Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Be Productive Without Burning Out | Cal Newport

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Slow productivity: achievement without burnout.Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast.  In this episode we talk about:How overload culture wears us out and makes us less productiveThe rise of “pseudo-productivity” in office culture The three tenets of slow productivity: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over qualitySign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/cal-newport-745 Additional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Dan here. Before we start the show, I want to tell you about a live recording of this podcast that we're doing in New York City on March 28th. I will be interviewing two frequent flyers from this show, the legendary meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, who will be just coming off a three-month solo silent meditation retreat, and Dr. Mark Epstein, a Buddhist therapist and bestselling author. The event will actually be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of my first book, 10% happier, and a percentage of the proceeds will go to the New York Insight Meditation Center. Come early if you want for a VIP guided meditation and Q&A with me. Thanks to our friends over at Audible for sponsoring this show and the event.

Tickets on sale right now at symphonyspace.org. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? How often does this happen to you? You run into somebody you haven't seen in a minute, you ask them how they're doing, and they issue a deep sigh and say, busy. It's almost like a humble brag or a badge of honor.

And I say this without any judgment because I do this. But what if there was a way to be productive without running yourself ragged, to achieve without burnout? That's what my guest today is promising. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown and a best-selling author of multiple books, including Digital Minimalism and A World Without Email, which he has come on this show to discuss in the past. His latest book, and the reason for his return, is called Slow Productivity. In this conversation, we talk about how we got into this mess, a mess that he calls overload

culture, the difference between pseudoivity and slow productivity, and the three tenets of slow productivity, do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. This conversation was right on time for me. Cal Newport coming up. But first, some blatant self-promotion, our little BSP segment we do here on the show. Just a reminder, there are a few tickets left for the event that we're doing on March 28th in New York City at Symphony

Space. I'll be interviewing Joseph Goldstein and Dr. Marc Epstein live for a recording of this podcast. It's also a celebration of the 10th anniversary of a book I wrote called 10% Happier, after which this podcast is named. Speaking of the 10th anniversary of 10% Happier, our friends over at the 10% Happier Meditation app are offering a big discount. If you want to give meditation a try, join us over on the app for 40% off. Get this deal before it ends on April 1st by going to 10% dot com slash 40 and dive into guided meditations and insightful courses for a 10% happier you. That's 10%, all one word spelled out, dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription.

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And we're the hosts of British Scandal. In our latest series, we're visiting one of the rockiest sibling relationships ever. Okay, so I'm thinking Danny and Kylie. No, no, no, I'm thinking Anne Boleyn and the other Boleyn. No, no, Barry and Paul Chuckle. No, it's Noel and Liam Gallagher. Now, these two couldn't be more different, but they're tied to each other in musical dependency.

Despite their music catching the attention of people around the world, Liam's behaviour could destroy their chances. However, their manager saw an opportunity to build a brand around their rebellious nature. It's got fights on boats, fights on planes, fights on land. They just fight everywhere. If you like fights, you'll love this. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus, on Apple podcasts or on the Wondry app. Cal Newport, welcome back to the show. Well Dan, it's my pleasure. More so my pleasure. I'm very excited. I mean, right from the title, Slow Productivity, and then the more I looked at what you've

done here, it's just so on point for things that I'm thinking about in my own life. So I'm very excited to have this conversation with you. Excellent. All of my books, they keep you in mind, Dan. So I'm happy. I hit my target. One of the things you say in this book is that it's primarily for skilled labor with significant amounts of autonomy.

And I appreciate that. And I think that describes my work life for sure. I want to be cognizant of the fact that I think there are a lot of people who listen to this show who don't fall into that category, who might be a nurse, for example, or something like that. And given that this is a blind spot for me, I think let's if we can make a mutual pact that will keep those folks in mind and try to come up with ways to make sure that your advice meets their

needs too. Can we make that mutual pact as we go through this conversation? Yeah, I think it's a great pact to try to keep the scope here as broad as possible. You know, I think of it like concentric circles. There's a target in the very middle for whom, okay, this advice, you can apply everything. And then as you go to different types of jobs, a lot of this still applies, maybe not this piece, maybe not that piece. And so we very much should keep that in mind. A lot of these ideas can apply to a lot of people.

Great. I love to hear that. I'm center of the bullseye, but I also recognize, and sometimes folks on my team will point out to me that it's a bit of a blind spot. I think that everything that applies to me applies to other people in it. It doesn't. So, all right, let me start with a very basic question, definitional question.

What is productivity? The fact that that question is not easy to answer, in some sense, is the whole motivation for my project here. We don't have, in the world of knowledge work in particular, but other places as well, but in particular in the world of knowledge work, we don't have a good answer for that question. Which is new, right? We had a good answer for this question in agriculture. It's bushels of crop per acre. You can measure

that if you change your crop rotation method and that number goes up, you say this is a better way to plant crops. We know how to do this in factories. How many labor hours is required per model T produced? If we change the way we build model T's and that number goes up, then we say that's a more productive method. Then we get the work where we're not growing things or we're not building things we can count and no, that applied anymore. And this became a problem. How do we measure what it means to be productive? If for example, you work in an office and you do 12 different things and those 12 different things vary from week to week, and there's no clear system that you use to organize your work because that's personal, that's not something that is given down to you from up above. How do we talk about things like

bushels per acre or model tees per labor hour? We can't. So what we did instead is fell back on a heuristic I call pseudo productivity, which is just saying activity is a proxy for useful effort. The more you're doing the better, busy is better than less busy, that'll just have to be good enough. And that heuristic has been the law of the land implicitly, I would say for the last 70 years. Look busy and therefore you're going to be viewed as productive or you might even feel productive. Yeah, and it's a rough heuristic and you know, there's some logic to it, I guess, if you're sitting there in your office in 1965

and doing nothing, like, okay, that feels like you're not being useful, but it's a very rough heuristic because it just says activity is better than inactivity. That doesn't work very well. It's okay until you get laptops, until you get email, until you also get smartphones and work can follow you anywhere.

There's always more work you could be doing. And suddenly this heuristic flies off the rails and we start to get a burnout epidemic. Yeah. You've called it overload culture. That's where we are. Yeah. We have too much on our plate, which does not make us produce more. Actually, what happens as we get more overloaded is we just spend more and more of our time on the

administrative overhead connected to these tasks, more meetings, more email, more Slack, less time actually spent doing things. And so as we get more overloaded, frustratingly, we fall farther and farther behind. We put more on our plate, we get less done. Psychologically, this is very draining. And from the perspective of actually just producing meaningful work, it's an ineffective strategy. Yeah. You've just described my life.

I mean, it's, I have a few big creative projects that I want to get done. And I do work on them. And I've got all of this, I think you called it administrative overhang emails I need to answer meetings. I need to attend things I need to read from people who work for with me. And, um, it just keeps sucking me away and often like annoying me in ways that take away from the things that I actually care about. But it makes sense if our implicit heuristic for productivity is just, hey, more is better

than less, activity is better than inactivity. It's been hard psychologically to say no. Like, oh, well, you know, it feels unproductive to say no to this or to say no to that. To have a lot to do by the pseudo-productivity heuristic is by the thing you're supposed to do that's de facto productive by that definition. So pseudo productivity has driven us to overload culture. It's a inescapable consequence of making activity our primary measure of doing good work.

Okay, so by contrast, what is slow productivity? Well, I wanted an alternative. So if pseudo productivity doesn't work, we have to put an alternative in place. Now there could be, and I'll be clear about it, many different alternative definitions for productivity that could make sense. So my definition, slow productivity, was trying to solve a very specific set of constraints. I wanted to avoid burnout.

