Ep. 338: Why You’re Always Distracted

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, I'm a little bit relaxed today because yesterday, the day before we recorded this, I published the fourth.

Of the four weekly columns I had promised the New Yorker. Oh, yeah. So four and four weeks. Four and four weeks. The month of January was Cal month. What I was really doing actually was taking over Kyle Shaka's column for. He's on leave or some such, and so they're sort of handing out his column to various people. So I took it for the month of January. Man, that's a hard job. So he writes one every week? I guess so. And you usually write one once a month?

Or whatever. I work on a word count. So it just sort of depends what I'm doing. Shorter ones will be more frequent, but if I do some longer ones, less frequent. I did a twice-a-month column in... god early pandemic and i don't remember if that was 2020 or 2021 but for about six months or a year i did a twice a month column that was like okay especially during the pandemic because there's nothing else to do like we couldn't go anywhere i would just come here

And work on these articles. And it was like something to do. Like you couldn't go to campus. You weren't going to social events. And I remember that being like okay. That was some breathing room. Once a week is fast. It was fun though. You should check out the final column. The final column is about Michael Crichton.

Like the challenge was to work Michael Crichton as a motivating force in one of these columns. And I wrote about actually lessons from Crichton that's relevant to dealing with technology today. So I think it's kind of a cool idea. I did not, however, get eruption. worked into i wanted to i we cut the stuff about like my personal relationship to creighton did you have an eruption reference in that i had a reference in some one of the drafts what did it say i i mean i was talking about

Somewhere I made a reference to the sort of preposterously large number of novels that were discovered after he died and published. And it was something like. Some of them, which were actually pretty good, like 2011's micros and others, I think I call it bafflingly bad. 2024's eruption. At least you tried. I tried. Yeah, I tried.

James Patterson might have sent out a hit team if I had said that. So anyways, read the articles. I think there's some cool stuff in there. Probably the one of the four that seemed that I don't know which one has gotten the most attention. I like the last one I did about social media bans.

So I actually got into the legal – we talked a little bit on the show, but that one I think got some legs. Get into the actual legal standards for when you do or do not ban things that could be harming kids and how would we apply those to social media. Also seemed to get a bunch of –

pick up i think on the me using tiktok article with the melt my face melting into a phone yeah yeah uh that that kind of made it around i just ran into one of my neighbors in the hallway here of the hq and she had seen that one okay yeah so that one must be getting around We'll see if the Crate one spreads. Anyway, that was fun, but my hat's off to Kyle for doing this every week. That is a skill, and I am impressed. All right, we got a good show. We got a deep dive in here about a topic.

that I care about a lot. We've got some good questions and case studies coming up. And for our final segment, this is our first episode of February, so we will do the books I read. We will review the books I read last month. All right, let's get rolling, Jesse. So one of the most common complaints I hear from my listeners and readers is that they feel like they're too distracted.

This is a problem they have at work. It is also a problem that many of you have in your life outside of work as well. When we study mismatches between the modern digital environment and our current lives, which is more or less the theme of this show. This distraction issue really is one of the big issues that we're dealing with. And we've talked about...

All sorts of different isolated aspects of distraction, where it comes from, the value of attention, reclaiming attention. We've talked about all sorts of isolated aspects about that on this show. But today I wanted to pull a bunch of those ideas together. I have five big ideas about why you're probably too distracted. Some of them about your life outside of work. Some of them about your life in work.

And then for each of those ideas, we have some concrete responses to it. If you recognize that source of distraction, if you recognize its dynamics, what can you do in response? All right, so that's our plan. Let's start with idea one. You use your phone as a stress reliever. So here's something I learned recently when I was going through first the acute recovery from my surgery for my core issue. And now as I'm going through.

the rehab for my back because my back got messed up because my core was injured. You know how those fun things unfold. One of the things I learned is that, oh, your phone can be a very powerful distractor stress reliever.

Right. Because the type of content you get delivered through your phone, if you're a social media user, it'll be through social media. If it's me, it's going to be like news or baseball rumors. It distracts you. It pushes emotional buttons. It's a bit of a sort of like a numbing palliative effect. In fact.

When I was on the gurney waiting for my turn for surgery, which I was nervous about for obvious reasons. I had my phone still, right? They don't take that till the end. I was looking up on my phone. On Wikipedia, I was reading the technical details of the MIDI format. I don't know if you know about this, Jesse, but the MIDI format that you use for digital music transmission.

That was very soothing to me is actually reading about the actual packet headers and payloads that have evolved for doing digital capturing digital music. So I get this right. I get that power. So what I learned from this is that for a lot of people. This just becomes a default response for any stress or any boredom because it sort of works. It will put your mind somewhere else. It'll probably press an emotional cue and it gets you just that, that relief in the moment.

And again, it's not a bad thing in isolation, but when it becomes your default response to any sort of stress and boredom, when that becomes ingrained into your habit loops, when that reward system is pumping out the dopamine every time it sees that phone nearby and you're a little bit uncomfortable.

your life necessarily becomes very distracted. You can't watch that television show you were looking forward to watching with your full attention. The phone pulls you in. You can't enjoy dinner with your family because the phone is pulling you in. You can't finish that really hard.

essay or memo or piece of source code you're trying to write at your job because that phone continues to pull you in. So we have a potentially positive use in isolation that when it becomes default, makes your life by default distracted. All right, so what is our concrete response to that particular dynamic? You have to introduce systematically higher quality stress relievers into your life. Build new habits about when I feel that stress.

I know it's built up. I'm stressed about what's going on at life or work. I just want to pull out that phone that you have these other higher quality, more self-contained stress relievers. It could be exercise. Could be getting outside and doing a particular type of walk. It could be making a certain type of tea. Reading is a good one here. A particular type of books, in particular locations that you like to read, hobby or hobby-related projects. You're retraining your mind.

and in particular your ward system to give you dopamine around those high-quality alternatives, it will also bust the stress. It will do so in a more durable way, and because it's an activity that has its own intrinsic value, you are actually going to feel better about it.

And it doesn't lead to a behavior loop that's going to affect other parts of your life. Another thing you can do here is just train your mind to be more comfortable with boredom or a mild amount of stress. You're just bored sometimes and you can kind of just like take a deep breath and slow down and be present.

That requires training, but it makes your mind more comfortable. And so your reward system becomes less desperate to have some sort of dissipation of those bad feelings. You're going to resist better this idea that I have this ready-made distraction ready to go. All right, idea number two, why you might be too distracted. In the context of work, you are playing obligation hot potato.

This is an effect I've talked about before on the show, but I think it's critical for understanding a lot of the distraction in the modern knowledge workplace. When you see a message arrive in your inbox or maybe in a chat window, but you see an incoming message that is sitting there.

This can be a source of interpersonal stress because we say this is now an obligation on my plate. Someone is waiting for me. It kind of makes us a little uncomfortable. Our instinct, this is the bad habit we've learned. is to want to get those things out of these inboxes or channels as quickly as possible because that will in the moment relieve you of the cognitive burden of knowing that this thing is your responsibility.

So what we do is we play obligation hot potato, which is what is the quickest way that technically speaking, this message or chat is out of my hands and on someone else's plate. And so you send it back with like a question you made up. you know it's going to come back, right? You're not getting to the heart of the issue. But temporarily, that's out of your...

out of your inbox, right? Someone's like, I think we should meet about this. You're like, I don't want to deal with thinking through when I want to meet or whatever. I don't want to deal with my schedule. So how about like, yeah, sure. We should. When's good for you. Technically that's out of your.

inbox for now it's coming back but in the moment it's out of here or you put thoughts question mark shoot it back or you send like a couple random thoughts you know it's insufficient for what they're asking for but in the in the moment it's not there in your inbox waiting for you to see it

So it's just that drive obligation hot potato is I want to get stuff out of my channels as quickly as possible. The problem with obligation hot potato is that these things come right back and then you punt them back when you're doing the bare minimum to get you out of your inbox. The total number of times that messages will arrive and command your attention related to this particular issue goes up.

You're punting it. They punt it back. You punt it. They punt it back. You're throwing the hot potato over there. It burns their hands. They throw it over there. It comes back to you. The total amount of time now that you are having to react to something incoming goes up. The velocity of these things goes up.

Because the granularity gets smaller and therefore the responses have to be quicker. And so overall, your level of distraction as captured by the amount of cognitive context shifting you have to do from your work back to your communication channels, that skyrockets all because in the moment. When you are in an inbox, you just want to get things out of there as quickly as possible. So once you recognize the obligation hot potato dynamic, it gives you...

