The Art of Manliness - Down With Pseudo-Productivity： Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 The last several years have seen the rise of a sort of anti-productivity movement.

00:00:15.740 Knowledge workers who feel burned out and that work is pointless, meaningless, and grinding

00:00:19.400 have been talking more about opting out, quiet quitting, and doing nothing.

00:00:23.720 My guests would argue that, in fact, productivity itself isn't the problem,

00:00:26.880 and that most people actually want to do good work.

00:00:30.000 Instead, he says, it's our whole approach to productivity that's broken and needs to be transformed.

00:00:34.980 Cal Newport is a professor of computer science and the author of books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

00:00:40.080 His latest book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:00:44.660 Today on the show, Cal explains what's led to the rise of what he calls pseudo-productivity

00:00:48.240 and the fallout when we apply the structures of the industrial revolution to modern work.

00:00:52.500 He then impacts the tenets and tactics of the slow productivity approach to work

00:00:56.300 and how to implement them, whether you work for yourself or for a boss.

00:01:00.020 We discuss why you need to do fewer things in the short term to do more things in the long term,

00:01:04.200 the artificiality of working at the same intensity every day,

00:01:07.140 and how to inject more seasonality in your work,

00:01:09.440 the role quiet quitting can play in achieving greater balance,

00:01:12.260 and many other ideas on how to make modern work more sustainable, humane, and fruitful.

00:01:16.520 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash slowproductivity.

00:01:31.740 All right, Cal Newport, welcome back to the show.

00:01:35.360 Brad, it's a pleasure to be back.

00:01:36.860 I mean, as we were just mentioning before we started recording,

00:01:39.760 you and I just passed our one decade mark of podcasting together.

00:01:43.760 So it's been quite the journey you and I, so it's a pleasure to be back for sure.

00:01:48.280 It has been a journey, and this is the fifth time you've been on the show,

00:01:51.160 and I think that's a record.

00:01:52.060 You hold the record now for most AOM podcast appearances.

00:01:55.520 And the reason I keep bringing you back on the show is I've been a fan of your work for a long time.

00:02:00.680 I remember reading your high school success guides.

00:02:03.100 Even though I wasn't in high school, I read these things.

00:02:04.900 I wanted, how could I improve in college?

00:02:06.440 And then watching your thought and writing on productivity has just been really useful in my own life.

00:02:14.220 And you got a new book out called Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:02:20.340 And you started the book talking about during the pandemic, you have a blog,

00:02:25.060 you also have a podcast where you talk about your ideas.

00:02:26.900 And one thing you started noticing during the pandemic was this pushback against personal productivity.

00:02:33.980 And then you also started seeing it in the wider culture in articles and books being put out.

00:02:39.060 What was going on?

00:02:39.980 What were you seeing going on during that time?

00:02:43.760 Well, knowledge workers in particular, who are the people that really consume productivity-related content,

00:02:49.980 they're really the people who think about things like how productive am I,

00:02:54.060 or what should I do to become more productive?

00:02:55.740 They hit their limit.

00:02:58.040 And as far as I could tell, there was a slow creep of incipient exhaustion that began for this sector in the early 2000s.

00:03:06.460 It was getting worse and getting worse.

00:03:08.160 And when we got to 2020, they were done.

00:03:11.700 So there was this sense of I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out.

00:03:13.960 And also, I'm nihilistic.

00:03:16.240 I'm looking at all this frenzied stuff I'm doing in April of 2020.

00:03:21.080 I'm at home.

00:03:21.680 My kids are here trying to do school on Zoom.

00:03:24.140 My employer is trying to pretend like it's fine.

00:03:26.580 We'll just switch to virtual.

00:03:28.360 And I'm jumping onto all these meetings and seeing all these emails.

00:03:31.020 And I don't even really know, what am I doing here?

00:03:33.560 I'm hearing my spouse next to me at the kitchen table so I can see what they're doing and they can see what I'm doing.

00:03:39.440 And we're like, what do we do here?

00:03:41.080 So there's a sense of almost nihilistic exhaustion that came to a head with the final push that the pandemic gave it.

00:03:48.280 And it was in that moment that I think people started saying, I'm fed up with what's going on.

00:03:53.340 And I sort of blame productivity as an amorphous target.

00:03:58.360 This is the problem somehow.

00:03:59.700 And this really clear anti-productivity movement gained a lot of steam in those first months and first years of the pandemic as a result of this pent-up exhaustion finally going too far.

00:04:12.440 Yeah, you're seeing books coming out about how not to do things, how to just take back your life.

00:04:16.700 You saw quiet quitting going on.

00:04:18.780 And it manifests itself in a whole bunch of different ways.

00:04:22.320 Right.

00:04:22.420 And the issue was, and this is what really caught my attention, is that half of this seemed right.

00:04:28.140 For sure, people were exhausted because I hear from them.

00:04:31.540 They send me notes.

00:04:32.580 They call into my show.

00:04:34.060 And these books are coming out.

00:04:35.800 There's a lot of people publishing these anti-productivity books.

00:04:37.980 So certainly it is right that knowledge workers were exhausted and had been pushed too far.

00:04:44.300 It was the other half of this that wasn't resonating with me, though.

00:04:47.320 The idea that, therefore, the right thing to do is essentially adopt an antagonistic relationship towards your work.

00:04:54.400 To come at work from more of a zero-sum labor politics perspective of this is a tussle between me and capitalism, capital C capitalism.

00:05:04.560 We're going to fight back and forth, and I'm going to try to free myself from it.

00:05:07.840 Scripts.

00:05:08.880 This didn't ring true because I know in my own life and a lot of people's lives, they do care about what they produce.

00:05:15.120 They do care about doing work they're proud of.

00:05:18.500 They're not really interested in doing nothing.

00:05:22.440 They want to do things.

00:05:24.260 They just don't want to be so exhausted.

00:05:26.240 And so I thought there was this opportunity here to start from the premise that gave birth to the anti-productivity movement, that we're exhausted.

00:05:34.300 We don't know why, but then go in a different direction with that towards, okay, so how do we fix work so that we're not exhausted, but also so that we don't hate our work, so that we still can have pride and motivation for what we're doing.

00:05:48.760 That seemed to me to be self-evidently what we needed to figure out.

00:05:51.780 And that's the question out of which slow productivity eventually emerged as an answer.

00:05:57.060 And so you argue that a big driver behind this backlash was people had an incorrect view of what productivity is.

00:06:04.820 Because I think oftentimes when you ask people, like, what does it mean to be productive?

00:06:07.380 You're going to get 20 different answers.

00:06:09.360 People really don't know what it is, particularly in knowledge work.

00:06:12.020 If you ask a factory worker or a farmer what productivity is, they can tell you.

00:06:16.300 It's like, well, if I do X amount of work, I'm going to get X amount of results.

00:06:20.060 It's a little harder when you're doing spreadsheets or doing writing or things like that.

00:06:25.040 And you argue that what ends up happening is that knowledge workers engage in a lot of what you call pseudo-productivity.

00:06:33.580 So what is pseudo-productivity?

00:06:36.140 This was the interesting history I eventually uncovered is exactly like you just mentioned.

00:06:40.680 Until recently, productivity was a very cleanly defined economic concept, right?

00:06:45.700 So you can trace back that notion all the way back to Adam Smith.

00:06:48.980 It was originally used in the context of agriculture most frequently, and it was very easy to define productivity in agriculture.

00:06:57.180 Bushels of crop produced per acre of land under cultivation.

00:07:00.700 Oh, here's a number.

00:07:01.760 I changed the way that I plant my crops.

00:07:04.040 That number went up.

00:07:04.880 This new way of planting crops is better.

00:07:06.980 Then we got the industrial revolution.

00:07:09.240 You get mills, you get factories.

00:07:10.640 We could directly adopt quantitative productivity to that context.

00:07:13.800 How many Model Ts are we producing per paid labor hour that goes into our factory? 0.98

00:07:20.220 Oh, when I switched to an assembly line, that number went way up.

00:07:24.160 Oh, great.

00:07:24.640 Assembly line is a better way to build Model Ts, right?

00:07:26.740 So this quantitative productivity was the backbone on which all of economic growth basically for 2,000 years was built.

00:07:34.860 Then we get the knowledge work.

00:07:36.340 This emerges as a major sector roughly in the mid-20th century.

00:07:39.780 The term knowledge work is coined in 1959 for the first time.

00:07:43.620 That definition of productivity doesn't work anymore because there is no one thing we're producing.

00:07:48.140 Instead, knowledge workers do a variety of different things.

00:07:52.000 What they're doing shifts over time and differs from person to person.

00:07:55.260 Like what I'm doing right now as a professor, the literal list of projects and commitments that I'm working on is different than the professor sitting right next to me at Georgetown.

00:08:04.620 We do different things.

00:08:06.340 We take things onto our plate in a more haphazard and ad hoc way.

