975: Cal Newport | Reclaiming Time and Focus with Slow Productivity

975: Cal Newport | Reclaiming Time and Focus with Slow Productivity

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[00:00:12] Cal Newport: It's productivity poison. We just tell ourselves this story that I'm just answering messages, but it is torture.

And when you think about it, you realize that like it's, the thing that exhausts us most is a diverse inbox of a bunch of different stuff, which by the way, this is why if you're doing fewer things, everything gets better because you have less things generating email and meetings, so that emails you have, there's less context represented here.

You now have the space to work on one thing for a while. I mean, it makes all of the difference. It's a light switch difference in both what you're producing, but in just the subjective wellbeing you experience while working. Like getting fewer things on your plate at once is like the biggest positive change you could make in your knowledge work life.

[00:01:01] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional astronaut hacker, real life pirate, special operator, tech luminary.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's guest, Cal Newport, has been on the show many times before and always brings the fire. Cal is really an original thinker in so many areas such as digital minimalism, productivity, or in the case of today's episode, something called slow productivity, almost kind of anti productivity In a way, we're gonna explore the growing sentiment against productivity and you thought you were just lazy.

We'll learn why we should actually aim to accomplish fewer things and how we ended up in this whirlwind of pseudo productivity Zoom calls and meetings. That could have been an email in the first place. Alright, here we go with Cal Newport.

Well, thanks for coming back on the show, man. You are one of my favorite people to talk to when it comes to this type of stuff. And actually, frankly, not to torpedo my own compliment here, but I have to say you're actually one of the only people that I will talk to when it comes to this stuff about productivity and the like, because.

I think largely over the past few years I have also become increasingly anti productivity. And some of that

culminated with

COVID, although it could be 2020 Hindsight I was during Covid, I was like fat outta shape stressed, working till 8:00 PM every day. I was always on the red line. And I remember just playing with my, at the time, 2-year-old son, and I like couldn't get up off the floor 'cause I was too fat and stiff from sitting in my chair.

And I was like, this is not good. And I looked at like, what do I have to show for it? It didn't even have zero inbox. I wish I could say I did, but I didn't. Right. I just had like my Twitter feed was all answered or something. It was just like very ungratifying. And I think you're, you sort of captured that in this latest book.

It's like people are fed up with doing more.

[00:03:26] Cal Newport: Yeah. I mean, I think people aren't anti productivity really so much as they're anti overload. Mm-Hmm. This idea of I have too much to do. Which doesn't just mean I'm really busy 'cause I have a lot of things to do. But it also means that the administrative overhead that comes with each of these tasks is now starting to pile up to the point where I'm barely actually making progress on any work.

Like the state of overload is uniquely deranging and I think the pandemic put a lot of knowledge workers into that mode and they personify that frustration by saying, well, you know, screw your productivity. Right? Because I mean, you think about loosely what is productivity? I don't know. Like trying to do more, like trying to produce more and more is the absolute less thing I need.

So I mean, I think the pandemic, a lot of people had your same experience, which is overload got to a place where its side effects became intolerable. Something has to change. The hard part was figuring out what, but I think most people agreed something had to

[00:04:20] Jordan Harbinger: change. Yeah. For me, I started with the physical because a friend of mine ran a personal training company.

He was like, you need a trainer. And I was like, oh, I'm not gonna say no to that. 'cause that's, that's just fact at this point. If I can't get up off the floor from playing Legos. So that

started things, but then it was like, well, I am

feeling good and playing with my kid more, so maybe I will put some tasks aside.

And I sort of almost accidentally discovered some of this where I was like, you know, now that I actually feel good, I don't wanna spend any more time. I don't wanna spend time going in the opposite direction by like trying to do more busy work. And I think I'm not, like you said, I'm not the only one.

There's this growing anti productivity sentiment during the pandemic, but aside from other people going through it in the pandemic at the same time, it seems like there's more happening with this. 'cause people are actually taking action. They're not just feeling it. They're starting to go to hell with this.

If you heard of Quiet Quitting, it's kind of related to this. Oh,

[00:05:14] Cal Newport: I know it. Yes. Yeah, I wrote a New Yorker piece about this a couple years ago that got some attention. So yeah, I'm, I'm pretty familiar with it. Can

[00:05:19] Jordan Harbinger: you tell us what that is for those of us who probably don't even have never heard of

[00:05:23] Cal Newport: this?

Well, the way I see it now is quiet. Quitting was actually one of several waves of reform disruption within knowledge work that happened because of the pandemic, so the quiet quitting wave. This was largely Gen Z, though it did extend beyond there, sparked by TikTok. So it got sparked by TikTok and then spread through other social media.

The idea was to do the bare minimum at work. So I'm not officially quitting. I'm keeping my job, but I'm not gonna do almost anything beyond the bare minimum. It's usually the sentiment was expressed in a sort of antagonistic employer employee relationship. Got it. I am about more than my labor. I'm just gonna stop going above and beyond.

I'm just gonna work the bare minimum. It spread really fast because of social media virality. It also kind of got squashed pretty fast because there was some pretty obvious I would say. Reactions to quiet quitting that were less than positive. I say more generally, this was a piece I wrote a few months ago.

This was one of multiple waves of similar disruptive sentiment that swept through different age groups within knowledge work after the pandemic arrived. I

[00:06:28] Jordan Harbinger: understand the desire to do something like that, but it's actually really good if you're the type of person who can put the work in, because if all your colleagues are quiet, quitting and you're like, I'll take the lead on that project that ends up working out for you.

It's almost like there's this funny tweet I saw, or whatever it was the other day, and it was like, I'm just saying that if I was a billionaire, I'd tell all my competitor would be competitors that the secret is getting up at four 30 in the morning. Have you seen this? It's like all these, yeah. I get up at two 30 in the, in the morning and I, I do it a three mile swim and it's like, when do you, when does this guy sleep?

When does he actually get work done? I guess this comedian was just like, you know, we all know that that's not true, but it's really great. You're just torturing all the people who are on your coattails far away from ever accomplishing anything.

[00:07:11] Cal Newport: Yeah. I, I always imagine Jocko Willink sleeping in the 10:00 AM every morning with his, his auto scheduled.

That would be funny to find out. Yeah. Yeah. Going on beers every night, right? Yeah.

[00:07:22] Jordan Harbinger: Pizza beers. It's like aftermath and it's the, the weights with the chalk and the sweat and it's like you check the metadata of the photo and it's like 8:00 PM the night before.

Yeah. It'd be

[00:07:31] Cal Newport: funny though, because if most knowledge workers were to do Jocko after math Yeah.

It's like, what would we have? It would be like our keyboard sort of askew our like inbox, like smoking a little bit. You like Right. I just slammed through 500 slack messages in the last seven minutes. But I mean, look, zooming out on it. Why did we have these various waves of disruption? It was quiet, quitting, but it wasn't just quiet quitting.

We also had before that the Great Resignation, which was later 2020 and end of 2021, which was across all economic sectors, but had a strong sub component about knowledge workers. So basically older knowledge workers who could left work, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna go to part-time. I'm gonna go to no time.

I'm gonna retire early. So we had that big go through, that big sweep go through, and then we had the remote work wars happen as well. Like a lot of unrest about, um, a lot of energy and what exactly the schedule was gonna be working from home or from the office, or we have to go back to the office. My argument is all three of those.

Our symptoms of the same underlying disease, which was people had become increasingly frustrated with overload and knowledge work a problem that started in the early two thousands. It got worse and worse, and they got pushed over the edge in the pandemic. And in some sense those were understandable, but misplaced reactions to this more fundamental issue, which was knowledge worked away.

We were running it, especially the way we're thinking about productivity, knowledge work. It just broke. And so then everything went haywire, and we start getting all these different reform movements and people spreading virality and complaining and equity. All these different things all happened in response to the same problem.

What I thought was

[00:09:05] Jordan Harbinger: interesting was it wasn't just the United States or West North America, whatever. I see this in China, and you hear, you read about it in China, I, I think they call it something like laying down, and it was basically, it's a little bit different because it has to do with the, well, actually, it's probably quite similar to what Gen Z's doing, which is, all right, I'm never gonna be able to afford a house.

I'm never gonna be able to get a job that pays anything close to what I need to survive like my parents did based on, you know, inflation or whatever. 'cause wage growth is completely stagnated, and

so I'm just not really

gonna do anything. And so there were these people in China that were like, I'm never gonna, I'm not gonna get a job at all.

I'm just gonna lay flat. It's called lay flat. And it really was a lot of the same sort of causes as we have here. I'm sure there's more to it, but it was like, yeah, I'm just, I'm never gonna be living even the same way as, 'cause in China, of course, they had this massive mobility from like, your grandparents were like turnip farmers.

Your parents worked in a factory or something like that and then bought a flat in Beijing and now you're like, you grew up in this totally modernized environment. And it's like, where's my mobility? No, no, no. You're gonna maybe stay right here, but probably go down a

[00:10:14] Cal Newport: notch. And you're like, I'm already here.

Right? I mean, I'm already living in my parents' flat, right? So, so why do I need my own, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not leaving the turnout, right?

[00:10:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Like, or the, yeah, the flat in Beijing, they're like, okay, I'm never really gonna be able to afford my own one of these things. So why should I work 90 hours a week just to not be able to marry anyone?

'cause there's no girls because the one child policy, it's like, no thanks. So

your new principles of slow productivity

are simple, but not simplistic. Right? So one, do fewer things. Okay. I think a lot of people don't switch the podcast off just yet, right? Two, work at a natural pace. This is a hard one for me, and we'll get into why.

Probably because nobody really knows what that means. Three though is my favorite of course, which is obsess over quality. And I wish more people would say that, and I wish more people especially would do that. So. Backing up the truck a tiny bit, what does productivity mean in the first place? Can we get to like a core definition of that?

