0:00

What's happening people? Welcome back to the

0:02

show. My guest today is Cal Newport.

0:04

He's a computer science professor at Georgetown

0:06

University, a pro- Ahem. Hello

0:09

everybody, welcome back to the show.

0:11

My guest today is Cal Newport.

0:13

He's a computer science professor at

0:16

Georgetown University, a productivity expert, and

0:18

an author. If you've ever felt

0:20

that you're not as productive as you could be,

0:22

you are not alone. But what if the goal

0:24

isn't to be more productive, but to let go

0:26

of the goals that aren't serving you? What if

0:29

the power of saying no to more things is

0:31

the most important skill you can develop? Expect

0:33

to learn what our current problem

0:35

with productivity is, why pseudo-productivity is

0:38

a catastrophe, the advantages to what

0:40

Cal calls slow productivity, how to

0:42

better organize your communication, the best

0:44

strategies for implementing a productivity schedule,

0:46

how to stop saying yes all

0:48

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now, ladies and gentlemen, please

3:46

welcome Cal Newport. I

4:06

was saying I'm really impressed with what you've

4:08

done with your podcast. Oh yeah, thank you.

4:10

Really cool. You know, for a

4:12

one-stop shop for understanding productivity and where it's at

4:14

and your history. I was hearing you try and

4:17

use some example of the Cretaceous

4:19

period of how email got introduced or

4:22

something. I was geeking out on that

4:24

one. Yeah. Yeah. The

4:27

KT boundary and email. Yes. Dinosaurs

4:29

and emails. I was having some fun

4:31

with that one. As it always does. Talk to

4:33

me about what the problem

4:35

is with our current definition of productivity.

4:38

Well, it's a bad one. Right? I

4:40

think that's what's going on is that in knowledge work, what

4:43

happened is I went back and dug

4:45

up this history, right, to try to understand. You

4:47

get the knowledge work as a

4:49

major sector begins to emerge roughly

4:51

mid-20th century. When it emerges,

4:54

there's this question of, okay, how are we going

4:56

to measure the productivity of people? How

4:58

are we going to actually manage people? This

5:00

is a harder question you would think, right, because before

5:03

the knowledge sector arose as a major thing, what did

5:05

you have as the major thing in the economy? The

5:07

industrial sector. Right? And it's

5:09

going to be productivity in the industrial sector.

5:11

It's quantitative. It's model

5:13

T's produced per labor hour input,

5:16

right? You had a number you could measure. You

5:18

could change the way you did it, right?

5:20

Let's move from the craft method to the assembly line and

5:22

see that number go up and say this is better. You

5:25

go to knowledge work. None of that works anymore.

5:27

Right? Because I'm working on seven different things.

5:29

It's different than what you're working on. How

5:31

I'm doing the work is kind of up to

5:34

me. I have my own private sort of

5:36

organizational systems. There's no clear thing that we can

5:38

improve or mess around with. So we don't

5:40

have a good old-fashioned definition of productivity. So

5:42

what do we do in that space? We said, well, we'll just

5:45

use visible activity as

5:48

a proxy for useful effort.

5:50

So if I see you doing stuff, that's

5:53

better than you not doing stuff. And if we need to

5:55

do better, let's do more stuff

5:57

like get there earlier. Let's work later.

6:00

I call that pseudo-productivity. That's

6:02

implicitly been what has been driving

6:05

knowledge work activity for at least 70 years. You

6:08

asked your readers or listeners, I

6:10

think, to try and define productivity.

6:13

This is a community of people that have come

6:15

together to watch a show

6:17

specifically on productivity, and

6:19

they failed to come up with a good synthesis

6:21

for what they meant by the thing they're interested

6:24

in. No, they couldn't do it. Here's what most

6:26

people did when I asked them. They basically just

6:28

summarized what their job was. So like,

6:30

what is productivity? And they're like, well, it's, you know, doing

6:33

my DevOps responsibilities well.

6:36

They would just parrot back what their

6:38

job was and say, I guessed that's

6:40

productivity. So that's the issue with pseudo-productivity,

6:43

is it's unnamed. So we

6:45

don't actually recognize or admit this is what we're doing, which

6:48

is just activities better than non-activity. So

6:51

we can't fix it because we don't know there

6:53

is something to fix. But my big argument is

6:55

that pseudo-productivity went off the rails once

6:58

we had computers and networks and emails and

7:00

laptop and work could follow you anywhere. And

7:02

you could demonstrate activity anywhere you were at

7:05

any time. You see this

7:07

in the productivity literature. We talk about

7:09

productivity completely different in the 90s than

7:12

we do in the early 2000s. Oh, yeah, didn't

7:15

you track productivity advice

7:17

from the 50s through until the modern day

7:20

or so, like an archeologist of productivity

7:22

advice? So take me through what we being told

7:25

about how to be more productive in the 50s

7:27

up to today. Yeah, I wrote this for the

7:29

New Yorker recently. And this was all for my

7:31

own shelf because I geek out on this stuff.

7:33

So I have a historical collection of sort of

7:35

vintage productivity. Yeah, so you see, we're gonna see

7:37

a big change when we get to the 2000s.

7:39

But starting the 50, the 1950s, the very first

7:41

book, it's

7:44

really the very first book on what we

7:46

would think of as modern time management. And

7:48

it's called The Management of Time, right?

7:51

It came out in 1950s. Good title. Yeah,

7:53

it was a good title, right? But it's not at all what you would expect. It's

7:56

almost entirely psychological, right? So

7:58

knowledge work as a new. it was

8:00

new, these large organizations in which you

8:02

were sitting at desks, a lot of

8:04

this was new, so most of the

8:06

management of time is actually

8:08

just grappling psychologically with this new reality.

8:11

It's the, how do you even, what's

8:14

the mindset to even have to

8:16

deal with a world in which you're no longer turning a

8:18

wrench on an assembly line, but there's all this stuff coming

8:20

at you. All right, 1960s,

8:22

definitive book, the effective executive, right,

8:25

Peter Drucker. Still read today. Fantastic book, right.

8:27

Peter Drucker, by the way, coined the term

8:29

knowledge work, so he was really a key

8:32

figure in understanding knowledge work, why it's

8:34

different. That book is all space age

8:36

optimism, right. It's all like,

8:38

okay, we can optimize, we

8:41

can optimize the hell out of this. It's, you know,

8:43

okay, executives, you need to keep a log of like

8:45

what you're doing every minute of the day, and then

8:47

we're gonna go back and we're gonna study this log

8:49

and we're gonna find the inefficiencies and we're gonna remove

8:51

those and you're gonna figure out like the optimal set

8:53

of actions. So it's very space age,

8:55

you know, we're just gonna throw a lot of

8:57

engineering at work and we're gonna make it

8:59

optimal. The 70s, everything

9:02

gets depressed, right, because the

9:04

American economy in the 70s is stagflation,

9:06

it's Jimmy Carter and the Great Malays,

9:08

right. So everyone is

9:10

in a bad mood. And so the

9:12

70s book I have is just A,

9:14

B, C through Z. So it's alphabetical.

9:17

And for every letter, it just has some things relevant

9:20

to the office that start with that

9:22

letter. And then they give you a

9:24

couple of paragraphs. Like B, briefcases. Well,

9:27

it's what you should look

9:29

for in your briefcases. A,

9:31

alcohol. Because they-

9:33

Bro and tea. Well, it's

9:35

clear from that entry that they were drinking

9:37

a lot at work. When you see

9:39

the advice, it was like, you know, I

9:42

don't know, maybe not have that third martini at

9:44

lunch. That was the advice? Yeah, something like that.

9:47

Wow. W, this is Dom, I'm making

9:50

this up, waste basket tree, waste

9:52

basket tree. Waste basket tree. It's

9:56

like the art of building waste baskets and where they

9:58

should be positioned. How many waste baskets to have? But

10:00

yeah, so anyways, there was no ambition

10:03

in the 70s. So it was just like,

10:05

let's just, all right, how do you keep

10:07

your- Procedural. Procedural, yeah. Then you get

10:09

to the 80s and 90s, now it's Stephen Covey. Right,

10:11

so 80s and 90s, right now

10:14

we're thinking Wall Street. We're thinking

10:16

the American consumer boom, the economy

10:18

starts booming, right? And so now

10:20

you get seven

10:22

habits of highly effective people. That's

10:25

in the 80s, first things first in the 90s. These

10:27

are all about work as

10:29

self-actualization, right? And so Covey is

10:31

like, here's what we're gonna do. It's incredibly

10:33

optimistic. You're gonna figure out what matters to

10:36

you in life and all your different roles.

10:38

We're gonna write those down and we're gonna

10:40

optimize everything you do in the day, all

10:43

aimed towards actualizing your biggest goals

10:45

in life, right, when we're gonna

10:47

figure out these complicated systems for

10:49

selecting and tracking your time, all

10:51

aimed at accomplishing your deepest ambitions

10:54

and not just in work, but at

10:56

home and in your religious communities,

10:58

Covey was a religious Mormon, et cetera. Then

11:01

we get to the 2000s and that's where the shift happens.

11:04

So the big book of the early 2000s

11:06

is David Allen, Getting Things Done.

11:08

Being on the show, he's a modern wisdom alumni,

11:10

he's a legend. Exactly, now if you go back

11:12

and you read Getting Things Done, this is not

11:14

an ambitious, optimistic book. It's like

11:17

his goal in this book

11:19

is like, how can we basically

11:21

find some moments of Zen

11:24

peace among this untamable onslaught,

11:26

right? The whole thing is like we

11:28

can't, it's very nihilistic almost, right? There's

11:30

this huge incoming onslaught and what we're

11:33

gonna do is keep this onslaught from

11:35

colonizing our mind and making us stressed.

11:37

So everything's gonna get reduced to next

11:40

actions and then with mind like water,

11:43

so I profiled Allen for The New Yorker,

11:45

so like he comes from a background in

11:47

Zen and karate, so he really likes mind

11:49

like water, you're just gonna execute these actions

11:52

without even having to, you're

11:54

gonna be almost mindless about it, let's just execute,

11:56

execute. What context am I gonna execute? So it

11:58

was about just trying to find. and peace

12:01

among and onslaught. That's really different. He's a very

12:03

peaceful man. And a peaceful guy. Lives

12:05

in Ojai, it's nice. It seems like it works for him.

12:07

Okay, 2010s. Yeah, but so

12:09

now this is a big change though, right? Because what happened

12:11

between the 90s and 2000s is

12:14

gonna be the front office IT revolution. Computers, it's

12:16

gonna be email, later it's gonna be smartphones, it's

12:18

gonna be Slack. So we get this huge uptick

12:20

in the amount of work people felt like they

12:22

had to be doing all the time. And that's

12:24

when we get this change in tone. Now when

12:26

we get to the 2010s, all

12:29

of the books are on this other side

12:31

of it, right? Where we are being essentially

12:34

overwhelmed by this work. How do we survive?

12:36

And so the big sellers are like essentialism.

12:39

My book, Deep Work. You have

12:41

Keller's One Thing. Like these are

12:43

all books about trying to combat

12:45

overload. So you get this big

12:47

shift. From 90s into the 2000s and 2010s, everything

12:50

becomes about work is overwhelming us.

12:53

It's too much, we're burning out. Alan is like,

12:55

how do we just basically disconnect

12:58

from the stress of this all and just

13:00

execute like we're cranking widgets. Me and essentialism

13:03

and you know, Keller's book. We're trying to

13:06

like, okay, how do we fight back about

13:08

this? Focus still matters, don't get overwhelmed. There's

13:10

almost like a rear guard action, you know?

13:12

Trying to protect the rear as

13:14

the advancing army is routing you, like all this

13:16

is going on. So it's a huge shift. I

13:19

think that's because shooter productivity was fine.

13:22

Like you could talk about alcohol and

13:24

waste baskets and self-actualization until you get

13:26

computers and emails and laptops and smartphones.

13:29

And then it began to overwhelm us. So

13:31

it's like a night and day shift in tone once you get to

13:33

about 2000. Why is

13:36

pseudo productivity so sticky? What's

13:38

caused that to be

13:40

so prevalent? Simple, it was

13:42

just simple, right? It was like, I don't know, what are

13:44

we gonna do here? Simulating like a manager

13:47

in the 1950s. What are we gonna

13:49

do here? I don't know. If I see you

13:51

working, at least I know you're not working.

13:54

And so it was simple, right? So anything

13:56

else is more difficult. So we just went with

13:58

what was simple. The other thing

14:00

that, so it's not, so it's less of that

14:03

sticky, it's simple. But the other thing that happened

14:05

is that same Peter Drucker, who wrote

14:07

The Effective Executive, he really hammered

14:09

writing in the 60s all the way up until

14:11

the late 90s. He

14:13

was really hammering, trying to explain, he's a

14:15

management theorist trying to explain knowledge work. He

14:17

was really hammering autonomy. He

14:20

said, productivity is not something for

14:22

us to discuss. Like

14:24

managers shouldn't be discussing it. It's not

14:26

our business. It's now personal. Researchers

14:29

will figure out on their own how they want to manage their business. Knowledge

14:32

work is not something where like in a factory we

14:34

care about how the work is done. This

14:37

is up to the individual. So productivity is

14:39

not a topic of discussion. So Peter Drucker

14:41

really pushed this idea. In knowledge

14:43

work, we don't talk about productivity. So

14:46

in lack of discussion, the simplest thing is going to

14:48

stick. And the simplest thing was, if I

14:50

see you working, that's good. Why aren't you answering

14:52

emails? You must, maybe you're, it's a defensive approach

14:54

to it. If I don't hear from you or

14:57

see you, how do I know you're

14:59

not slacking off? So that's, I

15:01

guess, organizationally how productivity has

15:03

become detected

15:08

by the people that are typically above

15:10

you and also by your peers as

15:12

well and your colleagues that you work

15:14

with. But this is emergent. Like we

15:17

are our own taskmasters with

15:19

regards to this. So

15:21

we're building out our

15:23

own pseudo-productivity desire and

15:25

whipping ourselves with this.

