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1 - Deep Questions with Cal Newport.mp3

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I'm Cal Newport and this is deep questions where I answer queries about work technology and the deep
life. Now these questions come from my mailing list. If you want to submit one of your own, you can
subscribe to this list at Cal. Newport.com. OK, let's get started. Time for work questions. Justin asks, how
do you manage being involved in multiple projects successfully while avoiding burnout? Well, Justin,
here's what I have observed. Burnout is caused by too many days in a row of high stress. In the work
context, stress is almost always created by not having enough time to get things done. It's deadline
driven, so you have a report that you promised by tomorrow and you don't have what you need to get it
done, or you have a book manuscript due on Monday and you still have 30,000 words to go. That's what
gets that stress reaction going. You get that stress reaction going enough. Your body's going to burn out.
So how do you do lots of things without burning out? You do them in a way that avoids. The stress
reaction. So that means you spread it out, you give yourself more than enough time. You don't do too
many things in parallel. Maybe you finish one project before doing the next. But you make steady
progress every day, work, work, work, work, work. I always used to tell the students I gave advice to
writing a paper is not stressful. Writing a paper when it's due in 12 hours is. So if you are working a lot,
but very rarely under time pressure or very rarely putting too much on your plate to actually get done
when it needs to get done, you're not going to be stressed out. So you just repeat that Formula Day
after day, week after week and lock it's. Done right. So I'm 37. I've published a lot of books. I've
published 6 books of the. 7th coming out. Alright, that seems like a lot book writing seems stressful, but
I've been doing it since I'm 20 years old. 17 years where I have very rarely gone for a stretch where I'm
not riding at least a little bit almost every day. That's 17 years of work with very little actual stress, and
yet it still adds up to a lot of results. Abby asks with constant distractions. A physician has to face during
a hectic day in the hospital. How would you suggest pursuing deep work now, Abby, I assume what you
mean here is producing peer reviewed academic papers outside of your clinical shifts. That seems to be
the most common deep work scenario. Here from doctors. The most basic answer is pretty
straightforward. You do it outside of your shifts and you do it on a regular schedule. You have your
research hours. It's in the morning. It's in the afternoons. If you are on 3, on three off or whatever your
shifts are, you take the off days. You make sure that you always have time. It's just the consistent
application of effort in a in a in a time period that you expect. It adds up to something deeper. I will say,
however, when I hear people talking about doctors and deep work, I like it because it's an opportunity
to do one of my favorite activities, which is going back and marveling at a young Michael Crichton. So so
my goal here is to make anyone out there who is a doctor somehow feel much worse about themselves
because I went deep diving. Into the press archives of articles that were published in the Boston area
about Michael Creighton around the time he was emerging as a force in fiction literature. All right, here
is one such article I'm quoting now. Michael Crighton spent four years at Harvard Medical School. And
what does he have to show for it? 7 novels, a movie, several more manuscripts and screenplays, and a
fast-paced, provocative book of nonfiction on the state of American Hospitals, which was published last
week. When that article came out, Michael Creighton was 27 years old. All right, let's see what else we
can find out about Michael Creighton. He sold the movie rights. He sold the movie rights for the
Andronis strain during February of his senior year at Harvard Medical School. I looked it up. Those rights
sold. I believe this was 1969 or 1970 for $500,000. That's about 3.3 million. If we adjust for inflation. So
that's a pretty successful side hustle for a medical student. What a lot of people don't realize about
Criton is that the andronis strain was not his first book. He had actually written five books before that
under a pseudonym. All throughout medical school to help pay his bills at Harvard Medical School, he
was writing pot boiler style. Techno thrillers I owned three of them. They republished them a few. Years
ago. They're OK. I mean, they're not great, but you can see criton polishing his craft using a pseudonym,
which he says he did because he did not want his professors at the medical school to get upset with him.
I have a sort of similar tale. When I was a graduate student at MIT, I didn't tell anybody that I was writing
books. My doctoral advisor found out that I was writing books because she saw one of them on the
table in the MIT bookstore. So are you writing? Books she did not get as mad as I feared, maybe
creightons professors would not have gotten mad as he feared, though with a $3.3 million. Movie right?
