0:11

I'm Cal Newport and this

0:13

is Deep Question, the

0:15

show about cultivating a deep

0:17

life in a distracted world. Here

0:24

in my Deep Work HQ, the joint

0:26

is always by my producer, Jesse.

0:29

One of our first days with the AC on in the

0:31

HQ. I feel like summer is here. Yeah,

0:34

I feel good about. I just got back from

0:36

Boston. That was a trip.

0:39

Took the boys to Fenway. Nice who

0:41

they play the white socks white socks.

0:43

Yeah. Yeah, they lost They won yesterday.

0:45

Okay. Good. Yeah. No, it wasn't a rousing

0:47

showing by the home team I couldn't

0:49

my memory is when I lived I lived

0:51

in Boston for a long time when

0:53

I was a graduate student and a postdoc

0:56

and I couldn't afford Red Sox tickets.

0:58

That's what I remembered I mean, this was

1:00

during their championship run, you

1:02

know, I was there 2004

1:04

to 2011 But I don't remember if

1:06

tickets were more expensive back then or I just didn't

1:09

have any money It was probably some, so it was

1:11

kind of nice. Like I could actually like buy tickets

1:13

and go to a Red Sox game and bring my

1:15

kids there. So it was a sort of cathartic situation.

1:17

They have the most expensive ticket in baseball. I'm pretty

1:19

sure. At least I did it last year. Well, it's

1:21

a small stadium. I didn't really realize I got in

1:23

there after spending the last decade going to Nats games

1:25

in Nats Park. It's like a finway. It's a small

1:27

stadium. Yeah. Really cool experience though. Went back to my

1:29

old stomping grounds, walked around

1:31

MIT, remembered what that was like,

1:34

walked through Harvard, walked by my old apartment. It's a

1:36

cool city. I like Cambridge. I like Boston. We just

1:38

had a bunch of T cards. We got everywhere. We

1:41

took the train. We took the bus.

1:43

We took even the ferry takes you

1:45

across, you know, that's part of the

1:47

T system is ferries to get you

1:49

across the water. So memories, but it's good

1:51

to be back to DC. Have you been

1:53

watching clubhouse on Netflix? I should. I

1:55

should have watched it before I went to the game. Yeah.

1:58

I mean, it's eight episodes. It's going to take a while. Well,

2:00

I know, but that's like good workout fodder,

2:02

the workout show. You don't have to really

2:04

pay that good attention. Anyways, Boston,

2:06

I miss you. But I am

2:08

happy to be back in DC. All

2:11

right, well, we got a good show. We're getting

2:13

into a sort of core digital era productivity

2:15

topic that I was working with and the

2:17

book I'm writing on the Deep Life. So

2:19

it's been on my mind. We got some

2:21

reader questions. And then for the final

2:23

segment, taking a break from AI, do

2:25

a classic react to something on the internet that

2:27

Jesse has promised. There's something he has found he

2:29

thinks I would find interesting. So I'm going to

2:32

encounter that in the final segment of the

2:34

show and give my thoughts and it's

2:36

related to the deep life. So you can

2:38

stay tuned for that. But with that

2:40

in mind, why don't we get started with

2:43

our deep dive? 17

2:45

years ago, the popular productivity

2:47

blogger Merlin Mann gave a

2:49

talk at Google where he

2:52

popularized the term inbox zero,

2:54

which he used to refer

2:56

to the goal of regularly

2:58

emptying your email inbox to

3:00

zero. messages. Soon

3:03

after he was offered a deal, soon after

3:05

that he was offered a deal to write

3:07

a book about his concept of M -Box

3:09

Zero. The project eventually led him into an

3:11

existential crisis about productivity more generally. He began

3:13

the question, why do we even care about

3:15

this? He never finished a book and he

3:17

shut down his popular productivity blog. In

3:20

the 17 years since, I think many

3:22

have had a philosophically similar reaction to

3:24

the idea of M -Box Zero. People

3:26

embrace its promise. but then

3:28

give up realizing that it is

3:30

quixotic, they fall into a

3:32

state of despair saying, I never will be

3:34

able to tame my inbox. I wanna return to

3:36

this topic today, 17 years

3:38

later. First, I'm gonna

3:41

go back and look at the

3:43

advice that Merlin Mann gave and

3:45

explain why it doesn't work, why

3:47

it particularly isn't gonna work today. I'm

3:50

thinking describe a method that might actually work.

3:52

I do go down to inbox zero, my

3:54

various inboxes, on a semi -regular basis. I

3:56

can explain what I do, and it's a

3:58

little bit different than what Merlin was talking

4:00

about. In the end, they'll justify why we

4:02

should care. Why is it important to try

4:04

to get your inbox empty? Is this just

4:07

a goal that we set for the sake

4:09

of having a goal, or is it actually

4:11

make our life better? All right, so that

4:13

is our game plan, Jesse. Let's

4:15

get into inbox zero. All right, so

4:17

what I want to start with is going

4:19

back to Merlin Man's talk. I'm

4:21

gonna play just a clip from this. We'll put

4:23

it on the screen for people who are watching

4:26

and instead of just listening and I'm just gonna

4:28

put on the screen and play a little bit

4:30

of Merlin talking and then it'll give us an

4:32

overview of what Merlin's method was from 17 years

4:34

ago. Like I say, last time I'll say this,

4:36

this may not be your trip. Like you're going

4:38

to have to figure out what you're, I think

4:40

these are actually pretty sound. I think 80 %

4:42

of the DNA for most email systems is probably

4:44

somewhere in here. But you need to figure this

4:46

out for yourself. You have your own workflow, you

4:48

got your own life, got your own weird, peculiar

4:50

habits you picked up in college. Honor

4:52

that. All right, let's pause it here. With my blessing. All

4:55

right, so what we have on the

4:57

screen, so Merlin has on the screen five

5:00

steps. Here, let's bring that

5:02

video back just a little bit, Jesse, to the to

5:04

five steps on the screen. All right, there we

5:06

go. The five steps he has on the screen

5:08

labeled choose one, delete, delegate.

5:10

Oh, I think it's still playing here. Delete,

5:13

delegate, respond, defer,

5:17

do. All right, so

5:19

what he's saying is to go through

5:21

your inbox. You have to choose one of

5:23

these five actions. He calls them verbs. You

5:26

have to choose one of these five actions for each

5:28

of the emails in your inbox. Delete it, delegate

5:30

it, means send it to someone else. respond

5:33

to it right there, defer it

5:35

to get back to it another time, or

5:37

just do whatever it is that's being requested of

5:39

you. All right, we can take this off the screen

5:41

now. Why does this

5:43

not work for most

5:45

modern inboxes? Well, I think

5:47

there are two real issues with

5:49

this. One, the

5:52

key steps there that are different

5:54

than simply just deleting it or... doing

5:56

it, responding when it's a quick

5:58

response. I want to put those type

6:00

of messages aside. Some messages you

6:02

can just delete. It makes sense

6:04

just to do that. Some messages you can

6:06

do what I call a quick response. So without

6:08

thinking about it much, it's a question that

6:10

you know the answer to. And

6:12

so you can just respond and come back. Someone

6:14

says, hey, remind me again what day the client

6:16

is coming. You can just respond to

6:18

that email. It's Thursday. Put

6:20

aside those messages and those reactions.

6:23

Many of these other steps, the

6:25

first issue is they take too long. So

6:28

the inbox, like that email

6:30

in your inbox might look innocent,

6:32

but often to delegate it

6:34

or to give a meaningful response

6:36

or to actually try to

6:38

make progress on what's being asked

6:40

is a non -trivial investment of

6:42

time. Emails are

6:44

typically connected to some sort

6:46

of back and forth discussion. The

6:50

task at hand is multifaceted. The information

6:52

needed for someone to act on it might

6:54

be voluminous. Right so now for me

6:56

to respond to this message like okay wait

6:58

so let me think about this for

7:00

a second I got to give the context

7:02

of this project I need to explain

7:04

the backstory and there's like three options here

7:06

and there's a different option depending on

7:08

which option you go with there's different next

7:10

actions you'll have to take I mean

7:12

I'm thinking about some of like the recent

7:14

emails I have sent like for example I

7:17

recently sent an email to the former

7:19

director of undergraduate studies. I had a

7:21

question about a student request. That's a

7:23

complicated question I'm asking that's gonna require

7:25

quite a bit of details and maybe

7:28

even some back and forth to explain,

7:30

right? So actually acting

7:32

on many messages can

7:35

take four, five, maybe

7:37

six minutes. Now, this doesn't

7:39

sound like a lot back in the day where you

7:41

might have a few emails to answer. But

7:43

the modern load of people's inboxes is so

7:45

large that you can multiply that across

7:47

20 or 30 messages. And now you realize,

7:49

wait a second, this could take hours.

