Dr. Cal Newport: A No-Pressure Plan for Next Year's Resolutions [GREATEST HITS WEEK]

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27:03how does the concept of of what we're discussing right take taking your time to really work on masterpieces how does that square with the desire to be prolific and the desire to accumulate the rapid feedback that is often necessary in order to improve. One of the first times I used the term slow productivity was observing often the most prolific people in history, so we think of them as very prolific, are working way slower than you. So you take these people where we look backwards on their production and say, a really prolific person. Then we zoom in onto an average Tuesday, and we think they're very lazy.

27:51And so the canonical example of this for me is John McPhee. We take the writer, John McPhee. He's written all these books, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, multiple finalists for the National Book Award. He's been writing canonically for the New Yorker since the 1960s, probably their most famous writer, just hundreds of articles. His course at Princeton in creative nonfiction writing trained the whole generation that followed him essentially like every major writer of uh gen x is basically trained under john mcphee i mean david rimnick trained under him john krakauer trained under him eric schlosser trained under him jennifer wiener trained under him even though she went to fiction uh tim ferris actually took his course as well i talked to him about it recently he's like he's like the best writing i've ever done is my stuff for john's class.

28:38So it's an incredibly prolific guy. But the book opens on a particular story of him working on a particular article in the 1960s. And he's lying on his back on a picnic table in his backyard. And he does that for a whole week. A whole week, he's just lying out there because he's trying to figure out how to crack this article. And it was about the Pine Barrens and it's some epic article. And in the end, it was like 10 ,000 words. And he's like, he couldn't figure it out. So he just laid on his back. And so when you look at McPhee on an average Tuesday, you're like, this guy is like the least prolific person we know.

29:10He's laying on his back on a picnic table. Come on, get after it, McPhee. But then we zoom out and we say, oh my God, this is like, I wish I could ever be that prolific as a writer. So this was like one of the ideas that got me into studying slow productivity in the first place is there's this huge mismatch between what it looks like day-to-day to produce over a career, a huge amount of great stuff versus what most of us do on the day to day. So we're working much harder day to day than a lot of these people who are producing over a career a super impressive amount of stuff. Right. And that goes back to on a day to day level, busyness is often a proxy for productivity.

29:50Yes. Right. So if you have a calendar that's completely full, then it appears to the outside world that you are productive because you have Zoom meetings and emails and things like that. But what strikes me is all of the examples that we've gone through so far are people who produce, I'm going to use the word creative, but I mean that in the broadest sense, chemistry, physics, those are also creative fields in that you are creating new knowledge. How do the people who are listening to this who are in management or their accountants, their engineers, their managers, how do they take these principles and apply it to their professions?

30:27Yeah. So how do we take these principles and make them be relevant to someone who works in an office all day. So I'll give an example. So we can look at these historical figures and say, hey, one of the things they're doing is they don't do a lot at the same time, right? They're not very overloaded. All right, let's examine what that means and then apply that to a manager, for example, or someone who's working in a support position. And we look deeper. We say, oh, it kind of makes sense. the more things you have on your plate at the same time, the less effectively you can do anything. Because what happens is, and we try to understand why they were doing this, what happens is everything you commit to do brings with it some sort of overhead.

31:09Not the direct execution of the project or the commitment, but the emails about it, the meetings, the standing meetings about it, the cognitive real estate that kind of gets taken up like, oh yeah, we've got to remember that we're doing this thing, right? So as you pile more things on your plate, you're piling up more of these administrative overhead duties. I call them overhead tax. And what happens is, is that more and more of your day gets dedicated to administrative overhead of this growing list of things you've committed to. And as more and more of your day gets taken up supporting work, there's less and less time to actually do the work itself.

31:44And so the rate at which you're actually finishing things can go down because the time available to actually work on the hard stuff is not only smaller, but it's probably highly interrupted because you have all this other administrative overhead, which doesn't just sit neatly in one part of your day, but of course, explodes throughout your day. And you have to answer those emails whenever, and those meetings are going to be set where people have time. And so your whole day is chopped up. Now, suddenly you are terrible at doing the fundamental part of your job, which is just, I'm using my brain to do valuable things.

32:15And it doesn't have to be writing plays or creating chemistry theories. What I'm doing might be coming up with strategy or making sure that my people I supervise have what they need or writing code or whatever it is I do. You're doing this all really poorly because so little of your time can actually go towards it. So now we've taken this principle from these rarefied worlds and we brought it to the office. We're like, oh, in the office, it's terrible to have too much to do because now you're very ineffective at whatever your your main job is. You're mainly just servicing work and it all collides with each other.

32:45So we should strive to have less on our plate at any one time so we can get more done over time. We get things done at a higher quality over time if we have less things on our plate at the same time. This then becomes all sorts of tactical suggestions for how do you keep your workload small at any one moment. And then you get now we're in the weeds of the person who's in the cubicle and is getting all the emails. We have now bridged the gap all the way to their world. And now we're talking about ways to do things like surface your workload and do time scheduling. And we get the tactical habits all aimed at keeping your workload from being too large.

33:18So we can kind of bridge the gap from these principles all the way over to how am I managing my digital calendar in a 2024 knowledge job? You give an example in the book of when it comes to that administrative overhead tax of someone who's in marketing who has a decision to make about do they plan a one day event or do they write a deep white paper? And you outline how if they were to, with that same basket of time, if they were to write a paper, that wouldn't have all of the administrative overhead, all of the emails and the meetings and the Zoom calls that they would have if they instead planned an event.

