Ep. 338: Why You’re Always Distracted  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 338: Why You’re Always Distracted - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/0ca9586b-8a17-4971-9fe0-41d4a998bd50 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Stress Relief** - Introduce higher-quality stress relievers like exercise, hobbies, or reading. - Train your mind to be more comfortable with boredom and mild stress. Transcript: Cal Newport Particular dynamic? You have to introduce systematically higher quality stress relievers into your life. Build new habits about when I feel that stress. I know it's built up. I'm stressed about what's going on at life or work. I just want to pull out that phone that you have these other higher quality, more self-contained stress relievers. It could be exercise, could be getting outside and doing a particular type of walk. It could be making a certain type of tea. Reading is a good one here, a particular type of books, in particular locations that you like to read, hobby or hobby-related projects. You're retraining your mind, in particular your ward system, to give you dopamine around those high quality alternatives. It will also bust to stress. It will do so in a more durable way, and because it's an activity that has its own intrinsic value, you are actually going to feel better about it, and it doesn't lead to a behavior loop That's going to affect other parts of your life. Another thing you can do here is just train your mind to be more comfortable with boredom or a mild amount of stress. You're just bored sometimes, and you can kind of just take a deep breath and slow down and be present. That requires training, but it makes your mind more comfortable. And so your reward system becomes less desperate to have some sort of dissipation of those bad feelings. You're going to resist better this idea that I have this ready-made distraction ready to go. ([Time 0:07:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9c643d9f-e7ca-45e9-92b6-c39f3d263b56)) - **Obligation Hot Potato** - Responding quickly to emails to offload obligation increases overall message volume and distraction. - Prioritize minimizing future replies, not immediate response time. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, idea number two, you might be too distracted. In the context of work, you are playing obligation hot potato. This is an effect I've talked about before on the show, but I think it's critical for understanding a lot of the distraction in the modern knowledge workplace. When you see a message arrive in your inbox or maybe in a chat window, but you see an incoming message that is sitting there, this can be a source of interpersonal stress because we say This is now an obligation on my plate. Someone is waiting for me. Kind of makes us a little uncomfortable. Is to want to get those things out of these inboxes or channels as quickly as possible, because that will in the moment relieve you of the cognitive burden of knowing that this thing is Your responsibility. So what we do is we play obligation hot potato, which is what is the quickest way that technically speaking, this message or chat is out of my hands and on someone else's plate. And so you send it back with like a question you made up, you know, it's going to come back, right? You're not getting to the heart of the issue, but temporarily that that's out of you, out of your, uh, out of your inbox, right? Someone's like, I think we should meet about this. You're like, I don't want to deal with thinking through when I want to meet or whatever. I don't want to deal with my schedule. So how about like, yeah, sure. We should. When's good for you. Technically that's out of your inbox for now. It's coming back. But in the moment, it's out of here. Or you put thoughts, question mark, shoot it back. Or you send like a couple of random thoughts. You know it's insufficient for what they're asking for. But in the moment, it's not there in your inbox waiting for you to see it. So it's just that drive. Obligation hot potato is I want to get stuff out of my channels as quickly as possible. The problem with obligation hot potato is that these things come right back and then you punt them back. When you're doing the bare minimum to get you out of your inbox, the total number of times that messages will arrive and command your attention related to this particular issue goes Up. You're punting it, they punt it back. You punt it, they punt it back. You're throwing the hot potato over there. It burns their hands. They throw it over there. It comes back to you. The total amount of time now that you are having to react to something incoming goes up. The velocity of these things goes up because the granularity gets smaller and therefore the responses have to be quicker. And so overall, your level of distraction as captured by the amount of cognitive context shifting you have to do from your work back to your communication channels, that skyrockets. All because in the moment when you are in an inbox, you just want to get things out of there as quickly as possible. So once you recognize the obligation hot potato dynamic, it gives you a concrete idea for solving this. ([Time 0:08:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c0a6e711-bf06-49cb-9879-a9b33c0bffe8)) - **Effective Email** - Spend more time crafting effective replies that minimize follow-up messages. - Batch process similar messages for less cognitive drag. Transcript: Cal Newport How do we stop playing obligation hot potato? Well, we're going to have to spend more time with our messages. So we're not doing the quickest thing. We're doing the thing that's going to be most effective. Now, I have a very specific definition of most effective here. What makes a reply effective? It minimizes the number of follow-up messages you will have to receive and respond to. That's what matters. That's how you have to retrain your brain. I don't care if it takes me 10 minutes versus 30 seconds to answer this message right now. If the 10 minute response will minimize the number of future messages generates by a factor of three or four, it's worth it. If this 10 minute response means like we're basically done, that is worth it versus the one minute response that's going to generate a 10 message back and forth. So you want to start prioritizing the reduction of unscheduled messages that you will have to receive and respond to. That is the thing you're trying to reduce, not the time in the moment. This means you're going to have to spend more time on your inbox or in the time you do spend your inbox, you're not going to get through as many messages and maybe you will need even longer Sessions or more sessions or stuff that's just going to take longer for you to get to it. Like there is something that has to give when you're no longer playing obligation hot potato, but it's better to have drawn out more frequent, more drawn out inbox sessions than to have All this back and forth communication all day long. ([Time 0:11:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc74b782-8e4f-4599-b4b9-8e8244863cc4)) - **Overhead Tax** - More concurrent obligations increase overhead tax, reducing actual work time and increasing distraction. - Focus on fewer tasks at once for faster completion and less overhead. Transcript: Cal Newport There's a core idea from my new, I guess I should call it new-ish book, Jesse, because we're coming up on the one-year anniversary. My new-ish book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. A key idea from that book is overhead tax. Every professional obligation you agree to brings with it logistical overhead. It's emails, it's