# Productivity Expert Explains: How to Accomplish Far More While Working Less (ft. Cal Newport)

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 13 Mar 2024, 1 h 13 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/dj21ha52691jorkxzxutu9gc.mp3

What if there was a way accomplish meaningful work—without the associated relationship breakdowns or stress? What if “making an impact” didn’t require massive amounts of energy or sacrifice? What if you could get more done by doing less? In this episode, I talk to Cal Newport about how knowledge work has got it all wrong. We discuss the subtle dangers of remote/digital work and the key to avoiding burnout, all while still being able to grind on the things you love. If you’re a stressed out, overworked remote worker, this one is for you. CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 The Burnout Epidemic: Why Flexibility Isn't Fixing the Problem • 00:01:22 Meet Cal Newport: The Professor Who Sold 20 Million Books Without Social Media • 00:02:52 What Is Slow Productivity? • 00:04:17 The History of Productivity: From Factories to Knowledge Work • 00:05:34 Pseudo-Productivity: The Activity Trap That's Killing Knowledge Workers • 00:06:52 The Corporate Meeting Nightmare: Why Everything Takes 90 Minutes • 00:08:30 Measuring Success on a Decade Scale: The John McPhee Example • 00:10:52 Adapting Traditional Knowledge Work Principles to Modern Jobs • 00:12:41 Take Longer: Why Doubling Your Timeline Produces Better Work • 00:14:23 The Beatles and Sergeant Pepper: Balancing Ambition With Deadlines • 00:18:37 Principle One: Do Fewer Things at Once • 00:19:20 The Overhead Tax: Why Every Commitment Generates Hidden Work • 00:20:55 Specialization Over Jack-of-All-Trades: A Team Management Lesson • 00:22:16 Remote Work and the Invisible Overhead Tax • 00:23:58 The Friction Paradox: Why Removing Barriers Makes Things Worse • 00:26:49 Context Switching: The Productivity Poison • 00:29:36 The Remote Work Paradox: Highest Satisfaction, Highest Burnout • 00:31:07 Hybrid Work and the Meeting Explosion • 00:33:01 Freedom as Anxiety: The Sartre Problem With Endless Options • 00:36:44 Making Your Workload Transparent: The Shared Queue Solution • 00:39:47 Pull vs. Push: The Manufacturing Lesson Knowledge Work Ignores • 00:43:20 Video Production Bottlenecks: Applying Pull Systems to Content Creation • 00:44:09 Principle Two: Work at a Natural Pace • 00:46:15 The Beatles, Mark Twain, and Picasso: Variability Within Massive Output • 00:47:03 Distinguishing Natural Pace From Procrastination • 00:16:50 Lin-Manuel Miranda's Seven-Year Journey: Milestones Without Endless Time • 00:49:49 The Anti-Productivity Movement vs. Slow Productivity • 00:52:59 Principle Three: Obsess Over Quality • 00:52:43 Self-Care vs. Self-Indulgence: Where's the Line? • 00:55:25 Is Slow Productivity a Privileged Position? • 00:58:36 Entry-Level Knowledge Work: Moving Up Through Rare and Valuable Skills • 01:02:32 Gen Z: The Attention Span Crisis and Hidden Advantages • 01:06:18 From Self-Destruction to Construction: Gen Z's Cultural Shift • 01:07:56 Generational Evolution: From Follow Your Passion to Job Engineering • 01:10:19 The MIT Theory Group: Where It All Began • 01:09:09 Slow Productivity as an Umbrella Framework ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://bit.ly/4w46FMH FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

## Transcript

[0:00] In a recent survey of 12,000 people across 15 countries, a shocking 75% of office workers said that they had experienced burnout in the past year. Burnout is defined as chronic workplace stress, or constant feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion. Not only has this become more common in the past decade, but post-pandemic, it has reached
[0:23] Well, epidemic proportions. Yet this is despite the fact that more people than ever have flexibility both between and within jobs. We are more able to choose our hours, work where we want and for who we want, on what we want, than any other time in history. On paper, things should be great for workers, yet they're suffering more than ever.
[0:45] So what the fuck is going on here? Are people just whiny and weak? Or is there something deeper and more psychological going on? Today's episode is all about productivity burnout and why when given more freedom and flexibility in our jobs, our minds appear to burn out faster.
[1:02] It's a complicated and nuanced subject and a must hear for anyone who struggles with feeling stressed at work. Now joining me today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. But Cal is best known for his New York Times bestselling books about the intersection of technology, productivity and work culture.
[1:22] His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into 40 languages. His newest one is called Slow Productivity, Accomplishment Without Burnout. But perhaps most impressively, Cal has made it this far in life without ever starting a social media account. Yes, you heard that correctly. If that blows your mind, well, once you listen to the conversation, you'll understand how he does it. 20 million books sold. Zero fucks given.
[1:50] It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. Cal, so good to have you here. Mark, it's good to be here. I'm excited to do this for a couple reasons. One is just I've been reading your books for 12 years now. Been a fan of your work for a long time. Also excited because I feel like philosophically we're very aligned. Every time I read your stuff, I'm like, that totally dovetails with what makes sense to me. But...
[2:20] There's so many situations where my intuition seemed diametrically opposed to yours. So I actually feel like this is a new podcast. So you might have the honor of being the first podcast guest that we get to disagree about things. I like it. And have a conversation about it. So I'm very excited about it. The new book is Slow Productivity.
[2:38] It's fantastic. It's clear. It's to the point. It's classic Cal Newport. Why don't we start by just laying some groundwork, defining some terms, and start out by just telling us what is slow productivity and what was the inspiration for the concept?
[2:52] Well, I mean, it's the answer to a question, which is how can we produce work we care about that's impactful and successful, right? Supports us, supports our family without burning out and without having work annex more and more of the territory of your life, right? That was the motivating question.
[3:10] I was hearing that from my readers and then I was feeling it myself as well. And, you know, for me, the personal motivation was my three boys all became elementary school age, which I discovered as a dad is a real switch. Suddenly, when you have three boys that are elementary school age, they want essentially every single minute you can give them.
[3:28] which is different than when they're younger and it's more like survival mode. Let's keep these things fed. Right. So it's really different. So I was feeling that at the same time that in my career, I was hitting on all cylinders, you know, as an academic, as a writer, you know, 10 year to Georgetown, writing for the New Yorker, books were coming well. So I had endless opportunities. And so I was feeling that personally.
[3:48] Then the pandemic hits and all my readers write and said, I'm tired of the word productivity and I'm tired of work. And this whole thing is nonsense. I just spent eight hours in Zoom and I'm going to quit and move to the countryside. We'll figure out later how I'm going to survive myself. All this was going on at the same time. And so I said, OK, we have to solve this problem. Like, how can we work and do interesting work and meaningful work and not burn out or just want to leave it all behind, move to the country? So slow productivity, that's the answer. It's what I came up with as an answer to that question. And how would you define slow productivity?
[4:17] Well, so we have to define it in contrast to what we do instead. So, I mean, I went deep in sort of Cal Newport fashion. I went deep on the history of productivity and knowledge work. And I think the story is important to understand what slow productivity means is that you go all the way back to mid 20th century. Knowledge work emerges as a major sector. The term is coined in 1959.
[4:42] There's a problem. It's a new type of work. We're using our brain. We're not building things with our hands. It's growing really big. We see this in the US economy. The problem is we didn't know how to define productivity because we were coming out of the industrial age in which we had very clear understanding of productivity. It was a ratio. We produced this many Model Ts for this many input labor hours. That's a number. We changed the way we build the Model Ts. That number goes up. This is better.
[5:07] And so you had a very straightforward notion of productivity that actually came from agriculture. We got this many bushels of wheat from this many acres of land. We switched the way we rotate our crops. That number went up. This is more productive. None of that work to knowledge work, right? Because I'm going to do five or six different things. That's going to be different than what you're doing. That's going to shift unpredictably. The method by which I actually complete my work is entirely obfuscated. No one has any idea how I'm doing it. There's no central system to even
[5:34] So we were left with a quandary. How do we define productivity? We need something, right? We have to manage these people. And what the industry came up with was we'll use activity
[5:44] as like a crude proxy for useful effort. Sure. Yeah. Activity is better than less activity. More is better than less. I call it pseudo productivity. And it was an activity-based notion. This kind of worked because we had offices we went to. And you would go there and you would do the show. And you'd put the magazine down when the boss walked by and whatever. And then we get to the 20th century and we get the front office IT revolution.
