Bookworm Transcripts

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So our first step in the real show is to tell people about the pre-show and to tell people about how to support the show.

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Yeah, so one of the things that we have been talking about for a long time is how do people actually support the show if they want to and what can we offer people that would be worth them giving us money every month.

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And it seems to be the format for these types of shows is extended ad-free content and that's exactly what we did.

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We recorded a whole pre-show about a reading workshop that I'm going to be doing.

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I've got the outline done, but Corey helped me talk through a bunch of the specifics, gave me some ideas for titles and if you're interested in that,

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then you can sign up to support the show because there will be a separate feed there which you can subscribe to.

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When we do have ads, it will have the ads removed and it will have the pre-show every single time going forward.

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At least that's the plan.

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Yeah, so just to kind of recap everything one more time, right, we're going to do added content.

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We're going to strip, you'll have an access to it, a separate feed that strips away any ads that we sell.

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What else was there, Mike?

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There's a bootleg which maybe that's not the right term, we're stealing it from ATP, but essentially what I'm going to do is when we record these, we do a zoom backup recording.

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I will take that zoom backup recording and I will throw it up unedited into a bootleg feed.

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So there'll be two separate feeds that you'll get when you subscribe for $7 a month.

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Does Patreon have a yearly option or is it just monthly?

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They just have a monthly option.

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Okay, so you'll pay $7 a month and then you'll get access to those a couple additional feeds.

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The one which has the pre-show and the removal of the ads, that one will go through the editing process and that one will probably be available the night before the actual episode in the main feed goes live.

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But the bootleg, we record these about two weeks in advance now, which is actually kind of nice from an editing perspective.

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Since my son does the editing, we've got some time to go back and forth and fix things if we need to.

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But that one will be uploaded basically when the show is done.

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Now I realize no one knows about this, support the show option as we record this one.

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So I probably won't put this one up just yet, but there'll be two separate feeds that you could subscribe to if you want to do that.

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And more importantly, you will be supporting the show. You can make sure that Bookworm continues to exist, which is important to me.

00:02:52

And yeah, I'm excited to have something that we can offer people because people have been asking about this for a while.

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Yeah, I'm excited too. There was one more thing that I thought about.

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I was like, I knew there's one more thing. The Bookworm wallpaper.

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So there's a really cool Bookworm wallpaper, really high res and hopefully you all are interested in that.

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And if you are, we'd appreciate it very much.

00:03:16

Yes, the link will be in the show notes if you want to sign up and we're going to use Patreon.

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So it'll be simple. That's where you'll go to get your feeds.

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And they'll handle all of the payment processing, things like that. You have issues, you can contact Patreon directly.

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They're a merchant of record. We don't have to collect taxes. Yadda yadda yadda.

00:03:36

So that will be in the show notes. I also have a link to the reading workshop that I mentioned.

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Corey was kind enough to talk through a lot of that stuff with me for the pre-show.

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So 15, 20 minutes about the science of reading and how all this stuff comes together if you're interested in finding out more about what's in that workshop.

00:03:57

And the kind of behind the scenes process as I'm still figuring out what is the format going to look like.

00:04:03

There's that in the pro show. I think it's going to be about two hours long, maybe a little bit longer.

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And it's going to be $49. I basically want to give you an entire online video course worth of content in a couple of hours with the goal of helping people establish a reading habit.

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Find better books to read.

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Develop a better process for reading so that you can take those ideas and insights and actually use them to create something new.

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Pretty ambitious goal I think for two hours, but we'll make it happen.

00:04:37

Wow, and you've got a good plan. So it's going to be a fun couple hours to get better at reading and think about it.

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Awesome.

00:04:47

All right. Well, we should probably get into today's book.

00:04:51

And this is one that I have been excited to talk about for a very long time.

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I think I preordered this in October or November of last year. It's been quite a while.

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And I had been every cow Newport book.

00:05:07

Oh, yeah, for sure. Actually, no, I don't think I have because he had one like how to be a straight A student.

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And I was not a student at that point, so I didn't read those. But all of the major publications, I'll say.

00:05:19

So let's see, there was deep work so good. They can't ignore you. Digital minimalism or roll without email.

00:05:27

I think those are the big ones. Like if you go to his webpage and under the book section, that's what's going to be there.

00:05:34

And he's one of my favorite authors. So I look forward to anything that he writes.

00:05:42

I'm a big fan of the deep life podcast. And I think he's been talking there about a lot of the ideas that he expounds in this book for a long time, which actually, let's just talk about the book itself.

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The book is slow productivity. The lost art of accomplishment without burnout.

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And I feel like this is a very timely book. The subject is very needed right now. And obviously I'm biased.

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I mean, I co-host a podcast called Focus, where the tagline is, "Life is more than cranking widgets."

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So I think you already know that I'm going to align with this and it's going to resonate with me.

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However, I will say that because I never miss an episode now of the Deep Life podcast,

00:06:31

I feel like he actually went a lot deeper there than he did in this book, which was a little bit surprising just by the way that he was talking about it because it was always like, "Oh, and this is going to be in the books."

00:06:43

So in the podcast, basically talking, he doesn't say it this way, I don't think. But if you want to go deeper, get the book.

00:06:50

And in the book, essentially, what I got was stuff that he actually went a lot deeper in the podcast, if that makes sense.

00:06:56

See, that's really interesting. We're going to have a good conversation about this because I've listened to essentially none of those podcasts.

00:07:02

So this is the first time a lot of this stuff was being presented to me and I'm intrigued to hear our conversation, like to talk about this today. This will be fun.

00:07:11

Yeah. So this is a, in terms of like the structure, it's a fairly simple book. There is an introduction.

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There's two parts. Part one is foundations and there are two chapters there. The rise and fall of pseudo productivity and a slower alternative.

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And then there is part two, which has three chapters, do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality.

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And then at the end, there is a conclusion. Now, it's interesting about these two different parts. You might think of this as like, "Well, they just kind of cut this book down the middle."

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Not so. The first part is, I don't know, 40, maybe 50 pages. And then the rest of it is part two. So part two is really where all of the meat is.

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And he probably could have gotten away with a single chapter in part one, which was basically just the rise and fall of the pseudo productivity and introducing the concepts before diving into the specifics of the three parts of his slow productivity model.

00:08:13

But yeah, it's interesting. Probably the most of the discussion will happen in three, four, and five. So we'll move fairly quickly, I think, through the beginning here.

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But it's a standard Cal Newport book. So it's very heavily researched. There's lots of great stories. And he makes lots of maybe controversial statements about what people should do.

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But he's so smart that you can't really argue with him when he says, "Don't check your email."

00:08:40

Yeah. One of the things that got me with this one is compared to a lot of the books, the format was very different. So you just described the way it broke down part one, part two, and then the five different chapters.

00:08:52

But it didn't feel at all formulaic. It felt much more like, "I have a story to tell. There are these parts in this story and this is the way I'm going to tell the story as opposed to chapter one, part A, part B, part C, chapter two, part A, part B, part C, which I like the last part of the story.

00:09:09

I liked a lot more because it didn't feel as artificial. It didn't feel as made up. It was like, "Listen, he's just going to tell us the story he wants to tell us." And then we get to evaluate it at the end of what we got out of it and how we liked that.

00:09:22

It felt less publisher-driven, if you will, and more like, "I'm just going to write this book." And maybe it's because it's his ninth book or whatever it is that his publisher trusts him now at this point to craft that. But I appreciated that part of it.

00:09:36

Yeah, that's interesting because the cover itself, I remember him talking about this on his podcast about how they wanted something totally different for the cover, and he fought for this picture of the cabin on top of the mountain range with the path.

00:09:55

It's going up through the forest, and he got this picture, and that's specifically what he wanted. And they were throwing out a whole bunch of other ideas. And I forget the podcast episode specifically, but him and his producer, Jesse, were making fun of it.

00:10:11

What I really need is a turtle holding a smartphone. But I share that just to say, he obviously had a little bit more say with this one. And that's an example of that. When you write so many books, I think probably they do give you a little bit more leverage.

00:10:32

And I think that with this one specifically, it seems like he's really going hard on the promotional tour. I know he's traveling all over the place to do these video podcasts. He was actually on the Focus Podcast a while back.

00:10:47

We reached out to him when this book came out, but I think we are too small for current Cal, unfortunately. It happens, I guess.

00:10:57

Yeah, but he's recording video podcasts with Noah Kagan and Ali Abdul, and I don't know who else is on his circuit. He's in Austin currently as we record this recording video podcasts.

00:11:12

So that maybe that was part of the deal too was he's been developing this audience. And so he recognizes, "I have this asset, so I'll leverage this, but in return, you let me do what I want with this one."

00:11:29

Yeah. All right, so we ready to get into the introduction?

00:11:33

Let's do it. So the introduction is just a real brief section at the beginning where he introduces the story of John McPhee, which in literary styles also kind of how he ends the book.

