Transcript for Ep. 296: Jane Austen’s To-Do List (LIVE)

I followed the same structure as our normal podcast.

Even though the book is out, they'll still sell you a signed copy. I just signed a bunch when I was over there.

All right, so here's the game plan. Like I normally do on my show, I want to start with what we call the deep dive, where I choose a topic to get into. I figured I would get into a topic relevant to this book. I've been talking about the book a lot on my show, but I'm going to focus on a story from the book I haven't pulled yet. So I think that should be fun. It's a literary story. So I think it'll be well-suited for the bookstore. So I'll do a little talking, and then we'll move over the questions, because again, that's the format of the show, and we can talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. All right, so for our deep life, the only thing I'm sad about is we don't have our music here, Jesse. I know. For those who know the show, no, we have the slow productivity theme song. I wanted to have a live band playing it for us every time. It turned out that, yeah, making couldn't accommodate that. It's my one request.

All right. So what do I want to do in my deep dive? Let me start first by just briefly talking about what this book is about, so around the same page. And then I want to dive a little deeper into a decision I made writing the book and did an example of that decision put into action. So what does the book actually about? Well, the book is in response to something that become increasingly apparent starting around the early 2000s in a particular sector of the economy known as knowledge work. So knowledge work has a sort of precise definition. It's often defined as a job in which you are adding value to information using your brain. But you can more informally think of it as a job where you probably look at a computer screen, or if you have a distaste for Microsoft Teams, you're probably an knowledge worker. So there's something to begin to happen in knowledge work, starting around the early 2000s, which was a growing sense of overload, exhaustion. And then after a while, almost a creeping nihilism, with work itself this idea of I'm here and I'm doing all these things but I don't even know what a lot of the stuff I'm doing means it's a lot of email it's a lot of meetings I feel like I'm not even really making much traction on the the thing that I'm ultimately hired to do This effect became pronounced in the early 2000s. It got off-escated by all of the other forces happening during the Great Resignation, but then picked up a clear visible signal again at the end of that. Really reached a peak in the beginning of the pandemic. That's when we began to see it not just anecdotally, but also in the survey research data as well. So one of the things I wanted to do in this book was explore why. And there's a few different major answers to this. I tried to uncover an answer that I thought was it being included as much in the conversation. So it's not a totalizing answer to why knowledge workers began burning out, but it was an important piece. And at the core of this explanation I looked at was a definition combined with a technology story. So the definition that was relevant here was the definition of productivity itself. So when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector in the mid-20th century, right, that the term knowledge work was coined in 1959, they had a problem, which was the definitions of productivity that had been dominant starting in the agricultural sector, followed by the industrial sector, these definitions of productivity weren't applying well to this new type of work. The definitions of productivity that were raining supreme in agriculture and then later in industrialization were quantitative and they're a ratio based. We have an input, we have an output, we have a clearly defined production system in between. We have this many acres of land. We produce this many bushels a week. Here is the crop rotation system we're using. If we change that crop rotation system and that number goes up, That's a better crop rotation system, so let's do that. Same thing in factories. We're producing this many model T's per paid labor hour. If we change our production system from the craft system to the continuous motion assembly line, and that number jumps up by a factor of 10, oh, that must be a more productive way of building cars. So we had this quantitative notion of productivity, though it's rained supreme since Adam Smith first pointed it out, did not apply to knowledge work. Because in knowledge work, there's not one thing we're producing. I could be working on seven different things. Those could be different than what Jesse is working on at the same time, and they could be different than what I was working on a month ago. To make matters worse from a measurement perspective, we don't have clearly defined production systems. In knowledge work, unlike other types of work, how you manage your time, how you organize your workload, how you collaborate with other people or even decide what to do during the day. This is all individualized and off-used. How I manage my work is different than how you manage your work. There are no central levers to pull or buttons to press and see what happens when we do that. It's much more ambiguous. It's much more haphazard than that. So the traditional economic notions of productivity did not fit well to knowledge work. And so what happened is we fell back on a heuristic. And I call this heuristic in the book pseudo productivity. And the core pseudo productivity is saying, look, we will just use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So we'll gather in buildings, we'll make office buildings, we'll work factory shifts, and this way we can just sort of see that people are working. And if we need to be more productive, come earlier, stay later. So pseudo-productivity was a Band-Aid. It was an answer to this question of like, well, how do we even manage if all of these sort of super quantitative Adam Smithy and style notions of productivity no longer apply at the Don Draper marketing firm in the 1960s? What do we do? Shooter productivity became the emerging answer. So my argument in the first part of the book is that was okay until we got the front office IT revolution. until we got network computers followed by mobile computing and laptops followed by smartphones. And the combination of these two things is my argument, played a major role in sparking the overload exhaustion and burnout crisis that began right around the same time that the front office IT revolution really hit his stride. Because when you have personal computers at your desk, one of the things that happens is the amount the possible work you could do greatly accelerates. There is a whole process of decentralization where the diversity of different roles and these knowledge work firms were reduced. Because now, anyone person could do almost any job using their computer. And so we could just have smaller numbers of people doing more things. Low friction, digital communication. Now made visible activities something that happened at a frenetic pace and a very fine grain. Now all day long, I have to worry about visible activity. I have to worry about an email that just arrived and making sure I respond to that in time so they see that I'm actually doing something. This is why when knowledge work went largely remote during the beginning of the pandemic, The sense that I'm busier than ever before became prominent because we have low friction digital communication, which was an even better way of demonstrating visible activity, but it's also exhausting. So this combination of the computer revolution in the office plus pseudo productivity as this You're risk stick that we were just using by default. I think that's what began to lead to the overload, which led to the exhaustion, also led to the sense of all I'm doing is sort of performing around my work, but don't have enough time to get to the work itself. So if that's one of the big problems, what do we do about it? We have to replace pseudo productivity. We need a more sophisticated notion of what we mean by productivity in knowledge work. It's going to have to be a definition that's less about activity. And more about quality results produced over time. And I make a whole argument in the book that this alternative that I call slow productivity, which I detail, could be more sustainable. It could be worked that is more meaningful. And it could also be worked at produces lots of value and is profitable if you're a for-profit organization. The pseudo-productivity really was so poor of a choice that we have a lot of options to replace this with something better. All right, so that's sort of the theory at the beginning of the book. In the second half of the book, I explore lots of ideas for how to actually put that theory into action. So this brings me to the decision I made that I wanted to discuss when I was writing this book that, I don't know, I think it's interesting. So I have this problem. Okay, part one is the theory. Part two is the advice. I want to give advice. What can we do? What can entrepreneurs do? What can people who work for a boss do? What can small teams do? I want to give concrete advice. But I wasn't happy with what the most common modes for this type of advice had become in books. I was just sort of not that they're wrong. I'm just kind of bored with them. I would say like one of the dominant modes for giving this type of advice right now is I'm going to say organizational psychology studies. researchers from the University of Michigan looked into this and they found paradoxically that actually like slowing down means you do better. I mean, the research is interesting that I was sort of tired of building a lattice of advice on top of just organizational psychology reports. So I sat out to do that. Another common approach would be, well, let me just profile very specific people in knowledge work right now who are doing things differently. But there I kept running into a problem, which was the uncanny valley problem. where if I come in and say, let me tell you about this particular knowledge worker, the fact that their job is very similar to yours, but not