"This Is Stealing Your Life Away!" - How To Completely Change Your Life In 30 Days | Cal Newport

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 So Cal, there was a recent report in the UK that suggested that 88% of UK workers have experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. What do you think an alarming statistic like that says about the state of society?

Cal Newport 0:20 Well, I think it says about the state of knowledge work, that it's broken, right? I, I think the way we work in knowledge work has for a long time been a problem, and the pandemic made it unmissable, right? So, so what I think happened during the pandemic is we had already begun this descent in knowledge work, where the introduction of digital tools like email, like Zoom, uh, like mobile computing, like smartphones, was increasing the, not just the pace of work-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:48 Mm

Cal Newport 0:48 ... but increasing the amount of time we were focusing on talking about work. Work became more performative. It's the, the, the communication about work, the back and forth. The pandemic made all that worse in an acute way, and I think it pushed a lot of people over the edge.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03 The term knowledge work comes up a lot in the new book-

Cal Newport 1:06 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06 ... Slow Productivity. What is knowledge work?

Cal Newport 1:09 Well, there's a technical definition, which has to do with adding value to information using the human brain. Uh, but I think there's an informal definition, which is essentially if you get annoyed by how much time you spend with email-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:21 ... uh, if, if the word Zoom, uh, generates mixed emotions-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:26 ... you're probably a knowledge worker. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28 Yeah. But it's not everyone, is it?

Cal Newport 1:30 No, it's not everyone. It's not everyone. Because a, a lot of my writing, a lot of my ideas, at the base, I think about technology and how technology comes into different parts of our life and disrupts things and what we do about it. So the, the techno story behind, uh, this new book is what happened when tools like email and laptops, network computers, when they entered the workplace, it really created a lot of problems. And so it's really the type of workplaces where those tools became prevalent, that's where we're seeing the sort of specific burnout overload problems that I'm talking about.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:01 Is one of the problems with knowledge work, or I guess more broadly, work that is done on screens-

Cal Newport 2:11 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:11 ... and using modern technology, is one of the problems that you never see real-world evidence for the completion of that work. So, so what I mean by that-

Cal Newport 2:20 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:21 ... is if you were a bricklayer, for example, and you spent eight hours laying bricks-

Cal Newport 2:26 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:27 ... at the end of the day, you can see the fruits of your labor-

Cal Newport 2:30 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:30 ... whereas you could literally spend eight hours just going back on forth on email, feel like you've accomplished something-

Cal Newport 2:38 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:38 ... but in many cases you've not actually done that much.

Cal Newport 2:41 Yeah. Well, I, I... Okay, you're getting at what I think is the core problem with knowledge work. We can't count feet of a wall that's been built. We can't count the number of automobiles that came out of a factory. We can't count the number of bushels of wheat that each acre of land produced.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:57 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 2:57 This is actually the key issue. So the notion of productivity, economically speaking, was very well defined for about 300 years, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:04 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 3:05 So for about 300 years we knew that there was a, a ratio situation going on. We could count the output versus input. This began in agriculture. It really hit its stride in industrial manufacturing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:16 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 3:17 You know, Henry Ford could say, "This is how many Model Ts produced per paid labor hour at my factory." And they could tweak something about the production system and say, "That number got better, so this new way of building cars is better." Knowledge work comes along, none of that works anymore. Because in knowledge work, I might be working on a bunch of different things. It could be different than what someone else is working on. How I'm doing this work is not well defined. It's obfuscated. It's my own sort of personal habits, how I actually like to organize my labor. So we have nothing to really measure. So productivity becomes a much more squirrely topic in knowledge work, 'cause we can't just say, "When we do this, we produce more Model Ts. When we do this, the number goes down." Without the ability to do that, we have to fall back on rougher heuristics, and that's where ideas like, "Well, let's just look at activity and being busy as a proxy for useful effort," that's where that emerges.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:08 Yeah. What, what I love the most about the new book, Slow Productivity, is it seems to kind of challenge a lot of the prevailing and accepted norms, the things that we've just sort of fallen into-

Cal Newport 4:25 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:26 ... as email and screens and technology has become a bigger part of our lives. And it reminds me a little bit of your book, Digital Minimalism, in the sense that the big take home for me from that book-

Cal Newport 4:38 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:38 ... was that what we need is an intentional approach to our technology.

Cal Newport 4:43 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:43 And that was particularly about technology in our free time and our non-working time. But it's, it's not a dissimilar idea that you put forward in Slow Productivity.

Cal Newport 4:52 Yeah. Well, I mean, because the same issues happen in the world of work, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:55 Yeah.

Cal Newport 4:55 So, so, so we, we had these technologies roll into work. Why did that create a problem? Well, well, here's my argument, is that when knowledge work emerged, before we got these modern technologies-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:05 Mm

Cal Newport 5:05 ... when it emerged as a major sector in the mid-20th century, the definition we came up with for productivity is what I call pseudo-productivity in the book.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:12 [laughs]

Cal Newport 5:13 But it's the idea that a visible effort will be our proxy for, for useful activity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:18 I love that term pseudo-productivity. It's very evocative.

Cal Newport 5:21 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:22 We've all been in that situation, I think, or many of us have, where someone is on their screen-

Cal Newport 5:29 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:29 ... in front of a desktop or a computer between 9:00 to 5:00-

Cal Newport 5:33 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:33 ... and therefore it is assessed that they have been productive or they have been working.

Cal Newport 5:38 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:39 But whether they were on Facebook, Twitter, sending the gas engineer an email, or whatever it might be, is kind of not being measured. It's just the simple fact that they were sitting in front of a screen. What they were doing-

Cal Newport 5:51 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:51 ... is a different matter altogether.

Cal Newport 5:52 That's why we call it pseudo-productivity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:54 Pseudo-productivity.

Cal Newport 5:54 And, and this w- I mean, this was the, the temporary answer to that real hard economic question of how do we manage- ... productivity and knowledge work if we can't count model Ts. Pseudo-productivity is what we came up with. It was like a, a Band-Aid or a heuristic. Like, well, at the very least, if I see you're doing something, that's better than you not doing something. That's what productivity became in knowledge work. Now, where this becomes a real problem is when we get email, when we get mobile computing, when we get smartphones, because if visible activity is how I demonstrate to you that I'm being productive-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:26 Mm

Cal Newport 6:26 ... now that we have email, the granularity at which I can demonstrate activity just got really small. It's no longer, "Oh, I see you're at your desk for eight hours," so, like, that's how I know you're doing something useful. You're here, and you're not obviously writing a magazine. Now it's, "Well, wait a second. How long did it take you to respond to this email? How many emails did I see you send and respond to?" So the, the speed of activity got faster, and the scale-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:51 Mm

Cal Newport 6:51 ... at which you had to show you were doing things got much smaller. So if visible activity is how we indicate we're being useful, and now we have a way of demonstrating useful activity minute to minute, not just in the office but with us on our laptops, with us on our smartphones, that's where you get this feeling of the pace of work starting to pick up. It's pseudo-productivity plus these digital communication tools. And so it's really not a great way to think about doing stuff with the brain. But again, this, the culture of, of activity-based productivity, pseudo-productivity, is deeply ingrained in knowledge work, and we don't realize it. It's fish not knowing what water is.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:24 Yeah.

Cal Newport 7:25 But it is what we are, what we're swimming in. It's the only thing we know, and when we think about knowledge work and its problems, too often we just assume that's the only way we have to measure productivity, and then we work from that assumption, and our options become really limited.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:38 Yeah, it's going more and more upstream to go, "Well, you know, where did this idea come from in the first place?"

Cal Newport 7:44 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:44 "What if we didn't subscribe to that idea? What might our working day and our working life look like?" I think when people read your book, they're suddenly gonna go, "Of course. I get it. I get it."

Cal Newport 7:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:56 "That's why I feel so frustrated." Going back to that opening figure of 88% of UK workers saying that they've, you know, experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years, what is it about pseudo-productivity that is leading to burnouts?

Cal Newport 8:12 Yeah. Yeah, because if you, if you're, if you're working a lot but you're working on something that's tangible and meaningful, it's not gonna burn you out. What, what's burning people out is the fact that they're busier than they've ever been before, but they feel like they're producing much less. So what's gonna burn you out is four or five hours of Zoom meetings plus 125 emails sent and received, and yet the important report, the piece of software-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:37 [laughs]

Cal Newport 8:38 ... the product strategy you're trying to put together, nothing's happening there, right? It's almost like a psychological experiment. We're gonna have you spend your entire day talking about work. No actual work is gonna get done. Maybe if you wake up earlier on the weekends, you can make a little bit of progress, and we're all gonna pretend like this makes sense. That's what I think is burning people out. It's the absurdity of the busyness, not just the raw workload itself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:02 Yeah. When I think of burnouts, because of course burnout is technically a term relating to work, I keep bringing up your previous book, Digital Minimalism, because I, I don't think it's just work that is leading to... Maybe I, I broaden out the term from burnout. Chronic overload and stress-

Cal Newport 9:23 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:23 ... which many people are feeling. Let's assume that work is frustrating and that we never feel that we've completed everything we've got to do-

Cal Newport 9:32 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:32 ... because there's an- al- always another email to answer, always something else that we could be doing, which is why or one of the reasons it infiltrates our evenings and our weekends.

Cal Newport 9:40 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:41 Is it not also, though, that when we are trying to switch off and relax, we're overwhelming ourselves by being digital maximalists?

Cal Newport 9:53 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:53 We- we- so, so it's not just the work. It's that that speed of life that we have at work, we're now taking into our relaxation time as well, so no wonder so many people feel, you know, burnt out and, and overloaded.

Cal Newport 10:07 Oh, I agree with that completely. Well, I mean, just to return briefly to, to what the mechanic is that's making the work particularly, uh, uh, burning us out, and then I, I wanna get to what's happening after work. The, the specific mechanic that's at the core of a lot of this is, uh, I think of it as administrative overhead or an overhead tax, right? So, uh, as you say yes to more and more things, right, everything you say yes to in a, in a work context brings with it administrative overhead, right? So I say yes on this project. We have to send emails about it. We have to do meetings about it. The thing that I think is particularly deranging for people is when they say yes to too many things. All of that administrative overhead builds up. It aggregates, and at some point, you cross a threshold where all you have left is time to handle the administrative overload without actually getting to the actual projects itself, and then you fall farther and farther behind on the projects, right? So that's the, that's the mechanism I think that's driving the knowledge work burnout. More than anything else, it's the having too many things on our plate is creating the days of this sort of shallow busyness because you have to service the overhead.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:10 So it's, it's a kinda low-grade busyness that doesn't actually achieve the truly important things.

Cal Newport 11:17 Yeah, and what's important, and I realized this working on this book, and I hadn't realized this in some of my previous work, right? So I, so I wrote a book before this just about email, and I was saying, "Okay, this is really bad. To switch your attention to an inbox every three minutes is bad from a neurological perspective. Our brain can't context switch that fast. It's gonna exhaust your brain. You're not getting much work done. This is terribly unproductive." But at the end of that book, I said the, the answer is to have different communication protocols That don't require being interrupted by messages. What I didn't realize back then is the reason why we're checking email so much is not just because we're, we're choosing to do busyness instead of doing our work, uh, it's because we said yes to so many things, and each of those things brings with it administrative overhead that cannot be avoided, right? That's how each of the, the items of work is coordinated, and it's adding up to a point where we have no breathing room left. There's no room left to say, "Hey, let's come up with a really smart process for how we're gonna communicate on this project," because this project's one of seven, and they're all generating messages, and you can't keep up with it. You're drowning it. So the, the overload is what's generating the excessive busyness, what's, what's generating the ex- uh, excessive communication. So as long as we're doing too many things at once, it... our work is gonna become increasingly more the busyness and less the actual substantive work. So the, so the overload, I think, is the, the driving factor, is that we have too many things on our plate, at which point all we can do is handle the overload, and everything devolves into the communication. But I do... I wanna get back to your digital minimalism point-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:51 Mm

Cal Newport 12:51 ... because I, I think you're absolutely right that technology is squeezing us from both sides of the work-life division.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:57 Yeah.

Cal Newport 12:57 So we have what's happening in work with email and the overload. The way I think about what's happening at home is that when we have tools that are these attention economy tools like social media on our phone, for example, what they're doing is subverting very deep human drives. So we have these deep human drives that, you know, if we follow them, help us be more fulfilled human beings. These tools hijack and subvert those for their own means. So like communication-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:24 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 13:24 ... we're super social. Like, we're driven to want to communicate with our fellow humans. It's very important to us to be part of communities. Social media comes in and hijacks that drive. Oh, you wanna communicate with people?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:36 Mm.

Cal Newport 13:36 Do it through the screen, right? And it feels enou- it's easier than actually talking to someone.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:41 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 13:41 It feels enough about it that we think we're being social, but we're not, and we get more, we get more strung out, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:47 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 13:47 Uh, what about the drive I've been thinking about recently, the drive to be a, a leader, right? We have this sense of, I wanna be respected in my tribe.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:55 Mm.

Cal Newport 13:55 I wanna be a leader of my family and my community and of my, my business. Social media can subvert that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:01 Mm.

Cal Newport 14:01 No, no, no. Be a leader posting things.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:04 Yeah.

