Transcript for Ep. 302: Re-Enchanting Work

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Question. The show about cultivating a deep life at a distracted world. So I'm here on my Deep Work HQ back in the good old United States of America. Join this always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I enjoyed London. I just got back, but it is good to be back to our own studio again. Yeah, it's good to have you back. I'll say, here's something that happened actually. It's kind of interesting. So I was staying, and this sentence has the most British words per sentence. The highest density of British words that you're ever going to hear in one sentence. I was staying in a hotel behind Victoria in bank meant not far from the royal horse cars and Trafalgar Square. There's many British words just like I put in the one sentence. Anyway, so towards the end of the trip, sort of interesting I noticed the hotel right across on the small back street the hotel right across the entrance right across from us there was like a crowd there's crowds and like some security set up so we asked what was going on and they said oh it's Chris him's worth a stain there because he was in town for the premiere of the new George Miller Mad Max movie a hymnsworth being the actor who plays a strong actor who plays famously Thor and you do his workouts. Yeah, so of course, and I use his workouts, right? So now I'm thinking, I think you could agree with this. I'm like, oh shoot. Like, now is going to be a whole thing because I'm the same height as Chris. We have a similar physique, I would say, similar chiseled superhero feature. So now everyone's going to be trying to get my autograph and thinking I'm Chris hymnsworth. You know, I don't know how I got lucky. No one actually bothered me, but I was just like I'm just going to be mistaken for him all the time. This is going to be a big problem.

I waited outside the hotel for nine hours. Yeah. Chris, Chris, Thor, Thor. Read my book. Read my book. I do your workouts. But that was cool. I'll tell you more tactically than what I did speaking of a callback to a recent episode. I brought a single purpose notebook with me. So I'm working, I was working on some ideas for the new book I'm working on. And I said, great, I'm bringing a single purpose notebook. So a field notes notebook dedicated to just working on this one topic. We had an episode about that one a couple months ago. Yeah. You know, I did that on this trip and it was great. It really just focused, this is what I'm thinking about, focus my thoughts. I'd one place to keep writing on it, then have to lug something digital with me. Just wherever I was going, I could bring that notebook with me and just copied those notes over. This morning, I got some good stuff in it. So it's a good case study in single use notebook game.

