I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.
Hey, it's Cal here.
We're trying something different this week.
Both Jess and I are on vacation at the same time, so we thought we would go back in our archives and find a classic episode that we both really enjoyed.
So the episode we chose is which came out almost two years ago exactly to this day.
It was August of 2023.
This episode has been one of our most popular.
When we put this on YouTube...
It generated something like 1.5 million views and counting.
So we figured, hey, this would be a fun episode to revisit.
I think you're going to like it.
What you're going to hear in this episode is some of the early forms of the ideas I was formulating around the deep life.
I had a fun time coming back to this recently because these ideas have evolved quite a bit.
And the current book I'm writing on the deep life.
So it's interesting to go back and hear again how these ideas started.
But something about these notions, the strategies described here seem to hit a chord.
So I think you'll like it.
We'll be back next week with another new episode.
But this one is worth another listen.
So enjoy this classic episode of the Deep Questions podcast.
So today's deep question, how can I reinvent my life in four months?
Now, that four months number is not arbitrary.
If it is the beginning of September now, where does four months put us?
September, October, November, December.
That means this overhaul process we're going to talk about will finish right around New Year's.
So right around the time, all of your friends are buying copies of James Clear's book and getting gym memberships, you'll already be done with doing a reinvention for the year.
And you'll be well into this new life, not just starting.
Now, not surprisingly for longtime listeners of my show and viewers of my videos I'm going to use the deep life stack framework to structure our discussion of how to reinvent your life this fall.
But I'm going to be specific this time.
And we're going to have particular timelines how long to spend at this layer, how long to spend at that layer, because I want this whole process to fit exactly within four months.
All right so, with great trepidation, I'm actually gonna do a little bit of drawing while we talk here so we can actually see the deep life stack that I am discussing.
So what I'm gonna do here is bring up my drawing screen and we are gonna draw ourselves a deep life stack and we're gonna annotate it as we go.
All right, so at the bottom of the stack, is the discipline layer.
So I will actually write this on the screen with my almost calligraphy quality handwriting.
Wouldn't you say, Jesse?
Looks pretty good.
For those who are watching instead of just listening, what you're seeing is a master draftsman.
All right.
And let me put a nice I see here, let me put a nice box around that.
Okay, so let's start with discipline as the starting place.
So if you're new to the whole concept of the deep life stack, discipline is the place that we start.
All right, so what are we going to do here?
First thing I want you to do as part of your reinvention, as we start down here at the discipline layer of the deep life stack.
I'm going to label this set up core.
So you want to get set up a place where you keep track of everything that's going to happen in this reinvention that follows.
So here are the habits I follow.
Here are my disciplines.
Here are the systems I'm using.
This is going to grow.
But at the very beginning of the reinvention, you set it up.
And really the easiest way to do this if you don't already have digital things in your life that you check regularly is to print out your current collection of all the things you're committing to put it in a clear plastic sleeve.
A protector like you would put a page in to put inside a binder and just put it on your desk or the drawer next to your desk where you work every day.
So you have a physical artifact.
And as we add things to this list of commitments, you will just grow this list.
So we want to set up that core location for everything we're about to do.
The other thing we're going to do when we're down here in the discipline stack is three keystone habits.
It's going to be step this early step, all right.
So a keystone habit is a habit that you do every day.
It should not be trivial, right?
So it shouldn't be look at my home gym every day.
But it also should be tractable, So it shouldn't be do 90 minutes of intense exercise every day, somewhere in between.
You have to put a little effort into doing it, but you can almost certainly succeed in doing this every day, even with schedules that vary, with unpredictability and difficulty.
So, to start this reinvention, once you set up your core, I want you to figure out three keystone habits to put in place.
I'm going to say divide their subject matter.
Have one focus on your professional life, one focus on your health and fitness, and one be purely focused on something personal, optional and high quality.
So this could be around reading or nature or meditation, something that has no instrumental value beyond just giving you a sense of quality or awe.
And what we're going to do here as we move through the stack I'm going to.
At the end, I will show you how long to spend on each of these things.
All right.
So we're going to do the timing last, but I'm going to go through the steps first.
All right.
So let's go to the next stage of the reinvention, which is going to be value.
Values.
So we start with discipline.
Now we're going to values.
So let me draw.
Oops, I'll make this blue.
All right, so let me draw the box here.
Again, my draftsmanship is it's like watching.
It's not unlike watching Picasso draw the peasant's hands.
I think we can all, and also it's clear for people watching.
I have expert control over how notability works.
I definitely know what I'm doing here.
Okay.
Let's just write.
All I'm trying to do here.
For those who are listening, I'm literally just writing the word values and drawing a box around it.
All right.
I'll get better at this.
All right.
Values.
What do we want to do here?
The first thing is the reconnect.
I'm going to label this as reconnect.
Reconnect.
It's going to be reconnect with your moral intuition.
So you're sort of reconnecting with what is important to you in your life, but also what defines a life well lived, regardless of circumstances, regardless of specific accomplishments.
So when I say reconnect with your moral intuition, probably the right way to do this is to go back and reread something that you've read before that really spoke to you, perhaps a Viktor Frankl man's search for meaning style book that really, at some point you remember, grounded you in thinking this is what's important in life.
This resonated with my moral intuition.
So try to find something that you have experience with, what's influential to you, and go back to reread that, to reconnect with these moral intuitions.
You might want to watch things as well.
If there's a particular documentary or movie that really touched you in that deeper way, go rewatch that as well.
So you're reconnecting here with what is at the core of your value system.
Once you have done that as part of this reinvention, I'm going to write the word code here.
You want to write a first draft of your code.
You should have a personal code.
And the code is not just what you stand for and what you don't stand for, but you should think of it as a roadmap for how you approach your life, through good and bad.
How you approach your life during the hard times in a way that makes you proud.
How you approach your life.
During the good times, this could be harder sometimes, in a way that makes you proud as well.
So it's a roadmap for living that lays out here's what's important to me, what I think it means to be a good person and live life I'll live but also how you are going to apply that.
The sense of here is how I go through my life, through good and bad.
That is your code.
And finally, as this step of your reinventions, I want you to put in place some number of rituals that regularly connect you back to your moral intuition, that regularly reinvigorate that connection for you in a visceral way, a way that you feel.
This could mean a lot of things, depending on what your setup in life is.
If you're religious, these rituals you'll almost certainly be drawing from long-standing religious rituals that are set up to do exactly that the five-time-a-day Islamic prayer, the daily Torah study in Judaism, and so on.
If you're not religious.
There's any other number of things.
You can do that once you know what's in your moral intuition and once you have your code written down that will reconnect you with this.
This could be.
You know, every week you hike to this place.
That gives you a sense of natural world awe.
It could be meditation.
It could be a particular type of volunteering you do on a regular basis to sort of humble yourself and reconnect you to helping other people.
All of this can be written down, your code, your rituals.
You can connect this all to what we set up in the first stage, that core document or folder.
So you have a place for this to go.
Okay.
So now we've moved to the value stack as part of our reinvention.
Remember, we will get to at the end, how long to spend on each of these.
Next layer.
So I'm drawing another box here.
Beautifully.
Definitely looks the same as the other boxes.
