Ep. 366: How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 366: How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/607de4d6-f293-4b97-99e5-660600d2e596 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Automate And Curtail To Free Breathing Room** - Use the detailed data from planning to automate recurring tasks and remove obligations that drain time and energy. - Curtail or outsource activities that fragment your schedule to create breathing room for meaningful projects. Transcript: Cal Newport So one of the big advantages of having these systems, and this is crucial, one of the big advantage of having these organizational systems is not that your goal is to try to fit more work Into your life. This is the common barb made at this type of thinking of the only reason why you'd want to do multi-scale planning is so that you can work more. And you probably watch a lot of hustle culture, YouTube videos, but that's not why we do this. We do this because we want information about how long things actually take control about how we spend our time. And then we can use this information to make our life better, not worse, to make it less busy, not more busy. ([Time 0:15:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/630a8448-6794-4dd8-a873-bcb226f40ec7)) - **One Small Overhaul, One Big Beginning** - In the vision layer, complete one small overhaul (fully done) and start one large overhaul (longer-term plan). - Prefer a non-professional small overhaul to make life more remarkable and start a career or lifestyle overhaul in parallel. Transcript: Cal Newport Okay. I finally figured out by the way, how to draw thicker lines. This final layer is vision. This is where you take in the typical deep life process, this is where you take specific aspects of your life and you overhaul them to be more remarkable. So now you have this great foundation of discipline, meaning that you have reinvented your identity as someone who is capable of doing things that have a long-term reward, even if they're Hard in the moment. You're in touch with your values, so you have this foundation that can get you through the good and bad. It's a compass that keeps you aiming in the right direction. You have control over your time, so now you have the ability to aim yourself and your energies in intentional directions, and now you figure out where to aim it. How to take aspects of your life and make those aspects of your life remarkable. So I'm going to put here, I'm going to label this here, one small, plan one large. So what I mean by this is during this final step of your four-month reinvention, I want you to actually take an area of your life, preferably a non-professional area of your life, where You're going to do a full overhaul of that towards more remarkability. And I'll give you an example about this in a second. But you take some aspect of your life and you do a full overhaul towards remarkability. And then you take one larger areas of your life, and this could be like what you do for a job, where you live, and you begin the process of an overhaul there. This could be one of these longer-term overhauls that could take a year or two to really think through. So you get a small overhaul completely done, and a big, exciting overhaul actually started. ([Time 0:19:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/261de216-a40a-42ed-a824-f2ef91e26b38)) - **Four-Month Fall Timeline To Reinvent** - Follow a four-month timeline: 2 weeks discipline, 4 weeks values, 4 weeks control, and final 6 weeks for vision overhauls. - Finish by January so you start the new year already living the changes. Transcript: Cal Newport How do we time all this? Because we have now quite a few different things I suggested, and we need this all to fit into for months. So I'm going to draw on the screen here a timeline. All right. This will be our four-month timeline, and I'm going to label this timeline with the relevant months. So let's see, we got September. We'll imagine we're starting this in September, and then we get October starts, then November starts, then December starts, that brings us to January. All right, so for those who are listening, I have four months written up on the screen. All right, so let's think about how long should we be spending on each of these things. I had to actually, I dropped the page that had my notes. I had to go get that. Okay. So let's start with discipline. I'll use yellow here on our timeline to mark that. So remember in discipline, you set up your core and got three keystone habits up and running. I'm going to suggest that we just take the first two weeks for this. I've marked the first two weeks on our calendar, uh, just for getting some keystone habits up and running your core system up and running. All right. Next comes values. I'll use a different color for this. So remember, you have to reconnect with your moral intuition, you have to get a code going, you have to get a regular ritual going that reminds you on a regular basis about this moral intuition. Here, we're going to put aside four weeks. And our schedule here, we're going from mid-September to mid-October. All right. So the next layer here was control. I'll use a different color here. Now we have a multi-scale planning, getting going to your professional life, some sort of household capture and planning system, and a stepping back after a little while of doing this And doing some automation and