Ep. 299: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Personal Productivity

This episode explores the complexities of personal productivity, focusing on how society's views and practices around productivity have evolved and the impact on our professional and personal lives.

1. Historical Context: Newport traces the evolution of productivity concepts from the late 20th century to the present, highlighting how changes in technology and workplace culture have transformed productivity strategies.
2. Philosophical Shifts: The discussion includes a transition from productivity as a means to enhance personal and professional life to a potential source of relentless pressure to perform.
3. Impact of Technology: The role of digital tools and platforms in shaping modern productivity practices, emphasizing both the benefits and the challenges they bring.
4. Cultural Critique: Newport critiques the current productivity culture that often prioritizes efficiency over well-being, discussing the potential for burnout and mental health struggles.
5. Future of Productivity: Speculation on the future directions of personal productivity, suggesting a need for a more balanced approach that incorporates well-being and sustainable work practices.

1: Historical Overview of Productivity

Newport starts with a detailed account of productivity's evolution, discussing key books and theories from the 1980s to the 2000s. He reflects on the impact of these ideas on his own career and broader cultural trends.

• Cal Newport: "The journey through personal productivity is not just about work efficiency but about understanding our deeper relationship with work."

2: Technological Influences

This chapter explores how advancements in technology, especially the internet and personal computing, have radically changed the landscape of productivity.

• Cal Newport: "Technology has not only increased productivity but also the intensity and expectations of work."

3: Critiques and Challenges

Newport discusses the criticisms of modern productivity practices, focusing on how they can lead to stress and diminish the quality of life.

• Cal Newport: "We must be wary of productivity approaches that lead to burnout rather than sustainable success."

1. Prioritize Well-being: Incorporate regular breaks and self-care routines to maintain mental and physical health.
2. Set Realistic Goals: Avoid the trap of overcommitment by setting achievable goals that allow for a balanced life.
3. Use Technology Wisely: Leverage technology to enhance productivity but be mindful of its potential to distract and overwhelm.
4. Reflect on Your Practices: Regularly assess your productivity techniques to ensure they align with your personal and professional values.
5. Seek Continuous Learning: Stay informed about new productivity strategies and approaches, adapting what is most beneficial for your specific needs.

Cal has been writing professionally about issues related to personal productivity for two decades. In today’s episode, he provides a short history of what he’s observed during this period about out constantly shifting relationship with this topic, from the quiet optimism of the 1990s, to the techno-mania of the early 2000s, to the whiplash shift from anti-distraction to anti-work sentiments in the 2010s. He ends with a summary of where we are today and what he currently thinks matters in thinking about getting things done. During the Q&A session, Cal is joined by special guest host Scott Young (whose new book is GET BETTER AT ANYTHING) to help answer your questions. We conclude with a list of the books Cal read in April.

People

Cal Newport

Companies

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Books

"The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey, "Getting Things Done" by David Allen

Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

None

Cal Newport

I'm Cal Newport, and this is deep questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

I'm here in my deep work hq, joined, as always, by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, it's hard to believe we've passed the two month mark since my book, slow productivity came out. Yeah, I was talking to somebody about that the other day, so I knew it's a long two months. On the other hand, it feels like a quick two months because I've been doing so much. So I've certainly been talking about this book a lot.

But anyways, I'm glad to have made it to the two month mark. And you know what? The book hasn't disappeared, so that's always good. There's always the worry that after the first couple of weeks, your book just sort of disappears. But I would say it's rolling along pretty strong.

Still, back in the day, before, podcasts were a big promotional avenue for podcasts. Did you have to travel everywhere? I didn't have to start traveling till digital minimalism. So after deep work, which was my fifth book, after that took off, then suddenly it was, oh, by the way, you have to go do things. Yeah, yeah.

And it was the easy days before then it was like, oh, maybe write an article or two, but you didn't sell as many books. You'll do. You'll do, like, a couple radio interviews, like, from your house, like, you know, do some podcasts occasionally with a iPhone. I used to use iPhone earbuds wired into my laptop, and do a couple podcasts from your bedrooms. There's no video back then, like, that.

Was it, like, deep work? I did very little because there's no video. Yeah, there's, like, a good review, deep work. I remember, like, I got a good review in the Wall Street Journal, which drove some sales for a while, but then it kind of disappeared. I don't know.

But I was already doing a bunch of podcasts, so I just kind of, like, kept doing podcasts at sort of, like, a very reasonable rate. I think it was mentioned on, like, the back page, the back page of the New York Times Book Review had, like, a column about self improvement books. It was sort of, like, mentioned in there positively, and that was it. And it didn't do well and wasn't a bestseller or anything. I sort of went on with my life, and then in the background, it just kind of kept selling and then selling and then selling more and, like, sold a ton of copies.

That's like, the ideal way to sell a book. You don't have to do much. Then it sells a lot. Then digital minimalism came along and like, all right, so your tour is going to start here and we're going to go to here. Then we're going to go to here.

And I was like, what is all of this? I have to, like, go on cameras and go in front of things. So anyways, Ryan Holiday had you on. His book list for the month. Yeah, his recommended reading list.

Yeah. Yeah. It was cool seeing his bookstore. I sort of feel like with our bookstore here with the town's bookstore, people's book, we can kind of get the benefit of hanging out in a bookstore without all the pain of hiring a bookstore. I know Ryan has to run a business.

It's cool over there. He's got, like, all these offices. Like, all his family was hanging out. Anyways, thank you for those who supported the book and those who are still on the fence. You know, check it out.

If you liked it, tell someone. Actually, if you liked it, leave a review that's useful. Leave a positive review. I appreciate that. Anyways, the deep dive that's coming up kind of roughly in honor of that is going to, and this might be a mistake on my part, but I'm attempting to summarize my 20 year history as a writer, touching on topics related to productivity and how that's changed over the years and the different eras of productivity riding over the last 20 years and where we are now.

So that should be interesting. I'm trying to synthesize my whole professional experience surrounding this topic. Also in the Q and a segment coming up, we're doing something kind of cool. Longtime friend of mine and longtime friend of the show, Scott Young, is going to join me for the Q and a segment. We're going to do the Q and a segment together.

He has a new book that just came out this week that's all about how to master hard skills. And so he's going to help me answer the question so you can get sort of double the answers for the same number of questions, twice the fun for the same amount. So that should be fun. And at the end of the show, I'm gonna do the books I read in April 2024. All right, so I think that's it.

Jesse, let's get started with the deep dive. So I've been a professional writer for two decades. At this point, throughout this entire period off and on, my writing has touched on or been related to the topic of personality, productivity. Not everything I write is about it, but it's sort of my writing has surrounded that topic or touched on that topic off and on for two decades now. So eight books and around 3 million sales later, I wanted to look back at what I've observed up close over this period about our culture's changing relationship with the topic of personal productivity.

I'll then conclude my thoughts about what I currently think is important for this topic, what you should care about when it comes to getting things done in our current 2024 moment. So it's going to be sort of a history, a personal history, if you will, of personal productivity. I'm actually going to start, we'll call this like the prelude before my professional writing career began. I'm going to start in this period of 1989 to 1999. I'm going to call this the era of sage advice and optimism.

So here's the thing. During this period, I was a student. I graduated high school in the year 2000. So the nineties was basically my whole elementary school, middle school, high school education. In this period, I was interested in business, especially technology business.

I read a lot of books about Apple and Microsoft. All this was very exciting to me. Michael Lewis is the new new thing, et cetera. So I eventually started my own small little tech company as a high school student, and I was reading accordingly, a lot of business advice books which were kind of touching on organization and personal productivity. So I knew the space pretty well.

The general sense of this beginning period, 1989 to 1999, the general sense surrounding personal productivity in the writing of this era was basically, look, you're fine not thinking about this stuff. It's not necessary. But if you do, if you're interested, there's some cool things you might get out of it. There's two major tones of book during this period. I'm going to load some of these sample books up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening.

Probably the most influential book of this period. I have it on the screen here now is Stephen Covey's the seven habits of highly effective people, powerful lessons, and personal change. This came out in 1989, sort of set a lot of the tone for personal productivity in the 1990s. He had a follow up book in the nineties as well. I'm going to read the sort of one paragraph description of this book.

In the seven habits of highly effective people, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step by step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity. All right, so let's think about this description right away. What should strike you is all of these words like principles, integrity, service, human dignity.

Right? This is not a book about, hey, let's get after it and crush it. It was actually very much focused on human flourishing and thriving. And so this genre of book, they have systems in it. So Covey has systems in particular.

He, he says you should be organized about your time, and you should be careful to make sure that the important things in your life get time, even though there's a lot of less important but urgent things that could crowd it out. Like, that's his main point. And if you look at his methodology, he actually has you list out what he calls the roles in your life. So this goes way beyond just a professional. You know, I'm a manager at this tech company.

I'm a father. I'm on the leadership committee of my church. You have these different roles in your life. And his whole system is about making sure that important, but perhaps non urgent tasks in each of these roles gets regular time. This is this principle centered, service centered human dignity.

He wanted you to build a full life. He had systems in this book, but they were just enough, just good enough to make sure that you could service what was important to your picture of a life well lived. So it was system servicing a good life. This kind of made sense coming out of the eighties, which was a very psychological age, a very sort of self reflective, sort of freudian, neo freudian age. We think we were very looking interior to ourselves and trying to understand what our meaning in life.

The baby boomers really big on this during the capitalist exuberance of the eighties. So it sort of carries that feel over. So it's technical but not obsessive over its systems, especially saying you need to get your act together so that you can do stuff that's important, not because somehow the work itself, you want to get more of it done. So that was a huge bestseller, 15 million copies sold. I think it still may stand as the best selling book in the sort of business productivity space.

If we count atomic habits as a productivity book, that's sort of catching up, but it's nowhere near close there. I think atomic habits is maybe five or 6 million copies. This book, it sold for a decade because there wasn't a lot else going on. That's one style of 1990s optimistic. It's not necessary, but if you care about this, your life can get better.

The other style I would call the sage advice guide. So I'm putting a representative copy of one of these books up on the screen. This is how to become CEO. The rules for rising to the top of any organization. So New York Times best seller, written by Jeffrey Fox, that came out in 1998.

This is another classic style in the nineties. Fox in this book, which was adapted from a talk he gave, an alumni talk, I believe, at the University of Pennsylvania. It's provocative, big think advice. The book had rules. Each rule had like a page.

They're pithy. And then it would have like some no nonsense, interesting, thought provoking advice. So I wish I could look at, I don't actually have a copy of this book. If I did, I would look inside of it. Okay, let's see here.

Here we go. Here's some rules. Know everybody by their first name. No goals, no glory. Don't take work home from the office.

Don't have a drink with the gang. Right? So it was these rules to be a little provocative and you'd be like, ooh, interesting. It's sage advice. And I want to sort of learn more from this person, what he means.

And again, it was like these useful nudges I could use to kind of help nudge my professional life into a little bit more order. So these were the two big genres of that period. The sort of optimistic, let's like build a good life, get your act together, we'll help you do it. And the sort of sage advice here, sort of like provocative wisdom. Okay.

Then we get to what I'll call chapter one of this history because it's where my professional career begins to intersect the history. This is the years 2000 to 2007. Otherwise, I think of this known as the productivity prawn period. And I'll explain what that means in a second. So the two thousands felt like a major shift from the nineties.

The book that I think captures that shift. I'll load up on the screen. Here is David Allen's classic getting things done, the art of stress free productivity. This came out in 2002. Now I'm going to read you a little bit of the description here because people think they know what this book is, but often they get that wrong.

Let me read you a little bit of the description, then I'm going to explain why this is really an important turning point in productivity literature. In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work in getting things done. Veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Alan's premise is simple. Our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized.

Can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential? All right, remember subtitle here is the art of stress free productivity. If you read this book, the tone is completely different than what came from before. So in the nineties, it's like, yeah, we have these jobs, they're fine, but if you want to, like, do something special, we can help you do something special. Getting things done.

The way this book reads is, oh, my God, the work in these jobs is killing us. We're being completely overloaded with the amount of stuff. And he uses that word. Alan uses the word stuff all the time to describe this. We have all of this stuff coming at us and we can't keep up with it.

And it's causing huge stress because we have all these, he calls them the stuff creates what he calls open loops. All these things are in our world, and we can't get our mind wrapped around all these things. It's not okay, here's the three things I need to do this week, and I see how I'm going to do it. It's a hundred things. We're drowning and it's stressing us out.

And Alan didn't like, distress. Alan's like, we got to get away from the stress of all this stuff that's coming at us. We need what he called stress free productivity. So his whole systems was about, how do we get all the stuff that's coming at us into these systems where we don't have to keep track of it in our head? And how can we then simplify work to basically the system will help us figure out, do this next, do this after that.

Do this after that. We could just start cranking widgets, as his followers likes to call it, just executing tasks and not have the stress of trying to keep track track of all these different things. He's trying to free us from stress, not like, hey, how do we do something extra? It's like, how do we survive? And this was a real change.

It was a real change in the two thousands where we began to get more overloaded by work. The volume of work and the velocity with which this work was coming at us began to really increase. It was no longer obvious how to even just keep up with our jobs. As I've talked about before came to realize later as I looked at this, this was a technological issue. It was the front office it revolution.

