Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.
This episode is airing in early April of twenty twenty four. Sarah and I are going to be interviewing Cal Newport, who is the author of Slow Productivity, which is a new book, also the author of Deep Work and several other books. And you'll notice that Sarah and I are both interviewing him.
What happened.
We tend to do interviews solo these days, partly for efficiency purposes, so we can make it work with everyone's schedules. So I had set this up with his publicity person, but then Cal sent us a very nice email to both of us saying how excited he was to chat about productivity. So I could not deny him, Sarah, and
so she fortunately was free and could make it so. Sarah, since we talk a lot about productivity in this, have you always been into productivity like you did planners and calendars and such in high school?
I'm not sure I was the world's most effective user of productivity tools back then, but I certainly really enjoyed them from a very young age. I loved getting my little school spiral notebook planner every year. It was always these ugly red and gold because that was our school colors.
And I also had these big, like full side, full side, like the size of like a full size piece of paper back blue cloth bound daily notebooks that had a page for every single day that I would inherit from my dad, and I think where he worked they actually gave them to every employee. Can you imagine being given this giant page per day planner as your workplace productivity tool. I mean, I kind of wish we still did that.
Yeah.
Now, I think that has gone by the wayside, but that's kind of a cool office perk. I guess if you're into that sort of thing. Yeah, I guess a lot of schools do still do this, right that they distribute calendars or something, or at least they were. I don't know, maybe everyone's moved to electronic calendars now.
Our school still hands out paper planners, and I do think there is a lot to be learned about executive function that can be learned from practicing writing and planners. So whether kids actually use them all year or not, I think at least experimenting with it and figuring out what works can be helpful. I also was conversing with my college friend yesterday trying to remember what we use in college, and she claims we were early bullet journalers. We just didn't call it that, so I'm going to
go with that. We had these cute little multi colored notebooks and a lot of jelly roll pins and had fun writing out our task lists and things we were doing all day and things like that.
So yeah, sounds good.
Yeah. I was trying to think of this too, and I honestly just cannot remember. So I must not have been buying cool planners or anything like that, because I
think I would have remembered making such a purchase. I know I've always had like a working notebook going, you know, I would I had a bunch of like journalism internships, and some of the places where I worked had like Steno notebooks that people could just like pick out of the supply closet for Back in the day, you know, people were taking their notes while going interviewing someone or.
Something like that.
And I imagine that in high school or middle school or whatever, we probably had those little calendars that they hand out to try to encourage people to write down their assignments. And clearly I must have been writing my assignments down somewhere because I got good grades and usually wasn't doing all nighters the night before, so I doubt I was just remembering all of this, but for the life of me, I cannot remember.
So that is fascinating. I don't know it was.
Productivity happens, whether we necessarily remember our systems or not. I know I did get into writing down weekly priorities after reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in my early twenties.
Did you ever read that?
No, my early twenties productivity guide was Getting Things Done by David Allen.
Well, that's also a good one. I read that at some point too. I just remember reading it after Stephen Covey. So yeah, long list of productivity people we got, you know, Stephen Covey with the Seven Habits, David Allen getting things done, and now here we're going to be talking with Cal Newport about slow productivity and other topics, so listen to that. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Cal Newport to
the program. Any of our listeners are no doubt familiar with him, So Cal, why don't you go ahead and introduce your stuff to our listeners.
Well, it's good to talk to you, both, both of you being of course past guests on my podcast, so we have a great circularity going on here. So for those who don't know me, I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University. I also write books for general audiences and for the past i don't know what it's been now eight years. My writing has focused a lot on the different ways technology impacts us and how we cope
with it. So I work a lot on, for example, how technology really destabilize the workplace, especially knowledge work, when things like email and chat and laptops and smartphones arose. I also talk about how it's destabilized our life outside of work, social media, the rise of screen addiction, screens
and kids. So this is sort of my interest area is how do we construct something like a meaningful or intentional life at work and at home in this world of these fast moving technologies that have just as many negative side effects as positive.
That's awesome.
And since this is of both worlds, and you know, as you mentioned, we talked about work and home. You have three kids, right, yes, they are how old?
I'm an eleven year old, a nine year old, and a five year old, all boys?
All boys?
Well, they match out well with Sarah's kids ages that's almost exactly the same as hers.
That's why Sarah and I look so well rested? Is that what?
