Skip to content

By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.

Tim FerrissTim Ferriss

How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time — Cal Newport & Tim Ferriss

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His new book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout: https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Productivity-Accomplishment-Without-Burnout/dp/0593544854/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 Everything discussed in this interview: https://tim.blog/2024/02/21/cal-newport-slow-productivity/ Subscribe to Cal's YouTube channel: @CalNewportMedia Cal Newport's official website: https://calnewport.com/ Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by: AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/Tim (save $200 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep this winter) Momentous high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) [00:00] Preview [01:13] Unforced Errors: The Internet Story. [04:47] Techno-selectionism. [13:54] Why YouTube and podcasts aren't ideal bedfellows. [19:24] Amish technology and Steve Martin. [25:02] What prompted Cal to write Slow Productivity? [28:48] Becoming a better writer through blogging. [37:47] The benefits of obsessing over quality. [42:12] How did Cal decide to identify himself as a writer? [49:54] People who exemplify slow productivity. [57:13] Trade-offs on the path to twenty-first-century slow productivity. [1:02:00] Push systems vs. pull systems. [1:03:23] Quota systems. [1:05:06] Why slow productivity isn't a zero-sum game. [1:08:40] Language that clarifies. [1:12:42] Sender filters. [1:16:11] What people might miss about Slow Productivity's message. [1:21:34] How Cal defines productivity. [1:26:01] Derek Sivers and money as a neutral indicator of value. [1:29:07] Contemporary slow productivity champions. [1:33:44] Asynchronous vs. real-time conversations. [1:37:13] Making group scheduling less hellish. [1:41:49] Cal's problem with Frederick Winslow Taylor. [1:43:30] How The New Yorker maintains its old-timey charm where other publications fail. [1:51:26] Cal's dream publications. [1:53:31] Mental models for cultivating a slow productivity mindset. [1:59:51] The consequences of playing the algorithm game. [2:07:30] The renewed viability of newsletters. [2:12:04] Parting thoughts. Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 900 million downloads and been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three years running. Sign up for "5-Bullet Friday" (Tim's free weekly email newsletter): https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/ Follow the Tim Ferriss Podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast/ Visit the Tim Ferriss Blog: https://tim.blog/ Follow Tim Ferriss on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tferriss/ Follow Tim Ferriss on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/ Like Tim Ferriss on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/

Cal NewportguestTim Ferrisshost
Feb 21, 20242h 19mWatch on YouTube ↗

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:13

    Preview

    1. CN

      And if that's all you're doing, you're just building up this negative attitude towards work, which I think, by the way, is a, one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in, let's say, elite culture.

    2. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CN

      It's just an all-out rejection of work itself. Like, well, m- any drive to do things is, it's a, it's a capitalist construction and, and the real thing to do is just do nothing.

    4. TF

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      But that doesn't last, and the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They're striving really hard to make sure that their Substacks and books about doing nothing are gonna have a really big audience-

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. CN

      ... and they're giving talks on it.

    8. TF

      [laughs]

    9. CN

      So you can't just focus on the doing less part. You need the obsess over quality part, and that's where-

    10. TF

      Yeah

    11. CN

      ... you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create, and that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living in. So that's why I think it's the glue. Uh, you have to do the other things, but if you just do the other things-

    12. TF

      Mm-hmm

    13. CN

      ... you know, you're gonna end up doing quiet quitting TikToks or something like that. [laughs] You know?

    14. TF

      [laughs]

    15. CN

      It's not gonna end up... You're not gonna end up where you wanna be.

    16. TF

      Oh, no. Purgatory. [upbeat music]

  2. 1:13 – 4:47

    Unforced Errors: The Internet Story.

    1. TF

      Let me ask you, if you don't mind, we'll just roll right into it. Does that work for you?

    2. CN

      All right. Let's roll into it. Let's go.

    3. TF

      Unforced errors, I mean, that, that should be basically a review of the last 10 years, right? I mean, that could be the [laughs] like, the Walter Isaacson sort of biography of a generation. Unforced errors. And I feel this way in the sense that we're talking right now about things kind of horseshoeing back around to many of the certainly some advantages, but many disadvantages and trappings of, say, television, right? So despite our best efforts, many of us seem to somehow get corralled into these unforced errors or corral ourselves into unforced errors.

    4. CN

      Right. I mean, you could almost write a book called Unforced Errors: The Internet Story.

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. CN

      It could just be about all of the ways we, we wandered off of some of the central motivations of the internet in the places that made everyone but a small number of investors really unhappy.

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CN

      Uh, but let's take what we were talking about just before because I think it's actually an example of a, something that seems at first to be an unforced error in terms of our engagement with the internet, which is gonna be video rising, podcasts shifting more towards television show style production. I actually think in that example, there is a good sign.

    9. TF

      Okay.

    10. CN

      I think there's something positive in there.

    11. TF

      Tell me.

    12. CN

      The real unforced error that I think hit content creation was algorithms.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CN

      So the, the shift of I am going to create content on behalf of a small number of large companies-

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm

    16. CN

      ... that will then curate for each individual user, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever. They'll curate with algorithms streams of interesting information from this giant pool of information that people are creating. Uh, this, I think, was a huge problem for content quality.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CN

      Podcasts by contrast, right, so we come back to podcast, is the opposite of the algorithm. I mean, one of the-

    19. TF

      Mm-hmm

    20. CN

      ... reasons why I was excited about this medium as it arose is that there is no algorithms in it. I mean, a, a podcast grows because a listener likes the podcast and tells another listener.

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      It's very similar to books in that way. "Hey, read this. You should listen to this." Uh, growth is slow often with podcast, but there is no countervailing content curation force from an algorithm. There's nothing you can do in a podcast episode that is going to make it go viral in the way that a tweet can or, or an Instagram can, because you can't share them that way. Video, I think, is now inevitable just because visual's more interesting.

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CN

      I mean, radio, for example, in the 1920s, 1930s, was a really well-developed technology. Radio shows were very good. Radios were cost-effective. Radios were portable. You could, you could put them in a, in a car. They weren't too expensive. And when TV came along, it was much more complicated, it was more expensive, the experience was squashed. They had to stay between these really bright klieg lights on these small stages because of the limitations of the early lenses and detectors, and it just ate radio's lunch.

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      Because visual's really interesting. So we can't help but watch when we have a chance to watch. So I, I think this is where podcasting is going, and it's gonna reinvent basically linear TV.

    27. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CN

      Like it was at the heyday of cable, there's a lot of channels and you hear about a show, "Hey, have you heard about the show Mad Men? It's really good," and then people go and, and watch it.

    29. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    30. CN

      But I think that's actually net, net positive because still what's driving this sort of podcast into the video podcast revolution, as long as it has to be quality, which is what you have to fall back on when you don't have algorithms-

  3. 4:47 – 13:54

    Techno-selectionism.

    1. CN

      movement.

    2. TF

      Let me bounce some thoughts off of you related to that. So my feeling is that, and I think you would agree with this, the ecosystem and the dynamics of the podcast world changed very dramatically in the last five to 10 years. The 10th year of the, this podcast is coming up in April. And I agree that at a certain critical mass, it seems like podcasts and books shared a lot in common. There were some fundamental differences in the sense that podcasting, consuming audio was a secondary activity for most folks. They were doing something else while they were listening, whereas much harder to do that with a book [laughs] at least in text format. Although, we've seen the commensurate rise almost in exact tandem of audiobooks certainly with, with podcasts as-

    3. CN

      Yep

    4. TF

      ... as smart devices and broadband have become more ubiquitous. I think when podcasts were, on a volume basis, similar to books insomuch as let's just say there's 100,000 books published in the US per year through major publishers. I have no idea if that number's accurate, but something like that. Let's just say a small handful of those make the bestseller lists. Those are used as shopping lists. Now all of a sudden you have a fixed- ... set of podcasts. But then you have this long tail and people listen to them and they recommend them and so on. Similar, I think now that you have millions of podcasts, the discovery problem, maybe it's similar to books on, say, Amazon, but it seems to be that the, the recommendations are now hinged on this very much kind of, in some respects, determining variable, which is video. So YouTube has always been a huge asset. I think Rogan was probably the first that I know of to really use clips and YouTube well as one of the world's largest search engines to drive consumption of audio. But I think there are a couple of other factors, like TikTok for, for instance, and the both kind of fear of TikTok as a competitor, and then emulation of TikTok by major platforms that has led to this divorce of long-form and short-form content. Right? So for instance, even for this podcast, we've had clips that have, with clear visual attribution, everything in the description related to Tim Ferriss Show, do 100 million views, and they have translated exactly zero to longer form, say, content consumption. So it's... I, I, I don't think we are free of the algorithm, I suppose is what I'm saying, in the sense that there is still word of mouth, but I've noticed a tremendous change in the last handful of years as things get more and more algorithmically driven. And what... And I feel like the big joke [laughs] don't worry guys, this isn't gonna be all cynicism, and [laughs] Tim Ferriss talking about the, the glass half full with respect to podcasting-

    5. CN

      On his podcast, yeah.

    6. TF

      On my podcast.

    7. CN

      [laughs]

    8. TF

      But I feel, I feel like the big kind of cosmic joke [laughs] for me is that if people are consuming podcasts, long-form podcasts as video, by and large, those are in background tabs or they're on a phone [laughs] as they're listening to Spotify that is running video, but they're listening to audio while they're in their car, killing their cellular data or whatever. [laughs] So in a sense, it's like you need the video to play the game, you need the machine to recognize and value your video, [laughs] but in many, many cases, humans are not actually consuming this beautiful product that you're producing. There are exceptions, and there are some-

    9. CN

      Yeah

    10. TF

      ... amazing cinematic experiences that get produced. But the reason that I'm, I'm delivering this, uh, sort of scent of a woman, hellfire and brimstone talk about formats is because this relates, I think, to a lot of what I would love to ask you about. And I went back through our last conversation also, and all of the notes on that conversation, because the reason I'm wearing this, this goofy headset, Audio-Technica, which actually has great audio quality, I'm shocked on some level that I didn't use this earlier, 'cause it clears up a lot of table space for my notes and so on, is that it allows me to be mobile. It allows me to stay true to, one might call it the root document maybe, the, the initial intentions and reasons for choosing this medium in the first place. That could be, and probably will be, to my commercial detriment. I think it will hurt the growth of the podcast for me not to focus more on video. However, that begets all sorts of questions. Why is growth important? Why is A, B, and C more important than the initial drivers that led you to adopt this medium as your home base, let's just say?

    11. CN

      Yeah.

    12. TF

      So what are some of the, for people who aren't familiar with you, 'cause a lot of people listening to this will be listening to you for the first time, or at least on this podcast for the first time, what are some of the ways that you have kind of pushed back against prevalent social behaviors, social adoption, technology adoption, et cetera? Just so folks have an idea.

    13. CN

      And I have a thought I'm gonna add on.

    14. TF

      Sure. Add away.

    15. CN

      [laughs] There is an idea here, but let me set the stage, right? So, so I'm a, I'm a computer science professor who also does a lot of writing about technology and the way it intersects with all parts of our lives, our work, our, our life outside of work, the way we, we connect with each other. In this role, I do a lot of writing as a contributor to The New Yorker, where I really explore those, those ideas in depth, in addition to my books. I'm often thinking about this.

    16. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CN

      How do we work with technology? I have a philosophy. This is actually new since the, the last time I was on your show. I, I did-

    18. TF

      Mm-hmm

    19. CN

      ... a New Yorker piece, uh, in late 2023, where I introduced this notion I called techno-selectionism.

    20. TF

      [laughs] I like it.

    21. CN

      And I said, this is really the way we should think about dealing with technologies in our life, but also in our organizations and our culture, so at multiple scales, is it's hard to predict in advance always the impact a new tool is gonna have. I, I always give the example of going back and watching Steve Jobs' keynote speech in 2007 when he's introducing the iPhone. He doesn't even get to the internet features until 30 minutes into the speech. I mean, he was just jazzed that your iPod was gonna be on the same thing as your phone, and you wouldn't have to switch back and forth.

    22. TF

      [laughs]

    23. CN

      But he had no way of predicting-

    24. TF

      Yeah

    25. CN

      ... eight years later you're gonna have, for example, a teenage mental health crisis.

    26. TF

      Right.

    27. CN

      So techno-selectionism says be willing to actually aggressively step backwards, and be willing to say, "Uh, this looks interesting."

    28. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    29. CN

      "Let me try this out. Oh, no. [laughs] You know? No, no, this is not matching what's really important to me, so you're out of here." All right, this I will do, this I won't.

    30. TF

      Mm-hmm.

  4. 13:54 – 19:24

    Why YouTube and podcasts aren't ideal bedfellows.

    1. TF

      Yeah.

    2. CN

      Now, I, I, I wanna put my coda on the video thing though, is that I don't think YouTube is the future of video for podcasts. In fact, YouTube-

    3. TF

      Mm

    4. CN

      ... and podcasts don't play well together at all.

    5. TF

      Mm.

    6. CN

      They really just don't. Most people are not successfully growing their podcast using YouTube unless it's really YouTube-specified. A- and so I think that mismatch is dulling the impact of the YouTube algorithm on the podcast ecosystem, because those audiences don't play well together.

    7. TF

      Mm.

    8. CN

      I think the future of video for podcasting, uh, it's gonna be on smart TVs. I think it'll probably be, you know, I subscribe to this app.

    9. TF

      Okay, so you think people will single-task, they'll watch it?

    10. CN

      Which by the way, you know, I was talking to our, our own YouTube guy, and the reason why I'm on YouTube, by the way, is practice.

