202: Slow Productivity

David Sparks

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co host, mister Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going?

Good, good. You are about to take a trip, right? I am. I'm going to Kansas City to hang out with our buddy Sean Blanc. He's doing his focus course live session in Kansas City, and it is going to be a fun time.

Mike Schmitz

If you are a focused listener and you're there, come say hi. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, I'm going to stay home like a shut in, but I have several trips planned, and we're going to get around to that. In fact, on deep focus today, we're going to talk about some of our favorite travel hacks. As to focused people, I think we've got a couple of good ideas, but today is a little bit of a different episode.

David Sparks

Cal Newport came out with a new book. He's been a guest on the show before. Both of us are fans of his work, and I thought it'd be fun to just kind of break down his new book, slow productivity. Yeah, if there was ever a book written for the focused audience, I think it is probably slow productivity. Yeah, maybe the ideas here aren't brand new, but they're definitely applicable.

Mike Schmitz

And Cal has a great way of breaking things down and defining things. So I thought it would be cool to kind of talk about the different parts of slow productivity and how they relate to some of the common themes that we talk a lot about on the Focus podcast. Yeah, I really think there's, like a trend right now that's kind of, I'll say maybe a reaction to the idea of highly paced productivity. So for several years, you know, as technology has emerged, the productivity discussion got, you know, kind of wrapped up in how to do more faster. And I think we lost the thread somewhere.

David Sparks

I mean, that's the reason, honestly, why we made this show, because of the idea that you need to stop and focus on what's important. And this isn't something we invented. People have been talking about this for a very long time. Chris Bailey wrote the calm book, I think, which has a lot of the same themes in it, but this is Cal's take on it. There really is kind of a Cal Newport literary universe, I would say, because he doesn't write the same book over and over again.

Some of the productivity guys do that. They have one idea and they just bang on it for three or four books. Cal kind of takes on a different thing or approach or angle with each book. And I really like that he got around to this idea of slow productivity. I guess I've been rambling, but it's a good book.

I mean, overall, start with the point of, I think anybody that's interested in this stuff should read this book. I 100% agree. In fact, for my mind map book notes for this book, I have, like, the different sections and the COVID in the middle. And the very first section, obviously, is the introduction. And on page four, he has a phrase which is very close to our texture tagline.

Mike Schmitz

And in my. My notes, I have life is more than cranking widgets as a reference to that. So right from the beginning, I'm like, oh, this is perfect, focused material. Uh, just to double click on something you mentioned, we're not the first people to talk about this. Cal's not the first person to talk about this.

Chris Bailey's not the first person to talk about this. And also, in the introduction, Cal mentioned several other books that came out during the pandemic which were kind of loosely based on this topic. And I thought that was kind of cool, sort of a hat tip to everybody else who is talking about this. And that's kind of interesting. I think, with the whole focus, deep work, slow productivity, I'm going to call it a space.

I don't know, like, people who really believe in this idea, they are not competing with other people to say, no, you got to read this one because this one contains all the answers. It kind of seems like people who are advocating this message, they find other people who are saying the same thing in different way, and they get excited and they help promote those other. Those other messages, which I think is kind of cool, is a camaraderie in the, uh, the. The focus space, shall we say? Well, and I will say that for me personally, this is the message of productivity that I'm most interested in for myself.

David Sparks

But also, just having talked to a lot of people since releasing the productivity field guide, I've heard from a lot of people out there, and I think a lot of people are struggling with that sense of overwhelm that feels uniquely modern. And I think that a lot of people are looking for ways out of that or around that. And I think this whole idea of more considered productivity, focusing on what's important, I think that is a message that a lot of people are looking for and ways to implement. And this book delivers the goods less. But better, essentially, is the theme here.

Mike Schmitz

But there is a specific definition that Cal uses for slow productivity, which sort of has in it a framework. So maybe we should talk about that and then break it down into individual parts as we go through the episode here. But the slow productivity definition that he uses is a philosophy for organizing knowledge, work efforts, and work efforts in a sustainable, meaningful manner based on three principles, which is do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. Now there's probably whole episodes on each one of those different pillars there, but I want to just basically talk about how those connect to the whole idea of focus. Before that though, I think the problem to be solved here is what Cal calls pseudo productivity.

And this is something we've been harping on for a long time, but it's the use of visible activity as a primary means of approaching, approximating actual productive effort. And where you see this a lot is agencies and organizations where people are kind of monitoring. Are you working by the green bubble next to your slack name or how quickly you respond to email? And as we've been championing for a long time, that is a terrible way to really measure how effective somebody is at their job. And so I think this is the big problem to be solved.

I don't think there's a simple solution or we would have stumbled upon it, you know, more than 200 episodes in. But it's a constant effort, it's a constant battle because it seems like as soon as you find a way to carve out some space and some bandwidth and you know, you have the condition set up for you to actually focus on something, there is a new set of challenges or obstacles that are presented into your life and work that you have to figure out new ways to overcome. I mean, looking back at all my years in the law practice, I feel like the legal profession really fell for this because it's a billable hour profession and you know, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on lawyers, particularly young ones, to bill hours. And like this idea of pseudo productivity fits right into that. It's like, oh yeah, I can just keep writing emails to this guy and I can charge for that.

David Sparks

And like, you don't actually move the case forward. And I saw it all the time and I was really against it. I did not handle myself in that way. I did not do busy work as a lawyer, but a lot of people do. And I think that there's a real feeling that this is somehow productivity and it's not.

I mean that's why he calls it pseudo productivity. But, but I would hope that people listening are thinking about that problem because it's, it's an easy trap to fall into, again, with the modern tools. Yeah. And it's harder for, quote unquote, knowledge workers because the work that you actually do isn't tied to the getting paid by the hour method or system that you were describing as a lawyer, for example. And there's a great book, I'm not sure if he mentioned it here or not, but I read a couple of years ago this book by Mason Curry about the creative habits of all these famous people.

Mike Schmitz

And they're just a whole bunch of tiny little character sketches on this is what Benjamin Franklin's day was like. And I use him as the example because there's kind of that famous image of how he time blocked his day out. You can find it on the Internet. But everybody and anybody who has created great work, from musicians to artists, painters, writers, and everyone's got their own method. But what's kind of unique about it is that people always, at least all the examples that Mason Curry shared, they found their own rhythm, and they almost never worked 40 hours a week.

