#568: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

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I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and doscelling. Me. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is a very well caffeinated Tim Ferris, welcome once again to the Tim Ferris Show. My guest today is

Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems and While his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology, Newport is the author of seven books.

That's a lot of books, man. Including most recently Deep Work. Digital minimalism and a world without email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get. So much done. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions Podcast. You can find him online.

Uh Cal newport dot com and there are a number of things conspicuously absent. From this bio and Thank you so much, Cal, for sending me an elegant streamlined bio. I sometimes get five or six pages that need to get cut down dramatically. So welcome to the show. Nice to see you, Cal. Thanks for having me.

I thought We would start. Where so many good things start, and that is with Steve Martin. You have written about Steve Martin.

before on your blog. You are prolific. on your blog, which I very much appreciate since that's where I started as well in the blogosphere. What are some of your favorite lessons or any lessons that come to mind? for you from Steve Martin. And he's fresh on my mind because

I had Covid recently. And while I was recovering, I was watching comedians in cars getting coffee in one of my favorite episodes. Was with Steve Martin. So let's start there. I'll pass the mic over. Martin was a big influence on me.

early on in my career because of that book he wrote, because he wrote his memoir. Born Standing Up, which was a professional memoir. The whole point of the book, the way he explained it in interviews, was I wanted to actually capture how I got from nothing to being a very well known and influential comedian, I didn't want to skip the steps. He complained a lot of

Celebrity biographies would sort of skip the interesting part that one day they would just be playing at the Copa and say, How did they get there? So he wrote this professional biography. It came up Might have been two thousand seven, two thousand eight, somewhere in there. I was a young grad student then. I had started grad school around Two thousand four, two thousand.

before two thousand five. So I was at MIT. I was blogging. I was writing books. I was doing research. And that book was very influential to me. Mm. part and maybe mainly due to something he never actually said in the book. But he said in a Charlie Rose interview about the book.

Where Charlie was asking him, like, Well what's your What's Boil it down. What's your advice? What's your advice for aspiring entertainers? And Martin said, I always tell them the same thing. And it's never what they want to hear. They always want to hear, here's my tips for finding an agent. Here's my way f tips for

doing an in run around the typical pipeline. He says my advice instead is always Be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come. That was his advice. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I mean, I remember at this time as a young scholar second third year PhD student, I published some books. I was thinking up all sorts of schemes.

Well, how do I market my work? How do I have a new angle on research that people haven't seen? How do I maybe if I write in a cross-discipline way no one else is doing, and that hit me like a lightning bolt. It was basically saying, actually wait first. Just do really good work. And that's hard. You're probably not that good yet. And you need to practice and get a lot better.

That became the foundation for almost everything else that happened in my professional life and so much of what I wrote about. I owe him quite a bit for that inspiration. So let's use that as a segue into focusing not just on what you do, but also perhaps

Beginning to touch on what you don't do. Just as with Steve Martin, a lot of what I find fascinating, or some of what I find fascinating about you is what is absent. Sort of like the uh the case of the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes, right? Really paying attention to absence sometimes. And

For those people who have heard a lot of bios on this podcast, social media handles are not Prevalent in your bio, among other things. We don't have to But I think it's not a good thing Let's Perhaps start with

your definition of the deep life, this phrase, this term. Could you just Unpack that. for us and and tell us what that means to you and what the constituent parts are. The term the deep life is something that emerged in the early pandemic, though the

Ideas and sentiment had been around for a long time in my writing. The pandemic hits. And I make a lot of changes. Suddenly I'm not seeing my readers. I'm not seeing my students. Much more isolated. And I began a podcast so I could connect to people and I went on a heroic

one month period where I wrote a an essay every day. And the whole direction what I was writing about shifted pretty dramatically. I mean I was in the At that point, I was finishing up a a business book, a book about communication in the business world, and I'd been writing much more about the impact of tech on business at that time. I was sort of on a roll with that.

And suddenly I found myself in my writing and in major segments of the podcast, like talking about Life. And building a life of resilience and meaning and depth. And that is where this term, the deep life, came up. I my audience just really was interested in this. And we in a symbiotic fashion really began to work out

what we meant by it, but at at a high level. The deep life is a term for one of these things. We all know it when we see it. We just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that It resonates. It feels authentic and interesting and resilient.

that they're not the type of person who's gonna look back at the end of their life and say, What did I do? We as humans have a deep craving for that. But we often suppress that craving because it's complicated and we don't know what to do about it. And we don't have a lot of cultural support for this idea of crafting a deeper life right now. That's not where the cultural pressures are. So we kind of avoid it and look for the short term Burst of

good chemicals, a short term burst of I feel good about this. I got a like on this, this beer makes me feel good, or whatever it is. And we've put it aside. And so I tried to excavate it. I think the disruption of the pandemic cleared aside a lot of the noise. And I've been working on that. It's one of the things I've been talking about quite a bit is Systematically speaking. Let's put like a like a Cal Newport overly systematic nerd computer science brain to this. Can we break down what the deep life is?

How you get there. what you need to do, what you don't need to do. And it's really emerged as something I've thought a lot about. We may take a bit of a boomerang path to come back to that, but I think A lot of these.

Topics will intersect. So I wanna go back In time. A bit. So we were just talking about pandemic. Let's go. Much further back.

And part of the reason I want to do that is These days say if Someone comes up to me on the street, it's Nine times out of ten. About the podcast.

And Let's call it In two thousand ten, two thousand twelve. If someone emailed me it would have been about tech investing in startups.

But My career at least. in any credible sense. I didn't start with that. And really it was the four hour work week that put me on

Any map. To speak of. One of my employees Knows you and got to know you. Through.

Study hacks. And he moved from overseas to Canada to university. He went from skating through high school because there really wasn't much required. to getting his first Fs.

And was Panic stricken because he needed to correct course. Ended up Finding steady hacks, your work and transformed himself into an A student.

Yeah. Is that Where you first found your groove, would you say, in terms of public audience and feeling some momentum in your career, or was it before or after that?

Right. It's a good history to get into that my my initial books, the first three books I wrote. were aimed at students. There are books roughly speaking of student advice though the third one touch on in a second began to veer away from that. And actually that third book intersected with you in a in a way that you may not remember, but I I think I wrote an essay for your blog back then about one of the ideas. But I started with student books and my blog in the early days was called Study Hacks because it was advice for students and the

The backstory on that Is As a high school student. during the late nineties.

I had started a dot com company. This was the first dot com boom. No one really understood this technology. So there's this brief period where we thought that uh if you're young That must mean that you really know about tech in a way older people didn't. So it's like a brief moment of insanity. They would give 17 year olds tens of thousands of dollars to do things we didn't know how to do. But as an effect of that, I was a seventeen year old. Who knew the business and productivity section of Barnes and Noble very well.

So I was reading business books and productivity books because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Then I went to college. And I'm, you know, I'm I'm taking on student loans. I I wanna do well. I'm I'm trying to take my my college career seriously. And I said, great, let me go. Two Barnes and Noble and Get the books about here's how the top student study so I can

Figure this out just the way I bought. a David Allen book or a Stephen Covey book to figure out how to do business stuff. And those books weren't really there back then. There was a a sense in the publishing industry back in the nineties that you had to be quote unquote cool.

or students would reject the book. And in that effort they accomplished the opposite. So it's all these books with like kooky people on the covers and it's all about, you know, your crazy roommate and how to deal with the dorm food. And and I just had this idea. I was like, look, what we need to do is write a book for college students who want to know how to do well. Exactly like a business book. This this doesn't exist. Don't try to talk about naked roommates and dorm food. Just be like here's how the top students do. Don't talk about the naked roommates. That's more of a show-down tell kind of situation.

Uh and so that's what got me started. So I had this idea and I was a writer in college. I was doing computer science and I was also writing and you know, I was the editor of the humor magazine. I was a columnist for the newspaper. I was really into actually humor writing. But I could write. I'd train myself to write in college. And I was uh in New York. And hanging out with an entrepreneur friend of mine and he's like, Well stop talking about just write the damn book.

So I was like, Okay, we'll figure that out. And then I figured out how to you know, it's not that hard to figure out. I I in a sort of uh a Tim Ferrisian style. I I found an agent and said, Look, I I don't want you to be my agent. I want you to just teach me how this whole industry works. I want you to teach me how can a 20 year old get a book deal. There's a very narrow path you would have to navigate as a twenty year old to get a book deal. And she laid it out for me and it has to be a book about students and you have to know how to write. And we figured it all out. And I literally pause you for one second. Did she end up becoming your official agent or not?

No, I was true to my word. No, she was a fiction agent. Right. Now my memory was this was actually She was an agent who represented, I think maybe Anne Patchet. Like very well respected. I might have that wrong, but that was my my memory was like Bel Canto had come out around this time. So I want you to don't lose track of this timeline, but How did you get her? Attention, why would she take this time?

To sit with you. So this was a family connection. My memory was my uncle's a journalist and I said Would you be willing to connect me for a and again this was very Tim Ferris style the way I went around this. That's why I think we're sympathetic. Oh, y your book kind of come out yet, but it's very Tim Ferris style. I said, look,

One hour, I just want to talk to them on the phone. I do not want them to be my age and I'm not gonna try to sell myself to them. I just feel that I need to understand. the landscape. I'm not gonna be able to navigate this because it's too atypical. I'm too young. I'm gonna be Ignored. I knew there'd be a narrow path. And so That's true to my word. And and so she was a fiction agent, so she wouldn't have been able to repres she wouldn't have represented me anyways.

That was my memory. So I was very clear. And you know what? She gave me the roadmap. She she told me like here is exactly what would you would have to do? Like um among other things, she said you have to go do commissioned writing. So I went out and started selling articles to these Midnight.

college focused websites and magazines so I could I could have commissions. Now is that important just to show that you're credible or that there is a market for your writing. Mm-hmm. They're gonna want writing samples and they wanted they're gonna want writing samples on the type of writing I was gonna do. And if I was gonna be writing a student advice book. I needed advice article. So I did that.

The second thing she said any agent would be worried about when I actually went to find an agent was is the content going to be good? And so what I did there is I sold a commission. For no money. two hundred dollars or something for a a nothing online college magazine. I don't even remember what it was. I use that commission.

to do all of my research for my first book. So I mean I I talked to because the first book I talked to a bunch of road scholars and Marshall scholars. Like the premise was I'm gonna talk to the best of the best and extract advice from them. And this article required me probably to talk to two people. And I talked to twenty. Yeah, just person after person. Oh, it's for an article. I'm writing this article. Can I can I interview interview for this article? And I had to figure out how to find them, but it turns out it's not hard. You look up press releases from colleges to to learn who had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship or a Marshall scholarship or a Truman scholarship.

And then you could often at this point email directories were private, but all you had to do was find the email address of any student on that campus. And then you said, Ah, there's the naming convention. you know, at Harvard, it's like firstname dot last name at FAS.harvard.edu. So then you could figure out How to get to them. And so I did All of the interviews for the first book. And then wrote out the whole annotated table of content. So I could come when I

started to talk to A just to actually be my agent, I could say I can write. Look, I'm an editor of a magazine at college. I write in the paper. Here's articles I've written for student advice. I have a good idea. Here is the whole thing laid out. And then the third thing I did is I I made the format of my first book as easy as possible. It was

Fifty short rules. Each with a contrarian title. each two to three pages long. So I mean the task is tractable. as possible. I was not going to try to do some sort of sophisticated take. And so all of those pieces came together.

And then the final piece was how do you find the right agent? And what I did there is I used the acknowledgement sections. Oh. Target books. to see when the author think they're agent. So I could see what agent was working on what book.

