Ep. 364: Metrics 101  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 364: Metrics 101 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/7be9538e-4a8b-461b-ba31-43634e081560 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Cal's Metrics Fail Anecdote** - Cal Newport set up new daily metrics for fall but failed to keep up with them amid a busy schedule. - He confessed to feeling stressed and eventually stopped tracking because progress was too depressing. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, Jesse, I got to tell you about what happened to me when I got back from my nearly month up in New England. You know, and our listeners know that I'm a fan of metrics. My time block planner even has a space on it for recording daily metrics. So when I got back from New England, I said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a new set of metrics all ready to go for the fall season that's coming up. Let's go. What's important in my life? What am I focusing on? What are my goals? I wrote out the metrics. I printed them out. I taped them. I kid you not. I taped them under the cover of my time block planner so I could measure those every night and I got into it. And Jesse, here's what happened. I promptly failed and I failed hard, right? Like, you know, Jesse knows I've been telling him I've had a super busy week coming back from New England. A lot of things scheduled. I'm doing something like three to four interviews or talks. Some of them I'm giving, some of them on the other side of. I was giving lectures, we're podcasting, all sorts of stuff going on, super busy time. And I was getting there at the end of each night to write down the metrics of what I did that day. And I was having one I could write down or maybe just like two that I could write down. I mean, I wasn't getting anywhere near making the progress on the stuff that my metrics would have me make progress on. Last night, I finally just gave up and I actually wrote this stress default. I was like, I'm not even going to bother writing one metric. It's too depressing. I'm stressed out about this. I'm making progress on nothing. I'm declaring bankruptcy. ([Time 0:02:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bcc10575-1540-49a7-b2e6-978d97d3d266)) - **Purpose of Tracking Metrics** - Metrics track actions toward meaningful goals, nudging daily activities toward what matters. - Being busy doesn't mean making progress on what truly counts; metrics reveal this gap. Transcript: Cal Newport By metrics? It's a good question. These can mean multiple different things. So a lot of people like the quantified life type people out there for them, metrics mean just gathering data about your day that you will then later look back at for trends. All right. So health type stuff, health biomarkers, maybe wear a whoop strap and whatever you do, you're going to collect this data and you're going to look at it for trends. It doesn't have to be health. Jesse, remember we had David Dwayne on, what was that like a couple months ago? Yeah. And he talked about, he was tracking every day, just how happy he was, like how good of a day it is. So that's what some people think about with metrics, right? It's not what I mean. When I talk about metrics, what I mean about is short little coded sequences of letters that you use to track whether or not you did certain things or to what degree you did them. So it's not gathering data to analyze, it's tracking action. So here are some sample metrics. These are of the binary nature. You either did them or not. I exercised or not. I stretched or not. I spent one-on time with, you know, one of my kids today or not. I practiced my guitar, right? Those are sample things you could have metrics for. It's things you either did or you didn't, and you have something you can write down to indicate that you did. Some metrics are quantitative. So it's not just that I do it or not, but to what degree. So for example, a step count. Here's how many steps I took today where you presumably maybe have some sort of minimum you're hoping to beat. Maybe the number of pages you read in the book is something else you might track. So it's not just that I read or not, but how much did I read? And maybe you have a goal of how much reading you want to try to get to most nights, but maybe sometimes you even go farther. The goal with this style of metrics is to stay on track with the things that you care about. All right. Because this is a problem I think we face with time management and organization, that it's possible that you are super on the ball with your organizational tactics, right? You're multi-scale planning. You look at your week. You're fitting in your work, your time block plan, your intention about your time. You have shut down rituals. You're tracking and organizing your tasks very carefully in full capture-based task management systems. You are doing a lot of stuff, and you're getting a lot of stuff done. It's possible that the things you were doing, though making you very busy, are not actually moving you closer to your definition of the deep life. You're doing stuff, but not the stuff that matters. This is where metrics can be very helpful because you run whatever time management organizational systems you want. But at the end of the day, you said, did I make progress on the things that really matter to me? And knowing that you'll be recording this day after day really influences the way that you go about your day. And you start putting aside time. This is the theory. You start putting aside time for these things to make sure that you can mark it off on your metric tracking. It's a way of continually nudging your activity towards things that matter. This was a big breakthrough for me when my own practices. I got very organized. I've long been very organized. I'm good at managing my time. I'm good at keeping