quite yours, actually can be an obstacle that's hard to get past. Like this two familiar, so now I can really notice the ways this job is different than mine, and now I can't bring the advice out of that case study because I just know that feel too well, and that job's not quite mine. So the decision I made, which was a little bit unusual, was why don't I go and look at Knowledge workers from Times passed, didn't work in offices, and didn't work at computer screens, and whose working lives in the concrete details actually look quite different in our jobs today. There's no uncanny valley. Traditional knowledge workers, I even went back historically. You know, we could talk about Mary Curie, we could talk about Galileo, we could talk more contemporaneously about non-office working knowledge workers, like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mary Oliver, I talk about all of them in the book. My idea was, okay, we'll take these traditional knowledge workers who had all of this flexibility to figure out and experiment what works and what does it when you create value with your brain. And then we could isolate those principles. What did they discover? And we can't mimic how they work and we'll get to that in a second. But we can isolate these principles and then use those principles. The generate very concrete advice for people who work in offices for entrepreneurs, for people who work in small teams. So I was trying this sort of historical case approach in this book because I thought that principles could be more powerfully isolated if the context in which we are isolating them were novel. That we weren't going to get tripped up in the young County Valley. So I want to tell one of those stories now. We're going to test out this method. I'm going to tell one of those stories now. We're going to extract a principle out of it and then we'll try to get some concrete advice out of that principle. So we'll sort of do one example here. So one of the stories I really enjoyed looking at when I was working on this book was Jane Austin. So I had always heard about Jane Austen. This idea that she wrote her books in small scraps of time on small scraps of paper in between all this other stuff that was going on. It turns out this story, which is cited a lot, I tracked it down. It comes from a biography, and I have the quote here. It comes from a biography that heard nephew James wrote 50 years after she died. Here's the actual quote. In his biography, James said about his aunt, Jane. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened. But she objected that having this little inconvenience remedy because it gave her notice when anyone was coming. This story got widely repeated. Here is, for example, Virginia Wolf in a room of one zone. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creek so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. You can find similar quotes throughout. I mean, I've came across this story as recently as Mason Curry's 2013 book Daily Rituals. The problem with it is it turns out James made that all up. That wasn't true. She didn't write on scraps of paper. She didn't hide her writing when people came in. If you go back and read the more recent definitive biographies based on primary sources, a completely different picture arises. Jane it turns out was way too busy to write. And it really was a problem in a frustration in her life. They weren't, she writes about these Gentile houses where the visitors would come and give their calling cards. They lived on a parcentage. They were running a boy's school out of their own house. She was milking cows and making jelly and jam for the borders in their house. They were very busy and she was frustrated as she would write about this. I have all the stuff going on and I can't find time to write. This went on for decades, right? She wanted to write. She had these ideas for books as she had started. She could not finish them. What finally happened with Jane Austen is after her father died, her mom, her sister and a family friend said, we're tapped out, we're tapped out from the social life, we're tapped out from the work. We need to take a break. And they moved to a small cottage, child and cottage, which was on some land that her brother inherited. They moved to the small cottage. They were out of the social scene. We're just going to sit here and just take a breather. Her mom started gardening, and this was considered very scandalous, because she wasn't a gardener. Why would a normal person garden? But they were done. They were done. This is when she was able to write books. So now that after almost everything was removed, this business was removed. I'm going to read here from my book here. Austin for the first time in over a decade had gained real and meaningful space to think and work creatively. It's here working at a modest writing desk by a window overlooking the road that she finally finishes to manuscripts for sense and sensibility and pride and prejudice before moving on to compose Manscale Park and Emma. Austin's nephew may have popularized a story of an over-scheduled Austin-Prim and proper intercity room working in frenzy burst between incest and distractions, but the reality of her remarkable years at Chalton is clearly quite different. Far from glamorizing a surabtitious discipline business, Austin's story, when told properly, seems to promote the opposite of this approach. Austin was not able to produce creatively during the crowd of periods of her life. It was only when through circumstance and contrivance, her obligations were greatly reduced that Austin was able, finally, the complete her best work. She basically wrote all of her books in like a period of five years and then died. So it was sort of a tragic ending. So what do we take away from that? So that we have our challenge. It's an interesting story. It's historical. It deals with productivity. How do we now apply that to my job working at a marketing firm or EPA or a professor? Well, clearly the takeaway message shouldn't be moved to a small cottage in rural England and just on your brother's land. OK, that's not a story that most of us can replicate. So what we need to do is actually zoom out a little bit. Like, what's the key principle here? Well, the key principle in that story is that when you have too much going on, it can sometimes be hard to really do anything. When you're busy, that doesn't necessarily aggregate to the things I really care about are getting done. Austin was busy couldn't produce the things she wanted to produce. Well, it turns out that this exact same effect is, of course, afflicting the modern knowledge worker, because what's happening to the modern knowledge worker? Well, if we decompose it, here's what I think one of the big issues is. We say yes to a lot of things because knowledge work is ambiguous. We don't have systematic ways of managing workloads and people just email us and we want to show that we're pseudo-productive and we say yes. But what happens when we say yes to many times? Each of the things that we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead. What I say yes to this is emails that have to be said meetings that have to happen. We have to talk about the work. So if I've said yes to many different things, What's going to happen to all of this administrative overhead? It's going to pile up in my day. And now the fraction of my day spent on administrative overhead versus actually working on the things that I agree to begins to grow and grow. And it gets to the point where your schedule is so fragmented with meetings and emails and chats that there's very little time to get anything done. And you have to work late at night with the administrative overhead dies down. And the whole thing can be very exhausting and make you feel like what am I really doing here? So there's a modern equivalent of Jane Austen being too busy. So now that we understand that's the issue, we can think about solutions. And the solutions clearly becomes, oh, we want to reduce the administrative overhead, we're facing any one time. Well, one way to do that is to reduce the number of things that we're actively working on at any one time. So with less administrative overhead, we could actually finish those things faster and with less frustration. So if you're an entrepreneur, that could be relatively straightforward to do. Sequence things. Work on this and do this. Don't put them together. If you work for someone else that gets trickier, but we have chapters in this book, walking through how you can set up in a normal office job, a workload management system, where you just differentiate between, I'm actively working on this. This stuff is chewed up for me to work on. And as I finish these things, I pull in the next thing. And there's ways to do this. It's very transparent. And what it means, though, is that you have greatly reduced the number of things generating overhead. It seems like an impossible dream, but then we find people who have tried this. And they actually get away with it. So their bosses say, the problem you're solving for me is taking this off my plate. I need the trust you can do it. Great. You have assistant that works. I can watch it March along. I don't need to hear about Jane Austen. You're not a source of stress for me. Great. I got to move on over here. So I use that just as a small case study, but what it captures is this historical method of we can actually start with the story that evokes a sort of intuition of something right or inspirational or interesting happening. We can isolate the principle. Then we can use the principle as a loadstone to actually navigate modern work with all of the difficulties we face in these normal jobs. And then use that to try to come up with ideas or tactics to escape the burdens of suitor productivity that we care about. So that's what I do in the book is a lot of principles, isolate in that way, translating into a lot of tactical advice that can then be sort of sitted through and seeing what might work. So anyways, let me leave my deep dive there. It's just he knows I could talk about this book for hours. He's just he has literally heard me talk about this book for and I'm going to I'm not going to exaggerate here. I would say probably 750 hours with that be.

