Why You're Always Tired & Exhausted (No Matter What You Do) | Cal Newport

Let's get started with our Deep dive so here's what I want to talk about today tiredness a lot of knowledge workers I hear from are telling me that they are tired and exhausted all of the time not the sort of lack of sleep tiredness where you know where that's from but more of a psychological exhaustion the sort of I have a hard time continuing to work on Hard things after we get to two o'clock in the afternoon so what I want to do here is argue that the explanation for this endemic tiredness is not what

you think and when we realize what's really causing this tiredness some unexpected but targeted Solutions become possible and I have a couple that I want to give you at the end of this deep dive all right so let's get started with the Most common uh answer if you ask people why are you tired all the time the most common answer you're going to hear from knowledge workers is work volume we have too much work the metaphor we want to give here is we have a battery that's our energy every unit of work every 10 minutes

of work drains a little bit from the battery so if you have too many units of work that you have to do in a given day you drain the battery down to empty and That's what caused a state of exhaustion I think this is the common mental model that most knowledge workers have I think however the real answer is more complicated than that there's two pieces of evidence that tells us that this draining battery model is not quite like we think it is the first piece of evidence is we can find numerous case studies of

knowledge workers who produce a large quantity of work so The total units of knowledge work that they're doing is very very high and yet they don't report being exhausted they don't report being tired let me give you an extreme example of this I can actually bring up a picture of her on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening up on the screen I have Maria Popov the Blogger writer newsletter writer her site used to be called brain pickings now it's called marginalia she does Reviews of books reviews and commentary on

books she works a lot so I found a profile of her from about 10 years ago where they they cataloged her typical work day but her typical workday is three essays or post per day she also used to have a regimen of 50 tweets per day all scheduled out so I can just tell you from a writing point of view that is a large amount of knowledge work especially since the Articles and posts that she puts on her Site are based off of her reading entire complicated books novels poetry non-fiction books Memoirs so she's reading

roughly a book a day she's posting three times a day plus uh at least for a while was doing 50 tweets a day so she works a lot but as the quote shows up there on the screen she does not describe herself as exhausted or tired I'm reading now something she said I'm a Believer in pacing creating a rhythm where you do very intense Focus work for an extended period but then you take a short break and then cycle back I think ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very

little sleep is a kind of badge of honor that speaks to work ethic or toughness or whatever but it really is just a total profound failure of priorities and self-respect she does not buy this idea that you Should be exhausted all the time here's another example I'll bring him up on the screen the famous Memoir not Memoirs non-fiction biographer Robert Carro who among other things has written the uh or is still writing the acclaimed multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson Robert Carroll also writes all the time I'm reading here on the screen a quote in his

New York City office where everything has this particular place Cara Works long hours seven days a week pouring through interview transcripts and primary source notes working slowly and deliberately on books he publishes on average once every 10 years he works constantly huge volume of work so just add up the units of work there's a lot yet he's not exhausted and then the the secondary quote here I have him talking about many days where he jumps out of bed Happy I'm really getting into it I tend to get up earlier and earlier just because I'm excited

to get to work it's not exhausted all right so volume of work this does not seem to be the the full explanation for why we are tired we also can look at some survey data on this as well I'm bringing here on the screen another article here this is from work life it's summarizing a study and the headline tells you everything you need To know about the study that they're summarizing nearly half of workers say they work four hours a day right so we have examples of people who work a huge amount they accomplish a

huge amount of work but are not tired we also have evidence then when we work at when we look at how many hours most knowledge workers are actually working it's not as large as you might suspect so there's something else going on here Than just the total units of work is draining our batteries so what is really going on here here's my answer it's not the volume of work that matters is how we schedule it so let's go back what was different our first piece of evidence was papava and Caro were not exhausted why did

their work schedule probably hit you as very different than your work schedule it's because the way they talk about how Their work was scheduled talked about I work for a long period of time extended periods of time on something hard Cairo sits in his office and he will sit there with interview transcripts hours and hours at a time just reading the documentary that came out last year about Robert Carroll had the title turn every page because that's his advice on how to write a good nonfiction biography Read every single page in the archives until you're

completely immersed in it so what we see in the scheduling of their work is a sequentialness long stretches on one hard thing at a time the total amount of work they do is large but the total amount of times that they are shifting from one thing to another is small this is very different than how most knowledge workers are approaching their Own work the typical knowledge worker is constantly jumping back and forth between different targets of their attention now there's a lot of reasons for this one is the diversity of things we have on our

plate at any one time is very large so we often have many different tasks and obligations that we're shuffling each of these different task obligations or projects brings with it its own demands of overhead Emails that have to be sent to keep coordinating it or moving it forward calls that have to be made meetings that have to be jumped on small tasks that have to be accomplished so if we have a lot of different types of things on our plate we get a lot of these small overhead tasks crowding out our schedule so we have

to jump back and forth between them and email about this project a meeting about this project on the three emails about that project an Email about this thing over here before we're back on a meeting and then we have to file this paper over here that requires a lot of Shifting back and forth of attention the other thing that happens of course is just in general the way that we coordinate or collaborate in the knowledgework environment is that we use ad hoc on-demand messaging we figure things out on the fly with these ongoing back and

forth digital conversations That are unfolding in an inbox or unfolding in a slack chat Channel this too requires us to keep switching our attention from whatever we're working on to these channels so that we can keep those conversations going and then back to what we're working on and then back to the channel to knock another message back or to reply to another chat then back to what we're working on so we create an environment in which our Attention is constantly shifting back and forth between different things very different than what we observe with Popova or

Cairo papa will sit down and read for four hours all she's doing is reading that book Carol will sit down and work on a chapter for five hours all he's doing is working on that chapter they're doing one thing at a time for long periods of time we're switching Back and forth frantically between many different things so is this a problem it is let me load up on the screen here a important research article from 2009 this is Sophie Leroy's paper titled why is it so hard to do my work the challenge of attention residue

when switching between work tasks I'm just going to read you something here from the abstract so here we go results indicate it is Difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers being able to finish one task before switching to another is however not enough to enable effective task transition time pressure while finishing a prior task is needed to disengage from the first task and thus move to the next task and contributes to highest performance on the next task so if you Look closer at this paper

she has these the these two results which is it takes a lot of time to switch fully your attention so when you switch from one task to another there is something called attention residue that is Left Behind which lowers your cognitive capacity generates fatigue until it clears out you have a conflict of things that you're focusing on she says even if you finish this is their second Point even If you finish a task it takes a while before that clears out of your mind now she says time pressure can help here so if you have

a deadline I have to submit this thing before the post office closed and you have a clear deadline and you you submit something right before the deadline it's a little bit easier to clear out that attention residue that's what she meant about the time pressure but the big picture thing here is that your brain loads up lots of information About whatever you're working on and it's not a cheap or quick operation to change that to a different Target this is why the typical knowledge worker approach of frantic switching back and forth of your attention is

exhausting us it's why you're tired by 2 pm and say I can no longer do anything hard it's the switching back and forth is making your brain miserable it just can't do it you're constantly in a state where your brain has one context and You're working on another context and before it can load that context you switch it back to that context it's just really difficult it's like if you're a professional runner for your job and you didn't realize that you've been wearing a backpack full of bricks it makes your job unnecessarily more difficult so

it's not the volume of work that's the problem Maria and Robert do a huge Volume of work but they're not context shifting they're barely context shifting so the mental experience is much more sustainable than those of us who maybe are only getting like that study said four real hours of work in but that four hours is completely fragmented with frenetic back and forth context switching so it feels like you just finished the proverbial knowledge work equivalent of a marathon with all those bricks on your back so it is very Self-imposed difficulties that we're putting ourselves

in this is why I think we're tired we switch our attention back and forth too much all right so that's good news bad news the bad news is uh shoot it's hard to just stop doing that my bosses is emailing me I have a lot of work on my plate but the good news is at least we know what we're trying to accomplish We don't have to argue give me less work we instead have to figure out how do I make my work more sequential so I want to give you one General piece of advice

