On Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. Some here my deep work HQ, a joint is always by my producer Jesse. Jesse I always want to give a quick update to the listeners who submitted their name to you, the potentially participate in the organizational challenge. By the time you're hearing this we have reached out to the initial group of people that I'm going to work with. So if you have not heard
back from us you can assume that you were not selected for that initial group. However, people might drop out or we might decide to do another group or a larger group. So you still may hear from us in the future, but just to update you on that challenge right now we have
reached out to the initial group. I will be talking to them soon and for all of the podcast listeners who are hoping to produce good audio out of this project so you'll be able to hear the real stories of real people who are struggling to organize a disordered life and then hear about what I recommend to them and then hear the after effect of what work what didn't. This is all part of my effort to try to make some of the advice I give here for what we call humanist productivity
make it more real and get away from the abstract. So stay tuned for that. I'm still deciding Jesse whether or not once we produce that package if it should be on the main show or if it should be an in-depth episode because real people could fit in in depth as well. So I'm still thinking about that. Yeah. I guess the one thing I'd say is we got a lot of very qualified applicants and you know as a talented pool with like a lot of people who showed a lot of interest like over like
200. Yeah. So we had to make a lot of hard choices and what we were selecting for in the end is just like the right mix, the right mix of people and circumstances that would work well for what we're doing. Maybe we'll do a bigger project. You know we did this for digital minimalism where we ran a large group of people. It was 1600 people I ran through a digital declutter and got a lot of information back. So maybe down the line we'll do a larger sort of experiment here. So stay tuned
on that. But I do want to continue to make the advice we talked about here on the show more realistic. All right. Well, we have a good show. We have a deep dive coming up that is very much tuned to our current moment, especially here in America. We got some good questions. We got a call about Oliver Berkman and I'm going to talk about Martha Stewart in the final segment. So stay tuned
for that. So first let's get started. Jesse with the deep dive. So I'm recording this episode a few days after the American presidential election for those of us like me who study technology and its impact on our lives elections can be particularly relevant and particularly worrisome. Now why is that it's because the dynamics of the lead up to elections, especially American presidential elections have a way of heightening a lot of the specific dynamics that make modern
technology problematic. I'm going to be very specific about this. First, the environment in the lead up to an election amplifies the interruptive nature of digital content. So what I mean by that is the the interruptive nature of digital content is the idea that you feel compelled to check in on say a social media feed or an online news site or newsletter subscriptions. You feel a need to check in on it during the middle of other things. It does interrupts whatever you're working
on. During elections, this trend or this poll becomes much more heightened because there is this very strong sense that there could be at any moment highly salient breaking news. And it could be something that happened that could change the election or it could be a particular hot take that you want to know about because it's going to make you happy or a take that's going to make you really upset about what's going on. Pull numbers as a classic example of these. It's intermittent
reinforcement. They could drop at any moment and it's someone could be commenting on them. So during election seasons, this idea that I need to pull out that phone one more time, that becomes extra strong. Why is that a problem? Because context switching is an expensive neural operation.
When you turn your attention from the conversation that you're having from the book you're trying to read, the memo you're trying to write, the meeting you're trying to pay attention to, when you switch your attention from that to a phone and you see something as highly salient and emotionally arousing, it triggers an expensive cognitive context shift within your own head. These operations can take 510 up to 15 or 20 minutes for your mind to completely change as cognitive context.
But you're not given it time to do that. You're glancing, you're initiating, and then you're returning to what you're doing before. So you've triggered this expensive change of where your mind is focused and you abort that change and try to bring it back to what you're doing before. And before your attention can fully settle on what you're actually trying to do, you check something else and initiate a new unrelated change. The result is an incoherent cognitive context.
You feel mentally exhausted and drained. That feeling that people associate with the sort of pre-election period. A big part of that is actually an exhausted brain. It can't keep switching back cognitive context. The second issue that's amplified with technology during the pre-election season is that the emotional salience of the content you're looking at is amplified. That is, it's ability to create
a strong emotional reaction is much more heightened than a typical content cycle. You're much more likely to see something that is going to make you aroused in the sense of very happy, very upset, outraged, afraid, frustrated, panicky, dread. And why this happens is because there's always a competition going on to create the content that's going to move to the top of the curation wars. You have to remember if you're running a platform like Twitter, there's hundreds of millions
of tweets being generated a day. The average user is going to see a couple hundred. So there's this intense informational Darwinian battle for what actually makes it to your attention. It's somewhat algorithmic. A lot of it actually has to do with more cybernetic dynamics such as amplification through power law, expanding follower graphs. I actually wrote a whole New Yorker piece about this two years ago where I got into how Twitter works and selects content. It's not just digital.
It's people plus digital. But the point is it's an incredibly complex competition. The things that are most arousing tend to win. You have a lot of competition to win. A lot of people are trying to gain and win the attention game during the election. So they're really pushing and trying all sorts of different angles to get to the top of this. Catch your attention, tournament. And as a result, the stuff you see in election cycle just hits that nervous system. And it's very innovating
and that itself is also very draining and exhausting. Right? So now that the election is over and our minds are hopelessly scrambled and our nervous systems are strung out, what should we be? Listers of this podcast, conscious users of technologies and seeker of the deep life. What do we do? Well, I wrote an essay about this for my newsletter at calnewport.com. It has a big proposal. I think it's the right proposal. And that's what I want to go through today in today's deep dive.
So if you're watching this episode instead of just listening, you'll see I have loaded that essay up on my screen here. This was on calnewport.com. It was also sent to people who subscribed to my email newsletter. The title of this piece is after you vote unplug. All right. So I want to start with the suggestion. So here's the meat of what I'm suggesting. I'm going to read here from the article. Here I have a suggestion that I think could be healing for all points of the political spectrum.
Use the stress of this election to be the final push needed to step away from the exhausting digital chatter that's been dominating your brain. So what I'm suggesting in this article is in the post election period, you take a substantial break from these digital content sources that have been so exhausting and draining over the past few months. Use the election as an excuse to at least temporarily reform your relationship with the digital. So what does that mean?
Step away. Well, I have four specific suggestions I give in the article. Number one, I say take a break from social media. I mean that stop, stop looking at, stop posting. Just go right now. Call Turkey. I mean, unless you are a political commentator who makes a living off of like Twitter commentary and your sub stack. So basically, unless you're like Matthew, you glacius, take a break from social media. Don't look at it. Take the apps off your phone.
Right? So they're just not there. Log out on your computer. So it's not easy on safari on your phone just to go to the sites and look in it. Certainly don't post anything on it. Don't seek out hot takes on it as we'll soon cover. There's better places to get information right now and you don't need information all the time. Social media, I think, is probably the the worst of the offenders in terms of a negative physiological and psychological impact on you during the election season.
Because of the dynamics we just discussed social media sort of the worst offender. So I have the strongest suggestion there. Take a break. All right. Suggested number two. Numbering from the article here. Stop listening to news podcast. Adjusted. We got to be really clear. This is not a news podcast. This podcast is the anecdote. Right? This will be the anecdote to an anecdote. An anecdote. And we'll tell some anecdotes, but it's the antidote to the news podcast. I'm a fan of
news podcast, by the way. I think it's fantastic. It's like harkening back to the days where you would listen to the radio news. But we got to take a break from it now. There's so much you've been so immersed in this information. And what you want to take a break from is just people having just these conversations about what's happening and how they feel about it. You don't need to be immersed further in the trauma or celebration depending on what side of the political spectrum
you are right now with strangers. So we're going to take a temporary break from news podcast. That's both news roundup style podcasts like the daily or if you're center right, like the dispatch. But also like the news analysis podcast or the independent media podcast. So you know, Barry Weiss is honestly podcast or whether she calls it now where people are talking about the news.
