#764 - Cal Newport - The Delicate Art Of Mastering Work-Life Balance

24:17That there's nothing that isn't done in service of productivity, even the things that are sensibly supposed to be for leisure. And then, yeah, to me, and maybe to a lot of people listening, it sounds like hearing Galileo or George Eroquif, you know, whanking off for four months and then dicking about and then coming back and I'll do a little bit of work, it sounds bohemian. It sounds new age, it sounds hippie because off -framing is only within the last, we only know the last hundred years of work. We only know that. Before that, it was just people hoeing the ground, right? It was just a grary and shit.

24:56And changed drastically by the seasons, right? Like, you talk about like the German ritual you all could say nothing to do, right? As a pagan ritual, they're like, we're going to have bonfires for a month because like, what are we going to do? There's no, it's the winner.

25:13There's I went back and looked really deeply into a Forge or Hunter Gatherer life, which is the 270 ,000, the first two and a 270 ,000 years of species. Nature dictated everything, right? I mean, it was today we're on this hunt. The other day it rained, we did nothing. We're in the middle of this hunt, but it's hot in the middle of the day, so we just stopped for a while. The only time in human history, like the first time we really had, and just work hard all day long, was when meals and factories were invented. And it was so unbearable, it was so terrible to try to take humans who were used to all of this variation in autonomy and their approach to work.

25:49They say you have to work all day long as hard as you can. We had to invent labor unions, we had to invent regulatory frameworks, so we had to put all of these huge apparatuses in place, just to make that type of incredibly unnatural work tolerable. But the knowledge work emerges, like all right, so how are we gonna organize our work day guys? like, yeah, let's do what the factory guys are doing. Grab that. Like the least natural in terms of our human wiring choice that we had because it was simple and it was what we were used to and it was what was big right now. And like, well, let's just do that.

26:19Yeah, one of the principles of slow productivity is work into natural pace. Yeah. What is that for humans? Well, there's two parts to it. So for humans is what we just talked about, variations and intensity. And it's not just on one time scale but basically all time scales, right? So when I went back and looked at how humans work before, within a day, you're going to have some periods of more intense than others. In a week, some days will be more intense than others. When you're looking at a season, you know, some seasons might be more intense than others. The fall harvest is way more intense than the winter.

26:52Even at a bigger time scale, you might have busier periods and less, busier periods. I'm writing a book for two years, and then for the next year, I'm going more follow, right? So variations, that's much more natural. Then the other principle that came out of that, and this was just from directly studying the great traditional knowledge workers of time past, they take much more time. So we try to go too fast. And a lot of these thinkers who were very productive in the sense of they produced new scientific work that changed the way we understood the universe, they worked very slowly. Their notion of how long should I take on this project was way slower than what we do today.

27:30So we're always trying to charge ahead right away. What's the quickest way I could get this done? They took their time, right? They're happy to take their time. Even contemporary traditional knowledge workers do this. Lin -Humel Miranda was one of the examples I gave his first play before Hamilton in the Heights. It was a big hit right eight Tonys. He spent seven to eight years working on that play. Not procrastinating. He didn't put it aside for eight years. He just was working slowly on it. For eight you kept coming back to it. They were doing readings with real actors Then you would go away and do some other stuff and think about it and try to get something better And they come back and do another reading year.

28:07It's just this like slow process But that's like pretty typical with traditional knowledge workers We think in the pseudo productivity culture is like not fast as possible. I want to do a play I'm gonna like go away for a weekend and grind this thing out like let's rock and roll That's not the way people used to do things What are the industries or job types for whom this changing of the pace doesn't work quite so well, because there may be people listening who say, well, that's all well and good if your goal is to create over the next however many years a really great play, but that's not the world that I live in, that's not the profession that I have access to.

28:47Right. So the whole goal is then how do we take these principles that the great traditional knowledge workers excavate, and then how do we apply to just normal knowledge jobs, right? So all the advice is for knowledge work jobs, right? Basically, if you work on a computer screen for a living, if you send a bunch of emails, you're probably a knowledge worker. All right, so what does it look like to start adapting these ideas to a regular job, where you have bosses or this or that? Well, now it becomes a little bit more subtle, but you get the same effect. So now when a boss asks you, hey, can you put together this report?

29:15Instead of you saying, sure, I'll have it done, and then you plug in the most optimistic, possible estimate. You know, we do like you fall in love with the idea of getting it done that fast. You instead take that estimate and you double it. Like, yeah, you don't say one month, you say two months. So you're giving yourself more time to work on it. Then what about like this seasonality? Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you can just start actually wiring this into your actual work rhythms. Right? Like I talk about an entrepreneur in the book. She takes two months off in the summer. She just works it out like the way her contracts and the clients and she's just not around.

29:50and that summer is about 20 % less revenue. She'll happily take that hit, to be able to take two months off in the summer, so she's getting variation. Then we talk about people who work and jobs or they can't do that. Now they start doing this subtly. Right, okay, so here's what I do. I don't really schedule meetings on Mondays. I don't tell people I'm doing this. Like when they say, hey, when you're available, I give them lots of times. They just don't happen to have any on Mondays. Now we have like a slower start. And I know in December, because we're gonna lose the last week anyways for Christmas, I'm kind of careful.

30:20I don't tell anyone about this, but I'm pretty careful to have projects set up to finish before that and start after it, but nothing gets really due into it. And I am turning down that intensity down for those three weeks. And it's not long enough for my boss to really notice. But for me, it's a big deal, knowing that I can wind down that month and wound down versus another month, right? So people can start implementing these principles but more surreptitiously. So we see them really flashily done in these historical stories. But then when we jump to implement them in practice, it's like more subtle, but it's the same principles you're taking longer You have variations of intensity on different times.

30:56This starts to add up starts to make a difference. Yes your first insight around do fewer things which is Essentially impossible for people to do because you look at a calendar and there's room in it and you feel the, the, the, what does gap? The gap should be filled. Should be doing things. And I think a lot of people feel like do fewer things is accomplish fewer things. Yeah. That's the conflation. Yeah, and they're wrong. Yeah. Because what, if I add two words, it becomes clear. Do fewer things at once. Right? Because here's what I think is going on. And this is like the case I make in the book.

31:36Is that when you agree to something, the big problem is when you agree to it, that is going to bring with it administrative overhead. So whether I'm ready to work on this thing or not, now the team needs to, hey, how's it going? There's emails I'm going to have to answer. There's meetings going on to the calendar, right? You're like, okay, we got to check in on this. How's this doing? I call it overhead tax. Everything you say yes to generates overhead tax. So the problem is when you say yes to a lot of things, you're not just trying to keep your mic Q really full. So I always have something to do.

32:03That's not just what's happening. You're generating a lot more overhead tax. So the more things you've said yes to, the more things are generated administrative overhead, which means the more meetings go into your calendar and the more emails that are coming that you have to answer, right? So where do those meetings come from that are filling up your calendar? They're not just random, right? It's not just, hey, let's just, you guys want to do a meeting, you know? No, no, it's related to things you've agreed to do. So the more things you've agreed to do, the more of your time gets devoted to the administrative overhead of the things you need to do, which means you have less time available to actually accomplish the things.

32:38And to make it worse, this administrative overhead does not coalesce into like one nice big batch. It jumps all over the track. Fractures your day into what's the quote from Deep War? I must have shared it a million times. Shatters your day into fragments so small that you get nothing meaningful done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shatters your, yeah, something like that. Your schedule in the fragments so small, like insufficient for concentration. Yes. Yeah. Nothing gets done. Yeah. Yeah. I think about that all the time. Well, but think what happens now, though. So this is why I think people are so burnt out because it really is deranging.

33:08Think about this. So you say yes to too many things. Now your schedule is completely full, not doing the things, but jumping on calls and answering people's emails about the things, right? Now you don't have time to really get them done. So what happens? You fall behind. So new things come in. So now the things you have to do get longer and you fall even farther behind. And then eventually you get to a place where most of your time is now taken up just dealing with talking about work, nothing gets done. You feel like you're making no progress. You have to start getting up at four or working in the evenings.

33:39And now you're completely frustrated because you said, I'm on Zoom all day long. And now I'm working instead of being at my kids basketball game. Like, what was the point of the day? And this is what's making knowledge workers cry, uncle. So when I say do fewer things at once, this is not at all about accomplishing fewer things. Because if you can save most of your schedule from all this administrative overhead, what happens? You start just executing. So now the rate at which you're finishing things and finishing them at really high quality levels, that skyrockets, right? So doing fewer things at once will make you actually accomplish many more things.

34:12That's not the only reason to do it. The main reason to do it is because it's entirely deranging. To have your whole schedule be taken up by a mystery of overhead. It just makes life bearable not to be overloaded, but you have this bonus, you also going to start producing, right? So if you can just bootstrap and have a lot of ideas how to do this. But if you can just bootstrap in the doing fewer things, get over that initial fear, you're going to pretty quickly earn your ability to keep doing fewer things because you're going to be outshipping everyone else in your organization. Yeah, the Zoom apocalypse that everybody went through when the overhead of having meetings and this, I guess, pain from management of coordination, you know, if you can't see what someone's doing when they're in the house because they're no longer in the office.