But you wouldn't say that they weren't productive because they were able to write hundreds of thousands of words and have all of these published works. So there's some sort of disconnect there, and it's not easily mapped. And I think with the technology based tools, there is a tendency to have all the data that you can possibly collect. Well, it's hard to get data on what's actually going on in your brain. And so the easy metric is, are you at your keyboard working, and how long were you there?

And that is not a real clean measure of productivity. So we still, all these years later, are still trying to figure out what is the best way to do the work that we're trying to do. Yeah. And that's been a thing that I believe Cal has written about in several books. But just the idea that we don't really have a way to measure information workers like, we don't, it's not like, how many cars did you spit out of the factory?

David Sparks

How many widgets did you crank? Right. It's a very different. How do you know what is the end product? Is it the process of writing words, or is it the process of finishing a book?

Kind of question? And I feel like this book starts out with a real attack on kind of applying factory productivity standards to knowledge work. And the idea of why this random 40 hours week, which kind of is under attack now anyway, just in general, becomes somehow the standard of which we measure ourselves. And I really enjoyed that, frankly, because I'm guilty of that. You know, growing up in the 40 hours workweek or, you know, Monday through Friday work phase, it is easy to think, well, that's just what I need to do.

And really it isn't. It's not. And what's interesting is even in traditional settings like factory work, for example, I'm noticing I live in Wisconsin in an area where kind of the whole industry was built on these paper mills that are on this river that runs right through the state. And I see billboards all the time of these paper mills advertising a four day workweek. So even people who view these jobs as sort of a commoditized job, like you have to just have somebody at this spot who's doing this thing and make sure that the machines don't break.

Mike Schmitz

They're recognizing that there is value in not doing the 40 hours weeks. Maybe they attract better talent. They get more skilled people to fill those positions. I don't know. That's not the world that I play in.

But it is exciting to me to see the trickle down effects of this beyond just what we would define as knowledge work, people working at their computers. I mean, there was a proposal in the California state legislature to switch California, just a four day workweek, and that's not 410. That's four eight hour days. And it didn't get anywhere. But I feel like that idea is now generally on the radar for people.

David Sparks

And, you know, there are studies that will show that it can be more productive if done right. I mean, so I don't know. I feel like there's a movement afoot and I'm really happy for it. And I hope this gets more kind of penetration into the general public because this concept of slow productivity, calm, whatever we want to call it now, is now, I think, more important than ever because we've kind of got to a breaking point. At least I feel like we have.

Mike Schmitz

I agree. We've gotten to a breaking point. And also, like, the story he shares right at the beginning of the book, I feel like is a great one because he talks about this guy, John McPhee, who is trying to get this breakthrough, and he doesn't get it by cranking more widgets and by putting in more hours, and he's just at the task long enough until something breaks. The breakthrough comes when he's laying on his back on the picnic table in his backyard. And you could look at that as like, well, and the kind of case Cal is making is you got to disconnect and you got to not think about those things anymore for a little bit.

That's kind of when the great ideas come. But I like to think of this as sort of optimizing for those revelatory moments. Like we've talked about the environment being important and we talked to Annie Murphy Paul with the extended mind. That's a big part of that book. So I feel like there's more that can be gleaned from the story about what are the conditions that John McPhee finds himself in when this breakthrough happens, and then kind of, how can we set up our environment so that happens more often.

David Sparks

Yeah, agreed. I mean, I think that's, I guess you started the show saying this isn't all, you know, revolutionary, but it is told from Cal's point of view, which I think is very good. But this is a lot of stuff we've been talking around throughout the run of the show.

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So why don't we get into the pieces of slow productivity and Cal's take on it? One of the things he points he made toward the end of the book is that his three points are not linear so much as they are interlocking. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. All that has to happen at the same time in order for this to work. And I thought, I wish he had said that at the beginning of the book because it really did click for me when he said that.

And I thought, yeah, this is something I should have had in mind throughout the whole reading of the book. So, you know, three points, do fewer things, work in natural pace, obsess over quality, but you've got to do all of them in conjunction in order to pull it off, according to Cal. Yeah, and you also have to recognize that the, the term slow productivity that he's using and really, the whole idea that we're talking about when we're advocating for not putting in so many hours and just doing better work is that it's not about extinguishing ambition is the term that he used. I like that a lot. But essentially, by working less, you can actually end up doing more, you can produce more and you can produce it at a higher quality.

Mike Schmitz

So you have to recognize that that is really the driver behind this. And I feel like that's important if this is going to gain any sort of traction in a business corporate style environment, is you have to make the case that actually this is ultimately going to produce more and, and better output. But even if it's just you and you're trying to make the most of your, your day as a independent knowledge worker, this is important to understand that when you take your foot off the gas, that actually helps you get further. It feels very contradictory, but it's absolutely true. When you take a longer view of things.

David Sparks

Well, there's a guy in the Max Sparky labs, because we do these quarterly planning calls, and when he first started coming, he was talking about how he's working on, like, 30 projects, and we talked about, well, maybe you need to do less. That's too much. And he was really struggling to get much done with 30. He eventually, I think, got it down to 14. And then in their last meetup, and for the beginning of quarter two, he said, oh, yeah, in quarter one, I just took four projects and I finished them all.

And it's like, you could see the light went off. Right. It's like, yeah, do less and nail it down. And he's gonna get, not only is he gonna get more done, he's gonna get the important ones done. Like, when you have 30, theres a lot on there that doesnt matter as much, right.

So you pick the four that matter and you do those, and then suddenly youre cooking. And thats, it was really fun to see him kind of go through that and, like, figure it out for himself, really. And one of the points that Cal made in the book about that was like, when you have a lot of projects, theres a certain amount of overhead that comes with each project. And that overhead know, accumulates the more projects you have. I thought that was an excellent point.

Mike Schmitz

Yeah. Just hearing about 30 active projects makes me, makes me cringe a little bit, because there's so much administrative energy that is being spent just figuring out which one of these do I engage with now? But that that's something people are dealing with. I mean, it might be that, you know, your boss thinks that makes sense to have you on 30 projects, or you might have the software stack in place that makes it look like you can track 30 projects, you know, and, like, there's a lot of reasons today that didn't exist years ago to make us think, oh, yeah, I can do 30 projects, when in fact you can't. And that's a, that's something you need to get through.