33:59And so if they're choosing between two projects, the one project that has fewer moving pieces might be a more effective use of their time. But the thing that popped into my head when I read that was knowing myself, right? If I were tasked with writing a paper, I would be the proverbial college student who puts it off, puts it off. And then at midnight the night before, I'm like, I better do that. And then pulls an all-nighter, right? Whereas if I'm planning something with other people, the very fact that other people are involved, the very fact that there are Zoom meetings about it creates the accountability that makes me actually do it.

34:37And so I guess to what extent do elements like teamwork, accountability, putting the structures in place that keep you from getting in your own way, to what extent do those play a role in this? Well, I mean, it plays a big role going back to what we talked about before. Like, how do you not procrastinate if you're Lin-Manuel Miranda or Marie Curie? You put stakes in the ground. You have people you're working with. So it's not just you thinking about things. But there's more than just that. Like, this example is a good one, right? So let's think about this organizing an event versus writing the paper.

35:14The problem with the organizing the event is that it becomes what I call a task engine, meaning that it can generate tasks that require your attention in an unscheduled haphazard way at a regular basis too. So like it's constantly going to spit off stuff that requires your attention in an unpredictable way. This vendor needs you to get back to them. You're trying to get the speaker to agree to come and there's something like back and forth. So it's not the fact you have to coordinate with other people. It's the fact that you're going to have impromptu coordination that is going to constantly be spinning off tasks that you don't know they're coming.

35:48So you have to sort of just always be ready. And that's a terrible impact. We call them productivity termites in the book. It eats away at all the other stuff you're trying to do, because now you have to keep switching your attention back to this thing. So let's go back to the writing the hard report. Well, what could you do there? So you don't just put it off or wait till the last minute. Let's bring other people in. Sure. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to have three check-in meetings on the calendar where I'm going to send you the night before I promised and you're my boss actually, right?

36:15So I feel like social capital, there's skin in the game. I'm going to send you the draft of part one, and I'm going to send you a draft of part two, and then I'm going to send you a combined draft. And then two weeks after that, I'll have the polished draft. Yeah, that's meetings, but it's entirely predictable. You know when they're coming, they're on your calendar way in advance. They are not going to unexpectedly step on the toes of something else you're working on. It's very predictable. Predictable disruption is fine. Unpredictable disruption just destabilizes everything. It's the, I was going to work on this thing today, but now I'm in a back and forth with the sound engineer contractor.

36:53And we got to resolve this today because the conference is coming up, but it's going to take 10 or 15 back and forth messages to figure this out. And if we're going to get through 10 and 15 back and forth messages in one day, I'm going to have to see each of their messages really soon after it gets here. So I can send that back again. So now I'm checking my inbox once every five minutes because I have to keep up with this conversation with the contractor. But now that I'm in my inbox every once, five minutes, I'm seeing all these other things going on. It's a destroyed day. Now trade that for, Hey, I know next week there's a one hour zoom with my boss.

37:25And so like I'm motivated because I want to have a good draft done, but I can just work and I can get this done. and my time is not being fragmented. So I really like to prioritize non-task engine choices when you do have a choice. One of your other tactical suggestions, going back to that frenetic, now I'm checking my email every five minutes, one of your other tactical suggestions is to take a page from what professors do when professors have office hours, which is anyone can have office hours. Any knowledge, any manager can schedule their time with an office hours capacity. Can you elaborate on that?

38:00Oh yeah. It's my favorite, my favorite piece of advice and to put it in context, right? When it comes to, and this all goes to that first principle of do fewer things because we want to avoid that overhead tax and we don't want our whole life to be servicing work. We want to be able to actually work on things. So the first thing you can do is just do fewer big things. And we talked about that, like limit the projects you're working on and there's tactics for doing that. But what do you do with the projects that remain that they're going to generate communication? They're going to generate tasks and meetings.

38:27Like you can't say no to everything. So how do we best contain the administrative work to the stuff we have to do generates? Office hours is, I think, one of the best answers. And because what are we trying to solve with office hours? It's that scenario that we just gave about the sound contractor. We're trying to figure something out over email, and it's going to take 10 back and forth messages. And because we have some time limit on this, it's not 10 messages over 20 days. It's 10 messages over five hours. I have to now to check my inbox all the time so that I can see your response pretty quickly.

38:59So I can send you one and I have to start checking again so I can see your next response. How do we avoid that? And a simple rule is saying, okay, email is for sending files. Great. Email is for announcing things. Great. Email is great for questions that could be answered with one message, right? Oh, remind me again, how many people were expecting for the conference. And then that can just sit in your inbox until you're, you're ready to do email and answer. It's like a great email use case. But you could say what it's not going to be used for is anything that requires back and forth. So then what do you do with that, right?

39:32Now here you could get in trouble because some people think, well, if I don't want to do back and forth via email, we should just turn everything into a meeting. But that doesn't scale, right? Because now you have Zoom meetings everywhere. And because of the way calendars are set up, you know, what's the minimum? You can't even see something that's less than 30 minutes. So everything has to take at least 30 minutes. And you're like, oh my God, that doesn't work there's that whole meme uh this could have been an email yeah it could have an email right and there's good reasons for it so what do you do instead office hours so you say yeah every day this hour my phone's on my office door's open i have a zoom room set up with a waiting room or whatever and now when anyone sends you a message that is trying to spark that 10 message back and forth like hey what's our plan for whatever and you're like oh god like we have to figure out the plan and you're just trying to get that off your head because you forgot about it.

