#722: Cal Newport — How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Build a Deep Life, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time

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Howdy, howdy ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers from all different disciplines. And my guess today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics in addition to his academic work.

Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages. He's also a contributor to the New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His new book is a slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. Cal is not active on social media.

This is usually where I would say you can find him on these following social media profiles, but you can't find him. He is really not active outside of his YouTube channel, which is the at Cal Newport Media Channel and the podcast and everything else you can find at calnewport.com.

In this conversation, we talk about slow productivity, human-paced productivity, the dangers of checklists and to-do lists and approaches that are similar. We talk about so many things that Cal puts into practice himself. He walks the walk, part of what I find so impressive about him is how effectively he has put positive constraints around his work and within his life so that he can do what he does best with the fewest distractions possible.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did and without further ado, Cal Newport. Let me ask you, if you don't mind, we'll just roll right into it. Does that work for you? Let's roll into it. Unforced errors. That should be basically a review of the last 10 years. That could be the Walter Isaacson biography of a generation.

Unforced errors. I feel this way in the sense that we're talking right now about things, horseshoeing back around to many of the, certainly some advantages, but many disadvantages and trappings of, say, television. Despite our best efforts, many of us seem to somehow get corralled into these unforced errors or crawl ourselves into unforced errors.

Right. I mean, you could almost write a book called Unforced Errors, the Internet Story. Just about all of the ways we wandered off of some of the central motivations of the Internet in the places that made everyone but a small number of investors really unhappy. But let's take what we are talking about just before because I think it's actually an example of a something that seems at first to be an unforced error in terms of our engagement with the Internet, which is going to be video rising,

podcast shifting more towards television, show style production. I actually think in that example, there is a good sign. I think there's something positive in there. Tell me. The real unforced error that I think hit content creation was algorithms. The shift of I am going to create content on behalf of a small number of large companies that will then curate for each individual user, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, they'll curate with algorithms.

Streams of interesting information from this giant pool of information that people are creating. This I think was a huge problem for content quality. Podcasts by contrast, right. So we come back to podcast is the opposite of the algorithm. I mean, one of the reasons why I was excited about this medium as it arose is that there is no algorithm.

A podcast grows because a listener likes the podcast and tells another listener. It's very similar to books in that way. Hey, read this. You should listen to this. I growth is slow often with podcast, but there is no countervailing content curation force from an algorithm. There's nothing you can do in a podcast episode that is going to make it go viral in the way that a tweet can or an Instagram can. I mean, you can't share them that way.

Video, I think is now inevitable just because visuals more interesting radio, for example, in the 1920s, 1930s was a really well developed technology radio shows were very good radios were cost effective radios were portable. You can put them in a car. They weren't too expensive and when TV came along, it was much more complicated was more expensive.

The experience was squash. They had to stay between these really bright clean lights on these small stages because of the limitations of the early lenses and detectors and it just eight radios lunch. Because visuals really interesting. So we can't help but watch when we have a chance to watch. So I think this is where podcasting is going is going to reinvent basically linear TV like it was at the heyday of cable.

There's a lot of channels and you hear about a show. Hey, if you heard about the show madman is really good, the people go and watch it. But I think that's actually that net positive because still what's driving this sort of podcast into the video podcast revolution as long as it has to be quality, which is what you have to fall back on when you don't have algorithms. I think it's a good countervailing force to social media so there might be a silver lining that particular movement.

Only about some thoughts off of you related to that. So my feeling is that. And I think you agree with this the ecosystem and the dynamics of the podcast world changed very dramatically in the last five to 10 years, the 10th year of this podcast is coming up in April. And I agree that at a certain critical mass, it seems like podcast and books shared a lot in common. There were some fundamental differences in the sense of podcasting consuming audio was a secondary activity for most folks.

They were doing something else while they were listening, whereas much harder to do that with the book, at least in text format, although we've seen the commensurate rise almost in exact tandem of audio books, certainly with podcasts as smart devices and broadband to become more ubiquitous.

I think when podcasts were on a volume basis similar to books in so much as let's just say there's a hundred thousand books published in the US per year through major publishers. I have no idea if that numbers accurate something like that. Let's just say a small handful of those make the bestseller lists those are used as shopping lists now of a sudden you have a fixed set of podcasts.

But then you have this long tail and people listen to them and they recommend them and so on similar I think now that you have millions of podcasts. The discovery problem maybe it's similar to books on say Amazon, but it seems to be that the recommendations are now hinged on this very much kind of in some respects.

So the YouTube has always been a huge asset. I think Rogan was probably the first that I know of to really use clips and YouTube well as one of the world's largest search engines to drive consumption of audio. But I think there are a couple of other factors like TikTok, for instance, and the both kind of fear of TikTok as a competitor and then emulation of TikTok by major platforms that has led to this divorce of long form and short form content.

So for instance, even for this podcast we've had clips that have with clear visual attribution everything in the description related to temp fair show do a hundred million views and they have translated exactly zero to longer form. Say content consumption. So I don't think we are free of the algorithm. I suppose as one of saying in the sense that there is still word of mouth, but I've noticed a tremendous change in the last handful of years.

As things get more and more algorithmically driven and I feel like the big joke don't worry guys this isn't going to be all cynicism and

I'm just talking about the glass half full with respect to podcast on podcast, but I thought on my podcast but I feel like the big kind of cosmic joke for me is that if people are consuming podcasts long form podcast as video by and large those are in background tabs or they're on a phone as they're listening to Spotify that is running video but they're listening to audio while they're in the car killing their cellular data or what

so it is sense it's like you need the video to play the game you need the machine to recognize and value your video but in many many cases humans are not actually consuming this beautiful product that you're producing there are exceptions and there are some amazing cinematic experiences that get produced but the reason that I'm delivering this sort of sent of a woman.

Hellfire and Rimsdom talk about formats is because this relates I think to a lot of what I would love to ask you back to our last conversation also and all the notes on that conversation because the reason I'm wearing this goofy headset audio technical which actually is great audio quality shocked on some level that I didn't use this earlier because it clears up a lot of table space for my notes and so on is that it allows me to be mobile it allows me to stay true.

To one might call it the root document maybe the initial intentions and reasons for choosing this medium in the first place that could be and probably will be to my commercial detriment I think it will hurt the growth of the podcast for me not to focus more on video however that be gets all sorts of questions why is growth important why is a B and C more important than the initial drivers that led you to adopt this medium as your home base let's just say.

So what are some of the for people who are familiar with you because a lot of people listening to this will be listening to you for the first time or at least on this podcast for the first time what are some of the ways that you have kind of pushed back against.

Prevalent social behaviors social adoption technology adoption etc just so folks have an idea let me set the stage I'm a computer science professor who also does a lot of writing about technology and the way it intersects with all parts of our lives are working on.

Parts of our lives are work are life outside of work the way we connect with each other in this role do a lot of writing as a contributor to the New Yorker where I really explore those ideas and depth in addition to my books I'm often thinking about this how do we work with technology I have a philosophy this is actually new since the last time I was on your show I did New Yorker piece in late 2023 where I introduce this notion I called techno selection is.

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

Switch back and forth I had no way predict me eight years later you're going to have for example a teenage mental health crisis so techno selection is I'm says be willing to actually aggressively step backwards be willing to say I this looks interesting let me try this out oh no no this is not matching what's really important to me so you're out of here.

I this I will do this I won't so being more willing to both experiment and reject after the fact to move away from these narratives of techno progressivism that says new technology is good and there are bumps along the way but you can't put this genie back in the box and I say we can build all sorts of new boxes and that's probably the right way to go for so in my own life for example what I used to be really known for was the fact that I never signed up for traditional social media so I never

had a Facebook account or a Twitter account or an Instagram account and for a long time I was seen as essentially a crazy person I actually wrote about this in that New Yorker piece on techno selection is I wrote about my experience in 2016 riding a times op ed that said quit social media and how like the world fell down on me like this cannot stand this can't be is like a glitch in the matrix someone cannot be saying this in the pages of the New York times the New York times

commission to response op ed they brought someone in to write an op ed two weeks later they went point by point to my op ed and said don't worry everyone you can ignore this right is don't don't worry about this in the case of a water landing assume the position it's going to be fine and of course now you know within a couple years that's a very normal position

you say oh I don't use Twitter and people say like good for you and move on with their life so things do change so I come at things from those perspectives what is the underlying value here if a technology or a way I'm using technology is not serving that value then we can push back or change it which is what you were doing we bring back to the headset which as we were joking before is going to be a metaphor for the deep

life the headset you're wearing right now what that represents is you have a vision of what you want podcasting to be that does not require you for me for you for me right what you care about right now in your life that does not require you to rent one of these warehouses and build the big sound stage in the middle of the stage and and have to crew with the five cameras set up or what have you that's techno selection is I want to put my

code on the video thing though is that I don't think YouTube is to future a video for podcast in fact YouTube and podcasts don't play well together at all they really just don't most people are not successfully growing their podcast using YouTube unless it's really YouTube specified and so I think that mismatch is doling the impact of the YouTube algorithm on the podcast ecosystem because those audiences don't play well

together I think the future of video for podcasting it's going to be on smart TVs I think it'll probably be I subscribe to this app that has on it OK so you think people will single task the way you know it's talking to our own YouTube guy and the reason why I'm on YouTube by the way is practice because I think videos going to be key YouTube

itself right now it's not going to drive my podcast but I want to be used to this medium he was saying on a lot of big shows and I think he was giving me the numbers from Lex Friedman smart TVs will often be the number two or the number three most common device on which the podcast is consumed really really yeah because if you think about it you can load the YouTube app on your smart TV podcasters are now filming in high death 4k and when you're watching you select a

podcast it's not that different than going to Netflix and selecting a show that's watching TV takes up the whole show and they don't like the stuff that's on anyways so I think that's going to be the future probably is you're going to have some app you're like OK I subscribe to this app is the equivalent of a 2004 linear cable channel that you

would have had on your menu it's a nice Netflix interface and Cal new ports latest shows and Tim's and Ryan holidays whatever like a group of people doing similar stuff it's a channel and you go through a horizontal carousel there's new episode of whatever you watched on your screen I think podcast is going to compete with streamers and cable because the overhead the key number used to be in cable dollar per hour of production cost and this is why discovery channel was the

profitable king of the first decade of the 2000s is that they got that down to something like $400,000 an hour which it was a minuscule cost per hour because they're doing these reality shows podcast you can get that down even with high production values another order of magnitude or more yeah but like one tenth the cost for like the super single cost of the people with the $60,000 trycasters for the three camera setups etc so that's a bit of an aside but that's where I think this is

a good thing to be thinking about podcast I think YouTube I don't like the YouTube algorithm it doesn't play well with podcast why do you say that because there are the anointed demigots of the YouTube podcast ecosystem right likes Friedman certainly Andrew Huberman is very hard to do that there's

certain names Jordan Peterson Gabor Mate even for instance there's certain people who once they have been given the YouTube algorithm they could fart into a microphone for ten minutes and get three million yes which is not to diminish what they do I think I actually

everyone I mentioned has produced some really spectacular content so it's not to minimize it in any way but why do you say it doesn't play nice because it seems like that is the primary arena in which many podcasts are trying to grow there I would say viewership because they're really not

