#594: Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss Revisit "The 4-Hour Workweek" (Plus: The Allure and The Void of Remote Work, Unsustainable Behaviors, Burning Out, The Cult of Productivity, and More)

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A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal metal skeleton. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. This episode's gonna be a little bit different. In this episode, past podcast guest and excellent writer, Cal Newport, interviews me for an article he ended up writing for the New Yorker titled Revisiting the Four Hour Work Week and How Tim Ferris's two thousand seven manifesto anticipated our current moment of professional upheaval. So the call itself was

for material. We were having a conversation for this print piece. that ended up coming out. And I really enjoyed the conversation and thought you might as well. So who is Cal? Cal Newport. You can find him at calnewport.com, C A L N E W P O R T dot com, 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, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Cal is the author of seven books, including most recently Deep Work and Digital minimalism and a world without email. He is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions Podcast. You can find my interview with Cal, me interviewing him, that is, at timdotblog.

slash Cal Newport and you can find the two thousand seven talk at South by Southwest. It launched everything. So my talk at that festival, my first ever keynote. on the content and the concepts. in the four hour work week. at timdot blog slash s x s

W And with all that said. Please. Enjoy. Tim, thanks for uh taking some time to talk with me today.

My pleasure. Excited to dig in. Yeah, so I I really want to focus, you know, as we've talked about before On The conception and immediate

Reception of the four hour work week and just to remind you of the context, I'm interested in this idea that That book's reception in two thousand and seven was actually a Warning shot of sorts. about what was happening in the world of work.

becoming less sustainable and it was a a warning shot that was largely forgotten. And now we are feeling it today. the after effects of this thing that you were pointing out early. So I wanted to get into A little bit of story of the book and the reception. I'm gonna ask you about that. And get your thoughts about why in some sense that warning shot

Fated. out of people's perception for a while. So that's the Route. I'm gonna take if that's amenable to you. It is absolutely amenable. I'm I'm game.

Yeah, so let' I I want to I wanna set the context of The times and the culture. before you started conceiving this book. So Right off the bat, you graduated Princeton, do I have this right? Right around two thousand. What was the actual year you graduated? Exactly two thousand. Okay.

And did you go straight from Princeton to True San? Was that your first job? I did. I did. Okay. Yep. Had the desk and the fire exit very much not up to code. They're overc over capacity. So it was an exciting time to get land in Silicon Valley. And and you were there for that first crash. The the two thousand one yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So when did you begin To notice. Signs of unsustainability. about the the work culture out there. Was it Tru San Was it later? with your startup. I mean what was it like out there? Because and just as context.

This two thousand to two thousand and five, roughly, this is when As far as I can tell. Something tipped? in the culture, especially in Silicon Valley, towards this sort of hyper community of unsustainable. So I know somewhere around it this was happening. You were there. What were you seeing on the ground back then?

I'm seeing what I suppose many people were seeing and engaging in, which is a heroic sprint or what was intended to hopefully be a sprint. Two sort of cash in or cash out with these

Incredibly fast growing startups. This was the sort of new new economy, all the rules were thrown out. At least that's how it was presented in the media. And I think everyone there was inclined to believe it. Because it was a An appealing fiction.

that you could sprint for a few years and everyone could make a ton of money and Cash out. Turns out that is harder to do. than it would seem on paper. But when things crashed, at least when I saw four The tech startup implosion. was people coming into the office on

the day before Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving and working late into the night and so on. And that in and of itself is not Intrinsically unsustainable. for everyone, but it's unsustainable for a lot of people, right? If you're Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yes, you can do that for the entirety of your whole life. If you're Henry Kissinger, you can also do that. But I think Vast majority of us can't sustain that for an incredibly time. So I took the behaviors That I had

Developed. Working in the startup. culture working in a very fast growing startup. And then applied it to my own business starting around. Say two thousand one.

My tenure at TrueSan didn't last very long because TrueSan didn't last very long. And I was Working across multiple time zones I was Waking up early, going to bed.

Very, very late. And Probably clocking, I would say, at least twelve hour days, typically. And What I began to notice this is very early. from a tech perspective, right? If you wanted to access

Certainly. say files on your computer. This is pre-dropbox. You might have to use something like go to my PC to log in remotely and so on. So as far as mobility and remote access, it was very, very early days. We had Flintstone's tools at the time. Compared to today. But The

Breaking point for me was about two thousand four. And I was dating Wonderful girl. Who I thought was probably going to end up my wife, and she broke up with me and gave me a not exactly a plaque, but uh do you know those trifold

Photo holders that you can get at a target or something like that. They're sort of wire brushed and so on. Yep. And so she had created A collage of sorts. It showed me photograph of my head cut out and pasted onto this. paper body in a business suit with a briefcase with stuff flying out and it said business hours end at five PM and so she basically said, Keep this for your health, put this on your desk. And At the end of that relationship

What I realized was that Outside of the pre Startup crash. euphoria and the quick flips and so on.

If I telescoped out. And if I'm not really getting to your answer, tell me, but this is sort of a microcosm of the macrocosm, if that makes sense. If I telescoped out a year, five years, ten years. and looked at the behaviors they were not sustainable and the problems that were small were going to get bigger. The little physical issues that I had from sitting in front of a computer for those types of stretches were just going to compound.

So on and so forth. And so that is when I decided to either completely rethink and remake the business or shut it down. And that led to A commitment to back when you could buy a one way ticket overseas without too much trouble. I bought a one way ticket to the UK where I stayed with a college friend crashed on a couch. And I committed to spend four weeks there to figure things out. And

ultimately, even with the rudimentary tools at the time was able to really Automate. and outsource an incredible amount. at the time, using things like Elance and again remote access tools like go to my PC, where you would still have to go to an Internet Cafe, mind you. I think it's Easy Internet or Easy Cafe, which was the Internet Cafe equivalent or Cousin of EasyJet, if that rings any bells. And

I just continue travelling. Because I had sort of remove the need to be physically in one location. And that led me to travel around the world for Around a year.

And over that period of time was guessed and I'll stop in a minute because I'm not sure if I'm going in the right direction, but over that time and for actually many years prior, from two thousand was the date. I wanna say it was two thousand three to two thousand thirteen. I guess lectured at Princeton twice a year in high tech entrepreneurship class. And I was the bootstrap example. They had a lot of venture backed. entrepreneurs who would come speak to the class and I was the bootstrapping example.

And I began to So to codify the rules that I had borrowed were refined for myself in this huge experiment. And that much later.

Turned into the four hour work week. Just that by the way, as an aside. Where was the there's not a business school at Princeton, so who where were they hiding this high tech entrepreneurship class? I'm assuming it was probably phenomenally popular.