00:08:09.900 So there's no one thing to measure.

00:08:11.340 And the systems by which we organize and approach our work are hidden.

00:08:15.220 There is no centralized equivalent of an assembly line that you have in an office that everyone is following.

00:08:21.480 So even if you could measure some sort of output, you don't have a clear centralized system to improve.

00:08:26.340 You don't have, okay, hey, this isn't working.

00:08:28.100 Let's try this instead.

00:08:28.980 So quantitative productivity did not translate to the birth of the knowledge sector.

00:08:35.220 So we fell back onto a very crude heuristic, which was what you mentioned, pseudoproductivity.

00:08:41.280 Well, at the very least, we'll use activity as a visible proxy for useful effort.

00:08:46.760 So what this led to was the obvious idea of, well, why don't we gather all these knowledge workers in an office building for roughly the same length of a shift in a factory?

00:08:54.920 And then we can just make sure they're there.

00:08:57.160 Hey, if you're there, we know at least you're doing something.

00:08:59.180 And then we can kind of watch and make sure that you're not spending too much time at the water cooler.

00:09:02.900 We'll just use activity as a proxy for productivity.

00:09:05.780 If we need our productivity to go up, we'll tell you to work longer hours.

00:09:09.320 It was a hack.

00:09:10.800 It was a hack because we didn't know how else to manage in the absence of quantitative metrics like we were used to from other sectors.

00:09:17.900 And so that's what's really been dominating our implicit understanding of productivity.

00:09:22.540 We don't write this down anywhere.

00:09:23.500 No one really realizes this.

00:09:25.120 It's not like put up on a mission statement, but it's what we've been doing.

00:09:29.320 Activity will be a proxy for useful effort.

00:09:31.940 When you combine that with the advent of computers and networks and portable computing, all this falls apart.

00:09:38.380 And this way of measuring productivity, pseudoproductivity spins out of control.

00:09:43.020 That then becomes the source of the discontent that reaches ahead in 2020.

00:09:46.560 Okay, so because there's no specific way to measure productivity in knowledge work, we end up just showing how we're productive by answering lots of emails, going to lots of meetings, doing Zoom.

00:09:58.440 I mean, what other kind of things do you see people do in knowledge work to show that they're doing something?

00:10:01.800 Well, specifically what went wrong is before we got those technologies, demonstrating busyness was a physical thing.

00:10:09.020 I have to come to an office.

00:10:10.060 I have to be at an office.

00:10:10.920 And if you walk by my door, I need to start typing or look like I'm looking through papers.

00:10:15.740 Once you add communication that's digital and once you add portable computing, so I can bring work home with me on a laptop and I can communicate with people about work from wherever I am through, let's say, a smartphone, Slack, email, et cetera.

00:10:28.860 The problem was the opportunities to do work became endless.

00:10:32.720 I could always do work.

00:10:34.060 The opportunities to demonstrate busyness also became ubiquitous because I could do this digitally.

00:10:39.840 If you see a footprint of me replying to a message or jumping on a Slack channel or being on a quote-unquote optional Zoom meeting, these all became ways of demonstrating productivity.

00:10:50.360 And the amount of work I could do also became limitless because with low friction communication, it's very easy to push more and more work at people.

00:10:57.260 There's always more work you could take.

00:10:58.800 So now this drive to be visibly productive morphed from let me show up to the office on time and look reasonably busy while I'm there and then I'll go home to this constant tug of war at all points of your life of, hey, this is a moment where I could be demonstrating more productivity.

00:11:15.940 Every time I choose to do something else, every time I choose to be with my family or to exercise or to go to church, whatever I'm doing is always now a constant psychological tug of war between I could be demonstrating more productivity.

00:11:28.000 It became this psychologically fraught internal battle of I always could be working, there's always more to be done, and that's when we got into trouble.

00:11:37.500 That's what pushed us towards this sense of exhaustion.

00:11:40.240 And not only that, it led to that nihilism because people would look at all the stuff they did during the day, the emails and the Zoom meetings, and they're thinking, boy, what did this actually do?

00:11:49.920 What did I actually accomplish?

00:11:51.160 There's no point to this, so I might as well just give up on this idea of productivity.

00:11:54.780 Yeah, well, one thing that happened in particular, which I think is tragic and overlooked, is that once activity becomes how I demonstrate that I'm useful, I start saying yes to more things, right?

00:12:05.560 Because what clearer way to indicate that you're active than saying yes when someone asks you to do something?

00:12:11.720 And what way would be more dangerous, more of a signal that you're not productive than to say no when someone asks you to do something?

00:12:19.220 So we began taking on way more commitments than we would have in time past.

00:12:23.660 So just the concurrent number of things we work on as an average knowledge worker, that's really gone up.

00:12:29.140 But the problem is each one of these things that we commit to doing, it's not just the time required to execute the task, the write the report or the do the committee meeting.

00:12:37.900 It's the administrative overhead that comes with it that begins to really take a toll on us.

00:12:44.360 Everything we say yes to brings with it a persistent administrative overhead that I call overhead tax.

00:12:51.200 And the more things you say yes to, the more of this tax you have to pay, which means the more of your day now has to be spent tending to all of the things that you've put onto your plate.

00:13:02.400 And the more time you now have to spend tending to these things, meaning emails and meetings and just the cognitive real estate that these things take up, the more time you have to tend to the administrative overhead of all these commitments, the less time you have to actually get work done.

00:13:16.440 And then we get to a point where there's very little time left to actually make progress on our work.

00:13:22.080 And this is what I think happened in the early pandemic is that the shift to remote work added about 20% more tasks to everyone's plate basically overnight because there's work to be done to adjust to the pandemic.

00:13:34.500 We were already so close to the edge.

00:13:37.900 So much of our day was already in administrative overhead that for a lot of people, that extra 20% spiraled the whole thing out of control.

00:13:45.500 And we began to hear from people that would have eight hours in a row of Zoom meetings.

00:13:49.700 I mean, I have emails I could show you of people saying, here's my problem, Cal.

00:13:54.340 When do I go to the bathroom during the day?

00:13:56.360 It's eight hours back to back to back to back to Zoom.

00:13:58.540 So the whole thing just fell apart because we were flying so close to the edge of absurdity.

00:14:03.840 That's why people feel so nihilistic.

00:14:06.020 It's like I'm spending basically all of my time talking about projects.

00:14:09.620 We're not actually doing any of the work.

00:14:11.620 This is like a Camus play or maybe something out of the Marx Brothers.

00:14:14.500 This can't actually be non-satirical.

00:14:16.880 This can't actually be a real job.

00:14:19.080 That's where so many people found themselves and they were just done with it.

00:14:22.740 Yeah, this idea of overhead tax was really powerful to me because you talked about this on one of your podcasts.

00:14:27.500 And whenever I heard it, I was like, that is, it made me think about my work in a different way.

00:14:31.860 So overhead tax is this.

00:14:33.620 So let's say the actual work you're trying to do is write a sales proposal for a big client.

00:14:39.440 That's the actual thing you want to do.

00:14:41.540 But the overhead tax is all the stuff you have to do to make that proposal.

00:14:46.760 So it's the emails, the meetings, all that stuff.

00:14:49.400 That's what you're talking about when you're talking about overhead tax.

00:14:51.540 Yeah, and that goes on even if you're not working on the thing at the moment.

00:14:56.080 That's part of the problem.

00:14:57.580 Even if you know, I'm going to work on this proposal next week, other people don't know that.

00:15:03.540 So they're going to be emailing you and they're going to be setting up the dreaded weekly check-in status meetings.

00:15:08.400 And so regardless of how you want to tackle this work, once you've committed to it, once it's been activated, other people are going to start demanding that you interact with them about it.

00:15:17.040 So the overhead tax is persistent and ongoing until that commitment is discharged.

00:15:23.320 And then the problem is you might think, well, I'm just taking on one task and that task is I'm going to write this proposal.

00:15:28.300 But then you think, well, I just got this one thing I'm doing so I can take on something else.

00:15:31.440 But then that other thing you add to your list comes with its own additional overhead tax.

00:15:38.460 And then you get the spiral.

00:15:39.520 So now if I keep adding things, eventually the amount of time I'm spending on overhead tax is so large that I fall behind on actually finishing the tasks.

00:15:49.960 And then more and more projects begin to pile up because you're not finishing the ones you said yes to because more and more of your day is overhead tax and things begin to spiral out of control.

00:15:59.300 The only way to escape that spiral is to start finding hours free from the cost of overhead tax to actually do the work.

00:16:08.700 And now we find people having to work early in the morning, to work on the weekends, to work in the evenings.

00:16:13.960 And this is particularly crazy making because they know that they have these long workday, which is just being wasted on meetings and email.

00:16:22.840 And the fact that they now have to also sacrifice a weekend or the evening.

00:16:26.800 I mean, that's why this stuff becomes derangy.