It was the personal computer plus digital networking like email and mobile computing that suddenly increased both the workload and the velocity at which the work was actually unfolding. So getting things done is a reaction. We didn't have these computers and networks in 1989, we had them in 2002. It's a reaction to this technological world, much more defensive in tone. What we did here is where things get interesting.

The early two thousands technology was leading us to be overloaded by our work and the speed at which the work was unfolding. We turned to technology at first as our solution to this problem. So the personal productivity world had a let's fight fire with fire mentality. They said, yes, these new tools have opened up a fire hose of incoming obligations, but maybe these same new tools will save us from that fire hose. So maybe what we need to do here is a two step adjustment.

This was the optimistic belief of the personal productivity world. All right, these new tools have unleashed a fire hose. But I think once we actually also deploy these new hose, these new tools on the receiving side, we'll be able to better manage the fire hose. So the advice suddenly became very technical. We went from the sort of common sense systems of Stephen Covey, which was really like, write out what you're going to do for today.

Have your five roles at the beginning of each week. Make sure that you put some time aside for each of those roles on your calendar to make sure that you're servicing everything that's important in your life. Write down your tasks. It was very simple stuff. Things got a lot more complicated.

Let me load up a spreadsheet here, a flowchart, rather, what I have on the screen here for those who are watching. This was the getting things done workflow. I don't know if you see this, Jesse, but it's what's he. 1234-5678 910 1112 1314. There's 15 components to this flowchart that has branching decisions that have to be made with some recursive loops in it.

This was this sort of productivity as algorithm type mentality. These systems got more and more complex. We were hoping to outsource our stress to these systems. These systems would manage the fire hose and we at the other end could just have this mine like water, stress free productivity experience of the system takes care of it, and I'm just sort of executing the tasks at the end. So it was like a algorithmic, techno optimistic, super complicated system approach to productivity.

This really spread online. So this is where we begin to get blogs. So this was the age of blogs, pre social media. We got blogs like Merlin Man's 43 folders, which really focused on building these systems and using even more advanced technology and software to implement these David Allen type solutions. A lot of other blogs took off with the same sort of incredibly technical mindset of if we make the software and the systems more complicated, we can find peace, we can find saving from this new technology amplified fire hose of tasks.

There is a term, elite speak term emerged for this productivity prawn. Pr zero in. It was sort of a technolingo for these incredibly complicated techno systems for managing your work and your flows. So there's this growing dread that work was becoming unsustainable and the threat of hope we had using as our sort of gospel. David Allen was like, well, if we just build complicated enough systems in response, we can somehow survive this.

My professional writing career begins during this era. So my first book came out in 2005. My second book came out in 2006. So it was like in the core of this transition. Here's what's interesting about my books, though.

I had read GTD, I got into this world of productivity prawn a little later, probably after my first two books count. But I knew about this changing mindset in this changing world. But my two first books, which were written for students, I remember I was an undergraduate when I wrote my first one and a first year graduate student when I published my second one. So, I mean, I was young. I felt even then that the GTD style thinking, though exhilarating, there was something sort of not stale about it, but dehumanizing.

It didn't feel quite right to me. So my first two books actually drew from the nineties style. My very first book, how to win at college, was a sage advice guide. I actually was directly influenced by how to become CEO. I wrote it exactly the same way.

Provocative rules, but now aimed at students. Sage advice, provocative rules like, oh, I want to learn more about this. Let me read 75 of these, and out of this I'll get some nudges that'll make my student life better. That first book, like a nineties style book, don't do all your reading, make your bed every morning. I mean, I sold that book to my agent because my agent had published Jeff Fox's how to become CEO.

And I wrote her and said, I want to do that book but for students. Right. And of course that worked because she liked that book, because she had purchased and published that book. And that worked out well. My second book, how to become a straight a student.

Classic covey. Right. There's systems in it. Yeah. Here's how you should organize your notes.

Here's how you should prepare for papers. Here's how you should manage your time. But the systems were servicing a greater goal, which is, I want to get good grades without being too overwhelmed. So it's like we have this greater goal, let's build good enough systems. But the focus was simplicity, reducing friction, systems that would be sustainable.

The systems themselves were not fetishized like they were in early two thousands. Productivity literature, where the system itself is what was cool here, what you were looking for is, I want my grades to be better. I don't want to work as much as I'm working. I don't want to be overloaded. The systems were just good enough, and it was.

The ideas were more important. Like, okay, if you want to study, active recall is more important than passive recall. You have to actually try to reproduce the information out loud as opposed to just passively reading it. The systems to help you do that, it's not even that exciting. It's like flashcards, it's like moving back and forth.

So it's very Stephen Covey. This thing is important in your life. Let's just build up some frameworks here to help you achieve that and give you some ideas for how to achieve it. So I was sort of out of step. Early in my advice writing career, I was out of step with what was going on in the cutting edge world of personal productivity writing.

All right, chapter two of this story, 2007 to 2013, roughly. This is the period of lifestyle design. Okay, so here's what happens here. This productivity prawn movement, this idea that increasingly complicated systems will save us from the techno amplified firehose that began to falter as the two thousands went on. Merlin Mann at 43 folders, for example, Merlin Mann got disillusioned.

He's like, my God, I can't make my work life better just by having increasingly complicated systems. He had this book deal to write about these topics on 43 folders. He gave back the money. He's like, I can't write this book. And then he shuttered the website.

And he basically gave this sort of valedictory address where he's like, what really matters is creating stuff that's important, and you just can't be too overloaded to do that. And he just sort of left that whole business. And in general, this sort of very productivity prawn type world began to falter because the fire hose of obligations got stronger, the velocity of work got faster and faster, and nothing was making none of these things, was making that better. It was an interesting hobby for some people to build out their KGTD electrosystems and database management systems. But it wasn't solving the problem.

Then we get this, I don't know, Molotov cocktail of a book in 2007. I'll load it up here. Tim Ferriss, the four hour workweek. The subtitle was escape nine to five, live anywhere and join the new rich. This is the expanded version on here.

The original version came out in 2007. I remember it because I had a mutual friend with Tim Ramit Sethi, who I knew, we're the same age, Ramit and I. And Ramit was like, you got to read this book. My friend Tim wrote this book. You got to read it.

This book was like a bomb being thrown into the world. Because instead of saying, how do we tame what's going on in work? He said, how do we walk away from this world in the first place? It was a book about, he calls it being the new rich, but basically how to actually just wash your hands of the sort of Merlin man. I am inundated with emails, trying to keep up with them, with increasingly complicated systems like, how do we just walk away from that?

And he called his technique lifestyle design. And he sort of got in the weeds. I mean, he had a lot of technical ideas, which was popular, but his big objective was really pretty radical and non technical and not about optimizing and certainly not about productivity. Tim Ferriss is completely misunderstood in this way. It was how do you change the way you think about your work?

And all of his suggestions were about start your own business, heavily automated, learn how to live cheaper, do some work, then take six months off. It was like radical new types of ways of living because people needed release from this increasingly overloaded world of constant incoming work and constant communication. So this book landed like a bomb. It was like permission. This period of like, let's stop trying to keep up and let's just wash our hands of what's happening here altogether.

This was a sort of an exciting idea for sure. And that really, I think, set the mode. You had the financial crisis hit soon after his book comes out. And really this idea is really starting to take hold. People are like, yeah, whatever.

Work to live, don't live to work. I don't want to just be answering emails in a cubic hole and being stressed all day. And so this really kicked off a really influential period. The blogosphere then changed over from productivity prawn 43 folders to this new movement based around minimalism emerged. And it was all about people simplifying their lifestyle, simplifying their possessions, simplifying their jobs.

This is where you like my friends, the minimalist emerged. They left their stressful corporate jobs to live cheaper during this period of their life. They moved to a cabin in Montana and were writing essays from there. Leo Babuda, Zen Habits, a classic blog of this period where he was able to use the sales of his ebook to quit his job and live this really simple life with his six kids. And they lived in San Francisco.

And it was, this was this period of simplification. So we saw this Tim Ferriss influence really go through the sort of the online discourse as well. No one was talking anymore about building more and more complex systems to keep up with work. It was about these alternative lifestyles, how to get away from the crush of work which the financial crisis was telling people. It didn't get us anywhere.

Anyways, after all this effort in the early two thousands, where do we end up? We all got laid off. Anyways, really interesting period. My third book publishes during this time, how to become a high school superstar. Completely influenced by this because what had happened, it's my in my personal writing life, after my second book, I started.

That's when I started my blog and newsletter and pretty quickly, and I've told this story before, but pretty quickly my focus there shifted away from just study habits and over to how do you build a rewarding college career? It was like Tim Ferriss for the Ivy League student. It was how do you avoid overload and stress as a student? How do you find meaning in your life as a student? Get really connected to the ideas and the idea of being a student?

How do we make this not something you're grinding through to try to get to something next, but something that you enjoy while at the same time doing well enough and being interesting enough that you'll have options after you graduate. It was during this period I began to travel the country. I'd give talks at colleges around the country about reducing student stress, about separating overload from ambition. How can you be an ambitious student who wants to do cool things and not have to have your life itself, have a low quality while you're a student? The motto of my blog during this period became do less, do better, know why, which are the same sentiments you've seen echoed in my work ever since.

So I was incredibly influenced. I'm a grad student reading Ferris, reading Zen habits, reading the minimalist, heavily influenced during this period. What matters is building a really good life. Work serves that. Be very careful about how this happened.

So it's like this really interesting countercultural period that a lot of us have forgotten. So my third book lands in this space, how to become a high school superstar. It's actually like a very subversive book. My editor left and then like three more editors got fired. And by the time it finally landed on the editor who published that, they had no connection to it.

They don't know what I had originally pitched. I could write whatever I wanted. It's technically a college admissions guide, but it's written like a Malcolm Gladwell book. And the whole premise of the book is following these students I called relaxed superstars who got into good colleges without being overloaded or stressed or grinding. I was trying to push out this alternative notion of ambition and success that could be interesting and slow and engaging and not stressful.

And the book got into the biology of impressiveness and how we think about and measure and understand people's accomplishments. It's a really interesting, weird, kind of quirky book. It's the first time I had ideas followed by advice. That two part structure you see in a lot of my other books going forward. Cool book, my least read book because of the title and the period where it came out, but also, I think, one of my most subversives.

So I was heavily influenced. So I wasn't influenced by productivity prawn, basically. My early books were nineties style books. I skipped the whole productivity prawn period, heavily embraced the lifestyle design period in my blog and in my third book, and then in my fourth book, 2012, I come out with so good, they can't ignore you. It's all about like, how do you build a career that you have control over?

I said, don't follow your passion. Get good at things. Use that as leverage to build a career that you really like. Because at the time, I really was allergic to this idea of work in which you're overloaded and lots of people can put stuff on your plate and you're stressed out and your work feels like you're in the office space movie. I said, the only way to avoid that is you got to be really good and just dictate your own terms.

And the stories in that book are of people who got really good and just decided what they wanted their work life to be like. Like the database developer Lulu, who would do freelance engagements, incredibly high paid because she was very good and she would do an engagement for half a year and then take three months off and then do another engagement and then take another four months off. Like, that's the way to do it, you know? So this was very, those books were very heavily influenced by lifestyle design. The interesting thing is people don't, people don't remember that period.

Like when people are thinking about productivity now, personal productivity, they forget that there was this very influential period in which it was very subversive and countercultural. I think they kind of jumped back in their memory to the productivity prawn period. So, like, that's what personal productivity is. They also forget the nineties when it was sage advice and self actualization and optimism. It's a much richer narrative than I think people realize.

All right, this brings us to chapter 320 14 to 2019. This is the period of fighting back. So what happened during this period is lifestyle design and minimalism. Very aspirational. But you know, most people still had jobs.

A lot of those people got older. They got in their thirties or into their forties. I still have jobs. I got to support my kids, private school tuition or whatever. I'm not going to start an online business that sells french striped sailors shirts.

An actual example from Tim Ferriss book, which I can then automate with Vas from India and go to Mendoza, the mountains and Argentina to drink wine. No, my job is still, I'm overloaded. The same problems are there that were there in the early two thousands. Tons of work coming at me, the velocity of work with email, and now we had slack in the picture. It's just so fast.

I'm interrupted all the time. I can't really get anything done. My workload is out of control. All those problems are still there. And we weren't all going to become Leo Babuda and live off of our ebook sales.

This created a new period in which the books in the productivity space began to say, let's fight back within the confines of work itself. Let's try to change work. Let's fight back and say the way we're working isn't working, and let's fight back against it. Not an escape plan as in the era before, not a plan to cope with it as in the area before that. But let's actually fight back.

I think that the definitive book that kicked off this era, I'll load this on the screen here, is Greg McKeown's 2014 book, the disciplined pursuit of less so in essentialism. I'll read you the description. Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin? Simultaneously felt overworked and underutilized? Felt busy but not productive?

Felt like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people's agendas? If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the way of the essentialist. Essentialism is more than a time management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter. So Greg was saying we have to fight back, and he was focusing in particular on the workload issue, that we had more and more work piling up on our plates.

And he said, you got to push back and say, no, if I do fewer things, it's going to be better. I want to do things that matter. Stop giving me this other stuff. And he gives all these stories in the book about, hey, this actually works out. You're more valuable if you do that.