7:51

And it does. And I think people have

7:53

this experience of trying to actually act

7:56

on everything in their inbox. It's taking them

7:58

hours to try to get through everything

8:00

and people don't necessarily have hours. The second

8:02

issue here is brain strain. Hard

8:04

to say that, brain strain. Because

8:07

here's what happens as you jump from message

8:09

to message in your inbox. How are these

8:11

messages sorted? They're sorted by time. What time

8:13

did a message arrive? Which

8:15

means you're going to likely be

8:17

jumping from message to message

8:19

from one completely unrelated topic to

8:21

another, one cognitive context to

8:23

a different one. It takes

8:25

time. We talk about this all the time

8:28

on this show. It takes time to

8:30

switch your cognitive context. If I want to

8:32

be thinking about an administrative issue involving

8:34

our undergraduates, that's a completely different cognitive context

8:36

than if I want to be dealing

8:38

with a research collaborator on a problem we're

8:40

working on. And if I jump from

8:42

responding to a message about the first thing

8:44

to a message about the second, my

8:46

brain is still in that first cognitive context.

8:48

So it's gonna strain to try to

8:51

answer the other one. You're gonna feel this

8:53

as a sort of grit in the

8:55

gears of your brain because your brain has

8:57

the wrong networks activated The networks you

8:59

might need are inhibited and until it can

9:01

shift your attention, which is a high

9:03

energy procedure. You're gonna struggle Yeah, okay research

9:05

what's going on here? You're trying to

9:07

load things up and what often happens is

9:09

you struggle out a response It's

9:11

difficult and you jump to the next message

9:13

completely different context. So now before you've gotten

9:15

to the new context, you begin shifting to

9:17

the third context and your mind really feels

9:19

that strain. That's a big ask for your

9:21

brain and you feel it as a sort

9:23

of mental fatigue and exhaustion, which we often

9:25

feel around our inbox. The

9:28

brain strain from switching context in our inbox

9:30

really creates that type of inbox fatigue that

9:32

we're all used to where you say, I

9:34

can't really answer

9:36

thoughtfully anymore, and you just begin jumping around

9:38

looking for messages that you can delete or

9:40

give a quick response to. It's because you've

9:42

exhausted your brain from jumping between those contexts. So

9:46

the Merlin Man approach of let's just

9:48

go message by message and apply a

9:50

systematic set of rules to each message

9:52

till we're done could take a really

9:54

long time and it'll probably exhaust your

9:57

brain before you finish. All

9:59

right, so how do we solve these? What's

10:01

an approach to emptying your inbox that might actually work?

10:04

Look first at this issue of

10:06

it taking too long to actually

10:08

respond to or deal with each

10:10

of the messages. My

10:12

argument, and this is what I do, is

10:15

that your goal when you're processing your

10:17

inbox is not to act on every message.

10:20

It's to get every message stored in a better

10:22

system. Let me walk this through. As

10:25

I go through inbox messages, delete the

10:27

stuff you can delete, sure. Respond

10:30

to the stuff that you can respond to right

10:32

away. The client's coming on Thursday, sure. For the other

10:34

things, I want them to go

10:36

on to the, a pointer to those to go

10:38

on to the appropriate past class. And

10:40

you know, the way I do things, I

10:42

talk about it on the show, is I use

10:44

Trello. I have a different Trello board for

10:46

each of the roles I play in my life.

10:48

And then each of those boards is broken

10:50

up into columns based on different possible statuses and

10:53

messages. Stuff I still need

10:55

to process, stuff on the back burner,

10:57

stuff I'm waiting for to hear a

10:59

response on. Stuff that I should talk

11:01

to certain people next time I see

11:03

them in a regular meeting stuff I'm

11:05

working on right away. I have different

11:07

statuses in each board I want to

11:09

eventually get those emails as I empty

11:11

them either deleted responded to or a

11:13

corresponding action on the corresponding card in

11:15

a corresponding column of a corresponding board

11:17

now just copying from an email inbox

11:19

and Directly adding new tasks to something

11:21

like Trello or Todoist or whatever you're

11:23

using even that is too slow for

11:25

me. Here's what I do instead I

11:28

have a blank text file open next to

11:30

my inbox. I call

11:32

it workingmemory .txt, plain text file, not

11:34

even any rich text formatting. I'm

11:37

going from my inbox to

11:39

notes in that text file, because

11:41

I can type really fast. And

11:44

in a text file, I don't have to click any buttons.

11:46

I don't have to create any new cards. I don't have

11:48

to type any new categories. I can just type. All

11:51

right, remember to do blah, blah, blah.

11:53

Get back to so -and -so about this. If

11:55

there's details in the email, that

11:57

I need to be able to act on

11:59

whatever. I'll copy a man or sometimes I'll

12:01

just copy the subject line so I know

12:03

what to search for in Gmail if I

12:05

want to find that message again. Copying

12:08

things, either deleting, responding to,

12:10

or adding a note, okay, here's

12:12

an obligation this message responds,

12:14

archive the message. And my text

12:16

file grows with these notes. Then

12:19

what I do is I look at what's

12:21

in that text file, and I can remix, reorganize,

12:23

reconsider, and consolidate. So when you see all

12:25

these things listed in your own words, they're not

12:28

emails in your inbox anymore, but you've honed

12:30

them down to like, need to figure

12:32

out this for so and so, so and so needs

12:34

this information, get back to, you know, so and so

12:36

with these grades or whatever. When you see them all

12:38

together, you can begin very quickly in a text file,

12:41

messing around with this information. Well, let

12:43

me batch together things that are

12:45

similar. Let me consolidate.

12:47

Now that I look at it, There's four different

12:49

requests in here that comes from the same

12:51

person. Okay. Uh, I'm going to

12:53

put these all together. I'm going to change this

12:55

to set up, you know, stop by so -and -so's

12:57

office to discuss issues and I'll put these all

12:59

below it. So I can consolidate all of that.

13:02

Some things you'll, the reconsider steps, some things,

13:04

once you look at everything in the light of

13:06

the harsh light of your text file, you're like,

13:08

I don't really need to do that. I'm not

13:10

going to do that. You kind of like take

13:12

some things off your plate. So it really

13:14

cleans up all this information. And then you can

13:16

go from that text file. start adding

13:18

things into your system from the text

13:20

file itself. All right, it's

13:22

quicker. It is much quicker to type things

13:24

in a text file than to actually try

13:26

to act on these. It's much quicker than

13:28

trying to create different things. And

13:31

typically, there's a fair amount of reorganization,

13:33

consolidation, and reconsideration that happens between the

13:35

text file and actually going into your

13:37

task systems. The

13:39

second issue that we pointed out with

13:41

Merlin's system was the brain strain of

13:43

switching context back and forth. Well,

13:46

this we can solve as well. This

13:48

is a method I've mentioned before on the show, but

13:50

I think it's really important. It's

13:52

to organize your messages when

13:54

you're processing them by context. This

13:57

could be really simple. In Gmail,

14:00

I'll have a label and you could

14:02

just call it context or processing

14:04

or something like this. And I'll go

14:06

through my inbox and I'm gonna

14:08

find every message that's related to that.

14:10

So maybe it's a director of

14:12

undergraduate studies. and another one for my

14:14

class or it's writing related. Like

14:16

whatever the context is, I'll go through

14:18

and I'll find all the messages

14:21

for that context. In Gmail, I'll click

14:23

all their checkboxes and then I'll

14:25

apply a bulk action, label them with

14:27

the processing label. Then

14:30

I can jump over to the processing label and just

14:32

see those messages. And like, great, let me go through those.

14:34

And now I'm only processing messages that

14:37

are from the same cognitive context. It

14:39

goes faster because your mind is just thinking

14:41

about this stuff, even just copying to the text

14:43

file, making decisions about what you really need

14:45

to do or don't do. All of that gets

14:47

much faster if you're within the same context

14:49

and the strain is much less. Then

14:51

you go back to your inbox and choose a

14:53

new context, then grab all those messages, put those

14:55

together, deal with them in a row. It feels

14:58

really different. And at first it seems

15:00

almost miraculous. Why is this going much easier?

15:02

It's because your brain isn't switching context. It's

15:04

like, yeah, we're just in the mood. We're doing Class

15:06

-related emails, you kind of get into the mood of

15:08

it. This happened to me the

15:11

other day, right? Processing a bunch of backlog

15:13

emails from my class. I processed them all

15:15

together in the same context. A

15:17

lot of the messages were students with questions

15:19

about grades because I had handed back a problem

15:21

set recently. Well, when I'm just looking at

15:23

that context, like, great, let me sort all those

15:25

together. I'll put all these grading questions over

15:27

here. Um, and I can just have

15:29

like a session later of just like going through

15:32

and doing grading questions. Uh, a lot of them

15:34

I could answer really quickly because it's like, oh,

15:36

I've seen the same question a bunch of times.

