I'm Cal Newport's and this is deep questions. Episode 2 13 on this show, I answer questions from my audience about the theory and practice of living and working deeply in an increasingly shallow world. If you want to submit your own questions or case studies, there is a link in the show notes for this episode or you can go to cal Newport's dot com slash podcast video of the full episodes as well as highlight eclipses available at youtube dot com slash media. Um, here in my deep work. HQ joined as always by my producer Jesse Jesse. It's good to see you. Good to see you too. I gotta say in the last week, I have fully transitioned back after my, my summer relaxed approach. I was gonna say hiatus will say my summer relaxed, approached the organization. I am back now, among other things into my,

my full daily planning habit routines, the sort of middle of the school year, hardcore cal Newport planning everyday routines. It takes me about a week or two to get back into it, but I'm back into it. I use my time block planner. First thing in the morning I go in and check my weekly plan. I look at my calendar, start to figure out what am I working on today, sketch out my initial plan. I do a shutdown complete at the end of my work day where I'm processing any task that have been captured in the planner throughout the day. I bring it then back upstairs, so it's upstairs in my room, I bring it downstairs to my study to that initial planning. It comes back up to my room because then at the end of the night when I'm getting ready for bed, all the relevant metrics for the day,

go into metric planning space when I'm at full throttle, that's all the things I'm doing. And I'm back to it after a summer of you know, I always pull back a little bit in the summer because I like seven jobs and it's pretty intense to keep it all running and so I pulled back when I can, But now I'm back to it, I feel good. Do you still have morning writing blocks every morning, every morning, six days a week? The plan is six days a week. I'm right in the morning, that's still rolling some mornings, I can write a lot some mornings I can't write as much this morning. I got in 75 minutes, that's on the short side, but it was 75 good minutes.

I was writing about Georgia O'Keeffe that's cool case. You're wondering, um You know, given my career in writing, I sort of have an ear for story that highlights interesting points. And Georgia. O'Keeffe has a really interesting story. This is my slow productivity book. I'm writing about seasonality, having different seasons throughout the year, where you do different times with your work. And I wrote about how, through the first eight years of her adult life, starting when she was 21 job after job after job, all over the place, she would be in texas teaching and then t and back in new york in the summers and taking some courses then teaching in uh south Carolina like all over the place.

Her art was developing but really slow. She had appeared in their four years which would even pick up a paintbrush. Then she meets Alfred Stieglitz, the famous photographer who runs it. Was running this famous gallery in Manhattan. It was showing a lot of the early modernist and he saw her work and exhibited it. They became friends and he's like, you got to come out to my family's property near Lake George. So Stiglitz's dad in 1880 had bought 36 acres Right north of Lake George Village on the Western Shore of Lake George. And so she leaves the bustle of the city. Goes up there. They live in a little farmhouse on the property. And in doing that it like unlocks Oliver, Oliver productivity. I mean, for the next however many years it was probably 1918,

She's just writing painting every summer, doing studies of the lake studies of the mountain studies of the barn, studies of the flower studies of the leaves. This is the stuff she starts exhibiting in the 1920s in Manhattan is what makes her name is, what makes her famous is the most prolific period of her career. And it's because she changed what she did during that part of the year, so that, you know, that's the type of thing I'm working on. Yeah, so I'm back into it, but back to my planner. So it was the thing I was thinking about this morning is every summer when I come back to full time block planning at the end of the summer, it's I struggle. There's always resistance. And the point this brought up for me is there is a real mismatch.

I'm guessing there's a real mismatch between our brains and the type of planning and motivation that they're wired to do and the complexity of the highly artificial type of organization we have to do for modern complicated knowledge work, family existences. So the brain, my brain, when it thinks about wait a second, we have to pull out this planner every morning we have to stop, we have to take five minutes. We have to write down our plan for the day and we have to record metrics in there. We have to follow the plan. This seems like constraint. It seems like energy that's being spent without an immediate reward. It seems like options being taken away. There's this resistance to doing it because the part of the brain, the motivational center that gets you going to do something does not understand this structure Over the course of a month is gonna two X. The amount of valuable knowledge product that we produce. It does not understand that.

So it just generates resistance because it's confused by it. So I feel that resistance every time. However once you've done it for a while the brain is pretty adaptable and it's like oh this is part of our routine, something good is happening. There's a structure to our days, we feel good about it and then it's easy to keep going. So there's some sort of interesting science of habit formation going on here. But every at the end of every summer resistance at first to get all the systems up and running, give it two weeks and the brain is like, yes what we do man, if we have a planner we weren't doing the things like we'd be all adrift and and so I don't know, there's an interesting commentary in there about what it takes to get our brain on our side for doing things that our brain doesn't really know much about in terms of evolutionary instinct, it's my brainstorm. Alright, so how's our uh how's our show? Look today jesse,

we got a good show today we have two blocks of questions. There's some something in there about hobbies career anxiety and then people want your advice on leaving a job. We also have some calls and then we have a picture that you're gonna take a look at that involves a closet a little case study. I like it. I like it. All right. Sounds good. Alright. So we have all that coming up. Let's start. However, as I like to do with a deep dive, The topic I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the art of no. So saying no is a major part of my own professional life because I'm someone who has multiple jobs with multiple demands and am somewhat in the public eye. So I have to spend more time saying no and thinking about how to say no and the ramifications of saying no I would say than probably the average person. So it's something that I have thought a lot about.

There's a couple observations I've always had about saying no No. one I think the average person creates this false binary between either you're someone who basically says yes or you are a disagreeable person who says no and they say well if those are my two choices I don't want to be the disagreeable person that seems stressful and emotionally taxing. So I'm just the person who who says yes I kind of have to say yes if it seems at all like it would be difficult to say no. The reality though is that everyone says no a lot Whether they know it or not whether it's implicit or explicit. But if you think about it, most knowledge workers you know they have a full schedule usually about 20% more full than they want it to be. But not impossibly full. They're not working till two a.m. But maybe they're working till six p.m. It is highly unlikely that the exact volume of things that was put onto their plate that they said yes to just happened to exactly match eight or nine hour day, right? Almost. Certainly there's many more things coming at them and they had they had to sort it through and they basically were implicitly or explicitly say no just enough the to keep a day full. So we're already all say no, even if we don't realize that we just do it somewhat haphazardly. And I wrote a new yorker piece about this last fall where I said my theory about how most people informally handle the goal of saying no, they don't have a plan, they don't have an intention,

they don't have a vision for what they're trying to accomplish. They instead wait until their level of experience stress is high enough that they feel emotionally justified turning someone down. So it's like I am so overwhelmed right now, I feel justified saying no. And until that point, I don't, what I argued in that new yorker piece is that this is a terrible way to go about this because it ensures that you remain at a persistent level of elevated stress. If you have to be sufficiently stressed to feel comfortable saying no, then you're never gonna start saying no and tell your sufficiently stress. So you're gonna stay at this level of being sufficiently stressed basically persistently. So when we are not intentional about how we filter what we do and don't do we end up in this default purgatory. This productivity purgatory of having just enough just enough on our plate that it is bearable but uncomfortable. We persist there. So we burn out and don't produce what we want and all the other negatives to come. So what we need to do is be more specific with ourselves about how we figure out what's a reasonable workload. What that workload should be made up of,

how we're gonna go about dealing with requests to fit that load. Uh and not overload. We need to be more specific about it. That's why I was happy to see an article that someone sent to me, an alert listener sent to me. That appeared in a it's a column in the journal Nature And it is written by four scientists and it is titled Why Four scientists spent a year saying no. And it is an article that gets into the tactical weeds about the challenges and proper strategies for declining or turning away stuff that's going to overload you turning away work. So, I want to go through this article because I often harp about this. Hey, you got to be more intentional about how you say yes or no, but we don't necessarily get into enough tactics about well, how do I actually say no without feeling really bad or annoying people. All right. So I have the article here. So those who are watching on Youtube.

