#722: Cal Newport — How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Build a Deep Life, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time

25:52I always waited around a little bit. And you can still be really early and catch the right waves, even if you have a certain built-in delay. And that's how I'm treating a lot of technologies and also behaviors. Like if technologies are just, and I'm not going to use a dictionary definition here, but let's just say tools in quotation marks of various types, which could be behaviors to accomplish a certain task, solve a certain problem, right? It could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite mound, but it could also be a certain type of behavior that you use, which is basically an algorithm.

26:29It's a recipe step-by-step, you know, L to get something done. I really want to think about like, what are, and this is what makes the best investors in the world also, in my opinion, is they think about not just primary, but like secondary and tertiary effects. It's kind of like the character loosely based on Peter Thiel in the first season of Silicon Valley, who's like, who is this Burger King? And he runs through this whole thing on the sesame seeds, and then it gets to the locusts, and he's like, the 30-year cycle is going to coincide, right? And the reason I mentioned that is if we think about, for instance, video, I think many people who are adopting video have never experienced what it is like to have widespread public recognition, like visual recognition when they walk around on the street.

27:17And so they're not familiar with that side effect, which people have experienced through other medium like television. And I have to my own limited experience that I'm not Brad Pitt or anything like that, but I have certainly. It is hard for a lot of people I know with popular podcasts that have any video component to go hang out at a coffee shop. They can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down and read a book because they'll get interrupted every five to 10 minutes if it's in any decently sized city, in the US at least, if they're US-based podcasters. And for that reason that I'm also kind of taking the techno selectionism slash Amish approach where I'm like, okay, I can afford to wait.

28:00This isn't true with everything, but I think this ties into also slow productivity. I can afford to wait six months. I can afford to wait 12 months. And if I am, I'm giving you credit for this, but it's certainly one of my favorite, in my case, audiobooks, Born Standing Up, Be So Good They Can't Ignore You, Steve Martin. Rule number one, Daniel Day-Lewis was not on TikTok in between all of his movies, making omelets or teaching people seven easy steps to financial freedom or what to do when Bitcoin crashes. He was working on his craft and getting so fucking good that every few years he would just show up and win best actor and then disappear again.

28:40All right. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. But let's come back to slow productivity. So the new book, I want to talk about this. The subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Who doesn't want that. The last time you were on this podcast, the episode was published February 2022, and you were telegraphing this a bit. You were talking about slow productivity a bit, and you were like, well, I'm thinking about making this book. So I'm just curious to know, process-wise, if you'd indulge me, what happened between then and now? Because now you have a finished book, and people can buy it.

29:15And this is maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your primary projects, the things to say yes to. Because writing a book takes a lot of energy. So what happened between, let's just say January 2022 and now we're recording January 2024 with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time? Well, it's a good case study because I was testing the idea then. I went back and actually pulled out this timeline. I think the first time I used the term slow productivity was maybe 2020 or 2021, right around there. Right before I came on your show the last time, I was ready to ratchet up my testing of the concept so I could also develop it more.

30:00So I wrote a New Yorker piece that January where the title was, It's Time to Embrace Slow Productivity. Now the piece just had one idea of what would eventually become the full-blown philosophy of slow productivity. And then I came on your show and we talked about it some more. Then pretty soon after I was on your show, I'm writing the book. Seriously, I pulled together. Okay. I think I really understand all the pieces. So that's like a two year ideation process. You know, I get the inspiration for the book in 2020. It's the mix of the start of the pandemic and some stuff happening in my own life.

30:33This is where I began playing with those ideas. 2022, I'm still trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form. You know, that summer I'm up, you know, up in New England writing, I'm up actually writing the book. So that's the process. This is summer of 2022. Summer of 2022. I would have handed this in spring of 2023. It's when I would have handed in my first manuscript. Wow, that's fast. Good for you. It's incredible. Well, see, I disappear. Part of my methodology is I disappear in the summer. I'm a professor. So typically professors in the summer take what's called summer salary.

31:08You don't actually get paid by your university at a research institution. You don't get paid in the summer. They pay you for 10 months. And then you can take on through grants, summer salary to keep working on research is what you're supposed to do. And at some point I realized, well, you know, I make money from writing books. I don't actually have to take a salary. Is the university the one who's providing the grant or is it some independent foundation or whatever? It would be independent, right. So I'm like a theoretical computer scientist, applied mathematician. So we'd get our money from the NSF, for example.

31:38And that's just what you do because you're researching. National Science Foundation. Exactly, yeah. And I realized at some point after I got tenure, I don't actually need that salary. Like this is what the book advance should be for. And I began disappearing in the summer and really let's write, let's really get ahead of steam. And so within a month or two after being on your show, I was beginning to seriously write that book. And then it's about a 10 month process for me to get a manuscript done. Then you get about four or five months of editing and then it locks in. So that locked in last summer, last summer, that book was finally locked in.

32:12So I'm going to selfishly just ask you a couple of questions about writing for myself because I'm working on my first book project in six years, seven years, something like that. Oh, excellent. And there are many reasons for it. It's one of those things that just refuse to go away. One of those ideas where I'm like, okay, this is just going to ricochet around inside my skull indefinitely unless I let it out somehow. So let's do it. And I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I also want to, and I keep saying this, I've said this for years, so I'm calling bullshit on myself on some level, get back into writing on the blog.

32:47And in part, because I feel I have more differentiation with that particular capacity, not that I'm the best writer, but there's a particular style of writing. There's a particular way of deconstructing things that people, at least some people seem to like, right from the 1000 True Fans perspective. Whereas in the interview format podcast world, there are a lot of very, very good people with very high production quality. So I feel like that arena is becoming more of a red ocean per se, as opposed to a blue ocean. So I'd like to experiment with doing more on the blog. Also, just to reinforce something you said, because the blog, number one, it's a platform that I own.

33:31It's on open source, it's WordPress. and the sort of barrier to comment is a little higher, which I like, there's a little more friction in the process. People can't just be like, that's so fucking dumb, LOLZ, you know, on the blog. There's more involved. There is a little more process involved in terms of leaving comments. So the signal tends to be higher. It allows me to workshop things also, quickly workshop things and see how they land. And I still think that for like memetic testing, text is pretty hard to beat. they're very different laboratories. Text and voice are very different laboratories.

34:06I think voice helps you to talk through whatever is percolating to develop ideas that you can then test really effectively via text, if that makes any sense. So I have two questions for you. The first is we, in our last conversation when I interviewed you on the podcast, talked about the Humor Magazine at Dartmouth and one of the main things that helped you, not specific to that, or I should say limited to that, was that you're either writing for editors or writing for acceptance and rejection. You had some feedback loop whereby you could improve your writing. As it stands right now, I'm not going to get much of that from my readers.

34:48God bless them, right? Because it's not their role. It's a heavy lift. They're going to either like it or not like it and provide some feedback in the comments. But in terms of becoming a better writer, how would you approach that if you were me writing blog posts? If I have a book, I will have possibly an editor. I will have friends read a chapter here or there. But how would you approach that? Because I would like to try to mimic, say, Seth Godin, short blog posts, which I'm fucking terrible at. I tend to be very verbose, which is why all my books are phone books. So I want to really make a goal for myself to do short blog posts because that'll be more sustainable, hopefully.

35:22How would you create that feedback? Because I want to get better. And I'm happier going back to writing because I mean, I think you're right that it's a much harder skill and it's a much rarer skill. I write constantly. That's basically my baseline for my career is I'm always writing. I'm always writing. Now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces. In the six weeks, counting today and going back six weeks from today when we're recording, I've published three pieces in the New Yorker. I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing, because I think that's the rare skill because you're right. People can become good podcast interviewers, like good enough.

35:57It's pretty quick. I mean, people, I don't know. With chat GPT, if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup, they can do it. Yeah, they can do it. Give me 10 questions in the style of Lex Friedman. If he were to interview such and such a guest who happens to be my next guest, and then you'll get 10 questions and you can finesse them. And then you have your iPad and you're ready to go. And if you have on interesting people, you're really just kind of getting out of the way. And actually it's an advantage. So we have this whole new generation of podcasters who just don't say much. And that turns out to actually work well.

36:24You know, anyways, but writing's hard as anything. Writing is hard. You can't write without practice. I mean, you've written, what, four or five phone books worth of books and Tim.blog. Five. Yeah, published five. And the blog was going fast. I was in blog posts. Really long time. Right. So I think that makes a lot of sense. One idea I would have is particular stylistic targets that you're working with. this post or for the next week or the next month. I like what's happening in this writing over here. This is resonating with me. So my taste is saying this is good. Let me deconstruct that and try that in my post.

36:56Like, oh, I like what's going on here with meter. I like what's going on here with abstraction or story. Let me try that. And this is what I did before I had a steady edited gig is that I would deconstruct articles and try to practice particular things I found from them. it was all toolkit building. And then the bigger the toolkit, the more tools you have available. So then you're working on a book chapter, what have you, and you can pull out the, whatever the metaphorical equivalent of the Phillips head screwdriver is here, the saw there. I think the regularity matters too, but it's that taste issue.

37:31And this is actually an idea that's in the new book, the slow productivity book, because one of the principles is obsess over quality. And if anything, that becomes the core principle for slowing down. I pulled that out because in my notes, it was on like page three or four and I was like okay this seems like the mother quality it is in a sense that allows for the birth of all these other qualities you can't be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with a hundred projects if you're obsessed about doing something really well it's incompatible with that now doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together but it is incompatible with being busy.

38:13Like Chris Nolan, the director doesn't even own a smartphone. He is just, I'm making Oppenheimer and that's what I'm doing for the next three years. And then when I'm done, I'm going to go away for six months and just read. That's what I do. I cannot be on YouTube, like your Daniel Day-Lewis example, because when you obsess over quality, like two things happen. One, you can't be busy because that gets in the way of actually getting really good at something. And then two, if you're doing something really well, that actually gives you the autonomy to push the other junk out of your life and slow down even more.

38:44You know, as you get better at something, the more say you get over the way your life unfolds. It's why you've been podcasting 10 years and you can say, I'm not going to do this video thing right now. Because you're really good at it, right? You have some autonomy to figure out how I actually want to do this. I call that principle the glue. It holds everything else together. The glue is the quality first, competency slash quality first. Obsess over quality. Yeah, because the other two principles are do fewer things and work at a natural pace. But if you're only doing those two things, you've set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general.

39:18It's like, all I'm looking about is like, how do I do less? I see work adversarially. I want to have more variety in my pacing. You're just sort of trying to get away from reduce or change work. And if that's all you're doing, you're just building up this negative attitude towards work, which I think, by the way, is one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in, let's say, elite culture. It's just an all out rejection of work itself. Like, well, any drive to do things, it's a capitalist construction. And the real thing to do is just do nothing. But that doesn't last. And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing.