[6:07] Now we have computers, we have networks, we have emails, we have smartphones, we have laptops. Suddenly, the opportunities to demonstrate activity are endless because I can send an email anywhere at any time. The threshold on what active means really went up because I can constantly be on Slack. I can constantly be leaving a digital trail. And the amount of work that was possible to do also became basically limitless. That's when the wheels really spun off the car. And that's when pseudo-productivity became increasingly unbearable until we get to the pandemic.
[6:37] That's it. I love this term pseudo productivity, because, you know, occasionally I will interface with very large corporations. And it's funny, because I'll go into a meeting. And in my head, there's like five minutes of things to talk about.
[6:53] But for people who are working at a large company, you know, a 90 minute meeting with Mark Manson sounds productive. It sounds like they're doing something really important. Right. And so you end up in this meeting and it's it's like eight or nine people, half of which probably don't need to be there in the first place.
[7:08] going one by one, giving like a 10 or 12 minute spiel about something that's completely inconsequential, but sounds important and sounds useful. And it finally takes 80 minutes to actually get to the five minute thing that is of any productive value whatsoever. And it kills me inside, you know, as a self-employed person and entrepreneur, it just, it drives me absolutely insane. But I love that you point at the ambiguity of
[7:35] measurement within knowledge work, right? Like it's easy. If you're a plumber, you can measure your productivity by how many sinks you fix per day. But if you are a writer, for instance, do you measure by how many words you write per day? Do you measure by how many hours you put in per day? Do you measure by how many chapter outlines? Like I ran into this myself with my books where it's like I would set word counts goals. Yeah.
[7:57] And quickly what you discover is that you'll just write bullshit to fill up your word count goal and then call it a good day, pat yourself on the back. And then I was like, okay, that's not working. Maybe I'll switch to just put in three good hours a day and then I would just sit at my desk for three hours and not write any words. Yeah. And then pat myself on the back and call it a good day. And so there's this ambiguity that pervades so many jobs.
[8:23] And I think so much of this problem is just accurately defining what is the metric that we're optimizing for.
[8:30] Well, I mean, I think your example about writing is perfect for getting to the core of the issue. So this idea that what's my daily metric, that's industrial thinking. Yeah. Right? So you're thinking, OK, so what am I supposed – I have to measure something. What am I doing today? Is it word count? Is it pages? Is it, yeah, time? Where I think the right metric for a writer is measured – and this is going to be quite different – on the scale of a decade.
[8:54] Okay. What books did I publish in the last 10 years? How proud am I of those books? I mean, it's why I opened Slow Productivity with a writer. I opened it with John McPhee. John McPhee is laying on his back on a picnic table in his backyard in Princeton, New Jersey for five days. Like the book opens with five days of John McPhee.
[9:13] laying on his back, doing nothing except trying to figure out how am I going to make this massive two-part New Yorker piece I'm supposed to write about the Pine Barrens? How am I going to write an article about this? And he sat there for five days. And my point is, if we zoomed into one of those five days with the...
[9:29] pseudo-productivity industrial mindset. We'd say, this person's lazy. Like, he's doing nothing. What can he point to? But then you zoom out. He's written 29 books. Yeah. You know, Pulitzer Prize, two different books that were finalists for the National Book Award. His writing for the New Yorker is incomparable, right? I mean, he's productive by any reasonable, sort of self-evident definition of productivity.
[9:48] So as a writer, like, yeah, what did I do? I mean, my decade began with this. Like, this is my productivity metric. Like, this was the first book. This was the start of me wanting to write serious idea nonfiction books. This is about 12 years, right? Yeah. So, like, now I can evaluate this. And I am. Like, okay, what comes next? So that's the scale.
[10:07] at which I'm thinking about. That's a very slow productivity mindset. I know it's hard and there's a whole, we can get into how do you approach work if ultimately you're going to measure some things on a scale of a decade, but that's slow productivity. This is a classic situation where my heart loves that.
[10:22] I'm like, yeah, that sounds great. Your brain is not so happy. And my brain is like, wait a second, time out. That can work for us as authors. That's a little bit of a luxury position, right? Yeah. And John McPhee as well. What if you are a data analyst at a bank, which is also knowledge work, also ambiguous metrics, KPIs that you're supposed to meet? Maybe they're good. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're driving you crazy, burning you out. But they don't have that luxury to necessarily measure their productivity in a decade.
[10:52] So this is the kind of the key of the approach in the book is let's start by looking at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So the people well before we had cubicles and computer screens used their brain to create stuff with value. Now, the thing about traditional knowledge workers, so writers, philosophers, like scientists, artists, right? The thing about them is they had huge flexibility.
[11:14] I mean, if you are supported by the Medicis to do statue carving, you have a lot of flexibility in how you work. And so my thought is, well, this is an interesting natural experiment
[11:24] What happens when you give a knowledge worker, a cognitive worker, complete flexibility? How are you going to figure out you can do anything you want through trial and error? Where do you end up? What principles do you end up embodying to produce the best stuff, to have the most sustainable, interesting career? And then my idea is we isolate those principles and then we adapt them to the data analyst, right?
[11:46] So we look at me writing books over a decade, or we look at Newton taking 30 years to get the Principia together, or Lin-Manuel Miranda spending seven years to do In the Heights. And we don't try to replicate their daily work habits. We don't say, great, as a data analyst, you should go be like Lin-Manuel Miranda, and you should kind of come back to it every few months and then be in a freestyle rap touring group for the rest of your time. We're not replicating the specifics, but let's isolate the principles they discovered.
[12:15] And then adapt them. So like, let's take this principle, which I would call take longer, right? Take longer on your work. Take longer the scales in which you measure productivity, you know, make that a longer scale. You have a standard knowledge work job. What that then mean is, okay, when it comes time for me to agree to a project, let me take whatever timeline I initially think of as reasonable. Like, all right, boss, I'll get you this report in a month and just automatically double it.
[12:41] Right. Because you're probably really bad at estimating how much time we see this principle of great creators is that like they take their time. If you give yourself more time, actually, it's not only to be more realistic, it's probably going to be a better report or a better marketing strategy or whatever it is you're putting together. So you can take longer. Now, it doesn't mean sit on your back at a picnic table for five days, but it might be this is going to take longer.
[13:02] two months instead of one. And now you're able to produce something that really turns heads and this gets the flywheel going, the momentum going. So it's all about adapting these examples to modern jobs. Are you familiar with the Hofstadter's law? A project will take 50% longer than expected even when you account for Hofstadter's law. Yeah, that's about right. I'm a big fan of that. So this is a classic example. Philosophically,
[13:27] Absolutely. And I have absolutely found in my own career, slowing down, doing fewer things, which is the first principle of slow productivity, do fewer things, say no to more things, it's been a huge help in my own career. But then I try to start actually like,
[13:43] you know, carving out where the boundary between that and just straight up procrastination, you know, where does that end and procrastination begin? If I go to my boss and I say, hey, that thing you said to have in a month, I'm going to, I'm going to do it in two. Like, do I actually need those two months? Am I bullshitting myself? I don't know. It's very murky for me. Do you, is there any way to like clarify that?
[14:05] Yeah, I mean, well, A, this is the challenge of doing interesting stuff with your brain. Yeah. Right? So, like, let's emphasize all this is hard. But, like, let's talk about the procrastination issue. The story in the book that was relevant here is the Beatles, right? So, I mean, I tell the story of Sergeant Pepper. Because what's interesting about that album is the Beatles had had this terrible tour.
[14:23] Right before that, everything went wrong. Right. And at the very final stop of that tour, they said, this is it. We're not touring again, which is a big thing when it comes to thinking about recording an album, because if you're going to tour, your songs have to be reproducible on stage, like in an arena where everyone's going to recognize the song. If you're not going to tour again.
[14:42] You can do anything you want with the music. So now they're in this situation of we could stay in the studio as long as we want. We can endlessly mess with tape loops and effects and Indian instruments and all the things they did. So now you're in this interesting tension of we want to do more interesting things than our first album, which they recorded in a single day.
[15:03] Yeah. Which is crazy. They just went in the studio. Boom, boom, boom. They had a completely practice. They've been playing those songs in hand. Boom, boom, boom. They're right out the door. So we want to do better than that. But we also don't want to be stuck in here endlessly, which, by the way, a lot of bands ended up doing. Right. They kicked off the progressive rock movement. A lot of bands, especially in the 70s, just got lost.
[15:22] in the studio. So how did they walk the balance between it? Well, they, they did spend more time, but they also set, uh, milestones that made them actually ship things. Right. So like the, they released a single, as soon as they had a single ready to release, this started the clock ticking of, okay, this album has to follow. Like you have a single out. So, so they felt, okay, we have some pressure to actually keep moving, but we're moving at a slower pace. So you should take two months instead of one. Cause I can, I know one month is not enough time.