00:11:50

John McPhee, I didn't jot down everything from this story because if you're going to try to capture the details of every interesting story Cal Newport says, you'll basically be rewriting the book.

00:12:04

So kind of what I jot down with this was John McPhee was wanting to, he needed to get this breakthrough and he got it while he was laying on his back on the picnic table in his backyard.

00:12:17

And the point there basically that Cal is making is that these inspirations and the revelations, the things that really move the needle and are significant and important, they tend not to happen when we are nose-to-toeing.

00:12:33

And we are nose-to-the-grindstone, just working real hard on stuff, which again, I'm biased here, I actually have in my notes as a talking point here, life is more than cranking widgets, right?

00:12:46

That's the whole basis of the Focus podcast.

00:12:51

We just recorded episode 200 of that and I was kind of talking to David about that, did a little bit of navel gazing, right? And we talked about how we are 200 episodes in, is that enough?

00:13:02

Has the message, have we said everything we want to say about this and we both feel like, no, it's actually more important now than it was all those episodes ago when I took over for Jason Snell and we rebranded the show.

00:13:15

We feel more strongly that people need to hear this message right now.

00:13:20

And Cal, I think, kind of agrees, he mentions a couple different books that were kind of sorta on this topic that were released during the pandemic.

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And I jotted all these down.

00:13:32

4,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman, I've actually read that one. That one is really good.

00:13:36

But also laziness does not exist by Devin Price, can't even by Ann Helen Peterson and do nothing by Celeste Headley. I've never heard of these books.

00:13:43

I'm probably going to end up buying these though, because I just like this topic and want to find out more about what other people are saying about this.

00:13:53

So we are the ideal audience for this book, you realize that, because you're a solopreneur, right? And I am an academic.

00:14:02

So therefore, if anybody has more control over what they do in thinking about the way they are productive, it's us.

00:14:10

What I thought was interesting in this first section is I started to reflect on, you know, the work I do have been trained through it as a systems engineer and an industrial and systems engineer.

00:14:21

As he brings that up about productivity, the idea of thinking about productivity came from industry and manufacturing and the government and the Department of Defense and things like that.

00:14:33

And it doesn't really apply to knowledge work, or it struggles to apply to knowledge work. And I was like, oh, that's actually, that's like a really interesting perspective that is, as you said, more relevant now than ever, because more of the jobs are going towards knowledge work.

00:14:48

And the jobs that are being replaced tend to be the more rot operational. Can we automate this in some way? Not those knowledge work jobs. So I like the way he, the way, like the way he starts out the book.

00:15:01

And he does define slow productivity in the introduction. And so he breaks it down into three different areas, do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality.

00:15:11

So he hits this, I mean, many times in the book, and there's different sections of the book that are dedicated to these things.

00:15:18

But I thought it was an interesting, a good start. And you were right in terms of the story. So I'm less familiar with, like, I know, Cal Newport, but I'm less like ingrained in his work, I would say, in terms of I've maybe read one other one other of his books.

00:15:35

And he'll go on for like a couple pages of a story. And then he'll tie it back in. There is no, here's this little piece of the story, and then here's this little piece.

00:15:48

It's like, here's this long story. And then we're going to talk about how that story applies. And then here's another long section of the story. So I like that style as well.

00:15:57

Yeah, the whole idea of slow productivity will impact that when we get to part two. But there's another thing that you kind of touched on in this section, which is really the jumping off point for chapter one.

00:16:11

So let's go there. Chapter one is in part one foundations. And chapter one is the rise and fall of pseudo productivity.

00:16:20

And this is at the heart of the knowledge workers, which he's kind of you were kind of looting to in the introduction, because knowledge workers are exhausted and Cal uses some examples of talking to his audience feedback that he got during COVID.

00:16:38

And I remember working with, I was with Blanc Media at the time, and being in one of those focus course sessions, and having somebody say, you know, I am just barely hanging on, because I have this job.

00:16:54

And all of my managers and supervisors think, this is great. We can do everything virtually. But what they don't realize is that they're monopolizing my time for eight hours during these meetings, where they're talking about the work, then they get to go home.

00:17:13

But I still have to do all of my work, and then everything else is harder because we have to do everything from home. And I'm married and I have a family.

00:17:24

And so like I'm working 16 hours a day and I still can't keep up. And that's kind of what he's talking about here. Knowledge workers are exhausted. The whole system is broken.

00:17:38

And I would like to think that progress has been made since then. The key point that he's talking about in the whole book here is that good work doesn't require that increased busyness. Doesn't require the increased effort.

00:17:50

You just got to think about how we're actually going to be doing the work. And then that term pseudo productivity, that is the real meat of this chapter one, which is the use of visible activity as a primary means of approximating actual productive effort.

00:18:05

So this isn't just looking over your shoulder. Oh, I see that you're working right now. When you apply this concept to knowledge work and virtual work environments.

00:18:17

This is a recipe for disaster because the only way you can see that somebody is they are doing something. Well, I guess there's a couple different ways. One, he didn't really talk about here, but email and slack were the big ones because they created this culture where people signal their busyness

00:18:34

and this leads to more of the day talking about work instead of doing the work. And I've been in those instances where it's like, Oh, while your slack bubble is green. So I'm going to send you this message and I assume that you're going to get back to me within 30 seconds.

00:18:49

Otherwise, I'm going to walk over to your office and see why you haven't responded to me.

00:18:56

So those two things, but then I also heard about there are some companies that will actually use zoom and people will log in at the beginning of their their shift. So they turn the audio off, but you've got a visual of all the all the people in your workforce.

00:19:15

So you can see them at their computer. And I heard a story about one person who was only given, I think it's like 10 minutes every so often as a, you know, you can take a bathroom break and they're like the minute you step away, the timer starts.

00:19:29

Like that is miserable. I would I would last about 13 seconds in that job. Like there's no way. I just couldn't do it.

00:19:38

I have very little patience for people telling me what to do, especially when I think it's stupid.

00:19:45

Yeah. Well, and so this performative activity that they brought up that phrase performative activity in this in this section and in the intro.

00:19:53

And I really like that idea of basically like we look, we're trying to look like we're working. Like we're not, we're not necessarily doing actually good work or any work at all. We're just trying to look like we're working.

00:20:05

And that's one of those pseudo productivity, you know, challenges. I really like when he starts talking about the interview he did with Davenport and then the quote here and I'm just going to read the quote because I love it so much.

00:20:16

In most cases, people don't measure the productivity of knowledge workers. And when we do, we do it in silly ways. Like how many papers do they produce or regardless of quality.

00:20:26

And I like that they acknowledge like the field from a knowledge worker productivity standpoint is really not very good. And this was in, it was a couple years before the book release.

00:20:36

So, you know, you think 22 23 is when he's when he's interviewing this individual. So that's, that's a really insightful argument for me, especially somebody who works in a similar space.

00:20:48

And I'm like, yeah, like they have no idea like how to measure my productivity every day. The only like the best way we can do it is outputs.

00:20:57

And like what are the number of outputs I produce and when I look at the things that I report in my portfolio every so many years.

00:21:06

It's the number of outputs. It's this I did this. I did this. I accomplished this. I did this thing.

00:21:11

And it's very much not a how long did it take you to do that. Why did it take you that long to do that? Like was it was it even any quality? Like can we guarantee quality on it or anything like that.

00:21:22

I like that a lot. Then you tie into the thing you mentioned at the very end. We went with zoom at my at mine. Well, I'm not a fan of email, right? Because I think email is a way for people to inject things into my world.

00:21:35

And I understand I have to use email and there's a good record keeping mechanism there. But now we introduce zoom chat.

00:21:43

So what it did primarily for me is yes, it gave me a faster way to interact with people. So I don't have to send email and then wait for it. If it's like a quick couple minute thing, I can do it that way, which I like that aspect of it.

00:21:54

But the thing I don't like is now I have another place to check. Right. So are we wait, are we sending this message on zoom or are we sending this message via email or why are we sending it in both places.

00:22:04

And it's like, Oh my gosh. So it gets to this whole, are we being more productive or are we just making more noise and you talk, you talk in a lot of different ways about signal noise, right? And your PKM and all that stuff.

00:22:15

It's like, are we making more noise or are we actually putting out signal because I'm looking for signal. Tell me exactly what I need to know when I need to know it.

00:22:22

Don't don't give me noise or else I'm just not going to pay attention to it.

00:22:25

Yeah. Well, the reason that you send it one place and then send it the other place, by the way, is that you want a response immediately. And that's a general you not use specifically Corey.

00:22:36

But the reason that you, again, the general you will want to get an answer right away is simply because you don't trust the system.

00:22:48

And so one of the things we did at the last day job is I created communication norms. So when you send me a message on Slack, the written assumption in the company handbook is that I am going to be doing deep work.