You exactly?
Right?
You both look great to me.
I don't know it. Your most newest book is called Slow Productivity, So maybe you can give us a little overview of what do you mean by slow productivity and contrast this with kind of the pseudo productivity as you set up as the punching bag against this.
Yeah, well, I mean I'm going to give the motivation for it too, because it's a it's a classic, like Best to Boast World's motivation. So where this book came from? And I'll sort of get to the meat of it here in a second was a mix of personal and professional motivations, which is rare for me. Usually it's one or the other, right, but in this case it was both.
So on the personal side, what was going on is, you know, I have these three boys, like we mentioned, and Sarah, I don't know if you had the same experience with your three or lad with your four. And this might because they're all boys. But when they all hit elementary school age more or less like they were. My youngest was just come to kindergarten, they're all in elementary school age, there is this switch where basically they seem to need as much dad time as humanly possible.
And it was different than it was before. It was different than toddler phase, where it was much much more of a survival game and making sure that no parent goes too crazy. It switched they want as much dad time as possible. These boys needed as much dad time as possible. So as in this situation where wait, I'm reaching my professional peak, right, I mean, I am at the peak of my powers. I can write best selling books. I'm a professor, tenured at professor writing for the New Yorker.
You know, I'm really my professional powers throughout their peak and simultanously my kids see as much time as possible. So suddenly it became very urgent for me to look at this question of, Okay, how can I still produce stuff that I'm proud of professionally and also you know, is a means of support and yet not have work take over everything and yet leave sort of indulgently large amounts of time for my family. So I was grappling
with that personally. Then the pandemic hit and all of my readers and podcast listeners begin to have sort of similar crisises with work, especially those knowledge workers that were sent home to work remotely on their laptops that it really the disruption gave them this distance where they were looking at their work and be like, what am I doing here? I'm on zoom all day, I'm sending emails all day like this is this what I want to
do with my life? So there's this whole sort of existential crisis happening in my readership and my listenership as well. And they said, something has broken about the way we're thinking about work and productivity. We got to fix this. So professional personal all looking at this same issue work and how to tame it or what's not working with work?
And so slow productivity was the answer I came up with, and it was a completely alternative way of thinking about productivity that is not based on activity but instead based on quality results over time. So instead of fastness, it focused instead on the result of slowness. And my argument is this is more sustainable. This is something you can
do for a whole lifetime. It's something you can do and be incredibly proud of what you've produced, and yet also be there at four point thirty for your kids baseball practice, be there for the trips, not have your whole life get taken up for work. And so it's a personal professional quest that led to this.
I think that's such a great point that you notice this more as the kids got older. And this does go against a little bit of rhetoric that I hear sometimes where it's like I have to be home for the babies. But I think Laura and I feel similarly that in many ways, as the kids have gotten older, a the specificity of us feels like it matters more like my kid wants me, not a provider, so to speak, and the time with the kids is actually more enjoyable and not something that I or Laura want to be
missing out on. So I think the timing actually makes so much sense, And even though it might go against what people might think, like oh, it's baby time, when you kind of need that time with the kids. So that's great. I love that that was true for you.
Yeah, we wanted to talk through some of the three penciples you talk about in slow Productivity, and particularly thinking of it in terms of how these might apply to someone with maybe a bit more of traditional job. I mean, cal, you and I are writing books, hopefully Sarah will soon but we'll get to that.
But we're producing podcasts too.
But you know, she obviously is seeing patients several days a week as well, So like a more traditional job like that, and how some of these principles would work for that. So maybe you could first say what those three principles are and then maybe talk a little bit about how that works for someone in a traditional job.