    11. TF

      Yeah.

    12. CN

      'Cause I think video's gonna be key. YouTube itself, mm, right now it's not gonna drive my podcast, but I wanna be used to this medium.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CN

      He was saying on a lot of big shows, and I think he was giving me the numbers from Lex Fridman, smart TVs will often be the number two or the number three most common device on which the podcast is consumed.

    15. TF

      Really? Currently?

    16. CN

      So a, a younger generation. Yeah, because if you think about it-

    17. TF

      Hmm

    18. CN

      ... you can load the YouTube app on your smart TV.

    19. TF

      Yeah.

    20. CN

      Podcasters are now filming in high-def 4K.

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      And when you're watching, you select a podcast, it's not that different than going to Netflix and selecting a show.

    23. TF

      It's watching TV.

    24. CN

      Yeah. It takes up the whole show. And they don't like the stuff that's on anyways, so I think that's gonna be the f- the future probably, is you're gonna have some app.

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      You're like, "Okay, I subscribe to this app." It's the equivalent of a 2004 linear cable channel that you would've had on your menu. And you know what? It, it, it's a nice Netflix interface and it's, it's, you know, Cal Newport's latest shows and Tim's and, like, Ryan Holiday's, whatever. Like, a group of people doing similar stuff. It's a channel, and you go through a, a horizontal carousel. Oh, there's a new episode of whatever, and you watch it on your screen.

    27. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CN

      I think podcasting's gonna compete with streamers and cable because the overhead, the key number used to be, in cable, dollar per hour of production cost. And this is why Discovery Channel was the, the profitable king of the first decade of the 2000s, is that they got that down to something like $400,000 an hour.

    29. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    30. CN

      Which it was a minuscule cost per hour because they were doing these reality shows. Podcasts, you can get that down even with high production values another order of magnitude or more.

  5. 19:24 – 25:02

    Amish technology and Steve Martin.

    1. CN

      with that.

    2. TF

      Yeah. I mean, I, I think there are, there are a bunch of open questions, but I wanna come back to the... I'll attempt to g- come back to the 30,000-foot view with the techno-selectionism, I think it was. Which, by the way, folks, if you're not aware, the... You may have even mentioned them in your piece, so I apologize, I haven't read it, but the Amish do something very similar. Like, they do adopt new technology.

    3. CN

      Yeah.

    4. TF

      They're just very strict about how they approach it. So the, the first thing I would say is if podcasts end up on smart TVs, there's a question about how they end up on smart TVs. Presumably, there's some platform or hardware company deciding on that, and they might use YouTube as a proxy for who to choose as their content partners, just in terms of popularity, right? So it may indirectly still be a determinant, YouTube that is, of who gets placement on these. Uh, otherwise you just run into the same discovery problem that people experience right now, which is, like, I wanna find a great podcast. Well, you can rely on the Spotify algorithm to recommend something similar, but then you run into the issue of, like, I listened to one country song once, and now I just get served hundreds of country songs every day [laughs] . Like, how do I change-

    5. CN

      Yeah

    6. TF

      ... my specifications? But to, to zoom out just on the techno-selectionism side, because I, I, I think you, you mentioned something that's worth underscoring. I think of new technology like I would think of new drugs, in the sense that at one point in time, for instance, thalidomide was considered a huge breakthrough, and then lo and behold, it has all these horrific side effects and birth defects and so on, and then it was pulled back and there were rules put in place and the FDA changes A, B, and C, and so on to make things safer. There's no reason to treat technology any differently, in my mind, right? Drugs are a technology.

    7. CN

      Yeah.

    8. TF

      So it's sort of a subset, but social media, same, same, right? Wearing a headset that you s- where you have the illusion of depth perception, but in reality you're looking at a screen that's less than a few inches from your eyes, and so on. There's just no real way to know what the long-term implications are, which doesn't mean you become a Luddite. But even living in Silicon Valley for 17 years, I was sort of a, [sighs] a sharp-edge adopter, but not a cutting-edge adopter, right? I never really took things on personally through self-experimentation or as an investor, really, if they were kind of first of their kind. I always waited around a little bit. And you can still be really early and catch the right waves, even if you have a certain built-in delay, and that's how I'm treating a lot of technologies and also behaviors, right? Like, if technologies are just, and I'm not gonna use a dictionary definition here, but let's just say tools, in quotation marks, of various types, which could be behaviors to accomplish a certain task or solve a certain problem, right? It could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite mound, but it could also be a certain type of behavior that you use, right, which is basically an algorithm, right? It's a recipe, step by step-

    9. CN

      Yep

    10. TF

      ... A to L, to get something done. I really want to think about, like, what are... And this is what makes the best investors in the world also, in my opinion, is they think about not just primary, but, like, secondary and tertiary effects, right? It's kinda like the, the character loosely based on Peter Thiel in the first season of Silicon Valley, who's like, "Who is this Burger King?" And he runs through this whole thing on the sesame seeds, [laughs] and then it gets to the locusts, and he's like-

    11. CN

      I remember

    12. TF

      ... "The 30-year cycle is gonna coincide," right? And the reason I mention that is if we think about, for instance, video, I think m- many people who are adopting video have never been, have never experienced what it is like to have widespread public recognition, like visual recognition when they walk around on the street. And so they're not familiar with that side effect, which people have experienced through other medium, like television, and I have to my own limited extent experienced that. I'm not Brad Pitt or anything like that, but I have certainly... Again, it is hard for a lot of people I know with popular podcasts that have any video component to, like, go hang out at a coffee shop. They can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down and read a book because they'll get interrupted every five to 10 minutes if it's in any decently sized city, in the US at least, if they're US-based podcasters. And it's for that reason that I'm also kinda taking the techno-selectionism/Amish approach where I'm like, "Okay, I can afford to wait This isn't true with everything, but I think this ties into also slow productivity. Like, I can afford to wait six months. I can afford to wait 12 months.

    13. CN

      Yeah.

    14. TF

      And if I am, and this, I, I am giving, uh, you credit for this, but it's certainly one of my, my favorite, in my case, audiobooks, Born Standing Up, right? Be So Good They Can't Ignore You, Steve Martin.

    15. CN

      Yes.

    16. TF

      Rule number one, Daniel Day-Lewis was not on TikTok in between all of his movies making omelets or teaching people seven easy steps to financial freedom or what to do when Bitcoin crashes or anything. [laughs] Like, he was working on his craft and getting so fucking good-

    17. CN

      Yes

    18. TF

      ... that every few years he would just show up and win Best Actor and then disappear again. Um, so, so [laughs] all right, thank you for coming to my TED Talk, but [laughs]

  6. 25:02 – 28:48

    What prompted Cal to write Slow Productivity?

    1. TF

      let's come back to Slow Productivity. So the new book, I wanna talk about this. The subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Who doesn't want that? The last time you were on this podcast, the episode was published February 2022, and you, you were telegraphing this a bit. You were talking about slow productivity a bit, and you were like, "Well, I'm thinking about making this book." So I, I'm just curious to know, process-wise, if you'd indulge me, what happened between then and now, right? Because now you have a finished book, and people can buy it, and this is, this is a, maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your, your primary projects, right? The things to say yes to.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      'Cause writing a book takes a lot of energy. So like, what happened between, let's just say January 2022 and now, we're recording January 2024, with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time?

    4. CN

      Well, it's a good case study because I was testing the idea then.

    5. TF

      Yeah.

    6. CN

      So I, I, I went back and actually-

    7. TF

      Smart

    8. CN

      ... pulled out this timeline. I, I think the first time I used the term slow productivity was maybe 2020-

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm

    10. CN

      ... or 2021, right around there. Right before I came on your show the last time, I was ready to ratchet up my testing of the concept so I could also develop it more, so I wrote a New Yorker piece that January where the title was It's Time to Embrace Slow Productivity.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. CN

      Now, the piece just had one idea of what would eventually become the full-blown philosophy of slow productivity, and then I came on your show and we talked about it some more.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CN

      Then pretty soon after I was on your show, I'm writing the book. Seriously, I had pulled together, "Okay, I think I really understand all the pieces," so that's like a two-year ideation process. You know, I get the inspiration for the book in 2020. It's the, the mix of the start of the pandemic and some stuff happening in my own life. This is where I began playing with those ideas. 2022, I'm still trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form. Later that summer, I'm up, you know, up in New England writing. I'm up actually-

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm

    16. CN

      ... writing the book.

    17. TF

      This is summer of 2022.

    18. CN

      Summer of 2022. I would have handed this in in spring of 2023 is when I would have handed in-

    19. TF

      Oh, that's fast

    20. CN

      ... my first manuscript.

    21. TF

      Good for you. That's incredible.

    22. CN

      Well, see, I disappear. Part of my, my methodology is I, I, I disappear in the summer.

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CN

      You know, I'm a professor, so typically professors in the summer take what's called summer salary. You don't actually get paid by your university at a, at a research institution. You don't get paid in the summer. They pay you for 10 months, and then you can take on-

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm

    26. CN

      ... through grants summer salary to keep working on research is what you're supposed to do. And at some point I realized, well, you know, I make money from writing books. Like, I don't actually have to take a salary.

    27. TF

      Now, is the university the one who's providing the grant or is it some independent-

    28. CN

      No

    29. TF

      ... foundation or whatever?

    30. CN

      It would be an independent... Right. So, so I'm like a theoretical computer scientist, applied mathematician, so we'd get our money from the NSF, for example.

  7. 28:48 – 37:47

    Becoming a better writer through blogging.

    1. CN

      book was finally locked in.

    2. TF

      So I'm going to selfishly just ask you a couple of questions about writing for myself, 'cause I'm working on my first book project in six years, seven years, something like that.

    3. CN

      Oh, excellent.

    4. TF

      Yeah. Yeah. Well, I... There are many reasons for it. It was... It's one of those things that just refused to go away. [laughs] One of those, one of those ideas where I'm like, "Okay, this is just gonna ricochet around inside my skull indefinitely unless I let it out somehow, so [laughs] let's do it." And I'm, I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I also want to, and I keep saying this, I've said this for years, so I, I, I'm calling bullshit on myself on some level, get back into writing on the blog. And in part because I feel I have more differentiation with that particular capacity. Not that I'm the best writer, but there's a particular style of writing, there's a particular way of deconstructing things that people, at least some people, seem to like, right, from the 1,000 true fans perspective. Whereas in the interview format podcast world, there are a lot of very, very good people with very high production quality. So I feel like that, that arena is becoming more of a, a red ocean per se as opposed to a blue ocean. So I'd like to experiment with doing more on the blog. Also, just to reinforce something you said, because the blog, number one, it's a platform that I own. It's on open source, it's WordPress And the sort of barrier to comment is a little higher, which I like. There's a little more friction in the process. People can't just be like, "That's so fucking dumb. LOLZ," you know, on the blog. There's more involved. There is a little more process involved in terms of leaving comments, so the signal tends to be higher. It allows me to workshop things also, right? Quickly workshop things and see how they land, and I still think that for, like, memetic testing, text is pretty hard to beat. They're very different laboratories. Text and, and voice are very different laboratories. I think voice helps you to talk through whatever is percolating to develop ideas that you can then test really effectively via text, if that makes any sense. And, uh, so I have two, two questions for you. The first is, we, in our last conversation when I interviewed you on the podcast, talked about the humor magazine at Dartmouth, and one of the main things that helped you, not specific to that, or I should say limited to that, was that you're either writing for editors or writing for acceptance and rejection, right? So you, you had some feedback loop whereby you could improve your writing. As it stands right now, I don't really get... I'm not gonna get much of that from my readers, God bless them, right?

    5. CN

      Yeah.

    6. TF

      Because it's not their role. It's a heavy lift. They're gonna either like it or not like it and provide some feedback in the comments. But in terms of becoming a better writer, how would you approach that if you were me writing blog posts? If I have a book, I will have possibly an editor, I will have friends read a chapter here or there. But how would you approach that? 'Cause I would like to try to mimic, say, Seth Godin. Like, short blog posts, which I'm fucking terrible at. I tend to be-

    7. CN

      Yep

    8. TF

      ... very verbose, which is why all my books are phone books. [laughs] And so I wanna really make a goal for myself to do short blog posts, 'cause that'll be more sustainable, hopefully. How would you, how would you create that feedback? 'Cause I wanna get better.

    9. CN

      Well, I mean, first of all-

    10. TF

      I'm a-

    11. CN

      Yeah.

    12. TF

      [laughs]

    13. CN

      Yeah. And I'm happy you're going back to writing because, I mean, I think you're right. That, it's a much harder skill and it's a much rarer skill. I write constantly. That's, that's basically my baseline for my career is I'm always writing.

    14. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    15. CN

      Now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces. Counting today and going back six weeks from today when we're recording, I've published three pieces in The New Yorker. I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing.

    16. TF

      Wow.

    17. CN

      Because I think-

    18. TF

      Yeah

    19. CN

      ... that's the rare skill. Because you're right, people can become good podcast interviewers, like, good enough. It's pretty quick. [laughs] I mean, people, I don't know, they-

    20. TF

      With ChatGPT, if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup, they can do it immediately.

    21. CN

      Yeah. They can do it.

    22. TF

      Right? Give, give me 10 questions in the style of Lex Fridman if he were to interview such and such a guest, who happens to be my next guest, and then you'll get 10 questions, and you can finesse them, and then-

    23. CN

      Yeah

    24. TF

      ... you have your iPad and you're ready to go.

    25. CN

      And if you have on interesting people, you're really just kinda getting out of the way. And actually it's an advantage, so we have this whole new generation of podcasters who just don't say much, and that turns out to actually work well bec- you know, anyways. Uh, but writing's hard as anything.