So here's what we're going to do. Let's switch over now. Imagine sound effect transition music. Let's switch over the questions. Alright, I want to take a quick break from our live show to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. That's our friends at cozy earth. As I've talked about off it on the show, my wife and I absolutely love the cozy earth bedding.

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The way we're going to do this is Jesse's going to come to you. He's going to double microphone you. It's going to seem like a press conference, but that's because we have hard hitting questions for you. No, one mic is going to amplify you and one mic is going to record you. Just know if you ask a question, it is going to go up potentially on a podcast. A lot of people will hear so no social security numbers.

All right. Two good questions. All right. So the, you two first. So here's our YouTube strategy. So to us, and by us, I mean, Jesse and I, so we thought about YouTube, I think video is important and it's going to be the future of podcasting. YouTube is kind of a weird place, but there's an audience on YouTube. So what we've been told, the audience on YouTube is different than the audience listening to the podcast. So it's a new audience. Right. It's not YouTube audiences do not carry over to, for example, podcasts. It's a younger audience, for example, in my audience. I like younger people. So we have a YouTube consultant, Jeremy, and the way we work is we say, look, we're going to, we just record our podcast. We record it on video. He says, I will put titles in thumbnail for them. They're crazy stuff. Right. Never stuff I think to do. And he said, this is how it works is this, The way young people use YouTube is like they recommend things or something and you got to get in front of their eyes so they can know what you're doing. It's like just trust me. We'll do some nails and titles. They're pretty crazy. But what I try to do is not, I don't even want to know what's going on over there. Like whenever I glance, YouTube, I don't like the YouTube algorithm. If I paint too much attention to YouTube and let's say my goal was to try to get YouTube views up. Here's what I would have to do. Every one of my episodes according to the data should be about notebooks or why social media is bad. Because those get a lot of views. So if I was like being driven, if YouTube was my primary platform got forbid, there'd be a lot of very fancy notebook discussion. Fortunately, we see the podcasts as our platform. And so we give him our podcast to say, you can put that out there. But we hope it goes back to the other way. LinkedIn. Okay. So the other question I want to see Paris by the way, Reed Hoffman, he boarded one of the books where I feel like I'm close with Reed Hoffman. So we're okay. I think that's okay. I agree. I think parenting and productivity is a fantastic space. I think there's room there for books just on that. The thing is, I need to read that book. I don't yet feel qualified to write that book. So I'm hoping someone who's made it through to the other side of parenting and figuring out, like, how do you run a household? I mean, just you know, well, occasionally on these episodes, we'll bring on a guest expert and be like, just teach us about, like, how do you run a family in a household, you know, how does those systems work? Those are just for me those episodes. Yeah. You'd pretend like the audience is interested. So I agree. It's a fascinating topic, but I don't feel like I'm the expert on that yet. Actually, all right.