15:28

What's the reason? Is it just that

15:30

this was the only measure of business?

15:32

Therefore we took that and turned it

15:35

into our own internal state? Or is

15:37

there something else going on when the

15:39

individual is working for themselves? Well, yeah.

15:41

So what happens within the non-working for

15:44

yourself context, if pseudo-productivity reigns, right?

15:46

So people are going to measure, your activity is how you prove

15:49

that you're valuable. And all of your own

15:51

work on being organized or productive is all going to

15:53

be aimed at how am I more visibly active?

15:55

How do I do more? How do I be seen

15:58

more? This just bakes into the culture eventually. So

16:00

yeah now i start my own company on a

16:02

freelancer on my own thing going on if the

16:04

only definition of productivity i know. Right

16:07

is the activity and everything that we've

16:09

been seeing since the early two thousand

16:11

is all in a world in which

16:13

this is what really matters. Seeing

16:16

work is what matters activities what matters slack

16:18

is a way you can always show that

16:20

you're involved and internalized it right so even

16:22

though there's a lot of flexibility if you

16:25

run your own business. They

16:27

actually are probably the worst tend to be the

16:29

worst offenders of pseudo productivity mindset because they

16:31

feel more pressure like i have to be productive.

16:34

Like it's all on me and if all

16:36

that we know is pseudo productivity. Then

16:39

that's what you're going to do when you

16:41

are both the person who decides which tasks

16:43

to work on and also the person who

16:45

works on the task you end up with

16:47

this very bizarre like. Harry

16:50

carry emulating sort of situation

16:53

where you work

16:55

never finishes in this sort

16:57

of productivity purgatory scenario where it

16:59

just permeates everything that you do

17:01

and. Yeah

17:04

i'm how would you. How

17:07

do you frame what do you think

17:09

about most people's relationship with productivity like

17:12

how do you think that they conceive

17:14

of that well it's shifting a lot

17:16

right because what seems to be happening

17:18

is. So the productivity has

17:20

been around it begins to become increasingly

17:22

unbearable in the two thousand what

17:25

we then get starting maybe

17:27

five or six years ago is

17:30

an emergent anti productivity movement. Right

17:32

because again this is coming out of a

17:34

place to make sense people are increasingly burnt

17:36

out it's also coming on the tail ends

17:38

of the first decade of the two thousand

17:40

there's a whole techno productivity revolution. This was

17:42

the whole what they would call the productivity

17:44

prong revolution this is some

17:47

beat speak but basically it was this

17:49

there's this moment in the early two

17:51

thousands where people were really optimistic about

17:53

this idea that productivity implemented by smart

17:56

software. Was qualified self it was going

17:58

to be i was going to revolutionize work. that

18:00

it was like, if we get the right system, remember

18:02

David Allen, I kind of introduced this idea of

18:05

being more systematic and engineering in

18:07

your systems. That plus the right

18:09

software was gonna bring us to

18:11

this utopia where work was like effortless. Like do this

18:13

now, do that now, and you're just gonna be cranking

18:16

widgets and the software was gonna do it. I

18:18

interviewed some of the people who worked on these

18:21

electronic GTD systems back in the day.

18:24

So there's this big optimism that kind of faded by

18:26

the end of the 2000s. Now

18:29

we're even more burnt out than before. We

18:31

begin to get anti-productivity. So

18:34

this begins to emerge. It's picking up some steam,

18:36

2018, 2019. These

18:39

are when some of the first big books

18:41

on this emerge. And then the pandemic really

18:44

accelerates that. So by the time I'm actually

18:46

writing the new book, there's a

18:48

really big anti-productivity movement. So we

18:50

now have an

18:52

emerging antagonistic relationship

18:55

with the concept of productivity, which

18:57

what it really is is antagonistic

19:00

relationship with pseudo-productivity, because the demands

19:02

of that are deranging, right? I

19:04

mean, especially when now you're at home,

19:06

you're working remotely, the work never ends.

19:08

At every moment you have to be

19:10

internally arguing with yourself, should I work

19:12

or do this other thing? I could

19:14

be working. Now you're in this constant

19:16

internal battle. There's no boundaries anymore between

19:19

work and non-work. So like that was

19:21

the defining relationship with productivity of the

19:23

last five years. I would

19:25

say it's this anti-productivity movement. And

19:27

where are we now? Are we still in the throes

19:29

of that? Or is there something new coming up? Well,

19:31

I'm trying to put something new in. So slow productivity

19:33

in my mind is a, it

19:36

starts from the same place as the anti-productivity

19:38

movement. It goes somewhere different. Because the problem

19:40

with the anti-productivity movement is they're starting from

19:42

the right place, which

19:44

is we're burnt out from

19:46

this. But their response is

19:48

typically anti-work, right?

19:51

So then the answer they often come to

19:53

is work itself is

19:55

tainted. And typically they'll bring

19:57

more of like a, More like

19:59

a, Left wing labor politics. For me, like

20:02

a more Remarks is framed right. this is.

20:04

This is an inevitability of the exploitative nature

20:06

of late stage capitalism injuries, cooperatives, and they

20:08

want to go that far. They'll just be

20:10

like don't try so hard. Rao.

20:13

Right right? I do not seen the

20:15

art of doing know how to do

20:17

nothing. These are titles of have a

20:19

really good so inbox and quiet. Quitting

20:21

was sort of are you to things

20:23

like an anti productivity move at so

20:25

it it recast is sort of recast.

20:27

What's going on away from our definition

20:29

of productivity doesn't work well to like?

20:31

Let's put this back into more of

20:34

like an early twentieth century labor politics

20:36

contacts of know it's exploitative managers time

20:38

to. Try. To exploit labor from

20:40

you and now we're in a zero sum fights

20:42

and away we're going to fight back and do

20:44

less work as more the life and works at.

20:46

So that was largely these the answer death and

20:48

really. Catch on in part because

20:51

a lot of people that were preaching

20:53

work last were like working really hard

20:55

to assist in other slavery beliefs. Yeah,

20:57

I'm subscribed the My Sub stack. I'm

20:59

writing everyday about Weiss and and work

21:01

hard and hard on lists of and

21:03

also people didn't he mark rightly deep.

21:06

A lot of people such the entrepreneur

21:08

sick I want to do the smell.

21:10

Like. I Wanna Be Killed by a I Don't

21:12

Be Killed By the Us. To that that became

21:14

the central question for my book was okay. So

21:17

here's a question. How do we are produced stuff

21:19

That's good. We. Do we're proud

21:21

or we could support a family with

21:23

operating out and without having worked take

21:25

over more more of your life like

21:27

best. The real question, right? The question

21:29

is not, how do we urge deconstruct

21:31

capitalism like that's not the right response

21:33

to the burnout crisis rates. As

21:36

capitalistically sell their books on this at the

21:38

right questions this how do we produced stuff

21:40

and be proud an ambitious but what we're

21:42

doing. But. Also number now. I

21:45

did or an annual review of use the same

21:47

process every year to have a while that the

21:49

Us and I read it does your dad tried

21:52

to ask myself more Kind of. Introspective,

21:55

artsy questions stuff like i'm what would

21:57

eight year old me look back on

21:59

him with I did more and less of. What

22:02

do I think is productive but isn't? What

22:05

isn't productive but I think is? Interesting.

22:08

That's a really great question to ask. Things

22:10

that are productive but I don't realize that they are,

22:14

were going for coffees with people

22:16

who are just coming through town for a short amount

22:18

of time, dinner with friends, playing

22:21

pickleball and going for walks.

22:24

Those were some stuff that I think is productive

22:26

but isn't. Getting on calls,

22:28

answering emails, spending time in Slack, sitting

22:31

at my desk when I'm not working, that's

22:33

a big one. I'm just like, if

22:36

I'm here and I'm at the seat and

22:38

the computer's there, something will

22:40

happen. You've drawn Twitter. It

22:43

doesn't matter. I'm just dicking about. That's

22:45

not productive. The

22:48

final question that I asked myself, just notes, and

22:51

it was the most interesting part of the review

22:53

process, was just notes at the bottom and it

22:55

was stuff that came up that didn't fit into

22:57

any of the questions or categories that I created

23:00

for myself. It was fleeting

23:02

thoughts. This one was, and

23:04

this is the main question for this year, and it's so funny,

23:06

this is the topic of your new book. Is

23:08

it possible to be world class and have

23:10

fun? That's

23:13

the main question that I'm asking myself. Many

23:15

of the most world class creative minds in history

23:18

had a lot of fun. The

23:20

answer is yes. This is why, it's

23:23

something some people complain about but I think it's actually a

23:25

feature of my approach in approaching

23:27

this topic. I said I'm going to go back

23:30

and find world class creators,

23:33

I call them traditional knowledge workers, scientists,

23:35

philosophers, artists, etc., throughout history. I want

23:37

to see how they worked. The

23:40

complaint is, well, wait a second. I can't work

23:42

the same way as Galileo. That's like a completely

23:44

different time and place. I was like, no, the

23:46

goal is not to try to replicate the work

23:48

day of Galileo, but what we can look at

23:50

is Galileo had a lot of flexibility in how

23:53

he worked. With all that flexibility,

23:55

what did he drift towards? What

23:57

they have a lot of space. Mary Curie had a lot of space.

24:00

space. Georgia O'Keefe had a lot of space

24:02

to figure out how they wanted to work.

24:04

So they were running these natural experiments to

24:06

see what is the absolute best way to

24:08

create value with your mind. Then once we

24:11

isolate those principles, okay, we can adapt them to modern

24:14

jobs, but like just the principles that matter.

24:16

So if you study these great traditional knowledge

24:18

with us throughout history, none of

24:20

them were busy. The idea

24:22

of busyness being somehow

24:25

connected with great production

24:28

is not inevitable, especially if we're not talking

24:30

about running a complicated business, but just creating

24:32

high value things with your brain. You don't

24:34

find a lot of busyness until you get

24:36

much more towards the modern era. What

24:38

was the typical day of some of

24:40

these favorite famous people from history like

24:43

that question when it makes sense to

24:45

them, right? So it's a

24:47

very modern notion that we have uniform

24:49

work days. And so we need to

24:51

have like a tip. Here's how, here's what I

24:53

do during work days. And I work five days

24:55

a week and I work this many weeks, this

24:57

many weeks a year. They were way more variable

24:59

about when and how they were working, right?

25:02

So it'd be like, okay, this two months

25:04

I'm working really hard on something. And then

25:06

I went away and traveled for four months

25:08

and did nothing, right? There is no typical

25:11

workday. They had a lot more variation, right?

25:13

So Georgia O'Keefe, the painter,

25:15

right? What kickstarted her

25:17

productivity as an artist is

25:19

she began dating Stieglitz and

25:22

he had land in

25:24

the Adirondacks. He's like, okay,

25:26

you got to come up. We're going to go up there

25:28

in the summers. And she figured out this rhythm. If they

25:30

go up there in the late summer into the fall,

25:32

she has this shack by the lake. And

25:35

that's where she has inspiration. She's doing her

25:37

nature paintings. And then she brings them, she's

25:39

there for months. And then she

25:41

brings them back to Manhattan and then she finishes

25:43

them and exhibits them and does the stuff. And

25:46

then they go back up to

25:48

the Adirondacks and she gets her creative input.

25:50

There's like no typical day for Georgia O'Keefe,

25:52

but there's a typical year and it has

25:54

different seasons. She's doing things. I opened the

25:56

book on John McPhee and I'm like, okay,

25:59

for a long time, I'm going to go back for five days, it opens

26:01

on five days of John McPhee's life in the

26:03

late 60s, lying on his back on a

26:05

picnic table. Because he was trying to

26:07

find his way into a New Yorker piece and it couldn't

26:09

figure it out, right? Like how I have all this research,

26:12

how am I gonna start this piece? And as someone who's written

26:15

my share of New Yorker pieces, I can tell you

26:17

this is like an impossible problem. Like how do I

26:19

get into this article? Five days he's laying on his

26:21

back just to try to figure out how am I

26:23

gonna make sense of this stuff? Like what's

26:25

a typical day for John McPhee? Like that? You

26:28

could look, if you zoomed in on that day, he

26:30

would say he did nothing, he's lazy. And

26:33

on another day he would be up in

26:35

his office next to a Swedish

26:37

massage parlor in Princeton where he has

26:39

this really kind of eccentric way

26:41

that he would cut up all of his notes and

26:43

Xerox them and put them on these boards. And he

26:45

might be in there for hours and

26:47

another day he might just be doing nothing or

26:49

doing research, right? So they didn't have typical days.

26:53

So this idea that there's a work day, how

26:55

do you structure your work day? We

26:57

invented that for knowledge work in the 1950s and

27:00

it was an idea we borrowed from factories because that's

27:02

how factories ran, you had shifts. And

27:04

so it's not even the right question for creative work. Every

27:08

time that I read, whether it's digital

27:10

minimalism or deep work or

27:12

any of your books, and some

27:14

of Ryan's stuff as well, it's this,

27:17

it almost feels like a nervous

27:19

system re-regulation, it's like a

27:21

reminder of a slower time, it's a

27:24

reminder of a different time. So

27:26

much of the stuff that we take for granted about the

27:28

rhythm of modern life, about the ferocity

27:31

and velocity that we go through these

27:33

things with, we

27:35

realize is just a creation, maybe

27:39

not even a creation, maybe a malignant bug

27:41

or a byproduct or a side effect, some

27:44

weird externality of a

27:46

thing that no one

27:48

really designed. It's the

27:50

second, third, fourth order effect of some shit

27:52

that happened 50 years ago. And

27:55

then reading stuff like that

27:57

or reading about how much Isaac Newton

27:59

or Einstein walk. I feel like that was

28:01

in one of your books at some point, like

28:03

the power of walking and how important that is.