You get to the control layer of the deep life stack.
The control layer is where you begin to organize, make sense of, and curtail the various obligations in your professional and personal life so that you have breathing room, so that you have space to think. space to enjoy what's good about your life, freedom from the anxiety of overload and disorganization, and freedom to actually experiment with new things or important things you want to add to your life in the final step that's going to follow.
So at some point you do need to get control over everything in your life, or a lot of this other work is going to be for naught because you'll be so short on time and overwhelmed and anxious that you won't really get to it.
So what I have here is three things for our reinvention.
First, I'm going to say multi-scale planning.
This is for your work.
So when it comes to your professional life, put multi-scale planning into work.
Get this executed.
This is where you have a quarterly or semester plan that you update every quarter or semester or season whatever three to four months.
You look at that plan every week and use it to create a weekly plan.
Your weekly plan.
You're consulting your calendar, you're seeing what's actually on your plate that week and you're looking then also at your seasonal semester plan, quarterly plan, for reminders of the bigger things you're working on and you write out longhand.
Here's my plan for the week ahead.
Then you look at that weekly plan every day when you do a daily time block plan for the actual hours of your day.
I of course recommend my own time block planner second edition timeblockplannercom.
But you can use whatever you want, but your time block plan in your actual day, in consultation with your weekly plan.
Your time block plan, every day, is informed by your weekly plan, which is written every week, which is informed by your seasonal plan, which is updated every three to four months.
That's multi-scale planning.
And there's, you can watch, I have, we'll talk about it later in the show.
I think there's a question about it.
You can look at the time management video for my YouTube page at youtubecom.
Slash Cal Newport media.
So we won't belabor the details, but it puts you in control of of your time and your professional life and gives you really clear feedback on what your current load of work looks like, how long things take, how well things fit, what's really killing you in your schedule, what's not so bad.
Multiscale planning gives you all of that.
It will give you all that information.
Not everyone lives in a house.
What I mean by household planning is getting some sort of basic system in place for your work outside of work.
I have to when I use household in quotation marks.
I'm thinking you know I got to clean the gutters.
We got to fix this hole that just got knocked into the drywall.
We have a problem with electricity.
You got to mow the yard, whatever these are, right?
And in your, my car needs to be, the oil needs to be changed.
I need to go pick up a new parking pass for my neighborhood.
All the stuff that's non-work related, but related to life outside of work.
We want some control over that as well.
You don't need something as extreme as full multi-scale planning, but you should probably have full capture for your work outside of work, someplace where everything gets written down.
I would then suggest reviewing that capture system when you do your weekly plan for work.
And the weekly plan can now you can add to it a section for home.
Okay, let me look at the week ahead.
Let me look at all the things I've captured for non-professional tasks.
What am I going to do this week?
And when things need to go on your calendar, put them on your calendar.
Okay, I got to take the car to get the admissions inspection.
This is the right time to do it.
It's going to be Thursday.
Let me move this meeting and put that there.
I'll put that on my calendar.
And let me protect Saturday, put a note, like I got to mow the yard and do some housework.
And let me get a big list of that.
So you're building a plan for the week that allows you to make some progress on the household things.
And you have this full capture system.
So if you jot down household tasks when you shut down your work, at the end of the day you can put them in that system and trust it.
I'm not going to forget the mow the yard.
I'm not going to forget that I have to hand in this new medical paperwork to my kids' school.
So full capture.
Review when you do your weekly plan for work.
Add a household component to that weekly plan.
Now you're in some control of that work as well.
It's not a hazard.
It's not disorganized.
And you're learning what's on your plate and how long it's taken.
The final thing I'm going to suggest here for this control step of our reinvention is using this information you learned about both your professional life and personal life to automate and curtail.
So one of the big advantages of having these systems and this is crucial one of the big advantage of having these organizational systems is not that your goal is to try to fit more work into your life.
This is the common barb made at this type of thinking of the only reason why you'd want to do multi-scale planning is so that you can work more.
And you probably watch a lot of hustle culture, YouTube videos, but that's not why we do this.
We do this because we want information about how long things actually take control about how we spend our time, and then we can use this information to make our life better, not worse.
To make it less busy, not more busy.
So this is why I say automate and curtail.
Once you know, here's what I'm doing each week, and I have a fine-grained control over it in my work and non-work, you can begin to automate.
So for work you say here's something that comes up again and again and it's taking up a lot of cognitive cycles.
And it's causing a lot of back and forth emails to deal with every week.
Let me find a way to quote unquote automate this.
I created a Google form.
Everyone in my team knows they just fill in this information in that form by Friday.
It automatically goes to a Google Drive and I have a half hour set aside at the end of the day every Monday to gather that information.
It's already in a useful format.
It takes me 15 minutes and I post the thing they need.
And now I've automated that work that happens regularly in a way that minimizes its footprint.
For your life outside of work, there's also often many ways to automate.
Once you see what you're spending your time on, you can say okay, how do I get this off of my think of it as my ad hoc scheduling plate?
How do I get this work that I have to do all the time around my house off of the list of just ad hoc random things that I have to remember to do?
So maybe I set up A biannual visit with the gutter cleaning company.
And I get that all arranged.
So I don't have to think about it.
They just come, they just do it.
That's set up.
Okay.
I'm kidding myself about raking the leaves.
I never really have time to do this.
I can work with a landscaping company.
This is just when they come.
Okay, here's something I always have to do with my car.
Let me find a mechanic I like that's nearby, and I bring it.
I put it on the calendar when the oil change happens.
Now I don't have to think about it.
When I get there, I execute.
The more things you can have automated, by which I mean you do not have to remember and schedule on the fly.
The work will just happen either now actually automatically, or you will get to regular calendar reminders.
When you know the process, you know exactly what to do.
It is off of your plate of things you have to remember and schedule.
That's what i mean by automate.
So now you're reducing the planning footprint of your life outside of work as well.
The other word i wrote down here was curtail, and what i mean by curtail is get rid of.
So now, when you know what's going on, you have this fine-grained control over your time and and you're getting this fine-grained, detailed feedback on your schedule.
You see the problems.
And in your work life, you realize being on this committee is killing me schedule-wise.
It's putting all these little meetings that eat up.
It's 10 people being scheduled and it's three meetings a week and they're short, but I have very little control over where they fall, because we have to find an intersection that works for 10 people and it's just partitioning my days in a terrible way.
Let's take that off our plate.
Or if you're at home, it's like okay, it's this one thing I'm doing in the house that's taking me hours and hours and stressing me out.
You know what?
I'm going to quit this thing over here and use that money to pay someone to do this.
Or it's this involvement I have, this community group I'm a part of.
This is really killing my schedule.
If I just quit that one thing, this is going to open up all the space.
This is going to move this sports team to this sports team.
Saturdays are completely open now.
That's going to be a huge blessing.
So it's all about once you know how things are landing on your schedule and their impacts, you can be incredibly high impact and strategic about get rid of that.
Get rid of that and change this and get huge returns back.
It's much better than just getting overloaded and stressed out and randomly starting to quit things left and right.
So that's all what control is about.
I control my time so I can automate and curtail until my load is reasonable.
And now I have breathing room.
