's, you know, old fish tanks with weird things in it. He writes in there. There's a, a full screening room movie theater in there. They podcast in there. The whole thing's decorated like a Tim Burton movie. Built it underground, right? 20, 10-foot ceilings, like they dug all... I have photos of all this. Then he covered it back over, and then they put, like, a garage on top of it, and he has a secret entrance (laughs) to it from his house. So he goes under... He's, the suburban house, it's like secret entrance in his garage, and it takes him into this, like, massive underground lair. I think it's awesome. Uh, it's, uh, preposterous.

    19. CW

      (laughs)

    20. CN

      But hey, what if you're writing fantasy novels though at his level? Like, yeah.

    21. CW

      Well, that's one of your lessons, which is that the space you inhabit when you're trying to do your productivity can influence the way that you feel.

    22. CN

      Yeah, and that's a slow productivity idea, right? Is that, like, okay, the environment matters because you're trying to produce the best possible stuff, not just trying to be as busy as possible. So yeah, so environment matters. So Sanderson built that whole underground lair 'cause it inspires him to write, you know, fantasy well, in much the same way that Dan Brown, who wrote The Da Vinci Code. He, he has a similar kind of quirky house he built in New Hampshire with like secret passageways and code and you pull down the statue head.

    23. CW

      Oh, cool.

    24. CN

      'Cause he writes sort of conspiratorial genre thrillers, so, like, why not, like, put ourselves into that, that mindset? Other people did other things. So, like, one example, uh, Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, he brings, wherever his production offices are, old electronic gadgets 'cause he likes this connection to building, like, "I'm building something that's, you know, I'm bringing together parts." And he used to solder and do all this stuff as a kid, so he, like, brings them wherever he's going. But it's not just, uh, the positive, which is have stuff in your space that's inspiring. It's also get away from the stuff that's distracting, right? And this is the problem, for example, with just working out of your home office, that's just right there in your home next to everything else, is that you're exposed to all of these highly salient distractions-

    25. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      ... that have nothing to do with what you're doing, but when you see them, are going to trigger... All these neural networks are gonna start to be activated and, "Ah, there's a laundry basket. Oh my God, the laundry."

    27. CW

      Yes, yes, yes, yes.

    28. CN

      "And when do I need to do the laundry? And what is going..." And it's, this is very difficult. So I also tell these stories of people, uh, these are mainly writers too, who go through, like, great lengths to get away from the distractions. And my favorite was Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws, because he lived right down the street from where I grew up when he was writing Jaws. So I, I know his house. I could see it from mine. It's a beautiful house. And when he wrote Jaws, he didn't write it in that house, but in a back room at a furnace repair shop that was on the other side of town.

    29. CW

      (laughs)

    30. CN

      And we, the fact checkers at The New Yorker talked to Wendy Benchley about this. Peter's dead, but they talked to Wendy, and she was like, "Oh yeah, they were, like, hammering in there, man. It was like loud metal hammering." That's where he went to write Jaws, because he was trying to get away from the distractions. Like, the distraction of loud hammering, whatever, that's not something that he has a lot of associations with. He can associate, right? That's no big deal. But the laundry basket, you know, th- now you're gone for the next 20 minutes thinking about it.

  8. 50:16 – 53:29

    Creating a Productive Work Environment at Home

    1. CW

      more accessible solution for someone who doesn't want to dig 20 feet underneath their house in Utah?

    2. CN

      Everyone should do that. Come on.

    3. CW

      That's true.

    4. CN

      More underground lairs.

    5. CW

      That... I'm pro-underground lairs. This is the revolution that we really need.

    6. CN

      Podcast lairs I think would be awesome.

    7. CW

      That would be cool.

    8. CN

      Yeah, you go to, like, the small office and you go down the stairs and you just have like-

    9. CW

      Through this, you could pull the statue of the tiny owl and it opens up the door.

    10. CN

      Yeah, and there's just like a killer underground... Yeah.

    11. CW

      I love it.

    12. CN

      Yeah. You could also, like, kidnap and murder your guest down there, I guess the problem with it.

    13. CW

      Imagine that, imagine if it was a podcast run by a serial killer, and each guest, that was just our last day on the planet.

