Ep. 353: Summer Schedules  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 353: Summer Schedules - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/f6a9c2a5-2777-482e-b47f-71b34bfbc3b2 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Work Seasonality Reflects Evolution** - Seasonality in work aligns with human evolutionary rhythms, offering variation in intensity across time. - Continuous uniform work, typical in modern knowledge jobs, estranges us from natural work patterns, harming productivity and well-being. Transcript: Cal Newport For me, today is in some, the first day of summer. I'm a college professor, and my final grades were submitted last week. I hosted the lunch for the graduating seniors. Commencement was on Saturday. The campus has just shut down for the summer season. Unlike most professors at most research universities, however, I don't take summer salary. As soon as the spring semester ends, I am officially off the clock until the fall comes. I have received no paycheck from the university. I receive no paycheck from the grant agencies during the summer. There is no expectations from anyone else. My time is my own. Here is the schedule that I more or less try to run during these summers of no external obligations. I try, if possible, to have no professional appointments, meetings, or calls on Mondays or Fridays. I want to begin and end my week with quiet and depth. So the transition into the weekend and from the weekend back into the week is one that is much more gradual and subtle and cognitively rewarding. You're not going from a quiet Sunday to a crazy Monday. I try when possible to make one of those days, Monday or Friday, an adventure thinking day where I'll spend at least three or four hours, usually somewhere outside in nature, being way Too hot because I do live in Washington, D.C., but maybe going to like the Pactuxic Wildlife Refuge right outside of the Beltway or to Wheaton Regional Park or to the, I like the Rachel Carson Greenway, to a trail, go for a hike, spend a couple hours outside, go to Rock Creek Park, bring my notebooks and try to really work through ideas. For Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, those days start with deep work. I don't look at an email or a computer until midday. Then in the afternoon, I have an admin block. What I try to do is have 30 minutes on my calendar midday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, where like a furious task completing machine, I go through small logistical things that have Piled up and try to make as much progress as possible. In the afternoons on those three days is when I'll have calls, I'll have interviews, I'll have professional-related appointments, and I try to end those days by four. That is my summer schedule, and I love it, and I can get away with it because I have these really slow summers. But it is a vital part of my success. It is a step away from the frantic demands of the school year. I get my best thinking done during the summer. I produce on my best ride in the summer. It's when I recharge for the year ahead. So I want to talk to you today about this general strategy of seasonality. I'm going to argue that it's important for basically everyone, especially if you have some sort of knowledge or office work job. You might not be able to push your summer schedule to the same extreme as mine, but I think it should be different. I'll argue why, and then I'll give you some ideas about how you can do that, even if you have less flexibility than myself. All right, let's start with the case for the seasonality, taking one season to be different and less intense than other seasons when it comes to your work. I'm going to read something from my book here, the Bible for this show, Slow Productivity. I wrote about this idea, did some good research on this, so I'm going to take a second to take advantage of the research I already did. All right, I'm going to read here. This side-by comparison underscores the degree to which our experience of work has transformed during the recent past of our species. Our shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the Neolithic revolution, only really picked up speed somewhere around 12,000 years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, foraging had almost completely disappeared from the human story. This reorientation towards agriculture threw most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice farming Agta, grappling with something new, the continuous monotony of unvarying Work all day long, day after day. All right, so I'm arguing here, so I do a, before this, I went through a treatment of what the foraging and hunting and gathering life was like in which we spent most of our species existence, Drawing on some more recent research from the Ajita people in the Philippines where you had the same people that divided half of the group, went to rice farming and the other half stayed With foraging. There's interesting research from the 2000s where they compared the lifestyle between these two groups that were otherwise very much controlled to be the same people in the same type Of geographical region. And they found that, oh, the hunting and gathering foraging group has way more variation in their days. Busy periods, non-busy periods, busy seasons, non-busy periods. So what I'm arguing here is that change with agriculture, our days when we were working became uniformly hard days. However, and I'm going back to reading here, the one saving grace in this scenario is that agriculture didn't demand this homogenized effort the entire year as the busy sowing and gathering The crops is offset by the quiet of winter. So we went from hunting and gathering and foraging where even within a given day, there's huge variation in intensity. This hour is really locked in because we're in the middle of a hunt. But the next two hours, we're taking a nap during the midday sun. Then we get agriculture. It said, no, no, when you work, we have this new idea of like working sunrise to sunset of equal intensity. Our Paleolithic forebearers did not have such uniform intensity, but at a bigger scale, you had busy ([Time 0:05:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ab4b11ae-a482-4d31-b22d-6f076c284de5)) - **Implement Weekly Slow Days** - Make one weekly day meeting-free, ideally near a weekend, for deep, unrushed work. - Use adventure days by working from new locations to shift pace and perception of time. Transcript: Cal Newport I do with my summer schedule is one example, but that's pretty specific to be. I mean, it's like why I became a professor and writer was exactly to be able to do that. Flexibility and schedule and a job like the writing that could sort of support me to take time off like that and give me like an activity to do. There's a lot of ideas you can do that are smaller that'll give you a taste of seasonality. I have a few to suggest here as you think about the summer ahead. One, consider