Ep. 351: Making the Internet Good Again  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 351: Making the Internet Good Again - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/a18bc05b-e532-47a1-8d79-4a658f3d9776 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Deep Breaks and Sustainable Work** - Take deep breaks by disengaging from conflicting cognitive activities like email to avoid scrambling your focus. - To sustain work pace, work less overall and reduce your concurrent workload instead of relying on breaks. Transcript: Cal Newport First question from Antonio. Speaker 2 Can you suggest activities for deep breaks? As a recovering binge worker, I struggle to maintain a sustainable work pace. I think that planning for some deep breaks along the workday may help me out. Cal Newport Well, I'm going to suggest two things. All right. You see, you're a recovering binge worker. A, I would say just work less. And then B, you can have some deep breaks interspersed between the work. But deep breaks are not what you use to make your work pace more sustainable. Working less is what you do to make your work pace more sustainable. So let me just pull those two apart real quick. Deep breaks, what that means is if you're working on something that requires deep work, right? So you're in a singular cognitive context doing something cognitively demanding and you need to like take a break, you need to give your brain a breather. Deep breaks say don't do something in that like five or 10 minute break that is going to load up a conflicting cognitive context because it's going to take you a while to get back into your Focus. So a deep break is a way to take a breather without jumbling up what's going on in your brain. So for example, if you're trying to write something very complicated, like I'm going to go up, I'm going to walk across the street to get a coffee. Maybe I'm going to listen to a podcast that is completely divorced from the work I'm doing, like a baseball podcast. And then I'm going to come back and put down my coffee, get back to the work. Like, that's fine. If instead you say, let me go on my email for 10 minutes. Now you're going to be looking at lots of semi-related work paths with overlapping cognitive context, and it's going to really get you like emotionally aroused and jumble up the cognitive Context that are activated in your brain. And then when you turn your attention back to writing, it's so much harder. So deep breaks is like, how do you take a breather without jumbling up your brain? That's not going to make your work pace more sustainable. I mean, yeah, it's nice to take breaks here and there. But what makes your work pace more sustainable is working on fewer things at the same time. What burns people out is too large of a concurrent workload. Why? Everything you agree to work on is going to bring with it its own administrative overhead, emails, meetings, conversations that you have to do to collaborate and keep up with the work. The more things you're working on, the more of this administrative overhead that's in your day. After a while, a large fraction of your day is just servicing administrative overhead, which tends to arrive haphazardly and often require sort of like ad hoc decisions or quick responses. And now you're just jumping around between things that burns you out. Work on fewer things, have a clear shutdown, make some days easier than others. Like I'm just going to really stop at two on Friday. That's how you get sustainability out of work. And it really is a separate thing than just making sure that your short breaks don't jumble your brain. Like deep break advice is really basically like don't check your email when you take a break from something hard. Like that's just going to scramble your brain. So there's really two different things going on here. ([Time 0:28:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ec8aa221-cfb5-4758-8b9e-51d0ca862d36)) - **Parenting Without Resenting Work** - Prioritize deep work during office hours and accept limited personal time when parenting. - Realize psychological and tiredness effects of parenting can interfere with deep work but adjust expectations accordingly. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, who do we got next? Next up is Yajna. Speaker 2 I'm struggling with the idea of becoming a parent largely because I fear losing the time and space required for deep work. This difference in priorities is causing tension between me and my partner who doesn't share the same creative drive or need for deep focus. Could you share your thoughts on how to approach parenting without resenting the sacrifices to my deep work? I mean, I think for most people in this situation, this question doesn't make a lot of sense. Cal Newport For some people it does, but let me make this distinction because it's, it's often something that surprises me. So here's the common situation that I'm thinking about. Like you, you have a job, you have a nine to five job, right? You're, you work at, you know, like university or something like that. You know, you have a job, maybe like it's hybrid, like on, on a one day a week, you could like do it from home or something. But like you have a traditional job. And then you have a kid. Okay. And then maybe you take time off from your job because you have like maternity leave or paternity leave. And then at some point, like you're going back to your job. Your life is a lot busier now in the sense that when you're not at your job, your time really is not your own. Presumably when you're at your job, you haven't left the