Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:03:45: Pseudo-productivity

00:06:07: The burnout effect

00:11:00: Three key principles …

00:12:11: … 1: do fewer things

00:21:10: a) reverse task list

00:24:45: b) office hours

00:27:44: … 2: work at a natural pace

00:28:42: a) small seasonality

00:32:48: b) slow productivity in teams

00:35:34: … 3: obsess over quality

00:35:58: a) start your own inklings

00:39:06: b) buy an expensive notebook

00:41:10: Useful interview questions

00:44:45: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi everyone, I am Helen and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we dive into the ins, outs, ups and downs of work, and share some ideas for actions and tools for you to try out to give you a bit more confidence and control over your development. 

And this is a slightly special episode today because instead of Sarah, the normal co-host and business partner and best friend that I spend my time with, you've got me and Cal Newport, guru of deep work and productivity, none of which I am. 

I expect a really interesting conversation and a slightly nervous Helen because I was really interested in learning from Cal; but the way that I work is so counter to a lot of his concepts, so I was really honest from the outset that that was where I was coming from, but also that I had a very open mind and willingness to learn. I hope that what you will listen to in this episode is me learning through the conversation, as well as hopefully what you can learn from as well, because Cal was really practical.  And do you know what?  He was really pragmatic.  He's not saying that we all need to go into monk mode every day. 

He is trying to share the importance of why we need to think differently about how we work and why it's not sustainable for lots of us to keep working in the maybe quite relentless way we do across so many things for so long a time without space and this deep work that he talks about. 

So he kind of gives a good case for why we might want to do something different, and he also presents practical ways that we can introduce elements of this to our work, because I think we're all on a bit of a scale in terms of how easy we find deep work to do, and I'm at the opposite end of it; I don't find it easy.  Sarah is actually very good at it.  But I think some of the ideas that we talked through in the episode are applicable for everybody and not that difficult to experiment with. So, I hope you enjoy it.  I would love to get some of your feedback on what you've learned and what you might try out and what you think of the conversation.  So, email us, we're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  But for now I'm going to hand over to Cal so we can learn a little bit about slow productivity. Hi Cal, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Cal Newport: Thanks for having me.

Helen Tupper: I'm excited and maybe a little bit nervous to talk to you about your book, because I loved it but I feel like I'm the opposite of the person who epitomises slow productivity.  It's not the way that I naturally work.  So, when I was reading the book, I was reading it really openly thinking I've got a lot to learn.  But I was also reading it thinking some of my traits that have maybe helped me, I think I was reading the book and sort of being challenged by, "Well, that's maybe not very sustainable", or, "Maybe the way that you're working is not going to lead to original thought".  So, it was a conflicting read for me.

Cal Newport: Yeah, but that's the best read; that's what you want, right?  That dialectical experience of, "Oh, wait a second.  This is not how I've been thinking about this.  What works, what doesn't work?"  In that collision, you really begin to figure out the truth, really.  So, that's my favourite reader.  I like that much better than, "I agreed with every word.  I already do this.  Let's high-five and we can go home".  This is this is what's interesting to me.  It's that that conflict, I think, is to the core of our current moment.

Helen Tupper: Okay, so this conversation, we're going to explore the productivity conflict.  And I'm just going to start with the purpose of the book.  So, at the end of the book, you talk about one of the goals, and I wrote it down because I thought it was really succinct and it stuck with me.  And you said, "The goal of the book was to free people from the dehumanising grip of pseudo-productivity".  And I kind of knew what the pseudo-productivity point was because I'd read it earlier in the book, but I thought for people that are listening now, this "dehumanising grip of pseudo-productivity", just talk to us a bit more about what that is and why we should be worried.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean this is the storyline, I think, that explains why knowledge workers in the last 20 years have been getting more exhausted and more burnt out, is we have to rewind the clock, actually, back to the mid-20th century. 

So, knowledge work, this sort of loose term for jobs where you're mainly using your brain and not your hands, the previous value, when knowledge work emerged, it really was a managerial crisis because we did not know how to measure productivity.  Because in a factory, we know how to measure productivity.  We can count the cars we produce per hour; we can count the number of light bulbs produced per paid labour hour.  In agriculture, we could do this, too. 

How many bushels of corn was produced per acre of land? In knowledge work, that didn't work anymore because I'm not just producing light bulbs or cars, I'm working on ten different things, and the person next to me is working on seven different things from that.  There's no clear number that we can measure.  We also did not have clear production systems in knowledge work.  The way you organise your labour in these jobs is very private and personal. 

We put the term "personal" in front of "productivity".  We're used to that today, "personal productivity", but if you mentioned that term to Adam Smith, you're like, "What are you talking about?  Productivity is how you organise all of your labour in your large company, and it's very systematic, and you have it all written down". So, in knowledge work, we had this crisis, how do we measure productivity?  We didn't have a good answer, so what we fell back on was pseudo productivity, which is a heuristic.  And it said, "We'll use visible activity as like a crude proxy for you doing something useful.  It's not a very good measure, but you know what?  It's the best we can do.  If I see you doing something, that's better than you not doing something.  So, let's all gather in an office and we can watch each other work and we'll do a factory shift and we'll do eight hours.  And I just want to make sure you're here and actually doing something".  I call that pseudo-productivity.  It was not very accurate, but it was semi-sustainable until we get modern technology. 