having one day each week, maybe a Monday or Friday, where for the most part you don't schedule appointments. Don't make a big deal about this. Don't announce it. Don't tell people when they ask you when you're available that you're not available on Mondays. Have plenty of options to suggest like, yeah, this day, this day. How about here, here, here? Just don't happen to suggest days on this day that you have secretly marked for yourself as a no meeting day each week. It won't always work, but many weeks it will. To have one day a week or two days a week, especially connected to a weekend where you can get into your work and get caught up and see what's going on at a more of a leisurely entry pace and Not have to jump into a thousand meetings really makes a big difference, makes the season seem slower. If possible, try to make one of those days into more of an adventure day. Get out of your normal workspace if you can, especially if you are able to work remote. Go into nature. Go to a museum. Go to the mall in D.C. It's what I used to do. Make it feel different. Now, still, work. Work on your notebook. Bring your laptop with you. Still get things done, but in a completely different location. It just makes the pace of work seem different. I would also suggest, oh, I lost a page here. Where did I put? Oh, I see what I did here, Jesse. I put my ads in the wrong place. Okay. So no meeting days. Yes. All right. Another thing you should think about doing is pushing new project start times. Again, you don't need to make a big deal about this, but you can wind down your projects as the summer starts. And as you take on new projects, be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's, I'm finishing up some things now, but like late August, I'll get that ramped up. That's close enough in the future that people are like, yeah, fine, that's reasonable. But what you've done is created a bit of a lacuna in your schedule here. There's going to be this period where you're not really starting or in the middle of any big projects. Now, you can't do this all the time because eventually the projects have to get done, so you can't keep pushing them into the future. But once a year, you can start saying for a little while when new projects are coming to you, like, yeah, I'm finishing up a bunch of stuff now, but what if like in mid-August I'll take this On? The reality is you're not really finishing up that much stuff, but it does buy you some space. Put your hand down more. And what I mean by that is when it comes to volunteer activities within your work, especially what researchers call non-promotable activities like organizing the internal office Birthday parties or this or that. Maybe you're that reliable go-to person that likes to help out and people like that about you. That's great, but put your hand down for a couple months. Just don't volunteer or say, I don't know, I'm a little busy right now. Again, if you do this all the time, then people might be like, oh man, he or she looks never useful. It's kind of annoying. You do it for a month or so for six weeks. No one notices then because like you're mainly volunteering a lot. They won't notice, but it makes these periods feel different. You just have less of this extra work on your plate. This is a strategy I talked about in my slow productivity book. The idea of like a highly autonomous blocker project, you take on a project for the summer that you can keep referring to to try to push away other type of work. Like, well, yeah, I can do that, but I'm working on the Maguire report, right? And like, that's where my head's down on this. But after I finished the Maguire report, like I can work on these other types of things. Choose that proverbial Maguire report to be something that's highly autonomous that you can, in reality, do like an hour every day and stay on top of it. It is a extremely effective strategy. People don't know how long work takes. Most people are like pretty inefficient. You take something where you have a lot of flexibility. It doesn't generate a lot of meetings. It doesn't make you have to be on other people's schedule. Be efficient and effective and then use that thing to push everything else off your plate for a little while. You can only get away with that so long, but really we're just looking for a month or two of respite. Start your day slowly. Apologize only if people notice. Like start your day in the coffee shop. Like get a little breakfast and coffee. Work there for a while. Just change the rhythm of the day so it just feels slower. It's not as frantic as other times of years. Like this is psychological. But these type of psychological differences really can add up. Finally, this idea that people keep getting upset about this. I'm not sure why. Just every other week, go do something midday someday that you don't normally do during the weekday. You go see a movie or something. It's two and a half hours. It's not some big deal. People go to doctor's appointments and stuff all the time. But it's going to give you a completely different feel for your week. When you're in a movie theater at 2 o'clock and you know it's a weekday, it makes you feel like you're not just in like the normal invisible factory clock and clock out. This is what I do every day. It just gives you a sense of autonomy and slowness and control. And in the summer, do this more often. Go see some dumb movies, right? Especially if you're in a situation where you don't have to account for every minute of your time. Again, if you go to movies every day, if you stop work at two every day all the time, people will notice. But if once or twice a month, you're gone in the afternoon, you're back a little bit late, no one knows, no one notices. So you can use these smaller tips if you don't have a huge amount of autonomy to introduce some seasonality. Summer is a great time for seasonality. So hopefully a lot of ([Time 0:16:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e8ce17a-1ea4-4856-ac40-8bb811f05674)) - **Structure Time During Injury** - Create a structured schedule during injury or constraints to avoid aimless time filled with distractions. - Pursue manageable projects combining cognitive and physical activity to maintain progress and mental health. Transcript: Speaker 2 Questions from quiz i'm a teacher in texas who usually spends summers on long backtracking trips which helps me recharge while walking, listening to good content, praying, and reflecting. Because of a knee injury, I can't do my usual trip this year and don't enjoy too much unstructured time at home. How would you suggest I structure my eight-week summer break and daily schedule to get similar benefits without being able to leave home or walk all day? Cal Newport I'm thinking maybe take up drinking. Good old-fashioned Texas moonshine or whiskey like a an old-fashioned texas cowboy that'll get you through the eight weeks pretty well um okay so you can't walk all day but i want