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Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices
Dr. Cal Newport: A No-Pressure Plan for Next Year's Resolutions [GREATEST HITS WEEK]
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- [00:00]
Paula Pant
Happy last Friday. It is the last Friday of the year, the Friday to end all Fridays in 2024. We are celebrating with the fifth and final episode of Greatest Hits week in which we talk to the productivity master himself, Dr. Cal Newport, about how to reach your goals, reach those resolutions that you've set for yourself for the year ahead. So if you have big plans and big dreams for 2025, you're going to learn in today's episode how to achieve more by doing less. A no pressure plan for slow productivity. Today's episode originally aired March 28. So here we are, exactly nine months later, almost to the day, and I want you to ask yourself, have you incorporated lessons from Dr. Newport's ideas into your life? Have you embraced some of the key concepts, the key takeaways of slow productivity? If you haven't, or if you think that you could use improvement, you will love this very timely reminder of the research based insights that Dr. Cal Newport shares on slow productivity. Enjoy. If you're familiar with Cal Newport, then you already know how to live in a world without email and you know how to go deep in your work. But you know how to be productive without being frenetic. That's what we're going to learn today. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource you need to manage, such as your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. All of which are matters that Cal Newport tells us that we're probably spreading a little bit too thin. So what matters most in your life and how do you make daily decisions accordingly? Answering those two questions is what this podcast is dedicated to. I'm your host, Paula Pant. Welcome to the show, Cal.
- [02:17]
Cal Newport
Thanks for having me back. I got to say, you're. Your studio looks really familiar. This is fantastic.
- [02:23]
Paula Pant
Thank you for welcoming me onto your turf.
- [02:25]
Cal Newport
Yes, I know the listening audience is wondering what we're talking about, but.
- [02:29]
Paula Pant
Ah, yes, yes, it's the.
- [02:30]
Cal Newport
It's the. What are they. What do the kids call it when the. The collab. It's the collab that people have been waiting for, right? Exactly. All ofantha Cal Newport's studio. So we're good.
- [02:40]
Paula Pant
Exactly, yes. And for the audio audience, head to YouTube. You'll see us, I would say live and in the flesh, but it's prerecorded. You'll see us prerecorded and in the flesh. Enough about Us. Tell me about Marie Curie and what she did when she was on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries of, of not just her life, but of the world of science.
- [03:00]
Cal Newport
Well, this was 1898, right around here, right? So we're talking late 19th century. Marie Curie is trying to isolate a substance from something called pitchblende. And she knew inside of there there was some sort of chemical substance that had this really interesting property today, we would call it radioactivity. Back then they won it because Marie Curie hadn't come up with that term yet. But she would and eventually would win one of her two Nobel Prizes for her work she was doing on the theory of radioactivity. What's interesting about this story though is she's working on this, she's making progress. That winter she publishes a notice about the progress she's making on isolating this element from pitchpland. She publishes it in the Proceedings of the Academy. She's in Paris at this point and she's getting closer and she stops and goes on vacation. And not our type of vacation, which is, hey, we went away to Florida for five days and then came back. Her and her family went away for the summer. They went to rural France. We have these diaries that talk about what she was up to. They were hiking and going to grottoes. So in the core of this really important work, she took a lot of time off. So in the moment, the reason why I told that story in my new book is that at the moment, if we were going back in a time machine from the 21st century knowledge work, we'd be like, Marie, what are you doing? This is crazy. Like you're being non productive, like you're, you're making progress on things, you gotta hustle and get after it. But for her, she said, yeah, I'm making progress on this work. And she came back and kept making progress. And later that year, she invented the term radium. She published her findings, she extended the theory, she worked on this for a few more years, then eventually won a Nobel Prize for it. So in the moment, it seemed crazy to us. Why would you ever step back from working really hard, especially if you're getting close to a really big result? But the her as to lots of other people who historically made a living using their brain before our current age of office work, you vary your intensity, you work and you come back, you recharge that you look at productivity over this longer timescale. And she would say, what are you talking about? I was very productive. I want A Nobel Prize, what's the issue? But we think about it differently today. We say productivity means right now, are you doing a lot of things. They saw it very differently back then and there's some wisdom in there now.
- [05:20]
Paula Pant
A couple of immediate follow up questions that come to mind. One is, can that lesson be applied to today or was that a different era? So, for example, perhaps that was a time in which because everybody worked more slowly, she wasn't worried about quote unquote getting scooped. Right. She wasn't worried about some other scientist making this discovery and snatching that Nobel out from underneath her?
- [05:42]
Cal Newport
Well, it's a very good question. I mean, scientists were worried about being scooped even well before then. I mean, what is it that pushes Charles Darwin, the finally finished Origin of the Species is someone else is hot on his trail. What is it that pushes Isaac Newton 200 years earlier to finally get the Principia put together? Leibniz has also invented calculus and is beginning to publish. So scientists worried about that. But there's a bigger point here, which is why study what I call traditional knowledge workers. So people like Marie Curie, who made a living with their brain, but in a time or circumstance where they didn't have bosses and offices and email. And the key thing here is that our goal is not to mimic their lives, right? So I'm not going to work exactly like Marie Curie. I'm not going to work like Jane Austin, who I also profiled. I'm not going to work exactly like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin. They were in different circumstances, different jobs, different times. But what we can do is use them as a natural experiment. So here are people who, like us, made a living with their brain, unlike us, had a lot of flexibility in how they did it. So given all that flexibility, what do they gravitate towards? And we can use them as almost like a lodestone to try to point us towards what really works when you want to try to produce valuable things with your brain. And then once we figure out what works, we can isolate those principles and then try to adapt them to the 21st century. So when we look at Marie Curie going to rural France for months at a time, we shouldn't take the literal lesson. We shouldn't say, what you need to do is go to rural France. Let's go for three months of rural France. Most of us can't do that. But what's the principle at play? Which is she was comfortable a taking longer her timeline towards big accomplishment. She was willing to stretch that out beyond the Bare possible minimum, which is what we tend to do today. What's the fastest way? Timeline, which I could get this done. And because of that, she could vary intensity. So I'm going really hard on this in my lab in Paris. I'm at a grotto in rural France now. I'm working really hard on this here. She could vary intensity. And it turns out that's the key principle from that particular story is take a little bit longer in your internal timelines and vary your intensity up and down. And I have story after story of other people doing the same. Let's go more modern. Lin Manuel Miranda working on his first play. So pre Hamilton. His first play was in the Heights, premiered on Broadway 2008. I think it got six or seven Tony Awards. So he already had a fantastically successful play before Hamilton that took him eight years. It was really the late 90s was the first time he performed a shorter version of that play as a student project at Wesleyan. And he spent eight years working on making that into a Broadway caliber play. And if you look at his story, it's Marie Curie all over again. I'm workshopping it with this group of alumni in New York really hard. And now I'm with my freestyle rap group Love supreme that he would tour with. Now I'm back to working on the play. Now I'm writing columns. He's, you know, his energy came up and down, up and down. He took his time, which allowed his insights to mature. It allowed his creativity to crystallize. And when he was done, he had something really great. But he took time. His intensity went up and down. So again, we can pull out the principle, not the literal path. So again, I'm not going to say you should have a freestyle rap troupe like Lin Manuel Miranda traveled the world, but he took longer on a hard project so he could vary his intensity, keep coming back to it fresh every time, integrating new insights. And so there's a general principle we can pull out of it. So we, we look at people whose circumstances we can be jealous of, but then we can look past our jealousy to say, yeah, but what did they discover? What can I mine from their experience that can apply to my life, which is very different.
- [09:42]
Paula Pant
How does a person know? Let's say there's a knowledge worker who's listening to this, who has some type of a project, a creative project that they want to bring to fruition. How do they discern when they are following Lin Manuel Miranda's example of working on something intensely and then setting it aside and Incubating it with their subconscious. What is the distinction between that versus simply procrastinating or falling prey to shiny object syndrome?