We're taking a temporary break from these. Not forever. We're taking temporary break. All right, third suggestion unsubscribe at least for a while from the political newsletters clogging your impact inbox with their hot takes and tired in fighting. This might be more of a DC thing. I don't know, Jesse, this might be something that like normal people don't do. But here in DC, people subscribe to email newsletters that have all these insider hot takes on political stuff.
I mean, I mean, there's so many of them around here because there's so many political experts here and this is a good business or job for them or whatever. If you subscribe to these, do you get like the silver bulletin or you know, Jonah Goldberg or whatever it is, this is a good time to temporarily take a break. We're trying to again get away from this content and subject matter that we're associating with being burnt out with being drained. Again,
we're not we're coming back to this. We're not putting these people out of business. We're taking a break. Right, finally, this is the most either confusing or most controversial. It's all going to read here specifically. I suggest you switch to a slower pace of media consumption with the formats
that remain. Don't laugh at this suggestion because I'm actually serious. Consider picking up the occasional old-fashioned printed newspaper free from algorithmic optimization and clickbait curation at your local coffee shop or library to check in all at once on anything major going on in the world. I think I might set up a Sunday only paper subscription as my main source of news for the rest of the
fall. So you want to get some news still. I think that's fine. It's also would be stressful to be cut off completely from the world during a time, especially in our country of the turmoil of a post-election period, especially like a highly fraught election like we just went through. But I'm saying we are slowing down that consumption is what I'm suggesting. We're not on social media. We're not getting newsletters not getting in podcasts. I'm saying pick up a newspaper. I say coffee shop
because I don't know if you've seen this, Jesse. Starbucks sells newspapers. It's interesting they're there, right? Your library has the newspaper every day. So like any day you could walk by the library and sit down and read the front page of the newspaper. I don't get any paper newspaper, but I am considering signing up for a Sunday only paper subscription for the near future. And for me, just think I will read section A of that paper on Sundays.
This gives you the news. You will be up to date. In fact, you will be more up to date on the news of the country and the world doing that than someone who's on their phone all the time. Because the newspaper is not algorithmic. A newspaper has no way of customizing what you see on the front page to your particular interest. And therefore keeping out of your site stuff that you don't have a preexisting interest in. They just show you the articles.
You are going to see what's happening in Turkey, for example, and Kurdistan and the missile barrage is excited. You might not have ever heard about that because it's not big on social media. You're going to hear about it, right? You're going to hear more digested takes. It's like this is covering, I don't need to be ticked, talk up to the beat on all the back and forth between the new administration and the old administration and America. Why don't I just read an article about
what was the most important thing that happened? Oh, they hadn't argued about this. I see it. I hear the quotes. Now I'm done. You're taking in news. You're not less informed. But the footprint of this news on your day-to-day attentional landscape is now greatly reduced. All right. That's my suggestion about what to take out of your life. What should you then do with the new found free attention? I don't even say free time so much as
free attention. What you're freeing up here is attention autonomy when you're not constantly looking at the phone. What you do with this? Well, in the article I talk about, I'll read it here. Equally important is how you redirect your newly liberated attention. Consider aiming it toward real community with real people who actually live near you to retrain your brain to stop thinking of the world that's hopelessly fractured into vicious tribes.
And I say in the article, and I guess I should say this right now in the podcast, but if right now you're scouring this post, the seek evidence has to whether I'm friend or foe, then you're already severely suffering from this malady. When you're online, it's all about the bad and the good. And not just the bad and the good, but making sure that you're sufficiently signaling to your team that you're on their team, this becomes the most important thing. And then make your
teams boundaries stronger. You have to make the other team be defined, increasingly, dire and irredeemable. That becomes your reality. When you're on that digital world, that becomes your reality. You have a hate in your heart for people you've never met. You see people, when you're on social media so much, you see people through suspicious, like what team are they on? And I'm looking for science to try to signify it.
You'd be surprised or maybe not by how much sort of upset, I would say, communication I get about. Why aren't you specifically signaling your allegiance to this particular issue I care about? You're not signaling publicly a legion to a thing I care about to me to the people writing in is very difficult for them. That is a weird mindset. Until 10 years ago, it is a weird way to go through the world. You wouldn't walk into the supermarket in 1985 and be like, you better tell me
whether or not you voted for Reagan. And if you didn't vote for Reagan, why aren't you going around talking about how much of a supporter, Jimmy Carter, you are, whatever. It's a weird thing that digital media created and we don't realize it's overcoming our world. So go spend time with real people. People you can see, people that you live with doing things with them that's unrelated to like whatever fights are going on online. It rewires your perception of the world.
People who spend time with real people and real situations have a lot harder time seeing the world through a lens of hatred. That's because that's how we're wired to live or wired to cooperate. We talked about the Morris book Tribal when I did my roundup of books I read last month. He argues that the human tribal instinct is one of actual cooperation. That's what allowed homeless sapiens to succeed. It's that we can cooperate and empathize with people that we don't
know. They're not in our close family or kin. That's what allowed homeless sapiens to succeed at a global level where other close hominid, closely related hominid species did not because they basically just treated everyone. They had no way of cooperating with people that wasn't direct kin. They would just kill them. The neanderthals could never actually grow large trade networks or cities or the types of things homeless sapiens do. Lean into that human instinct,
be around real people. It will really retrain. You'll just feel happier. You'll feel less upset. Another suggestion. Consider reading books again. There's a pleasure in the conquest of deep ideas that's been lost as we thrashed in a digital sea of turning distraction. Books slow down your mind. Books give you a deeper understanding of issue than you'll get online. Books challenge your perceptions or sharpen and sophisticated your understandings and beliefs in ways they couldn't
before. Books change the way you understand the world. Go back to reading more books. Books about whatever, just as a principle. But also, if you're having a strong reaction to the election, the right way in my opinion that try to make sense, you feel like you don't understand the
the world. You don't understand our country. The right way to make sense of things is not trying to sift through 50,000 hot takes or 500 different podcasts interviews with people pontificating me and hope that sort of out of that morass of highly engaging random intention seeking content, better understanding will come. It's the, I think, the slow encounter with relevant ideas. And books are the way to do it. Re-books you think are going to help you better understand what's
going on in your country. And it's a it's a slower. It feels meaningful. I went through this in 2016. I remember doing this very clearly. That simpler time 2016, Jesse. I remember we're coming out of eight years of Obama, you know, hope, red, blue. And if you were living in a coastal city and you're like an academic like I was, like everything's great, everyone's happy. I mean, um, Obama's awesome. There's like some weird tea party people, but I think they just like
tricorder hats and like that was just our world. And then, uh, so the 2016 Trump victory much more, so I think then the 2024 one was super surprising. And I remember having this feeling, it's just, you know, I East Coast intellectual my whole life of bafflement. I remember that like I don't understand. I'm a bomb supporter reading the New York Times. I don't understand how anyone could vote for Doncho. I remember having this bafflement, right? Because I just had never been exposed to,
you know, whatever that part, um, what was going on. I had no empathy with the mindset. Um, and so what I did because I'm a nerd this way is I got a bunch of books. I got a bunch of books. And I was like, I'm going to read and I read on the left and the right. All like center left center right stuff, right? Because I like reactionary far right stuff is not interesting to me. And um, I wasn't interested in like far left type stuff or whatever, but I was