kid home alone with the dog or presumably you don't have the baby horn on at your office and hoping no one notices. So there's child care during that period. But when you're not at your job where before you could be like, I'm going to go for a run and then I'm going to read a book and then I'm going to like maybe meditate. No, no, no. What you're going to be doing is like survival mode and including at night, the baby is up and it's constantly like passing it back and forth. And you really do lose that time. But when you're at your job, you're at your job. If you're in the standard situation of having a standard job, deep work is all about just what you do during those hours where you're at your job. I'm here anyways. I want to make a higher fraction of this time be deep versus shallow, which means I'm going to put aside chunks of time while I'm at the office to do undistracted work as opposed to trying To interleave my other work with my deep work. So it's just about here are the things I'm doing at my work. How do I want to arrange them today? I'm going to try to batch together concentration and then batch together non-concentrative things. In that sense, this is unrelated to what's going to happen when you get home. In other senses, it can be really related. So let's go through those cases as well. Okay, how can it be related? Well, some people don't have normal office jobs, right? And some people are like, look, I'm freelancing or cobbling things together. I work from home. I don't have a child care solution. I'm going to just be watching the kid and trying to do as much of this freelance work as I can. That is a situation in which at first will be very hard to do deep work because you will be very distracted. It'll be very hard if you're doing child care and work. That is just a hard situation and it will be hard to do deep work. That is a situation which is hard to do deep work. The other ways, and this is kind of more subtle, right? So I used to say, like, look, this is a clean distinction. When you're at your office, you're at your office. I'm not saying work more hours or anything. Just deep work is what you do when you're there. There is overlap between these two things. A, you're going to be tireder, right? That can make it harder to do deep work. So yeah, my kid is in childcare. It's with the nanny. I'm at the office, but you were up five times feeding the baby. It's going to be harder to do deep work than without it. That is a way that kids can interfere with deep work at work. The other way, and honestly, I think this gets worse as the kid gets older, is there's a psychological footprint of thinking about your kids. What's going on? I'm worried about this or that, that you find I have a harder time concentrating, even though there's not a physical distraction. I'm at my office. My kid is not here. My kid has no access to me, but I'm thinking about her, thinking about him. And it's harder than it used to be to get into deep work. Fair or not fair, this tends to affect moms more than dads. So I'll get this complaint from moms, like, yeah, sure, we both go to work and we're both working the same number of hours and we're splitting the work when we get home in like a consistent Way. But I am worrying about the kid a lot more because of whatever evolution or genetics that my husband is. And this is frustrating to me because I'm just having a hard time working as deeply as I used to. And I think that's a reality I didn't used to notice. But then we had someone on at some point, Jesse, we had a psychologist on who sort of explained this. There's someone who studies psychology at work. All right. So we put these together. What do we get? We get, okay, during this period, you got to be really on the ball. If you're working at an office, be on the ball when you're working because you don't have access to time outside of that, right? So you want to be organized and separate time blocking and deep work versus non-deep work is important because you just don't have – you're not going to have the ability that you might Have had before the kid to be like, oh, that's like when I get home from work, knock out the memo. So you have to be more on the ball. Two, you probably do have to moderate your deep work expectations, whether it's because you're freelancing at home, tiredness or psychological footprint of kids. It is going to reduce your facility with deep work, but then it gets better, right? And then the kids get older and it's the division between the two. It's less of a crisis mode. Your mind gets more used to kids in your routine. And it's like, this is fine when I'm working, I'm working when I'm not working, I'm not working. They're not staying up all night. You gain back other parts of your life again, and then it gets better. And so like, it's okay to think about like a young kid period is a foot off to accelerate a little bit on deep work period. And knowing that like, I can put it back on again in a little bit. I mean, there'll be other issues but the that crisis mode kind of goes away so I I now recognize where I used to say like I don't understand the relevance of this like are you bringing your Kid to the office like this is just about what you do at the office I now see this stuff bleeds over so get realistic about it but know that like from a work perspective it does in some sense, It does get easier, better to get back to deep work. Or you'll end up like simplifying. Like, actually, I don't want to work this much. I'm going to sort of change my, you know, which I think is also a very natural evolution that kids