OoM 063: Approaching Work Like a Craftsman with Cal Newport

If you're anything like me, there never seems to be enough time in the day. When looking back, you know you were busy, but what did you actually get done? My guest today, Cal Newport author of Deep Work, makes the case that most of us are participating in what he calls "shallow work", which is why most of us are busy, but not productive. We talk about the power of going deep in your work, why you should be approaching your work like a craftsman, and how to live a more efficient, productive, and satisfying life. You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears, and boldly charge your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time. You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man. "Man, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Mickler, and I am your host and the founder of Order of Man. Welcome back after a long Memorial Day weekend. On that note, I hope that you took some time over the weekend, spend time with the family and friends, but more importantly, I hope you took some time to reflect upon the sacrifices of so many men and women who have given the ultimate sacrifice to make this country great. Too often we get lost in the expectation of summer and the barbecues and the sales and everything else that's going on again, so I hope that you took the time to pause and give thanks to the men and women who make every day possible. Now, if you're new to this show today, we talk about all things manly here, how to be a better provider, how to be a better protector, and how to preside more fully or lead more effectively in your life. And as always, we have incredible guest lined up for you today. The author of Deep Work, Mr. Cal Newport is going to talk with us about the power of productivity and deep work. But before I introduce you to him, know that all the links, the quotes, the resources, everything that you want for this show are available at orderofman.com/063. Also, make sure you join in the conversation we're having on our closed men's Facebook group with over 3,800 guys now for a deeper conversation about this topic so many more at facebook.com/groups/orderofman. Now, with all that said, let me introduce you to our guest today, Mr. Cal Newport. He is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his PhD from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital ages as a professor, he also writes about the impact of the technologies on the world of work. This is what he's going to be talking with us about today. In his most recent book, Deep Work, Cal argues that focus is the new IQ in the knowledge economy and that individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. He is the author of three other books on unconventional advice for students, how to be a high school superstar, how to be a straight-a student, and how to win at college. The How-To student series has sold over 150,000 copies since its inception, and Newport has been invited to speak on these topics at some of the country's top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Georgetown, and Duke to name a few. Today, he is here to talk about how to be more productive and efficient and why incorporating the deep life is paramount to your success. Cal, what's going on? Thanks for joining me on the show today, man. Sure, hi Ryan, that's cool to be here. Yeah, you know, I came across your work several years ago. When did you release so good they can't ignore you? That was 2012, the fall of 2012. Okay, I must have, that's when I came across your work. I must have been at the airport and came across your book, fell in love with the book obviously, and then you've got this new book, Deep Work, which is what I want to talk with you about today, which is really timely because I've been putting out fires today, and as I get busier and busier with order of man, I feel like I'm just consumed with emails and can't do anything that's actually meaningful to me. So I'm really excited for this conversation today. Oh yeah, and you're the sweet spot in terms of readers for this book because you have your own company and therefore have massive amounts of autonomy, which means I can talk you into all sorts of drastic changes to your lifestyle, so be aware. Well, I'll be taking notes and I'll just make sure that I implement the most important stuff because I think that's the advice you'd give me, right? Yeah, I think the most important stuff, do that to get the other stuff. All right, perfect. So tell me a little bit about the premise. I mean, Deep Work, tell me what that is because that's a term that you've kind of coined if I understand correctly, so why don't you tell us what that is? Yeah, it's a new term for a really old concept. So Deep Work is what I name the activity of focusing without distraction for a long amount of time on a cognitively demanding task. So when you say cognitively demanding task, what are you referring to? Like what would be an example? So what I mean by that is you're you're really pushing your mind to its limits. You're trying to create something at the very limit of your current capability. So I mean, this spans sort of the whole realm of work from a computer programmer trying to write the best piece of code to a business owner trying to come up with the sharpest strategy given the data, you know, before him or a woodworker, right? Trying to create the sort of whatever the skill there is, but sort of the perfect carving or the perfect sort of lathe work they're doing on the wood. It's where you're taking your skills and you're trying to apply them at your highest level to produce the most valuable thing you can. How do you determine that level? I mean, do you really know? I mean, this is always improving obviously because where I was a year ago, even with interviewing guys like yourself, I wasn't nearly to the level I am now and that continues to get better. How do you know what that level is? Well, I think the sense that you're giving it, you're all is what qualifies as Deep Work. You know, you're what you're doing, you're trying to give it your full attention in the moment. It's not that you have to quantify what your level is. It's just I'm doing this all in whatever it is I'm doing right now. It's getting my full attention. It's not getting 90% of my attention while I'm also checking Facebook. I'm not taking occasional breaks