meetings, it's back and forth that you have to have just to sort of organize and keep that obligation rolling. The more things you're working on at the same time, the more overhead tax you're paying at the same time. But that overhead tax, as it increases, what doesn't increase? The amount of time you have in the day. So now the ratio of your time spent servicing work versus actually doing work becomes unreasonable. And this is another big source of feeling distracted all the time is because if you have 10 ongoing obligations, that is a lot of overhead tax. And that overhead tax is pulling out your attention because they're all generating emails and meetings you have to jump in and out of and you feel really distracted. The concrete solution here is what I suggest in the book. Do fewer things at once. This doesn't mean you're doing fewer things. You're accomplishing fewer things over a long timescale. You probably get more done per month or per year if you do a few things at a time before you move on to the next. But in the moment, work on fewer things at once so they can more of your attention. Less of your day is spent on overhead tax. Those tasks will get completed faster. Then you bring in the new ones. You'll be getting things done in a setting that feels a lot less distracted and a lot less frustrating. ([Time 0:13:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/332c1143-65fd-4e8c-ba62-a3384e362ded)) - **Organization** - Use task collection systems, such as status boards, and practice full capture. - Implement a weekly plan, reviewing calendar and tasks, and schedule dedicated work time. Transcript: Cal Newport Right. Idea number four, you're disorganized. If you have not organized well obligations in your life, your life is going to feel distracted. Because what's going to happen is you're always discovering at the last minute, oh, my God, this thing is due. I got to get this done. I need to find these people. I'm making these calls. I'm waiting to hear back. Where does this form go? There's going to be a sort of freneticism that is induced when your life is disorganized. Work gets consolidated around when it's due. Often you have deadline conflicts where multiple things are due around the same time and you're all doing them at the last minute. And now your day is incredibly back and forth and you're staying up late to try to make these things happen. There's always a sense of I need to be checking in on lots of channels because God knows what I'm missing. If you're not organized, reacting to things becomes your main motive force for your actual effort. So you have to constantly be checking things because who knows what I'm missing. On the other hand, if you're organized, you know what you have to do and you make smart decisions about when you're going to do it. All of that calms down because you make better allocation of your available time. You can spread work out more evenly. So no one day is going to feel so overloaded. You can be more confident about being done with your workday or during your workday being confident when I'm working on this. I don't need to be checking all the time for these other things because I know what I'm doing and I know my plan to do it. The more organized you are, the less distracted you're going to feel. So the concrete suggestions here is you got to get your act together from an organizational perspective. At a minimum, you need some sort of task collection system. I suggest using status boards where you have a Trello style board for each of the roles you have in your professional life. And then you divide it up into columns. You have like back burner things you're working on this week, things you're waiting to hear back from people on, etc. And then individual obligations are stored in these columns as cards in which you can then paste or attach or write all of the relevant information. You need one of these type of status boards and you need to practice a full capture methodology straight out of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, which means nothing is kept just In your head at the end of every day part of your shutdown. You have to make sure that anything is just in your head gets onto one of those boards or gets onto your calendar if it's time specific, but it's not just in your head. You full capture and you got to review that thing. At the very least, you need to be doing a weekly plan where you grapple with your calendar for the week. You see what's coming up. You understand what's coming up, what deadlines are coming up. You move things around on your calendar. Maybe I need to cancel this or move this over here to make time. And you begin adding appointments with yourself on your calendar to make sure that for the time-sensitive things coming up, that you have enough time put aside to get it done and you're Protecting that time. Oh, my God, this thing is due on Thursday. Let me block off Monday afternoon just to make sure that time doesn't get taken because that's when I'm going to write this memo. When you do these weekly plans, it's when you really check in on those and update those status boards at the very minimum. You could be looking at these more frequently, but at the very minimum. So capture and planning. Capture and planning is what you need to not feel like you're constantly distracted. Now, if you get more advanced, we talked about on the show, a full multi-scale planning methodology combined with these task boards, put all this together will be the best. But the very minimum, you need to be looking at your calendar once a week and having some place where all the things you need to do that aren't on your calendar can live. ([Time 0:15:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/91b01177-a3ae-4e9e-a1f5-321821bd4173)) - **Foundational Pursuits** - Pursue foundational activities (long-term, focused projects) at work and outside of work. - These provide structure, reduce reactive behavior, and resist default distraction. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, final idea for why you're so distracted. You lack sufficient foundational pursuits. So a foundational pursuit is something that requires an investment of focused time over a long period of time, and it's something you care about. You can have these in your work life. You can have these in your life outside of work. They're foundational because you can sort of build your life on top of them. And there will be a certain stately pace to your life and a certain resistance to a sort of just random frenetic distractedness. When you don't have these, your mind doesn't know what to do. So at work, it's like, let's just react to things. We need something to do. Like we need to, otherwise we have no value to this office, right? If we're not doing things. So let me jump on calls and answer emails and be in the mix. And you lean towards distraction. And at home, you're like, I don't know what to do with myself. Let me, I'm on my phone, like video games. Like I need something to do to fill my time so that it feels more significant. So you need to have these foundational pursuits so you do not fall into that sort of default distraction. So in work, that means you've got to have some sort of project in which you are regularly dedicating long, deep work sessions towards. Unbroken concentration towards something important. It's building a new skill. It's a new initiative, a new project. That's the foundation on which you can build everything else in your work life. It's what's going to make you be more resistant to the distraction and busyness. It's going to give you the courage to push back or corral that and not feel like you have no self-worth