    26. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    27. CN

      Writing is hard. You know, people can't-

    28. TF

      Mm-hmm

    29. CN

      ... you can't write without practice. I mean, you've, you've written, what, four or five phone books worth of books-

    30. TF

      Five

  8. 37:47 – 42:12

    The benefits of obsessing over quality.

    1. TF

      So returning to, because this relates, to the writing of Slow Productivity, choosing to spend your entire summer working on this. Um, dog with a bone with respect to the writing process. So I will come back to that, but not to bore everybody who is not a writer in the audience. [laughs] Although, by the way, folks, I'm talking about creative process and choosing projects. So I wanna talk about choosing to write Slow Productivity because wanting to or understanding the importance of, say, obsessing over quality, which I think you would agree is the best promotion, like rather than worrying about all the different ways you can market something, like [laughs] product first is a great marketing plan.

    2. CN

      Yep.

    3. TF

      You still need to choose which thing to become great at, because you could choose quiet quitting TikToks as your particular specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not for me. But you chose instead to do other things. So how do you choose to use the sort of metaphor, I think it's probably apocryphal, but the stones, the big rocks to put in your jar before the gravel and the sand. How did you choose Slow Productivity? Why that versus the many other things you could do, right? Because presumably you get all sorts of speaking invites. You could have just crammed a bunch of those into the summer and done, done really well financially. You could have done who knows what. Maybe have people emailing you about, like, film adaptations of this or who knows, right? You, you have stuff that gets lobbed over the transom. Maybe you even have great or exciting ideas, right? 2:00 in the morning, you're like, "Oh, God, it'd be so cool if I did X." At the end of the day, you chose to focus on this. Why?

    4. CN

      There's a general and a specific answer. Uh-

    5. TF

      Uh-huh

    6. CN

      ... the general is writing is what I do.

    7. TF

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      That is what I do. I come up with ideas that I think are important, and I put them into writing with the best possible craft. I'm not happy if I'm not writing.

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CN

      So that's why I'm not giving 100 talks a year. It's why I'm not releasing an app. It's why, you know, you can't hire the Deep Work Academy consultants or... You don't know how many times people have told me, like, "We would give you any amount of money to, like, come to our company and, like, redesign our practices to be focused on deep work and less distracted-

    11. TF

      I'm sure

    12. CN

      ... by email." And I'm like, "Nah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write instead."

    13. TF

      [laughs] I wrote the book. [laughs]

    14. CN

      Yeah.

    15. TF

      You guys can just buy a bunch of those.

    16. CN

      Read the book. Yeah. Buy, buy many, many of those [laughs] to try to replicate what they would pay. But then the s- specifically that idea, I spend years, I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to, to write a book about. This is one of the skills I think is lost in the Internet age because, again, going back, let's tie this all to the algorithm.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CN

      That, that surfaces something or that promotes something very different.

    19. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    20. CN

      It's a volume game, among other things, right? I wanna put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm hits. It's a format game. It's also a lot of chasing trends game. You say, "Okay, what just took off two days ago on related channels?" Now you're gonna get 70 videos all doing the same thing. It's a completely different way of thinking. I think part of my secret sauce, and the secret sauce for a lot of people, it could be at least, is really waiting to get started.

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      You know, I wrote this years ago on our mutual friend, a friend who introduced me to your work, actually, Ramit Sethi.

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CN

      Way back when, in his early blog, I remember writing an article for him that said, "Don't get started."

    25. TF

      Hmm.

    26. CN

      You know, it was, like, my, my advice because my thought was it's really hard to get a good idea, and so, like, take your time.

    27. TF

      Yeah.

    28. CN

      And then to cultivate a good idea takes years, and it's gon- you have to write, you have to... You know, you're gonna dedicate a lot of your life to it. So really don't get started if you can at all stop, or if you can all hold back-

    29. TF

      [laughs]

    30. CN

      ... until you're really, really sure about it. And then people say, "Yeah, but I worry that I'm just gonna procrastinate forever." And in some sense it's like, well, then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work.

  9. 42:12 – 49:54

    How did Cal decide to identify himself as a writer?

    1. TF

      So I do want the specific... I mean, you, you did mention it, I guess, because you're a writer. But that, that, not to go, like, it's turtles all the way down, but I will ask, like- How did you decide that you're a writer? 'Cause that, looking at your CV, one might conclude, yes, he does a r- lot of writing, but he's also a computer science theoretician, and he's this and this and this, and da, da, da, da, da. So to say, "I am a writer," is something that, uh, I think also many folks right now who are in any form of content would have a lot of trouble saying, "I am X." They might say, "I'm a YouTuber," but usually it's like 15 hyphens.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      And therein lies many opportunities and also many temptations to be resisted. I would say that just a, a few observations. The first is that as you're talking [laughs] about, you know, don't get started, it makes me think of Warren Buffett and the, "Don't just do something, stand there." [laughs]

    4. CN

      Yep.

    5. TF

      Right? [laughs] Right, like, you don't need to make 100,000 investments. You don't need to be a day trader. Like, wait for the fat pitch. Like, figure out what the fat pitch looks like. Figure out what your kind of zone of genius is. [laughs] What is your advantage? And I would say also, like, it seems to me like, and I'm really putting together a question with a million semicolons here, but you do get started, but you're not over-committing to half-baked ideas, right? Like, you are exploring and experimenting and workshopping, which is also, as I think I might have mentioned, another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts because if you look at, say, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Body was workshopped for years before it ever came out. Just wasn't under that name. The first blog post that ever went super mega viral on Digg at the time, D-I-G-G, from Kevin Rose-

    6. CN

      Sure, Kevin. Yep

    7. TF

      ... and perhaps a few others, was from Geek to Freak, about gaining a bunch of muscle. And the response to that, it was what made me very interested in workshopping adjacent material to see if it would be similarly received and if I would enjoy it, if I would be good at it, et cetera. And so that was workshopped for years. That doesn't mean wasting time. It means that by the time I decided to really commit resources, the likelihood of success in my mind was, I'm not gonna say all but certain, but it was as certain-

    8. CN

      Yeah

    9. TF

      ... as I could possibly be. I had already tested this. 4-Hour Workweek was workshopped for, I don't know, six, seven years in lectures, right? [laughs] So how did you decide that you were a writer, that you would identify that way? Because identifying that way is a story that enables you to then be very selective and focused in what you do.

    10. CN

      It's a good question because I decided early.

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    12. CN

      I, I decided I was a writer when I was 20.

    13. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    14. CN

      And I became a professional when I was 21. So I signed with my agent when I was 20 and signed my first book deal right after I turned 21.

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CN

      So I, I came to it early, uh, because I was a, a big reader and was verbally precocious, right?

    17. TF

      [laughs]

    18. CN

      So it was-

    19. TF

      It's gonna be in the title of this podcast. [laughs]

    20. CN

      [laughs]

    21. TF

      The glue of high quality and being verbally precocious.

    22. CN

      Verbally precocious and, and literarily precocious, I, I suppose. I mean, it was like gifted and talented reading program. People think, you know, the, the Johns Hopkins talent search, the CTY camps, people think, "Oh, you probably went to one of those for math," but I was invited for the creative writing one.

    23. TF

      Hmm.

    24. CN

      I went to college, and I said as I went to college, "I'm not gonna be a writer. I, I just... It's really hard. Writing's really hard."

    25. TF

      True.

    26. CN

      "So that's not what I'm gonna do."

    27. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CN

      And I, I was a walk-on onto the crew team instead, 'cause I had the right build for it, and I was like, "This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do sports. This is great."

    29. TF

      Was that lightweight or regular weight?

    30. CN

      Oh, man, yeah. Believe it, 160 pounds, this guy. [laughs]

  10. 49:54 – 57:13

    People who exemplify slow productivity.

    1. TF

      And I'm also, maybe this is just because I'm a curmudgeon and [laughs] like one of the old Muppets up in the balcony, Mortimer, but I think offline is incredibly uncrowded and absurdly valuable in the sense that if you're looking for real-time feedback, like go, go volunteer for 10 bucks an hour to teach a class at Learning Annex and see what sticks, see what works, see what's confusing. Like, your, the feedback loop is so fast. Like, you do that once a week for a month, you're gonna, you are going to know a lot. I mean, you're gonna know more than if you'd written 100 blog posts by far, in my opinion. So I try to test things live. And for people who might be curious, people who test material tend to test material in a lot of different ways, in my experience. So if you listen to, for instance, my Jamie Foxx episode from way back in the day, 2015, it was podcast of the year at the time, back when that was possible, when there were [laughs] when there were like, oh, only, only a few thousand podcasts to choose from. [laughs] But he was, even in that podcast, working on material, seeing what my response was, and you can do that with non-fiction too. Just as a quick, quick example of taste, I'm, I'm listening to a book right now, which I've read excerpts of, but it's called The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby, and it's about venture capital. He wrote a book, also called More Money Than God, which is non-fiction, encyclopedic, and beautifully written romp through the world of hedge funds, which blew me away because he was, he was very good at making the sort of esoteric very graspable. Similar to, in some senses, Michael Lewis. But The Power Law book, I know most of the content. I lived in that world for a long time. I know most of the history, and still, I was listening to it in the car yesterday and I was like, good God, it's just so good. Like the-

    2. CN

      Yeah

    3. TF

      ... writing and the timing that we've talked about before, and, uh, Dave Barry, right? For like, just like setting up the punchline-

    4. CN

      Yeah

    5. TF

      ... and like ending the chapter on the right note where you're like, oh, that's so good. It's just so, so good. The same way I felt about, say, Joe Abercrombie and this fantasy trilogy, which starts with The Blade Itself, where I was just like, oh, God, it's so well architected, right? It's not just the prose, but it is the prose as well. So that, that taste and building up that barometer being so important. Let me ask you, on the topic of Slow Productivity, could you give some examples, I mean, you mentioned Chris Nolan, could you give some examples, old and new, of people who in your mind exemplify Slow Productivity?

    6. CN

      I was motivated by slow food as an example.

    7. TF

      Hmm.

    8. CN

      Where they looked back to traditional cuisines where, where cultures had evolved over generation and generation, like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy? And, and the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So people who did things with their brain, but not the normal 1950s and onward I'm in an office or working at a computer screen, so like artists and philosophers, scientists, the, the s- the original knowledge workers.

    9. TF

      Hmm.

    10. CN

      They tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said, great, we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work, 'cause they had freedom and flexibility, so we can identify what matters, and then I adapt that to, to sort of modern life. So a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers. And so one of the early examples is, you know, Isaac Newton. And I said, okay, we all know he wrote this great master work, The Principia, that-

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm

    12. CN

      ... has, calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to-

    13. TF

      [laughs]

    14. CN

      ... to specify the laws of gravity, right? To give celestial order to the way the, the cosmos works. He wrote that thing over decades.

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CN

      You know, decades. He would go and do other things and come back. It wasn't this frantic push until it's done, but no one remembers how long he spent working on that. They're just like, "Yeah, that thing changed the way we understand the world." Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play, In The Heights, the same way. I, I do his whole story. It's a seven-year odyssey-

    17. TF

      Hmm

    18. CN

      ... from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play, which wasn't very good- To when it first goes onto a professional stage, its pre-Broadway debut. That's a seven-year period, and he's working on it, then he's not, then he's working on it again, and he's not. We don't know about that now. We're just like, "Oh, yeah, his first play won a lot of Grammys, and he did Hamilton." You know? Uh-

    19. TF

      [laughs]

    20. CN

      He's like a Wikipedia-

    21. TF

      Right. If you read Wikipedia, you're like, "Oh, that was fast." [laughs]

    22. CN

      Yeah, you don't realize-

    23. TF

      The synopsis in one sentence. [laughs]

    24. CN

      His dad told him, like, when he left, when he, when he graduated from college, his dad was like, "You really should go to law school." You know, he took a job as a substitute teacher. He was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap troupe that, called Love Supreme, that would travel around doing, like, freestyle rap shows. So if you zoomed in on a particular day in the almost decade that Lin-Manuel Miranda was working on In the Heights, you'd be like, "Man, you're so lazy. You're pr- you're not even working on your thing. Like, what's going on? Why aren't you getting after it? Why aren't you, you know, why aren't you crushing it?" Uh, because things take longer.

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      I use Georgia O'Keeffe as an example of seasonality, that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began saying, "You know what? In the summers, I'm going with Alfred Stieglitz. We're going to Lake George, and I'm gonna sit there in a shanty that she..." She called it the shanty. It was an outbuilding near the, the lake.

    27. TF

      [laughs]

    28. CN

      "I'm just gonna paint and be inspired, and then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show him and do all the other sorts of stuff." Most productive years of her life. By actually slowing down for a season every year, her productivity exploded. She became, you know, one of the most famous early Modernists of that whole era of painting, right? So we, we see those examples. Well, Marie Curie, at the, at the pinnacle of about to discover in pitchblende, the substance she's studying, about to isolate radioactivity and win her first of two Nobel Prizes, goes to France with her family on vacation for two months. In the moment, you're like, "What are you doing? You gotta be a- getting after. You gotta be crushing it." But we don't see that now. We're like, "Yeah, she was great. She won two Nobel Prizes."

    29. TF

      She wasn't part of the hustle culture. [laughs]

    30. CN

      Way to go. There was no hustle culture. That's the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people producing things of real value-

  11. 57:13 – 1:02:00

    Trade-offs on the path to twenty-first-century slow productivity.

    1. CN

      time.