to look at other things. I'm just locked in to what this is trying to produce the best thing I can produce whatever my current skill level is. It sounds a lot like a term that we run across quite a bit on the interviews that we do, which is being present in the moment. Is that what you're talking about? Is it different than that? Yeah, it absolutely requires that, which is part of the reason why Deep Work can actually be immensely satisfying because it really requires by definition that your full attention is going to one thing, which is a state of mind that is incredibly calming and satisfying for the human being. But it's different than say, let's say being in a meditative state, which is also being in the moment because you're actually doing something. So you're in the moment, but in that moment, you're giving your intense concentration to try to create something valuable. Right. Yeah. This makes sense. And I think this kind of goes without saying, but I want to hear from you what some of the common distractions are that people run against. So maybe we can just be a little bit more aware of when it happens that, oh, this is a distraction. I need to get rid of this in my life. Yeah, sure. Well, let me even back up and say the reason the reason I'm even talking about Deep Work is I think it is largely undervalued in our current society. That's sure. People have missed the reality that Deep Work is an immensely productive and immensely satisfying activity. If you become adept at Deep Work and adopt what I call the Deep Life, where you really prioritize your ability to concentrate, you train your ability to concentrate, and you go to sort of aggressive measures to make concentration and important things at the core of your day. Now, if you embrace the Deep Life, it's not about being a little bit more productive or a little bit less distracted. It's about being massively more productive. That, you know, the people you look at and say, wow, that guy is a star. Often the underlying explanation is they're really adept at this skill. So just to set the foundation, sort of the claim I'm going to make is that this skill is almost like a superpower or to use the term the economist used when reviewing the book, Deep Work is like the killer app of the knowledge economy. So it is very different than how most people work. So this brings us back to distraction. I think there's, it's been almost a distraction to talk too much about distraction because when we focus on Facebook or Twitter, email, it's sort of ambiguous, right? People think I am spending a lot of time on these things and it doesn't quite feel right. But on the other hand, there's some value in it. I mean, I got to answer emails from my clients like this isn't bad. And so it just gets in this ambiguous model. So what I'm trying to do is actually flip it and say instead of focusing on what's bad about the distractions, let's turn and talk about what's so good about their opposite. That people and relevant to your audience, you know, men, you know, out there of a certain age who maybe are feeling a little anxious, a little at drift, a lot of what you might be working for, looking for, you might find if you recommit your mind like craftsmen of time old to taking a small number of things and spending a lot of time doing those things really well. You know, in some sense, that's like a manly approach to professional life and it feels a lot less at drift. So I've completely avoided your question. No, but what you're talking about makes perfect sense. It actually reminds me of an experience I had the other day I did a video and I posted it on our Facebook group and I showed them your book and I talked a little bit about the premise of deep work. I even suggested that you were going to come on the show. This was after we said, headset something up. And one of the guys said, Cal would not approve of you doing this right now because if you were really doing deep work, you wouldn't be on social media talking about it. But I don't think that's true. It's just a time and place, right? Yeah. I mean, so when it comes to social media, for example, my stance on it is not binary. So, you know, I think a lot less people should do social media, but I don't have a binary stance that is good or bad. Instead, what my stance is is just adopt the same sort of mindset that craftsmen have for millennia, where you're just careful about the tools you choose. You know, if you take a tool into your life that's going to have access to your time and attention, there should be significant positive advantages to using that that outweigh the negatives. It can't just be there might be some benefit I don't want to miss out. So, for example, for you who runs a media company, there's gonna be substantial positive advantages if you have any social media presence because contrary to my writing, almost everyone uses it. It's a fantastic way for you to reach an audience, but for someone else, let's say like a writer like myself, I don't use social media. And you could come up with a lot of small advantages that might get, but I look at it just like any craftsman looks at tools and say there's no substantial advantage here that will outweigh the impact it'll have on my time of the tension. That'll go to the list of everything else that's kind of useful that I'm not gonna waste my time on. - Well, and I think there's probably a point where you could be using in your example social media, but you could actually probably, especially if this is your career, like it is mine, do social media in a deep and meaningful way. Like for example, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I block out my time on social media. Like I block out my post, I know exactly what I'm gonna talk about, when I'm gonna talk about it, I check social media at these times throughout the day. So I'm very scheduled and articulate about what it is I'm doing on social media. Would that be considered deep work? - Well, it would be considered compatible with deep work. In other words, you would be taking an activity that's important to your business and you're finding a way to integrate into your life that it has minimal impact on the core activities of your business, which is actually gonna be concentrating deeply to produce the most valuable possible content for your audience. So I think that's a great example of an element of the deep life, which