And I took the business book whose format I was completely copying for my student book. Found the agent of that book, wrote that agent and said, I want to do this book, but with student advice instead. Here's all the stuff. And she signed me right before our my twenty first birthday, and I've been with her for twenty years now, actually. So that's how that all started. That's amazing. So let's see. What year

Roughly would that have been. When you signed that. Uh agent. So this was two thousand three. So in the spring of two thousand three, if if my memory serves, I was twenty. I turned twenty one that June. I was a junior in college. I signed a contract, a book

I had pitched it as Conquer College. And the head of the agency said you can't have the hard K's right after each other. So we Uh we changed it to how to win at college. And I wrote it the fall of my senior year of college. I would just wake up early. And write for sixty to ninety minutes every morning.

I just would wake up and write for sixty, ninety minutes. The format of the book was perfect for it because you could do a draft of one chapter in sixty to ninety minutes. And that was that. And that book, I finished that book while while still at college and it it came out right after I graduated. I sold another book while still in college. So while that was still in production I upgrade it's like okay, I'm now gonna do a book with normal chapters. And this was how to become a straight A student. This this ended up becoming

Probably the the biggest of my student books. I had no idea how much it'd been selling in the background because it was never a big bestseller, but it I checked Last week. And that

Little book has sold like three hundred thousand copies. That's amazing. Which is With never selling more than a very small amount in any one week or month. It just Chugs along. So in that book what I did is I said okay, let's get past the more vague stuff. And I just talked to 50 straight A students and it was hardcore. Like this is how you take notes. For a math class, this is how you should study. For a An English class.

This is how you prepare for a blue book exam. It was just nuts. Here's how you manage your time. This was like one of the first books to seriously tackle time management for students and treat this as something you should do. And so I wrote that almost immediately and and and I submitted that right after I started grad school. So so by my first

year of grad school, I had one book come out and another book in the can. So I just sort of knocked those off real quick. I have many follow up questions. So a few observations. The first is you're you're mentioning that As a seventeen or eighteen year old. back in the the dot com boom and then subsequent busts you could get tens of thousands of dollars to try anything. I think we've learned our lesson because now you have to be at least twenty to get Hundreds of millions of dollars. So what could go wrong?

And Couple of other things that that just top to mind as I'm listening to this because it is kind of like deja vu all over again for me as well. There are a lot of similarities. And One does not tie in perfectly to your story, but when you Spoke to this first fiction agent.

To ask for advice. If you had not Promised. Actually, even if you had promised not to pitch yourself. I do wanna

mention that there's a saying, or there was, at least when I was there in Silicon Valley, if you want money, ask for advice. And if you want advice, ask for money. And that very often the indirect path. Can actually Reap. Dividends, right? In terms of asking.

for advice, which this did. It just did it in a in a in a in a more indirect fashion, right? It it kinda laid things out longitudinally. And then The other piece I wanted to To mention That I think it strikes me as important is that while you were in college, you created a book that was easy to read, but perhaps first and foremost, you created a book that You are capable of writing.

And that is why, for instance In the four hour body or other books, Twoles of Titans certainly I have written books in a modular way. Not just because it allows people to dip in and out in this choose your own adventure type of approach, but because it makes it easier for me to write.

Cause ultimately if the book doesn't get written, it doesn't matter how easy it is to read. And uh so that that also occurred to me, right? If you had chosen to try to reverse the order and write the Let's call them normal chapters instead of the two to three page. Chapters with principles. Maybe that first book Never would have been written. Just given the time constraints.

Right. Yeah, and and skill. I don't think I could have done it yet. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So this leads me to ask And we're gonna bounce all over the place'cause that is how my brain functions or malfunctions.

You graduate from college. What does your first six to twelve months look like out of college? I mean the two things I did in college is I wrote And I did computer science. I was like. Real computer guy.

I think we actually overlap when I was in high school, I went to high school in a small town near Princeton. And so I think This maybe even overlapped when you were there as an undergrad. I ran out of computer science to take and so I was taking computer science at Princeton in the university classes when I was still in high school. So I went to Dartmouth College. And

was really just doing very well into computer science. So I was really a like a locked in sort of computer science student. And so I I rolled right out of Dartmouth into MIT. What type of focus did you have within computer science? Where were you most interested in and focused on? As an undergrad, it's just you're learning everything. The research I was doing as an undergrad was more network systemsy, and I made a big leap when I

went to MIT. You know, you you interview the way it works is uh potential PhD advisors, you go and you meet with them and and then they they if essentially make you offers. I'm gonna make you an offer to come join my group. And so you go and meet with them, and it was mainly the systems. oriented professors who were meeting with me. But I had been a real big fan, you know, I wrote uh of a Richard Feynman. I'd read like the James Galik biography genius. I was a fan of John von Neumann. of Einstein, I had in my mind just this this image of

mathematical research of standing at a whiteboard and proving a proof. It just was incredibly romantic for me, even though math wasn't really considered my strong suit. And so there was one theory professor Who said I need a systems person.

To come to my group to help build wireless network systems. And I had done wireless network research. So I I went to her group. And then just pulled a fast one and just immediately started trying to write theory papers and became a theoretician. And so, you know, I haven't programmed a computer since I arrived since 2004 when I left school and went to MIT. I joined a theory group at MIT. and um uh have been a theoretician ever since. So I I haven't touched a computer since really. All right. So if we if we look at programming

Though and we look at writing prose. If we look at poetry. There are some similarities. Right. And depend it depends on who you talk to, of course. But I I think of for instance

An artist Named Dmitry Cherniak, who works in Generative art. predominantly at the moment.

And He put up a post recently on Twitter where he showed a screenshot of his code and he said, This is my art. So It's

you can strive for and find elegance and beauty in all of those different domains. So there's perhaps more overlap than one might expect, at least from a first principle's perspective. You mentioned In passing. And I trained myself to write.

In college. I wanna hear more about that. Because I I would imagine it wasn't the sloppy ad hoc. approach just given what I think I know of you. How did you train yourself to write?

One of the things I always tell people, because it was my experience, is that In order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing. Like if you want to get better at writing fast. You have to be writing for editing. And you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections.

Because writing is one of these things where everyone can do it well enough that if you're mainly just writing on your own, so I'm writing in a journal. I'm writing a blog. I'm doing national novel writing month. It's just me, you know, working on my novel. You don't necessarily get that stretch. that's going to improve your skills. And so the thing that mattered for me is that I was writing for editing and for acceptance and rejection. For editing meaning writing for an editor, you have a reader. Mm-hmm. Yes.

an editor who's gonna edit it and also will reject it if it's not good. And so this is actually why writing for the the the humor publication was a big deal. You probably remember from your time in in Ivy League schools in particular, there's a real culture around humor writing because it used to be back in the days where everything was the the the sort of old Well, boys network, the vast majority of of comedy writers for shows like SNL or the Tonight Show, they were a lot, they were coming out of these Ivy League.

Humor society. What is the name of the humor magazine at Dartmouth? At Dartmouth, it's the uh the jack-o'lantern. The Jack O'Lantern and people may Have heard. The

term lampoon. The lampoon is is that of Harvard, and then you have the a number of different magazines in Princeton and so on. Yeah, exactly. And then they all have these huge old histories, you know, so like Dr Seuss did cartoons for the Dartmouth Jack'lantern in the nineteen twenties and So That's a very competitive world. You would pitch pieces. And if they were funny, they would go. So they would back then it would be you know print magazines. You would pitch pieces, and if they were funny enough, they would get in. If they weren't, they won it. It was just it was just starkly competitive.

And then I wrote a humor column for the paper, but it's the same thing. Become a column, they would say, no, no, no, yeah, we'll do that one, no, yeah, we'll do that one. And if you got five in the paper, You had the possibility of doing a columns. So I think that really stretched my skill. And that helped. That helped. And and you know, I'll say the two things that helped my writing the most.

to your original point here is A humor writing turns out to be Incredibly useful. for any type of writing because humor writing is all about the timing, the pacing, and the music of the words. You you have to replicate the timing of a Stand up comedian.

using grammar and word choice and having to get the right rhythm to set up the punchline way to beat and nail it. You have to do that all with words. That gives you an incredible facility with sentence crafting. And so I mean, I'll tell you like today as a writer for the New Yorker, where which is very craft focused, you know, they really care writing craft is a really big deal over at the New Yorker. The training I did

As a humor writer. is incredibly because you hear the words as music and the pausing and the rhythm. It's you you have to actually the performance of the reading You think a lot about it. And That actually really helps over there. And then mathematics, just like programming. That has been the other key to my success because if you do proofs, for example.

You develop this sense where uh it's not right. This doesn't work, the pieces don't fit. And then when the pieces fit, it's the course of angels, right? Like your mind is like I don't like when things don't quite fit. And when they do, it's dopamine coming out of your ears. It led to my style of writing, which is My advice rate is very intricate. you know, it's layout the generative theory that lays out these pieces and these pieces all fit together. And you might not notice it consciously when you read it, but part of the experience of my writing is that

All of the pieces I'm laying out there all click together. into a hole where everything fits nicely and this is symmetric with this and this makes sense here and nothing is hanging out and it it reduces this cognitive drag that happens sometimes when writing's a little bit less the ideas are a little bit less formed and it makes it harder to write. But I think that's been a A bit of a secret sauce in my work is that it's it's cognitively pleasing. Because your brain appreciates the fact that

sort of nerdishly and obsessively all the pieces actually fit together. So a few things. Number one, I think we might have to call this podcast Cal Newport A Course of Angels. That's that may be where we go with this. Just to get people in the door and uh The second Is

what you're talking about in terms of symmetry and structure, if anybody listening is interesting in exploring that further. There's a book called Draft Number Four. By John McFee, who's a staff writer. at the New Yorker and just a

Behemoth. Of a craftsman. And really really thinks about structure a lot and lays out structure pieces graphically So draft number four.

Makes for A really fun read if you are willing to go into the weeds and be a super nerd when it comes to That type of topic. I want to ask you about humor writing. So I was

The graphics editor. So an illustrator and graphic editor at the Princeton Tiger. Which is Kind of the equivalent. Uh

The Jack Lantern. And Just a piece of trivia for people for whom this will make. Any sense. I took that job or I I applied to that job more accurately because

Jim Lee had previously held that post when he was a student, and Jim Lee at the time was one of my favorite comic book pencilers or Just beforehand had been one of my favorite comic book pencilers has had rebooted the X-Men. I think he's now at D C

Still need to get him on the podcast and I would sit at this desk And at Princeton there's this street called Nassau Street with all these Gigantic mansions called the eating clubs of different names and they all have their particular personalities. And you know, F Scott Fitzgerald was at Ivy over here and J F K was also at Ivy, and then th this person was at such and such. So it has this storied and bizarre history. But when

He would go out I don't think this is speaking out of school, it's pretty funny. People go out I wanna say it was Thursdays and Saturdays. And just get hammered. And I didn't get hammered too much, but I opened up the

drawer at one point of this desk and I found drawings that Chip we had done. Clearly when he had come back from being completely hammered. At least that was my impression. And I was like, oh my God, these are treasures. And I don't know if I ever told anyone about them because I didn't want them to disappear. They're like my little secret in this desk. But the reason I brought this up is that The head editor.

of the magazine at the time ended up shortly thereafter going and becoming the editor in chief of Maxim Magazine, which at the time was a very, very big deal. So it just kinda goes to show you how quickly you can jump. My question for you Is How one can practice humor writing. or cultivate an awareness of that timing and so on that you're talking about.