And it really was email, Slack, mobile computing, smartphone, ubiquitous wireless, internet access to work at any moment.  That plus pseudo-productivity is what really began to get the train to leave the tracks.  That's where we got this speed up of work, this freneticism, a sense of busyness that really became all encompassing.  So, pseudo-productivity started as a crude solution to a real problem, and has now become, I think, the driving force for knowledge work burnout.

Helen Tupper: And we're going to talk about three principles which are, in light of that challenge, things that you can do differently so that this doesn't affect your impact and probably your mental health, and all kinds of things that this leads to.  But if we did nothing, if you were to kind of look into the future and we didn't put your principles in place and we just let these two things, the technology and pseudo-productivity, just kind of keep coming together exponentially, what do you see work becoming if we do nothing? Cal Newport: Well, it's already a crisis now. 

I just heard this stat yesterday.  I was doing an interview and the interviewer had the stat, in the UK, the number of workers that are reporting some amount of burnout, it was something like 88%, right?  So, we're already at a crisis.  Work isn't working for a lot of these jobs because with this pseudo-productivity-driven freneticism, more and more of what we're doing is we're talking about work.  It's email, it's meetings at this very fast pace; it's leaving the workday, it's following us everywhere we go; it's exhausting, it's not very sustainable, it doesn't produce a lot of good value.  So, there's an actual macroeconomic productivity hit for this, because when you have everyone running around communicating frenetically about work all day, not a lot of actual work is getting done. 

So, I think all of that's a problem. But it also is psychologically, I think, deranging for people.  I mean, if you have a day in which you've been on, let's say, Zoom for six hours out of eight, and the other two hours you were frantically emailing people and you end that day and said, "I made no progress on the actual things I need to get done", it's almost like you've devised a psychology experiment to see how much people can take before they break, because it's sort of absurd.  And then everyone pretends like, "I guess this is just what work is".  So, where we're heading right now, if we if we stay on this trajectory, it's nothing good.  I think we're going to have increases, these burnout numbers are going to solidify very high; we're going to have a lot of turnover; and I think you're going to see an increasing effect at the macroeconomic scale.  The productivity of actual national economies is going to be dragged or slowed by this broken way of working.

Helen Tupper: And I think it's hard, isn't it?  Because you have this short term thing, which is, "Today, if I behave in that way, I will get more done.  But then if that is the way that I behave every day, then over a month or a quarter or a year, my impact will be less in terms of the quality of the work that I do, the originality of the work that I do, my ability to sustain the work that I'm doing".  But it's quite hard in the moment when there are so many inputs and you're trying to get so much done, to press pause and do some of the things that we're going to talk about today, to see that there is a benefit that's bigger beyond that point in time.

Cal Newport: Yeah, well I mean, pseudo-productivity makes it hard.  If that's the culture that you've adopted or your organisation has adopted, if activity is what matters, it biases you towards talking about work a lot, sending that email very fast, jumping on a call, doing a meeting, because this is all very visible activity, right?  So, the logic of pseudo-productivity demands this sort of action that in the moment feels useful, but in the long run it's not actually you making traction.  Whereas the opposite is to have an outcome-based notion of productivity, where you say, "Okay, what I really want to care about is at these larger time scales, what did I produce or what am I going to produce this quarter that I'm proud of?  What is this year?  What's the portfolio of completed projects this year that I want to look back on and say that really made a difference, that really moved the needle for my company".

When you look at productivity at that scale, suddenly the busyness on a Tuesday morning starts to seem much less important and much less natural.  Suddenly you begin to realise, "Wait, all of these meetings and all these email messages, though satisfyingly busy in the moment, is not going to help the version of me who's looking back at the end of the quarter and says, 'How many things that I finished that I'm proud of?'"  So, activity-based productivity, it gives you a completely different mindset than an outcome-based way of thinking about it, and the latter just demands slowness.

Helen Tupper: So, that actually brings me to when I started the book, I was like, "Oh, I'm a complete disaster.  I'm starting so far behind what this book is saying that we should be that this is going to be a real challenge."  And actually, as I was going through, I started to make a note of, "Oh, actually, that's something that you do that fits with that principle and that you should keep doing it". 

So for example, something that me and my business partner do is we have something called Win Watch.  We do it every quarter and it's the three or four big things that we are working towards.  And we come back to it regularly, it gets a RAG Status, and it helps us to zoom out a little bit and not get distracted by things. As I was going through the book, there were just a few things that I was thinking, "Oh, there is something good that I'm doing and I should keep doing that".  And there was also an awful lot of other very small, practical tweaks that I thought, "I can do that".  So, that is what I would love to bring to life for the listeners, because I think there are some people that will already be, like my business partner, Sarah, I think she is already aligned with your mindset and your approach, and already doing a lot in this way.  I love working with her because I learn from that.  But then, I think there'll be lots of other people listening that are a bit like me, that are very sort of doing activity orientated, busy-minded, busy days, and it's quite a shift for them. 

So, I think some of the simple actions and little tweaks that can make a difference, I really want to make sure people can sort of try out. So, the three principles I thought we'd maybe go through each in turn, talk a little bit about what they are, why they matter.  And then, I just picked out a couple of, I think, some of these relatively easy things that people can do that make a difference. 

