Cal Newport: Lifestyle Design, Slow Productivity and Contrarian Writing
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When I first started writing, it was like a side thing. But then I made this shift after Deep Work came out, and suddenly it became, I'm a technologist. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Cal Newport, who is a computer science professor and also the author of a bunch of books, including Deep Work, which has become ridiculously popular in the productivity niche, and also this fantastic book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which I made a video about recently that's done very well.

Now, Cal is one of those interesting people because he straddles the world of like traditional academia as a computer science professor at Georgetown University. And he also straddles the world of like online creatory type people. He's been blogging on the internet since way before it was cool. And so in the conversation, we talk about Cal's career and what it's like to balance these worlds of like the old world prestige of academia and the new world vibes of content creation. I think when people ask me, what do you do?

If I actually answered I'm a writer, I think it's actually probably higher prestige in that situation than if I say I'm a professor. Like people respect professors, but they often change it to teaching. They're like, oh, you teach. Yeah, I was thinking about teaching. It drives academic professors crazy because it's this like blood sport intellectual competition to publish incredibly hard stuff and really competitive venues. We talk about how to reverse engineer a career based on the lifestyle you want. And we talk about the concept of slow productivity. A lot of my work, I'm a computer scientist. It's

productivity, but productivity seen through the lens of what's happening to our ability to produce things. It's a broad topic. And where I come at it is this techno-social cultural convergence of trying to figure out how to take control of what you're doing in a world in which there's all these other forces that are trying to prevent you from exactly having that control.

Right. So Cal, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Um, this feels particularly surreal for me because I've been following your stuff for just, I can't, I feel like I was reading your blog way back in like 2010 or 2011 when you were, uh, posting about, um, how to figure out what to do with your career and some of the slow productivity stuff and stuff around like treating your studies as if they're a bit more of an adventure. Um,

And that was when I would have been in high school just before going to university. So it had an enormous impact on my life. So firstly, thank you so much for that.

Yeah. Wow. And that goes way back. There's like three phases of that blog newsletter. The early phase was all student stuff. This was after I first published my first two books on student advice. And you joined that period, 2011, 2010. There was this big, for me, fraught transition where I said, I have to move on from just doing student advice and career advice was the thing. And I did a strict...

50-50 alternation for a while. And then it evolved from there into what it is today. But that's great. So you're an old timer. You're an old timer on my blog and newsletter. Yeah, it's great. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think kind of my online career had a similar thing where when I started making YouTube videos in 2017, I was in my sort of final year of med school. And so I knew that like, oh, hang on, I need to break out of this student market pretty soon and started erring towards like tech and then somehow stumbled into the general genre of productivity.

And now I'm this productivity YouTuber, which feels like a strange place to be because it's never where I set out to be. But I guess you're like particularly famous in the productivity world as well for in particular for deep work. I wonder, like, how how do you approach the word productivity these days? Yeah, well, first of all, let me say there's a there's a interesting congruence between us. Right. Because think about we both were trained. You're a doctor. Right. I mean, you were on this very traditional path.

path that's highly trained. And I'm sure you had very similar sideways glances and whisper conversations. It's like, well, what's he doing? What's going on on YouTube? And I'm a professor. So a very similar sort of thing, being trained and trained to do something very specific, but also was writing and thinking about all these other issues that orbited my job and other types of issues. And so, yeah, productivity. I am associated with that a lot. And and

To some extent, I think that's true. I think a lot about producing good work, producing meaningful work. But on the other hand, I don't really come at it exclusively from the angle of just how do you maximize what gets done. A lot of my work, because I'm a computer scientist, is entangled in techno-criticism. So it's productivity, but productivity seen through the lens of

What's happening to our ability to produce things because of email, because of social media, because of smartphones, because of Zoom invites that are flying back and forth faster than we can handle it. So it's a broad topic. And where I come at it is this techno-social cultural convergence of trying to figure out how to take control of what you're doing in a world in which there's all these other forces that are trying to prevent you from exactly having that control.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's an interesting lens to approach it with. I guess kind of basically all of deep work was essentially about that. And then obviously a world without email was specifically and explicitly about that. I'd have to get a bit of an understanding, like what does a normal week in your life look like these days? And the reason I ask is because often when I think of like, what do I want my life to look like in the future and think about vague long-term plan stuff,

I often think of you as being like, yeah, I think I'd quite like to have a career kind of like Cal Newport does, where it's like you're a professor of computer science, you're teaching people, it seems. But on the side, you do the blog, you do the books, you did the podcast recently, you go on other people's podcasts. You seem to be straddling the life of like a traditional academic, along with the sort of being an internet influencer in like a weird kind of way. So I'd love to know what that looks like for you these days.

Well, it's very seasonal, which I think is actually important because that's a model I think should be more broadly adopted, but only some professions have it. So my typical week right now, we're recording this in the summer as a professor is going to look a lot different than let's say next spring when I'm when I'm teaching two classes. But I'll just talk about both. Like right now, it's the summertime.

I'm on my own dime. So the way professorships work at research academies is you are paid for 10 months. Some places it's nine, but at Georgetown University, I am, it's 10 months. And then you have two months of summer. Now, what a lot of professors do is in your research grants, part of the funding you ask for is summer salary. And that's actually where your salary comes in July and August. I don't do that.

Because I have income as a writer. So I literally in July and August am not on Georgetown's dime. So there's essentially no work happening other than obviously my doctoral students have still talked to work with my students. But I do very little research and I do nothing on campus. I don't do meetings. So a typical day in the summer like today, get up breakfast for the kids. I write.

I go to my study. I have a custom-built library table that I had built from a company in Maine that produces library tables for universities. That's like a big part of what their work is. So it's not a desk. It's actually the dimensions of a library table, which is different. And I sit there and I write. Today I wrote until 11 a.m. So it was like 8 a.m.

8, 8.30 a.m. to about 11 a.m. then I came to prepare this. Midday, I do things like this. I'm doing an interview with you. I owe some stuff to a web designer, a little bit of business, some email, and then I'll shut that down by four and work is done. So my summer schedule is my ideal schedule. And the other layer I put on top of that, by the way, is I try when possible to have two days a week, usually Mondays and one other day where I schedule nothing.

So it's writing in the morning and then those afternoons is for walking and thinking. So really priming the pump on the ideas I'm working out in my writing, the ideas I'm trying to work out in my more academic thinking. That summer schedule, I love it. If we jump forward in the fall, I'm on teaching leave, so it'll be somewhere in between.

sort of like that, but more meetings in the afternoons and going to campus once a week, go to the spring, and then it becomes much more bifurcated. I teach two days a week. Those days, it's like for you would have been the days you're on call. I'm on campus all day. I tend to load meetings with students, administrative work, Zoom with administrators all into those days, and they're just

Let's just get after it and be exhausted and then let the other three days be more open like the schedule. So it's very seasonal. It really depends on the seasons. You get some intellectual challenge in the summer, but relaxation for administration and in other parts of the years, maybe it's more administrative, but less of the intellectual challenges. So it's a it's a mix. That sounds pretty, pretty fun. Are you do you like this kind of variety that you have?

I, you know, I think it's, I think it's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the main issue professors have is administrative work, service work, obligations that go beyond just doing the academic work. So that's the, you know, it's, here's what people who know me know. When I'm in the middle of the busiest parts of the year from an academic perspective. So for me last spring, I was co-chairing a university wide three position search, which was a very time consuming administrative thing.

I'm walking around, man, I should just write full time. What am I doing here? Like, I just should just go have a cabin and write. This is crazy. What a waste of my time. But you talk to me now in the summer when I have no responsibilities for the university. I'm, man, I love academia. There's all these cool people I work with, you know, all these ideas I'm constantly being challenged. So I'm a little bit Jekyll and Hyde in how I feel about that. It really depends on my workload.

Interesting. So I was working with this executive coach a couple of years ago. This was when I had just taken a break from medicine and I hadn't decided, am I going to leave completely or am I going to do it as like a part-time gig? Because I kind of liked the idea. And again, I was thinking of what does your life look like? I liked the idea of maybe practicing medicine like two days a week, maybe one day a week, something like that. And then I could spend the rest of the time doing the thing that I think

I'm actually passionate about, which is writing and reading and learning and teaching and making videos on the internet and stuff. And I was thinking about the idea of, hey, you know, it would be cool to be like a teacher at a university. Maybe I could teach at a medical school or something like that.

And my coach challenged me on that. He was like, why do you need to be affiliated with an academic institution? Could you not just do the teaching? If you say you enjoy teaching in real life, why not just run your own lectures and just do it without being attached to university? And I was like, oh, that's a good suggestion. It seems like you get all the benefits of the contact with students and teaching and stuff without any of the nightmare admin associated with it.

being a act, actually being involved with the university. What's your what's your take on that? Like, why not just go in your cabin in the woods and then run seminars on the weekend, which loads of people would attend, probably because you're famous and good at teaching to avoid having all those obligations? Well, you know, it's a complicated question. I've been surveying a lot of people I know in various different relationships to me in various different professional situations to get their take on this question. And it's it's very split.

So, for example, I had a conversation a couple of years back with Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, sort of famous business writer. He was a business professor at Stanford in his late 30s. So kind of around the same age I was, quit just to write books full time. And Jim's argument was you get just as much credit.

for having done the thing that you get for still doing the thing. In other words, he says, I get the credit for having been a Stanford Business School professor. Like, okay, the credentialing, whatever that gives you, is the same as he was a Stanford Business School professor and now is no longer. Because, hey, if you were an Olympic athlete, we trust you know about fitness and nutrition, even if you're no longer on the team. Other people, however, when I ask them this exact same question,

We'll say, no, no, no. Like the, if you're not a professor, it's not, it's just, if you're not actively a professor, it's not the same. You don't have the same authority. You'll lose your, uh, advantage within the space who are writing. Uh, so that, you know, that comes up as well. So I have both of these things, both of these things going on. I had one person tell me, and I don't think this is a good take. I had one person tell me, uh,

No one will buy your productivity discussions if they don't see that you have this really demanding life.

being a professor and doing these other things and managing the juggle. To which I was thinking, all of my writing on this for the last multiple years has all been about not doing that, about simplifying and slowing down. Don't you think it's actually worse? I'm writing a book right now called Slow Productivity. Don't you think it's actually worse if I have more going on in my life? In some sense, it seems like you're not embracing your own ideas. So I'm curious how you made that final decision. For you personally,

How did you deal with... Here's one of my questions. So part of internet influence right now, but even just book writing, forget internet like I do, it all feels a little bit ephemeral. Like the technology could change in two years and it could go away. You have two books that don't hit and the publisher is not interested. To me, that's this interesting fear, the stability. How did you deal with that? Thinking about...