Maybe. Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to use the term principles. I mean, where I'm landing right now with this deep life book and things are still early is, you know, I'm really leaning into the fact that it is technical. But like we have a lot of books about what goes into like a more focused or intentional life like you should care about this you should care about that there's the value of community there's the value of this but we don't talk a lot about how do you actually implement changes in your life. What are the nuts and bolts of saying I want my life to be more intentional and focused? Sort of separate from the what you're trying to do is the question of how you're going to do it. And so I've been experimenting with because that's really the tone we have on the show about this right? I'm not I'm not telling people Here's what you need to be doing in your life or to be considered deep. I'm people who kind of have a sense of that, but don't know how to get to it. There's nuts and bolts to that. There's lifestyle centric planning. There's multi-scale planning. There's getting organized. There's evidence-based planning working backers from the lifestyle. There's all these ideas we talk about. So I've been experimenting with that in my more recent outlines. is really focusing on a technical guide, like the nuts and bolts of how you actually implement the focus scene, that's not really a word, but how you actually implement a more intentional life that sort of the mechanics of the transformation, not just the inspiration to transform or the goal of the transformation. So we'll see. So right now I am thinking about like, not like a one off book, but like, here's the guide. You know, we talked about this along the show. I want to have it in the book form. So the people can point towards it. So we'll see. I have some other things I'm working on, too, that I'm more technology related since that sort of my day job is thinking about technology. So I've sort of a lot of book ideas sort of floating at the moment. But there we go. Look and say what's going on. All right. You know, as we got a good show, I want to get to it without too much delay. Good deep dive. It's going to get into issues with some cool pictures. So if you're listening, there's a lot of pictures of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, something like seven different pictures to show you. So if you're listening, you want to see it. This is episode 302. Just go to thedplife.com slash listening to episode 302. Once the video goes live, we attach it right to that page. So if you hear me talk about things, that's where it's going to be. Good questions. I think we're doing multiple calls today in the question period. We've got a case study and then a a really interesting British themed final segment I'm reacting to a new segment about a famous British institution. No, not the royalty. We're talking about Manchester United who didn't get the memo about slow productivity. So we're going to get into that. That should be fun as well. All right, Jesse, let's do a deep dive. So we talk a lot here about the mechanics of how to organize and execute your work in a world that is full of digital distractions. Today, I want to change course a little bit and talk instead about where you do your work. We've made cognitive jobs grinding and exhausting almost like we're toiling in a mental factory. We come to our non-descript desks and open up our screen and just it goes until we can't take any more. But it doesn't have to be this way. By getting more radical about where you do the most important of your work, you can actually change the entire character of your professional life. That's what I want to talk about in this deep dive. I'll give you some examples of people who have done radical things with where they work. I'll show you some of the interesting places I work. I'll get into the theory about why that works and some ideas for how you can put these ideas in the play yourself. But where I want to start is actually from somewhere deeper in my past. I want to roll all the way back to 2008. This is when my newsletter, study hacks, was focused exclusively on students and in particular college and university life and how to be successful as a student. Way back then, I introduced a concept that's going to be relevant to our discussion today. I'm going to bring this up on the screen for people who are watching. This is an article from 2008 titled Adventure Studying. an unconventional new approach to exam preparation at the very top of this post I actually say exam advice week here study hacks is winding down so sad next week it's back to the normal mix I used to do interesting things on your Jesse yeah I forgot about this that the back of the day of blogs and newsletters it was like a TV channel you would have like different days would have different content you'd have theme weeks anyways I kind of missed that Alright, so I want to read a little bit from this article because we're going to connect these ideas to the world of work here in a second. Alright, I'm reading from my own 2008 article here. For many students, this thought reeks of heresy, the thought here is like working somewhere unusual. conventional wisdom says studying happens on campus, or if you're feeling particularly crazy, maybe in a Starbucks in your campus, and that's it. It's supposed to be a grind that takes place in the same old boring libraries surrounded by the same old boring people. And by the end with your eyes rimmed to red with exhaustion, your skin, salo, and whiten from fluorescent saturation, you can grand feebly and announce, I survive. Here's my question. Does it have to be like this? At Dartmouth, I frequently sought ways to challenge this conventional wisdom When I would see the hooded sweatshirted masses trudging towards the library at the beginning of the finals period, I would turn and run into the opposite direction. I was known to drive 20 minutes away from campus to study at a bookstore where no one knew or cared at my school had exams. I would sometimes tackle 30 take home exam questions while walking the banks of the Connecticut River. Anything to avoid the Cinderblocks study lounges that most students believed, the bafflingly that they were contractually bound to inhabit during this period. I call this tactic, adventure study. The basic idea is simple. Our minds crave novelty. If you work on exam preparation and paper writing and novel environments, it becomes easier to engage the material, be more creative, form standard comprehension. And overall, there I say it, perhaps even enjoy the process. So I have this idea of adventure study. Here's a photo. People sent in their examples of it. Here's a photo I want to load up on the screen here. See, that really nice waterfall Jesse, someone sent in back in 2008, like this is where they did their exam study and they would hike to this waterfall and sit by it to do their work. And it just sounds nice as compared to a study room. All right, so here's my idea today. Why can't we apply the same idea originally developed in the context of university life, the knowledge work? the stuff we do in our cognitive jobs. Why don't we go to inspiring and usually unusual places in our jobs to do the most demanding or interesting work that we have to tackle? Let's call this adventure working. And I think it's something that we should give more of a thought to. Now in my new book Slow Productivity, I do talk about this. In the principle and working at a natural place, I talk about environments conducive to brilliance, that if we look at people who build things with their mind historically, before our current moment of sort of email-driven knowledge work, they would often, we would see many examples of them leveraging really interesting and novel environments to do their most important work. I have a few pictures I want to show here, examples of this. So right here, this picture on the screen, this is the Isle of Sky. off the coat of Scotland. So if you're listening instead of watching, it looks like it's green mors with rocky cliffs. This picture was posted on Instagram by Neil Gaiman. So Neil Gaiman, of course, the writer, bought a house on the Isle Sky, just for inspiration. Here's what he wrote. Here's his caption for this picture of the Isle Sky. I spent some time over the last few weeks in my favorite place in the world, the Isolus guy. This is a photo I took of the, I'm going to say this wrong, quarrying, which is a lot like being in Ferry, the land of the sort of the British mythology, like the land of mythical, like Ferrys and elves, etc. Go to sky, but off season when the weather is bluster and the cues are gone and the restaurants will be happy to feed you. So he ended up buying a house here and part for the inspiration. Just for the inspiration of it. Okay, here's another picture. This is black water pond and Cape Cod. There's a picture of someone by the water. There's a picture of the water. Here's a nice pine, a pine needle drape the path by the pond. Mary Oliver wrote a famous poem about Blackwater pond because in general, the poet, the late poet Mary Oliver did her best writing walking in nature. I write about in detail about this in slow productivity, but wandering through nature is where she felt like she could get the inspiration to do her acclaimed nature themed writing. And this is a picture of one of these very specific places she walked and wrote a poem about it. It's so different than looking at a laptop screen. You know, at your kitchen table or home office, right one more. This is the Scottish novelist crime novelist Ian Rankin. Here he is on black aisle, which is not an island. We had a listener write in about this, but off the coast of Scotland as well, peninsula, not an island. But anyways, he ended up with some pictures of him, it's on the water. They bought a little cottage and he goes there to do his writing. And he just little cottage by the water and the Scottish Highlands here in this Quaint town. And you because he couldn't get inspired about his writing, right? So we see this in sort of famous or traditional knowledge workers that they do adventure working. They care about where it is that they actually do their work. Well, the rest of us can do this as well, especially those of us who have at least some days per week that we don't work at the office. Remote work is so much more common now. No one really knows exactly where you are. We've never had more capability to do adventure work do we have right now now for most of us this might not mean an island off of the coast of Scotland but think about the opportunities we do have hiking to a quiet place like that waterfall is showed earlier thinking about what's your you need to work on the memo you need to write them when you get to the quiet place you actually write your first draft of it museums You know, that's a big one. That original post on adventure studying at the top of the post I had a picture of a modern art museum in Boston where I went to the scenic room they had overlooking the Charles and I actually did some exam work there. Here in DC, I often go to the museums because they're free and you can find like an interesting eight tree and replace the sit to work surrounded by these cultural artifacts that really gets your creative juices going. It might cost admission to go to these museums great. for the cost of like your latte, you can now spend a few hours, you know, wandering and being inspired, working in a really unusual situation. Another idea I had back in that adventure studying period was, you know, pubs and bars. speaking of Britain, right? There's a big British tradition of you have your sort of pint of cask, pulled low alcoholic beer, you're the fireplace that you're reading the complicated thing. There's a reason why the famous British poets and thinkers and philosophers would sit and do that because it's conducive, you're having ideas, there's a conviviality of the room and it's different than just your office. Parks are fantastic as well. finding that scenic part of a park that you like to work. I used to do a ton of this, especially when my kids were young, we had a nanny at home with the kids. And the days I didn't want to go into the office at Georgetown, I didn't want to be at home either because I didn't want the kids to see me. It was too confusing. So I would often go and spend hours, various parks in the Montgomery County, Maryland, these various parks. I would just wander all seasons and sit and write down and write out my ideas. And I felt like I got a lot done back in those days. I actually have a few pictures here of some places I've been doing adventure working in my past. These are all of my newsletter, accountnewport.com. All right, so here's a picture here. It's from a 2015 article titled The Power of the Outdoor Office. This is me with the key components. All right, a coffee. I have a composition notebook. I was working on a math proof and I'm by a stream. Now, it hiked to the stream. I know exactly by the way where this is, this is on Slego Creek, you know, for those who were wondering between Piny Branch and Wayne Avenue, I think. Here's another picture. Here's me working on a math proof, sitting on a rock by a trail. I love this stuff. I got so much of the academic papers, the math proofs I published in the 2010s, you know, came from working outside. Here's another picture. This is a picnic table under some trees. That's actually on the Georgetown campus near the trails. There's these trails that run from the river across as reservoir roads. It's called the Glover Archibald Park. Over by reservoir road, there was a table that was shaded and I would wander over there and do some work just because it was different. As on campus, I wanted to be out of my one to be out of just my regular office. There's examples of this, right? So we can do adventure work. without having to have an unusually adventurous local that we have to travel great distances to go there. So how do we make adventure work actually work? A couple of tactics. One, you want to have a clear singular objective of what you're trying to accomplish in the section. To wander someplace beautiful and then just answer emails on your phones or it defeats the purpose. But also you don't want to just take it as I'm just going for a walk to clear my head. That's fine, but that's not adventure work. Adventure work you're like I'm working on this proof and working on this memo. I'm trying to figure out this business strategy. What's not working? What should we do instead? I'm trying to figure out how we change the objectives for the upcoming quarter. I'm stuck on this programming challenge. How do I more efficiently get this part of the program to work? Whatever it is, you have a clear objective that you're working on. Have a way of ending your session with an artifact of this cognition. Do not just keep it in your head. You want to be writing down in a notebook or dictating even into an audio notes app on your phone or you can bring a laptop with you. You need to capture your thinking as part of this. You're thinking? and you're capturing. You want to come away with an artifact of your cognition. You also want an iterative process here. I used to like the move through the scenic location and think, then sit down somewhere and write, then move through the scenic location and think some more, then sit down again and write a particular like trails at parks that have benches, because you can kind of walk to the next bench and sit down and take your notes on what you just thought about, get up and move to the next one. This is a fantastic exercise and extracting cogent thoughts from your brain. You're going to do much better with this and if you just sit still in an office. If possible, do your adventure work as the final thing in your day. Get the small stuff done, clean your inbox. Maybe even do a shutdown routine before you do the adventure work. So you don't have the small hanging over your head. You know, sometimes I've vivid memories of this, of where I was waiting for some sort of information that was timely. So I would have to check my email throughout an adventure work session on my phone, and it really would really degrade the quality of those sessions. Interestingly, around the time, one of those pictures was taken as when I was waiting to hear back on tenure, whether or not I got tenure. And I was just, I just wanted to check because it comes like a letter in your email. And I remember that period thinking, man, the quality of my work is going down because my mind can't just stay focused on my single clear objective. I keep seeing all these other emails and it would take me out of it. So you want to really not have other things on your mind if possible while doing adventure work. All right, so why does this work other than it just looks cool? And you can take cool pictures. There's a few things that goes on when you work in interesting locations. One, the lack of familiar cues helps your focus. You aren't seeing cues that you're used to that have associations with other distracting thoughts unrelated to what it is that you're actually trying to work on. When you're in the woods, it's much more easy to stay focused on just this one problem. When you're in your home office, or your office at work, many other unrelated things are going to more easily intrude. Location novelty can spark more creative insights. When you're in a location that's visually novel, you're brain for whatever reason. I can't tell you the neuroscience here, but it's just true. It's more open to original or interesting thoughts. The breakthrough that alluded you when you sat there on the Zoom meeting in your office might come much more quickly when you're looking at the awe-inspiring waterfall. The work itself becomes more interesting. Just the process of working is more interesting because you're somewhere interesting. It's less draining and it's more sustainable, right? You can just, it's more enjoyable to be working someplace interesting on one thing than it is just to be in your same old office, so your work itself becomes less draining more sustainable. And finally, it gives you a nice separation. When you're thinking about work, it gives you a nice separation between what I'm doing to my office, that my big monitor, where I'm wrangling with emails and to do's and going back and forth to Google Docs versus, oh, when I'm in cool locations that I'm thinking deeply about big important things, relevant to the jobs, you've separated those two things. physically and psychologically. I think that's really important. The more that all the different aspects it goes and the modern knowledge work, jumbled together, the more modern knowledge works becomes the sort of jumbled mass of generic activity that itself is philosophically draining. I like this idea of having more of a clear separation between the different types of things you do. In general, I'm going to say, adventure studying is something that makes a lot of sense if like we are in the show and in my I am in my work, you are worried about the impact of the technological and the rest of your life. The way in which the technological, especially in the world of knowledge work, attempts to transmute you into an information processor and to a network router into something that's just bombarded by information that you rock it through your exhausted circuits and then generate bits to go out the other end, that dehumanizing push towards digital freneticism, this is a bulwark against that. It is giving primacy to analog cognition. in analog environments. It's sort of not anti-technology, but untechnological. And it is really important in an increasingly technological knowledge we're setting to have this defiantly untechnological engagement with ideas to resist becoming that sort of inbox-eyeboard. So it fits, right? I mean, the adventure work fits right into our central program here of understanding technology and the way it affects us and what we should do about it, a way to maintain and promote your humanity in a world of increasing digital dehumanization. So there's a sort of techno response core in there to adventure working as well. Now here's the thing, adventure study, I know this from experience, in the moment is scary because it feels like you're slowing down too much. This is slow. I'm driving 20 minutes to go to this park. I'm only working on this one thought and I only got a few notes out of the two hours I spent at the park. I could have spent that whole time. send in it and and reply to email messages. I could have had like three zoom calls and a bunch of slacks and we've got information around this is so slow my god how long can I get away with this but here's the thing. About adventure work and this is a core idea from my books low productivity so obviously read that book. Count new product on slash slow if you want to have like a more wider discussion of this if the key idea from that book. give this some time. And the slowness begins to reap rewards. It's worrisome in the moment, but over time you're saying, man, I'm really shipping. I mean, it would always feel slow to me when I would go off to a park and lose a half day to it. But if I did that for a semester, I would say, I wrote some killer papers that semester because the core ideas The high value cognitive output that was at the core of those peer review papers was generated over these sessions of going to this interesting place and giving the ideas that time required to actually unfold. So I'm telling you, it feels slow in the moment, but over time, you're going to wonder how you ever accomplished anything big without these more analog movements. So yeah, it's slow, but it's slow in a good way. This is sort of, this is the heart of the paradox of slow productivity. Sometimes you have to slow down to actually produce more of what actually matters. So there we go. I did some good adventure work, Jesse, when I was in London, my trip recently, when I had some downtime, there's no shortage of really cool places, the walk to the historical, you could really think interestingly. I spent some good time at St. James Park, turned out to be, that was like, I found that to be a really useful place for getting some thoughts out, spent some time sort of along the river there. got some really good thoughts done there as well. Victoria and Bankman, I was doing some reading there, but there was some sort of plant that, like, just pollen attacked my head. Really? It's all I had to leave there. I don't know what was, what was, uh, blooming there, but it was pretty bad. But anyways, I, this was on my mind because in that trip, there's a lot of novel, interesting, aesthetically interesting locations. And I really leverage that to try to shake loose some interesting thoughts.