15:38

So I can just answer those now, uh, et

15:40

cetera. Right. I've done the same

15:42

thing with like my director of undergraduate studies

15:44

duties, right? I pull out just those messages

15:46

and like, okay, what do I really have

15:48

here? Well, there's like three students I'm working

15:50

with on. some external course approvals, and all

15:53

these messages are from them back and forth.

15:55

Let me just load in that context. Okay,

15:57

where are they? Let me update, look at

15:59

the notes, and I can make a clear

16:01

next action for each of these students. I

16:03

can make those decisions better when I'm just

16:05

in one context. The process context by context

16:07

is gonna go much easier. All

16:10

right, so why should you

16:12

do this? Why is it

16:14

worth Trying to go through the

16:16

trouble of once or twice a week getting

16:18

your various inboxes emptying into your task systems. It's

16:21

because your inbox is a terrible place to

16:23

store obligations. If you don't do this, what you're

16:25

implicitly doing is saying my inbox has now

16:27

become one of my primary systems for keeping track

16:29

of things I need to do. We

16:32

got to keep track of the things you need to do or you're

16:34

going to be stressed as your mind tries to do it for itself. There's

16:37

no structure in your inbox. This is problem

16:39

number one with using it as a task

16:41

management system. There's no structure in your inbox.

16:43

So now the various things you have to

16:45

do are just all jumbled and mixed together.

16:48

It's very difficult when you're trying to figure out like, okay,

16:50

what am I going to work on today or what

16:52

am I going to work on next? It's very difficult to

16:54

jump into an unstructured inbox and just see all this

16:56

different stuff. Two, tasks

16:58

are obfuscated in an inbox. What

17:01

do you see in an inbox?

17:03

Not the... -labeled tasks in

17:05

your task system. You see subject

17:07

lines. And the

17:09

subject line for a key task that has

17:11

to do or the actual task is, you

17:13

know, getting in touch with the advising dean

17:15

to clarify a question about online course credits, what

17:18

you actually see there is re,

17:20

colon, re, colon, forward, colon, uh,

17:23

summer course. Or something like this and

17:25

it's not clear what that means so now you

17:27

have to try to recreate from obfuscated subject lines

17:29

what the actual tasks are so it's very hard

17:31

to get a sense of the various things you

17:33

have to do. And there's a bunch of junk

17:35

in your inbox stuff that should just be deleted

17:37

there's junk mail in your inbox other sorts of

17:40

things in there. that off you skate. So it's

17:42

like the worst possible task list. It's a task

17:44

list where you are camouflaging the actual tasks with

17:46

fake decoy tasks and then changing the title of

17:48

your tasks so they're hard to read and then

17:50

mixing them all together. If I came to

17:52

you and said, this is my plan for a productivity app,

17:54

you are not going to invest in that. But that's what happens

17:56

if you're using your inbox. When you

17:58

instead have your tasks stored by Roll

18:00

and within roll by status. It's much

18:02

much easier to deal with now when

18:05

it's time to deal with stuff related

18:07

to your class You just go to

18:09

that board and it's all organized like

18:11

here's the the stuff I need to

18:13

do I maybe have a column for

18:15

like pending grading questions Okay, I'm gonna

18:17

this afternoon put aside time just to

18:20

go through all those in order and

18:22

I'm gonna get back I have these

18:24

more complicated, you know a combination request

18:26

I'm gonna Ping those people I

18:28

say have like six of these built up

18:30

and I think of I need to just go

18:32

over to the the academic resource center and

18:34

have a conversation Why don't I send them all

18:36

a message when I'm doing my next teaching

18:38

block and just like hey just want to let

18:40

you know I see this is here and

18:42

I am having a meeting that I'll get some

18:44

answers to you and then I'm going to

18:46

move those over to a waiting to hear back

18:48

and it's like okay after I have this

18:50

meeting get back to all these people you just

18:54

dealing with things, you're seeing things, their

18:56

status is clear. You can make intelligent

18:58

decisions. Working off structured task storage

19:00

is just way more calming and effective and

19:02

efficient and stress reducing than working from a

19:04

camouflage obfuscated task list, which is what an

19:06

inbox actually is. So I think inbox zero

19:08

is possible. You don't have to be there

19:10

all the time, but to try to get

19:12

back there once a week, I think is

19:14

not a bad standard. And if you fall

19:16

behind, okay, then you can do it the

19:18

next week. It takes a while. You

19:21

know, I it's hard for me to say

19:23

how long it takes me because I have five

19:25

inboxes So it depends on the inbox, but

19:27

you know, I'm gonna I just got back from

19:29

this trip So I'm gonna have the process

19:31

my plan today is the process my Georgetown inbox

19:33

back to zero that one. I try to

19:35

keep to zero twice a week because it's Urgent

19:37

stuff. It's my job in my writing life.

19:39

I think people recognize I Don't always am I'm

19:41

not always able to get back. I have

19:43

a bunch of jobs, but I've been hope I'm

19:45

an independent writer, you know, give me a

19:47

little grace, but And my job

19:49

as a professor, I like to be much more prompt.

19:51

I'll empty it like twice a week and maybe

19:53

it takes 20 to 45 minutes to get stuff in

19:55

the task list when I do it this way. All

19:58

right, two other things I'll throw out there. I

20:00

don't want to go into detail, but two things that

20:02

makes this a little bit easier. This is like

20:04

more standard advice. One, and these both have

20:06

to do with reducing the messages to process that you

20:08

have the process in the first place. One, do

20:11

a junk mail sort of confrontation day

20:13

once or twice a month. Where you go

20:16

through and say, like, what messages am

20:18

I getting, you know, the junk that builds

20:20

up? How did I get on this

20:22

list? This is like promotional. Google

20:24

is not filtering this for me. Once

20:26

or twice a month when you're clearing your

20:28

inbox, add extra time to try to

20:30

unsubscribe or filter from all of those things.

20:33

So you're like, okay, is that just a leading? You

20:36

know, it's the message from Whole Foods and the

20:38

message from I bought something from this store three

20:40

years ago and now I get six emails a

20:42

week from them. I'll actually take a time to

20:44

try to prevent these from ever coming to my

20:46

inbox again. And if you can auto unsubscribe, do

20:48

it. If you can't, you can do filter messages

20:50

like these in Gmail and just have it go

20:52

straight to Trash or Archive. If

20:54

you do that once or twice a month, it

20:56

prevents the junk messages from getting too out of

20:58

control. It's not that big of a deal to

21:01

delete junk messages, but it can be psychologically difficult,

21:03

like a bit of a hurdle to see 300

21:05

messages in your inbox. Even if you can erase

21:07

200 of those almost right away, it's much easier

21:09

if they just don't show up in the first

21:11

place. The bigger thing you can do

21:13

is try to move more back and forth

21:15

collaboration out of asynchronous messaging and into other

21:17

forms. I wrote a whole book about this

21:19

called The World Without Email. Read

21:21

that book. But the very short

21:23

version of it is you do not

21:25

want unscheduled messaging back and forth to be

21:27

the way that you make decisions about

21:29

things. Use office hours.

21:32

Use like a standing group clearing

21:34

the docket meeting. grab

21:37

people in the hallway or after meetings, have

21:39

lists of things to go over with people,

21:41

but do what you can to avoid having

21:43

back and forth messaging be how you figure

21:45

something out. Because that becomes a big driver

21:47

of not just the number of messages in

21:49

your inbox, but the number of messages that

21:51

require non -trivial answers and time -sensitive answers. So

21:53

if you can reduce those from showing up

21:55

in your inbox in the first place, processing

21:57

your inbox to zero does become easier. So

22:00

there we go. Maybe we need a new term for it, Jesse.

22:02

Inbox zero has kind of been, people are, They

22:05

think that's impossible, but I don't

22:07

know. It's a good one. I

22:09

don't know what else to call

22:12

it. You do that with your

22:14

personal email too. Yeah, but not

22:16

with I have not been doing

22:18

it with The podcast email it's

22:20

been taken over so I'm gonna

22:22

have to I'm gonna have to

22:24

take some time I mean people

22:27

mainly know just to bother you

22:29

so that helps but the Cal

22:31

Newport comm address has gotten

22:33

on too many like PR and marketing firms

22:35

list. And so I have to spend some time

22:37

to go through and like hide and unsubscribe

22:39

to all of those because it'll be just hundreds

22:41

of messages a day now. And it's all

22:43

like press releases and this and that. So that

22:45

one I lost control of, I have to

22:47

get control back of that one. But

22:50

like my New Yorker address is blissfully,

22:52

cause that address isn't really out there

22:54

in the world. It's like blissfully spam

22:56

free. Yeah. Yeah.