Cal Newport 14:04 You have this sort of fake community that you feel, and there's likes happening, and people are reposting your things, and again, it subverts this drive-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:12 Mm

Cal Newport 14:12 ... that otherwise would've been used to do things that would've been really fulfilling, like I'm actually going to emerge as a sort of a person of standing in my actual physical community. So we get this again and again with these technologies, the drive to be, you know, entertained with novelty, to go out and experience and be inspired by the world. Again, our phone is, "No, no. We got a clip for you to look at."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:32 Mm.

Cal Newport 14:32 So it hijacks these drives that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:35 Like food, right?

Cal Newport 14:36 Food, same thing, fast food.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:37 Yeah.

Cal Newport 14:37 I'm hungry. Let me just grab whatever, a candy bar. It's hijacking the, hijacking the drive. In the end, you don't really get what you need, and you get less healthy, but in the moment, it seems better. It's hyperpalatable. So I think that's what's happening in our life outside of work, and so all of these activities that are hard but fulfilling that make humans humans are being subverted into, uh, these apps. They're being subverted into our phones so they can be monetized, and so we feel less rooted and more shallow because of that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:03 Yeah. In Digital Minimalism, you wrote a lot about solitude and the importance of solitude, and I think the definition you utilize in that book-

Cal Newport 15:13 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:13 ... was freedom of input from other minds-

Cal Newport 15:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:16 ... which was just beautiful.

Cal Newport 15:18 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:18 But why is solitude so important?

Cal Newport 15:20 Yeah, because people think of it as physical isolation, which it's not, right? The definition of solitude that matters is you alone with your own thoughts, taking in the world around you-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:29 Mm

Cal Newport 15:29 ... and thinking about things, right? This is how people make sense of their lives in the world. You have experiences. That's step one. Step two, you sit there, and you grapple with them, right? Because we, we build in our heads these sort of hidden schemas, these frameworks for understanding our life and our journey. What has happened to us? Where are we going next? Uh, how do we understand what's important to us and what's not important to us? All of that takes time in your own head-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:55 Mm

Cal Newport 15:55 ... just thinking things through. What's going on? What did I... Why do I feel this way? Um, what do I wanna do different in life? So solitude is, is critical. Until recently, it was completely unavoidable, right? You were just gonna have time during your days where you were alone with your own thoughts because there was nothing else to do. You were in line at the store.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:15 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 16:15 You're just thinking. You're, you're walking to, you know, the underground or something. You just, you're there with your own thoughts. Smartphones, ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet makes it possible for the first time in the history of our species to get all solitude out of your life, and I think it's a real issue because without the ability to make sense of our lives in the world, we feel unrooted.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:35 Yeah.

Cal Newport 16:35 And that makes us more anxious, so then we hide even farther in the distractions of the phone, and that's not a cycle that ends up well.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:41 Yeah. I mean, I, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I've, I've said on many occasions, I actually believe that a daily practice of solitude is one of the most important things that we can do for our health and our happiness.

Cal Newport 16:52 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:53 Because without it, as you say, you, you, you don't, you know, realize that sense of who you are. You don't really have the time and the space to reflect on your life-

Cal Newport 17:01 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:01 ... to step outside, to go, "Oh, that's how I'm living. You know, I don't wanna live like that. I wanna, I wanna sort of live a bit differently. I wanna make different decisions." And actually, although I think Slow Productivity is probably at least initially written for the workplace, 'cause it's about work and how do we-

Cal Newport 17:20 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:20 ... work in a much more meaningful way-

Cal Newport 17:24 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:24 ... in the 21st century, to me, it's so much more than that. I, I think it's a, a revolutionary manifesto for a slower way of life.

Cal Newport 17:33 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:34 But I also think there's a huge health component, which is really interesting to me as a doctor, that if you are feeling overwhelmed every day at your job, if at the end of the workday- You feel a sense of incompleteness, that nothing really meaningful got done.

Cal Newport 17:52 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:52 Well, what do you do? Yes, you go to social media, you go to alcohol.

Cal Newport 17:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:56 You go to sugar, you go to junk food, you go to takeaways, right?

Cal Newport 18:01 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:01 A- and I've been really thinking deeply about what are the root causes of all these poor lifestyle choices that so many of us are making. I don't think knowledge is the answer. Giving people more knowledge about the harmful effects of too much sugar, everyone knows that.

Cal Newport 18:18 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:18 It's because of the state of our nervous systems, because of the way we're living and the way that we're working-

Cal Newport 18:23 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:23 ... we have to soothe it. So I would argue that your book in many ways is a health book, because if you can work in that much more slower and meaningful way, I think you are naturally going to make better health choices as well.

Cal Newport 18:37 I think that's so right. I mean, if you, if you read, uh, a lot of the examples in the book, and, and I, I make this choice in the book, by the way, like, where did I wanna draw my wisdom from?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:46 Mm.

Cal Newport 18:47 And instead of doing, uh, what might've been the obvious thing, which is, well, I just wanna study companies that are doing this differently, or I wanna pull social psych papers and say-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:56 Mm, yeah

Cal Newport 18:56 ... researchers at Michigan show that... You know? I was like, I don't wanna do that with this book. Um, to be true to the idea of slow movements in general, slow food, slow cities, slow medicine, I wanted to look back at a traditional source of wisdom and then try to adapt it to our modern times.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:10 Mm.

Cal Newport 19:10 So I study what I call traditional knowledge workers.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:12 Mm.

Cal Newport 19:12 People in times past that used their brain to create value, but had a huge amount of flexibility and autonomy to experiment with it, try to figure out what did they land on, and then I try to adapt that to modern office jobs. But if you read those stories, there's just this moment of, uh, these moments of recognition and inspiration. It just feels somehow right.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:33 Mm.

Cal Newport 19:33 That was my experience with these stories. I mean, hearing about Jane Austen or Lin-Manuel Miranda or even going back to Galileo, there's these, these intimations in their stories of, oh, that's what work should be like.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:45 Yeah.

Cal Newport 19:45 It's meaningful, it's slower. It's, um, it's productivity measured on a big time scale. Like, look what I produced this year. Look what I did this decade that I'm proud of. Not productivity on a minute-to-minute scale, not look how busy I was in the last hour. The fact that those stories resonate, I think tells us that what we're doing now isn't natural.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:09 Mm.

Cal Newport 20:09 Because we ache for what we hear when we hear these stories of times past about how people used their brain to create value. It just seems right somehow.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:17 Yeah.

Cal Newport 20:17 That they're on to... There's something there. Of course, we have to adapt it to a modern office job. We can't live the life of Jane Austen.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:23 No.

Cal Newport 20:24 But, like, we can learn lessons, and then ask the question of how do we make those lessons work in our modern life. So that resonance, I think, in those stories tells us that there's something natural going on there.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:32 One of the stories that really stood out to me in Slow Productivity was, I think he... the worker for HSBC, who, during the, the pandemic, during the lockdowns-

Cal Newport 20:44 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:44 ... suffered a heart attack.

Cal Newport 20:46 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:46 It was very, very powerful, and particularly because we've covered on this show quite a lot recently, because I'm very passionate about it, the regrets of the dying. You know?

Cal Newport 20:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:56 From Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse, she wrote the book The Five Regrets of the Dying, and one of those top five regrets on people's deathbed says, "I wish I'd worked less."

Cal Newport 21:04 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:05 And I think this particular example kind of speaks to that.

Cal Newport 21:09 Yeah, because he wrote out a list, I guess it was 10 things that, his resolutions or revelations having survived a heart attack early in the pandemic. Number one, spend less time on Zoom, which, which-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:18 I mean, let's just pause on that for a minute.

Cal Newport 21:19 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:20 Spend less time on Zoom.

Cal Newport 21:22 'Cause remember what happened, and I think it's important what happened, because it shows a, a deeper underlying dynamic. But remember what happened. Early pandemic for a lot of office workers, their days got completely taken over by Zoom.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:33 Mm.

Cal Newport 21:34 Which, if you think about it, is absurd, where you would have... people would have an eight-hour day back to back to back to back. I mean, I had calls into my podcast from listeners where their problem was, "When do I go to the bathroom?" Like, "There's not even a 20-minute break in my day."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:50 Yeah.

Cal Newport 21:51 That's what I think emphasized to people, okay, something we're doing is broken. Now, now how do we end up, I call it the Zoom apocalypse? A couple things happened, uh, when the pandemic erupted that I think made this sort of inevitable. One is we were working right at the limit, which is what we tend to do in a pseudo-productivity culture, is we work right at the limit of what's bearable. Because in a pseudo-productivity culture, where activity is what matters, it's very dangerous, we feel, to say no. So how do we then manage how much work we take on? What a lot of people do is they wait until the stress of their workload becomes sufficiently acute that they feel like they have psychological cover to say no. So their busyness has to be sufficiently painful to compensate for the pain of saying no. So because of this, we tend to work constantly at this level of having too much, right? That's how we, we get some sort of psychological permission-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:42 Mm

Cal Newport 22:42 ... to start saying no to things. So if you perturb this at all, it falls apart, and I think that's what happened in the early pandemic, is everyone was already working at this peak workload where things were just barely possible. The pandemic introduced 25% new tasks all... you know, overnight, basically. That was enough-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:59 Mm

Cal Newport 22:59 ... for this whole thing to, to, to tumble, and then it was just endless meetings and endless email. But to me, the real lesson of that is not just how terrible the summer of 2020 was, but how busy we were in the winter of 2020, right? How busy we were in 2019. How at the red line we already were that any sort of perturbing, any sort of inflation of our workload could lead people to have their lives completely fall apart.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 23:25 The book's been out for a little while now, and you've been on many high-profile shows talking about the ideas in the book. Are people getting it? Are people thinking, "Yes, I can do this. I can make a change"? Or, as I've seen in my job as a doctor time and time again, it often requires people to get sick and to get a diagnosis- Before they start really looking at their life and going, "Right, you know what? Enough's enough. I ain't living this way." Or it requires someone to become burnt out and have-

Cal Newport 24:00 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:00 ... to take six months off work to then recognize, "I've gotta live in a different way. I've gotta work in a different way." Do you think it's possible for humans to make those changes without going to that edge?

Cal Newport 24:14 I hope so.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:15 Yeah, I do, too. [laughs]

Cal Newport 24:16 I hope so. I mean, what I'm seeing is there's two major audiences for the book, right? So there's entrepreneur types who are much more willing and able to make radical changes to their work.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:26 Mm.

Cal Newport 24:26 And so within the entrepreneurial circles, you have sort of a dividing line. Those who are constantly experimenting, and they're like, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's rock and roll. I'm gonna cut this back. I'm gonna do this."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:35 Mm.

Cal Newport 24:35 "Let's, let's see, let's see how this works." And then there's those who are living in fear of, "If I'm not hustling every minute, this could all go away. The clients could disappear." The other major audience is people who work for large companies, and again, there's sort of a split there. Those who are saying, "Okay, this is scary 'cause I have to walk softly 'cause I have bosses."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:54 Mm.

Cal Newport 24:54 "I wanna be careful about this, but I think this can work." I mean, most of the advice in the book is actually for that crowd, and how you walk softly and make this work. And then the other half of that crowd is saying, "I love the idea. I'm just too nervous."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:06 Yeah.

Cal Newport 25:06 "I'm too nervous. It's too different." And so it's, it's a split kinda down the middle in both of these crowds between the, like, "Let's rock and roll," and the, "I hear you, but I'm afraid of what's gonna happen."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:19 Well, let's get into some of those specifics then because that was one of my big questions is who is this exactly for? If you have autonomy-

Cal Newport 25:26 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:27 ... over your working day, like a lot of entrepreneurs perhaps do, perhaps they may feel it's easier to make some of these changes, as you say, compared to someone who's got a boss, and they're accountable for certain things. So let's go into those three core ideas in the book.

Cal Newport 25:44 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:44 Maybe explain what they are, and then let's get into actually how do people do this in, in real life.

Cal Newport 25:50 Yeah, because I'll, I'll preface it by saying so if you work for someone else, you actually have a lot more autonomy than you think.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:55 Mm.

Cal Newport 25:56 Right? So, so autonomy is baked into knowledge work in a, in a very literal sense. So, so the, the guy who coined the term knowledge work in the late 1950s, Peter Drucker-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:06 Yeah

Cal Newport 26:06 ... the, the very first management theorist. He invented the field. Um, he basically midwived the notion of knowledge work as a major economic sector. He was responsible in his writings for explaining to the world of business, "This is what knowledge work is. Here's how it's different than industrial manufacturing. Here's what you need to know to succeed." And if you go back to his writings, again and again he says autonomy. A direct quote, "Autonomy, autonomy, autonomy." You have to give autonomy to the worker.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:34 Yeah.

Cal Newport 26:34 'Cause he was making the point, which was right, uh, this is not an assembly line. You can't break down the work of a ad man into, uh, seven steps they always follow. You have to give them autonomy. It's creative and it's skilled work. And so autonomy is baked into knowledge work. So what we do is his, his suggestion, what we do today is management by objectives. Make it clear what I want you to do, but how you do it is up to you, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:58 Mm.

Cal Newport 26:58 So knowledge work has a ton of autonomy. That can cut both ways.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:02 Yeah. Exactly.

Cal Newport 27:03 So it's what allows us to get super overloaded into these absurd workloads because, again, there's no set system that we use of here's how we manage how much you're working on. Here's how we decide, you know, what's a reasonable amount to work on. We don't have any systems like that, so people can get into a lot of trouble. You keep saying yes to things-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:20 Mm

Cal Newport 27:20 ... the next thing you know, you're overloaded. But it cuts the other way as well. Because there's no set way this is how we work, and here's how many things you work on, and here's exactly how you do it, you have a lot of flexibility, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:32 Mm.