00:16:29.040 I mean, this is why we got an anti-productivity literature.

00:16:31.520 I'm not surprised.

00:16:32.580 The way we were working was just crazy.

00:16:34.980 But I think the big difference between, let's say, the way I think about this and an anti-productivity person is they would say, if we're feeling really bad about work, if it's really making us crazy, it must be really benefiting someone else.

00:16:47.760 It's all going to be these dialectics.

00:16:49.660 So if we feel terrible about work, it must be because we have a mustache twirling manager that's getting a lot of extra labor out of us.

00:16:58.440 This must be an exploitative relationship.

00:17:02.060 The reality is also, I think, is more crazy than that.

00:17:04.960 No one was benefiting from this way of work.

00:17:06.900 It's not good for a company that you're spending eight hours in Zoom.

00:17:10.680 They don't make money for you being in Zoom.

00:17:12.760 You answering emails does not produce the reports or the software that they're selling.

00:17:16.880 It's not good for anybody.

00:17:18.340 That's what I think is.

00:17:19.140 It's crazier than the anti-productivity people realize.

00:17:21.860 They're thinking like, yeah, this is just like an early 20th century Marxist analysis.

00:17:26.520 It's crazier than that.

00:17:28.360 No one was benefiting from this way of work.

00:17:30.500 The whole thing had just spiraled into absurdity.

00:17:33.900 So your response to this absurdity is what you call slow productivity.

00:17:38.340 It's a new philosophy of productivity.

00:17:40.520 Actually, it's not new.

00:17:41.300 It isn't new.

00:17:42.420 You look to the past to kind of guide and shape your philosophy.

00:17:47.180 I mean, one of the things you look to when you're developing your idea of slow productivity was the slow food movement.

00:17:53.340 How did the slow food movement inspire some of the tenets of slow productivity?

00:17:58.140 Well, I first looked at it just because the term slow.

00:18:01.380 So I kind of had this intuitive appeal to the word slow because things felt really fast and distracting.

00:18:09.580 As I read more about slow food, though, I said, oh, there's actually a framework here around which we could build a solution to the issues we're having in work.

00:18:16.780 So if you look at slow food, there's two things that's really key about that movement and the additional slow movements that followed it.

00:18:23.980 One, they look back to traditional sources of wisdom.

00:18:27.080 So instead of trying to build from scratch a new utopian way of thinking about something, they like to look back and say, where is the aggregated cultural wisdom on this topic?

00:18:37.920 So slow food didn't try to build alternative food cultures to fast food from scratch.

00:18:43.780 They look back at their great grandparents, you know, how did they eat in this part of Italy 100 years ago?

00:18:49.740 So they look back to traditional aggregated sources of cultural knowledge as opposed to trying to build new things from scratch.

00:18:55.800 And two, they really believed in a positive alternative.

00:18:59.920 Present a positive alternative to what it is that is upsetting you.

00:19:04.740 Don't just attack what's upsetting you.

00:19:06.300 So instead of just attacking McDonald's coming to the Spanish steppes in Rome, they said, let's give you an alternative way to think about food that's better.

00:19:15.740 We think it's a better alternative.

00:19:17.060 And I realized that's what we needed to deal with what was going on in knowledge work.

00:19:21.560 We had to, A, avoid just attacking work.

00:19:25.680 I mean, it feels good for the writers doing it, but it doesn't help anyone.

00:19:28.260 Just to say work is just bad.

00:19:29.620 We need a positive alternative to the way that we're working that's not working.

00:19:34.000 And two, instead of trying to invent new approaches to work entirely from scratch, let's look back at traditional ways we thought about work.

00:19:41.180 And for me, it made sense that what I'm going to do is look for knowledge workers from time past, people who use their brain to produce new value, who did not work in an office, but instead had a lot of freedom about how and when they did their work.

00:19:55.300 Let's see what they gravitated towards.

00:19:57.280 What did they discover through trial and error was the right way to use your brain to produce useful knowledge in the world.

00:20:03.940 Let's isolate those principles and then adjust them to the modern 21st century office setting.

00:20:09.420 So we'll look back just like slow food, look back to traditional cuisine.

00:20:12.880 I look back to traditional knowledge workers and just like slow food said, what's our positive alternatives to McDonald's?

00:20:18.960 I said, what is our positive alternative to being on Slack 10 hours a day?

00:20:23.720 And so, yeah, you look to Jane Austen, I think Charles Darwin, a lot of famous knowledge workers who the work they did, groundbreaking, it changed, sometimes changed the course of history.

00:20:35.900 But if you look at their day-to-day work life, it doesn't seem like they were doing much, but little by little, they got a lot done.

00:20:43.340 So let's dig into these tenets of slow productivity.

00:20:46.640 And the first one is just do fewer things.

00:20:50.040 And so by doing fewer things, this can reduce a lot of that overhead tax we were talking about, right?

00:20:55.080 So if you take on fewer projects, fewer commitments at work, you'll have to deal with less of the back and forth emails, the Zoom meetings, etc.

00:21:02.660 But how do you convince your boss or the people you work with that, hey, I can't take on another project when there's this expectation you should?

00:21:11.800 There's a lot of social pressure that you need to take on more projects.

00:21:14.420 So any advice there?

00:21:16.620 Well, one of the key things to remember is that really what this principle is saying is not do fewer things this year.

00:21:24.240 It's not saying accomplish less useful results over the next few months.

00:21:28.520 It is instead asking that you do fewer things at once.

00:21:32.500 So cut down on the simultaneous number of commitments.

00:21:35.840 When you cut down on how much you're doing at once, as we talked about, the overhead tax goes down, you have more time per day to actually work on hard things, and you finish these things faster.

00:21:45.520 There's this irony to it that if you take on fewer commitments at any one time, the total number of things you accomplish over months and years is actually much higher.

00:21:55.080 So there's some sense of, if I can just get away with this long enough, the value of how I work is going to be self-evident.

00:22:02.820 Fewer things it wants means more things over time.

00:22:05.020 So how do you do this?

00:22:06.300 And so the book, I mean, a lot of the book is trying to understand how do we engineer these timeless principles into this very specific time we have right now of bosses and email and Slack.

00:22:14.960 And so there's a lot of ideas, a lot of real practical ideas about how to do this.

00:22:18.400 But if you work in an office and for a boss, a lot of these heuristics or tips that I talk about, they center on making workload transparent.

00:22:26.480 The key thing that drives overload right now is the fact that it's a secret how much I'm working on.

00:22:32.300 You have no idea.

00:22:33.740 There's no systematic, transparent way of seeing who's working on what.

00:22:37.300 There's no systematic rules for when and how we assign new work to people.

00:22:40.900 So all I know is I have something that needs to get done.

00:22:43.800 You seem like someone who could do it.

00:22:45.560 I send a quick email.

00:22:46.820 It's off my plate.

00:22:47.760 I move on with my life.

00:22:48.960 I have no idea if you're overloaded or not.

00:22:51.820 Transparency about workload can make a really big difference.

00:22:55.060 So in its very simplest form, you could literally have a shared document.

00:22:59.320 Here's what I'm working on right now, like actively dividing line.

00:23:03.620 Here are other things that people want me to work on.

00:23:06.240 And, you know, I have them roughly ordered.

00:23:08.240 And so you could say to someone when they ask you to do something like, well, yeah, go to my work queue and go ahead and add it on there.

00:23:14.460 And suddenly they have to confront, oh, my God, you have like 15 things waiting to be done once you're done working on the three things you're doing now, which will either A, lead them to say, you know what, never mind.

00:23:23.260 Or B, have completely reset expectations about how long it's going to take and whether they're going to bother you about something else until it's done.

00:23:30.320 Another way you can do this is do pre-scheduling of time.

00:23:34.780 Oh, you want me to do this project?

00:23:36.020 Great.

00:23:36.280 Hold on a second.

00:23:37.220 I'm going to go find the time to do this work on my calendar.

00:23:40.600 Let me get back to you once I do.

00:23:42.440 I'm going to find it and block it.

00:23:44.460 So you're not this is not just a time management strategy like, oh, I want to protect that time for when it comes.

00:23:49.300 It gives you a completely accurate assessment of how much time you really have available.

00:23:54.500 And this is where you might come back and say, look, this is going to take 15 hours.

00:23:58.400 The closest place I could find 15 hours to do this is in three months.

00:24:02.380 You know, it's transparency about the reality of your workload.

00:24:06.200 Then there's simpler to implement tactics.

00:24:09.040 And I'll just mention one quotas, a different type of work you establish per quarter, per month, whatever makes sense.

00:24:16.300 Here's how many of these things I do during this time period.

00:24:19.680 And when you hit that limit, you say, hey, you know, love to help.

00:24:23.280 I do a lot of this.

00:24:24.720 I maintain a quota of whatever per month.

00:24:27.640 And I've already hit that quota for this month.

00:24:28.880 So I can't do it this time.