David Sparks

And the idea of doing fewer things, I mean, to me, I think I've even said on the show before, I feel like that is like the underlying premise of all productivity literature. Like, if you just read every book, there's like one underlying theme. It's like, do less, just do less. If you do less, you'll be more productive. And it's like, it takes a minute to get there.

But almost every person who writes about this stuff inevitably says that, I even put in the productivity field guide, I think I put a video called something like, you have to do less because it's just, it's just like, it's the truth. I mean, it doesn't matter how good your tools are and how fancy your systems are, if you're doing too much, it's not going to work. 100% agree. And this is kind of the whole idea behind the twelve week year, too. Yeah.

Mike Schmitz

The person who is doing 30 projects and will whittled it down to four. Well, 30 was still too much, but the whole idea behind the twelve week year is you engage with those four projects and you actually ship them like, like you mentioned. And then the next quarter you pick four more. And the next quarter you pick four more. So if you take a year view, you're getting 16 projects done, but if you were actually doing all 30 of those, you're going to be working on those for who knows how long.

But there's all the switching costs that and the admin costs that go with it. So my guess is that by the time you're actually finishing all of those, it's probably more like five years. Yeah. So there actually is an increased efficiency by choosing to do these fewer things and then just focusing on those things for a short period of time. But then you have to have the reflective process, I think, there to.

Okay, now we take a step back and we figure out what are the next most important projects. There's got to be some sort of, I don't know if it's a system, but there's got to be like a filter that you use a prioritization method where you don't just say, okay, this is important, and it gets added to a list. But like what you were saying, you're saying these three things, these four things. There are boundaries around the number of things that I'm going to put in this bucket, and that's what's going to allow me to do these things with excellence and in a timely manner. Yeah.

David Sparks

And for me, that's why these quarterly reviews and planning are so important. Like for me, I don't take on four projects a quarter because I have so much existing bandwidth, being tied up with existing ongoing obligations, making this podcast, keeping up with the Max Sparky labs and, you know, the field guide production work. So I actually only take on one. I try to take on one additional Max Sparky project per quarter and I feel like that's enough because I'm keeping up with the other stuff and I know that I don't have the bandwidth to take on a bunch more. And I have a list, like in the first quarter for me it was getting assistance on administrative stuff.

Second quarter for me it's the newsletter. I want to work really hard on getting the Max Berkeley newsletter in better shape. I'll put a link, by the way, I guess I should do that more often. I'll put a link to sign up if you want, for the newsletter in the notes here. But it's just like I'm picking what I already know, kind of what I want for the third quarter.

But that's going to assume that I nailed down the newsletter in the second quarter. And I can tell you personally, I keep this list very short of extra things that I work on. You have to. I also like the fact that you're not picking a project with a set end state. So just to clarify, like we've kind of been told you need to set goals and they have to be these smart goals, they got to be specific, they got to be measurable, all that kind of stuff.

Mike Schmitz

And I have found when I do my, my personal retreats that I get the most traction when I say, this is the area of emphasis for me. And I've actually had a couple of the same areas of emphasis now for the last couple personal retreats. And that's because there is a specific metric that is indicative of the health of my independent creator business, which is the number of email subscribers. And for a long time I neglected my email list. I didn't send anything.

People kind of stumbled onto it, but it wasn't clear, like, what am I actually going to send you? All that kind of stuff. So I've kind of been zeroing in on that for a while. And then tied to that, which has been working for me, is the whole YouTube stuff. And we talked about this before, so I won't get into the details there, but those have kind of been my two priorities for the last couple of personal retreats is grow the YouTube channel, grow the email list.

And the question that I ask during the quarters that I'm working on these things is like, okay, so what can I do right now that is going to, uh, help me achieve these two outcomes or what's in, in service of, of moving the, the needle in these particular areas. And sometimes it's, you know, just crank out a killer newsletter for this Monday, but sometimes it's, uh, figure out a new automation sequence and without having to define those things at the quarterly level, because if I did have to pick those things, I feel like they would change multiple times. Yeah. So just setting the, the direction, essentially what I'm doing is I am setting the compass, but I don't have the blueprint. And that is completely okay because I know that the things that I'm going to engage with on a weekly level when I do that planning and even the daily level when I time block are in service of those larger goals.

David Sparks

No, and I think you're right on there. Like, I, part of these quarterly obligations that come with a commitment like this to me is a research project. Like, the first thing I do is I research the problem. When I needed to get assistance, I researched offshore help, computer aided support, hiring local virtual assistants. I looked at all the different options before I started actually picking what I was going to do.

And I like going into it with kind of like a beginner's mindset. And right now I'm doing the same thing. I'm studying about newsletters and mine and what works and what doesn't. I'm just trying, I'm in data collection mode really right now on this problem. But as we record this, we're in early April and I've got some time, but I've got a plan.

Mike Schmitz

Yeah. And that's really all you, all you need is what is the next step that I'm going to be working on? So this whole idea of, you know, do fewer things, it is just selecting fewer things in the short term or really right now, it's doing less things concurrently. It's less multitasking. It's not get less things done.

But the reason that we default, I think, to the multitasking stuff is that it's hard to know what's the thing I should be focusing on. If you don't have the clarity, the only way you get the clarity is by stepping back from the work and thinking about why are we doing these things in the first place. So you kind of have this built in system for FOMO where as soon as something appears, it's like, oh, this might be important. I better not let this slip through the cracks. So we optimize our systems to handle everything that's thrown at us without any question as to, is this something I should really be doing?

Yeah. And this is where, to me, maybe the most impactful piece of this book was this concept of pull based productivity. And it's like, I've read about this before, and Kurosh Dini calls it visit based productivity, which I think might be a kinder way to approach it. The idea of just taking on a few things at a time and leaving everything else on the future list. But like I said, I've read about it before, but for whatever reason, the way Cal frames it in this book, this is where I'm like, yes, I really need to spend more time with this.