A concrete idea for solving this. How do we stop playing obligation hot potato? We're going to have to spend more time with our messages. So we're not doing the quickest thing. We're doing the thing that's going to be most effective. Now, I have a very specific definition of most effective here. What makes a reply effective?

It minimizes the number of follow-up messages you will have to receive and respond to. That's what matters. That's how you have to retrain your brain. I don't care if it takes me 10 minutes versus 30 seconds to answer this message right now. If the 10-minute response will minimize the number of future messages generates by a factor of three or four, it's worth it. If this 10-minute response means like we're basically done, that is worth it versus the one-minute response.

that's going to generate a 10 message back and forth. So you want to start prioritizing the reduction of unscheduled messages that you will have to receive and respond to. That is the thing you're trying to reduce, not the time in the moment. This means you're going to have to spend more time on your inbox or in the time you do spend your inbox, you're not going to get through as many messages.

And maybe you will need even longer sessions or more sessions or stuff that's just going to take longer for you to get to it. Like there is something that has to give when you're no longer playing obligation hot potato, but it's better to have drawn out more frequent, more drawn out inbox sessions. than to have all this back and forth communication all day long. A thing that can help here, this is like a bonus tip, a thing that can help here is if when you go into your inbox,

you take a particular category of message, messages that are all of the same type. So either they're all dealing with like the same project or event, or they're all of the same type in the sense of like, these are all paperwork or logistical questions, et cetera. Take a bunch of questions of the same type, put them in their own folder or label, then just load up those messages and deal with those one after another. It will be easier if the things you are dealing with consecutively...

If they're all in the same cognitive context, it will be much less mentally exhausting to sort of go through those messages. Then you get another batch. It's a mistake people make when you're batching email. It's not just I'm going to. batch the time in which I answer email, it's much better if you batch the content as well. It has much less of a cognitive drag. So that will help. But if you don't play application hot potato, your sessions are longer.

But the times you're checking your inbox get much smaller, and that's going to make your life feel a lot less distracted. All right, idea three, you're doing too many things at the same time. There's a core idea from my new, I guess I should call it new-ish book, Jesse, because we're coming up on the one-year anniversary. My new-ish book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. A key idea from that book is overhead tax.

Every professional obligation you agree to brings with it logistical overhead. It's emails, it's meetings, it's back and forth that you have to have just to sort of organize and keep that obligation rolling. The more things you're working on at the same time. the more overhead tax you're paying at the same time. But that overhead tax, as it increases, what doesn't increase? The amount of time you have in the day. So now the ratio of your time spent servicing work versus actually doing work

becomes unreasonable. And this is another big source of feeling distracted all the time is because if you have 10 ongoing obligations, that is a lot of overhead tax. And that overhead tax is pulling out your attention because they're all generating emails and meetings you have to jump in and out of and you feel really distracted. The concrete solution here is what I suggest in the book. Do fewer things at once. This doesn't mean you're doing fewer things.

You're accomplishing fewer things over a long timescale. You probably get more done per month or per year. If you do a few things at a time before you move on to the next, but in the moment, work on fewer things at once. They can get more of your attention. Less of your day is spent on overhead tax. Those tasks will get completed faster. Then you bring in the new ones.

You'll be getting things done in a setting that feels a lot less distracted and a lot less frustrating. All right, idea number four, you're disorganized. If you have not organized well, the obligations in your life, your life is going to feel distracted. Because what's going to happen is you're always...

Discovering at the last minute, oh, my God, this thing is due. I got to get this done. I need to find these people. I'm making these calls. I'm waiting to hear back. Where does this form go? There's going to be a sort of freneticism that is induced when your life is disorganized.

consolidate it around when it's due. Often you have deadline conflicts where multiple things are due around the same time and you're all doing them at the last minute and now your day is incredibly back and forth and you're staying up late to try to make these things happen.

There's always a sense of I need to be checking in on lots of channels because God knows what I'm missing. If you're not organized, reacting to things becomes your main mode of force for your actual effort. So you have to constantly be checking things because who knows what I'm missing. On the other hand, if you're organized, you know what you have to do and you make smart decisions about when you're going to do it, all of that calms down.

Because you make better allocation of your available time. You can spread work out more evenly. So no one day is going to feel so overloaded. You can be more confident about being done with your workday or during your workday being confident when I'm working on this.

I don't need to be checking all the time for these other things because I know what I'm doing and I know my plan to do it. The more organized you are, the less distracted you're going to feel. So the concrete suggestions here is you got to get your act together from an organizational perspective. At a minimum, you need some sort of task collection system. I suggest using status boards where you have a Trello-style board for each of the roles you have in your professional life.

And then you divide it up into columns. You have like back burner, things you're working on this week, things you're waiting to hear back from people on, et cetera. And then individual obligations are stored in these columns as cards on which you can then paste or attach or write all of the relevant information.

You need one of these type of status boards and you need to practice a full capture methodology straight out of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, which means nothing is kept just in your head. At the end of every day as part of your shutdown, you have to make sure that anything that's just in your head gets onto one of those boards or gets onto your calendar if it's time-specific, but it's not just in your head. Needful capture.

And you got to review that thing. At the very least, you need to be doing a weekly plan where you grapple with your calendar for the week. You see what's coming up. You understand what's coming up, what deadlines are coming up. You move things around on your calendar.

Maybe I need to cancel this or move this over here to make time. And you begin adding appointments with yourself on your calendar to make sure that for the time-sensitive things coming up, that you have enough time put aside to get it done and you're protecting that time. Oh my God, this thing is due on Thursday. Let me block off Monday afternoon just to make sure that time doesn't get taken because that's when I'm going to write this memo.

When you do these weekly plans, it's when you really check in on those and update those status boards at the very minimum. You could be looking at these more frequently, but at the very minimum. So capture and planning. Capture and planning is what you need to not feel.

like you're constantly distracted now if you get more advanced we talk about on the show a full multi-scale planning methodology combined with these task boards put all this together will be the best but the very minimum you need to be looking at your calendar once a week and having some place where All the things you need to do that aren't on your calendar can live. All right, final idea for why you're so distracted. You lack sufficient foundational pursuits.

So a foundational pursuit is something that requires an investment of focused time over a long period of time, and it's something you care about. You can have these in your work life. You can have these in your life outside of work. They're foundational because you can sort of build your life on top of them and there will be a certain stately pace to your life and a certain resistance to a sort of just random frenetic distractedness.

When you don't have these, your mind doesn't know what to do. So at work, it's like, let's just... react to things we need something to do like we need to otherwise we have no value to this office right if we're not doing things so let me jump on calls and answer emails and be in the mix and you you lean towards distraction and at home you're like i don't know what to do with myself

Let me, let me, I'm on my phone, like video games, like I need something to do to fill my time so that it feels more significant. So you need to have these foundational pursuits so you do not fall into that sort of default distraction. So at work, that means you've got to have some sort of project in which you are regularly dedicating long, deep work sessions towards.

Unbroken concentration towards something important. It's building a new skill. It's a new initiative, a new project. That's the foundation on which you can build everything else in your work life. It's what's going to make you. Be more resistant to the distraction and busyness. It's going to give you the courage to push back or corral that and not feel like you have no self-worth as an employee. At home, this is going to be significant hobbies, sort of reading.

challenge you're taking on, self-education goals, health projects, community involvement, something from that type of list. It's like a really big part of your life. In fact, I recommend people, especially the hustle types, work less. Then make sure you have a foundational activity outside of your work. The counterbalance to work. It's that valuable. Even if it means that's a couple more hours, I could be crushing it. And I'm not because I'm trying to run this community thing or I have a really.

important like athletic physical pursuit that's an important part of my life and I want to train for it and do it, that is worth it. If you don't have that, the time that remains in your life is going to be scattered and reactive. All right, so those were my... Four ideas for why you might be too distracted. I'll list all five ideas. I was distracted there. Five ideas. Idea one, it's because you're using your phone as a stress reliever. Idea two.

It's because you're playing too much obligation hot potato. Idea three is because you're doing too much at the same time. Idea four is because you're disorganized. Idea five is because you lack foundational pursuits in both work and your life. So there we go. I think distraction of the type we're talking about was less of a problem before the advent of our modern digital environment, which to me the.

all the pieces to come together for a modern digital environment to make it what it is. It's digital technology plus digital networks. So we have internet technology and we have the sort of accessibility through devices like phones and tablets, et cetera. This idea that I'm distracted too much was less of a problem 50 years ago or 100 years ago. It doesn't mean, though, that we can look at those times nostalgically. They had their own problems. If you go back 100 years, if we go back to…

1926. Like what is the real issue going to be? It's going to be people who are in these newly industrialized workforces where their job is grueling and is breaking down their body and there's a sense of nihilism and they're self-medicating through like excessive alcohol consumption.