I got to trust that this is a thing that's also going to be a thing 15 years from now. Yeah, honestly, this is the thing that keeps me up at night still to this day. And those sort of three different perspectives that you shared were basically spot on exactly the three perspectives I had in my mind where I was like,

You know, some people were saying, oh, once you've been a doctor, the fact that you now practice clinically one or two days, like no one actually cares beyond that point once you've got the doctor on the title. On the other hand, people are saying, no, the fact that you're doing the thing and you're actually doing the thing is like a really, really important part of it. And then other people. And I think this was the story that I was telling myself a lot was that when I was a working full time doctor.

and making YouTube videos on the side and running a business on the side, my schedule was sufficiently demanding to warrant my productivity advice. And it made my productivity advice seem more legit because I was doing the thing. But now if I'm becoming a YouTuber and a writer writing about productivity, but like the examples I'm using are from my life as a person who writes about productivity. Now we're in this weird, like circular thing where what's, what's, what's going to happen there. I,

I haven't yet figured this out. I'd love to get your take on it. But the way I'm thinking of it is kind of like, and I don't know if this is legit, but I ask myself, you know, if I had 100 million in the bank, how would I choose to spend my time? If like we completely removed money from the equation, how would I choose to spend my time?

And I think the answer to that is actually broadly the routine you've just described of like, hey, I'd want to have breakfast with the family right in the morning for a few hours until like midday, kind of like the Ryan Holiday lifestyle. And then in the afternoon, I can do a podcast, I can do a video, I can like hang out, have lunch with some friends or just like roam around in nature.

And I think, does any of that, does my ideal week in this world where I don't care about money, does any of it involve actually practicing medicine? And I think, well, maybe some of it involves teaching medical students because that's fun or teaching people, but I don't think any of it involves practicing medicine. And then I was thinking, well, if that's the case, then does the fact that I'm entertaining the decision to continue practicing clinical medicine, is it really only for the credential and only for the fact that I can then flex it on my YouTube channel and in my books and be like, oh, this guy's a doctor. Yeah.

I felt like that was probably not the right reason to do it. But yeah, what's your take on this? The interesting thing is when I'm looking at your case, even though it's very similar to mine, I can have so much more confidence because it's not me.

So I'm like, that makes complete sense. I mean, people don't realize, I think people don't realize the overhead of these really highly skilled credential positions. There's a lot of overhead, time overhead, emotional, psychological overhead. There's a lot of frustrations in it. I mean, they're complicated jobs. I'm sure working for National Health Service has the same

weird bureaucratic complications is working for a large university. So I think that, see, for you, I think it makes complete sense because it's not like

your clinical practice is closely related in any way to what you're doing otherwise. Whereas I have this complication of, I've been shifting my work more towards basically just an academic take on similar stuff. I work on working on tech and culture, techno, social anthropology, et cetera.

So there's this argument to be made that there's these great thinkers about the impact of various things on cultures, these great social critics who were in academia where they were surrounded by and being challenged by all these complicated theoretical frameworks. So this is why I think your decision is maybe cleaner, is that there is –

Such a difference between day-to-day clinical practice and the writing and videos that you produce. Whereas there's a play for me where they could be more integrated, which is just a complication. I think it would almost be easier if I was a biochemist.

And it was like, look, this is I just and by the way, this is the way that people and it's a shift that happened and not to get too insider baseball. But but for when I first started writing, it was that strict separation as a grad student. Well, I started as an undergrad writing and then as a grad student was writing student advice books. I was studying computer science. It was like a side thing like, oh, you write these advice books. It's how I help pay the bills as a, you know, on a doctoral student stipend.

So they really were unrelated. But then I made this shift after Deep Work came out. So Deep Work came out. I'm a professor. I got tenure around that time. I'm like, well, you know, that's really a book about technology. It's about how technology changed the workplace and why we have to be worried about those changes. And then the next two books I wrote were also about the impacts of technology on either our personal or professional lives. And suddenly it became I'm a technologist.

who also writes about the impact of technology on various aspects of our lives. And then suddenly there was a congruence, which was very useful. I think once my writing fit into my academic career, it really opened up, let's say, the sort of mainstream or elite press I could get. I was sort of accepted by the New York Times of the world, the New Yorkers of the world, over on your side, the Financial Times, the Times of London, etc.

The Guardian, these have all been sort of big supporters of my work. So they mesh together. And so now I'm a little bit intertwined in a way that I wasn't before. Yeah, that's so interesting. So like, I feel like... Yeah, I appreciate that that's probably very complicated. Because from where I'm sitting, it feels like, hey, once you've been a professor at Georgetown, it's like you've been a computer science professor. And therefore you...

I would agree with your friend who said that, or with Jim Collins, unsurprisingly, he said that that credential is... The currentness of that credential is not particularly relevant. But I guess this is the thing that I've often worried about as well. It's like, now that I've left medicine, will I actually...

have any chance at like mainstream, mainstream elite, uh, institution, like legitimacy, you know, times guardian and stuff. Will they actually care about some kid who used to be a doctor and now is a sort of self-help book author for a living or a self-help influencer for a living compared to if I was still doing the thing. It's, it's that like credential, credentialism. And then part of me is like, why, why do I care? Part of me is like, uh,

I know I shouldn't care about trying to hit the New York Times list. I know I shouldn't care about trying to do this kind of stuff. But then another part of me is like, yeah, but I kind of do. And I guess you're in that position. So like, how do you how do you dissociate things that you personally care about from the accolades and recognition you get from elite institutions? Well, I mean, first, your concern is absolutely right. Like, I have seen this again and again. There's there's a.

The credentialing required to be covered by the sort of elite mainstream publications, it's a very real thing. I mean, think about we mentioned Ryan earlier, right? Ryan Holiday, very influential author, very successful writer, can't get the time of day from mainstream publications. The New York Times did a profile of him a few years ago, but it was snarky. It was like, yeah, look at this guy trying to repackage, you know,

I was a few years ago, Mark Manson, you know, Mark Manson, the subtle art was out here giving a talk near where I live. So we were kind of killing some time here and he was telling a similar tale. One of the best selling nonfiction writers of this generation. I mean, the number of copies of books that guy has sold, very few nonfiction writers have come near that. I think it's up to 20 million copies now. It's hard to underscore just how successful his books are. He can't get the time of day.

He can't get covered. No, no, no one's writing about these books. And I definitely noticed when I leaned into my academic credentials, when presenting myself in the publicity of my book, it made a big difference. I mean, I'm on in the States. I do. I'm on NPR all the time. You know, I do a lot of stuff. I used to do a lot of my last for digital minimalism, a book I wrote with the New York Times all the time. Right. So that that is the concern there is true. But I think your follow up question is also true. How much do you care about that?

you know, because it has very little to do with, with the, with book sales, especially for you, you have a huge audience and,

that knows you and that you're speaking to, and you have channels for reaching this audience, they're going to be way more effective. You're only dependent on being covered in the Financial Times if you're a CEO writing a business book that no one can know about it unless they actually read about it in a paper. So that's the question of how much do you care about that? And I think that's probably the critical question. You could make a play. You could have made a play of leaning into your doctor, like NHS doc,

is, you know, rethinking the system of how we manage our time and is like speaking out against the grind of the sort of knowledge work machinery. And you could have pulled these things together and written Guardian op-eds and made yourself into like a fixture. Like I am a fixture of sort of like the standard, you know, be on BBC Five all the time, et cetera. But I don't think you'd have a bigger audience. Yeah.

You know, it'd be it'd be its own type of thing. And it's a little precarious because then you'd be thinking, what if I have the wrong cake on something? Because like you're much more susceptible to that, like being in favor and not in favor. So we're speaking the same language. And I think the problem you pointed out is like a real problem. Like it does matter. Like it is what gets you covered is narrow. But I think that question of do you care? That's it. That's the whole ballgame.

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tangible benefit like book sales or sales of a course or sales of a thing. But then there's another like social status benefit of that where, you know, I still have this conversation with my mum sometimes where, you know, she's a doctor as well. And, you know, that generation is very much about

Her whole thing was like, why would you leave medicine? It's such a prestigious profession. You're respected in society. And I fully appreciate from her perspective the decision to leave medicine to become a YouTuber. It's just really freaking weird. And so there's still this part of me that's sort of wanting to try and

hold on to the glory badge of honor of having been a Cambridge University student and sort of like, oh, but that was like four years ago and I need a new badge of prestige. And the New York Times list seems like one of those or becoming a Harvard MBA student seems like one of those. And it's like, I find myself pulled in this direction where it's like,

I could totally make a play for that. And I actually started an application to Stanford and Harvard business schools, like about a year ago, until loads of people talked me out of it. They were like, look, what are you doing? Like, this really looks like you're chasing a credential for like literally no reason. But I guess it's so hard to get out of that sort of status seeking mindset. Yeah. What does that vibe with you at all? Oh, it's so hard. Yeah. I mean, that is really hard. Like the status stuff.