is having a lot of respect for your time and attention, recognizing that unfracture time and attention is the most valuable resource you have in a knowledge economy and you have to treat it with respect, just like an athlete, you know, a treat his or her body with respect. - So did this kind of the opposite of this is the myth of multitasking? Is that what we're talking about here? - Yeah, and in fact, actually that evolved. So the way I understand it is we had in the early 2000s, the multitasking do where people had literally multiple windows open. So it was like literal multitasking. I'm on the phone, my email inbox is open and I'm writing. All right, a lot of research came along in the mid 2000s, Clifford Nass' group at Stanford among others, it said, okay, that doesn't work. You can't actually do things simultaneously. Your mind's just shooting back and forth between them really rapidly and doing them all pretty bad. So at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, people moved away from it. I mean, people for the most part don't leave an inbox open on their desktop next to something when they're writing. Most people don't like talk on the phone, we'll try to do something else. We don't really multitask anymore. So people think they're single-tasking, but the new research says you have to worry about attention residue. So if you're paying attention to one thing and then you turn your attention to another thing, that first target leaves a residue in your mind that can last 10, 15, 20, even 30 minutes that reduces your cognitive capacity. So even though you're not actually multitasking, if you're single-tasking, but switching your attention every 15, 20 minutes, you're still having most of the negative effect. So what most knowledge workers do today, for example, is maybe they're trying to do something hard, write an article, write a deck for a presentation they're doing. And maybe once every 10 or 15 minutes, they do a quick just check on their inbox or a quick just check on ESPN because there's a day game. You just want to know what this is for. Right, right. Those just checks have a massively negative impact on your cognitive capacity. Because for the next 30 minutes, your mind is reduced. You do another check before that even wears off. So we have sort of a whole culture of people out there working at a significantly reduced cognitive capacity. So they're producing much less. They're producing at much lower value output. And they're just feeling anxious and torn and unsettled because the mind is constantly exposed to this residue. That's why with deep work, you spend a long amount of time locked into a single thing. You give yourself time to clear out all that residue. And once that's clear, it's like you get a ratchet up to the next level. And you begin to produce at a level that is much higher than what most people are doing during the typical day. Yeah, it's really interesting. I had a conversation just a couple of days ago with somebody who was talking about being busy. And I thought to myself, you know, we wear this busyness as a badge of honor. But the goal isn't to be busy. I mean, that's not what I want. I don't want to be busy. I want to be hyper efficient. I want to be hyper effective. And I think that's what you're talking about here. It's not just running from task to task with your head cut off like a chicken and trying to get as much done. It's being very effective and deliberate about the few things that you are doing. Yeah. When people tell me, oh, I'm busy, my first reaction is, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, right. This is someone said, I'm coming off the flu. You're like, ah, that sucks. I'm sorry, Matt. That's right. Because here's the reality. The market is ruthless. What the market is going to reward are things that are rare and that are valuable. So any activity that's not rare, valuable, any activity that a 19-year-old can do with no training, by definition, is not going to be value much by the market. But that's most of what people are doing when they say they're busy. So if you're sending receiving emails, you're cultivating your social media brands, you're reading articles, you're jumping on coffees and setting up meetings, none of that is rare and valuable. Anyone can do that. So by definition, you're not creating new value. On the other hand, deep work where you're taking multiple hours and concentrating as hard as you can to produce something that uses the best skills you have at the highest level of your skills. What you're doing there is trying to produce the most value you're capable of producing. You're doing something just hard, something that requires your training, something that's making you better. So every time you do it, you get better at it. So the next time you'll produce at a higher level, that's actually taking how the market operates into account. So the efficient way to build a professional life that's productive and that gives you career capital and that gives you autonomy is to spend as much of your time as possible, producing things that are hard to replicate, concentrating, producing things that are rare and valuable. The more you're busy, really just means the more time you're essentially producing stuff at the market could care less of and that stuff is not going to bring value into your life. Right, and then we wonder why we can't get ahead financially, but we're not doing anything worthy of actually getting ahead. That's right, no one ever made a fortune being good at using Facebook, but I can point to a couple of people that made a lot of money doing the deep work required to build the complex systems that run a service like Facebook. And so this is the concept of specialization. I mean, in the economy that we are now, I think there's a lot to be said for specializing and getting very good at one task and leaving all the other stuff to somebody else or something else, maybe technology, and then just specializing, niching down so that you can be more effective. Yeah, be a craftsman. Just because we're dealing with bits more often than we're dealing with wood or pottery clay, doesn't mean the craftsmanship doesn't apply. And there's something immensely satisfying about honing a craft, but there's also something that's immensely powerful about it. If you can produce something at a high level that people value, you get to write your own