Ep. 329: The Tao of Cal

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, we've got a good show coming up. We've got a challenge. You'll hear about it soon. But we got a fun challenge I'm going to try to pull off in the deep dive. I've got a rant coming up later in the final segment. Stay tuned for that one. Good announcement, book announcement.

I like having these book announcements about slow productivity, my book, Slow Productivity. What do we got? Named to The Economist, best books of 2024. Oh, wow. There we go. These best of lists are coming. We got the best books of 2024 for The Economist, best books of 2024 for Amazon. Goodreads has as one of the nine most popular self-help books of 2024.

Showed up a couple other places as well. My mom told me she saw it on the NPR list. Oh, yeah. I think it is on NPR list as well. Yeah, that's right. So there we go. So it's getting out there. You know, it really helps. Here's what I've noticed about these year-end lists because I think the book is doing well on them.

There's two different ways that organizations do year-end list. One way is like the New York Times-Washington Post way, which is just here's 50 nonfiction books we like and here's 50 fiction books we like. The problem with that is almost all of those are going to come from biography, memoir or cultural commentary. Where we tend to do better is where they have a few categories. So like The Economist had three categories for nonfiction books, biography, memoir.

culture and arts and a category they called business economics and technology 10 books in each 30 total books and so we were one of the 10 books in business economics and technology amazon does something similar they have a few categories and in like the business category We're in that book. We're in that list. So I think the key is what I'm realizing is business idea books are their own beast. So if there's a place doing list where they.

They understand business idea books and what they're like and are sort of focusing that territory. We do well. If it's just here's the 50 best nonfiction books, like we might do less well because. If you're not used to business idea books, they tend to confuse book types. Like, what is this? You're giving advice? Do those folks just read books all day, the reviewers? I guess so. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done a book review.

off and on for like the new york times like some of them are outsourced and then they have professional reviewers as well yeah they read a lot of books they got to get through them all right anyways we got a good show so let's get started with our deep dive So I've given a lot of advice on the show over the past three and a half years. I've given 329 episodes worth of advice. So I thought it might be fun to try to do something sort of crazy today.

to try to summarize most of the main ideas I talk about in five minutes or less. I'm going to call this the Tau of Cal. Okay, to be fair, I'm not going to get into specific pieces of advice, right? Like we're not going to get into the details of particular ways of doing X and Y. It's going to be the big ideas, the high-level ideas that almost all of the specific advice I give comes back to it. So I thought this would be fun.

After I do the list, and I'm probably going to have Jesse time me here, so be ready for that, Jesse. After I do the list of the main ideas I've talked about over the last three and a half years, I'm then going to step back and try to provide some theoretical connective tissue that will pull them all together.

So take this list that might seem pretty disparate, and I'm going to try to give you a grand unified theory of Cal that makes sense of all of these ideas. But first I want to get through them. Jesse, you got your watch ready? I have my Casio. Yeah, I was going to say, I admire all the money you've invested in your watch. Whenever the band breaks, I just get a new watch because they're only $16. I had that watch in 1987.

Fantastic. It's my fourth iteration. Okay. Well, well played. So we'll be accurately timed on Jesse's highly expensive watch. All right. Here we go. Tower Cow. All right. Let's roll. First, I want to summarize my big ideas when it comes to advice about... Knowledge work. Number one, treat context shifts and overload, which I define to be working on too many things concurrently, as productivity poison.

These are the main things you want to limit to keep your work sustainable and your results impressive. Number two, spending a good amount of time focusing without distraction is like a knowledge work superpower. but it will require you to both train your ability to concentrate and tame your schedule in ways that makes time to do this type of concentration, and neither of those things are easy. Number three, organize your obligations and time carefully with smart systems.

Because the human brain cannot easily on its own handle the volume or velocity of tasks that are encountered in most modern knowledge work jobs. Number four. Remote work requires more structure than in-person work to function sustainably. You need a particular to be careful about how you assign tasks and communicate about works in progress.

Smaller workload, less unscheduled communication, and more accountability is key when it comes to remote work. And finally, when it comes to using your brain to create value, your spaces matter. If possible, your deepest work should be done in. intentionally designed locations. Alright, here's my advice related to the internet. Small trumps big when it comes to online activity.

Self-governing niche communities online function much better than massive global conversation platforms and have much fewer negative side effects on its users. Distributed news media such as podcasts and newsletters offer better ways to make a living doing creative work online than trying to become an influencer on a major platform. Internet advice number two.

Keep kids off smartphones. Their brains aren't ready for unrestricted access to the internet. Internet advice number three, don't use social media if possible. Instead, prioritize things like reading books, spending time outside, becoming a leader. in your relevant communities and developing hard and interesting skills. And finally, your phone should not be a constant companion in your life. Final category here, advice related to living a deep life.

Plan backwards from an ideal lifestyle instead of forward toward grand goals. Be wary in particular of the idea that just accomplishing one grand goal is going to make your life better. It's better to work backwards from the lifestyle that you have more evidence will succeed. And my final piece of big picture advice, Jesse, in general.

Sticking with something over a long amount of time, working sustainably but steadily wins out in the end in terms of both enjoyment and reward. How'd we do? 244. Look at that. Not even three minutes. Most of the main ideas I talk about on this show, I'm obviously missing things. Most notably, I'm not including on this list my older work on student-related advice. I have a lot of big ideas about how to be successful as a student.

Beyond that, I don't know. What am I missing, Jesse? Is anything coming to mind, like a major idea we talk about a lot? I gave this some thought, but not a huge amount of thought. Yeah, because you just go deeper into the other things in terms of like the specifics of each of the overall broad concepts. So I thought it was good. I looked at a lot of old episodes. Really almost everything fits under.

outside of like tech explainer episodes, but that's not really advice. I'm glad you're going to go into a deeper conversation about them all because I was a little sad that the... Deep dive was only going to be five minutes. That'd be great. Five minute deep dive, do a couple of minutes. We could be out of here in a tight seven minutes. Well, all of my favorite podcasts, if I look at the timestamps and they're only like 37 minutes, they usually go an hour. I'm usually kind of sad.

Well, don't worry. When it comes to padding, like just talking longer than we should, you don't have to worry about me. I'm an expert at that. All right. So let's see if we can do some deeper connections here. So I had these categories. Knowledge work, internet, and sort of more general advice related to good living. Within these are a lot of different topics, productivity, phones, email, lifestyle design, career issues, etc.