39:52They're striving really hard to make sure that their sub stacks and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience. They're giving talks on it. So you can't just focus on the doing less part. You need the obsess over quality part. And that's where you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create. And that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living. And so that's why I think it's the glue. You have to do the other things, but if you just do the other things, you know, you're going to end up doing quiet quitting tech talks or something like that.

40:20You're not going to end up where you want to be. Oh no. Purgatory.

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41:31Returning to, because this relates to the writing of slow productivity, choosing to spend your entire summer working on this. I'm a dog with a bone with respect to the writing process. So I will come back to that, but not to bore everybody who is not a writer in the audience. Although, by the way, folks, I'm talking about creative process and choosing projects. So I want to talk about choosing to write slow productivity because wanting to or understanding the importance of, say, obsessing over quality, which I think you would agree is the best promotion, like rather than worrying about all the different ways you can market something, like product first is a great marketing plan.

42:08You still need to choose which thing to become great at, because you could choose quiet quitting TikToks as your particular specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not for me. But you chose instead to do other things. So how do you choose, to use the sort of metaphor, I think it's probably apocryphal, but the stones, the big rocks to put in your jar before the gravel and the sand. How did you choose slow productivity? Why that versus the many other things you could do? So presumably you get all sorts of speaking invites. You could have just crammed a bunch of those into the summer and done really well financially.

42:44You could have done who knows what, maybe have people emailing you about like film adaptations of this or who knows. You have stuff that gets lobbed over the transom. Maybe you even have great or exciting ideas. Two in the morning, you're like, oh God, it'd be so cool if I did X. At the end of the day, you chose to focus on this why there's a general and a specific answer the general is writing is what i do that is what i do i come up with ideas that i think are important and i put them in the writing with the best possible craft i'm not happy if i'm not writing so that's why i'm not giving 100 talks a year it's why i'm not releasing an app it's why you can't hire the deep work academy consultant you don't know how many times people have told me like we would give you any amount of money to come to our company and redesign our practices to be focused on deep work and less distracted by email.

43:36And I'm like, no, I'm going to write instead. I wrote the book. Read the book. You guys can just buy it. Yeah, buy many, many of those that try to replicate what they would pay. But then specifically that idea, I spend years. I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to write a book about. this is one of the skills I think is lost in the internet age because again going back let's tie this all to the algorithm that surfaces something or that promotes something very different it's a volume game among other things I want to put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm hits it's a format game it's also a lot of chasing trends game you say okay what just took off two days ago on related channels now you're going to get 70 videos all doing the same thing it's a completely different way of thinking.

44:25I think part of my secret sauce and the secret sauce for a lot of people, it could be at least, is really waiting to get started. You know, I wrote this years ago on our mutual friend, or the friend who introduced me to your work actually, Ramit Sethi, way back when in his early blog, I remember writing an article for him that said, don't get started. It was like my advice because my thought was, it's really hard to get a good idea. And so like, take your time. And then to cultivate a good idea, it takes years. And you have to write, You're going to dedicate a lot of your life to it. So really don't get started if you can at all hold back until you're really, really sure about it.

45:00And then people say, yeah, but I worried that I'm just going to procrastinate forever. And in some sense, it's like, well, then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work. But the solution to that is not just let's just go. Let's just like tweet this. Let's do this video. Let me jump over this. Let me start using generative AI looking for if I crypto this thing, just looking for some quick thing that you can connect. And you got to just not want to get started until you can't help but get started. I think that's frustrating for a lot of the internet generation because it takes a really long time.

45:30So I do want the specific, I mean, you did mention it, I guess, because you're a writer, but that not to go like it's turtles all the way down, but I will ask like, how did you decide that you're a writer? Looking at your CV, one might conclude, yes, he does a lot of writing, but he's also a computer science theoretician and he's this and this and this and da, da, da, da, da. So to say I am a writer is something that I think also many folks right now who are in any form of content would have a lot of trouble saying I am X. They might say I'm a YouTuber, but usually it's like 15 hyphens. And therein lies many opportunities and also many temptations to be resisted.

46:07I would say that a few observations. The first is that as you're talking about Don't Get Started, it makes me think of Warren Buffett and the don't just do something, stand there. Like you don't need to make a hundred thousand investments. You don't need to be a day trader. Wait for the fat pitch, like figure out what the fat pitch looks like, figure out what your kind of zone of genius is. What is your advantage? And you are, I would say also like the, it seems to me like, and I'm really putting together a question with a million semicolons here, but you do get started, but you're not over committing to half-baked ideas.

46:46you are exploring and experimenting and workshopping, which is also, as I think I might have mentioned, another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts. Because if you look at, say, the four-hour body, the four-hour body was workshopped for years before it ever came out. It just wasn't under that name. The first blog post that ever went super mega viral on Digg at the time, D-I-G-G, and perhaps a few others, was from Kevin Rose. Sure, Kevin. was from geek to freak about gaining a bunch of muscle. And the response to that, it was what made me very interested in workshopping adjacent material to see if it would be similarly received and if I would enjoy it, if I would be good at it, et cetera.

47:29And so that was workshopped for years. That doesn't mean wasting time. It means that by the time I decided to really commit resources, the likelihood of success in my mind was, I'm not going to say all but certain, but it was as certain as I could possibly be. I had already tested this. Four-hour work week was workshopped for six, seven years in lectures. So how did you decide that you were a writer, that you would identify that way? Because identifying that way is a story that enables you to then be very selective and focused in what you do. Right. It's a good question because I decided early.

48:04I decided I was a writer when I was 20 and I became a professional when I was 21. So I signed with my agent when I was 20 and signed my first book deal right after I turned 21. So I came to it early because I was a big reader and was verbally precocious. It's going to be in the title of this podcast. So I read a lot. The glue of high quality and being verbally precocious. And literally precocious, I suppose. I mean, it was like gifted and talented reading program. People think that John Hopskin's talent serves the CTY camps. People think, oh, you probably went to one of those for math, but I was invited for the creative writing one.

48:45I went to college and I said, as I went to college, I'm not going to be a writer. I just, it's really hard. Writing's really hard. So that's not what I'm going to do. I was a walk on into the crew team instead. I had the right build for it. I was like, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do sports. This is great. Was that lightweight or regular weight? 160 pounds. This guy, there was a lot of sauna and weight cutting in that. Yeah. I was the brutal. Yeah. I was the big guy. I mean, you know that from wrestling, but I was the big guy that would cut down. Anyways, and I may have talked about this before on the show.

49:13I'm not sure, but I long and short of it, I developed a congenital heart condition, a sort of rapid heartbeat. So I had to stop rowing. And so I said, maybe I'll see about riding. And that's when I started riding. I don't think you mentioned this. I mean, it was, I was a pretty good rower. Actually, it was, you know, a bunch of recruits on this freshman boat from prep schools. And then it was like me and one other walk on it. Just, I was a middle distance sprinter in high school. I was the right build for it, whatever. So I was like, I could maybe make a go of this and had to stop. It was just out of nowhere.

49:41Just, all right, I have a, it's called an atrial flutter. Okay. So I guess I can't do this anymore. And so then I said, let me try. I need some sort of activity. I guess grudgingly, grudgingly, I'll try writing. And the very first thing I wrote was an op-ed about 9-11 for the student newspaper a couple weeks after 9-11. And I started, I started writing columns for him. I got involved in the humor magazine after a year or so of that, I was like, Oh, maybe I, I am good at writing. And that's when I decided I'm going to write a book. Let's become a writer. Let me write a book. And that's what we talked about last time was figuring out how can a 21 year old sell a book and it would have to be the right topic.

50:19And we did all of that, but that's when I declared, but when it comes to your other part of this question, which is how do you figure out what to work on? I think you have two options and you can do both. One option is to actually have like you did, or I have a way of test driving ideas. So, Well, you know, I use like you used to do my newsletter and my blog to test drive it. The fact that you pointed out like you honed in on slow productivity as something you wanted to talk to me about was a really good signal. Okay, this topic probably has legs. So I do a lot of that. So you're right. If you read my newsletter, I'm trying a lot of things, most of which will never become a book.

50:57If you don't have that, then the other option, and this is what I think of as like the MFA option, is you have to develop really good taste. MFA meaning Masters in Fine Arts? Yeah. So if you go back, I took an award, the Penn Hemingway Award for first-time novelist. I just chose whatever year was most recent, and here's the finalist. And I went through their bios. All but one had come to an MFA program. And so what's going on there, it's not that these MFA programs, which are creative writing graduate programs, they don't really teach you. It's not instructive. Here's how you do paragraphs, or here's techniques you didn't know, but it increases your taste, meaning your ability to recognize what's good and what's not and what's possible with good things.

51:38So that's the traditional option in sort of a pre-internet age is you get really discerning about other people's work. You read a lot and just know this is a good novel and this is not. I read a lot of New Yorker and I know what makes like a really good long form nonfiction journalist article. And then you can apply that taste to your own work and be your own worst critic. This isn't there yet. This isn't there yet. Oh, this is getting better. So you either need a way to test what you're doing. And the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago. And, or you really have to put in the work to develop taste.

52:09So you understand what makes this good. I'm not there yet, but this is the closest thing I've done so far. So let me go after this, or I can see how good this is. So I know I'm not going to try to publish this as a novel, but I could probably do a short story over here. Taste can also become the way you do it, But one way or the other, you do need some sort of discernment function to figure out what ideas are worth pursuing. Because if you're just going off of inspiration in the moment, I mean, that's a huge crapshoot. Like you're really unlikely to be successful that way. Yeah. And I'm also, and maybe this is just because I'm curmudgeon and one of the old Muppets up in the balcony, Mortimer.

52:48But I think offline is incredibly uncrowded and absurdly valuable. in the sense that if you're looking for real-time feedback, go volunteer for$10 an hour to teach a class at Learning Annex and see what sticks, see what works, see what's confusing. The feedback loop is so fast. You do that once a week for a month, you're going to know a lot. I mean, you're going to know more than if you had written 100 blog posts, by far, in my opinion. I try to test things live. And for people who might be curious, people who test material tend to test material in a lot of different ways, in my experience. If you listen to, for instance, my Jamie Foxx episode from way back in the day, 2015, it was podcast of the year at the time, back when that was possible.

53:33And there was only a few thousand podcasts to choose from. But he was, even in that podcast, working on material, seeing what my response was. And you can do that with nonfiction too. Just as a quick example of taste, I'm listening to a book right now, which I've read excerpts of, but it's called The Power Law by Sebastian Maliby, and it's about venture capital. He wrote a book also called More Money Than God, which is nonfiction, encyclopedic, and beautifully written romp through the world of hedge funds, which blew me away because he was very good at making the sort of esoteric, very graspable, similar to, in some senses, Michael Lewis.