as an employee. At home, this is going to be significant hobbies, sort of reading challenge you're taking on, self-education goals, health projects, community involvement, something from that Type of list. It's like a really big part of your life. In fact, I recommend people, especially the hustle types, work less to make sure you have a foundational activity outside of your work. The counterbalance to work. It's that valuable. Even if it means that's a couple more hours I could be crushing it. And I'm not because I'm trying to run this community thing or I have a really important like athletic physical pursuit that's an important part of my life and I want to train for it and Do it that is worth it if you don't have that the time that remains in your life is going to be scattered and reactive all right so those were my four ideas for why you might be too distracted I'll list all five ideas I was distracted there five ideas idea one it's because you're using your phone as a stress reliever. Idea two, it's because you're playing too much obligation hot potato. Idea three, it's because you're doing too much at the same time. Idea four, it's because you're disorganized. Idea five, it's because you lack foundational pursuits in both work and your life. ([Time 0:18:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db7256d1-d67f-4f2e-8d78-f5c5f841a88d)) - **Social Media Strategies** - Cal Newport discusses how he uses social media and newsletters strategically. - He separates their roles into amplifying existing success and building new audiences, cautioning against the latter's difficulty. Transcript: Jesse First questions from Arnod. I'm developing a documentary film project focused on environmental issues. I don't like social media, but started setting up Instagram and LinkedIn. I'd much prefer to have a solid newsletter. What should I do? All right. Cal Newport Let me tell you the way I've been refining my thinking. Let me tell you the way I've been refining my thinking when it comes to the use of these, let's call them, I don't know, digital attention or digital content tools. Digital content tools is a good term. There's some points about this that have been confusing to me, and I think I have a new framework for thinking about this that helps with those confusions. So you can let me know if you buy this. When it comes to digital content tools like namely social media and newsletters, maybe we could throw a podcast in there, but let's just talk about social media newsletters primarily. There are two different roles these can play in helping you with like the success of a project or professional endeavor. And I think we get confused when we mix these roles together. So let me pull these roles apart and we'll see if this clarify things. All right, role number one. Social media and newsletters can be something that you can deploy after something you're doing becomes successful to help you magnify or make more pervasive that success. Right? So if you're doing something like you're an author who hits a wave and it's getting a lot of attention, you have a startup that is buzzy. It's doing something that people think is really interesting. Your movie or your album is like starting to gather attention or it's got some good reviews and now suddenly everyone's paying attention. Social media and newsletters in this circumstance can be very helpful for spreading or amplifying that success and or solidifying that audience. So for example, you might start putting up lots of social clips that are shareable about your documentary or relevant to your book and if people are really into it, they're going to share It. And that expands the reach because you have people organically, authentically sharing stuff that's about what you're doing. If you're an author whose book is doing really well, well, now you can solidify access to that audience by trying to capture them on an email newsletter, where now you have a way to actually Talk to your audience directly. So that's a primary role these play. But that role requires first that you're doing something that's successful. And then it's about how do you professionally maximize the opportunities that that creates. So in that situation, if you're working on your documentary or film project and it starts to take off, you want to make sure you have pros in place to sort of take advantage of these possibilities To help spread the word, to harness the energy and harness the audience. The second role, technically, that social media newsletters can play is as something that builds an audience and then deploys that audience towards the primary project you're working On and makes that project more successful than it otherwise would be. So it's like what makes your project successful. This is where I think a lot of people think about using social media and newsletters. It's almost never successful. Roll 2 is almost never successful. So we mix these two things up. So it's not like social media newsletters aren't important. And we really successful projects that really lean into this. But there's often a chicken and egg inversion happening there. They're professionally taking advantage of the audience they have built through other means, as opposed to they did something first to build an audience, and then they use that to Make their primary project succeed. And where you do see that happening, typically the primary project came later. This is someone who had success in one of these realms. Typically they had success in social media and then they said, oh, why don't I do a project to take advantage of that? And there there's a big survivorship bias issue because like most people don't have success on these platforms. And those who do are more likely to say maybe I'll do a book. Like Sahil Bloom has a book out right now that's doing very well. He has a huge presence online. So the book is doing very well, but the huge presence online came first. The reason why that direction is it's hard to deploy on demand. It's hard to say, I have this primary project. Let's go build a big newsletter or social to help it. Is that it's really hard when you're not starting with an already successful brand name or project to build a big social presence or newsletter. If you look at like Substack, what's successful on Substack? I mean, it's almost always people who already have earned audience trust painstakingly. It's journalists, it's authors with successful books, right? Like I have a big newsletter. We got 125,000 people on something like that. That's because I've been writing books for whatever it is now, 20 years, and have built trust with a lot of audience and then captured it, right? Nate Silver makes a lot of money off of his Substack. But he had a massively successful journalistic career, especially at the New York Times after his blog got taken up. People know him and follow him, so they followed him to Substack. It's very hard to do this from scratch. That's because these markets are attention markets, and attention markets, especially when these attention markets are pretty efficient and pretty competitive. Why should someone pay attention to you? That is a hard question to answer. And so what happens then is people say, well, I, I did the stuff you would do for role one. And role one, if you have a successful book and you want to use media newsletters, you're like, I'm going to like systematically make clips about my book. And I'm going to very carefully have my, my web presences, like ask for newsletter subscribers. And because people are really into me and what I'm doing, that will help spread and will gather a lot of people so they'll be like I'll do that but for my unknown