Ep. 356 How Much Should We Work

Cal Newport
So he was sort of processing it. Here’s what he wrote. I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object. Let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all but a true sauntering of the eye. Okay, let’s think about this a little bit. What did he mean by this? Well, to get some analysis that’s going to help us connect us to work, I’m going to turn to the source where I found this journal entry, which was in Caleb Smith’s recent book, Thoreau’s Axe, which I read a couple months ago and we talked about on this show. The author of this book, Caleb Smith, in analyzing Thoreau’s journal entry that I just read, said the following. At Walden, Thoreau had begun by trying to undistract himself, to reawaken his own powers of perception and refocus his attention on natural, uncommodified objects of contemplation.

Cal Newport
But in this journal entry that comes after he leaves Walden, he’s realizing that the bigger problem was how much time he was spending paying attention in the first place. So he was discovering this idea of like, I need to focus really hard on the right thing, like focus on the ice that I’m going to write about in Walden, focus on the clouds up above, that that Act of paying so much attention itself was unnatural, regardless of what he was paying attention to. There’s periods where you just need to let the world be around you, let objects come to your attention and then drift off. This might give you deep insight. Sometimes it might not, but it gives you a more deeper sense of contentment. So we had this revelation. There’s only so much we can kind of force ourselves to pay attention. We’re actually wired to let the world come to us, just to be there in the world for a lot of our time. All right, let’s connect this to knowledge work. There is a through line here. In his philosophizing, Thoreau was stumbling on this important point about paying focused attention being to some degree unnatural or something we can only do a limited amount.

Cal Newport
But in this journal entry that comes after he leaves Walden, he’s realizing that the bigger problem was how much time he was spending paying attention in the first place. So he was discovering this idea of like, I need to focus really hard on the right thing, like focus on the ice that I’m going to write about in Walden, focus on the clouds up above, that that Act of paying so much attention itself was unnatural, regardless of what he was paying attention to. There’s periods where you just need to let the world be around you, let objects come to your attention and then drift off. This might give you deep insight. Sometimes it might not, but it gives you a more deeper sense of contentment. So we had this revelation. There’s only so much we can kind of force ourselves to pay attention. We’re actually wired to let the world come to us, just to be there in the world for a lot of our time. All right, let’s connect this to knowledge work. There is a through line here. In his philosophizing, Thoreau was stumbling on this important point about paying focused attention being to some degree unnatural or something we can only do a limited amount. And yet, isn’t this exactly what knowledge work demands of us? The knowledge work demands that we have to be focusing and paying attention on things with our brain the entire day. Well, where did this come from? Well, here’s a story to tell. As we get the rise of the Industrial revolution and factory labor, we invented a new

Cal Newport
And you could kind of get away with that. Then technology came along and we lost our ability to fake it. The personal computer, as I’ve talked about before, and I wrote about this in my book, Slow Productivity, the personal computer came along and it vastly increased the number of things You could be working on. There’s so much more work that could be assigned to you because there’s so many more things that one individual could do because the computer made so many tasks just easy enough that One person could learn to do them. This led to a theory of workload that said, well, great. Now that there’s so many different things you can do, why not just fill your queue hopelessly large with the idea that there’ll be no downtime? So there’ll always be something you can work on, right? So we were kind of calling the bluff of this renting your brain model. We’re like, okay, if we really have your brain for eight hours, now that there’s like an endless amount of stuff you could be doing, let’s put so much on your plate that you never have an Excuse not to be working. Then we got the digital communication revolution that started by email and was continued by things like Slack and Teams, et cetera.