Hi, Cal. I'm I'm Clara Fang and I live in Germantown, Maryland. Love you work. I think one thing that sticks with me and I repeat to myself is your advice to do less. All right, do fewer things and do them well. And I find that so challenging in this society time where we're just told to do more more, you know, and no matter how much you're already doing, you can you can still do more. I see you to quite a lot. I don't know how you do all the things that you do. But I'll just use my life as an example. I don't have kids even. I would be even busy here if I did. But, you know, I'm running a consulting company. I'm working with an environmental racial equity nonprofit organization that has where I'm playing all the roles like I'm the only staff person. So I do everything. And then there are so many committees to be on. So you have to be on the steering committee of this other organization, on the board of this other organization. So it just seems like it proliferates and it's hard to figure out How do you do less things when everything seems important? You know, in plus, I also try to write and like Jane Austen, just not finding the time and don't know how you find the time to write so much. I have ideas for books. I've been writing poetry since I was 20. But you know, it just seems like the time to do that gets less and less to say.

Yeah. Oh, I mean, it is the number one problem right now. I would say it's like my number one thing. I'm constantly fighting in my own life. Like an important thing to know about this book is it's in part response to my audience. We're burning out. We got to do something about this. Also part in response to me just entering my forties and be like, okay, I got to tighten up the ship. Right. Almost all of my books have that reality to it. Right. If you look at a so good they can't ignore you, a book about how do you cultivate careers you love? That's what I was going on the job market for the first time. Deep work I wrote is I was trying to get 10 year at Georgetown. So like, okay, how do you how do you do this? Well, you know, digital minimalism. I didn't have much of a problem with my phone. World without email was after I had 10 year in all the service. obligations fell on me and I was like, why am I on email so much? There's a lot of, I've redefining self-help in a much more literal way, I guess, when I think about working on these books. I'll mention a few things I do with mixed success in my own life and then maybe some of that will be useful. One thing I try to do is sequencing, right? So there's a difference between looking like doing a lot of things over a decade versus doing a lot of things on Tuesday, right? So like in my own life, I sequenced. Like I'm in book tour mode right now. So I'm not doing other things. I'm not writing a book right now. I'm not working on like a major academic project. There's periods of my life when I'm really all in on bookwriting, but I'm not going on podcasts. I say yes to a lot fewer of service obligations. There's periods where it's department building periods. This is just working on the director of this at my department. I'm giving that my attention right now. I'll often stack my classes, for example. I'm teaching multiple all my classes in this semester and none in that semester. So in this semester, All I can be focused on is like, I want to be a good teacher. And then in this semester, I can be writing a book or working on an article. So that type of thing has helped, the sequencing helps. Over time, as different things finish, you get a lot of things that rack up. And then there's a thing, there's a temporal collapse that happens when you hear about, oh, this person did these five things. In your mind, you collapse and imagine those things all being worked on simultaneously. But I try to sequence to a degree. I also try to be really explicit about workload management. Like one of the big issues with overload, especially in sort of the types of this like knowledge work type jobs, which are much less very strictly defined, is we don't have set philosophies for how do we keep track of what we're working on and determine how much we should be working on. We don't have these agreed upon ways of doing this. Other fields do. Like if you're a computer program where they have these systems already where you really should only be working on one thing at a time and it's on a board and the other things go over here we move the index cards around like they really have thought about that but we don't do this on a lot of other knowledge workshops and I try to do it and I try to do it with things like quotas. So with quotas, there might be a, this type of thing is important for me to do, like paper reviews. But the number of potential paper reviews I'm going to be asked to do is too many for me to do. So I need to determine in advance, I do five of them per semester. Like have a quotas. So it's like I'm doing this important thing, but I'm trying to think in advance. How much of that am I going to do? Same thing with sort of involvements with activities, boards and committees, like outside of work, these are important. I want to do them. But why don't I say I do two of them, right? So just to starting to think through what is the load that I want to do, that matter, so that helps as well. And then finally, this is the idea I mentioned briefly, but really having a dual category way of thinking about commitments. Like the things I've said yes to, Dividing them between actively working on these two and these 10, I'm waiting to work on. And as I finish something here, you bring the next thing in from the list of things you're waiting on. You still have agreed to do these things. But then if someone involved in one of these things, like, hey, let's check in on this or whatever, you can say like, oh, yeah, it's not on my active list, but it's moving towards it. And I can actually show you exactly where it is. So the idea is to prevent Everything you've agreed from, from concurrently generating overhead and trying to isolate the overhead to the, the small number of things are actually working on. You sort of all of these ideas at it, you still have too much to do, but at least you feel like there's a bit of a handle around it. So hopefully that's helpful. The other thing I'll say is I just cycle on this. And I end up having too much going on and then I get overloaded and then I take everything off I played and then I get in trouble and then I bring stuff back on. So we all we all struggle with it. I struggle with it more than anything else, but later it's good question.

Yeah. Oh, it's a very common problem. It's a good question. It's a very common problem. Uh, the main thing that helps there is actually the ritual you have for, uh, completing the deep work block. Right. So if you're good about, okay, I'm capturing everything I did. Here's where I call it recording state when in my own practice. Here's where I was. Here's what I'm going to be working on next. Like here's the next thing I have to figure out. Sometimes it takes up to 20 minutes just to deactivate working on something that's that's cognitively demanding. That helps because you're mind then trust. We got everything down. Right. It's here. Here's where here's the state where we left off. Here's what we're going to work on next. Here's what we need to know about it. You know, a himming way used to do this famously with his right and you would try to leave it out of place where like you knew exactly he knew where to pick it up next time. He he didn't like to finish his writing at the end of a chapter for the day. He liked the idea of okay. I know exactly where I'm going to pick it up the next day so I can just get started. So a lot of people think about these shutdown routines. I have to do that. I have to record all the state about what I'm working on. That helps. It's still hard. So then what I have to do is have a way to dump the ideas that pop up uninvited that are relevant to what you're working on. I keep a text, plain text, text document open on my computer. It's called workingmemory.txt. And I just dropped stuff into that. Then at the end of the day when I shut down my day, I can deal with it. Like, what do I want to do with this text? So I just have a place that like when I'm in the middle of trying to do something else, my mind's like, but what about this? I could just get it out of my mind right away. But what you're talking about is it's very, very common.

Oh, I've gone in the back.

Jewel is an interesting story.