So we have a starting block. Well,

[00:11:07] Cal Newport: let's start with the broken definition. Okay. My argument is the implicit definition that arose once the knowledge sector became a major sector, which is in the 20th century. The implicit definition was visible activity is a useful proxy for productive effort. So pseudo productivity, which substituted activity as a like a heuristic.

Mm-hmm. Seeing you doing things is better than seeing you not doing things. That became the dominant mode for thinking about productivity and knowledge work, which is very different than the way we were thinking about these ideas in the industrial sector. The agriculture sector, I think this is important is that in the industrial sector it was quantitative and clear that Model Ts produced per labor hour invested agriculture is very clear bushels of corn.

Per acre of land that we're cultivating, right? You had these numbers and these ratios, you had clearly defined production systems and you could tweak that system and see what the number did and like, oh, when we changed it this way, we produce more model T's. That's a better way to build Model T's. A lot of the issues with, I think, people's complaints with productivity and knowledge work is that they implicitly shift that mental model from industrial manufacturing, agriculture to knowledge work where we don't actually use it.

We don't actually use ratios and knowledge work because there is no clear thing. We produce different people work on different things. We work on lots of different things at the same time, there's also no clear production systems to tweak. Productivity is personal. It's up to you how you organize and manage your work.

So that doesn't really work in knowledge work, but we pretend like that's what we're still doing. So it's why when you see like a magazine writer, you know, in 2020. Writing about productivity and knowledge work, they'll be bringing up Frederick Winslow Taylor. Mm-Hmm. Right. The famous scientific management guru with a stopwatch that was trying to make people's motions more efficient.

We actually don't do that in knowledge work because there is no, well-defined process to make more efficient. There is no movement to look at and say, how do we do this faster? There is no number. We're trying to improve that. We can sort of relentlessly drive people to do so. What we are doing, instead of pseudo productivity, like visible activity is better than nuts.

Let's all come to an office, look busy. The boss is here, they can see you there, right? If we need to get ahead, let's work longer hours, show up early, stay late, and that's what we were using. My argument is that when it mixed with the front office, it revolution starting in the two thousands, so we have networks and mobile computing.

That's when that definition really began to fall apart because email, chat, laptops, smartphones, this made it possible in a very fine grain way to demonstrate activity. At all times at a very small level of granularity, and that's when the wheels fell off the bus. So now it's constant messaging back and forth, constant meetings.

It's where work took this turn towards the fully, clearly non-productive performative. And that's when things became deranging. So that's where we are. Pseudo productivity was fine for about 50 years. Doesn't play nice with email. Mm-hmm. Does not play nice with smartphones. Does not play nice with Slack.

Work became intolerable in the two thousands. So we need a new definition. And so my definition of slow productivity is an approach that focuses instead on the actual long-term production of stuff that has value, the big stuff that matters. Are you producing good stuff at a reasonable rate over a long period of time?

Yeah. The busy work

[00:14:23] Jordan Harbinger: over the, so rushing through meaningless tasks instead of sitting down to do deep work, I suppose, uh, as per your, one of your previous works. Is toxic the right word or is that just an no overused word? It seems quite toxic, right? It seems quite like a, a bad path to be going down because when I worked in Wall Street, this is like 2006, so we had email, of course we had Blackberries, but you know, it was, we had Outlook or whatever it was.

Am I in my office? Are you shooting emails back and forth that include a partner? So they kind of know that you're there? Am I on

the phone, uh, on a conference call in a room with other people? Basically? Is that billable hour ticker thing

that you fill out at the end of every day or every project? Are

there blocks dropping in that

thing or are you doing something that can't be measured?

So with, with a lawyer, it was a little bit easier 'cause you're measuring billable hours, but you still then would be like, oh. I went to the bathroom and I thought about this and I even talked about this while I was there. So I'm gonna bill that. I mean, there were literal times where we'd come back chuckling 'cause we're like, I just billed that piss.

It was like 60 bucks,

you know, it's ridiculous. But it was really what we were

doing. And yeah man, this must be so much worse now. All we had then was email and we had an electronic tracker that we filled out billable hours by the client. Now there's email, but there's also texting and there's also Slack and there's also phone calls and there's meetings.

But some

of them are virtual and they're on Zoom.

Some of them are in person and some of them are, you know, there's just all kinds of infinitely new ways to do nothing really.

[00:15:51] Cal Newport: And at least when you're a lawyer, you say, we're billing for it. Right? At least you're getting paid. Yeah, there's a direct connection.

I charge while I was in the bathroom. I'm gonna make money by it in most other jobs. The problem is you're taking that lawyer style fism without the, not only without getting paid, but it's also directly getting in the way of the work you need to do. So you're like in the moment. Staying on top of my email and Slack in meetings is a pseudo productivity purified.

And it's gonna make me seem like I'm being productive. But you know, I still have to write the report at some point that I pro, like I still actually have to do the work, so I'm gonna have to wake up early or do it at night. Ugh. And so it's uniquely deranging, right? Because it's not only are you constantly in this activity, but the activity is preventing you from doing the actual projects that need to be done as well.

So you're having to work even longer hours. So that's what makes it hard, if at least you said, I'm getting paid for every email I send. Like, this is hard, but I'm racking up the dollars. But instead you're having to send emails all day knowing that this is directly gonna make your life worse. Not better.

Yeah. And that's really difficult. I think we

[00:16:55] Jordan Harbinger: had FaceTime, which was like, make sure that you're in the office when the boss walks by. But the reason you had that, not only so that everybody knew you were there like punching in late, but it's

because there

were people there doing real work at late hours.

But then reading

your book, I was like, oh

yeah, why are they there at 8:00 PM on a Sunday? Well, because during the week they

can't get shit done because they're getting calls and emails and someone's like, Lorna, can I pull you into this real quick? We're waiting

for a fax from Deutsche Bank. Okay. And I have to sit in the room while y'all wait

for the fax, because then we can bill the client

for my hourly rate in addition to the other 20 associates who are sitting here.

And it's like. The untold

sort of

grift was, yeah, if there's 30 of us waiting for the facts, we bill like thousands of dollars per hour. But if you're over here doing something else for another client that could be done later, then you can't bill for that and bill for this. Right? So it's like they would rather have you sit, and this is probably not unique to lawyers, there's probably a brand of this for every profession.

They would rather have you sit in the meeting doing nothing and then come in on the weekend and do the other thing for the other client than just stay in your office and do the thing for the other client and not go to that meeting that you weren't needed at at all. Because then you can bill for those two things separately.

Does that make sense? There's some version of that for every profession though. For sure. Yeah. But it's

[00:18:12] Cal Newport: just much worse. Right? Right. Because I mean, the other thing, you know, I was talking to a friend recently who was telling me about his friend who's in Wall Street. I forget exactly. Mm-Hmm. What type of banking?

They might be a hedge fund. Not exactly sure. But anyways, she was telling him about how some of her younger employees were like, uh. She's like, why'd you answer my email? Or whatever. And they're like, oh, I was, you know, going for a walk or I was with a friend or whatever. And her answer was, look, if you wanna do those type of things, get a different job.

Oof. We're compensating you here. It's hard, but we're compensating you for what's hard. And I hear the same thing from lawyers, like young lawyers is they're often given the message, yeah, this is really long, annoying hours, but you can't say, we're not compensating you for that. Mm-Hmm. So if you want less money, go get another job and you have more flexibility.

The problem is we've taken that Wall Street Elite law firm also mentality, and we're taking the worst of that without the wall. At least you're being compensated for. That's a good point. Yeah. That's the problem with it, is that if you're just working, you're a university professor, you're just in the marketing department, you're a development director at a nonprofit, it feels more like Wall Street felt like law firms felt I'm jumping around doing all this work, but without the real reason behind it other than this, yeah.

Pseudo productivity mindset. Which is not, and this is where I differ from some of the anti productivity movement, is that it's not that the, at least in my analysis, it's not that the pseudo productivity mindset is easily translatable or reduced to some sort of zero sum relationship, some sort of antagonistic relationship between management and labor.

It's more arbitrary and cultural than that. Mm-Hmm. Right. So the pseudo productivity mindset, let's stay busy all the time and demonstrate activity. It's not a particularly good way of producing valuable output. Right. It's not making your company more profitable. Right. And so it's not that, okay, it's zero sum.

It's good for the company, but bad for the employee and and we're butting heads against it, right? No, it's more of a cultural idea that emerged without consensus that was explicit. It's just like what we fell into once knowledge work emerged and then like the water getting hot slowly. With the frog in the pot, doesn't realize that he's being cooked.

That's what happened when the IT revolution came and began to make this increasingly intolerable. It happened a little bit every year, you know, and I get into this, you can watch it get worse and worse, but a little bit every year. And then we looked up at some point, I like, man, this is really on email a lot.

We're really in a lot of meetings like I'm not getting a lot of work done. It happened gradually. It's not being imposed by one group on the other for some sort of zero sum purpose that makes it sort of uniquely difficult that it's not helping anybody, and yet we're all stuck in it.

[00:20:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we are all stuck.

It's funny you should mention that we're all stuck in it because look, if you're being pulled into meetings that you don't need to be in, that sounds like a bad office environment if you're doing that, but I work alone in my underwear half the time. I'm still engaging

in pseudo productivity on a regular basis.

Sure. No one's like, Hey Jordan, can I pull you into this meeting? No, you can't. It's not on my calendar. That doesn't happen anymore.

But I'm still making sure that I don't have any dms on this social media thing that come from,

or making sure my inbox is cleared and I'm doing a terrible job because there's so much stuff in there right now.

'cause I just got back from Japan. But it's, it's pseudo productivity is still present, even if you're not in a company with a boss. We're just now doing it to ourselves. And some of that might be my Wall Street programming, like that's what a job is, just doing a bunch of meaningless crap all the time.