Yeah, it's interesting because people talk about it not mattering or people say like, ah, look like your accomplishment, your credential status or having done this, like, you know, you're excited for a moment, but then you're just back and frustrated with your toast burning the next morning. It doesn't really matter just what but but what what's true about it is like, no, there is like a background, a background hum of satisfaction.

or of like a little bit of a trickle of pride, like, you know, I graduated from Cambridge. Like I'm, and I kind of have that and kind of feel good or like, I'm a, you know, I'm a doctor. Like it is a real thing. I mean, I think we, we, we try to underplay it, but I think we should face it because I find it really hard. Now, the interesting thing is if you can say you're a writer, I have the sense that that like in these days is, uh,

in a bohemian way, really high status as well. Like actually, because I've been thinking about this recently. I think when people ask me, what do you do? If I actually answered, I'm a writer,

I think it's actually probably higher prestige in that situation than if I say I'm a professor. Like people respect professors, but they often change it to teaching. They're like, oh, you teach. Yeah, I was thinking about teaching. And it drives it drives, you know, academic professors crazy because it's this like blood sport intellectual competition to publish incredibly hard stuff and really competitive venues online.

oh, and you do teach some courses. So when people say, oh, you teach, I was thinking about teaching. You're like, oh, you don't understand. Like all my time at MIT was figured out how to solve math problems. Other people couldn't. But if you say, oh, I'm a writer, like actually there's some like interesting prestige in that. Like, well, wait, you can do that as you're living. Like you must be doing something interesting. You must be artistic. You must be interesting. And so maybe that's the way I think about it. That's how I've been thinking about it recently is finding, you know, hacking that system of my brain.

So think about these decisions. Is there – if I change my situation, could I have a way of describing it? And so I don't know what it would be. I mean, you're writing a book. How's that going, by the way? I don't know if you're liking that process or not. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, on this writer point, this was a –

probably about two years into my YouTube career when things started going really well. So that was, you know, I've been doing YouTube for five years now. So about two years in, I was still working as a doctor. I was sort of, YouTube channel was on like a quarter of a million subscribers. Revenue was starting to sort of 3X what I was making as a doctor. And I was like, oh my God, there's really something here. But then that thing in my mind was the question that you mentioned earlier was, what does this look like 10 years from now, 15 years from now?

And my solution to this was writer. Because, and again, I was thinking of people like you, people like Ryan, people like Tim Ferriss, even, who like, it feels like being a writer is something you can do when you're like 50 years old. But I think of when I'm 50 years old, I'm unlikely to be looking at a camera and being like, what's up, guys? Welcome back to my YouTube channel or whatever that looks like. So I'd kind of had this vague plan of, okay, I think...

The evolution of the internet thought leader is to...

get the book, the book, if it can hit a bestseller list, cool, whatevs, um, that unlocks speaking opportunities, which unlocks the next book. And that felt to me like it could be a game that I could play, you know, the infinite game. Um, I'd be quite content living that lifestyle of just like, Hey, I get to write books every, every few years. And as long as the system around it of like selling stuff or doing a podcast, getting sponsorships or, or if I kept my expenses low enough, that would be able to sustain a full-time lifestyle. Yeah.

So here's, I'm going to make another suggestion for you. Like if I'm thinking about describing you, well, first of all, I think to say YouTuber is super narrow. Like to me, I see a media entrepreneur, media mogul. Like this is what Ryan Holiday is. This is what,

Tim Ferriss is right. This is, it's what Bill Simmons did building out the ringer, right? So I'm looking around at people that have, let's say a presence online. How many actually have teams that you meet, you know, like you do in an office to like go over your schedule, whatever. It's a new media entrepreneur, new media mogul, media entrepreneur that what you're really building is a new type of media company where there's a video content, there's audio content, there's interactive digital content, but,

Books might be a part of that, but that's something interesting. You have your finger on the pulse of an emerging new segments of the media market that I think are going to be massive. You have a head start. You're in the top one half of 1% of people working on this.

So I'm wondering if that's the answer to the question. It's like, yeah, I was a doctor and I left to do a media startup. I'm a media entrepreneur because I think there's all of this disruption happening. And, you know, we have this big audiences and all this innovation and we're figuring things out.

Yeah, you know, I think that's a good insight. I've not quite thought of it in that way. But one word I have been sort of, you know, me and my team have been floating around is like, instead of media entrepreneur, like creator entrepreneur, or like creatorpreneur, which is a bit of a weird mesh of mesh of those things, where I think, increasingly, the world is moving more towards media.

individuals, well, you know, the creator economy, I would say that you're a, you know, would be fair to describe you as a creator as well, because books and podcasts and blogs and articles and all that kind of stuff.

And there's this sort of new wave of creator entrepreneurs, the sort of creators who then build a team around them and create like either a lifestyle business like mine broadly or a very performance heavy business like someone like Mr. Beast with a team of like 100 people and this whole like empire. That feels like something kind of interesting, but it feels like we're sort of at the start of that where the creator economy has been around for several years now. But there's very few people doing it with this whole like building a business around the thing.

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of innovation is happening. I mean, something I'm thinking about right now or actually I'm doing right now is sort of spinning off.

you know, a lot of my writing recently has been about various aspects of what I summarize with the phrase, the deep life. So my recent books, my recent articles, the things I'm writing now, a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it is really about ways to, to take back control of your life and how you spend your time and work, but also in your life outside of work and defeating distractions and being more intentional and buildings, more meaningful, interesting, whatever work and professional lives is, uh,

I'm building a home for this that is distinct from just me as Cal Newport, the writer, because I also do other things. I publish academic papers. I write about other topics. I do more, more hardcore techno criticism. And so this is something I'm trying to figure out right now is that we, this portal, the deep life.com is, you know, a month or two away, but it's going to be the online home for that movement. And it's now suddenly I can,

the various stuff content I'm creating around that can have a home, but also other people can help provide content for that. And it can be its own standalone entity in some sort. And what I'm realizing is none, there's no playbook for any of this, you know, it's all, all this is up in the air. So that's why I keep coming back to you. You're running a successful media business, which, which I think is really interesting because obviously something really interesting is happening now. This, this, when you distribute content,

I've been trying to work through this theories, but when you, when you distribute the means of production for media, so now many more people have access to means of production for a certain type of media. It generates a lot of innovation. It happened with text first with the web. Now suddenly almost anyone could produce texts that could be universally consumed. It happened next for audio because the tech hurdle there I think was, was easier. So now we see the, the business model around podcasting blowing up because the combination of iPhone, uh,

uh, wireless internet plus, uh, podcast technology, but like this is comparable to radio. So now suddenly you could have broad competition in the radio space. And then now it's happening with, with, with video, uh, YouTube helped enable that better cameras, better, better production. And now that's just starting to figure out how to, what happens when we distribute the means of production for, uh,

video media, which is going to be the biggest of all, because that's the, in traditional media, that's the most successful medium of all is, is, is visual. And we have no idea where, where that's going to unfold other than there's going to be a lot of innovation. The pie of available revenue is going to grow and be more widely distributed. And no one really knows where, where that's going to end up. I mean, I have to assume the YouTube aesthetic what's emerged right now is just step one of

Five or 10 years from now, I'm not quite sure what this world of distributed videos can look like, but I think it's going to consolidate in the sort of these small to medium-sized firms. I think the sort of $100 million, 40-person creation network is going to be the key unit of the future of content production, these minor production houses. I don't know if that's all going to be true. All I know is there's a lot of churn of innovation happening right now. Yeah.

Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, this is something I do think about a lot. Anytime we're doing kind of quarterly planning or anything for the business and for the team, people keep on asking me, hey, where are we going? What's the vision and stuff? And I'm like, partly, I have no idea. We're just making it up as we go along. But then I do think, huh, what would it look like? You know, a few months ago, I was thinking...

okay, we, you know, we've got a team of like 20 ish people. You'll be good to get a revenues up to like 10 million and then expand out into like a space where we can rent out studios to other creators in London. And we can form this little London creators hub. And then maybe we'll go up to 40 people. And, and then, I don't know, I, I found that, I mean, I, I probably did this wrong, but I found my calendar just being chock-a-block with management related stuff rather than, uh, creation and reading and writing, which is the thing that I actually care about. Um,

And then we kind of did a little bit of downsizing, moved to some freelancers. And now when I think of that model of like a team of 40 people and like a big company or big-ish company, I feel, oh, that sounds like pretty bad. I'd actually quite like the life where I've just got maybe 10 people on the team or like 12 people on the team and we're all remote and I get to travel around the world and do my writing for four hours a day or whatever that looks like. So I feel like there's a little bit of this tension between

I kind of want to live a sort of Ryan Holiday-esque lifestyle on a farm versus...

I know that the world is moving towards building these media companies that I'm kind of resisting the lure of, Oh, just growth for the sake of growth. Yeah. All right. So it's interesting. So here's the other, let's put that data point on the other end of the spectrum, though. Ryan's busier than all of us. So we won't, let's not use him. He has the farm, but he also has the bookstore and like 90 other things. But, but I think the right examples is Ferris and Rogan. It's like Ferris and Rogan's model is this one thing I'm doing is very successful.

let's do it at a really high level. It generates a lot of money. And so let's just be and build a really interesting lifestyle about it. Like think about like Tim has really stopped the other types of things. He stopped the book writing. You know, I interviewed him about this and you can, he played the interview that I did of him on his feet. So if you want to find that you find out his feed, not mine. And he was really talking about how books burnt him out because he was

he was writing doorstops. He was writing 500 page books. And the podcast and investing was burning them out. He was doing a lot of angel investing, a siege phase. And he just stopped all of that. And so I'm just going to do the podcast as, as like an escape because it was just one thing. It was more focused. It was more, more immediate. And then they kill it with it because they get these massive CPMs and have a really big audience. And then Rogan, I guess is the classic example of that is he's like, this thing is doing well. I'm just going to do this.

And he's not interested in all the rest of his time is as far as I can tell, just by secondhand. Right. It's just very intentionally allocated to things that are optional, optional activities that he enjoys that have no. So maybe we should put a I like this. We're kind of we're working out an ontology here. So we have Bill Simmons here.

On one side of this, build the ringer, sell it for $200 million. Like that's where the, that's where the capital is flowing. On the other side, you have Ferris, you have Rogan, which is figure out the thing you do well, taking advantage of new media opportunities to be able to build an empire in a place where you wouldn't have been able to 15 years ago, get it, get it down to a science, really enjoy what you're doing, have, you know, do that really well, but also generate copious autonomy because, you know, Hey, you're,

I don't know if you're doing 4 million a year on a podcast.