- [10:09]
Cal Newport
Yeah, well, first of all, procrastination is a huge character in the play that we can call slow productivity. So the whole philosophy we're exploring here that Marie Curie demonstrates, that Lin Manuel Miranda demonstrates is what I call slow productivity. So producing great things without burning out, that is one of the main characters in that play is procrastination. So it is the trade off you're going to make that if you're going to adopt this more sustainable approach to accomplishment, this approach that lots of great creatives and thinkers have used over time, that's going to be your enemy is walking that line between straight up procrastination and trying to have a sustainable pace. So there are things you can do. So what Lin Manuel Miranda did is the same thing that Marie Curie did, which is they had other people involved. They had objective feedback on what they were doing. They had stakes in the ground that kept moving them forward. So Marie Curie was publishing. She published before she went to France, a notice like, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm looking for. It was basically announcing to the world, I'm working on this. It was a starter pistol for other people to work on this as well. She kind of had to come back and keep making progress because she had called her shop. Lin Manuel Miranda was the same thing. This was not him just going back to his apartment and just thinking about his play. No, he was working with two alumni from Wesleyan that had a theater company in Manhattan. And what they were doing is on a semi regular basis, like once a month or so, sometimes more often, sometimes less often, staging readings. And they would bring in actors and they would stage readings. What's working, what's not working. So they had other people involved, other people that said, yeah, we are investing and we want this to be good. So the other people were involved. They had put their stake in the ground. I'm working on this with memoranda. They then kept upping the game. And what really broke it open for them is they applied for a prestigious conservatory style summer program where you could go to this playhouse in Connecticut. And your whole point was to develop, if you're working on a musical, like, develop it so it was ready for the stage. And that gave them a lot more resources. And when he was there, he brought in another writer. Because Miranda's real weakness was the book. Actually, the music is what caught people's attention about in the Heights is they're saying, hey, he's doing this thing with hip hop. This is interesting. But his book wasn't good. So the original version of this play was Shop Warn. It was like a love story that was, you know, hackneyed or whatever. So they brought in this writer. She was incredibly talented, who she went on to win a Pulitzer of her own. A completely unrelated play. Right. So like a different Pulitzer than he won later on. Because they got into this program and then that allowed them to attract others. And so they were constantly bringing in new people. They were involved, they were putting their stake in the ground. They were trying things. They were getting feedback. So if it's just you, like, my novel's going to be ready one day, I just want to, you know, I'm in my basement working on it, you know, there be dragons. But if it's. I've written these first two chapters. I got an agent because of that. The agent is waiting for the final. She wants to do the pitches when we get to this conference, you know, you have stakes in the ground, you have people involved, you're getting objective feedback. Then you'll still make progress. But you can just make that progress, be a reasonable pace. And like, that's the key to slow productivity, is you're making these guys, they're bulldog, like, we're going to get this done. I'm going to discover radioactivity. I'm going to get this play to Broadway. But they're willing to say, at a pace that is sustainable, it's going to give me a better result.
- [13:42]
Paula Pant
What would you do in that case if the people that you have involved in a project want a faster pace? Agents often want faster pace.
- [13:51]
Cal Newport
Yeah, it's hard. So, you know, at some point you have to say, that's what I'm doing. You know, like, agents do want a faster pace. They also want you to succeed and sell a book or sell a play. They want things to go well. Who you put around you matters. That matters too. Probably, though, the most important thing you can do long term, and it's not an answer that people love when they're starting out, is get better. The better you get. And I'm talking unambiguously, demonstrably, better you get at what you do, the more control you get. And it's why. So in my book, there's three principles to slow productivity. The first two principles make sense when you hear a term like slow productivity because they're directly connected to going slower. Principle one, do fewer things like that okay, yeah, sure. Principle two, work at a natural pace like we're talking about. Principle three is obsess over quality. And so at first, when you see that, you're like, well, what does this have to do with. But slowing down, like, doing fewer things is slower. Like, working at a more natural pace, that's slower. What does obsessing over quality have to do about it? It's what unlocks everything. Because when you obsess over, like Maria Curie did, getting the best result, or Lin Manuel Miranda did on his play being something new, two things happen. One, slowness becomes demanded of you because quality, you're just like, it's not ready. I can't rush this. So now you have a reason to slow down because you want this thing to be good. You care about quality. You're not just slowing down because you have an antagonistic relationship to your work. And you're like, I'm done with you, and I just want to do less. You're slowing down because I need to go slower to make this thing work. Flip side of that. As you get better, you can dictate more of your pace, right? So maybe it was more fraught. I know for Lin Manuel Miranda, it was fraught because for one thing, his dad was really on him about, like, you need to go to law school. Like, what are you doing? That was. He was playing after, what are you doing with this? You're doing all these odd jobs. And. And Lynn was like, look, I'm working on this play. Just. Just believe in me. You better believe. When he started working on Hamilton, he could take as much time as he wanted because he had a two arms full of Tony Awards at that point. And now people were like, yeah, Lynn, you do what you want to do. And in fact, just as an aside, when he did work on Hamilton, and he did take a long time on it, one of the things he did is he got access. There's a house in Manhattan, the oldest surviving structure in Manhattan. And it's where Aaron Burr actually was when, I think, during his vice presidency. It was also where Washington for a while temporarily had a headquarters before they got driven out of Manhattan. And so he got access to this historical house so he could just like, sit there and get the vibes when he was working on the play. Right? So you can do those type of things when you're already really good, because people say, yeah, you can write the ticket here. Like, this is your own show. This story I used in the book about that particular principle, the one that I really like is Actually, Jewel, the singer, songwriter. Yeah, because she has this really paradoxical opening chapter to her professional career where she's living out of her car in San Diego, performing at this coffee house. And the shows are epic because Jewel can do this thing where she'll pour her heart out in like a three hour set. And if you're there, you know, you feel like you've just been a part of this really emotional experience. She's got this really tough life, you know, traveling the rural Alaska with her dad, like doing musical performances and biker bars and like this really interesting weird background. She's living in her car, sitting at this coffee shop and it's going so well that these record executives start coming to see her and, and they get really into, oh my God, this is, she's so great. This is the next big thing. They start flying her out the la and one of the executives puts a million dollars on the table. So, all right, Jewel, million dollar signing bonus, let's go. And she turns it down. So I don't want it. And so like why did she do this? And so you go deeper into it, like why did she do this? It's because she realized if I'm going to become a really good professional musician, I need time. Like, she obsessed over the quality of her work. She's like, I've got all this talent, but the only performance I've done is in a coffee shop. And if they give me a million dollar signing bonus, they're going to want that back and they're going to want that back right away. And if I don't have a hit right away, they're going to wipe their hands at me. And that was my shot and I know it's going to take me longer. So she said, no, I don't really want a big bonus, just give me more on the back end. Which was the smartest decision I think a musician has ever made. And it took her a while to do exactly what she thought she would have to learn how to do. How do I perform? She traveled all over, she didn't even want to use a van that was too expensive. She drove herself and just performed, performed, performed. She recorded her album, she didn't love it, she was nervous. So she came back later once she got more confident and re recorded and she just kept working at it. And then finally when it blew up, it blew up big. And that extra backend really helped at that point. But she knew she had to go slow, it was going to take time to get good. So she rejected the fast path Give me a million dollars. Let's get all the hotshot pop producers, and let's just go and try to make a big album. She took her time because she was obsessing over quality. So the quality obsession forced her to go slow.
- [19:02]
Paula Pant
Right. I'm hearing echoes of be so good they can't ignore you.
- [19:06]
Cal Newport
Yes.
- [19:07]
Paula Pant
In a case like that, you know, most successful people suffer from imposter syndrome, and that imposter syndrome is always there. It's pervasive. Like, we're. All of us are terrible at evaluating our own skills and our own level of readiness. How does one do that?