David Sparks

And the idea is you've got a queue of things you want to work on, but you don't put all of those into your system. You just pick one or two, you take it on your desk. I use the term bench I like as a woodworker. I put it on my bench. You only have one thing on your bench at a time and you work on that.

And then when it's done, you go and you pull another item out. And the example he used in the book was in a company working with multiple people. But I feel like individually, as a knowledge worker, I think that this applies equally. And I've been doing a lot of research and experimentation around that since I read the book. This is a piece of this that I think I need to understand even fuller and figure out ways to implement on a smaller scale for me that I think can make a difference.

Mike Schmitz

I agree. The way that I'm doing this is not how Cal defines it in the book, but I agree with you that it is definitely applicable to individuals as well. Is I kind of have. Anytime I have an idea for like a newsletter that I want to send out or YouTube video that I want to make, I will add those ideas to a list. And that is essentially, you know, a someday maybe list.

But then periodically I'll go through that list and the ones that I'm really excited about, I will add those to. I've got kind of like a Kanban view in Obsidian. I won't get into the nerdy details about this, but essentially it's a backlog. And those are basically things that I want to work on at some point in the near future. There are no deadlines associated with them and there's no commitment to actually do something with them.

If I decide, you know, this isn't exciting to me anymore, that's the reason it's in the backlog. I can just remove it from the backlog, put it back in the idea bucket, and when I need to send out a newsletter or when I need to make a YouTube video, I'll go to that backlog. I look at the list, there's usually like five or six different things in there. I'm like, okay, that one seems like I could write about that or create something about that pretty easily. I'm excited about that.

I'm curious about it, whatever that goes to, in progress. And that's the thing that I work on until it gets shipped. I'm not thinking about any other things in the backlog. And then once that thing works all the way through the channels, so it's actually published, it's actually delivered, then you go back and you pick one new thing from the backlog and you, you work on that. But every, every time I try to do more than one of those at a time, I find that I just stop working on them all together.

And then it gets to be Sunday night because my newsletter goes out on Monday morning and it's like, oh man, what am I going to write about now? Yeah, I, I feel like the, um, the way I do it is I like to, um, to keep them in separate platforms. And I've done this for a long time. So, like I've got in Omnifocus, a project called Content Ideas. Like you, I've got automation built.

David Sparks

Anytime something occurs, I should do that. I've actually got it broken down into different platforms for me, like the labs versus the podcast, etcetera. But I've just got a list of ideas for all the stuff I make sitting there. But to me, they become real when I add them to a notion database, because I've got notion databases for the shows and for the labs. And so I only have a few items in notion that I'm actually actively pursuing.

But I've got this big list of ideas I can pull from. But I was thinking about this idea of pull based productivity, and I've been doing that workflow for a long time, but expanding it even further to like, what are the active projects? You need to really narrow them down. Like my labs member, who only does four quarter, I think that he's onto something, and I think that is what Cal is referring to here. And I think we all need to be able to step back and get a little more perspective.

Mike Schmitz

So before we move on from the pool based productivity idea, I know for Deepfocus, a while back you had shared you were implementing this with JF. How is that going? Is it still working with Max Sparky Enterprises? Yeah, I mean, we're early days with it, right. It's really not, it really doesn't impact him that much because the way our workflow is, I'm the, I create the stuff, and then he, and then he does the cleanup on, you know, the kind of the terminology we use is I wash the dishes and he dries them, you know, and so what I'm trying to do is wash fewer dishes and then the ones he gets to dry are the ones that are definitely going out.

David Sparks

I don't have, well, I guess I just explained it. I'm just picking on one or two at a time and they get through the process before the next batch comes in and so it doesn't really impact him that much. But to a certain extent our model matches what was talked about in the book. But I am definitely the bottleneck because I do the work of figuring out what to make and then how I'm going to make it. And then he picks up the the production of the back end.

Mike Schmitz

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Okay, the next part here is to work at a natural pace. And I'm curious, David, what in the world does that mean? Well, I mean, I think that in comparison to the modern pace that we're encouraged to work at doing things at a slower pace, just taking it. I think it comes in part with doing fewer things, but being focused on getting through them without the rush. In this section, he goes through a lot of old timey science, Isaac Newton and folks back then, Mary Curie, and they would like come up with a theory over a course of years, and they'd take vacations and they would kind of work around an idea before they came up with their conclusions, which is something that is just unheard of today.

Yeah, the thing that kind of stood out to me as I was reading this section was the conversation that we had about Richard Feynman's twelve favorite problems and how those are basically things that you're not rushing to get a solution for. And that feels weird in today's society, maybe because a lot of the problems that we encounter we feel are knowledge problems. And if we just had the right information, then we wouldn't have this problem. But I think that actually can work against us because we find the first plausible answer and then we assume that is the right thing. Yeah, and it kind of reminds me of liminal thinking by Dave Gray that our friend Ernie recommended to us a while back, and how we have this limited experience.

And on that experience we build all of our judgments, all of our beliefs. We surround ourselves with people who look, think, talk, and act just like we do. And this is truth, but it's one small section of what is actually knowable. So we have to constantly be curious. We have to constantly be seeking out other perspectives.

And it's hard to do that when you're not curious about the problems that are in front of you. And so I really like that idea. Of those twelve favorite problems, just the TLDR with this is that there are these problems that you haven't solved, but you just enjoy kind of thinking about them whenever you have some thinking time. And so you've got this list and you consult it not every day, not every week, but every once in a while. And, oh, yeah, this was something that was curious to me.

And kind of in the background, sort of like your brain's background process. Occasionally you'll stumble upon something. It's like, oh, that actually applies to this. You've sort of primed the pump for those moments of inspiration. So how does that tie to work at a natural pace?

Well, I feel like a lot of our work is I just got to put out these fires. I just got to solve these problems. And I think at the heart of work at a natural pace for me is recognize, and this is easier said than done. I still struggle with this, mightily recognize that not every problem needs to be solved by you, first of all. And second of all, doesn't need to be solved by you right now.

That's really hard to say. I'm just going to put this one over here, and that's going to remain a problem for the time being, because this is the problem that I am trying to solve right now. But the truth is that we're never in this state of utopia where all the problems have been solved. We just aren't aware of the ones that aren't immediately in front of us. So when one appears, fight the urge to, okay, this is now being loaded into the active working memory, and we're going to solve this alongside the other thing.