Advance a guest who cares? So he wrote five books with a pseudonym while in medical school. They got
better. How do we know they got better? The 5th book he wrote the final book under a pseudonym
before he wrote the androgynous strain, a case of need one Edgar Award for Best Mystery in 1969. So
by the time that astronomist training book came out during his senior year at Harvard Medical School,
he'd been honing that craft for a while. All right, so how did he? How did he do it? Right. I mean, this is
let's get back to Abby's question. We'll talk about deep work while a doctor. I mean, that's a lot to do
while in Med school. And in that first year internship. Here's another quote I found from a
contemporaneous article as a student, Criton took his typewriter during summers and Christmas
vacations. And into medical courses in which he had no interest, anyone who wanted to look at my
transcript, Mr. Creighton said with a boyish grin, could see when I was working on a book. All right. So I
guess he was in what I would call in the book Deep Work. The journalistic mode of deep work wherever
you get time to do it right, get that work done. Be obsessive about it. Be relentless about it. I've heard
apocryphal, perhaps tales of him riding on the shuttle bus in Cambridge that went between the various
Med school campuses there in the Boston area. I've also heard stories, perhaps apocryphal. During his
internship year 4th year Medical School of Writing in the The Room where you would go to sleep, you
know at the night shift when you're waiting to be. Called in. So this was a guy who worked a lot. Another
quote I found from the time he said that he writes when the fit hits me and then the article goes on to
say this is a New York Times article from June of 1970. It goes on to say, Michael, Mr. Creighton can
write 16 hours a day for a week or two, often turning out 10,000. Words a day, 1970. So this article
would correspond with the year after Criton left Harvard Medical School. He did one year as a postdoc
and left that fellowship because he was just having way too much success as a writer. All right, Abby, so
you have the boring answer and the exciting answer. The boring answer is find regular time outside of
your clinical shifts and allow the deep work to accrete. Build up day by day, week by week, so those
papers come out. The exciting answer is be like Michael Crichton and write 16 hours a day. Somehow
bring a typewriter. Into your classes. I'm not quite sure how that worked and make $3 million by the
time you graduate, right? So there we go. Two different ways of thinking about that challenge. Kylie
asked about adjusting to life with kids, so a little bit of background on this question. Kylie had a baby
about a year ago. She says that she is struggling with the adjustment and wondering quote how I will
ever get anything done ever again. But I think this is an important question because it has layers. Gets at
some pretty deep issues as we go deeper into these layers. Let's start at the surface here. When you
have kids, this is something I have some experience with. I have a whole mess load of kids and none of
them are particularly old. How does productivity work? How does professional productivity work when
you have kids? Well, something that I've seen true, proven true again and again is that there has to be
this strict separation. Psychologically speaking, there are work hours. Which are hours in which you are
not providing childcare. And then there are non work hours which are hours when you are providing
childcare. You basically have to write off those child care hours. Caring for kids is a full time job. If you go
into it thinking, hey, it's a baby, can't I still get some stuff done? While I have this baby, here doesn't
work. You have to think about there as the hours in which I am not responsible for the. Kids and hours
when I am and you have to be as a parent really. On your game in those hours in which you actually
have time to work, you just basically have to be a lot more organized and a lot more productive than,
let's say, your colleagues who don't have. Any kids at all or colleagues who have essentially a spouse
that handles everything so that you, you still have all your waking hours, essentially free, that sort of
older misogynistic model from generations past. You don't have that benefit anymore. So you have to
find a way to fit what needs to get done into the time that you're not doing childcare. It's very binary to
make it work, you really have to start caring about your productivity habits. There is, however, a deeper
layer here which I think is really interesting and worth discussing. I used to be confused. Why so many
people would ask me, Cal? How can I do deep work? I have kids. Right. And and this would be confusing
I think. Well, you know deep work is about what you do during your work hours that during your work
hours you should spend a probably a higher ratio of those hours doing deep versus shallow. I don't know
what having your kids outside of the work hours has to do with this, right, deep work. That book was
about what you do during your work hours. But what I've come to realize is that the reason that.
Question has become more relevant is because of the shifts in how we work. Right. We have entered in
this age of frictionless digital communication like e-mail and slack. We have we have, we have entered
this world in which we are so disrupted and our time is so fragmented that very little can actually get
done during work hours. I mean basically where human network routers we sit there answering
messages. In between meetings, and often during those meetings, just passing information back and
forth, talking about work, moving little tasks around. Where does the actual work have to get done?
While increasingly the only way to actually get anything deep done is outside of work hours? Where
there is no childcare. So if we actually had a sensical knowledge work system where we were organized
about work, we were structured about work, we we actually thought critically about, how do I get
what's the best way to get things done? What's the best way to assign tasks to review tasks? How do we
get away from this world of constant emailing? This issue of kids in deep work would be less
pronounced because it would be. There's times when I'm. Working and then there's times when I'm not
and when I'm not. I'm caring for kids while as when my younger colleague is not working, then maybe
they're playing video games. It wouldn't be as big of. A deal. But we've, we've. Squeezed work outside of
work hours and this is not a good situation. I just get so surprised that we don't take more seriously
these drastic changes we made to the very definition of work they have. All of these second order
effects when you when you transform your nine to five hours into this e-mail slack. Persistent constant
communication. You have to force people to work outside of the work offices. You get all these
unexpected inequities, you get suddenly that people that have to do childcare are now at a
disadvantage to people that don't. To what end? Right now you're just holding back potential talent for
no real reason. It's it's an unexpected or secondary side effects. So I think we have to take so much more
seriously. How we actually work in a knowledge work age, because what we're doing today is causing a
lot of these unexpected issues. OK, so there's the shallow answer to your question, which is. When you
work, you're probably going to have to be twice as organized, as productive as someone without kids.