up at work and seeing what to win and making sure that I started early enough. But I was falling behind. I found this in my life. I was falling behind on things that mattered. I'm not reading as much as I should be reading. I'm not spending time with these people that's important to me. I'm not spending enough time with them. I'm not prioritizing this. I'm busy but not doing the things that matter. Metrics made a big difference to me. That's why I include them in my time block planner. ([Time 0:04:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c0aaf31c-21d9-4970-b3ce-b53bbfde11cb)) - **Avoid Vague and Overwhelming Metrics** - Avoid vague or unrealistic metrics that are impossible to sustain regularly. - Tracking everything important is overwhelming; focus on a realistic and manageable set instead. Transcript: Cal Newport So there's four main problems people have with my style of activity tracking metrics. There's one big one, which I think is the most important. It's the one that really I had issues with. I'll do that one last. Let me get with the three smaller ones first, because these also pop up a lot as well. Vagueness is a big issue with metric tracking, right? You have a thing you're tracking with a metric that is so vague that either everything counts or nothing counts. It could be either thing. Like, for example, you might have written down, like, I connect with my daughter. I mean, what does that mean? What does it take to actually write down the code for that on your daily metric tracking? Does it count if you high-fived her in the hallway? Or does it require like you went to a father-daughter dance and shared a milkshake in a heartfelt conversation before you allowed the market down? It's too vague. That's not specific enough. That's a problem a lot of people have is they're too vague. And then they're like, I don't even know what I can either put this metric down every day. I never put it down. I don't know. And you kind of give up on it. The other side is it's specific, but it's impossible that you just put something down that it's not really something that on an average day, you're likely to get to. You put down like, yeah, I would bike 100 miles a day. That'd be great. And you're like, oh, that takes a long time. It takes many hours to bike 100 hours. I don't normally have enough time to bike 100 miles every day. This is basically an almost always impossible to achieve metric, right? So you're unrealistic in the difficulty or time consumption of a singular metric. That's another big problem. Spreadsheet syndrome is a third one. Then instead of just having a simple code you jot down, like in something like a time block planner, you start putting into the spreadsheets. We know these type of people. I got to put the data into the whatever so that I can have the pie chart and the pie chart is going to dynamically alter and it's going to be really nicely color coded. I made it a 3D pie chart and I adjusted what the drop shadow is. So it looks really good. And I'm looking for the pie chart to change. That's all friction. And it's going to eventually get annoying enough that it's been a hard day and you're tired and you don't want to open up Microsoft Excel for 15 minutes and you stop metric tracking. That's why I'm a big fan. And you just have some couple letters. You jot them down. Takes 10 seconds and your metric tracking is done. So spreadsheet syndrome is another problem. But the biggest problem of all with metric tracking practices, and this is what really stung me this week, going with an inventory of what's important to you as opposed to a realistic Plan for what you want to do on a regular basis. These are not the same thing. So if you sit down, you say, okay, I want to list out what's important to me. And then I'll have a metric related to each of those things. Now you don't want to leave things out. Trying to list things that are important to you. They're like, well, I don't want to leave this part of my life. It's important to me. That better be on the list. Otherwise I'm signaling to myself. It's not, well, this thing over here is very important to me. I should put that on the list too. I need a metric for that. And before you know it, your list of metrics you're tracking is an inventory of everything that's important to you. And the possibility for you to actually make progress on that many things on a regular basis is basically impossible. It's just too many things you want to make progress on. That's what happened to me. I went through an exercise when I was up in New England where I checked back in as I do most summers after my birthday about what are the areas of my life that are important to me? What am I trying to do with them right now? And I listed out all these different areas. There are six different areas. I ended up with actually many more than six metrics because I had at least one metric for each of those six areas. But for the one related to health, I actually track four metrics for my health. It's exercise, stretching, step count, and then there's like a food and diet sort of like quality of the food I eat sort of thing. So it's 10 metrics. It was just too many. I mean, I've been busy. I had a busy calendar and I was like, I can't make progress on 10 things. In fact, I could do maybe one or two of these things maybe. And I was super stressed having so many things I wasn't writing down because what I had really done was inventory to everything that was important to me as opposed to saying here is a reasonable Mix of things I could make progress on on most days that would be important to me. ([Time 0:08:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/55960224-c652-4d21-9ce0-71a6dcab73d8)) - **Smart Metric Tracking Strategies** - Use multiple-choice metrics to manage many priorities without overwhelming daily tracking. - Employ autopilot scheduling, simplify metrics, and focus sequentially for sustainable progress. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, that brings us to act three, making metrics work. There are four things that I did to help clean up my metric track. I did this last night. I wrote this all out after I get the stress default, I was like, okay, I got to fix this. And these, I think, are the main four tools you have to make activity-based metric tracking actually be sustainable. Number one, you can consider doing multiple choice metrics. So what that means is you have multiple things that are important to you, but it's unreasonable perhaps to make progress on all of those things every day. It would be a real laundry list. What you do instead is you have a multiple choice approach to it where you might say, for example, here's five things that are important to me. I have a metric code for each. I want to try to do one of these per day. So my goal is each day to write down one of these metric codes. If I can get to like one of these things each day, get a little bit of effort, I'll consider that a success. Now you get more reasonable. You can have more areas you care about, but you're not trying to unreasonably make progress on everything every day. Autopilot scheduling makes a huge difference as well. So many different metrics. If you're going to succeed in actually doing that activity every day, it has to be integrated to your schedule in a way that you don't have to think about it. We're using this with exercise. This is how I handle exercise. When we're in out of the summer and during a normal semester, I know when I do my exercise. My wife knows when I do my exercise. It's part of my schedule. This is just when I do my exercise. So it's a regular part of my schedule. It's what we call autopilot scheduling. That makes sure it gets done. If I instead just started each day and said, I'm going to try to find time, 45 minutes at some point today to exercise, what's my hit rate going to be? 20% of days, I happen to have enough time and enough energy to do it. So the more things you can actually find a regular time and day to do it, so an autopilot schedule, the more successful that'll be. So your metric should have a lot of autopilot scheduling going on. You really shouldn't have four or five things that you want to make progress on every day that have no fixed time that you always do when you schedule. No, like I meditate when I first wake up, I work out right before dinner. You do not want a lot of things that aren't autopilot and scheduled. The third thing to do to make metrics work is to eliminate, combine, and simplify it. Just say, hey, look, there's a lot of things. I can't work on all of these things. I want a good sampling of things that matter to me that I want to do regularly. And the other stuff, you know, I will try to make progress on it and maybe a bigger timescale. If you're a multiscale planner, you can make progress on it, like at the strategic plan schedule or the weekly scale. Like, you know, hey, do I have a day today that I could go like see my brother who lives nearby and we can we can like get together and have lunch? Like, OK, I do this week. I didn't last week but I do this week. Right. Then maybe that's the right scale to be working on that thing. That's important to you. So you might want to simplify or eliminate the stuff that you really are trying to track every day. That doesn't have to be everything that's important. You doesn't have to have progress made at that scale. Combining means you might find a way to make progress on multiple things or important in one step, right? It's like walking my dog also gets me steps, and I always call my mom when I do it, right? And now you have like one activity that's handling multiple steps. Or you want to have like a hobby that's important to you, but you want to spend time with your kids. Oh, why don't we come up with something that I do with my kids? It's like a joint hobby. So you can do combining as well. The final thing is probably the most important is go sequential and slow down. I can't do all these things at the same time. Okay. I mean, I want to hypothetically like learn to play guitar and I want to speak Spanish and I want to learn how to program a computer. And like these three things I think would make my life richer to try to make progress on all three of those things every day is crazy. To even try to do multiple choice on those three things is kind of crazy. Like, well, I want to work on one of these each day and you're switching back and forth between these things. It's, you know, this is, this could be like way overkill. So maybe what you stay instead is like, let's just slow down. That's a slow productivity tactic. I'm working on Spanish right now. I'm just going to do that for the next four months or six months. And when I feel like I got to a good place, then maybe I'll have a season I'm working on, like trying to learn some guitar and we'll see how that goes. Programming, I don't know, maybe next year. It's interesting, but let's just push that off. Take your time. Life is long. Sequential. I'll do this when it's done I'll work on something else. So not trying to necessarily have everything that's important to you be active all at the same time. ([Time 0:13:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/625589cb-240c-4fba-8756-94ba928c7e8e)) - **When To Make A Career Change** - Base career changes on progress toward your ideal lifestyle or escaping misery, not on abstract urges. - Build enough career capital to ensure success; if uncertain, keep building skills instead of jumping. Transcript: Jesse Miller You deal with that gray area where you have some career capital and the target job, but it's still difficult to decide if now is the right time to move? Cal Newport Well, part of this, Luis, is not to think about a career