David Sparks

I also think a piece that stood out for me in this is just the idea of how much harder working at a natural pace is today than it was back in the time of Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton didn't have the demands on him that we have these days. He didn't have an email inbox. He didn't have a shared calendar. Right.

Your time was more your own back then. And I think that this section just reminds me that, yeah, we need to do this, but it's harder now than it used to be. It is the strategies that we use to solve this. I feel like Cal Newport talked about these many years ago in deep work, where it's kind of setting the expectations and the boundaries. And there's one story from that book that stands out to me still to this day about the woman who was at a job and she wanted more time to focus on deep work, but she had to respond immediately to these demands from her boss.

Mike Schmitz

And the way that she got the time to do the deep work she wanted was by scheduling a meeting with her boss and saying, okay, these are all the things that you have asked me to do in the last couple of days. This is the thing that I am actually getting paid to do and I want to do with excellence and do it well. So what would you rather have me do? And the boss says, well, obviously the thing in the job description that's the most important. So.

Okay, well, if that's the most important, is it okay if I ignore these other things for the time being? Yes. Okay. Now take it a step further. Is it okay if I protect this time in the morning for two to 3 hours so I can actually do that thing?

That is a really uncomfortable conversation to have, but it needs to be had. And I feel like the reason that it's so uncomfortable is we create this scenario in our heads of, there is no way that I will possibly get the response that I want with this. But you don't really know until you, you try. You know, kind of the way I got into coaching soccer, and I've coached soccer now for, I don't know, three or four years at this point. I'm actually the head coach of the, the middle school soccer team now.

But originally I was asked because someone found out I played soccer in high school, and Mike seems to know something, maybe, maybe he can help out. And I was adamant I didn't want to do it because I had in my mind, well, these are the requirements. So the very first conversation I had with the person is, okay, I'll help, but I can't do Fridays, I can't do Thursdays, and I can't do Wednesday nights. And they were like, okay, sounds fine. Like, it caught me off guard.

I had built up this whole big conversation I was going to have and all the arguments that I was going to have to make going back and forth, and in the end, like, all of it was, was mute. And I feel like there's the opportunity for that, that we don't entertain with these uncomfortable work conversations. But really, the worst case scenario, if you do have one of these conversations, is that now you at least know what you're dealing with instead of projecting it and creating this picture in your mind. Yeah, one of the things I've been working on is doing less email, and somebody wrote me about the problem of email, how he was getting stuck going to email too often and couldn't figure out why and what was my advice. And rather than write him a response, I wrote a post, I'm actually going to do it as a short series.

David Sparks

And the first one I did, I'll put a link in the notes, was about that. I think one of the reasons we jump into email and find ourselves going to it constantly is because it's not the hard thing. Quite often the hard thing you do takes more energy than email, so it's easier to just go to email and engage in what Cal would call pseudo productivity. And I do think that there's a real thing to that. If you find yourself checking email too often, it might be because at some level you don't want to do the hard thing.

And maybe you need to become more intentional about doing the hard thing. Yeah, you need to just do the hard thing. But also I think kind of coupled with this, at least for me, is this feeling that you don't want to disappoint people, you don't want to let people down. Yeah, I guess I'm a recovering people pleaser, but I feel like anybody who wants to avoid drama in a work situation, which is just about everybody, is going to naturally want to help people out because they know that they're going to need help at some point and they want people to reciprocate. So it does require some conversations about what's most important.

Mike Schmitz

If you're able to, you want to establish some boundaries within the work culture. That's basically what I did at the last day job. I was an integrator. So kind of like an operations person, but really just kind of went through how are we actually working? And created documents on like communication expectations.

Like we use slack, we use email there, but we, once we defined that, you know, if you send somebody a message on slack, it doesn't mean because they have a green bubble that they're going to reply to you in ten minutes. In fact, in the company documentation now, you know, you're supposed to assume that that person is actually in the middle of a project. They're at their computer, but they're working and they will see your message during one of their scheduled breaks in the morning. So expect a response within three to 4 hours. Okay.

So that just having that shared understanding eliminates a lot of the hey, can you help me out with this quick? Because you know that you're not going to get a response within ten to 15 minutes at least. You're not supposed to, you don't have management on board with that and someone above you sends a request, you know, that that can kind of be counter counterproductive at that point. But having the shared understanding, you know, these are the rules that we're playing by, can help eliminate some of that stuff. And kind of a related idea to this is the idea of the small scale seasonality because, you know, there's an obvious application of this with like the 7th week sabbaticals that we've talked about Sean McCabe previously.

But one of the things that Cal advocated for with this is like no meeting Mondays, just a day a week that you're not going to have meetings. And I feel like if you were to introduce something like that at a company or an agency, everybody thinks they have too many meetings. So just the idea of, okay, we're not going to cut any of these meetings, but we're going to organize them in a way where on this day we're not going to have to worry about it. I mean, you're going to absolutely be able to champion some support for that sort of idea, but it requires you to think about how could things actually be better, which is hard to do when you're just responding to the things that keep showing up in your inboxes and you already feel overwhelmed. Yeah.

David Sparks

And I just feel like this whole section work at a natural pace goes at the heart of many of the modern worker problems, you know, getting space to do your work. You're right. I feel like there's a lot of parallel between this section and the deep workbook. But I think this is something that is a particular difficulty for a lot of us now. I mean, I work for myself and yet I still get interrupted all the time.

So it's just something we have to really be conscious of. I mean, I think it's one of the big goals of us making this show about focus is finding ways to stop and work on the important stuff. And working at a natural pace comes right in hand with that, if you can back off the exterior interruptions and distractions. You mentioned at the beginning that these three things kind of tie together. So what makes work at a natural pace actually work is that you have done the first step in doing fewer things.

Mike Schmitz

You've selected fewer projects to work on. And by doing so kind of implied here is that, you know, the things that you are working on are important and they're important enough that you're not just trying to crank these out in a day, a week. These may be things that are going to transform your life or the organization, but they're going to require a significant investment of effort. And so you recognize that you're not going to ship this, you're not going to get it done in a short period of time. But you can show up every day and you can make progress.