00:23:06

I will take a scheduled break once in the morning, once in the afternoon. I don't know exactly when it's going to happen because it's going to be based off of my rhythm. But when I have a logical stopping point, that is when I will check my messages.

00:23:20

And then I will get back to you. Okay. So you use Slack if you need something within three to four hours. If you need something quicker than, well, actually, if you need something quicker than that, I kept pushing.

00:23:32

Like, no, we have these regular weekly meetings. So whatever you want to talk about fits under one of these buckets. So put it on the agenda there and we'll talk about it there.

00:23:42

Yeah. That was, I mean, once we had that stuff, I at least had something to point to, but there's still a mighty struggle with that, especially if you've got that drain behavior.

00:23:51

Yeah. For the most part, I mean, I think it did start to work, you know, a year and a half into it.

00:23:57

But habits die hard, especially when you're used to doing things a certain way, which he kind of talked about this in deep work too, a little bit where, you know, if you want to protect that time for deep work, like, and you don't, you're not the boss.

00:24:12

You don't get to call the shots. You have to make a case for why this is better. But you can have those conversations with people and be like, okay, so what is it you say that I do here that's actually valuable?

00:24:23

This, okay, well, you know, I could do more of that or I could do it better if I could just have two protected hours in the morning where you can't reach me.

00:24:32

Okay, I guess I can hold off for two hours, you know, so put it on your calendar, block it out. You know, I'm unavailable during that time and that's when you do this stuff.

00:24:40

And it can be frustrating for people who are knowledge workers because we think, well, when you work as a knowledge worker, specifically creatively, I think, you can't just work eight hours a day.

00:24:57

You don't have that much mental capacity. All the most prolific creators I know work in the creative mode at most three to four hours a day. That's all they got in them. The rest of the day is admin or some of them are just like, you know what, that's it.

00:25:13

I'm tapping out now. And that doesn't mean that they're not able to produce in the long term. All of these incredible works and the things that really matter, they're able to move the needle.

00:25:24

But if you're measuring the pseudo productivity of, well, how many hours did you work today? How many hours did you work today? How many widgets did you crank today? Like, it's not going to look that impressive.

00:25:34

And this ties into that to have references a couple of different times that diffuse learning. So when you're doing this type of work, you don't stop thinking about it. You just don't necessarily focus on it for that period of time.

00:25:47

And when you say they're doing their creative work for three hours or whatever it is, a day, but the whole time they're doing that admin, there's things floating around in the back of their head. And this is why I'm a big fan of, you always have to have some quick capture mechanism right beside you.

00:26:03

So a notebook or drafts or something, you have to have some sort of quick capture mechanism, because when you do creative work and you do knowledge work like this, you never know when it's going to pop in and you want to get that down as fast as you can and then get back to whatever you were doing, and then dedicate some time later on when you have that focus time to really unpack that and really work through that.

00:26:23

You said with your reading workshop, you know, like, "Oh, I worked on this for like a day. Just saw it. I was thinking about this for a day, which ties into principles that we're going to talk about from Cal a little bit later, which I like a lot. So I'm going to move to chapter two now."

00:26:39

All right. So one other thing I want to mention here, because you kind of hit on like you need that time where you're just kind of brewing on these things and you're not actively working on them. There's a concept that I came across, which is pretty fascinating. You know, Richard Feynman is.

00:26:54

Okay. So he has this thing he talks about, his 12 favorite problems.

00:26:58

I'm not familiar with these.

00:27:00

Okay. So basically it's a list of 12 problems that he wants to kind of unpack in his subconscious. So he has a list that he brings with him. And I actually put this inside of Obsidian. David and I recorded a focused episode about this.

00:27:14

And it's essentially 12 things that you don't have the answers to. And just by writing them down and carrying them with you and occasionally looking at them, you're priming the pump for those insights to come in the moments where you least expect them that you were talking about.

00:27:26

And it's just kind of like you're loading it up in your mental ram and that is enough.

00:27:31

Just, you know, you're not actively working on it. You're doing something completely different. And then you're like, "Oh, that thing that I was thinking about yesterday, this totally makes sense."

00:27:41

You're biasing yourself, right? Like you're biasing yourself to think about those things just by writing them down. Yeah, that's interesting. That's really interesting.

00:27:48

Yeah, I thought you would dig that. All right. So chapter two is a slower alternative. And this one is basically him marketing the idea of slow productivity across different arenas, different markets.

00:28:06

Like one of the things he talks about is slow food, which is this restaurant started by Carlo Petrini, which was in response to these negative feelings about a McDonald's opening up in this historic neighborhood in Rome.

00:28:18

And basically the whole thing that people were upset about was this idea of fast food because fast food kind of implies cheap food.

00:28:29

Yeah. So there was a little bit of an uprising. And so in this same plaza, basically, was my understanding of the story.

00:28:38

There's this person who provided an appealing alternative to this fast food, which is time tested from these cultural innovations.

00:28:47

It's kind of like the right thing at the right place, right time. But this slow food is like, "We're going to source all these ingredients locally."

00:28:54

And they say it right when you walk in, if you want fast food, go somewhere else, this is going to take a while, but it's going to be good.

00:29:01

And what I like here is he calls out this slowness revolution. That's what he refers to it as the slowness revolution.

00:29:09

But then he also kind of cuts the argument of, "We're just not going to do this. We're not going to do this pseudo-productivity. We're not just going to work for no reason and just be just not taking advantage of it.

00:29:25

But we're not just going to like crank widgets. There you go. That's the phrase I was looking for.

00:29:29

And I like that he does both of those here. So he calls out this idea of slow. And here's the counter argument to the other side of this.

00:29:40

He says very distinctly that you need an appealing alternative.

00:29:45

Well, okay, we can't just say productivity the way we've been defining it is bad. We have to say, "What's better?"

00:29:51

There has to be this better. And this is where he puts his stake in the ground for this is a better approach or this might be one of the better approaches.

00:29:59

So he calls out slow food, slow cities, slow schools, slow media. He has all these different ways that he starts to talk about slow basically and how we can slow these things down, which I like a lot.

00:30:14

I mean, I think about it obviously I teach at an institution and we get so tied into our syllabi and the way we've mapped out that course and what we should be doing on Monday, what we should be doing on Wednesday, what we should be doing on week eight Monday.

00:30:28

And it's like, "Well, hold on. Why don't we slow down and why don't we actually look at what do the students need? Why do they need it? Do they need an extra week on this topic?

00:30:37

Do they need us to divert and go this way and then come back and hit that other thing?" And I see this a lot where we get so in our own heads or so tractor beamed about, "I have to stay to that schedule. I have to stay to that schedule."

00:30:49

And there's a really big, and there's a really appealing argument. I think that's the way I'll put it here is for there might be a better way to approach this or a different way to approach this and we need to evaluate whether that's better.

00:31:01

Yeah, and I'll add to that that you mentioned, "Do they need extra time with this?" And it's not, slow productivity is not just things take as long as they take.

00:31:13

There's three elements to this, one of which is work at a natural pace, which will dissect when we get into part two.

00:31:20

But kind of coupled with that here are a couple things that I wanted to touch on. So number one, knowledge work is the economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with marketability.

00:31:30

And then we're going to talk about how to do an artifact with market value through the application of cognitive effort.

00:31:35

I don't know if you've ever thought about what is knowledge work before. I know I definitely have because that term comes from Peter Drucker was the first time I saw it.

00:31:46

And that was a long, long time ago before people were working online, obviously.

00:31:51

The tendency can be to think of knowledge work as creative work. Maybe that's my bias. And I know not all knowledge workers would identify as creative workers.

00:32:03

However, this definition, I feel like, kind of lends credence to that argument that you are actually creating in some way, shape, or form, because you're taking knowledge and you are transforming it into an artifact, something that has market value

00:32:19

and the process that you use to do that is the cognitive effort, the gray matter between your ears.

00:32:26

But I know this is something I hit on in the creativity flywheel concept is like, I tell everybody, you are creative. Maybe you don't think you're creative.

00:32:33

Maybe you think you're an accountant, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer, and there's no room for creativity because there's these standards that you have to uphold.

00:32:39

But there are places where you are still able to express creativity and you are wired that way.

00:32:45

And you will do better work, you have more satisfaction about a job well done when you learn to embrace that creative rhythm.

00:32:55

So I thought that was interesting.

00:32:57

Give me one example here that I think that tied really well.

00:33:01

So a lawyer, let's say I'm a corporate lawyer, well, 99% of my work might be doing a very, very similar thing every time.

00:33:11

Like I figure out this contract, I write up the contract, like you are creating value in that.

00:33:16

Now, are you being creative? Probably not.

00:33:19

Like you're probably using tried and true practices that you know are going to work, you know they're going to hold up in the court of law.

00:33:23

And that's what I want you to do.

00:33:25

Like that is why I hired you is I want you to create the value that I need, that I don't have the skill to do.

