OoM 063： Approaching Work Like a Craftsman with Cal Newport
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Summary
Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, makes the case that most of us are participating in what he calls "shallow work," which is why we are busy but not productive. We talk about the power of going deep in your work, why you should be approaching your work like a craftsman, and how to live a more efficient, productive, and satisfying life.
Transcript
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If you're anything like me, there never seems to be enough time in the day. When looking back,
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you know you were busy, but what did you actually get done? My guest today, Cal Newport, author of
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Deep Work, makes the case that most of us are participating in what he calls shallow work,
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which is why most of us are busy, but not productive. We talk about the power of going
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deep in your work, why you should be approaching your work like a craftsman, and how to live a
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more efficient, productive, and satisfying life. You're a man of action. You live life to the
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fullest. Embrace your fears, and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back
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up one more time, every time. You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong.
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This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day,
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and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
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Men, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Mickler, and I am your host and the founder of
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Order of Man. Welcome back after a long Memorial Day weekend. On that note, I hope that you took
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some time over the weekend to spend time with the family and friends, but more importantly,
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I hope you took some time to reflect upon the sacrifices of so many men and women
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who have given the ultimate sacrifice to make this country great. Now, too often we get lost
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in the expectation of summer and the barbecues and the sales and everything else that's going on again,
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so I hope that you took the time to pause and give thanks to the men and women who make
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every day possible. Now, if you're new to the show today, we talk about all things manly here,
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how to be a better provider, how to be a better protector, and how to preside more fully or lead
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more effectively in your life. And as always, we have an incredible guest lined up for you today.
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The author of Deep Work, Mr. Cal Newport, is going to talk with us about the power of productivity
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in deep work. But before I introduce you to him, know that all the links, the quotes,
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the resources, everything that you want for this show are available at orderofman.com
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slash 063. Also, make sure you join in the conversation we're having on our closed men's
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Facebook group with over 3,800 guys now for a deeper conversation about this topic and so many
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more at facebook.com slash groups slash orderofmen. Now, with all that said, let me introduce you to
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our guest today, Mr. Cal Newport. He is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
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He specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his PhD from MIT in 2009
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and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations
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of our digital age as a professor, he also writes about the impact of the technologies
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on the world of work. This is what he's going to be talking with us about today. In his most recent
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book, Deep Work, Cal argues that focus is the new IQ in the knowledge economy and that individuals who
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cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. He is the author of three
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other books on unconventional advice for students, how to be a high school superstar, how to be a
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straight A student, and how to win at college. The how to student series has sold over 150,000 copies
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since its inception. And Newport has been invited to speak on these topics at some of the country's
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top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Georgetown, and Duke to
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name a few. Today, he is here to talk about how to be more productive and efficient and why
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incorporating the deep life is paramount to your success. Cal, what's going on? Thanks for joining
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me on the show today, man. Sure. Hi, Ryan. It's cool to be here. Yeah. You know, I came across your
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work several years ago. When did you release So Good They Can't Ignore You? That was 2012, the fall
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of 2012. Okay. I must have, that's when I came across your work. I must have been at the airport and
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came across your book, fell in love with the book, obviously. And then you've got this new book,
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Deep Work, which is what I want to talk with you about today, which is really timely because I've
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been putting out fires today. And as I get busier and busier with Order of Man, I feel like I'm just
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consumed with emails and can't do anything that's actually meaningful to me. So I'm really excited
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for this conversation today. Oh, yeah. And you're the sweet spot in terms of readers for this book
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because you have your own company and therefore have massive amounts of autonomy, which means I can
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talk you into all sorts of drastic changes to your lifestyle. So beware. Well, I'll be taking notes and
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I'll just make sure that I implement the most important stuff because I think that's the advice
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you'd give me, right? Yeah, I think the most important stuff, do that, forget the other stuff.
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All right, perfect. So tell me a little bit about the premise. I mean, Deep Work, tell me what that
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is because that's a term that you've kind of coined, if I understand correctly. So why don't you tell us
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what that is? Yeah, you know, it's a new term for a really old concept. So Deep Work is what I name
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the activity of focusing without distraction for a long amount of time on a cognitively demanding task.
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So when you say like cognitively demanding task, what are you referring to? Like what would be an example?
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So what I mean by that is you're really pushing your mind to its limits. You're trying to create something
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at the very limit of your current capability. So I mean, this spans sort of the whole realm of work
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from a computer programmer trying to write the best piece of code to a business owner trying to come up
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with the sharpest strategy given the data, you know, before him or a woodworker, right?
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Trying to create the sort of whatever the skill there is, but sort of the perfect carving or the
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perfect sort of lathe work they're doing on the wood. It's where you're taking your skills and
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you're trying to apply them at your highest level to produce the most valuable thing you can.