Yeah, So the three ideas that seemed to matter was first, doing fewer things, by which what I really mean is doing fewer things at the same time. I have a core argument here that having too many committed projects on your plate at the same time becomes this massive roadblock to be able to actually do work, but also this massive source of anxiety and stress, and so smaller workloads in the moment I think really is key to slowing
down productivity. It also produces more so it's not the zero sum trade off of I'm going to make my boss's life worse to make my life more sustainable. I think it's good for everybody. My second idea was work at a natural pace. We've forgotten the degree to which the factory model that we have poured over to knowledge work of you'd clock in for an eight hour shift and you work as hard as you can those full eight hours, and you do this all year round. We've
forgotten how unnatural that is in a literal sense. We're not wired to do that. It's a very recent innovation in the history of our species, one that we realized right away when we first tried it, with the innovation of mills and factories, that is really sort of difficult and hard on people, and yet we just blithely think that's the model we should follow. If I'm not all in, all laws in during the work hour, no matter what hour of the day it is or what week of
the year it is, and I'm somehow being unproductive. I really tried to stabilize that and say, actually, it's much more sustainable and you produce much better results over time with more variation in that on different time scales. And then the final principle is obsess over quality. That, like carying about your craft and what you produce, becomes to
glue for these other principles. It's what makes slow productivity not just about an antagonistic pose towards your work, but about a more positive or self fulfilling sense of trying to produce stuff that matters. Also, obsessing over quality, caring a lot about quality ultimately is what's going to give you the leverage you need to really reshape these other parts of your work to be slower and slower. So there's a sort of virtuous cycle that happens there. So those are the three ideas that.
Says we're going to take a quick ad break and then we're going to come back and talk about how someone in like Sarah's job might do things like this.
We're back, and I wanted to take kind of a little bit of a focus on the obsess over quality piece, especially because We've spoken before on the podcast with women who struggle with perfectionism, and we're often kind of giving the opposite advice, like just do B plus job, like it's better to just do it. And sometimes people had this vision of how amazing something needs to be, and in reality something almost as good would be, like that eighty twenty principle kind of thing would get the most
of the way there. So where does that dividing line fall or do you look for different levels of quality depend on which project you're thinking about.
Yeah, perfectionism, it's a big issue, and it's one of the themes I really try to get into in the book. I use it as an excuse to go back and talk about the Beatles recording Sergeant Pepper's, which it's this interesting turning point in the history of music where right before that album, the Beatles to say I did no more touring. They were done with touring. But this opened up this sort of terrifying freedom because if you don't have to replicate the album you're recording on stage, you
could basically do anything in the album. And so they went to the studio after this nineteen sixty eight sort of disastrous tour, I mean, it's a popular tour, but all these bad things happened to him on the tour. This was the We're Bigger than Jesus tour where all
this controversy unfolded. They had complete freedom now because they could bring in any instruments they wanted, they could bring in brass, they could bring in Indian sitars, they could work with tape, speed manipulation, and so there's this perfectionism issue of how do you know when you're done? And the balance they made is, Okay, our goal is to do this really well, to advance the level of quality beyond what we've done before. But they also put stakes
in the ground. So as soon as they had a releasable single, they released that single, and now there is a stake in the ground, like, okay, the rest of this album, we don't have that much more time. So they added constraints to a general quest to do something better than they have before. So trying to do something better than before with constraints, that's tractable in a way of the best thing possible. It can be impossible, and
you could keep working on it forever. I give another example of that of lin Manuel Miranda working on his first play in the Heights, which actually took him seven years. It took him a long time. And the way he navigated perfectionism is they had these regular stakes in the ground where he was working with a performance troop in Manhattan, and every few months or so they would get some actors together and do a reading. Right, we're gonna do
a reading of the newest version of the book. So he had to keep working on it because he needed something new, but he wasn't working on it all the time. He was doing lots of other things. He would come back to it, wait to get inspiration, make meaningful updates, and then they would do another reading. So we had these stakes in the ground that were pushing him to deliver, and he was trying to make things better, but not
this pressure of make the best possible thing. And so I think we can translate that into sort of everyday knowledge work jobs that you have this mindset of I want to get better at what I'm doing. So this current project i'm doing, I want to do well and maybe there's some way I can do this better than the last time I did it. On the other hand, I want to put stakes in the ground. I'm going to guarantee this on a reasonable timeframe. But I'm going to tell my boss I'll have this to you in
two months. You know, you put some stakes in the ground. I got a ship, So this can't be the best thing I've ever produced. But if I give it attention and maybe do something better than I've done before, I'm making progress and I'm happy with it. So it's really that navigating perfectionism versus non caring is really key to a quality obsession.
Yeah, we always say that done is better than perfect, Yes, because something can't be perfect if it's not done.
You know, the most.