I wanted to avoid feeling like work took over all of my life. This was personally very important to me. I have three young kids. They recently all got to elementary school age. They're all boys and they all suddenly needed essentially every minute I could give them. And so there's this real tension of, okay, every minute I'm not with them, that's actually a problem. There's a tension between my work and my family. So whatever my definition of productivity was, was going to have to allow me to not have work take over my whole life. But the other condition was I want to produce stuff I'm proud of.

I want to keep producing really good work. I want to be able to support my family. I want to be doing meaningful effort. I want to be developing my skills. So I still want to accomplish things. So I want accomplishment. I don't want burnout. Slow productivity was my definition of productivity that I thought could support those two things. So that's me throwing my hat into the ring of what alternatives to pseudo productivity

could we come up with. Slow productivity was the one that resonated with me. And I think you were inspired by the Slow Food Movement? That's where the name came from. Yeah. So if you look at the Slow Food Movement, the key aspect of that is they looked backwards and said, let's look at traditional food cultures. If we want to figure out how to eat today, let's look back at how people ate in our grandparents'

day or our great-grandparents' day. And there's these cultures that evolved over a long period of time around food. There's wisdom in that. Let's learn from that to figure out our relationship with cuisine right now. So I did something similar with productivity. That's how I came up with this definition. I said, well, let's go back and study historically figures who primarily created things using their brain because knowledge work is what I was primarily caring about, but had some autonomy about how they did it. So we're talking philosophers and playwrights

and scientists and let's see what they came up with. What did they come up with when they had a lot of autonomy to figure out what's the best way to use my brain? Let's grab those best ideas and then adapt them to actually work for real jobs where we have bosses and people need things from us and email exists. And so I used a slow movement approach on productivity. I went back and looked at traditional knowledge workers, pulled out ideas from the lives of Georgia O'Keeffe or Lin-Manuel Miranda or Mary Oliver, Jane Austen, pulled out ideas from what they figured out and then tried to adapt them to a reasonable 21st century email age office work definition of productivity. Yes.

And it gets complicated because, you know, George O'Keefe and Lin-Manuel Miranda, I mean, they have very special, specialized, highly creative work lives. And I think it's what you said about reasonably applying it to a 21st century office worker. That's the key word, reasonable. Yeah, I think that's where the magic is. If you go back and try to replicate the lives of someone who's a full-time creative who lived 200 years ago, I mean, good luck, right? And so we often give up.

We say, oh, well, I can't live like Jane Austen lived. That's 300 years ago. This is completely different. But that's not what we really need to do. This was sort of one of the insights of the book. We need to go back and see what are the underlying principles of how they work. Those principles can be removed from the specifics of your job and your day-to-day rhythm. And then we can take those principles and say, what would it look like to try to put something like that in the play in a modern job? So you might look back and say, okay, Georgia O'Keeffe went to Lake George every summer,

and she painted in this shanty that was on Stiglitz's property, and that's where her creativity, she had this creative outburst, she returned a painting, it fueled a decade of some of her most famous works. So she changed the pace of her life. Well, I can't go to Lake George for a summer all year,

but I can pull an idea out of there about seasonality. The different times of the year, your work can feel different. And there's times where you're recharging and times where you're going after it. Even if you're in the same office every day, there's a general principle there of seasonality that we can pull out of that idiosyncratic context and generalize to a much more general modern setting. So we're going to come back to seasonality as this conversation proceeds. Let me say though that you, and this is not going to be news to you, I'm saying it more

to the listeners, the book is divided up among three core principles for slow productivity. The first is do fewer things. The second is work at a natural pace. That's where seasonality will come back in. And the third is obsess over quality. So let's, if you're cool with it, march through these principles. And again, number one is do fewer things, a little bit self-explanatory, but explain nonetheless. I think the big misconception that I try to dispel there is that people often think about doing fewer things as a zero-sum

negotiation with their clients or with their employers. This will be worse for you, but it's going to make my life nicer. And I'm arguing in this chapter that actually that's not the case. Doing fewer things not only does make your life more sustainable, it gets rid of the overload issue, you get better at what you do. Your rate at which you produce things, that might actually go up. Certainly the quality of what you produce will go up.

And it all has to do with that overhead tax we were alluding to earlier, which is that everything on your plate makes you pay that task of persistent administrative overhead. So as you put more and more things on your plate, a larger and larger fraction of your day is actually servicing the administrative overhead, paying the overhead tax that comes

along with all these obligations. So the fraction of your day left to actually accomplish things gets smaller. And as that gets smaller, the amount you accomplish per day goes down. So doing fewer things, and there's all sorts of ideas about how you would actually get away with this or implement this or introduce this into your work life. But generally speaking, doing fewer things not only just gives you breathing room and makes work into something that's actually sustainable and enjoyable, in a lot of cases, it's going to make you better at your work as well. There's a quote from the book, our brains work better when we're not rushing. It's really a problem with the way so many of us work right now is because we have so much stuff on our plate and we have to jump back and forth to service all of these, everything

speeds up. Now, we're a species that's been around for a long time. I mean, humans in their modern form date back about 300,000 years. We are rarely in our entire history as a species, we rarely would put ourselves in a situation in which we're jumping between so many things so quickly. As an entirely artificial cognitive state that we put ourselves in, we shouldn't be surprised that our brain is not well suited to handle it. Okay, so let's talk about how to set these boundaries.

I think from the jump, I'm going to go kind of back to our pact from the beginning, which is, you know, I think at least in my experience, it seems like it would be easier for somebody who looks like me and you, frankly, to set these boundaries in a workplace than it would be for a woman or a person of color or somebody who's junior. Would you agree with that? Yeah. And it's a big reason why systematizing these boundaries is so important,

because as long as it's just up to your willingness, for example, to say no, that's gonna be vastly inequitable. It's gonna come down to who's more comfortable saying no, who has the status to say no more often. The more ad hoc and haphazard workload management and assignment is, the more inequitable the outcomes become.

Yes, and we live in a world where there are no norms around this right now. And so what do we do given that and especially given the fact that there are just social inequities here? Exactly. So I start by saying saying what's the default solution people throw around is what I call the Richard Feynman solution. Richard Feynman famously the physicist, late Nobel Prize winning physicist, famously said in an interview back in the 80s, here's how I get out of administrative work as a

professor, I just am really irresponsible. And then people stop bothering me, they stop asking me to do things. It's like the least applicable advice you could give. And then you go forward in Richard Feynman's life and you realize, you know what, he didn't really keep up with that. Like when the Challenger disaster occurred and his former student, who is now the director of NASA, asked him to head the national commission to investigate this, he did it. And he later reflected and said, yes, I didn't follow my own advice. You know, this was important. So I sort of bust that myth that we should just be bold and annoying and say, no, I don't want to do this.

So we, we need another way to manage workload. All the advice I give, I think has as its foundation, this notion that we need to be more transparent. Here's what I'm working on. Here's what I'm already working on. Here's how much time these things are going to take. Here's how much time I have. With transparency, we can get towards, I think, more reasonable workload management than when it's all just obfuscated and I send you an email and you either say yes or no. And so you start to get suggestions

that'll do things such as, okay, here's my list of the stuff I'm working on. And it's like, yeah, add it in the details onto this list. Now someone can see, oh, she has 15 things already on this list. Hmm. If I add this on here, that's going to be months till this can really get done. Unless I want to make the argument that my stuff is more important than all these other things on the list.