54:16But the Power Law book, I know most of the content. I lived in that world for a long time. I know most of the history. And still, I was listening to it in the car yesterday. I was like, good God, it's just so good. The writing and the timing that we've talked about before and Dave Barry for just setting up the punchline and ending the chapter on the right note where you're like, oh, that's so good. It's just so, so good. The same way I felt about, say, Joe Abercrombie in this fantasy trilogy, which starts with the blade itself, where I was just It's like, oh God, it's so well architected. It's not just the pros, but it is the pros as well.

54:56So that taste and building up that barometer being so important. And let me ask you on the topic of slow productivity, could you give some examples? I mean, you mentioned Chris Nolan. Could you give some examples old and new of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity? I was motivated by slow food as an example, where they look back to traditional cuisines where cultures had evolved over generation and generation. Like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy? And the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers.

55:33So people who did things with their brain, but not the normal 1950s and onward. I'm in an office or working at a computer screen. So like artists and philosophers, scientists, the original knowledge workers, they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said, great, we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work because they had freedom and flexibility. So we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the sort of modern life. So a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers.

56:05So one of the early examples is Isaac Newton. and I said, okay, we all know he wrote this great masterwork, the Principia. Calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity, to give celestial order to the way that the cosmos works. He wrote that thing over decades, decades. He would go and do other things and come back. It wasn't this frantic push until it's done, but no one remembers how long he spent working on that. They're just like, yeah, that thing changed the way we understand the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play, In the Heights, the same way.

56:40I do his whole story. It's a seven-year odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play, which wasn't very good, to when it first goes on to a professional stage, his pre-Broadway debut. That's a seven-year period. And he's working on it, then he's not. Then he's working on it again, and he's not. We don't know about that now. We're just like, oh, yeah, his first play won a lot of Grammys, and he did Hamilton. He's like a really good playwright. Right. If you read Wikipedia, you're like, oh, that was fast. Yeah, you don't realize. The synopsis in one sentence.

57:10His dad told him, like when he left, when he graduated from college, his dad was like, you really should go to law school. He took a job as a substitute teacher. He was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap troupe called Love Supreme that would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows. So if you zoomed in on a particular day in the almost decade that Lin-Manuel Miranda was working on in the Heights, you'd be like, man, you're so lazy. You're not even working on your thing. Like, what's going on? Why aren't you getting after it? Why aren't you crushing it? Because things take longer. I use Georgia O 'Keeffe as an example of seasonality, that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began.

57:50So you know what? In the summers, I'm going with Alfred Stieglitz. We're going to Lake George. and I'm going to sit there in a shanty that she called it the shanty. It was an outbuilding near the lake. I'm just going to paint and be inspired. And then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff. Most productive years of her life by actually slowing down for a season every year. Her productivity exploded. She became one of the most famous early modernists of that whole era of painting. Right. So we see those examples. Well, Murray Curry at the pinnacle of about to discover in pitch blend, the substance she's studying about to isolate radioactivity and win her first two Nobel prizes goes to France with her family on vacation for two months.

58:31In the moment, you're like, what are you doing? You got to be getting after, you got to be crushing it. But we don't see that now. We're like, yeah, she was great. She won two Nobel prizes. Way to go. She wasn't part of the hustle culture. There was no hustle culture. That's the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people producing things of real value, using their brain, they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard, but they didn't hustle. And they didn't work 10-hour days, day after day. They didn't work all out year round. They didn't push, push, push until this thing was done.

59:04It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the same time and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality. That's the slow productivity approach. It still produces stuff that you're really proud of, but it doesn't burn you out and it doesn't leave you in this weird out-of-sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time. I think a lot of choosing a path is about choosing trade-offs. So if you choose slow productivity, there's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of trade-offs. What are the pressures, expectations, psychological challenges, et cetera, that you should be prepared to face?

59:42Why don't we start there? Because I think most people listening will agree, like, yes, I don't want to be doing quiet quitting TikTok videos. In other words, I'd rather be building the Sistine Chapel instead of sandcastles that just get wiped away every time that wave comes in. But the fact of the matter is, I have a mortgage. I've got this, I've got this, this, this, and I can't just disappear for months at a time and take two decades to write my masterwork. I can see how a lot of folks would rightly say that, at least at face value. So what should people be. Willing to accept as trade-offs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity.

1:00:22and is it mutually exclusive? Like presumably Lynn Manuel Miranda had a way to buy groceries and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap, right? So maybe I'm making a, creating a false dichotomy here. Lynn was a teacher and was also a columnist. He was writing reviews and columns for a paper while he was working on this in his spare time. But the bigger points, the important one, is how do we take an example like Newton and the Principia and apply it to someone who has just a 21st century corporate semi-remote hybrid work job for a big company. So how do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers, but just modern knowledge workers?

1:01:03So like if we start with the first principle, do fewer things. Well, what this really means if you have a normal corporate job is starting to be very explicit about workload management, which is something that everyone does workload management, but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways. Because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context, in most jobs, not in software development, but in most other jobs, it's up to you just to manage what's on your plate. People send you emails and you just say, yeah, sure, I'll do it. So what most people do, for example, is they wait until they feel really stressed and then they say, all right, I have psychological cover to say no because I'm so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no.

1:01:45It's a terrible way to manage your workload. So you can be much more explicit about how you manage your workload. Here's how many slots I have. Oh, I filled them. I mean, this is really sort of four hour work week style. Let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload. You could go to a pull based system instead of a push based system. You can do reverse to do list. And there's a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn't get too large in a way that's fully compatible. Work at a natural pace. Well, there's organizational things you can do here so that you're not at full intensity, but you can also just do this yourself.

1:02:18You can titrate your workload. I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year. And I can do this in a way that my employer doesn't notice. It's pretty subtle in what projects you take on or don't take on. You can quiet quit for two months and no one notices. Whereas if you quiet quit for 20 months, people say, okay, wait a second. I know your worth as a human is not defined by your labor, but your worth to me as an employee is. You got to do something, right? Quiet quitting is just not doing very much work. Quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum. Yeah. And it comes out of a place of this sort of late stage capitalism critique of like, why should I have to do work?

1:02:51Which is a whole other thing. And then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality, that then becomes the accelerant that allows you to do these other things faster and better. So as you hone in on, okay, here's what I'm going to own within this company and I'm going to get better and better at this and make myself more and more valuable. Now you're able to much more easily and much more aggressively do fewer things. Now you're able to much more easily and aggressively say, I'm gone in August. I don't do work in June. You gain autonomy. as you get better, and then you're able to accelerate these things.

1:03:21So the vision is even if you work for someone else, these principles can be implemented, whether they're on board or not. And it's going to get you something like the slow productivity benefits of I'm doing good work. Work is not taking up most of my life. And I think we can safely assume that a lot of the audience listening will be self-employed or have some agency, at least as most people would assume, beyond, say, mid-level HR manager at a large company. Yeah, it makes it a lot easier, by the way. Yeah, it makes it easier. I think that a lot of folks listening will be self-employed. So we can use that lens if it makes it a little easier.

1:03:59But perhaps they run, who knows, a software like a B2B SaaS company, and they have employees and so on. But they can set rules at the end of the day. They can create systems that build in some of what you're talking about. What is a pull system instead of a push system? I mean, it's okay. Here's how many things I work on at a time. So I only pull something new in when I'm done with something, which is different than the default of anyone can push work onto your plate at any time. And it's up to you to just sort of manage this. You have an unlimited load. A pull system says, no, this is what I'm working on now.

1:04:35I can't do something else until I'm done with this. Now we can have a holding tank and this is where it is. here's how I estimate when I'm going to get to it. There's this many things ahead of it. Software developers already do this because they already have Kanban inspired cards on a whiteboard system where you pull in, I'm going to work on this feature now. And over here, you have the holding tanks of features that need to be done. And when you're done on with the feature you're working on, it moves to the next column and you can pull something else into its place. You could do this more with more other types of work.

1:05:05The idea being you don't want to be juggling too much at the same time because the overhead gets to you. How do you do that personally? The similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles like mine is a professor writer's quota systems. So that's more what I will lean into. Break up work into the different types of things I need to do and quota. Here's how many of these I do per semester. Here's how many of these I do at a time. The idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that is part of my responsibilities, but it's cap. So if I have a quota as a professor for here's how many paper reviews I do per semester, when I hit that cap, I can now say to someone, hey, thanks for thinking about this.

1:05:46I do a lot of paper reviews. I like doing paper reviews. I've already hit my quota for this semester, however, so I can't take any more on this semester. This is really effective because for someone to push back against that, they basically just have to argue your quota is wrong. Well, whatever it is, is wrong. You should be doing more, you know, as opposed to saying, I'm really busy. You know, I don't know if I have time. And they're like, everyone's busy. It'd be good for me if you would just do this. Yeah. Don't worry. I can make this a really light lift for you. And you're like, yeah, don't worry about it.

1:06:15And we'll whatever. There's nothing more quixotic than the overburdened worker who is trying to not say no, but get the person who's giving them the work to voluntarily agree to not give them the work. It never works. If someone's trying to get you to do something and you're like, well, I guess I could, but you know, I am pretty busy. They're never going to say, you sound busy. Don't do this. They're like, oh, good. Well, I'm glad you can do it. Here you go. Get this off my plate. What are you talking about? I'll lean more into quotas. And I'm really careful about that. When you say careful, what do you mean?

1:06:46Careful about taking on too much. I'm very careful. Is that what you mean? Yeah. And not only do I have quotas for, I only do this much per semester. I'll think about I'm not going to do any of this work this season or I'm writing the season. So I'm going to disappear and not do this or this season. I'm working on research. I'm very wary of workload and workload management. How many things do I have on my plate? That's the number I check with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety. You know, one of my core ideas is the problem about putting a lot of things on your plate, even if they don't have colliding deadlines or it's up to you when you finish them is Once something is on your plate and you've agreed to do it, it generates overhead.

1:07:28People are going to check in on it. There's going to be calls you have to jump on to talk about it. It has some cognitive space. And what's been happening a lot in modern knowledge work is that people have put so much stuff on their plate that the overhead of just managing all of this stuff, not doing the work, just the administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings takes up most of their schedule. And it's this weird, almost Sisyphean position that so many knowledge workers are in today where all day long is just talking about their work. And it's, okay, maybe late at night or on the weekend, I do a little bit of work.

1:07:58Like it makes no sense, right? If your workload gets too big, the overhead takes over more and more of your time and it takes longer to get through your actual workload. It's an incredibly inefficient way of executing work. It's one of the reasons why, by the way, that this is not a zero-sum game slow productivity. It doesn't make you worse at your job, but happier. It actually makes you better at your job. I mean, if I'm an employer, I should like the idea of slow productivity because my workers are going to produce better stuff. We will make more money if we don't pile 15 things on their plate because more of their time is going to be working on value producing objectives and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to.