It was very popular and Relatively new, all things considered. It was in the It was in two departments. It was ELE four ninety one. So it was in electrical engineering. And even though it was uh decidedly non technical. It was within electrical engineering and also

I believe it was called it may have changed in name. O R F operations research finance, like financial engineering and operations engineering. So I believe it straddled both of those departments. And so you had undergrads and graduate students in that class and it was phenomenally Popular Ed Shao Z S C H A U

Is An incredible human, incredible teacher, incredible character. He's worth looking up. I don't know how much you want me to get into right now, but he was a former competitive figure skater had been a congressman, had taken a couple of of companies public, was one of the first computer science teachers at Stanford, had then taught at a Harvard Business School. Of course, chronologically all these things are out of order. And

He was tremendously Inspiring and also encouraging. And so he helped connect me. Ultimately with the people who led to the job at True Zoom. And was he Ed was Who taught you the Proto principle? Do I have that right?

It's a good question. I'm not sure if Ed taught me Pareto's principle. The Pareto Principle could also have come from a lot of reading. I mean, I've always been a a voracious reader, so it could have come from any number of books. Someone you cited, yeah, in your two thousand seven speech. Maybe it was A different Ed? Was there an Ed Lau is there is there a different I'm trying or or a Ted? If I had mentioned

And Ed probably would be Ed show. So I'm perfectly happy to attribute it to Ed. We'll give we give him the credit. Rewinding just a little bit though, so I like this idea that You have this, you know

The new new thing. Culture. In Silicon Valley. Late nineties, early two thousands. Everyone wants the Jim Clark.

Hyperion yacht, you know this is where I'm gonna end up, right? And so, you know, you go and you you go to your startup, you're like, This is how I'm gonna r push now because that's what you do. Now, in your case, you mentioned somewhere, I think maybe in the four hour work week, which I just I reread last weekend. Oh, thanks for that. You mentioned cryptically well, it's great. I love the book. And I still remember my first listening of it after our common friend Remit Sethy called me. It was like My friend Tim has his book. You gotta read it today. And I uh I listened to it on Audible or whatever it was back then. Ray Porter.

Good narrator. Yeah. Ratefor is great. Yeah. She does a lot of thrillers now too. Yeah, he's perfect. You mentioned you mentioned the book that you had made a fatal flaw. with your company that meant that you weren't going to

This wasn't something you're gonna sell in three years and buy the yacht. Little bit of a side, I'm just curious, what was the fatal flaw that made the the company something that wasn't going to be quickly? Well, uh I I think that if you start with the end in mind, perhaps I'd started with the wrong end. And by that I mean my relationships and contracts and so on would not Necessarily transfer over to new leadership. So a lot of the business was dependent on me. Ultimately, I created the business because I understood.

That's I had a very large margin of safety with the actual Profit margin. And it was also an area I understood really well. But the the flaw was not I mean, there were many. There was more than one flaw is the short answer. But there's a good book, actually, that people can read, which gives them pretty much the gist in the title, and that is built to sell.

Yeah. And the a more extreme example of something not built to sell would be, say, the Tim Ferriss show, the podcast. Right. It is so intrinsically intertwin with me. There's a key man in this case, dependency. There's a bunch of that built into the business. And

That made it. More. difficult. The other piece that made it difficult in a sense, which can be a very elegant solution for You know, I hesitate to call it a lifestyle business because some of these so called lifestyle businesses are really just cash flow.

healthy businesses that are privately held, right? I don't think they get maybe a unfair knock, but With many of these lifestyle businesses, certainly a lot of the businesses that exist now and a lot of the businesses that were created after people read the four hour workweek. You would have one or two Owners.

And then you would have Lots of contractors. And If you haven't assembled a management team that would

effectively transfer as an acquire. even if the price were larger to another company, there are all sorts of complexities involved. So That's a bit of a meandering answer, but There are a bunch of weaknesses because I created it first and foremost. having never sold a company, having never invested in startups, having never even really considered how one would build a company to sell, I started it first and foremost to produce

Cash flow. And That's the Long and short answer. Right, exactly. That that in some sense because you you've mentioned before, for example At some point people tried to knock it off unsuccessfully, and that's because it's not just the idea or assembling the right contractors.

It's the intense focus on operations that the founder, runner, you injects into it that I am here seven a.m. to midnight, doing all the things, keeping the things up, caring, you're the operational cog. Yeah. Yeah absolutely. You can hire all the contractors and set up a relationship with the manufacturer, but if you're not paying attention to it.

Cal, may I add actually one more thing? Yeah, sure, of course. I was just gonna say I think it's important to note that 'Cause we're talking about sprints. And I I mentioned that word at least and sustainability and so on. I think it is All things equal, critically important if you are opting into, say, the venture backed startup game, where there are some zero sum scenarios that you work your ass off. I do actually think that's important. If you're playing

That game. And It is in some ways very similar to professional sports. It tends to favor the young who are really going to put nose to grindstone and are willing to

engage in that type of full contact sport. But even within that type of intense environment, things very often take two or three times longer than you would like them to and cost two or three times more. And so it makes sense to have systems and habits and principles that support those types of contingency plans, if that makes any sense. Well yeah, and uh and I'm glad you brought that up because this

Sort of brings me to my my next question, which is You have this culture emerging in Silicon Valley where there's people making a run for startups that going big for the first time this capital was there, everyone saw what happened to Netscape and then the firing gun had had been fired. But then what interests me, and this is where I don't know if you have a an answer or not.

Is that attitude metastasized out of people who were employee number three on a startup trying to hit an IPO schedule. And it grew to just I'm a Programmer, I'm in the marketing department at this larger company, and then it grew out of Silicon Valley and the knowledge work more generally. This let's get after it, let's sprint this hustle culture. And the other place it it has shown up where it was sort of necessary was in

you know, high finance. So in the eighties, I guess, you had Michael Lewis now For him looking at Silicon Valley, of course, you had Liars Poker, so they also was that culture was coming out of the managing director. push in high finance in the eighties and nineties, and then we get this push for your startups, but it it spread. And it spread to people who

I am not in line to I don't own thirty percent of a company that my effort's going towards that I'm gonna make a lot of money when this thing sells, and yet everyone began working more and more like that. rarefied model of the founder trying to make Their startup successful. I don't know if you have an answer. I don't have an answer, but I'm I don't know if you have a thought on it, but why

Is this just Silicon Valley's cultural influence? Because this is what I saw. That idea spread. And people began treating work became more and more that type of sprint, even when there wasn't a clear finish line. That you were sprinting towards.

It's a good question and I can only Take a an educated Stab at it. But it's still speculative. I would say I think what happens in Silicon Valley often

is twofold. There are Companies and people who are lionized and put on a pedestal and therefore culturally There is a lot of imitation of Silicon Valley.

I do think that's a piece. I do think though it's possible that and even larger piece is that Silicon Valley. Certainly. at that time and there are more

Places like Silicon Valley now. whether that's New York City, Cambridge, Shanghai, Beijing, there are more places like it. But if we flash back to the early two thousands, Silicon Valley was also the prototyping and testing ground for new technologies. And you had bleeding edge early adopters. Even if technologies are available.

