How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time — Cal Newport & Tim Ferriss

and if that's all you're doing you're just building up this negative attitude towards work which I think by the way is a one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now in let's say Elite culture it's just an allout rejection of work itself like well any drive to do things is it's a it's a capitalist construction and the real thing to do is just do nothing yeah but that doesn't last and the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing they're striving really hard to make sure that there substacks in books about nothing or going to have a really big audience they're giving talks on it so you can't just focus on the doing less part you need the obsess over quality part and that's where you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create and that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living and so that's why I think it's to glue uh you have to do the other things but if you just do the other things you know you're going to end up doing quiet quitting Tik TOS or something like that you know it's not going to end up you're not going to end up where you want to be oh no purgatory [Music] let me ask you if you don't mind we'll just roll right into it does that work for you all right let's roll into it let's go unforced errors I mean that that should be basically a review of the last 10 years right I mean that could be the like the Walter isacon sort of biography of a generation un St and I feel this way in the sense that we're talking right now about things kind of horsing back around to many of the certainly some advantages but many disadvantages and trappings of say television right so despite our best efforts many of us seem to somehow get coralled into these unforced errors or Corral ourselves into unforced errors right I mean you could almost write a book called unforced errors the internet story it could just be about all of the ways we we wandered off of some of the central motivations of the internet in the places that made everyone but a small number of investors really unhappy uh but let's take what we were talking about just before because I think it's actually an example of a something that seems at first to be an unforced error in terms of our engagement with the internet which is going to be video Rising podcast shifting more towards television show style production I actually think in that example there is a good sign I think there's positive in there tell me the real unforced error that I think hit content creation was algorithms so the the shift of I am going to create content on behalf of a small number of large companies that will then curate for each individual user Facebook Instagram Twitter whatever they'll curate with algorithms streams of interesting information from this giant pool of information that people are creating uh this I think was a huge problem for Content quality podcast by contrast right so we come back to podcast is the opposite of the algorithm I mean one of the reasons why I was excited about this Medium as it arose is that there is no algorithms in it I mean a a podcast grows because a listener likes the podcast and tells another listener it's very similar to books in that way hey read this you should listen to this I growth is slow often with podcast but there is no counterveiling content curation for from an algorithm there's nothing you can do in a podcast episode that is going to make it go viral in the way that a tweet can or or an Instagram because you can't share them that way video I think is now inevitable just because visual is more interesting radio for example in the 1920s 1930s was a really well-developed technology radio shows were very good radios were costeffective radios were portable you could you could put them in a in a car they weren't too expensive and when TV came along it was much much more complicated it was more expensive the experience was squashed they had to stay between these really bright CLE lights on these small stages because of the limitations of the early lenses and detectors and it just ate radio's lunch because visual is really interesting so we can't help but watch when we have a chance to watch so I think this is where podcasting is going it's going to reinvent basically linear TV like it was at the Heyday of cable there's a lot of channels and you hear about a show hey have you heard about the show Mad Men is really good then people go and watch it M but I think that's actually net net positive because still what's driving this sort of podcast into the video podcast Revolution as long as it has to be quality which is what you have to fall back on when you don't have algorithms right I think it's a good counterveiling Force to social media so there might be a silver line in that particular movement let me bounce some thoughts off of you related to that so my feeling is that and I think you would agree with this the ecosystem and the Dynamics of the podcast World Chang changed very dramatically in the last 5 to 10 years the 10th year of the this podcast is coming up in April and I agree that at a certain critical mass it seems like podcasts and books shared a lot in common there were some fundamental differences in the sense that podcasting consuming audio was a secondary activity for most folks they were doing something else while they were listening whereas much harder to do that with a book at least in text format although we've seen the commensurate rise almost in exact tandem of audiobooks certainly with with podcasts asep as smart devices and Broadband become more ubiquitous I think when podcasts were on a volume basis similar to books in so much as let's just say there's 100,000 books published in the US per year through major Publishers I have no idea if that number is accurate but something like that let's just say a small handful of those make the bestseller lists those are used as shopping lists now now all of a sudden you have a fixed set of podcasts but then you have this longtail and people listen to them and they recommend them and so on similar I think now that you have millions of podcasts the discovery problem maybe it's similar to books on say Amazon but it seems to be that the the recommendations are now hinged on this very much kind of in some respects determining variable which is video so YouTube has always been a a huge asset I think Rogan was probably the first that I know of to really use clips and YouTube well as one of the world's largest search engines to drive consumption of audio but I think there are a couple of other factors like Tik Tok for for instance and the both kind of fear of Tik Tok as a competitor and then emulation of Tik Tok by Major platforms that has led to this divorce of long form and short form content right so for instance even for this podcast we've had clips that have with clear visual attribution everything in the description related to Tim feris show do 100 million views and they have translated exactly zero to longer form say content consumption so it's I I I don't think we are free of the algorithm I suppose is what I'm saying in the sense that there is still a word of mouth but I've noticed a tremendous change in the last handful of years as things get more and more algorithmically driven what and I feel like the big joke don't worry guys this isn't going to be all cynicism and Tim Ferris talking about the the glass half full with respect to podcasting on his podcast on my podcast I feel I feel like the big kind of cosmic joke for me is that if people are consuming podcasts long form podcasts as video by and large those are in background tabs or they're on a phone as they're listening to Spotify that is running video but they're listening to audio while they're in the car killing their cellular data or whatever so in a sense it's like you need the video to play the game you need the machine to recognize and value your video but in many many cases humans are not actually consuming this beautiful product that you're producing there are exceptions and there are some amazing cinematic experiences that get produced but the reason that I'm I'm delivering this uh sort of Scent of a Woman Hellfire and brimstone talk about formats is because this relates I think to a lot of what I would love to ask you about and I went back through our last conversation also and all the notes on that conversation because the reason I'm wearing this this goofy headset audio Technic which actually has great audio quality I'm shocked on some level that I didn't use this earlier because it clears up a lot of table space for my notes and so on is that it allows me to be mobile it allows me to stay true to one might call it the root document maybe the the initial intentions and reasons for choosing this medium in the first place that could be and probably will be to my commercial detriment I think it will hurt the growth of the podcast for me not to focus more on video however that begets all sorts of questions why is growth important why is a and C more important than the initial drivers that led you to adopt this Medium as your home base let's just say yeah so what are some of the for people who aren't familiar with you because a lot of people listening to this will be listening to you for the first time or at least on this podcast for the first time what are some of the ways that you have kind of pushed back against prevalent social behaviors social adoption technology adoption Etc just so folks have an idea and I have a thought I'm going to add on sure add away there is an idea here but let me set the stage right so so I'm a I'm a computer science Professor who also does a lot of writing about technology and the way it intersects with all parts of our lives our work our our life outside of work the way we we connect with each other in this world I do a lot of writing as a contributor to the New Yorker where I really explore those those ideas in depth in addition to my books I'm often thinking about this how do we work with technology I have a philosophy this is actually new since the last time I was on your show I I did New Yorker piece in late 2023 where I introduced this notion I called technos selectionism and I said this is really the way we should think about dealing with Technologies in our life but also in our organizations and our culture so at multiple scales is it's hard to predict in advance always the impact a new tool is going to have I I always give the example of going back and watching Steve Jobs keynote speech in 2007 when he's introducing the iPhone he doesn't even get to the internet features until 30 minutes into the speech I mean he was just jazzed that your iPod was going to be on the same thing as your phone and you wouldn't have to switch back and forth you had no way of predicting yeah 8 years later you're going to have for example a teenage Mental Health crisis so technos selectionism says be willing to actually aggressively step backwards be willing to say this looks interesting let me try this out oh no you know no no this is not matching what's really important to me so you're out of here right this I will do this I won't so being being more willing to both experiment and reject after the fact to move away from these narratives of uh techn progressivism right that says new technology is good and there are bumps along the way but you can't put this Genie back in the box and I say we can build all sorts of new boxes and that's probably the right way to go forward so in my own life for example what I used to be really known for was the fact that I never signed up for traditional social media so I never had a Facebook account or a Twitter account or an Instagram account and for a long time I was seen as essentially a crazy person I actually wrote about this in that New Yorker piece on no selectionism I wrote about my experience in 2016 riding a Time OP ED that said quit social media and how like the world fell down on me like this cannot stand this can't be it was like a glitch in The Matrix someone cannot be saying this in the pages of the New York Times the New York Times commissioned a response oped they brought someone in to write an oped two weeks later that went Point by point to my oped and said don't worry everyone you can ignore this everything's going to be fine this isn't right don't worry about case of a water landing assume the brace position it's going to be fine exactly you're going to be fine and and of course now you know within a couple years it's it's that's a very normal position you say oh I don't use Twitter and people say like good for you and move on with their life you know so so things do change so I come at things from those perspective what is the underlying value here if a technology or a way I'm using a technology is not serving that value then we can push back or change it which which is what you were doing we bring it back to the headset which as were joking before is going to be a metaphor for the the Deep life the headset you're wearing right now what that represents is you have a vision of what you want podcasting to be that does not require you for me for you right what like what you care about right now in your life that does not require you to rent one of these warehouses and build the big Sound Stage in the middle of the stage and and have the crew with the five camera set up or what have you that's technos selectionism I I want to put my Coda on the video thing though is that I don't think YouTube is future of video for podcast in fact YouTube and podcast don't play well together at all they really just don't most people are not successfully growing their podcast using YouTube unless it's really YouTube specified and so I think that mismatch is doing the impact of the YouTube algorithm on the podcast ecosystem because those audiences don't play well together I think the future of video for podcasting it's going to be on Smart TVs I think it'll probably be you know I sub cribe to this app okay so you think people will single task they'll watch it which by the way you know I was talking to our own YouTube guy and the reason why I'm on YouTube by the way is practice Yeah because I think video is going to be key YouTube itself right now it's not going to drive my podcast but I want to be used to this medium he was saying on a lot of big shows and I think he was giving me the numbers from Lex fredman Smart TVs will often be the number two or the number three most common device on which the podcast is consumed really generation yeah because if you think about it you can load the YouTube app on your smart TV yeah podcasters are now filming in highdef 4k and when you're watching you select a podcast it's not that different than going to Netflix and selecting a show it's watching TV yeah it takes up the whole show and they don't like the stuff that's on anyways so I think that's going to be the the future probably is you're going to have some app you're like okay I subscribed to this app it's the equivalent of a 2004 linear cable channel that you would have had on your menu and you know what it it it's a nice Netflix interface and it's it's you know Cal newport's latest shows and Tims and like Ryan holidays whatever like a group of people doing similar stuff it's a channel and you go through a horizontal kousol oh there's a new episode of whatever and you watch it on your screen I think podcasting is going to compete with streamers in cable because the overhead the key number used to be in cable dollar per hour of production cost and this is why Discovery Channel was the the profitable King of the first decade of the 2000s is that they got that down to something like $400,000 an hour which it was a minuscule cost per hour because they're doing these reality shows podcast you can get that down even with high production values another order of magnitude or more yeah about on10th the cost for like the super cinematic stuff as far as I one the cost of even the people with the $60,000 TRC casters for the three camera setups Etc so that's a bit of an aside but that's where I think this is who should be thinking about podcast I think like YouTube I don't like the YouTube algorithm it doesn't play well with podcast it's it's good for a few podc why do you say that because there are the anointed demigods of the YouTube podcast ecosystem right Lex fredman certainly Andrew huberman there certain names Jordan Peterson Gabor mate even for instance there's certain people who once they have been given the elixir of Life by the YouTube algorithm they could fart into a microphone for 10 minutes and get 3 million views yeah which is not to diminish what they do I think actually everyone I mentioned does uh has has produced some really spectacular content so it's it's not to minimize it in any way uh but why do you say it doesn't play nice because it seems like that is the primary arena in which many podcasts are trying to grow their I would say viewership because they're really not podcasts anymore in the sense that they're they're video first because the thumbnails and the salacious headlines and the clickbait and so on are all being sold visually right so I feel like it's more as you put it kind of competing on a TV menu using visual candy as a TV show like as a visual Charlie Rose versus as a podcast like it's almost a misnomer to consider them podcasts at this point for a lot of folks yeah I think that's true and but I think two things are