34:56Oh, God. I mean, that's anxiety inducing, isn't it? So why don't we start looking at Slack dashboards and activity time? And then, you know, a response to this, you know, the anti productivity movement was that law? Was it France that brought it in where bosses can't message their workers after 5 p .m. I think they tried. Yeah, I don't have to lock. I don't know if it went through or not. Interesting. Yeah, but it was the topic for the podcast. Well, it is interesting. Well, in French, they have labor unions that represent knowledge workers in a way that we don't in the US. But the problem with that, and I wrote about this summit at the time, is, you know, Again, it's like putting a little bit of a bandaid on the wound.

35:32We got to stop the things that are creating the big wounds. In other words, this is the issue with almost any response that is just focusing on, let's just reduce the time you can work. Let's have a four day work week, instead of a five day work week, et cetera. The problem with these ideas is if you don't also fix the overload problem, you're not getting to the core issue. The core issue is I have too many things on my plate at the same time. Yeah, so this is why people went insane during the pandemic and anti productivity took off because that overhead got out of control because a Everyone got sort of like 20 % new tasks solid once in the shifted remote, right?

36:07And then be the coordination took 25 % longer because things we could have just done in the hallway get a zoom meeting But I can't drag a zoom meeting I'm on it. Yeah, that's fine and on zoom there is no two -minute zoom meeting Hey, did you got that thing sort of? It's gonna be a half hour because I can't drag it smaller. So we had a the footprint of overhead got worse, the quantity overhead got worse. Zoom inflation. And we got the Zoom apocalypse, where, and this is, my readers were writing me and saying my main problem right now, and you know, May 2020, is when do I go to the bathroom? Because I have eight hours of Zoom without any gap anywhere in it.

36:46And then at this point, it's just absurdities, right? Like that's like a, a absurd play or something. What's that idea, the red queen effect? Yeah. Running faster and faster to stay in the same place. Correct. And this is, you know, the podcast, and it's been interesting, I guess, that you've been in the arc. You've been involved on the guest side in an arc, seeing it from an episode, two hundreds. You were in one of the first ones, and then maybe like three hundreds and then six hundreds and now. And operationally, it's so complex behind the scenes, you know, to coordinate something of their size.

37:20And increasingly, I find myself doing more and more of being an operator, is supposed to be a creator or a visionary or a researcher or just a learner. It's all coordination, all the time, so much coordination. And you don't, like that, it's the thing from Michael Gerber's, the Emyth revisited that they did that starts a bakery and then soon enough, she can't remember what it's like to bake a cake. All that she's doing is on Zoom meetings, organizing factories to start, where's the wheat coming from, and what's the new machine that we're gonna have to grind the flour and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm very much living a, and I can remember when the operation was simpler because the business was simpler and because the actual production itself was simpler.

38:05But I'm observing, even within my own life, this trajectory go from simplicity and purity to much more success and I'm very, very grateful and it's amazing to do all of this stuff, but there are all of these side effects that come along with it that build things out. And there are a million opportunities. There's a million things to say yes to. There's a million things to say no to that you would have begged to have the opportunity to say yes to only two years ago. So you're permanently re -adjusting the sensitivity on what constitutes a hell yeah. Like that's the one thing that with Sivir's hell yeah, I know rule which is fantastic.

38:47The problem is that you lag. Yes. What you would have begged for yesterday is something you now need to learn to say no to today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the guy has it all figured out. We all have to just nod our heads to Ferris. So I was on his show in February. and he had this headset, like NASCAR headset, whatever I was like, what's going on with this thing, man? And he's like, if I do video well, if I build a studio, then I have to stay where the studio is, then I have to have people to run the studio. And I want to travel and I have this headset, like look at this thing. This is a pretty good microphone.

39:25I could just be anywhere in the world. And so maybe Ferris figured this whole game out. I mean, he's the guy that did it. But there's a deeper thing in there though, right? Which is like, that is the central tension when with slow productivity, when things start going well. Like this is partially why I wrote this book is because things are going well for me, right? Like this is not a book that would have been relevant to me as a 23 year old at MIT, doing a theoretical computer science. But now it's like things are hitting well. Like I can, my books get read and I'm a tenured professor and there's opportunities and there's, you know, and I have a podcast, there's other things are going on now, and it was that same fear of, okay, so how do I keep and crystallize the principles of just slowly producing stuff that matters, even with different stuff going on?

40:12And it's led actually me to be pretty careful or thoughtful thinking about the different aspects like what I do and what I don't do. Like when I started the podcast in the pandemic, I was really worried about the footprint because the footprint can get big, which is fine for a tier one show like this, but this was something I was doing in addition to being a professor, in addition to writing. So I made a rule, I said half day a week. That's what you get. The podcast gets a half day a week. And if I want to grow or add something, or whatever I want to do, I got to figure out a way to do that, such that the podcast doesn't leave a half day a week.

40:48So I got to have to hire, yeah, and it's what happened. So it develops slowly eventually hired a producer to touch the computer for me, because that saves a lot of time, right? like, okay, I don't have to touch any computers. And we have, you know, I'm the master, and okay, so he talks to all of them. So now I can just show up and do the show. Now I have more time to think about, you know, what am I gonna say or what are we gonna do? Then we wanna do video. Well, how are we gonna make this fit within a half day a week? Well, it took a long time. We had to find the right person to set something up that was super turnkey.

41:15Like we have the studio set up where like it's all just installed and my producer can just turn on these lights that and these cameras are always in the same place. Yeah, with these big sea stands that like never moved that the cameras are locked off locked into and everything like that So okay, great that doesn't so everything has been very Slowly but it also means though right there's impacts like if I wanted to have a lot of guests Probably wasn't gonna work with a half day a week rule because you don't guests can do it when they can do it and it's not gonna fit and so I'm not doing that right like it so it's made some had some impact actually, and yeah, well, you can and can't do.

41:53But it allows me, but it's slow. It is growing and slow productivity. So like the show is growing and it's like, actually, this does pretty well. It generates more money than like my professor's salary. This is interesting. Like it's starting to get interesting. It's probably going slower than maybe it could, but it's a slow productivity play. You know, this is important. But I want to take my time with this and not let it metastasize. I think James Cleoputt and a newsletter recently over the short term your results are determined by your intensity and over the long term your results are determined by your consistency.

42:27And it is a trade -off, you know, there is a trade -off between the two, the harder you work, the quicker you burn out. And there is a threshold above which, you know, that's not to say that that's a linear relationship. You know, if you're doing the bare minimum, doing double the bare minimum is probably not going to make that much difference to your consistency over a long period of time. But if you're running at seventh gear at 7000 rpm trying to shift that to a little bit faster is something that's really going to hurt. Yeah, look at a famous novelist Like they figured this out right novelist who have very long careers They figured out no more than if you're a genre one book a year and if you're literary like one book every two or three years Maybe even every four years do very little Outside of the writing like the whole industry understands this like we don't need to hear from John Grisham until he has a book coming out.

43:17But it allows them to produce large literature over their lifetime, right? So we could all take a lessons from that. Like you don't see John Grisham being like, you know, if I really get after it, I could probably get three books done. You know, I could do the whole James Patterson thing. Like I got to have three books a year and then I could get a team to write other books and then we could merchandise this. I'm gonna have John Grisham land and it's going to work with you. No, it's like, if I do all that, I'm gonna last five years. Have you seen Brandon Sandison's output? Yes, yes. I mean, so there's a I think it's in the R -slash fantasy subreddit and if you have a look at that the number of words that that guy writes for you is terrifying.

43:57It is, but I'm worried about him. Me too. Because he's adding other things. He started adding, he's building out more of a company. A merch. Where? Well, and yes, exactly, merch and fulfilling their own their own printer now, they do some of his books, they print themselves as opposed to going through like a standard publisher and he has a big team now and like his whole thing like every he's famous in writing circles for exactly this like he just sits and writes and he generates like a lot of words like that's what I think it's maybe 300 ,000 words a year. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean you saw his video his whole surprise video thing in the pandemic where he was like I have a surprise for you.

44:39I wrote five extra books and I'm going and like sell them directly. You just wrote five extra books. Yes, I did see that. Yes, yes. The thing he did which I do admire, it's crazy, but I love it. It's a deep work thing. So he lives in like a normal cul -de -sac in Utah, right? So it's just like a cul -de -sac of houses. He bought the lot next to his was empty, right? What he did was, instead of building like a cool workspace there, he dug down and built an underground layer, right? So he built it a whole Victorian Gothic underground layer where there's old fish tanks with weird things. And he writes in there, there's a full screening room movie theater in there, they podcast in there.

45:21Whole thing's decorated like a Tim Burton movie. Built it underground, right? 10 -foot sealants, they dug a photos of all this. Then he covered it back over, and then they put a garage on top of it, and he has a secret entrance to it from his house. So he goes under, he's the suburban house. He's like secret entrance and his garage, and it takes him into this like massive underground layer. I think it's awesome. It's preposterous. But hey, what if you're writing fantasy novels though, at his level? Like yeah. Well, that's one of your lessons, which is that the space you inhabit when you're trying to do your productivity can influence the way that you feel.