curtailing. I think we need four weeks for this as well. So I have mid-October through mid-November marked on here. All right. Because it's going to take a few weeks. You might want to spend two weeks on the business, one week on the personal life, and then give yourself a week after that of learning from the systems and starting to make some decisions. And we're left now with the vision piece. We're going to do a complete small overhaul of an area of your life and plan out a larger overhaul. And I'm going to mark on here the final six weeks. So overhauls can take some time. So we'll give ourselves six weeks. ([Time 0:25:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ea441b7-8f1a-417b-8fc0-acb06a64fdca)) - **Start With A Core And Three Keystone Habits** - Set up a single physical or digital core that captures every commitment for your reinvention and keep it where you check daily. - Choose three keystone daily habits: one professional, one health, and one personal high-quality practice. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll use yellow here on our timeline to mark that. So remember in discipline, you set up your core and got three keystone habits up and running. I'm going to suggest that we just take the first two weeks for this. I've marked the first two weeks on our calendar, uh, just for getting some keystone habits up and running your core system up and running. ([Time 0:26:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/240aa71b-f7ca-4681-bfd4-eb18b765a86c)) - **Rebuild Values With A Code And Rituals** - Reconnect with moral intuition by rereading influential works and create a personal code that guides you through good and bad. - Add regular rituals that viscerally reconnect you to those values (meditation, nature, volunteering, or religious practices). Transcript: Cal Newport I'll use a different color for this. So remember, you have to reconnect with your moral intuition, you have to get a code going, you have to get a regular ritual going that reminds you on a regular basis about this moral intuition. Here, we're going to put aside four weeks. And our schedule here, we're going from mid-September to mid-October. ([Time 0:26:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af549765-05d9-4f09-8b8f-14be0029c6a3)) - **Control Your Time With Multi-Scale Planning** - Implement multi-scale planning: seasonal (3–4 months), weekly, and daily time-block plans that link to each other. - Use full capture for household tasks and review them during your weekly plan to reduce chaos outside work. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll use a different color here. Now we have a multi-scale planning, getting going to your professional life, some sort of household capture and planning system, and a stepping back after a little while of doing this And doing some automation and curtailing. I think we need four weeks for this as well. So I have mid-October through mid-November marked on here. All right. Because it's going to take a few weeks. ([Time 0:27:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/02fa76be-ffb3-40a0-bd75-50d932a7f68f)) - **Fall Is Better Than New Year's For Overhaul** - Reinventing in fall gives you momentum so you're settled by New Year's while others start. - The deep life stack builds capacity to keep adding remarkability beyond the initial overhaul. Transcript: Cal Newport You're being pushed around by digital technology in your life outside of work. You're just looking at your phone and are being dragged along emotionally by whatever is being shown on social media as the big thing to be upset about or not, or having drool-inducing Distraction. And your professional life is just email and Zoom all day. You're generically busy. Don't even know what it is you're doing there. If you're caught in the shallows of the digital, the aimless digital, you do four months, go through a stack once, in the way I recommend, you're going to feel a lot more freedom. You're going to feel more in control. You're going to feel more grounded in what matters to you. You're going to feel like not only have you overhauled part of your life, but that you have the capabilities to keep going and pile remarkability upon remarkability. ([Time 0:28:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ac87b085-f7c2-42e7-97d2-ad6b47f11574)) - **Hut Ranger's Paper Credit-Card Slip** - Cal told a story about a hut ranger taking credit card numbers on paper to show non-digital retail oddities. - He used the anecdote to recommend Shopify's point-of-sale as an example of digital tools solving old manual problems. Transcript: Cal Newport I was hiking last month in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. And we went to a hut, one of these like Appalachian Trail huts in the top of a mountain in Franconia Notch, and there was a ranger up there selling snacks. You know how you did the purchase? They wrote down your credit card information, the number, the expiration, your address on a sheet of paper, an old-fashioned credit card slip, which they put in a folder. And you know what thought I had in that moment? This is true. Man, I bet they wish they could use Shopify. Because here's the thing. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail businesses that can bring together both your online and in-store operations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient. We're talking endless aisle, ship to customer, buy online pickup and store, all made simpler so customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close to sale every time. Look, this has proven that this stuff works. Based on a report from EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relative to The market set survey. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/deep. Go to shopify.com/deep. ([Time 0:35:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0a9259dc-2b8a-45a3-b023-678556a6cbfc)) - **Ease Into Multi-Scale Planning By Time-Blocking** - Start multi-scale planning with daily time-block planning first since it's the hardest and most impactful habit. - Add weekly and seasonal planning after one to two weeks of daily blocking to lock the system in. Transcript: Cal Newport So multi-scale planning we talked about earlier. Quick reminder, you have three different time scales at which you plan. Week, day. You update the season, every season, you update the week, every week, looking at the season. When you do so you update the day, every day, looking at the week when you do so. So everything gets connected back. Is there a way to break this up, to ease your way into this type of planning? One way to do this, I suppose is start with daily time block planning. That's the hardest discipline of all this is because it's not only you do it every day, but it is how you run your workday. So it's the, it's the biggest change you're going to see in your day-to experience of your work from the whole multi-scale planning philosophy is going to be doing that daily time block Planning. And there's no way to break that up. You just need to do it. Now, if you want to help convince yourself, I'm a daily time block planner, I'm really giving this a try. That's why, you know, I do sell that planner because it really helps people signal to themselves. I'm doing this. I spent 20 something dollars on this. At least I'm going to try this for a while. So if you need a kick, you can look at timeblockplanning.com and find that planner, timeblockplanning.com probably, or do it in a notebook or however you want to do it. But just get going with daily time block planning. After you've done that for a week or two, and you sort of get the feel of it, you're seeing the benefits, then you can add in the weekly seasonal planning. And I'm going to tell you that that's going to be easy. Because the time footprint of weekly seasonal planning is small. It's not that hard to do. Weekly planning takes 30 minutes. Seasonal planning, you're doing what, three times a year. So it's not going to be hard to add that. The hard part is the daily time block planning. So you can either just jump right in and do all three or daily time block plan for a week or two before adding in the other two elements. ([Time 0:37:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc4dd16e-0bbe-4f92-aad1-97c978a38c6d)) - **Separate Preparatory Sessions From Deep Work** - Separate preparatory/fiddling sessions from intense deep-work sessions to avoid costly context shifts. - Use dedicated low-stakes sessions to collect, format, and prepare materials so deep work stays focused. Transcript: Cal Newport I think it's a really good idea. Does it fit into the deep life framework? Well, everything kind of does, right? So again, I guess I would place this as something you might experiment with in the control layer of your deep life stack, because that's where you really put in place the systems that Help you take control over what's on your plate and keep things reasonable. But let's really look at this strategy because I like it. I like this idea of having non-deep or non-intense sessions for your deep work style of work that complement the more intense deep work sessions. So Philip is a programmer. So he talks about, he has programming time where he's not really writing code, but just doing all the other stuff that a programmer might fiddle with when working on code. So formatting things and changing configurations in their editors. And then he has completely separate sessions where I'm actually trying to do the intense cognitive thing of writing code. So I don't know if I would use the terminology unstructured or structured. Maybe I would do preparatory and focused. That's maybe a better way of thinking about it. But I think it's a really good idea because as we know, there is a cost to cognitive context shifts. And even within a given activity, just that shift from wandering fiddling mode to I'm serious about what I'm doing mode can be really significant. And we see this with a lot of work. If you're a writer, this is really easy. You can fall into internet research mode, and it's very hard to get back into crafting sentences mode. You can get into trying to get a formatting thing proper for the article you're writing. Like, why is this block quote not quite right? And it's hard to get back into the, uh, that's crafting mode. Certainly we see this in brainstorming. Let's say you're brainstorming a product or business strategy. As soon as you're looking at the features on the fancy smart whiteboard that you're using, you lose that thread of momentum of trying to think big thoughts. That's because really hard focused thinking gets your entire mind oriented around this one thing you're doing and you're holding the relevant variables and information in your working Memory and using those to try to move forward down the path of critical intense