So you can find this at Youtube dot com slash support media. You'll see on the screen that we have the date highlighted. This is from august 25th. So this is recent. Now the the four scientists who wrote this column, their names don't show up in this version I have here, but but probably relevant to this article, I believe all four women, so it's just that will come up a little bit later. Alright, so I want to highlight a couple of things here first. Just to start, let's give the premise for what they were doing here before we get to their specific advice. So the premise is the following, last May, I'm quoting the article here last May facing pandemic and career burnout.

This member whimsically suggested. So member of uh these four scientists have a group that meets regularly to discuss just their career and the challenges of being scientists. Alright, so back to the quote, a member of the group with whimsically suggested we make a game out of saying no By challenging ourselves to collectively decline 100 work related request. Thus we spent a year tracking and reflecting on our decisions to say no. So they started in May of 2021. They finished in March of 2022. So they got systematic about saying no and had four observations. They call them here for insights about what they learn saying no systematically 100 times over the course of a year. So let's go through these four insights real quick Alright. The first insight tracking helped make no an option. So they started keeping track of all the things they said yes or no to just a simple list. This is separate from whatever other organizational system you have for organizing your time or projects. Let's just have a yes no list. So they pointed out,

first of all, it helped them understand how much they already said yes, it's easy to forget. It also induced the Gamification, motiva motivational. How many notes do we have? I want to get a couple more nodes this week, maybe I do want to say no, what they didn't talk about is that once they started tracking No, this got them in the tracking mindset which helped them in other ways as well. So reading from the article here, they say we logged completed tasks to counteract imposter syndrome. We kept a running count of active projects and tracked how we were spending time each day. This is all the type of stuff I recommend when you actually start tracking your time, your projects, what you're doing,

what you're not doing when you actually confront what we talked about the show, the productivity dragon of what's really on your plate, what you've slaved in the past. This is all very important for you, getting your arms around your work and making confident plans for how you want to go forward? As long as you exist in this liminal space of emails coming in, you're saying yes or no, You're you're jumping in and out of meetings and just always scrambling, but you're not really sure what am I doing? How much am I doing? What have I gotten done? What am I saying yes to If you don't know these things, you're a fireman, you're putting out fires And people who put out fires eventually get burnt. Alright, No.

2 2nd thing they observed from this experiment say no more often into larger asks. So when they were reflecting, they said we declined too many little things, such as reviewing journal articles and not enough big tasks. I think that's a good point. They're saying you can rack up the nose quicker if you're aiming on the little things, the things that might take you a couple hours in the afternoon. But they're noting the things that cause the most stress for the big asks and they give some examples here, leadership opportunities, the chance to help write large grant proposals, etcetera. By the way, all of this is giving me cold sweats because they're this is too close to home, jesse knows this. Um okay, so what they ended up doing is coming up with a series of questions,

a series of questions to help evaluate when to say yes and when not. So here's their questions that five of them, This is what they started asking to try to figure out. Okay, is this something I should say yes to one? Does it fit into my research agenda and identity to does it spark joy? Three. Do I have time to do a good job without sacrificing extra commitments for does the opportunity to leave space for my personal life? Five. Am I uniquely qualified to fill this need? Right? So that made it easier for them to say no because they had eventually they had these criteria. So when something big would come along, they would say, look, there's two of these criteria that doesn't pass.

So now I have a reason to say no. Three, That's an important one. Maybe sometimes overlooked saying no is emotional work. It really is. I have to say no a lot. I just earlier this week got out, you know, said no to a speaking thing that I sort of went down the road with it because I thought it would be interesting. But it logistically was gonna be a pain. I knew I would regret it later on. And it's hard And sometimes the other people get upset. I would say nine times out of 10 people aren't really upset. They just need an answer and they're moving on. But but just emotionally, the lived experience of saying no because of the way it plays on our interpersonal social network.

Wiring in our brain. The lived experience is often quite stressful. This hits different people differently. So here's the author's here. I'm reading in myriad ways. We saw how our cultural conditioning as women academics and public servants contributed to our difficulty with setting boundaries tracking not just how often we said yes or no, but also our emotional responses made the emotional labor of saying no visible. We often do ignore the emotional side of some of this otherwise seemingly dry technical productivity. Uh, strategically that there's an emotional side to it. I talk about in a world without email. There's non surprising but well done surveys the workplace behavior that says if you start to categorize what they call non promotable behavior. So these are behaviors that aren't directly projects, activity tasks, not directly ties you being promoted. So I will help organize the birthday party for jesse,

You know, next month women were way more likely than men to be doing those like they're they're disproportionately spending more hours on it. So there's these these subtleties in terms of just the emotional exchange and saying no, not wanting to let someone down. Uh women are much less likely just to be straight up jerks. Guys can kind of get away with that in academia. You have a lot of guys that are barely in some fields barely fit for social like human social interaction, if that makes sense. You can ask my wife about this, She's been throughout grad school. I brought her to a lot of uh computer science parties, you get some of that, you get out of a lot of work when you don't even want to have a conversation with someone. So I think that's a good point there pointing out. Um, so what they say here is we need less logistical advice and more emotional advice when it comes to thinking about yes or no.

So let's acknowledge that. I think that's a very important point. All right, in the same piece they pulled out and there's one other thing I want to highlight in the same section here. They were looking, what's the terminology here? Soft? No or little No. So they had heard something called Little No, which is where like you agreed to a little bit or to do a lesser thing. So it's not as emotionally taxing. And they described that strategy, that strategy for reducing the emotional toll, saying no to be a slippery slope that led people to ask for a greater commitment. Later on, they went on to say only a firm no,

truly reduced our commitments. That is so true to my experience, You know, I become a master of that in my time. You can't can't try to soften the blow. You have this sense of like maybe there's a way I can say no here, that I'm not really saying no, but I don't have to do the work. It doesn't work. You have to be incredibly clear and you know, I I've learned this through experience where I'll say, I really appreciate this invitation. I'm honored. You thought of me. Um However, because of X.

Y. Z. I have to say no to this request. Like you have to have that piece. It's unfortunately with regrets, I have to say no to this request. You have to have that peace. It can't just be like, yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm pretty busy. I'm not sure if it's gonna work out in X, Y and Z. And just hope that they're going to come back and say, you know what?

You seem too busy. Don't worry about it. They won't they? Their life will be easier if you say yes, as long as there's any opening they're gonna keep going. You owe them and yourself clarity. So that's you have to have in there somewhere. I've definitely learned this specifically. I am saying no period and then you can add regrets and stuff like that, that's fine. But don't give any wiggle room. The other thing to say is don't say, well I'm really busy right now. Um So I don't think I can do it this semester or this month because they will be like great, how about january? So it has to be because of business or because of whatever I have to say no,

you can't answer back like okay, but maybe you mean yes. Alright. Fourth thing they these authors the fourth insight practice makes no easier As they did it more as they got closer to 100, it got easier to do. So anyways, I like that article. Uh and I like the topic. You have to control what is on your plate. You're doing this whether you have a plan or not, you're saying no to things, you're turning things down, you're probably just doing implicitly, you're probably just wait until you're stressed and then lashing out randomly and trying to get out of things until people see you're so exhausted that maybe they stop bothering you. Alright, that's not a good plan.

It's a plan. That's not a good plan, You need a better one. And I think this article is a pretty good treatment of the topic. So get more systematic about saying no, recognize the difficulty of doing so and it'll make your life in the long run uh a lot easier actually. No, all the time jesse. It's like my whole life. Yeah. I would imagine you get a lot of requests. I do. I do. I mean it helps. I don't this is why I don't have a general purpose way for people to reach me. It's why there's there's um if you go to my contact page.