podcasts anymore in the sense that they're their video first because the thumbnails and the salacious headlines and the clickbait and so on are all being sold visually so I feel like it's more as you put it kind of competing on a TV menu using visual candy as a TV show

like as a visual Charlie Rose versus as a podcast like it's almost a misnomer to consider them podcasts at this point for a lot of that's true but I think two things are going on here one I think it's less podcast just as a per capita basis less podcast and we think that

are seriously competing in that space I mean that's YouTube land but there's so many this whole middle class of podcasters by which I mean you're earning a Kevin Kelly thousand true fans middle class or above income that just aren't playing in that arena it's a golf

podcast it's a fitness podcast what have you or it's on video but it doesn't really matter I mean they have to camera since younger people listen to it on the video that's not like that's driving its growth human men and Lex their outliers in ways it's not useful to

pursue I mean to pursue that is similar to being early in your TV career and say well let's just do what Oprah is doing she has a lot of listeners it's hard to replicate I think there's a self reinforcing ecosystem already that they're all a part of also the length of their videos that tends to be favored by the algorithm if you go two or three hours and people actually watch it that's really favored by the algorithm and it's so extreme though it's it's like the only

game in towns chicken in the egg people like them so they'll watch a full three hour video and then the YouTube algorithms like oh my god people are watching three hours that's a lot of time we're going to really push this but I don't know that most podcasts need YouTube but also even if you do it just doesn't work it's really difficult YouTube's algorithm once Mr. Beast way more than it once you know is a client it's just the reality of what's going on

with that yeah I mean I think there are a bunch of open questions that I want to come back to the attempt to come back to 30,000 of you with the techno selectionism is it was which by the way folks if you not aware you may have even mentioned them in your

piece of apologies I haven't read it but the homage to something very similar they do adopt new technology there's very strict about how they do the first thing I'd say is if podcasts end up on smart TVs there's a question about how they end up on smart TVs presumably there's some platform or hardware company deciding on them they might use YouTube as a proxy for who to choose as their content partners just in terms of popularity so it may indirectly

still be a determinant YouTube that is of who gets placement otherwise you just run into the same discovery problem that people experience right now and you can really really great podcast well you can rely on the Spotify algorithm to recommend something similar but then you run into the issue of like I listen to one country song once and now I just get served hundreds of country songs every day like how to change my specifications but to zoom out just on the techno

selectionism side because I think you mentioned something that's worth underscoring I think of new technology like I would think of new drugs and so on and so on to make things safer there's no reason to treat technology any differently in my mind drugs are technology so it's sort of a subset

of media same same wearing a headset where you have the illusion of depth perception but in reality or can get a screen that's less than a few inches from your eyes and so on there's just no real way to know what the long term implications are which doesn't mean you become a

lot I but even living in Silicon Valley for 17 years I was sort of a sharp edge adopter but not a cutting edge adopter I never really took things on personally through self experimentation or as an investor really if they were kind of first of their kind I always wait it around a little bit and you can still be really early and catch the right waves even if you have a certain built in delay and that's how I'm treating a lot of technologies and also behaviors like if

technologies are just and I'm not going to use it dictionary definition here but let's just say tools and quotation marks of various types which could be behaviors to accomplish a certain task solve a certain

problem right could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite mound but it could also be a certain type of behavior that you use which is basically an algorithm to recipe step by step eight out L to get something done I really want to think about like what are and this is what makes the best investors in the world

that I think is the thing about not just primary but like secondary tertiary effects kind of like the character loosely based on Peter teal in the first season of Silicon Valley who's like who is this burger king and he runs this whole thing on the Sesame seeds and that I guess the number of the summer is like the 30 year cycle is going to coincide right and the reason I mentioned that is if we think about for instance video I think many people

who are adopting video I've never experienced what it is like to have widespread public recognition like visual recognition when they walk around on the street and so they're not familiar with that side effect which people have experienced through other medium like television and I have to my own limited experience that I'm not Brad Pitt or anything like that but I have certainly it is hard for a lot of people I know popular podcasts that have any video component to

go hang out at a coffee shop they can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down read a book because they'll get interrupted every five to 10 minutes if it's in any decently sized city in the US at least if they're US based podcasters and for that reason that I'm also kind of taken the techno selection is a slash

from like okay I can afford to wait this isn't true with everything but I think this ties into also slow productivity like I can afford to wait six months I can afford to wait 12 months and if I am giving you credit for this but it's certainly one of my favorite in my case audio books born standing out be so good they can't ignore you Steve Martin rule number one

Daniel DeLuis was not on tiktok in between all of his movies making omelets or teaching people seven easy steps to financial freedom or what to do when Bitcoin crashes are you like he was working on his craft yes getting so fucking good that every few years you just show up and win best actor and then disappear again all right thank you for going to my Ted talk

but let's come back to slow productivity so the new book I want to talk about this subtitle is the lost art of accomplishment without burnout who doesn't want that the last time you are on this podcast the episode was published February 2022 and you were telegraphing this a bit you were talking about slow productivity a bit and you were like well thinking about making this book so I'm just curious to know process wise if you didn't

doge me what happened between then and now because now you have finished book and people can buy it and this is a maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your primary projects the things to say yes to because writing book takes a lot of energy so what happened between let's just say January 2022 and now we're recording January

January 2024 with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time well it's a good case study because I was testing the idea then I went back and actually pulled out this timeline I think the first time I used the term slow productivity was maybe 2020 or 2021 right around there right before I came on your show the last time I was ready to

ratchet up my testing of the concept so I could also development more so I wrote a New Yorker piece that January where the title was it's time to embrace slow productivity now the piece just had one idea of what would eventually become the full blown philosophy of slow productivity and then I came on your show we talked about it some more then pretty soon after I was on your

show I'm writing the book seriously I pulled together okay I think I really understand all the pieces so that's like a two year ideation process you know I get the inspiration for the book in 2020 it's the mix of the start of the pandemic and some stuff happening to my own

life this is where I began playing with those ideas 2022 I'm still trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form you know that summer I'm up you know up in New England writing I'm up actually writing the book so that's the process this is summer of 2022 summer of 2022 I

would have handed this in in spring of 2023 is when I would have handed in my first man's for you yeah incredible well see I disappear part of my methodologies I disappear in the summer you know I'm a professor so typically professors in the summer take what's called summer salary you don't actually get paid by your university at a research institution you don't get paid in the summer they pay

ten months and then you can take on through grants summer salary to keep working on research is what you're supposed to do and at some point I realize well you know I make money from writing books I don't actually have to know it's not university the one who's providing the grant or is it some it no independent foundation independent right so I'm like a theoretical computer scientist applied mathematician so we'd get our money from the NSF for example and that's

you do because your research national science foundation exactly yeah and I realize at some point after I got 10 year I don't actually need that salary like this is what the book advance should be for and I began disappearing in summer really and really let's write let's really get ahead of steam and so within a month or two after being on your show I was beginning to seriously write that book and then it's

about a ten month process for me to get a manuscript done then you get about four or five months of editing and then it locks in so that locked in last summer last summer that book was finally locked in. So I'm going to selfishly just ask you a couple of questions about writing for myself so working on my first book project in six years seven years something like that.

Oh excellent and there are many reasons for it it's one of those things just refuse to go away one of these ideas are like okay this is just going to ricochet around inside my skull and definitely unless I let it out somehow so let's do it and I'm excited about it I'm very excited about it I also want to and I keep saying

this I've said this for years so I'm calling bullshit on myself on some level get back into writing on the blog and in part because I feel I have more differentiation with that particular capacity not that I'm the best writer but there's a particular style of writing there's a particular way of deconstructing things that people at least some people seem to like right from the 1000 true fans perspective.

Whereas in the interview format podcast world there are a lot of very very good people with very high production quality so I feel like that arena is becoming more of a red ocean per se as opposed to a blue ocean so I'd experiment with doing more on the blog also just to reinforce something you said because the blog number one it's a platform that I own it's on open source WordPress and the sort of barrier to comment is a little higher which I

like there's a little more friction in the process people can't just be like this who can do mellow LZ you know on the blog there's more involved there is a little more process involved in terms of leaving comments so the signal tends to be higher it allows me to workshop things also quickly workshop things and see how they land and I still think that for like memetic testing.

Text is pretty hard to beat they're very different laboratories text and voice are very different laboratories I think voice helps you to talk through whatever is percolating to develop ideas that you can then test really effectively via text if that makes any sense so two questions for the first is we in our last conversation when I interviewed you on the

podcast talked about the human magazine at Dartmouth and one of the main things that helped you not specific to that or I should say limited to that was that you're either writing for editors or writing for acceptance and rejection you had some feedback loop.

Whereby you could improve your writing as it stands right now I'm not going to get much of that from my readers God bless them right because it's not their role it's a heavy lift they're going to either like it or not like it and provide some feedback in the comments but in terms of becoming a better writer how would you approach that if you were me writing blog posts if I have a book I will have possibly an editor I will have friends read a chapter here there but how would you

approach that I would like to try to mimics a set go like short blog posts which I'm fucking terrible that I tend to be very verbose which is why all my books or phone books is I want to really make a goal for myself to do short blog posts because I'll be more sustainable hopefully.

How would you create that feedback so I want to get better and I'm happy you're going back the writing because I mean I think you're right that it's a much harder skill and it's a much a rare skill I write constantly that's basically my baseline for my career is I'm always writing I'm always writing now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces in the six weeks counting today and going back six weeks from today recording I published three pieces in the New Yorker I'm just writing writing

writing writing writing because I think that's the rare skill because you're right people can become good podcast interviewers like good enough it's pretty quick people I don't know they with chat GPT if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup they can do it they can do it give me ten questions in the style of Lex Friedman if he were to interview such and such a

guest who happens to be my next guest and then you'll get ten questions and you can finesse him and then you have your iPad and you're ready to go.