But I think if everyone is doing this and not everybody worked at a white shoe firm on Wall Street, then this is almost like it's something in the water at this

[00:21:49] Cal Newport: point. It is in the water now. Yeah. Because it's all we knew, right? I mean, knowledge work is a thing, is widespread thing is pretty new. This is like the 1950s and sixties.

The term knowledge work is coined in 1959 because it wasn't a big enough sector of work. The sector where you use your mind to add valued information, it just wasn't a big enough thing to even label until the mid 20th century. So all we've known is pseudo productivity. So it is in the proverbial water.

So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a freelancer, if you're a solopreneur, you don't have a lot of other options to even think about. You're like, this is what work is. And in some sense, people who work for themselves can be the the worst practitioner. Oh yeah. Like the most intense practitioners of pseudo productivity.

'cause you also have fear and guilt driving you like, I need this to work and I'm willing to do what it takes to be successful. Like the mortgage payment depends on it. And if the only lever you know to pull is P suitor productivity, you're answering those emails, man. You're jumping on those calls.

You're leaving. Mm-Hmm. No stone unturned. And it, it's why I say at the end of the book, slow productivity is a alternative definition to suitor productivity. But probably the larger project here is to have alternative definitions writ large. And there could be many of them. But just to get people thinking, what is my definition of productivity?

What are its principles? How do I pursue it? Like to have a menu that's not just. You should be, uh, jumping off and on calls about funnel marketing or whatever, like get, have options that are not just pseudo productivity. And I think that's as important of a consequence of what I'm trying to do as even the details of my particular pitch is break people out of this mold.

Teach the fish what water is. Hey, pseudo productivity is not destiny. And in fact, it's a pretty terrible way to organize. Cognitive labor, like let's start thinking of

[00:23:27] Jordan Harbinger: alternatives. I like your slow productivity concept, which is essentially, and I'm paraphrasing as usual, reorienting your work so that it's a source of fulfillment instead of overwhelm.

And the lawyer example might be a little tricky just because you're measured on billable hours. So there is a way to sort of measure your productivity. But I know you mentioned in the book also doctors with crazy patient schedules might have trouble implementing some of this stuff. There's still plenty that I think they can do.

I would imagine if you really sat a group of doctors down, you could say What's taking up a bunch of your time? And there's gonna be all kinds of crap that they could outsource or have somebody else do or that they're doing to themselves because that's how they got through medical school. So they're used to doing

all the extraneous crap.

I'm curious what the pandemic did to speed things up. We kind of talked a little bit about these. Zoom calls I think are, are one

of the, the gross examples of this. I know people

that love these things. I don't, you know, I go outside and walk and refuse to use my camera and. I remember during the

pandemic it was like Zoom

coffee chat with friends and I just remember being like, I love you guys, but this is the last thing I wanna do with any free time is be on Zoom even more.

It was like I ended up trading Zoom calls with friends and family in Australia or whatever, people that I love in order to do Zoom calls for work or talking with like other entrepreneurs in the podcast space in a hangout. Ugh. It's the worst.

[00:24:47] Cal Newport: A lot of like drinking by yourself with a camera, right? Yeah.

Like, oh, have a happy hour. Have a glass of,

[00:24:52] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, it's like having a glass of wine in my kitchen at the, and then the time

zone's all weird, right? Everyone's in New York and it's like 7:00 PM and they're like, yeah, and you're like, it's, it's four. This just feels weird and wrong and I have so much stuff I gotta do after this and I just wanna

[00:25:04] Cal Newport: take a nap.

Yeah. Alright, so here's what I think happened in the pandemic. There's two things that made it worse. So one has to do with workload. So like one of the big ideas is we're bad at managing our workloads and we should care about it, right? Because the issue is everything that's on our plate brings with it administrative overhead, right?

Yeah. So like everything I say yes to. That generates emails, that generates meetings. I have to support this thing I've agreed to do. So as you say, yes to more and more things, more of your time has to be servicing the administrative overload of all the things on your plate. Less time is there to actually make progress on the task themselves, and everything begins to slow down.

So workload really matters. And the way that most people implicitly manage their workload is with stress. Because there is no, in most knowledge, work circumstances, no transparent way of saying, how much are you working on and how much should you be working on? And how do we manage how much you're working on?

We don't do that, right, and knowledge work, we're like, ah, that's up to the individual. Yeah, that's up to you. It's none of our business. So what people do is stress. They say, I keep saying yes because there's a social capital cost of saying no. I keep saying yes until I feel sufficiently overloaded by my workload that that psychological distress gives me cover to say, no, it's worse.

Now. That feeling of overload is now worse. Then the feeling of saying no to another person, and therefore I can now start saying no. The problem with that heuristic is it keeps us like right at the red light. Yeah. Like it keeps our workload, oh god. Exactly. At the point where, uh, I can barely handle this.

Right? So we, we always have like 20% too much work to do. So what happened with the pandemic for knowledge workers overnight? You got like a bonus, 20% worth of tasks, right? Because, uh, we have to shift our operations to run right remotely. Like it generated a bunch of tasks overnight. We have a lot of knowledge workers at the red line and then like overnight, hey, let's add 20 more percent more tasks we can't avoid it pushed people over.

I think that was one. Two is more simple. We do in person a lot of quick ad hoc interaction. I grab you after another meeting, like, Jordan, what's going on with client X? So we can just like figure it out in a minute, have a quick back and forth and figure it out. Mm-Hmm. When we weren't in person anymore. I was like, okay, Jordan, we need to talk about Client X.

We would say, well, let's just set up a, A zoom meeting.

[00:27:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Here's my calend leave. It comes in 30 minute blocks. And I'm like, now I have a two 30.

[00:27:25] Cal Newport: That's the problem. It's 30 minute blocks. Yeah. So we also began expanding a bunch of two minute conversations into 30 minute conversations. Right? Mm-Hmm. And also, keep in mind, those two minute conversations were well placed.

Right. It wasn't just, I would just run and burst through your door no matter what you were doing and be like, talk to me about this now. Right. It'd be, I'd wait till I saw you in between things, or You're getting coffee. Good coffee. It was time you were, yeah. So it was time that was otherwise unspoken for, right?

Mm-Hmm. So then that created the zoom apocalypses where we had meeting after meeting after meeting, because we were expanding a lot of the ad hoc into 30 minute plus blocks on our calendar. So those two things, we were at the red line and we got pushed over by 20%. Then we had like a big increase in meetings.

The best number I saw was from a Microsoft annual work survey. They found a 252% increase. Oh. In these type of meetings from 2020 to right now. And by the way, that number's not going back down. Oh, it's not?

[00:28:18] Jordan Harbinger: Oh shoot. I was gonna

say, but it reset a little, right? No.

[00:28:21] Cal Newport: Oh man. Nope. Because we went to hybrid work and so it got bad, right?

So of course that pushed people over the edge. But it was the underlying reason why we were set up for that to push us over the edge is in a pseudo productivity regime. It was like, Hey, activity is all that matter. So you don't think about things like workload, you don't think about things like, when do I work and how much should I work?

And what's the optimal load of things to work on and how should I spread things out? It's like, oh, I just do activity. And like it kind of worked and it was stressful and, but it kind of worked. And then we shook things up at the pandemic and it was like eight hours of Zoom. Yeah, it's, you're working at four in the morning on writing stuff so that you can clock in for an entire day of doing virtual meetings.

Like it just. It pushed the bad situation towards the absurd. Yeah, and I think that was just, that was too much for a lot of people.

[00:29:10] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the

Jordan

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[00:31:17] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I book all these amazing folks for the

show, it's because of my network. The circle of people I know, like, and trust.

I'm teaching you how

to build the same

thing for yourself for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. I realize you're probably not booking for a podcast, but this is all going to make you a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. And

it's not cringey. It's not gonna make you do all this awkward stuff that's

gonna make you look like a doofus or make other people feel bad.

And it just takes a few minutes a day and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the

course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart

company where you belong. You can find the course. It's all for free@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Cal Newport. You know, it's funny, this reminds me, there's a company, a very popular company in Silicon Valley that I probably shouldn't name just because of what I'm about to say, but my friend worked there in sales and this alarm went off and I was in his office and I was like, oh.

And he is like, yeah, it's just a meeting. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, and I get up to like walk out, 'cause I'm thinking, you gotta go to a meeting. He goes, oh, I don't have to go to that. I was like, are you sure? Like, just 'cause of me. 'cause I can come back, we could

grab lunch later. He's like,

no, no, no.

I'm in sales. We don't have to do any of the meetings. I was like, you don't have to go to meetings at all.

And he's like, no, CEO

name, like, you know, household Silicon Valley Tech. CEO says that anybody in sales, we, we just don't have to go to the meetings. And it's funny because, so-and-so came in here and was like, I wanna see you at this meeting and da da da.

And I was like, Nope. And he went to the boss's boss's boss and the guy was like, he doesn't have to go. He is in sales. And I thought that was so telling, right?

They have all these meetings and they have to go and they've gotta go to this and you gotta go to that. Oh wait, you're one of the people who actually makes money for this company.

Do not come to this meeting. You need to be doing your thing. We need the money for the company. And I thought that was so telling, like, these

meetings are so important. Unless of course you get paid by outside parties,

in which case this is completely not a thing you need to do. And it's like, so it's really

not that important.

If you don't need the salespeople there because they're the ones that generate revenue, then you probably don't need the other 80

people. That got invited outta the hundred that are just showing up because their calendar outlook thing went off and they don't wanna say no to the big guy

[00:33:20] Cal Newport: upstairs. Yeah.

I mean I think that exactly highlights the issue of so much knowledge work is because again, we don't, if we're not in sales, we don't have this number we can point to mm-Hmm. Of like, this is what I'm generating. And when we started doing this, that number went down. Most of us don't have this. That's what allows these really suboptimal weird cultural, implicit consensus type of behavioral patterns to emerge.