reading, and I don't remember, I remember some of the books, but not of them. Like I remember reading, um, like Thomas Frank's had this book called Listen Liberal that was talking about the evolution of the Democratic Party from its working class coalition and then in the post Nixon era, how, uh, it moved and re-aligned around more like salary economic elites, like lawyers and, uh, had,
you know, finance years and how this happens or during the Clinton era. Um, and, and this, this movement happened in part because the Democratic Party was upset with their working class base because of, uh, support for Vietnam and lack of support for civil rights. And it was like interesting. Um, I was, I read some, you've all leavened how to book coming from the center right. I remember reading that book. I was reading these books. I tried to understand, um, like how did the
modern right feel? What it had? What's going on with the modern left? And I remember it was very calming because reading is slow and it's, it calms the nervous system and you feel like the structures of knowledge are complicating themselves and it feels productive, but it's sort of a emotional
and, uh, in some sense for me, it was very helpful. I remember it was like something to do and, uh, uh, what I, it also changed like it changed my perception of the world in ways that I think was, um, a useful for me going to the world became a more complicated place in a way that I think was useful. So there's books read, don't scroll, read, don't scroll. That's the right way. Same if you're on the
right as well. Let's say like you're super celebratory or this or that it's gratuitous to just say I'm going to just bathe in, you know, people dunking online, right? Understand like what's going on with my party? What is the potential positive future? What are the traps to avoid? Like what's happening? Like get read and get get into the complexity of what's going on, right? Um, as soon as reading slows things down, it makes the world richer, makes you get rid of the, the pot nerves, right? Like
people in a library are not stressed. Being around books is not stressful. So, um, I suggest reading final suggestion from the book, spin more time in nature, the discover that despite the apocalyptic dinner of the online world, it's analog counterpart persist and is beautiful. We feel good when we're in nature. Sunshine, walking in nature trail. It just resets, it resets our nervous systems, which had been artificially put out a whack because of the digital. Go outside, go outside this fall,
go outside this winner. You know, um, that makes a big difference. All right, so they're my advice, right? So okay, quick summary, the suggestions of what the temporarily walk away from social media, political podcast, political newspapers, um, and to move the slower media consumption, things to do to fill this newly liberated attention, read books,
meet real people and spend more time outside. Now how long should we do this? Because again, I said I'm not talking about, um, a permanent disconnect from like political news sources. Here is the, the good news about the American election schedule. We do these elections in November, but nothing changes till January. Right? So there's no, um, like to do in other countries,
we have this election in November next week. You know, the new person takes over. So like we, and whether we're like worried or celebrating this new person, we really want to be up the date on like what's happening and what they're doing. It really matters. We have in the American system this break. Nothing can really happen between November and January except for pontification. Nothing can really happen except for the search for clicks except for the challenge
online to win the attention curation tournament. So take a break till the new year. I think that's the right timing. You're not missing much. You got holidays that are centered on family. We got things giving. We got Chris McCuhm, I'm sure if you know this, but Hanukkah is starting on the same on Christmas day or some or Christmas eve or Christmas day. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it's a rare, um, a rare confluence of those two things. Um, we got back going on. We got more
importantly than all three of those baseball hot stove season. Juan Soto is meeting with Steve Cohen, everyone. This is something you could be paying attention to right now. I think that's good to pay attention to. Someone actually wrote me back to us. He when I posted this newsletter. And they wrote me back of like, yeah, um, I've been doing this and a lot of people actually, by the way, they wrote me back and said they started this like a few weeks before the election.
They were just done. Mm-hmm. Right. And they're kind of in a happier place than any of us right now, probably. But someone wrote back and said they was like, I've been doing it for two weeks, but one of the things I've been struggling with is sports news. I was like, oh, no, no, no, that's, that's good. Actually, you want to spend time with sports news. That's the solution to healing because I need my baseball trade rumors. All right. So do it for the, do it for the fall.
And then the new year you can reevaluate. If you want to reevaluate smartly, maybe reread my book digital minimalism and it'll talk about how to, how to re-enter technology into your life after a break. But the main thing I want to suggest is just take this political break and then do this act of alternative activities. Do this pretty hardcore for the rest of November for all December. Just let your body reset. Let your mind reset. You can revisit the world of politics in a more
serious way in the new year. So let me end this day by by reading the paragraph that ended this article. The Republic will still stand without our constant digital vigilance, but it's unclear if our mental health can survive the status quo. And I really believe that. So let's all unplug. Time to take a break. I have a couple of follow up questions. Yeah. What I think about the Met's chance of signing Wantsoto. It's a good question. Pretty strong actually. I think, I think
you'll spend whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It'll be fun for us to see him though. In the Middle East, it's like we get to see Harper a lot still. So I guess that'd be fun. The thing that that Doug always says is how the free agency takes so long at baseball. It's just so drawn out. And it's like, I hate it. Orable. Yeah. But anyway, did you use chat GPT to make that image?
Yeah. I could tell. I was just messing around with that. Isn't it creepy? They all look the same, but I could tell you probably put like I want a voting sticker and then like, I just curious. Yeah. It's just curious. I don't think I'll be using chat GPT for most images in the world. Because here, let me load this on the screen. If people are watching, I'll make it big. It's so creepy. They all look the same. You can tell. But let me show you like the things that are creepy.
Like, yeah, there's an I voted sticker. But the the font is weird, right? Like it's kind of weird and gothic. And there's someone reading, but her face looks weird. Like, when I look at this picture, so if you're just listing, there's a young woman reading a book by a creek with an I voted sticker on conceptually. This is like a good image for this article. Like, you've, you've, because the thing the title was after you vote on plug. So it's like, I went from
voting to I'm reading a book by a creek. But everything about this picture screams that if that, that young woman turns slowly to look at the camera, she would like her mouth would be so shut. And her eyes would be red. You know what I mean? Like, you just, you feel like this is the setup of a creepy scene in like a Blumhouse movie. Or that she's just like that, like she's just reading there. And it zooms out. And it's just corpses everywhere. Like, don't you
get that sense? Yeah. She's on a mountain of corpses. She, she zooms out and like, there's some sort of like dinosaur in the water. I don't know. Man, AI makes creepy pictures. A couple other quick questions. I thought you did get the newspaper every day. I used to get the post. Okay, you stopped that. We weren't keeping up. Okay, it was too much news. And then it was, it was feeling wasteful. Next up, when you do reconnect, what news podcast
dealists do? I feel like our audience would be curious. Well, I don't do news roundup podcast because we used to get the paper. I usually just read the paper online. But I do like someone like the different news commentary podcast. Like what? Well, so the thing I do typically is I'm often chasing guests. Some interested in particular guest. But I do like listening to center right center left commentary podcast because I feel like those you read a balance of those,
you get a really good, like kind of a non-pulimical understanding of what's going on. And it's sort of good to try to balance those things. Like a good center right podcast would be like listening to Andrew Sullivan. You know, he used to editor of the New Republic. He used to write for New York magazine. Has a British accent, which makes him like 25% smarter. Which is like, it's true. I was just we've joking about it. But like all of our Berkman on the show, that accent gave him 20 IQ points.