45:56Yeah, and that's a slow productivity idea, right? Is that like, okay, the environment matters because you're trying to produce the best possible stuff. Not just trying to be as busy as possible, but yeah, so environment matters. So Sanderson built that whole underground layer because it inspires him to write fantasy well. Much in the same way that Dan Brown, who wrote the DaVinci Code, he has a similar kind of quirky house he built a new Hampshire with like secret passageways and code and you pull down the statue head. Oh, cool. Because he writes sort of conspiratorial genre thrillers. So like why not put ourselves into that mindset?

46:28Other people did other things. So like one example, Coppola, Francis IV Coppola, he brings where his production offices are, old electronic gadgets because he likes this connection to building something that's, you know, I'm bringing together parts and he used to solder and do all the stuff as a kid. So he like brings them wherever he's going. But it's not just the positive, which is have stuff in your space that's inspiring. It's also get away from the stuff that's distracting. Right. And this is the problem, for example, with just working out of your home office. That's just right there in your home.

47:01Next to everything else is that you're exposed to all of these highly salient distractions that have nothing to do with what you're doing. But when you see them, are gonna trigger all these neural networks are gonna start to be activated. Yeah, there's a laundry basket. Oh my God, the laundry. Yes. And when do I need to do the laundry? And what is going? And this is very difficult. So I also tell these stories of people, these are mainly writers too, who go through like great lengths to get away from the distractions. And my favorite was Peter Benchley who wrote jobs because he lived right down the street from where I grew up when he was writing jobs.

47:35So I know his house. I could see it from mine. It's a beautiful house. And when he wrote jobs, he didn't write it in that house. But in a back room at a furnace repair shop that was on the other side of town. And we, the fact checkers in New Yorker talked to Wendy Benchley about this Peter's dead, but they talked to Wendy and she was like, oh yeah, they were like hammering in there, man. It was like loud metal hammering. That's where he went to write jobs because he was trying to get away from the distractions. Like the distraction of loud hammering, whatever, That's not something that he has a lot of associations with.

48:04He can associate right? That's no big deal, but the laundry basket, you know, now you're gone for the next 20 minutes thinking about it. Did you ever hear the story about Victor Hugo being locked in the room by his own servant? No. So this is a guy who wanted to write six pages per day, his writer, and he paid his servant every single night to come in during the middle of the night and pull the bedsheets off him, just slide the bedsheets off him, and then there was a quill and an ink part and six pieces of paper that were left on the table next to him, and then he would lock the bedroom door from the outside and he wouldn't unlock the door until Victor Hugo slid six pieces of paper double -sided written underneath the door.

48:49I like that. That's the whole... People, by the way, extremity that writers have had to go through in order to be able to overcome the writing hump. My Angela would do this. She would go to typically like cheaper hotels, take all the artwork off the wall. She wanted to be white box, and she would write on the bed. So she would just like prop up on one arm with a legal pad. And like that, there's nothing to do. You're in a completely distraction, and keep on. Steinbeck had this beautiful property at Sag Harbor. He would get his robot and go out into the middle of the harbor. And write on a little hand desk.

49:20David McCola lived in Martha's Vineyard, beautiful house, West his berry. He wrote him basically the garden shed. So he had a great home office, like where he would do his like correspond to whatever. He wrote his books on a typewriter in a garden shed. Like it was pretty absurd. It was in the backyard in like a shed, but yeah, they would do anything to kind of, let's get away from distractions. Let's like lock ourselves someplace where it's, you know, it's hard to leave. There's nothing here that's distracting. Let's get some work done. I don't have the keys. They don't have that yeah Mark Twain when he had this off building that he would go an out building He would work at and so his wife had this like horn she would blow to try to get his attention It's time to come back for dinner because he was so far away, right?

50:00It was like the hard wow I have an off you know I have a my house. I have a very nice library, but I also Rent off his space like a three -minute walk away. It's just like a different place to go to And so my podcast studio is there, but also it's a place to go to write what is a more accessible solution for someone who doesn't want to dig 20 feet underneath the house in Utah. Everyone should do that. Come on. That's true. More underground layers. I'm pro underground layers. This is the revolution that we really need. Podcast layers, I think would be awesome. That would be cool. Yeah, you go to the small office and you go down the stairs and you just...

50:36You could pull the statue of the tiny owl and it opens up the building. And this is like a killer underground. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. You could also like, kidnap a murderer or guest down there. I guess the problem with it. Imagine that imagine if it was a podcast run by serial killer and each guest that was just that last day on the planet The ratings would be I mean the downloads will be off the charts. It would be briefly And then yeah, they may get cool because of the murdering that would be the problem. Yeah, yeah, it's look down on You need to redo that yeah, but you got innovate you got innovate Yeah, so okay, what let's see you're not you're not gonna build another ground layer right?

51:05I'm a big fan for example what I call work from near home Which is you don't need to build an underground layer but also if you don't work in an office, find a space to work in that's not your house. Like that is a worthy investment, and that might just mean leasing, it's like low cost office space nearby. That might be worth it, right? And don't think of that as an expense. Think of it as you are gonna be able to be, your mental health is gonna be much better you're gonna be able to produce much more, or taking an out building in your backyard and making it into something that you can work in.

51:35I mean, I think this idea of going out of your way to find places to work, this not just your home, is the right idea. Don't think about it in terms of my home is free and this is not free. Now think about it more is my home is this terrible place to work that I really wish I didn't have to work there. Oh, this is, I only have to pay this much to avoid that. Oh, that's great. You know, you're paying this all the problem. You're good, Refriend. And then be careful about your environment. But the rituals can be not not just aesthetic, but can also be functional. So it might not just be, here's what's in my space to inspire me.

52:12It can be, here's what I do as a ritual before I work to inspire me. So it could be, I walk the same route, like to this coffee shop, I get this coffee, as I walk with that coffee back, that's when I'm beginning to frame up what I'm about to work on. And then when I sit down after those sessions, it's like hard work time. And that's how I mentally separate from email time. And you know, like I do this, for example, there's a particular walk I'll do about 15 minutes, transition walk. Okay, I'm switching, I'll often switch locations, but also I wanna switch my mindset into I'm writing now, not answering emails or doing something like this.

52:51It's the reason why training at home during the pandemic was so difficult that there is something ritualistic about you get in the car and you drive to the gym and you say hello to it or you're playing your music, you say hello to the receptionist and then you know you dump your bag down. There's something about that. Right, okay, this is gym time and in some ways there's a bit of a costly signaling thing going on which is yeah, I've driven all the way to the gym. I'm not going to train now. Yeah, driven 15 minutes to get to the gym. Whereas if you go and walked into the garage like Yeah, it's a bit of infighting thing.

53:28Yeah, so what about going back to the do few of things thing? For the innate people pleases amongst us, how can we get better at learning to say no to things, both philosophically, emotionally and then tactically as well? Transparency about your workload. Right. I think this is the number one issue that when solved makes workload management better is getting transparent with other people. This is what's on my plate. Instead of keeping at this off -uscated thing, no one knows what anyone else is doing. And we just sort of throw tasks at each other. And like sometimes they come back and sometimes they're accepted.

54:06And we just imagine why that is be more transparent. So many of the tactics in the book are all under that category for it under doing fewer things or all under this category of making your workload more transparent. So like, Here's a really direct way of doing that, for example. This is like sort of on the nose, but people are actually doing this. So now I say like this is not a thought experiment, but really do this. Imagine you have a shared document. And at the top, it says, okay, here's what I'm actively working on right now. And you should have like three things under there. Like I'm working on these three things.

54:35Below it, like big dividing line. All right, here's the ordered queue of things that like are lined up for me to work on next. And in the order in which they're gonna like sort of pop into here as I finish things, right? Now imagine someone's like, Chris, can you do whatever? Now it's just like, no, or yes, you can be like, yeah, just go add it to the queue, right? This is where I keep track of. I'm very careful about my work. Add it over there. If there's any information I need to know to do it, you know, either put that in there or put a note there that I should like call you when I get closer.

55:05And now they have to confront the reality of your workload, right? Which means either they're going to say, all right, never mind. Like, I kind of need to get this done. You have like 15 things waiting to happen. I, you know, it would take too long or their expectations are reasonable. Like, oh, okay. I see you're not starting to work on this tomorrow. I'm not gonna start bothering you. In fact, I can keep checking in on this document and seeing this thing marching its way up to when it's active. So I'm gonna generate no overhead tax until you're working on it. Yeah, of course we're not gonna have standing meetings or emails until it's one of your three things you're working on.

55:38So you either get much more realistic calibration of like when did you're gonna get work back? Or you're like, oh, don't bother about it. Now, if they're a boss, they say, no, no, I need to get this done now. Now you can put it back to them. Great. Tell me which one to move. And I'll let them know, you said that like, and so now there's people have to actually be involved. What about the emotion that you feel of? There's this sort of default to yes. You know, you don't want to appear lazy. There's almost this sort of self -flagulation that I certainly have with my productivity where it's like I should be able to take on more.

56:15I shouldn't be as inefficient or whatever melody I think I have that's causing me to not get a million things done in a day and only to get half a million things done in a day. What about dealing with that guilt almost, productivity guilt? Yeah. So never give a yes or no in the room. It helps with that. So once you have some sort of system, now you're kind of tracking. What am I working on now? What am I waiting to work on? How ever you want to do that? Your answer can always be, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really important. That sounds like the type of thing I could really do. Next time I get a chance, let me just go, I'm very careful about, I have these work management systems.