And as humans, we are terrible at estimating how long something is going to take. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. So if you can show up and write 1000 words a day, I mean, how long does that take? If you are clear on what you're going to be writing and understand how it fits into the big picture, maybe an hour or two at the most. But if you did that every day, it's a couple of months before you have 60,000 words and you have a book.

But just thinking about writing this book, this feels like such a huge, heavy lift. I'm not even going to start thinking about that. If you chose fewer things and then you recognize that today I did my thousand words. I checked that box. You know, I'm just trying to show up every day.

I'm trying to move the needle. But you have to trust that those small actions are tied to the bigger outcomes. And over time, if you just show up every day, if you win the day, then the results are going to take care of themselves. But you have to have that, that big picture in mind. And this sounds kind of contradictory, I realized when I was railing on goals previously, but goals, I guess what I'm saying is, like, let's say you have the goal of writing a book.

I think that's a great goal. I just wouldn't say this is going to be published by this specific time. For those people who have the book deal, like, fine, you're working differently than most of us who are just trying to get something out into the world. But the way to actually make that thing is, I'm just going to do this small piece and I'm going to do it every single day. But even the people that we know that get book deals do it the same way.

David Sparks

I know for a fact Chris Bailey does that. He thinks about it on a daily basis. He doesn't think about it as a big project deadline. He says, how many words do I need to write today? And the other point I wanted to make is one of the downsides of this, as we've been talking about, you get all these external interruptions.

I think you need to be serious about communicating with people. If you decide to take this on, you're going to do fewer things. You're going to work at a natural pace. You need to tell your coworkers, hey, you know that big project you want me to work on? That is like, third in line right now.

These are the other two things I'm working on. And I used to do this with my legal clients when I was in trial. Like, all my other clients would want help when I was in trial. And what I would say is, right now I'm in trial, that means I'm giving 100% of myself to my client who is in court, you know, every day looking at a judge. And that means I can't help you right now.

But what I will tell you is, when your turn comes and you are in trial, I will give you the same priority. And that was always very, I could, you could tell that was very settling to clients to hear that, like, okay, I get it. So, um, you can't help me right now because you're doing this other thing, but when it's my turn, I'm going to get the same focus. Well, you can do that with respect to this type of, um, priority. Like you say, I'm working on this one thing right now for Mike and Joe.

Once I finish the thing for Mike, you're going to get the same priority. Yeah. And then Cal says in the book that the trick to making that work is you actually have to follow through and do things when you say you're going to do them. So kind of a result of implementing the slow productivity system. And I say system, but really it's just those three ideas of doing fewer, but more important things, working at a natural pace.

Mike Schmitz

And then the next one, we'll get to obsess over quality. The natural fruit of that is that you have more control. Maybe control isn't the right word, but you have more trust in your system. You more. More trust in your ability to handle whatever is thrown at you.

You've got the. The scaffolding to support these, these things. And instead of constantly feeling like you're, you're drowning, you can project out. You know, it is going to be a couple of months, but then I'm going to have the bandwidth to work on this project. And I think I call that out because it may be hard for people to picture what that actually looks and feels like.

If you're in the stage of overwhelm and it feels like there's constantly more being poured in than you have capacity to do, that is the promised land that we're trying to get to with this.

David Sparks

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Okay, the third point, the third principle, I guess we would say, is obsess over quality. Why is this important? Well, actually this one I like a lot. So the obvious, the idea here is you want to do things with excellence, but I actually think the title of this one can be a little bit misleading because the natural, just grabbing the headline of this, I feel like, lends itself to perfectionism. And that's not what he's talking about.

Mike Schmitz

What he's talking about is doing work that matters, that makes a difference in people's lives, and that is going to take some time. However, as I said, you know, this kind of lends itself, I think, without getting into the details, towards perfectionism. Again, that's not really what he's, what he's talking about. The way to create quality things is to do it enough to get enough reps in. So there's a balance here with the quantity and the quality.

And I would argue anyways, where if you're creating something specifically, you start off and you make something, you ship it. It's not very good, but the fact that you shipped it, now that it's out there, you can actually see how it could be better. And so the next time it gets a little bit better, and the next time it gets a little bit better. If I were to go back and listen to some of the first podcast episodes that I recorded, I would probably curl up in a ball and be completely ashamed of how they sounded. I remember editing the first one that I ever did, and I spent so much time cutting out every, on every, um.

And what I learned from that is, like, I gotta clean up my filler words. I gotta go to toastmasters and get comfortable, just kind of speaking stem about these different things. And over time, you know, I did that, and I published enough episodes. Oh, this could be a little bit better. That could be a little bit better.

And I learned the quality. So I think the way that I would kind of define this is you need to have an eye for quality. You have to have a certain level of taste that is developed of, this is where I want to get to, but also, you have to let go and say, this is the best that I can do right now, and be okay with that result. Yeah, I think consideration toward quality is really more what he's talking about than obsessing over it. But this is the shortest section in the book.

David Sparks

And you do, I think, looking at the interlocked nature of these principles, if you are going to do less and if you're going to work at a natural pace, it needs to be good. I think that's really what he's saying. Yep. And you need to. You need to care about the results.

And I would argue that that should always be the case. Except I think when you're overwhelmed with too many projects, it's just not possible. This is the gift, right? The ability to. To take more care over the quality that you get the pay.

It's almost like the payoff for the first two principles. Yeah, it is. There's a. A phrase that he uses here, which I like. Hardwood grows slowly.

Mike Schmitz

And I feel like this is the chapter, but I can't recall specifically where he talks about the musical artist Jewel, kind of, as a side note, I guess Cal Newport has some incredible stories in here, but the one about jewel I liked a lot, because basically she was this unknown musician, and she started showing up at this coffee shop, and there were only a couple of surfers there for the first show, and then the next show there were a couple more, and she just basically kept doing that enough, and the audience grew, because every time that she showed up and she sang and played, she gave it everything that she had. And that was evident for even the few people that were there. So they went and they told other people, and eventually the attention came. But that's an application of this concept, I guess, that I was kind of clumsily talking about earlier. I feel like is you need to just do the very best that you can right now and then if you have that eye towards excellence.