He's like, oh, yes, profound. So, you know, things like that are interesting. I think I think of Ezra Klein as center left. You have a very policy focus. So I'm brilliant guy, brilliant interviewer. So if you take like Sullivan and Klein and sort of like those are good, you're going to get kind of an interesting balance tank. Sometimes like Sam Harris will have on interesting, especially when Sam Harris is doing like technology, I think is really interesting. He has that way of just
slowly trying to break down and understand what's going on. And so I'll listen to his sometimes. That's what I listen to. He has a good question. I don't think a ton of political content. That's a good answer. But I'm missing some. There's definitely more. There's definitely more I listen to sometimes. Cool. And then lastly with the newsletters, I remember when I was just started listening to your podcast when you started, I used to have a lot of newsletters. But now I trimmed
like a lot of them. So I'm very selective about my newsletters that come into my box in box. Yeah, I think that's probably good. I mean, you mainly need mine. Mine has been like very sporadic recently. I do. My plan is to go back. There should be a weekly. I want to write my newsletter weekly. So I'm working on some schedule template changes that's going to make that possible. I'm not quite there. I would like to be there for the New Year's. I think more than
once a week is like too much. Yeah. That's what I'm going for. I might have some sort of more synergy, but like we did today, where I write a newsletter on something to really organize my thoughts. And then I can use that as the foundation for a deep dive on the podcast. I'm thinking about doing something like that. But I'm not quite there. Not quite there yet. I just have so much
writing I do. Yeah. You know, I just have a lot more writing. I use the newsletter. What I probably need to go back to is I used to write the newsletter in the evening, but it's because my I had babies before. So like they would go to bed at, you know, 630. And then I could just choose one night a week and sit in the big leather chair. Longtime listeners know about the big leather chair. It's in the big leather chair put on a record right. My newsletter is like nice
and meditative. But now my kids are like, staying up later than I am. Yeah. And it's just interesting. That's not as much of an option anymore. So I got to figure this out. But yeah, be selective with newsletters. Definitely like you subscribe to newsletter for the election cycle. It's unsubscribe left and right. Nate silver was very clever. It's not super clever, but a smart move. You know, Nate silver, the election forecaster. He turned off as we got to the fall. He turned
off monthly subscriptions. Oh, he's like, I only have annual subscriptions. Because he knew like a lot of people like all I really care about is your discussions of your model in the lead up to the election. So he's like, fine, but you still have to subscribe for a whole year, which is smart. Because then when you finally get around to, okay, now I can finally unsubscribe. He's like, there's like some other like midterm like another election happening. So we'll see.
All right. So that's it for the deep dive. We got some good questions coming up. We're covering a lot of topics in those questions. But first, you're from one of our sponsors. I want to talk in particular about our friends at notion. Notion combines your note stocks and projects in the one space that's simple and beautifully designed. And now we have the new notion AI, which has the capabilities of multiple AI tools built in, which means you can search, generate, analyze, and chat
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There's this new beta feature called AI Connectors, which allows us to search across other apps that are relevant like Slack discussions, Google Docs, etc. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash Cal. Do that in all lower case letters. Notion.com slash Cal. To try the powerful, easy to use notion AI today. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. That's Notion.com slash Cal. I also want to talk about our friends at
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Then we got first. First question comes from Rebecca. With several years worth of emails, notes, and files spread across various formats and locations, how can I best approach consolidating this information without succumbing to overwhelm? Amation used notion. We said that every for notion. Move it all on there, but use my promo code. Okay. So here's what I my typical thought for organizing information. You need a digital and physical filing cabinet. Physical filing cabinet
is obvious. It's a literal thing. It's a filing cabinet. You have folders, manoeuvr folders within bigger hanging folders. You put actual pieces of the paper in there. Digital filing cabinets is like a particular directory tree within your computer where you store information that you want to keep. So like on my computer, the folder is called administrative. And then underneath that, I have all sorts of subfolders for various things. Like here is stuff related, like digital files
related to tax filings. Here's stuff related to like important Georgetown like contracts or whatever. So digital treat it like a physical filing family. You have a particular digital filing cabinet. I believe in encrypted backup of digital filing cabinets. I use Dropbox. And so it's automatically synced and stored encrypted on the Dropbox server. So if my computer is destroyed or lost, I'm not losing those important files. I can access them online and I can re-sync those files to a new
computer when I get it. All right. If something is important, it should go in one of those two things. It's like you say here, like what do I do with the years worth of emails? Well, nothing. Most emails, if you just have them stored in your inbox, they're just in your inbox. I don't treat that particularly special. If there's a particular piece of information that arrived in an email that's important, print it and put it in a proper folder in your physical filing cabinet or export it as a
PDF and put it in an appropriate file within your digital filing folders. And what I mean by export it, well, technically speaking, the way I take things like emails and I store them, you just go to print, like you're printing it. And then when you select a printer, at least the way it works on Mac, you can say open and preview or print the PDF. And so it just takes like whatever what a printed and it puts in a PDF file and you can just save that and move it into the filing cabinet.
All right. So just have one digital one physical notice where you don't have to replicate between the two. Some stuff can be that's fine. Right. Like maybe you someone sends you as a PDF, a contract and you throw it in your digital, but you printed it to sign it and maybe you want to store the printed but you don't have to duplicate between the two. But that's where important stuff goes. Nothing else is a trusted storage system to use a terminology from David Allen.
So if something arrived in your email that's important, it is not stored until it's in one of those cabinets, digital or physical. Someone gives you a paper, it comes through the mailbox, you get mail to form, attacks, former contractor, whatever. It is not stored until you have it in a folder in your physical mailing cabinet or in your digital file storage, just either one of those two things. All right. So just simplify where things can be stored, physical and digital and don't consider
things stored until it's in one of those places. Everything else you don't have to stress about. Like if you have a bunch of emails, archives and Gmail, who cares? The key stuff has been put in one of those folders. All right. What do you got next? Next question is from Anonymous. How can I go out on my own when my company has a strict conflict interest policy preventing you from performing my craft on the side? I'm a high performer and objectively good at my craft, but would eventually like
to start my own indie business. This goes directly against your advice to prove that you can make money doing something before quitting leaving your day job to pursue your own venture. So the specific advice that Anonymous is talking about comes from my book, So Good, They Can Ignore You. Right. Said use money as a neutral indicator of value. And the specific advice was to know if what you want to do, let's say, is like a new job is valuable. See if you can get people
to give you money for it. And the key idea here is that people are happy to give you verbal praise or affirmation. It costs them nothing and it seems like the pleasant, sociable thing to do. Hey, that's a great idea. Your business idea is great. You should just go for it. I wish I could do that. You're definitely going to be successful. That means nothing, right? They might not know anything about it or they're just trying to be nice, but people do not like to give you their money.
So you're like, okay, can I sell enough of this thing to support myself and then I no longer do my job? Well, if you can't, people aren't willing to give you your money for the thing you're selling that it's not good enough for you to make a living on it. Right. Can I get a big enough book, can I get a big book advance on this book idea? If not, then maybe it's not the great book idea. I thought it was et cetera. So that's what we mean by money as a neutral indicator of value.
So the person asking the question here is same, but I can't go and try my thing on the side because I signed a contract. Well, that's true. You can't. If you signed a contract that says, look, I am a writer for this magazine and I'm not allowed to write for any where these other magazines while I'm here, then yeah, you can't go right for other magazines while you're here. Right. Contract is a contract. Can you still apply the advice, though? Yes. In a couple of
very specific ways. And the main way is a job offer. Don't like your current job. You want to bring your skills somewhere else where the setup better fits your lifestyle-centric planning vision. You're allowed to go solicit job offers. If someone says, we will pay you this much money for you to come work for us, that's a fantastic neutral indicator of value. Oh, my skills
are valued by them. Now I can quit my job and go take that other job. So you can actually just go out to the marketplace and see if in the other type of work you want to do with your skills, it's better going to fit your lifestyle. Can you get a job offer that is sufficiently large? That's also using money as a as a neutral indicator of value. All right. And that probably the main thing you could do in a situation like that. All right. What do we got next? Does that make you
sign a conflict of interest? I think I did. I said, you're not allowed to. What would you be doing on this side? You're not allowed to. We need an enemy podcast. As I was going to say, you're not allowed to produce podcast for, we don't have an enemy podcast. We need a nemesis. I don't know who the nemesis would be of our podcast. Maybe we should just choose someone famous. Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan. His podcast is so big. You are not allowed to go produce Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm sorry.