22:58

It's like Dave Remnick,

23:00

like announcements. for

23:03

the staff or something like that's it

23:05

like this is what email is great that

23:07

email address is like what email was

23:09

like in 1999 i'll like load up that

23:11

inbox it'll be like four relevant announcements

23:13

about you know from like kandey naston hey

23:15

there's uh we're like celebrating this tonight

23:18

you know you can meet us here uh

23:20

hey i want to congratulate so -and -so

23:22

for like doing well and then maybe there'll

23:24

be like a question for me you

23:26

know like hey you need to do your

23:28

like uh IT training for convent ass

23:30

or something and it's like three messages and

23:32

they're all kind of relevant It's great.

23:35

It's like what email used to be so

23:37

when you're say you have like a

23:39

thread for Georgetown related stuff And you want

23:41

to remember what that said like six

23:43

months ago? Do you keep like a description

23:45

file or something and just a fuller? You

23:48

can go back and check no because everything

23:50

and you know, we use Gmail on our

23:52

show we use it at Georgetown Everything's archived.

23:54

We'll see just archived with the subject title.

23:56

So I just in my my task will

23:58

just have the subject I usually just copy

24:00

the title And it'll say like search for

24:02

yeah, and then I can just search for

24:04

that the exact title of the message and

24:07

it comes back a listener wrote in I

24:09

mentioned this recently and a listener wrote in

24:11

and said actually in Gmail is possible to

24:13

get a link if you're using the web

24:15

-based inbox There's you can actually like copy

24:17

a link. It'll take you straight to the

24:19

email. I don't really know how to do

24:21

that But it say the task is complete.

24:23

Do you archive your task to one trial?

24:25

I think it does. Yeah. So I think

24:27

always delete them, but I think you can

24:29

archive. I click archive. I always click archive.

24:31

Yeah. So in Trello, when you get rid

24:33

of a card, you can delete it or

24:35

you can archive it. And I've just been

24:38

clicking archive. So yeah, in theory, it's all

24:40

in there because I'll copy information into it.

24:42

So don't be afraid, by the way, when

24:44

you're working with your text file, there's no,

24:46

you're not charged by the word, right? The

24:49

copy a lot of text from an email

24:51

and just like, drop it in that text file,

24:53

and then when you create a Trello card,

24:55

just paste all that text on the back of

24:57

the card. If you want to put all

24:59

the relevant information in your Trello card, you can

25:01

go ahead and do that. So if you

25:03

needed to revisit something six months later, you'd go

25:05

back and check. I've never done it, but

25:07

in theory, yeah. I think I could search the

25:09

Trello archive and find a task I had

25:11

already done, and when I've done them, I could

25:13

see that being useful. So I do archive

25:15

those tasks. All right,

25:17

well, we've got some good questions coming up. But first,

25:19

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29:37

let's do some questions. First

29:41

question is from Julia. I

29:43

have a similar rating system that David

29:45

DeWayne discussed in the most recent in -depth

29:47

episode. On my scale, bad days are ones

29:49

and unbelievable days are fives. I call

29:51

the ones survival days. There are times when

29:53

I need to perform beyond the bare

29:55

minimum on survival days and don't know how

29:57

to do that. Well,

30:00

first of all, thanks for the shout

30:02

out to the David DeWayne episode. I

30:04

liked that episode, Jesse. It wasn't like

30:06

we were having on a famous writer

30:08

or someone who was an expert in

30:10

different topic. It's just someone who lived

30:12

a really, he lives a very intentional,

30:14

deep life. I've known him forever. And

30:17

the fans seem to be responding well, like

30:19

this guy was interesting. Yeah, I liked it too.

30:21

He had like interesting ideas, very intentional. I

30:23

think it was inspiring for a lot of people.

30:25

And I love his method of keeping track

30:27

of every day, how good it is so you

30:29

can look for these trends. And so that's

30:31

probably the big picture thing, Julius, figuring out how

30:33

do you have more of the unbelievable days

30:35

and how do you have less of the survival

30:37

days? Short term, what do you do on

30:39

survival days. You're asking how to perform beyond the

30:42

bare minimum. Well, first of all, I

30:44

say don't have high expectations for those days. Life

30:47

is long. Okay,

30:49

so hard days, we have a fair

30:51

amount of those. You don't have to

30:54

try to squeeze out unless you really

30:56

have to. You don't have to try

30:58

to squeeze out more productivity. Being

31:02

organized working on things that are important

31:04

staying on top of things we talked about

31:06

that's a lot on this show You

31:08

know this services the bigger image of your

31:10

bigger goal of having a deep life,

31:12

but ultimately is trying to serve your life

31:14

so to make your life today harder

31:16

Because like well if I'm more productive today,

31:19

there's some abstract goal in the future

31:21

that might be better is a trade -off

31:23

you're robbing Peter to pay Paul Right if

31:25

you're having a hard day, let's honor

31:27

the fact that it's a hard day and

31:30

be okay with that, okay? I'm not doing

31:32

as much today. It's like when you're sick,

31:34

okay? I mean, my wife always gets, makes fun

31:36

of me because I'm sort of offended by

31:38

the idea of getting sick. Like

31:40

this is offensive to me that I can't like

31:42

go do X, Y, and Z and she'll

31:44

say you're sick, this is fine. So

31:46

I wanna first lower your expectations. The

31:48

next thing I would say,

31:51

okay, if you have hard days,

31:53

it helps in general to

31:55

minimize the self -initiated effort Required

31:57

for the stuff that kind of

31:59

keeps the lights on proverbial

32:01

speaking So in advance of any

32:03

hard days coming I'm a

32:05

big believer of trying to autopilot

32:07

as many survival activities as

32:09

possible So it's just this happens

32:11

automatically or on an automatic

32:13

schedule Like this is where like

32:15

how we deal with you

32:17

know bills and the the client

32:19

time sheets that have to

32:21

go out and you know this

32:23

these shopping that has to

32:25

happen, like the things that need

32:28

to happen. Make

32:30

that as autopilot as possible. So it's

32:32

either automated or it's automatically in your schedule.

32:34

I just do it without thinking the

32:36

first hour on Tuesdays. I gather all the

32:38

bills and as they come in throughout

32:40

the week, I gather them in this mail

32:42

sorter. And it's just the first thing

32:44

I do on Tuesday is that time is

32:46

never scheduled. I get a cup of

32:48

coffee and I sit down, I go through

32:50

them all. My filing cabinet's here and

32:53

I have stamps and I have whatever and

32:55

I walk. to the post office and

32:57

get a cinnamon roll there after I mail

32:59

them to sort of reward myself for

33:01

doing it. You don't have to think about

33:03

it. It's automated because the automated stuff

33:05

you can just execute even on hard days.

33:07

Like let me just do the automatic

33:09

stuff. What's hard is self -initiated effort because

33:11

your brain doesn't have the chemical energy it

33:13

needs to be like, let me get

33:15

ahead of motivational steam going here. Hey,

33:18

I know today is hard, but I really want

33:20

to get going on. working on

33:22

this project or trying to get five things done

33:24

off my to -do list. Come on, we gotta

33:26

motivate ourselves. It's hard to motivate yourself on hard

33:28

days. The automatic stuff you just do, you

33:30

still brush your teeth, you still take your kids to school. The

33:34

stuff that you normally do, you just sort of go

33:36

through the motions. So you wanna make in general, most

33:38

of the survival stuff, automated

33:40

or automatic. And

33:42

then when a hard day comes, you can be

33:44

like, great, I'm not gonna motivate myself to do

33:46

anything new. I'll do the stuff that's automatic and

33:48

then I'm going to eat that cinnamon roll. and

33:50

be okay with that. That

33:53

one took me a little while to

33:55

learn, Jesse. It took me a while

33:57

be like, it's okay to have harder

33:59

days. How often do you have hard days? For

34:02

me, sickness is a big one.

34:04

I get very frustrated by sickness. And

34:07

then unexpected... like family crises, like not me

34:09

being sick, but two kids being sick at

34:11

the same time or, you know, my wife

34:13

has to go here and this kid has

34:15

to go to the doctors or that type

34:17

of stuff. You get more used to it.

34:19

So I get a little bit more used

34:21

to like, that's fine. Like we'll be okay.

34:25

There's a bigger question here in addition to just

34:27

automating your schedule. There's like a bigger goal, which

34:29

has always been a big goal of mine is

34:31

trying to set up a work schedule where no

34:33

individual day is vital. That's a whole other conversation,

34:35

but to me, I think that's an important goal. where

34:38

you say, it's not vital that I work

34:40

on Tuesday, but it would be

34:42

a problem if I skipped every Tuesday. In

34:44

other words, you have give in your schedule. You're

34:46

working on important stuff. It requires a lot

34:48

of hard work, but you don't have a ton

34:50

of urgency. To me, that's sort of an

34:52

ideal schedule. All right, who do

34:54

we got next? Next up is Natasha. My

34:57

new job is shift -based and changes

34:59

weekly. With my old job,

35:01

I used to autopilot and use weekly templates.

35:03

Now, No can do anymore. How can I

35:05

plan and gain clarity with this changing schedule?