That's the only way to make it work, because you can't get anything done when you're caring for kids.
The deeper answer here is the very fact that this is an issue tells us that we have bigger problems to
solve. Kicksey asks what's your chosen task management system. I had to change it this year so within
my department at Georgetown this year, I was the OR I am still the director of graduate studies. This is a
sort of administrative job. You help run the graduate. Ram, it gets passed around the various professors
we all. Take our turn. Helping to run the graduate program now this position has. With it, there's a full
time, non academic staff member called the graduate program manager that deals with a lot of the
administrative details of running the department forms and budgets etc. Well, he quit. So I at some
point this spring actually right around the time that we shut down in person learning due to the
coronavirus at Georgetown. I also had to learn and handle all of the administrative aspects of running
our entire graduate program. So what I actually did is my inbox was going to kill me. You cannot, cannot
run such a complex system with so many different types of demands, ongoing conversations, ambiguous
request information to. Learned this cannot execute as just messages in a single over filled non
differentiated general purpose inbox. I was never going to work so I ended up switching over to Trello.
Trello allows you to create. They're basically virtual task boards. You can have columns, and then you
can stack cards. Under the columns and, the cards can have tasks on them. Information on you can
attach files to them I created. A Trello board for each of my roles at Georgetown. So I had one for the
graduate director work. I had one for course and class related work. I had one for research related work
so work related to my research. The students and postdocs I supervised and so on. Everything that came
into my inbox that I had to do something about. I got out of my inbox onto a card onto the appropriate
Trello board. So these columns on each of these boards allowed me to actually structure this
information. So for example, I could have a column for waiting to hear back from. Everyone that I had
sent something to or I'm waiting to learn something from. I can have a card in a column under the
appropriate role so I won't forget that. Oh, I'm waiting to hear back from this Dean about this process.
It's not in my brain. It's not a David Allen style open loop eating away mental energy. I have a column for
OK here's things this week I have to act on. I have a column for backburner. I'm not quite ready to work
on these things, but let's put them here and we'll review them every week when I do my weekly review.
And so on. So so all of this work got out of my inbox, got assigned to a particular role, got assigned to a
particular column in that role. All of the information related to that builds up on the digital card, so
there's no searching around to get the various pieces. This structuring makes a big difference. It cannot
emphasize enough how hard is it is to do almost any non trivial role when all of the information about
that role exists in some combination of your head in one inbox. Incredibly stressful. These boards gave
me some structure to that informational landscape. It's still a hard job. I'm still not very good at it. But at
least it is not eating me alive in the way that I'm sure it would be. So I like that. I like that solution. I like
using task boards. I like putting tasks and information on cards under columns. On boards assigned to
roles. Chris ask how can I make my workflow less reactive? Chris, you have to time block. Right. You
have two choices for how. You run your day. You can run it off. A list and an inbox. Or you can make a
plan for your time and give every minute of your day a job and then do everything you can to actually try
to stick to that plan. The latter thing is called time boxing. It'll give you about 2X more productivity it. It's
very hard. You have to work very intense to hit your time blocks. You'll probably mess up your schedule
three or four times during the day and therefore have to build a new schedule for the time that.
Remains, but it puts you in control. You see all of your hours. You see all of your obligations, and you
come up with a plan that's going to get the most reasonable work done for what you actually have
available. It is just a better way of doing things. Then instead just reactively saying what just came in
what is on my list that I might want to do next. You are going to get a lot more done if you time block I
talked about. This in deep work talk about this on my blog. I actually have coming out this fall a planner.
The Cal Newport Time block planner. That makes it easy to actually implement these time block
schedules. I'm a huge believer of them. If you're not time blocking, you're not really working near your
full potential. All right, Caroline asks. I'm a 10 year track professor. How can I say no to colleagues,
students, etcetera and set boundaries so that I can focus on my research, which is critical to achieving
tenure? What do I say no to? And how do I do it while navigating team player BS expectations? Look, if
you're pre tenure and tenure track, the expectation is that you're going to get your research done and
get tenure. You probably are blowing up in your head the degree to which other people really are upset.
If you're not able to do something, here's a secret about other professors and administrators at colleges.