here and then one brand new specific piece of advice a strategy that I think a lot of people could get a lot of help out of it's something I haven't mentioned before on this show so the general piece of advice is desperately seek and try to preserve Sequentiality just keep thinking context switching hurts context switching hurts avoid context switches when I can you want to have a an almost visceral dislike of switching your attention so that your instinct is to try to preserve your focus on one thing at a time before you switch so that

might be simple in some cases okay if I'm working on this just work on this don't check my inbox till it's done And then spend 30 minutes on my inbox then work on this thing over here just knowing you're trying to set up your work to be one thing after another time block planning can help you do this much better so if you time block plan where you lay out a plan for every minute of your day you're much much uh better able to figure out where things fit so everything has its time and you

can give that thing its full attention when it's actually happening The really succeed with making your work more sequential you also are probably going to have to come to grips with there is less things you can actually productively push forward in a given day we write ourselves these idealized work fairy tales in the morning about wow if I could actually push forward all six of these different things that would be great I would feel productive but you don't actually have enough time to give all six of the things in this example Enough undistracted attention to

make a difference probably should just work on three we feel bad in the moment because we're thinking that's less productive but when we zoom out we see the sort of just touching on these things wasn't helping when there was too much of a crowded schedule we were just sending out the proverbial thoughts question mark email to just try to play obligation hot potato and get things off our plate and just to say technically Speaking I talked about this we stall we delay we obfuscate we do low quality work so we also have to be more

comfortable with there's less things per day than we think that we can actually deal with so that's the general advice here is develop a diversion to context switching use time block planning to to better lay out past during the day and get comfortable with actually doing fewer things in the day because you're Probably already trying to do too much all right now what's my my super secret piece of specific advice well I want to tackle your email inbox in particular I think this is one of the most devastating vectors of context switching exhaustion there is

fewer things more daunting for your brain's attentional system than a crowded inbox and the reason is is when you see a Crowded inbox you have dozens of things that you need to respond to on dozens of different contexts so as you go from email to email you are drastically switching the relevant cognitive context from message to message and this is incredibly draining so you have an email from your department chair and it's urgent and it's Salient that someone that you work for and you want To answer them quickly but you have to try to load

up this context of all of the issues surrounding the committee that that he's asking you about and then two minutes later you have an email from a student in one of your classes this is a completely different cognitive context all right the class what's going on what's our schedule uh who's the student but before you can switch completely over that context you have an email from an administrator a scheduling question That's a completely different context oh my God like what is going on with my schedule do I have time for this let me see my

calendar this is a massive demand you are making on a brain that is used to being much more sequential and it's why email clearing in particular can be one of the most exhausting activities we have in knowledge work is because it is pushing this context switching Pace to completely unsustainable levels so here's my Specific piece of advice about this specific source of acute context switching overload single thread your inbox here's what I mean about this this is entirely using context Theory to make your inbox worse less worse you have your inbox open you want to

catch up on emails choose a single context for which there are multiple messages so messages from students Messages about scheduling things messages about this upcoming conference that I'm organizing and what you're going to do is just focus on the messages that all fall within the same cognitive context and I want you to load up right next to your inbox a blank text file we call these on the show workingmemory.txt file so the sort of a blank text file right there on your browser and you're going to type in a Quick one sentence summary of every

email of that context so you have a bunch of student questions quick summary every email from a student that's in your inbox then you're going to go over to this text file and say okay I forget the inbox for I don't want to see these other messages I forget all that here are six or seven things that are all related to the same cognitive context let me think through my answers to all Of these uh yes no I'm not going to delay this I'm going to ask this and right I'm talking right bullet points in

your text file you're tackling all these things together and you're going to find that as you get going the friction reduces because as the single relevant context gets loaded up into your neural circuitry the facility of thinking about this the ease with which you can come up with ideas is Going to increase and increase and it's going to be like okay great I'm on it you're getting a pretty nuanced answers okay great this is great actually let me let me tell these three students to wait to hear these two students are wondering about the timing

of this exam you know what I should move that exam okay so who I need to tell the TA and you're just in a context you come up and you work out all of your answers then you go back to your inbox you translate that to Responses to each of those relevant emails you clear them out of your inbox right okay thread over what's my next contextual thread maybe there's a bunch of different things about scheduling and meetings okay now I'm in meetings mode over here every single meeting message I'm going to put a line

in my text file um any dates that they're suggesting okay I need to find a date uh next week I need the suggested date here's dates They're suggesting I need to choose one all that information in your text file close down your inbox load up your calendar load up your text file and you're just working on scheduling now that's all you're doing again you're going to find after a few minutes as the context loads and you stop trying to interrupt it you become a scheduling Master oh you're not going to move this here and we

consolidate these I'm going to move that Meeting and if I clear out this Tuesday I can fit these all on here and then you go back and you answer all these emails it's funny because in the end maybe you're answering the same total collection of emails when you're done the experience though is going to be 5x less exhausting and it's because you're hacking context shifting you're sticking in one context till you're done then another so single threading your inbox Can drastically change your experience of what it's like to empty your inbox and really minimize the

contrail of fatigue that inbox checking can otherwise leave across your mental sky so that's a specific tip before I give you some general advice as well but all of this is wrapped around the same idea is it's a detour or a diversion when we think too much just about how much am I working and if I just had less hours of work I'd be Less exhausted that's not what's causing the issue with knowledge workers it's the context shifting itself and that is something we can as individuals do something about it's definitely something that organizations and

bosses and managers could do something about but I want to be holding my breath about that but it's all about why are we tired well in large part because we're scheduling our work in a way that is designed to Exhaust our brains stop doing that we still have a lot of other issues to deal with but at least things are going to get a lot better you might not be able to have Robert Carrows eight hours in a row of just reading articles but getting closer to that ideal is going to lower the amount of

exhaustion that you're going to feel by the end of the day I think Carol still uses a typewriter I believe it obviously he did when it Was profiled in the New York Times he was on scene or 60 minutes once yeah yeah this or slow them down stay not be distracted I mean these are extremes Cairo is an extreme Popova is an extreme like they just read and write like that's all they do but I do think it's important to study these extremes because when you study people who do produce huge volumes of high level

knowledge work you often see this they they minimize they naturally lean Towards minimizing contact shifting and I think in normal knowledge work we just don't think about context shifting as an enemy at all I think we should it's productivity poison so once we recognize that it can really change uh really change a lot of habits all right so what we have is a a bunch of questions and and a case study uh a live case study actually coming up where we have someone calling in to give their case study about trying to do a Robert

Carro style book writing project in the middle of an otherwise busy family and professional life so we've got some great questions and a case study coming up first however I want to talk about uh one of the sponsors that makes this show possible in particular deep questions is sponsored by better help so fall is off in a busy time for a lot of people maybe you're finding that racing thoughts are keeping you up at night Or anxiety about all sorts of different things is getting in the way of the activities that you used to find