[15:48] I've never met a knowledge worker who has ever accurately estimated how long something was going to take. I mean what people do is they create a fairy tale about wouldn't it be great if –
[16:00] I could finish this book chapter in a month. And then your mind falls in love with how everything in your life would make sense. If you could just, but it's not what's actually going to happen. So make it two months, but not three. I'm taking more time, but not endless time. And what's my equivalent as a knowledge worker of releasing a single? Hold me to it, boss. I'm going to send you updates along the way. This is going to be good. You're going to like it. Hold me to it. There's a cost now. So, okay, that helps me conceptualize this. Because one thought that I had a,
[16:29] it recurred throughout me reading this, was this idea of like limitations and constraints can actually improve productivity. And it sounds like what you're saying is don't just kick the can down the road, like still have a deadline, still put a constraint on, just allow for an extra amount of leeway than you might do naturally or normally.
[16:50] I mean, this is what Lin-Manuel Miranda did in that example, right? So he has this play. He writes it as a sophomore because, you know, he's a brilliant guy. Yeah. So he writes in the Heights as a sophomore at Swarthmore. They perform. It's not very good because also he's a sophomore. Yeah.
[17:05] But he's like, there's something here, right? I mean, I think there's something here. I need to mature creatively, but I think there's something here. So he didn't just sit on it and say, let me wait till I'm inspired. But he also didn't say, what I'm going to do is like disappear for three months and like finish this thing. Because it would not have debuted on Broadway and won eight Tonys if he had done that. He did the middle.
[17:23] So he got connected with two alums from Swarthmore who saw the play and said, I think you're on to something. Like your book is kind of trash, but the music is really interesting. So there's something here. And they said, here's what we're going to do. They had a theater company in Manhattan. They said, we're going to every couple of months.
[17:39] stage a new reading. We're going to bring in actors and actresses. We'll pay for it. And we're going to do a reading. And you're going to really get a sense about what's working and not working from actually hearing people read the script. And then you better update it before the next reading comes along, right? You need to actually act on it, right? So we have these milestones.
[17:56] that pulled him forward. But he was also touring with his freestyle group. He was doing some substitute teaching. He was writing a restaurant review column. Like he wasn't just doing that. Yeah. So he was taking time to let that really mature. But at the same time, he wasn't, uh,
[18:14] He wasn't sitting there and saying, I'll get to this when I feel inspired. So it sounds like this principle of do fewer things isn't necessarily do less work. It's work really hard on fewer things over a longer period of time. Yeah. So do fewer things. There's another bit of a logic to it as well, which I think is clear when I add two words to it and say, do fewer things at once.
[18:37] Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Fewer things at once actually means that your rate of completing things is probably going to go up. Yeah, right. So like this one gives palpitations to people with bosses, because they interpret it as like, I'm going to do less stuff. And they see it typically through a standard sort of zero sum employer manager relation like you would have in the labor politics of the industrial sector.
[19:00] You know, I, as the employee in the factory, what makes my life better is going to make your life as the factory owner worse. And what makes the factory owner's life better is going to make my life as the employee worse. We're going to fight, right? And we're going to have to just go back and forth. It's not that situation, actually, in this case. Doing fewer things at once.
[19:20] is actually going to produce more things. And the reason for that actually, it's like really insidious and subtle. It is the administrative overhead that comes along with saying yes to something. Yes. Right. So once you say yes to something, there's an administrative overhead in an office that's going to be emails, that's going to be, I get shutters thinking about it, but standing meetings. Like I don't know.
[19:40] I'm also an academic, so you don't have to deal with this as much. But great. We'll meet every Wednesday to talk about this. Everything generates that. Yeah. Right. Which is fine. Like you have to there's overhead with commitments. You got to talk to people about it. The issue is that's generated whether you're working on that at the moment or not. So if you say yes to too many things, they're each generating this overhead tax that begins to pile up.
[20:02] Right. And then once that begins piling up, the time left in your day to actually execute the work gets smaller and smaller and more fragmented because these meetings aren't going to all fall one after another. They're going to fall sprinkled throughout your day. So now the pace at which you're actually completing things goes down. So how long does it take in between things you finish? That actually begins to get longer. So if you keep fewer things on your plate at once, right?
[20:25] It's not that fewer things get done. Actually, it goes faster. So I always tell people, if you start there, it's okay. Because once you bootstrap doing fewer things, your boss is going to say, why are you so productive? It's actually going to be the opposite thing. Like, hey, what's going on here? You're shipping at a pretty fast rate. I believe it. I've actually found that with my own team. I actually had a sit down with one of my employees maybe six months ago. And I told her, I'm like, you're doing too much. Like, you're good at five things. I need you to be excellent at one. Interesting.
[20:55] it was really effective. It's been really helpful. I think it's, I've definitely seen, as my team has grown, I have seen the importance of specialization. You know, because when you're small and it's just two or three people, everybody wears a lot of hats. Yeah. And the stakes are a little bit lower. But now that we're growing quite a bit,
[21:10] I'm finding that I'm having to have these conversations of like, you are gonna be the team expert at this one thing. And you are in charge of this domain. And it's been great. It's been really effective. Do that well. I mean, this is like software developers figured this out a long time ago. Like we want you to write this type of code that you write
[21:28] really well, right? That's why software developers figured out a while ago, we're not just going to push tasks on people. We're not just going to say, here's like 20 features we need in the, just, Hey, take care of these. No, we're going to use some sort of agile system where if there's a feature that needs to be done, we'll write it down on a board and it's not on your plate. And it's not on my plate. It's on the team's plate. It's generating no overhead tax because no one is assigned to this yet. And then we're going to give you one thing at a time.
[21:54] And just like sprint, do that thing, you know, all the 10 X code this. And when you're done, we're going to give you another thing, right? They discovered programs get built faster and better that way than just dropping everything on everyone at once. And like, just, hey, figure this all out and, you know, add all these features and keep up with them. So one of the recurring subjects that happens throughout the book is...
[22:16] remote work. I don't think you ever completely address it directly, but it continually shows up as examples, particularly over the last few years since the pandemic. And I was thinking that this concept of the overhead tax, which I love, and it's a completely accurate way of thinking about it, I think there's something about digital work that
[22:40] deludes us, it makes the overhead tax less apparent. Yeah. Like if you come to me in person and you're like, Hey Mark, I'm doing this event. It'd be really cool if you showed up. For some reason, you know, we can talk about it. I can ask like, okay, what are your expectations? How many days is it? How long is the talk? You know, all these things. And I can get a really good sense of like, okay, how much time in my schedule is that going to take up? Whereas if I
[23:04] company or organization saying, hey, come out to Indiana and come speak to a thousand people and we're gonna pay you a shitload of money. For some reason, that email
[23:15] just looks like easy money. And I'm like, just on paper, I'm like, oh man, this is the best deal ever. And for some reason, my brain is not processing that this is, we're gonna have multiple Zoom meetings. I'm gonna have to fly out like two days early. There's gonna be a meeting with the organizers. There's gonna be a meeting with the VIPs. There's gonna be a sound check. There's gonna be a lunch.
[23:38] With the VIP launch, there's going to be a reception. There's going to be a book signing. My flight's going to get delayed coming back. It's actually a four-day commitment. And it's actually not worth it. And it took me a long time to start saying no to those things. Part of me wonders, what is it about digital work in particular that...
[23:58] that obfuscates the overhead tax. I mean, I think it matters you're not seeing someone. Yeah. Right. I mean, the friction, little reductions in friction can make a big difference. Right. I mean, there's a study that Gloria Mark did where they went to a company and they took 12 people and they turned off their email. It's like one of these cool Gloria Mark studies of like, let's unplug this wire and
[24:20] See what breaks, right? Yeah. But then she told me a backstory about the study, which I think gets to this, is that one of the subjects in the study told her, like it's not in the paper, but told her that he was really annoyed at his boss in general because he had this job where he had to set up a laboratory for experiments every day. It was an R&D lab. And the boss would just keep –
[24:39] And emailing him with like, do this. Can you just do this? Like, get me this. No, just get me. Did you get the email? Did you get the email? And he's really annoyed because it would keep distracting him from what he was doing. And it was kind of intricate what he was doing. Then they selected that guy to be one of the no email people in the subject. In the study, the boss essentially stopped bothering him. And then what Gloria would say, the reason why this is interesting is the boss's office was like three doors down.
[25:02] from the laboratory that this guy was setting up. So like the boss could just walk down the hallway and ask this guy, hey, could you do this? What about this? That extra little friction, that was the difference. Yeah. Right? It like substantially cut down. So there's something about, you know, like if I pitched you right now, come to Indiana. Yeah. It's just like you're saying, I want you to come give a time. I've done exactly this in Indiana. So we've probably done it for the same company. Been there, done that. Yeah. We've probably done it for the same company.