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How do you determine that level? I mean, do you really know? I mean, this is always improving,
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obviously, because where I was a year ago, even with interviewing guys like yourself,
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I wasn't nearly to the level I am now. And that continues to get better. How do you know
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what that level is? Well, I think the sense that you're giving it your all is what qualifies it as
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deep work. You know, you're you're you're what you're doing. You're trying to give it your full
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attention in the moment. It's not that you have to quantify what your level is. It's just I'm I'm
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doing this all in whatever it is I'm doing right now. It's getting my full attention. It's not getting
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90% of my attention while I'm also checking Facebook. I'm not taking occasional breaks to look at
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other things. I'm just locked in to what this is trying to produce the best thing I can produce
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whatever my current skill level is. It sounds a lot like a term that we run across quite a bit
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on the interviews that we do, which is being present in the moment. Is that what you're
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talking about? Is it different than that? It absolutely requires that, which is part of the
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reason why deep work can actually be immensely satisfying, because it really requires by definition
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that your full attention is going to one thing, which is a state of mind that is incredibly calming
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and satisfying for the human being. But it's different than, say, let's say, being in a meditative
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state, which is also being in the moment, because you're actually doing something. So you're in the
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moment, but in that moment, you're giving your intense concentration to try to create something
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valuable. Right. Yeah, this makes sense. And I think this kind of goes without saying, but I want
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to hear from you what some of the common distractions are that people run against. So maybe we can just be
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a little bit more aware of when it happens that, oh, this is a distraction. I need to get rid of this
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in my life. Yeah, sure. Well, let me even back up and say the reason I'm even talking about
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deep work is I think it is largely undervalued in our current society. People have missed the
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reality that deep work is an immensely productive, immensely satisfying activity. If you become adept
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at deep work and adopt what I call the deep life, where you really prioritize your ability to
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concentrate, you train your ability to concentrate, and you go to sort of aggressive measures to make
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concentration on important things at the core of your day. Now, if you embrace the deep life,
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it's not about being a little bit more productive or a little bit less distracted. It's about being
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massively more productive. You know, the people you look at and say, wow, that guy's a star.
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Often, the underlying explanation is they're really adept at this skill. So just to set the foundation,
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sort of the claim I'm going to make is that this skill is almost like a superpower, or to use the term
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the economist used when reviewing the book, deep work is like the killer app of the knowledge
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economy. So it is very different than how most people work. So this brings us back to distraction.
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I think there's, there's, it's been almost a distraction to talk too much about distraction,
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because when we focus on Facebook or Twitter, email, it's sort of ambiguous, right? People think
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I am spending a lot of time on these things. And it doesn't quite feel right. But on the other hand,
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there's some value in it. I mean, I got to answer emails from my clients, like this isn't bad. And
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so it just gets in this ambiguous muddle. So what I'm trying to do is actually flip it and say,
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instead of focusing on what's bad about the distractions, let's turn and talk about what's
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so good about their opposite. That people and, you know, relevant to your audience, you know,
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men, you know, out there of a certain age who maybe you're feeling a little anxious, a little
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adrift, a lot of what you might be working for, looking for, you might find if you recommit your
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mind, like craftsmen of time old, to taking a small number of things, and spending a lot of
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time doing those things really well, you know, in some sense, that's like a manly approach to
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professional life, and it feels a lot less adrift. So I've completely avoided your question.
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No, but it but what you're talking about makes perfect sense. It actually reminds me of an
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experience I had the other day, I did a video, and I posted on our Facebook group. And I showed them
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your book, and I talked a little bit about the premise of deep work, I even suggested that you
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were going to come on the show. This was after we had set something up. And one of the guys said,
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Cal would not approve of you doing this right now, because if you were really doing deep work,
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you wouldn't be on social media talking about it. But I don't think that's true. It's just
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Yeah, I mean, so when it comes to social media, for example, my stance on it is not binary. So,
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you know, I think a lot less people should use social media, but I don't have a binary stance
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that is good or bad. Instead, what my stance is, is just adopt the same sort of mindset that craftsmen
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have for millennia, where you're just careful about the tools you choose. You know, if you take a tool
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into your life, that's going to have access to your time and attention, there should be significant
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positive advantages to using that that outweigh the negatives, it can't just be there might be some
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benefit I don't want to miss out. So for example, for you who runs a media company,
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there's going to be substantial positive advantages to you having a social media presence,
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because contrary to my writing, almost everyone uses it. It's a fantastic way for you to reach an
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audience. But for someone else, say like a writer like myself, you know, I don't use social media,
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and you could come up with a lot of small advantages I might get. But I look at it just like
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any craftsman looks at tools and say you're not there's no substantial advantage here that will
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outweigh the impact it'll have on my time and attention. That'll go to the list of everything
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else that's kind of useful that I'm not going to waste my time on. Well, and I think there's
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probably a point where you could be using in your example, social media, but you could actually
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probably, especially if this is your career, like it is mine, do social media in a deep and meaningful
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way. Like for example, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I block out my time on social media,
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like I block out my posts, I know exactly what I'm going to talk about,
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when I'm going to talk about it, I check social media at these times throughout the day.
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So I'm very scheduled and articulate about what it is I'm doing on social media. Would that be
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considered deep work? Well, it would be considered compatible with deep work. In other words,
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you're you would be taking, you'd be taking an activity that's important to your business,
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and you're finding a way to integrate into your life that it has minimal impact on the core activities
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of your business, which is actually going to be concentrating deeply to produce the most valuable
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possible content, you know, for your audience. So, so I think that's a great example of an element
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of the deep life, which is having a lot of respect for your time and attention, recognizing that
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unfractured time and attention is the most valuable resource you have in a knowledge economy,
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and you have to treat it with respect, just like an athlete, you know, would treat his or her body
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with respect. So did this kind of the opposite of this is the myth of multitasking? Is that what we're
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talking about here? Yeah. And in fact, actually, that evolved. So the way the way I understand
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that is we had in the early 2000s, the multitasking boom, where people had literally multiple windows
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open. So it was like literal multitasking. I'm on the phone, my email inbox is open, and I'm writing.
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All right, a lot of research came along in the mid 2000s, Clifford NASA's group at Stanford,
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among others that said, Okay, that doesn't work. You can't actually do things simultaneously,
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your mind's just shooting back and forth between them really rapidly and doing them all pretty bad.