Are these all just disparate advice or is there a way to connect it? I'm going to argue that most of this advice, actually, we can find a connection to them if we go back to my fundamental background as a technologist. Obviously, I'm trained as a computer science. I'm a full professor of computer science at Georgetown University. In addition to my many papers on distributed algorithm theory.

have increasingly become involved in thinking about technology and its impact on our world. I'm a founding faculty member of Georgetown Center for Digital Ethics. I also direct our new Computer Science Ethics and Society academic program. So I'm a technologist who thinks about technology's impact. Now, you might be thrown, how is that connected to all of these issues? Because some of these issues are not explicitly technological, but I'm going to argue that they are.

almost all connected in a pretty direct way to technology-related issues. All right, so let me explain this. I mentioned some of this terminology briefly in last week's episode. I'm going to lay it out here a little bit more clearly and concisely in today's episode. Here is the way I think about the world and the source of a lot of my advice. We currently live in what I call the modern digital environment.

It's an environment where we have many digital tools, mainly network connected, that create a technology ecology that have a big impact on our day-to-day life. Many elements of this modern digital environment, which is very new. conflict with both our Paleolithic brains and our Neolithic culture. So what I mean by that, our Paleolithic brains is our brains as wired over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When I say Neolithic culture, I mean the culture that evolved after the Neolithic Revolution when we first began to live in larger groups connected by abstract concepts. So as we transition from small tribes of hunter-gatherers to living in cities and city-states connected by larger affiliations, cooperating at much greater scales.

Culturally speaking, the Neolithic revolution is sort of the foundation of life as we know it. It's a big difference, Neolithic living versus Paleolithic living. See Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, for a really good discussion of … What enabled Neolithic culture? So we've had more or less the slowly evolving Neolithic culture where we have countries and cities and et cetera. That also conflicts with the modern digital environment. These mismatches create what I think of as disorders.

mismatches between the modern digital environment and our brains and culture those disorders cause issues that need to be addressed and they can be addressed By individual action, they can be addressed by community or organizational action, and sometimes they have to be addressed by larger sort of national legislative, perhaps regulatory action. We have a lot of ways we have to react to those disorders.

They also create sometimes opportunities to leverage new technologies in new ways that open up exciting new possibilities for thriving ones that did not exist even 20 or 25 years ago. So I see a lot of my program as understanding. these mismatches between the modern digital environment and what our bodies and cultures are used to, figuring out where they create problems and trying to get around it, figuring out where they create opportunities and seeing what we can leverage and how we can do it.

Now, the reason why this can sometimes seem disconnected from technology is that I have learned over time that in particular when it comes to the disorders of the modern digital environment, the problems are caused by digital technology. The solutions are often analog. So it sounds like analog advice. We're going off and we're reading books or we're pen and paper planning of what we want our life to be like. But the underlying problems that led us to that actually are digital in origin.

So digital problems don't always have digital solutions. So let's go back. I was going to go back to some of the advice I talked about and sort of walk through this exercise of tracing back the advice to one of these mismatches with the modern digital environment. So let's think about some of my advice around knowledge work, for example. The core disorder back here.

is we have this neolithic culture. Okay, we get together, we have organizations. In this context, we develop this idea of pseudo-productivity. So knowledge work emerges as a new type of work. We evolved this idea of pseudo-productivity, which I talk about in my book Slow Productivity, as a way of coping with management of work that uses the mind because we didn't have widgets to count.

Pseudo productivity says let's use visible effort as our main proxy for you doing something useful. My argument is we kind of have this non-technological cultural adaptation. I guess we'll manage activity instead of results because it's too hard in knowledge work to actually point towards results.

Then that mismatched with the arrival of digital computer networks. So once we had low-friction digital communication, and it was very easy to communicate with people, and then that communication became mobile, first on laptops and on smartphones, so now I could communicate. with basically zero cost or time cost at almost any time and almost any location, that combination with pseudoproductivity gave us the hyperactive hive mind.

a new style of working in which you're constantly communicating figure things out on the fly this completely conflicts with our neolithic brain which can't shift its attention between so many things back and forth so quickly it's just not capable of doing that And we get a big source of the over-distraction burnout problem that is afflicting modern knowledge workers.

So you get a lot of my advice about taming the hyperactive hive mind and context switching and how to restructure work to have more structured communication rules. It all comes back to that fundamental disorder.

All right, here's another example. We talk about leaving social media, so that's digital, but we can go to an underlying – what is like an underlying disorder? Well, one of the underlying disorders… that has been exposed in the modern digital environment with respect to social media is the issue of global conversation platforms tricking our paleolithic brains.

So our Paleolithic brains are used to organizing social units into like tribal communities. It's a group of people that I am around physically and in totality really affect my success. as a individual, right? I mean, I need to be on the good side. I need to be respected. Osterization would be tantamount to death. I need to be in good with my tribe. It's 50 people. It's 20 people. It's 100 people. We live in the same cave, right? That's how we organize. We think about the main unit of group.

Then you get global conversation platforms where you might have an example like Twitter X, 600 million users. Well, clearly this is a number that is so astronomical that we can't even approach dealing with. Sensical interactions with that many people. So what do these platforms do? Using various sort of curation that's algorithmic and cybernetic, they sort of pull from this massive...

collection of people all talking about various things. And it sort of pulls out for each user interaction experience that feels like what we're used to. It's I'm talking to people in my tribe. I'm talking to people in my community. But they pull it out to be like the most interesting, engaging, emotional conversations possible so it's never boring. Again, our mind gets tricked by this. Like, okay, I'm talking to my tribe and also my tribe is like.

fantastically angry with everyone and with me and all the alarm bells go off so it's a mismatch a global conversation platform is a digital technology that mismatches with the way our paleolithic mind works and that creates problems Let's do a more abstract one, lifestyle-centric planning. This seems to be very non-digital, working backwards from a vision of an ideal lifestyle instead of forward towards a grand goal. But why is this such a problem? Why do we need advice?

About how to construct a life of meaning and satisfaction. Why do we need this advice? Well, I think it is digital knowledge work. Digital knowledge works and knowledge work that's done largely at. computer screens, had a couple attributes that, again, are a real mismatch with us. One, work itself became highly abstract. Moving bits around on networks, it's messages going back and forth and files being attached to things.

work becomes very abstract. So we sort of lose that connection that our mind has. between having an intention and seeing it be made manifest concretely in the world. I built this thing and I can hold it and it has mass and gravity. When we remove that from our efforts, it dislocates and disembodies us from our efforts. And that can be really alienating.

To borrow a term from Marx in that context, it's very alienating to be like just this work is like this abstract thing. It also homogenizes. Give me almost any knowledge work job. What are the key tools going to be? It's going to be. an email client and some variation of Microsoft Office. So work is just now this like homogenized, it doesn't really matter what the job is. It's you're moving messages and attachments back and forth and making slide decks.

And going on Zoom and seeing people in Windows, it's homogenized. All jobs are the same. The actual activities are sort of isolated now from the actual world. You don't see concrete results. You're kind of alienated from your effort. It's this sort of weird game you do.

And then finally, because it's all digital, location matters less. We're less likely to go to a particular office. We're less likely to be our work to be tied to a location. I make shoes and the shoes are for people who live in this town. That type of concrete regionalization of our efforts is also dissipated. Well, this really upsets our ability.