[25:28] You're in person. A, I'd be much more reluctant to ask you because I can watch. I mean, I know it sounds small, but like asking someone to do something, you have to watch their face and the consternation. And there's like a social capital. There's a risk of feeling the rejection. It's easy. Like if you don't get an email back, it doesn't really bother you. But when you stand face to face with somebody and ask them something and they're like, no, like.
[25:52] It sucks. It does suck. And yeah, and I think that that is true, right? Yeah. So you get that with the digital. Yeah. So you're like, okay, I don't care if I send this out, you know, because what happens, they're going to say no. You also have to see the context, right? So, you know, when I see you in your office, I see you're doing things.
[26:12] So I'm thinking like, oh, Mark's kind of busy. Like, okay, I'm not going to bother him about this. On email for whatever reason or Slack, the way we imagine other people is basically like empty vessels to do our work. It's like we imagine like you're just sitting there. My entire team is nodding along right now. And especially like the killer is not necessarily the trip to Indiana that's going to take four days. It's the thing that's going to take like 45 minutes of your time because they imagine –
[26:37] Like, come on, why not? What are you doing right now? Like, I do things that take 45 minutes all the time, and they don't understand you're busy or the scale of how many people are asking this. Or even five minutes. Like, it's dozens of five-minute things. Yes.
[26:49] And there's something to, there's a cognitive load that comes with task switching. Yep. And so when you are always available and when everything seems minor and easy and you just get inundated constantly with a five-minute thing here and a five-minute thing there, it wears you out in a way that, I mean, this is a lot of what deep work is about. It wears you out in a way that, you know, working four hours on one thing does not. And this, I think, is like the productivity poison.
[27:16] Yeah. It's like the fact that the human brain is not a microprocessor, right? Like a microprocessor, every op that it executes, every op code is the same as far as it's concerned. It just, here it goes, it goes to the circuits. It takes exactly one cycle. Give me the next thing. So all that matters for a processor is you want to make sure that it's never idle.
[27:34] So if you design a processor, like all of us computer scientists had to do in school, you want to keep a pipeline as full as possible of instruction so that like it's never idle. Human brain can't do that. Like if I want to switch from what we're doing now to talk about or think about something unrelated, I have to do a lot of cognitive work. I mean, and it goes down to the neuronal level. I have to inhibit certain networks that are relevant to this conversation. I have to excite different neuronal networks that are relevant to the new conversation. This can take 10 to 20 minutes. It's why when you sit down to do something hard,
[28:03] It's this sucks, this sucks, this sucks. Ooh, I'm in flow now, right? Like 15 minutes in. Like why is that? Because it takes about 15 minutes for your brain to reconfigure to what you're doing. And then it goes easy. So yeah, so what happens when you have to switch every five minutes? You always feel like in the first 10 minutes of trying to write. Like everything is just frustrating. Your cognitive capacity is reduced. It's deranging. Like it completely exhausts people. It's like working in an environment with weird flashing lights and it's like too cold. Like it's not conducive.
[28:32] to how humans actually function. Like I really do think constant context switching is like the number one mental health affliction of knowledge work, right? Like it's a massive issue. And it's something that technology to the point of digital minimalism, it's something that technology enables further. There are a couple of themes here that keep coming up on the pod.
[28:53] with multiple people. So like when Oliver Berkman was on, we spent a lot of time talking about how removing friction actually can in some cases make things worse. And with him, it was more in kind of like a philosophical existential sense. Like it's without friction, things don't feel as meaningful. They don't feel as important. When David Brooks was on, we talked about how the loss of social friction is actually makes relationships more superficial and more
[29:19] more tenuous. And here we're seeing it with productivity. Like that lack of friction is actually, in some ways, kind of overloading our brains. So when I was doing research for this episode, I came across something really fascinating. I looked up job satisfaction surveys.
[29:36] And I was surprised, really surprised. According to the Conference Board Job Satisfaction Survey, 2023 marks the highest job satisfaction since the survey began almost 40 years ago. It measured job satisfaction across 26 categories, and it found that the gain in job satisfaction was,
[29:53] was most marked in people who had hybrid or remote work. Let's put a pin in that. Next thing I looked up, burnout. Burnout is also at an all-time high. 61% of workers say that they find it difficult to unplug and stop working at home. 77% of remote workers say that they feel isolated. And 41% say that they do not feel supported by their bosses or coworkers. One study found that on average, remote workers spend two and a half hours more per day than
[30:20] working, which is, that's staggering. That's like a 52-hour work week. So we have this weird contradiction going on here of if you ask people how satisfied they are with their jobs, they're more satisfied than ever.
[30:35] And the people who are working from home or have the option to work from home say that – report that they are the most satisfied they never. But they are also the most burnt out of all the remote work, of all the workers, period. So what the fuck is going on here? I know these data. All right.
[30:51] Partially what's going on here is people like flexibility. Yeah. Right. So many different surveys ask people, and this is not surprising, would you rather have flexibility in your schedule or a schedule that you have no flexibility? Nine out of 10, I'm thinking of recent Gallup data, will say...
[31:07] I want flexibility. It's like asking, do you want sunshine? Totally. Yeah. Right. So when you ask a newly hybrid or remote worker, are you satisfied with your job? I honestly think a lot of that answer is I don't want you to take this flexibility back away. Yeah. So I'm going to say this, like they see the question as a, as a quorum, you know, they're asking you, do you like having this flexibility?
[31:29] Like, no, it's good. It's good. Don't take it back. Right. And that's a lot of the dynamic right now is people who gained hybrid or remote work schedules don't want it to go back. Actually, right now, what's ended up dominating is hybrid. You know, I was just looking over these numbers. We had fully remote, of course, in remote capable jobs, like jumped and dominated in March of 2020. On site fell all the way down to 12%.
[31:51] On-site came up a little bit. It never got back above 20. It's been there ever since. We basically got rid of on-site jobs for jobs that didn't have to be on-site in knowledge work. The real shift is remote and hybrid. Remote just fell, fell, fell. Hybrid rose, rose, rose. Hybrid is now two times more
[32:09] prevalent than fully remote. So like we're in a hybrid world now and no one wants to not have the option. Yeah. Yeah. But they're also really burning out. Yeah. Right. So hybrid work, remote work, whatever combination you have, it brings with it these friction issues we're talking about. It also brings with it the issue of we get more meetings and their virtual meetings, because if I can grab you in the hallway and,
[32:31] then we don't have to set up a Zoom. If we set up a Zoom because we're both at home or one of us is at home and one of us isn't, that's going to eat up 30 minutes on my schedule because I don't have the dexterity, the drag like a smaller thing on Google Calendar than 30 minutes. So now you're taking what might have been 15 total minutes of ad hoc conversation and now it's going to be two and a half hours of Zoom meeting. And this is really deranging for people as well. Yeah, again, it is a concept that keeps showing up over and over is people like a lack of friction. It...
[33:01] on some level makes them happy, but it produces worse results in terms of just overall well-being, mental well-being. It's really interesting to, not to get too philosophical, but when I was thinking about this, I've been thinking a lot about Jean-Paul Sartre. He had this idea. As one does. Yeah, of course. What else do you do on a Tuesday morning? Good existential, sure. But Sartre, he described that as a good Frenchman, he said, freedom was anxiety and terror.
[33:30] And, you know, at the time that was just very, I don't know, edgy of him to say, but the older I get and the more all of this technology develops, the more I see the wisdom of that, of how giving people endless optionality is actually in some sense emotionally overwhelming.
[33:49] and cognitively taxing, to use your word. Like it is a tax and it's a subtle tax. I don't think we recognize it when it's happening, when we're scrolling on Instagram or browsing through Netflix or opening our email and like scanning through the 200 emails that just came in. Like our conscious perception is, wow, look at all this amazing stuff that's available to me. What's actually happening behind the scenes is very taxing and draining. It looks like the Netflix effect. Yeah.
[34:16] Right. I mean, you go on Netflix today and like, I can't find something to watch because when the options are endless, you're like, there's gotta be some sort of perfect movie. That's like going to match my emotional state slash interest of the day slash. I heard about this thing also has this actor in it. If I can't find that, I'm not happy. Whereas 15 years ago, you could basically take a random thing that you select on Netflix. And if it was on TBS and you were home that night,
[34:41] You're like, this is great. This is kind of interesting. Look, like Vince Vaughn's in it. Okay, I don't know. Like, it's going to be funny. I don't, we were happier. Yeah. Yeah. Or like when I was a kid, probably the same, right? Remember the 90s? It was like, we're going to go to the movies every weekend. And it's like, okay, you know, there'll be something that seems like kind of okay. And it was fun. Like some things were like fine. Some weren't. It'd probably be a movie with like Harrison Ford jumping off something. And it was like fine. And we really loved it. And we were happy. And now we're on max. Like, oh, there's only like 20 Oscar winners here. And I don't know.