    2. TF

      I think a lot of choosing a path is about choosing trade-offs. So if you choose slow productivity, there's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of trade-offs, right? What are the pressures, expectations, psychological challenges, et cetera, that you should be prepared to face? Why don't we start there? Because I think most people listening will agree, like, yes, I don't wanna be doing quiet quitting TikTok videos. In, in other words, I don't wanna be building... I'd rather be building the Sistine Chapel instead of sandcastles that just get wiped away every time [laughs] a wave comes in. But the fact of the matter is, you know, I have a mortgage. I've got this. I've got this, this, this, and I can't just disappear for months at a time and take two decades to write my masterwork. I can see how a lot of folks would, would rightly say that, at least at, at face value. So what, what should people be willing to accept as trade-offs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity? And, and is it mutually exclusive? Like m- uh, l- like presumably, Lin-Manuel Miranda had a way to buy groceries, and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap, right? [laughs] So-

    3. CN

      Yeah

    4. TF

      ... maybe I'm creating a false dichotomy here.

    5. CN

      Well, I mean, Lin was a teacher, uh, and was also a columnist. He was writing reviews and columns for a paper while he was working on this in his spare time.

    6. TF

      Hmm.

    7. CN

      But the bigger point, the important one, is how do we take an example like Newton and the Principia and apply it to someone who has just a 21st century corporate, you know, semi-remote hybrid work job for a, for a big company?

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CN

      So how do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers but just modern knowledge workers? So, like, if we start with the first principle, do fewer things.

    10. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    11. CN

      Well, what this really means if you have a, a normal corporate job is starting to be very explicit about workload management, which is something that everyone does workload management, but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways. Uh, because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context in most jobs, not in software development, but in most other jobs, it's up to you just to manage what's on your plate. People send you emails, and you just say, "Yeah, sure, I'll do it." So what most people do, for example, is they wait until they feel really stressed, and then they say, "All right, I have psychological cover to say no because I'm so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no." It's a terrible way to manage your workload. So you can be much more explicit about how you manage your workload. "Here's how many slots I have. Oh, I've filled them." I mean, this is really sort of four-hour workweek style, let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload. You could go to a pull-based system instead of a push-based system. You can do reverse to-do list. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn't get too large in a way that's fully compatible. Uh, work at a natural pace.

    12. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    13. CN

      While there's organizational things you can do here so that you're not at full intensity, but you can also just do this yourself. You can titrate your workload. I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year, and I can do this in a way that my employer doesn't notice. You know, it's pretty subtle in, like, what projects you take on or don't take on. You can quiet quit for two months and no one notices, whereas if you quiet quit for 20 months And people say, "Okay, wait a second. I know your-

    14. TF

      Mm-hmm

    15. CN

      ... your worth as a human's not defined by your labor, but your worth to me as an employee is. You gotta do something, right?" Too much, they don't notice.

    16. TF

      So quiet quitting is just not doing very much work while you're employed?

    17. CN

      Quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum, and it comes out of a place of this sort of late-stage capitalism critique of, like, why should I have to do work, which is a whole other thing. And then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality, that then becomes the accelerant that allows you to do these other things faster and better. So, so as you hone in on, okay, here's what I'm gonna own within this company, and I'm gonna get better and better at this and make myself more and more valuable, now you're able to much more easily and much more aggressively do fewer things.

    18. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CN

      Now you're able to much more easily and aggressively say, you know, "I'm gone in August. I don't do work in June."

    20. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    21. CN

      You gain autonomy-

    22. TF

      Mm-hmm

    23. CN

      ... as you get better, and then you're able to accelerate these things. So the vision is, even if you work for someone else, these principles can be implemented, whether they're-

    24. TF

      Mm-hmm

    25. CN

      ... on board or not, and it's gonna get you something like the slow productivity benefits of, uh, I'm doing good work, work is not taking up most of my life.

    26. TF

      And I think we can safely assume that a lot of the audience listening will be self-employed or have some agency, at least as most people would assume, beyond, say, mid-level HR manager at a large company.

    27. CN

      Makes it a lot easier, by the way.

  12. 1:02:00 – 1:03:23

    Push systems vs. pull systems.

    1. TF

      Yeah. Makes it easier. I think, I think that a lot of folks listening will be self-employed, so we can use that lens if it makes it, if it makes it a little easier. But perhaps they run, who knows, right, a software, like a B2B SAS company, and they have employees and so on. But they can set rules at the end of the day. They can create systems that build in some of what you're talking about. What is a pull system instead of a push system?

    2. CN

      Well, with a pull system you say, "Here's how many things I work on at a time."

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CN

      So I only pull something new in when I'm done with something.

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CN

      Which is different than the default of anyone can push work onto your plate at any time, and it's up to you to just sort of manage this.

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CN

      You have an unlimited load. A pull system says, "No, this is what I'm working on now. I can't do something else until I'm done with this." Now, we can have a holding tank, and this is where it is. Here's how I estimate when I'm gonna get to it. There's this many things ahead of it. Software developers already do this, right, because they already have Kanban-inspired cards on a whiteboard system where you pull in, "I'm gonna work on this feature now," and over here you have the holding tanks of features that need to be done. And when you're done on, with the feature you're working on, it moves to the next column and you can pull something else into its place. You could do this more with more other types of work. The, the idea being you don't want to be juggling too much at the same time, because the overhead gets to

  13. 1:03:23 – 1:05:06

    Quota systems.

    1. CN

      you.

    2. TF

      How do you do that personally?

    3. CN

      So the similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles like mine, as a professor writer, is quota systems. So that's more what I will lean into. Break up work into the different types of things I need to do, and quota. Here's how many of these I do per semester. Here's how many of these I do, uh, at a time. The idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that I, is part of my responsibilities, but it's capped. So if I have a quota as a professor for here's how many peer review, paper reviews I do per semester, when I hit that cap, I can now say to someone, "Hey, thanks for thinking about this. I do a lot of paper reviews. I, I like doing paper reviews. I've already hit my quota for this semester, however."

    4. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CN

      "So I, I can't take any more on this semester." This is really effective, because for someone to push back against that, they basically just have to argue your quota's wrong. "Well, whatever it is is wrong."

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. CN

      "You should be doing more," you know?

    8. TF

      Yeah.

    9. CN

      As opposed to saying, "Ah, I'm really busy, you know. I don't know if I have time." And they're like, "Everyone's busy. It'd be good for me-"

    10. TF

      Yeah, yeah.

    11. CN

      "... if you would just do this," right?

    12. TF

      "Don't worry, I can make this a really light lift for you." And you're like, "Ah, fuck." [laughs]

    13. CN

      Yeah, don't worry about it, and we'll whatever. There's nothing more quixotic than the, uh, overburdened worker who is trying to not say no, but get the person who's giving them the work to voluntarily agree to not give them the work. It never works. If you, if someone's trying to get you to do something-

    14. TF

      [laughs]

    15. CN

      ... and you're like, "Well, I guess I could, but you know, I am pretty busy," they're never gonna say, "You sound busy. Don't do this." They're like, "Oh, good."

    16. TF

      [laughs]

    17. CN

      "Well, I'm glad you can do it. Here you go. Get this off my plate. What are you talking about?"

    18. TF

      Yeah. [laughs]

    19. CN

      So I'll lean more into quotas, and I'm really careful about that.

    20. TF

      Careful about taking on too much

  14. 1:05:06 – 1:08:40

    Why slow productivity isn't a zero-sum game.

    1. TF

      beyond your quotas?

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      Is that what you mean? Yeah.

    4. CN

      I'm very careful about it. And not only do I have quotas for I only do this much, you know, per semester, I'll think about I'm not gonna do any of this work this season. I'm just gonna be focused on, or I'm writing this season, so I'm gonna disappear and not do this. Or this season I'm working on research. Like, I'm, I'm very wary of workload and workload management.

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CN

      How many things do I have on my plate? That's the number I check with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety. You know, one of my core ideas is the problem about putting a lot of things on your plate, even if they don't have colliding deadlines or it's up to you when you finish them, is once something is on your plate and you've agreed to do it, it generates overhead.

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CN

      People are gonna check in on it. There's gonna be-

    9. TF

      Yeah

    10. CN

      ... calls you have to jump on to talk about it. It, it has some cognitive space. And what's been happening a lot in modern knowledge work is that people have put so much stuff on their plate that the overhead of just managing all of this stuff, not doing the work, just the administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings, takes up most of their schedule. And it's this weird almost Sisyphean position that so many knowledge workers are in today, where all day long it's just talking about their work.

    11. TF

      [laughs]

    12. CN

      And it's, okay, maybe late at night or on the weekend I do a little bit of work. Like, it makes no sense, right? If your workload-

    13. TF

      Right

    14. CN

      ... gets too big-

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm

    16. CN

      ... the overhead takes over more and more of your time, and it takes longer to get through your actual workload. It's an incredibly inefficient way of, of executing work. It's one of the reasons why, by the way, that this is not a zero-sum game, slow productivity. It doesn't make you worse at your job but happier. It actually makes you better at your job. I mean, if I'm an employer I should like the idea of slow productivity because my workers are gonna produce better stuff. Like, we will make more money if we don't pile 15 things on their plate, because more of their time is gonna be working on value-producing objectives, and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to. So there- there's actually really a-

    17. TF

      Yeah

    18. CN

      ... a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs, between employers and employees. Slow productivity produces good stuff. It doesn't just make the workers happier. It doesn't just make you happier.

    19. TF

      Mm.

    20. CN

      You produce better stuff. I mean, your company has more profit.

    21. TF

      Yeah.

    22. CN

      Your, your clients are happier. You can charge more for the services you offer. So it's not zero-sum, it's more win-win if anything else.

    23. TF

      I would have to imagine that also if any company were to have the emperor of the universe dictate that they embrace the tenets of slow productivity for, say, a three to six-month period of time, the companies that would not do well on at least one level would probably be those who have not clearly defined what the high-leverage, most important things are, right? [laughs] So if, if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and, and taken the measure twice, cut once approach to determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominoes or makes them irrelevant, they're gonna be... They'd, they'd probably be quite bad at slow productivity. I mean, that would make them bad at most types of productivity, [laughs] I would say, other than just, like, the volume game of tonnage of here, do another 30 tasks. But remaining really focused, right? Which I think is a... It's a risk, or I'd say that risk is increased when you are not good at defending yourself against the agendas of everyone else, in a sense, right? If you take on too much.

  15. 1:08:40 – 1:12:42

    Language that clarifies.

    1. TF

      From a tactical perspective, you mentioned the I only do, say, making this up, five... I've committed to only doing five peer-reviewed article reviews per quarter. "Really appreciate you thinking of me, but unfortunately I've already hit that, and I need to focus on A, B, or C." Right? So the actual language that is used for defense, I'm very interested in. What other types of language do you use when you get stuff over the transom, which I have to imagine you do. Are there other approaches, other specific types of phrasings that you have found you come back to because they're effective?

    2. CN

      Well, extreme clarity is the most important.

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CN

      I think people tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness, which is really not that important to the, the person making the request. They want this thing done, and they wanna know if you're gonna do it or not.

    5. TF

      Yeah.

    6. CN

      Now, you don't wanna be rude, but actually clarity is the key. You can have zero wiggle room. And, and anyone, y- I'm sure you're very good at this. I mean, anyone who has a lot coming over the transom learns you have to say, "I can't do this."

    7. TF

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      And then you can s- give some explanations, but you can't give any ambiguity. So you say, "Unfortunately, I can't do this because..." And you, you can give some explanations. Most people don't read past the I can't do this. Like, they're already emailing the next person that they're gonna ask about this-

    9. TF

      Mm-hmm

    10. CN

      ... once they get to that line. So I, I think short and sweet and clear. Clarity is underrated in this. I mean, what do people really want? They want something done, and they also want clarity about when is this gonna get done, because they wanna be released from having to keep track of something in their mind. I wrote about this in my last book, this company that made their clients sign a communication agreement. All right?

    11. TF

      [laughs]

    12. CN

      This is how we are gonna talk to you. Like, this is how we're gonna discuss things. You can't just email or call us whenever.

    13. TF

      Yeah.

    14. CN

      What we're gonna do is we're gonna have... And I believe their setup, if I... This was a few years ago, but I believe their setup was, "We're gonna have this weekly check-in call, and we're gonna take careful notes during this check-in call. Of any questions you have that we don't have the answer on right away, we're gonna take careful notes on that, and we'll post it and get you that information back."

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CN

      "All right? This is what we're gonna do." One of the two partners of this company was thinking, "This is it," right? Like, "We're going out of business." Because cl-

    17. TF

      [laughs]

    18. CN

      ... clients don't want anything taken away from them. They want full flexibility. This is, they're gonna see this as weird and eccentric and, and-

    19. TF

      Mm-hmm

    20. CN

      ... who are we to say this? The clients didn't care. They didn't care.

    21. TF

      Yeah.

    22. CN

      Because what do clients want? If I have an issue, I need to know it's going to be taken care of. So if you have no communication agreement, what that means is, okay, I just sent you an email about this as soon as I thought about it.

    23. TF

      Yeah, just nebulous anxiety. They don't know when something is going to be addressed.

    24. CN

      So you better get back to me right away. Because if you don't get back to me right away, I worry that you're gonna forget this, and so I'm just gonna keep bothering you about this [laughs] until you get back to me. So then you think-

    25. TF

      Yeah

    26. CN

      ... oh, what the client wants is responsiveness. But if you give them an alternative, "Here's a shared document. Write anything that comes up in here, and on our Thursday call, we're gonna go boom, boom, boom. Like, we're gonna go through this whole thing," that solves-

    27. TF

      Mm

    28. CN

      ... the same problem for them. They're like, "Great."