28:05

You think, God, I came

28:08

up with this idea, the productivity purgatory is

28:10

one of those where all of the things

28:12

that you do, even the things that you're

28:14

supposed to do for leisure, you do because

28:17

you once saw an Andrew Huberman documentary that

28:19

said 15 minutes of walking improves your dopaminergic

28:21

response by whatever, whatever, that there's nothing that

28:24

isn't done in service of productivity, even the

28:26

things that ostensibly are supposed to be for

28:28

leisure. And then, yeah,

28:32

to me, and maybe to a lot of

28:34

people listening, it sounds like hearing

28:37

Galileo or George O'Keefe, you

28:39

know, wanking

28:41

off for four months and then dicking

28:44

about and then coming back and I'll do

28:46

a little bit of work. It sounds bohemian.

28:48

It sounds new age. It sounds hippy because

28:51

our framing is only within the last, we

28:53

only know the last hundred years of work.

28:55

We only know that. It

28:58

was just people hoeing the

29:00

ground, right? It was just agrarian

29:03

shit. And changed drastically by the

29:05

seasons, right? I talk about the

29:07

German ritual of Yule because they

29:09

had nothing to do, right?

29:11

It was a pagan ritual. They're like, we're going

29:13

to have bonfires for a month because what are

29:15

we going to do? It's the winter. There's no

29:17

crops to whatever. And then in the fall, they're

29:19

really busy. So the agrarian lifestyle was up and

29:22

down. I went back and looked really deeply into

29:24

Forage or Hunter Gather Life, which is the two

29:26

hundred and seventy thousand, the first two hundred seventy

29:28

thousand years of our species. Nature

29:30

dictated everything, right? I mean, it was today

29:32

we're on this hunt. The other

29:34

day it rained. We did nothing. We're in the middle of this

29:36

hunt, but it's hot in the middle of the day. So we

29:38

just stopped for a while. The only

29:41

time in human history, like the

29:43

first time we really had just work hard all

29:45

day long was when mills and factories were invented.

29:48

And it was so unbearable. It was

29:50

so terrible to try to take humans who were used

29:52

to all of this variation in autonomy and their approach

29:54

to work. They say you have to work all day

29:56

long as hard as you can. We had

29:59

to invent labor. unions, we had to invent

30:01

regulatory frameworks. So we had to put

30:03

all of these huge apparatuses in place

30:05

just to make that type of incredibly

30:07

unnatural work tolerable, but the knowledge

30:10

work emerges. Like, all right, so how are we going to

30:12

organize our workday guys? Like, let's do what the factory guys

30:14

are doing. Grab that like the

30:16

least natural, uh, in terms of our human wiring choice

30:18

that we had because it was simple and it was

30:20

what we were used to. And it was what was

30:22

big right now. And we're like, well, let's just do

30:24

that. Yeah. One of the principles of

30:27

slow productivity is work at a natural pace. Yeah.

30:30

What is that for humans? Well,

30:32

there's, there's two parts to it. So for humans

30:34

is what we just talked about, uh, variations in

30:36

intensity. And it's not just on one time scale,

30:39

but basically all time scales. Right. So, so when

30:41

I went back and looked at how humans work

30:43

before within a day, you're going

30:45

to have some periods that are more intense than others in a

30:47

week. Some days will be more intense

30:49

than others. Uh, when you're looking at a

30:51

season, you know, uh, some seasons

30:53

might be more intense than others, the fall

30:56

harvest is way more intense than the winter.

30:58

Uh, even at a bigger time scale, you

31:00

might have busier periods and less busier periods,

31:03

I'm writing a book for two years. And

31:05

then for the next year, I'm going more

31:07

fallow, right? So variations, that's much more natural

31:09

than the other principle that came out of

31:11

that, and this was just from directly studying

31:13

the great traditional knowledge workers of

31:16

time past, they take much more time. So

31:19

we tried to go too fast. And

31:21

a lot of these thinkers who were very productive in the

31:23

sense of they produce, you know, uh, new

31:26

scientific work that changed the way we understood

31:28

the universe, they worked very slowly. Like

31:30

their notion of how long should

31:32

I take on this project was

31:34

way slower than what we do

31:37

today. So we're always trying to charge ahead right

31:39

away. What's the quickest way I could get this

31:41

done. They took their time, right? They're happy to

31:43

take their time. Even contemporary traditional knowledge workers do

31:46

this. Lin-Manuel Miranda was one

31:48

of the examples I gave his first

31:50

play before Hamilton in the

31:52

Heights was a big hit, right? Eight

31:54

Tony's. He spent seven, eight years working

31:57

on that play. Uh, not procrastinating. He didn't

31:59

put his. aside for eight years, he

32:01

just was working slowly on it for

32:04

eight years. He kept coming back to it. They

32:06

were doing readings with real actors. Then he would

32:08

go away and do some other stuff and think

32:10

about it and try to get something better. Then

32:12

he'd come back and do another reading. It's just

32:15

this slow process. But that's pretty typical

32:17

with traditional knowledge workers. We think in the suit

32:19

of productivity culture, it's not as fast as possible.

32:21

I want to do a play. I'm going to

32:23

go away for a weekend and grind this thing

32:25

out. Let's rock and roll. That's not

32:27

the way people used to do things. What

32:32

are the industries or

32:34

job types for whom

32:36

this changing of the

32:38

pace doesn't work quite so well? There may

32:40

be people listening who say, well, that's all

32:42

well and good if your goal is to

32:45

create over the next, however many years, a

32:47

really great play. But

32:50

that's not the world that I live in. That's not

32:52

the profession that I have access to. Right. The whole

32:54

goal is then how do we take these principles that

32:57

the great traditional knowledge workers excavate and then how

32:59

do we apply them to just normal knowledge jobs.

33:02

All the advice is for knowledge work jobs. Basically, if

33:04

you work on a computer screen for

33:07

a living, if you send a bunch of emails, you're

33:09

probably a knowledge worker. All right. What does it look

33:11

like to start adapting these ideas to

33:13

a regular job where you have bosses or this or

33:15

that? Well, now it becomes a little bit more subtle,

33:17

but you get the same effect. Now when a boss

33:19

asks you, hey, can you put together this report? Instead

33:22

of you saying, sure, I'll have it done.

33:24

Then you plug in the most optimistic possible

33:27

estimate. You know, we do like you fall

33:29

in love with the idea of getting it

33:31

done that fast. You instead take that estimate

33:34

and you double it. Like, yeah, you

33:36

don't say one month, you say two months. So you're

33:38

giving yourself more time to work on it.

33:40

Then what about like the seasonality? Well, if

33:42

you're an entrepreneur, you can

33:44

just start actually wiring this into your actual

33:47

work rhythms. Right. Like I talked about an

33:49

entrepreneur in the book. She takes two months

33:51

off in the summer. She

33:53

just works it out with the way her contracts and the clients

33:55

and she's just not around in that summer. It's about 20% less

33:58

revenue. She'll happily. take that hit to

34:01

be able to take two months off in the summer

34:03

so she's getting you know variation then we talk about

34:05

people who work in jobs or they can't do that

34:07

now they start doing this subtly right

34:10

okay so here's what I do I don't really

34:12

schedule meetings on Mondays I don't

34:14

tell people I'm doing this like when they say

34:16

hey when you available I give them lots of

34:18

times they just don't happen to have any on

34:20

Mondays now we have like a slower start and

34:22

I know in December because we're gonna lose the

34:24

last week anyways for Christmas I'm kind of careful

34:27

I don't tell anyone about this but I'm pretty

34:29

careful to have projects set up the finish before

34:31

that and start after it but nothing is really

34:33

due into it and I am turning down that

34:35

intensity dial for those three weeks and it's not

34:37

long enough for my boss to really notice but

34:40

for me it's a big deal knowing

34:42

that I can wind down that we

34:44

at that month I'm wound down versus

34:46

another month right so people can start

34:48

implementing these principles but like more surreptitiously

34:50

so we see them really flashly done

34:52

in these historical stories but then when

34:54

we jump to implement them in practice

34:56

it's like more subtle but it's

34:58

the same principles you're taking longer you have

35:00

variations intensity on different times that starts to

35:02

add up starts to make a difference yes

35:06

your first insight

35:08

around do fewer things which

35:11

is essentially

35:14

impossible for people to do because you look

35:16

at a calendar and there's room in it

35:18

and you fill the water

35:20

the gap the gap should be filled shows should be

35:22

doing things and I think a lot of people feel

35:25

like do fewer things is accomplish

35:28

fewer things yeah that's the conflation

35:30

yeah and they're wrong yeah

35:33

because what if I add two words it becomes

35:35

clear do fewer things at

35:37

once right because here's what

35:39

I think is going on and this is like the case

35:41

I'm making the book is that when you

35:43

agree to something the big problem is

35:45

when you agree to it that is going to bring

35:47

with it administrative overhead right so whether

35:49

I'm ready to work on this thing or not now

35:51

the team needs to hey how's it going there's emails

35:54

I'm gonna have to answer there's meetings going on to

35:56

the calendar right you like okay we got to check

35:58

in on this house is doing I call it over

36:00

overhead tax, everything you say yes to generates overhead

36:02

tax. So the problem is when

36:04

you say yes to a lot of things, you're not

36:06

just trying to keep my cue really

36:08

full so I always have something to do.

36:11

That's not just what's happening. You're generating a

36:13

lot more overhead tax. So the more things

36:15

you've said yes to, the

36:17

more things are generated administrative overhead, which

36:19

means the more meetings go into your calendar and

36:22

the more emails that are coming that you have to

36:24

answer, right? So where do those meetings come from that

36:27

are filling up your calendar? They're not just random, right?

36:29

It's not just hey, you guys wanna do a meeting?

36:32

No, no, it's related to things you've agreed to

36:34

do. So the more things you've

36:36

agreed to do, the more of your time gets devoted

36:38

to the administrative overhead of the things you need to

36:40

do, which means you have less time

36:42

available to actually accomplish the things. And

36:45

to make it worse, this administrative overhead

36:47

does not coalesce into one nice big

36:49

batch. It jumps all over your calendar.

36:51

Fractures your day into, what's the quote

36:53

from Deep Work? I must have shed it a

36:55

million times. Shatters

36:58

your day into fragments so small that you got

37:01

nothing meaningful done. Yeah, it shatters something like that.

37:03

You're scheduling the fragments so small, like insufficient for

37:05

concentration. Yes, whatever. Nothing gets done, yes. I think

37:07

about that all the time. Well, but think what

37:09

happens now though. This is why I think people

37:11

are so burnt out because it really is deranging.

37:14

Think about this. So you say yes to too

37:16

many things. Now your schedule is like

37:18

completely full not doing the things, but

37:20

jumping on calls and answering people's emails about

37:22

the things, right? Now you don't

37:24

have time to really get them done. So what happens? You fall

37:26

behind. So new things come in. So

37:29

now the things you have to do get

37:31

longer and you fall even farther behind. And

37:33

then eventually you get to a place where most

37:36

of your time is now taken up. Just

37:38

dealing with talking about work, nothing gets done. You

37:40

feel like you're making no progress. You have to

37:42

start getting up at four or working

37:45

in the evenings. And now you're completely frustrated because

37:47

you said I'm on Zoom all day long and

37:49

now I'm working instead of being at my kid's

37:51

basketball game. Like what was the point of the

37:53

day? And this is what's making knowledge workers cry

37:55

uncle. So when I say do fewer things at

37:57

once, It's not at all about

37:59

accomplishing. If you are things because of

38:01

you can save most of your schedule from

38:04

all this administrative overhead. What happens is to

38:06

just executed. So. Now the rate

38:08

at which your finishing things and sensing

38:10

them a really high quality levels that

38:13

skyrockets right? So. doing fewer things

38:15

at once. Will make you

38:17

actually accomplish many more things. That's not the

38:19

only reason to do at the main reason

38:21

the do it is because is entirely deranged.

38:23

The have your whole schedule be taken up

38:25

by mystery of overheads. Emmys just makes life

38:27

bearable. not to be overloaded, but you have

38:30

this bonus. You. Also can

38:32

start producing. right? So you can

38:34

just bootstrap and of a lot of ideas how

38:36

to do this. But you can just bootstrap in

38:38

the doing. See where things get over that initial

38:40

fear. You're going to pretty quickly on your ability

38:43

to keep doing fewer things because you're going to

38:45

be outstripping everyone else in your organization. Yeah

38:47

Diaz Zoom apocalypse that everybody

38:50

went through when the overhead

38:52

of having meetings and this.

38:55

I. Guess pain from management of coordination. You

38:57

know if you can't see what someone's doing

38:59

when they're in the house because the no

39:01

longer in the office out com and that's

39:03

anxiety inducing isn't It's a why don't we

39:06

start looking at slides, dashboards and added activity

39:08

time and then you know a response to

39:10

this scene of the anti productivity movement was

39:12

that low budget friends that brought it in

39:14

were bosses com message their workers after five

39:17

pm I think they tried yeah I don't

39:19

have. the loss of a muslim went to

39:21

are not interesting yeah but but it was

39:23

some select for the bug dust. Bowl is

39:25

interesting one in France a of labor unions

39:28

that represent knowledge, workers and way that that

39:30

we don't in the Us. But the problem

39:32

with that I wrote about the summer time

39:34

is you know again it's like putting earn

39:36

that little bit of a band aid on

39:38

the wound. We just stop the things that

39:40

are creating the big moons like an in

39:42

other words this is the issue with almost

39:45

any response that is just focusing on was

39:47

has reduced the time you can work was

39:49

have a four day work week is of

39:51

a five day work week etc. The problem

39:53

of these ideas is if you don't. Also,

39:55

sixty Overload problem. You're not getting to the

39:57

core issue or the core issue as I

40:00

have to the things I'm I played

40:02

at the same time. Yes to this. What

40:04

people went insane during the pandemic. an anti

40:06

productivity took off because that overhead guts out

40:09

of control because a everyone got like

40:11

twenty percent new tasks all at once. the

40:13

shifted remote play and undies, the coronation took.