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So right, right. So at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, people moved away from it. I mean,
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people for the most part, don't leave an inbox open on their desktop next to something when they're
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writing. Most people don't like talk on the phone while trying to do something else. We don't really
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multitask anymore. So people think they're single tasking. But the new research says, you have to worry
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about attention residue. So if you're paying attention to one thing, and then you turn your attention to
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another thing, that first target leaves a residue in your mind that can last 10, 15, 20, even 30 minutes
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that reduces your cognitive capacity. Sure. So even though you're not actually multitasking, if you're
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single tasking, but switching your attention, every 15, 20 minutes, you're still having most of the negative
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effects. So what most knowledge workers do today, for example, is maybe they're trying to do something
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hard, write an article, write a deck, you know, for a presentation they're doing. And maybe once every 10 or 15
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minutes, they do a quick just check on their inbox, or a quick just check on, you know, ESPN, because there's a
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day game. You just want to, you want to know what the score is. Right, right. Those just checks have a massively
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negative impact on your cognitive capacity, because for the next 30 minutes, your mind is reduced, you do another
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check before that even wears off. So we have sort of a whole culture of people out there working at a
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significantly reduced cognitive capacity. So they're producing much less, they're producing at much
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lower value output. And they're just feeling anxious and torn and unsettled, because the mind
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is constantly, you know, exposed to this residue. That's why with deep work, you spend a long amount
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of time locked into a single thing, you give yourself time to clear out all that residue. And once that's
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clear, it's like you get to ratchet up to the next level, and you begin to produce at a level that is
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much higher than what most people are doing during the typical day.
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Yeah, it's really interesting. I had a conversation just a couple of days ago with somebody who was
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talking about being busy. And I thought to myself, you know, we wear this busyness as a badge of honor,
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but the goal isn't to be busy. I mean, that's not what I want. I don't want to be busy. I want to be
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hyper efficient. I want to be hyper effective. And I think that's what you're talking about here. It's
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not just running from task to task with your head cut off like a chicken and, and trying to get as much
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done. It's being very effective and deliberate about the few things that you are doing.
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Yeah, when people tell me, Oh, I'm busy, my first reaction is, Oh, I'm sorry.
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This is someone said, I'm coming off the flu. Like, Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry, man.
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Because here's, here's the reality. The market is ruthless. What the market is going to reward
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are things that are rare, and they're valuable. So any activity that's not rare, valuable any activity
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that you know, a 19 year old could do with no training, by definition is not gonna be valued much
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by the market. But that's most of what people are doing when they say they're busy. So if you're
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sending, receiving emails, you're you're cultivating your social media brand, you're you're reading
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articles, you're you're you're jumping on coffees and setting up meetings, none of that is rare and
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valuable. Anyone can do that. So by definition, you're not creating new value. On the other hand,
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deep work, where you're taking multiple hours and concentrating as hard as you can to produce
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something that uses the best skills you have at the highest level of your skills. What you're doing
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there is trying to produce the most value you're capable of producing, you're doing something that's
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hard, something that required your training, something that's making you better. So every
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time you do it, you get better at it. So the next time you'll produce at a higher level,
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that's actually taking how the market operates into account. So the efficient way to build a
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professional life that's productive, and that gives you career capital, and that gives you autonomy
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is to spend as much of your time as possible, producing things that are hard to replicate,
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concentrating producing things that are rare and valuable. The more you're busy, really just means
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the more time you're essentially producing stuff that the market could care less of. And that stuff is
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not going to bring value into your life. Right. And then we wonder why we can't get ahead
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financially, but we're not doing anything worthy of actually getting ahead.
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That's right. No one ever made a fortune being good at using Facebook, but I can point to a couple
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people that made a lot of money doing the deep work required to build the complex systems that run a
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service like Facebook. And so this is the concept of specialization. I mean, in the economy that we are
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now, I think there's a lot to be said for specializing and getting very good at one task and leaving all the
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other stuff to somebody else or something else, maybe technology, and then just specializing,
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niching down so that you can be more effective.
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Yeah, be a craftsman. Just because we're dealing with bits more often than we're dealing with wood or
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pottery clay doesn't mean that craftsmanship doesn't apply. And there's something immensely
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satisfying about honing a craft, but there's also something that's immensely powerful about it. If you can
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produce something at a high level that people value, you get to write your own ticket. And that's why, you know,
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the deep life I promote is really about finding those things that you're going to double down on,
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building your days as much as possible about honing this craft, and you're going to feel better,
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and you're going to be a lot more productive, you're going to produce a lot more value, you're
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going to get a lot more options. I mean, it's really hard. It's really hard to be a good sculptor.
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It's really hard to, you know, be a good iron worker. I mean, it's really hard. But we're meant for
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that. I mean, the mind of the man does not mine hard. Hard is good. You know, hard gives you
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something to feel satisfied about, you know, something that you can have a cold beer at the
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end of a hard day and feel good about it. I mean, so hard is good. And a lot of what people are doing
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in this age of busyness is you're seeking convenience, you're seeking quick hits, you're
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seeking shortcuts. And that's just a recipe for listlessness.
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So how does a man who's listening to this find that meaningful work? I mean, you talk about being a
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craftsman, and I know there's a lot of guys out there who feel the exact opposite of that in their
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current station, especially when it comes to the work they're doing. How would you suggest that we
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start finding and exploring what it is we're meant to do and then doing it deeply?
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Yeah, well, I recommend, you know, focus on craftsmanship as the goal and don't worry so
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much about the particular craft. You know, this was actually, this was the subject essentially of
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the book I wrote before, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I essentially made the case that we spend
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too much attention trying to figure out in advance what we're meant to do.
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We and that the passion that we have that we're hardwired, you should discover this hardwired
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passion, and then go find a job that matches that passion. And that's really a nonsense idea that
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that's applicable to very few people in the economy that if you if you study people who love what they
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do, nine times out of 10, it was the reverse pattern. They for whatever reason, started developing
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a craft, it could have been circumstances, it could have been random, it could have been they stumbled
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into something. But as they became better and became more of a craftsman, the passion followed.