    29. TF

      Yeah, totally.

    30. CN

      "I can just write this here." And the win for the client is not you responding to an email right away. That's not what they really care about. The win is the anxiety of having to keep track of this has been relieved, and I don't really care how that happens. And I don't care if I have to write it on the, a little, a piece of paper to attach to a homing pigeon that I'm gonna send out the window-

  16. 1:12:42 – 1:16:11

    Sender filters.

    1. TF

      Any other keys for you personally in terms of whether it's, like, preemptively stemming the tide by having Public rules or blog posts or autoresponse or something like that that basically says, "These are the things I can and can do or will or won't do." Do you have any other systems in place or anything like that that takes the, lessens the burden of it? Maybe the answer is you just don't get a lot of this because people are already very well aware that sort of your [laughs] existence and positioning in the world is the deep work guy, so they just don't send you a ton of stuff. I don't know.

    2. CN

      I'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people have switched to a, a social media paradigm for communication. Oh, I'm gonna DM you on whatever.

    3. TF

      Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    4. CN

      The fact that I'm not on-

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. CN

      They're like, "I don't know, I don't know how to reach you." People forgot about email.

    7. TF

      [laughs]

    8. CN

      I also have, you know, I call them communication channels, very specific, right? So th- there is no, "Here is the general way to talk to Cal Newport," right? It's, I, I have very specific channels for specific reasons with clear expectations. I, I used to call these sender filters, and I still really depend on these today. Like, if you have this type of request-

    9. TF

      Hmm

    10. CN

      ... you can send it here. If you wanna send me a link or something, you can send it here, but you're not gonna get a reply, but I probably will see it. If this is an interview request, you know, I'm aiming you at a publicist. If this is a speaking request, I'm aiming you at a speaker. Here's a big warning about using my academic address. Uh, if you send a non-academic thing here, it will not be read, so y- you're not, you're not outsmarting anyone. And then I add on top of that, and this is controversial, but I think it's common, I add on top of that a second layer filter which is, uh, default to not answering. I mean, if I don't know a person and they come in with a request, because I have these filters set up, right, that's pretty clear like this is not just a general purpose address. That's my final filter.

    11. TF

      And you've made this explicit.

    12. CN

      It's explicit, right? I mean-

    13. TF

      If I don't know you... Yeah, how do you phrase that? You're like, "If I don't know you, it's very low likelihood that I will reply"? Which is fine, I'm just wondering how you convey it.

    14. CN

      The particular channels have this, right? So it'll be send this here, this here, this here, this there. So if someone is... And, and it'll be clear, I'm not gonna respond probably, but I probably will see it. And I have other people, this is not even going to me. It's when people-

    15. TF

      Hmm

    16. CN

      ... circumvent that, they get to my personal address, or they go to my Georgetown, they go to my professor address-

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm

    18. CN

      ... uh, my default becomes not to respond. Which-

    19. TF

      Yeah

    20. CN

      ... you know, it's a little bit controversial. But actually, it's not a bad filter. I learned that from professors at MIT when I was there. That was sort of how the, the grand professors at MIT managed their inbox was, "If I don't respond, that means you need to try again. This was too vague. This was not in my best in- You need to try again," right [laughs] ? Like whatever-

    21. TF

      Yeah

    22. CN

      ... you sent here-

    23. TF

      Yeah

    24. CN

      ... it was their way of saying, "No. Try again," right? You need to be more clear or have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with. And so that's my final wall is getting past that, and that took me a while. I mean, it had to- took me a while to, I felt comfortable doing this. This is my final wall is like, if I don't know how to respond to this easily, I'm probably just not gonna respond to it. And, and that sort of works-

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm

    26. CN

      ... a lot of things out as well. You know, there's just not this expectation. This is not a conversation in person.

    27. TF

      Yeah.

    28. CN

      To not answer this email is not the same as you coming up to me and me just pretending like you're not there. It, it's a-

    29. TF

      Mm-hmm

    30. CN

      ... it's a different sort of asymmetric medium, so you can feel more comfortable about just not answering.

  17. 1:16:11 – 1:21:34

    What people might miss about Slow Productivity's message.

    1. TF

      What do you think in this book... I ask this question a lot 'cause there's usually something that pops up, which is, what do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over? For the 4-Hour Workweek, it's the filling the void chapter. People are like, "Oh, yeah, it must be a nice problem to have. Like, you gotta worry about how you fill your time." I'm like, "Actually, no, it's a very, very, very, very important thing," because if you are a work machine and you're always in sixth gear and then you remove work, your life doesn't just get auto-populated with awesome stuff that [laughs] that makes you fulfilled. You kind of have to plan for it. And people gloss over that, right? 'Cause they're like, "Ah, I'll worry about that later." And then they end up in these, these, like, existential crises. So i- is there, is there anything in this book, could be anything, like a philosophical kind of foundational piece, could be strategic or tactical, where you're like, "Hmm, based on people I've talked to, based on proofreaders, based on whatever," I'm like, "Hmm, if I, if I could draw attention to something I think people might gloss over or not give its, its, uh, full weight of importance." Anything come to mind?

    2. CN

      I think people don't realize the degree to which they don't actually have a sensical definition of productivity.

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    4. CN

      Right? So there's a part in the book where I survey 700 of my readers, and one of the questions I ask them is just define productivity. No one has an answer, right? Uh, what-

    5. TF

      [laughs]

    6. CN

      ... most people did was just describe their job. Like, "Well, productivity is producing good software." Like, they just sort of list what it is their, their job is supposed to be. So I think people, they think they know what productivity is and that it's just a matter of your relationship to that. Like, well, productivity, I don't like it, and so I wanna do less of it. But the reality is no one really knows what it means. Uh, I think people don't realize how chaotic and haphazard and impromptu the way they're organizing their work is, how chaotic it really is, right? I don't think people realize that.

    7. TF

      Hmm.

    8. CN

      What we really did, and by we, I mean, like, the whole knowledge sector, is in the 1950s when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large companies with a large number of people working in offices, there wasn't a clear idea how do we measure how someone is productive because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and agriculture, and they didn't apply. Like in manufacturing-

    9. TF

      Hmm

    10. CN

      ... you could tabulate the labor hours per Model T produced, and in agriculture you could count bushels produced per acre of land. You had numbers, and so you could say, "Oh, the assembly line increases this number, so let's do that instead," or, "This Norfolk crop rotation method increases, like, the bushels, you know, so let's do that instead." Knowledge work couldn't have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse. And the organizational systems were autonomous. Like, it's just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself. There's no organizational-wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see, "What if we change this?"

    11. TF

      Right.

    12. CN

      "Is it, is it better?" So what, what happened was we invented this idea called pseudo productivity, which was-

    13. TF

      Hmm

    14. CN

      ... we will use activity that's visible as a proxy for useful effort. So it's just-

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm

    16. CN

      ... hey, you're doing something that's good. Doing more things is better than less. That's where this sort of notion of sort of busyness is good, and, "How are you?" "I'm busy." And then what happened is, my contention is, once we got mobile computing and the internet, and we got networks and email, and I could work on my laptop, you can't combine that with pseudo productivity because if more activity is better than less, and you have endless work that you can do in any place, you just spiral into just constant work and guilt, and that's wh- that's where we get the burnout crisis.

    17. TF

      Yeah. [laughs] You're done.

    18. CN

      You're done. Right?

    19. TF

      You're gonna incinerate on re-entry. Yeah, you're done. [laughs]

    20. CN

      Yeah. Like, pseudo productivity worked for Don Draper. It's like, yeah, okay, visible activity's better, but you can only see me when I'm in the office, and let's all agree that we can have three martinis at lunch. And so it's like, okay, fine, whatever. Like, put the magazine down when someone comes by your office.

    21. TF

      [laughs]

    22. CN

      It doesn't work with an iPhone. It doesn't work with a... When you have a MacBook, and you could be doing Slack. So I mean, this is the thing I think people miss, is they think they know what productivity means, and they have a lot of opinions about it, and my argument actually is you don't have a sensical definition. We just have this, like, activity is somehow good, which it's clearly not, especially for non-entry-level knowledge work.

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CN

      Busyness doesn't produce high value. And so I, I think people too often think of something like slow productivity as I'm willing to trade off economic output for psychological su- sustainability. I'm, I'm willing to trade off-

    25. TF

      Mm

    26. CN

      ... making more money for feeling better about myself, and that's not what it is. It's... No. What you're doing now is crazy. It's you're building Model Ts with the lights off. Like, it's a terrible way to work. It's like, no, let's get a real definition of productivity that is very sustainable, but also is gonna produce good stuff. And so I think people think they're stepping away from something that works but is hard. Yeah, this gets it done, but it's hard on me, and let's replace it with something better. No, the thing that we're doing now doesn't work. It's not a sensical way-

    27. TF

      Mm

    28. CN

      ... of connecting human brains to add value to information. It's not a good way of working. So, like, almost any alternative that's intentional is gonna be better than what we have.

    29. TF

      Yeah.

    30. CN

      So we might as well choose one that's also sustainable and makes us feel good. But I think people get that wrong a lot.

  18. 1:21:34 – 1:26:01

    How Cal defines productivity.

    1. TF

      What's your definition for yourself of productivity?

    2. CN

      Let's go back to the book you mentioned, Born Standing Up, which, as you know, is influential for me. I mean, I wrote a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

    3. TF

      It is so good. Yeah, it's a great book.

    4. CN

      But I loved what Martin said in that, right? Which w- which was basically you take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at and that's interesting to you, and then you really put on your blinders for a decade. Like, get really good-

    5. TF

      Mm

    6. CN

      ... at something that's important. Everything else will work itself out. Like, his exact quote was, "Be so good you can't, they can't ignore you. If you do that, everything else has a way of working out."

    7. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CN

      'Cause that's really been my thing. I mean, the decision I made in college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't row crew anymore was, "Here's the two things I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do computer science and I'm gonna write." And, like, that's all I did. Like, that was it. Let me do computer science. Let me write. I don't wanna do Instagram. I don't wanna do Twitter. Let me just do that. I just wanna get good at this, and let me read people who are really good, and I wanna get better and better at this, and that's where all of my energy was. Like, let me just try to do these two things as well as I can. And that's the way I think about productivity now, is how good is the best thing I've produced recently? That's it. I wanna be better at things that are hard and, and meaningful. And that's it. I don't wanna be famous. I don't wanna be busy.

    9. TF

      And by good, you mean an internally driven evaluation of quality. By good.

    10. CN

      Yeah.

    11. TF

      Just not to be nitpicky.

    12. CN

      No.

    13. TF

      Right? Good is not, as we already know based on your description of not using social media, but it's not likes, it's not this, it's not that. How much of it is how you feel about a piece versus, say, with The New Yorker, how well something does, the feedback you get from editors or other inputs?

    14. CN

      I think external is good if it's a, if it's a trusted evaluation, 'cause you can't BS yourself, right?

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CN

      This is something I... You know, you want unambiguous indication of value is really, I think, the right thing to chase 'cause it keeps you honest.

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CN

      Like, in computer science, when I last talked to you, I was working on a theoretical computer science paper, an algorithms paper, and there was an idea in there I thought was really good. And I was like, "I think there's something really interesting here." And we published it and won an award. It was Best Paper award, right? Like, this was the, the best paper at this conference in the, the fall of, you know, 2022. That's important to me. 'Cause, like, okay, this is... This... It's hard. It's hard to write papers, it's hard to get them past accepted, uh, and it's hard to win an award. That's something to strive towards. And, and same thing with The New Yorker. It's, like, just really hard to write for them. It's really hard to get a piece accepted. It's really hard to, you know, get a piece out there that seems to be resonating with people. So I'm looking for that. Or, or even numbers. I mean, so I'm not against external numbers. I mean, seeing a book find an audience is important to me.

    19. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    20. CN

      Because I'm not a good marketer, so if that book finds an audience... All my books that have been super successful have taken years to get there.

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      It's a mark that something in there is actually, uh, working. So having, let's call these high-value external indicators versus serendipitous or low-value external indicators. So I think virality on a YouTube video is a low-value external indicator because there's a lot of serendipity in there. It doesn't require... It's not a, a, a linear dose function on quality of input, right?

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CN

      So it's not the better the video you create, like, just from a sheer quality- Then the more views it's gonna get. It's... No, it, it could be whatever. You know, like you have a very popular video about peeling-

    25. TF

      I was just going to say-

    26. CN

      ... a hard-boiled egg, right?

    27. TF

      My most popular YouTube video, it's like 8 million views or 10 million views, is how to peel hard-boiled eggs without peeling the whole egg. [laughs] Filmed in my kitchen-

    28. CN

      Yeah

    29. TF

      ... on a shitty camera, God knows when. [laughs]

    30. CN

      Right

  19. 1:26:01 – 1:29:07

    Derek Sivers and money as a neutral indicator of value.

    1. TF

      but yeah.

    2. CN

      Well, somehow he does it without the-

    3. TF

      [laughs]

    4. CN

      ... without cutting through. I don't know.

    5. TF

      I don't know.

    6. CN

      And now I'm gonna go watch the stupid video, so there you go.

    7. TF

      [laughs]

    8. CN

      But think about, compare, compare your 8 million, 8 million views on the egg video to your first book hitting number one on the New York Times bestseller. I would say number one on the New York Times bestseller, that's more-

    9. TF

      Yeah

    10. CN

      ... of a, a high-value external indicator. It's very hard to do. Like-

    11. TF

      Yeah

    12. CN

      ... it reflects, like you- you've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience. You know, that's difficult. That's difficult to do. That's a high-value external. And so I like the high-value external. Money can be... This is controversial, but I, I learned this from Derek Sivers, who told me that money is a great, here's his quote, "neutral indicator of value." People don't-

    13. TF

      Hm

    14. CN

      ... like to give away their money.