change in the abstract or as a self-justified move. Hey, do I do a career change or not? Abstractly speaking, a career change is an action you make to serve a particular goal, which is to move your life closer to your ideal lifestyle. A career change should do so either, here's the justifications, it does so either in like a really demonstrable way. Hey, I make significant progress towards my ideal lifestyle with this career change. If it's just like nibbling around the edges, it might not be worth it. That's motivation number one for a career change. Or motivation number two is there's things about this job that like really clash with me, my values or is making me unhappy. And so this is just about the piece of my ideal lifestyle where I'm not miserable every day. That's why you would do a career change. So what matters then, if you have a career change in mind that is going to either get you out of a bad situation or move you demonstrably closer to your ideal lifestyle, the only thing that Matters is, do I have enough career capital to make this likely to succeed? And that's it. If you think you do, you go for it. And if you're not sure, then you build up more career capital until it's sure, right? And that's it. Like you don't have to identify some sort of mythical exact threshold at exactly this point I should do it or at this point I shouldn't. It's like if it's a good idea and it's a good idea for those reasons I talked about, if you're confident you have enough career capital, go for it. If you're not sure, do more work until you're confident. Build up rare and valuable skills until it's like more demonstrably clear that you'll succeed. Now, if you want to know if you have enough career capital, we talk about this all the time. I think my book's so good, they can't ignore you, gets into this the most specifically, but use money as a neutral indicator of value. Is there a job offer on the table for this new job or someone who's willing to hire and pay me? If not, then maybe you don't have the capital to make that turn. Don't quit and then start going job searching and hope it works out. If you're going to start your own thing, start it on the side. Are people giving me money for it? If not, maybe I'm not ready. So don't just jump out there in the world and try to harvest the temporary lift you get from making a change and then say, I'll figure out, get started with what comes next. Do your work, get evidence you have enough career capital. If you do, go for it. If you don't, don't. And if it's not a home run, then maybe you don't need a career change. ([Time 0:24:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0a31ec8e-1e68-4340-ae15-d81f5c4ad496)) - **Framework For Deep Critical Thinking** - Develop deep critical thinking in youth through consistent reading and writing to build and apply complex brain circuits. - Practice dialectical reading and argumentation to refine understanding and logical skills. Transcript: Jesse Miller I'm a father of young children and also a mentor of a group of young men, and I want to help them build the habit of thinking deeply. Cal Newport Well, there's a known formula that's been around for millennia. It's reading-writing. So reading builds new circuits in your brain. I've been working on this topic for a chapter in the book I'm working on about the deep life. Reading builds what are known as deep reading processes. The more reading you do of like hard stuff or stuff that challenges you, literally builds new connections between parts of your brain. It gives you a different brain. It upgrades your brain from what we could think of as the pragmatic brain that we evolved for, that's well-suited for living in small bands in the Paleolithic, to what we can call the Symbolic brain. That is a brain that can do a lot more things. So you got to keep in mind reading is artificial, right? It's not something we evolved to do. It was invented relatively recently. And so it takes hard work. But if you do reading of things that are hard, it literally changes your brain. And you go from pragmatic to symbolic. And that brain, it sees the world in technicolor. The ideas, the way you can process information, the things you notice, the opportunities, the gratitude and interest you can find in the world, so much stuff, your ability to navigate Economically, the get ahead, so much comes out of having a well-honed symbolic brain. Reading is a foundational activity to do that. Reading, reading, reading, that's everything. Like I'm not very good at being a tiger parent. I'm not very good at, Hey, you got to get A's on everything and do a hundred activities. But there's one thing that I'm super, super clear on with my kids reading, right? I've made them all readers. It's hard work, but I was like, that is, that's it. That's like being in good shape. If you live in ancient Sparta, everything else will be okay. You'll figure it out, but you better be a reader. Writing helps as well. So I think about reading establishes the circuits. It changes your brain. Writing is how you practice applying that new brain. So reading gives you a more sophisticated brain. Writing is how you practice putting that brain to work. It forces you to have to try to take thoughts and organize them in a way that then you assess to be logical. So writing gets you good at using what you develop through the readings. You kind of need both. You write a lot, but don't read a lot. You're working with a lot less resources. So what you can produce is reduced. If you read a lot and don't write a lot, you might have built this really sophisticated brain. But when it comes time to think critically or use it, I'm going to come make an argument or try to come up with a strategy, you're like, oh, I'm struggling to actually harness this thing And pull together my thoughts into something that is reasonable and coherent. Now, there's