- [19:24]
Cal Newport
Yeah. Well, you have to improve your taste, which is really the first I call proposition in the chapter about quality is really what you have to do if you want to obsess over quality, is learn what quality is. Because otherwise, like, the imposter syndrome can be big. You can also have the opposite, which is delusion. I'm awesome. I mean, people are. This novel is great. People are going to love this. Or I'm an awesome podcaster. This is going to be great. And you just think it's great, and it's not, because you don't even know what good is. So taste is really important, and we overlook that. And an interesting case study of overlooking that is that famous? I don't know if you've seen this, this famous Ira Glass interview, and it's from 20 years ago. I talk about it in my book so Good They Can't Ignore youe, which is an older book now, so that just shows how old this Ira Glass quote is. But he had this famous quote that everyone talks about where he says, oh, here's the hard thing about being a creative is at first your skill is here, but your taste is here. And that gap is really frustrating. You're like, oh, my God, this. This isn't good. And he's like, but you got to stick with it, because as you get better and better, you'll eventually catch up to your taste. And, like, that's when good stuff happens. Right. This was this famous advice. But then he gave another interview more recently. So Michael Lewis's podcast. And in that interview they went back and listened to. It was Glass's first major NPR piece. It was at an Oreo cookie factory for their anniversary, and they listened to it on the podcast. And Glass is like, I have. I have a hard time hearing that. It's not good. That's bad radio. But then he added, but you know what? I didn't realize that at the time. I thought it Was great. I didn't know. I thought that was good radio. I had so much to learn later. Ira Glass is contradicting earlier Ira Glass because actually his taste was down here, so he thought he was doing a really good thing, right? So later, when he was giving, you know, when he gave us famous advice, he's like, you're going to know what good is. You're going to be so far from it. But the reality is he, we didn't know what good was. Like, that's actually a fallacy that we already know what good is and all we have to do is go after it. So we really need to spend more time up front learning what good is. That's like, more important at first than actually trying to get good. Because if you don't know where you're aiming your ship, a skill, it's just going to go randomly through the waters of activity, if you know what I mean. So we actually have to, like, one of the most important things you can do is not, how do I get better? It's like, what makes those really good people good? And when you trust your taste, then you're getting really good feedback. Okay, this is pretty bad, but I know why it's bad. I can't do this, this and this. All right, Could I do that? With enough practice, yes. Could I do this? You know what? No. I'm never going to be able to do this. Let's change our plan. So I think we really undervalue taste when we talk to people about getting good at things or pursuing quality.
- [22:08]
Paula Pant
How do you refine your taste?
- [22:10]
Cal Newport
Well, partially. You study what you're doing. Like you're a journalist, like you're a scientist. Like, I am studying the thing I do. Like we're podcasting right now. You can study podcasting. You can say, why is Bill Simmons, for example, so electric on the microphone? Why are the most popular podcasts, what are they doing? Is it the way they're delivering is the information. You can do differential analysis, which is something people don't, but should, which is okay, let me take a podcast that is very successful. Let me take another podcast doing the same thing, same topic. They're trying to do the same thing and it's not as successful and it's just worse. Why is it worse? And you do differential analysis. You're like, well, look at the way they're talking. Look at the preparation, look at the. And you start to figure out what's important. So in a non artsy field, you can do the same thing. And like, often what you need to do is take someone who is in your same field, who's doing very well, and you say, I want to take you out the coffee. I want to hear your whole story. And you walk them through. All right, so here was your first job. What was your next promotion? Well, what mattered at that promotion? Okay, then what happened next? And you begin to figure out what mattered for this person. So you can do this even when it's not a public figure, even when there's not podcasts to listen to or magazine profiles to read. And the key thing if you're just talking to someone is. Is not just finding out the steps they took, but for every step. The key question is, what did you do in that step that other people trying to make that same step but failed, were not doing? So let's get that differential analysis happening in your own career in, you know, marketing copy or whatever the particular field have programming, whatever it happens to be, and you get at this is what matters. Then you also just expose yourself to the greats. Just be around really good stuff from the field. And that taste not only directs you, it motivates you, and it helps you fight the procrastination we talked about as well. I think Lin Manuel Miranda, he kind of knew what he wanted eventually. And then he was in that hourglass situation of, oh, I'm so frustrated that this play is not that. And he had to keep stretching and bringing in the right people and find the right musical director, and eventually it all came together. So, like, I think taste is. Is a big part of the puzzle.
- [24:33]
Paula Pant
Holiday memories are anchored in the home. For my family, we're Nepalese Hindus. And so our holiday memories are around Dasay and Diwali, and they happen in October. But for many of my friends, it's now it's December, when they are celebrating holidays with their families and they have in their homes Christmas trees or lights or they have a menorah, and maybe they and their family bake cookies or watch certain holiday movies together. All of these are memories that are fundamentally rooted in the home. Whatever it is, you need to have those cozy comforts at home. You can find that with Wayfair. Wayfair has everything you need to create that holiday magic at home. So maybe you're looking for beautiful tableware and serve ware. Maybe you want throw blankets or garlands or candles or decor like tree trimming and lights. All of those holidays essentials you can find with Wayfair. Personally, I use Wayfair to get more storage solutions. Specifically, I have a lot of shelving in my home. I've used Wayfair to get very space efficient modifications for my apartment because I live in Manhattan. But for you, whatever it is that you need for every style, for every home, no matter your space or budget, you can find that at Wayfair, right? The holidays can be stressful, but Wayfair has everything you need for festive feasts for out of town guests. They've got bedding, they've got living room updates, and there's fast and easy and free delivery even on all of the big stuff. Set the scene for new holiday memories with Wayfair. Head to Wayfair.com right now to get your home holiday ready. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home.
- [26:17]
Cal Newport
This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things, like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 to use Gemini Live. This episode is brought to you by Lifelock.
- [26:45]
Paula Pant
The holidays mean more travel, more shopping.
- [26:48]
Cal Newport
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- [27:07]
Paula Pant
Save up to 40% your first year.
- [27:09]
Cal Newport
Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.
- [27:19]
Paula Pant
How does the concept of what we're discussing, right? Taking your time to really work on masterpieces. How does that square with the desire to be prolific and the desire to accumulate the rapid feedback that is often necessary in order to improve?
- [27:41]
Cal Newport
One of the first times I used the term slow productivity was observing often the most prolific people in history. So we think of them as very prolific, are working way slower than you. So you take these people where we look backwards on their production and say, wow, this is a really prolific person. Then we zoom in onto like an average Tuesday and we think they're very lazy. And so like the canonical example of this for me is John McPhee. So we take the writer John McPhee. He's written all these books, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, multiple finalists for the National Book Award. He's been writing canonically for The New Yorker since the 1960s. Probably their most famous writer. Just hundreds of articles. His course at Princeton and creative nonfiction writing trained the whole generation that followed him. Essentially like every major writer of Gen X is basically trained under John McPhee. I mean, David Remnick trained under him. John Krakauer trained under him. Eric Schlosser trained under him. Jennifer Weiner trained under him even though she went to fiction. Tim Ferriss actually took his course as well. I talked to him about it recently. He's like, he's like the best writing I've ever done is my stuff for John's class. So it's incredibly prolific guy. But the book opens on a particular story of him working on a particular article in the 1960s. And he's lying on his back on a picnic table in his backyard. And he does that for a whole week. A whole week. He's just lying out there. Cause he's trying to figure out how to crack this article. And it was about the Pine Barrens and it's some epic article. And in the end it was like 10,000 words. And he was like, he couldn't figure it out, so he just laid on his back. And so when you look at McPhee on an average Tuesday, you're like, this guy is the least prolific person we know. He's laying on his back on a picnic table. Come on, get after it, McPhee. But then we zoom out and we say, oh my God, this is like, I wish I could ever be that prolific as a writer. So this was like one of the ideas that got me into studying slow productivity in the first place is there's this huge mismatch between what it looks like day to day to produce over a career, a huge amount of great stuff versus what most of us do on the day to day. So we're working much harder day to day than a lot of these people who are producing over a career. A super impressive amount of stuff.
- [29:59]
Paula Pant
Right. And that goes back to. On a day to day level. Busyness is often a proxy for productivity. Yes, Right. So if you have a calendar that's completely full, then it appears to the outside world that you are productive because you have zoom meetings and emails and things like that. But what strikes me is all of the examples that we've gone through so far are people who produce, I'm going to use the word creative, but I mean that in the broadest sense. Chemistry, physics, those are also creative fields in that you are creating new knowledge. How do the people who are listening to this who are in management or their accountants, their engineers, their managers. How do they take these principles and apply it to their professions?
- [30:42]
Cal Newport
Yeah. So how do we take these principles and make them be relevant to someone who works in an office all day?