00:24:30.000 I do this as a professor with paper reviews.

00:24:32.620 I have to review papers, but I get way more requests than I can ever do.

00:24:35.980 So I set the terms.

00:24:37.060 I do five per semester, whatever it is.

00:24:39.200 This is also effective because, again, you're confronting people with the reality of your workload.

00:24:43.900 And it's a very hard thing for people to get upset about or argue about.

00:24:47.420 Because our only real argument is your quota is wrong.

00:24:50.500 You should do more work.

00:24:51.460 You're lying about your calendar.

00:24:53.400 You secretly do have a lot of time.

00:24:55.180 You've made up this list of projects.

00:24:56.640 They're not going to say that.

00:24:58.160 You know, the key is not that they're trying to exploit you.

00:25:00.860 It's just that they haven't thought much about you or what you're doing or how much work you have on your plate.

00:25:04.300 They're just trying to get rid of something.

00:25:05.360 So transparency about the reality of workloads goes a long way to moderating the actual flow of assignments and works in these environments.

00:25:13.740 Yeah, it sounds like what you're doing is you're making your abstract work concrete.

00:25:18.500 Yep.

00:25:18.560 You see, whenever I go to a contractor to fix something or like a couple years ago, I had my shower redone.

00:25:23.820 And I said, hey, I want my shower redone.

00:25:25.760 They said, okay, great.

00:25:26.360 They came out and they gave me the estimate.

00:25:27.880 And they say, well, look, it's going to be three months before we can get to it because we have this backlog.

00:25:32.160 And I understood that because, yeah, it takes a while to build showers or redo showers.

00:25:37.280 I feel like with knowledge work, people don't have that idea, that understanding because they think, well, you know, it's not.

00:25:43.120 It's just it's an email.

00:25:44.080 It's this project.

00:25:44.840 You can fit it in when you can.

00:25:46.220 But what you're doing here is you're saying, no, this is an actual concrete thing.

00:25:49.160 It takes time.

00:25:50.220 So you're going to have to might have to wait before I can get to it.

00:25:53.100 Yeah, it's almost like you wish we could have a jar of marbles on your desk and they each represent, you know, a half hour of your time for the next.

00:26:02.300 Two weeks or something like that.

00:26:03.840 And then when someone wanted to ask you to do something, they have to come into your office and grab out the appropriate number of marbles from your jar and know what they're taking from you.

00:26:12.240 And if there's no marbles left, there's no marbles left.

00:26:14.380 We somehow want to capture that metaphor digitally.

00:26:17.780 Somehow we want to capture that metaphor in the way we work today.

00:26:21.880 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:26:29.000 And now back to the show.

00:26:30.500 So just reducing the number of projects you take on at a time can go a long way to allowing you to keep your sanity and reduce a lot of that overhead tax.

00:26:41.440 But are there things we can do to reduce the overhead tax on the projects we do take on?

00:26:46.540 Because I feel like maybe a lot of people have experienced this.

00:26:49.120 You're working on a project and you think, I'm doing a lot of movement on this thing, but I'm actually not moving anywhere. 0.98

00:26:57.000 Because you're kind of spinning your wheels doing dumb stuff.

00:26:59.640 Anything we can do to reduce the little piddly things that take up our time during the day?

00:27:04.100 Yeah, it's a really important element to add to this.

00:27:07.580 And I essentially consolidated in the book years of writing and thinking about these small time-consuming overhead activities and sort of consolidated all my best thinking on it.

00:27:18.140 And the verb I used was how do you constrain the small?

00:27:23.660 So we want to limit the big.

00:27:24.820 So we want to limit how many things we commit to.

00:27:27.040 But then how do we, after we've committed to things, constrain the impact of the small administrative work that comes along and we can't avoid?

00:27:35.680 How do we constrain its impact?

00:27:37.880 So we can't eliminate those things.

00:27:40.240 You know, we have to have meetings about this.

00:27:41.980 We're trying to get this project done.

00:27:43.320 My HR department needs me to fill out this form.

00:27:46.180 I can't not do it.

00:27:47.360 So then taking that small stuff that remains, how do we constrain it so that its impact on our schedule is minimal?

00:27:53.640 And here's, there's a bunch of things you can do autopilot scheduling.

00:27:56.760 If it's regularly occurring, small tasks or obligations, same time, same days, it's on your calendar and protected.

00:28:04.940 You don't even think about it.

00:28:06.120 Every other Tuesday, there's this hour around lunch and I do a lot of paperwork that I know is going to be generated regularly.

00:28:11.800 I do my hours.

00:28:12.520 I do my timesheets.

00:28:13.440 So stuff that's regular, decide in advance where it's going to happen.

00:28:16.760 So it can't just sit there and be in your mind and pockmark your schedule.

00:28:21.340 That's really going to help use synchronous communication as much as possible.

00:28:26.380 This is a big one.

00:28:27.780 Think about email as a tool for delivering files and broadcasting information.

00:28:34.640 It's very good for that.

00:28:36.180 I want to send you a contract emails.

00:28:39.480 Great.

00:28:39.780 I can attach it.

00:28:40.580 It goes right to you.

00:28:41.460 Fantastic.

00:28:42.300 I want to send a message to the whole department.

00:28:44.860 Email is great.

00:28:45.620 We used to have to print it out and put it in people's mailboxes.

00:28:48.220 This is really great.

00:28:49.320 Or maybe I have a question that can be answered with a single message.

00:28:52.880 That's a really good use of email, too.

00:28:54.580 Like, hey, I don't want to bother you.

00:28:56.180 When you get a chance, remind me again what date you're going on vacation.

00:29:01.220 Email is great for that.

00:29:02.140 It sits there until you're ready and then you answer it.

00:29:04.480 Anything that requires back and forth, now we're going to have to actually talk about this, get it out of email.

00:29:10.360 Now, what you don't want to do here is instead make every conversation be its own meeting because that's its own type of hell.

00:29:17.840 There's a reason why people said, could this meeting have been an email?

00:29:21.580 That's like a meme that is quite popular.

00:29:24.180 That's its own special type of hell.

00:29:25.440 It's like every single thing needs a 30-plus-minute block on your calendar to discuss.

00:29:30.080 I hate that as well.

00:29:31.340 What you want is something like office hours.

00:29:33.980 Every day at the same time, I am in my office.

00:29:36.780 My door is open.

00:29:37.640 Zoom is turned on.

00:29:38.420 My phone is on.

00:29:39.940 I publicize this.

00:29:41.000 So whenever someone wants to begin a back and forth interaction, I get that fateful email that's like, hey, what are we doing about the client visiting tomorrow?

00:29:49.520 And I can just imagine the seven or eight back and forth emails they're going to follow.

00:29:53.240 Now I can say, great question.

00:29:55.820 Next time you're able, jump over into my office hours.

00:29:58.920 We'll figure it out.

00:29:59.860 Like two minutes, real time.

00:30:01.560 We're talking to each other on the phone or in person.

00:30:03.560 We get the whole thing done.

00:30:04.600 So you want to constrain long, drawn out, back and forth.

00:30:08.220 And then another thing you might think about is be more careful how you select what you commit to.

00:30:13.400 Two projects might look the same.

00:30:15.800 In fact, one project might even look harder.

00:30:17.720 Like, oh, that's going to be hard work.

00:30:19.000 But what you really should be measuring these projects on is how many tasks are they going to generate?

00:30:25.780 How much unscheduled obligations I'm going to have to respond to in the moment?

00:30:30.200 Is it going to be a task engine or not?

00:30:33.600 And bias towards the commitments that have less of the ongoing small tasks that happen unexpectedly.

00:30:40.140 So like I give the example of organizing a conference versus writing a really big report.

00:30:44.420 The report is hard, but you control your time.

00:30:48.000 The conference is not intellectually demanding, but there's going to be a ton of unscheduled back and forth urgent emails with vendors and other people.

00:30:54.860 And so you should bias towards the report because what you're trying to minimize is not effort.

00:30:59.320 What you're trying to minimize is not hardness.

00:31:01.400 You're trying to minimize small tasks that can sit there and take up time in your schedule.

00:31:06.440 So, yeah, there's a lot you can do to constrain the small.

00:31:09.300 Yeah.

00:31:09.360 One other one that I liked was make other people work more.

00:31:12.680 It's one of the problems with particularly email and Slack.

00:31:15.760 It's so easy to make requests.

00:31:17.440 It's just types and things hit send and bam, at the speed of light, you can contact somebody.

00:31:23.160 You talk about this in the world without email, that facility of email digital communication just results in more and more and more communication.

00:31:32.580 So if you make people have to work a bit more to talk to you, so that might mean going to the office hours at a specific time and have that face-to-face conversation, they're going to think a bit more before they actually make a request.

00:31:43.540 And like I do this in my own business.

00:31:45.660 Like I don't have a contact form on our website.

