Cal Newport: The Secrets of Slow Productivity

hello and welcome back to Deep dive the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs academics creators authors and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love what you're about to hear is a wonderful if I say so myself conversation between me and the amazing Cal Newport this was the first time Cal and I were meeting in real life we've been internet buddies for a while uh we have blured each other's books have we blured each other yep we have blurbed each other's books and he has recently released an absolute Bang of a book called slow productivity the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout in this conversation we talk about the concept of deep work we talk about productivity principles that overwhelmed people can use to apply to their life not just if you're an entrepreneur but also if you have a normal corporate day job or if you're a student for example and we talk a lot about how the concepts of slow productivity can help us have more of a chill relationship with life but also weirdly be more productive because we're not trying to do all of this stuff and be super overwhelmed with all the things that we're doing but instead taking a lower more relaxed approach to meaningful accomplishment anyway I hope you enjoy this interview with Cal neport as much as I did Cal neport welcome to the podcast hey it's good to see you we meet in person for the first time I know I feel like we've been talking for a long time we've done each other's shows but uh for the first time been following your blog since like 2012 uh Adventure studying all all the stuff oh that's an Insider reference right there yeah I love it 2012 is kind of recent though right because that thing goes all the way back to 2007 so you could get the real oh yeah you the old yeah I think I trolled through about catalog to figure out has Cal said anything like 20 years ago that I can make a YouTube video about like students today may not have heard of so I've I've done the the trolling through the archives I'll tell you what's interesting about that though by the way is so when that blog started it was all student advice because the books I wrote early on were for students in my memory was oh for years that blog uh was student advice right and then like eventually as I got closer to my first non-student book in 2012 it shifted over I went back recently to read the archive it student advice for like a year I didn't realize how early I began talking about things like follow your passion is bad advice what's going on with careers deep work I didn't have that term I called it hard Focus back then it was a lot earlier than I thought so so I guess I had sort of moved on from the student stuff uh my mind had moved on earlier than I realized because you know I didn't actually publicly move on in my books for years later so it was an interesting surprise to go back um revisiting a bit of an old classic why is following your passion bad advice oh man wrote a whole book about this yeah yeah we we've we've done a whole video about it as well yeah well now it's the big thing I think a lot of people talk about it the latest is I think Scott Galloway has been talking about this in his new book and Mark juen talked about this uh so let me just set the context though like why I was writing about that was I was finishing up academic work right so I gone to grad school got my PhD was doing the a postto which is like the holding pattern before you go on the academic job market right I had this thought if I was ever going to understand what leads people to really love their work this would be the the highest leverage point in my life to figure that out because if I go on this academic route that the momentum was going towards that's it that's job for life right it's like okay I I want to make sure I really understand this question of how people love their work so it that's what motivated the book so I look into the question the first answer that comes up everywhere back then at least was follow your passion right so I look into that like okay so why do we think this is true the whole thing is nonsense right we we think this is some wisdom that you know Plato wrote about and then you know Thomas aquinus then talked about and the founding fathers and it's this old piece of advice no if you go back and look at the emology the phrase follow your passion is from the early 1990s oh wow okay it's like a very new idea right this was not the way we thought about careers I was the first generation because I I went through school in the 90s graduated went to college in like 2000 right I was the first generation to be told this so it's not ancient advice right in fact ancient advice is much more different about how to actually build a life of meaning or do work of meaning right so the advice was new so I looked at a little further do we have scientific evidence that says yeah when you match a pre-existing inclination with your occupation your happier no none of that research exists what does exist if you study the research literature on job satisfaction is way more more General traits like do I have autonomy do I have a sense of Mastery in my work am I connected to other people in my work do I feel like my work is important and none of these have to do with matching your job to a really specific passion so then I said okay why is everyone giving this advice and so I started tracking down the backstories of famous people who had famously said Follow Your Passion nine times out of 10 it's not what they did right they stumbled into whatever they ended up doing and it trans formed into a passion so all this evidence came together and I said this is nonsense passion is great you don't start with it you're probably not wired for a particular job that happens to exist in the 21st century knowledge economy there's probably not a gene that you inherited that said you were meant to be a brand manager for like an athletic apparel company based out of whatever right uh so that's not that's not how you end up passion about your work you cultivate passion and and the more I looked into it the more it became clear uh you good at something as you get better at something you get more control over your life and your career and then you got to take that control for a spin and that's when you really begin crafting your working life over time into something that really resonates right so the passion is cultivated the passion is grown you want to end up passionate about your work but if you're 22 and saying let me figure out now what I'm supposed to do and if I just figure that out and match that to my job I'll be happy from here on out it's a Disney fairy tale what about natural inclinations in the sense that you know uh Visionary versus operator or you know systems people versus big idea people you know that sort of idea where does that fit into this into this thing around well it matters right uh because ultimately what you're trying to do is if you get good at something you get control so you want to say what advantages do I already have uh pushing me towards getting good at something right so if you've already been training for something well let's keep that in mind because I've already done a lot of work for this if you feel like you have an inclination towards a certain type typ of thing you're very technical okay it's probably going to be easier for you to get really good at something in a technical field right maybe you have some sort of uh family connection to whatever hey let's not ignore that right I mean this whatever is going to get me quicker towards being good at something that's valuable uh is what I want to care about so what I often say it's about lowering the threshold right so Follow Your Passion the threshold is find your one true passion and if you miss you're screwed right I'm learn to threshold to there's a lot of things you could probably cultivate into uh a really passionate professional life there's a lot of things not everything for sure right but there's probably a lot of things the the hard part is not finding one of those things it's what you do once you choose it it's the work you do for the next 10 years so you know I'm not throwing a dart at a job listing board and saying I guess that's what I'm going to do but I'm also not super fedding that if I don't make this Choice exactly right I'm going to be in trouble if it's like this seems interesting to me I have an inclination for this it looks like there would be a lot of flexibility and opportunities if I got good at this be like that's good enough that's good enough now let's do the hard work of actually cultivating passion here nice okay so um yeah so the first book of yours I read was so good they can't can't ignore you and very much vibed with the message and then the next book of yours I read was deep work yeah um where it's it seems like so many people that that word has really seeped into the world and do you have a sense of how many people know that you originated that word versus it's just part of English vocabulary now oh that's a good question I mean that was my goal