To the point where we get the Women's Christian Temperance League pushing through the prohibition amendment to the Constitution. That's not better. It's just different. Or we had similar in the 70s. We were all just watching. television all the time so it was like terrible quality entertainment with drinking our schlitz beer like you know it's not like things were a panacea before

And if anything, I actually see these mismatches with the modern digital environment and in particular this one of distraction. I'll take it. Here's why. It's much more easily solvable. Like those type of solutions I gave are not that hard and they make your life better. So I don't – I'll just end on this idea because I'm a technocritic. I don't like this idea that everything is always bad. Everything is just making things worse or there was like a better time that we're getting away from.

We are always going to have problems because of mismatches between our culture and our Paleolithic brain and Neolithic way we run our lives, right? We're always going to have problems. The question is... Are those problems getting easier, harder to solve? And maybe there's some hope that these modern digital environment problems are going to be easier to solve, right? It's going to be...

The jobs, these jobs aren't particularly bad. For example, the people who are distracted with email at work, they're going to an air conditioned box for like eight hours a day doing non-physical labor with a huge amount of autonomy. If you're in 1926, you would take that bet all day long.

Right. Like I will do that. So like we're in a pretty good setup. We're just along the borders. Well, we get the emails catch us up or too distracted or some nihilism. Those are more solvable problems. So I just want to add that coda.

This is a relatively new problem, and it's a problem I'll take because it is more solvable, and where we end up when we solve it is so much better than where we were before. I can still see an arc of progress that we're progressing on. All right, Jesse, so there we go.

It's why you're too distracted. So when you were in the surgery reading your phone, even though you were on social media, is that still technically a distraction or can you kind of treat it like a book? You know, I don't know because it was random. I was just looking for something.

Literally distracting. Okay. Right. I wouldn't have had the energy to like really focus on something hard. We'll see in the book segment we do at the end of today's episode in the aftermath of that when I've sort of laid up.

I read a lot of math books, which we'll talk about at the end. But, like, I couldn't do that then because I was, like, really nervous. But, you know, surgery is a weird thing. So I was just like, I don't know. It's like a random thing. That's why it's a distraction. My distractions are more nerdy.

looking up technical protocols or whatever, but I felt like it was, but there's, it served a purpose. Right. I didn't need to be thinking about, you know, what was about to happen. But if you technically had, you know, the Washington post app on your phone, I would have been distracting myself with it.

Yeah. I want to be like, I'm really interested in what's happening in, you know, Congress. I would have been like, I don't want to think about having my stomach cut open. Makes sense. Yeah. All right. Well, we got. I want to talk first about our friends at Defender. particularly the Defender 90, the Defender 110, and the Defender 130, which seats up to eight line of vehicles. These were on my mind the other day because friend of the show, Brad Stolberg, was down in Miami.

And he texted me a picture of a Defender. It was a tricked out Defender. I think it was a 130. And it looked cool. And he was saying, hey, when are we going to drive around in one of these things and podcast? And I think that's actually not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea. Me and Stolberg just driving around in our Defender. It was a really cool looking car. This one was tricked out. I think they had kitted it out with...

I don't know the terminology, but like the off-road type stuff, like the tire jack and kind of the cool stuff. These are cool-looking cars. You can see them if you go to LandRoverUSA.com. You can see the three defenders, and you can decide for yourselves if Brad and I should tour the country in one of these. I think we should. This one, he sent me a picture of. They had tinted the windows, so it was extra Miami cool.

I love it. We'll just have an arm up, just podcasting like it's an episode of Comedian in Cars. But that would be cool. So anyways, I appreciated that he was on the lookout for Defenders because, I don't know, it's a great looking car. It's got that great tech.

But I just love the way it just has cool lines. And then like the cool, it's a comfortable ride and it has a great technology and you can drive it off road and it has the camera that will show you like what's under your car. You can avoid obstacles and it looks nice in Miami. But I just love that idea of me and Brad.

Just cruising, cruising in our Defender. So anyways, you can design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com. Go there, check it out. Let me know if you think I should be cruising in one of those. You think maybe it'll be cooler than my... Kia Carnival minivan, which is black though. We have a black one. I think the Defender looks cooler. I also want to talk about a new sponsor, a high-tech sponsor for my...

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First Defender for free. But you got to use the promo code. It'd be funny if there's just a promo code when you're signing your paperwork to buy a new car. They just put down a sheet with a box in the middle and you write like deep 20. All right, enough of that. Let's move on to our questions. Hi, first questions from Arnod. I'm developing a documentary film project focused on environmental issues. I don't like social media, but started setting up Instagram and LinkedIn.

I'd much prefer to have a solid newsletter. What should I do? All right. Let me tell you the way I've been refining my thinking. Let me tell you the way I've been refining my thinking. When it comes to the use of these, let's call them, I don't know, digital attention or digital content tools. Digital content tools is a good term.

There's some points about this that have been confusing to me, and I think I have a new framework for thinking about this that helps with those confusions, so you can let me know if you buy this. When it comes to digital content tools like namely social media and newsletters, maybe we could throw a podcast in there, but let's just talk about social media newsletters primarily. There are two different roles these can play.

in helping you with like the success of a project or professional endeavor. And I think we get confused when we mix these roles together. So let me, let me pull these roles apart and we'll see if this clarify things. All right. Role number one. Social media and newsletters can be something that you can deploy after something you're doing becomes successful to help you magnify or make more pervasive that success.

Right. So if you're doing something like you're an author who hits a wave and is getting a lot of attention, you have a startup. That is buzzy. It's doing something that people think is really interesting. Your movie or your album is like starting to gather attention or it got some good reviews and now suddenly everyone's paying attention.

Social media and newsletters in this circumstance can be very helpful for spreading or amplifying that success and or solidifying that audience. So for example, you might start putting up lots of social clips that are shareable about your documentary or relevant to your book.

And if people are really into it, they're going to share it, and that expands the reach because you have people organically, authentically sharing stuff that's about what you're doing. If you're an author whose book is doing really well, well, now you can solidify access to that audience.

By trying to capture them on an email newsletter where now you have a way to actually talk to your audience directly. So that's a primary role these play. But that role requires first that you're doing something that's successful. And then it's about how do you professionally maximize the opportunities that that creates. So in that situation, if you're working on your documentary or film project.

And it starts to take off. You want to make sure you have pros in place to sort of take advantage of these possibilities to help spread the word, to harness the energy and harness the audience. The second role technically that social media newsletters can play. is as something that builds an audience and then deploys that audience towards the primary project you're working on and makes that project more successful than it otherwise would be. So it's like what makes your project successful.

This is where I think a lot of people think about using social media and newsletters. It's almost never successful. Roll two is almost never successful. So we mix these two things up. So it's not like social media newsletters aren't important. And we see really successful projects that really lean into this. But there's often a chicken and egg inversion happening there. They're professionally taking advantage of the audience they have built through other means.

As opposed to they did something first to build an audience and then they used that to make their primary project succeed. And where you do see that happening, typically the primary project came later. This is someone who had success.

In one of these realms, typically they had success in social media, and then they said, oh, why don't I do a project to take advantage of that? And there there's a big survivorship bias issue because most people don't have success on these platforms, and those who do are more likely to say, maybe I'll do a book.

Like Sahil Bloom has a book out right now that's doing very well. He has a huge presence online. So the book is doing very well, but the huge presence online came first. The reason why that direction is it's hard to deploy. on demand. It's hard to say, I have this primary project, let's go build a big newsletter or social to help it, is that it's really hard when you're not starting with an already successful brand name or project to build a big social presence or newsletter.

If you look at like Substack, what's successful on Substack? I mean, it's almost always people who already have earned audience trust painstakingly. It's journalists. It's authors with successful books. I have a big newsletter. We got 125,000 people on something like that. That's because I've been writing books for whatever it is now, 20 years, and have built trust with a lot of audience and then captured it. Nate Silver makes a lot of money off of his.

But he had a massively successful journalistic career, especially at the New York Times after his blog got taken up. People know him and follow him, so they followed him to Substack. It's very hard to do this from scratch. That's because these markets are attention markets, and attention markets, especially when these attention markets are pretty efficient and pretty competitive. Why should someone pay attention to you? That is a hard question to answer.