going on here one I think it's less podcast just as a per capita basis less podcasts than we think that are seriously competing in that space I mean that's YouTube land but there's so many this whole middle class of podcasters by which I mean you're earning a Kevin Kelly thousand true fans middle class or above income that just aren't playing in that Arena and it's you know it's this is a it's a golf podcast it's a fitness podcast it's you know what have you or it's on video but it doesn't really matter I they have the cameras and younger people listen to it on the video but it's not like that's driving its growth huberman and Lex they're outliers in ways it's it's not useful to pursue I mean to pursue that is similar to being early in your TV career and saying well let's just do what Oprah is doing right she has she has a lot of listeners it's it's hard to replicate I think there's a self-reinforcing ecosystem already that they're all a part of also the length of their videos that tends to be favored by the algorithm if you go two or three hours that's and people actually watch it that's really favored by the algorithm and it's so extreme though it's it's like the only game in town chicken in the egg people like them yeah so they'll watch a full three-hour video and then the YouTube algum is like oh my God people are watching three hours that's a lot of time you we're going to really we're going to really push this but I don't know that most people most podcasts need YouTube but also even if you do it just doesn't work yeah it's really difficult YouTube's algorithm wants Mr Beast way more than it wants you know ezar Klein it's just the reality of what's going on with that yeah I mean I I think there are there are a bunch of open questions but I want to come back to the I'll attempt to come back to the 30,000 foot view with the technos selectionism I think it was which by the way folks if you're not aware the you may have even mentioned them in your piece I apologize I haven't read it but the Amish do something very similar like they do adopt new technology they're just very strict about how they approach it so the the first thing i' would say is if podcasts end up on Smart TVs there's a question about how they end up on Smart TVs presumably there's some platform or hardware company deciding on that and they might use YouTube as a proxy for who to choose as their content Partners just in terms of popularity right so it may indirectly still be a determinant YouTube that is of who gets placement on these otherwise you just run into the same Discovery problem that people experience right now which is like I want to find a great podcast well you can rely on the Spotify algorithm to recommend something similar but then you run into the issue of like I listened to one country song once and now I just get served hundreds of country songs every day like how I change my specifications but to to zoom out just on the technos selectionism side because I I I think you you mentioned something that's worth underscoring I think of new technology like I would think of new drugs in the sense that at one point in time for instance the lamide was considered a huge breakthrough and then lo and behold it has all these horrific side effects and birth defects and so on and then it was pulled back and and there were rules put in place and the FDA changes A and C and so on to make things safer there's no reason to treat technology any differently in my mind right drugs are a technology so it's sort of a subset but social media same same right wearing a headset that you where you have the illusion of depth perception but in reality looking at a screen that's less than a few inches from your eyes and so on there's just no real way to know what the long-term implications are which doesn't mean you become a lite but even living in Silicon Valley for 17 years I was sort of a a sharp edge adopter but not a Cutting Edge adopter right I never really took things on personally through self-experimentation or as an investor really if they were kind of first of their kind I always waited around a little bit and you can still be really early and catch the right waves even if you have a certain built-in delay and that's how I'm treating a lot of Technologies and also behaviors right like if Technologies are just and I'm not going to use a dictionary definition here but let's just say tools and quotation marks of various types which could be behaviors to accomplish a certain task or solve a certain problem right it could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite Mound but it could also be a certain type of behavior that you use right which is basically an algorithm right it's a recipe step by step L to get something done I really want to think about like what are and this is what makes the best investors in the world also in my opinion is they think about not just primary but like secondary and tertiary effects right it's kind of like the the character Loosely based on Peter teal in the first season of Silicon Valley who's like who is this Burger King and he runs through this whole thing on the sesame seeds and then it gets to the Locust and he's like the 30-year cycle is going to coincide right and the reason I mentioned that is if we think about for instance video I think many people who are adopting video have never been have never experienced what it is like to have widespread public recognition like visual recognition when they walk around on the street and so they're not familiar with that side of effect which people have experienced through other medium like television and I have to my own limited extent experience that I'm not Brad Pit or anything like that but I have certainly it is hard for a lot of people I know with popular podcasts that have any video component to like go hang out at a coffee shop they can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down and read a book because they'll get interrupted every 5 to 10 minutes if it's in any decently sized city in the US at least if they're US based podcasters and it's for that reason that I'm also kind of taking the technos selectionism slish approach where I'm like okay I can afford to wait this isn't true with everything but I think this ties into also slow productivity like I can afford to wait 6 months I can afford to wait 12 months and if I am and this I I'm giving you credit for this but it's certainly one of my my favorite in my case audio books born standing up right be so good they can't ignore you Steve Martin rule number one Daniel de Lewis was not on Tik Tok in between all of his movies making omelets or teaching people seven easy steps to Financial Freedom or what to do when Bitcoin crashes or he was working on his craft and getting so [ __ ] good that every few years he would just show up and win best actor and then disappear again um so so all right thank you for coming to my TED talk but let's come back to slow productivity so the new book I want to talk about this subtitle is the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout who doesn't want that the last time you were on this podcast the episode was published February 2022 and you you were telegraphing this a bit you were talking about slope productivity a bit and you were like well I'm thinking about making this book so I'm just curious to know process-wise if you'd indulge me what happened between then and now right because now you have a finished book and people can buy it and this is this is a maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your your primary projects right the things to say yes to because writing a book takes a lot of energy so like what happened between let's just say January 2022 and now we're recording January 2024 with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time well it's a good case study because I was testing the idea then so I I went back and actually pulled out this timeline I I think the first time I used the term slow productivity was maybe 2020 or 2021 right around there right before I came on your show the last time I was ready to ratchet up my testing of the concept so I could also develop it more so I wrote a New Yorker piece that January where the title was it's time to embrace slow productivity now the piece just had one idea of what would eventually become the full-blown philosophy of slow productivity and then I came on your show we talked about it some more then pretty soon after I was on your show I'm writing the book seriously I pulled together okay I think I really understand all the pieces so that's like a two-year ideation process you know I get the inspiration for the book in 20 2020 it's the the mix of the start of the pandemic and some stuff happening in my own life this is where I began playing with those ideas 20122 I'm still trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form later that summer I'm up you know up in New England writing I'm up actually writing the book this is Summer of 2022 summer of 2022 I would have handed this in in Spring of 2023 it's when I handed in my first manuscript good for you it's incredible well see I disappear part of my my methodology is I I I disappear in the summer you know I'm a professor so typically professors in the summer take what's called Summer salary you don't actually get paid by your University at a research institution you don't get paid in the summer they pay you for 10 months and then you can take on through grants summer salary to keep working on Research is what you're supposed to do and at some point I realize well you know I make money from writing books like I don't actually have to take a salary now is the university the one who's providing the grant or is it some independent Foundation or whatever it would be independent right so so I'm like a theoretical computer scientist applied mathematician so we'd get our money from the NSF for example I got him right National Science Foundation exactly yeah and I realized at some point after I got tenure I don't actually need that cell read like this is what the book Advance should be for and I began disappearing in the summer and really let's write let's really get ahead of steam and So within a month or two after being on your show I was beginning to seriously write that book and then it's about a 10-month process for me to get a manuscript done then you get about four or five months of editing and then it locks in so that locked in last summer last summer that book was finally locked in so I'm going to selfishly just ask you a couple of questions about writing for myself cuz I'm working on my First Book Project in six years seven years something like that oh oh excellent yeah yeah well I there are many reasons for it it was it's one of those things that just refuse to go away those one of those ideas I'm like okay this is just going to Ricochet around inside my skull indefinitely unless I let it out somehow so let's do it and I'm I'm excited about it I'm very excited about it I also want to and I keep saying this I've said this for years so I I'm calling [ __ ] on myself on some level get back into writing on the blog and in part because I feel I have more differentiation with that particular capacity not that I'm the best writer but there's a particular style of writing there's a particular way of deconstructing things that people at least some people seem to like right from the 10,000 true fans perspective whereas in the interview format podcast World there are a lot of very very good people with very high production quality so I feel like that that arena is becoming more of a a red ocean per se as opposed to a blue ocean so I'd like to experiment with doing more on the blog also just to reinforce something you said because the blog number one it's a platform that I own it's on open source it's WordPress and the sort of barrier to comment is a little higher which I like there's a little more friction in the process people just be like that's so [ __ ] dumb lolz you know on the blog there's more involved there is a little more process involved in terms of leaving comments so the signal tends to be higher it allows me to Workshop things also right quickly Workshop things and see how they land and I still think that for like mimic testing text is pretty hard to beat they're very different Laboratories text and and voice are very different laborator iies I think voice helps you to talk through whatever is percolating to develop ideas that you can then test really effectively via text if that makes any sense and uh so have two two questions for you the first is we in our last conversation when I interviewed you on the podcast talked about the Humor Magazine at Dartmouth and one of the main things that helped you not specific to that or I should say limited to that was that you're either writing for editors or writing for acceptance and rejection right so you had some feedback loop whereby you could improve your writing as it stands right now I don't really get I'm not going to get much of that from my readers God bless them right because it's not their role it's a heavy lift they're going to either like it or not like it and provide some feedback in the comments but in terms of becoming a better writer how would you approach that if you were me writing blog posts if I have a book I will have possibly an editor I will have friends read a chapter here there but how would you approach that because I would like to try to mimic say Seth Goden like short blog posts which I'm [ __ ] terrible at I tend to be very verbose which is why all my books are phone books so I want to really make a goal for myself to do short blog posts because that'll be more sustainable hopefully how would you how would you create that feedback because I want to get better yeah and I'm happy you're going back the writing because I mean I think you're right that it's a much harder skill and it's a much rarer skill I write constantly that's that's basically my Baseline for my career is I'm always writing now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces counting today and going back six weeks from today when we're recording I published three pieces in the New Yorker I'm just writing writing writing writing because I think that's the rare skill because you're right people can become good podcast interviewers like good enough it's pretty quick I mean people I don't know they with chaty PT if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup they can do it immediately yeah they can do it right give give me 10 questions in the style of Lex Friedman if he were to interview such and such a guest who happens to be my next guest and then you'll get 10 questions and you can finesse them and then yeah you have your iPad and you're ready to go and if you have on interesting people you're really just kind of getting out of the way and actually is an advantage so we have this whole new generation of podcasters who just don't say much and that turns out to actually work well you know anyways but writing's hard as anything writing is hard you know people can't you can't write without practice I mean you you've written what four or five phone books worth of books and blog published five the blog was going for a really long time right so I think that makes a lot of sense one idea I would have is particular stylistic targets that you're working with all right with with this post or for the next week or the next month I like what's happening in this writing over here this is resonating with me so my taste is saying this is good let me deconstruct that and try that in my my post like oh I like what's going on here with meter I like what's going on here with abstraction or story let me try that and this is what I did before I had a a steady you know edited gig is that I would deconstruct articles and try to practice particular things found from them it was all toolkit building and then the bigger the toolkit the more tools you have available so then you're working on a book chapter what have you and you can pull out the you know whatever the metaphorical equivalent of the Philips head screwdriver is here the saw there I think the regularity matters too but it's that taste issue and this is actually an idea that's in the new book The Slow productivity book because one of the principles is obsess over quality and if anything that becomes the core principle for slowing down I pulled that out yeah because in my notes it was on like page three or four and I was like okay this seems like the mother quality in a sense that allows for the birth of all these other qualities you can't be busy and phenetic and bouncing off the walls with a 100 projects if you're obsessed about doing something really well like it's incompatible with that now doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together but it is incompatible with being busy like Chris Nolan the director doesn't even own a smartphone he is just I'm making Oppenheimer and that's what I'm doing for the next three years and then when I'm done I'm going to go away for six months and just read that's what I do I cannot be on YouTube like you you're Daniel de Lewis example because when you obsess over quality like two things happen one you can't be busy because that gets in the way of actually getting really good at something and then two if you're doing something really well that actually gives you the autonomy to to push the other junk out of your life and slow down even more you know as you get better at something