Yeah, I think of the William. Gibson quote, which is very overused, but it is apt here, which is the the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed, and that's true. In Silicon Valley. So for instance.

Years ago. You could go into a coffee shop in Palo Alto and they were actually attempting It was Coupa Cafe, C O U P A. They were attempting to allow you to pay in Bitcoin. For Your coffee. I don't think they had many takers, but nonetheless that was an option and similarly, I think

Whether it's internet cafes, remote work arrangements. virtual organizations. A lot of these were teste early on, and you also had people buying tools and iPhones and So on the iPhone may have come later. with a certain density in Silicon Valley. And when you have all of those tools and you have certain cultural norms, but you're they're enabled by

A certain pervasive technology fetish. If we look at where we are now, it's easiest way to make the point that When you can always be connected. And when you don't have a single physical office.

You can work all the time. And in fact it's incredibly challenging and you need strategies and rules. Maybe even Technological.

Constraints so that you don't work all the time. It bleeds over. And I think that's a byproduct of not just the culture. And the narrative, although that's a big piece of it. It's also byproduct of Silicon Valley. at the time at least being sort of ground zero for density of new tech use, which then proliferated out.

Two other places. I like this because I think it's the Alternate. Hypothesis. And it's a hobby horse hypothesis of mine that the other way to understand

People getting more busy work seeming less sustainable. We have the my original hypothesis, which is there's this culture of overwork that came out of Silicon Valley. But I what you're saying here is the other, I think competing hypothesis, which is maybe even more right. I mean I just read a whole book about this, it was the tools. Yeah. And that when you give people always on low friction digital communication. There's weird dynamics that occur. And I note, for example And you're two thousand seven sort of coming out south by south west.

Talk south by southwest interactive talks. I wanna get to is sort of the core of this book's release. I just re-listened to it. Email is mentioned. You mentioned email four times in the first six minutes of that talk. It is your personification in some sense of Unsustainable work.

Right. The whole opening of this talk is about how work has become unsustainable and email is brought up multiple times as the example. So this is the competing hypothesis. Which is Once email. Spread. And again, we can blame Silicon Valley in the sense that they probably prototype like hey, we should all be on email talking all the time. And that's where that came from. It became a

accidental byproduct. We can all reach each other at all times. There's no governor on that behavior and the whole social cultural economic business culture environment just spiraled out of control and suddenly no one knew what to do. We were constantly getting emails. We didn't know what to do with it. No one was putting a cap on that. No one was asking how should we do it. So that's that's another hypothesis that maybe that one's more accurate. I did you because you mentioned email so much when you were talking about this book in the time. Mm-hmm.

I'm taking it that that's an important To you that's an important piece of part of what was making work less sustainable back then. Oh, for sure. And I mean I think that Well, a few things. Number one, I would love to hear that talk'cause I haven't heard it since I gave it. I wasn't even aware that they had a recording. So if you uh could send a link to that, I would love to

To listen to it. I have to do it. Do you remember your PowerPoint broke? Do you remember that? I do remember that. I absolutely remember that. I do remember that. It seemed like a metaphor for something. It seemed very profound. It was very me very very meta. So Let me just as a backdrop say I think Silicon Valley in its Best.

Versions. Shows us the bright Optimistic. Enabled. better future that we can have. You get glimpses of

things that might only be seen on Main Street. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty years later. So in that sense. It is a

Yeah. Conversely, it's also the canary in the coal mine for new maladies, for new neuroses, for new afflictions that are related. Two. new technologies and developments and cultural changes also if they're associated with technology. So the email at the time

was the Email addiction. And sorted issues w was the easiest to point to. And Twitter is just an example. I think you and I spoke about this some time ago, but

My understanding is that Twitter launched Officially. that same south by southwest. And I remember there being a huge Big screen TV on the ground floor. of the convention center where they had South by South West Interactive, which at the time was really the redheaded stepchild of the entire event. It was tiny. It was so small. And now it's the connective tissue that binds

Everything at South by South was together. But at the time it was very small. And you could see all of the tweets being published in real time in the world. on one big screen TV and you could watch it. You could watch it slowly click through and you could see it scroll. It was incredible and kind of crazy to think that you could do that. at that point, two thousand seven. But Twitter wasn't ubiquitous. Social media weren't

Ubiquitous in the same way that they they are today. So email at the time was A clear example of a tool.

That was designed for Defense purposes. If we go back to like ARPANET and so on, best I can. Yeah.

that was now being adapted to be used as And instant messaging. tool by millions of people. And I recall I don't know if I mentioned this in the talk, but At the time.

Robert Scobel was a big figure in this corner of tech, and he had said something to me along the lines. I may have only mentioned this in later talks, I don't know if I mentioned it in that one, but That the only way to receive fewer emails is to not respond. And that he had noticed when he responded to email, for every email he responded to, he received something like 1.75 email in response.

And uh That is the very definition of insurmountable. It's you used the word metastasize earlier in the conversation. Uh very appropriate here. And if you begin to telescope out just looking at

If we take that math as roughly true for a lot of people in some fashion. It was very clear. That We had

Either a broken tool. And or a broken approach to handling this tool. And everybody empathized. Especially the people in this audience at South by South West. I mean these are

Tech early adopters. Who have maybe been sort of wading through The Briar Patches. and quicksand of high volume email by that point. Perhaps for a few years longer.

Then the mainstream. that acute pain perhaps had not been been felt by a lot of other people, which is part of the reason why I think the four hour work week really And it was deliberate on my part also, but it really took off among tech savvy and tech immersed knowledge workers.

In a handful of cities. First. And I th I think it's because they felt the pain most acutely. And that matches my research. They're hard to find now, but I used to have

People were posting notes. They're notes from your session. And The email It's too much.

Tell people you're not gonna answer. You know, except all of that elimination ideas was just Asterix exclamation point. Scobel's interview with you. Let's get into the email. You definitely Felt that.

This is where that tipping point was happening, but no one no one was yet saying this was unsustainable. My whole theory on this is that when I went back and did all the research on email spread, it spreads in the early nineties because We needed more cost effective asynchronous communication was replacing fax machines and voicemail, and it's cheaper and it did it well, and it's good for that. And then we got what you said. Which was well, let's just use this as the main medium through which all collaboration happens. Hyperactive hive minded back and forth conversation. That doesn't scale. That that fried our brains and tech got there first.

