Cal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity

Ali Abdaal
By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, feel good productivity is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold, and it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out.

It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook. Everywhere books are sold. Hello and welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast, where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, academics, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is a wonderful, if I say so myself, conversation between me and the amazing Cal Newport. This was the first time Cal and I were meeting in real life.

We've been Internet buddies for a while. We have blurbed each other's books. Have we blurbed each other? Yep, we have blurbed each other's books. And he has recently released an absolute banger of a book called slow the lost art of accomplishment without burnout.

In this conversation, we talk about the concept of deep work. We talk about productivity principles that overwhelmed people can use to apply to their life, not just if you're an entrepreneur, but also if you have a normal corporate day job or if you're a student, for example. And we talk a lot about how the concepts of slow productivity can help us have more of a chill relationship with life, but also, weirdly, be more productive because we're not trying to do all of this stuff and be super overwhelmed with all the things that we're doing, but instead taking a slower, more relaxed approach to meaningful accomplishment. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this interview with Cal Newport as much as I did. Cal Newport, welcome to the podcast.

Cal Newport
Hey, it's good to see you. We meet in person for the first time. I know. I feel like we have been talking for a long time. We've done each other shows for the first time.

Ali Abdaal
Been following your blog since, like, 2012 adventure, studying all of the stuff. Oh, that's an insider reference right there. Yeah, I love it. 2012 is kind of recent, though, right? Because that thing goes all the way back to 2007, so you could get the real.

Cal Newport
Oh, yeah, you get the old stuff. Yeah, I think I trolled for your back catalog to figure out. Has Cal said anything like 20 years ago that I can make a YouTube video about students today may not have heard of. So I've done the trawling through the archives. I'll tell you what's interesting about that, though, by the way.

So when that blog started, it was all student advice because the books I wrote early on were for students in my memory was, oh, for years that blog was student advice. Right. And then, like, eventually, as I got closer to my first non student book of 2012, it shifted over. I went back recently to read the archive. It's student advice for like a year.

I didn't realize how early I began talking about things like follow your passion is bad advice. What's going on with careers? Deep work. I named that term. I called it hard focus back then.

It was a lot earlier than I thought. So I guess I had sort of moved on from the student stuff. My mind had moved on earlier than I realized because I didn't actually publicly move on in my books for years later. So that was an interesting surprise to. Go back revisiting a bit of an old classic, why is following your passion bad advice?

Oh, man. Wrote a whole book about this. Yeah, yeah. We've done a whole video about it as well. Yeah.

Well, now it's the big thing. I think a lot of people talk about it. The latest is I think Scott Galloway has been talking about this in his new book, and Mark Cuban talked about this. So let me just set the context, though. Like, why I was writing about that was I was finishing up academic work, right?

So I had gone to grad school, got my PhD, was doing a postdoc, which is like the holding pattern before you go on the academic job market, right? I had this thought, if I was ever going to understand what leads people to really love their work, this would be the highest leverage point in my life to figure that out. Because if I go on this academic route that the momentum was going towards, that's it, that's job for life. It's like, okay, I want to make sure I really understand this question of how people love to work. So that's what motivated the book.

So I look in the question. The first answer that comes up everywhere back then, at least, was follow your passion. So I look into that like, okay, so why do we think this is true? The whole thing is nonsense, right? We think this is some wisdom that Plato wrote about, and then Thomas Aquinas then talked about and the founding fathers, and it's this old piece of advice.

Ali Abdaal
No. If you go back and look at the etymology. The phrase follow your passion is from the early 1990s. Oh, wow. Okay.

Cal Newport
It's like a very new idea. Right? This was not the way we thought about careers. I was the first generation because I went through school in the nineties, graduated, went to college in, like, 2000. Right.

I was the first generation to be told this. So it's not ancient advice. Right. In fact, ancient advice is much more different about how to actually build a life of meaning or do work of meaning. Right.

So the advice was new. So I looked at a little further. Do we have scientific evidence that says, yeah, when you match a pre existing inclination with your occupation, you're happier? No, none of that research exists. What does exist if you study the research literature on job satisfaction is way more general.

Traits like, do I have autonomy? Do I have a sense of mastery in my work? Am I connected to other people in my work? Do I feel like my work is important? And none of these have to do with matching your job to a really specific passion.

So then I said, okay, why is everyone giving this advice? And so I started tracking down the backstories of famous people who had famously said, follow your passion. Nine times out of ten, it's not what they did. Right? They stumbled into whatever they ended up doing, and it transformed into a passion.

So all this evidence came together, and I said, this is nonsense. Sense passion is great. You don't start with it. You're probably not wired for a particular job that happens to exist in the 21st century knowledge economy. There's probably not a gene that you inherited that said you were meant to be a brand manager for, like, an athletic apparel company based out of whatever, right?

So that's not how you end up passionate about your work. You cultivate passion. And the more I looked into it, the more it became clear. You get good at something, as you get better at something. You get more control over your life and your career, and then you got to take that control for a spin.

And that's when you really begin crafting your working life over time, and there's something that really resonates. Right? So the passion is cultivated, the passion is grown. You want to end up passionate about your work, but if you're 22 and saying, let me figure out now what I'm supposed to do, and if I just figure that out and match that to my job, I'll be happy from here on out. It's a Disney fairy tale.

Ali Abdaal
What about natural inclinations in the sense that, you know, visionary versus operator or systems, people versus big idea people, that sort of idea where does that fit into this thing? Around it matters, right. Because ultimately what you're trying to do is if you get good at something, you get control. So you want to say, what advantages do I already have pushing me towards getting good at something? So if you've already been training for something, well, let's keep that in mind because I've already done a lot of work for this.

Cal Newport
If you feel like you have an inclination towards a certain type of thing, you're very technical. Okay. It's probably going to be easier for you to get really good at something in a technical field, right? Maybe you have some sort of family connection to whatever. Hey, let's not ignore that, right?

I mean, this whatever is going to get me quicker towards being good at something that's valuable is what I want to care about. So what I often say it's about lowering the threshold, right? So follow your passion. The threshold is find your one true passion and if you miss, you're screwed. Right?

I'm lowering a threshold to there's a lot of things you could probably cultivate into a really passionate professional life. There's a lot of things. Not everything for sure, right? But there's probably a lot of things. The hard part's not finding one of those things.

It's what you do once you choose it. It's the work you do for the next ten years. So I'm not throwing a dart at a job listing board and saying, I guess that's what I'm going to do. But I'm also not super fretting that if I don't make this choice exactly right, I'm going to be in trouble. If it's like this seems interesting to me, I have an inclination for this.

It looks like there would be a lot of flexibility opportunities if I got good at this. Be like, thats good enough, thats good enough. Now lets do the hard work of actually cultivating passion here. Nice. Okay.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. So the first book of yours I read was so good they cant ignore you and very much vibed with the message. And then the next book of yours I read was deep work where it seems like so many people that that word has really seeped into the world and do you have a sense of how many people know that you originated that word versus it's just part of english vocabulary now? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, that was my goal for sure is I wanted that piece of vocabulary to spread because my thought was more important than any particular piece of advice was just people separating deep work from non deep work.