I put it in a contract. I was listening to him in Elon the other day and I guess Jamie does play a lot of golf. That's a pretty good job. And you already have a kind of similar name. I mean, if he just started saying Jesse instead of Jamie, how many people you think would really notice? Like casual listeners like, yeah, there's like, you never see his face. You don't know what he looks like. He's he kind of looks like you. I mean, he's tall. And I think he has blonde hair.
And he plays golf. Yeah. Yeah. If you've been wondering, it is true. Jesse is the same as Jamie from the Joe Rogan podcast. He makes a ton of money doing that because he makes like 30 million a year. I hope so. Yeah. I mean, I really do. That's their whole, like my main inspiration I derive from Joe Rogan other than like taking lots of human growth hormone is he kept his operation small. Like his biggest staffing, the biggest like staffing he has is actually security. I mean, it really
is him and Jamie. Like I just knowing from I know a lot of people who know him or have been on his show, it's like Jamie does the things and puts the files online and runs it and that's it. And then like Joe books, he kind of just text guests specifically. Like so how you get on the Joe Rogan podcast from what I understand, never been on the show, but I know that's people who have is typically someone
you know in common will reach out and be like, can I give your phone number to Joe? And then he'll just like text you and be like, Hey, man, can we chat? And then he'll talk to you on the phone. And like, this could be cool. I think we should talk. And then that's that. I think they have someone who like does travel booking or something. But when you go on the show, can you use a gym? Don't they have a sick gym at their studio? Yeah, but I'm like, worry, be like you use it before.
I think I probably do it both. And then you just spend the whole day there pouring sweat. You're just in there. Yeah. Like I'm in there just vomiting into a bucket, just pouring sweat. That ripped my pack muscle. I have an arrow through my shoulder because I was trying to like, he does a lot of like elk hunting. And I put an arrow through my shoulder. Yes, I can go. I can go. But yes, Jesse is not allowed. I'm putting my foot down. He's not allowed to produce Joe
Rogan's podcast and mine. Right. You can't have two giants competing for the same attention. There's only room in American cultural life for one of these two shows where both B. Ameth's I think between us, we do something like five million views a week between us and Joe Rogan's podcast. It were very powerful. You know, between our episode on time block planning. And Joe's episode where he interviewed Donald Trump. 200 million views combined.
All right. So that's a lot of cultural power we have. We can't, you know, you put two, you put two alphas in them in a rink, right? You put two bowls in the same paddock. It's not going to work. Sorry, Jesse. We got you got to choose your allegiance. See their me or Rogan. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Stephen. I'm a new listener and just finished your episode about the eight productivity books I can change your life. What is humanist productivity?
Well, I like that episode. I don't remember what I remember maybe like half of what those books were. That episode was from what last year. I'll pull it up while you answer. Yeah. Okay. So humanist productivity. I've been using that term or variations of that term for a while. I actually did a whole interview about that on Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus's and Clay Skippers show. I think it was titled like humanist productivity. All right. So what's the deal here? Well,
what do we mean by productivity? There's two big definitions that have both explicitly and implicitly dominated sort of economic life. And then there's humanist productivity, which is going to be a third option, which I think is better. So the first definition of productivity is the oldest definition of productivity. This emerges as an economic concept in the 18th century. Comes out of agricultural production and then moves on to industrial production. And it's a ratio.
The ratio of output per unit input. So bushels of corn per acres of land cultivated. Number of model teas produce per paid worker hour. Right. In classic economics, typically the goal for anything that produces things is to increase that ratio as much as possible. When you hear, for example, about a country's productivity or productivity growth, this is the style of productivity they're measuring. So typically they'll measure the economic output of a sector and
they'll divide it by the number of people who work in the sector. So there it's like dollars generated per worker. When that number goes up, productivity is up. When that number goes down, productivity is down. All right. So ratio based productivity is a standard economic metric that's named productivity. It was at the core of most of the economic growth that funded what we think of as the Western world today. This is Peter Drucker's argument. This idea of we're measuring this carefully.
And we keep looking for innovations and technique or processes that makes this ratio bigger. And it just led to sort of like massive explosions and economic growth. But it's really something that discusses it's relevant to production processes. All right. So then knowledge work comes along. It comes a major sector in the 20th century. And this ratio based definition of productivity doesn't cleanly apply. Why? Because a knowledge worker, someone who's sitting and working at a desk,
doesn't just produce wheat or doesn't just produce model teas. There's not a clean output to measure. They work on many different things. Many different projects, some internal, some external. Often these projects are collaborative. So their role within the project is actually hard to actually separate or isolate. And so you don't have a ratio to measure anymore. I can't give you a number that for most knowledge work positions, it says here's your productivity number. We want to
go up and down. So what did we do? We invented the second major notion of productivity. And this was implicit. No one really said this out loud until I came along with my book, Slow Productivity, where I make this big argument. But we came up with the knowledge work space with what I call pseudo productivity. And it says, okay, if we can't explicitly manage or measure productivity because you're working on too many things, we will just use instead visible effort as a proxy
for useful effort. The more you're doing the better, we can't kind of figure out what you're doing or what you're doing, like how much it matters or its direct impact on the bottom line. But more visible activity is better than less. That's pseudo productivity. That has implicitly been how we managed knowledge work since like the 1950s. In an age of offices you came to in typewriters, it worked okay. It's not a great measure, but it didn't cause a lot of problems. It just meant
like you had to be at the office. And when you're at the office, you know, try to hide the fact that you're on your third martini of lunch, right? You know, just kind of be there be doing stuff. Don't spend too much time with the water cooler. Suteur productivity went off to rails once we had the front office IT revolution. Once we had email and then mobile computing, the problem was there was now no escape from opportunities to demonstrate activity because you could always be checking in
on things, answering emails, working on work wherever you happened to be. And this is when knowledge work became exhausting. It's when knowledge work eventually became deranging because now you as the individual had to constantly fight this battle between work and other things are important to you in your life. The boundary was gone. Inequities became amplified. The 23 year old with nothing going on can very easily just demonstrate visible activity by doing nonsense, slack and email answering
late into the night. Whereas the people with families or caring for sick relatives or just other things going on that are important to them in their life couldn't do this as much. And now they're suffering into this measure even though the 23 year old doing slack in the middle of the night is not actually producing more value. If you had a way to really measure that. So we had the ratio based productivity followed by pseudo productivity. Two minutes productivity says
no, no, no, the thing we want to optimize is your flourishing as a person. It's the type of productivity I talk about here on the show. The reason why I want you to take control over what you have to do and control over your time and attention is so that you are in control of your life. Once you're in control of your life aim it towards where you want it to go. Now part of that is
beat on top of your work, being able to accomplish the stuff. Then not only helps you keep your job but helps you shape your career in the directions that are compatible with your vision of an ideal
lifestyle. So this is a very important part of flourishing but allows you to do it on your own terms and do not have this take up all of your time and have other time to do other things and then make sure these other things are important become a part of your life to make sure your kids get what they need that your soul gets what you need that your community gets from you what it needs
from a leadership perspective. So I'm a big believer for the individual through deploy the tools of productivity we discuss towards human flourishing and that is different than ratio based productivity which is trying to optimize output that's different than pseudo productivity which is trying to optimize visible activity. And so that's what we talk about
here. It is my response to the anti productivity movement. I think the anti productivity movement tends to argue that like any discussion of productivity is about trying to move humans back towards this industrial ratio based version of productivity and I say it doesn't have to be. The anti productivity movement tries to make this sort of false binary choice.