ticket. And that's why the deep life I promote is really about finding those things that you're going to double down on, building your days as much as possible about honing this craft. And you're going to feel better, and you're going to be a lot more productive, you're going to produce a lot more value, you're going to get a lot more options. I mean, it's really hard. Just like-- It's really hard to be a good sculptor. It's really hard to be a good iron work. It's really hard, but we're meant for that. I mean, the mind of the man does not mind hard. Hard is good. Hard gives you something to feel satisfied about. Something that you can have a cold beer at the end of a hard day and feel good about it. I mean, so hard is good. And a lot of what people are doing in this age of busyness is you're seeking convenience, you're seeking quick hits, you're seeking shortcuts. And that's just a recipe for listlessness. So how does a man who's listening to this find that meaningful work? I mean, you talk about being a craftsman. And I know there's a lot of guys out there who feel the exact opposite of that in their current station, especially when it comes to the work they're doing. How would you suggest that we start finding and exploring what it is we're meant to do and then doing it deeply? Yeah, well, I recommend focus on craftsmanship as the goal and don't worry so much about the particular craft. This was the subject, essentially, of the book I wrote before, so good they can't ignore you. Where essentially made the case that we spend too much attention trying to figure out in advance what we're meant to do. And the past, we're hardwired. You should discover this hardwired passion and then go find a job that matches that passion. And that's really a nonsense idea that's applicable to very few people in the economy, that if you study people who love what they do, nine times out of 10, it was the reverse pattern. They, for whatever reason, started developing a craft. It could have been circumstances, it could have been random, it could have been they stumbled into something. But as they became better and became more of a craftsman, the passion followed. So I say, look at your current situation, see what skills you already have. See what skills are interesting to you already have and say, let me go there. And I want to start honing those, which means I'm going to start training my ability to concentrate and I'm going to start training my ability to do deep work. And then I'm going to start carving out and protecting more and more time in my life to do deep work at this craft. And I'm going to start to make some changes in my general lifestyle to sort of tell myself and communicate to myself that I take this ability to use my mind like a tool very seriously. Right, and that's what I found in my own life is that I can even make mundane tasks, interesting and engaging to me when I figure out how to do it more efficiently or how to do it a little bit better or have fun doing it, right? And I think this is something all of us can probably work on a little bit more. Yeah, and also what happens is once you actually start prioritizing deep work and focusing on a small number of things and doing them very well, you gain the confidence to eliminate a lot of things that have been a drag at your time and attention and that were a little bit important, but not a lot important, but that you never would have jenisoned before. So I've told this story a few times now where, I know someone who's in a very similar business to yours in the sense that they run in sort of an online digital media property. and they were drowning in email and this was this was eating away their time and they just felt overwhelmed by it and His solution was he just got rid of the email address from the website And then he put up a PO box I really need to reach me you can you can get through a PO box and he found that Wait a second. There was like some kind of important stuff that sometimes came through email But writing really good content and doing really good interviews is like 99% of what makes my company successful So my there's no reason that I was doing really poorly at that or really degrading my ability at that the stuff I'm really doing craft and producing value so that I can make a few people happy or have a few opportunities come through the Transome the math and it makes sense and he there's zero effect on the on the bottom line And if anything his audience grew because now he was able to you know He can really concentrate on producing the stuff that his audience of hundreds of thousands can see as opposed to making the You know 100 people a month that he might have had a meaningful email response to happy so you know once you actually start adopting this deep Craftsman tight mindset. There's lots of things in your life that you realize are there because they Maybe might bring a little bit of value and you say that's not enough I'm really interested in doubling down on the things that can be massively positive This almost reminds me of the era of cell phones where you know you hear somebody say well I can't not have my phone. What if there's an emergency? It's like well What if there was an emergency ten years ago? We figured out a way to deal with it. Yeah I've had this argument about movie theaters. Why not just Block cell phones in the movie series so people can't do the text messaging right so you don't have the screen glare and people So you can't do that like what if there's an emergency or the babysitter needs to reach you or or like You know there's something happens you have to call the police and I'm thinking we've had movies theater since the 1920s Like I don't remember right or remember my childhood like being really teneted to go into the movie theater like we'll wait a second Like what if I can't be reached at every moment during the movie? You know parents used to you know you would sneak out and halfway through the movie and call the babysitter and make sure things are okay You know, so I'm with you on that that we were like especially with new technologies There's usually a phase we go through the last a few decades where The new technology comes in is disruptive we go nuts with it and then it kind of settles down later and we figure out Okay, wait a second Every possible use of this is not necessarily the way to go Yeah, right so many technologies in