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So I say, look at your current situation, see what skills you already have. See what skills are
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interesting to you you already have and say, let me go there. And I want to start honing those,
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which means I'm going to start training my ability to concentrate and start training my ability to do
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deep work. And then I'm going to start carving out and protecting more and more time in my life to do
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deep work at this craft. And I'm going to start to make some changes in my general lifestyle to sort
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of tell myself and communicate to myself that I take this ability to use my mind like a tool
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very seriously. Right. And that's what I found in my own life is that I can even make mundane tasks
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interesting and engaging to me when I figure out how to do it more efficiently or how to do it a
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little bit better or how to have fun doing it. Right. And I think this is something all of us can
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probably work on a little bit more. Yeah. And also what happens is once you actually start
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prioritizing deep work and focusing on a small number of things and doing them very well,
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you gain the confidence to eliminate a lot of things that have been a drag at your time and
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attention and that were a little bit important, but not a lot important, but that you never would
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have jettisoned before. So, you know, I've told this story a few times now where, you know, I know
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someone who's in a very similar business to yours in the sense that they run sort of an online,
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you know, digital media property and they were drowning in email. And this was this was eating away
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their time and they just felt overwhelmed by it. And his solution was he just got rid of the email
00:20:10.060
address from the website. And then he put up a PO box and you really need to reach me. You can,
00:20:14.840
you can get to a PO box. And he found that, wait a second, there was like some kind of important
00:20:19.740
stuff that sometimes came through email, but writing really good content and doing really good
00:20:24.100
interviews is like 99% of what makes my company successful. So my, this notion that I was doing
00:20:29.020
really poorly at that, or really degrading my ability at that, the stuff where I'm really doing
00:20:32.900
craft and producing value so that I can make a few people happy or have a few opportunities come
00:20:37.400
through the transom, the math and it makes sense. And there was zero effect on the, on the bottom
00:20:42.260
line. And if anything, his audience grew because now he was able to, you know, he can really concentrate
00:20:46.480
on producing the stuff that his audience of hundreds of thousands can see, as opposed to making the,
00:20:51.880
you know, a hundred people a month that he might've had a meaningful email response to,
00:20:55.260
uh, happy. So once you actually start adopting this deep craftsman type mindset, there's lots
00:21:00.300
of things in your life that you realize are there because they maybe might bring a little bit of
00:21:04.200
value. And you say, that's not enough. I'm really interested in doubling down on the things that
00:21:08.660
can be massively positive. This almost reminds me of the era of cell phones where, you know,
00:21:14.720
you hear somebody say, well, I can't not have my phone. What if there's an emergency? It's like,
00:21:18.120
well, what if there was emergency 10 years ago? We figured out a way to deal with it.
00:21:20.980
Yeah. Yeah. I've had this argument about movie theaters. Why not just, uh,
00:21:25.740
block cell phones in the movie theater? So people can't do the text messaging, right? So you don't
00:21:28.780
have the screen glare and people say, you can't do that. Like, what if there's an emergency or the
00:21:32.420
babysitter needs to reach you or, or like, you know, there's something happens and you have to
00:21:36.340
call the police. And I'm thinking we've had movies theater since the 1920s. Like I don't remember,
00:21:41.960
I don't remember my childhood, like being really tentative to go into the movie theater. Like,
00:21:46.100
well, wait a second. Like, what if I can't be reached at every moment during the movie? You know,
00:21:50.380
parents used to, you know, you would sneak out and halfway through the movie and call the babysitter to make
00:21:54.320
sure things are okay. You know? Uh, so I'm with you on that, that we were quick, especially with
00:21:58.760
new technologies. There's usually a phase we go through that last a few decades where, uh, the
00:22:03.020
new technology comes in as disruptive. We go nuts with it and then it kind of settles down later and
00:22:08.740
we figure out, okay, wait a second. So every possible use of this is not necessarily the way
00:22:13.220
to go. We have so many technologies in the last 25 years that we're just going nuts. The way we use
00:22:18.140
email at work, the way we use cell phones, social media and its current state. I mean,
00:22:22.460
a lot of this is just the, the early stages of the, the, the future of the sort of digital
00:22:27.260
connected world. We're going to look back at this in 30 years and say, all right, we're going a little
00:22:31.280
bit crazy. I remember back in 2015 where like people were walking on the sidewalk and the phone
00:22:36.220
and walking in the cars and we're, we're worried, you know, we'll look back at it with, with
00:22:40.440
some amusement I would predict. Men, let me just take a quick pause to tell you about our elite
00:22:46.780
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00:22:51.500
working to take their lives to the next level in the areas of relationships, their health,
00:22:55.880
their wealth. And specifically this month, we're talking about self mastery. We want you involved.
00:23:01.100
Now we're close to 100 members and we've got some big things, some big plans happening.
00:23:06.020
This topic that we're going to be covering this month of self mastery is such a critical thing to
00:23:10.380
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00:23:15.320
to accomplish everything that you set out to in life. More often than not, our biggest enemy
00:23:19.300
and obstacle is the man in the mirror. So if you feel like maybe you're sitting on the verge of
00:23:23.380
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00:23:28.600
And our goal is to help you along with the other 90 men of the iron council, learn more about yourself,
00:23:33.040
get out of your own way and achieve all that you set out to do. So you can check that out at
00:23:37.160
orderofman.com slash iron council. We look forward to seeing you on the inside.
00:23:44.880
You know, my wife and I have this debate every once in a while, somebody will knock on the door
00:23:48.440
at our home when we're watching a movie or doing something else. And the kids immediately jump up.