And if you have on interesting people you're really just kind of getting out of the way and actually is an advantage we have this whole new generation of investors who just don't say much and that turns out to actually work well you know anyways but writing's hard as anything writing is hard you can't write without practice I mean you've written what four or five phone books worth of books and Tim dot blog you

five and the blog was going for a blog post really long time right so I think that makes a lot of sense one idea I would have is particular stylistic targets that you're working with this post or for the next week or the next month I like what's happening in this writing over here this is resonating with me so my taste is saying this is good let me deconstruct that and try that in my post like I like what's going on here with meter I like what's going on here

with abstraction or story let me try that and this is what I did before I had a steady edited gig is that I would deconstruct articles and try to practice particular things I found from them it was all tool kit building and then the bigger the toolkit the more tools you have available so you're working on a book chapter what have you and you can pull out the whatever the metaphorical equivalent of the Phillips head screwdriver is here the

saw there I think the regularity matters to but it's that taste issue and this is actually an idea that's in the new book the slow productivity book because one of the principles is obsessed over quality and if anything that becomes the core principle for slowing down I pulled that out because I in my notes is on like page three or four and I was like okay this seems like the mother quality it is innocence that allows

for the birth of all these other qualities you can't be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with a hundred projects if you're obsessed about doing something really well it's incompatible with that now doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together but it is incompatible with being busy like Chris Nolan the director doesn't even own a smartphone

he is just I'm making oftenheimer and that's what I'm doing for the next three years and then when I'm done I'm going to go away for six months and just read that's what I do I cannot be on YouTube like you're Daniel Day Lewis example because when you obsess over quality like two things happen one you can't be busy because that gets in the way of actually getting really good at something and then two if you're

doing something really well that actually gives you the autonomy to push the other junk out your life and slow down even more you know as you get better at something the more say you get over the way your life unfold that's why you've been podcasting ten years and you can say I'm not going to do this video thing right now because you're really good at it right you have some autonomy to figure out how

I actually want to do this I call that principle the glue it holds everything else together the glue is the competency slash quality first obsessive quality yeah because the other two principles are do fewer things and work at a natural pace but if you're only doing those two things you've set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general it's like all I'm looking about is like how do I do less

I see work adversarially I want to have more variety in my pacing you're just sort of trying to get away from reduce or change work and if that's all you're doing you're just building up this negative attitude towards work which I think by the way is one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in let's say elite culture it's just an all out rejection of work itself like well any drive to do things it's a capitalist construction and the real thing to do is just do nothing but that doesn't

last and the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing they're striving really hard to make sure that their substax and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience they're giving talks on it so you can't just focus on the doing less part you need

the obsess over quality part and that's where you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create and that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living and so that's why I think it's to glue you have to do the other things but if you just do the

other things you know you're going to end up doing quiet quitting tiktoks or something like that you're not going to end up where you want to be oh no purgatory just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode

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slash Tim check it out returning to because this relates to the writing of slow productivity choosing to spend your entire summer working on this dog with a phone with respect to the writing process so I will come back to that but not to bore everybody who is not right in the audience

although by the way folks I'm talking about creative process and choosing projects so I want to talk about choosing to write slow productivity because wanting to or understanding the importance of say obsessing over quality which I think you would agree is the best promotion like

rather than worrying about all the different ways you can market something like product first is a great marketing plan you still need to choose which thing to become great at because you could choose quite quitting tiktoks as your particular specialty

not that there's anything wrong with that it's not for me but you chose instead to do other things so how do you choose to use the sort of metaphor I think it's probably apocryphal but the stones the big rocks to put in your jar before the gravel in the sand

how did you choose slow productivity why that versus the many other things you could do so presumably you get all sorts of speaking invites you could have just crammed a bunch of those into the summer and done done really well financially you could have done who knows what maybe a people emailing you about like film adaptations of this or who knows you have stuff that gets lobbed over the trans and maybe you even have great work citing ideas to in the morning like oh god be so cool if I did X

at the end of the day you chose to focus on this why there's a general in the specific answer the general is writing is what I do that is what I do I come up with ideas that I think are important and I put them in the writing with the best possible craft I'm not happy if I'm not writing so that's why I'm not giving a hundred talks a year it's why I'm not releasing an app it's why you can't hire the deep work academy consultant so you don't know how many times people have told me like

we would give you any amount of money so it come to our company and like redesign our practices to be focused on deep work unless distracted by email and I'm like now I'm going to write instead I wrote the book you guys and just buy by by many many of those they try to replicate what they would pay

but then the specifically that idea I spend years I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to write a book about this is one of the skills I think has lost in the internet age because again going back was tied this all to the algorithm that surfaces something or that promotes

something very different it's a volume game among other things I want to put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm hits it's a format game it's also a lot of chasing trends game you say okay what just took off two days ago on related channels now you're going to get 70

videos all doing the same thing it's a completely different way of thinking I think part of my secret sauce and the secret sauce for a lot of people it could be at least is really waiting to get started you know I wrote this years ago on our mutual friend or the friend who introduced me to

your work actually we meet Sethy way back when in his early blog I remember writing article for him that said don't get started was like my advice because my thought was it's really hard to get a good idea and so like take your time and then the cultivated good idea takes years and you

have to write you know you're going to dedicate a lot of your life to it so really don't get started if you can at all hold back until you're really really sure about it and then people say yeah but I worried that I'm just going to procrastinate forever and in some sense it's like well

then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work but the solution to that is not just let's just go let's just like tweet this let's do this video let me jump over this let me start using generative AI you're looking for if I crypto this thing just looking for some quick thing that

you can connect and you got to just not want to get started until you can't help but get started I think that's frustrating for a lot of the internet generation because it takes a really long time so I do want the specific I mean you did mention it I guess because you're a writer but

that not to go like it's turtles all the way down but I will ask like how did you decide that you're a writer looking your CV one might conclude yes he does a lot of writing but he's also a computer science theoretician and he's this and this and this and that that that that so

to say I am a writer is something that I think also many folks right now who are in any form of content will have a lot of trouble saying I am X they might say I'm a youtuber but usually it's like 15 items and they're in lies many opportunities and also many temptations to be

resisted I would say that a few observations the first is that as you're talking about don't get started it makes me think of Warren Buffett and the don't just do something stand there like you don't need to make a hundred thousand investments you don't

need to be a day trader wait for the fat pitch like figure out the fat pitch looks like figure out what you're kind of zone of genius is what is your advantage and you are I would say also like the it seems to me like and I'm really putting together a question with a million

semicolons here but you do get started but you're not over committing to half-baked ideas you are exploring and experimenting and workshopping which is also as I think I might have mentioned in another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts because if

you look at say the four-hour body the four-hour body was workshoped for years before it ever came out just wasn't under that name the first blog post that ever went super mega viral on dig at the time DIG and perhaps a few others was from Kevin Rose sir Kevin was from

to freak about gaining a bunch of muscle and the response to that it was what made me very interested in workshopping add Jason material to see if it would be similarly received and if I would enjoy it if I would be good at it etc. and so that was workshop for years that

doesn't mean wasting time it means that by the time I decided to really commit resources the likelihood of success in my mind was I'm not going to say all but certain but it was as certain as I could possibly be I had already tested this for our work week was workshoped for six

seven years in lectures so how did you decide that you were a writer that you identify that way because identifying that way is a story that enables you to then be very selective and focused in what you do right it's a good question because I decided early I decided

I was a writer when I was 20 and I became a professional when I was 21 so I signed with my agent when I was 20 and signed my first book deal right after I turned 21 so I came to it early because I was a big reader and was verbally percosis it's going to be in

the hyperblogging but I read a lot the glue of my quality and being verbally percosis and literally percosis I suppose I mean it was like gifted and talented reading program people think you know that Johns Hopkins talent serves to CTY camps people think oh you probably

went to one of those for math but I was invited for the creative writing one I went to college and I said as I went to college I'm not going to be a writer I just it's really hard writings really hard so that's not what I'm going to do I was a walk

on into the crew team instead said the right build for it like this one going to do sports this is great was that lightweight or regular weight 160 pounds this guy there is a lot of sauna and weight cutting in that yeah I was the brutal yeah I was the big guy I mean

you know that from wrestling but I was the big guy that would cut down anyways and I may have talked about this before on the show I'm not sure but I long as short of it I developed a congenital heart condition a sort of rapid heartbeat so I had to stop rowing and

so I said maybe I'll see about writing and that's when I started writing I don't think you mentioned this I mean it was I was a pretty good rower actually it was you know a bunch of recruits on this freshman boat from prep schools and then it was like me and one

other walk on it just I was a middle distance printer in high school I was the right build for it whatever so I was like I can maybe make a go of this and have a stop is I just out of nowhere just all right I have a it's called an h real flutter okay so I guess I can't

do this anymore and so then I said let me try I need some sort of activity I guess grudgingly grudgingly I'll try writing and the very first thing I wrote was an op ed about 9 11 for the student newspaper a couple weeks after 9 11 and I started I started writing columns for my gone vault in the humor magazine after a year or so of that I was like oh maybe I am good at writing and that's when I started to write a book let's become a writer let me write a book and that's what we talked about last

time was figuring out how can a 21 year old sell a book and it would have to be the right topic and we did all of that but that's when I declared but when it comes to your other part of this question which is how do you figure out what the work on I think you have two options you can do both one option is to actually have like you did or I have a way of test driving idea so you know I use like you used to do my newsletter and my blog to test drive it the fact that you pointed out like

you honed in on slow productivity as something you wanted to talk to me about was a really good signal okay this topic probably has legs so I do a lot of that so you're right if you read my newsletter I'm trying a lot of things most of which

will never become a book if you don't have that then the other option this is what I think it was like the MFA option is you have to develop really good taste MFA meaning masters and fine arts yeah so if you go back I took an award the pen him you way award for first time novelist I just chose the

whatever year was most recent and here's the finalist and I went through their bios like all but one had come through an MFA program and so what's going on there it's not to these MFA programs which are creative writing graduate programs they don't really teach you it's not instructive like

here's how you do paragraphs or here's techniques you didn't know but increases your taste meaning your ability to recognize what's good and what's not and what's possible with good things so that's the traditional option in sort of a pre internet age is you get really discerning about

other people's work you read a lot and just know this is a good novel and this is not you know I read a lot of New Yorker and I know what makes like a really good long form nonfiction journalist article and then you can apply that taste to your own work and be your own worst this

isn't there yet this isn't there yet oh this is getting better so you either need a way to test what you're doing and the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago and or you really have to put into work to develop taste so you understand what makes this good I'm not there yet

but this is the closest thing I've done so far so let me go after this or I can see how good this is so I know I'm not going to try to publish this as a novel but I could probably do a short story over here taste can also become the way you do it but one way or the other you do need

some sort of discernment function to figure out what ideas are worth pursuing because if you're just going off of inspiration in the moment I mean that's a huge craps you like you're really unlikely to be successful that way yeah and I'm also and maybe this is just

because I'm a curmudgeon and one of the old muppets up in the balcony more to my but I think offline is incredibly uncrowded and absurdly valuable in the sense that if you're looking for real time feedback go volunteer for ten bucks an hour to teach a class at learning annex and see what

sticks see what works see what's confusing the feedback group is so fast you do that once a week for a month you're going to know a lot I mean you're going to know that if you had a 100 blog post by far in my opinion I try to test things live and for people who might be curious

people who test material tend to test material in a lot of different ways in my experience if you listen to for instance my Jamie Fox episode from way back in the day 2015 it was podcast of the year at the time back when that was possible when they're

like only a few thousand podcasts to choose from but he was even in that podcast working on material seeing what my response was and you can do that with nonfiction too just as a quick example of tastes I'm listening to a book right now which I've read excerpts of but it's called the

power law by Sebastian Malibu and it's about venture capital he wrote a book also called more money than God which is nonfiction encyclopedic and beautifully written romp through the world of hedge funds which blew me away because he was very good at making the sort of esoteric very graspable similar to in some senses Michael Lewis but the power law book I know most of the content I lived in that world for a long time I know most of the history and still I was listening to it in the

car yesterday I was like good God it's just so good like the writing and the timing that we've talked about before and Dave Barry for like just like setting up the punch line and like ending the chapter on the right note where you're like oh it's so

good it's just so so good the same way I felt about say joeab her crombie in this fantasy trilogy which starts with the blade itself where I was just like oh God it's so well architected it's not just the pros but it is the pros as well so that taste and building up that barometer being so important

and let me ask you on the topic of slow productivity could you give some examples mean you mentioned Chris Nolan could you give some examples old and new of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity I was motivated by slow food as an example where they look back to traditional cuisines

where cultures had evolved over generation and generation like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy and the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration I look back at what I called traditional knowledge workers

so people who did things with their brain but not the normal 1950s and onward I'm in an office or working at a computer screen so like artist and philosophers scientists the original knowledge workers they tended to have a lot more freedom in autonomy than we did today so I said great