If they don't, and most people won't. Have access to working at such a magazine. Do you have any thoughts? It has to be for editing.

You have to find a place to submit with you. You need someone who can reject you and help you improve. You need someone who could reject you. Because it's like the little things matter. I w I would so one of the things like the Jack'lanter did is we would also do sort of Onion style. Once or twice a year fake newspaper. So there's a daily newspaper at at Dartmouth called the Dartmouth, and we would print a paper that was exactly the same format. we'd just change like the U to a V or something and we would put it in the machines where uh the regular newspaper was. But but it was all onion style. And

I was good at onion style stuff because there's a certain like dryness that has to work. And for whatever reason I have this memory. I I did a piece for it once and So timing matters. So I don't I don't remember exactly the title, but it was something like Team from Amish University places last at robotics competition. Ha ha

Right. Which you gotta just there's a straight laceness of it. And I and I remember I wrote this thing, I wrote it as a maybe a sophomore or something like this, and it was Just it had to be the exact rightness of drawing. And I remember the editor came in And added some extra things to it, like some quotes like, Oh, and then Jebediah said like I had I had made it really dry where I was trying to do it very repertorial style and it like at some point you've You figure out they put like tinfoil on a cat or something like it was something, but it was just it would be revealed very dryly.

And I just remember he added a few quotes from some of the people and I felt like the whole thing fell apart. You know. I was like, that's out of the character. You're breaking the dry net. Like there's a whole whatever. But the only way you're gonna get that type of fine tuning is

submit things, have it be rejected, have things be accepted and then Try to understand why The thing they added is ripping up your you're like, this is just I this is making me it's just not right. I think that really matters. And then the other thing for comedy writing is you have to consume a lot of stand up comedy, I think. You got to see the timing. The timing of the top stand up comedians.

is actually the foundation on which all human writing comes out of like at the time when I was doing my column for the paper My column I tried to ape. Dave Barry style. Yeah. I don't know if you remember Dave Barry.

He he wanna pull it, sir. For his his comedy column. That's incredible. Yeah. Incredible, yeah, but he was a timing guy. Dave Barry's great. Do you have any favorite books or if people wanted to start with something, do you have any suggestions? Uh just read his collections. He has it his collections are fantastic. Because his whole thing was to set up and then the ups then he would come in with the absurd

punch to the gut. He would set you up and be kinda dry. And the timing would be just right beat. And then something completely absurd. And then he would just keep rolling. So he'd he'd be writing about

It would be mundane, like people bring too much stuff on the plane to put into the overhead compartment. But I still remember at some point in his piece, there's people with full grand pianos and a uh, you know, such and such brand John Deere yard tractor that they're trying to get up there. It's like the precision and the absurdity that he just Boom, comes out of nowhere and hits you with it. That that has a good Simon Rich. is really good at that style. I don't know. Simon Rich is a Yeah, he's a younger guy.

He was at S N L. I believe. I think he's a Lampoon. So he came out the Lampoon, he's at S N L He does some shouts and murmurs for the New Yorker. That's hilarious. He's sort of the I think he's the modern young version of Dave Barry. It's a little edgier than Dave Barry is.

the absurdity and and what he does really well, not to geek out too much on on comedy writing, but he does the no, let's do it. Don't hold back. The amplification of absurdity. So he'll set up an absurd situation. He'll take it very seriously and he'll be very dry about it.

And it just the absurdity of what's going on increases and like the Simon Rich What he's really known for. is you end up in just like the most absurd places, but without ever losing the dryness. So he had this great piece during Covid about What should you do?

If you're like an advice call. Like what should I do if my kid's afraid of Monsters in the closet. At first it starts off with kind of reasonable advice. And then it becomes pretty clear that this column exists in a world in which there has been a portal that has opened up and like savage monsters are actually out there in the world and are coming in and taking and devouring children. And like by the end of the article, it's all about have your shotgun and you're explaining to your kid that you're gonna die for the cause as you leave, you know, the go fight the monsters that have been whatever. But he keeps the dry, all of that builds up within

the idiom of a Q and A advice column. And and it's great. I love it. And and in the end, the thing great thing about Simon, unlike Barry, is like it's actually a whole metaphor for like the stress and anxiety parents were feeling about COVID and how like we're trying to, you know, use the idioms of normal news while everyone's terrified. And so there's there's a there's a heart to it that was really sophisticated, but That's the dream. Maybe I should have done that. Well, never say never. I am gonna throw one more

Hat in the ring, and that is Bill Bryson. And for people who want a place to start a walk in the woods. Which is Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is just an outstanding, outstanding book. Also very, very good with timing. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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I I want to Perhaps just return to and I think these are related on on some level. A term that that I have in front of me, I suppose I'm coming back to it visually, I haven't mentioned it yet, but could you speak to slow productivity? And perhaps you could

speak to uh John Gribbin's book, The Scientists. You mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation. Because you you strike me also as kind of a proof case Or a test case. Of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you Just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you.

Well I mean I'll tell And this is literally true. What I was doing. In the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, it was it was in the other room in my office this year. With a notebook.

working on slow productivity, notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the the earlier stages and I had gone for a walk earlier. and had been developing some new thoughts and I wanted to get'em down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook as I was looking at the clock, like I got to get in to to talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean it's literally It's literally fresh in my mind. And and so That's a big caveat. That means this is not a fully baked idea. I love half baked ingredients or

Yeah, so the ingredients are swirling. So look here, I'll pitch you what I wrote down this An hour ago. So as of an hour ago. This is the way because I what I do when I'm thinking about ideas is I I try to basically

re pitch them out from scratch. And I do that again and again. And each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year. to get, for example, a book idea. ready to even propose. Like it's just this is the like we talked about the math mind. Like I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is

The problem itself. So here's the problem we're facing. The human brain is wired. It's Good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important. And it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. This is critical to humans, why we're different than a lot of animals. We can we can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good when we actually

You know, we need to fix the fence, we fix the fence, the cattle can't get out, we feel really good. The issue is If you don't do anything. Let's say I'm I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable. We know that. But if you put too much on people's plates.

So that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of assent to complete then you can easily conceive actually all getting done. you short circuit that drive. Just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat like a huge amount of junk food, it's short circuits to drive and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's gonna get done.

It makes us really unhappy because we're short circuiting a cognitive drive here and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed and it doesn't feel good. So we can't treat humans like we would a a computer processor. When a computer processor, you want to pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there. So that not a single cycle is wasted because you just wanna make sure that you always have something to do. But for the human brain. That huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done actually makes the brain unhappy.

Our solution to this type of overload, we have too much on our plate. in work and in our life admin as well. Our solution has been to to uh use Fast productivity. So fast productivity are are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks.

So how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about. Lower friction, easier access to information. Take out seven steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled. We want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks. My emerging concept of slow productivity says Shift that scale up to years, months and years.

I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain. Because now suddenly. Well I'm gonna try to do a lot less. The stuff I'm doing, I'm doing it on a a larger time scale. So maybe I'm

working a lot on it this week and then I go a month without doing it at all. And I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow. You have the seasonality up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. you get rid of the sense of overload because if you're want to produce, you know, a good book in the next two years. That's a very different set of initiatives than I want to do with many writerly related promotional things as possible this week. Like that latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment, and you tend to produce things of higher value because when you're just focusing on

Maximizing what you can do in the scale of Days or weeks. it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace we have to completely rethink.

Work allocation, our current mode of doing this is completely incompatible with slow productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say it's up to you to self regulate. And so You know, I had this New Yorker piece recently called Why Do We Work Too Much and I sort of make this argument in there that If we have to self regulate. We're just gonna end up with twenty percent too much on our plate. We're gonna let stress be the feedback function that slows us down. And in our personal lives, we probably

need to be doing significantly less, but the stuff we're doing do it better. And over longer time period. So I so There's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now, that this epidemic of busyness. I think is causing Issues.

because of its mismatch with our brain. And maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it. Let's look at some Beacons of hope, perhaps, but we're gonna we're gonna look at the ghosts of Christmas past first. So very briefly. In uh The Scientists by John Gribbin, you wrote

on your blog. This was twenty twenty one. I think it was uh towards the end of July that you're that you're reading his Magisterial Tom. I'm not quoting verbatim, the scientist. You're up to page one ninety, which is you're only up to Isaac Newton. Now I am gonna read. verbatim. Even early on I become intrigued by a repeated observation. Though the scientists profiled in Gribbin's book are highly productive in quotation marks by any intuitive definition of this term, the daily pace of their work was incredibly slow by any modern standards of professional. effectiveness and this comes then to I'm skipping ahead. What you just said.

When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the fame scientists in Gribbin's books seem spectacularly unproductive. Years would pass during which little progress was made on epic theories. Even during periods of active work, it might take months for important letters to induce a reply or for news of experiments to make it across a fractured Europe. Now I'm gonna ask you a follow up question on that piece. I'm only gonna read a little bit more. When we shift, however, to the slow scale of years, these same scientists suddenly become immensely productive. And Last line I'll read, no one remembers Newton's lazy lockdowns, but his Principia achieved immortality. And

I'll ask a few questions and then feel free to tackle them or answer a different question however you like. So the first is I would imagine some people hear this say That's great, but we just live in different times. Like we are contending with different problems.

and a volume of stimulation that these people could not even conceive of. And had there been TikTok and Twitter and so on, perhaps Newton never would have achieved anything. And that's why I wanted to just note that I want to ask about important letters taking months to induce a reply and so on. They had some inbuilt friction in the system that has been removed in certain ways. And you could perhaps reintroduce it. So the

question this leads me to which is really the real question is Are there any people who come to mind for you who are more contemporary? They could be dead, but let's just say within the last Twitter. who stick out

as being particularly good. That's slow productivity. It could be a category of person. But do we have a do we have any contemporary examples? There's a couple of places where we we still see a lot of slow productivity. So one is fiction writers. And in particular literary fiction writers, but also some genre fiction writers.

This is one of the few places where you're allowed to basically say, leave me alone. I'll come back when I have a book. And so if we look, for example, at Dave Eggers, the novelist Dave Eggers, he works in a house on a laptop that doesn't have internet connectivity. So it there's no wifi. And he just basically works nine to five. He's pretty hard to reach.

he talks to a couple of times a week is from what I understand. He does have like assistants to deal with some of the logistical stuff, but he just he doesn't do much but work on on his books. Another example is you know Neil Stevenson. He wrote that great essay. Years ago.

Why I'm a bad correspondent. Oh he said, so good. So good. It's so good. It's inspiring, but basically his point was He's mellowed out some, by the way. I remember going to see him do a book publicity tour back in Cambridge and and back then that was the only time he would leave was to do publicity tours and he seemed so upset. that he had to be there. He just wanted to be writing. And he really didn't want nerd. He hated nerd questions about like the canon of his books. But anyways, but the bad correspondent was like If I answer all your messages and go to all your conferences and answer all your emails, what will I have in the end? I'll have like a couple thousand messages I sent to individuals. If I instead

Don't do that. and write a book that I'm really proud of, then maybe, you know, a million people are gonna read that book. And so my impact will be bigger if I ignore your message so that I can be basically writing something for a lot of people. So John Grisham is another example. I went down this rabbit hole recently. He Not long ago his longtime assistant retired.