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so we're gonna move on now to some questions uh I guess these all roughly orbit mental exhaustion tiredness you know we do our best to keep the theme somewhat on theme later in the questions as I Previewed before we're gonna have a someone calling in to give their case study about using some of these ideas so stay tuned for that but let's just get started with a standard question Jesse who is our first question of the segment first questions from John how do I read for longer stretches of time I want to be able to

read for 90 minutes in one sitting but I just can't the best I can do is 45 minutes and by the end I'm falling asleep how do I build up my Reading stamina well John first of all let's go back to what we talked about in the opening segment of the show and be very wary about context shifts so we are so used to today having this easy access to distraction in our pockets that we don't even note it as an activity so you when you say here you know I can read for 45 minutes

but then I'm very tired by the end you think you're reading for 45 minutes The the neutral Observer has probably seen seven or eight smartphone checks check this text message and see what's happening with the baseball game so keep this in mind every one of those checks is inducing a context shift which is incredibly fatiguing so of course you're not going to make it very far it's like saying I want to go for a 5K run but let me just bring this wheel barrel full of metal slag with me it's a huge extra cognitive weight

that you are Adding which makes the activity all the more harder so the easiest thing you can do is when you read your phones in a different room that alone is going to give you 30 to 50 percent more reading stamina without changing anything else all right so then how do we expand beyond that let's say we want to get all the way up to 90 minutes or two hours out of sitting there the the two-part solution is going to be two things that Start with the letter i interval training and interesting books so the

second piece is the easiest when you're trying to expand your reading capacity read the most interesting possible books do not use Anna Karenina as the book you're going to use for trying to expand your reading capacity don't read Thomas pension as the book you're going to read to expand your reading capacity get a Book that you were like super excited to read when it came out and that you have a hard time putting down you know think about this as the running equivalent of don't start to get in shape for your 5Ks by running up

a really Steep Hill maybe go on a flat nice in track that has a lot of give all right interval training the technique that I developed when I used to work with undergraduates who are trying to build up their capacity for Studying and all we would do is get a timer and we would set the timer for okay how long are you going to read and until this timer goes off focus on the reading if your attention wanders bring it right back and you start that timer at something that's reasonable but somewhat ambitious so maybe

30 minutes maybe 45 minutes and once you're able to do that for a couple weeks at a time you increase it By about 15 minutes for the next sessions okay now I'm going for a full hour and then it's going to get difficult for a while okay I can get through about 45 minutes no problem that final 15 minutes I'm struggling but my timer is here I see there's only 15 minutes left there's a clear goal I want to make it so I will I will power through now it seems like a little thing whether

you have a timer on or not but it makes A big psychological difference if you're just saying read as long as you can the voice in your head saying check your phone check your phone has a pretty strong argument because they can say you're going to stop reading it at some point anyway so why not stop now but when you have a timer and there's that voice in your head saying check your phone check your phone you say well I can wait nine more minutes You know you have a Clarity there so then once you

get used to the new expanded interval which might take a couple weeks you add 15 more minutes so it's interval training you stretch until that stretch is no longer a stretch and then you increase it some more you can get the 90 minutes based on my experience work with undergrads in roughly a semester so in a few months if you're pretty careful about it so there we go interesting Books plus interval training and a rule of zero context shifting you can significantly increase your stamina for concentrating on the written word all right Jesse what do

we got next I like that timer stuff all right next question is from Joel I'm getting the recommended eight hours of sleep every night but constantly feel exhausted both when I wake up and throughout the day I've been watching videos on the importance of limiting Screen time before bed and I think I may be a culprit uh for my bad sleep do you have any advice on ways to reduce screen time before bed is I find it very addicting and hard to break that habit I love the irony of watching videos about how to reduce

screen time I imagine him Joel up late late into the night watching videos about how to not watch videos before bed all sorts of contradictions and irony in the online productivity space as the Channels are exactly the causes of productivity issues in the first place all right Joel a couple things here I mean first of all of course if you're tired throughout the day and you're getting enough sleep if you actually already enough sleep go back to the opening segment of the show make sure that you're not excessively context shifting some of that tiredness may

actually be mental fatigue and not actual um run down tiredness so you want To just set up your day to be less unnecessarily exhausting but we're going to focus specifically on this issue of your sleep being disrupted I mean I agree that good sleep hygiene can help and uh going on to I think the right way to think about it is highly Salient highly distracting highly arousing content should not be consumed near bed so anything where it's coming through an app That makes money by how much time you look at it avoiding that I think

is important so you should not go on YouTube before bed you should not go on to Instagram or Twitter or Tick Tock anything that's attention engineered uh is is going to be a problem because again these Services those Services work Services you don't pay to use work by getting YouTube look at the service longer so they're going to be pressing Buttons within your brain to get a response that makes you very engaged and aroused emotionally and wanting to actually come back and keep watching more that's not a great state to be in if you want

to go to bed so if you're going to be looking at a screen before bed a general rule of thumb here is look at things where they don't make money off of you spending more time on it so if there's a the office on peacock Like I watch an episode or two of the office because it's it's comforting and it's dumb that's going to have much less of a negative impact right these streaming services make money by you paying a subscription fee so they want to make sure there's stuff on there you like but they

don't particularly care if you binge for seven hours in a row or not they're just here's we have a bunch of shows we think you'll like so there's a real difference They both seem like screens but you know watching a comforting somewhat boring show could actually help your brain calm down in a way that watching Tick Tock videos or following YouTube recommendations might actually get your brain fired up so the intent of the platform is it engagement or is it customer experience makes a difference on how it's going to affect your sleep the other thing

I want to throw in here Though sort of the curveball is another common sleep disruptor it's not necessarily what you do right before bed but what's happening inside your head if your head is keeping track of a lot of open loops to use a term from David Allen task that you're responsible for projects you need to work on ideas that might lead to cool opportunities if you have a lot of these things that exists primarily in your head And if you forget about them it's going to be a problem your brain is going to have

a hard time falling asleep because it feels like the juggler with the things that's juggling are very fragile and valuable and doesn't want to drop anything so it has to keep moving so ironically one of the biggest things you can do to help you sleep at night is be better about how you control your work during the day being better about How you shut down your work at the end of the day organizational systems that are built around Notions like full full capture and planning so every task that you need to do that you've committed

to is captured in a trusted location that you review regularly so your brain doesn't have to keep track of it makes a huge difference for your sleep multi-scale planning I have a plan for my season which gets turned into plans for my week Which gets turned into plans for my day so that my brain doesn't have to just keep thinking hey what am I working on what should I be working on should I be thinking more about this or that helps you sleep having in general a good shutdown routine okay the day is over before

I shut down work let me check all of the inboxes my email my plan making sure that everything has a place anything that came up has been written down I Know what's happening tomorrow there's nothing that there's nothing I need to be keeping track of we have a good plan everything's captured great let me now check that shutdown complete checkbox in my time block planner or have a ritual or phrase I say and so later if my mind starts to get ruminative about work I can say no no I checked that checkbox on my time

block planner I said that phrase that means I successfully reviewed and shut down all Open Loops I don't have to worry about things till tomorrow that makes a big difference for sleep all right so to summarize we have a couple different things going on here be careful about what screens you expose yourself to before bed it's probably going to be easier if you have a bedtime screen Habit to just change what you look at than it will be to just cold turkey stop looking at a screen before bed just sift your screens to things That's

not emotionally Salient or emotionally arousing and then care a lot about how you organize your work open loops shutdowns and multi-scale planning and finally make sure that some of your daytime exhaustion is not actually from Context shifting as opposed to sleep disruption those are my three points Joel I think all three of those things combined will make a difference From no suggested we got not only do we have a bunch of J names in a row but the next name is literally JJ it's as if we go through our questions alphabetically I like it unfortunately

it's the last the J names I wish we had more but anyways let's get after John and Joel let's get rolling with what JJ has to ask us yep all right so JJ has to say I'm constantly feeling stressed during The evenings when I'm not at work because I feel like I'm wasting time I want to constantly be improving myself but I also want to take time to do fun things video games see friends Etc what should I do right so this could be an issue for people who care a lot about productivity writ large

as evenings can be stressful it can be stressful because if you're not doing uh anything structured you feel just unnerved You practice multi-scale planning your work day is time block planned it's connected to a weekly plan and a seasonal plan and it can feel unnerving to be just around I feel unproductive but then you're worried about like what do I want to do is if I treat my day like my work day that's exhausting because it's also really hard to be very structured during the work day and so you can be in a dilemma like