So, you can let me know if you think, "Helen, you've missed a really good one".  So, the three things we've got, principle one was, do fewer things; principle two, work at a natural pace, that was my hardest; principle three, obsess over quality.  So, let's start with, do fewer things.  So, my main takeaways with the do fewer things was that this sort of administrative overhead that we're dealing with, perhaps particularly because of technology, it makes it very hard to focus on the do fewer things.  But dealing with all this stuff every day is really getting in the way of original thinking. Given my job and what I do, that was probably my biggest motivator because I was thinking, "I like doing a lot of things, Cal, I like starting lots of projects, I love it".  But then, when I read that it gets in the way of original thinking, I thought, "Oh, but you're just going to do loads of samey stuff.  You're not going to produce anything new and interesting for people", and that was probably my unlocker of, "Okay, I'll keep reading the do fewer things".

Cal Newport: Yeah.  Well, I mean look, I think it's one of the key ideas that I really came across working on the book, is this workload issue is one of the biggest issues surrounding pseudo-productivity and burnout.  So, here's what happens when you take something and put it on your plate, you agree to do something.  It's going to bring with it administrative overhead, right?  I'm doing this project, there's going to be emails to be sent, meetings to be had, and that's fine, you have to collaborate about projects.  So, what happens though when you say yes to too many things?  You have too many things going actively.  We tell ourselves, "The more things I say yes to, the more productive I'll be, because there's just more things for me to work on". 

But what happens is, each of those things you say yes to brings with it its own administrative overhead.  That aggregates, right?  Each of these projects has its own emails I need to answer, my own meetings I have to attend. Eventually, if you say yes to enough things, this pile of administrative overhead passes a threshold where now your day is mainly spent dealing with administrative overhead.  And that's that phase of sort of ultra-busyness that really, over time, exhausts people and is deranging.  That's where you get to that phase of, "All I've been doing is talking about work", because you have very little time left to actually do it.  So, let's do a thought experiment.  Let's say instead, okay, I have ten projects; let's use a number. 

If I do ten projects at the same time, I'm going to have ten projects' worth of administrative overhead every day I'm dealing with.  Almost no time is left to make progress on anything. Now imagine I say, "No, I'm going to do one of these projects at a time, only deal with the administrative overhead of one project at a time".  Well, now your day is mainly open.  You have a few emails and a meeting about the project, the rest of your time is over.  You're going to do this project really well.  I mean, you're going to have time to think about it, you have time to do the work, you're going to do it fast, you're going to do it at a high level of quality.  Then you bring in the next project and do the same.  The time it's going to take for you to finish those ten projects in this do-one-thing-at-a-time scenario is going to be significantly less than if you tried to work on all ten at the same time, because of the character of your day. Now, those are extreme numbers.  I'm not actually saying, "Work on one thing at a time".  But the bigger principle there is, doing fewer things at once means you'll probably accomplish more things over time.

Helen Tupper: And it's not that I don't believe that, but I was trying to think about the reality of my role today in Amazing If.  So, we're constantly experimenting with ways that we can make career development more effective.  So, we kind of start quite a few things to see kind of what sticks and what resonates.  And then, I used to do a job quite a long time ago for a company called E.ON, they're an energy company.  I worked in innovation and part of my job was to launch, very specific, six to eight new products and services a year, and some of them had to fail. 

Basically put a volume of things out and see what works.  And so actually, you know the do one thing at once?  I feel like in those scenarios, actually putting quite a few things out, but maybe dropping the quality of them, which I think is the last one we're going to come to as a principle, they don't all have to be perfect.  But you're trying to sort of put things out to see what engages people.  So, that is initiating quite a few projects.  And then I sort of cull and continue the ones that work.  Is that still okay?

Cal Newport: Yeah, well think about it this way.  So, if it's a large thing you're working on, you break it into smaller pieces, right?  And so then you might say, "Okay, this week I'm going all in on this piece of this project.  All right, for the next three days after that, I'm going all in on this piece of this project.  And for the final two days, I'm redoing the piece of this project".  So, it's not, "I'm going to spend four months working on one of these six things until it's done and then do the next", but when we zoom in, I'm not trying to juggle four or five things concurrently.  Because remember, the more things you're doing concurrently, the ratio of admin to actual work is going to get larger and larger, and it's just going to take longer to get through these things.  So, I'll do this if I'm writing a book.  I mean, I can't just say, "The thing I'm working on right now is writing a book".

Helen Tupper: Wouldn't that be lovely?  It would be so nice!

Cal Newport: It would be, I wish, but I can't say, "Okay, when I'm done writing my book, I'll do something else".  But what I can say is, "I'm working on a chapter, and so that's one of my two things I'm working on this week, is just really getting lost in this chapter.  Okay, now next week I have this other project I'm working on, and that becomes my main thing".  So, six things, six projects a year, that could definitely be in a rhythm of any one day, even any one week, there's a small number of things that are getting most of my most of my attention.  And then at a higher timeframe, it might be like, "This quarter is about these two things, and this quarter is about those two things".  So, we don't have admin overhead from all four floating around.