40:21And this is going to be terrible. We're going to be seeing emails all day. Like, yeah, we should discuss this. Here's what you say now. Yeah, we should discuss this. Grab me in the next office hours you can. And you're just pushing people towards those left and right. And then in this one hour a day, you have like four or five discussions that each take five minutes. You're saving yourself 20, 30 emails a day, but it's not the 20 or 30 emails we care about so much as the two to 300 email checks that accompany those emails. And it makes a huge difference. So synchronizing communication makes a big difference.

40:49So office hours do it. Having standing group docket clearing meetings is another thing. So here's our team works on things. We meet twice a week. We have a shared document where every time someone thinks of something that's relevant to the group, you add it to the shared document. And then when you get to the meeting, you go through everything one by one. Again, it sounds simple, but here's what happens. If you just schedule the regular meeting for your group, what happens two days earlier when something comes up that's relevant to the group? Most people get stressed. Now I have an open loop. I don't want to forget this.

41:20This seems important. I don't have a complicated productivity organizational system because most people don't, despite me trump my best attempts. I need to get this out of my head because I worry I'm going to forget this. So I'm just going to send an email to the team. But if there's, oh, I could put it on this document that I know for a fact on Wednesday we're going to go through, you get relief and it cuts down on email. So, I mean, it's all about how do we effectively synchronize communication that has to happen so that it happens in real time in times we chose in advance and does not require unscheduled messages that must be intercepted and replied to.

41:54Right. It sounds as though you're trying to make asynchronous communication more synchronous. It's asynchronous, like asynchronous synchrony. I don't know if that's a thing. Yes, or batch synchrony. I wrote this really nerdy article years ago for The New Yorker that was called was Email a Mistake. And it gets into synchrony versus asynchrony because in my academic field, I'm a distributed systems theorist, a computer scientist that studies this. In that field, synchronous communication versus asynchronous communication is something we study mathematically. And so we have this really good sense that in the world of these protocols you might run in distributed systems, here's the typical tradeoff.

42:37Synchrony allows for easy, like low message complexity solutions to things. So if we have really synchronized and typically in these abstractions, it's like synchronized rounds. But if like we're basically going in real time, right? We can solve things with really easy interactions. But when you build a system, there's a huge cost to try to build a system that can like synchronize us so we can do it. Asynchrony, so I'm gonna send a message to you. It'll get to you eventually. I don't know how long it's going to take, or even if you're there or not, or maybe you've left. Very easy to build a system where computers can talk asynchronously, but now the protocols become much more complicated because we have to deal with the fact that we're not just here in real time and the number of messages involved in everything greatly increases.

43:24So there's this tradeoff. It's hard to build a synchronous system, but then everything's easy once you have it. It's easy to build an asynchronous system, but all of the interactions you do are really complicated. And it actually is the point of this geeky New Yorker article is that holds for things like email and office communication. It's a pain to set up the office hour system, you know, because you have to have rules and you have to teach people about it and you have to stick to it. But once it's set up, the actual interactions are way simpler. An asynchronous system, which in office communication just means we all have email addresses.

43:57Let's just go. You know, let's just email. Right. No rules, no guidelines. We all know how to use email. Great. Nothing to learn. Very simple to set up, but the interactions are way more costly and complicated and expensive. So there's like this interesting tradeoff between the two that mathematicians know about, but it really applies as well to the office. Right. Well, and it resonates, you know, when you think of in the 1980s when people could synchronously spoke on the telephone and telephones at that time were landlines with a cord that plugged into your wall. Right. Both people had to be available at precisely the same moment.

44:29It was harder to get somebody on the phone, but easier to do things, you know, versus. Once you're on the phone, you could like rock and roll, right? Exactly. And not only was it efficient, it was also accurate. Because, for example, I can tell how you're feeling about something if I can hear your voice. Email, it's a terrible medium for conveying any sort of emotional accuracy. People wildly misinterpret, is this person mad? Are they happy? Are they bored? Going from words to trying to infer the emotional state of the person who wrote the words is really, really hard. That's why really great novelists are revered, because they know how to do it.

45:12And they're very rare, because it's very hard just using words to convey an emotional reality. It's why in the 1800s, if you looked at letters that people would send to their spouses, or Lincoln writing to Mary Todd Lincoln, they're huge, long, flowery things. because it takes pages that try to convey your emotional state accuracy. So they would have to do all this flowery prose, which hits us as really weird today. But what they're trying to do is like, let me convey to you the tone of this. And it takes a lot of words. So anyways, when we just are hacking out an email as quickly as possible, of course, no one understands them.

45:47We completely miss. So it has its challenges for sure.

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47:45I'm reminded of something that you introduced in a previous book, the any benefit hypothesis. We live in a world in which if there is any given benefit to doing a thing, we are encouraged to do that thing. Sure, there's some benefit to being on TikTok. Then there's some benefit to going to a conference and there's some benefit to setting up a meeting. But we pile this on with no boundaries and no limitations because there is some theoretical benefit. As knowledge workers, we live in an environment where everyone's like, why aren't you on LinkedIn? Why aren't you on Substack? When we are on Twitter, we get immediate rapid feedback around an idea.

48:22So you can put out 40 tweets in a week and see which four of those 40 are the top performers and then decide to flesh out those four or maybe even just one. maybe the one out of 40 that's the top performer, flesh that out into a blog post or a sub stack or a YouTube video. When we don't have that level of rapid feedback, sometimes it can be harder to know what to work on. But then in order to, this is turning into a long question, but then in order to determine what to work on, we then add more of that any benefit stuff onto our plate. How do we simultaneously obsess over quality while doing fewer things?