And he didn't hire anyone else. Because he didn't need one. He has created this life, from what I understand, he has created this life where basically his editor knows how to get in touch with him. Outside of his two weeks of book publicity. You can't reach him. He doesn't do things. I know he does do some things. He does do some political fundraising and stuff, but basically

He says I write my books once a year. He said I didn't need to rehire my assistant because not enough people knew my phone number for it to make any sense. Yeah, so basically He just set that up. And and he put his energy other places. He uh he built a bunch of baseball fields and became the commissioner of the Little League in the one of the the town he lived. So he put a lot of time into that. He's really into coaching.

That was inspiring. And then if you look at Mathematicians and scientists. Like that are really at the cutting edge. They're just getting after it. They're not on Twitter.

Tweeting all day long for the most part. Putting aside, let's say, like public health stuff during COVID, but for the most part, the top mathematicians, the top theoretical computer scientists I know. the really leading edge lab scientists. They're Doing their thing. They're they're going for their Nobel. They're trying to get their fields. They're trying to

they're trying to do the work. And so that that's another category, I think. that you see where This is not for me. So I take great inspiration from you novelists that really can just disappear. I collect stories by the way of Dual home.

professional writers. It's always just they live in a city in the winter and then they have like a farm they go to in the summer. It's just my dream. One day So yeah, there's people out there doing it. And there's people like and like me, like you you hinted at it before. It's like the weirdest thing about me. As far as anyone is concerned, is that I've never had a social media account. And it turns out it's allowed.

Like today everyone understands it, but until like a minute ago, people thought I was literally insane. And it's fine. I had friends who knew what was going on in the world and sold a couple books. So you know, it's like I I think we tell ourselves that like we're stuck in this way of existence. We're not really stuck. We have a lot of options. Let me just add a few footnotes. Thank you for that. So Neil Stevenson for people who don't know.

Uh first of all, N E A L. Stevenson S T E P H And He'll pop up as soon as you type in N E A L. But if you've heard the term metaverse, probably came from Yeah.

has written many seven Eve's. My favorite is probably Kryptonomicon, which I think is a rare choice as a favorite, but Personally, I think crypto notes. Yeah. Computer scientists love crypto.com. It's so prescient in so many ways. I mean, if you look at You know, cryptographic. cryptography leading into decentralized currencies and so on. Like he is

He's spotted so many things around corners. ten, fifteen, twenty years in advance. It is really quite Mind boggling. Neil Stevenson's piece, Why I Am a Bad Correspondent. I'll put it in the show notes. as well. I was going to include

why I'm a bad correspondent in this book that I was working on a few summers ago that I ended up canceling Which was the no book. The placeholder title was the no book, and I kept writing and writing and writing this book on how to say no and coming up with compelling reasons for why I should not write the book myself. So it was kind of this recursive situation where I ended up saying no to the no book. But the why why I'm a bad correspondent is outstanding. So we'll put that in the show notes. You mentioned writers, you mentioned scientists. And

then one of the things that is perhaps weird or the people consider weird about you in that and that is that you don't have social media accounts. So I'm going to ask you just to let this Bake for a minute. What other things people would consider unusual or strange. And you can take that in any direction you want, but about you, your workflow, how you work, how you live, anything.

But before we get to that. The no social media, so Found a GQ piece. on you and digital minimalism. And

You mentioned that you had tech company during the dot com bubble. And You've joked that You originally didn't sign up for Facebook. Because maybe there is I'll just read the quote.

There was probably a little bit of petty jealousy, Newport says, like, Oh, why is this company so popular? I'm not gonna give him the satisfaction of using his product. So did you Commit is that just purely in jest, or did you early On commit to that. And then it just worked for you, so you In other words.

Was it like f a first principles decision or did it start off in a different way? Through the sands of time. I'm trying to remember because I had to go back and do some research and I I did confirm that Facebook arrived at my college in two thousand and four and I I confirmed that was true. And that was the first major there's things before that, versus Friendster, et cetera, but those were more niche. Like there wasn't a real pressure to sign up for those. Right.

My memory, and again, this is through the Santa Time is that there were two factors why I didn't sign up for Facebook. One was just what you were talking about. So Mark Zuckerberg was a contemporary of mine. He was a computer science student at Harvard at the time that I was a computer science student at Dartmouth. We had both started companies around the same time. His has been a little bit more successful. So Facebook ended up a little bit more successful than Princeton Web Solutions, which is what which is what I had been.

I had been running, I mean, you know, comparable, uh if you just add seven zeros. Uh So there was some of that because especially I remember like all the like women I knew and that were they were like oh this is so fun I wanna be on there and like why are they interested in this guy's service? There's some of that. The other thing, and I think this is true. Because I have a really strong memory of this.

I have a weird it's not a phobia, but um An inability. to do rank list. So if you ask me, hey, what's your favorite book? Which I get asked on podcasts, I don't know how to answer it. If you say what's your two favorite movies, I can't it's uh there's there's probably a name for it. Our rapid fire questions are gonna be great towards the end of this. Oh, I free you'll see. You'll see, I'll freeze. I freeze on these all the time. Or if I know they're coming, like

I've done Ezra Klein show a few times. Sorry sorry, you're cutting out. I'm sorry. What was that? Yeah, your your connection's really bad. They're all great. It's like enumeration enumeracy, if I'm gonna invent the word. And that was what early Facebook was. Your profile was a favorite quote, favorite movies, favorite books. It was a lot of Irving Goffman presentation of self pipe sociology. You had to decide like what am I gonna say my favorite movie is my favorite quote to try to create a presentation of self that was and I c I can't do that.

I can't I can't so I really remember just a combination of those two things. I was like, nah, this isn't for me. And I gotta tell you, all it took was a few years of separation. that suddenly I felt like Margaret Mead. Among the Polynesian islands because I was the only person not using this, and it was so interesting. Like the from a remove, it was like really interesting.

And I was like, Okay, I think I'm just gonna run with this for a while because I gotta tell you, from the outside seemed more and more absurd. Not that the services seemed absurd in isolation. The thing that seemed absurd, my memory, Was this Presumption of universality.

that these are technologies that everyone has to use and it's weird if you don't. I thought they seemed kind of niche, like they're kind of cool. And if you're into technology or web two point oh, maybe it's interesting. I had nothing against them. But I was really wary about this rising presumption that Everyone has to use it. And I, you know, I'm an internet nerd from the early days. And I'm like, I don't know that we should consolidate. the internet into two or three companies where they built their own private shadow version of the internet that they can control. We already have the internet. Do we have to use these private walled garden versions of the internet? And this idea that it was weird not to use it.

Th that was the thing that really probably made me an advocate. in the skeptical calm among social media. It was not that I thought what was happening on Twitter was bad. It was Why is it such a big deal that I don't use it? That's really what pushed me into a place of, you know, something weird's going on in our culture.

Thank God your personal Everest is putting together lists of favorite books and movies. If if you hadn't had that problem, who knows where you'd be. You could be just another troll on Reddit or something. So that's a good thing that you had that friction. We're gonna shift gears a little bit because I wanna continue to focus on the Unusual. An unusual not in any sense of impracticality, but uncommon. Uncommon things that you do or don't do.

What is your roles and values document? Do you still have a roles and values document? I do. Yeah. It's it's it's part of what I pitch. I I pitch this multi scale approach. To planning things out. And when I say pitch, I mean you know, like on my

Podcast or my articles. Roles and values are at the top. And this comes right out of Stephen Covey, sharpening the style of seven habits. Here are the different roles in my life. And here are the values that define how I want to execute each of these roles. There's a

Professor Family, parent, right? You know, whatever the writer. whatever the role of community member. And here are my values. And there they are. And I look at them and I refine them and you have to think about them. And then in my scheme.

You look at those when you then create your plan for the current quarter. You wanna be in a line with your values when you make that plan. And then you look at your quarterly plan when you create your plan for the week.

You want your week what you do this week to be in line with what your bigger vision is for the quarter. And then when you build your plan for each day. figuring out what to do with your time, that's influenced by your weekly plan. And there you have a thread that connects everything you're doing. indirectly, but without any breaks into links all the way back up to your value. So what I'm doing right now There's a multi-link connection all the way back up to here's the things I care about. Let's get into some specifics, more specifics here. You've written

Very well. on and I'm I'm going I'm going to get the phrasing. Imperfect, but You've written very well on how many meetings are created or scheduled because people otherwise don't have good systems.

for keeping track of things і натоверд Forgetting. to do something and therefore they just drop a meeting in the calendar. with no clear agenda because at least it functions to prevent the sand from slipping through the fingers. You have this document.

The roles and values document. If I were to create a roles and values document, say in Google Drive. I would be super excited. I would focus on it. I might look at it the next day, but if I did not have some system For Forcing me.

to look at it, evaluate it, revise it. It would become lost very, very quickly. I would forget I ever put it together. So could you just walk us through how you ensure that doesn't happen for you personally. with the roles and values documents and then furthermore

with the quarterly plan and so on. What is your workflow? Or your flow look like for those things. Well, I'm I'm a big believer in in what I call rooted productivity. There has to be somewhere, I call it the root document. That says.

These are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life. And Therefore The only commitment I really have to make is that I will Follow

This root document. That this is the commitment. Either I'm someone who follows this root document or my life is chaos. And then that root document is what lays out what what I'm talking about here. It lays out that multi-scale planning that these are the types of planning I do. There's a few other things that lays out. It lays out that I do David Allen style full capture. I'm a big believer about not having open loops. Sorry to interrupt, but I will do you so do you read that every morning? Is this like your boot up sequence? It's internalized now.

But Right. It's written down. And my listeners do the same thing. Like we we put it in a directory, you call it root, and you put all your planning documents in that directory. And you don't have to look at it. every day once you you internalize it pretty quickly. But just knowing it's there.

And you can assess yourself as am I following that or am I not? And it's a binary. And then everything else comes out of it. So we call it a root because then the tree of all these different systems and stuff grow out of it. And then you might be really nitpicking with all these other small little systems, but they all eventually connect back to the root. And to me, that's a really big deal. That the biggest decision you make If you're gonna live a deep life.

Like productivity in isolation, I don't even know what that means. Who cares? But if you're gonna live a deep life, like the ultimate original commitment is I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of Things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter even if I don't feel like it.

And like that is the biggest binary zero to one flip that happens in in crafting a life. What you commit to, that evolves over time. You might find like this is a bad idea. I've been trying to whatever write down notes on a thing once a day and that's not really working. And it all evolves over time, but the zero to one commitment is. Do I have some sort of structure I'm committing to? with the goal of making my life deeper.

Or am I winging it? That's the zero to one bit that I think matters more than any other. Are there any particular Levers actions. Anything that

Health. helped facilitate that for you personally. sort of disproportionately. So I'll share a few things for myself, which are I think sometimes embarrassingly primitive for me to even talk about because some of my readers and listeners just imagine like I wake up every morning with this like mental karate shop and just like matrix my way through the day with all these sophisticated systems and that is

Not really. how it plays out. Uh And

I will say though that there are a few things. One is looking at my calendar on an annual basis and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline. And by extended, that's one, two, or three weeks. And ensuring that I have hopefully Something of at least a week, once a quarter.

So I'm actually leaving. Tomorrow for Three weeks off the grid. And I will have no wi fi and no phone for three weeks. And that's important to me.

on a multitude of levels. Number one is it allows me to check in and see how comfortable I am with myself when I am not. Over busied. It provides me with time to reflect with out the ability to indulge in the temptation to go on Twitter or check something. So I don't I don't need to rely on self control, in other in other words, I'm sort of saved from myself. It allows my f system physiologically time to kind of reboot and recover.