35:09

Well, first, let me just briefly define for

35:11

listeners who don't know what autopilots and

35:13

weekly templates are. Autopilots, we just talked about

35:15

in the last question. That's

35:17

where you have worked. It happens on a regular schedule.

35:19

And so you can have an automated way you deal

35:21

with it. Like, oh, I always do this Tuesday mornings.

35:25

Weekly templates. We talked

35:27

about this being like a general structure

35:29

for your week. So when you're doing

35:31

your weekly plans, you already kind of

35:33

have this general structure. Like you might say,

35:35

look, for this semester, if I'm a

35:37

teacher, I can have a general

35:39

weekly template knowing like these are teaching days

35:41

and this is generally how I'm gonna structure them

35:43

and non -teaching days, I'm gonna structure them this

35:46

way. Like non -teaching days, I'm gonna write until

35:48

noon. Teaching days, I'm gonna

35:50

prep before the first class and it's office hours.

35:52

Like you can kind of have a general

35:54

structure for your week for the current season. All

35:56

right, so in your case, you're saying the

35:58

structure of your job can change week to week.

36:00

Neither of these things will work. Okay, what

36:02

you need to really then lean into is your

36:04

weekly planning. Your weekly planning is

36:06

now more important because you're essentially having to

36:08

create de novo. You're creating from scratch a

36:10

smart plan for each week as you arrive

36:12

and understand what your shift work that week

36:14

is gonna look like. So you need to

36:16

put more time into your weekly planning. You

36:18

have to sit there and say, okay, how

36:20

am I going to make sense of this

36:23

week given that this is what my work

36:25

is going to look like? And

36:27

then you can mark up your calendar, however

36:29

you want to lock in your plan. Okay, well,

36:31

I'm going to do this type of work

36:33

here and I'm going to have to consolidate all

36:35

of these tasks for household tasks on the

36:37

Friday afternoon. You really want to make a careful

36:40

plan for each week. So give yourself 20,

36:42

30 minutes at the end of each week to

36:44

plan the next one. and put a

36:46

lot more emphasis into your weekly plan. The

36:48

key is intention. Yeah,

36:50

repeatability makes this a little easier. If you

36:52

could autopilot schedule, if you'd have a weekly

36:54

template, it's easier to weekly plan. You don't,

36:56

but the key is still to have intention.

36:58

And I think the weekly plan is going

37:00

to prove really important if the nature of

37:02

your weeks are really changing, really changing from

37:04

week to week. All

37:06

right, we're rolling here. Who do we got? Next

37:09

up is Bruce. Cal recently

37:11

talked about the distinction between the types

37:13

of AI. Can you clarify what

37:15

it means to reward a computer program? In

37:17

psychology, rewards are linked to effort

37:19

and motivation, but a computer or a program is

37:21

neutral in that respect. We

37:23

sneak in some AI content, Jesse.

37:26

You thought you got away from computer

37:28

science, Cal, but you

37:30

did not. Bruce brings up a

37:32

good point. We do use some phrases

37:34

in AI that sound value laden

37:36

or sort of anthropomorphized like rewards and

37:38

you're being rewarded and we think

37:40

of rewards, meaning we have a value

37:42

system, what's good or bad. What

37:45

this all comes down to in the discussion

37:47

I was having is just weights and neural

37:49

networks. Okay, so I

37:51

talked about two different types of

37:53

training. I'll do this briefly, but

37:56

I talked about two different types

37:58

of training. There was the unsupervised

38:00

or only semi -supervised Training

38:03

I guess will be semi supervised data

38:05

driven training like a language model does where

38:07

I said look they take a real

38:09

text that a human wrote and they'll knock

38:11

a word out of the text and

38:13

they'll they'll give the Model while training it

38:15

all of the text up to the

38:18

word that you knocked out and then you

38:20

tell the model try to predict what

38:22

word should go there and The closer it

38:24

gets to the the right word the

38:26

better You're kind of like

38:28

rewarded for that and the farther it

38:30

gets like no no you're off base.

38:32

You're thinking is off base. The other

38:35

type of training we talked about was

38:37

reinforcement learning where now instead of specifically

38:39

predicting a word you generate an action.

38:41

The model generates an action which is

38:43

evaluated by some other reward function you

38:45

would call it. It says how good

38:47

is this action. And if it's good,

38:49

you kind of zap the model. Like

38:52

that was good. And if it was

38:54

bad, you zap the model and say

38:56

that was bad. What does that mean,

38:58

zapping the model, rewarding it? At

39:00

the core of these models are

39:03

simulated neurons, right? So

39:05

they're digital neurons that are just

39:07

represented by numbers. And the way to

39:09

imagine it is you have these

39:11

layers of these simulated neurons that have

39:13

incoming connections. And

39:15

each of these connections are labeled with a number. And

39:17

a signal coming through each of these

39:19

connections gets multiplied or attenuated

39:22

by that number, and then

39:24

they get combined, and an activation

39:26

function is applied to them

39:28

to see if that neuron then

39:30

fires. Not to

39:32

get too technical, but it's typically a sigmoid function,

39:34

so you can differentiate it, but don't worry about

39:36

that. And then if it fires,

39:38

it has outgoing connections, and those are

39:40

connected to other neurons. So this types

39:42

of simulation of neurons is how the

39:44

thinking happens. Inputs come into the bottom

39:46

of these networks, and they pass

39:48

through these simulated neurons, and at the other

39:51

end of it, the signals that fire

39:53

in the final layer are sort of like the outputs. The

39:56

nice things about simulated neurons is that

39:58

you can represent them as just tables

40:00

of numbers, and you can simulate them

40:02

by just multiplying tables of numbers together.

40:04

And that turns out to be exactly

40:06

what modern graphic cards, GPU cards do.

40:08

This is why the revolution for PlayStation

40:10

to make our graphic cards faster made

40:13

it really fast to simulate really large

40:15

networks like this. All right, so all

40:17

the rewarding and zapping and all the

40:19

stuff I talk about is just tweaking

40:21

those numbers. So

40:23

I put some text into the bottom of

40:25

this network and coded as signals. They

40:27

go through the network and the signals at the

40:29

other end of the network point to a new word.

40:32

And if that word is like close

40:34

to what it should be, we

40:36

go back through and say, yeah, these numbers are

40:39

pretty good. But if it's far, we should tweak

40:41

these numbers. These numbers weren't very good. Let's try

40:43

messing around with them a little bit. super

40:46

high level, but that's what's happening. Same thing with

40:48

the reward function for reinforcement learning. If

40:50

we don't like the action that the network point

40:52

out, the negative zap is going to change a

40:54

bunch of the numbers in the network. Be

40:57

like, let's move away from whatever you got to

40:59

this conclusion. Let's kind of move you in a

41:01

different direction. And then if eventually

41:03

it starts doing something good, we'll sort

41:05

of solidify those numbers. The

41:07

actual mechanisms by which this happens is

41:09

we'll hear fancy terms like back propagation.

41:12

All these are ways of like going

41:14

through and kind of changing these

41:16

numbers. So all it is is Rewards

41:18

and training is you're just tweaking

41:20

numbers in these tables of numbers to

41:22

be towards things that are giving

41:24

better answers and away from things that

41:26

are giving worse answers That's what's

41:28

actually going on there. So there's no

41:30

affect or value judgments actually happening

41:32

All right, what we got next next

41:34

up is Tanya my boss regularly

41:36

goes on 40 minute talking tangents about

41:38

things not related to work. This

41:40

is disruptive My cube is next

41:42

to her office, so she walks by regularly. I

41:44

have morning focus blocks, but she always interrupts

41:46

them. Is there anything I can do to stop

41:48

these? I mean, I'm thinking, what do

41:50

you think, Jesse Airhorn? I

41:54

empathize, Tanya, that's a

41:57

hard situation. What

41:59

you're going to have to do

42:01

there is you have to differentiate your

42:03

deep work sessions more definitively. And

42:05

I'm going to entreat you to be

42:07

a little bit braver about this. Two

42:10

options I'm going to suggest. Option

42:12

number one is the headphone option, right?

42:15

You kind of tell people, yeah, I like

42:17

listening to white noise or brown noise. When

42:19

working on something that requires concentration, it

42:21

kind of helps in the office, especially the

42:23

cube environment. So when you have those

42:25

on, it's kind of indicating the people I

42:28

am doing deep work versus when you

42:30

have those off. indicates

42:32

that you're not. And the message kind of gets

42:34

there pretty soon, right? Because now the boss has to

42:36

like tap you on the shoulder and you have

42:38

to take off the headphones. And at first, you know,

42:40

they'll want to know what those are. And you're

42:42

like, yeah, when I'm really focusing, this helps me focus

42:44

and get into a state of focus. And kind

42:46

of the message is planted. And it

42:48

becomes a little bit harder for her to say like, I'm

42:50

just gonna make you take off those headphones just so

42:52

we can chat. The boss is bored. You

42:55

have those headphones on, she'll learn to go to the

42:57

next victim. I shouldn't say victim,

42:59

colleague. but it's going to save

43:01

you. The other thing you can consider

43:03

is getting the habit of having

43:05

a separate location for focus. And

43:07

I don't mean like, oh, I work somewhere

43:09

else. Like you might have to be in your

43:11

office, but get in the habit and you

43:13

can get approval for this. And people are typically

43:15

on board with this, reserving a conference room,

43:18

or maybe there's like another spot in the office.