49:04Because sometimes those can seem to be at odds with one another. Well, I mean, I think the rapid feedback hypothesis, which is often given as a justification for using lots of digital social tools, for example, I think it's largely mythological. And here's my test for it. Take whatever field it is you're in. Presumably it's something that's existed for more than 11 years. But it's only been about 11 years since we've had something like ubiquitous cultural acceptance of social media. Say, are people in that field producing significantly better things today than they did 11 years ago? And if the answer is no, then it pushes back on this hypothesis that somehow getting lots of feedback from social media is making people better at what they do.

49:45And so, you know, I've heard this about me as a writer, right? So writers say this. We're not better at writing now than we were 15 years ago. Being on social media all the time has not made writers better. It's not made journalists better. It has not made books better. So it pushes back on this idea that somehow this is getting us something new. Same thing in the creative arts. People often say, how can I possibly succeed if I don't spend a lot of time on social media, like promoting? I was like, I don't know. How do people succeed for like the entire history of this field until 11 years ago?

50:16Those channels are still there. So I think one of the things social media was very good at doing and these other tools was creating these self-justifying narratives of this is critical to everything in culture. And I think we're finding out more now is like, no, I think use of this was really critical for the people who own the stock in the company to make a lot of money when their stock price went up. It gets lots of user engagement minutes, but it hasn't been as critical as we think. And so what is the right way to approach doing work? because you have talked about this in a lot of books. This book is sort of the synthesis of all my thinking on it.

50:50Like these three principles, this is the recipe. Don't work on too many things. The things you work on, take your time, work at a natural pace, like give it the time it requires to really do well. And then couple this with an obsession on, I want to do something great. Like those are the three things that have to come together. And like when those three things come together, you're like, I don't need to be AB testing things on TikTok. Like I need to actually just be getting like way better at my craft you know you don't see the great movie directors being like i gotta go get feedback like christopher nolan like do i want to do oppenheimer or not let me go on twitter and like let me see like what's going like i've been obsessed with doing my art for my whole career you know you you see this and uh great musicians they're just thinking about like pushing the music to a new place often great artists the person they're trying to impress most is like the peer in their field they most respect.

51:42You know, are they going to like, are they going to like this song? It's like when I'm writing a magazine, like a New Yorker article, the main thing I'm thinking about is like, is my editor going to think this is good? You know, like you're thinking, because he's really good. He's like a really good editor. And so if he thinks it's good, this is good. And you get kind of myopic around it, but then you get better and then you produce better things. That is the big issue with the world right now is, and I'm going to break it into two categories. I think this is really important. If you are working for yourself, if you're a creator, if you're a freelancer, if you're a socialpreneur, so you work for yourself, the biggest problem with this sort of fast productivity, pseudo productivity we face today is what you're just talking about.

52:24There's so many things I could be doing. More is better than less. And I'm really selling myself and my opportunity short unless I'm doing as many things as possible. And then of course, the overload just prevents you from doing anything well. The other instantiation of the pseudo productivity curse is if I work for someone else. And it's less about I'm trying to become a star and it's more about I'm trying to signal to my employer that I'm productive. And if all I know is pseudo productivity, then the only way I know to signal that I'm productive is to be doing lots of visible things, which means I have to answer a lot of emails real quick and make sure that I'm in a bunch of Zoom meetings.

52:59And then I'm completely overloaded and frustrated that I can't actually get anything done. Same problem, but two different instantiations. So for the creator, the problem is I'm on social media all day because I can be busier and busyness is good. For the employee, the instantiation of this problem is I'm just like on email and Slack all day because I want everyone to see I'm working because this is the only way I know to signal that I'm productive. Two instantiations of the same problem of focusing on pseudo productivity, activity itself, visible activity as our proxy for useful effort, two different instantiations of that core problem.

53:35For the people who are listening who are employed by an employer who views busyness as a heuristic for are you showing up to work or not, right? Who views busyness as an indicator of productivity. What can they do to train their bosses or to train their managers to allow them to, on the surface, appear as though they're doing less? Right. So doing fewer things is going to be an important first step in this scenario, because when you have fewer things on your plate, you finish things faster. So if you can get fewer things on your plate, you will actually demonstrably invisibly be a more useful employee than if you have a lot of things on your plate.

54:23So yeah, people do, busyness matters in the sense that I want to see your emails and this and that. But of course, if you're actually shipping, then that can begin to outweigh that. So the question is, how do you begin to keep your concurrent workload smaller, keeping in mind that's going to keep your overall production higher? And again, this is like a really key thing I want people to remember, doing fewer things at once means you accomplish more things over time. So this is not a standard zero-sum labor negotiation of I want to make my life better in a way that's going to make my company's life worse.

54:53It's not that, right? There's not a labor union negotiation. Actually, what I'm doing is going to make both our lives better. I'm going to be less frustrated and overloaded. You're going to get more good results. So like, how do we jumpstart this? And that becomes the interesting tactical question. And most of the tactics I suggest for getting to a smaller concurrent workload, focus on making your workload transparent. So it's like the big issue in knowledge work is that we have no centralized systems for keeping track of our assigning work. It's all informal. Like, you know, Paula, can you handle this?

