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Hello boys and girls. Ladies and germs. This is a very well caffeinated. Tim Ferriss welcome. Once again to the Tim Ferriss show. My guest today is
Cal Newport. Cal Newport
is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University who previously earned his PhD from MIT his scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his General audience writing explores intersections of culture and Technology, Newport is the author of seven books. That's a lot of books man, including most recently.
Deep work,
digital, minimalism and a world without email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get so much done. He is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of The Deep questions podcast. You can find him online at Cal Newport.com. And there are a number of things conspicuously absent from this bio and thank you so much Cal for sending me inelegant streamlined by. Oh, I sometimes get five or six pages, that need to get cut down.
Dramatically, so, welcome to the show. There's just you
go. Thanks for having me. I thought
we would start. We're so many good things start and that is with Steve Martin. You have written about Steve Martin. Before on your blog, you are prolific on your blog which I very much appreciate since that's where I started as well in the blogosphere. What are some of your favorite lessons or any lessons that come to mind for you from Steve Martin and he's fresh on my mind? Because
This I had covid recently while I was recovering. I was watching Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and one of my favorite episodes was with Steve Martin. So let's start there. I'll pass the mic over.
Martin was a big influence on me early on in my career because of that book. He wrote Because he wrote his Memoir born standing up which was a professional Memoir, the whole point of the book. The way he explained it in interviews, was I wanted to actually capture how I got from nothing to being a very well-known and influential.
Shal comedian. I don't want to skip the steps. He complained, a lot of celebrity biographies. What sort of skip the interesting part that one day. They would just be playing at the Copa. See, how did they get there? So he wrote this professional biography. It came up. I've been 2007-2008 somewhere in there. I was a young grad student. Then I had started grad school around. 2004 2004 2005. Does that MIT? I was blogging. I was writing books. I was doing research. And that book was very influential to me in part.
Maybe mainly due to something. He never actually said in the book, but he said in a Charlie Rose interview about the book where Charlie was asking him. Like, well, what's your? Let's boil it down. What's your advice? What's your advice for aspiring entertainers? And Martin said, I always tell them the same thing and it's never what they want to hear. They always want to hear. Here's my tips for finding an agent. Here's my wave tips for doing an end run around the typical pipeline. He says my advice instead is always be so good. They can't ignore you.
If you do that, lots of other good things will come. That was his advice. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I mean, I remember at this time is a young scholar. Second third year, PhD student published. Some books. I was thinking up all sorts of schemes. Well, how do I Market my work? How do I have a new angle on Research that people haven't seen? How do I maybe if I write and across discipline way? No one else is doing that. Hit me like a lightning bolt. It was basically saying, actually wait, first just do really good work and that's hard. You're probably not that good yet and you need to practice and get a lot better.
That became the foundation for almost everything else that happened in my professional life and so much what I wrote about I who am quite a bit for that inspiration. So let's use
that as a segue into focusing not just on what you do, but also perhaps beginning to touch on what you don't do because just as with Steve Martin a lot of what I find fascinating where some of what I find fascinating about you is what is absent sort of like the the case of the dog that
It didn't bark and Sherlock Holmes writing really paying attention to absent sometimes and for those people who have heard a lot of BIOS in this podcast. Social media handles are not prevalent in your bio among other things. We don't have to focus directly on that. But let's press start with your definition of the deep life. This phrase this term. Could you just unpack that for us and tell us what that means to you and what the constituent parts are.
The term, the Deep life is something that emerged in the early pandemic though, the ideas and sentiment had been around for a long time. In my writing, the pandemic hits and I make a lot of changes suddenly. I'm not seeing my readers. I'm not seeing my students, much more isolated and I began a podcast. So I could connect to people and I went on a heroic one month period where I wrote an essay every day and the whole Direction. What I was writing about shifted pretty dramatically.
I mean, I was in the at that point I was finishing up a business book, A book about communication in the business world and I've been writing much more about the impact of tech on business. At that time. I was sort of on a roll with that and suddenly, I found myself in my writing and in major segments of the podcast like talking about life and building a life of resilience and meaning and depth. And that is where this term. The Deep life came up by my audience just really was interested in this and we in a symbiotic fashion. Really began to work out.
What we meant by it, but at a high level, the Deep life is a term for one of these things. We all know it, when we see it. We just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that it resonates, it feels authentic and interesting and resilient that they're not the type of person who's going to look back at the end of their life and say, what did I do? We as humans have a deep craving for that, but we often suppress that craving because it's complicated and we don't know what to do about it, and we don't have a lot of
Cultural support for this idea of crafting, a deeper life right now. That's not where the cultural pressures are. So we kind of avoided and look for the short-term bursts of good chemicals to short-term. Burst of, I feel good about this. I got a like on this this beer makes me feel good or whatever it is and we put it aside. And so I tried to excavate it. I think the disruption of the pandemic, clear, decide a lot of the noise and I've been working on. That is one of the things I've been talking about quite a bit, is
Systematically speaking. Let's put a like a cal Newport overly, systematic nerd, computer science brain to this. Can we break down? What the Deep life is? How you get there? What you need to do, what you don't need to do, and it's really emerged as something. I thought a lot
about
We may take a bit of a boomerang path to come back to that. But I think a lot of these topics will intersect so I want to go back in time a bit. So we were just talking about pandemic. Let's go much further back and part of the reason I want to do that is these days. Say if
Someone comes up to me on the street. It's nine times out of ten about the podcast and let's call it in 2010 2012. If someone emailed me, it would have been about tech investing in startups. But my career at least in any credible sense and didn't start with that and really, it was the 4-Hour workweek. That put me on any map.
To speak of one of my employees knows you and got to know you through study hacks. And he moved from overseas to Canada to University. He went from skating through high school because there were really wasn't much required to getting his first F's, and was panic-stricken because he needed to correct. Course, ended up finding study hacks, your work and
Transformed himself into an a student.
Is that
where you first?
Found your groove. Would you say in terms of public audience and feeling some momentum in your career, or was it before
or after that? You're right. It's a good history to get into that. My initial books. The first three books. I wrote were aimed at students. There are books roughly. Speaking of student advice, though. The third one will touch on in a second began to Veer away from that and actually that third book intersected with you in a way that you may not remember. But I think I wrote an essay for your
Blog back then about one of the ideas, but I started with student books and my blog in the early days was called study hacks because it was advice for students. And the back story on that is as a high school student, during the late 90s. I had started a.com company. This was the first.com. Boom. No one really understood this technology. So there's this brief period where we thought that if you're young, that must mean that you really know about tech and Away. Older people didn't it? So, who's this?
Well, bit of Insanity would they would give 17 year olds tens of thousands of dollars to do things. We didn't know how to do, but as an effect of that. I was a 17 year old, who knew the business and productivity section at Barnes & Noble very well. So, I was reading business books and productivity books because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Then I went to college and I'm, you know, I'm taking on student loans. I want to do. Well, I'm trying to take my college career seriously, and I said great. Let me go to Barnes and Noble and get the books about here.
How the top student study so I can figure this out just the way. I bought a David Allen book or Stephen Covey book to figure out how to do business stuff. And those books weren't really there back. Then there was a sense in the publishing industry back in the 90s that you had to be quote, unquote. Cool, or students would reject the book. And in that effort, they accomplished the opposite. So that all these books with, like, kooky people on the covers, and it's all about, you know, your crazy roommate and how to deal with the dorm food. And
And I just had this idea is like look, what we need to do is write a book for college students who want to know how to do? Well exactly like a business book. This doesn't exist. Don't try to talk about making roommates and dorm food. Just be like, here's how the top students don't talk
about the - roommates that's more of a show. Don't tell kind of situation
continued that I would I would say so yeah, you know, we need to see that once it so that's what got me start. So I had this idea and I was a writer and call it. I was doing computer science. I was also writing and you know, it's the editor of the
Our magazine, I
was a columnist for the newspapers really
into actually humor writing but I could write, I trained myself to write in college and I was in New York and hanging out with an entrepreneur friend of mine. He's like, well, stop talking, not just write the damn book. So like, okay, we'll figure that out. And then I figured out how to do. You know, it's not that hard to figure out. I sort of Tim Pharisee and style. I found an agent and said, look, I don't want you to be my agent. I want you to just teach me how this whole industry works. I want you to teach me. How can a 20 year old, get a book deal. There's a very narrow path.
Would have to navigate as a 20-year old to get a book deal and she laid it out for me and it has to be a book about students and you have to know how to write and we figured it all out and I literally pause you for one
second. Did she end up becoming your official agent or not?
No, I was true to my word not she was a fiction agent right now. My memory was is this was actually she was an agent who represented I think maybe Ann Patchett. So he's very well respected. I might have that wrong that I was my memory is like bel canto had come out around this
time. So I want you to don't lose track of this.
This timeline. But how did you get her attention? Why would she take this time to sit with you?
So this was a family connection. My memory was my uncle's, a journalist. And I said, would you be willing to connect me for a? And again, this was very Tim Ferriss style. The way I went around. This is why I think we're simpatico your book how to come out. You have a very Tim Ferriss. Tally said look one hour is want to talk to him on the phone. I do not want them to be my age, and I'm not going to try to sell myself to them. I just feel that I need to understand.
The landscape. I'm not gonna be able to navigate this because it's to a typical and Too Young. I'm going to be ignored. I knew there'd be a narrow path and so I was true to my word and so she was a fiction agent. So she wouldn't have been able to represent. You want to represent to me. Anyways, that was my memory. So I was very clear and you know what? She gave me the roadmap. She told me that here is exactly what would you would have to do like among other things. She said you have to go do commissioned writing. So I went out and started selling articles to these middling College focused websites and magazines.
So I could I could have commission's now is that important just to show that you're
credible or that there is a market for your writing.
They're going to want writing samples and they wanted they're going to want writing samples on the type of writing I was going to do and if I was going to be writing a student in advice book, I needed advice article. So I did that the second thing. She said any agent would be worried about when I actually went to find that agent was it's a Content going to be good. And so what I did there is I sold a commission for no money $200.
The for a nothing online college magazine, I believe remember what it was? I use that commission to do all of my research for my first book, I talk to you because the first book I talked to a bunch of Rhodes Scholars and Marshall scholar. Like the premise was, I'm going to talk to the best of the best and extract advice from them. And this article required me, probably to talk to two people and I talk to 20 yards person after person. Oh, it's for an article. I'm writing this article. Can I get an interview interview for this article and I had to figure out how to
To find them. But turns out it's not hard. If you look up, press releases from colleges the, the learn who had just been awarded a Rhodes scholarship, or a Marshall Scholarship, or a Truman scholarship. And then you could often at this point, email directories, where private, but all you had to do was find the email address of any student on that campus and he said, oh there's the naming convention, you know, at Harvard. It's like first name dot last name at FAS that harvard.edu. So then you could figure out how to get to them. And so I did all of the interviews for the first book and then rode out the whole annotated.