And that's the only thing you're doing. I guess there's a, there's an affluence argument here. Like, are you less happy than Bill Simmons with the, his, the 70 million cut he got from the sale of the ringer, but who is now the head of content at, you know, audio content at Spotify and overseeing and all these things and documentaries. I think that's actually like a really fair question. And maybe the answer is, it depends who you are. Like Bill Simmons is probably happy doing that, but Tim would be miserable and Simmons would be miserable if he was Tim. So I guess maybe that's the question is where do we fall on that spectrum? No, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a blog post you wrote. I can't remember the time, probably like 2010 or something. And you said something like, the advice that you give to students when they're trying to figure out what to do with their careers is to begin with the lifestyle in mind.

and reverse engineer the career from that rather than, hey, I did an economics degree, therefore private equity, hedge funds or investment banking are my three options. And you end up going down one of these routes. And that post really vibed with me because I think it made me think, hmm, if I were to begin with a lifestyle in mind, does that in fact actually look like the big media company?

The answer is probably not. But then another part of me was like, am I just feeling, am I just bullshitting myself and just like setting my ambitions lower because I am afraid of the work that it would take to

to build said media company and try and go big. And I'm just content to wallow in my own mediocrity of like, oh, I'll just write four hours a day and then I'm happy with life. I don't need to make that much money. Do you get what I'm getting at? Yeah. I don't think you're dilute. So first of all,

I love that post. So yeah, lifestyle centric career planning, I think it's such a critical idea, especially for young people trying to figure out like in college. I wrote that while at a graduation ceremony for my sister. So I was thinking about graduation, graduation advice. Yeah. And you, and it has to be the right answer.

For how you figure out your career, which is you get the image of the lifestyle you want at whatever point, you know, in the future and you make it super tangible. Like you can you can feel it. You can smell it. You can see it, but not getting specific at all about what your work is. Like, are you in the countryside? Are you in a city? Is it you know, you're you're at the bohemian mountain.

bar in the in the Lower East Side and and around all these artists are you in a field and you've been out in the sun and like you know whatever working on your trails like what is it is a very social you're in a small town are you what are you up in the mountains like get that really clear and then say great let me work backwards now to figure out how do I get there with my work

Right. And I think that's such a critical way of thinking about things because, A, it's not just, hey, follow your passion or something like this, because the right answer might be, I'm going to go to medical school so that I can be sort of get these nightingale shifts where I work three times a week, one week out of the month or something like that, or work for three months. And it's the highest hourly rate I can get. And then I can spend the whole summer in the Canary Islands. Like it can lead you to really interesting places. I think it's the way to do it. And the reason why I think you in particular are not

you're not diluting yourself into, you know, avoiding the difficulties of ambition is that a lot of people, when they do this exercise, it is a hundred percent clear. They want that,

they really crave that activity and work, right? So I think it's a really clear personality type thing that if you are the type of person whose ideal lifestyle does involve, I've got a team, I'm making moves. It's super really clear. If you talk to those people and I have, because this is my framework and I run that framework past, there's a lot of people who are like,

I love the idea of activity and I want to be doing something. I want people, you know, I want to be at the center of attention. I want people that are on my team. I want to be, I love that action, the sociality, the, the, some people love that. So if you don't feel it unambiguous, of course, that's what I want to do. Then I think that's really meaningful. And I'll tell you, I think I'm like you.

which is why the way I am logistically handling the business aspect of all this career is right now I have a half day rule, one half day a week. It has to fit in that. If it can't, if something can't fit in that, then I can't do it. And my goal down the line is make that one day a week and that's it. And so, and that's how I've done my whole with the podcast, everything else. It's

Whatever fits in a half day a week that I put aside on my calendar, that's what I can do. And as I get good at something, we hire people to do something that frees up more time. I can try to add something else, but I'm constrained by that because I think like you, I would have misery. I would find misery if every single day it was like rock and rolling. Let's go. That's the calendar. You mentioned your calendar chock full of, uh, I got heart palpitations. I hate that. Right? So for me, it's like, okay, one half day a week.

All in, what can we do with that? Get better, improve this, hire that, let's fix this. And outside of that, I don't want to think about the business because I think I'm with you. And that's the compromise I've come up with. Nice.

Yeah, I've landed on one day a week where I just do my YouTube stuff. So every Thursday is YouTube day. Perfect. We start the Thursday with usually just a vague notion of maybe we'll film videos ABC in the morning. We're like, all right, cool. What are the videos going to be? And yesterday filmed, I think, three videos. And we're like, yeah, cool. That's content for the next three weeks. Sorted. And that feels like a good place to be because to come back to the book thing, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, that now unlocks basically...

every morning for three, four hours from nine till 1230, nine till one is blocked out, protected book writing time. And then most afternoons are generally free-ish to, you know, either be in the studio and chat to the team and brainstorm some ideas if that's what I feel like doing or just doing like a whole day on the book. And

And as of this morning, I handed in the really crappy first draft to our editors at Penguin and Macmillan. And now I'm just waiting because but like some of it is like fleshed out. Some of it is still notes and bullet points. Some of it is still like I was feeling so bad about this. But then my agent replied. She was like, don't worry. Handing in the first draft is always really, really, really messy. It does not need to look look pretty. What's been your your experience of the whole first draft and then and then beyond?

Yeah, well, I just handed in a week ago the first 20,000 words of my newest book. So we're in the same place. I haven't heard back yet. Now, I mean, I've been at it for a while because I did my first – what's the math on this? My first book deal I signed right after I turned 21. So I've been through it a bunch of times. And so it's a little bit less fraught now. How old are you now?

40. Oh, okay. Damn, you've been in this for 20 years. Solid. 20 years. Yeah, I've been at the game for 20 years. Yeah, I wrote my first book my last year at university. So I've been doing it for a little while.

My method, everyone has a different method. What I tend to do is hand in like big chunks early on. So to see, because for me, it's a hard, I have finding the voice for a book is usually takes me some time. And so I want to make sure I have it right. So like I handed in 18,000 words last Friday, a critical part of the book. And I was like, I want to stop there and talk to my editor.

And then if she's on board with that, and once we get that right, then I'm going to have the confidence to go and write the next 60 or whatever, however many are going on. So that's been my process. Now, I'm also right now writing one of the first chapters in the book is more idea-like. And I pitched the idea as a New Yorker article. So I'm writing it for the New Yorker now. Then I can use it for the first draft of the book. So that's another one of my tricks. If something has to be

It's subtle and it has to be really well researched. I let the pressure of the New Yorker like force me to do the work because it's like, you got to get it right. It's really hard. So that's like, that's where I am now. And it's like today, this morning, like finished the last technical piece of that art. It's a big five, 6,000 word beast finished the last technical beast of that this morning. And so like by Monday, I'll probably, probably have that thing, have that thing done. But that's what I do pieces. I do it in pieces.

What is your, if, you know, let's say it's four hours in the morning and you've got your writing time. What does that, what does that look like? I guess I, as, as specifically as you can possibly be, because I, I'm, I'm looking for any magic bullet that will help solve my problems. Well, okay. So I, I, I spend a lot of time doing richly detailed annotated outlines, right? So like, to me, that's really important. I got to get, if I'm working on a big section, I got to get that

feel right, like this and that and this, and these are the examples. And that I'll work on, not on foot often. I find on foot's the right way to do that. And I'll spend hours and hours over many days just coming back to thinking about structure ideas, structure writing, and do this idea, this and that and this. All right, so then when I'm writing,

what I'm doing is implementing that plan. So when I'm writing in the morning, like this morning, if you came into my study and like watch me writing, it's I use Scrivener. Yep. So I have, you know, dozens of notes where I've copied in notes or this or that on one pane and, and the, and the main draft and the other, and then I'll have a stack of books that whatever books I'm pulling from for that, for that particular piece. And then it's just, I'm clawing one sentence at a time.

You know, like that, that look this up and I'm all about pacing. This has been my big thing recently. Uh, in the last few years, I'm trying to up my writing quality. It's, it's a lot of pacing. It's like, take your time, get it right. You know, slow and steady, definitely like a slow and steady wins to race type of type of vibe. Get it right. Because I think that density comes through. It comes through in the writing. If it was a lot was trying to get done here in two hours and it shows in the writing.

You're kind of, you're, you're, you're working your way around the tricky points. And I try to, and a lot of this came to me writing for the New Yorker helped on this is you got to have consistent density. Like, you know what you're saying? Everything is based on, it's been thought through, you're citing the right things. It's you're taking your time. And so it's just pulling sentence by sentence. Let's go, let's go. I do, I do it all on this, you know, small MacBook with,

which is this one is, you know, two years old, but there's no, you can't see any of the letters. Most of the letters on the keyboard have been rubbed off from just writing, you know, like just, just rock and rolling, like all the notes you take, all the writing, all the editing. And then the other thing I'll say about my process is it's all gut for me. So I will often finish something and just, and my gut says it's not singing and I will go back and do

drastic surgery. I do this all the time. I really trust my gut where I'm like, I physically feel uncomfortable and about a draft. And to me, it's the structure. There's nothing to do with the craft of the synthesis. The structure of ideas is not right.

And that makes me physically uncomfortable. And then I will go back and do drastic surgery on things. And just to give you an example of this, a couple of weeks ago, I published a New Yorker piece on TikTok and Facebook and what TikTok means about social media. After that article had been sent to copyediting, I was feeling so physically uncomfortable.

And I was on vacation at the time. I was like, this is just not right. And I just told my wife and kids, like, pretend I'm not here and just put my head down and essentially completely reworked the whole thing. And then suddenly it felt right. And that's like very common for me. I'm like, this isn't right. And then when it is, it feels it. Nice. Yeah. That very much vibes with my experience in that.

So I've been working on mine for about 18 months now. And we're now at the point where, you know, I had it in the first draft, but a lot of it, there was a lot of outlining initially. And then a lot of like, just sort of trying to get vomit, any kind of words out onto the page. And in the process of vomiting words out onto the page, I feel like my ideas got refined to the point where now when I,

When I went back to it to just do the first round of editing before handing it into the editor officially, I found it really helpful to actually zoom back out. I went on a Miro interactive whiteboard thing and just put loads of post-it notes on there and basically drafted out the outline again

And thinking, okay, that leads to that leads to that. Oh, hang on. There's a bit of a hole in the logic over there. Okay. Let's figure out how we're going to flesh that. And sort of moving sort of post-it notes around this interactive whiteboard thing was just so helpful. And then I just translated once I was happy with the argument, I just translated each one into a little thing on Scrivener. And then I just went, all right, cool. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

And I felt like, okay, cool. At least the argument makes sense. Point A leads to B leads to C leads to D. And there's no random leaps of logic where I can get away with it in a YouTube video where no one's going to think about it. But like in writing, it's like, oh, I feel like the argument needs to be a bit more refined for it to feel legit.