we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work because they had freedom and flexibility so we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the sort of modern life so a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers so one of the early examples is Isaac Newton and I said okay we all know he wrote this great master work the Principia calculus is just invented in that as part of the

effort to specify the laws of gravity that gives celestial order to the way that the cosmos works he wrote that thing over decades he would go and do other things and come back it wasn't this frantic push until it's done but no one remembers

how long he spent working on that there's like yeah that thing changed the way we understand the world Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play in the Heights the same way I do his whole story it's a seven year odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play

which wasn't very good to when it first goes on to a professional stage that's a seven year period and he's working on it that he's not and he's working on it again and he's not we don't know about that now we're just like oh yeah his first play won a lot of Grammys and he did Hamilton

he's like a really good player if you read Wikipedia you're like oh the synopsis in one sense his dad told them like when he's left when he graduated from college his dad was like you really should go to law school he took a job as a substitute teacher he was spending a lot of time with a

little rap troupe called love supreme that would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows so if you zoomed in on a particular day in the almost decade that Lin-Manuel Miranda was working on in the Heights you're like man

you're so lazy you're not even working on your thing like what's going on why aren't you getting after it why aren't you you know why aren't you crushing it because things take longer I use Georgia O'Keefe as an example of seasonality that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up

until she began so you know what in the summers I'm going with Alfred Stiglitz we're going the lake George and I'm going to sit there in a shanty that she called it the shanty it was an outbuilding near the lake I'm just going to paint and be inspired and then I'll come back after the summer

and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff most productive years of her life by actually slowing down for a season every year her productivity exploded she became you know one of the most famous early modernist of that whole era of painting right so we see those examples what Murray Curry at the pinnacle of about to discover in pitch blend the substance she's studying about the isolate radio activity and when her first to two Nobel

prizes goes to France with her family on vacation for two months in the moment you're like what are you doing you got to be getting after you got to be crushing it but we don't see that now like yes she was great she won two Nobel prizes way to go she wasn't part of the hustle culture that's the interesting things when you go back and study people producing things of real value using their brain they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard

but they didn't hustle and they didn't work ten hour days day after day they didn't work all out year round they didn't push push push until this thing was done it was a more natural variation they had less on their plate at the same time

and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality that's the slow productivity approach it still produces stuff that you're really proud of but it doesn't burn you out and it doesn't leave you in this weird out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time I think a lot of choosing a path is about choosing tradeoffs so if you choose slow productivity there's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of tradeoffs what are the pressures expectations

psychological challenges etc that you should be prepared to face why don't we start there because I think most people listening will agree like yes I don't want to be doing quiet quitting tiktok videos in other words I'd rather be building the

cysteine chapel instead of sandcastles that just get wiped away every time wave comes in but the fact of the matter is you know I have a mortgage I've got this I've got this this this and I can't just disappear for months at a time and take two decades to write my masterwork

I can see how a lot of folks would rightly say that at least at face value so what should people be willing to accept as tradeoffs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity and isn't usually exclusive like presumably

then when Miranda had a way to buy groceries and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap right so maybe I'm making a creating a false dichotomy here Lynn was a teacher and was also a columnist he was writing reviews and columns for a paper while he was working on this in his spare time but the bigger points the important one is how do we take an example like Newton and the principia and apply it to someone who has just a 21st century corporate

semi remote hybrid work job for a big company so how do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers but just modern knowledge workers so like we start with the first principle do fewer things but what this really means if you have a normal corporate job

it's starting to be very explicit about workload management which is something that everyone does workload management but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context in most jobs not in software development but in most other jobs

it's up to you just to manage what's on your plate people send you emails and you just say yeah sure I'll do it so what most people do for example is they wait until they feel really stressed and then they say all right I have psychological cover to say no because I'm so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no there's a terrible way to manage your workload

so you can be much more explicit about how you manage a workload here's how many slots I have oh I filled them I mean this is really sort of four hour work week style let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload you could go to a pole based system instead of a push based system

you can do reverse to do list and there's a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn't get too large in a way that's fully compatible work at a natural pace while there's organizational things you can do here so that you're not at full intensity

but you can also just do this yourself you can titrate your workload I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year and I can do this in a way that my employer doesn't notice you know it's pretty subtle in like what projects you take on or don't take on

you can quiet quit for two months and no one notices whereas if you quiet quit for 20 months people say okay wait a second I know you're worth as a human's not defined by your labor but your worth to me as an employee is you got to do something right

quiet quitting is just not doing very much right quite what he was doing to bare minimum yeah and it comes out of a place of this sort of late stage capitalism critique of like why should I have to do work which is a whole other thing and then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality

that then becomes the accelerant that allows you to do these other things faster and better so as you own in on okay here's what I'm going to own within this company and I'm going to get better and better at this and make myself more and more valuable

now you're able to much more easily and much more aggressively do fewer things now you're able to much more easily and aggressively say I'm gone in August I don't do work at June you gain autonomy as you get better and then you're able to accelerate these things

so the vision is even if you work for someone else these principles can be implemented whether they're on board or not and it's going to get you something like the slow productivity benefits of a I'm doing good work work is not taking up most of my life and I think we can safely assume that a lot of the audience listening will be self-employed or have some agency at least as most people would assume beyond say mid-level HR manager at a large company makes it a lot easier by the way

yeah makes it easier I think that a lot of folks listening will be self-employed so we can use that lens if it makes it a little easier but perhaps they run who knows a software like a B2B SaaS company and they have employees and so on but they can set rules at the end of the day they can create systems that build in some way you're talking about what is a pole system instead of a push system I mean it's okay here's how many things I work on at a time

so I only pull something new in when I'm done with something which is different than the default of anyone can push work onto your play at any time and something you to just sort of manage this you have an unlimited load a pole system says no this is what I'm working on now

I can't do something else until I'm done with this and we can have a holding tank and this is where it is here's how I estimate when I'm going to get to it there's this many things ahead of it software developers already do this because they already have con bond inspired cards on a whiteboard system where you pull in I'm going to work on this feature now and over here you have the holding tanks of features that need to be done and when you're done on with the feature you're working on

it moves to the next column and you can pull something else into its place you could do this more with more other types of work the idea being you don't want to be juggling too much at the same time because the overhead gets to you how do you do that personally the similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles like mine is a professor writers quota systems so that's more what I will lean into break up work into the different types of things I need to do

and quota here's how many of these I do per semester here's how many of these I do at a time the idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that is part of my responsibilities but it's cap so I have a quota as a professor for here's how many paper reviews I do per semester

when I hit that cap I can now say to someone hey thanks for thinking about this I do a lot of paper reviews I like to be paper reviews I've already hit my quota for the semester however so I can't take any more on the semester this is really effective because for someone to push back

against that they basically just have to argue your quotas wrong well whatever it is is wrong you should be doing more you know as opposed to saying I'm really busy you know I don't know if I have time and they're like everyone's busy it would be good for me if you would just do this

yeah don't worry I can make this really light lift for you don't worry about it and will whatever I there's nothing more quick so I think then the overburdened worker who is trying to not say no but get the person who's giving them the work to voluntarily agree to not give them the work it never works if someone's trying to get you to do something you like well I guess I could but you know I am pretty busy they're never going to say you sound busy don't do this I like good

well I'm glad you can do it get this off my plate what are you talking about I'll lean more into quotas and I'm really careful about that when you say careful what do you mean careful about taking on yeah I'm very careful this is that we mean yeah

and not only do I have quotas for I only do this much per semester I'll think about I'm not going to do any of this work this season though I'm riding the season so I'm going to disappear and not do this or this season I'm working on research I'm very wary of workload and workload management how many things do I have on my plate that's the number I check with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety you know one of my core ideas is the problem about putting a lot of things on your

plate even if they don't have colliding deadlines or it's up to you when you finish them is once something is on your plate you've agreed to do it it generates overhead people are going to check in on it there's going to be calls you have to jump on to talk about it it has some cognitive space and what's been happening a lot in modern knowledge work is that people have put so much stuff on their plate that the overhead of just managing all of this stuff not doing the work just the

administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings takes up most of their schedule and it's this weird almost Cisophian position that so many knowledge workers are in today where all day long is just talking about their work and it's okay maybe late at night or on the weekend I do a little bit of work like it makes no sense right if your workload gets too big the overhead takes over more and more of your time and it takes longer to get through your

actual workload is an incredibly inefficient way of executing work it's one of the reasons why by the way that this is not a zero sum game slow productivity it doesn't make you worse at your job but happier it actually makes you better at your job I mean if I'm an employer I should like the idea of slow productivity because my workers are going to produce better stuff we will make more money if we don't pile 15 things on their

plate because more of their time is going to be working on value producing objectives and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to there's actually really a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs between employers and employees slow productivity produces good stuff it doesn't just make the workers happier doesn't just make you happier you produce better stuff I mean your

company has more profit your clients are happier you can charge more for the services you offer so it's not zero sum it's more win-win if anything else I have to imagine that also if any company were to have the emperor of the universe dictate that they embrace the tenets of slow productivity for say a three to six-month period of time the companies that would not do well on at least one level would

probably be those who have not clearly defined what the high leverage most important things are right so if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and taken the measure twice

cut once approach to determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominoes are makes them irrelevant they're probably be quite bad at slow productivity I mean that would make them bad at most types of productivity I would say other than just like the volume game of tonnage of here do another thirty tasks but remaining really focused right which I think is a risk or I'd say that risk is increased when you are not good at defending yourself against the agendas of everyone else in a

sense right if you take on too much from a tactical perspective you mentioned the I only do say making this up I've committed to only doing five peer reviewed article reviews per quarter really appreciate you thinking of me but I'm

unfortunately I've already hit that and I need to focus on a beer safe to the actual language that is used for defense I'm very interested in what other types of language do you use when you get stuff over the transom which I have to imagine you do are there other approaches other specific types of

phrases that you have found you come back to right because they're effective well extreme clarity is the most important I think people tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness which is really not that important to the person making the request they want this thing done and they want to know if you're going to do it or not now you don't want to be rude but actually clarity is the key you

can have zero wiggle room and anyone I'm sure you're very good at this I mean anyone who has a lock coming over the transom learns you have to say I can't do this and then you can give some explanations but you can't give any ambiguity so you say unfortunately I can't do this because you can

give some explanations most people don't read past the I can't do this like they're already emailing the next person that they're going to ask about this once they get that line so I think short and sweet and clear clarity is underrated in this I mean what do people really want they want

something done and they also want clarity about when is this going to get done because they want to be released from having to keep track of something in their mind and so it's why this company that made their clients sign a communication agreement this is how we are going to talk to you

like this is how we're going to discuss things you can't just email or call us whenever what we're going to do is we're going to have and I believe their setup if I this was a few years ago but I believe their setup was we're going to have this weekly check in call and we're going to

take careful notes during this check in call of any questions you have that we don't have the answer on right away we're going to take careful notes on that and we'll post it and get you that information back right is what we're going to do one of the two partners of this company

was thinking this is it right like we're going out of business because clients don't want anything taken away from them they went full flexibility they're going to see this as weird in a centric and who are we to say this the clients didn't care they didn't get because