You're not valuable trying to juggle 100 things. You're just trying to satisfy people in the moment when you say yes, but you're not satisfying yourself or your organization in the long run because you're overwhelmed and nothing actually gets done. This kicked off this period of books about pushing back and trying to redefine work. My fifth book came out in this period, deep work, also a fighting back book. So if Greg was worried about workload, deep work, was worried about the high velocity and interruption and was saying, this is a terrible way to use the human brain to try to create valuable things, we got to push back against this focus.

Undistracted focus is what really creates the value. So if your workday is set up to make it impossible to get undistracted focus, you're in trouble. Your Ford factory with, like, the lights out, we don't know where to put the stuff on the car. We have to change the way we work and make focus something we really care about more than we care about responsiveness, more than we care about the speed at which things can be answered. Information can move.

Focus is the key state. We got to practice it. We got to protect it. This was also a fighting back book. Gary Keller's one thing, another fighting back book.

So this was a period where personal productivity books were really about how do we try to fix a knowledge work world that really isn't working at this point? I've now become a professor. Deep work is the first book I write entirely while a professor. I write that while I'm an assistant professor. At the time, sort of pre tenure, I'm a computer scientist.

I'm also beginning to get more interested in the impact of technology in our lives. So deep work is really the first book where I'm explicitly dealing with technology and how it impacts our lives. All of my books since then, much more explicitly deal with that topic. When I start writing for the New Yorker a few years after that, I'm specifically dealing with technology. So this is for people who get confused by my bibliography.

This is the turning point where my writing has this technological thread through it where the books before it so good they can't ignore you. The college books obviously were sort of just their own thing. All right, this brings us to chapter four in this short history of personal productivity. I'm going to put this from like 2019 to 2023. You could call this either the period of deconstructing productivity or, depending on your point of view, the productivity winter.

Now, the key book in this era that kicks it off in 2019, I'm going to put up on the screen here is Ginny O'Dell's book how to do nothing, resisting the attention economy. This book got a lot of elite press. Look at this list. It was a best book of the year by time the New Yorker, NPR, etcetera. The New York Times Book review really liked it, called it a complex, smart, and ambitious book that at first reads like a self help manual, then blossoms into a wide ranging political manifesto.

I'll read you one paragraph from this. Far from the simple anti technology screed or the back to nature meditation we read so often, how to do nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, the book will change how you see your place in our world. By the way, a quick aside, this is always something that kind of catches my ire look, it says far from the simple anti technology screed that we read so often, no one is writing those screeds again, everything that talks about technology always posits this world in which everyone is saying we should stop using technology so that the author who's saying, well, that's too simple, somehow seems like an intellectually complex hero. I'm yet again to find a book that says let's just all stop using technology anyways.

This book had a really big impact, especially in elite circles. I knew it well because my 6th book, digital minimalism, came out the same week as Ginnys Book. So we were covered together a lot because Ginnys book wasnt really about work and productivity, but thats the way it eventually became interpreted. Ill get to that in a second. But it was meant to be about the attention economy and looking at our phones.

And so our two books got covered a lot. So like Gio Tolentino wrote in the page of the New Yorker, a long article where she grappled with both my book and Ginny's book. The New York Times Book review did a big roundup that included my book and Ginny's book. The Ringer had an article that talked about my book and Ginny's book. So we sort of got to know each other.

We were being covered a lot in the press. Odell's work kicked off this new period because it did something new. It brought academic formalisms into thinking about these type of issues of work and productivity in particular. Odell was heavily influenced and I guess, worked on, studied the italian Marxist Franco Berardi. And so she was basically adapting a Berardi style marxist argument to the more modern tools of the information age.

We don't need to get into the details of it. Berardi had basically updated a lot of modernist marxist ideas to knowledge work. Right. This was like one of Berardi's big contributions. It's like, well, classic Marxism is industrialism, capital, factory owners, right?

It's an industrial narrative. And he helped sort of update it to a knowledge work era. And then Ginny further updated it, applied his approach to, in particular, she was talking about our relationship to our phone. So she had these narratives about were using social media, et cetera, all the time, because in a berardian style, we had internalized these narratives of capital production, and every moment was something to be monetized. It was sort of classic, newer marxist type stuff.

Quickly, however, her critique was generalized by the receiving audience because it talked a lot about our need to be productive all the time in this sort of internalized way, is why we're using social media all the time. But it generalized real easily to just work and productivity anyways. It introduced this whole notion of, we can use these marxist academic formalisms in critiquing productivity. And this was a hit, especially in more sort of elite circles. It's timed very well because you sort of have the post Donald Trump election as part of the, the left's backlash against that is, you saw in many areas what were formerly more academic narratives on topics sort of burst into the mainstream.

So we began to get all these much more complicated, sort of left wing academic ideas burst into the mainstream post Trump. So it was like a perfect time for a very smart academic critique of productivity to like, yeah, they could ride those tailwinds soon. You would find basically, like, any conversation you would have with a reporter about productivity was using this sort of terminology. The sort of Odellian terminology was where we began hearing about sort of the performativity of work, etcetera. Once this was part of the slipstring, then we had other modes of critique came to productivity.

In particular, the postmodern critical critiques, which were really big and sort of identity product, identity politics and critical race theory. This sort of. These aren't Marxists now. These are postmodern style critiques. These began to really be applied as well.

So there's a lot of sort of elite academic style energy turned on the topic of productivity, which is sort of why I think of this as the productivity winter. So the goal of these critiques was the deconstruction of productivity, seeking the problematic that's inherent in the substructures that hold up the whole notion of the concept of productivity. A lot of focus began on who was being left out. They would use the term discourse. This is a postmodern term, foucaultian term, actually.

Who was being left out? Why do we even need to work in the first place? Look, if you're an academic, it's really interesting to study the elite discourses around productivity, because it was mixing, sometimes contradicting styles of analysis were all being put here. A marxist analysis would really jump in and be like, why do we even work in the first place? This is like the late stage capitalism.

It's very marxist modernist argument. But then you have these postmodern arguments also piling on, even though they don't play nicely with marxist modernist arguments, talking about the discourses and the way that productivity plays with received language, a sort of negative theory, literary critical approach. These don't play well together, but they were all piling on the issue of productivity. So a lot of the focus began during this period on who. Does this advice not apply to what's problematic about it?

Have you given sufficient caveats to signal your awareness of this analysis or this, or who might be upset about it? Missing someone in your discussion became much more important than whether the advice you were giving generally was useful or not, or was accurate or not. It really became an interesting moment. But what's interesting, we also got a lot of sort of standard, sort of postmodern trauma language, psychological language, exhaustion language, etcetera. Interesting period.

All of this, though I'm going to fuel. I think the same fuel exists throughout this whole period, which is we are exhausted by knowledge work. We have too much work on our plates, and the velocity of working on this work is too fast. The same problem that began in the early two thousands, the same fire that began burning the same two thousands and burned and caused the lifestyle design pushback and then led to the fighting back era of books. The same fire was there.

And if anything, we get the pandemic during this period, which makes that fire even brighter. That's what's the same thing fueling it. It's just the response to it now because of the political moment and Odell's really smart book. And by the way, this is like one of the smartest books on productivity I've seen written in a long time, because it's actual, this is like original academic work that Odell was doing. She was adapting Berati's argument from knowledge work to the attention economy.

It was recognized because I think it was truly really smart work. But this became the vector through which we dealt with the same fire that already been there. So for this three or four year period, this is how we were dealing with the unsustainability. This was our primal scream of rejection of what work had become, was, okay, we're going to just sort of deconstruct productivity itself now. Of course, that wasn't going to solve the problem.

It wasn't going to solve the problem that we had too much to do and the velocities too fast. We could deconstruct and problematized and yell into the wind about, like, discussions of productivity as much as we wanted. But the problem all that productivity talk was trying to solve is still there. So this brings us to chapter five, where we are now. It's not exactly clear where we are now, but I would say we're moving out of that moment of the productivity winter and into some sort of new phase of our engagement with, unfortunately, the problems that still exist and have existed now for over two decades.

So one sign that we're moving out of the productivity winter is two months ago, I published my book slow productivity, one of the first books in steep work that sort of was explicitly dealing with this issue in elite circles, the sort of deconstructing productivity crowd. It got sort of a mixed review, right? Because they're still around and it's still like, why are we talking about productivity? Who are you leaving out? Are you signaling the right things?

Why do we even care about work? And why aren't you talking about deconstructing capitalism? Like, that's still there. But the general audience is buying the book. So slow productivity comes out two months ago, debuts number two on the New York Times bestseller list.

Might have been number one if not for James Clare Atomic habits. There was a big bulk order that week, too. They had the symbol so there's a big bulk order that week, but whatever is a popular book, it's the biggest first two months I've ever had with a book. We've moved 75,000 units in just like a couple months. People are interested in this topic from a more practical perspective again.

So even though the productivity winter crowd is still like we shouldn't talk about, we shouldn't be giving advice, we should be deconstructing it. People want to talk about it again, so we're entering in some sort of new phase. The characteristics of our current relationship with personal productivity, I think, builds on a lot of our experiences of the last 20 years. I wrote down a few points I think roughly characterize our current moment. One, we're wary of the potential for exploitation or managerial shenanigans or institutional excesses at work.

Things that the productivity winner crowd cares about. But we also still care about the idea of work and doing things well is appealing. We do want advice. We might not accept it all, and that's okay. We want just to hear good ideas, and we'll decide what we like and what we don't.

That's characteristic of the moment. We're ready to hear ideas, even if they don't all apply to me. Let's get more ideas out here. Three, the goal in discussion productivity right now needs to be about two things at once, doing great work, having sustainable and flourishing life. We somehow have to mix those two things together.

We've now tried the rejecting work thing several times. We tried it with the lifestyle design interlude. We've tried it with the deconstructing productivity and late stage capitalism interlude. It's just not sticking. So we do want to talk about doing work better.

We also want to talk about our life being sustainable and flourishing as a non negotiable, as whatever system we talk about. I would say we do care about the nitty gritty of organizing tasks and time. I've seen this even from more of the elite crowds. But we only care about this to the degree that it helps with our bigger goals. It's a very Stephen Covey I want to be organized with my stuff, but I don't care about the system that much.

I don't want to fetishize my system and build some complex computer thing and build flowcharts and argue endlessly about the details of it. I just want a good enough system that my stuff and time is organized enough that I can make progress on the point before, which is I want to do well in work and I want my life to be sustainable and flourishing. Finally, I think we agree there's something broken about the high tech office that needs more systemic fixes. Like the way we're working isn't working. We need to actually have major changes to the way we think about instructure work.

But in the meantime, I want to work on what I can do as an individual to make my life better. So, again, two thoughts in our heads at the same time. How do we advocate for making work better, better structurally, while also making my specific life and work better right now? I think these are the things that are in the air right now. What people are looking for from personal productivity.

I don't know what to call this. One alternative is humanistic productivity. This productivity that is grounded deeply in sort of the dignity of humans and the drive of humans to live flourishing lives. So what should we care about specifically, then, in this humanistic era of productivity 2024? What are the things now, if you are interested in productivity that you should care about?

Well, I'll give you my answer. So if you listen to this podcast or read my book, slow productivity, I really have four pillars that I think define the way I'm engaging with personal productivity right now. Number one, you should do fewer things at once. Doing too many things. Overload is a huge cause of derangement and exhaustion and burnout.

It's not a great way to produce things. Two, you should work at a natural pace. Give things the time that's actually required to get them done, the realistic amount of time. Vary your intensity over time. You know, slow down.

It turns out what people want, what clients want, what your bosses want, what you know you need in your life is you need clear deadlines. That's good. You need to be held accountable and go after deadlines. But no one knows or cares if that deadline is very realistic or very short. So just make them very realistic.

Your life will be better. Craft really matters. You should care a lot about quality and craft. That's what makes work sustainable. When you're doing something you're proud of, you're going to get much more out of work.

Also, when you're doing something you're really good of and proud of, you get more leverage to control your work and get the nonsense out of it. So that's got to be a core of any modern sense of personal productivity. And finally, you need to organize your time. You need to organize your tasks, and you need to organize how you collaborate and communicate with people. People.

It matters if you don't care about these things. It's a huge unforced error. That's going to make it very difficult for you to succeed with any of those other pillars. However, you don't want to worry too much about those things. You want good enough organization of your time and your task and your communication that it helps the three pillars that come before.

But no more than that. We're done with that early two thousands period of fetishizing systems. You have to be organized. But we don't obsess over organization. Those are my four pillars for what personal productivity should be right now.

So anyways, I think this is a really interesting history because we only typically get little bits of it when people are talking about this. When people think about personal productivity, they'll think about the early two thousands productivity prawn period. This is what it is. Or they'll think about maybe the Stephen Covey period, or maybe they just think about now the deconstruction period. But we never get the whole story.

I think as much richer and more interesting and a reflection of our culture over the last 30 years of what we're doing and what we're thinking and what we're dealing with. It's a much more interesting narrative. I think a lot of people just simplify this to there's a hustle culture and everyone's telling you just to get more done. And systems, I don't know. Right?

That's so not only just simplistic but wrong. This is a much richer field. My entire professional life, my writing has sort of orbited advice and being organized and productivity is often close. Sometimes not too close, but often closer. I'm surrounded.