1:08:39There's actually really a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs, between employers and employees. Slow productivity produces good stuff. It doesn't just make the workers happier. It doesn't just make you happier. You produce better stuff. I mean, your company has more profit. Your clients are happier. You can charge more for the services you offer. So it's not zero sum. It's more win-win than anything else. I would have to imagine that also if any company were to have the emperor of the universe dictate that they embrace the tenets of slow productivity for say a three to six month period of time, The companies that would not do well on at least one level would probably be those who have not clearly defined what the high leverage, most important things are.

1:09:26right so if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and taken the measure twice cut once approach to determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominoes or makes them irrelevant they're probably be quite bad at slow productivity i mean that would make them bad at most types of productivity i would say other than just like the volume game of tonnage of here doing other 30 tasks but remaining really focused right which i think is a risk, or I'd say that risk is increased when you are not good at defending yourself against the agendas of everyone else, in a sense, right?

1:10:08If you take on too much. From a tactical perspective, you mentioned the, I only do say, making this up. I've committed to only doing five peer-reviewed article reviews per quarter. Really appreciate you thinking of me, but unfortunately I've already hit that and I'd need to focus on A, B, or C. So the actual language that is used for defense, I'm very interested in. What other types of language do you use when you get stuff over the transom, which I have to imagine you do? Are there other approaches, other specific types of phrasings that you have found you come back to because they're effective?

1:10:46Well, extreme clarity is the most important. I think people tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness, which is really not that important to the person making the request. They want this thing done and they want to know if you're going to do it or not. Now, you don't want to be rude, but actually clarity is the key. You can have zero wiggle room and anyone, I'm sure you're very good at this. I mean, anyone who has a lock coming over the transom learns, you have to say, I can't do this. And then you can give some explanations, but you can't give any ambiguity. So you say, unfortunately, I can't do this because you can give some explanations.

1:11:20Most people don't read past the, I can't do this. They're already emailing the next person that they're going to ask about this once they get to that line. So I think short and sweet and clear. Clarity is underrated in this. I mean, what do people really want? They want something done and they also want clarity about when is this going to get done because they want to be released from having to keep track of something in their mind. And so it's why this company that made their clients sign a communication agreement. This is how we are going to talk to you. Like, this is how we're going to discuss things.

1:11:54You can't just email or call us whenever. What we're going to do is we're going to have, and I believe their setup, this was a few years ago, but I believe their setup was we're going to have this weekly check-in call and we're going to take careful notes during this check-in call. If any questions you have that we don't have the answer on right away, we're going to take careful notes on that and we'll post it and get you that information back. All right, this is what we're going to do. One of the two partners of this company was thinking, this is it, right? Like we're going out of business because clients don't want anything taken away from them.

1:12:21They want full flexibility. They're going to see this as weird and eccentric. And who are we to say this? The clients didn't care. They didn't care because what do clients want? If I have an issue, I need to know it's going to be taken care of. So if you have no communication agreement, what that means is, okay, I just sent you an email about this as soon as I thought about it. Yeah, just nebulous anxiety. Nebulous anxiety. They don't know when something is going to be addressed. So you better get back to me right away Because if you don't get back to me right away, I worry that you're going to forget this.

1:12:48And so I'm just going to keep bothering you about this until you get back to me. So then you think, oh, what the client wants is responsiveness. But if you give them an alternative, here's a shared document, write anything that comes up in here. And on our Thursday call, we're going to go boom, boom, boom. Like we're going to go through this whole thing. That solves the same problem for them. They're like, great. I can just write this here. And the win for the client is not you responding to an email right away. That's not what they really care about. The win is the anxiety of having to keep track of this has been relieved.

1:13:16And I don't really care how that happens. And I don't care if I have to write it on the little piece of paper to attach to a homing pigeon that I'm going to send out the window and it's going to make it to the roost that you, you know, that your intern check. I don't care. I don't have to worry about it. It's not about politeness so much. I mean, you don't want to be rude. It's not about managing and massaging the relationships. It's clarity. Okay, great. You can't do this or you can do this, but here's how we're going to talk about it. Okay, good. I trust this will get done now. I know what's coming next.

1:13:43I have a hundred other emails in my inbox. I've already moved on. So, you know, I think clarity, clarity, clarity is the key. Once you start actually managing your workloads much more explicitly. Any other keys for you personally, in terms of whether it's like preemptively stemming the tide by having public rules or blog posts or auto response or something like that, that basically says, these are the things I can't and can do or will or won't do. Do you have any other systems in place or anything like that that lessens the burden of it maybe the answer is you just don't get a lot of this because people are already very well aware that sort of your existence and positioning in the world is the deep work guy so they just don't send you a ton of stuff i don't know i mean i'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people have switched to a social media paradigm for communication oh i'm going to dm you on whatever the fact that i'm not oh yeah yeah like i don't know i don't how to reach people forgot about email i also have i do have though you know i call them communication channels very specific there is no here is the general way to talk to cal newport i have very specific channels for specific reasons with clear expectations i used to call these sender filters and i still really depend on these today like if you have this type of request you can send it here you want to send me a link or something you can send it here but you're not going to get a reply, but I probably will see it.

1:15:04If this is an interview request, you know, I'm aiming you at a publicist. If this is a speaking request, I'm aiming you at a speaker. Here's a big warning about using my academic address. If you send a non-academic thing here, it will not be read. So you're not outsmarting anyone. And then I add on top of that, and this is controversial, but I think it's common. I add on top of that, a second layer of filter, which is default to not answering. And if I don't know a person and they come in with a request because I have these filters set up, right? That's pretty clear. Like this is not just a general purpose address.

1:15:36That's my final filter. And you've made this explicit. It's explicit. Yeah. How do you phrase that? You're like, if I don't know you, it's very low likelihood that I will reply, which is fine. I'm just wondering how you convey it. The particular channels have this, right? So it'll be send this here, this here, this here, this there, and it'll be clear. I'm not going to respond probably, but I probably will see it. And I have other people, this is not even going to me. It's when people circumvent that they get to my personal address or they go to my Georgetown, they go to my professor address. My default becomes not to respond, which, you know, it's a little bit controversial, but actually it's not a bad filter.

1:16:12I learned that from professors at MIT when I was there. That was sort of how the grand professors at MIT managed their inbox was if I don't respond, that means you need to try again, right? Like whatever you sent here, it was their way of saying, no, try again. You need to be more clear or have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with. And so that's my final wall is getting past that. And that took me a while to, I felt comfortable doing this. So my final wall is like, if I don't know how to respond to this easily, I'm probably just not going to respond to it. And that sort of works a lot of things out as well.

1:16:43There's just not this expectation. This is not a conversation in person to not answer this email. It's not the same as you coming up to me and me just pretending like you're not there. It's a different sort of asymmetric medium. So you can feel more comfortable about just not answering. What do you think in this book? I ask this question a lot because there's usually something that pops up, which is, what do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over? For instance, for the four-hour workweek, it's the filling the void chapter. People are like, oh, yeah, it must be a nice problem to have.

1:17:12You got to worry about how you fill your time. I'm like, actually, no, it's a very, very, very, very important thing. Because if you are a work machine and you're always in sixth gear and then you remove work, your life doesn't just get auto-populated with awesome stuff that makes you fulfilled. You kind of have to plan for it. And people gloss over that, right? Because they're like, ah, I'll worry about that later. And then they end up in these existential crises. So is there anything in this book could be anything? Like a philosophical kind of foundational piece could be strategic or tactical where you're like, hmm, based on people I've talked to, based on proofreaders, based on whatever, I'm like, If I could draw attention to something, I think people might gloss over or not give its full weight of importance.

1:17:55Would anything come to mind? I think people don't realize the degree to which they don't actually have a sensical definition of productivity. There's a part in the book where I survey 700 of my readers, and one of the questions I ask them is just define productivity. No one has an answer. What most people did was just describe their job. productivity is producing good software. Like they just sort of list what it is their job is supposed to be. So I think people, they think they know what productivity is and that it's just a matter of your relationship to that. Like, well, productivity, I don't like it.

1:18:32And so I want to do less of it. But the reality is no one really knows what it means. I think people don't realize how chaotic and haphazard and impromptu the way they're organizing their work is how chaotic it really is. Right. I don't think people realize that. What we really did, and by we, I mean like the whole knowledge sector, is in the 1950s, when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large companies, with a large number of people working in offices, there wasn't a clear idea, how do we measure how someone is productive? Because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and agriculture, and they didn't apply.

1:19:07Like in manufacturing, you could tabulate the labor hours per Model T produced, and in agriculture, you could count bushels produced per acre of land. You had numbers. And so you could say, oh, the assembly line increases this number. So let's do that instead. Or this Norfolk crop rotation method increases like the bushels. So let's do that instead. Knowledge work couldn't have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse and the organizational systems were autonomous. It's just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself. There was no organizational wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see, what if we change this?

1:19:42Is it better? So what happened was we invented this idea called pseudo productivity, which was we will use activity that's visible as a proxy for useful effort. So it's just, hey, you're doing something that's good. Doing more things is better than less. That's where the sort of notion of sort of busyness is good. And how are you? I'm busy. And then what happened is my contention is once we got mobile computing and the internet and we got networks and email and I could work on my laptop, you can't combine that with pseudo productivity because if more activity is better than less and you have endless work you can do in any place you just spiral into just constant working guilt and that's what that's where the burnout crisis you're done you're done right like we it kind of worked you're you're going to incinerate on re-entry yeah you're done like pseudo productivity worked for don draper it's like yeah okay visible activity is better but you can only see me when i'm in the office and let's all agree that we can have three martinis at lunch and so it's like okay fine whatever.

1:20:38Put the magazine down when someone comes by your office. It doesn't work with an iPhone. It doesn't work when you have a MacBook and you could be doing Slack. So, I mean, this is the thing I think people miss is they think they know what productivity means. They have a lot of opinions about it. And my argument actually is you don't have a sensical definition. We just have this like activity is somehow good, which is clearly not, especially for non-entry level knowledge work. Busyness doesn't produce high value. And so I think people too often think of something like slow productivity as I'm willing to trade off economic output for psychological sustainability.

1:21:16I'm willing to trade off making more money for feeling better about myself. And that's not what it is. It's not what you're doing now is crazy. You're building model T's with the lights off. It's a terrible way to work. It's like, no, let's get a real definition of productivity that is very sustainable, but also is going to produce good stuff. And so I think people think they're stepping away from something that works, but it's hard. Just gets it done, but it's hard on me. The thing that we're doing now doesn't work. It's not a sensical way of connecting human brains to add value to information.

1:21:49It's not a good way of working. So like almost any alternative that's intentional is going to be better than what we have. So we might as well choose one that's also sustainable and makes us feel good. But I think people get that wrong a lot. What's your definition for yourself of productivity? let's go back to the book you mentioned born standing up which as you know is influential for me i mean i wrote a book called so good it is so good it is so good yeah it's a great book but i loved what martin said in that which was basically you take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at and that's interesting to you and then you really put on your blinders for a decade get really good at something that's important everything else will work itself out.