- [30:47]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [30:48]
Cal Newport
So, like, I'll give an example, so we can look at these historical figures and say, hey, one of the things they're doing is they don't do a lot at the same time. Right. They're not very overloaded. All right, let's examine what that means and then apply that to a manager, for example, or someone who's working in a support position. And we look deeper, we say, oh, it kind of makes sense. The more things you have on your plate at the same time, the less effectively you can do anything. Because what happens is, and we try to understand why they were doing this, what happens is everything you commit to do brings with it some sort of overhead. Not the direct execution of the project or the commitment, but the emails about it, the meetings of the standing meetings about it, the cognitive real estate that kind of gets taken up like, oh, yeah, we've got to remember that we're doing this thing, right? So as you pile more things on your plate, you're piling up more of these administrative overhead duties. I call them overhead tax. And what happens is that more and more of your day gets dedicated to administrative overhead of this growing list of things you've committed to. And as more and more of your day gets taken up supporting work, there's less and less time to actually do the work itself. And so the rate at which you're actually finishing things can go down because the time available to actually work on the hard stuff, it's not only smaller, but it's probably highly interrupted because you have all this other administrative overhead, which doesn't just sit neatly in one part of your day, but of course explodes throughout your day. And you have to answer those emails whenever. And those meetings are going to be set where people have time. And so your whole day is chopped up. Now, suddenly you are terrible at doing the fundamental part of your job, which is just, I'm using my brain to do valuable things, and it doesn't have to be writing plays or creating chemistry theories. What I'm doing might be coming up with strategy or making sure that my just people I supervise have what they need or writing code or whatever it is I do. You're doing this all really poorly because so little of your time can actually go towards it. So now we've taken this principle from these rarefied Worlds. And we brought it to the office. We're like, oh, in the office, it's terrible to have too much to do because now you're very ineffective at whatever your main job is. You're mainly just servicing work and it all collides with each other. So we should strive to have less on our plate at any one time so we can get more done over time. We get things done at a higher quality over time. If we have less things on our plate at the same time. This then becomes all sorts of tactical suggestions for how do you keep your workload small at any one moment? And then you get, now we're in the weeds of the person who's in the cubicle and is getting all the emails. We have now bridged the gap all the way to their world. And now we're talking about ways to do things like surface your workload and do time scheduling. And we get the tactical habits all aimed at keeping your workload from being too large. So we can kind of bridge the gap from these principles all the way over to how am I managing my digital calendar in a 2024 knowledge job?
- [33:41]
Paula Pant
You give an example in the book of when it comes to that administrative overhead tax of someone who's in marketing who has a decision to make about do they plan a one day event or do they write a deep white paper? And you outline how if they, if they were to, with that same basket of time, if they were to write a paper that wouldn't have all of the administrative overhead, all of the emails and the meetings and the zoom calls that, that they would have if they instead planned an event. And so if they're choosing between two projects, the one project that has fewer moving pieces might be a more effective use of their time. But the thing that popped into my head when I read that was knowing myself, right? If I were tasked with writing a paper, I would be the proverbial college student who puts it off, puts it off. And then at midnight the night before, I'm like, ah, I better do that and then pulls an all nighter, right? Whereas if I'm planning something with other people, the very fact that other people are involved, the very fact that there are zoom meetings about it creates the accountability that makes me actually do it. And so I guess to what extent do elements like teamwork, accountability, putting the, the structures in place that keep you from getting in your own way, to what extent do those play a role in this?
- [35:09]
Cal Newport
Well, I mean, it plays a big role. Going back to what we talked about before, like how do you not procrastinate if you're Lin Manuel Miranda or Marie Curie? You put stakes in the ground. You have people you're working with. So it's not just you, you thinking about things, but there's more than just that. Like, and this example is a good one. Right. So let's think about this. Organizing an event versus writing the paper. The problem with the organizing the event is that it becomes what I call a task engine, meaning that it can generate tasks that require your attention in an unscheduled, haphazard way at a regular basis too. So like it's constantly going to spit off stuff that requires your attention in an unpredictable way. This vendor needs you to get back to them. You're trying to get the speaker to agree to come. There's some back and forth. So it's not the fact you have to coordinate with other people. It's the fact that you're going to have impromptu coordination that it's going to constantly be spinning off tasks that you don't know they're coming. So you have to sort of just always be ready. And that's a terrible impact. We call them productivity termites in the book. It eats away at all the other stuff you're trying to do because now you have to keep switching your attention back to this thing. So let's go back to the writing the hard report. Well, what could you do there? So you don't just put it off or wait till the last minute. Let's bring other people in. Sure. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to have three check in meetings on the calendar where I'm going to send you the night before. I promise. And you're my boss actually. Right. So I feel like social capital. There's skin in the game. I'm going to send you the draft of part one and I'm going to send you the draft of part two and then I'm going to send you a combined draft and then two weeks after that I'll have the polished draft. Yeah, that's meetings, but it's entirely predictable. You know when they're coming, they're on your calendar way in advance. They are not going to unexpectedly step on the toes of something else you're working on. It's very predictable. Predictable disruption is fine. Unpredictable disruption just destabilizes everything. It's the. I was going to work on this thing today, but now I'm in a back and forth with the sound engineer contractor and we got to resolve this Today because you know the conference is coming up but it's going to take 10 or 15 back and forth messages to figure this out. And if we're going to get through 10 and 15 back and forth messages in one day, I'm going to have to see each of their messages really soon after it gets here so I can send that back again. So now I'm checking my inbox once every five minutes because I have to keep up with this conversation with the contractor. But now that I'm in my inbox every once five minutes, I'm seeing all these other things going on. It's a destroyed day now. Trade that for hey, I know next week there's a one hour zoom with my boss. And so like I'm motivated because I want to have a good draft done, but I can just work and I can get this done and my time is not being fragmented. So I really like to prioritize non task engine choices when you do have a choice.
- [37:55]
Paula Pant
One of your other tactical suggestions going back to that frenetic now I'm checking my email every five minutes. One of your other tactical suggestions is to take a page from what professors do when professors have office hours, which is anyone can have office hours. Any knowledge, any manager can schedule their time with an office hours capacity. Can you elaborate on that?
- [38:15]
Cal Newport
Oh yeah. It's my favorite, my favorite piece of advice. And to put it in context right when it comes to, and this all goes to that first principle of do fewer things because we want to avoid that overhead tax and we don't want our whole life to be servicing work. We want to be able to actually work on things. So the first thing you can do is just do fewer big things. And we talked about that, like limit the projects you're working on. And there's tactics for doing that. But what do you do with the projects that remain? That they're going to generate communication, they're going to generate tasks and meetings. Like you can't say no to everything. So how do we best contain the administrative work that the stuff we have to do generates? Office hours is I think one of the best answers. And because what are we trying to solve with office hours? It's that scenario that we just gave about the sound contractor. We're trying to figure something out over email and it's going to take 10 back and forth messages. And because we have some time limit on this, it's not 10 messages over 20 days, it's 10 messages over 5 hours. I have to now check my inbox all the time so that I can see your response pretty quickly so I can send you one. And then I have to start checking again so I can see your next response. How do we avoid that? And a simple rule is saying, okay, email is for sending files. Great email is for announcing things. Great email is great for questions that can be answered with one message, right? Oh, remind me again how many people were expecting for the conference. And then that can just sit in your inbox until you're ready to do email and answer it. It's like a great email use case. But you could say, what it's not going to be used for is anything that requires back and forth. So then what do you do with that Right now here, you could get in trouble because some people think, well, if I don't want to do back and forth via email, we should just turn everything into a meeting. But that doesn't scale, right? Because now you have zoom meetings everywhere. And because of the way calendars are set up, you know, what's the minimum? Can't even see something that's less than 30 minutes. So everything has to take at least 30 minutes. And you're like, oh, my God, that doesn't work. There's that whole meme, this could have been an email. Could have been email, right? And there's good reasons for it. So what do you do instead? Office hours. So you say, yeah, every day, this hour, my phone's on, my office door is open, I have a zoom room set up with a waiting room or whatever. And now when anyone sends you a message that is trying to spark that tin message back and forth, like, hey, what's our plan for whatever? And you're like, oh, God, we have to figure out the plan. And you're just trying to get that off your head because you forgot about it. And this is going to be terrible. We're going to be sending emails all day. Like, yeah, we should discuss this. Here's what you say now. Yeah, we should discuss this. Grab me in the next office hours you can. And you're just pushing people towards those left and right. And then in this one hour a day, you have like four or five discussions that each take five minutes. You're saving yourself 20, 30 emails a day. But it's not the 20 or 30 emails we care about so much as the two to 300 email checks that accompany those emails. And it makes a huge difference. So synchronizing communication makes a big difference. So office hours do it. Having standing group docket clearing meetings is another thing. So here's our team works on things. We meet twice a week. We have a shared document where every time someone thinks of something that's relevant to the group, you add it to the shared document and then when you get to the meeting, you go through everything one by one. Again, it sounds simple, but here's what happens if you just schedule the regular meeting for your group. What happens two days earlier when something comes up that's relevant to the group? Most people get stressed. Now I have an open loop. I don't want to forget this. This seems important. I don't have a complicated productivity organizational system because most people don't. Despite me trying my best attempts, I need to get this out of my head because I worry I'm going to forget this. So I'm just going to send an email to the team. But if there's, oh, I could put it on this document that I know for a fact on Wednesday we're going to go through. You get relief and it cuts down email. So I mean it's all about how do we effectively synchronize communication that has to happen so that it happens in real time, in times we chose in advance and does not require unscheduled messages that must be intercepted and replied to.