the last 25 years that we're just going nuts the way we use email it worked the way We use cell phones Social media and its current state. I mean a lot of this is just the the early stages of the the future of the sort of digital connected world We're gonna look back at this in 30 years and say all right We're going a little bit crazy. I remember back in 2015 where like people are walking on the sidewalk in the phone and walking in the cars and we're We're you know, we'll look back at it with with some amusement or predict Men, let me just take a quick pause to tell you about our elite mastermind the iron council This is a group of dedicated committed and ambitious men They're working to take their lives to the next level in the areas of relationships their health their wealth and specifically this month We're talking about self-mastery. We want you involved now. We're close to 100 members And we've got some big things some big plans happening this topic that we're going to be covering this month of self-mastery It's such a critical thing to cover because if you can master yourself what I call the natural man You will be better equipped to accomplish everything that you set out to in life more often than our biggest enemy and Osteagle is the man in the mirror So if you feel like maybe you're sitting on the verge of great things, but just can't seem to break free I'd have you consider that maybe you're in the way and our goal is to help you along with the other 90 men of the iron council Learn more about yourself get out of your own way and achieve all that you set out to do so you can check that out at order of men.com Slash iron council. We look forward to seeing you on the inside now. Let's get back to my interview with Cal You know my wife and I have this debate every once in a while Somebody will knock on the door at our home when we're watching a movie or doing something else and the kids immediately jump up And my thought is I'm not obligated to answer the door just because you knocked on it So I'll tell the kids just sit down. We're doing family night Whoever needs to get a hold of us if they really need it that bad they can do it another day And so my wife and I have a debate about this because she's under the belief that well No, you have to answer the door of somebody knocks in your home It's maybe a small example of what you're talking about But certainly I can see how that makes us more Effective with our time. Yeah, yeah, and there's a deeper thing going on here Which is you know the reason I advocate the sort of lifestyle changes that if you want to embrace the deep life You're actually very selective about anything to can have access to your time and attention I think it's cognitive junk food. It's like being an athlete who you know eats Oreos outside of training You know if you use your mind to make craft you should you should be away from it And any part of the reason I make an argument is that you know all these things have some value none of them are that bad But what they add up to is this sort of fragmented sense of attention That's just really incompatible with theft So if you spend your evenings with your attention just fragmented between all these different devices Even if the next day you hike to a cave without any technology and you're stuck there till the tide goes back out and you're I'm just going to write and concentrate. You're not going to do it that well. They they're connected right if most of your time You're not treating your your your attention with respect You're not going to be able to get a lot out of it when it comes time to actually concentrate and we have a lot of different research that backs this up That you can't be sort of fragmented attention at some parts of the day and then hope to be able to concentrate your attention and produce real value at another time Just like you're not going to be a professional athlete if outside of your hard training You know you're smoking and you're drinking and you're eating the Oreos right like your whole lifestyle has to be fit if you're going to be a professional athlete Well, if you're going to use your mind to create this very satisfying Autonomous value producing deep life you have to treat your mind with respect throughout the whole day and everybody's heard the quote You know the way you do one thing is the way you do everything yeah, yeah So you are pretty practical in the book about who this applies to and maybe some circumstances where it doesn't but you identify Some areas some industries where this actually makes a lot of sense. Can you help walk us through that a little bit? Yeah, the deep life and deep work it's not for everyone. I mean for some people it's just too hard right they just don't want to they would they're comfortable With being busy and constantly having a distraction if you're always distracted it kind of keeps you away from dealing with some some deeper issues and some people are happy with that But there's also somewhere deep work is just not going to be that valued So if you're in industry that's truly built almost entirely upon communication so if you're in sales or if you're in you know lobby or something like this The ability to concentrate for long periods of time It's not that important if you're the CEO of a major company It's probably more Effective for you to hire smart people to do deep work and you you should pass judgment on the ideas to come up with that Can be more effective use of your time because a lot of things have to go to you need to be making decisions but I think for any non-entry level job where you are trying to use skills to create things that are valuable Deep work is probably going to be an incredibly important tool in your toolkit Yeah, and I think the example that you use is Jack Dorsey right and you talk about his ability to be so successful Yet he is not somebody who's doing deep work. Yeah, right. So he's a CEO of two companies and I track down some magazine profiles about his typical whole day There's no deep work in Jack Dorsey's typical day. It's an incredibly fragment today And I said that's probably makes sense. I mean What he's doing is trying to keep these companies afloat which means he holds the vision for the companies and all these decisions Have to go through him so that he can make decisions in a way that's consistent with the vision so the company can actually Move forward