1:22:32Like his exact quote was be so good. They can't ignore you. If you do that, everything else has a way of working out. That's really been my thing. I mean, the decision I made in college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't recruit anymore was here's the two things I'm going to do. I'm going to do computer science. I'm going to write. And like, that's all I did. Like that was it. Let me do computer science. Let me write. I don't want to do Instagram. I don't want to do Twitter. Let me just do that. I just want to get good at this and let me read people who are really good. I want to get better and better at this.

1:23:02That's where all of my energy was. Like, let me just try to do these two things as well as I can. And that's the way I think about productivity now is how good is the best thing I've produced recently? That's it. I want to be better at things that are hard and meaningful. And that's it. I don't want to be famous. And I don't want to be busy. You mean an internally driven evaluation of quality. Yeah. By good. Just not to be nitpicky, right? Good is not, as we already know, based on your description of not using social media, but it's not likes, it's not this, not that. How much of it is how you feel about a piece versus, say, with The New Yorker, how well something does, the feedback you get from editors or other inputs?

1:23:42I think external is good if it's a trusted evaluation because you can't BS yourself. Unambiguous indication of value is really, I think, the right thing to chase because it keeps you honest. Like in computer science, when I last talked to you, I was working on a theoretical computer science paper and algorithms paper. And there's an idea in there I thought was really good. And I was like, I think there's something really interesting here. And we published it and won an award is best paper award, right? Like this was the best paper at this conference in the fall of 2022. That's important to me.

1:24:16It's hard. It's hard to write papers. It's hard to get them past accepted and it's hard to win an award. That's something to strive towards. And same thing with the New Yorker. It's like just really hard to write for them. It's really hard to get a piece accepted. It's really hard to get a piece out there that seems to be resonating with people. So I'm looking for that or even numbers. I mean, so I'm not against external numbers. I mean, seeing a book find an audience is important to me because I'm not a good marketer. So if that book finds an audience, all my books that have been super successful have taken years to get there.

1:24:48It's a mark that something in there is actually working. So having, let's call these high value external indicators versus serendipitous or low value external indicators. So I think virality on a YouTube video is a low value external indicator because there's a lot of serendipity in there. It's not a linear dose function on quality of input. So it's not the better the video you create just from a sheer quality than the more views it's going to get. It could be whatever. you know like you have a very popular video about peeling a hard-boiled egg i was just gonna say my most popular youtube video it's like 8 million views or 10 million views is how to peel hard boiled eggs without peeling the whole egg yeah filmed in my kitchen on a shitty camera god knows when so if i had followed that as my indicator can you imagine what my whole youtube channel and life would be so much peeling like the you know the kitchen hacks martha stewart of youtube i mean And that's what I would have turned into.

1:25:45And by the way, if it makes you feel better, Mark Rober, who's a major YouTuber, 20, 30 million view videos. His number one video is how to peel a watermelon inside the whatever. So yeah, you guys, you could have been huge. People have problems with peeling things. People have problems with peeling things. But for you though, compare that. Just thinking about peeling a watermelon. Sounds like very high labor. Well, anyway. Somehow he does it without cutting through. I don't know. And now I'm going to go watch the stupid video. So there you go. But think about compare your 8 million views on the egg video to your first book hitting number one in the New York Times bestseller.

1:26:21I would say number one in the New York Times bestseller, that's more of a high-value external indicator. It's very hard to do. You've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience. You know, that's difficult to do. So I like the high-value external. This is controversial, but I learned this from Derek Sivers, who told me that money is a great, here's his quote, neutral indicator of value. People don't like to give away their money. So it means something if clients buy your product. It means something if people buy your book. It means nothing for me to click to watch your egg video because, I don't know, whatever.

1:26:53What am I going to lose? But to give$20 to get your book, I care about my$20. So I think high value external indicators of value aren't a bad thing. They're scary because people don't like the rejection and they don't like that it's very hard. But I think that's fine because it keeps you honest. It keeps you honest. What do you think Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive? I would think it'd be a positive indicator, but maybe I'm using a different scale than he is. So he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased. I think this is what he did at every stage of his career when he had the next thing he wanted to do.

1:27:31So he was working as a record executive, for example, and wanted to go full time with his band. He would wait till the next thing was making as much money as the current thing. And then that's when he would say, let me go do that. And so he waited till CD baby then was creating as much money as he was making as an artist before he went all in and just working on his startup. But he meant neutral because if you just ask people their opinion on your idea or ask them, Hey, do you think I should do this? They're not neutral. They like you and they want to be nice. So like, yeah, man, go for it. Yeah.

1:28:01You should definitely quit your job to do a band. Like, that would be awesome. Like, I wish I could do that. It's not useful feedback. It's not neutral. But as soon as you ask for their money, they become Switzerland. and they're like, all right, well, you know, we're going to stay out of this. I'm not a partisan here. Like, okay, hold on a second. Well, how good is your band? Wait a second. Are you that good? Yeah. So it's a different thing. It's a different thing. I'm really not qualified to evaluate such a thing, but Derek would stand out to me as someone who's unrushed, right? And I would say also, if this is helpful for folks, if you feel like you have to rush to compete in something, race in some way, chances are you don't have a great sustainable competitive advantage.

1:28:43I would say almost certainly you don't have any sustainable competitive advantage, in which case, if you telescope out and just ask yourself, what does this look like? What does my life look like in one year, three years, five years? It's going to break. Something's going to break. It's just a question of when it breaks. So you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that or look at other ways to kind of augment your ability to not rush. I think Derek is very, very good at this. Who are some other contemporaries? I know that, and maybe we'll talk about it, but Jane Austen would be another example, historically speaking.

1:29:18Who are some contemporaries within the last 20 years who stand out? 10 years, just because the technological landscape, I think about this a lot. Like how many Newtons, how many Da Vinci's, how many very curious are just making tiktok videos right now and they're never actually going to make something that is fulfilling their full potential i would have to imagine it's vast swaths of the population so let's just say the last five to ten years or current day people who stand out to you well i think where you see this most often today is in the arts so like i'm a movie buff you see this with the great directors.

1:29:54You know, it's, I got to get the right project. It takes a long time to get the project together. You spend a long time on that project till it's right. And then you do it right. I mean, if you look at Tarantino, you look at Greta Gerwig, you look at Chris Nolan, they take their time. And also they're not filling in the gap. Let me be on YouTube. Let me be on Twitter. Let me have a really sort of active presence out there. They take their time. Novelists are very good at this, especially literary novelists, because their books need to be really good. That's their whole selling proposition. So they take their time.

1:30:26An example, a specific example I like is John Grisham. I did this comparison. I uncovered this old interview of Michael Crichton once. It was an interview of Michael Crichton when he was 27 years old. And so I wrote this essay about compare Michael Crichton to John Grisham. You're going to see two different approaches to roughly the same job, which is writing popular genre fiction. Crichton was all about busy. So you read this essay. This was after the Adronima strain had come out and it's all ambitions for things he wants to. I want to direct. I want to do movies. I have five books in development.

1:31:00I'm writing screenplays. I just moved out to LA. Like it's this huge plan. John Grisham, on the other hand, like as soon as the firm did well, it was the second book. His first book was a flop, a time to kill when it first came out. But he said, I'm going to write two. And if one of the two works and I'll keep doing this, the firm blew up, did really well. And as soon as he had some autonomy, he simplified, simplified, simplified. to the point where at some point more recently, this would have been in the 2000s. He had this longtime sort of assistant who worked for him. When she retired, he was like, I don't have to hire anyone else because no one bothers me.

1:31:35Like my agent and my editor know how to contact me. I don't do anything. I write my book once a year. That's it. Like I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my town and he was the commissioner of the Little League. He had a lot of stuff he did unrelated to work. He just slowed down. He's like, I just want to write. that's all I do I don't need to have tv shows and I don't need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made into things and I don't need to create a six-part series and direct my whatever and get in the television he's like I'm just gonna I'm getting paid a lot of money I'm gonna write that's what I want to do I want to simplify so Grisham has always stood out to me and I know a couple people who know him and they underscore this that he's like I write I do one book a year and you're not going to hear from me until it's done and then you get me for like four weeks and I'll do like some publicity, but people know who I am.

1:32:23Do the dog and funny show. I'll do it for four weeks, right? And then leave me alone. I'm going to go do other things. So he's a great example. So it's two different types of ambition. The Crichton ambition is now that I have all these opportunities, I want to do every single one I can. I've been starving for years and now I'm at the buffet and I'm going to fill my plate. And Grisham had the complete other mindset. Now that I'm successful, I have the leverage to do nothing. No, no, no, no, no. oh, I just wanted to do this one thing. Isn't that great? So he's definitely slow productivity. Maybe that's your next book, The Leverage to Do Nothing.

1:32:57It's actually a pretty good title. Thinking of Grisham as someone who decided from the outset to use a rowing example, is it sculling? One person, single person rowing? So he's out there on the Charles, just thinking about his next book, rowing by himself. And then there are a lot of other people out there and I've been in this position before, so I'm not throwing too many stones in my glass house, but you're like, how did my life get so fucking complicated? And you're like, shit, instead of sculling, I built Noah's Ark. I've got two of every goddamn animal in here and I have to unload this fucker.

1:33:34Like if I want to simplify, I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat. And I want to jump into some ways to simplify. So if you are able to maintain that from the outset, God bless you, you're a miracle worker. I wish I could do what you do. maybe I can, but I often slip. I backslide and then I'm just like, oh, okay, now I have to unload Noah's Ark again. One of the points in the notes here that I have is work to reduce collaboration overhead. We talked about overhead, right? Talking about work instead of doing it by replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversations. So this, I think, will strike a lot of folks as counterintuitive.

1:34:09Could you expand on this, please? Well, asynchrony is a problem. So asynchrony meaning not real-time. So email, for example, I send you a message, you read it when you're ready to read it, then you reply. So it's not real time. Asynchrony has advantages because there's an overhead to having to arrange real time conversation. You and I have to agree somehow. This is when we're going to get on the phone together. The problem with asynchrony is that if you use it for drawn out conversations, there's going to be seven back and forth messages for us to decide on something. this now requires me to constantly monitor whatever channel we're using here because if we're going to get through seven back and forth messages today because we're trying to decide on something i have to see most of those messages let's say within 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving because we have to knock this ball back and forth enough times 15 minutes per knock you know we're already a couple hours into it so now i have to be checking these inboxes all the time but if i'm checking these inboxes all the time.

1:35:07I'm seeing lots of other stuff as well. Now I'm in a state to borrow a term from Linda Stone of partial continuous attention, which drains my energy. I can't think well, I'm exhausted and I can't produce anything deep. I can't do any really good work. So asynchrony is one of these things that looks good on paper, but as soon as you start doing back and forth planning or conversations of any type with asynchrony, it destroys everything. It is one of the most potent productivity poisons. And the thing about it is that we think it's actually making us more efficient because, oh, look, I can just press send and I don't have to go on a phone.