55:23Send you an email, grab you in the hallway. Like, hey, can you, do you think you can do this thing for me? You know, I need you to like get the client testimonials on the website. No one knows who else is working on what, how much things they're working on. How is it going? How long they've worked on it? All of that is obfuscated. And it's just emails going back and forth. And everyone keeps this internal. If you can surface your workload, then you have a lot more foundation on which to control it. Right? So like in the very easiest, this is like a half thought experiment, half real suggestion.

55:55Have a shared document. This is what I'm actively working on now. You know, divider line. Here's my ordered queue of things I've committed to I'm working on next. And when someone's like, hey, Paula, can you do like whatever? You say, yeah, just go and add it, add it to my list. And now they have to go and confront like, oh, okay, you're working on these three things. There's six things in this queue. I put it down here. Oh my God, like Hala has a lot to do. So either I'm going to say, actually, look, you have enough on your plate. Or if I put on your plate, I have completely different expectations.

56:27Like you're not going to get to this for a long time. And I know why, right? If they don't have that information, the way people simulate everyone else is like basically just sort of like sitting around, waiting to help them. So like, well, Paula, why don't you do this? I asked you yesterday, but when they can see it, right. So then you can, you can simulate that effect less directly. So I talk about not maybe exposing that whole list, but keeping track of your time estimates and everything on that list so you can respond to someone happy to do it. You know, I keep very careful track of like my projects and when they're going to get executed.

57:02I have seven things on my queue ahead of you. I estimate that I'll get to this, you know, in four weeks and you mark it on the list. And then the key thing with that particular suggestion is when you get to that point, If you're not actually able to do it, if you misestimated, you update them. I know I said it would be four weeks, but actually item four and five took longer. It's going to be another two weeks, right? People will appreciate and respect the clarity. They'll say, well, this person's kind of got their act together. They know exactly what's happening with their workload. And now by making your load transparent and being clear about it, people's expectations are changed.

57:39Another thing you can do is just pre-schedule time for commitments. Oh, you want me to do this? let me go find when I'm going to do it. And I'm going to block out that time on my calendar, however much time it's really going to take. And I'm going to be honest about it. All right. So there's a time management advantage here. So like, okay, when I, there will be time for this when I get to it. So that's good. But there's also a feedback mechanism here. You said, I went to try to find the 15 hours it would take to do this project. I could not find 15 hours until April. I mark everything on my calendar.

58:08April is the next time I can do this. It all has the same effect of making your workload transparent. And now they have to confront the reality of how much is actually on your plate. They can't say you're lying. And they don't want to explicitly say, stay up late or work in the morning. And so people have to confront the reality of how much you're actually doing. And once they do, you can keep that amount reasonable. You can keep what you're working on at any one time reasonable. So if you have that list of, here's what I'm working on now, and here's the seven things I'm waiting on, you tell those people, no, I'm not emailing about this or doing meetings about this until until they move into my active projects list.

58:46So I think more transparent and clearly structured workload management makes doing fewer things at once way easier than what most people do, which is they wait till they get really stressed out and they get mad at everybody. Don't you know how busy I am? And like, okay, that lasts for like a week. And then, you know, it doesn't work. We need clarity and systematic structure. Right. And it strikes me as you describe it, that a lot of task management programs like Monday, Monday.com or Asana, to an extent sort of reflect, here are the people who are working on the projects and here are the various levels of criticality.

59:18And, you know, there's a little bit of an at-a-glance feature. This is what most people should do, by the way. So software developers who use those tools a lot, they already do this. Other people should too. It's that these teams and these tools have this idea of work to be done by default is owned by the team, not an individual. Individuals only own what they're working on right now. And so if you use a tool like Asana as a software developer, there might be this big pool of project features that need to get done. They're not on any individual's plate. They're sitting here in this sort of like, we need to do this type of column.

59:56What you're working on is way more narrow. I'm working on this feature right now. And then when I'm done, we'll pull something else out of there. This is my organizational suggestion, is work by default should not exist on individual's plates. Individual's plates should be small. There should be a place where everyone can see here's things that need to get done, but no one owns these right now. There's no one to email about these right now. We have to decide who's going to work on what next and things get pulled out of here. You know what, if this thing has stayed on here for a long time, maybe we probably shouldn't be doing it.

1:00:25I actually have a cool story in the book of a team that did this. They were observing a literal physical assembly line process at the Broad Institute at MIT. There was this process for sequencing genomes where you would pass. There's like these machines. I don't know how it works. We had to pass the samples from station to station. And things were like piling up or whatever. And so they switched over to a pull system. They're like literally pull. I pull in another sample from you and I'm ready to process it. And it kind of slowed down the whole pipeline to match the slowest, whatever. But there was a knowledge work group at the Broad Institute.

1:01:02It was like, well, why don't we do this with our just knowledge work tasks? And they built this virtual assembly line on the wall of their offices where they put things on Post-it notes. And no one owned them. They were just on the wall. And then you would bring them over to working on once someone decided to work on something. You'd write their name on it. And it wasn't moving samples through a pipeline. was doing their building projects or whatever. But it's really made this group way more productive in the sense of they finished more things because people were working on fewer things at a time because all the work that came in wasn't owned by individuals.

1:01:34It was owned by the team. So there's no overhead tax cost until you actually took it onto your plate. But if you only take one thing on your plate at a time, minimal overhead tax. Now the ratio of your hours working versus talking about work, really large. Stuff gets done much faster. Right. And the differentiator there, That push versus pull with the lab, when they were just pushing the samples onto the next stage, then there were clogs in the pipeline. Some people had nothing going on in their machines and other people had to give up basically. And so because they had so many things being pushed because they were slower and then the whole thing fell apart.