43:20

Like, yeah, that's where I go when I'm

43:22

really trying to concentrate on something. It helps me

43:24

to have a different environment. And it just

43:26

literally takes you away from her. It's also useful

43:28

for you though, beyond trying to avoid talking

43:30

tangents for your own mind. It gives you these

43:32

really clear distinctions between in my focusing or

43:34

not. And you begin to crave

43:36

like, oh, headphone time or conference room time. And

43:38

you're more likely to do more of that. You're

43:40

also going to get more value out of it

43:42

because like, if I'm going through all the trouble

43:44

of going to a conference room or putting on

43:47

my headphones, I don't want to open my inbox.

43:49

Like, why don't I actually just do the work

43:51

I really want to do? So it's going to

43:53

make you more effective as well. But. Yeah, I

43:55

definitely empathize. Definitely empathize with

43:57

that. All

43:59

right. Call. Okay,

44:02

we got a call. Let's hear it. We have two actually,

44:04

but we'll play the first one first. Double call, I'm liking

44:07

it. Hi, Karl and Jesse.

44:09

This is Yvonne from London in the UK.

44:11

I've been listening for about two years

44:13

and I found you via Sarah Hart Unger

44:15

and Laura Vanderkam. And as

44:17

someone who works full -time outside the home,

44:19

has little kids, volunteers, runs a side hustle,

44:21

I've definitely benefited from hearing you talk

44:23

about time blocking and autopilot scheduling. It's

44:26

really fun to hear how someone else with lots of

44:28

different jobs makes it work. And just

44:30

so that you get a chance to play the theme

44:32

music, I will mention that I have read Slow Productivity,

44:34

along with a couple of your earlier books too. So

44:37

my question today is about David Allen's book

44:39

Getting Things Done. You and Sarah

44:41

both mentioned him a lot and I can definitely see

44:43

the links with full capture. But

44:45

a lot of that book is about identifying

44:47

the next actions on every project and keeping

44:49

a big list or several lists sorted by

44:51

context so that when you have some time

44:53

you can just dip into them. I

44:55

hear you talk about Trello boards and

44:57

not context switching, but I don't think I've

44:59

ever heard you specifically mention a list

45:01

of next actions. So I'd be

45:03

interested in your thoughts on that part

45:06

of the GTD methodology and how you

45:08

approach that or something similar. Thanks. Hello,

45:11

Cal. All right. Well, she

45:13

did mention slow productivity. So do we get the

45:15

theme? Is that still loaded? Yeah. All right.

45:17

Let's get the right mindset by hearing that slow

45:19

productivity theme music. Now

45:25

we're in the mindset. First

45:27

of all, let's just relax. It's not that

45:29

big of a deal. GTD.

45:33

Getting things done. Okay, next

45:36

action. So this is

45:38

a big focus of

45:40

Alan. He thinks,

45:42

he has a couple ideas, some

45:44

of which I really agree

45:46

with. But one of his big

45:48

ideas is tasks paralyze us

45:50

when we think about them too

45:52

abstractly. And really what tasks

45:54

actually are is a physical action

45:56

you can do. And when

45:59

you reduce some of the next

46:01

actions, they're much easier to

46:03

deal with. And work becomes easier

46:05

because work becomes less about

46:07

grappling with these big weird abstract

46:09

monsters like client visit exclamation

46:11

point. And it becomes something much

46:13

simpler such as call the

46:15

caterer to get a quote for

46:18

client visit. Like that's something

46:20

you can actually do. So

46:22

I do think there

46:24

is insight into getting

46:26

to more clarity about

46:28

what actual actions are.

46:30

There's a couple of places I differ with Alan, though.

46:33

One is I think a lot of

46:35

work is not reducible to a

46:37

concrete short next action. I think a

46:39

lot of work has to do with

46:41

longer, deep work sessions. I think to

46:43

come up with a business strategy

46:45

right for a couple hours. That's gonna

46:47

be you know two hours among a

46:49

thousand that eventually it's gonna take

46:52

to finish this book that you're writing

46:54

Brainstorm right like there's certain things that

46:56

it's not like a concrete action.

46:58

You can just crank through it's a

47:00

Cognitive activity that's gonna take time I

47:02

think more in terms of activity sometimes

47:04

I do actions right some things

47:06

are actions to send this email some

47:08

are activities Go research this topic and

47:10

try to come up with like

47:12

a plan for what to do next

47:14

and they resist being sensibly

47:16

broken down in the small actions. So

47:19

I do think it's important to be clear,

47:21

but I don't obsess about it as much

47:23

as Alan does. The other

47:25

thing that I do differently

47:27

with my Trello boards is

47:29

Alan thinks that if I'm

47:31

understanding his system properly, if

47:34

you break down something in the next

47:36

actions, you only have the very next action

47:38

on your action list. So like,

47:40

let's go back to our example of

47:42

client visit exclamation part. He

47:44

would say, You would just take the very

47:46

next thing that he would call it

47:48

a project if it requires more than one

47:50

task as a project. The very next

47:52

thing goes on your task list and that

47:54

might be call the caterer. But you

47:56

don't want to forget that there's more things

47:58

to do there. So he would say,

48:00

then you should have a separate list of

48:02

projects where you have plan client visit.

48:05

He calls those stakes in the ground. And

48:07

then if I'm understanding the system properly,

48:09

you're supposed to regularly review this list of

48:11

projects and be like, oh, Am

48:13

I up to speed on this project?

48:15

Yeah. What's the next step that makes sense?

48:17

Let me go add that over to

48:20

my task list. There's like a separate process

48:22

of generating new tasks from your project

48:24

list, which is separate from your sort of

48:26

main wheel of progress, which is just

48:28

trying to grab next actions from your list

48:30

and execute them. So he really wants

48:32

you not to have to think about anything

48:34

but just executing actions unless you're specifically

48:36

in a planning state where you're looking at

48:38

your projects or trying to think what's

48:40

important. I think that's a

48:42

little bit much and it's something that's too

48:44

much friction for most people. So like

48:46

typically for me, if I have a

48:48

project that's gonna require a lot of things,

48:50

I might have one card for it

48:52

and I'm gathering all the relevant information and

48:54

my best understanding of what to do

48:56

and what information we have on one card,

48:58

but then I'll highlight on the front

49:00

of the card the next thing to do.

49:02

This is the advantage of a digital

49:04

world that largely Alan wasn't grappling with in

49:06

the late 90s, early 2000s when he

49:08

was writing this, but with tools like Trello

49:10

that client visit, I can now have

49:12

a card for client visit. And all the

49:14

information is on there somewhere, but on

49:16

the front of the card, it might be

49:18

like next step is like call caterer.

49:20

And then, um, I'll usually put in parentheses,

49:22

like schedule next or S in I'll

49:24

put. And so like when I put

49:26

that task where it needs to go, when I

49:29

execute that, I have all the information right there

49:31

to figure out like what, what the next things

49:33

are going to be, or I'll have like three

49:35

tasks on the front of it, like get through

49:37

these three next steps or whatever. Um, so I'm

49:39

a little looser. I'll put a lot of steps

49:41

can be captured on the same card. And sometimes

49:43

I'll highlight the next one only and then update

49:45

what's on the front of the card once I

49:47

do it. So I integrate projects more often if

49:49

they're like medium size like that into the card

49:51

itself. Obviously, if it's a big

49:53

project, I'll have a dedicated column for

49:55

it. Something's going to take

49:57

a few months. I might have a

49:59

dedicated column of just tasks for that.

50:02

But I have projects, my tasks right

50:04

there on my list. So hopefully that's.

50:06

That's somewhat clarifying. G2D is a little

50:08

bit confusing, Jesse. have a 16 -element

50:10

flow chart that's part of it. To

50:13

really learn it, people

50:15

like the confusingness because I think it makes it

50:17

seem more likely to them that it's going to

50:19

work. The complexity

50:21

and the specificity seems well

50:23

-suited to the complexity of

50:25

their work. But sometimes you

50:27

have to be a little bit looser. Do you put

50:29

the next task in the title of the card or

50:31

just like in the tops parts that you can see?