And I think it's exactly what you're saying is incredibly telling. You find a knowledge worker where there's a clear indicator of their output and you begin to see like what actually makes sense? Oh, these meetings mean you sell less. That's what you do. That's important. So you shouldn't have to do those meetings.

We'll figure it out. Mm-Hmm. We see the same thing with programmers. Silicon Valley figured this out at some point. Writing computer codes, very industrial. I mean, it's a knowledge work thing, but it's industrial. You're building up. Product. A product. Yeah. And they realize like, okay, our main, our main piece of machinery that builds this product is human brains.

And it's really hard. Has to think and write computer code. And so they figured that out a long time ago. Also, leave the programmers alone. We're using a sprint methodology like in the morning we will check in, what are you working on? And only one thing, only work on one thing. What is it? What do you need from us?

Good. We'll check in tomorrow. Mm-Hmm. And you just put your head down in code because it turns out like that's how you produce really good computer code. And if you start making the programmers go to a bunch of meetings and be on unrelated slack all day, the thing doesn't ship. Now what kind of art

[00:34:41] Jordan Harbinger: do we want in the break room?

What do you want this to work or not?

[00:34:45] Cal Newport: Most knowledge work, it's, it's not so clear because you're doing seven things and it's a different seven things than what you were doing. And some of them are non-pro promotable activities and some are core activities. Yeah. And so it's just anything can arise. It's the obfuscation of process and knowledge work allows for all sorts of weird sort of pathological.

Behavioral patterns to emerge. And so I, I think that's a great example where the rubber clearly hits the road. Another example where, where else do we see this literary novelist? People who write novels that are award caliber, they famously disappear. And the entire work culture surrounding the publishing industry says yes, novelists in between their books.

We leave them alone. They should not be doing podcasts. They don't need to do social media. We don't want them doing anything but thinking and writing. Because you know what? If your book is great, it's going to sell like 5 million copies and everyone's gonna talk about it. It's gonna be, Oprah's gonna recommend it, and that's what we need.

That's our product. So just don't do anything else except for try to write a great book. And so novelists famously disappear and then they come back like when they're done with their novels, like when the rubber hits the road and it's clear, I. The way we work looks nothing like most knowledge workers work, but the thing is, is most knowledge workers actually have, if you really pull back the layers, this is the two things you do that creates the most value for our company.

And if you did those things better, it would be really useful for our company. We are preventing you from doing those things better, but because there's not, uh, here's where we landed on the best seller list, or here's how good the code is, or here's how many sale dollars you brought in. 'cause it's not directly observable.

We prevent people from still doing like the core things that that's their most valuable contribution.

[00:36:21] Jordan Harbinger: I love this message and I love if there's something you said in the book that was, you kind of touched on it earlier in the show, how we manage our workload is problematic. 'cause we're always on the edge of that burnout.

And one of the reasons being the

discomfort of saying no to something new

has to be greater than the distress we cause the other party by saying no to something new. So basically like we have to be so tormented by our workload that it's actually the only answer we could possibly give is no. And that washes away all the guilt we feel by saying no to something, even if it's totally unreasonable, not related to our Cortes.

And I think that sort of speaks to why the idea of doing fewer things sounds a bit scary because to some people it sounds like accomplish fewer things and it's not really

[00:37:04] Cal Newport: that is it? No, it's not that at all. I mean, it helps people sometimes when I append it to say, do fewer things at once. Right?

Because really what we're trying to do here with that advice is reduce all that administrative overhead, right? So like we can use hypothetical numbers. You know, imagine everything I say yes to brings with it a certain number of emails and meetings that I just have to do to support the thing, talk to people about it, have meetings about it, right?

So if I have two things versus four things on my plate, that's gonna have the number of emails and meetings on it, but those emails and meetings clogged the day. Mm-Hmm. They clogged a schedule. They make you have to shift your context back and forth. They reduce your ability to think clearly. They fragment your schedule so you have less, longer periods of time to work.

So the amount of total productive work per day has gone down. So when I have four things on my plate, the average productive effort towards finishing things per day is much smaller than when I had two. So when I have two things on my plate, I actually finish them faster. And not only do I finish 'em faster, but I finish them at a, a higher level of quality and I'm happier because it's not this whole deranging know I have no time to actually do the work.

And hey, what can I do? When I finished those two things, I could bring two new things onto my plate. Mm-Hmm. And so now how long did it take me to do those four things? Probably not nearly as long. In the scenario where you did a two at a time and then the other two versus when you just said yes to all four at the same time.

So doing fewer things not only makes work much more sustainable, you become better at working, right? Like if you can just bootstrap into this, it's not gonna be long before your star is on the rise. Mm-Hmm. Like Jordan is shipping, look at this like, good stuff. He did this and this and this and this, and it all looks great.

But your secret was, you're like, yeah, because I only did one of these things at a time. Yeah. And it led me to actually do the work. It's

[00:38:50] Jordan Harbinger: funny, a lot of, a lot of other podcasters or people in the media space will be like, how do you produce three episodes a week? It's so much. They're different. You read the book for every guest that comes on the show and the answer is, yeah, but I'm not doing other stuff.

Right. I don't have like a product thing. I'm not also on the speaking circuit and writing a book and. I've got two kids, like, how do you manage all this? I just read the book and I do the interview. I don't have 17 other irons in the fire. The problem is I get fomo, right? I see other people. I'm like, oh, Cal's got a new book.

I, I should probably should probably write a book. It's a, you have to focus on on this stuff 'cause you're right, it gives you that psychological space to innovate and focus on quality, which we'll get to in a minute. And you know, I used to not really be a believer.

I was like, I

can switch context, no problem, but I really can't.

Maybe I'm just getting old now, Cal, I don't know. But going from,

I'm

gonna do a bunch of email to, I'm gonna

sit down and read and take notes to

then going, I'm gonna do a, a live show or whatever, like a recording. It doesn't work. And I don't

know, did it never work and I didn't notice it or am I just, am I getting slower jumping

between like performance mode podcasts than reading than email?

I don't know. I dunno the answer.

[00:39:58] Cal Newport: No human in the history of the human species has been able to do that. When you're younger pain better. Better. You have a big, you have a bigger pain tolerance. Right? That's true. This is just neurochemistry. It takes time for the human brain to change its target of attention from one thing to another.

Because inside your brain you have to start inhibiting certain neural networks and you have to begin exciting other networks. It takes a while. The clearest way to measure this is just think about when you sit down to do something that's very hard. Like write something right? Or read something difficult.

You know, there's that like 10 to 15 minute period where you're like, this is really hard. I really don't like this, and I'm not making much progress. And then you feel like you're sort of getting into the flow of it. Well, it took 10 or 15 minutes for your brain to load up all the right programs. And so when it starts feeling easier is because your brain has now fully switched its attention frame.

Mm-Hmm. To what you're working on. So if you're switching back and forth between things, you never allow yourself to ever settle on an attention frame. I mean, it's why checking email and answering emails. Is actually one of the most cognitively distressing things we do as humans right now. It's taxing our brain in a way that it absolutely can't do because every email in that inbox is associated with its own attention frame, its own cognitive frame, and they're often, by the way, highly salient.

It involves other people we know who need things from us. Mm-Hmm. Potentially they're upset or there's like our relationships on the line and one email after another means we're switching from one frame to another to another. Never giving our brain anywhere near enough time to actually like switch the cognitive context over.

So we're trying to wrestle with these things without the right things loaded in our brain. It's mismatched. If we get that cognitive grading, it's exhausting. Right? There's a hack out there for email that I like. That speaks to this, and it seems weird at first until you understand attention frames. But the hack is, you go through your inbox and you take all of the emails related to the same thing, and then you sort of move them into their own folder.

Mm-Hmm. And then you deal with all of those, and then you go in and get all the other emails of a different type, and then you move those into a folder and deal with those. If you try this, you'll realize like, oh, this is much easier. Yeah. It's because you're giving your brain time to shift its cognitive frame and then it's easier to do.

So I don't think we realize the cost, and I honestly think like jumping to an email inbox back to work on the slack, back to work on the social media, back to work. For a cognitive worker, it is the equivalent of an athlete, like someone who depends on their body for a living that's, let's say, taking tequila shots in between.

Matches. Yeah. You know, that same effect that has on our ability to run really fast and like throw balls accurately. We're doing the same thing to our brain, but no one realizes it. You know, like, of course we're miserable.

[00:42:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's funny, you're, you're right, and I never thought about this, but I, I do the email triage where I'm like, okay, this is important, and when I have space, I'm gonna hit this.

Let's like start or whatever. But then there's

people who are just like, Hey, I just found your show and I really like it. Or, you know, Hey, I've been listening for five years and I have a question about, so that goes into a separate folder. And I've noticed that when I go through that separate folder, I can do like a hundred

emails in two hours.

But when I'm in my inbox where I'm doing triage or in the starred ones where it's important, I can do like 20 emails per hour. What does that end up being? Like 40 to 60, 80 emails in the same amount of time. I could do a hundreds in the other folder, and it's because when I'm cruising. On one lane. I can really do that stuff fast.

But you're right, if I'm switching lanes and you don't think about it as switching lanes, 'cause you're like, it's just email. Now you're thinking about your schedule and then this next one you're thinking about, do I want this person on the show? And then in this next one you're thinking about, can I join this conference?

And then this other one's like, do we want you to do a keynote? And you're like, oh, is my keynote if it, it's a completely different game and it takes like five times

[00:43:38] Cal Newport: as long, it's productivity poison. We just tell ourselves this story that I'm just answering messages, right? But it is torture. And when you think about it, you realize that like it's, the thing that exhausts us most is a diverse inbox of a bunch of different stuff.

Which by the way, this is why if you're doing fewer things, everything gets better because you have less things generating email and meetings. So the emails you have, there's less context represented here. You now have the space to work on one thing for a while. I mean it makes all of the difference. It's a light switch difference.