But the problem was tech was the wrong place for that to hit first. because they're such techno instrumentalist in that world. They're like, okay, it's all about user habits. If I can just get a custom Vim Macro suite set up just properly, right? This was the era of Merlin Mann and inbox zero. That like if email's a problem, it's because I don't have the right Shut up. I don't have the right configuration. I don't have the right processing system for and so they were they were going at it by saying, I'll just build better tools because

Detect people. Tech is quite neutral. It's all about how you use it. So like we must just be using this tool wrong, but I think you're right. And I agree with that theory. That no, no, the the whole way is uh organizations were using emails like this is how collaboration happened meant there's nothing you could do to your inbox configuration.

that was going to save you from having to answer a lot of emails. You had to actually change how the work happened. Which is basically what a lot of what you were preaching. And maybe that's what made it Transgressive at the time. Or or a release. But

I'm glad you had that same Reaction because that's so strongly how I remember your talk. is the email thing just landed. You know, like that was a punch that just landed and the audience was like, Yes. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Now email and the idea of autoresponders and de-risking auto-responders and case studies of people who'd implemented interval based management of email, say checking every day at ten AM and four PM and providing a phone number.

if they're needed more urgently, et cetera. I mean these types of approaches and the actual experiments and case studies Which allowed people to see how infrequently the worst case scenario is manifest. landed in a very, very big way. And just to build on what you said. Yeah, it's very tempting.

To think that you can make surface level changes to the tools and tactics. That's already lay on top of what you're doing. And

It turns out, I think Certainly in Hindsight if we look at the last year. twenty years since two thousand. I would

Imagine That If what I've seen as any reflection of the broader experience that Instead of having an inbox now, you have five crowded inboxes. You have different messaging apps. You might have iMessage, you might have multiple emails, you might have any number of other applications that sit on the desktop or on your phone and

It's clear to me that You really At least. I mean millions of people who have read the four hour work week have found it more Helpful.

to start with first principles and questioning assumptions and Identifying possible worst case scenarios, how to mitigate them, and then running experiments. a little higher up the stack, if that makes any sense, or or further upstream, just to mix all my metaphors. Because at the end of the day If you have an unsustainable approach, you can window dress it.

With an upgrade or an application switch. But you're not typically addressing root causes. And I think that's why Even now since you just read it last week. I mean you can say As credibly as anyone that

The resources in the four hour work week are out of date. And uh many of the examples, how to market test, how to Launch. what people would now call an MVP. Have all changed.

But The book still sits in Top few hundred on Amazon generally to this day. Somewhere in the top thousand. And I think it's because of the principles. It's because the principles in the stories and the pain are still present.

And can still be used or in the case of the pain. minimized by kind of revisiting the fundamentals. Right. Go to my PC and TV hooky fans. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Those those those are no longer relevant. And if this is actually a great point, like if you think The latest

App is gonna save you. You're just going to have to repeat the drill six months later, twelve months later. There's very little durability to A tactical. based or a tool based

approach in my experience. Right. You're not one Slack. Plug in away. From Productivity Nirvana. From Nirvana. Right.

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Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim. That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. One of the things you talk about in the

For our work week is in elimination you talk about I don't like productivity. And I think most time management is, you know, in some sense a waste of time. This is smart people spending too much time trying to be more efficient instead of trying to be smarter about what they do. And I I recently did this big piece for the New Yorker. on it was called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done and it was about the rise of

The Productivity Prawn movement. Which was this movement that felt like with the right high tech tools and scripts and database backed applications, you could basically make work.

You could tame all your work and it would be easy. An interesting thing about that timeline is that that movement Picked up all of its speed. In the three or four years before the four hour work week came out.

And around the time the four hour work week came out. the main one of the main organs of that, which was uh Merlin Man's forty three folders blog, which was like a really important thing at the time. Oh hugely influential. Yeah. Basically sh not shut down, but it redirected away from I'm This isn't gonna work. That's kind of the point of this article that followed Merlin's story, but it was like, okay, we're not gonna solve work by just having quicksilver scripts and and KGTD, like actually we need to rethink work. All of that was concurrent. So when you were looking at Productivity is not working, time management's not working.

Is that what you were seeing that moment of that that brief moment of optimism where we thought with like the right Mac configurations we can make our overwhelming work effortless without having to actually ask the question of what our work is. You might not remember. I mean this is a while ago. No, I remember a lot of it. I think that last portion Is true for me at least, in the sense that The cult of productivity.

And we have to be very careful with that term. And you've written about this. I read your recent piece actually, which I thought was very good. We have to define productivity very carefully. Yes. Lest we become Yeah, you know, the greyhound chasing this rabbit around a track, not knowing why we're there in the first place, but I think Technologists.

And those who are Mesmerized by Technologists since technology. Are very prone.

Extremely efficient at doing things that are not important. I and and sometimes Sometimes they do apply it to things that are important, but

The thrust of the four hour work week, I would say in a nutshell is What you do? is more important than how you do it. And put another way. Being effective.

is more important than being efficient. So let's think really hard. About The eighty twenty principle, otherwise known as Preto's Law. Such that

If you focus on The highest leverage. Things. Even if you fuck up. Every which way from Sunday.

You have such a margin of safety and such a disproportionate output for the time that you put in. It's okay. Does that make sense? So If you look at

Churchill, Drucker. I mean a lot of these figures Who were massively productive by almost any definition. I mean taking naps, you got like Ulysses S Grant, alcoholic, you know it's not like they were sitting in front of a typewriter or dictating or active frenetically active all the time. That was just not the case.

So Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think Anyone who has attempted to kind of address

The malaise of overwork by adding More tools and tricks and scripts. realizes pretty quickly's always going to fill faster than you can bail it out with that type of approach.

At least in my experience. Yeah. I think that idea was very influential for me too. I got it from you. I'm pretty you know, I got that from the Far I Work Week. But I thought about it recently, I wrote an essay over the summer. Where I read a book about the history of all the a lot of great scientists. About the history of science. And I wrote this essay that was saying

Galileo didn't work that much. And yet we see him as being incredibly productive, but he was never He was rarely busy. That's a for our work week idea. I just want to say one more thing because it's so tangible for folks. A lot of

People don't identify with scientists or maybe even writers, but This is true of a lot of the world's best investors, also. I mean Warren Buffett don't just Do something, stand there instead of don't just stand there, do something.

And Dairy Laziness bordering on sloth, I think, is how either he or Munger have described their investing approach. You don't have to do a lot. If you get a few things right.

And if you really pick your targets well. Okay, good. Now that you've brought it up, let me just as an aside pitch you this. This is this idea I've been developing on my podcast recently, slow productivity. Yeah. And Here's my whole concept. I don't know. Let's see if this makes sense. Productivity depends on scale.

So when you say what I wanna do is maximize what I produce on the scale of weeks You're gonna be very, very busy. Like get things moving, emails going back and forth, I'm jumping on calls or what have you. But if you change the scale to years. Like I want to maximize what I produce over the next five years. to be as impressive as possible. It's like a completely different game because now it's like I want to produce three great things in the next five years, which means your Wednesday, you might do nothing, right? It's it's like scale. So this is my this is my new thing, maybe scale.