Perfect in play in the world that no one ever sees is not perfect because it hasn't been seen, which is a necessary component of it being perfect in the first place. But yeah, if we can sort of shift back to the previous two elements of this slow productivity, I mean, how does someone who has a pretty structured job, who works for someone else decide to do fewer things or work at a natural pace. I mean, I know Sarah has patients scheduled at a certain time at a
certain pace. That is what is expected for her hospital system. You know, there are certain things she does with that, but obviously there's probably ways that she could do fewer other things. So I wonder if you can sort of talk about how people could could navigate that.
Yeah. Well, so I think the target audiences useful to set our constraints. I call it loosely knowledge workers in the book. But there's actually a key attribute of the jobs I'm talking about that makes the advice pretty applicable, and that is a flexibility or unspoken autonomy in workload management. So actually, most knowledge work jobs, most jobs for people do they're on a computer screen most of the day.
There is no explicit system of workload management. There is no explicit system of here's what you're working on, here's when you do do it. Here is the system with which we assign you your work. Most knowledge work jobs don't have that. Work flows informally through email and Slack and conversations. People ask you to do things, You agree to things, meetings show up on your calendar. There's a lot of issues with that flexibility, but we can turn it around like a little Judo throw and say okay,
But that also gives you opportunity. If it's going to be so flexible, that can cause a lot of trouble. You can get really overloaded, you can really get to unsustainable situations. But also you can leverage that same implicit autonomy to build some much smarter approaches. So these are the jobs I'm thinking of. So then we have to be more careful. If we're talking about jobs where there
is a structured workload management, then things get more difficult. So, Sarah, I think doctors are they're kind of on that line because because often doctors are in a clinical structure where it's this is your schedule all day long, this is what you're doing. We have a very structured way of actually filling out your schedule. You do, here's what you do this patient, then that. But as we shift over to more hey I'm out a computer screen and send
a lot of emails. Now we start to get some flexibility, so we talk about doing fewer things. For example, Well, if you have control over your workload, there's a lot of ideas or systems I talk about for how you can manage what's on your plate even without having to say no all the time. So, for example, one of the things I talk about in the book is starting to make a distinction between actively working on and committed to do but not actively working on yet. Right, So
here's what I'm actively working on. Here's my queue of projects I've committed to but I'm not actively working on yet. And as I finish something i'm actively working on, I pull something new from that queue into this list of things I'm actively working on. If you do that and make it transparent, it can really change some of the negative externalities of overload because now when someone says, okay, I need you to really do this, you could say, great,
here's my list. You can see here's the three things I'm working on now, and here's the six things queued up. We'll just put that on the end there and say, hey, you can watch this list. It's transparent, and when this hits my active list, then you know I'm actively working on it. Now. Why does that matter? Because now you can restrict administrative overhead to just the projects you're actively
working on. Now, we're not going to have standing meetings and we're not going to send emails about this project and tell I'm actively working on it, and you don't have to worry that I'm going to forget it because
you can watch it march up that queue. Right and now you've reduced the number of projects on which you have active administrative overhead from ten down to just the three active ones, which is a substantial improvement on your day to day ability to just focus and get things done, not feel overwhelmed, and move things through the system quicker.
So it's an example of what happens once you have some of this implicit autonomy and workload management, you can start trying out some pretty interesting ways of actually making that play to your advantage.
I will say there are a couple of ways that, in my very structured job, some of your principles do kind of make sense. One is being extremely intentional about what is a sustainable workload, in communicating that to who you work with, and ensuring that you are not doing
work that is not necessarily yours to do. So, if you have an x number of patients to see and they want you making xyz rvus, what is the actual physician essential work and what can you not do like printing out pieces of paper and like faxing stuff and things like that. And so I think there's actually more new Portean application to a very structured job. And the other piece would be when you are asked to do
extras which you will do. Even if you are in a primarily clinical role, you always have to think about is this worth having to have multiple things on my plate on a given clinical day where you want your focus to be on the patient. So Laura knows, I've quite a lot of things in the last couple of years so that I can focus on the things that I really care about.
Sarah, can I ask you? I want to ask you a doctor follow up question because it instructs me. So it seems like in all the different disciplines in medicine, the one clinical discipline that seems to have way more of a culture of why don't you ty trate what you want your work to be more so than almost any other, seems to be eered doctors, right, emergency department doctors. That there's like a whole culture there of if you want to say, I'm an emergency department doctor, there's a
huge demand for me. I also love surfing. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do two shifts a week and that's it. And I'm that's fine, that's good money for two shifts a week, and I'm going to surf five days a week. Or whatever. I'm going to spend half the year doing a bunch of shifts here and then half the year doing nothing. And do I have this right? Like what's going on here that that particular subspecialty seems to really embrace experimentation when
it work fits into life. Whereas if you're a whatever, a gas internolo, what do you? I forgot exactly your specialty.