00:33:30

But then I think to your point, there is a way that you can tap into the creativity.

00:33:34

Oh, this is a unique arrangement.

00:33:36

This is a unique contract that I'm setting up.

00:33:38

What's the creative way to establish this that I haven't been able to do before?

00:33:41

So I think I like what you did there is you call it out the fact that both of these things can exist, but knowledge work, no matter how you slice it at the base level is creating value.

00:33:51

He says that as transform into an artifact of market value, it's creating value.

00:33:55

It just looks like it may not be the most exciting thing in the world that we typically think with creativity.

00:34:01

Let's talk about the lawyers and their contracts there quickly because I've been observing from a distance, obviously, David Sparks for a long time, but I would argue that as a lawyer, he was very creative.

00:34:12

He's using text expander for those contract templates, or he's using doodle to arrange meetings with other lawyers where it doesn't require a whole lot of back and forth via email, or he's bringing his iPad to do visuals in the courtroom.

00:34:26

There are ways to figure out better ways to do things, and that is a way of being creative as well.

00:34:33

So, yeah, creativity is definitely a part of this, but again, you can't just be like boom, boom, boom, go, go, great, create, create.

00:34:40

There's going to be natural rhythms here.

00:34:42

It's why slow productivity is a thing here.

00:34:44

And the other thing that he talks about here is that slow productivity is not about extinguishing ambition.

00:34:49

You can think slow productivity is like dial it back, don't do as much, but do it better.

00:34:54

And in the short term that means I'm not going to produce as much, but he's basically saying take a longer view and look at what you're able to produce over a longer period of time.

00:35:03

What you'll find is that if you embrace the slow productivity idea at the end of a year, five years, ten years, whatever, you're going to get a lot more quality work done this way than you would the other way.

00:35:14

But not everybody can do that either because the last thing he says in this section, the idea of slow productivity can be embraced by anyone, but those people who are paid by the hour are going to have a harder time because there is a built in pseudo productivity bias there.

00:35:28

All right, you ready to go into part two?

00:35:32

Yes, let's do fewer things.

00:35:35

All right, well, as Corey just alluded to, chapter three is do fewer things.

00:35:41

And this is the first of the three main pillars or tenants of slow productivity.

00:35:46

I think condensing it down to these three specific things maybe was not the right choice.

00:35:55

I hesitate to say that because I get what he's trying to do with this and you do want to simplify things so people can grok them.

00:36:04

But with these three specific pillars, what you end up with are like three aspirational things that you're kind of left with.

00:36:14

If you're the person working hourly getting paid hourly, you're like, well, that sounds great, but there's no way I can do that.

00:36:21

I kind of think if there was even five or six specific things, but you were able to take tangible action on the first couple.

00:36:31

It's kind of like Dave Ramsey's debt snowball.

00:36:33

You know, you build some momentum as you're working towards this ultimate slow productivity goal, but it is easy to remember, obviously, to break it down this way.

00:36:44

So maybe that's maybe that is better.

00:36:47

Okay. Okay. Would you have had five, let me think, five parts to the book and then the propositions would have been sub parts because that would have been another way to structure this book that that would have possibly been interesting because each of these three chapters three,

00:37:02

chapter four, chapters five have prepositions in them.

00:37:05

Yeah.

00:37:06

Or propositions sorry propositions in them.

00:37:08

And would that have sat better with you?

00:37:11

Oh, I mean, I don't know that it necessarily sits better one way or the other, but I do have it gone through it now.

00:37:17

Like if you're overwhelmed and you're trying to figure out where to even start with this, kind of what he does in these chapters is he introduces the concept of do fewer things and then he gives you a whole bunch of tactics as ways that you could potentially do this.

00:37:33

Maybe that is the better way to do it.

00:37:35

Okay. So just for this example, do fewer things means strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare.

00:37:45

Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance a small number of projects that matter most.

00:37:50

That sounds very pie in the sky aspirational.

00:37:53

Now you can do a whole bunch of the things that he talks about later in order to get to that point.

00:38:00

But this is the issue I have with like the productivity hacks.

00:38:07

I don't really like I actually like thinking in systems.

00:38:11

I don't like systems books where it's so prescriptive like you do this and you do this and you do this.

00:38:16

But this feels like it's sort of left up to you to figure this out.

00:38:20

And as somebody who's coming to this who's potentially overwhelmed, you want someone to show you the path.

00:38:25

You want a guide and basically what the guide is saying like, "Well, here's a menu.

00:38:30

Why don't you see what looks good on this?"

00:38:33

And you're like, "But I've never tried any of this stuff."

00:38:35

So like I have to do a whole bunch of experimentation now.

00:38:38

So if I were to pick one thing to as like this is the thing that you really got to be chewing on if you're going to try to do fewer things,

00:38:47

it would be this pull versus push idea that he talks about at the end of this chapter actually.

00:38:52

So just to unpack that a little bit, you've got an email client.

00:38:57

You can have pull or push where pull notifications or sorry push notifications as soon as the message comes in,

00:39:04

it's pushed in your face, "Hey, you should be thinking about this right now."

00:39:08

And that's a problem if you're trying to do deep work because it's probably not important and now your focus is broken.

00:39:14

So for years, probably eight to ten years at this point, I've been telling people, don't use push notifications.

00:39:23

Use pull instead.

00:39:25

And usually it's not framed that way inside the app, but essentially only check for messages when I go into my email app.

00:39:32

And this completely disappears in something like Slack, but then you've just got to control when you actually go look at those things.

00:39:39

But essentially, you're saying, "I'm not going to get anything from this potential information source until I choose to engage with it."

00:39:49

And he talks about having this simulated pull system in terms of like a team or an organization.

00:39:55

I actually talked to David about this a little bit.

00:39:57

I don't really like this simulated pull system.

00:39:59

It sounds like really fancy and it's a really fancy attempt to describe scrum in a different way using different words.

00:40:08

And I know it's not exactly the same, but a lot of the things he's trying to accomplish with the simulated pull system,

00:40:15

basically scrum is designed to do. And I have a background of scrum.

00:40:19

Yeah, you have your parking lot. You pull things out of your parking lot. You've got them rated for story points.

00:40:24

Yeah, okay, I can see this now. I did not think of that before, but I can see that now.

00:40:28

Okay, cool. Yeah, because the whole idea of scrum when it's implemented well is that as a team, we're trying to ship this stuff by a specific time.

00:40:35

And the only stuff that really matters is the stuff that we ship.

00:40:38

And I think if you were to ask Cal, he would say, "Yeah, that is true. It doesn't matter if you do a little bit here,

00:40:42

you're a little bit there." Like, what did you actually accomplish? The published artifact. What is that?

00:40:48

And so that's what scrum is optimizing for. And with any system, you know, there's opportunities to use it for nefarious purposes

00:40:56

and just continue to try to squeeze more and more work out of people.

00:41:00

But when you implement it well, it gets the whole team working together in terms of producing the artifacts.

00:41:05

So... The thing that gets me about the pool push system that he describes there is this works if you have the ability to actually dictate to other people that they need to use this.

00:41:16

So if you're in a situation with like everybody's on the same field, I mean, people coming back to you and just being like, "No, I'm not going to do that.

00:41:24

What do you do that?" You're going to get into a little bit of a battle with them because you're going to say, "I want all this information" or go to this spreadsheet and add this to my list.

00:41:34

And they're going to be like, "No." And then you're going to be like, "Well, then I'm not going to do it." And they're going to be like, "Well, I'm not going to fill out your form."

00:41:40

And you're just going to go in this song and dance back and forth. But if I'm like, "I could do this with my students." And I could say, "Students, if you want to meet with me, you go to this thing, you fill out this form.

00:41:51

It tells me all the information I need to know. And then I will tell you when it's time for us to meet." But I have power in that situation, right?

00:41:59

Like, not everybody's in that same part. That's what, from a personal usage standpoint, this sounds great. From an actually interacting with other people while I'm using this, it does not sound so good.

00:42:15

That was my big rub with the pull push.

00:42:19

Yeah, so that's the thing. Like, the pull system is, it's simulated pull system is his attempt to create this system that people could use, but it's kind of clumsy.

00:42:30

And it's one specific piece. Like, there's a whole bunch of other stuff in here. He talks about, for example, having office hours, which I think is a genius suggestion, which, you know, he's got an academic background.

00:42:42

So that's where he credits the idea, but apply this in a professional setting. I think this makes a ton of sense. There's lots of stuff that you can do with some of the things that he has talked about here, but it feels like a lot in a 50 page chapter or whatever this is.

00:42:59

Like, basic marketing, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them what you told them. Like, there's no opportunity for that because there's so much here.

00:43:08

This would actually make sense where you're coming at the very beginning of the episode is like, "Oh, I feel like I got a lot more out of the podcast." Well, he was probably able to unpack this a lot more in the podcast.