The scale at which you're talking about Producing changes the Rhythm. of what your everyday every day feels like. But this is all aspirational for me because I have too much going on. Yeah, I I I love that phrasing, slow productivity or like patient productivity.

is maybe another way to to look at it. And not to revert back to investing over and over again. But money is such a important, tangible, scary, alluring thing to people that it's useful as an instrument when talking about some of these

Principles and uh read a book recently. Well listen to a book called The Psychology of Money by Morgan House and I was quite impressed by it and one of the chapters explored The importance of playing your own game and not other people's games. But that

Entails knowing what games they are playing. So for instance, if you have Momentum traders who are in very short positions who really don't care If Let's just use an arbitrary example. If Google has a higher price a year from now, but they do care

They don't care about fundamentals, anything like that, free cash flow, whatever. They don't care about any of that. What they do care about is sort of market sentiment or behavior. driving up the price that they can sell tomorrow or a week later. And It's important to kinda know the motivations and the games of other participants. Because if you have a different time horizon.

your way of relating to that is totally different. For instance, like can I guess This is not investment advice, but like can I guess Can I guess correctly whether stock's gonna go up or down by what percentage over the next week. No. Over

A year. No, probably not. I mean any kind of cataclysm could hit. But there's certain trends over time where it's like, Yeah, do I think there's certain technologies that inescapably are going to become more pervasive in a five to ten year stretch. And if I invest in companies that are investing heavily in those areas, Do have a pretty high. Degree of confidence is gonna go up. Yep.

And that's all the homework I really need to do. Does that make sense? And similarly With productivity. If your time horizon is like how can I get Yeah. the most important things done over the next five years. And that's reasonably well thought through.

But you're reading interviews with people on the cover of magazines, if that's even a a thing anymore. who are in a mad sprint in a zero sum startup game to like dominate market share and Do God knows what. You're playing different games. They're just different games.

Was that your mindset? When you moved into podcasting. Like now we're doing a long game. 'Cause you had a lot going on. And it seems like you simplified things. And at first it must have been

The first month you're doing that. Is not an empire. Oh yeah. The podcast well the here's I'm not sure if it's gonna be relevant, but I'll tell you, the podcast came about because the four hour chef just about killed me. It was a such a complex project done in such On such tight. Timelines?

It was one of the most grueling things I've ever done physically very, very difficult project. And when I launch books, I'm basically doing an 8020 analysis and looking at what is The different channels. and forms of media that are decreasing in influence but are thought to have still very high influence by the majority and thus kind of overvalued in some fashion. This could apply to paid acquisition too. And then I'm looking at the neglected darlings that are undervalued in some way, uncrowded in some way, but

growing in importance. And so podcasts, I do this every book launch. And the podcasts came out pretty uniformly as having a a massive impact. This is in two thousand twelve. Thousand eleven, two thousand twelve, planning this. So I did a lot of podcasts. For The book release.

And they had a tremendous impact. And I really enjoyed the format. And Decided that I wanted to test podcasting for I think my commitment was six episodes.

But here's the rationale. The rationale was Or rather, the question that I would ask myself is like Is there a way that I can win doing this even if I fail? And the way that I win doing something even if I fail is if I develop skills

and relationships or deep in relationships that transcend that project as a failure. Does that make sense? Yep. Scott Adams writes a lot about this really well. And in the case of the podcast, I thought to myself, Well, I'm gonna take a break from books. No matter what. given the type of books I write, I do interviews, I ask questions.

I would like to get better at asking questions and navigating those conversations. I'm going to have these types of conversations anyway. Also. So why don't I determine what I think the minimum effective dose is.

for podcasting. Like how many episodes would I actually have to do to start to get better at speaking and interviewing? I was like six to ten, probably. Great. Let's commit to that. Yeah. And then I was after the races. And It's become a lot more Since

But that's how it started. Interesting. Yeah, I was just I was curious about that. So that's a I'm glad we got that that detour. But okay, so going back to Work being unsustainable.

Warning shot. When you got this opportunity to speak at South by Southwest two thousand and seven at South by Southwest Interactive. This was potentially a hostile crowd. As far as I can tell, right? Because these are Silicon Valley types. I mean he's at this music festival, but this is where all the khaki pants were and all the vest were.

These were people who were Going after it, crushing it, you know, trying to get their startups turned around. So it it kinda could have gone Both ways. So because this this was ground centered. So so were you Were you worried about that, or were you you knew everyone enough people in this world that like, yeah, everyone's gonna be on board with this. What's the mindset going into that crowd?

Hay. Uh the mindset was I really don't have much to lose. In the sense that if it works Great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I'm right back where I started. And I felt like I knew That crowd because I was a member of that crowd. On some level.

If that makes sense. And I also wanted to Approach it.

Maybe this is part of the mindset. By telling my story and describing case studies. I was You would know better than I'cause I haven't heard it since I gave it, but I don't think I was saying you have to do this.

And everyone should do. X, Y, and C There were certainly prescriptions, like you could do this. This is what I've done, this is what so and so did. But it was it was really sharing a story and there was so much common pain. I knew the pain was gonna land. I knew it was gonna land because I had also Workshopped the material.

on classes For years. of technologists and now these are undergrad and graduate students, but nonetheless. I was living in Silicon Valley, so I was surrounded by friends who were co founders and people who were

Using technology. So I was very highly confident that at the very least The various pains would be something people would identify with. And Also, maybe a little known fact.

Hugh Forrest, who I thank pretty much every time I speak at South by South West, gave me a shot. I did not have a proper room. The talk was given in basically an overflow room, I wanna say, that also acted as a mini cafeteria. And there was a cancellation. There was some type of cancellation. And

To my memory, he was like, Hey If you still want a shot. We got a spot. You know, there's this little stage. Yep and I wanna say the capacity was something like a hundred Maybe a hundred, two hundred and fifty people somewhere in that range.

And No one knew who the hell I was and it was Pact. It was Fact.

And that had nothing to do with me. Had zero to do with me. It had to do with the pain and the Potential of some. toolkit that would help alleviate that pain. But it was standing remotely. And that That is purely from

Subject matter. The structure of the talk was Six minutes, seven minutes. Pain. Like let's get let's get into the pain.

And then Relief in You know, we can radically rethink what work is. And now we'll talk through like different ways you might do that. One of the things I picked up relistening to it recently too is the other thing that seemed to land in there was the examples you gave about

It's okay. to do things that might make someone else is life. Temporarily less convenient. For some reason that really landed. Like put an autoresponder and say I'm not gonna respond to you right away.

Or fire a client. Those two things really seem to land. Do you think that gets at the pain in a pretty clear way? Like or the frustration. I definitely came away with that because when I heard those two things, I remember those things landing when I first heard your talk and they landed Whatever this is now fourteen, fifteen years later. It's okay

The Basically, Tell some people. You have to be inconvenienced here. So there must have been something going on where like everyone could just grab you and your time and there's a helplessness and

That frustration was palpable when those examples really I think those examples really got to it. For sure. And it's also, you know, the sort of interpretation is in the eye of the beholder here, but And one way to look at it would be. It's okay if you inconvenience other people.

The other way to look at it is It is not just okay, but it's imperative that you prioritize your self care. And if you don't You're not gonna be a player in this game very long.

And if you don't Established boundaries and Ask for what you want. Indicate what you don't want. The world will be happy to program all that for you.