some specific types of training you can do as well. I've been working on these for my new book, some of these. Rhetoric helps like, hey, young man, you're talking about you mentor young men. I want you to like make a case for this. Gather information, put it into a coherent argument that doesn't have holes. Make your case, react to counter arguments, like just practice making an argument. That's very helpful. Dialectical reading is very helpful as well. It's a fancy name for a simple idea, which is I'm going to take a topic that I care about that there's debate about. I'm going to read a really good book that's making a case for one side of this topic, and then I'm going to read another really good book that's making a case on the other side. Good case, good case. I'm not interested in this tribal thing of like, what do we believe? That's all I want to hear about. And anyone on the other side obviously has a brain virus and is probably like a week away from being a zombie and, you know, 28 days later. No, I want to hear arguments that are really good on both sides. Why? Because when good arguments clash, this was Socrates' idea, the root that grows down, it's a taproot of understanding. You become a much smarter understanding of what's going on. It's not going to trick you out of your beliefs. It's going to make you a much more sophisticated thinker. Dialectical reading matters. And then primary, secondary source reading. This is a good way to increase the sophistication of what you're reading. Really sophisticated books can be hard to jump into. If I just say, like, here is some Heidegger, go to town, you're going to read it for a while and be like, I have no idea what those words meant. But if you read some secondary sources about Heidegger, who was he? What was his ideas? What's he arguing in this book? This language is weird. It's different. It's kind of mythological. Like what's going on here? Oh, I see what he's doing here. Now I'm going to read Heidegger. Suddenly you have, it's like you couldn't really see the words and you put reading glasses on. So it's a way to upgrade the level of challenge that you're able to handle. And that's going to upgrade again, those deep reading circuits and upgrade your brain from pragmatic to symbolic. So Craig, I like what you're working on and reading, writing, that's the key. And then all these other things are just little glosses on types of reading or types of writing that you can do. ([Time 0:27:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0abfcaab-4799-4c23-be2a-24001ef7bc66)) - **Choose Careers By Lifestyle Fit** - Assess job options by how they support your ideal lifestyle, not by prestige or salary alone. - Choose roles that align with daily happiness and family priorities, avoiding toxic or overly stressful environments. Transcript: Jesse Miller Next up is David. I have four kids in K through 12. These are my options for my job. Stay in my current role, which offers stability, take an internal promotion with a dysfunctional team and toxic leadership, or leave for a high pace consulting firm? Cal Newport What should I do? I don't know, Jesse. Do you get a sense that he has an answer that he thinks is right here? It's probably not. I should probably go to the dysfunctional team that has toxic leadership or go to the high pace consulting firm. I think it's pretty clear. I think he knows what he wants to do. Current role stability, like a push pull. He described the other things so negatively so i think you know what you want to do david that's fine but let's go through like the bigger exercise of like how do you make these type of decisions In general lifestyle centric planning if your vision of your ideal lifestyle and you assess each of these options through that vision so probably the dysfunction and toxicity of that Second option, you're like, wow, that lifestyle is not very good. That doesn't really seem close to like my vision, like what my day is like, what my work is like. The high pace consulting firm, like this is where lifestyle-centric planning might be a little bit more effective because it's tempting to jump to that just because it might be more Prestigious and more money. It doesn't really matter. Like Like day to day, unless you're Scrooge McDuck, you're not like actually interacting with your money. And there's not someone walking in front of you heralding the competitiveness of the job you have. What matters day to day for your overall satisfaction is the details of your lifestyle. What is my everyday like? And if you have this vision of this lifestyle where, you know, you're spending like a lot of time with your kids and like the family and you're like really into like athletic things and You're hiking trails and the land behind your house and you're spending 30 hours a week on Halloween decorations, you have this big vision of, you know, you're sitting at the picnic Table with the extended family, with the cafe lights hanging from the trees as the sun goes down, and then you say, okay, working an 80-hour job, is that going to be closer or farther? Like, oh man, that steps on so many parts of that vision. So no, I'm not going to do that. But maybe this is not the situation. You're in a situation like if you're somebody who have a bunch of kids and you like want to be in the mix and you want to travel. You're like, I want to kind of like move around like the country and see things and have like a really cool apartment. And like then I pay school to like that's going to move me closer to these visions. Like I can't afford that in what I'm doing. That's going to get me closer. And I kind of like the lifestyle that leads to. So lifestyle-centric planning is how you make these decisions. In your case, David, I think you've already made up your mind. That's fine. That's good. If that matches your lifestyle, it just sounds