Either you become like the human equivalent of the model to assembly line where like we're trying to squeeze out as much production as possible or your only other choice is to step away from productivity discourses and I guess write sub stacks about late sage capitalism. I say no there's a third choice. Use the tools of productivity to build a life of human flourishing because here's the thing. Souter productivity is extremely stressful. Steping away from any type of organizational
thinking is also very stressful. You're going to be working more you're going to be more stressed you're going to be more frazzled more frustrated more upset. So the solution here is to learn the tools you need to control your test and time and attention but then you being control of what you want aim towards and you should aim towards human flourishing. That's what humanism is about. So we call
it humanist productivity. I have the books. All right. What were the eight eight were seven habits of highly effective people getting things done for our work week essentialism four thousand weeks how to do nothing make time 168 hours and what was the episode number for that 265 okay so we're at what like three 26 yep yeah there's a while ago I have one more book I would now add to that list which I think will be no surprise to our listeners eruption by Michael Crite and James
Patterson. Oh yeah it's funny. Torah ask in its wisdom for human living. Now I'm not happy about that book folks Michael Crite and his spinning in his grave. All right what do we got next next questions from Joel I'm a software student and very distracted by my phone I have an iPhone an Apple Watch Ultra and a flip phone what's your view on Apple Watches and should I just use a
flip phone in college look here's what I'm going to suggest you in college and this is a general thing I often suggest to people is when it comes to like technology and its negative impact on certain things you're doing the problem might be caused by technology but you don't solve the
problem solely with technology as well we kind of have this implicit technodeterminus narrative out there that the tools you own specify like what the rhythms of your life is like so if you want to change something you just like about the rhythms of your life like I'm very distracted when
I'm studying you have to choose a change the tools you own I argue no no change your behaviors change your processes change how you approach things then the tools themselves probably won't matter that much now if it's helpful because of like a really strong addiction to a smartphone to replace it
with a non if that's the only way to replace with a non smartphone is like the only way you think you can break that addiction okay go ahead but keep in mind I'm someone who is very non-destracted by the digital world and I own a perfectly normal smartphone it's not the technology that matters
it's my rules and systems so when it comes particularly to college I've been arguing this now for almost two decades it's hard to believe it's been almost two decades since I published my first book focus is a superpower if you are comfortable with and frequently deployed
academic sessions with no context switching to no quick checks of phone in any ways text messages social media web you just can focus without distraction compared to your peers who are context shifting back and forth it's like 58 key points it really will be like a superpower you'll
finish your assignments like 2x faster and your performance will be like 2x better so how you do that it's not so much what technology owns about what your rules are so let me give you a few when you do studying whether it's reading working on problem sets or writing do it with zero
connectivity do not bring your phone you're in college right you're not the FEMA director it'll be okay if you are unreachable for 90 minutes all right you got to get over yourself a little bit don't bring your phone turn off the Wi-Fi on your computer don't give me the whole thing about
anything usually you don't have to get the sources and so therefore I have to look at tick-tock on my phone while I study if you need to use the internet that's a separate session go gather everything you need on a separate session bring your computer turn off your lap turn off the Wi-Fi
if it's something you do without a computer even better don't bring your phone with you go to an out of the way library practice studying without connectivity it'll be very hard at first as you get used to it it's like taking the limitless pill you're gonna be like wow this is so much easier
than it used to be you need to regularly practice being disconnected even outside of these sessions so that you're more comfortable with it do something every day without your phone let go have a meal go drop off a book at the library doesn't have to be long like 10-15 minutes
but just get used to this idea that sometimes you do things without highly salient algorithmically curated distraction it just gets your brain used to the idea of like that's fine and then you'll you'll have more success with those study sessions if you're really struggling in those study sessions
use timers I can do 50 minutes and then I can go to back to my dorm room and look at my computer phone and then I'll come back and set another timer when you're aiming towards a a time limited goal like I just want to survive 50 minutes without looking at my phone it's much easier to succeed than
if you're just generally saying a study for hours I don't want to look at my phone your mind will convince you like we have to look at it at some point why not now why not now timing makes that much simpler like I can last 50 minutes come on and be embarrassing if I couldn't all right so
but outside of those two things okay only had two outside of those two things the tech doesn't really matter you just you practice studying and writing and doing schoolwork without connectivity and you practice that in other parts of your life and that's just how you do it super power
I don't care if back in your room you have you know an iPhone 19 that's plugged into one of those like Apple Vision Pros and you're wearing an Nintendo power glove whatever you want to do with your technology outside of the studying whatever like get used to that and you're really
really going to do well all right what do we got next we have our corner all right let's hear some theme music so as regular listeners know every week we like to have one question that deals with an issue from my latest book low productivity the lost start of accomplishment without burnout if
you have not read that book you need to it is probably at the core of at least 50% of what we talk about on this show go find that book slow productivity wherever books are sold all right Jesse what is our slow productivity corner question of the week it's from angel my work day my work days consist
of coding a new feature or fixing a bug our company works in a three week sprints and many of my co-workers crush it how can I work at a natural pace when it's out of my hands I actually think sprints can be quite compatible with working at a natural pace as quickly to find those two terms
sprint is an idea that comes out of agile software development methodologies where you have a particular bug your fixing or feature you're working on and you just do that right so it's like just sprint working on this one thing until it's done and it will change its status and then we
can figure out what you should work on next it's a methodology I really like because it recognizes the reality of instead trying to work on multiple things concurrently slows down the actual time per thing to get done right so if I work on three features concurrently and then once I finish
all three features you divide that time by three like what was the average time it took me to finish each of these three features that average time tends to be much longer than if you did a sprint on the first feature stopped the sprint on the second feature stopped and the
sprint on the third feature and stopped and it's just because of the administrative overhead of working on something and when you have to keep switching your context it slows you down so sprints are a great idea I think they can be compatible with working on a natural pace now that's the second principle for my bookstool productivity which says humans are not meant to be working all out all day all week all year we need variations and our intensity on multiple different time scales
otherwise is really artificial and stressful sprints can help you here in two ways one at the macro scale it gives you a natural down cycle period you finish a hard sprint that sprint is over you can now explicitly take a break until the next sprint begins or you have a natural place to down cycle some software companies do this explicitly base camp does this explicitly you can read about down cycles and their employee handbook online where after you finish a sprint on something big
they want you to take a sufficiently long down cycle where all you're doing is reflecting on what you just did thinking about what you want to do next and closing up loose ends they say you can't skip this it said it might be natural you feel more productive to jump into a next sprint right away but
don't because if you don't restore overall you're going to burn out and your effectiveness will go down so consider adding a similar methodology like this just ask for it just like yeah this sprint was really hard i want to take two days to just close up to loose ends and recharge and then we'll
start the next sprint if you're doing good work you know it's fine possibly whatever just this sounds a good idea so like how do you port stuff like go for it right sprints can also be useful for varying up your intensity at the smaller scale as well because you're just working on one
thing you have a lot more autonomy moment the moment if the main thing i'm doing is working on this feature i can for example do like a three hour like really intense working on it and then maybe like take two hours where i'm like going for a walk and just like recharging and thinking or like
exercising or something like that you have more flexibility to do this because you just have one thing to work on so there's not as much of a public trace of your efforts compare this to a typical pseudo productivity shop we're just working on lots of stuff at the same time now you have a lot
more hard edges on which down cycling your intensity could hit you have a lot of meetings everywhere that like it's hard to get away from you have all these emails going back and forth about 10 or 15 different things words notable if you don't answer an email for two hours right when you