And Chances are it's not gonna turn out very well. So You can sort of develop A

What I would consider a positive assertiveness. Or you can build resentment. And A crew fatigue until you break. And it's not.

Only those two options, but I think it's perhaps useful to Think of the two in opposition. And that definitely landed for folks. And The tools are important, right? I don't wanna say that the tools aren't important, but ultimately

It's asking better questions, it's testing assumptions, and it's really reorienting yourself with Different philosophies and a different psychology. 'Cause if you don't believe it's okay.

For anyone to wait. an hour or two or three, or even a day or two or three for a response in some Instances. It doesn't matter what tool you use. It just doesn't.

And Impatience will. Just swell to fill the void, if you allow it. On behalf of Everyone who is being

Trained to be impatient. What was the private reception, if you remember. So now you're you've given the talk standing room only. You're socializing the parties, et cetera, that makes up South by South West. Do you remember what were people

talking to you about, growing to you about, excited about. I would say that The vast majority It's been a while, right? So to my memory. The vast majority of

The conversations began with a confession of some type. People came up to talk about their pain or their situation. Or the unrealistic expectations that are made of them and how they feel Like they have digital handcuffs.

Of one type or another. I mean it almost always started with Some type of confession and commiserating. Right, because I've been there and done that. So I wasn't an outsider in that sense. I was

A fellow patient. If that makes sense. That makes no sense. And People were also excited and nervous to test things. So they

We're looking for reassurance that These were experiments. worth doing with limited downside. Which is always how I painted it. I said. What is the I would ask questions and you've heard this again. I haven't heard the talk and since I gave it, but what is the

Absolute worst case scenario if you put up an auto responder. Are you gonna be Fired. sight unseen because you created an autoresponder. Okay. Then you determine what you think the worst case scenario is. How could you mitigate the risk of that downside? Maybe you talk to your boss in advance. Maybe you test it

Only for half a day on Fridays when your boss leaves At three PM and you can get to see how co workers respond to it. And then How would you sort of reverse the damage? If the worst case scenario comes through, well you take the autoresponder down.

What is the residual damage of that really? And if the damage is Containable if it's finite. And you look at the potential upside of What it could mean to you if it works.

That is a gamble worth taking. Right. So just an asymmetric. Yeah. And so I tr really tried to frame it that way. I was like, look, I'm not saying

that anyone should commit to doing these things forever, right? Because a lot of the concerns and the pushback would be like, Well, what if this and what if that and what if all these scenarios I can't account for all the scenarios. But I do know that in my own life and in the life of the people who served as case studies. A short test. Twenty four hours.

Forty eight hours. Is very Valuable. because it provides you with more information and it either confirms or questions a lot of the fears associated, the anxieties associated with it.

So a lot of the conversations were around that and people got right to it. I mean, South by South West lasts a while. So there were people who began to test autoresponders the next day. Yeah. And so people then started coming up to me. To

share their kind of Hallelujah. I thought all these horrible things were gonna happen and none of them happened. At the same conference. At the same conference. I mean I think

That's a very important point. That The freedom to experiment. Is the meta value? Like in in other words, like the book and your talk as a microcosm of the book.

First lays out, here's this pain, that wasn't being articulated. And so people say thank you, right? No one's articulating this. They're all saying go, you know, get after it. And then the second part is You have a lot more options than you think. You can even be relatively radical and reengineering what work means. Go out there and try things.

And then the book had specific Things to try. But am I paraphrasing or summarizing the reaction, how you were thinking properly when you were saying it's not that You have to build a

particular automated muse that uses VAs in this very particular way. It's you should be doing that type of experiment. Like be willing to say, well, what if I did this? Let me try and you And you might not end up Selling French sailor shirts. But you can forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you could almost certainly end up

With a much better work configuration might look much different. And my the person who always comes to mind, and I won't use his name because I didn't ask him permission, but he's a common friend of ours. And was really big. You know, on your book when it came out. I met up with them at some point, I think it was two thousand eight.

In Rio. And I was there presenting a paper at a computer science conference. He was there for carnival. He's a lifestyle designer. And when I first met up with him, He was showing me okay I I've written this Code. It was like very in line.

specifically with the examples in the book. It goes through the Google Ad words. automatically finds like what underperforming, you know, value add words. I click this button. And it automatically sends a email to my my VAs in the Philippines who are good English speakers who then write twenty five articles on this topic and put it on HubSpot so we can get a high price for these. He he wanted, you know, it's very, very automated. And then I met up with him a couple years later. And

What he was doing was much more sustainable. He was a computer programmer. He's like, you know, I found that uh I'm working remotely Hourly. But for a European company and I'm getting paid in euros and I'm living mainly in South America and there's a great or geo arbitrage going on there. And I and it was the spirit of rethink your work life.

You know, his first attempt was let me exactly follow one of the examples in the book. And then where he ended up was actually I'm getting mobility, I'm getting geo arbitrage, those those bigger concepts. And then he ended up uh going to an incubator and doing a startup because he had time to think about things and what he wanted to do and Anyway, so that to me that always summarized that point you're making there. That

You can do radical things that are different in the thing that's very unsustainable now. But you have to go take action experiment and that's okay. And even if some people get mad, that's okay. But there's a wide variety. And especially as time changes and tech changes and like let's say today people are not Incredibly nervous about asking for a remote. work arrangement. But when that book came out, that was incredibly. You know, so the times have changed. Yeah.

But that general principle approaches that applies. Even two years ago, a lot of people Would still be able to do it. you relate to Remote work very differently.

than they do today. Both as Employers and employees. And I want to take if it's okay with you, just take a step back for a second because The point you made about Time scale. And

how you think about say productivity. Leads me to Want to also just mention at the very least that The four hour work week.

started with Some overarching kind of macro principles. And The definition section, right? There's the definition, elimination, automation, liberation, all that. The definition section

The purpose of that was to Uncover Perhaps unexamined assumptions like these invisible scripts that are running a lot of our decisions and long term planning. And to question them and then to offer Alternatives.

So for instance, taking a very close look at what I called in the book the deferred life plan. The deferred life plan, which is this sort of slave save, retire. I will Redeem my decades of work for this sort of utopian vision of

leisure in My older years And that will work for me and be great. has sort of dozens of unexamined assumptions.

inside of it. And then offering alternatives like mini retirements and sort of distributing retirement throughout life since long life is not guaranteed and there are all sorts of other issues with assuming you'll have enough for retirement with no income, et cetera. There are others that I'm just gonna mention because they may be Interesting to take a closer look at.

One would also be and this is very relevant now. That Well two things. One is that there's absolute and then relative income. So

Determining how much you make per hour is actually quite Important. in the sense that it's easy so and so makes two hundred thousand dollars a year, so and so makes seventy five thousand dollars a year, another person makes five hundred thousand dollars a year. Therefore, the last example is the most successful, and no doubt they have The

greatest sort of lifestyle output. Four. What they make, but the lifestyle or life value of each unit, each dollar is really dependent on

Other factors. And to what degree you control them. The where, with whom, how, et cetera. Determines a lot of that, and which is part of the reason that Geoarbitrage or geoarb was another thing that was I don't know if it was put on the map, but it was definitely Kind of thrust into the zeitgeist.