can sometimes push. This used to be this big thing, right? Just like people would always write in like, well, who's watching the kids when you're doing deep work? It's like, I'm at the office. Like, I don understand the nanny. I mean, I'm at work. What do you mean? I'm not, I'm not, it's not like nine o'clock at night and I'm at a chalkboard while like my wife's feeding the kids. Like, what are you talking about? But then we sort of learn like, okay, no, no, there's like the psychological, these like deeper things that are going there. ([Time 0:31:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd544fd5-3818-4d1c-a942-a973ce06d077)) - **Deep Life vs. Range** - The "deep life" means focusing on a few things that matter, not just narrow deliberate practice. - David Epstein's idea of range complements deep work by encouraging variation within a general field. Transcript: Speaker 2 Up is Benji. In David Epstein's book range, he describes the advantages of doing a wide variety of activities. I understand the deep life as being more focused on deliberate practice and applied to narrow topics. Do you feel that your two philosophies are as different as I am representing them or are they closer than they seem? Cal Newport Well, I'm going to change the terminology there. That's not my definition of the deep life. So you say, I understand the deep life as being focused on deliberate practice applied to narrow topics. Now, the deep life is about cultivating a life where you spend more time doing the small number of things that really matter to you and less time doing the things that don't. I think what you're referring to is maybe more of the philosophies you would see in like my book, Slow Productivity, or my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I do talk about professionally The value of having a small number of things you do really well, this being more sustainable, but also something that gives you more career capital and therefore more control over your Working life. So being good at a small number of things that are valuable, I argue, is often the best career strategy. We had Dave on the show when his book came out. I don't know what episode this was, Jesse, but it was a couple of years ago. He came and did it in studio. And we talked about this. We kind of got into, you know, my professional strategies of focusing on a small number of things and his strategy of being more open to things. And we actually reached an area of common ground. I don't remember exactly how it resolved, but I believe the sort of common ground we landed on is that he was sort of arguing, professionally speaking, because his advice is also your Non-professional life. It's just more interesting to have varied interests. But professionally speaking, he was talking about within a general direction, by sampling, like you're kind of doing different things within that general direction, they can come Together in really interesting ways. Not do completely unrelated things are going to somehow necessarily help your career. So he was talking about experimenting more within your general field, things to come together in more interesting ways. Or he was also talking about like maybe a single major life change like his was he was in grad school studying science and then he went into journalism and then the science helped them Be a science journalist. And like that, you know, that was really helpful. But I think we found some common ground where he agreed on deliberate practice and getting good at things is important, right? He talked about – I remember he talked about taking a novel writing course just to get his nonfiction writing a little bit better because it was pushing muscles he didn't have before. And then he was also saying having other experimenting within your field could lead to interesting new connections that, you know, give you an interesting niches to uncover. So go back and find that episode. It was a really interesting discussion. Range is a great book. I mean, I know Dave, well, he's a DC guy, great writer. It's a great book. So, but we did find common ground. So definitely go back and find that interview. ([Time 0:38:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42f93103-1014-4d5a-87ca-ee94278995e9)) - **Academia as Winner-Take-All Field** - Academia is a winner-take-all field requiring top-level output with no shortcuts. - Success depends on publishing top papers and competing intensely like professional sports. Transcript: Speaker 2 Right. Who else do we got? Next up is Alex. I was interested in pursuing a career in academia. Based on your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is this considered a winner-take field or an auction field of work? Cal Newport That's an important question, Alex. For those who don't remember So Good They Can't Ignore You, a winner-take field is where there's a pretty clear competitive structure by which you're being evaluated, and only those Who get near the top of this structure get to succeed, right? The obvious example being like sports. It's pretty obvious what it means to be good at baseball. You're evaluated in a clear way, and it's a very small number of people. I think the major leagues, I saw this number the other day. It's like 600 or 350 total people. Very few people are going to like win. And when they win, they do really well. And you're gonna make a lot of money and be very successful. But there's no shortcut or secret way to get into professional baseball. Auction markets, by contrast, this is more like we were talking about with Dave Epstein. It's where you find a unique