So if you're interested in speaking, here's my speaking agent, if you have like a publicity thing, here's my publicist. If you have like a question about rights or translations or something about the books. Here's my literary agency, right? It's like your question has to get moved to someone who is not me. If you want to send us links, which I love. Here's the address, but the request won't be answered. Like we just make that clear on the site. Like there's just too many of the messages that come through. I love that you guys send me things, but I can't say I can't actually respond to it.

So there's not actually a general purpose place. I mean, and then if people make their way, sometimes people make their way to my Georgetown address, but then I just feel finally if you're using that for a non academic purpose, like you already know like I don't, I'm not expecting a response. I don't respond to this. You know, it works. I mean it's it's hard because it's nice to talk to people and I used to interact with all of our, all my different readers and would answer every email and it took all my time and then I couldn't do anything else. So it's, it's, it is hard and I still get a lot of requests. I have to say no to you.

I'll tell you the hard ones. Sometimes they come from friends. You know, it will be uh the the hardest ones and then, and then I'll leave it. I'll just say the hardest ones are, let's say it's a friend of the family are you know, who doesn't know much about me, but just like comes across something and then he's like, oh I know him. Like I know his wife, I know his mom or something like that and like, hey can you uh it's so exciting. I saw you like um can you come down to our office and like come give a talk and like come join this webinar, do this and that and those are kind of, those are the,

those are the hard ones. It's hard to say no which I do, but it's just hard to do. Yeah, but you just have to have to rip off the band aid. Yeah. My wife's got used to that just saying to people who know her and she's like, he's just, he's not doing things right now. And she has some phrase, she says like he's not, he's not taking on new things right now or something. Just got the script optimized. Alright, well speaking of optimized, this is not a great transition.

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Hello, my name is erika. I am a return color and general Askar of questions. Um Today my question is regarding anxiety and time block planning. So one side of me loves to have my schedule set so I don't have to think about it but when I get to the day where I have something planned at a certain time I get anxiety because there's this other side of me that loves flexibility. I do like schedule throughout my day some unstructured time but and once I start an activity I'm usually happy with doing the activity but I just get a lot of commercial pre event anxiety and just you know a feeling of not wanting to do a certain thing at the time I have it. So I'll give a good example like I schedule a reservation at a restaurant, you know like a month in advance or something that I'm really excited for but when the day comes I just don't like feeling boxed in and having to be at the restaurant at a certain time but then I get there and I love it. So do you have any like tips or thoughts on how I might be able to just get over this? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know the right term for it I guess create inertial anxiety towards a structured schedule event. Alright, thank you very much. Take care. Bye.

Well I mean Erica, this is similar to what we were chatting about at the top of the show about the the resistance I feel to restarting my full time block planning system at the beginning of the fall, you're feeling this But basically on the scale of individual scheduled events or blocks same underlying mechanisms and is quite normal our brain does not understand, I understand, I mean has not been evolved over deep history time. The last 2 to 300,000 years where modern homo sapiens have walked the earth. It has not evolved to work with scheduled events. It's not evolved to work with, I am now going to start doing this task because it's drawn up in a box on a piece of paper, I am now going to head over to a restaurant to eat because it's in my planner that that's what happens next. That is not how our motivational loops are evolved to actually function. They're they're functioning. They're meant to function on much more immediate and clear stimuli. We need more food. We're going for a hunt, this person who's in front of me, who I can see.

So all of the social networks that take up so much of my neuron, neuronal space in my brain are all fired up and looking at this person in front of me who's a part of my tribe who's asking for my help. Oh yeah, we're gonna go help that person. We expect these more acute stimuli. The brain does not understand a small box written one of these or a little green glowing screen box on your screen, your google calendar for an appointment. It doesn't understand that. So we have some trouble literally getting the motivational system to put the right chemicals into our system that gets us up and actually moving. There's something called the ventral striatum that's involved in this. The neuroscience gets complicated details don't matter. We can we'll get Andrew Huberman on the line if we really want to get into this. Uh But let's just rest assured this is what our brain does. Different people. Erica have different reactions to this mismatch, right?

So some people, it's whatever. Yeah, you have to just kind of bull rush into the task, then you get going. It's like it's minor. Other people like you Erica the mismatch triggers anxiety, which again, chemicals anxiety is a physical feeling, there's a constriction in the chest, there's a difficulty in the breathing. You can you can do some self scanning and say this is just physical hormonal, chemical driven reaction, the autonomic immune system or nervous system rather is involved in this. And so for you and a lot of other people this mismatch can create uh literal anxiety. The thing we have to do about this uh put bluntly is sort of ignore,

I mean, we can recognize my brain does this just like my knee hurts when a storm is coming, but beyond recognizing it, we still go forward, we still go forward because let me tell you, let's say you get rid of your time block planning during the day, like let's just rock and roll. So I don't have to have the anxiety of having something scheduled. You're opening yourself up to a much more existential anxiety because you're gonna just ping pong back and forth randomly, putting out fires, not making progress on things are important, forgetting about things, having to scramble at the last minute to get things done. This is not from a physiological perspective or a psychological perspective, a better subjective experience, it's a deeper existential anxiety,

you're gonna feel so you're trading one for the other, same thing. If you know, you don't go to the restaurant, you don't go to the party, uh you're not gonna feel better, You'll get like relief in the moment because you're resolving the mismatch, but you're not around friends, you're not doing interesting things and you know, I get that to Erica, I don't get I don't get anxiety around blocks if it's just work, I've put aside, I just get normal resistance when you throw a there's different aspects, Sometimes there's social aspects that this might be what you have. There might be like a social aspect in there where there's a little bit of social anxiety so that could exaggerate it. Um I don't have that so much,

but I have as I talked about the show, these weird deep rooted issues with surrounding sleep and so I'll sometimes get this around events if you're at night, like, you know, I don't know how late it's gonna go and with my sleep and and you know what I've learned to do is say, okay, thank you Brain welcome anxiety, I'm glad you're here chemicals you'll pass soon. Uh and I'm gonna go on and keep doing this thing. So that's what I say Erica. Um it's natural, it's not that you shouldn't find it that interesting in the sense of like here this comes, it'll go and you make the plans that are good, you execute the plans and find pride in your action and not give so much attention to the physiological, it's gonna do its thing and then Erica, you're gonna do your thing because more often than not,

it's gonna be like an enjoyable experience to like going to the party or going to the gym or going to a game. That's what I'm trying to separate here is like how much, how much we're dealing with the, the planning mismatch with Erica, which is a real thing. I mean people sometimes anxiety a lot of times, just procrastination, it's like really hard for people to get started on things that are just that are planned in some sort of abstract, arbitrary system and there's also social anxiety and she's mentioned both in the call. So I'm assuming they're kind of all mixed together. I mean, social anxiety is its own its own thing, which again, is completely natural because our brain is so attuned to the sociology that, you know, a lot of what 20th first century social life is not exactly what our brain expects,

it expects. Like this is my tribe that I am around all day with them all day. That's why I'm miserable when I'm alone. But if it's strangers and some people, I don't know and it's in like a bar, I haven't been to, the brain is like, I don't, I don't know about this. Some people care more than others. You have negative social anxiety as far as I can tell you, love people and you love doing things. I'm around a lot of people a lot, like in various my other jobs and stuff and yeah, I do a lot of things to, I guess that's a spectrum.