Able to content. So, I could come. When I started to talk to ages to actually be my agent. I could say, I can write. Look. I'm an editor of a magazine at College. I write in the paper. Here's articles. I've written or student advice. I have a good idea. Here is the whole thing laid out. And then, the third thing I did is I made the format of my first book as easy as possible. It was 50 short rules each with a contrarian title. Each two to three pages long. So I meet the task is tractable as possible. I was not
Going to try to do some sort of sophisticated take and so all of those pieces came together. And then the final piece was, how do you find the right agent? And what I did there is a use the acknowledgement sections of target books to see when the author think their agent. So I can see what agent was working on. What book. And I took the business book whose format. I was completely copying for my student book, found the agent of that book wrote that agent and said, I want to do this book, but with student advice instead,
All the stuff. And she signed me right before my 21st birthday, and I've been with her for 20 years now
actualize, so that all started. That's amazing. So, let's see what year roughly would that have been, when you signed that
agent, this was 2003. So, in the spring of 2003, if my memory serves, I was 20, I turned 21 that June. I was a junior in college. I signed a contract, the book. I had pitched it as conquer college, and the
Of the agency said, you can't have the hard case right after each other. So if we we changed it to how to win at college and I wrote it the fall of my senior year of college. I would just wake up early and right for 60 to 90 minutes every morning. I just would wake up and write for 6090 minutes. The format of the book was perfect for it because you could do a draft of one chapter in 60 to 90 minutes and that was that. And that book, I finished that book while while still a college and it came out right after. I graduated. I sold another book while still in college.
So while that was still in production, I upgrade is like, okay. I'm now going to do a book with normal chapters. And this was How to Become a Straight A Student. This this ended up becoming probably the biggest of my student books. I had no idea how much I've been selling in the background because it was never a big bestseller, but it I checked last week and that little book has sold like 300,000 copies that's amazing which is with never selling more than a very small amount than any one week or month. It just chugs along. So in that book, what I did is I said, okay, let's get
Past the more vague stuff. I just talked to 50 straight. A students. It was Hardcore like this is how you take notes for a math class. This is how you should study for an English class. This is how you prepare for a blue book exam. It was just nuts. Here's how you manage your time. This was like one of the first books to seriously, tackle time management for students and treat this as something you should do. And so I wrote that almost immediately. And I submitted that right after I started grad school. So by my first year of grad school,
Had one book come out and another book in the can so I just sort of knock those off real quick.
I've many follow-up questions. So a few observations. The first is you're mentioning that as a 17 or 18 year old back in the the.com, boom and then subsequent bus you can get tens of thousands of dollars to try anything. I think we've learned our lesson because now you have to be at least 20 to get hundreds of millions of dollars. So exactly what could go wrong and a couple of other things that just hop to mind.
As I'm listening to this, because it is kind of like deja vu all over again for me as well. There are a lot of similarities and one does not tie in perfectly to your story. But when you spoke to this first fiction agent to ask for advice.
If you had not promised actually, even if you had promised not to pitch yourself, I do want to mention that there's a saying, or there was at least when I was there in Silicon Valley, if you want money, ask for advice and if you want advice, ask for money and very often in direct path. Can actually reap dividends in terms of asking for advice. Which this did it. Just did it in a in a more indirect fashion, right? It kind of laid things out.
Longitudinally. And then the other piece I wanted to to mention that I think it's strikes me as important. Is that. While you're in college, you created a book that was easy to read. But, perhaps first and foremost, you created a book that you're capable of writing and that is why, for instance, in the 4-Hour Body or other books tools of Titans. Certainly. I have written books in a modular way, not just because it allows people to death.
In and out in this choose-your-own-adventure type of approach but because it makes it easier for me to write because ultimately if the book doesn't get written. It doesn't matter how easy it is to read. And so that that also occurred to me, right? If you had chosen to try to reverse the order and write the
Let's call them normal chapters. Instead of the two to three page chapters with principles. Maybe that first book never would have been written just given the time constraints, right?
Yeah, and I'm still I don't think I could have done it yet. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So
this leads me to ask and we're going to bounce all over the place because that is how my brain functions or malfunctions you graduate from college. What is your first six to 12 months? Look like out of college. I
mean, the two things I did in college is I wrote and I did computer science.
I was like a real computer guy. I think we actually overlap when I was in high school. I went to high school in a small town, near Princeton. And so, I think this maybe even overlapped when you were there as an undergrad, I ran out of computer science to take and so I was taking computer science at Princeton in the University classes when I was still in high school. So I went to Dartmouth College and was really just doing very well into computer science. So I was really like a locked-in sort of
computer science student. And so I rolled right out of Dartmouth and to MIT.
What type of focus did you have with, in computer science? Where were you, most interested in and focused
on as an undergrad, is just your learning everything. The research I was doing as an undergrad, was more Network system Z and I made a big leap when I went to MIT you interview the way it works is potential PhD advisor as you go and you meet with them and then they essentially make you offers. I'm going to make you an offer to come. Join my group. And so you go and
Eat with them. And it was mainly, the systems oriented professors who were meeting with me, but I had been a real big fan. You know, I wrote of a Richard feinman. I'd read like the James gleick biography, genius. I was a fan of John Von Neumann of Einstein. I had in my mind, just this this image of mathematical research of standing at a whiteboard and proving a proof. It just was incredibly romantic for me, even though math wasn't really considered my strong suit, and so there was one Theory professor.
Who said I need a systems person. The come to my group to help build wireless network systems. And I done wireless network research. So I went to her group and then just pulled a fast one and just immediately started trying to write three papers and became a theoretician. And so, you know, I haven't programmed a computer since I arrived since 2004. When I left school and went to MIT. I joined a theory group at MIT and imp have been a theoretician ever since I haven't touched a computer since really,
all right. So if we, if we look at
Ramming though, and we look at writing prose. If we look at poetry,
there are some
similarities and depend depends on who you talk to, of course, but I think of, for instance, and artist named Dmitri charniak who works in generative art predominantly at the moment and he put up a post recently on Twitter where he showed a screenshot of his coat and he said this is my art. So it's
Occurs to me that you can strive for and find elegance and beauty in all of those different domains. So, there's perhaps more overlap than one might expect at least from a first principles perspective. You mentioned in passing. I trained myself to write in college. I want to hear more about that because I would imagine it wasn't this sloppy ad hoc approach. Just given what I think I know of you. How did you train yourself to
write?
One of the things I always tell people because my experience is that in order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing. Like if you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejection because writing is one of these things where everyone can do it well enough, that if you're mainly just writing on your own, so I'm writing in a journal. I'm writing a Blog. I'm doing National novel, writing month is just me, you know working on my novel.
Don't necessarily get that stretch, that's going to improve your skills. And so, the thing that matter for me is that I was writing for editing and for acceptance and rejection for
editing. Meaning, writing for an editor. You have an editor reader.
Yes, editor, who's going to edit it and also will reject it if it's not good. And so this is actually why riding for the, the humor publication was a big deal. You probably remember from your time and Ivy League schools. In particular. There's a real culture around humor writing because it used to be back in the days where everything was the the sort of old.
Boys network that vast majority of comedy writers for shows, like, SNL or it's night show. They were a lot. They were coming out of these ivy league human
societies. What is the name of the Humor Magazine at Dartmouth
at Dartmouth? It's the, the jack
o'lantern, the jack o'lantern. And people may have heard the term Lampoon. The Lampoon is is out of Harvard. And then you have the number of different magazines at Princeton and so
on. Yeah, exactly. And then they're all have these huge old histories. You
no, so like dr. Seuss did cartoons for the Dartmouth jack-o'-lantern in the 1920s. And so that's a very competitive world. You would pitch pieces and if they were funny they would go. So they were back then would be in print magazines, you would pitch pieces, and if they were funny enough, they would get in. If they weren't they wanted it was it was just starkly competitive and then I wrote a humor column for the paper but is the same thing become a columnist. David say, no, no. No. Yeah. We'll do that one. No. Yeah, I will do that one. And if you got five in the paper, you had the possibility of doing a columns. So I think that really
My skill and that helped that helped and and you know, I'll say the two things that helped my writing the most to your original Point. Here is a humor writing turns out to be incredibly useful or any type of writing because humor writing is all about the timing, the pacing in the music of the words. You have to replicate the timing of a stand-up comedian using grammar and word choice and having to get the right Rhythm to set up the punchline way to beat and nail it. You have to do that all with words that
Gives you an incredible facility with symptoms crafty. And so, I mean, I'll tell you like today as a writer for the New Yorker where, which is very craft Focus, you know, they really care. It writing craft is a really big deal over at the New Yorker. The training I did as a humor writer is incredibly applicable because you hear the words as music and the pausing in the Rhythm, its you have to actually the performance of the reading, you think a lot about it. And that actually really helps over there and then mathematics just like programming that has been the other key to my success because if you do
Roofs, for example, you develop this sense where it's not, right? This doesn't work. The pieces don't fit and then the pieces fit. It's the chorus of angels, right? Like your mind is like, I don't like when things don't quite fit and when they do it's dopamine coming out of your ears. It led to my style of writing which is my advice rains very intricate. You know, it's layout, the generative theory that lays out these pieces and these pieces all fit together and you might not notice it consciously when you read it, but part of the experience of my writing, is that all of the pieces on
Laying out there all click together into a hole where everything fits nicely in. This is symmetric with this and this makes sense here and nothing is hanging out and it reduces this cognitive drag that happens. Sometimes when writings a little bit, less the ideas or a little bit less formed, and it makes it harder to write. But I think that's been a bit of a secret sauce in my work is that it's cognitively pleasing, because your brain appreciates, the fact that sort of nourished lean obsessively, all the pieces actually fit together.
So, few things number one.
I think we might have to call this podcast Cal Newport A Chorus of angels. That's that may be where we go with this just to get people in the door. And the second is what you're talking about in terms of symmetry and structure. If anybody listening is interesting, exploring that further. There's a book called draft number four by John McPhee, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker and just a
Behemoth of a Craftsman, and really, really thinks about structure a lot and lays out structure pieces graphically. So, draft number four makes for a really fun read. If you are willing to go into the weeds and be a super nerd. When it comes to that type of topic. I want to ask you about humor writing. So I was the graphics editor. So, in illustrator and graphics editor at the Princeton tiger,
Which is kind of the equivalent of the jack o'lantern and just a piece of trivia for people for whom this will make any sense. I took that job or I applied to that job, more accurately because Jim Lee had previously held that post when he was a student and Gimli at the time was one of my favorite comic, book pain, slurs or just beforehand have been one of my favorite comic book pencils.
His head rebooted, the X-Men. I think he's now a DC still need to get him on the podcast and I would sit at this desk and at Princeton. There's this street called Nassau Street with all these gigantic Mansions called eating clubs of different names and they all have their particular personalities. And you know, F Scott Fitzgerald's was that IV over here in JFK was also a diving. Then this person was at such-and-such. That's it. Has this storied and bizarre history.
But when he would go out, he'll think this is speaking out of school. It's pretty funny people go out. I want to say it was Thursdays and Saturdays, and just get hammered. And I didn't get hammered too much, but I opened up the drawer at one point of this desk and I found
drawings Chipley. It done
clearly when he had come back from being completely hurt. At least, that was my impression and I was like, oh my God, these are treasures and I don't know if I ever told anyone.
One about them because I didn't want them to disappear. They're like, My Little Secret in this desk. But the reason I brought this up is that the head editor of the magazine of the time, ended up shortly thereafter going and becoming the editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine, which at the time was a very very big deal. So it's kind of goes to show you how quickly you can jump my question for you is
How one can practice humor writing or cultivate? An awareness of that timing and so on that you're talking about if they don't and most people won't have access to working at such a magazine. If you have any thoughts,
it has to be for editing. You have to find a place to submit with. You
need someone who can reject, you and help you improve. You need someone who could reject you because it's like the little
things matter, I would so one of the things they did Jacqueline or did is we would also do sort of unusual.