40:15

Twenty. Five percent longer because things we could

40:18

have just done in the hallway. Good as

40:20

you meeting but I can't drag as you

40:22

media knowledge among other things sorted. yeah I'm

40:24

on it. Yeah yeah his mind that are

40:26

zoomed there is no two minutes zoo meeting.

40:29

Age you gotta think sorta is gonna be a

40:31

half hour because I can't drag it smaller So

40:33

we had a steep footprint of over had got

40:35

worse the quantity over he got worse as we've

40:37

inflation and we got the zoom part. Lips were

40:40

and this is my readers were riding me. And

40:42

say my main problem right now and you

40:44

may twenty twenty his window I go to

40:47

the bathroom. Because. I have

40:49

eight hours of zoom without any gap

40:51

anywhere in it. And. Then at

40:53

this point is just absurdities, right? Like

40:55

that idea. Third player, something. What's that?

40:58

I did the red Queen sacked. Yeah,

41:00

yeah. Running faster and faster to stay

41:02

in the same place? Correct? Yeah, And

41:04

this is in A with the. Podcast.

41:07

And it's been interesting. I guess that you've

41:09

been in the Ark, you been involved as

41:12

on the guess I didn't and Arc is

41:14

seeing it from under meps. Absurd. So two

41:16

hundred Zero, one of the first ones and

41:18

then maybe like three hundred and six hundred

41:21

and now Ana operation The it's so complex

41:23

behind the scenes, you know to coordinate something

41:25

of the size and increasingly if I messed

41:27

up doing more and more. Of

41:30

being an operator as opposed to

41:32

being a creator or a visionary,

41:34

or a researcher, or just a

41:37

loner. Ah, it's all coordination all

41:39

the time. So much coordination and

41:41

he don't. Like. That it's the

41:43

thing from Michael Good as the myth revisited that

41:46

lady to start the bakery and and soon enough

41:48

she can't remember what it's like to bake a

41:50

cake Seattle does She suing is on the meetings

41:52

organizing factories to stop. begin was the week coming

41:55

from and of with what's the new machine that

41:57

we're gonna have to grind the flour and stuff

41:59

like that. So yeah,

42:01

I'm in. I'm very much living. A.

42:04

Arm and and I can remember

42:06

when the operation was simply because

42:08

the businesses simpler and because of

42:11

the actual production itself was simpler.

42:13

But I'm observing even within my

42:15

own life this trajectory go from

42:17

simplicity and purity. To are

42:20

much more success than and and am

42:22

very very great in. It's amazing to

42:24

do all of this stuff. But.

42:27

There are all of these side effects that come along

42:29

with it that filled the build things out and or

42:31

of. A million opportunities As

42:33

million things. To. Say yes to.

42:36

As many things to say no to

42:39

that you would have begged to have

42:41

the opportunity to say yes to only

42:43

two years ago. Yeah so you're permanently

42:46

re adjusting the sensitivity on what constitutes

42:48

a how yeah yeah like that's the

42:50

one thing that he with said is

42:52

how you are on rule which is

42:55

fantastic. The problem is that you lag

42:57

guess what you would have. Begged.

42:59

For yesterday, something you now need to lead

43:02

to say noted that Yeah, Yeah.

43:04

I mean I think it the guy has it all

43:06

figured out. We off it's not our heads to ferris.

43:09

So. I was on a so in February

43:11

and yeah, we had to like headset. Like

43:13

that old are helmet at whereas like no other

43:15

was gonna want us they met and he's like

43:17

of. If I if I do

43:19

video well as I build a studio. That.

43:22

I have to stay where the studio is,

43:24

the Nasa people around the studio and I

43:26

want to travel and weather's headset through the

43:29

think at this is a pretty good microphone.

43:31

I could just the anywhere says issue for

43:33

in the world and so maybe Ferris. Through.

43:36

This whole game out. I mean, he's the guy

43:38

that did it. Ah, but there's a little a

43:40

deeper thing in there, though, right? Which is like

43:43

Dad is the central tension when whistler productivity when

43:45

things are going well with. This is partially why

43:47

I wrote this book is because things are going

43:49

well for me. right? you know like

43:51

this is not a book to would have been

43:54

relevant to me as a twenty three year old

43:56

at mit you doing i yelled directly computer science

43:58

but now it's like things are hitting

44:00

well. My books get

44:02

read and I'm a tenured professor and

44:04

there's opportunities and I have a podcast

44:06

and other things are going on now

44:09

and it was that same fear of

44:11

okay, so how do I keep and

44:14

crystallize the principles of just slowly producing

44:16

stuff that matters, even with

44:18

different stuff going on. And it's led actually me

44:20

to be pretty careful or thoughtful

44:22

thinking about the different aspects like what I

44:24

do and what I don't do. Like when

44:26

I started the podcast and the pandemic, I

44:29

was really worried about the footprint because the

44:31

footprint can get big, which is fine

44:34

for like a tier one show like this,

44:36

but this was something I was doing in

44:39

addition to being a professor, in addition to writing.

44:41

So I made a rule, it said

44:43

half day a week. That's what

44:45

you get. This podcast gets a half

44:47

day a week. And if I want to grow or add something

44:49

or whatever I want to do, I got to figure out a

44:51

way to do that such that the podcast

44:53

doesn't leave a half day a week. So I got to

44:55

have to hire, yeah, and it's what happened. So it developed

44:57

slowly. Eventually I hired a producer to touch the computer for

45:00

me because that saves a lot of time, right? Like,

45:02

okay, I don't have to touch any computers and we have,

45:04

you know, I'm the master. Okay, so he talks to all

45:06

of them. So now I can just show up and do

45:08

the show. Now I have more time to think

45:11

about, you know, what am I going to say or what

45:13

are we going to do? Then we want to do video.

45:15

Well, how are we going to make this fit within a

45:17

half day a week? Well, it took a long time. We

45:19

had to find the right person to set something up that

45:21

was super turnkey. Like we have the studio set up or

45:23

like it's all just installed and

45:25

my producer can just turn

45:28

on these lights that are in, and these cameras are always

45:30

in the same place. Yeah. With these

45:32

big C stands that like never

45:34

moved that the cameras are locked off, locked

45:37

into and everything like that. So, okay, great.

45:39

That doesn't, so everything has been very slowly,

45:42

but it also means though, right? There's impacts. Like if

45:44

I wanted to have a lot of guests, probably

45:47

wasn't going to work with a half day a week

45:49

rule because young guests can do it when

45:51

they can do it and it's not going to fit. And

45:53

so I'm not doing that, right? Like it's,

45:55

so it's made some, had some impact.

45:57

Yeah. Well, you can and can't do. But

46:00

it allows me, but it's slow. It is growing in

46:02

slow productivity. So the show is growing. And it's like,

46:05

actually, this does pretty well. And it

46:07

generates more money than my professor salary. This

46:09

is interesting. It's starting to get interesting. It's

46:11

probably going slower than maybe it could. But

46:14

it's a slow productivity play. This

46:16

is important. But I want

46:18

to take my time with this and not

46:20

let it metastasize. I think James

46:23

Clear put in a newsletter recently, over

46:27

the short term, your results are determined by

46:29

your intensity. And over the long term, your

46:31

results are determined by your consistency. And

46:34

it is a trade-off. There is

46:36

a trade-off between the two, the harder you work, the

46:38

quicker you burn out. And there is a threshold above

46:40

which. That's not to say

46:42

that that's a linear relationship. If you're doing the

46:44

bare minimum, doing double the bare minimum is probably

46:46

not going to make that much difference for your

46:49

consistency over a long period of time. But if

46:51

you're running at seventh

46:53

gear at 7,000 RPM, trying

46:56

to shift that to a little bit faster is

46:58

something that's really going to hurt. Look

47:00

at a famous novelist. They

47:02

figured this out, right? Novelists do have

47:04

very long careers. They figured out,

47:07

no more than if you're a genre, one

47:09

book a year. And if you're literary, one book

47:11

every two or three years, maybe even every

47:13

four years, do very little outside

47:15

of the writing. The whole industry understands

47:17

this. We don't need to hear from

47:19

John Grisham until he has a

47:22

book coming out. But it allows

47:24

them to produce large literatures over their

47:26

lifetime, right? So we could all take

47:28

lessons from that. You don't see John

47:30

Grisham being like, if I really

47:32

get after it, I could probably get three books done. I

47:34

could do the whole James Patterson thing. I could have three

47:36

books a year, and then I could get a team to

47:38

write other books, and then we could merchandise this. I'm going

47:41

to have John Grisham land and it's going to work with

47:43

you. No, if I do all that, I'm going to last

47:46

five years. Have you seen

47:48

Brandon Sanderson's output? Yes,

47:50

yes. So I think it's in

47:52

the r slash fantasy

47:55

subreddit. And if you have

47:57

a look at that, the number of words that...

48:00

that guy writes per year is

48:02

terrifying. But I'm worried about him.

48:04

Me too. Because he's adding

48:07

other things. He started

48:09

adding, he's building out more of

48:11

a company. The merch, weighing

48:13

in. Well, yes, exactly, merch, and

48:16

fulfilling their own printer

48:18

now, they do some of his books, they print themselves,

48:21

as opposed to going through like a standard

48:23

publisher, and he has a big team now.

48:26

And like his whole thing, like everyone, he's famous

48:28

in writing circles for exactly this. Like he just

48:30

sits and writes, and he generates like a lot

48:32

of words, like that's what he's- I think it's

48:35

maybe 300,000 words a year. Yeah,

48:37

it's crazy, it's crazy. I mean, you

48:39

saw his video, his whole surprise video

48:41

thing in the pandemic, where he

48:44

was like, I have a surprise for you. I

48:46

wrote five extra books, and I'm gonna

48:48

like sell them directly to you, he just wrote five

48:50

extra books. Yes, I did see that. Yeah, the thing

48:52

he did, which I do admire, which

48:54

is crazy, but I love it, it's a deep

48:56

work thing. So he lives in like a normal

48:59

cul-de-sac in Utah, right? So it's just like a

49:01

cul-de-sac of houses. He

49:03

bought the lot, and actually his was empty,

49:06

right? What he did was, instead of building

49:08

like a cool workspace there, he dug down

49:11

and built an underground layer, right?

49:13

So he built a whole

49:15

Victorian Gothic underground layer

49:19

where there's, you know, old fish, tanks with

49:21

weird things in it, he writes in there,

49:23

there's a full screening room movie theater in

49:26

there, they podcast in there, whole thing's decorated

49:28

like a Tim Burton movie, built it underground,

49:31

right? 10 foot ceilings, like they dug all,

49:33

I have photos of all this. Then he covered it back over,

49:35

and then they put like a garage on top of it,

49:38

and he has a secret entrance to it from his house.

49:40

So he goes under, he's the suburban house,

49:43

he's like secret entrance in his garage, and

49:45

it takes him into this like massive underground

49:47

layer. I think it's awesome, it's

49:49

preposterous. But hey, if you're writing fantasy

49:52

novels though, at his level, like yeah.

49:54

But that's one of your lessons, which

49:56

is that the space you inhabit when

49:58

you're trying to. to do your productivity can

50:01

influence the way that you feel. Yeah, and that's

50:03

a slow productivity idea, right? Is that like, okay,

50:05

the environment matters because you're trying to produce the

50:07

best possible stuff, not just trying

50:09

to be as busy as possible. Yeah, so environment

50:11

matters. So Sanderson built that whole underground layer because

50:13

it inspires him to write fantasy

50:16

well, much in the same

50:18

way that Dan Brown, who wrote the DaVinci

50:20

code, he has a similar kind of quirky

50:22

house he built in New Hampshire with like

50:24

secret passageways and code and you pull down

50:26

the statue head. Oh, cool. So if we

50:28

write sort of conspiratorial genre thrillers,

50:31

so like why not put ourselves

50:33

into that mindset? Other people did

50:35

other things. So like one example,

50:38

Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, he brings where

50:40

his production offices are, old

50:43

electronic gadgets, because he likes

50:45

this connection to building, like

50:47

I'm building something that's, I'm bringing together parts and

50:49

he used to solder and do all this stuff as

50:51

a kid. So he like brings them wherever he's

50:53

going, but it's not just the

50:55

positive, which is have stuff in your

50:58

space that's inspiring. It's also

51:00

get away from the stuff that's distracting. Right?

51:03

And this is the problem, for example, with just working

51:05

out of your home office, that's just right there in

51:07

your home. Next to everything else

51:09

is that you're exposed to all of these

51:12

highly salient distractions that have nothing to do

51:14

with what you're doing. But when you see

51:16

them are gonna trigger all

51:18

of these neural networks are gonna start

51:20

to be activated. Yeah, there's a laundry basket. Oh

51:22

my God, the laundry. Yes. When do

51:25

I need to do the laundry? Why does it go,

51:27

and this is very difficult. So I also tell these

51:29

stories of people, these are mainly writers too, who go

51:31

through like great lengths to get

51:33

away from the distractions. And my favorite was

51:35

Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws because he lived

51:37

right down the street from where I grew

51:40

up when he was writing Jaws.