I'm a pediatric endocrinologist, and I can explain this pretty easily. So with my work, there's a ton of continuity. When I go to work on a given outpatient day, one of the things I have to do is follow up all the labs that I sent for my patient from the week before. That's like a good chunk of my day. In addition, er has none of that. They start every single day with a completely blank slate. It doesn't matter
if they work a Monday at Thursday or whatever. There are other medical feels like that critical care is one of them. That's essentially shift work at this point, some types of hospital medicine. But my husband is a surgeon, and they're like me, like, if you operate on someone, you're not going to be like bye, peace out. That
guy's not my problem, Like, there's much more continuity. I have figured out ways to make a sixty percent kind of situation work, but it does take a lot more conscious attention than it would for like an er physician.
You're right now, fascinating, fascinating. Yeah, but but anyways, I love hearing what you said though, right that even when you're your schedule is fixed, the load of patients is something you can work on and the other activities which comes up a lot, Like one of the ideas in the book is for these other activities, like whatever it is when someone asks you to do something, and one of the ideas is never give a yes or no into room, right, So I always say, oh, fantastic, that
sounds really interesting. Well, hey, look I do a very careful time tracking, so let me just I'll check out my calendar. I'll get back to you. So you never give the yes or no in the room when the social pressure is highest, and then you can go back. And one of the things that some people do that I write about is I say, well, if I'm going to agree to this, I'm first going to go find the time when I'm going to do this and put it on my calendar. So now you're actually confronting, like,
what is the footprint of this thing? How much time is it going to take up? Where is that time actually coming from? And often it's in that confrontation of the reality of the time footprint of one of these small asks that you realize I don't have time for this, or I'll have time for this in like six weeks at the soonest, and this needs to be done sooner. Now there's more confidence when you give the follow up, No, hey, I looked into this. I was looking for the time
for it on my calendar. I really have nowhere to squeeze this for at least four weeks, which is too far in the future. Sorry, I can't do it. And it's this like nice way of workload management without having it just in the room be like no, you know, like I don't do things. You know. It's not a yes in a room. It's very reality based. It's based on your real schedule and a confrontation of your time.
People are more likely to respect that, know as well, if you have the reputation of someone who's like very careful about your time, Like I don't think Sarah's just making this up. She'd looked at her calendar and she must be really full, you know. So I like that idea that you have to care about not just the big rocks. It's the little things sometimes that are easy to say yes to in the moment that become killer.
Yeah.
Well, thinking about schedule, Hopefully Sarah will let me move forward a little bit.
In the questions, we.
Were hoping that you could talk Cal a little bit about a day in the life of Cal. Right, our listeners always love hearing how people are managing their lives and their schedules, and so I imagine things are somewhat different day to day, given that you're wearing a lot of hats.
But if there's a broad structure that you have found works for you, maybe you could talk us through what it looks like and we can look at some of the principles that you are implementing as you are setting your daily schedule.
Well, I'm very seasonal, which is one of the ideas from principle too, So what my schedule looks like in part depends on what time of the year it is. So my summer schedule, for example, is very different than a fall teaching schedule. One thing I always keep as a standard and This is something I began doing in my early twenties. It's called fixed schedule productivity. I start
with my working hours. Here's when I work, and it's you know, for me, it's like roughly nine ish to five ish, and I don't go past that, So everything else has to work backwards from that. Rights So I call it a metaproductivity commitment because is a general commitment that forces you to invent lots of smaller tactics and rules and thresholds to try to actually follow it. So first of all, I stick with that. If it can't fit in nine to five, then I can't do it.