Yeah, and if the reading is relevant to my work, and I kind of see it as similar things. Yeah. But anyways, we should do more of it. We make our work too boring. Why? I just want to make it more interesting.

Yeah, but I haven't been doing enough of it recently. So this is partially a pep talk to myself. I missed how frequently I was doing this, right? Because I used to do this all the time. And now, you know, I don't have a cool home office. I have the HQ. I have the coffee. Like, I don't find as much need to like, I have to go find a place to work. So I'm trying to reengineering and do more of this this summer. Um, re-engineer explicitly on my weekly plan. Okay. This half day go to this park, this half day. I want to go back to my, my, my haunts that there's a bunch of places. I like, all right, for people who are in this northern DC southern Montgomery County area. We in regional park, I did a lot of work. All up and down, Sligo Creek Park, which is right in your eye live, did a lot of interesting work. There's a federal wildlife refuge at Petoxet. So you have to go around the beltway. It's a bit of a hike, but not a crazy hike for me. It's a huge sort of federal wildlife refuge, like right on the beltway. It's really cool. You can really get lost in there and off season. It's completely empty. That's a place I like to do adventure work. And then the mall and DC various museums down there I would go and work in various places and wander the halls. I used to do all of that. So I want to do more of that again. I'm going to make a point of doing that. I'm not teaching this fall. So I think I'm going to work at regularly in my schedule at least one day a week where there's a four four hour expedition. And I can choose where I want to go, but it's got to be some or novel just to do this type of work because I think I'm happier when I do it. And when I fall out of the routine, I'm less happier. I also just think I produce better stuff. So that's what we should do. All right, so we got some good questions. We found a bunch of questions that were vaguely about maybe not specifically adventure works, and that's very specific, but rituals in general, like things rituals or habits people do. But before we get there, let's hear briefly from one of our sponsors. I want to talk in particular about our friends at Element LMNT. Now, I talk about the element drink mix. I've been talking about that for years. We have a whole box full of this in our kitchen. I use it every day. It's a no-sugar, no dodgy ingredient drink mix. It gives you all of that sort of salty electrolytes you need, especially after you've been exercising in the DC heat and sweating or like me having a long day of giving lectures and appearances where I lose a lot of Salt to get the hydrated. I always element in my ice waters what I do. But they have a new offering which I'm excited about. 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And if you're on the element insider or if you're an element insider, you will also get first access to element sparkling a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. So find out about the drink mix. Get your free sample pack. Perhaps if you're an insider, uh, get your early access to element sparkling all at drink element dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing, however you chaching. Shopify is what you should be using if you are trying to sell things regardless of the size or nature of your business. They have point of service tools. If you have a physical store, they have the best e-commerce tools on the internet in my opinion. And it works whether you've just launched your online shop or have your first real-life store or on the other side, you've just hit your millionth order of your massive concern. Shopify is what you need. 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Now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in, that Shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's get to our questions.