Like probably for you. Um, the way that wiring is set up is you see the potential opportunity in a novel social environment, like, oh, something cool could happen. I could meet someone interesting. Maybe you'll see something interesting for other people. It will be, but what happens if I get there and like I can't find the, I can't find the person or like as I, as I walk into the, as I walk into the room, like I'm immediately, you know, catch on fire or whatever,

waiter spills water on me. Really? I had a friend we used to joke about that would be anxious about like going to a bar we've never been at before and we try to one up each other on our predictions for what was gonna happen. And it would usually end up with like as the door open, just three or four people already at a full sprint are just charging you to take you down and to beat you with some sort of like bats or black Jackson that would see like how, how, how exaggerated we could make the story. That would, you know, explain some social anxiety. Like as soon as you're in the door, it's just gonna be like fire boys and like immediately there's some of the flamethrower and you know, you're over the top. All right, let's do another question, What do we have next?

Uh, next question is from Olivia. Olivia is a product designer from new york city. She also feels anxious about choosing which hobbies to spend time on because she has lots of interest more specifically, she likes to write short stories and her most recent story was accepted from the slush pile on the top literary journal. Now she feels pressure to pursue that hobby, like alone versus dabbling in her other hobbies, which she considers mediocre, like drawing, cooking exercise and volunteering. Alright, so hobby question. Um, so Olivia, I would say, what's going to help you here is to introduce the deep life buckets into this conversation.

I I think you're you're lumping together too many things under the rubric of hobby. So you're lumping together your amateur writing what you're doing at a, at a high level, right? If you've made into a top literary journal, you're lumping that in withdrawing cooking, exercising, volunteering. You see this as one thing and like which of these do I do, which these do. I have time to if you look at this through the perspective of uh, the deep life buckets and let's go with the standard default buckets here. We'll do craft constitution, uh, community contemplation and celebration. Let's do the default buckets.

You'll see that these. Now these examples you gave, they fall out into these buckets in a more diverse way. Right, so the writing you're doing that's at the level of getting published in top literary journals that's gonna fall under craft, it's not your paid job, but that is craft that it, that it's, it's something where you are honing a skill at a high level to produce things of value. So I would, I would deal with that when I'm dealing with the craft bucket of my life volunteering now that's gonna be in the community, I would deal with volunteering is one of the things on the plate when trying to craft right now, what makes the most sense for me in the community bucket of my life exercising that's going to fall into the constitution bucket when you're contemplating what do I want to do with the constitution in my life? Right now my health and fitness exercise is going to play in there cooking. You could see coming into the celebration bucket that the bucket where you're uh trying to have gratitude and appreciation and of things in the world and experiences and, and things that you do that are sort of celebrating life and,

and, and all the things that makes life interesting and good. So these things fall into different buckets, not just I have to have a hobby. What's my hobby going to be then? How do you figure out which of these you have time for? Well now you're working the buckets in the standard way. Right? You, you have a vision for each of these buckets that fit together to make sense for your life right now and are aiming towards whatever vision you have for an ideal lifestyle in the future. So you're looking holistically at your whole life, you want to make sure that all of these buckets are represented, you know the system. If you've listened to the show, you start with keystone habits and you give 6 to 8 weeks to each of the buckets, one by one to overhaul that part of your life.

That's when you deal with these things. So when you're dealing with the community part of your life, you can say with where I am right now and the decisions I made for the other bucket. So what I'm trying to do at this stage of my life community is important, how am I gonna integrate community my life in a way that makes sense And maybe that involves volunteering, maybe it does it. You know, if you're deployed in the military this year, then when you're thinking through community that's gonna be focused much more on, you know, connections with the people important to you back home, maybe you're thinking I'm going to write uh long letters once a week, they're gonna post publicly. So all my friends can see what I'm up to. It's going to focus on the people that you're deployed with and being there for them and mentoring to people below you, it's not gonna be volunteer opportunities.

On the other hand, if you're home and you're working part time and you have more time you have before, then maybe that community pieces gonna super expand and volunteering is gonna be big, but this gives you a systematic way of thinking about that, same with celebration, what do I want to do in there and you're thinking through what, what actually fits into your life? So that's the way I would actually think about it. All right now, what you're trying to do is come up with answers for these five buckets that fit together makes sense and is tractable and be happy about that and what that looks like will depend on what phase of life you're in, what you're going after. So you know, when I was looking at your elaboration of your question, you mentioned for example that you are getting a part time graduate degree in addition to your job. Like this might be a period of one or two period where craft is really focused on like your job and trying to get this graduate degree and you're in very minimalist deployments of the other buckets, keeping those part of your life alive,

but you have to keep them pretty minimal because you don't have much time and then maybe when you're done with that graduate degree and you have more time you reassess those buckets and now suddenly maybe you're reclaiming that time you were spending for your graduate degree to systematically work on your writing craft as a, as an outlet for your creative energies. So this, this can morph and change over time, but you have to see all of the pieces as part of a big picture and that's why I think split into these buckets, making sure each bucket is dealt with, but that they all add up to something intractable. That is the way to think about these. Not in this much more simplified way of what hobby should I choose. You know, what is my hobby? That type of terminology is not that useful. I mean it's only recently that I've spent any sort of systematic time on anything that you might qualify as a hobby because I have a whole mess of kids and the youngest is now four. But that means until quite recently I've always had someone between the ages of one and three essentially in my household, like it's been really busy and I have seven jobs and that's fine. So my bucket definitions,

we're really heavy on craft and community and then there wasn't the other stuff. I had to just have bare minimum. So I respected him and prove to my point myself they're important, but they had to be very low impact and the kids are getting older kids at school every day. I can rejigger the buckets. So anyways, that's the way I would think about it Olivia. All right, what's our next question here. So we have a follow up question from Olivia as well and she took advantage of the new question survey because we got to answer two questions from her back to back. If you're early, If you're early and answered filling in that survey, you're much more likely to get your question answered then a few months from now. So yeah, good. Good advertisement for filling out the question survey.

So in her and she says in your book. So good. They can't ignore you. You give the following as a reason for leaving a job. It presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable. She worries that in her job as a product designer, she's repeating the same work instead of getting better. She studied literature in college and as we talked about, she did a part time Masters and well she's doing a part time Masters in Economics right now. These feel much more challenging, like something that you can truly develop expertise in at the same time, she gets paid a lot as a product designer and text. So maybe the skill is valuable. How can I how can she decide if the first disqualifier applies to her career. So just to put this in context Olivia is referring to in my book. So good.

They can't ignore you. I lean heavily on this idea that stop worrying about if you have the exact right job for you or that you have a passion that has to be matched to your career. And if you don't exactly match it, then you're gonna be miserable? I I argue that many different professional pursuits can be the foundation for a working life, it's a great source of satisfaction, but I did give three disqualifiers said, here's three things to tell you that this might not be a job you should stay in. So the first was what Olivia mentioned, you don't really have options to build up skills that can then be used as leverage to shape your career going forward. That was disqualifier number one, uh I believe this qualifier number two, was it conflicted with values, So, you know, you're working for Phillip Morris and the idea of so many people getting sick from smoking is like against your values and then three I think was you don't like the people like these people are just,

I can't stand them, you know, like I don't mind being investment banker from a from a value perspective, I you're gonna have lots of options because I make a lot of money and lots of options if I get really good, but you know what, I can't take the these people, I work with a goldman, right, so that be number three. Alright, so she's asking do I think that first disqualifier applies to a job as a product designer in text, she's worried, you know, is this something I can keep getting better and getting options or is it something that I'm just going to eventually have to move on from what I would suggest in this situation is, and this is a evolution from the way I talked about this back and so good, they can't ignore you.