So I'll start with that. Then my day will be different depending if I'm teaching or not. So a teaching day, I'll be on campus and I'll be doing I'll try to consolidate most of my meetings and administrative work relating to being a professor and working with students and everything
that'll happen on a teaching day. On a non teaching day, I'll be doing deep work first thing, in the beginning of my workday as far forward as I can push it, and then whatever else will happen in the afternoon, I'll still do deep work on the morning of a teaching day if I can, but it's just going to be a much smaller window. You know, I might get an hour in there. This summer looks different. What I try
to do in the summer is Mondays and Fridays. Nothing on my calendar, keep those consolidated to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. As a professor, I can kind of get away with this for a couple months. Maybe not longer, but for a couple months I can kind of get away from this. So I like this idea of having Mondays and Fridays where you're just you're working. I'm usually writing books in the summer, You're kind of writing till you're done in the early afternoon, thirty minutes of task
and you're done. Only have meetings and calendar things in the middle of the week, and so the summer is going to look different than what's going to happen here. The other rule I have is with podcasting. You know, I introduced podcasting in twenty twenty very worried about as time footprint, and so the rule I made, which I followed ever since it gets one half day a week,
it never gets more time. My podcast gets one half day a week, and so anything new I want to do with it, anything that's going to take more time, I have to figure out how to fit it to a half day this week. So I'm going to have to wait till I make enough money on ads to hire someone to take this off my plate so I can spend more time on this. It's not allowed to grow. So you see throughout my schedules, its constraints are a big deal for me. Work backwards from constraints and do
what you need to do. It's partially why I'm known for a lot of these organizational time management style strategies is because I had to work in this nine to five type of constraint, and so I had to get pretty serious about my time within there if I was going to actually satisfy that constraint with the various things I wanted to do. So I do like placing constraints, and I do like variation within the week, within the months, and within the years.
Well, we're going to take one more quick AD break and then we're going to be back talking a little bit about that time outside nine to five.
We're back, and yeah, so Laura brought up a great point. When we were just speaking, we were talking about the day in the life, and I love the constraints on your day. I think that especially women, that's really common to have because on average, probably more women are doing dropping off, picking up, et cetera. Are you able to I mean, we don't need specifics. Don't worry, no one's
going to like come stock you or anything. But we do have most of our guests share like do you tend to be the drop off parent the pick up parent? What does your activity with your kids look like in the stage of life? How are you enjoying those hours outside of the work.
Well, so I can't stake the bus, but it's a good fifteen minute walk. I don't know the exact distance, which I like actually, so it's like a half mile or so away from our house. My wife and I both like the walk for the drop off, walk to kids for the drop off, because then we get the walk back, which is a nice way to start the morning. And then the afternoon it's who's around, right, so who's around for the pickup? I like the afternoon pickups when I can do it, because it's an excuse the walk,
especially when the weather's nice. It's an excuse to take a walk and then you get it. You wait for the bus and you have to get there early because you know it's hard to predict, and that could be a pretty nice break. Another thing I'm really big on and I started this god back in grad school. It's just like a long habit is having a very rigorous work shut down routine. Right, So, when I'm done with work for the day, I have this routine I go through where I'm really trying to make sure that there
are no open loops left in my head. Right, what am I doing tomorrow? Did I forget anything today? Is there any emergency emails I'm missing? No, that's good. Have I written everything down? There's nothing I'm just keeping track of in my head. Right, Okay, good, we're all set. We know what we're doing tomorrow. All right, shut down work for the day. And then it's a sort of
a cognitive behavioral therapy trick. After you shut down for work, if there's some sort of intrusive rumination this professional hey, are we doing the right thing for this or that, I'm like no, no, no. I went through the shutdown routine, and I would not have concluded that routine. If I didn't actually address all the open loops, We'll deal with
that tomorrow. And that's been really helpful because it allows me to be a lot more present when I'm actually done with work, and especially like the line of work I'm in, because as a semi public figure, there's always stuff going on. There's people saying things about me, there's like big moves that we're doing, there's deals being made. I could, if not careful, be thinking about this and checking in on this and sort of doing emails here and there every waking hour, and that would just make
me miserable. So I rely incredibly heavily on I've shut down work so that I could be one hundred percent president at least to the best of my ability when I'm not working.
And one of the things you do, we learned in slow Productivity is watching movies with a very critical eye.
Maybe you could tell us about.
How you've landed on that as a way to kind of boost your creative abilities while it not being strictly work.