00:23:52.640
And my thought is I'm not obligated to answer the door just because you knocked on it. So I'll tell
00:23:57.140
the kids, just sit down. We're doing family night. Whoever needs to get ahold of us, if they really
00:24:01.460
need it that bad, they can do it another day. And so my wife and I have a debate about this because
00:24:05.180
she's under the belief that, well, no, you have to answer the door if somebody knocks and you're
00:24:08.140
home. And it's maybe a small example of what you're talking about. But certainly I can see
00:24:13.060
how that makes us more effective with our time. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a deeper thing going on
00:24:18.540
here, which is, you know, the reason I advocate the sort of lifestyle changes that if you want to
00:24:22.580
embrace a deep life, you're actually very selective about anything that can have access to your time
00:24:26.980
and attention. I think it's cognitive junk food. It's like being an athlete who, you know,
00:24:31.920
eats Oreos outside of training. You know, if you use your mind to make craft, you should be away
00:24:36.080
from it. And part of the reason I make that argument is that, you know, all these things
00:24:39.720
have some value. None of them are that bad. But what they add up to is this sort of fragmented
00:24:46.020
sense of attention that's just really incompatible with depth. So if you spend your evenings with your
00:24:51.400
attention just fragmented between all these different devices, even if the next day you hike to a
00:24:56.280
cave without any technology and you're stuck there till the tide goes back out and you're,
00:25:00.540
I'm just going to write and concentrate, you're not going to be able to do it that well.
00:25:04.120
They're connected, right? If most of your time you're not treating your attention with respect,
00:25:09.680
you're not going to be able to get a lot out of it when it comes time to actually concentrate.
00:25:12.520
And we have a lot of different research that backs this up, that you can't be sort of
00:25:17.060
fragmented attention at some parts of the day and then hope to be able to concentrate your
00:25:20.980
attention and produce real value at another time. Just like you're not going to be a professional
00:25:24.980
athlete if outside of your hard training, you know, you're smoking and you're drinking and you're
00:25:30.020
eating the Oreos, right? Like your whole lifestyle has to be fit if you're going to be a professional
00:25:33.380
athlete. Well, if you're going to use your mind to create this very satisfying, autonomous,
00:25:37.740
value-producing deep life, you have to treat your mind with respect throughout the whole day.
00:25:42.900
And everybody's heard the quote, you know, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything,
00:25:47.100
So you are pretty practical in the book about who this applies to and maybe some circumstances
00:25:52.760
where it doesn't, but you identify some areas, some industries where this actually makes
00:25:57.760
a lot of sense. Can you help walk us through that a little bit?
00:26:00.520
Yeah. The deep life and deep work, it's not for everyone. I mean, for some people it's just too
00:26:05.180
hard, right? They just don't want to, they're comfortable with being busy and constantly having
00:26:11.520
a distraction. If you're always distracted, it kind of keeps you away from dealing with some
00:26:14.880
deeper issues. And some people are happy with that, but there's also some where deep work is just
00:26:20.500
not going to be that valued. So if you're in an industry that's truly built almost entirely upon
00:26:26.000
communication. So if you're in sales or if you're in, you know, lobbying or something like this,
00:26:31.760
the ability to concentrate for long periods of time, it's not that important. If you're the CEO
00:26:36.320
of a major company, it's probably more effective for you to hire smart people to do deep work. And
00:26:41.720
you can pass judgment on the ideas they come up with. That's going to be a more effective use of
00:26:45.660
your time because a lot of things have to go through you. You need to be making decisions. But I think for
00:26:51.600
any non-entry level job where you are trying to use skills to create things that are valuable,
00:26:57.400
deep work is probably going to be an incredibly important tool in your toolkit.
00:27:01.680
Yeah. And I think the example that you use is Jack Dorsey, right? And you talk about his ability
00:27:07.120
to be so successful, yet he is not somebody who's doing deep work.
00:27:10.960
Yeah, right. So he's a CEO of two companies and I tracked down some magazine profiles about his typical
00:27:15.960
day. There's no deep work in Jack Dorsey's typical day. It's an incredibly fragmented day. And I said,
00:27:21.040
that's probably makes sense. I mean, what he's doing is trying to keep these companies afloat,
00:27:26.840
which means he holds the vision for the companies. And all these decisions have to go through him so
00:27:31.760
that he can make decisions in a way that's consistent with the vision. So the company can
00:27:35.000
actually move forward with some direction. So that's an example of a job where deep work is not
00:27:40.180
that applicable. On the other hand, I find a lot of people try to make the claim that, well,
00:27:45.200
in my job, I don't think deep work is that applicable. But if you dig a little deeper,
00:27:48.740
the reality is the way they currently do their job leaves no room for deep work. But if they
00:27:55.080
reconfigured it so that deep work was at its core, they could actually be much more successful.
00:28:00.320
So in a way, just a little bit delusional about the reality of their desire, their need,
00:28:06.240
That's right. Yeah. So a lot of people find that their job is almost entirely consisting of moving
00:28:10.620
information back and forth in an email inbox. And so they, oh, I don't need deep work.
00:28:14.520
But my retort is you should be really scared because what you're doing is you're basically
00:28:19.260
acting like a human network router. And I can tell you as a computer scientist, the network routers are
00:28:23.960
the commodity piece of the network stack. That's the easy part. That's the part that's cheap and
00:28:28.220
easy to automate. You should be really worried if most of what you do is move messages back and
00:28:32.940
forth because there's not a lot of value in that. So you better find where you can bring value and then
00:28:37.020
start aggressively honing your ability to concentrate and producing high value things. Because email moving,
00:28:42.980
this is going to be the first thing that's automated as technology gets better.