to Push on this a little more you say you can't leave home i don't think he means he can't literally leave his house he means just like on longer trips i guess right yeah yeah um because i was Going to say you know a few things i was going to say, but my overarching advice here is have a schedule, have a plan, right? Don't go into your day saying like, ah, whatever. The day is kind of awful. Just see how it unfolds. There's not much I can do because of my knee. It's that type of slow, slow through the mud. Like I'm just sort of wasting time. I'm on my phone for three hours this morning. I don't even know where that went. I'm going to watch some TV and see what's going on. Like that type of stuck in the mud, mired in time mentality can really be relaxing for a day. But over eight weeks, I think is really going to be a bummer. So you want to have some notion of a schedule or plan, whatever those details are. This is what I'm doing this summer. This should probably involve some sort of project or projects you're working on. And these might be more intellectual, cognitive and physical, preferably things you can work on outside of your house. I mean, you say you can't leave your house, but you can leave your house and go different places. Start your morning with the paper at the coffee shop. Then you're going to the woodshed because you're working on mastering some sort of new woodworking tool. You know, yeah, your knee is hurt. You can't walk all day, but it's not going to be something where you can't walk on it. I mean, even people with knee replacements, they want you up and around. So I want you up and around working on some sort of projects that is not just in your house. It could be cognitive. It could be physical. Some mix of the two have some initiatives you're going on. I'm going to read all these books. I'm going to watch every movie that, you know, every Ford movie between this 10 year period and like read books about or whatever it is, but have things to do that feels like they're rewarding. That's what the long hikes were. So you want something that's similarly ambitious, but just not something that makes such a big demand on your knee. And there needs to be a plan here. I think we tell ourselves, this was kind of my pushback against the sort of Ginny O'Dell hypothesis about doing nothing. We tell ourselves that some sort of Rousseauian platonic ideal, that doing things is an internalization of capitalist narratives and doing nothing is a brave resistance. And that's where we're going to rediscover ourselves. But there's only so much of literally doing nothing that we can put up with before we get antsy. And then what happens is, is we have all these highly polished attention economy tools that are very much happy to solve our problem for us. Like you're antsy about doing nothing. Look at this screen. Your eyeballs bleed. We can give you something to do. And then time just disappears and you come out of it feeling depressed. I was just looking at a study that was featured on NPR clip a couple of months ago that was showing these connections between looking at algorithmic content and your mood. And as they, in an experiment, took people off of their phones, essentially, they found this steady increase in their actual psychological well-being. So it's, you know, doing nothing. It's not, we think it is very appealing, but really what we don't like is being overloaded, burnt out, overworked. But we're not looking for the opposite of that. Or if we are, the opposite of overworked is not doing nothing. It's a reasonable amount of work. The opposite of grueling efforts that feel meaningless and pointless is efforts that are meaningful and have a point, right? So the opposite of these things that wear us out is not sitting there on your phone doing nothing all day. It's doing less things and doing those things better, more meaningful things. So just keep that in mind, quiz, and then keep active, get that knee healed. Maybe PT is a big part of the something you're doing this summer, and then get back to those hikes as soon as you can. ([Time 0:27:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3957be49-7a67-459b-907c-b5f8b3df4ff1)) - **Collaborate to Learn Academic Secrets** - Collaborate directly with top faculty in your field to gain insider knowledge and mentoring. - Apprenticeship is essential to break into top academic publication venues. Transcript: Cal Newport How do I discover these secrets if the faculty don't even know my name? I mean, honestly, Martin, like if that's what you want to do, right, you want to publish at the top of your field and gun for top academic positions, you need to work for those people. So if there's a few of those people at your school, like you want to find a way to actually collaborate with them. Now, you might not be able to change your postdoc advisor this far into game, but if you can find a way to collaborate with them, hey, I'm making your life useful. I'm writing a paper with you and doing a lot of the work. That's what you have to do. I mean, it's an apprenticeship system. High-end academia is an apprenticeship system. You have to find an apprenticeship. It is very hard otherwise to make your way into this sort of metaphorical guild. So see if there's a way you can write a paper with these top-of faculties. I mean, good for you for noticing, based on last week's answer, that's who you need to be allied, Lewis, if you have this very narrow goal of publishing the top places and getting access To these type of jobs. So you got to find a way to actually work with them. It's very difficult to learn these things from afar. ([Time 0:32:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a564ef72-6d63-414a-9439-6731fa09de70)) - **Content Creation's Social Media Shift** - The shift from traditional media to social media changed the barriers and perceptions around content creation. - Phase one social media allowed 'cosplay' content creation, but real success still requires hard work and expertise. Transcript: Speaker 2 Or do you think today's attention economy is too focused on social media to the point where the barrier to entry is too high for a new successful blog or sub stack? Cal Newport So I was questioning a little bit his use of the word short and long. Maybe you have a better sense here, Jesse. When he's saying short form versus long form, is long form books? Speaker 2 No, long form is a blog or a sub stack and short form is like a YouTube short or something like that. Cal Newport Oh, I see. So he's saying, is it too hard to – the longform stuff that I talked about before, is it too hard now to start with that? Yeah, like to start your website and stuff like that. Okay, so it's always been hard. Here's what I think has happened. And I don't know. This is maybe a curmudgeonly way of looking at the media landscape. But if you look back 30 years ago, where what's dominating in the printed word media landscape is going to be, you know, books