Well, I realized at some point, sort of three kids in oh, I don't have any hobbies anymore, which is pretty common, right. I Mean, I read a lot, but that's kind of professional because I need to read a lot for you know, I work as well. And so I very systematically said, well, I always used to love movies. My wife and I used to see literally everything, right, We would just we lived in Boston near multiple theaters, would just see everything. So I said, I'm going to
get more formal about that. So I'm going to study film. I'm going to read about film. I'm going to sort of run myself through some self education projects on film because I like film and I want to have something like this that I can focus on. This nothing to do with work. And then there was another thing I introduced in my life was working with microelectronics, programming micro controllers. And this wasn't part because I could do it with
my kids and expose them. So my studios here we have of a maker lab with a bunch of circuits and printers and micro controllers and stuff like that. These are both important for two reasons. One, it gives me something like focus on and really get thinking about that has nothing to do with work, right, because, like a lot of people, especially high achieving people, the dream is not to be in a state where you have nothing to do because you go insane. Your brain goes insane
when it's like, what are we thinking about? I'm not just interested in just being here on the beach. We got to think about something, so I wanted to aim it at things that was not professional for anxiety reasons.
And then the film interest had this unexpected secondary positive benefit I talked about in the book, which was studying an art form unrelated to what I do, which is writing, actually made me better at writing because it exposed me to people doing creative, interesting things, but outside of the specific context of my work, and I could find more inspiration over there than I could studying people doing exactly what I was doing, because that's too stressful and I
know them all and it's hey, if they do it in my book doesn't do well, it's bad financially. But film, there's no stakes, it's not my field. And I found that the inspiration studying creative people over there carried over to what I was doing in my writing and actually injected me with some creative juices. So I accidentally found something productive in this complete escape from trying to do things related to work.
Yeah.
I love how you talk about reading other nonfiction. It's always like, well, what are they doing that I didn't do. It's a little similar. I should have done that in the last one. Oh well, yeah, exactly.
Any more questions, Sarah that you have for.
I was just going to say his hobby is also great for crowding out screen time, which is something he talks a lot about on his show. And we've done episodes on hobbies before as well, and I think it's an under I think that could be like another topic for you. Cal like dive deeply into hobbies, because.
I think you're examply into running. She's like, that's my non obsession, you know, marathon training. I love doing thousand piece puzzles. That is something that I have found that keeps me mostly off my phone, not completely. I'm often texting with friends at the same time, but I've gotten pretty good.
At them over time. Kevint convinced any of my kids to do them with me yet, but maybe someday.
I don't think we do have every year. My wife is so much better at them that I am. I'm really bad at puzzles, but it gives me a hope that you said you got better at it.
I did get better.
Well, you start to see like, yeah, that's not going to fit there. I mean, you obviously can see it's not going to fit there, even just thinking in terms of that knobs, that size, and that's you know, it's a it's a skill, but if you wish to get better at it, I am sure that you will. So, Cal, we always end with a love of the week, which is something that we are currently enjoying that you know
we want to share with our listeners. We can go first to give you a minute to think about it, Sarah, did you want to start off?
Well, mine feeds on yours, So I'll give a teaser that Laura is going to talk about a book. So I was like, oh, do I have a book that would have something to do with Laura Cal And I am a very dedicated deep questions listener. Cal, you will know I do this very specific route on Tuesday mornings, and your podcast is always what I listened to. I'm such a nerd anyway, So do my square run listen
to Cal? And So I know what you read because you talk about your books, and I feel like the Venn diagram of what I read and what you read is like the only overlap is Laura Vandercamp.
So I'm in.
I love your books.
What can I say? You guys are both excellent writers. I'm excited to be chatting with you. That is my love of the week.
Thank you so much, Sarah.
I was going to say that one of the fun parts for me of reading Slow Productivity is your extended set piece on John McPhee, who is one of my favorite professors in college. I took his somewhat famous writing nonfiction writing class, and I actually took it the one year he offered it as a freshman seminar. So for many years he's offered it, he offered it as a regular class. My year he offered it as a freshman seminar, and then after that he did it as like a sophomore seminar or something.
But anyway, my year.
Was freshman and it was quite a great class. I was just say one of his books that people might want. I mean, I guess by the time this eras basketball season is over. But if you are missing basketball season, you should read A Sense of Where You Are, which is his biography of Bill Bradley, as one of the best pieces of sports writing ever.
So, cal what do you have for us?