In our Paleolithic mind or for our Neolithic culture, which is still built around building these communities like cities and towns and being part of these larger communities, all of this is upset by this much more abstracted digital. non-embodied style of work and so people are adrift they're living in this disembodied digital world playing digital games and

not feeling as if they're a part of a place, a part of a group or producing things they can even see and their mind doesn't know what to do with this. And we become adrift. It makes us feel sort of numb and dislocated. And so we pursue grand goals because we think the chemical hit of pursuing that goal at least will make us feel alive. And so we make these kind of drastic moves to try to put some energy back into our lives. Or we get lost in the online.

Just like, let me just plug it in my veins. I'm just on the phone and it's, oh my God, look at like the thing Elon just posted. And it kind of, it's pressing primal buttons in a muted way. And we just kind of get lost in this. As long as our work is so abstract.

We just get lost in an abstract world, and that also doesn't end up well. So we get something like lifestyle-centric planning. It's like taking back control of our life in a way that wasn't as automatic as it used to be in a pre-digital world. The modern digital environment made that a necessity that we now have to think much more about how we construct a life of meaning as opposed to just letting our location and work sort of do that for us. So we go through this again and again.

But almost all of those ideas I talked about comes back to fundamentally to a mismatch between the modern digital environment and our brains and culture. All right? So that's kind of the Tao of Cal. And really the big idea, maybe this is the big idea of my style of advice, is you don't have to stay in the world of digital to deal with the issues that digital creates. You can be a technologist who's giving advice, and that advice doesn't have to be limited to...

parental controls and how you set up your iPhone and thinking about doomsday scenarios around AI. The modern digital environment touches many aspects of our day-to-day life. And so the advice we give from a place of technology criticism is advice that can go much broader than the world of technology. So there we go.

Tower of Cal. I'm sure I missed some things. We'll hear about it, Jesse. But I think that covers a lot of the main things. I liked it. All right. So we got some questions coming. They're pretty broad since I covered. There's literally no question we can get almost it's not going to be relevant to this deep dive because I covered everything we ever talked about. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. This show is sponsored by...

Better help. So we're in the holiday season. For many, that's great. You know, I do thriller December in the holiday season where I read purposefully stupid books. Often by a fire, I've already finished my first Thriller December books, other people. It's about the family. It's about the holiday traditions. But it can also be a really hard time if you have a troubled relationship with your own mind.

For a lot of people, the holidays can be really tough in this situation because it just emphasizes the pain you're feeling or the discontent you're feeling. As you think about, remember when I used to just... enjoy the holidays, and now I have all these other things going on. So it is a great time, a great motivator to make sure that your relationship with your brain is in good shape.

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visit betterhelp.com slash deepquestions, one word. And if you will get 10% off your first month, that's betterhelp.com slash. Deep questions. All right. I also want to talk about our friends at ZocDoc. Look, as you get older, as Jesse and I are realizing, you need more doctors in your life. No matter how we try to avoid it. Jesse and I were actually just joking. We both have – oh my god. I won't get into the details, Jesse, for medical privacy reasons. But let's just say –

We're seriously considering podcasting from like side-by-side beds in the hospital. We have different things we have to get taken care of. You need a lot of doctors. For stuff you didn't even know you need doctors from, you know, there's feet doctors. You don't know this until you get to your 40s, right? You don't know that I need an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I need a dermatologist. Oh my God, there's so many doctors. How do you find them?

I suggest you use ZocDoc. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high-quality in-network doctors. Choose the right one for your needs and click instantly to book an appointment. We're talking about in-network appointments with more than 100,000 health care providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health, eye care to skin care, and much more. Oh, yeah, my eye doctor just left, too. Shut down his practice. Retired?

Yeah, I guess. He was right down the street from the HQ. ZocDoc time. That's what I want to make ZocDoc a verb. I think that'd work well. I'm not worried about my eye doctor leaving. I'm just going to ZocDoc that problem. I'm going to zock-dock the hell out of that. Don't worry about it. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located nearby, who are a good fit for any medical needs you may have, and who are highly rated by verified patients.

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I think you will too. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash deep to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash deep. ZocDoc.com slash. Deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? First questions from Max. Can you provide an example of how time blocking a workday is different than using a weekly template?

Can you also explain why time blocking is more demanding? Well, weekly templates don't specify every hour of your workday. So for those who listened to my weekly template episode from a few weeks ago, The idea of a weekly scheduling template is basically placing some either big rocks or big constraints on your schedule in a way that's going to apply week to week, right? So you might say, for example, no meetings in the morning, no meetings till 11. I'm always writing in the morning.

That's a weekly scheduling template. Or you might say, okay, on Tuesday and Thursday, I'm on campus to teach in the morning. I have office hours midday. I'm leaving those afternoons free. This is when I want to do my meetings with people on campus. Those Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'll keep those afternoons free. So it's these big rocks or... consistent scheduling constraints that you want to put in place. And you can just write these in your weekly plan so you see them.

They'll probably, I guess, would live in your strategic plans, your quarterly plans, and you see them each week when you make your weekly plan and apply them to your week. And then you remember them too as you're scheduling other things that you want to obey your weekly template. It's just a good way of adding some structure to.

each upcoming season in a way that respects what your goals are for that season. If you don't use weekly templates, the problem is if you're just tackling each week or even each day as it comes, stuff gets busy, stuff gets suboptimal. Time block planning, you're planning every hour of the day. So your weekly template will help you shape your day, but it's not telling you everything you need to do in the day.

And knowing that you're writing in the morning, for example, still doesn't tell you how you're dealing, like when you stop that and how you're dealing with the afternoon. When you have meetings, when you're doing to-dos, what you're doing with the time that's free, that's still going to require time block planning.

All right, but let's connect this. Here's what I'm going to try to do today, Jesse. Connect every question back to the modern digital environment. So how does this connect back to what we talked about in the deep dive? Well, this very issue of having to do complicated scheduling. I think comes back to the intersection of the digital with knowledge work. So we talked about briefly in the deep dive is digital and digital networks from knowledge work.

led to a lot more communication it also has led to a much greater workload Because it's so easy to A, assign work to someone, like anyone can just email anyone else and in like nine seconds have placed a major obligation on their plate. So it's like free assignment of work. the technology that we have to execute this work. So network computers is so powerful.

The total number of things you could conceivably doing has also exploded. So this is a whole separate issue. This is sometimes called the curse of specialization or of despecialization rather. And this is well documented. I talk about this in my book, A World Without Email. and a little bit in slow productivity. But basically, when we gave people these productivity machines, computers, they made a lot of things that we used to divide the labor on.