[35:11] this is two and a half hours. I don't have enough time for that. So imagine like in the workplace, one of the ultimate flexibilities we gave people in knowledge work is we said, okay, productivity itself,
[35:21] figure that out. How do you organize your work? Figure that out. You can do anything you want. You know, it's, we'll just throw stuff at you and you have to figure out like, how are you going to make sense of everything? Like why leave that completely up to every worker? And you would say like, well, options are better, but I think exactly it's the, the start right over again, right? It completely paralyzes people. Yeah. Like I have to figure out how I say yes, how I say no, how I keep track of what I'm doing, how I decide what to do next, how I, you know, every time I do
[35:51] that's even remotely, you know, hey, here's a productivity-related thing you could do. Those numbers fly through the roof because there's so many people out there like, oh my God, I don't know what to do. It's Netflix all over again. It is fascinating how much this topic...
[36:06] has blown up since the pandemic. And it's funny because at first I thought it was that everybody was at home and had nothing to do. And so they suddenly became very aware of all their bad habits and all of their worst tendencies. That might be part of it. But as it keeps going, I have to believe that this is part of it too, that it's the remote work and the weird kind of paradox of
[36:31] increased flexibility versus feeling like you're running in place all the time, feeling like nothing's actually getting done, and the burnout that comes along with that. I think some of the best practical tips in the book –
[36:44] come from this section of like, even if you have a boss, even if you're working in a huge company, even if you've got like 20 people under you who are relying on you, like here are some practical tidbits that you can do to slow things down, to take things off your plate.
[37:02] Can you run through a couple of those really quick? Yeah. And most of them come back to the practical tips in that section, making your workload more transparent. It's almost like psychology hacking in some sense. One of the issues that keeps too much work coming on your plate and you saying yes too much is other people don't know what you're doing. Again, so they see you as a vessel to do their work and they're offended. Why would you say no? They're like an idea in there that was actually meant as a thought experiment, but people that I've talked to about this on the podcast are actually doing it. So it's fascinating. Like it's maybe not a thought experiment.
[37:32] is have a shared document, right? And at the top of it is, here's like the three things I'm working on right now, like a divider line. All right, here's the queue of things I'm gonna work on next, like that I've agreed to. Now when someone comes along and is like, hey, can you do this? And it's, you know, it's not like an obvious no, right, it's from your boss or whatever. Like, yeah, of course, just add it.
[37:51] Throw it on the queue. And like, you know, if there is information I need to know to execute it, you can put it there. Or you can just put a reminder to say like, you know, to call you when it gets closer or whatever. Throw it on the queue. Oh, and by the way, you can check in anytime you want to see where that thing is as it works its way up. Oh, and you want it to be done fast? That's great. Like you're the boss. You know, just tell me which of the things. Yeah.
[38:12] So what are we moving? Yeah, you know better than not. Like, which one are we moving down? I'll let them know, you know? And it forces a confrontation with the reality of workload. And you would think something like this would be kind of preposterous or, you know, boss, like, what are you talking about? But if you do this.
[38:27] nicely, it's actually really effective. Like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing. You're working on these things. You know what, don't worry about this, right? Because it's gonna take you too long to get to this anyways. I'll give it to someone else or we just won't do it. Or now that I see what you're doing, can we take these three things back off your plate? I don't want you doing those. It's like your employee. I don't want you doing those three things. Like these type of things are more important. Oh, I see what's getting in the way of you doing this, which you're really good at. So you know what? Tell these people you're not doing that. I want you just to be working on this. Transparency unlocks
[38:57] a lot of good things, and obfuscation unlocks a lot of frustration. Hearing you say that, it makes me wonder how much of this issue is that if you're in person, or let's say you're in a blue-collar job, you're on a construction site or something, you can physically see what everybody's doing. You can talk to someone. You can see if they seem flustered or overloaded. There's an emotional, intangible communication that happens in person where, as a group, you can kind of prioritize and sort tasks,
[39:25] by what's most valuable in each given moment. And there's not an argument about it. There's no, there's no ambiguity about it. Whereas when you go digital, you don't have that extra nonverbal communication. You don't actually see that John's like working his ass off or busy with eight other things. So it makes sense that building systems with, with that explicit purpose would solve a lot of these issues. I was a big fan of,
[39:47] Of the push versus pull processes. That's actually, that's the section that I hit. I was like, oh my God, I'm totally going to use this. That's the way all work should be done, by the way. Pull, not push. Yes. Yeah. Pull, not push is like how all knowledge work should be assigned. And almost none is. Can you describe each one of those and what it looks like? Yeah. And this comes out of manufacturing, right? So, you know, in manufacturing, a push system would be as soon as I'm done with this step of the manufacturing process, I push it onto the next person.
[40:14] Right, this doesn't work out very well because I can't control the speed at which things are being pushed on me and then you can get pileups. So what works better is a pull-based system. When I'm ready to do the next thing, I'll pull it from you. No one gets piled up. So basically the slowest step of the chain in this particular setup dictates the speed. But then what really happens in these systems is then you can pretty clearly identify, oh great, this is the slowest one. We can put more resources there and the whole system speeds up. No pileups though.
[40:42] This is how knowledge work should be assigned, but it's not. We push. Something comes into my world. It's now a source of stress for me. Like a client called me. I was like, we got to, you know, whatever. We got to get this feature, whatever added to the software. I want to get this off my plate as soon as possible.
[40:57] Because productivity is personal and I'm not very organized and it's just in my head and it stresses me out. So I'm just going to push it onto someone else's plate. So I can just be like, Mark, take care of the feature, exclamation point, emoji, sin, boom, it's off my plate, right? It took me like seven seconds and it's just on – now I've pushed it onto your plate. Now you have to deal with it. So now you're pushing other things onto other people's plates. So all the work that comes into the system.
[41:18] gets pushed on someone's plate. It's all unevenly distributed and we get the whole over-to-tax issue, right? A poll-based system and knowledge work would be, okay, things that need to be done exist by default, not on an individual person's plate. Like we have a place to keep track of as a team. These are things that need to be done. So the client calls me, hey, we got to have this feature, whatever. I put it to our list of these are things we need to do. It's not on my plate, it's not on your plate. Then what individuals do is as they finish something,
[41:48] They pull something more from that list. And you can do this intelligently. Like let's have a quick meeting or whatever to figure out. We have a standup meeting. It's how they do it in software development. Okay, you're done with this. What's the best thing for you to do next? Well, now that we're really looking at this, like we should really give this priority. Okay, will you take that on next? And it gives you an opportunity to say, okay, if I'm going to do this,
[42:06] I'm going to need this from you and this from you and this from you. And you can kind of figure it out right then. Yeah. Okay. Not a lot of emails. Okay. Make sure I get that by Tuesday. Let's write this down. You're doing that. All right. This draft will be ready for you to check by Wednesday. I'll put it in this drop box and you do that and I'll come back to it. And you figure out the whole plan.
[42:22] And then you go and do that thing and it gets executed. Like that is the right way to leverage cognitive resources, not just, oh my God, like, let's just email this thing with them off. You know, it's just obligation hot potato. I got to get this stuff off my plate right now because I'm stressed. Totally. I temporarily feel better. I just made 20 people feel worse. They're going to retaliate. They're going to retaliate. It's like, no, you get this. And you know, you get this sometimes where people will send you an email and you know that.
[42:49] There's not enough information there for you to do it. You know it's not, you know, it's going to get bounced back. They know it's going to get bounced back. But in the moment, they were just trying to get that off their back. They're trying to get it out of their inbox. Yeah. Because they feel like, oh, if I can just clear my inbox, I'm done for the day. I'm done for the day. Yeah. So you said nonsense. I love this because a pain point in my business right now is, you know, we've completely pivoted the video and everything relies on the video production. Are you filming this? Oh, man. Yeah.
[43:20] Cut to me in a suit. Yeah, right. With an elaborate wig on. Yeah. But yeah, everything in the business now relies on the video content being produced. So the social content that we put out, the way we promote things, the promotions that go into the newsletters. And video production is very hard and complex and very labor intensive. So when things get stuck in the video pipeline, it's...
[43:47] everything gets like backed up in the rest of the business. And I've been talking to my, my lead people, like, how do we solve this? How do we get over? And so as soon as I saw the push pull thing, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. All right. So let's get to where I think we might disagree. Principle number two is work at a natural pace. What the fuck is a natural pace?