51:42

So I know his house, I could see it from

51:44

mine. It's a beautiful house. And when he wrote Jaws,

51:46

he didn't write it in that house, but

51:48

in a back room at a furnace repair shop that

51:50

was on the other side of town. And

51:53

we, the fact checkers in New Yorker talked to

51:55

Windy Benchley about this, Peter's dead, but they talked to Windy and she

51:57

was like, oh yeah, they were like hammering in there, man. It was

51:59

like, loud metal hammering, that's where he went

52:01

to write Jaws, because he was trying to

52:04

get away from the distractions. Like

52:06

the distraction of loud hammering, whatever, that's not something

52:08

that he has a lot of associations with. He

52:10

can associate, right, that's no big deal. But the

52:13

laundry basket, you know, now you're gone

52:15

for the next 20 minutes thinking about it. Did

52:17

you ever hear the story about

52:19

Victor Hugo being locked in the room

52:21

by his own servant? No. So

52:25

this is a guy who

52:27

wanted to write six pages per day, he's

52:29

a writer, and he paid

52:31

his servant every single night to come

52:33

in during the middle of the night

52:36

and pull the bedsheets off him, just

52:38

slide the bedsheets off him, and then

52:40

there was a quill and an ink pot

52:42

and six pieces of paper that

52:44

were left on the table next to him,

52:46

and then he would lock the bedroom door

52:48

from the outside and he wouldn't unlock the

52:51

door until Victor Hugo slid six pieces of

52:53

paper double-sided written underneath the door. I

52:56

like that. That's delightful. By

52:58

the way, The extremity that writers have had

53:00

to go through in order to be able to overcome

53:02

the writing hump. My Angela would

53:04

do this, she would go to typically cheaper

53:07

hotels, take all the artwork off the

53:09

wall, she wanted it to be white box, and

53:11

she would write on the bed. So she would just

53:13

like prop up on one arm with a legal

53:16

pad. And there's nothing to do, you're in a

53:18

completely distraction to meet Bonn. Steinbeck had this beautiful

53:20

property at Sag Harbor, he would get his rowboat

53:22

and go out into the middle of the harbor

53:24

and write on a little hand

53:27

desk. David McCullough lived in

53:29

Martha's Vineyard, beautiful house, West

53:31

Tisbury. He wrote him basically

53:33

the garden shed. So

53:35

he had a great home office, like where he

53:37

would do his like correspond to whatever. He wrote

53:39

his books on a typewriter in the garden shed.

53:42

Like it was pretty absurd, he was in the

53:44

backyard in like a shed, but yeah, they would

53:46

do anything to kind of, let's get away from

53:48

distractions, let's like lock ourselves someplace where it's, it's

53:51

hard to leave, there's nothing here that's distracting, let's

53:53

get some work done. I don't have the keys. I

53:55

don't have that, yeah. Mark Twain, when he had this

53:57

off building, that he would go and outbuild, he would.

54:00

work at and so his wife had this like horn she

54:02

would blow to try to get his attention. It's

54:04

time to come back for dinner because he was so far away,

54:06

right? It was like hard. I

54:08

have an office, you know, I have a my house, I

54:10

have a very nice library, but I also rent office

54:13

space like a three minute walk away. It's

54:15

just like a different place to go to and

54:17

so my podcast studios there, but also it's

54:19

a place to go to write. What

54:22

is a more accessible solution for

54:24

someone who doesn't want to dig

54:26

20 feet underneath the

54:28

house in Utah? Everyone should do that.

54:31

Come on. That's true. More underground layers.

54:33

I'm pro underground layers. This is the

54:35

revolution that we really need. Podcast

54:37

layers I think would be awesome. That would be cool. Yeah,

54:39

you go to like the small office and you go down

54:41

the stairs. You could pull the statue of

54:43

the tiny owl and it opens up the door. Yeah,

54:45

and there's just like a killer underground. Yeah. I love

54:47

it. Yeah. You could also like kidnap and murder your

54:50

guest down there. I guess the problem with it. Imagine

54:52

that. Imagine if it was a podcast run by a

54:54

serial killer and each guest, that was just our last

54:56

day on the planet. The ratings would be, I mean

54:58

the downloads would be off the charts. It would be

55:00

briefly and then make it cool. Because

55:02

of the murdering. That would be the problem. Yeah. Yeah.

55:04

It's looked down on. I need to redo that. Yeah,

55:06

but you got to innovate. You got to innovate. Yeah.

55:09

So, okay. Let's say you're not going to build an

55:11

underground layer, right? I'm a big fan, for

55:13

example, in what I call work from near home, which

55:15

is you don't need to build an underground layer, but

55:18

also if you don't work in an office, find a space

55:20

to work in that's not your house. Like

55:22

that is a worthy investment. And that

55:24

might just mean leasing. It's like

55:27

low cost office space nearby. That

55:29

might be worth it, right? And don't think of that as an expense.

55:31

Think of it as you are going to be able to be your

55:34

mental health's going to be much more, you're going to be able to

55:36

produce much more or taking an outbuilding

55:38

in your backyard and make it into something

55:40

that you can work in. I mean, I

55:42

think this idea of going out of

55:44

your way to find places to work, this not

55:46

just your home is the right

55:48

idea. Don't think about it in terms of my

55:51

home is free and this is not

55:53

free. Now Think about it more as my home

55:55

is this terrible place to work that I really wish I didn't

55:57

have to work there. Oh, this is, I only have to. Adidas,

56:00

much to avoid that. Oh, that's great.

56:02

You know you're you're You're paying the

56:04

solve a problem good referring and then

56:06

be careful about your environment. But the

56:09

rituals can be not just a static.

56:11

But. Can also be functional. right?

56:14

So so it is might not just be.

56:16

Here's what's in my space to inspire me.

56:18

It can be. Here's what I do as

56:20

a ritual before I work. To.

56:22

Inspire me so he could be. I

56:24

walked the same route to this coffee

56:27

shop. I get this coffee as I

56:29

walk with that coffee back. That's.

56:31

When I'm beginning to frame up on

56:33

on about the work on and then

56:35

when I sit down up to those sessions,

56:37

it's like hard work time. And that's

56:39

how I mentally separate from email time and

56:42

he like I do this. for example,

56:44

there's a particular walk I'll do. Best.

56:46

Fifteen minutes transition walk. Okay,

56:49

I'm I'm switching off and switch locations

56:51

but also I want to switch my

56:53

mindset into I'm Writing Now Not. Answering

56:56

emails are doing something like this. It's

56:58

the reason why training at home during

57:00

the pandemic was so difficult that there

57:02

is something ritualistic about he get in

57:04

the car and and me drive to

57:06

the gym and you say hello to

57:08

are you playing a music, he sailed,

57:10

the receptionist and then he you dump

57:12

he bagged us to something about that

57:15

is right. Okay this is Jim time

57:17

and in some ways does a bit

57:19

of a costly signaling thing going on

57:21

which is driven all the way to

57:23

the gym or not. Not Gonna try

57:25

now. yeah from fifteen. Minutes to get to

57:27

the gym whereas if you go. I walked into

57:29

the. Carriage that you laugh.

57:31

A little bit of a dog

57:33

in thing yet. So I'm what

57:35

about going back to the do

57:38

few things thing said. the. Innate.

57:41

People pleases amongst us here.

57:43

How can we get better

57:45

at learning? Say no. yeah.

57:47

Things have both philosophically. Emotionally

57:50

and then tactically as well. Yes,

57:52

transparency about your workload. right?

57:55

I think this is that the number one issue.

57:57

That. When solved makes workload man.

58:00

better is getting transparent with other people,

58:02

this is what's on my plate. Instead

58:04

of keeping at this obfuscated thing, no one

58:06

knows what anyone else is doing, and we

58:09

just sort of throw tasks at each other,

58:11

and sometimes they come back, and sometimes they're

58:13

accepted, and we just imagine why that is,

58:15

be more transparent. So many of the tactics

58:17

in the book are all under that category

58:19

for doing fewer things, are all under this

58:21

category of making your workload more

58:23

transparent. So here's a really direct way of doing

58:25

that, for example. This is sort of on the

58:27

nose, but people are actually doing this, so now

58:30

I say this is not a thought experiment, but

58:32

really do this. Imagine you have

58:34

a shared document, and at the top, it

58:36

says, okay, here's what I'm actively working on right now, and

58:39

you should have three things under there. I'm working on these

58:41

three things. Below it, big dividing line.

58:44

Here's the ordered queue of things that

58:46

are lined up for me to work on next, and in

58:48

the order in which they're gonna pop into

58:50

here as I finish things. Now

58:53

imagine someone's like, yeah, Chris, can you

58:55

do whatever? That's what just be like, no,

58:57

or yes. You can be like, yeah, just

59:00

go add it to the queue.

59:02

This is where I keep track of, I'm very careful about my work. Add

59:05

it over there. If there's any information I need to

59:07

know to do it, either put that

59:09

in there or put a note there that I should

59:11

call you when I get closer, and now they have

59:13

to confront the reality of your workload, which

59:16

means either they're gonna say, all right,

59:18

nevermind. I kinda need to get this done.

59:20

You have 15 things waiting

59:23

to happen. It would

59:25

take too long, or their expectations are reasonable.

59:27

Oh, okay, I see you're not

59:29

starting to work on this tomorrow. I'm not gonna

59:31

start bothering you. In fact, I can keep checking

59:33

in on this document and seeing this thing marching

59:36

its way up to when it's active, so I'm

59:38

gonna generate no overhead tax until you're working on

59:40

it. Yeah, of course, we're not gonna have standing

59:42

meetings or emails until it's one of your three things

59:44

you're working on. So you either get much more realistic

59:47

calibration of when you're gonna get work back, or

59:49

you're like, oh, don't bother about it. Now

59:52

if they're a boss, they say, no, no, I need to

59:54

get this done now. Now you can put it back to

59:56

them. Great, tell me which one to move,

1:00:00

No, you said that like, and so

1:00:02

now there's, people have to

1:00:04

actually be involved. What

1:00:06

about the emotion that you

1:00:09

feel of, there's this sort

1:00:11

of default to yes, you know,

1:00:13

you don't want to appear lazy. There's

1:00:15

almost this sort of self-flagellation that I certainly

1:00:17

have with my productivity where it's like, I

1:00:19

should be able to take on more. I

1:00:22

shouldn't be as inefficient or whatever malady I

1:00:24

think I have that's causing me to not

1:00:26

get a million things done in a day

1:00:28

and only get half a million things done

1:00:30

in a day. What about

1:00:32

dealing with that, you know, guilt

1:00:35

almost, like productivity guilt? Yeah. So

1:00:38

never give a yes or no in the room helps with that. So

1:00:41

once you have some sort of system, now you're kind of

1:00:43

tracking what am I working on now? What

1:00:45

am I waiting to work on? However you want to

1:00:48

do that, your answer can always be, yeah, that

1:00:50

sounds great. That sounds really important. Like that sounds like the

1:00:53

type of thing I could really do. Next

1:00:57

time I get a chance, let me just go, you know,

1:00:59

I'm very careful about, I have these like work management systems.

1:01:01

I track my time very carefully. Let me just run it

1:01:03

through that and see like what I'm dealing with and then

1:01:05

I'll get back to you. And so

1:01:07

you're not giving a yes or no in the room. And now

1:01:09

the next day or like later that day, you can actually go

1:01:11

through and look at and come back and either you say this

1:01:14

is important and figure out when you're going to work on it

1:01:16

and give them a good estimate or be like, I

1:01:18

know, you know what, I took a look and really,

1:01:21

I don't have a lot of, I'm looking at my time. I track

1:01:23

my time very carefully. It'd be like a couple months before I had

1:01:25

enough cycles. So this is not going to work. I'm not going to

1:01:27

be able to fit this in now. Yeah. That

1:01:30

specifically the wordage of

1:01:33

delivering this to people. Have you

1:01:35

found any better or worse ways

1:01:37

to actually communicate? This is a

1:01:39

thing that I don't think

1:01:41

I can get done. Yeah. Well,

1:01:44

there's two things here. The first is just you have to be

1:01:46

super clear with the no when you give it. So

1:01:48

when you give the no, it has

1:01:50

to be, you know, hammered into

1:01:52

the tablets. The Moses is holding

1:01:55

clear, right? Like I can't

1:01:57

do this. And then you can put whatever,

1:01:59

then you soften. Well, the softening should

1:02:01

be around the very clear no when

1:02:03

you actually give it. Do not leave any wiggle

1:02:06

room for like, maybe I could do this. Yeah,

1:02:08

I can't do this right now. Right now, because

1:02:10

their whole goal in life is to get this

1:02:12

thing taken care of that's on their list. So

1:02:14

if you give them, they're not going to, a

1:02:16

lot of people just hope that

1:02:18

the other person who gave them the task in the

1:02:20

first place is gonna do the no for them. I

1:02:22

will take this off. Yeah, you're right, Chris, I'm looking

1:02:24

at your schedule. Yeah, you do sound busy. No, don't

1:02:26

bother, I'll take it on. They'll be like, great, so

1:02:28

when are you available? Two and a half weeks, great.

1:02:31

I'll expect in two and a half weeks. That's,

1:02:33

you gotta be clear, I can't do this. And

1:02:36

then you can be nice around it, but don't let

1:02:38

the niceness make the no be ambiguous. But the thing

1:02:40

I mentioned before, that's the second piece here that could

1:02:42

be useful, signaling that you're very

1:02:44

careful about your time. This

1:02:46

earns you a huge amount of

1:02:48

leeway, right? Because a lot of

1:02:51

no resistance, right? Resistance of someone

1:02:53

saying no comes from the

1:02:55

fact where I don't really trust that you have

1:02:58

your act together. I

1:03:00

just, I don't, are you? Is this overwhelming or is

1:03:02

this laziness? Are you laziness? Are you all, you know,

1:03:04

just, you're entitled, it gets all these,

1:03:07

do your work. But if you

1:03:09

have the reputation of, oh,

1:03:12

you're like a Cal Newport nerd, right? Like you have

1:03:14

your stuff together. So if you're signaling that, yeah, let

1:03:16

me just run this through my system, because I actually

1:03:18

track everything I work on and I find the time

1:03:20

in advance I'm gonna work on it. Let me just

1:03:22

run it through the system and let you know like

1:03:25

when we could fit this in. And then you come back and say, I

1:03:27

can't fit it in. Now they're dealing

1:03:29

with, Chris has his act

1:03:31

together on this. So he's probably not

1:03:33

lying. He probably doesn't have enough time

1:03:36

for this. And yay, isn't it also that Chris has

1:03:38

his act together? And it's a,

1:03:41

the technical no, so like the no based on

1:03:43

I have a very technical system can actually raise

1:03:45

your esteem in the eyes of the people you're

1:03:47

saying no to. Absolutely, absolutely. Like, oh, this guy,

1:03:49

okay, wait a second. Maybe this is someone we

1:03:51

should keep their eyes on. Like they really seem

1:03:53

to have their act together. So having some sort

1:03:55

of system where I'm managing my own workload, here's

1:03:57

what I'm working on. Here's what's active. Here's what's

1:03:59

not active. active, that division is critical.