And so what happens then is people say, well, I did the stuff you would do for role one. On role one, if you have a successful book and you want to use media newsletters, you're like, I'm going to like systematically make clips about my book.

And I'm going to very carefully have my web presences like ask for newsletter subscribers. And because people are really into me and what I'm doing, that will help spread and will gather a lot of people. So I'll do that, but for my unknown project and nothing happens.

Because like the clips you're making about your project, no one cares about if they don't already know about your project. And your newsletter that you have all these sign-up widgets for, no one wants to sign up for if they don't know who you are and they don't care about it. So I think separating role one and role two explains a lot of the confusions people have.

They're doing the stuff you observed for role one as working, and they're trying to use that to succeed in role two. But in role two, almost no one succeeds. And if you want to succeed there, you've got to make a huge swing. Like if you want to try to build a social –

presence from scratch you really have to think about it like you're a showrunner for a cable cable network like i gotta try to make a show that's going to break through and get a big audience it can't just be random it can't just be let's just film some stuff and put it on the on amc and hope people watch you have to like

really think through, like there's a niche in the market. I got to really invest in this. I think this is different than what anyone else is doing. It's very catchy. It plays on the medium well. You really would have to be thinking about this like a major endeavor. Newsletters are even harder. People don't sign up for newsletters if they don't.

have a reason to do so. So don't mess up, don't mix up role one strategies for this technology to try to achieve a role two goal. And so I think making these separations, hopefully that helps clarify how people think about this. I don't know. I think it helps me because – I don't know, Jesse. Tell me if you think that's more clarifying. But that's basically the way – that's how I finally realized what people were doing. And so like, well, I'm doing the same things Ryan Holiday is doing.

I'm looking at like the clips he's put on his Instagram and I'm doing that myself. And why don't I have the followers? And it's like, well, he already has the audience. And so he's just feeding them things they can spread.

So if you do that same thing when you don't yet have the audience, nothing will happen. So there's got to be some core. You have to get the audience or win the audience at some point. And if you don't have something, to win an audience from scratch on social media is really hard. It's like having your show.

be top five in the ratings. It's just really hard to do. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Tom. I'm a software engineer wanting to take on more technically advanced work projects involving LLMs and 3D computer graphics. My last formal math class was in high school, so I lacked the foundational skills. To be so good, I can't be ignored. I think I need to add one to two hours of daily study. How can I do this on top of a full plate of work, hobbies, exercise, and young kids?

Well, you know, I'm going to start my answer by saying, make sure first you're facing the productivity dragon. How much time do these various things you care about take? And if that time adds up to more time than you have reasonably available, you can't do all those things. The universe, and in particular the physics of time, do not care about your list of what you want to do.

So the universe is not going to accommodate by bending the rules of time the fact that in addition to all these things, you want to do something else as well. So facing the productivity dragon can be freeing sometimes, right? Because it might lead you to say. I like my full life outside of work and I have young kids and I'm into this exercise and I don't really have time to pick up a major new skill. That time doesn't exist. Okay, great. Then I don't feel guilty about not doing that.

And that might be the answer here, that you face a productivity dragon and say, we can't do all of these things. So maybe I'll put my attention towards getting better at the things I'm already doing at work during work itself. So through my selection of projects, for example.

Taking on projects that stretch my skills and I can actually act on those stretches during work. I'm learning new things to try to use. I'm learning this skill for exactly the feature I'm trying to add, the sprint I'm doing right now. Like you're integrating the learning into your work. You're moving your project skills towards areas that you think are going to give you more career capital that's useful. Let me just be better about what I'm doing during the workday. That might be the answer.

Or the answer might be, no, no, no, I'm doing lifestyle-centric planning, and if I could do LLM work, it's going to open up a lot of things. Maybe there's like a lot of jobs. I could do remote at 1.5x the salary, which really would open up this hole.

vision I have for what I want to do with life. For me, if I could do LLM work, it could be six months on, six months off, like maybe to unlock something really cool. So like, I got to figure this out. All right. Well, in that case, again, you have to face reality. and look for some more extreme options. So for example, maybe what you need to do is take vacation time and be like, I'm going to take 10 days and just hammer on this, like with a course on this technology, six hours a day.

crash course this, maybe spend two days with someone who knows all about this, pay someone to like to come to me on the weekend and be like, teach me how to. build this LLM using, you know, whatever particular, I'm using TensorFlow or something like this. And I want you to really walk me through it and explain that to me, explain that to me, explain that to me. I'm going to just crash course it.

It might mean you're saying, okay, here's what I want to do. I normally work from like nine to five. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to start work at eight. So I can get an hour in every morning on an online course and then stretch that out over six months to pick up the skills. And maybe what this is going to require is I'm going to have to ask a big sacrifice for my wife and say, look, I'm not going to be able to do my school drop-offs for four months.

Here's why. If I could pick up this skill, I think it's going to get us closer to X, Y, and Z, or we'll swap back and I'll take them all after this is over. But you might have to change something, try to do something more extreme. Or you find a way to... Get formal permission. Okay, I'm doing the math. It doesn't add up. My evening doesn't have this time. Let me get formal position from my boss. Like, can I spend one to two every day working on an online course?

on LLMs because I think I should have that skill because we might want to, you know, I need to be conversant in that if we want to add those features. And they're like, okay, yeah, if you can work around and not fall behind on your whatever. So you might have, you could do something, you have to engineer something more extreme.

There's not just, I'll just add this to what I do after work. But face the dragon. Don't try to change the laws of physics and time and either settle on, well, let me build my capital on what I'm doing or find something you can change that's going to make that.

more possible. The only other word of advice is going to be, if you're going to learn something new, make sure every minute you're spending is actually challenging you and helping you learn something new. Like I want to actually build a LLM using open source model and these libraries.

I have that goal and everything I'm doing is like towards that goal. So I'm not just getting lost reading and watching YouTube videos and like generally exploring and having ideas and people are drawing cute diagrams of transformers. You don't really know what's going on. Like, no, if you need to learn.

linear algebra to understand what they're talking about when they're they're doing uh what's the dot product i don't remember how to do vetrix embeddings or whatever go learn that with like a course you're learning it and then be like i want to then use that to build something here and show that i built it so be very concrete

You don't want to waste the time because you don't have that much time to actually spare. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Ryan. I'm in the Bay Area. I'm a Bay Area tech guy in my 50s who has spent the last 25 years pursuing one lifestyle. style plan focused on the hustle of building high growth products while raising high growth kids.

I'd like to spend the next 25 years pursuing a very different lifestyle plan anchored in the emerging set of second mountain core values. I even took a year off as a sabbatical to figure this out, but found myself coming right back to my first mountain at the end. Do you think when he says high growth kids, he's trying to have his kids be tall? That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. There's lots of milk. Get you tall. I was just watching. I rewatched because I have to watch things while I do my PT.

uh it was re-watching last dance the espn documentary about the yeah yeah but it saved a lot of people during covid yeah that was early in covid yeah so i'm re-watching that whole thing but anyways my point is if you're tall you can do well yeah you can do well some of those guys it's crazy like scotty pippen is playing oh god was this at the high school level maybe maybe at the college level he was like 6'2 yeah he grew a ton yeah and they're like

You're like a fine basketball player, but like if you're 6'2", like unless you're Allen Iverson, right? Like it's fine. And then he came back and he was like 6'6". And then he kept growing. But that was like over a summer. And it's like, oh, if you're like a fine basketball player in 6'2", a fine basketball player in 6'6", it's like a whole different situation. You're like, oh, now this is useful. Yeah, same with Jordan. He grew. Yeah. He was short and he didn't make the team.

as a freshman in high school and then he grew he also got better but like he grew like makes a big difference um right i don't think that's what you're doing though with high growth kids um but it's interesting to think about so this is a common this is a common

issue, right? So if you don't know the first mountain, second mountain, that comes from David Brooks' book, The Second Mountain, where he says there's the first part of your adult life is focused on what he calls first mountain goals, which are professional aspirations. It's success. It's distinction standing out.

And he says there's going to be a point at some point you're going to move beyond that first mountain. And Brooks talks about you fall into a valley between the first and second mountain where you're going to have some despair. And then you realize, oh, what really matters are these second mountain values, which as he talks about are the types of things people will talk about in your eulogy. In your eulogy, no one is going to say, hey, Ryan delivered quarter over quarter growth.

you know, for fiscal year 2020, the fiscal year, you know, 2030 or whatever. Like that's not going to be what they talked about in your eulogy. It's going to be. This was a dependable person. He was there for you. He was like a leader in our community. And Brooke says as you get older, that second mountain values become more important and that you need to sort of shift more towards them. You've done.