Ian style once or twice a year fake newspaper. So there's a daily newspaper at Dartmouth called the Dartmouth and we would print the paper. That was exactly the same format. We just change like the you to a v or something and we would put it in the machines where the regular newspaper was, but it was all, I mean inside, and I was good at onion style stuff because a certain like dryness that has to work. If whatever reason I have this memory. I did a piece for it once and it's a timing matters. I don't know. Exactly a title. It was something like team from Amish.
City places last at robotics competition, which you gotta just, there's a straight-laced this of it. And I remember I wrote this thing. I wrote it as a sophomore, something like this. And it was just, it had to be the exact rightness of drying. And I remember the editor came in and added some extra things to it, like some quotes like oh and then Jebediah said, like, I had made it really dry. Whereas trying to do it. Very Repertory oil style and it like, at some point you've you figure out they put like tinfoil on a cat or something. Like it was something but it was just.
Just it would be revealed very dryly and I just remember he added a few quotes from some of the people and I felt like the whole thing fell apart, you know, it's like that's out of the character. You're breaking the drying. It like there's a whole whatever. But the only way you're going to get that type of fine-tuning is submit things have to be rejected, have things be accepted and then try to understand why the thing they added is ripping up your hair. Like this is just like, this is making me, it's just not right. I think that really matters and then the other thing for comedy writing is you have to consume a lot of
Stand-up comedy. I think you got to see the timing. The timing of the top stand-up comedians is actually the foundation on which all human writing comes out of. Like at the time when I was doing my column for the paper, my column. I tried to a Dave Barry style. Yeah, I don't, you remember. Barry was just
getting it. A very. Yeah, he won a
Pulitzer for his comedy calling. I
Just Praise credible. Yeah,
incredible. Yeah, but he was a timing guy.
Dave Barry's great. Do you have any favorite books or if people wanted to?
Start with something. You have any
suggestions? I'll just read his collections. He has his collections are fantastic because his whole thing was to set up and then the obsession he would come in with the Absurd punch to the gut. He would set you up and be kind of dry. And the timing would be just right beat and then something completely absurd and then he would just keep rolling. So he'd be writing about it would be mundane like people bring too much stuff on the plane to put into the overhead compartment, but I still remember at some point in his piece. There's people with full
grand pianos.
And you know, such and such brand, John Deere yard tractor that they're trying to get
up there. It's like the Precision in the absurdity that he just boom comes out of nowhere and hits you with it. That that has a good. Simon Rich is really good at that style. He's don't know. Simon Rich is a younger guy. He was at SNL, I believe, I think he's a Lampoon. So he came out the Lampoon. He's at SNL. He does some shouts and murmurs for the New Yorker, but it's hilarious. He sort of the, I think he's the modern young version of day. Barry. It's a little edgier than Dave. Barry is
Is the absurdity and and what he does really, well, not the geek out too much on Comedy writing, but he says, no, let's do it. Don't hold back. The amplification of absurdity. So he'll set up an absurd situation. He'll take it very seriously and you'll be very dry about it and it just the absurdity of what's going on increases. And look at the Simon Rich. What he's really known for is you end up in just like the most absurd places, but without ever losing the dryness. So you have this great piece during covid about
What should you do? If you're like an advice column? Like what should I do? If my kids afraid of monsters in the closet at first, it starts off with kind of reasonable advice and then it becomes pretty clear that this column exists in a world in which there has been a portal that has opened up and like Savage monsters are actually out there in the world and are coming in and taking and devouring children and like by the end of the article. It's all about have your shotgun and you're explaining to your kid that you're going to die for the cause as you leave, you know, the go fight the monsters that have been
Ever but he keeps the dry all of that builds up within the idiom of QA advice column and it's great. I love it. And in the end the think great thing about Simon. Unlike various like it's actually a whole metaphor for like the Stress and Anxiety parents were feeling about covid and how like we're trying to, you know, use the idioms of normal news while everyone's terrified. And so there's there's a, there's a heart to it. That was really sophisticated. But that's the dream. Maybe I should have done that.
Well at Sea, You Never Say Never, I am going to throw one more.
Hat in the ring and that is Bill Bryson. And for people who want to place the start a walk in the woods, which is rediscovering America on the Appalachian. Trail is just an outstanding outstanding book. Also very, very good with timing.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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I want to.
Perhaps just returned to and I think these are related and on some level a term that I have in front of me. I suppose I'm coming back to a visually. Haven't mentioned it yet. But could you speak to slow productivity? And perhaps you could speak to John Gibbons book, the scientists. You mentioned, a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation because you strike me also is kind of a proof case or a test case of slow productivity in a world where it is.
I thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way? That makes sense to
you? Well, I mean, I'll tell you and this is literally true what I was doing in the moments. Before we logged on to do this discussion right now. It was in the other room in my office is here with a notebook. Working on slow, productivity notes on slow productivity because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the earlier stages and I had gone for a walk earlier and have been
Developing some new thoughts and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook. As I was looking at the clock, like, I got to get into this, talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean, it's literally, it's literally fresh in my mind. And so, that's a big caveat. That means, this is not a fully baked idea it when it's love, has been greedy answer. Yes. The ingredients are swirling. So look here. I'll pitch you what? I wrote down this an hour ago as of an hour ago. This is the way because what I do and I think about ideas as I
At a basically repitch them out from scratch and I do that again and again and each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times but also New pieces and that's how it polishes is. Why it takes me six months to a year to get. For example, a book idea, ready to even propose. Like it's just this is the like we talked about the math mind, like I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is the problem itself. So here's the problem. We're facing the human. Brain is wired. It's good at making a plan.
An for executing something that you think is important and it makes you feel good. When you complete that plan. This is critical to the humans. Why we're different in a lot of animals we can. We can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good. When we actually, you know, we need to fix the fence. We fix the fans, the cattle can't get out. We feel really good.
The issue is if you don't do anything, let's say I'm not making any plans. I don't want to do anything. We know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their sense of efficacy and they're miserable. We know that, but if you put too much on people's plates, so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete, then you can easily conceive. Actually, all getting done. You short circuit that drive.
Just like your dry for Hunger is really important. But if you eat like a huge amount of junk food is short circuits to drive, and you end up unhealthy. So, when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily. Imagine how it's going to get done. It makes us really unhappy because we're short circuiting a cognitive drive here, and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed and it doesn't feel good. It's so we can't treat humans. Like we would a computer processor when a computer processor you want a pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there. So that not a single cycle is wasted because just want to make sure that you always have
Need to do, but for the human brain that huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done, actually makes the brain unhappy our solution to this type of overload. We have too much on our plate in work and in our life admin as well our solution has been to use fast productivity so fast productivity are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So, how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about lower friction easier access to information. Take out seven.
Steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled, we want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks.
My emerging concept of slow productivity, says shift that scale up to years months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff. I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain is now suddenly. Well, I'm going to try to do a lot less the stuff. I'm doing. I'm doing it on a larger time scale. So maybe I'm working a lot on it this week and then I go a month without doing it at all. And I have a hard day today and an
off day tomorrow of the seasonality up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload because if you want to produce, you know a good book in the next two years. That's a very different set of initiatives that I want to do as many right early related promotional things as possible this week, like that ladder could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment and you tend to produce things of higher value. Because when you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the
Stained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so, I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace, we have to completely rethink work allocation our current mode of doing this is completely incompatible with low productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say it's up to you to self-regulate an impossible task to ask. And so, you know, I had this New Yorker piece recently called, why do we work too much? And I sort of make this argument in there that if
We have to self-regulate. We're just going to end up with twenty percent too much on our plate. We're going to let stress be the feedback function as slows us down. And in our personalized, we probably need to be doing significantly less but the stuff we're doing. Do it better and over longer time period. So I so there's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain does happen right now that this epidemic of busyness I think is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain and maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of
it. Let's look at some beacons of Hope.
Perhaps, but we're going to, we're going to look at the ghosts of Christmas Past first. So very briefly in the scientists by John Griffin. You wrote on your blog. This was 20 21 think it was towards the end of July that you're that you're reading his magisterial Tome. I'm not quoting verbatim the scientist. You're up to page 190, which is your only up to Isaac Newton. Now, I'm going to read verbatim even early on. I became intrigued by repeated observation though the scientist profiled.
Urban's book are highly productive in quotation marks by any intuitive, definition of this term, the daily pace of their work was incredibly slow by any modern standards of professional Effectiveness. In this comes then to I'm skipping ahead. What you just said when viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks. The fame scientists in gribbins book, seemed spectacularly, unproductive years would pass during which little progress was made on Epic theories, even during periods of active work. It might take months for important letters to induce reply.
Or for news of experiments to make it across a fractured Europe. Now. I'm going to ask you a follow-up question on that piece. I'm going to read a little bit more when we ship however to the slow scale of years. These same scientists suddenly become immensely productive and last line. I'll read no one remembers Newton's lazy lockdowns, but his principia achieved immortality and I'll ask a few questions and then feel free to tackle them or answer a different question. However, you like
So the first is, I would imagine some people hear this say that's great. But we just live in different times like that. We are contending with different problems and a volume of stimulation that these people could not even conceive of and had there been Tick-Tock and Twitter and so on perhaps Newton never would have achieved anything which is maybe, maybe not. And that's why I wanted to just note that I want to ask about important letters taking months to induce a reply and so on they had some
Inbuilt friction in the system that has been removed in certain ways and you could perhaps reintroduce it. So the question this leads me to which is really the real question is. Are there any people who come to mind for you, who are more contemporary? They could be dead. But let's just say, within the last 20 years, who stick out as being particularly good at slow productivity could be a category of person.
But do we have a, do you have any contemporary
examples? There's a couple places where we still see a lot of slow productivity. So one is fiction writers and in particular, literary fiction writers, but also some genre fiction writers. This is one of the few places where you're allowed to basically say, leave me alone. I'll come back when I have a book. And so if we look, for example, at Dave Eggers, the novelist Dave Eggers, he works in a house on a laptop that doesn't have internet connectivity. So if there's no Wi-Fi, and he just basically works,
25 is pretty hard to reach. He talks to a couple times a week is from what I understand. He does have like, assistance to deal with some of the logistical stuff, but he just he doesn't do much but work on on his books. Another example is, you know, Neal Stephenson, he wrote that great essay years ago, why I'm a bad
correspondent. So he said so good, so
good. It's so good. It's inspiring. But basically his point was, he's mellowed out some, by the way. I remember going to see him do a book publicity tour back in Cambridge and
Back, then it was the only time he would leave was to do publicity tours. And he seemed so upset that he had to be there because he's supposed to be writing and he really didn't want nerd. He hated nerd questions about like the Canon of his books, many ways, but the bad poor spawned it was like if I answer all your messages and go to all your conferences and answer, all your emails. What will I have in the end? I'll have like a couple thousand messages. I sent two individuals, if I instead, don't do that, and write a book that I'm really proud of then, maybe, you know, a million people are going to read that book. And so my impact will be bigger if
Nor your message so that I can be basically writing something for a lot of people. So John Grisham is another example, I went down this Rabbit Hole recently. He not long ago. His longtime assistant retired, and he didn't hire anyone else because he didn't need one. He has created this life. From what I understand. He has created this life. Were basically his editor knows how to get in touch with him outside of his two weeks of book publicity. You can't reach him. He doesn't do things. I know he does do some things. He does do some political fundraising stuff. I basically he says, I
I write my books once a year. He said I didn't need to rehire my assistant because not enough people knew my phone number for it to make any sense, you know, so basically he just set that up and he put his energy other places. He built a bunch of baseball fields and became to commissioner of the little league in the one of the the town he lived. So he put a lot of time into that. He's really into coaching this house inspiring and then if you look at mathematicians and scientists like that are really at The Cutting Edge, they're just getting after it. They're not on Twitter tweeting.