By the way, I talked to Tim Ferriss recently about that. He also took that class at Priston, and he told me, Tim said, I think that writing was the best writing I've still done in my career. On was the writing I did like draft three to try to like get marked up less by Professor McPhee. It's all been downhill
from there. I'll tell you what I'm loving is just a few days ago when we recorded this, I had my first sort of in person book event for like one of my books since before the pandemic, right because I had a book come out in twenty nineteen. We did a traditional book tour. Then I had a book come out in twenty twenty one and that was all virtual, and you know, I've done events for other people's books, but like I have this, this is my first book
that's come out post pandemic. And so I went back to the politics and pros here in DC's where I always do my book launches, and it's like, we're going to have a book launch and it was great. It was a real love fest. I mean, we broke all the fire codes. We had so many people in there.
I sign onto the sidewalk.
Yeah, an hour and forty five minutes because everyone was just like wanted to stay and stay hi and like get something signed. And you know, I've been talking to everyone through a microphone for the last four years, and so to actually be able to for the first time for one of my books and my events to sit down and have so many people from the area to show up and talk to them face to face, not through a microphone or a screen, it was fantastic. I
was like, oh, this is great. I can't do too much of that because I'm an introvert and it drains me, like being in a matrix pod basically, you know, but it's good for me to do every once in a while. So I'm loving that. That was a lot of fun.
That's awesome.
Yeah, and Politics and Pros is an awesome bookstore, so definitely any of our listeners visiting Washington, DC, you should go to check it out. And they have a lot of live author events and other community events, so worth going to. Well, Cal, thank you so much for joining us. Why don't you let our listeners know real quickly where they can find you.
So Calnewport dot com has all the information about me and my podcast is called Deep Questions I'm not on social media, but I am on cal Newport dot com and I am in your ears through deep questions. So if you're interested in my book Slow Productivity, are the other things I'm writing or doing? Check it out there.
Sounds good. Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Well, we are back.
That was so fun interviewing Cal and with both of us. We had quite the time attempting to make sure Sarah and I weren't stepping on each other as we're doing our two person interview, but we're a little rusty at that, but I think we did okay. So this question comes from someone who says she's a long time listener and noticed recently that She says to Sarah that you and Laura have talked a lot about blogs that you read regularly.
She says, do you use some sort of service to send a bunch of blogs to your inbox every day? Or do you visit like the website for each blog every day? How does this physically work?
Yeah?
So I am a feed lely user. Feed Lee is a feed aggregator, meaning that you can subscribe to a number of blogs and then just go to feed lee dot com and then see all of the latest posts from each contributor. And that came about after an app called Google Reader went defunct somewhere in the I don't know, mid teens or something like that, because Feedlee looks a lot like Google Reader. But to me, it seems like
someone was just like, Okay, that's going away. I'm going to make an exact copy of that, and everyone can move to that. And Feedle still works very well. It is free. I love it. I find it really really efficient, and it means I'm never checking to see if someone posts. I will say, every once in a while, something happens with someone's feed and you will stop getting it, and then all of a sudden you'll get like a dump of posts.
But usually if.
You're a creator, you're aware of that and you're gonna fix it. I do subscribe to my own blog on Feedblea, so I can see if any shenanigans are happening with my feed.
Yeah, I was thinking about this.
I'm like, no, I just go to the blog website and the ones that I read regularly tend to post fairly regularly.
So someone like the.
Frugal Girl, she almost always posts in the morning and she posts Monday through Friday on a pretty set schedule, and so if you go to the website at seven point thirty in the morning, probably nine times out of ten there is going to be the new post there. So on some level it's inefficient, But on the other given that it is such a regular posting schedule, it
isn't same with Sarah. She has a pretty regular posting schedule that I just kind of know at this point, So I just go and check the blog later in the day, and most of the time she has in fact posted. Now, if she doesn't, I guess I would go and see that it was the old post, and then I might not go again for another day, and then i'd go check again and she's still not posting.
I guess I'd go in and check another day.
So there's a little bit of inefficiency here, But I don't know. I guess I don't feel like I have to be that tight with my seconds that going to the website is a huge waste of time.
So I have not.
Come up with a more efficient solution, but seems to work okay for me. Well, we have been interviewing cal Newport speaking of people who do things efficiently in this episode, talking about all things slow productivity. Although maybe checking websites individually counts as slow productivity.
I don't know.
But we will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.