Having just transparency on here's my current workload, that alone can start to give you a governor effect of, okay, actually, wait a second, maybe there's too much on here right now. So just more clarity about how much you're working on, how much is reasonable to work on, bringing other people in that conversation can really have actually surprising impact. So I'll give you a real world example. I think this fits. Somebody who works for me, Tony Magyar, shout out to Tony, sent me a graphic the other day,

like said that she had made. And it was like, it was a four quadrant and it said, here, this is what I propose to you. Here's what I think is the most important. And then the next quadrant is stuff that's kind of like on the line, I need your view on it. Here's something I can think I can delegate and here's some stuff that we just shouldn't do for now. And she was just kind of running it by me and telling me, you know, here are the priority list.

And it was accompanied by a conversation of like how much can she actually accomplish. Would that be like a shining example of what you're describing? Yeah, that's a perfect example. Another example from the book is it was a development team at a big healthcare company, but they built software tools internally and they were suffering from overload. And they actually just took a part of their wall

and said, okay, every project we're supposed to be working on, we're gonna write it on a card and we're gonna stick it on the wall and we're gonna write on that card who's working on it. And so over here is where whenever a project enters our world, someone else says, hey, can you do this for us? We put it in this holding pin. And over here is the stuff that we're actually working on. And we will decide as a team when someone finishes something in that working on pile,

what do we want to bring in next and who has cycles to work on it? And that answer would be really clear because if you were already working on pile, what do we want to bring in next and who has cycles to work on it? And that answer would be really clear because if you were already working on something, you would be up on the wall. And so they were only pulling in things that the team decided was best to work on next and assign them to people who actually had the cycles. So it wasn't that they were getting out of work. They were saying, no one should own this work until they're ready to actually work on it. We will just hold onto it as a team. And so what they got here was faster

throughput. But more importantly, just like you said in your example, if they saw something really languishing on that holding tank, it's been here for a while, we keep moving other things, they eventually say, maybe that's not something we should work on. And they take it off the wall. they eventually say, maybe that's not something we should work on. And they take it off the wall. And so it wasn't the rejection of work as it was coming into their team. It was more, we will hold onto this work centrally. You as the individual can just work on a small number of things at a time. When you're done, we can choose something else new for you.

We could figure that out in an intelligent way, completely transformed the satisfaction and the productivity actually of that group. I think that's really a cool example and an example of setting up a system from the top that works well for everybody. Many of us don't work in sane systems and so therefore we have to bring the sanity ourselves. And it kind of goes back to what we've come back to a couple times here is, you know, how do you do that? And especially if you might feel marginalized already in the workplace, how do you set these boundaries? So a couple more internal things you can do, meaning that it's not a system that everyone has to buy into, you can just individually run it. One thing that seems to

work well is when a new potential commitment comes towards you, find the time for it. So actually go to your calendar, estimate how many hours and how many sessions are gonna need to do this, and actually try to find the time somewhere on your calendar to block off for that project. And what this is gonna give you

is a couple bits of realistic feedback. So first of all, if it's something you really need to do or you're not in a position to say no, you can give a reasonable estimate of when you're going to get it done. Because you say, this was the closest time I could find to do it. It's in three weeks. And so you can give a realistic response. Okay, sure, of course. I track all my work on my calendar and schedule everything in advance and the next slots for this is going to be in three weeks. And so I'll get it back to you then. So you're giving clear feedback. and schedule everything in advance, and the next slots for this is going to be in three weeks.

And so I'll get it back to you then. So you're giving clear feedback. If you're really struggling to find time for it, you now have better justification to say, I don't think this project's the best idea. Its footprint is large. I'm struggling. I can't really find time. I'm not seeing it in my calendar.

The reason why this is effective is that a big part of saying yes or no to tasks in places where there's no workload management systems is psychological. So what most people do is not that they don't say no, people say no. Most people get more work coming out of them if they really measured it than they could do. But what most people do before they say no is they wait until they become so overloaded and so stressed out that that gives them psychological cover to pay the social capital cost of saying no. And the more you care about the social capital cost, the more overloaded you have to make yourself before you feel justified in saying no.

So people are still saying no, they're just waiting until they're too overloaded. So if you have another concrete measure that gives you internal psychological cover to say no, you're more willing to do it. You don't think to yourself, I'm just being lazy. I just can't handle it. You're saying no, I block out all my time. I don't have time for this.

This is a good reason to say no. So there's a confidence booster internally that gives you, as well as a good external excuse that's harder to push back on. I mean, basically they can either say you're lying about your calendar or I want you to work at night, but you're saying not vaguely, I'm busy, I don't want to. You're saying I track my time and this is when the time is available to reasonably get this done. It seems like courage is an important ingredient here. Well this is where I want to reduce the courage.

And I think this is where it helps if you have clarity about why I'm saying no, that gives you courage. I also think recognizing and trusting, there's an element of trust, maybe this is the real courage, it's a one-time trust you have to have in yourself. When you start managing your workload lower, it's scary at first, because you're used to pseudo productivity and you think this is the same as saying, I am doing less work and it's lazy

and it's gonna be the end of your career. But if you hold out for a few months, you're now gonna start to see, wait a second, I'm getting a lot done. Actually, I'm finishing more projects than I normally did. I'm getting more approval for what is catching attention, right? Because I'm not spending four tenths of my day, four fifths of my day doing admin. So stuff I'm doing is good.

And that's starting to gain me some currency in my organization. I'm starting to get some more autonomy and leverage. People are respecting what I'm doing. So you have to have courage upfront. You don't need as much going forward. So, you know, I think a lot of what I'm trying to do here is get to reasonable workloads without you having to feel like you're taking really bold stands on a daily basis. I just have this feeling that there are some people listening saying, this dude doesn't know my boss.

I would never get away with this. Well, this is certainly true. Right. Some bosses, bad bosses are a big problem. They're a big problem, not just because of what it tells us about the particular slow productivity tactics. Bad bosses have a whole host of problems that come with it.

But even still, just knowing the principle, less is what I'm looking for. That's important. And even if there's only at the margins at first that you can find ways to do that, or even if that is what helps you figure out a job shift, like, oh, maybe this is what I'm actually looking for. The ability to have more sane workload management. Now I actually have some clarity. I hate this boss.

This job is no good. I was thinking about leaving anyways. Now I have some better clarity about what I'm seeking, you know, some other things that I'm looking for. It puts a priority and value on this idea of doing less. You recognize that's just something I want to take seriously. That's something that I want to value and make a goal I want to pursue if possible. Let me see if I can sum up what I think

you're saying on this score, which is I, Cal Newport, cannot radically reshuffle the social order and make it so that certain genders and sexual orientation and races are not facing undue scrutiny or pressure. iCal Newport cannot change your boss's temperament. However, iCal can give you some tools that may help on the margins and actually might help you in quite meaningful ways. Yeah, that's the best I can offer. But hopefully it's something that's gonna be important for people Let me just go back to courage for a second because

when I think about Doing fewer things for myself. It's not so much like I don't have a boss so it's it's really about having the courage to stand up to my lesser angels and To say yeah, you have to pick You got to leave this job or not do this project Even though your fear is trying to tell you you need that money or you need that exposure, etc., etc. Does that land for you? It's a real common problem.

Doing less when you're coming out of an entire culture, baked in pseudo productivity is disconcerting in a lot of different ways. And for people like you and I, we come at it from a standpoint of ambition and like, I want to do everything well and have all these opportunities. And it's very scary to say, I'm going to stop doing that. And I'm going to stop doing that and do less of this. And let's just focus on this. It came up so often and not to jump ahead here, but it's why I say that the third

principle of the book, obsess over quality, is the glue that holds the other ones together. Because that's going to be part of the solution to actually finding comfort with doing less for a lot of people is coupling it with a newfound obsession with, I want to do the things I do best as well as possible. When you start doing that, your work begins to demand fewer things. That no longer becomes something you are scarily trying from the side. You say, oh, this is now an imperative.