for sure is I wanted that that piece of vocabulary to spread because my thought was more important than any particular piece of advice was just people separating deep work from non- Deep work and like once you recognize deep workk is very important then people can kind of figure out oh I'm not doing a lot about this how do I do more of this what's happening in my job I mean I give advice in that book obviously but the variety of what people are actually doing is much greater than that so like that was my goal I don't know how many people associate it with me it shows up in weird places there's a menu somewhere in Microsoft Outlook where it's it's not a deep work option but there's a little explanation for like a focus mode option and it says to support deep work so it's kind of floating around in there I don't know if I haven't got my royalty check on that yet uh I do hear people say it I people often attributed to me I mean here's the thing about that book um it came out quiet right like I published that book super disappointed it it just it didn't have a lot of uh Buzz around it when it came out they had lowered my advance for that book versus so good they can't ignore you because like so good they can't ignore you didn't do great at the time uh and so they had lowered the advance the book came out I I was I was thinking because I I didn't understand publishing back then right so what I knew was I was like this is a killer idea so why is this not being promoted everywhere and spread everywhere and you know my agent sat me down and was like that's not how it works it's what did your last book do like that's what's going to matter and your last book didn't take off right away so like they're not going to put as much into this and because I was really upset I had a friend who his family went to pick it up from a bookstore they're not even carrying it on publication week right I was like I'm kind of down with this and then quietly in the background at some point they're like you know this is kind of selling never on a bestseller list has never been on a bestseller list like this is just kind of selling oh it's still kind of selling oh then more people were talking about it and then more people were inviting me to come on their podcast and it was just this really interesting Slow Burn where there was no one point where I realized like oh this book is doing really well but I look back now that thing's closing in on like two million copies oh nice yeah it's just it's been out there without ever having been on a bestseller list yeah yeah and I imagine the people who have read the book are like a a zillion X lower than the people who use the word and know what the word means that's probably true yeah you know the the most interesting person I heard use it was on the Tim Ferris podcast years ago Jamie Fox I I'm sure he has no idea who I am or that I wrote it but I was like okay my work here is done so um being able to cultivate time for deep focused work this is something I struggle with yeah you and I are vaguely in similar sort of careers sort of you've got the academic thing going I sort of have the business thing I guess on the side which it keeps occupied some percentage of our time yeah really I guess one thing I often think is oh man I wish I had more time in my life for deep work yeah um any any tips for what you know about me and this this career that that we're both in yeah maybe a slower definition of productivity see what I did there I'm connecting it I'm connecting it back to my work I mean I think to me and this is the research that kind of win this slow productivity uh overload is the the the key villain here right so like every active project that you're working on is going to necessarily bring with it overhead right like we have to talk about it we have to have meetings about it we have to have emails about it which isn't bad like projects require collaboration I'm more and more realized the problem then is when we aggregate too many of those projects because all that overhead adds up right so if there's six different active projects going on it's really really difficult to find time for deep work because that's six projects worth of administrative overhead that all just overlap now right and it's all all competing for the same time so I've really never found a better General solution than reducing the number of things that I'm working on yeah which which I'm like you I mean I I have so many interesting ideas and opportunities and so I don't know if you do this I go cyclical right so I'll I'll have a bunch of ideas I'll start doing things and then I get really overloaded like this is not good I can't do deep work anymore and then I really scale back and then I get bored and then I start like adding things back in So my last overload was pandemic right so like pandemic hits I start to get kind of in a entrepreneurial hustle mode because look I'm a professor and a writer right uh in those early months of the pandemic it was are the University's going to shut down like I mean it would they were we have to freeze parts of your pay because you know the money wasn't coming in and then at the same time there's all these rumors that the publishing industry was going to start climing back uh advances and like slashing and and that you know Barnes & Noble was going to go out of business and all this type of stuff and so I went into a mode of I got to get more irons in the fire I gotta whatever and then you fast forward a year and a half and I'm like oh no oh like I have too much I can't the overhead so that's the killer the projects are awesome it's the overhead that comes with the projects that that adds up so you either reduce the number of projects or uh you find a way with the projects you have you have to be really careful about controlling that admin overhead like this is when we talk about it this is the processes for like where the information goes like you have to liberate those Pro those those projects from just send me a message when you need something let's just have a ad hoc back and forth communication to figure things out so you either have to get super structured or you have to simplify yeah yeah yeah is uh there was a time I think last year before your book had come out uh you had done a casual episode on Tim Ferris I mean to the degree that any episode on Tim F is casual but it's like the book hadn't quite come out and you were like exploring the idea of slow slow productivity yeah and you mentioned this the this overhead thing and it it sort of clicked something in me where where I realized kind of like in in in physics you know like parallel versus series circuits it's like you assume a parallel circuit is actually better because like oh if I have these three things than doing all through at the same time yeah the whole like consistency thing you know I thought that the best way to write a book is work on it a little bit each day yeah and if you work on the book a little bit each day and work on your YouTube videos a little bit each day and work on the business a little bit each day surely everything gets done yeah no it doesn't like basically zero gets done and instead what I found super helpful was doing things in series rather than parallel Yep this week I'm just going to intensely focus on just the book and then I'm going to forget about it and then next week is I'm going to Bach some YouTube videos and then next week I'm going to work on the product and then go back to the book yeah and even that it was sort of felt annoying because I what I really wanted to do was I'm just going to not make YouTube videos until I finish this book yeah but then the business would have died and so it's like I I've been trying over time to figure out what is the absolute minimum well what's what what is the minimum number of the maximum number of projects that I have to have going at any one time yeah and how do I just limit it to those things so once I do one thing then I move on to another Well actually that's that's a really good strategy I was actually just talking about something like this the event I was at before this because I was talking to actually a corporate crowd um who had a lot of work they they tended to have a lot of work put on their plate that they couldn't say no to yeah so it's an interesting case so what do we do about that and what I was advising they do is they said okay so you have this list of things you have to do uh write them down now let's put at the head of the list a a small section that we call Active it's like okay these are the things I'm actively working on right now everything else let's sort and call that waiting Y and what you're going to tell everyone and what you're going to do is only work on the active things right and that means like that's what you're sending emails about having meetings about if it's not on the active list you're not you're not dealing with it and as you finish an active thing you can pull something else from the waiting list to have something new so you only have one to three active things right uh and I said look this works really well because uh you're only generating admin