And it also forces me to put In place or revisit systems. That allowed me to be gone for three weeks. So as an example. figuring out right now. and yesterday and today that my usual checks and balances with team members and assistants for

wire approvals isn't going to work while I'm gone. So we need to upgrade those systems. So that we don't have any issues. assistant, unless there is a an emergency that necessitates a satellite phone is not going to be able to reach me. Right. And then those systems outlive the time off the grid. That's an example of one thing. That I do that seem simple.

It is simple. In theory at least. that has this huge spectrum of Ripple. effects. And there there's some other things that come to mind, but I'd love to know for you

If you're trying to focus on this deep life And rooted productivity. Which levers or actions have been particularly Impactful for you.

They come to mind. Well, I mean I think periodic reflection plays a critical role for me too. As a professor, there's a seasonality that's built into my work, which I wish could be widely replicated. So jealous. Yeah. I mean, I suppose I could do it, but man, it's such a great Such a wonderful thing.

Everyone who runs their own business who's entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility, I think you should Integrate. seasonality in in into what you do. I I I I'm a big believer in seasonality in all scales, by the way. busy and not busy parts of your day. busier, non busier days of the week.

busier and non busier months in the season. I mean, I think at at all scales we need it. Being Pegged. all the time, filling your time all the time is not healthy for So for me. There's the December break and the summer break.

So December sixth is my last lecture on campus. That's when the semester ends and for All of the time after that, between then and when the semester begins again, each week I've already blocked off one full day off from No meetings, no phone calls, no podcast recordings, no nothing, plus an additional half day off. for what I call adventure work, where typically I'll go to

uh trails outside somewhere scenic. Sometimes I'll go to the museums in downtown DC to just think about one problem in a awe inspiring or unusual location. I've already blocked those days off. I want to get the most out of December. And then when I get to the summer. With professors is a little bit weird. We're not really paid during the summer. What you do, at least at a research university, is you get summer salary from research grants. And that's how you cover the the two months in the summer.

And at some point I after ten year, when I didn't have to worry about that so much, is I decided I'm not gonna take research grants for the summer. I'm just gonna take the summers off. I'll fill in the gaps and income, you know, with writing or what have you. And so I actually literally am not working for the university for two two months out of the summer. And that's really critical for me. That type of seasonality is probably the

One of the biggest advertisements. For for the professor life that I could give. Mm. What do you do on your days off? It's not clear like what on or off means for me. I I mean I I read a lot, I think a lot, I take a lot of notes. Like for me, a day off.

What I care about is a day where I don't have to be Interacting. professionally with other people. Like to me that's what off is. I I don't have to go on Zoom. I don't have to go in for a meeting. I'm not in front of an audience. It's I'm in full control of my time.

I don't actually like not doing things. When I have control of my time, I love to do things where I have complete autonomy over my time. I'm I'm gonna go for a walk and think this through. I'm gonna go work on a book proposed. I'm gonna read this book. Then when my kids get home from school, we're gonna go do something else. And so for me, a day off is a day where I have. Full autonomy. Over what I do.

The blank calendar. Day to me. is one of the more glorious. If you really want to hear the chorus of angels, forget solving a math proof or getting a sentence to work right. Seeing a day on the calendar where there's nothing in Gmail. I think Gmail should have a feature where they just sort of you know Pulsates an angelic glow.

If you see if you see in it the little little feedback, right, the little feedback loop. Mm. Ha ha ha. I'm looking for some inspiration. So these half days

of adventure work at inspiring or cool locations. I don't want you to dox yourself, but like what are some locations you've used or types of locations and why did you choose them, right? Because eva even if you say museum, if you're in a city, There are multiple museums you could choose. So how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some

larger problem or project. What does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you've knocked out the Wi Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real world examples, that would be super helpful. I think a lot about location. So if I'm down at the mall in D C, for example, there's a couple of different Games I'll play.

Uh sometimes I'll go to the botanical gardens. The National Botanical Gardens, it's a giant greenhouse. And so it's just It resets your whole context because you're in a tropical climate with palm trees and and there's these paths that go through it and there's benches and it's you're gonna get really sweaty. It's very humid.

But I'll go there. Sometimes I'll go to the National Gallery because there's a there's a certain type of connection to history. classical antiquity mindset you get if you walk through and here's a Leonardo. You're looking at Especially like the Italian Renaissance floor. And then there's a an underground cafeteria at the National Gallery that connects the east and the west wings, in which there's essentially no cell phone reception. So then you go down there.

And you get coffee from the coffee place and there's this waterfall and uh that you can see through the glass. And then hiking, there's uh the pack toxic national wildlife refuge is not far from me. Go there and you can hike there. There's the Rachel Carson Greenway, that used to be closer to my old house and

I would hype the same thing every week. And so I got really good at The change of seasons. is a real thorough move, like noticing week by week how things were changing and what was happening with the leaves. And I had names for all the places. And I would do the same hike again and again.

And this is all pen and paper. It's me Notebook. A uniball micro You know.

Zero point five millimeter Roller pen. Oh a zero point five guy. I like that. I like that. I you know, I'm torn between the zero point seven and the zero point five. Well the deep interconflict. I don't know, man. I think if you're using the point seven, you're gonna start to get some bleed when you're uh master.

If I'm doing CS work, I'm doing math. And so there's a lot of little Greek if you're drawing an epsilon. Or you're doing exponents or You need a point five. My notepads are so full of exponents and epsilons. So you have your you have your point five millimeter Exponent ready pen. You have your pad.

You go to the botanical gardens. You're drinking coffee. You're sweating your face off. What type of work are you doing? What does it look like for that half day? What

If we're looking over your shoulder. What is what what's happening there? Either I'm Trying to solve a particular proof. So if I'm doing my Have my computer scientist hat on.

I'm trying to solve a proof. I'm I'm it's literally I'm do a lot of kind of graph theoretical stuff and you're drawing graphs you're doing a quote, you're just trying to make it work. Or at least make aspects of it work or figure out why it doesn't work. I'm drawing equations, I'm drawing graphs. Or if I have my writer hat on. I'm trying to crack structure.

So writing has to happen for me, writing of course has to happen with a computer and and that's just it's a whole other thing. But I put a huge amount of time in figuring out the structure of the ideas that I want to write. And especially if I'm working on something like a book proposal. I mentioned before it takes me six to twelve months. Again and again, you're gonna find me somewhere with a notebook, just like I was doing this morning right before I got on the call with you here.

Just writing trying to structure out index outline. Ah, it's not quite working. You know, how does this fit together? What about this format for the book? I'll sometimes buy a dedicated notebook for a book idea. So it's a trick of mine. I do the same thing. Yeah.

Dedicated notebook. That's what I'm writing. Yeah, so it'll be one of those two things. Yeah. What do you use for writing books? What's do you have a preferred software as you're talking about indexing and playing with table of contents and structure I have found Scrivener just to be a lifesaver in that department. I'm sure there are a million other options, but I've used Scrivener for many, many years. What do you use for your

Book writing. When I switch to contributor status at the New Yorker is when I switch to Scrivener. I haven't tried it yet for a book. We'll see about that. But I definitely for all of my articles, all my New York work, all that scrivener, I love it.

Why was that the catalyst to Switch to Scrivener? New Yorker writing's very dense. It's like dense in information. So you're citing a huge number of different, you know, you saw it in the article I w I wrote about you. There's like a huge number of things you have to cite. And so the double pain feature of Scrivener is an absolute lifesaver. Like, okay.

I can just grab the article I'm citing and it's on the right pane. And then I can quote from it directly on the left pane, or I can take a different section of the article and put it on the right pane so that The left pane I can Properly reference it and then you just jump into composition mode when you're so you know you're you're pulling in information and kind of getting a draft of it and then you shoot to composition mode full screen.

best composition mode of any tool out there, and then your word polishing. And then you jump back, uh. It's a great tool. I've loved it. I've been a fan for ever since I started using it. Just for people who don't have contacts, add a little bit more. So Scrivener for me the the reason I began using it. Is that Prior to that, I'd use Word. And if you're using Word.

And you have Let's just say, as in my books, which are both long and have many components. If you have Twenty seven chapter. And you have fifteen open documents because you also have research documents and reference documents, your computer will cease to function and your brain will cease to function. But with

The scrivener, at least the way that I use it, you have these stripped down Format minimal. documents that can all be looked at within a single application and you can format it in different ways a lot of Screenwriters or playwrights use

Scrivener. I think that's initially how it came onto my radar. I had not seen anyone use it for nonfiction at that point, but if you imagine your screen cut right down the middle, on the left hand side, you have this. table of contents. It's the easiest way to think about it. And I will immediately break my book into three or four sections, even though I may not even have labels for the sections. And then I decide Which documents will go into

each of those sections. And you can just drag them around. So you can play with the order. You can create another Section as an example. And then you have research at the bottom of that left hand pane. On the right side, if you split that in half. horizontally. what I'm working on. This is just how I do it. What I'm working on will be in the top right pane.

And then below that, the bottom right pane, I'll have whatever research doc I'm referring to, since my stuff is also very, very factually dense and requires citations and references and so on. And By doing that, you don't have to click back and forth between tabs or between programs between documents. It's it's a really Really elegant solution.

And I hope you're not offended by me focusing on some of the tactical stuff, but I'm curious in the thought process. behind some of your decision making, right? That's much more interesting than just the output of the decision. It's like okay, how did you arrive So what I was Reading about your

quarterly plan, sample week plan, etc. In the end of this blog post. And that was from January of twenty twenty one. And I don't know if this is still the case. But I'll just read this last paragraph. To be clear, most of my obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists. Which as my podcast listeners know I maintain using Trello.

But most of the projects that move the needle in my career working on a research paper, writing a major article, never get Discretized, I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, into bite sized actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves. S The Trello use. I've used Trello. I like Trello. I tend to use

I've used both Trello and Asana. I'm curious. How you've ended up Arriving at Trello. Trello has been my my tool of choice recently for

Organizing tasks. And the the way I actually use it is I do a different board for different professional roles. So I have a writer board, I have a board for CS research, so my role is a researcher, and then a board for the the teaching and administrative pieces of being a professor.

So they're three separate roles, they have separate boards. the columns that I then divide those boards into represent different categories. You know, I have a column for I gotta process this. This is a David Allen idea where I need to put this down somewhere, this thing, but I don't really even know what this thing means I need to do. It's you know, a we need to recruit someone.

Like, okay, I don't know what that means, but I don't want to for so let me just write that down under to process. Like another hack I do is Anyone I meet with on a regular basis They'll have their own column on the particular board. So if anything comes up I need to ask them, I actually just put it on a card and put it under their Meeting column. And then when I meet with them, I just go and uh boom, we're going to go through it. Then typically I'll have a column for like okay, definitely this week this needs to happen. So I I

When I go through my weekly planning, I'll move things to that. And so I like that that have different roles, different columns, and I like that the virtual cards and all these tools can hold a lot of information. So I'm a big believer that All the relevant files, all the relevant notes. If someone emailed me something about this task that's relevant, you can just copy and paste this all onto the virtual back or attach it to the card. It actually is also an information management system, not just a task Management system.