what a clients one if I have an issue I need to know it's going to be taking care of so if you have no communication agreement what that means is okay I just sent you an email about this as soon as I thought about it yeah just nebulous anxiety they don't know when something is

going to be so you better get back to me right away because if you don't get back to me right away I worry that you're going to forget this and so I'm just going to keep bothering you about this until you get back to me so then you think oh what the client wants is responsiveness

but if you give them an alternative here's a shared document write anything that comes up in here and on our Thursday call we're going to go boom boom like we're going to go through this whole thing that solves the same problem for them like great I can just write this here and the win

for the client is not you responding to an email right away that's not what they really care about the win is the anxiety of having to keep track of this has been relieved and I don't really care how that happens and I don't care if I have to write it on the a little piece of paper to

attach to a homing pigeon that I'm going to send out the window and it's going to make it to the roots that you know that your intern check I don't care I don't have to worry about it it's not about politeness so much I mean you don't want to be rude it's not about managing

a massaging the relationships it's clarity okay great you can't do this or you can do this but here's how we're going to talk about it okay good I trust this will get done now I know what's coming next I have a hundred other emails in my inbox I've already moved on

so you know I think clarity clarity clarity is the key once you start actually managing your workloads much more explicitly any other keys for you personally in terms of whether it's like preemptively stemming the tide by having public rules or blog posts or auto response

or something like that that basically says these are things I can't can do or will or won't do do any other systems in place or anything like that that lessens the burden of it maybe the answer is you just don't get a lot of this because people are already very well aware

that sort of your existence and positioning in the world is the deep work guys so they just don't send you a ton of stuff I don't know I'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people switch to a social media paradigm for communication I'm going to DM you on whatever the fact

that I'm not like I don't know I don't have to reach people forgot about email I also have I do have though you know I call them communication channels very specific there is no here is the general way to talk to Cal Newport I have very specific channels for specific reasons with

clear expectations are used to call these sender filters and I still really depend on these today like if you have this type of request you can send it here you want to send me a link or something you can send it here but you're not going to get a reply but I probably will see it if this is an

interview request you know I'm aiming you out of publicist if this is a speaking request I'm aiming you at a speaker here's a big warning about using my academic address if you send a non academic thing here it will not be read so you're not out smart in anyone and then I add on top of that

and this is controversial but I think it's common I add on top of that a second layer of filter which is default and not answering I mean if I don't know a person and they come in with a request because I have these filter set up right that's pretty clear like this is

not just a general purpose address that's my final filter and you've made this explicit it's explicit yeah how do you phrase it you're like if I don't know you it's very low likely that I will reply which is fine just wondering how you convey it the particular channels have this

right so it'll be send this here this year this year this year this there and it'll be clear I'm not going to respond probably but I probably will see it and I have other people this is not even going to me it's when people circumvent that they get to my personal address or they go to my

Georgetown they go to my professor address my default becomes not to respond which you know it's a little bit controversial but actually it's not a bad filter I learned that from professors at MIT when I was there that was sort of help the grand professors at MIT managed their inbox was if I don't

respond that means you to try again right like whatever you sent here it was their way of saying no try again you need to be more clear have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with and so that's my final wall is getting past that and that took me a while to I felt comfortable doing this with my final wall is like if I don't know how to respond to this easily I'm probably just not going to respond to it and that sort of works a lot of things out as well there's just not this

expectation this is not a conversation in person to not answer this email is not the same as you coming up to me and me just pretending like you're not there to different sort of asymmetric medium so you can feel more comfortable about just not answering what do you think in this book I

have this question lock says usually something that pops up which is what do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over for instance for the four hour work week it's the filling the void chapter people like oh yeah must be a nice problem to have like you got to worry about how

you feel your time I'm like actually know it's a very very very very important thing because if you are a work machine and you're always in six gear and then you remove work your life doesn't just get auto populated with awesome stuff that makes you fulfill kind of have to plan for it and

people gloss over that like I'll worry about that later and then they end up in these existential crises so is there anything in this book could be anything like a full softical kind of foundational piece could be strategic or tactical where you're like

hmm based on people I've talked to based on proofreaders based on whatever I'm like if I could draw attention to something I think people might gloss over or not give it's full weight of importance with anything come to mind I think people don't realize that agreed to what they

don't actually have a sense of definition of productivity there's a part in the book where I survey 700 of my readers and one of the questions I asked them is just to find productivity no one has an answer what most people did was just describe their job productivity is producing

good software like they sort of list what it is their job is supposed to be so I think people they think they know what productivity is and that it's just a matter of your relationship to that like well productivity I don't like it and so I want to do less of it but the reality

is no one really knows what it means I think people don't realize how chaotic and haphazard and impromptu the way they're organizing their work is how chaotic it really is right I don't think people realize that what we really did and by we I mean like the whole knowledge sector

is and the 1950s when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large number of people working in offices there wasn't a clear idea how do we measure how someone is productive because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and agriculture

and they didn't apply like a manufacturing you could tabulate the labor hours per model tea produced and an agriculture you could count bushels produce per acre of land you had numbers and she could say oh the assembly line increases this number so let's do that

instead or this Norfolk crop rotation method increases like the bushels you know so let's do that instead knowledge work on it have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse and the organizational systems were autonomous like it's just up to you to figure out how to organize

yourself there's no organizational wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see what if we change this is it better so what what happened was we invented this idea called pseudo productivity which was we will use activity that's visible as a proxy for useful

effort so it's just hey you're doing something that's good doing more things is better than less that's where the sort of notion of sort of busyness is good and how are you on busy and then what happened is my contention is once we got mobile computing and the internet

and we got networks and email and I could work on my laptop you can't combine that with pseudo productivity because if more activity is better than less and you have endless work you can do in any place you just spiral into just constant working guilt and that's where the

internet race is you're done you're done right it like we kind of work you're gonna incinerate on reentry yeah you done like pseudo productivity work for Don Draper it's like yeah okay visible activities better but you can only see me when I'm in the office

and let's all agree that we can have three martinis at lunch and it's like okay fine whatever put the magazine down when someone comes by your office it doesn't work with an iPhone it doesn't work with a when you have a MacBook and you could be doing select so I mean

this is the thing I think people miss is they think they know what productivity means they have a lot of opinions about it and my argument actually is you don't have a sensical definition we just have this like activity is somehow good which is clearly not especially for non-entry level knowledge work busyness doesn't produce high value and so I think people too often think of something like slow productivity as I'm willing to trade off economic output for psychological sustainability I'm

willing to trade off making more money for feeling better about myself and that's not what it is is now what you're doing now is crazy you're building model teased with the lights off like it's a terrible way to work it's like no let's get a real definition of

productivity that is very sustainable but also is going to produce good stuff and so I think they're stepping away from something that works but's hard just gets it done but it's hard on me the thing that we're doing now doesn't work it's not a sensical way of connecting human brains to add value to information is not a good way of working so like almost any alternative that's intentional is going to be better than what we have so we might as well choose one that's also sustainable

makes us feel good but I think people get that wrong a lot what's your definition for yourself of productivity let's go back to the book you mentioned born standing up which as you know is influential for me I mean I wrote a book called so good is so good yeah it's a great book but I loved what Martin said in that which was basically you take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at and it's interesting to you and then you really put on

your blinders for a decade get really good at something that's important everything else will work itself out like his exact quote was be so good they can't ignore you if you do that everything else has a way of working out that's really been my thing I mean the decision I made in college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't row crew anymore was here's the two things I'm going to do I'm going to do computer science I'm going to write and like that's all I did like that was it

let me do computer science let me write I don't want to do Instagram I don't do Twitter let me just do that I just want to get good at this and let me read people who are really good I want to get better and better at this that's where all of my energy was like let me just try to do these two things as well as I can and that's the way I think about productivity now is how good is the best thing I produced recently that's it I want to be better at things that are hard and

meaningful and that's it I don't want to be famous and good you mean an internally driven evaluation of quality yeah by good just not to be nitpicky but right good is not as we already know based on your description of not using social media but it's not likes it's not this not that how much of it is how you feel about a piece versus say with the New Yorker how well something does the feedback you get from editors or other inputs I think external is good if it's a

trusted evaluation because you can't be us yourself unambiguous indication of value is really I think the right thing to chase because it keeps you honest like in computer science when I last talked to you I was working on a theoretical computer science paper and algorithms paper and there's an idea in there I thought was really good and I think there's something really interesting here and we published it and one in award is best paper award right like this was the

best paper at this conference in the fall of you know 22 that's important to me it's hard it's hard to write papers it's hard to get them past accepted and it's hard to win an award that's something to strive towards and it's same thing with the New Yorker it's like just really hard to write for them it's really hard to get a piece accepted it's really hard to get a piece out there that seems to be resonating with people so I'm looking for that or even numbers I

mean so I'm not against external numbers I mean seeing a book find an audience is important to me because I'm not a good marketer so the book finds an audience all my books have been super successful have taken years to get there

it's a mark that's something and there's actually working so having let's call these high value external indicators versus serendipitous or low value external indicator so I think virality on a YouTube video is a low value external indicator because there's a lot of serendipity in there it's not a

lower dose function on quality of input so it's not the better the video you create just from a sheer quality then the more views that's going to get it could be whatever you know like you have a very popular video about peeling a hard boiled egg I was just going to say my most popular YouTube videos like 8 billion views of 10 million views is how to peel hard boiled eggs without peeling the whole egg yeah filmed in my kitchen on a shitty camera God knows

what I'm doing so if I had followed that is my indicator can you imagine what my whole YouTube channel and life would be so much peeling like the you know the kitchen hacks Martha Stewart of YouTube I mean that's what I would have turned into well and by the way if it makes you feel better Mark Rober who's a major youtuber 20 30 million view videos his number one video is how to peel a watermelon inside the whatever you guys you can have problems with

peeling things people are probably feeling things but for you though compare that just thinking about peeling a watermelon sounds a very high labor well anyway somehow it does it without cutting through I don't know and I'm going to go watch the stupid video so there you go but think about compare compare your 8 million views on the egg video to your first book hitting number one the New York Times best seller I would say number one of the New York Times best seller

that's more of a high value external indicator it's very hard to do you've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience you know that's difficult to do so I like the high value external this is controversial but I

learned this from Derek Sivers who told me that money is a great here's his quote neutral indicator of value people don't like to give away their money so like it means something if clients buy your product it means something if people buy your book it means nothing for me to click to watch your egg

video is out whatever what am I going to lose but to give $20 to get your book like I care about my $20 so I think high value external indicators of value aren't a bad thing they're scary because people don't like the rejection and they don't like that it's very hard but I think that's fine because it keeps you honest it keeps you honest what do you think Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive I think it'd be a positive indicator but