Here's people who type. Here's people who schedule trips. Here's people who work on presentations, the graphic department. The stuff we used to specialize all became easy enough. We could put it on the plate of individuals, just do everything. And so instead of having... 30 employees, maybe 10 of which were the sort of trained frontline executives, like working on the direct things to make value and 20 of which were sort of support. We went to like 20.

of the frontline executives and no support is what it turns out. And there's a cool paper by this. I talk about it in a world without email. It turns out when you fire all the support. the number of non-support mainline people you need to get the same amount of work done increases because now they're having to do on their computers a lot of the work that the support staff was doing. So you need more of the non-support people to get the same amount of work done.

Well, they typically are more expensive salaries than to support people. So now you're employing less total people, but your salary costs are the same, if not higher, and everyone's more miserable. So the sort of overload that necessitates solutions like... weekly scheduling templates and time block planning to make tractable were actually caused by these modern digital environment innovations like the putting of the productivity revolution with huge air quotes in the front office. All right.

So it sounds like an analog work thing, productivity thing, but it comes back in the end of digital. So when you do, when you're in your summer schedule and you do a writing block, that's the same though, in terms of intensity as like when you're working during the year, right? Yeah. Writing blocks are writing blocks. I'm always writing. Yeah, it's sitting down and working on whatever's next on what you're writing. Got it. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Michael.

Earlier this year, my wife, my six month old baby and I moved across the country to a beautiful new rural house. In hindsight, it turned out to be a terrible idea. We got swept up in the idyllic vision of owning a big wooded property.

We neglected to consider the other aspects of life that are important for a young family. It's been a lesson that focusing too much on one component of the deep life can sometimes push other important areas into the background, often without us even realizing it. Well, I think it's a great case study. Like a little brief case study. And it comes back to the idea we talked about in the deep dive of lifestyle-centric planning versus grand goals, right? So the problem with the grand goal method.

Which is the idea that if I fixate on a grand romantic goal, its pursuit and accomplishment will fix my life and make my life better. The problem with the grand goal theory, and I actually have already written this chapter.

In my new book, I'm working on about the deep life. So I've been thinking about this. There's two major problems with a grand goal approach. One, when you focus on a grand goal, you're typically focusing on just one aspect of your lifestyle that's important to you. So in this example, they're thinking about... nature, quiet, the sort of slower stillness of being outside. It's like this is a thing we want in our lifestyle, right? Like this is important. By fixating on just one,

The two bad things that could happen is, one, at best, you are ignoring other things that are important to a successful lifestyle so they don't get better. So these other things you need. To have a sustainable ideal lifestyle aren't being addressed. At worst, they can actually make those things worse. Like you're actively hurting other things. So like in this case, by focusing just on this environmental idea.

I want to be in nature. I want it to be calming. You probably were like actively making worse connections to other people, like being a part of a community. I've known other people who have left the city to do something like this who didn't realize how much they valued intellectual life, you know, events. There's seen interesting movies, being around interesting people who are working on interesting things. So maybe even if there is community where they're moving.

It's not writers. It's not people who are whatever your artist or whatever it is that you're interested in or high-tech entrepreneur types if you're in that world. And they didn't realize how much they valued that. There's other convenience things people really – in their ideal lifestyle, maybe it's – they want to be able to spend time reading and doing what they're interested in.

Not realizing moving to the farm means they have to spend most of their time working on farm things and they don't really care about those. But that's going to get in the way of these other things and you can kind of create these big mismatches. Probably the most common one of these is pursuing.

income and professional respect. You say, well, this is very important to me. So then you go and take the cliche is you go and take that job that's going to give you the big raise and more professional respect.

But now you have like an hour-long commute. You don't see your kids as much. You don't like the town that you're in. Like all these other things that are important get actively pushed down. So you really have to think about in lifestyle-centric planning, you're looking at all the things that matter. And trying to do generally good on all of those. You're coming up with more bespoke, sometimes complicated ideas or plans that are really helping multiple different things you care about.

And for the ones that these lifestyle-centric plans don't directly affect, at least they're doing no harm. You're not taking something that's important to you and making it much worse. Or if there is a trade-off, it's being made really clear.

And when you see it's a tradeoff, you can say, okay, we're going to do some weird or over-the-top interventions to try to go to this thing that's getting worse when we make this lifestyle shift and try to bring that back. We might have to do that in unusual or weird ways.

Is it like the classic moving to the city but like really going out of your way to set things up so that you can spend three months in the summer in the country because there's certain compromises about being in the city that you're worried about and that's how you balance that out.

So it's a great example of lifestyle-centric career planning being the way to do things as opposed to grand goal theory. We talked about connecting back to digital. We talked about this in the deep dive, so I won't repeat it in detail. But the weird abstract nature of work in the digital age leaves us sort of bewildered about finding meaning in our life. A lot more of that is placed on our plates.

And because of that, we tend to fall into easy patterns like grand goals. Let me just like drastically change where I live as a way to try to change our life. But the whole idea that we have to grapple with all of this, I think, is really amplified by the digital. All right, what we got next? Next question is from Elliot. I'm working to reduce four email accounts to one personal and one business email account. Each consolidation step often leads to an additional task and complications.

Do you have strategies for simplifying this transition or managing the incremental steps without feeling constantly bogged down? I mean, it sounds like to me, Elliot, you're making this too complicated. If you're going to make a change with your email setup like this.

So be okay with for a while, you're going to miss some things and upset some people and then just do it in the easiest possible way. I mean, I think that's the way to do it. I think we blow up in our head too much. Like I have to be super incremental and careful about this because. What if someone that I sometimes talk to doesn't get the note? And then I might fall out of touch with them or it might take them some work to find me again. That's okay. Be okay with upsetting some people.

Be okay with you miss some things. It'll pass in a few months. You know what? Maybe it'll actually lessen your load. Like, oh yeah, some people didn't find me on the new email address. Maybe that's not the worst thing. If it really was important, they really would find me.

So I would simplify how you're doing this, you know, put an autoresponder on for a month and then just be like, I'm assuming the bad stuff that happens when I turn off these other two accounts will be survivable because it almost certainly will be. I'm not even going to bother connecting that to digital because it's just a digital question. Email. How do we deal with email? That's obviously a modern digital environment question. All right. What do we got? Next question is from Matt.

When reading to improve your general knowledge, is it better to read a few books and take lots of notes on them and revise the notes quiz yourself on the book or read more books and take fewer notes? How do you strike a balance? I mean, I think in general, just read more.

If you're going to take notes, you can just do my page marking method. Mark the corner if there's something that looks interesting and then just sort of bracket out those sentences or paragraphs that have really caught your attention.

That way, if you ever want to go back to that book, you just flip to the pages that are marked in the corners and then read the sentences that are marked in the brackets. You can typically grok the big ideas of a nonfiction book in like five minutes that way. That's usually how I read.

Now, there's two exceptions where you're going to want to actually take notes outside of the book itself. One is, of course, if you're working on a specific project that requires that information, an article, a report, or what have you, a podcast episode, then that's fine. If you have a specific project that needs the information from a book, it might be worth slowing down or moving notes from that book out of the book and into another medium. If you're someone who...