    14. CN

      The ratings would be... I mean, the downloads would be off the charts.

    15. CW

      It would be briefly-

    16. CN

      Briefly.

    17. CW

      ... and then-

    18. CN

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      ... they'd may get caught.

    20. CN

      Because of the murdering. That would be the problem. Yeah.

    21. CW

      Yeah.

    22. CN

      Like, eventually.

    23. CW

      Yeah. It's looked down on.

    24. CN

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      Need to redo that.

    26. CN

      Yeah, but you got to innovate. You got to innovate. Yeah, so, okay, what... Let's say you're not, you're not going to build an underground lair. Right? Um, I'm a big fan, for example, in what I call work from near home. Which is you don't need to build an underground lair, but also if you don't work in an office, find a space to work in that's not your house. Like, that is a worthy investment. Um, and that might just mean leasing just like, you know, low-cost office space nearby. That might be worth it, right? And don't think of that as an expense. Think of it as you are going to be able to be... Your mental health's going to be much better, you're going to be able to produce much more. Or taking an outbuilding in your backyard and make it into something that, uh, you can work in. I mean, I think this idea of going out of your way to find places to work that's not just your home is the right idea. Don't think about it in terms of, "Uh, my home is free, and this is not free." No, think about it more as, "My home is this terrible place to work that I really wish I didn't have to work there. Oh, this is, I only have to pay this much to avoid that? Oh, that's great." You know? You're, you're, you're paying to solve a problem.

    27. CW

      A good reframe.

    28. CN

      And then be careful about, uh, your environment. But the rituals can be not just, uh, aesthetic, but can also be functional. Right? So, so it, it might not just be here's what's in my space to inspire me. It can be here's what I do as a ritual before I work to inspire me. So it could be I walk the same route, like to this coffee shop, I get this coffee. As I walk with that coffee back, that's when I'm beginning to frame up what I'm about to work on. And then when I sit down after those sessions, it's like hard work time, and that's how I mentally separate from email time. And, you know, like I do this, for example. There's a particular walk I'll do, about 15 minutes, transition walk. Okay, I'm, I'm, I'm switching... I'll often switch locations, but also I want to switch my mindset into I'm writing now, not answering emails or doing something like this.

    29. CW

      It's the reason why training at home during the pandemic was so difficult, that there is something ritualistic about you get in the car and, and you drive to the gym and you say hello to... Or you're playing your music, you say hello to the receptionist, and then, you know, you dump your bag down. There's something about that that's, "Right, okay, this is gym time." And in some ways, there's a bit of a costly signaling thing going on, which is-

    30. CN

      Yeah.

  9. 53:29 – 1:02:55

    Getting Better At Saying No

    1. CW

      what about going back to the do-fewers-things thing. For the innate people pleasers amongst us-

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      ... how can we get better at learning to say no-

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. CW

      ... to things? Both philosophically, emotionally, and then tactically as well.

    6. CN

      Yeah. Transparency about your workload. Right? I think this is the, the number one issue that when solved makes workload management better, is getting transparent with other people, "This is what's on my plate." Instead of keeping it this obfuscated thing, no one knows what anyone else is doing and we just sort of throw tasks at each other and, like, sometimes they come back and sometimes they're accepted, and we just imagine why that is. Be more transparent. So many of the tactics in the book are all under that category for under, doing fewer things, are all under this category of making your workload more transparent. So, like, here's a, a really direct way of doing that, for example. This is like sort of on the nose, but people are actually doing this, so now I, now I say, like, this is not a thought experiment, but really do this. Uh, imagine you have a shared document. And at the top it says, "Okay, here's what I'm actively working on right now." And you should have like three things under there. Like, "I'm working on these three things." Below it, like big dividing line. "All right, here's the ordered queue of things that, like, are lined up for me to work on next, and in the order in which they're going to, like, sort of pop into here as I finish things." Right? Now imagine someone's like, "Yeah, Chris, can you do whatever?" Now someone just be like, "No," or "Yes," you could be like, "Yeah, just go add it to the queue." Right? "This is where I keep track. I'm very careful about my work. Add it over there. Uh, if there's any information I need to know to do it, you know, either put that in there or put a note there that I should, like, call you when I get closer." And now they have to confront the reality of your workload.... right? Which means either they're going to say, "All right. Never mind. Like, I kind of need to get this done. You have, like, 15 things (laughs) waiting to happen. I... You know, it would take too long," or their expectations are reasonable, like, "Oh. Okay. Uh, I see you're not starting to work on this tomorrow. I'm not going to start bothering you. In fact, I can keep checking in on this document and seeing this thing marching its way up to when it's active, so I'm going to generate no overhead tax until you're working on it. Yeah. Of course, we're not going to have standing meetings or emails until it's one of your three things you're working on." So you either get much more realistic calibration of, like, when d- you're going to get work back, or you're like, "Oh. Don't, don't bother about it."