If you get what I mean.

It feels weird to people and they can't even really put their finger on it. They're like, I just don't like this. It's why, by the way, you know, probably from your, your medical training,

which there's a lot of precision to that is probably helping you here a lot because you're thinking this, this, this has to fit. This has to click together. My training as a mathematician helps me a lot in idea writing because I do proofs, uh, for a living as an academic where everything has to fit, like literally. So I construct my, my arguments like a proof. Like if this doesn't fit from this, and if you didn't mention this here and there, uh,

No QED. Yeah. It makes a big difference, even if the reader doesn't put their finger on it directly. This is why some stuff, if you read like online, feels amateurish and some stuff feels really compelling is the amateurish stuff is people are putting down. Here's a bunch of points I thought of that I think are interesting, but they don't click all together in some sort of cohesive way. And it just reads very different.

How do you think about this? We're going deep into sort of self-indulgent territory here on my part, but that's fine. How do you think about the balance of let me say the things that are sufficiently counterintuitive and novel to get a dopamine hit from the audience versus let me say the things I need to say in order for my argument to make sense? Do those things ever clash in your mind? I mean, yeah, because we both are in this space where we're, you know, I'm definitely known for contrarianism. I mean, I would say for me,

What I'm always looking for is an understanding of something in the world that makes sense to me, explains things that otherwise didn't make sense before and is generative. So I can then use this to like make decisions going forward or understand new things that arrive in the world. And there's like a real great feeling when you get there. Now there's often a,

to it because, look, I grew up immersed of the sort of the great idea writers of the 90s and 2000s. I was, you know, immersed in Gladwell and Johnson and really like some of the stuff Clive Thompson was doing back then. But the really great idea writers and Gladwell was a master of this. It was,

it wasn't contrarianism in the sense of you thought this, but it's the opposite. Instead, it's, you don't know anything about this, but once you do, all of that makes sense in a new light. Like that's what, that's what I love. So if I can convince myself, like, okay, I have a working model of,

that explains whatever, that explains the dynamics in the social media space and why, what's going on with TikTok or this or that, or I have dynamics for understanding career satisfaction or what's going on in the workplace and why we're so distracted. Why would that persist? Why would we persist with something that was so low productivity? When I get a model that works and the pieces click together, that's what I love. And then it's like, it's contrarianism, but it's not

it's different than I think take ism, which you get a lot online, especially in click culture, which is look at, look at my take, you know, I've got my hot take where all you're trying to do is have a headline that grabs people's attention. And, and you're trying to make your hot take. That to me is a lot less interesting. I mean, a lot of the hot take writing online right now, that's trying to attract clicks, especially more like the news and commentary space often is usually, it's not even contrarian anymore. It's more just like,

We all belong to the same tribe. Let me take my turn dunking on the enemy. And then everyone kind of applaud like, ooh, that was a good, like you got a good punch in there. That was really kind of smart and snarky. And then someone else steps up and is like, well, look at my take. So-and-so is the worst since whatever. Ah, so not interesting. So anyways, that's how I come at it. I mean, I don't know a lot of the details of your book, but it sounds like it's kind of in the same pace. You have your...

Your ideas, you're explaining various things. I mean, obviously, I think your thoughts on productivity have a lot of this, too. It's like, here's my model. You know, this is the way I think about things.

And I think that's really fulfilling. Yeah, no, it's really fun. Like I get a big kick out of like, yes, the framework makes sense. It's like coming up with like, how do I make the framework fit in three parts? Because two is not that satisfying. Three, oh yes, it works. And it explains all these different things. And when I teach my YouTuber academy and teach people how to do content and stuff, I try my best to essentially frameworkify it

Like I would back when I was teaching medical students around like, hey, really, there's only three different types of hemolytic malignancies that you need to know about. One, two, and three. And now we can break those into three more. There's something satisfying about connecting ideas or simplifying ideas like that in a way that is generative, as you said, like helps you actually make decisions moving forward.

Yeah. And just to throw out one other thing that like non nonprofessional idea writers also get wrong as well is you as the writer don't have to handle all the caveats. So it's like another issue you have, like if it's a common misconception people have where they'll be like, well, but you didn't mention this. And what about people who are in this situation? And the reason is, if you're in interpersonal conversation with another human, you're

you're of course going to caveat whatever advice you're giving to kind of match that person, right? Like if you're a runner and giving running advice and someone has like a knee brace on, he's had a knee injury, you're going to sort of caveat it. Well, you know, like you're not going to, I'm not going to tell you like go run six miles a day or whatever. But in broad audience idea writing, you don't do that. Like you have a framework that's

interesting. It's compelling. It's going to open up a lot of thinking, help people understand new things. They're going to take that and integrate it into their own experience. And they're going to have to caveat and modify it. And like, of course, the running advice isn't supposed to apply to the person who's in the knee brace. Like they'll figure that all out, but it's like a cohesive, coherent intellectual schema that they can integrate into their life. And that's exciting. And they build from it and integrate it to other things they know. So it's like in professional idea writing,

You take your swing and you make it as exciting as possible and good and interesting and coherent, and you don't bother explaining, but here's 10 cases where it might not be this and these people might not be able to use and don't worry about that. And so I think idea writers get this critique from individuals a lot. Well, you didn't talk about this situation.

Because again, I think that's the gap. When you're dealing one-on-one with people, of course, you're going to caveat whatever you're saying to their situation. When you're writing one to a million, it makes the writing bogged down and boring and weird and self-protective and muggy. You know, it's not good writing. You know, take the swing.

throw the take the big swing you can other people will other people can modify it a little bit so that's like another thing it takes them getting used to is you have to it's like you're simplified yeah a little bit that's a really good tip i think this is something i'm definitely struggling with right now and i think um sort of the the youtube videos that i put out so you know the other day put out something around um

Oh, I was, I was, uh, it was a, it was a collaboration with a friend of mine who was thinking of quitting their job. And I was like, okay, cool. You know, let's figure out, let's try and riff and come up with a framework for how to decide when to quit your job in terms of like how much income you have coming in expenses, side hustle income, blah, all this opportunity cost, expected value, all of the things. And the video did pretty well. People really liked it. And there was one comment saying this video was extremely ableist as a disabled person who struggles to focus. I couldn't possibly do any of this stuff.

And part of me was like, yeah, you're kind of right. Like, I mean, but also part of it was like, Oh, you know, maybe I should have caveated bit like, Hey, this relies on you actually having the time and the energy to, but then the whole video becomes a series of caveats. And I think I'm struggling with that in the book as well to think, Oh, but I can think of like eight different objections to this idea here. And I don't want to have space to write a counter to all eight of them. So yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I,

I call this like the blind caveat rule or something like this. It's like if you're writing a book about a painter or something like that and like, well, this is Cezanne was really working with color and doing this and that. You don't have to bother adding the caveat. Of course, if you're blind...

This like information about what these paintings look like is not going to be as useful because people already know that. Like they'll add that they'll add that caveat or it's the broken leg, the broken leg principle. Right. Like if you're writing a book about running training, you don't have to caveat it. You know, if you're if you have a broken leg, you're not going to be able to do this training. Right.

the people with the broken legs know they're not gonna be able to do this train. But again, I think what comes back to here is it's actually well intentioned. I mean, some of this stuff is cynical. It's, you know, I, whatever, like we're in a world of, there's a whole, there's a whole thing to talk about, about how the various critical theories in academia have pervaded culture. So there's a, there's a tone of, of critique in those theories that have now filtered into culture. So there's a lot of now social standing from critique, blah, blah, blah. Like there's a whole self indulgent, uh,

academic rant to give about that. But actually like a lot of that type of critique is well-intentioned, like what you're talking about there. Because again, if I'm not a writer or someone who does YouTube videos for hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people, my frame of reference is talking to someone. And if I was talking to someone whose life was really not in, they're having a lot of difficulties and their life wasn't in order. And I was giving them advice about like, yeah, and then you got to like,

look at the expected value and do this and that, it would be weird and insulting and kind of mean, you know, like this is not someone who's, who's there in a situation where they can't take this advice. Why would you possibly be talking about this stuff when someone's not in a situation to take it? And so that's our frame. I think our frame as humans is one-on-one and it's very different than one to a million. And so, yeah, I think the, the, it, it,

when you shift to the broadcast frame, it's like, yeah, obviously a lot of people, this is not for, but, but there's a lot of people who can take this and work with it. And so like, let's, let's put that, put that out there. But I get the same thing all the time. How can I do deep work if dot, dot, dot. And there's a lot of things you can put on the other side of that dot, dot, dot. And, and, you know, I get that all day long and I was like, it's true, but it would be the first 50 pages of my book if I had to go through. And it would be such boring, weird, uh,

self-indulgent writing if it's like let me let me talk about it like obviously you know how can i do deep work if i'm a telegraph operator and my job is to at western union to to take papers and do telegraph i can't do deep work there it's like yeah okay you got me i mean this is the theory is not valid like i don't know what you want me to say but anyways i feel you feel your pain

This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted and I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos. But then I discovered WeWork and I

I was a member, me and Angus, my team members, we were members of the WeWork in Cambridge and they have like hundreds of other locations worldwide as well. And it was incredible because we had this fantastic, beautifully designed office space to go to, to work. And we found ourselves like every day, just at nine o'clock in the morning, just going to WeWork because it was a way nicer experience working from the coworking space than it was just sitting at home working. These days, what me and everyone on my team has is the all access pass, which means you're not tied to a specific WeWork location, but it means you can use any of their several hundred coworking spaces around London, around the UK, and also around the world.