So it's been 10 years since that book came out. So this is a bit of an evolution. I would lean a little bit heavier on a lifestyle centric career planning approach to this question as opposed to remaining more narrowly focused on just the aspects of the career. So in lifestyle center, career planning, you have your vision for what you want, your daily experience, what you want, your life to be like in all different aspects, not just professionally and then you can work backwards and figure out how your work can help get you to that lifestyle. So, if you have this lifestyle fixed the question then becomes does this technology product design career that I'm in? Do I see a way to use this to grow in this? Do I see a trajectory here that is going to support this lifestyle? I have this vision I have in my lifestyle alright. Uh and and and answer that question,

you probably want to look for role models, case studies and examples people at your company or other companies, freelancers, people on their own, but people within the same orbit of general skills that have done interesting things with it. This will elaborate your understanding of what is possible with this job as you get good. What are the different options of what you can do with this? You mentioned in your elaboration? I'm looking at it now, You say some pretty stark things like only people in their twenties can be a product designer while their mind is fresh, there are no product designers in their thirties. Your only chance, your only options to become a manager. But then even then you can only do that during your 40s. That's probably not true. I mean,

I think you probably need to be more systematic at learning what the different possibilities are for this general constellation of skills and not just okay within the company you work for and you know, what's the promotion chain here, but for product designers and generally people who work in different industries on product design. People who go out on their own, people who do freelance. Is there people who do this for this type of company and they do it Six months out of 12 and make a pretty good living at it. And using that they can live somewhere that's kind of cheap but exotic and interesting on a farm somewhere, I don't know, you got to get out there, you got to get the information and then figure out seeing all these different options. Do I see a way of deploying of these to get to my, my image of an ideal lifestyle and if yes, go for it. If no, then yeah, you can see this disqualifier applies.

So that's my evolution. Let's let's use lifestyle more and be a little bit less narrowly focused on just what is this job? What am I gonna get from this job? Where can I go for this job? Because ultimately, what does that matter if it's not serving the life that you're actually aiming to achieve that comes back to when you talk about being a reporter for your own job, essentially, you talk about that a lot. Yeah. Act as if you're a reporter and figure out what the steps are to do X, Y Z. You're writing a book or an article about how people get here in my career. Go talk to people, look up people's resumes online, read profiles of people in your industry. Yeah,

you gotta be like, I'm gonna write a book about product design and the career possibilities of product design. So it's a, yeah, a research mindset. What do we got next? Uh next, we have a question from Jackson, 25 year old in Vermont for the past two years, I've been working for an ambulance service running a Covid testing site, which was shut down in late june, I'm searching for more technical work and I'm struggling to break into the field of knowledge work. I have a degree in philosophy and I'm looking mostly at work with within Vermont, Well, I mean, hey,

first of all good news embedded in that question. The covid testing site was shut down. So there we go. We got something positive. Pandemic news and uh, and I'm looking at an update here. It shut down because um, everyone involved was hospitalized with Covid. So you see, I thought it was positive, I thought it was positive and oh no, this guy, this guy was not so one person. Uh, but he got monkey pox, you know?

See, I thought, I thought we had something positive here every time we think we're, we're this close to something positive, something negative happens. Um All right, well, Jackson, I have a, an answer to your specific question than a more general suggestion to tack onto the end of it. So for your, your general question, um, if you want to work for the state, not a bad idea. Actually,

when I was in Vermont last summer, jesse, we met several people who work for the state in Vermont, there's a whole thing like you work for the state and maybe go to Montpellier sometimes and they all ski all the time and they seem like they're outside all the time and it's a really stable job and they're always outside. And it actually seems like a, a cool state to work for the state because you can, there's a lot of these jobs, it's like, yeah, I'm in charge of the like mushroom management program, whatever it takes, like nine hours and then the cross country ski the rest of the day. So Jackson, what I'm saying is you have an interesting plan here. Um, so I think what you need to think about is not the specific job you're gonna get right away,

but the department or program in which that job lives because once you're inside the department or program, if and when you prove yourself to be so good, you can't be ignored. You can move within the department of program relatively easily. So with that in mind, maybe you need to aim at something that's temporary. Something that's more entry level that you might be looking for long term and have the plan of give me a year and I'm going to move up to something cooler. I'm going to move to something more interesting. I just need to get my foot in the door. So lower your standards for the very first job you're gonna get in the state with the plan of that will be far from your last and the way you do that. This is my advice. I always give the people who are in their young twenties and new to some sort of knowledge work environment. Once you have the job, don't let things drop through the cracks. If you agree to it or put on your plate, you will not forget it.

It will get done to deliver things when you said you would and three consistently deliver at a high quality, do those three things you will become indispensable and if you're indispensable you're gonna get more and more freedom and flexibility because people were gonna want you there, they're gonna want to keep you there, they're gonna want you on your projects, they're going to give you more opportunities, especially in the state and the state government when they're like, look there's this guy Jackson that we just hired over in the mushroom management program. The guy's a star, he gets it done, he doesn't forget things it gets done at a high level like you can trust him, he makes our life easier. You know you're gonna be uh the mushrooms are or whatever. I don't know how the program works within two or three years and then you'll be cross country skiing all day. So I think that's good. The general piece of advice I want to tack on though is this is also a good place to check your thinking on what you're trying or interested in doing like you're talking about like I want to just be in knowledge work. I mean okay but why like what does that mean?

I mean this is where I think a lifestyle center career planning exercise is gonna have super high leverage in your life because you're young and you're done with one thing about to start something new. So this decision you're about to make is going to be consequential. So definitely get that vision of 5 to 10 years from now or maybe one vision at 51 at 10 of what every aspect of your lifestyle is like what type of place do you live? What is your day like? Are you in a city or you're in office? You in the woods, are you, are you out you know cross country skiing as the sun comes up and chopping wood in the evening? Are you getting the hell out of Vermont and want to be in florida in Miami where there's it's warm and there's a city like you gotta think like where do I want to be? What's my day like who am I around? What's my connection to the community? How am I spending my time? What what's the general style of work? I have work backwards from that vision to say what are my different ways of getting there? And it might be working for the state, it might be something completely different.

It might even be something that's not knowledge work. I don't know. I mean you work with an ambulance service, maybe you're in paramedical care, maybe you know, you end up in real estate in Vermont and I don't know my thing is this is the time to get a good answer though, so do a little bit of lifestyle center, career planning. All right, rolling along, what do we got next here, jesse? Alright, we have a question from Dylan, he's a 24 year old from London, he has a pharmacy degree.

His plan is to sit for the exam that gives the gets in the pharmacy license that will help him finance the study of medicine, which he's already begun. Unfortunately he's failed the exam and now he only has one attempt left. Um Sometimes I was right when he wrote here. Sometimes when I see the amount of content that is required to pass this exam, my anxiety gets the better of me and it's hard to carry out on any day to day activities. I get paralyzed and I don't know where to start. If I don't pass the exam then I won't have the finances to finish med school nor I'll be able to go back into the pharmacy work. Alright so we got a bit of a complicated situation but I think I understand it. Uh So Dylan got a pharmacy degree and there's an exam you pass after you have the degree to be a practicing pharmacist. Dylan has started medical school. But in order to keep paying for medical school, the plan is that he will become a pharmacist and in his pharmacy work will pay for him to finish medical school and then he'll be a doctor. I'm guessing he Dillon cook is dealing with an eye is that it could go either way. Yeah I was thinking it was a he. Yeah well we'll go with it could be a shift.

So my apologies Dylan. I just don't know the name, not familiar with that spelling. Um And then so then the concern is if he fails the pharmacy exam then he can't be a pharmacist and he won't have the money to pay for the rest of med school. And and because of this he's paralyzed with anxiety. Just can't, it's you can't study, you can't sleep. I mean I'm looking at the elaboration here is like real anxiety about this. Alright, so I mean I think there's two pieces to this. I mean there's the exam prep piece which I think you already are up on. You know, how do you prep for a big exam like this for something like this. We're talking two or three hours a day of work but not more in that time you're doing the work that you have evidence actually matters. Active recall sample tests,

whatever actually does matter. And if you're not sure, talk to people who took the test recently and asked them what is the prep work that made a difference? What was a waste of time? Do not ever approach exam preparation with a plan based on what you want to be true. Always work backwards from what actually matters what type of review activities actually make the difference and just spend your time on that. Right? And then you just trust the process 2-3 hours evidence based prep again and again again. Trust the process after two or three hours, move on with life next morning, do it move on with life etcetera. Like that's how you prep for an exam. Alright, let's talk about now the anxiety which I think is the uh the biggest issue. So I think you need to do something, we need to do something about the anxiety.