It's a good question, Tyler. That changes over time, especially as I get older. I mean, I would say the big change in the last couple of years versus the type of habits I talked about before is I exercise longer. and more frequently. I mean, I basically probably five or six days a week have a good 40 minute plus exercise session, weights, or heavy weights, exercise section. Just a lot more time than I used to spend just because I'm not the young spring chicken I used to be. So exercise almost every day for 40 plus minutes, I like to do this right before dinner as a sort of transition from work is done And then we're going to like make dinner and do that sort of and have the evening and this is like a nice transition between those two things. So that's why I tend to do it. I walk a lot because of adventure work is just part of my cognitive process. I walk the think. So I try to walk quite a bit and then I try to make any what I call automatic eating healthy. So I'm busy and scheduled during the day. I don't think a lot or care a lot about breakfast or lunch. I just need the food to get rolling. So I try to make that sort of just by default automatically healthy. that works as well. And I drink a lot of coffee, so it prevents me from eating too much during the day I suppose. I drink a ton of coffee. So that's where I am. I don't know. You spend more time than I do. And I'm not really right. What would you say? Like, your major thing right now is you're at the CrossFit box pretty frequently, right?

So your doctor said sleep can impact blood pressure.

Yeah, so you noticed it. Yeah. How interesting. Okay.

How long does and in CrossFit, how long on average is a workout of the day?

Okay. Yeah. That's serious. Yeah. Okay. I mean, basically, I feel like as we get older, we have to exercise more just to get the same benefits of like a little bit of exercise when we're younger. Yeah. It helps me. It really helps my energy.

Yeah. So basically, like more time than I would like. It's just been doing this stuff.

Well, alright, we're getting to the weeds a little bit here, Jamie. And one of the things I'm noticing is I work on my book on the deep life is that I'm trying to trim these weeds a little bit. Like I don't want to get too far into the weeds. I love, I want to be technical. Because again, we underappreciate the technical aspect of crafting a deep life. We focus too much on just the what is going to be in the life. We don't want to get too technical. So like what's going on here is there's two different things we've talked about before. There is daily disciplines and there's rituals. And they seem similar and they are, but they're not exactly the same. Daily disciplines, it was a very specific thing you would do to help transform yourself perception as someone who could take non-obligatory action towards things that are important to you. So it's something you do every day in each of the main areas of your life, something that's non-trivial, but still tractable. And that's more about just changing your identity. Right, if I have something to do every day for my health, if I have something to do every day for community, something to do every day for like my soul, something to do every day for my my moving my career and interesting direction, I tell myself, I'm someone who can shape my life. That's what daily disciplines were. Richables came up when we were talking about really making sure you had a foundation of values and they were, again, Disciplines and habits, but the goal of them in this case was to help reinforce like things you think are valuable, right? So my value system, ritual is something that would help underscore parts of that value system. If you're religious, it could be prayer, for example. These are just both examples of sort of disciplined behavior writ large. So I don't think we have to get too much in the weeds of these different types of discipline behaviors because if that's helpful it's helpful it might not be. But the bigger point here, and this is one of the big ideas that I'm developing for, I'm thinking about developing for the book, is a comfort with discipline and activity. is like a prerequisite if you're going to transform your life. And yet we often skip that. I mean, so much of what are thinking about how to take control of your life, whether we call it a deep life or not. So much of this thinking ignores all of the preparations that go into making you someone who is going to be able to actually take the reigns of life and direct it somewhere. We just jump right ahead to what it directed towards. We've seen these books, and they're important, but we've seen the same book a bunch of times. Community is important, your health is important, your work is important, your connection to this is in gratitude, it's like the stuff that's important that you do. But how do you become someone who can take these things that are important and actually inflate them in your life and take the obstacles to these things that are important and reduce those obstacles? Well, it's probably going to require quite a bit of discipline to action. Things you do, even though you don't want to, or don't, aren't obligated to do it, but you do it for a long term benefit. And so like in general, getting comfortable with this a plan to action, I think is a big part of preparing for, for cultivating your life. So daily disciplines, value rituals, all of these are all in that same general category of things you do to help rewire your sense of identity to be someone who is disciplined. And from that comes really cool deep things.

10 minutes is 10 minutes is not super long. Usually like 20 to 40 minutes would be more regular. But I have to say, Max, I don't think five books I don't think is a lot. Like, I don't have to do a lot special to read five books. I think if I wanted to read 10 books a month, I would need a lot of much more careful scheduling and ritual around it. Like, to really make sure I had a lot of time, I get the five books a month basically by making reading a default habit, something I'd like to do when I have free time, and it sure to get there. I started to get there, right? It's like, oh, I got some free time. I want to read. I think it was like a good thing. Like, oh, this thing got canceled tonight. We're going to have some free time. I'm going to go read for a little bit, right? It's something I don't have to force myself. Hey, make sure we put aside time for reading. I get excited when I find time for reading. I mean, the only regular reading time in my schedule that's, you know, I know for sure. This is when I'm always going to read is in bed. Everything else, it's sort of opportunistic. Ooh, I want to read. Like this morning, I was up a little early, because I'm still on London time, or I'm halfway transition. And there's this book on AI theory I'm reading. I just read a chapter of it. You know, because whatever, I had a little bit of free time. I was just talking to my wife earlier today. I was like, ooh, we kind of have some time free because my son's baseball practice got canceled. We should set outside and read a little bit tonight. He's going to be good weather for it. We like seeing outside. So that just adds up. The only thing I couple that with which really helps is a completionist attitude. So you cultivate this idea of I'm getting kind of close to finishing this book. You're like, oh, now I want to finish it. And you get really, I'm going to put aside time and pretty aggressively close out this book. So like what my reading life becomes like is a lot of just serendipitous reading here there. I'm working on a lot of books at a time. And then when I realize at some point like, oh, I'm kind of close to finishing this book, then I'll get aggressive for a day or two and like I really want to finish this and like put a few hours into it and push it. Those two things, those two mindset approaches together makes five books a month. I don't even think about it. Again, I think seven to ten months, 10 books a month, I'd have to start thinking about it. Five books is like right on that boundary of it doesn't matter much. So if you want to read more, probably the most important thing you can do is make reading more appealing to you. Choose stuff that you are really excited to read. What that is, we'll broaden over time. Doesn't matter at first. What matters at first is like, I'm excited about this book. This book is inspiring me. I like this type of genre book. This book is really fun. Don't care what it is, but make it something you're really excited to read and sort of wire yourself to think about reading as something that you're really looking forward to doing. All right. Um, let's keep rolling.

