Slow Productivity: How to Do Less, Focus More, and Not Burn Out with Cal Newport

Cal Newport 00:00:00  Social stress drives you back to your phone because you’re stressed that someone you know has sent you a message, and if you’re not responding, they will interpret it as you’re ignoring them. We’re really wired for this because if I’m in an actual forager band 100,000 years ago, these interpersonal connections are everything for my survival. And if someone in my band is like tapping me on the shoulder and I ignore them, that could be a huge problem.

Chris Forbes 00:00:32  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living.

Chris Forbes 00:01:07  This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:17  For years, I believed the only way to succeed was to put in more hours. But when I was working full time in software while also running this podcast, I couldn’t do more. I had to find a way to do less. And then something surprising happened. My work improved. I had to get clear on what was most important in both roles. It forced me to think about what really mattered for getting results. As Cal Newport argues, our obsession with busyness is pseudo productivity. It looks like progress, but it isn’t. In his new book, Slow Productivity, he shows how we can accomplish more by doing less with focus and intention. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Cal. Welcome back to the show.

Cal Newport 00:02:06  It’s always a pleasure. Good to see you.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:08  It’s nice to see you. I’m excited to talk about your most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:17  But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Cal Newport 00:02:54  I like that parable. Right. You contain possibilities, some better than others, and it’s a matter of which of these you actually feed. I like that parable. I mean, I think about a lot of my work. It’s in reaction to technology. And the thing I often put up as the alternative to a life that is spent sort of subservient to screens, subservient to distraction and busyness, is something I think of as the depth principle, which is focus on things that matter.

Cal Newport 00:03:23  Giving them the time required to actually do them well, and trying to clear out stuff that gets in the way. And so I think for a lot of people, that is a battle that my work is trying to deal with. That maybe is one way to look at it, that there’s this other battle towards busyness and distraction, and it’s very conveniently delivered to you through little glowing pieces of glass if you need it. And then on the other side, you could feed this other instinct, which is, let me pare things away. Focus on what matters to it. Well, obsess over quality. Not not worry necessarily about how long things take, but also don’t take my attention off it altogether. It’s like two completely different ways. It’s deep versus shallow. And so I like it. I think this parable works. I think it maps onto what I talk about.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:04  Excellent. So I want to start outside of your new book, because you and I communicate about this interview about a month ago, and you were getting ready to go away for a little while, and I had read something of yours talking about smartphones and children, and I had sent you a study that sort of contradicted a little bit some of the science that is out there today, or said it’s a little bit more unsettled than we know in the intervening time.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:32  You wrote a really good article which basically said, hey, we don’t need to wait for all the facts to come in for us to trust our moral intuition. And I agree with that to a certain degree, and I’m actually less interested in the answer to this question than I am and how you would think about it. Because I think you’re a really you’re a you’re a deep thinker. That’s what you’re known for, is that our moral intuition oftentimes is led astray by popular cultural narrative. And there has been a popular cultural narrative for a long time that there’s something wrong with time on screens and phones. So I’m just curious for you how you separate sort of what feels like a moral imperative from the fact that those can be wrong based on the cultures that we’re in.

Cal Newport 00:05:25  They can be right. But I think it depends on the clarity and severity of that intuition. And so when it came to this issue in particular, which is kids and phones, I spent a lot of time talking to parents. I spent a lot of time talking to kids.

Cal Newport 00:05:39  There’s not ambiguity. I mean, they they’re looking these are my kids. I know my kids. And I know when like, they’re going well and I know when there’s something that’s not going wrong. I know that like, something must be going on poorly at school. They’re just not themselves. I can sense that in them. And the parents just see this in their kids. It’s like this thing is all you want to look at. It changes your personality. It’s keeping you away from other things are more important. And then the kids themselves are self-reporting so heavily. I don’t like this. This is making me anxious. I feel like I’m somewhat pressured into having to use it. And so to me, unlike other issues we’ve dealt with, we could think of them through an epidemiological frame where we have to tease out data like smoking and lung cancer. I can’t directly observe, oh my God, as I’m smoking this, I can see a cancerous cell mass grow. I need to look at data.

Cal Newport 00:06:25  We need to somehow separate out. Is this really correlation, not causation? This felt much more direct because it’s people’s actual lived experience is clear. And I think especially with parenting, the experience of people around you embodied wisdom observation really has, throughout history, gone a really long way, and we get a little bit too. It’s too easy, I think, to think, to get caught up in the. On the one hand. On the other hand, complexity of scientific analysis, especially with social psychology where there’s never clarity. Right. And so you can massage retrospective data sets to sort of say whatever you want. And I spent a lot of time in the literature on this issue. I sort of have interviewed the players on this multiple times, and it’s become a muddied morass that’s never going to be dried up, because once we measure the trajectory of this subatomic particle, we know for a fact what it is it’s never going to be. It’s never going to be clear. So I take your warning, but I think this is an issue where everyone kind of agrees. There’s not a lot of doubt here in our lived experience. This is not that complicated. So it’s just a matter of of pulling the trigger on making changes.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:32  I think it’s really interesting, the self-reporting aspect, because as I was thinking back to like, okay, well, what would be other examples of our moral intuition in these ways leading us wrong, right.

Cal Newport 00:07:43  Comic books, video games, rock and roll music.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:47  Precisely. But what the kids that were doing all those things would not self-report is that I feel bad when I do this. They’d be like, I feel great when I do this. And I think that does make it a different a different animal.

Cal Newport 00:08:01  Yeah. And also, so I think it’s a great point. the kids playing pinball pinball was a big scare for. But I’m going to put big and I’m going to come back to this and put a big in quotation marks here for important reasons. The kids playing pinball or reading comic books for now, like, oh my God, man, I just wish I feel pressure, I’m playing too much pinball.

Cal Newport 00:08:18  I don’t like this. This pinball is making me anxious. I wish I was from my parents generation where they didn’t have pinball machines like you never would have heard that. But the other aspects and the reason why I put big scare in quotation marks is I did some work on this. I wrote an article for wired magazine about this a few years back. I looked at a lot of these prior sort of techno phobic scares, right? They were often more minor and more religious than today. What we do is we take, like, look, we were afraid about everything. That’s just what we do. We have moral panics. And he said, it’s not comparable. A lot of these, like you’ll go back and look at a pinball, you hated pinball or whatever. It’s this was much more minor and it was like much more religious. It’s a very different character than what I think we’re feeling now with the most comparable example, I think, for the last 20 or 30 years is like television, right? But that turned out to be pretty much correct.