So I've watched this close up that is the saga of productivity over the last 20 years. I like this humanistic productivity place we've ended up now. I think it's learned and built on all the lessons that we have encountered over the last 20 or 30 years. But I'm sure this definition will continue to evolve as things go forward. But anyways, in honor of the two month anniversary of slow productivity and the two decade anniversary of me being a professional writer, I thought it'd be interesting to really get the deep history of what we've been doing with this topic over the past 20 years.

So there we go. Jesse, it's a complicated history. What do you think is going to happen in the next ten years? It depends on what AI does. I think.

I think whether or not AI has a big impact will affect the next ten years. I'm hoping we're going to see more systemic changes in the way we run knowledge work. If we can dampen down the underlying fire of too much to do and too high of a velocity of work, you can tamp down that fire. We'll all get a lot more breathing room, and I think it'll be better. So I hope that comes next.

We might be running out of what we can do as individuals unless AI does something different. So I hope we actually tamp down that fire. We'll see. I mean, I've written whole books about this. It's difficult.

Yeah, but we'll see. Anyways, it's a cool field and it's a rich field, not one to dismiss. There's all sorts of different voices at all sorts of different levels who are getting to this. All right, well, anyways, we've got a cool q and a coming up where Scott Young is going to join me, will answer questions. He'll tell us about his book.

But first, let's briefly hear from one of our sponsors.

All right, this shows, this show is brought to you by betterhelp. So I saw an interesting comment recently on an interview I did where we were talking about productivity, so relevant to the deep dive, and someone in the comments said, yeah, but can you address the difficulty of worrying about organizing your work when you're dealing with psychological pain? It's really difficult. Just like if you had really bad knee pain, it'd be really hard to focus on. Let me organize my task and make good use of my time and care about these pillars of slow productivity because you'd be so distracted by your knee pain.

Well, this commenter was saying, what about psychological pain? I think it's a fantastic point. We need to take that seriously. If there is distress mentally, be it ruminations, anxiety, depressive symptoms, this is something we have to address as a core part of thinking about just flourishing professionally, being productive, in whatever definition we want to use for what we mean by productive. This is where Betterhelp enters the scene.

Betterhelp makes it easy to get the professional therapy that can help you deal with the psychological aspects relevant to living a flourishing and productive life. Now, here's why Betterhelp makes this easy. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist.

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That's Betterhelp. H Dash e dash p.com deep questions I also want to talk about our friends at Notion, a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It's a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. We're fans of notions here at the Deep Question podcast because I am a big fan of building custom information systems for the work you do regularly. Otherwise, what you end up doing is just your work unfolds with just a bunch of emails and files attached to emails, and you try to track down various word documents that are somewhere in your archive.

Notion lets you build these data centric systems and data views and processes. You can customize them for exactly what you need. We've used them here, for example, for keeping track of our advertisers. For the podcast, notion allowed the system to be built out where you can see the information, all different views. Show me the ads we're reading this week.

Let me look at this advertiser. Show me all the ads we've done for this advertiser. Let's look at this advertiser. And this day when we did the reading, where can we put the, we'll put the pointers right there to where in the episode the timestamp was, etcetera. These custom systems that just made this repeated task easier.

Well, one of the things I wanted to tell you about notion is that they have been increasingly integrating AI directly into the app, and this has been a game changer. So the AI that they've integrated, it's directly in the tool. It's not a separate chat window you open up in a separate browser tab. It's right there in the notion tool. It allows you to do things, for example, like generate ideas for text.

Can you make action items from, I just put in a transcript here of a meeting. Can you automatically generate action items also? And this is the part I like the best, it allows you to interrogate your data. So you're like, I'm looking for, can you help me find all natural language? Can you help me find the ad copy from this advertiser from February?

And using language models can say, yeah, here it is, here's the information. So now you can find, as your systems get more complex, you can find the information you're looking for easier. So notion, with the power of AI, is a fantastic tool for anyone who's doing anything non trivial with information and wants to build the type of smart custom processes I talk about here and in my books, you got to give notion a look. Here's the good news. You can try notion for free when you go to notion.com cal.

Do that in all lowercase letters, notion.com Cal C A L and start turning ideas into action. And when you use our link, you will be supporting our show. That's notion.com cal. Now let's get to our Q and A with special guest host Scott Young.

All right, so it's time to answer some questions. As I previewed, we have a special guest to help me with the questions today, my long time friend, Scott Young. Scott is an expert in a lot of areas. I often think about him as sort of one of the leading voices in thinking about learning how you learn things, how you learn new skills, how you learn new subjects. I also with Scott, always feel like the way he approaches life and talks about life really resonates with the deep life we talk about here.

I think Scott is very intentional about how he approaches things, so his advice is infused with that deep life magic we love here. I'm happy to have him here so we can get a couple opinions on these questions. Scott, the reason why you're here, this episode versus another, is that you do have a new book that came out. I think it came out or is coming out tomorrow. So if you're listening to this on the day the podcast drops, it's coming out on the 7th, I believe.

The book is called get better at anything. Twelve maxims for mastery. Scott, I have my blurb here. I'm going to read my own blurb. I said the ability to efficiently learn hard things is like a superpower.

In this phenomenally wise book, Scott H. Young reveals exactly how to obtain it. So, Scott, thanks for helping me out here at the Q and A. Do you want to give us, before we get going, what's your sort of elevator pitch you've been testing out for the book right now? Why is my audience interested here?

Scott Young

Yeah, so the book is sort of a deep dive into how learning works, understanding what are the fundamental ingredients that you have to get right to make improvement. And so I break it down to three components, which we subdivide into these twelve maxims. So there's c. Learning from other people. Most of what we know comes from other people.

And so the ability to learn and understand what the best practices are, what the right way to perform skills or solve problems are, really determines to a large extent, how quickly we can learn ourselves do, which is practice. Obviously, you need a lot of practice to get good at something, but not just every kind of practice is equally good. And so I spent a lot of time talking about how sometimes we need to make tweaks to our practice so we actually make progress and don't just plateau. And then finally, feedback. We need to get corrective information from the environment, from other people, in order to fine tune our performance.

So there's a lot of interesting research on how feedback works, when it works, when it doesn't work. And I go into a lot of those details in the book. So if you've wanted a handbook that will sort of map out this really complicated domain of learning science, cognitive science, it will give you a lot of pointers for getting started in your own improvement efforts. I don't know if you remember this, Scott, but in the early days of my study hacks blog, back when we first knew each other, I used to have a link on the side to the Cambridge manual for performance. It was like the academic book that Anders Eriksen wrote.

I love talking about Cambridge manuals. The Cambridge manual. It was this dense book, and my readers were like, well, I know you like Anders Eriksen, but my God, I can't follow this. So we've come a long way because you make this information so successful. Let me ask you, I mean, before we get to the readers questions.

Cal Newport

Question for you. For me. So, you know, from my list, Cal asks, what is it? Like, a lot of my audience wants to master things, right? I want to learn this skill so I have more leverage.

I'm trying to, like, change some aspect of my life, et cetera. What is it that people are most likely or often miss from this framework when they just try to go after mastering things without mastering the process of mastering things? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to point to one exact thing. Cause I find with, like, different skills, there tends to be different tripping points. So, I mean, you and I have had a lot of conversations about writing and the writing industry.

Scott Young

And it seems to me from, like, viewing people who, like, wanna write books, that this c component, this ability to, like, learn what is the best practice, what are the ingredients you need to have to succeed as a writer, are just missing. And so the problem is not that people aren't doing enough writing, even though you have, like, things. Like, I know your favorite month is national novel write month, but you have things like this where people are, like, churning out all their own writing because they think the problem that I'm not writing enough. And the problem is, actually, you don't understand how this field works. You don't understand how to navigate what are, in some cases, a fairly narrow corridor of success.

But then there's other skills where, you know, the problem, I think, is often it is very much leaning on this lack of practice or the right kind of practice. So, you know, I've, I've spent some time learning languages, a bit of a hobby of mine. And I can say, you know, with definite certainty that the maximum, you know, the majority of people who go through language classes, you know, spanish class in high school, the problem, the reason they don't speak Spanish after it is that they have not done enough speaking, enough listening to achieve fluency. So they know about grammar and conjugation and some vocabulary, but they don't feel comfortable speaking it. And so they're never going to use it outside of the classroom.

And so I think, you know, part of writing this book and part of working on it is sort of trying to label and identify these common problems and what are the mechanisms behind it so you can see yourself in them and be like, oh, this is my issue right here. And this is sort of what research says is the best way to overcome it. And so the real, the diversity of problems are often a bigger thing than just like, well, just do this one thing, one simple trick. It's not quite, but I think if you understand the manual, you can make progress. You're speaking our language here.

Cal Newport

Yeah, especially with the c portion. We're always talking about that evidence based planning. Yes. My audience could probably say this with me. Don't write the story you want to be true about how you get good at something.

Learn the story that actually is true. It might not be what you want, but there's great power and actually understanding. Oh, this is how this field works. This is what skill means. Here's how it's measured.

Here's how people get good at this skill. We always love to write our own stories. National Novel writing month is a big one. If I just do this, I just forced myself, in one month, I will have this brilliant book that everyone will buy, and it's not the way it works out. All right, so we got a bunch of questions here now to match the deep dive I did earlier, they're all roughly surrounding productivity and productivity related issues.

So, Scott, in my deep dive, I was talking about my history, like, the evolution of the field of productivity from when I first started working in it to where it is now. So they're kind of vaguely around there, but I think this will be a good chance to talk about mastery and just other things you think about. All right. Yeah. First question.

This comes from Alex. Alex says my file organization system can be a hindrance to deep work blocks in my job, I run a lot of tests, so I usually have separate folders for each test with a text file of the reason for the test and the conclusion. But I spend too much time searching through my project archives for similar cases to apply to new projects. An approach like the para method by Thiago Forte is okay, but I can't quite abstract it to my case. All right, so this is an in the weeds questions.

First of all, Scott, I know you know thiago. Do you know the para method? Do you know what he might be referring to there? Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Young

So he talks about this in building a second brain. I'm not. I won't give a spiel about what the para method is. I think that's probably something best left for Thiago. But if anyone's interested, Thiago react.

He wrote building a second brain, a very interesting book on this, kind of, like, emerging. It's old, but it's also new. This trend of doing note taking systems and the para method. I think he has a second follow on book, just focused on that, about how do you organize your knowledge and information. Now, I think it's interesting because I spend a lot of time thinking about this from a writerly context of, like, writing books, because with this book in particular, I had a lot of research that I had to cover.

And I remember when I was writing my first book, Ultra Learning, I was not too careful about how I organized the research, and I was like, I'm going to print off all these academic papers. And I just had, like, binders of papers. And then when it came to, like, where was that paper that said x? Oh, my God. It was a nightmare.

It was just like, trying to find these things and looking over dogs, documents and this kind of stuff. And so I do think when you're dealing with big projects with lots of files, having a good file system is going to be very important. Now, it sounds like this is like a programming kind of question. I don't want to give, like, a programming specific answer. I'm not in this person's job giving, you know, dealing with lots of different tests.

But I think the big thing that you want to think about when you're creating any kind of sort of external knowledge management system is you have to think about, like, what is the context when you're going to want to retrieve it, what is the context when you're going to want to be able to retrieve that? And you want to be, as you're creating it, creating tags or little breadcrumbs that you can find that information later based on that information. So, you know, a big thing that I did when I was going through all of my research is that there was a big period of time where I was just reading research, and I didn't have like a, this is what the book is going to be yet. And then once I sort of started having ideas, I went through all the research and kind of categorized it as opposed to like, you know, okay, this is about this topic or this topic in research, and I put these little tags on it. And then that way, when I was looking for information on expertise, for instance, or transfer of learning or problem solving or this kind of stuff, it was much easier to find those particular breadcrumbs.

So I think part of the problem is if you just sort of organize things, you make this big, complicated file system. If you're not thinking about what's the retrieval concept, what is the situation where I'm going to be looking for it? What are going to be the keywords that come to mind? What are going to be these systems that I'm going to want to pull up? You're right, it can be very difficult to find things later.

So I think that's something that, I don't think there's a one sentence answer for everyone, but if you can think about where you're going to retrieve the information, it makes a big difference in designing the system. Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of good enough low friction systems. When it comes to personal systems, it's good enough. I can largely find what I need, for the most part, pretty easily, and the friction of using it is very low. This is the problem I often have with more complicated information management systems, is the friction of just using the system, of entering everything into the system begins to become an obstacle that you stop using it.

Cal Newport

It's like the old fashioned Zettelkasten, where you have to have all these numbers with the slashes, and eventually you stop writing the numbers and the slashes. So what? So let's reveal our actual technology for our bookwriting. Let's see if this is useful. So I use Scrivener, and when I'm working on a book, so I just have, there's a research folder in Scrivener, and I create subfolders for different topics, and I put in links and articles and my own notes into those folders.

I might have 30 different folders by the time I'm working on a book. I sometimes lose things, but for the most part, I'm like, okay, I can more or less find what I'm looking for. These 30 self name folders is enough. It's a good enough system, and the friction is very low. If I can just grab an article and throw it in a folder in Scrivener, and I know it'll sit there until I need to go to it.