All day long. For the most part, putting aside. Let's say like public health stuff during covid, but for the most part, the top mathematicians, the top theoretical computer scientist. I know that really Leading Edge lab scientists. They're doing their thing.
They're going for their Nobel. They're trying to get their fields. They're trying to they're trying to
do the work. And so that's another category. I think that you see where this is not for me. So I take great inspiration from you novelist. It really can just disappear. I collect stories by the way of dual home, professional writers.
It's always this. They live in a city in the winter. And then they have like a farm. They go to in the summer is just my dream one day. So yeah, there's people out there doing and then people like like me like you hinted at it before. It's like the weirdest thing about me as far as anyone is concerned, is that I've never had a social media account and it turns out it's allowed like today, everyone understands it, but until like a minute ago, people thought I was literally insane. That is fine. I had friends who knew what was going on in the world and sold a couple books. So, you know, it's like I think we tell ourselves that like we're stuck in this.
Way of existence, we're not really stuck. We have a lot of options.
Let me just add a few footnotes. Thank you for that. So Neal Stephenson for people who don't know, first of all, any Al Stevenson, stephan1 pop up, as soon as you type in any Al. But if you've heard the term, metaverse probably came from his novel. Snow crash, has written many 70 Eve's. My favorite is probably Krypton Omicron, which I think is a rare Choice as a favorite.
But personally, I think Cryptid not
well, not in my world. Yeah, computer scientist. Love Krypton off. It's
so prescient in so many ways. Mean, if you look at, you know, cryptographic cryptography leading into decentralized currencies, and so on, like he is his spotted so many things around corners, 10, 15, 20 years in advance. It is really quite mind-boggling. Neal Stephenson's apiece. Why I am a bad correspondent. I'll put it in the show notes as
All I was going to include why I'm a bad correspondent in this book that I was working on a few summers ago that I ended up canceling, which was the no book. The placeholder title was the no book and I kept writing and writing and writing this book on how to say no and coming up with compelling reasons for why I should not write the
book myself.
So it was kind of this recursive situation where I end up saying no to the no book, but the why why? I'm a bad correspondence out.
Standing. So we'll put that in the show notes. You mentioned writers, you mentioned scientists. And then one of the things that is perhaps weird of the people consider weird about you and that and that is that you don't have social media accounts. So I'm going to ask you just to let this bake for a minute, what other things people would consider unusual or strange, and you can take that any direction you want but about you your workflow, how you work? How you live anything. But before we get to that the nose,
Social media. So found a GQ piece on you and digital minimalism and you mentioned that you had tech company during the.com bubble and you've joked that you originally didn't sign up for Facebook.
Because maybe there is I'll just read the quote. There was probably a little bit of petty jealousy Newport says like, oh, why is this company? So popular. I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of using his products. So did you commit is that just purely ingest or did you early on commit to that? And then it just worked for you? So you continued it. In other words was it like from first principles decision or did it start off in a different
way through the sands of time? I'm trying to remember, so I had to go back and do some
And I did confirm that Facebook arrived at my college in 2004 and I confirmed that was true. And that was the first major. There's things before that. There's Friendster Etc. But those were more nice. Like there wasn't a real pressure to sign up for those right? My memory. And again, this is through the Santa time. Is that there's two factors why I didn't sign up for Facebook? One was just what you were talking about. So Mark Zuckerberg was a contemporary of mine. He was a computer science student at Harvard. At the time that I was a computer science student at Dartmouth. We had both started companies around the same time.
I'm his has been a little bit more successful. So yeah Facebook ended up a little bit more successful than Princeton Web Solutions, which is what which is what I had been. I had been running. I mean, you'll comparable if you just ask 70's, so there was some of that because especially I remember like all the women I knew and they were they were like, oh, this is so fun. I want to be on there like why are they interested in this guy's service? There's some of that the other thing and I think this is true because I'm a really strong memory of this.
I have a weird. It's not a phobia, but an inability to do ranked list. So if you ask me, hey, what's your favorite book? Which I get asked a lot of podcast. I don't know how to answer. If you say, what's your two favorite movies? I can't say
probably name for it. Our rapid fire questions are going to be great for Xander. This
continuously. You'll see, you'll see how free I freeze on these all the time or if I know they're coming like I've done every client show a few times. I'm sorry. Sorry you're
cutting out. I'm sorry. What was that? Yeah, your connections really bad.
They're all great. It's like enumeration and numeracy, if I'm gonna invent the word and that was what? Early Facebook was. Your profile was a favorite. Quote, favorite movies, favorite books. It was a lot of Erving Goffman, presentation of self, type sociology. You had to decide like, what am I going to say? My favorite movie is my favorite quote, to try to create a presentation to self. That was, and I can't do that. I can't. So I really remember, is the combination of those two things. As like now, this isn't for me and I got to tell you all it took was a few years of separation.
That suddenly, I felt like Margaret Mead among the Polynesian Islands because I was the only person not using this, and it was so interesting, like, they're from a remove. It was like really interesting. And I was like, okay, I think I'm just going to run with this for a while because I got to tell you from the outside, it seemed more and more absurd. Not that the service is seemed absurd in isolation to thing that seemed absurd. My memory was this presumption of universality, that these are technologies that everyone has to use. And as
Weird, if you don't I thought they seem kind of Niche like they're kind of cool. And if you're in the technology or Web 2.0, maybe it's interesting. I had nothing against them, but I was really wary about this Rising presumption that everyone has to use it and I'm an internet nerd from the early days and I'm like, I don't know that we should consolidate the internet into two or three companies where they built their own private Shadow version of the internet that they control. We already have the internet. Do we have to use these private wild garden versions of the internet? And this idea that it was weird, not to use it.
The that was the thing that really probably made me an advocate in the skeptical. Calm among social media was not that I thought what was happening on Twitter was bad. It was, why is it such a big deal that I don't use it. That's really what pushed me into a place of, you know, something. Weirds going on. In our culture.
Thank God, your personal Everest is putting together lists of favorite books and movies. If, if you hadn't, had that problem, who knows where you'd be, you'd be, you could be just another troll on Reddit or something. So, that's a good thing.
You had that friction. We're going to shift gears a little bit because I want to continue to focus on the unusual in unusual, not in any sense of impracticality, but uncommon uncommon things that you do or don't do. What is your roles and values? Document.
Do you still have a rolls and values document? I do. Yeah. It's part of what I pitch. I pitched this multiscale approach to planning things out and when I say pitch, I mean, you know, like on my podcast for my articles.
Roles and values are at the top. And this comes right out of Stephen Covey sharpening. The saw seven habits. Here are the different roles of my life. And here are the values that Define how I want to execute each of these roles. There's Professor family parent, right, you know, whatever, the writer, whatever, the rules Community member, and here are my values and there they are. And I look at them, and I refine them. And you have to think about it. And then, in my scheme, you look at those, when you then create your plan for the current quarter, as you want to be in a line with your
Values. We make a plan. Then you look at your quarterly plan, when you create your plan for the week, as you want your week. What'd you do this week to be in line with what your bigger vision is for the quarter. And then when you build your plan for each day, figure out what to do with your time that's influenced by your weekly plan. And there you have a thread that connects everything you're doing indirectly, but without any breaks in the links, all the way back up to your values of what I'm doing right now is a multi-link connection all the way back up to. Here's the things I care about.
Let's get into some specifics more specifics here. You've written
Very well on and I'm going, I'm going to get the phrasing imperfect but you've written very well on how many meetings are created or scheduled because people otherwise don't have good systems for keeping track of things. In other words, they're afraid of forgetting to do something. And therefore they just drop a meeting in the calendar with no clear agenda because at least it functions to prevent the sand from slipping through the fingers.
You have this document, the roles and values document. If I were to create a roles and values documents say in Google Drive. I would be super excited. I would focus on it. I might look at it the next day, but if I did not have some system.
For forcing me to look at it, evaluate it revised. It. It would become lost very, very quickly. I would forget I ever put it together. So could you just walk us through how you ensure that doesn't happen for you personally, with the roles and values documents and then Furthermore with the quarterly plan and so on. What is your workflow or your flow look like for those
things?
Well, I'm a big believer in what I call routed productivity. There has to be somewhere. I call it the root document. That says, these are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life. And therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this route document. That this is the commitment either. I'm someone who follows this route document or my life is chaos. And then that route document is what lays out what I'm talking about here. Lays out that multiscale planning, that
These are the types of planning. I do. There's a few other things that lays out at lays out that I do. David Allen Style full capture. I'm a big believer about not having open Loops.
Sorry to interrupt, but I will do. So, do you read that every morning? Is this like your boot up sequence?
It's internalized now, but right? It's written down and my listeners do the same thing. Like we put it in director, you call it root, and you put all your planning documents in that directory and you don't have to look at it every day. Once you, you internalize it pretty quickly, but just knowing it's
Are you can assess yourself as in my following that or am I not? And it's a binary, and then everything else comes out of it. So, we call it a root because then the tree of all these different systems and stuff, go out of it. And then you might be really nitpicking with all these other small little systems, but they all eventually connect back to the root. And to me, that's a really big deal that the biggest decision you make. If you're going to live a deep life, like productivity in isolation. I don't even know what that means. Who cares? But if you're going to live a deep life, like the ultimate original commitment is
I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things. I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter, even if I don't feel like it and like, that is the biggest binary zero to one flip that happens in crafting a life, what you commit to that evolves over time. You might find like this is a bad idea. I've been trying to whatever write down notes on a thing. Let's add a and that's not really working. It all evolves over time. But the 021 commitment is, do I have some sort of structure. I'm committing to with the goal of making my life, dear.
Or my winging it. That's the zero to one bit that I think matters more than any
other are there any particular levers actions anything that have helped facilitate that for you personally? So disproportionately. So I'll share a few things for myself, which are, I think sometimes embarrassingly primitive for me to even talk about because some of my readers and listeners. Just imagine, like, I wake up every morning with this like,
Mental karate chop and just like Matrix, my way through the day, with all these fists, to get it systems. And that is not really how it plays out. And I will say though that there are a few things, one is looking at my calendar on an annual basis and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline and by extended, that's one, two or three weeks, and ensuring that I have. Hopefully,
Something of at least a week once a quarter. So I'm actually leaving tomorrow for three weeks off the grid and I will have no Wi-Fi and no phone for three weeks and that's important to me on a multitude of levels. Number one is it allows me to check in and see how comfortable I am with myself. When I am not over busied. It provides me with time to reflect without the ability to indulge.