have a lot of things going on simultaneously it's hard to down cycle for a few hours or take a day lighter than others when you're working on one thing you can maybe like really get after it Monday and don't do much Tuesday but then give it a big push on Wednesday then all kind of adds up
to the same if you're working really hard when you work we tend to do better with variations anyway so it's not going to take you longer and because you're sprinting i think you have a lot more flexibility at least in shops that don't have this maddenly self destructive habit of you should
be slacking with people while you sprint which makes no sense to me i think that's like owning an MBA team and making your player smoke a bunch of cigarettes it's counterproductive the make your programmers have to be on slack all day makes them significantly dumber in the moment you can't
do that contact shift you can't code that way so i think sprints can be on multiple scales compatible with working on natural pace i guess you made it when i was reading the question too i was under the impression that those sprints were like right after the others but you answered that by saying she should ask for it yeah it's interesting when you're doing good work and this is why the third principle slow productivity is obsessive equality when you're doing good work the biggest
fear of your employer is losing you and it's a mindset shift you have to make is you get organized using the type of stuff i talk about and get good using the stuff i talk about you have to leave the mindset which fits earlier in your career which is my employer is looking for reasons not to
keep me on my employer is looking for reasons to fire me my employment here is contingent they're not sure about me at some point you change from that to we don't want to lose them and if you're doing great work and they know you're super on the ball and you listen to my podcast and that like you're
you're super organized and you're really focused and you say here i want to take these two day down cycles here's why they don't want to lose you i mean worse thing they might say no but they're not going to get mad speaking of basketball i saw the other night Steph Curry playing the wizards
oh you went to the game yeah buddy had a luxury box nice yeah wait wait he's a lawyer so we just needed one of us to have like a legitimate reason small connection to the law firm or something like that right it wasn't me look i want to go out on a limb here with a hot take
Steph Curry is good at basketball he's very good at basketball he's been doing it for a long time too he has not that much time he's really good at golf too i believe it all right so that's our question let's get some theme music to end the corner all right Jesse we have a call this week
we do all right let's hear it hi kale my name is Amy and i'm a PhD candidate in nursing living in Canada my question for you focuses on imperfectionism versus doing really good work that gets noticed or being so good they can't ignore you how do you know when your work is good enough to ship
does it matter whether the work is like the type of work you're doing um and i'm just thinking about your recent conversation with Oliver Bergman on imperfectionism thank you you want tangible evidence about the value of your work at least when it comes to your career and
career shaping you want to be working on things where the value is more unambiguous this ship this mini units this sold us mini units this got this much praise from the client i brought in this much work we have this much demand and why does this matter because it's the
main trading ship you have for shaping your career demonstration of unambiguously valuable capability or skills that is your leverage for shaping the reality of your professional life and if you can shape the reality of your professional life you can shape it into really cool
configurations that resonate with what's important to you this is my whole bit about lifestyle centric planning you figure out your vision of the idea of lifestyle and then you try to work backwards from that your profession is a big piece of that getting good at what you do in an
unambiguous way is how you take control of your profession and you you're going to be much more likely to be able to shape your ideal lifestyle that way um i mean this is what Oliver did right like he has his life right now is he's just like a full-time writer he's not even a calmness
anymore he just writes books and so like what he talks about this lifestyle of uh right do deep work for like three hours a day like right do your best with the time that remains to kind of just have it to do this and like do some useful stuff and then and and kind of be okay
and then you know go enjoy yourself and just be okay that is a particular vision which resonates with me as well by the way a very particular vision of a lifestyle that Oliver was able to engineer in part because he was a successful writer he he he became a journalist his column was very successful
it gave him a name in this particular area um he began writing books i think his first book didn't hit as big but four thousand weeks really did it was a culmination of this training and that really opened up this ability for him to then um reduce the urgency and load of the things
he has so that this particular lifestyle of right do a little bit of admin and then enjoy it is possible so he's like a great example of lifestyle syndrome career planning so this is why I like in slow productivity I say obsess over quality is this critical principle is because it
enables everything else but again to get to the specifics of your question don't shy away from unambiguous evaluation that's where lifestyle centric planning really can play it's scary because unambiguous evaluation can be unambiguous negative evaluation you know attacked by a fly well I noticed that in here actually I think I described it hold on
I did not I did not I thought I was like mr. Miyagi I did not um it's tempting to to steer away from things that is going to be unambiguous about how valuable it is like this sold this many units we will or will not give you the deal for this book like the
client bought this or not because it makes failure clear but the flip side of things that have a unambiguous downside that you're afraid of is that the upside is going to be unambiguously useful and so that's the territory you swim towards I'm it not everyone has to do this um some people's
vision of an ideal lifestyle doesn't require this they're like look I have this particular job um it's not so hard to do it well it pays well as me live in the place I want to live I like the people that are there and building on top of this I can make the rest of my life what I want it to be
that's fine but if there's something more radical you want to do with your life that's where you're going to have to do something where you have a big chance of notable failure because the flip side of that's what's going to give you the big leverage you need to make radical changes so maybe that's
the way I would put it is care about stuff that is too good to be ignored if you have visions in your lifestyle that are too desirable to be easily obtained and that's a good way to think about it all right I think we have a case study here so I like to do these now and again
or we read tales of people talking about the specific ways in which they put the type of advice we talked about on the show how they put into practice in their own life so do we have a name Susan all right Susan says I am a new manager with one direct report that is outsourced
I was very confused at first on what to include him in and when I should involve him in stuff he's new to the business so I just see see them on everything inviting him to every meeting maybe some of the maybe some of the emails will be educational like my notes from various meetings
or client responses maybe he would learn to business at the various meetings we met once a week but I was very unclear on what he was working on I would send one off tasks his way but it was unclear if he had enough work to do or too much well thanks to slow productivity my clarity is
drastically better when I was whittling down the non-sudo productive work for him to do I had to get very clear on what was important now we meet more often for short updates and he's got max three projects in a shared list since I know exactly what he is working on I can stop spamming him with
vaguely relevant emails and I can just update the list when I need to share details or additional worker projects for him to do further I started sharing my project list as well at first it was uncomfortable to have him see what I was working on I was holding myself accountable to his judgment
what would he think but having another human see what my projects are and having the frequent update meetings to show my incremental work has been rewarding I'd like forward to one day having a larger team where we can all cross collaborate in this way all right so Susan is demonstrating an
important concept this is from principle one of my books low productivity manage your workloads better it's like the key thing the key thing that we don't think about it all in knowledge work is workload management and this is what causes so many problems so what did Susan do
follow my advice she said let's be explicit what are you working on and how many things should you work on oh you probably shouldn't be working on more than three things at once so let's be clear about what those are we'll put them in a list if other things come up we could put them
in a waiting queue right next to us who won't forget about them but I'm not going to ask you to work on them concurrently when you finish one of these three we can figure out together what's the right thing to put into your active list to replace it to you put in place a particular
communication protocol for collaboration three day week meetings is great when you have a one on one like this because this means you don't have to send the one off email you're never more than a day away from having a conversation so now he can just keep track of oh what questions do I have
and when next meet you guys can efficiently go through them you can keep track of the questions you have and go through them you know you're going to get an update on exactly where he is within a day 30 minutes three days a week could take the place of 30 emails a day five days a week which is