overhead from a small number of things so you've agreed to all these things but you've you've neutralized the admin overhead also be super transparent about this I told him put it in a Google doc and show everybody here's your thing it's position seven and like as soon as it gets pulled in the active I will let you know I'm like I'm all in on this right now like call me this is what I'm doing this week like let's get into it like let's get this done like people know you have your act together and so then they ask like well what about we have really big projects sometimes like it's going to take a whole year and the answer is yeah you have to break it into these smaller things and use these smaller chunks with the same method I think that's what you were doing right and it's not right it's not great in the sense that it's not what your mind wants to do because it's not really the right way is what you said and by right way I mean the human brain has evolved right is probably I obsessed about this book till it's done I'm obsessed with making these YouTube videos until like the season is over or whatever like that's probably the right way to do it but taking a chunk one chunk at a time and just doing that chunk that's sort of like the best compromise because at the very least during that week you're not in the impossible micro situation of having to jump back and forth between 10 things and because it's just impossible yeah uh the macro switching is still frustrating yeah but at least the work gets done but yes that's a little I mean I feel the same way I mean all I want to do when I write is just write and I can get away with about three months of that I take the Summers so like I can do about three months of just writing and nothing else but I need more than three months to to finish a book so like I'm happy for three months of my book writing yeah how how are you thinking of that in relation to your podcast now and I guess the the the YouTube channel which seems to be blowing up yeah so the podcast gets a half day a week oh that was the was the the the agreement I made with myself when I finally started a podcast in in 2020 was it gets a half day a week so to develop it it's going to be slow slow productivity it's going to be slow because I have to figure out what I'm doing you know get good at what I'm doing first before I can do something else and if I want to if I want to add more it has to fit within a half week right so for me that meant it starts simpler um and then I finally could make enough money from advertisements to have a producer and now the producer can take these things off my plate late so now I can spend more time on that and then finally we're like okay we can we want to do video but it's got to fit within a half day a week okay how are we going to do this well we're going to have to set up this video rig and here's the people who are going to work on it and here's the pipeline and I don't ever want to see a video editing piece of software or anything ever right it it we have this pipeline figured out um and it's we we can't do X Y or Z for video which would be better for the YouTube channel because that would take too much time so what we can do is take the video straight from the podcast and put it out there and then over time we're like you know YouTube doesn't really love that it's like okay we're able to bring on someone now who can work on the video produced by the podcast and figure out how to like where to start and what thumbnail to put on but all of it was slow because the podcast couldn't get more than a half day a week so I treat the podcast more like a service obligation as opposed to uh a one-time project I'm trying to do and I I treat those two things differently because I'm always going to be doing the podcast so now I have to really contain it and understand it and control its footprint so that it cannot expand beyond that footprint but like a book chapter is different it's like I got to get this done it's best that I just focus focus on this as hard as I can till it's finished yeah nice yeah I've landed on a similar conclusion with my YouTube channel in that it gets one day a week yeah so fascinating yeah so most Wednesdays except today where where it's tomorrow so tomorrow is filming day all day yeah where Tintin our producer will come in in the morning at 9: a.m with a coffee and we'll chat [ __ ] for about an hour and then we'll film a video and and the video will be prepped there and then he will he will have rocked up with some tit and thumbnail ideas we may have some research that a researcher has done but broadly I'll sit down with a title that's given to me and I'm like okay how would I teach this topic yeah and then I draw some stuff on a whiteboard or whatever and then I hit record and I talk yeah then we go out for lunch and we come back and we do another video and we get two videos done in a day and it's a really fun day it's fairly chill yeah and the YouTube channel is is like still growing with with that method this is the opposite of Mr Beast oh yeah yeah he's like I'm going to spend the next month building some crazy thing I by the way I love the same day prep I do the same thing right I think there's a lot of energy in it yeah it's like like I vaguely have an idea of like here's a topic we're going to do but yeah I come in I go to my studio and it's like let's prep it takes like 90 minutes you know my my producer pulls the questions and stuff like that and but yeah I love the energy of let's figure out what we're going to say o this is good press play like let's let's like write it with it okay but it pro I'm assuming it took you I mean you you've probably evolved this whole process over time right like someone if they were new to making YouTube videos couldn't jump straight into this process I'm assuming you figured out what's the pipeline like who needs to edit what what type of things work what prep matters what prep has been a waste of time it's that like sort of evolution I'm assuming we've run the entire gamut all the way from me spending five days seven days a week working on YouTube videos and word for word writing scripts bullet points what's the difference what was the difference for your channel between seven days a week and bullet point scripts and the one day a week two videos a week you're doing now um basically none this is this is kind of this is kind of the key Point yeah this is kind of the key point is uh yeah activity doesn't by default alchemize into results right this the thing like I get this question a lot in our in our YouTuber Academy where people are like okay you know only saying make one video a week but what if I spend more time making higher quality videos isn't that better and I'm like yes in the yes that's true if more time actually leads to a better quality video which is like you know our highest performing one one of our highest performing videos of all time we put out about a month ago and I had a conversation at a friend's birthday party with a dude who was asking me some questions about how to get rich yeah the following day I thought hm let me talk about this on camera I hit record no prep boom we got a million views in like a week and I was like what yeah zero prep and videos that we painstakingly prepared for six months with a whole producer and whole research team have gotten a fraction of the views yeah there's just like no Rhyme or Reason to yeah activity and outcome well it's what I like about I don't know if it's your YouTube Academy or maybe some the videos you did about like how to be a professional or just be a YouTuber what I liked I was watching that what I like is how much of it is um yeah you have to train how to be like how to be on camera you got to get just practice it's you know it's not the like here you're gonna come up with like the magic idea and then you're guaranteed to succeed it's like no it takes time it's you got you got to keep doing things but things that take time that you have to keep doing are not conducive with overload right like a lot of things this reminds me of Steve Martin's Memoir right his born standing up his which is very influential to me uh it's where I got the term so good they can't ignore you for that the book about don't follow your passion that's a Steve Martin quote right oh when is that is that when someone asked him how do I get an agent or some [ __ ] like that like Charlie Rose Charlie Rose asked Steve Martin like what advice do you not like being asked about or whatever and he said the thing everyone asked me is how do I get ahead in the entertainment industry and everyone thinks I'm going to tell them like here's how you get the right age in or here's how you pick the next project he says no what I always tell them and they don't want to hear it is be so good they can't ignore you that's Steve Martin Charlie Rose 2007 right it's like this this like classic quote um and he his book I reread it recently 10 years right I actually had a whole chapter in my book I cut but just sort of indulgently because I like Steve Martin I I wrote a really long sort of story of his rise and how did he become the biggest