00:31:47.840 I used to years ago, but what I found is that I was spending all my time answering people's emails who had these one-off questions and I'd have to spend, you know, 30 minutes answering their single question.

00:31:59.400 And I wouldn't have any time to actually work on writing articles, working on the podcast.

00:32:03.220 So now we have a PO box.

00:32:04.900 And if you want to reach us, you got to write a letter.

00:32:07.520 And I think, you know, if people have to write or have to spend 10 minutes to write a letter as opposed to just, you know, dashing off an email as soon as they have a thought, they reevaluate whether something that felt urgent is actually important.

00:32:22.180 And we get fewer messages and only messages from people who have actually thought about it.

00:32:28.040 And that allows us to spend more time on the stuff that, you know, actually provides value for our readers, which is podcasts and articles.

00:32:35.780 Yeah.

00:32:35.900 Well, I mean, here's a simple example of that.

00:32:38.040 I mean, imagine, and this is both a thought experiment and a concrete suggestion, but imagine when someone wants you to take on some sort of project or task, you, you know, you say effectively, that's great.

00:32:49.360 Go to this Google Drive folder, create a document for what you're asking me to do.

00:32:55.140 And then you need to put in there all the information I need to execute it.

00:32:58.520 Like, okay, so here's what I want you to do.

00:33:00.300 Here's what success looks like.

00:33:01.380 Here's pointers to all the examples.

00:33:03.620 And you say, just let me know when everything is in there.

00:33:06.220 You can change the title to be like ready.

00:33:08.520 And then I'll put it on my list to tackle it and take as much time as you need.

00:33:11.800 But, you know, wait till everything, once everything's in there, I will tackle it.

00:33:15.080 But that gets rid of like 75% of projects because they don't really want to do that work if it's not vital.

00:33:21.740 And they're like, I should just do this myself or we're not really ready to do this.

00:33:24.780 Because a lot of what happens with these commitments is just obligation hot potato.

00:33:28.500 It pops up on their plate.

00:33:30.240 They're now responsible for it.

00:33:32.060 That's a source of stress.

00:33:33.180 If they can get it off their plate, it's not going to be a source of stress anymore.

00:33:36.940 So you're just like, Brett, can you, can you look into this send?

00:33:39.840 Boom, it's off my plate.

00:33:40.700 You know, and then like what will normally happen is at some point you'll have to send back an email and say, OK, but what do I do?

00:33:46.460 Like, do you have some examples?

00:33:48.020 Like, oh, my God, it's back on my plate again.

00:33:50.160 Look at this.

00:33:50.940 Look at this address.

00:33:51.720 Send right.

00:33:52.180 Like sending those messages as quickly as possible.

00:33:54.680 And for weeks, this hot potato is going back and forth.

00:33:57.160 You say, no, gather everything you need for me to do.

00:33:59.540 And once it's all there, I'll execute it.

00:34:01.620 And most of this stuff actually goes away.

00:34:04.160 It's like, well, I don't that's going to take time.

00:34:06.480 OK, I guess I really have to deal with this.

00:34:08.180 Is this really that important?

00:34:09.140 So, yeah, friction, friction makes a really big difference.

00:34:13.100 Another example is reverse meetings.

00:34:15.000 No, no, you can't gather 10 people have to now get together where you are for an hour.

00:34:20.740 If you do that, you've just taken an hour out of 10 people's lives.

00:34:24.440 No, no, no.

00:34:25.000 You need to go to each of those 10 people one by one and talk to them about the issue.

00:34:28.580 Like the meeting should be much harder for the person organizing it than the people who have to go because you going to each of those 10 people has a much smaller impact on the overall organizational footprint.

00:34:38.360 Then making 10 people come to you.

00:34:40.440 So friction, reducing asymmetries and effort.

00:34:43.800 We obsess a lot about simulating other people's minds.

00:34:47.640 Are people going to get mad?

00:34:49.020 And to me, that's just that social nuance.

00:34:51.940 You can figure that out.

00:34:53.260 But let's get to the underlying principle.

00:34:55.200 Yeah, make people work more.

00:34:57.440 Okay.

00:34:57.540 So, yeah, principle one, do fewer things, do fewer big things, and then do less of the piddly things or find ways to reduce that or constrain it.

00:35:05.760 The second principle of slow productivity is work at a natural pace.

00:35:10.380 What do you mean by that?

00:35:11.220 We don't realize how artificial it is, those of us who do cognitive work, that we use a model of eight hours.

00:35:19.840 Like I'm supposed to, between roughly nine to five, just be super intense, available, working that whole time.

00:35:28.400 The dictate of pseudo productivity is like during work hours, you should be available and working and filling those hours as much as you can.

00:35:34.580 But this is actually, in the broader scope, a really artificial way of approaching work.

00:35:39.980 If we go back, like I do, to the Paleolithic, like 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, our workday, quote unquote, hunting and gathering, was incredibly variable in terms of intensity and all sorts of scales.

00:35:51.660 Like on three hours, we know this from studies of extant communities that still forage, hours of just doing nothing while we wait for the midday sun to go down, followed by two very intense hours when we're on a stock.

00:36:04.580 The winter is very different than the season in which the herds we hunt are active.

00:36:11.020 You know, there's all sorts of variability.

00:36:13.180 Neolithic revolution comes along. 0.71

00:36:15.080 Now work is literally seasonal.

00:36:16.840 You know, like we're busting our butts in the fall to get the harvest done.

00:36:20.960 But then in January, like we basically have nothing to do.

00:36:23.500 You know, it's like time for the Yule ceremonies of the pagan Germans, right? 1.00

00:36:28.300 We're building bonfires and talking to the dead because we have nothing to do.

00:36:32.140 It's very variable.

00:36:32.900 The idea of just I'm going to work intensely all day long for set hours without variation throughout the year was invented for mills and factories because in mills and factories, the equipment is most productive when it runs all the time and we need people to run the equipment.

00:36:45.520 But this was incredibly unnatural and it really was a massive source of human misery.

00:36:53.060 It's why we had to invent labor unions.

00:36:55.620 It's why we had to invent entire regulatory infrastructures to constrain this work.

00:37:01.280 The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the U.S.

00:37:04.540 And you can't make people work more than eight hours.

00:37:06.640 And if you do, you have to pay them a lot of money because this is really unnatural.

00:37:10.500 Then in the 50s, knowledge work comes along like, oh, so how are we going to do this?

00:37:14.000 Like, do it like the factories.

00:37:15.640 So we adopted this very recent, very unnatural, misery-inducing approach of work that we have no real history with through most of our history.

00:37:26.720 And we're like, yeah, we'll just do that for knowledge work as well.

00:37:29.440 Because pseudo-productivity, if I can see you, I know you're working.

00:37:32.320 And we created what I call the invisible factory.

00:37:34.560 Yeah, you come to the office, you check in.

00:37:36.400 And now in an age of remote work and email, we just do this digitally.

00:37:39.580 You better be answering those messages and available for Zoom meetings.

00:37:42.580 It's the same thing.

00:37:43.180 It makes no sense that we would do this if we don't have to.

00:37:47.540 We had to do long, intense shifts to build Model Ts because we didn't have the technology to do this otherwise.

00:37:52.620 But it was a very artificial thing.

00:37:54.300 We all agreed this was artificial.

00:37:55.960 Just like we pay extra money to soldiers when they're in hazardous duty, we were like, okay, we have to sort of accommodate that this type of labor is very hard to do.

00:38:04.340 So it was an unforced error in some sense that we stick to that today.

00:38:07.860 Knowledge work is not well served by maintaining constant intensity every day, day after day, week after week, month after month.

00:38:15.940 It's much better served with huge variations in intensity on different timescales.

00:38:20.420 Sometimes the day you're working harder than others.

00:38:22.600 Some days you're not working that much.

00:38:24.420 Other days you're working a lot.

00:38:25.960 Some seasons are more intense than other seasons.

00:38:29.140 We need this variability for us to recharge and then go after it, to find inspiration and then apply it.

00:38:35.300 This type of variation of intensity is what we're wired to do.

00:38:39.040 And if we go to the factory model, we become miserable.

00:38:41.740 There's no reason to do that.

00:38:43.420 When you looked at knowledge workers from the past, so composers, writers, even scientists, if you look at their schedule, there was a seasonality to their schedule.

00:38:53.000 There'd be periods where they weren't doing really much of anything.

00:38:55.820 They'd just be at the beach and taking walks, but then they'd have these bouts of frenzied work that would last weeks, months, and then they'd take a break again.

00:39:05.820 And so what you're saying is that knowledge workers today who work for companies, they could emulate some of that.

00:39:12.060 It is a better way to produce knowledge from our brains.

00:39:15.440 If it was productive in some sort of literal sense to just work eight hours a day as hard as you could, we would see in these examples of world-famous traditional knowledge workers that that's what they would do.

00:39:26.380 But they don't do that because they quickly discovered, oh, I produce less.