I have a, I don't know, a category of writing rituals, a collection of writing rituals and I sort of pick and choose from it. Some things that are pretty common is when I'm writing I like the right for the most part and there's one exception which I'll talk about in a second, but I like to try to write first thing. In particular, no email or other types of admin distractions before. That makes the writing go a lot better. I always always start my writing with a walk. That's how I get my mind going best. I like to think while I move about what I'm going to write. Usually this will just be through my neighborhood. I often will then break not always but we'll often break to seal on my writing in a novel location so like I'll go for a walk and then maybe get breakfast at the coffee shop and start my writing there just because it's a different location before I come back to let's say my my desk and my home office or here at the deep work HQ the exception to this is I sometimes add afternoon early evening writing sessions like if I'm trying to close out a New Yorker article or or finish a chapter of a book I just need that extra time The hard part for me is getting my energy and attention back into that riding mode of the afternoon or evening. So there I will almost always go to a different location. I'll either come here or real favorite of mine is like late afternoon, go to the coffee shop and you know, get a beer or something and sit there and work. It's different. It has to be different because I can't at 430 or 5. Just go back to my desk at home because I already done a lot of administrative work there. Other stuff's going on. It's hard for me to get it back. So I'll create special writing sessions and sometimes I'll do like Sunday morning special writing sessions early where I'll go get like the right cup of coffee, and I'll come over here. But changing up the location for those special sessions helps. It helps me. Oh, this will be fun. I'd like to go to the coffee shop. This will be interesting. And I get that motivation to get going again. When I travel, so we typically spend about a month each summer. sort of getting out of dodge, leaving DC going in the nature, usually going up the New England. And I used to do a lot of writing there. There I built my own habits. So like we're going up to Upstate New York this summer and the property we're renting has trails, 75 acres and it has its own trails and a little writing shack. So I'm going to invent a really cool riding ritual up there. That's going to involve hiking through these trails and then going to the riding shack. I'll probably do this all real early in the morning before my kids are up and rolling. So I write really cool rituals, create really cool rituals when I'm in unusual places as well. So it's not one ritual I do the same way, but I have a ton of rituals surrounding riding. Because it's not easy. Coaxing ideas from one's head. So I have a lot of things I surround it with.

Like different? Then it doesn't matter. If it's non-deep stuff, I don't care as much. Yeah. Just so I get the work done. Do a shutdown routine when I'm done. Yeah. So I don't ritualize. I ritualize the hard cognitive stuff, but not the other types of work.

Yeah, I tried to just work on one. I mean, sometimes I'll do the afternoon session if I have an unrelated thing. So if I'm writing like a newsletter essay, those are often happening after noon sessions because I'm using the morning session for academic paper, like a book chapter. And I can write a newsletter essay in an hour. So like, okay, a lot, that's a lot of the ways I get that done. I'm going to go over the coffee shop this afternoon to close out my day. And that's what I'm going to write my newsletter essay. Alright.

Yeah, let's get the music. Get ourselves in the slow productivity mindset. And before you read that question for people who don't know who are under the show, we have one question per episode that is related to my book's slow productivity. And we call it the slow productivity corner. It's our excuse to play that music. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity question of the week?

Well, Carmen, you refer to this as a slow productivity question. It's also really a deep life question as well. My main concern here is these these activities that you're discussing seem ungrounded, but you're talking about jobs abstractly. Like, I want a great job. This is a great company. Should I apply to this great company because they have a job listing? I don't want you thinking about jobs and the greatness of the job or the company so abstractly. And what you're thinking about your ideal lifestyle? Right? What is your, the day to day of your ideal lifestyle? What type of place do you live? What's the rhythm of your day? What's the nature of your work? Not the specifics, but the general nature of your work? How are you spending your time? What does it look like? What does it smell like? Who's around you? Like, what is that rhythm? When someone makes a TV show about your day, where is it set? And what are the recurring sets and scenes? You really want to build up this image of what a really meaningful lifestyle would look like for you. And then you can figure out the role of your work in this vision. So now when you're thinking about jobs, you're thinking not just, is this a great job or non-great job, is this a stellar company or non-esteller company? You're thinking, what are my obstacles and opportunities for getting closer to my ideal lifestyle? Right. And okay, now if you're doing this type of thinking, you might say, okay, I have this major obstacle to my ideal lifestyle. And my current job is a big, intractable source of this obstacle. But if I could get a job that had this feature instead of that, it's going to unlock these three or four things, which really helps me move much closer to what I'm looking for in my lifestyle. And now when I see a job that allows me to do those things, that's why I'm going after those jobs. That's how you should be thinking about this, not that company's better than this company, maybe I should change. Because your job alone is not going to make your life better or worse. But what's going to make the character of your life depends on the day to day realities of your life, your lifestyle, the day to day realities of your lifestyle. That's what you should be working directly towards. Okay, so then once you have that in mind, yeah, there's a slow process here. This is sort of a slowly productive process. You're building up skills to open up opportunities. When you know what you're looking for and you're building up your value, interesting opportunities have a way of arising, but it does take some patience. You can't force it. You can't say, you know, here's the problem with what I'm currently doing is really gives me these obstacles to what I'm looking for. Here's going crazy today, Jesse. For those who are listening instead of watching, here's falling to my eyes a lot. But instead of saying, instead of saying, right, so when you know what you're looking for and you're systematically trying to move towards this, opportunities arise. And it's not so random and abstract. Like, oh, this is a better company. It's like, oh, you know what when you see it, this is going to make such a difference. because it's going to get me out of this type of work and towards this type of work and the location here is going to be much better which allows us to make the plan of moving here and but doing this work but doing it on this schedule instead and we can afford and all these pieces come together right so when you're being systematic what I'm saying here is when you're working backers from your ideal lifestyle you know what you want you know what the obstacles are you know what your opportunities and you're working systematically to open up more options for moving towards it really cool bespoke opportunities will arise your life will become deeper and become better But it could be a process that requires patience. It's not something you can just force overnight. How can I transform my life tomorrow by changing my job in some dramatic way? So there is certainly a slow aspect to this. But it's an informed slowness. You need to know what you're slowly working towards. You need to know what you're looking for. You need to be slowly setting yourself up to have more and more opportunities. more swings so that you're much more likely to find an actual sort of connection at some point with that proverbial ball. So this kind of a mix here between slow productivity and the idea surrounding the deep life. Let's get them music one more time. All right. Well, you know, let's have some good. We do a lot of written questions, but we're trying to do more calls on the show. So Jesse, let's, let's listen to one of these calls that we have queueed up.