comedian in the world it took about 10 years um and you know he talks about in the book that he was diligent and what he means by Dil was not just doing the work but saying no to the other things would get in the way of the work but when you're doing that type of push like it's going to take me years to master this but the rewards are going to be great there is no reason to be overloaded because you can't be overloaded for 10 years you can't like uh do the comedy five times faster you can't do I'm GNA do five shows a night instead of one like this stuff takes time right like what's often relentlessness is needed for things but relentlessness is not about it's not super stress stressful it doesn't make you super busy it's this uh ability to return I'm just going to do this again and again and again bring in feedback adjust try to do better take another swing no one day looks super hard what's hard is that I did this for the last five years and on the other end of that I'm a really good comedian on the other end of that I figured out how to broadcast and finally found an angle that's like really working for me on YouTube like none of that can be forced right you can't avoid the hard work but the hard work o can't be compressed and I think a lot of people now want to compress the hard work like can I trade uh get after it be hard like let's just go forward can I trade that type of energy to speed the stuff up and it it doesn't work that way yeah yeah this is where I I keep on flip flopping because you know for us just doing YouTube one day a week has has worked for you doing the podcast half a day a week has worked but for me trying to write for 3 hours each morning to work on the book didn't work nearly as well as sending myself to a random Airbnb in Wales and just like cranking it out the first draft in like a week yeah and just thinking okay it's going to be [ __ ] but it's just going to at least I've got the 50,000 words on a page you know that kind of idea how how do you balance the I guess doing things reg I guess consistently over time with these bursts of intensity yeah but I mean I think these are the same things just different scale right so so uh for a YouTube video right you want to have a serendipitous idea you need to hold that idea in your head manipulate it and figure out like how am I going to turn this into a script for a video that's going to be like 15 minutes long right so you can do that in a few hours a book it's 75 80,000 words right and you're trying to okay how do I pull together a lot of ideas and make them make sense and build a consistent thing uh that takes a long time to work through and that's why it makes more sense to like sit down and you have to really it's just going to take longer to work it through I mean a book is just much bigger than a YouTube video so I think it's the same principle that play nice what I do because I can't it take I I I'm a slow writer just in I mean I I write fast but I write slow in the sense that I the New Yorker kind of ruined me for this but wordcraft is very important to me like the Rhythm and sounds of sentences so I what I have to do is make my chapters pretty they're pretty self-contained like the chapter has to be my unit because I can't go away and write a whole draft of my book I just it would be too many months um and I just can't get away from the other things that like my university is going to make me do so you'll notice in my books often the chapters are they're long and they have like an arc and they're kind of self-contained because like that I can go away with and like I can do 7,000 words you know and like that I can I can get obsessed so I think the time require so that requires like a week or two a YouTube video requires half a day a full book requires a month right I think it's a scaling law yeah that's good and as as you were saying that I was also thinking around you know how we talked about how every new project has an administrative cost it also has has a startup cost like trying to work on the book for two hours and and then doing other things and then coming back the following day to it takes like half an hour at least for me to try and read through what I wrote yesterday figure out where was I in my research find the 18 zillion tabs and my scrier documents to see to sort of load it up into my Ram yeah and then be able to work on it by which time half an hour is already gone oh yeah it takes forever yeah yeah well like a YouTube video uh because it's it's completely from scratch you don't have to load a bunch of stuff up in fact what you're trying to do is like encounter the world fresh and have a serendipitous idea of like o this hits me like you almost want to be mind like water open like that's how I often do it I'm like what hits me and you're right it's kind of Hit or Miss right because sometimes it works sometimes sometimes it doesn't but the other thing I spend a lot of time doing like when I write books is I treat the the idea creation process like here's the here's the framework for this book here are the ideas um here's the pieces of this idea right so like slow productivity you know how do I understand where the problem came from what are my principles you know that I will spend an inord amount of time try to get macr structure the macro structure yeah I mean I will send like I'm in the early stages of a new book idea right now that I'm I'm not really talking about yet but like I like to work on the ideas of a new book when I'm publicizing a past book so I can just sort of get out of my head about what's going on and be like no there's something else coming um I have spent probably 50 hours so far just outline just outlining ideas not even book outlines idea outlines right um because I just this isn't quite right this works okay how is this fit to hear so when it comes time for me to write now I really can focus on a chapter because I know like what this chapter is about and how it fits into the broader thing and so I don't have to load up the entire framework of all the ideas I'm trying to write and make sure it all fits together um I have that working before I write any words and then that allows me be like okay so how do I then write a chapter on this piece of the puzzle that's really good and then that's that's like a smaller scale for me nice that's really good oh by the way quick thing in case you are interested in starting and or growing and or monetizing a YouTube channel then you might like to check out my part-time YouTuber Academy it is a course that has dozens and dozens of hours of content in it along with templates and worksheets and resources that basically open source absolutely everything that me and my team have learned about growing my YouTube channel and also this podcast YouTube channel over the last 7 plus years so you can check that out at academy. al.com that'll be linked Down Below in the video description and the show notes as well feel free to check out the parttime YouTuber Academy when I read Morgan hell's psychology of money it's like 20 chapters each are the length of a short blog post yeah and that was I was like oh how nice must it be to be able to write a book where you've got 20 chapters each that of the length of a short blog post he sold he sold a couple copies of that book too I understand that are all like selfcontained with really interesting stories it's really good I felt good listening to an audible cuz he you know it didn't take long to get through I was like Wow and like a handful of ideas stuck with me I'm like wow why did I spend all this time trying to architect a whole freaking 70,000 word thing when actually had I just chunked it down a little bit more and thought of it as self-contained ideas almost like YouTube videos maybe things might have worked better yeah yeah he he's thee of the game I had that same thought once when I read I don't know if you know jiren lenir sort of uh he's a techn Critic computer scientist invented VR interesting guy right brilliant guy um uh but I remember reading and he just has like ideas right I remember reading one of his books when I was working on maybe a world without email and he's like all these ideas I looked in the back and like there's no footnotes I was like oh I didn't know you could do that he's just like look guys I have ideas and I'm just going to give you here if you look at my books because I'm an academic I mean it's like laboriously in noted it's all blinded notes so it doesn't get in the way of the reading but it's like a big chunk of the back and it's inotes there's footnote I got this from here but some sources disagree with this or whatever his techno idea books he just rock and rolls he's like I don't know something like this is right I like I didn't know you could do that and I bet he wrote those books he could write those they're brilliant because he's a smart guy probably spends like a month just like you know smart and just like rocks Rock and rolls and like writes this thing or whatever yeah there something around you know a question that I I often ask is uh what would this look like if it were fun and I and I didn't ask that question enough