combination of skills in some field that no one else has. And then you're able to gain career capital and autonomy based largely on the fact that like I can do this, this and this and no one else can. I didn't have to beat out a thousand people and definitively be the best among those thousand people to get the success. There's just no one else doing this. This was sort of like Dave with his science master's degree. And then he went to Sports Illustrated and he was like, look, I'm really the only sports writer here who also understands how to read academic science papers. And then that became, you know, his beat, this sort of like science of sports beat. Academia, if we're talking, I mean, we got to define our terms here, but if we're talking like R1 academia, so like a classic tenure-track job at a well-known institute, Carnegie One Institute, that's basically a winner-take field. It is a trap to think I can kind of find a way into a position by, look, I'm combining this interest with that interest and this type of skill here. No one else is doing this. And that's going to kind of get me a side door into the job at Georgetown or the job at Dartmouth or the job at Harvard. That basically doesn't work. It's a pretty clear competitive structure that is almost entirely assessed on how many papers have you published in places where it's super, super hard to publish papers, just straight Up intellect testing, right? That's what matters. You have to do that. It's really hard to do that. Most people aren't going to succeed to do that. Everyone's trying to publish in the top venues. Only the best stuff gets in. You have to do that a bunch of times. It's the academic equivalent of, look, I've been hitting 300 and D1 college baseball for the last three years, right? There's no shortcut to that. The numbers don't lie. So with academia, that's why I always say, if you want to do like the classic, you know, R1 tenure track position at like a tier one school, you have to like honestly assess, do I have, do I have a chance of like winning in this winner take all competition in my school? Can I be like one of the top producers, you know, in my field? That's what it's going to take. That's why you want to go to the best possible graduate school and work with the best possible people and publish, publish, publish. It was a lot of flashbacks about this, Jesse, because we were up in Boston a couple of weekends ago and took my kids to MIT. So walking around the MIT campus, it was a lot of flashbacks of my time at MIT. That was the whole attitude there was like, you need to publish in the best places and you need to do it like yesterday. Like that's what we do here. You're going to get an academic job. That's what matters. None of this like going to work for industry stuff. That's embarrassing. You want an academic job and that means you have to publish. And I came out of there with a lot of papers. I don't remember. I had to look up my, it wasn't my, not my application for my professorship, but my research statement when I went up for tenure, which I did pretty soon, early. I went up early for tenure. And I was giving it, someone asked for it yesterday, another professor going up for tenure. So I was like looking at my old, the research statement when i went for 10 year in 2015 uh and what does it say it was like okay i have published it was 64 peer-reviewed papers damn yeah 42 Conference 10 journal and then workshop and shorts it was like a lot of already 2500 citations 22H index at the point. It's numerical. Like you had to just do the work. There's no secret way into those types of – I mean you can get kind of fake positions at those good schools and people might not be able to tell the difference. But there is no shortcut. So like if you think you can win, it's a really cool job. But don't delude yourself. If you're really not on the track to win in that game, then it is a winner-take field. Speaker 2 When you finished your program, how many other students finished with you? I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, MIT has a huge, relatively speaking— But in your little group, like five? Cal Newport Oh. Let me think. In my group, I was the only one who graduated that year, my research group. Oh, okay. Usually like there's someone it's a big enough group that you'll have someone like hurt once per year or any of those other people who are below or above you professors right now yeah Yeah yeah some of them are killing it um there's one guy who started towards the end of my time he's mit professor now yeah he was really good. Another person, she came up in conversation the other day. She had Tel Aviv University. ([Time 0:41:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/beb39098-90f9-4bf5-a69c-d417d472f747)) - **Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning** - Work backwards from your desired daily lifestyle rather than focusing solely on following a job passion. - This lifestyle-centric planning offers more career options and better fits overall contentment. Transcript: Speaker 2 Is AK. What's the difference between following your passion, which you are critical of, and lifestyle-centric planning, which you advocate for? The latter seems to be based on what you feel passionate about. Cal Newport So the problem with following your passion is it's an idea that's very based on jobs. It's very job-specific. So this phrase, follow your passion, is specifically referring to how you select a job and what you should expect in return for that selection. It says if you match your job to a preexisting passion, your life