Cal Newport 27:32 So we have more autonomy than we think. It's just a matter of flexing that autonomy in a way that is palatable-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:40 Mm

Cal Newport 27:40 ... that doesn't bring negative attention to you, and I think it's completely possible. And so, like, the three principles we can talk about, um, all three of them are very implementable within the autonomy that most knowledge workers already have.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:52 Okay. Great. Well, let's go through them.

Cal Newport 27:54 Okay. So, so number one, this is the one that scares people the most when they hear it. Do fewer things, right? Uh, my... The, the quick summary of that is that it doesn't mean accomplish fewer things, but what it does mean is actively work on fewer things at the same time. So your concurrent work, reduce that. Focus on a small number of things at a time. Do those things faster, do those things better, then pull in something new. That way of working, small number of things at a time, you pull in something once you finish something you're working on, as opposed to everything you agree to working on it at the same time-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:31 Mm

Cal Newport 28:31 ... uh, is much more sustainable, produces better quality work, and you actually finish things faster. So things come through this queue of projects actually much faster than if you try to work on them all at the same time, right? Then we have work at a natural pace.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:44 That's the second one, work at natural pace.

Cal Newport 28:46 Yeah, right, and there's, there's two elements to that. One is you need much more variety and intensity. Humans aren't meant to work all out every day, all week long, all year long. We're, we're just not wired for that. We need variation and intensity. Um, and accompanying that, we should stretch out the timescale in which we think about productivity-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:03 Mm

Cal Newport 29:03 ... and say, "What am I producing this season? What am I producing this year?" Make those productivity timescales longer changes the way that you, you think about work. It allows more of that variety-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:15 Yeah

Cal Newport 29:15 ... and pace. And then the third principle, obsess over quality. So for these two things to work, you have to couple it with this third idea of I really care about how well I'm doing the thing I do best.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:27 Mm.

Cal Newport 29:27 And I wanna get better at that thing, and craft matters to me, and that's ultimately gonna be my ticket to autonomy is doing something really well. Uh, that's gonna give you two benefits. One, it's gonna naturally make busyness seem anathema.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:42 Mm.

Cal Newport 29:42 It's gonna make pseudo productivity and the freneticism that defines work, that's gonna suddenly seem unnatural to you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:48 Yeah.

Cal Newport 29:48 At the same time, as you get better at things that are valuable, you get more control over your career, and you can more fight back- Against the busyness, 'cause as you get better at things, you're more valuable.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:59 Yeah.

Cal Newport 29:59 You get more control. So that's kind of the engine that's gonna drive your ability to do these other principles.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:04 To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits. We can all make short-term change, but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life? Often they don't, and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take. They're really, really effective. If you wanna get hold of that free guide right now, all you have to do is click the link in the description box below. Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:35 Well, I love it. Well, let, let's get into the first one, do fewer things.

Cal Newport 30:39 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:39 Now, as it happens, my own internal mantra to myself over the past, I'm gonna guess two or three years, has been, "Do less, be more."

Cal Newport 30:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:51 Whenever I'm not sure whether, you know, if I'm journaling or meditating or just reflecting on my life, the thing that I often come back to is do less, be more. That's just something I've discovered from being overloaded-

Cal Newport 31:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:04 ... and from falling into many of these traps.

Cal Newport 31:06 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:07 I think, like many of us do, I've learnt that no wrong in... That there's, there's a few high-impact things you do that you can do really well.

Cal Newport 31:15 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:16 Focus on those things-

Cal Newport 31:18 That's it

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:18 ... and get people in to help you to do the stuff that they can do sometimes better than you.

Cal Newport 31:23 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:23 You know? And it... But it takes a while to get into that, so I very much resonate with the idea of do fewer things. The pushback is, though, as you say, people are gonna go, "Yeah, but my boss has given me these 10 things that I need to do."

Cal Newport 31:36 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:36 "So what do you mean, Cal, when you say do fewer things?"

Cal Newport 31:38 Yeah, yeah. So for, for an entrepreneur, it might be less initiatives, right? Like, these are the struggles you and I might have, is like, okay, how do I prevent, uh, having a podcast, for example-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:48 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 31:48 ... from metastasizing over the rest of my schedule?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:51 Mm.

Cal Newport 31:51 Do I wanna add this new product? Eh, I don't know. I wanna do fewer things. If you work for someone else, this becomes less about saying yes and no, and more about demarcating active versus waiting. So, so what I mean by this-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:05 Mm

Cal Newport 32:05 ... is imagine you work for someone else, right? And you don't have a lot of leeway on saying yes or no. Imagine that you maintain a, a public list, like on a shared document, and it's split in half, right? Um, at the front of the list is-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:18 Mm

Cal Newport 32:18 ... here are the things, the projects or major tasks that I'm actively working on.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:22 Mm.

Cal Newport 32:22 And there's, like, two or three of those. All right, then big dividing line. Here's the ordered queue of other things I'm gonna do in the order in which I'm gonna do them as I finish my active work.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:32 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 32:32 And so as I finish an active project, I pull the next thing off the front of that list. And I finish something else that's active-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:37 Mm

Cal Newport 32:37 ... I pull the next thing from that list for me to actively work on. So if you give me something to do and I say I'm gonna do it, you can see exactly what its status is, and you can watch it march down that waiting list towards actively working on. And you know as soon as it makes it onto actively working on, I'm gonna contact you, "Okay, I'm, I'm working on this now. Let's talk about it. I'm here. Let me know your thoughts. We can talk about it." Uh, this thing, for example, this simple idea, makes a major difference, because what are you doing when you divide between these two categories? Everything in the waiting list is no longer generating administrative overhead.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:10 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 33:10 Those, you've agreed to them, but they're not generating emails, and they're not generating meetings, and they're not pulling at your cognitive cycles because they're not on your active list yet.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:19 Yeah, and you're also making the invisible visible.

Cal Newport 33:22 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:23 Which I think is one of the... The other big issues is that because it's all screen-based and it, it goes into that-

Cal Newport 33:29 Oh

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:29 ... you know, the big ether of the World Wide Web, no one knows what anyone else is doing.

Cal Newport 33:33 No one knows.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:33 So you can start making assumptions that that person's not doing anything.

Cal Newport 33:36 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:36 But they have been slogging away at something or, you know, to speak to one of your earlier books, Deep Work, they're doing the deep work-

Cal Newport 33:43 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:44 ... that that creative project may require, but you don't know that. You know, if you're assessing them just on hours, you're, you're not really seeing that. So I think it's a... I mean, I, I really like that tip, because then you're making the invisible visible. Everyone around you knows what's going on. But I think you also gave this nice example in the book where if your boss gives you another task to do-

Cal Newport 34:09 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:09 ... you, because it's all open, you can say, "Hey, no problem. This sounds really, really interesting."

Cal Newport 34:13 Yeah. When do you want it?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:14 When do you want it? Which one of these current tasks would you like me to stop working on-

Cal Newport 34:18 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:18 ... so that I can deliver on this?

Cal Newport 34:20 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:21 Which then goes back to your boss, and your boss, "Oh, actually, you know what? That one's actually more important. We don't need that one." So it's, it's a very... I think it's a very clever way, without... You know, you're not, you're not trying to be problematic at work.

Cal Newport 34:35 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:35 You're just trying to be open and transparent.

Cal Newport 34:37 Transparency makes such a big difference.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:39 Yeah.

Cal Newport 34:39 I mean, I, this, this is one of the big drivers of overload, is that workload management is obfuscated. I have no idea what you're working on. You have no idea what I'm working on. You're just some sort of vessel that, like, receives work-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:50 Yeah

Cal Newport 34:50 ... and, and does it for me. As soon as you make it transparent, a lot of good things happen. And what, what's key about these types of strategies, and I have a bunch of them, but what's key about these types of strategies is you're not putting a burden on someone else, right? Right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:02 Mm.

Cal Newport 35:02 So you're not saying to someone else, "You now have to do something more complicated as part of my new system." That doesn't go over well.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:09 Mm.

Cal Newport 35:09 But I'm not asking you to do anything different. I'm just giving you more information if you choose to look at it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:15 Mm.

Cal Newport 35:15 Right? So you're not adding, uh, a burden. Um, you're also demonstrating that you're organized. And, and I don't wanna under-emphasize the importance of what you earn within a workplace when people see you as someone who has your act together.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:30 Yeah.

Cal Newport 35:30 Oh, you're really organized. You're keeping track of exactly where things is. I can watch where it is. You gain yourself-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:36 Respect

Cal Newport 35:37 ... a lot of respect and flexibility. Adam Grant calls these idiosyncrasy credits.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:40 Yeah.

Cal Newport 35:41 You get the ability to be idiosyncratic about things, uh, if you're delivering, if people trust you. Now, here's what I think is really going on in the workplace, because one of the big fears I hear from people-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:53 Mm

Cal Newport 35:54 ... is that, "No, no, no, what my boss wants is me to do something right away." ... 'cause that makes his life easier, and he won't tolerate anything less. I think that's actually not true in most cases. Here's what's really happening. The, the problem you're solving for your boss, uh, is that they have this thing that entered their world that needs to get done. It's a source of stress for them until it gets done, right? Because it's in their mind taking up space, right? And so if they're gonna enlist you to help them get this done, the problem you're solving for them is taking their stress away. Now, if they don't know anything about your workload, if they don't know-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:27 Yeah

Cal Newport 36:27 ... anything about your work process, if they just, they don't know anything about this, they would rather you just did it right away because they can't release this till you finish it, because they don't know what happens once they give it to you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:37 Mm.

Cal Newport 36:37 So like, "I've sent this to you, but I don't know if you're gonna do this or not. I'd rather you just do it because I'm gonna still-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:42 Yeah

Cal Newport 36:42 ... be stressed about this." If you're organized, if it's, "Sure, I'm happy to do it. I've put it in position seven on this list, which you can look at and watch it, but I'm happy to move it somewhere else if you want to," you've solved the same problem. They're not stressed about it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:56 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 36:56 Great. You have this. You're taking care of it. You've taken my stress away. That's what I needed from you. Not that you did it right away, but that you took my stress away right away. So if you're organized, your system can really work in your favor, and people will be okay with it as long as it solves their problem, as long as they trust when they give you something, it's gonna get done. They can see it's gonna get done. They don't need it tomorrow, but they need their stress to go away right now.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:21 Yeah. I, I think that's such a good point about sending out this signal that you're on top of things-

Cal Newport 37:30 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:30 ... that you are organized, that you've got stuff you're working on. I think it's really, really important. I think it's also important in how you say no to things, isn't it?

Cal Newport 37:41 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:41 I think you used that example in the book that, again, if you can very clearly and be transparent why you cannot say yes to something-

Cal Newport 37:48 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:48 ... it probably makes it go away faster. Is that fair to say?

Cal Newport 37:51 Yeah. So, so if, if you're at a level where you can actually just turn things down, so now you don't have to entirely just rely on something like this transparent queue where everything goes, clarity is everything. Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:02 Yeah.

Cal Newport 38:02 Yeah. So, uh, as they say, uh, apologize is fine, but don't give wiggle room on whether you can do it or not. Just be clear. Like, what people need is clarity. Uh, "I want you to do this thing for me. It would be great if you could." Um, don't leave me dangling. You know? Either come back and say, "This looks great. Thanks. I can't do it right now. Really sorry about that," nice thing, nice thing, nice thing. Don't come back and say, for example, "Well, I'm really busy, and, you know, I have this other thing going on," and hope that the other person will then let you off the hook, because the other person won't. They really want you to do whatever they're asking you. They're not gonna, they're not gonna say no to themselves. Uh, so-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:40 Yeah

Cal Newport 38:40 ... if you just describe your busyness, they're like, "Oh, we can fit it in. Don't worry about it." Or if you say, "Well, I'm really busy right now doing X," they'll be like, "Great. I'll get right back to you as soon as," you know, "X is done."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:50 Is over, yeah.

Cal Newport 38:51 Oh my God, I've been, I, I [laughs] have been there, like many of us, so many times.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:55 Yeah. So, so what are your tips, then, for someone who says, you know, we both acknowledge that not everyone are in jobs where they can say no to certain things. Sometimes, you know, depending on your position or your role in the company, whatever it might be, you can't do that.

Cal Newport 39:09 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:09 But if you have, as you say, you have a degree of, um, autonomy-

Cal Newport 39:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:15 ... or you have a degree of decision-making ability where you can say no to things-

Cal Newport 39:21 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:21 ... what are your top tips for saying no?

Cal Newport 39:23 Yeah. I got two big ideas. All right. So one, and this is pretty straightforward, is quotas. So if there are certain tasks that come up regularly, and you need to do some of, right? But you get way more requests for these type of tasks than you can handle, just have a quota. Like, okay, this month or this quarter, I do five of these.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:41 Mm.