56:55I track my time very carefully. Let me just run it through that and see what I'm dealing with, and then I'll get back to you. So you're not giving a yes or no in the room. Now the next day, or later that day, you can actually go through and look at and come back. And either you say this is important and figure out when you're going to work on it and give them a good estimate or be like, I know, you know what, I took a look and Really, I don't have a lot of I'm looking at my time. I track my time very carefully It'd be like a couple months before I had enough cycle so this is not going to work I'm not going to be able to fit this in now.

57:22Yeah, that's specifically the the wordage. Yeah of Delivering this to people have you found any better or worse ways to actually communicate? This is a thing that I don't think I can get done. Yeah, well, there's two things here. The first is just you have to be super clear with the know when you give it. So when you give the know, it has to be, you know, hammer it into the tablets. The Moses is holding clear, right? I can't do this. And then you can put whatever, then you soften up. The softening should be around the very clear know when you actually give it. Do not leave any wiggle room for like, maybe I could do this.

58:01I can't do this right now. Right now, because you know what I, their whole goal in life is to get this thing taking care of that's on their list. So if you give them, they're not going to. A lot of people just hope that the other person who gave them the task in the first place is gonna do the know for them. I will take this off. Yeah, you're right, Chris. I'm looking at your skit. Yeah, this, you do sound busy. No, don't bother. I'll take it on. They'll be great. So when you're available two and a half weeks, great. I'll expect into in a half weeks. That's, you gotta be clear. I can't do this.

58:29And then you can be nice around it. but don't let the niceness make the nobi in big US. But the thing I mentioned before, that's the second piece here that could be useful, signaling that you're very careful about your time. This earns you a huge amount of leeway, right? Because a lot of no resistance, right? Resistance is someone saying no, comes from the fact where I don't really trust that you have your act together. I just, I don't, are you this overwhelmed or is this lazy? Are you laziness? So you know, just your entitled, it gets all these mind, do your work. But if you have the reputation of, oh, like you're like a cowl new partner, right?

59:07Like you have your, you have your stuff together. So if you're signaling that, yeah, let me just, let me just run this through my system because I actually track like everything I work on and I find the time and advance on going to work on. Let me just run it through the system and let you know like when we could fit this in. And then you come back and say, I can't fit it in. Now they're dealing with, Chris has his act together on this. So he's probably not lying. He probably doesn't have enough time for this. And yeah, isn't it also that Chris Lake has his act together? You know, and it's a, it's a, the technical no.

59:35So like the no based on I have a very technical system can actually raise your esteem in the eyes of the people you're saying. Absolutely, absolutely. Like, oh, this guy, okay, this is my second. Maybe we, this is someone we should keep their eyes on. Like they really seem to have their act together. So having some sort of system where I'm managing my own workload. Here's what I'm working on. Here's what's active. Here's what's not active. that division is critical. You cannot treat everything on your plate as all active at once. It has to be this is active, this I'm waiting on. That's how you get rid of that overhead tax problem.

1:00:05And then you need to communicate to other people, I'm really careful about this. So to recap the nose for people pleases, be transparent about your time to help people buy in and understand what's going on. Say no when you mean no and relate it back to your time management and and availability and the fact that you're careful with your usage of time. Yes, and to make this all easier, don't give the yes or no in the room. So in the moment where all of the social pressure is on you, have your set answer, which is not yes or no. But as this sounds great, let me next time I get a chance, I'll run this through my system and see when I might be able to get this done.

1:00:43Is that to give you a little bit of emotional buffer so that you're not as... Oh, yes. Yes, because the emotional... Just squeeze that dynamic. I mean, I'm like, is there like Chris? Can you do this? You can't, you do not want to say no there. Yes. Okay. I'm gonna say that in email four hours later, now you got the courage, right? It's very good. I think I heard a story. Is it Daniel Kahneman? Maybe. I think it's either Daniel Kahneman or Warren Buffett that say something along the lines, if I never say yes, I know on the phone. Yeah. I've heard this before. Like some kind of stealing this. I don't know who it was, but I've heard this before.

1:01:20Well, it's just, there is a particular, I don't know, I'm seeing people pleasing everywhere at the moment and I'm very hesitant about like my shiny new psychological pattern toy being used to reap, you know, like this is great tweet I saw the other day that said, I've just learned about the availability bias and I have to say out of all of them, I think it's my favorite one. I love it. Yeah. And I'm very hesitant about like pattern matching this to everything. But I can't imagine the mindset of a person who doesn't feel that compulsion. Doesn't feel that sort of desire to buy. I mean, I don't know what to say.

1:01:56No, I'm just waiting on me there on the phone or in the person. And yet, it seems to be giving yourself a little bit of psychological distance. You know, that mindfulness gap as Corialin calls it to just go, OK, in the cold harsh light of day, can I do this? Probably not. And I don't think, you know, when I think about this stuff that I say yes to additional calls, many of which I said in the Uber on the way here, yes to, I'm looking at my Monday and I'm like, that's nice and free. And someone goes, if you've got a kind of time for a call, I swear, I'm like, yeah, Monday looks great. Giving yourself as much psychological distance as possible just helps you to, like, I probably can't do this.

1:02:39I don't really even need to look at my schedule because if it's something that's optional and it doesn't find me up and it's not mandatory. I can just it's a no. It's obviously a no. Yeah, but you're not going to say it in the moment. Press. Well, it's obviously a no, Chris. Speaking of which, can we get on a call later? He's like Monday. Monday, it's great. But another thing that goes along with that would also be template and quote us. Like it's another way. So how do you deal with things where you're going to say yes to some, but you can't say yes to everything. So you could quote it, right?

1:03:09Yeah, I'd love to take calls with like whatever new people or whatever, but I only do three a month So I already hit my three this month. I can't do it this month like quotas are a way to keep you Doing things or it doesn't you don't want to say no to it to every single time But if you say yes every single time you get overwhelmed and then Tim plates which would probably be great for you Actually, I've been messing around with these two for certain types of really common things You have to have a whole templated process in place So that it doesn't have to just be the interaction. So like if you write Adam Grant, to blur a book, he's got this great, so you want me to blur a book document.

1:03:44And like it walks through, like, and so here's how it works, like I can't blur most books, but you should send it to me. And here's how many I get. And so in the end, I blurb a few. And so if you don't hear from me, then that means it wasn't about, and he lays the whole thing out. So now, because you, I get this request a lot as a writer. Now when someone's like, okay, can you blur my book? And it's often like someone you kind of know. Now you can just send them the thing. You've templated it, right? So it's not an issue. Well, you can even have a, we've started using this on the website for a few things, like dark links on your website, secret URL, at calnewport .com slash testimonial or whatever, and you just set, well, there's the URL.

1:04:23Have a little look. I think there's a type of legitimacy that the URL gives it as well, which is quite nice. Yeah, they're like, oh my god. It's a system. It's a system. He's got a URL for it. This means that it must happen in awful lot. Yeah, like calmeupor .com slash blurberquest or something. And now it's in like real, yeah, precisely. Do you have this issue with like unsolicited guest? Is this like a, or do people kind of understand in this world, you know, the host and their team, it's, or it's pulling in guest. Or do you get a lot? So I get an awful lot of requests to come on the show. One of the problems and this is, I guess a unique challenge of going from total cottage industry, solo influencer to niche micro fame to whatever version of platform we're at now, like a hyper niche slightly larger fame.

1:05:17I built up along the way. You have my email. And like fucking David Allen has my email and Ryan Holiday has my email. Mark Manson has my email. And it's clearly a personal email. Correct. You set up long time ago. Yes, it's it was I've had it for 10 years. Dude, my my phone number, I probably shouldn't say this, but I don't care. My phone number was on every flyer for a club night that we ran for years, years and years. And I haven't been. You don't start something off most of the time with the systems and processes of and one day this is going to reach half a billion people a year. And like there's going to be all of these weird ex -knowledge.

1:06:00You just do the thing. You just in this sort of scrappy can do. You can wrap it together. Exactly, which is cool. And I like the fact that we did that. But yeah, I am reaping the whirlwind of this Frankenstein's monster that we built before. Up until a year ago, we got our first like additional member of staff one year ago. One year ago was me and video guy Dean still. Yeah, same thing. And then we go another guy and he was like, what's your systems for communicating and stuff? And we have a Facebook Messenger chat. So what do you mean? I was like, there's me and Dean and a Facebook Messenger chat.

1:06:37We just rocking around. And we just go back and forth and we do a met because you can reply. And Facebook maintains the quality of media. He said, that's insane to do that. That's absolutely insane. I was like, yeah, but we've released 600 podcasts and a thousand clips through a Facebook messenger chat. And then he moved us over to Slack. I know you got a problem with Slack, but it's a slight problem. But that was revolutionary for us because it segmented things into different channels. And we could find things much more easily. And it's got a record. It's a history of everything we've ever spoken about, organized by topic.

1:07:10But yeah, it's a real interesting time. I'm really thinking an awful lot about the operations of the show, except for myself becoming increasingly distracted by being an operator, not being the creator, not spending time reading, not doing that stuff because it's just this huge big behemoth. It must be the stage right now, is that transition to this? It is. It becomes, you become the head of an organization. I'm not just like someone who's doing a podcast that people are talking to. No. It's very quickly become, I'm now COO, Chief Brand, the leader, I'm not going to be host, head researcher, guest curator, all of these things.