By readers of this book. The idea that you can geoarbitrage, which you can do in a single country. Or even a single state. Right. Doesn't have to be scattering different income and expenses around the world. It could be You know, you've you've gone through COVID.

You lived in Manhattan, you decided this makes no sense to escape the city you went to New Jersey or Long Island or Connecticut or who knows where, right? Upstate New York, you realize you prefer that quality of life and that you can get You know, four times the sort of value for money. in in certain locations, even just within our radius of a few hours. I just think the definition section is super

Super important. We don't have to dwell on it, but I just wanted to mention some of like these overarching approaches to deconstructing assumptions that underlie a lot of our decision making. Let's pull on that thread. In particular the thread about Today.

This message was fifteen years ago. Work is unsustainable. B Willing to consider radical changes to what work is and what role it plays in your life.

There's the mystery of why that warning shot was somewhat ignored in the semi-immediate aftermath, which I'll get back to in a second, but we we fast forward to today, especially COVID. Post pandemic. As someone who's writing about these topics right now. This is exactly what's on everyone's mind.

This book and what you're talking about Everyone is going through not everyone, but there's a very large fraction of let's say remote, capable knowledge workers who who had severe disruption of what their day to day life was like. Do the pandemic or going through the thinking.

You mentioned before, you're seeing the book is Catching Not catching a new wave. It's always sold well, but it's Finding an audience now, a new audience? It's never really stopped.

But I would imagine I would have to imagine it's finding a new audience. I mean a friend of mine, old friend. Sent me a photograph. from Austin. He said, Oh, this makes me happy and he sent it was a photograph of Young guy, probably late twenties.

Reading. Four hour work week. The only hardcover edition. Or I should say the latest hardcover edition. that exists, which is the two thousand nine expanded and updated edition. Right. So

eleven or twelve years later. Post COVID. This is still finding. an audience and it's finding new audiences. I think, in part because There were early adopters for this book.

And there were People who really ran the tests and did the experiments in the book. And then there's also, of course, it's called the four hour work week. There was a lot of dismissing it. Based on the title.

Even though I mean, on some level it's really about Maximizing per hour. Output transcript: Right on some level.

It's about that. But For the title. Because of how popular it became In the subsequent. year, you know, it was on the New York Times bestseller list, I wanna say for

I could get you the exact duration, but like four and a half years, five years straight, or something like that. And it became part of the pop cultural conversation. And I think that

There are many, many, I mean, there have to be at this point, just given the exposure of the book, millions of people who have seen the book They've heard about the book. And they concluded this will never work. This can never work for me. And then all of a sudden, you know, this discussion of time and mobility, which is the centerpiece of the four hour work week.

Has been pushed to the forefront of everyone's mind through this gigantic experiment called Covid nineteen. And all of a sudden, people who thought they want to be in an office, people who thought they wanted to work in a certain way. After having experienced alternatives are saying, Wait a second.

I actually don't want to go back to the office. How do I figure this out? And They're also I don't want to say risks, but

challenges in working remotely in feeling like you have and developing community when you are fully distributed. And these problems existed Certainly. when the four hour work week was initially released, they still exist. So I feel like we are still in the honeymoon phase of remote work. for millions of people. They think they found the promised land, but I don't think they have experienced some of the harder aspects.

Like the filling the void chapter in four hour work week talks about this, right? So I think for a lot of these reasons and more The book has definitely seen a new resurgence of Interest. Yeah.

Why in the inter it's a mystery that I'm curious about it. In the interim between When it first hits, work is unsustainable, you should try radical new things. In the interim the over time the book in pop culture beyond people who are directly engaged with the book got associated with something different. And and I mentioned this to you via email, but

I think about two thousand eleven. The office. brings up the book. Daryl brings up the book, the character Dale. in the office. And by that point in two thousand eleven when he's bringing up this book, it has nothing to do with work being unsustainable and radically rethinking work. It is all just how do I

be more hyper productive. Which is almost the opposite. Of what the book is about. And I bet that for a lot of people who The book was on their radar, but they didn't engage with the book. That's for a lot of people became associated with like

being hyper productive by using you sort of radically inventive in the systems you use for the purpose of getting more done. Which is not what the book was about. And so this is sort of this mystery to me is that this big warning shot was happening.

We feel it today, huge. Yeah, work's not sustainable. We need to rechange it. But in between somehow that warning shot for a lot of people got changed to Um How can we use tech and innovative systems to get even more done.

Yeah, that's a damn fine question. You know, the four hour work week became and you know, I didn't mind. I thought it was kinda funny. This Yeah, sort of pop culture productivity. Novelt. Novelt. Novelty, yeah, in a way, right? So you've so it shows up on the office or The cast.

from well supposedly the cast. I mean it's probably a bunch of ghostwriters, but from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrote a book called The Seven Secrets of Awakening, the highly effective four hour giant today. So you can see what that is. And I would love to hear your theory for why this is, but I think it's deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And it can be deeply, deeply challenging to really

question the assumptions and plans that Are the underpinning for much of your existence. your waking existence. I think it's very uncomfortable. And it's not

as cleanly Measurable, perhaps? As Installing a new Chrome plugin that helps you do A, B, and C and I I cleared seventeen percent more email in the last hour. That type of trackability.

And that type of Accountability. is really alluring. So the Product.

Activity porn, like real porn, is highly addictive and highly distracting. And As new Technic and applications and approaches surfaced, even if they're old.

approaches that are being reinvented, right? Using note cards or index cards for various things. It's a very graspable appealing novelty that I think. Almost everyone gravitates towards. You know, it's not surprising to me. That

The four hour work week became A representation of a collection of productivity. Tricks or techniques or technologies because it i it did include that in fairness.

But I think that What Is unfortunate. But not surprising is that

The four work we sort of treated like a tool kit and a bunch of constru construction materials. But used without the blueprint. and the approach and the guiding design principles that are explored in the first Say two sections especially. Those two things are divorced, where in my mind the blueprints and the design principles

Those are the most valuable and most important piece. And then the tools, those are all going to change over time. And I expect them to change over time. That's Observed.

Did you observe people Doing that? You know, just looking at the hacks and not or was it the The perception of the people who weren't reading the book but just This is what I think it is.

Because you y of course you're around this crowd a lot more. Yeah, I think it's more the latter. The book is written in a way. If you start at page one. You cannot get around. the sort of philosophical resets and questioning of assumptions and design principles. You can't get around it.

Yeah. But If you You are reading a blog post that

is supposedly a summary of the four hour work week. Or you are reading any number of books that followed the four hour work week, which were intended to kind of capitalize on that wave of popularity. They focused on

Almost without exception on The tools. And the tricks. And the latest websites. and the best virtual assistant services and so on.