with some direction. So that's an example of a job where deep work is not that applicable on the other hand I find a lot of people try to make the claim that well in my job. I don't think deep work is that Ethicable but if you dig a little deeper the reality is the way they currently do their job leaves no room for deep work But if they reconfigured it so that deep work was at his core they could actually be much more successful So in a way just a little bit delusional about the reality of their Desire their need I should say to do deep work. That's right. Yeah So a lot of people find that their job is almost entirely consisting of moving information back and forth in an email inbox and so they No, I don't need deep work But my report is you should be really scared because what you're doing is you're basically acting like a human network router And I can tell you as a computer scientist the network routers are the the commodity piece of the network stack best The easy part that's the part that's cheap and easy to automate You should be really worried if most of what you do is move messages back and forth because there's not a lot of value in that So you better find where you can bring value and then start aggressively Honing your ability to concentrate and producing high-value things Because you know email moving this is gonna be the first thing. It's automated as technology gets better I mean it is currently we have auto responders and everything else that are starting to replace the ability or the The need for somebody to send an email to actually sit down and write an email out and send one Yeah, you know, I just did a panel with the CEO of a new company that's that's Going to launch I guess in the fall, but they've spent three years and 30 million dollars training this AI To set up meetings for you and it's an amazing technology right? You basically just say like if you wrote to me and said a query to a meeting I would reply to you I'd see see with an email address this AI and just say yeah, I want to set up a meeting with Ryan Tuesdays and Thursdays are good, but they it has to be in the afternoon and this AI takes over and does all the back and forth and you want to even know that you're talking to To an AI so anyways the point is in just in most of your day Seeing they receive an emails five six years from now There's going to be some bot in the cloud that can do that all for you So then you have to ask all right if you took that all off my plate What would I be doing with my time and what you need is an answer to that question that is I would be Working deeply on doing this incredibly valuable thing and a lot of people don't actually have that answer yet And that should be worrisome how do you identify that well again yet to say where do I have skills? skills. And, okay, I already have this foundation of skills where I can produce things that are valuable. I need to make that my craft. I need to spend a lot of time honing those skills. I need to do as much work as possible in states of deep concentration where I can get the most out of my mind so I can get better and better and better. And I don't sweat too much what those skills are so much as either you're going to have a craft and you can thrive and be satisfied in the coming economy or you don't really have a craft and you're going to be automated outsourced or replaced. It's going to be this divide which I think is going to be relatively extreme when it comes to fruition. So what do you say to the guy and even this, I can hear this in the back of my mind coming to me as I'm having this conversation with you that is, okay, I understand the value in deep work. I can see how I'd be more efficient if I'm focusing on a few things that I'm going deeper rather than wider. But, email still have to get answered. And I still feel like, okay, I've got to put some social media out post out there because this is part of the marketing, the branding and the things that I'm doing. How do we adjust for that? And compensate for that. Well, I think the key question to ask is, you know, for your job, what is the ideal ratio of deep work hours to shallow work hours in the typical week? So if you work for yourself, you need to do reflection and have an answer to that question. And then you work backwards from that answer to put in place the habits, the systems, the scheduling that allows it to work. If you work for someone else, my recommendation is that you have this conversation. It's a respectful conversation. You say, here's what deep work is. Here's what shallow work is. Both are important, right? Both have to happen. But I think I want to clarify what should my ratio of deep to shallow work be. And you know, your boss or your supervisor have the conversation, have them sort of say, this is what I think it should be. And then measure and talk about it. Hey, I'm falling well, well, sort of it. So, you know, I told the story recently of someone who worked in marketing at a Silicon Valley startup. And they had this culture at this place where if you weren't immediately accessible, people assumed you were slack enough. And they were using slack ironically. And so if you weren't on slack, you're considered to be slack enough. And he said this was crazy because what he did for this company required deep work to more concentration he could give it, the more value he generated for the company. So, you know, he read this suggestion of mine and he sat down with his boss and they had this conversation. And he said, as soon as he brought it up, it was immediately clear that it would be absurd for her to answer, I want you to just do shallow quickly. I just want you communicating internally because we were paying this guy a lot of money to think deeply and produce, in this case, these well research articles they use for marketing purposes. So, once they actually nailed down that he should be doing like a 50/50 ratio, they could just work backwards from this agreement. And quickly, they settled on the solution of he was going to have this two hour chunk every morning and a two hour chunk afternoon where it was well promulgated and well understood among his team that he was unreachable. And he does this deep work. So, four hours of deep work a day, everyone knows they can't contact him then. So, they just plan around it, right? Oh, if I really need something from him, maybe I should grab him before