That's really the game, is finding in the shorter term having less things that are actively pulling at your attention.  It makes people nervous.  This one makes people nervous because this is the logic of pseudo-productivity.  You really associate doing fewer things with accomplishing fewer things, right.  And because I think a lot of this, if I will be frank, I think a lot of discussion about burnout right now has taken on more of this sort of antagonistic relationship with work, "I'm going to make my life better at the expense of my organisation.  I'm going to do fewer things because I need a more sustainable life, and I'm more than just my labour and it's a trade-off".  That's not really the case here. Pseudo-productivity is burning out the individuals; it's also terrible for the organisations.  The organisations in the end have to produce things that's going to have value.  This is a bad way to produce things with value.  So, doing fewer things is not, "Okay, I'm demanding something to make my life better, just going to make my employer's life worse", it's an approach to work that's going to make everyone happier.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I think as well, there were two sort of aha moments for me, which were that if you imagine that everything you say yes to has an admin overload, I think that just makes you think about, "Oh, this is a very big yes".  You know, it's not a small yes, each yes is slightly bigger than I thought, and I thought that made me consider more.

Cal Newport: And can I throw one out?

Helen Tupper: Yeah. Cal Newport: All right.  So, I want to give out an idea that sort of emerged for taking action here.  It's kind of in the book, but also it's been shaped by reader feedback after the book came out, right?  So, what if you're in a situation where you can't really say no to things?  So then, what do we do with this?  I want to lower admin overhead aggregation, but I'm here on the totem pole and it's hard for me to say no.  All right, here's an idea that some of my readers have been trying out. They take their list of things they've agreed to do, and they divide it, "This is what I'm actively working on, and this is what I'm waiting to work on".  And it's ordered, the stuff I'm waiting to work on is ordered, and they make it public, it's a Google Doc, "My boss, my colleagues, you can all look at this".  And what they do is they say, "Okay, I only work on the things in the active thing, and as soon as I finish something there, I pull the next thing in from waiting.  If you want to know where your thing is you asked me to do, you can just see it.  It's right here, it's in position four.  Now it's in position three. 

And as soon as it crosses into active, I'm going to send you a note, I'll say I'm actively working on this now.  It's one of the few things I'm working on, so call me whenever, I'm all in, I'm going to get this done, I'm going to do it really well".  This has been working really well for people. A lot of people are worried of, "What my boss or my colleagues want is for me to do their thing right away".  That's not necessarily what they want.  What they want is to trust that you're going to do it.  What they want is to be able to offload the stress of this thing needs to be done, to take that stress away from them. 

They say, "I know you are going to get this done.  You're very organised, I can see where it is.  It's marching toward, I don't care if it's two weeks versus one week, I just don't want to have to think about it".  But the advantage of this model is you're only generating admin overhead for the things in the little active list.  And so, that ratio of admin to work plummets and they start moving through this list.  It's a complete gamechanger without them ever having to say no to anything.  And in fact, they actually gain status within their organisations when they do this, because what they're revealing to other people they work with is, "Oh, I'm super-organised, which earns you a lot of latitude. Trust earns you a lot of latitude within organisations.  If I don't trust you to remember something or get things done, I'm going to be on your back, "Did you do this?  Did you do this?  Can you just do this right away?  Because I have to remember it until I'm sure you did it".  But if you have a reputation of, "I'm very organised, here's how it works and here's where it is and here's when I work on it", it's like, "Great, I don't have to worry about you".

Helen Tupper: We did a podcast recently about the value of consistency in your career, which kind of sounds boring, but actually things like saying, "I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do", it actually links with that.  Because when people don't believe that you're going to do it, because they've given you an action and they don't know what's going on with it, it creates that kind of mismatch in trust.  So, that, the thing that you just talked about, about having the lists and people being able to see like, "Is it in progress or is it waiting to proceed?" that links to one of the ideas that I really liked, which was the reverse task list.  So, I think my interpretation of it here was, we often get given lots of actions for people without really a lot of effort on their part.  So, "Cal, can you create that report for that meeting on Monday?  Helen, can you get that document to me so I've got some information to review?" 

So, you're just sort of handed over these tasks to do. I like the reverse task list, which was like, "In order for me to proceed, I need to know what it is, who it's for, by when it is.  If you can give me all of that information, then it goes on my list", and it puts the effort back on the requester.  And I see this sometimes with mentoring.  So, I get a lot of people who come to me and say, "Oh, can you mentor me?"  And I go, "Really happy to consider it.  Can you go away and just answer these questions for me, 'What do you want mentoring on; who else have you gone to; what questions have you got?'"  And so many people never come back to me.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I was going to say, it's probably a small percentage, right?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, hardly anyone comes back to me.  And I'm not trying to be mean by doing that, but also I can't really help you unless I have that information anyway.  I might not be the right person for you, but I quite like that.  I'm happy to consider if I can help, but in order to do that, I need a bit more detail.  So, "If you… then I…"  And I really like that idea of the reverse task list, because I could really imagine myself doing it.

Cal Newport: Yeah.  Well, I mean because a lot of what's going on in these pseudo-productivity contexts is just obligation hot potato.

Helen Tupper: Love that! Cal Newport: Like, "This is on my plate, which is a source of stress.  If I can just get it off my plate for a little bit, I'll feel better in the moment", and so you just get these terrible, "Hey, what do you think about this?" thoughts, because technically now they've cleared out that email, even though it really has made no progress.  There's a complement to the reverse task list.  I don't have a good name for it yet, but involving meetings, right?  Because one of the things that happens with meetings is people will be disorganised.  They don't really trust themselves to make effort on a project that requires effort over time, and so they say, "Well, let's just have a meeting".  Because for people who are bad at productivity, personal productivity, the one tool they do trust is their calendar.  People look at their calendar and they say, "This will force me to think about this".