Needs to draw from a lot of books for projects. I'm thinking about Ryan Holiday here because he talks about his method. He's constantly copying notes from most of the – especially biographies and history books he reads. He's constantly copying notes onto – Physical note cards. Then he files these note cards. I've seen them. These like giant boxes. But that's because like almost every book he reads is producing information that he will at least potentially use for a future book.

But for most people who don't have a particular project or a plausible particular project that needs information, just read. Read more is better than less. The other exception is going to be if there's a particular topic you care a lot about. And it doesn't have to be professional.

Right. Maybe it's just here's something happening in our culture right now. I really want to know more about it. It impacts me. I want to be informed on it. You can consider creating a idea or information document. You just create like a. text file, I use Google Docs, where you actually say, I'm going to go through, I'm going to read four or five books on this topic. Maybe I'm going to take an online course, like a great courses course on this. And I'm going to...

Pretty painstakingly copy the main ideas from all these into a big document, then make sense of them. Because when I can see all the ideas in one big document from four or five books, I can sort these around and sort of get a sense of a deeper understanding of that idea just because I want a deeper understanding of that idea. Like I'm doing that now. I began reading some books that have to do post-election.

I'm much more interested in the idea, and I'm putting air quotes around it, of wokeness, like where it came from, its impact on American culture and American elections. And I am creating a document I think is relevant to my life as an academic. I think it's relevant to my life.

As someone who does cultural commentary, I want to know more about it because it seems to be having a big impact on all of our lives. So I'm reading books. I just finished a great book we'll talk about in the November book summary. We Have Never Been Woke. That was a very good book. Sociologist from Stony Brook wrote it. Anyways, that's an idea where I have four or five books I've chosen. It's going to take me a while to make my way through because I'm working on other stuff. I'm taking notes.

And then I'll sort that document around and out of that's going to come like a more refined knowledge about that idea. Now that will be something I have like a quote-unquote take on, like an intellectual foundation that I can use when talking about something else or build on or have some confidence.

You could do that as well. Basically create a project for yourself and capture notes into a shared document. Otherwise, just read. Mark it in case you want to come back years later, but more books in general is better than less. Do you ever use active recall for... general personal stuff no no but i i for me i mean i say no in the sense of i don't test myself like when i think of active recall i think of like my book how to become a straight a student

And I think about note cards and I'm testing my knowledge on certain things. What I do do, however, when I'm like creating an idea document for a topic is I'm thinking it through in my head. Like I'm as if I was writing an essay about it. or doing a podcast monologue on it, and I'm trying to make sense and fit things together. So in a sense, that is sort of like Active Recall.

I'll try out my ideas in conversations or I'll test them in some writing. That in sense is also active recall. So the more I play with the ideas and try to make sense of them in my own mind, the more it's becoming ingrained. And there's this idea I have where if you've worked with connected ideas long enough, they eventually just get added to the internal infrastructure of ideas, your intellectual infrastructure. It's just part of that scaffolding for the knowledge in your head.

And now it's something you can forevermore draw on. Just like now, I can draw very fluently thinking about the neuroscience and psychology of context shifting and distraction and its role on cognitive processing. I've just worked with this information enough that it's just a part of how I understand the world.

So creating a document, playing with the ideas, trying to summarize the ideas. So when you play with these documents, you write summaries of the ideas above the notes. That's kind of like active recall. So maybe I'll say playing with the ideas is like a lightweight active recall.

That does help you not only understand them better, but integrate them into your, into that sort of intellectual scaffolding. This would all stuff to go in my, you have that book idea in defense of thinking. We don't talk enough about just. The mechanics of thinking. We don't do enough of that. We look at our phones, but the mechanics of thinking and the joy to come from thinking.

Working with ideas, increasing your understanding of the world. This is like a really rewarding human activity. We know this all the way since Aristotle talked about it in the ethics. But we don't talk about that much anymore. We talk about content, like what you're learning.

And also we just don't spend that much time. We're not that familiar with our brain. It's a weird thing how our brain works and how it takes information. But we don't talk much about that. We know a lot more. Like the lay public knows a lot more about how muscles work. than they do about how the brain works, right? Like anyone who's like an amateur weightlifter.

Knows a lot about like roughly how muscles work and how they grow and progressive resistance. We know very little about the brain, but it's at the key not just of many of our jobs but of like a fulfilling human life. So I'm very interested in that topic. All right. What do we have next? We have our corner. Slow productivity corner. Let's hear some theme music. So the slow productivity corners are we...

Designate one question per week to be specifically about my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. I now can refer to it as one of the economist's best books of 2024. Check it out if you have not already. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week? It's from Eric. I've worked in a fast-paced environment for the past seven years, and I'm tired of running.

I recently read Slow Productivity. My company and industry, for that matter, does not work at a natural place and focus on quality. There's less people willing to do this work and it's simultaneously becoming more complex and time consuming. Therefore, I'm considering a career shift to better align with my values. How do I apply slow productivity without losing career capital?

Well, it's a good question. It helps to know what you're looking for when you're looking for a shift. So you're looking to make a career change. You don't want to throw out. excessive amounts of career capital, which again is just my terminology for your rare and valuable skills that you've already developed. What I would look for, typically the best way to leverage your capital to get more slow productivity.

is to find ways to trade accountability for accessibility, to try to change your situation in such a way where you're being held accountable for what you produce, but are given extreme freedom and latitude for how you do it.

So sometimes this means, for example, moving out of a organizational role where there's like a lot of people that you work with and therefore lots of expectations about communication, how work unfolds, moving out of one of those roles into more of like a freelance or consulting role. Where it's, hey, I've signed a contract to do this. We'll check in once a week at this time on a phone call, and otherwise I'm just rock and rolling. So now I no longer have accessibility.

understandings or expectations about, Hey, I'm always going to answer emails. It'd be on Slack, but I got a lot of accountability because if I don't bring it, I don't get a new contract. You know, I'm going to eat what I eat, what I hunt, eat what I kill. Right. That's probably what you should be looking for. You have skill now. How can I leverage this so that it's going to be quality that I live on? It's quality to make my reputation. I'll be accountable for what I do.

But how I do it, I'm going to have a lot more freedom. You're probably in a good position to start thinking about taking those trade-offs. When successful, they really can be life-changing because it allows you to embrace so much more slow productivity in your professional life. All right. What do we got next? Oh, wait, we're going to hear the theme music again, right? Yeah, we always close with the theme music. Ah, there we go. We're like 50-50 on whether we close with it or not.