cognition. As soon as you start messing with that context and putting other stuff into those working memory variables, once you start loading up other context in your brain, you lose that thread. The proverbial man falls off of the high wire. So I think this is a really cool idea. And so if we're going to make this suggestion systematic, what is Philip actually suggesting here? For intense deep work, have unrelated sessions, not touching the deep work session, for preparation and fiddling. So if you're a programmer, have a session where you're looking at your code and formatting things and reminding yourself of where you're going to write and where you need to write the New section of code. If you're a writer, you have everything set up. This is a good time to get your research in order. You could have a session where you find, okay, what are all the articles I'm going to need to cite for these next few paragraphs I'm going to write for this magazine article? Let me go get those and put them nicely into the system and pull out the quotes. And then you're done with that and you're done with that. And then later you sit down to write code and that's all you do. Later you sit down to write the paragraphs of that magazine article and everything's there and that's all you do. I think that's a really good strategy when it comes to particularly intense deep work. So I like that. Unstructured preparatory deep life. ([Time 0:41:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/53511dcb-c5d4-4b61-9f5b-de35eb43dd36)) - **The Trap Of The Passion Mindset** - The passion mindset obsessively asks 'what does this offer me?' and fuels constant switching when tasks get harder. - That restless search prevents building the depth needed for real skill and fulfillment. Transcript: Cal Newport Off right now as I read your question. You, my friend, are deeply tangled into what we call the passion mindset. This terminology is from my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was basically a book all about this issue that you're facing right now. In fact, the motivation for that book was dealing with college students switching their majors all the time. So we're really in the territory that I spent a lot of time thinking about. So what is this passion mindset? It's the mindset that says you should focus a lot on what the current thing you're doing, whether it is an academic major as a student or a job as a non-student, you should focus on what The current thing you're doing offers you. And you should be really worried, is it offering me enough or is something else going to offer me even more? So am I loving this major or would that major, I'm going to, that's, I'm really going to enjoy that more. Is this job really letting me, is it giving me the things I really love to work on or would another job have a different setup where I would get even more excitement out of it or even more Fulfillment out of it? So it's constantly thinking me, me, me, what's being offered? What could offer me more? This is a very dangerous mindset, especially when it comes to your professional life. So beginning with the majors you choose and then with the jobs you choose after that. And it's dangerous for exactly the reason that you are experiencing in your own life. ([Time 0:45:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39c69e70-b407-425b-a38b-18f10eb77284)) - **Plan Your Career Around A Lifestyle Vision** - Use lifestyle-centric career planning: define your ideal five- to ten-year lifestyle and reverse engineer jobs that lead there. - Adopt a craftsman mindset: ask 'what can I offer?' and build career capital rather than endlessly chasing passions. Transcript: Cal Newport What you need to do instead, James, is lifestyle-centric career planning. We talk about this all the time. But you fix a clear vision of what you want your life to be like five or 10 years from now. This is a vision that captures all aspects of your life, and it is visceral. What does it feel like? Where are you? What do you see? What do you hear? What's the rhythm of your day-to life? It's not just work, but what's happening in your life outside of work. What, when you see in a magazine or a documentary or a book, has resonated with you? Oh, I want that in my life. I want that in my life. You want this really clear vision of the aspects of your ideal lifestyle five to 10 years from now. And then you work backwards from that and say, how do I move my life in that direction? When you're doing lifestyle-centric career planning, you're freed from the pressure of all that matters is what I choose to do professionally. That is the sole arbiter of how happy I feel, how fulfilled I feel in my life. Your work instead becomes instrumental. It's one of the levers you have to pull to move yourself closer to your ideal lifestyle. And once you start seeing your major and then the work that your major enables through this lens, you become less worried about, is this the right thing for me? Because what is the right thing for you now? It is something I can leverage to get closer to my ideal lifestyle. Not is it perfect? Not is it my passion? So now you can apply the alternative to the passion mindset to your work, which is what in my book I call the craftsman mindset. So if the passion mindset says, what does this job offer me? The craftsman mindset says instead, what can I offer this job? And it turns your focus towards how do I