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CN

      So like it means something if clients buy your product. It means something if people buy your book. Because people, it means nothing for me to click to watch your egg video because I don't know, whatever. What am I gonna lose?

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    18. CN

      But to give $20 to get your book, like I care about my $20. So I, I think high-value indic- external indicators of value aren't a bad thing. They're scary because people don't like the rejection and they don't like that it's very hard, but I think that's fine because it keeps you-

    19. TF

      Yeah

    20. CN

      ... honest.

    21. TF

      What do you think Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive? I would think it would be a positive indicator, but maybe I'm using a different scale than he is.

    22. CN

      So he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased, I think.

    23. TF

      I see. Right.

    24. CN

      So like his main point was, this is what he did at every stage of his career, is when he had the next thing he wanted to do, so he was working as a record executive, for example, and, and wanted to go full-time with his band. He would wait till the next thing was making as much money as the current thing.

    25. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    26. CN

      And then that's when he would say, "Let me go do that." And so he waited till CD Baby then was creating as much money as he was making as an artist before he went all in and just working on his startup. But he meant neutral because if you just ask people their opinion on your idea or ask them, "Hey, do you think I should do this?" They're not neutral. They like you and they want to be nice.

    27. TF

      Right.

    28. CN

      They're like, "Yeah, man, go for it. Yeah, you should definitely quit your job to do a band. Like, that would be awesome. Like, I wish I could do that."

    29. TF

      [laughs]

    30. CN

      It's not useful feedback.

  20. 1:29:07 – 1:33:44

    Contemporary slow productivity champions.

    1. TF

      years?" It's gonna break. Like something's gonna break. It's just a question of when it breaks. So you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that or look at other, other ways to kind of augment your ability to not rush. I think Derek is very, very good at this. Who are some other contemporaries? I, I know that, and maybe we'll talk about it, but Jane Austen would be another example, historically speaking. Who are some, uh, contemporaries, like last, within the last 20 years, who stand out? Eh, 10 years. Just because the technological landscape, I think about this a lot. Like how many Newtons, how many Da Vincis, how many [laughs] Marie Curies are just making TikTok videos right now? And they're never actually gonna make something that is fulfilling their full potential. I would have to imagine it's [laughs] vast swaths of, of the population. So let's just say the last five, five to 10 years or current day, people who stand out to you.

    2. CN

      Well, I think where you see this most often today is in the arts. Like I'm a movie buff. You see this with the great directors. You know? It's I gotta get the right project. It takes a long time [laughs] to get the project together. You spend a long time on that project till it's right, and then you do it, right? I mean, if you look at Tarantino, you look at Greta Gerwig, you look at Chris Nolan, they take their time.

    3. TF

      Mm.

    4. CN

      And also they don't, they're not filling in the gap. Let me be on YouTube, let me be on Twitter, let me, let me have a really sort of active presence out there. They take their time. Novelists are very good at this.

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CN

      Especially, uh, literary novelists because their books need to be really good. That's their whole, that's their whole selling proposition.

    7. TF

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      So they take their time. An example, a specific example I like is John Grisham. And I, I did this comparison. I uncovered these, this old interview of Michael Crichton once. It was an interview of Michael Crichton-

    9. TF

      Mm

    10. CN

      ... when he was 27 years old. And so I wrote this essay about compare Michael Crichton to John Grisham. You're gonna see two different approaches to roughly the same job, which is writing popular genre fiction. Crichton was all about busy. So you read this, this essay, this was after The Andromeda Strain had come out, and it's all ambitions for things he wants to do. "I wanna direct, I wanna do movies, I have five books in development, I'm writing screenplays, I just moved out to LA." Like, it's this huge plan. John Grisham, on the other hand, like as soon as The Firm did well, it was his second book, his first book was a flop, A Time to Kill, when it first came out. He said, "I'm gonna write two, and if one of the two works, then I'll keep doing this." The Firm blew up, did really well, and as soon as he had some autonomy, he simplified, simplified, simplified, to the point where at some point more recently, this would've been in the 2000s, he had this long-time sort of assistant who worked for him. When she retired, he was like, "I don't have to hire anyone else because no one, no one bothers me. Like, my agent and my editor know how to contact me. I don't do anything else. I write my book once a year, that's it. Like, I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my, my town," and he, he was the commissioner of the Little League. Y- he had a lot of stuff he did unrelated to work. He just slowed down. He's like, "I just wanna write. That's all I do. I don't need to have TV shows, and I don't need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made into things, and I don't need to create a six-part series and direct my whatever and get into television." He's like, "I'm just gonna... I'm getting paid a lot of money. I'm gonna write. That's what I wanna do. I wanna simplify." So G- Grisham has always stood out to me.

    11. TF

      Hmm.

    12. CN

      And I know a couple of people who know him, and they underscore this, that he's like, "I write. I do one book a year, and you're not gonna hear from me until it's done, and then you get me for like four weeks, and I'll do like some publicity."

    13. TF

      [laughs] Do the dog and pony show. [laughs]

    14. CN

      "I'll do a bit of four weeks, right? And then leave me alone. I'm gonna go [laughs] I'm gonna go do other things." So he's a great example. So, so it's-

    15. TF

      Mm-hmm

    16. CN

      ... two different types of ambition. The Crichton ambition is, "Now that I have all these opportunities, I wanna do every single one I can." It's, it's-

    17. TF

      Mm-hmm

    18. CN

      ... "I've, I've been starving for years, and now I'm, I'm at the buffet, and I'm gonna fill my plate."

    19. TF

      Yeah.

    20. CN

      And Grisham had the complete other mindset. "Now that I'm successful, I have the leverage to do nothing. You know [laughs] get out. I... No, no, no, no, no. I just wanna, like, do this one thing. Isn't that great?"

    21. TF

      Yeah.

    22. CN

      So he's definitely slow productivity.

    23. TF

      So maybe that's your next book, The Leverage To Do Nothing. [laughs] It actually would be a pretty good title. [laughs] So I'm thinking of Grisham as someone who decided from the outset to, to use a rowing example, to, is it sculling? One person, single person rowing?

  21. 1:33:44 – 1:37:13

    Asynchronous vs. real-time conversations.

    1. CN

      Yep.

    2. TF

      So he's out there on the Charles just, like, thinking about his next book, rowing by himself. And then there are a lot of other people out there who have, and I've been in this position before, so I'm not, I'm not throwing too many stones in my glass house, but you're like, "How did my life get so fucking complicated?" And you're like, "Shit. Like, instead of sculling, I've built Noah's Ark. I've got two of every goddamn animal in here, and I have to unload this fucker. Like, if I wanna simplify, I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat." [laughs] And so I wanna jump into some ways to simplify, right? So if you are able to maintain that from the outset, God bless you, you're a miracle worker. I wish I could do what you do. Maybe I can. But I often slip. I backslide, and then I'm just like, "Ugh, okay, now I have to unload Noah's Ark again." One of the, one of the points in the notes here that I have is work to reduce collaboration overhead. We talked about, about overhead, right? Talking about work instead of doing it. By replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversations. So this, I think, will strike a lot of folks as counterintuitive. Could you expand on this, please?

    3. CN

      Well, asynchrony is a problem. So asynchrony meaning not real time.

    4. TF

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      So email, for example. I send you a message, you read it when you're ready to read it, then you reply. So it's, it's not, not real time.

    6. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CN

      Asynchrony has advantages, right? Because there's an overhead to having to arrange real-time conversation. You and I have to agree somehow this is when we're gonna get on the phone together. The problem with asynchrony is that if you use it for drawn-out conversations, there's gonna be seven back-and-forth messages for us to decide on something. This now requires me to constantly monitor whatever channel we're using here, because if we're gonna get through seven back-and-forth messages today because we're trying to decide on something, I have to see most of those messages, let's say, within 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving, because we have to knock this ball back and forth enough times, 15 minutes per knock, you know, we're already a couple of hours into it. So now I have to be checking these inboxes all the time. But if I'm checking these inboxes all the time, I'm seeing lots of other stuff as well. Now I'm in a state, to borrow a term from Linda Stone, of partial continuous attention, which, uh, drains my energy, I can't think well, I'm exhausted, and I can't produce anything deep. I can't do any really good work. So asynchrony is one of these things that looks good on paper, but as soon as you start doing back-and-forth, uh, planning or conversations of any type with asynchrony, it destroys everything. It is one of the most potent productivity poisons. And the, the thing about it is that we think it's actually making us more efficient because, "Oh, look, I can just-

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm

    9. CN

      ... press send and I don't have to go on a phone." So instead having regular times to talk real time can actually be much more efficient. The key is not to have a separate meeting for everything you might need to discuss, 'cause now you have a separate problem, which is your schedule is crowded. So I think the answer to all of this is just office hours. Like, this is it every day.

    10. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    11. CN

      This hour to 90 minutes, I, my phone is on, I have a Slack channel, my door is open, and you just punt everything to office hours. "Yeah, good question. Grab me at the next office hours you can." "Yeah, we should get into that. Grab me at the next office hours you can." "Oh, yeah, a bunch of, uh, requests are coming in for interviews, you know, for my book coming out." "Great."

    12. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    13. CN

      "Next office hours you can, come and we'll go through them all." You know? So you, you consolidate synchrony into a regular period, so you're not wasting a lot of time arranging the synchrony. I think that's a sweet spot for collaboration.

  22. 1:37:13 – 1:41:49

    Making group scheduling less hellish.

    1. TF

      So to get into the nitty-gritty of that, you mentioned Slack. I'm curious from a flow perspective what that looks like. So if you're communicating with your team via Slack, and they're like, "What about this?" And you're like, "Grab me at the next office hours," do you then have, like, a Calendly or some automated tool where it's like, "Hey, every Friday..." I'm curious what this looks like for you if you use it or how you've seen other people implement this, just from a flow perspective. Friday from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM, I am available in 30-minute slots or whatever, and then here's a Calendly link, if I'm getting [laughs] the service name correct, where you can book a time, and we're not doing it via email, right? Because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling. I fucking hate it with such a passion. It just, "How about Tuesday at 2:00? No, that doesn't work. What about Thursday at 3:00? How about Monday at this?" It's, it's is one of my least favorite things in the world. So from a flow perspective, what, what does that look like, and have you found any particular day or way of clustering office hours to work well for you or for other people?

    2. CN

      First of all, don't use Slack [laughs] to coordinate with your team. Like, that'd be, that'd be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing, at any point conversation could come in. I, I've suggested this a couple times in the pages of The New Yorker is, is just stop using Slack. [laughs] Essentially, I come back to it. It, it's funny actually, when Salesforce bought Slack-

    3. TF

      Mm-hmm

    4. CN

      ... that, right after they bought Slack, I had an article that was titled Slack Built the, the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work, and it was sort of a critique of this sort of-

    5. TF

      Mm-hmm

    6. CN

      ... hyperactive hive mind. And Salesforce, unrelated, they didn't know about it, they invited me to come give, like, a high-price lecture.

    7. TF

      [laughs]

    8. CN

      And I was like, "Hey, I'm honored, but I should point you towards this article I just published." And then they came back-

    9. TF

      Yeah

    10. CN

      ... and in, in fairness-

    11. TF

      Mm-hmm

    12. CN

      ... this was the marketing company that was organizing this conference for Salesforce.

    13. TF

      Right, right. For sure. Yeah.

    14. CN

      They came back and said like, "Well, yeah, you know, I think we're okay." [laughs]

    15. TF

      Yeah. [laughs]

    16. CN

      "I think... I don't think we need you." But to your question about office hours, actually, you wanna lean more into academic style office hours, which are unscheduled. And so if it was a completely in-person situation like we used to be, then it would just be my door is open.

    17. TF

      Yeah.

    18. CN

      Right? And that, like, that's how I run office hours with my discrete math students, right? Oh, you look, oh, someone's in your, your office. I wait till they're out, then I come in. But you can simulate this digitally using Zoom, for example, and just have a waiting room. So-

    19. TF

      Mm

    20. CN

      ... people come to your Zoom conference. They just know the Zoom link is open for this 90 minutes every afternoon at this set time, so they can just log in there, and if you're talking to someone else, they're just waiting in the waiting room till you bring them in. And I mentioned Slack, so I, I probably should have elaborated that, but what some people do is say, "I have a Slack channel called Office Hours, but I only-

    21. TF

      Mm

    22. CN

      ... monitor it during my office hours." So you just know from, like, 3:00 to 4:30, then we can go back and forth and chat, like, because that's what I'm here-

    23. TF

      Mm

    24. CN

      ... to do is just talk to people. So I will have that Slack channel, that office hour channel-

    25. TF

      I see

    26. CN

      ... open from 3:00 to 4:30. And there, if we wanna go back and forth on Slack, that's still real time, right? I mean, we're going back-

    27. TF

      Yeah

    28. CN

      ... and forth in real time. It's not asynchronous. That's fine as well, but I'll never look at that channel outside the office hours.

    29. TF

      Mm.

    30. CN

      And then you can tack on to this another 30 minutes with 10-minute chunks and a Calendly link where you can say to someone, "Either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one-on-one slots. Here's the link." And so you can put those two... I mean, I actually have an article out today, the day we're recording this, called How to Have a More Productive Year, and I talk about exactly this, having a open office hour plus an extra 30 minutes of one-on-ones and having a webpage that says, "Here's, here's how we talk. Show up during these office hours and just rock and roll, or grab one of these slots if you want a little bit more time," and that you just throw that link at people, you know, like, like confetti at Mardi Gras. Just there, ugh, link, link, link.