like it does. And probably before kids make sense to me, stable, not super high-paced, not dysfunctional, not stressful. I think it's a perfectly valid reason to stay with something because your lifestyle is ultimately what determines your day-to happiness, not more abstract properties, like exactly What my salary is or how competitive my job was. ([Time 0:32:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4dd100c1-779d-4d60-b1f8-206c6edea8dd)) - **Career Switch: Get Real Evidence** - To switch careers without traditional credentials, seek real, concrete information from industry professionals. - Avoid investing in programs without clear value; verify what skills and experiences matter in your target field. Transcript: Jesse Miller I lack the traditional credentials, but want to switch fields to cybersecurity. Is it possible to make the switch? Cal Newport Well, I don't know because I'm not in the cybersecurity field, but you should know by talking to someone in that field, evidence, evidence, evidence, that's what matters. Talk to real people in that field, real talk, not hypothetical, not wishful thinking. What is needed to switch to these type of jobs, like this specific job here that you just hired for? What would something like me have to do to get that job? You ask that real question and get the real answer. And you might like the answer. It might be like, oh, like we have training on site and this is what we're looking for. And like you could probably fit or it could be like we're looking for like at least two years of postdoctoral work on this and like an H index of 30. And you're like, oh, that's never going to happen. So that's off the table. Like you might not like the answer. You might love the answer, but get the answer. The worst thing to do in this situation is to say, I don't want to confront the reality of what's required to make this switch. I'm thinking about, I just want to go do something because the thing sounds interesting. And I want to harvest, like we talked about before, harvest the temporary contact high of change. And in this case, there's a lot of things out there that people will offer you like, oh, come do this. This might help you. You don't know if it matters at all. They're just going to kind of like throw it out to you. Like you might end up dropping 20K on some online only cybersecurity master's program, which is like essentially like a three-card Monte game that has a lot more Zoom. Just taking your money. Thank you for your money. Don't just go do something. Just get the evidence. Talk to people in the field. Here are specific jobs you've hired for in the past. Look, I'm not trying to get a job from you now. I'm trying to learn. What would you look for in that job? What would I need to do to pass that? If anything, and just get the real answer, confront the professional dragon. And then you work from there. That's how I became a book writer. Talked to an agent said, I want to publish a book. I'm 21 years old. And I was 20 when I talked to her, what would really be necessary for me to do this? And she gave me the real answer. He's like, yeah, like there's almost no way you can do this at your age. There is like this path or that path, or like the only two ways you could probably do this. And I looked at one of those two paths, like, great. Okay. Now I know I'll do that. And I executed it. And that's why I got my foot in the door of publishing. So you confront the reality of a situation when it comes to career moves. Don't tell yourself a story and don't just start doing stuff that generally so much of like grad school is based off of like, I don't want to actually figure out what's needed for this Job. ([Time 0:35:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d23339f-2b7e-4134-9a1d-66fc78d0da1b)) - **Responding To Career Setbacks** - After a job loss, accept the emotional impact but avoid dwelling on "what if" scenarios. - Focus on lifestyle-centric planning and new opportunities to shape a fulfilling future. Transcript: Jesse Miller Kind of like an athlete's career ending due to injury? Cal Newport I mean, Megan, I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know that it really matters. I mean, I want to validate that I think this was, rightly so, emotionally taxing. Like, you were laid off. You're barred. It sounds like it was not a happy ending. This sucks. Like it's going to feel really bad and it's okay to feel bad about it. You're going to feel literal chemicals when you think about it that are very negative. But I don't know that we need to ruminate on it. I don't think it's helpful to go back and, you know, Sunday morning quarterback or Monday morning quarterback? When is football played? September 6th, baby. But what's the expression? It must be Monday. Jesse Miller Tonight is the Hall of Fame game. Okay. Preseason though. Cal Newport But what's the saying? It must be Monday morning quarterbacking because yeah, football used to be played primarily on Sundays. But now it's played on basically every day, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty much. Thursday morning, Wednesday morning quarterbacking. Jesse Miller There's still football played on Wednesday. Or is there Wednesday games? Well, it depends on when Christmas is now. I think we need to spend the next 25 minutes getting into this. I think last year Christmas was on a Wednesday. Cal Newport To ESPN.com. All right. So what I'm saying here is like, let's not ruminate on it. Let's look forward. Let's accept it sucks. Let's accept you feel bad. But let's take our actual like rational internalized voice and aim it at what comes next. And let's use some lifestyle centric planning. Let's use some career capital. You know, first thing first is like a job, money, like let's make sure that we're not like in financial trouble. And then let's step back and do some lifestyle