Iljin the temptation to go on Twitter or check something. So I don't I don't need to rely on self-control and other. In other words. I'm sort of saved for myself. It allows my system physiologically time to kind of reboot and recover and it also forces me to put in place or revisit systems that allow me to be gone for three weeks. So, as an example, figuring out right now and yesterday, and today, that my usual checks and balances with team members in a
Since 4-wire approvals isn't going to work while I'm gone. So we need to upgrade those systems so that we don't have any issues because my assistant unless there is an emergency that assist States, a satellite phone is not going to be able to reach me, right? And then those systems outlive the time off the grid, that's an example of one thing that I do, that seem simple. It is simple in theory, at least that has this huge spectrum of Ripple effects and
There's some other things that come to mind, but I'd love to know for you. If you're trying to focus on this deep life and rooted productivity, which levers, or actions have been particularly impactful for you to come to mind.
Well, I mean, I think periodic reflection plays a critical role for me to as a professor. There's a seasonality that's built into my work which I
wish could be widely replicated, so jealous. Yeah, I mean I suppose I could do it but man, it's such a great, such a wonderful. I
think everyone who runs their own business, his entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility. I think you should integrate seasonality and do what you do. I'm a big believer in seasonality and all scales. By the way, busy and not busy parts of
R day, busy, or non busier days of the week busier and busier months in the season. I mean, I think at all scales, we need it being pegged all the time, filling your time. All the time is not healthy for. So for me. There's the December break in the summer break. So December 6th. Is my last lecture on campus. That's when the semester ends and for all of the time. After that, between dinner, when the semester begins, again each week. I've already blocked off one, full day off from no meetings. No phone calls. No.
Cast recordings. No, nothing plus an additional half day off for what I call Adventure work. We're typically I'll go to Trails outside somewhere Scenic. Sometimes I'll go to the museums and downtown d.c. To just think about one problem in a inspiring or unusual location. I've already blocked those days off because I want to get the most out of December. And then when I get to the summer with professors is a little bit weird, we're not really paid during the summer. What you do at least at a research University is you get Summer salary from
Search grants. And that's how you cover, the two months in the summer. And at some point, I after 10 year, when I have to worry about that, so much is I decided I'm not going to take research grants for the summer. I'm just going to take the Summers off. I'll fill in the gaps and income, you know, with ride, you know, what have you and so I actually literally am not working for the university for two months out of the summer and that's really critical for me. That type of seasonality is probably the one of the biggest advertisements for the professor life that I could give.
What do you do on your day?
Off. It's not clear. Like what on or off means for me. I mean, I read a lot. I think a lot. I take a lot of notes like for me a day off. What I care about is a day where I don't have to be interacting professionally with other people like the to me. That's what office. I don't have to go on. Zoom. I don't have to go in for a meeting. I'm not in front of an audience. It's I'm in full control of my time. I don't actually like not doing things when I have control of my time. I love to do things where I have complete autonomy over my time. I'm going to
Go for a walk and think this through, I'm going to go work on a book proposal. I'm going to read this book. Then when my kids get home from school. We're going to go do something else. And so for me a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over. What I do, the blank calendar day to me is one of the more glorious sight. If you really want to hear the chorus of angels, forget solving a math, through forgetting a sentence to work right seeing a day on the calendar where there's nothing in Gmail. I think Gmail should have a feature where they just sort of, you know, pulsates and Angelic glow.
If you see him at the little little feedback right there, little feedback loop.
I'm looking for some inspiration. So these half days of Adventure, work at inspiring or cool locations. I don't want you to Doc's yourself, but like, what are some locations you've used or types of locations? And why did you choose them? Right? Because even if you say Museum, if you're in a city, there are multiple museums you could choose. So, how did you
choose a particular place and then when you are working on some
Larger problem or project? What does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you've knocked out the Wi-Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real world examples, that would be super
helpful. I think a lot about location. So if I'm down at the mall and DC, for example, there's a couple different games. I'll play, sometimes I'll go to the botanical, gardens, the National botanical gardens. It's a giant greenhouse, and, and so, it's just it resets your
I'll contact because you're in a tropical climate with palm trees and there's these paths that go through and there's benches and it's, you're gonna get really sweaty. It's very humid. But I'll go there. Sometimes, I'll go to the National Gallery because there's a, there's a certain type of connection to history classical Antiquity mindset. You get if you walk through, and here's a Leonardo you're looking at especially like the Italian Renaissance floor. And then there's an underground cafeteria at the National Gallery. The connects the East and the West Wing's in which there's essentially no cell phone reception.
So then you go down there and you get coffee from the coffee place. And there's this waterfall and that you can see through the glass and then hiking there's a peck. Toxic National Wildlife Refuge is not far from me, go there and you can hike. There there's the Rachel Carson green way. They used to be closer to my old house and I would hike the same thing every week and so I got really good at the change of seasons is a real thorough move, like noticing week-by-week, how things were changing and what was happening with the leaves and I had names for all the places.
Isis. And I would do the same hike again and again, and this is all pen and paper. It's me notebook. A uniball micro, you know, 0.5., Mm, roller pin. Who
is 0.5? Give notes. I like that. I like that. I, you know, I'm torn between the 0.7 and 0.5.
Well, the bleeding or not. No, I don't know, man. I think if you're using the point seven, you're going to start to get some bleed. When you're not thinking I'm a master because also, if I'm doing csworks.
I'm doing math. And so there's a lot of little greek if you're drawing an Epsilon or you're doing exponents or the 2.5 - real I know
pads are so full of exponents and epsilon's. I don't know what to do with myself. So you have your you have your point, five millimeter, exponent ready, pain. You have your pad, you go to the botanical gardens, you're drinking coffee. You're sweating your face off. What type of work you doing? What does it look like for that?
Half-day, what if we're looking over your shoulder? What is it? What's happened in
there either? I'm trying to solve a particular proof. So if I'm doing my, have my computer scientist had on, I'm trying to solve a proof and it's literally do a lot of kind of graph theoretical stuff. And you drawing graphs. You're doing a quote, you just trying to make it work or at least make aspects of it. Work or figure out why it doesn't work and drawing equations. I'm drawing graphs or if I have my writer hat on. I'm trying to crack structure. So writing has to have for me, right?
Course, has to happen with a computer. And that's, it's a whole other thing, but I put a huge amount of time and figuring out the structure of the ideas that I want to write. And especially if I'm working on something, like a book, proposal a mission before, it takes me six to twelve months. Again. And again, you're going to find me somewhere with the notebook. Just like I was doing this morning right before I got on the call with you here, just writing trying to structure out index outline as not quite working. You know, how does this fit together? What about this format for the book? I'll sometimes by a dedicated notebook for a book. I
Idea,
so it's a trick of mine. I do the same thing. Yeah, dedicated
notebook. That's what I'm writing. Yes, would be one of those two things.
What do you use for writing books? What's do you have a preferred software as you're talking about indexing and playing with table of contents and structure. I have found scrivener just to be a lifesaver in that department. I'm sure there are a million other options, but I've used scrivener for many, many years. What do you use for your book writing?
When I switch to contributor status at the New Yorker is when I switch the scrivener, I haven't tried it yet for a book. We'll see about that. But I definitely, for all of my articles, all my New York will work all that scrivener. I love it. Why was that the
Catalyst to switch to scrivener
New Yorker? Writings very dense. It's like dense and information. So you're citing a huge number of different. You know, you saw it in the article. I wrote about you. There's like a huge number of things you have to cite. And so the double pane feature scriveners, absolute Lifesaver like
Okay, I can just grab the article. I'm citing and it's on the right Pane and then I can quote from it directly on the left pane, or I can take a different section of the article and put it on the right pane. So that the left pane, I can properly reference it and then you just jump in the composition mode when you're so, you know, you're pulling it information and kind of getting a draft of it and then you shoot to composition mode fullscreen, best composition mode of any tool out there and then your word polishing and then you jump back. It's a great tool. I've loved it. I've been a fan forever since
Started using it just for people who don't have contacts to add a little bit more. So scrivener for me. The reason I began using it is that prior to that, I use word. And if you're using word and you have, let's just say as in my books, which are both long and have many components. If you have 27 chapters, and you have 15 open documents because you also have research documents and reference documents. Your computer will cease to function and your
Brain will cease to function, but with the scrivener at least the way that I use it. You have these stripped-down format minimal.
Documents that can all be looked at within a single application and you can format it in different ways. A lot of screenwriters or playwrights use scrivener. I think that's initially how it came onto my radar. I had not seen anyone use it for nonfiction at that point. But if you imagine your screen cut right down the middle, on the left hand side, you have this table of contents. So easiest way to think about it and I will immediately break my book in.
Two, three or four sections, even though I may not even have labels for the sections and then I decide which documents will go into each of those sections and you can just drag them around. So you can play with the order, you can create another section as an example. And then you have research at the bottom of that left hand. Pane on the right side. If you split that in half, horizontally, what I'm working on. This is just how I do it. What I'm working on will be in the top right panel.
And then below that the bottom right pain, I will have whatever research doc. I'm referring to since my stuff is also very, very factually dense and require citations and references and so on. And by doing that, you don't have to click back and forth between tabs or between programs between documents. It's a really, really elegant solution and I hope you're not offended by me focusing on some of the Tactical stuff, but I'm curious.
It's in the thought process behind it. Some of your decision-making, right? That's much more interesting than just the output of the decision. It's like, okay. How did you arrive at this? So when I was reading about your quarterly plan, sample week planned etcetera in the end of this blog post and that was from January of 2021. And I don't know if this is still the case, but I'll just read this last paragraph to be clear. Most of my obligations on my plate exist is concrete items in my
Cyclists, which is my podcast listeners know I maintained using Trello but most of the projects that move the needle in my career, working on a research paper writing, a major article never get discretized, not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly into bite-sized actions on a list and said treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves. So the Trello use I've used Trello. I like Trello, I tend to use I've used both Trello and Asana. I'm curious. How you
Ended up arriving at Trello
Trello. Has been my tool of choice, recently for organizing tasks. And the way I actually use it is, I do a different board for different professional roles. So I have a writer board. I've ordered for CS research. So my role as a researcher and then a board for the teaching and administrative pieces of being a professor. So, there are three separate roles. They have separate boards. The Columns that I then divide those boards into
Represent different categories, you know, I have a column for, I got a process. This this is the David Allen idea, where I need to put this down somewhere this thing, but I don't really even know what this thing means. I need to do. It's, you know, a, we need to recruit someone. Look, I don't know what that means. But I don't want to. Let me just write that down under due process. Like another hack, I do, is anyone I meet with on a regular basis. They'll have their own column on the particular board. So, if anything comes up, I need to ask them actually, put it on a card and put it under
They're meeting column. And then when I meet with them, I just go and whom will Glover through it. Then typically I'll have a column for like, okay, definitely this week, this needs to happen. So I when I go through my weekly planning, I'll move things to that. And so I'd like that that different roles different columns and I liked it the virtual cards and all these tools can hold a lot of information. So I'm a big believer that all the relevant files. All the relevant notes. If someone emailed me something about this task that's relevant. You can just copy and paste this all on to the virtual back or attach it to the card.
Actually is also an information management system, not just a task management system. That's been what I've been. I've been using and then typically I really go through those all at the beginning of the week. But when I build out my weekly plan, I'm often identifying off those boards. This is what I really want to get done this week. And then I'm off in executing largely off that weekly plan. Do I should let me actually Tim. I'm going to give a broader context here because I'm kind of a weird guy talked about a lot of things. So I'm going to attempt to try to put all the weird things I do in the some.