And one of the things I really love about the coworking setup is that it's fantastic as a bit of a change of scenery. So these days I work from home, I've got the studio at home, but if I need to get some focused writing work done and I'm feeling a bit drained just sitting at my desk all day, I'll just pop over to the local WeWork, which is about a 10 minute walk from where I am. I'll take my laptop with me, I'll get some free coffee from there, I'll get a few snacks. And it's just such a great vibe and you get to meet cool people. I made a few friends through meeting them at WeWork and it's just really nice being in an environment, almost like a library, but kind of nicer because there's like...

a little bit of soft music in the background and there's other kind of startup bros and creators and stuff in there as well. And it's just my absolute favorite coworking space of all time. It's super easy to book a desk or book a conference room using the app. And it's a great place to meet up with team members if you're gonna collaborate and you'll live in different places. They've got unlimited tea and coffee and herbal teas and drinks on tap. And they've also got various kind of after work events that happen like happy hours and yoga and a few other exercise type things. And you can also take in guests. So often when guests will come over to visit,

I'll say, hey, let's pop into WeWork and we'll just work from there for the whole day. And then we'll go out for dinner sometime in the evening. Anyway, if you're looking for a co-working space for you or your team, then I'd 100% recommend WeWork. Like I said, I've been a paying customer for theirs for the last two years, which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali. And you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. I'm just curious, what sort of

criticism do you get and how do you how do you deal with it like i've i've heard lots of criticisms of malcolm gladwell of like oh but he's cherry picking whatever story to suit his ends and

And then when he wrote talking to talking to strangers and had a whole thing about sexual assault in there, I was like, oh, hello, that's going to get a lot of criticism from people who are like, oh, cherry, cherry picking of data, cherry picking of stories. That's not how it actually happened. He's only saying that because it's interesting. What sort of stuff do you get? And I'm just I'm just very curious because I'm trying to sort of preempt what sort of criticism I'm going to get. And I feel like my stuff is going to be more in line with yours than in line with with Gladwell's. I mean, it depends on the.

On the content area, because I write in a bunch of content areas. But OK, so here's a few classics. And some of these have changed. It's like, you know, obviously in my techno criticism, I did a lot of thinking and writing about social media and its impact on human flourishing. Was sort of an early critic of social media, the only person in my generation not to have a social media account. I used to get before disliking social media became mainstream. I used to get a lot of like, how can you possibly

write about something that you don't heavily use. So that was a big one, which I thought was weird, right? Because a lot of great journalists, for example, covered the various drug epidemics in the US without having to go heavily use all those drugs to write about it. I mean, people have written books about serial killing without having to actually go serial kill. So I used to get that, but I don't get that as much. With deep work, one I get a lot now, and it's taken me a while to try to...

I get a lot like, but how can I do deep work if I have kids or childcare? Or deep work is great if you have someone at home to take care of other things. That's a very common one. And for a while, it confused me because I was like, well, wait a second. This framework was about you're at the office for eight hours a day. During that time that you're there, you should spend more of those hours

in undistracted work versus more distracted work. So it was about like the ratio of what you spent your time on, like during the day when you're at work, I was like, I, it's not. And, and so I used to be confused. I was like, well, what does this have to do? I'm not asking people to work more. I'm not asking, like, I'm trying to understand what's going on here. And I think what's happening with that critique is there is, um, a leap. And I think this is telling and, and, and earnest. So it's not like I'm, this is critical. I think there's a leap from deep work, uh, deep work,

can produce like more impressive accomplishments that gets associated with ambition. And that gets associated with the sort of all in ambitious, like I'm working all day trying to crush it, you know,

changing the world. So there's this weird, I think, leap people are making in their minds between what I thought was a pretty dry argument, which is like when you're at your office, instead of like going back and forth your inbox all day, you know, like do that first and then do this for a long time and then go back to your inbox instead of interspersing. Like it's a very dry technical argument about how you spend the time you're already spending working. Right. Um,

And it became and I think it became wrapped up in people's minds about a life of ambition and going after really cool things and a frustration of like not everyone is has the like the flexibility or autonomy or just energy left to do that. And so that's that's an interesting critique. Right. And I'm still trying to pull that pull that one apart. Deep work to people, I think, means.

Like excessive, ambitious, self-oriented Elon Musk changed the world type work. Yeah. I think, yeah, that's a common one that's out there too. I think I, I get that a lot. And then the third one I get, which is just accurate is you're a dude. And especially like, you don't really fully understand not being a dude.

And I'm like, fair enough. That's fair enough. Right. Like, I mean, just the way like guys very, you know, stereotypically speaking process, a lot of things think about a lot of things, the things that they're concerned with is specific. And I think it comes through and, and I have a lot of women in my audience, but they also are like, you talk about this a little differently than we do. And to which I tip my cap. I'm like, that's true. Yeah. Definitely. I guess, um,

Your second criticism, this sort of deep work becomes associated with ambition, hustle, and stuff. Broadly, what's your hot take on the phrase toxic productivity these days? Yeah, well, my work on slow productivity comes out of this to some degree. Yeah, so there's a real anti-productivity movement

going on right now, but it's a little bit confusing. I wrote several articles about this for the New Yorker trying to figure out what's going on with the anti-productivity movement. And I think there's a couple different things in there. One, there's a straw. I think what now has become a straw man, this hustle culture, and maybe it's not a straw man because I'm not on social media, so maybe this still exists. You would know better. But I think it's become a straw man, this idea of

everyone is saying work harder, do more things. And I'm the bold social critic who says, you know, maybe not. Whereas I actually see the opposite. Everyone is saying like, we're too overloaded. Like we should do less stuff. Like me time, find yourself. Like, I don't know where, maybe it's just Gary Vanderchuk. It's like the last person left. I don't know where this is, but there's this notion of like, there's this big culture that's pushing even outside of the professional sphere, this like Instagram hustle culture of like, you gotta, but,

And that might exist. Again, I don't use social media, so maybe there's a lot of that going on still of, you know, Jocko, I'm up at 4 a.m. and you got to, you have to as well. But even Jocko says, like, I'm weird. I have low sleep demands and I don't recommend this for other people. So there's that. And then I think there's another thing going on, which to me is more interesting.

Which is, I think, knowledge work in general is pretty broken. I think the way we run offices is very haphazard and unintentional, and it's unnecessarily exhausting. I think we're terrible at organizing groups of people using their brains to add value to information. And people are exhausted because we run offices dumbly, and the pandemic made it much worse. Yeah.

So there's a few things that happened with the pandemic that made the systemic issues we already had, which were productivity issues. Like the way we assign, organize, and keep track of work is just bonkers in office work. It's just rock and roll on email and Slack. I don't know. Here's a media invite. Let's just hope it works out. And the pandemic made it work because it generated a bunch of new work and reduced the effectiveness of collaboration because it was all video. We couldn't grab people in the hallways and kind of push things over the edge. So I think the other half of

and this is probably the core engine of anti-productivity culture, is

People in office jobs are exhausted by how stupidly we run offices. And so they kind of vaguely just like, eh, productivity, like stop asking me to do more work. Like my work's exhausting me. And then there's a small sliver. This is my cynical thing. There's a small sliver of like very online people for which the productivity movement is like they're online, well-educated professional writers with sub stacks who, um, who usually, you know, quite left of center and want to, they love the idea of like

being part of a labor movement themselves. They sort of look, look with some envy at the big sort of industrial labor movements, the union movements, these big successful movements from the left. They have workers against the capitalist overlords. And I think there's some sense of like, oh, I want that too. So we kind of invent this notion of this mustache twirling,

managers are like trying to force us to do too much work and we're fighting back and we're Norma Rae. And so there's a little bit of that going on too. So I think all three of those things are going to sort of the straw man culture of like, I want to fight against the straw man. The fact at work, we don't know what productivity means in the office. Our definition is stupid. And I think people get that. And that just gets simplified as enough of this productivity stuff. And then you have the sort of sub stackers that are just, you know, want to be a Cesar Chavez and, and, and are trying to conflate and they're trying to,

You can tell this type because they make a living writing, but when they're talking about their issues and their exhaustion, we'll try to work in the Amazon labor union space.

into their, like, try to mix those two together. Like, yeah, me and the Amazon workers in the warehouse, like, we're all kind of fighting management. And so there's some of that type going on. We have to, like, pull all those threads apart to really understand what's going on. Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the whole strawmanization of the hustle culture thing. Even Gary Vaynerchuk has stopped...

peddling that narrative many years ago. But it's still, he's been become painted with that brush and now he's sort of lab bastard. It's like, oh, but like Gary Vee says you should work all the time. Gary Vee's like, his whole thing is like, hey, look, man, you know, just do whatever makes you happy. I think that was a super interesting...

There was this random Instagram reel that a friend of mine actually posted where the caption, which I just sort of chuckled at, where the caption was, hey, it's Friday. So I'm going to close my laptop at four rather than five just because my corporate overlord does not own my time. And like, it was like, okay, cool. Fair enough. But then part of me was just like a bit confused by that because it's like,

This person is choosing to work, well, has chosen to work in a job which is famously demanding, i.e. one of the management consulting firms.

and is like saying that yeah it's an act of self-care to stick it to my corporate overlord and quit work an hour early yeah and i was i was just like what's what's going on there but because i i i guess for me in this position of privilege it's like my my work is my life and i genuinely enjoy it and it's like would i want to leave leave work early on a friday it's like probably not because it's actually kind of fun and i

But that post got loads of likes. And I've been trying to figure out, like, what is the culture going on there where...

It's like almost us against them, almost a sense of like, I'm a poor employee and my manager is the one who's forcing me to work really hard. And therefore, I'm going to carve out this self-care time for myself by closing my laptop an hour early. Any idea there? Well, so here's my one theory. We'll see if this one sticks. I wrote about this one last fall. I was like, okay, here's one thing that might be going on with this particular type of backlash, which is in most cases,

If you look in most economic sectors, a lot of thought goes into how the work is actually organized and assigned. And so productivity is typically a systems issue. How do we run this factory in a productive way? If you're on the Ford assembly line, it's not just like, you know, hey, do what you can to get these cars out of here fast. It's a systems issue, right, that you think through. With knowledge work,

unique among all major economic sectors before that, the task of productivity was put onto the individual, was made personal. It was like, okay, it's up to you to figure out how to organize stuff and get things done. So like, I don't know, like you should watch, you should read Getting Things Done or whatever. Like that's kind of up to you. It's none of our business. And there's a whole reason why that was. It has to do with Peter Drucker and the autonomy culture surrounding knowledge work. There's various reasons, but that's the case.