will be good and you'll be happy. My argument is that often doesn't work and a lot of people don't have a clear passion they can match the jobs in the first place. What does bring people day-to happiness is actually the reality of their day-to lifestyle. Who are they around? What type of place do they live? Like, what's the rhythm of their day? What's going on? Is it like a day where they're living somewhere scenic and they're done with work by three and they're mountain biking in these mountains and then they come back and there's like friends In the backyard and it's cafe lights and they're like trying out like a micro brew that someone brewed and just socializing or is it like they're in, you know, it's it's they're they're In a city and it's like all energy and they're kind of like plugged into like an art scene. And and, you know, you feel like, what do I want my day to day? What what that's what makes your your affect is affected by the reality. The reality of your day toto-day, like what type of things happen in your day-to So my argument has been for a very long time, work backwards from that. Like, what do I want my days to be like? Then I'll figure out, like, how do I get that? And your job will be one of the big levers you use, among other things. But now your job is way more instrumental. In the follow-your paradigm, your job is the source of your contentment. In the lifestyle-centric career paradigm, your job is one of the tools you use to get to a lifestyle that you think is going to cause you contentment. It's way higher probability to work backwards from the lifestyle that seems good than the work forwards from the job. I mean, I think most people can identify like, yeah, a lifestyle like this would make me happy and it's different from people to people. That's not super hard to identify. What is hard is assuming that just like your choice of the job is going to give you everything you want and care about in your lifestyle. And in fact, one of the main reasons why following your passion fails is that connecting a job to something you're passionate about often disrespects or steps on all of the other stuff That's important to you in your lifestyle. Like in pursuit of like, I'm passionate about this, you end up like living in a type of place you don't want to live in, working in a rhythm you don't like to work in, doing the types of things Day to day that like make you unhappy with like four or five things that are really meaningful to you that are far removed from your life because your job doesn't know what the ideal lifestyle Is. So I first introduced Lifestyles to Career Plan. I looked this up the other day. It was way early, way before I even published So Good They Can't Ignore You. It was a blog post on my blog, and I believe it was titled, like, The Career Advice No One Ever Tells You. And I wrote it at my sister's graduation. I remember we had like rented a house. She went to the Naval Academy. So we're in Annapolis. So I was thinking about graduation and commencement stuff. And I remember just having this clear. So I would have been at this point early in my grad student career. And I remember thinking, man, what really matters is like the day to day of your life. I wish I had just thought, you know, know, this is the right way to do it. Like work backwards from the ideal lifestyle and then think, what are my options for getting there? So anyways, I'm a big advocate for it. The other thing that's opened up by Lifestyle-Centered Career Planning is options. Right? So we're pretty good at being like, this lifestyle will make me happy. There's often a huge number of different combination of stuff you could do to get close to that lifestyle. The more options you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Whereas with following your passion, there might be just like one job that you think is your passion. It might be really hard to get. Like it's a way more narrow path. You might be out of luck. But if you're working backwards from a lifestyle, there's like so many different ways, you know, you can get there. And so you're much more likely to succeed with it. So I've been, I'm really developing this concept now because part two of my new book on the deep life is going to be about it. So I will have more rich thoughts about it, I guess, coming up. I'm just finishing, you know, I'm up to my ears right now in the final chapter of part one of that book which is prepare to change your life and then part two is doing lifestyle planning To actually transform it so i'll be thinking about this a lot more so jesse we'll have to revisit we'll revisit lifestyle centric planning as i add more sophistication but that's the Basic idea and then we can wear the hats oh we have yeah vblccp. ([Time 0:47:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d9424f5-164f-4973-940c-d6ca0a1cc27c)) - **Abigail's Frog Task Success** - Abigail prioritized cooking dinner as her "frog" task, getting it done early for less stress and better job focus. - Identifying true friction points in life can yield surprising but effective productivity wins. Transcript: Cal Newport This is where people write in to talk about parts of our advice that we give here on the show actually working in their own life positively. If you have a case study, you can send it to jesse at calnewport.com. Okay, so today's case study is from Abigail. I said that right. And it says, I wanted to share my experience after implementing the takeaway from a recent episode. In particular, the idea of eat the frog. I've heard it before, but something really hit me