1:35:39So instead having regular times to talk real time, it can actually be much more efficient. The key is not to have a separate meeting for everything you might need to discuss because now you have a separate problem, which is your schedule is crowded. So I think the answer to all of this is just office hours. Like this is it every day, this hour to 90 minutes, my phone is on. I have a Slack channel. My door is open. And you just punt everything to office hours. Yeah, good question. Grab me at the next office hours you can. Yeah, we should get into that. Grab me at the next office hours you can. Oh yeah, a bunch of requests are coming in for interviews, you know, for my book coming out.

1:36:15Great. Next office hours you can. Come and we'll go through them all. So you consolidate synchrony into a regular period. So you're not wasting a lot of time arranging the synchrony. I think that's a sweet spot for collaboration. So to get into the nitty gritty of that, you mentioned Slack. I'm curious from a flow perspective what that looks like. So if you're communicating with your team via Slack and they're like, what about this? And you're like, grab me at the next office hours. Do you then have like a Calendly or some automated tool where it's like, hey, every Friday, I'm curious what this looks like for you if you use it or how you've seen other people implement this just from a flow perspective.

1:36:50Friday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., I am available in 30 minute slots or whatever. And then here's a Calendly link, if I'm getting the service name correct, where you can book a time and we're not doing it via email. Because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling. I fucking hate it with such a passion. How about Tuesday at two? No, that doesn't work. What about Thursday at three? How about Monday at this? It's one of my least favorite things in the world. So from a flow perspective, what does that look like? And have Have you found any particular day or way of clustering office hours to work well for you or for other people?

1:37:28Well, I mean, first of all, don't use Slack to coordinate with your team. That'd be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing. At any point, conversation could come in. I've suggested this a couple of times in the pages of the New Yorker to stop using Slack. Essentially, I come back to it. It's funny, actually, when Salesforce bought Slack, right after they bought Slack, I had an article that was titled Slack built the right tool for the wrong way to work. And it was sort of a critique of this sort of hyperactive hive mind and Salesforce unrelated. They didn't know about it.

1:38:03They invited me to come give like a high price lecture. And I was like, Hey, I'm honored, but I should point you towards this article I just published. And then they came back and in fairness, this was the marketing company that was organizing this conference for Salesforce. They came back and said like, well, yeah, you know, I think we're okay. I think, I don't think we need you. But to your question about office hours, actually, you want to lean more into academic style office hours, which are unscheduled. And so if it was a completely in-person situation like we used to be, then it would just be my doors open.

1:38:33That's how I run office hours with my discrete math students. You look, oh, someone's in your office. I wait till they're out, then I come in. But you can simulate this digitally using Zoom, for example, and just have a waiting room. So people come to your Zoom conference. They just know the Zoom link is open for this 90 minutes every afternoon at this set time. So they can just log in there. And if you're talking to someone else, they're just waiting in the waiting room until you bring them in. And I mentioned Slack. So I probably should have elaborated that. But what some people do is say, I have a Slack channel called Office Hours, but I only monitor it during my office hours.

1:39:07So you just know from like 3 to 4.30, then we can go back and forth and chat. That's what I'm here to do is just talk to people. So I will have that Slack channel, that office hour channel open from three to 430. And there, if we want to go back and forth on Slack, that's still real time, right? I mean, we're going back and forth in real time. It's not asynchronous. That's fine as well. But I'll never look at that channel outside the office hours. And then you can tack onto this another 30 minutes with 10 minute chunks and a calendar link where you can say to someone, either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one-on-one slots.

1:39:41Here's the link. I mean, I actually have an article out today, the day we're recording this called how to have a more productive year. And I talk about exactly this, having a open office hour plus an extra 30 minutes of one-on-ones and having a webpage that says, here's how we talk. Show up during these office hours and just rock and roll or grab one of these slots if you want a little bit more time and that you just throw that link at people like confetti at Mardi Gras. Link, link, link. Just toss it at people to try to squash these asynchronous back and forth. And the how to be more productive this year, that's in the New Yorker.

1:40:13Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it came out today. Yeah, it's a New Yorker piece where we just thought, it's not typical New Yorker fare, but my editor and I were just thinking, why don't we just write an article about how to be more productive? Now, okay, I couldn't resist because it was the New Yorker. It also has a meta commentary on productivity advice itself. And I go through every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, the dominant productivity book of that decade and how the advice changes from, there's some New Yorkery stuff in there, but there's also some like real hardcore advice. Did you mention Ouroboros?

1:40:42Is there a snake eating its own tail in this piece? I should have. Yeah. Sneak one in. I should have done Ouroboros. Yes, that's always a good one. You always have to mention, this is like if you write for an elite publication and you mention productivity, you always have to mention Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is like a pet peeve of mine is from the mind of people who are professional writers who critique productivity in their mind. Frederick Winslow Taylor is like the central figure of American capitalism and productivity basically means him there with a stopwatch looking at your movements.

1:41:17And he wasn't that influential of a person. It's such a pet peeve of mine. Scientific management, it was esoteric and kind of cult-like and it had a following, but it got completely pushed out of the way by Fordism and the idea of building smart production processes. Winslow Taylor was a weird guy. These time motion studies with these incentive-based pay scales was weird and he was weird and they determined that's not so important. What's important is an assembly line is a much better way to build a car than the other way. The systems matter a lot more. And also forget this weird incentive scale of I'll pay you 10 cents more if you're 10 cents faster shoveling whatever.

1:41:55Ford figured out, pay your workers a lot of money because the turnover is more expensive than trying to whatever. So anyways, it's a pet peeve of mine. Frederick Winslow Taylor does not yield an outsized influence on the way we think about productivity. Our issues with productivity do not come from Frederick Winslow Taylor. They actually come from Peter Drucker. And there's a whole other argument I could make here, but that's my pet peeve is like, you don't have to mention him every time you try to critique productivity. So rant aside. Yeah. And Peter Drucker, I got to say, man, it hit so many nails on the head.

1:42:28The effective executive still to this day, just such an incredible short book that punches above its weight class. So to scratch my own itch here, the New Yorker also has this typographical convention that has always been kind of confusing to me and seems a little highfalutin. Tell me if I'm getting this right. It always stands out. It jumps out like a wart on someone's face every time I see it. They put an umlaut over, maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated, like coordinate, and they'll put an umlaut over the second O or something like that. Why do they do that? That's not in the Chicago book of style.

1:43:06Like what's going on there? Right. Or is that just a New Yorker thing? Well, I mean, that's true. So they do, yeah, umlauts on second vowel. So like re-engage, you would have an umlaut. And then also focus, they do British. So double S because I write a lot about focus. So you double S focus and focusing. That's there. And then email, the convention for email is, I forgot exactly what it was, but the way they write about emails, it's tradition. It's an old magazine. It's been around for a long time. And so there was a style guide invented early on when a lot of this was more up for grabs. And I think it's just, it's tradition.

1:43:39Like let's hold on to the style guide to whatever. There might be a deeper story to it, but that's what I've always understood. Yeah. Why not? I mean, tradition's fun. And they format it the same way. So a lot of that's tradition. I mean, their whole thing, which I love about it is they're not chasing trends. I really love that publication. Anyone who reads it, the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just to try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for. And their whole theory is make your place really, really writer friendly and writers will write cool things.

1:44:10And I think that's cool. And they have a subscription base, so they don't have to chase web traffic. They don't have to worry so much about ads. They have a million people who pay a hundred dollars a year for the magazine and you've got this great foundation. Like, okay, so we can just write. It's not big. Yeah. Anyway, it's not to go on a New Yorker rant, but. Well, let me play devil's advocate on that because it seems like when the New York Times went from predominantly ads to predominantly subscriber revenue. They ended up producing more news coverage to please their base of subscribers, and it became a much more exaggerated kind of left-leaning caricature of itself in a way that is not helpful for contending with polarized tribalism and so on, in my opinion.

1:44:54So you feel like that is not, I mean, fundamentally they're different outlets. I mean, they're very different, but are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media dynamics at play for the New Yorker? Because I've seen these formerly when I would consider highly credible publications. Hold on. My phone is always off, but I have to pull this up because this example is so nuts. My friend sent me this screenshot because he said, here we go, the economist stepping up their copy game. And the screenshot he sent me is the sort of superscript is the swines. And then it says, feral super pigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairies.

1:45:37They're well adapted to the cold with thick fur, long legs, and tusks as sharp as steak knives. And it has this photo of these pigs running over a hill. And I'm like, this is The Economist, man. What the fuck is happening? And I love The Economist. No offense to The Economist. Love The Economist. But I was like, oh man, everybody's getting pulled down into the mud here in the quest for traffic and attention. That's a bit of a ramble, but how does the New Yorker resist the temptation slash incentives slash risks of the modern online world as we know it? Well, I mean, you're pointing out a real effect.

1:46:15It's a trade-off. If we're going to talk about trade-offs, it's a trade-off of facts. And I think the times really did have to face this trade-off. when you move to their subscriber model, what they gain is they don't actually have to do the attention chasing, right? So this is one thing about the Times is they don't need the super feral pig example. They do not have a model based on chasing attention, right? Where other publications I think had an issue when the web grew, where they began just really pushing volume and trying to find social media virality. The New York Times saved themselves from that so they could actually focus on what they wanted to write.

1:46:52They did not have to chase. So that was a positive. But the audience capture effect, I think, is also real. When you don't have to, and this is now a standard, I think, accepted critique in the world of journalism, when you have to service big advertisers, you sort of stay pretty neutral on things because the consumers of those products are all over the place. So you're like, okay, we want Procter & Gamble to buy a lot of ads in 1995 New York Times. So we're going to be really good, but like down the middle. You're absolutely right that when you go to subscriber base, that subscriber base was way more progressive left-leaning than the public writ large.

1:47:26And then you get the audience capture effect. Now, I think there was other dynamics that happened as well where you had the rise of certain ideological frameworks coming out of the colleges and young staffers coming to the New York Times. But it was the subscription model gave them the cover to we can change even our definition of news, especially post-Trump. I think it really changed towards our goal here is to promote the right. That's the best way I could describe what happened there is that when they know there's something that is clearly right, pushing the thing that is right is like a noble thing to do, even more important than certain journalistic standards.

1:47:58The New Yorker avoids that because they're not a news magazine. I think that's the main thing. That's not their model. So they've been a subscription model from the beginning. They still have a print magazine, though. They sell in the newsstands, right? I don't know how much of a consideration that is for a business model. It's a big part of their income. New Yorker subscribers get the magazine and the digital. I don't know the numbers, but they're way more combined than with the New York Times. I think it's, I subscribe to the New Yorker. I get the magazine and I get access to the online. That's a big part of what they do, but it's a magazine of ideas.