1:07:49And yet we've got, right now we've got an exact, after I finish up with you, I've got a two hour meeting with an executive consultant who I literally just needed to be like, I need a Navy SEAL kind of guy to come in and kick the door down and just say, right, this isn't a problem for you. This is something I'm gonna take off your plate and I'm gonna re -org everything. Because if you look at the org structure of modern wisdom, It's a 15 -legged octopus with one head. Because you hired people here and there to do this. Yes, I picked everything together and then didn't vertically pull anything out.

1:08:22And especially because it's also recent. It's also recent and so new. You're solving problems with... You come and solve this problem. Yes, but the combination problem is still always on me. So yeah, not to get into the weeds too much, I suppose, about the internal machinations of what's going on with the show. And also, there's a part of me that's like hesitant about being too open about this on the internet because it feels like a humble brag, which it isn't if you saw the mess and like the nightmare that I have to wake up with on email every day, it's not a flex. But the other thing being that the whole point of the podcast is for me, is for me to just express my curiosity and to speak to people that I'm interested in about stuff I'm interested in.

1:09:04And all of this sort of complexity feels a little contrived and cynical. And it's like, hang on, this is just supposed to be you chatting with people you're interested in. Why does there need to be 15 people behind you? And it's like, well, because as the number of incoming emails and sponsors and all of this other stuff needs to happen, and the reason it has to happen is because the show gets to a size where I can't take it on anymore. But yeah, inbound email, a lot of that, outbound guest research keeping on top. I mean, your last book was a world without email, which I dream of. and your fantasy.

1:09:37It's a very interesting challenge. I'm really hoping that I'm gonna look back at sort of this period as operationally, organizationally, psychologically, emotionally, a very formative learning experience where I had to let go of the kind of boy operator I was before and grow up to be a real kind of. Yeah, isn't this fun that you can kind of do this for a living? Like I'm just chatting with people and at some point it changes to like, that's a media company. You put on a TV show. TV shows have stabs. Yes, and they need to. So, obsessing over quality, we were talking about this before. It's something that I've really leaned into as much as I can with the show.

1:10:18You know, this hyper fixation that we've had on the quality of the AV stuff, the way that we shoot, the way that I try to construct the guest lineup as well to give this really sort of lovely museum art gallery curator. You know, good mix of different types. Yeah, you know, I had a Democratic presidential candidate on a couple of weeks ago. He was the founder of Belvedere Vodka and Teleti Gelato of the Philips. Yeah. And he's a cool dude. Yes. And I'm like, I'm interested in this guy. So I'm going to speak to a Democratic presidential candidate just because it's interesting. And I think, oh, wow, that's cool.

1:10:53Now look back on those sorts of episodes. I think that's great. And then, oh, Dr. Robert Glover, no more Mr. Nyske. So this obsession of equality is important, but I think a lot of people, when that gets ripped out of them, the fear of doing fewer things is, well, busyness is a reliable route towards success, and the obsession of equality plays into their fear of perfectionism paralysis. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think they have it backwards. Busyness is never a route to success. Like some successful people are busier than they probably should be. But the route that success is producing stuff is valuable.

1:11:31And calls don't produce things that are valuable and emails don't produce things that are valuable and jumping back and forth on SlatChat. They don't produce things that are valuable. That requires doing something really, really well. And it turns out the world's like incredibly competitive. So it's 10x harder than you imagine when you get started, right? Like you have to produce stuff that is at a very high level if you want to begin gaining autonomy over your life and career and impact and this and that. So I think people get that backwards. So then I see, yeah, but I'm afraid. So busyness, I think it's reliable and that you'll succeed at it.

1:12:02I think what's appealing with busyness is it's a goal that you will succeed at. I want to be busy. You will succeed at that. It's not a hard goal to succeed at. It's not easy because you have to be busy, but you know you can succeed at it. Just keep take calls, do this, do whatever you need to do. People worry much more about, no, I want to produce something that is unambiguously really good. And that means it could be bad, right? like there's fear there. So then people fear about perfectionism. And essentially, like my short answer to that, is like, yeah, that's the whole challenge. This is like the whole challenge of doing stuff that matters.

1:12:34I gotta make this good. I'm gonna have to battle perfectionism. Like that is the dragon, I'm saying George. Like that's just part of this challenge. It's like saying to a relief pitcher in baseball, you're gonna be nervous. Like relief pitchers in baseball, right? They come out in these like super important moments of the game and it all rides on like this one person through in the ball. And I've heard them talk about this before. They say, oh, the whole part of this job is how do you do stuff when physiologically, you feel incredibly anxious, right? Like, like, it's absurd that your goal would be, I don't want to be anxious.

1:13:08Like, no, you're going to have to deal with anxiety, right? You know, other types of performers do have this as well. Exieties, a big part of what you do, what you do is high stakes. You're hosting the Oscars. Okay. That's, you're going to be anxious because it's very high stakes. You got to deal with it. This is the same thing with trying to produce things that are really good. You're going to struggle with perfectionism. We have ideas how to get past it, and there's best practices here. That's it. That's the challenge. You're trying to get better. You want to do as good as you can without waiting too long and holding on to it.

1:13:35You're going to walk this tight rope and you might fall to the side sometimes. Yeah, that's it. That's the whole game. You're going to be nervous when you pitch. That's the whole game. So I tell people, business is not going to make you successful. How do people deal with perfectionism? So, you know, there's a couple things to do, but the example I gave in the book was the Beatles. Right? Because when the Beatles decided to stop touring, it was like a big deal. They had a terrible tour. In the late 60s, everything went wrong. And they just declared, like, on their way to the very last stop, which was a candlestick park in San Francisco, like, this is it.

1:14:06We hate touring. We don't want to do this anymore. So they went to the studio after this. For the first time, They did not have to produce an album that they could replicate on stage That's just opened up like every possible option, right? So it's kind of Pandora's box like when you're when you're recording music as had been done up until that point that you Were going to then go play on stage you only had so many options We're gonna have guitar and the bassist and we only so many chords we can do and let's go Yeah, so they didn't have that so it was completely open -ended right and so there's this fear and they were like We're gonna make this better we're gonna spend way more time than we've ever spent on album before we wanted to be great But we also want to get it out.

1:14:41So one of the things they did and actually we could probably give credit to Their manager and not them. But one of the things he did is as soon as they had a single that was releasable He released it. So we put a stake in the ground. Oh, there's a single out. Oh, we're expecting an album Now kind of a clock take three years after three years, right? So they spent much more time on this album they ever had before but they didn't spend Incredible amount of time on it the album was Sergeant Peppers and it stayed longer at number one than anything they'd ever done before. It's like, that's the tight rope you're working on.

1:15:12So what they did there is something that other people can do. You put a stake in the ground. It's what Lin -Mimile Miranda did. Seven years working on the play in the Heights, like, oh, that seems like perfectionism land. But what they did was he was working with these two alumni of Swarthmore that had a theatrical company in Manhattan. They would schedule, all right, three months from now, we're going to bring in actors to read the latest version of the script. So like you had to do something. Like it had to be better. The people were going to come and read this. The people who were kind of investing, you want to see this as better.

1:15:43So you had to do something to make it better. But it also was, oh my god, I got to do this tonight. So they kept scheduling. Well, here's the next thing we're going to do. Here's the next thing. He had time to think about it, time to marinate and mature creatively. But he always had a stake in the ground that was pulling him forward. So it's like you want to make the thing you're doing as well as you can, as good as you can, but also put time pressure on yourself, put some constraints, and we're like, okay, I want this to be good. I really want this to be good, but I also got to ship it. And if that's the best possible thing, the next one will be better.

1:16:12Justify to the busy addict why they should obsess over quality. Well, it's gonna give you two things. I mean, so if you care about slow productivity, it's gonna make slowness suddenly be natural. The people who obsess over quality grow antibodies to busyness, because they begin like the complaints you were having about the administrative overhead of your show. It's because you're obsessed with the quality of what you're doing. It's in the contrast to that that the busyness becomes frustrating. If you didn't care about the quality of what you were doing, it's a job. It's fine. I do these things all day, right?

1:16:47So it makes slowness becomes more natural once you care about quality. Then, as you actually do better because you have obsessed about quality, you gain more control, more autonomy, more leverage to enforce more slowness. You can start taking stuff off your plate. You can afford to hire people to do things or like in Ferris' case, because his show, the OG show that's so powerful, he can just say, I'm gonna just wear a headset and record from wherever I am in the world. And it's just me and my right hand man and whatever, right? So then you gain more leverage to keep the stuff off your plate. So it's really the glue that makes slowness possible.

1:17:21And if you don't care about slowness, Then I think the right argument is nothing great didn't require an obsession over doing quality. Greatness is not accidental. No one accidentally produces sergeant peppers or breaks a record in a sport. That is an obsession with I want to do this better. Meticulous. Meticulous. Getting the evidence is another big thing. Finding the evidence of what actually matters. So another part of growing up in terms of professional lives is realizing it's something point, here's this thing I want to do well. I can't just write a fairytale about what I want to matter. Right.