get better? How do I get more invaluable? How do I make myself indispensable? How do I build up what I call in my book, career capital, the metaphorical substance you acquire as you become better and better at things that are rare and valuable? Because that is your leverage to shape your life. That is your leverage to shape your work towards the things that resonate in a way from things that don't. That's the thing that allows you to shape your work towards what's going to get you closer to your ideal What can I offer my job? ([Time 0:47:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cc385598-120e-4413-af19-d87299e972c1)) - **Get A Job First, Then Build Career Capital** - If underemployed, pick an accessible job that will reward skill growth and build career capital there first. - Use the next one to two years to become undeniably good in that role and then leverage it toward your five-year lifestyle. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, okay, I'm worried here as well, because I'm seeing hints of the same passion mindset that we were talking about with the last question. So I looked at the extended version of your question. What I learned from it is this last five years where you've been trying to methodically progress and skill build, you have been pursuing those five years. What you've been methodically building towards is this idea some sort of ideal job that matches your academic training. And you have this vague idea that I have this arts degree, I should be, you know, in some sort of arts job, because that's why I got this degree, and I don't want to go to waste. What I'm going to say is that's not working. There isn't a easily accessible ideal job for you, you spent five years trying to do it. So the slow productivity approach here is not be slow in terms of trying to find work. The slow productivity approach, that's a mindset that says when you're working on specific accomplishments, be okay with that taking time, make steady progress on it, work at a natural Pace, try to make it really good. But when it comes to finding a job, you need a job. Now, I think lifestyle-centric career planning is going to help you here remove the concern about just finding a job that works, because what you really need here is something that Is going to reward career capital if and when you build it with autonomy and opportunities. There are many different jobs. You have a master's degree, so you're just generally an educated person. There's many different jobs you can likely find that will offer you those attributes. They might not have any connection to the specific art topic you studied, but there's something that you can use as a foundation towards building towards your ideal lifestyle. So I would say right away, blank slate, five-year lifestyle, What are all the aspects? Nail that down. Next, figure out, okay, of jobs that are actually accessible to me now, which is going to be the best foundation on which to build towards this ideal lifestyle. Keep it in mind, it might have nothing to do with your degree. And then you need to get into that job. It's going to take you one or two years probably of heads down, craftsman mindset, career capital acquisition, skill building. This is where you put in this energy, not trying to find a job, not trying to make yourself generally useful to the job market. It's once you have a job, once you actually have a job that is going to reward you becoming so good you can't ignore you with more autonomy and opportunities. That's where you put your head down because you can very specifically be building the exact skills that that job will specifically you have evidence for reward. So we got to leave the passion mindset of like, if I just keep working on my skills and trying, I'll find this perfect job and get a job and then kill that job. And when I say kill it, I mean, kill it at that job, do really well and use that as leverage to get towards an ideal So you really should have a five-year plan here with the next two years in Your professional life are becoming undeniably great at something that you do, not sweating what that thing is. ([Time 0:52:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd041d95-ae0a-4248-bf06-0d40e6482085)) - **Combine Therapy With A Structured Deep-Life Approach** - Seek professional help for depression first, then apply the deep-life stack alongside therapy. - Use discipline, values, control, and vision to create tractable routines, control waves of symptoms, and build meaning slowly. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, Anu, it's a good question. I've talked to multiple people about this, not on the show, but over email. The first caveat, of course, is this is not my area of expertise. So whatever advice I give here is not going to apply to everyone. So take that, take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. All right. First thing first, before you get into any specifics about the deep life or how you want to go through a reinvention of your life, if you're dealing with depression symptoms, you want Professional help for it. Depressive symptoms are often the result of disordered thinking, disordered thinking about yourself and your life, ruminations that happen with an intensity and anxious ferocity That they're not easily tamed, ruminations that have become so draining and anxiety-producing that they ultimately begin to short-circuit the circuits of your