If actually I want to do this better, I can't be doing these other things. It becomes clear as day. So the obsessing over quality piece that's going to come last is actually going to support the two pieces that come before it. Coming up, Cal Newport talks about tactical advice for doing fewer things and how to work at what he calls a natural pace. I'm Peter Frankenpern.

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That's 10%, one word all spelled out, dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. Let's talk about some more of your tactical advice for helping us do fewer things. You have these ideas, limit the big and contain the small. Can you teach us about these ideas? Yeah, so limit the big is the big picture initiatives you take on. And this is where we're saying sort of obviously, take on less. Take on less big projects, have fewer big projects that you're trying to do better. Contain the Small says, how do you deal with all the other small stuff that's a part of

life? The stuff that Georgia O'Keefe and Lake George don't have to worry about, the emails, the meetings, the HR department needs you to fill this or that out. And there are all the tactics I give are around containment. So how do you take the inevitable small distracting things that you have to do and contain when they happen so that they're not a constant background source of context shifting distraction

throughout everything else you do, how do you take this and you get them in the smaller blocks? You get them in more replicatable ways. How do you get your arms around? Not eliminate because you can't eliminate the small, I wish you could, but in almost any knowledge work job, you can't eliminate your email inbox. How do you contain this in such a way that its footprint is not so large that it's a source of real dissatisfaction? So I'd like that thought. If you say eliminate

distractions, people say, okay, and also I want to fly and find a million dollars on the street. That sounds great. Let's do that. It's not practical, but contain the distractions that are unavoidable to make them tolerable. Well, that's a place we can actually gain some ground. So along those lines, you have some ideas like putting tasks on autopilot, synchronizing, spending money, and pulling instead of pushing. Let's walk through some of these.

Yeah. Well, like synchronizing, for example, I think is the true gem hidden in here. So by synchronizing, I mean in particular communication. So if you think about your email inbox as a source of distraction, something you check all the time, we often get the idea wrong that explains why we have to check our email all the time.

We think it's just like a volume thing or a discipline thing. And what I really need to do is just batch my email checking. But, you know, having studied this problem for a while, I wrote a whole book on it. Having studied this problem for a while, the real thing that draws people back to their inbox again and again throughout the day tends to be they have ongoing interactions. So it's, hey, we're remote. We're trying to figure something out.

We kind of need to figure this out by the end of the day. We're doing it with a back and forth email conversation. If that conversation is going to require seven or eight back and forth messages to conclude, I have to see your next message pretty soon because we have four or five more messages that have to happen right after that. So now I have to keep checking my inbox all the time

so that pretty soon after your next volley comes in, I can hit it back over that digital net and then keep checking so that when it comes back. So if you have seven or eight different ongoing conversations unfolding in email or over chat, now you have to check all the time. So it's not a discipline issue. It's not an email volume issue. It's a collaboration issue. If that's how we're doing, we have to an email volume issue. It's a collaboration issue. If that's how we're doing, I have to check all the time. So what does synchronize say? Well, let's have some standard times in the day where we can have real time conversation

without having to set up a custom meeting or try to say, Hey, when are we going to talk? So why don't I have office hours every day, same time that my door's open, my phone's on maybe I have a Zoom conference that I'm logged into with a waiting room or whatever. And for any email that comes in that's going to require some back and forth, you say, this is a great discussion, why don't you just like jump into whatever of my next office hours is convenient and, you know, five minutes we'll work this out. It seems like a small thing, but if you can take those seven conversations that were each

going to generate eight back and forth messages and you can push them into those office hours, you've saved yourself hundreds of inbox checks. You've saved yourself having to constantly be checking things and changing your cognitive context. You've saved yourself from days of distraction in exchange for just an hour that every day that you know you're available. So synchronizing communication, that alone can contain the small. The same conversations happen, you're not ignoring it, you're not saying don't bother

me, but you're containing when they happen into a format where the damage is much smaller. Do you have to be pretty senior in order to get other people to play along with you on this? Well, we have some interesting data on this. So if we look at companies that have actually tried this, in particular, I talk about Basecamp, the software development company, they did this. There's a lot of subject matter experts. These weren't senior people.

It was, I'm really good at this particular Java thing. So people are always bothering me. They moved to an office hours model. They were worried that people would be really upset about this and say, no, no, no, I want accessibility. This is a problem. It turned out their worries were unfounded.

What people wanted was not accessibility, but clarity. How do I get an answer? And if I have a way, I know I'm going to get an answer. Like I can go to an office hours and you'll be there and I'm going to get an answer. That's great. Now I can not worry about this anymore. I just show up here. I'll know I good answer. In fact, a lot of people preferred that to, if I email you, now I have to remember that I emailed

you, I have to check in, I'm worried, are you going to respond? Maybe you're overwhelmed with email and I don't know if I'm going to get a response in time and I have to send follow-ups. And actually, people were happy about it. And we see this again and again, where clarity often trumps accessibility when it comes to communication. So it's not that you are putting a demand on other people. A lot of times other people will say, great, now I always know how to get an answer from Dan for something. You've made my life easier. So I'm happy about that. Let's talk about some of these other ones like putting tasks on autopilot.

Well, if you know you have to do something again and again, choose the time, choose the place, choose the day, put on your calendar, stop worrying about it. I just know there's this block of time on Tuesday after the staff meeting where I always do these four things. It no longer sits as something in your mind that you have to remember to do. It's no longer a source of stress. It's no longer something you're going to do in a frenzy five minutes before it's due because you forgot and your boss just sent you an email like, Hey, where's your

form? So anything that can be made into a regular schedule, almost always that's going to be more efficient and have a much smaller, that's got a much smaller cognitive footprint. The tasks are still there, but again, we're containing their impact on your mental state. Spend money. This is a big one for entrepreneurs. So for the entrepreneurs in the audience, spending money to reduce your time you have to spend on things is one of the most underrated investments.

So often entrepreneurs, especially if you're a solopreneur or a freelancer, you're thinking, I don't want to waste this money. I don't want to, I don't want to spend money on the full version of a software package that's going to automate some stuff for me. I don't want to spend money on the accountant to do my books. Like I'll just sort of figure it out. But often what happens is when you do spend that money and you reduce the burden of admin that you have to wrangle, you just get much better at your job. Your freelance work is better.

You service your clients better. You just have more energy. So I pushed this and I profiled an entrepreneur in the book, a small business. She has a few part-time employees, but it's otherwise just her. It's like a coaching business. And she sent me her spreadsheet of every software service she pays for. Software services that just help her do her job better. It was $2,000 or something.

It was $2,000, not a month, but a quarter, but it was a lot of money. And she was like, I'd be drowning without it. Like actually that seems like a lot of money, but the amount of time that frees up for me to do other things, to do my work better, to recharge, she's like best investment I ever made. Finally pull instead of push. I mean, this is what I wish I could wave a wand and change the structure of teams around the world. What we do now with workload management is almost entirely push. When I want you to do something,

I push it onto your plate, and then you have to deal with it. So it's the recipient of work has to manage the work. And in the push-based system, which is again, what most people do, all the work exists on someone's plate, right? So if it's on mine, I can try to push it onto yours, until I do it's on mine.