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CN

      Now, if they're a boss, they say, "No, no, I need to get this done now," now you can put it back to them, "Great. Tell me which one to move," and I'll let them know they s- you said that, like, uh... And, and so now there's... People have to actually be involved.

    9. CW

      What about the emotion that you feel of... Uh, th- there's this sort of default to yes. You know, you don't want to appear lazy. There's almost this sort of self-flagellation that I certainly have with my productivity work. It's like, "I should be able to take on more. I shouldn't be as inefficient," or whatever malady I think I have that's causing me to not get a million things done in a day and only-

    10. CN

      Right.

    11. CW

      ... to get half a million things done in a day.

    12. CN

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      What about dealing with that, you know, guilt almost-

    14. CN

      Yeah.

    15. CW

      ... like productivity guilt?

    16. CN

      Yeah. So never give a yes or no in the room helps with that, right? So once you have some sort of system, now you're kind of tracking, "What am I working on now? What am I waiting to work on?" however you want to do that. Your answer can always be, uh, "Yeah. That sounds great. That sounds really important. Like, that sounds like the type of thing I could really do. Uh, next time I get a chance, let me just go... You know, I'm very careful about... I have these, like, work management systems. I track my time very carefully. Let me just run it through that and see, like, what I'm dealing with, and then I'll get back to you." And so you're not giving a yes or no in the room. And now the next day or, like, later that day, you can actually go through and look at it and come back and, and either you say, "This is important" and figure out when you're going to work on it and give them a good estimate or be like, "And, uh, you know what? I took a look, and, um, really I don't have a lot of... I'm looking at my time. I tracked my time very carefully. It'd be like a couple months before I had enough cycles, so this is not going to work. I'm not going to be able to fit this in now."

    17. CW

      Yeah. That specifically, the, the wordage-

    18. CN

      Yeah.

    19. CW

      ... of delivering this to people, have you found any better or worse ways to actually communicate, "This is a thing that I don't think I can get done"?

    20. CN

      Yeah. Well, there's, there's two things here. The first is just you have to be super clear with the no when you give it. So when you give the no, it has to be, you know, hammered into the tablets that Moses is holding clear, right? Like, "I can't do this." And then you can put whatever... Then you soften all... The softening should be around the very clear no when you actually give it. Do not leave any wiggle room for, like, "Maybe I could do this."

    21. CW

      It's, yeah. "I can't do this right now."

    22. CN

      Right now, because you know what'll ha- Their whole goal in life is to get this thing taken care of that's on their list. So if you give them... They're, they're not going to. A lot of people just hope that the other person who gave them the task in the first place is going to do the no for them.

    23. CW

      "I will take this-"

    24. CN

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      "... off now."

    26. CN

      "Yeah. You're right, Chris. I'm looking at your sch- Yeah. This... You do sound busy. No. Don't bother. I'll take it on." They'll be like, "Great. So when are you available? Two and a half weeks? Great. Uh, I'll expect in two and a half weeks." Like, that's... So you got to be clear. "I can't do this." Um, and then you can be nice around it, but don't let the niceness make the no be ambiguous. But the, the thing I mentioned before, that's the second piece here that could be useful, signaling that you're very careful about your time. This earns you a huge amount of leeway, right? 'Cause a lot of, uh, no resistance, right? Resistance is someone saying no, comes from the fact where, "I don't really trust that you have your act together."

    27. CW

      Yeah.