I want you to think about the anxiety like that you're feeling about this exam, like tooth pain. Now I can ignore it. Like I got tooth pain, I don't like it, it feels bad, but you know what dentists know how to fix tooth pain. So I should probably go and get the tooth pain fixed. Like that's the way you would think about it, that's the way you need to be treating the anxiety. The anxiety now is uh getting in the way of the activities, you need to sort of function normally in life. And that's the threshold that we would say that okay, now it's disordered. So let's get that back ordered. So what you think about test prep and anxiety management,

it completely makes sense that you feel anxiety in that situation. It's an anxiety producing situation. But the anxiety is, is at a level that is disproportionately high for the stakes. This style of anxiety, I'm sure what's going on here is distorted rumination. So your brain is telling stories about what could happen and all these bad things that could happen and there, it's being distorted into extreme peril, extremely dire stakes and then that is feeding the actual physical sensation of anxiety. This style of anxiety is very, very common, very, very treatable, right? This is this is the good news, right?

This is very, very treatable. One of the classic frameworks that applies well to this type of anxiety would be cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy directly addresses the distorted ruminations is a systematic approach to actually confronting those ruminations, pointing out with clinical precision the name of the distortions. And you know, you got a bunch here, there's this sort of predicting the future distortion, There's black and white thinking distortion and you correct it and then move on. You might feel that you still feel the anxiety, but you've corrected the ruminations. You do that again and again and again and it it fills in that groove in your mind that groove that when you fall into you get stuck in the anxiety builds up. So this is a longstanding methodology. This might be helpful here. You want to learn more about it. Read the book Feeling Good by David Burns.

This is an old book, I think is from the eighties is one of the maybe even the seventies, one of the innovators of cognitive behavioral therapy explains how it works. Gives the evidence, even gives you some information if you want to start applying this yourself, um and then talk to someone and again, think about someone who could help you with this type of rumination taming therapeutic practice. So, as the second way of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. As a dentist. This is what they do. They fix tooth pain and this is an easy tooth pain to fix. Just need a little bit of cavity fill. But my main thing I'm telling you here, Dylan is don't let the tooth keep hurting your the anxiety you're feeling here is again,

I get why you're feeling it. I've seen it 100 times. It's very common. It's not a mystery. If you're a if you're a fan of the show West Wing, it's only West Wing nerds out here will understand this reference the the episode Noel, I believe it's season two where josh Lineman is having post traumatic stress from uh the attempted assassination of the president. Where josh got shot at the end of season one episode called What a day it's been. I believe something like that. What type of data? That's the type of day. It's been something like that. Anyway, they bring in this high level uh therapist to the White House to deal with them. It's a whole sorkin esque thing where there's you know mysteries being revealed. But at the end they figure out like your your it's post traumatic stress from the shooting blah blah blah.

They figure it out and then josh is like okay um so when's my next appointment with you? Like when are we gonna work on this? He's like no you're not gonna work with me. We'll give you some names like well I want to work with you and he's like, you're too easy for me. Like this is too basic. It's too, we see this again and again again with the treatment so straightforward. You don't need someone as high of A level and Dylan. This is a, it's like josh, Lyman and Noel. Um a standard understandable stressor pushes rumination based anxiety to a somewhat disordered level. Cognitive behavioral therapy will pull that right back. So keep doing the good prep, 2 to 3 hours a day.

Never more evidence based prep trust the process, deal with the tooth pain. You know, Jesse, there's a whole podcast called the West Wing podcast Where all they do is one episode of the show of West Wing per one episode of the podcast and then they just go through that episode seven. Are you the host? Well, no, no. Okay. West Wing, the show was seven seasons. I don't know where the West Wing podcast is. This is the thing though. I think it's profitable because it's uh, I don't know how profitable that show is,

but the Office Ladies, which is starring as a podcast with uh Jenna Fischer uh pam and then uh Angela, the actress who plays Angela there, the host and they're just going episode by episode that's often a top 10 podcast. Then you have on Conan's network and I've listened to some of this rob Lowe is hosting a podcast that goes through parks and recreation episodes. It's him and the head writer and they go through parks and recreation episodes one television show per episode and they go through it and you have guests on. It's a, it must be working as a format. But it was when the West Wing podcast came out of surprise because it's, it's co hosted by one of the actors from the show from josh malina who shows up in season four. So it's not like, it's, and you know, Jenna Fischer is the office one rob Lowe to, so it's not like this is just weird fan. So I think they must,

this must make enough money that even for like working actors and actresses, they're like pretty well known. It's so why don't we got, what are we gonna do, are what are we gonna do our fan recap podcast on, we gotta add one to our network nationals draft. You know what? Okay, so there is, let's get into this, there is uh that equivalent for baseball for the nationals. So my man Mark Zuckerman along with Al Goldie, uh I think this is very innovative, is they do a podcast after every single game and it comes out, they'll record it if they're on the west coast at three in the morning, whatever they come out the next morning and they're competing with morning sports radio,

you know, I listen to it, they do that for a lot of teams actually, they do it for the red sox. I know, yeah, it's a thing in sports now because they realize and it's breaking open completely the sports radio model. The whole sports radio model is like I saw this game last night now I'm going to work and I want to hear and hear people talk about the game and whatever, so I'm gonna put on the radio and I'm driving to work. So like why not just capture this in a podcast and you know, Zuckerman's a beat writer, but now he can, it's kind of a cool idea. The overhead is a fraction of like what it costs to run a sports radio station and they can pull in. I'm assuming it's a lucrative audience for the audience who wants to reach Nationals fan. So yeah,

so I think what we need to do is merge the two with Mark Zuckerman's podcast. Well, you watch the rewatchable or you listen to the re watchable is a lot to write. So yeah, that's rewatchable is great too, but rewatchable and this is the issue, I don't wanna go off on it, but like the issue with the ringer, Which is like Bill Simmons Network, they sold for $200 million dollars is like at the core of the ringer and I think at the core of its success is the fact that Bill Simmons is like a generational podcast talent. He's just very, very good with the medium and you have to, it's not until you've done this for a few years even like we've done now that you realize how good he is at it. So he has these flagship podcasts like the Bill Simmons podcast and rewatchable that are just excellent podcasting and they have a bunch of other podcasts. I don't know if any of them are even listen to that much. I guess they can kind of piggyback onto these,

these other ones. But that's what I've learned doing podcasting here for a couple of years. Don't sleep on how good Bill Simmons is doing podcasting. I mean I'm a movie guy. So like he's a clear interesting in out uh watch his transitions. He rip cords like he gets to immediately to like what's funny and rip cords into the next thing. It's really hard what he does and he's never been on radio. Never. It's like it. He is an organic podcaster. He's been on some tv but you know, he's a columnist and he was Anyways, let's do a so we have a case study here. So I want to do more case studies on this show. Um there's some talk about, you know jesse is helping us figure this out how to actually have live case studies.

We're gonna have callers at some point relatively soon to call in and share their case study, but for now we have some case studies people sent in. Uh so I want to do this one real quick. This is a note an anonymous reader sent to me. Here's what he said. I'm transitioning to a new industry next year and planning to apply for software engineering roles. I'm balancing a few things, work interview, prep, grad school apps, wedding planning, being a dog, dad, ultra running etcetera. Sounds like a young person, jesse.