They're just overburdened and just trying to get stuff off their plate. They're not over sweating it. If you
say no. If you want a strategy to make that easier, use the quota strategy. Where you say? Well, look, I
have a quota. For how many committees I could do per semester? I have a quota for how many peer
reviews I could do a semester. I have these quotas I set up to make sure that I still have enough time left
to do the work I need to get tenure. And you know what? I've already hit my quota on that for this
semester, so I'm unable to say yes to this particular request. This method works really well because
man, it is hard to push back on that. It is very hard to say. I don't care about your quota. I would rather
you do this for me than actually get the work you need to do for 10 year. No one is going to say that it
works like a charm. You lose this ability once you get tenure. I can tell you that from the other side of
this. But that's a good way to do it. But Caroline really just say no. Say no more often people are not
over sweating. What Caroline did yesterday, they said. OK, she can't do it. Who else can I ask? They've
forgotten about it 4 minutes later. Protect your time more fiercely than you do. The feelings of others. It
is the right equation. Trust me. You they will get their revenge once you actually do get tenure. Final
work question, John. What's your next book? Well, haven't talked a lot publicly about this, but I do have
a book coming out next spring. We are editing the manuscript and looking at covers right now as we
speak. I'll probably make a big announcement once we have all the information sort of uploaded to
Amazon. A little bit later in June or July, but we're all friends here, so I'll give you the I'll give you the
exclusive. The new book is titled a World without e-mail, and it takes a big look at how did we get to the
way we got today with work. How do we get to this world in which we're just constantly communicating
all the time and make the argument that it's arbitrary and make I pull together all the research in a way
that no one has done? All the psychology, all the organizational psychology, all the neuroscience, even
drawing from anthropology, pull together all the research. To make the the the comprehensive case that
the way we work today is incredibly unproductive is making people miserable. Part 2 of the book. I say
there's a better way. Take inside. Take people inside organizations that are working without constant
communication. I draw lessons from companies from the past. I say a world without e-mail is not only a
possibility, it is inevitable. The only question is whether or not you are ahead or behind on this coming
trend. That's the new book. It's a monster really excited about it. Hoping to make waves with it, you will
hear more about that soon. All right, let's move on to technology questions. Sarah asked as an author,
how do you effectively market your books without using social media? It's true. It's what I'm known for.
I've never had a social media account and have managed to sell a few books. One thing I'll say about this
is that. Where social media really helps authors is that it allows people to talk about your book if you
really like it. I find that's actually probably more important for your sales than you yourself talking to
your audience about your book. Your audience assumes that you like your book. It's not nearly as
important as other people who like your book spreading the word. So writing a really good book is a
really good first step. I have a mailing list that helps. Right, I mean mailing lists are actually significantly
more effective than social media feeds in terms of actually driving sales. Once you get your list to a given
size, you can get a pop of sales early on which can help with bestseller list, but it's really not going to get
you much farther than that. I mean, honestly guys. A really big social media following a really big mailing
list can maybe guarantee you 20,000 sales. But it's not going to get you 200,000 sales. That has to come
from the book itself. So I don't over sweat that. Piece of it, I think writing the right. The right book for
the times that you're the right person to write, it's going to change the way people see the world, that
people are going to love, that people are going to pass on. I mean, that's what sells books. There's only
so much you can force through your followings. I recommend authors like look if you want to have some
social media find. Just make sure that it is not getting into your writing time. By far the most important
thing. Is to write books that people care about. Right, Brad asks what academic and related
psychological effects do you see the average college student going through because of increased social
media use. Anxiety is to be. This is what the college mental health professionals I've talked to saw
change most dramatically. Once students began arriving on campus with smartphones, it was anxiety.