Of context because we've covered a lot of territory to unawares. The weird, its death, or just to, like, illustrate the weird. There's these two different main hats, I wear. So there's, there's a hat where I'm a computer scientist and I published papers on mainly like theory of distributed systems. Then there's a sort of journalistic public commentary critique typewriting. This is like my article for the New Yorker. My New York Times. Op EDS, my books, mainly in my books, especially recently of really been about tech and culture and
Impact, do they have a real practical aspect you? But then, I often also talk about productivity largely because it's just people are kind of interested in how I do these other things. So it's like, it's not just like a tier one topic that I write about though. I kind of do because deep work. I think talks about this for sure. But then also we talked a lot on my blog and in my newsletter on my podcast about like, what we're talking about here, because I don't think we talked enough about this in general. So people are out there. Well, how do I organize my aspirations? How do I structure a life to be deeper and not get lost in the noise, but not
Not be over scheduled and so we geek out a lot on productivity as well. So just to give us useful. But a landscape of I do these two big things, but then I have to care a lot about productivity to do these big two things. So then I talk about what do I do to make sure that I can still write an academic paper and a New Yorker piece and a book and whatever? Like how does that all fit into my life? And so I care a lot about it. So I don't that's useful. But that's my lay of the weird landscape for the various things. I do.
We are going to talk about
Safe for instance, a 30-day digital, minimalism experiment. So, do you want to dig into that before we get to it? We've got in 2019, the artist writer Jenny Odell. Is that, right? Yeah. Helped going to start the trend which were going to talk about when she published a book titled, how to do nothing subtitle resisting, the attention economy. So that becomes a New York Times bestseller. Barack Obama, one of his favorite books to this 19, then it was followed. I guess a year later, the following Spring by
West Headley, I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but do nothing subtitle how to break away from overworking overdoing and under living. And you have an Helen Peterson's can't even help Millennials became the burnout generation. Maybe, a little less inspiring sounding. It doesn't always curious about titling decisions and the thought process behind it. Maybe. I mean, it could be a fantastic book, but I haven't read any of these and then Devon prices laziness does not exist. These are
I wouldn't say entirely new in the sense that you can go back to throw or Emerson and certainly, you can go thousands of years back to like hot gluing and you can find discussions of overworked busyness laziness versus contemplation. Are there any books? And I know I'm pushing on your weakness here in terms of listing. So I'm not asking you to list, but there are there any books in the last?
Five or 10 years from broadly, speaking this kind of category that really stand out for
you. It's an interesting category. First of all, like I sometimes call it like the anti productivity category though that that's not quite accurate label, but to really interesting category. So, you know, my book came out the same month as how to do nothing. So, we were me and Jenny were paired and so many, some of the New Yorker. New York Times book review the ringer. There's all these articles that came out where it was always talking about us, those two books together. So, that was definitely
How to close experience prices book is great. I blurb that book Celeste headley's book is great. I interviewed her for the New Yorker in a piece. I did, I would say that what I would add more recently book, just on really well, and I think it'll get into a reason why I think it did was Oliver berkman's new book, which is maybe it's called 4,000 hours. I might have the number wrong. I'll over and then being yeah. Yeah. He's a British writer and I blurred that book because it's great. Anyways, it and, and the subtitle something like time management for more.
Turtles or something like this, but it killed it. The book did great. It came out a few months ago, or maybe over the summer, a bad sense of time. But the the number of hours. I'm getting the number wrong. Probably some 4,000 it was
4,000 weeks. Yeah. Hi management
for Mortals Oliver Brooke weeks, Berkman within, that's how many
we are Kema n. Yeah, 4000 weeks, time management for Mortals and he writes
a column for the guardian. So four thousand weeks is how many weeks you have to live. I think that really hit and
Really hit in particular because it was introducing a like a values-driven productivity. You could think about it like it's about all that really matters when it comes to organizing your time or being organized. Is you what you're trying to do is you only have so much time and you want to do things with it. That's useful, meaningful and effective and just be busy for the sake of being busy isn't good. I think all of those books make that argument. I think they're all pushing back on the can in.
T, crushing busyness, I am all this stuff. I'm doing, it's always phonetic. But I'm papering over the existential void. I don't want to stare down by doing all of this. When what I probably need to do is stare into that void for a while, wait until the vertigo goes away and then get up and actually start building something real and I think they're all touching on that because there's this whole sort of fractured since of overload this happening. Right now. We have all these different things coming together. You have like the digital distraction piece which obviously,
I'm sort of associated with is really a symptom of the bigger problem. So yes, our phones can be a palliative to this existential despair. But the despair is there. And the despair is not going to be fixed by just getting rid of the palliative and saying, let's not use Instagram anymore. It's still going to be there. We're using these things all the time because we just it more palatable to be active and busy all the time. Then sometimes to face. What's hard about what's going on in our lives or the
And I think, all of these books are picking up on that and like, we need to slow the hell down. Figure out what we really want to do. Do these things at a reasonable Pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff and make the good stuff better. All these books. I think are getting at that main thing. They all just have different angles at their. So each of them have a different approach. They take to this issue and that's like its own interesting topic. I mean, everyone comes out this from different ways. Berkman comes at it from like a humanist way. I kind of
Not from a humanist way to and digital minimalism.
What does that mean? To let's say in Oliver's case to come at it, from a humanist perspective. What is, what does that
mean like from a perspective of sort of trying to maximize or improve the flourishing of the the sort of unique and cherish being? That is the humans, right? Like as a human urine, important unique entity to be cherished, and should think about crafting a life in which you flourish. That's the human eye. So, it's kind of in this lives of indiscriminate busyness where I'm just overwhelmed all the
Time and distracting. Every moment is your diminishing, your Humanity. There's a humanist approach where and he'll and Peterson might come out. This more with a sort of post liberal anti-capitalist type of approach that this is productivity culture is really just part of the super structure that supports the base of exploitative capital extraction. It's an economic argument, Justice take these different arguments Celeste is more comes out of four, more of a cultural Odell comes out. It was a mix of humanist and economic and artistic. And as I think that's why that's
Phenomenal book. And he's very smart, very original. And so we all discussed these different takes that are all coming at it and all add something, but they're all getting that the same underlying issue of this sort of sense of crushing overwhelming. Busyness,
you know, I was thinking, if this New Yorker gig CS professorial, life doesn't work out for you. You could actually work on some sobering children's books along the lines of doctors Seuss, and the first one,
Could be could be called the despair as there.
Let's get these kids sobered up quick.
I'm gonna get
worse, not
looking at that through and this, this may not be the best segue. But I'm going to give it a shot. Anyway, we were talking about the Deep life and I'm going to lead into this through that and looking at a post of yours from 2020. And it says, I strive to divide my focused attention among
Four categories, Community, Family, Friends Etc, craft work in quality Leisure. I love that term quality Leisure Constitution, Health in parentheses and last contemplation, and then in parentheses matters of the Soul. So I'm going to ask you, not the second but I'm going to ask you about that. Fourth one, contemplation matters and soul. And the way there were going to move into that is through John Newport. So who was John Newport?
That's my father's father. My grandfather Baptist Theologian and scholar. And one of the only of his era Baptist apologist meaning basically someone who he was Southern Baptists, who is very interested in actually going out there and encountering, other worldviews, understanding other approaches to things and then trying to make a case. Let me make a case for the Baptist Christian worldview. Let me actually go out there and make my case as opposed to saying the not.
I'll just approach of batten down the hatches. We have it, right? I don't want to hear about what else is going on there. My grandfather was someone who he hung out with Carl Jung. He would walk with special in Central Park, when he stole was still at the Seminary. There. He was at Harvard for year hanging out with niebuhr, right? I mean, he was out there. Exposing himself to every interesting idea and worldview and approach. That's out there. He would want to understand him deeply, and then try to understand why the
Images of his through comparison and not to get too philosophical, but it was a sort of Socratic dialect. Do this question is very much, a
philosophical question. So let's let's yeah, but he
would find it. You, you would get more strength and what you, which is a big thing. I took from him. He was alive time right around him. He died basically on his way to my high school graduation. So I knew him throughout my entire up to the beginning. My adult life, the dialectical method of encountering and fully understanding a different.
Your understanding of the world and your convictions will get stronger that you don't want to try to avoid or sidestep or discredit before you have to see them go hang out with heschel. Go hang out with niebuhr go hang out with kilikki wrote a book on Paul tillich go hang out with you and really understand
who is Paul tillich. Just so I know I'll admit I don't I don't know that
name. He was a Christian apologist. He's like a Christian Theologian. That did a lot of sort of of the same rough era c.s. Lewis, but was a little more
Edema can Lewis but so is like theater. Very smart apology. Like really trying to understand, explain like the Christian worldview. So, let me pause for a second. So
apologist, I would imagine for some people has a sort of a negative connotation to it, but it doesn't seem like that's how you're using this word. Would you mind just explaining the use of that
term? There's a technical definition that I'm using. So the so like that, the technical definition of an apology.
Just that you're someone who is out there, making a case for the thing that you believe in the effort of explaining it to other people. It doesn't have to be Evangelical in the general sense of that term. In terms of, you're trying to convince people. But at least you're trying to encounter other people and explain why your what you the thing that you're trying to explain is, right? So, I mean a lot of like what writing you do or I do is technically would be apology. Like if I write a book, you know, about productivity apologist. Yeah, like I'm a cop.
Apologist,
that's a confusing term. Do you have any idea how that became? Like the the enemy magical reasons came out of theology. Yes. I think it - I don't want to
talk out of school. I might be wrong about that. You're right though. It's not in common parlance. So I should Advocate maybe. But yeah, the main point is in the Southern Baptist Church at that time. You want to see a lot of apologia because you didn't want to go out there and encounter other worldviews. I just don't even want to know about that and I think we see a lot of that today.
I
mean, outside of the religious context and so we talked about this, a lot of my podcast but don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that are did seem different than what you believe in. You're not going to get tricked out of your convictions are believing something that's false. You actually strengthen your understanding the world and therefore strengthen your own convictions by encountering. Other ideas that are well formed. And that's it's at the core of the intellectual life for the last. However, many centuries want to say it that that's sort of a core.
Operation and he personified that. So if we look at the
contemplation bucket and then parentheses matters of the Soul. So this is one of your four categories of focused attention. What does that mean to you? How do you focus on contemplation and matters of the
soul? The way, I would generically tackle. That would be to say that humans have these intimations where this seems.
Right or good or on spiring? This doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem good certain behaviors. You see, you know in a movie the villain and it's just it hits this thing inside. That's not right. You're watching secession on HBO and you're like, all of my moral intuitions are telling me that these are bad. People. Don't be like these people, right? You know what I mean? And we get on the other side to you encounter the inspiring, the person who sacrifices or what have you, and it just hit something inside and you feel it. Right? And and so you can
all these intimations, John height would call these moral intuitions. There's there's different terminologies for it.
Critical, I think and this obviously, by, I mean, like, all of philosophy, but critically, I think is and all the theology for that matter, to is figuring out how to actually structure a life around these intimations. A life that pushes you more towards the things that just instinctually hit you as this is this is right and good and I just know it and away from the things in the behaviors and the approaches to life that just hits you at a gut level. Is this is not right. This is not good. This is what philosophy does. This is what religion does if we think about it?