Cal Newport
Even if the thing you’re paying attention to is good, there’s only so much of it you can do. So what would it look like if we rolled back the clock and said, look, Thoreau is my management consultant of choice. And we’re going to design what I’ll call the Thoreau schedule, a schedule for knowledge work, a typical daily schedule that actually is compatible with the way the human brain actually Functions. Here’s what this would more or less be. Two to three hours of deep work in the morning. So working on one or two things that are important and require application of skills and concentration, non-trivial amount of time off, like an hour or two, long walk, other types of Things unrelated to work, one to two hours of administrative work, including a standing 30-minute meeting or office hours to check in with all sorts of other people and get questions Answered and any other sort of things that need to happen, and then you’re done. That would actually be the schedule that best corresponds to the human brain. If you want to invent a cognitive job that’s based just off people using their brain, that is, the Thoreau schedule there is probably the optimal thing. Now, the obvious point, of course, is that if you ran the Thoreau schedule, yes, you would be much less likely to be burnt out. If you ran this as an organization, your exhaustion numbers, your turnover, your burnout numbers, of course, would plummet. That’s a much more natural rhythm.

Cal Newport
It works with our brain. We’re not exhausting ourselves. But would it be a productivity disaster? We don’t know that it would be. Here’s a couple things to keep in mind. Remember from a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the data from the four-day workweek studies. They reduced the amount of time people had to work, therefore reducing the amount of stuff they could work on. And all of the quantitative productivity measures that they studied didn’t go down. In some cases, they went up. It’s slow productivity. I talk about the idea of overhead tax aggregating. Everything you’re working on generates an overhead tax of meetings and emails and thoughts, the sort of the collaborative glue that holds together any sort of project. The more things you’re working on, the more of that is in your day. And the more of that you get in your day, eventually your day is going to be gunked up with the overhead tax with very little time left to do the actual work. Yes, you’re busy, but very little actual quality output gets produced. So if you’re only working one big block in the morning on one or two things and then some administrative work in the afternoon, yes, your number of things you can concurrently be working On is going to be much smaller. It doesn’t necessarily mean that on the scale of a quarter that you’ll be producing less than in a much more non-Thorough busier schedule. And also keep in mind that the impossibility that Thoreau points out of actually focusing productively and hard for eight hours means that we’re just using lots of pseudo productivity To fill in the gaps during our day. And pseudo productivity, which is just using busyness as a proxy for useful effort, has little to do with outcome, has very little to do with the needle moving actual valuable stuff That is produced so a thorough schedule might be largely just eliminating pseudo productivity which means again when you zoom out to a quarter or to a fiscal year the amount of value Produced the actual macroeconomic measure productivity which is how many dollars came in per employee we have hired, that could actually be the same or go up. I mean, maybe not, but I suspect it would not be as bad as you suspect. So to conclude, most major companies and organizations, they’re not going to shift to a thorough schedule anytime soon. I think this idea of we’re renting your brain and we want to get our money’s worth for this rental agreement is both obvious and comfortable and entrenched, and it’s going to be hard to Easily shake off. But if they did, and I think people should, there would be a whole new relationship to knowledge work and a whole new approach to productivity that might be uncovered.

Cal Newport
When it’s within your personal life. It’s this this grand goal theory. Right. So all right. This is subtle. I’m not a big believer in the idea that a grand goal is going to solve all your problems. So a lot of people think, look, I have some grand goal. And if I can achieve that goal, my life will be happy. One goal can’t solve all your problems, right? Achieving one goal is not likely to tweak all the different elements that are relevant to your ideal lifestyle and make them better. It’ll make one thing better. It might make other things worse and be indifferent to others. But having ambitious goals as a way to work on specific parts of your lifestyle that want to be better. I like that idea. So the grand goal theory would be like, hey, if I can, you know, be the pickleball champion of my at my local club, like my life will be happy. And like that by itself is not gonna make you happy. But I feel like I want to be very physically active. I worry about a retirement being less physically active. And one way I’m going to do that specific thing in my lifestyle is an ambitious goal. Like I’m going to try to become the pickleball champion. I’m going to play a ton of pickleball. That’s actually like that is a good application of ambition and grand goals. So I like this, like taking big swings on things that are connected, the parts of your lifestyle that you think are important.
Jesse Miller
All