  23. 1:41:49 – 1:43:30

    Cal's problem with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

    1. CN

      one.

    2. TF

      [laughs]

    3. CN

      You always have to mention, this is, like, if you write for an elite publication and you mention-

    4. TF

      Yeah

    5. CN

      ... productivity, you always have to mention Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is, like, a pet peeve of mine-

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. CN

      ... is from the mind of people who are professional writers who, who-

    8. TF

      Yeah

    9. CN

      ... critique productivity, in their mind, Frederick Winslow Taylor is, like, the central figure of American capitalism, and productivity basically means him there with a stopwatch looking at your movements, and he wasn't that influential of a person. [laughs] It's such a pet peeve of mine.

    10. TF

      [laughs]

    11. CN

      Scientific management was not, it was, it, it was esoteric and kinda cult-like and it, it had a following, but it got completely pushed out of the way by Fordism and the idea of building-

    12. TF

      Mm

    13. CN

      ... smart production processes. Winslow Taylor was a weird guy. These time motion studies with these incentive-based pace scales was weird, and he was weird, and they determined-

    14. TF

      Mm-hmm

    15. CN

      ... that's not so important. What's important is an assembly line is a much better way to build a car than the other way.

    16. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    17. CN

      The, the systems matter a lot more, and also forget this, like, weird incentive scale of I'll pay you 10 cents more if you're 10 cents faster shoveling whatever. Ford figured out pay your workers a lot of money, right?

    18. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CN

      Because the turnover's more expensive than trying to whatever. So anyways, it's, it's a pet peeve of mine.

    20. TF

      [laughs]

    21. CN

      Frederick Winslow Taylor does not-

    22. TF

      Mm

    23. CN

      ... yield an outsize influence on the way we think about productivity. Our issues with productivity do not come from Frederick Winslow Taylor. They actually come from Peter Drucker, and there's a whole other argument I could make here, but that's my pet peeve is, like, you don't have to mention him. Every time you try to critique productivity, so-

    24. TF

      [laughs]

    25. CN

      Uh, rant,

  24. 1:43:30 – 1:51:26

    How The New Yorker maintains its old-timey charm where other publications fail.

    1. CN

      rant aside.

    2. TF

      Peter Drucker, I gotta say, man, hit so many nails on the head. The Effective Executive still to this day, just such an incredible short book that punches above its weight class. So [laughs] to scratch my own itch here, The New Yorker also has this typographical convention that has always been kinda confusing to me, and seems a little [laughs] highfalutin. [laughs] Tell me if I'm getting this right. It always stands out. It jumps out like a wart on someone's face every time I see it. They put an umlaut over a s- maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated, like coordinate, and they'll put an umlaut over the second O, or something like that. Why do they do that? What is... That's not in the Chicago book of style. Like, what's going on there? Or is that just a New Yorker thing? [laughs]

    3. CN

      Well, I mean, a- that's true. So they do, yeah, umlauts on second vowels. So like-

    4. TF

      [laughs]

    5. CN

      ... reengage, you would have a, an umlaut.

    6. TF

      [laughs]

    7. CN

      And then also focus they do British, so double S, because I write a lot about focus. So you, you double S focus-

    8. TF

      [laughs]

    9. CN

      ... and focusing. That's there. And then email, the convention for email is, I forgot exactly what it was. But the, the way they write about emails, where... No, it's just, it's tradition, right?

    10. TF

      I got it.

    11. CN

      So, so it's a, it's an old magazine.

    12. TF

      Yeah.

    13. CN

      It's been around for a long time, and so th- there was a, a style guide invented, you know, early on when a lot of this was more up for grabs. And I think it's just, it's tradition. Like, let's hold on to the style guide to whatever. I mean, I, I don't know if there's a, there might be a deeper story to it, but that's what I've always understood is that th- they-

    14. TF

      Yeah, why not? I mean, tradition's fun

    15. CN

      ... yeah, and they format it the same way, right? So a lot of that's tradition. I mean, their whole thing-

    16. TF

      Mm-hmm

    17. CN

      ... which I love about it, is they're not chasing trends, you know?

    18. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CN

      I mean, I r- I really love that publication. Anyone who reads it, the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just to try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for.

    20. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    21. CN

      And their whole theory is make your place really, really writer-friendly and writers will write cool things. And-

    22. TF

      Mm-hmm

    23. CN

      ... and I think that's cool, and they have a subscription base, so they don't have to chase web traffic. They don't have to worry so much about ads. They have a million people who pay $100 a year for the magazine, and you got this great foundation. Like, okay, so we can just write, you know? It's not big. Anyways, not to go on a New Yorker rant [laughs] .

    24. TF

      Well, let me play devil's advocate on that, 'cause it seems like when The New York Times went from predominantly ads to predominantly subscriber revenue, they ended up producing more news coverage to please their base of subscribers, and it became m- a much more exaggerated, kind of left-leaning caricature of itself in a way that is not helpful for contending with polarized tribalism and so on, in my opinion. I mean, fundamentally they're different outlets, right? I mean, they're very different, but are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media dynamics at play for The New Yorker? Because y- I've seen these formerly, what I would consider, highly credible publications [laughs] ... Hold on. I have to [laughs] I, my phone is always off, but I have to pull this up [laughs] because this example is so nuts. [laughs] My friend sent me this screenshot because he said, here we go. [laughs] The, The Economist stepping up their copy game, and the screenshot he sent me [laughs] is the, the sort of super text or the superscript is, "The Swines," and then it says, "Feral super pigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairies. [laughs] They are well-adapted to the cold, with thick fur, long legs, and tusks as sharp as steak knives." Then it has this f- photo of these pigs running over a hill, and I'm like, "This is The Economist, man. What the fuck is happening?" And I love The Economist, no offense to The Economist. Love The Economist, but I was like, oh man, like, everybody's getting pulled down [laughs] into the mud here in the quest for traffic and attention. That's a bit of a, a ramble, but how does The New Yorker resist the, the temptation/incentive/risks of the modern online world as we know it?

    25. CN

      You're pointing out a real effect. If we're gonna talk about trade-offs-

    26. TF

      Mm

    27. CN

      ... it's a trade-off effects, and I think The Times b- really did have to face this trade-off. So when you, when you move to their subscriber model, what they gain is they don't actually have to do the attention chasing, right? So this is one thing about The Times, is they don't need a super feral pig example.

    28. TF

      [laughs]

    29. CN

      They do not have a model based on chasing attention, right? Where, where other publications-

    30. TF

      Yeah

  25. 1:51:26 – 1:53:31

    Cal's dream publications.

    1. TF

      my newsletter, in terms of pieces I think are worth sharing. It's probably got the highest hit rate, at least in the US. Are there any magazines or outlets that you would just, like, you know, cut off a pinky Yakuza style to write for, obviously I'm exaggerating, or would have loved to have written for that never got the chance to write for, like Parish Review or anything else? Is there anything sort of on your, your wish list outside of The New Yorker? Or have you already summited Everest and you're like, "I'm good"?

    2. CN

      I mean, that was my wish. My agent has reminded me of this, that early on, early on in my career, I remember watching Jonah Lehrer at the time-

    3. TF

      Mm

    4. CN

      ... who was my age, early on in his career get some New Yorker slots, and it... This is how I said to my agent, like, "What I wanna do, this is what I wanna do outside my books, is write for The New Yorker." So, like, that-

    5. TF

      Mm

    6. CN

      ... that was my Everest. I've written for the other places as, you know, well, I've written for The New York Times and Wired and, and The Atlantic. They're great places to write, and they have huge audiences, right? So, like, a, a New York Times piece, I always feel lucky when they publish something of mine, 'cause their audience is just huge. Like, if you write something for them-

    7. TF

      Yeah

    8. CN

      ... people read it and people see it. And I have written for them, so that's also cool. Like, I think one of the coolest jobs in journalism might be New York Times op-ed staff.

    9. TF

      Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that.

    10. CN

      Krugman and Brooks. They get to write about ideas, but it's big swing impact, man. Those things-

    11. TF

      Yeah

    12. CN

      ... those things hit a lot of eyeballs. So, like, when Ezra Klein left Vox and took the op-ed spot at The New York Times, I was like, that doesn't confuse me at all. Because that's, that's a really cool job because you're, you can affect the national conversation on a regular basis, and I don't know-

    13. TF

      Yeah

    14. CN

      ... who else can offer that, that you can shape conversation on a regular basis. That'd be a cool job.

    15. TF

      It's true. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I mean, The New York Times also has some great stuff. It's that the, the discovery problem, to come back to that, is a little bit harder than, say, with The New Yorker, unsurprisingly, because you just have a, such an immense volume of stuff. [laughs]

    16. CN

      Yeah.

  26. 1:53:31 – 1:59:51

    Mental models for cultivating a slow productivity mindset.

    1. TF

      But the op-ed narrows that down quite a bit. I mean, there's, there's been... Yeah, you, you are right. In terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs, uh, I suppose that's another advantage of the subscriber model, although you're hitting [laughs] one subset of the political spectrum, so there is that. [laughs]

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      But all's fair in love and editorial. Uh, [laughs] well, Cal, we've talked about a lot, and people should check out the new book. You walk the walk, which is sort of the most, for me, critical litmus test of material, especially if there's any prescriptive aspect in sort of a, a productivity self-help way, and I, I could define productivity. [laughs] I define it pretty similarly. Um, the new book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and people cannot find you on social. [laughs]

    4. CN

      They cannot.

    5. TF

      But, but there's the YouTube channel, Cal Newport Media, so people can find that, and there's The Deep Questions podcast, and calnewport.com. Certainly people can find a lot there. I'm curious, maybe as we're beginning to wind this to a close, if there are any other heuristics or mental models or anything that makes slow productivity easier or more appealing for people to embrace. And I would, for instance, say that by and large, I succumb to the shiny objects occasionally, but by and large, I, I think I fall into the slow productivity camp. And for instance, I mean, the book that I'm working on now, I mean, it started five years ago, notes, and, like, wrote 72,000 words five years ago and tabled it and shelved it and then have been kind of workshopping things. One of the, just to maybe start with sharing on my side, one of the things that helps me with this is thinking about choosing my projects, which is why I'm so interested in choosing projects, how people choose projects. I choose my projects generally on what skills and relationships they help me to develop that could transcend that project. So even if the project "fails" by all external metrics, if I've Developed or improved relationships, it could be preexisting or new relationships, and developed skills that will apply to other things. Having a long timeframe is a huge, huge, huge advantage, right? It's kind of the ultimate. In a world of attention compression, like, having a long time horizon is a unbelievable advantage in f- so many ways. But thinking about my projects and how they snowball in that cumulative way gives me the peace of mind and confidence to take those longer time horizons, if that makes any sense. So I w- I'm wondering if there's, there's anything like that that could just be kind of philosophical one-liners or beliefs that you have that allow you to embrace this without the fear and the FOMO that I think a lot of folks would have.

    6. CN

      I agree, by the way, that I definitely see you as an example of the slow productivity mindset. I mean, I think, for example, your focus on the podcast. Uh, okay, this is the main thing I'm gonna do. I'm gonna stop the, the book publication cycle. I'm not gonna seek out a lot of, you know, TV opportunities or whatever. I think that's a good example.

    7. TF

      Mm.

    8. CN

      Which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out to be titled, To Peel an Egg [laughs]

    9. TF

      [laughs]

    10. CN

      101 Hacks in Your Kitchen That'll Amaze Your Friends, or, [laughs] whatever.

    11. TF

      That's right. [laughs]

    12. CN

      You on the cover.

    13. TF

      101 Kitchen Tricks for Any Occasion. [laughs]

    14. CN

      Yeah, fully illustrated.

    15. TF

      As it stands, no, no egg peeling [laughs] in the new book.

    16. CN

      Here's the heuristic maybe that ties a lot of this together, is that at least for professional stuff, in the end, it's craft.

    17. TF

      Mm.

    18. CN

      Like, craft is what matters. Respecting craft, developing craft, applying craft, finding meaning in craft. I mean, just go, just keep watching on repeat Jiro Dreams of Sushi, right? [laughs]

    19. TF

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    20. CN

      Just go back and watch that, like, once a month, uh, because the more you think about craft is where I get fulfillment, craft is where I impact the world, craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life and can provide for the people I care about and, you know, give interesting opportunities in my life, it all comes back down to craft. You slow down. Your timeframes become much longer. Psychologically, you get so much resilience. Maybe you couple that, if I can add a second heuristic, is ignore the Internet.

    21. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      Like, uh, I mean, it's a crazy-making machine. It's just a crazy-making machine. It... Like, don't, don't require random people on social media to be a regular part of your life. Don't require, like, metrics you have to look at on a day-to-day basis of being, you know, important. I, I could just feel it. Like, we do... My podcast, we put the episodes on YouTube because I, I think, you know, as we talked about before, video will be the future, not YouTube, but we should practice. Uh, and I have a YouTube guy, and I say, "You can do whatever you want to, like, the thumbnails and the titles. I don't know. You understand YouTube." But I don't wanna know about how it's doing. Like, I don't wanna-

    23. TF

      Mm-hmm

    24. CN

      ... feel any impact from that algorithm. I wanna do my podcast show where there is no-

    25. TF

      Right

    26. CN

      ... cybernetic loop pushing back and changing-

    27. TF

      [laughs]

    28. CN

      ... what you're doing. Beyond these super large scales, over the last six months, if we average out downloads, I think we're, I think we're trending upwards, right?