Cal Newport 39:41 You know, I go to one conference per season. I do, uh, three peer reviews per month-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:46 Mm

Cal Newport 39:46 ... or whatever it is, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:47 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 39:48 And then when you, uh, exceed that quota, you say, "You know, I appreciate that. I, I do a quota of this many per month, this many per season. I've already hit that quota, so I can't, I can't do this." This puts you in a good position because it's not an arbitrary no. You're not saying no to all of these things. You're giving out a lot of yeses, and the only real pushback to this can be, "Your quota's wrong. You said you do five of these. It should be six," right? Which is something that people don't actually wanna push back about because it sounds like you're being very reasonable about trying to figure out how much.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:16 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 40:16 All right. Here's my other idea. Uh, actually go and find time for something before you do the work, right? So what this allows you to do is that when someone comes up to you and says, "Hey, can you do this?" Instead of giving a hard yes or no in the room, you say, "Oh, that sounds really good," or, "That sounds really important. Um, I'm really careful about my time, so I'll tell you what. As soon as I'm done here, I'll go to my calendar, uh, and I'll, I'll look what's going on with the time and where I might have time for this, and you know what? I'll get right back to you about it."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:43 Mm.

Cal Newport 40:43 So it's like you're giving them a positive thing-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:45 Mm

Cal Newport 40:45 ... but what you're really doing is setting yourself up to see what's really going on, and then actually go and look for the time. How long will this take? When am I gonna do it?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:53 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 40:53 Let me schedule that time on my calendar. And if you can't find it, now you have this much more, uh, systematic way of coming back and saying no. You say, "You know what? I went and checked. I keep track of everything very carefully. It really is gonna be like three or four weeks till I have, like, enough-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:09 Mm

Cal Newport 41:09 ... contiguous time to get this done. That's too late for what you need, so I don't think it's gonna work out." So by not saying yes or no in the room, but instead establishing, "I'm organized. I'm gonna go check my systems"-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:19 Mm

Cal Newport 41:19 ... and then you come back four hours later, that's a much more effective no.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:23 Yeah, I love that. I mean, this literally happened to me last week. So, um, saying no is something I feel I've got much better at over the past few years-

Cal Newport 41:31 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:31 ... out of necessity, frankly.

Cal Newport 41:33 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:34 But I was very proud of myself like a week ago because my assistant got a request for me to come to London to do a talk, and you know, she knows that I just don't [laughs] like going to London to give talks much anymore. You know what?

Cal Newport 41:48 Yeah, same way.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:49 And part of that reason... Well, this is, I guess, one of my, one thing that's really helped me, not just in my ability to say no, but just in many other aspects of my life, is to measure the unmeasurables, or to try and measure the unmeasurables. And for me personally, having children is a brilliant way of doing that.

Cal Newport 42:07 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:07 So my kids are now 13 and 11.

Cal Newport 42:10 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:11 They're an amazing age. I love hang- hanging out with them and doing things with them. And so, you know, weekend events for me are pretty much always outs-

Cal Newport 42:20 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:20 ... 'cause kids are at school. Um, they're not at the weekends.

Cal Newport 42:23 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:23 I don't wanna go off at a weekend when I could spend time with them.

Cal Newport 42:26 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:27 So it's trying to quantify c- because we don't really have metrics. Well, you're a computer scientist, maybe you can tell me if we do, but we have metrics to measure our salary-

Cal Newport 42:39 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:40 ... our follower count, how many people downloaded this episode of the podcast, right?

Cal Newport 42:44 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:44 But we don't have the same kind of metrics to, uh, measure quality time with my children at the weekend or my wife.

Cal Newport 42:52 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:53 So that's something I've become very, very aware of.

Cal Newport 42:55 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:56 And also, the other thing is your rule was never say yes in the room.

Cal Newport 42:59 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:00 My internal rule has been never say yes on the phone.

Cal Newport 43:02 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:03 So I got asked, it was, you know, it's a very prestigious event, and the only reason I was even considering it is because it was a good friend of mine's wife was asking me.

Cal Newport 43:11 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:11 So I got on the phone with her, and she made a really powerful case for it.

Cal Newport 43:16 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:16 And I, I'm such a people person that I nearly said yes.

Cal Newport 43:20 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:20 And I actually, I just thought about it. I had this nagging feeling. I just don't wanna do it.

Cal Newport 43:25 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:25 Just don't wanna do it. Just don't wanna do it. I have to get a super early train. I'll be back late.

Cal Newport 43:30 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:30 It will exhaust me the next day.

Cal Newport 43:31 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:31 There's other stuff going on. My daughter's musical is that week.

Cal Newport 43:34 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:34 I don't wanna be tired for it. And, and then I communicated that in a way that I usually don't, which was a very clear, "Hey, it's a great offer. I generally cannot fit that into my schedule that week with everything else I've go- I've got going on. Good luck with finding someone else."

Cal Newport 43:50 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:50 And it was a re- because I was so clear and transparent-

Cal Newport 43:55 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:56 ... the, the reply I got was also fantastic. That, I just, I felt really good afterwards. I thought, Rangan, you're growing up.

Cal Newport 44:02 There you go.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:02 You're learning how to do this stuff.

Cal Newport 44:03 Yeah. They moved on and, and within five minutes, it's like, okay, who's the next person I'm gonna ask?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:07 Yeah.

Cal Newport 44:07 They're not sitting there the next day with, you know, their whiskey in their hand like, "Rangan, I cannot believe he said no," you know, throwing it into the fireplace. They've moved on.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:16 But even if they were, that's also their issue and not my issue.

Cal Newport 44:20 I think that's right. Well, I'll tell you, uh, my kids played a big role in this book as well, right? So I have three kids, all boys, uh, 11, nine, and six.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:27 Okay.

Cal Newport 44:27 Right? So they all recently are now of, uh, like in the States we say elementary school age, right? So they're all sort of in school. When they got to that age, one of the things that changed is that they all needed basically like every minute of dad time possible, which was a real change, right? Because when kids-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:43 Mm

Cal Newport 44:43 ... are younger, it's much more of a sort of survival thing and making sure that like no one in the partnership has too much of a load, but suddenly it was, we need to spend time with our dad. And that was one of the big inspirations-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:55 Mm

Cal Newport 44:55 ... for I really gotta figure out the details of this slow productivity thing because I'm also, you know, I'm reaching the peak of my professional, uh, capabilities.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:03 Mm.

Cal Newport 45:03 Right? The options are endless. And so I had to answer this question: how do I keep producing stuff I'm proud of, leave a legacy, support my family, but also not let work take over? Because this is the time when they, when they need me. And so one of the mindset shifts I've made, it, it reminds me of what you're talking about here, is shifting from, uh, away from the value of what the opportunity brings and more towards, yeah, what's lost.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:27 Mm.

Cal Newport 45:27 And this was key for me. Do I already have a good variety or amount of that value in my life? Like a notion of enough.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:35 I think you were on Ryan Holiday's podcast recently.

Cal Newport 45:37 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:37 You guys were talking about this.

Cal Newport 45:38 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:39 About, I think he got a request one summer when he was... Well, actually, this is interesting. I was listening to that podcast this morning, and you and Ryan were talking about speaking gigs.

Cal Newport 45:49 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:49 And he was talking about, I think, one summer when he was having four weeks off, and he was just not gonna do any, any work apart from his own writing at home.

Cal Newport 45:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:57 And then he got, you know, offered a big payday to go and talk somewhere for a, uh, a big company. Now, I wanna acknowledge not everyone is in that position, okay? [laughs] Of course.

Cal Newport 46:08 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:08 So I wanna be really sensitive to that. Some people are struggling to make ends meet. That is not necessarily relevant for them. But Ryan said something really interesting to you, because you were talking about how you guys make decisions, and, and he ended up saying in that, in that podcast, "That ended up being one of the most expensive four weeks off I, I've taken."

Cal Newport 46:29 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:30 And I thought, that's an interesting way of phrasing it, isn't it?

Cal Newport 46:33 It's not the way I would think about it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:34 Yeah. And again, I found it fascinating 'cause I thought it depends what is your mentality. How do you look at life? Do you, do you look at it as if something you didn't say yes to and didn't earn, so it was never yours in the first place?

Cal Newport 46:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:51 Do you see that as a loss?

Cal Newport 46:52 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:53 You know, it, it's again, it's looking at what you can measure. I'm not... Hey, I love Ryan Holiday. I think what he's doing is great, so this is nothing anti-Ryan at all. I to- it was an interesting turn of phrase for me.

Cal Newport 47:02 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:02 And I've had this conversation with a really good friend of mine from university who, to me, works way too hard, and he also has that sort of phrasing. "Yeah, but if I take a weekend off and I'm not doing a clinic at the weekend-

Cal Newport 47:16 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:17 ... I'm losing money." But I'm like, maybe you're not losing money, 'cause if you don't say yes, you've never made it in the first place.

Cal Newport 47:23 Yeah. And also, what are you doing with the money? It, it's, it's like the old parable of the, the fisherman. You heard the story of like the fisherman-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:30 Yeah

Cal Newport 47:30 ... in Mexico, right? It's, uh, the, the billionaire who's on the vacation and meets the small fisherman and says like, "Yeah, you should, you should build out like a, a company and get a boat, and eventually you could hire other people, and eventually you'll be able to buy a whole cannery operation for your own fish, and you could build a huge company out of this." And the fisherman said, "Okay, so then why would I do that?" And he's like, "Because you could sell it and move near the water and go fishing every day," right? [laughs] It's like money is instrumental. Uh, so once you're past the place like your friend probably is, where they're past the place where they're stressed about-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:59 Yeah

Cal Newport 48:00 ... their finances-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:00 And that's a real, that's an important-

Cal Newport 48:01 ... which is a terrible place. Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:02 ... exactly, and we have to be very sensitive and aware of that.

Cal Newport 48:04 Exactly. Yeah. But, but I, I think these examples have a more general point. So it's, it's-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:08 Yeah

Cal Newport 48:08 ... it's useful, right? Is, uh, what happens is when you don't know what you're building to- ... towards and it's more your, your, the fear of what you might be losing, in general, there's issues, right? So like for example, I'm a big fan of what I call lifestyle-centric planning. Build your positive vision of what you want your life to be like, not just profess- all the time with family, where you live, what's your typical day is like, your, your, your, what you're involved in, what role work plays in your life. This is your target, right? And your goal is like, okay, I wanna get closer and closer to implementing this ideal lifestyle. That changes the way you think about things, like in this example, doing extra clinics or speaking gigs.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:47 Mm.

Cal Newport 48:47 Because now you're saying, okay, uh, I'm pretty close to this lifestyle, and maybe if I do a small number of these speaking gigs, it, it enables me to do something else-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:55 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 48:55 ... like take the summers off or whatever. But, um, to do a bunch of these gigs, well, that's gonna get in the way of the vision-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:02 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 49:02 ... I have of my life because I'm gonna be too busy on these sort of days. And so then you begin to just think about some of these things more instrumentally. How do they help or hurt what I want my, my day-to-day life to look like? If you don't have these sort of clear lifestyle visions, you usually have a, an achievement or maximization-based strategy. More is better-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:20 Mm

Cal Newport 49:20 ... than less. You know? More money is better than less money. More accolades is better than less accolades, whatever it is, and that never seems to work for people. So like when you're building... when you're trying to build the good life, however you define that, it makes you see these opportunities much differently.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:36 Yeah. I think solitude again comes up here for me because without a regular practice of solitude-

Cal Newport 49:42 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:43 ... you're not asking yourself these questions.

Cal Newport 49:45 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:45 You're not asking yourself, what is your perfect life?

Cal Newport 49:48 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:48 How much is enough? What are my-

Cal Newport 49:50 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:50 ... values? What do I actually require in life to be happy-

Cal Newport 49:53 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:53 ... and content? So you end up on this constantly moving train which you feel you have to be on. You end up-

Cal Newport 50:00 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:00 ... on this rat race, which of course contributes to burnout.

Cal Newport 50:03 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:04 And at some point you have to ask yourself, well, what are you working for? What's the point of this? And there's a, there's a wider point there for me, Cal, which is I, I've been thinking deeply about your book yesterday and today, and this idea of busyness. And I wonder, you know, have you ever thought about whether there's a, there's an East v. West kind of demarcation here? I mean, you can't really say, you know, specifically East v. West-

Cal Newport 50:32 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:32 ... but very generically speaking, I kind of feel in a lot of Western cultures now, UK and US-

Cal Newport 50:41 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:41 ... where we've become quite isolated, we moved away from families, we're trying to do everything by ourselves, a lot of the time we don't feel that we're of value to people. We're not of value to our communities. So I, I wonder sometimes is our overbusyness an attempt to feel important, to feel that we are actually of value? Whereas in some Eastern cultures, let's say very, very broadly speaking, with tighter family units where you, you feel day to day that you are contributing, that what you do actually matters-

Cal Newport 51:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:17 ... I wonder if there's less of a drive to fill yourself up with busyness at work-

Cal Newport 51:21 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:22 ... when you have that value in other places.

Cal Newport 51:24 Well, I mean, this is an idea I've been thinking about recently, so I'm, I'm sort of b-beta testing this here. You can tell me if this, if this makes sense. Uh, I think in the West there's been a major shift over the past 150 years or so when it comes to how do we think about the question of... I sometimes call it the deep life, but, uh, building a life that's very intentional, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:43 Mm.

Cal Newport 51:44 Right? Let's say that's the goal. I think this really is a lot of people's goal. I heard a lot about this during the pandemic from people is-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:49 Mm

Cal Newport 51:50 ... uh, I wanna feel like my life is lived on purpose. It's like sort of quietly remarkable in its own ways.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:56 Mm.