of myself when I was writing my book because I I thought oh it's it's a book it's a big deal it has to be a thing it's like you know I vaguely have a somewhat academic background so I want to make sure I cite every freaking source for everything and like that citation is a bit dodgy because that study was a bit dodgy but you worry people are going to everyone worries this the people are going to come after after you for this no one cares no car you're convinced that like all these all these professors are going to like pull their pipe out and be like uh uh uh I don't know about this citation right here and like some sort of alarm's going to go off and no one cares there are stuff people get upset about but it's never the citations yeah it's like I don't like the word productivities in your title which is yeah I'm sure something we both dealt with oh yeah exactly I I kind of flip-flopped between different like over the over the last like four years like especially during the pandemic there was a very an productivity wave yeah and well initially there was a very Pro productivity wave then there became a very anti- productivity wave yeah so the time we were thinking about titles we like do we not have the word productivity in it because people don't like the word how how did you decide to lean into the word productivity well this I I mean this is the phrase I like right I think this is right and I think this could stick I think it I think it describes right what I'm trying to do and I'm actually following the framework of the slow movements in general here so like I think it's appropriate there's slow food there's slow cities uh and so I think you know for the broader audience it's the right I think the term is self-explanatory in a way I think it's the right thing they do the sort of more Elite media did not like this term no really oh yeah yeah how's it uh they just were not happy because I don't know it I don't know if you have the same experience but the the people who are unhappy about the book are they're like we're unhappy with the word productivity um and here's like the acceptable way to talk about it which is essentially uh productivity is a construction of capitalist narratives and we have to like take down capitalism if you're willing to make that critique we're willing to like take you as a serious think thinker if you're not we are not going to be happy so it's interesting I definitely got I definitely got some of that how do you personally find ways to make writing fun I mean writing is my number one thing yeah I mean I've been I've done it my entire adult life it's my that's my art form that's my you know the thing I admire the thing I want to do it's it's my sport if I was a professional athlete like I so I've just always done it I started in University you know I I'd been a good writer in school and knew it was hard and I went to University and said the one thing this is true I said to myself the one thing you cannot do when you're here is become a writer it's like too hard anything else but do not become a writer so in about a year I started writing right I didn't listen I tried to become an athlete actually right so I uh was rowing crew um and was like doing well at that I like this is great I was like I'll be like a like a dock and it's like fun like you know hang out with all of these because I'm not I'm not you know crew is not like a big thing in the states except for at you know like the ivy Le schools and I I was just from like a public school but I went to an Ivy League school where they had the boat houses and the ratas I was like this is great this is what I assume College people do is they row boats and stuff and I developed a heart condition uh completely idiopathic or um you know just was there congenital I guess would be the ter is that you're the doctor right uh you were born it's just what you were born with it yeah um so you would probably an atrial flutter so yeah like a rapid tardia right and it just out of nowhere later in the year just exercise induced uh that's annoying yeah right so I couldn't row anymore yeah um and like what am I going to do like I'll write okay and the next year I started writing right so that and I've made peace with it being really hard um at first I was just you know I'm going to do this even though it's hard I was my in University was my mindset was um just do it and do more I was writing for the paper I was writing for The Humor Magazine and I was like I'm just going to outright everyone just through like effort yeah if we have a magazine issue coming out I'm gonna give you five pieces they're going to be good and they're going to be whatever um and then over time I like okay I'm starting to enjoy this and like it and now I see it as like a craft I see as like an art form um you know I've written a bunch of books I get to do it for the New Yorker which is like a dream of mine like this is really hard writing you know and I don't dread it at all um I just like it being hard so I just got used to it it's like the athlete that like after a while likes the hard training because they know this is what I do and this is part of like performing on the field and it gets there okay CU I don't feel that way about writing yeah and so I'm kind of thinking I mean I do sort of I do feel that way about doing like uh chill YouTube videos where I can do the bullet point thing like that feels very alive for me yeah I feel like I yeah I come alive when someone poses a question be like how do I stop procrastinating and I'm like but you've been doing that for a long time right like you've been doing it goes back to the beginning of the conversation like you've cultivated a passion for that over time oh yeah I was I wasn't very good at it or really enjoyed it initially yeah back to like your initial here's how to like prepare for the medical exam videos it's not like you finish that we're like this is my calling like like but but like you're just a perfect example of like you you passion follows you doing something not you start with your passion I mean I've been writing for a long time I I signed with my agent when I was 20 years old how how old are you now 41 oh D yeah so I've been writing and I signed my first book deal right after I turned 21 like a few months after that right so I've been writing professionally now for two decades damn okay yeah so I've been doing it for a long time yeah you know good to know because I'm sort of comparing I'm like man I really don't enjoy writing as much as as much as K does but you've been doing it for five times longer so okay where um what are some of your favorite stories around this idea slow productivity for people who maybe haven't read the book on because it's really good well and there are a lot of stories what I did and I should preface this as long as we're talking about writing like a writing decision I made in this book is uh there's two things I decided not to do in this book just because I've done it before and I wanted to try something different right so I decided um not for the most part not to focus on contemporary examples of knowledge work organizations or individuals and say uh look what they're doing here this is interesting yeah um also I wasn't going the studies route yep right researchers from University of Michigan said that you know in a control group I was like okay I don't want to do that either um what I did instead and this this was the slow movement inspiration is I went back and I looked at the stories what I call traditional knowledge workers who were people who used their mind to create value um but did it in times past with huge flexibility and autonomy all right why did I care about knowled we're talking Galileo we're talking Mary cury we're talking Jane Austin right why am I looking at these knowledge workers that don't work in office and don't deal with email don't because the fact that they had a lot of flexibility and autonomy meant they could experiment and I said okay let me see what they gravitated towards like when you said you have patronage you can all that matters is how good the stuff you produce you figure out how to do it what do they gravitate towards right that's where I identified the key principles of slow productivity and then because I've just written about technology knowledge work for a long time I said can I adapt these Timeless principles to a 21st century job where you have a slack handle an email address and like the reality of modern work and then I adapt those principles so the stories are of like Timeless figures in the past the advice is like needle accurate for I have exactly this job you know in a modern company and I'm dealing with this Dynamic for with my yeah I found it really um engaging in a way that most non-fiction self-help books rarely are because I was I was like oh I didn't know this about Jane Austin or like John MC or like Galileo or cool it's like oh it it sort of made me imagine like oh how nice it would be to you know go to The Meadows and just sort of lie on the Park Bench thinking for a seven days my thought if like trigger that response and then follow it with and here's how you