The number of students that were coming into the mental health Centers for anxiety or anxiety related
disorders. Dramatically and significantly increased. So I think college kids are a lot more anxious. The
second issue I think we have from this era of ubiquitous and addictive technology in your hand is
concentration, diminishment. I think students are just. Less comfortable. Sustaining focus on hard things
than they used to be. You're less comfortable sustaining focus on hard things than an act like learning
something becomes more challenging. It takes more time. The quality of the work produced goes down,
so you might be asking can we see this in the data? Can we see, let's say average GPA is dropping? Well,
we don't because I'll tell you why we're just implicitly inflating our grades. By we, I mean college
professors. Because you have in mind roughly what these grade distributions should be like, and we just
sort of implicitly inflate our grades, everyone feels fine, but I don't know. My my guess is that the
average college student in the year 2000 when I went to college without a cell phone, even without a
laptop. Probably was way more comfortable focusing without distraction than the average college
student in 2020, and that is going to have real effects. Connor asked for an if. Let's see, an evangelist of
deep work and for disconnection from social media, how do you justify an e-mail distribution list? Well,
this is a common I think mistake that people make. Which is taking all things Internet related. And kind
of mixing them all together and saying, look, if you're against this piece of the Internet, then you're
against this piece of the Internet as well. If you're against social media, then you're against e-mail list
and so on. But I think we have to be a lot more new. Most people are often surprised to find out that,
hey, I'm an Internet geek. Right. I mean, I'm one of these guys that was using Gopher. I'm one of these
guys that was telnetting into university. Computer mainframe systems over the early Internet, before
there was a World Wide Web. I had the first Mosaic browser that you could download. I remember the
link style text based browsers. I'm a huge Internet geek guy. I love the Internet. I really dislike social
media. Not the same thing. So I think the Internet's ability to expose yourself to interesting ideas, to
express yourselves, to connect with people is fantastic. That I, as a professor and writer, can have 40,000
fans that really like my writing and and and opt in to have my writing sent to them once or twice a week
is a fantastic thing. 50 years ago, any number of thinkers would have really been excited if that had been
a possibility. It's much different than what's going on with social media. Social media is about the
exploitative extraction of people's attention and information. To try to grab that value and ossify it into
stock price for a very small number of stockholders. Social media is about how do we get you captured
in our ecosystem and spending way more time than you know is useful or you know is healthy. Looking
at these screens, swiping these things, taking time away from things that are more valuable. Because we
can get a little bit more value out of your time. You spend less time with your kids, you're not getting in
shape, you're spending less time pursuing. Hobbies that are useful to you spending less time in self
reflection in the contemplative arts are going to give you a resilient foundation for life. Yeah, you're
doing all of that a lot less, but you. Now what? We had this Instagram endless feed. Calibrate it just right
that you can't help scrolling it and looking at a little bit more. It's 50 extra cents of value we got out of
you this afternoon. That's what I dislike. I think that is a corruption of the democratic potential of the
Internet, and I think it's something that we can be very wary of while still embracing the bulk of what
makes the Internet so. Right. So that's probably my rant alert of the day. Social media presses my
button. So Connor, you get the award today for getting my my rant engine going. Alright, so let me
power down here. Manual says how have you changed your digital minimalism attitude during the
COVID-19? Pandemic, you know, I've been writing about this on my blog. I've done some writing about
this for wired. I have a piece coming on The New Yorker which touches. On some of this. Essentially, I
think the COVID-19 pandemic took the main points of the digital minimalism philosophy and made them
starkly clear. So the core idea of digital minimalism is that technology is best when you deploy it
carefully to amplify things you really care about. That if you instead approach technology without this
care and just say, hey, that could be interesting, this seems whatever. Why don't I just try this? That it it?
It has the potential of really having an outsized influence on your time and attention. So if you use
technology? Very intentionally. You can get huge value out of it if you're casual about it, it can actually
make your life much worse. When has this lesson been more clear than during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Right. There are certain uses for technology in this pandemic that are very intentional and are incredible
value producing, right? The ability to zoom with family members and friends that the know what's going
on in your community to know hey on the list, Sir, like this happen. To be early in the pandemic, there's
a neighbor down the street. They're worried they're sick. They had been traveling to someone. Have one
of those oxygen meters you can put on your finger because their doctor says they need one and they're
hard to get right now. And you know what? Yeah, someone had them they. Got it over to them. Right,
this type of intentional use of technology to amplify the things that really matter. The connection to our
friends and to our community. Shows the power of technology. On the other hand. Has there ever been
a time where the attention economy has wreaked more psychological damage than during this
pandemic? I mean, if you're one of the people or no one of the people that's just glued to online news
and it's just so relentlessly dire that it just fritzes out your brain makes you despair. You're doing
genuflections of despair every morning to yourcnn.com feed or social media, and Twitter has really been
a problem for a lot of people during this because what happens is it's just a lot of people. Spending their
time and energy fighting against abstractions. You guys are terrible because you want us to wear masks.
You guys are terrible because you're not wearing masks. Look at this picture. Too many people are in
this lake. You know, I mean, this is just a completely counterproductive behavior, this sort of
disembodied community activation where you're you're you're at the national level just being exposed
to these random things that are good or bad and joining these tribes and fighting. And I think it's making
a lot of people very anxious. So here we have digital minimalism writ large. You use technology
intentionally during this pandemic. Makes your life better. You use it casually. During this pandemic,
you're either in a fetal position or yelling at Twitter. Phantoms probably give yourself a heart attack
before the virus gets you in the 1st place anyways. All right, so I think this pandemic has only amplified
what I predicted was true about. I wrote a post you can Google it. It's called on digital minimalism and
pandemics. I wrote it early in the pandemic that basically lays out these points. Mike asked for those of
us who are consultants and responding to clients in a timely fashion, is critical. How do we still find ways
to carve out meaningful, deep work? Mike, you need more structure for how you communicate. With
your clients. A lot of people and client facing services think that what their clients want is accessibility.