In both what you're producing, but in just the subjective wellbeing you experience while working. Like getting fewer things on your plate at once is like the biggest positive change you could make in your knowledge work life

[00:44:25] Jordan Harbinger: right now people are thinking, okay, great. How do I say no to work though? Go back to what you guys are saying about telling my boss, no, I don't wanna do this.

That I think is, it's like the trick. What do we do? And I love, I love this tactic, if I can call it that in the book where most of us, we just say something like, oh, I'm really busy. I can't. But instead of that, we

say, well, okay, I can't start on this project for about six weeks, then I've got four other projects competing for that slot.

So tell me why you know this needs to happen during that. And I know if I asked you to do something and you told me that, I'd just be like, nevermind. And I think that's kind of the

[00:45:01] Cal Newport: idea, right? Yeah. I mean, so this is like most of that chapter is on how do you get away with it? Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Like that's a be because if you have control of your own schedule, and it should be clear if you're an entrepreneur or solopreneur or whatever, it's not that this is trivial, right?

Even after you get over the psychology of doing fewer things, it's not that it's trivial, but there's like one key trick if you're an entrepreneur, which is you can't reduce what you're working on each day if you don't reduce the number of projects you're working on. And you can't reduce the number of projects you're working on unless you reduce the number of missions you're pursuing in your job.

So start from the top down, like simplify at the highest level what you're trying to do. Then you'll have less projects you're working on, and then, so that's the key trick for there. But if you work for someone else. Most of the ideas that I give are based on making workload transparent. Mm-Hmm. The biggest thing that helps support pseudo productivity is that no one talks about their workload.

It's all informal. And so everyone sees everyone else as a vessel. Mm-hmm. To make their life easier by executing work that they need done. And when they just see you as a black box work executing vessel, it's like, this would be great if you could do this. And it's annoying to me if you can't. What you need to do instead is break that mental model by making your workload transparent.

And there's a bunch of ways to do this, but like the simple way, here's like the vanilla way of doing this, it's actually really effective, is that you keep track of what's on your plate and you divide it between actively working on and queued up for me to work on. Right. So you make a distinction of the things you've said Yes.

To actively working on. Queued up the work on and here's the order it's coming. And you let other people into this context. And when, so someone comes up and says, Hey, can you do this for me one way or the other? You can word it however you wanna word it, but one way or the other, you're basically saying, yeah, sure, here's my workload tracker.

Just throw it on there at the end of the queue. Mm-Hmm. Of things that I'm waiting to work on and like, let me know like what I need to do it, or that I should call you when the time comes. Mm-Hmm. Now they have to confront two things. One, oh, he's not actively working on this yet. It's at the back of this queue.

And until it gets up here, he's not actively working on it. So no emails, no meetings until he is actively working on it. Two, they get a realistic picture of your workflow and they realize, oh, okay. He's saying yes, but all of these things have to get done first. So it might be a while. So either I'm gonna say, you know what?

It's not that important, or My expectation is gonna be recalibrated. Or if I'm your boss, I say, no, no, this has to be done. Now you're able to bring them into the workload process. Be like, great, I'm with you. Help me choose what to move out. Mm-Hmm. I'll swap this in for something up there. You let me know which one's lowest priority.

They're now involved in that as well. Right? Right. I mean, they now have to explicitly, and I'm saying this in a way that sounds somewhat confrontational. The book talks about how to do this, you know, of course. Without just being like, Hey, boss, use my spreadsheet. But essentially this is the mindset that completely changes people's relationship with work

[00:47:51] Jordan Harbinger: assignments.

Man, I love it. 'cause instead of No, it's no, and here's a bunch of great reasons why, or Yes. Yeah. But here's also why I, I can imagine someone be like, Hey, get on that, uh, such and such report. And you're like, great. All right. It's gonna fit in here, May 3rd. And it's like March 25th. And they're like, whoa, what are you talking about?

Okay, if you want me to do it now, that's fine. But then you and I have to tell this other partner that I can't actually work on his thing because I'm doing your TPS reports and it's like, oh, let's not, let's not stir that can of worms up. Let's not stir that. Yeah. Maybe I'll give it to the other guy who's just sitting there with his thumb in his, uh, nose.

[00:48:25] Cal Newport: Well, so like, here's another way of doing it that's less. Concrete, right? Like another thing I talk about doing is to implement the same idea is when someone asks you to do something, you find a time on your calendar for it and schedule it. Great. This is gonna take 15 hours, I gotta find 15 hours and I'm gonna protect it.

Right? It gives you a time management advantage, right? Because now like you don't have to schedule stuff once you've already scheduled it, but it gives you a realistic confrontation with your schedule. Yeah. So now you're looking for 15 hours to schedule something. You gotta find 15 hours, and it might be a month until you can find those 15 hours.

But if you're clear like, Hey, I'm really careful about managing my time and I schedule every project on my plate. I schedule when I'm gonna do it, and this is when I could find the next 15 hours clear. You're accomplishing the same sort of idea as the two lists, and it's more unimpeachable than you would imagine, because part of what happens is you get a reputation.

I. For being careful about your time. You don't get a reputation for being difficult. You get a reputation for being careful about your time that earns you trust. Yeah. So like, well, you know what, but this guy over here, he's always like haphazard and doing stuff or what? I don't trust that he's really busy.

I think he's just disorganized, right? You just get this done, but you're the guy who's like, yeah, no, no, no, no. Look, I manage everything on my calendar, and I always deliver. When I say I'm gonna deliver, I know what's on my plate. And when I say, I'll do this on this day, you get it. You've just earned yourself a lot of trust.

And then they're like, oh, okay, so I guess you're too busy for this because again, it's helpful for people if you say yes, but they're not thinking that much about you. What they're thinking about is, I wanna get this thing off my plate. Yeah. Hey Jordan, can you do this? Well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, well, whatever.

Hey, can you, yeah, they're gonna move on to someone else. Like they're not sitting there stewing. Right? And as, and as I tell people also, you already say no to things, right? You don't just happen to have the perfect number of things being thrown at you. That exactly fills your schedule. You're saying no to things.

That's why your schedule's like Exactly full. This just means you're probably saying no to more things, but no one keeps track of that ratio. There is no break room where like the CEO and the CFO are in there and they have your name up on the wall and they have like the number of times you've said yes or no, and they're plotting it right and being like, you know what?

This ratio has changed in the last couple of months. I don't like this at all. Oh, you're like a black box. Like sometimes you say yes, sometimes you say no. They're talking to a lot of people and that's another reality is reducing your commitments by like 25%. No one even notices that it's still like you say yes, you say no.

I don't know the exact ratio. It doesn't feel different enough for them to notice. But for you. That could be the whole ball game. A completely different experience

[00:50:54] Jordan Harbinger: of work. You know, it's, I'm not recommending anybody do this, but it reminds me when I, again, when I was on Wall Street, these, these corporations are so dysfunctional.

It's kind of funny. There was a, a, a young lady who only

wanted to do a very specific

type of work and they would give her things that were not that, and she would go, oh no, you know, I really am only doing this. And they would go, oh, okay. And I asked her, so what are you doing if you don't have enough of that kind of work?

And she's like, oh, I just read. And I'm like, read what? She's like books. And she was always

reading, and I'm not talking about like law books, I'm talking about like novels.

She just, you know, caught up on whatever, Harry Potter or whatever. And I'm like, you're gonna get fired. She's like, oh, well. And

during her performance review, they were like, you billed like 20 hours this quarter.

Everyone else billed you like 400 or whatever it was. And she's like, yeah, I just wasn't getting enough tax work or something. And instead of being like, you're fired

to their credit slash or

whatever, this offer was like, we really need to make sure that you get more of this type of work. And I was blown away.

'cause I was, I thought you are gonna get

kicked out

of there so hard. You better bring a parachute to work. They're gonna throw you out

the window.

And they didn't, they tried to accommodate this and that blew me away. And of course, by, at that point, I was like, I gotta try some version of that, that won't get me fired.

And sure enough,

you can say no to certain kinds of work. Now if there's something

everyone needs to work on, you don't say no to that. Right? You're, you're team player getting it done. But if people are just dumping crap off on you, it never occurred to me that you could be like, oh, you know what, no, I'm, I'm not gonna take part in that.

There was a lot of sort of like shit rolls downhill at these corporations and some people were just like,

Nope. Not doing it. And they totally

got away with that, which is actually shocking. And to your earlier point, you know, I know that there's a lot of ad hoc that goes around, like the overload there that goes around work.

I know, I'm pretty sure I'm

not the only person who would get an email and is like, I really don't wanna deal with this today. I'm hungry. Let me ask a question

about something logistical and ping pong this off

a few more people so that I just, I'll look at it tomorrow when those replies come in. Or I'll like boomerang this for a week after asking a question about something that I could have asked at the meeting.

I think we probably all do that stuff and we just make, it makes everyone's problem worse and we do it because we're overloaded. Right. If I, if I had the space to deal with it, I'd be like, yes, I would love to do this. Let me get started on that. Where's the plan? Lemme get together. But since I don't, since I'm already on the red line.

I just make more busy work for other people because it's like a temporary, it's like I can come up for air by doing that and then dive back into the sea of crap that I've gotta deal with.

[00:53:28] Cal Newport: Yeah. I call it obligation hot potato. Oh yeah. This is on my plate right now, so that's a source of stress. If I send an email about this to you, no matter how nonsensical or unproductive or ambiguous, it's not on my plate in the moment, and I get a little bit of relief.

And so you get the like thoughts. Yes. Yeah. You know, like question mark. Yeah. I mean, that's just because it gets you off your plate. Guilty. You know, I saw this, for example, in response to something I suggested in Deep Work, my book from 2016, where I had a very common sense suggestion about email. It was called process oriented email, but I was like, look, if we're being very rational about this, if you sit and think before you write an email about some sort of project or request, if you really think through what really needs to happen here.