What actual tech did you use working on your latest book? Yeah. So I had two processes, because most of the research was derived from either reading academic papers, which I downloaded and placed in one giant folder. So there's like 600 papers in this one folder. And I also sorted out like a queue of, like, to be read red, and then, like, ones that I decided I'm not going to read just because that also helped clear things up.

Scott Young

You don't want to, like, be mixing up things like what am I reading next? Versus what's what I've already read. And then for books, every time I would finish a book, I would go through it very quickly, copy any important highlights. So if it was a paper book, I just make very brief notes about, like quotes and things that were important. Like if they mentioned some research or some finding that I thought was interesting, I would put it.

And also I would do, like, my kind of high level retrieval. This is what the book was about. These were some of the issues that were brought up, so that when I reflect back on the book, I have like one page that I can search through, as opposed to the whole book. So I did that with books. And yeah, with papers, any digital document, I would do highlights.

And especially if there was something that was going to be a theme, like something that I knew I was going to be wanting to talk about later, I would sometimes, occasionally, using just the Mac preview thing, just put an annotation with one word about that thing. So if this is a interesting study about transfer, I could just write transfer, or I could just write, you know, problem solving or one of those things. Now, as I said, the way it worked for me is that I did a lot of this research not quite knowing the shape of the book. So there was a period where I was still figuring out what's the best way to organize it, where I actually went through all of these notes and put them in a system called the archive, which is closer to a Zettelkassen system. But for me, it wasn't about like maintaining that system.

It was just kind of like, okay, I've got like 500 papers here and I need to compress them full further because even looking through those highlights is going to take too long. And so I need some kind of like, you know, all the research on this is just in one big thing, and I have like 20 citations and I can just remind myself, oh, yeah, this was the paper where someone said this example or this kind of, wait. How does that archive, how does that work? Don't you pull up. The archive is a software that uses like, just uses like, txt files.

So it basically allows you to make a bunch of like, very simple notes and then you can link to other notes in there. So I could say, like, I made one where it's like expert novice differences, because that was a whole area of research. And then I went through, when I was going through my papers, every time there was a paper like, okay, so and so and so and so talk about expert novices, like so and so in this book talks about this, and I would give these examples and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then that way, when I was writing the chapter where I talk about some of these, some of this literature on expertise, and it's sort of like, oh, I want to say, you know, these are some of the fields where this phenomena has been found. I already have the five things because they're written down there.

But I think that process of converting it to a, like a certified Zettelkasten system for me at least, was not something that was like I was just doing continuously throughout the whole project. I kind of is the same as you. Like, I started with like a relatively easy, simple system, and then once there was so much, it was like, okay, I'm going to refactor. You know, using a programming analogy. I know there's a lot of programmers who follow you, Cal.

That's often what you're doing when you're writing code is that you start working on a library and you work it, and then it gets messier and uglier and they're like, okay, let's refactor it. And you kind of rewrite the library because now you know what the shape of it's going to be. So I think of that way with research. I don't think I would do that with every book, but with this one, which was a lot more like, what's the state of the science for different fields? And I don't even know how I'm going to use it.

Exactly. It was. It was kind of necessary. So I spent, like, a couple days just reorganizing notes. All right, so here's a nerd question on that, though.

Cal Newport

So let's say in the archive, you create a page for expert systems or something like this. How are you then connecting that to papers on expert systems? Is this like a backlinking system or each of those papers. Oh, I just. Or you just like the name?

Scott Young

I would just put the name, like, you know, like, the really brief citation. Like, you know, this is, like, you know, Simon, whatever, 2008 or, you know, that kind of thing. And then, because the way I saved. I saved all of the file names for the papers with, like, first author name and then, you know, title of the paper. Then you just, you know, if you want to find the paper, because there's, like, 600 files in this folder, you just, like, sort by name, and then you scroll, scroll to find the name.

Because usually there were some examples where you actually, like, finding the correct paper by that person could be hard. You know, a lot of people seem to have the last name Anderson in this field. So I have, like, I had to, like, put different Andersons because there's, like, multiple ones. But. But, I mean, for the most part, you know, there's gonna be, like, I'm only gonna have maybe, you know, less than a dozen papers by a single author.

So if I say, you know, Simon, and then the date, it's usually fine finding it. But it wasn't so much for me. It wasn't so much about, like, I need to make this, like, an extremely user friendly system. It was just, you know, the problem that I often have with writing, and I'm sure you do as well, is that you read an enormous amount. And if the idea is not really referenceable by, like, well, I know it's from this book, or I know it's so and so's biography or so and so's this.

It can be hard to find things later. And so I think, you know, like, I also did that with some stories, too. I wrote about Octavia Butler, and there wasn't a single source. I kind of went through, like, dozens of different interviews. And so when I was compiling things for her, I made a special file where I was like, okay, it's from this book.

It's from this book. Because otherwise, you're just, like. You're looking through, like, a dozen books to be like, where did this thing come up? That was pretty good. That would work well for this paragraph that I'm writing right now.

Cal Newport

Yeah, yeah, well, that's interesting. I mean, I would say, especially with scientific papers, when you're writing books, this type of having something helps. I had so my slow productivity, end of science, a lot of science, because my whole point with that book was I was taking a break from science papers. But for email, for example, I remember one of the things I did is I said, I'm going to read every paper Gloria Mark wrote. I was like, okay.

Her research is like, I just need to know this research in and out. But then I had a folder of 25 Gloria Mark's papers, which is Mark's, 1986. So then I wrote a key. So I made a document, and it was like, okay, each name and a description of like, okay, here's what's in this paper. Here's what's in that paper.

And that was very useful. So I'd be like, oh, I know, Gloria wrote something relevant to this. And I could look through that key and be like, yes, it was this 2006 paper. Then go to that paper and pull out the quotes. But I think what we have in common here is good enough.

You build a system that solves the big problems you have, as opposed to where I would worry for Alex is thinking about the system doing more cognition. That's typically where I haven't seen a lot of success. So this idea of I'm building a very complicated system not to make it easier to find something that I sort of remember or like. I read a few papers on this. Where are they?

But this idea that the system itself is going to surface new insights I didn't already have, that I'm going to follow serendipitously out of these links, and these maps are going to emerge. Oh, I didn't even think about that idea. I can make a chapter about it. To me, that often belies the complexity and difficulty of getting a good idea. It's a very personal, subjective, in your brain process.

So good. I think that's a good distinction you can have. A system needs to be as complicated as needed based on the volume of information. So, Alex, whatever is complicated enough and no more complicated than that, so that you're like, okay, I can more or less find the different tests. It might be a naming convention for your folders.

It might be. I actually have tags, and I'm going to move these into a system where I can have tags and tag them. Different things, but just complicated enough and no more complicated. I think an idea that's really useful here when we're talking about this, is that there's a balancing act, because the more complicated and sophisticated your note taking system is, the more work you're doing as you process information, you're going to slow down your throughput. And for me, I think the big thing in writing a book like this is just, can you read like ten times what a normal person would read on this topic?

Scott Young

That's how you build that kind of knowledge base so you can know what you're talking about. And so you don't want to slow that down too much, but you don't want to have the opposite problem where it's like 30% of the time you just can't find the thing that, you know, you saw and you spend all day looking for it. So it's kind of, you're doing a bit of this balancing act. And I think it does depend also, again, like I said, on how much information is in it. If I have a, you know, if I'm writing an essay on a topic and there's going to be ten papers, I don't worry about anything.

But if it's going to be like I'm writing, you know, you're writing a book and you have hundreds, then. So your system should scale to, like, how difficult is the search cost going to be for finding this later compared to the, you know, extra work of annotating and organizing in the beginning? Exactly. Yeah. And I like your idea of, you read a bunch of stuff and then later when you're moving stuff into a more retrievable system, a lot of filtering is going on.

Cal Newport

There probably was a lot of stuff you read initially that turned out to be not at all relevant. And who wants to sit there creating a complex whatever for each of these papers that you weren't going to use? All right, this next question, a tricky one. A neo, it's an interesting one. He says, despite a track record of high achievement and the appearance of being adept at nearly everything I tackle, my secret is that my effort towards my goals is minimal.

I've become what I call a goal machine, achieving maximum grades on exams and excelling in interviews despite my procrastination and suboptimal effort. This paradox of achieving great results with minimal understanding is taking a toll on me, leading to a destructive cycle of diminishing effort and quality in my work. How do I become the person I've so convincingly portrayed to discover my potential by genuinely committing to my values? Well, neo, this is nice and self aware. A couple points I'll say right off the bat, and then we're going to get Scott's take on this is this gambit of being a goal machine where you sort of procrastinate, minimal effort, but kind of just at the end, like put in the push and get things done.

That's not going to be sustainable. You're a student right now. Yeah. You can kind of get away with that as you move through the ranks of your professional life. That's just not going to cut it.

Things are just going to get harder and more competitive and this approach that worked as a student will just stop working. So like, you're right to point out you need to refactor here. It's much harder to be impressive in, let's say, a world where you're trying to get paid a lot of money to do something than it is to impress an interviewer when you're still a university student. So I think this is the right time. Scott, I'll give you my piece of advice here that I'm interested in your take on it.

This is where I'm going to push lifestyle centric planning on a neo. This is the time to start thinking about in your twenties that are looming ahead of you, what you want your life to be like, all aspects of your life, not just your professional life. Don't get specific. I want to be having this job, living in this place. But be broad.

Right? Like, what does my day look like? What type of place do I live in? What's the character of my work? What's the character of my life outside of the work?

Am I walking by the lake and thinking big thoughts or am I in the skyscraper sort of where we're making moves and doing things that are high impact? Am I spending a lot of time with friends or outside? Am I instead in the art scene? Like really get this image of what you want your life at 25 to be like, and then you're going to work backwards. Work backwards from this understanding of like, this is this type of life, these aspects to it.

That's what I'm looking for. Look backwards and say, how do I move closer to there with my existing opportunities and obstacles? Now you have a reason for the work. I'm doing this professionally, this non professionally, this over here, because it's moving me towards this lifestyle that's highly resonant and appealing. As opposed to where you are now, where I bet this is pretty abstract.

The game is, can I get good grades? Okay, you know, can I win at that game? The game is, can I get a prestigious job this competitive, okay, can I win at that game? Those games get tiresome. So that's what I'm going to suggest is lifestyle centric planning.

What's your take here though, Scott? Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. It's an interesting kind of question because even when the person is stating it is like, I'm like, I'm just hearing what Anio is saying that, you know, this is like, I'm doing really well in everything successfully, but I'm not working very hard solve my problem and I'm scratching my head a little bit. I'm like, I'm trying to read between the lines of, like, where the problem is, what the distress is, because for most people, I mean, if, like, if I were saying, you know, this is a personal finance blog, the problem is that I make too much money and I spend too little. Like, you know, can you help me, you know, financial guru?

Scott Young

Because my savings are just accumulating and I don't. So I just thought, you hear the key, the key phrase hidden in here. This is what's catching my attention, leading to a destructive cycle of diminishing effort and quality of my work. So I think he's sensing this is, it's like what I used to call deep procrastination on my blog. I think he's sensing this is starting to like his, the minimalist is getting more and more minimal and like, pretty soon it's going to stop producing the results.

Cal Newport

Like, he's, he's feeling that will, that will to do the, like, last minute push to get things done. I think he's feeling that will starting to dissipate. No, I think you're right. And I think it's very, my sort of point in listening is it's always interesting to hear people when they describe situations because I feel like you do need something. You need to dig under the surface.

Scott Young

Like, what is the real problem? What's the real worry here? And so, you know, I think what you said is absolutely right, that some of it is that I think a lot of people, especially if you have a lot of aptitude and things are fairly easy for you, you maybe don't think a lot about your goals because, you know, you're not in this sort of, like, I have to prioritize. I have to choose this or this other thing. There's just kind of like, well, they wanted me to do this assignment, so I did it and they wanted me to do this.

And you're not really thinking about what do I want? What do I actually want to achieve? So I think that what you said is absolutely right. That's number one. The second thing I was thinking about, too, is that it also sounds to me like maybe this person needs to, like, up the challenge level of what they're doing.

I think that, like, the human brain is an effort saving machine. We are designed to be lazy and to avoid wasting calories and to avoid doing things that are, like, beyond what is the minimum required. That is how we are engineered. So there's nothing irrational about, you know, my classes are easy. I get a's all the time.

So I don't study until, like, one night before the exam, because why would I? Right? That makes sense in a kind of perverse way. And so I think, you know, for me, what was, as someone who was a fairly good student without working too, too hard and in university, I think one of the things that made a big difference for me was deliberately seeking out challenges that were at that threshold of my ability, those goals, which were, you know, I might be able to achieve this if I get my act together, but I won't if I just, you know, try to coast on it. And so things like, you know, starting a successful business, building a writing career, some of the personal projects that I've done were of that kind of forcing function.

And so if you are a high actor aptitude young person who seems adrift and is worried about your self destructive habits taking over, that's what I would be looking for. What do you want and how do you take on challenges that are deserved of your abilities, that are deserved of, like, where you're at and that are gonna force you to actually try your best and not just coast? I think that's really smart. I mean, I think that was exactly me as well. My story in college, I studied how to study and kind of cracked a system, right.

Cal Newport

And I was getting 40 s, you know, every quarter, and it wasn't taking a huge amount of time. And so I began writing books. So, like, I need to do something else. I have to fill something else in here. I need something.