Helen Tupper: "I feel seen, I feel very seen"!

Cal Newport: Yeah.  So, what I've seen, some companies do this where they say like, "Okay, if you want to organise a meeting, you've got to do the work first".  Amazon does this in the States.  "You have to produce -- I need a document, it needs to be three pages, you need to explain the background on what we're going to discuss, what it is we're trying to figure out in the meeting, the information we need to help make those decisions and why the meeting's important, like what specifically are we going to discuss?  And we all have to read that before the meeting".  This gets rid of a lot of meetings because so many of the meetings that people set up is to avoid work, "I know I need to make progress on this project.  The easiest thing I can do is get a calendar invite on.  Okay, when I get there, we'll talk about it", and that's like, "I'm using meetings as a productivity tool". But if you have to do work to set up a meeting, then they're like, "Oh, okay, well never mind.  I have to schedule that", or whatever, and a lot of these meetings go away.  And then the meetings that do happen are super-effective.

Helen Tupper: It's sort of like creating the constructive overhead, isn't it?  You know we were talking about the admin overhead's a bad thing?  Actually, sometimes you can use it in an intentional way, so it protects your time. The other one I really liked in this do fewer things, I thought, "Oh, I can do that", is this idea of office hours, which I think is not a very UK phrase, I would say, this office hours.  

But the principle that I took from it was that you can have a time in your diary where all the little itty-bitty things that people send you team messages for, and all those kinds of things, you go, "I'm not going to digest that now, I'm not going to respond to that now.  I've got 45 minutes in my diary", whatever people want to call it, this kind of office hours thing, "That's the time when I will come back to you on that thing", or, "That's the time where we could have a quick chat", or whatever is appropriate.  And I quite liked the boundary nature of that, both for me knowing that that's in my diary, that's when I'm going to get it done, so I don't have to hold it in my head that I have to come back to that thing; but then also to communicate that to the team, that if they want me, that's when I'll be online and nothing else will be happening other than me being responsive in that way.  I could really see that working.

Cal Newport: Well, I mean otherwise it's a disaster what happens.  Let's say there's something that you and I could figure out in five minutes, but we have to talk it through, we're trying to figure out, "Wait, what are we going to do with this client meeting?"  If that unfolds over email, that's going to be, let's say, ten messages that go back and forth.  But because this is timely, I have to see each message that comes to me as part of this conversation.  I have to see it pretty quick so I can bounce it back to you so you can bounce it back, because we have to get through this discussion in email, let's say, in one day.  So, now I have to be constantly checking my inbox, waiting to see your reply to my last message so I can send this message over to you. Now let's say we have five of these conversations going on in a day.  We've just generated 50 or 60 email messages and a few hundred inbox checks, right?  If we took all five of those conversations and just during this one 45-minute period, people just walked in your office or you have a Zoom with a waiting room set up, and you just had five five-minute conversations --

Helen Tupper: Gosh, I never thought about having a Zoom with a waiting room for that idea!

Cal Newport: You absolutely should do this.  You have a setup conference -- we know this from being a professor during the pandemic, we got very good at this, of having virtual office hours.  This thing, it's a gamechanger.  And so when anyone's like, "Hey, what should we do about whatever?" and you know it's going to be a conversation, you say, "Grab me at the next office hours you can".  The other thing you can do with office hours, if everyone's doing them, is reverse meetings.  So, we talked about reverse tasks; reverse meetings is, "Well, wait a second. 

You need to talk to these five people".  Instead of you being able to command five people's worth of time to come to you so you can have this conversation, no, you go to those five people's office hours.  You, as the person originating the meeting, go individually to the people you want to talk about and gather the information and talk to them, bring it out, so it puts more of the weight of the meeting on the person initiating it.  Yeah, you have to have five conversations as opposed to making five people all have to get together at your time.  I really think office hours are a gamechanger, because you just get in the mindset of any message that can't be answered with a single message.  The culture should just be, "Grab me at my office hours".

Helen Tupper: I like it! Cal Newport: Completely change the feel of the rest of your day.

Helen Tupper: I might experiment.  The team will be listening to this going, "Oh my gosh, what's she going to do?  Office hours, everyone, that's what's happening".  So, two more principles to talk through.  Second one, work at a natural pace.  Now, my natural pace, it's quite pacey, so I feel like I do have a natural pace, it might need to slow down for this.  The statements that I wrote down from this chapter were, "This means don't rush, let work unfold, have a sustainable timeline that is conducive to brilliance".  "Don't rush and let work unfold", I was like, "I'm not sure". 

But, "Conducive to brilliance" got me!  I was like, "Right, I want to do something that is conducive to brilliance". A couple of the ideas in here, the ones that stuck with me, and then I'd love to just get your thoughts on this, I love that there was a "simplify" point.  You said, "One for you, one for me", which is about meetings, so every time a meeting goes in your diary, having a meeting for yourself in there, so you retain the space.  I quite like that.  I think it's because I once tried, I mean I failed, Cal, but I once tried this principle with my wardrobe, which is like every new thing I bought, one thing had to go. 