But the whole collection of work that this team or company or group needs to do, all of it exists on people's plate generating overhead tax and administrative overload. I'm a big proponent that work should not default to be on a person's plate. We need a place to keep work where we as a team or a company or organization are committed to doing this but it's no one's responsibility right now. It's not any individual's responsibility until they pull something onto their plate. So when they're done with what they're doing, they pull something else on. We know from industrial process design, this actually

maximizes throughput. Like actually you do want to do one thing at a time and immediately pull in something new when you have bandwidth that's much more efficient than pulling in four and having them hit up against each other and create unnecessary delays. But it requires a mindset shift that we should no longer think about work as existing just on people's plates. It should be something that exists in our group, our team, our company. And then what individuals do is they take work to work on themselves. It's a mindset shift.

It doesn't reduce what gets done. It doesn't say no to things, but it's actually much, much better for everyone involved. Can you get a free rider effect in this scenario where people who are lazy just don't toll as much? Well, it has the opposite effect because it puts clarity to workloads as well. So it's not that hard to see now, you haven't pulled something in a while. Well, what about this thing you're working on?

It's been three weeks. You have nothing on your plate right now. It's actually much easier to obfuscate free ridership in a world of just ad hoc back and forth push-based work because no one really knows what anyone else is working on. All they see is that you're answering emails really quickly and seem to jump on the zoom meetings and no one really knows what anyone else is doing. That actually that obfuscation is a much more beneficial environment for free riders

than a pull-based system where it's actually clearer. So it's you know there's advantages and disadvantages that come with it. You will be less overloaded in a pull-based system. And we know this from studying software developers who use these systems. You will also be more scrutinized because now you actually can't hide from,

I'm not really doing so much. And that's not, I think it's important to say that that's not a pure good, actually, especially in the American context, where we don't have good systems for dealing with things like there's a sickness in my family, or let's say a worldwide pandemic and my kids are at home and try to do school next to me while we work. We don't have good ways of grappling with that. What a lot of people have to fall back on is essentially leveraging the haphazard nature of push-based work to kind of obfuscate that like,

I need to cycle down for a while now. So I can just jump on email a lot and for a few weeks, make it seem like I'm doing stuff, but actually cycle back because I have other issues going on. It's a problem that we make people have to do this on their own. And it's a problem that gets amplified when you go to clear workload management systems, because now you can't do that. So it's actually, there is an interesting tension here that when workloads get clearer, you avoid overload, things become less stressful, but it's almost like you now have to directly confront, how do we deal with these other issues that people face in their lives? How do we stop pretending that it's

not an issue that you have three kids at home during the pandemic and you don't and we're just sort of pretending like, hey, let's just all stay productive. You have to then address those much more concretely because they pop up unavoidably, right? I can't pull another thing right now because I don't have as much time. So there's an interesting tension that shows up when you get to these push more clear workload management systems. You've brought me exactly where I wanted to go. Just to reset, we're marching through the three principles of slow productivity.

The first is do fewer things, which we just discussed. We're gonna move on to work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. But I believe at this point in the book, after do fewer things, the first principle, you have an interlude about overwhelmed parents obsess over quality, but I believe at this point in the book, after Do Fewer Things, The First Principle, you have an interlude about overwhelmed parents, and you've just been talking about overwhelmed parents. So can you give us a summary of your thoughts about how overwhelmed parents can be slowly

productive? Well, I mean, I introduced the impact of overload on parents at that point in the interlude because the whole point of the interlude was to check myself. I'm a computer science guy. I'm a geek. I'm mathy. And so as you can probably tell, I tend to get caught up in the economic argument, hey, doing fewer things can make you actually produce more.

It can make you better at your job. There's just like economic logic to doing fewer things. And I get deep into these case studies of overloaded parents there to step back and remember there's also a deeper psychological sort of humanist meaning to doing less as well. It's not just an economic argument. Life with too much can be almost insufferable. And the stories, I was pulling some examples from Bridget Schulte's book, Overwhelmed, Overloaded, Overworked. And she tells some heartbreaking stories in that book, right,

of a period in her life where she was overloaded in her work and how this really strained her as a mother. Some heartbreaking examples of her daughter saying, when I grow up, I want to be a teacher, so at least then I can be around my kids, right? All these, it's heartbreaking stuff. And I didn't want to get away teacher so at least then I can be around my kids. It's heartbreaking stuff. I didn't want to get away from that emotional core of doing less as well. There's a reason to do less that's not just about economic instrumentalism.

If it's possible and you have the ability to engineer this in your life, or the circumstances happen to be there, it's worth doing also because it's a better life. We don't talk about enough and we're doing it more now, which is good, but we have it in the pseudo productivity era, talked about enough, the cost of overload. It's not just, yeah, this has worked. You got to get after it. Let's do it. High five. It's not just that. There is a real cost. So that interlude was a check against myself, not to get too caught up in just the economic contrarianism.

Before we leave this first principle of do fewer things, back to our pact from the beginning, how would I do fewer things if I'm a nurse? I keep coming back to nurse and I'm not in control of my workload. Medical care professionals, I hear from them a lot, right? Because it's definitely an industry that could use more of this workload. Oh yeah, medical care professionals, I hear from them a lot, right? Because it's definitely an industry that could use more of this thinking. It's an industry that I think too often sees its practitioners like mechanisms.

We turn you on and you execute this work until, you know, a shift is over and then you stop executing this work and we can just throw as much as we can at you during those periods. And it doesn't work that way. And it can be incredibly exhausting what actually happens during those periods, how much work you're actually juggling. So that's a hard, it's a hard position I think medical practitioners are in right now. That whole field, I think, needs to become, the way I word it, is more psychologically aware of work management, workload management. This notion of work is work and you're either on or you're off,

it's just way too simplistic. It's just not true. A doctor, for example, or a nurse, let's say a nurse in an eight-hour shift who has more than enough time to see and work with the patients they're working with and don't have an overload of requests that they're hitting them any one moment. Those eight hours in that shift feel completely different than the nurse that has 50% too many patients. They can't actually give the right care to that many patients they're doing the rounds on. And their requests come in at too fast of a rate for them all to be satisfied. That's a completely different experience. It's not just an eight hour shift is an eight hour shift. So I have a lot of empathy for medical practitioners.

I also see them as a great frontline of the argument for the organizational recognition that overload is a real problem. Work is not just work, it's not just on-off shift length. What you're doing during your work, that matters. And the amount of work on your plate is one of the most important factors. Okay, so the second principle of slow productivity is work at a natural pace. Can you say more about that?

So the default in knowledge work for how we spread out our work is an idea that just came directly from factories. We say, we'll have a workday, maybe nine to five or whatever it happens to be. And you should just be working at full intensity during that workday. And you should have five workdays a week. And then we should work most weeks of the year all throughout the year, because factories, the more they run, the more is produced and the more fast they run when they're on the better. And so that's how factories operated. But factories where this idea

comes from are incredibly unnatural. It's not the way throughout most of human history that we encountered what we might summarize as work. I mean, I go back to the Paleolithic. I mean, let's think about our long period as hunter and gatherers. There's huge swings and variations and intensity in your efforts if you were in, let's say, a hunting gathering community 100,000 years ago. Like during a particular day, if you're on a hunt, during the heat of the midday, there might be hours where you're doing nothing. And then later there's a stock going on. In the winter, when the migration patterns have your main animal food source no longer nearby, it could be a completely different field than the summer.

The Neolithic comes along, agriculture's invented, now things become literally seasonal. The harvest period is incredibly busy. But then we have huge festivals, harvest festivals when we're done and in the winter we have nothing to do. There's all sorts of variation. Factories came along and for the first time in human history, we said, work as hard as you can, just all day every day. And when knowledge work emerged as a sector,

we say, well, let's just do that. Like that's, you know, factories are what are big right now, let's do that. So we created what I call the invisible factory. Knowledge work should be work as hard as you can all day long, year round. I'm advocating actually for, let's go back towards the prior 290,000 years of our history.