JJ is in as well So the two things I recommend in this situation is one clear separation between work and non-work okay so clear shutdown routine we just talked about this and the answer that I gave to Joel in the previous question so you really can shut down work that'll help your mind leave the work productivity mindset of we are constantly trying to keep track of what's going on and making sure Nothing's being misplaced and we're making good use of your time you want to clear shutdown so your mindset can shift but the second thing

I would advise is that especially if you're an organized person having no plan is overrated we often tell ourselves that the solution to maybe the exhaustion we feel from work is nothingness The goal is if I could just have nothing to do then no plan no intention that will be the opposite of being having too much to do and I'm going to find relaxation and Rejuvenation actually does not work that way for a lot of people especially if you're organized having nothing to do having no plan is stressful and you get that unnerving feeling that

you talk about so what's the right thing to do sketch a Plan but make sure that plan is varied and rejuvenating and interesting the problem that people have what what stresses us out about work is not the fact that we have things to do it's not the fact that we have a plan it's just that we have too many things to switch back and forth behind us because the work is hard the work is stressful it's not the plan itself it's what the plan is actually is in the plan work is hard So you sketch

a plan after your shutdown it shouldn't be a detailed time block plan be like yeah I want to get a reading session in and work out and then why don't we watch this show with the kids that I've been reading about I think it's going to be special and I want to make sure that you know I have a go for a walk before we get ready for bed you sort of sketch a plan of things that are meaningful and useful for the family and useful for yourself and Varied and rejuvenating and it's not a

tight minute by minute plan you're actually going to feel much better about that so again the key to get away from the stress of a busy work day is not to significantly reduce what you do it's not to significantly reduce the idea of having a plan is to make the things you do much better to make the things you've planned to do fun or interesting or useful to the World beyond the world of work and completely unconnected so shut down work shift to non-work mode but then say I want to hit the pillow proud tonight

what do I want to do with my time that makes this an evening that I'm proud of and it has nothing to do with productivity it's not how do I achieve this or get ahead of this it's like how do I like get time to read this book I really like how do I get some one-on-one time with like my oldest son Who haven't seen recently you want to make intentional use of your time which is separate from some notion of optimizing time or maximizing output so doing little can be stressful I mean that's the

there's so many books just there's a while where do nothing how to do nothing The Art of Doing Nothing it was this whole notion of what we need to do is nothing doing nothing stresses a lot of people out yeah like humans don't like to do nothing Yeah because people are like really afraid of being bored yeah and boredom is actually a useful human emotion right yeah like why do we feel such a strong distasteful uh emotional reaction that doing nothing is because we're evolved to actually want to be doing things that's what drives humans

to unlike a cat who's completely happy if I can lay in the Sun for seven hours and I'm a cat it's a good day right cats don't get bored humans do but that is the drive That's like okay well what else are we going to do well I don't know let's invent fire or organize a political system or invent religion like boredom is part of what drove humans to take advantage of this larger brain that we grew yeah so yeah we shouldn't boredom is important indicator the key is I mean again people are not stressed

out by doing things they're stressed out by what they're doing yeah the reasonableness of what They're doing whether they have enough time to do it the the actual demands of the work they're doing that's what's stressful not the doing itself I mean you can stop your work and be reading and Woodworking and you know movies watching sport like all sorts of things you can do which are things but they're very different than work it's really the content of activity not so much the uh planning around activity planning itself Is not too stressful yeah actually Lex

had Yuval Harari on like a couple weeks ago and I listened to that they were talking about like Civilization and boredom and stuff oh interesting yeah yeah you've always real big on um the conceptual the cognitive conceptual developments and human evolution that just unlocked everything yeah I'll listen to that one yeah yeah it was just before the Isaacson won I think um I saw someone The Other Day a tribute Sapiens to me that's pretty good they said Cal newport's books like millions and millions of cops yeah I was like that I like that I suppose

I mean it's probably bad news for Yuval Harare but I guess good news for me I was like I'll take it I'll take it oh man all right let's keep rolling what do we have next all right next questions from etn Cal I'm a benedictian monk in Missouri I Have a disagreement with a part of your deep life stack discipline is not an identity per se but rather a tool for developing and solidifying an identity you use value as a criteria for leading a meaningful and purposeful life shape through code ritual and routine you rightly

assert that you need discipline for a value to take hold but discipline needs a reason yeah it's a good question I I you know I get this debate a lot is I think it's One of the more unique and controversial aspects of my conception of cultivating a deep life where I say discipline comes first no it's the end here disagrees part of this is semantic I think discipline is an an overloaded word we have a lot of connotations with it often negative we think about discipline sometimes as something being enforced upon us the cruel Headmaster

disciplining the Kids we also have connotations with discipline with those who are idolizing making a false god out of discipline itself where we have my all that matters is the discipline of what I do and the harder things I do and other people won't do these things this hard and all of my self-worth just comes entirely from my discipline this is the sort of uh David Goggins style philosophy of sort of building Your identity around extreme Feats of discipline this was an idea that was you know really big and supported by Instagram culture sort of

over the last decade so it's an overloaded term so let's let's use a different term just for this conversation efficaciousness so efficaciousness describes the degree to which you believe yourself able to actually uh take action towards goals if you're an efficacious person you say yes in general I am someone who if I have Something I want to do and it's reasonable I can do it I can figure out how to do it my argument having spent a lot of time with people who are trying to turn around their lives is that that is missing a

lot of times and if that is missing nothing else works even trying to determine what your values are and believing that you can build your life around those values even That seemingly fundamental decision lays on a foundation of efficaciousness if you do not see yourself as someone who can take action towards important things even if it's not obligated and even if it's hard if you do not see yourself as a person who can do that almost any other self-developmental activity is going to be derailed it's going to dissipate before it actually takes hold now there's

other people and probably Upon I mean you're you're a Benedictine monk so you're probably an Exemplar of this other type of person where they just have the strong sense of efficaciousness and so what matters like right off the bat then is like okay let me figure out my values and build my life around it but most people the average person stumbles before they get there so when I say discipline is an identity uh what I don't mean is what matters is That you build your identity around discipline that you become David Goggins or Cameron Haynes

that like how you define yourself and your value is through your discipline and I agree with you fully there a team that that's not that's false idol that's not going to get you there but on the other hand I think until you have built a minor Foundation of efficaciousness your efforts are likely Going to be wasted the average person's efforts are likely going to be wasted so that's why I put discipline first you have to just start by convincing yourself I can do things and there's an excitement and a motivation and a Clarity and a

drive that comes out of that that when you then say okay so what do I care about you actually care about that question and you take it more seriously and the answers actually stick I'm so kind of Convinced about this foundational idea that I've been recently playing around with my deep life stack and one of the configurations I've been playing around with more recently actually has a much clearer division between laying the foundations and then cultivating depth now and I'm not this is very early stages I'm just throwing out ideas here but one of the

reconfigurations I've been playing with in my notebooks recently is one where It's not just discipline comes first but maybe we're going to do discipline control and maybe even throw in something like craft so first of all how do I convince myself I'm efficacious second of all how do I just take control of all the stuff in my life learn how to have control over what's on my plate and how it's going to get done and how to take things off of my plate and maybe throw in their craft okay now let me teach let me

take this out for a spin And show myself that I can actually get good at something when I set my mind to it and almost seen that in in this new configuration I'm playing with that's the foundation now with that Foundation set let's get serious about depth and that's step two now it's okay what do I what do I really value now I'm ready to tackle that question seriously sacrifice how am I sacrificing my time and attention on behalf of other people The community around me people I care about let's get serious about that there's

no meaning without that and then finally escape a remarkability then now how do I um leave my legacy how do I create the remarkable aspects of my life built around these values I mean I'm almost seen now as like a very clear separation where there's this long process of just becoming to borrow a term from Jocko an exceptionally capable human being And then once you do that you say now I can become an exceptionally deep human being and I think when we sometimes swap these things around it's not successful for people some people it is