I mean, it worked for about a month, but I like the principle. Then "small seasonality" struck with me as well, and this is one of the things I thought, "I think I've done this a little bit", which is about, and I'll get your perspective on it, but the thing that I had done that I took from this was, I redesigned my week so that rather than just everything getting mixed in, my Mondays became "Doing" Monday, very internal; Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I called them "Delivery days", so that's when I'm doing lots of workshops with organisations on careers; and then Friday, "Freedom Friday", no meetings, I get to read, research, think, actually do some of that.  And so I thought, "Oh, that sounds a bit like small seasonality".  So, maybe we could dive in a bit deeper on this.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I love that idea, by the way, "Freedom Friday".  That's the right way of thinking about it.  Well, so natural pace, you nailed it there.  What does that mean?  Well, there's two things we do wrong, which is we rush, so we don't give ourselves enough time to work on things.  We're like, "Oh, I'll get this done in a week".  You know you're not going to get it done in a week.  We fall in love with these storylines about how long something, we want it to take.  Humans, look, we're wired to make time estimates, but not about abstract cognitive activities, right?  So, we're very bad at estimating how long is it going to take to write a report.  We're very good at estimating how long is it going to take to go forage over on that side of the mountain, like physical tasks, but cognitive tasks we're very bad at. 

So, we come up with very optimistic predictions. Then we fall in love with that prediction because we begin to think, "If I could get this done in a week, that would be great".  I mean, we write these stories, these fairy tales about the super-productive wizard and we fall in love, "If I got this book chapter done by the end of October, then I'd be completely --" Helen Tupper: "I'd be great!"

Cal Newport: "I would be in great shape.  That's what my plan is going to be", which is not the way it works.  Wishing doesn't make it so.  So, we don't give ourselves enough time, even though we could, because no one knows how long things take.  So, if your boss says, "Can you do this?  How long is it going to take?"  He doesn't, or she doesn't know the answer.  Whatever you say, they're like, "Great.  At least we have an estimate.  Good". 

So, you might as well make that realistic.  And for most people, I say that probably means take your instinct and then significantly increase it.  Whatever you're tempted to say, multiply that by two, because that's probably how much time you really need. 

So, realistic timeframes where you're not rushing means you don't overload yourself, you have variation. The other mistake we make, and this is where seasonality comes in, is we don't vary intensity enough, which all throughout our human history, the intensity of effort was incredibly variable in many different timescales, like seasonal timescales, all the way down to within the day, "Worked really hard tracking down this wildebeest", or whatever.  And then we had three hours where it was the hot of the sun and we were sort of just chilling, and then another two hours, we were processing.  It was lots of variation in intensity. 

But in a pseudo-productivity, knowledge work environment, we say, "No, if activity is effort, is useful, you've got to be at it all day long", and we don't vary throughout the day.  We're very suspicious of, "Where did you go for an hour?" because visible activity is what matters.  And we don't vary all year round.  We just do this all day long, all week long, all year round.  This is very unnatural in the most literal sense of our species and how we're wired.

So, yeah, the advice you gave, these are all ideas to help you not rush your work and to have more variation.  So, my Friday is different than my Wednesday is a fantastic example of trying to have some of this more natural variation.  And you can do this at larger timescales too.  My Julys are slower than my Septembers, right? 

That's what we actually expect as a species.  And if you're producing stuff with your mind, that's what you really need if in the long term, you really want to produce.  We tell ourselves a story when we have these, "I'm on all day working really hard".  What we're really doing, because our brain can only concentrate so much, is we're just filling in space with emails and Slack and busyness and we don't have to do that.  Why don't we just let there be some variation?  Over time, you're going to feel a lot better, I think you're going to produce more as well.

Helen Tupper: So, we also, and I'm going to give us a tick, we also kind of have shut down in August.  So, we're still working but it's a very different kind of work.  So, we don't do workshops, for example, in August, so have a bit of, I guess, more head, creating and think time.  I think this is a good time to bring in a question from a listener that we got from LinkedIn.  So, Helen Ketteringham said, "How can teams tackle this systematically?"  So, we talked about, you know, it's great for me to have a Freedom Friday, but what do teams need to do so that this can work across a number of people?

Cal Newport: Yeah, workload management.  Teams need a team scale way of keeping track, what needs to be done and who's working on what.  That goes a long way.  Because what most people do instead is, workload management is entirely distributed and entirely obfuscated.  People are working on stuff.  And everything is owned by someone, right?  If something comes into the team's view, it gets emailed to someone, now it's on your plate and everyone just has these huge stacks of things they're responsible for.  Who knows how spread out they are, how equitable it is. just everyone has stuff and we all just frantically work on it.  The biggest thing a team can do is say, "No, this is where we keep track of what the team needs to do".

So, there's a place for things that need to be done to live that's not on an individual's plate.  And when it's on this list of like, "These are things we need to get to", it's not generating any overhead.  And then we need a way of keeping track of, "Okay, who's working on what?  And how do we decide when someone's done with something?  How do we as a team decide how everyone's doing, what do you need?  Okay, you finish that, what should you work on next?  Let's look at this list together, right?" Software developers know this.  This is basically Agile methodologies.  I argue that a stripped-down version of this should be in every knowledge work team.  And now, each individual can be working on a small number of things, finish those things quickly and well, and there can be a collaborative decision process of like, "Now you work on this next".  It drastically reduces the administrative overhead.