1:18:00So a lot of people do this. I want to be a novelist. The fairytale I want to be true is that if I do national novel writing month and I write every single morning for one hour, at the end of it, I'll be, you know, John Grisham, right. Now you have to actually go get the evidence, how does this field where I work actually function? What matters? How are things judged? How do people people get good at this, what distinguishes the top performers from the lower performers, because you almost always found on the mountain a success in a field, there's all of these paths and almost none of them go up.

1:18:31And there's like a very narrow path and it's a hard one that's reverse because it's steeped. There's like one path that goes up. And if you're not having that really well -blaced for you, I know exactly what I'm doing. I know exactly how I'm training or what I need to do to try to sell this book or whatever. If you don't know exactly the path you're trying to go, you just wander around the base, and then you kind of just eventually burn out. Yeah, enough of this, and let's go do some more email. It's interesting to think about the people who do find success that haven't had that quite meticulous plan in advance have basically closed their eyes and thrown a dart and then opened one and gone, oh, God, I hit the bullseye.

1:19:11Wow, amazing. But you don't want to leave your success up to a fluke. Yeah, because it's not going to happen. I mean, it might happen, but you also might as well buy some lottery tickets. You kind of play with similar odds. I mean, this is like the YouTube influencer effect. You know, like everyone, my kids age, elementary school age kids, they all want to be YouTube influencers when they grow up because they don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Look, I told my son I was like, I want to come give a talk at your school about the economics of YouTube and what's actually involved in how this works and how difficult it is.

1:19:38When is it losing? But occasionally people just blow up. Now, the problem is like with YouTube influencers, the people who sort of just accidentally blew up into these huge audiences. The main thing they had in common was they were very early. It was, you know, I just wandered into this, but it gives this fairy tale of, it's possible that you could just, because I could, I have a camera and this person who blew up was just talking, so, you know, I could just talk into this camera. I can be plucked out of obscurity as well. Now, this is the insiduous thing about TikTok is they are actually explicitly playing with that that effect because TikTok can control exactly how many people see whatever, you know, they can show your video to exactly how many people they want to show it to, right?

1:20:18So they figure this out. Like, oh, here's what you do. When someone is new to TikTok, pretty early on. You give them a big video. 10 ,000 views. Yeah. Yeah. You're hooked. You're hooked. You're like, oh my God. I'm going to chase that dragon. I am so close. I think people really like me. Like I have something going on here. Yeah. I'm going to be famous. But let me just keep scrolling on here. Yeah. That's a brilliant business model. What does obsessing over quality look like practically? What are the rest of the strategies that people should rely on? You got to improve your taste as a big part of it.

1:20:48So don't just assume you know what quality is. You have to actually go out there and learn about the thing you want to do. What makes it what's good? What's bad? What makes a good stuff good in the bad stuff bad? Like that's harder than people think. We often take it for granted, right? So like this was Ira Glass's famous YouTube interview. I don't know when he did this thing, but I cited it back in so good they can't ignore you, which was 2012. He has this interview he did about taste that everyone sites and in it he says basically I'm paraphrasing. The whole thing is if you're a creator is that at first your taste is going to be here and your output's going to be down here.

1:21:26There's this gap and it's really frustrating because your stuff is bad. He's like he's got to persist. If you persist, you eventually catch up to your taste and then that's like when things go really well. But then I found that interview from a couple years ago, Ira Glass talking to Michael Lewis. And they go back and listen to Ira Glass's very first NPR piece, which was at the Oreo factory at their anniversary or something. And in that retrospective, Ira Glass said, you know, like Michael, when that came out, he's like, this is really bad, first of all, this is bad radio. But when that came out, I thought it was the best thing.

1:21:58I was like, I really got this thing, Chris. It's standard to move over time. Yeah, so he didn't have this idea that you have this gap you're trying to close. is no, the main people have is not the gap between their taste and their performance is that they're taste is so bad, they think they're great. So you actually, like what makes Ira Glass succeed was he kept pushing his understanding of what good could be. You gotta open the gap. So it's a little counterintuitive because people wanna jump right into what's my deliberate practice plan, right? If I got 10 ,000 hours, I gotta pile up. I wanna get hours one through six done today.

1:22:30Like let's get after it. But often the first thing to do is don't forget your own creations right now, you need to understand what you're trying to do. It's, you know, you're the aspiring filmmaker like maybe you need to go to film school. Not to learn how to shoot. You could learn how to do that, but you need to be watching a lot of films and be around a lot of other people watching films. You want to be a literary novelist, maybe you need to go into MFA program. Not because you need to learn how to write sentences or how a novel works, but you need to be around a lot of other really talented young writers who are writing experimental things and critiquing everyone's things left and right so that your taste can jump about.

1:23:04And now when you pursue it, you're going to say taste what you mean. What's your definition of taste? You're understanding what's good. So you want to better understanding what's good and what's bad. That's very artistic to think about things like that.

1:23:22And one of the problems is that taste and popularity don't always correlate. Yeah.

1:23:30It's possible, especially in modern content creation, to do something which is untasteful, but successful. However, I've found it to be usually quite rare that if something is done in very good taste and executed well, that it doesn't end up reaching some form of success. Well, and let's even complicate the term, right? Because taste also has this other connotation, this sort of high art connotation. So taste because it tastes full, some people think to mean also quality in a certain sort of artistic sense. But we can we can vulgarize the term. No, it just means I know what good is in this field.

1:24:10And if we think about it that way, for example, Mr. Beast has incredible taste. Knowing what say that his videos are tasteful, right? And so it's someone I can appreciate. But very effective. But he knows exactly. And he says this all the time in interviews. He's like, you know, it's frustrating to me when people struggle because I can tell you exactly how to make a video like be really successful because he has I think what he does understand is he has this incredibly honed sense of taste for algorithmically driven YouTube videos right knows exactly what good is and what good isn't and you see someone else trying to do this and from his perspective it's just like this is like a really bad ugly video because his taste is really home you know you had that obsessive period of just like studying these things left and right.

1:24:54So once his taste got good, it because there's not like, he has some other skill that is the key to the success. Like he's not like a super like handsome on TV, telegenic like I can't take my eyes off of this person, type of personality. He's not a comedian. He doesn't have like great timing. He's not, he's not a very effective communicator. It doesn't have like some sort of physical skill that's amazing or whatever. He doesn't even have, you know, I've been interested in, I've been studying the subnitch of YouTube, of Maker YouTube. It's like Mark Robors. Yeah, Mark Rob is great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

1:25:27But like in that world, there, the whole key is you have to bring incredible engineering talent to the table. That's how you sort of big time each other is like, I'm going to build something. You actually make. Even crazier, you know, and this is like the stuff made here, channel, where, you know, he's just like, I'm going to engineer something that is so crazy. But Mr. B, doesn't have any of that. But he does have this incredible taste for virality and like can just express that so it can be vulgarized too It doesn't have to be a sort of high art Arnold Bennett type of thing here what One thing I think that's a little bit of an enclosed loop one of the problems that people will get caught up with an awful lot is Communication this back and forth the requirement for communication what are your solutions from a slow productivity way strategies for people to slow down the velocity of their communication.

1:26:18Yeah. Well, first of all, just doing fewer things already. You're cutting that down. Because each thing brings with it excellent. Well, and nation -renowned. Yeah. So get rid of three things. That's three things less generating communication. Which is actually like 10 times less communication. Because of all of the things. Exactly. Then you take what's left. What I always say, this goes back more to my former book, but I think it applies here, is like what you're really trying to avoid with communication is you're not trying to avoid delays, you're not trying to optimize efficiency. Like, what you're trying to avoid is unscheduled messaging that requires a response.

1:26:51Right? So something coming in in a chat or an email that I wasn't expecting this, but now it's going to require a response for me. The more stuff you have this generating, unscheduled communication that requires responses, the more time you have to spend monitoring channels. So for the stuff that remains on your list, after you do fewer things, you need to figure out other ways to collaborate. Specifically, here's how we collaborate that is going to generate as few unscheduled messages requiring responses as possible. That's where you get something like office hours. You could have this in your company.

1:27:22We have these twice a day, this hour, that hour, almost everything to require some back and forth just gets deferred to those office hours. You can implement these on Slack, for example. A lot of people do this in the pandemic, slack office hours. It's an office hours channel. This channel is monitored during this half hour and this half right? It's real time and go back and forth. Let's figure this thing out. You can do it on the phone. You can do it in person. So you start to get ideas like that or you put processes in place. Okay. Let's not just send unscheduled messages to each other about the video clips until they get done.

1:27:54We have a process in place. They go to this file. They're in this folder by the end of day on this day. This person, what you're trying to do here is not be fast. You're not trying to be efficient. You are trying to reduce unscheduled things that arrive that require a response. Is it, presumably there must be some people whose jobs are roles are unslow, productivity, anti -doting, the guy that's the enforcer, the operations person, they will have a job whose, their entire role is to basically be the on -demand gatekeeper of whatever's happening. So just thinking that maybe people who've confused their roles, that maybe people who see themselves as that enforcer, you're the social media manager, like you're not supposed to be the person that does that thing.