when I was listening to you guys talk about it. I figured out that the frog for me has nothing to do with work, but rather with making sure that I cook dinner for my kids. Since listening to the episode, I prioritize that difficult task in a set time after my husband takes the kids to school between 9 and 10 a.m. It has made a world of difference for being able to focus on my actual job. I own a martial arts school currently in a self-maintaining phase, so mostly just communication with current and prospective students. It has also helped my emotional well-being by reducing stress levels as I solo parent most evenings while my husband is teaching. I guess what surprised me is figuring out what the difficult task was and accepting that. I am also a writer, and I may have been tempted to pick that as the focus, but it's not the thing that's causing the most friction in my life right now. So I just wanted to thank you and maybe share with your listeners how a takeaway can be a little bit surprising but still very helpful. Eat that frog. That's a Brian Tracy idea. Do the hard thing first and the rest of the day will be easier. I think the phrase is if the first thing you do in the day is like eat a frog, then everything else will seem easier by comparison. So that's a great example of it. I'm jealous, by the way, that your kids go to school between 9 and 10 a.m. We're out the door at 7.30 a.m. That would be nice. Our elementary schools around here, the public elementary schools start at like 9. Oh, really? Yeah, but our kids are an independent school, so we don't get that advantage. High schools are like early. So it's middle school is earlier than elementary school because they use the same buses. High school is earlier than middle school. High school is like a seven o'clock bus pickup. Yikes. But that's great. I like this idea. Figure out like what is the thing that's really causing friction and figure out a way to deal with it. And it could be eating the frog. Like I just do that first thing. It could be automating it or it could be taken out of your life. But I like that, like actually facing what's causing me stress. ([Time 0:52:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11bdf0b9-7eda-4196-be11-03dbaca412e8)) - **Managing Seasonality and Meetings** - Mark seasons with planning days and create busier and less busy work periods to introduce seasonality. - Control meeting times via scheduling tools, pad meeting lengths, require prep work, and use office hours to contain meetings. Transcript: Cal Newport Question. There's a lot of ways to think about introducing seasonality into your work. A couple things that are obvious. At the beginning of each season, do a plan, do a seasonal plan. You know, we talk about in multi-scale planning, the highest level is like a quarterly or semester plan. You can call that a seasonal plan. Take a day to do this. Like I'm going to kind of plan. Maybe I'm not going to go into the office, take a personal day or vacation day. It's only four. It's not going to add up to that much. Go to a cafe, think things through, work out your weekly templates or autopilot schedules, get new priorities, kind of clear your head. Like that's helpful to mark the passing of seasons. Then I would say have busier seasons and less busier seasons. Maybe the summer is going to be your less busy season. You don't need to make a big deal about this. Just like have less projects that are due. Schedule less meetings. You know, just have a period that you consider less intense and then other periods where you make it more intense. That's going to make a difference as well. When it comes to your question about meetings, I think the important thing in a meeting-heavy job is to not think of like your whole schedule's fair game for meetings. You need to have more control about when these meetings happen. If it's a meeting-heavy job, I would really lean into the use of some sort of automated scheduling tool. And it could be using shared calendars. It could be using a specific scheduling tool like a Calendly, like a ScheduleOnce. And you're going to have to have significant parts of your days open for meetings, but it gives you control over when those parts of your day are, right? So you might have like 11 to 4. So the morning you can kind of get stuff done and you have four to five to like shut down and you give people like the chance to schedule meetings in there. Another thing. So now it's easy, right? You want to take the friction out. Like we got to talk about this. Here's the link. We got to talk about this. Here's the link. And people just sign up when they can. You just see when your afternoon meetings are. I think that works. I think that works really well. Another trick with this is like if you have a couple different meeting durations, make the actual duration that people are booking for 10 to 15 minutes longer than that. So if you're using one of these scheduling tools, you could have like a short conversation. You describe it however you want. So you can be like short conversation, 15 minutes, longer conversation, 45 minutes. But the actual scheduling schedules a half hour for the short conversation and an hour for the long one. So that you are going to have extra time right after a meeting to fully process your notes from that meeting. What do I need to do with this? What tasks need to go on my task list? What follow-up can I do right away? You really do not want to stack back-to meetings because the unfinished task of the first meeting stay in your mind while you're in the second, and this stuff can kind of