I think it's a positive indicator of value I'm using a different scale than his so he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased I think this is what he did at every stage of his career when he had the next thing he wanted to do so he was working as a record executive for example and wanted to go full time with his band he would wait till the next thing was making as much money as the current thing and then that's when he would say let me go do that and so he waited till CD

baby then was creating as much money as he was making as an artist before he went neutral because if you just ask people their opinion on your idea or ask them hey do you think I should do this they're not neutral they like you and they want to be nice so like yeah man go for it yeah you should definitely quit your job to do a band like that would be awesome like I wish I could do that it's not useful feedback it's not neutral but as soon as you ask for

their money they become switcher win they're like all right well you know what are you gonna stay out of this I'm not a partisan here like okay hold on a second well how good is your band wait a second are you that good yes it's different thing it's different thing I'm really not qualified to evaluate such a thing but Derek would stand out to me as someone who's unrushed right now would say also if this is helpful for folks if you feel like you have to

rush to compete in something race in some way chances are you don't have a great sustainable competitive advantage I would say almost certainly you don't have any sustainable competitive advantage in which case if you tell us go about and just ask yourself what does this look like what does my life

look like in one year three years five years it's gonna break like something is gonna break is just a question of when it breaks so you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that or look at other ways to kind of augment your ability to not rush I think Derek is very very good at

who are some other contemporaries I know that and maybe we'll talk about it but Jane Austen would be another example historically speaking who are some contemporaries within the last 20 years who stand out 10 years just because the

technological landscape I think about this a lot like how many newtons how many divinches how many curious are just making tick-tock videos right now and they're never actually going to make something that is fulfilling their full potential I would have to imagine it's vast swaths of the population

let's just say last five to 10 years or current day people who stand out to you well I think where you see this most often today is in the arts like I'm a movie buff you see this with the great directors you know it's I got to get the right project it takes a long time to get the project

together you spend a long time on that project till it's right and then you do it right I mean if you look at Tarantino you look at Greta Gerwig you look at Chris Nolan they take their time and also they're not filling in the gap let me be on YouTube let me be on Twitter let me have a really sort of

active presence out there they take their time novelists are very good at this especially literary novelist because their books need to be really good that's their whole selling proposition so they take their time and example a specific example I like is John Grisham I did this comparison I

uncovered this old interview of Michael Crite and once it was an interview of Michael Crite and when he was 27 years old and so I wrote this essay about compare Michael Crite into John Grisham you're gonna see two different approaches to roughly the same job which is writing popular genre

fiction Crite was all about busy so you read this essay this was after the adronoma strain had come out and it's all ambitions for things he wants to I want to direct I want to do movies I have five books in development I'm writing screenplays I just moved out the LA like is this huge plan John

Grisham on the other hand like as soon as the firm did well it was the second book his first book was a flop of time to kill when it first came out he's not going to write to and if one of the two works and I'll keep doing this the firm blew up did really well and as soon as he had some

autonomy he simplified simplified simplified to the point where at some point more recently this would have been the 2000s he had this long time sort of assistant to work for him when she retired he's like I don't have to hire anyone else because no one bothers me like my agent and my

editor know how to contact me I don't do anything I write my book once a year that's it like I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my town and he was a commissioner of the little league he had a lot of stuff he didn't really the work he just slowed down it's like I just want to write that's all I do

I don't need to have TV shows and I don't need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made in the things and I don't need to create a six part series and direct my whatever and get in the television he's like I'm

just going to I'm going to pay a lot of money I'm going to write that's why I want to do on a simplify so Grisha is always stood out to me and I know a couple of people who know him and they underscore this that he's like I write I do one book a year and you're not going to hear from me until it's

done and then you get me for like four weeks and I'll do like some publicity but people know who I am do the dog and for four weeks right and then leave me alone I'm going to go do other things so he's a great example so it's two different types of ambition the correct ambition is now that I

have all these opportunities I want to do every single one I can it's a I've been starving for years and now I'm at the buffet and I'm going to fill my plate and Grisha had the complete other mindset now that I'm successful I

have the leverage to do nothing no no no no I just wanted to like do this one thing isn't that great so he's definitely slow productivity maybe that's your next book the leverage to do nothing it's actually pretty good title thinking of Grisha as someone who decided from the outset to use a

rowing example to is it sculling one person single person rowing second yeah so he's out there on the Charles just like thinking about his next book rowing by himself and then there are a lot of other people out there and I've been in position before so I'm not throwing too many stones

my glass house but you're like how did my life get so fucking complicated you know like shit instead of sculling I built Noah's Ark I've got two of every goddamn animal in here and I have to unload this fucker like if I want to simplify I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat and I want

to jump into some ways to simplify so if you are able to maintain that from the outset God bless you your miracle worker I wish I could do what you do maybe I can but I often slip I backslide and then I'm just like okay now I have to unload Noah's Ark again one of the points in the notes

here that I have is worked to reduce collaboration overhead we talked about overhead right talking about work instead of doing it by replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversations so this I think will strike a lot of folks as counterintuitive could you expand on this please

well asynchronous a problem so asynchronous meaning not real time so email for example I sent you a message you read it when you're ready to read it then you reply so it's not real time a synchrony has advantages because there's an overhead to having to arrange real-time conversation you and

I have to agree somehow this is when we're going to get on the phone together the problem with a synchrony is that if you use it for drawn out conversations there's going to be seven back and forth messages for us to decide on something this now requires me to constantly monitor

whatever channel we're using here because if we're going to get through seven back and forth messages today because we're trying to decide on something I have to see most of those messages let's say within 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving because we have to knock this ball back and forth

enough times 15 minutes per knock you know that we're already a couple hours into it so now I have to be checking these inboxes all the time but I'm checking these inboxes all the time I'm seeing lots of other stuff as well now I'm in a state to borrow a term from Linda Stone of partial

continuous attention which drains my energy I can't think well I'm exhausted I can't produce anything deep I can't do any really good work so a synchrony is one of these things that looks good on paper but as soon as you start doing back and forth planning or conversations of any type with a

synchrony it destroys everything it is one of the most potent productivity poisons and the thing about it is that we think is actually making it more efficient because oh look I can just press in then I don't have to go on a phone so instead having regular times to talk real time it can

actually be much more efficient the key is not to have a separate meeting for everything you might need to discuss because now you have a separate problem which is your schedule is crowded so I think the answer to all of this is just office hours like this is it every day this hour to 90

minutes my phone is on I have a slack channel my doors open and you just punt everything to office hours yeah good question grab me at the next office hours you can yeah we should get into that grab me at the next office hours you can oh yeah a bunch of requests are coming in for interviews you

know for my book coming out great next office hours you can come and we'll go through them all so you consolidate synchrony into a regular periods you're not wasting a lot of time arranging the synchrony I think that's a sweet spot for collaboration so to get into the nitty-gritty of

that you mentioned slack I'm curious from a flow perspective what that looks like so if you're communicating with your team via slack and they're like what about this you know like grab me at the next office hours you then have

like a calendar or some automated tool where it's like hey every Friday I'm curious what this looks like for you if you use it or how you've seen other people implement this just from a flow perspective Friday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. I am available in 30 minutes slots or whatever and then here's a

calendar link from getting the service name correct where you can book a time and we're not doing a via email because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling I fucking hate it with such a passion how about Tuesday to know that doesn't work what about Thursday three how about

Monday at this it's it's is one of my least favorite things in the world so from a flow perspective what does that look like and have you found any particular day or way of clustering office hours to work well for you or for other people well I mean first of all don't use slack that coordinate

with your team that be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing at any point conversation could come in I've suggested this a couple times in the pages of the New Yorker to stop using slack essentially come back to it it's funny actually when sales force bought slack right

after they bought slack I had an article that was titled slack bill the right tool for the wrong way to work and it was sort of a critique of this sort of hyperactive hive mind and sales force unrelated they didn't know about it they invited me to come give like a high price lecture and I was like I am honored but I should point you towards this article I just published and then they came back and fairness this was the marketing company that was organizing this

conference for sales force they came back and said like well yeah you know I think we're okay I think I don't think we need you but the to your question about office hours actually you want to lean more into academic style office hours which are unscheduled and so if it was a completely in-person situation like we used to be then it would just be my doors open that's how I run office hours with my discrete math students right you look someone's in your office I wait

till they're out then I come in but you can simulate this digitally using zoom for example just have a waiting room so people come to your zoom conference they just know the zoom link is open for this 90 minutes every afternoon at this set time so they can just log in there and if you're talking to someone else they're just waiting in the waiting room till you bring them in and I mentioned slack so I probably should have elaborated that but what some people

do is say I have a slack channel called office hours but I only monitor it during my office hours so you just know from like three to four thirty then we can go back and forth and chat that's what I'm here to do is just talk to

people so I will have that slack channel that office hour channel open from three to four thirty and there if we want to go back and forth on slack that's still real time right I mean we're going back and forth in real time it's not a synchronous that's fine as well but I'll never look at that

channel outside the office hours and then you can tack on to this another thirty minutes with ten minute chunks and a calendar link where you can say to someone either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one-on-one slots here's the link I mean actually have an article out today the day we're recording this called how to have a more productive year and I talk about exactly this and having an open office hour plus an extra thirty minutes of one-on-ones

and having a web page that says here's how we talk show up during these office hours and just rock and roll or grab one of these slots if you want a little bit more time and that you just throw that link at people like confetti at

Marty Grun just link link link is toss it at people to try to squash these asynchronous back and forth and then how to be more productive this year that's in the New Yorker also yeah yeah came out today or the New Yorker piece where we just thought it's not typical New Yorker fair but my editor

and I were just thinking I was just writing article about how to be more productive now okay I couldn't resist because it was the New Yorker it also has a meta commentary on productivity advice itself and I go through every decade

from the nineteen fifties to the two thousand the dominant productivity book of that decade and how the advice changes from there's some New Yorker East off in there but there's also some like real hardcore advice did you mention oraboros is there a snake eating its own tail in this piece I should

have yeah snake one in there or boris yes that's always a good one I always have to mention this is like if you write for an elite publication and you mentioned productivity you always have to mention Frederick Winslow Taylor this is like a pet peeve of mine is from the mind of people who are professional writers who critique productivity in their mind Frederick Winslow Taylor is like the central figure of American capitalism and productivity basically

means him there with a stopwatch looking at your movements and he wasn't that influential over person it's such a pet peeve of mine scientific management it was esoteric and kind of cult like and it had a following but it got completely pushed out of the way by Fordism and the idea of building

smart production processes Winslow Taylor was a weird guy these time motion studies with these incentive based pay scales was weird and he was weird and they determined that's not so important what's important is an assembly line is a much better way to build a car than the other way the systems

matter a lot more and also forget this weird incentive scale of I'll pay you 10 cents more if your 10 cents faster shoveling whatever Ford figured out pay your workers a lot of money because the turnovers more expensive than trying to whatever so anyways it's it's a pet peeve of mine

Frederick Winslow Taylor does not yield an outsize influence on the way we think about productivity are issues with productivity do not come from Frederick Winslow Taylor they actually come from Peter Drucker and there's a whole other argument I can make here but that's my pet

peve is like you don't have to mention him every time you try to critique productivity so grant aside and Peter Drucker I got to say man it's so many nails on the head the effective executive still to this day just such an incredible short book that punches above its way class

suit to scratch my own it here the New Yorker also has this typographical convention that has always been kind of confusing to me and seems a little typhilutin tell me if I'm getting this right it always stands out it jumps out like a war on someone's face every

time I see it they put an umla over maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated like coordinate and they'll put an umla over the second or something like that why do they do that that's not the Chicago book style like what's going on there right that's just a