All right, good question, right? Okay, so so what he's referring to here in this question about working at a natural pace, that principle and the book's little productivity, one of the ideas under that principle was seasonality. So having variation of intensity over time, don't just work all out all day, all week long, all year long. So as he mentioned, to call or mention, teachers have some very natural seasonality in that summer is very different in the rest of the school year. And you really want to lean into that seasonality as a teacher. So it's a fantastic benefit of that type of job that more jobs should have something similar. So you really want to make the character of your life different in the summer versus the non-summer. But to answer the question, you can have variation in intensity at different timescales as well. So for example, you could have variation intensity at the scale of the week. Choose one week when you're thinking about how you distribute your work throughout the week as a teacher. Choose one day of that week to be much easier. So you kind of have a lighter day compared to some heavier days. Right? And it might be a day that you work longer another day to have another day that you can basically have, you can leave right after school in. Like Friday, I'm making really easy. But I work longer on like Thursday and Monday and the kind of catch up on things for like Friday is a much more relaxing. Like a teach when it's over. I like I go home and start my weekend early. So variations and intensity at that scale can make a difference. You can also have very, when it comes to work in actual pace as a teacher, Another thing you can think about is slowing down the pace at which you work on new ideas, like you have classroom pedagogical ideas, things you want to do, new units, you want to develop better assignments, you want to put together. All of that is great. You don't want to stop doing that work, but spread it out more. Alright, I'm just, this, this marking period I'm just working on. Here's my one thing when I have time I work on it. And now this is good. I improve this thing. Okay, this marking period I'm working on this other thing. Like you're slowing down. You're not running around frantically. I want to do all these things for all the kids. Make everything better and burn in yourself out. You slow down. One thing at a time. Take your time working on these things. That'll use your work become more sustainable. But when you look back after a few years, you say it's actually A lot of innovations have slowly built up in the classroom. The way I teach this, what I do here, the mentoring I've done over here, and it adds up over time to be potentially much more impactful than if you try to just do everything all at once, you burn yourself out after a year or two. So it's sort of like slowing down, trusting the aggregation of quality effort over time will lead to something really big. You don't have to do all that effort all at once. There's a real energy or pressure in teaching the hustle hustle hustle do more do more is for the kids don't you care two more do more do more but the long game here matters like i'm gonna do great stuff for these kids but got to do it at a natural pace busy periods less busy periods. I'm working on cool stuff, but reasonable amounts drawn out over time. I'm not volunteering for as much. If I'm taking on a non-curricular project for the school, then that's going to be my thing this marking period and put everything else on hold. Just making sure that the proverbial sort of engine heat meter on your work life gets out of the red. It doesn't go in the red or is rarely in the red. That's what's going to keep in this metaphor that engine running much longer. If it runs for a really long time, this metaphorical boat's going to cover a lot of distance. If you run it in the red, it goes really fast and then it hits the iceberg and sinks. He's super drawn out metaphor. So I think slow productivity in some sense, if you're a teacher, it's frustrating because so much of your life is structured, you have so little control. But on the other hand, there's a lot of room. Once you understand that benefits as slowness, you realize there's still a lot of room for me to inject some of these ideas, even into this highly structured job. And you have to. Otherwise, you're going to burn out and teaching so important. I think teaching plus slowness is a fantastic combination. All right, let's do another college. Let's do a two-call episode, which I'm excited about.