Breathing room to reinvent, breathing room to appreciate the results of reinvention.
All right, this brings us up now to the final layer of the deep life stack.
Okay, i finally figured out, by the way, how to draw thicker lines.
This final layer is vision.
This is where you take in the typical deep life process.
This is where you take specific aspects of your life and you overhaul them to be more remarkable.
So now you have this great foundation of discipline, meaning that you have reinvented your identity as someone who is capable of doing things that have a long-term reward, even if they're hard in the moment.
You're in touch with your values, so you have this foundation that can get you through the good and bad.
It's a compass that keeps you aiming in the right direction.
You have control over your time.
So now you have the ability to aim yourself and your energies differently, in intentional directions, and now you figure out where to aim it, how to take aspects of your life and make those aspects of your life remarkable.
So what I'm going to put here, I'm going to label this here, one small, plan one large.
So what I mean by this is, during this final step of your four-month reinvention, I want you to actually take an area of your life preferably a non-professional area of your life where you're going to do a full overhaul of that towards more remarkability.
And I'll give you an example about this in a second.
But you take some aspect of your life and you do a full overhaul towards remarkability.
And then you take one larger areas of your life.
And this could be like what you do for a job, where you live.
And you begin the process of an overhaul there.
This could be one of these longer term overhauls that could take a year or two to really think through.
But so you get a small overhaul completely done and a big, exciting overhaul actually started.
All right, so for example, let me give you an example of a small overhaul.
Let's say you decide my life outside of work.
I need more life-affirming interests or hobbies, right?
I want some aspect of my life that's unrelated to my job, but I want to take it to kind of a remarkable level, like a real remarkable in the sense that people will eventually remark this about me.
Oh, this is something that he really does.
So let's say just for the case of a case study, you decide I want to become a serious cinephile.
I like movies.
What if I made movies and appreciation of movies a serious part of my life?
Well, what might that type of overhaul look like?
Well, it would be a mix of concrete steps that you actually take complete, plus new habits or systems you put into your life that all lead you towards a vision of that part of your life that's more remarkable.
So I jotted down some ideas here.
So maybe say okay, first thing.
First I want to, as a concrete step, I'm going to overhaul my basement theater and Good TV, good sound system, get a Blu-ray DVD player, blackout curtains for the windows down there, the basement windows, so I can have a really good movie-going experience.
I'm going to invest some money in this, and I'm signaling to myself I take this seriously.
Now I'm going to add a habit or system to my daily routine as part of this overhaul.
So maybe I want to get into a twice a week I watch a movie schedule.
Maybe there's one evening I put aside for doing that and one extended lunch break.
Or maybe it's two extended lunch breaks during the week.
Maybe you're working remotely.
Don't tell your boss.
45 minutes an hour and you're able to get through one movie during the week and you have one evening you've set aside and sort of.
Agree, I don't do bedtimes that night.
You have one evening a week that you watch a movie.
So this is like a new habit.
And maybe every week, you have this habit of going to the library to return the DVDs or Blu-rays that you rented and you get new ones to watch.
Or you join...
The old-fashioned Netflix would still exist.
You can still get DVDs and Blu-ray in the mail through that using the envelopes, right?
So there we go.
That's the system.
And then maybe you have the system that says when I do this twice-a-week movie watching, I have to find three articles to read ahead of time.
And I read all three articles about the movie, maybe like two reviews and one longer article.
So I sort of know what I'm looking at.
And in that way, I am enhancing my knowledge.
All right.
And then maybe, as a concrete, a second concrete step.
You say I'm going to found an online course about film appreciation.
I'm going to take that.
I'm going to take this online course.
Maybe as a couple of books, I'm going to read.
Right.
So what you've done here in this overhaul is you have some concrete things to accomplish and then a new systems that you're sort of getting into place.
Now new regular habits are getting into place.
In this example.
When this is all done, you're going to find yourself in a place where you're watching movies on a regular basis in a good home theater.
You've studied film more than you had before.
You have a much better foundation.
And now you can see your appreciation really growing.
Then you might have a longer term goal.
OK, if I keep this up for three months, I'm going to join a local film club that meets at this local nonprofit arts theater.
And I'm going to definitely go and they have monthly meetings and watch movies.
And I'll have I do this for three months.
I'll be ready to join that.
That's an example of a small overhaul.
When you're done with this, you have made this thing a much more remarkable part of your life.
And give this a year or two to unfold, from here and people are going to look at you and say yeah, this is one of the things we know about you.
You're really in the movies.
It's a big part of your life.
You get a lot of satisfaction.
So imagine that on almost any area of your life.
That's going to be the small overhaul.
And then you're going to think through a larger overhaul.
Lifestyle is such a career planning style approach.
What is my ideal lifestyle five, 10 years from now look like?
What is a major change I might need to make to get me closer there?
And you begin scheming what would be involved.
And it might be, okay, I have to build a lot of new skills.
I'm going to have to get promoted.
I'm going to have to get the side business up to this certain size of income before I'm comfortable leaving my main job.
This could be a longer term overhaul, but you get that going.
All right.
So how do we time all of this?
How do we time all this?
Because we have now quite a few different things I suggested and we need this all to fit into four months.
So I'm going to draw on the screen here a timeline.
All right.
This will be our four-month timeline.
And I'm going to label this timeline with the relevant months.
So let's see, we got September.
We'll imagine we're starting this in September.
And then we get October starts, then November starts, then December starts.
That brings us to January.
All right.
So for those who are listening, I have four months written up on the screen.
All right.
So let's think about how long should we be spending on each of these things.
I had actually I dropped the page that had my notes.
I had to go get that.
OK, so let's start with discipline.
I'll use yellow here on our timeline to mark that.
So remember, in discipline, you set up your core and got three keystone habits up and running.
I'm going to suggest that we just take the first two weeks for this.
I've marked the first two weeks on our calendar just for getting some keystone habits up and running, your core system up and running.
All right, next comes values.
I'll use a different color for this.
So remember, you have to reconnect with your moral intuition.
You have to get a code going.
You have to get a regular ritual going that reminds you on a regular basis about this moral intuition.
Here we're going to put aside four weeks.
And our schedule here, we're going from mid September to mid October.
All right.
So the next layer here was control.
I'll use a different color here.
Now we have a multi-scale planning, getting going your professional life, some sort of household capture and planning system, and a stepping back after a little while of doing this and doing some automation and curtailing.
I think we need four weeks for this as well.
So I have mid October through mid November marked on here.
All right.
Because it's going to take a few weeks.
You might want to spend two weeks on the business, one week on the personal life and then give yourself a week after that of learning from the systems and starting to make some decisions.
And we're left now with the vision piece.
We're going to do a complete small overhaul of an area of your life and plan out a larger overhaul.
And I'm going to mark on here the final six weeks.
Overhauls can take some time.
So we'll give ourselves six weeks.
So, if we look at this correctly, this gets us from September to January, moving through all four layers of the deep life stack and doing specific things at every layer.
By January.
If you do this, it will be a pretty significant reinvention of your life, especially if you are starting right now from a place of shallowness, by which I mean a life in which you are somewhat unanchored.
You're being pushed around by digital technology in your life outside of work.