New Yorker's that's true so they do yeah umlots on second vowel so like reengage you would have a new lot and then also focus they do British so double S because I write a lot about focus so you double S focus and focusing that's there and then email the convention for

email is I forgot exactly what it was but the way they're right about emails which it's tradition it's an old magazine it's been around for a long time and so that there was a style guide invented early on when a lot of this was more up for grabs and I think it's just it's

tradition like let's hold on to the style guide to whatever there might be a deeper story to it but that's what I've always understood yeah we're not in tradition so yeah and they format it the same way so a lot of that's tradition I mean their whole thing which I love about

is they're not chasing trends I really love that publication anyone who reads it the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just to try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for and their whole theory is make

your place really really writer friendly and writers will write cool things and I think that's cool and they have a subscription base so they don't have to chase web traffic they don't have to worry so much about ads they have a million people who pay a hundred

dollars a year for the magazine and you got this great foundation like okay so we can just write it's not big yeah anyway not to go out in New York or at but well let me play devil's advocate on that because it seems like when the New York Times went from predominantly

ads to predominantly subscriber revenue they ended up producing more news coverage to please their base of subscribers and it became a much more exaggerated kind of left leaning caricature of itself in a way that is not helpful for contending with polarized tribalism and so on in my opinion

to see you feel like that is not I mean the fundamentally they're different outlets in a very different but are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media dynamics at play for the New Yorker because I've seen these formerly when I would consider highly credible publications

hold on my phone is always off but I have to pull this up because this example is so nuts my friend sent me this screenshot because he said here we go the economist stepping up their copy game and the screenshot he sent me is the sort of superscript is the swines and then it says

Ferrell super pigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairies they're well adapted to the cold with thick fur long legs and tusks as sharp as steak knives that has this photo of these pigs running over a hill and I'm like this is the economist man what the fuck is happening and I love the

economist no offense to the con us love the economist but I was like oh man like everybody's getting pulled down into the mud here in the quest for traffic and attention that's a bit of a rambled but how does the New Yorker resist the temptation slash incentive slash

risks of the modern online world as we know it well I mean you're pointing out a real effect it's a trade off if we're going to talk about trade outs it's a trade off effects and I think the times really did have to face this trade off when you move to their subscriber

model what they gain is they don't actually have to do the attention chasing right so this is one thing about the times is they don't need the super feral pig example but they do not have a model based on chasing attention right where other publications I think had an issue

when the web grew where they began just really pushing volume and trying to find social media virality the New York times save themselves from that so they could actually focus on what they wanted to write they did not have to chase so that was a positive but the

audience capture effect I think is also real when you don't have to and this is now a standard I think accepted critique in the world of journalism when you have to service big advertisers you sort of stay pretty neutral on things because the consumers of those

products are all over the place. So you're like okay like we want proctor and gamble to buy a lot of ads in 1995 New York times so we're going to be really good but like down the middle you're absolutely right that when you go to subscriber base that subscriber base

was way more progressive left leaning than the public writ large and then you get the audience capture effect now I think there was other dynamics have happened as well where you had the rise of certain ideological frameworks coming out of the colleges and young staffers

coming to the New York times and but it was the subscription model gave them the cover to we can change even our definition of news especially post Trump I think it really changed towards our goal here is to promote the right that's the best way I could describe

what happened there is that when they know there's something that is clearly right pushing the thing that is right is like a noble thing to do even more important than certain journalistic standards the New Yorker avoid that so not a news magazine I think

that's the main thing that's not their model so they been a subscription model from the beginning they still have a print magazine the they sell a new thing I don't know how much of a consideration that is for business model it's a big part of their income

New Yorker subscribers get the magazine and the digital I don't know the numbers but they're way more combined than with the New York times I think it's I subscribe to the New Yorker I get the magazine and I get access to the online that's a big part of

what they do but it's a magazine of ideas it's a slow magazine they don't slow productivity in action they don't want to be the first to talk about a new story that's not their goal and also you have to keep in mind the New York times is massive it's

massive they have their own building it's thousands of people it's a huge company I've been there it's gigantic New Yorker slower so it's a different thing so the New Yorker is not a news magazine I think then they get the advantages of the subscription model without the disadvantages the

advantages being we don't have to chase attention or clicks or volume and so we can just try to write whatever we find to be interesting it's you know like dt max has a piece in a recent issue where it's just profiling this lady who spend 500 days in a cave really interesting

article you know it's like really well constructed she goes into the cave she comes out she's like this was great and then he spendy more time with her and like slowly it comes out that this was this like horrific experience it's like great it's awesome it's

like a really interesting article the New Yorker I would say probably more if I were to go back and look at the pie chart of magazine or outlet attribution I'd say probably the New Yorker has the highest hit rate of inclusion and five bullet Friday my newsletter in

terms of pieces I think are worth sharing it's probably got the highest hit rate at least in the US are there any magazines or outlets that you would just like cut off a pinky he out goes astral to write for obviously I'm exaggerating or would have loved to have written for that never got the chance

to write for like parachute or anything else is there anything sort of on your wish list outside of the New Yorker or if you already submitted Everest and you're like I'm good I mean that was my wish my agent has reminded me of this that early on in my career I remember watching

Donalair at the time who is my age early on his career get some New Yorker slots and this is how I said to my agent like what I want to do this is what I want to do outside my books is right for the New Yorker so like that was my Everest I've written for the other places is you know well

of written for the New York times and wired and the Atlantic they're great places to write and they have huge audiences so like a New York Times piece I always feel lucky when they published something of mine because our audiences is huge like if you write something for

them people read it and people see it and I have written for them you know that's also cool like I think one of the coolest jobs in journalism might be New York Times op-ed staff so yeah crude man I agree rocks and that's because they they get a right about ideas but it's big swing impact and those

things hit a lot of eyeballs so like when Ezra Klein left vox and took the op-ed spot at the New York Times I was like that doesn't confuse me at all you know that's a really cool job because you can affect the national conversation on a regular basis I don't know who else can offer that that you

can shape conversation on a regular basis that'd be a cool job yeah it's true it's true I mean the New York Times also has some great stuff it's that the discovery problem to come back that is a little bit harder than say with the New Yorker unsurprisingly because you have such an immense

volume of stuff but the op-ed narrows that down quite a bit you are right in terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs I suppose it's another advantage of the subscriber model although you're hitting one subset of the political spectrum so there is that but all

sphere and love and editorial well we've talked about a lot and people check out the new book you walk the walk which is sort of the most for me critical litmus test of material especially if there's any prescriptive aspect in sort of a productivity self-help way and I could define

productivity I define it pretty similarly the new book is slow productivity lost or an accomplishment without burnout and people cannot find you on social but there's the YouTube channel Cal Newport Media so people can find that there's the deep questions podcast and calnewport.com

certainly people can find a lot there I'm curious maybe as we're beginning this to a close if there are any other heuristics or mental models or anything that makes little productivity easier or more appealing for people to embrace and I would for instance say that

by and large I succumb to the shiny object occasionally but by and large I think I fall into the slow productivity camp for instance I mean the book that I'm working on now I mean they started five years ago notes and like wrote 72,000 words five years ago and tabled it and shelved it and then

have been kind of workshopping things one of the to maybe start with sharing on my side one of the things that helps me with this is thinking about choosing my projects which is why I'm so interested in choosing projects how people choose projects I choose my projects generally on what skills and

relationships they help me to develop that could transcend that project so even if the project quote-unquote fails by all external metrics if I've developed or improved relationships it could be pre-existing or new relationships and developed skills that will apply to other things

having a long time frame is a huge huge huge advantage that is kind of the ultimate in a world of attention compression like having a long time horizon is a unbelievable advantage in so many ways but thinking about my projects and how they snowball in that cumulative way

gives me the peace of mind and confidence to take those longer time horizons if that makes any sense so I'm wondering if there's anything like that that could just be kind of full-softical one-liners or beliefs that you have that allow you to embrace this without the fear and the

fomal that I think a lot of folks would have I agree by the way that I definitely see you as an example the slow productivity mindset I mean I think for example your focus on the podcast okay this is the main thing I'm going to do I'm going to stop the book publication

cycle I'm not going to seek out a lot of you know TV opportunities or whatever I think that's a good example which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out to be titled to peel an egg 101 hacks in your kitchen that will amaze your friends or whatever to you on the cover

101 kitchen tricks for any any a kitchen fully illustrated as it stands no eggpeeling in the new bug the heuristic I don't here's the heuristic maybe that ties a lot of this together is that at least for professional stuff in the end is craft craft is what matters respecting craft developing craft

applying craft finding meaning in craft just keep watching on repeat Jiro dreams of sushi just go back and watch that like once a month because the more you think about craft is where I get fulfillment is where I impact the world craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life

and can provide for the people I care about and you know give interesting opportunities in my life it all comes back down to craft you slow down your time frames become much longer psychologically you get so much resilience maybe you couple that if I'm going to add a second heuristic

is ignore the internet it's a crazy making machine it's just a crazy making machine it like don't require random people on social media to be a regular part of your life don't require like metrics you have to look at on a day to day basis of being important I could just feel it like we do my podcast

we put the episodes on youtube because I think you know as we talked about before video will be the future not youtube but we should practice and I have a youtube guide and say you can do whatever you want to like the thumbnails and the titles I don't know you understand youtube

but I don't want to know about how it's doing I don't want to feel any impact algorithm I want to do my podcast show where there is no cybernetic loop pushing back and changing what you're doing beyond these super large scales oh over the last six months if we average out downloads I think

we're trending upwards right so maybe put those two things together craft is everything you can build a psychologically resilient sustainable successful professional life on craft and ignore the internet do those two things you're going to be really happy especially if you're talented

and have like a particular talent or ambition that's where you should aim it don't let an attention algorithm suck all that skill out of you and basically monetize all that potential into add sense views that can help google investors or whatever craft focus on craft

and get fulfillment out of craft even beyond results and then just be incredibly wary about the internet maybe I'll say away from that that's the two things do those two things it's night or day like what your life is like yeah it makes me think of

camera with the attribution i mean there are many versions of this but you would you rather fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not those types of quotes i think about quite a bit because possibly you know if we take this vanity metric

and look it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on youtube videos as an example but let's say you looked at your numbers and you're trending down over six months does that mean you stop or does that mean that you are calling the herd and over time refining

to the point where you are actually getting to your one thousand or ten thousand true fans and you went from basically doing speeches at state fairs and now you're standing on the TED stage is that bad you don't really mean like I'm saying like maybe there's a win embedded in what you're

perceiving as a failure or even if it's trending in the wrong direction right because otherwise man the stuff oh here let me show you on let me see if i can find it i'll show you another one and i'll describe what this is just because this is the youtube equivalent of the economist

feral supercube on youtube it gets so bad but i was texting with my team went on youtube and i was like oh my god this is what happens to everyone on youtube if they stay on long enough and they are trained by the incentives this is what happens to everybody so i don't know if you can see this

there's a woman wearing very little clothes is that a robot what is that this is a this is like a big huge muscular dude in a toga slash sarong type thing walking away it's a woman on the other side he's saying bye she's got question marks overhead

she's in a thong pointing away from the camera holding her ass cheeks pulling them apart and then the headline is stoicism ten lessons men learn too late in life in parentheses might hurt your feelings and i'm not saying look i'll give these guys credit because the thumbnail got me uh stoic wisdom wonders 1.9 million views put up one month ago but i was like oh man you're going to get trained by the algorithm like if you're not careful and even if you are careful if you're paying attention to

quote unquote the right things everything converges into a chick with a thong spreading her ass cheeks in a thumbnail like with like what to do before the imminent financial collapse everything doesn't matter if you're covering climate change hoping to change the world with that renewable energy

you're gonna end up there no i'm chomsky on like the structure of manufacture consent and there's a woman in a bikini yeah yeah yeah there you go you know for me and i gotta give this guys credit they just got much free promotion so good for them and it got my attention

but i think the approach of treating these tools and new behaviors it's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools new technology as new drugs would you want to be the first chimpanzee you know injected with this or maybe you wait until you're the

hundredth chimpanzee you can still be an early adopter like let's see what the long term effects are and if you feel like you got a rush here in the wrong game you're just in the wrong game and you could win but like be very careful about what winning looks like

when you do that telescoping out like okay if this just gets faster if things just change more frequently if the shifting sands of algorithm favoritism just start pouring from the sky and become much much harder to track require me to have now i don't have just a full time thumbnail guy i've got a full time algo chaser and an analytics person and it becomes kind of money ball do you want to win that game and what does it look like?