The issue is when productivity and here I mean, like how you actually like organize and schedule and execute and assign task is left to the individuals just to kind of figure out that builds resentments. That's where you get this interesting resentment because now you as the individual are you have to start making these choices.

Between I could work more hours tonight, but now my personal life is affecting and now my personal life is pitted against my professional life. And that's really different than when productivity is systemic. So when the system, so here's how our company assigns work and how much work we think you should have on your plate and how we collaborate or whatever. Now you have a clear thing that you can, if it's demanding too much, you can push back against it. You can say, here's our system and we think it should be

Two projects at a time, not three. We think it shouldn't be like you have a thing that you can argue about and debate and have a say in. It's such an interesting trick. And this wasn't done on purpose. I think this was accidental, but it's such an interesting, devious trick. When that becomes completely personal. Now you have to wage the battle against yourself.

Well, maybe I could work Saturday. Maybe I could work a little bit more because like I need to get these things done. And so I think that the inefficiency and the personal internal battles created by in a corporate setting or organizational setting, just letting everyone figure out their own personal productivity, it just doesn't work. And it's making people resentful. And this is why like a lot of my solutions are if you work for a team or if there's an organization or a company, you can't just say it's none of our business how you organize your task. You got to be like

No, no, no. How do we figure out where work comes from? Where are all the projects we're waiting on? How many are you working on right now? That looks like a full plate. You shouldn't have to pull on more. When do we talk? Do we just send emails all day or do we do docker clearing meetings and office hours? And there's all of this. When productivity is a thing that the system supports, you can see and debate and modify and improve and have a...

it's much better. And when you put it on the people's plates, we can't handle it well. And so I kind of get why people are getting resentful. I agree with you too that it also doesn't seem to make sense from the outside where someone's like, I'm closing my laptop at four. You're like, well, I thought the agreement was you're going to work eight hours a day or something. This has happened a lot with the remote work thing. I think remote work, by the way, these fights about remote work

Remote work has just become a proxy for these frustrations with how knowledge work comes out. So like all of this frustration and anger and issues of like it's emails all day long and I have way too much work on my plate and it's all up to me to figure it out and I'm kind of tired of this. It's all getting channeled now into like

I should be able to work from home because it's like the only thing people know to it's like a specific tangible thing you can you can fight for. It's like spoiler alert. I mean, you remember 2020 and early 2021. You're still not going to like your work, even if you're at home and your kids are running around. You know, it's like not that much better. But this is one of my working theories is making productivity personal. We take it for granted, but it's a really weird step we took when the knowledge sector emerged. It's kind of a weird way of doing it.

Nice. I look forward to reading more about this. What is slow productivity broadly? So, yeah. So if we don't have, here's the issue with knowledge work in general,

The issue we've been grappling with in the last 20 minutes, like what does productivity even mean? Right. And so then it just becomes this weird catch all or boogeyman. So I have this thought of like, why don't we actually positively come out and come up with a definition that we like a definition that's human, a definition that, that melds well with our human instincts and the way our brain is actually wired, that centered around producing meaningful and valuable things, but in a way that's very sustainable in a way that's very satisfying. So, so instead of just pushing back against the,

the boogeyman productivity, like let's put in place an alternative. And the alternative I've been working on is called slow productivity. And like the slow food movement or these other movements, I've gone back and pulled from these sort of existing cultures of knowledge workers that have been around for centuries, in some cases, millennia, that had the privilege and space to kind of figure out what's the best way to work with your mind.

you know, what works, what doesn't and figuring out, can we have a widely applicable definition of productivity comes out of it. And so slow productivity has three principles to it. Do fewer things, working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. Those three things, approaching knowledge work with those three principles realigns the efforts with our humanity, the way we're wired. I can give you a neuroscience argument for it. I can give you a psychological argument for it. I can give you a philosophical argument for those three things. On all three of those levels,

Orienting knowledge work around that is meaningful, satisfying. You can produce things of great value. It can be very productive for companies and it can be very satisfying for individuals. So I'm sort of putting together my pitch of what target of productivity should people who make a living using their brains, what should they be going for beyond just get after it, have your to-dos organized? I don't know. What's the philosophical argument?

Well, there's like, we can go back to Aristotle if we need to, right? There's this, what is the teleology of human existence? Well, what's the one thing we have that other creatures don't is we have these brains that can sit and think and create things. And there's an argument towards the

the production of things of value and meaning and sort of giving things the time they require, craftsmanship, that there's a real philosophical foundation to the human value that's extracted from actually like doing things of value of impact with your mind. And a lot of that gets sapped away when you're just

answering emails all day or just hustling to get after it. You could go all the way back to neuro. I mean, this is the thing I'm working on now is I've gone back heavily to do a deep into the mainly social anthropological research to do a deep history of work for 300,000 years. What was work for humans? Because that's a long enough time span that our brain

evolved, right? To match this definition of work. And, you know, surprise, surprise, when you go back and look through this deep literature, you see not doing too many things. Sees a variation in pace and intensity. A lot of your time being the application of hard-won skills. Like that's exactly what comes up. That's what we did for 300,000 years. So there's also this almost like psychology, anthropological, even neuroscientific argument for

not being overloaded, varying your intensity in various ways and spending more of your time like applying hard one skills, like what we expect work to be. Do you have you stumbled across any kind of Dunbar number for number of active projects that one should have at a given time? Like when you say fewer things, I mean, how few are we talking?

Well, yeah. I mean, I, so there, there's two different timescales. I mean, at the scale of like what you're working on right now, it's one, right? So like in the, what, what we cannot do, what our brain cannot do is concurrently during like the afternoon, go back and forth between three different things.

Just the way our planning motivation loop works, like we have one thing in our working memory, we build this internal model that pulls episodic memories out of the hippocampus. We use that to try to predict what we should do next. That system cannot handle more than one thing. So we cannot be thinking about making decisions on or making progress on more than one thing at a time. And I don't mean like literally at the time, like over a...

A couple hours, even like work on one thing till you're done, move on to the other thing. Our brain cannot go back and forth. It's why email, like going back and forth between your email just crushes us psychologically. You know, a recent podcast episode, I talked about task freeze where you see like 15 things you need to do and you just stop.

It's because you literally, the planning motivational center of your brain can't make plans for 15 things at the same time. It neurologically can't do that. So your motivation system just freezes up, right? So at a time, one thing, in terms of like ongoing projects, I'm a big believer in like pull-based methodology, where there's like two or three things you're working on. When something finishes, you can pull something else in.

And I actually think this is how companies should organize work. Software developers already do this, but I think we should do this more broadly in knowledge work where, yeah, there's a lot of work the company needs to do. Don't just distribute that to everyone's plate and everyone has 20 things that they have to kind of figure out what to do with.

They should just be working on a couple things and they can pull in new things once it's ready. And the problem, why I think this is important and why I think it's killer to have a lot of things on your plate, even if you're not working on them at the exact same time, is there's something called an overhead tax that every project that you have committed to generates. It's an overhead of administrative work that you have to do, even if you're not actively working on the project. It's emails you have to send.

meetings, planning meetings, standing meetings you have to have, and just cognitive load of knowing it's there. So that builds up.

So if you have 15 projects on your plate, you're paying overhead tax on 15 projects and that tax takes up your time. And before you know it, most of your time and mental energy is going to the maintenance of the ongoing projects and almost nothing gets done. And then you fall farther behind and then more projects build up and the tax gets worse. I call it the overhead spiral. It's a terrible state to be in. So there's a real cost to having too many things on your plate, even if you're very careful about

This morning, I'm just working on this. And then in the afternoon, I'm just working on that. And on Tuesdays, I work on this. Once you get past a certain level, it's a problem. And I think, again, it's something companies get wrong. They just say, let's distribute the task informally to everyone. We'll have everything live on people's individual plates and they can just figure out what to work on and whatnot. And the overhead tax kills them. A much better system is this all sits in a holding tank.

And when I'm ready for the next thing, I pull it in. But until it leaves that holding tank, I'm paying no overhead tax on it. It's not actually, it's not actually my view. So I honestly think like three active projects at a time is best. And obviously when you're working on something, you're only working on that one thing. Yeah. This is actually something like as of last week, we have now started doing in our, in our team and it's,

I'm so surprised it's taken so long to get to this because we were in that model of, oh, there's all these things we could do. Let's just like distribute them. But now we're like, oh, actually, let's do the thing that software people do and actually make a... I mean, we have like a bucket list of... We would love to...

to have my website contain book summaries of every book I've ever read. We'd love to think about a Patreon. We'd love to think about making our own keyboard. We'd love to think about making our own bag. We'd love to think about this enormous list of things, but not right now. Like for the next six weeks, we're just focusing on these things. Good. And then six weeks later, we can reassess the bucket list and see, okay, whether we actually want to put things onto it. And that model has...

basically it's like within half an hour freed up a lot of cognitive overload from people being like, oh, actually this is not a priority right now. So therefore I'm not going to think about it until our next six week sprint planning or whatever that looks like. Yep. Yep. That's a hundred percent right. By the way, that's what everyone should be doing. I have a chapter about this in the new book I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Everyone should be doing that, but mainly only software people do. And it's such a, it's such a, it's such a,

Such an unnecessary, unforced source of stress and overhead. I mean, just like this is what I think happened, by the way, with the Zoom apocalypse. So I don't know if you heard this from your listeners. I definitely was getting this feedback that during 2021, when everyone we were everyone's remote knowledge workers were remote. People got to these sort of absurd states where like all they were doing was Zoom remote.

They're like, wait, there's no work left. Like it became absurd. It was like a Kafka play or something like this, like some sort of like meta commentary on the absurdity of work and bureaucracy or something like that. But what this was, I think, was like a really clear example of the overhead tax system.