aggregate. You just tell people like, yeah, this is a 15-minute meeting. It's going to book for a half hour on my calendar because I protect the second half for processing the meeting. But this meeting is for 15 minutes, right? And that's how long we're going to talk. This is a 45-minute meeting. I know it's on our calendar for an hour, but I'm going to call it at 45 minutes. And that's going to help us because I need to process these notes. That makes a big difference as well. The other thing I would add is you need probably, especially if you're in the managerial position, you need to make sure that these meetings are on the ball, right? So there needs to be some sense of whenever someone schedules a meeting, you know, it's this is what we need before this meeting starts. Like you need to send me X, Y, and Z. I need like here's the decision you need that needs to be made and here's all the relevant points for it, right? Culture of you have to do work before the meeting so the meeting can be focused on the decision that has to be made, that culture is really important for preventing meetings from rambling, And it allows much shorter meetings to actually work. Some companies have this culture. Amazon famously has this culture. You have to do a lot of work before you can call people together into a meeting. And they have read, you have to write up this whole memo, like, here's why we're meeting. Here's all the relevant information. Here's why I can't make a decision what I need from you. And you get grilled basically for like 15 minutes from the people who have read this, and then a decision is made and that meeting is over. So you really have to avoid people using meetings as a stand-in for actual time blocking or productivity. You really have to be careful with people who are like, this is on my plate. I'm worried about not making progress on it. So I'll just put a meeting with you on the calendar because when we get there, that'll remind me to work on this and we'll figure something out. Like, no, no, no. I'm not a source of your productivity for you. If you need to meet with me, there needs to be a reason you have to do work. Right. And, and so if these are people that you manage who are scheduling these meetings, you can actually say like, yes, okay. Um, you can schedule a meeting with me, but before you do, like, before I say, yes, schedule a meeting with me, send me the following. And you tell them a background on like what decision needs to be made, what the relevant information is, and why they, what like help they need in making that decision. And you could say, email that to me. Even better, you can have like a folder where they can set up a Google doc, like, okay, I'm going to put all that information in. And you can say, let me know once you filled that in. And then we can schedule a time to talk about it. Half your meetings are going to go away, by the way, because people like I don't actually want to do work. I was just trying to not have to remember this and get it on your calendar so I don't have to forget about it. And then the work that does happen is going to be way more efficient. So three things I said here. Have scheduling set up for your meeting so you can control when you don't meet so they can't conquer your whole schedule. Two, schedule meetings longer than the meeting is going to last. You always have at least 15 minutes to process a meeting and fully shut down that context when you're done. And three, always have some sort of pre-task that has to be done before you'll give someone the ability to schedule with you, at least for people who are below you where you can actually Get away with that. Those three things make a meeting heavy job better. And then four, I mean, you mentioned this in your call, but use the office hours, right? For quick questions or quick discussions every day, one hour, just show up during that time and ask me. I'm telling you, it's going to be a third of your meetings or more can get deferred to the office hours. Hey, that's a quick question to show up at my next office hours. You can't at three o'clock every day. Just call me or stop by my office. That's going to be a third of your meetings and never have to take up a dedicated spot in your calendar. This is a quick thing. Just show up at my next office hours. We'll get into it. We'll figure it out real quick. You do those things. I think you contain meetings. The final thing is, if you have too many things going on, you're going to have too many meetings, but we'll leave that aside for now. ([Time 0:56:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/48a14ee9-3372-44de-9a5c-0baf4ee7febd)) - **Cal's April Reading List** - Cal Newport read five diverse books in April, including Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis. - He finds value in exploring technology, history, business, and storytelling through varied literary works. Transcript: Cal Newport I read, as I often try to do, five books in April, which I'll briefly summarize for you. Now, the first was iRobot, my Isaac Asimov. I came across, actually, my wife came across it, a cool vintage version, like a 1950s version with a great sort of sci-fi modernist cover. The book itself came out in the 40s, but so this is like a pretty early edition, not a first edition. I hadn't read it in a long time. A really interesting book. It's actually a collection of short stories that they combine to a single book by adding these sort of italicized narration the beginning of every story to try to like draw some connections Between them but you can tell they're separate