1:28:50So it might actually require a reformulating of what people's expectations are internally. And what you find in a lot of businesses is that if you start to fill a people will begin to lean up against you in that gap. You know what I mean? So I was just talking to Ryan Holiday about this because a long time ago, Ryan wrote this thing, I guess he was an assistant at some point. He was an assistant to Robert Green. Okay. And he was around some Hollywood stuff for a while too. So he wrote this thing at some point, I quote all the time, and so we brought this up the other day. Where he said, the key to being an assistant, like especially in Hollywood, where they start you as an assistant, and your whole job is to try to move up from there.

1:29:34If you want to be an agent, you start as assistant and then you move up to, he said the issue. Get in the mail room first. Exactly. And he said the issue is, if you're too good at the assistant stuff, you're not gonna get moved up. They're like, no, we want this person. Superstar. Superstar, you manage the phones like no one else. You anticipate everyone on my needs. He's like the key is to be competent, right? So they don't want to think you're dumb. Be competent on the phones and scheduling their dry cleaning. But where you're really trying to show value is on the stuff that will be useful at the next level.

1:30:03And then they're like, okay, this person is fine as an assistant, but they're showing we want to move them up to be an agent. They're thinking actually a little bit higher. They're pitching ideas. They're really good working with the clients. They're on that part. They're fine on the phones, but whatever, great, we want to move them up. So what I was talking to Ryan about the other day is, a lot of people who are not in those roles are accidentally making themselves into the indispensable assistance. They're not at the desk at a Hollywood agency. see they're an executive somewhere. They're in the middle of the hierarchy and some marketing firm or something like this.

1:30:35And they've just accidentally turned themselves into the indispensable assistance. Oh, we couldn't live without cow. How do we live without cow? Every email right away, he's always around. He jumped, he puts out the fires. He's always very in communication. You've made yourself into the assistant when you really want to be the agent. No, you're not going to be able to move up. So don't make yourself into the assistant or the ops guy enforcer if that's not actually your role. Yeah, I often think about it kind of like a map from above and territory is being taken over by certain people and there's more and more is one person who just keeps on eating a bowl of this territory and everyone else is like, this is sweet.

1:31:12This is sweet and we'll lean on Carl a little bit and we know and then if he starts to pull back you feel though, oh, hang on a second, that didn't used to be the thing. So I think setting the tone is important. And Oliver Birkman, 4 ,000 weeks, phenomenal book. He's coming back on the show. So funny. Oliver, a man who writes an awful lot about productivity and the pains of it and being bad at it, took ages to respond to emails. I thought it was such a very costly signal of, I live my philosophy and the challenges out myself. Yeah, and I'm over it's great. Yeah, precisely. He's got this great idea in 4 ,000 weeks where he says, decide in advance what you're going to suck at.

1:31:50But basically, what is the price that I need to pay to go through, to achieve this particular thing, to go through the process that I'm talking about? What are the prices that people need to pay to be a slow productivity? Right. This is like Richard Feynman saying, okay, here's my secret for being good at doing physics work is I'm really bad at being on committees. He's like, all right, I'm bad at that. But because of that, I have more time to put on the physics work. I sort of like that idea. Yeah, you got to figure out what. So here's what I think holds people back is they underestimate their value.

1:32:25Right? So there's a mismatch, I think, between how employers see the world and how employees see the world. They understand each other differently. So the employees think, from the employer's point of view, they have all these people who they could hire and could do the job really well. They're really suspicious about you and they're kind of looking for like, are you showing any cracks that would give me an excuse to get rid of you? What's the reality? Employers are desperate for good people. They're desperate for people who are like professional, reliable and can do something valuable really well Like that's it like they're all they care about is how do I find these people right so you actually have way more Langed in you think to be look.

1:33:02I'm not super on the ball necessarily about like the Assistant stuff or whatever but I do this thing over here really well and reliably and I turn these white papers I write are really good and I'm getting better at it and I'm really on the ball and I'm competent and reliable and professional. Not a great at email and don't like get involved in a lot of other things. That is an absolutely fine position to be in because you're good at something valuable and you're professional. People will be desperate to hire you. I don't think people realize how hard it is to hire good people. And good doesn't mean there's nothing you never do anything.

1:33:36Everything you do, you do well. There's nothing. No, it's like you do something really well in your professional. So people have more, they have more levers than they think. If you get good at something, you have more levers and you think to be bad at other things. Talk to me about from the individual's perspective, what, how can they themselves, as they go through this process? What should they expect? What are the pain points that they are going to encounter from where they are now, frantic, urgent, always living in the immediate Slack channel? What are the things, the common pitfalls and pains that they're going to pain points they're going to encounter.

1:34:15Yeah, there's a lot of self -doubt. Right. Especially early on, you're beginning to obsess over quality, but you haven't really gained traction yet. Right? That's difficult. You're like, oh my god, I'm trying to do some things really well here. I mean, use this as the foundation for slowness. You have a lot of self -doubt until that picks up. You're going to imagine, you're going to be wrong about this, but you're going to imagine that everyone in your organization is very carefully studying how you reply to emails, how many things you're saying yes to and that they're all are having these conferences behind your back or they're complaining about oh my god you see he told me his list was too full and you have time.

1:34:50The reality is no one cares. Everyone is very busy. They're just trying to find people to do stuff that they get off their plate. You said you couldn't do it. They've already moved on to the next person. They haven't given that any second thought. So the reality is no one cares. But in your mind it's a real big pitfall. Is it like everyone is carefully monitoring. There's a bulletin board in the back where it's like they're tallying my yes and nose Oh my god, the nose are up 20 % what's going on? Third pitfall is people start talking too much about What they're doing and why they're doing it don't talk about it.

1:35:20Just do it Because people aren't gonna really notice until like you're Standing out. I think this is great. Don't announce to people. This is my new system. This is why I read Cal I heard Cal and Chris's show it. I'm do it. Don't tell them why don't like point towards the books. Don't have definitely don't have auto responders that explain in great detail. I am following a slow productivity strategy. Please expect a response from me. Here is why. Blah, blah, blah. Just do it. Just do the things and adjust a lot. You're probably going to have to adjust a lot. So this way you don't want to announce it because you're going to have to change what you're doing 15 times anyways in some barricade.

1:35:57So just like pull the trigger, start going. Be ready for the self -doubt and keep reminding yourself they're not having like Chris email response rates, strategy sessions in the back room. Like no one cares, no one's paying that much attention. Be professional, do your work, do well, put these things in place gradually, experiment, adjust. It's like the march towards slowness. No one knows you're making that hike, you know. And maybe when you get there, they're like, oh yeah, you really have a good situation. Like you really just do this now and like we don't bother you about that and you seem pretty happy.

1:36:26They'll notice when you get there, they'll knock on those you marching on the way. What are the places people should begin? This sounds great. Slow productivity. I'm way too urgent and overwhelmed and I feel like I'm on the verge of burnout or I've been burned out before and I can see myself slowly sort of trekking toward it now. What is the initiation implementation way? How do people get started unwinding where they are to get to water life of slow productivity right now? Overload first. Yeah. Yeah, that's the emergency. Is that you have too many things you've said yes to. So that's where you should start.

1:37:02You should immediately start doing these ideas about like transparent workloads or quotas and templates or one we didn't mention about is pre -provisioning. So every time someone asks you to do something, you have to go find a time in advance on your calendar. Right? And so that was just promising. Yeah, I'm getting it done. Yeah. And that'll either tell you, I don't have time for it or I do have time for it and it's going to be in two months or, hey, this is urgent. So help me choose between these two things to take off my calendar. So doing that makes a really big difference as well. So you start doing those type of things.

1:37:32You can also do like a one for me, one for you, meeting scheduling strategy, which I like every time you put a meeting on your calendar, you have to schedule the same amount of time for deep work, somewhere within that same week. So like, yeah, you have flexibility when you schedule meetings, but as you get more and more meetings, the available time on your calendar begins to shrink and you can exactly control that ratio, do that right away. Because the problem is your gas beam for air. Like the water is like up to your nose. Like we got to like get a little bit closer to shore before we start thinking about seasonality.

1:38:06And like, okay, now I'm going up this thing. I'm going to do really well and I'm going to assess it. Even though that's to glue, like obsess over quality is to glue the makes it all possible. It's the third principle, not the first. because until you tame that overload, you can't fix the plane, you know, as it's diving towards the ground, right? You gotta get the plane out of it first. So that's where I think people start. And then you're gonna feel much better. Just you start taming some overload, like I can get away with this, no one noticed. You're gonna feel much better. And then when you feel better and have some breathing room, you're like, now what do I really want?

1:38:38I want a much slower work life. Now let's like get into the other details. What's your relationship like with work now? You know, you are a guy who for a decade now pretty much has been talking about in some former another this, a heart back to an agrarian society pace of life trying to do not anti -technology, but you know, you made a, you were quite well known for not having a Facebook account when that came out and then no Instagram account and you know, you've got the podcast and you've got books and you've got columns and that's it and books and columns are kind of the same. Just say, like, just columns go into the books.

1:39:12Precisely, yeah. What talked to me about your personal emotional relationship with work and the flow of things now, all of us strikes me as somebody who is still very much in the trenches. How do you feel on a daily basis? Are you fully zanned out like David Allen or are you still grappling very hard with new challenges? I'm grappling still. I mean, I'm probably more dialed in than Oliver. We talk about this. My systems are dialed in. I'm not flailing from thing to thing. My biggest thing that I'm constantly having to turn to knobs on the tight rope I walk is what too many things means for me, right?