From a big picture perspective is it is ideas evolved over time through experience an argument that essentially help you align your life with the things that the moral intuitions that are positive in a way from the ones that are - it's why you shouldn't be quick. For example, to dismiss a field of philosophy or religion. As I can just figure this out from scratch or it's talking about mythologies that I can't empirically validating the world. What you really have. There is a moral technology. Something has been evolved over time to align
In your life with these intuitions that you feel, and that's the contemplation bucket is, you better be doing something along those lines because just winging, it is not going to matter. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to think about that bucket. Some details of how I tackle that maybe as personal summer, not engage a lot in philosophy. There's religious engagements in my life. I'm not formally practicing and associated with a particular religion, but that's also something that might not
I think that's necessarily a permanent State. I think there is a lot of intuition and Brilliant human moral Engineering in religions. Well, if you're open
to it, I'd love to to talk a bit more about this because I've heard for instance, conversations between Sam, Harris who's a friend and Jordan Peterson and I'm going to I'm sure miss represent both sides. So sorry guys. I'm just gonna kind of paraphrase but you know, in general Jordan refers to
Mythology. And the Bible as moral Frameworks that have been time-tested which is not to say, I don't think he would say that we should base all of our lives on Cain and Abel or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that as humans, we've had a whole lot of trial and error over a very very long period of time. Certain stories have struck a chord and stuck and maybe there's value in those.
Those stories and then again, sorry, Sam. I'm sure misrepresenting, but if Sam is, perhaps arguing that you should start from first principles, you do not need theology or religion, but can build a moral code, and framework for yourself. I think Jordans response to that would be, You're Expecting too much of people. People are just going to have too much trouble doing that. They want something out of the box. That is good enough to be helpful. So what I'd love to ask you is,
And I spent a good amount of time thinking about these things for myself, just for myself, not for anything else, but my life and I would love to know what this does for you. Maybe we could start there. What is the need that it satisfies or the unease that it quelles to have contemplation / matters of the Soul as one of the four main categories. Maybe we could start there and I just love to hear you expand and in
Anyway, you feel
comfortable in that particular division. My instinct is a Jordan is probably more on the right path. And I'll tell you a book that really was striking to me, that I think gets right at this. There's this great book called All Things shiny and it was written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Berkeley Dreyfus. And I forgot the other name, but they talk about this issue. Right? So this was this was the central issue that this was what Mitchell was worried about like weird.
Now going to have to create morality from scratch and that's not going to go. Well, right. And obviously Jordan is very keyed into this because his early interest was in the rise of totalitarian regimes that occurred in the 20th century in that context. And spoiler alert things did not go well, but there's this lament in that book about is looking at these prior periods in human history, where they used the word, the sacred, they talked about life was just infused with the sacred.
David and the in ancient Greece, The Classical Greece. They really did feel like the gods, The Olympian gods would inhabit you areas. What inhabits you? And that was to feel like these feelings. You would have is literally God's inhabiting you. And in the medieval Christians, everything had a place in a sacredness to it, even objects in the world, and then that all went away. And they opened the book with David Foster Wallace and basically use him as personifying. I can just figure this all out from scratch from first principles.
And they use them as that. It's a really poignant, but tragic story because, of course, it's a story that ends up with Foster Wallace's suicide. And they use that to set up the difficulty of trying to build everything up from scratch. And especially when I guess that's what Jordan likes to the point out is we have these intuitions that are really deep and Incredibly powerful and you know, Jordan was very inspired by Young so he's really drawing from Carl Jung's ju in
Gee, his archetypes as idea that there's these the collective unconscious, it has these archetypes that all humans have they have a deep history pre culture and that like are myths. The reason why certain myths resonate as they're pressing these buttons and those buttons, what he would call archetypes young I think of as intuitions and that we have these Technologies for sort of and I'm using technology not digital or electronic but philosophical and Theological Technologies, like it really, it aligns your life to these things. We're
In to be aligned to him. Just like our sense of thirst. Means we really need to drink water. We shouldn't just ignore that. And say is there another way for me to achieve like the proper isotonic balance in my bloodstream? Like actually the instinct is telling us to drink water. All of those things have been very effective to me, you know, with an a effective in the sense of like affecting me. And so I think there's something to that is that
I mean a life that alliance with these intuitions can be very resilient and Rich and we just have personal experience. And, you know, some people, get this through philosophy. And some people get this through religion, but they're drawing from the same internal Hooks. And so, I get very nervous when I think about the challenge, the kitchen. That's a weird challenge of going back to First principle. And we tried, I'm just was all a philosophy. Tried to do this for a couple hundred years. Like, what Kant was trying to do. I mean, we all we tried, this is very difficult and I know Sam disagrees.
He's smarter than me. So like, you know, let's listen to him maybe more more than we listen to me. But that's where I fall on that if that makes sense.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's this is a topic of kind of infinite interest to me. And I'd love to keep adding things around for a little bit, if you're open to it. So I actually have all things shining downstairs, all things shining subtitle reading the Western Classics to find, meaning in a secular age, by Hubert Dreyfus, and Sean, Dorrance Kelly. I was gifted this book and
You would think based on the title and how much of us stoicism and philosophy nerd. I am that I would have just taken to this like a fish to water. I found it very challenging to read and I think perhaps it was just all the references to Moby Dick in the Odyssey. It could have been that, I'm not sure, but I found it very dense in a way that made it hard for me to at least process. At the time that I was I was gifted it.
And I'm just going to mention a few things kind of in no particular order. The fact the matter is it don't know, Jordan Peterson. Well, we've spoken before and I've had him on the podcast but I don't know him. Well, I would say, I know Sam well and have spent a lot of time around Sam. I used is waking up app. I've read many of his books and we've just spent a lot of time in person, Sam by and large seems to me to be a very happy at peace guy, right? So that's
That's interesting. Now, is that Sam? Out-of-the-box? How much of that is nature versus nurture and training versus default. I can't say, I have no idea but he has managed. It seems to thread the needle and create meaning and Frameworks for himself there, really seemed to work well and certainly there are counter examples. And when I see a book like all things shining, do, you know?
The backgrounds of the two co-authors. In other words, where they backing into the book, from the perspective of people with religious upbringings or do not know the background. I mean, I know their
background. I think Shawn was Kelly was Dorrance, has advisee or some such, but I don't know. I think they're because they end up in a non-religious place by the way, right? So, if you get to the end of that book, where they end up basically,
Saying craftsmanship, craft is the solution to re-injecting sacredness in a secular World. They so they do not end up with saying what we need is religion or stoicism or particular philosophy end up saying craft is partially our savior because when you're trying to do something at a high level, you have a rigid framework of value that. If you're a wheel right? Some wood is better than others. Regardless of what other system you've created is just an external reality. This would is better than that would and it's a way to actually get
Firmament, so they end up saying you should focus on basically your work or crab and like a taste and quality and it's actually maybe not that far from her Sam is so maybe. Yeah, I think it's
really interesting point. Yeah, baby, they ended up converging. I mean, it's also a very not to paint with too broad a brush, but having lived in Japan, and having gone to school there and speaking, and reading, and writing Japanese. I feel like I have some credibility to say that it's all. It's also a very
regen Panini's or a very prevalent sort of Japanese sentiment and predisposition is to focus on these sort of meticulous.
Attention to detail, within craft, as a means of creating the sacred, whether you look at the Tea Ceremony, you look at Q double, which is the Japanese archery. There are many, many different sort of instantiations, if that's the right word of this. Throughout the culture, which is by and large, not always, but by and large can be experienced through a secular or religious lens in Japan. Japan's of
An example. I can't remember the exact expression. It's in Japanese some doing, a terrible job of mangling a translation here, but it's something along the lines of We Are.
Buddhists when we're born Christian, when we get married and Shinto when we die, I might actually have it in the exact opposite but you know, Shinto and were born Christian, when were married and Buddhist when we die, but with comes to mind for me, when looking at all of these different approaches to trying to check the box of contemplation or matters of the soul, is that? And I'd love to hear
You think of this because there's no right and wrong. How would I prove this? Is that humans really do not like the discomfort of uncertainty in the Paradox of choice presented by a life that is largely messy and outside of our control. And therefore we want Frameworks and rules so that we constrain the universe of things that we need to think about. Does that make sense? So yeah, as such something
Like the Ten Commandments very helpful, right? And having strict rules for what you can say, eat or not. Eat are very helpful in some ways. It just removes certain territories of life that you need to think about. Or at least you have some reassurance that you don't need to worry about. And at the same time there's part of me that thinks well religion is fantastic for that and I did not grow up.
Judges, I've been exposed to a lot of religion and honestly very often. I have extreme Envy of people with strong religious conviction for precisely that reason, right X. I just feel like I'm trying to David Foster Wallace my way through life, and it's really fucking hard. And can be very least for me, destabilizing just to have this universe of infinite options and potential decision making at the same time. I think. Well, if we are
Are accepting religion because it is this pervasive not to make it bad, almost Universal. Instinct of humankind, which it seems to be like myth-making not saying that's what religion is, but meaning-making through stories and religion in some fashion, really seems to be an evolved Instinct of some type. But we could also say, without certain constraints. There are other impulses humans have, right.
That we constrain and so I don't even, I know I'm going on and on a bit here, but it's these are some of the questions that, you know, remain with me as I continue to explore. In my case. I think I've sort of
Past the point of no return with respect to a specific denomination of religion. I just I don't expect that. I will be able to for a million reasons get there. So looking at the Alternatives, these are some of the questions that I end up pondering. I mean, if you are talking to someone, let's say you're talking to students who are in a similar position. Maybe they had a really terrible experience.
Being brought up in a religious household or perhaps just for any number of reasons. They're just not going to end up at religion. Are there other ways you would suggest? They explore because you said philosophy. But philosophy is so broad, right? I mean, you could just go and walk into a philosophy department at any University and man, you've got, you do have a paradox of choice situation on your hands. If you're an undergrad and going to like this topology 101 and kind of getting walked through it. That's fine.
But if you're trying to use philosophy to help figure out your life and starting from scratch. Do you have any secular recommendations for folks? Any other recommendations are
thought, I just want to throw one one idea into the mix. It's a comedy in some theological circles, but I think the author Karen Armstrong makes this argument very well in her book. The Case for God, she is actually not religious Affiliated. She used to be a nun and had a bad experience and left.
The
Catholic church, but just as magisterial book called the case for God and long story short. She said we don't understand Religion Today and by today, she means after the enlightenment because we think about it, as the ascent to empirically validated truths to be religious means that here's this thing that this happened, this person did this and I agree that this happened in this is true, but I don't quote unquote believe that or what have you and her all arguments. Like, through all the history of religion. It's actually a commitment to action and is after you do
The action that the Insight comes that you start by doing the things and then later that gains you Revelation, that's where you actually start to gain insight and understanding. You don't start with, okay. I think this is right like some empirically validated thing. Like I think gravity is right? And so now I can be all on board with it. And that was a really interesting take I thought was really interesting. We're not as used to it now because we're used to world after Descartes where it's all about. We're in our head doing rationality. So like okay religion, like any other a philosophy. We have to work our way up.
Wouldn't believe it and then we can go off and do it and you know, some religions are better about that than others. I think the Jewish tradition doesn't care so much about what's going on in your head, do these things and then you'll have Revelation, which is like, through experience acting as if don't overthink this this God, Yahweh and you got to do this and don't eat that and do that. And you need to family's very important, blah, blah, blah, you do this stuff and over time, you then, you deepen your understanding of the what she calls the ineffable things. You can't even put into words anyway, so, in her mind, all of religion is
Trying to basically get intimations of the ineffable through action and we think about it too much. Like here's a alternative to my history book and I think this is right or not, which is interesting. And I think it's like a really is one of these Minds. I don't know what to do with it. I just think it's a really interesting point and I've been just trying to get people to read her because I think that's a really cool book and is underappreciated philosophy. Can do you write a lot of philosophies complicated? I think this is why, you know, our mutual friend, Ryan, holiday is really doing well right now is because he's making stoicism accessible.