could kind of simulate that same effect in your actual life right now I thought that would be like an interesting pairing but I'll give you an example though so like the Jane Austin example is a good one right um because I thought this was a really interesting story so you know Jane Austin the novelist um there's lore about her right there's this lore that Jane would write surreptitiously while she was in like the sitting room and when people would come like visitors or whatever she had a a creaky hinge on the door when they would hear that Creek that would warn her like let me hide what I'm working on so it was like this story of her like fitting in work like wherever she could like and then I fit it in whenever I had these moments and like that's how she wrote her books right and everyone told this story uh Virginia wolf references this in a room of Room of One's Own um Mason Curry tells the story and daily rituals like it's been around it turns out like I'm looking into this like it's all completely made up right it was her nephew James wrote a biography of her decades after she died and basically just made a lot of stuff up that like he thought would help the story of his aunt and it would be interesting uh but now there's more recent biographies that look at primary sources that's not at all what happened um Jane was too busy to write and was super frustrated about it she had these ideas but they had so much going on she could not not make progress on them and it was like a huge source of frustration in her life she was not fitting in the writing into little Open Spaces um she didn't have the Open Water to get things done later in her life uh her father dies her her mom her sister and a family friend are like we're tapping out of this whole busy life and the social scene and all this type of stuff we doing and they move into a cottage that her brother owned uh he had inherited land and they had a c they moved in this Cottage and just no more no more active life and they free time for the first time Jane writes all five of her famous books in like two years not by by squeezing it into little free time in a busy life but by becoming much less busy right so I thought this was a really cool story so like what's the principle there is like well okay um sometimes to do something good you have to do a lot less right like uh good things require time and space and sometimes simplifying what's going on is what actually allows you to break through and do not pushing more stuff in well we can easily adapt this over to knowledge work like that goes back to like what we were talking about before I said yes to 10 projects as a knowledge worker that each have administrative overhead that's clogging up my schedule now I can't finish my proverbial novel if I cleaned out what I was working on you know worked on fewer things at the same time built my own version of Jane Austin's Chon Cottage now I can start finishing Emily in sense in Emma I should say in Sense and Sensibility right I could start making like actual progress on stuff that matters so it's like a Timeless principle and then we can give really tactical advice for leveraging it in a modern job what so I so a few hours ago I was I was I was teaching a live session for our our productivity lab and loads of people in the in the in the zoom chat were asking this thing of like cuz we were planning um you know the the the ideal week like blocking out what would your dream week look like and everyone's kind of realizing [ __ ] my dream week there are not enough hours in the week to do all of the things that I would like to do oh interesting so they were reacting that question by enumerating lots of different things they wanted they were like oh yeah you know you you know in my dream week I would have time for this and this and this and I'd also spend 10 to 20 hours a day on my hobbies and blah have time for the kids have time for the wife blah blah blah BL blah blah um and then they were like wait a minute there's like they just aren't enough hours in the day yeah and so I found myself saying that like yeah well you know you just need to do less and stuff but then they were like well easy for you to say you're a YouTuber you can do what you want what about those of us with the corporate job and so I wonder if what would you say to like the corporate employee who's like yeah but Kell I can't just not do these 10 things like we we've talked about how one of the strategies is this like Google doc showing active and what's passive are there any other things that you found helpful that corporate corporate workers have found in as as a way of reducing the amount of stuff that they're working on at one time yeah oh yeah there's a bunch of things you can do okay so like another thing is never give a hard yes or hard no in the room okay so your boss says uh hey look here's this important project I want you to work on can you do this for me don't say yes or no be like that sounds like really important that sounds um like a really high priority um I'll tell you what I I will go back like right away away and because I keep track of my time very carefully and I'll get right into my schedule right away and get right back to you about like when I can do this or how it's going to fit in now you bought yourself some time and you've established I'm very organized right and you've escaped the social pressure of I'm in the room and the hands on my shoulder and like what are you g to say yes or no and then a few hours later you can come back and be like uh you know look I take I I keep track of this stuff really carefully I have like four things like I'm actively working on it's eating up basically like most of the time honestly it would probably be like 6 weeks till enough of this stuff is clear that I could give this attention right so no I I I wouldn't be able to turn this around that is like an effective no because it's not in the room yeah uh you've established that you're very organized which is like gives you credibility in the conversation you've social proof the I I have this is my workload I'm not complaining I'm just being really like uh effective about organizing my time so that works well quotas work well there's a common type of thing you get asked to do and it's not something you can always say no to as a part your job but you get asked to do it way more than you have time to do have a quota like I do three of these a month I do five of these each quarter and so you say yes until you hit the quota and then you say I would love to do it these are important I do a quota of like three of these per month they already hit the quota so I can't do this one nice now they're in a position where if they're complaining all they can complain about is oh your quota is wrong you know like well maybe like your quota should be for but they're not going to do that like no look you you've thought about this or you do this like what what you're validating what they're afraid of is it like you're lazy and you don't want to do work and you're like I'm just going to say no to things I don't want to do things but like these type of things uh make a big difference another thing you can do schedule the time for your commitments on your calendar and it's there and now the time is blocked off and if something else comes in let me find time to do this and now you can just be super transparent with people like okay uh happy to do it uh I think this will take about 10 hours U I actually presch all my work on my calendar the next time I can get 10 hours in like reasonably large chunks is you know it's going be 3 or four weeks from now so I can do that in three or four weeks and take up that time so what what you're doing in that example is making your workload transparent making the reality of your all of these things are sort of making your workload transparent making your systems transparent uh this works right like you think your boss is a mustache twirler that's like I'm going to catch you and you know it's not the way it works people think their bosses are evil that um they they want to make your life hard and that they're looking for an excuse to fire you that's not the case first of all if you're good they stay up at night worried about you leaving the hardest thing in business you know this right is hiring good people right they are not looking for an excuse to fire you if you're good they're uh desperately afraid you're going to leave what does your boss really want from you then right what they want is for you to take stress away from them y so when they come to you with a thing y it's a source of stress for them that they have to keep track of this thing right now it's their responsibility they want that stress to go away if they know nothing about how you organize yourself if they know nothing about your workload um just giving you the project is not enough to take their stress away they still have to worry about it till you tell them it's done so what are they going to say do this right away because I want my stress to go away right away if you're organized you're showing them your queue you're showing them like where okay here's