Cal Newport
And, like, once you recognize deep work is very important, then people can kind of figure out, oh, I'm not doing a lot about this. How do I do more of this? What's happening in my job? I mean, I give advice in that book, obviously, but the variety of what people are actually doing is much greater than that. So that was my goal.

I don't know how many people associate it with me. It shows up in weird places. There's a menu somewhere in Microsoft Outlook where it's not a deep work option, but there's a little explanation for a focus mode option, and it says to support deep work. So it's kind of floating around in there. I don't know if I haven't got my royalty check on that yet.

I do hear people say it. People often attribute it to me. Here's the thing about that book. It came out quiet, right? Like, I published that book.

Super disappointed. It didn't have a lot of buzz around it when it came out. They had lowered my advance for that book versus so good, they can't ignore you. He's like, no, so good, they can't ignore you. Didn't do great at the time.

And so they had lowered the advance. The book came out. I was thinking, because I didn't understand publishing back then, right? So what I knew was, I was like, this is a killer idea. So why is this not being promoted everywhere and spread everywhere?

And my agent sat me down and was like, that's not how it works. It's, what did your last book do? That's what's going to matter. And your last book didn't take off right away, so they're not going to put as much into this because I was really upset. I had a friend who his family went to pick it up from a bookstore.

They're not even carrying it on publication week. I was like, I'm kind of down with this. And then quietly in the background, at some point, they're like, you know, this is kind of selling. Never on a bestseller list. It's never been on a bestseller list.

Like, this is just kind of selling. Oh, it's still kind of selling. Oh. Then more people were talking about it, and then more people were inviting me to come on their podcast, and it was just this really interesting slow burn where there was no one point where I realized, like, oh, this book is doing really well. But I look back now, that thing's closing in on, like, 2 million copies.

Ali Abdaal
Oh, nice. Yeah, it's just, it's been out there without ever having been on a bestseller list. Yeah, yeah. And I imagine the people who have read the book are like a zillion x lower than the people who use the word and know what the word means. That's probably, yeah, it's probably, yeah.

Cal Newport
You know, the most interesting person I heard use it was on the Tim Ferriss podcast years ago, Jamie Foxx. I'm sure he has no idea who I am or that I wrote it, but I was like, okay, my work here is done. So being able to cultivate time for deep, focused work, this is something I struggle with. You and I are vaguely in similar sort of careers, sort of. You've got the academic thing going.

Ali Abdaal
I sort of have the business thing, I guess, on the side, which keeps occupied some percentage of our time. Yeah. Really? I guess one thing I often think is, oh, man, I wish I had more time in my life for deep work. Any tips for what you know about me and this career that we're both in?

Cal Newport
Yeah. Or maybe a slower definition of productivity. See what I did there? I'm connecting it. I'm connecting it back to my work.

I mean, I think to me, and this is the research that kind of went into the slow productivity overload is the key villain here. Every active project that you're working on is going to necessarily bring with it overhead. We have to talk about it, we have to have meetings about it, we have to have emails about it, which isn't bad. Projects require collaboration. I'm more and more realizing the problem then is when we aggregate too many of those projects because all that overhead adds up.

If there's six different active projects going on, it's really, really difficult to find time for deep work because that's six projects worth of administrative overhead that all just overlap now, and it's all competing for the same time. So I've really never found a better general solution than reducing the number of things that I'm working on, which I'm like you, I have so many interesting ideas and opportunities, and so I don't know, if you do this, I go cyclical, right? So I'll have a bunch of ideas and I'll start doing things, and then I get really overloaded. Like, this is not good. I can't do deep work anymore.

And then I really scale back and then I get bored and then I start, like, adding things back. And so my last overload was pandemic, right? So, like pandemic hits, I start to get kind of in an entrepreneurial hustle mode because, look, I'm a professor and a writer. Right. In those early months of the pandemic, it was, are the universities going to shut down?

Like, I mean, they were, we have to freeze parts of your pay because, you know, the money wasn't coming in. And then at the same time there's all these rumors that the publishing industry was going to start climb back advances and slashing and that Barnes and Noble was going to go out of business and all this type of stuff. I went into a mode of, I got to get more irons in the fire. I got to whatever. And then you fast forward a year and a half and I'm like, oh, no, I have too much.

I can't. The overhead, so that's the killer. The projects are awesome. It's the overhead that comes with the projects that adds up. So you either reduce the number of projects or you find a way with the projects.

You have. You have to be really careful about controlling that admin overhead. This is when we talk about it, this is the processes for where the information goes. You have to liberate those projects from. Just send me a message when you need something.

Let's just have a ad hoc back and forth communication and figure things out. So you either have to get super structured or you have to simplify. Yeah. There was a time, I think, last year before your book had come out, you had done a casual episode on Tim Ferriss. I mean, to the degree that any episode on Tim Ferriss is casual, but the book hadn't quite come out, and you were exploring the idea of slow productivity.

Yeah. And you mentioned this overhead thing and it sort of clicked something in me where I realized kind of like in physics, like parallel versus Siri circuits, it's like you assume a parallel circuit is actually better because, oh, if I have these three things, then doing them all three at the same time, the whole consistency thing, you know, I thought that the best way to write a book is work on it a little bit each day. And if you work on the book a little bit each day and work on your YouTube videos a little bit each day and work on the business a little bit each day, surely everything gets done. Yeah, no, it doesn't. Like basically zero gets done.

Ali Abdaal
And instead, what I found super helpful was doing things in series rather than parallel. This week I'm just going to intensely focus on just the book, and then I'm going to forget about it. And the next week is good. I'm going to batch from some YouTube videos, and then next week I'm going to work on the product and then go back to the book. Yeah.

And even that, it was sort of felt annoying because what I really wanted to do was I'm just going to not make YouTube videos until I finished this book. But then the business would have died. And so it's like I've been trying over time to figure out what is the absolute minimum. Well, what's, what is the minimum number of the maximum number of projects that I have to have going at any one time. Yeah.

And how do I just limit it to those things? So once I do one thing, then I move on? Well, actually, that's a really good strategy. I was actually just talking about something like this at the, the event I was at before this because I was talking to actually a corporate crowd who had a lot of work. They tended to have a lot of work put on their plate that they couldn't say no to.

Cal Newport
It's an interesting case. So what do we do about that? What I was advising they do is they said, okay, so you have this list of things you have to do. Write them down. Now let's put at the head of the list a small section that we call active.

It's like, okay, these are the things I'm actively working on right now. Everything else, let's sort and call that waiting. And what you're going to tell everyone and what you're going to do is only work on the active things. That's what you're sending emails about, having meetings about. If it's not on the active list, you're not dealing with it.

And as you finish an active thing, you can pull something else from the waiting list to have something new. So you only have one to three active things. I said, look, this works really well because you're only generating admin overhead from a small number of things. So you've agreed to all these things, but you've neutralized the admin overhead. Also, be super transparent about this.

I told him, put it in a Google Doc and show everybody, here's your thing. It's position seven. And as soon as it gets pulled into active, I will let you know. I'm like, I'm all in on this right now. Call me.

This is what I'm doing this week. Let's get into it. Let's get this done. People know you have your act together. Then they ask, well, what about, we have really big projects.