Brooks is writing largely for high achieving upper middle class knowledge workers, which is like what Brooks is. And it's like what he went through. And Ryan, it sounds like you as well. So that's what he's talking about. The second mountain values. It's hard to make that shift. Right. In part because. The first round values give you something concrete to do and you can succeed at it and they give you resources and they can dominate your whole life.

So often the people that Brooks talks about who make this transition have some sort of inciting event. Like for Brooks, it was his divorce. So like often there's like some inciting event. Ryan, you might not have. like had an exterior event yet. You're just noticing this is a shift that you're leaning towards. So it's going to be a more gradual transition. A couple of things I would recommend. Do lifestyle-centric planning.

Brooks leaves this out, but I'm going to put it in. I do lifestyle-centric planning. with second mountain values that resonate with you in mind so what do i want my life to actually be like five years from now day to day like where am i where am i going what type of place do i live am i at an office or not like what's going on with my older kids at this point

How is my time spent? Am I walking through the woods or am I in a golf club? I don't know. You're feeling it. What does my life actually feel like? And make sure. The second mountain values that resonate are in this image. And then do the straight-up lifestyle-centric planning work of let me work backwards from that. How do I steer – like what are the obstacles and opportunities and how do I steer towards that?

So you have to be probably more systematic about this than you started this. I'm looking at your question. You started this. You wrote out roles and you're trying to think what you want.

do in your life. You're adding roles, probably like leader and community member that you wanted to make more important. But the question is how you do that. And that's where lifestyle centric planning comes in because you're not just saying, I want to be more of a leader. You have like a specific part of your image.

I'm involved in like the board at my community and like really there and I'm at a meeting and we're trying to figure something out and people turn to me and I'm like thickly enmeshed in what's going on with some organization. You have a more concrete image of what that means.

And now you're working backwards for something more concrete. The whole lifestyle-centric planning methodology is all about obstacles and opportunities, leveraging the opportunities you have to help you get closer and really identifying the obstacles and saying, how do I get rid of those or circumvent them?

This is probably where your current work, which is being driven by these first mountain valleys, this is where your current work will probably come up as an obstacle. And in this exercise is where you're going to start thinking about, well, how do I reconfigure this work in a way that…

allows me to get to these other parts of my lifestyle vision. So ultimately, it's going to be changing some details of your work in the second half of your working life. But you got to work backwards from that lifestyle-centric planning. You can't just abstractly say, This role or value is important to me. Let me just try to do more of that in my life. It's much more difficult than that. You also have to assume it's going to take a while. The path between the mountains is long.

And you might go into a deep valley where you have an inciting event like a divorce or a health scare. Or maybe the path is nice through a meadow. It's not dark, but it's still going to be meandering and long. So you have a vision. You work towards it. You edit. You work towards it. You edit. You work towards it.

But you're beginning to turn your eyes towards that second mountain, and there will be changes. The only other thing I would recommend is if you've read Brooks' book, also read Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward. It's more explicitly religious, but it's the book that David Brooks based The Second Mountain on. So if you want to get to the core ideas, but sort of stripped of a Brooksian upper middle class driving knowledge worker veneer, like let me just get to the core ideas without that piece.

That's helpful for a lot of people to see it in a more purified form. So check out Richard Rohr's book, ROHR, Falling Upward. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Rebecca. I often find myself unable to make meaningful progress with organizing my thoughts and projects, given the volume of the past materials I have. What strategies could help me move past this paralysis and build momentum towards fully getting my business and personal projects running smoothly?

Well, I'm not a big believer in complicated information systems. I'm not a big believer in what is holding you back from a project. It's like you can't quite get the right information together to make progress.

I think in general, people should work on fewer big projects. They should wait until they have an idea that won't leave them alone and then act on it. And then once they're acting on it, put their perfectionism aside and say, great, I'm going to follow this through to the end to see what happens because it makes my life more interesting.

So if you're exposing yourself to a lot of information, you're reading things, you have ideas, wait to see what sticks with you. Like, yeah, I keep having this idea about something we could do at our business. It's come up a few times now. I mentioned this to someone. They thought it was a good idea. Okay, great. Let's go do that.

Or I've got this like personal project. I don't know. I keep seeing these Instagram stories about people with their such and such like, I don't know, workshop. And it's really appealing to me. And I keep coming back to that. Okay, great. I'm going to go through and I'm going to execute. So just wait till something sticks with you and then see it through just because it's interesting to see it through. Don't.

Don't overemphasize the, like, I got to get all my information right. Don't overemphasize this idea of there's a right project to do, and if you choose the wrong one, you're in trouble. See what sticks. Take action. Follow it through. Interesting things will happen. Repeat. Don't overcomplicate it.

find value in the actual execution of things because it's kind of fun. If this one doesn't work out, the next one will. And hopefully all that together should stop some of this sense of paralysis. I'm like that with books, Jesse. I'm like...

I read a lot of stuff. I think a lot of stuff. How do I come up with a book idea? It's just something sticks with me for a long time. I just mull it. I come back to it. I have other ideas. I come back to it, mull other things. If something has stuck with me for a while, it's very informal. I'm like, you know what? That could be a book.

And then I start seriously like talking to my circle about it. I don't have complicated information tracking systems. I don't have the ideas emerge from some sort of like content semantic graph that's on some complicated program. Just like an idea that sticks with me in my gut says this feels timely. That's all it is. All right. What do we got next? We have our corner. Ooh, our slow productivity corner. Let's hear that theme music.

This is the segment where we tackle a question relevant to my last book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Productivity. All right, Jesse, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? Without burnout. What did I say without productivity? I said the lost art of accomplishment without productivity. That could actually kind of be an answer. That could work. The first chapter is like how to steal.

steal ideas from people smarter i wasn't gonna say anything but then i was the fans were probably like oh my god noted something and then we have to distract them we have to distract them all right brandon sanderson wrote name of the win go

Somebody emailed me about that the other day. He was like, do you know that? I was like, oh, it's actually a joke. That's how we distract you when we make other mistakes. All right. What is our actual slow productivity question of the day? All right. It's from Seeking Slow Success. I work in admin at a large university. I'm struggling with the roles, many hats, communications, marketing, scheduling, supervising, advising, event planning, financial, all sorts of stuff.

It's also in the context of a thick bureaucratic process. I've heard that this type of juggling is just typical for this role and that we're understaffed. What should I do? Well, this is where the books look productivity in your circumstance. might be more effective for understanding why you're unhappy than it will be for helping you become happier. Let me explain what I mean by that. A core idea in that book.

which really tries to deconstruct how the way we currently work in knowledge work, why it doesn't work. A core idea in that book is what we talked about in the deep dive, which is the notion of overhead tax, right? Everything that you're...

working on every process that you're responsible for every task or project that's undergoing generates its own overhead of emails and meetings and just cognitive cycles i have to like think about this the more of these you have the more of that overhead you have the more of your cognitive cycles are taken up

the more of your day then becomes like servicing projects. Now, when this gets really bad is when these various projects exist in different cognitive contexts. So to switch from one to the other, you have to completely switch your mindset. So when you're switching from finances and development to academic and staff over to facilities, each of these is a fully different context. And so when you have a lot of things going on in a lot of topics...

You have all these different emails and meetings you have to do. You're constantly switching context. That is exhausting. We're not wired for it. It makes us miserable. So I can validate why you're not feeling good about this position. Now, some people... react worse than others to this overhead taxing out of control and to all this context shifting. The most successful high up university admins that I know just are naturally.

This is – they're okay with it. Like this is what I do. In fact, usually it's because they take pride. And I switch from this to here to here, and I find the right thing to push and the right button. And how do I help this person here? How do I move this information here? And it's like a game. They see it like an orchestra conductor, and you're trying to keep these different things.

And some people can get enough pleasure out of that challenge that they can counteract the cognitive fatigue of having to do all that context switching. Other people just feel the fatigue of the context switching. They're like, this is terrible. I'm in that ladder camp, right? You put me in a high up.

administrative position at a university, that university is going out of business. This is terrible. I can't keep switching between these things. You know what? I would rather, I know this is urgent.

Like we're not going to have water in the east side of campus. I just think we're not going to have water on the east side of campus. I can't think about all this stuff anymore. This is crazy. I got to go do deep work. Other people can see it as a challenge. So if you're like me, slow productivity will explain why you're having a challenge.