    28. CN

      Um, "I just... I, I don't..." Are you-

    29. CW

      Is this overwhelm or is this laziness?

    30. CN

      Are you laziness? Are you all... Uh, you know, just you're entitled. It gets all these mi- Do your work. But if you have the reputation of, oh, like, you're like a Cal Newport nerd, right? Like, you have your, you have your stuff together. So if you're signaling that, "Yeah. Let me just, let me just run this through my system because I actually track, like, everything I work on, and I find the time in advance when I'm going to work on it. Let me just run it through the system and let you know, like, when we could fit this in," and then you come back and say, "I can't fit it in," now they're dealing with, "Ah, Chris has his act together on this. He's... So he's probably not lying. He probably doesn't have enough time for this. And, yay, isn't it awesome that Chris, like, has his act together?"

  10. 1:02:55 – 1:10:10

    The Benefit of Quotas & Templates

    1. CN

      speaking of which, can we get on a call later? Is that-

    2. CW

      (laughs) Yeah. Uh, Monday.

    3. CN

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      Monday looks great.

    5. CN

      Uh, but another thing that goes along with that would also be templates and quotas. Like, it's another way... So, how do you deal with things where you're gonna say yes to some, but you can't say yes to everything? So, you could quota it, right? "Yeah, uh, I'd love to take calls with, like, whatever, new people or whatever, but I, I only do three a month. So I already hit my three this month, so I can't do it this month." Like, quotas are a way to keep you doing things or... It doesn't, you don't want to say no to every single time, but if you say yes every single time, you get overwhelmed. And then templates, which would probably be great for you, actually. I've been messing around with these too. For certain types of really common things, you have to have a whole templated process in place, so that it doesn't have to just be the interaction. So, like, if you, uh, if you write Adam Grant to blurb a book, he's got this great, "So you want me to blurb a book document." And, like, it walks through, like, and so, "Here's how it works. Like, I can't blurb most books, but you should send it to me and, and here's how many I get. And so, in the end, I blurb a few. And so if you don't hear from me, then that means it wasn't bl-" and he lays the whole thing out. So now, because you're- I- you know, I get this request a lot as a writer. You know, when someone's like, "Okay, uh, can you blurb my book?" And it's often, like, someone you kinda know. Now you can just send them the thing. You've templated it, right? So it's not an initiative-

    6. CW

      Or you could even have, uh... We've started using this on the website for a few things, um, like dark links on your website, you know, secret URLs. CalNewport.com/testimonial or whatever.

    7. CN

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      And you just set... Well, there's the, there's the URL. Have a little look.

    9. CN

      Yeah.

    10. CW

      I think there's a, a type of legitimacy that the URL gives it as well, which is quite nice.

    11. CN

      Yeah, they're like, "Oh, it's a system."

    12. CW

      Oh my God.

    13. CN

      It's a system.

    14. CW

      He's got, he's got a, he's got a URL for it. This, this means that it must happen an awful lot.

    15. CN

      Yeah, like CalNewport.com/blurb-request or something.

    16. CW

      Yes, yeah, precisely.

    17. CN

      And now it seems, like, real, yeah.

    18. CW

      Precisely.

    19. CN

      Do you have this issue with, like, unsolicited guest? Is this, like, or-

    20. CW

      Uh, the-

    21. CN

      ... or do people kinda understand in this world, you know, the, the host and their team, it's r- it's pulling in guest? Or do you get a lot?

    22. CW

      So, I get an awful lot of requests to come on the show. One of the problems, and this is, uh, I guess a unique challenge of going from total cottage industry solo influencer to niche micro fame, to whatever version of, of platform we're at now, like, hyper niche, slightly larger fame. Um, I built up along the way. You have my email.

    23. CN

      Yeah.

    24. CW

      And, like, fucking David Allen has my email.

    25. CN

      Yeah.

    26. CW

      And, and Ryan Holiday has my email.

    27. CN

      And that's-

    28. CW

      And Mark Manson has my email.

    29. CN

      And it's clearly a personal email address-

    30. CW

      Correct, yeah.

Episode duration: 1:50:15

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode TA5gYCCuYWs

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome