#722: Cal Newport — How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Build a Deep Life, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time

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4:22 No Ha, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers from all different disciplines. And my guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times best selling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep questions podcast. His new book is Slow Productivity.

5:12 The lost art of accomplishment without burnout. Cal is not active on social media. This is usually where I would say you can find him on these following social media profiles, but you can't find him. He is really not active outside of his YouTube channel, which is the at Cal Newport Media channel. and the podcast and everything else you can find at calnewport.com. In this conversation we talk about slow productivity, human paced productivity, the dangers of checklists and to-do lists and approaches that are similar. We talk about so many things that Cal puts into practice himself. He walks the walk. And part of what I find so impressive about him is how effectively he has put positive constraints on Around his work.

5:58 And within his life so that he can do what he does best. with the fewest distractions. possible. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And without further ado, Cal.

6:09 Newport. 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. Unforced errors. That should be Basically a review of the last ten years, right? I mean, that could be the like the Walter Isaacson sort of biography of a generation. Unforced errors and I feel this way in the sense that we're talking right now about things

6:35 kind of horseshoeing back around to many of the Certainly some advantages, but many disadvantages and trappings of, say, television. So despite our best efforts, many of us seem to somehow get corraled. into these unforced errors or corral ourselves into unforced errors. Right. I mean you could almost write a book.

6:58 Called Unforced Errors. The internet story. It could just be about all of the ways 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. But let's take

7:12 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

7:29 There is a good sign. I think there's something positive in there. Tell me. The real unforced error that I think hit content creation was algorithms.

7:39 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. This I think was a huge problem for content quality. Podcast by contrast, right? So we come back to podcast.

8:02 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. 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.

8:17 You should listen to this. I growth is slow, often with podcasts. But there is no countervailing content curation force 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 account, because you can't share'em that way.

8:34 Video I think is now inevitable just because visual is more interesting. Radio, for example, in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties. was a really well developed technology. Radio shows were very good. Radios were cost effective. Radios were portable. You could put them in a in a car They weren't too expensive. And when T V came along, it was much more complicated, it was more expensive, the experience was squash, they had to stay between these really bright clean lights on these small stages because of the limitations of the early lenses and detectors.

9:03 And it just eight radios launch. Because visual's really interesting. So We can't help but watch when we have a chance to watch. So I I think this is where podcasting is going. It's gonna reinvent basically. Linear TV. Like it was at the heyday of cable.

9:16 There's a lot of channels. And you hear about a show, hey, have you heard about the show Mad Men, it's really good, then people go and and watch it. But I think that's actually That 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.

9:36 I think it's a good countervailing 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 changed very dramatically in the last

9:54 Five to ten years. The tenth year of 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.

10:21 in exact tandem of audiobooks, certainly with podcasts as Smart devices and broadband to become more Ubiquitous. I think when podcasts were on a volume basis similar to books.

10:36 In so much as let's just say there's a hundred thousand books published in the US per year through major publishers. I've no idea if that number's 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 all of a sudden. You have a fixed Set. of podcasts.

10:55 But then you have this long tail 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 recommendations are now hinged on this. Very much kind of a

11:15 In some respects. determining variable, which is video. So the YouTube has always been 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.

11:33 Consumption of audio. But I think they're are a couple of other factors like TikTok, for instance, and the

11:41 kind of fear of TikTok as a competitor. And then emulation of TikTok. by major platforms. that has led to this divorce of long form and short form content. So for instance.

11:54 Even for this podcast, we've had clips that have with clear visual attribution, everything in the description related to Tim Ferriss show, do a hundred million views and they have translated exactly Zero to longer form. Say content consumption. So I don't think we are free of the algorithm, I suppose is what I'm saying, in the sense that there is still word of mouth.

12:17 But I've noticed a tremendous change in the last handful of years. As things get more and more Algorithmically driven. And I feel like the big joke, don't worry, guys, this isn't gonna be all cynicism, and Tim Ferris talking about the glass half full with respect to podcasting. On his podcast. On my podcast, but I feel like the big kind of cosmic joke for me Is that

12:44 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 um Delivering this.

13:20 Sort of scent of a woman. Hellfire Ribstone 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 of the notes on that conversation. Because The reason I'm wearing this

13:36 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. Two

13:51 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.

14:08 That begets all sorts of questions. Why is growth important? Why? Is A B. And see. more important than the initial drivers that led you to adopt this medium as your home base, let's just say. 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

14:33 Prevalent. Social behaviors, social adoption, technology adoption, et cetera. Just so folks have an idea. Let me set the stage. 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 life outside of work, the way we connect with each other. In this role I do a lot of writing as a contributor to the New Yorker, where I really Explore those ideas in depth in addition. My books. I'm often thinking about this.

15:01 How do we work with technology. I have a philosophy. This is actually new since the the last time I was on your show. I I did a New Yorker piece in late twenty twenty three. Where I introduced this notion I called techno selectionism. And I said this is really the way

15:17 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 gonna have. I always give the example of going back and watching Steve Jobs Keynote speech in two thousand and seven when he's introducing the iPhone. He doesn't even get to the internet features until thirty minutes into the speech. I mean, he was just jazzed.

15:40 That your iPod was gonna be on the same thing as your phone and you wouldn't have to switch back and forth. You had no way of predicting Eight years later. you're gonna have, for example, a teenage mental health crisis. So techno selectionism says

15:52 Be willing. To actually aggressively step backwards. Be willing to say I this looks interesting. Let me try this out. Oh no. No, no, this is not matching what's really important to me, so you're out of here. Alright, this I will do this I won't. So being more

16:07 willing to both experiment And reject. after the fact to move away from these narratives of techno progressivism. That says new technology is good.

16:19 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.

16:37 And for a long time I was seen as essentially a crazy person. I actually wrote about this. In that New Yorker piece on techno selectionism. I wrote about my experience in two tausin six stin. writing a Time Sop ed that said quit social media. And how like the world fell down on me.

16:54 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 op-ed. They brought someone in to write an op ed two weeks later that went point by point to my op ed and said, Don't worry, everyone. You can ignore this. This isn't right. Don't don't worry about this. In the case of a water landing, assume the position. It's going to be gonna be fine. And of course now, you know, within a couple of years, 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. So things do change. So I come at things from those perspectives. What is the underlying value here.

17:31 If a technology or a way I'm using technology is not serving that value. Then we can push back or change it. Which is What you were doing. If we bring it back to the headset, which as we were joking before is gonna 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.

17:50 that does not require you For me. For you. For me. 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 techno selectionism. I want to put my coda on the video thing though, is that I don't think YouTube is the future of video for podcasts. 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.

18:19 Using you to Unless it's really YouTube specified. And so I think that mismatch is doling the impact of the YouTube algorithm. on the podcast ecosystem because those audiences don't Play well together.

18:32 I think the future of video for podcasting, it's gonna be on smart T Vs. I think it'll probably be I subscribe to this app. That has on it. Which by the way, you know, I was talking to our our own YouTube guy. And the reason why I'm on YouTube, by the way, is practice. 'Cause I think video is gonna be key. YouTube itself, mm, right now it's not gonna drive my podcast.

18:52 But I wanna 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 Fridman. Smart T Vs will often be the number two or the number three most common device on which the podcast is consumed. Really? Correct. Yeah, because if you think about it. You can load the YouTube app on your smart TV.

19:10 Podcasters are now filming in high def four K. 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. 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 future probably is you're going to have some app. You're like, okay, I subscribe to this app. It's the equivalent of a Two thousand and four linear cable channel.

19:29 that you would have had on your menu. It's a nice Netflix interface and it's Cal Newport's latest shows and Tim's and like Ryan Holidays, whatever, like a group of people doing similar stuff. It's a channel and you go through a a horizontal carousel. Oh, there's a new episode of whatever, and you watch it on your screen. I think podcasting's gonna compete with streamers and 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 two thousands is that they got that down to something like

19:58 four hundred thousand dollars an hour. Which it was a minuscule cost per hour because they're doing these reality shows. Podcasting you can get that down. Even with high production values, another order of magnitude or more. Yeah, but like one tenth the cost for like the super sensitive. Yeah, even the people with the uh the sixty thousand dollar tricasters for the three camera setups, et cetera.

20:18 So that's a bit of an aside, but that's where I think This is who should be thinking about podcasts, I think. I like YouTube I don't like the YouTube algorithm. It doesn't play well with podcasts. Why do you say that? Because there are the anointed demigods of the YouTube podcast ecosystem, right? Lex Friedman.

20:35 Certainly Andrew Huberman. It's very hard to do that. There are certain names. Jordan Peterson. Gabromate 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 ten minutes and get three million views. Which is not to diminish what they do. I think actually everyone I mentioned has produced some really spectacular content. So it's not to minimize it in any way. But why do you say it doesn't play nice? Because it seems like that is the primary

21:03 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.

21:20 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.

21:37 For a lot of people. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think two things are going on here. One, I think it's less podcast Just as a per capita basis. Less podcast 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

21:52 Your earning a Kevin Kelly Thousand True fans. Middle class or above income. That just aren't playing in that arena. It's a golf podcast. It's a fitness podcast.

22:01 What have you. Or it's on video. But it doesn't really matter. I mean they have the cameras and s and younger people listen to it on the video. That's not like that's driving its growth. Huberman and Lex. They're outliers in ways it's not useful.

22:14 To pursue I mean to pursue that is similar to being early in your T V career and saying, Well, let's just do what Oprah's doing. She has a lot of uh 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

22:31 Favored. By the algorithm. If you go two or three hours. 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. It's chicken and the egg.

22:42 People like them. So they'll watch a full three hour video. And then the YouTube algorithm's like, Oh my God, people are watching three hours. That's a lot of time and we're gonna really push this. But I don't know that most podcasts need YouTube, but also even if you do, it just doesn't work.

22:56 It's really difficult. YouTube's algorithm once Mr. Beast Way more than it once, you know, is reclined. It's just the reality of what's going on with that. Yeah, I mean I think there are a bunch of open questions, but I wanna come back to the I'll attempt to come back to the thirty thousand foot view with the techno selectionism.

23:13 Think it was. Which, by the way, folks, if you're not aware, you may have even mentioned them in your piece. I'm I apologize, I haven't read it, but the Amish do something very similar. They do adopt new technology. They're just very strict about how they approach it. The first thing I'd 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 prox for who to choose as their content partners just in terms of popularity. So it may

23:43 indirectly still be a determinant YouTube, that is, of who gets placement. 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 do I change my specifications? But to zoom out just on the techno selectionism side, because I I think you

24:11 mention 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, thalidomide 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 there were rules put in place and the FDA changed the A B and C and so on to make things safer.

24:34 There's no reason to treat technology any differently, in my mind. Drugs are a technology. So it's sort of a subset, but social media, same, same, wearing a headset. where you have the illusion of depth perception, but in reality looking at a screen that's Less than a few inches from your

24:51 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 Luddite, but even living in Silicon Valley for seventeen years, I was sort of uh sharp edge adopter, but not a cutting edge adopter. I never really took things on personally through self experimentation or

25:11 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 ear 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 like If technologies are just And I'm not gonna use the dictionary definition here, but let's just say tools and quotation marks of various types, which could be behaviors, to accomplish a certain

25:40 Task solve a certain problem, right? It could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite mount. But it could also be A certain type of behavior that you use. Which is basically an algorithm. It's a recipe, step by step.

25:55 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. It's kinda like the uh character loosely based on Peter Thiel 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 gets to the locusts and he's like the thirty year cycle is gonna coincide, right? And the reason I mentioned that is If we think about, for instance, video I think many people who are

26:27 Adopting video. I've 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 effect.

26:43 Which people have experienced through other medium like television. And I have to my own limited experience that I'm not Brad Pitt or anything like that, but I have certainly it is hard for

26:56 A lot of people I know with popular podcasts. That have any video component. So like go hang out at a coffee shop. They can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down and read a book. Yeah. because they'll get interrupted every five to ten minutes if it's in any decently sized city in the US at least.

27:10 If they're US based podcasters. And For that reason that I'm also Kinda take a knee.

27:17 techno selectionism slash Amish 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.

27:30 Six months. I can afford to wait twelve months. Yep. And If I am giving you credit for this, but it's certainly one of my favorite In my case, audiobooks, born standing out. Be so good they can't ignore you. Steve Martin. Rule number one.

27:45 Daniel Day Lewis was not on TikTok 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 fucking good that every few years he would just show up and win best actor and then disappear again. 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. The 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 were telegraphing this a bit. You were talking about slow productivity a bit. And you were like, well, I'm thinking about making this book. So

28:28 I'm just curious to know. Process wise, if you'd indulge me. What happened between then and now? Because now you have a finished book. And people can buy it. And this is a

28:39 maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your Primary projects, the things to say yes to. Because writing a book takes a lot of energy. So what happened between let's just say January 2022? And now we're recording January twenty twenty four. with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time. Well, it's a good case study.

29:03 Because I was testing the idea then. I went back and actually pulled out this timeline. I think the first time I Use the term slow productivity What Maybe twenty twenty.

29:14 Or twenty twenty-one, 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.

29:29 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 and 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.

29:51 In twenty twenty. It's 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. twenty twenty two I'm still

30:01 trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form. You know, that summer. I'm up. you know, up in New England writing. I'm up actually writing the book. So that's the process. This is summer of twenty twenty two. Summer of twenty twenty two.

30:13 I would have handed this in And Spring of twenty twenty three. It's when I would have handed in my first manuscript.

30:22 Incredible. Well, see, I disappear part of my my methodology is I I disappear in the summer. Yeah, 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 at a research institution. You don't get paid in the summer. They pay you for ten months. And then you can take on through grants, summer salary to keep working on research is what you're supposed to do.

30:42 And at some point I realized, Well, you know, I'm I make money from writing books. I don't actually have to Now is the university the one who's providing the grant? Or is it some independent foundation or whatever? Independent. Right. So I'm like a theoretical computer scientist, applied mathematician. So we'd get our money from the NSF, for example. And that's just what you do because you're researching. National Science Foundation. Exactly. Yeah. And I realized at some point after I got tenure.

31:07 I don't actually need that salary. Like this is what the book advance should be for. And I began disappearing and really let's right. 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

31:24 Ten 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'cause I'm working on my first book project in six years, seven years, something like that.

31:42 Oh. Excellent. And There are many reasons for it. It's one of those things that just refuse to go away. One of those ideas are like, okay, this is just gonna ricochet around. inside my skull indefinitely unless I let it out somehow. So let's do it. And

31:59 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'm calling bullshit on myself on some level. Get back into writing on the blog. And in part because I feel I have More differentiation.

32:17 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 least some people seem to like, right from the one thousand true fans perspective. Whereas

32:32 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 arena is becoming more of 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.

32:49 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 can't just be like, That's so fucking dumb, L O L Z, you know, on The blog. There's more involved. There is

33:09 A little more. process involved in terms of leaving comments, so the signal tends to be higher. It allows me to workshop things also. quickly workshop things and see how they land. And I still think that for like mimetic testing. Text is pretty hard to beat.

33:25 They're very different laboratories. Text and voice are very different laboratories. 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. So I have two questions for you. The first is We in our last conversation when I interviewed you on the podcast.

33:47 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. You had some feedback loop. whereby you could improve your writing.

34:07 As it stands right now. I'm not gonna get much of that from my readers. God bless them, right? Because it's not their role. It's a heavy lift. They're gonna 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 or there. But

34:29 How would you Approach that. 'Cause I would like to try to mimic, say, Seth Goden, like short blog posts, which I'm fucking 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 create that feedback?

34:46 I want to get better. And I'm happier going back to 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 basically my baseline for my career. is I'm always writing.

35:00 I'm always writing. Now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces. In the six weeks Counting today and going back six weeks from today when we're recording, I've published three pieces. in the New Yorker. I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing because I think

35:13 That's the rare skill. Because you're right. People Can become good podcast interviewers like good enough. It's pretty Quick.

35:22 I mean people I don't know they with chat GPT if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup, they can do it. Yeah. They can do it. Give me ten 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 ten questions and you can finesse them and then you have your iPad and you're ready to go. And if you have uninteresting people, you're really just kind of getting out of the way. And actually it's 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.

35:49 Writing is hard. You can't write without practice. I mean you've you've written what four or five phone books worth of books and Tim Dot blog, you would be five, five, yeah. And the blog was going for really long time. Right. So I I think that makes a lot of sense. One idea I would have is particular stylistic targets that you're working with. This post or for the next week or the next month. I like what's happening in this riding over here. This is resonating with me, so my taste is saying this is good.

36:17 Let me deconstruct that and try that in my host. 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 steady edited gig is that I would deconstruct articles

36:34 And try to practice particular things I 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 whatever the metaphorical

36:47 equivalent of the Phillips 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.

37:05 Because in my notes it was on like page three or four and I was like okay this seems like the mother quality. It is. In a sense. That allows for the birth of all these other qualities.

37:18 You can't be busy. And frenetic. and bouncing off the walls with a hundred projects. If you're obsessed about doing something really well. It's incompatible with that. Now doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together.

37:33 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 gonna go away for six months and just read. That's what I do. I cannot be

37:49 on YouTube, like your Daniel Day Lewis example. Because when you obsess over quality, like two things happen. One, you can't be busy. getting really good at something. And then two If you're doing something really well.

38:03 That actually gives you the autonomy 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 gonna do this video thing right now. Because you're really good at it, right? You 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 slash quality first. Up sus over quality. Yeah, because the the other two principles are do fewer things and work at a natural pace.

38:35 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 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 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

38:57 One of the dominant reactions to burnout Right now in Let's say elite culture. It's just an all out rejection of work itself. Like well, any drive to do things, it's a capitalist construction. And the real thing to do is just do nothing.

39:10 But that doesn't last. And the people who are telling you to do this Or not doing nothing. They're striving really hard to make sure that their sub stacks and books about doing nothing are gonna have a really big audience and they're giving talks on it. Um 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 the glue. You have to do the other things.

39:38 But if you just do the other things, you know, you're gonna end up doing quiet quitting TikToks or something like that. You're not gonna end up where you wanna be. Oh no. Purgatory. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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40:51 Returning to Because this relates. Slow productivity. Choosing to spend.

41:01 Your entire summer. Working on this. um 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

41:19 wanting to or understanding the importance of say obsessing over quality. Which I think you would agree is the best promotion, like rather than worrying about all the different ways you can market something, like product first. Is a great marketing plan. You still need to choose which thing.

41:34 Great eye. 'Cause you could choose. quiet quitting TikToks as your Particular. Specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not for me.

41:43 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. 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 of people emailing you about like film adaptations of this, or who knows? You have stuff that gets lobbed over the transom. Maybe you even have great

42:17 Or exciting ideas. Two 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.

42:28 That is what I do. I come up with ideas that I think are important. And I put them in the riding with the best possible craft. I'm not happy if I'm not riding. So that's why I'm not giving a hundred talks a year. It's why I'm not releasing an app, it's why

42:43 You can't hire the deep work Academy consultants or you don't know how many times people Have told me like we would give you Any amount of money. 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, nah I'm gonna

43:00 Right. Instead. I wrote the book. Read the book. You guys can just buy it. Yeah, buy by many, many of those that try to replicate what they would pay. But then the specifically that idea, I spend years I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to Write a book about

43:19 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 surfaces something or that promotes something very different. It's a volume game. Among other things. I wanna put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm

43:34 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 gonna get seventy videos all doing the same thing. It's a completely different way of thinking.

43:48 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, or the friend who introduced me to your work actually, Vermeet Steffi.

44:01 Way back when In his early blog I remember writing an article for him that said, Don't get started. That was like my advice. Because my thought was it's really hard to get a good idea. And so like take your time.

44:13 And then to cultivate a good idea takes years and you have to write, you have to you know, you're gonna dedicate a lot of your life to it. So really Don't get started if you can at all. Hold back. Until you're really, really sure about it. And then people say, Yeah, but I worry that I'm just gonna procrastinate forever. And in some sense it's like well then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work.

44:31 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. using generative AI, you'll looking for If I cry to this thing, just looking for some quick thing that you can connect and You gotta just not wanna get started until you can't help but get started.

44:48 I think that's frustrating for a lot of the Internet generation. Because it takes a really long time. So I do want the specific I mean you you did mention it, I guess, because you're a writer, but 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?

45:03 Looking at your C V, 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 da da 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 am X. They might say I'm a YouTuber, but usually it's like fifteen hyphens. And therein lies many opportunities and also many temptations to be resisted. I would say that

45:32 a few observations. The first is that as you're talking about, don't get started. It makes me think of Warren Buffett and the Don't just do something, stand there. You don't need to make a hundred.

45:45 thousand investments. You don't need to be a day trader. 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 You are I would say also like the It seems to me like and I'm really putting together a question with a million semicolons here, but

46:04 You do get started. But you're not overcommitting to half baked ideas. You are exploring and experimenting and workshopping. Which is also as I think I might have mentioned and another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts, because if you look at say the Four Hour Body, the Four Hour Body was workshop for years before it ever came out. Just wasn't under that name.

46:26 The first blog post that ever went super mega viral on Dig at the time, D I G G and perhaps a few others was uh from Kevin Rose. Sure. Kevin. 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, et cetera. And so that was workshop for years.

46:53 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 gonna say all but certain, but it was as certain as I could possibly be. I had already tested this. Four hour work week was work shopped for Six, seven years in lectures.

47:11 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. Right. It's a good question because I decided early.

47:27 I decided I was a writer when I was twenty. And I became a professional When I was twenty one. So I signed with my agent when I was twenty and signed my first pork deal right after I turned. twenty one.

47:39 So I came to it early. Uh because I was a Big reader. and was verbally precocious. It's gonna be in the title podcast. But so you know, I I I read a lot. The glue of high quality and being verbally. Verbally precocious and and literarily precocious, I suppose. I mean it was like gifted and talented reading program.

47:59 People think, you know, the Johns Hopskins talent search to 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 gonna be a writer. I I just it's really hard. Writing's really hard. So that's not what I'm gonna do. I was a walk on onto the crew team instead.

48:19 Does have the right build for it. Like this is what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do sports, this is great. Was that lightweight or regular weight? Hundred sixty pounds this guy. There's a lot of sauna and weight cutting in that. Yeah. I was the 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.

48:34 And I may have talked about this before on the show, I'm not sure, but I long and short of it, I developed a congenital heart condition, a sort of rapid heartbeat. So I had to stop rowing. And so I said, Uh maybe I'll see about riding. And that's when I started riding I don't think you mentioned this. 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 the right build for it.

48:59 Whatever. So I was I was like I could maybe make a go of this. And had to stop. Is uh just out of nowhere just all right, I have uh it's called an atrial flutter. Okay. So I guess I I can't do this anymore.

49:10 And so then I said, Let me try I need some sort of activity. Uh guess grudgingly. Grudgingly I'll try writing. And the very first thing I wrote was a an op ed about nine eleven. For the student newspaper.

49:24 a couple weeks after nine eleven. And I started. I started writing columns for him. 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 when I decided I'm gonna write a book. Let's become a writer. Let me write a book. And that's what we talked about last time was figuring out how can a twenty one year old sell a book and It would have to be the right topic and we did all of that, but that's what I I declared.

49:44 But when it comes to Your other part of this question, which is how do you figure out what to work on? I think you have two options and you can do both. One option is to actually have like you did or I have.

49:56 a way of test driving ideas. 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

50:12 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. If you don't have that.

50:22 Then the other option, and this is what I think of as like the MFA option, is you have to develop really good taste. M FA meaning Masters in Fine Arts. Yeah. So if you go back, I took an award, the Pen Hemiway Award for first time novelists. I just chose the whatever year was most recent and here's the finalist. And I went through their bios, like all but one. had come to an MFA program.

50:42 And so what's going on there, it's not that 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 increases your taste. Meaning your ability to recognize what's good and what's not and what's possible with good things.

51:01 So that's the traditional option in sort of a pre internet age. is you get really discerning about other people's work. You read a lot and just know this is a good novel and this is not. 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.

51:19 And be your own worst cr 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 twenty years ago. And or You really have to put in the work to develop taste. So you understand.

51:34 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 gonna 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.

51:52 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

52:04 And maybe this is just because I'm curmudgeon. And one of the old Muppets up in the balcony, Mortimer. But I think offline is incredibly Uncrowded. And

52:18 Absurdly valuable. in the sense that if you're looking for real time feedback, go volunteer for ten bucks an hour to teach a class at learning annex and see what sticks, see what works, see what's confusing. The feedback loop is so Fast. You do that once a week for a month, you're going to know.

52:35 A lot. I mean you're gonna know more than if you had written a hundred blog posts. By far, in my opinion. 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. If you listen to, for instance, my Jamie Foxx episode from way back in the day, 2015.

52:53 It was podcast of the year at the time, back when that was possible. When there were like 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 example of taste. I'm listening to a book right now. Which I've read excerpts of, but it's called The Power Law by Sebastian Malibe and it's about venture capital.

53:18 He wrote a book. Also called More Money Than God, which is Nonfiction. Encyclopedic And beautifully.

53:28 written romp through the world of hedge funds. Which blew me away. Because 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.

53:46 And still I was listening to it in the car yesterday and I was like Good God, it's just so good. Like the writing and the timing that we've talked about before and Dave Barry 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 Abercrombie in this fantasy trilogy, which starts with the blade itself, where I was just like, oh. God, it's so well architected. It's not just the pros, but it is the pros as well. So that taste.

54:21 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

54:38 Slow food. As an example. Where they look back to traditional cuisines 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. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers.

54:56 So people who did things with their brain But not the normal nineteen fifties and onward I'm in an office or working at a computer screen, so like artists and philosophers. scientists, the original knowledge workers. they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said, Great. We can study them to see what did they gravitate towards.

55:15 in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work. 'Cause 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.

55:29 is you know, Isaac Newton. And I said, Okay, we all know He wrote this great masterwork, the Principia. Calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity.

55:42 The give celestial order to the way the the cosmos works. He wrote that thing over decades. 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.

55:59 Lin Manuel 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 on to a professional stage, as pre Broadway debut. That's a seven year period.

56:18 And he's working on it, then he's not. 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 Grammy's than he did Hamilton. He's like a really good player. Right. If you read Wikipedia, you're like, Oh Yeah, you don't realize the synopsis in one sense. His dad was like you really should go to law school.

56:38 He took a job as a substitute teacher He was spending a lot of time with a Free style rap. True. Called Love Supreme.

56:47 That would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows So if you zoomed in on a particular day In the almost decade that Lynn Manuel Miranda was working on in the heights. 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?

57:03 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 saying, You know what, in the summers I'm going with Alfred Stieglitz, we're going The Lake George. And I'm gonna sit there in a shanty that she called it the shant. It was an outbuilding near the the lake. I'm just gonna paint and be inspired, and then I'll come back after the summer.

57:27 and finish the artwork and show'em 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 modernist of that whole era of painting, right? So we we see those examples. Well Murray Curry. At the

57:44 Pinnacle of about to discover. in pitch blend 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 gotta be uh getting after you gotta be crushing it, but we don't

57:59 See that now. Like, yeah, she was great. She won two Nobel prizes. Like Way to go. She wasn't part of the hustle culture. That's the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people Producing things of real value.

58:11 Using their brain. They were smart and they were dedicated. And they worked really hard. But they did hustle. And they didn't work. Ten hour days, day after day.

58:21 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.

58:33 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 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

58:51 Slow productivity. There's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of trade offs. What are the Pressures, expectations. psychological challenges, et cetera. that you should be prepared to face.

59:05 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 TikTok videos. In other words, I'd rather be building the Sistine Chapel instead of sand castles that just get wiped away every time the wave comes in. But

59:22 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 rightly Say that at least at face value. So what should people be

59:39 willing to accept as trade offs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity. And is it mutually exclusive? Like presumably Lin Then we'll Miranda had away, too. buy groceries and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap. Right. So

59:55 Maybe I'm making a creating a false dichotomy here. Teacher. columnist. He was writing reviews and columns for a paper. While he was working on this in his spare time. But the bigger point's the important one is how do we take an example like Newton and the Principia.

1:00:11 And apply it to someone who has just a twenty first century corporate semi remote hybrid work job 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.

1:00:28 Do fewer things. Well, what this really means if you have a normal corporate job is 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. Because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context in most jobs Not in software development.

1:00:48 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.

1:01:05 that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no. This is a terrible way to manage your workload. So you can be much more explicit about how you manage your workload. Here's how many slots I have. Oh, I filled them. I mean this is really sort of four hour work week style Let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload. You could go to a pull based system instead of a push based system. You can do reverse to do list. I mean, there's a lot of things you can do.

1:01:29 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 titrate your workload.

1:01:43 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 in 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 twenty months People say, Okay, wait a second.

1:01:59 I know you're Worth as a human's not defined by your labor, but your worth to me as an employee is, you gotta do something, right? Quiet quitting is just not doing very much work. Yeah, 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.

1:02:15 And then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality That then becomes the accelerant that allows you to do these other things faster and better. So as you hone in on, okay, here's what I'm gonna own within this company and I'm gonna 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 I'm gone in August. I don't do work at June, you gain autonomy.

1:02:41 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 gonna get you something like the slow productivity benefits of a I'm doing good work.

1:02:57 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.

1:03:13 Yeah, makes it a lot easier, by the way. Yeah. Makes it easier. I think that a lot of folks listening will be Self employed. So we can use that lens if it makes it a little easier. But perhaps they run Who knows? A software like a

1:03:26 B to be. 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? I mean it's okay, here's how many things I work on at a time.

1:03:43 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. You have an unlimited load. A poll system says no, this is what I'm working on now.

1:03:58 I can't do something else until I'm done with this. And 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 ahead of it. Software developers already do this because they already have Kanban inspired cards on a whiteboard system. where you pull in, I'm gonna 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,

1:04:21 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. Th 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? The

1:04:36 Similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles like mine is a Professor Ryder's 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.

1:04:53 The idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that is part of my responsibilities. But it's cap. So if I have a quota as a professor for here's how many Paper reviews I do per semester. When I hit that cap.

1:05:05 I can now say to someone, hey Thanks for thinking me about this. I do a lot of paper reviews. I like doing paper reviews. I've already hit my quota for this semester, however. So 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

1:05:21 Your quota's wrong. Well, whatever it is is wrong. You should be doing more, you know? As opposed to saying Ah, I'm really busy, you know, I don't know if I have time. And they're like everyone's busy. It'd be good for me if you would just do this. Yeah. Don't worry, I can make this a really light lift for you and you're like, don't worry about it and we'll whatever.

1:05:39 There's nothing more quixotic. then 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 someone's trying to get you to do something,

1:05:54 You're like, Well, I guess I could, but you know, I am pretty busy. They're never gonna 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? I'll lean more into quotas and I'm really careful about that. When you say careful, what do you mean? Careful about taking on too much. I'm very careful. Is that what you mean? Yeah. And not only do I have

1:06:14 quotas for I only do this much per semester. I'll think about I'm not gonna do any of this work. this season. Oh, I'm riding the season, so I'm gonna disappear and not do this. Or this season I'm working on research. I'm very Wary of workload.

1:06:30 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 and you've agreed to do it. It generates overhead.

1:06:51 People are gonna check in on it. There's gonna be calls you have to jump on to talk about it. It it has some cognitive 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.

1:07:07 Just the administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings. takes up most of their schedule. And it's this weird almost Sisopheian 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 overhead takes over more and more of your time.

1:07:27 And it takes longer to get through your actual workload. It's an incredibly inefficient way 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

1:07:44 I should like the idea of slow productivity. Because my workers are gonna produce better stuff. We will make more money. if we don't pile fifteen things on their plate because more of their time is going to be working on value producing objectives. and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to. There's actually really a

1:08:03 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. Let's just make you happier. You produce better stuff. I mean your company has more profit, your clients

1:08:19 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 tenants of slow productivity for say a three to six month period of time. The companies that would

1:08:38 not do well. on at least one level would probably be those who have not clearly defined What? The High leverage.

1:08:48 Most important things are. Right. So if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and taken the measure twice, cut once approach. Two. determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominoes or makes them irrelevant. They're probably be quite bad.

1:09:05 Uh 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 here doing other thirty tasks. but remaining really focused, right, which I think is a Risk.

1:09:21 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. I've committed to only doing five peer reviewed

1:09:40 Article reviews. Per quarter. Really appreciate you thinking of me, but unfortunately I've already hit that. And I'd need to focus on A B or C. So the actual language that is used.

1:09:51 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.

1:10:07 Right. Because they're effective. Well, extreme clarity is the most important. I think People tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness. Which is really not that important to the person making the request. They want this thing done.

1:10:22 And they want to know if you're gonna 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 you can give some explanations.

1:10:43 Most people don't read. Past the I can't do this. Like they're already Emailing the next person that they're gonna ask about this once they Get to that line. So I think short and sweet

1:10:55 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 gonna get done. Because they wanna be released from having to keep track of something in their mind. And so it's why

1:11:08 This company that made their clients Sign a communication agreement. 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.

1:11:19 What we're gonna do is we're gonna have and I believe their setup if I this was a few years ago, but I believe their setup was we're gonna have this weekly check-in call. And we're gonna 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 gonna take careful notes on that and we'll post it and get you that information back. This is what we're gonna do. One of the two partners of this company was thinking, this is it, right? Like we're going out of business because clients don't want anything taken away from them. They want full flexibility. They're gonna see this as weird and eccentric and Who are we to say this? The clients didn't care.

1:11:51 They didn't care because what do 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 as I thought about it. Yeah. Nebulous anxiety. Nebulous anxiety. They don't know when something is going to be a change. So you better get back to me right away. Because if you don't get back to me right away

1:12:09 I worry that you're gonna forget this. And so I'm just gonna 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 shark. Write anything that comes up in here. And on our Thursday call, we're gonna go boom boom boom. Like we're gonna go through this whole thing.

1:12:26 That solves the same problem for them. Like, great, I can just write this here. And the win 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 gonna send out the window and that's gonna make it to the roost that you you know that your intern check I don't care.

1:12:50 I don't have to worry about it. 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 clarity. Okay, great. You can't do this. Or you can do this, but here's how we're gonna talk about it. Okay, good. I trust this will get done now. I know what's coming next.

1:13:06 I have a hundred other emails in my inbox. I've already moved on. So I you know, I think clarity, clarity, clarity. Is the key Once you start actually managing your workloads much more explicitly. Any other cues 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 things I can't and can do.

1:13:28 Or will or won't do. Do you have any other systems in place or anything like that that lessens the burden of 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.

1:13:46 I mean I'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people have switched to a social media paradigm for communication. Oh, I'm gonna DM you on whatever. The fact that I'm not the like I don't know. I don't have to reach people forgot about email. I also have

1:14:02 I do have though you know, I call them communication channels very specific. There is no Here is the general way I have very specific channels for specific reasons with clear expectations. I used to call these sender filters. And I still really depend on these today. Like if you have this type of request, you can send it here.

1:14:22 If you wanna send me a link or something, you can send it here, but you're not gonna 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

1:14:40 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 layer of filter, which is default to not answering.

1:14:51 I mean 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.

1:15:04 Yeah, how do you phrase that? You're like if I don't know you, it's very low likelihood that I 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, and it'll be clear. I'm not gonna 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

1:15:25 They go to my Georgetown to go to my professor address. My default becomes not to respond. Which You know, it's a little bit controversial.

1:15:34 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 grand professors at MIT managed their inbox was If I don't respond, that means you need to try again. Right. Like whatever you sent here, it was their way of saying, No. Try again. You need to be more clear or have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with. And so that's my final wall is

1:15:54 getting past that, and that took me a while to I felt comfortable doing this. It was 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 that sort of works a lot of things out as well. 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's a different sort of asymmetric medium so you can feel more

1:16:17 comfortable about just not answering. What do you think in this book I ask this question a lot'cause there's usually something that pops up. Which is What do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over?

1:16:30 For instance, for the four hour work week, it's the filling the void chapter. People are like, Oh yeah, it must be a nice problem to have. Like you gotta 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, your life doesn't just get auto-populated with awesome stuff that that makes you fulfilled. You kinda have to plan for it. And people gloss over that, right? I'll worry about that later. And then they end up in these existential crises. So is there anything in this book could be anything, like a philosophical kind of foundational? Peace. Could be.

1:17:04 strategic or tactical. Where you're like, hmm. Based on people I've talked to, based on proofreaders, based on whatever, I'm like, hmm, if I could draw attention to something, I think people might gloss over. Or not. It's

1:17:16 full weight of importance. W anything come to mind? I think people don't realize that agree to which they don't actually have a sensical definition of productivity. There's a part in the book where I survey Seven hundred

1:17:29 of my readers and one of the questions I asked them is just to find productivity. No one has an answer. What most people did was just describe their job. Productivity is producing good software like they sort of list what it is their job is supposed to be. So I think people

1:17:46 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 haphazard. An impromptu

1:18:04 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 nineteen fifties when knowledge work

1:18:16 emerge 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.

1:18:39 And she 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. Now it's working. have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse.

1:18:53 and the organizational systems were autonomous. Like it's just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself. There's no organizational wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see what if we change this, is it better? So what what happened was We invented this idea called pseudo productivity. Which was

1:19:11 We will use activity that's visible as a proxy useful effort. So it's just hey. You're doing something that's good. Doing more things is better than less. That's where the sort of notion of sort of busyness is good and how are you on busy

1:19:24 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

1:19:39 Spiral into just constant work and guilt and that's what that's where did the burnout crisis. You're done. You're done. Right. I it like we it kinda worked. You're you're gonna incinerate on reentry. Yeah, you're done. Like pseudo productivity work 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.

1:20:01 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 productivity 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.

1:20:21 Which it's clearly not, especially for non entry level knowledge work. Busyness doesn't produce high value. And so I think people Too often think of something like slow productivity. As I'm willing to trade off

1:20:35 Economic output. For psychological sustainability. I'm willing to trade off Making more money. for

1:20:44 feeling better about myself. And that's not what it is. It's no what you're doing now is Crazy. You're building model Ts with the lights off. Like it's a terrible way to work. It's like no, let's get a real definition of productivity.

1:20:55 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's hard. Just gets it done. But it's hard on me. The thing that we're doing now doesn't work.

1:21:07 It's not a sensical way of connecting human brains to add value to information is 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 and makes us feel good. But I think people get that wrong a lot. What's your definition for yourself? Of productivity.

1:21:27 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 they can't. It is so good. Yeah, it's a great book.

1:21:39 But I loved what Martin said in that, 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.

1:21:50 Get really good at something that's important. Everything else will work itself out. Like his exact quote was Be so good, 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

1:22:05 In college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't row crew anymore. was here's the two things I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do computer science, I'm gonna 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.

1:22:21 I just want to get good at this and let me read people who are really good. I wanna get better and better at this. 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've produced recently. That's it. I want to be better at things that are hard and and meaningful. And that's it. I don't want to be famous and I don't want to be. Good you mean an internally driven Evaluation of

1:22:45 Quality. Yeah. 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, not that.

1:22:55 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 trusted evaluation.

1:23:09 'Cause you can't be us yourself. 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

1:23:22 theoretical computer science paper, an 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 won an award, it was best paper award.

1:23:33 Right. Like this was the best. paper at this conference in the fall of you know twenty twenty two. That's important to me. It's hard. It's hard to write papers. It's hard to get them past accepted. And it's hard to win an award.

1:23:45 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 get a piece out there. That seems to be resonating with people. So I'm looking for that. Or even numbers. I mean, so I'm not against external numbers. I mean seeing a book Find an audience is important to me.

1:24:05 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 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

1:24:24 is a low value external indicator because there's a lot of serendipity in there. It's not a linear dose function on quality of input. So it's not the better the video you create. Just from a sheer quality. Then the more views it's going to get.

1:24:38 It could be Whatever. You know, like you have a very popular video about peeling a A hard boiled egg. I was just gonna say my most popular YouTube video, it's like eight million views or ten million views, is how to peel hard boiled eggs without peeling the whole egg. Yeah. Filmed 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. Like the you know, the kitchen hex 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.

1:25:12 twenty thirty million view videos. His number one video is how to peel a watermelon. Insight or whatever. People have problems with feeling things. People have problems with pe peeling things. Um But for you though, compare that.

1:25:27 I'm just thinking about peeling a watermelon. Sounds very high labor. Well somehow he does it 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 views on the egg video So your first book hitting number one of 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. You've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience.

1:25:53 Yeah, that's difficult. To do. So I like the high value external this is controversial, but I I learned this from Derek Sivers. Who told me that money is a great H here's his quote.

1:26:02 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.

1:26:13 It means nothing for me to click to watch your egg video because I don't whatever. What am I gonna lose? But to give twenty dollars to get your book, like I care about my twenty dollars. So I I think high value external indicators of value. Aren't a bad thing. They're scary because people

1:26:27 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. It keeps you honest. What? Do you think

1:26:37 Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive. I would think it would be a positive indicator. But maybe I'm using a different scale than he is. So he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased, I think. This is what he did at every stage of his career. when he had the next thing he wanted to do. So he was working as a record executive, for example, and and wanted to go full time with his band.

1:26:58 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 C D 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

1:27:12 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.

1:27:22 So 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

1:27:35 We're gonna stay out of 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 thing. It's a different thing. I'm really not qualified to evaluate such a thing, but 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.

1:28:01 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, three years, five years? It's gonna break. Like something's gonna break. It's just a question of when it breaks. So you want to preemptively think through

1:28:25 How to prevent that or Look at a other. Ways to kinda augment your ability to not rush. I think Derek is very, very good at this. Who are some other contemporaries? I know that and maybe we'll talk about it, but Jane Austen would be another example, historically speaking. Who are some contemporaries within the last twenty years who stand out.

1:28:45 Ten years just because the technological landscape. I think about this a lot, like how many Newtons, how many Da Vinci's, how many Mary Curies are just making TikTok videos right now, and they're never actually gonna make something. That is fulfilling their full potential. I would have to imagine it's vast swaths of of the population. So let's just say Glass. Five to ten years or current day.

1:29:08 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.

1:29:17 You know, it's I gotta get the right project. It takes a long time to get the project together. You spend a long time on that project till 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.

1:29:31 They take their time. And also they're not filling in the gap. Let me be on YouTube, let me be on Twitter, let me have a really sort of active presence out there. They take their time. Novelists are very good at this. Especially literary novelists.

1:29:45 Because their books need to be really good. That's their whole selling proposition. So they take their time. An example, a specific example I like. is John Grisham. I did this comparison. I uncovered this old interview of Michael Crichton once. It was an interview of Michael Crichton when he was twenty seven years old. And so I wrote this essay.

1:30:02 about compare Michael Crichton to John Grisham. You're gonna see two different approaches to roughly the same job, which is writing popular genre fiction. Crichton was all about busy. So you read this essay, this was after the Adronomus Strain had come out. And it's all

1:30:18 ambitions for things he wants to I want to direct. I wanna do movies. I have five books in development. I'm writing screenplays. I just moved out to 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, a time to kill when it first came out. I'm gonna write two. And if one of the two works, then I'll keep doing this.

1:30:38 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 two thousands, he had this long time sort of assistant to

1:30:52 Work for them. When she retired, he's like, I don't have to hire anyone else. Because 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 town and he he

1:31:07 was the commissioner of the Little League. He had a lot of stuff he did unrelated to work. He just slowed down. It'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 into things, and I don't need to create a six part series and direct my whatever and get into television. He's like, I'm just gonna I'm getting paid a lot of money.

1:31:28 I'm gonna write. That's what I wanna do. I wanna simplify. So Grisham has always stood out to me. I know a couple of people who know'em. And they underscore this. That he's like I write. I do one book a year.

1:31:39 And you're not gonna hear from me until it's done and then you get me for like four weeks. And I'll do like some publicity. But people know who I am. Do the dog and function. But it's four weeks, right? And then leave me alone. I'm gonna go do other things. So he's a great example. So it's two different types of ambition. The Crichton ambition is Now that I have all these opportunities I want to do every single one I can.

1:31:59 It's a I've been starving for years and now I'm I'm at the buffet and I'm gonna fill my plate. And Grisham had the complete other mindset. Now that I'm successful. I have the leverage to do nothing. No, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to like do this one thing. Isn't that great?

1:32:15 So he's definitely slow productivity. Maybe that's their next book, The Leverage to Do Nothing. I don't know. Thinking of Grisham as someone who decided from the outset to Use a rowing example to is it sculling?

1:32:31 One person, single person rowing. Yeah. So he's out there On the Charles. thinking about his next book, Rowan by Himself. And then there are a lot of other people out there. And I've been in this position before, so I'm not throwing

1:32:45 But you're like How did my life get so fucking complicated? And you're like shit, instead of sculling I built Noah's Ark. I've got two of every goddamn animal in here, and I have to unload this fucker. Like if I want to simplify, I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat. And I want to jump into some Ways to simplify. So if you are able to maintain that from the outset, 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 oh okay, now I have to unload Noah's Ark again.

1:33:18 One of the points in the notes here that I have. It is Work to reduce collaboration overhead, we talked 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?

1:33:34 Well, asynchrony is a problem. So asynchrony 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 not real time. Asynchrony has advantages because there's an overhead to having to arrange real time conversation. You and I have to agree somehow. This is when we're gonna Get on the phone together.

1:33:54 The problem with asynchrony is Is that if you use it for drawn out conversations There's gonna be seven back and forth messages. For us to decide on something. This now requires me to constantly monitor whatever channel we're using here, because if we're gonna get through

1:34:11 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 ten or fifteen minutes of it arriving. Because we have to knock this ball back and forth enough times.

1:34:23 fifteen minutes per knock, you know that 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 drains my energy. I can't think well. I'm exhausted.

1:34:41 And it 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 planning or conversations of any type with asynchrony, it destroys everything. It is one of the most potent productivity poisons.

1:34:55 And 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. It can actually be much more efficient.

1:35:07 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. It's just office hours. Like this is it every day. This

1:35:21 Hour to ninety minutes. My phone is on, I have a Slack channel, my door is open. And you just Hunt everything to office hours. Yeah, good question. Grab me at the next office are as you can. Yeah, we should get into that.

1:35:32 Grab me at the next office hours you can. Oh yeah, a bunch of requests are coming in for interviews, you know, for my book coming out. Great. Next office hours you can. Come and we'll go through them all. So you consolidate synchrony. into a regular period. So you're not wasting a lot of time Arranging the synchrony.

1:35:48 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 calendarly 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 One PM to six PM.

1:36:17 I am available in thirty minute slots or whatever. And then Here's a calendarly link, if I'm getting the service name correct, where you can book a time and we're not doing it via email because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling. I fucking hate it with such a passion.

1:36:35 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 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.

1:36:54 That coordinate with your team. That'd be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing at any point conversation could come in. I've suggested this a couple of times in the pages of the New Yorker.

1:37:07 Just stop using Slack. Essentially come back to it. It's funny actually. When Salesforce bought Slack. Right after they bought Slack, I had an article that was titled Slack built the right tool for the wrong way to work. And it was sort of a critique of This sort of hyperactive hive mine. And sales force.

1:37:24 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 they came back. And in fairness, this was the marketing company that was organizing this conference for Salesforce. They came back and said, Like, Well yeah, you know, I think we're okay.

1:37:41 I think I don't think we need you. But the to your question about office hours, actually You wanna 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 door's open.

1:37:56 That's how I run office hours with my discrete math students, right? Oh, 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 the Zoom link is open.

1:38:12 for this ninety 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.

1:38:29 during my office hours. So you just know from like three to four thirty. Then we can go back and forth and chat. 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 three to four thirty. And there, if we want to go back and forth on Slack.

1:38:45 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 onto this. Another thirty minutes with ten minute chunks. And a calendar link. We can say to someone

1:39:01 Either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one on one slots. Here's the link. I mean actually I 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 thirty minutes of one on ones and having a web page that says Here's how we talk. Show up.

1:39:19 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. Like confetti at Mardi Gras, just air. Yeah, link, link, link. Just toss it at people to try to squash these asynchronous back and forth. And the how to be more productive this year, that's in the New Yorker. Yeah, yeah, came out today. It's not typical New Yorker fair, but w my editor and I were just thinking

1:39:43 Why 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 nineteen fifties to the two thousands, the dominant productivity book of that decade and how the advice changes from there's some New Yorkery stuff in there, but there's also some like real hardcore advice. Did you mention Ouroboros? Is there a snake eating its own tail in this piece? I should've, yeah.

1:40:09 Sneak one in. I should have done Aura 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 peeve of mine. Yeah. From the mind of people who are professional writers who Critique productivity.

1:40:28 In their mind. Frederick Winslow Taylor is like the central figure. of American capitalism and productivity basically means him there with the stop watch. looking at your movements and he wasn't that influential of a person. It's such a pet peeve of mine. Scientific management, it was esoteric and kind of cult like and it had a following, but it got completely

1:40:50 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 pay scales 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

1:41:08 than the other way. The systems matter a lot more. And also forget this weird incentive scale of I'll pay you ten cents more If you're ten cents faster shoveling whatever. Ford figured out. Pay your workers a lot of money. Because the turnover's more expensive.

1:41:23 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 Winslow Taylor. They actually come from Peter Drucker and there's a whole other argument I could make here, but that's my pet peeve. It's like you don't have to mention him.

1:41:44 Every time you try to critique productivity. So Rants aside. Yeah. And Peter Drucker, I gotta say, man. It hit so many nails on the head. The effective executive still to this day. Just such an incredible

1:41:55 Short book that punches above its way class. So to scratch my own inch here. The New Yorker also has this Typeographical convention that has always been kind of confusing to me and seems a little Hifalutin.

1:42:10 Tell me if I'm getting this right. It always stands out. It jumps out like a war on someone's face every time I see it. They put an umlaut. Over Maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated, like coordinate, and they'll put an umlaut over the second O or something like that. Why do they do that?

1:42:27 That's not in the Chicago book of style. Like what's going on there? Or is that just a New Yorkers? Well, I mean, that's true. So they do yeah, umlots on second vowel, so like reengage you would have a an umlaut. And then also Focus they do British.

1:42:40 So double S because I write a lot about focus, so you you double S focus and focusing. That's their and then email, the convention for email is I forget exactly what it was, but the way they write about email is for it's tradition. It's an old magazine It's been around for a long time. And so th there was a a style guide invented 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.

1:43:05 To Whatever. There might be a deeper story to it. But that's what I've always understood. Yeah, why not? I mean tradition's Yeah, and they format it the same way. So a lot of that's tradition. I mean their whole thing, which I love about it. is they're not chasing trends. I really love that publication. Anyone who reads it, the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just a try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for.

1:43:28 And their whole theory is Make your place really, really writer friendly and writers will write cool things. 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.

1:43:39 They have a million people who pay a hundred dollars a year for the magazine and you got this great foundation. Like, okay, so we can just write. It's not big. Yeah. Anyways, not to go on a New York or rat, but Well let me play devil's advocate on that'cause 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

1:44:06 kind of left leaning. Caricature. of itself in a way that is not helpful for Contending with Polarized.

1:44:15 Tribalism and so on, in my opinion. So you feel like That is not I mean the fundamentally they're different. Oh that's I mean they're very different. Are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media.

1:44:31 dynamics at play for the New Yorker. Because I've seen these formerly what I would consider highly credible publications. Hold on. 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, uh here we go. The economist stepping up their copy game. And the screen shot he sent me is They sort of superscript is the swines and then it says Feral superpigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairie.

1:44:59 They're well adapted to the cold, with thick fur, long legs, and tusks as sharp as steak knives that has this photo of these bigs running over a hill and I'm like, this is the economist, man. What the fuck is happening? And I love the economist, no offense to the economists. 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 a ramble, but

1:45:25 How does the New Yorker resist The temptation slash incentive slash risks. of the modern online world, as we know it. Well I mean you're you're pointing out A real effect. It's a trade off. If we're gonna talk about trade offs, it's a trade off effects. And I think the times really did

1:45:44 have to face this trade off. 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. Uh they do not have a model. based on chasing attention, right? Where other publications I think had an issue when the web grew.

1:46:05 Where they began just really pushing volume and trying to find social media virality. The New York Times. Save themselves from that. So they could actually

1:46:13 focus on what they wanted to write they did not have to chase. So that was a positive. But the audience capture effect I think is also real. 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.

1:46:33 So you're like, okay, like we want Procter and Gamble to buy a lot of ads in nineteen ninety five New York Times. So we're gonna be really good, but like down the middle. You're absolutely right that when you go to subscriber base, that subscriber base was way more Progressive left leaning. than the public writ 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

1:46:54 ideological frameworks coming out of the colleges and young staffers coming to the New York Times and 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 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.

1:47:16 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'cause they're not a news magazine. 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

1:47:29 magazine though this is all the news stands, right? I don't know how much of a consideration that is for business model. It's a big part of their income. New Yorker subscribers get the magazine. and the digital. I don't know the numbers, but they're way more combined than with the New York Times. I think it's I subscribe to the New Yorker.

1:47:45 I get the magazine and I get access to the online. That's a big part of what they do. But 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 news story. That's not their goal. And also you have to keep in mind

1:48:00 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. New York has floor. So it's a different thing. So the New Yorker is not a news magazine. 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 can just try to

1:48:19 Right, whatever. we find to be interesting. It's you know, like DT Max has a piece in a recent issue where it's just profiling this lady who spent five hundred 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.

1:48:38 that this was this like horrific experience. It's like great. It's awesome. It's like a really interesting article. The New Yorker I would say Probably more if I were to go back and look at The pie chart of

1:48:51 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 Wouldn't. Just like 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 Wish list outside of the New Yorker.

1:49:22 Or if you already summitted Everest and you're like, I'm good. I mean that was my wish. My agent has reminded me of this that early on in my career I remember watching Don't air. 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 write for the New Yorker. So like that was my Everest. I've written for the other places as you know, well I've written for the New York Times and Wired and The Atlantic. They're great places to write And they have huge audiences.

1:49:49 So like a New York Times piece, I always feel lucky when they publish something of mine. 'Cause 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. You know, that's also cool. Like I think one of the coolest jobs in Journalism might be New York Times op ed.

1:50:05 Staff. So Krugman Brooks and that'cause they They get a right about ideas, but it's Big swing impact. And those things hit a lot of eyeballs. So like when Ezra Klein left

1:50:18 Vox and took the op ed spot at the New York Times. I was like that doesn't confuse me at all. That's a really cool job because 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. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I mean the New York Times also has some great stuff.

1:50:37 It's that the Discovery problem. To come back to that is a little bit harder than say with the New Yorker, unsurprisingly, because You have such an immense volume of stuff. But the op ed narrows that down. Quite a bit.

1:50:51 You are right, in terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs. I suppose that's another advantage of the subscriber model. Although you're hitting One subset of the political spectrum, so there is that. But All's fair and love and editorial.

1:51:06 Well Hell, we've talked about a lot. And uh people should check out the new book. You walk the walk, which is sort of the most For me critical. litmus test of

1:51:18 material, especially if there's any prescriptive Aspect. in sort of a productivity self help way. And I could define productivity. I define it pretty similarly. The new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And people cannot find you on social. But there's the YouTube channel, Cal Newport Media. So people can find that. And there's the Deep Questions podcast.

1:51:40 and calnewport.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 make slow productivity Easier or more appealing for people to embrace and I would for instance say that

1:52:00 By and large, I succumb to the shiny objects occasionally, but by and large, I think I fall into the slow productivity count. For instance, I mean the book that I'm working on now. I mean it started five years ago. uh notes and like wrote seventy two thousand words five years ago and tabled it and shelf it and then I've been kinda work shopping things. One of the To maybe

1:52:21 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 metrics. If I've

1:52:43 developed or improved relationships. It could be pre existing or new relationships. and developed skills. It will apply to other things. Having a long time frame is a huge, huge, huge advantage.

1:52:56 That is 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 in that cumulative way.

1:53:10 gives me the peace of mind and confidence. to take those longer time horizons. If that makes any sense. So I'm I'm wondering if there's anything like that that Could just be kind of philosophical. one liners or beliefs that you have

1:53:25 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, though 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 gonna do.

1:53:41 I'm gonna stop the book publication cycle. I'm not gonna seek out a lot of you know, T V opportunities or whatever. I think that's a good example. Which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out

1:53:54 A hundred and one hats in your kitchen that'll amaze your friends or whatever. Fully illustrated. As it stands, no egg peeling in the new book. The heuristic I don't Here's the heuristic maybe that ties a lot of this together. Is that At least for professional stuff. In the end, it's craft.

1:54:17 Craft is what matters. Respecting craft, developing craft, applying craft. Finding meaning in craft just keep watching on repeat. Giro Dreams of Sushi. Right. Just go back and watch that like once a month.

1:54:31 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. It 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.

1:54:45 Your time frames become much longer. Psychologically you get so much resilience. Maybe you couple that if I'm gonna add a second heuristic. Is Ignore the internet.

1:54:55 It's a crazy making machine. It's just a crazy making machine. It's like 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 important. I could just feel it.

1:55:12 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. 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 wanna know about how it's doing.

1:55:28 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 trending upwards, right? So maybe you put those two things together. Craft is everything. You can build a psychologically resilient, sustainable, successful professional life.

1:55:52 On craft. And ignore the internet. 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. Don't let an attention algorithm.

1:56:05 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.

1:56:18 And then just be incredibly wary about the internet. Uh, maybe I'll stay away from that. Maybe I'll stay away from that. Like that's the two things. Do those two things. It's night or 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 yeah, would you rather

1:56:33 Fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not. Those types of quotes uh think about quite a bit because possibly you know if we take this vanity metric And look, it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on your YouTube videos as an example, but Let's say you looked at your

1:56:51 Numbers and you were trending down. Over six months. Does that mean you stop? Or does that mean? that you are calling the herd and over time refining to the point where you are actually getting to your one thousand or ten thousand true fans.

1:57:05 And You went from basically doing speeches at state fairs and now you're standing on the Ted stage. Is that bad? You know what I mean? Like I'm saying like maybe

1:57:16 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 because this is the YouTube equivalent of the economist feral supercase. So much worse on YouTube. It gets so bad, but I was texting with My team.

1:57:42 Went on YouTube and I was like, Oh my God. This is what happens to everyone on YouTube if they stay on long enough and they uh Get trained by the incentives. This is what happens to everybody. So if you can see this. There's a woman wearing very little clothes. Is that a robot? What is that? This is a uh this is like a big huge muscular dude in a

1:58:02 Toga slash sarong type thing, walking away. It's a woman on the other side. He's saying bye. She's got question marks over her head. She's 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 parentheses might hurt your feelings. And I'm not saying look, I'll give these guys credit. This is because the thumbnail got me. Uh stoic wisdom wonders, one point nine million views put up one month ago. And I was like, Oh man, you're going to get trained by the algorithm. Like if you're not careful. And even if you are careful, if you're paying attention to quote unquote the right things. Everything converges into

1:58:42 That chick with a thong spreading ras cheeks in a thumbnail. Like with like what to do before the imminent financial collapse. Everything doesn't matter if you're covering Climate change. Hoping to change the world with Renewable energy. You're gonna end up there. Noam Chomsky on like the structure of manufacturer consent. And there's a woman in a bikini. Yeah.

1:59:03 Yeah. Yeah, there you go. You know, for me and I gotta 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 It's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools.

1:59:20 New technology. As new drugs. Would you want to be the first Chimpanzee, you know, injected with this? Or maybe you wait until you're the hundredth chimpanzee. 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. You just

1:59:40 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.

1:59:56 Just start pouring from the sky. 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 algo chaser. An analytics person and it becomes kind of money ball.

2:00:10 Do you want to win that game? And what does it look like? And then there are gonna be people just like, for instance, you know, going to school, a lot of I banks, investment banks, and so on. Recruit there and nine out of ten people, probably 19 out of 20 would wash out. They would just

2:00:25 get destroyed because they weren't built for that. And then one out of twenty was just perfectly built for it. Fantastic. And they would Thrive in that environment. But I I do think that

2:00:36 When we're looking at some of these platforms where the numbers are probably even less favorable. It's like okay, ninety nine out of a hundred are gonna wash out. And then one will just be The Michael Phelps of YouTube and awesome. Like good for them.