and the big glossy Conde Nast magazines that you find on the Newsstand. There wasn't a lot of people who were like, hey, I kind of want to be in that game, right? Like you didn't have to sort of like the average person being like, yeah, I want to be one of the authors on the shelf there at Barnes and Noble or in the van, you know, with my articles in Vanity Fair. You had like a relatively narrow group of people who wanted to be professional writers and that was a vocation. It was kind of competitive, but sort of cool if you could get there. But the average person was content to be like, yeah, I read that stuff. I think a lot of this changed with Web 2, and then particularly after Web 2 gave way to social media, where a big part of the pitch of phase one social media, and I'll tell you what phase one Means in a second, was you can try on, you can cosplay producing content for an audience. I'm convinced that this was the original sales pitch of phase one social media was that Facebook, which was the first big player, they emerged in 04 and they're generally public in 06. You have to remember at this point, Web 2, which had been around since like the early 2000s, which was blogs basically, was pretty brutal. This technology came along and said, hey, anyone now can publish something. You don't have to, there's not a gatekeeper at a magazine or a newspaper or like a web developer you need to sort of put content. You can set up an account and publish something and it's on the web and anyone can read it. And what happened is a lot of people tried it and no one cared because it's really hard to write things as it always has been that people care about. And so a lot of people were disillusioned by blogs. It was it was embarrassing. It was it was whatever it was demotivating. I wrote and no one came. Then Facebook came along and said, okay, here's our deal. You write on here, people will come. Here's the social contact. You're going to go through the contract. You're going to go through and you're going to indicate all these other Facebook users who know you and we're going to tell them about stuff when you publish it. And yeah, the stuff doesn't matter, but there's going to be a social contract that they'll come over and they'll click like and poke and write comments and you'll do the same for them. And we can all sort of feel what it's like to be producing ideas and commentary and have an audience that cares about it. What it would feel like to actually be Michael Lewis writing these pieces for Vanity Fair, right? Or Malcolm Gladwell producing these books that are getting all, you know, these readers. And that was a big appeal of phase one social media. Now that changed, we got the phase two, TikTok brought us into the phase two where we said, you know, forget publishing your own stuff. What really matters is just like put it right into my veins, algorithmic distraction. And we kind of gave up caring about posting stuff and what people thought about us and was just like, put it right, right in my veins until my eyes bleed. That's phase two where we are now. I think that was the original pitch of phase one social media. And so it really traded on this idea that like, yeah, not only is the ability to publish words accessible to a lot of people now, but like it's really kind of right there. You get a couple of right breaks and some stuff goes viral and it just feels like you're right there. You're posting stuff and people, you have this built-in audience that will look at it a little bit and anything could go viral at any time and you hear stories about it. And suddenly now this became something that it was like running triathlons or something that like a lot of people could do. And I think it changed our approach to things like professional content production to like, hey, maybe I should do this. Which again, you don't hear a lot of people in 1985 just casually be like, walk by and see someone reading, you know, The New Yorker and be like, hey, I should write for that. That might be fun. Like, I can start doing that. Because there's just like less venues and they're really hard. So this is being curmudgeonly, but I'm coming back to this and saying, well, what content are you producing? Like, do you want to be a professional writer? Then like you should go down the path of becoming a professional writer. Don't be seduced into this idea that there's some sort of shortcut into that that requires a lot less effort and a lot less hard hoops to make it through where I'm posting short-term content And something takes off and, you know, next thing you know, I'm a writer on SNL or whatever. Like, yeah, that happens, but really not that often. So is the media attention economy too focused for things like a successful blog or sub stack or a podcast or books? No, I think it's like it's always been. It's very hard. It's no easier, no harder than it's always been. If you want people to read your articles or books or listen to your podcast, which is kind of like an audio version of like long articles, it's like like it was 30 years ago. It's hard. You have to have like an extra expertise and a voice and and like find, you know, your audience and what you offer and have a couple swings that finally connect and then build on those. It's the same thing that professional writers have been doing all the time. I don't think it's any harder, any easier than it's been before. We just have this other thing over here, which is the cosplaying that you get in attention economy social media, where everyone feels like they're pretty good and they're one lucky Break away from being the next Kim Kardashian. That, I think, has warped how we think about content creation. But I'm a big believer in writing professionally. I just put these reality checks on it that it's like very hard. Right? Digital technology did not make this something that is easier for like a huge number more people to succeed at. It changed the forms in which you can do it. It changed the economic for the people who are good at it. Now you have more control over how you reach and get to your audience, but it doesn't actually give you a big audience. ([Time 0:33:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b9223f3-4043-4e31-b5f4-709276cb24b3)) - **Leverage Feedback, Manage Stress** - Use the clear, direct feedback from pushbacks to improve your work deliberately. - If stress is high and constant from adversarial roles, consider leveraging skills for a less adversarial environment. Transcript: Speaker 2 Since filings are infrequent and mistakes are highly visible, it's tough to design a deliberate practice routine to reduce pushback. Cal Newport Well, Mark, you're actually in a situation that's really ripe for deliberate practice because you're getting super clear feedback. We are really mad because of X. That's great feedback on like, okay, how do I never do X again? So you probably are in a cycle of deliberate practice here that is making you