1:04:02

You cannot treat everything on your plate as all

1:04:04

active at once. It has to be, this is

1:04:06

active, this I'm waiting on. That's

1:04:09

how you get rid of that overhead tax problem.

1:04:11

And then you need to communicate to other people,

1:04:14

I'm really careful about this. So

1:04:16

to recap the no's for people

1:04:18

pleases, be transparent about your

1:04:20

time to help people buy

1:04:22

in and understand what's going on. Say

1:04:25

no when you mean no and

1:04:27

relate it back to your time management and availability

1:04:29

and the fact that you're careful with your usage

1:04:31

of time. Yes, and to make this all easier,

1:04:34

don't give the yes or no in the room.

1:04:37

So in the moment where all of the social pressure is

1:04:39

on you, have your set answer, which

1:04:41

is not a yes or a no. But as

1:04:43

this sounds great, next time I get a chance,

1:04:45

I'll run this through my system and see when

1:04:48

I might be able to get this done. Is that to

1:04:51

give you a little bit of emotional buffer so that you're not

1:04:53

as... Oh, yes. Yes,

1:04:55

because the emotional... It just squeaks out of

1:04:57

you. The power dynamic is the like, Chris,

1:05:00

can you do this for... You don't... You

1:05:02

can't... You do not want to say no there. Yes. Okay.

1:05:06

You did it in an email four hours later, now you got the courage,

1:05:08

right? Very good. I think I

1:05:10

heard a story, is it Daniel Kahneman

1:05:12

maybe? I think

1:05:14

it's either Daniel Kahneman or

1:05:16

Warren Buffett that say something along

1:05:18

the lines of I never say yes or no on the

1:05:20

phone. Yeah. I've heard

1:05:23

this before. I'm kind of stealing this. I don't

1:05:25

know who it was, but I've heard this before.

1:05:27

Well, it's just... There

1:05:29

is a particular... I

1:05:32

don't know. I'm seeing people

1:05:34

pleasing everywhere at the moment and I'm very hesitant

1:05:36

about like my shiny new psychological pattern toy being

1:05:38

used to re-play. You know, like this is great

1:05:41

tweet I saw the other day that said, I've

1:05:43

just learned about the availability bias and I have

1:05:45

to say out of all of them, I think

1:05:47

it's my favorite one. I

1:05:49

love it. Yeah. I'm very

1:05:52

hesitant about like pattern matching this

1:05:54

to everything, but I can't imagine

1:05:56

the mindset of a person who

1:05:58

doesn't feel that component. It doesn't feel

1:06:00

that sort of desire to lie. I mean,

1:06:03

I know he's waiting on me, he's there

1:06:05

on the phone, or he's there in the person. And

1:06:09

yet, it seems to

1:06:11

be giving yourself a little bit of

1:06:13

psychological distance, you know, that mindfulness gap,

1:06:15

as Corey Allen calls it, to

1:06:17

just go, okay, in the cold, harsh light

1:06:22

of day, can I do this?

1:06:25

Probably not. I don't think, you know, when I think about

1:06:27

the stuff that I say yes to, additional calls, many of

1:06:29

which I said in the Uber on the way here, yes

1:06:31

to, I'm looking at my Monday and I'm like, that's nice

1:06:34

and free. And someone goes, do we go to contemporary call

1:06:36

next week? I'm like, yeah, Monday looks great. Giving

1:06:40

yourself as much psychological distance as

1:06:42

possible just helps you to, like, I

1:06:45

probably can't do this. I don't really even need

1:06:47

to look at my schedule, because if

1:06:49

it's something that's optional and it doesn't fire me

1:06:51

up and it's not mandatory, it's

1:06:54

a no. Obviously a no.

1:06:56

Yeah, but you're not going to say it in the moment. It's

1:06:59

obviously a no, Chris. Speaking

1:07:01

of which, can we get on a call later? Monday. Monday

1:07:04

looks great. But another thing that goes along with that

1:07:06

would also be templates and quotas. Like, it's another way,

1:07:08

so how do you deal with things where you're

1:07:11

going to say yes to some, but you

1:07:13

can't say yes to everything. So you could quota it,

1:07:16

right? Yeah, I'd love to take calls with,

1:07:18

like, whatever, new people or whatever, but I

1:07:20

only do three a month. So

1:07:23

I already hit my three this month, so I can't do

1:07:25

it this month. Like quotas are a way to keep you doing

1:07:27

things or it doesn't... You don't want to say no to

1:07:29

every single time, but if you say yes every single time,

1:07:32

you get overwhelmed. And then templates, which would probably be great

1:07:34

for you, actually. I've been messing around with these too. For

1:07:37

certain types of really common things, you have

1:07:39

to have a whole templated process in place

1:07:42

so that it doesn't have to just be the interaction.

1:07:44

So like if you write Adam

1:07:46

Grant to blurb a book, he's got

1:07:48

this great, so you want me to blurb

1:07:50

a book document. And like it walks through. So

1:07:53

here's how it works. Like I can't blurb most books, but

1:07:55

you should send it to me. And

1:07:57

here's how many I get. And so in the end, I

1:07:59

blurb a few. And so if you don't

1:08:01

hear from me, then that means it wasn't, and he lays

1:08:03

the whole thing out. So now, because you, I get this

1:08:05

request a lot as a writer. Now when someone's like, okay,

1:08:07

can you blur my book? And it's often like someone you

1:08:10

kind of know. Now you can just send

1:08:13

them the thing. You've templated it, right? So it's

1:08:15

not an issue. Well you can even have, we've

1:08:17

started using this on the website for a few

1:08:19

things. Like dark

1:08:22

links on your website, secret

1:08:24

URL, calnewport.com/testimonial or whatever. And

1:08:26

you just set, well there's

1:08:28

the URL. I

1:08:30

think there's a type of legitimacy that the URL

1:08:32

gives it as well, which is quite nice. Yeah,

1:08:34

like oh my god, he's got a URL for

1:08:37

it. This

1:08:39

means that it must have happened an awful

1:08:42

lot. Yeah, like calnewport.com/blurbrequest or something. And now it

1:08:44

seems like really, yeah. Do you

1:08:46

have this issue with unsolicited guest?

1:08:49

Is this like, or do people kind

1:08:51

of understand in this world, you know, the

1:08:53

host and their team, it's pulling

1:08:55

in guest, or do you get a lot? So

1:08:57

I get an awful lot of requests to come

1:09:00

on the show. One of the problems, and

1:09:02

this is, I

1:09:05

guess a unique challenge of

1:09:07

going from total

1:09:10

cottage industry solo

1:09:12

influencer to niche

1:09:15

microfame to whatever version of

1:09:17

platform we're at now, like

1:09:20

hyper-niche, slightly larger fame. I

1:09:24

built up along the way, you have my email.

1:09:27

And like fucking David

1:09:30

Allen has my email, and Ryan

1:09:32

Holiday has my email, Mark Manson has my email.

1:09:34

And it's clearly a personal email. Correct. That

1:09:37

you set up a long time ago. Yeah, I've had

1:09:39

it for 10 years. Dude, my phone number, I maybe

1:09:41

shouldn't say this, but I don't care. My

1:09:44

phone number was on every flyer for a club

1:09:46

night that we ran for years,

1:09:48

years and years. And

1:09:52

I haven't been, you don't start

1:09:54

something off most

1:09:57

of the time with the systems

1:09:59

and processes. of and one day

1:10:01

this is going to reach half a billion people

1:10:03

a year and like it's gonna be all

1:10:05

of these weird externality just do the thing you

1:10:08

just in this sort of scrappy can do app

1:10:10

it together exactly which is cool and I

1:10:12

like the fact that we did that but yeah

1:10:15

I am reaping the

1:10:17

whirlwind of this Frankenstein's

1:10:19

monster that we built before it up

1:10:21

until a year ago we got our

1:10:23

first like additional member of staff one

1:10:25

year ago one one year ago it

1:10:27

was me and video guy Dean still

1:10:29

yeah same thing and then

1:10:31

we got another guy and he was like

1:10:33

what's your systems for like communicating and stuff

1:10:35

and oh we have a Facebook Messenger chat

1:10:39

what do you mean I think it was me yeah

1:10:41

and Dean and a Facebook Messenger

1:10:43

chat we just rock and roll and

1:10:45

we just go back and forth and we do

1:10:47

a man because you can reply and you know

1:10:49

Facebook maintains the quality of media he

1:10:51

said that's insane

1:10:54

to do that that's absolutely insane

1:10:56

I think yeah but we've released

1:10:58

600 podcasts and a

1:11:00

thousand clips through a Facebook

1:11:02

Messenger chat and then we can move to server

1:11:05

to slack I know you got problems like but

1:11:07

it's like problem but that was revolutionary for us

1:11:09

because it segmented things into different channels and we

1:11:11

could find things much more easily and it's got

1:11:13

a record it's a history of everything we've ever

1:11:15

spoken about organized by topic but yeah

1:11:18

it's it's a real interesting time I'm

1:11:20

really thinking an awful lot about the operations of

1:11:22

the show I found myself becoming

1:11:24

increasingly distracted by being an operator not

1:11:26

being the creator not not spending time

1:11:28

reading not doing that stuff because it's

1:11:30

just this huge big thing must be

1:11:32

the stage right now is that that

1:11:34

transition to it it becomes you

1:11:37

become the head of a organization I'm not just

1:11:40

like someone who's doing a podcast people are

1:11:42

talking to no yeah it's it's it's very

1:11:44

quickly become I'm now COO chief

1:11:49

brand the leader

1:11:51

host head researcher guest curator all

1:11:53

of these things and yeah

1:11:56

we've got right now we've got an executive after I

1:11:58

finish up with you I've got two hours meeting

1:12:00

with an executive consultant who I literally

1:12:02

just needed to be like, I need

1:12:04

a Navy Seal kind of

1:12:06

guy to come in and take the door

1:12:08

down and just say, right, this isn't a

1:12:10

problem for you. This is

1:12:13

something I'm going to take off your plate and

1:12:15

I'm going to reorg everything. So if you look

1:12:17

at the org structure of modern wisdom, it's a

1:12:19

15 legged octopus

1:12:22

with one head. Because you hired

1:12:24

people here to do this. I piecemealed

1:12:26

everything together and then didn't vertically pull

1:12:28

anything out. And especially because it's also

1:12:30

recent. It's also recent and so new.

1:12:32

So you're solving problems with you come

1:12:34

and solve this problem. Yes, but the

1:12:36

combination problem is still always on me.

1:12:38

So yeah, not to get into the

1:12:40

weeds too much, I suppose, about the

1:12:42

internal machinations of what's going on with

1:12:44

the show. I'm also part

1:12:46

of me that's like hesitant about being

1:12:48

too open about this on the Internet, because in part

1:12:50

it feels like a humble brag, which it isn't. If

1:12:53

you saw the mess and like the nightmare that I

1:12:55

have to wake up with an email every day, it's

1:12:57

not a flex. But the other thing being that the

1:13:00

whole point of the podcast is

1:13:03

for me is for me to just express

1:13:06

my curiosity and to speak to people that

1:13:08

I'm interested in about stuff I'm interested in.

1:13:10

Yeah. And all of this sort of complexity

1:13:13

feels a little contrived and cynical. And it's like,

1:13:15

hang on, this is just supposed to be you

1:13:18

chatting with people you're interested in. Why does there

1:13:20

need to be 15 people behind you? And it's

1:13:22

like, well, because as the number

1:13:24

of incoming emails and sponsors and all of this

1:13:26

other stuff needs to happen. And the reason it

1:13:28

has to happen is because the show gets to

1:13:31

a size where I can't take it on anymore.

1:13:33

Yeah. But yeah, in inbound

1:13:35

email, a lot of that outbound guest research keeping

1:13:37

on top. I mean, your last book was A World

1:13:39

Without Email, which I dream of. And

1:13:42

yeah, your fantasy. Yeah, it's

1:13:44

a very interesting challenge. I'm

1:13:46

really hoping that I'm going to look back at

1:13:48

sort of this period as operationally,

1:13:51

organizationally, psychologically, emotionally,

1:13:53

a very formative

1:13:55

learning experience where I had to let go of

1:13:58

the kind of boy operator

1:14:01

I was before and grow up to

1:14:03

be a real kind of. Yeah, isn't

1:14:05

this fun that you can kind

1:14:07

of do this for a living? Like I'm just

1:14:09

chatting with people and at some point it changes

1:14:11

to like, that's a media company you're put on

1:14:13

a TV show. TV shows have staffs. Yes. Yeah.