00:43:19

It's a longer format. He's speaking a little bit more extemporaneously. You know, like, that actually makes a lot of sense why you felt like this was limited. The book was limited, but the podcast was more valuable, but you know what I mean.

00:43:35

Well, I will say valuable because there's one thing here specifically, like limit significant commitments in your professional life. And he talks about your overarching mission, your ongoing projects and your daily goals.

00:43:45

I remember him talking in the podcast. This is actually where I got the idea for the PKM stack because he was talking about the deep life stack.

00:43:53

And those things are from that deep life stack, but he never talks about the deep life stack in this book.

00:43:59

So maybe he's saving that for the next book. I don't know. But yeah, so there's definitely like big ideas that he talks about currently that aren't included here.

00:44:09

And then the way that these tie together just, I don't know, it's not the polished Cal presentation that I was expecting, I guess.

00:44:20

It feels very much like here's a buffet, pick whatever you want. But the idea of slow productivity, I mean, the first section building up to this point was, you really got to nail this.

00:44:30

And then it's like, oh, you just try a bunch of stuff. It feels weird.

00:44:34

So there's a couple of things I want to call out before we move on. So he does, he gives three approaches to do less limit strategies, limit projects, limit daily goals.

00:44:45

And his limit strategies, he's basically saying, like, you got to figure out what you're, like, you would call it your life theme, right? Like what's your life purpose? What's your mission? What's your focus? What's your goal?

00:44:54

That's good, where I think this becomes an issue is, I think there's going to be people that are going to read this book going. I don't know what that is. Right? Like, I have no clue. Right? And that's where I would say, well, you know what you need to do. You need to go do Mike Schmitz's life theme cohort. Right?

00:45:09

But it's, it's, if you haven't thought about that, like right there, you immediately go, oh, man, like, what do I, what do I do? So then we go into to limit projects. And what I liked about the projects thing is, it's his term for any work initiative that cannot be completed in a single session.

00:45:25

Okay, cool. So now we've got an idea for a project. It's a longer term thing. It's going to take multiple sessions. Okay, we've got this idea for it. I like the generality of that. I could pick holes, you know, I could kind of shoot holes in it, but it's like, I like the generality of that for where we are.

00:45:38

And then I really like this idea of at most one project per day. I don't know how realistic that is, but at the same time, I like that it's a hard boundary, because this is, and this is probably personal. It's like one of the things I struggle with is I want to work on too many things in the course of a day.

00:45:55

And then I find myself feeling lost, you know, I'll hit like noon or one o'clock in the afternoon and I'm like, man, what should I work on next? Because I've been trying to bounce too much and I haven't been laser-free.

00:46:07

I haven't been laser-focused on the thing I should be working on at that period of time or for that day. So to your point, I think there's good stuff in here.

00:46:18

I just think maybe 50 pages didn't do it justice, you know, or the limited amount of time we had didn't do it justice. So I agree with you on that.

00:46:26

And that is probably an unfair argument because I think Cal kind of views these books as like all fitting together. Like he's talked about the Deep Work trilogy before being Deep Work, a world without email, digital minimalism.

00:46:42

And so I guess I'm just a little bit confused as to where this fits. Maybe this is the beginning of another trilogy and he gets into like the whole purpose and mission stuff in another book. I don't know.

00:46:55

That would make sense. Trying to glean as strategic as he sounds.

00:46:59

I wouldn't be surprised if he has that plan of like, oh, here were these three that I wanted to do and these were manageable chunks for me to do those in for a Deep Work standpoint.

00:47:09

Here are the three for slow productivity. Here are the three for these other things.

00:47:13

Yep. Yep. All right. Let's go to work at a natural pace. That is chapter four. And this means don't rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline with variations in intensity in settings conducive to brilliance.

00:47:30

There's a lot in this. So work at a natural pace. I feel like this could be broken apart as to essentially the big idea that he talks about at the beginning here is that timescale matters when you're defining productivity.

00:47:48

And that is an idea, right? But then in the settings conducive to brilliance, this is all about environment. And this is a totally separate idea that Annie Murphy Paul does a great job unpacking in the extended mind.

00:48:02

Okay.

00:48:03

Can we hold off on the settings for right now? Can we stay above that? And then we'll make a hard transition into that later? Because there's a decent amount I want to say in the top part of this.

00:48:18

He says the key 10 in a slow productivity is this grand achievement built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. Okay, so work at a natural pace. Like, we think about this project, we think about this goal, we think about this thing and we want to achieve it quickly and he's like, hold on, slow down, slowly accumulate, right, over time, and then eventually you'll notice.

00:48:39

And this is, I actually stopped writing down examples here. Like I had been writing down like the stories he would tell so I don't remember at all what stories he told in this chapter.

00:48:50

But it's like you could, he gave quite a few examples of like people who slowly did work and then next to you know at the end of their life it was this big major accomplishment in this major achievement was this the, was this the proof chapter.

00:49:03

But there's one where he talks about a guy. I remember he talks about Isaac Newton, but this is more related to the environment because he, Isaac Newton is known for like the apple falling on his head.

00:49:13

Yeah. Right. But then that happened at his summer cottage where he was taking a break from the busyness of his day to day. So,

00:49:21

yeah. One of the things that I struggle with with this chapter is, you know, in his, in his proposition to take longer, allow the main project to develop and grow as it needs to.

00:49:32

Okay. And an ideal world, I can do this. But in a world with deadlines, I can't do this. Like I can't just let the main project just exist.

00:49:42

Like in like if I was completely financially independent, if I didn't have any other responsibilities, sure I could do all this stuff.

00:49:49

But I can't just like have this ethereal grand project that like just lives in the, in just floats around and I make progress on it in these small little chunks.

00:49:58

And I don't know how to balance that. Like honestly, like I know I'm laughing kind of as I say this, but I really don't know how to balance that like there are these, these ideas and there are these goals, projects, if you will, that I want to do.

00:50:09

I need more, a little bit more structure on those. I need a little bit more on what does that look like? Yes, I understand that the counter to that.

00:50:19

So the other side of that is me being so focused on the minutiae or what he would call pseudo productivity that I'm actually not making any progress on it because I'm doing these tiny little things that aren't, aren't hitting it or I've got so much pressure and so much stress and so much anxiety

00:50:35

that I get in my own way of making progress on the, on the big project. So I get the main point. The main point is be a little more free, open up a little bit more, let this unfold the way it's going to unfold.

00:50:46

But I, I felt like the examples that I was getting were like, Hey, it's just going to happen. Like just, it's there and then poof like success and amazing things. And it's like, I don't know about that.

00:50:58

Oh man, I'm not quite sure how to respond to this because I understand your point. I understand Cal's point. I would argue that when you have a good system, then yes, poof magically the results can appear like, let's just use creativity as an example.

00:51:15

I, for a long time thought, creativity was this flash of divine inspiration that showed up every once in a while and just like the whole thing was downloaded.

00:51:26

But what I've realized over time is that when I had a regular habit of reading and collecting these ideas and then when I had a more refined system for taking those notes, you know, I always had stuff that was basically preloaded that the pump was always primed that when I sat down

00:51:44

to create, I may not have any idea what I was going to create or I may not have any idea what this article is actually going to look like.

00:51:51

But because I had done all the previous work and it wasn't in association with this specific project, but because I had primed the pump, when I sat down to do that creative work, there was something there that I could draw from and it wasn't like this stuff is in this specific folder waiting for me.

00:52:09

If you would have told me if I had been to the first sit down at the keyboard, what are you going to write about? I'd be like, I don't know.

00:52:15

But I know that in an hour I'll have 1,500 words because I know they're going to come because I have already been thinking about these things.

00:52:23

And I don't know how they connect. I didn't decide that ahead of time, but that's the whole idea with the flywheel.

00:52:30

So, I'm going back to the very beginning, the writing workshop thing. The rules of flywheels is that they're harder than to get them going than a pump is specifically at the beginning.

00:52:42

But once you get them going, each rotation becomes easier and each rotation produces more output.

00:52:47

So, I feel like once you have those flywheels spinning in whatever area you need to have them, then you can trust that they are going to produce something.

00:52:56

And the first couple times that you do it, you're freaked out because you're like, "I don't know what I'm going to be able to do this."

00:53:01

But then once you do it enough times, you've kind of proven to yourself that you can rely on this system.

00:53:07

You do have to build up trust in it though. And it may fail at the beginning when you're dialing things in.

00:53:12

But I also think there's situations where you're assigned a project by someone that you have no input in and they're like, "Get this thing done in the next 3 months."

00:53:22

And you're like, "Well, this isn't the best version of this, but here you go."

00:53:27

So, I think there's a balance here between producing the absolute best version of something, which we're going to talk about in the next chapter and obsessing over the quality.

00:53:36

And this is good enough and I'm just going to get this out there.