but I think a lot of people starting with the depth before they have the capability leads to a lot of self-incrimination and dissipation it might lead people to believe I'm just not able to do this I'm just fundamentally a broken person I I'm trying to like build my life around Values I can't identify them I don't trust the values I pick it can almost be harmful if you jump right to the cultivating depth before you've done the the boring hard work of becoming a capable human being in the first place so I don't know I'm

still playing with these thoughts of teen so I like the excuse to just discuss and get some more feedback and I love this type of feedback but that's a little bit of an Insight into how I've been thinking about this recently all right Jesse let's do one more question before we do our live call-in case study which I'm excited about sounds good next question is from yilon hi Cal until three years ago I used to be a deep life person I had a schedule for each day I studied a lot slept well my phone was

on airplane or silent mode for most of the day the usual stuff but since then I've been losing my charm I'm having a really hard time making time for studying or even reading I almost never plan anything ahead anymore and I've been seriously addicted to video games I'm an English teacher and I have my obligations but I never do anything beyond the obligatory area what's more being a teacher in Israel makes you become hooked on your phone because there are so many notifications updates regarding what's going on with the school you have to be aware

of What's going on I want to get back on track and it feels extremely hard and sometimes even impossible you know Jesse what's interesting about that is a couple nights ago I was giving a talk up at my kids school about smartphones and kids and social media and kids and I was talking to a family afterwards who just moved here from Israel and they actually had the same point they said you know in in Israel the Phone culture is like inescapable and they said here they actually felt like it's their kid their middle schooler had

a phone and everything he said in Israel like everything is built around like WhatsApp notifications and how the schools operate and everything is built around the phone for all these various different reasons and here it feels like it's possible not to do that and so they were wondering can we pull it back we had that you know so it's Interesting something about Israel did you read that uh New Yorker article like last month about the Chinese school and like all the WhatsApp and how there's a thousand messages a day for the parents yeah I was

like completely overwhelmed it's like the same thing yeah yeah yeah um so I think cultural differences and Tech patterns is an interesting one but to get back to the bigger issue here I think this goes right back to the question with the Benedictine monk that We just answered so what we see here is kind of the opposite so so the the Benedictine monk this is basically what I mean here is this is sort of uh it's the right way to put this yilan I believe has done the become a capable person piece of the deep

life stack you as he talks about he previously had it all dialed in he's organized he has control over his Uh time and activities and schedules and is careful about how he uses his tools but then he stopped before getting to the stuff that etan the Benedictine monk said is important to figuring out your values your vision for your legacy and purpose on Earth building your life around that so this is a really interesting point because what it shows is if you just do the first part in my plan which is like you got to

be capable before you can Really figure out how to be deep if you just do the capable part you don't know it's going to stick so what happened here you did the capable part and your mind was basically the what purpose and so you began escaping back into video games and found sort of the capability stuff starting to dissipate again so yolan what you need to do is keep moving up the Deep life stack So once you regain you know how to do this so just get back to like okay intentional multi-scale planning careful about

my tools great now you got to keep moving up the stack now you got to get really engaged on your values what's my code what are the rituals I use to remind myself of the value of this code on a regular basis what is this uh this Vision on which I'm going to build my my lifestyle my purpose on Earth maybe then throw in some sacrifice if you're not Sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of other people you're not going to feel Fully Alive as a human so you're a teacher so there's many ways

for you to reintegrate this into your life and then finally you have this sort of Escape remarkability Legacy piece where you have some ambitious plans that you put into your life that are meant that are meant to actually take these things you care about and push them to New extremes and now you're working towards something your capability your ability to be organized on top of things is being deployed towards something that's important to you I think that's what's missing so in the last question I said if you just do the second part but not the

first part that's a problem because it's very hard to actually seek depth and sacrifice and have these Legacy building projects if you're not a capable human But we're seeing here is if you just do the first part that's not enough either you're being productive for the sake of being productive is eventually going to probably be something that is not fulfilling so we got to see both sides of the stack neither them can act in isolation you need both of them so yolan I'm glad uh glad to give me a chance to talk about that all

right so what I want to do uh next is something Kind of new so we often do case studies on the show where people send in a written description of them applying the ideas we talk about so we can see them in action a friend of mine a magazine editor friend of mine however was telling me about his story of of how he integrated book writing into a busy life both professional and personal which had a lot of different stuff going on and I Said wait a second let's get you on the air because I

think it's a great case study about integrating ambitious deep projects into an already busy life and it does some myth busting on things that people worry about and people get wrong so my friend Stuart Reed agreed to call in and do a live case study so let's do that now let's get Stuart on the line all right Stuart thank you for jumping on the line with us today uh hopefully You're doing well it looks like you're in a fancy looking Studio there for those who are watching this instead of just listening why don't you tell

us where you are calling in from right now I am on the Upper East Side of New York in the Council on Foreign Relations which is the think tank that the magazine I work for foreign affairs is part of and I'm deep in the basement although there's a projection behind me to make it seem like I'm on the rooftop So Stuart is classing up the show here well we're gonna be talking about Foreign Affairs and complicated diplomatic wranglings uh so Stuart the reason why I wanted you to come on is you know you have this

new book out the LA Mumba plot a secret history of the CA in a cold war assassination the type of gripping narrative non-fiction book you might expect the executive editor of Foreign Affairs to write But the reason why I wanted to get you on the line was uh not so much the details of the book but how you wrote it because you were telling me offline about the experience you had figuring out how to make this project work in an otherwise busy life and I thought aha there is an interesting case study lurking here about

taking on ambitious projects finding time to do the work and some of the paradoxes of what leads to efficiency so I want to Just go through a quick timeline here this book is coming out in mid-october so imminently when this case study is airing but take us back to the beginning just to set the stage when did the idea of this book emerge and what was going on in your life at the time sure so thanks for having me it's so exciting to be here um the idea you know was percolating in 2017 2018 I

focus on Africa Foreign Affairs and and thought there was this Cool Cold War story that uh you know was front page news in the New York Times at the time but was later forgotten and so as you probably know the best day in any non-fiction writer's uh journey to publication is the day you get the book deal and then you realize oh shoot I have to actually figure out how to I'm you know legally on the hook to turn in a certain number of words by a certain date and so I um you know I

had turned in my proposal to my agent And then I actually got hit by a car while biking in Brooklyn which would turn out not to be the the craziest thing that happened to me during the whole book writing experience and it's like just to just interject right there I think it would have been to your advantage to somehow spin that as the forces you talk about in the book trying to silence you you see what I'm doing here you could make your own life into a Thriller story I mean it's a coincidence to it

all I'm saying is the day you turn in a book about the secret history of the CIA you mysteriously get hit by a car anyways go on so when was this that was a missed marketing opportunity and I I yeah I remember sort of sitting in editors offices and my tailbone really hurting and trying not to Grimace that was in January 2019 um I then got married in September of that year and then uh went on Book leave from foreign affairs for 10 months the idea being oh you know and 130 140 000 word book

you know I should be able to basically Crank that out in 10 months um my wife and I moved to Paris because that seemed like a fun thing to do I got a decent amount of research done but um by the end of that 10 months I did not have a book at all right okay so then we we have this initial period so I'm basically just narrating your life Steward I hope you don't mind but this is what I do so we have this initial period where you got book leave and you moved to