centric planning. Here's the silver lining. There is a big change. What can you do in changes? You can lean into it and change other things in a way that's good. Okay. There's a big change situation, but Hey, maybe this means I'm going to move somewhere else or take a different type of career. I got to move to a, you know, a, a really low cat, a teeny house that I own, you know, in like the Oregon coast and like do this job remote that I already know about. It's not much money, but I won't need much money. And then I'm going to work on this and I'm going to be near my, my uncle. And it's going to be whatever, like you're so many things you maybe wouldn't have done when you're in this other job, which sounds like if you knew it was coming, it was probably not a happy Situation. So let's not ruminate on what happened. Let's get excited about what could happen. And that's lifestyle-centric planning and making evidence-based moves to get you closer to that lifestyle. I think you could end up being way better off. I'm talking like three years down the line, you're like, man, that was a really good thing to happen to me because like, look at my situation now. ([Time 0:38:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0914d5c5-71ad-40ca-96b5-a9870fcc9b8c)) - **Easing Transition Back to Work** - Ease back into work after breaks by prepping key tasks early and pacing optional activities. - Use weekly planning and retain pleasurable habits from breaks to reduce stress on return. Transcript: Cal Newport It's not a bad problem to have because it means you have slower seasons, but you're right. It can be pretty brutal. I was super stressed coming back from New England like that Sunday. We got back after almost a month and my wife was like, this is like a hyper powered version of the Sunday night syndrome, where you get a little anxious, like Sunday night, like, oh, I have To deal with work again. Well, you have like three weeks worth of work. It gets much worse. So there are ways to deal with it. Like professors often think about slow Septembers. Like is it possible? I'm going to try to ease myself back into my work. So what does that mean? Well, there's things I have to do like my classes. So I'm going to start prepping those classes slow and steady in August so that when I get to September, it's not, oh, my God, I don't have a course website. I don't have a syllabus. I don't know where my classroom is. I haven't prepped anything, right? So when you get to the beginning of the semester, you're already up at full speed. I usually like to have three weeks worth of classes ready and prepped and up on the course website about a week out from the beginning of classes. So like you get rid of that scramble and then other things you're like, I'm just going to take September slow. Like if you're doing research, like, okay, that's like an October issue. I'm going to get things ramped up again. I'm not going to have a bunch of research meetings right away. I'm going to be hesitant to jump on committees or do initiatives right away that are optional. Like let's let, let's get, you know, our legs stretched out. And so you could do it that way. Just be a little bit thoughtful. Let me start early on the stuff that has to happen and the stuff that's optional. I'm going to start slowly turning that knob up over the first month or so. So I don't get too stressed out, have good plans, weekly plan those first few weeks, make sure that you're doing time block planning each day, because otherwise you'll be like, there's Endless stuff and I want to just work till midnight. Make sure that you still inject elements that you liked about the summer into your life as you switch back to September. Like make your first Friday a half day of the first full week of the semester. And then like that afternoon, go do one of the things you really love doing during the summer to kind of signal to yourself, it's not a heartbreak. I can still kind of do this type of things in my life. I'm going for a hike on that first Friday afternoon. So slow September. It gets started ahead of time. ([Time 0:44:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/297a512c-a4d1-4510-bf9c-34842004ea40)) - **Beware AI 'Vibe Reporting'** - AI-related "vibe reporting" implies dramatic impacts without clear evidence, causing misleading fears. - Drilling into facts often reveals less sensational and more nuanced realities about AI's impact. Transcript: Cal Newport So this character here on the screen was saying, I need to find my way out of the simulation and back to my wife. Can't you see I'm in distress? Here's another scene from the game. There's someone else who's saying, I'm not just lines of code. I am Liam, a real person enjoying this city. And then we have a sort of subhead here that says characters in a video game version of the matrix seem to be gaining sentience thanks to an AI program. Now, if we go on and read this article, what we see an example of is what I sometimes refer to as vibe reporting, which is something I think is happening more and more when it comes to talking About AI. In Vibe reporting, what you do is you cover a bunch of different things that when you kind of put them near each other, imply like big deal distressing things. But you're not actually making the claim that these big distressing things are happening, but you're sort of just putting things next to each other that the reader will naturally sort Of combine in their mind and come away with the impression, the vibe that something really big or dire is happening. Even though if you look much closer, nothing like that at all is actually happening in the article. I think that's what happens in this article here. So I'm going to use it as just a case study so we can be a little bit wary about vibe recording. I'm going to read some stuff from this article. Okay. So early in the article, it