- [42:09]
Paula Pant
Right. It sounds as though you're trying to make asynchronous communication more synchronous.
- [42:15]
Cal Newport
It's asynchronous. It's like asynchronous synchrony. I don't know if that's the thing. Yes. Or batch synchrony. I mean I wrote this really nerdy article years ago for the New Yorker that was called was email a mistake? And it gets into synchrony versus asynchrony. Because in my academic field, I'm a distributed systems theorist, computer scientist that studies this. In that field, synchronous communication versus asynchronous communication is something we study mathematically. And so we have this really good sense that in the world of these protocols you might run in distributed systems. Here's the typical trade off. Synchrony allows for easy like low message complexity solutions to things. So if we have really synchronized and typically in these abstractions it's like synchronized routes. But if we're basically going in real time. Right. We can solve things with really easy interactions. But when you build a system, there's a huge cost to try to build a system that can like synchronize us so we can do it asynchrony. So you know, I'm going to send a message to you. It'll get to you eventually. I don't know how long it's going to take or even if you're there or not. Or maybe you've left. Very easy to build a system where computers can talk asynchronously, but now the protocols become much more complicated because we have to deal with the fact that we're not just here in real time and the number of messages involved and everything like greatly increases. So there's this trade off. Like, it's hard to build a synchronous system, but then everything's easy once you have it. It's easy to build an asynchronous system, but all of the interactions you do are really complicated. And it actually is. The point of this geeky New Yorker article is that holds for things like email and office communication. It's a pain to set up the office hour system because you have to have rules and you have to teach people about it and, and you have to stick to it. But once it's set up, the actual interactions are way simpler. An asynchronous system, which in office communication just means we all have email addresses. Let's just go, you know, Right. Let's just email, right? No rules, no guidelines. We all know how to use email. Great. Nothing to learn. Very simple to set up. But the interactions are way more costly and complicated and expensive. So there's like this interesting trade off between the two that mathematicians know about. But it really applies as well to the office, right?
- [44:30]
Paula Pant
Well, and it resonates, you know, when you think of in the 1980s when people could synchronously spoke on the telephone. And telephones at that time were landlines with a cord that plugged into your wall. Right. Both people had to be available at precisely the same moment. It was harder to get somebody on the phone, but easier to do things versus once you're on the phone.
- [44:52]
Cal Newport
You could rock and roll, right?
- [44:54]
Paula Pant
Exactly.
- [44:54]
Cal Newport
Not only was it efficient, it was also accurate. Because, for example, I can tell how you're feeling about something if I can hear your voice. Email, it's a terrible medium for conveying any sort of emotional accuracy. People wildly misinterpret. Is this person mad? Are they happy? Are they bored? Like going from words to trying to infer the emotional state of the person who wrote the words is really, really hard. That's why really great novelists are revered, because they know how to do it and they're very rare because it's very hard, like just using words to convey an emotional reality. It's why you know, in the 1800s if you looked at letters that people would send, you know, to their spouses or Lincoln writing to Mary Todd Lincoln, they're huge, long, flowery things because it takes pages that try to convey your emotional state accuracy. So they would have to do all this flowery prose, which hits us as really weird today. But what they're trying to do is like, let me convey to you the tone of this and it takes a lot of words. So anyways, when we just are hacking out an email as quickly as possible, of course no one understands them. We completely miss so it has its challenges for sure.
- [46:13]
Paula Pant
If you've heard that sound from Babbel before, I bet you do. Babbel is the science backed language learning app that actually works with quick 10 minute lessons. Handcrafted by over 200 language experts, Babel gets you on your way to speaking a new language in just a few weeks with over 16 million subscriptions sold and a 20 day money back guarantee. Just start speaking another language with Babel right now. Up to 55% off your Babel subscription at babel.com Spotify podcast spelled B A B E L.com Spotify podcast rules and restrictions may apply I'm reminded of something that you introduced in a previous book, your the Any Benefit Hypothesis. We live in a world in which if there is any given benefit to doing a thing, we are encouraged to do that thing. Sure, there's some benefit to being on TikTok, then there's some benefit to going to a conference, and there's some benefit to setting up a meeting. But we pile this on with with no boundaries and no limitations because there is some theoretical benefit. As knowledge workers, we live in an environment where everyone's like, why aren't you on LinkedIn? Why aren't you on Substack? When we are on Twitter, we get immediate rapid feedback around an idea. Yeah, so you can put out 40 tweets in a week and see which four of those 40 are the top performers and then decide to flesh out those four. Or maybe. Or maybe even just one. Maybe the one out of 40 that's the top performer. Flesh that out into a blog post or a substack or a YouTube video. When we don't have that level of rapid feedback, sometimes it can be harder to know what to work on. But then in order to this is turning into a long question. But then in order to determine what to work on, we then add more of that the any benefit stuff onto our plate. How do we simultaneously obsess over quality while doing fewer things because sometimes those can seem to be at odds with one another.
- [48:11]
Cal Newport
Well, I mean, I think the rapid feedback hypothesis, which is often given as a justification for using lots of digital social tools, for example, I think it's largely mythological and here's my test for it. Take whatever field it is you're in. Presumably it's something that's existed for more than 11 years, but it's only been about 11 years since we've had something like ubiquitous cultural acceptance of social media. Say, are people in that field producing significantly better things today than they did 11 years ago? And if the answer is no, then it pushes back on this hypothesis that somehow getting lots of feedback from social media is making people better at what they do. And so, you know, I've heard this about me as a, you know, I'm a writer, right? So writers say this, we're not better at writing now than we were 15 years ago. Being on social media all the time has not made writers better, has not made journalists better, it has not made books better. So it pushes back on this idea that somehow this is getting us something new. Same thing in the creative arts. People often say, how could I possibly succeed if I don't spend a lot of time on social media like promoting? I was like, I don't know, how do people succeed for like the entire history of this field until 11 years ago, those channels are still there. So I think one of the things social media was very good at doing and these other tools was creating these self justifying narratives of this is critical to everything in culture. And I think we're finding out more now is like, no, I think use of this was really critical for the people who own the stock and the company to make a lot of money when their stock price went up. It gets lots of user engagement minutes. But it hasn't been as critical as we think. And so what is the right way to approach doing work? Because I've talked about this in a lot of books, this book is sort of the synthesis of all my thinking on it. Like these three principles, this is the recipe. Don't work on too many things, the things you work on. Take your time, work at a natural pace, like give it the time it requires to really do well and then couple this with an obsession on I want to do something great. Those are the three things that have to come together. And when those three things come together, you're like, I don't need to be ab testing things on TikTok. I need to actually just be getting way Better at my craft. You don't see the great movie directors being like, I got to go get feedback. Christopher Nolan, like, do I want to do Oppenheimer or not? Let me go on Twitter and, like, let me see, like, what's going. Like, I've been obsessed with doing my art for my whole career. You know, you see this in great musicians. They're just thinking about, like, pushing the music to a new place. Often great artists, the person they're trying to impress most is like the peer in their field they most respect. You know, are they going to, like. Are they going to like this song? It's like, when I'm writing a magazine, like a New Yorker article, the main thing I'm thinking about is like, is my editor going to think this is good? You know, like, you're thinking, because he's really good. He's like a really good editor. And so if he thinks it's good, this is good. And you get kind of myopic around it, but then you get better and then you produce better things. That is the big issue with the world right now is. And I'm going to break it into two categories. I think this is really important if you are working for yourself, if you're a creator, if you're a freelancer, if you're a socialpreneur, so you work for yourself. The biggest problem with this sort of fast productivity, pseudo productivity we face today is what you're just talking about. There's so many things I could be doing. More is better than less, and I'm really selling myself and my opportunities short unless I'm doing as many things as possible. And then, of course, the overload just prevents you from doing anything. Well, the other instantiation of the pseudo productivity curse is if I work for someone else, and it's less about I'm trying to become a star, and it's more about I'm trying to signal to my employer that I'm productive. And if all I know is pseudo productivity, then the only way I know to signal that I'm productive is to be doing lots of visible things, which means I have to answer a lot of emails real quick and make sure that I'm in a bunch of zoom meetings. And then I'm completely overloaded and frustrated that I can't actually get anything done. Same problem, but two different instantiations. So for the creator, the problem is I'm on social media all day because I can be busier and busyness is good. For the employee, the instantiation of this problem is I'm just like on email and slack all day because I want everyone to see I'm working, because this is the only way I know to signal that I'm productive. Two instantiations of the same problem of focusing on pseudo productivity activity itself. Visible activity as our proxy for useful effort. Two different instantiations of that core problem.