the more say you get over the way your life unfolds that's why you've been podcasting 10 years and you can say I'm not going to do this video thing right now yeah because you're really good at it right you have some autonomy to figure out how I actually want to do this I call that principle the glue it holds everything else together the glue is the quality first competency quality first obsess over quality mhm yeah because the other two principles are do fewer things things and work at a natural pace but if you're only doing those two things you've set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general it's like all I'm working all I'm looking about is like how do I do less I see work adversarially I want to have more variety in my pacing you're just you're you're sort of trying to get away from reduce or change work and if that's all you're doing you're just building up this negative attitude towards work which I think by the way is a one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now now in let's say Elite culture it's just an allout rejection of work itself like well any drive to do things is it's a it's a capitalist construction and the real thing to do is just do nothing yeah but that doesn't last and the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing they're striving really hard to make sure that their substacks in books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience they're giving talks on it so you can't just focus on the doing less part you need the obsess over quality part and that's where you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create and that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living and so that's why I think it's to glue uh you have to do the other things but if you just do the other things you know you're going to end up doing quiet quitting Tik toks or something like that you know it's not going to end up you're not going to end up where you want to be oh no Purgatory so returning to because this relates to the writing of slow productivity choosing to spend your entire summer working on this I'm dog with a bone with respect to the writing process so I will come back to that but not to bore everybody who is not a writer in the audience although by the way folks I'm talking about creative process and choosing projects so I want to talk about choosing to write slow productivity because wanting to or understanding the importance of say obsessing over quality which I think you would agree is the best promotion like rather than about all the different ways you can Market something like product first is a great marketing plan yep you still need to choose which thing to become great at because you could choose quite quitting Tik toks as your particular specialty not that there's anything wrong with that it's not for me but you chose instead to do other things so how do you choose to use the sort of metaphor I think it's probably apocryphal but the Stones the big rocks to put in your jar before the gravel and the sand how did you choose slow productivity why that versus the many other things you could do right because I presumably you get all sorts of speaking invites you could have just crammed a bunch of those into the summer and done done really well financially you could have done who knows what maybe if people emailing you about like film adaptations of this or who knows right you you have stuff that gets lobbed over the transom maybe you even have great or exciting ideas right 2: in the morning you're like oh God it'd be so cool if I did X at the end of the day you chose to focus on this why there's a general and a specific answer the general is writing is what I do yeah that is what I do I come up with ideas that I think are important and I put them in the writing with the best possible craft I'm not happy if I'm not writing so that's why I'm not giving 100 talks a year it's why I'm not releasing an app it's why you know you can't hire the Deep work academy Consultants or you you don't know how many times people have told me like we would give you any amount of money to like come to our company and like redesign our practices to be focused on deep work and less distracted by email and I'm like no I'm going to I'm going to write instead I wrote the book you guys can just buy a bunch of those yeah buy buy many many of those that try to replicate what they would pay but then this specifically that idea I spend years I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to to write a book about this is one of the skills I think is lost in the internet age because again going back let's tie this all to the algorithm that that surfaces something or that promotes something very different it's a volume game among other things right I want to put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm hits It's a format game it's also a lot of chasing Trends game you say okay what just took off two days ago on related channels now you're going to get 70 videos all doing the same thing it's a completely different way of thinking I think part of my secret sauce and the secret sauce for a lot of people it could be at least is really waiting to get started you know I wrote this years ago on our mutual friend the friend who introduced me to your work actually from Meet sethy way back when in his early blog I remember writing an article for him that said don't get started it was like my my advice because my thought was it's really hard to get a good idea and so like take your time and then the cultivate a good idea takes years and it's you have to write you're have to you know you're going to dedicate a lot of your life to it so really don't get started if you can at all stop if you can all hold back until you're really really sure about it and then people say yeah but I worried that I'm just going to procrastinate forever and in some sense it's like well then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work yeah but the solution to that is not just let's just go let's just like tweet this let's do this video let me jump over this let me start you know using generative AI you looking for if I crypto this thing just looking for some quick thing that you can connect and you got to just not want to get started until you can't help but get started and it's I think that's frustrating for a lot of the internet generation because it takes a really long time yeah so I do want the specific I mean you you did mention it I guess because you're a writer but that that not to go like it's Turtles all the way down but I will ask like how did you decide that you're a writer cuz that looking at your CV one might conclude yes he does a lot of writing but he's also a computer science theoretician and he's this and this and this and d da d d da so to say I am a writer is something that I think also many folks right now who are in any form of content would have a lot of trouble saying I AMX they might say I'm a YouTuber but usually it's like 15 hyphens yeah and therein lies many opportunities and also many Temptations to be resisted I would say that just a few observations the first is that as you're talking about you know don't get started it makes me think of Warren Buffett and the don't just do something stand there right like you don't need to make a 100,000 Investments you don't need to be a day trader like wait for the fat pitch like figure out what the fat pitch looks like figure out what your kind of zone of Genius is what is your advantage and I would say also like it seems to me like and I'm really putting together a question with a million semicolons here but you do get started but you're not overc committing to half-baked ideas right like you are exploring and experimenting and workshopping which is also as I think I might have mentioned another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts because if you look at say the 4-Hour Body the 4our body was workshopped for years before it ever came out just wasn't under that name the first blog post that ever went super mega viral on dig at the time di from Kevin Rose Kevin yep and perhaps a few others was from Geek to freak about gaining a bunch of muscle and the response to that it was what made me very interested in workshopping adjacent material to see if it would be similarly received and if I would enjoy it if I would be good at it Etc and so that was workshop for years that doesn't mean wasting time it means that by the time I decided to really commit resources the likelihood of success in my mind was I'm not going to say all but certain but it was as certain as I could possibly be I had already tested this for our work week was workshopped for I don't know six seven years in lectures right so how did you decide that you were a writer that you would identify that way because identifying that way is a story that enables you to then be very selective and focused in what you do it's a good question because I decided early I decided I was a writer when I was 20 and I became a professional when I was 21 so I signed with my agent when I was 20 and signed my first book deal right after I turned 21 so I came to it early uh because I was a a big reader and was verbally precocious right so it was it's going to be in the title of this podcast the glue of high quality and being verbally precocious verbally precocious and and literarily precocious I I suppose I mean it was like gifted and talented reading program people think you know the the Johns Hopkins Talent search the cty camps people think oh you probably went to one of those for math but I was invited for the creative writing one I went to college and I said as I went to college I'm not going to be a writer I just it's really hard writing's really hard so that's not what I'm going to do and I I was a walk- on under the crew team instead I had the right build for it like this is what I'm going to do I'm going to do Sports this is great was that lightweight or regular weight oh man yeah I believe it 160 lbs this guy growing at 100 there was a lot of sauna and weight cutting in that brutal brutal yeah I was the big guy I mean you know that from wrestling but I was the big guy that would cut down anyways and I may have t talked about this before on the show I'm not sure but I long and short of it I developed A congenital heart condition s a rapid heartbeat so I had to stop rowing and so I said maybe I'll see about riding and that's I started riding I don't think you mentioned this I didn't know that yeah I mean it was I was a pretty good rower actually it was you know a bunch of recruits on this freshman boat from prep schools and then it was like me and one other walk- on it just I was a middle distance Sprinter in high school I was to write build for it whatever so I was I was like I was like I could maybe make a go of this and had to stop it was just out of nowhere just all right I have a it's called an atrial flutter okay so I guess I I can't do this anymore and so then I said let me try I need some sort of activity I guess grudgingly grudgingly I'll try writing and and the very first thing I wrote was an oped about 9911 for the student newspaper you know a couple weeks after 911 and they were like and I started I started writing columns firm I got involved in The Humor Magazine after a year or so of that I was like oh maybe I I am good at writing and that's why I decid I'm going to write a book let's become a writer let me write a book and and that's what we talked about last time was figuring out how can a 21-year-old sell a book and it would have to be the right topic and we did all that but that's when I I declared but when it comes to your other part of this question which is how do you figure out what to work on I mean I I think you have two options and you can do both one option is to actually have like you did or I have a way of test driving idea so you know I use like you used to do my newsletter and my blog to test drive it the fact that you pointed out like you honed in on slow productivity as something you wanted to talk to me about was a really good signal okay this topic probably has legs so I do a lot of that so you're right if you read my newsletter I'm trying a lot of things most of which will never become a book yeah if you don't have that then the other option and this is what I think of as like the MFA option is you have to develop really good taste MFA meaning Masters in Fine Arts yeah so if you go back and I I did this in in my book I took an award for the pen himiway award for firsttime novelist I just chose the whatever year was most recent and here's the final list and I went through their bios like all but one had come through an MFA program and so what's going on there it's not to these MFA programs which are creative writing graduate programs They Don't Really teach you it's not instructive like here's how you do paragraphs or here's techniques you didn't know but it increases your taste meaning your ability to recognize what's good and what's not and what's possible with good things so that's the traditional option in sort of a pre- internet age is you get really discern learning about other people's work you read a lot and just know this is a good novel and this is not or you know I read a lot of New Yorker and I know what makes like a really good long form non-fiction journalist article and then you can apply that taste to your own work and be your own worst this isn't there yet this isn't there yet oh this is getting better so you either need a way to test what you're doing and the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago Andor you really have to put in the work to develop taste so you understand like what makes this good I'm not there yet but this is the closest thing I've done so far so let me go after this or I can see how good this is so I know I'm not going to try to publish this as a novel but I could probably do a short story over here taste can also become the way you do it but one way or the other you do need some sort of discernment function to figure out what ideas are worth pursuing because if you're just going off of inspiration in the moment I mean that's a huge crapshoot like you're really unlikely to be successful that way yeah and I'm also maybe this is just because I'm kudin and one of the old Muppets up in the balcony Mortimer but I think offline is incredibly uncrowded and absurdly valuable in the sense that if you're looking for real-time feedback like go go volunteer for 10 bucks an hour to teach a class at Learning Annex and see what sticks see what works see what's confusing like you're the feedback loop is so fast like you do that once a week for a month you're going you are going to know a lot I mean you're going to know more than if you had written a 100 blog posts by far in my opinion so I try to test things live and for people who might be curious people who test material tend to test material in a lot of different ways in my experience so if you listen to for instance my Jamie Fox episode from way back in the day 2015 it was podcast of the year at the time back when that was possible when they were when they were like oh only only a few thousand podcasts to choose from but he was even in that podcast working on material seeing what my response was and you can do that with non-fiction too just as a quick quick example of taste I'm I'm listening to a book right now which I've read excerpts of but it's called the power law by Sebastian malib and it's about venture capital he wrote a book also called more money than God which is non-fiction encyclopedic and beautifully written romp through the world of hedge funds which blew me away because he was he was very good at making the sort of esoteric very graspable similar to in some senses Michael Lewis but the power law book I know most of the content I lived in that world for a long time I know most of the history and still I was listening to it in the car yesterday I was like good God it's just so good like the writing and the timing that we've talked about before and uh Dave Barry right for like just like setting up the punchline and like ending the chapter on the right note where you're like oh that's so good it's just so so good the same way I felt about say Joe abber cromi in this fantasy Trilogy which starts with the blade itself where I was just like oh God it's so well architected right it's not just the pros but it is the pros as well so that that taste and building up that barometer being so important let me ask you on the topic of slow productivity could you give some examples I mean you mentioned Chris Nolan could you give some examples old and new of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity I was motivated by slow food as an example where they looked back to traditional Cuisines where where cultures had evolved over generation and generation like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy and and the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers so people who did things with their brain but not the normal 1950s and onward I'm in an office or working at a computer screen so like artists and philosophers scientists the the the original knowledge workers they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy we did today so I said great we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work because they had freedom and flexibility so we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the sort of modern life so a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers and so one of the early examples is you know Isaac Newton and I said okay we all know he wrote this great Masterwork the principia that has calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to to specify the laws of gravity right to give Celestial order to the way the the cosmos Works he wrote that thing over decades you know decades he would go and do other things and come back it wasn't this frantic push until it's done but no one remembers how long he spent working on that they're just like yeah that thing changed the way we understand the world Lyn manuell Miranda with his first play in The Heights the same way I I do his whole story it's a seven-year Odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play which wasn't very good to when it first goes onto a professional stage as pre- Bradway debut that's a seven-year period and he's working on it then he's not then he's working on it again and he's not we don't know about that now we're just like oh yeah his first play won a lot of Grammys and he did Hamilton you know Wikipedia you're like oh that was fast yeah you don't realize synopsis in one sentence his dad told him like when he left when he when he graduated from college his dad was like you really should go to law school you know he took a job as a substitute teacher he was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap Troop that called Love Supreme that would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows so if you zoomed in on a particular day in the almost decade that Lyn Mel Miranda was working on in the Heights you like man you're so lazy you're you're not even working on your thing like what's going on why aren't you getting after it why aren't you you know why aren't you crushing it uh because things take longer I use Georgia O'Keefe as an example of seasonality that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began say you know what in the Summers I'm going with Alfred stiglet we're going the Lake George and I'm going to sit there in a shanty that she she called it The Shanty it was an out building near the the lake I'm just going to paint and be inspired and then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff most productive years of her life by actually slowing down for a season every year her productivity exploded she became you know one of the most famous early modernists of that whole era of painting right so we see those examples well Murray Curry at the at the Pinnacle of about to discover in Pitch blin the substance she's studying about to isolate radioactivity and win her first of two Nobel prizes goes to France with her family on vacation for two months in the moment you're like what are you doing you got to be getting after you got to be crushing it but we don't see that now like yeah she was great she won two Nobel prizes she wasn't part of the hustle culture there was no hustle culture that's the interesting thing so when you go back and study people producing things of real value using their brain they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard but they didn't hustle and they didn't work 10hour days day after day they didn't work all out year round they didn't push push push until this thing was done it was a more natural variation they had less on their plate at the same time and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality that that's the slow productivity approach it still produces stuff that you're really proud of but it doesn't burn you out and it doesn't leave you in this weird out of out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time I think a lot of choosing a path is about choosing trade-offs so if you choose slow productivity there's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of TR offs right what are the pressures expectations psychological challenges Etc that you should be prepared to face why don't we start there because I think most people listening will agree like yes I don't want to be doing quiet quitting Tik Tok videos and in in other words I don't want to be building I'd rather be building the CIS Chapel instead of sand castles that just get wiped away every time the wave comes in but but the fact of the matter is you know I have a mortgage I've got this I've got this this this and I can't just disappear for months at a time and take two decades to write my Masterwork I can see how a lot of folks would would rightly say that at least at at face value so what what should people be willing to accept as tradeoffs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity and and is it mutually exclusive like like presumably Lynn then well Miranda had a way to buy groceries and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap right so yes maybe I'm creating a false dichotomy here well I mean Lynn was a teacher and was also a columnist he was writing reviews and columns for a paper while he was working on this in his spare time but the bigger points the important one is how do we take an example like Newton and the principia and apply it to someone who has just a 21st century corporate you know semi- remote hybrid work job for a for a big company so how do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers but just modern knowledge workers so like if we start with the first principle do fewer things well what this really means if you have a a normal corporate job it's starting to be very explicit about workload management which is something that everyone does workload management but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways uh because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context in most jobs not in software development but in most other jobs it's up to you just to manage what's on your plate people send you emails and you just say yeah sure I'll do it so what most people do for example is they wait until they feel really stressed and then they say all right I have psychological cover to say no because I'm so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no it's a terrible way to manage your workload so you can be much more explicit about how you manage a workload here's how many slots I have oh I filled them I mean this is really sort of 4-Hour Work Week style let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload you could go to a pole based system instead of a push based system you can do reverse to-do list I there's a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn't get too large in a way that's fully compatible work at a natural pace well there's organizational things you can do here so that you're not at full intensity but you can also just do this yourself you can titr trate your workload I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year and I can do this in a way that my employer doesn't notice you know it's pretty subtle and like what projects you take on or don't take on you can quiet quit for two months and no one notices whereas if you quiet quit for 20 months people say okay wait a second I know you're you're worth as a human is not defined by your labor but your Worth to me as an employee is you got to do something right too much they don't quitting is just not doing very much work while you're employed quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum and it comes out of a place of this sort of late stage capitalism critique of like why should I have to do work which is a whole other thing and then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality that then becomes the accelerate that allows you to do these other things faster and better so so as you hone in on okay here's what I'm going to own within this company and I'm going to get better and better at this and make myself more and more valuable now you're able to much more easily and much more aggressively do fewer things now you're able to much more easily and aggressively say you know I'm gone in August I don't do work in June you gain autonomy as you get better and then you're able to accelerate these things so the vision is even if you work for someone else these principles can be implemented whether they're on board or not and it's going to get you something like the slow productivity benefits of a I'm doing good work work is not taking up most of my life and I think we can safely assume that a lot of the audience listening will be self-employed or have some agency at least as most people would assume Beyond say mid-level HR manager at a large company makes it a lot easier by the way yeah makes it easier I think I think that a lot of folks listening will be self-employed so we can use that lens if it makes it if it makes it a little easier but perhaps they run who knows right a software like a B2B SAS company and they have employees and so on but they can set rules at the end of the day they can create systems that build in some of what you're talking about what is a pull system instead of a push system well with a pull system you say here's how many things I work on at a time mhm so I only pull something new in when I'm done with something which is different than the default of anyone can push work onto your plate at any time and it's up to you to just sort of manage this MH you have an unlimited load a poll system says no this is what I'm working on now I can't do something else until I'm done with this now we can have a holding tank and this is where it is here's how I estimate when I'm going to get to it there's this many things I ahead of It software developers already do this right because they already have kbon inspired cards on a whiteboard system where you pull in I'm going to work on this feature now and over here you have the holding tanks of features that need to be done and when you're done on with the feature you're working on it moves to the next column and you can pull something else into its place you could do this more with more other types of work the idea being you don't want to be juggling too much at the same time because the overhead gets to you how do you do that personally so the similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles like mine is a professor writer is quota systems so that's more what I will lean into break up work into the different types of things I need to do and quota here's how many of these I do per semester here's how many of these I do at a time the idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that I is part of my responsibilities but it's cap so if I have a quot as a professor for here's how many peer review paper reviews I do per semer when I hit that cap I can now say to someone hey thanks for thinking me about this I do a lot of payper reviews I I like doing pay-per reviews I've already hit my quota for this semester however so I I can't take any more on this semester this is really effective because for someone to push back against that they basically just have to argue your quot is wrong well whatever it is is wrong you should be doing more you know as opposed to saying I'm really busy you know I don't know if I have time like everyone's busy it would be good for me if you would just do this don't worry I can make this a really light lift for you and you're like ah [ __ ] yeah don't worry about it and will whatever there's nothing more quixotic than the uh overburdened worker who is trying to not say no but get the person who's giving them the work to voluntarily agree to not give them the work it never works if you if someone's trying to get you to do something you're like well I guess I could but you know I am pretty busy they're never going to say you sound busy don't do this they're like oh good well I'm glad you can do it here you go get this off my plate what are you talking about so I'll lean more into quotas and I'm really careful about that careful about taking on too much beyond your quotas ises that you mean I'm very careful about it and not only do I have quotas for I only do this much you know per semester I'll think about I'm not going to do any of this work this season I'm just going to be focusing on or I'm riding this season so I'm going to disappear and not do this or this season I'm working on Research like I'm I'm very wary of workload and workload management how many things do I have on my plate that's the number I check with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety you know one of my core ideas is the problem about putting a lot of things on your plate even if they don't have colliding deadlines or it's up to you when you finish them is once something is on your plate you've agreed to do it it generates overhead people are going to check in on it there's going to be calls you have to jump on to talk about it it it has some cogn space and what's been happening a lot in modern knowledge work is that people have put so much stuff on their plate that the overhead of just managing all of this stuff not doing the work just the administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings takes up most of their schedule and it's this weird almost sopian position that so many knowledge workers are in today where all day long it's just talking about their work and it's okay maybe late at night or on the weekend I do a little bit of work like it makes no sense right if your workload gets too big the over takes over more and more of your time and it takes longer to get through your actual workload it's an incredibly inefficient way of of executing work it's one of the reasons why by the way that this is not a zero sum game slow productivity it doesn't make you worse at your job but happier it actually makes you better at your job I mean if I'm an employer I should like the idea of slow productivity because my workers are going to produce better stuff like we will make more money if we don't pile 15 things on their plate because more of their time is is going to be working on value producing objectives and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to so there there's actually really a yeah a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs between employers and employees slow productivity produces good stuff it doesn't just make the workers happier doesn't just make you happier you produce better stuff I mean your company has more profit your your clients are happier you can charge more for the services you offer so it's not Zero Sum it's more win win if anything else I would have to imagine that also if any company were to have the emperor of the universe dictate that they embrace the tenets of slow productivity for say a 3 to six month period of time the companies that would not do well on at least one level would probably be those who have not clearly defined what the high leverage most important things are right so if if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and and taken the measure twice cut once approach to determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominoes or makes them irrelevant they're going to be they they're probably be quite bad at slow productivity I mean that would make them bad at most types of productivity I would say other than just like the volume game of tonnage of you're doing other 30 tasks but remaining really focused right which I think is a it's a risk or I'd say that risk is increased when you are not good at defending yourself against the agendas of everyone else in a sense right if you take on too much from a tactical perspective you mentioned the I only do say making this up five I've committed to only doing five peer-reviewed article reviews per quarter really appreciate you thinking of me but unfortunately I've already hit that and I need to focus on AB or C right so the actual language that is used for defense I'm very interested in what other types of language do you use when you get stuff over the transom which I have to imagine you do are there other approaches other specific types of phrasings that you have found you come back to because they're effective well extreme Clarity is the most important mhm I think people tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness which is really not that important to the the person making the request they want this thing done and they want to know if you're going to do it or not now you don't want to be rude but actually Clarity is the key you can have zero wiggle room and and anyone I'm sure you're very good at this I mean anyone who has a lot coming over the transom learns you have to say I can't do this and then you can give some explanations but you can't give any ambiguity so you say unfortunately I can't do this because and you you can give some explanations most people don't read past the I can't do this like they're already emailing the next person that they're going to ask about this once they get to that line so I I think short and sweet and clear Clarity is underrated in this I mean what do people really want they want something done and they also want clarity about when is this going to get done because they want to be released from having to keep track of something in their mind I wrote about this in my last book this company that made their clients sign a communication agreement right this is how we are going to talk to you like this is how we're going to discuss things you can't just email or call us whenever what we're going to do is we're going to have and I believe their setup if I this was a few years ago but I believe their setup was we're going to have this weekly check-in call and we're going to take careful notes during this check-in call of any questions you have that we don't have the