brain that give you Excitement or hope or energy. So they put in their place a sort of severe ahedonic stupor. This is really a difficult thing to deal with just on your own. Therapy helps you fix this. Let's start reordering your thinking. Let's start moving the ruminative pathways out of their deep grooves so that we can begin to rebuild some of these other circuits that allow for other types of more hedonic, subjective Experience. So you need professional help with that, and you want to get that help as the foundation for anything else. All right, so let's put that, let's assume that you're doing that. What I've heard from other people who deal with various mental health issues of this type is that the deep life, the way we talk about it here on this show, is actually pretty useful. It's actually pretty useful because the way we talk about the deep life on the show is very structured and process-based. And what's difficult if you're coming from a place of depression or just from a hard time is if you have a definition of success, if your definition of what you're trying to do is based On either a really positive subjective feeling, like I just want to feel great, or very concrete accomplishments, like I just want to be the best and win and get the best job and have all The money, and I'm just going to feel good every time I have that accomplishment. That's a really bad yardstick, especially if you're dealing with something like depression, because you're not going to feel good or you will sometimes, but it's often out of your Control. And if that's the goal you're looking for, then it's just going to create more rumination. Well, why don't I feel good? And if you need very particular types of really intense professional accomplishments, well, that's really hard too, because those are hard to get. And actually, if you're depressed, they can be even harder to get because it's, you know, the amount of just, I'm willing to just do 15 hours a day becomes really difficult when you have Anything else difficult going on in your mind. So then you're going to be self-recriminating, and that will make it worse. The deep life structure, by contrast, is not about a specific feeling or a particular accomplishment. It's about intention. Let's build up some regular discipline in our life in a tractable way. Once we have this regular discipline in our life, let's get in touch with what really matters to us and have a code by which we live through good times and bad. So even just at that layer of the deep life stack, this already is a big deal for a lot of people who are adrift in the shallows and also dealing with mental health issues, is having a code That you believe in that is grounded in your moral intuitions that says this is what we do even when times are bad and we can have pride in that. It's incredibly powerful as opposed to why don't I just feel good? All right, then as we move up the stack, well, you get to something like control. I just have control over what's on my plate so I don't feel disorganized and anxious. That's useful. More importantly, the automation and curtailing aspects of control allows you to say, you know what, this is a hard time coming. And people I know who are dealing with depression often talk about waves. You feel it coming on, and then there could be an extended period that you didn't leave from. If you have the control stack in place, when you feel a wave coming on, this is going to be a hard winter. You have the levers to pull, to pull back from things in a way that's going to make things more tractable. Okay. I need to Catherine May wintering mode here. Let me pull back, pull this back, stop doing this. You have that control allows you to pull back in a systematic way. Very useful when you have up and down mental states. And then finally, you get to that plan for the remarkable, just building things in your life that are remarkable, regardless of how you feel. It gives you a sense of efficacy, gives you a sense of autonomy and adds really interesting, self-initiated, persistent sources of value into your life that themselves are like a beacon That shines bright amidst the dark fog, which is the depressive syndrome. So I think all aspects of the deep life stack can be really useful to work through, even if depression is an issue. It'll take longer maybe than someone that's, you know, all Adderald and focused and high energy and whatever. Sure, who cares? It takes the time it takes. And you have to take breaks for him to come back to it. Fine, do that. I don't care. But you're slowly building these stacks and then working your way through them again and again. I actually think it's quite compatible. It's quite compatible with a systematic response to these all too common types of mental health issues. So keep with it. Take your time, but keep with it. ([Time 0:56:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9d1fda80-9289-40e6-a0c2-a32806d9d285)) - **Humanistic Productivity Over More-Is-Better** - Humanistic productivity reframes productivity to support a richer, sustainable human life rather than relentless output. - The goal is accomplishment without burnout by choosing fewer, meaningful commitments and protecting attention. Transcript: Cal Newport Reimagine productivity and move it towards what I call humanistic productivity. So there's a genre of thinking and books that have emerged on what I call humanistic productivity. Now, what