That's been what I've been I've been using and then typically I really go through those all at the beginning of the week. But when I build out my weekly plan I'm often identifying off those boards, this is what I really want to get done this week. And then I'm often executing largely

off that weekly plan, though. I should let me actually Tim, I'm gonna give a broader context here. Because I'm kind of a weird guy. I talk about a lot of things. So I'm I'm gonna attempt to try to put all the weird things I do into some sort of context. Because we've we cover a lot of territory. Yeah. Or just to like illustrate the weird there's these Two different main hats I wear. So there's there's a hat where I'm a computer scientist and I

I publish papers on mainly like theory of distributed systems. Then there's a a sort of Journalistic public commentary critique type writing. This is like my articles for the New Yorker, my New York Times op-eds. My books mainly and my books especially recently have

really been about tech and culture and their impact. Though they have a A real practical aspect too. But then I often also talk about productivity largely because it's just People are kind of interested in how I do these other things. So it's like it's not necessarily like a tier one topic that I write about, though I kind of do, because deep work, I think talks about this for sure. But then also we talk a lot on my blog and in my newsletter on my podcast about like what we're talking about here because

I don't think we talk enough about this in general. So people are out there, well, how do I organize my aspirations? How do I structure a life to be deeper and not get lost in the noise, but not be overscheduled? And so uh we geek out a lot on productivity as well. So just to give I don't know if that's useful, but a landscape of I do these two big things, but then I have to care a lot about productivity to do these big two things. So then I talk about. What do I do to make sure that I can still be able to do it? write an academic paper and a New Yorker piece and a book and a whatever. Like how does that all fit into my life? And so I care a lot about it. So I don't that's useful, but that's my uh lay of the weird landscape for the various things I do.

We are gonna talk. About Safe. For instance a a thirty day digital minimalism experiment.

dig into that before we get to it. We've got in two thousand nineteen the artist writer Jenny Odell, is that right? Yeah. helped kinda start the trend, which we're gonna talk about when she published a book titled How to Do Nothing. Subtitle Resisting the Attention. economy. So that becomes a New York Times bestseller.

Barack Obama, one of his favorite books of two thousand nineteen. Then it was followed. I guess a year later, the following spring, by Celeste Headley. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but Do Nothing subtitled How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Under Living. Then you have Anne Helen Peterson's Can't Even Hell Millennials Be Came the Burnout Generation. maybe a little less inspiring sounding. It doesn't I'm always curious about titling decisions and the thought process behind it. Maybe I mean it could be a fantastic book, but I haven't read any of these. And then Devin Price's laziness does not

Exist. These are I wouldn't say entirely new in the sense that you can go back to Throw or Emerson and certainly you can go thousands of years back to like Hawking and you can find discussions of overwork, busyness. Laziness versus contemplation.

Are there any books? And I know I'm pushing on your weakness here in terms of listing. So I'm not asking you to list, but there are there any books In the last Five or ten years. from broadly speaking this kind of category that really stand out for you.

It's an interesting category, first of all. Like I sometimes call it like the anti productivity Category though. quite the accurate label, but it's a really interesting category. So you know, m my book came out the same month as How to Do Nothing, so we were Me and Jenny were paired and so many so in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, The Ringer, there's all these articles that came out where it was always talking about us uh those two books together. So that was definitely Had a close experience.

Price's book is great. I blurbed that book. Sless Headley's book is great. I interviewed her for the New Yorker in in a in a piece I did. I would say that what I would add more recently, that book just done really well, and I think And I'll get into a reason why I think it did was Oliver Berkman's new book. Which is

Maybe it's called four thousand hours. I might have the number wrong. Oliver Bergman. Yeah. Yeah, he's a British writer.

And I blurbed that book because it's great. Anyways, it and and the subtitle something like Time Management for Mortals or something like this. But it killed it. I the book did great. It it came out a few months ago, or maybe over the summer. I have a bad sense of time. But the The number of hours, I'm getting the number wrong, probably is something four thousand weeks. Time management for mortals.

Oliver for weeks. Berkman with an E B R K E M A N Yeah, four thousand weeks, time management for mortals. And he writes a column. For the Guardian. So four thousand weeks is how many weeks you have to live.

I think that really hit and it really hit in particular because It was introducing a Like a values. driven productivity, you could think about it. Like it's about all that really matters when it comes to organizing your time or being organized is you what you're trying to do is you only have so much time and you wanna

Do things with it. useful, meaningful, and effective. And to just Be busy for the sake of being busy. isn't good. I think all of those books make that argument. I think they're all pushing back. On the

Like an empty crushing busyness. I am All the stuff I'm doing is always frenetic. But I'm papering over the existential void I don't want to stare down. by doing all of this when what I probably need to do is uh stare into that void for a while.

wait until the vertigo goes away and then get up and actually start building something real. And I I think they're all touching on that because it there's this whole sort of fractured sense of overload that's happening right now. We have all these different things coming together. Uh you have Like the digital distraction piece, which obviously I'm I'm sort of associated with. is really a symptom of the bigger problem. So yes, our phones can be a palliative to this. Existential despair.

But the despair is there. And the despair is not going to be fixed by just getting rid of the palliative and saying let's not use Instagram anymore. It's still going to be there. We're using these things all the time because we we just it more palatable to be active and busy all the time than sometimes to face what's hard. about what's going on in our in our lives or the world. And I think all of these books are picking up on that. And like we need to Slow the hell down.

Figure out what we really want to do. Do these things. At a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast. and face the hard stuff and in and make the good stuff better. All these books, I think, are getting at that main thing. They all just have different angles at this. So each of them have a a different approach they take to this issue. And that's like its own interesting topic. I mean, everyone comes at this from different ways. Berkman comes at it from like a humanist way.

I kinda come at it from a humanist way too in digital minimalism. What does that mean to let's say in Oliver's case to come at it from a humanist Perspective. What does what does that mean? Like from a perspective of of sort of trying to maximize or improve the flourishing of the the sort of

unique and cherished being that is the humans, right? Like as a human You're an important unique Entity to be cherished and should think about crafting a life in which you flourish. That's the the humanist. So it's it's kind of in this these lives of indiscriminate busyness where I'm just overwhelmed all the time and distracting every moment is you're diminishing your humanity. There's a humanist approach where And Helen Peterson might come at this more with a sort of

post liberal anti capitalist type approach that this is Productivity culture is really just part of the superstructure that supports the base of exploitative capital extraction. It's an economic argument. Just to take these different arguments. Celeste is more comes at it from more of a Cultural. Oh, Dell comes out at With a mix of

humanist and economic and artistic and that's I think that's why that's a phenomenal book. I think it's very smart. Very original. And so we all there's just these different takes that are all coming at it and all all add something. But they're all getting at the same underlying issue of this sort of sense of crushing overwhelm and busyness.

Yeah, I was thinking if this uh New York or gig C S professorial life doesn't work out for you, you could actually Work on some sobering children's books along the lines of

Doctor Seuss and the first one could be c could be called the despair is there. Let's get these kids sobered up quick. Uh only gonna get worse, buddy. Get ready. Looking at that.

through and this this may not be the best segue, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway. We were talking about the deep life. And I'm gonna lead into this. Through that. I'm looking at a post of yours from twenty twenty and it says I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories. Community. Family, friends, etcetera. Craft. Work and quality leisure. I love that term quality leisure. Constitution.

Health in parentheses. And last Contemplation. And then in parentheses, matters of the soul. So I'm gonna ask you, not the second, but I'm gonna ask you about that fourth one, contemplation, matters of the soul. And the way that we're going to Move into that.

Is through John Newport. So Who was John Newport? Oh it's my my father's father, my grandfather. I

Baptist theologian and scholar and one of the only of his era Baptist apologist, meaning basically someone who he was Southern Baptist. who was very interested in actually going out there and encountering other worldviews. understanding other approaches to things and then try to make a case.

Let me make a case for the Baptist Christian worldview. Let me actually go out there and make my case, as opposed to saying the non-apologist approach of, Batten down the hatches. We have it right. I don't want to hear about what else is going on there. My grandfather was someone who he hung out with Carl Jung. He would walk with Hessel.

in Central Park when Heschel was still at the seminary there. He was at Harvard for a year hanging out with Nieber, right? I mean he was out there Exposing himself to every interesting idea and worldview and approach that's out there. He would want to understand them deeply. And then try to understand why the advantages of his through comparison and and not to get too philosophical, but it was a sort of Socratic. Dialect. Very much a philosophical question. So I let's let's not

But but he would find it you you would get more strength than what you which is a big thing I took from him. He was alive till I right around I mean he he died basically on his way to my high school graduation. So I knew him throughout my entire up to the beginning of my adult life. The dialectical method of encountering and fulfilling a different approach, your understanding of the world. And your convictions will get stronger that you don't want to try to avoid

or sidestep or discredit before you have to see them. Go hang out with Heschel. Go hang out with Nieber. Go hang out with Tillich. He wrote a book on Paul Tillich. Go hang out. With you. And really understand Who is Paul Tillic, just so I know, I'll admit I don't I don't know that name. He was a Christian apologist, so he's like a Christian theologian that did a lot of

Yeah, sort of of the same rough era as C S Lewis. But was a little more academic than Lewis, but So it's like the very smart Apologia, like really trying to underst explain like the Christian worldview. So let me pause for a second. So apologist, I I would imagine for some people has a

Sort of a negative Connotation. to it, but it doesn't seem like that's how you're using this word. Yeah. Would you mind just explaining the use of of that term?

There's a technic that I'm using. So so like the the technical definition of of an apologist is just that you're someone who is out there making a case for the thing that you believe in the effort of explaining it to other people. It doesn't have to be evangelical in the general sense of that term in terms of you're trying to convince people, but at least you're trying to Encounter other people and explain

Why your what you the thing that you're trying to explain is right. So I mean a a lot of like what writing you do or I do is technically would be Apologia like if I write a book, you know, I'm a productivity apologist. Yeah. Like I'm a I'm a concentration apologist. That's a that's a confusing term. Do you have any idea how that became like the the edible reasons came out of theology. Yes. I think it might have I I don't want to talk out of school. I might be wrong about that. You're right, though. It's not in common parlance. So I I should advocate maybe. But yeah. But the the main point is In the southern

Baptist church of that time. you wouldn't see a lot of apologia because you didn't want to go out there and encounter other worldviews. I just don't even want to know about that. And I think we see a lot of that today, I mean, outside of the religious context and and so We talk about this a lot on my podcast, but Don't be afraid of

ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that are That seems different than what you believe in. You're not gonna get Trick.

out of your convictions or believing something that's false. You actually strengthen your understanding of the world and therefore strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas that are well formed. And that's It's at the core of D intellectual life for the last however many centuries we want to say it, that that's sort of a core operation. And he personified that. So if we look at the

Contemplation bucket. And then parentheses matters of the soul. So this is one of your four categories of focused Attention. What does that mean to you?

How do you focus? on contemplation and matters of the soul. The way I would generically tackle that Would be to say that Humans have these

Intimations. Where This seems Right or good. Or awe inspiring.

This doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem good. Like certain behaviors you see. You know, in a movie the villain and it's just It hits this thing inside. That's not right. You're watching Sucession on HBO. And you're like all of my moral intuitions are telling me that These are bad people. Don't be like these people, right? You know what I mean? And we get on the other side too.

You encounter the inspiring the person who sacrifices or what have you. And it just hit something inside and you feel it, right? And and so you can call these int intimations. John Height would call these moral intuitions. There's there's different terminologies for it. Critical, I think, and this obviously by I I mean like all of philosophy, but I critical, I I think is and all of theology for that that matter, too, is figuring out how to actually

structure a life. around these intimations. A life that pushes you more towards the things that just instinctually hit you as this is this is right and good. And I just know it and away from the things and the behaviors and the approaches to life that just hit you at a gut level is this is not right. This is not good. This is what philosophy does, this is what religion does, if we think about it From

big picture perspective is it is Ideas evolved over time through experience and argument that essentially help you align your life with the things that the moral intuitions that are positive and away from the ones that are negative. It's why you shouldn't be quick, for example, to dismiss a field of philosophy or religion as Oh, I can just figure this out from scratch. Or it's Talking about

mythologies that I can't empirically validate in the world. What you really have there is a moral technology, something that's been evolved over time to align your life with these intuitions that you feel. And that's the contemplation bucket. Is You better be doing something along those lines because just winging it is not going to matter. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to think about that bucket. Some details of how I tackle that maybe as personal, some are not.