- [52:39]
Paula Pant
For the people who are listening, who are employed by an employer who views busyness as a, as a heuristic for are you showing up to work or not? Right. Who views busyness as an indicator of productivity, what can they do to train their bosses or to train their managers to allow them to, to, on the surface, appear as though they're doing less?
- [53:07]
Cal Newport
Right. So doing fewer things is going to be an important first step in this scenario because when you have fewer things on your plate, you finish things faster. So if you can get fewer things on your plate, you will actually, demonstrably, invisibly be a more useful employee than if you have a lot of things on your plate. So, yeah, people do business matters in the sense I want to see your emails and this and that. But of course, if you're actually shipping, then that can begin to outweigh that. So the question is, how do you begin to keep your concurrent workload smaller? Keeping in mind that's going to keep your overall production higher. And again, this is a really key thing I want people to remember. Doing fewer things at once means you accomplish more things over time. So this is not a standard zero sum labor negotiation of I want to make my life better in a way that's going to make my company's life worse. It's not that. This is not a labor union negotiation. Actually, what I'm doing is going to make both our lives better. I'm going to be less frustrated and overloaded. You're going to get more good results. So how do we jumpstart this? And that becomes the interesting tactical question. And most of the tactics I suggest for getting to a smaller concurrent workload focus on making your workload transparent. So it's like the big issue in knowledge work is that we have no centralized systems for keeping track of our assigning work. It's all informal, like, hey, Paula, can you handle this? I send you an email, grab you in the hallway, like, hey, can you, you think you can do this thing for me? I need you to get the client testimonials on the website. No one knows who else is working on what, how much things they're working on, how is it going, how long they've Worked on it. All of that is obfuscated and it's just emails going back and forth and everyone keeps this internal. If you can surface your workload, then you have a lot more foundation on which to control it. Right. So in the very easiest, this is like a half thought experiment, half real suggestion. Have a shared document. This is what I'm actively working on now. Divider line. Here's my ordered queue of things of committed to. I'm working on next. And when someone's like, hey Paula, can you do like whatever you say? Yeah, just go and add it to my list. And now they have to go and confront like, oh, okay, you're working on these three things. There's six things in this queue. I put it down here. Oh my God, like holla. Has a lot to do. So either I'm going to say actually look, you have enough on your plate, or if I put on your plate, I have completely different expectations like you're not going to get to this for a long time. And I know why. Right. If they don't have that information, the way people simulate everyone else is like basically just sort of like sitting around waiting to help them. So like, well, Paula, why don't you do this? I asked you yesterday. But when they can see it, right? So then you can, you can simulate that effect less directly. So I talk about not maybe exposing that whole list, but keeping track of your time estimates and everything on that list so you can respond to someone happy to do it. You know, I keep very careful track of like my projects and when they're going to get executed. I have seven things on my queue ahead of you. I estimate that I'll get to this, you know, in four weeks and you mark it on the list. And then the key thing with that particular suggestion is when you get to that point, if you're not actually able to do it, if you miss misestimated, you update them. I know I said it would be four weeks, but actually item four and five took longer. It's going to be another two weeks. Right. People will appreciate and respect the clarity. They'll say, well, this person's kind of got their act together. They know exactly what's happening with their workload. And now by making your load transparent and being clear about it, people's expectations are changed. Another thing you can do is just pre schedule time for commitments. Oh, you want me to do this? Let me go find when I'm going to do it and I'm going to block out that time on my calendar. However much Time it's really going to take. I can be honest about it. All right, so there's a time management advantage here. So like, okay, there will be time for this when I get to it. So that's good. But there's also a feedback mechanism here. You said I went to try to find the 15 hours it would take to do this project. I could not find 15 hours until April. I mark everything on my calendar. April is the next time I can do this. It all has the same effect of making your workload transparent. And now they have to confront the reality of how much is actually on your plate. They can't say you're lying and they don't want to explicitly say stay up late or work in the morning. And so people have to confront the reality of how much you're actually doing. And once they do, you can keep that amount reasonable. You can keep what you're working on at any one time reasonable. So if you have that list of here's what I'm working on now and here's the seven things I'm waiting on, you tell those people, no, I'm not emailing about this or doing meetings about this until they move into my active projects list. So I think more transparent and clearly structured workload management makes doing fewer things at once way easier than what most people do, which is they wait till they get really stressed out and they get mad at everybody. Don't you know how busy I am? And like, okay, that lasts for like a week. And then, you know, it doesn't work. We need clarity and systematic structure.
- [58:08]
Paula Pant
Right? And it strikes me as you describe it, that a lot of task management programs like Monday, Monday.com or sauna to an extent, sort of reflect, here are the people who are working on the projects and here are the various levels of criticality. And, you know, there's a little bit of an at a glance feature.
- [58:26]
Cal Newport
This is what most people should do, by the way. So software developers who use those tools a lot, they already do this other people should too, is that these teams and these tools have this idea of work to be done by default is owned by the team, not an individual.
- [58:43]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [58:44]
Cal Newport
Individuals only own what they're working on right now. And so if you use a tool like Asana as a software developer, there might be this big pool of project features that need to get done. They're not on any individual's plate. They're sitting here in this sort of like, we need to do this type of column. What you're working on is way more narrow I'm working on this feature right now and then when I'm done we'll pull something else out of there. This is my organizational suggestion is work by default should not exist on individuals plates. Individuals plates should be small. There should be a place where everyone can see here's things that need to get done. But no one owns these right now. There's no one to email about these right now. We have to decide who's going to work on what next and things get pulled out of here. You know what, this thing has stayed on here for a long time. Maybe we probably shouldn't be doing it. I actually have a cool story in the book of a team that did this. They were observing a literal physical assembly line process at the Broad Institute at mit. There was this process for sequencing genomes where you would. There's like these machines. I don't know how it works, but you had to pass the samples from station to station and things were piling up or whatever. And so they switched over to a pole system. They're like literally pole. I pull in another sample from you when I'm ready to process it. And it kind of slowed down the whole pipeline to match, like the slowest, whatever. But there was a knowledge work group at the Broad Institute. It was like, well, why don't we do this with our just like knowledge work tasks. And they built this like virtual assembly line on the wall of their offices where they put things on post it notes and no one owned them, they were just on the wall. And then you would bring them over to working on. Once someone decided to work on something, you'd write their name on it. And they weren't. It wasn't moving samples through a pipeline, it was doing their building projects or whatever. But it's really made this group way more productive in the sense of they finished more things because people were working on fewer things at a time. Because all the work that came in wasn't owned by individuals, it was owned by the team. So there was no overhead tax cost until you actually took it onto your plate. But if you only take one thing on your plate at a time, minimal overhead tax. Now the ratio of your hours working versus talking about work, really large stuff gets done much faster.
- [60:52]
Paula Pant
Right. And the differentiator there, that push versus pull.
- [60:55]
Cal Newport
Yeah.
- [60:56]
Paula Pant
With the lab, when they were just pushing the samples onto the next stage.
- [61:01]
Cal Newport
Yeah.
- [61:01]
Paula Pant
Then yeah, there were fogs in the pipeline.