00:28:46.740
I mean, it is currently, we have auto responders and everything else that are starting to replace
00:28:50.300
the ability or the need for somebody to send an email to actually sit down and write an email out
00:28:55.220
and send one. Yeah. You know, I just did a panel with the CEO of a new company that's going to launch,
00:29:02.420
I guess, in the fall. But they've spent three years and $30 million training this AI to set up
00:29:09.060
meetings for you. And it's an amazing technology, right? Well, you basically just say, like, if you
00:29:14.380
wrote to me and said, can we do a meeting? I would reply to you at CC with an email address as AI and
00:29:19.820
just say, yeah, I want to set up a meeting with Ryan. Tuesdays and Thursdays are good, but it has to
00:29:25.160
be in the afternoon. And this AI takes over and does all the back and forth. And you wouldn't even know
00:29:29.300
that you were talking to an AI. So anyways, the point is, you spend most of your day sitting and
00:29:34.560
receiving emails five, six years from now, there's going to be some bot in the cloud that can do that
00:29:39.740
all for you. So then you have to ask, all right, if you took that all off my plate, what would I be
00:29:44.400
doing with my time? And what you need is an answer to that question. That is, I would be working deeply
00:29:50.120
on doing this incredibly valuable thing. And a lot of people don't actually have that answer yet.
00:29:54.360
And that should be worrisome. How do you identify that? Well, again, you have to say,
00:29:58.360
where do I have skills? And okay, I already have this foundation of skills where I can produce
00:30:03.980
things that are valuable. I need to make that my craft. I need to spend a lot of time honing those
00:30:08.020
skills. I need to do as much work as possible in states of deep concentration where I can get the
00:30:12.620
most out of my mind so I can get better and better and better. And I don't sweat too much what those
00:30:16.640
skills are so much as either you're going to have a craft and you can thrive and be satisfied in the
00:30:21.960
coming economy, or you don't really have a craft and you're going to be automated outsourced or
00:30:25.760
replaced. It's going to be this divide, which I think is going to be relatively extreme when it
00:30:30.640
comes to fruition. So what do you say to the guy? And even this, I can hear this in the back of my
00:30:35.100
mind coming to me as I'm having this conversation with you. That is, okay, I understand the value in
00:30:40.740
deep work. I can see how I'd be more efficient if I'm focusing on a few things and I'm going deeper
00:30:44.860
rather than wider, but emails still have to get answered. And I still feel like, okay, I've got to put
00:30:52.220
some social media posts out there because this is part of the marketing, the branding and the
00:30:55.520
things that I'm doing. How do we adjust for that and compensate for that?
00:30:59.340
Well, I think the key question to ask is, for your job, what is the ideal ratio of deep work hours to
00:31:06.960
shallow work hours in the typical week? So if you work for yourself, you need to do reflection and
00:31:12.380
have an answer to that question. And then you work backwards from that answer to put in place the
00:31:17.440
habits, the systems and the scheduling that allows it to work. If you work for someone else,
00:31:21.600
my recommendation is that you have this conversation. It's a respectful conversation.
00:31:26.040
You say, here's what deep work is. Here's what shallow work is. Both are important, right? Both
00:31:31.660
have to happen. But I think I want to clarify, what should my ratio of deep to shallow work be?
00:31:36.120
And your boss or your supervisor, have the conversation, have them sort of say, this is
00:31:40.440
what I think it should be, and then measure and talk about it. Hey, I'm falling well short of it. So I told
00:31:45.880
the story recently of someone who worked in marketing at a Silicon Valley startup. And they
00:31:50.400
had this culture at this place where if you weren't immediately accessible, people assumed you were
00:31:54.880
slacking off. And they were using Slack, ironically. And so if you weren't on Slack, you were considered
00:32:00.120
to be slacking off. And he said this was crazy, because what he did for this company required deep
00:32:06.480
work. The more concentration he could give it, the more value he generated for the company. So
00:32:10.260
he read this suggestion of mine, and he sat down with his boss, and they had this conversation.
00:32:14.200
And he said as soon as he brought it up, it was immediately clear that it would be absurd for
00:32:18.820
her to answer, I want you to just do shallow work. I just want you communicating internally.
00:32:23.580
Because they were paying this guy a lot of money to think deeply and produce, in this case, these
00:32:29.040
well-researched articles they use for marketing purposes. So once they actually nailed down that
00:32:33.220
he should be doing like a 50-50 ratio, they could just work backwards from this agreement. And quickly,
00:32:38.020
they settled on the solution of he was going to have this two-hour chunk every morning and a two-hour
00:32:41.960
chunk afternoon, where it was well promulgated and well understood among his team that he was
00:32:46.580
unreachable. And he does his deep work. So four hours of deep work a day. Everyone knows they
00:32:51.800
can't contact him then, so they just plan around it, right? Oh, if I really need something from him,
00:32:55.380
maybe I should grab him before he goes into one of these sessions. Completely non-disruptive. And yet,
00:33:01.400
he's now spending 50% of his time doing deep work. So it's probably having orders of magnitude more
00:33:06.740
value produced for the company. So what's the deep to shallow work ratio that makes sense? And then
00:33:11.360
you work backwards to say, what do I have to do to hit here? Do I have to be more efficient with my
00:33:15.700
shallow work to hit this target? Probably. Do I have to eliminate some shallow work to make some
00:33:20.440
room? You know, probably. Do I have to have some pretty strict rules for how I schedule my deep work
00:33:25.220
to make sure it gets done? Probably that as well. But it gives you targets to push off against to
00:33:29.900
actually start making changes in a way that's more guided.