better. It's not fast in the sense of you're doing 20 reps a day, but like, you know, each year you're getting probably a dozen or two great pushbacks, right? So great teaching signals about what's working and what's not working. And the rate at which you are improving at writing these types of reports that you're filing is probably impressive. If you're looking at the right timescale. I will throw in, however, if this job is stressing you out, and it sounds like it might be, I mean, it was stressing me out. Like you're just constantly being yelled at by people who are mad by default are mad about what you're going to send them. You might think about getting another job. The key, however, is if doing so, take your career capital with you. Don't quit this job to become a yoga instructor. Quit this job to become an actuary somewhere else, but in a non-adversarial environment, right? So if there's something that's emotionally draining about a position, see if you can pick up your skills and take them somewhere else that removes that thing that is emotionally draining. Because I'm suspecting that might actually be the real problem ([Time 0:43:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/64a37875-15d4-4ef5-9f6d-cf7b770a85f1)) - **Learn Quantitative Skills via Projects** - Improve quantitative skills by working on projects requiring those skills, professionally or for fun. - Avoid just studying theory or textbooks without practical application to maintain motivation. Transcript: Speaker 2 However, I'm curious if you have any recommendations for how to improve quantitative and technical skills as a way to get smarter in a dumb world. Cal Newport I would focus on specific projects that require you to master a new technical or quantitative skill to make progress. The two types of projects that you'll actually return to is either one that has a professional salient. So you volunteered to do this thing and your organization's like, yeah, that's good. Do this thing. And now they're waiting for an answer. And to get them an answer, you have to pick up the new skills. That'll focus your mind or something that's really fun. I think there'll be really fun to, you know, build this thing that's going to require me to learn circuit design or going to have to learn computer programming. Maybe I'm doing it with my kids, but have a project that you either are interested in for professional financial reasons or for fun, sort of like family connection reasons, and let that Drive you to have to pick up new quantitative skills. Don't just sit with a textbook and say, all right, guys, it's coming to Torx Day, and just like sit there and try to memorize theorems. Like that's not going to be very fun, but having a project is going to make that easier. I like, by the way, that you brought up my suggestion from before because I always like to underscore that. Read two books that are very smart and have the opposite view on something. Even independent of the content, the dialectical clash of two opposing opinions on something adds just a new layer of nuance to your mind. It just makes you smarter. It makes you see the world in more interesting shades of gray and not black and white. It's a really interesting experience. Even if you don't care about the topic, seeing that clash just adds like a more sophisticated layer to your brain. And if it's a topic you really care about, then you extra sure want to read the opposing view as well, because that's where you're really going to figure out why you care about it. It's going to strengthen your conviction. It's going to make you a better advocate for that. Do not try to avoid stuff that you think is going to be contradicting stuff that you care about because that's not a belief. ([Time 0:45:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9f53158a-0b9a-4cbb-9020-d48fc9e0efbf)) - **Father Balances Art and Family** - A father balanced music, work, and community by organizing his schedule to prioritize deep work and limit distractions. - Intentional structure led to more meaningful productivity and family presence, despite a flexible career. Transcript: Cal Newport If you have a case study, you can send it to jesse at calnewport.com. Do we have a name for this week i guess not we'll just call this peter yeah peter said at the end of 2022 my life reached a turning point i had just become a father father for the first time Released my own music after years supporting other artists and was deeply involved in serving my local baha'i community on paper i had achieved his name is probably not p life goals, But something still felt off. I realized after talking with my wife that I was constantly distracted thinking about music and work while at home and feeling guilty for not being fully present with my family or in My community service. Social media, I suspected, was a big part of the problem. It'd be funny here if the case study said, so I got rid of my family and now have much more time for my social media and I've never looked back. His name is Cyril. Cyril, okay. Social media, I suspected, was a big part of the problem. Discovering your TED Talk and then diving into your books, especially deep work, was a revelation. It helped me see that my habits needed to change if I wanted to be truly present and effective in all areas of my life. Over the past two years, I've worked hard to put your ideas into practice. I've become much more intentional about how I organize my days, treating my music career like a knowledge work job with clear boundaries. Deep work sessions are now a priority, allowing me to focus on improving my core musical skills, which are composing, producing, singing, and playing instruments. I'm also more disciplined with my time. I keep social media off my phone, stick to fixed work hours, and reserve evenings and weekends for my family. This structure has actually made me more flexible, letting me step away from work when needed for family or community projects. I've also picked up new habits like boxing and reading more books, which have brought a steady sense of well-being. All right, what I really like about this case study is this sometimes paradoxical sounding idea that having some more structure and intentionality and control of your time makes your Life slower and more full and more meaningful. There is sometimes this idea that's out there that once you begin to think more intentionally about your time, that necessarily means what you're doing is internalizing capitalist Narratives and you're building your life into like a stressful scramble of trying to produce, produce, produce. But that's not always what's going on. An unstructured life can be busy and exhausting. A structured life can be intentional and more relaxed. And I think that's what we see in Surreal's story here. I'm going to go back and show you a couple things that I think are important here. His job was flexible, right? It's a music production. He's not at an office working