Cal Newport 00:09:12  Like the role that television, we got worried about how much TV we were watching, but it really did jump up to something like 6 to 8 hours a day on average for an America like it did have a it was. Right. Like actually the critiques, the television was right. It did change culture in a massive way and in ways. It was like very largely non positive that had a similar size concern. Almost none of these other quote unquote moral panics did. They were much more parochial or narrow. most people would be like, what are you talking about? You know, it’s tipper Gore and rap music.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:44  That’s exactly what I was thinking of. And that was around my. You know, I was in my late teens around that time, so I was very into the kind of music that tipper Gore and all those people were saying was so, so dangerous. So I remember that one. And you’re right, it was on a much smaller scale and.

Cal Newport 00:10:02  Most people don’t care. Most parents are like, they’re cursing a lot of this. But that was kind of like the extent of it wasn’t God. It’s like the day and day out concern of a lot of parents right now. I mean, if we were listening to, you know, that music in the 90s, I guess, I don’t know, the equivalent would be of like, we stopped doing our homework, we stopped socializing. All we did was like, sit around listening to the music and our parents like, oh my God, this is like a problem. They’re obsessed with this. You know, it wasn’t that though. So so I think this is I try to make these distinctions between different types of pushbacks. And I also also make the case like it can’t it can’t possibly be the case that these are always like, I like, I don’t. I never understood this universalist argument that we always moral panic about technology because it’s a universalist statement that says so therefore, like a technology can never be wrong. Right.

Cal Newport 00:10:52  Like it? Which doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, so even if we are prone to getting worried more than we should or exaggerating worries, it’s not a dispositive to the claim that there could be technologies that are a real problem, right? It doesn’t actually free us from the burden of actually assessing when concerns come up. Does this feel real or does this feel overblown and being sometimes like the answer is going to be, well, maybe this is real.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:15  Right. And it’s one of the things I appreciate about a lot of what you write is there’s a real nuance in it, right, that you aren’t striking one position or the other incredibly firmly. There is a there’s a nuance in there that says, well, yeah, we certainly do overreact many times, but sometimes we don’t. And I think that this is a day and age. I’m one of those people. When everybody says that the world is getting worse, I pause because I’m like, well, everybody always thinks the world is getting worse, right? Like, that’s a historical fact.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:48  That’s what old people do. And it’s possible that indeed, in some ways it is. You know, I think it depends on who you are and where you are in the global economy and all that, whether the world is getting worse for you or not. It’s getting better for many people in many different ways. But okay, I don’t want to belabor our whole conversation there, but I did want to kind of hit on that and get your thinking on it. Let’s move into the the latest book, Slow Productivity. You open the book with an executive at CBS named Leslie. Well, you may not open it exactly. Actually open it with John McPhee. But you early on. Early on. Yeah, yeah. You reference Leslie at CBS demanding people work longer hours, and then you kind of swing back around near the end of it and and tell a different story. Walk me through why this idea of measuring productivity on ours is so possibly misguided.

Cal Newport 00:12:44  I mean, it wasn’t until it was. Right.

Cal Newport 00:12:47  So if we if we think about productivity as it was introduced as an economic term, it’s like a pretty clear definition. It’s measuring outputs for inputs. So you have this many acres of land. How many bushels of wheat did that produce? You have this many the way they did. For I looked into this automotive assembly lines. The input was paid worker hour. It’s like how many hours of in my pain paid hours is going into my factory? How many model T’s come out on the other side and like that’s the the ratio you want to make better. So like productivity was a matter of measuring these ratios. Then you get to knowledge work. Right. This becomes a major economic sector starting like mid 20th century. That becomes complicated because suddenly if I work in an office, I’m Don Draper in the 1960s or whatever. It’s not a one thing I’m doing. I’m not producing Model T’s. I’m not, you know, having a pile of widgets I can point to and be like, hey, today you pay me.

Cal Newport 00:13:47  I worked eight hours and I produced 55 widgets. But, you know, over here they produced 65 widgets. They’re more productive because what happened is work became creative, it became non-linear, and it became varied. So people would be working on multiple different things. what I’m working on might be different than what the person next to me is working on. It was hard to directly measure also output, because you could have contributed the idea that unlocked an ad campaign that then down the line was going to get you a huge contract with a company. How do you trace that all back to that idea you had that day? Ended up generating $10 million in new billing. Like, it’s very difficult to measure outputs in a way that you can connect to inputs. So what we did, like my argument in the book is that managers said, what are we going to manage if we can’t count things, what are we going to manage? And the fallback was it was like a bandaid or heuristic was like, well, we’ll just use busyness in general as a proxy for useful effort.

Cal Newport 00:14:41  Like seeing you here doing things is better than not. And so if we want to be more productive, the only lever I know how to pull is be here more hours doing things, because it was like a rough heuristic. We needed something to manage, and that was Leslie Moonves story is that CBS was in last place among the major networks or above Fox, but below the other three networks. And his solution? And this was in the late 90s, early 2000, he says. We got to work longer. He said, look, you think he was at the headquarters, CBS headquarters out there, Television City. And he was like, do you think over at ABC, over at the other network? You know, I guess he was at CBS, like at NBC. You think you think the parking lot is empty at four? I bet they’re there. Stay here longer. We’ll work longer hours for it, because that’s the only lever he knew how to pull. And it did become they did jump to number one.

Cal Newport 00:15:34  And my argument, as you mentioned, I wrap around to it at the end of the chapter. The argument is like, well, they became number one, not because the employees came in an hour later and stayed an earlier stay. An hour later they became number one because of survivor. It was like an idea for a show from this iconoclastic, weird, highly creative writer in Las Vegas who was like, working on this concept and got this bone in his teeth and wouldn’t let it go. And it was uneven, and he’d work on it, and there was nothing about it that had to do with maximizing hours per day. But that creative output that turned around the whole company. So I was trying to emphasize this idea that in knowledge work and creative work, what moves the needle is not just how many hours is the butts in the seat, and that it’s this great mismatch that we’re having right now in the world of work in general, is that we still have this industrial mindset of more hours, produces more than less, and busyness, therefore, is better than less busyness.

Cal Newport 00:16:25  And it leads to a measure of productivity that’s essentially disconnected from the things that really matter. And I think that’s deranged over time. Right? It really gives you this disconnect in your day to day work. It all becomes performative and weird and arbitrary, and it’s burning a lot of people out.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:38  Yeah, it is very interesting. I was in the software business for many years of my career before I started doing this, and I remember struggling with that very question, what am I measuring here? Because there are so many factors that go into software development. You don’t know how hard a problem necessarily is even at the beginning of software development. And so I struggle with this a lot. And I think I also fell into the both for myself and early on in my career. The hours model. What I found very interesting was late in my career, and it was after I had started this podcast, but I was still in the software world. I had a podcast to do in addition to a full time software executive type job, and so I only had so many hours in the day, so I ended up putting less time into my job, you know, my software job.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:31  But what I did was I got hyper focused on what actually really mattered. Like, what was the most important thing? What was what was going to drive the success that was going to make? And I spent way more time thinking about that question than I ever had before. And I think I got better at what I did. I think I got better because I knew what was most important. This makes a lot of sense to me because I’ve kind of lived it.