I think we should because I like it. And it reminds me of the More You Know music from NBC. Sometimes you're going and I don't know if I should play it or not. All right. I think there's never too many times to play that theme music. All right. What do we got next? We have a call. Ooh, let's hear it. Hey Cal, long time reader and listener. I'm a 28 year old software engineer working remotely from Western Colorado. I grew up here, moved away for a couple of years.

and develop the career capital to move back with the purpose of lifestyle-centric career planning. While I love the outdoor opportunities and ability to participate in my small town, I'm lonely working from home, especially as a single person. I visit the office once every couple months, which re-energizes me and facilitates collaboration. Don't know if I'm more productive in the office, but I definitely am happier. My boss said I can...

get a decent pay raise if I moved to Denver to be closer to the office, but then I'd have to start over with my community and deal with heavy ski traffic. It's totally optional and I can move back if I'm unhappy. As an extrovert, at least according to pseudoscientific BuzzFeed quizzes, I enjoy physically being in the office, but I also love my lifestyle after work. There are a few other benefits to moving to Denver.

I'm single and the dating pool is lacking in my small town. There'd be a higher potential for career growth in a tech hub. I also speak multiple foreign languages and would eventually like to apply that skill to my job. There would be more exposure for my side hustle as a musician, and finally my family moved to the front range, so I'd be closer to them.

I eventually want to settle down here, but am I too early in my career and life path to choose my current lifestyle? What would you do in my situation? Thanks a ton. All right. Well, Josh, it's a good chance to practice lifestyle-centric planning. So the key with lifestyle-centric planning is you have multiple different things that go into your ideal lifestyle. We have to be careful about this terminology, for example.

Because I see you, for example, referring to a subset of things that matter in your lifestyle as your quote unquote lifestyle. So living. In western Colorado, in a more remote place connected more closely to outdoor activities, you're calling that your lifestyle. I was like, no, that's part of the attributes.

of your ideal lifestyle. You're also mentioning many other attributes of an ideal lifestyle that are incompatible where you currently live. So you talked about feeling more energy when you work in your office, the dating pool. Family proximity, like being around family because they live in the front range. More things going on. Like these are other attributes. You've mentioned those things and you mentioned.

liking the communities because I guess you said you grew up there in Western Colorado, liking that kind of quiet vibe and the easier access to outdoor activity, avoidance of sort of outdoor traffic. So we have multiple attributes. And there's not an obvious winner in terms of location. This is a very classic setup for lifestyle-centric planning. There's not like a location that satisfies that all. So now what we're looking to do is come up with a plan.

That is going to improve as many of those as possible. And then maybe look for compensation for those that are neglected by the plan. So often a situation like this place, this idea is going to. help more as many of my lifestyle things directly as possible. And I'm going to come up with perhaps even outside the box planning.

for how to deal with the remaining important things that this plan doesn't actually satisfy. So for example, I'll go both directions. You might say, you know what, Denver... is if I do Denver right, move to Denver, there's so many of these lifestyle things that are going to affect me day-to-day and long-term, day-to-day, like what my work experience is like long-term, like finding a mate, someone to marry down the line.

Being around family during this period where like before they – there's these things that's going to affect so often that are going to be – these are very important to me. So going to Denver is going to affect those. All right. So now how can I – compensate for the small number of attributes that will be negatively impacted, which is like the quiet, the outdoor activity without all the traffic, that sort of aspects of life I like. Just start thinking out of the box and be like, okay.

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm younger. I am going to find a way to have some sort of simple property. I might have to save up for a year, but some sort of simple property out in Western Colorado. It's going to be like a cabin. that I'm going to work on and make better. And I'm going to set up my work in Denver because they don't seem to care in office or remote. So maybe I'm going to set it up so it's like three days in office or two remote or like Fridays I do remote.

or Mondays I do remote or something like this. And what I'm going to do is like on a lot of weekends, I'm going to head out to that property, kind of make that drive, work from there and be in the countryside for the whole weekend. Okay, so I get that quiet. I get that outdoor activities. I'm connected to that community. You get a lot of weekends I'm out there.

And I'm fixing up this kind of cool cabin I go to and it's my center for mountain biking in the summer and for skiing in the winter. And it's this sort of like cool project I have going on. But I'm spending most of my days in the city and I'm in the office most days. Like most weeks, I'm getting that advantage. I'm seeing my family and I could go out and like hang out with people, especially on like weekday nights or if there's like a date, maybe I don't go out to the cabin that weekend.

But I also have a place for my friends I meet in the city to go out to. And now what you're doing with this lifestyle planning, this is not like an obvious off-the-shelf solution. Like, oh, like the standard solution of working four days a week in Denver with a cabin in Western Colorado that you work on most weekends. It's not an off-the-shelf solution. It's a solution.

solution is bespoke to your particular list of lifestyle attributes you care about and now you know that's what you're doing then you begin looking for opportunities and this is where you find out like okay here's what i want to do and it's where you find out like actually

This friend of my family, we used to live there, he's always mentioned they have this big property and they have a cabin on it. And they would probably rent that to me because they'd like it to be fixed up. And this is really not going to be that expensive. And my other buddy lives out there still and does custom home building.

And maybe he could suddenly these like super bespoke plans begin to emerge. And there might be another way you could go the opposite way. I could imagine a way where you go all in on the where you're currently living and the way you would probably do that.

is figure out how to much more aggressively invest in non-professional community. Maybe there's a co-working space you go to, but also maybe you just get really on the ball with your work using my type of techniques to free up much more time so that you're sort of...

technically done without people knowing by work by two. And so you can be involved in all these like really aggressive outdoor activities and communities. My brother used to be very good at this when he worked for the government would shift. His schedule would start at 5 a.m. and that freed up the afternoons for outdoor activities. So you had big community that was sort of unrelated to work. So like there's shifts you can start to make there. And then maybe you say.

I come into Denver for three days every other week. You know, I have like a place, like an Airbnb I like that I rent and I'm there half a week every other week. Or you do the thing where you're like, yeah, I go into the city. for uh monday and tuesday and then i'm back for wednesday through sunday in the country right you figure out a way to do that maybe you buy a cheap apartment that you sort of fix up and i don't know right but you start thinking about these

not off the shelf, sort of bespoke solutions. Once you know the game, these are the attributes that I want to try to help them all. And some I can help directly and some I have to do something unexpected to. This is what lifestyle centric planning looks like.

And it's very different than grand goal thinking, which would be like if I just make one big change, everything else is going to be better. So that's like what I want to emphasize here is that when you have this list of attributes you're working on, they can't just all be helped by one decision. You get creative. And it's why the deepest lives often have a relatively complicated structure. Because that's what happens.

When you're working to satisfy multiple attributes at the same time, it's actually kind of a fun game and you have way more opportunities to do things you would never even think of until you know exactly what you're trying to do. So you got a couple of cool options here, Josh, but I think the key is. Do real lifestyle-centric planning. All of this, Jesse, is what I'm – I haven't got to this part of my book yet.