The other thing teams should do is have basically a team version of office hours two or three times a week.  I called it a docket clearing meeting.  As things come up that need to be discussed as a team, you don't just immediately email that out.  You put it on a shared document called the docket.  When you get to the next docket clearing meeting, you just go through that list, "We all get together, let's just hammer through this list.  Okay.  What about this?  Is this important?  Okay, should we put this on our list of things to do?  This we can ignore.  What's happening here?" and that's when these things are discussed.  So, docket clearing meetings plus team workload management is going to significantly reduce the amount of time individuals spend talking about work, running around with their proverbial hair on fire.  It's going to make work much more sustainable, it's going to make it much more focused.

Helen Tupper: I'm giving us another tick.  I'm getting better at this.  We've just started a stuff-to-sort list, which is the docket, and then we have a stuff-to-sort meeting, where we just basically go through it, and what can we quickly do and are we just jointly going to pause that thing because it's way too big to sort now.  Recently initiated, so we may be on the right track.

Cal Newport: You're there, right?

Helen Tupper: Well, I don't think we're there.  We're on the right track towards this.  I think we're recognising a lot of the problems that you talked about.  So, the last area, the last principle, obsess over quality.  And the bit that I really noted down here was, "Obsess over quality, even if it means you have to miss opportunity, but you can leverage the results to increase your freedom", because I was like, "Oh, I don't want to miss opportunities.  That's not what I want to do".  But I value freedom.  That is literally one of my values.  I was like, "Okay, maybe I'll do it if it's going to give me more freedom".  And just a couple of things that really stuck with me here.  I loved the "Start your own inklings", like have a little community of people that are challenging and building on ideas.  And I also loved "Buy an expensive notebook".  I quite like stationery, Cal, and I liked that idea.  So, can we talk a bit about quality and expensive notebooks?

Cal Newport: Yeah, okay.  So, you're a fellow notebook-head, I love this, yeah.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I love it!

Cal Newport: Look, quality, caring about the quality of what you do, and that's the glue that makes this whole thing work.  So, when you start to say, "What I care about is doing the thing I do best really well", two things happen with respect to slow productivity. 

One, you begin to really dislike busyness because if you know what you're about, what I'm about is doing this thing really well, now suddenly all that pseudo-productivity, all that freneticism, instead of being comforting, is going to feel like it's in the way of you doing something really well.  So, the idea of slowing down becomes natural once you start caring about quality. Also, and this is like the virtuous cycle, as you get better at something, you gain more leverage and you can better implement your distaste for busyness.  The better you are at something, the more control you get over how your day unfolds, what your work is like, how you work with your colleagues, how you work with your clients, because you're producing something valuable, you have a lot more say.  Now, suddenly people are like, "Okay, office hours, okay, fine.  I'll wait until your office hours. 

Oh, you have this list where it's active and waiting for?  Okay, whatever you need to do", because you're making it rain, you're producing stuff that's really valuable.  So, you need this piece of, "I care about the quality of what I do", to make all the other pieces, I think, more sustainable long-term.  I mean, to me, that's the core of the slow productivity mindset.  That's the core of shifting from activity to outcome, is really starting to care about the quality of the outcome. It also just makes work better.  Like we really like, as humans, producing something that's good and getting better at that and knowing like, "Look, I produced this and this is better than what I produced two years ago and I'm respected for how well this thing is that I do, whatever this thing happens to be".  Now, we're really pressing a sort of evolutionary sweet spot there, and work becomes much more fulfilling and meaningful versus a model of work where you said, "Man, I got a very quick average email response time today".  That's not natural, that makes us stressed out.  When we're producing stuff we're proud of, that makes us happy.

Helen Tupper: It's interesting, because I think for a long time, I did put my value in being a responsive person, you know, "I'm Helen, I'm here to help".  But actually, you drown in that.  And I do find it quite comforting, you know the kind of obsessing about quality and wanting it to be better.  And then, I loved your having a distaste for busyness, it's very evocative language.  But we're writing our third book at the moment and I do really care about the quality of that book, because I know how much effort you put into a book so I want it to be a good book.  And I know from our other books, when you get it right, how helpful they can be.  So, I think just having that that care for quality of something means you can't do as many things, but that you do possibly get to a bigger impact.  And I really do buy your point around, if you create something of value, that gives you more permission to say no to things that aren't of value.

Cal Newport: Yes.

Helen Tupper: I think I really get that and I believe it.  So, okay, so I'm with you.  So, the notebook, tell us how expensive notebooks help us to obsess over quality.

Cal Newport: Well, look, I did this when I was a postdoc, a postdoctoral fellow, which means I had no money.

Helen Tupper: I know!  I thought it meant you were a very clever person!

Cal Newport: Well, not clever about finances.  If you take a postdoctoral, it's a different type of cleverness.  Academically, I'm a theoretical computer scientist, and so it's proofs, maths proofs, right?  And so I bought a really expensive notebook.  It was actually a lab notebook, which they have to be very expensive because they're archival, and if there's a patent dispute about your breakthrough invention, you need to have a record.  So, these are very expensive notebooks.  And I bought it so that I would take my work more seriously, because I wouldn't scribble in this thing.  I was like, "Well, I want to be very careful about what I write down in this thing".  And it really worked.  I went and found this notebook recently, I've kept it, and I didn't use this notebook that long, maybe about a year.  I went through it recently when I was working on this book and there was something like seven or eight different peer-reviewed papers or funded major grants that have their origins in that notebook.