50:33

It's not really titles. So if you look at a

50:35

Trello card, it's not really titles. It's

50:38

just like text. It's just what you can

50:40

see before you open the card. Like so the

50:42

first couple of lines. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

50:44

Well, so there's a back. It's

50:46

called like more information. So there's

50:48

like, here's what's on the front of the card. It's just

50:50

a text box. Yeah. You can actually make it pretty

50:52

long. Yeah. And then there's like a, if you click on

50:54

the card and kind of flip it over, then you

50:56

have More information you

50:58

can add text and you can attach files.

51:00

You can do checklists You can do like

51:03

there's a lot of stuff you can start

51:05

to put on the the back of the

51:07

card So some like trailer cards will have

51:09

a few things on it on the front

51:11

and then but I always I Always have

51:13

a note usually like see back for more

51:15

for next or whatever But I like to

51:18

keep information Consolidated if it's a project that's

51:20

big and small enough that you can kind

51:22

of keep it all in one place I

51:24

like to keep it all in one place,

51:26

right? So all that

51:28

stuff does help, especially if this caller is

51:30

talking you have a lot of roles. All

51:33

right, do we have a second call this week? We do. All

51:35

right. Well, and Jesse,

51:37

my name is Declan. I'm a

51:39

computer science student at the

51:41

New Jersey Institute of Technology. Unfortunately,

51:43

that is not MIT, that

51:45

is NJIT. I'm

51:48

a junior right now and

51:50

undergraduate and I'm facing a

51:52

crazy job market. I've applied

51:54

to countless co -ops and internships

51:56

without any luck yet. And

51:59

in the meantime, I know I think what

52:01

I should be doing is improving my skills.

52:04

I want to be so good they

52:06

ignore me, but I am struggling

52:08

with the wide variety of options that

52:10

I have. In school,

52:12

I'm learning everything from web

52:14

development to computer networks, to data

52:16

science, to AI, to

52:18

more low -level programming and

52:20

hardware. And I just

52:22

am having trouble finding one

52:24

space where I can build

52:26

true depth. I'm graduating

52:28

in May of next year, and

52:30

I fear feeling unsure of what direction

52:32

to head in when I get

52:34

there. So I guess my

52:37

question is, how would you recommend choosing a

52:39

technical focus and building valuable skills if

52:41

you were in my position? What

52:43

strategies should I use to create the

52:45

deep work environment necessary to gain traction

52:47

in such a broad and competitive field?

52:50

Given your credentials, I couldn't imagine a

52:52

better person to ask this question. So

52:54

I thank you in advance for any advice that

52:56

you could offer me. I remember

52:59

NGIT. It's a New Jersey

53:01

native myself. Here's

53:03

a good question. I'm glad

53:05

you're asking it because typically people don't confront this

53:07

question until they're on the job market and

53:09

it's too late. I would say right now,

53:11

go look at job listings. Go

53:13

look at... are the job listings that

53:15

most catch your attention the companies you

53:18

would most want to work for and

53:20

say what are they looking for? What

53:23

experiences are they asking for

53:25

then? I would go to the

53:27

graduating class perfect time to do this

53:29

and Find the students in the major who

53:31

are taking impressive jobs and say hey,

53:33

can I take you out for like a

53:35

beer or coffee or whatever? I want

53:37

to find out like Why did you get

53:39

this job? Like what was the market

53:41

like what helped you stand out? And

53:44

you're going to find out there what skills

53:46

are important. You'll find out the importance of

53:48

grades. Maybe they're going to say, no, no,

53:50

here's what you need to do. You need

53:52

to start contributing to some open source projects

53:54

and show off your skills in X, Y,

53:56

and Z. Get evidence -based information. And

53:59

then focus like a laser beam on improving those skills.

54:01

You also want to get good grades. I mean, this ship

54:03

is somewhat sailed. You only have one year left. But

54:05

do as well as you can. Keep your schedule simple. Just

54:07

focus on the CS. Give

54:09

yourself more than enough time to crush the classes.

54:11

Having good grades does matter. That's an important signal

54:13

that gets past various screens at some of these

54:15

institutions. But what you really need is like, what

54:17

are the specific skills that people that I want

54:19

to work for who are hiring for my school?

54:21

What skills are they looking for? Let me choose

54:23

one of those to get good at. Let me

54:25

also talk to grads who got good jobs and

54:27

say, what was it that mattered most? And then

54:29

focus like a laser beam on exactly that. So

54:31

you're asking the right question, which is what is

54:33

valuable? What you're not doing,

54:35

and I appreciate this, is you're not writing a story. about

54:38

what you want to be valuable. You're

54:41

not saying, look, I want my

54:43

basic programming or my scratch games to

54:45

be the thing that matters. Like,

54:47

no, what is it? Is it being

54:49

able to work with like Python

54:51

based AI libraries or is it doing

54:53

like 3D graphic design or is

54:56

it doing assembly language coding or who

54:58

knows, right? You got to see

55:00

what people are looking for right now,

55:02

build a skill that's valuable, have

55:04

a strong pitch as you get on

55:06

the market. Your science is a

55:08

great field to be in. If you build

55:10

the right skills, you'll find the job, but

55:12

also keep in mind, you don't need the dream

55:14

job out of school. You just want to

55:16

get in the industry. That's when you can really

55:18

begin to become so good. When you see

55:21

like what's valuable in the marketplace and you do

55:23

that, that's when you begin laddering up and

55:25

gaining autonomy and career capital. So you've got to

55:27

find somewhere and really start shipping. But

55:29

in the meantime, investigate what's

55:31

valuable for the people hiring

55:33

from your school. Do

55:36

not write a story that you want to

55:38

be true. There's a

55:40

rough job market, tech industries. Everyone's

55:42

a little bit hazy right now.

55:45

There's a rough job. When I

55:47

graduated grad school, this was

55:49

right during the financial crisis. I got my

55:51

doctor in 2009. And so we all

55:54

had to go become postdocs. No

55:56

one was hiring. And so was like,

55:58

we all became postdocs for a couple of years, just

56:00

did more research. Like we basically just, and then it

56:02

worked out fine. And then people like

56:04

me who did that, we just got 10 year early,

56:06

like we just moved, we just had

56:08

a two year, like a head start when we

56:10

got started with our faculty jobs or whatever. But

56:12

I remember that it was a rough job, even

56:14

coming out of MIT with like a pretty good

56:16

H index, it was like no one

56:18

could hire, everyone was paralyzed, all the universities were paralyzed,

56:20

the tech companies were paralyzed, the economy was in

56:22

free fall. So we had to kind of just hang

56:24

out for a little bit longer in Boston. So

56:27

I feel it, it happens, but you know,

56:29

markets get better. Good. Best

56:31

job you can. And then start moving once you're there.

56:35

All right. So I think we have

56:37

a good final segment where I'm going

56:39

to react to something. But first, let's

56:41

briefly hear from another sponsor. We'll

56:43

talk about our friends at Kinsta. I'm

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a WordPress guy. My

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digital life has been run

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56:52

beginning, the very original Cal

56:54

Newport.com. That's on WordPress. It's remained

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spend a lot of time with WordPress. Jesse spends

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visit kinsta.com slash deep questions

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59:00

-I -N -S -T -A dot com

59:02

slash deep questions. I also

59:04

want to talk about our friends at Udacity. We

59:06

were just talking about it in a recent question. the

59:10

difficulty of the job market out there, especially

59:12

right now, what do you need to survive

59:14

in the current job market? Skills, you have to

59:16

be able to build up skills. You have

59:18

to pivot and say, here's what is valuable right

59:20

now. How do I learn that? How do

59:22

I get up to that speed? How do I

59:25

make myself more valuable? This is where Udacity

59:27

enters the scene, because their courses,

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their online learning courses can help

59:31

you learn the skills that command the

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high salaries. We're talking AI, we're

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Instead of just looking for

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random YouTube videos or prompting

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GPT for answers, Udacity

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removes the guesswork so you can

59:46

learn what you need to know and

59:48

nothing that you don't. These

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courses are fantastic. 87

59:52

% of Udacity graduates say

59:54

that they achieved their

59:56

enrollment goal by taking these

59:58

courses. Both Jesse and I have

1:00:00

used Udacity. I actually went through a

1:00:02

couple game programming courses with my

1:00:04

son. We really enjoyed it. But Jesse,

1:00:07

you did something with marketing. Yeah, I took

1:00:09

a marketing class. Yeah. I mean, it's

1:00:11

a great platform. Yeah, works well at the

1:00:13

videos. You have the exercises, you know,

1:00:15

you move through in this ordered way. There's

1:00:17

tons of options for learning tech skills, but

1:00:19

only Udacity is consistently ranked as the top

1:00:22

skill development platform because it actually works. They've

1:00:24

been at this for a long time and

1:00:26

they've honed in on how do we make

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courses that actually work. You're going to have

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real world projects. You can have human experts

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that grade what you're doing. Udacity

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is how you are going to get better

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at things that matters. And because Udacity has

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been around long enough, recruiters

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1:00:43

certification. They'll take notice of

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that. They know what that means that it's

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not something achieved lightly. So

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for a better job, better salary, better skills, you

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1:01:14

right, just let's move on to our final segment. All

1:01:17

right, so we're going to do a react

1:01:19

segment. Is that right? Yeah. All right. What

1:01:21

am I reacting to this week? What is

1:01:23

the internet dealt up to us for me

1:01:25

to take a look at? Craig Maude was

1:01:28

on Tim Ferriss's show last month and he

1:01:30

was talking about his epic walks in Japan

1:01:32

where he Craig Maude, the writer who walks.