00:39:30.380 I produce less good ideas if I'm constantly trying to do that.

00:39:34.240 In fact, I don't think it would have even occurred to them, especially if we go back far in history.

00:39:38.280 It would not have occurred to them.

00:39:40.060 They say, why would I work like someone in a mill?

00:39:44.620 That doesn't make sense.

00:39:45.700 I'm trying to invent calculus.

00:39:47.980 It wouldn't make sense.

00:39:49.140 Probably they're only, if you went to Isaac Newton, they would have very little reference.

00:39:53.800 What is my reference for solid work?

00:39:56.600 Because even mercantile work, there's market days and non-market days and days where you're completely off.

00:40:02.580 They really wouldn't have much of a reference for working at the same level.

00:40:08.400 They're just like, that's not how the brain works.

00:40:09.940 What are you talking about?

00:40:11.260 And yet we think today, what else would we do?

00:40:13.740 Anything else makes no sense.

00:40:14.960 So we don't know how ahistorical and abnormal what we're doing now in knowledge work really is.

00:40:20.600 So how can knowledge workers inject a bit of seasonality into their work?

00:40:24.980 Any concrete tips there?

00:40:26.900 Yeah.

00:40:27.100 So again, we have a spectrum here depending on how much control you have.

00:40:30.840 So if you're a freelancer or an entrepreneur, I give a lot of these examples.

00:40:35.560 You have a lot of control.

00:40:36.360 You should take it.

00:40:37.760 You should have a lot of seasonality.

00:40:39.720 I talk about one entrepreneur in the book where she realized what would happen if I adjusted my schedule, my contract.

00:40:47.260 She does a coaching business where there's two months a year in the summer.

00:40:50.600 I don't do work.

00:40:52.160 She figured that out pretty easily.

00:40:53.300 Yeah, there was some effort to do that.

00:40:55.000 She's losing some money, but not that much, right?

00:40:57.960 So I think she was like, yes, I'm going to get about 20% less revenue, but get my summers off.

00:41:03.220 Yeah.

00:41:03.640 Fair trade.

00:41:04.520 You know, like that's a fair trade and it's like entirely more sustainable.

00:41:09.240 Freelancers will also do things I talk about where they'll do like six weeks on.

00:41:13.920 They'll do an engagement and then take six weeks off and do four months on and then maybe take a month off to do something else.

00:41:19.400 So if you have control, do not simulate the factory.

00:41:24.520 I know you think that it's maximizing income or whatever, but in the long run, not only going to be happier, you're going to be way better at what you do if you approach your work otherwise.

00:41:33.400 Now, if you're in a big company, there's things that the big companies could do and some do.

00:41:38.280 Like I talk about the company base camp that has a whole methodology of cycles.

00:41:43.180 Our employees work in cycles and they're like four to six weeks long and you're working intensely on a small number of objectives.

00:41:49.600 And then you take like two weeks cycle down.

00:41:52.280 They call it a cool down period.

00:41:53.600 You're not allowed.

00:41:55.100 Don't start something else big during the cool down period.

00:41:57.980 You're just reflecting on what you just did.

00:42:00.380 You're tweaking things.

00:42:01.600 You're catching your breath.

00:42:02.900 You're figuring out what to work on next.

00:42:04.440 And base camp figured out cycles makes us much more effective than trying to stay at high intensity all the time.

00:42:11.460 Now, finally, if you have no control and your boss is just the king of pseudo productivity, now you can start to do some more subtle things.

00:42:18.880 So you can take the idea of quiet quitting, for example, which taught us like, oh, you do have a lot of control over your workload.

00:42:25.800 Quiet quitters discovered if I do the bare minimum perpetually, hey, it eventually gets noticed.

00:42:31.620 And that's a problem because my employer will not like if I'm systematically doing the bare minimum.

00:42:37.220 But if you quiet quit for a month, once a year, no one's going to notice.

00:42:41.920 But you know, yeah, July is pretty quiet and I'm not making a big deal about this.

00:42:47.120 But I really pull back in July.

00:42:49.140 And just before people might really start to notice like, hey, hasn't it been a few weeks till, till, you know, Brett's been able to come to a meeting?

00:42:55.820 I'm back to kind of a normal pace again in August and they move on with their lives.

00:42:59.360 So when it comes to the situation where you have no control and your boss loves pseudo productivity, even then I have a whole list of surreptitious tactics you can do to get some more of that variation over time and your intensity.

00:43:12.740 Yeah, one was schedule rest projects.

00:43:15.620 So you look at your queue of projects you have and say there's one you have to work really hard on.

00:43:19.660 It's going to be intense.

00:43:20.480 You have to work overtime on this thing weekends.

00:43:23.080 But then after you're done with that, you take on a project that it'll look like you're doing something.

00:43:28.600 Your boss will be, hey, yeah, he's getting stuff done, but it's not that big of a deal.

00:43:32.180 Like you can kind of take your foot off the gas.

00:43:34.740 Yep.

00:43:34.920 And it has a lot of leeway.

00:43:36.680 So you can kind of obfuscate the fact you're not doing much and it lets you deflect.

00:43:40.140 So when someone says, hey, can you do this thing right now?

00:43:43.080 Like, oh, I'm happy to help with that.

00:43:44.320 You know what?

00:43:44.600 But I'm working on X, but I should be done.

00:43:47.180 Once I'm done with this, like, let's talk about that.

00:43:50.100 So you're not even having to say no.

00:43:51.660 You're using the relaxed project to deflect things into the future.

00:43:56.300 So like really, you're not drawing much attention.

00:43:58.420 And, you know, some people get nervous about this surreptitiousness, but I think it's all hands on deck, all options on the table right now because of the absurdity that we documented earlier in this interview.

00:44:09.020 Because of the absurdity of what's going on in knowledge work, it's a sort of break glass in case of emergency situation.

00:44:16.460 I think all options should be on the table.

00:44:18.440 And even Peter Drucker, you know, the kind of the father of knowledge work management productivity thinking, he said that the biggest challenge is personal management.

00:44:28.160 And it's up to each knowledge worker to manage themselves.

00:44:31.280 Like, you can't rely on a manager to manage your own workload because it's up to you.

00:44:35.580 You have to take it into your own hands.

00:44:38.140 Well, and that's the irony of the situation is that part of what allowed pseudo productivity to flourish was Peter Drucker, who really helped instill this idea that knowledge work is autonomous.

00:44:49.200 Productivity is personal.

00:44:50.160 People figure out on their own how to work.

00:44:53.140 We don't have a set system for how we organize our work at a given company.

00:44:57.500 It should be everyone does it on their own.

00:44:59.080 Now, this allowed pseudo productivity to thrive in part because there was no system to measure or improve or push back against.

00:45:06.020 Without a clear system for workload assignment, for example, this allowed these informal workloads to spiral out of control.

00:45:12.600 But the reason why I say it's ironic is exactly what you just emphasized there is at the same time, we can lean into that to save ourselves from productivity, from pseudo productivity rather.

00:45:22.760 So, yeah, if it's up to me how I organize my work, then I'm going to do that.

00:45:27.600 And so when I tell you now, hey, this is how I keep track of my hours.

00:45:32.040 I have these quotas.

00:45:33.420 I don't do meetings in the morning.

00:45:34.940 I pre-scheduled projects.

00:45:36.740 I have queues of projects.

00:45:38.500 You got to let me do that because there's no it's up to me, right?

00:45:41.580 You said productivity is up to me.

00:45:43.040 Great.

00:45:43.240 This is what I chose.

00:45:44.360 And actually, people worry about being specific about these things.

00:45:48.280 Being specific about these things gives you more cover because if you're clear and confident in explaining what you're doing, people say, okay, this guy has his act together.

00:45:58.000 He's thinking about how do I organize?

00:46:00.880 He has systems.

00:46:02.580 So now I'm actually going to trust him much more and let him much more get away with saying what he will and won't do than someone who's much more frenzied and haphazard.

00:46:10.940 And it's forgetting things.

00:46:12.060 And if I don't think that you're organized, I'm going to ride you, right?

00:46:15.940 No, no, no.

00:46:16.480 Get back to me right away.

00:46:17.500 I don't trust you to do this.

00:46:18.440 Are you doing this?

00:46:19.320 If you are a sort of like Cal Newport nerd, you know, I'm like, okay, I'm going to trust that you're thinking this through.

00:46:26.500 You know, I mean, think about it.

00:46:28.080 I've I'm I'm known for productivity because some of these books I've written, I get a lot more leeway when I tell someone no, or here's how I'm going to do it because they sort of assume Cal knows what he's talking about.

00:46:39.260 Like if he can't do this, that's probably because he really can't.

00:46:42.240 Whereas if I'm just haphazard and all over the place and lost, they're like, I don't like how disorganized you are.

00:46:47.080 You probably could do this.

00:46:48.080 You're just you just are out.

00:46:49.300 It's not my fault.