1:14:15

And they, and they need to. So obsessing

1:14:18

over quality, we were talking

1:14:20

about this before. It's something that I've really

1:14:22

leaned into as much as I can with

1:14:24

the show. Yeah. Uh, you know, this hyper

1:14:26

fixation that we've had on the quality of

1:14:29

the AV stuff. The way that we shoot,

1:14:31

the way that I tried to construct, uh,

1:14:33

the, the guest lineup as well

1:14:35

to give this really sort of lovely museum art

1:14:37

gallery curator, you

1:14:39

know, good mix of different types. You

1:14:41

know, I had a democratic presidential candidate

1:14:43

on a couple of weeks ago. He

1:14:46

was the founder of Belvedere vodka and

1:14:48

Telentigillato. And

1:14:50

he's a cool dude. Yes. And I'm like,

1:14:52

I'm interested in this guy. So I'm going to

1:14:54

speak to a democratic presidential candidate just because it's

1:14:57

interesting. And I think, Oh, wow, that's cool. Now

1:14:59

look back on those sorts of episodes. I think

1:15:01

that's great. And then, Oh, Dr. Robert Glover, no,

1:15:03

my Mr. Nice got it. So this obsession of

1:15:05

equality is important, but I think a lot of

1:15:07

people when, when that gets

1:15:09

ripped out of them, the fear of,

1:15:11

uh, doing fewer

1:15:13

things is, well,

1:15:16

busyness is a reliable route towards

1:15:18

success. And the obsession of

1:15:20

equality plays into their

1:15:22

fear of perfectionism paralysis. Yeah.

1:15:26

Yeah. So, I mean, I think they have it backwards. Busyness

1:15:28

is never a route to success. Like

1:15:31

some successful people are busier than they

1:15:33

probably should be, but the route

1:15:35

to success is producing stuff that's valuable and

1:15:38

calls don't produce things that are valuable and

1:15:40

emails don't produce things that are valuable and

1:15:42

jumping back and forth on Slack chat, they

1:15:44

don't produce things that are valuable. That requires

1:15:46

doing something really, really well. And it turns

1:15:48

out the world's like incredibly competitive. So it's,

1:15:50

it's 10 X harder than you imagine when

1:15:52

you get started, right? Like you have to

1:15:54

produce stuff that is at a very

1:15:56

high level. If You want to

1:15:59

begin gaining autonomy. the of your life and career

1:16:01

and impact and decide. I think people get their

1:16:03

backers so they see a but I'm afraid to

1:16:05

a business. I think it's it's reliable and that

1:16:07

you'll succeed at it. I think what's appealing with

1:16:10

dizziness is it's a goal that you will succeed

1:16:12

at. A want to be busy you

1:16:14

will succeed it. I just not a hard go to succeed

1:16:16

as. It's it's. not easy because you have

1:16:18

to be busy, but you know you can succeed out

1:16:21

and just keep take calls. Do this. Do whatever you

1:16:23

need to do up. People worry much more about not

1:16:25

want to produce something that. Is unambiguously

1:16:27

really good. And. That me

1:16:29

to could be bad, right? Like there's there's there's

1:16:31

fear, their to the people, fear about perfectionism. And

1:16:34

essentially like my short answer to that is like

1:16:36

yeah, that's the whole challenge. Is. Like

1:16:38

a whole challenge of doing stuff that

1:16:40

matters. I gotta make this good. I'm

1:16:42

gonna have to battle. Perfectionism.

1:16:45

Like. Dad is the dragon. I'm saints or

1:16:47

it's like us. As part of this challenge

1:16:49

it's like saying to us relief pitcher in

1:16:51

baseball you're gonna be nervous like relief pitchers

1:16:54

in baseball They come out and is a

1:16:56

super important moments of the game and all

1:16:58

rides on like this. One person though in

1:17:00

the ball and I've heard them talk about

1:17:02

this before they say oh the whole. Part.

1:17:05

Of this job is how do you do stuff

1:17:07

when physiologically you feel incredibly anxious, right? Looks like

1:17:09

it's absurd that your goal would be. I don't

1:17:12

want to be anxious like know you're gonna have

1:17:14

to deal with anxiety right you know or other

1:17:16

types of performers to have this as well. Exile

1:17:18

is a big part of what you do. What

1:17:20

you do as high stakes you're hosting the Oscars.

1:17:22

I guess that's you're going to be anxious to

1:17:24

get is very high stakes of the idea with

1:17:26

it assesses the same thing with trump or do

1:17:28

things that are really good. You're. Going out.

1:17:31

Biggest struggle of perfectionism and we have ideas how get

1:17:33

past it. There's best practices here, but that's it. That's

1:17:35

the challenge. you're trying to get better. You eat. You

1:17:37

want to do as good as you can without

1:17:39

waiting too long. Holding onto it. you're going to walked

1:17:41

as tight rope and you might fall to the

1:17:43

side. Sometimes that that's it. That's the whole game, right?

1:17:46

You could be nervous when you pet. That's the whole

1:17:48

game. So. I tell people businesses

1:17:50

are going to make you are. Not

1:17:52

going to you successful. How do people

1:17:54

deal with perfectionism? So. yeah

1:17:56

was a couple things to do but example i gave in

1:17:59

the book was the beatles Right because when

1:18:01

the Beatles decided to stop touring it was

1:18:03

like a big deal They had a terrible

1:18:05

tour late 60s Everything

1:18:07

went wrong and they just declared like on their way to

1:18:09

the very last stop which was a candlestick park in San

1:18:11

Francisco Like this is it we hate touring. We don't want

1:18:13

to do this anymore So they

1:18:16

went to the studio after this for the

1:18:18

first time They did not have

1:18:20

to produce an album that they could replicate

1:18:22

on stage That just opened

1:18:24

up like every possible option, right? So it's kind of

1:18:26

Pandora's box like when you're when you're recording music has

1:18:28

had been done up until that point that you were

1:18:30

going To then go play on stage. You only had

1:18:32

so many options We're gonna have guitar in the bassist

1:18:35

and we're only so many chords we can do and

1:18:37

right? Let's go Yeah, so he didn't have that so

1:18:39

it was completely open-ended, right? And so

1:18:41

there's this fear and they were like we're gonna make this better

1:18:43

We're gonna spend way more time than we've ever spent on now

1:18:45

before we want to be great But we also want to get

1:18:47

it out. So one of the things they did and actually we

1:18:50

could probably give credit to Their manager

1:18:52

or not them. But one of the things he did is as

1:18:54

soon as they had A single that

1:18:56

was releasable. He released it. So

1:18:59

we put a stake in the ground. Oh, there's an there's

1:19:01

a single out Oh, we're expecting an album now kind of

1:19:03

a clock on me three years three years, right? So

1:19:07

they spent much more time on this album they ever

1:19:09

had before but they didn't spend Incredible

1:19:11

amount of time on it the album with sergeant peppers

1:19:13

and it stayed longer at number one than

1:19:16

anything They'd ever done before it's like that's the tightrope you're

1:19:18

working on So what they did there is something that other

1:19:20

people can do you put a stake in the ground Is

1:19:23

what Lin-Manuel Miranda did seven years working on

1:19:25

the play in the Heights like oh that

1:19:27

seems like perfectionism land But what they did

1:19:30

was he was working with these two alumni

1:19:32

of Swarthmore that had a theatrical company in

1:19:34

Manhattan They would schedule. All right three months

1:19:36

from now. We're gonna bring in actors

1:19:38

to read the latest version of the script So

1:19:41

like you had to do something

1:19:44

like it had to be better There people were gonna come

1:19:46

and read this the people who are kind of investing you

1:19:48

want to see this as better So you had to do

1:19:50

something to make it better, but it also wasn't oh my

1:19:52

god. I gotta do this tonight So they kept scheduling. Well,

1:19:54

here's the next thing we're gonna do. Here's the next thing

1:19:57

And he had time to think about it. Time

1:19:59

to. It it immature creatively, but he always

1:20:01

had a stake in the ground. There. Was

1:20:03

point on forward so it's like you want to

1:20:05

make the thing you're doing as well as you can

1:20:08

as good as you can but also put time pressure

1:20:10

on yourself. Put some constraints and we would have wanted

1:20:12

to be gonna really want this to be good

1:20:14

but I also got to ship it. And.

1:20:16

We are the best possible. Think the next one will be better.

1:20:19

Justify. To the busy addict,

1:20:21

why they should obsessive quality.

1:20:24

What? Is going to be two things

1:20:26

I mean so if you turbo slow productivity

1:20:28

of. It's. Gonna make slowness suddenly

1:20:30

be natural. The people who obsess

1:20:33

over quality. Grow. Antibodies to

1:20:35

Business. As. They begin like

1:20:37

the complaints you you were having about the

1:20:39

administrative overhead of your show is because you're

1:20:42

says of the quality what you're doing. It's

1:20:44

in the contrast to that did the the

1:20:46

busy ness becomes frustrating if you to care

1:20:48

about the quality of what you're doing a

1:20:51

good it's a job is fine with. I

1:20:53

do these things all day right. Still makes

1:20:55

slowness becomes more natural. Want to care about

1:20:57

qualities then. As. You actually do

1:20:59

better because you have suspect quality. You

1:21:01

gain more control, more autonomy, more leverage

1:21:03

to enforce more Sloan as he could

1:21:05

start picking stuff off your plate. You

1:21:08

can afford to hire people to do

1:21:10

sayings or like and. Ferriss.

1:21:12

Case does his so is so the oh geez

1:21:14

show that so like powerful he can just say

1:21:16

i guess is where a headset, a record from

1:21:18

wherever I am in the world and you know

1:21:20

this is just me and my right hand man.

1:21:22

Whatever rights to then you gain more leverage to

1:21:24

the keep the stuff off your plate. So it's

1:21:27

really the glue that makes loon as possible. And

1:21:29

if you don't care about slowness, starting to write

1:21:31

argument is nothing great. Didn't require

1:21:33

an obsession over doing quality greatness

1:21:35

as not accidental. No one accidently

1:21:38

produce a Sergeant Pepper's. Or

1:21:40

breaks or record in a sport. That

1:21:43

is an obsession with I want

1:21:45

to do this better. Meticulous.

1:21:48

Meticulous. Getting

1:21:50

the evidence is another big thanks fine

1:21:52

of the evidence of what actually matters.

1:21:55

So. another part of growing up in

1:21:57

terms of like professionalize is realizing that

1:21:59

some Here's this thing I want to do well. I

1:22:02

can't just write a fairy tale about

1:22:04

what I want to matter. So

1:22:06

a lot of people do this. I want to be a novelist.

1:22:08

The fairy tale I want to be true is

1:22:11

that if I do National Novel Writing Month and I

1:22:13

write every single morning for one hour at the end

1:22:15

of it, I'll be John Grisham. You

1:22:18

have to actually go get the evidence. How does

1:22:21

this field where I work actually function?

1:22:24

What matters? How are things judged? How do

1:22:26

people get good at this? What

1:22:28

distinguishes the top performers from the

1:22:30

lower performers? Because you almost always find on the

1:22:32

mountain of success in a field, there's all of

1:22:35

these paths and almost none of them go up. There's

1:22:37

like a very narrow path and

1:22:40

it's a hard one to traverse because it's steep. There's like

1:22:42

one path that goes up. If you're

1:22:44

not having that really well-blazed for

1:22:46

you, I know exactly what I'm doing. I

1:22:48

know exactly how I'm training or what I need to do

1:22:50

to try to sell this

1:22:52

book or whatever. If you don't know

1:22:54

exactly the path you're trying to go, you just wander around

1:22:57

the base and then you kind

1:22:59

of just eventually burn out enough of this and

1:23:01

let's go do some more email.

1:23:04

It's interesting to think about the

1:23:07

people who do find success that haven't

1:23:09

had that quite meticulous plan in advance

1:23:11

have basically closed their eyes and thrown

1:23:13

a dart and then opened one and

1:23:16

gone, oh God, I hit the bullseye. Wow,

1:23:18

how amazing. But you don't want to leave your

1:23:20

success up to a fluke. Yeah, because it's not going to happen.

1:23:22

I mean, it might happen, but you also might as well buy

1:23:24

some lottery tickets. You're kind of playing with similar odds. I mean,

1:23:26

this is like the YouTube influencer effect. Everyone

1:23:29

my kids age, elementary school age kids, they all

1:23:32

want to be YouTube influencers when they grow up

1:23:34

because they're- Don't do it, kids. Don't do it.

1:23:36

Look, I told my son, I was like, I

1:23:38

want to come give a talk at your school

1:23:40

about the economics of YouTube and what's actually involved

1:23:42

and how this works and how difficult it is.

1:23:44

When does it lose that? But occasionally people just

1:23:46

blow up. Now, the problem is like with YouTube

1:23:48

influencers, the people who sort of just accidentally blew

1:23:50

up into these huge

1:23:53

audiences, the main thing they had

1:23:55

in common was they were very early. It was,

1:23:57

I just wandered into this. But

1:23:59

It gives- This fairy tale of

1:24:01

it's possible. That. You could just

1:24:03

because I could. I have a camera. And

1:24:05

this person who blew up was just talking. so

1:24:08

you know I could just talk into this camera

1:24:10

beverley out of obscurity. Ever know that this is

1:24:12

the assiduous thing about Tic Toc? Is.

1:24:15

They are actually explicitly plane without effect because

1:24:17

tic toc and control exactly how many people

1:24:19

see. Whatever they can show your video to

1:24:21

exactly how many people they want to show

1:24:23

it to rights. So they figure this out

1:24:25

with oh here's what you do when someone

1:24:27

is new to tick tock pretty early on

1:24:29

the gym a big that it doesn't use

1:24:31

it is hop your hope you're like oh

1:24:33

my god I mean to say said rag

1:24:35

I am so close. I think people really

1:24:37

like me like I have something going on

1:24:39

here on the I see No I'm going

1:24:41

to be same as By let me just

1:24:43

keep scrolling on here as. A brilliant business

1:24:45

model. What does obsessing over quality

1:24:47

look like? Practically wanted the rest of the

1:24:50

strategies that people should rely on. You got

1:24:52

improve. Your taste is a big part of

1:24:54

it. So. Don't just assume

1:24:56

you know what quality is. U.

1:24:58

Actually, go out there and learn about the thing you

1:25:01

want to do. What makes it?