Cal Newport 51:56 It's like the... it reflects like I, I constructed it and it's cool. It's interesting. It's, it's, you know, I'm, I'm proud of my life. That's what people want. They don't want aimlessness, so I call this the deep life. Uh, it used to be throughout basically all of human history we saw this as, okay, uh, a lifestyle, I'm gonna call it lifestyle-centric approach. You, you... what's important, what parts of your life are important, make sure that you're servicing those parts of life. And, and throughout most of history, this would've been through ph-philosophical or theological ritual and beliefs. You would structure your life, the role of family, the role of, uh, spirit, the role of community. It was, it was-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:31 Mm

Cal Newport 52:31 ... pretty structured, but it was like, I wanna, I wanna focus on parts of my life that are important to me and live those rights. How I live is what matters. Um, and then we get this sort of shift, 19th century going into the 20th, especially in the West, where that's stripped away because we, we sort of had the, the, the shift to more of a post-Enlightenment secular culture, and we shifted over to goal-centric planning.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:52 Mm.

Cal Newport 52:52 Which was, okay, how do I make my life good? We said, well, what I'm gonna do is take a big swing at something. Like if, if, if something really good happens, if my business becomes huge, if I become the number one person doing this, in the wake of that big goal being successful, my life's gonna get better, right? Just as a side effect of doing this-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:11 Mm

Cal Newport 53:11 ... one thing, following my passion, getting the, to the top of the food chain, whatever it is. If I do this one big thing, the rest of my life will fall into place. And this, of course, just doesn't work this way. Like, why would pursuing one big thing to the point of obsession make all these other parts of life that are important suddenly work out well? We know this doesn't work out well for people. And so I think it's like we have to rediscover or transport some of this lifestyle-centric planning that this was the way f- you know, we thought about building the good life until, you know, a proverbial minute ago. Transport some of that to our current age.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:43 Yeah.

Cal Newport 53:43 And we can do it in a more modern, secular way if we want to. But just thinking about, no, no, I need to think about all the parts of my life. What do I want those to be? And building my life around sort of satisfying those needs, constructing an ideal life from the ground up, as opposed to hoping that a single goal-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:02 Yeah

Cal Newport 54:02 ... if sufficiently bold and brave, will somehow fix everything.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:05 Yeah, I love it. It makes complete sense. Again, something I've been thinking about recently is this idea of our life have... that there are several buckets. You know, there's friends, there's family, there's work.

Cal Newport 54:14 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:15 There's personal passions and projects. There's health. And You know, it may be hard to keep all of the buckets full at the same time-

Cal Newport 54:25 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:26 ... but you've gotta at least try, and at least be aware-

Cal Newport 54:28 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:28 ... when you're neglecting one of those buckets so that neglect doesn't go on for too long.

Cal Newport 54:33 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:33 And I think that's the key, isn't it? You know, there are times in our life where actually, you know, we do get a little overwhelmed, or we do have deadlines, or we do have a little bit too much going on. I think we can handle that for short periods of time.

Cal Newport 54:46 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:46 It's like acute stress. We, we are wired for acute stress, but-

Cal Newport 54:49 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:49 ... not for the chronic stress.

Cal Newport 54:50 Yeah, yeah. I think that's the way. And also, when you're looking at all those buckets at the same time, you begin to find much more creative solutions for the problems of your life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:59 Mm.

Cal Newport 54:59 Right? So when you're not just trying to maximize one thing and hope everything else follows in, uh, in its, uh, footsteps, you begin to see really interesting configurations where you're like, "Well, in my work, if I start building up this skill, this skill's pretty valuable, but also has a big freelancer-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:14 Mm

Cal Newport 55:14 ... uh, potential to it, right? And if I could get to the point where I could freelance this, well, then we could live over here in the countryside, like in the Lake District, because there's this... We wanna be quiet, we wanna be in the fells.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:27 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 55:27 Like, we have this other vision of our family life, and, well, this would make that possible-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:31 Mm

Cal Newport 55:31 ... 'cause this would be remote, and it's pretty well paid, and it's cheaper to live here. And so we could actually do this, uh, I could do this 10 months out of the year and have two months completely off, and then our kids could then learn. And you begin to find these multifaceted solutions where you're like, "Oh, if I do this, it enables these three things, which then supports these things." That's where the really interesting lives come out of.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:49 Mm.

Cal Newport 55:50 Those lives that when you encounter them, you're like, "Oh, that's really cool." Like, what you're doing is really interesting. You're, like, writing poetry, but also on, like, your sheep farm, but a database admin that is, like, homeschooling your kids as you build up.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:05 Mm.

Cal Newport 56:05 It... Whatever. You get these really interesting, incredibly intentional configurations that are remarkable when you see them, but you can only get there by looking at all the buckets.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:14 Yeah. We'll be back to the conversation in just a moment. Now, many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible whole foods. That's why I'm a big fan of good quality whole food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now. It contains over 75 whole food source ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, and can help us support our energy, focus, digestion, and our immune system. AG1 are giving my audience a fantastic offer, one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order. You can see all details at drinkag1.com/livemore, or just click on the link below. And now, back to the conversation.

Cal Newport 57:03 And trying to think, how do I do this?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:04 There, there was a lovely case study in the book, a- a- and which really spoke to this idea where you have to almost challenge the prevailing cultural norm. I think that's a big theme throughout Slow Productivity, is that just 'cause this is the way we're doing things-

Cal Newport 57:19 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:19 ... well, it doesn't mean that's the way we have to continue doing things.

Cal Newport 57:22 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:23 And was it this computer designer, I don't have his name to hand, where in... He... You, you did this thought experiment. If, if he was charging $50 an hour-

Cal Newport 57:31 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:31 ... and being... Do you remember the case?

Cal Newport 57:32 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:33 Who was it?

Cal Newport 57:34 Yeah. So this is from, uh, Company of One, Paul Jarvis.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:37 That was it.

Cal Newport 57:37 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:38 I, I thought that was great 'cause it reminds me of the parable of the fisherman and the American businessman a little bit-

Cal Newport 57:42 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:42 ... whereby conventionally, in our UK and US Western cultures, it's always about how can you achieve more? How can you earn more? How can you scale up?

Cal Newport 57:53 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:53 Right? But this guy's doing the opposite of that.

Cal Newport 57:56 Yeah, because when you scale up, you get, uh, more ongoing projects, which means more administrative overhead, which means more busyness.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:01 Mm.

Cal Newport 58:01 Yeah. Paul, I love Paul Jarvis's story. So that book, I love that book, Company of One. I blurbed it when it came out-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:06 Did you?

Cal Newport 58:06 ... uh, years ago, right? Uh, I love that book, but Paul's story is basically, he was in Canada, in Vancouver, sort of expensive apartment in Vancouver, was a web programmer, some sort of technology guy, right? And he was getting better at what he was doing, and there was a, a demand for his services, and he made this, this important decision. He said, "The typical thing to do is to build a business. I'm in demand. If I hired four people, we could take on much more work. We could grow this."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:32 Mm.

Cal Newport 58:32 "If it got big enough, maybe, uh, I could sell this for, you know, a few million dollars or something like this." Instead, he said, "No, no, no. If I'm getting better, here's what I'm gonna do. Uh, I'm gonna charge more per hour and work less."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:46 Mm.

Cal Newport 58:47 He went the other way. He's like, "Why not go that way with getting better?" It's like, if I'm comfortable living on this salary now, why not, if I get twice as good, uh, just halve my hours?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:56 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 58:57 Same amount of money's coming in. Now, I have half my time free. And he's like, actually, to me, that's much more valuable than 15 years from now getting a, you know, $5 million payday. Like, what if right now I could be working half the week or whatever? So that's what they did. Him and his wife, they moved to Vancouver Island, which is a sort of, uh, really sort of rural, nature-y place off of Vancouver, and there's a surf break there, and she's a surfer. So they lived in this house in the woods-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:22 Mm

Cal Newport 59:22 ... this sort of modest house in the woods where he had extensive gardens, and he just charged more per hour.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:27 Yeah.

Cal Newport 59:28 They lived cheaply, and he had the life right away that you would imagine, well, this is where I could end up in 25 years if all of this busyness goes well. So I love that mindset, is that he, as he got good at something, he obsessed over quality, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:40 Mm.

Cal Newport 59:40 Principle three of the book. Um, he used the leverage that gave him to take control of his life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:47 Yeah.

Cal Newport 59:47 He said, "Great, I'm gonna work less."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:49 I think, Cal, if you got someone in a calm state, so they're not stressed out from work, they feel their nervous system relax, and you presented to them those two options-

Cal Newport 1:00:01 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:02 ... right? In 15 years' time, you could sell your business for X million, but the cost of that is gonna be 15 years of hard work-

Cal Newport 1:00:16 Yep

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:17 ... stress, late nights, potentially You know, a denigration of your relationship-

Cal Newport 1:00:24 Yep

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:24 ... with your friends and your wife and your partner.

Cal Newport 1:00:27 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:27 But you're gonna get that 50 million or, I don't know, half a million dollar-

Cal Newport 1:00:31 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:31 ... payday. What would you rather have? I actually do believe that most people, if they had the space to think about it, would say, "You know what? If I was gonna earn enough to go on holiday and feed my family, and engage in my passions, and I'd have a really good relationship with my wife and my children-

Cal Newport 1:00:52 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:52 ... I'll take that." But I think the problem is, and again, I keep bringing up solitude 'cause I do agree with you that it's a very, very important foundational activity for every single human.

Cal Newport 1:01:01 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:03 Without that, you don't have the intentionality to even think about your life, so you end up doing what everyone else is doing.

Cal Newport 1:01:09 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:10 And if you look at that statistic from the start of the show, well, 88% of people are burning out.

Cal Newport 1:01:15 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:15 So do you wanna be doing what everyone else is doing in the first place?

Cal Newport 1:01:17 Yeah, I, I mean, I love you emphasizing solitude, and I would add to it, you need more time doing this than you think probably.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:23 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:01:24 Right? I spend hours, hours on a regular basis alone with my own thoughts, right? Like, here's a concrete example. I fly into London, uh, get in. I don't, you know, I don't have events that day, get in in the afternoon. So I go for a three-hour walk. Um, I'm, I'm staying over by, like, Parliament and Trafalgar Square. So it's like, okay, I haven't been to London in a long time, and I'm walking, uh, for hours, just walking past all the sights, uh, just thinking, right? And so then I'm walking through St. James's Park, which is beautiful, and I come across the... Have you seen this, the duck keeper's cottage?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:55 No.

Cal Newport 1:01:56 Oh, it's like a medieval Tudor sort of small, beautiful cottage tucked in on the, uh, the pond in, in St. James's Park. And because there's these exotic birds in that pond, and I'm sure this was some royal position where, like, generations-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:09 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:02:09 ... lived in this cottage or whatever, and it really resonated with me. It was aesthetically beautiful. It was, uh, in a natural environment. You could imagine the, um, the, the kind of the, the simplicity but meaning of the work of, like, this is what I do-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:26 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:02:26 ... and I do it really well. And from that random encounter, I got hit by this wave of like, oh, there's something there, and I began to think about writers I know who have, like, a quiet house somewhere where they go and write. That is, like, a reflection you get from solitude.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:38 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:02:38 And then I'm churning on that and like, what does that mean? Why is that resonating with me? What does that... I'm not gonna become a duck keeper, but what does that tell me about simplicity and aesthetics-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:48 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:02:48 ... and, and a slowness and a purpose? All of those type of insights, which I'm now, you know, I'm processing, it comes from I'm gonna spend time walking, thinking, just taking in the world around me. You know, I have a little field-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:00 Mm

Cal Newport 1:03:00 ... notebook with me, field notes notebook with me. You have to do that a lot to really start to make sense, and so I do it a lot. I also recommend, if we're gonna talk solitude, that on your birthday each year, you take like a full day, go hike, like be away from your normal things, and really work through your vision for where is my life? What do I wanna... Where, what do I don't like? What do I do like? What am I gonna do in the year ahead to push me closer to what I do like? I do that every year on my birthday. I have a birthday coming up. I'm excited, you know, for it. And in the weeks building up to my birthday, I'm thinking and taking notes. So I'm a huge believer in exactly what you're saying, is you have to have time to get your act together, and the thing that's keeping you away from doing that more than anything else is probably your phone.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:43 Yeah. I've never heard that before, to do that on your birthday. I love that.

Cal Newport 1:03:47 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:47 What a, what a lovely idea. What a lovely way of ritualizing your birthday to actually, you know, help you reflect on what-

Cal Newport 1:03:57 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:57 ... that extra year means.

Cal Newport 1:03:58 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:59 And, you know, the accumulation of another year and where you're going. Where are you gonna end up if you keep-

Cal Newport 1:04:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:04 ... living like this?

Cal Newport 1:04:05 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:05 I think it's a, I think it's a lovely practice that I may, might try and adopt this August when it's my birthday.