Sometimes it's going to take a whole year. And the answer is, yeah, you have to break it into these smaller things and use these smaller chunks with the same method. I think that's what you were doing. Right. And it's not.

You're right. It's not great in the sense that it's not what your mind wants to do because it's not really the right way, is what you said probably. And by right way, I mean the human brain has evolved. Right. It's probably.

I'm obsessed about this book till it's done. I'm obsessed with making these YouTube videos until like, the season is over or whatever. Like, that's probably the right way to do it. But taking a chunk one chunk at a time and just doing that chunk, that's sort of like the best compromise because at the very least during that week, you're not in the impossible micro situation of having to jump back and forth between ten things and because it's just impossible. Yeah, the macro switching is still frustrating, but at least the work gets done.

But yes, that's a little. I mean, I feel the same way. I mean, all I want to do when I write is just write and I can get away with about three months of that. I take the summers, so, like, I can do about three months of just writing and nothing else, but I need more than three months to finish a book. So, like, I'm happy for three months of my book writing.

Ali Abdaal
How are you thinking of that in relation to your podcast now? And I guess the YouTube channel, which seems to be blowing up. Yeah. So the podcast gets a half day a week. That was the agreement I made with myself when I finally started a podcast in 2020 was it gets a half day a week.

Cal Newport
So to develop it, it's going to be slow. Slow productivity. It's going to be slow because I have to figure out what I'm doing, get good at what I'm doing first before I can do something else. And if I want to add more, it has to fit within a half week. Right.

So for me, that meant it starts simpler. And then I finally could make enough money from advertisements to have a producer, and now the producer can take these things off my plate, so now I can spend more time on that. And then finally we're like, okay, we can, we want to do video, but it's got to fit within a half day a week. Okay, how are we going to do this? Well, we're going to have to set up this video rig and here's the people who are going to work on it, and here's the pipeline.

And I don't ever want to see a video editing piece of software or anything ever. Right? We have this pipeline figured out out, and we can't do x, y or z for video, which would be better for the YouTube channel because that would take too much time. So what we can do is take the video straight from the podcast and put it out there. And then over time, we're like, you know, YouTube doesn't really love that.

It's like, okay, we're able to bring on someone now who can work on the video produced by the podcast and figure out how to, like, where to start and what thumbnail to put on. But all of it was slow because the podcast couldn't get more than a half day a week. So I treat the podcast more like a service obligation as opposed to a one time project I'm trying to do. And I treat those two things differently because I'm always going to be doing the podcast. So now I have to really contain it and understand it and control its footprint so that it cannot expand beyond that footprint.

But, like, a book chapter is different. It's like, I got to get this done. It's best that I just focus on this as hard as I can until it's finished. Yeah, nice. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
I've landed on a similar conclusion with my YouTube channel in that it gets one day a week. How fascinating. Yeah. So most Wednesdays, except today, where it's tomorrow. So tomorrow is filming day all day, where Tintin, our producer, will come in in the morning at 09:00 a.m.

with a coffee, and we'll chat shit for about an hour. And then we'll film a video, and the video will be prepped there. And then he will have rocked up with some titan thumbnail ideas. We may have some research that a researcher has done, but broadly, I'll sit down with a title that's given to me, and I'm like, okay, how would I teach this topic? And then I draw some stuff on a whiteboard or whatever, and then I hit record and I talk.

Then we go out for lunch and we come back and we do another video, and we get two videos done in a day. And it's a really fun day. It's fairly chill. Yeah. And the YouTube channel is, like, still growing with that method.

Cal Newport
This is the opposite of MrBeast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's like, I'm going to spend the next month building some crazy thing. By the way, I love the same day prep.

I do the same thing. I think there's a lot of energy in it. I vaguely have an idea of. Here's a topic we're going to do. But, yeah, I come in, I go to my studio, and it's like, let's prep.

It takes like 90 minutes. My producer pulls the questions and stuff like that. But, yeah, I love the energy of, let's figure out what we're going to say. Ooh, this is good press play. Let's write it with it.

But I'm assuming it took you. I mean, you've probably evolved this whole process over time, right? Someone, if they were new to making YouTube videos, couldn't jump straight into this process. I'm assuming you figured out, what's the pipeline. Like, who needs to edit, what, what type of things work, what prep matters, what prep has been a waste of time.

It's that, like, sort of evolution. I'm assuming we've run the entire gamut, all the way from me spending five days, seven days a week working on YouTube videos and word for word, writing scripts, bullet points. What's the difference? What was the difference for your channel between seven days a week and bullet point scripts and the one day a week, two videos a week you're doing now? Basically none.

This is kind of the key point. Yeah, this is kind of the key point. Activity doesn't, by default, alchemize into results. This is the thing. I get this question a lot in our youtuber academy where people are like, okay, Ali's saying make one video a week, but what if I spend more time making higher quality videos?

Ali Abdaal
Isn't that better? And I'm like, yes, in theory, yes, that's true. If more time actually leads to a better quality video, which is just like, you know, our highest performing, one of our highest performing videos of all time, we put out about a month ago, and I had a conversation at a friend's birthday party with a dude who was asking me some questions about how to get rich. The following day, I thought, hmm, let me talk about this on camera. I hit record.

No prep. Boom. We got a million views in, like, a week. And I was like, what? Zero prep and videos that we painstakingly prepared for six months with a whole producer and a whole research team have gotten a fraction of the views.

There's just, like, no rhyme or reason to activity and outcome. Well, it's what I like about. I don't know if it's your YouTube academy or maybe some of the videos you did about, like, how to be a professional or just be a youtuber. What I liked, I was watching that. What I like is how much of it is you have to train how to be on camera.

Cal Newport
You gotta get. Just practice. It's not the like here. You're gonna come up with the magic idea and then you're guaranteed to succeed. It's like, no, it takes time.

You gotta keep doing things. But things that take time that you have to keep doing are not conducive with overload. Right? Like a lot of things. This reminds me of Steve Martin's memoir.

Right? His Bourne standing up, which is very influential to me. It's where I got the term so good, they can't ignore you for that. The book about don't follow your passion. That's a Steve Martin quote.

Ali Abdaal
Oh, is that when someone asked him, how do I get an agent or some shit like that? Charlie Rose asked Steve Martin, what advice do you not like being asked about or whatever? And he said, the thing everyone asked me is, how do I get ahead in the entertainment industry? And everyone thinks I'm going to tell them, here's how you get the right agent, or here's how you pick the next. And he says, no.

Cal Newport
What I always tell them and they don't want to hear it, is be so good, they can't ignore you. That's Steve Martin. Charlie Rose, 2007. It's like this classic quote and his book. I reread it recently, ten years.

I actually had a whole chapter in my book I cut, but just sort of indulgently because I like Steve Martin. I wrote a really long sort of story of his rise and how did he become the biggest comedian in the world? It took about ten years. And he talks about in the book that he was diligent. And what he means by diligent was not just doing the work, but saying no to the other things would get in the way of the work.