[44:09] Not like you're in the Ford factory. Okay. Not, okay. Full intensity, nine to five, five days a week, 50 weeks, 50 weeks a year. No variation in intensity. Work is turn it on. You should be working really hard until it's over. That was not how humans worked through all of our history.
[44:26] until we invented mills and factories. And then when we tried to put people into that type of work, it was so unnatural and so terrible that we had to invent labor unions and giant regulatory frameworks just to try to make this type of artificial work somewhat tolerable. And then knowledge work comes along and what do we do? Like, how do we organize this? We're like, oh, let's do what the factory does. Yeah. Yeah, show up nine to five, let's go. So a natural pace is inherently variable.
[44:50] Variable. Okay. So there's like sprints. Yes. Periodic bursts. At different time scales too. Yes. Within the day, within the week, within the month, within the year. Like the summer is slower than the fall. This day is more intense than that day. The morning's more intense than early in the afternoon. Or within a career, I assume. Yeah, you could go that wide as well. Because as I was reading through this section, I kept thinking of counterexamples. Like you mentioned the Beatles earlier. They did 12 albums in nine years. Yeah. Which is...
[45:17] an insane amount of output. They never stopped working. Yeah. They never stopped working. Like never, which is completely atypical. And, you know, there, there are other musicians that like you talk about Jewel in the book, you know, took slow down, canceled opportunities, took her time with albums, you know, like really honed her craft and, and also was massively successful. Turned down a million dollars. Didn't just slow down. Yeah. Yeah. Without homeless at the time. Yes. Turned down the million dollars so that she could take more time and make $200 million a couple of years down the line. Yeah. Jewel, if you're out there,
[45:46] Come on the pod. So the variability of it makes more sense to me. I couldn't help but feel, and I guess this goes without saying, but a certain amount of this is probably personality-driven as well. I imagine some people's natural setting is a little bit higher or lower than other people's. And I say that just because maybe I'm a workaholic in denial, and this is like... Is this therapy now? This is like triggering to me. You'll be okay, Mark.
[46:15] Okay. But I, no, I really thought about this and because I came across some examples and I'm, I'm curious what your response would be. So we've got the Beatles. Mark Twain did 94 books in 55 years. Picasso, if you average out Picasso's output, he averaged almost a painting a day in his adult life.
[46:36] these guys have huge variation in their day-to-day intensity. Yes. Mark Twain was not writing nine to five every week. I mean, he would go on these trips. Like I'm going to go, you're like, I'm going to go to California to like write an article about California. That's like five days on the train, you know? And then like, he's there for three weeks and then he comes back. This is like John McPhee. He wrote 29 books. Yeah.
[46:56] But also he spent five days laying on his back, like just thinking about when you compress a career, you imagine this is what happens is you think about like kind of working on all those things at the same time. Right. Picasso had huge diversions, you know, where he was like, let me try this or that. Movies happens all the time, too. Like directors, right? Like, wow, they have this great filmography. There's often like some exceptions. Just like.
[47:19] years were like, man, nothing was really getting made. I was going back to the creative. Well, I'm glad you bring this up and I kind of interrupted, but I just, no, no, no. I want to, I want to hear you. Cause this, I was thinking about this during the book. Yeah. Because like in variations in intensity is completely compatible with like
[47:36] killing it. Like I'm just like producing great stuff, right? Like I write a lot of books, but I'm not writing every day. I'm not writing every month. Years will go by, you know, a year will go by where I don't touch a book at all. And then you kind of recharge and come back. It just kind of gets to a third principle out of obsessing over quality, but like slow productivity, a lot of the exemplars of this, these traditional knowledge workers are really productive, right? Like you look at what they've done and are like, okay, I'm just going to like give you a round of applause. Yes.
[48:03] But they're not trying to do full intensity every day because that's impossible. You can do it with pseudo work. Totally. Right. I can do email and Zoom eight hours a day, you know, five days a week because it's busyness, right? But it doesn't – it's not – I'm actually not being taxed that much. Yeah. I can't write at that intensity. I can't do a movie. I can't do painting at that intensity. So they're all over the place. I may be placated here. I'm trying. Yeah.
[48:28] No, but that makes sense to me, that at a macro level, somebody can be intensely productive. Yes. There's peaks and troughs and variation. And again, as a self-confessed workaholic, that maps pretty well to myself. It's funny. I go to my wife, my team. I'm like, you know, this year is a sprint. Like, I'm going to go hard this year. It's going to be six to eight weeks, you know.
[48:49] whatever. There are other years where I'm like, I'm going to take three months off. Like I'm feeling exhausted. I need time away. So you're a slow productivity aficionado. That's working at a natural pace. So, okay. So this kind of gets back to the point where it's like philosophically, like, I think we're on the same page. It's,
[49:06] Maybe it's interpretation of the philosophical precepts. So can I propose maybe – tell me if this rings true. Like maybe part of the instinctual friction – because I get this a lot, so I think this is worth talking about – is the notion of slowness in our culture is so connected to sort of anti-productivity, self-care. Laziness. Yeah.
[49:27] Yeah, but – or we'll positive spin it, but it's like, yeah, you're doing – be less productive because there's more to life than productivity. Right. It's not what I think about with slow productivity. Actually, I think about I want to really produce awesome stuff. Like I'm fiercely ambitious. I want to produce really good stuff and keep getting better. This is what allows you to keep doing it. It's what allows you like Picasso to do it. 100%.
[49:49] But I think there's another dominant discourse right now that came out of the same place, which is pseudo-productivity is terrible and people are exhausted and we're done with being on Zoom eight hours a day. The other dominant discourse that came out of this is the anti-productivity movement. And that's much more coming at it from a perspective of work as a pejorative. And it's more of a antagonistic relationship between you and work. And you at zero sum are claiming more for...
[50:18] Life outside of work, there's more of the life than work. These type of arguments have never been as compelling to me because I think that people who need them ignore them. Let's just be less hustly. I mean, like, yes. Yes. But also, like, that's a hard sell for a lot of people. So when it's framed that way, it resonates a little bit more. You know, the –
[50:38] anti-hustle culture thing. Like it's, I agree with you that it's, there's often, especially when you're in one of these sprint periods, you get outsized gains from taking your foot off gas for a little while. Like go take that four day weekend and relax by a lake or something and you'll come back and you're actually twice as productive as you would have been otherwise. And you make up for the lost, quote unquote, lost time. Totally get that. With this, I run into the fear too of like, and maybe it's part of this, I just don't trust myself.
[51:07] myself enough but like how do we recognize what the natural pace for us is because i know for myself and a lot of people i know as well if i try to allow myself to take breaks i will sometimes wonder if i'm being lazy if i'm just avoiding responsibilities if i'm
[51:29] actually nervous to try to do something. And this is my way of like trying to avoid it. And then on the converse side, like on the flip side, I'm also sometimes when I push myself super hard, I'm like, this is unhealthy. I'm probably avoiding something. Like I'm very skeptical of my own ability to accurately gauge what is natural for myself. And so, yeah.
[51:48] Maybe this is my therapy session. Well, I mean, look, I would rather have you have more variation in your intensity for the wrong reasons than have you work all out for the wrong reasons. Totally. Because working all out is just not sustainable. It's just not sustainable. Like it just doesn't work, right? So there isn't really an argument for –
[52:06] I could do this, like work all out and have no variation in my pacing. And there's some things I'm losing and some things I'm gaining. No, net net you're going to just lose. Sure. Right. It's just going to – it is going to burn you out in the end because it's unnatural, right? I mean same thing if you had a relationship with food or drugs or something. They were like this is just not sustainable.
[52:26] For like a human body. Like, okay, I'm going to drink heavily. Yeah. Uh, and that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It's like, no net net is going to end up being just all disadvantages. Like right now. Yeah. You're getting advantages out of it. Like sociality, but give that 20 years, like this is not going to go someplace good. That's what I feel about the all out working.
[52:43] One thing that I've talked about before on this podcast is that there's a very fine and blurry line between hashtag self-care and hashtag self-indulgence. You know, where is that line where taking the time off, backing off, just turns into, you know, quiet quitting or whatever?
[52:59] Yeah, so this is why the third principle, obsess over quality, I call that the glue for everything else. This is what makes all that work, right? So when you begin to also reorient your work around doing things really well, like this is the thing I want to do really well, and I'm going to keep getting better at it. Like I'm going to prioritize craft and get better about something. This makes all of the other things I talked about not become degenerate and go into a weird direction. So if you don't have the obsess over quality,
[53:28] And all you're working on is I want to do fewer things and I want more variation. These are all real issues. Yes. Right? I mean, it's like, I don't know where this is going. And you can become sort of pathological about that. Yes. I do nothing. Yeah, I work two days a week. I win the do fewer things and natural pace or whatever. The obsess over quality is the moderator. So, I mean, I say in the book without that,
[53:47] you're just going to be engendering a sort of weird antagonistic relationship with your work and it's going to go weird places. If you're obsessing over quality, a lot of these issues go away, right? Because now what's driving you is I want to produce the next thing I do. I want it to be great. So I am going to keep working on this. And like, why am I having variations? Because it feels as natural to me as anything else that my quality is slumping here.