I feel like it's not explicitly stated in this chapter, but I really do believe that if you're consistently trying to do the very best that you can do, and you're asking yourself, how can I honestly be better? You're open to receiving constructive criticism, whether it's coming from yourself or others, and you're able to overcome the fear of putting something out there. I feel like the quality is a natural byproduct. If you just do it enough, if you just have enough quantity, then the quality will be there, but it won't be there the first time, it won't be there the fifth time. It's going to take some time in order for it to get there.

No matter how. How skilled or talented you are at the beginning, the first time that you do it, you're not going to be very good at it. I would add to that that you have to care. I mean, just doing it over and over again isn't going to make you naturally better unless you're paying attention. And the story about Juul that stood out to me was.

David Sparks

So once she got kind of big at this coffee shop, then the record company started showing up and they offered her a million dollar deal. She grew up relatively poor, and somebody said, I'm going to give you a million dollars for this record deal. And rather than just say yes, she went to the library and read a book about the music business and realized that if they give her a million dollars, they're going to expect her to make a lot of money off her first record, or they're going to dump her. And she knew that she wasn't quite there yet. She didn't have the abilities that she wanted to, and she didn't want to put herself under that pressure.

The same thing happens with companies. As a former attorney, I'll tell you the worst thing that can happen to a company is a high valuation at the beginning, because suddenly they've got all these people wanting money out of the company because they've got this high valuation. You want to start low. And so she turned down the million dollars, which took an incredible amount. I mean, she was, like, in her, you know, early twenties, and she turned down a million dollars and she found a different record company.

She said, look, don't give me a bunch of money, but I want a higher cut, you know, and I want. And that way, if my first record doesn't make a ton of money, you're not in it. You know, you haven't lost your million dollars, and you'll give me some time to get better. And that's what happened. Her first couple records did okay, but she really blew up much later, and, and she had the foresight to kind of put herself in that position.

I thought that was a really remarkable story. It's even more remarkable when you realize that she was living out of her car at the time. Yeah. Like, that million dollars would have been very, very helpful, but that takes a lot of, a lot of guts and a lot of belief, I feel like, in yourself and your ability to, to learn and get better. And she did the same thing at the other end because once she was a massive success, people wanted her to be in movies and everything.

And she stood back from that and said, no, I have enough money. I'm happy. I think she got a farm in Texas, and she still makes great music with her studio at her house, and she's doing what she wants. I feel like a very impressive person. I didn't know about her, really.

I was aware of jewel, but I didn't really know about her. After I read this, I went back and listened to some of her music because I'm like, this is a smart person. Yeah, yeah. You kind of touched on another theme there, which isn't super explicit in the book, but she did end up trying a bunch of different things and then realized that I don't like doing these other things. I like doing this thing.

Mike Schmitz

This is the thing that I'm really good at. So kind of all the way back to the beginning now with do fewer things, you know, so this is not a linear progression, and then you get to the end, and then there we're done. Uh, this is a cycle. And so once you've done fewer things, you work at a natural pace. You obsess over the quality.

That just sets you up for a little bit more clarity to start the cycle all over again. Another thing he does throughout the book is he comes up with principles and ideas, and he's talking at this high level like we are in the show. But in each section, he includes several little practical things you can do to pursue some of these goals. One of the ones he has in obsess over quality said, buy yourself a $50 notebook. And he talks about how when he was a PhD student, he bought a fancy lab notebook, like an archival notebook.

David Sparks

And owning that high piece of equipment for what he was doing kind of raised his level of quality. He wanted to work to a level of that notebook, and I think that is something that really works for a lot of people, and it's something that we've talked about in the past in the show in different kind of lights. But I do like, just overall, throughout the book, the way Cal includes some little exercises you can do. He's not going to really show you the path. Everybody has a different path, but he's going to give you a few options that kind of help yourself get started on some of these principles.

Mike Schmitz

Agreed. And that's going to be something that certain people will love and something that certain people are going to hate. They're going to read this book and be like, what? I thought there was going to be a simple system for me to follow, and he kind of has a framework there, but the details of it you have to work out for yourself. So I can totally foresee a scenario where you get to the end of the book and you're like, I thought you were going to tell me how to do this, and you have more questions than answers still.

But I would argue that that doesn't diminish the value of the book at all. I think this is a great book, and there's a lot of things that challenge you to think about. How could I actually work better? Excellent book. I would argue.

David Sparks

Well, I'm not going to argue. I'm just going to state it. I love the COVID of this book. I know it's a little weird, right, to say that, but productivity book covers are usually so boring. And this one has a beautiful painting of a cabin out in the woods.

And I was like, I feel. I feel like it conveys the idea of the book, and I just love it as a cover. I'm just gonna say that part. Agreed. I like it a lot, too.

Mike Schmitz

Reminds me a lot of the personal retreat stuff. And I remember hearing Cal talk on his podcast about how he kind of fought for that cover because it is not your standard productivity book cover, but I think it is very effective and very in line with the message of the book. Yeah, it's a good one. If you're interested in this stuff, if you're struggling with overwhelm, this is a book you should read. And I do think it's one of the best books on this kind of emerging topic of more deliberate, slower, but better, less but more important productivity thing we're going through.

David Sparks

And I'm on board for it. Me, too. Speaking of books, what are you reading right now? David? I'm catching up with you, Mike.

We talked about feel good productivity by Ali Abdall about a month ago. I read the book last week, and I liked it. It was good. You know what I liked about it the most was the first premise that you should feel good about your productivity, because I think so much of it has got these negative consequences or negative emotions attached to them. Like, oh, I have to do more.

I have to bring in a sense of joy or happiness to it, I think could really help. I also think this book pairs nicely with slow productivity. I did, too, which was surprising to me at first, I guess just understanding that Cal is so anti social media anything. And Ali Abdall is a youtuber who built his business on borrowed attention using social media. Just seemed like those two perspectives were a little bit at odds.

Mike Schmitz

And kind of the thing that opened my eyes to this was an interview that was on Cal Newport's podcast, where he had Ali Abdallah. And I'll find a link and I'll put that in the show notes that people are interested in that episode. This was a really good interview. And then after hearing that, it kind of made me realize that actually, yeah, these are complimentary ideas. I feel like if you are picking fewer things and you know that they're important, then you feel better about working on those things and allows you to do a lot of the other things that Cal talks about in his book, and we've talked about here today.