Cal Newport 00:18:00  I mean, this explains a lot of the seemingly contrarian results from these four day workweek experiments that have happened over the last 4 or 5 years, where mainly in Europe, they commissioned these studies where they’d have companies and say, lop a day off of your workweek and we’ll we’ll have these measures of like output or whatever. And they keep finding study after study, production in the way that matters, like your revenue or whatever. It’s not going down. We cut out 20% of the days and it’s not going down. And then when they’ll interview people, it’s always exactly what you’re saying.

Cal Newport 00:18:30  They’re like, yeah, I mean, a lot of what? A lot of it’s just busyness. The actual things that move the needle don’t take 40 hours a week. And so if you take away a day, we just like lop off, that’s fine. We just lop off more busyness. The stuff that matters still easily, easily fits. Like that’s the conclusion I take away from those studies. Not that the workweek is wrong in its length, but that our focus on busyness, our pseudo productivity, as I call it, is like that just underscores. That’s what we’re doing here, that if you could arbitrarily take away 20% of the time and it doesn’t change what’s being produced, the conclusion shouldn’t just be, oh, we should have a four day workweek. It should be we should rethink how we’re working. Like, what were we doing in that extra eight hours a day? Like, what a waste. Like we could be. We’re you know, that’s the real the real issue there. So yeah, I think that it speaks to the confusing ness of knowledge work, that it’s really nonlinear, it’s hard to measure, and it’s not a linear dose response of just if I add another hour, then I get this much more useful stuff produced.

Cal Newport 00:19:29  and I think it’s been a massive managerial headache. It is because it’s unclear how to manage.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:59  You’re a writer, you’ve written a number of books. Now I hear you talk about turning in a chapter or doing this. I just wrote my first book, which will come out next April, and I had no idea how much I could produce in any given window, because I had never done it. I didn’t know it could. I write 500 words a day? Could I write a thousand words? I just didn’t know anything. So what I measured in this case actually was effort, not crazy amounts of effort. I didn’t set a goal of like or just as many hours as I can get. I set what I thought was reasonable and sort of learned, kind of like, oh, well, after that point I’m useless kind of thing. But I measured effort because I couldn’t measure anything else because I didn’t know anything better. How about you? How do you think about do you end up on book deadline? If you do end up on book deadline, how are you managing to it?

Cal Newport 00:20:54  I think I have a pretty good instinct to experience at this point about, what it feels like to be producing at a sustainable rate and, and efforts, a good way of talking about it, because it’s not necessarily strict hours, but it’s not strict pages either, because some pages take a lot longer than others.

Cal Newport 00:21:13  I just have a sense of I’m producing good stuff and I’m giving it enough effort that we’re making. We probably are in good shape heading towards a deadline. Pushing it beyond this is probably going to become less sustainable, right? And I know where that sweet spot is. That sort of like 2 to 4 hours? Most, but not all days. Type of sweet spot that for me is producing. But allowing the allowing the engine to recharge. Right. So so like in writing, I have that really dialed in in a way that I think in a lot of jobs, people don’t have that dialed in at all. And so it all just becomes busyness. Right, right. Or avoiding non busyness because non busyness is a signal that you’re not productive.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:54  So let’s talk about slow productivity in general. You mentioned it’s sort of a philosophy for organizing our work efforts in a more sustainable and meaningful way. And you’ve got three aspects to it. Walk us through what those are.

Cal Newport 00:22:11  In general, I see it as my alternative to pseudo productivity.

Cal Newport 00:22:14  So if the thing that we are mired in right now is this idea that busyness is a proxy for useful efforts, a more is better than less. If that’s what we’re doing now, what’s an alternative that’s going to work better? So we’ll set it up as slow productivity is a particular alternative. And the three principles like sort of the high level description. The first is do fewer things. And what that really means is do fewer things at once. So the number of concurrent projects you should be juggling. You want to get that down to a reasonable size, right? And this is not just about because that makes your life less stressful. You produce more that if you have too many things that you’re working on. At the same time, the fixed overhead of each of those things begins to pile up and conflict, and then you just end up in a spot eventually, if you’re working on enough things where basically most of your time is just dealing with the overhead of the things you’ve agreed to do. Very little actually gets done.

Cal Newport 00:23:04  If you graph like how much useful stuff is coming out of your brain, it begins to precipitously fall. The second principles work at a natural pace, right? So this covers both how long you think is reasonable to take to to complete something. We tend to write fairytales in our mind about. Wouldn’t it be great if I was able to finish this in two weeks, and then we fall in love with that story because like, that would be great. Like, everything would fall into place and then we want that to be true. But of course, this is a four week project, right? Like it was a completely unreasonable prediction. So like be okay with things. Take time. I’ve learned this in my writing career. Take an extra year for a book. Makes all the difference in the world to you and no one else notices, right? Publishers are like, great. Okay, so Cal has your book. When does he want to come in then? Great. When we get closer to it, we’ll look for it, right? Like, let things take time, but also work at a natural pace.

Cal Newport 00:23:53  Means variation on different time scales as well. Like I’m busy. Big push today. Tomorrow I’m sort of taking my foot off the accelerator. This has been a busy month, but this month coming up I’m doing a little bit less this season. I’m really into it. This other season I’m recharging, so it’s letting things take time. Don’t rush them and allow yourself to have variation, intensity. And then the final principle which holds those together is obsess over quality. So this only really works as a sustainable way to be sort of successful in the world of work. If you couple these two ideas with I really care about how good the best things I do are, and that is what eventually is going to get you. The ability, the better the quality of the stuff you produce that’s going to gain you the ability to have this sort of flexibility in how you work and to get away from pseudo productivity. It’s like you’re buying your way out of pseudo productivity with quality, and it’s also going to make you intrinsically want to escape pseudo productivity, because the more you care about quality, the more busyness begins to seem intolerable.

Cal Newport 00:24:51  So like you put those three things together, it’s an alternative way of thinking about productivity that I think is not going to burn you out, but it’s still going to if you’re an individual going to produce stuff that you can make a living on, if you’re a company is going to make your company successful. I mean, it is a it is a strategy, a definition of productivity. It’s not just sustainable, but I think actually like economically very viable.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:11  So it’s obvious for someone like you or me even who sort of control our own destiny to a certain degree that we might choose or be able to do this. How does somebody who’s sort of in the, for lack of a better word, the cogs of the machine implement this sort of thing into their lives? Or what are some starting places where they can begin to bring some of this in.