[54:08] Yes.
[54:22] And it's just a pseudo productivity world. And you're like, I don't know more. I could always do more and more is always abstractly better. So when you obsess over quality, slowness becomes natural. Like, of course I need to slow down because this junk is getting in the way of this. Like you're not even convincing yourself. And then you get the other advantage was as you get better, you get more leverage to actually do more of that. So you have this sort of virtuous cycle. So yeah, the quality piece is...
[54:46] is the linchpin. People who obsess over quality don't hashtag self-care. Yeah, totally. They hashtag, here's my Tonys. You know what I mean? Like, this is what they're thinking about. But by the way, they're probably doing more self-care than a lot of just pseudo-productivity drenched knowledge workers because, you know, I got to do what works. Like, Lin-Manuel Miranda needed this play to be great, and he couldn't white-knuckle that yet. Yes. So he knew it was going to take time.
[55:07] And it's, there's an awareness of like, it's not just about taking care of myself. It's also, you're taking care of your own work because yeah, if you white knuckle it for too long, you start doing bad work. So that, that totally makes sense. So far you were Neo in the matrix with my objections. Uh, I've got two more.
[55:25] Here we go. I should have put more curse words in that title. I thought about it. How much of this is kind of a privileged position, like obsessing over quality in particular? Like if you are somebody who's growing up in poverty, just trying to claw your way out of it, do whatever it takes, you know, fuck how well the product turns out. Like I'm going to work three jobs until I can get the fuck out of here. Like where is the boundary on that dimension? Yeah.
[55:52] And I use the word privileged, like not in a pejorative way, but like just in an honest, like socioeconomic way of like, is this a middle class white collar knowledge worker thing, college educated thing? Or is this more broadly applicable?
[56:06] This book is looking specifically at this particular economic sector, because this is the economic sector that has these odd dynamics of complete autonomy and lack of specificity about how work unfolds, complete dependence on digital tools that allows work to follow you anywhere you're going. These are the things that came together to create the pseudo productivity burnout crisis. So this is very focused on knowledge work. But one of the things I say about that.
[56:31] is knowledge work up to this point hasn't really had this discussion, right? So other sectors of the economy that do other types of work were often much more comfortable maybe not solving the problem, but have a vocabulary for talking about the problem. Like, okay, well, this is the problem with the service sector, for example. There's a lot of issues with the service sector, right? And service sector jobs can be way worse than anything we're talking about here.
[56:56] Right. Like having three service sector jobs where they're doing algorithmically optimized scheduling, meaning that the Starbucks manager just calls you and it's like, never mind. You're working like one hour this day and like three hours here. This is way worse than I have too many emails. But also in the service sector, at least the people who are talking about this, like this is definitely a problem. Everyone's like, yeah, this is a problem. What is this? What are you doing with this? And we're going to unionize now. And at least there's a fight going on.
[57:22] Knowledge work, we don't even have the fight, right? It's like, no, you should just feel like this is white-collar work. Like this is, you know, it's creative and you're passionate about this job. How could you complain? You have passion. You've got a great salary and benefits and you're working from home. What are you complaining about? Yeah, exactly, right? So you don't want to compare the magnitude of the problems between sectors because, I mean, this sector's got a –
[57:43] You work in air conditioner. Let's be honest about this, right? So, you know, these are not strategies for the service sector. It's not strategies for the agriculture sector, for the industrial sector. But one thing this sector could learn from all those other sectors is, like, be willing to have people to step back and say, there is a problem here. Let's think about what it is. And, like, let's talk about solutions. And let's fight about the solutions. And, you know, I'm going to propose this and this person. And we just don't have that discussion at all in all.
[58:08] Well, to clarify maybe, what about at the bottom of the totem pole of the knowledge worker sector? Like a secretary who's taking an extra job doing data entry or something? Yeah, in the knowledge sector, but at the lower sectors of it. Yeah. So hopefully the idea is not only will your job be more sustainable, you're going to move up faster. Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay, what's going on here? This job's entry level. It's always my advice to someone, entry level knowledge work.
[58:36] Like find a two or three things or the one or two things that you can start learning how to do really well, that then you're indispensable on that. And then they stop giving you the other things. And that's how you begin to move up. I mean, this is the it's like the fallacy of being an assistant in Hollywood. Right. You want to be like super competent and ambitious, but not too good.
[58:56] at the small things, right? If you make yourself indispensable at, I can figure out that you're dry cleaning, you could pick it up on the way here. And I got the driver going over here. They're never going to let you move up because the agents, if they move you up to be a junior agent, don't need to be good at that. They need to have like some other attribute. And there's this whole thinking of like, okay, so I want to get really good. And there's that whole game theory there. It's like you, whatever it is they care about, some shark attitude, but you got to
[59:22] obsessing over quality more like right away what can i do better thinking about okay i need some variation in the book i talk about how to put variation without telling anybody without it being notable like right i have all that advice about stealth quiet quitting for just three weeks at a time like giving yourself secretly variations you're not burning out yeah and then working with transparency of workload and trying to the subtler advice for doing fewer things the hope is that will move you up quicker
[59:47] than if you're just like, let's just rock and roll, I'm just going to be on email all day, you're going to burn yourself out. So hopefully, if you're in the knowledge sector, this is implementable and will make things better. Yeah, my other question was around young people, particularly because they have the most energy, generally. And often they aren't totally aware of what they want to specialize in or what they want to get really good at. And so there is an element of like,
[1:00:14] test a bunch of different things, maybe even test a few different jobs before you go all in on something. Yeah. Like how does that fit into this? Yeah. I mean, if only there was a book that thought more about that.
[1:00:29] Young people spend too much time doing that. Yeah. And I'm not saying you should just throw a dart, but also the only leverage or capital you have in your career and knowledge work is your skills. Yes. Like the things you can do well that are rare and valuable, that's your leverage. And you can alter those over time. You can pick up new ones, but you should be obsessing almost from day one
[1:00:48] Where is there some place here in this entry-level job and I'm Xeroxing things for whatever, where is there a place here where there's something valuable that like most people at this level aren't doing well that I can with laser focus get really good at, right? It doesn't mean, like what might that be if you're at an entry-level knowledge reposition Xeroxing? That thing is not going to be
[1:01:06] your career 25 years from now, that's going to be what starts moving you towards options. It starts exposing more of the world to you. You know, it's, it's like a, when you're new in your career, you have these huge blinders on. You could survey the world as much as you want, but all you're going to see is like the reality of the entry level jobs. You don't,
[1:01:25] know enough to know what comes up next or what it really feels like. So you actually have to start climbing the ladder. And at each level, it's like Donkey Kong. Now I can run over this platform and go up another ladder, but I don't know what's up there. So you have to, how do I get those ladders quicker? Rare and valuable skills.
[1:01:41] If anything, just practice it. Like in your first job, make it a game. I'm going to choose this thing. And within six months, I'm going to be awesome at it. Just to do, just to practice. Like what does it feel like to get really good at something? What is just the sense memory or the cognitive sensation of doing that? So I'm a big fan that rare and valuable skills, that's the only currency. In the end, knowledge work is the only currency that really matters. And so you want to have a lot of that so you can kind of make investments in what you want your career to be like.
[1:02:09] Yeah, you won me over. I have no room to talk because I never had a real job. So I mean, I mean, have I really? I'm a professor and a writer. Speaking of being a professor, I'm curious, you know, it's fashionable to trash Gen Z right now, particularly around things like this, around quiet quitting, self-care, how they're always on social media. Have you noticed
[1:02:32] Any trends? Any differences? Like, do you think it's overblown? Are you bullish, bearish on Gen Z? What are your thoughts? I'm bullish. I mean, look, the students at Georgetown that I teach, they're all brilliant. They're all smarter than I was at that age. So you don't really see that carry over. I think social media trends are easy to extrapolate
[1:02:52] to a generation. But often, no, it's why, what makes a social media trend a trend is it plays well with the algorithm. And then more and more people figure that out. And it's this weird cybernetic content production loop. And now everyone's doing quiet quitting videos. And then the algorithm kind of disfavored that and no one talks about quiet quitting anymore. I care less about that. The thing I do worry a little bit about talking to like my Gen Z students, the attention span thing is real, right? I mean, I have students telling me, I can't believe that anyone watches YouTube anymore. Right?