But when you're doing that type of push, like, it's going to take me years to master this, but the rewards are going to be great. There is no reason to be overloaded, because you can't be overloaded for ten years. You can't do the comedy five times faster. You can't do, I'm going to do five shows a night instead of one. This stuff takes time.

Often, relentlessness is needed for things, but relentlessness is not about. It's not super stressful. It doesn't make you super busy. It's this ability to return. I'm just going to do this again and again and again.

Bring in feedback, adjust, try to do better. Take another swing. No. One day looks super hard. What's hard is that I did this for the last five years and on the other end of that, I'm a really good comedian.

On the other end of that, I figured out how to broadcast and finally found an angle that's really working for me on YouTube. None of that can be forced. You can't avoid the hard work, but the hard work also can't be compressed. And I think a lot of people now want to compress the hard work. Can I trade get after it, be hard?

Let's just go for it. Can I trade that type of energy to speed this stuff up and it doesn't work that way? Yeah, this is where I keep on flip flopping because for us, just doing YouTube one day a week has worked for you, doing the podcast half a day a week has worked. But for me, trying to write for 3 hours each morning to work on the book didn't work nearly as well as sending myself to a random Airbnb in Wales and just like cranking it out the first draft in like a week and just thinking, okay, it's going to be shit, but it's just going to at least I've got the 50,000 words on a page. That kind of idea.

Ali Abdaal
How do you balance the, I guess, doing things, I guess, consistently over time with these bursts of intensity? Yeah, but I mean, I think these are the same things, just different scales. Right. So for a YouTube video, you want to have a serendipitous idea. You need to hold that idea in your head, manipulate it, and figure out how am I going to turn this into a script for a video that's going to be 15 minutes long?

Cal Newport
So you can do that in a few hours. A book, it's 75, 80,000 words, and you're trying to. Okay, how do I pull together a lot of ideas and make them make sense and build a consistent thing that takes a long time to work through. And that's why it makes more sense to, like, sit down and you have to really. It's just gonna take longer to work it through.

I mean, a book is just much bigger than a YouTube video. So I think it's the same principle at play nice what I do, because I can't. It takes. I'm a slow writer just in this. I mean, I write fast, but I write slow in the sense that the New Yorker kind of ruined me for this.

But Wordcraft is very important to me, like the rhythm and sounds of sentences. So what I have to do is make my chapters, they're pretty self contained. Like, the chapter has to be my unit because I can't go away and write a whole draft of my book. It would be too many months and I just can't get away from the other things that my university is going to make me do. So you'll notice in my books often the chapters are long and they have an arc and they're kind of self contained because that I can go away with and I can do 7000 words and that I can get obsessed.

So I think the time requires. That requires a week or two. A YouTube video requires half a day, a full book requires a month. Right. I think it's a scaling law.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah, that's good. And as you were saying that, I was also thinking around how we talked about how every new project has an administrative cost. It also has a startup cost, like trying to work on the book for 2 hours and then doing other things and then coming back the following day. It takes like half an hour at least for me to try and read through what I wrote yesterday, figure out where was I in my research. Find the 18 zillion tabs and my scrivener documents to see, to sort of load it up into my ram and then be able to work on it, by which time half an hour is already gone.

Cal Newport
Oh yeah, it takes forever. Yeah, yeah. Well, like a YouTube video, because it's completely from scratch. You don't have to load a bunch of stuff up. In fact, what you're trying to do is like encounter the world fresh and have a serendipitous idea of like, oh, this hits me, right?

Like you almost want to be mind like water opened. Like, that's how I often do it. I'm like, what hits me? And you're right, it's kind of hit or miss, right? Because sometimes it works, sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.

But the other thing I spend a lot of time doing, like when I write books, is I treat the idea creation process. Here's the framework for this book, here are the ideas, here's the pieces of this idea. Slow productivity. How do I understand where the problem came from? What are my principles that I will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get around?

Ali Abdaal
Macrostructure, the macro structure. Yeah, I'm in the early stages of a new book idea right now that I'm not really talking about yet. I like to work on the ideas of a new book when I'm publicizing a past book. So I can just sort of get out of my head about what's going on and be like, no, there's something else coming. I have spent probably 50 hours so far, just outline, just outlining ideas.

Cal Newport
Not even book outlines, idea outlines, because this isn't quite right. This works. Okay, how does this fit to here? So when it comes time for me to write now I really can focus on a chapter because I know what this chapter is about and how it fits into the broader thing. And so I don't have to look up the entire framework of all the ideas I'm trying to write and make sure it all fits together.

I have that working before I write any words. And then that allows me like, okay, so how do I then write a chapter on this piece of the puzzle? That's really good. And then that's like a smaller scale for me. Nice.

Ali Abdaal
That's really good. Oh, by the way, quick thing, in case you are interested in starting and or growing and or monetizing a YouTube channel, then you might like to check out my part time youtuber academy. It is a course that has dozens and dozens of hours of content in it, along with templates and worksheets and resources that basically open source absolutely everything that me and my team have learned about growing my YouTube channel and also this podcast YouTube channel over the last seven plus years. So you can check that out at academy dot alibdal.com. that'll be linked down below in the video description and the show notes as well.

Feel free to check out the part time youtuber academy. When I read Morgan Housel's psychology of money, it's like 20 chapters each are the length of a short blog post. Yeah. And I was like, oh, how nice must it be to be able to write a book where you've got 20 chapters each that are the length of a short blog post? He sold a couple copies of that book too.

Cal Newport
I understand that. Are all self contained with really interesting stories. It's really good. I felt good listening to an audible because it didn't take long to get through. I was like, wow.

Ali Abdaal
And a handful of ideas stuck with me. I'm like, wow. Why did I spend all this time trying to architect a whole 70,000 word thing when actually had I just chunked it down a little bit more and thought of it as self contained ideas? Almost like YouTube videos. Maybe things might have worked better.

Cal Newport
Yeah, he's ahead of the game. I had the same thought once when I read, I don't know if you know Jaron Lennar, sort of. He's a technocrit computer scientist, invented VR. Interesting guy, right? Brilliant guy.

But I remember reading and he just has ideas. Right? I remember reading one of his books. When I was working on maybe a world without email, and he's like, all these ideas. I looked in the back and like, there's no footnotes.

I was like, oh, I don't know. You could do that. He's just like, look, guys, I have ideas, and I'm just going to give you here, if you look at my books, because I'm an academic, I mean, it's like laboriously endnoted. It's all blind and notes, so it doesn't get in the way of the reading, but it's like a big chunk of the back. It's endnotes.

There's footnote. I got this from here, but some sources disagree with this or whatever his techno idea books, he just rock and rolls. He's like, I don't know, something like, this is right. I was like, I didn't know you could do that. And I bet he wrote those books.

He could write those. They're brilliant. Because he's a smart guy. Probably spends like a month just like, you know, I'm smart and just like, rocks, rock and rolls, and, like, writes this thing or whatever. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
There's something around, you know, a question that I often ask is, what would this look like if it were fun? And I. And I didn't ask that question enough of myself when I was writing my book because I thought, oh, it's a book. It's a big deal. It has to be a thing.

It's like, you know, I vaguely have a somewhat academic background, so I want to make sure I cite every freaking source for everything. And, like, that citation is a bit dodgy because that study was a bit dodgy. But you worry people are going to. Everyone worries people are going to come after you for this. No one cares.