Great, that's good question, right? So for people who haven't read slow productivity, what he's talking about is, I recommend when you take the various things you've agreed to work on. Instead of just working on all of them concurrently, you instead divide this list. Between, here's the small number of things I'm actively working on and here's the things I'm waiting to work on. And you only actively work on the things that are in that active list. And as you finish one of these things, you pull something new into the active list from your big collection of things you're waiting on. Now talk about this on the show, but just as a quick reminder, the reason why this is effective is that things are actually working on generate administrative overhead, emails, meetings, et cetera. So the more things you're actively working on, the more administrative overhead you have in your life, which clogs your time and schedule and leaves less time and energy to actually make progress on the stuff you're working on. So if you restrict what is active, you limit administrative overhead. And you can actually make much better faster progress on these things. All right. So the question here is, what if you are stuck on one of these things that you're actively working on? What should you do? Well, a couple of things I want to say about this. First, make sure that the scale of these projects is tractable. Let's give up on a couple of interviews, actually, in my recent UK trip. So this is sort of fresh on my head here. You want them to be not too big, not too small. right. So like if I'm writing a book, I'm not going to have one of my active projects be right the book. Wait too big. Right. But I could have an actor project be right chapter four of the book. Like, okay, that's something I get my arms around in a relatively continuous application effort over a less than a month like it finished this thing. Like that might make more sense as an actor project. So you want the actor projects not to be too big. So you have less of these chances for just like long delays. All right, so that's important. Two, have more than one. I usually recommend like two or three things are actively working on. So if one thing is against stuck for a couple days, shouldn't be a problem. I have like a few things I'm working on. That thing I'm waiting to hear back on, but I have these other things I can work on as well. I don't think that's a problem. If you have a few things to have to wait a few days. If something gets long term stuck, like, okay, now I have to wait to hear back from this other department. in my massive organization and God knows this could be who knows how long until they find this is not a priority for them who knows how long till they hear back could be weeks right more than a couple days let's say as our threshold then it's fine to just swap out an act of thing and bring in something else Right, just move it off of your active list. You know, this is stuck. I'm waiting to hear back. I'm moving this off my active list on the waiting and I'm moving something else to take its place and that's completely fine as well. So when you keep this sort of dual mode list active and waiting, you have a very clear way of moving things between these statuses. So like, okay, I was actively working on this. Now I'm moving it back over the waiting. and pulled something else in and so now i'm not going to generate administrative overhead from this a people are bothering me about this thing i moved back to waiting i could say you know what i've had to temporarily put this back on my back burner because i'm waiting for approval from the department of mysteries and it could take a month and so i put on my back burner but once i once i get that You can, I'll bring it back to my active list and I'll let you know and then we can start working on it again. So you can just inform the people, the relevant people who are generating the admin overhead. Oh, this has gone back to my back burner, but I'll let you know once it becomes active. And in doing so, you prevent it from eating up a space for a month at a time. Right. So that's what I would say. So I'll just summarize. Keep the projects at a tractable size should be days or weeks, not months. have a few things going on at the same time delays on the scale of some two or three days fine give yourself some breathing room delays that are like a weaker grader consider formally putting that thing on the back burner move it to your waiting list and moving something else in the take it's place that's how it handle it but that general idea of the pull base work uh... what software developers do with their conmoner agile systems and what i'm suggesting is a much more simple version of that it is really critical to slow productivity I mean, it is the source, the major source of burnout and knowledge work is overload. Too many active things, considering too much concurrent administrative overhead, choking like productivity cuts you, any sort of like energy or will to do original creative work out of your daily professional life. If you can minimize concurrent administrative overhead, all these other things become possible. and making a differentiation between actively working on and waiting to work on. And only generating or accepting admin overhead for the act of, I mean, this is a silver bullet that's going to make a huge difference. So I'm glad we got a chance. That's in the principal do fewer things in slow productivity. If you read one chapter from the book, read that chapter. That's probably where you're going to get the the biggest major bang for your buck right away, benefit of almost anything else I talk about. All right, looks like we have a case study. All right, so a case study is where people send in an account of them applying the type of things we talk about this show in their own life. So we can see what this advice looks like in action. Today's case study comes from Matt, and it's about how he applies some of the ideas we talk about for organizing your life to his life as his family life, not just his professional life, but his family life, him and his wife. So we just to say here. Matt says, I appreciate the simplicity of needing only three tools, calendar, file storage, and inbox. My wife and I have been sharing calendars for years now, and I'm not sure how we would organize ourselves without it. All their family events, days we are working in the office, first working from home, et cetera, are marked. We started reviewing the first three weeks of events on a weekly basis to ensure we are aligned. This practice has become essential as our kids' schedules are dynamic. So I'll interject there. Matt is so right, if you have a family, you have to be using a shared calendar with your partner. You have to be. I mean, this is absolutely critical, because you have these complicated, you have a multiple, potentially multiple professional schedules, multiple child schedules, multiple sort of social schedules. You have to be able to see the whole ball of game on it once and review these together. My wife and I have, I don't know what it's called, so this is like a terrible ad, if you're this company, but we have like this frame, Like a digital picture frame in our kitchen that has loaded in it. It's like a tablet, our shared calendar. So we can just without having to load up a phone or a computer. It's just right there. Like in the kitchen while you're working on things, you see the shared calendar and you can scroll and see what's going on in the day and scroll ahead of what's going on. It's so central to how we run our lives and the lives of three elementary school kids. Our calendars are so central that we just have a permanent calendar device right there in our kitchen. Let me go back to Matt's case study here. He says, I appreciate how you suggested having both a digital and physical file storage solution. We do, but we try to minimize the amount of physical paper we keep in the house. We found Microsoft's one drive a great solution because it allows you to scan paper to PDFs. We could then shred the original unless a physical copy is required. Regarding an inbox, we have had good success using both the iOS reminders app for tracking tasks. Any shared Trello board for tracking projects, which he defines as outcomes to require two or more tasks to complete. Examples of projects are home renovation, vacation planning, et cetera. Per your recommendation, it sounds like we have an opportunity to improve our physical inbox. I also realized we can be more intentional about giving each other time away from the kids to accomplish non-work administrative tasks and inbox clearing around the house. All right, Matt, what I like about this is you're being intentional. You and your wife are being intentional. You know, an organized life is the prerequisite for an interesting deeper remarkable life. Like if you don't have control over what is actually happening in your life, you don't have a lot of control over what that life is going to be like, what direction it's going, how it unfolds. I really don't buy these critiques. that somehow say the push to become more organized in your life is somehow diminishing the spontaneity of life. That is an obsession with optimization, that it's like an internalist capital is narrative. It's like, no, I mean, what do you do in your life? You have a complicated stream of obligations that need to be executed. You could either control those or you can wander through them, have hazardly, and be surprised by them. If you control them, you can do a lot more cool stuff if you can't. The organized life is what unlocks the remarkable, interesting life. At least this is one of the ways to do that. Now, of course, you can go too far. And yes, you can become obsessed with optimization. We're playing with human instincts here. We like to sort of have control and plan and see our plan's executed. So you can get sort of addicted to organization. But the response that reality is not to be disorganized. It's just to be reasonably organized. I mean, I'm a big proponent of this that, you know, any book about the big deep life transforming your life, how to live the happy life, all these big books, they should have like a really big chapter on time management, like family time management. You know, but they don't because it's not sexy, but they should. So Matt, I appreciate just hearing what it sounds like when a family's been very intentional about trying to figure out how do we wrangle all this stuff so the stuff doesn't drown us. There's some good ideas there. All right, well, we got a cool case study coming up. But first, I want to talk about another one of our sponsors. In particular, I want to talk about listening. This is a service that we've talked about in some recent episodes, and I think it is really cool. All right, so here's the idea. Think about the various things that you need to read or consume in your life, like articles or books or PDFs or email newsletters, websites, et cetera. The things you read, that have important information and you need to hear a job or you just find it really interesting. where you said, you know what, it would be nice if I didn't have to sit down and look at a screen to consume all this information because I have all this other time when I'm doing dishes, when I'm commuting, when I'm doing yard work or doing my laundry, if all this other time, we're like maybe I listen to podcasts or audio books, where I could be using it to consume this information, these articles, these books, these PDFs, I want to be cool if that stuff that you read, you could also listen to. Well, that's where the listing app enters the scene. It allows you to take that content and transform it into audio content so that you can listen to it while you're cooking while you're walking or exercising. Whatever it is that you are doing. I've messed around with the listing app. You can use academic papers. It's like a cool one because I read a lot of papers as part of my work as a writer and thinker. So I like this idea that when I'm commuting to work, I can hear from it. I also like the email newsletter is a good use for this as well. You know, it's you subscribe to these newsletters because you love the ideas, but you don't ever feel like you have time to read them all because when you're in your email inbox, you have to answer a thousand emails to be able to grab a few throat to the listing app. And listen to it when you're, you know, going to grab lunch. I found that to be really useful as well. It has fantastic voices that uses, you know, we've had these breakthroughs in AI recently. So the voices are very life like we're talking like a motion intonation. So it sounds like they hired a narrator read this. is not your favorite academic article is read by Stephen Hawking. It's going to sound like you had a live reader doing this. The technical terms I have found that it pronounces those really well. The feature I really like in the listing app is the one-touch note-taking