But that's why I'm kind of looking forward to this deep life book and just having like a manual for this type of lifestyle thinking. It'll be like the least technology seemingly related book I've written, though, again, it's motivated by technology because the very fact that we have to think so explicitly about how to shape our lives.

is something that came from the digitization of work. It's like one of the side effects of it. But I'm going to be glad when I can actually sort of just hand this book to people. I'm still in part one, which is preparation. The hard work of preparing to change your life, because that's my other argument. And Josh, I guess I'll throw this to you as well. The first big idea in my book is sometimes it's hard to jump straight into transforming your life. You have to prepare for it first.

And then part two is lifestyle centric planning and how you actually do this type of planning. So I'm in the final chapter of part one right now in my writing. When it's finished, we'll fall in the same category as social productivity. You mean in terms of like how a. I guess it's going to be considered more traditional self-help. It is not really about business or the world of work or technology as directly. So I guess it'll be seen as a more traditional.

Self-help book, I suppose. And then do we know any of the books in 2024 on that list this year? I should look. It's often not its own category. Yeah. I mean, so. Where I have been on lists like that was Goodreads did their nine most popular self-help books, which covered like all advice books. And I was on that list. But like if you look at the economist list, they don't have a category for that. I guess it could be under cultural and the arts.

It's probably not going to – I guess it could be under business, technology, economics, but probably not. And it's not going to be under history or memoir. So like that area is a little bit less represented in some of these lists. So we'll see. It's been a fun book to write though.

Yeah. Yeah. Taking my time. All right. So we got next a case study where people send in their accounts of putting into practice the type of advice we talked about on the show. So you can see what it looks like in the real world. You have a case study, send it to jesse at jesse at calnewport.com. Today's case study comes from Brooke. Brooke says, prior to reading slow productivity,

I had honestly been just scared to start the creative pursuits I was interested in. Everyone else seems to be able to crank out a book in six months or produce a work of art with a seemingly minimal natural effort. Since I was just a beginner in everything, my art would take forever and suck. And wouldn't that be the worst thing to ever happen? Then I read Slow Productivity, and immediately after, I read Deep Work.

The framework and slow productivity and concepts of deep work really resonated with me, and I decided it was finally time to start writing the book I've been thinking about. If it took forever, who cares? I would create something I was happy with, and that's all that matters.

To keep going past the initial spark of inspiration, I built my writing schedule around the idea that deep work is a muscle you cultivate. Since my deep work muscle was probably weaker than a newborn kitten, I set aside only one hour on weekdays to work on my book.

I started a ritual to get in the writing zone, then one to finish out my deep writing session, which broke down writing a whole book into easily achievable chunks. I also got a small field notebook to record other random ideas that came to me outside of my deep work sessions. I don't think this notebook would be all that helpful, but it turned out to be pivotal in developing the plot. While I haven't written oodles of chapters as a beginner, this is a pace that is natural and sustainable to me.

My ability to work deeply has improved along with my writing sessions to get longer. Critically, I'm so happy with what I've written, which provides major motivation to keep going. All right, well, Brooke, I appreciate that case study. A couple ideas to... underlying for people. One, the idea of deep work is being cultivated. The more you train it, the better you get. So if you haven't really been spending a lot of time focusing intensely without distraction, don't be upset.

that when you go out to that writing cabin you rented for a month you have struggled to produce anything useful this is not some flaw in your wiring it just means you're out of practice just like if you went to run a 5k

Having not done any running in a while, it's not going to go well. You'll be winded. Your lungs will hurt. Your legs will hurt. You wouldn't say, I don't have a running body. I'm just not meant to run. You say, yeah, I haven't been training. If I did some more training, I'd be better at this. You have to think about deep work that way. I appreciate that.

I also appreciate you embracing the idea of working at a natural pace from my book, Slow Productivity. Yeah, take your time. No one cares. A lot of great stuff took a really long time and no one knows that. No one knows how long things take. We invent these timelines in our head about how long we want something to take. And then we convince ourselves of two things. One, this is how long it takes for other people. And two, wouldn't it be great if this was true?

And we fall in love with that story. We tell ourselves everyone writes books in six months and we imagine what it would be like to be done in six months. And then that becomes a story that we want so much to be true that we try to force it to be true. But if you spend three years instead.

What might have been impossible might become very tractable. Slow and steady. I talk about this a lot as the compound interest of productive effort. You work on something, not randomly, but like productively. When I work... I have a structure. I'm working deep. I'm trying to make progress, but only a little bit of work at a time on a regular basis, but maybe not a crazy pace. That adds up. Over time, that adds up. At first, you're not seeing the benefits.

You're adding up pages, but you can't really tell the difference. You've just written a bunch of stuff. But eventually that turns into like a manuscript if we're going to use the book example.

Now you have a thing that can get feedback on and ideas about that you can be revising, right? And then at some point that leads to something that gets published. And now like you're really getting rewards. Like, well, I'm a published author and I have the opportunity to publish other books and the rewards begin to aggregate.

And once you've published a few books and you've had one of them that's broken out and been successful, you look at the rewards per effort and you see it's like flat, flat, flat, and it starts moving, moving, moving faster, faster, faster. But you can't jump to the top of this curve from scratch. You have to sort of work your way on the slow curve before the exponential really begins to pick in. The compound interest of consistent productive effort is a really important factor.

So just take more time is fine, right? You're going to build up good work. Building up good work is building up good work. And who's to say three years is worse than two years is better than six months, right? So I love it, Brooke. Great case study. Keep going. Go slow. Keep obsessing over quality. Read the obsess over quality section of slow productivity. Work on your taste. I have all this advice in there for how to work on your taste.

how to be around people who are doing it well, how to create your own inklings, how to get non-biased feedback. You want to be obsessing over quality here, but you can couple that with taking your time. You can kind of read the story about Jewel. will be a good story for you here as well. So yes, slow productivity is the Bible for what you're doing right now. Go slow, take your time, obsess over quality. Good stuff will likely come. All right, we have a final segment coming up here. But first...

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This is actually someone reporting something they just encountered in their workplace. They're reporting about it on Reddit. So this is from the rsysadmin Reddit thread from just a few days before. We are actually doing this recording. All right, I'm going to read some of this here. Had the pleasure of sitting through a sales pitch for a pretty big productivity monitoring. Why can't I say this word? Monitoring. It's not a hard word.

I'm not trying to say like ZocDoc.com productivity monitoring software suite this morning. Here's the expected basics of what this application does. Full key logging and mouse movement tracking. Takes a screenshot of your desktop every interval between 10 seconds to 5 minutes. Also part of every RMM I know. Keeps track of the programs you open and how often. This is also standard.

Creates real-time recordings and heat maps of where you click in any program. Then he says, here's where it gets fun. It allows your manager to group you into a work category. along with your co-workers it then uses ai to create a productivity graph from all your mouse movement data and where you click how fast you type how often you use backspace the sites you visit the programs you open

how many emails you send and compares all this to your coworkers data in the same work category. It goes on and on. All right. This represents like a natural trajectory of quote unquote. productivity monitoring software in the current world of knowledge work, all of which tends to be based on this idea that what matters is activity.