going to cause a constant state of having to go back and forth and check inboxes and stress so Susan I love the way that you made workload explicit and by doing that everyone got more effective you structure effort effort gets more sustainable effort gets easier all right so we got a final
segment coming up where I promise I'm going to talk about Martha Stewart but first you're from a sponsor again Jesse as I drink from this big white mug we need a sponsor actually it says mid-star health on it so the response to your mid-star health I talked to the give a thing at a mid-star
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work day and straight into whatever comes next head to rhone comm slash cowl and use promo code cowl to save 20% off your entire order that's 20% off your entire order when you head to our H O N E dot com slash cowl and use code cowl it's time to embody your most confident self all right Jesse let's get to our final segment all right so load on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listing this is the trailer for the new Netflix documentary Martha about Martha Stewart
a good documentary if you see any of Jesse I have yeah that was good right let me tell you what caught my attention early on especially when her career was taking off I was remarking uh she must be incredibly busy she had this property the turkey hill farm that she was sort of
custom renovating his acres and acres of property into like all these like custom gardens she had this catering company this like really famous catering company would do these major catering jobs that were like very famous that's just a complicated logistical battle with with um
um your clients but also with the the people who are working with you and the the chefs and the servers and she was writing she was writing these books which are on the screen right now and she's writing these books like once a year I mean of course as her empire grew into a big media publicly
trade company she was super busy but we're kind of used to the idea of like CEOs a big company's been really busy and having big staffs I was interested in this like earlier part of her life where she had so much different things going on I mean I still have skeletons on my yard Jesse
and I'm not nearly I'm not working on nearly as many stuff as she was and she was landscaping by hand like 50 acres of a farm so I started thinking I was like you know the time management book I would be curious in is one written by Martha Stewart like how does she manage her time like how
did that work and it turns out she did uh she did write a book I didn't know this and it was called like Martha Stewart's organizing I have a picture of it here on the screen she did write a book about time management so it's like oh I'm just fast like how did she do all this and then I look at this
book and I look at the tips in it and I say this has nothing to do with how someone like Martha Stewart organizes her life so here's the book you can already already see by the cover with like paper clips that I need box and a well wrapped up USB cable that this is not about how Martha Stewart
built her empire while writing books will also renovate all this land look at some of the tips to see highlighted from this book keep your kitchen drawers well organized maybe using her expandable indoor utensil tray have a ceramic tool crock on your kitchen countertop to keep
those kitchen utensils neatly put away make sure in your home office that you have file folders with vine decals on them so that they're aesthetically pleasing she has a planner um the Martha Stewart spiral update a weekly calendar it's very pretty it has like roughly
enough space on it for like seven things to the right down and that's all the advice she gives I bring this up because it points to an important divide when we talk about time management and productivity that we don't always elucidate and that's the different between aesthetic productivity
and real productivity so these products and what Martha Stewart is talking about in that book is you know what I call aesthetic productivity it's typically based on organizing physical things in a pretty way and it uses that metaphor for organizing your life you should have like a beautiful
little notebook and draw these pictures in it and have stickers you put on it and then there's real productivity which is I have a huge amount of stuff in my life my schedule is very crowded my attention is being pulled in all sorts of directions I need to take control of this ship like
what Martha Stewart did at the height of her early busyness to try to build this empire that she did and none of that has to do with your organizers are pretty planners that have pictures of flowers on the cover it's complicated hard um super focused work it is the equivalent to athletes for all
the training they do in the gym and like when it comes to athletes who are good at what they do we don't downplay how hard that is and how important the training is well I think for any sort of knowledge work it is the continually adjusted fight to keep control of the chaos is this like
very difficult thing we have to do to be able to succeed with our jobs and aesthetic productivity I think downplays it makes it seem more minor makes it seem like you know it's a matter of taste or sort of owning the right tools so I would be really interested in like an actual
an actual productivity book from Martha Stewart I could tell you I don't know you think Jesse from the documentary be pretty brutal I would assume it would say like only sleep four hours a night which she did fire fools she was firing people left and right if you need something done
yell not the nicest not the nicest person I bet she was super time blocked if I had to guess super time block like exactly when I'm going to fit in these things to make it all work I better information systems were locked in tight like every order of food and who were hiring and where's the staff
I think she hired good people and fired anyone who wasn't great like I mean I think um man that the real Martha Stewart time management book would probably be like Sun zoos are to war it be a pretty brutal book if I had the guess they don't you know I'm not suggesting most people need to do
that level of extreme organization because she's way too stressful what she does way too stressful but it is interesting that we don't as like another aside we don't often see a lot of windows into how like the like the hyper busy organize themselves I'm very curious about it's like a curiosity
I only know of one such book which I think is actually called hyper productivity and it literally was just like a very busy executive you said on a lot of boards it said here's how I organize my stuff and yeah it's hard and a lot of systems I'm really fasting about type of stuff again not
that people need to do that because most people's ideal lifestyle does not involve like what Martha Stewart's ideal lifestyle involved it doesn't involve juggling five boards and like two public companies or whatever but it's a curiosity to me how they do it but the one thing I know about
how they do it it's not through drawer organizers or file folders with vines on them the one thing that I looked at a lot in the documentary was just you know the stock price obviously went down a lot when she was in had her legal troubles and stuff so I just checked it it's at 6.4 now
so she's probably still a billionaire right I don't know that's a good question because when she was a billionaire it was in the it 20s wasn't it it it was the initial offering was at 18 which I guess in today's dollar it was like 33 so not optimal he said she sold it to like a brand management
company or something oh she did yeah licensing company I go how long ago um after jail okay probably early 2010s yes they just licensed the the brand name the thing to okay so here's if we're gonna talk about Martha the other thing to cut my attention is the scoreboard aspect like
the fact that she's like I want to make I want this to be a company that goes public and I want to be like the richest self-made woman in the world at the time there's no functional reason to do that right because this is a when you have a brand to build around a person like what we've learned
in like today's economy is you can make a killing when it's built around you and you have a real talent for it you can make a killing and have all sorts of autonomy and flexibility there's no reason to like build an on the media company that has like all these employees or this or that right there's
no reason she could have been making a killing with like books and could have her magazine in a TV show and just be like I'm really well known I'm really good at this and I get paid a lot of money to do this uh there's no reason to have to start a major company yeah and then once you have that
major company they had to have like a 50 different magazines and like 20 different just to try to like justify um whatever so it's interesting she's scaled to that we're today he's like the podcast economy if you have that level of talent so like she was exceptional enough that you could
build this whole company around her you can get a hundred fifty million dollar podcast deal except for now what are you doing for that hundred fifty million dollars you're podcasting once a week or whatever which is so much different than being the CEO of a public company so it
really caught my attention that she wanted to start a big company I think she likes to lie in light too obviously I mean she wanted to do the documentary hello to she she we looked it up uh 80 she's 80 80 one or 82 good yeah yeah because she was 63 when she went to jail
mm-hmm yeah yeah she's older than you think yeah she looks great yeah I guess that's just me it's lifestyle-centric planning I'm like oh if my if I had this big brand that could be built and I kind of a reasonable brand built around me all of my instincts is not how do we build a huge media
company it's like how do we build like a very autonomous flexible yeah you know business off of that that that's doesn't require yeah award meetings um interesting topic all right anyways it's all the time we have this week we'll be back next week with another episode if you listen to my
advice from the guinea maybe you'll be one of the few podcasts you'll be listening to next week until then as always stay deep hi it's Cal here one more thing before you go if you like the deep questions podcast you will love my email newsletter which you can sign up for at calnewport.com
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