answer on right away we're going to take careful notes on that and we'll post it and get you that information back right this is what we're going to do one of the two partners of this company was thinking this is it right like we're going out of business because what clients don't want anything taken away from them they want full flexibility this is they're going to see this as weird and eccentric and and who are we to say this the clients didn't care they didn't care because what do the clients want if I have an issue I need to know it's going to be taken care of so if you have no communication agreement what that means is okay I just sent you an email about this as soon I thought about it nebulous anxiety they don't know when something is going to be addressed so you better get back to me right away because if you don't get back to me right away I worry that you're going to forget this and so I'm just going to keep bothering you about this until you get back to me so then you think oh what the client wants is responsiveness but if you give them an alternative here's a shared document write anything that comes up in here and on our Thursday call we're going to go boom boom boom like we're going to go through this whole thing that solves the same problem for them they're like great I can just write this here and the wi for the client is not you responding to an email right away that's not what they really care about the win is the anxiety of having to keep track of this has been relieved and I don't really care how that happens and I don't care if I have to write it on the a little piece of paper to attach to a homing pigeon that I'm going to send out the window that's going to make it to the roost that you you know that your intern check I don't care I don't have to worry about it yeah and so I think that it's not about politeness so much I mean you don't want to be rude it's not about managing and massaging the relationships it's it's Clarity okay great you can't do this or you can do this but here's how we're going to talk about it okay good I trust this will get done now I know what's coming next I have a hundred other emails in my inbox I've already moved on so you know I think Clarity Clarity Clarity is the key once you start actually managing your workloads much more explicitly any other keys for you personally in terms of whether it's like preemptively stemming the tide by having public rules or blog posts or Auto response or something like that that basically says these are the things I can't and can do or will or won't do do you have any other systems in place or anything like that that takes the lessens the burden a it maybe the answer is you just don't get a lot of this because people are already very well aware that sort of your existence and positioning in the world is the Deep work guy so they just don't send you a ton of stuff I don't know I'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people have switched to a a social media Paradigm for communication oh I'm going to DM you on whatever oh yeah the fact that I'm not on like I don't know I don't how to reach people forgot about email I also have you know I call them communication channels very specific right so that there is no here is the general way to talk to Cal Newport right it's I I have very specific channels for specific reasons with clear expectations I used to call these cender filters and I still really depend on these today like if you have this type of request you can send it here if you want to send me a link or something you can send it here but you're not going to get a reply but I probably will see it if this is an interview request you know I'm aiming you at a publicist if this is a speaking request I'm aiming you at a speaker here's a big warning about using my academic address if you send a non-academic thing here it will not be read so you're not you're not outsmarting anyone and then I add on top of that and this is controversial but I think it's common I add on top of that a second filter which is uh default and not answering I if I don't know a person and they come in with a request because I have these filters set up right that's pretty clear like this is not just a general purpose address that's my final filter and you've made this explicit it's explicit right if I don't know you yeah how do you phrase that you're like if I don't know you it's very low likelihood that I'll will reply which is fine I'm just wondering how you convey it the particular channels have this right so it'll be send this here this here this here this there so if someone is and it'll be clear I'm not going to respond probably but I probably will see it and I have other people this is not even going to me it's when people circumvent that they get to my personal address or they go to my Georgetown they go to my professor address uh my default becomes not to respond which yeah you know it's a little bit controversial but actually it's not a bad filter I learned that from professors at MIT when I was there that was sort of how the the grand professors at MIT managed their inbox was if I don't respond that means you need to try B this was too vague this was not in my best in you need to try again right like whatever you sent here it was their way of saying no try again right you need to be more clear have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with and so that's my final wall is getting past that and that took me a while I mean I had to took me a while to I felt comfortable doing this my final wall is like if I don't know how to respond to this easily I'm probably just not going to respond to it and and that sort of work works a lot of things out as well you know there's just not this expectation this is not a conversation in person to not answer this email is not the same as you coming up to me and me just pretending like you're not there it it's it's a different sort of asymmetric medium so you can feel more comfortable about just not answering what do you think in this book I ask this question a lot because there's usually something that pops up which is what do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over for the 4our work week it's the filling the void chapter people are like oh yeah it must be a nice problem to have like you got to worry about how you fill your time I'm like actually no it's a very very very very important thing because if you are a work machine and you're always in sixth gear and then you remove work you're life doesn't just get autop populated with awesome stuff that that makes you fulfilled you kind of have to plan for it and people gloss over that right CU they're like ah I'll worry about that later and then they end up in these these like existential crises so is there is there anything in this book could be anything like a philosophical kind of foundational piece could be strategic or tactical where you're like hm based on people I've talked to based on proof readers based on whatever I'm like you if I if I could draw attention to something I think people might gloss over or not give its its full weight of importance anything come to mind I think people don't realize that agree to which they don't actually have a sensical definition of productivity right so there's a part in the book where I survey 700 of my readers and one of the questions I ask them is just toine productivity no one has an answer right uh what most people did was just describe their job like well productivity is producing good software like they sort of list what it is their their job is supposed to be so I think people they think they know what productivity is and that it's just a matter of your relationship to that like well productivity I don't like it and so I want to do less of it but the reality is no one really knows what it means I think people don't realize how chaotic and halfhazard and impromptu the way they're organizing their work is how chaotic it really is right I don't think people realize that what we really did and by we I mean like the whole knowledge sector is in the 1950s when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large companies with a large number of people working in offices there wasn't a clear idea how do we measure how someone is productive because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and Agriculture and they didn't apply like in manufacturing you could tabulate the labor hours per Model T produced and in agriculture you could count bushels produced per acre of land you had numbers and so you could say oh the assembly line increases this number so let's do that instead or this Norfolk crop rotation method increases like the bushes you know so let's do that instead knowledge work couldn't have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse and the organizational systems were autonomous like it's just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself there was no organizational wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see what if we change this is it is it better so what what happened was We Invented this idea called pseudo productivity which was we will use activity that's visible as a for useful effort so it's just hey you're doing something that's good doing more things is better than less that's where this sort of notion of sort of business is good and how are you I'm busy and then what happened is my contention is once we got mobile Computing and the internet and we got networks and email and I could work on my laptop you can't combine that with pseudo productivity because if more activity is better than less and you have endless work you can do in any place you just spiral into just constant work and guilt and that's that's where you get the burnout out crisis yeah you're done you're done right you're going to incinerate on re-entry yeah you're done yeah like pseudo productivity worked for Don Draper it's like yeah okay visible activity is better but you can only see me when I'm in the office and let's all agree that we can have three martinis at lunch and it's like okay fine whatever like put the magazine down when someone comes by your office it doesn't work with an iPhone it doesn't work with a when you have a Macbook and you could be doing slack so I mean this is the thing I think people Miss is they think they know what produc means they have a lot of opinions about it and my argument actually is you don't have a sensical definition we just have this like activity is somehow good which is clearly not especially for non-entry level knowledge work busyness doesn't produce high value and so I I think people too often think of something like slow productivity as I'm willing to trade off economic output for psychological sustainability I'm I'm willing to trade off making more money for feeling better about myself and that's not what it is it's no what you're doing now is crazy it's You're Building model te's with the lights off like it's a terrible way to work it's like no let's get a real definition of productivity that is very sustainable but also is going to produce good stuff and so I think people think they're stepping away from something that works but hard yeah this gets it done but it's hard on me unless replace something no the thing that we're doing now doesn't work it's not a sensical way of connecting human brains to add value to it's not a good way of working so like almost any alternative that's intentional is going to be better than what we have so we might as well choose one that's also sustainable makes us feel good but I think people get that wrong a lot what's your definition for yourself of productivity let's go back to the book you mentioned born standing up which as you know is influential for me I mean I wrote a book called so good they can't ignore you it is so good yeah it's a great book but I loved what Martin said in that right which was which was basically you take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at and that's interesting to you and then you really put on your blinders for a decade like get really good at something that's important everything else will work itself out like his exact quote was be so good you can't they can't ignore you if you do that everything else has a way of working out that's really been my thing I mean the decision I made in college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't ROK creu anymore was here's the two things I'm going to do I'm going to do computer science I'm going to write and like that's all I did like that was it let me do computer science let me write I don't want to do Instagram I don't want to do Twitter let me just do that I just want to get good at this and let me read people who are really good and I want to get better and better at this and that's where all of my energy was like let me just try to do these two things as well as I can and that's the way I think about productivity now is how good is the best thing I produced recently that's it I want to be better at things that are hard and mean meaningful and that's it I don't want to be famous I don't want to be busy and by good you mean an internally driven evaluation of quality by good just not to be nitpicky but right good is not as we already know based on your description of not using social media but it's not likes it's not this it's not that how much of it is how you feel about a piece versus say with the New Yorker how well something does the feedback you get from editors or other inputs I think external is good if it's a if it's a trusted evaluation because you can't BS yourself right this is something I you know you want unambiguous indication of value is really I think the right thing to chase because it keeps you honest like in computer science when I last talked to you I was working on a theoretical computer science paper and algorithms paper and there's an idea in there I thought was really good and I was like I think there's something really interesting here and we published it and one won an award his best paper Award right like this was the the best paper at this conference in the the fall of you know 2022 that's important to me it's like okay this is this it's hard it's hard to write papers it's hard to get them P accepted uh and it's hard to win an award that's something to strive towards and same thing with the New Yorker it's like just really hard to write for them it's really hard to get a piece accepted it's really hard to you know get a piece out there that seems to be resonating with people so I'm for that or or even numbers I mean so I'm not against external numbers I mean seeing a book find an audience is important to me because I'm not a good marketer so if that book finds an audience all my books that have been super successful have taken years to get there it's a Mark that something in there is actually uh working so having let's call these high value external indicators versus serendipitous or low value external indicator so I think virality on a YouTube video is a low value external indicator because there's a lot of sing ipity in there it doesn't require it's not a a linear dose function on quality of input right so it's not the better the video you create like just from a sheer quality than the more views it's going to get it's no it it could be whatever you know like you have a very popular video about peeling I was say my most popular YouTube video is like 8 million views or 10 million views is how to peel hardboiled eggs without peeling the whole egg fil in my kitchen on a shitty camera God knows when so if I had followed that as my indicator can you imagine what my whole YouTube channel and life would be so much peeling the kitchen hacks Martha Stewart of YouTube I mean that's what I would have turned into well and by the way if it makes you feel better Mark Rober who's a major YouTuber you know 20 30 million view videos his number one video is how to peel a watermelon inside the whatever people have problems with peel huge people have problems feeling things but for you though compare that I'm just thinking about peeling a watermelon sound it's a very high labor anyway well somehow he does it without the without cutting through I don't know and I'm gonna go watch the stupid video so there you go but think about compare compare your eight million eight million views on the egg video to your first book hitting number one the New York Times bestseller I would say number one of the New York Times bestseller that's more of a high value external indicator it's very hard to do like yeah it reflects like you you've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience you know that's difficult that's difficult to do that's a high value external so I like the high value external money can be this is controversial but I I learned this from Derek cers who told me that money is a great here's his quote neutral indicator of value people don't like to give away their money so like it means something if clients buy your product it means something if people buy your book because people it means nothing for me to click to watch your egg video because I don't know whatever what am I going to lose but to give $20 to get your book like I care about my $20 so I think high value indic external indicators of value aren't a bad thing they're scary because people don't like the rejection and they don't like that it's very hard but I think that's fine because it keeps you honest what do you think Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive I would think it' be a