I engage a lot in philosophy. There's religious engagements in my life. I'm not formally practicing and associated with a particular religion. But that's also something that might not I don't think that's necessarily a permanent state. I think there is a lot of

Intuition and brilliant human moral engineering in religions. Well, if you're open to it, I'd love to to talk a bit more about this because I've I've heard, for instance Conversations between Sam Harris, who's a friend and

Jordan Peterson. And I'm going to, I'm sure, misrepresent both sides. So sorry, guys. I'm just gonna kinda paraphrase, but Yeah, in general. Jordan refers to mythology. And

The Bible. As Moral frameworks. That have been Time tested.

Which is not to say I don't think he would say that we should base all of our lives on can't enable or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that as humans We've had a whole lot of trial and error over a very, very long period of time. Certain stories have struck a chord and stuck. And maybe there's value.

In those stories. And then again, sorry, Sam, I'm sure I'm misrepresenting, but if Sam is perhaps arguing that you should start from first principles, you do not need theology or religion, but can build a moral code and framework for yourself. I think Jordan's response to that would be you're expecting too much of people.

People are just gonna have too much trouble doing that. They want something out of the box that is good enough to be helpful. So What I'd love to ask you is and I spend a good amount of time thinking about these things. For myself.

Just For myself. Not for anything else, but my life. And I would love to know what this does for you. Maybe we could start there. What is the need that it satisfies or The

unease that it quells. Contemplation slash matters of the soul as one of the four main categories. Maybe we could start there. And I just love to hear you expand in in any way you feel comfortable. In that particular division.

My instinct is that Jordan is probably more on the right path. And I'll I'll tell you a book that really was striking to me that I I think gets right at this. There's there's this great book. Called all things shiny.

And it was written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Dreyfus and I forgot the other name. But they talk about this issue, right? So this was this was the central issue that that this was what Nietzsche was worried about. Like we're we are now gonna have to create morality from scratch and that's not gonna go well. Right.

And obviously Jordan is very keyed into this because His early interest was in the rise of totalitarian regimes that occurred in the twentieth century in that context and Spoiler alert, things did not go well. Ha.

But There's this Lament in that book. about is looking at these prior periods in human history where they use the word the sacred

But they talked about life was just infused with the sacred. And the in ancient Greece, the classical Greece. They really did feel like the gods, the Olympian Gods would inhabit you. Areas would inhabit you. And that was to feel like these feelings you would have was literally God's inhabiting you. And in the medieval Christians, everything had a a place and a sacredness to it, even objects in the world. And then that all went away. And they opened the book with David Foster Wallace and basically

use him as personifying I can just figure this all out from scratch from first principles. And and they use them as the it's a really poignant but tragic story because of course it's a story that ends up with Foster Wallace's suicide. And they use that to set up the

Difficulty. of trying to build everything up from scratch. And especially when I guess that's what Jordan likes to the the point out is We have these intuition that are really deep and incredibly powerful. And uh you know, Jordan

was very inspired by Jung. So he's really drawing from Carl Jung's uh you know J U N G his archetypes, his idea that there's these these uh the collective unconscious that has these archetypes that all humans have. They have a deep history. Um Pre culture. And that that like our myths, the reason why certain myths resonate is they're pressing these buttons and

those buttons, what he would call archetypes, Jung I think of as intuitions, and that we have these technologies for sort of and I'm using technology not Digital or electronic, but philosophical and theological technologies like it really It aligns your life to these things. We're meant to be aligned to him just like

Our sense of thirst. means we really need to drink water. We shouldn't just ignore that and say, is there another way for me to achieve like the proper isotonic balance of my bloodstream? Like actually the instinct is telling us to drink water. All of those things have been very effective to me, you know, with an A effective in the sense of like Affecting me.

And so I think there's something to that is that I mean a life that aligns with these intuitions can be very resilient and rich and and then we just have personal experience. And and you know, some people get this through philosophy. And some people get this through religion, but they're drawing from the same internal hooks and So I get very nervous.

When I think about the challenge the The Chinese That's the word challenge of Going back to first principle. I mean, we tried, I mean, this was all of philosophy tried to do this for a couple hundred years, like what Kant was trying to do. I mean, it w we we all we tried it. It's very difficult. And I know Sam disagrees.

And he's smarter than me, so like, you know, let's listen to him maybe more more than we listen to me. But That's where I fall on that, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well s you know, it's um This is a topic of kind of infinite interest to me.

And I I'd love to Keep batting things around for a little bit if you're open to it. So I I actually have all things shining downstairs. All things shining. Subtitled Reading The Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrence Kelly. I was gifted this book.

And You would think based on the title. And how much of a stoicism and philosophy nerd I am. that I would have just taken to this like a fish to water. I found it very challenging to read. And I think perhaps it was just all the references Two

Moby Dick and the Odyssey. It could have been that. I'm not sure, but I found it Very dense in a way that made it hard for me to at least process at the time that I was I was gifted it. And I'm just gonna mention a few things kind of in no no particular order. The fact of the matter is I don't know

Jordan. Peterson well. We've spoken before and I've had him on the podcast, but I don't know him well. I would say I know Sam well. and have spent a lot of time around Sam. I use his waking up app. I've read many of his books and we've just spent a lot of time in person. Sam, by and large Seems to me to be a very happy at peace guy. Right, so that's interesting.

Now is that Sam out of the box? How much of that is nature versus nurture and training versus default, I can't say. I have no idea. But he has managed, it seems, to thread The needle. And

Create meaning and frameworks for himself that really seem to work. Well. And Certainly there are counterexamples. And when I see

a book like All Things Shining. Do you know the backgrounds of the two co authors? In other words, were they Backing into the book from the perspective of people with religious upbringings. Or do you not know the background.

Uh I mean I know their background. I I think Sean Was Kelly was Dorance's advisee or some such, but I don't know. I think they're because they end up in a non religious place, by the way, right? So if if you get to the end of that book where they they end up basically saying

Craftsmanship. Craft. is the solution to reinjecting Sacredness in a secular world. So they do not end up with saying what we need is religion or uh stoicism or particular philosophy. They end up saying Craft is partially our savior because when you're trying to do something at a high level.

You have a rigid framework of value that if you're a wheelwright, some wood is better than others, regardless of what other system you've created. It's just an external reality. This wood is better than that wood. And it's a way to actually get some firmament. So they end up saying you should focus on Basically your work or you know, craft and and like a and taste and quality and and

Which is actually maybe not that far from where Sam is. So maybe yeah I I think it's a really interesting point. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they ended up converging. I mean it's also a very Not to paint with too broad a brush, but having lived in Japan and having gone to school there and speaking and reading and writing Japanese, I feel like I've some credibility to say that it's all it's also a very Japanese

Or very prevalent sort of Japanese sentiment and predisposition. is to focus on these sort of meticulous attention to detail within craft as a means of creating the sacred. Whether you look at the tea ceremony, you look at Kudol, which is the Japanese archery, there are many, many different

Instantiations. If that's the right word. Of this. Throughout the culture. Which is by and large, not always, but by and large, can be

experienced through a secular or Religious. Lens in Japan. Japan's a fascinating example. I can't remember the exact expression. It's in Japanese, so I'm doing a terrible job of of mangling a translation here, but

It's something along the lines of We are Buddhist when we're born. Christian when we get married. And Shinto when we die. I might actually have it in the exact opposite, but you know, Shinto when we're born.

Christian when we're married and Buddhist when we die. But what comes to mind for me when Looking at all of these different approaches to Trying to

check the box of contemplation or matters of the soul is that and I'd love to hear what you think of this. Because there's no right and wrong. How would I prove this? Is that humans? really do not like the discomfort. of uncertainty and the paradox of choice presented by

A life that is largely messy. And outside of our control. And therefore We want frameworks and rules. So that we constrain the universe of things that we need to think about. Does that make sense? So as as such, something like the Ten Commandments, very helpful. Right. And having strict rules

Yeah. Are very helpful. In some ways. It just removes certain territories of life that you need to think about or at least You have some Reassurance that you don't need to worry about.

And At the same time there's part of me that Thanks. Well, Religion is fantastic for that. And I did not grow up religious. I've been exposed to a lot of religion and honestly

Very often I have extreme Envy. Of people with strong religious for precisely that Reason, right? I'cause I I just feel like I'm trying to David Foster Wallace my way through life and it's Really fucking hard. And

can be very, at least for me, destabilizing just to have this universe of infinite options and potential decision making. At the same time, I think, well If we are accepting religion because it is this Pervasive

Not to make it bad, almost universal instinct of humankind, which it seems to be like myth making. Not saying that's what religion is, but meaning making through stories and religion in some fashion. really seems to be an evolved Instinct of some type.

But We could also say Without certain constraints, there are other impulses humans have. Right. That we constrain. And

So I I I don't even I know I'm I'm going on and on a bit here, but it's um These are some of the questions that, you know, remain with me as I continue to explore. In my case I think I've sort of past the point of no return with respect to A specific

denomination of religion. I just don't I don't expect that I will be able to for a million reasons get there. So looking at the alternatives, these are some of the questions that I end up Pondering, I mean, if you are talking to someone, let's say you're talking to students who are in a similar position. Maybe they had a really terrible experience. being brought up in a religious household or perhaps just for any

number of reasons they're just not going to end up at Religion. Are there other ways you would suggest they explore because you said philosophy, but philosophy is so broad. I mean you could just Go walk into a philosophy department at any university and man, you've got you do have a paradox of choice situation on your hands. If you're an undergrad and going to like epistemology one oh one and kind of getting walked through it, that's fine.

But if you're trying to use philosophy to help figure out your life and starting from scratch. Do you have any secular recommendations for folks? Any other recommendations or thoughts? I just wanna throw one

One idea into the mix. It's a common idea in some theological circles, but I think The author. Karen Armstrong. makes this argument very well in her book, The Case for God. She is actually not religious affiliated. She used to be a nun.

and had a bad experience and left the the Catholic Church. But she has this magisterial book called The Case for God. And long story short. She said We Don't understand religion today, and by today she means after the enlightenment.

Because we think about it as the A scent to empirically validated. Truths. To be religious means that here's this thing that you this happened, this person did this, and I agree that this happened and this is true. But I don't quote unquote believe that or what have you. And her whole argument is like through all of the history of religion, it's actually a commitment to action and is

after you do the action that the insight comes. that you start by doing the things. And then later that gains you Revelation. That's where you actually start to gain insight and understanding. You don't start with, okay, I think this is right, like some empirically validated thing, like I think gravity is right. And so now I I can be all on board with it. And that was a really interesting take. I thought that was really interesting. We're not as used to it now because we're used to a world after Descartes where it's all about we're in our head doing rationality.

So like okay, religion, like anything or a philosophy, we have to work our way up to it and believe it, and then we can go off and do it and Yeah, some religions are better about that than others, I think the Jewish tradition doesn't care so much about what's going on in your head. Do these things and then you'll have

revelation, which is like through experience, acting as if don't overthink this. This God and Yahweh and you gotta do this and don't eat that and do that. And you need to your family's very important, blah blah blah. And you do this stuff and over time you Then you deepen your understanding of the what she calls the ineffable things you can't even put into words anyway. So In her mind, all of religion is trying to basically get intimations of the ineffable. Through action. And we think about it too much like

Here's a alternative to my history book and do I think this is right or not. Which is interesting. I and I think it's like a really it's one of these mind blow I don't know what to do with it. I just think it's a really interesting point. And I've been just trying to get people to read her because I think that's a really cool book and is underappreciated. Philosophy can do you're right. A lot of philosophy is complicated. I think this is why, you know, our mutual friend Ryan Holliday is really doing well right now is because he's making stoicism accessible. And I know he's very influenced by you in in that work.