You spell it out. Alright, here's what we need to do. We need to reach this decision. Here's the steps that are required. Let me spell out how we should do this. Let me lay out the process like I'm gonna suggest these times. I'm gonna put 'em in this document and, and you take a look on them and you, everyone takes a look on 'em.

And by Wednesday, everyone marks which ones that work. I'm gonna check in on that document Thursday morning. I'll pick the time that works in the middle. And like you could, if you laid out the process of like how the work was gonna unfold in your original email, you can prevent needing to have another 25 back and forth messages, each of which requires a bunch of inbox checks.

It's just much better. There's this question like, so why aren't people doing this? And they're like, I just, I don't have nearly enough breathing room or space that would take like 10 minutes to write that email message. I can't do that. Mm-Hmm. I have to just thoughts? Yeah. You know, like, get that off of my, like, are you available that day?

You know, oh, it's off my plate. Right? And so it's another consequence of overload. But I liked your example about the law firm because this is actually at Wall Street. Like this is a real thing. I was getting real numbers for this here in DC My lawyer friends told me about this. It is a thing in these big elite law firms in DC where you can leave the partner track and say, I'm gonna be a specialist, right?

Like, I just do like this type of compliance with this law. Anyone who's working on a case that has this, I can come work on just that thing, right? And is considered inside the firms to be non prestigious. 'cause you leave the partner track, right? Partners, you have to do all the crap, right? Mm-Hmm. I got the numbers from people and I was like, well if you can become a managing partner at one of these firms with bonus, it's like a a one to $1.2 million a year annual compensation package.

Your life is like hell, but it's like a one to 1.2 million. And they're like, and yeah, but these specialists, they don't get a profit cut. Honestly. They like top out at like $600,000. I

[00:55:54] Jordan Harbinger: knew you were gonna say that. And I was like. That's amazing,

[00:55:56] Cal Newport: right? It's amazing. You work one third of the hours, one third of the hour, it's a huge salary.

It can be made more reasonable, but it's even better than that. In a lot of knowledge work forms, you can make yourself one of these non-partner track specialists without having to trade off the money. The trade off, you have to make off into do this where you say, this is what I'm doing. Mm-Hmm. The trade off you have to make is accountability.

Right? That's how it wears risk in it. But in a lot of firms, non-law firms, which is like normal type of knowledge work firms, you can say, I am gonna specialize on this. Measure me. Like this is what I do. And if I'm not like bringing the reign, like hold me accountable for it. But you can trade accountability for accessibility, right?

Because most people, the trade off is I have to be emailing all the time. I'm in pseu productivity, but it's low risk. It's like I can very consistently look productive. All I have to do is be willing to send emails all day and jump on Zoom meetings and it's, it's all off. You skated. I have a lot of flexibility.

I, I don't even have to really be doing a lot of work, right? Mm-Hmm. I just have to be really busy and kind of stressed out. If you trade that for accountability, people will leave you alone. But you have to deliver, like typically it means like, I'm just gonna do this. Mm-Hmm. And this stuff I do is gonna be great.

And if it's not like this is not gonna work out, you might have to fire me. But if it does work out, the flip side is I don't do 17 different things. There's nothing to do Zoom meetings. We'll check in once a week. Leave me alone. Yeah.

[00:57:14] Jordan Harbinger: That's, oh man, it's incredible. I did not know that that was an option at any law firm.

That's a really good career track. That's a really, it it on Wall Street, it's more like partner track or they pigeon you into this one sort of like council area and you stay there until you jump back in or you leave. Right. It's kind of like you're not gonna make partners so you should go work at Visa and have a

[00:57:36] Cal Newport: lifestyle change.

You know, who's innovating. And I think it's relevant, who's innovating the law firm space now is there's an increasing number of, there tend to be more boutique firms run by women. Mm-Hmm. And the women seem to be much more willing than the men if obviously stereotyping here, but they seem much more willing than men to experiment with different models.

Revenue models, right? And so you have these women run law firms that are emerging where they say, our model is not our maximization. Right? It's not like theoretically speaking, which is how most big law firms run, theoretically speaking, what is the maximum number of dollars that this number of people can generate using their brains?

And they're instead thinking like, alright, here's our job. We wanna like get paid, well get good compensation and have reasonable hours. We're really smart. Mm-Hmm. So why don't we find a way to use our smarts to like make a good salary and do like really interesting high level work, but not try to maximize the money we make.

And it turns out like law could be a fantastic job if you're doing a third of the hours. Yeah. It's fascinating, interesting work. And because a lot of people are realizing like a third of the money, well fine. Okay, so it's not 1.2 million, it's like. 350, $400,000. Right? But so what if we start as like, that's a giant salary if you're not comparing yourself to other people, if you don't have exactly belong to the Chevy Chase golf club, if you can do this remote, a lot of these companies are remote first.

Like, I live in Asheville, North Carolina. Now why do I care if you know, like 400,000? I'm a king. Yeah. You know, I've got, I've got the nicest house on the block. What do I care? You know, this is great and I'm working 30 hours a week. That innovation is great, but pseudo productivity doesn't support it.

Pseudo productivity says activities, what matter, doing less activities bad, and that's just it.

[00:59:13] Jordan Harbinger: This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Cal Newport. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Progressive.

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you can't find the code, you wonder if we have a sponsor for something. Feel free to shoot us an email, jordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Cal Newport, man, I'll never forget one of my professors who was a managing partner at a Chicago law firm.

He was also like a, he commuted it to Michigan, which is uh, quite a drive. He would teach this class on law firms and legal careers. And he was an interesting guy, typical sort of high level law partner. He is like, yeah, I belong to a golf club in Ireland. It's 40 grand a year. I've been there once in four years.

And you're like, what the heck? That's expense and expensive round of golf. Somebody had asked him something like, are there part-time options at law firms? And he goes, no, not really. Unless you're a woman and you're pregnant at that particular moment, not really. And even then, not really. And we were like,

why?

And he goes, well, how many of you would work

half as much for half the money? And like everyone in the whole class is like, yeah. And he's like, that's why. And

we're like, but isn't that kind of okay?

And he is like, well, benefits and stuff. And you know, it adds up. And it's like,

but can't we sort of account for that?

Can't, you know what if I buy my own healthcare can then I work only 45 or 60 or whatever it was, hours a week. You know, can we not figure this

out? And it was like he just was like, hell no. This was 8,000 hour work territory, these kinds

[01:02:49] Cal Newport: of firms, well, you know, who is experimenting this better is entrepreneurs.

When entrepreneurs fall into the slow productivity mindset. So now it's just you negotiating with your own psychology. They're innovating with a lot of these ideas. And I really push, and I talk about this a bunch in the book, is like, if you're an entrepreneur, you can experiment massively. Right? Here's a, an example is a, an entrepreneur, it's a, a solo shop.

She like does coaching and then she has maybe four or five sort of part-time virtual type people, right? So it is like that scale of a shop. And she figured out at some point she's like, here's what I'm gonna do. I take two months off in the summer. She's like, okay, it's not too hard to work out. You have to be a little bit careful with your contracts, but it's not too hard.

She lost about if you do the math, like 20% income revenue. Okay. Right. She's like, that's a super fair trade. Yeah, this is great. Like 20% less revenue. And I like July and August. I can take completely off. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. I'll take that trade. Like the numbers are arbitrary. Who cares? 20%. Like I'll do that. You know, I'll do that all day.

Right. I have a writer friend who does that, takes three months off. I do this with, I'm an non entrepreneur, but kind of am. Right. I'm a professor. Yeah, you kind of are. Yeah. Yeah. So I realized at some point people don't realize that if you're at a research institution as a professor, the school pays your salary for 10 months and the two months over the summer, they don't pay your salary.

And so like what most people do is their research grants, they ask in their research grant budgets for what's called summer salary. And that's where you fill in those last two months is it's coming out of I see. Your grants. Right. And that's just what people do. And in fact, the push I had was when I first started was you can get three months, technically speaking, if you have three different research grants, you can take a month of summer salary from each and actually get paid three months worth of salary in two months.

Mm-Hmm. And that's what you want to try to do. But the thing is, that means you're doing all this work. And I figured out at some point. I said, well, what if I just didn't do that? Like I just didn't ask for summer salary and grants and I just didn't work on academic stuff in the summer and I just sort of disappeared and went to New England and like wrote books or whatever.

And it turns out, oh yeah, you know, it's 20% less money. But yeah, you can do that except for

[01:04:50] Jordan Harbinger: your books are bestsellers and you're probably massively in demand on whatever speaking circuit and stuff. So I, I think you've maybe figured out how to make, how to plug the gap cow.

[01:04:58] Cal Newport: Yeah. But it's a, it was an awareness of like, oh, that's an option.

Like, oh, that's just the trade. It's 20% less money, but you get the summer off and there's a lot of professors who make that same trade who don't also write books and do whatever. What they do is they just adjust their spending. Like, let's just pretend my salary is 20% less. Like, this is so worth it. I can take the whole summers.

So a lot of professors who don't do research will teach summer classes to try to fill in their salary. And those are really hard because you do like a semester's class in two weeks, it's like five hour days. Yeah. And I know a lot of professors who are like, well, what if I just spent 20% less and took the summer off and like that is so much better.

Mm-Hmm. That is, that is so much worth it. Anyways. There's a lot of innovation. I know people that do seasons on seasons off too. It's like I work really hard and then I take a season off, then work another season, like they go back and forth. There's a lot more innovation and models. Once you break outta suitor productivity, and if you work for yourself, everything is on the table, right?

You're just playing with these like income spending ratios. You have so much flexibility on your table.

[01:05:56] Jordan Harbinger: There's some stuff I wanna say in the show close about working at a natural pace. But in the interest of time, I think we can kind of blow past a little bit. 'cause you're touching on some of it right now.