00:53:40

Yeah. And I should give Cal credit where credit's due because he does in this section at a section that's called "Concrete Steps."

00:53:48

He says, "Okay, here are the concrete steps for this. Okay, I maybe forgot that and I got a little carried away."

00:53:54

But yes, this is the fun part of this chapter for me.

00:53:59

I'm ready to talk about setting because this one, or do you want to do seasonality first?

00:54:05

I don't even know. So seasonality is basically rhythms.

00:54:11

It's how I would define it. Yeah, because he talks about small seasonality, like no meeting Mondays, and I'm like, "That's not seasonality. That's rhythms, but whatever."

00:54:20

But you do this, though, so the work in cycles, right? You do it with your retreats where you'll have an extended period of time and then you'll retreat and then you'll have an extended period of time and you'll have a retreat.

00:54:29

I think about gray, CDP gray, where he goes on writing retreats and it's like, "Boom, I'm just completely focused on this thing and then taking time off or whatever it might be."

00:54:42

So I think there's something here. You just have to figure out what it works for your life and your family.

00:54:48

For me, as an academic who runs a traditional academic schedule, I get this over Christmas break and then I get this over the summer where everything changes.

00:54:58

So my entire schedule changes, the entire structure changes, and I can tell you for me it's very healthy. I like that a lot. It's a good thing for me.

00:55:07

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. There's a whole lot to be discussed potentially with this. Let me step back a bit.

00:55:17

If I were writing this book and I'm championing the idea of slow productivity, I'm breaking it into three sections and the introduction is, this is what slow productivity is. It's these three pillars.

00:55:31

Each one of those sections has multiple chapters. Okay, so chapter three off the top of my head here, maybe we've got eliminating back and forth context switching, so eliminating interruptions and things like that.

00:55:46

Which you basically talked about in Deep Work already. And then we've got saying no, and then we've got poll versus push.

00:55:55

In this specific section, I think it's really clean because you've got essentially work at a natural pace, so kind of like slow down and then take breaks and then tune your environment.

00:56:13

So the breaks and the environment for the retreats, those things come together for me because I get away. I've been using these getaway houses recently where you get out into the woods.

00:56:24

There's no internet, no cell phone actually. And that's really effective. But these are like the critical components that you have to use when you are crafting this whole work at a natural pace idea.

00:56:40

So, I kind of want to just move on from that. Okay.

00:56:45

We can't, can I make one tiny little comment? Yeah, go for it.

00:56:50

The spaces, so the context of what you do work in, man, I don't know if I've resonated with anything, anybody's written more like it lately.

00:57:01

Because I'm very much this way. If I'm in the wrong place trying to do a certain type of work, I may as well just stop. I mean, there is nothing is going to get done and I can't understand. I can't explain it to you.

00:57:13

Like, I've never been able to peg. Like, this is exactly what's causing that. But if I, if I just get in the wrong context, it's really, really bad.

00:57:21

I mean, he gave some pretty dramatic examples of the person writing in the furnace factory and stuff like that. But, but it's like, I can tell you that coffee shops, I work really, really well in coffee shops focused working coffee shops, even though there's way more chaos there.

00:57:35

If I'm at home, nope. I mean, it's really hard for me to do productive work at home because I hear the kids and I hear things going on and I see those things.

00:57:44

So I really resonated with that, that last section in terms of the context and the setting.

00:57:49

Yeah, well, let's go to the last chapter here, which is obsessed over quality. And again, I feel like you could break this down into different sections. So I'll start with his definition of obsess over quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term, leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term.

00:58:07

So kind of built into this is the idea of career capital, it talks about so good they can't ignore you. But essentially, there are a couple things that he kind of specifically needs to call out here.

00:58:19

I think one is kind of leading on from work at a natural pace. It's like, do quality work consistently. The next thing here is beat perfectionism because he kind of touches on this a little bit, but perfectionism is a really big deal.

00:58:39

I've definitely struggled with this, where that can be the thing that holds you back from just shipping things and he sort of talks about this a little bit, but essentially the way to get really good at something is you put in a bunch of reps.

00:58:50

I have this slide from a presentation I did at max stock a while back when I was talking about tips or creativity.

00:58:58

Everyone loved it because it's like a poop emoji, arrow poop emoji arrow poop emoji arrow diamond. And the point was that quality quantity is what actually produces the quality.

00:59:10

If I go back and I listened to bookworm episode one, first of all, I won't do it because I'll be so ashamed of all my a's and all my a's and all the mistakes that that I made.

00:59:21

Now, fortunately, editor cleans up some of that stuff, but the fact is that I've gotten better over time. The more that I have done it, you know, thousands of podcast episodes in at this point between all of my different shows, all the different YouTube videos and all the different things that I've created.

00:59:36

I feel a lot more comfortable speaking into a microphone just because I've put in the reps. And I feel like that is something that doesn't really get addressed specifically here.

00:59:48

And I wanted to call that out. And then the other big idea I think is surround yourself with the right kind of people. And again, this is sort of tied to environment, but he talks about like the inklings with CS Lewis and JRO Tolkien.

01:00:00

And basically, essentially, they had a mastermind group and they challenged each other to write some, what was it, a fictional, there was a specific phrase that they used for this.

01:00:14

They're both professors at Oxford at the time and they started meeting to discuss works in progress and their literary ambitions.

01:00:20

And then they started getting interested in writing speculative fiction. That's the term, which led Tolkien to write the Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis to write the Chronicles of Narnia.

01:00:31

So a couple of the most famous works of fiction writing that have ever existed. And I know specifically with them and their backgrounds, it's kind of like Christian fiction or allegorical. I don't know, it's based off of some religious texts and there's themes that are applied there.

01:00:50

But it's crazy to think about like there's these things that the world, but regardless of your religious belief system, you recognize this is a great work of art.

01:00:58

Wouldn't have happened if they wouldn't have had a buddy who was like, "Hey, let's do this together and see what we can accomplish."

01:01:04

Let's get together once a week and just talk about what we're doing here. The little quality work every day that will produce more and more satisfying results than frantic work piled up on top of frantic work. This is really good.

01:01:16

The thing I thought about when I read this was the other way to think about this of like, "Okay, just do. Do and do and do and do and do and you'll get better and you'll get better."

01:01:26

And I think there's a hybrid between these two. I need to do more and at the same time, I need to think about quality while I'm doing more.

01:01:36

So it's really the intersection of these two things that I think is where good long-term work gets produced.

01:01:43

It's lots of reps, like you said, that we're constantly thinking about how to make those reps quality, but understanding that every rep is not going to be quality.

01:01:54

We just have to try to hit as many quality reps as we can. I don't remember where I heard it before, but it's a lot of times the perfectionism comes in and we're like, "Well, I'm just not going to do it because I can't do it at the quality I want to."

01:02:07

And it's like, "No, you still have to do it. You have to make the stuff." But then he's trying to look at it from the other perspective of, "Hold on, lower the bar in terms of the number of things, but just do the one really well and then do another one really well."

01:02:23

So I like the kind of the smush together of those two ideas.

01:02:27

The other thing he talks about in this section is this idea of betting on yourself.

01:02:31

And kind of the way I thought about betting on yourself was basically help give yourself external accountability.

01:02:38

So I saw that as more of an external accountability thing because of what he gives as the examples is, "Give it up free time."

01:02:46

Well, okay, there's an internal accountability there. If I'm going to give up free time, I better be getting something out of this, or I better see the goal on this, or else I'm going to stop giving up free time.

01:02:54

That's just a human nature thing. Then there's one sacrifice money. Well, if I'm giving up money, I better be getting something out of this.

01:03:02

There's a "tell somebody else where now the external accountability comes in where it's, "Oh, you said you were going to. How are you doing? What's going on?"

01:03:10

And then the investor is now there's extreme external accountability of like, "You told me you would do this, and I gave you, I committed resources. Where's the result? Where's the product?"

01:03:21

And I kind of liked that way of helping yourself think through, "How do I help myself increase quality while I do this through an accountability mechanism of some sort?"

01:03:32

Yeah, I like the different levels of the accountability there. I don't think it's just limited to the buckets that he describes there.

01:03:41

But, yeah, getting an investor creates the pressure to not let them down is kind of how he said that, and that resonated with me. I jotted that down in my mind map for this one.

01:03:55

I don't know. I mean, this is a good way to end it. I think there are a couple things to nitpick in here. Essentially, he is enabling us to spend a bunch of money on getting better tools.

01:04:08

And I think at some point, yes, that is important. But if you're at the beginning, just use what you have.

01:04:18

I guess playing guitar, I've fallen into this trap. I've got one hanging on the wall buying me as we record this.

01:04:27

I would buy pedals, I would buy a new board, I would buy a new amp, I would buy a new guitar, and sounds a little bit better.