You're just looking at your phone and are being dragged along emotionally by whatever is being shown on social media as the big thing to be upset about or not, or having drool-inducing distraction in your professional life.
It's just email and Zoom all day.
You're generically busy.
Don't even know what it is you're doing there.
If you're caught in the shallows of the digital world, the aimless digital.
You do four months, go through the stack once.
In the way I recommend, you're going to feel a lot more freedom.
You're going to feel more in control.
You're going to feel more grounded in what matters to you.
You're going to feel like not only have you overhauled part of your life, but that you have the capabilities to keep going and pile remarkability upon remarkability.
All right, so forget New Year's.
Fall is the time to reinvent.
And that is my four-month plan for reinventing your life by the time we get to 2024.
So for yourself, you've kind of already done this exercise before, but will you tweak some things?
Well, what I do is I start this process typically late June.
So I time it to my birthday, which is late in June.
Because I figure why not get started when I'm in the middle of summer and it's pretty slow.
So I'm usually hitting the ground running by the school year and I'm hoping by October to have my overhauls all in place.
So I start this a little bit earlier to take advantage of how slow the summer is.
But the point is it's all aimed towards right around.
The fall is when I'm going to have some big changes in place.
So I have a bunch of changes I'm working on right now.
A lot are in place.
A lot were done over the summer.
The ones that are not done yet, I'm hoping by October, November, they'll be locked in.
I mean, I don't want to be thinking about this stuff in January.
I want to be rock and rolling in January.
That's typically the way I see it.
For some of your small overhauls do they just pile up on each other or they come to completion and then you add a new one.
So the way I have it written now, for example.
So if you were to look in my semester plan, what you're going to see is the way I've broken this up, for the things I still have to do is I have immediate and soon.
So it'll be, okay, immediately, that means these are things I want to get done.
And this is broken up in different areas of my life.
These are things I want to get done as soon as I can.
And so when I'm building my weekly plan each week as part of multi-scale planning, I'm saying okay, let me see if there's some of these I can accomplish this week or make a lot of progress on, because I'm trying to get through these as quick as possible.
For some of these areas, I have something labeled soon, which is don't work on it right now.
But when you're done with the immediate things for most of these areas, here's a big project to think about getting going next.
And they tend to be the few things I have labeled as soon or a little bit broader, a little bit more ambitious.
And so I want to get the immediate things done as quickly as possible and And then plan some of these more ambitious ones.
So I do have right now that's the way I'm breaking it up is the final soon things I want to get done and then the more ambitious.
Now, actually, this summer I did it two phases.
I had a phase of this I did when I was up in New Hampshire for the summer, and then I have another phase I'm doing for the next couple of months.
So I sort of broke up because some things really were relevant to being back here in DC, And so I waited for those part of my annual overhaul reinvention.
I waited till I was back.
And some things actually being up in New Hampshire and away from DC.
That was the right time to do them.
So for those, I worked on them on the summer.
So right now, this is what's left in different areas of my life.
Soon, combination of habits and one-time things to accomplish.
I mean, immediate, I should say, habits and one-time things to accomplish.
And then soon, projects to do next once those are done as well.
So, for example, overhauling the office, the maker lab office, in our HQ under one of the areas my plan is a soon, so it's like I'm not doing it right now.
There's a couple more immediate things I'm doing in that area of my life, but that'll be the soon, so in theory, by like October I.
I'll be pretty serious about, okay, let's, I said my weekly plan.
Now I want to make progress on this.
Let's get someone out.
Let's hang the thing.
We'll do whatever we're going to do.
So just to just to make that kind of more concrete.
Another place where that's useful is fitness stuff.
This will often happen because, you know, September can be busy.
So it's, sometimes I'll do something like right now, here's what I'm going to do for six weeks or eight weeks, just to make sure that I'm exercising, I'm moving, I'm outside, I'm lifting things.
But as I get into the rhythm of the semester maybe six to eight weeks from now, and I'm used to this then I'm going to upgrade and do a you know two or three months of something more intense.
So that's another thing you might.
There's a, there's an easing into more intense efforts.
That can happen as well.
It's like, let me get used to doing something new in my life on a regular basis.
So I think about this as being a key part of my life.
And then I can upgrade it later to now let me get really intense about what that thing is.
Because often making something a regular part of your life, that's the really hard step.
Upgrading that once you're committed to it, it tends to be not as hard.
So that's another thing I'll do as well.
All right, so let me give you the lay of the land for the rest of the show.
I want to move on now and do some questions, all of which will orbit more or less around this general topic of reinventing your life, the deep life, the deep life stack.
Anything about trying to improve major areas of your life, to escape the shallows and get more depth?
I'm going to have five questions that orbit that theme.
And then in the final segment, I want to do a cover reveal for my new book and tell you a little bit about why I made such a drastic change in how that book cover actually looks.
So you want to stay tuned for that.
So I want to tell you about a tool that my team here at my media company uses constantly, and that is Miro.
Miro is a shared web-based workspace that teams can use to work together more effectively.
We use it here to keep track of all of our upcoming podcast episodes and newsletters.
We have like a master table in there of ideas, but we also use it to brainstorm and collect information.
We have sticky notes with story ideas and can embed Google Docs straight into the table or put links in there.
But here's why I'm excited today.
Miro has been on the forefront of integrating AI features into this product in a way that's really cool.
For example, you can now use Miro AI to turn unstructured data like sticky notes or screenshots into usable diagrams or product briefs or data tables or prototypes just in minutes.
There's no need to toggle over to another AI tool or write long prompts.
The AI is integrated right into the Miro canvas where you're already working.
You do any sort of collaboration, you got to check this out.
Help your teams get great done with Miro.
Check out Miro.com to find out how.
That's M-I-R-O.com.
I also want to talk about Shopify.
It's a true story.
I was hiking last month in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
And we went to a hut, one of these, like Appalachian Trail huts in the top of a mountain in Franconia, Notch.
And there was a ranger up there selling snacks.
You know how you did the purchase?
They wrote down your credit card information, the number, the expiration, your address on a sheet of paper, an old-fashioned credit card slip, which they put in a folder.
And you know what thought I had in that moment?
This is true. man, I bet they wish they could use Shopify.
Because here's the thing Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail businesses that can bring together both your online and in-store operations.
Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient, and We're talking endless aisle, ship to customer, buy online, pick up in store.
All made simpler so customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close the sale every time.
Look, this has proven that this stuff works.
Based on a report from EY businesses on Shopify POS.
See real results like 22 better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 89 uplift in sales on average relative to the market set surveyed.
So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash deep.
Go to Shopify.com slash deep.
That's Shopify.com slash deep.
All right.
Well, while we daydream about selling our incredibly lucrative coin, I figured we'd do some questions.
So who do we got first, Jesse?
All right, first question from Multiscale Planning Amateur.
Is it hard to implement multiscale planning all at once?
Is there a step-by-step plan similar to the DeepLife stack for gradually implementing this system?
Well, a timely question, since we talked about multiscale planning in the deep dive earlier in this episode.
As I often do, because my systems are way too complicated, I have to start by critiquing our terminology here.
Multiscale planning is not a separate entity from the deep life or the deep life stack.
It's actually something that you are likely to implement as part of the control layer of the deep life stack.