Again, not to say those don't have value. They do have value. But without the underlying frameworks and principles. I don't think you end up solving many problems. And in fact, I think you can end up creating a lot of new problems. Well, and and maybe some of that was

I mean you're a hundred percent right because I just reread the book. There's no other way to interpret the book if you read it. There's no other way to interpret it than this is unsustainable. You know, you have to craft a life that emphasizes the other currencies that are important. This is what the good life is built on. Oh, now let's talk about

How you might do it. And part of this uh so I have two theories I'll throw at you. Part of this, I think is Don't underestimate the degree to which the The way you did talk about the systems when you got there was so new and compelling. That it almost opened up a new Genre and tone.

In productivity. There is a I don't quite know how to Articulated but there was a Precision and a brashness to, you know, it was like very declarative and precise and and it it's kinda hard to articulate, but the way you would talk about uh and the VA should do this and we should and uh don't do it for th this. I can't do it justice, but it's very compelling in itself. So I think you might have introduced a stylistic approach to giving advice.

That Itself could be Separated. Yeah. From the context, right? Because that's a great it was a it's a very compelling but it's very compelling. The book is very compelling. beyond the content. So there's yeah, there's something in in that tone.

But then the other thing is I I think And I talked when we last talked, we kind of I was bringing this up to you is that I've been covering recently, I'm very interested in the the anti-productivity movement, and it's very powerful right now. And I'm taken by the degree to which when you read people Who are in this movement.

The way they characterize what is popular in productivity and type management is Invented. It's fabricated. Like it that when they talk about like what productivity books are out there right now, they will say it's like, Yeah, it's all about trying to get sixty things done and find more time in your day to get things done. And so I go over to okay. Time management.

in Amazon. Let's look at the bestseller list, right? What are the commonly the top three books there. It It's usually shifting back and forth between four hour work week. My two thousand sixteen book, Deep Work. And Greg McEwen's two thousand fifteen book.

Essentialism. All of these books are about working less, getting away from distraction, getting away from busyness, trying to like get the things that are more meaningful. I mean, you have to go down pretty far. I mean, David Allen shows up pretty early, but I think he's misinterpreted. I think he's more about I hate the fact we have so much to do, but let's at least try to tame it so we don't go insane, right? So I you can't really interpret him as Pushing for overwork. I can't find on the list of best selling time management books right now. Anything. Yeah.

How do we get more done? I think like the last book like that that just straight up lionized that was maybe hyperproductivity. From eight years ago. Or something like this. And so there this that also seems to be effective going on is that for people who are characterizing Far Work Week or any of these books or characterizing me or other people in the genre.

Or engage in the books. They have just projected this whole fabricated world where Productivity we're all Frederick Winslow Taylor. And we have stopwatches and we're, you know, twirling our mustaches and trying to trying to get people to move back and forth between if you put your keyboard over here, you can type faster and move your mouse faster and whatever. So I don't know what that means.

But it seems to be true that there is a fabricated world of what productivity literature is. And nothing like that has been popular in Yeah. Yeah, I think I think the narrative. This is true for a lot of things. There's a delay in the narrative. How we think about ourselves, how we

perceive the world around us, what we think is popular. is informed by our realities, but there's kind of a a lag time. And the durability to narratives, if that makes any sense. So if you grow up with like hyperinflation, you have a certain story around that, like you're gonna continue to have that story Even beyond hyperinflation.

for a period of time. Might even affect your behavior for the rest of your life. Who knows? And I think that for a lot of people who are commenting on What they would consider productivity books or time management books. They have all the biases that You would expect, right? They have privacy recency, they've got

Any number of other things at play. I think for many people who Sort of grew up. In the

Say. mid to late, but not grow up professionally came up in the mid to late. Yeah. Or actually it's not even yeah, it's not even that long. It would be like the first, like two thousand

To two thousand. Ten. Maybe. things seemed to be pretty saturated with that kind of advice. Not necessarily in the form of books, but certainly online. There was a lot of productivity porn.

And you know, I was a beneficiary of that, so I can't slam it too hard on some level. But I think that type of highly prescriptive hyperproductivity. instructional material has kind of lost its luster.

For most people, I would say. So optimistically then, and I know we're running short on time, so I'll I'll give my optimistic Take and you can see if you share my optimism. Here's the optimist storyline then of For our work week. And today.

Is two thousand seven. This book comes out. The way we're working is becoming unsustainable. Be willing to Consider radical alternatives.

It was aimed at for the tech crowd that was ahead of the trend on unsustainability. It it landed very powerfully. people who encountered it said, Yeah, this is absolutely right. It's taken fifteen years to get to but the wider world around it was not quite ready for that yet. They were still we're like, look, we're still doing We still believe that maybe hardcore productivity and systems and if we just have the right planner that we can solve this problem. We get the 2021, we get the pandemic to help accelerate this. Now

Knowledge work writ large. is like that. three hundred people in that overcrowded converted cafeteria in two thousand and seven. They now recognize things are unsustainable. They're now really open to the idea of maybe radically new things are

available that your book was a warning shot. We might have ignored it for a little while, and by we I mean the people who didn't directly encounter it, which it was a large people. But now we're hearing the echoes of that warning start reverberating because What you are warning about.

We're all there. that you were fifteen years ahead of your time. Am I optimistic there or is that plausible? I mean that sounds plausible. For sure. I certainly

What I saw and experienced other people saw and experienced. I just happen to be the one of many who could have written this book, who sat down After looking for this book for myself.

And I think. That A lot of the challenges Disgusts.

in the four hour work week have only compounded. And You know if compounding is the East.

Then It's remarkable and terrifying what that can become. So I do think I agree with you. That it's you know, same same but ten X, same same but a hundred X, same same but a thousand X. Uh instead of one b inbox we now have fourteen. It's It's clear to me, and maybe this will always be the case, but that

A lot of what we consider work is just simply not working. And It's never been more important to Ensure that we are not getting really good at doing things. That should not be done in the first place.

Yeah and optimistically also, we've never, in a sense, had more options. The technology's never been better. The flexibility with remote work arrangements have never been better. So The tools and options And unorthodox. career and life choices that are available.

now have never been available to more people in my Opinion. So I know we're We're at the ninety minute. Mark, I promise. So I'll just I'll I'll just conclude by saying

When I first read that book or listened to it, I guess it was in April two thousand seven. I had that instinct that there's something prophetic about this in the sense that This is picking up on bigger trends that are gonna be very important and a lot of thinking, a lot of things are gonna be based on for a long time to come. And At least it's my sentiment that that

Fifteen years later, I think that was uh that was true. I'm glad you put those ideas out there when you did. Thanks, Cal. I really appreciate that and really admire the work that you do. And uh the thinking that you do behind the work that you put out. Really I am a big fan.

So thank you for Taking the time to to have the chat also. Well thank you, Tim. 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 I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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