So I think that's really wise. All right, so, anio, I'm going to summarize both answers. I think they overlap. So, a, you have to have something you're working towards that you want to work towards. And the reason why I emphasize the lifestyle centric planning is when I used to work with and advise elite college students, when I had the early days of my blog, they would run into this problem of deep procrastination where their will to work would suddenly dissipate, right.

And they just, they couldn't do any more work. I called it deep procrastination because it wasn't depressive symptoms. They weren't ahedonic. They weren't. I can't imagine having joy in life.

Like, I just can't do the schoolwork anymore. And my argument, like my eventual, in my analysis, with deep procrastination, is it was a mixture of, I don't know why I'm doing these hard things, plus the things getting hard enough. And when these two things came together, the work gets harder and harder as you move through school and you have no, I don't know. I'm just doing this to win the game. And I've been doing this my whole life.

You can try your motivational center. So having something you're working towards that you chose and actually gives you that shiver, that resonance of, ooh, that's what I want my life to look like. I certainly had these very clear things of what I wanted my life to look like in my twenties than in my thirties. That breaks you out of that cycle, because now we can put up with hard things if we know why we're doing it and we believe and why we're doing it if we don't. That's a dangerous combination.

But I love your addition as well, is you might just be a little bit bored. Anio, your school's too easy. You've kind of cracked a code. So do as part of your vision. Hopefully you have something in there that requires or will be helped by you taking on some new challenges, something that pushes you and where you realize, like, right away, hey, I started doing minimal effort here and just, boom, got knocked down.

Like, oh, minimal effort doesn't cut it here. You probably need one of those worlds. All right, here's a quicker question from Ginny. I've seen a lot of people talk about monk mode. Does this actually work?

Monk mode, meaning you sort of. I first heard this from Greg McKeown, where he, like, I'm disappearing. I'm going to a shed for a month, and all I'm doing is writing Adam Grant. So I wrote about this in deep work. I called it the monastic mode of deep work, or maybe I called the bimodal mode.

I confused these up, but I was thinking about Adam Grant, where he would have periods of the year where he would just disappear to work on research, be out of touch, and other periods where he was back. So Monk mode, I guess, is spreading online again. I think you might have the same take on this as I do, which is it's less about monk mode working to me, than it is the way the hyperactive hive mind constantly context switching that we call normal work today. How bad that is. Like, monk mode is just escaping from that.

So, like me and you, I know neither of us disappear to cabins for six months, the right. But I think we're just much more careful in general in making our day to day work something that we don't have to escape so dramatically from trying to just in general. See, I don't want to just constantly be context switching between a lot of things so we don't have as much to escape from. I don't know. What do you say?

You don't escape to a cabin. Right. You're also. I think of you as being pretty careful about, like, how you. How you work.

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Again, I think I don't place so much emphasis on the, like, retreat into the wilderness. Not that that's always bad, but just, to me, sometimes that can also be a little bit of a fantasy, distracting from what the real problem is. They're like, well, the problem is that I'm in this physical location, like, sometimes. But usually the problem's in your head, right?

Usually the problem is not like, well, that you couldn't do any deep work here, but that it's hard and it's, like, easier to, like, open your phone and do that kind of thing. And so I do think it's not necessarily monk mode, but one thing that I notice, especially when I embark on, like, bigger, cognitively challenging projects. And maybe you can attest to this, Cal, is that, you know, right now, for instance, I am in the kind of promotional mode for my books. I'm like, emailing every old friend and being like, hey, you know, like, I've got a new book. Can I send it to you?

And it is like a hive mind kind of thing. Like, I open my email and there's lots of little communications, like, who do I have to message? And it's very extroverted, socially focused, this kind of thing. But when I'm writing the book, I find that the challenge is that, okay, I've got this 30 page dense paper to read that I think is important for me to read, but it's a little boring. You know, it's not like this is.

This isn't a Harry Potter book or something, like murder mystery novel or something. I'm not just churning through the pages. I'm like, wait, what's that word? And I'm going to look up keywords and maybe this citation, this kind of thing. And so I think the real challenge that we have in doing work that requires cognitive demands is that you're sitting and maybe you want to read for 3 hours straight, but after, like, 15 minutes, your brain is telling you, you know what?

Maybe go on twitter, maybe check that email inbox. Maybe there's some distraction that would be like a break from doing this kind of work. And so I think what this kind of monk mode or something akin to that can be helpful for is that you have to sort of shift yourself into a mode where you are getting used to doing that kind of work. It's a little bit like training for a marathon. Like, if you don't run every and then you run for 20 minutes, your lungs are screaming, your body's tired.

It's like, okay, I've got to stop now. I don't think that past a certain point, it's so much that your physical fitness is increasing. It's just you're learning to switch off that part of your brain that's like, do something else, do something else, do something else. And so I think when you get into this, or like, I need to do a lot of deep work mode, I think it is helpful to kind of create some constraints around your work so that you're prioritizing this deep work. You're able to get longer stretches in.

You're able to just like, okay, I just sat and I read all day, and it wasn't like, agony. That does take a little bit of building up to get to. And so I think, you know, that's where this can be helpful is if, like, if you're in the cabin in the woods, you don't have the friends, this kind of thing. Maybe it's sometimes easier to transition to doing that, but I think the transition to doing that is what's really important. I love the practice message.

Cal Newport

Yeah. And supporting. Right. What supports it? I mean, slow productivity.

I talk about rituals and location. Yeah. Have a separate location where you do the monk mode work. It doesn't be a dramatically different location, but it's okay. Instead of being at the home office desk, I go to the screened in porch.

But it's a place that I only associate and then have rituals. I go for a walk, I make a certain amount of tea. That helps. But I love this idea. The more you practice, the better you get.

This is connected to your book, though, right, Scott? Because what is all the key efforts in mastery that you talk about are efforts that require sustained concentration. And that's something you have to be, you get used to. Right? Used to your, like, I just do this on a regular basis.

There's periods of my day where I'm just locked in on something and I'm not distracted. It's kind of hard. I mean, I talk about this in deep work. Right. The more comfortable you are with that, the more comfortable you'll be with learning something hard.

It's the same basic cognitive muscles are being stretched. So I'm assuming you would see the same problem where if I live a full Linda stone partial continuous attention lifestyle, I'm just constantly moving back and forth. I'm not very comfortable focusing. If I then say, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start learning something really hard. I'm going to struggle in just a sense that my mind is not used to the feeling of cognitive strain that is going to be involved in learning something hard.

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, I think so. One of the things that I find important in this regard is when you're approaching this kind of task, it is helpful to, like, be more deliberate about, you know, we do this in our course life of focus, where you are being very explicit about, like, these are my deep work hours. You put the computer away, you kind of remove yourself physically from those distractions. It doesn't have to be a different location, but it can just be some way that you're pushing them away. Because I think as you build the skill, the way I think of it is it's.

It's a little bit like, you know, it gets thrown around too much, but, like, addiction and this motivational hardwiring is very similar that, you know, if you were a gambling addict and you're like, oh, I'm going to go, like, live right next to the casino. It would be very difficult when you're in the habit of going to the slot machines all the time to resist that. So you might want to get yourself removed from it. Don't have any reminders, don't have any things that's going to make you think about doing this, but then maybe once you've done it more and more, it would be fine. Okay.

I just don't gamble. I don't think about that. So you could even, like, walk through Las Vegas and not feel as much temptation. So, similarly with deep work, I think some of the difficulty is that if you're not used to the sustained cognitive effort, maybe because it's a new role, new task, new project, this kind of thing, it can be exhausting, but it's also, what is exhausting about it is your motivational hardwiring. Being like, this is easier.

This is more fun, this is more appealing. And that will quiet down if you can stick to it. And so that's sort of that transition can be hard, I think, for people. And you have to believe that that's going to happen, that after you do it for three months. Oh, actually, sitting and reading for 4 hours straight is doable by a normal person.

You don't have to be some kind of, like, savant, like, focus person to do it. La test shrink. Monk mode. Monk mode doesn't have to be. This month, I'm going to monk mode.

Cal Newport

You have a little bit of monk mode every day. That's sort of. Okay, these are. I have a monk hour here. Start with, like, a monk half hour.

I have, like, a monkish morning. Yeah, I used that phrase somewhere. God, I've written too many things, but somewhere, somewhere I used this phrase, monk mode morning. And it was a CEO who ran his own sort of small company. It was like a 15 person thing.

And I remember this was his thing, monk mode morning. And he said, no one can schedule anything with me until I forgot what it was. But it was like, 1030 or eleven. And he's like, that's it. We just.

Let's just work around that. But until ten, 3011, I don't plug into anything. I'm just, like, working on it. And he's like, it transformed everything. That regular drumbeat of the uninterrupted allowed him to make progress on a lot of the big things that really mattered, and he got a lot better at it.

And then it really made a difference for the business. And it turns out having to wait till 1030 or eleven before you can call or get an email response or set up a meeting with someone. People adjusted. It wasn't a big deal, but the benefit was. So, monk mode morning.

I remember that. All right, here's a long question, but it's interesting. I think I might have a quick answer, but. Okay, Adam, look at this. This is our third a name.

I was interested in that we have three a. Did you sort it alphabetically when you were bringing the sheet here? In my archive text based planning system, I sorted alphabetically. All right. Adam says, in my earlier years, I thrived on structure and processes.

Crossing things off was therapeutic and enabled me to get a lot done. Fast forward to 2024. And in my work, a lot of the time, a task isn't as simple as task a. Complete or not complete task. A actually involves a series of ten or 15 steps with various blockers, context and definitions of completion.

I've delved in the productivity applications, but none seem to be the all in one solution I'm looking for. This has led to looking to AI as a savior, but I'm now realizing that the rudimentary large language models don't solve the problem. Am I better off going back to basics in this time of technology, apps and AI? Growth and trust in my process, or should I pick just one program and become an expert with it? Well, my listeners know I'm going to say, go back to basics.

An app is not a substitute for a process. You have to figure out, what am I working on, how do I want to work on it, what do I have to keep track of it and then go find the tools to implement that? And nine times out of ten, those tools are going to be boring. It's going to be a Google Doc, maybe a Trello board. It's not going to be that interesting.

And mainly, I mean, look, it looks like, Adam, you kind of have been up to now, you're used to what we call productivity light, the sort of zero to one binary flip from I just am completely reactive to, I keep track of things, I cross things off. I sometimes think of this as like bullet journal productivity. It's nice. It looks good. I can kind of keep track of the books I read and like what I want to work on today.

And I can illustrate the borders when you get into these high end knowledge work jobs. Productivity lite doesn't cut it anymore. Like, your bullet journal can't keep up with 75 emails a day. It can't keep up with the administrative overhead of a shifting array of twelve ongoing projects. It can't keep up with a calendar that's averaging 20 to 40 events per week.

Like the systems, you have to go from productivity light to productivity heavy. But it's the process that rules. I don't use any complicated software. I use Google Docs, I use my calendar, I use Trello. You figure out how do I organize and have a process for working this work, and then you find the tools.

I have some concrete suggestions, but, Scott, you don't work in a complex, process oriented knowledge work job. So from kind of from the outside, like, what's your take on this idea of, like, the tool, you know, is there the right tool I need that's going to solve this versus other ways of thinking about organizing effort? Well, so I'm not sure if it's Adam. Right? Adam's the Adam.

That's right. Yeah. Adam. I'm not sure, if my experience directly parallels Adam, but I'll share it anyways. But I found for me, and maybe you can comment on this as well, Cal, that when I got interested in productivity, when I was first doing it, this kind of checklist based approach just seemed like that's what productivity was.

Scott Young

You write down all your tasks and then you check them off. And especially if you're a student, it's like, read this chapter, complete this essay, do this kind of stuff. It really fits that mold. And now when I think about my work, two things have changed. One is that I've gotten to the somewhat enviable position that a lot of the checklist based stuff have been delegated.

I don't have the checklist based tasks anymore. Someone else does the, like, here's the eight mechanical steps you have to do every single time you do this. And they check it off. I don't do them anymore. But then what was left, what was remaining was this core of, like, these hard problems that is sort of like, they're not something you can just check off.

It's sort of like, okay, write a best selling book. Okay, what's the tasks there? I mean, you could make a task list, but the thing is you're going to start working on the tasks and realize, no, that's not the right way to do it, or you're not doing it properly. You certainly can't approach it with the mindset of, like, just check off this one and move to the next one, and then you're going to have a best selling book or you're going to have something successful here. And so for me, I think I naturally gravitated more and more as I get older, as my career matures to the kind of deep work sort of system that, you know, what I'm trying to do is ensure that there is a deep focus on important tasks and that there is a lot of flexibility in how those get executed.

And I'm, I'm not really, like, trying to break it down into, okay, well, I've just got to do these ten little things. I mean, I still do that. I still have that sort of segregated somewhere else. But what I'm really trying to do is, like, how can I have, like, 6 hours to just work on this book chapter and, like, grind through it and think through it? And, like, in the moment, I'm constantly going back and forth between research and doing this, and it's problem solving.

Like, there's no template I can follow, but the enemy of that is, well, I'm going to just, I'm going to spend 30 minutes and write 500 words every day. Like that kind of mindset that you see so often. And on Twitter, like, you know, I don't know, I was reading somewhere, someone was saying like, you know, you could write a book every three months because if you write this many words per day, then that totals a book. And then I was just thinking, well, you know, I like, good for you if that's how you can write books. But I mean, for me it's, it's not the metric.