stories it's interesting because asimov is dealing with ideas that seem relevant in our current age of ai at a time when computers didn't Even exist so it's like a largely electronic analog world these robots have artificial intelligence through something he calls a positron network he just kind of invented a technology There's like it just works and they they they had intelligence and he's mainly dealing with like the moral quandaries of having intelligent robots they're they're all constrained By the three laws robotics they can't hurt people in his book there's a worldwide government and the unions have said no robots on earth they're not taking jobs they only exist on like Outer space mining you know rigs or whatever and the stories are like about these like border cases moral quandaries about weird stuff that'll happen uh including there's a cool story On the space station early on where like one of the robots becomes a god to the other robots like one of those those types of things uh anyways good. Asimov is an interesting character. I like the fact that he was a professor and then his sci-fi writing became so successful that he became a full-time writer. I kind of collect those stories. Then I read, because I don't know, I read a lot about Disney for some reason, but I read a book, a new one called After Disney by Neil O'Brien. It was a book about the period right after Walt died and about that like 10 to 20 year period. And it's, it's really like a TikTok business book. And I, not like TikTok TIK, but T-I like this happened, that happened, this happened. It just kind of captures this period where, uh, Walt's son-in takes over and what was going on in the company. I just have always been interested in Disney as a business. We're going, by the way. God help us. I have a talk in Anaheim. I'm bringing out the kids. Speaker 2 Oh, you're going the one on the West Coast? You're going to Disneyland. Cal Newport Yeah. Speaker 2 God help us. Cal Newport Actually, I'm looking forward to it because I've read all these books about Disney, including books about Disneyland itself. So I want to get... You've been before, right? I've never been. Speaker 2 Really? Yeah. Cal Newport Yeah. My parents have been to Disney world. I've been to neither. My parents weren't on board with that, but I'm excited for pirates. I love old animatronics, pirates, the Caribbean haunted mansion, like that type of stuff. I'm excited about we're staying in the grand Californian. Sweet. Doing it up. That should be fun. Then I read the baseball book of why by John McAllister because it's baseball season started. I had to try to read some baseball stuff when it started. I'm reading another baseball book now, but just to kind of get in the mood, that was a quick read. Then I read The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zemiski. So Karp is the founder of Palantir, I believe, right, which is like a Silicon Valley-style tech company that works on military technology. It's an interesting book. I like these types of books where they have like a new way of looking at things. There is a lot of homogeneity, I think, in like tech journalism and tech criticism. It's like this is how we think about this, and then everyone gets on board with that. This book is coming in and saying like, hey, we should be using technology like not just – like their argument, Karp's argument, which I've heard him make before, is it's like wimpy or A lack of courage or interestiness that like all of these tech companies, like what's the safest thing we can do is make like advertising based apps like social media apps and video sharing Apps. He's like we should be building cool stuff with technology. And in particular, like we should be making our country better. Like technology shouldn't just be like, what's the safest thing we can do that, you know, is going to maybe make the most money. We should be like building better weapons systems so the U.S. Can like be awesome. Right. We should be building flying cars and like doing cool stuff that makes the country better, like have ambitions for our technologies beyond just these like anodyne distraction apps. So, you know, I like that argument. And clearly, he's biased in the sense that he wants the answer to be like Palantir is the right thing to do. You know, his argument is like military technology is important. Like it's better that the U.S. Needs to be better than other countries out the military. That's for our benefit and the benefit of the world. But I like that more general argument of like we should be more inspired with technology, like do cooler, bigger things with it, not just trying to make apps that like in theory could Be like a billion dollar unicorn, but doesn't really help the world at all. So it was interesting. He's a good writer. Finally, I read Everything is Tuberculosis. This is – John Green, the novelist, wrote this nonfiction book about tuberculosis and its history and his own experience meeting someone at a tubercular ward in Africa. It's getting really good reviews. It was a good book. Yeah. John Green is a good writer. I picked this up randomly at the Harvard bookstore and it was good. It's interesting. It's partially the history of tuberculosis, partially like why we should be treating it more, like the history of policy on tuberculosis plus personal narrative. And it's an interesting book. I like those types of swings. So I enjoyed it. I recommend it. There we go, Jesse. Those are my books for April. ([Time 1:06:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ee95eb1-1c7f-4fe7-95d8-67e56afa2111))