Let's reintroduce more variation and intensity at different timescales into work. That's how we're wired to work. Hard periods, less hard periods at many different timescales. We should not see that somehow as periodic slacking or somehow we can't cut it. It's actually us returning to the way we're wired.

We're gonna be much more satisfied as homo sapiens if our work has a lot more variation in its intensity. So what does that look like for you? It's at different scales. So the key thing, it's like a fractal. As you go out the larger, larger scales, you wanna find variation, regular variation, right? So in a day, what might that mean?

Really hard, intense cognitive work in the morning, less intense work in the afternoon, there's variation in the day. On the week, it might be Fridays, I really steer clear more of meetings, that's more of a thinking day, but the first half of the week, I'm really like, let's get going and getting things moving. There's variation in the week. When you go up to the scale of seasons, you me, I'm a college professor and a writer, I really lean back during the summer. I disappear, obviously I don't teach in the summer. I also don't take research,

summer salary research. I write, I really pull back, I don't pursue new projects. So there's seasonal variation. The fall is then really busy. So it's on different time scales, intense, balanced by unintense. You have variation. This seems like one that I can imagine many people listening would say, I don't know how I apply this to my life, especially since I'm not really in control. Well, yeah. So if you're not in control, we have some sort of stealth suggestions we get into the book.

One of them being, you do have this ill-defined but powerful control over your workload in the short term. We talked about this earlier when we said the haphazard ad hoc nature of knowledge work means you can really off you skate. I'm not taking on as many projects now. I'm kind of being careful because there's something else going on in my life. And one of the things I recommend is strategically deploying that. It's not going to be noticed necessarily.

But you know, these two weeks coming up, I want to relax, I need to recharge. So I have big projects ending up here, I have new projects starting there, but I'm being much more tight with my time in between. And I know I'm going to be less engaged there. Or it could be something as simple as I'm going to take a vacation day for no other reason but I'm just going to take a random Wednesday and just once a season, once a month, whatever it is, and go to the movies, like have a real day to recharge and just to give some variation back into it. So there's a lot of, you can subtle stuff you can do to keep the intensity

varied more, and especially the benefit you get from the recharge helps you more afterwards. So, so at the larger level, people don't necessarily notice it's not, oh, you don't produce anything anymore. It's more subtle than that. People can get away. So I say in the book, like quiet quitting as a permanent strategy didn't work out so well because employers don't tend to like when their employees say, I'm going to do the bare minimum. Quiet quitting seasonally, that you might

get away with. People might not notice that in July you weren't really locked in because by August, you're back into it again. Like, I must've been imagining this. We might have more flexibility than we think. That's really interesting. Another thing you talk about in the book is, and I think this is really much more for knowledge workers, is the idea of taking longer. And in fact, you explicitly recommend doubling your project timelines.

Yeah. Well, if you have autonomy for saying how long you're going to spend on something, hey, can you do this for me? How long is it going to take? Keep in mind your instinct. Like your first instinct when someone asks you that is usually you imagining what would be great? What would be amount of time to be great if I could finish in that time? Yeah, if I could finish this report by Friday, that would be great because then I would be done. Or if I could finish in that time. Yeah, if I could finish this report by Friday, that would be great because then I would be done or if I could finish this book chapter by the end of the month, wouldn't that be great? It's like distilled optimism and it's almost always completely inaccurate and overly optimistic.

So just take longer. Whatever your instinct is for how long it takes, ask for twice that time because that's actually closer to the reality. Giving yourself enough time to get it done, not being over optimistic, that makes a difference. So the traditional knowledge worker story I used to pull out this principle was actually Lin-Manuel Miranda working on his first big play in The Heights, which won a lot of Tony Awards before Hamilton came out. And I go through the whole story. He spent seven years. He debuts a version of this play as a sophomore in college. It's seven years later that it makes the professional stage.

He took his time. And during this time, you know, he's working on it in the background off and on, pretty consistently. Some periods more intense than others. He has other jobs, he has other initiatives, he has other projects he's working on. He took his and in the end what I argue is no one knows how long he took to wrote that play We're just like wow, that was a great play and then he did another great play. He's so precocious

He's so productive. No one thinks like man. What a lazy guy He why didn't he just get this done in two years? And so taking longer makes things more sustainable. It improves the quality of your work. I argued Miranda could not have gotten in the heights to the level it did in just a couple of years. He had to get more experience with life. He had to mature. He had to mature as a playwright.

He needed that time to make that play as good as it was. And so just take longer on projects. I mean, it's so tempting to have that optimistic scenario be true. What if I could write a book in six months? Wouldn't that be awesome? It'd be done in six months, but it's a recipe for failure. Say no, year and a half. Let me give myself some time. This will come together, but I don't want to be frantically chasing a deadline I'm never going to meet. Okay. So now I'm going to abuse my privilege of being the host of the show to ask you about

something personal. I've been working on a book for six years. It's the sequel to 10% Happier, which was my first book. And we initially thought it was going to come out in 2020. You and I are recording this in 2024, and it's still not out. I think I'm pretty damn sure it actually will come out next year, but I find myself On the one hand I can get into a self-congratulatory mode of like, you know good for you. You're taking your time You're doing Lin when men well Miranda and it will probably be a seven-year process and it'll be better for it the other hand

I wonder am I just obsessing over shit that nobody's gonna care about in the end? And so how do we? And this may be addressing a vanishingly small percentage of the audience so I apologize for that, but how do we know the difference between Taking our time in a way that makes sense and obsessing to the point of disutility Well, this is not a narrow question if anything, this is the the core issue surrounding taking longer as a successful tactic. The example I really draw from to get at the core of this issue was this idea of the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper.

So people don't always know the backstory of what happened right before they recorded Sergeant Pepper. Essentially, they had this tour that was like the tour from hell. Everything went wrong on this worldwide tour. In Japan, there was protests, they needed police protection, they went to the Philippines and they offended Amelda Marcos and then she basically started to make their lives purposefully difficult and the whole country turned on them. They came back to the US like, the US likes us.

And then the, we're bigger than Jesus quote came out. And so now the whole American South turns against them when they're touring through there. So they finished this terrible tour in 68. They're going to their last show at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and they say, no more touring. That's it. We're not touring anymore. This decision changed their relationship to music because now they could create an album where they did not have to replicate the songs on stage. And so it opened up complete freedom for what they could do. And this is what Sergeant Peppers was the first album that Beatles recorded where they weren't trying to produce music they would have to then go perform. And so, you know, it was very experimental and they worked with different instruments and playing with tape speeds.

But this introduced a problem. When do you stop? When you have no constraints and you can do anything, when do you stop? And a lot of bands that followed in the Beatles footprint, so we had the whole progressive rock movement that began to do these experimental albums, a lot of them crashed against the shore of we could just stay in the studio forever. And so the question was, how did the Beatles not do that? They could just stay in the studio forever. And so the question was, how did the Beatles not do that? They didn't stay in the studio forever.

They did push harder than they ever had before. It was their most innovative album to date, but they also got it out. They spent longer on it than prior albums. In fact, their very first album, I went back and looked this up, they recorded in a single day. They showed up, they played the songs, looks good, and they left. This one took a factor of 100 more hours. We actually did the math, but they did finish.

I said the strategy here, how do they walk that line between perfectionism and taking their time to do something well is Brian Epstein helped them here. As soon as they got a first single done, he released it. And he began to create some expectation for the album to create some buzz. And now they had a gentle forcing function of, we do kind of need to get this done. Like people are now waiting for it. The first single has come out. That's basically what you have to do when trying to take longer on a hard project where you have complete autonomy about when it finishes. You wanna do a really good job,

but you also don't want it to go on forever. So it's almost like you have to start introducing, whether they be artificial and internal or like public, like releasing a single. Okay, this has been announced. I've sent out an excerpt of this chapter, like this does kind of have to get done. So you take longer, but not forever.