It's spiraling out of control because when people went remote, it increased the amount of tasks on their plate by like 20% all of a sudden, because you had to figure out how to run whatever you do remote. So it generated new work, right? To figure out how do we make the transition and switching over to video processing.

is there's efficiencies that that's lost so there's a lot of efficiencies in person where where i can grab you at the end of a meeting be like well hold on like what are we doing about this client coming tomorrow we go back and forth for three minutes and figure it out when i can't do that anymore we're left saying like we should have a zoom meeting yeah the talk about the client but what's the smallest interval on your calendar 30 minutes and so now five minutes becomes 30 minutes so i think the the

The zoom apocalypse that happened in like the summer of 2020 was making the phenomenon of overhead tax unavoidably visible. Like it's like,

Look, we, we, we up these things by about 20% and soon all time went away for working. All time went away for working. And it showed how, how perilous, like how, how much we, we, we push that tax up almost to the limit. Like before the pandemic, we must've already been spending so much of our time just talking about work because when it got 20% worse, we couldn't ignore it anymore because people were writing me and saying, I don't know when to go to the bathroom.

Because it's back to back to back to back to back for seven hours of, you know, Zoom. Like it got so absurd that people were like, okay, obviously this can't be right. But we were like right below that for years and years. So I think it's a huge phenomenon and we really should spend more time thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that we're trying to figure out right now in terms of, you know, we're moving into this new like sort of office type thing. And I'm trying to figure out what's a good balance between, oh, having our team be somewhat remote and also somewhat in-person. Where in-person is,

Just those conversations happened, the three minute conversation that I just had about pricing for one of our courses, which would have happened maybe never or in like a sort of one hour long course debrief and stuff. And actually just it just took a few like bouncing a couple of ideas as I was refilling my water bottle to actually come up with a pretty solid idea.

And we just don't get that in Zoom meetings because like who's going to bother arranging a Zoom meeting? And then when some people are remote and some people are not, it's like you're having a conversation about a thing, but then it's just like a lot of effort to update the person who is also involved in that project because you're never going to be like, hey, let's hop on a Zoom meeting just so I can update you about this 30-second conversation I had. But then that person is out of the loop and it just ends up creating this mess. Have you, in your thinking about this, figured out a magic solution or is it still like, we've got to kind of work through this and figure it out?

Well, my take on remote, because I did a bunch of pieces on this too, like this was like a big issue, especially during the pandemic, is you have to, for remote to succeed, it has to be accompanied by really rethinking and getting much more smart and structured about how just work happens in your organization in general. Right. So like think about, for example, what economic sector in knowledge work already had successful widespread remote work before the pandemic hit? It was software.

There's lots of software development firms that are remote. How are they able to pull it off? Well, think as we've just been talking about, software development is highly structured. Like we have, we're using an agile methodology. We have this pull methodology with these highly structured collaborative status meetings. We know the point of the status meetings. We then do the sprints. Everything was already really well structured. So they understood, okay,

If we're going to move you out of this location, we know exactly how to integrate you into the workflow when you don't have that. So most offices just run off what I call the hyperactive hive mind. Like we just rock and roll back and forth, grab people, messages, email, Slack. When you go remote, it just amplifies the issues.

Which is why I keep saying like that, making the debate that's happening now just about can I be remote or not? Like, do you have to be in the office or not is missing. Like you have to actually structure your work. And then if you understand exactly how things are assigned, when things are discussed, then it's much easier to figure out who can be remote and who can't. And so, I mean, I see a future in which hybrid work is going to succeed when things are much more clear and segmented. Like you're not here.

But because of that, we don't think of you as the same that we think of the, like this core planning team that is here. Like probably what you're working on for us is it's much more clarified. Yeah.

It's much more like you're taking this, you're working on it, and you're coming back and producing, giving us what you've produced. It's much more segmented in that way. But then this other type of group we have here, we're all here, we're all in London because there's a lot of planning and decisions that have to happen. And there's huge efficiencies in the in-person interaction, right? There's all these efficiencies in it. I wrote this thing once about World War II, talking about remote work. There is a reason why, if you go back and look in World War II, Churchill and Roosevelt were

would go through literal risk to life and limb to travel and meet each other.

Uh, they had telegraphs, they had telephones, but there's just, there's something in the in-person interaction that was, that was so important that, you know, they would actually, uh, take ships and fly from Greenland or whatever, like do really dangerous things, right. To do this. And George Marshall, our chief of staff would, would go over to Europe and, you know, whatever. Right. So there, there, there's something to it. So I think we're going to see much more segmented, clearly defined roles, uh,

more clearly defined systems for how work is assigned and executed and reported back. Once you have that, then you can figure out how does this work? And so it might be some people are in person, some people are remote. It might be I wrote about this particular proposal that's out there. Chris Hurd, the entrepreneur Chris Hurd, had this proposal where it's everyone's remote, but then gathers people.

on these sort of semi-regular basis, not at a set office. It could be all the way all around the country. You gather every month or two and it's like a hyper in-person session where like all these decisions are made and figured out. And when you get all those advantages of being in person and team building and then everyone disperses and executes and comes back. So I think there's a lot of options, but the option that doesn't work is, um,

We are kind of doing this and now we're still doing this. But like, if you want to be on zoom, you can, it does not, when you just informally insert some remoteness into your work, that's not the right way to do that, which is why I think most companies are going to be coming back to in person before we see further innovation. Most companies in the pandemic just said like, look, we got to go remote because of like virus stuff. And yeah,

made no other substantive changes to how work executes. And so the friction of that inefficiency, I think, is collapsing most companies back to in-person. They're going to have to then re-go back out into innovative forms, but only once they actually rethink how work actually happens. Yeah, I know this is all the stuff that we're in the process of attempting to figure out, having dealt with various degrees of remote and hybrid and in-person, as I'm sure is everyone who's listening to this and who has a job. Yeah.

Final thing I'd like to talk to you about, and it would be great to do a part two of this if you're ever in London in the near future. That would be sick to meet up in person. But I guess one of the things I love about your work is that you pull in from all sorts of different sources. And like even in this conversation, you know, talking about like Aristotle, talking about World War II and Churchill and Marshall and stuff like that. What does your reading process look like?

Are you kind of Ryan holiday with a little note cards? Like what's your, what's your method for, I guess, ingesting information from stuff and then doing stuff with said information. Well, so, so yeah, I do, uh,

I call the corner marking method. So it's much lower friction than Ryan's more Zettelkasten style, like capturing ideas on cards that you then file. So what I do is if I'm reading a nonfiction source that I think I will need for a book or article, if there's something on a page that seems relevant, you put a line across the corner at the upper. So you can find that real quickly. See, there's like a little hash mark up in the corner. And then I'll bracket out the relevant sentences.

And that's it, right? So mark the corner, bracket out the things you think are relevant. What I found is that maybe you lose a little bit information, but you can go back and take a book. And I was just doing this today, 500 page book. And in four minutes, just flip through and find every page that is corner marked, read those bracketed sentences. And in about five minutes, you can basically load back up like, oh yeah,

I remember what was interesting in this book. I remember what this book was about. I did that the other day for a book I read probably in 2009, Present Shark by Douglas Rushkoff. There's something I wanted from it. And I went through and went through my markings. Five minutes.

That whole book is swapped back in like the stuff that really matters. So I love that method because it's incredibly low friction. It barely slows down your writing. And there's almost, I mean, you're reading and there's no overhead. Like you don't have to go and then like laboriously, I think the Zettelkasten folks will spend a lot of time processing their thoughts from the books afterwards. But I go through a lot of books and I just am not going to do that. And I don't want that overhead to stop me from actually reading. So that's why it's a pencil and a

That's it. Fair play. Cal, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Any final parting bits of advice? So you know what stage of the process I'm at, just somewhat handed in the first draft, but now we're in for probably six months worth or maybe more of just this editing back and forth to try and make this absolute turd of 80,000 words that I currently have into something vaguely presentable. Any tips from a seasoned pro?

Well, I mean, first I'll say editing is always more fun than writing for the first time. So that's going to do it because you have the foundation, you're moving things around, you're cutting things down. And also it just, the stuff you come away with from the sessions is better because you're like, Hey, I made this thing better. Um, cutting is usually the right answer. That's like a way other when I'm, when I'm like wrangling with something, I'm, I'm,

I cut and then I feel better. Like, oh, it's, it's a, it's simpler. Like, let's get rid of that story. You know, kill, kill your, your anecdotal babies. Like, let's just cut that one and that one and just like form it around this one, get right to the point, you know, hit it, hit it and get out. So, you know, editing is funner than writing. So that's good. And to simplifying is always the right move. At least in my case, as I simplify it, things get tighter. Yeah. I get happier with the writing. Yeah.

So that's pretty exciting. So you're at 80,000 words. What's your target? You think you're going to do like 60, 75? I feel like shorter is probably better. But at the same time, I still have this like, oh, but what if there's not enough material? Will people feel shortchanged if the book's not big enough? And I think, no, obviously not. People prefer a shorter book anyway. So why don't I just like cut out the fluff and yeah. Yeah.

How long was Digital Minimalism? Because that was quite small in paperback. Oh, Minimalism, it was probably... I have it here somewhere. It's 70 or 80 probably. Oh, wow. Okay. What about Deep Work? Because that was pretty big, but I guess I'm just sort of thinking in terms of how thick the paperbacks are.

Yeah. So you're in UK. I think, yeah. So it's complicated because, well, it's, it's tricky because I think the, the trim size for digital minimalism in the UK was bigger. So the pages are bigger, right? And deep work has a smaller trim size. Yeah. There's a lot, I don't know. It, it, I always misjudge that, but I'm usually like 70 to 90,000 words. Yeah. That's where I come from. Like my, my final thing I'll say about, about, uh, book writing is, um,

I always think about the book I'm trying to finish up. I'm like, well, my goal here is just to make this reasonable. The next one will be great. And then like, so in other words, like, and then that, that helps me not get too worried about like, is this right? Are people going to like it? And then as soon as I finish a book, I'll start thinking about the next one. You know, once it's out of your hands, you know, you move on to the next thing. Incredible. Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Where can people learn more about you if they want to check out more of your stuff?

So I have a podcast, Deep Questions, which you can listen to or watch the episodes on YouTube. And then my newsletter every week, I write an essay on this stuff. You can sign up at calnewport.com. Brilliant. Cal, thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

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