So it's actually a little bit recursive.
So we can't say use a deep life stack approach to implement multiscale planning, because actually the deep life stack approach might include implementing multiscale planning.
This is all to say my systems are too complicated.
But let's get to the meat of this.
So multiscale planning, we talked about earlier.
Quick reminder, you have three different timescales at which you plan. season, week, day.
You update the season every season.
You update the week every week, looking at the season when you do so.
You update the day every day, looking at the week when you do so.
So everything gets connected back.
Is there a way to break this up, to ease your way into this type of planning?
One way to do this is I suppose, is start with daily time block planning.
That's the hardest discipline of all.
This is because it's not only do you do it every day, but it is how you run your workday.
So it's the biggest change you're going to see in your day-to-day experience of your work from the whole multi-scale planning philosophy is going to be doing that daily time block planning.
And there's no way to break that up.
You just need to do it.
Now, if you want to help convince yourself I'm a daily time block planner.
I'm really giving this a try.
That's why you know I do sell that planner, because it really helps people signal to themselves I'm doing this.
I spent 20 something dollars on this.
At least I'm going to try this for a while.
So if you need a kick, you can look at timeblockplanningcom and find that planner.
Timeblockplannercom probably.
Or do it in a notebook or however you want to do it.
But just get going with daily time block planning.
After you've done that for a week or two and you sort of get the feel of it you're seeing the benefits.
Then you can add in the weekly time seasonal planning.
And I'm going to tell you though, that's going to be easy, because the time footprint of weekly seasonal planning is small.
It's not that hard to do.
Weekly planning takes 30 minutes.
Seasonal planning, you're doing, what, three times a year.
So it's not going to be hard to add that.
The hard part is the daily time block planning.
So you can either just jump right in and do all three, or daily time block plan for a week or two before adding in the other two elements.
But don't be...
Don't be intimidated by multi-scale planning.
It's not something that's going to require you to spend hours fiddling with systems.
It's streamlined.
And you are going to, it has an addictive quality to it.
It's very hard to go back from time block planning once you're used to it, because a non-time block day then feels chaotic and stressful.
So it has this chemical self-reinforcement.
And then once you're doing time block planning, it feels good to have the weekly plan.
And once you're weekly planning, it has good to look at the seasonal plan.
So I would say just get started.
Start with time block planning.
Add the other elements soon.
All right, what do we got next, Jamie?
I was just about to call you Jamie.
It's all good.
Who do I have in mind, Jamie?
That's Rogan's producer.
That's right.
Is that his name?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Next question is from Phillip.
I find that occasional unstructured work sessions create a sense of play that help drive my creativity.
In my case, one night a week.
I'll typically go through my code and make small tweaks like code formatting, or do experimental work such as trying new color schemes.
The result is that I end up more focused during my deep work sessions because I know that I have separate time when my mind wandering is allowed.
Is this something that fits into your deep life framework?
I think it's a really good idea.
Does it fit into the deep life framework?
Well, everything kind of does, right?
So again, I guess I would place this as something you might experiment with in the control layer of your deep life stack, because that's where you really put in place the systems that help you take control over what's on your plate and keep things reasonable.
But let's really look at this strategy because I like it.
I like this idea of having non-deep or non-intense sessions for your deep work style of work that complement the more intense deep work sessions.
So Philip is a programmer so he talks about, he has programming time where he's not really writing code but just doing all the other stuff that a programmer might fiddle with when working on code.
So formatting things and changing configurations in their editors.
And then he has completely separate sessions where I'm actually trying to do the intense cognitive thing of writing code.
So I don't know if I would use the terminology unstructured or structured.
Maybe I would do preparatory and focused.
That's maybe a better way of thinking about it.
But I think it's a really good idea because as we know, there is a cost to cognitive context shifts.
And even within a given activity, just that shift from wandering fiddling mode to I'm serious about what I'm doing mode can be really significant.
And we see this with a lot of work.
If you're a writer, this is really easy.
You can fall into internet research mode and it's very hard to get back into crafting sentences mode.
You can get into trying to get a formatting thing proper for the article you're writing.
Like, why is this block quote not quite right?
And it's hard to get back into the, that's crafting mode.
Certainly we see this in brainstorming.
Let's say you're brainstorming a product or business strategy.
As soon as you're looking at the features on the fancy smart whiteboard that you're using, You lose that thread of momentum of trying to think big thoughts.
That's because really hard-focused thinking gets your entire mind oriented around this one thing you're doing and you're holding the relevant variables and information in your working memory and using those to try to move forward down the path of critical, intense cognition.
As soon as you start messing with that context and putting other stuff into those working memory variables, once you start loading up other context in your brain, you lose that thread.
The proverbial man falls off of the high wire.
So I think this is a really cool idea.
And so if we're going to make this suggestion systematic, what is Philip actually suggesting here?
For intense deep work.
Have unrelated sessions not touching the deep work session for preparation and fiddling?
So, if you're a programmer, have a session where you're looking at your code and formatting things and reminding yourself of like, where you're going to write and where you need to write the new section of code.
If you're a writer, you have everything set up.
This is a good time to get your research in order.
You could have a session where you find okay, what are all the articles I'm going to need to cite for these next few paragraphs?
I'm going to write for this magazine, article.
Let me go get those and put them nicely into the system and pull out the quotes.
And then you're done with that and you're done with that.
And then later you sit down to write code and that's all you do.
Later you sit down to write the paragraphs of that magazine article and everything's there, and that's all you do.
I think that's a really good strategy when it comes to particularly intense, deep work.
So I like that.
Unstructured, preparatory, deep life.
All right, cool.
So now we got a question from James.
Maybe that's what I saw, Jesse, when I called you Jamie.
I saw James on the next page.
All right, next question is from James.
When I started college, I had a clear major in mind, but quickly changed to another subject that I find more interesting.
But I'm constantly thinking about what else I could do.
More recently, I'm thinking about getting into a completely different field.
I daydream about it frequently and often find the possibility very exciting.
I'm worried I'm going to fall into a pattern of forever quitting.
Well James, I can say there's all sorts of alarm bells that are going off right now as I read your question.
You, my friend, are deeply tangled into what we call the passion mindset.
This terminology is from my 2012 book So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was basically a book all about this issue that you're facing right now.
In fact, the motivation for that book was dealing with college students switching their majors all the time.
So we're really in the territory that I spent a lot of time thinking about.
So what is this passion mindset?
It's the mindset that says you should focus a lot on what the current thing you're doing, whether it is an academic major as a student or a job as a non-student.
You should focus on what the current thing you're doing offers you.
And you should be really worried.
Is it offering me enough, Or is something else going to offer me even more?
So am I loving this major or would that major, I'm really going to enjoy that more?
Is this job really letting me, is it giving me the things I really love to work on?
Or would another job, have a different setup, where I would get even more excitement out of it or even more fulfillment out of it?
So it's constantly thinking me, me, me.
What's being offered?
What could offer me more?
This is a very dangerous mindset, especially when it comes to your professional life.
So beginning with the majors you choose and then with the jobs you choose after that.
And it's dangerous for exactly the reason that you are experiencing in your own life.
Because the answer to what is this offering me is always less than something else could be.