1:02:09And then they started doing priority samples where someone would just walk it from place to place. And they're like, this is stupid. They switched the polling. The whole thing worked. And the other thing to figure out with polling is if this part's going slower, it's now really obvious, right? So why don't we, instead of keep putting samples onto our tray for them to pull, go help them so they can help clear it out faster. So now the people, the technicians could move. It was, but anyways, you can do the same thing with work. So like if you can control your team, we need a solution like that. We all agree.

1:02:37Here's the task that no one's doing and then we're going to assign them. But there's things I was talking about before where you have your own list of what you're working. You're basically simulating that. By saying, here's what I'm actively working on. This stuff may technically be on my plate, but it is in a waiting queue. And I don't do anything about this until it's on my active queue. And if you bother me about it, I can tell you exactly. I'm getting to that in six weeks. Here's my queue. You look at the document if you want. Here's where I am. So you can sort of simulate this by treating everything but your core things you're focusing on as waiting in the station before you's tray.

1:03:10I have not yet pulled that onto my plate, even if technically I'm the person who it's been emailed to. Right. Right. So I have two more questions that are in my brain. One is going back to what we were talking about earlier when you discussed the rapid feedback hypothesis. And you said a lot of writers might think being on Twitter and getting that rapid feedback can help A, B test a lot of decisions. But are we really better today? Two things that strike me about that. One is the context of today is necessarily different. The way that people market or promote today, for example, in any given business is due to the technology that we have necessarily different and the opportunities available are different.

1:03:55There are a lot of businesses that exist today that would not have been able to exist in the 90s because in the 90s, those businesses would have needed brick and mortar footprints and there would have been high barriers to entry, a lot of heavy capital overhead. Today, there are a lot of small businesses that exist that due to low barriers to entry, they can exist. given the fact that context is different today and given the fact that there are businesses and in fact entire industries that exist today that couldn't have existed 15 years ago, how do we square all of that? Well, I think the internet as an infrastructure play is fantastic.

1:04:31Right. Right. Because digital delivery across a ubiquitous accessible network is great. So I can deliver digital information to anyone. We have shared protocols. That's great. We can communicate with anyone. That's great. The barriers to producing and spreading content is very low, like what we're doing right now. We can make audio content that lots of people can listen to. You couldn't do that 20 years ago. You would have to have an antenna. You're going to have the broadcaster, right? All of that, I think, is fantastic. So I'm a huge internet booster and a huge social media skeptic. This is this sort of interesting position I play in sort of internet critique.

1:05:11So my argument is when it comes to social media content production in particular, you get two harms. One is once you're in an ecosystem designed to grab your attention, it's going to grab a lot of your attention. The cost to your production is probably going to be higher than whatever you gain potentially in terms of new audiences. So you think that you're A-B testing for article ideas, but you spent 40 hours on Twitter because once you're in there, it's hard to go away. And now you're just thinking a lot about it. And this, the cognitive tax is really high. But two, the success in those mediums, so that feedback, what's it pushing you towards?

1:05:47It's not pushing you towards writing a better long form article. It's pushing you towards writing more successful tweets, right? Or if you're doing YouTube content, it's not pushing you necessarily if you're paying attention to the numbers. It's not pushing you to whatever the content you're producing to be better in a general sense. It's pushing you for you to do better on YouTube. And those dynamics are very different often from the core crafts on which one could build a really sustainable and robust and sort of meaningful creative business. We see this all the time is Twitter begins transforming you into someone that can succeed on Twitter, which is going to be a very specific type of person.

1:06:24Now, some people can succeed in that, but it's a really stressful, anxiety-ridden existence and probably really far from where you started, which is, I'm trying to write articles on X. I thought I was just testing them on Twitter. Now what I'm trying to do is get a good reaction from this really narrow audience that's being curated through an algorithm and it just pushes you to a weird place. It's like if YouTube does this even more pronounced because the YouTube algorithm is idiosyncratic, right? So success on YouTube is a very specific thing. People imagine like, oh, it's just this general place where people can put up videos and there's lots of ways for videos to be interesting and it's just a platform.

1:06:57No, oh, the algorithm is really selective. It's why you start on YouTube saying, I go on there, I'm like, I'm going to give personal finance advice. And where am I going to end up is going to be me shirtless doing videos about getting shredded because this with really fast cuts and me trying, I'm trying so-and-so's diet today or whatever, because that does really well. But what did that have to do with me wanting to be a really respectable personal financial advice thing because doing that really well is not what the, so I worry about the algorithms. So you end up not testing what to do, what you really want to do better.

1:07:33You end up learning how to do what those platforms want you to do better. So you put Lin-Manuel Miranda on YouTube, instead of going to Wesleyan in the late 90s, let's say he's going to Wesleyan in the 2010s. If he's thinking like, great, I want to, I'm working on a new style and I want to succeed on YouTube first. You're not going to get in the Heights. You're not going to get Hamilton. And you're going to get, I don't know, Lin-Manuel Miranda talking about how to get shredded. It's going to push them into a weird place because those algorithms have their own mechanism. So social media, it's just something to treat with caution.

1:08:08Like you mentioned, if you have a small business, it's great for marketing. Why are these companies so profitable? Not because lots of people use them, but because lots of people use them and can be targeted very specifically. So it's like a miracle if you're advertising. like I can advertise and try to get my ad in front of exactly the people I want to see it. So it's like very good for marketing. There's definitely use cases where it helps, you know, where you're careful about it, where I'm not on social media all the time, but I'm still getting some benefit. You know, I think about like Ryan Holiday has his team tweet out like a stoic quote every day and you know what those get to people and it does grab new eyeballs for them.