David Sparks

So what are you reading these days, Mike? All right, well, I've got a book that I am reading by someone who used to work with Brian Holiday, Brent Underwood. And this is not a productivity book at all, though. It is called Ghost Town living. I'm not sure if you came across this story a few years ago, but definitely some of the people that I followed were talking about this.

Mike Schmitz

But there was a group of people who makes stuff online. I think Nathan Barry was one of the people who was part of this group that bought this old ghost town called Sarah Gordo. Do you remember hearing anything about this? Yes. Barely, though.

Okay, so at the time, I was like, what? Why did these guys buy a ghost town? Well, Brent Underwood, to my understanding here is the person who actually has been living there. So I just think the whole concept of ghost towns is fascinating. It was built on this mine obviously that produced a lot of silver and I believe gold hundreds of years ago, but it's been completely empty since like 1850 or something like that.

So I like the picture of that. And I just am fascinated by old buildings and things like that. If these walls could talk, what sort of stories would they tell? And uh, I'm not sure I would actually want to go live there, but I think it's a pretty fascinating premise. So uh, I am bringing this one on the plane and uh, reading it while I'm traveling this week.

David Sparks

I can tell you, growing up in the west, you know, we would go out to ghost towns when I was a kid. Like that was a thing back in the seventies. I don't know if they're as accessible as they used to be. And it was just weird, you know, that there was this town there that had a whole history behind it and it now it's just a bunch of rubble or falling down buildings. But yeah, I remember like kind of going out there and we like, we would camp out there and stuff and it was, it was weird.

But yeah, that was the thing where I grew up. Nice. Got any shiny new objects? Yeah, I do. I, you know, sometimes you just want to spend money on yourself.

Ever had that feeling? It's like, oh, I'm going to buy myself something. And uh, and I always, I make tea every morning and I never finish it because it always gets cold. And I finally decided to try one of these ember mugs. I've heard from a bunch of my friends that love them.

I bought one. It's ridiculous to pay over a $100 for a tea mug. But what it is, it's a little mug. It's got a heating element in it and a battery and then it comes with a, it's a plate. It's not a hot plate, it's a charging plate.

And you make your tea, you put it in there in the morning and you've got hot tea for the whole morning and you can pull it off the, the charger and it holds, keeps the tea hot for like a couple hours when you pull it off. But I usually keep it on the charging plate throughout the morning. And my tea, I usually finish drinking it by about eleven. But I. Man, it's a nice quality of life improvement for me that I have hot tea all morning.

We're recording very early today. I haven't made mine yet. I'm looking at it right now, thinking you need some tea inside of you. Nice. Yeah, these are cool.

Mike Schmitz

I got one for my wife because she. I typically make coffee in the morning, and then she is the one who homeschools our kids. So she gets busy, and I go down to my office, I drink my coffee, and I write and I work, but she'll get distracted by something that someone needs help with, and her coffee gets cold. So I got her one of these a couple of years ago, and she loves it. Is it still working?

David Sparks

I mean, I'm wondering what the lifespan of this thing is. No, it still works. It's great. You know, there is an app that comes with it, which is kind of useless once you set the temperature that you want your beverage to stay at. I guess that's kind of the killer feature of it.

Mike Schmitz

And I'm sure there are cheaper alternatives to this, but it is a really nice mug, first of all, and it's. It's easy to use. I'm a. I'm a big fan. I just have not pulled the trigger on getting one for myself because I drink my coffee too quickly.

David Sparks

Well, you don't need it then. No. Guess not. My shiny new object is basically what I've been calling a life theme in a box. Michael Hyatt has this product called life Focus.

Mike Schmitz

I put the link in the outline, and I'll put the link in the show notes. People are interested in this, but essentially. So I've got this process for developing your personal mission statement. I call it a life theme, and I'm not original in this. Everyone's got their version of it.

Well, this is Michael Hyatt's version of it, and kind of all of them. You have to figure out what's really important to you, and then you talk about doing fewer things. You choose projects that are in alignment with your vision and your values. So he's got, obviously, books and courses to help you figure this stuff out. And it's kind of all based off of this wheel of life concept.

So these are the different areas of your life and what are kind of the things that are important to you in these. These different areas. So this is actually a box that has a whole bunch of these cards, and I think it's a really useful tool for people who have never done this sort of thing before. For example, there's a whole bunch of cards that have sample values. So if you just tell somebody, hey, sit down and write down your values, that's hard to do if you've never thought about it before.

But by having all these cards, you have a bunch of examples, and you can basically put them in three different piles. This really resonates. This kind of resonates. This isn't me. Those aren't the exact terms that he uses, but that's the idea.

And then after you go through those, you go through the stack with the ones that are the most resonant, and you pick three to five of those. And then from there, you have the different areas of your life, and there's different examples of projects and things that you can do that would move the needle in those particular areas. So it's basically a box with a whole bunch of cards in it. But I feel like the cards, the physical objects, are kind of useful when you're kind of going through this stuff and trying to figure out, why am I here and what really matters to me. I know I've got my system.

You've got your system. So if you've done this sort of thing before, chances are you may not actually find this all that useful, because I don't think there's anything revolutionary here other than the physical nature of the cards. But if you are looking for a place to start, I think this is a really cool product. Yeah. I think Michael Hyatt does such a good job of getting through to people who are not reading all the books on this stuff.

David Sparks

Like, and, you know, he's one of the best at this. Yep. All right. Well, that will do it for this episode. So if you haven't already, go check out slow productivity by Cal Newport.

Mike Schmitz

Can't tell we're big fans of the book. And congratulations, Cal, on another phenomenal book. Thank you all for listening. Thank you to our sponsors, which is our friends at Zocdoc. Indeed.

And vitally in deep focus. David and I both have travel coming up, so we'll be talking about some of our favorite travel hacks. Deepfocus is the ad free extended version of the podcast. If you want to sign up for Deepfocus, you can do so at relay FM focused. Otherwise, we'll catch you next time.

202: Slow Productivity

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1: Introduction

2: Discussing Cal Newport's Book

3: Practical Implications

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