Cal Newport 1:04:10 Yeah. Yeah, and also you feel it, especially as, you know, we're mid-aged now, you feel the time.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:15 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:04:15 Like, that whole year passed. That was a weird year. You know, I've, uh, I didn't really... I felt sort of stuck in that year. It really does help. Like, I'm going through some transformations in my life. Um, they're complicated-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:27 Mm

Cal Newport 1:04:28 ... right? Especially, uh, like in my academic role as I, as I move more from pure computer science and over towards digital ethics and thinking about technology and technology's impact, and that transition's complicated.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:42 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:04:42 What's happening in my writing career is complicated, right? And I've really been working on this now for years, where it's just hundreds of hours of thought, um, making sense of what's happened, revising my plans for the future. I mean, a lot of effort goes into intentionally shaping parts of your life, and I have diagrams and pictures-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:04 Mm

Cal Newport 1:05:04 ... that evolve over time. And, you know, it's a lot of time like I'm spending right now at this phase of my life trying to figure out, okay, I knew what my 30s were about, I knew what my 20s were about. I'm figuring out now what my 40s are about.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:15 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:05:15 And it's a complicated question, and I'm giving it a lot of time.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:19 This is a practical piece of advice that is relevant for everyone, isn't it?

Cal Newport 1:05:23 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:23 Because whether you're a knowledge worker or not-

Cal Newport 1:05:26 Yep

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:29 ... creating time for solitude is important.

Cal Newport 1:05:34 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:35 And I think a lot of the time people are so busy they think, "I don't have time for solitude," without realizing that solitude actually will give you so much more of your time back.

Cal Newport 1:05:44 Yeah. Yeah, just don't use your phone for a week. You'll find time.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:47 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:05:48 Yeah. I mean, I, I ran this experiment for Digital Minimalism where I had all these people stop using their phone more or less for a month. Oh, they had a lot of time. In fact, the problem they had was how much time that generated, and they didn't know what to do with it. That was the biggest problem.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:04 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:06:04 And so this experiment I did for that book was 1,600 people, and for a month, uh, we called it optional digital activity, so like you're not on social media, you're not browsing the news, you're not watching video on the news. The biggest issue was what to do-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:17 Mm

Cal Newport 1:06:18 ... with all the time that opened up.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:19 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:06:19 So yeah, we, we, we have time. Also, solitude is easy. It's not, you don't have to go to a meditation room. You don't have to, like, put aside time. You don't have to go to a gym. It's, you're already going to work in the morning, just don't put something in your ears, you know? You're already walking the dog. Just, like, do a dog walk without, you know-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:37 Mm

Cal Newport 1:06:37 ... uh, reading something on your phone at the same time. I mean, solitude is just about activities you're already doing. Just be doing that activity and let your mind go where it's gonna go.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:48 You know, one thing that really, if I can say, worries me about the state of society at the moment, and it's highly relevant for me because of the age my children are-

Cal Newport 1:06:59 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:00 ... is technology, smartphones with children.

Cal Newport 1:07:03 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:04 I w- I was literally speaking to Jonathan Haidt about this last week, and he's obviously done a huge deep dive into the issues here. But when I drop my son at the bus stop, for example-

Cal Newport 1:07:15 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:15 ... most mornings to go to school, I can remember when I was his age, uh, you know, standing at the bus stop, you'd have to talk to people, right? Even if you didn't know them. And over a period of five, six, seven years of being at secondary school, you kind of figure out how to do it, right? Even if you were nervous at first, you'd figure out, like, how that actually works. What, what's going on now? No one's chatting. They're standing there at the bus stop. Everyone's staring at their phones. And I'm not blaming the kids, right? I get how addicted these technologies are.

Cal Newport 1:07:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:50 But it does make me think about w- well, what happens in 20 years or 30 years when these children who are growing up without solitude become adults?

Cal Newport 1:07:59 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:59 Like, what are the consequences of this?

Cal Newport 1:08:01 Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes me nervous. I mean, I'll tell you what makes me, gives me some hope, though, 'cause I'm really worried about that, right? Because it's difficult to learn how to be a sort of adult socialized human.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:12 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:08:13 Like, socialization is hard. Our teenage years is when we practiced, you know? I mean, I don't, I don't know what your teenage years were like, but also remember parties.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:20 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:08:20 You had to walk into this room. You were trying to navigate, like, "Am I cool enough to be here?"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:25 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:08:25 You have nothing you can look at. You have to figure out what's happening. You get really good, uh, at socializing. So, so I, I am worried what's gonna happen if you lose that training. The one thing that makes me a little bit more optimistic is that the, the university students I teach, and maybe this is just a-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:41 Mm

Cal Newport 1:08:41 ... reflection of the school, it's a pretty elite school, they're pretty good communicators. Like, they're very polished.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:47 Okay.

Cal Newport 1:08:47 So I'm like, okay, there's some hope there. Like, maybe they're, they're, they're still picking this up. But I think Jon's take on technology and kids is right, that, uh... He's been very influential. I've known Jon for a little while, so I've seen, I've been following along his research-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:01 Mm. Me too

Cal Newport 1:09:01 ... over the years, right? And, and I've been, I've given talks at my kids' school about it where I basically just simulated Jon on stage. Like, "I'm gonna show you his charts," or whatever. I think he's right that we're shifting, and we'll be there within the next few years, to a cultural mindset that it's, it's roughly 16 or older is the earliest for unrestricted internet access. It's post-puberty-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:22 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:09:22 ... is when people should get, uh, unrestricted internet access. That's coming really quick now, and I think we're gonna look back and say, "Man, you had a real misfortune if you happened to be born in a time that got you to your adolescent years when we were still in the experimental phase of a new technology."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:38 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:09:38 Which is, by the way, what we do with all new technologies. When it first comes around, we spend a decade or so, let's just try everything. And then there's the next couple of decades-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:47 We figure out

Cal Newport 1:09:48 ... we figure out, oh, okay, maybe we should have traffic signals on the roads, right? Like, we figure out, like, once the technology comes along, we're just entering the traffic signal phase of kids and smartphones. So you know, man, if you were a teenager in 2015 or something like this, you just got bad luck, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:02 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:10:02 I mean, you were like the, the, the poor country farmer who got ran over by the first automobile in 1903 because we didn't really know what to do with the technology, and people just were driving everywhere.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:11 Well, why... I know Jonathan says as well, in your view, why after puberty? Why, why should we wait until after puberty?

Cal Newport 1:10:18 Yeah. I mean, a couple things happen. Um, one, your brain has developed more.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:21 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:10:21 Um, two, you have a much more stable sense of identity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:24 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:10:24 So it, it's, it's really dangerous when you're trying to identify, build your identity and where you fit into sort of like the world of social structures-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:33 Mm

Cal Newport 1:10:33 ... to be bombarded by these sources that can manipulate and play on your identities in early adolescence. So by the time you're post-puberty, you're much more stable in your sense of self.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:42 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:10:42 Um, also your social groups are already more set. So you have a, you have a better understanding of here's who I am, here's who my friends are, here's-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:48 Mm

Cal Newport 1:10:48 ... our connections we have to each other. And now you're in your interest. All of this is more baked, and then these things come in. Uh, it's not playing with wet clay as much, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:58 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:10:59 So it can't, it can't do as much. A, a 13-year-old-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:02 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:11:02 ... man, you just get buffeted around because so much is happening at that age.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:05 Well, that's particularly social media, isn't it?

Cal Newport 1:11:07 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:08 Because as I spoke about with Jonathan, we, we... Reluctantly, I did, with my wife, get my son a smartphone when he joined secondary school-

Cal Newport 1:11:17 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:17 ... but there's no social media, and he's really, really good with his use actually.

Cal Newport 1:11:21 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:21 And again, we take it seriously to model good behavior at home, so we're also not on our phones around them at home-

Cal Newport 1:11:26 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:26 ... and that sort of stuff. So, so I think that's another piece of it which we have to take seriously. But yeah, I appreciate your thoughts on that. Um, you still don't have any social media, do you, Cal?

Cal Newport 1:11:36 I don't, no.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:37 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:11:37 Though people say I don't think this counts.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:39 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:11:39 Our, our podcast is put out on YouTube.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:43 Yeah, I-

Cal Newport 1:11:43 But that's not, it's not my social media. It's not a... I, I, you know, I don't know. I don't understand the world of social media well. Um, the one exception is I do reporting on social media, especially my writing for The New Yorker. It's one of the beats I cover. So I will enter into various social media circles like an anthropologist going to like-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:01 To observe

Cal Newport 1:12:01 ... the distant island, yes. So, like, I'll go onto Twitter for a while to observe certain things to write about, or I'll, I'll see what's happening on TikTok so I can write about it. So, so my understanding of social media comes, uh, as a third-party observer. I'm the only third-party observer I think left in the world, [laughs] you know, at this point.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:19 Well, yeah, it's incredible 'cause most people will say you cannot do what- ... you are doing as a very successful author-

Cal Newport 1:12:27 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:27 ... and not have a social media account.

Cal Newport 1:12:28 Yeah, it's madness.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:29 Yet you have, you have proven that's simply not the case. It may be harder for some people, for sure. I get all that, but you've definitely proven that it is possible. I think in Digital Minimalism, you also made the case that... Well, I don't know if it was what you do or you recommended people do-

Cal Newport 1:12:46 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:46 ... but try not to have any apps on your phone that make money from your attention.

Cal Newport 1:12:54 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:54 Did you say that? Do you still stand by it?

Cal Newport 1:12:57 I said that, yeah. Don't put anything on your phone where someone makes more money the more you look at it, because you're gonna lose that battle, right? I mean, look at the, the capitalization of something like Meta. Its market capitalization is somewhere between $500 to $800 billion, depending on the day. I mean, this is significantly larger than ExxonMobil. That amount of resources, if that's being aimed at getting you to look at your phone more, you're not gonna win that battle by just having, like, some good intentions of, "I wanna look on these things, uh, less often." You gotta take it off your phone. So yeah, what I recommend is, like, okay, if you have some professional reason you need social media, um, use it like a professional. Have it on your computer in the browser-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:34 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:13:34 ... where it's not at all interesting. Have a schedule where you go on there, and I go on there on Fridays, and it's sort of tedious. I post these clips that I've, I filmed on this other day, and I update these things, and then I shut it back down again.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:47 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:13:48 Right? 'Cause, because a lot of what happens is someone will have a very narrow... Legitimate, but very narrow use for a social media tool. Like, I need to post, um... Like, let's use Ryan Holiday as an example. Like, he's like, "I'm gonna post a, a stoic quote every day," right? So you'll have some... This is fine. It's a brand-building exercise, but then they'll use that as an excuse. Ryan doesn't do this, but someone who had a reason like that might use that as an excuse to, "Great, so I have to be on social media all the time."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:13 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:14:13 It's like, no, this is, like, a very narrow thing you're doing. Uh, so don't put it on your phone. That's where all the attention engineering goes is the mobile apps.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:21 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:14:21 The website versions of these things is boring for me. I go onto the computer to post my quote every morning. Like, Ryan, I think, has a big Google Doc full of these things, and there's someone on his team. It's, like, the most mechanical thing. Every morning, copy, paste, you know, send-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:37 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:14:37 ... a- a- and that's that. Uh, there's no reason to be... I mean, there, there's reasons, but it's trouble. There be dragons if it's, "I want this on my phone, and I wanna interact with people."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:47 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:14:47 Or, "I wanna see how well this thing is doing." Or, it, I mean, it's just-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:51 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:14:51 ... mind virus territory.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:51 You, you also recently said, which I found absolutely fascinating, that you do use a smartphone, but because you don't have any of those apps on it, it's actually not that exciting.

Cal Newport 1:15:02 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:03 Which is- I think is, uh, is really eye-opening for a lot of people. We will say that the phone is addictive. Perhaps it's not the phone. Perhaps it's what we're putting on the phone.

Cal Newport 1:15:13 Yeah. I, I wrote this New York Times op-ed about this-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:15 Did you?

Cal Newport 1:15:16 ... where I said we should use our, our iPhone, our smartphones the way Steve Jobs intended.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:21 Sorry to interrupt. To make sure you are taking action after watching this video, I have created a free special guide to help you improve your sleep and reduce fatigue. Now, in my clinical experience, most people who are struggling to sleep are doing something unconsciously in their day-to-day life that is negatively impacting their ability to sleep at night. So in this free guide, I share with you five of my very top tips, tips that I have seen transform the lives of many of my patients. So if you wanna get hold of this guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below.

Cal Newport 1:16:01 Right. And so what I did is I went back, and I watched the original, uh, keynote address where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone. Um, I also went and talked to one of the original engineers of the iPhone. They had no notion of the idea that this device was gonna be your constant companion. The goal of the iPhone when it was invented was not, people will look at this all the time, that if you go to a bus stop or a train, people will be on it all the time. If you watch that original keynote, Steve Jobs', uh, intention is super clear. He's like, "I, I don't want you to carry a separate iPod and cellphone. Those should be in the same device." And he thought the interface for smartphones was insulting. He's like, "No, it should be you should have visual voicemail. It should be really easy." That's what he was doing. You have to get over 20 minutes into his keynote address before he even mentions, uh, other non-music or other non-phone uses.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:52 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:16:52 So he was... What Jobs was doing was taking things we already loved, music and communicating, and said, "I'm just gonna build you a better device for doing it." So that's what the iPhone was.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:02 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:17:02 There was not even an App Store when it came out.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:04 Wow.

Cal Newport 1:17:04 Then later they, they introduced an App Store, and then Facebook really led the charge by realizing, like, oh, wait a second, we can get super high engagement on mobile because people have this with them all the time.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:13 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:17:13 So if we engineer this thing to be really appealing, we can get, uh, exponentially more attention minutes than we've ever gotten before. That's when it became a constant companion. It's not fundamental to the phone.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:23 And perhaps that's why my son, at least up until now, has good habits-

Cal Newport 1:17:29 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:29 ... because there are no apps on his phone which make money off his time.