2:00:49 But if everyone tries to do that. What a Cataclysm. Not to make it sound too dark, but it's like there're so many Opportunities for slow productivity.

2:01:00 Hiding. In plain sight. 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.

2:01:13 is just about as big as I can think. At least at this point. Sorry. Complete. I completely agree with your rant. The numbers on algorithmic attempt, just look at real numbers. Let's use real numbers not to go I'm gonna extend your YouTube branch slightly. Let's look at real numbers. Please. What's like the take home CPM essentially on YouTube is low.

2:01:33 People are monetizing these videos to the tune of maybe like Five dollars. Per thousand views. Cost per thousand. Whereas for podcasting. it is significantly larger, right? It's at least five times larger than that per ad, and you can have up to four ads per episode. I mean it's not even comparable. We're talking

2:01:52 orders of magnitude. So just to be like concrete. You could have a YouTube channel Where, you know, you have a million views a month or something like this. But a podcast that has thirty thousand regular downloads a week. Like you have an audience of thirty thousand. It's it's bigger than one thousand true fans, but not that much bigger. I've done the math on that, and that is like a professor salary. You can make like a very good living off of that.

2:02:15 And it's much more stable. But if you build up a thirty thousand person audience They're there for a reason. They're not gonna leave fast either. That's something you could then do for years whereas YouTube is gonna be way more fickle and then the technology's gonna go away and there'll be another thing that's coming into town anyways. or the algorithm's gonna change, or you start it as a channel and know him Chomsky.

2:02:34 And then you end up Like Mr Beast. Like Mr. Beast. Well I respect what he's doing, but he's just the he's the platonic expression of the algorithm. And he'll say this. He's broken down what matters. Like you have to have An outrageous but interesting visual thing.

2:02:48 that you're gonna deliver, you need to show the person right up front, you're gonna see this, this, and this. Here's some clips of it. And then you need it to move every fifteen seconds, it's moving forward. They're beautifully edited things. But they're just pure Yeah.

2:03:00 It's just We're going to drive expensive cars and 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.

2:03:14 Like a newsletter is another thing. This is another slow productivity example is I was just gonna say if if you think podcast CPMs are high, look at niche newsletters. like CIOs or hedge fund managers or whatever, like I mean we're talking. hundreds of dollars.

2:03:29 CPM Right. Yeah. And you don't have to be famous either. I know so many people have done I have a good newsletter and it's or subscription base. It's fantastic, right? If if people are paying five dollars a month. I mean, okay, that works out to an incredibly high CPM because if you you could show that same person a huge number of ads.

2:03:45 So it's just a different game. The example I was going to give was to writer Andrew Sullivan. who lives here in D C. And you know, he he was the editor of The New Republic and wrote for the New York Magazine before he sort of got pushed out. for you know political ideological reasons. He has a sub stack now.

2:04:00 And the way he talks about it. He's like, Well, this is great. Like I have a Pretty fair size 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.

2:04:17 And I don't need to do anything else. And I don't need like a studio and ca there's nothing else I need to do, you know? So I agree, anything where an algorithm is driving attention, don't make that I mean you could. Again, you could. But be wary of it. Also be wary is my other warning heuristic. of checklist productivity. So if you learn from a YouTube course

2:04:35 All right, here is how you're gonna 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 uh Follow me because I do these threads every so often. It's like you can't all just follow these same checklists. That's not the way economies work.

2:04:52 It's not just if I just do these ten things. Pick your niche. Make sure on a regular basis you have a thread. Format your thread this way. And if you do this, it used to be like in our childhood, the Carlton Sheets infomercials where it was like look. Do you remember this?

2:05:12 Well think about it. Classified ad. for something you're drop shipping. And let's say you put a classified ad in one paper. And you make ten dollars drop shipping. Well then put it in a hundred papers.

2:05:22 And you're gonna make a thousand dollars, 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 wanna buy A random piece of crap from an uh a classified ad. That part was left out. You're like, well, let's 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.

2:05:50 It'll scale. It's like 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.

2:06:06 And I would also say these are not mutually exclusive, right? So if you want to play in the algo Arena. Go for it. 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.

2:06:26 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 hard to overstate. But I would say if you want to play that game Some of it's fun. I get it. I like competing and you know, I'm not gonna be doing any dangerous competitive sports any time soon, so I gotta channel that somewhere. So okay. I could like Firewall. twenty percent of my attention for

2:06:54 Dicking around with that. That's fine. Or fifty, like whatever, but like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find Something. where you can cultivate this slow productivity. So maybe it's a slow carve out at first, but if you don't have that.

2:07:10 It's like Driving on A race course in a Sports car. Where the race course changes.

2:07:17 Constantly, right? Like curve seven is no longer curve seven. Used to be a straightaway narrow, now it's a hairpin curve, and you don't have an airbag or any type of seatbelt on or eight point harness. Yeah, like you're gonna crash eventually. So like you need some type of Safety net and long time horizon and Slow productivity. for me at least has been it's been my safety net for

2:07:39 twenty years I have 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 these 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

2:08:00 Check out the book, folks. Sol productivity. Cal, anything else you'd like to Mentioned. Any TikTok videos you'd like to point people to? My peeling video channel, which there's now gonna be a thousand of by the way.

2:08:11 Peeling squash. So thanks for introducing that. Yeah, you've you've introduced that notion now. No, this this has been great. Yeah, no, but it's slow productivity. It kind of it connects everything together. 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.

2:08:33 And my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team. It's a different dynamic that that's going on out there. 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

2:08:48 different we were offered was just Stop trying things. Work is bad. Stop trying, don't do anything. That's at a stick because, well, I 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 this second generation of thinking about this, which is.

2:09:02 Do it better. Like figure out like how do you really want to work? What makes sense? And and so hopefully this works. But I I appreciate it talking about it. I put an excerpt, by the way. I'm not on social media, but at CalMeport.com slash slow We put an excerpt up. So like if you're like, uh, maybe 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 uh John McPhee. I opened the book on Mic John McVeigh and I know it's a as someone who took his course at Princeton, which I'm jealous of.

2:09:29 You'll appreciate the McFee it's rich McFee 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 learned more from McVee 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.

2:09:58 And I go back and sometimes I look at my writing and I'm like, I think Worse writer now. I think I'm a better teacher, but like my actual pros I think could use some more weight training. So I'll get back into it. The glue high quality. And I should also say that slow productivity, 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.

2:10:26 And That's a way like selective productivity, selective and proactive productivity, which happens to usually correspond to more sustainable Long term.

2:10:40 Thinking. Or intentional. Intentional productivity. Have an actual Consistent coherent. philosophy for how I'm gonna do my work. That's more sophisticated than just I'll be busy because at least

2:10:51 If I'm busy. I'm not gonna 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 not everyone, like if you're an investment banker like you talked about, or or you're trying to become a law partner.

2:11:02 A very intentional, coherent, reasonable Productivity plan involves Working all the damn time. Because that's like specifically what works in that world. But for most people when they're intentional, they realize eighty percent of what I'm doing. is just trying to generate smoke from friction, but there's no fire. Like it's just I'm trying to be busy because I don't know what else to do. Like slowness becomes almost always inevitable.

2:11:24 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 her business, the warm buffets.

2:11:42 Jeff Bezos, certainly. Go back and read the first ten. Shareholder letters. For Amazon. And you will see kind of How well planned and prescient.

2:11:54 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 shit. I mean, it's rare to find.

2:12:10 Like relentlessly focused. And also very patient. With Criticism. And

2:12:18 Skepticism. And so on. Remarkable. Slow productivity is actually kind of Hidden all around us if we pause.

2:12:26 to look at the people we most respect. Almost all of them are gonna 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

2:12:42 Putting a name to a f that's my whole secret is like And I've said this before to people about Pragmatic nonfiction writing. The goal is not to try to 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 that's what really has an impact. It's like, yeah.

2:13:04 I know slow productivity is better. I said have a name for it. Or a framework. You know, don't try to convince people of new things. Explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action. I think that's the secret to nonfiction, prescriptive nonfiction writing is. You're not really Teaching people something new.

2:13:23 Leverage something. My gut tells me it's true. I just don't have my Fingers around it all the way. Six minute abs. If anybody gets the reference. It might be a seven minute abs, but 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.blog slash podcast. We'll put everything in there that we've spoken about. Thanks so much for taking the time, Cal.

2:13:49 Nice to see ya. Yeah, thanks Tim. I appreciate it. Yeah, 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.

2:14:02 Take your time. The good things. We'll wait. Because it's uncrowded. The really important things. Those domains are typically very, very uncrowded. So be a little bit kinder to others and to yourself. Take things a little bit more slowly. Until next time, uh thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

2:14:38 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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