function. Oh, this is a place I want to mark this place because this was interesting. And I'm listening to it. Mark this place. I go back later and add a note about this. We can collect all the notes about what I'm listening to. So anyways, I think this is just a cool idea. We already love listening to podcasts like this. We like listening to audiobooks. Why not throw into the mix the other sort of really interesting information that we otherwise would just read? So your life got just got a lot easier. Normally, listing would offer a two week free trial. But as my listeners, you can get a month free of the listing app. Go to listing.com slash deep or use the code deep at checkout to get a whole month free to try the listing app. That's listing.com slash deep and use that code deep at checkout. Continuing the theme of listening to really good information, I also want to mention our longtime friends at Blinkest. The Blinkest app gives you summaries of over 6,500 best selling nonfiction books, each of these summaries, which you can read or listen to. Depending what you prefer, takes just 15 minutes to consume. The way that I use Blinkest, the way that Jesse uses Blinkest, is that as a Tree Out Service for Books. I want to think about reading this book. Let me just listen to the blinker. Read the blinker real quick. Get the main ideas. It's a fantastic way of telling. Oh, is this something I want to buy the full book for? Or is this not quite what I think? Or it is what I thought. But I got all the information I need from the blinker. I don't want to buy the whole book. It's a fantastic way. Throw books or interested into your blinkers queue and then read the blanks. Listen to the blanks. You can triage books. Other people use blanks that I know. They get the lay of the land quickly on a topic. Oh, I really care. I should know more about crypto or Gen AI. Great. Let me listen to the blinks of five books, one, two, three, four, five in a row. You have just picked up from those summaries, all of the keyboard, vocabulary and ideas you need to at least think about these things in a reasonable way. And then later on, when you select a more in-depth book to read, you really know the landscape. So I think of Blinkist as a critical tool for anyone who embraces the reading life. A life in which a lot of reading happens. Blinkist is a great assistant to have in navigating this particular life. They also have a cool new feature right now called Blinkis Connect in which when you subscribe and give another person unlimited access for free so it's basically a two for one deal so keep that in mind. Right now Blinkis has a particular special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkis.com slash deep To start your seven day free trial, you will get 40% off. That's almost half off. 40% off a Blinkist Premium Membership. That's Blinkist spelled BL-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com slash deep to get 40% off any seven day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. And remember, now for a limited time, you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one at polikis.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment. All right, so one of the things I like to do in the final segment is react to something interesting that I read about in the news. So in particular, I want to talk about an honor of my trip to England that I just got back from. I want to talk about a article from the Guardian about the football club Manchester United. All right. So I'm loading this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. So I guess Manchester United is owned by someone named Jim Ratcliffe. So Jim Ratcliffe just announced that the employees of Manchester United, the sort of the office, the front office, employees back office employees, need to work from the office. And in doing so, he cited email traffic statistics at his, as his motivation for making this claim. So let me read you a little bit from this article. United have had a flexible work from home policies since COVID, but Radcliffe sigilded an into this during his all-staff meeting held in person via video call last week as part of his tour of Old Trafford in the cart, the Carrington training base. He informed a club's approximately 1,000 employees that email traffic dropped by 20% when one of his companies experimented with work from home Fridays, which he cited as the reason for his dictate. Radcliffe believes having all staff on site will allow greater productivity and strength in unity and collaboration to emphasize his message. United's minority owner uses these methods at Ineos, told the meeting, if you don't like it, please seek alternative employment. Alright, there's some interesting things going on here. The first of all, let me be clear, I'm not of that camp that has emerged, that has somehow cited working from home as both the cure for everything that ale's knowledge work and a fundamental human right. I'm not one of these like, of course we need to be working from home and anyone who doesn't want their company working from home is essentially like an exploitative, you know, capitalist that just like hates people. I think a lot, and I'm just, you know, I wrote about this in the New Yorker, you know, I think a lot of this, like working from home is vital, is more of a reflection of a deeper unrest about the, the unsustainability and deranging exhaustion of pseudo-productivity that the pandemic pushed us over the edge about all of these things about knowledge, or that I talk about on my book's slow-productivity, that have become sort of unlivable We began to push back about this. We grabbed that anything we had and it's like working from home with something we could grab because when bosses said, let's come back to the office that felt like we were conceding something, we're just upset about work. We want to fix something. I don't think just seamless work from home is going to fix these big problems, right? So I am not a absolute about working from home. That being said, I think Jim Ratcliffe's response here gets things absolutely backwards. He said, look, at one of my companies, we did work from home Fridays and the email traffic went down by 20%. His takeaway from that is that working from home doesn't work. My takeaway from that statistic is the exact opposite. He should have said, wow, work from home Friday was a huge success because email traffic dropped by 20% when we did that. This equation of visible, performative activity with useful effort. What I call pseudo-productivity in my book Slow Productivity is the core engine driving much of the exhaustion and burnout in this current economic sector. This idea that emails being sent back and forth, that that's what work is. And if that goes down, work is going down is one of the most purified examples of the ananity of pseudo-productivity that I have recently uncovered. His company does not make money by sending a receiving emails. It makes money by producing whatever this is various companies actually produce that's valuable in the marketplace. The constant and receiving of emails actually probably slows the pace at which this is produced. Right in the Atlantic back in March when my book first came out I wrote an op-ed for the Atlantic. They got a little bit of traction and I actually suggested in that. Your days that you work from home, so like what Ratcliffe calls work from home Friday. If you have a hybrid schedule where some days people are at home and some days they're in the office, the days you work from home should have zero email and zero meetings. I call this hybrid attention. They said, this is the right way to take advantage of hybrid work schedules. Why not say when I'm at home on Fridays, don't touch your email inbox. Don't get on any sort of meetings. Just produce things. Now, if you're like, how do I know if my employees working? Well, that's a bigger problem you have, right? You need a better way of actually saying, what did you do for us in the last six months? And if people can't clearly answer that question, then your whole company is just a mess of sort of incestuous suit or productivity. And that's a big problem, right? But that's an easily solved problem. If you can just ask people, what do you do? What did you do? What do you produce? And you made this project. Did this project work? Where's your value? Right? Once you have that, you don't have to care anymore about, at this particular hour, on this particular day, are you actively at your keyboard? Who cares? produce stuff that matters. And once you care about people producing stuff that matters, you don't have to use the suitor productivity metrics to try to figure out who's useful and who's not. So your email traffic dropping by 20% on work from home Fridays is not only not a problem, but it's not going far enough. That number should be zero. 100% would be optimal. So again, working from home is a complicated thing. Just simply saying do your job, but do it from home and do in Zoom doesn't solve a lot of problems can make some things worse. But you cannot use email traffic. Email traffic is a measure of productivity. Means you don't have a sense of cold measure of productivity, which means you're probably getting a fraction of the possible actual useful effort that's latent in your employees. You're probably just extracting a fraction of what's possible there. If what you care about is just sort of just surface performative activity. So anyways, I had the exact opposite response to the statistic that scared Radcliffe. This is not the only example of this by the way. It happened back in the original experiments with remote work, 2011. I wrote a big New Yorker piece about this in May of 2020 about the history of remote work. you get may of uh... you get a two thousand eleven when we get but roughly two thousand eleven all the technology had finally come to place for remote work to make sense because we needed ubiquitous broadband internet at home we need a low cost video conferencing and we needed like the right infrastructure for for shared documents right we had all that in place by the end of the first decade of the two thousand Companies start really experimenting with this. Anyways, one of the big experiments was Yahoo, the Hermersa Myers or CEO. She said, I don't like this no more remote work. Everyone has to come back. What did she cite? log into the email server. They went down when people were at home and she associated that with people being less productive. So look, if you read my book's slow productivity, I have this whole, the first chapter of this book is like the rise of pseudo productivity and why it makes no sense and why it's making us miserable. But even if you don't read that, your instincts are probably telling you, yeah, there's something wrong here. Email traffic. This is how you measure whether I'm useful or not. We why not just have a chat GPT agent just sits there in your inbox and sends back and forth like yeah great idea thoughts what about this and and then we'd be the most productive copy of the world of course you would because who cares about the emails what you produce so I don't know if Manchester United needs to be working in person or not But the reason cited by Jim Radcliffe is to me is very clearly the wrong reason. And in fact, again, I push even farther. If you're going to have a hybrid schedule, make the days really different at home days or for thinking at work days or for talking, and I bet you'll see over the next few months, the needle really move on the stuff that you really care about being produced. So there you go. Man just united. It's a very British reference. They play soccer. I think of that out as much. Oh, that's how Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso. I've taught, yeah, interesting. You know, deep work, Ryan is more of this. Ryan holiday is more of this than I do, but there's been like a lot of interest in some of these ideas from professional sports teams here in the U.S., and I've talked to GMs from various sports or whatever. Maybe it's just lean more into that. Sports are fun.

That's the key. That's what this is all about. Folks is a good tickets. All right. Speaking of good tickets, that's all the time we have for today. That makes sense, Jesse. Speaking of good tickets, that's all the time we have for today. That would only make sense if I said, and I have to get to a game. Again. They're not going to a national game right now because they have a switch that says like on one side of the switch like let's play baseball and then below it it's like you know give up and someone accidentally knocked into that switch last week. So, I'm not really interested in watching them right now. That shouldn't stop Mike Rizzo from bringing me in the talk about D-Port. That's it. That's all right. Anyways, enough time, enough of this. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week as usual. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calmer.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.