project and nothing happens Because like the clips you're making about your project no one cares about if they don't already know about your project and your newsletter that you're you have all these signup widgets For no one wants to sign up for if they don't know who you are and they don't care about it so I think separating role one and role two explains a lot of the confusions people have they're Doing the stuff you observe for role one as working, and they're trying to use that to succeed in role two. But in role two, almost no one succeeds. And if you want to succeed there, you've got to make a huge swing. Like if you want to try to build a social presence from scratch, you really have to think about it like you're a showrunner for a cable network. Like I've got to try to make a show that's going to break through and get a big audience. It can't just be random. It can't just be let's just film some stuff and put it on AMC and hope people watch. You have to like really think through like there's a niche in the market. I got to really invest in this. I think this is different than what anyone else is doing. It's very catchy. It plays on the medium well. You really would have to be thinking about this like a major endeavor. Newsletters are even harder. People don't sign up for newsletters if they don't have a reason to do so. So don't mess up. Don't mix up role one strategies for this technology to try to achieve a role two goal. And so I think making these separations, hopefully that helps clarify how people think about this. I don't know. I think it helps me. I don't know, Jesse. Tell me if you think that's more clarifying but that's basically the way that's how i finally realized what people were doing and so like well i'm doing the same things ryan holiday is Doing i'm i'm looking at li... ([Time 0:29:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/35ac61bb-72de-4b29-9bb5-107484e00a3d)) - **Learning New Skills** - Evaluate available time honestly before taking on new learning goals. - Make learning active and project-based, ensuring every minute is challenging. Transcript: Jesse We got next? Next question is from Tom. I'm a software engineer wanting to take on more technically advanced work projects involving LLMs and 3D computer graphics. My last formal math class was in high school. So I lacked the foundational skills to be good, to be so good. I can't be ignored. I think I need to add one to two hours of daily study. How can I do this on top of a full plate of work, hobbies, exercise, and young kids? Cal Newport Well, you know, I'm going to start my answer by saying, make sure first you're facing the productivity dragon. How much time do these various things you care about take? And if that time adds up to more time than you have reasonably available, you can't do all those things. The universe and in particular the physics of time do not care about your list of what you want to do. So the universe is not going to accommodate by bending the rules of time the fact that in addition to all these things, you want to do something else as well. So facing the productivity dragon can be freeing sometimes, right? Because it might lead you to say, I like my full life outside of work. And I have young kids and I'm into this exercise and I don't really have time to pick up a major new skill. That time doesn't exist. And okay, great. Then I don't feel guilty about not doing that. And that might be the answer here. That you face a productivity dragon and say, we can't do all of these things. So maybe I'll put my attention towards getting better at the things I'm already doing at work during work itself. So through my selection of projects, for example, taking on projects that stretch my skills, and I can actually act on those stretches during work. I'm learning new things to try to use. I'm learning this skill for exactly the feature I'm trying to add, the sprint I'm doing right now. Like you're integrating the learning into your work. You're moving your project skills towards areas that you think are going to give you more career capital that's useful that, you know, let me just be better about what I'm doing during The workday. Like that might be the answer. Or the answer might be, no, no, no, I'm doing lifestyle-centric planning. And if I could do LLM work, it's going to open up a lot of things. Maybe there's like a lot of jobs. I could do remote at 1.5x the salary, which really would open up this whole vision I have for what I want to do with life. For me, if I could do LLM work, it could be six months on, six months off. Like maybe it unlocked something really cool. So like I got to figure this out. All right. Well, in that case, again, you have to face reality and look for some more extreme options. So for example, maybe what you need to do is take vacation time and be like, I'm going to take 10 days and just hammer on this, like with a course on this technology, six hours a day, crash Course, this maybe spend two days with someone who knows all about this, pay someone to like to come to me on the weekend and be like, teach me how to build this LLM using, you know, whatever Particular I'm using TensorFlow or something like this. And I want you to really walk me through it and explain that to me, explain that to me, explain that to me. I'm going to just crash course it. It might mean you're saying, okay, here's what I want to do. I normally work from like nine to five, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to start work at eight. So I can get an hour in every morning on an online course and then stretch that out over six months to pick up the skills. And maybe what this is going to require is like, I'm going to have to ask like a big sacrifice for my wife and say, look, I'm not going to be able to do this, my school drop offs for four months, But here's why. If I could pick up this skill, I think it's going to get us closer to X, Y, and Z, or I'll, I'll, we'll swap back and I'll take them all after this is over. But you might have to change something, try to do something more extreme. Or you find a way to get formal permission. Okay, I'm doing the math. It doesn't add up. My evenings doesn't have this time. Let me get formal position from my boss. Can i spend one to two every day working on an online course uh on llm is because i think we should i should have that skill because we might want to you know i need to be conversant if we want To add those features and they're like okay yeah if you can work around and not fall behind on your whatever uh so you might have you could do something you have to engineer something more Extreme there's not just i'll just add this to what I do after work. But face the dragon. Don't try to change the laws of physics and time and either settle on, well, let me build my capital on what I'm doing or find something you can change that's going to make that more possible. My only other word of advice is going to be, if you're going to learn something new, make sure every minute you're spending is actually challenging you and helping you learn something New. Like I want to actually build a LLM using open source model and these libraries. I have that goal and everything I'm doing is like towards that goal. So I'm not just getting lost reading and watching YouTube videos and like generally exploring and having ideas and people are drawing cute diagrams of transformers. You don't really know what's going on. Like, no, if you need to learn linear algebra to understand what they're talking about when they're doing, what's the dot product? I don't remember how to do Vectrex embeddings or whatever. Go learn that with like a course you're learning it