Young people have so much time and energy, wait till they have three kids. Like I'm working on mowing the yard this month, but maybe next month at the latest. Alright. Anyways uh he goes on to say, I expressed my failure to do deep work with my partner and I told her that I eventually wanted to create a deep work studio when we moved to a bigger place. She asked why not? Now? We made one in our closet. We had to move things around in this cramped. But I love the space. I'm only in there a total of two or three hours a day but I'm insanely productive during those hours. So for those who are watching the Youtube version of the show, we have a picture of the closet looking at it now that's pretty intense. Let's see what we got here.

So okay, so for people who can't see um it is a very small closet that there is a it can fit a laptop, a monitor, a is that a time block planner. It's not a time block plan. This person is dead to me. Some sort of plant and a coffee mug but barely uh has some sort of sign on the door? I'm not quite sure, I can't quite read that. I think it says nerd at work. I'm not sure. Anyways. I love it though. It's it's a little isolation monastic isolation chamber in a small apartment and and he gets a lot more done. Location matters, You know,

during the early pandemic Jesse, I did a bunch of um reader case studies about this when people were sheltering in place around the world and they would send me photos of what they were doing in their small living spaces to find more deep work and people got crazy. So if you want to go to my old blog and go back, go back to like April and May of 2020. There's someone who built a cabin inside their apartment that was my favorite. Like it was in their storage, in the storage room of their apartment. They had all the walls and stuff of this cabin or something like a shed and they assembled it inside the living room, there's like the living room and in the middle of the living room is a cabin they go into. So I love that type of stuff. Actually, I was home the other day visiting my parents and I had a spanish class. I just take them online. But I was thinking of what you always talk about and I was like my uncle lives nearby and he's got really cool spaces like cool desk and stuff. So I was like, can I come over and take my spanish class here in the house and he's like,

yeah, I went over there sat as a nice desk, took the class and then it matters probably right. Yeah, it was good. Yeah. Location, location, location, Yeah, definitely matters. Alright. Well speaking of things that matter Briefly mentioned one of our sponsors of today's episode And that is our friends at 80,000 hours You have 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. Do that.

Matthew get to 80,000, that's a lot of time and it means that your career is probably your biggest opportunity to make a positive impact on the world. Career planning of course can be overwhelming, especially if you really do care about doing something positive with your work. So how do you know what actually matters when it comes to taking your professional life and actually doing something high impact. That is where 80,000 hours enters the scene. It is a nonprofit whose whole goal is helping people have a positive impact with their career. I have known the folks at 80,000 hours since they got started. I used to write a lot about these topics. So I know these people, we've talked over the years. Um we are on the same wavelength about a lot of ideas about using work. Instrumentally for a bigger goal. They also aren't big believers and they just follow your passion or there's one job you're meant to do. Like, come on,

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A bunch of Oxford guys, they've got english accents that make them sound really smart and they're at Oxford. So, uh you're gonna get something interesting in this podcast. I recommend it. So, sign up for the newsletter. Look at the job board. Listen to the podcast. All of that can be done at 80,000 hours dot org slash deep slash deep. So they know you came from us at 80,000 hours dot org slash deep. I also want to talk briefly about insurance and our good friends at policy genius. So here's the thing we're used to other types of insurance. We pay hundreds of dollars per year to protect our homes and our cars and even our phones. But too much of us are not taking steps to protect our family's finances, mortgage payments,

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And Prudential all in one place. See what's the best bet. Sign up right there. You can say 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with policy genius options started just $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage. So go to uh policy genius dot com to get personalized quotes in minutes and to find the right policy for your needs. Remember the license agents that policy genius work for you and not the insurance companies, they're on hand throughout the entire process to help you understand your options, you can make the best decisions with confidence. So go to policy genius dot com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Alright. Going for a little while here I think we do a few more questions. How about a college is we have a call we could do yeah we have a call from Connor and he's a copywriter and he's got he wants your thoughts on project management um Project management tools like Wrinkle are Ricky and monday dot com. So here we have to say hello cal my name is Connor Beck and I am a copywriter and content marketing specialist from ST paul Minnesota. I really enjoy your show and all of the amazing insights that you provide. Um So thank you for that. My question has to do with project management tools specifically Reich um and other related project management tools.

My company, my current company in the past two that I've worked at have used right and I've seen it work well and I've seen it work not so well and it seems to be less effective when it gets overly complicated. So my question is how would you suggest? Companies and teams use tools, project management tools like right or monday dot com in order to facilitate deep work rather than create unnecessary distractions and wasted time. Thanks again for your insight cal and uh yeah, keep up the good work. Alright, well right off the bat I'll admit. I know monday dot com. I don't know. Reich I'm actually gonna load it up. Let's see here. This this could be I'm loading up on our tablet here, just I'll tell you when I have it. Right?

See what we're dealing with here. Reich Project management. Hold on. Alright, Alright. Have this loaded up on the tablet here, Right. W R I K E. It says managing multiple projects shouldn't be a struggle. Right? Sounds good to me, trusted by 20,000 happy customers Lord. This is looking complicated. Alright, build the path. It says streamline your process and gain visibility at every stage.

You can use custom workflows, create custom workflows to help your team on the stay on the same page. Easy to implement. Simple to use. There's some animation here. Uh man, there's a lot going on here, jesse. You see this like clicking four deep into this. They click on a thing to a sub menu to a sub menu to change the color of the status. There's a blinking light. All right. You can set timeline. So, here's a gant chart that they're dragging things on prioritize and visualize their dragging pictures between others, like a trail aboard.

Um, you gotta have like an obligatory photo of someone in an office. It's all white. The white shelves, white walls, a few books. They're always very happy. Look at this person, this picture. She's like, I'm so happy to be using right dot com in my white office. It's never, it's never like the disheveled guy with a five o'clock shadow, the giant Starbucks cup. That's like the kid got sent home from school with headlights. I gotta get out of here.

All right. I mean, look, here's my thing. Connor uh the issue the, the issue with project management tools, be it Reich or monday dot com or what have you or methodologies like scrum or conven. The issue becomes when you think that the, the tool or the methodology itself is uh the solution that is this, if we can just do this thing, right? It is going to solve our problems like, hey, we're disorganized. We're, we're seeing too much email or having a hard time keeping up with with projects that our company,

what tool will solve this problem? This is the way they market themselves. You know, it's this clear C. T. A. You send us this money to subscribe the right and your problems go away, but no tool or methodology on its own uh is guaranteed to solve the problem. What what I recommend doing instead is you have to figure out before before you think about technology, how do we actually want this type of collaborative effort to unfold what type of work we're doing, who is involved, what's what's involved in our specific work. Let us come up with a process or workflow here to get this done in a way that is not only organized, but as I like to harp on, minimizes the need to receive and respond to unscheduled messages and then you can say, okay,

now what tools are gonna help us do this? And here's the thing when you do this type of planning, where you plan the process first and then go looking for the tool to implement it. More often than not, the tools become the easy part. You use more simple, multi versatile, multi function tools to implement the process you designed. This is why you're going to see more use of google docks or Trela boards or google sheets. Like dropbox is just simple things because the smarts is in the custom process you came up with for the specific work you do with the specific people you work with, the promise of something like Reich or uh at scrum or monday dot com is it's it's all the complex complexities of how the work unfolds already figured out and baked into their software. So you have to fit what you're doing to their particular system. It's like a totem that you trust is going to deliver, freedom from stress and that's much less likely to work and it does lead to, as Connor pointed down his call, especially in technical circles.