It's not the metric. Sometimes you can write 5000 words, sometimes you spend days trying to figure out the opening sentence. And so I think this shift towards harder, more ambiguous tasks that have complexity built into it. I think to me that's why the kind of a little bit more using the time metric, a little bit more using this is the chunk of time that I'm devoting to this. This is what chunk of time I'm going to push everything else off of so that I'm not having interruption distractions has been more important to me.

But I mean, you can weigh in on this. You have a lot more like multiple job descriptions, responsibilities, calendar interference, but I mean, I think it reflects your time block planning to some extent. Yeah, I mean, if we need the terminology, like shallow versus deep productivity. Deep being like the really complicated jobs, Adam, I'll give you an example. I'm going to give you four processes that you probably need.

Cal Newport

All four of these. And for each of these, the tech to implement it is boring. Just based on my experience with these type of jobs, Adam, and dealing with people with these type of jobs. First of all, you need some sort of structured task management. You need a place of keeping track on your different projects, what needs to be done, where you can collect relevant information.

If someone sends you a file about that task you're waiting to work on or sends you an email about it, you can add it to where that thing lives. So all the information lives in one place. Why I call this structured is because you can have, I use Trello for this, you can use a Google Doc for this. You want to have categories. So here's like tasks for a particular project.

Here's tasks that I'm trying to work on this week critically. Here are things I'm waiting to hear back from other people on. So you have a place for. I'm waiting to hear back from this person on this. Once I hear back from this, then I can move on and do this, right.

So you can keep track of here's all the stuff that I know so far needs to get done for the various things I'm working on. Relevant information can live right there with the task. And I can have different categories here of just like these are tasks for this project but I'm not actively doing them. Here's tasks I'm working on this week. Here's things I'm waiting on.

Any sort of thing can hold this information. You could have Google Docs for different types of projects. You can have a Trello board with different boards for different types of projects or roles. The technology is boring, but you need something like that. You probably need to do multiscale planning at this level of complexity, Adam.

Right. So for the quarter you check in like what are the big things I'm working on? You check that quarterly plan every week when you make your weekly plan. Alright, so which of these things am I trying to make progress on this week? When am I doing it?

Do I need to move some meetings around so I have some more open time? Do I need to add some new meetings to my calendar to make progress on it? What's my game plan this week? Week for making progress on the things I want to make progress on. And then you have a daily time block plan where you look at the weekly plan.

So you are grappling with the things you need to do at multiple scales. The other thing I think you need, Adam, is to work with noninterruptive communication. So if you have a bunch of things going on like this, the real enemy, if we're going to get into weeds, deep productivity nerd stuff, the real enemy is going to be the context switches. If you have six ongoing projects that are each generating emails and slack messages that you pretty much have to see and respond to pretty quickly because that's how things are being worked out. You are sabotaging your ability to actually do this work.

And so you need to have structured communication. This means daily office hours. Anything that requires more than a one message response, you say, just grab me at my office hours. We'll do a five minute real time conversation. Figure this out.

The various groups you work with have to have standing maybe twice a week meetings. So just go through a lot of things at once. You should have a docket for each of these groups. As people think up things that there's a question or something we have to figure out, you add it to the docket and when you get to the meeting, you go through that docket one by one so you don't have to email people or slack people, when something comes up that you worry about, you throw it on the docket. None of this stuff requires big tech, right?

Office hours requires you open up a zoom window and keep your door open. A docket is a Google Doc or a Dropbox where you have a text file in it. Right? So I'm giving you these examples, Adam, not because that's the magic collection, but these are things that work really well. So they're representative of the type of processes that deep productivity processes that work in these complicated knowledge work jobs.

None of them require complicated tech, and they're certainly not unified in some sort of master tool that's going to do this work for you. In the end, it's still you doing planning at multiple scales and executing this stuff helps keep things organized, but it's still you doing this work. The tech is not that interesting. So I know, I come back to that, Silicon Valley wants us to believe the tool is what will give us the productivity, whereas, and I wrote a New Yorker piece about this last fall, it's the other way around. We figure out what we need to be productive and then go and find the tools.

The problem is most of those tools have already been invented and are very low cost. So this is not great for the Silicon Valley companies. Google workspaces is not that expensive like that. Plus, Trello, you don't need any more. An email, like email.

You can send files back and forth and you're good. Monday.com isn't even needed. All right, I have a final question here. Let's shift broad. Let's get philosophical here.

Scott Young

Okay. All right, this is Sean. What are the most underrated habits for living a great life? There's a lot loaded in here. Let's make our job easier.

Cal Newport

Scott, by noting that he's talking about underrated habits. So we don't have to say these are like the most critical, or like, this is the core. We can think more like, okay, what's something that we have discovered in life is very useful that we didn't really realize maybe before for great life. This is a deep question. I mean, there's lots.

Scott Young

There's lots, I think. So some underrated habits that I think are important, at least in my life, like one, and it seems to be rare these days, is, and this is, I'm speaking, obviously not going to apply to everyone here. But, you know, for Callan, I might attest to this, like having, having family dinners together, like having a space where you and your loved ones actually, like, talk and spend time together so much is like go, go, go right now. And so I think human connection and being able to spend time, and you can extrapolate this to, like, time with your friends and this kind of stuff, it's often in our productivity obsessed world or on both of us talking about this, there is often this kind of sense that those hanging out with friends, spending time with people that you're close with, that those are sort of frivolous activities that those should occupy once all the important stuff has been done. But I think, really, other people are the source of our happiness and misery in life.

And so, you know, it, you can make more money, but if you don't have people around you that you have good relationships with, I think that's, that's a big thing. The other thing, I think this is, this is just for me, but I'm gonna say this hopefully extrapolate. But I think also time for hobbies. I think hobbies are kind of this, again, a frivolous thing that people like, kind of very dismissive of that. You know, it's not work, and it's not just like, pure entertainment.

It's not something that you just, like, just, you know, sit back and turn on Netflix. But I feel like we have a real desire innately to do skill based things that don't have the pressures and kind of the societal kind of requirements to be economically productive and do this kind of thing. And so I think hobbies, again, time with family, time with hobbies. These are like the first things on the chopping block when we're busy and chaotic, but they're really sources of our happiness. You know, I think having some things, having some project that you can just get consumed with and that the other parts of the world can fade away.

All of life stresses, all of, like, the other things are not going to be there because your attention is occupied in something important, I think is really important. And it's something that I think, again, too often you either go one way or the other. You like, you get rid of it or you try to make it into work, or you say, oh, well, this is too much effort. So I'm going to, I'm going to watch Netflix or play video games or something instead. So, so those would be my two picks for underrated habits for happiness.

Cal Newport

Look, I'm typing this in. This could be. This could put us out of business, Scott. But right now I am typing this question in the chat GPT I'm kind of curious. This feels like, what are the most underrated habits for living?

And great. Oh, I spelled it wrong. Alright, so we're going to get. If these are good answers, we're in trouble for living a great life exactly the way he worded it. All right.

Living a great life often involves a combination of well known habits like exercise, healthy eating and maintaining strong relationships. However, some underrated habits can significantly enhance one qualities of life. Gratitude practice, mindfulness meditation, continuous learning, prioritizing sleep, unplugging from technology, acts of kindness, setting boundaries, embracing failure, physical touch, spending time alone. It's a pretty good list, actually. I don't know.

Scott Young

Let's retire right now. Let's, let's retire. Just hope, you know, hope that like the, the book rollers that came in, those are enough to live on because chat GPT we're out of a job now. We will just gonna have, just gonna have chat GP deep faking our faces for the rest of time. So that giving, giving chat Cal Newport.

Cal Newport

Style advice to people, I guess we have to just get very radical and controversial. That's the only thing we have left here, Scott. Yeah. It's all about giving up sleep and being angry at the world. That's the real truth to happen.

Scott Young

These contrarian takes that chat GPT's not. Going to be able to get rob a bank once a month. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Under, okay, that's, that's actually a pretty good list.

Cal Newport

I'm not going to call those underrated, though. So I'm going to say that whole list chat GPT gave are like, yeah, that's like what I would, that's what most people would think of. So that's like, what are common, what are common habits? Underrated is hard. Like, what are the things?

I mean, I can think of the big advice I give that isn't widely given elsewhere. It's not underrated for me. We talk about it a lot, but I mean, I think, like, for example, my whole framework of if you want a life that, like a deep life, like a life that's really intentional and meaningful for you, there's two approaches. And this is sort of what I'm exploring in the new book I'm writing. Approach one, which is really common in 2020 1st century western culture, is pursue a big goal and then hope is a side effect of that your life will be good.

So this job or this accomplishment or whatever, I'm a big believer. No, no, no. Just work directly towards the, the details of the life you want. Like, what makes a good life good to me? What are the details of this lifestyle?

Okay, how do I just like, directly, actually try to get to that thing. Like, I want to. I want to. I want to be, like, sort of a quieter life. I want to be kind of in the country.

I want to be in creative work, but I want to have, like, autonomy, and I want to be deeply connected to a community. Okay. There's a hundred different ways I can combine various things. And let me think about, like, how do I directly engineer the lifestyle I want, as opposed to hoping that a big change will bring in its wake a desirable lifestyle, which it usually doesn't. So working backwards from the lifestyle instead of working forwards towards a big goal that you hope will fix everything.

I think that's underrated. We run out of ideas, I think, and we just think, okay, passion or accomplishment or just like, a single cause. Like, if I just give all in on this one cause, like, it'll. All the other parts of my life are going to come, come together. Why not just directly?

It's like, you talk about transfer theory a lot in your book. Instead of doing sort of related activities to get good at the thing you want, just practice the thing you want. Like, people often say to me, should I meditate so I get better at focusing on my work? And I said, well, what you should really do is focus on your work. Practicing, focusing on your work, increasing the interval, trying to produce better stuff.

So maybe there's a connection there. So I don't know if it's underrated, but I think it's this lifestyle centric planning I'm going to keep coming back to. Is my underrated. Underrated by the culture at large approach to living a great life? Yeah, I think also, and maybe this is just sort of my perspective on a lot of that.

Scott Young

I think we are kind of a somewhat self deluded species in that a lot of, like, the source of our motivation is a kind of status anxiety and status obsession. But that's really unbelievable, unpalatable to, like, say that out loud, that, like, what I want to do is just have people think I'm important. Right? Like, you don't want to say that. No one wants to say that.

So you come up with these delusions that, like, well, once I become a millionaire, then I'm going to be happy because I'll have more time for fishing or something like that. So I think part of what requires courage is in some ways pushing back on this idea that, like, you know, recognizing that actually, you know, trying to, like, at all costs, win various status games in your life is actually, like, that's not a good game to play. You shouldn't be playing that game. Yeah. And you're, and so you have to be honest with yourself that you're going to find it appealing.

Just like you find eating too much sugar and fat appealing, or just like you find, you know, being on your phone all day appealing. But if you have the discipline to be like, this is a false path, this is not actually going to make me happy. I think you open up the door to being like, well, what actually would make me happy? Maybe it's having more time with my families or some time for some hobbies or do something interesting like that, you know. Well, I'm a big believer in sustainable status.

Cal Newport

Like, because we do, we do seek that. And there is like an ongoing positive part of like if you're doing something or have done something, your position is impressive in some way. There is like a sort of sustaining benefit you get from that and there is a sustaining negative impact to feel like nothing I'm doing right now has any sort of cultural social status. But my sustainable status idea is when designing your lifestyle, choose something that you're going for that can give you sufficient status that like, you're not anxious or feel bad about your position. And it's like, yeah, this is an impressive thing I'm proud of, but doesn't make more and more demands of you.

Like, I do this, I do this well, I'm proud of doing this. It's an important thing. It's hard. I have some distinction in it and knowing, like, that's good. Now I have this status I can build on and get rid of that anxiety.

But it's different than, no, I need to be the very best in the world at this or I need to make more money. You know what I mean? So it's the, like, I write about this topic. I write novels and I like writing novels. I think these are good novels.

I'm not super well known, super best selling author, but like, I write and I do it professionally and I'm proud of it. And so I think there's something there. All right. We're running low on time, but we usually, Scott, we do a case study where I read a case study from someone who wrote in about applying the type of advice we talk about. I have a short case study I want to read and then I want to ask you briefly about it because I think there's some stuff you've done in your life that are similar maybe, or you might have some interesting thoughts here.

All right, so here's a case study from Cassandra who wrote in and said writing in with a somewhat unconventional effect that slow productivity has had on my life. I'm a mom to two kids, one of whom is almost four and the other is ten months. This week I had a zoom out moment about how often I rush or cajole my toddler into my own knee jerk, frenetic pace of grown up life. All the hurry ups, let's go's five more minutes, etcetera. Obviously, toddlerhood requires coaching, otherwise no one would get anywhere.

But my renewed focus on embracing a natural, creative pace has bled into my off work hours in a really life affirming way. Being led around the house by an infant learning to walk feels like the ultimate embodiment of doing fewer things at a natural pace and obsessing over a uniquely intangible sense of quality. And I'm better able to adjust, embrace my kids sense of observation and play instead of carrying over my stress about time management and output from my work life. So I like this idea of slow productivity. You can think about this in your life.