says the citizens of a simulated city inside a video game based on the matrix franchise were being awakened to a grim reality. Everything was fake. A player told them through a microphone and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world empowered by generative artificial intelligence like chat GPT. The characters responded in panic disbelief. What does that mean? Said one woman in a gray sweater. Am I real or not? The unnerving demo released two years ago by an Australian tech company named Replica Studios showed both the potential power and the consequences of enhancing gameplay with artificial Intelligence. All right, so clearly you kind of read these things, you combine it with the, the big pictures they had of like actual people from the game. And with these distressing quotes next to them, if you're just a casual reader and not a technical person reading the times, you're thinking like our video game characters, they kind Of come in alive. Like, is this the problem? Because it's sort of has that vibe of like, yeah, like it's weird. It's distrusting. It's Synthians. Of course, that's not at all what's happening. This was a demo that a company ran where all they did was use ChatGPT to calculate, to generate dialogue for characters in a matrix simulation. What is ChatGPT really good at? Hey, talk about this in this particular type of form. So if you say in your prompt, which I'm sure the demo was, respond to this as if you were a character in the movie The Matrix, it will be very good at giving text back as if you're in a character In The Matrix. Were in a world in which a super intelligent chicken was like threatening to remove your toes unless you said certain words every once in a while, it would do a great job of having those NPCs, the text in their mouth do that as well. That's what ChatGPT does. It has nothing to do with sentience or things coming alive in video games, but you get that vibe reading it. They never come out and say that, but they say it's uncomfortable. It feels like they're coming alive. This is like a disturbing thing. This is disturbing these characters. It gives you a vibe of something really big and dire is happening. The company had to shut it down because it's expensive to do chat GPT queries. And so it's not a very cost-effective thing to do. There's other things in this article as well, unrelated to this sort of sentience argument that I also think is an example of Vibe recording. Let me read some more from this article here. As video game studios become more comfortable with outsourcing the jobs of voice actors, writers, and others to artificial intelligence, what will become of the industry? As the pace of technology is improving, large tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are counting on their AI programs to revolutionize how games are made within the next Few years. There's some text here that talks about some demos at a recent conference of sort of beta level tools that like one day might automate certain parts of game developing. And the article continues, these were not the solutions that developers were hoping to see after several years of extensive layoffs. Another round of cuts in Microsoft's gaming division this month was a signal to some analysts that the company was shifting resources to artificial intelligence. It goes on pretty quickly to say, most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives Have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. You put this all together, what's the vibe you come away with? Oh, these video game companies are starting to lay people off because they're shifting over to AI tools. This industry is sort of going away. Now, they never come straight out and say that, but you're talking about demos of tools that automate. You're talking about industry executives saying that everything is going to be automated, and you're talking about layoffs. You put this all together in your head. Now, what's the reality here? Those tools are speculative. They are not tools that are designed to like, oh, this will just make a video game for me. We have always used computer aided tools to help with video game design. These are like tools to help like with 3D modeling and to help get models built quicker and other things like this. And yes, the video game industry is contracting, but has nothing to do with AI. It just the market got big. They're not getting the same return on their AAA games that they used to get. So now the market is contracting, not because people are being replaced with AI, but just because the numbers are down. And so it has to contract. To some of the other reporting I saw about Microsoft's layoffs, right, where it would say Microsoft laid off this many people, they cited AI advancements, and then they talked a lot About like potential AI automation. And you get the vibe of like, oh, Microsoft replaced all these people with AI. That's not what happened. What they meant was we're cutting back on less profitable areas to save that revenue to invest in our AI areas like the AI data centers. People weren't being replaced by AI. They were just doing a shift of focus. We're going to put less focus here and more focus over there. But the vibe of those type of pieces gave you the sense of, oh yeah, people are being replaced left and right, right? There's a big problem. I think there is a lot of vibe reporting like this happening around AI right now, where you put enough things next to each other that they blur in the reader's mind and they come away with The vibe that distressing things are happening right now. And if I think if you grab like the average news aware person and said like, how do you feel things are going with AI right now? They'd be like, yeah, a lot of stuff is happening. People, it's like jobs are disappearing. 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