for a boss. Adding clear boundaries made it much better. Here's when I work and here's when I'm done. Without that, it just bled over into the rest of his life and it was causing real distress and problems. He makes deep work a priority. There's lots of stuff he could be doing that's probably more fun and maybe I should be working on the social media pages of the bands that I'm repping and try to make sure that they're getting Attention. But he says, no, on a regular basis, I want to deep work on getting better at music. Long-term is probably making it much more successful. Short- is giving him a lot more psychological satisfaction out of his job because it continually connects him back to the core artistic element of what he's doing and why he values it He keeps social media off his phone and weekends and evenings are just for family that really helps i'm not working i'm not on my phone you're going to connect to your family much more So these like simple ideas, but these little rules and structures made a really big difference in Surreal's life. And so I think it is a fantastic case study. All right, let's do a call. Yep. Hey, ([Time 0:47:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b3583352-0ee4-4091-b7ea-1cbbc4a10682)) - **Side Hustle Success Tips** - Avoid side hustles trading time for money; seek scalable income tied to rare skills. - Use money earned as a neutral gauge of your side hustle's real value. Transcript: Cal Newport To me like Alex referred to me as Al. Speaker 2 Yeah, but I think he knows your name's Cal. You think it's because his name, he was queued up to say Alex. Yeah. And then, yeah. He definitely knows your name's Cal. Cal Newport Yeah, all right. I was going to say Alex, I'll see you in hell, buddy. But I'm going to assume that was a runtime error. I was somewhere where I was recently where i was continually introduced as kyle so would you rather be introduced by al as al the weird thing is my wife who was misintroducing me i think She just forgot no i made that up uh side hustles all right uh three things to keep in mind One, I typically would say be wary of a side hustle where ultimately what you'll be doing is trading Your hours for time. So basically wage labor side hustles. They don't scale well. You're typically getting less money for your time than you could get just putting those hours into your primary job. And it's not what you're really looking for with a side hustle, which is like a flexible and stable and potentially scalable source of side income. So it's tempting because they're easier to get into. It's easier to get people right off the bat to pay you for your time. But if you're effectively just if I spend five hours versus 10, I'm going to get half as much money is not where you want to be in a side hustle. That's not a good side hustle. Two, I would say care about your existing career capital. The more that you're leveraging rare and valuable skills that you've earned, the more value you can get and the more likely it is you can have like a really effective side hustle. So if you like something, but you don't have demonstrably rare and valuable skills in that area, the, the possibility that you are going to get sort of scalable time independent income From that direction is very low. That type of low hanging fruit just gets washed out in efficient markets, right? If there's some like relatively easy way that you can make like a lot of money on some topic you're interested in and don't know much about anyone who doesn't know much about it could make Money on that topic and they would start trying it and then that would drive down the price and that market would go away. So the inefficiencies that produce good side hustles usually take advantage of skill. The more rare and valuable skill that you're deploying, the better chance you have of finding a real inefficiency and getting a really actually attractive side hustle. So don't ignore your career capital. You mentioned fashion. Like would really need some sort of career capital and fashion before you think that's going to necessarily be a good side hustle. Finally, there's an idea from Derek Sivers that I featured in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. When evaluating your current side hustle and whether you want, if it's successful or not successful, or whether you want it to become more of a full-time thing, I'm quoting them here, Use money as a neutral indicator of value. All right. Are people paying me for this? People will tell you your idea is good. People will tell you your idea is interesting. People will for free like, yeah, I would love for you to give me a tarot card reading or whatever, but they don't like to give away their money and people only give away their money if they Feel like they're actually getting a proportional amount of value for that money. So Derek Sivers had this idea with the side hustles that he transformed in the full-time roles on multiple occasions throughout his interesting career is that he would use money as A neutral indicator of value. If this is generating money, it's valuable. If it's not, it's not. Should I make this my full-time job? Well, here's the question. Is it generating enough money to be my full-time job? That seems like it's really simple, but people often ignore that. They want to sort of assign other sources of value to their idea. Like, well, it's really cool. I know someone else who did really well with this. My friends tell me it's awesome. It's not really a reliable indicator of value. Get people to give you money. And if they're not, the idea is not that successful. ([Time 0:52:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fe713ae4-e9ed-472f-906c-83b0ea233f99)) - **Study Without Your Phone** - Boost study output by increasing focus intensity, not just time spent. - Never bring your phone when studying to avoid distractions and enable high-intensity focus. Transcript: Speaker 2 And that was my initial introduction to you. My question is, you talked for a second that if you were going to rewrite that, that you would have a section on focus. And I know that you said that you'd probably never rewrite it, but I was curious what principles you would go over in a section like that. That's something that I really struggle with and I'm trying to figure out how to implement that as a college student. Thank you. Cal Newport So my basic framework about focus is in the book and when it changed. There's a core idea in that book, how to become a straight A student from 2006. It's an equation that says work accomplished equals total hours spent times intensity of focus. And my point there, like why I made that argument was one of the easiest ways or most effective ways to get more work done is to not just increase the hours piece of that equation, but to Increase the focused piece of that equation. They're multiplied by each other. Double your focus, you can double your output in the same number of hours. And