00:33:32.300
And I imagine, too, there's a lot of experimentation in that. Because to come up with
00:33:36.960
a random number, like I should be doing 70% deep work and 30% shallow work would probably
00:33:41.520
not really make sense unless you experimented without actually working. And then, like you said,
00:33:46.880
measuring and tracking the results of that. Yeah, measure, track, discuss. And if you work for
00:33:49.940
yourself, then it's you reflecting on the data. The other thing I want to emphasize is that deep work
00:33:55.900
is a trained skill. And again, this is something a lot of people get wrong. They think of it like a habit,
00:34:00.680
like flossing their teeth, something that they know how to do. I know how to concentrate. I just
00:34:04.200
got to make more time to do it. The reality is the ability to concentrate is imminently trainable.
00:34:09.760
And the more you train it, the better you get. So if you really want to get the true deep life
00:34:14.140
experience, there's going to be a period where you have to be pushing your ability to concentrate,
00:34:18.540
just like you'd be pushing your muscles if you're picking up a new sport. And it's important because a lot
00:34:24.120
of people, when they first try to add more deep work systematically into their life,
00:34:27.840
they find it to be very frustrating and unproductive. It hurts their head. It feels
00:34:32.320
uncomfortable. They don't actually produce much work. Their mind rebels against the lack of novel
00:34:36.640
stimuli. And it's tempting to step back and say, I'm not producing much here. I'm not a deep work
00:34:41.360
person. But if you understand that it's a trainable skill, you have the more realistic reaction,
00:34:46.880
which is, okay, I'm not really good at this yet. So I better get training because I really want to
00:34:51.380
get the value that comes with being really good at concentrating. And so this just motivates me to
00:34:55.740
train all the harder. This actually reminds me of my training. I'm currently training for
00:35:01.820
a Spartan Agogi, which is a 60 hour event. It's a team building event in Vermont I'm going to.
00:35:07.820
And as I'm training, I'm doing a lot of running. Well, I typically run with my earbuds in,
00:35:11.900
I'm listening to a podcast or I'm listening to a book, whatever it may be. And I've deliberately
00:35:16.160
not done that. I've deliberately gone on runs without any music, without any podcast,
00:35:22.340
just me and my mind and me running. And I know when I started, it was really,
00:35:27.740
really difficult for me to do. I was all over the place. My runs were shorter than they normally
00:35:31.680
were. But as I've gained and developed this muscle and the skill of concentration and focus and being
00:35:37.740
able to just be with my thoughts, I've noticed myself getting stronger in those areas.
00:35:42.000
You get better at it. You know, I did a similar practice right around 2010, 2011. I started this
00:35:48.000
practice. I call it productive meditation, where I would go for walks and I would have a single
00:35:53.360
professional problem. So I'm a theoretical computer scientist as my day job. So it'd be like a math
00:35:58.220
proof. And I would try to hold it in my head and make progress on the problem in my head.
00:36:03.280
And whenever I noticed my attention wander, I would just notice it and bring the attention back.
00:36:07.560
And it was really hard at first, but I walked to where I was a postdoc and back from my apartment.
00:36:14.440
So I had this walk every day. So I was like, I'm just going to do it every day,
00:36:16.840
every day. And I got better and better at it. And then, you know, after a couple of years of
00:36:21.860
doing this, I now do quite a bit of work in my head. I do quite a bit of work in the woods,
00:36:25.280
actually, because I can, you know, hold the problems in my head and make progress just as
00:36:28.720
easily. It's just trainable. You know, so it's a, it's a great insight. And as you're probably
00:36:34.220
experiencing, once you get better at it, it can be an incredibly satisfying and productive
00:36:38.020
experience to just be able to lock into something and give it your full attention. So it's worth
00:36:42.500
training because it's a, it's a very nice experience that a lot of people, especially young men,
00:36:46.740
these days really have no life experience with. They just don't have a good experience of ever
00:36:52.160
being truly deeply locked into something. Because if you've had something in your hand beeping at
00:36:57.900
you since you were a teenager, you know, your brain has never been exposed to what it really
00:37:02.840
feels like before you locked into something. And so like, once you've trained that experience,
00:37:07.860
Now you've talked a little bit about and skim the surface on these, but I want to get real
00:37:11.560
practical and some, some maybe steps or strategies somebody can employ to, to have a little bit more
00:37:16.260
deep work. One of the things that you mentioned was making yourself less accessible, but are there
00:37:20.720
some other things that we can do to get a little deeper into the current work that we're doing?
00:37:25.120
Yeah. So there's really three categories of things that I think are important. Uh, if you want to adopt
00:37:29.860
more of a deep life, I'll just mention three categories real quick and then we can get practical.
00:37:33.960
Um, but the first is, uh, so actually developing your ability to concentrate. So like we were talking
00:37:39.840
about training that, like a muscle, there's practical things like productive meditation,
00:37:43.160
going for runs without anything in your ears that just help you in general, embracing boredom is
00:37:48.660
important. You have to be away from stimuli a lot every single day, because if your mind is trained
00:37:55.840
to get a little bit of stimuli, every time it's a little bit bored, you're never gonna be able to do
00:37:59.320
deep work. The second type of category is, uh, how you actually structure your work day such that
00:38:06.080
deep work shows up regularly and is protected. So you need some sort of scheduling system that
00:38:12.320
makes sure that when you're going to do deep work is very well identified and that you're not just
00:38:17.060
trying to figure out on the fly. Maybe I should do some deep work right now. You also need some sort
00:38:21.320
of rituals or habits built around these deep work sessions to try to get as much as possible out of
00:38:27.080
them because deep work is very hard to do. Right. So you really have to give it a lot of support.
00:38:30.860
And then the final type of things, which are important for getting more depth into your life
00:38:34.860
is these lifestyle changes. I'm talking about changes you make to your general lifestyle that
00:38:39.340
basically communicate to yourself. I'm now taking my time and attention seriously. So this is where I
00:38:44.920
get into, you know, convincing more people to quit social media or to spend the day leaving their phone
00:38:50.680
at home, these types of efforts to sort of communicate to yourself. I take my attention seriously. So if you can
00:38:55.760
get some practical habits going in each of these three categories, that's the right formula I found
00:39:01.980
for really succeeding with getting more depth into your life.