No one cares. You're convinced that all these professors are going to pull their pipe out and be like, I don't know about this citation right here. Some sort of alarm is going to go off and no one cares. There are stuff people get upset about, but it's never the citations. It's like, I don't like the word productivity is in your title, which is, I'm sure, something we both dealt with.

Oh, yeah, exactly. I kind of flip flopped between different. Over the last four years, especially during the pandemic, there was a very anti productivity wave, or initially there was a very pro productivity wave. Then that became a very anti productivity wave. So at the time we were thinking about titles, we were like, do we not have the word productivity in it because people don't like the word.

How did you decide to lean into the word productivity? Well, this is the phrase I like. I think this is right, and I think this could stick. I think it describes right what I'm trying to do, and I'm actually following the framework of the slow movements in general here. So I think it's appropriate.

Cal Newport
There's slow food, there's slow cities. And so I think for the broader audience, it's the right. I think the term is self explanatory in a way. I think it's the right thing to do. The sort of more elite media did not like this term.

Ali Abdaal
Oh, really? Oh, yeah. How's it. They just were not happy because I don't know. I don't know if you have the same experience, but the people who are unhappy about the book, they're like, we're unhappy with the word productivity.

Cal Newport
And here's the acceptable way to talk about it, which is essentially, productivity is a construction of capitalist narratives, and we have to take down capitalism. If you're willing to make that critique, we're willing to take you as a serious thinker. If you're not, we are not going to be happy. It's interesting. I definitely got some of that.

Ali Abdaal
How do you personally find ways to make writing fun? I mean, writing is my number one thing. Yeah. I mean, I've been. I've done it my entire adult life.

Cal Newport
It's my. That's my art form. That's my, you know, the thing I admire, the thing I want to do, it's. It's my sport. If I was a professional athlete, like I.

So I've just always done it. I started in university. You know, I'd been a good writer in school and knew it was hard. And I went to university and said the one thing this is true, I said to myself, the one thing you cannot do when you're here is become a writer. It's, like, too hard.

Anything else, but do not become a writer. So in about a year, I started writing, right? I didn't listen. I tried to become an athlete, actually, right? So I was rowing crew and was, like, doing well at that.

I was like, this is great. I was like, I'll be like a jock. And it's like, fun. Like, hang out with all these, because I'm not. Crew is not like a big thing in the states, except for it, the Ivy League schools.

And I was just from a public school, but I went to an Ivy league school where they had the boathouses and the regattas. I was like, this is great. This is what I assume college people do is they row boats and stuff. And I developed a heart condition completely idiopathic or just was there congenital, I guess would be the term. You're the doctor.

It's just what you were born with it. She was probably an atrial flutter. Yeah, like a rapid tecardia. Right? And it just, out of nowhere, later in the year, just exercise induced.

Ali Abdaal
Damn, that's annoying. Yeah. Right? So I couldn't row anymore, and what am I going to do? And I'll write.

Cal Newport
And then the next year I started writing. Right. So that, and I made peace with it being really hard at first. I was just, I'm going to do this. Even though it's hard.

I was my, in university, this was my mindset was just do it and do more. I was writing for the paper. I was writing for the humor magazine. I was like, I'm just going to outright everyone just through effort. If we have a magazine issue coming out, I'm going to give you five pieces.

They're going to be good and they're going to be whatever. And then over time, it's like, okay, I'm starting to enjoy this and like it. And now I see it as a craft. I see as an art form. You know, I've written a bunch of books.

I get to do it for the New Yorker, which is like a dream of mine. Like, this is really hard writing, and I don't dread it at all. I just like it being hard. So I just got used to it. It's like the athlete that after a while likes the hard training because they know this is what I do and this is part of performing on the field.

And it gets there okay. Because I don't feel that way about writing. Yeah. And so I'm kind of thinking, I mean, I do sort of, I do feel that way about doing, like, chill YouTube videos where I can do the bullet point thing. Like, that feels very alive for me.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah, I feel like I, yeah, I come alive when someone poses a question to be like, how do I stop procrastinating? And I'm like, but you've been doing. That for a long time, right? Like, you've been doing. It goes back to beginning the conversation.

Cal Newport
Like, you've cultivated a passion for that over time. Oh, yeah. I wasn't very good at it or really enjoyed it initially. Yeah. Coming back to, like, your initial, here's how to, like, prepare for the medical exam videos.

It's not like you finished that were like, this is my calling. Like, I like, but, like, you're just a perfect example of, like, passion follows you doing something, not. You start with your passion. I mean, I've been writing for a long time. I signed with my agent when I was 20 years old.

Ali Abdaal
How old are you now? 41. Yeah. So I've been writing, and I signed my first book deal right after I turned 21, like, a few months after that. Right.

Cal Newport
So I've been writing professionally now for two decades. Damn. Okay. So I've been doing it for a long time. Yeah.

You know, good to know. Because I'm sort of comparing. I'm like, man, I really don't enjoy writing as much as Cal does. But you've been doing it for five times longer, so. Okay.

Ali Abdaal
What are some of your favorite stories around this idea of slow productivity for people who maybe haven't read the book? Yeah, everyone should, because it's really good. Well, and there are a lot of stories. What I did, and I should preface this as long as we're talking about writing, a writing decision I made in this book is there's two things I decided not to do in this book just because I'd done it before and I wanted to try something different. Right.

Cal Newport
So I decided not, for the most part, not to focus on contemporary examples of knowledge work organizations or individuals and say, look what they're doing here. This is interesting. Also, I wasn't going the studies route. Researchers from University of Michigan said that in a control group, I was like, okay, I don't want to do that either. What I did instead, and this was the slow movement inspiration is I went back and I looked at the stories, what I call traditional knowledge workers who are people who use their mind to create value, but did it in times past with huge flexibility and autonomy?

All right, why did I care about knowledge? We're talking Galileo. We're talking Mary Curie. We're talking Jane Austen. Right?

Why am I looking at these knowledge workers who don't work in an office and don't deal with email? Don't, because the fact that they had a lot of flexibility and autonomy meant they could experiment. And I said, okay, let me see what they gravitated towards. Like when you said, you have patronage, you can. All that matters is how good the stuff you produce.

You figure out how to do it. What do they gravitate towards? Right. That's where I identified the key principles of slow productivity. And then, because I've just written about technology knowledge work for a long time, I said, can I adapt these timeless principles to a 21st century job where you have a slack handle an email address and the reality of modern work, and then I adapt those principles.

So the stories are of, like, timeless figures in the past. The advice is, like, needle accurate, for I have exactly this job in a modern company, and I'm dealing with this dynamic for. With my. I found it really engaging in a way that most nonfiction self help books rarely are, because I was like, oh, I didn't know this about Jane Austen or John McPhee or Galileo. It's timeless.

Ali Abdaal
It sort of made me imagine how nice it would be to go to the meadows and just sort of lie on the park bench thinking for a seven day. That was my thought. If I trigger that response and then follow it with, and here's how you could kind of simulate that same effect in your actual life right now. I thought that would be an interesting pairing, but I'll give you an example, though. So, like, the Jane Austen example, a good one, right?