It's not quite true. Clients want clarity. Clarity Trump's accessibility. If they know how to reach you and
are sure that they're going to. Get a timely response. The answer does not have to be. They can reach
out at any moment. So if you have systems in place for, here's how we check in on things. Here's how
you ask questions here we make sure we make sure you have what you need. You don't need to be
accessible all the time. One of the case studies in the new e-mail book that I mentioned. Earlier in the
podcast was of a UX design company that went through this transformation. They used to allow. Their
clients to actually have access to their slack channels, right? Oh, terrible idea. Their clients could bother
them on slack. 24 hours a day. Huge disaster. One of their engineers burnt out. I'm done with this. Can't
take it anymore. They knew they had the change. So we're gonna make a drastic change. Hey, we might
lose all of our business, but we have to change something because this is just miserable. They went 180
degrees the other direction. They started making their client sign a client. Communication. Agreement
that's spelled out. This is how you communicate with us. And what they did for most clients, they said
we're going to have this conference. Set time every week. We're going to go over what's going on?
Here's where we are. Here's what's happened since the last call. What questions do you have? We will
now record everything we promised and every action items from that call a summary of the call and we
will send it to you within 30 minutes. Clients turned out to be ecstatic with this. They didn't have to
worry about anymore. Like, great, I don't have to worry about this company dropping things I don't have
to bother them. I don't have to get annoyed. They didn't answer my e-mail in 4 minutes because I know
you know we have this. I can ask him my questions. Then they'll bring us up. To date, we'll have
everything summarized in writing. I can take this out of the corner of my mind that is preserved for or
reserved for worrying. Clarity Trump's accessibility, so that would be my my push back on. You, Mike, is.
You might be overestimating the degree to which being always available is important. If you can replace
that with some more structure, you're gonna find a lot more regular time for other activities like deep
work. Let's see what else we have here, Scott. How is your phone set up? What apps you have? What's
on your lock screen? Your first page, Scott, I don't even know what that means and I guess that's the.
Point I have an iPhone, I my wife. Sends me photos on it. You know, I like the text message on it. You can
send photos. That's good. I listen to podcasts. You know, the purple button maps. I get lost a lot. I use
the. Maps I mean. That's basically it. I don't know what a first page or a lock screen is, and I think that's
the point, right? I like Steve Jobs. Originally vision of the iPhone, which is it's the best iPod you ever had
and the best phone you ever had put together in one sleek device. Oh, and by the way, it has a map. It
can play some music. OK, you don't need to run your life off of your phone. You don't need your phone
to do that much. There's probably more important uses for your attention. All right, let's move on to
questions about the deep life. Nam asks. What are your tips for graduate students on becoming a
professor? Published papers in the best possible venues publish more of them than you think is possible
for you. Publish, publish, publish. That's everything. Don't think about anything else. Think about writing
the best possible. How do you do this? Find people who already are learn from them what it actually
takes. Don't invent your own rules for for how you want to do your research. Don't invent your own
rules for how the world should work. Figure out how people who do publish in the top places actually
get it done. Learn at their feet, get the best possible advisors you can get the best possible collaborators
you can spend as much of your time. As possible writing papers, that is, everything in the becoming a
professor game. Krishna asked how do you handle boredom? Little background here Krishna is a
student. Krishna, my advice is you have to just set things up so that boredom is unavoidable. The best
way to do that. Is to do more things without your phone. So you just run errands, you walk the dog, you
go to class. Whatever you do, some things every day. Where you don't have your phone with you. Now
what's going to happen is you are going to now unavoidably find yourself in situations where you're
bored. In the sense of there is no novel stimuli that you can deliver to yourself by just tapping on this
little glowing piece of glass. You actually don't have that escape valve. Now, I don't think you should just
sit there and be bored and just marinate in that uncomfortable feeling. I think you should instead free
from the artificial crutch. That is our phone. See where that boredom drives you. It'll get you thinking
about things we're not just going to sit here and think nothing, so maybe I'm going to think about my life
and I'm going to reflect on some things. I'm going to have some ideas, maybe I'm going to go take
action. Maybe I'm just going to sit here. I should get up. I'm going to go do something that is useful,
right? Let the boredom, Dr. you towards behaviors that feel in the moment like. The natural response to
that strong drive. Boredom is natural. Boredom will drive you to natural behaviors that will be fulfilling.