And so if you're a student, you're going to start changing your major.
Why are you changing your major?
Because what happens is as you move through your major, the courses get harder.
Harder courses are less fun.
And then your mind says, this must not be my passion.
Let's switch.
And guess what?
The new major is going to get hard too.
And you say, well, this is not really my passion, but maybe this one is.
Same thing will happen in your job.
I don't really love this, and I'm spending a lot of time doing this, which is not my favorite.
I really want to have more autonomy.
I'm going to quit.
Let me try this one.
Well, this is not quite it either, but that job is going to be the key.
It's constant anxiety that you are not doing the right thing which leads to constant quitting and shifting, which has all sorts of negative consequences.
What you need to do instead, James, is lifestyle-centric career planning.
We talk about this all the time.
But you fix a clear vision of what you want your life to be like five or ten years from now.
This is a vision that captures all aspects of your life, and it is visceral.
What does it feel like?
Where are you?
What do you see?
What do you hear?
What's the rhythm of your day-to-day life?
It's not just work, but what's happening in your life outside of work.
What when you see in a magazine or a documentary or a book has resonated with you.
Oh, I want that in my life.
I want that in my life.
You want this really clear vision of the aspects of your ideal lifestyle five to 10 years from now.
And then you work backwards from that and say, how do I move my life in that direction?
When you're doing lifestyle-centric career planning, you're freed from the pressure of.
All that matters is what I choose to do professionally.
That is the sole arbiter of how happy I feel, how fulfilled I feel in my life.
Your work instead becomes instrumental.
It's one of the levers you have to pull to move yourself closer to your ideal lifestyle.
And once you start seeing your major and then the work that your major enables through this lens, you become less worried about.
Is this the right thing for me?
Because what is the right thing for you now?
It is something I can leverage to get closer to my ideal lifestyle.
Not is it perfect?
Not is it my passion?
So now you can apply the alternative to the passion mindset to your work, which is what in my book I call the craftsman mindset.
So if the passion mindset says, what does this job offer me?
The craftsman mindset says instead, what can I offer this job?
And it turns your focus towards how do I get better?
How do I get more invaluable?
How do I make myself indispensable?
How do I build up what I call in my book career capital?
The metaphorical substance you acquire as you become better and better at things that are rare and valuable, because that is your leverage to shape your life.
That is your leverage to shape your work towards the things that resonate and away from things that don't.
That's the thing that allows you to shape your work towards what's going to get you closer to your ideal lifestyle.
What can I offer my job?
What can I offer my professors in my classes?
How can I stand out?
How can I be the best in this class?
That is the route to building a fulfilling life.
Now, it's really hard, right?
Because you have to put your head down and do really good work and build up career capital.
Then have the courage to leverage that capital and not just follow the expected path that that career path has.
You have to have clarity and vision about what you want your life to be like.
But it frees you from the high stakes decision of one choice what I do for my major, what I do for my work.
It frees you from that one choice somehow being all important.
Once you have a vision for your ideal lifestyle, there are any number, any number of different professional paths you could use as the foundation for building yourself closer to that goal.
The choice doesn't matter that much.
What happens is what you do once you actually have that work.
Now one thing I might suggest.
If this is troublesome to you right, because you're young, when you're young, you haven't lived that long as an adult yet.
So every year feels like a big portion of your life.
If you're having a hard time with this idea of I just took this major, this major is going to lead to this job.
It's going to take me a couple of years to build up some career capital here.
If that feels stultifying to you, you can be focusing during this period of heads down craftsman mindset in your job.
You can be putting a lot of attention to the other parts of your life as well.
And turning those towards the remarkable.
You know, maybe you're hiking all of the high peaks in the White Mountains or you're training for some sort of athletic event, or you get really into movies or building up some sort of community center.
You can find other aspects of your life that you can push towards the remarkable much quicker, while going through that slow.
I'm 23 and just building up my reputation and skills phase of your professional life.
But the key here is to be working backwards from a vision and applying a craftsman mindset to get yourself forward towards that goal.
And you've got to escape this passion mindset.
The grass will always seem greener.
But the thing is, if you keep hopping fences to the next field, you never have time to actually enjoy the ground that's right there under your feet.
I actually did some events, Jesse, up at Dartmouth this summer on So Good They Can't Ignore You.
But it's been a while since I really got into that career mode.
But there's a couple events I did where that's what they wanted to talk about.
There's a lot of people.
And one grad student there had this great old copy of So Good, They Can't Ignore You, where the cover had faded so much that you could barely see the words on it.
That's great.
I signed it.
I was like, yeah, that's it.
And he still was like, look, I've been using this for the last decade to shape my life.
Did you have to read the book again to remember all the key ideas?
I remembered it.
I even did an event on one of my student books.
Those are getting pretty old now.
Now we're talking 2005, 2006.
Yeah.
I remembered, though.
I was going to say, that could count for one of your five books a month.
Yeah.
How to win at college.
Yeah, that's going to count as one of my five books.
Oh, I can't go back and reread my own books.
All right.
Let's do a couple more.
What else do we got here?
Next question is from Agent30.
I graduated with an MA about five years ago, but despite some good interviews, I haven't been able to land a job in my field and have therefore spent the last five years consistently underemployed.
Since discovering the ideas associated with the deep life, I've been trying to pursue my goals in a more disciplined way, focusing on methodically progress, progressing and skill building.
However, I feel like my mind doesn't fully trust the approach based on slow productivity because, in the back of my mind, I feel like it's going to come too little, too late.
Well, okay.
I'm worried here as well, because I'm seeing hints of the same passion mindset that we were talking about with the last question.
So I looked at the extended version of your question.
What I learned from it is this last five years where you've been trying to methodically progress and skill build.
You have been pursuing those five years.
What you've been methodically building towards is this idea of some sort of ideal job that matches your academic training.
And you have this vague idea that I have this arts degree.
I should be in some sort of arts job, because that's why I got this degree and I don't want to go to waste.
What I'm going to say is that's not working.
There isn't an easily accessible ideal job for you.
You've spent five years trying to do it.
So the slow productivity approach here is not be slow in terms of trying to find work.
The slow productivity approach.
That's a mindset that says when you're working on specific accomplishments, be okay with that taking time.
Make steady progress on it, work at a natural pace.
Try to make it really good.
But when it comes to finding a job, you need a job.
Now I think lifestyle-centric career planning is going to help you here remove the concern about just finding a job that works, because what you really need here is something that is going to reward career capital if and when you build it with autonomy and opportunities.
There are many different jobs.
You have a master's degree, so you're just generally an educated person.
There's many different jobs you can likely find that will offer you those attributes.
They might not have any connection to the specific art topic you studied, but there's something that you can use as a foundation towards building towards your ideal lifestyle.
So I would say right away, blank slate, five-year lifestyle.
What are all the aspects?
Nail that down.
Next, figure out okay of jobs that are actually accessible to me now, which is going to be the best foundation on which to build towards this ideal lifestyle.
Keep it in mind, it might have nothing to do with your degree.
And then you need to get into that job.
It's going to take you one or two years probably, of heads down, craftsman mindset, career capital acquisition, skill building.
This is where you put in this energy, not trying to find a job.