Cal Newport
Because I thought this was a really interesting story. So Jane Austen, the novelist, there's lore about her, right? There's this lore that Jane would write surreptitiously while she was in the sitting room. And when people would come, like, visitors or whatever, she had a creaky hinge on the door. When they would hear that creak that would warn her, let me hide what I'm working on.

So it was this story of her fitting in work, like, wherever she could, and then I fit it in whenever I had these moments. And that's how she wrote her books, right? And everyone told this story. Virginia Wolf references this in a room of a room of one's own. Mason Curry tells the story in daily rituals.

Like, it's been around. It turns out, like, I'm looking into this. It's all completely made up, right? It was. Her nephew James wrote a biography of her decades after she died and basically just made a lot of stuff up that, like, he thought would help the story of his aunt, and it would be interesting.

But now there's more recent biographies that look at primary sources. That's not at all what happened. Jane was too busy to write and was super frustrated about it. She had these ideas, but they had so much going on. She could not make progress on him.

And it was like, a huge source of frustration in her life. She was not fitting in the writing into little open spaces. She didn't have the open water to get things done later in her life. If her father dies, her. Her mom, her sister, and a family friend are like, we're tapping out of this whole busy life.

And the social scene and all of this type of stuff we're doing. And they move into a cottage that her brother owned. He had inherited land, and they moved in this cottage, and just no more. No more active life. And they had free time for the first time.

Jane writes all five of her famous books in, like, two years, not by squeezing it into little free time in a busy life, but by becoming much less busy. So I thought this was a really cool story. What's the principle there? It's like, well, okay, sometimes to do something good, you have to do a lot less. Good.

Things require time and space, and sometimes simplifying what's going on is what actually allows you to break through and do not pushing more stuff in. Well, we can easily adapt this over to knowledge work that goes back to what we were talking about before. I said yes to ten projects as a knowledge worker that each have administrative overhead. That's clogging up my schedule now. I can't finish my proverbial novel.

If I cleaned out what I was working on, worked on fewer things at the same time, built my own version of Jane Austen's Chawlton cottage. Now I can start finishing Emily and sense. And sense Emma, I should say, in sense and sensibility, I could start making actual progress on stuff that matters. So it's like a timeless principle, and then we can give really tactical advice for leveraging it in a modern job.

Ali Abdaal
A few hours ago, I was teaching a live session for productivity lab, and loads of people in the Zoom chat were asking this thing of, like, because we were planning the ideal week, blocking out what would your dream week look like? And everyone's kind of realizing, shit, my dream week. There are not enough hours in the week to do all of the things that I would like to do. Oh, interesting. So they were reacting that question by enumerating lots of different things they wanted.

They were like, oh, yeah, in my dream week, I would have time for this and this and this, and I'd also spend ten to 20 hours a day on my hobbies and blah, blah, and have time for the kids, have time for the wife, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they were like, wait a minute. There's like, there just aren't enough hours in the day. And so I found myself saying that, like, yeah, well, you know, you just need to do less and stuff. But then they were like, well, easy for you to say.

You're a youtuber. You can do what you want. What about those of us with a corporate job? And so I wonder if what would you say to, like, the corporate employee who's like, yeah, but Cal, I can't just not do these ten things like we've talked about how. One of the strategies is there's this Google Doc showing what's active and what's passive.

Are there any other things that you found helpful that corporate workers have found as a way of reducing the amount of stuff that they're working on at one point? Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's a bunch of things you can do. Okay.

Cal Newport
So another thing is never give a hard yes or hard no in the room. Okay. So your boss says, hey, look, here's this important project I want you to work on. Can you do this for me? Don't say yes or no.

Be like, that sounds really important. That sounds like a really high priority. I'll tell you what. I will go back right away because I keep track of my time very carefully and I'll get right into my schedule right away and get right back to you about when I can do this or how it's going to fit in. Now you've bought yourself some time and you've established I'm very organized and you've escaped the social pressure of I'm in the room and the hands on my shoulder and what are you going to say, yes or no?

Then a few hours later you can come back and be like, look, I keep. Keep track of this stuff really carefully. I have like four things, like, I'm actively working on. It's eating up basically, like, most of the time. Honestly, it would probably be like six weeks.

Telling enough of this stuff is clear that I could give this attention, right? So, no, I wouldn't be able to turn this around. That is like an effective no, because it's not in the room. You've established that you're very organized, which is like, gives you credibility in the conversation. You've social proofed the.

I have. This is my workload. I'm not complaining. I'm just being really, like, effective about organizing my time. So that works well.

Quotas work well. There's a common type of thing you get asked to do, and it's not something you can always say no to as a part of your job, but you get asked to do it way more than you have time to do. Have a quota. I do three of these a month. I do five of these each quarter.

And so you say yes until you hit the quota. And then you say, I would love to do it. These are important. I do a quota of like three of these per month. I already hit the quota.

So I can't do this one. Nice. Now they're in a position where if they're complaining, all they can complain about is, oh, your quota's wrong. You know, like, well, maybe like your quota should be, but they're not going to do that. Like, no, look, you've thought about this, or you do this, like, what you're validating.

What they're afraid of is that, like, you're lazy and you don't want to do work, and you're like, I'm just going to say no to things. I don't want to do things. But, like, these type of things make a big difference. Another thing you can do, schedule the time for your commitments on your calendar. And it's there.

And now the time is blocked off. And if something else comes in, let me find time to do this. And now you can just be super transparent with people like, okay, happy to do it. I think this will take about 10 hours. I actually pre schedule all my work on my calendar.

The next time I can get 10 hours in reasonably large chunks is going to be three or four weeks from now. I can do that in three or four weeks and take up that time. What you're doing in that example is making your workload transparent. Making the reality of your. All of these things are sort of making your workload transparent.

Transparent. Making your systems transparent. This works, right? You think your boss is a mustache twirler. That's like, I'm going to catch you.

And it's not the way it works. People think their bosses are evil. They want to make your life hard and that they're looking for an excuse to fire you. That's not the case. First of all, if you're good, they stay up at night worried about you leaving.

The hardest thing in business, you know this, right, is hiring good people, right. They are not looking for an excuse to fire you. If you're good, they're desperately afraid you're going to leave. What does your boss really want from you then? Right?

What they want is for you to take stress away from them. So when they come to you with a thing, it's a source of stress for them that they have to keep track of this thing. Right now. It's their responsibility. They want that stress to go away.

If they know nothing about how you organize yourself, if they know nothing about your workload. Just giving you the project is not enough to take their stress away. They still have to worry about it till you tell them it's done. So what are they going to say do this right away because I want my stress to go away right away. If you're organized, you're showing them your cue.

You're showing them like where? Okay, here's, this takes this many hours. Here's when I have time. You're giving them this type of information. They're like, of course he's going to get this done.

I trust them. That also takes my stress away right away. I don't need it done tomorrow. I need my stress to go away by tomorrow. Right.

So you can get away with a lot more than you think. If you're really on your game and you're organized and you're not complaining and your whole focus is on. Because I want to be super effective and I'm very realistic about my time so that I can do really good work. You get away with a lot more than you think, mate. That's great.