You just have to get this incredibly artificial construct, which is the Internet connected phone out of your
life, to actually get back in touch with those natural rhythms. I like to use the analogy to hunger. Hunger
is very natural. Junk food is an unnatural. Response to that natural instinct. So if you respond to hunger
by just eating Twinkies. You're basically way overreacting to that impulse, or you end up very unhealthy.
So if you equivalently respond to boredom by looking at social media on your phone, the digital
equivalent of Twinkies. You're also going to end up quite unhealthy, so just put yourself in a situation
where you don't have that crutch. Allow the boredom to come see where it takes you. You will get more
used to it. Chin asks, are there any health hacks or habits you have that you think contribute to your
productivity and concentration? 100%. How you take care of your body has a massive impact on what
you're able to do with your mind. If you do not take your body seriously, you are leaving a lot of
potential on the table. There are things I track and try to do every. Single day. More than 10,000 steps
outside every day. I very rarely miss that. I have a very simple workout routine in the dungeon I have in
my unfinished garage. 30 push-ups, 30 pull-ups. And 50 combination of sort of terrible things, I. Do on
the dip bars. It doesn't take long. Not trying to become a bodybuilder. I just want the major muscle
groups of my body every day to get pushed really hard. Just seems to me if I do that every day and I
move for 10 to 20,000 steps every day, my body will be in the right mode of yeah, we move, we do hard
things, we Sprint every once in a while. And the right types of systems will happen, whereas if you don't
move much or if you rarely move your major muscle groups, I think things shut down. Look, I'm not a
physiologist. I don't know if that's true. I'm probably making a lot of this up, but I think it really matters.
So I track those things almost never miss them. Sometimes I have to do these exercises. You know, it's
9:30 at night. I've got kids. It's busy, but I get it done. I track it. I also care a lot about my food. I roughly
not. They'll open the kimono. Too too wide here. I automate breakfast and lunch. To me that is fuel.
Fuel, fuel. I don't even want to think about it. That's just plain fuel. I more or less go off of the dietary
tips of Mark Sissin when it comes to breakfast and lunch, which is, I don't know. He's semi paleo, semi
primal. It's real foods. Very little grains, a lot of healthy fats. I've cut down my caffeine to about 2 cups a
day, which is a big change for me as well. So it's it's all automated. So it's like I'll have eggs for breakfast.
I usually have some sort of salad with some protein for lunch. I don't want to think. For dinner, Michael
Pollan is my guy. So just eat real foods. My wife and I cook. Let's make food from scratch here for having
pasta or bread. I'll eat pasta or bread, you know, be a little bit less, a little bit less strict there, but just
real foods. We try not to keep much snack. Food in the house. That's it. I track those things by the way.
All right, every day it's in. My journal. They slip up, have something that's not on there. I track it.
Alcoholic drinks. I write down how many I'm going to see it. Right. Got to face these things. Don't try to
hide from it. And so I do track those things. I do think it matters. I do think I had to get serious about my
health because. You know, with the kids, with the workload, I need the edges I can get. And I think this
makes a difference. Right. So those are my advice. Get serious about your food. And again, the easiest
thing to do is just automate from when you wake up the 5:00 PM just it's like you eat the same things
every day. Really healthy. Don't even think about it real. Food at. Night move every day. Train your
muscles every day makes a difference. Zane asks. Do you ever find yourself slipping out of the deep work
life unintentionally after being in it for an extended period of time? Yes, every year professors call it
September. I don't like it. I get depressed in September. I love the summer. I I do a lot more deep work.
The broader point here is aim is, yeah, you're going to slip and change because your life circumstances
will change. The key is just intention. You know the type of life you're trying to lead. You know that
you're trying to do the deep life philosophy of focusing on what matters and not wasting too much time
on the things. We don't. Keep coming back to that. Keep making adjustments. You will be fine. Don't be
too hard on yourself when those adjustments happen. Because they are unavoidable. Final question,
Kevin. I have recently been lacking a sense of purpose. A little bit of background here. Kevin tells me that
he is a delivery driver. Kevin, you are not alone with this question, especially now during these times of
pandemic where there are a lot of acute hardships. Pile down to everything else now. I think one of the
issues here is that our culture has become really bad. At helping people with something that's very, very
important, which is. Living a life of purpose. We basically push that topic to the side it used to be at the
core of, let's say, a university education. It's a core of university education used to be at the core of most
peoples childhood and upbringing. Of community parents, religious organizations. There was so much in
people's lives it was focused on. How do you build a structured life of purpose? We stripped that all
away. And now we find ourselves saying I'm not quite sure. What I'm supposed? To do what we
replaced it with is largely fairy tales. So I wrote about this in my 2012 book, so good they can't ignore
you. Basically starting in the 1980s and really picking up speed in the 1990s, we started telling people
these fairy tales that say, well, no, here's how purpose comes you you figure out like your passion, some
sort of like job you're supposed to do or something. Then when you get that match. You find the right.