positive indicator but maybe using a different scale than his so he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased I think I see right so like his main point was this is what he did at every stage of his career is when he had the next thing he wanted to do so he was working as a record executive for example and wanted to go full-time with his band he would wait till the next thing was making as much money as the current thing and then that's when he would say let me go do that and so he waited till CD Baby then was creating as much money as he was making as an artist before he went all in and just working on his startup but he meant neutral because if you just ask people their opinion on your idea or ask them hey do you think I should do this they're not neutral they like you and they want to be nice right they're like yeah man go for it yeah you should definitely quit your job to do a band like that would be awesome like I wish I could do that it's not useful feedback it's not neutral but as soon as you ask for their money they become Switzerland they're like all right well you know we're going to stay out of this valate this I'm not a partisan here like okay hold on a second well how good is your band wait a second are you that good yeah so it's it's a different I'm really not qualified to evaluate such a thing but the yeah who are some Derek would stand out to me as someone who's unrushed right and I would say also if this is helpful for folks if you feel like you have to rush to compete in something or race in some way chances are you don't have a great sustainable competitive Advantage I would say almost certainly you don't have any sustainable competitive advantage in which case if you telescope out and just ask yourself what does this look like what does my life look like in one year 3 years five years it's going to break like something's going to break it's just a question of when it breaks so you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that or look at other other ways to kind of augment your ability to not rush I think Derek is very very good at this who are some other contemporaries I I know that and maybe we'll talk about it but Jane Austin would be another example historically speaking who are some uh contemporaries like last within the last 20 years who Stand Out H 10 years just because the technological landscape I think about this a lot like how many newton how many Da Vinci how many mer cues are just making Tik Tok videos right now and they're never actually going to make something that is fulfilling their full potential I would have to imagine it's vast swats of the population so let's just say last five five to 10 years or current day people who stand out to you well I think where you see this most often today is in the Arts so like I'm a movie buff you see this with the great directors you know it's I got to get the right project it takes a long time to get the project together you spend a long time on that project it's right and then you do it right I mean if you look at Tarantino you look at Greta Gerwig you look at Chris Nolan they take their time and also they don't they're not filling in the Gap let me be on YouTube let me be on Twitter let me let me have a really sort of active presence out there they take their time novelists are very good at this especially a literary novelist because their books need to be really good that's their whole that's their whole selling proposition so they take their time an example a specific example I like is John Grisham and I I did this comparison I uncovered these this old interview of Michael kryon once it was an interview of Michael kryon when he was 27 years old and so I wrote this essay about compare Michael kryon to John Grisham you're going to see two different approaches to roughly the same job which is writing popular genre fiction kryon was all about busy so you read this this essay this was after the adonus strain had come out and it's all Ambitions for things he wants to I want to direct I want to do movies I have five books in development I'm writing screenplays I just moved out the LA like it's this huge plan John Grisham on the other hand like as soon as the firm did well it was his second book his first book was a flop at time to kill when it first came out he said I'm going to write two and if one of the two works then I'll keep doing this the firm blew up did really well and as soon as he had some autonomy he simplified simplified simplified to the point where at some point more recently this would have been in the 2000s he had this longtime sort of assistant who worked for him when she retired he's like I don't have to hire anyone else because no one no one bothers me like my agent and my editor know how to contact me I don't do anything I write my book once a year that's it like I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my my town and he he was the commissioner of the Little League yeah he had a lot of stuff he did unrelated to work he just slowed down he's like I just want to write that's all I do I don't need to have TV shows and I don't need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made in the things and I don't need to create a six-part series and direct my whatever and get in the television he's like I'm just G to I'm getting paid a lot of money I'm going to write that's what I want to do I want to simplify so J Grisham has always stood out to me and I know a couple people who know him and they underscore this that he's like I write I do one book a year and you're not going to hear from me until it's done and then you get me for like four weeks and I'll do like some public publicity do the dog and pony show I'll do it but four weeks right and then leave me alone I'm going to go I'm G to go do other things so he's a great example so so it's two different types of ambition the kryon ambition is now that I have all these opportunities I want to do every single one I can it's it's I've been starving for years and now I'm I'm at the buffet and I'm going to fill my plate and Grisham had the complete other mindset now that I'm successful I have the leverage to do nothing you get out I no no no no no I just wanted to like do this one thing isn't that great yeah so he's definitely slow productivity maybe that's your next book The Leverage to do nothing it's actually would be a pretty good title so I'm thinking of Grisham as someone who decided from the outset to use a rowing example to is it skulling one person single person rowing so he's out there on the Charles just like thinking about his next book rowing by himself and then there are a lot of other people out there who have and I've been in this position before so I'm not I'm not throwing too many stones in my glass house but you're like how did my life get so [ __ ] complicated and you're like [ __ ] like instead of skulling I built Noah's Arc I've got two of every goddamn animal in here and I have to unload this [ __ ] like if I want to simplify I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat and so I want to jump into some ways to simplify right so if you are able to maintain that from the God bless you you're a miracle worker I wish I could do what you do maybe I can but I often slip I backslide and then I'm just like H okay now I have to unload no's Arc again one of the one of the points in the notes here that I have is work to reduce collaboration overhead we talked about about overhead right talking about work instead of doing it by replacing asynchronous communication with real-time conversations so this I think will strike a lot of folks as counterintuitive could you expand on this please well asynchrony is a problem so asynchron meaning not real time so email for example I send you a message you read it when you're ready to read it then you reply so it's it's not not real time asynchron has advantages right because there's an overhead to having to arrange realtime conversation you and I have to agree somehow this is when we're going to get on the phone together the problem with asynchrony is that if you use it for drawn out conversations there's going to be seven back and forth messages for us to de side on something this now requires me to constantly monitor whatever Channel we're using here because if we're going to get through seven back and forth messages today because we're trying to decide on something I have to see most of those messages let's say within 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving because we have to knock this ball back and forth enough times 15 minutes per knock you know we're already a couple hours into it so now I have to be checking these inboxes all the time but if I'm checking these inboxes all the time I'm seeing lots of other stuff as well now I'm in a state to borrow a term from Linda Stone of partial continuous attention which uh drains my energy I can't think well I'm exhausted and I can't produce anything deep I can't do any really good work so asynchrony is one of these things that looks good on paper but as soon as you start doing back and forth uh planning or conversations of any type with asynchron it destroys everything it is one of the most potent productivity poisons and the the thing about it is that we think it's actually making us more efficient because oh look I can just press send and I don't have to go on a phone so instead having regular times to talk real time can actually be much more efficient the key is not to have a separate meeting for everything you might need to discuss because now you have a separate problem which is your schedule is crowded so I think the answer to all of this is just office hours like this is it every day this hour to 90 minutes I my phone is on I have a slack Channel my door is open and you just punt everything to office hours yeah good question grab me at the next office hour as you can yeah we should get into that grab me at the next office hour as you can oh yeah a bunch of uh requests are coming in for interviews you know for my book coming out great next office hour as you can come and we'll go through them all you know so you you consolidate synchrony into a regular periods you're not wasting a lot of time arranging the synchrony I think that's a sweet spot for collaboration so to get into the nitty-gritty of that you mentioned slack I'm curious from a flow perspective what that looks like so if you're communicating with your team via slack and they're like what about this and you're like grab me at the next office hours do you then have like a calendly or some automated tool where it's like hey every Friday I'm curious what this looks like for you if you use it or how you've seen other people implement this just from a flow perspective Friday from 1 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. I am available in 30 minute slots or whatever and then here's a calendly link if I'm getting the service name correct where you can book a time and we're not doing it via email right because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling I [ __ ] hate it with such a passion it just how about Tuesday at two no that doesn't work what about Thursday at three how about Monday at this it's it's is one of my least favorite things in the world so from a flow perspective what what does that look like and have you found any particular day or way of clustering office hours to work well for you or for other people first of all don't use Slack that coordinate with your team like that' be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing at any point conversation could come in I I've suggested this a couple times in the pages of the New Yorker is just stop using slack essentially I come back to it it's funny actually when Salesforce bought slack that right after they bought slack I had an article that was titled slack built the the right tool for the wrong way to work and it was sort of a critique of this sort of hyperactive hi M and Salesforce unrelated they didn't know about it they invited me to come give like a high price lecture and I was like hey I'm honored but I should point you towards this article I just published and then it came back and In fairness this was the marketing company that was organizing this conference for sure yeah they came back and said like well yeah you know I think we're okay I don't think we need you but to your question about office hours actually you want to lean more into academic style office hours which are unscheduled and so if it was a completely in-person situation like we used to be then it would just be my doors open yeah right and that like that's how I run office hours with my discret math students right you look oh someone's in your your office I wait till they're out then I come in but you can simulate this digitally using Zoom for example and just have a waiting room so people come to your Zoom conference they just know this Zoom link is open for this 90 minutes every afternoon at this set time so they can just log in there and if you're talking to someone else they're just waiting in the waiting room till you bring them in and I mentioned slack so I I probably should have elaborated that but what some people do is say I have a slack Channel called office hours but I only monitor it during my office hours so you just know from like 3:00 to 4:30 then we can go back and forth and chat like because that's what I'm here to do is just talk to people so I will have that slack channel that office hour Channel open from 3:00 to 4:30 and there if we want to go back and forth on slack that's still real time right I mean we're going back and forth in real time it's not asynchronous that's fine as well but I'll never look at that channel outside the office hours and then you can tack on to this another 30 minutes with 10minute chunks and a calend link where you can say to someone either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one-on-one slots here's the link and so you can put those two I mean I actually have an article out today the day we're recording this called how to have a more productive year and I talk about exactly this having a open Office hour plus an extra 30 minutes of one-on ones and having a web page that says here's here's how we talk show up during these office hours and just rock and roll or grab one of these slots if you want a little bit more time and that you just throw that link at people you know like like confetti at Marty just Link Link Link just toss it at people to try to squash these asynchronous back and forth and the had to be more productive this year that's in the New Yorker yeah it's a New Yorker PS where we just thought it's not typical New Yorker fair but my editor and I were just thinking don't we just write an article about how to be more productive now okay I couldn't resist because it was the New Yorker it also has a meta commentary on productivity advice itself and I go through every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s the dominant productivity book of that decade and how the advice changes from there's some New Yorker stuff in there but there's also some like real hardcore advice did you mention Ora boros is there a snake eating its own tail in this piece or no I should have sneak one in every I should have done Ora Boris yes that's always a good one you always have to mention this is like if you write for an elite publication and you mention productivity you always have to mention Frederick Winslow Taylor this is like a pet PE is from the mind of people who are professional writers who who yeah critique productivity in their mind Frederick Winslow Taylor is like the central figure of American capitalism and productivity basically means him there with a stopwatch looking at your movements and he wasn't that influential of a person it's pet peeve of mine scientific management was not it was it it was esoteric and kind of cult-like and it it had a following but it got completely pushed out of the way by fordism and the idea of building smart production processes Winslow Taylor was a weird guy these time motion studies with these incentive based Pace scales was weird and he was weird and they determined that's not so important what's important is an assembly line is a much better way to build a car than the other way the the systems matter matter a lot more and also forget this like weird incentive scale of I'll pay you 10 cents more if you're 10 cents faster shoveling whatever Ford figured out pay your workers a lot of money right because the turnover is more expensive than trying to whatever so anyways it's it's a pet peeve of mine Frederick Winslow Taylor does not yield an outsize influence on the way we think about productivity our issues with productivity do not come from Frederick winow Taylor they actually come from Peter Ducker and there's a whole other argument I can make here but that's my pet peeve is like you don't have to mention him every time you try to critique productivity so rant rant aside Peter dker I gotta say man hit so many nails on the head the effective executive still to this day just such an incredible short book that punches above its weight class so to scratch my own Ed here the New Yorker also has this typographical convention that has always been kind of confusing to me and seems a little high futin tell me if I'm getting this right it always stands out it jumps out like a wart on someone's face every time I see it they put an uml out over a maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated like coordinate and they'll put an O loud over the second l or something like that why do they do that what is that's not in the Chicago book of style like what's going on there or is that just a New Yorker thing well I mean that's true so they do yeah um lot's on second Val so like re-engage you would have an llot and then also Focus they do British so double s because I write a lot about Focus so you double s focus and focusing that's there and then email the convention for email is I forgot exactly what it was but the the way they write about emails no it's just it's tradition right so so it's an old magazine it's been around for a long time and so that there was a style guide invented you know early on when a lot of this was more up for grabs and I think it's just it's tradition like let's hold on to the style guide to whatever I mean I I don't know if there's there might be a deeper story to it but that's what I've always understood is that why not I mean they format it the same way right so a lot of that's tradition I mean their whole thing which I love about it is they're not chasing Trends you know I mean I I really love that publication Anyone who reads it the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just to try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for and their whole theory is make your place really really writer friendly and writers will write cool things and and I think that's cool and they have a subscription base so they don't have to chase web traffic they don't have to worry so much about ads they have a million people who pay $100 a year for the magazine and you got this great Foundation like okay so we can just write you know it's not big anyway it's not to go on a New Yorker rant well let me play Devil's Advocate on that because it seems like when the New York Times went from predominantly ads to predominantly subscriber Revenue they ended up producing more news coverage to please their base of subscribers and it became a much more exaggerated kind of left-leaning caricature of itself in a way that is not helpful for contending with polarized tribalism and so on in my opinion I fundamentally they're different outlets right I mean they're very different but are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media Dynamics at play for the New Yorker because I've seen these formerly what I would consider highly credible Publications hold on I have to my phone is always off but I have to pull this up because this example is so nuts my friend sent me this screenshot because he said here we go the The Economist stepping up their copy game and the screenshot he sent me is the the sort of super text the super script is the swines and then it says feral super pigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairies they are well adapted to the cold with thick fur long legs and tusks as sharp as steak knives and it has this photo of these pigs running over a hill and I'm like this is the The Economist man what the [ __ ] is happening and I love the economist no offense to The Economist Love The Economist but I was like oh man like everybody's getting pulled down into the mud here in the Quest for traffic and attention that's a bit of a ramble but how does the New Yorker resist the the Temptation slash incentives SL risks of the modern online world as we know it you're pointing out a real effect if we're going to talk about tradeoffs it's a trade-off effects and I think the times really did have to face this trade-off so when you when you move to their subscriber model what they gain is they don't actually have to do the attention chasing right so this is one thing about the times is they don't need the super feral pig example they do not have a model based on chasing attention right where where other Publications I think had an issue when they when the web grew where they began just really pushing volume and trying find social media virality the New York Times saved themselves from that and so they could actually focus on what they wanted to write so that they did not have to chase so that was a positive but the audience capture effect I think is also real so when you when you don't have to and this is now a standard I think accepted critique in the world of Journalism when you have to service big advertisers you sort of stay pretty neutral on things because the consumers of those products are all over the place y like okay like we want Proctor and Gamble to buy a lot of ads in you know 1995 New York Times so we got to we're going to be really good and but like down the middle Y and you're you're absolutely right that when you go to subscriber base that subscriber base was way more Progressive left leaning than the public r large and then you get the audience capture effect now I think there was other dynamics that happened as well where you had the rise of certain ideological Frameworks coming out of the colleges and young staffers coming to the New York Times and sure but it was the subscription model gave them the cover to we can change even our definition of news especially post Trump I think it really changed towards our goal here is to to promote the right that's the best way I could describe what happened there is that when they know there's something that is clearly right pushing the thing that is right is like a noble thing to do even more important than certain journalistic standards the New Yorker avoids that because they're not a news magazine yeah I think that's the main thing that's not their model so they've been a subscription model from the beginning they still have a print magazine though they sell on the news stance right I don't know how much of a yeah consideration that is for business model it's a big part of their income right because New Yorker subscribers get the magazine and the digital I don't know the numbers but they're they're way more combined than with the New York Times right I I think it's I subscribe to the New Yorker I get the magazine and I get access to the online you know so that's a big part of what they do but it's a it's a magazine of ideas it's a slow magazine they don't slow productivity in action they don't want to be the first to talk about a new story that's not their goal and also you have to keep in mind the New York Times is massive it's massive they have their own building it's thousands of people it's a huge company I've been there it's gigantic nice Building New Yorker has a floor you know so it's a different thing so the New Yorker is not a news magazine yeah I think then they get the advantages of the subscription model without the disadvantages the advantages being we don't have to chase attention or clicks or volume and so we could just try to write whatever we find to be interesting DT Max has a piece in a recent issue where it's just profiling this lady who spent 500 Days in a cave really interesting article you know it's like really well constructed she goes into the cave she comes out she's like this was great and then he's spending more time with her and like slowly it comes out that this was this like horrific experience it's awesome it's like a really interesting article so anyways yeah the New Yorker I would say probably more if I were to go back and look at the pie chart of magazine or Outlet attribution I'd say probably the New Yorker has the highest hit rate of inclusion in five bullet Friday my newsletter in terms of pieces I think are worth sharing it's probably got the highest hit rate at least in the US are there any magazines or Outlets that you would just like you know cut off a pinky Yakuza style to write for obviously I'm exaggerating or would have loved to have written for that never got the chance to write for like Parish review or anything else is there anything sort of on your your wish list outside of the New Yorker or have you already summoned Everest and you're like I'm good I mean that was my wish my agent has reminded me of this that early on early on in my career I remember watching Jon aair at the time who was my age early on in his career get some New Yorker slots and this is how I said to my agent like what I want to do this is what I want to do outside my books is right for the New Yorker so like that that was my Everest I've written for the other places as you know well I've written for the New York Times and wire and and the Atlantic they're great places to write and they have huge audiences right so like a a New York Times piece I always feel lucky when they publish something of mine because our audience is just huge like if you write something for them people read it and people see it and I have written for them so that's also cool like I think one of the coolest jobs in journalism might be New York Times op-ed staff yeah yeah I agree with that Krugman and Brooks they get a write about ideas but it's big swing impact and those things those things hit a lot of eyeballs so like when Ezra Klein left Vox and took the oped spot at the New York Times I was like that doesn't confuse me at all that's that's a really cool job because you're you can affect the national conversation on a regular basis and I don't know who else can offer that that you can shape conversation on a regular basis that'd be a cool job it's true yeah it's true it's true I mean the New York Times also has some great stuff it's that the the discovery problem to come back to that is a little bit harder than say with the New Yorker unsurprisingly because you just have a such an immense volume of stuff yeah but the uped Narrows that down quite a bit I mean there's there's been yeah you you are right in terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs uh I suppose that's another advantage of the subscriber model although you're hitting one subset of the political Spectrum so there is that yeah but all is fair and love and editorial uh well Cal we've talked about a lot and people should check out the new book you walk the walk which is sort of the most for me critical litmus test of material especially if there's any prescriptive aspect in sort of a a productivity self-help way and I I could Define produc I Define it pretty similarly um the new book is slow productivity the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout and people cannot find you on social but but there's the YouTube channel Cal Newport media so people can find that there's the Deep questions podcast and Cal newport.com certainly people can find a lot there I'm curious maybe as we're beginning to wind this to a close if there are any other heuristics or mental models or anything that makes slow productivity easier or more appealing for people to embrace and I would for instance say that by and large I succumb to the shiny objects occasionally but by and large I I think I fall into the slow productivity camp and for instance I mean the book that I'm working on now I mean it started 5 years ago notes and like wrote 72,000 words 5 years ago and tabled it and shelf it and then have been kind of workshopping things one of the just to maybe start with sharing on my side one of the things that helps me with this is thinking about choosing my projects which is why I'm so interested in choosing projects how people choose projects I choose my projects generally on what skills and relationships they help me to develop that could transcend that project so even if the project quote unquote fails by all external metric if I've developed or improved relationships it could be pre-existing or new relationships and developed skills that will apply to other things having a long time frame is a huge huge huge Advantage right it's kind of the ultimate in a world of attention compression like having a long time Horizon is a unbelievable advantage in so many ways but thinking about my projects and how they snowball that cumulative way gives me the peace of mind and confidence to take those longer time Horizons if that makes any sense so I'm wondering if there's there's anything like that that could just be kind of philosophical onliners or beliefs that you have that allow you to embrace this without the fear and the fomo that I think a lot of folks would have I agree by the way that I definitely see you as an example of the slow productivity mindset I mean I think for example your focus on the podcast okay this is the main thing I'm going to do I'm going to stop the the book publication cycle I'm not going to seek out a lot of you know TV opportunities or whatever I think that's a good example which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out to be titled to peel an egg 101 hacks in your kitchen that'll Amaze your friends or whatever that's kitchen tricks for any occasion yeah ful Illustrated as it stance no no egg peeling in the new book here's the heroic maybe that ties a lot of this together is that at least for professional stuff in the end it's craft like craft is what matters respecting craft developing craft applying craft finding meaning in craft I mean just go just keep watching on repeat Jiro Dreams of Sushi right just go back and watch that like once a month because the more you think about craft is where I get fulfillment craft is where I impact the world craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life and can provide for the people I care about and you know give interesting opportunities in my life it all comes back down to craft you slow down your time frames become much longer psychologically you get so much resilience maybe you couple that if I'm going to add a second her istic is ignore the internet like I mean it's a crazy making machine it's just a crazy making machine it like don't don't require random people on social media to be a regular part of your life don't require like metrics you have to look at on a day-to-day basis of being you know important I mean I could just feel it like we do my podcast we put the episodes on YouTube because I I think you know as we talked about before video will be the future not YouTube but we should practice H and I have a YouTube guy and I say you can do whatever you want to like the thumbnails and the titles I don't know you understand YouTube but I don't want to know about how it's doing like I don't want to feel any impact from that algorithm I want to do my podcast show where there is no cybernetic Loop pushing back and changing what you're doing Beyond these super large scales oh over the last six months if we average out downloads I think we're I think we're trending upwards right so maybe put those two things together craft is everything you can build a psychologically resilient sustainable successful professional life on Craft and ignore the internet like do those two things you're going to be really happy especially if you're talented and have like a particular Talent OR ambition that's where you should aim it you know don't let an attention algorithm suck all that skill out of you and basically monetize all that potential into AdSense views that can help Google investors or whatever craft focus on Craft and get fulfillment out of craft even Beyond results and then just be incredibly wary about the internet maybe I'll stay away from that I'll stay away from that like that's the two things do those two things yeah it's just it's neither day like what your life is like is night or day yeah it makes me think of can't remember the attribution I mean there are many versions of this but would you rather fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not I mean those types of quotes I think about quite a bit because possibly you if we take this vanity metric and look it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on YouTube videos as an example but let's say you looked at your numbers and you were trending down over 6 months like does that mean you stop or does that mean that you are calling the herd and over time refining to the point where you were actually getting to your 1,000 or 10,000 true fans yep and you went from basically doing like speeches at state fairs and now you're standing on the Ted stage is that bad right no is that is no I'm just saying you know what I mean like I'm saying like maybe there's a win embedded in what you're perceiving as a failure even if it's trending in the in the wrong direction right because otherwise man the stuff oh here let me show you one let me see if I can find it I'll show you another one and I'll describe what this is just cuz this is this is sort of the the YouTube equivalent of The Economist feral super pigs oh it gets so much worse on YouTube it gets so bad but I was texting with my team one on YouTube and I was like oh my God this is what happens to everyone on YouTube if they stay long enough and they get trained by the incentives this is what happens to everybody let me show you oh come on yeah it's good it's good so I don't know if you can see this okay so there's a woman wearing very little clothes is that a robot what is that no this is like a big huge muscular dude in a toga Sarang type thing walking away it's a woman on the other side he's saying bye and she's got question marks over her head she's in a in a thong pointing away from the camera holding her ass cheeks like pulling them apart and then the headline is stoicism 10 lessons men learn too late in life in parenthesis might hurt your feelings and I'm not saying look I'll give these guys credit this is because the thumbnail got me stoic wisdom wonders 1.9 million views put up one month ago and but I was like oh man like you're going to get trained