And so you have to basically simulate your own Brian Epstein to balance those two. Another thing about Brian Epstein, who is the Beatles manager, and maybe this is more of a George whatever their producer role, but our mutual friend Adam Grant talks about having a board of directors, you know, getting feedback from people. So one of the things that I've done throughout this writing process is give manuscripts to people. And sometimes people come often actually to date, people come back and say, yeah, this needs to be cooked more.

And that helps me guard against the idea that I'm all by myself on this thing. And I have no I'm too close to it to know whether I'm obsessing it appropriately. I think that's a great idea. I think that works well. Also, once again, principle three, obsess over quality, can be helpful here because that requires you to develop your taste. I know what good means.

Okay, so now I have a threshold. Is this good? No, no, no. Oh, it made it. Good, let's go. So like actually the more attune you get with your craft Is this good? No, no, no. Oh, it made it. Good. Let's go. So like actually the more attune you get with your craft and what good means, it seems paradoxical because obsessing over quality should make me a procrastinator.

You can actually more confidently finish because you can say, this is good now. This is good enough. Let's go. Let's get this out in a way that if you don't have that same developed sense of taste, you might just forever tinker because you're worried. It's like the famous story of novelists who never finished their first book. Everyone comes out of Harvard literature program saying, I'm going to write the great American novel and then they never finish because they never trust that it's good.

And they're really worried about what if it's not good? And what if like my friends like this is a bad book and you're stupid? And so because they don't trust what good means, they never want to stop. Whereas the novelists who have published a few good books, they have some instincts they trust. If they take a long time, it's because it's not working, not because they're procrastinating. So yeah, obsessing over quality can actually make you better at pulling the ripcord at some point. Coming up, Cal talks about why we should obsess over quality, why early in his career he invested 50 bucks in an expensive notebook,

and why that was very much worth it, and how incorporating rituals into your work can help your brain. your brain. This podcast is brought to you in part by Audible. Every year offers us the opportunity to get closer to the best versions of ourselves. No matter where you are on your well-being journey, Audible is there for you. They have an ever-growing selection of stories to inspire, sounds to soothe, and voices that have the potential

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Enjoy The Last City on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Last City right now, ad free, on Wondery+. Get started with your free trial at Wondery.com slash plus. There are a few more things in principle two around working at a natural pace that I wanna ask you about, but since you've brought up the third principle of slow productivity, which is obsessing over quality,

let's go there for a minute. What's the top line advice in this principle? The things you do best, you should be really focused on doing those as well as possible. If you do that, that will begin to demand that you go slower, because busyness and chaos gets in the way of doing something better. And paradoxically, or maybe we should say complementarily, as you do better and do things better and better, you get more control over your working life.

So if I get better and better at my core thing, I'm going to want to be slower and I'm going to become more and more able to demand slowness. So there's this like really nice self-reinforcing loop here that comes from, let me care about being good. A couple of things you recommend here. I'll just go one by one here. One of the things you recommend tactically under this notion of obsessing over quality is improving your taste.

What does that mean? We often leave this out when we think about quality. We often leave out, how do you know that what you're doing is good? To me, like one of the examples that captured this importance is there's this famous interview that NPR fabled this American life radio host Ira Glass did this interview that's everywhere online where he said, Hey, here's the hard thing about being creative is that at first, you know, the stuff you're doing is not good.

And so the whole challenge is pushing through that until you get good enough to match your definition of what's good. And this interview is inspirational and a lot of people send it around. But then I went back and found a more recent interview, Ira Glass talking to Michael Lewis. And they went back and listened to one of the very first NPR pieces that Ira Glass edited. It was him in the Oreo cookie factory on their 75th year anniversary. And in the Michael Lewis interview,

Ira Glass said, oh, that's not good. That's a bad radio segment. But you know what? At the time, I didn't realize that. I thought I had just done something great. So there's this interesting contradiction. We have the famous story from Ira Glass of you're gonna feel like your stuff isn't good,

but keep pushing through till it's good. And then we have Ira Glass being a little bit more honest and saying, I thought my stuff was great. I didn't realize till later, I still had a long way to go. And so my takeaway is we talk a lot about practicing. We talk a lot about like hone your craft, but we don't talk enough about how do you get better at assessing your craft.

And that is its own thing. Increasing your taste, your ability to assess the quality of the things you do. Increasing your taste is a separate activity that you need to pursue in parallel with getting better at your craft. And so to get better at your craft, you practice. To improve your taste, you spend more time with people who already are very good with

their output, their products. You try to understand it. You try to become more of a connoisseur of your own feel. So if you're a new podcaster, yeah, you want to podcast a lot and try to get better, but you also want to understand why great radio and podcasters, why they're so good. What makes this show really good and not that show really good? And that's its own discipline, learning to really understand a field. So I think we neglect taste, but you can't get really good at something until you understand

what really good actually means. That reminds me of back in 2020, right around the time that my book was supposed to come out and I knew it wasn't going to come out. My friend is a meditation teacher. This is a name that will be familiar to maybe not to you, but to a lot of the people listening. Her name is Sabine Selassie. She's a great meditation teacher and one of her love languages is she will give gifts to people.

And so she gave me a gift, which was a book called The Overstory, which is a novel by Richard Powers. It's a phenomenally beautiful book. And I actually hadn't read novels in a long time, but I read that and I was blown away. And I just started looking up all the books that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and just started reading them all. And I've been, I read a ton of novels now and it has helped me immensely in writing my memoir, which is again, it's nonfiction, but in terms of elevating my craft, sitting with these great novelists and reading them has been incredibly helpful.

Well, I had the same experience. For me, it wasn't novels, it was movies. So I got really into the film and understanding great film and the directors and sort of like self-education. That really helped my writing. And I think there was something, maybe you had the same effect. I think there was something to the fact that

because it wasn't my field, that was actually kind of helpful because you could be completely inspired and appreciative of the power of art without all the uncanny valley things that apply to specifically to you. It's like if I'm reading a book in my exact genre, that's excellent. There's also a lot going on about like, I don't do that. I don't think I could do that. Oh, I didn't do that in my last book. Oh man, I don't have, look how much time she spent researching this. I don't do that. Oh, I don't think I could do that. Oh, I didn't do that in my last book. Oh man, I don't look how much time she spent researching this. I don't

have that time. And that whole voice is actually a dulls inspiration. But when I'm watching a movie that I love, it's not connected at all to my professional life. And you get great inspiration from it. Like, oh, art is great. Producing great stuff is great. So it's a great thing you pointed out. In addition to studying your field, you're probably going to, if you just want inspiration, which is incredibly helpful, artistic inspiration, inspiration towards quality, learn another field. I think the section of my book was titled, kind of cheekily, like, you know, become a film expert or something like this. But it made a difference. Unrelated feel, it really did give me some more courage in my writing.

Yes, I mean, it's novels, film, the type of nonfiction writing that you and I do, yours is a little bit more pedagogical than mine, but it's all storytelling, it's all teaching, it's all bringing people along on a narrative of sorts. And I think if you're, I agree with you, if I spent all my time reading memoirs, which I don't, it would kill me.