Cal Newport 1:17:35 Yeah, the original-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:35 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:17:36 ... Steve Jobs iPhone is fantastic. Like, what do I do on my iPhone?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:39 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:17:39 I listen to audio, right? It's podcast, audiobooks, music. It's fantastic for that. Uh, I don't make a lot of phone calls, but I do a lot of text messaging with my family.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:48 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:17:48 And I use the map.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:49 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:17:49 And, like, I'm very happy to have this thing in my...

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:51 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:17:51 ... I can look up where I'm going. I can listen to things. Um, but the idea that I would just be looking at it all the time, it's just not the way, it's not my relationship with it. Yeah, I blame... Social media made the phone into a constant companion. Uh, Steve Jobs would've thought that was inelegant.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:06 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:18:07 He loved music, and it's like, well, I don't wanna be looking at this little screen all day. I want people to spend $600 to buy one of these things-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:14 Mm

Cal Newport 1:18:14 ... 'cause it's beautiful and awesome, but then once they have it, I don't need them looking at it all the time. Apple doesn't make more money if you use your phone more often.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:20 That's true.

Cal Newport 1:18:20 It's the apps.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:21 Yeah. Let's go back to slow productivity.

Cal Newport 1:18:24 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:24 Okay? Uh, in a, a nice little brief detour into digital minimalism-

Cal Newport 1:18:28 [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:29 Bloody fantastic book, honestly. I, I really, really enjoyed it when I read it in, what, 2019 when it came out?

Cal Newport 1:18:34 2019, yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:35 2019. Um, you mentioned the three principles. One, do fewer things, which we've sort of covered. Two, work at a natural pace.

Cal Newport 1:18:44 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:44 Can you talk about that?

Cal Newport 1:18:45 Yeah. Well, one of the things that matters is we're not wired to work all out all the time, right? I mean, that was something that was invented by factories and mills. That was really the first time in human economic history. And by economic, I mean that loosely, going all the way back to 300,000 years of foraging and hunting.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:03 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:19:04 We were not wired to work at steady intensity all day long, day after day, week after week, right? That's just not the way that, that human beings actually operated. Um, we had a lot more variation within the day, but also within the seasons, the... If in the, the agricultural period, in the Neolithic Revolution, in the winter is gonna feel very different than the fall. If you're a hunter and gatherer 150,000 years ago, the migration period is gonna have-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:27 Mm

Cal Newport 1:19:27 ... a different feel than the non. Uh, I cite research in the book looking at extant foragers about what the daily rhythm of that looks like. Within the scope of the day it's super varied. It's, okay, we're, we're on a hunt, but now it's the midday sun, so we're gonna rest because the animals are resting, and then we're gonna... So lots of variation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:45 But that was really interesting. That was, for me, one of the most fascinating things in the book was this idea of us asking ourselves, well, what does work mean?

Cal Newport 1:19:54 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:55 And if we look at our modern lives through an evolutionary lens, well, how much did we even used to work? And when you look at that, you go, no wonder so many of us are burnt out because what we're doing today is so unnatural.

Cal Newport 1:20:08 It's super unnatural. So, so it was mills and factories came along, and now for the first time in human history, it was actually, it makes sense, it's more productive for us who own the mills and factories if you just work all the time. The more you can work, the better, right? And that's where we got the idea of steady intensity all year round, and it was a disaster. It was terrible for people. It was so unnatural to be doing this. We eventually had to invent, you know, labor unions and regulatory frameworks, and have the very antagonistic relationship between the workers and the owner of the faculties, fac- uh, factories-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:39 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:20:39 ... 'cause what we were asking people to do was so unnatural and unbearable that we had to have huge protections around it to even make it sort of survivable.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:46 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:20:46 Right? Remember Blake referred to those mills dark and satanic. Uh, knowledge work emerges. Well, okay, how are we gonna organize this new type of labor? And we're like, let's do the factory thing. We'll just do, yeah, factory shifts, eight hours a day-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:59 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:20:59 ... all year round, no variation. Uh, instead of now you putting steering wheels on the car or whatever, moving the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:05 Mm

Cal Newport 1:21:05 ... the shuttlecock through the loom, you're gonna be in your office, like sending emails or whatever, but we want you clocking in and doing your shift, and it should be all day long. We're very suspicious if you're not working, and just do this all year round, no variation in the day-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:17 Mm

Cal Newport 1:21:17 ... no variation in the year. We're not wired for it. And so we're getting exhausted by it because we don't even have, at least in the industrial sector, we recognize that way of working as unnatural and unbearable, and we build huge frameworks. Like, okay, if you're gonna make me do this, you gotta give me all these protections, and we're going to negotiate for pay, and you have to give me breaks, and all this types of stuff.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:36 Or even drivers, truck drivers, lorry drivers-

Cal Newport 1:21:38 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:38 ... they're only allowed to work for a certain amount of hours-

Cal Newport 1:21:41 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:41 ... because it is deemed... or one of the reasons is it's deemed unsafe-

Cal Newport 1:21:44 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:44 ... so they have to rest.

Cal Newport 1:21:45 But in knowledge work we get none of that. So we get all the worst parts of this very unnatural-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:49 Mm

Cal Newport 1:21:49 ... way of working, uh, with none of the protections that, that we do need for it. The solution here is we shouldn't work that way. And when I go back and study knowledge workers from a previous time where they're just working on their own, what do they gravitate towards? Huge variation in intensity. Busy periods, unbusy periods. Marie Curie, uh, honing in on isolating radium from pitchblende, right? This was gonna be the first sort of formal identification of a radioactive substance. This was Nobel caliber work. Honing in on this. Drops everything, goes for a two-month vacation in France, right? Comes back and starts working on some more and does it, isolates it, wins her first of two Nobel Prizes. It's a different mindset. It's like, yeah, over the next few years I wanna isolate this and make a big discovery, but also I need to put the brakes on a little bit. I'm getting kind of exhausted, so let's go explore grottoes in, you know, the, the French countryside, and then come back and try again. Like, this was, uh, much more, much more natural, that things had much more variation. That's how we always naturally produce value with our brain, until recently.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:52 How, how does that apply, the, the, the second law, as it were in the book, work at a natural pace?

Cal Newport 1:22:57 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:59 How, how can someone who doesn't have the luxury of taking off two months in the summer-

Cal Newport 1:23:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:05 ... to reflect on a big idea or do something else and come back and get their Nobel Prize, what can they take from that idea-

Cal Newport 1:23:12 Yep

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:12 ... and apply immediately?

Cal Newport 1:23:13 Yeah, so I, I can tell you, first of all, what I think companies should do, and then what individuals can do if their companies don't do these things, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:20 Okay. [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:23:20 So there are examples. So companies are now starting to experiment with ways to have more variation, which I, I applaud, right? Um, one is the idea of sabbaticals. More and more companies are introducing this idea of, uh, sabbaticals for employees. You have a hard few years, you do some cool things, take two months off, paid, uh, to, to recharge and rethink, and then come back again. Paid sabbaticals, that's becoming a bigger thing. I think it's a great idea. Uh, another idea that's out there, Basecamp, the company Basecamp does this. They do cycles. So work unfolds in cycles. You're on an on cycle, which could be four to six weeks, where you're really focused on one or two things, right? Then you have an off cycle. This can be, like, a two-week period where you purposely don't do a lot of things. It's all about trying to close up the loose ends-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:04 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:24:05 ... on what you're just working about, and more importantly, thinking about, with space to reflect, what is most important for me to do next. And the employee handbook for Basecamp says, "Resist the temptation to just push more work into the off cycles." You have to actually cycle down your workload before you cycle it back up. So I love ideas like that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:23 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:24:23 What can individuals do if they don't work for one of those companies? You can do this internally without telling anybody. Pick times of the year, these three weeks in the middle of the summer, like before the holidays and, you know, whatever, um, I'm gonna wind down a little bit during those periods. I'm not gonna make an announcement about it. I'm just gonna... When I s- how I schedule things, uh, what projects I have end and when I have new projects start, the hours I'm actually gonna be, like, putting in work, I'm just gonna down cycle for a while, right? You sort of, like, quiet quit, but just for a couple weeks at a time, right? At a smaller timescale, you can do things like pick a day out of the week and say, "I'm just not gonna schedule any meetings on that day."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:02 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:25:02 And again, I'm not gonna announce it. It's just when people ask me when I'm free, I'll offer lots of dates, they just won't happen to be on that day, right? So that that day can be, uh, quieter-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:13 Mm

Cal Newport 1:25:13 ... than other days. Or once a quarter or once a month, take an afternoon off and go see a movie. And again, don't make a big deal about it, just say, "I have an appointment." No one cares.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:23 You know, when you, when you shared that tip in the book about seeing a matinee once a month-

Cal Newport 1:25:27 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:27 ... and, and how great it would feel, um, I haven't done this, but midweek in the afternoon-

Cal Newport 1:25:33 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:33 ... in a cinema-

Cal Newport 1:25:34 Ah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:34 ... I don't know, what, how does it feel?

Cal Newport 1:25:35 It feels... I- By the way, I do this, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:38 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:25:38 Um, it feels great because you know the context of other people are at work right now.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:43 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:25:44 And so it's the most relaxing movie experience. [laughs] You're like, "This is great." You really appreciate it. It's like cold water after a long stint in the desert.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:51 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:25:51 You'll appreciate it a lot more.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:52 I, I love that. And, and actually the bit in the book which I, I, I really, really enjoyed reading was that if you feel guilty about this-

Cal Newport 1:25:59 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:59 ... just remind yourself how many evenings you've worked-

Cal Newport 1:26:02 Yes

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:02 ... how many times you've worked at weekends-

Cal Newport 1:26:04 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:04 ... which is true.

Cal Newport 1:26:05 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:05 Because a lot of people do feel guilty about that kind of stuff if they're able to do it.

Cal Newport 1:26:10 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:11 But they forget, like, hey, you have overworked loads. You've probably-

Cal Newport 1:26:14 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:14 ... given your company way more-

Cal Newport 1:26:16 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:16 ... in the past. So-

Cal Newport 1:26:17 Yeah. Where's, where's your overtime for working after-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:19 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:26:20 Yeah, you don't get it. But also if you leave the pseudo-productivity mindset, this becomes psychologically easier. So in the pseudo-productivity mindset, activity is value.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:28 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:26:28 You think about any reduction in activity as taking value away from your employer, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:33 Yeah. This is it, isn't it? Because this is, this is basically the fish not knowing what water is.

Cal Newport 1:26:41 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:42 It, it... Th- that example illustrates it beautifully. The reason you feel guilty is because you have developed the belief somewhere that you are only measured in terms of your activity and your visible activity.

Cal Newport 1:26:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:57 If you didn't have that belief in the first place, there's nothing to feel guilty about.

Cal Newport 1:27:00 Nothing to feel guilty about.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:01 [laughs]

Cal Newport 1:27:01 I mean, what if instead d- the way you thought about your work is, "Okay, this year or this season I have this portfolio of projects I'm working on, and I'm really proud of the work I'm doing on these, and it really uses my skill, and I think it's gonna move the needle, and this is great. I'm on track for it." It- going to a movie on this Tuesday is not gonna negatively affect that, right? It's a completely different way of thinking about it. But if you imagine yourself like an assembly line worker, you're like, "Well, wait a second, if I'm not at my spot on the assembly line putting the steering wheels on the car, like, the whole thing slows down-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:31 Mm

Cal Newport 1:27:31 ... and it's a problem for everyone else." But when you, when you switch from activity to outcome, you realize, "Well, uh, I'm producing stuff I'm proud of." It's why writers, professional, like, novelists just write novels. And I say novelists because-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:42 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:27:42 ... it's the one type of writer that we leave alone.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:45 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:27:45 For whatever reason, not, we don't get to do this as nonfiction writers.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:48 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:27:48 But novelists, we're very safe to say, "Disappear, write your book, two-week book tour, and then go write another book." Like, we don't make them do things, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:58 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:27:58 Study the lives of a novelist. They're doing all sorts of things, right? Because you can only write so much. And they, they have to, like, take downtime and because what they're thinking is, "Am I gonna produce a really good book-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:10 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:28:10 ... over this next two years?"

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:10 And that's what they're judged on.

Cal Newport 1:28:11 That's what they're judged on. So they-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:12 Not how many hours they put into that book.

Cal Newport 1:28:14 Yeah. Yeah, so-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:14 It's like how good is the book.

Cal Newport 1:28:15 So for them to say, "I'm not feeling it this afternoon, I'm going to a movie," yeah, of course, why not? Why is that a problem? Yeah. So we could adopt more of that mindset. We, uh... And we're not novelists, I wish we were, I love their, their lifestyle, but we could take this into other knowledge workshops.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:28 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:28:28 Like, this is what I do that's valuable. Here's my portfolio of projects I'm working on. I'm really doing well-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:33 Mm

Cal Newport 1:28:33 ... in these things, right? Uh, that's what matters. Am I proud of what I produced this quarter? Am I proud of my, my annual contribution to the company? Not how, uh, how does my time card look.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:45 I think one of the other differences between, let's say, factory work and knowledge work, you mentioned that individual who if they're not at the factory putting on the steering wheel-

Cal Newport 1:28:55 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:56 ... then there is gonna be a reduction in, you know, output for that company. One of the upsides of that, and I'm sure there's many negatives of working in that environment, is that when you clock off at 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM, you've clocked off.