1:48:28It's a slow magazine. They don't, it's slow productivity in action. They don't want to be the first to talk about a news story. That's not their goal. And also you have to keep in mind, the New York Times is massive. It's massive. They have their own building. It's thousands of people. It's a huge company. I've been there. It's gigantic. New Yorker has a floor. So it's a different thing. So the New Yorker is not a news magazine. I think then they get the advantages of the subscription model without the disadvantages. The advantages being we don't have to chase attention or clicks or volume. And so we can just try to write whatever we find to be interesting.

1:48:59It's like DT Max has a piece in a recent issue where it's just profiling this lady who spent 500 days in a cave. Really interesting article. It's like really well constructed. She goes into the cave. She comes out. She's like, this was great. And then he's spending more time with her. and slowly it comes out that this was this horrific experience. It's like, great. It's awesome. It's a really interesting article. The New Yorker, I would say probably more, if I were to go back and look at the pie chart of magazine or outlet attribution, I'd say probably The New Yorker has the highest hit rate of inclusion in Five Bullet Friday, my newsletter, in terms of pieces I think are worth sharing.

1:49:40It's probably got the highest hit rate, at least in the US. Are there any magazines or outlets that you would just cut off a pinky Yakuza style to write for? Obviously, I'm exaggerating. Or would have loved to have written for that never got the chance to write for, like Parish Review or anything else? Is there anything sort of on your wish list outside of The New Yorker? Or have you already summited Everest and you're like, I'm good? I mean, that was my wish. My agent has reminded me of this, that early on in my career, I remember watching Jonah Lair at the time, who was my age, early on in his career, get some New Yorker slots.

1:50:13And this is how I said to my agent, like, what I want to do, this is what I want to do outside my books is write for the New Yorker. So like, that was my Everest. I've written for the other places as, you know, I've written for the New York Times and Wired and the Atlantic. They're great places to write and they have huge audiences. So like a New York Times piece, I always feel lucky when they publish something of mine because our audience is just huge. Like if you write something for them, people read it and people see it. And I have written for them. You know, that's also cool. Like I think one of the coolest jobs in journalism might be New York Times op-ed staff.

1:50:43So yeah, Krugman, Brooks and that because they they get a right about ideas, but it's big swing impact. And those things hit a lot of eyeballs. So like when Ezra Klein left Vox and took the op-ed spot at the New York Times, I was like, that doesn't confuse me at all. That's a really cool job because you can affect the national conversation on a regular basis. I don't know who else can offer that, that you can shape conversation on a regular basis. That'd be a cool job. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I mean, the New York Times also has some great stuff. It's that the discovery problem, to come back to that, is a little bit harder than, say, with the New Yorker, unsurprisingly, because you have such an immense volume of stuff.

1:51:26But the op-ed narrows that down quite a bit. You are right. in terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs. I suppose it's another advantage of the subscriber model, although you're hitting one subset of the political spectrum, so there is that. But all is fair in love and editorial. Well, Cal, we've talked about a lot, and people should check out the new book, You Walk the Walk, which is sort of the most, for me, critical litmus test of material, especially if there's any prescriptive aspect in sort of a productivity self-help way. And I could define productivity.

1:52:04I define it pretty similarly. The new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And people cannot find you on social. You're not. But there's the YouTube channel, Cal Newport Media, so people can find that. And there's the Deep Questions podcast and calnewport.com. Certainly people can find a lot there. I'm curious, maybe as we're beginning to wind this to a close, if there are any other heuristics or mental models or anything that makes slow productivity easier or more appealing for people to embrace. And I would, for instance, say that by and large, I succumb to the shiny objects occasionally, but by and large, I think I fall into the slow productivity camp.

1:52:44For instance, I mean, the book that I'm working on now, I mean, it started five years ago, notes and like wrote 72 ,000 words five years ago and tabled it and shelved it and then have been kind of workshopping things. One of the, to maybe start with sharing on my side, one of the things that helps me with this is thinking about choosing my projects, which is why I'm so interested in choosing projects, how people choose projects. I choose my projects generally on what skills and relationships they help me to develop that could transcend that project. So even if the project quote unquote fails by all external metrics.

1:53:19If I've developed or improved relationships, it could be pre-existing or new relationships, and developed skills that will apply to other things, having a long time frame is a huge, huge, huge advantage. It's kind of the ultimate. In a world of attention compression, having a long time horizon is an unbelievable advantage in so many ways. But thinking about my projects and how they snowball in that cumulative way gives me the peace of mind and confidence to take those longer time horizons, if that makes any sense. So I'm wondering if there's anything like that that could just be kind of philosophical one-liners or beliefs that you have that allow you to embrace this without the fear and the FOMO that I think a lot of folks would have.

1:54:08I agree, by the way, that I definitely see you as an example of the slow productivity mindset. I mean, I think, for example, your focus on the podcast. Okay, this is the main thing I'm going to do. I'm going to stop the book publication cycle. I'm not going to seek out a lot of TV opportunities or whatever. I think that's a good example, which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out to be titled To Peel an Egg. A hundred and one hacks in your kitchen that'll amaze your friends or whatever. To you on the cover. A hundred and one kitchen tricks for any occasion. Fully illustrated.

1:54:43As it stands, no egg peeling in the new book. The heuristic, I don't know. Here's the heuristic maybe that ties a lot of this together is that at least for professional stuff, in the end it's craft. Craft is what matters. Respecting craft, developing craft, applying craft, finding meaning in craft. Just keep watching on repeat Jiro Dreams of Sushi, right? Just go back and watch that like once a month because the more you think about craft is where I get fulfillment. Craft is where I impact the world. Craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life. It can provide for the people I care about and, you know, give interesting opportunities in my life.

1:55:19It all comes back down to craft. You slow down, your timeframes become much longer. Psychologically, you get so much resilience. Maybe you couple that, if I'm going to add a second heuristic, is ignore the internet. It's a crazy making machine. It's just a crazy making machine. It's like, don't require random people on social media to be a regular part of your life. Don't require like metrics you have to look at on a day-to-day basis of being important. I could just feel it. Like we do my podcast. We put the episodes on YouTube because I think, you know, as we talked about before, video will be the future, not YouTube, but we should practice.

1:55:58And I have a YouTube guy and I say, you can do whatever you want to like the thumbnails and the titles. I don't know. You understand YouTube, but I don't want to know about how it's doing. I don't want to feel any impact from that algorithm. them. I want to do my podcast show where there is no cybernetic loop, pushing back and changing what you're doing beyond these super large scales over the last six months. If we average out downloads, I think we're trending upwards, right? So maybe you put those two things together. Craft is everything. You can build a psychologically resilient, sustainable, successful professional life on craft and ignore the internet.

1:56:31Do those two things. You're going to be really happy, especially if you're talented and have like a particular talent or ambition, that's where you should aim it. Don't let an attention algorithm suck all that skill out of you and basically monetize all that potential into AdSense views that can help Google investors or whatever. Craft, focus on craft and get fulfillment out of craft even beyond results. And then just be incredibly wary about the internet. Maybe I'll stay away from them. I'll stay away from that. Like that's the two things. Do those two things. It's night or day. Like what your life is like is night or day.

1:57:03Yeah. It makes me think of, I can't remember the attribution. I mean, there are many versions of this, but would you rather fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not? Those types of quotes I think about quite a bit. Because possibly, if we take this vanity metric, and look, it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on YouTube videos as an example. But let's say you looked at your numbers and you were trending down over six months. Does that mean you stop? Or does that mean that you are culling the herd and over time refining to the point where you're actually getting to your 1 ,000 or 10 ,000 true fans and you went from basically doing speeches at state fairs and now you're standing on the TED stage?

1:57:50Is that bad? You know what I mean? I'm saying maybe there's a win embedded in what you're perceiving as a failure, even if it's trending in the wrong direction, right? Because otherwise, man, the stuff, oh, here, let me show you one. Let me see if I can find it. I'll show you another one and I'll describe what this is just because this is the YouTube equivalent of the economist feral super big. Oh, it gets so much worse on YouTube. It gets so bad, but I was texting with my team, one on YouTube, and I was like, oh my God, this is what happens to everyone on YouTube. If they stay on long enough and they get trained by the incentives, this is what happens to everybody.

1:58:29So I don't know if you can see this. There's a woman wearing very little clothes. Is that a robot? What is that? This is a, this is like a big, huge, muscular dude in a toga slash sarong type thing walking away. It's a woman on the other side. He's saying bye. She's got question marks over her head. She's in a thong pointing away from the camera, holding her ass cheeks, like pulling them apart. And then the headline is Stoicism, 10 Lessons Men Learned Too Late in Life, in parentheses, Might Hurt Your Feelings. And I'm not saying, look, I'll give these guys credit. This is because the thumbnail got me.

1:59:04Stoic Wisdom Wonders, 1.9 million views, put up one month ago. But I was like, oh man, you're going to get trained by the algorithm. Like if you're not careful, and even if you are careful, if you're paying attention to quote unquote the right things, everything converges into a chick with a thong spreading her ass cheeks in a thumbnail with what to do before the imminent financial collapse. Everything, doesn't matter if you're covering climate change, hoping to change the world with renewable energy, you're going to end up there. Noam Chomsky on the structure of manufacturer consent, and there's a woman in a bikini.

1:59:39Yeah, there you go. For me, and I got to give this guy's credit, they just got a bunch of free promotions, so good for them. And it got my attention. but I think the approach of treating these tools and new behaviors, it's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools, new technology as new drugs. Would you want to be the first? chimpanzee, you know, injected with this, or maybe you wait until you're the 100th chimpanzee. you can still be an early adopter but like let's see what the long-term effects are and if you feel like you got a rush you're in the wrong game you're just in the wrong game and you could win but like be very careful about what winning looks like when you do that telescoping out like okay if this just gets faster if things just change more frequently if the shifting sands of algorithm favoritism just start pouring from the sky and become much, much harder to track, require me to have now I don't have just a full-time thumbnail guy.

2:00:41I've got a full-time algo chaser and analytics person, and it becomes kind of money ball. Do you want to win that game? And what does it look like? And there are going to be people just like, for instance, going to school, a lot of iBanks, investment banks, and so on recruited there. And nine out of 10 people, probably 19 out of 20 would wash out. They would just get destroyed because they weren't built for that. And then one out of 20 was just perfectly built for it. Fantastic. And they would thrive in that environment. But I do think that when we're looking at some of these platforms where the numbers are probably even less favorable, it's like, okay, 99 out of 100 are going to wash out.

2:01:21And then one will just be the Michael Phelps of YouTube and awesome, good for them. But if everyone tries to do that, what a cataclysm. Not to make it sound too dark, but it's like there's so many opportunities for slow productivity hiding in plain sight. And there are counter examples. And if you want a sustainable competitive advantage and who doesn't, having a longer time horizon and being unrushed with most things is just about as big as I can think, at least at this point. Sorry, rant complete. I completely agree with your rant. The numbers on algorithmic attention, just look at real numbers.