And you've done a lot to make stoicism accessible and That has done a lot of good for people. I think also committing to communities of character seems to help people. So okay people are very committed to their role in the military.

It's a community of character, a community in which there's certain aspects of character that are underlined and emphasized, and there's sort of a structure there. People get this through other types of causes or volunteerism, where you're you're committed to a community that actually tries to live true to certain characteristics, elements of character they think are important. I think that can get you there too. But I'm really taken by that Armstrong idea.

of act first, insight second. Yeah. Get out there and start doing it. Yeah. It's a quote I don't have the attribution. But I think about it often which is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. And what you say also brings up for me

memories from several trips to the Middle East. So I've I've spent a decent amount of time in the Middle East and What I've heard more than once from Both Jews and Muslims is you would Hope for us.

in our religions, and I I say this as a non Jew and a non Muslim, so Forgive me if I anyone out there if I get this wrong, but We believe in action. Like what you do matters. What you believe is really secondary. What you do matters. And that's At least You know, they would contrast that with

Some other religions were like what you believe matters first. You can do all the worst things in the world and believe certain things and then you are saved. Those are fundamentally very, very different. Right. And I don't I don't have a you know particular perspective to add there. It is a contrast. And

These are things that I will obviously continue to to think on because I find Precisely for maybe some of the reasons that you already mentioned, the persistence of and the endurance and durability of religion to be fascinating. Even if I disagree with any of the tenants Of

say all religions, the fact that it is so persistent is very, very Interesting, right? Like are we evolutionarily programmed to create have adhere to religion in the same way that birds are programmed to build bird nests.

I don't know. Maybe. It's it seems entirely possible. I'm gonna take a super hard left turn on topic shift, if that's okay with you. Because I promised it. So segueing from uh religion and finding meaning and contemplation. Let's talk about digital minimalism for a second. So

I would love to hear you expand on your suggestion of people doing a thirty day digital minimalism experiment where one removal technologies. I appreciate the congruence we're making here between the uh These are all basically the same. We're all in kind of the same ontological category here. Tomato, tomato. You know, we're all going the same direction. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We got

Yeah, but the profits and also, you know, thirty day declutters. All those kind of things. In fairness, if if you have Let's just say stocks on your iPhone and Twitter push notifications and Everything else. Just giving you a Psychoemotional.

death by a thousand paper cuts, how do you expect to find ultimate meaning in life? It's gonna be tough. gonna make it an uphill battle. So that's my attempt at tying it together.

So let's let's talk about this. This suggestion, this experiment. potential and what that might look like for people. And feel free to obviously add anything that you would like, but th this is something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very, very interested in considering. Doing.

The thirty day Declutter. Is at the core of my philosophy of digital minimalism. So this was My take on

What do we do about the fact that Starting around two thousand sixteen. People became very uneasy about their phones in a way that they weren't in two thousand fourteen. There was this Flip that switched where At some point we realized

I'm looking at this thing too much. Like this is a problem. Like we got we got uneasy, and I could tell very precisely where that happened just based on reactions to my own work when it switched from you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. It happened in like a very quick period where my social media skepticism in particular. really switched. And so My approach to it was You can't start with the habits and the tactics, right? You can't start with like let me get right to setting filters and turning off notifications and not having my phone in my bedroom and putting my phone into grayscale and moving my icons onto the back screen of my iPhone.

that doesn't work, you're going to end up back where you were. And so Digital minimalism by contrast was this humanist philosophy where it says, no, you gotta figure out what you're all about. What you really care about and what you want to do. And then work backwards and say what tech supports that.

And That's how you choose what tech you use in your personal life and what rules you put around it. You start with what's important to me and then you put the tech to work. That's Much more sustainable. But how do you figure out

this question like how do you get that insight into what do I really want to do? What's important to me when you already have all that distraction. That's where the declutter came in. And so I said. take thirty days where you don't use social media, you don't stream online videos. The only podcast you listen to is Tim and Mines and everyone else you stop listening to.

No video games, no online news that's very influenced by you and your low information diet, for example. And you experiment and you reflect and you think about life and go for walks and join things and ride your bike and hang out with friends without sending them messages on a a glowing bitmap screen and you figure out what you're all about. And then at the end of the thirty days, You say, What do I want to do? And so I had that idea I mentioned it to my newsletter. Because I was working on this book, but it was in the early days.

And I said, Does anyone want to try this? And my thought was This is a big ask. So maybe seven people would say yes. And my plan was that's great. I will follow these seven people. And see how it goes and write like pretty long profiles of them. It'll be good for the book. Sixteen hundred people came back and said, Yeah, I'm doing it.

So like it threw that idea that I was gonna follow everyone. Sixteen hundred people did it. One of the people who was doing it was the roommate of a New York Times reporter. So then the New York Times was covering the declutter. Like it became a whole thing. I got hundreds and hundreds of reports back from people. about their experience and what worked and what didn't. But the the main takeaway was It is much more effective if you want to tame the Technology in your personal life. If you want to tame that.

If you're working backwards from first principles of this is what I want to do with my life, how can tech help? It's incredibly sustainable. If you instead say I'm unhappy with all the tech I'm using now, so let me try to put in rules that use it less. That's incredibly non sustainable. You're almost certainly going to go back to where you were before. So if people want to

Give this a shot. What should they do? Well, I mean beyond the the obvious of buying the the book I ended up writing. Which which of course you should start with. Yeah, and and a copy for each of your friends because it's easier for them to read it than you to have to explain it. Um once you've done that. Uh it's actually straightforward. So literally what I say is just I call'em optional.

personal technologies and and I want to draw a really clear line here. This is really about your personal life. I've written other books about email and Slack and and technology in the working world. That's a whole other issue and it seems similar, but there's different issues underlying it. So therefore different solutions. But I'm talking about The stuff you do outside of work that Largely speaking, has you looking at your phone.

You take a break from them from thirty days. If it's a dual use technology. Like I mainly use this for personal reasons, but there's some reason I need to use it. Then you put up fences. So if you're like uh I don't want a text message. But my daughter uses text messaging to tell me when she needs to be picked up from practice. You

put up a fence and say, Well, I'll still do that. But I'm not going to participate in text change with my friends for the 30 days. So you can set the rules how you want to set the rules. And then the only key thing is you go through thirty days. Be very active.

So in that experiment, the people who treated this like a detox. And I hate the application of that term to technology. I think it's a complete misappropriation of that term. People who try to just white knuckle it and say, yes, I'm just not going to use these technologies for 30 days. And just by not using them, something positive will happen. They never made it thirty days. But the people who are like, I will now be very aggressive about

Reflection and experimentation, trying new things, going places, going to the library, buying a bike, joining a running club. reading books, going on long walks. They're the ones who really kept with it. And then at the end of the thirty days, you literally write out a code. Here is the tech I use and the rules by which I use it.

I'm going to use Instagram because I'm an artist. But the only way I'm gonna use it is on my computer. The only people I'm gonna follow are these 10 artists that really inspire me. And I have a glass of wine and look at their latest post on Friday evening. And it's the only interaction I have with that service. You get specific. I'm using this for this reason here, so I use it. And then you're

You've reset, you've marry condoed your digital closet. You took everything out, you only put back in the stuff you cared about, and uh and you go for it. Why not Friday for an Instagram scroll through ten inspiring artists does sound like it would spark joy. So thank you, Vikanda. She's the tiniest woman. I've maybe ever met in my life. She was on the podcast a hundred years ago. I actually interviewed her in Japan and

She is the most Perfect. porcelain skin I've ever seen on any human. really uh may may in fact be an alien. Very sweet. Very or a very organized a very organized alien though. So she's a very organized alien.

be really discouraging if this hyper advanced alien civilization showed up and they're really, really fucking disorganized. Just couldn't figure things out. You'd be like, oh no. We thought we had we thought we had so much clarity to look forward to. And It sounds like from your description that the people who approach This type of digital minimalism experiment as one of subtraction, and that's their focus.

They fail. And those who view it as an experiment with new additions or substitutes to kind of Crowd out default. Tech behaviors. are the ones who end up benefiting most. Is that a fair

Description? We're good at humans to committing to things that are positive. Like that's very motivating for us. We're bad at trying to avoid things that are negative. It's very bad for us to be like, uh, I think I use Instagram too much. I'm gonna try to use it less. Is like that doesn't

isn't very compatible with our wiring. But on the other hand, you're like, I I have this vision of my life that it's really positive and it makes me feel good. I'm really into it. Oh, and by the way, that's a vision in which I don't use Instagram. is way more effective. Do you still use and this could be a dead end and we can just cut it if so, do you still use a shutdown ritual? When you close your computer. You do. All right.

Could you please describe for folks? What the shutdown ritual is. At the end of your work day. At the end of your workday, you you go through and you close, use the David Allen term. All the open loops.

So okay, let me make sure there's nothing I missed. There's not like an email I had to answer that was very urgent that I forgot about. You look at your weekly plan and your calendar, what's going on tomorrow. I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Okay, my plan makes sense. You look at your task list. I didn't forget to do something today that was very urgent. All right. I'm good to stop working. And then you have to do some sort of demonstrative

ritual at that point to indicate that you did all those checks. So Back in the early days of my blog, the thing that me and my readers always talked about doing was actually saying the phrase. Schedule shutdown. Complete. Because it's absurd, right? Like it's a weird absurd thing. But the the whole idea was then later on when your monkey brain turns on is like work, work, work, I'm sure we're missing things. Ah, right? Like we do.

Instead of having to go back and say, I have to now have a whole conversation with my monkey brain about, well, let me look at my calendar and I did this, I did that. You can short circuit all of that. And say I said the absurd phrase. I would not have any other time in my life have said that phrase if I hadn't actually gone through all the steps of making sure there was nothing open. So I don't need to get into it.

I said the phrase, I know I'm okay. And when people would do this it would take about a week or two and it would significantly reduce that Evening or morning work anxiety where your mind's like, Oh, I'm sure we're forgetting something. Oh, let's go over the email that we sent. Was that the wrong thing to send? You can just say, I said the stupid thing.

And I would never have said that stupid thing if like I hadn't shut it down. It Look, I created it because I needed it as a grad student. I created it and it took on a life of its own. There's a lot of people out there looking left, looking right, making sure they're alone, and then under their breath going Schedule shutdown complete. Schedule shutdown complete. That is so fantastic.

Oh, just great. Well Calm. This has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for taking the time. I don't want to end it prematurely. I want to of course ask, is there anything else that you would like to Share?

I'm in no rush. Is there Any type of closing comments, requests for the audience, anything you'd like to point people to, anything at all that you would like to Say or ask before we wind to a close. No, this has been great. I I I love the territory we covered.

Awesome. Well I really appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have show notes, links to everything, all the resources to all of Cal books. Includ.

Digital minimalism and his latest A World Without Email. We'll also link to a number of his New Yorker pieces to the Deep Questions podcast and you can find him online. Not On any Social media platforms, but at Cal Newport, C A L N E W P O R T Dot.

Come? And until next time. Be safe. Experiment often. And thanks for tuning in. Schedule shut down.

Complete. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then

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