Cal Newport
Or as Derek Siver said, use money as a neutral indicator of value. Soon I was able to quit my survival job as a waiter, do the few plays and film projects that I got cast in, but that didn’t pay the bills, and use all of my ample free time to develop a large Repertoire of folktales and personal stories. I made three big decisions after some initial successes in storytelling in my late 20s that enabled me to live a current lifestyle full of deep meaning and impact for my community and My family with time to develop new skills and hobbies. One, I told my acting agents I’d only auditioned for major roles from a small list of theaters, TV creators, and film directors. They all promptly dropped me, and I used this newfound free time to develop even more stories. Two, I soundly invested the majority of the money I made during that time, lived only off the per diem I received, and even rented out my apartment while I toured for months, telling stories All over the world. I also chose not to own a car and used the savings to take longer retreat-style workshops my mentors offered in fabulous locations. Three, I put much of that earned money back into my career, developing PR materials that helped keep the flywheel spinning with the clarity of carefully putting all my eggs in the basket Of storytelling. I am now able to pick and choose the multiple opportunities that come my way and have increased my rates so much that I only have four to six, I only two or six days a year. Wow. I’m very much a stay-at dad for our two children based on the lifestyle center career planning I did with my wife in the late 30s. So there we go. Classic lifestyle center career planning. You end up in places that you wouldn’t come up with if you’re planning forward. You’re 20. Like, what do I want to do with my life? You’re like, I want to be an actor, I guess. Right. But he had a lifestyle in mind and it allowed him as he saw different opportunities to begin to develop those opportunities towards his lifestyle.

Cal Newport
Mean, I think life dashboards are cool. I’ve known some people who have built them before, and I think you’re right to point out that AI makes it much easier. You could whip up one of these, vibe code up one of these sort of idiosyncratic programs for yourself pretty quickly. So I think that changes the game. That in general, by the way, is something I’m interested in. The idea of using vibe coding as a way to build bespoke, personal productivity type digital tools. There’s like an interesting potential movement to happen there. We’re like, hey, I can build this tool to do exactly this type of stuff I care about. To manage my time, energy, and attention

Cal Newport
Mean, I think life dashboards are cool. I’ve known some people who have built them before, and I think you’re right to point out that AI makes it much easier. You could whip up one of these, vibe code up one of these sort of idiosyncratic programs for yourself pretty quickly. So I think that changes the game. That in general, by the way, is something I’m interested in. The idea of using vibe coding as a way to build bespoke, personal productivity type digital tools. There’s like an interesting potential movement to happen there. We’re like, hey, I can build this tool to do exactly this type of stuff I care about. To manage my time, energy, and attention in a way that’s like very specific to me, as opposed to having to have these like giant SaaS products that I’m trying to like adapt to what I’m doing. So I like that general approach. People put different things in their life dashboards. They’re often professional is what I see. They’re tracking various things that they think are important to their job, like especially non-tangibles that are going to make them better. Like how many calls did I make or how many hours did I spend doing, you know, education relevant to my job? I knew a management consultant that tracked travel because, you know, it’s hard in the moment to be like, well, how many – I think he was tracking something like nights reading to kids, His kids before he went to bed. That was per month and he had a sort of limit like this needs to be below x percent and you know that’s data that when that gets made visual and process it’s easier to grok than when it’s just You know trying to remember like oh how much was i weighed this last month i don’t know what would be on mine i mean probably deep work hours for sure probably some of my daily metric tracking Would be nice to be able to sort of see click those easily and see like what percentage of the days i’ve been uh I’ve been doing well on there. That could be interesting. Maybe I could imagine like you having your quarterly and weekly plan, you could cycle through on there. So it’s just all there and like one place to see when you’re building your time block plan for the day, um, things like that. But the bigger thing I care about here is this idea of bespoke personal productivity, bespoke digital personal productivity. I think that’s a cool for people who are like to geek out on vibe coding, I think that’s interesting. So I’m always interested in those examples.