Cal Newport 00:25:38  And this is basically the bulk of the advice in the book is how do you implement this? Yeah, if you work in a company with a thousand employees and you’re on a team of 20 and you have six layers of bosses or whatever, because you’re right, it’s if you have full control of your schedule, the implementation details aren’t as interesting.

Cal Newport 00:25:55  Like you’re like, yes, I’m going to take on fewer things and I’m going to take longer, and I’m going to give myself variation like, just do those things, it’ll be good. so the interesting advice is about what if you don’t have that autonomy, the, the overarching thing. But this is like the long term strategy is that principle three get better at something that’s valuable. You get more control. So this is like an overarching, you know, argument. Adam Grant talks about. He calls them idiosyncrasy credits. Like, the better you get it. Something in your organization, the more you can kind of cash in these credits for being idiosyncratic in the way you work, or what you take on, or how your day functions. It’s it’s earned. It’s a I am really, really good at integrating whatever these AI models into our, our client offerings or whatever. No one else here can do it as well as me. I’m a savant at it. This earns me a lot of flexibility.

Cal Newport 00:26:44  And now when I say I, you know, I don’t want to work on committees, I only do this one thing. I work remote four days a week. Like you have options more short term. So before you get really good at something valuable, I mean, I talk a lot in the book about workload management, right? There’s a lot of different ways to do it. One way is you can try to get explicit about your workload with your actual team, like, hey, we should be clear about what we’re working on and who’s working on what. So that everyone has to confront, oh, I can’t just throw this on your plate. You have four things on your plate. So you know what? This thing that we need to do is going to go in this other column over here of things we need to do where it’s not assigned to any individual yet. And as people finish things, it will come on to someone’s plate. And now suddenly you’re not paying the overhead cost about it.

Cal Newport 00:27:30  If your team doesn’t want to do this, you can do this simulated internally where you’re like, okay, here’s the things that are on my plate. I don’t have a say about what comes onto my plate or not, but I’m going to sort them. Here are the things that I’m actively working on. Here are the things I’m waiting to work on. And I have them in an ordered list. And this is I’m going to make this public internally. It’s in a shared document or spreadsheet or something. And the three things at the front of this list, I’m actively working on meetings, emails. This is where my focus is at. Everything else is to like I’m waiting to work on. As soon as I finish something in the active list, I’ll pull the next thing on. And so someone asks you like, hey, what’s going on with this thing you agreed to do? You could be like, here you go, it’s in position five and you’ll see it’ll march. And as soon as it marches into my active list, I’m going to call you up and let you know.

Cal Newport 00:28:18  And like, we’re all into it. And by the way, if you think it’s a higher priority than other things, I’m happy you’re the boss. Tell me. I’m happy to do a swap in here. If you say, like, swap this thing out of active and swap that in, you’re the boss. You tell me how you want to swap it, but you are preserving a system here where the concurrent things is controlled. So the things they’re generating, meetings and emails and overhead are limited. So there’s a lot of things you can do like that. Quotas is another thing you can do where you’re like, I, I need to do some of this type of thing in my job, but I have too many of these things coming into my life to be sustainable. Here’s my quota. It’s I do one a month, I do three a quarter. And so when they come back like, hey, can you join this committee? Instead of having to say, I don’t do committees, which is bad, or yes, I’ll say yes to everything, which is also bad.

Cal Newport 00:29:05  You like? Yeah, I love doing committees. A big part of my job. I have a quota of three per quarter. That seems to be like the right amount of balance of that of my other work, and I’ve already signed up for three, so I can’t do this one this quarter. That works really well because you’re not being obstinate, you’re being clear. And the the argument you’re putting up there is one that’s hard to push back on. The pushback would have to be your quota is wrong. You should be doing four right. Like you’re a lot of this is about forcing a confrontation with the reality of workloads. There’s all sorts of things you can do calibrated to how much autonomy you have, how reasonable your bosses are, all sorts of things you can do in the short term, but the long term lever that is going to really gain you a lot of freedom is get good at something that matters. I think people underestimate the degree to which an employer, their number one thing they care about is keeping good people, right? I think employees worry.

Cal Newport 00:29:58  They imagine in their head incorrectly that their employer is like, can we fire him yet? Let’s we’re collecting evidence to fire him, right? Like, hey, hey, like they have a whole team of people and there’s a bulletin board with your face on it, and they’re pinning up yarn and stuff like that. You know what’s going on? Is there anything, anything today that gives us a reason to fire him? Because we just really want to get rid of this guy. The reality is, if you’re good and doing something that’s really valuable, they’re up at night. Like, what if he leaves? Like, that’s going to be a hard person to replace. So, you know, we often swap that as soon as you are doing something that is rare and valuable. Your boss’s number one fear is that you leave and there’s some value in that.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:54  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen.  Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day. It’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at onefeed.net/newsletter. That’s oneyoufeed.net/newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right. Back to the show. That ability to go back to whoever is assigning you work and say, sure, happy to do it. However, these three things are currently ahead of it. Which would you like me to do? Is really useful, and I used to love it when my people did that to me as a as a leader. Yeah, because if I just keep giving you things and you’re not going to get them done. I mean, one failure that I had as a leader, and I think a lot of leaders have it is I’m not really entirely clear how much I have loaded up onto you.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:19  Yeah, right. I just yeah, okay. Give it to so-and-so. Give it to so-and-so. And so when so-and-so would say, like, well, I’ll take it, but it’s gonna, you know, it’s going to displace this or displace that. Then I got to decide what was important. That’s a really valuable conversation to have. And most of us think that no one’s going to want to have that, like, our bosses aren’t going to want to have that conversation, but many of them will. Yeah. Because they’re measured on results in the same way that you are. And they don’t want to be skipping down the road thinking this is all getting done. Yeah. When it’s not, you know, they’d much rather then go to their boss and say hang on.

Cal Newport 00:32:55  Yeah. Well, and you can tell me if this matches your experience in leadership positions. But like, another thing that seems clear and I think this is helpful to a lot of people is the problem you’re solving for like a manager when they ask you to do something right.