Yeah, it's fantastic question. I first of all, I just want to mention I'm not surprised that the group was reading deep work or you find residents of that as you come up with a 10 year because I wrote that book as I was worried a lot about 10 year. So I've like secretly a book about how do I get 10 year? Professors really resonate with that book. I don't think it's not a coincidence. It's fantastic question, Beyonce, and how we compare that with Jewel. So for people very briefly, the story there was that Jewel had this super rapid ascent, right? She was living out of her car in San Diego. And just doing these concerts at a coffee shop. She just met the owner of this coffee shop. The coffee shop was about to go out of business. It's like, let's just try this. I'm going to do these concerts here. And it just clicked, right? And the crowd did this exponential double-leam thing. You know, it's two people than four people. And within six months, it was record executives were flying her around. And they was one of them put a million dollars on the table. And she turned out the million dollar bonus, right? So what was going on there? Is that her assent was so fast. that she realized she didn't yet, she hadn't polished up performing skills to where it needed to be to have a successful enough album out of the gate to make back that million dollars fast enough that they wouldn't drop her. She knew, okay, I have to work on this craft because she looked it up, but she realized, so not just giving me a million dollars, it's an advance on royalties, it's basically alone. And I'm going to have to record an album fast and it has to be a hit right away. I don't think I'm going to be able to do that because six months ago, you know, I wasn't even performing professionally. So she instead took a, said, don't give me a big signing bonus. She very cleverly got more back in though, which ended up being worth a lot of money, so that she would have time on the label. to perform, to get better, to re-record songs, to try to find her voice. And she had that time, and then she got good enough that, which she did take off finally, she was ready to take off. Beyonce, no, I don't know Beyonce's story very well, but I think Beyonce, by the time she was really making her artistic moves, she had this very, like a much longer sort of apprenticeship in some sense, right? I mean, she had super talented and performing in the group, the multi singer group, Dessie's child. She had a lot of time to get really good. She was very, very good and she was performing at a high level from a pretty young age and got really good and new it. So I sort of think about when she went solo and she made that move. It was from a position of, I really got this. Like, I've been doing this. I've been on the road. I know how this works. I can tell I'm really talented. I know how, I figured out what I'm going to do. I have the experience for it. And so, Julia would say, like, once she got better, that sort of what she did, is she just decided what did she want to do, and then she started making this sort of, those decisions. So, I mean, I don't know if you buy this or not, but I would say that's maybe a shared feature of the both of those stories. Is this idea of, Developing craft opens up opportunities to do all these like really interesting or effective or important things and dual just didn't she didn't get the apprenticeship the lengthy apprenticeship before suddenly she had the attention of the recording industry on her so like her I guess her great insight was to realize that and say like I kind of need another year here before I even know how to be on stage The real lesson here is that my idea to make my next book a advice from the life of Beyonce, maybe. I keep pitching that to my publisher. They don't want me to write that.

Some examples. That's a good scenario because it gives us some interesting to look at. In that scenario, I'm thinking out loud here, but in that scenario where you have more of a long-term engagement with these groups, like a bunch of different priorities are going to get spun up, but we're going to be working together. These are all being spun out of the same major objective. This might be a place where actually the book that's closest to you on the stand there, the world without email, this book actually might have specifically relevant things to say here, right? Because in a world without email, what it focuses on is if you have the time and space to actually think about it and when you have long-term projects this is easier, it's about how do you craft sort of collaboration protocols? for whatever it is you're working on in these long-term projects to reduce the cognitive footprint. And the main metric in that book, the key idea there is like you want to figure out how to collaborate with your long-term collaborators in a way that minimizes unscheduled messages that require responses. Like so what you're trying to minimize is having to keep switching your attention back and forth. I have to be on four slack channels for four projects and we're going back and forth. So it documents the neuroscience. So why our brains can't do this well. Trying to switch back and forth briefly between a lot of projects is cognitively exhausting and you run out of steam by like two in the afternoon. We all know the effect where you're trying to clean out your inbox and you just eventually freeze. And then you start looking for really easy to answer emails, because your brain is exhausted. It can't switch context that quickly, right? So that book is about, put in place collaboration protocols. And it's all sorts of things about, here's like the process by how we do this. It's office hours. We have a particular email address for a project instead of using individual people's email addresses, all sorts of ideas. And those can all work really well. The relationship between that book and this book, is that a lot of people who read that book said I wish I could do this but I have so many things going on I don't have any time to actually sit down and talk to people and say what are our protocols are going to be I'm just drowning in all the stuff I said yes to so if you have a smaller number of very long-term projects is probably worth taking the time to say How are we going to actually collaborate when we work on these? And it's like a pain in its friction and people want to just rock and roll on their slack or whatever. But it's very, very worth it. If you're going to be working for more than a couple weeks with people. So that I think that book might have a lot of useful things for your issue right here. Yeah, it's interesting said it.

It's circular. It's a good question. So how do I become the principles first or do I come up with the examples first? Typically I've I'm drawing from examples I've already come across because I'm always reading and encountering and filing things away. Out of those begins to emerge sort of fledgling versions of the principles, then I go seeking specifically examples to further try to understand what's going on. It's like if you did a deep dive into the concept of slow productivity, you start to see inklings of it. Show up, 2020, 2021, you'll start to see inklings of it. I think I used a term like this in a blog post where I had read about Galileo and about like, wow, he really took a long time to do this stuff. We think about him being famous for doing like he sort of slowed down and then I had a New Yorker essay. that was, I used a title, I guess, time to embrace slow productivity, but it was really just talking about workload management. Just that, I had a couple examples there I was playing with. The jewel, I had definitely gone on a deep dive in jewel before. An example was just back there and I was sort of trying to figure out what that meant. So it's very circular. So they don't come ex-neal, right? It's not just, I just have these ideas for three principles. They come out of like things I've been looking at. But then as I seek out many more examples, that's when I refined them. And so you kind of get that circular refinement. Yeah. And the one thing I always tell people is, I spend frameworks are hard, and it often I'll spend years thinking about them. It takes me about a year, like eight months to write a book, but often it's like two or three years of kind of playing with a concept. Testing it on the podcast, trying to see, like is this resonating, testing it in my New Yorker, pieces like trying to see if it's resonating or not before. So it can really take me years before I feel like something is ready to capture. Yeah, it's an interesting process.