And the boogeyman that you have to chase down and get rid of is people doing nothing. This productivity monitoring software creates a world where if you're doing lots of stuff on your computer, it's great for the company. And there's a lot of freeloaders who sit there sipping Slurpees, and you've got to figure them out with this software. If you can just get rid of those, you're going to be productive. This is, in my opinion, ridiculous. And it is what happens when we let...

Software companies dictate to us what productivity means. The definition of productivity that they're dictating to us is productivity that can be helped and monitored by their tools, which cost money, by their SaaS tools. But if we step back with even just a little bit of objectivity, the shift towards digital productivity monitoring in most jobs is crazily misguided. It would be the equivalent of going to like the Ford factory.

in the early 20th century and saying, okay, we want to be better at producing Model Ts. And here's how we're going to do it. Like we've created this apparatus that looks at like the arm movements of the different people involved. in building the cars. And here's how it works. We've put bells on people's arms and they have different tones and we've trained people to recognize the different bell tones. And if we hear a particular bell, is it...

ringing enough, well, maybe that person is just not helping to build cars and we can identify them. So everyone's going to have to make sure their bells are ringing all the time. This would be a crazily indirect way of trying to increase Model T production. What works better? Why don't we measure how fast we're producing Model Ts? And then let's have a process we use to produce Model Ts. And then if we change the process, see if that produces more Model Ts.

That's what led to the continuous motion assembly line, which is 10x more effective than the methods we're using before. Not this sort of like vaguely indirect, let's make sure people are moving more. And the reason why, and this becomes crystal clear when we think about this analogy to car manufacturing.

Is it in car manufacturing? It becomes clear, oh, it's completely misguided. What you're trying to do here is not figure out a way to do something better. You're trying to figure out a way to eliminate some narrow negative case you're worried about. You're worried about the person who's on your car manufacturing floor.

who's just sitting there taking a nap. So you have this negative boogeyman you're really worried about and you're putting all of your energy to track that down. Hey, if you're just doing nothing, I'm not going to hear your bell, then you're going to be in trouble. But what it doesn't focus on is the positive of trying to produce more stuff.

which is ultimately the thing that more directly matters. I don't care as much about as someone taking a nap. What I care about is are we producing Model Ts at a fast rate? That's what matters to me. I don't get paid by car purchasers for lack of naps. I get paid for Model Ts.

But in knowledge work, we have this like terribly indirect way of doing things where we say, well, visible activity is going to be our proxy for useful effort. So let's just make sure there's no one doing like very little visible activity. But as I argue in my book, Slow Productivity, this is a disastrous way to think about actually getting things done. In knowledge work, we have to figure out how to measure the stuff that matters.

And the processes we use to produce that stuff and see if those processes work well or not. It has nothing to do with putting the proverbial bells on people's elbows just to make sure that their body's moving. Now, what about that negative? What about the freeloader problem?

Almost anything you come up with for actually directly improving the quality of what you produce, almost anything you come up with as soon as you get very systematic about what should the processes be for how we produce stuff. Almost any of these solutions make freeloaders really obvious. Because once you actually think about process, like here's the stuff we do, we tend to do things like external tracking of workload. We tend to do things like...

clarity and communication. We, every other day we sit down, you are working on this. Where are you? Where are you stuck? As opposed to just receiving a bunch of emails about a bunch of stuff. I know what you're working on. I want to know what you need, what you did, what you need.

Like that is a situation, for example, in which it's very hard to be the car worker not moving your arms. I don't need to be tracking your computer or seeing if your mouse is movement. It's where's the goods. You didn't do this. It's clear. 10 minutes before this meeting, you put some crap together. So when you get more systematic, the freeloader problem goes away, but you also free people from this.

counterproductive surveillance culture approach, which is more about like managers being really mad, imagining some negative than it is about trying to get more things done. So the equivalent of the assembly line and knowledge work is like, let's get. more focused on what we produce. Let's have external workload management. Let's structure communication. So people are in context shifting and let's trade accessibility for accountability.

This is what the software industry did when they moved towards agile methodologies. They don't just email each other like, hey, can you work on this feature? And what about that feature? And who's working on this? No, they track what features need to be done. Who's working on what? You're working on this. Only work on this.

How long do you need? Two days? Great. Get it done in two days. We'll check back in and figure out what you should work on next. Huge flexibility in how work is executed. Very little surveillance. But on the other hand, very few freeloaders because it becomes obvious pretty quick.

you've been very nonproductive. You're not getting these things done for us. So what we need to care about is real processes that take into account how the human brain actually works and are more focused on results than they are these... crude proxies for useful effort. So the type of productivity monitoring software talked about in this Reddit thread is exactly the wrong direction to go. It's putting the bells on the forward workers instead of innovating the assembly line.

It is missing the forest for the trees. It is not going to make your company more productive. It's just going to make people more miserable. I'm not surprised that software companies are pitching this because this is something you can write software from and throw some AI at it so it seems like it's a value add and you can charge $12 a seat with your SaaS solution. The companies themselves say it's not the software.

The software companies aren't going to tell them what productivity is. We know our business. Let's get serious about producing stuff that matters. Even if structuring work is going to be a pain, it's better than all this nonsense. So there you go. It's a little bit of a rant, but productivity monitoring software is going in the absolute wrong direction. And of course, let me connect this like we're doing all episode back to digital. This is all a problem.

of the digital environment around knowledge work where there's so many different things you could be working on and there's such ease in just passing stuff on along. We get into this sort of pseudo-productive, hyperactive, hive mind environment where everyone just rock and rolls and emails everyone.

And in that world, what else can you do except for say like, well, let's just get rid of people not participating. But this is all a side effect of digital knowledge work. It caught us off guard. We didn't know how to handle it. And we need better tools than something like. monitoring software. All right. All right. There we go. That is our episode for today. We covered, I guess I could say everything, Jesse, because in theory I've touched on almost every major topic I've talked about.

I did leave out a whole section of advice about skeletons. I do have a lot of thoughts about that. I also had another whole section of advice about Brandon Sanderson and his book, Name of the Wind. This is a good time to tell people, by the way, if you have corrections about things I've said, like misattributing authors to books, Jesse at CalNewport.com. He loves to hear about them. I do. I got a couple. I get those emails. We must have mentioned Brandon recently because I got another.

Brandon didn't write name of the wind email kind of recently. My favorite type of favorite type of emails. All right. That's all of it for all we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode. We didn't, I guess this is coming out early December, right? Yes. All right. So we'll do the November books. I forgot to bring them today. We're recording this.

It was pretty early in the week of November, so I didn't think about it. But I will do the books I read in November. We'll do those at the end of next episode, okay? Keep up with your thrillers if you're doing Thriller December, and we will see you next week. And 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. Each week I send out a... new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply i've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week

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