Paris this I'm just going to say is to stand in for what people imagine is needed to successfully tackle a very large intellectually demanding project I need to be able to go somewhere intellectually stimulating and spend a lot of time doing nothing but working on this project so the first phase of this project was you doing what People think is needed to accomplish something of this size which is just go away and do nothing but work on the book but as you just said that wasn't enough time that didn't work out you got research done

but only wrote maybe a third or so of the book by the time that window was open so now suddenly you're in this situation we have a lot more book left to right the book leave is gone all right so bring the narrative I'll bring the Narrative back to you because I think things are about to get even more busier than they were uh before so now what happens you have a lot a lot of book left to right the magical book leave in Paris didn't it solve your whole problem now what happens in your

life is you're facing the rest of this manuscript process sure and and to you know somewhat complicate the point you're trying to make I think it was useful to be able to think about nothing other Than the book that was certainly a luxury but you're right that in you know in terms of words cranked out it didn't didn't quite cut it so then you know suddenly my day job comes back uh you know I need health care and a salary and I'm having to compress the writing process into the day so I mean the key

thing that really helped um was taking a page from your work is to time block plan and specifically to in the mornings just protect one ideally Two hours first thing in the morning where you're where I'm just writing I haven't even opened my email inbox because if the minute I open that I see an email oh and author's mad or whatever suddenly that's in my brain and I can't concentrate on the actual task of writing how many mornings so how many mornings a week on average are we talking at this point every weekday was the

goal and um you know you've talked about Jerry Seinfeld's uh idea of having an X and a chain of x's of every day he's worked and I really followed that and that what I think that allowed me to do is it even if I only wrote 50 words and I was tracking how many words I wrote it would still feel like I had to advance the ball a little bit and contributed to the big project you know hopefully I'd write 700 words but some days you know I would only get literally 20 but if I'd

written one sentence it was like well at least I Didn't do nothing and how hard how hard was it to protect that time uh you're an executive editor which means there's a big there's a big amount of responsiveness to your job there's also probably a lot of meetings in your job so just walk us through what was required to protect that morning was it as simple as just I don't schedule meetings first thing no one really noticed or was it more of a battle what's the reality of protecting five Mornings a week for one to

two hours I would just get up earlier frankly and you know no email that someone sends you at you know from 9pm the night before it needs to be answered at seven rather than nine a.m so just you know literally putting it on my calendar so no one could schedule a meeting not that people were trying to schedule at 7am meetings with me anyway but protecting it that way and then you know almost like culturally within the house Just protecting it of like okay I'm going to this room everyone knows not to bother me um

and then having that time just allowed me to be purely focused and I had you know my coffee and a little ritual a nice desk that sort of thing um and that proved crucial for just really accreting the number of words I needed to right okay so you get up a little earlier probably starting your Foreign Affairs work day a little bit later than you would have before no one noticed because again no one really keeps track of exactly when Stewart is answering his first email of the day no one has a chart out of

like well what's every meeting time I've ever suggested to Stuart and I can see wait a second there's a pattern here he never accepts the eight to eight thirties I wonder if he's working on something else so it basically you just kept the chain going No one really noticed okay now for a lot of people though they're going to say an hour to two hours max that doesn't seem like enough time to write 150 you know thousand word book or what have you but what was your experience in terms of the rate at which progress

accrued during this period yeah I mean slow and steady really works is that John McPhee quote I know you've cited before where you add a bunch of drops to a bucket and all of a sudden The pail's full um so you know I I'd usually write anywhere from 300 to 700 words a day um and it really does add up I'd supplement this with you know weekend writing Marathon sessions or you know I took a vacation where all I did was work on the book for a week um but it was you know most of

the book got written in those early morning sessions so it worked how long would it take you in an early morning session Just to swap swap into context you know so was it the first five minutes the first 20 minutes how long did it take you to be up and running and ready to start writing new words not that long and one trick I can't remember where I got it but um is when you're writing to leave something sort of half finished the day before so that you have momentum going in so that could mean

you know You're riding along and then you have uh some notes saying add paragraph on blah blah and write two sentences where lumumba goes to blah blah meeting or whatever and then the next morning it's so much easier to start when you're like okay I actually don't have to be fully cognitively present I'm just sort of filling in the details of uh what I worked on yesterday I mean in another sort of related trick to that is um journalists are familiar with the Abbreviation TK which stands for to come and if you just use a

lot of TKS you can really get momentum going and so you know TK quote and then you write what you know and then there were TK number of soldiers in the room that sort of thing it really allows you to keep moving forward and then you can fill in the details later now at some point during this Post-bookly process things got more complicated because he had a child so how long how long into this writing post book Leaf writing was it that you have a child and then how did that change up what you were

doing it was about a year so my daughter was born in September 2021 and um it was a really crazy my wife and I are just a very unusual experience in that our daughter shortly after she was born started having seizures we had to Go to the hospital it turns out she has this extremely rare genetic disorder called STX bp1 which is a neurodevelopmental disorder and so that was uh you know when you track the word count suddenly there is an Abrupt cessation in September 2021 and it I mean it turned our lives upside down

I didn't think I'd be able to finish the book what would be the point and it was a really Tough period for us as a family as and this was our first child and you know we were suddenly grappling with just a very different future than we had imagined and so it was uh yeah I mean it was the hardest thing I've ever experienced and hopefully ever will so then what happens after after that so you get through September is incredibly hard everything comes to a stop how does things get going again yeah I mean

I think we sort of had to Personally you know fully accepting this would be to that was a longer process but just you know you're you're literally in shock at the beginning and can barely function and so you know writing a long-term Book Project is the furthest thing from one's mind um but you know through um I mean partly just coming to know our lovely smiling daughter and you know she became more than a diagnosis she became You know this person with you know all sorts of cute things um so there was that process of

acceptance and then also there was just a sort of sheer willpower and that I'm very much someone who believes that you just have to constantly be moving forward and so that means you know going to the friend's birthday party even though you really don't feel like It you know going to exercise even if you really just want to lie in bed all day and just through sort of sheer force I think we were able to get out of our Funk and then on the writing side that included just returning to the okay I'm going to

do you know an hour of writing today um I mean I just I remember also I had an interview scheduled with someone it was like had been scheduled It ended up being the day after I got the diagnosis and I considered canceling but I just sort of made myself show up to that and I'm sure I uh was not at my you know Peak Performance but sort of just forcing yourself to move forward faking it till you make it um I don't know if that's you know top shelf psychiatric advice but it worked for me

well and there's another I think observation that's important for My listeners which is you know when you're in the moment of working on something or working on something hard it's you know easy to focus on the short term and the short term is critical and and I you know no delays are possible but from a slow productivity mindset when you zoom out life has all of these different twists and turns and it throws curve balls and there's there's hard times and good times and unexpected things that happen and houses that flood And people that get

sick uh which means hey I stopped working for a month or I put this aside for now and in the moment it might seem this is a disastrous for this project but when you zoom back out so we Zoom back out now it's 2023 you've written this great book the book is out there the fact that there's periods where other things in your life had priority that there was periods where that book got put on the Shelf uh don't even Factor no one even knows That right now and and so this notion of variability in

life that there's seasons of I'm locked in on this and Seasons where other things are going on this notion of really embracing that and saying in the long term as long as the seasons of stepping away from something important don't turn into lifetimes of that so long as when it is appropriate you're able to come back to it it's not bad for there to be this variability and effort that are put into it so I do Appreciate that part of your story just because I think there's a lot of people in my audience who have

a very hard time with the idea of slowing down or putting something on the shelf for a while it feels somehow like a failure where I see it as it feels like being a human being so you're a great Exemplar of that and then you came back to the project when it was appropriate and the project kept going and now you have this great book and it Was also very appropriate in September 2021 not to be touching that project and in the end this is a slow productivity principle it's what you produce on the scale

of years not on the scale of weeks that ultimately ultimately matters so anyways I I think it's a it's interesting to punctuate that yeah and I think you've said this before but just giving yourself permission to be to have a non-productive month because other Stuff's going on is you know really important but like of course I wasn't gonna be you know pumping out 10 000 words I had the craziest thing ever happened to me um but then you know as you said in the long scale of slow productivity it turns out that's just a blip

and uh you know a month over the course of years isn't that much yeah okay so now if we if we fast forward uh you know past that that very difficult fall and you're falling Into a bit of routine of a family with a child and not just a family without a child how did you find did your timing did this timing still work well the like doing things in the morning was that compatible you felt that worked well because that kept your evenings and afternoons free for all just the chaos of of wrangling children