Yeah. Yeah. So with teams, there's a couple of things that can help, but they're all built around the same idea of like, get a win. Like, once there's one win, like we did this, we all really love this. Now, like the floodgates are open. Like, all right, let's have, like, let's get together. What are we going to do next? And people, so it's all about breaking that barrier to the first intentional change that moves you away from the term I use for the standard collaboration workflows hyperactive hive mind. It's like the default is just, we'll figure things out on the fly with, without hot communication. So like, when you get your first intentional practice that everyone agrees on that's not a step away from that. It makes people really happy, right? And then like a lot of other things can follow. So there's a couple, I'll give you two options for like potential first things to try. One that I think I profile and all it's worth team doing this in the book is this idea of let's have a difference between stuff the team agreed to do and what individuals are doing, right? So instead of just having everything that needs to be done has been just distributed among people kind of informally like I guess I'm working on this now because you made me and you're working on this have a central place where like when something needs to be done or we think it needs to be done, this is where it goes. And the example in the book, they actually were pinning these things on a wall. They had a wall where their team met. This was at the Brut Institute in Cambridge. And they just put on index heart, put it on the wall. Like, oh, we should do this. We should do this. Like if someone, if something came up, you'd have to just send a CCD mail. Like, hey, what do you all think about this? Which is like, oh my god, what do I answer this? Like, yes, I mean, yeah, I hate that. Put it on the wall, right? then there's like what each person's working on. And he made that separate. And they put that on the wall as well. Like, okay, here's like the things I'm working on right now. Oh, I finished this thing. Let's look at this big pile or like, what should I do next? Like, what do we think about this? Like over time, it was like a good way of trying to see like what should we really be working on or not? It got rid of that anxiety of like whatever happened to this thing and after email each other. But it's significantly reduced administrative overhead because individuals were only working on a small number of these things at a time, right? So I've seen that one work because it's pretty clear. We have a Trello board and it's like anyone can add to it or we have like a Google Doc, like let's work on this, let's work on that and like here's the main things I'm working on. So that could be a really big win because that feeling of reduced administrative overhead can be really good. Another thing that I've seen work for inducing changes, this actually comes from my book Deep Work, but then I mentioned it as an aside, and then lots of people tried it, and then they come back and tell me, and it was surprisingly effective. What's this idea, which this was more for working for bosses, but can work for teams as well, was measuring, right? It's like in Deep Work, there's this idea of talking to your team or talking to your boss and saying, okay, like for my role, What do you think the optimal ratio, for example, like focused work and administrative work would be for my roles, can be different for different roles, but like what ratio is going to like produce the most value for us, right? And you get a number, 50, 50, whatever, two, two, three, just whatever's going to be in the new measure. And you come back like, oh, like, we're kind of way off of that. It's like, what can we do to get the ratio where we agreed was going to produce more value? This turned out to be like a wonder drug for a lot of people where they were a person after person would tell me that they were convinced that the way they were to like, we're always on slack. You have to answer everything right away. This was entrenched this could never change and they did this exercise and the boss the team lead was like, oh, yeah. So why don't we just, no meetings or emails in the morning? No, like just drastic changes, seemingly out of nowhere because there's like a number of their working at and it's positive. It's framing it like how do I produce more value and not like when you stop bothering me or whatever. So those two are I think good for steps. centralizing teamwork and measurement. Like, okay, what should we be trying to do? Oh, we're not there. Like, what ideas do we have to actually change this number? And that actually can spur a lot more flexibility to innovation than people often expect.