So when technical workers start using these systems, obsessions with details, I think programmers tell me this all the time about agile, use scrum, like an agile methodology like scrum, there's some basic ideas here that like make a lot of sense, but people get so in the weeds of like if we don't exactly right, have the scrum master, second Lieutenant, you know, use the, you know, appropriate uh every other thursday tribal council session uh after intermission to do its scrum message circle delivery of this point, I'm not going to get enough experience points to kill the ogre in the dungeon, They get really obsessed about these details. As if like there's this magic system and the reason why it's not working is that you're not satisfying the gods of scrum properly.

There's some, there's some sloppiness in your implementation and then it just gets so annoying that nothing happens. So this is why I always say forget the tools, get the process and then implement with the tools because that puts your focus on hey us people team. How do we want to do this work? Like what makes sense? Let's not just email each other. I mean I think what we should do here is have a place where we collect the client questions and twice a week we get together and go through the client questions and we'll just throw them in a google doc and we can just mark right there, that's the easiest way to do this. Just mark right there and they're like, okay, Jesse is going to work on this, you know, put the notes there and we'll check it. Just figure this stuff out like the intelligence is in the custom and formal, flexible interpersonal plants you've made with other people that make sense for exactly your context and then use tools to implement it.

My main analogy I use for making this point, like when I give talks about this is when you look at a really effective system from times past, like the first efficient continual motion assembly line that Henry ford put together at the river rouge plant up in michigan. The way this happened was not ford was at some industry conference and saul this assembly line system and methodology and said, let's let's let's buy that and install that in our car factory. Now, he invented it from scratch, what's the right way to actually build cars. And then he brought in existing technology, invented a lot of new pieces of technology to implement the thing that he came up with as the right way to build cars. So you start with the process, then you gather the tools to implement it and maybe something like write on monday dot com. It's like, oh this is great, this has all the pieces we need for our plan. We can turn off these features,

we can use these features. That's great. And that's a good way to use those tools. But you've got to start with the process first before you get anywhere near giving your credit card number to a software service company. Alright, let's uh let's do another question. What do we got Jesse? Uh we got a question from Andrew, he's a 33 year old teacher in London and he says in episode 2 11, you laid out your system for organizing your life? I was wondering how quarterly plans linked to the system are the same, Are they the same as strategic plans or something else? Uh they're the same Quarterly plans. Strategic plans, semester plans. I because I'm a really great clear communicator have used all three of those terms to mean more or less the same thing over time.

They all mean the same thing, a plan that is focusing in particular on the next 3 to 5 months and what your goal is and your approach is everything you need to know about what your vision is for that upcoming quarter, that upcoming semester, whatever you wanna call it. Um I think strategic plans, if we want to get the etymology, I think strategic plans, I introduced that term because before it was business people think in terms of quarters, so they call this accordingly. Plans, academics think in terms of semesters, so they call us the semester plan And so both are valid and I don't want to keep going back and forth or using both. So, strategic plans was supposed to be a general term captured both. So, thanks for that question.

And that does help clarify things. Let's do one more jesse. What do we got? Alright, Final question is from Alison. She's a 29 year old software developer in Washington D. C. She says, hi cal. In your previous podcast, you talked about how you organize your life and your core documents. How did you create your values document? How do you know what values are important to you? Well, first of all say I'm distracted by our tablet here with the right enemy. The Reich animation I'm looking at right now,

my Lord. There's a hissed a gram a stacked, hissed a gram of task completion per person stacked by the different categories of tasks. Moving up and down, man. Okay, sorry Allison, I'm entranced by the visual complexity that is These project management tools. Wait till they see our whiteboard jesse were too simple. We have a white board and google docs. Dropbox. We use. Dropbox Yeah. Noah stacked, hissed a gram. All right,

Allison, I'm sorry. This is an important question. Okay, how do you come with your values document? Here's the key thing about values, documents which again for people who didn't hear episode 2 11. My suggestion is you have a document that has your core values that you review on a regular basis. It becomes the foundation for everything else you do. So when you write your strategic plans for like what am I doing for the next semester, all this stuff comes back to my serving my core values. The key point about that is there's not a single right answer to that that you have to get just right before the document can be used. Your notion of what your values were will evolve over time with experience and exposure. Two other systems of thought. What's important is that you have something that makes sense and aligns with your experience intuition at the moment and that you're using it. This gives you intention and direction with your life,

even if that direction shifts over time, you're still always better moving at any one moment in an intentional direction as opposed to just wandering around. So otherwise I want to try to stay here. Allison is lower the stakes here. I wrote my original values document. I was in my 20's as a grad student for some reason. I remember this have a weird memory for certain things I wrote in my mole skin and it was, we were waiting to go to sit Shiva with a friend of ours, a friend of ours who was at Harvard grad student whose dad had died. So his dad had died. You know young and we were going to go sit Shiva and it gets you thinking about things. and I remember that's one of the very first draft and I'm sure I have that mole skin somewhere I have, I have a stack this high of these old mole skins where I keep track of ideas about my values and living the deep life. That's why I worked out my first value plan and it's just evolved since then getting married, changed that I was married at that point already having kids changed the values plan, career shifting,

change the values plan when you, if you encounter or discover systems of organized systems of moralistic thinking, be it philosophical or theological. Now you're tapping into really ancient wisdom going to affect your value plan. So the thing will evolve but you do, you gotta start, you wanna have something. So that's the way to think about it. Allison having something is better than not, don't sweat if you have the right thing because that will evolve with your, with your life experience. So you keep all your old skins for century twenties, keep more skins I guess if you go back and look, you can kind of see, it's like a diary, you know,

I keep a lot, not all of them. I also have a lot of time blocking. So I have a lot of these old planners and then the one that was a lot of black and reds from before. I don't keep all of those. I realized like I don't need all these, but I have a fair number of those with the most kids. I keep, I've gone back through before, there's some, I've done blog post from now and then or email newsletter articles every once in a while where I'll take a picture of like the teetering stack. Yeah. I last went through them for digital minimalism. This was writing about journaling in digital minimalism. And so I actually went back and cited a bunch of things from old was kind of cool to go back, go back and read.

I mean you, you get older, your thoughts mature is what I would say. That's my, that's my experience going back and reading my 20, year old skins. Um, but it's cool things. I mean, the, the coolest thing I found was the transition in my writing life when I was leaving student writing and trying to make that decision because I've written three books for students. My newsletter slash blog was called study hacks and it was just for students, it had traction. I was probably one of the top people writing on that topic and I was like, I can just own this topic. Like I'm owning it now.

I brought some new things into that world. I was working and then also I was thinking, I can't just do this for the rest of my life though. Like I'm not gonna be a student forever and like, do I want to just keep doing this and I worked a lot of that out of my mole skin And I have a weird, my wife knows this. I don't have a fully magnetic memory, right? Like I don't have photographic memory, but I do for certain things like books I can remember, like almost every book where I read it, where I was at any time I'm writing or reading. So I have a very clear memory and this must have been 2008. Very clear memory Coolidge corner movie theater Brookline massachusetts. Uh because my wife, I used to see every movie literally every movie and we were there to see.

It was a Disney nature documentary about lions and lion cubs because we just saw like we've seen everything what's playing, right? And I remember being in the main theater at Coolidge Corner, the main, the nice one that has the uh the old fashioned theater with the curtains or whatever. We're watching that movie. And I remember sitting there with my mole skin and working through. So if I see those notes, I can remember where I was when I took them. That's great. Yeah. Alright, well anyways, uh we have gone on long enough. Let's wrap this up. So thank you everyone to send your questions,

go to the show notes has a link for how you can submit new questions. You can also go to dot com slash podcast for instructions, youtube dot com slash counterpart. Newport media to watch this episode and clips from this and past episodes. We'll be back next week with the next installment of the Deep Questions podcast and until then, as always, stay deep.