this takes this many hours here's when I have time I you you're giving them this type of information they're like of course he's going to get this done I trust them that also takes my stress away right away I don't need it done to tomorrow I need my stress to go away by tomorrow right so you can get away with a lot more than you think if you're really on your game and you're organized and you're not complaining and your whole focus is on like because I want to be super effective and I'm very realistic about my time so that I can do really good work you get away with a lot more than you think May that's great um that's that's golden advice um what sort of quotas or stuff have you got in your life so as an academic uh pure reviews is a big one right because you get more review requests you have time to do it's an important part of your service to your academic Community you can't say no to all reviews but you can't do all the reviews right program committees is another thing this is very like Insider baseball um book blurbs to some degree yeah like uh a pretty sort of tight quotas unless it's someone I already know um so I do pretty tight quotas on that uh I also have a lot of walls too like so there's quotas and there's walls right so quotas are all do some but not too many uh a lot of times you know especially in in like our typee of work you have to just wall off certain things even though you're like this could be good this could be interesting like I've had the wall off direct communication with my readers for example um I don't have a general purpose email address where you can just like email me and ask whatever I used to and I loved it but it's completely unsustainable and I don't know how to quoif that because it and so at at some point if it's the delus is too strong to quo toy you have to think about just Walling it off it's like I W that off and it was it was really hard I mean years ago I had to do this it was really hard because I really liked answering people's questions and now I do it I broadcast it on a podcast and now I answer six people's questions a week but you know 60 or 7,000 people will hear those answers and that's better than me answering 70 questions a week right the number of people who are getting information but like so sometimes you got to wall things off as well talks I don't know about I strongly quote a talks they don't like giving talks drives my speaking agent crazy like I'm doing a talk this fall already what are you talking about he's like do you realize like these other business authors they'll do like 50 talks a year do you realize I was like I just don't like it yeah nice um what does let's say the summer's coming up and you've got your half day cord for the podcast what does like a day in your life look like oh the summer is very specific for me right because I'm an academic at a research institution right um the way that works at one of these institutions is they don't pay you salary in the summer right they pay you 10 months salary uh and typically because what what you do is for the the summer months in your research grants part of what you ask for in the budget is salary for those two months so that's how if you're at a research institution that's how you get your your like full sort of salary that they they hired you at right uh I realized at some point like my books were doing well enough that I could just not take salary in those summer months not budget salary from the grants and actually just say these are mine um and you could absolutely do that right there's no hey it's summer like they're not paying the university has no expectations there's no Grant bearing organization that thinks are going to be doing anything the summer is actually mine so so I I take that really seriously um I call it summer so I have no uh administrative academic work for the most part in the summer because I'm not taking paycheck yeah right okay um and then I run what I call Summer hours so nothing can be scheduled on a calendar professionally on Monday or Friday right so I want Friday through Monday nice clean calendar right uh the things that can be sched on Tuesday Wednesday Thursday only in the afternoon so that's where like if because there stuff you know I I want to talk to people I want to do a podcast interview with someone you know I have meetings with people or whatever I I kind of consolidate it there um big push deep work Monday big push deep work Friday deep work half day Tuesday Wednesday Thursday weekend's completely off yeah so that's my summer hours which by the way is basically my dream schedule yeah if if I sound like my dream schedule as well doing your productivity lab exercise that's what I that is my dream schedule now I'm only able to do this uh and then the podcast is uh I have to figure out what I'm gonna do about it this summer it might be its own half day on Monday or Friday but maybe I really what I should do is take one of those Tuesday Wednesday Thursday meeting half days like all right let's take one of those for the podcast yeah Mee be two days yeah so I I also have Mondays and Fridays completely CED off yeah Wednesdays are filming days Tuesday mornings are team meetings and Thursday afternoon is any ad hoc thing that needs scheduling yeah which leaves Monday completely free Friday completely free Thursday morning completely free Tuesday afternoon somewhat completely free and Wednesday's filming day anyway which is my service obligation to my YouTube channel yeah um and that's nice oh one one difficulty I have is let's say the Monday is free or the Friday's free and someone wants to come on the podcast and it's someone that I kind of want to talk to and I I sort of know them a bit of a social obligation to get them on the podcast I would really it if it could fit into my Thursday afternoon slot but for whatever reason they're only London for like a certain day and I'm like you're you're looking at me really hard right now because we're recording right now we're recording right now category I love doing podcast in the evening because then it's like oh the workday is done we're just having a chat life is sometimes we get takeway Etc but I find that the amount of sort of yes but not hell yes starts to eat into the schedule yeah how how do you deal with this cuz I imagine you have a lot of yes but not like hell yes shouting from oh it's the podcast interview thing is hard specifically I guess I shouldn't use his name because we were talking off the air but I had this exact conversation with uh a major another major podcaster and and this is his big problem too like he really likes the way we're talking about structuring his days and his time but also his show is based on awesome guest yeah and there's like only to some degree can he fit like awesome guest into a certain time um I like your Solution by the way of like how do I make the guest interviews itself into something I really enjoy doing in the evening it's not stepping on it's not in the middle of the day in a way that's stepping on it um but yeah I mean look we all have our version of that I think right like for me it's it's not gonna be a podcast I don't do a lot of interviews M exception for you but know it's not really an interview show and kind of on purpose because it's that's a treadmill that's like complicated yeah but for me it's like interesting people in town for example like I used to struggle like I want to see this person I want to go like whatever and there's a while where I would be frustrated like this is stepping on the free point of the calendar and at some point I changed my mindset about that I was like no this is like the type of thing that your flexibility is rewarding you with it's like someone's in town who's really interesting and we can like go for a hike or whatever like go get drinks or something like that like that's actually like great that I can do that and so I I've been I've been trying to have that mindset shift for for those type of interruptions yeah same thing for going on pod I don't I do a fair number of podcasts just always like just as a background drum beat but when I'm not doing book publicity I'm really like kind of picky I just like I don't know if you say sit in your schedule and and sort of take up time but for me it'll be if like um because a lot of the big podcasts I've done typically the first time I've done them has been randomly over the transom right so not we pitched them because a book was out it's just you know whatever Sam Harris wants you to come on and talk about and this is when he records or something yeah it's like great and that yeah and I'm like okay yeah I'll do it yeah and like psychologically I try not to be too much like okay you're stepping on my schedule because in in the what's the point of having this schedule it's so that like you don't feel busy you don't feel rushed your life is interesting you can work on stuff you care about this is like a fun thing to do yeah yeah know I've I've kind of landed on the same general idea there were times in the past where someone would be in town for a coffee and and I'd be like okay well you know my my lunch hour should