Yeah. All right. Good question. So zoom apocalypse for those who don't know. It talked about in the book where when all knowledge workers went remote during the pandemic. We had this problem where the efficiency of collaboration got suddenly much worse because we lost all of the, let me grab you for five minutes and we'll figure this out. And everything got turned to the Zoom meetings or Teams meetings, but the smallest granularity that people could easily stretch a meeting on their calendar was 30 minutes. So everything needed a 30 minute meeting. And I began to hear from people that were saying, you know, I've eight hours back to back. Like we had this question on the show, I think Jesse, where like the question was literally window I go to the bathroom cow because like I have these eight hours of meetings with no there's no like 20 minute breaks and there or anything like that so like dialysis zoom apocalypse I mean a couple things one you'd be surprised about especially the tech sector if you say I got three hours of deep work done that they might be happier about that than you think you know that that term that term is in Microsoft Outlook somewhere there's some mode where they say this is for deep work Yeah, so you're basically being over-meated. So there's a couple of things to do I talk about in the book, right? So like, these are a little, not sneaky, but I think they're kind of clever heuristics. A good one is the one for you one for me, heuristic, right? So like, if you're in a business that lives and dies by the calendar, you have to have a meeting, your calendar is shared, like let's find a time or like whatever. You can have a metric of every time I schedule a meeting, I find that equivalent amount of time that week and I block it off for a meeting with myself. And then another person schedules a meeting, I find that equivalent amount of time somewhere else, and I blocked that off, right? It preserves flexibility and meeting scheduling. So like in a heavy meeting culture, it's hard to have rigid rules like I don't meet in the morning, or I don't meet on Monday and Friday, because it's, you know, you keep getting these situations, like no, that's the only time that works. So you're not taking anything off the table, but you're just artificially filling your calendar faster than it was otherwise filling. And so if you do a one for you, one for me, you're going to end up with like a 50, 50 ratio of meetings, but you can tune that. Right. If it's a heavy meeting role, it could be, if I put two hours in meetings, I put one hour of time for me. Or you could go the other way if you're like in a heavy development role or something, every hour of meeting, I find two hours. And so you just use the calendar that's your enemy. It can become an out scenario in some sense, your savior as well. Or you could do the Deep-to-Challa work ratio method. I mean, a lot of the examples I heard were from tech companies where the people said, this is just a culture. Like, you got to just be responsive. You got to just jump on calls or whatever. And they were surprised when they had this conversation. So what is the right ratio of the contrary to work and collaboration like talking about work? Like what's the right ratio for my job? Time and again, people report, they're talking to their leader, their CEO or what have you. And they immediately see in the room it'd be ridiculous to say, no, I want you like 100% talking to clap meetings and emails whenever, right? In the room it seems like it doesn't make sense. So they sort of think, okay, we have to figure out some ratio that makes sense, like maybe half and half. That's typically what they say. And then you have this number to measure. And again, and again, people would come back and the tech lead and the CEO's like, all right, well, I mean, I guess you're not hitting this 50 50, I guess it does make sense. Like, you shouldn't be spending all your time in meetings. Okay, great. These two hours and these two hours, I'll just tell your team, you're on available or whatever, right? So don't Don't be too pessimistic about that ratio technique working because I keep getting notes from people who are surprised when they're convinced they're wasn't going to work, but mainly I just feel you're paying. Like a lot of people got out of the Zoom apocalypse because they're like uncle and people got tired of it, but there are people still stuck in like, well, everything has to be a meeting. And it's my whole calendar's available, tell it's full. It really is a kind of deranging state because it's like, I'm not working. All I can do is talk about the work, but when do we do the work? I mean, it's part of what made what's going on so frustrating for people. So there's a lot of empathy coming from over here. All right, let's take another quick break to talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. That's our friends at element L m in T. I actually just had some element this morning. What is it? It's a mix a drink mix. It's a powder that you mix into water and it puts into your water. The electrolytes that you need. the sodium, the potassium, the magnesium. At the right levels, you really need if you have dehydrate yourself. You've been exercising or like me, I was at the live event you're hearing now. I recorded that at the night before. So I was talking for like two and a half hours. Came back with a big headache dehydrated. The first thing I did was make some element into a big now gene water bottle had some more this morning because I have to get back everything I sweat it out it's not just the liquid. The reason why I like element is that a they get the ratios right they know how much of these electrolytes you actually need and make sure you're getting enough right it's designed by the former research biochemist Rob Wolfe and the ketogames founder Louiseville Cnoir The other thing I like about it, zero sugar, zero artificial colors, no other dodgy ingredients. So I don't feel like I'm drinking a soda. When I'm trying to rehydrate after a big event or after a long workout or after a days full of lecturing, I know there's no sugar in here. There's no junk in here. It's just the stuff I need to add to the water to make sure that I get hydrated. They've got a lot of cool flavors, fan favorites like citrus salt or raspberry salt, but they also have spicy flavors like mango chili. You can actually mix I've heard about this, their flavor chocolate salt tastes good if you mix it into a morning coffee. I'll tell you this, I won't name names, but I've been on a podcast two where I was recently to promote my new book. And I can tell you multiple podcasters who promote this element on their podcast are drinking it right there when I'm there. This is like one of these products that we all use. So I love element, no sugar, no noogenous. We got an offer for you. If you go to drink element.com, slash deep drink lmnt dot com slash deep if you do that slash deep you will get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase. So you buy drink mix purchase till send you a free sample packs. You can try out the other flavors as well. That's drink element dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Oh, Blinkist. They just added actually the slow productivity blink to the Blinkist app. So I'm excited about that. So what is Blinkist? It's an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries and expert lead audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity psychology and more on the go and get entertained at the same time. The way I use Blinkist is the triage potential book purchases. Like, oh, I'm interested in this topic. Okay. Here's a couple books on this topic. Let me listen to the blanks. I like to listen to them, Jesse likes to read them, whatever. It's a short summary.

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Other people use it other ways. I know some people who just use it like a pod is just entertaining. It's like a really awesome podcast, right? Any author you want to be a guest on a podcast, you can just listen to the blank summary of their book and sort of get the main ideas of the book. And so some people just use it for straight up entertainment. You know, as I love it, some people use it to actually learn things. I kind of want to know about crypto, but I don't want to read a lot of books. I'll listen to five blanks and I'll know enough to be conversational. It's a great tool, a great

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Yeah, it's a good question. So these, the stakes in the ground, like, okay, someone is, I told someone this is coming. Or like the example in the book was talking about the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper, where they released a single. So like, okay, we kind of have to, we have time, we're taking a lot more time than before, but we kind of have to finish this because otherwise the single's gonna go as a stale. That's all about walking that tight rope between perfectionism and like really caring about craft. Because perfectionism is a real issue and that's one of the ways you can sort of get around it. So working at a natural pace has a couple of components. One is for variation in intensity. So don't try to be all on all intensity every day all you're round, right? So that's fine. That's compatible with, you know, stakes in the ground. And then the second piece is taking longer, right? Don't, don't try to rush work. We see this time and again when we look at people who really care about craft that they spend, they take their time on things, right? They sort of, they don't try to do it the fastest possible way. The stakes in the ground is making sure that time doesn't become forever time. right so it's like that's the protection against the like look slow down Don't try to rush everything. Be okay to have some quieter periods of some hard work periods. You know, how do you have that plus a commitment to craft and not just say, look, my novel will be done next year and you say that for the next 50 years. And so that seems to be these types of stakes in the ground committing the people. I'm going to do this. I took on money. Whatever it is, the stakes in the ground seem to be the best way we have of like walking that that tight rope between them. Yeah, that's a very good question. Also, as an excuse, I really went deep on the Beatles. I was like a fun part of the book as well.