1:25:03

What's good, What's bad, What makes a good

1:25:05

stuff good in the bad stuff. badly. that's

1:25:07

harder than people think we often taken for

1:25:09

granted right? So like this was Ira Glass

1:25:11

is Famous You Tube interview I don't have

1:25:13

when he did this thing by cited it

1:25:16

back in So Good The Can Ignore You

1:25:18

which has two thousand and twelve vs. Is

1:25:20

this a interview he did about Taste? That.

1:25:22

Everyone sites and in it he says are

1:25:25

basically I'm paraphrasing. The whole thing is if

1:25:27

you're creator is that at first. Your

1:25:29

taste is gonna be here and your outputs

1:25:31

can be down here. There's a gap in

1:25:33

is really frustrating because your stuff as bad

1:25:35

as a he's got a persist. If you

1:25:37

persist you eventually catch up to your taste

1:25:39

and then that's like when. Things.

1:25:41

Go really well. But then I found that interview

1:25:43

from a couple years ago. ira glass

1:25:46

talking the michael lewis and they go back and

1:25:48

listen to ira glass is very first npr piece

1:25:50

which was at the oreo factory at least or

1:25:52

or something and in that retrospective ira glass said

1:25:54

you know like michael out with that came out

1:25:57

He's like, this is really bad, first of all.

1:25:59

This is bad radio. But when that came out,

1:26:01

I thought it was the best thing. I was

1:26:03

like, I really got this thing correct. The standards

1:26:05

move over time. Yeah. So he didn't have this

1:26:08

idea that you have this gap you're trying to

1:26:10

close. No, the main people have is not the

1:26:12

gap between their taste and their performance. It's that

1:26:14

their taste is so bad, they think they're great.

1:26:18

So you actually, like what makes Ira

1:26:20

Glass succeed was he

1:26:22

kept pushing his understanding of what good could be.

1:26:24

Yes. You got to open the gap. So it's

1:26:26

a little counterintuitive because people want to jump right

1:26:29

into what's my deliberate practice plan? If I got

1:26:31

10,000 hours, I got a pile up, I

1:26:34

want to get hours one through six done today. Let's

1:26:37

get after it. But often the first thing

1:26:39

to do is don't forget your own creations

1:26:42

right now. You need to understand what you're

1:26:44

trying to do. You're

1:26:47

the aspiring filmmaker. Maybe you need to go to film school.

1:26:49

Not to learn how to shoot. You could learn how to

1:26:51

do that. But you need to be watching a lot of

1:26:53

films and be around a lot of other people watching films.

1:26:55

You want to be a literary novelist, maybe you need to

1:26:57

go to MFA program. Not because you

1:27:00

need to learn how to write sentences or how

1:27:02

a novel works, but you need to be around

1:27:04

a lot of other really talented young writers who

1:27:06

are writing experimental things and critiquing everyone's things left

1:27:08

and right so that your taste can jump

1:27:11

about. And now when you pursue it, your... When you

1:27:13

say taste, what do you mean? What's your definition of

1:27:15

taste? Your understanding of what's good. So

1:27:19

you want a better understanding of what's good and what's bad.

1:27:23

That's very artistic to think about things like that.

1:27:29

One of the problems is that taste

1:27:32

and popularity don't always correlate. It's

1:27:38

possible, especially in modern content creation,

1:27:40

to do something which is untasteful

1:27:43

but successful. However,

1:27:46

I've found it to be usually

1:27:48

quite rare that if something is done in

1:27:51

very good taste and executed well, that

1:27:53

it doesn't end up reaching some form of success. And

1:27:56

let's even complicate the term, Because

1:27:58

taste also has this... The

1:28:00

other contests in the sort of high

1:28:02

art connotations so tasty get a taste

1:28:04

for some people think to mean also

1:28:06

quality in a certain sort of artistic

1:28:08

sense. but we didn't We didn't vulgar

1:28:11

I said term know it just means

1:28:13

I know what. Good is in

1:28:15

this field and if think about

1:28:17

that way. For example, Mister Beast

1:28:19

has incredible taste. No. One

1:28:21

would say that his videos or taste for

1:28:23

right and know is Seattle, but I also

1:28:26

very effective, but he knows exactly He says

1:28:28

it's all the time in interviews he's like,

1:28:30

you know it's frustrating to me when people

1:28:33

struggle because I could tell you exactly how

1:28:35

to make a video, like be really successful

1:28:37

because he has were ethically does understand as

1:28:39

he has this incredibly hone sense of taste

1:28:42

for algorithmically driven Youtube videos or knows exactly

1:28:44

what good is and what good is it.

1:28:46

and you see someone else try to do

1:28:48

this. At. It from his

1:28:51

perspective is this like this is like

1:28:53

a really bad ugly video. Because.

1:28:55

His taste as really home to. He

1:28:57

had that obsessive period of just like

1:28:59

studying these things left the rights of

1:29:01

what's his taste got good to because

1:29:03

it's not like he has some other

1:29:05

skill that is the key to the

1:29:07

success. Like he's not like a super

1:29:10

like handsome on T V telegenic like

1:29:12

a can't take my eyes off of

1:29:14

this person Type A Personalities is not

1:29:16

a comedian he doesn't have like great

1:29:18

timing, is not not a very effective

1:29:20

communicator, doesn't have like some sort of

1:29:22

physical skill that's amazing or whatever he

1:29:24

doesn't. Even have you know I have been

1:29:26

interested in? I've been studying the sub niche of

1:29:29

you tube of maker you tube. Like

1:29:31

Mark Rovers yeah my brothers great the as

1:29:33

yeah and that. but like in that world

1:29:36

there the whole key is you have to

1:29:38

bring an incredible engineering talent to the table.

1:29:40

That's how you sort of big time. each

1:29:42

other is like I'm going to build so

1:29:44

you actually make even crazier. You know this

1:29:47

is like this stuff meteor Channel where you

1:29:49

know he's just like I'm going to engineer

1:29:51

something that is so crazy about spaces. have

1:29:53

any that. But. he does have this

1:29:55

incredible taste for by rallied in my can

1:29:58

just express that so can be vulgar It

1:30:00

doesn't have to be a sort of high art

1:30:02

Arnold Bennett type of thing here. What? One

1:30:07

thing I think that's a little bit of an enclosed loop,

1:30:09

one of the problems that people will get caught up with

1:30:11

an awful lot is communication. This back

1:30:13

and forth, the requirement for communication, what

1:30:16

are your solutions from a slow

1:30:18

productivity way, strategies for people to slow

1:30:21

down the velocity of their communication?

1:30:23

Yeah, well first of all, just doing

1:30:25

fewer things already, you're cutting that

1:30:27

down. Because each thing brings

1:30:29

with it ex-ordination. Yeah, so

1:30:31

get rid of three things. That's three things

1:30:33

less generating communication. Which is actually like ten

1:30:35

times less communication because of all of the

1:30:38

things. Exactly, yeah. Then you take what's left

1:30:40

and what I always say, this goes back

1:30:42

more to my former book, I think it

1:30:44

applies here, is like what you're really trying

1:30:46

to avoid then with communication is you're not

1:30:48

trying to avoid delays. You're

1:30:51

not trying to optimize efficiency. What

1:30:53

you're trying to avoid is unscheduled

1:30:55

messaging that requires a response. So

1:30:58

something coming in in a chat or an

1:31:01

email that I wasn't expecting this, but

1:31:03

now it's going to require a response from me. The

1:31:06

more stuff you have that's generating unscheduled communication

1:31:08

that requires responses, the more time you have

1:31:10

to spend monitoring channels. The

1:31:13

stuff that remains on your list after you

1:31:15

do fewer things, you need to figure out

1:31:17

other ways to collaborate. Specifically, here's how we

1:31:19

collaborate that is going to

1:31:21

generate as few unscheduled messages requiring responses

1:31:23

as possible. And that's where you get

1:31:25

something like office hours. You

1:31:28

could have this in your company. We have these

1:31:30

twice a day, like this hour, that hour, almost

1:31:33

everything that requires some back and forth, it just

1:31:35

gets deferred to those office hours. So you can

1:31:37

implement these on Slack, for example. A lot of

1:31:39

people do this in the pandemic, Slack office hours.

1:31:42

It's an office hours channel. It's just this channel

1:31:44

is monitored during this half hour and this half

1:31:46

hour, right? It's real time to go back and

1:31:48

forth. Let's figure this thing out. You can do

1:31:50

it on the phone. You can do it in

1:31:52

person. So you start to get ideas like that.

1:31:54

Or you put processes in place. Okay, let's not

1:31:56

just send unscheduled messages to each other about the

1:31:58

video clips until they get done. done, we

1:32:01

have a process in place. They go to this file. They're

1:32:03

in this folder by the end of day on this day.

1:32:05

This person, and you, what you're trying to do

1:32:07

here is not be fast. You're not trying to be efficient. You

1:32:10

are trying to reduce unscheduled things

1:32:12

that arrive that require a response. Is

1:32:15

it, presumably there must be

1:32:17

some people whose jobs or roles

1:32:20

are unslow

1:32:23

productivity-ness anti-doting.

1:32:26

The guy that's the

1:32:29

enforcer, the operations

1:32:32

person, they will have a job

1:32:34

whose their entire role is to

1:32:36

basically be the on-demand gatekeeper

1:32:39

of whatever's happening. So

1:32:42

just thinking, there

1:32:45

may be people who've confused their roles. There

1:32:47

may be people who see themselves as that

1:32:49

enforcer and it's like, you're the social

1:32:52

media manager. You're not supposed to be

1:32:54

the person that does that thing. So

1:32:57

it might actually require reformulating

1:33:00

of what people's expectations

1:33:02

are internally. And what

1:33:04

you find in

1:33:06

a lot of businesses is that if

1:33:09

you start to fill a gap, people will begin

1:33:11

to lean up against you in that gap. You

1:33:14

know what I mean? So I was just

1:33:16

talking to Ryan Holiday about this because a

1:33:18

long time ago, Ryan wrote this thing. I

1:33:20

guess he was an assistant at some point.

1:33:22

He was assistant to Robert Greene. Okay. And

1:33:24

he was around some Hollywood stuff for a while too. So

1:33:26

he wrote this thing at some point, I quote all the

1:33:28

time, so we brought this up the other day. We

1:33:31

said the key to being an assistant,

1:33:34

like especially in Hollywood, where they start

1:33:36

you as an assistant and your

1:33:38

whole job is to try to move up from

1:33:40

there. If you want to be an agent, you start as an

1:33:42

assistant and then you move up to junior. Get in the mail

1:33:44

room first. Exactly. And so the issue is, if

1:33:47

you're too good at the assistant stuff, you're

1:33:49

not going to get moved out. They're like, no, we

1:33:51

want this. We want this person to be a

1:33:54

superstar. You manage the phones like no one else.

1:33:56

You anticipate every one of my needs. He's like,

1:33:58

the key is to be competent. So

1:34:01

they don't want to think you're dumb. Be competent

1:34:03

on the phones and scheduling their dry cleaning. But

1:34:05

where you're really trying to show value is on the stuff that

1:34:07

will be useful at the next level. And

1:34:10

then they're like, okay, this person is fine as

1:34:12

an assistant, but they're showing like we want to

1:34:14

move them up to be an agent. They're thinking

1:34:16

actually a little bit higher than this. They're pitching

1:34:18

ideas. They're really good working with the clients. They're

1:34:20

on that part. They're fine on the phones, but

1:34:23

whatever. Great, we want to move them up. So what

1:34:25

I was talking to Ryan about the other day is

1:34:27

a lot of people who are not in those roles

1:34:30

are accidentally making themselves into the

1:34:32

indispensable assistants. They're not

1:34:34

at the desk at a Hollywood agency. They're an

1:34:36

executive somewhere. They're in the middle of the hierarchy

1:34:39

in some marketing firm or something like this. And

1:34:42

they've just accidentally turned themselves into the

1:34:44

indispensable assistant. But we couldn't live without

1:34:46

Cal. How can we live without Cal?

1:34:48

Every email right away, he's always around.

1:34:51

He jumps, he puts out the fires. He's always

1:34:53

very in communication. You've made yourself into

1:34:55

the assistant when you really want to be

1:34:57

the agent. You're not going

1:34:59

to be able to move up. So don't make yourself

1:35:02

into the assistant or the ops guy enforcer if that's

1:35:04

not actually your role. Yeah, I often

1:35:06

think about it kind of

1:35:08

like a map from above and territory is

1:35:10

being taken over by certain people. And

1:35:13

there's more and more is one person who just keeps on eating

1:35:15

up all of his territory. And everyone else is like, this

1:35:17

is sweet. This is sweet. And

1:35:20

we'll lean on Cal a little bit. And we know

1:35:22

and then if he starts to pull back, you feel

1:35:24

that, oh, hang on a second. That didn't

1:35:26

used to be the thing. So I think setting the

1:35:28

tone is important. Oliver Berkman,

1:35:30

4000 Weeks, phenomenal book. He's coming

1:35:32

back on the show. So

1:35:35

funny. Oliver, a man who writes an awful lot

1:35:37

about productivity and the pains of it and being

1:35:39

bad at it, took ages to respond to emails.

1:35:41

I thought he was such a very

1:35:45

costly signal of I live

1:35:48

my philosophy and the challenges out myself. Oliver's

1:35:51

great. Yeah, precisely. He's

1:35:53

got this great idea in 4000 Weeks where he says, decide

1:35:56

in advance what you're going to second. Basically,

1:35:58

what is the price that I need to pay? Yeah. To

1:36:01

go through, to achieve this particular thing, to go

1:36:03

through the process that I'm talking about, what

1:36:05

are the prices that people need to pay

1:36:08

to be a slow productivist? Right. This

1:36:10

is like Richard Feynman saying, okay, here's

1:36:12

my secret for being good at doing

1:36:14

physics work is I'm really bad at being

1:36:17