1:39:52Because I have all these opportunities and but I'm a slow productivity practitioner. I cannot like my I the way I work best is it doesn't matter what you do tomorrow, but it matters what you do this month, right? So like deliver a book at the end of this year, but I don't care how you do it. Like that's that's my sweet spot that's right, that's where I thrive. And I get worried about when I feel that I'm drifting too much towards I have too much to do. And I know exactly when that feels because I already, I mean, I'm locked down. I'm locked down, fixed scale productivity, I only work during certain hours.

1:40:24I have, you know, this is all I have these clear shutdown routines. All of my work is out of my head and track very carefully. I plan on multiple scales like on my podcast, we do all the concrete nerd stuff. We get into all this, right? So I have that all locked down. It's the commitment. The number of commitments is just the right number or not. And it's something I went through a big reappraisal of like this is part of what led to me writing this book is implicitly I knew a lot of these ideas and it roughly followed them, but I worried I was getting out of sync It was getting out of sync with the ideals and part of what happened is my kids have three boys Once they all got the elementary school age.

1:40:59They just needed every minute I have to give to them. And I was like, I gotta recalibrate now. Right. And so I really was thinking like, and the problem is I'm very ambitious. And I'm like, I'm finally getting good at things. Like I'm finally getting good at writing, you know? Like it's like the structure. The street unit of effort that you put in now, the returns are greater than they ever were because you have a bigger audience and you have more leverage and you have better platforms to speak on and your writings of high equality. Yeah, exactly. And stuff matters now. Like if I write a really good New Yorker piece, you know, I might be called in the brief senators about it.

1:41:29Like it matters, right? And if a book goes well, it could be a million copies sold. And but I realized like, okay, I got a retune. All right, let's recalibrate. And so writing this book helped me articulate the principles, go explore them so I could better understand them and then go back and tighten the ship. And like one of the things I realized doing that is, I need even less. I need, I have to be even more careful. Now one of the things I do is like an extreme seasonality. Like I disappear in the summers, for example, and like really to shut that down. My teaching is largely just one semester out of the year.

1:42:04There's other things I've been changing my relationship with the university that move away from computer science type stuff and really like this public writing about technology is like my main upset reduces things. So I'm reducing. I'm in reduction mode for sure. Wow. Because what I want to produce, I care about writing basically. I want to write, That's my obsession. You know, I signed my first book deal right after I turned 21. Like that's my, I want to write. And for me, I want it to be the craft matters to me and the impact matters to me. Like that's what I want to do. And I think in our current world, a lot of what I'm writing, like a lot of my columns are trying to navigate technology, which I think is like a huge issue right now.

1:42:45And so I want to do that as well as possible. Like I understand AI, I have a, you know, I'm a computer science professor, the doctor from MIT, like I understand pretty deeply how like a large language model works, you know? And like why in 2017, the innovation of a transformer, what that changed and how self attention plays a role. And I'm like, this is an area where I could be having my own lane in there. So I understand deeply how this stuff works, but also I can think about culture impact. And these. I got the writing skill. So like, this is what I care about, is writing stuff that matters, that moves things.

1:43:17Everything else I see suspiciously. So that's why it took me 10 years to start a podcast. because like this is not writing. But eventually I realized like this is the modern world. I need some way of being in touch with my listeners. And I need a way of actually reaching people beyond who have just seen my books. But you know, I had to constrain it half day a week. You know, like that's been the rule. That's very impressive. And shout out to whoever your right hand or producer is for being able to spin everything up so that you are ready to just step onto the field of play. Well played, Jesse.

1:43:49I'm going to walk in, not only all the lights on the cameras around and the script is in all the outweeds. It's all, yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, I think I'm coming at writing now from the other side of the fence, Lydia, who is your senior editor is also my lady. I work with Lydia. I am indeed, yes, I'll say we'll take a photo afterwards, I'll send it to her. Yeah, I've been talking with her today. Thinking about what happens from a writer first going into podcasting, I'm a podcaster first going into writing. But I started doing this newsletter about four years ago, let's say, I think I've done about 200 of them, every single Monday, I've ripped your inner killies, I'm still writing it, I'm away in Guatemala, I'm still writing it.

1:44:34You're training basically. Correct. That's 200 ,000 words over, you know, it's called three minute Monday, it takes about 300 words a minute, people read slowly. And my writing is influenced the podcast probably more than any other pursuit that I do, even more than reading because once a week I'm forced to sit down and this, you know, I give people this prescription of, you should make a fake podcast, put your phone down on the table with a friend once a week for 30 minutes and just talk about something rigorously. It doesn't matter what it is, it can be sport or Taylor Swift conspiracies or what's going to happen whether there's aliens.

1:45:07And I think that it's very good because it forces you to focus in a way that normal conversation doesn't. But once you've got that, I think that a really great next place to go to, I think everyone should have a newsletter or or a sub -stack of some kind, because forcing yourself to get concrete about what you learned this week, go, okay, here's this idea in my head about people have hidden and observable metrics in their life, and they often trade hidden metrics for observable metrics, which is why they'll sacrifice their relationship or the peace of mind or the quality of the time that they get spend with their kids for an increase in pay packet or a more expensive car or a bigger house.

1:45:42It's like, oh, that's interesting. Okay, so let's flesh this out. And who do I think of? Like, when I think of that, Who can I think from, you know, popular culture or from history about that? And before you know, you go, wow, that's, that's like firm. Yeah. But that's not something for all that I love conversations and talking about things that's not an idea that you can play with quite so well verbally. You can come up with the genesis and I probably did. In fact, I think I know that I did. I came up with the genesis of that idea talking, but it really took form in writing. Yes. And for me, the synergy between the two is, and I, there's no reason for me to keep doing the newsletter, apart from the fact that it's the only audience that you want, as you all know.

1:46:27And the second one being that it makes the podcast so much better to have that once every week. I'm forced to find new things. I'm like, dude, did you ever see the job advert that Ernest Chackleton put in 1912 in the British, in the fucking London Times or whatever? I've found this thing because I needed to, I gotta find something. It's the same as when you start journaling. If you do gratitude journaling and the particular one that I use at the end of the day has three great things that happen today, I have to actively look for great things during the day. And after a while, God, I can't do another night where I look at the page and I don't have an idea.

1:47:03So I better be looking for great things. Yeah, and then you find them. Yes, but that synthesis between conversation and writing, I think is... Writing's thinking. Yeah, like writing is thinking. It's thinking out, you can't be a sophisticated thinker if you don't write because our working members, a lot of reasons why, but I think the main reason is our working memories are limited, right? So when you write, it's like you're cyborg and extending your brain. You can now have a lot of ideas, hold a bunch of different points together and then start rearranging them. And like the great thing about writing is that when you're reading something you wrote and it's not quite right.

1:47:37So this doesn't click into this. Wait, why did you introduce this piece about Shackleton? This is different than this, or this didn't pay off, you feel that viscerally. Like this isn't quite right. And then you feel it when the writing is right. And it's like what your brain is like practicing is rationality and narrative and how to bring pieces together. I mean, I don't know if you've noticed this, and you're I'm curious. Like do you find, well, there's kind of two competing forces. I was gonna say, do you find that writers are interesting podcast guests because they think in terms of coherent thoughts that click together.

1:48:13Now the counter -veiling forces, some writers aren't very good at just interacting with human beings. So you have like two forces going against it. It depends whether or not you've got a secret underground writing dungeon. Yes, most of the time, people that are great writers are fantastic podcast guests. There's been a number of people that I found online. One particular guy, Gwinda Bogal, I think he's been on the show seven times. He'll be in the top five of guests of all time. And he's a nobody, but he is one of the best substack writers and tweet thread writers. And I saw this thread from this guy three years ago.

1:48:48And I was like, if he can talk a quarter as well as he can write, he'll be phenomenal. And sure enough brought him on. And he was a really good communicator. And he had all of these ideas. And I'd just run this back all the time. I'm like, this guy's fantastic. Rob Henderson's the same David Pinsoff that so many of the people that I find for the podcast come from substack blogs and stuff. I can see the proof of your ideas here. If we can talk about, if we get through even 50 % of the insights I've learned from this 3000 World article, all right, this is brilliant and that's a phenomenal episode then we can play with that.

1:49:26What about this? I think it is an interesting counterfactual. So, yeah, people that write well are often good podcasters and great podcast guests just need the communication side. Yeah. And on the other hand, like pure YouTube people, for example, who are like fantastic at creating great YouTube videos are often like really bad podcast guests because they're different And also not particularly good writers. Yeah. Yeah. Cal Newport, ladies and gentlemen, Cal, I appreciate this is flown by. It's been two hours and it's absolutely flown. It's been really great to meet you. Why should people go? They want to keep up today with everything that you're doing.

1:49:58Uh, Kellniport .com. Yeah, I don't use social media, but I have a website podcast called Deep Questions, Book a Slow Productivity. That's all I am. Oh yeah, we did it. Go. And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emo in its natural habitat, helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural All I'm Doug! Uh, Lemoo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates Excludes Massachusetts