Cal Newport 00:33:11  The problem you’re really solving is one of stress reduction. This is something that’s on their plate, the manager’s plate. Like this thing it got. This needs to be done right. And as long as it’s on my plate, it’s like a source of minor stress. And the problem you’re solving is taking that stress out of their life. So it’s not necessarily what’s important is that it gets done right away. What’s important is that they 100% trust that it will get done. Like if if managers know you’re organized and this is the side effect of showing them some sort of kind of ridiculously color coded spreadsheet or whatever it is, they know you’re on the ball, and if they know this ball will not be dropped, it will move down this list and they’ll get back in touch and this will get done. I don’t have to worry about it. You’ve solved 99% of that manager’s problem and they’re happy with it. In fact, like they probably don’t want you to do it right away anyways because then it’s going to generate more work for them in the short term.

Cal Newport 00:34:03  Like, it’d be nice if this could just like I it’s not going to disappear. It’s going to get done. I can trust that’s going to get done. Maybe not right away, because often when people are demanding like, hey, can’t you just do this right away? Often that is because they don’t trust that you’re going to do it. And so the stress is still on their plate until it gets done. If you’re not trusted, then the manager is going to want you to just do that right away because they can’t release the stress till it’s done. If you are trusted, you have a lot more leeway because they say the stress was reduced as soon as you took this on your plate, because I know you’ll get it done, so I don’t have to. I don’t have to keep track of this anymore. But yeah, I think there’s more. Be reliable. Deliver what you say you’re going to deliver. Deliver it at a high level. That foundation is something you can build a lot of approaches to work on.

Cal Newport 00:34:52  And it’s also it’s pretty rare.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:54  Yeah. And there are situations where no amount of doing any of that is going to work, where the demands are unreasonable and they remain unreasonable. And that is a reality in many cases. You know, it’s almost the worst thing is when you have a boss who can’t say no. Yeah, that’s almost the worst scenario to be in because they just keep taking it. Yeah. You were saying that, you know, I wish I could get this done in two weeks because that would be really great. Is also like, you know, every project managers nightmare is like, well, when do you think best case scenario, you could get this done here? And I’m like, well, October. Well now it’s October. That’s October right. You know, so you learn never, you know, you just double everything. Yeah. Right. It’s the persuasion technique of anchoring. Don’t don’t let them anchor on October. Anchor them on, like, next March.

Cal Newport 00:35:43  Yeah.

Cal Newport 00:35:43  And Dublin is usually right, by the way. Like, when we double, that just gets you in the ballpark of, like, roughly how long it’s going to take. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:50  Oh, yeah. In software development I certainly also learned like he says it’s going to take X amount of time. I’m going to double that. He says it I’m going to do four times that because you know he always wants he he wants to please. Yeah. He’s going to give me the best, you know, the the shortest answer he can because he wants to make me happy. And so I know, you know, you just sort of start to learn how to how to work with these things. I want to talk about doing fewer things. So you talk about doing this in sort of three comp propositions in the book, but limiting the big, containing the small and pulling instead of pushing. And we’ve talked about this a little bit, but I’d like to have you kind of break down each of those three because they are different.

Cal Newport 00:36:34  Yeah. You’re right. There is some nuance to this otherwise simple idea like do fewer things, right. And so limiting the big that’s about the number of like large commitments. It’s more more than like an individual commitment but like things that you regularly are working on. Right. So I’m doing marketing and I’m working on like this software product, but I’m also sort of working on this other software product. Now there’s three major things that are like regularly generating like ongoing obligations. Keeping that small right up front makes a difference, right? So once you’ve like the argument is like once you’ve agreed to a big direction, there’s a certain amount of work that necessarily generates that needs to be done. And so once you’ve said yes to too many big directions, there’s not much else you can do downstream to really get away from doing too many things. Because, you know, each big thing you’re working on, there’s some minimum amount of work you have to do to keep that thing rolling. And so all the downstream solutions, the having the queues and the tracking, the active and non-active that can all get overwhelmed.

Cal Newport 00:37:42  If you’re working on too many big picture things because you just you’re not going to be able to even keep up with like the minimum effort required. When we think about the small that’s talking about more of like the overhead itself, the administrative, the small things that can eat up so much of your schedule. So that’s like, how do we get our arms around that? how do we make sure that I’m not just like answering emails all day, like trying to. And some of that is how you deal with the better organize this smaller things in your life. A lot of that is how do you rearrange your work to generate fewer small things? I think that’s actually like more important than what you do once it’s already there. Right? Like by the time you’re worried about how do I organize my overstuffed inbox, it’s already too late. You need to figure out how to prevent so many messages from arriving in the first place. And then the pull, not push, is getting to that idea of I’m.

Cal Newport 00:38:30  This is what I’m working on actively. This is the stuff I’m waiting to work on. I’ll pull one of those things in when I finish one of the things I’m working on. So the the just sort of enforcing. But yeah, you need all of those things, like any one of these things by itself won’t be enough pulling versus pushing. It’s not enough if I have like seven major projects, because the amount of things I’m working on actively at a time is just not going to be enough, like things are going to it’s going to be a problem if I don’t control the small All, even a relatively reasonable workload of commitments could overwhelm my whole life with like, emails and meetings that can get out of control real easily. So you got to do all three of those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:09  Yeah, yeah. My business coach for years had a three project rule, basically. Like that’s it. Any more than three big things you can’t really do because you’ll, as you said, drive yourself insane and you won’t move any of them forward.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:24  Yeah. Because you’ll just keep doing a little bit of time on each. And nothing. Nothing ever goes out of the queue then. Yeah, right. Nothing ever gets done so that you can then move on. And that’s as a, as a small business, I’m sure you, you, you have this also is that you’ve got to be spending a lot of time really thinking about like, well, what are those three? You know, those are important, important decisions. Give me an example of some of the things that we can do that fell into the category of making sure you don’t keep getting more small things on your plate. You referenced email. I’m sure you have a host of different things, but pick one that’s sort of this. I think you call them task engines sometimes.

Cal Newport 00:40:07  Yeah, like that’s one, right? So if you’re you’re picking between different things to do. Like what’s the right thing to measure when deciding, hey which of these projects should I take on. Right. We often measure difficulty in terms of like, oh, how hard will this be? Like, is this a hard challenge? Am I really going to have to learn something complicated? Is it going to be really like this report I have to write? It’s going to take forever to write.

Cal Newport 00:40:31  Like we think about the hardness of it. Or I say what we really should probably also evaluated on is how many small tasks is it going to generate. And more importantly, there’s a particular type of small task I care about, which is going to be small tasks that are like relatively unpredictable when they arrive relatively frequent and require like a relatively prompt response. That’s a killer. So if you have something that’s It’s generating. Let me talk to this person and get back to them, and then they’re going to get back to me. And then I got to make this call, and then I got to jump on a call and have these meetings. That’s a schedule killer. And so like one of the examples I gave in the book is I said, okay, imagine you’re choosing between two hypothetical projects, and one of them is going to be really hard intellectually. It’s creating like a really large there’s some sort of report, right? I was like self-study or marketing report. It’s going to take a lot of hours.