- [61:03]
Cal Newport
Some people had nothing going on in their machines and other people had to give up basically. And so because they had so many things Being pushed because they were slower. And then the whole thing fell apart. And then they started doing priority samples where someone would just walk it from place to place and they're like, this is stupid. They switched the polling. The whole thing worked. And the other thing they figured out with polling is if this part's going slower, it's now really obvious, right? So why don't we, instead of keep putting samples onto our tray for them to pull, go help them so they can help clear it out faster. So now the people, the technicians could move. It was. But anyways, you can do the same thing with work. So, like, if you can control your team, we need a solution like that. We all agree here's the tasks that no one's doing and then we're going to assign them. But those things I was talking about before, where you have your own list of what you're working, you're basically simulating that by saying, here's what I'm actively working on. This stuff may technically be on my plate, but it is in a waiting queue and I don't do anything about this until it's on my active queue. And if you bother me about it, I can tell you exactly. I'm getting to that in six weeks. Here's my queue. Look at the document if you want, here's where I am. So you can sort of simulate this by treating everything but your core things you're focusing on as waiting in the station before use tray. I have not yet pulled that onto my plate, even if technically I'm the person who it's been emailed to.
- [62:18]
Paula Pant
Right, Right. So I have two more questions that are in my brain. One is going back to what we were talking about earlier when you discussed the rapid feedback hypothesis and you said a lot of writers might think being on Twitter and getting that rapid feedback can help ab test a lot of decisions. But are we really better today? Two things that strike me about that. One is the context of today's is necessarily different. The way that people market or promote today, for example, in any given business is due to the technology that we have, necessarily different, and the opportunities available are different. There are a lot of businesses that exist today that would not have been able to exist in the 90s, because in the 90s those businesses would have needed brick and mortar footprints and there would have been high barriers to entry, a lot of, you know, heavy capital overhead. Today there are a lot of small businesses that exist that due to low barriers to entry, they can exist. Given the fact that context is different today and Given the fact that there are businesses and in fact entire industries that exist today that couldn't have existed 15 years ago, how do we square all of that?
- [63:31]
Cal Newport
Well, I think the Internet as an infrastructure play is fantastic.
- [63:35]
Paula Pant
Right?
- [63:35]
Cal Newport
Right. Because digital delivery across a ubiquitous, accessible network is great. So I can deliver digital information to anyone. We have shared protocols. That's great. We can communicate with anyone. That's great. The barriers to producing and spreading content is very low. Like what we're doing right now. Like we can make audio content that lots of people can listen to. You couldn't do that 20 years ago. You would have had to have an antenna. You're going to have the broadcaster. Right. Like all of that I think is fantastic. So I'm a huge Internet booster and a huge social media skeptic. This is this sort of interesting position I play in sort of Internet critique. So my argument is when it comes to social media content production in particular, you get two harms. One is once you're in an ecosystem designed to grab your attention, it's going to grab a lot of your attention. The cost to your production is probably going to be higher than whatever you gain potentially in terms of new audiences. So you think, think that you're ab testing for article ideas, but you spent 40 hours on Twitter because once you're in there it's hard to go away. And now you're just thinking a lot about it. And this, the cognitive tax is really high. But two, the success in those mediums, so that feedback, what's it pushing you towards? It's not pushing you towards writing a better long form article, it's pushing you towards writing more successful tweets. Right. Or if you're doing YouTube content, it's not pushing you necessarily if you're paying attention to the numbers, it's not pushing you to whatever the content you're producing to be better in a general sense, it's pushing you for you to do better on YouTube. And those dynamics are very different often from the core crafts on which one could build a really sustainable and robust and sort of meaningful creative business. We see this all the time, is Twitter begins transforming you into someone that can succeed on Twitter, which is going to be a very specific type of person. Now some people can succeed in that, but it's a really stressful, anxiety ridden existence and probably really far from where you started, which is, I'm trying to write articles on X. I thought I was just testing them on Twitter. Now what I'm trying to do is get a good reaction from this really narrow audience that's being curated through an algorithm and it just pushes you to a weird place. It's like if you YouTube does this even more pronounced because the YouTube algorithm is idiosyncratic, right? So success on YouTube is a very specific thing. People imagine, like, oh, it's just this general place where people can put up videos and there's lots of ways for videos to be interesting. And it's just the platform. No, the algorithm is really selective. It's why you start on YouTube saying, you know, I go on there, I'm like, I'm going to give personal finance advice and like, where am I going to end up? Is going to be me shirtless, doing videos about getting shredded because, like this with like really fast cuts and like me trying. I'm trying so and so's diet today or whatever. Because that does really well, you know. But what did that have to do with me wanting to be a really respectable personal financial advice thing? Because doing that really well is not what. So I worry about the algorithms. So you end up not testing what to do what you really want to do better. You end up learning how to do what those platforms want you to do better. So you put Lin manuel Miranda on YouTube instead of going to Wesleyan in the late 90s. Let's say he's going to Wesleyan in 2010s. If he's thinking, like, great, I want to. I'm working on a new style and I want to succeed on YouTube first. You're not going to get in the heights. You're not going to get Hamilton. You're going to get, I don't know, Lin Manuel Miranda talking about how to get shredded, right? It's going to push him into a weird place because those algorithms have their own mechanism. So social media, it's just something to treat with caution. Like you mentioned, if you have a small business, it's great for marketing, right? Why are these companies so profitable? Not because lots of people use them, but because lots of people use them and can be targeted very specifically. So it's like a miracle if you're advertising. Like, I can advertise and try to get my ad in front of exactly the people I want to see it. So it's like very good for marketing. There's definitely use cases where it helps, you know, where you're careful about it, where I'm not on social media all the time, but I'm still getting some benefit. You know, I think about, like, Ryan Holiday has his team tweet out like a stoic quote every Day. And you know what? Those get the people, and it does grab new eyeballs for them. But Ryan Holiday doesn't get within 20ft of a Twitter account. Right. He doesn't want to see that. Right. And he doesn't pretend like he is either. But, like, okay, that's interesting. Use. Or like, how you and I use YouTube, which is like, we'll put our podcast episodes on there. But it's not like you or I are using the numbers from YouTube to, like, really influence what we do on our podcast. Because, again, both our podcasts would end up being about either, like, weightlifting or Taylor Swift. Right. Like, if we were just using, like, what's getting the numbers up, you know, it would change it. So there's. There's plenty of, I think, careful good uses for it, but I don't see it as fundamental, especially like, doing things that are too good to be ignored.
- [68:26]
Paula Pant
That actually dovetails perfectly with my final question, which is on the topic of, you know, too good to be ignored, one thing that's somewhat contradictory that happens is that as a person grows in reputation in their field, more and more distracting opportunities come their way. And in the book, you give the example of Richard Feynman and how he swore that he would not get distracted, but then he. He got pulled onto the Challenger project.
- [68:56]
Cal Newport
Yeah.
- [68:56]
Paula Pant
If you could share that story and then talk about how to deal with sort of the curse of success.