You're making that long, longer term kind of vision of what you want your life to look like and working in seasons. I love this idea. Our mutual friend Jenny Blake does this. She's funny because whenever I look at her phone, she always has like 74 unread text messages and I, my skin starts to itch. I'm like, oh gosh, I wonder what you think of that as somebody who's like, Hey, email's overrated.

I'm like, yeah, but do you have 74 unread text messages? That just makes me have some sort of weird anxiety.

[01:06:31] Cal Newport: I'm bad at text messaging, let's put it that way. Not

[01:06:33] Jordan Harbinger: really. You get back to me like right away. Yeah, but you're, I

[01:06:35] Cal Newport: feel like you got lucky. Okay. I drew, trust me, drew the long straw. Yeah. People know if, like, if I have my phone around that, I'm just doing a mid, I'll answer a text message.

But if I'm in like a three hour rec record, like I don't know what text messages are arriving right now. Right. I declare text message bankruptcy basically after any extended period of doing something away from my phone. Just seven different things going on here. All with long threads. I mean, people just have learned that about me.

Mm-Hmm. Okay. Sometimes he's around and he will answer. If he doesn't, he's probably like writing a recording and may not see this at all, and so I'm not gonna expect it. People rewire pretty quickly, I suppose. Yeah. And Jenny, by the way, just took like one of her podcast off of her plate as well. I saw that.

Which is like, she's in my book, I talk about her in the book. That's slow productivity, right? It's like, do I really need to do this? I mean, it's fine, but what about the time I would get, okay, let me take this off my plate. Yeah. Yeah. I love that way

[01:07:24] Jordan Harbinger: of thinking. She's great at taking a few months off or whatever, and just being like, this is my sacred time in Hawaii.

Sorry. Yeah. Or she'll like call friends like, we're f you know, she's a friend of mine. I'm not asking her to do any work. So it's like, you know, Hey, let's chat and catch up. What are you working on? Nothing. My tam, you know, great, good for you. But for me it's like, oh gosh, can you do that? So she's been really good at sort of, I guess, an inspiration in many ways you might say, because she's really good at not doing that stuff.

And I, I won't say doing nothing 'cause she gets a lot of stuff done. But she's also, I had a problem of many years ago where I separated from one business into another and she's like, you need, she didn't call it a cool down period, but it was basically what you talk about, which is like a cool down.

She's like, go to Hawaii for two months and just don't do anything. And that was too scary. I didn't take her advice. I kind of probably should have,

[01:08:12] Cal Newport: but lemme get your opinion on that. I had an interesting argument about this with Ryan Holiday, so I wanna get your opinion right. Mm-Hmm. What do you think would happen if you're with Amazon, right, in terms of your

[01:08:22] Jordan Harbinger: podcast?

I'm not, no, no. I'm on podcast one. I, it's funny, I almost went to Amazon. That's,

[01:08:26] Cal Newport: we probably talked about it. Let's say next time you negotiate your contract with Podcast one. Like what if you said, yeah, I podcast 10 months a year. And then like two months I don't Mm-Hmm. And then so I can go to like Hawaii or do whatever.

Yeah. So I brought this up on Ryan's show because I, I'm really thinking about this as, you know, telling my ad agency, I was, I'm independent, but my ad agency books about a year in advance worth of my ads. Right? Wow. I was like, yeah, I'm thinking of telling them, let's book 45 weeks or whatever, 46 weeks.

Sure. I'm just gonna take, when I'm gone in the summer, like not worrying about like podcast or whatever, because I was doing the same sort of math, right. I was like, yeah, it's less money, but like for me, I'm not, you know, it's all kind of funny money to me anyways. It changes each year. I'm like, whatever, why not?

That would be great not to have to record. Ryan was very worried about this, and this was in hi, uh, public. So I, I'm not talking about school. He is like, I don't know about this. I'm worried about this because you're gonna lose your audience and people are not gonna become used to listening to you anymore.

And there's like a whole momentum thing. So, okay. You be the arbiter here because I'm gonna try to convince you to do the same if I do it. Mm-Hmm. Is that really scary or is it we're just telling ourselves the story of, I'm just nervous about. Not doing the work

[01:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: with

podcasts though, tons of them go in seasons.

It used to not be the

case. Tons

of podcasts go in seasons now it'll be like 12 episodes or 24 episodes of this TV goes in seasons, right? But they have to advertise the next season. What I would do if I were you in this particular situation is certain apps like Apple Podcasts will stop downloading.

It'll be like, Hey, this show hasn't been updated. Do you still wanna listen? And people have to kind of like re-opt in. What you could do is take episodes like this one that I'm doing with you and you could be like, alright, that was, that was half decent. Why don't I save that? I'll do the, I'll air that during my summer break and I'll air the one I got I did with Ryan during my summer break and we'll, I'll run two of those that are already done.

You did like no work other than being the work you're doing right now sitting here suffering through this conversation with me. Um, but you're doing no work to produce, right. And edit the thing. Really, your team can get it done ahead of time and then you have something to put in your feed, but it doesn't require you to then sit down and produce it.

I mean, you could, of course, and you've already thought of this, you could also record episodes in advance, right. That's the other solution. And then you don't have to do any work during that time. Right. That's sort of the ideal, but that requires you to do all the prep and all the production for those episodes.

So

[01:10:40] Cal Newport: it could be a sort of a pseudo hiatus, right? It's like Yeah. In the summer season. Yeah. It's like reruns, right? And then like the new stuff starts again, and that's like enough to like, keep you active in the podcast frees and, and Apple doesn't unsubscribe you and Right. And people are like, oh, this is a good one.

Or, and button your downloads go down. In fact. You could even not sell ads on those or Yeah. Use a programmatic advertisement. Programmatic ads.

[01:11:02] Jordan Harbinger: Those programmatic ads. Yeah. A hundred

percent. Man, you know, for me, I, I record ahead and I go on vacation and it, nobody cares slash even notices for you. If you don't wanna do that,

take your rich role in your Ryan and your Jordan interview and throw 'em in every three weeks and people will be like,

wow, those are really cool.

I've never heard that side of Cal before. They're not gonna be like, this guy's not doing any work. Unsubscribe. Yeah. You know, they're gonna be like, oh cool, I'll see you in Hill Newport.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, no one cares. I've put episodes where somebody interviews me and people are like, wow, I've never heard you interviewed before.

That was my favorite episode for the last

year. Meanwhile, I put that in and I'm like, oh man, how many emails am I gonna get that are like, are you okay? Are you sick? Why are you being lazy? Zero. Zero of them came in. I love it. Alright, good. Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that, but yeah, two months with nothing.

Nothing. It's like, oh, is he dead? You know, you don't wanna do that to your fan base. There's so much in the book, and again, I'm gonna cover a lot of this in the show. Close. There's a lot in the book about rituals and creativity of, well-known people, creatives, finding certain places to do their work.

Like I'm no Ian Fleming with a beach house in Aruba or whatever it was.

But I,

I have certain places where I will sit down and answer certain kinds of, like, I call it fan mail, which sounds so self-important now that I say it out loud on your show, on our show here, 'cause we're doing a crossover, but it's like, it's fun to have a

coffee and do that. And like when that coffee's done, I'm kind of like, eh, done with this particular project that I

find helps me do certain kinds of work.

If I'm reading, I like to go out and walk. It keeps the rest of my body busy, gets rid of that anxious stuff. There's just so much in your book that is very practical. I don't want people to think that the whole book is like two guys complaining about how there are too many meetings. That's not what you

[01:12:43] Cal Newport: wrote about.

Yeah. I mean there's the reduce part and then there's the amplify part. Yeah. How do you produce. Better stuff, which is the glue for everything else. Right? That's third principle. Obsess over quality. Yes. It's the glue for the other two. If you don't do that, if you don't care about, like how do I like really begin to care more about what do I do best and like push myself to do it better.

If you don't do that, you only just try to reduce workload and you only try to work at a natural pace, that's probably not gonna work. Mm-hmm. Right? Because it keeps you in this mindset of just like, I don't know, I don't like working. I wanna do less of it. It's not very sustainable psychologically, but when you obsess over the quality of what you do, those ideas become inevitable and natural.

It's like, yeah, I'm trying to do this thing better. Busyness is incompatible with me doing this better. So of course I want to try to simplify things. Yes. And then this is why the flywheel starts getting pretty quick. As you start doing things that are valuable, better, you gain more autonomy and control over your workload and it gets even easier to simplify it and then that flywheel gets going.

Yeah. And that powers, that really is what powers a substantial and sustainable shift to slow productivity. Obsessing over quality and that's where the rituals matter. Isolating what's important matters. Working on your taste, caring about what you do, that's what ultimately is gonna break you out of pseudo productivity's, grip and fuel you as you try to like travel to a brand new configuration of work.

Did

[01:14:02] Jordan Harbinger: you think about calling the book Pseudo Productivity? Yes, but

[01:14:05] Cal Newport: But they didn't like that, right? Well, the School of Thought is you wanna name this positive selling proposition that makes sense. It did very well. But the worst Performing Still New York Times bestseller, but the worst performing book of my last three or four was a World Without Email because I was focusing on the negative.

Right? The title. Yeah. Deep Works. The positive thing to do. Digital minimalism is the positive thing you want to do. Be so good they can't ignore you. True story about so good. They can't ignore you. By the way, when I pitched that to my publisher, the title was Don't Follow Your Passion. Oh. And the publisher said, yeah, I will never publish a book with that title.

And we left. I was at Random House, but we left and went to Hase. But after we left. We swapped the name from, don't follow your passion to be so good. They can't ignore you to the positive. And then the book went to auction. Huh? And like a lot of people wanted to buy it. So yeah. I'm focusing on the positive vision of where you want to get better.