[1:03:21] like those videos could be like 15 minutes long. Like, are you kidding me? Like in an age of TikTok, who is watching YouTube? It's like a sincere concern that like a lot of my students have. And so I'm always telling them, this could be really good news for you, right? Like it's the parable of the bear. If you're with your friend and a bear charges, you don't have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than your friend, right? Yeah. Well, it's the same thing with attention right now. I was like, if you opt out,
[1:03:45] like 50% of this, like if you don't use TikTok, just let's just do that. Like if you read as a college student, just compared to the fragmentation of the attention of the people around you, you're going to be like Einstein. People are like, I cannot believe that you wrote this whole thing, this whole memo in like three hours. How did you get so much stuff done? How do you also have these hobbies that are fulfilling you? And so that's the thing I do care about is the deep work effect, right? Yeah.
[1:04:11] is I do think digital media, especially in non-professional media, where Gen Z has this very particular frenetic relationship, that could have some ramifications. But it's a very smart generation. I agree. I interact, you know, a significant percentage of my audience is Gen Z and I play a lot of video games. So I inevitably end up watching
[1:04:35] you know, these 20-year-olds on Twitch who are just incredible at games. And yeah, it's a hungry generation. It is. I'm actually consistently impressed by how thoughtful and aware they are of everything going on. And I agree. I have seen 20-year-olds on Twitch and Discord say and think about things that I was nowhere near that level of maturity when I was their age. So I mean, I think this is the plus side of like YouTube influencer culture.
[1:05:03] Right. If you think back to Gen X, for example, like before us, you know, the sort of slacker culture in part because there was no like obvious place to let out what might be a natural ambition. Now, like every kid is like, I'm going to be like a very successful YouTuber. All right. They're not going to be, but at least they're thinking in terms of like an ambition, like, okay, I could do this. I could focus on this. I'd have to buy a camera. And then if I got really good, we could grow the audience. Like, you know,
[1:05:28] A lot of people don't think that way when they're 15, 16 years old. Absolutely. Now the key is how do you take that ambition and then translate it away from, I'm going to be a Twitch streamer. And like, you know what? Like that same mindset, you could push over here to like the sport you're training for, or like you're getting into theater as like a high school student. Like you could put that same ambition over here and realizing, oh, this is, this is something I can do for like whatever I'm in.
[1:05:53] Yeah, one thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is that our generation Gen X and before Starting with the boomers really self-destructiveness kind of became cool became a status symbol I think it started in the 60s with the free love and rock and roll and everything and it continued up through the 90s and I feel like Gen Z is the first generation since maybe the 40s and 50s that I
[1:06:18] Status is awarded towards constructive behavior. Sure. Which it's actually kind of blowing my mind. Like, it's one of those when you're, it's like a fish doesn't recognize the water that it's been swimming in its whole life. I've become a lot more aware of a lot of the destructive tendencies that existed when I was a teenager and in my 20s. And a lot of the...
[1:06:40] dumb, destructive shit I did because I thought it was cool and it got, it got like one me cool points with my friends. It's something that's just really been sitting on my mind quite a bit lately. And I, I don't totally know how to explain it or what to make of it. I mean, it's a good question. Like what, to what degree, for example, this whole phenomenon of interaction is more digital for the, for Gen Z, right? There's some real harms about that. It also is reducing the self-destructive behavior.
[1:07:05] Because now you have other ways that I can at least simulate sociality when it's when I'm just with my buddies. Yeah. When we were in our teens. Right. You like do stupid stuff. Like, I don't know. This is the group I'm stuck with. Yes. Like, how are we going to what's going to impress them? Like, OK, I think I can, you know, you take the car to the parking lot. We're going to do the donuts. Do donuts. We literally would do this. Steal your mom's beer. Yeah. Yeah. We're now kids are like, let's, you know, let's let's let's let's record a let's play.
[1:07:30] of this like new video game. So, but then there's also costs. So it's interesting. It's, it's evolution. Our generation also had, I wrote this New Yorker piece about this last year. My take on our generation, like at least from our relationship to work is that we were the first generation raised on follow your passion. Yes. Right. So that is an idea that rose in the 1990s, right? You can just look at it in a logically entomologically that got big in the 90s. So Gen X didn't have that as much.
[1:07:56] Then we're also a generation that got 9-11 and the financial crisis. So like we learned, we're like, wait a second, this doesn't work. This idea. And so like fall, your passion was the baby boomers trying to rationalize these two sides of their experience, the sixties and seventies in which it was like, you need to like be true to yourself. And then the eighties and early nineties were like, oh, you need money to pay mortgages. And there's a lot of, you know, so how do we, and they're like, what if we just put these two things together? We'll, we'll like take all the good and get rid of all the bad from our life and like
[1:08:25] Make money, but be passionate about working at the law firm or whatever. And then we figured out that doesn't work. Like it's not how you, job satisfaction doesn't come from matching the content of your job to a preexisting passion. So our generation invented job engineering.
[1:08:41] Like we, you know, we, we get like the minimalism movement, we get lifestyle design, we get, uh, all these Instagram influencers, they're showing alternative. Like that's what our generation came away with is like, okay, you got to shape your life. Like that really influences us. It's a lot of my book. How do you craft your life to be what you want? And it's very pragmatic. We get like the fire movement. Like this is all Gen Y millennial, like, Oh, follow your passion. Didn't work. So we got to just sort of re-engineer work to be what we need out of it. So by now Gen Z is doing its own thing.
[1:09:09] So this is the last question I want to ask you. The three principles of slow productivity, it occurred to me that this is actually kind of an umbrella framework for all of your books. So if you look at do fewer things is digital minimalism, work at your own pace, deep work, and then obsess over quality is so good they can't ignore you. Did you think of it in those terms or did that just kind of naturally emerge? It's somewhat purposeful. Okay. Yeah.
[1:09:33] Right, right. So it's trying to draw all these ideas I've been exploring, deconstruct them, understand them, and then rebuild like a coherent philosophy for work. Yeah. So it is – I think it's why people who like my prior books who have read this are like, oh, yeah, no, I really like this. Yeah.
[1:09:51] They're going to really like it. I'm actually writing an article right now. Maybe it'll be out in this podcast. It's a New Yorker piece. It's a personal essay, right? So I've been writing a lot about this book, but they're like, why don't we write something different? Let's do something different. Let's do something personal. And so I excavated my past, right? And in this essay, I go back to my time in the theory group at MIT. And it was like this preposterous place. Like this is, because I had put a lot of this down, but I came back, I redredged this up. Like what it was like,
[1:10:19] showing up at the theory group at MIT, which is the number one theory group in the world. Right. And it was preposterous. I come to orientation and one of the first people I meet, 16, starting the doctoral program, graduated college two years earlier. So he graduated college at 14, had spent two years. All right. Show up. The professor across from me, like in their office, is my age.
[1:10:43] And he won in MacArthur the year before. I was hired as a professor when he was 20. He got tenure at the end of my first year. And he was the least accomplished person on that wall of offices. Three offices had Turing Award winners. Oh, my God. And he was the – there was a fourth and fifth. Anyway, so I went back and like redredged this like preposterous experience. And basically the point of this essay is like, oh, my God, everything I've chased in all these books that culminate in slow productivity, all of it goes back –
[1:11:07] To my time at the theory group, they were obsessed over focus. They had a real sort of humanistic, because they were theoreticians, computer science theoreticians in a world of engineers. The human mind is what matters. Be very wary of technology and how it affects the mind. There was no rushing. Theoreticians can't rush. So they were very productive.
[1:11:27] But like they didn't, you couldn't be busy because you can't force proofs. So I realized all these things like work at a natural pace on not too many things, care a lot about focus, be obsessed about quality. Everything I've done, I realized it's like this five-year experience of this like preposterous place that no business being there. I've just been chasing it ever since. So that's, that's my new self-therapy is like that experience is something I've been trying to like grapple with in my writing for 20 years later. One of my favorite quotes, I don't remember who said it.
[1:11:56] We spend our entire lives trying to either prove or disprove who we were at 18. Yeah. It was so overwhelming, this experience, that I've never – I was like, okay, I just have to grapple with this for the rest of my life. I think there's something happening here in a weird, extreme, purified form that is somehow right.
[1:12:13] And it's being lost in this like really weird preposterous place that no one sees. But I think they've like absolutely accidentally like purified and made radical like these ideas. Like why have they stuck with, I think they were onto something. And then I just keep rediscovering them again and again. Nice. All right. That's all for the show. Be sure to follow the show. If you haven't leave a review, make sure you're subscribed and tell me how handsome I am. And we'll be back next week with an all new episode of the subtle art of not getting a podcast. See you all then.

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