I think some of these high-level admin positions, that's the position. That's what they're hiring for. That you're someone who can oversee a complicated array of different things and try to keep all those plates spinning. If this doesn't work well with you...

it might be a time to think about how do I take that career capital and take it somewhere that's going to work better for me. But the key here, if you're doing that, is to figure out what better means. And that's why you need to understand this overhead tax issue, too many concurrent projects, that that is a problem.

That's why you're unhappy. So you know if you're looking to do something else that takes your career capitals like a horizontal move, you know what you're optimizing for. Minimize the number of concurrent things happening so you don't have so much context shifting and overhead tax.

We often don't realize that's what's making us unhappy about jobs. And when people are in that situation, we don't know that's why we're so exhausted, that it's the overhead tax. And so we start looking for other reasons that seem more obvious or proximate. It's like, well, maybe the bosses are bad or the system is stupid. And so then you shift and you make these.

ineffectual high overhead shifts to another job that has just as much overhead tax but you convinced yourself it was the people and the broken processes and that's why you're unhappy and you go the other place and you're still unhappy because no the problem was you're doing 15 things at once and your brain was melting

So it's useful to know that's a real problem. And I think just pointing out overhead tax is a problem. Too many concurrent tasks is a problem. I'm looking for jobs. I'm evaluating them on what they're going to do with that type of concurrent tasks.

Just recognizing that's a problem could improve a lot of jobs. But when you don't recognize something as a problem, you focus on the other stuff. It's going to be the perks or the benefits or the, I call it faux autonomy. Like, yeah, you have a lot of autonomy.

in terms of how you spend your time, but not in terms of your workload. So you really don't have any autonomy in how you spend your time because you're trying to service 15 projects. So it's all overhead tax all day. So yeah, we don't clock your hours. You can work remote if you want. But also, who cares? You have to be in your inbox 15 hours a day or things aren't going to work out. So I don't think for your position, little things will help. You can look in the book.

for keeping your overhead lower and trying to differentiate active and non-active projects. But a lot of this at that level for this type of job, a lot of that advice isn't going to work because of the nature of that job. So at least knowing what it is you don't like about the job. is going to help you understand how to fix it, what it is actually that you want to fix. You've got to figure out the problem before you can really fix it.

I don't know. I believe that, Jesse, is like sometimes knowing why you're unhappy unless you fix it. And like the biggest problem is unhappy people who don't know why they're unhappy because then you start just doing random stuff. Yep. And at least the problems. But what we can be happy about is hearing the theme music. One more time. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear it.

My name is Jorge and I have a question that really has to deal with being a good spouse. The context is that my spouse is an interesting part of her life where one, she enjoyed most of her corporate life for the last 15 years. Two, we have a family with young kids where time with them is very precious before they become teenagers and start ignoring us. And three, she recently got laid off of her job.

She is in the field of DEI, which is diversity, equity, inclusion, and navigating has been very difficult. It's been a very hostile environment for that industry for the past 24 months or so. It's not like she works in a... coal mined and all the mines are shutting down but it can feel like that at times and she expresses that she's been doing a lot of writing and starting to explore the idea of switching out of corporate life and doing more with

crafts, cooking, general artistic things, and maybe even writing about those things. I support her. Initially, I recommended the book Slow Productivity as she faced this hiccup in her career and ways to explore doing new work. And then as she started talking about doing more artistic work and kind of make a transition, I suggested it's so good they can't ignore you. My question is, is there any approach I should be taking to support my spouse as they work through this?

at a period of life-based career planning. We are a family, can't do these things in a vacuum, and I wanted to be more than someone who just recommends books to her. I wanted to know how to best show up to be alongside. her as she goes through life-based career planning, whether she knows it or not. Thank you. Well, first of all, I like this approach of just give people my books. That's like a good catch all.

That's going to be my answer for every question now. Well, how many of my books have you read or given the person? That'll solve the problem. Now, the actual real first thing is, first of all, it really stinks to get laid off. Like that's just. emotionally hard it's psychologically hard it's financially hard there's a lot of empathy here right none of that's easy especially if you feel like your whole industry in which you have expertise the whole industry is struggling so it's not just

My company had issues, but there's a bunch of other companies do this. So we'll start with that. It's just hard. So I'm glad you're recognizing that. Like, that's hard. It's hard to get laid off, especially at that phase of life. So we'll start with that and not be too cheery optimistic.

Everything's going to be fine immediately. The next thing I would say, and you picked this up in your call, so I'm going to underscore it. The next thing I would say is that when you have a family with kids, lifestyle-centric planning... The lifestyle you're planning is the full family's lifestyle. It's no longer what is my ideal lifestyle? What is your ideal lifestyle? And we're both going to try to do our own planning towards those ideal lifestyles because what's going to happen is.

When you're looking for obstacles and opportunities, the other person's opportunities might become an obstacle to you and vice versa, and then you get resentment or at least you get confusion. So I like what you said, that we're a family. That is critical here. This is a good time. This disruption is a good time to say, what is our lifestyle-centric plan? And when you have young kids, you really should have three plans. That's the way my wife and I did it. What is our ideal lifestyle for the...

We thought it was like the pre-elementary school period, the sort of the preschool and nanny period, right? And that was the period we were in when we were doing this initial planning. So, you know, given what we have now, then we look ahead. It's like the elementary school period. You start to have young kids that are first, second, third grade or this or that. And then there's this third phase, this sort of in high school going off to college phase.

And then there's a phase after that, but that seems so distant. You're like, we'll get to that later. You say, what do we want our lifestyle to be like during those periods? Like, what is it? What's the vision we have? And people have all sorts of different visions of this. Some people envision.

My kids having like a real city, like urban upbringing and they're on the subways and we go, you know, take the subway to see the baseball game and going to blah, blah, blah. Other people see, man, I really want when I'm thinking about my kid being in third grade. I'm there. We pick them up from the bus stop. They're coming home from the bus stop and I'm there and give them snacks and there's people coming over. You get these visions. What do I want it to be like?

then you work backwards from those. So you should have a vision for pre-elementary school, during elementary school, and then sort of like late junior high, high school, like what you want those to be like. That's what you're planning backwards from as a family. So it's not about... individuals so much anymore. It's like what's going to work with stress, finances, and the sort of flexibility or time required. Those are all really important. And then there's the bigger things like location.

All those factors matter for family-centric, lifestyle-centric plans. Like, where do we want our stress? What's our time or flexibility constraints? Is it like we're walking the kids to school and picking them up? Or is it, you know, there's a nanny, but we're home in the evenings. Is it like, how is that? Are you figuring that out? The finances, we don't want to be stressed by money.

So where do we want to be financially? We don't need to be farther than it, but where's the place that's going to make us with the things we want to do with our family? Where do we want to be financially? What do we want the environment to be like? So location, like where we live, schooling comes up too. Like what type of school do we want them to be going to?

All of these factors go in and you're making a plan as a family and then you figure out the right configuration to get that done. And this might require doing all sorts of like interesting hacking or arrangements with careers and jobs. Like, well, you got this skill. I have this. My skill is actually very flexible. Yours is less, but very high pain. So I could do mine kind of lesser hours. It's very flexible. You know, I'm a writer or something like that. And that could.

didn't cover but then i could be around to pick up the kids but your job is it's you have to be in the office but it makes a lot of money and if you did that but we went this path instead of that path it's not gonna be too bad you begin to figure out these different kind of configurations you have two people two skill sets

two sets of career possibilities available and you can start mixing and matching to figure out your vision for the whole family lifestyle. So that's what I would say. This is a time to start doing that planning together. And there are so many different paths that might come out.

You know, like, OK, I'm going to take a maybe like your spouse takes like a year off and then goes into this type of career over here and you switch to this career. You move over here where it's much cheaper. And I don't know. I've seen everything.

But you don't get to the cool, unique configurations unless you're doing the lifestyle-centric planning. So that's what I would say. Family, unit, lifestyle-centric planning, three phases. It's actually pretty fun to do because you have a lot of possibilities. You're two very skilled people.

You probably have a little financial flexibility of young kids, which is fun. You could figure out something pretty cool. I love going through this planning process, you know, and we've been executing our plan pretty well and it's unique. I would say we have kind of a, it's idiosyncratic.

People don't really understand what I do for a living, but that's on purpose because there's all sorts of factors I get out of that in terms of flexibility and seasonality, etc. So it's fun, but do the planning as a family. And there might be sacrifices involved. It's not about making sure both of you have some sort of individual self-actualization to the highest extent. You kind of got off that train when you had a family. Family happy. That should be the goal. All right.