2:01:59Let's use real numbers not to go, I'm going to extend your YouTube rant slightly. Let's look at real numbers. Please, Coda. What's like the take-home CPM essentially on YouTube is low. people are monetizing these videos to the tune of maybe like$5 per thousand views. Cost per thousand. Whereas for podcasting, it is significantly larger, right? It's at least five times larger than that per ad. And you can have up to four ads per episode. I mean, it's not even comparable. We're talking orders of magnitude. So just to be like concrete, you could have a YouTube channel where, you know, you have a million views a month or something like this.

2:02:38but a podcast that has 30 ,000 regular downloads a week, like you have an audience of 30 ,000. It's bigger than 1 ,000 true fans, but not that much bigger. I've done the math on that. And that is like a professor salary. You can make like a very good living off of that. And it's much more stable. But if you build up a 30 ,000 person audience, they're there for a reason. They're not going to leave fast either. That's something you could then do for years. Whereas YouTube is going to be way more fickle. And then the technology is going to go away. And there'll be another thing that's coming into town anyways, or the algorithm is going to change or you started as a channel on Noam Chomsky and then you end up like Mr.

2:03:13Beast, like Mr. Beast, who I respect what he's doing, but he's just the, he's the platonic expression of the algorithm. And he'll say this, he's broken down what matters. Like you have to have an outrageous but interesting visual thing that you're going to deliver. You need to show the person right up front. You're going to see this, this, and this. Here's some clips of it. And then you need it to move every 15 seconds. It's moving forward. They're beautifully edited things, but they're just pure it. It's just, we're going to drive expensive cars and just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. That's the distillation of the algorithm.

2:03:44And so, yeah, there should be some Mr. Beast out there doing that. But like for most other people build a successful podcast over five years, like a newsletter is another thing. This is another slow productivity example is. I was just going to say, if you think podcast CPMs are high, look at niche newsletters, like CIOs or hedge fund managers or whatever. Like, I mean, we're talking hundreds of dollars cpm right yeah and you don't have to be famous either i know so many people have done i have a good newsletter and it's or subscription base it's fantastic right if people are paying five dollars a month i mean okay that works out to an incredibly high cpm because you could show that same person a huge number of ads so it's just a different game the example i was going to give was the writer andrew sullivan who lives here in dc and you know he he was the editor of the new republic and wrote for new york magazine before he sort of got pushed out for you know political ideological reasons.

2:04:35He has a sub stack now and the way he talks about it, he's like, well, this is great. Like I have a pretty fair sized audience. I make a lot of money off of this. Like, why would I want to do anything else? This is great. I can write for this audience. It's a big audience. I make more money doing this than I ever made as a magazine writer and I can write what I want and I don't need to do anything else. And I don't need like a studio and there's nothing else I need to do, you know? So I agree. Anything where an algorithm is driving attention. Don't make that. I mean, you could, again, you could, but be wary of it.

2:05:05Also be wary is my other warning heuristic of checklist productivity. So if you learn from a YouTube course, all right, here's how you're going to make a lot of money on Twitter. What you need to do is these tweet threads where at the last tweet in the thread needs to say, Hey, if you enjoyed this thread, you should follow me because I do these threads every so often. So you can't all just follow these same checklists. That's not the way economies work. It's not just if I just do these 10 things, pick your niche, make sure on a regular basis, you have a thread, format your thread this way. And if you do this, it used to be like in our childhood, the Carlton Sheets infomercials, where he was like, look, do you remember those?

2:05:43Oh man, I haven't heard that name in ages. And his log is kind of the same as checklist productivity on Twitter. His logic was, well, think about it, put a classified ad for something you're drop shipping. And let's say you put a classified ad in one paper and you make$10 drop shipping. Well then put it in a hundred papers and you're going to make a thousand dollars completely leaving out the fact that by far the most common outcome is that zero people buy it. No matter how many papers you put it in because they don't want to buy a random piece of crap from a classified ad. That part was left out.

2:06:13You're like, well, let's think about it. If you make this much money here, then there's this many papers. You'll make this much money. This is crazy logic, but it reminds me a lot of where you see like, Like, oh, if I just do these videos and I do it right and have the right sign off and I write my titles carefully, it'll scale. It's like most people, nothing will happen. Algorithmic attention economies be very wary. Do the slow productivity attention economies. They're hard, but it's fantastic if you're able to establish yourself there. If your books work, your podcast works. It's way, way better.

2:06:43And I would also say these are not mutually exclusive, right? So if you want to play in the algo arena, go for it. Look, I have a YouTube channel and I would do this, that, and the other thing. And even podcasting is, let's be honest, on some level, like if Apple decides to kneecap everybody, which happens occasionally, it's like, oh, oops. I just read this article. It's actually very well done. I wish I had the proper attribution, but it was something called like the great shrinking podcast economy, something like that. And the incredible power of platforms to dictate your metrics is hard to overstate.

2:07:16But I would say if you want to play that game, some of it's fun. I get it. I like competing and I'm not going to be doing any dangerous competitive sports anytime soon. So I got to channel that somewhere. So, okay. I could like firewall 20 % of my attention for dicking around with that. That's fine. Or 50, like whatever. But like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find something where you can cultivate this slow productivity. So maybe it's a slow carve out at first, but if you don't have that, it's like driving on a race course in a sports car where the race course changes constantly, right?

2:07:56Like curve seven is no longer curve seven used to be a straightaway narrow. Now it's a hairpin curve and you don't have an airbag or any type of seatbelt on or eight point harness. Yeah. Like you're going to crash eventually. So like you need some type of safety net and long time horizon and slow productivity, for me at least, has been my safety net for 20 years. I have no reason to think that that should change. And the more frenetic things get, the faster things change. We didn't even get to AI, but the more the avalanche of information continues to grow in volume, the more all of these things will be an advantage that I'm discussing.

2:08:37So check out the book, folks, Slow Productivity. Cal, anything else you'd like to mention? Any TikTok videos you'd like to point people to? My peeling video channel, which there's now going to be a thousand of, by the way. Peeling squash. So thanks for introducing that. Cal Newport peeling squash. Yeah, you've introduced that notion now. No, this has been great. Yeah, slow productivity. It connects everything together. Do something really well. Get meaning out of it. And then, yeah, talk about it. Different platforms, have fun, play on it. But you're right. There's a difference between, I like to take my car to the track because it's fun and my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team.

2:09:13It's a different dynamic that's going on out there. So slow is just better. I think people are ready for it too. I mean, I think this is just where we are is we want something different. The first wave of different we were offered was just stop trying things. Work is bad. Stop trying. Don't do anything. That doesn't stick because, well i i still like to do things and also i need to you know feed my family so i think now we're getting the second generation of thinking about this which is do it better like figure out like how do you really want to work what makes sense and and so hopefully this works but i appreciate talking about i put an excerpt by the way i'm not on social media but at calmeuport.com slash slow we put an excerpt up so like if you're like uh maybe you can actually like read the whole introduction of the book there's a lot of you'll appreciate it tim because there's a lot of john McPhee.

2:10:00I opened the book on John McPhee and I know as a, as someone who took his course at Princeton, which I'm jealous of, you'll appreciate the McPhee. It's rich McPhee content in that free excerpt. Oh, I can't wait. Okay. So I will read that. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Yeah. I learned more from McPhee in one semester about writing than I have in all of my reading and practice and classes outside of that one seminar. I wish I could go back and take it again. frankly. You never know. Who knows? I went back. I actually have all my notes and all of my assignments from that class to this day.

2:10:32Like marked up? I have the marked up notes. And I go back and sometimes I look at my writing and I'm like, I think I'm the worst writer now. I think I'm a better teacher, but my actual pros, I think, could use some more weight training. So I'll get back into it. The glue of high quality. And I should also say that slow productivity, yes, slow is an aspect, but in my mind, and tell me if you disagree with this, certainly, but it's really about proactive productivity instead of reactive productivity. And that's a way, like selective productivity, selective and proactive productivity, which happens to usually correspond to more sustainable long-term thinking.

2:11:17or intentional, intentional productivity, have an actual consistent, coherent philosophy for how I'm going to do my work. That's more sophisticated than just I'll be busy because at least if I'm busy, I'm not going to self-recriminate. Like if I'm busy, at least I know I'm trying. Like that's people's default. Be more intentional. And not everyone, like if you're an investment banker, like you talked about, or you're trying to become a law partner, a very intentional, coherent, reasonable productivity plan involves working all the damn time because that's like specifically what works in that world.

2:11:48But for most people, when they're intentional, they realize 80 % of what I'm doing is just trying to generate smoke from friction, but there's no fire. Like it's just, I'm trying to be busy because I don't know what else to do. Like slowness becomes almost always inevitable. Once you actually start to be intentional about what am I really doing here? Like what really works? What matters? What does it? Yeah. And if people really pause to think about many of the figures they might respect most for what they've accomplished in investing or business. The Warren Buffetts, Jeff Bezos certainly. Go back and read the first 10 shareholder letters for Amazon, and you will see kind of how well-planned and prescient in some respects, seems obvious in hindsight, but so does everything, Bezos was in planning and how methodical and patient.

2:12:40The blend of being kind of relentless and patient is an interesting one. Holy shit. I mean, it's rare to find. Relentlessly focused and also very patient with criticism and skepticism and so on. Remarkable. So slow productivity is actually kind of hidden all around us if we pause to look at the people we most respect. Almost all of them are going to fall in there somewhere. It's all I do as a writer, basically, is come up with two-word terms for things that widely exist and everyone already knows about. Right. So deep work already exists. I just put a name to it. Digital minimalism. It's like, yeah, I'm just putting a name to a philosophy.

2:13:21That's my whole secret is like, and I've said this before to people about pragmatic nonfiction writing. The goal is not to try to teach someone something completely new they didn't know about. The goal is just to try to help people articulate something they already know deep in their gut is true. They just don't have a framework or terminology for it. Like that's what really has an impact. It's like, yeah, I know slow productivity is better. I shouldn't have a name for it or a framework. You know, don't try to convince people of new things, explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action.

2:13:52I think that's the secret to nonfiction, prescriptive nonfiction writing is you're not really teaching people something new. It's just a, how do I leverage something? My gut tells me is true. I just don't have my fingers around it all the way. Six minute abs. If anybody gets the reference, it might be a seven minute abs. That's a hitchhiker and something about Mary. So Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment without burnout. People can check it out. And we'll link to, of course, Cal Newport and all the other links in the show notes, tim.blog.com slash podcast. We'll put everything in there that we've spoken about.

2:14:25Thanks so much for taking the time, Cal. Nice to see you. Yeah, thanks, Tim. I appreciate it. Yeah. And for everybody listening or watching, check out the show notes. And until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary, maybe a little slower than is necessary. Take your time. the good things will wait because it's uncrowded. They're really important things. Those domains are typically very, very uncrowded. So be a little bit kinder to others and to yourself. Take things a little bit more slowly. Until next time, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.

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