00:46:50.060 You're out of control.

00:46:50.840 So being specific about these things and hey, if productivity is personal, then great.

00:46:54.860 I'm leaning into that.

00:46:55.760 Here's my system.

00:46:56.960 Your move.

00:46:57.960 Most people aren't going to attack your system.

00:47:00.100 They're going to say, okay, you called our bluff.

00:47:01.920 We kind of have to now live with how you answered this call to figure out your own systems.

00:47:06.260 You also talk about how your workspace, where you work can actually help you work at a natural pace.

00:47:13.120 What's going on there?

00:47:14.840 Well, you know, location matters.

00:47:16.340 It's another thing we saw when I studied these traditional knowledge workers is they really cared where they worked.

00:47:20.980 Like it really made a difference where work happened.

00:47:24.380 We see this most clearly with writers.

00:47:26.560 And I think writers are a good case study, especially in an age of remote work, because they were the original remote workers.

00:47:33.240 Like writers did not have, if you're a novelist or a nonfiction writer, you didn't have an office to go to, right?

00:47:38.780 So they were the original remote workers.

00:47:40.560 And so if you study famous writers, book writers from times past and said, where did they work?

00:47:45.960 It's interesting that you discover it's almost never their homes.

00:47:48.920 They would find these eccentric locations often really near their home, but these eccentric locations that they would go to do their writing.

00:47:55.680 One of the cool examples of this was Peter Benchley, who wrote the hit novel Jaws that the movie was based off of.

00:48:01.340 The house he lived in when he wrote Jaws was right down the street from the house I grew up in.

00:48:07.340 So I'd walk by it every day.

00:48:08.920 It's a beautiful house.

00:48:10.140 It's a converted carriage house that has lots of land and these like nice conifer trees on it.

00:48:15.700 When he wrote Jaws, he lived in that house.

00:48:18.080 He did not write in the beautiful carriage house where he could overlook the stream beyond.

00:48:23.180 He instead rented space in a furnace repair company on the other side of town.

00:48:28.980 And we talked to the fact checkers.

00:48:31.540 I wrote about this in the Yorker.

00:48:32.440 The fact checkers called up Wendy Benchley.

00:48:34.120 Peter was dead, but they called up Wendy Benchley.

00:48:35.820 And she was like, oh yeah, it was crazy.

00:48:38.340 You would go there and it was just like bang, bang, bang.

00:48:41.740 And he was sitting there writing his books.

00:48:43.180 So why would he choose to write in a furnace repair shop as opposed to his beautiful house?

00:48:49.160 Location matters.

00:48:50.760 And so his house he associated with house stuff and chores and other sorts of stressors.

00:48:55.720 The furnace repair factory, his only association with that is writing.

00:48:59.840 So when he hears those hammers banging, he's like, yeah, I'm here to write.

00:49:03.000 There's nothing else here that's familiar to other parts of my life.

00:49:05.660 It's a great indication that location really matters.

00:49:08.480 We see this traditional knowledge workers do this all the time.

00:49:11.380 They build special places to do their best work.

00:49:15.120 They care about location.

00:49:16.720 They care what's in their space.

00:49:17.980 They care where their space is.

00:49:19.480 They care about the rituals surrounding their work.

00:49:22.140 They know this is all really important to do something as artificial and abstract as trying

00:49:27.060 to produce new knowledge ex Nilo from scratch using their brains.

00:49:31.640 So it's not just the pace that matters, but the location as well.

00:49:35.000 We learned this from the greats, but we can adopt it to our lives as well.

00:49:38.940 All right.

00:49:39.040 So first principle, do fewer things.

00:49:40.580 Second principle, work at a natural pace.

00:49:42.780 The third principle is obsess over quality.

00:49:45.480 And you use the musician Jewel to talk about this principle.

00:49:48.560 Tell us about her story.

00:49:50.100 So Jewel got discovered in San Diego playing at a coffee shop, the interchange coffee shop,

00:49:56.540 and she was homeless.

00:49:57.520 She was living out of her car at the time.

00:49:59.140 She immediately began to attract attention.

00:50:01.880 She was a good musician.

00:50:02.780 She had spent her entire childhood performing all around Alaska.

00:50:05.400 So she knew music.

00:50:07.440 She had yodeled early on.

00:50:09.300 So she had an interesting voice.

00:50:10.560 She had interesting vocal control. 0.94

00:50:11.860 And she was doing these epic concerts that were attracting bigger and bigger crowds.

00:50:16.180 These executives begin to show up to this coffee shop in San Diego.

00:50:19.560 They all begin fighting over her.

00:50:22.160 Who's going to sign her? 0.97

00:50:23.920 Eventually, someone puts on the table a million dollar signing bonus.

00:50:28.280 So she's living out of her car.

00:50:30.380 Here we go.

00:50:31.060 Million dollar signing bonus.

00:50:32.020 Sign with us.

00:50:32.840 And she turns it down.

00:50:34.380 All right.

00:50:34.880 This is fascinating.

00:50:35.580 What's going on here?

00:50:36.400 Why would you in that situation turn down a million dollar signing bonus?

00:50:39.260 Because she had done the math.

00:50:41.600 She had realized this is a advance on the money I make them.

00:50:45.440 It's a loan, basically.

00:50:46.420 It's guaranteed, right?

00:50:47.380 So when you get an advance, you don't have to pay it back.

00:50:49.480 If you don't make the money, you still get to keep it.

00:50:51.480 So that million dollars was guaranteed.

00:50:53.340 But she realized if she didn't make back that advance quickly, they would drop her.

00:50:57.880 They're going to drop it from the record label.

00:50:59.220 And she had enough self-awareness to know, I have something special here, but I'm not great yet.

00:51:04.260 I have a lot of work to do to become a famous musician.

00:51:08.180 I only have performance experience at this one coffee shop.

00:51:11.860 I, you know, I have a lot of work to do here.

00:51:13.620 And so she turned it down so that she would have more time to get better.

00:51:17.300 And she said, just give me a small amount of a signing bonus up front, a small enough

00:51:21.540 amount that you won't care if I don't become a hit right away.

00:51:24.380 And she wasn't a hit right away.

00:51:25.940 She was nervous in the first version of the album she recorded.

00:51:28.920 She recorded it at Neil Young's ranch with his backing band and it scared the hell out

00:51:33.160 of her.

00:51:33.600 And so she's nervous on some of these songs.

00:51:35.620 You can tell like she's nervous being there.

00:51:37.600 And she just performed and performed to perform, stayed as cheap as she could for the record

00:51:41.960 label, finally figured it out.

00:51:44.120 And then she took off. 0.97

00:51:46.100 If she had taken the million dollars, they would have dropped her. 1.00

00:51:49.160 Right.

00:51:49.440 So like in her story, we saw getting good at things takes time.

00:51:54.160 So getting good at things demands that you go slowly.

00:51:58.380 But then there's this other part to her story.

00:52:00.080 Once she became huge, they began pushing her to do the Taylor Swift route, right? 1.00

00:52:05.780 You need to be an international superstar where you tour around the country.

00:52:09.240 She took a role in an Ang Lee movie.

00:52:11.240 They're like, yeah, you have to be a multimedia threat.

00:52:13.980 Move to LA.

00:52:15.080 You need to do movies in between international tours with like some time to write your albums

00:52:20.080 in between.

00:52:20.580 And she's like, wait a second.

00:52:22.580 I'm rich now.

00:52:24.180 Like I like music.

00:52:25.920 I don't like this.

00:52:27.520 No.

00:52:28.240 And she never toured again.

00:52:29.620 And she never did another movie appearance.

00:52:31.060 She did a lot of albums and has lived a very respected musical career, but never did it

00:52:35.820 again.

00:52:36.180 So this is the other side of getting really good at things.

00:52:38.780 It gives you the ability to say no.

00:52:41.040 It gives you the ability to slow down.

00:52:42.820 And so for those two reasons, I say obsessing over quality is like the glue that holds these

00:52:46.940 other two principles together.

00:52:48.320 It's going to force you to slow down.

00:52:50.180 It's going to justify you slowing down.

00:52:52.220 And as you get better, you get more and more ability to slow down because you gain more

00:52:57.100 control over your life.

00:52:58.000 So if you skip the last part where you get good, then all you're really doing is just

00:53:01.940 trying to reduce the footprint of work in your life.

00:53:04.900 It's all sort of reduction of effort.

00:53:07.240 You might grow in antagonistic relationship towards your work.

00:53:10.100 It's all about doing fewer things.

00:53:11.520 It's all about taking longer.

00:53:12.920 You got to couple it with the positive side.

00:53:15.080 And when you couple it with that, I'm going to become awesome at what I do.

00:53:17.920 Then all the pieces click together.

00:53:20.240 And a part of becoming awesome, what you do is developing taste.

00:53:23.220 At least that's what you argue.

00:53:24.320 How can improving your taste make you more quality conscious?