back then, I was saying what I saw is too many people would study in a low intensity of focus, so sort of at the library with their friends and reading instead of doing more difficult, Like passive consumption of active recall. And they would just try to increase the hours component to get the amount of work that needed to be accomplished done. But that's a hard game. Like you got to spend long amounts of time doing that work. And I would say, no, no, increase that intensity of focus, come at this thing with laser-like focus, and you can drastically reduce the hours needed to get the work done. And that's actually more sustainable in the long run because you're not spending all your time studying. That central equation still stands. What's different is the obstacles to intensity of focus today versus 20 years ago. You have way worse obstacles, in particular, in your hand, in that phone that's next to you while you study. That is a much bigger obstacle than we had to deal with in 2006. I was worried about conversations with people at the same table. I was worried about you just using low intensity techniques. So using study techniques that weren't very mentally taxing. Therefore, they didn't require much focus, but required a lot more time. And like walking over to public email terminals to like check your messages like that's the type of stuff I worried about so you have obstacles to boosting that intensity focus now that Are way more accessible and appealing and disastrous than what we were facing back in in 2026 but I would have one rule one extra rule that I think translates most of the value of that equation To today, never have your phone with you when you study. That would be the rule I would add. And don't look at this like this is crazy. You're not an ER surgical attending. You're not the pope. People will be okay if they can't get in touch with you for 90 minutes. It's okay. You're not that important. Don't bring your phone with when you study. Go to a library to study. Go to a non-popular library to study. Don't have your phone with you. Now you just don't have access to those distractions, right? That's going to make it. Now you can just apply the advice as written in my 2006 book. Now still you have to use high intensity study tactics that are going to get you to focus more, use active recall instead of passive recall. Um, you know, go to places where you don't have a lot of distractions. There's like all this stuff I talk about now, now applies equally as well in 2026 as it was in 2006, as long as you don't have that phone with you. So it would be like my number one, uh, advice. You would want to put a giant sign over over every library or public study space that says, abandon all ye phones ye who enter here. Little Dante reference right there. And that puts you back on a level playing field. And then you actually have a chance of succeeding with focused, high-intensity studying. Let me tell you the effect of this. It will feel like a superpower. You will, and I'm not exaggerating, study a third of the time of the other people in your class and you'll get good grades. If you study without your phone and you use smart study techniques like the type I talk about in my book that actually work, they're hard but actually work and not what's easier, and you Boost up that intensity focus part of of the equation and you do the time management stuff we talked about a couple weeks ago on the podcast that's in that book you're gonna get really Good grades you're not going to work late into the night you're not gonna do all-nighters you're gonna have a lot of free time so that's it that would be the number one thing i would add You just just don't don't have screen time rules. Don't get cued about it. It is just not allowed to come with me when I go to study. That'll ([Time 0:56:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/617776e5-14ea-4656-8606-782c1886fb51)) - **Use Active Recall for Learning** - Use active recall by producing answers out loud from memory to learn effectively. - Passive recall, like rereading notes, is inefficient compared to active engagement with material. Transcript: Speaker 2 Make all the difference. For the newer students in the audience, can you, in a couple sentences, explain to them what active recall is? Cal Newport The only way to learn new information that actually works with any sort of effectiveness is trying to produce the information out loud from your own brain as if lecturing a class without Looking at notes. That's how you learn things. The opposite of that is passive recall, which is where you read your highlighted notes. That is an incredibly inefficient way of learning stuff. I'm going to give you an analogy. Let's make the analogy trying to get like muscles larger. Passive recall is, I'm going to hold a shake weight. Have you seen the shake weight, Jesse? They used to sell these in infomercials. You hold, it's like a dumbbell where the two ends go and they shake back and forth, like powered by batteries or whatever. And like, it's shaking your muscles and like, it's going to kind of make it stronger. I guess you're like kind of holding it up or something. Active recall is like, I'm getting, I'm doing curls with heavy weights and it's kind of sucks because it's like it's burning but I'm doing them you know on a really good schedule like Your muscles actually get easier. It's harder but your muscles going to get bigger. You can stand around with the shake weight as much as you want but maybe get a little bit stronger. So there you go. Active recall is the only thing that matters. It sucks in the sense that it's really hard but you have to think of that hardness as like the, it's not literally this, but like the feeling of your neurons reforming. You're forcing your brain into a new configuration where that information is accessible. Lecturing out loud as if lecturing a class. I preach this to my students like five or six times a semester. ([Time 1:00:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d5b6211-e7de-4b13-bc48-4ed6b74c20cc)) - **AI Scaling Law Slowdown** - AI progress via scale alone is slowing; improvements now require more specialized tuning on specific tasks. - The dream of exponential AI leaps from bigger models is fading; development shifts to bespoke models and applications. Transcript: Cal Newport I want to talk briefly about an article that's important. You might not realize how important it is. I'll bring this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. It's from the Wall Street Journal. It came out on May 15th. Here's the title. Meta is delaying the rollout of its flagship AI model. The company's struggle to improve the capabilities of latest AI model nears issues at some top AI companies. So what's going on here is that Llama 4, which they're nicknaming Behemoth, had been the long-awaited next big large language model from Meta. They were greatly increasing the amount of compute and data, but