But seeing other people who are masters at their craft in a non-threatening way is incredibly helpful. Exactly. Well, and I talked about a more concentrated example. There could be even specific parallels. I was reading Quentin Tarantino's book and learning about his filmography and a lot of what he does is he plays with genres. He'll take a genre and he put this

genre and he plays and deconstruction and plays with the tropes. And I found some specific inspiration in that because I realized like, oh, I kind of do that a little bit in my books too. Like I'll take a straight pragmatic nonfiction genre and its tropes and then I'll make it more academic or I'll combine it with like an intellectualism or a narrative that's on I play with genres. That gave me inspiration to do that more aggressively, more intellectually fulfillingly, like take some bigger chances. So yeah, you sometimes even get super direct parallels between techniques from

an unrelated field to techniques in whatever you're doing. I love that. Staying with this third principle, obsessing over quality. One of the other things you recommend is that we buy a $50 notebook. What's that about? I mean, I did that as a postdoc and I found it. I mean, I found it recently. That's why I wrote about it. At some point as a postdoctoral associate, I was worried that on my algorithm proofs, which is like what I did as an academic, I was pulling the intellectual rip cord, so to speak, too soon, like the strain of thinking hard, I was giving up too soon. And so I went and bought an engineering notebook and an engineering lab notebook cost a lot of money because they have to be archival. It's like really thick paper. It's

important, right? Like because this might become up in a patent dispute. So you need like these are super quality notebooks. So I bought a $50 notebook, which was a lot of money for me. I was a postdoc and I started using that to do my notes when I was working on papers. And I went back through this more recently when I was working on the book and counted how many successfully funded grants or successfully published papers do I see the origins of in this notebook. And it was a really high number. I forgot exactly what it was. It was like a dozen different projects. And this is in a less than a two-year period, essentially. And my thesis was this notebook was so nice that when I used it, it put me into like a much more careful and high quality mindset.

My handwriting, this notebook is super clean and neat and I don't want to waste pages. So the niceness of the notebook focused or elevated my work when I used it and I produced a lot more. So there's some psychology. Having a nice tool sometimes gets you to do nicer work. It just feels like you're doing something more important. It's a hack, but it's a hack that works pretty well. Before I let you go, let me just go back

to the second principle of working at a natural pace. There were a couple of things you recommend there that I thought might be worth mentioning here. One of them is match your space to your work. What's that about? We don't think enough about the impact of our physical environment on our cognitive functioning. It really does matter.

An interesting case study of this is that if you look at writers who are like the original work from home workers, right, novelists throughout history or whatever, they don't work in their houses. that if you look at writers who are like the original work from home workers, right? Novelists throughout history or whatever, they don't work in their houses. I wrote a New Yorker piece about this because I was so interested in this idea of all of these different writers who had very nice home offices and they wanted to work anywhere they could that was not their house. And they would work in really weird places.

Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, used to live down the street from where I grew up and he had a very nice house. He did not write Jaws in that house. He wrote them in a furnace repair shop about a mile across town, in a furnace repair shop. And we talked to Wendy Benchley about this. She was like, it was banging on metal drums. That's where he would go to write. Maya Angelou would go to hotel rooms, take everything off the wall, and prop herself up on the bed and write that way. Steinbeck would take a skiff out into the middle of Sag Harbor and write on his knees.

He had a beautiful property. And so I was like, why do they do this? Why does everyone, they're writing near home, but not in home. And I think it's because the cognitive context of your home, for example, has too many salient distractions. Your brain associates it with, look at that laundry basket,

I gotta do laundry, look over there, I have to think about dinner. And your brain is constantly switching to familiar non-professional context and it's hard to focus. So you go somewhere that's kind of absurd, like a furnace factory, none of those salient triggers

are there. So your brain says, okay, nothing's catching my attention here. I mean, the banging is, but there's nothing here that's very familiar to me. So I might as well work. So context matters. So avoiding the familiar matters, but then also having a very consistent context that you associate just with work. These things matter as well. It's why David McCullough at his house in Martha's Vineyard would write in a shed in his backyard, unconditioned shed on a typewriter because he associated that shed with that's writing time. Like in that shed I write, I have a home office where I do email and faxes and contracts. That shed is writing time.

We need to care more about that in an age of knowledge work, especially in an age of remote knowledge work, where it's not just here's your office, you have to go here. It's up to us to think where we're going to work. Context matters. One final thing that caught my eye is you talk about the importance of rituals. What do you mean by that? Well, just like environment can help you focus more, rituals can put you into a mindset. So a ritual before you start a hard bit of work, a ritual that you do again and again before you start a hard bit of work,

can really make it easier to get into that mindset. And part of what's going on here is purely neuroscience. So it takes longer than most people realize to change the target of your attention. So if I'm working on one project and then I wanna switch over to an unrelated project, I can't just light switch that. It could be 10, 15, 20 minutes

until all of the relevant neural networks connected to the first project are inhibited and I've activated the relevant networks for the new project. And until that's done, I just feel this as resistance. I can't get into my work. I don't know. I'm not inspired. And then that feeling of getting into the zone when it comes to cognitive work often follows from, oh, now my brain has fully calibrated for this work.

So having rituals between hard work can actually help you through that transition. It allows your mind to start that transition, to leave behind what you were working on before. And so when you get to something that's hard to do, you get into that zone almost right away. You don't have to have that 10 to 20 minutes of suffering of like, why can't I make any progress? Because you don't know what's happening in your brain, but that's what's going on. So I walk, I make tea in a certain way.

I walk around the block. I like David McCullough used to do, he would walk through his backyard to the shed and he talked about the gate he would pass through. All of that is about hacking our neurochemistry. To make it do something that we're not really wired to do, which is to think about abstract symbolic things and somehow create value in them. And it's not what we're really meant to do. We have to kind of hack the brain to do a lot of knowledge work. Rituals can help you do it better.

Cal, is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? Well, I mean, I think just in general, I end the book. I end the book by saying slow productivity is not a universal answer to the issues we have with overload in work right now. The answer more generally is we need alternative definitions to pseudo productivity. And I am pretty clear in the conclusion of the book, we're going to need a lot of those answers. Like, so the important thing here is not trying to find some exact answer because as we've navigated throughout this interview, different philosophies will apply here, here, and here,

kind of here, not there. This philosophy will apply here, here, and here, and not there. But what we need, what everyone who's overloaded needed is a recognition that what we're doing now is not working. This implicit understanding of, I don't know, activity just means useful effort, that's not working. This implicit understanding of, I don't know, activity just means useful effort, that's not working. And we have to stand up and say, let's be clear about what we want to do instead. And let's name it and let's give principles to it. And let's talk about it. And for a lot of people, it might be slow productivity. For other people, it might be a completely different thing.

But clarity is what's needed here. We can no longer just sort of assume we all intuitively know what productivity means and work is just work. We have to be clear about productivity if we want to solve our issues with it. And so slow productivity is just as much about a particular philosophy that might help you as it is a tip of a bigger movement that hopefully will generate many more philosophies, each of them much more intentional and much more humanistic than simply pseudo productivity and effort for the sake of effort.

Yeah, I think you're working on a micro level and a macro level simultaneously. Last question, which is, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and you've written many other books, maybe you wanna name a few of those, or is there a central location that you would send people to to learn more about what you're doing in the world? Well, the new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Yeah, I've also written Deep Work, Digital

Minimalism, A World Without Email. We've talked about several of these books on the show before, if people want to find them. CalNewport.com, you can learn about all of these. I also have a podcast called Deep Questions, where we just get in the weeds and all these issues with real people call in with real issues about work. And we try to see what we can do. So if you want to see some of this in action, Deep Questions is a good place as well. Cal, congratulations on the new book. I found it very helpful. Always great to see you. Thank you, Dan. Thanks again to Cal. If you want to hear his previous appearances on the show, dip into the show notes. I put some links there.

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