or with some changes needed because you're dealing with exotic sleep schedules you know how did things when they got rolling again Did it get rolling on this similar schedule it as anyone who has young children knows you wake up earlier than you did in previous eras in your life so I think it actually sort of dovetailed well and I mean I specifically remember a former colleague of mine who had once written a book when I was about to write a book I said do you have any advice and she said finish the book before you

have any children which I utterly failed to Follow but in a weird way I think having kids made me more productive in that it really um you know fills up your calendar and constrain you know you really can't faff about and waste time when you have these uh you know yapping creatures who need to be fed and changed and so it really um in my case at least focused the mind and sort of you know set the constraints that allowed me to really just get stuff Done right so you had already learned uh prior to

having the the child that okay if I just do a little bit of work every day uh it builds up and the bucket gets full to use a John McPhee quote and that is a work approach that is more compatible with a a full schedule or a crowded schedule because it's about just a little bit of time before things get going just do that repeatedly it's not a schedule that requires Multiple weeks of being left alone it's not a schedule that requires offloading all family responsibilities to someone else so that you won't be disturbed it's

about slow and steady so you had already discovered that so then when the the child came along for some there's some degree like you were you were already in the ideal schedule for a a schedule that was going to be full of a lot more responsibility so it sounds like you're able to just Keep making progress what you couldn't have done is if your publisher said hey get this done in three weeks you say great I'm just going to write 12 hours a day for three weeks that's not going to be possible but slow and

steady you know you're already well configured for that yeah I mean another thing I should mention that really helped was um you've talked before Cal about sort of the importance of investing in your Own career so I took some of my book Advance money um plus a grant I received and spent it on Research assistance um you know I did all the research myself but there are certain tasks that are eminently outsourcable like you know go track down these obscure books at a library and you know get me a copy of chapter three of this

one Etc um and you know that cost money but it was uh Being able to devolve tasks that didn't my highest best use of time was actually writing the book it was not um you know emailing back and forth with an archivist about could they scan box 7 folder three so that was another you know I was very fortunate in that respect but it was it helped me focus on writing which was the most important thing well I think that's a good point it's another thing we see uh often and talk about often on the

show that the uh Some of the biggest impacts on work schedule is not the cognitive difficulty of a project it's not the raw hours required by a project it is sometimes the context shifting so what makes a new project a really difficult addition to a professional schedule if it's something that you have to keep turning to back and forth throughout the day so if for example like the you just said if you have to have this back and forth email conversation going with archivist where Uh throughout the day no no it's not that box and

get this yeah send it here oh I'll check it if it was something that was requiring you to shift back to the book project and back to work them back to the book product and back to your work the negative impact of that on your schedule is greatly Amplified versus 90 minutes in the morning and then it's done and again so I I think this is another good point to emphasize it's not necessarily the minutes It's the context switching that really dictates how much of an impact a particular Pursuit is going to have on your

schedule so I think your investment in minimizing context switches and I'm going to invest money to minimize context switching so I can work on this project largely in single continuous context was actually a brilliant investment because that could significantly reduce the negative impact of this project on on your schedule was There anything else you had to do with your other work so you're able to fit this in the morning that doesn't actually overlap your normal work schedule having a child probably did more right it's um now you can't just easily or casually work later into

the night Etc was there any other things you had to do in your work life as an editor some efficiencies or structure to make sure that from the outside world's perspective you were still more or less Producing the same stuff you'd always produced at the same level of quality you would always produce what other changes might have been necessary in this new stage of your life sure and I should mention that then my wife and I had a second child in April who's uh his birth sort of acted as a deadline for getting in final

edits and I was actually marking up proofs in the hospital I remember um But I think I I definitely got more efficient at my day job as well I I can't point to any particular trick I mean it's the whole bag of tricks that you talk about all the time but you know only going to meetings that are actually necessary where you'll add value you know not switching between tasks just saying okay I need to do a top edit of this article I'm going to work on that for the next 45 minutes and not check

Any email not check Twitter not do anything else just being really disciplined and I think knowing that I had this other project that I also cared cared about in addition to my work made it every minute felt like it counted more and so okay I need to you know be on my best behavior here at work and fully show up and do as great a job as I can so that I can then use the in between times of the day to to work on this Other project um yeah so if we had gone back

in time and talked to 2018 version of Stewart just in the middle of your work day and said hey here's what we want you to do we want you to add two extra hours of work per day oh and by the way you can never work late like you have to when you get to this whatever 5 30 time you always have to stop hey is that going to be a problem you probably would have said well I I'm busy I'm Filling every minute of my day I'm often having to stay a couple hours late

just to catch up on things I'm behind on how could I possibly do both of those things and yet a few years later it turns out oh I can because work is not just work in a generic sense work is actually a combination of all sorts of different activities and switching and sequencing and scheduling in systems and it's something that has a lot more knobs to turn and levers to pull so what would Be the advice you would give you know let's say in my audience there's a 27 year old doesn't yet have a family

feels very busy they're filling their day they're they're checking email at night they have this idea of an important project that they're well through the pursue but say I don't I just don't see you know how I can do this unless I quit my job or had some sort of sabbatical now based on your experience 2023 looking back on how you Felt in 2018 what would your advice be to this hypothetical listener one is like super technical but I thought I was someone who could not get up early and that turns out to have just

been a lie that I told myself and so you know you actually can get up at 6 15 just go to bed earlier um you know don't waste time going to bed so that that's a pretty nitty-gritty detail but like it was totally important For my being able to get stuff done I mean the other thing also honestly was just locking yourself into a contract like nothing stimulates figuring out how to get it done than being actually on the hook for doing it and so um kind of making that leap of faith and deciding that

you're going to do it and trusting your future self to make the changes necessary to to work it out even if you don't know exactly how you're going to rearrange your schedule you Know if once you believe that it's probably possible in some way you'll figure out the details later you know try and figure out them now but um know that you can uh you know that external Force the The Stick of having to deliver and the carrot of you know wanting to publish your own book or whatever the project is the combination of that

can actually just really force you to figure it out I love it it's the uh there's almost a Rule we could name here like the 90 minute rule if you're willing to always protect 90 minutes a day first thing in the day five days a week if you zoom out 10 years 20 years the amount of really cool interesting stuff that you are able to produce the amount of impact you're able to have is massive but it all starts with that that smaller commitment so this is excellent so now that you're done this book is

out or about to come out depending on when people listen to This the lumumba plot which I I highly recommend what are you going to do next are you going you've learned how to do this with this boarding block you can conquer the world so what are you thinking about yeah that's a great question I mean I have really loved writing a book you know my day job is editing working with other auth for authors and you know sublimating my own ego in service of them and I love that too but it was a Special

treat to be able to as you know just have basically full control over this extremely long detailed project I love you know the paragraph can be exactly the way I want it and so that was really rewarding so I'd love to do another book um but uh on what we'll see yeah and uh this time just be careful about suspicious looking drivers depending on depending on how inflammatory your topic uh Stuart I really appreciate you Calling in I think this was a great case study I get these questions all the time from listeners who are

wondering about how to make big projects work in busy schedules you have a busy schedule you didn't have a heroic quick interventions to make this work possible it was just slow and steady early in the morning so it was a good case study and I appreciate you sharing it and everyone check out the fruits of this labor which is Stuart's new book The lumumba Plot L-u-m-u-m-b-a thank you Stuart thanks so much for having me all right so that was great thank you Stuart for calling in I think we all learned a lot from that story