by the algorithm like if you're not careful of and even if you are careful if you're paying attention to quote unquote the right things like everything converges into a chick with a thong spreading her ass cheeks in a thumbnail like with with like what to do before the imminent Financial collapse like you're everything doesn't matter if you're covering climate change hoping to change the world with right you know renewable energy you're going to end up there no I'm Chomsky on like the structure of manufactur consent and there's a woman in a bikini yeah yeah there you go yeah I got to give this guys credit they just got a bunch of free promotions so good for them and it got my attention but I think the approach of treating these tools and new behaviors not just because the it's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools new technology as new drugs right like would you want to be the first chimpanzee you know injected with this or maybe you wait until you're the 100th pany yeah you can still be an early adopter but like let's see what the long-term effects are and if you feel like you got to rush you're in the wrong game like you're just you're just in the wrong game and you could win but like be very careful about what winning looks like when you do that telescoping out like okay if this just gets faster if things just change more frequently if the shifting Sands of algorithm favoritism just start pouring from the sky guy and become much much harder to track require me to have now I don't have just a full-time thumbnail guy I've got a full-time like algo Chaser like who's like an analytics person and it becomes kind of Moneyball like do you want to win that game no right what and what does it look like and there are going to be people just like for instance you know going to school a lot of i banks investment Banks and so on recruited there and nine out of 10 people probably 19 out of 20 would walk out right they would they would just get destroyed because they weren't built for that and then one out of 20 was just perfectly built for it fantastic and they would thrive in that environment but I do think that when we're looking at some of these platforms where is the numbers are probably even less favorable right it's like okay 99 out of 100 are going to wash out and then one will just be the Michael Phelps of YouTube and awesome like good for them but if everyone tries to do that what a cataclysm not to make it sound too dark but it's like there are so many opportunities for slow productivity hiding in plain sight right and there are counter examples and if you want a sustainable competitive advantage and who doesn't having a longer time Horizon and being unrushed with most things is just about as big as I can think of at least at this point but sorry rant complete well no but I completely agree with your rant the numbers on algorithmic attent just look at real numbers right let's use real numbers not to go I'm going to extend your YouTube Brant slightly please let's look at real numbers Koda Koda what's like the take-home CPM essentially on YouTube is low right I mean people are monetizing these videos to the tune of maybe like $5 per per thousand views cost per thousand views yeah whereas for podcasting it is significantly larger right because it's significantly it's at least five times larger than that per ad and you can have up to four ads per episodes I mean it's not even comparable we're talking orders of magnitude so just to be like concrete you could have a YouTube channel where you know you have a million million views a month or something like this but a podcast that has 30,000 regular downloads a week like you have an audience of 30,000 it's bigger than 1,000 true fans but not that much bigger I've done the math on that and that is like a professor salary like you could make like a very good living off of that and it's much more stable but if you build up a 30,000 person audience they're there for a reason they're not going to leave fast either that could something you could then do for years whereas YouTube is going to be way more fickle and then the technolog is going to go away and there'll be another thing that's coming into town anyways or the algorithm is going to change or you started as a channel on Noom Chomsky and then you end up like m Beast like Mr Beast I respect what he's doing but he's just the he's the platonic expression of the algorithm like they just and he'll say this right like he's broken down what matters like you have to have an outrageous but interesting visual thing that you're going to deliver you need to show the person right up front you're going to see this this and this here's some clips of it and then you need it to move every 15 seconds it's moving forward they're beautifully edited things but they're just pure ID it's just yeah we're going to drive expensive cars just go go go go go go go that's the distillation of the algorithm and so yeah there should be some Mr Beast out there doing that but like for most other people build a successful podcast over five years like a newsletter is another thing this is another slow productivity example I was just going to say if you think podcast cpms are high look at Niche newsletters right if they there's a newsletter like Ci or hedge fund managers or whatever like the it is unbel I mean we're talking hundreds of doar CPM right yeah and you don't have to be famous either right I mean it's I know so many people have done I have a good newsletter and it's subscription based it's fantastic right if if people are paying $5 dollar a month I mean okay that works out to an incredibly High CPM right because you could show that same person a huge number of ads so it's just a different game you know I mean so I was the example I was going to give was to writer Andrew Sullivan who lives here in DC and you know he he was the editor of the new Republic and wrote for New York Magazine before he sort of got pushed out for political ideological reasons he has a substack now and the way he talks about it he's like well this is great like I have a pretty fair-sized audience I make a lot of money off of this like why would I want to do anything else this is great I can write for this audience it's a big audience I make more money doing this than I ever made as a magazine writer and I can write what I want and I don't need to do anything else and I don't need like a studio and there's nothing else I need to do you know so I agree anything where an algorithm is driving it attention don't make that I mean you could again you could but be wary of it also be wary is my other warning her istic of checklist productivity so if you learn from a YouTube course all right here's how you're going to make a lot of money on Twitter what you need to do is these tweet threads where at the the last tweet in the thread needs to say hey if you enjoyed this thread you should follow me because I do these threads every so often so you can't all just follow these same checklist and assume that's not the way economies work you know it's not just if I just do these 10 things pick your Niche make sure on a regular basis you have a thread format your thread this way and if you do this you know it used to be like in our childhood the Carlton sheets infomercials where like what oh man I heard that name in ages yeah yeah it's kind of the same as checklist productivity on Twitter his logic was well think about it we can drop ship put a classified ad for something you're drop shipping and let's say you put a classified ad in one paper and you make $10 Drop Shipping well then put it in a 100 papers and you're going to make $1,000 at completely leaving out the fact that by far the most common outcome is that zero people buy it no matter how many papers you put it in because they don't want to buy a random piece of crap from a classified ad you know that part was left out you're like well think about it if you make this much money here then there's this many papers you'll make this much money this is crazy logic but it reminds me a lot of where you see like oh if I just do these videos and I do it right and have the right sign off and I write my titles carefully it'll scale it's like no most people nothing will happen algorithmic attention economies be very wary do the slow productivity attention economies they're hard but it's fantastic if you're able to establish yourself there your books work your podcast works it's way way better and I would also say these are not mutually exclusive right so if you want to play in the algo Arena like go for it like look I have a YouTube channel and I do this that and the other thing and even podcasting is let's be honest on some level like if Apple decides to kneecap everybody which happens occasionally it's like oh oops I just read this article it's actually very well done I wish I had the proper attribution but it was something called like the great shrinking podcast economy something like that and the incredible power of platforms to dictate your metrics is is hard to overstate but I would say if you want to play that game cuz like like some of it's fun I get it you know I like competing and you know not going to be doing any dangerous competitive Sports anytime soon so I got to channel that somewhere so okay I could firewall 20% of my attention for [ __ ] around with that that's fine yep or 50 like whatever but like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find something where you can cultivate this slow productivity right yep so maybe it's a slow carb out at first but if you don't have that it's like driving on a race course in a sports car where the race course changes constantly right like curve s is no longer curve seven used to be a straightaway now now it's a hairpin curve and you don't have an airbag or any type of seat belt point harness yeah like you're going to crash eventually so like you need some type of safety net and longtime Horizon and slow productivity for me at least has been it's been my safety net for 20 years I've no reason to think that that should change and the more frenetic things get the faster things change we didn't even get to AI but the more the kind of avalanche of information continues to grow in volume the more all of these things will be an advantage that I'm discussing so check out the book folks still productivity Cal anything else you'd like to like to mention any Tik Tok videos you'd like to point people to yeah exactly my peeling video channel which is now GNA be a thousand peing squash Cal newort peeling squash yeah you've introduced that notion now uh um no this has been great yeah no it's slow productivity it kind of it connects everything together be do something really well get meaning out of it and then yeah talk about it different platforms have fun play on it but you're right there's a difference between I like to take my car to the track because it's fun and my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team you know it's just a it's a different Dynamic that's going on out there yeah so slow is just better I think people are ready for it too you know I mean I think this is just where we are is we want something different the first wave of different we were offered was just stop trying things you know work as bad you know stop trying don't do anything that's that that it stick because well I I I still like to do things and also I need to you know feed my family so I think now we're getting the second generation of thinking about this which is do it better like figure out like how do you really want to work like what makes sense and and so hopefully this works yeah but I appreciate it talking about I put an excerpt by the way I'm not on social media but at Cal newport.com slow we put an excerpt up so like if you're like ah maybe you can you can actually like read the whole introduction of the book there's a lot of you'll appreciate it Tim because there's a lot of John MC nice I opened the book on John MC and I know as a as someone who took his course at Prince which I'm jealous of oh yeah you'll appreciate the MC it's Rich MC content in that free excerpt oh I can't wait okay so I will read that we'll put that in the show notes as well yeah I learn more from MC in one semester about writing than I have in all of my reading and practice and classes outside of that one seminar I wish I could go back and take it again frankly you never know who knows I went back you know I actually have all my notes and all of my assignments from that class to this day like marked up I have the marked up notes and I go back and sometimes I look at my writing and I'm like I think I'm worst writer now I think I'm a better teacher but like my actual Pros I think could could use some more weight training so I'll get back into it the glue of high quality and I should also say that slow productivity you know yes slow is an aspect but in my mind and tell me if you disagree with this certainly but it's really about proactive productivity instead of reactive productivity right and that's a way like selective productivity selective and proactive productivity which happens to usually correspond to more sustainable long-term yep thinking or intentional productivity yeah intentional have an actual consistent coherent philosophy or how I'm going to do my work that's more sophisticated than just I'll be busy because at least if I'm busy I I'm not going to sell for criminate like if I'm busy at least I know I'm trying like that's people's default be more intentional and I think you're right and not everyone like if you're an investment banker like you talked about or you're trying to become a law partner like a very intentional coherent reasonable productivity plan involves working all the damn time because that's like specifically what you that's what works in that world but for most people when they're intentional they realize 80% of what I'm doing is just trying to generate smoke from friction but there's no fire like it's just trying to be busy because I don't know what else to do like slowness becomes almost always inevitable once you actually start to be intentional about what am I really doing here like what really works what matters what doesn't yeah and if people really pause to think about many of the figures they might respect most for what they've accomplished in investing or business the Warren buffets Jeff Bezos certainly go back and read the first 10 shareholder letters for Amazon and you will see kind of how well planned and preent in some respects seems obvious in hindsight but so does everything Bezos was in planning and how methodical and patient the blend of being kind of Relentless and patient is an interesting one holy [ __ ] I mean it's it's rare to find like relentlessly focused and also very patient with criticism and skepticism and so on remarkable so the the slow productivity is actually kind of hidden all around us if we pause to look at the people we most respect almost all of them are going to fall in there somewhere it's all I do as a writer basically is come up with two-word terms for things that widely exist and everyone already knows about right so deep work already exists I just put a name to it digital minimalism it's like yeah I'm just putting a name to a Phil that's my whole secret and I've said this before to people about pragmatic non-fiction writing yeah the the goal is not to try to uh teach someone something completely new they didn't know about the goal is just to try to help people articulate something they already know deep in their gut is true they just don't have a framework or terminology for it like those that's what really has an impact is like yeah I know slow productivity is better I said have a name for it or a framework you know don't try to convince people to new things explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action that's the secret to non-fiction prescriptive non-fiction writing you're not really teaching people something new it's just how do I leverage something my gut tells me is true I just don't have my I don't have my fingers around it all the way yeah totally six minute abs if anybody gets the reference it might might be seven minute abs that's a hitchhiker and something about Mary so slow productivity the Lost Art of accomplishment without burnout people can check it out and we'll link to of course Cal Newport and all the other links in the show notes tim. blp podcast we'll put everything in there that we've spoken about thanks so much for taking the time Cal nice to see you yeah thanks Tim I appreciate it and for everybody listening or watching check out the show notes and until next time be a little Kinder than is necessary maybe a little slower than is necessary take your time the good things will wait because it's uncrowded the really important things those domains are typically very very uncredited so be a little bit kinder to others and to yourself take things a little bit more slowly until next time and thanks for tuning in

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 60,245

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, cal newport, deep work, productivity, slow productivity, deep questions podcast, how to be more productive, how to avoid burnout, how to prevent burnout, burnout, cal newport deep work, cal newport slow productivity, digital minimalism, the deep life, improve focus, distractions

Id: 8KPLs-ZFuPo

Length: 139min 37sec (8377 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024