1:08:47But Ryan Holiday doesn't get within 20 feet of a Twitter account, right? He doesn't want to see that, right? And he doesn't pretend like he is either. But like, okay, that's interesting use. Or like how you and I use YouTube, which is like, we'll put our podcast episodes on there. But it's not like you or I are using the numbers from YouTube that like really influence what we do on our podcast. Because again, both our podcasts would end up being about either like weightlifting or Taylor Swift, right? Like if we were just using like, what's getting the numbers up, you know, it would change it. So there's plenty of, I think, careful good uses for it.

1:09:18But I don't see it as fundamental, especially like doing things that are too good to be ignored. That actually dovetails perfectly with my final question, which is on the topic of too good to be ignored. One thing that's somewhat contradictory that happens is that as a person grows in reputation in their field, more and more distracting opportunities come their way. And in the book, you give the example of Richard Feynman and how he swore that he would not get distracted, but then he got pulled onto the Challenger project. If you could share that story and then talk about how to deal with sort of the curse of success.

1:10:00Yes, maybe one of the only times we'll compare Richard Feynman to Joule. But actually, it's relevant. Yeah. So Feynman famously had said in this interview on Horizons, he had famously said, here's how I get good physics work done. He's a professor. Here's how I get good physics work done. I cultivate this reputation of being irresponsible. So if you try to pull me onto a committee to do something, I'm going to do a terrible job. And eventually people are like, let's just not bother. Let's not bother Feynman. And he's like, and I get a lot of physics work done. And I told that story in deep work.

1:10:31But then in my new book, I was like, yeah, but later he, a former student of his becomes the director of NASA and says, Richard, I want you to run the commission to figure out why the Challenger exploded. And he did this interview afterwards with the LA Times saying like, I wasn't following my advice. Like I said, like, don't get pulled into things. Right. And he did. But actually the important thing about that story is reflecting on it. He said the weakness was in his original advice. He's like, because he's like, this was important. and this was important to the world. This was an important thing to do.

1:11:04It was a good application of my expertise. And so actually maybe what was broken here was my original advice, which is like, just tell everyone to leave you alone. And so what you get out of that is you have to be really careful. Combine those two things. You have to be really careful. As you get better, more opportunities will come towards you. But still you want to follow your values because some of those are important. So we can connect us to Juul because this was the second part of her story. The first part of her story was she turned down a million dollars so she could take more time to get better.

1:11:34She knew it would, she had to go slow if she was going to get better. The second part of her story is what happens after she blows up. So she blows up, her album is a huge success. A million copies a month at its height. Remember this album, Who Will Save Your Soul? You Were Meant For Me. It was all over MTV. So she blows up and they put her on the Taylor Swift path. So international tours, movies. So she's in the Devil May Care and Ang Lee movie. And they're saying her people, now you have people, plural, are like, okay, Jewel, you have to move to LA because here's what we're going to do. In between your international tours, we're going to get you in movies and we're going to make you a sort of like multimedia threat or whatever.

1:12:16And she was like, wait a second. I don't like this. I have money now. I am not, my album did really well. I really like making music. And so she said, no, no more tours, never toured again. No more movies, didn't go to Hollywood. Instead, she actually went to Texas. Her boyfriend at the time was a rodeo writer and had this ranch. She's like, go to the ranch and I'm going to write music or whatever. And so she used her ability, which gave her leverage, to say, I'm going to dictate what my life looks like. Another example of that, I like these AB comparisons, Michael Crichton, John Grisham. right so they were vying for like the the title of the best-selling author fiction writer you know in the world they kept going back and forth right in the 90s completely different approach to getting really good so michael crichton like as he started taking off his writing career taking off he was like i want to do it all he moved to la he's like i want to write books i'm going to write screen plays i'm going to direct movies i'm going to direct tv shows i want to do everything you know That was his thing.

1:13:21John Grisham had a completely different reaction to the exact same circumstance. 1990s, your books are really taking off. Grisham's response is like, great. I can quit my job. I don't have to be a lawyer anymore. I can move somewhere quiet. I get a lot of free time back. And what he did is he built for his town this giant baseball little league complex. And he's like, I'm going to be the commissioner of the little league that my kids are playing. Because I really like baseball and coaching. And this is great. I'll write one book a year. I'll do three weeks of publicity. It takes me about six months to write the book and forget about me otherwise.

1:13:55And he had like one assistant. And like when she retired, he didn't bother replacing her because there's no work for a new assistant to do. He's like, the only people who know my phone number is my agent and my editor. And there's no one's calling me. I don't do things, you know? So like Jewel, he said, there's, I have control now. I can do something that's valuable. Now, if I want to maximize my money and opportunities, I can do like the Michael Crichton thing, or I can go be the little league commissioner and say like, people are going to let me do what I want because I can do something really well.

1:14:23So I really, I love that idea of, you know, obsess over quality makes your work more meaningful. It forces you to slow down. It's served by a more natural pace. It also eventually gives you the ammo to really start to push the structure of your life in these sort of remarkable directions. It's really the glue. It's a thread that goes through a lot of my books, but in this book, it's like, all of this is finally coming together. Here's the philosophy. Here is the philosophy to build this work life. You're not overloaded. You're not burnt out. It could range from just, I like my job and I want it to be sustainable to I'm the little league commissioner and I work six months out of the year.