We've got here a case study, and these are where people write in to jesseatcalnewport.com, and they share their experience putting the type of advice we talk about on the show into practice in their everyday life. This was a cool one from Erica. It's about... Commuting. We mentioned in last week's show, we were talking about commuting when we were talking about remote work. So I thought this was an appropriate follow-up case study to last week's deep dive.

All right, Erica says, on episode 337, that was last week, Cal mentioned the benefits of having a commute prior to and after work. I have developed a great appreciation for my daily commute routine to and from the office. I've also done a little bit of lifestyle-centric planning with my commute. I started working for a new company in 2024, which reduced my daily commute from over an hour each way to about 20 minutes each way.

Secondly, I love driving as a hobby, so I found a job where I can drive into the office and have free parking. On the way to work, I drink my smoothie and listen to a podcast. Monday is always deep questions. Because I'm driving, I'm not using my phone and looking at social media. And so I'm able to get my mind cleared out of various nonsense and be ready for work. On the way home, I generally listen to music and either go to the gym or go window shopping.

like trying out perfumes at various department and beauty stores. The commute going home allows me to let work melt away until the next morning. Note, I also used a time block planner and a Kanban board to help me feel set for the next day, but the commute is a great shutdown routine.

When I work at home, I have in the past eschewed stimulating a commute, so I feel cranky most of the day. So I'm trying to use my treadmill and my bicycle indoor trainer to do a little bit of exercise in the mornings. It helps some, but it's not the same as my morning drive.

So I found that I work from home as little as possible and will even go into the office even if it's half a day of work. While changing locations and adjusting my commute is not the typical big idea lifestyle-centric planning changes some want, this small change has been very large, positive. I feel that this one small change has helped my general mood and focus in a large way. Well, I like this idea that you do not need big ideas for lifestyle-centric career planning to have a big impact.

Make a contrast between lifestyle-centric planning and the alternative, which is the grand goal approach. The grand goal approach is like I have some big thing I go after and it makes my life magical from there on out. Almost never works. Lifestyle-centric career planning.

could lead to some things that in retrospect kind of look radical or interesting, but they don't have to. And a lot of the biggest impacts come from these smaller changes. So like in Erica's case, shifting to a job with a 20-minute commute. That was a key shift for the things she valued in her lifestyle-centric plan because the commute was actually helpful for her. But an hour-long commute is brutal. And so now it was like, I can do this commute.

Long enough to be effective as a phase transition, but not so long that is brutal. 20 minutes is not bad at all. Trust me, in Washington, D.C., 20 minutes is roughly what it takes to get out of your neighborhood. before you could even get to a major road. So 20 minutes is not bad at all. Just long enough to change your mindset, but not so long that it's a problem. So now she can say, let me just go to work then. I'll go to my office. I'll park. I have a transition. Work real hard.

shut down, complete on my time block planner. I've got things stored on my boards. I can let my mind go and enjoy that commute back and I'm in a better mood. That's a great configuration. We forget this in a lot of the discussions about remote work.

Early on, a lot of the people who were arguing for remote work, it was in part because their commutes were really bad. It's a really long commute and it's kind of grinding on me, so it would be nice not to have to do that all the time. But there was a whole middle group of people where the commute's not so bad.

They're not worried about – they have a plan for the childcare. That's the other thing. But they have a plan for the – my work ends two hours after school. That's figured out. And they actually like it. So you do the drive. You're there. When you're not – when you're home, you're home and you have some separation.

So that's a great example of sort of small-scale changes from an LCP leading to big positive improvements. All right, we got our final segment coming up. We'll talk about the books I read in January. But first, let's hear from another.

So I think one of the harder things about raising a family, we're just talking about families in the call before, is food. It is difficult. You're trying to find food for your family that is healthy, that doesn't have... junk in it that's not like a bowl of red dye number five or whatever the thing is they just banned and floating in the middle is a marshmallow but also that your family will eat i mean this is so much of what

my life and my wife's life has been about is like as each kid goes through this certain age band, it's like we got to find food to eat, it's got to be healthy, and then they'll decide that essentially all food is bad. And so food is something you think about all the time if you have a family. This is why...

I like Thrive Market. Thrive Market makes it simple to find trusted, family-friendly brands without spending hours in the grocery store. From snacks and school lunches to pantry staples, everything they offer is 100%.

non-GMO, and with their on-site filters, you can shop based on what matters most to your family. So maybe it's low sugar or it's gluten-free or it's organic or it's high-protein options. All of this is just a click away. Like, for example, The low sugar filter is a great one on Thrive Market because my kids, some days of the week, I mean, essentially their energy level is what you would get if you gave like a lot of PCP.

to a hyperactive super criminal. They don't need more sugar. So you get these low sugar, let me just look at the low sugar options because one of the things we buy a lot of is like snacks, snacks for school and for when they come home. Great, I could just filter for those and select what it is I want.

One feature that's really cool is the HealthySwap scanner in the Thrive Market app. Here's how it works. You scan a product that you're used to buying, like, oh, here's a thing I usually buy, and it will instantly recommend a cleaner, healthier alternative. This is also a game changer, especially, again, the snack thing is where this is really a cool game changer. All right, pretzels, sticks, or whatever. We kind of get these. Snap it. Oh, here is like a salty snack that's...

no GMOs, no like less artificial stuff in it. So again, it just makes it easy to get family food for your family that you can trust. Cool app, easy to use. It's delivered. That's great as well. going to the supermarket and standing there. So I've become a big fan of Thrive Market.

Thrive Market's smart cart feature takes the guesswork out of healthy shopping. When you create an account, they ask you about your family's needs and automatically build a cart full of cleaner versions of your favorite brands. I love this. So tired of going to the store.

You can tweak it before checking out, but it's a great way to get started, especially if you're trying to phase out junk food. If you're ready for a junk-free start to 2025, head to thrivemarket.com slash deep and get 30% off your first order. Plus a free $60 gift. It's a good promo actually. That's T-H-R-I-V-E market.com slash deep thrive market.com slash deep. Also want to talk about our friends.

at shopify look i'm in the what do you call it online world a podcast i have a newsletter so i know a lot of people in the online world and the people i know who sell stuff online that you Shopify. It is just the industry standard. It's a fantastic backend experience for you, the person selling. It's a fantastic shopping cart experience for the person buying.

Their shopping carts have an incredible conversion rate, so you're not going to lose people at that final step. They go beyond online selling as well. They have point-of-sale technology, so now you have... Your store that's actually in real life, Shopify can integrate and help you right there. I mean, it is a no-brainer. If you're going to sell things, you need to be using Shopify.

So you can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that so many people I know use when you use Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period. at shopify.com slash deep. Now you need to type that in all lowercase, but you go to shopify.com slash deep to upgrade your selling today. That's shopify.com slash deep.

All right, let's move on to our final segment. Every month, at the beginning of each month, I talk about the books I read the month before. Long-time listeners know my goal is to read. five books a month so this is our first episode of january or february rather so i will talk about the books i read in january 2025 all right i started with

Film Appreciation Book. I don't know if it was called The Film Appreciation Book or Film Appreciation Book by Jim Piper. I'm an amateur cinephile, so I like to randomly read sort of pseudo textbooks or books about movies. And this was almost like a textbook. It just went through a lot of different aspects of film and talked about how they mattered. I like this one because it had a lot of pictures and scenes. You could go on the YouTube and watch the scenes. They had pictures in the book.

So when they're talking about different types of shots or different types of compositions, I really like being able to actually just see it. So it was fine. It's one of these systematic books. You're just going to learn a lot of terminology. and learn a lot learn about like a lot of like stuff you should know if you want to know the lingo for film so it's a good one a lot of your fans are interested in because it's movie season is um your take on the films of this year

We should do more film stuff. Last year, my wife and I watched all 10 Best Picture nominees. I don't know if we're going to do that this year. I've seen a bunch of them. There's been requests. I'm not super excited by... I'm trying to think what in the best pictures nominations this year that I've been super excited about. Mad Dog saw Dylan like four times. Yeah, that was good. I saw it in the theater. Yeah, Complete Unknown. I thought that was very good. That move.

for a over two hour long movie, that thing rock and rolled in more ways than one. Right. So that thing really moved. Chalamet was great. Uh, I liked the, the direction was very good. That, that director also did the, uh, walk the line, the Johnny cash. which was also very good. That's a favorite. Dune 2 I saw last spring doing my book tour. So I was in Austin doing Ryan Holiday's podcast and Chris Williamson's podcast.