he goes into one of these sessions. Completely non-disruptive. And yet, he's now spending 50% of his time, you know, doing deep work. So, he's probably having orders of magnitude more value produced for the company. So, what's the deep, the shallow work ratio that makes sense? And then you work backwards to say, what do I have to do to hit here? Do I have to be more efficient with my shallow work to hit this target? Probably, do I have to eliminate some shallow work to make some room, you know, probably? Do I have to have some some pretty strict rules for how I schedule my deep work to make sure it gets done? Probably that as well. But it gives you targets to push off against to actually start making changes in a way that's more guided. And I imagine too, there's a lot of experimentation in that because they come up with a random number like I should be doing 70% deep work and 30% shallow work would probably not really make sense unless you experimented with actually working. And then like you said, measuring and tracking the results of that. Measure track discuss. And if you work for yourself, then it's you reflecting on the data. The other thing I want to emphasize is that deep work is a trained skill. And again, this is something a lot of people get wrong. They think of it like a habit like flossing their teeth. Something they know how to do. I know how to concentrate. I just got to make more time to do it. The reality is ability to concentrate is imminently trainable. And the more you train it, the better you get. So if you really want to get the true deep life experience, there's going to be a period where you have to be pushing your ability to concentrate just like you would be pushing your muscles if you're picking up a new sport. And it's important because a lot of people when they first try to add more deep work systematically into their life, they find it to be very frustrated and unproductive. It hurts their head. It feels uncomfortable. They don't actually produce much work. Their mind rebelled against a lack of novel stimuli. And it's tempting to step back and say, I'm not producing much here. I'm not a deep work person. But if you understand that it's a trainable skill, you have the more realistic reaction, which is, okay, I'm not really good at this yet. So I better get training because I really want to get the value that comes with being really good at concentrating. And so this just motivates me to train all the harder. This actually reminds me of my training. I'm currently training for a Spartan Gogi, which is a 60 hour event. It's a team building event in Vermont. I'm going to. And as I'm training, I'm doing a lot of running. Well, I typically run with my earbuds in. I'm listening to a podcast or I'm listening to a book, whatever it may be. And I've deliberately not done that. I've deliberately gone on runs without any music, without any podcasts, just me and my mind and me running. And I know when I started, it was really, really difficult for me to do. I was all over the place. My runs were shorter than they normally were. But as I've gained and developed this muscle and the skill of concentration and focus and being able to just be with my thoughts, I've noticed myself getting stronger in those areas. Yeah, you get better at it. You know, I did a similar practice right around 2010, 2011. I started this practice. I call it productive meditation, where I would go for walks and I would have a single professional problem. I'm sorry, my theoretical computer scientist, as my day job would be like a math proof. And I would try to hold it in my head and make progress on the problem in my head. And whenever I noticed my attention wander, I would just notice it and bring the attention back. And it was really hard at first. But I walked to where I was a post-doc and back from my apartment. So I had this walk every day. So I was like, I'm just going to do it every day, every day. And I got better and better at it. And then, you know, after a couple of years of doing this, I now do quite a bit of work in my head. I do quite a bit of work in the woods, actually, because I can, you know, hold the problems in my head and make progress just as easily. It's just trainable. You know, so it's a great insight. And as you're probably experiencing, once you get better at it, it can be an incredibly satisfying and productive experience. Just be able to lock into something and give it your full attention. So it's worth training because it's a very nice experience that a lot of people, especially young men these days, really have no life experience with. They just don't have a good experience of ever being truly deeply locked into something. Because if you've had something in your hand beeping at you since you were a teenager, you know, your brain has never been exposed to what it really feels like before I locked into something. And so like, once you've trained that experience, it can be pretty addictive. Now, you've talked a little bit about and skim the surface on these. But I want to get real practical in some, some maybe steps or strategy, somebody can employ to have a little bit more deep work. One of the things that you mentioned was making yourself less accessible. But are there some other things that we can do to get a little deeper into the current work that we're doing? Yeah. So there's really three categories of things that I think are important. If you want to adopt more of a deep life, I'll just mention three categories real quick. And then we can get practical. But the first is, so actually developing your ability to concentrate. So like we were talking about training that like a muscle, there's practical things like productive meditation, going for runs without anything in your ears that just help you. In general, embracing boredom is important. You have to be away from stimuli a lot every single day. Because if your mind is trained to get a little bit of stimuli, every time it's a little bit bored, you're never going to be able to do deep work. The second type of category is how you actually structure your work day such that deep work shows up regularly and is protected. So you need some sort of scheduling system that makes sure that when you're going to do deep work is very well identified and that you're not just trying to figure out on the fly. Maybe I should do some deep work right now. You also need some sort