Ali Abdaal
That's golden advice. What sort of quotas or stuff have you got in your life? So as an academic, peer reviews is a big one, right? Because you get more review requests than you have time to do. It's an important part of your service to your academic community.

Cal Newport
You can't say no to all reviews, but you can't do all the reviews. Program committees is another thing. This is very insider baseball book blurbs to some degree. Yeah. Pretty tight quotas, unless it's someone I already know.

So I do pretty tight quotas on that. I also have a lot of walls too. So there's quotas and there's walls. So quotas are, I'll do some, but not too many. A lot of times, especially in our type of work, you have to just wall off certain things even though you're like, this could be good, this could be interesting.

I've had the wall off direct communication with my readers. For example, I don't have a general purpose email address where you can just email me and ask whatever I used to and I loved it, but it's completely unsustainable and I don't know how to codify that because at some point if the deluge is too strong to quotify, you have to think about just walling it off. I walled that off and it was really hard years ago. I had to do this. And it's really hard because I really liked answering people's questions.

And now I do it. I broadcast it on a podcast. Now I answer six people's questions a week, but 60 or 7000 people will hear those answers. And that's better than me answering 70 questions a week, the number of people who are getting information. But sometimes you got to wall things off as well.

Talks, I don't know about. I strongly quoted talks I don't like. Giving talks. Drives my speaking agent crazy. Like, I'm doing a talk this fall already.

What are you talking about? He's like, do you realize these other business authors, they'll do, like, 50 talks a year? Do you realize? I was like, I just don't like it. Yeah, nice.

Ali Abdaal
What does. Let's say the summer's coming up and you've got your half day cornered off for the podcast. What does, like, a day in your life look like? Oh, the summer is very specific for me. Right.

Cal Newport
Because I'm an academic at a research institution. Right. The way that works at one of these institutions is they don't pay you salary in the summer. They pay you ten months salary. And typically, because what you do is for the summer months in your research grants, part of what you ask for in the budget is salary for those two months.

So if you're at a research institution, that's how you get your full salary that they hired you at. I realized at some point my books were doing well enough that I could just not take salary in those summer months, not budget salary from the grants, and actually just say, these are mine, and you can absolutely do that. Right? There's no, hey, it's summer. They're not paying.

The university has no expectations. There's no grant bearing organization that thinks they're going to be doing anything. The summer is actually mine. So I take that really seriously. I call it summer.

So I have no administrative academic work for the most part, in the summer because I'm not taking paycheck. And then I run what I call summer hours. So nothing can be scheduled on a calendar professionally on Monday or Friday. Right. So I want Friday through Monday.

Nice, clean calendar. The things that can be scheduled on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, only in the afternoon. Oh, okay. So that's where, like, if, because there's stuff, you know, I'm gonna talk to people. I wanna do a podcast interview with someone.

You know, I have meetings with people or whatever. I kind of consolidate it there. Big push, deep work. Monday. Big push.

Deep work. Friday, deep work. Half day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Weekend's completely off. Yeah.

So that's my summer hours, which, by the way, is basically my dream schedule. Yeah, sounds like my dream schedule as well. I mean, if I was doing your productivity lab exercise, that's what I. That is my dream schedule now. I'm only able to do this.

And then the podcast is, I have to figure out what I'm going to do about it this summer. It might be its own half day on Monday or Friday, but maybe really what I should do is take one of those Tuesday Wednesday Thursday meeting half days and like, all right, let's take one of those for the podcast. Yeah. It's only two days. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal
So I also have Mondays and Fridays completely cordoned off. Wednesdays are filming days, Tuesday mornings are team meetings, and Thursday afternoon is any ad hoc thing that needs scheduling, which leaves Monday completely free. Friday completely free. Thursday morning completely free. Tuesday afternoon somewhat completely free, and Wednesday's filming day anyway, which is my service obligation to my YouTube channel.

Yeah, and that's nice. One difficulty I have is, let's say the Monday's free or the Friday is free and someone wants to come on the podcast, and it's someone that I kind of want to talk to. And I sort of know them. There's a bit of a social obligation to get them on the podcast. I would really love it if it could fit into my Thursday afternoon slot.

But for whatever reason, they're only London for a certain day. And I'm like, you're looking at me really hard right now. We're recording right now. We're recording right now. Great tool.

I love doing podcasts in the evening because then it's like, oh, the work day's done. We're just having a chat. Life is good. Sometimes we get takeaway, et cetera. But I find that the amount of sort of yes, but not hell yes starts to eat into the schedule.

How do you deal with this? Because I imagine you have a lot of yes, but not like hell yes shouting from the oh, it's hard. Well, the podcast interview thing is hard. Specifically, I guess I shouldn't use his name because we were talking off the air, but I had this exact conversation with another major podcaster, and this is his big problem, too. He really likes the way we're talking about structuring his days and his time, but also, his show is based on awesome guest, and there's only to some degree can he fit awesome guest into a certain time.

Cal Newport
I like your solution, by the way, of how do I make the guest interviews itself into something I really enjoy doing in the evening? It's not stepping on. It's not in the middle of the day in a way, that's stepping on it. But, yeah, I mean, look, we all have our version of that, I think, right? Like, for me, it's not gonna be a podcast I don't do a lot of interviews.

Main exception for you. Thank you. But it's not really an interview show and kind of on purpose because that's a treadmill. That's, like, complicated. Yeah.

But for me, it's like, interesting people in town. For example, like, I used to struggle. Like, I wanna see this person. I wanna go, like, whatever. And there's a while where I would be frustrated.

Like, this is stepping on the free point of the calendar. And at some point I changed my mindset about that. I was like, no, this is like the type of thing that your flexibility is rewarding you with. It's like someone's in town who's really interesting, and we can go for a hike or whatever, go get drinks or something like that. That's actually great that I can do that.

And so I've been trying to have that mindset shift for those type of interruptions. Yeah, same thing for going on pod. I do a fair number of podcasts, just always, like, just as a background drumbeat. But what I'm not doing book publicity. I'm really, like, kind of picky.

I just like, I don't know. We say sit in your schedule and sort of take up time. But for me, it'll be if, like, because a lot of the big podcasts I've done, typically the first time I've done them has been randomly in over the transom. Right. So not, we pitched them because a book was out.

It's just, you know, whatever Sam Harris wants you to come on and talk about. And this is when he records or something. Yeah. It's like, great. And, yeah.

And I'm like, okay, yeah, I'll do it. Psychologically, I try not to be too much like, okay, you're stepping on my schedule. Because in the end, what's the point of having this schedule? It's so that you don't feel busy, you don't feel rushed. Your life is interesting.

You can work on stuff you care about. This is a fun thing to do. Yeah. I've kind of landed on the same general idea. There were times in the past where someone would be in town for a coffee, and I'd be like, okay, well, my lunch hour should only really be one to two because I've got this thing at two, and I'm like, I just block off one to 03:00 p.m.

Ali Abdaal
as my lunch break. Nice. Because if anyone is in town, 2 hours is a good amount of time for a thing. Or if there's time in the day and my significant other needs some emotional support or whatever. And I will try to the best of my ability to give that emotional support.