00:39:05.860
Yeah, I can see that. I know for me, one simple thing that I've been able to do in my life is just
00:39:09.740
turn off the notifications on my phone. Not that I still can't access the social media or the email
00:39:14.400
I need to, but just turning off the notifications has allowed me more time with the things that are
00:39:18.860
actually important. Yeah. And sometimes like that's like step one. And then step two would be,
00:39:22.740
well, just take the apps off the phone, right? I mean, if you, if you need to, you need to access these
00:39:26.740
things, you can put aside time and when you're at your computer and then that way you don't have the
00:39:30.440
thing to glance at, you know, step three might be actually quit most of the services that are engineered
00:39:36.540
using the same logic as Las Vegas casino devices to capture and distract you. I mean,
00:39:42.720
right. Why would you, why would you put a slot machine in your pocket if you're worried about a gambling
00:39:46.580
addiction? Well, the same thing to have some of these services that are being engineered by attention
00:39:51.740
engineers to capture your attention and convert your time and attention into, you know, virtual
00:39:56.000
quarters for these companies. If you're trying to take your ability to focus seriously, don't put
00:39:59.880
in your pocket. Just like if you wanted to be an athlete, don't have a bag of Doritos in your gym
00:40:04.060
bag, right? I mean, it's right, right. Forget about the discipline, just eliminate the even desire or
00:40:09.240
ability in this case to, to, uh, cheat at all. Yeah. This is for example, why I've never had a social
00:40:13.240
media account. It's, it's not because I feel that I'm better than it. It's because I don't trust
00:40:17.100
myself. They're too good. Interesting. They're too good at it. The people who are building these
00:40:21.240
companies, uh, they're too good at building these things sticky. They have billion dollar market
00:40:25.560
caps. That means they have a lot of money to spend on figuring out how do we get time and
00:40:29.740
attention? Just like slot machines are engineered to get as many quarters out of your pocket into the
00:40:34.340
slot machine as possible. They're using the same principles for the social media apps, except for now
00:40:39.480
the quarters are minutes of your attention and bits of your personal data. You know, I find it to be a
00:40:45.300
scary thing. And so just like, I just won't go to Las Vegas on vacation. I'm not going to put
00:40:49.560
Facebook in my pocket if I make a living thinking about things. Yeah, that makes sense. Cal, we're
00:40:54.380
winding down on time here. I do want to ask you a couple of additional questions. One I prepped you
00:40:58.180
for. And the question is, what does it mean to be a man? Yeah. I mean, to me, manhood is about
00:41:04.520
taking the things that you value and transforming them into character by actually acting on those values
00:41:13.300
day in and day out. Love it. Just a matter of taking action. Yeah. That you, anyone can say
00:41:18.580
they value something, but character, you know, manly characters where your life actually reflects
00:41:22.960
it. Awesome. Cal, if we want to connect with you, want to buy the book, we want to learn more about
00:41:27.680
the work you're doing. It's going to be difficult to get ahold of you on social media. So how do we
00:41:32.280
track you down? Right. It's true. I'm hard to contact by design. I don't have any social media
00:41:37.380
accounts. I don't have a general purpose email address. I make no promise to be accessible or respond to
00:41:42.080
things, but my writing's easy to find. So, uh, you know, my books are on Amazon or in Barnes and
00:41:48.140
Noble and calnewport.com has my blog where, you know, every week I'm on there talking about writing
00:41:55.320
about thinking about issues of how you build a sort of meaningful, successful life in a digital age. So
00:41:59.960
my ideas are easy to find. I'm a little bit harder. Well, we'll make sure we link that up in the show
00:42:04.960
notes. So anybody who's listening can access that stuff. And I want to tell you, I feel honored that you
00:42:10.500
would take time out of your day to come talk with me and the rest of the guys. So I really appreciate
00:42:14.280
you. I appreciate the work you're doing. I can already see how between so good they can't ignore
00:42:18.880
you and also deep work, how this is making me more effective and efficient in my work. So I appreciate
00:42:23.940
the work that you're doing. Well, thanks. And you know, I appreciate the chance to come on and
00:42:27.100
talk to your audience. I mean, I, this idea that there's a, an audience out there that wants to get
00:42:33.080
more out of life, that's willing to put in the work to shape their life into something more
00:42:36.200
impactful. I think that's a powerful thing. So I'm, I'm honored to be able to come on and have
00:42:41.360
a talk with your audience. There you have it guys. Cal Newport making the case for deep work.
00:42:46.340
I've read the book and I can tell you from experience that when you start incorporating
00:42:49.760
the concepts Cal outlines in your life, you will be more productive. You'll be more efficient and
00:42:55.200
satisfied with what you are accomplishing throughout the day. So go get the book, read it, apply it.
00:43:00.800
In the meantime, go check out iron council. It's an elite group of brothers inside of again,
00:43:05.740
in the iron council, they're going to push you. They're going to question you. They're
00:43:08.560
going to test you and they're going to hold your feet to the fire. And that's what it takes to shake
00:43:12.180
you out of the life you might currently find yourself in. So head to order of man.com slash
00:43:16.060
iron council. Join us right now. And all the details for this show in the meantime can be found
00:43:21.200
at order of man.com slash zero six three and join in the conversation again that we're having about
00:43:26.080
masculinity in our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash order of man guys. I look forward
00:43:31.500
to talking to you next week, but until then take action and become the man you were meant to be.
00:43:36.500
Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be
00:43:41.640
more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.