01:04:37

And then you get around somebody who is really skilled and they pick up your instrument and they play it and you're like, "Wow, that's actually what it's capable of. Oh, I guess I got to do the scales."

01:04:47

So, I like the phrase that he says at the end of the book. If you put a drop in a bucket every day, about 365 days, the bucket is going to have some water in it.

01:04:59

And I was like, "Man, that is a really good quote that it's like, just do a little bit every day."

01:05:06

And next thing you know, this thing has happened when you get to the end. I like that a lot. It's a good vision for not slow productivity,

01:05:16

but it's just a good vision for moving forward with doing good work.

01:05:20

Yep, that is a very good visual, I agree.

01:05:23

All right, let's go to the conclusion. The conclusion at the end of the book basically just encouragement to go apply slow productivity.

01:05:37

As I mentioned at the beginning, it does have this poetic envelope here where he brings back John McPhee and talks about how slowing down is not just about protesting work,

01:05:48

it's about finding a better way to do it. I think that's really important.

01:05:51

He talks about the goals of the book, which in his words are, "To help as many people as possible free themselves from the dehumanizing grip of pseudo-productivity,

01:06:00

I'd introduce a coherent idea about how our cognitive work efforts should be organized and measured."

01:06:04

And this is where I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I've kind of mentioned those specific things with each of these chapters that I'm like,

01:06:10

"Oh, I don't really know if that works. I would have done it a little bit differently."

01:06:13

I understand that this is the beginning of the conversation.

01:06:18

So if Cal word to come out and say, "This is the system and these are the things that you do in this specific order,"

01:06:26

it's probably going to be wrong in three to six months. But by just kind of talking a little bit more generally and focusing on these three pillars,

01:06:36

I feel like this has a lot more staying power. It's a lot more evergreen. So used as a business card, essentially, this is a good way to do it.

01:06:47

Do you think this book gets written if COVID doesn't happen in 2020 and the whole shift to Zoom and virtual work? Do you think this book gets written?

01:06:59

I do. And the reason I say that is that there were a bunch of books that were released during the pandemic that weren't necessarily written during the pandemic.

01:07:09

That's what primed the pump for him. So one book specifically that I think does not get written without the pandemic is Digital Body Language by Erica Duwan.

01:07:19

Okay.

01:07:20

So there are books that fall into that category. And that book I actually really liked a lot. And that was essentially like how do you show empathy and actually have connecting.

01:07:28

Connect with people when you're having to do these virtual meetings as opposed to in-person meetings.

01:07:33

But I think it's probably a little bit different without the pandemic.

01:07:39

But I think the book still has a place because what's the right term for this?

01:07:48

The pseudo productivity idea, like that's manifested for a long time. It's it manifests different ways during COVID.

01:07:57

But this has always been an issue. And that's really what slow productivity is is addressing.

01:08:03

All right. Anything else about the book before we get into action items? Not from here. I'm ready to move.

01:08:11

All right. So action items. I actually have a couple of them from this book.

01:08:18

The first one is to create my autopilot schedule. This comes from chapter three. We didn't really talk a lot about an autopilot schedule.

01:08:31

But essentially it's this schedule where you don't have to think about what you're going to do when.

01:08:38

And I don't think this means for me that I'm going to automate a whole bunch of things.

01:08:47

But I'm going to automate the decision making about when I'm going to do certain things.

01:08:52

So I've kind of already been thinking about this. For example, I'm trying to make Mondays my light days because I'm at church all day on Sunday.

01:09:01

I play on the worship team. Occasionally I'm involved with preaching and there's always church ministry things that need to happen on Sundays.

01:09:11

So Mondays, I've been thinking for a long time, like, how can I make that an easier lift? And I think this autopilot schedule is basically the way to do it.

01:09:18

Where if I can prep the newsletter prior to Monday, so basically it's written, everything is there.

01:09:25

It just needs me to actually go in and push the button because I don't automatically scheduling these things.

01:09:32

That can be something that I do on Monday morning, but that's just, you know, I'm reading through it one more time, making a few simple edits, and then I hit the button.

01:09:39

And then the other thing with this, I think, is going to be using that newsletter to kind of build out the different social media posts and things that I'm going to have throughout the week.

01:09:48

But it's basically like light stuff that really isn't all that taxing. It's more like a rest day, but I'm still doing a little bit of work if that makes sense.

01:09:56

- No, it makes sense. - And confining that to Mondays.

01:09:59

And I think the other thing on Monday would be like if the YouTube video is completely edited and ready to be released, you know, I'll upload that and actually publish that on a Monday as well.

01:10:09

But then all of the writing and all of the meetings and all the podcast recordings, like all that stuff happens Tuesday through Friday.

01:10:17

And maybe even Saturday, and I just make Monday my weekend day. That's kind of what I'm thinking about there.

01:10:24

- Yeah, that's reasonable. - So, yeah, the lot of explanation there for create my autopilot schedule.

01:10:29

- That's good. - The next one is to simplify my daily schedule.

01:10:34

And this is kind of tied to the idea of like the one project per day.

01:10:39

I'm not sure I'll be able to get it down to one project per day, but I'm going to try. And then I've got one for implementing work cycles.

01:10:47

And basically, I'm already doing this. It's on my calendar. This is a accountability to follow through with it.

01:10:54

So the work cycles that when I think of work cycles, I think of like the seventh week sabbatical Sean McCabe talked about when I was at Blanc Media, we had these eight week cycles.

01:11:04

So every eighth week we would take off. I actually have those scheduled on my calendar.

01:11:09

And the next one is going to come up some point in April. And I'll let you know if I actually follow through and take that week off.

01:11:17

I was able to do it previously when we went on vacation to Florida.

01:11:21

I wrapped things up before I left. And I want to be able to do that regardless of whether I'm going to be traveling or not.

01:11:27

I just want to have that regular rhythm where I force myself to take a little bit of a break.

01:11:31

Good. Am I up? You're up. What do you got?

01:11:35

So mine is as much of a reflect on the following. So it's like a multi item reflection, I think is the way I'd call it.

01:11:48

And here are the things I want to reflect on. So basically what's big and what's small?

01:11:55

I have to figure out in my life in the project work life, what's big and what's small?

01:12:02

And then what needs to go? So this week I already dropped one thing that was on my plate.

01:12:09

But it hadn't really been on my plate for a long time and it needed to go.

01:12:14

And I was kind of just letting it stay there. But it was taking up mental space.

01:12:18

And I realized I was like, "Okay, this is taking up enough mental space that you need to kick this off the plate.

01:12:23

It needs to go. You're probably not going to make any progress on this."

01:12:26

So the do less idea. Why do you think about, are there other things in my world right now that I should do less of?

01:12:33

And what are those things and what's big and what's small?

01:12:36

Another one would be to the one project per day.

01:12:40

And I think I would work best if I'm not making that decision the day of.

01:12:45

So does that mean I make that decision on Sunday?

01:12:48

Or I make that decision on Monday morning or the Friday before where it's like next week I'm going to do this, this, this and this and I map those out?

01:12:55

I would love to think about a pool versus a push system, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.

01:13:03

I just really don't think that that's fully.

01:13:05

I implemented a tiny piece of this at one point where instead of me scheduling meetings with people via email,

01:13:12

I sent them a fantastical link or like I had it posted in a much different places and I would just say, go to the link, schedule the meeting.

01:13:19

Go to the link, schedule the meeting. And the problem with that was I had to be really good about blocking off the times I didn't want to meet with people.

01:13:26

Or else I would get meetings with me once.

01:13:28

Yeah, I would get meetings like, "No, I didn't want to meeting that day." Like, son of a gun. So that was mine.

01:13:34

And then the rituals one. So again, it mind like a big like kind of a reflection all over the place kind of thing where I want to think about, "Can I be more strategic with my rituals and my spaces?"

01:13:46

We didn't really talk about rituals all that much, but it's like, "Can I be more strategic with my rituals and my spaces?"

01:13:52

That way when I'm needing to get really focused work done on that one project or that really important thing for that day,

01:14:00

I can't make a bunch of excuses. It's like, "No, this is your space. This is your ritual. This work will get done at this time."

01:14:09

And I don't know if any of them are going to actually turn into anything, but like dedicating the time to think about them is I think step one.

01:14:16

And that's what I want to do between now and next time we record.

01:14:19

Yeah, I think that one is really good. Definitely worth thinking about that.

01:14:25

Regarding the, you're kind of alluding to weekly planning when you were talking about the one project per day.

01:14:32

Let's actually, I'll jot down the note here because this is actually going to get into style and rating.

01:14:39

Okay, so I really like that approach where you are planning weekly and then from that weekly plan you make your daily plans.

01:14:50

Cal has a term for this. He didn't talk about it in this book I don't think unless I missed it.

01:14:58

But it's called multi-scale planning.

01:15:00

Multi-scale planning, okay.

01:15:02

And this is one of the things that he talked about in the podcast and I was like, "This is amazing. It's life changing. I'm totally doing this."