And I know he's very influenced by you in that work. And you've done a lot to make stoicism accessible, and that is done a lot of good for people. I think also committing to communities of character seems to help people. So okay, people are very committed to their role in the military. It's a community of character community in, which there are certain aspects of character that are underlined and emphasized and they're sort of a structure. Their people get this through other types of causes or volunteerism where you're committed to a community that actually tries to.
Of true to certain characteristics elements of character. They think are important. I think that can get you there too. But I'm really taken by that Armstrong idea of ACT. First Insight second. Yeah. It's get out there and start doing it. Yeah,
it's a quote. I don't have the attribution, but I think about it often, which is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than, to think your way into a new way of acting. And what you say, also brings up for me.
Memories from several trips to the Middle East. I've spent a decent amount of time, leads to end. What I've heard more than once from both Jews. And Muslims is, you would hope for us to find more common ground because in our religions, and I say this as a non Jew and a non-muslim, so, forgive me if anyone out there, if I get this wrong, but we believe in action, like what you do matters, what you believe is really secondary what you do?
Otters. And that's, at least, you know, they would contrast that with some other religions were like, what, you believe matters. First. You can do all the worst things in the world
and
believe certain things and then you are saved. Those are fundamentally very, very different. Right? And I don't, I don't have a particular perspective to add there, but it is a contrast and these are things that I will obviously continue to think on because I find precisely for maybe
Of the reasons that you already mentioned, the Persistence of in the endurance and durability of religion, to be fascinating, even if I disagree with any of the tenants of say all religions, the fact that it is. So persistent is very, very interesting. Right? Like, are we evolutionarily programmed to create have adhere to religion in the same way? That birds are programmed to build.
Yes, I don't know. Maybe it seems entirely possible. I'm going to take a super hard left. Turn on topic shift if that's okay with you because I promised it. So segueing from religion and finding meaning and contemplation. Let's talk about digital minimalism for a second. So, I would love to hear you expand on your suggestion of people doing a 30-day digital, minimalism experiment. Where one, removes optional.
Jeez, I appreciate the congruence. We're making here between the Islamic and Jewish understanding of the meaning of the world in life. And also my 30-day declutter. These are all basically the same. We're all kind of the same ontological
category here, tomato tomahto, you know, we're all going the same direction. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but we got yeah. Yeah, but the
profits and also, you know, 30-day declutter all those. Now In fairness if you have let's just
say stocks on your iPhone.
Twitter push notifications and everything else just giving you a psycho-emotional death by a thousand paper cuts. How do you expect to find Ultimate meaning in life? It's going to be tough. It's going to make it an uphill battle. That's my tempted. Tying it together. All right. So so let's let's talk about this this suggestion, this experiment potential. And what that might look like for people and feel free to obviously add.
Anything that you would like, but this is something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very very interested in considering doing
the 30-day declutter is at the core of my philosophy of digital minimalism. So this was my take on. What do we do about the fact that starting around 2016 people became very uneasy about their phones in a way that they weren't in 2014. There was this flip that switch to we're at some point. We
Is, I'm looking at this thing too much. Like, this is a problem. We got, we got uneasy and I could tell very precisely where that happened. Just based on reactions to my own work, when it's switched from, you're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're crazy. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. It happened in like a very quick period where my social media skepticism in particular really switched. And so my approach to it was it can't start with the habits in the tactics, right? You can't start with like, let me get right to setting filters and turning off notifications.
Nations and not having my phone in my bedroom and putting my phone into grayscale and moving my icons onto the back screen of my iPhone. That doesn't work. You're going to end up back where you were and so digital. Minimalism by contrast. Was this humanist philosophy? Where it says. No, you got to figure out what you're all about, what you really care about and what you want to do and then work backwards and say what text supports that and that's how you choose, what tech you use in your personal life. And what rules you put around that you start with what's important to me and then you put the text.
That's much more sustainable. But how do you figure out this question? Like, how do you get that insight into? What do I really want to do? What's important to me? When you already have all that distraction? That's for the declutter came in. And so I said, take 30 days where you don't use social media. You don't stream online videos. The only podcast you listen to is Tim and mines and everyone else you stop listening. So no video games. No online news. That's very influenced by you and your low information diet, for example, and you experiment, and you reflect, and
You think about life and go for walks and join things and ride your bike and hang out with friends without sending them messages on a glowing, bitmap screen and you figure out what you're all about. And then at the end of the 30 days, you say, what do I want to do? And so, I had that idea, I mentioned it to my newsletter, because I was working on this book because in the early days and I said, does anyone want to try this? And my thought was, this is a big ask, so maybe seven people would say yes. And my plan was that's great. I will follow these seven people and see how
Goes and right like pretty long. Profiles of them. It'll be good for the book 1600. People came back and said, yeah, I'm doing really get through that idea that I was going to follow everyone. 1600 people did it. One of the people who's doing? It was the roommate of a New York Times Reporter for the New York Times was covering the declutter, like it became a whole thing. I got hundreds and hundreds of reports back from people about their experience at what worked and what did it but the main takeaway was it is much more effective. If you want to tame the technology in your personal life, if you want to.
Tame that if you're working backwards from first principles of this is what I want to do with my life. How can Tech help? It's incredibly sustainable. If you instead say I'm unhappy with all the tech I'm using now. So let me try to put in rules that use it less. That's incredibly non-sustainable. You're almost certainly going to go back to where you were before.
So if people want to give this a shot, which they do,
well, I mean beyond the, the obvious of buying the book, I ended up writing obvious, of course, she start with. Yeah, and a copy for each of your friends, because it's easier.
Them to read it. That you two have to explain
it. Once you've done that, it's actually straight forward.
So, literally what I say is just I call them optional personal Technologies and I want to draw a really clear line here. This is really about your personal life. I've written other books about email and slack and technology in the working world. That's a whole other issue and it seems similar. But there's different issues. Underlying it. So therefore different solutions, but I'm talking about the stuff you do outside of work that largely speaking. Has you looking at your phone you take a break from them from 30 days if it's a dual-use technology like I mainly
This for personal reasons, but there's some reason I need to use it then you put up fences. So if you like, I don't want to text message but my daughter uses text messaging to tell me when she needs to be picked up from practice. You put up a fence and say, well I'll still do that. But I'm not going to participate in text change with my friends for the 30 days. So you can set the rules how you want to set the rules. And then, the only key thing is you go through 30 days, be very active. So in that experiment, that people who treated this like a detox, and I hate that
The application of that term, the technology. I think it's a complete misappropriation of that term. Who people who tried to just white-knuckle it and say, yes. I'm just not going to use these Technologies for 30 days and just by not using them. Something positive will happen. They never made it 30 days, but the people who are like, I will now be very aggressive about reflection and experimentation trying new things going places. Going to the library, buying a bike, joining a running club reading books going on long walks. They're the ones who really kept with it. And then at the end of the 30 days, you literally,
Doubt a code. Here is the tech I use and the rules by which I use it. I'm going to use Instagram because I'm an artist, but the only way I'm going to use it is on my computer. The only people I'm going to follow are these 10 artists that really inspire me and I have a glass of wine and look at their latest post on Friday evening. And it's the only interaction I have with that service. You get specific. I'm using this for this reason, here's how I use it. And then your, you've reset. You've married condos your digital closet. You took everything out. You only put back in the stuff, you cared about, and
And
you go for it wine on Friday for an Instagram. Scroll through 10, inspiring artist does sound like it would spark Joy. So thank you for conda. She's the tiniest woman. I've maybe ever met in my life. She was on the podcast. 100 years ago, actually interviewed her in Japan and she's the
most
perfect porcelain skin I've ever seen on any human, really? May. In fact be an alien, very sweet.
Very organized.
Reorganized alien do. So. She's very organized a lie,
but they've really you really discouraging if this hyper Advanced alien civilization showed up and they're really, really fucking
disorient couldn't figure things out you like,
no, we thought we had with. Oh, we had so much Clarity to look forward to and it sounds like from your description that the people who approach
This type of digital minimalism experiment as one of subtraction. And that's their focus. They fail. And those who view it, as an experiment with new additions or substitutes to kind of
crowd out. Default
Tech behaviors are the ones who end up benefiting most, is that a fair description. We're
good at humans to committing the things that are positive. Like that's very
Motivating for us were bad at trying to avoid things that are negative. It's very bad at for us to be like, I think I use Instagram too much. I'm going to try to use it. Less is like that doesn't is a very compatible with our wiring. But on the other hand, you like I have this vision of my life that I'd really positive, and it makes me feel good. I'm really into it. Oh, and by the way, that's a vision in which I don't use, Instagram is way more effective.
Do you still use in? This could be a dead end and we can just cut it. If so, do you still use a shutdown ritual?
When you go to your computer, you do. All right. Could you please describe for folks what the shutdown ritual
is, at the end of your work day, the end of your work day you go through and you close use the David Allen term all the open Loops. So okay. Let me make sure there's nothing. I miss there's not like an email. I had to answer that was very urgent that I forgot about you. Look at your weekly plan in your calendar. What's going on tomorrow? I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Okay. My plan makes sense. You look at your task list. I didn't forget to do something today. That was very urgent.
All right. I'm good to stop working. And then you have to do some sort of demonstrative ritual at that point to indicate that you did all those checks. So back in the early days on my blog. The thing to be in my readers always talked about doing was actually saying the phrase schedule, shutdown, Complete because it's absurd, right? Like it's a weird absurd thing. But the whole idea was then later on when your monkey brain, turns on is like, work work work. I'm sure we're missing things, right? Like we do.
So instead of having to go back and say I have to now have a whole conversation with my monkey brain about well, let me look at my calendar and I did this, I did that you can short-circuit all of that and say I said the Absurd phrase, I would not have any other time in my life. Have said that phrase if I hadn't actually gone through all the steps of making sure there's nothing open. So I don't need to get into it. I said the phrase, I know I'm. Okay. And when people would do this, it would take about a week or two and it would significantly reduce that evening or morning working. Xiety. We
Sounds like I'm sure we're forgetting something else. Let's go over the email that we sent to was that the wrong thing to send and you can just say, I said the stupid thing and I would never have said that stupid thing is like I haven't shot it down. It look I created it because I needed it as a grad student. I created it and it took on a life of its own. There's a lot of people out there, looking left, looking right, making sure they're alone and then under their breath, going scheduled, shutdown, complete
schedule, shutdown complete. That is so fantastic. Just great.
Eight. Well Cal
this has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for taking time. I don't want to end it. Prematurely. I want to, of course, ask is there anything else that you would like to share? I'm in. No rush. Is there any type of closing comments requests for the audience? Anything you'd like to point people to anything at all that you would like to say or ask before we want to a
close. Now that's been great. I love the territory recovered.
Awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have show notes links to everything. All the resources to all of Cal's books, including deep work, digital, minimalism and his latest a world without email will also link to a number of his New Yorker pieces to the Deep questions podcast, and you can find him online not on any social media platforms, but
But at Cal Newport, CA L +, ew, po RT.com, and until next time, be safe experiment,
often,
and thanks for tuning in schedule. Shutdown complete.
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