Not trying to make yourself generally useful to the job market.
It's once you have a job.
Once you actually have a job that is going to reward you becoming so good you can't ignore you with more autonomy and opportunities.
That's where you put your head down, because you can very specifically be building the exact skills that that job will specifically.
You have evidence for reward.
So we've got to leave the passion mindset of like if I just keep working on my skills and trying, I'll find this perfect job and get a job and then kill that job.
And when I say kill it, I mean kill it at that job.
Do really well.
And use that as leverage to get towards an ideal lifestyle.
So you really should have a five-year plan here, where the next two years in your professional life are becoming undeniably great at something that you do not sweating what that thing is.
And again, like I talked to you with the last person in the last question, You can outlet some of this deep life energy towards other aspects of your life relevant to your vision of the ideal lifestyle, parts of your life that have nothing to do with your work.
Focus on those as well, so you don't feel like you're just confining your world to just being very reliable and good and learning the specific skills that a particular company needs.
You can work on these other aspects of your life as well.
But you need a job.
You need a job before slow productivity matters.
You need a job before becoming so good.
You can't ignore.
You makes sense, because there's got to be someone who's paying attention.
There's got to be someone that is looking at and cares about how well you're actually doing.
So find a good enough job and start moving today towards your five-year vision of a more ideal lifestyle.
All right, let's do one more question, Jesse.
I think we have time.
Yep.
Next question is from Anu.
What advice would you give to people with depression so they can realistically reach their goals for a deep life?
Well, Anu, it's a good question.
I've talked to multiple people about this, not on the show, but over email.
The first caveat, of course, is this is not my area of expertise.
So whatever advice I give here is not going to apply to everyone.
So take that.
Take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt.
All right.
First thing first, before you get into any specifics about the deep life or how you want to go through a reinvention of your life.
If you're dealing with depression symptoms, you want professional help for it.
Depressive symptoms are often the result of disordered thinking, disordered thinking about yourself and your life.
Ruminations that happen with an intensity and anxious ferocity that they're not easily tamed.
Ruminations that have become so draining and anxiety producing that they ultimately begin to short circuit the circuits of your brain that give you excitement or hope or energy.
So they put in their place a sort of severe a hedonic stupor.
This is really a difficult thing to deal with just on your own.
Therapy helps you fix this.
Let's start reordering your thinking.
Let's start moving the ruminant pathways out of their deep grooves so that we can begin to rebuild some of these other circuits that allow for other types of more hedonic subjective experience.
So you need professional help with that.
And you want to get that help as the foundation for anything else.
All right.
So let's put that, let's assume that you're doing that.
What I've heard from other people who deal with various mental health issues of this type is that the deep life, the way we talk about it here on this show, is actually pretty useful.
It's actually pretty useful because the way we talk about the deep life on the show is very structured and process-based.
And what's difficult if you're coming from a place of depression or just from a hard time, is if you have a definition of success.
If your definition of what you're trying to do is based on either a really positive subjective feeling like I just want to feel great.
Or very concrete accomplishments.
You know like I just want to be the best and win and get the best job and have all the money and I'm just going to feel good every time I have that accomplishment.
That's a really bad yardstick, especially if you're dealing with something like depression, because.
You're not going to feel good or you will sometimes, but it's often out of your control.
And if that's the goal you're looking for, then it's just going to create more rumination.
Well, why don't I feel good?
And if you need very particular types of really intense professional accomplishments well, that's really hard too, because those are hard to get.
And actually if you're depressed they can be even harder to get because it's you know the amount of just I'm willing to just do 15 hours a day becomes really difficult when you have anything else difficult going on in your mind.
So then you're going to be self-recriminating and that'll make it worse.
The deep life structure, by contrast, is not about a specific feeling or a particular accomplishment.
It's about intention.
Let's build up some regular discipline in our life in an attractable way.
Once we have this regular discipline in our life, let's get in touch with what really matters to us and have a code by which we live, through good times and bad.
So even just at that layer of the deep life stack this already is a big deal for a lot of people who are adrift in the shallows and also dealing with mental health issues is having a code that you believe in, that is grounded in your moral intuitions, that says this is what we do, even when times are bad, and we can have pride in that.
It's incredibly powerful. as opposed to, why don't I just feel good?
All right, then as we move up the stack, well, you get to something like control.
I just have control over what's on my plate, so I don't feel disorganized and anxious.
That's useful.
More importantly, the automation and curtailing aspects of control allows you to say you know what this is a hard time coming.
And people I know who are dealing with depression often talk about waves.
You feel it coming on, and then there could be an extended period that you didn't leave from.
If you have the control stack in place when you feel a wave coming on, this is going to be a hard winter.
You have the levers to pull, to pull back from things in a way that's going to make things more tractable.
Okay.
I need to... Catherine May wintering mode here.
Let me pull back.
Pull this back.
Stop doing this.
You have that control allows you to pull back in a systematic way.
Very useful when you have up and down mental states.
And then finally get to that plan for the remarkable.
Just... building things in your life that are remarkable, regardless of how you feel.
It gives you a sense of efficacy, gives you a sense of autonomy and adds really interesting self-initiated, persistent sources of value into your life that themselves are like a beacon that shines bright amidst the dark fog, which is the depressive syndrome.
So I think all aspects of the deep life stack can be really useful to work through, even if depression is an issue. take longer maybe than someone that's, you know, all Adderall and focused and high energy and whatever.
Sure, who cares?
Takes the time it takes.
And you have to take breaks from it and come back to it.
Fine, do that.
I don't care.
But you're slowly building these stacks and then working your way through them again and again.
I actually think it's quite compatible.
It's quite compatible with a systematic response to these all too common types of mental health issues.
So keep with it.
Take your time, but keep with it.
I think you are going to find it beneficial in combination with professional help.
All right, so what I want to do next, that's a good place to end it on the questions.
In the final segment today, I want to do a cover reveal for my new book, Slow Productivity.
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All right, let's get back to this classic episode of the podcast.
All right, Jesse, I want to talk briefly about my upcoming book.
The title is Slow Productivity.
The subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.
It comes out in March 2021.
I wanted to talk about the cover.
I put this in my email newsletter, but we haven't talked about it yet on the show.
So I'm going to load up on the screen for those who are watching.
And again, if you're listening, go to the deeplife.com slash listen.
This is episode 263.
You'll link to the video below.
All right.
So I've loaded on the screen here, the cover of my new book.
So what you'll see if you're listening is this is not like the covers of my past books.
You think about deep work.
If you think about A World Without Email, the two other books I've written about the world of work, it's big fonts on a sort of solid color background.
Those are books aimed at the world of business.
We're going to look at ways that technology has broken the world of business and how you should rethink business to get around these shortcomings.
This book.
What we see is a mountain range and a wooded pine forest, with a path going through it leading its way up to a cliffside cabin, overlooking a scenic mountain range.
It's a very different look.
Have I showed you this yet, Jesse?
Have you seen this one?
Yeah, I saw it because you mentioned it, and then I went and checked it out.
Yeah.
So what's going on here?
This is a more aspirational, a more human cover.
I thought I'd talk a little bit about it.