00:53:27.520 Well, you can't get better unless you know what better means.

00:53:30.220 And so if the first question we ask after I introduce this idea, obsess over quality is

00:53:35.300 like, great, how do I do that?

00:53:37.060 And I took advantage of this question to actually deal with something that's caught my

00:53:42.800 attention for a long time.

00:53:44.060 And it's that famous, I don't know if you know this one, Brett, but it's all over the

00:53:47.720 internet.

00:53:48.020 It's maybe 15 years old.

00:53:49.620 Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, he has this famous interview where he's talking

00:53:55.260 about how do you do creative work?

00:53:57.320 And he says, look, it's really frustrating in the beginning because, uh, you know, you're

00:54:01.940 not very good.

00:54:02.700 You have your taste is here, but what you're producing is down here.

00:54:06.360 And that gap is very frustrating.

00:54:08.380 And he said, but the key to creative work is to keep at it until you close that gap where

00:54:14.040 your abilities meet your taste.

00:54:15.320 And then that's when it becomes sustainable.

00:54:18.140 So it's this famous interview that's everywhere on the internet.

00:54:21.060 Well, this has always bothered me because I've also found this other interview of Ira

00:54:24.940 Glass is more recent.

00:54:26.180 It's on Michael Lewis's podcast and they go back and they listen to his first major piece

00:54:30.580 he did for NPR and they listen to it.

00:54:33.080 And when they're done listening to it, Ira Glass is like, oh, that's terrible.

00:54:37.200 You know, I know that now that's terrible editing.

00:54:39.180 But then he tells Michael Lewis, I didn't realize that at the time I thought this was great.

00:54:44.280 You know, I didn't know that that was bad editing.

00:54:45.720 So what he's telling Lewis directly contradicts the advice from that famous interview.

00:54:50.100 He didn't have a big gap between his taste and his ability.

00:54:54.000 He thought he was great.

00:54:55.660 And so what was really important was not closing the gap between his ability and his taste.

00:55:00.400 It was improving his taste.

00:55:01.860 What mattered was him getting more and more sophisticated in his understanding of what

00:55:06.740 good meant.

00:55:07.900 And then that pulled his ability along.

00:55:10.680 And so I think we neglect that too much.

00:55:12.340 So I start by saying, if you want to obsess over the quality of what you do, start obsessing

00:55:17.740 over the field that you're in, like really get to appreciate and understand craft and

00:55:23.180 what makes something good, good and have appreciation for examples of good.

00:55:28.600 That's what's going to power your quest to get better.

00:55:30.620 If you just jump straight into like, let's just practice.

00:55:32.740 I'm going to write every day.

00:55:34.140 Well, don't just write every day.

00:55:35.640 Learn to appreciate beautiful writing and what makes it beautiful.

00:55:38.480 Like that's just as important as the actual work of closing the gap.

00:55:42.280 Okay.

00:55:42.800 So if you're a writer, read good books.

00:55:44.920 If you're a podcaster, listen to good podcasters.

00:55:47.960 If you're a salesperson, find the best salesman in your field and observe what they do.

00:55:54.520 Yeah.

00:55:54.940 And figure out the difference.

00:55:56.160 Yeah.

00:55:56.600 What do they do that I don't?

00:55:58.260 You could take apart people in your career.

00:56:00.420 All right.

00:56:00.660 Here's someone who's where I want to get.

00:56:02.840 Let me look at how they did that step by step.

00:56:05.380 How did they make each step?

00:56:06.680 And more importantly, at each major step in their career, what did they do that other

00:56:11.300 people who did not make that step didn't?

00:56:12.940 Like what was differentiating them there?

00:56:14.700 And how do you get this information?

00:56:15.980 Just take them out to coffee.

00:56:17.460 Act like a journalist.

00:56:18.860 Like, Hey, people are flattered.

00:56:20.320 Trust me.

00:56:21.080 I interview people for a living.

00:56:22.640 They're flattered.

00:56:23.480 Hey, can I take you out the coffee?

00:56:24.660 I want to walk through your career.

00:56:26.180 And that's where you learn the real stuff.

00:56:28.020 Like, Oh, there's this skill here.

00:56:29.440 I didn't even know about in my field.

00:56:32.120 That's what he focused on.

00:56:33.620 Or that's what she mastered. 0.96

00:56:34.820 And I didn't even know that was important.

00:56:36.500 And now you've improved your taste.

00:56:38.080 You have a better understanding.

00:56:39.560 So it doesn't have to be just in the arts, almost any field.

00:56:42.060 You can improve your taste.

00:56:43.460 How do you avoid teetering into perfectionism in your quest to obsess over quality?

00:56:48.740 Well, that's definitely one of the fears, right?

00:56:50.800 I mean, you can't pursue better and better stuff without worrying about being crippled by

00:56:54.980 perfectionism.

00:56:55.780 And I have a whole story in there about the Beatles working on Sergeant Pepper, which was

00:57:00.380 like the very first time they had complete freedom when recording an album.

00:57:04.640 Because it was right after they decided, no more touring.

00:57:07.400 And if you don't have to replicate an album on stage, you can do almost anything on that

00:57:12.260 album.

00:57:12.940 And so they had no tour coming up.

00:57:14.820 They were never going to tour this music.

00:57:16.580 And so they could have done endless time in the studio.

00:57:19.020 So how did they avoid it?

00:57:20.600 Well, part of it was, and this might've been Epstein who was doing this, or maybe George

00:57:24.960 Martin.

00:57:25.380 I don't know which of the two, Brian Epstein or George Martin.

00:57:27.700 One of the two of them began putting these forcing functions.

00:57:31.280 Spend your time to make this album great.

00:57:33.360 But also, as soon as you get a good single, we're releasing that.

00:57:37.400 Now there's kind of some pressure for the rest of this album to come out, like people

00:57:40.520 that's on people's radar.

00:57:41.640 So you have to walk that line of don't go too fast, but commit the things, publicize

00:57:46.920 things.

00:57:47.820 Take step one and say, I'm going to have this done in a month.

00:57:51.040 You need to put enough stakes in the ground that are going to allow you to like, I can't

00:57:56.600 take forever.

00:57:57.300 I actually have to commit and ship things.

00:58:00.080 And so you have to follow the Beatles example there with Sergeant Pepper.

00:58:02.800 They took a lot more time with that album than their past albums, but not an absurdly

00:58:07.160 more amount of time.

00:58:07.860 And by the way, that album was innovative and great.

00:58:09.280 And it was their biggest hit to date by far.

00:58:12.440 Well, Cal, this has been a great conversation.

00:58:14.060 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:58:16.860 Well, so I have a podcast called Deep Questions, where all we do is talk about these issues with

00:58:21.480 questions from real people with real issues in their work.

00:58:24.100 You can also find out more about this book at calnewport.com slash slow, download an excerpt,

00:58:30.740 figure out, you can buy it anywhere.

00:58:32.000 But if you want to learn more about the book, just remember calnewport.com slash slow.

00:58:37.100 Fantastic.

00:58:37.240 Well, Cal Newport, it's always a pleasure.

00:58:39.000 And I want to say, I read a lot of books for my job and I'm never disappointed with

00:58:43.900 your books.

00:58:44.520 They're always good.

00:58:45.220 I can tell that you put into practice what you preach.

00:58:48.180 So thanks so much for writing another great book.

00:58:50.720 Well, thanks for having me.

00:58:51.680 It's always motivation to write more books to come see you.

00:58:54.520 If you ever do bring video back, what I'm going to have to do for my next book is grow

00:58:58.140 a mustache.

00:58:58.860 And we're going to have to just mustache it off right there.

00:59:01.860 That's going to be my challenge.

00:59:03.320 I'm just going to show up with a McKay style mustache.

00:59:06.700 I think you can grow a good one.

00:59:07.660 I think you got it in you.

00:59:09.420 Yeah.

00:59:09.660 We'll have our own show, Mustache Talk.

00:59:11.320 It'll be great.

00:59:11.900 That'd be great.

00:59:12.460 Well, Cal, thanks so much.

00:59:13.420 Thanks, Brett.

00:59:14.800 My guest today was Cal Newport.

00:59:16.100 He's the author of the book, Slow Productivity.

00:59:17.940 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:59:19.860 You can find more information about his work at his website, calnewport.com.

00:59:23.820 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash slowproductivity, where you find links

00:59:27.680 to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:59:29.580 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:59:40.340 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives.

00:59:43.980 While you're there, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter.

00:59:46.660 It's the best way to stay on top of what's going on at AOM, and it's absolutely free.

00:59:50.620 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate you to take one minute to give us your view

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00:59:54.440 It helps out a lot.

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00:59:56.880 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get

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01:00:00.900 As always, thank you for the continued support.

01:00:02.980 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

01:00:04.480 Remind you to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - March 06, 2024

Down With Pseudo-Productivity： Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work

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