Then pointing to the negative thing that you're trying to escape.

[01:15:00] Jordan Harbinger: That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah. 'cause I noticed you just keep using that phrase and it's a great one. And I'm like, it's so catchy. But you're right, it is kind of like no one wants to buy a book on pseudo product. I would not buy that book either now that you mentioned it.

So they, they were probably onto something there. I love that you transition to obsessing over quality because quality demands that you slow down in the first place. I could do the show seven days a week if I didn't need to read your book to prep. I didn't need to watch other interviews that you've done to find out some of the stuff you're really like passionate about talking about.

I don't think the show would be nearly as good if I did seven a week. Because at that point you're kind of like, you know, to use the PC term, pooping him out kind

of, right? Like back in the TV days

when people cared about those talk shows that were on tv, RIP, Larry King. But one of the things I asked him was like, how do you prepare for interviews in part because it doesn't seem like he does a whole lot of that.

And he said, yeah, I just use my natural curiosity. I often don't even know

who's gonna be in studio that day. Sometimes I read a

printout of their bio in the car on the way to studio, and I

thought that worked for you for a long time because there was one

other show on at the same time as yours. And they watched that or they watched you and that was kind of

like you threw your hands up in the air and it wasn't your problem.

And that's a level of production that you can't get away with anymore. There's too much competition. If I'm

just talking to you and I'm like, tell me what your book is. I haven't even looked at it. Another podcaster who's like, I don't know, read the back in chapter one is gonna crush me. Yeah. And they should.

And I think

[01:16:30] Cal Newport: that's absolutely right. If you want to actually do something good, it can't be busy. Mm-Hmm. And this goes back to why, why do literary novelists do the fewest things as compared to every other type of author? Because they're the most obsessed with the quality of what they do because their whole professional career resides on their book being award caliber.

Like if you're Jonathan Franzen. I can't just write a book and be like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. It's like this book had better be great because that's my whole selling proposition is that like I write great books. And so they're like, of course I can't do other stuff. Dave Edgar very famously Mm-Hmm.

Goes to like a rental house with no internet, works on a laptop with no internet, and he just disappears and writes his novel because the novels have to be good. Yeah. And they obsessor, you see this Chris Nolan look at movies, right? Chris Nolan just won an Oscar Best director, best movie, all the seven Oscars.

But Chris Nolan doesn't even own a smartphone. He's like, I'm trying to win the best Picture award. That's funny. I can't do email. I don't wanna hear your pitch, and I don't wanna, 'cause people get this wrong, they get mad at me when I say that. They're like, well, but he has other people who take calls for him.

And it's like, no, that's not the point. Right. The point is, there's a lot of stuff that if you're a director, you could have your hands in a lot of calls you could take because you want to take 'em. Let's strategize, let's, yeah. Hey, let's do Dark Night, the ride at Universal Studios, and what are we doing over here?

And what he's saying by saying, I don't wanna have a smartphone, is I just wanna work on the movie. Because that's the difference between winning the Academy Award and making a billion dollars and like, oh, that was okay. The more people move up that hierarchy of like, the quality unambiguously matters, the less busy they become.

But that same effect happens like with your solo entrepreneurship endeavor, with your podcast, with your job within a company where you say, I'm gonna start specializing on this and I wanna do this really well. Uh, I'm in sales. I can't do my job if I have to be on meetings all day. That becomes so clear and intolerable once you really focus on, I wanna do this thing well, that you find the courage motivation to be like, we gotta completely con reconfigure this.

I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that. Hold me accountable if you need to, whatever you need to do. It becomes an imperative that if you're not obsessing about quality, it just becomes a, wouldn't it be nice if I had less to do type of thing, which is not nearly

[01:18:35] Jordan Harbinger: as compelling. It's not,

and you write this in the book, you say something along the lines of the market doesn't care about your desire to slow down, so, and you have to give something in return.

So if you're not obsessing over quality, it's like, I wanna do less stuff. I'm just too busy to focus. People are going, okay, but like your work is, eh, it's alright. What do you mean you'd wanna do cool? You wanna get a different job to earlier example, get a different job. But if you're suddenly at my law firm, one of the highest paid guys, he was never in the office.

And I was like, how did that happen? How come you don't work? You just work from home? And he's like, kind of, I mean, but that's not the point he was bringing in business, so nobody was like, you know, you didn't hit your 2000 billable hour requirement. They were like, here's a bonus check for $500,000.

Because you brought in Citibank.

Yeah. The way he did that was he did basically no crappy little work. He was

never in meetings. He didn't even show up to the office. And I was like, I. What are you doing? And he is like, ah, well I'm limping because I have a jiujitsu injury because I was rolling with, I don't know, some like junior partner over at Deutsche Bank.

And then he was like, ah, but I've got this 30 mile cycling thing tomorrow with I'm guessing another potential client. And so this guy was like on cruises at dinners, jiujitsu golf,

biking. His biggest concern was

resting his knee and hip because he was pushing 40 or whatever years old, not am I gonna hit my billable hourly requirement.

So he had to basically satiate the market by doing work that was of a different or higher quality than everyone

[01:20:06] Cal Newport: else. People under themselves, they don't realize that employers are desperate for good people. Yeah. They imagine their employers basically are mustache twirling. They're like, kind of employ people, but I wish I, I just, I wish I could just fire them.

No, they're desperate for good people. Mm-Hmm. That like do stuff. Well, if you do something well, that's valuable. That's the lottery, right? They struck oil. You have so much leverage you don't even know, right? Mm-Hmm. They're like, I do not wanna lose this person. They're a rainmaker. They're bringing in business.

They like bring in the development dollars. No one organizes events better. Whatever it is you do really well. That is like the most valuable thing if you're a manager or an employer is someone who does something well, they're not looking for an excuse to fire you. They're terrified you're gonna leave.

Once you start doing something, well, you have all of this leverage, but it gets lost in the fog of pseudo productivity. You're like, I don't know. Isn't it bad if I say no? So I'm with you on that so

[01:21:01] Jordan Harbinger: much. Man, I always love the message, do less but get better work done. And you bring that every time. And, uh, so yeah, if you'll excuse me, I've got 600 emails in

my inbox to ignore while I go out to lunch with my wife.

But thank

you so much for coming on the show, man. Always appreciated. And like I said, for people who are like, but wait, I have a lot more in the show. Close. You talk about studying unrelated fields, which I really liked. Uh, no. Meeting Mondays, I've actually kind of got the opposite meeting. Mondays, if you want me on a day that's not Monday better be damn important.

And unless it's the, like the show, which is of course a different kind of work, there's a lot in your book as well on setting work boundaries, project timelines, long-term vision types of workflows. So this is by no means an exhaustive interview of everything that's in the book. And I just, I always like to highlight that so people aren't like, don't need to buy that.

Already heard the

[01:21:50] Cal Newport: podcast. Yeah. Well, Jordan, you're always one of my favorite conversations. I have something out, so I, I, I was excited. Looking forward to a chance to chat about this one with you. We've known each other for a while, so I was like, yeah, this is on Jordan's wavelength, but it's been a lot of fun talking to you about it.

[01:22:03] Jordan Harbinger: Thanks, Gail. Now I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get

into that, here's a sample of my interview with astrophysicist

Neil deGrasse Tyson. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art, what our education should ideally train us for. Here's a quick look inside

Walt Whitman.

When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were arranged in columns before me when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them. When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon unaccountable, I became tired and sick till rising and gliding out.

I wandered off by myself into the mystical, moist night air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars. It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it, you just have to make sure nothing interferes with it.

So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one. Why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words? Words when I can see it fully with my eyes. Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest than have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation.

You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know to ask, because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is. Oh man. Because think about it. The fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there, but I wanna know the question that I can't know yet.

What is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions? We've been smart enough to pose thus far

for more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold. What it'll take for the US to get to Mars before China and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth

is flat. Check out episode 3

27 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. One big takeaway for me from this book was that saying no is not as hard when you realize it is the only reasonable answer to being asked to do just one more thing.

We

really do need to free ourselves from the tyranny of the small so we can focus on the big. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae, busy work and things like that, working in the business instead of on the business, that kind of thing. Uh, but really it comes down to how many little things are chipping away at my focus every day when it comes to project timelines.

Another big takeaway from this is to double project timelines. This lets you work at a natural pace, and also, I don't know about you, but for me, I am terrible at estimating the time needed for projects. Turns out that's true pretty much across the board by the way. We plan

because we feel like it would be great to, I don't know, write

four chapters of a book by spring, but that's based on feelings.

It's not based on logic. It's not based on reality. It's not based on our actual available time for that project. And so we end up disappointing ourselves and feeling like we failed when really what we've done is set the bar so high that we could never meet that standard. Now, I know some of you might be thinking like, how do I do this?

How do I set boundaries at work that's gonna cost me in my career?

Maybe for some of you

it will, but that's okay. For a lot of us, we really do have to decide. I, I was just talking to a friend of mine minutes before recording, and he is a lawyer. He's in-house at a massive bank, and he says his hours aren't bad because he only works 60 hours a week, but not on weekends, usually, anymore.

Imagine what that means. That's 12 hour days, five days a week for the most part. That's. Really kind of gross, actually, not good, not a good

lifestyle for most people.

If he were able to set boundaries, he might not be where he is. He might make a couple hundred grand less a year. Would it affect his actual lifestyle?

Probably not. Of course that's an individual decision, but man, uh uh, the older I get, the more time I spend with my kids, the more I realized. Choosing sanity over another dollar is almost always a pretty good trade. All things Cal Newport will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com or as the AI chat bot.

Also on the website, transcripts are in the show notes as well. Advertisers deals,

discount codes, ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our

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We dissect the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show, you wanna recap of important highlights, takeaways, you wanna know what to listen to next. The newsletter is a great place to do just that. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Six minute networking over there for free@sixminutenetworking.com.

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