and then be like, I want to then use that to build something here and show that I've built it. So be very concrete. You don't want to waste the time because you don't have that much time to actually spare. ([Time 0:37:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18741a02-f6fb-4156-8044-304ce7d4dd34)) - **Second Mountain Values** - Transitioning to second mountain values requires lifestyle-centric planning, focusing on a concrete vision of your ideal life. - Plan backward, identify obstacles and opportunities, and accept the transition's length. Transcript: Jesse Next question is from Ryan. I'm in the Bay Area. I'm a Bay Area tech guy in my 50s who has spent the last 25 years pursuing one lifestyle plan focused on the hustle of building high growth products while raising high growth kids. I'd like to spend the next 25 years pursuing a very different lifestyle plan anchored in the emerging set of second mountain core values i even took a year off as a sabbatical to figure This out but found myself coming right back to my first mountain at the end do you think when he says high growth kids he's trying to have his kids be tall that's what i'm thinking yeah there's Cal Newport Lots of milk get you get you. I was just watching. I rewatched because I have to watch things while I do my PT. It was rewatching Last Dance, the ESPN documentary about the 98 bulls. Yeah. Jesse But it saved a lot of people during COVID. Cal Newport Yeah, that was early in COVID. Yeah. So I'm rewatching that whole thing. But anyways, my point is if you're tall, you can do well. Yeah, you can do do well some of those guys it's crazy like scotty pippen is playing oh god was this at the high school level maybe maybe at the college level he was like 6'2 yeah he grew a Ton yeah and they're like you're like a fine basketball player but like if you're 6'2 like unless you're alan iverson right like it's fine and then he came back and he was like 6'6". And then he kept growing. But that was like over a summer. And it's like, oh, if you're like a fine basketball player in 6'2", a fine basketball player in 6'6", is like a whole different situation. You're like, oh, now this is useful. Yeah, same with Jordan. He grew. Yeah. He was short and he didn't make the team as a freshman in high school. And then he grew. He also got better, like he grew like makes a big difference um right i don't think that's what you're doing though with high growth kids um but it's interesting to think about so this Is a common it's a common issue right so if you don't know the first mountain second mountain that comes from david brooks book the second mountain where he says there's the first part Of your adult life is focused on what he calls first mountain goals which are professional aspirations and success. It's distinction standing out. And he says, there's going to be a point at some point you're going to move beyond that first mountain. And Brooks often talks about you fall into a valley between the first and second mountain where you're going to have some despair. And then you realize, oh, what really matters are these second mountain values, which as he talks about are the types of things people will talk about in your eulogy. In your eulogy, no one is going to say, hey, Ryan delivered quarter over quarter growth for fiscal year 2020, fiscal year 2030 or whatever. That's not going to be what they talked about in your eulogy. It's going to be this was a dependable person. He was there for you. He was like a leader in our community. And Brooks says, as you get older, that second mountain values become more important and that you need to sort of shift more towards them. You've done, and then Brooks is writing largely for high achieving, upper middle-class knowledge workers, which is like what Brooks is. And it's like what he went through. And Ryan, it sounds like you as well. So that's what he's talking about, these second mountain values. It's hard to make that shift, right? In part because the first mountain values give you something concrete to do and you can succeed at it and they give you resources and they can dominate your whole life. Often the people that Brooks talks about who make this transition have some sort of inciting event, like for Brooks, it was his divorce. So like often there's like some inciting event, Ryan, you might not have like had an exterior event yet you're just noticing this is a shift that you're leaning towards so so it's going To be a more gradual transition a couple things i would recommend do lifestyle centric planning brooks leaves this out but i'm going to put it in do lifestyle centric planning with second Mountain values that resonate with you in mind. So what do I want my life to actually be like five years from now day to day? Like where am I? Where am I going? What type of place do I live? Am I at an office or not? Like what's going on with my older kids at this point? How is my time spent? Am I walking through the woods or am I in a golf club? Like I don't know. You're feeling it. What does my life actually feel like? And make sure the second mountain values that resonate are in this image and then do the straight up lifestyle centric planning work of, let me work backwards from that. How do I steer, like, what are the obstacles and opportunities and how do I steer towards that? So like, you have to be probably more systematic about this. Then you started this. Like I'm looking at your question. You started this, like you wrote out roles and you're trying to think like what you want to do in your life. You're adding roles, probably like leader and community member that you wanted to make more important. But the question is how you do that. And that's where lifestyle centric planning comes in because you're not just saying, I want to be more of a leader. You have like a specific part of your image. You know, I'm, I'm involved in like the board at my community and like really there. And I'm at a meeting and we're trying to figure something out and people turn to me and I'm like thickly enmeshed in what's going on with, you know, some organization. You have a more concrete image of what that means. And now you're working backwards for something more concrete. The whole lifestyle centric planning methodology is all about obstacles and opportunities, leveraging the opportunities you have to help you get closer and really identifying The obstacles and saying, how do I get rid of those or circumvent them? This is probably where your current work, which is being driven by these first mountain values, this is where your current work will probably come up as an obstacle. And in this exercise is where you're going to start thinking about, well, how do I reconfigure this work in a way that allows me to get to these other parts of my lifestyle vision? So ultimately, it's going to be changing some details of your work in the second half of your working life. But you got to work backwards from that lifestyle-centric planning. You can't just abstractly say, this role or value is important to me. Let me just try to do more of that in my life. It's much more difficult than that. You also have to assume it's going to take a while. The path between the mountains is long. And you might go into a deep valley where you have an inciting event like a divorce or a health scare. Or maybe the path is nice through a meadow. It's not dark, but it's still going to be meandering and long. So you have a vision. You work towards it. You edit. You work towards it. You edit. You work towards it. But you're beginning to turn your eyes towards that second mountain and there will be changes. The only other thing I would recommend is if