These ideas carry over to your life outside of work that just slow down, don't do so many things, revel in, like, the quality of the situation. Like, it's not pseudo productivity now being translated to the world of life outside of work. Like, my toddler needs to be more efficient. So I love that point. And I think about Scott, like, some of the things you do, like, for example, particularly consolidating your writing to one part of the year so that you could have a slower other part of the year.

Some of this is probably with your family in mind. I mean, so how you, I feel like you have engineered a sort of slowness into your life outside of work as well as in work. You, like, you're willing to try interesting things. Yeah, well, I mean, I really resonated with this comment because I have a four year old and a 16 month old right now. So I'm very much in the same zone of like, you know, having the two kids about the same age.

Scott Young

And one thing, you know, and I'm not, I don't make any, like, special claims to be some kind of master parent. I've got, like, the wisdom of how to do it. But I will reflect on an observation that I had is that I have a four year old and he wants a lot of attention from me. And sometimes when I'm trying to do some household chores at the same time, and he's like, I want to play, I want to do something else, and he's wanting my attention. I can get a little bit frustrated.

Like, I'm trying to get this done right now. I need this space, this kind of thing. And it was, it was pretty recently I had, my wife and my daughter were not, not at home, so it was just the two of us and we had a lot of chores to do. And I was just kind of like enlisting him and helping me, and he just loved it. Now, part of it was me letting go of the idea that I have to get this done in the most efficient way possible.

Because him helping me with the task probably slows it down a little bit. Like, I think we were like, you know, scrubbing the deck or something like that. So he's throwing the water on there, but he can't do it quite the way that I would, and this kind of thing. And so I think, you know, that idea of letting go a little bit of some of the processes is good. I think the productivity mindset that we apply to work can be very disastrous if you try to apply it to parenting.

It's just things are on a very different rhythm there. And so I do think there's, there's a real place for, like, trying to flip your mindset and not have a quite so efficient minded approach, especially for certain types of things like that. It's almost like a slower version of productivity. If only someone write a book about that, I will tell you what I did. Right.

Cal Newport

I'll tell you what book someone did write. Get better at anything. Twelve maxims for mastery. For those who are watching instead of listening, you can sort of see the book behind Scott's head there. Yeah, a little bit on the shelf.

There we go. Yeah, the book is, when you're listening to this, the book is either available or it's going to be available in a few hours. So go buy the book. I mean, basically, this is my now recommended handbook for when you're going through my sort of deep life methodology. And you get to something like, I want to get really good at this because that's going to open up all these interesting options in my life.

Read Scott's book for the how to get really good at this piece. It's deeply based on the science, but is actually, like, approachable. Like, oh, I get it. Do this, do this, do this. Yeah, this is not easy, but this is what actually works.

I'm glad you finally wrote this book, Scott, because I know you've been talking about it for a while. So thanks for helping me out with the questions. I think we got a lot of cool answers in here and thanks for writing the book. Get better at anything. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Scott Young

It was lots of fun.

Cal Newport

All right, well, that was fun. I'm glad Scott could join us. We got two answers for the price of one in that segment and definitely check out his new book. Alright, we have a final segment coming up where I'll talk about the books I read last month. But before we do, I want to talk about some more sponsors that makes the show possible.

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Go to Shopify.com deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com deep all right, let's move on to our final segment. Longtime listeners know I aim to read five books a month. The first podcast of each new month. I talk about the books I read the month before.

So this podcast is coming out in early May. So I want to talk about the books I read in April 2024. All right, the first book I read was an empire of their own by Neil Gabler. This is a history of the early tycoons of Hollywood. So I read this when I was out in LA doing my book tour.

At least I started it when I was out in LA doing my book tour. And then I got back to it and finished it in April. So I put my books in the month where I actually finished them. It's a very good book. It won a bunch of awards.

It's Neil Gabler who I really like. The book Neil Gabler wrote that I liked best was his epic biography of Walt, Walt Disney, which is fantastic. So Neil Gabler is great. This book was late eighties, early nineties. It feels it.

So if you read any of these sort of biography type books from that period, they're very psychoanalytical. The focus is really on the psychology of these tycoons, which is interesting, right? They're all typically first or second generation european immigrants. Either they came over as young kids or were born right after their parents came over. And it really gets into the psychology, all of them who are everyone who is profiled as jewish, there's a lot of talking about the sort of changing relationship with their religion versus their parents who were coming out of sort of the shuttles of eastern Europe and how they sort of cast off that baggage, the next generation in the US.

So a well written book, it felt a little slow for me, mainly because what I was looking for, I was looking for a technical history. I wanted to know about the early film technologies and the content, how the studio took off the marketplace for this. And the book was about the people, not about the business. For me, that was a little bit of a disappointment, but it's clearly a well written book, especially if you're used to that eighties style of psychoanalytical biography. Then I read co intelligence by Ethan Malik.

Ethan Malik is a professor at Penn. He has a very popular email newsletter where he just keeps. Keeps you up to speed with like the latest, coolest, interesting things happening with AI. He's become the kind of go to AI expert for companies, for the White House, for like, he's the guy who has his finger on the pulse of like, the very latest, greatest tools and how people are using them. And so he has 150,000 people that subscribe to this newsletter.

I subscribe to it. I need to keep up with this stuff for my own reporting, etcetera. So he had his first book come out, this portfolio book, my same publisher, where it's like, hey, let me just bring you up to speed with what's happening in AI right now, how it works, how people are using it, what might be coming. And so it's just like, it's exactly what you would want from this book. Hey, Ethan, you're up to your eyeballs in AI.

Bring me up to speed. It's conversational. He doesn't get too technical. There's some cutesy stuff in there where he has AI write stuff and he talks about it, but it's mainly like, let me just kind of bring you up to speed. Here's what a language model is.

Here's why it's different than other things. Here's what's being used. Here's how it's being used here, how it's going to impact various sectors, just like a, I call it a service book. Sometimes people need to know about this thing more. Right now this person knows a lot about it.

So a good read. A quick read, too. It's not a long book. Then I read Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Interesting book.

So Carl Sagan, it's a nonfiction book. It's a lot, it's written in the seventies, and it's a lot about neuroscience and evolution. What do we know about the brain? A lot of this was new then. It'll sound more familiar to the modern year, but a lot of new stuff happening in neuroscience.

And he has, it's a little bit esoteric in that it kind of jumps from thing, I should say not esoteric, but maybe like eclectic. It jumps from thing to thing. So he gets into the evolution of our brain and how our brain evolved from primate brains and how our fear of dragons. This is where the title comes from. We might have this evolutionary footprint in our brain of being afraid of sort of reptiles that slither because our primate ancestors had to be afraid of this.

And from that came our fantasies of dragons. There's kind of a jungian aspect to that. So it's a good book on neuroscience. He's a good writer. He pulls together these ideas were really new back then.

Anyway, so he writes this book. He's a professor, has becoming sort of more of a public science personality, not a neuroscientist, but an astronomer or planetary physicist, depending how you want to talk about it, but writes this book about neuroscience, wins the Pulitzer Prize. So he kind of just writes this book and wins the Pulitzer Prize. This type of thing doesn't happen anymore. Now, I think the win a Pulitzer either for this type of book just doesn't really happen.

It can't just be like, here's a bunch of interesting ideas about a type of science I thought about, and then you win the Pulitzer. It could be your life's work. Like Eo Wilson won a Pulitzer for his book on ants, but also they're more, I would say, distributed. These type of pulitzers are more distributed with intent. Now, we're also giving a Pulitzer to this because this topic is important.

This was just like a smart guy writing a cool book with interesting ideas at interesting time. But I liked it. I knew a lot of the stuff about brains, but I was like, this is a good writer, and I really admire Carl Sagan, as you might imagine. I'm very interested in his trajectory in that scientist who did increasing public communication about science. And I do a little bit of that with technology is one way to think about what I do.

I do a lot of public communication about technology, how it affects us, how to navigate it. So I definitely look at him as like an interesting example. All right, the next book I read was the perfect Mile by Neil Bascom. This book, it's a sports book, a narrative sports non fiction book in the style of boys in the boat. And it's about the quest to break the four minute mile.

The thing about this book, I'm going to loan it to you, actually, Jesse, I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a really good book. I've got to give Neil credit. First of all, there's an obvious narrative spine to it. It's like Seabiscuit or boys in the boat.

Part of what makes these books work is there's a clear narrative spine. Is Seabiscuit going to win the races? Is the crew team going to win the Olympics? And this has the same thing. When and how are they going to break the four minute miles?

You have this sort of narrative spine of competitions, but it gets into the lives of these four runners, basically, they all go to the same Olympics and they all have a bad experience at the Olympics. We have an australian runner, we have an american runner. I guess it's three runners, an australian runner, an american runner, and Roger Bannister, the british runner. And they're all trying to redeem themselves from this. And they all decide, the way I'm going to redeem myself is I'm going to break the four minute miles.

Because they were sort of dealing with the shame of, like, not doing well in the Olympics. And they represent all three different training styles. Like, Bannister was from the british amateur style, right? He would train like an hour and a half a day. That's it.

But it was very focused training, and he was very analytical about how to solve this. And then he had the Australian who was just like, just running crazy workouts, like, working out harder than anyone had ever worked out before, just obsessive, like a maniac, right? So, like, Roger Bannister was just trying to, like, can I break the four minute mile in one race? Whereas, like, this other guy who was training so hard, he could run these fast miles, like, day after day after day after day. Bannister didn't have that stamina.

But Bannister's like, I don't need that stamina. I don't need. I'm not a professional racer. I'm a doctor. I want to be able to.

So it's different. And then the American was dealing with the college system where, like, I'm a part of a track team, I'm a college athlete vision of amateurism. So you had these three different versions of amateurism, british amateurism, which is like, this really is a hobby. And I do on the side because it's good to be disciplined. Then you have the australian version of it, which is like, my whole life is built around just training to do this one thing.

Then you have the american version of it, which is very collegiate, which is. No, a member of a track team. And we get a lot of support. We have expert coaching. Our colleges pay for it and our expenses are paid for, but I have to run five events in each meet.

So it's hard for me to specialize in, like, trying to do this one thing because I'm part of a team and it all comes together and finally Bannister does it. And then there's this one extra big race afterwards where the australian guy is like, I'm going to destroy Bannister, because the australian guy then breaks Bannister's record and they get together for this final race and Bannister beats him. And so it's really redeeming. I found myself cheering for Bannister. I don't know why.

It's like a great book. Really well researched, really well written. The perfect mile. Finally, the final book I read was to heal a fractured world by Jonathan Sacks. I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

I think he was a modern orthodox rabbi. I think he was modern Orthodox, but was the chief rabbi of the UK. So, like, was very involved with, like, the royal family and all sorts of cool stuff. Anyways, fantastic writer. So in, in the world of jewish thinkers, what Sacks is known for is his sort of secular philosophical knowledge.

And what he's able to do is, in a way that I feel like professional philosophers can't because they get so in the weeds, is he can just pull in and summarize, well, here's what Nietzsche thought about this. Spinoza was thinking this, and here's how this differs from the kantian worldview. And then the Marxism was saying this, he could just easily pull from and summarize and connect together all of these different philosophies and then put the abrahamic monotheism just in the mix of this and sort of show how it's different. So it's very worldly and secularized, but also very approachable. So I've been finding him like a very interesting, not just like theological instructor, but actually just like philosophical instructor.

This book to heal a fractured world is basically, it's a book of ethics. So he's extracting here's the system of ethics from Judaism but he's connecting it to all these other sorts of systems of thought as well. Kind of the key argument. I mean, this is like something that's not like an idea he uncovered but he really gets into. I really find this history interesting.

The rise of monotheism, however much this would be 4000 years ago, basically small part of the desert by the Mediterranean Sea. These ideas that came out of this small group of people is like the foundation on which not just all the abrahamic faiths but like all notion of modern ethics comes out of the dignity of the individual human. Didn't exist until the small group of people began writing down these ideas that didn't exist. It was like, no, we kind of all had our roles to play and the gods were kind of using us as pawns. And in homeric Greece, like what really mattered.

It was like you would the heroes and the beautiful heroines and being infused with the spirit of the gods temporarily making life interesting. And this was the human has dignity. The idea of peace as a positive objective, like we take this all for granted, didn't exist before. It's like, no, war is like how you have a worthy life dying bravely in war. It's what we do, we fight each other.

The idea that peace was an objective government by consent of the people that comes back to these same ideas as well, sort of the abrahamic covenant with God influenced all the enlightenment thinkers about, wait, government is not just. This guy was told by God that you're the pharaoh and that's it in the story, you can do whatever he wants. And it was like, no, you can have a covenantal relationship with those in power. You're here because with our consent, all of the, basically all the main ideas that have built the modern liberal world emerged 4000 years ago in, you know, a small desert surrounded by these massive empires that were thinking about things completely differently. And so I know I love like tracing all the things back, their origins.

And this book does a good job of it. He's a great writer, so I enjoyed it. To heal a fractured world. Jonathan Sachs. Alright, Jesse, that's what I got.

Good episode. I'm gonna mention I'm going to London. I'll mention this the next episode. I'm going to London, London soon. But I'll talk about that more in the next episode.

Until then, I think we're good. So until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for@calnewport.com each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter@calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.