and they're going to peep people just like for instance you know going to school a lot of i banks, investment banks and so on recruited there and nine out of ten people probably nineteen out of twenty would wash out they would just get destroyed because they weren't built for that

and then one out of twenty was just perfectly built for it fantastic and they would thrive in that environment but i do think that when we're looking at some of these platforms where the numbers are probably even less favorable it's like okay ninety nine out of a hundred are going to wash out

and then one will just be the michael felps of youtube and awesome like good for them but if everyone tries to do that what a cataclysm not to make it sound too dark but it's like there's so many opportunities for slow productivity hiding in plain sight and there are counter examples

and if you want a sustainable competitive advantage in who doesn't having a longer time horizon and being unrushed with most things is just about as big as i can think at least at this point sorry rant complete i completely agree with your rant the numbers on algorithmic

attempt just look at real numbers let's use real numbers not to go i'm going to extend your youtube rant slightly let's look at real numbers koda what's like to take home cpm essentially on youtube is low people are monetizing these videos to the tune of maybe like five dollars per thousand views

cost per thousand whereas for podcasting it is significantly larger right it's at least five times larger than that per ad you can have up to four ads per episode i mean it's not even comparable we're talking orders of magnitude so just to be like concrete you could have a youtube channel

where you know you have a million views a month or something like this but a podcast that has 30,000 regular downloads a week like you have an audience of 30,000 is it's bigger than 1,000 true fans but not that much bigger i've done the math on that and that is like a professor salary

you can make like a very good living off of that and it's much more stable but if you build up a 30,000 person audience they're there for a reason they're not going to leave fast either that's something you could then do whereas youtube is going to be way more fickle and then the technology is going to go away and there'll be another thing that's coming into town anyways or the algorithm is going to change or you started as a channel

a no-em-chomp ski and then you end up like mr. bees like mr. bees why respect what he's doing but he's just the he's the platonic expression of the algorithm and he'll say this he's broken down what matters like you have to have an outrageous but interesting visual thing that you're going to deliver

you need to show the person right up front you're going to see this this and this clips of it and then you need to move every 15 seconds it's moving forward beautifully edited things but they're just pure it it's just we're going to drive expensive cars and just go go go go go go

that's the distillation of the algorithm and so yeah there should be some mr. beast out there doing that but like for most other people build a successful podcast over five years like a newsletter is another thing this is another slow productivity example is

i was just going to say if you think podcast cpms are high look at niche newsletters like cios or hedge for matters or whatever like i mean we're talking hundreds of dollars cpm right yeah and you don't have to be famous either i know so many people have done i have a good newsletter

and it's or subscription base it's fantastic right if people are paying five dollars a month i mean okay that works out to an incredibly high cpm you could show that same person a huge number of ads so it's just a different game the example i was going to give was to writer and you solven who lives here in dc and you know he he was the editor of the new republic and wrote for the new york magazine before he sort of got pushed out for you know political ideological reasons he has a sub stack now

and the way he talks about it he's like well this is great like i have a pretty fair size audience i make a lot of money off of this like why would i want to do anything else this is great i can write for this audience it's a big audience i make more money doing this and i ever made as a magazine writer and i can write what i want and i don't need to do anything else and i don't need like a studio and there's nothing else i need to do you know so i agree anything where an algorithm is

driving attention don't make that i mean you could again you could but be wary of it also be wary is my other warning heuristic of checklist productivity so if you learn from a youtube course all right here is how you're going to make a lot of money on

twitter what you need to do is these tweet threads were at the last tweet in the thread needs to say hey if you enjoyed this thread you should follow me because i do these threads every so often so you can't all just follow these same checklist that's not the way economies work it's not just if i just do these ten things pick your niche make sure on a regular basis you have a thread format your thread this way and if you do this it used to be like an art childhood the Carlton sheets

infomercials where he was like look do you remember that i've heard that name of the agent his law is kind of the same as checklist productivity on twitter his logic was well think about it put a classified ad for something your drop shipping unless you put a classified ad in one paper and you make ten dollars drop shipping well then put it in a hundred papers and you're going to make a thousand dollars

completely leaving out the fact that by far the most common outcome is that zero people buy it no matter how many papers you put it in because they don't want to buy a random piece of crap from a classified ad that part was left out you're like well if you make this much money here then there's this many papers you'll make this much money this is crazy logic but it reminds me a lot of where you see like oh if i just do these videos and i do it right and have the right sign off and

write my titles carefully it'll scale it's like most people nothing will happen algorithmic attention economies be very wary do the slow productivity attention economies they're hard but it's fantastic if you're able to establish yourself there if your books work your

way way better and i would also say these are not mutually exclusive right so if you want to play in the algo arena go for it look i have a youtube channel and i did this that and the other thing and even podcasting is let's be honest on some level like if apple decides to kneecap everybody

which happens occasionally it's like oh oops i just read this article it's actually very well done i wish i had the proper attribution but it was something called like the great shrinking podcast economy something like that and the incredible power of platforms to dictate your metrics is hard to overstate but i would say if you want to play the game some of it's fun i get it i like competing and you know i'm not going to be doing any dangerous competitive sports

anytime soon so i got to channel that somewhere so okay i could like firewall 20% of my attention for dicking around with that that's fine or 50 like whatever but like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find something where you can cultivate this slow productivity so maybe it's a slow car about at first but if you don't have that it's like driving on a race course in a sports car where the race course changes constantly

right like curve seven is low on your curve seven used to be straight away now it's a hairpin curve and you don't have an airbag or any type of you're gonna crash a seatbelt on or eight point harness yeah like you're gonna crash eventually so like you need some type of safety net and long time horizon and slow productivity for me at least has been it's been my safety net for 20 years i have no reason to think that that should change and the more

frenetic things get the faster things change we didn't even get to AI but the more the kind of avalanche of information continues to grow in volume the more all of these things will be an advantage that I'm discussing so check out the book folks slow productivity call anything else you'd like to

mention any tick-tock videos you'd like to play people to my peeling video channel which is now going to be a thousand of by the way yeah peeling squash so thanks for introducing that to tell people to squash you've introduced that notion now no this has been great yeah no slow productivity it kind of it connects everything's together do something really well get meaning out of it and then yeah talk about it different platforms have fun play on it but you're right there's a difference between

i like to take my card of the track because it's fun and my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team it's a different dynamic that's going on out there so slow is just better i think people are ready for it too you know i

mean i think this is just where we are is we want something different the first wave of different we were offered was just stop trying things work is bad stop trying to do anything that's a stick because well i still like to do things and also i need to feed my family so i think now we're getting

the second generation of thinking about this which is do it better like figure out like how do you really want to work what makes sense and so hopefully this works but i appreciate talking about i put an excerpt by the way i'm on social media but at calmeaport calm slash slow we put an excerpt

up so like you say i maybe you can actually like read the whole introduction of the book is a lot of you'll appreciate it Tim because there's a lot of a john Mcfea i open the book on make john Mcfea and i know as a as someone who took its course at Princeton which i'm jealous of you'll

appreciate the Mcfea it's rich Mcfea content and that free excerpt i can't wait okay so i will read that will put that in the show notes as well y'all learn more from Mcfea in one semester about writing then i have an all of my reading and practice

and classes outside of that one seminar we're sure to go back and take it again frankly you never know who knows i went back you know i actually have all my notes and all of my assignments from that class to this day like marked up i have the marked up notes and i go back and sometimes i look

at my writing and i'm like i think worse writer now i think i'm a better teacher but like my actual pros i think could use some more weight training so i'll get back into it the glue of high quality and i should also say that slow productivity yes slow is an aspect but in my mind and tell me if

you disagree with this certainly but it's really about proactive productivity instead of reactive productivity and that's a way like selective productivity selective and proactive productivity which happens to usually correspond to more sustainable long term thinking or intentional

intentional productivity have an actual consistent coherent philosophy for how i'm going to do my work that's more sophisticated than just i'll be busy because at least if i'm busy i'm not going to sell for criminality like if i'm busy at least i know i'm trying like that's people's default be more

intentional and not everyone like if you're an investment banker like you talk about or you're trying to become a law partner a very intentional coherent reasonable productivity plan involves working all

the damn time because that's like specifically what works in that world but for most people when they're intentional they realize 80% of what i'm doing is just trying to generate smoke from friction with there's no fire like it's just i'm trying to be busy because i don't know what else to do like

slowness becomes almost always inevitable once you actually start to be intentional about what am i really doing here like what really works what matters what does it yeah and if people really pause to think about many of the figures they might respect most for what they've accomplished

in investing her business the warm buffets Jeff Bezos certainly go back and read the first 10 shareholder letters for amazon and you will see kind of how well planned and prescient in some respects seems obvious in hindsight but so does everything Bezos was in planning and how

methodical and patient the blend of being kind of relentless in patient as an interesting one holy shit i mean it's rare to find like relentlessly focused and also very patient with criticism and skepticism and so on remarkable so the slip productivity is actually kind of hidden all around us

if we pause to look at the people we most respect almost all of them are going to fall in there somewhere it's all i do is a writer basically is come up with two word terms for things that widely exist in everyone already knows about right so deep work already exists i just put a name

to digital minimalism it's like yeah i'm just putting a name to a philosophy that's my whole secret is they and i've said this before to people about pragmatic nonfiction writing the goal is not to try to teach someone something completely new they didn't know about the goal is just to try to help

people articulate something they already know deep in their gut is true they just don't have a framework or terminology for it like that's what really has an impact is like yeah i know slow productivity is better i said have a name for it or a framework you know don't try to convince people

in new things explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action i mean that's the secret the nonfiction prescriptive nonfiction writing is you're not really teaching people something new it's just uh how do i leverage something my gut tells me is true i just don't

have my fingers around it all the way six minute abs if anybody gets the reference to my maybe you said my internet abs that's a hitchhiker and something about my so slow productivity the lost art of accomplishment without burnout people can check it out and we'll link to of course

calmy purd and all the other links in the show notes tim bomb block slash podcast we'll put everything in there that we've spoken about thanks so much for taking the time cal nice to see you yeah next time i appreciate it yeah and for everybody listening or watching check out the show notes and

until next time be a little kinder then is necessary maybe a little slower than is necessary take your time the good things will wait because it's uncrowded the really important things those domains are typically very very uncrowded to be a little bit kinder to others and to yourself take things

a little bit more slowly until next time thanks for tuning in hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half

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