01:15:10

I did a YouTube video on how I do Cal Newport's multi-scale planning in obsidian. That's literally a title of the video.

01:15:17

Like, I'm giving him full credit for this idea.

01:15:20

Okay.

01:15:21

And essentially you step back a little bit further. You think quarterly, weekly and then daily.

01:15:26

Okay.

01:15:27

That's the cadence that he recommends and that's very much in line with what I've been doing for a long time.

01:15:31

But I've been slack on the weekly piece of it.

01:15:35

Okay.

01:15:36

And so I started doing that inside of obsidian and it's made a huge difference.

01:15:40

Like, I really, really enjoy that. So how does this fit into style and rating?

01:15:44

I wish he would have gotten to stuff like that in this book.

01:15:47

Yeah.

01:15:48

There's like a big, long list of things that I've heard him talk about in the last several months and I'm like, "Where is it?"

01:15:57

Yeah.

01:15:58

Now, because I've followed Cal for so long, he probably has the next book half-written and that's where it's going to be.

01:16:09

Right. So my initial reaction to this was, "Oh, I'm a little bit disappointed because..."

01:16:17

And this is, I think, unfair. I went into this hearing what he was talking about every week on the podcast.

01:16:23

And in my mind, I'm connecting all these dots. And I'm already, you know, been preaching the similar messages for a long time.

01:16:30

So I'm like, yeah, the Cal Newport version, the definitive life work, you know, of everything Cal Newport has ever done.

01:16:37

That's what this is going to be. And it's not. It's another great Cal Newport book about a very specific piece and probably the first part of, you know, three books that are going to speak to different aspects of this.

01:16:52

And the more I think about that, the more I think that's probably the better approach. So this isn't exactly what I was looking for, but this is still a phenomenal book.

01:17:06

All right. So if you listen to the whole episode up until this point, you'll probably be very surprised when I give this a five-star rating.

01:17:15

I am surprised that you've given this a five-star rating.

01:17:19

Okay. Well, that's because, you know, I mentioned like there's specific things that you could argue. Well, he doesn't really go deep on this or the person in this situation is probably thinking like, how do I actually apply this?

01:17:33

And Cal is practicing what he preaches here, I'm believing and saying like, well, just wait.

01:17:39

Yeah. You know, what does the next Cal Newport book look like? What does the one after that look like? You can look back and you can see how there's a natural arc to everything that he writes.

01:17:51

And I feel like I can see kind of where he's going with this.

01:17:55

And I get maybe more excited about the stuff that's coming than the stuff that's here. But also when I get over the fact that, you know, I was hoping to be multi-scale planning and the deep life stack and stuff like that.

01:18:06

When I take the disappointment out, what is actually here is really, really good. Yeah.

01:18:14

And it's really easy to read and the stories are phenomenal. And I don't think there's a better researcher, maybe Ryan Holiday, I guess, in terms of like, I'm going to go do all this research and I'm going to actually read it.

01:18:24

And I'm going to actually write an engaging story. Like Cal's one of the best.

01:18:29

So this isn't what I thought it was going to be, which is like a handbook manual. Here's everything you need to know about slow productivity.

01:18:37

But if you think about where we're at culturally and what he's trying to do with this, this is the person who is not sold on this idea yet.

01:18:47

Okay. Maybe they don't listen to the Focus podcast. Maybe this is the first time they've heard the, they've understood the idea of pseudo productivity.

01:18:56

This book is going to help a ton of people. It's going to help them start going down this intentional path. So this is obviously where you have to start if you're a Cal Newport and you're preaching this message.

01:19:09

He's just a couple steps ahead of me, I think, when I first picked it up. And then after as I was going through it and processing it afterwards and even talking through it today, I'm like, oh, I think I see where you're going now.

01:19:20

Yeah. So I really like Cal Newport. I really like this book. I thought, you know, in the past there were a couple of Cal Newport books I didn't particularly love. I think like digital minimalism. I gave like a four star because when I read it, it felt like a bit of a stretch.

01:19:35

This one feels very approachable. Like he gives really practical stuff. And even though I kind of reeled against in the episode about how there's all these different things that you could try.

01:19:44

The benefit of doing that is no matter what your situation. There's something you can try. There are certain things you're not going to be able to move, but there's certain things in here that you can absolutely apply.

01:19:54

And all of the suggestions, I think, are good. And even if you're able to just apply one of those, you're going to start seeing some benefit.

01:20:02

So I got to disconnect a little bit, I think, and realize, you know, who's he really writing this for? Where does this fit? And when you think about it that way, I mean, this is a really good one.

01:20:12

Yeah. All right. So I did not have the expectations that you had coming into this.

01:20:18

I didn't know he was writing another book. I had heard of some of his.

01:20:24

What I'll say is, you know, to put the rating first, it mines a four. It's a four star.

01:20:31

Definitely. When I was reading through it, I don't think anything like wowed me. I was like, oh, man, this book is amazing. This book is really, really good that would bump it up to a five star.

01:20:43

Like everything that was in there was solid. The way it was organized was solid. What I've done, maybe certain things differently. Sure, I would have, but you're always going to have that. That's, that's nothing to knock a book on.

01:20:54

The examples were good in the book. I thought the way he connected different points was well done.

01:21:01

I don't think I could have said it better. So I'm not going to elaborate on it in terms of if I'm new to thinking about productivity in a different way.

01:21:10

Thinking about something other than pseudo productivity. Man, what a great way to start thinking about something other than, than pseudo productivity. So I think this is a solid, you know, four star in my mind.

01:21:22

I would recommend this book to other people who are thinking about this type of thing. It just for some reason, you know, didn't rise to the level of like, oh, wow, like I walked out of the, out of the book or I, you know, closed the Kindle.

01:21:35

If you can, and said, and said, that's a five star, like, nope, just didn't, didn't raise to that level for me. I do have one close out question for you before we get to upcoming books and cat books.

01:21:48

All right. What was your favorite story in the book that he told?

01:21:52

Favorite story.

01:21:56

I think I like the Isaac Newton one, the best, because he introduces a new element there where everyone knows the story of the apple falling hitting him on the head. That's how he got the idea for for gravity.

01:22:11

But he kind of adds some more context to it where like, he never would have had that insight if he hadn't gotten away from the busyness of the day to day.

01:22:21

And that completely changes the conversation around that story.

01:22:25

It does. It does. So, one other thing I want to add, you know, regarding your, you mentioned, you know, I put it down and don't think like, oh, that's a phenomenal five star book. I think I tend to agree with you, but I'm basing my rating essentially on what I think the importance of this message is and how effectively

01:22:44

I'll deliver it. Like, I can look back at deep work now, having read that so long ago and be like, that was one of those tipping points. Right. I feel like this is a cultural tipping point. I feel like years from now, we'll still be talking about slow productivity.

01:23:03

It could be why he's done the big media tour too, is he might think that as well. Like, this is the front end of a multi part series that's going to really impact people.

01:23:13

All right. Let's put slow productivity on the shelf. What's next, Corey?

01:23:18

So, my book is next. It is a long book. We knew that. We talked about it on the episode. Yes, it is.

01:23:25

It's called Mastery by Robert Green. There are Robert Green's written quite a few books and we're going to check out mastery and see what we can get out of it. So what Mike, do you remember? Is it like, it's like 350 pages, isn't it?

01:23:40

This time, it's something like this. Yeah, it's a lot of pages and it's small print. So it's going to take a while.

01:23:49

Have you started it yet? Yes. So, okay. I'm not very far, but I've started it.

01:23:54

Yeah, me too. All right. And then after that, I gave you a couple to choose from because I was in the airport while we were traveling and I instantly bought a couple books off of Amazon because you do.

01:24:11

One of them that you thought sounded interesting was Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg. And I like the premise of this book. I also historically have not particularly liked Charles Duhigg.

01:24:27

So, this is a chance for redemption. And we'll be going through that one after mastery. Do you have any gap books?

01:24:37

So, I don't know the way gap books are supposed to work, but I can tell you the way they're going to work for me is my gap book right now is it's called Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller.

01:24:48

And it's for a grant project that I'm working on. I mentioned it last time and I'm still going to be working through that one. It's just going to be a slower, slower gap book.

01:24:56

And then especially when I give 350 page primary reading books, it's definitely going to be slower. How about you?

01:25:03

Yeah, I actually do not have any gap books. I've got a stack of them that I would like to read as gap books, but I'm not going to throw one out there yet because I think that mastery is going to be consuming all of my reading time for the foreseeable future.

01:25:19

Yes, probably true.

01:25:22

All right, well, thanks everyone for listening. If you want to support the show, there is a link to do that now in the show notes. You'll get access to the pro feed, the bootleg feed, and a 4K wallpaper.

01:25:37

If you're reading along with us, pick up mastery by Robert Green. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.