you've read Brooks's book, also read Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward. It's more explicitly religious, but it's the book that David Brooks based the second mountain on. So if you want to get to the core ideas, but sort of stripped of a Brooksian upper middle class driving knowledge worker veneer, like let me just get to the core ideas without that piece. That's helpful for a lot of people to see it in a more purified form. ([Time 0:42:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/97abf3d2-fce3-4b46-9fd1-5ba04673ea2d)) - **Project Paralysis** - Focus on fewer big projects and wait for compelling ideas that won't leave you alone. - Put perfectionism aside, take action, and find value in the execution itself. Transcript: Jesse Question is from Rebecca. I often find myself unable to make meaningful progress with organizing my thoughts and projects, given the volume of the past materials I have. What strategies could help me move past this paralysis and build momentum towards fully getting my business and personal projects running smoothly? Cal Newport Well, you know, I'm not a big believer in complicated information systems. I'm not a big believer in what is holding you back from a project is like you can't quite get the right information together to make progress. I think in general, people should work on fewer big projects. They should wait until they have an idea that won't leave them alone and then act on it. And then once they're acting on it, put their perfectionism aside and say, great, I'm going to follow this through to the end to see what happens because it makes my life more interesting. So if you're exposing yourself to a lot of information, you're reading things, you have ideas, wait to see what like sticks with you. Like, yeah, I keep having this idea about something we could do at our business. It's come up a few times now. I mentioned this to someone. They thought it was a good idea. Okay, great. Let's go do that. Or I've got this like personal project. I don't know. I keep seeing these Instagram stories about people with their such and such, like, I don't know, workshop. And it's really appealing to me. And I keep coming back to that. Okay, great. I'm going to go through and I'm going to execute on that project. So just wait until something sticks with you. And then see it through just because it's interesting to see it through. Don't overemphasize the, like, I got to get all my information right. Don't overemphasize this idea of there's a right project to do. And if you choose the wrong one, you're in trouble. See what sticks, take action, follow it through. Interesting things will happen. Repeat. Don't overcomplicate it. Find value in the actual like execution of things because it's kind of fun. If this one doesn't work out, the next one will. And hopefully all that together should stop some of the sense of paralysis. ([Time 0:48:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e576316-309c-4a70-98bc-b43c8b8592fb)) - **Knowledge Work Overhead** - High overhead from juggling many roles can lead to unhappiness, especially if roles require context switching. - Some thrive in this environment, others don't; recognizing this helps find fulfilling work. Transcript: Jesse All right. It's from Seeking Slow Success. I work in admin at a large university. I'm struggling with the roles, many hats, communications, marketing, scheduling, supervising, advising, event planning, financial, all sorts of stuff. It's also in the context of a thick bureaucratic process. I've heard that this type of juggling is just typical for this role and that we're understaffed. What should I do? Cal Newport Well, this is where the book slow productivity in your circumstance might be more effective for understanding why you're unhappy than it will be for helping you become happier let Me explain what i mean by that a core idea in that book which really tries to deconstruct how the way we currently work in knowledge work why it doesn't work a core idea in that book is what We talked about in the deep dive which is the notion of overhead tax right Everything that you're working on, every process that you're responsible for, every task or project that's Undergoing, generates its own overhead of emails and meetings and just cognitive cycles. I have to like think about this. The more of these you have, the more of that overhead you have, the more of your cognitive cycles are taken up, the more of your day then becomes like servicing projects. Now, when this gets really bad is when these various projects exist in different cognitive contexts. So to switch from one to the other, you have to completely switch your mindset. So when you're switching from finances and development to academic and staff over to facilities, each of these is a fully different context. And so when you have a lot of things going on in a lot of topics, you have all these different emails and meetings you have to do. You're constantly switching context. That is exhausting. We're not wired for it. It makes us miserable. So I can validate why you're not feeling good about this position. Now, some people react worse than others to this overhead taxing out of control and to all this context shifting. The most successful high up university admins that I know just are naturally, this is, they're okay with it. Like this is what I do. In fact, usually it's because they take pride in, I can, I swap switch from this to here to here, and I find the right thing to push and the right button. And then how do I help this person here? How do I move this information here? And it a game they see it like a an orchestra conductor and you're trying to keep these different things moving and some people can get enough pleasure out of that challenge that they Can counteract the cognitive fatigue of having to all that context switching other people just feel the fatigue of the context switching like this is terrible I'm in that ladder camp Right you put me in a high up, uh, administrative position at a university, that university is going out of business. I'm like, I, this is terrible. I can't keep switching between these things. You know what? I would rather, I know this is urgent that like, we're not going to have water in the east side of campus. I just think we're not going to have water on the east side of campus. I can't think about all this stuff anymore. This is crazy. I got to go do deep work. Other people can see it as a challenge. So if you're like me, slow productivity will explain why you're having a challenge. I think some of these high-level admin positions, that's the position. That's what they're hiring for, that you're someone who can oversee a complicated array of different things and try to keep all those plates spinning. If this doesn't work well with you, it might be a time to think about how do I take that career capital and take it somewhere that's going to work better for me. But the key here, if you're doing that, is to figure out what better means. And that's why you need to understand this overhead tax issue, too many concurrent projects, that that is a problem. That's why you're unhappy. So you know if you're looking to do something else that takes your career capitals like a horizontal move, you know what you're optimizing for. Minimize the number of concurrent things happening so you don't have so much context shifting and overhead tax. We often don't realize that's what's making us unhappy about jobs. And when people are in that situation, we don't know that's why we're so exhausted, that it's the overhead tax. And so we start looking for other reasons that seem more obvious or proximate. It's