of rituals or habits built around these deep work sessions to try to get as much as possible out of them because deep work is very hard to do right. So you really have to give it a lot of support. And then the final type of things which are important for getting more depth into your life is these lifestyle changes I'm talking about. Changes you make to your general lifestyle that basically communicate to yourself. I'm now taking my time and attention seriously. So this is where I get into, you know, convincing more people to quit social media or to spend the day leaving their phone at home. These type of efforts to sort of communicate to yourself. I take my attention seriously. So if you can get some practical habits going in each of these three categories, that's the right formula I found for really succeeding with getting more depth into your life. Yeah, I can see that. I know for me one simple thing that I've been able to do in my life is just turn out the notifications on my phone. Not that I still can't access the social media or the email I need to, but just turning off the notifications has allowed me more time with the things that are actually important. Yeah, and some sense like that's like step one. And then step two would be we'll just take the apps off the phone. Right. I mean, if you need to you need to access these things, you can put aside time and when you're at your computer. And then that way you don't have the thing to the glance at. You know, step three might be actually quit most of the services that are engineered using the same logic as Las Vegas casino devices to capture and distract you. I mean, right. Why would you why would you put a slot machine in your pocket if you're worried about a gambling addiction? Well, the same thing. The have some of these services that are being engineered by attention engineers to capture your attention and convert your time and attention into, you know, virtual quarters for these companies. If you're trying to take your ability to focus seriously, don't put in your pocket, just like if you wanted to be an athlete, don't have a bag of Doritos in your gym bag, right? Right, right. Forget about the discipline, just eliminate the even desire or ability in this case to cheat on. This is, for example, why I've never had a social media account. It's not because I feel that I'm better than it is because I don't trust myself. They're too good. They're too good at it. The people who are building these companies, they're too good at building these things sticky. They have billion dollar market caps. That means they have a lot of money to spend on figuring out how do we get time and attendant. Just like slot machines are engineered to get as many quarters out of your pocket into the slot machine as possible, they're using the same principles for the social media apps, except for now the quarters are minutes of your attention and bits of your personal data. I find it to be a scary thing. Just like I just won't go to Las Vegas on vacation, I'm not going to put Facebook in my pocket if I make a living thinking about things. Yeah, that makes sense. Coward winded down on time here. I do want to ask you a couple additional questions. One I prepped you for and the question is what does it mean to be a man? To me, manhood is about taking the things that you value and transforming them into character by actually acting on those values day in and day out. Love it. Just a matter of taking action. Anyone can say they value something, but character, manly characters where your life actually reflects it. Awesome. We want to connect with you, we want to buy the book, we want to learn more about the work you're doing. It's going to be difficult to get a hold of you on social media. How do we track you down? It's true. I'm hard to contact by design. I don't have any social media accounts. I don't have a general purpose email address. I make no promise to be accessible or respond to things. But my writing is easy to find. My books are on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble and calnewport.com has my blog where every week I'm on there talking about writing, about thinking about issues of how you build a sort of meaningful, successful life and a digital age. My ideas are easy to find. I'm a little bit harder. We'll make sure we link that up in the show notes. Anybody who's listening can access that stuff. I want to tell you, I feel honored that you would take time out of your day to come talk with me and the rest of the guys. I really appreciate you. I appreciate the work you're doing. I can already see how between so good they can ignore you and also deep work. While this is making me more effective and efficient in my work, so I appreciate the work that you're doing. Well, thanks. I appreciate the chance to come on and talk to your audience. I mean, this idea that there's an audience out there that wants to get more out of life that's willing to put in the work to shape their life into something more impactful, I think it's a powerful thing. So I'm honored to be able to come on and have a talk with your audience. There you have it, guys. Calnewport making the case for deep work. I've read the book and I can tell you from experience that when you start incorporating the concepts, Cal outlines in your life, you will be more productive. You'll be more efficient and satisfied with what you are accomplishing throughout the day. So go get the book, read it, apply it in the meantime. Go check out Iron Council. It's an elite group of brothers inside of, again, the Iron Council. They're going to push you. They're going to question you. They're going to test you and they're going to hold your feet to the fire. That's what it takes to shake you out of the life. You might currently find yourself in. So head to orderamand.com/ironcounsel. Find us right now in all the details for this show. In the meantime, can be found at orderamand.com/0, 6, 3. And join in the conversation again that we're having about masculinity in our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/orderofman. Guys, I look forward to talk to you next week. But until then, take action and become the man. We're meant to be. Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast. If you're ready to take charge of your life, to be more of a man you are meant to be, we invite you to join the order at orderofman.com. [MUSIC]