Cal Newport 00:41:18  It’s going to be a lot of writing. It’s going to be a lot of research. Like it’s going to be a hard thing to do. The other project is like organizing a client conference or something like that. And, it’s not as intellectually demanding. And, you know, there’s a time frame, like, when we get here, it’ll be done. I said, do the hard report because it’s all self-driven. You’re doing research, you’re writing, you control. When you do that, the client conference is going to be all emails and phone calls and caterers, and it’s going to generate all of these interrupt of small tasks that’s going to make everything else impossible. So don’t measure hardness when making a choice like I was arguing, measure the amount of interrupt of small tasks that a particular project is going to generate and all other things being equal. I would minimize that that second property.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:04  That’s a really interesting insight to think about. You know, I’m just sort of running through in my head the things that I and, and my person on my team choose to do and seen like, oh yeah, some of those definitely are the one you described.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:21  There are these open loops. There are all these open loops. There’s this thing that drive me crazy on my like I go through a task list and all. Oftentimes one of the statuses I have is waiting. Yeah. You know, and when those start to pile up, it starts to get really unmanageable. You know, because you don’t know when they’re going to come back. You don’t know when it initially feels really good. Like, okay, I did that. I did my part of it. It’s now in waiting. I sort of mentally sort of check it off. Except when it shows back up, it’s not done. Yeah.

Cal Newport 00:42:52  And you don’t know when it’s going to show back up? Exactly. Whenever.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:56  Yeah.

Cal Newport 00:42:56  Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I’ve long argued the real productivity poison. Right. Like the thing that kills output and makes people miserable is unscheduled messaging that requires responses. And the reason why that’s, that’s that’s sort of poison is that when something comes in, things are coming in that require you to respond, but you don’t know when they’re going to come in.

Cal Newport 00:43:20  This means you have to monitor these channels all the time. Right. So if, if, if we’re working on something that we’re figuring out with back and forth messaging. So it’s I don’t know when your response is going to come, but I have to see it pretty soon after it does because I have to bounce it back to you in time for you to bounce it back to me so that, like, we can kind of come to an agreement over email before, like close a business or whatever. I have to check that email inbox all the time because I don’t know when your message is coming in, but I know when it comes in, I need to respond to it quick. What happens when we have to check these inboxes all the time is that we’re constantly inducing our brain to go into network target switching. We’re seeing other things that are salient and important, and from people like in our circles, that are different than what we’re doing and whether we want to or not, our brain begins changing as context.

Cal Newport 00:44:04  So when I have to just jump into a quick reply to your email, it’s not just the 19 seconds it takes for me to reply that initiates a context switch in my brain. And when I come back to the other work, I have started my brain already trying to switch over to this other complicated context for this task. And then I try to stop that and bring it back to what I’m doing. But then I have to check my inbox again five minutes later because there’s other. And then that starts another context switch, and it’s that entire contextual stasis that we put our brains into, where I never give myself the 20 uninterrupted minutes required just to get my brain all in on a task that makes us miserable. And it’s why here’s like, the clearest, purified example of this so people can test this in their own life. Why is it so hard to take an email inbox and just go chronologically answering emails? Why? Like for a lot of people, that becomes incredibly difficult. You begin to feel a huge amount of resistance.

Cal Newport 00:45:02  It’s because every email is a different context, and you’re asking your brain to switch and switch and switch and switch and it’s killer and your brain can’t do it. And it’s why people hate like you think it should be easy. Like, why can’t I just go through message after message till my inbox is empty? Because you’re switching your brain context so much that you get this massive resistance. That’s why people give up and just bounce around looking for easy to answer messages. We can’t switch context that much. It’s like a big part of my advice to companies is that’s what’s killer. Is this context shifting, mainly caused by unscheduled messages that require response, find a more structured way to collaborate that is not dependent on unscheduled messaging, even if that more structured way to collaborate is a pain. And it means you might have to wait longer. and there’s more rules to follow, and it’s not as easy in the moment, I argue. That is all worth it. If you’re saving someone from like the cognitive impossibility of I have to check in on like 20 unrelated conversations every five minutes, it’s just the worst possible neurological context to try to get anything done right.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:06  And the context switching, if that’s all the tax you’re paying, is actually not as bad as what mostly happens, which is you pop over to see if there’s an email from Jim, and there’s one from Ted that you weren’t even thinking about, and now you’re off down that rabbit hole. I mean, we all have these experience where you’re like, I go to pick up my I. This happens to me. I go to pick up my phone for a specific purpose. And there is a message, a text message or whatever. Then I go chase whatever that thing is. And then I’m like, how did what did I even come here to do? Like, I’ve completely I mean, and I think that in addition to the context switching that you’re talking about is the other real danger is that we just, you know, they used to use that term surf for the internet, but it’s the same thing. You’re just following the wave wherever it happens to be going, which is very challenging. You wrote another.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:58  I don’t know if you call them blog posts or essays, but they they appear as blogs on, you know, sort of what we would traditionally think of a blog as on your website. It was an interesting idea where you looked at texting, as I’m paraphrasing here, the gateway drug to more serious problems that we have with like TikTok or Instagram. And your point was that people feel like they have to respond quickly, so they’re being drawn back to their phone often. I mean, the way I would almost make it as a former addict myself, it would be almost as if I was, you know, walk into the place where they sold drugs all the time and then was surprised. Why do I keep buying drugs?

Cal Newport 00:47:38  Yeah, right. I mean, the particular studies I was looking at, what the connection they were drawing is social stress as a major driver of behavior. So social stress drives you back to your phone because you’re stressed that someone you know has sent you a message, and if you’re not responding, they will interpret it as you’re ignoring them.

Cal Newport 00:47:59  Right. Because we’re really wired for this. Because if I’m in an actual forager band 100,000 years ago, these interpersonal connections are everything for my survival. And if someone in my band is like tapping me on the shoulder and I ignore them, that could be a huge problem, right? Because they’re going to think that like, oh, we have a bad relationship and they’re not going to share food and it’s the whole thing. So we have we feel a lot of social stress around messaging, even if there are modern conventions about, hey, we know this is not urgent. We know this is not time, you know, time sensitive. It’s very difficult for our our social mind to get beyond the idea of someone’s tapping me on the shoulder. I better not ignore them. So social stress drives people to their phones once they are habitually looking at their phones to try to satisfy this social stress. I’m going to make sure no one’s texting me. Now. You’re in the the addict. It’s in the drugstore, right? It’s like, oh, yeah.