like, well, maybe the bosses are bad or the system is stupid. And so then you shift and you make these ineffectual high overhead shifts to another job that has just as much overhead tax, but you convinced yourself it was the people and the broken Processes. And that's why you're unhappy. And you go to the other place and you're still unhappy because no, the problem was you're doing 15 things at once and your brain was melting. So it's useful to know that's a real problem. And I think just pointing out overhead tax is a problem. Too many concurrent tasks is a problem. I'm looking for jobs. I'm evaluating them on what they're going to do with that type of concurrent tasks. Just recognizing that's a problem could improve a lot of jobs. But when you don't recognize something as a problem, you focus on the other stuff. It's going to be the perks or the benefits or the, I call it faux autonomy. Like, yeah, you have a lot of autonomy in terms of how you spend your time, but not in terms of your workload. So you really don't have any autonomy in how you spend your time because you're trying to service 15 projects. So it's all overhead tax all day. So yeah, we don't clock your hours. You can work remote if you want, but also who cares? You have to be in your inbox 15 hours a day or things aren't going to work out. So I don't think for your position, little things will help. You can look in the book for keeping your overhead lower and trying to differentiate active and non-active projects. But a lot of this, at that level for this type of job, a lot of that advice isn't going to work because of the nature of that job so at least knowing what it is you don't like about the job it Is going to help you understand how to fix it what it is actually that you want to fix you got to figure out the problem before you can really fix it so it's i don't know i believe that jesse Is like sometimes knowing why you're unhappy unless you fix it and like the biggest problem is unhappy people who don't know why they're unhappy because then you start just doing random Stuff. ([Time 0:52:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c218bff-9cd2-4714-b011-4aa63a76564b)) - **Family Career Planning** - Approach career planning as a family unit, creating a shared lifestyle-centric plan with three phases (pre-elementary, elementary, and high school). - Consider factors like stress, finances, flexibility, location, and schooling. Transcript: Jesse Cal. My name is Jorge, and I have a question that really has to deal with being a good spouse. The context is that my spouse is an interesting part of her life where, one, she enjoyed most of her corporate life for the last 15 years. Two, we have a family with young kids where time with them is very, very precious before they become teenagers and start ignoring us. And three, she recently got laid off of her job. She is in the field of DEI, which is diversity, equity, inclusion, and navigating has been very difficult. It's been a very hostile environment for that industry for the past 24 months or so. It's not like she works in a coal mine and all the mines are shutting down, but it can feel like that at times, and she expresses that. She's been doing a lot of writing and starting to explore the idea of switching out of corporate life and doing more with crafts, cooking, general artistic things, and maybe even writing About those things. I support her. Initially, I recommended her, the book Slow Productivity, as she faced this hiccup in her career and ways to explore doing new work. And then as she started talking about doing more artistic work and kind of make a transition, I suggested So Good They Can't Ignore You. My question is, is there any approach I should be taking to support my spouse as they work through this period of life based career planning? We are a family, can't do these things in a vacuum. And I want to be more than someone who just recommends books to her. I want to know how to best show up to be alongside her as she goes through life-based career planning, whether she knows it or not. Thank you. Cal Newport Well, first of all, I like this approach of just give people my books. That's like a good catch-all strategy. That's going to be my answer for every question now. Well, how many of my books have you read or given the person? That'll solve the problem. Now, the actual real first thing is, first of all, it really stinks to get laid off. Like that's just emotionally hard. It's psychologically hard. Financially hard. There's a lot of empathy here, right? None of that's easy, especially if you feel like your whole industry in which you have expertise, the whole industry is struggling. So it's not just my company had issues, but there's a bunch of other companies do this. So we'll start with that. It's just hard. So I'm glad you're recognizing that. Like, that's hard. It's hard to get laid off, especially at that phase of life. So we'll start with that and not be too cheery optimistic. Everything's going to be fine immediately. The next thing I would say, and you pick this up in your call, so I'm going to underscore it. The next thing I would say is that when you have a family with kids, lifestyle centric planning, the lifestyle you're planning is the full family's lifestyle. It's no longer what is my ideal lifestyle? What is your ideal lifestyle? And we're both going to try to do our own planning towards those ideal lifestyles, because what's going to happen is when you're looking for obstacles and opportunities, the other Person's opportunities might become an obstacle to you and vice versa. And then you get resentment or at least you get confusion. So I like what you said that we're a family. That is critical here. This is a good time. This disruption is a good time to say, what is our lifestyle centric plan? And when you have young kids, you really should have three plans. That's the way my wife and I did it. What is our ideal lifestyle for the pre, we thought it was like the pre elementary school period, the sort of the preschool and nanny period, right? And that was the period we were in when we were doing this initial planning. So, you know, given what we have now, then we look ahead to like the elementary school period. You start to have young kids that are first, second, third grade, or this or that. And then there's this third phase, this sort of in high school going off to college phase. And then there's a phase after that. But that seems so distant. Like we'll get to that later. You say, what do we want our lifestyle to be like during those periods? Like what is it? What's the vision we have? And people have all sorts of different visions of this. Some people envision my kids having like a real city, like urban upbringing and they're on the subways and we go, you know, take the subway to see the baseball game and going to blah, blah, Blah. Other people see, man, I really want when I'm thinking about my kid being in third grade, like I'm there with pick them up from the bus stop. Like they're coming home from the bus stop and like, I'm there and give them snacks. And there's like people coming over. Like, I don't know, you get these visions. Like, what do I want it to be like? Then you work backwards from those. So you should have a vision for pre-elementary school, during elementary school, and then sort of like late junior high, high school, like what you want those to be like. That's what you're planning backwards from as a family. So it's not about individuals so much anymore. It's like what's going to work with stress, finances, and the sort of flexibility or time required. Those are all really important. And then there's the bigger things like