I see this book Slow Productivity as being a part of a more general movement in the book world right now to reimagine productivity.
Reimagine productivity and move it towards what I call humanistic productivity.
So there's a genre of thinking and books that have emerged on what I call humanistic productivity.
Now, what does humanistic productivity mean?
Well, first of all, it says, what's the definition, the general definition of productivity?
It's the general arrangement of efforts, the general arrangement of your efforts, with some intention in mind.
So productivity in its most general sense is I do stuff all day.
Let me have some way of organizing these efforts towards some sort of intentional goal.
Now, humanistic productivity believes if you don't do any such thinking, you don't end up someplace good.
You don't end up relaxed.
You're going to be prone to two major sources of negative well-being.
The first is in the professional sphere, reactive busyness.
So if you say I just hey man, I don't do productivity, you're going to get swallowed into a whirlpool of reactive busyness.
Oh, my God, everyone has emailed me all the time, and the faster I answer, the more they come out.
And there's all these Zoom meetings and my God, everything is crazy.
You're not relaxed.
You get supercharged busyness.
And in your life outside of work again, if you're like I just man, I just chill you're very prone to get swallowed in a whirlpool of supercharged distraction.
And next thing, you know you're up to 3 am yelling at white supremacists on Twitter while building your underground bunker because of catastrophe 7 through 11 that's going to hit and destroy the earth in the next three weeks.
So just saying I don't think about this stuff man, is going to make you vulnerable to so many negative things.
So you need some sort of notion of productivity.
Here's how I arrange my efforts with some intention in mind.
But what humanistic productivity recognizes is that we can't leave this decision to the 2005 version of Merlin Mann right.
We can't leave this decision to the people online who spend all day trying to build their hyper-optimized system so that you can have algorithmic support for generating your task list.
Optimization, synced Zettelkasten, whatever complexity, right.
Because that's just exhausting and it's turning humans into widget grinders.
So the sweet spot in productivity thinking is saying how do I intentionally organize my efforts in a way that the entire goal is to support my humanity, to support a richer, fuller human life?
That's humanistic productivity.
Grounding productivity thinking in the pursuit of a richer, sustainable, fuller human life.
So there's a lot of books in this genre.
I think we could go back.
I'll list a couple that I think all belong to this humanistic productivity genre.
I think Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek is an early example of this genre, perhaps.
He was coming in and saying, let's completely rethink work.
Let's completely rethink work as this huge means to an end, the end being all these other things that make a good life good.
And if we can be very clever about how you set up your work and how you automate it, let's just reduce the footprint and just make it this money engine that produces just enough proverbial horsepower that you can study tango in Buenos Aires.
I think Gregory McKeown's Essentialism is another book in this category.
It's about how do you sort of intentionally and aggressively take stuff off your plate.
So it understands that at the core of any humanistic productivity philosophy is avoiding overload.
You have Jenny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing and Celeste Hanley's Do Nothing.
I think both those books are also really in this space.
Jenny is embracing a notion of productivity in which you are moving away from activity, that you are purposely resisting a push towards activity as a way of reconnecting with values that aren't based off of action.
Do Nothing, I think is a little bit more Celeste's book's a little bit more approachable, a little bit less academic, but again about reorienting a productive life away from quantity of activity, quantity of accomplishments.
I think Oliver Berkman's book, 4,000 Weeks, is another great example of this genre.
It's a definition of productivity that's based on being completely fine with the fact that you can't do most things.
So why squeeze in a few more things?
Most things you can't do anyway.
So what's the point of overloading yourself?
You're still not doing most things.
So why not just accept that and be happy with the things you are doing and the opportunities you do have?
Slow productivity.
My new book is sort of in that same genre.
That was sort of a more humanistic approach to productivity.
So it's slow productivity.
I don't want to get into details now.
We've got plenty of time for that as we get closer to the book.
And also I talk about it all the time on the show, but the cover looks like the way it looks because this is a book about refinding your humanity in a world where the definitions of productivity that dominate in the world of work in particular are based on this inhuman, unstoppered busyness.
This more is better than less.
It's up to you to decide how much work you do, but more is better than less.
You go make these decisions every day.
And it's this exhausted, self-recriminating, sort of terrible way to organize work.
This is a more humanistic alternative.
That's why I say the lost art of accomplishment without burnout.
How do we do things we're proud of without having to be completely burnt out and overloaded?
So anyways, to indicate this is not just a business book.
Here's another way that tech is corrupting the world of work and how to sidestep that to avoid the negative impacts.
It's also a book about refining your humanity.
And it's within that tradition.
And so I think this cover, I think, captures that. more of that feel.
That's what I'm trying to capture here.
Not to say there's no technology in this book.
Look, I'm a CS professor at a famously liberal arts humanistic university.
So most of my work, one way or the other, is about ways tech is having these impacts and how we refine our humanity.
And yes, at the core of this book there is the story early on is the way that technology subverted these creaky definitions of productivity we had in office work, and technology blew them up.
And that's why everyone's burning out.
So there's technologies at the core of the problem here, but the solution is very human.
And it's a book about refining what matters to you in your life.
And so I think that cover, you know, captures that more so than just slow productivity.
Huge text on a clean background.
So there you go.
I'm excited about this one.
You'll obviously hear more about it in the spring as we get closer.
But the cover's out there now.
It's on Amazon.
It's pre-orderable.
So I figured we would have a quick discussion.
Jesse, what I was deciding on with this book cover was either this cover, which is the scenic view, and the nice fonts.
The other cover I had in mind was I wanted to wear kind of like a fun vest cover, you know like a 1980s stand-up comedian, like a paula poundstone vest, and it would be me.
On the cover it's my arms crossed, like leaning back and kind of giving a giving a coy look.
Giving a coy look at the uh at the camera, or maybe like uh saying like just holding my chin, just looking at the camera, maybe like a quirky hat, yeah.
The other thing i was thinking like a, a bowler hat, Yeah.
The, the pipe from your French accent guy.
I have a pipe.
I was definitely thinking like loud vest, fun hat, pipe in a sort of silly or like you know.
Maybe you have my arms on my hips and sort of cocky my hips a little bit like.
So those are the choices.
I thought it was that.
The third choice was me in a turtle costume.
Just slow, you know.
So I was like, let's be on the nose here.
So it was going to be me in a turtle costume on all fours holding a day planner.
So that was like the more the on the nose option.
So it was me in a turtle outfit holding a day planner, option three.
Option two, me in a loud vest and a funny hat and a pipe in a sort of a quirky position.
So, you know, it's a hard choice, but hopefully we made the right one.
Yeah, hopefully.
All right, so there you go.
That was a classic episode of the Deep Questions podcast, one of the most popular we've ever done.
I think that advice holds up.
There's other stuff I would say.
I might do some future Deep Life episodes in the near future as I work on my book.
So stay tuned to see how my thinking has evolved.
But I'll stand by any of those ideas.
If it works for you, if it resonates... give it a try.
So I hope you enjoyed that blast in the past.
You can find the video, just search for this same title of the audio podcast.
You'll find that video on YouTube.
It's pretty popular.
And otherwise we'll see you next week with a new episode of the show.
But until then, as always stay deep.
Hi, it's Cal here.
One more thing before you go.
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