Yeah, I do. We do that. It's a really hard challenge and it's one that I'm relatively nihilistic about, right? Like a big decision I made in this book was to focus mainly on the individual because I tried the focus higher up before. It's very difficult, especially like mid to large size organizations. It's very difficult to get drastic changes in the way work unfolds coming from the top down. And there's whole theories about why this is, this book I keep talking about, Alfred Chandler's book, The Visible Hand. It's from the 1970s as an economic historian, one of a bunch of prizes, Pulitzer National Book Award. But he talks about the rise of the big organization, and one of his ideas in this book is, as we switched over to big organizations, which really didn't exist pre-railroads for the most part. As we switched over to big organizations with many layers of management, It's really a new type of capitalism that he calls managerial capitalism. And one of the things that characterizes managerial capitalism is the way that the organizations internally operate. like the way the managers operate internally are relatively buffeted from market signals. So like it's fine for them to stay ossified in a way of organizing work. It's like not a really good way of working. When they're big enough, the signals that they begin optimizing for more like things like stability, like risk reduction, I don't want to lose my position in the C-suite or as a high-level manager, et cetera. And I really think that's a strong force that's preserving a lot of these ways we work, that's just objectively like a terrible way to take human brains and produce value. It's like running a car factory, but you have all the lights off to save money and people are putting steering wheels where the wheels are supposed to go. It doesn't really make sense, but in these like large organizations where things are more ambiguous. I've talked to a lot of C-suite people. I've talked to a lot of well-known CEOs. It's really difficult to try to affect that change. So with this, I went back to what can you do as the individual to begin to integrate some of these principles into your life or your team's life in a way that you can make things much better, knowing that that's much easier. then getting, you know, the person 10 levels up to say, we're going to get rid of email. Yeah, so it's, it's a, it could be frustrating. The knowledge work is a weird space.

Yeah. So when you're getting stuck, is so what's happening is then it takes a long time to try to figure out what's going on. Well, first of all, I think that terror, I guess I should define further people. So Kanban, a lot of what I'm talking about with centralized workloads and keeping track of who's working on what, and you work on a smaller number of things. This is a well-known methodology, so people in cybersecurity, people in computer programming, development shops, know these methodologies very well. And so con bonds like one of the names that comes out of industrial manufacturing, you may have heard of agile methodologies, most of those borrow these metaphors of different work and different statuses. So I have one suggestion, this is probably not going to be maybe the killer suggestion, but one thing I've seen work well is these type of firms is having sort of more of these prescheduled, they're short, but sort of all hands on deck, kind of check-ins, like even throughout the day, right? So it's like at noon, all right, everyone that you know, let's all stop over doing okay who's stuck who needs what and it's like you have everyone's there okay i don't know what to do here all i know about this i read about this you get all the brains together and you swat all the problems you can right away and if you can't swat them right away you're able to figure out a plan right there well who is going to figure the who's well suited to figure this out go do that do that now and we can check back in again we have this meeting again It's like trying to prevent there being really like long or ambiguous amounts of time where like someone is just starting to work on trying to figure this out and a couple of days go by and then they email someone else like I'm stuck on it. So that might help a little bit because I've seen that model of not just like the morning meeting like morning midday late afternoon, especially when like a lot of collaboration like has to happen for solving problems. Yeah. But cybersecurity, like computer programming shops, they're so far ahead of everyone else. I feel like when it comes to workload management, like they already know these ideas. At least they think about these ideas of externalizing work and having a system. I mean, even that question is a question that wouldn't be relevant to most knowledge workers because they don't have even a notion of like work and what status it is. It's just, you know, like things are just flying back and forth. And so I take a lot of inspiration from those sectors, actually. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there.

Yeah, it's a great question, especially early career. One thing that definitely helps is to as quickly as possible develop a reputation for being incredibly organized. Like, it develop a reputation early on as a time management nerd, you know, Like, a partner comes to you and ask you questions about, hey, are you using a time blocker? Like, what do you know about this or whatever? They sort of know that reputation gains you. Adam Grant has a term for this. He calls it idiocycracy credits. It gains you flexibility because there's a trust there, right? So, for example, If they don't know if your organized or not, or if you have a reputation of being disorganized, there's going to be an expectation of like, I would rather you just do this right away and respond right away because I can't let this go. I can't trust you to do it necessarily. So now I have to keep it in my head till you're done. So I would really just rather you do this right away. But if on the other hand, it's like, I wish you would stop talking about Cal Newport and these time blockated all this type of stuff. You're still solving the problem of like, oh, she'll get it done, right? So I don't, it doesn't matter to me as much of, you know, uh, issue on teams right away responding. If I, you have that reputation, if to like, did she really just send this like an IT ticket for like, whatever? Uh, they're like, okay. She's got it handled. So that it can earn you so much breathing room, like the more you develop that reputation, the more people trust you, the more like they know you have these idiots in credit systems, but they work well, it helps. And then you begin to get some flexibility. And like, yeah, I don't always like respond right away, but I'll see you always get a response within two hours. I send you these updates and There's a couple examples in the book, you'll like them along those lines, where it's like really almost over the top, like you're sending these like these update emails to the stakeholders of like the status of your task. It's just shifted over here. It all seems crazy, but what it does give you is like a lot of breathing room.

OK. All right. Well, excellent. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming out. These questions, the steep dive. We're going to clean that up and we're going to release it on the podcast feed. So if you want to hear yourself in your questions, the podcast is called Deep Questions. I think we're going to use AI to just alter all the questions to be just mainly very positive. I knew you were a smart cow, but I didn't even hear that good shape. Oh, well. Thank you, Congressman Raskin. So we're just going to really work with, we're really going to deep-fake the heck out of this now. Don't joke and we will. But thank you very much for coming. I love the questions and I love Tacoma Park and People's Books, so this was great. Thank you. All right, it's Kyle here again back in the Deep Work HQ. I thought there was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the questions at that live show. I was there for another hour. So after what you heard ended, I was there for another hour just talking with people. We were signing books and just talking with people. People had come from all over. I think one of the coolest things was there was multiple couples there from somewhere from Canada, somewhere from California, I believe.

And he told me at the show afterwards that book is now coming out. It's how going to be published. That was really cool. So he was that was a lot of fun. It was great to see everyone. I love those questions. Got a lot of good feedback. Got a lot of good support. So thank you everyone who came. Thank you people's book. favorite book store in Washington, D.C. Again, you can buy a signed copy of slow productivity straight from them. We'll put a link in the show notes. Great way to support independent book stores. And that's it for today. We'll be back next week with a standard indie HQ episode of the deep questions podcast and until then as always, stay deep.