location. All those factors matter for family-centric, lifestyle-centric plans. Like where do we want our stress? What's our time or flexibility constraints? Is it like we're walking the kids to school and picking them up? Or is it, you know, there's a nanny, but we're home in the evenings? Is it like, how is that? Are you figuring that out? The finances, we don't want to be stressed by money. So where do we want to be financially? We don't need to be farther than it, but like, where's the place that's going to make us with the things we want to do with our family? Like, where do we want to be financially? And like, what do we want the environment to be like? So location, like where we live, schooling comes up to, like what type of school do we want them to be going to? All of these factors go in and you're making a plan as a family. And then you figure out the right configuration to get that done. And this might require doing all sorts of like interesting hacking or arrangements with careers and jobs. Like, well, you got this skill. I have this. My skill is actually very flexible. Yours is less but very high paying. So I could do mine kind of lesser hours. It's very flexible. You know, I'm a writer or something like that. And that could then cover, but then I could be around to pick up the kids. But your job is, you have to be in the office, but it makes a lot of money. And if you did that, but we went this path instead of that path, it's not going to be too bad. You begin to figure out these different kinds of configurations. You have two people, two skill sets, two sets of career possibilities available, and you can start mixing and matching to figure out your vision for the whole family lifestyle. So that's what I would say is this is a time to start doing that planning together. And there are so many different paths that might come out, you know, like, okay, I'm going to take a, maybe like your spouse takes like a year off and then goes into this type of career over Here and you switch to this career, you move over here where it's much cheaper. And I don't know, I've seen everything, but you don't get to the cool unique configurations unless you're doing the lifestyle-centric planning. So that's what I would say, family unit lifestyle-centric planning, three phases. It's actually pretty fun to do because you have a lot of possibilities. You're two very skilled people. You probably have a little financial flexibility of young kids, which is fun. You could figure out something pretty cool. I love going through this planning process, you know, and we've been executing our plan pretty... ([Time 0:58:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7a63da4-7aad-4721-a6d3-5a92e647eb48)) - **Commute Benefits** - Erica reduced her commute to 20 minutes and now uses it as valuable transition time. - This small lifestyle change significantly improved her mood and focus. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. We've got here a case study. And these are where people write in to jesseatcalnewport.com. And they share their experience putting the type of advice we talked about on the show into practice in their everyday life. This was a cool one from Erica. It's about commuting. We mentioned in last week's show, we were talking about commuting when we were talking about remote work. So I thought this was an appropriate follow-up case study to last week's deep dive. All right, Erica says, on episode 337, that was last week, Cal mentioned the benefits of having a commute prior to and after work. I have developed a great appreciation for my daily commute routine to and from the office. I've also done a little bit of lifestyle-centric planning with my commute. I started working for a new company in 2024, which reduced my daily commute from over an hour each way to about 20 minutes each way. Secondly, I love driving as a hobby so I found a job where I can drive into the office and have free parking. On the way to work, I drink my smoothie and listen to a podcast. Monday is always deep questions. Because I'm driving, I'm not using my phone and looking at social media, and so I'm able to get my mind cleared out of various nonsense and be ready for work. On the way home, I generally listen to music and either go to the gym or go window shopping, like trying out perfumes at various department and beauty stores. The commute going home allows me to let work melt away until the next morning. Note, I also used a time block planner and a Kanban board to help me feel set for the next day, but the commute is a great shutdown routine. When I work at home, I have in the past eschewed stimulating a commute, so I feel cranky most of the day. So I'm trying to use my treadmill and my bicycle indoor trainer to do a little bit of exercise in the mornings. It helps some, but it's not the same as my morning drive. So I found that I work from home as little as possible and will even go into the office even if it's half a day of work. While changing locations and adjusting my commute is not the typical big idea lifestyle-centric planning changes somewhat, this small change has been a very large positive outcome. I feel that this one small change has helped my general mood and focus in a large way. Well, I like this idea that you do not need big ideas for lifestyle-centric career planning to have a big impact. In fact, I often make a contrast between lifestyle-centric planning and the alternative, which is the grand goal approach. The grand goal approach is like I have some big thing I go after and it makes my life magical from there on out. Almost never works. Lifestyle-centric career planning could lead to some things that in retrospect kind of look radical or interesting, but they don't have to. And a lot of the biggest impacts come from these smaller changes. So like in Erica's case, shifting to a job with a 20-minute commute, that was a key shift for the things she valued in her lifestyle-centric plan because the commute was actually helpful For her. But an hour-long commute is brutal. And so now it was like, I can do this commute. It's long enough to be effective as a phase transition, but not so long that it's brutal. 20 minutes is not bad at all. Trust me, in Washington, D.C., 20 minutes is roughly what it takes to get out of your neighborhood before you can even get to a major road. So 20 minutes is not bad at all. Just long enough to change your mindset, but not so long that's a problem. So now she can say, let me just go to work then. I'll go to my office. I'll park. I have a transition. Work real hard. Shut down. Complete my time block planner. I've got things stored on my boards. Like I can let my mind go and enjoy that commute back and I'm in a better mood. Like that's a great configuration. Like we forget this in a lot of the discussions about remote work that early on a lot of the people who are arguing for remote work it was in part because their commutes are really bad you Know it's a really long commute and it's kind of grinding on me so it'd be nice not to have to do that all the time but there was a whole middle group of people where the commute's not so bad They're not worried about for it's it's they have a plan for the child care that's the other thing but they have a plan for the you know my work ends two hours after school and that's figured Out and they actually like it. So you do the drive, you're there when you're not, when you're home, you're home and you have some separation. So that's a great example of sort of small scale changes from an LCP leading to big positive improvements. ([Time 1:05:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/54b4a265-ce80-4e17-8202-7aa605a1c519))