Cal Newport 00:48:47  Now that I’m there, there’s all of these other things that are very shiny, right? That maybe, like, abstractly, if I’m nowhere near my phone, I’m not like, I really want to look at TikTok. Like it’s sort of, you know, it’s a it’s a weird kind of arbitrary behavior when looked at objectively. But when you’re already on your phone, it’s right there. Right. And so it’s this interesting idea that social stress starts to path for people, for some people. And it ends up and these, these highly engineered addictive things. But what actually gets you on the phone is not billions of dollars of investment in these apps. It’s millions of years of evolution for a social brain. Now this is a it’s very gender specific. So it’s interesting. This affects women more than men because women are they care more about social connections. They’re a little bit more sophisticated than this than men seem to be men. And these studies have their own problems. so there’s a there’s a there’s an interesting gender split on that too.

Cal Newport 00:49:41  Which? Which was interesting. So different people are drawn to their phones for different reasons. But I thought that was interesting. Is that our wiring? It’s something so simple, the apps that no money is spent on, the apps that have no engineered addictiveness is the gateway drug to all, like the shinier things, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:49:56  Right. I mean, because what’s your on your phone? You’re kind of on your phone is what I have found. Yeah. You know, once I have it in my hand, I do the thing I’m going to do. And then there’s almost this, like, well, what? I don’t know how to describe it. It’s almost a shouldn’t I be doing something else while I’m here kind of thing? And things can be so situation context wise like that. I’ll give you an example. Like my I joke about this on the show a lot, but it’s not really a joke, which is my favorite way to escape when I’m working. And I hit a hard patch as I start playing solitaire.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:29  Yeah, it’s a silly thing. I never crave playing solitaire anywhere else except sitting in front of this computer. So if I don’t come to this computer. I don’t find myself randomly playing solitaire. But you sit me down in front of this computer. There’s a chance that some part of my brain is going to start up right. I’m saying that, like, I resonate a lot with exactly what you’re saying. It’s like once I’m here in this context, then I do this behavior. Take me out of that context. I don’t do that behavior at all.

Cal Newport 00:51:03  I mean, this is the good news, bad news about phones and what, like, separates them from other types of addictions, especially more like chemical or substance addictions is. The good news is it’s it’s very situational, right? Which is not the case. you know, with other types of addictions. Right. With a drug addiction, you will go way out of your way to, to find access to the, to the drug. Or if you have an alcohol addiction, like I will go find, you know, alcohol where it’s not the case with phones.

Cal Newport 00:51:30  Like you could be like, I use TikTok so much and it really, you know, bothers me. But if your phone is broken, you’re not Probably going to go get up off the couch and load up your laptop and go to TikTok and go to like you could, you could, it’d take a little bit of effort. You’re not going to do it. You’re like, oh, it’s not with me. The bad news is the situation is always with you because the phone is something that you always have on you. Right? So it’s like, hey, the good news is you’re not going to have like addiction of seeking behavior. The bad news is you never have a need to seek because you have this thing with you all the time. And that’s where something like texting plays a big role, because that’s a good reason to have your phone if you worry about the social stress. Yeah. And then you have like the beer bottles are just at the table with you everywhere you go. Right? Like it’s so it’s and it means like the solution though is finding a way to break the constant companion model of your phone, where you go back and think, this phone is very useful.

Cal Newport 00:52:21  There’s a lot of things I do with it. It’s not a constant companion. I don’t keep it on my person all the time. If you can change that relationship with your phone, a lot of these other behaviors get better. The number one thing that makes that hard to do is texting, because people say, well, that’s the one thing where I do need to have it nearby because I’m in the middle of 19 different conversations and I, I want to be a part of them. So it’s like you have to break the constant companion model, and then it’s fine. If the phone is in your foyer and plugged in the charge, like you’re not going to go get it, you’re not going to get up and go get it to look at the thing, the play, Wordle or whatever. Right? But in order to get away with doing that, you have to get rid of any habitual connection that requires you to have it with you all the time, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:53:02  Which sometimes you can’t do.  But, you know, like I live my life more or less on Do Not Disturb to the chagrin of some people in my life. And yet, like there are times where I need to be reachable by certain people for certain things. In your latest podcast episode, or at least the latest one, I listen to you talk about this. You give some really useful strategies for. Here’s how to handle it. If you’ve got to get a text from your kids about soccer practice or, you know, but but I think we all can lessen at least my experience is most of us can lessen how quickly we really think we need to respond to things. Yeah, with some concerted effort, not perfection. You know, you give the example of like a listener or a reader asking like, well, what do I do if my parents are in the hospital that afternoon and there’s a group text, you’re like, well, have your phone with you.

Cal Newport 00:53:52  Right. Like you’re in the hospital.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:54  Yeah. Sometimes you got to do that.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:56  I want to come back to the book now for a second and talk about assessing a little bit more on quality. You talk about obsessing over quality, and then you also talk about people saying, well, but my problem is that I’m a perfectionist. And I was wondering if you could tell a story. And the reason I’m asking is two things. I’m in London today. So and I’m a huge Beatles fan. And today on my Beatles, on my day in London, I took a tour where I went and saw some of the key Beatles sites in London. And you have a Beatles story in the book, so it’s too perfect to let go. So.

Cal Newport 00:54:34  Oh that was I love that story to because it gets at exactly this tension between quality and perfectionism. But also it’s something I didn’t really understand before. Right? So like the whole story there is, it’s about Sergeant Pepper and about what’s important about that album is that it’s the the first album that the Beatles did after they made a decision that was basically unprecedented in popular music up to that point, is they said, we’re not going to tour anymore.

Cal Newport 00:55:01  And this was I went through the whole this year leading up to them making this decision was like a terrible touring year. They had all these and this was the bigger than Jesus year when, you know, but that was just like the the icing on the cake of, oh, they went to Japan and they, they, insulted, you know, the emperor by accident, like, oh, this is a sacred place where you’re doing your performance. They go to the, the Philippines and somehow they snub, you know, Imelda Marcos. And now suddenly they’re, like, sabotaging the Beatles so that, like, that. It just chased out of there, right? I mean, it’s just they go to the south and they’re having threats because of the bigger than Jesus. Like they’re just done, like we’re not going to tour anymore. And which was like unprecedented. But they were an unprecedented band. So they could say that. What I didn’t realize is like, why was that a big deal? Well, because when you’re recording writing a recording songs as a popular music act, you always are writing a recording with performance in mind.