I think those are the two I was doing. So I was in Austin, and then one of them got canceled. I had an afternoon free, and I walked over to a cool indie theater. in Austin and saw Dune 2 right when it came out. That was cool. I enjoyed that. That was fun. That was pretty good. I saw Conclave recently. It was okay. I saw that.

Yeah, I thought it was – I mean I like the high-contrast cinematography. I thought it was like kind of beautifully shot. It was cool. It's based off a Richard Harris book. What else is out though? I've been hearing bad things about Amelia Perez. Like people just don't like it. It's on Netflix, though, so it's easy to see. I watched Substance with Demi Moore. My wife was like, I'm done with this. It's a body horror movie. She hates that type of stuff, where it's like...

That was good. I was supposed to win best actor other than if it's not Chalamet. I don't know. I just read an article that said it's like everyone could win. Yeah. There was the one guy Brody and the other one. Yeah. So that's brutal. It's still hard to it's here in DC. So I should see it.

It's three hours. Yeah, there's an intermission. Yeah, I know. I haven't seen it. I got to get my back in better shape, I think, before I see The Brutalist, or I have to wait until it comes. I love to see it. So last year, I saw almost everything in the theater.

And I loved it. I couldn't get everything. I saw almost everything. Brutalist I do want to see. And it is playing in a couple places here in D.C. I should see it. I like Brody. I don't know what else the other nominees were, which is like a problem, right? That means it's not.

It's not a super exciting year. But this was the year with less movies because of the strike. The after effect of the strike two years ago was the things not going in the pipeline then meant last year was just not as many movies were out. So I don't know. We'll see. Maybe I'll end up seeing more of them. All right. Second book I read. I had originally read this years ago, but I went back and reread Rich Rolls' memoir, Finding Ultra. He'd actually updated it.

So I guess this is the newer version of it. It's just a cool story. People forget back when Rich Roll, whose show I've done twice now, I like Rich a lot, when he was coming up. this is what he was really known for like today he's known as like the wise old man of the podcast i don't mean old he's not that much older than me much better shape but you know like he seems like an eminence in the podcasting world but he was known for doing

these crazy ultra-athletic events. Like, that was his thing, was, like, I'm going to do... He came out of nowhere, and he started at the age of 40. At the age of 40. Now, it's not quite fair because he was also like an Olympic hopeful D1 swimmer for Stanford. So he's got the genes. And there was a part in his life where he was a fantastic athlete. But then he had an alcohol problem. And then that swimming fell apart.

became a lawyer, finally had to get sober because of like the DUI, like he was going to get sent to jail, and finally like rehab stuck. So he put that addictive personality into eating junk food. So he was like in bad shape. which is hard to imagine right so he's in and there's pictures in the book you should buy the book just to see the pictures a rich role it's a different person pictures like in his 30s i saw the cover yeah yeah so

Look at 10 years before that, and he's 50, 75 pounds heavier or whatever. And he's just in his 40s. So now he's clean, but he's eating junk food all the time. Runs out of breath. or walking up the stairs or something and it's like i gotta change this or whatever and so he just gets into it he becomes a vegan and starts like serious athletic training and ends up uh becoming like a very successful

like triathlons and then ultra marathons. And then he does this thing where he does five Ironmans in seven days. So it's like almost one Ironman per day. Like he starts doing these crazy challenges. The frustrating thing about the book is it's like, I start changing how I eat.

And just like all the weight falls away. His body is like an athlete's body. He starts training and he's like really good at these things. But it's a great book. And that was his story. And he was like on the cover of maybe it was Men's Health. as the fittest man in the world or something like in his mid to late forties. So yeah, he became just like got in super good shape, a very inspiring story for me.

I find him to be an aspiring guy. I have not heard what happened with his house in the fires. I know they evacuated. He's in Calabasas, which was in the crosshairs. I don't know what happened. i've been to his house once when i did his podcast the first time and that that was after the 2017 fires had been kind of recently and he showed me we like went down the road and he showed me like the burn line he's like there it is like this was

really close to my house. And I think this one was much worse. I hopefully, hopefully his house survived, but I know they got out of there. So anyways, it's a great book. People forget that backstory. Rich Roll has an awesome backstory. He's an awesome guy. All right. Then I got into my, this is my, like, I need to learn math because my back hurts and I'm in surgery and my mind still works. So that's what I'm going to do. So I read Why Machines Learn by Anil Anathaswamy.

well-known science reporter. It's a book about the mathematics behind machine learning, sort of starting with the beginning with like perceptrons and then moving all the way up to what's happening with like deep learning networks. And I don't really know who the book is for outside of like me, right? Because it's mathy. It's not all the math. It's not a textbook, right? So it's like not all the math you need to know. But it's also...

you know, multivariate derivatives are in there. So there's still math, like you got to know math to like follow it, but he's just giving you enough math that if you know math, you're like, Oh, I get a sense of how this works. Right. So it's kind of, I don't know who the audience is. I loved it.

Because I'm a computer scientist, but I'm not a machine learning person. So it's like, oh, cool. I see what you're doing here, right? So like I can come away and understand better about like what's happening with support vector machines, right? Why you might want to take like a –

particular vector and you want to sample it up into a higher dimensional space where you have more of a chance of actually finding a clean margin on your hyperplane that you can actually have like an optimal boundary on the problem is you can't actually do these optimal hyperplane boundary algorithms in these multi high multidimensional spaces is too computationally expensive but if you use these special types of functions you can actually compute these you can compute these planes and

discover them without using just like low dimensional computation, without actually having to leave from the high dimensions and therefore find these really good boundaries that would otherwise be hard to separate spaces. Like that's what support vector machines are. Like for me, that's useful. I can't tell you exactly how the math works, but I have a sense of what type of math is involved. So I'm a great market for this book. I know more about the math, and it's great, too, to understand why.

When deep learning came around, it just blew the doors off and frustrated everyone who had been working on the, I call it boring machine learning, but this sort of theoretically rigorous, provable. This is these algorithms and here's what we're doing and here's how the math works. And these guys came along with these multilayered huge number of parameter models and were like, I don't know, let's just train the hell out of this thing.

And they were like, no, this won't work. It's going to overfit. That's not how this works. And it just worked. They made it bigger and it just got better. So it must have been frustrating for the mathematicians. So it's kind of a mathy book. But I got this. This is the part of my recovery when my back started hurting. I was like, okay, well, I can still use my mind. I got that book from Labyrinth Books in Princeton over the Christmas break and just enjoyed that.

All right. Then I also read Burn Math Class, which I actually started this book right before my surgery. When I was, my mobility was restricted as I was waiting for the surgery. And then I finished it in January. And this is a crazy book. This is Jason Wilkes' book. I love it. Jesse stole my copy. I bought another copy.

I don't think he wrote anything else about this, but it's this crazy program of a book where he basically just derives from first principles all of mathematics up to multidimensional calculus. And just... from scratch like why it's not here's a chain rule it's like let's derive like get to like why the chain rule works like here so i don't know i think it's kind of a tour de force he formatted the whole thing in latex

He wrote it in a few months. It's a little bit crazy. There's these like long extended diagrams between like mathematics and like the author of the book. It's a little bit strange.

But his mathematical program is fantastic. So I followed this all the way up. I lost steam at the very end. I got through like... multidimensional derivatives for calculus like the last 30 pages i kind of lost steam on but i got through basically all of it anyways this was me like my mind works even if my body doesn't and i think that book should be more well known it should have had a better title this guy jason if you're out there

You're a creative guy. You're obviously very, very smart. Write more books about math. Be the Sean Carroll or the Brian Green of mathematics. You could do it. I should find him and tell him that. It's a cool book, but Burn Math Class is not the right title. And then I read The Intentional Father by John Tyson. It was a book on parenting adolescent boys. My oldest is 12. I was like, oh, I need that advice.

So I grabbed this book on Kindle. It was more Christian than I thought. I didn't realize it was like super Christian. Not necessarily a bad thing, right? I mean, religions have good ideas for parenting. I'm still digesting it. I think Tyson's approach is like very structured. Like we are as a father. So it's about being a father to adolescent boys. So like right in my wheelhouse, it's, it's a very structured approach. Like we're going to do these.

initiation routines and set aside this time and have these conversations every morning and it was like a lot of structure that maybe i'd be comfortable with but i'm letting the ideas marinate but i'm looking for good parenting books that's a call A call out to the audience is I'm about to hit adolescence full out. So if people have good books for that, especially like boys, father's boys, send those along to Jesse at Cal Newport dot com. I need to read basically all of those.

I already see it coming, like the emotional everything. It's for real, folks. All right. That's all I got for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. 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. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at CalNewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.