    29. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    30. CN

      So maybe you put those two things together. Craft is everything. You can build a psychologically resilient, sustainable, successful professional life on craft, and ignore the Internet. Like, do those-

  27. 1:59:51 – 2:07:30

    The consequences of playing the algorithm game.

    1. TF

      Yeah. It makes me think of, can't remember the attribution. I mean, there are many versions of this, but would you rather fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not? I mean, those types of quotes I think about quite a bit. Because possibly, you know, if we take this vanity metric, and look, it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on your YouTube videos as an example.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. TF

      But let's say you looked at your numbers and you were trending down over six months. Like, does that mean you stop? Or does that mean that you are culling the herd and over time refining to the point where you are actually getting to your 1,000 or 10,000 true fans?

    4. CN

      Yep.

    5. TF

      And you went from basically doing, like, speeches at state fairs, and now you're standing on the TED stage. Is that bad? Right?

    6. CN

      No. I, yeah.

    7. TF

      Is that... No, I'm just saying, you know what I mean?

    8. CN

      Yeah. Yeah.

    9. TF

      Like, I'm saying, like, maybe there's a win embedded in what you're perceiving as a failure even if it's trending in the, in the wrong direction, right? Because otherwise, man, the stuff... Oh, here, let me show you one. Let me see if I can find it. I'll show [laughs] you another one, and I'll describe what this is just 'cause th- this is, this is sort of the, the YouTube equivalent of The Economist feral super pigs. [laughs]

    10. CN

      Oh, it gets so much worse on YouTube. [laughs] Let's give-

    11. TF

      It, it gets so bad, but I was texting with my team, went on YouTube, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is what happens to everyone on YouTube. If they stay on long enough and they get trained by the incentives, this is what happens to everybody." Let me show you. [laughs] Oh, come on. Yeah, it's good. It's good. So I don't know if you can see this. [laughs] Okay, so-

    12. CN

      There's a woman wearing very little clothes. Is that a robot? What is that? [laughs]

    13. TF

      No, this is, like, a big, huge muscular dude in a toga/sarong type thing walking away. There's a woman on the other side. He's saying bye, and she's got question marks over her head. She's in a, in a thong pointing away from the camera, holding her ass cheeks, like pulling them apart, and then the headline is Stoicism, 10 Lessons Men Learn Too Late in Life, in parentheses, Might Hurt Your Feelings. And I'm not saying, "Look, I'll give these guys credit." This is [laughs] because the thumbnail got me Stoic Wisdom Wonders, 1.9 million views, put up one month ago. [laughs] And, but I was like, oh man, like, g- you're going to get trained by the algorithm. Like, if you're not careful, you of c- a- and even if you are careful, if you're paying attention to, quote-unquote, the right things, like, everything converges into a chick with a thong spreading her ass cheeks in a thumbnail. Like, [laughs] with, with, like, what to do before the imminent financial collapse. [laughs] Like-

    14. CN

      Yeah

    15. TF

      ... [laughs] you're g- everything, doesn't matter if you're covering climate change, hoping to change the world with- [laughs]

    16. CN

      Right

    17. TF

      ... you, you know-

    18. CN

      Yeah

    19. TF

      ... renewable energy. You're gonna end up there.

    20. CN

      Noam Chomsky on, like, the structure of manufactured consent-

    21. TF

      Yeah

    22. CN

      ... and there's a woman in a bikini.

    23. TF

      Yeah.

    24. CN

      Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah.

    25. TF

      Uh, yeah, I gotta give this guy's credit. They just got a bunch of free promotions, so good for them. Uh, [laughs] and it got my attention. But I think the approach of treating these tools and new behaviors, not just because the t- it's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools, new technology as new drugs, right? Like, would you wanna be the first chimpanzee, you know, injected with this? Or maybe you wait until you're the 100th chimpanzee. [laughs]

    26. CN

      Yeah.

    27. TF

      You can still be an early adopter, but, like, [laughs] let's see what the long-term effects are. And if you feel like you got to rush, you're in the wrong game. Like, you're just, you're just in the wrong game. And you could win, but, like, be very careful about what winning looks like when you do that telescoping out. Like, okay, if this just gets faster, if things just change more frequently, if the shifting sands of algorithm favoritism just start pouring from the sky and become much, much harder to track, require me to have, now I don't have just a full-time thumbnail guy, I've got a full-time, like, algo chaser, like, [laughs] who's, like, a- an analytics person, and it becomes kinda Moneyball. Like, do you wanna win that game?

    28. CN

      No.

    29. TF

      Right? What, and what does it look like? And, and there are gonna be people, just like, for instance, you know, going to school, a lot of I banks, investment banks and so on recruited there, and 9 out of 10 people, probably 19 out of 20 would wash out, right? They would, they would just get destroyed because they weren't built for that. And then 1 out of 20 was just perfectly built for it. Fantastic, and they would thrive in that environment. But I, I do think that when we're looking at some of these platforms where, where this pr- the numbers are probably even less favorable, right? It's like, okay, 99 out of 100 are gonna wash out. And then one will just be the Michael Phelps of YouTube and awesome, like, good for them. But if everyone tries to do that, what a cataclysm. Not to make it sound too dark, but it's like there are so many opportunities for slow productivity hiding in plain sight, right? And there are counter examples, and if you want a sustainable competitive advantage, and who doesn't, having a longer time horizon and being unrushed with most things is just about as big as I can think of, at least at this point. But sorry, rant complete. [laughs]

    30. CN

      Well, no, but I completely agree with your rant. The numbers on algorithmic atten- just look at real numbers, right? Let's use real numbers not to go, "I'm gonna extend your YouTube rant slightly."

  28. 2:07:30 – 2:12:04

    The renewed viability of newsletters.

    1. CN

      Like, a newsletter is another thing. This is another slow productivity example.

    2. TF

      I was just gonna say, if, if you think podcast CPMs are high, look at niche newsletters, right? If they, there's a newsletter to, like, CIOs or hedge fund managers or whatever, like, the [laughs] it is unbel- I mean, we're talking hundreds of dollars CPM, right?

    3. CN

      Yeah, and you don't have to be famous either, right? I mean, it's-

    4. TF

      No

    5. CN

      ... I know so many people have done, have a good newsletter, and it's subscription-based. It's fantastic, right? If, if people are paying $5 a month, I mean, okay, that works out to an incredibly high CPM, right? It, because you, you could show that same person a huge number of ads. So it's just a different game, you know? I mean, so I was-

    6. TF

      Yeah

    7. CN

      ... the example I was gonna give was the writer Andrew Sullivan Who lives here in DC. And, you know, he, he was the editor of The New Republic and wrote for New York Magazine before he sort of got pushed out for political ideological reasons. He has a Substack now, and the way he talks about it, he's like, "Well, this is great. Like, I have a pretty fair-sized audience. I make a lot of money off of this. Like, why would I wanna do anything else? This is great. I can write for this audience. It's a big audience. I make more money doing this than I ever made as a magazine writer, and I can write what I want, and I don't need to do anything else, and I don't need, like, a studio and ca- uh, there's nothing else I need to do, you know?"

    8. TF

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CN

      So I agree, anything where an algorithm is driving attention, don't make that... I mean, you could. Again, you could. But be wary of it. Also be wary is my other warning heuristic of checklist productivity. So if you learn from a YouTube course, all right, here is how you're gonna make a lot of money on Twitter. What you need to do is these tweet threads where at the, the last tweet in the thread needs to say, "Hey, if you enjoyed this thread, you should follow me because I do these threads every so often." It's like you can't all just follow the same checklist and assume that's not the way economies work, you know?

    10. TF

      [laughs]

    11. CN

      It's not just if I just do these 10 things. Pick your niche. Make sure on a regular basis you have a thread. Format your thread this way. And if you do this, you know, it used to be like in our childhood, the Carlton Sheets infomercials-

    12. TF

      [laughs]

    13. CN

      ... where he was like, "Look-"

    14. TF

      Oh, man. I haven't heard that name-

    15. CN

      Do you remember those?

    16. TF

      ... in ages. Yeah.

    17. CN

      Yeah. It's kind of the same as checklist productivity on Twitter. His logic was, well, think about it. We can drop ship, put a classified ad for something you're drop shipping, and let's say you put a classified ad in one paper and you make-

    18. TF

      Mm

    19. CN

      ... $10 drop shipping. Well, then put it in 100 papers, and you're gonna make $1,000. Uh, com- completely leaving out the fact that by far the most common outcome is that zero people buy it no matter how many papers you put it in because they don't wanna buy a random piece of crap from a classified ad. You know, that part was left out.

    20. TF

      [laughs]

    21. CN

      You're like, well, just think about it. If you make this much money here, then there's this many papers, you'll make this much money. [laughs] This is crazy logic.

    22. TF

      [laughs]

    23. CN

      But it reminds me a lot of where you see like, oh, if I just do these videos and I do it right and have the right sign-off and I write my titles carefully, it'll scale. It's like, no, most people, nothing will happen. Algorithmic attention economies, be very wary. Do the slow productivity attention economies. They're hard, but it's fantastic if you're able to establish yourself there. Your books work, your podcast works. It's way, way better.

    24. TF

      And I would also say these are not mutually exclusive, right? So if you wanna play in the algo arena, like go for it. Like look, I have a YouTube channel, and I do this, that, and the other thing, and even podcasting is, let's be honest, on some level, like if Apple decides to kneecap everybody [laughs] which happens occasionally. It's like, oh, oops. [laughs] I just read this article. It's actually very well done. I wish I had the proper attribution, but it was something called like the great shrinking podcast economy, something like that. And [laughs] the incredible power of platforms to dictate your metrics is-

    25. CN

      Sure

    26. TF

      ... is hard to overstate. But I would say if you wanna play that game, 'cause like, like some of it's fun. I get it, you know? I like competing and, you know, I'm not gonna be doing any dangerous competitive sports anytime soon, so I gotta channel that somewhere. So okay.

    27. CN

      Sure.

    28. TF

      I could firewall 20% of my attention for dicking around with that. That's fine.

    29. CN

      Yep.

    30. TF

      Or 50, like whatever, but like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find something where you can cultivate this slow productivity, right?

  29. 2:12:04 – 2:19:26

    Parting thoughts.

    1. TF

      Yeah, like you're gonna crash eventually. So like you need some type of safety net and long time horizon. And slow productivity, for me at least, has been, it's been my safety net for 20 years. I have no reason to think that that should change. And the more frenetic things get, the faster things change, we didn't even get to AI, but [laughs] the more the kind of avalanche of information continues to grow in volume, the more all of these things will be an advantage that I'm discussing. So check out the book, folks, Slow Productivity. Cal, anything else you'd like to, like to mention? Any TikTok videos you'd like to point people to?

    2. CN

      Yeah, exactly.

    3. TF

      [laughs]

    4. CN

      My peeling video channel, which there's now gonna be 1,000 by the way.

    5. TF

      Peeling squash.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. TF

      [laughs] Cal Newport, peeling squash.

    8. CN

      Yeah, you've introduced that notion now.

    9. TF

      [laughs]

    10. CN

      Uh, [laughs] um, no, this, this has been great. Yeah, num- Slow Productivity, it kind of, it connects everything together. Be- do something really well. Get meaning out of it.

    11. TF

      Yeah.

    12. CN

      And then yeah, talk about it, different platforms, have fun, play on it. But you're right, there's a difference between I like to take my car to the track because it's fun, and my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team. You know, it's just a-

    13. TF

      [laughs]

    14. CN

      ... it's a different dynamic that's going on out there.

    15. TF

      Yeah.

    16. CN

      So slow is just better. I think people are ready for it too, you know? I mean, I think this is just where we are is we want something different. The first wave of different we were offered was just stop trying things. You know, work is bad, you know, stop trying, don't do anything. That st- that didn't stick because, well, I, I, I still like to do things, and also I need to, you know, feed my family. So I think now we're getting the second generation of thinking about this, which is do it better. Like figure out like how do you really wanna work? Like what makes sense? And, and so hopefully this works.

    17. TF

      Yeah.

    18. CN

      But I appreciate talking about it. I put an excerpt, by the way. I'm not on social media, but at calnewport.com/slow-

    19. TF

      Mm-hmm

    20. CN

      ... we put an excerpt up. So like if you're like, ah-

    21. TF

      Great

    22. CN

      ... maybe. You can, you can actually like read the whole introduction of the book. There's a lot of... You'll appreciate it, Tim, because there's a lot about John McPhee.

    23. TF

      Nice.

    24. CN

      I open the book on Mc- John McPhee, and I know as a, as someone who took his course at Princeton, which I'm jealous of-

    25. TF

      Oh, yeah

    26. CN

      ... you, you'll appreciate the McPhee. It's rich McPhee content [laughs] in that free excerpt.

    27. TF

      Oh, I can't wait. Okay, so I will read that. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Yeah, I learned more from McPhee in one semester about writing than I have in all of my reading and practice and classes outside of that [laughs] one seminar. I wish I could go back and take it again, frankly. [laughs] You never know. Who knows? [laughs] I went back, you know, I actually have all my notes and all of my assignments from that class to this day.

    28. CN

      Like, marked up?

    29. TF

      I have the marked up notes.

    30. CN

      Cool.

Episode duration: 2:19:36

In the uListen app, the transcript lights up word by word as you listen. Get uListen

Transcript of episode 8KPLs-ZFuPo

Get more out of YouTube videos.

Read along on your phone, search it beside the video, or ask your favorite AI app what was said.

iOSAndroidClaudeChrome