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rhone.com Cal and use the promo code Cal and you will save 20 off your entire order that's 20 off your entire order when you head to r h o n e dot com slash Cal and use that code cal It's Time to find your corner office comfort I also want to talk about our good friends at Shopify the Commerce platform that is revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide if there's something you want to sell online you should be using Shopify they put you in control of every sales channel so whether you're selling satin sheeps sheets not

sheeps because you could sell sheeps from shopify's in-person POS system or offering organic Olive oil on shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform you are covered and once you've reached your audience Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers you have probably used Shopify technology multiple times buying things online you just don't realize it if you've ever had a really nice experience and you think it's just wow this website really has a great shopping Experience it knew my information it filled it all in it was easy to do they were

probably using Shopify so Jesse when we figure out our Justice skeleton merchandising strategy Shopify is going to be how we reach our masses I mean we need a we need a platform capable of handling tens of millions of dollars of Jesse's skeleton related orders yeah I mean I'm thinking like seamless checkout process seamless checkout Process Direct ship you get your Jesse skeleton animatronic you set it up wherever you work and it just sort of at sporadic points during the day begins moving and uh motivates you I think it'll be a good product yeah it doesn't

need to get off your phone yeah hey you should uh it's the arms are moving like little animatronic letters you should get off your phone and then it goes back quiet again come on people would buy that yeah yeah All for just 7.99 99 . on a Shopify site on a Shopify site um but if I if we were selling something we would do Shopify the people I know who use it absolutely love it it Powers now 10 of all e-commerce in the US they're also a truly Global Force they power all birds rothies Brook

Linens and soon jessyskeleton.com they also work with entrepreneurs in over 170 countries um it's the service you should use if You want to sell things online so you can sign up now for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com Deep all lowercase go to shopify.com deep to take your business to the next level today that's shopify.com deep [Music] Jesse I want our Jesse skeleton product and this is what's really going to make it a top seller right before it's sporadically and Unpredictably starts moving and telling you to get off your phone and work

harder I'm thinking um incredibly loud clocks and horn sound so like get your attention so you're working and then just really loud Motors and then it's are you working that's how you know and then then other people in nearby buildings will ask what is that really loud alarming clocks and sound I keep hearing every seven to Eight minutes you'll see it's my Jesse skeleton and they'll say well is it where can I get one you'll stay online at jessyskeleton.com like yeah but it's going to be like a really clunky difficult e-commerce experience so forget about

it you're like no no no it's powered by Shopify and they're going to buy one got it all figured out oh man all right uh We got time we used to do a third segment on this show once we're done with the nonsense uh where we just like to do something interesting or different so in our final segment today Jesse I just wanted to talk about I wanted to react to an article that I read online that captured my attention because I think there's a couple interesting lessons in here about our ongoing interest to embrace

slow productivity I'll load this article up on the screen for those who are watching if you're listening to the podcast remember go to the deeplife.com listen this is episode 267 and you can find the videos right there on the episode page all right so this article came from the New York Times magazine I believe September 9th the title is how Lauren Groff one of our finest living writers does her work So I love these knowledge worker Elite knowledge worker case study so we get some insight into how really high cognitive performers do their work how

do we know she's one of the finest living writers what we see right off the bat that she is a three-time national book award finalist basically the last three books she has written were uh National book award finalists probably her new book of Esther Wilds will be as well so I just want to point out a Couple I marked a couple insights from this article I just want to briefly underscore and then we'll talk about it okay so she has three New York Times bestsellers she is unusually productive for a literary writer so her new

book The vaster Wilds is coming out exactly two years after her last book Matrix which itself came out just three years after her book before that Florida this is a very fast pace For literary writers as she goes on to say it takes about five years to write a book of this caliber so how is she doing it so fast she's interleaving the writing process that's what that's the next thing I want to talk about here she's able to keep up her publishing Pace by working on several projects even several novels simultaneously holding vibrant distinct

worlds distinct in her mind to help do that She has these different projects live in different corners of her office so she works in different spaces of her office on different books so there's her desk she also has a wooden a different wooden desk a different end of it she has a day bed so different projects exist in different spaces all right so once she's working on a book how does she actually do it I thought this was crazy and fascinating When graph starts something new she writes it out long hand in large spiral notebooks

after she completes the first draft she puts it in a banker's box and never reads it again so her method is I'm going to write an entire draft of a book slowly and deliberately long hand and never look at it again because what she's figured out is to write at a very high level literary fiction the the ideas matter the Defining those ideas those characterizations those plot points just hit the right buttons or everything so she figures if she writes the whole book and never looks at it again the stuff that sticks is the good

stuff so then when she comes to write another draft of the book what's going to come back to her from that initial draft if she can't actually go back and read it it's going to be the stuff that's stuck and what is it makes a great book great Is all these scenes that stick with you after you've read it so she's found a way to efficiently filter for this literary Magic by actually writing something and then seeing what sticks with her without having to actually go back and look at it she calls these lightning bolts

I'll put this uh quote here nothing matters except for these lightning bolts that I've discovered Okay so she's going back and forth between books she has this method of how to do it uh later in the article they also talk about her timing like a lot of writers of this caliber she wakes up and I'll quote here at 5am and disappears into her writing for hours after uh without having to manage routine of getting her two children feding out the door so she has an agreement she has that worked out with her husband that she

can start writing the morning then She stops writing early afternoon according to this and then the afternoon is more for the business side of writing the publicity Etc taking back over responsibility of the kids so she also has a very strict schedule of just you do this writing morning to a certain point in time and then you're done with it all right so I'm gonna draw a couple slow productivity observations from this this is an incredibly successful writer What she did is figured out what's needed to produce a national book award finalist if anyone has

cracked this code it is Lauren Groff she's done it three times in a row probably four we'll see how her new book does she realized like okay it's all about its craft but it's also about these lightning bolts as you call it having these sort of brilliant moments of characterization and plot so here's the Process you got to write a whole book longhand and basically throw it out then write a second draft long hand and see what sticks and then only then deliberately and relentlessly starts transforming that into a typed up manuscript that you're very

carefully polishing and tweaking and trying to get it just right and it takes five years and it takes five years and you need plenty of time in between these things and so if I want to write a book more Than once every five years then great how can I interleave two or three of these at the same time well I can do it I know when I can switch from one to another and I'll use different spaces so I don't have confused cognitive context and I'll just deliberately work four or five hours a day and

she just did the math and it works slow but steady here's what I do here's how I do it this is what matters don't spend stuff on Time that doesn't matter super long hours aren't needed I don't need to have no kids I don't need to never have any child care responsibilities I just need to be able to have four to five hours a day and do the right thing during those four to five hours a day and only do those things during those four to five hours a day and then add in the secret

ingredient of time you add up enough days this is the John McPhee quote you Put enough drops in a bucket it eventually ends up full you spend enough four hours days focusing on not just writing but the writing activities that make the difference and you patiently build up over time one of the most impressive writing careers I would say of the 21st century so far serious I thought Lauren was a a great case study of slow productivity in action focus on what matters work Steadily but a reasonable amount let time and aggregation do more work

than freneticism and exhausting overwork in the moment and really cool stuff can come out of it you know I also like Jesse she's Summers New Hampshire oh yeah right she's got it dialed in live in New Hampshire in the summer and she's in Florida the rest of the year but live in New Hampshire in the summer I like it that's the secret yeah She does a lot of physical activity um her and her husband were both athletes they're also she sees it as like she's lots of running and I think he was a rower so

a lot of like be in really good shape and spend a lot of time outdoors and write four hours every morning and it just works yeah just got dialed in slow productivity everyone that's the secret not freneticism or busyness or keeping options open or I don't know What other the other stuff we talk about so if only someone would write a book on slow productivity that we could collapse collect all these insights if only let's say in March there was a book coming out about slow productivity if there was I would just say everyone should

buy it but you know we'll have to wait and see all right enough nonsense uh quick reminder you like the show leave a review it does help consider subscribing it also helps Helps people find it so you know I read the reviews and I really appreciate them otherwise thanks for listening we'll be back next week with another episode of the show and until then as always stay deep hey so if you liked today's episode about tiredness I think you'll also like episode 248 about decoding overload check it out as you get more stuff on your

plate the cost of that seems to grow much faster than the amount of work You're adding