1:15:00All of that's on the table now once you have this more sensical human notion of productivity. Do fewer things. Obsess over quality. There's one in the middle. Natural pace. And work at a natural pace. That's it. Great. Great. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Is there anything that I haven't asked about or are there any final messages that you want to leave with the audience? Well, it's a dangerous question because I could talk about this for hours. I think we just scratched the surface. So, you know, the book is called Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

1:15:32Lost art because we're like learning from these historical figures. And it's a mix of the two different types of things we talked about, these principles that are timeless and really nitty gritty tactical stuff. Like, this is how I deal with my boss wanting to give me more projects. And, you know, I think we have to be willing to marry those two things together. I mean, we have to be specific. We also have to be aspirational. So, you know, hopefully this book will do that for people. And calnewport.com slash slow, you can get the excerpt from the book. So there you go. Perfect. Well, thank you.

1:16:03Yeah, thanks, Paul. Thank you, Cal. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, there are three elements to slow productivity. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. Now the first two, do fewer things and work at a natural pace, those are fairly easy to understand. But let's talk about that third element, obsess over quality. In the first key takeaway, Cal Newport shares how great achievers make this principle work. There's three principles. The first two principles make sense when you hear a term like slow productivity because they're directly connected to going slower.

1:16:53Principle one, do fewer things like that. Okay, yeah, sure. Principle two, work at a natural pace like we're talking about. Principle three is obsess over quality. And so at first, when you see that, you're like, well, what does this have to do with slowing down? Like doing fewer things is slower, like working at a more natural pace that's slower. What does obsessing over quality have to do about it? It's what unlocks everything. Because when you obsess over, like Marie Curie did, getting the best result, or Lin-Manuel Miranda did on his play, being something new, two things happen. One, slowness becomes demanded of you.

1:17:27Because quality, you're just like, it's not ready, I can't rush this. So now you have a reason to slow down because you want this thing to be good. You care about quality. You're not just slowing down because you have an antagonistic relationship to your work and you're like, I'm done with you and I just want to do less. You're slowing down because I need to go slower to make this thing work. Flip side of that, as you get better, you can dictate more of your pace. Obsessing over the quality of what you create can be challenging. It can be tricky, but it is what ultimately sets you apart. And it is what allows you to do fewer things, to do those things at a natural pace, and to have a career with legendary output.

1:18:15And by the way, this applies in all facets of life. You can obsess over quality at your day job, if that's what you're super into. You could obsess over quality at a side hustle. You could obsess over quality at some type of a volunteer or nonprofit or philanthropic endeavor. You could obsess over quality in a community group. You can follow these principles in any realm of life. Just remember, do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. That's the first key takeaway. And it leads to key takeaway number two, learn how to identify quality. If caring about high quality is critical to achieving more without burning out, then the next question becomes, all right, how do we know what high quality is?

1:19:08How do we know it when we see it? Cal Newport explains what we need to prioritize when we are obsessing about quality. So we really need to spend more time up front learning what good is. That's like more important at first than actually trying to get good. because if you don't know where you're aiming your ship of skill, it's just going to go randomly through the waters of activity, if you know what I mean. So we actually have to, like one of the most important things you can do is not how do I get better? It's like, what makes those really good people good? And when you trust your taste, then you're getting really good feedback.

1:19:42Okay, this is pretty bad, but I know why it's bad. I can't do this, this, and this. All right, could I do that with enough practice? Yes. Could I do this? You know what? No, I'm never going to be able to do this. Let's change our plan. So I think we really undervalue taste when we talk to people about getting good at things or pursuing quality. And so that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, in order to produce great things in your field, you need to be inspired. So find other people in your field who have done amazing things. And again, Again, this could apply at your day job, at your side hustle, at your small business, at a community group or a nonprofit or a volunteer activity.

1:20:24This could apply in any domain, right? Find someone who's done the thing that you want to do, someone you admire, someone you look up to, and find out how they became successful. Find out how you can plot that path. What you need to do is take someone who is in your same field, who's doing very well, And you say, I want to take you out the coffee. You want to hear your whole story and you walk them through. All right. So here was your first job. What was your next promotion? Well, what mattered at that promotion? Okay. Then what happened next? And you begin to figure out what mattered for this person.

1:20:59So you can do this even when it's not a public figure, even when there's not podcasts to listen to or magazine profiles to read. And the key thing, if you're just talking to someone is not just finding out the steps they took, but for every step, the key question is, what did you do in that step? that other people trying to make that same step but failed were not doing. So let's get that differential analysis happening in your own career in marketing copy or whatever the particular field have programming, whatever it happens to be. And you get at this is what matters. Then you also just expose yourself to the greats.

1:21:33Just be around really good stuff from the field. And that taste not only directs you, it motivates you. And it helps you fight the procrastination. And ultimately, what you want to do with this conversation is figure out what matters and what's noise, what is important and what is distraction. And the people who are best poised to answer those questions are the people who have produced great work in the same domain. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our show notes and our newsletter by going to affordanything.com slash show notes, affordanything.com slash show notes.

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1:23:00That's where you can connect with other people who are into the same things that you're into, whether that's retirement investing, real estate, getting out of debt, early retirement, whatever that is, whatever aspect of this financial world you're interested in, you can find like-minded people there and have those conversations. Affordanything.com slash community, totally free. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pitt. This is the Affordanything podcast, and I will catch you in the next episode.