In the past, I used to be like, oh, it's kind of interrupting the workday. But now I'm like, actually, the whole point of doing this flexibility entrepreneur thing is so that I can interrupt my workday to lend some emotional support. So what do you do in that one to 03:00 lunch hour if nothing comes up? Oh, then I'll just go for lunch. And, like, take a walk or something.

Yeah, take a walk. Listen to an audiobook, do some deep work, be like, yes, reality transurfing is a book I've had on my desk bookshelf for years. Finally, I have a spare hour to. Sit down and actually, I love this idea. Well, I'll tell you another thing.

Cal Newport
I do this with another mindset shift is I had to be very careful about not shifting professional productivity mindsets over to personal life, right? Because I have three kids, they're all like, school age now, right? So there's a lot of stuff, right? And I had that. There's a moment where I was like, hmm, the schedule is too cluttered because I have these beautiful summer hour schedules or whatever, and it's like, wait a second.

It's like baseball. And then picking up this kid and doing this and doing that. And then I had this mindset shift of like, no, this is the good stuff, right? This is where, like, the flexibility of your work is great, because, like, I can go see the thing at the school, and actually having a whole evening shuttling kids around and doing various activities is like, that's what you want to be doing in your evening, right? That's good clutter.

So I like this. Let's use a term like good clutter or productive clutter versus bad clutter or destructive clutter. Good schedule clutter is like, stuff that is important can show up and you can make room for it. There's a phrase I've been thinking about for a few years. People often ask, how do you cope with distractions?

Ali Abdaal
I'm like, there are welcome distractions and unwelcome distractions. So when I was at university, I would leave my door propped open all the time, because a welcome distraction is a friend coming up the stairs, poking their head in and having a chat. That's the point. And you're like, yeah, maybe it reduces my productivity by 3% because I was interrupted and focused and blah, blah, blah. But the point of university is not that I got an extra 3% on my exam, it's that I had those connections.

So that's a welcome distraction. Similarly, when I have kids, I hope I've heard from, from parents that when the kid knocks on your office door and wants to tell you something, you're like, oh, got my work. But it's the kid. And they always are glad that they made the decision to prioritize the kid in that context. That should be our metric.

Cal Newport
Then the metric for you have the right definition of productivity, of the right approach to work is that if the kid knocks on your door, it's not stressful. Because if you're pseudo productivity, busy out the gills, having to put out the fires of ten projects worth of administrative overhead, it is stressful if there's any interruption because you're like, this house of cards is barely staying together. I'm just like putting water on this fire and it jumps over here. Whereas if you're slowing down your definition of productivity, I'm not doing too much. I don't have too much on my plate today.

I'm giving things a lot of time for it to unfold and develop. I'm not too crowded. Then when someone, the kid knocks on the door like, it's not a big deal, you know, I'm working on my book right now. Yeah, come in, let's talk. So like, maybe that's the metric.

How stressed do you get by like a innocuous distraction? If you're getting super stressed about that, your productivity notion is probably off base. Yeah. One area where I currently get stressed by this is recently I've realized I should take my health more seriously. So I schedule in 07:00 a.m.

Ali Abdaal
gym sessions with a personal trainer. And so if a dinner with friends is running late to like 11:00 p.m. i'm like, oh no. Just eating into the sleep. Oh shit.

Oh no. You're going to be good at being a parent. This is the whole thing. That's the whole thing. Like, what time is that movie start?

Cal Newport
I gotta wake up. What are you talking about? How do you approach this? Like slow productivity stuff while at the same. Okay.

Ali Abdaal
One of my issues is I'm like, there's still part of me that feels this. If I'm not cranking out the YouTube videos at the right time, then I might become irrelevant. Or if I'm not doing more and more book promo, then we've only sold x number of copies. And the publisher says if we sell three x number of copies, then the book will take on a lifetime of its own. And maybe I should just push hard now so that I can chill out later.

And then it gets into this sort of seed of productivity. Pushing, pushing, pushing mode again. Yeah. Worse. Later, though, is the problem.

Cal Newport
Well, then later there's going to be something else. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of sustainable hard work. Yeah. Like, I'm trying to do something.

I think about books this way. I'm taking a great swing at this. Like, I want to give it good time. I want to try to write something I'm proud of. I'm going to give it good attention.

And then it's done. It's done. Let's go out. I'll give it a good push and we'll see what it does and maybe it'll do really great and maybe it won't, and we'll sort of tip our cap and then we'll sort of move on to the next one, you know? Because again, I started giving advice to college kids, and this was like the number one source of stress for university students was this idea of, I'm going to grind it out here because that'll get me to whatever medical school, to this job in the law school, and I'll be so happy with that accomplishment.

That'll be worth it. But when you get there, it's like, well, I got to grind it out here. But then I'll be so happy to finish that because I'll get the great residency. Well, okay, I have to grind it out through the residency, but then I'll get the great. And it's endless.

Right? I mean, I have a lot of friends who've gone through this, like, through the law process, right. Because I'm of an age where people my age are becoming partners in law firms, right. And that's like, the final thing. And it's just been brutal.

And they get there and the work there is brutal as well. Like, wait a second. What is the game we were playing here? It's not when you get there, they're like, okay, like, here's your house on an island. Go have fun.

It's like you get to do this for the rest of your life. Yeah. It's a dangerous mindset. I mean, I'm a big fan, and sometimes something needs, like, a big, hard push, right? I mean, you're like a movie director.

It's like you gotta, you gotta go all in to make this movie. But if you have control over the schedule, like book writing, you can say, here's how long I need to write this book. You can do it in a reasonable way, right? Do it in a reasonable way. Nice.

Ali Abdaal
Yeah. All right, Cal, I know you have to go because you have a dinner date with your wife, which is the perfect reason to cease to say goodbye here. Yes. Thank you so much. Any potting wisdom for people who have listened this far?

Cal Newport
Look, I mean, I think the important thing is when it comes to productivity. You talk about productivity, I talk about productivity. If you're thinking about productivity, define your terms. So much of the issues around this concept comes from different definitions of it. So never just use the word productivity by itself.

Have a modifier, feel good, slow, fast. Like whatever it is, we need to get more specific when we talk about productivity. What are we trying to do? How do we do it? How well is this technique?

How well is this philosophy actually working? That's half the work I'm trying to do with this book is just saying, here's what our current implicit definition of productivity really is in knowledge. We're going to call it pseudo productivity. Let's just name it what it is, let's define it. Let's see where it came from.

If you like it, you can like it. But once we see what. What it is, maybe you're going to say that doesn't make a lot of sense. Let's seek out another alternative. Just naming things, I think really matters.

So there is no capital p productivity period. Done. There's philosophies and ideas of what productivity means to you and how you go after it. And so you got to be pretty specific about it. And I think that's what we're starting to see now.

We're starting to see modifiers added to productivity, which is exactly where this conversation, I think right now needs to go. Amazing, kel. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Alright, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.

Ali Abdaal
Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode.

That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye.

Cal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity

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1: Introduction

2: Deep Work and Productivity

3: Historical Examples of Slow Productivity

4: Implementing Slow Productivity

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