really be one to two because I've got this thing at two and I'm like I I just block off one to 300 p.m. as like my lunch break nice cuzz if cuz if anyone is in town like 2 hours is a good amount of time for thing yeah or if there's like time in the day and like my significant other is you know needs some emotional support or whatever and I will try to the best of of my ability to give that emotional support um in the past I used to be like ah it's kind of interrupting the work day but now I'm like actually the whole point of doing this flexibility entrepreneur thing is so that I can interrupt my workday to lend some emotional support so what do you do in that that one to 3:00 lunch hour if nothing comes up oh then I'll just go for lunch and like take a walk or something yeah take a walk listen to do some deep work like yes reality transerfing is a book I've had on my desk bookshelf for years finally I have a spare hour to sit down and actually I love this idea well I'll tell you another thing I do this with another mindset shift is I had to be very careful about um not shifting professional productivity mindsets over to personal life right because I have three kids they're all like a school age now right so um there's a lot of stuff yeah right and I had that there's a moment where I was like hm the schedule's too clut because I have these beautiful summer hour schedules or whatever and it's like wait a second it's like baseball and then picking up this kid and doing this and doing that and then I this mindset shift of like no this is this is the good stuff right this is where like the flexibility of your work is great because like I can go see the thing at the school and actually having a whole evening like shuttling kids around and doing various activities is like that's what you want to be doing in your evening right like that's good clutter so I like this let's use a term uh like good clutter or productive clutter versus clutter destructive clutter like good schedu clutter is like you can stuff that is important can show up and you can make room for it there's a the there's a phrase I've been thinking about for a few years um people often asking how do you cope with distractions I'm like there are welcome distractions and unwelcome distractions so when I was at University I would leave my door propped open all the time because a welcome distraction is a friend you know coming up the stairs looking the head in and having a chat like that's the point yeah and you're like yeah maybe it reduces my productivity by 3% because I was interrupted and F and blah blah blah BL but the point is the point of university is not that I got an extra 3% on my exam it's that I had those connections yeah so that's a welcome distraction similarly when I have kids I hope you know I I've I've heard from from from parents that like you know when the kid knocks on your office door and wants to tell you something you like oh got my work but it's the kid yeah and they always are glad that they made made the decision to prioritize the kid in that context that should be our our metric then like the metric for you have the right definition of productivity of the right approach to work is that like if the kid knocks on your door it's not stressful right because if you're pseudo productivity busy out the gills having to put out the fires of 10 projects worth of administrative overhead it is stressful if there's any Interruption because you're like this house of cards is barely staying together I'm just like putting water on this fire and it jumps over here whereas if you're slowing down your definition of productivity I'm not doing too much I'm I don't have too much on my plate today I'm giving things a lot of time for it to unfold and develop I'm not too crowded then when someone the kid knocks on the door like it's not a big deal you know I'm I'm working on my book right now yeah come in let's talk so like maybe that's demetric how stressed do you get by like a innocuous distraction if you if you're getting super stressed about that your productivity notion is probably off off base yeah one one area where I currently get stressed by this is recently I've realized I should take my health more seriously so I schedule in 7: a.m. gym sessions with a personal trainer and so if a dinner with friends is running late till like 11:00 p.m. I'm like oh no this eating it into the sleep oh [ __ ] oh no you're going to be good at being a parent this is the whole thing that's the whole thing is like what time is that movie start I got to wake up what is you talking about um how do you approach this like slow productivity stuff while at the same okay one of my issues is I'm like there's still part of me that feels this if I'm not cranking out the YouTube videos at the right time then I might become irrelevant or if I'm not doing more and more book promo then you know we've only sold X number of copies and the publisher says if sell 3x number of copies then the book will take on a life of its own and maybe I should just push hard now so that I can chill out later yeah and then it gets into this sort of seed of productivity pushing pushing pushing mode again yeah where's later though is the problem well you know because in later there's going to be something else to yeah I'm a big fan of like sustainable hard work yeah like I'm trying to do something I think about books this way I'm taking a great swing at this like I want to give a good time I want to try to write something I'm proud of I'm going to give it good attention um and then it's done it's done it's go out I'll give it a good push we'll see what it does and maybe it'll do really great and maybe it won't and we'll sort of tip our cap and then we'll sort of move on to the next one you know um because I you again I started giving advice to college kids and this was like the number one source of stress for for for University students was this idea of um I'm going to grind it out here because that'll get me to whatever medical school to this job in the law school and I'll be so happy with that accomplishment that'll be worth it but when you get there it's like well I got to grind it out here but then I'll be so happy to finish that because I'll get the great residency well okay I have to grind it out through the residency but then I'll get the great and it's it's endless right I mean I have a lot of friends who've gone through this like through the the law process right because I'm of an age where people my age are like becoming Partners in law firms right and that's like the final thing um and it's just been brutal and they get there and the work there is brutal as well like wait a second what what is the game we were playing here it's not when you get there they're like okay like here's your house on an island go have fun it's like you g to do this for the rest of your life uh yeah it's a dangerous mindset I mean I'm a big fan and like sometimes something needs like a big hard push right I mean you're like a movie director it's like you got to you got to go all in to make this movie but if you have control over the schedule like bookwriting you can say here's how long I need to write this book you can do it in a reasonable way right do it in a reasonable way nice yeah all right cal um I know you have to go because you have a dinner date with your wife which is the perfect reason to say goodbye here um thank you so much any potting wisdom for people who have listened this far look I mean I I think important thing is like when it comes to productivity you talk about productivity I talk about productivity uh if you're thinking about productivity Define your terms right like so much of the issues around this concept comes from different definitions of it right so never just use the word productivity by itself have a have a modifier feel good slow fast like whatever it is like you we need to get more specific when we talk about productivity what are we trying to do how do we do it how well is this technique act you know how well is this philosophy actually working um that's like half the work I'm trying to do with this book it's just saying here's what our current implicit definition of productivity really is a knowledge we're going to call it pseudo productivity let's just name it what it is let's define it let's see where it came from if you like it you can like it but once we see what it is maybe you're going to say that doesn't make a lot of sense let's seek out another alternative just naming things I think really matters right so there is no capital P productivity period done right there's philosophies and ideas of what productivity means to you um and how you go after it and so you got to be pretty specific about it and I think that's what we're starting to see now we're starting to see modifiers added to productivity which is like exactly where this conversation I think right now Needs to Go amazing ke thank you so much thanks for having me all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 21,843

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast

Id: oyI-HO7moKc

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024