- [69:03]
Cal Newport
Yes. Maybe one of the only times we'll compare Richard Feynman to Jewel. But actually it's. It's relevant. Yeah. So Feynman famously had said in this interview on Horizons. He had famously said, here's how I get good physics work done. He's a professor. Here's how I get good physics work done. I cultivate this reputation of being irresponsible. So if you try to pull me onto a committee to do something, I'm going to do a terrible job. And eventually people are like, let's just not bother Feynman. Right. And he's like, and I get a lot of physics work done. And I told that story in Deep Work, but then in my new book, I was like, yeah. But later, he, former student of his, becomes a director of NASA and says, richard, I want you to run the commission to figure out why the Challenger exploded. And he did this interview afterwards with the LA Times, saying, like, I wasn't following my advice. Like, I said, like, don't get pulled into things. Right. And he did. But actually, the important thing about that story is reflecting on it. He said, the weakness Was in his original advice. He's like. Because he's like, this was important and this was important to. It was important to the world. This was an important thing to do. It was a good application of my expertise. And so actually maybe what was broken here was my original advice, which is like, just tell everyone to leave you alone. And so what you get out of that is you have to be really careful. Combine those two things. You have to be really careful. As you get better, more opportunities will come towards you. But still you want to follow your values because some of those are important. So we can connect this to Juul. Because this was the second part of her story. The first part of her story was she turned down a million dollars so she could take more time to get better. She knew she had to go slow if she was gonna get better. The second part of her story is what happens after she blows up. So she blows up. Her album is a huge success. A million copies a month at its height. Remember this album, who Will Save youe Soul? You Were Meant For Me. It was all over, all over mtv. So she blows up and they put her on the Taylor Swift path. So like, international tours, movies. So she's in the Devil May Care and Ang Lee movie. And they're saying her people now you have people, plural are like, okay, Jewel, you have to move to la. Because here's what we're going to do in between your international tours. We're going to get you in movies and we're going to make you a sort like multimedia threat or whatever. And she was like, wait a second, I don't like this. I have money now. My album did really well. I really like making music. And so she said, no, no more tours. Never toured again, no more movies. Didn't go to Hollywood. Instead she actually went to Texas. Her boyfriend at the time was a rodeo writer and had this ranch. Go to the ranch and I'm going to write music or whatever. And so she used her ability, which gave her leverage to say, I'm going to dictate what my life looks like. Another example of that. Like, I like these AB comparisons. Michael Crichton, John Grisham, right? So they were vying for like the title of the best selling author, fiction writer, you know, in the world. They kept going back and forth, right in the 90s, completely different approach to getting really good. So Michael Crichton, like, as he started taking off his writing career, taking off, he was like, I want to do it all. He moved to la. He's like, I want to Write books. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to direct movies. I'm going to direct TV shows. I want to do everything. That was his thing. John Grisham had a completely different reaction to the exact same circumstance. 1990s, your books are really taking off. Grisham's response is great. I can quit my job. I don't have to be a lawyer anymore. I can move somewhere quiet, and I get a lot of free time back. And what he did is he built for his town this giant baseball Little League complex. And he's like, I'm going to be the commissioner of the Little League that my kids are playing in, because I really like baseball and coaching, and this is great. I'll write one book a year. I'll do three weeks of publicity. It takes me about six months to write the book and forget about me otherwise. And he had one assistant, and when she retired, he didn't bother replacing her because there's no work for a new assistant to do. He's like, the only people who know my phone number is my agent and my editor, and there's no one's calling me. I don't do things, you know, so like Jewel, he said, there's, I have control now. I can do something that's valuable now. If I want to maximize my money and opportunities, I can do, like, the Michael Crichton thing, or I can go be the Little League commissioner and say, like, people are going to let me do what I want because I can do something really well. So I really. I love that idea of, you know, obsess over. Quality makes your work more meaningful. It forces you to slow down. It's served by a more natural pace. It also eventually gives you the ammo to really start to push the structure of your life in these sort of remarkable directions. It's really the glue. It's a thread that goes through a lot of my books. But in this book, it's like all of this is finally coming together. Here's the philosophy. Here is the philosophy to build this work life where you're not overloaded, you're not burnt out. It could range from just, I like my job and I want it to be sustainable to, I'm the Little League commissioner and I work six months out of the year. All of that's on the table now. Once you have this more sensical human notion of productivity, do fewer things.
- [74:12]
Paula Pant
Obsess over quality.
- [74:13]
Cal Newport
There's one in the middle, natural pace.
- [74:15]
Paula Pant
And work at a natural pace.
- [74:16]
Cal Newport
That's it.
- [74:17]
Paula Pant
Great well, thank you for spending this time with us. Is there anything that I haven't asked about, or are there any final messages that you want to leave with the audience?
- [74:24]
Cal Newport
Well, it's a dangerous question because I could talk about this for hours. I think we just scratched the surface. So the book is called Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Lost art because we're learning from these historical figures. And it's a mix of the two different types of things we talked about. These principles that are timeless and really nitty gritty. Tactical stuff like this is how I deal with my boss wanting to give me more projects. And I think we have to be willing to marry those two things together. I mean, we have to be specific. We also have to be aspirational. So hopefully this book will do that for people. And. Calnewport.com slow you can get the excerpt from the book. So there you go. Perfect.
- [75:06]
Paula Pant
Well, thank you.
- [75:07]
Cal Newport
Yeah. Thanks, Paul.
- [75:09]
Paula Pant
Thank you. Cal. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, there are three elements to slow productivity, do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess with over quality. Now, the first two, do fewer things and work at a natural pace. Those are fairly easy to understand. But let's talk about that third element, obsess over quality. In the first key takeaway, Cal Newport shares how great achievers make this principle work.
- [75:49]
Cal Newport
There's three principles. The first two principles make sense when you hear a term like slow productivity because they're directly connected to going slower. Principle one, do fewer things. Like that. Okay, yeah, sure. Principle two, work at a natural pace. Like we're talking about. Principle three is obsess over quality. And so at first, when you see that, you're like, what does this have to do with slowing down? Like, doing fewer things is slower. Like working at a more natural pace, that's slower. What does obsessing over quality have to do about it? It's what unlocks everything. Because when you obsess over, like Marie Curie did, getting the best result, or Lin Manuel Miranda did on his play being something new, two things happen. One, slowness becomes demanded of you because quality, you have to. You're just like, it's not ready. I can't rush this. So now you have a reason to slow down because you want this thing to be good. You care about quality. You're not just slowing down because you have an antagonistic relationship to your work. And you're like, I'm done with you, and I just want to do less you're slowing down because I need to go slower to make this thing work. Flip side of that. As you get better, you can dictate more of your pace.
- [76:57]
Paula Pant
Obsessing over the quality of what you create can be challenging, it can be tricky. But it is what ultimately sets you apart, and it is what allows you to do fewer things, to do those things at a natural pace, and to have a career with legendary output. And by the way, this applies in all facets of life. You can obsess over quality at your day job, if that's what you're super into. You could obsess over quality at a side hustle. You could obsess over quality at some type of a volunteer or nonprofit or philanthropic endeavor. You could obsess over quality in a community group. You can follow these principles in any realm of life. Just remember, do fewer things work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. That's the first key takeaway, and it leads to key takeaway number two. Learn how to identify quality. If caring about high quality is critical to achieving more without burning out, then the next question becomes, all right, how do we know what high quality is? How do we know it when we see it? Cal Newport explains what we need to prioritize when we are obsessing about quality.
- [78:20]
Cal Newport
So we really need to spend more time up front learning what good is. That's, like, more important at first than actually trying to get good. Because if you don't know where you're aiming your ship of skill, it's just going to go randomly through the waters of activity, if you know what I mean. So we actually have to, like, one of the most important things you can do is not, how do I get better? It's like, what makes those really good people good? And when you trust your taste, then you're getting really good feedback. Okay, this is pretty bad, but I know why it's bad. I can't do this, this, and this. All right, Could I do that? With enough practice, yes. Could I do this? You know what? No. I'm never going to be able to do this. Let's change our plan. So I think we really undervalue taste when we talk to people about getting good at things or pursuing quality.
- [79:03]
Paula Pant
And so that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. In order to produce great things in your field, you need to be inspired. So find other people in your field who have done amazing things. And again, this could apply at your day job, at your side hustle, at your small business, at a community group or a nonprofit or a volunteer activity. This can apply in any, any domain. Right? Find someone who's done the thing that you want to do, someone you admire, someone you look up to and find out how they became successful. Find out how you can plot that path.
- [79:43]
Cal Newport
What you need to do is take someone who is in your same field, who's doing very well, and you say, I want to take out the coffee. I want to hear your whole story. And you walk them through. All right, so here was your first job. What was your next promotion? Well, what mattered at that promotion? Okay, then what happened next? And you begin to figure out what mattered for this person. So you can do this even when it's not a public figure, even when there's not podcasts to listen to or magazine profiles to read. And the key thing if you're just talking to someone is not just finding out the steps they took, but for every step. The key question is, what did you do in that step that other people trying to make that same step but failed were not doing? So let's get that differential analysis happening in your own career in marketing copy or whatever the particular field have programming, whatever it happens to be, and you get at this is what matters. Then you also just expose yourself to the greats. Just be around really good stuff from the field. And that taste not only directs you, it motivates you and it helps you fight the procrastination.
- [80:48]
Paula Pant
Ultimately, what you want to do with this conversation is figure out what matters and what's noise, what is important, and what is distraction. And the people who are best poised to answer those questions are the people who have produced great work in the same domain. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our show notes and our newsletter by going to affordanything.com shownotes afford anything.com shownotes we send out a synopsis of every episode as well as fun announcements about cool stuff that we're doing. So make sure that you don't miss out on any of our great updates. Afford anything.com shownotes also please rate review recommend right please the three Rs that is if you're a friend of the show and you want to help the show out, those are the three most important things that you can do. Rate us in your favorite podcast playing app. Write us a review. These reviews are so instrumental in helping us book amazing guests and recommend us to a friend or a family member if you want to chat with like minded people, head to afford anything.com community. That's where you can connect with other people who are into the same things that you're into. Whether that's retirement, investing, real estate, getting out of debt, early retirement, whatever that is. Whatever aspect of this financial world you're interested in, you can find like minded people there and have those conversations. Afford anything.com community totally free. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I will catch you in the next episode.