when they finished, they realized this thing wasn't that much better. It wasn't better enough versus their last model to justify yet releasing it. Now, there's an important quote in here. I'm looking through the article now where other companies have been having similar problems. All right, let me read from the article. Meta's recent challenges mere stumbles or delays at other top AI companies that are trying to release their next big state-of models. Some researchers see the pattern as evidence that future advances in AI models could come at a far slower pace than in the past and at tremendous cost. Right now, the progress is quite small across all labs, all the models, said Ravid Schwartz-Ziv, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at New York University's Center for Data Science. GPT-5, one of OpenAI's next big technological leaps forwards, was initially expected mid 2024, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. In December, the journal reported that development of the model was running behind schedule. All right, and they give some more examples. All right, we can take this off the screen now, Jesse. This is pointing towards a very, very important trend in AI, but the details are a little berky, and I think most people don't know it, and I want to make it as clear as possible. Here's the best way I can explain this. There was, in the aftermath of open AI starting to make their moves with their GPT family of models, so in particular GPT-2 and 3, there was this idea. They're called the scaling laws. There is this idea that as you continue to increase the amount of computation and the amount of data that you use to train these language models, their skills would keep massively jumping Forward. And in fact, the chart that showed this relationship between resources and ability was exponential. And for a while, it was fitting that. GPT-3 was like this huge improvement over GPT-2. GPT-4 was a huge improvement over GPT-3. It was better at like everything. It was doing it better. The visions you heard about a year or more ago about like artificial general intelligence, for about all work being essentially automated was people looking forward on this curve And saying, this was so much better than that model. This model, so much better than this model. As we continue to build out the compute and get more and more data, eventually these models will just become so capable that we can just build software agents around them to actually Execute the stuff they say. We can just say like, hey, here's a job. Tell me how you're going to do it and have a software agent actually execute it. And basically we can automate everything. It will just be able to understand so much about the world that we can just ask it, describe how you do this or that. And we, it'll be a general intelligence that can basically do anything that a human can do. This is going to completely change the world. This was the scaling vision was the vision for what was going to happen. The reality, however, is that the benefits of scaling are starting to give massively diminished returns. It turns out that this exponential doesn't keep going. Hundreds of billions have been invested in building out compute and in building out the biggest possible data sets to train these things. But after roughly that GPT-4 point, the improvements begin to become diminishing. That's why GPT-5 hasn't come out yet. It's not good enough. It's not that much better. It's why Llama 4 Beemoth Project, they haven't released it yet. It's not that much better. And in the cases where they have put this in, you look at like Grok, I guess it's 3 now versus Grok 2, massively more compute. It's a little bit better. So the scaling laws are kind of trailing off. So we're not going to. There's a dream of like if we keep building bigger and bigger data centers, we don't have to do anything else but get bigger. We're going to have like AGI. That's not happening. I don't think everyone's caught up to that yet. There's still so many of these sort of non-technical articles about like, hey, what are we going to do in the future? We're going to have no jobs. They're still looking up this curve. Well, look at how much better this model was than that model. If we just do that five more times, it's the danger of exponentials, the seduction of exponentials. We do that type of doubling in ability five more times and like all work will be done this way. But that's starting to level out. So where is all the energy shifted? Because they still need to make improvements, right? You've noticed OpenAI has now released all these models that have weird names. It's GPT-40 and GT.403 and all these different types of weird names. Well, they're having to put their energy into much more narrow development. So a lot of what's happening now is they'll take what they call a foundational model, which will just be an existing model like GPT-4. And then what they're going to do is they get a particular data set about a particular type of task they care about where they can have a lot of examples of questions and write answers. So computer programming is a fantastic example of this is because you can have a question saying, write a computer program that does this, and then you can compile the answer and test It and see if it actually does it. Math is another area where they could do this because you can write math problems and have the right answer, right? And so they take an already trained foundational model like GPT-4 and they do a tuning step with these type of synthetic data sets with right answers where they ask it these questions. And if they give the wrong answer, they use reinforcement learning to kind of move its weights away from that. And if it gives the right answer, then they use reinforcement learning to make its weights more solidified towards that. And they can tune the base language model to be better at these specific tasks for which they have big synthetic data sets with examples of right answers. That's what they've been doing since the scaling is not working as well. So they're like, look, this model is good at computer programming. Why? They built a huge synthetic data set of computer programming examples. Over here, we have a program that's getting really good at math. Why? Well, because we're hiring a bunch of math PhDs and paying them $100 an hour to write all these problems where here's a problem, here's the answer. We're using that, the TUN foundational language model. The reasoning quote unquote advances that came recently was they worked through, built out these big synthetic data sets of questions that require reasoning and then step-by answers. And then they could use that with reinforcement learning to train certain models to be better at like doing something that looked like that type of step-by reasoning. So that's what's really going on ([Time 1:07:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8f7c516d-96cb-4feb-a771-b467638d6eb0))