Helen Tupper: Oh, wow!

Cal Newport: Yeah, and it's all very neat handwriting because when I used that notebook, I took my work more seriously, right?  So, there's something to that.  You get a nice tool or you go to a nice place to do the work, "I'm going to a very inspiring, aesthetically pleasing place to work on this hard thing", your brain takes the work more seriously.  And it's a quality mindset, right?  And it really separates the production of stuff that's valuable from the busyness of pseudo-productivity.  Like, "This is a very different activity".  So, I love that separation.  So, telling your brain we're doing something different and something harder and more meaningful, giving your brain that signal, it could be the notebook, it could be where you go, it could be however you do it, makes a big difference.

Helen Tupper: You just reminded me, I did a vision board at the start of the year with things that are important to me and I put the word "quality" on there as a word that I wanted to work towards.  And I think thinking about quality mindset, and also you talked about the importance of space as well in the book, and it makes me think it's notebooks, it's where you work, it's how you're designing your work to be at its best, it's really important. I've got one more question from one of our listeners that I wanted to share and get your perspective on.  And Katie Smythe, her question was, I like this one, "What questions would you suggest people ask prospective employers to understand their expectations around ways of working?"  So, I'm coming to work for the Cal Newport company and I'm like, "What's this going to be?"  In an interview, are there any questions I should ask or signals I should be spotting that would help me to see whether this is going to be a place where slow productivity is possible or a frenetic disaster for my development; what do you think?

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean there's a few things I would ask.  I would ask, first of all, "How do you measure success?  How do you measure how useful or valuable an employee is being?"  So, do they think about that?  Are they thinking about that at the outcome level or not?  Because if they're not, it's going to be pseudo-productivity all the way.  If they don't have a good answer for that, it's going to be, "You'd better be responding to my emails". 

I would ask about workloads, "How do you manage what things need to be done and who's working on what and what the right number of things to work on?"  If they have no thoughts on that, again it's probably going to be a pseudo-productivity grindhouse, "We're just, let's just go for it", and whatever.

Then, three, I would ask about like, "Look, I'm very organised, I use a lot of systems", or whatever, "what's the autonomy or culture here around how you build out your time management, your project management?  What's the culture, the flexibility, the acceptance of that?"  If it's a culture of like, "Oh, we love this stuff.  Yeah, we nerd out on it and people have their Trello boards and other people have built out their Notion system", if they're fellow productivity nerds, that's probably a place that's going to tolerate a lot of experimentation.  And within that autonomy, you can construct slow productivity-conducive systems.  So, those would be the things I would ask. Don't ask about response time expectations. 

You always want to be careful with these things, not to come at it from the point of view of, "Are you doing something that's going to make my life as the employee harder?  And are you going to be a bother to me?  Are you going to expect me to answer emails fast?"  Always come at it from, "How am I going to be more valuable?  How do I know, like, how do you measure if I'm being successful or not; or how do you measure productivity?  How do we work with workloads?  I'm very interested in how we figure out who's working..." 

All this is from a positive, how autonomous or how much do people think about productivity systems and time-management systems?  You're being positive in all of this.  It's like you thinking through the mechanics of work from a way that's going to produce more value.  And so that's how I would do it.  And I would avoid the more prosecutoral questions or -- that's not the right word.  What am I thinking?

Helen Tupper: Procedural?

Cal Newport: Prosecutoral, that's not a right word, I'm making up a word!  Prosecutor style.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, yeah.

Cal Newport: This is an American phrase that I'm kind of mingling here.  But you know what I mean?  It's sort of like, "I'm putting you on trial.  Are you going to make me answer your emails right away?"  That doesn't work.

Helen Tupper: Well, it's probably just going to result in a red flag from the interviewer of, "This person wants to work in a very fixed way".  And I think you can still be flexible with everything that you've suggested.  But ultimately, the outcome and the impact of the outcomes is what's better.  Cal, thank you so much.  I think I'm converted, which honestly at the start, I was like --

Cal Newport: You were already there, though.  I'm thinking about all the ticks you gave throughout this interview.  You're basically running a slow-productivity shop, you just didn't realise it, right?

Helen Tupper: Well, I've definitely got some ideas to make it better, and there's lots of things I really want to go and talk to the team about and experiment, particularly office hours.  I think that could be really useful.  And then having some kind of team place where we can look at the workload.  We talk about it, but I don't think we've kind of visualised it in that useful way. 

So, personally, it's really helped me and I really hope it's helped lots of our listeners as well.  So, thank you so much for your time today.

Cal Newport: Great.  Thanks for having me on.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, everyone.  I hope you found it interesting.  I hope you took away some ideas that you can try out.  We've summarised some of the key things that we talk about in the episode in the PodSheet. 

So, that's the one-page downloadable tool that comes with every episode. 

You can get that from either going to the podcast page on amazingif.com, or it will be in the show notes; the links will be to it there.  If you ever can't find any of our resources, just email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  But I will leave it there for now and I'll be back with another episode with Sarah next week.  Bye, everyone.