One thing to do with your. If you will feel great. So you got to find that purpose. You find this one thing.
You do that thing, and then you're going to be much happier. This is a very recent idea. It's counter to
almost all of philosophy, literature and theology. On this topic. It doesn't help very much. So where does
purpose really come from? Well, it's a much more complicated rig. An interesting question, but if we if
we look back even in the oldest of mythologies, where we see the hero like Odysseus going through the
trials after the battles in Troy as he works to get back home, we see a very clear pattern. The first thing
you do is you survive the hardships, so the hard things happen. His ships are dashed on the rocks, he
finds himself down in Hades at some point in the literal underworld. In the the myth of Odysseus, he
survives. He perseveres. He gets out of the water, he gets off of the island of the Lotus Eaters. He blinds
the cyclops. He survives. He gets past the hardships, sticking with this particular myth, he gets back
home. Gets back home to his his island Kingdom and finds that his household is in disarray. There's
these suitors who have come in. They're trying to usurp him. So he gets his household back in order, and
the myth he literally kills them. But again, this is mythological language. What this really means is that
he survives the acute hardships. Then he gets his life back in order. Gets things organized, gets his
household back in order, gets control of himself. Then the final part of this myth, which is not actually in
the the version of the Odyssey that we know but is part of the deeper myth that it's based on, is that he
then goes on this journey into the inland, on the mainland, inland, where he brings an oar with them till
he gets to a place where no one knows what an oar is. And they haven't heard of all of his old. And he
does these sacrifices and he basically. Transforms into a deeper, more meaningful life, and so sort of the
final step of the this classical mythological journey to purpose is that after you've, you've with great
persistence and resilience, gone through the acute hardships and then second got yourself and your life
in order. The third thing is you say, then how do I evolve this life to be more useful? And that almost
always means for people's responsibility. Serving others serving your family, serving your community,
doing things is useful to the world. Doing it without the need to feel like you have to beat your chest on
Instagram or have people see you know how good you look or how some accolades published in the
paper and perhaps a touch of of quality and gratitude in there. Just appreciations for pieces of life that
really are beautiful no matter what the other circumstances are. Right, that's the basic pattern that we
see in the Odyssey, which is basically the original myth. It's the oldest extant mythology we have in the
Western Canon. You see that same structure come show up again and again and again throughout
ancient philosophy you see it all throughout theology. You see it in literature as well. So what I'm going
to say, Kevin, is that. There's meaning in these myths. There's a reason why they have survived, and this
is probably the type of template you need to think about, not the 1990s fairy tale of you were meant to
be a race car driver, and the only thing the only problem is, is that people have told you that you can't
be a race car driver. And if you could just have the courage to do it, you'll have purpose. That's a fairy
tale for kids. That's a Disney movie. In that case, that's literally a Disney movie. That's the plot of Cars 3
movie I don't like. I don't like very much. The deeper solution here is no, no, no. Here's what you do.
When the real hardships come, you get through them. You get through them with strength. You know
it's hard, but you know you can survive it when you get past the acute phase, you get your life in order.
You eat well, you get in shape, you get your finances in order and your job. I'm going to do this. Well, I'm
going to get better at the job. I'm gonna support myself. Going to support my family. And then third, you
begin to take on responsibility. You begin to take on humility. You begin to take on the challenge of I
want to do things in this world that is useful, and then along the way, keep pausing for gratitude. Keep
seeking out those moments of quality that also makes life rich. A much more complicated answer, but
also a much older and more persistently told answer. And the way I see it is if an idea like that has
survived as long as it has survived. Then there must be some mimetic value there. There must be some
truth underlying it. So that's my answer. It's sort of a general question. The key to purpose. Is really
seeking the deeper life and these are the elements that are in the deeper life. The fairy tale of if I just
find the right job or something, I should just feel good all the time. That's for kids. Grownups like
Odysseus in that original myth survive the heartship get their house in order, then transform their life
into something that that serves the world and has some quality. Has some gratitude in it. Right, that's
that's my prescription. That basically is the deep life philosophy that I have been preaching. It is hard
work like any of these things are, but it's incredibly rewarding. Earlier one so that is the end of episode
#1. I hope you enjoyed my answers to your questions today. Again, I solicit new questions from my
mailing list. I I on occasion, once I run out of questions, I send out a a form. It's a giving you questions. So
if you want to have a chance to submit your own questions. To this show, you need to sign up for my
mailing list at calnewport.com and I hope to see your questions. Then until then, stay deep.