Cal Newport 1:29:12 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:12 You cannot be doing that at home, right? So yeah, sure, maybe the job is a bit monotonous, maybe there's things you don't like about it. You know, everything has got upsides and downsides. One of the upsides might be that you simply cannot work at home-

Cal Newport 1:29:27 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:27 ... because that work can only be done at the factory. Whereas with knowledge work, those emails, that thing-

Cal Newport 1:29:33 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:33 ... it can be done any time. It could be done on Sunday morning.

Cal Newport 1:29:35 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:35 It can be done at any time, which makes that, um, that switch off very difficult for many people.

Cal Newport 1:29:41 Yeah. I mean, imagine if you worked on an assembly line and you were, like, assembling magnetos for the alternator, and now imagine that the company is like, "You know what? We put a bunch of magneto parts at your house.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:52 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:29:52 And it's up to you, but, like, while you're at home, you could probably build a few more of these. And no, we're not saying you have to, but, like, you know, we are counting the magnetos. And, and if you maybe build a few while you're at home."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:02 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:30:02 And, and, and by the way, when you go, uh, when you go to, like, your, your kids' sports games or this or that, we're just gonna have a guy who follows behind with a, a cart full of magneto parts. Hey, it's up to you, but you might wanna build a couple.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:13 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:30:13 That's what email is. Yeah. And that's part of why modern technology made pseudo-productivity not work anymore. I mean, this is really the way I... The techno story here I keep coming back to is pseudo-productivity was crude. It kind of worked. It wasn't very accurate, but whatever, until we got modern technology in the office, and then it spun out of control. This is one of the reasons why it did. Because if activity is how I demonstrate my value, and now I have the opportunity to do activity at any time and any place-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:39 Mm

Cal Newport 1:30:40 ... I now have to fight an internal battle- Constantly

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:43 Constantly

Cal Newport 1:30:44 I have to fight the battle

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:45 And it's draining

Cal Newport 1:30:46 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:46 It's draining that battle.

Cal Newport 1:30:48 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:48 You know, there's research, isn't there, that says if your smartphone is there on the table, you are exerting willpower just to not pick it up and look at it.

Cal Newport 1:30:57 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:57 It's not neutral

Cal Newport 1:30:58 Well, it's like a torture. I mean, think about it. It's almost like a torture device in the sense that what do humans care about? Their tribes, right? We're, we're, we're a community-based species, right? If someone in our, our tribe, historically speaking, needs something from us, we better take care of that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:13 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:31:14 We do not want to ignore, in the Paleolithic era, someone in our tribe is like, uh, tapping on your shoulder.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:18 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:31:18 You don't want to ignore that person because it's gonna break perhaps the relationship-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:21 Mm

Cal Newport 1:31:21 ... and they're not gonna share food when there's the next famine.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:23 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:31:24 But what is an email inbox as far as our more primitive social circuits are concerned? What is an email inbox, if not a bunch of members of your tribe need something from you? And if you're ignoring it, now you're in danger. You're in danger of not passing on your genes, right?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:37 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:31:37 Because we're wired, don't ignore when people need things from you, because that part of our social circuits don't know about norms at a knowledge work office space-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:45 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:31:45 ... and asynchronous communication. So like an email inbox that is slowly filling at all times is like a social psychological torture device. It's like, I dare you not to go and check this. It's pulling on some of our deepest instincts. It's like having folders full of pornography around everywhere. [laughs] It's like, don't open that, but by the way, you know, there's, you know, pornography behind every corner. You're like, oh my God, all the deep instincts are like, oh, I wanna take a peek at that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:09 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:32:09 This is pulling out another deep instinct, the instinct to be social. And so it really is sort of perverting this thing we have, this instinct we have in a way that makes... That challenge is impossible.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:19 Do you have an email app on your phone?

Cal Newport 1:32:22 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:23 So you manage to use that in a way that enhances your life? If w- if we take the digital minimalism approach-

Cal Newport 1:32:28 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:28 ... has that been quite intentional that this email app helps you?

Cal Newport 1:32:31 Yes. Well, well, first of all, I have like five or six email addresses, so I, I, because I use specialized email for specific purposes so that I can have sort of specific expectations around those addresses.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:42 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:32:42 So this is just for one of those accounts.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:44 Okay.

Cal Newport 1:32:45 So I had an interesting, uh, experiment back in March. The, the app broke, and I didn't have access. I got basically logged out of Gmail on my phone, and for various reasons I couldn't log back in. So I, I went about a month, month and a half with no email access on my phone. Uh, and what I found is like, oh, there's these very specific but frequent logistical reasons why I needed the email.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:08 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:33:08 Like coming here on the train-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:09 Mm

Cal Newport 1:33:09 ... I have the tickets in my email.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:12 Email.

Cal Newport 1:33:12 Right. So I have this one address with an email app, so for these logistical purposes, um, but that's it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:18 So but, but again, you're very intentional about it. You just-

Cal Newport 1:33:20 I'm super intentional

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:20 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:33:20 Yeah. But also like with email, I mean, for me, the key to email is, uh, it's not what you do. Once you're thinking about what do I do with all these requests coming in, do I need to deal with, how do I deal with all those requests, you've already lost the battle. The real, the real war here is how do I stop so many of those requests-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:35 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:33:35 ... from showing up in the first place. Like, that's... You gotta go upstream. So if you're just like a standard knowledge worker, that's where having less active projects helps, 'cause now there's-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:44 Mm

Cal Newport 1:33:44 ... less things generating emails for you to actually receive. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're like you or I running like a little media concern, there's other types of things you can do to try to be very intentional about what goes where. Um, but I'm, I'm... I really do not like unscheduled incoming messages that requires a response.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:01 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:34:01 That's the killer.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:03 Third principle, obsess over quality.

Cal Newport 1:34:05 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:08 We don't have a huge amount of time to go through it. The word obsess-

Cal Newport 1:34:13 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:14 ... I've been thinking about that word because, of course, the danger, as you acknowledge in your book, is that this can, you know, spill over into perfectionism-

Cal Newport 1:34:24 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:24 ... and never actually doing anything because you're so keen to make it the perfect thing.

Cal Newport 1:34:28 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:30 How come you chose the word obsess?

Cal Newport 1:34:32 Yeah. Well, 'cause you have to care a lot about it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:35 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:34:35 Yeah. I mean, if, if I had said instead, uh, care about quality, that's too light. Everyone's like, "Yeah, I care about quality. I wanna do good work."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:44 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:34:44 It, it doesn't capture the magnitude of what I'm trying to say, which is this should be central.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:49 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:34:50 This has to be central to your story. The perfectionism/craft trade-off is central and unavoidable, and in some sense, like this is the challenge, uh, you can't sidestep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:02 Mm.

Cal Newport 1:35:02 You have to confront it head on. It is a real challenge. Anyone who's ever tried to do anything well faces this challenge, and my approach to it is recognize that. Here's some ideas about what to do with it-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:13 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:35:13 ... but don't run from it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:15 Yeah.

Cal Newport 1:35:15 Don't run from... Don't let your fear of, like, what if I procrastinate over perfectionism stop you from trying to get better, because it is so important to try to get good. Craft is so central to, uh, earning the ability to have a slower notion of productivity, is that, like, you can't underemphasize it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:31 Yeah. I completely agree. I mean, it's... That those three principles, they really work beautifully in harmony with each other.

Cal Newport 1:35:37 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:38 Right? Because if you take principle three, obsess over quality, without do fewer things, you've got a big problem.

Cal Newport 1:35:44 You do.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:44 If you've got 10 things that you're obsessing about to be perfect-

Cal Newport 1:35:47 Yep

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:47 ... you're gonna be overloaded. So they, they all kind of feed each other quite nicely, don't they?

Cal Newport 1:35:52 And, and you get the flip side too, which is if you're just, like, say, trying to do fewer things, but not caring about the quality of your work, then it... work, it just becomes a game where you begin to get this like antagonistic relationship with your work of less is better than more, and how many things can I take off my plate, and that can have its own sort of nihilism to it. Like, the, the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:10 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:36:10 ... you need the counterbalance. I wanna do fewer things so that I can do the things I care about better, right? You need those-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:16 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:36:16 ... it, it's the glue. I call that principle the glue that holds the whole thing together.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:21 In terms of my public face and career, the two, I guess, most important things I do are my books and this podcast, and all of these principles really apply-

Cal Newport 1:36:34 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:34 ... to this kind of endeavor.

Cal Newport 1:36:35 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:36 And if we just focus on obsess over quality for a minute, one of the big differences between the podcast and the book is that the books come out every year or every two years.

Cal Newport 1:36:47 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:47 Right? So there's a different-

Cal Newport 1:36:49 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:49 ... there's a different timing to that. Whereas the podcast is every week apart from six weeks every summer. So we can obsess over quality, and we do, but we also have to be able to say, "That's good enough-

Cal Newport 1:37:06 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:06 ... to press publish," because otherwise you could literally spend six weeks crafting a podcast, one show-

Cal Newport 1:37:12 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:12 ... to be absolutely perfect.

Cal Newport 1:37:13 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:14 So yeah, i- it's interesting, whereas with a book I can take longer, but I still need a deadline.

Cal Newport 1:37:19 You still need a deadline.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:19 You still need a deadline.

Cal Newport 1:37:20 But that- that's the whole, that's the whole game-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:22 Yeah

Cal Newport 1:37:22 ... is you need constraints, and then you do the best you can within the constraints.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:26 Yeah, exactly.

Cal Newport 1:37:27 Like, that's, that's the whole game with perfectionism, and it... Yeah, so the podcast is a great example. This has to come out every week. I, I also have time constraints on my podcast.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:34 Yeah. It's half a day a week, right?

Cal Newport 1:37:35 Half a day a week, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:36 Is that prep as well?

Cal Newport 1:37:38 Uh, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:39 Wow, so you've got half a day a week to prep and record it.

Cal Newport 1:37:42 Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, uh, I, I, I have to get help to do that, and, like, as I add new things, I have to figure out how to take other things off of my plate. Am I... Now I have a producer that helps, like, gather the questions for the prep-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:54 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:37:54 ... or this or that. Uh, but within that half day I'm like, "Oh my God, I wanna make this as good as possible."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:59 Yeah. I love that.

Cal Newport 1:37:59 I tr- I try as hard as possible, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:01 Cal, honestly, I'm, I'm such a fan of your work, um, and have been for many years. It's, it's really such an honor to have you in my studio and talking to you. I think Slow Productivity is a game changer for people.

Cal Newport 1:38:13 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:13 I really do. I think it's gonna help people really understand why their work may be overwhelming them, and it is chock-a-block full of practical tips-

Cal Newport 1:38:23 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:23 ... that people can use, that even an office worker who may feel, as you said before, doesn't have much autonomy, there are still things you can do.

Cal Newport 1:38:31 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:32 I also wanna shout out Digital Minimalism, 'cause I thought that was a absolutely fabulous book as well, and I guess that deals more with the, the kind of o- off time, our non-work time.

Cal Newport 1:38:41 Yep.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:41 But there's a huge synergy between the two of them.

Cal Newport 1:38:44 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:45 Just to finish off, Cal, for someone who has heard this conversation and thinks, "Yeah, you know what? I'm, I am overloaded. I'm one of those 88%."

Cal Newport 1:38:56 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:56 "My, my life feels too much."

Cal Newport 1:39:00 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:00 "I'm sick of being overwhelmed all the time."

Cal Newport 1:39:03 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:04 Where would you advise them to start?

Cal Newport 1:39:05 I would start with workload, doing fewer things at once is gonna give you the most immediate benefits. I mean, I think when you say, "All right, I'm gonna look at this big list of things I'm actively working on. I'm gonna take 30% off my plate. For the, the 70% that remains, I'm gonna divide it between these are the two I'm working on for the next couple of weeks, and the rest are just gonna sit here, and I'm not gonna give them active work, uh, until I'm finished with something over here, and I'll pull it in." Do the workload changes first. You're gonna get breathing room, and then once you have breathing room, everything else begins to seem possible because I... You know, I discovered this because I, I wrote a book before, um, where I was talking about email and building processes and how to have, uh, better ways of communicating that's not so interruptive, and what I learned working on this new book is that the biggest problem people were having is they had so much on their plate that they didn't have breathing room to even step back and ask these type of questions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:01 Mm-hmm.

Cal Newport 1:40:01 Like, oh, how do I wanna communicate on this project? Oh, is there a way we could collaborate on this that's not just gonna be-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:07 Mm-hmm

Cal Newport 1:40:07 ... Slack all day? When you have too much to do, it's like you're drowning, and when you're drowning, you can't actually, uh, get enough air to make any changes. So if you reduce that workload first, it's gonna feel like I can finally catch my breath, and you can get some solitude, some reflection. You can think about your pace. You can think about quality. You can think about doing what you do best even better. Everything becomes possible once you get that extra space. So I've been telling people, if you're gonna start with slow productivity, start with the number of active things on your plate.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:37 Cal, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. You're doing fantastic work. Thank you for coming on the show.

Cal Newport 1:40:42 Oh, thank you. I enjoyed it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:43 If you enjoyed that conversation, then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.

Cal Newport 1:40:47 We live in an age of rings and pings and dings and app notifications, social media alerts. We're rewiring our brains. Technology's a tool for us to use, but if technology's using us, then, then we become the tool.