1:01:34

Yeah. Yeah. I know who this is. Yeah.

1:01:36

So I'll play a clip. All right. This

1:01:38

is from the Tim Ferriss show. Yep. Okay.

1:01:41

The news. You're not allowed to read the news. There's

1:01:43

no social media. And by you, that

1:01:45

means Craig. That means, yeah, if you're

1:01:47

walking or if I'm walking, I'm always

1:01:49

talk about Me and the third person

1:01:51

so you can't read the news. You

1:01:53

can't do social media You can't touch

1:01:55

any of that stuff basically the idea

1:01:57

is to just be radically present radically

1:02:00

radically present and radically cultivate like a

1:02:02

boredom an incredible sense of boredom and

1:02:04

never teleport I mean I think one

1:02:06

of the weirdest things about being a contemporary

1:02:08

human is like first of all We're

1:02:10

never bored because we always have this stupid

1:02:12

black mirror slab in our pocket right

1:02:14

that's like always distracting us with some other

1:02:16

dopamine hit and We're constantly

1:02:18

teleporting. If there's any

1:02:20

millimeter of friction, if there's one millisecond of

1:02:22

friction in your life, you just pull

1:02:24

that stupid thing out and start sucking at

1:02:26

the teat of whatever information, you

1:02:30

know, cow is in there, right? All

1:02:32

right. I love this. First of all, Craig is an

1:02:34

interesting guy for what I know about him. He's

1:02:36

a writer. He's based in Japan and he does these

1:02:38

epic walks. Yeah. Like very long.

1:02:41

Very long walks. Yeah. But

1:02:43

I didn't know this detail about it, that

1:02:45

he's really focused on being present

1:02:47

during the walk. He's not on his

1:02:49

phone. He's not looking at social media. He's

1:02:53

got a script for his phone that

1:02:55

he dictates into so he can't open

1:02:58

other things. He just has the map

1:03:00

function too. So we can take notes.

1:03:02

You can take notes by scripting in

1:03:04

and he's got this freedom software too. I've

1:03:07

been thinking about this exact topic. You

1:03:09

didn't know it, Jesse, but for my deep

1:03:11

life book. So I've been

1:03:13

looking at some other things similar to this.

1:03:15

Let me set the context here. So

1:03:18

I'm writing the first part of the book

1:03:20

is about getting your act

1:03:22

together before you try to change

1:03:24

your life. Okay, so I'm in a chapter in

1:03:26

there about time management. And

1:03:28

in time management, I'm like, I'm not

1:03:30

gonna give you a super detailed system

1:03:32

you have to follow. I'm gonna give you

1:03:34

like, here's three questions. You need some sort

1:03:36

of answers for these three questions. And the

1:03:38

last of those questions is sort of, Why

1:03:40

are you doing it? And it's about like

1:03:42

having some way of thinking systematically about workload. As

1:03:46

I'm talking about like, how do

1:03:48

you think more systematically about your workload and

1:03:50

prevent it from getting out of control? One

1:03:53

of the ideas I was just wrangling with

1:03:55

like yesterday, thinking about

1:03:57

this book was

1:03:59

as you build more of

1:04:01

an appreciation for quote unquote,

1:04:03

doing nothing. Like I

1:04:06

really enjoy just like

1:04:08

quiet. and presence, it

1:04:10

gives you a back pressure against

1:04:12

busyness, because busyness feels like it's

1:04:14

encroaching on that thing you really

1:04:16

like. And so I

1:04:18

have this theory that we've lost

1:04:20

our taste for presence, for doing

1:04:22

nothing, the long walk and just

1:04:24

enjoying what's around us. And because

1:04:26

we've lost our taste for that,

1:04:28

because we fill that time with

1:04:31

digital distractions, we lose the back

1:04:33

pressure against busyness, we just get

1:04:35

busier. You know, like,

1:04:37

yeah, why not? why not do more things?

1:04:39

Because we're not picturing what's being lost

1:04:41

because we don't do that anymore. So I

1:04:43

love this idea of trying to purposely

1:04:45

just be out there and be present. It's

1:04:48

relevant to my recent trip to

1:04:50

Boston because we were going through some

1:04:52

of my old neighborhoods. And when

1:04:55

I lived on Beacon Hill, I would

1:04:57

walk every morning across the Longfellow

1:04:59

Bridge, the campus on MIT. And

1:05:01

I would force myself I'd

1:05:03

have my dog with me often. I would force

1:05:05

myself to just be like Craig Maud on that

1:05:07

walk. I have to just observe like what's going

1:05:09

on. What's happening to like the buds are starting

1:05:11

on this tree. What's happening with the ice on

1:05:14

the Charles? How is this looking today? I was

1:05:16

doing, I was on a whole thorough kick at

1:05:18

the time. So really like observing the world around

1:05:20

me. And I found it very sinnering, you know,

1:05:22

just to be present and really understand every day

1:05:24

and how the weather changed from day to day.

1:05:26

And then I would run home across the Harvard

1:05:28

bridge, the Mass App Bridge and come back on

1:05:30

the Espionade. And you're like really, Plugged

1:05:32

in to like the weather and the seasons

1:05:34

and exactly what was happening and you would appreciate

1:05:37

what was new and when you get the

1:05:39

first warm day like we were at Boston for

1:05:41

the first warm day last week you would

1:05:43

really appreciate that and and all this stuff Matt

1:05:45

where the Sun was a different types of

1:05:47

the day and I found that That was really

1:05:49

nice. They missed a lot of that. So

1:05:51

I think what Craig is doing there is really

1:05:53

interesting Someone else who had this instinct with

1:05:55

John Muir, you know the famous naturalist A little

1:05:57

known part of his story. I might cover

1:05:59

this in more detail. I was just reading about

1:06:02

it this morning, but just to say it

1:06:04

briefly. It's an interesting part of his story where

1:06:06

he was mechanically minded and got a job

1:06:08

in Indianapolis working on contraptions, I don't know, some

1:06:10

sort of machining job or whatever. He's like,

1:06:12

I like this. I'm good at this is what

1:06:14

I want to do. I'm good at building

1:06:16

things. I'm going to like work in one of

1:06:18

these jobs. He got an

1:06:20

owl, AWL in his eye.

1:06:23

And he went blind for a while. His

1:06:25

other eye went like sympathetically blind. And when

1:06:27

he came out of this blindness, he was

1:06:29

like sort of nuts to this. The world

1:06:31

is too, you know, I'm

1:06:33

not gonna keep putting off experiencing the

1:06:35

world. And he took a train, he

1:06:39

headed east to something

1:06:41

like Jefferson, Missouri, maybe,

1:06:43

and then like walked from there to Florida.

1:06:45

So he went on this epic walk basically

1:06:47

like across the whole, it's like, I'm just

1:06:49

gonna walk and just Encounter the

1:06:51

world and it kind of kicked off this

1:06:53

new life as a naturalist where his whole

1:06:55

life was about just he could see again

1:06:57

He's like and I want to see and

1:06:59

so in some sense I think for a

1:07:01

lot of people coming out of a world

1:07:03

connected to that smartphone at every moment of

1:07:05

distraction is like John Muir getting his vision

1:07:08

back and his left eye. It's like, ooh,

1:07:10

I can see again in the world is

1:07:12

really interesting. So I love this idea more

1:07:14

time away from your phone, more time non

1:07:16

-teleporting into other worlds or into reacting to

1:07:18

other people's minds, more time just reacting to

1:07:20

the world around you. It's what we are

1:07:22

wired to do. And when you go back

1:07:24

to it, it's like going home. Like this feels really

1:07:26

natural in a way that just staring at that screen all

1:07:28

the time didn't. So I like that. I'll have to listen

1:07:30

to this whole episode now. Yeah, there's two of them actually.

1:07:33

Excellent. It was two parts. Yeah. Well,

1:07:35

Ferris loves Japan too. Yeah. They were speaking

1:07:37

Japanese and, and, and, and, and Mod lives

1:07:39

in Japan. So that makes sense. Yeah. All

1:07:42

right. Well, speaking of walking, I'm going to walk

1:07:44

on out of the studio, but thank you for listening.

1:07:46

And we'll be back next week with another

1:07:48

episode and Intel then as always stay deep. Hi,

1:07:53

it's Cal here. One more thing

1:07:55

before you go. If you

1:07:57

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