Cal Newport 00:55:54  It’s like, this can’t be. We’re pretty constrained in what we can do. It has to be like a four piece band or a five piece band can play it right. So like it’s pretty constrained. They go to, you know, Abbey Road Studios, I guess it was called that then and still is. Still is. Yeah. That’s probably what part of your tour. Yeah. Yeah. And suddenly it’s like, we can do anything on this album because we’re never going to go on tour to play this. Like, why not have a guitar on here? Like, why not play with tape loops and changing the speeds of things like, we can do any sounds we want to do on here because we’ll never have to be on stage at like Candlestick Park playing disc or whatever. And it opened up this issue of so you could spend forever working on this album. Like there’s always more things you could do. And it was an interesting it was an interesting tension because on the one hand, they needed to spend time to do this right.

Cal Newport 00:56:43  Quality matter. They were trying to do something new. Quality mattered. Right? It couldn’t be like their first album. I got the numbers somewhere. They basically recorded the first album in like a day and a half, right? It was like, it’s crazy. Yeah. They just they’ve been playing these songs again and again and again. They were tight. They showed up, they played them. They left. Right. So it couldn’t be that. But you could also go forever. And a lot of bands ended up having those problems in the 70s and 80s, the progressive rock movement that followed where people would just stay in the studio forever, trying to perfect a sound and like they would never finish their their album. And so they had to walk a tightrope. We want to spend more time than we ever had before to build something better than we ever had before, but we can’t be in here forever. And the solution was, and I often mix up the name of the various people I think was Brian Martin, who did this.

Cal Newport 00:57:27  I think the manager. Right. He’s like, this is great. Spend more time. But as soon as you had something that was like, kind of done. He released it as a single and he’s like, so there is a stake in the ground now. Like, you don’t have to finish this tomorrow. But we released a single, a single. So like, this needs to be done now within the next X number of months. So do the best thing you can. But there’s. And it’s more time you spent before. But there’s also a stake in the ground. Like you only have so much time. So do the best you can in that constraint. Push yourself not to build the best thing ever, but to build the best thing you can in this constraint. Yeah. And of course it was you know, they’re masterpiece. One of the most successful albums of all time. It worked out pretty well. Yeah, that seems to be the solution to the perfectionist quality quandary. It can’t be.

Cal Newport 00:58:11  I’m going to produce the best thing ever. It is. I’m giving myself a reasonable amount of time, and I want to produce the best thing I’m capable of producing right now in that amount of time. I want it to be better than what I did last, and what’s the best I can do in that constraint? So it’s not the best thing possible, But the best thing I can do in this time. And then I’m going to try to make the next thing better. Like, that’s the mindset that builds quality, that walks that tightrope between trying to get better and never, never releasing things.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:37  There’s a book I don’t know if you have if you’ve heard of it. It came out this year. It’s by a British writer named Ian Leslie, and it’s called John and Paul. You might like it because a he is an outstanding non-fiction writer, and it’s a really interesting look at their relationship and how the creativity that came out was influenced by their personal relationship. And it’s a really, really good book about music and creativity and highly recommended.

Cal Newport 00:59:05  Oh, interesting. So I would probably give an even deeper insight. I mean, they were just they had that locked in. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they worked and they shipped and they did the work, but they also cared about the quality. And I think that aspect of their relationship is probably underappreciated, like how good they were at the art of producing good things. What sounds like really Self-evident. Like, yeah, you try to do really good things, but no, there’s a whole art to producing. And maybe I should say shipping good things. Like, there’s a whole art to that because it’s about pushing yourself, exposing yourself to influence. Like giving yourself the capacity to grow, but also like continuing to execute and ship and get feedback. And so like this balance between production and growth and stretch and ambition and practicality, there’s a real there’s a real art to being really good. Yeah. That I think we just we just think it’s like, oh, you’re so genius. So like the stuff, you’re like everyone else.

Cal Newport 00:59:57  You sit down and you write songs. It’s just yours are much better. Yeah. And it’s much more complicated than that.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:02  It is much more complicated than that, for sure. Let’s wrap up with you giving us one small thing. If somebody wants to embrace slow productivity, what is one thing they might be able to do today as a starting place? Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime. Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed dot net letter.

Cal Newport 01:00:49  I’m going to break the question and give two answers a bottom up top down, both of which things you could do. Like today you could start on but one. Small ones big, right? All right. The bottom up answer I would say, you know, workload management is probably like the right way to start.

Cal Newport 01:01:03  And what’s the right way to start with workload management is write down everything you’ve agreed to work on. Just force yourself to confront. Here are all the things I am working on professionally. I’m working on this project. I’m in charge of this and that. I’m taking on this and look at that list and say, is this reasonable? And if it’s not reasonable, what size would give me margin and like to me, margin means I usually use the four day rule. So it’s like if someone just randomly came and took a day out of your week because like, you’re sick or something like that, could they do that without it being a problem? And if they could, then you have enough margin in your schedule, right? If you’re like, no, if I lost a day this week, like it’s going to be a huge problem. You probably have too many things. So just looking at and confronting am I show my podcast, we call this Confronting the Productivity Dragon. This is what I’m committed to.

Cal Newport 01:01:51  Reasonable or not, it’s not. I can’t ignore it. It doesn’t make it go away. And then being like, where should that really be? That’s often like the first step towards workload management. This should be half that. And now I’m confronting that reality. Most people just don’t really know what they have. The top down thing to do would be to make a decision of like, what is one thing? In my professional context, it might take me some time that I could get great at, because ultimately I call that obsessing over quality principle. This is the glue that makes everything else work. Because if all you’re doing is trying to reduce your workload to something reasonable, to slow down how much you’re working on things, you could end up eventually just an antagonistic relationship with work. Like, yeah, like, I guess all the stuff I’m doing is about like, doing less work and people trying to give me work as bad. Like at work, it’s like a necessary evil that I’m trying to minimize.

Cal Newport 01:02:41  As soon as you add into it, I want to do something really well. It changes your relationship to this. You’re trying to minimize other stuff so that you can do this better, not just because work is bad, right? You have a reason for trying to push back against a suit of productivity, and it’s what’s going to give you the leverage to push back even better, because the more valuable you get, the more leverage you have. So like decide right away what is something I could get good at, even take six months or a year, but something I could master and be really proud about and do at a high level of quality. Because like that ultimately is going to be the engine of slow productivity being sustainable in your life. So it’s like the negative thing is confront your real workload. The positive thing is identify the the skill, product or ability that’s going to be ultimately your key to freedom.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:25  Excellent. Well, that is where we’re going to wrap up for today. Carl, thanks so much for coming on.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:30  Thank you for the book. And like I said, you’ve got a great podcast that keeps giving people information. And your website with your essays are really good also. So thank you so much.

Cal Newport 01:03:40  Well thank you. I always enjoyed chatting.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:42  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.