does humanistic productivity mean? Well, first of all, it says, what's the definition, the general definition of productivity? It's the general arrangement of efforts, the general arrangement of your efforts with some intention in mind. So productivity in his most general sense is I do stuff all day. Let me have some way of organizing these efforts towards some sort of intentional goal. Now, humanistic productivity believes if you don't do any such thinking, you don't end up someplace good. You don't end up relaxed. You're going to be prone to two major sources of negative well-being. The first is in the professional sphere, reactive busyness. So if you say, I just, hey, man, I don't do productivity, you are going to get swallowed into a whirlpool of reactive busyness. Oh, my God, everyone has emailed me all the time. And the faster I answer, the more they come out. And there's all these Zoom meetings. And my God, everything is crazy. You're not relaxed. You get supercharged busyness. And in your life outside of work, again, if you're like, I just, man, I just chill. You're very prone to get swallowed in a whirlpool of supercharged distraction. And next thing you know, you're up to 3 a.m. Yelling at white supremacist on Twitter while building your underground bunker because of catastrophe 7 through 11 that's going to hit and destroy the earth in the next three weeks. So just saying, I don't think about this stuff, man, is going to make you vulnerable to so many negative things. So you need some sort of notion of productivity. Here's how I arrange my efforts with some intention in mind. But what humanistic productivity recognizes is that we can't leave this decision to the 2005 version of Merlin Mann, right? We can't leave this decision to the people online who spend all day trying to build their hyper-optimized system so that you can have algorithmic support for generating your task list Optimization, synced, Zettelkasten, whatever complexity, because just exhausting and it's turning humans into widget grinders. So the sweet spot in productivity thinking is saying, how do I intentionally organize my efforts in a way that the entire goal is to support my humanity, to support a richer, fuller human Life? That's humanistic productivity. Grounding productivity thinking in the pursuit of a richer, sustainable, fuller human life. So there's a lot of books in this genre. I think we could go back. I'll list a couple that I think all belong to this humanistic productivity genre. I think Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek is an early example of this genre, perhaps. He was coming in and said, let's completely rethink work. Let's completely rethink work as this huge means to an end, the end being all these other things that make a good life good. And if we can be very clever about how you set up your work and how you automate it, let's just reduce the footprint and just make it this money engine that produces just enough proverbial Horsepower that you can study tango in Buenos Aires. I think Gregory McEwen's Essentialism is another book in this category. It's about how do you sort of intentionally and aggressively take stuff off your plate. So it understands that at the core of any humanistic productivity philosophy is avoiding overload. You have Ginny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing and Celeste Hanley's Do Nothing. I think both those books are also really in this space. Jenny is embracing a notion of productivity in which you are moving away from activity, that you are purposely resisting a push towards activity as a way of reconnecting with values That aren't based off of action. Do Nothing, I think, is a little bit more, Celeste's book's a little bit more approachable, a little bit less academic, but again, about reorienting a productive life away from quantity Of activity, quantity of accomplishments. I think Oliver Berkman's book, 4,000 Weeks, is another great example of this genre. It's a definition of productivity that's based on being completely fine with the fact that you can't do most things. So why squeeze in, you know, a few more things? Most things you can't do anyway. So what's the point of overloading yourself? You're still not doing most things. So why not just accept that and be happy with the things you are doing and the opportunities you do have? Slow productivity, my new book, is sort of in that same genre. So sort of a more humanistic approach to productivity. So Slow Productivity, I don't want to get into details now. We've got plenty of time for that as we get closer to the book. And also I talk about it all the time on the show, but the cover looks like the way it looks because this is a book about refinding your humanity in a world where the definitions of productivity That dominate in the world of work in particular are based on this inhuman, unstoppered busyness. This more is better than less. It's up to you to decide how much work you do, but more is better than less. You go make these decisions every day. And it's this exhausted, self-recriminating, sort of terrible way to organize work. This is a more humanistic alternative. That's why I say the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. How do we do things we're proud of without having to be completely burnt out and overloaded? ([Time 1:07:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15cd30ce-5729-4cda-8dc7-fde19aac18c1))