What do I do about the impulses that prevent me from living a Deep Life? - with Cal Newport on Optimize Coach

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I'm loving your work and I really love that you also write that why the deep the focus Life is a good life and irrationally I kind of get it. But emotionally I do still feel that throughout the day, while working and also while resting, I'm trying to kind of like, yeah, I surrender too much to my impulses still. So do you have any, like, practical. You probably get this all the time. Any practical tips to. Yeah, I really ingrained it in your daily routines.

Yeah, Otto, that's a great question. And also I should clarify to people if you see me looking off to the side, that's because my monitor is actually here, so I like to. So I can actually see when I see the person, Otto, asking the question. And then my camera is over there. All right, so it's a good question. So I mean, basically the way I'm going to summarize the question is how do you move towards the deeper life where it's focusing on less things, doing those things better? I think there's a few pieces of advice here that might be useful. I'll do real quick. One is just the mindset. I mean, a lot of my advice for how to approach aspects of life comes down to this motto of do less, do those things better, know why you're doing them. So there should be some meaning or reason why you're working on those things. And there should be in work and life a small number of things that you feel really strongly about and you get a lot of pride out of just returning to it. And I want to just do these things and get better at these things and do the long game and build the skill and eventually use this as a lever of impact. Keep in mind, this goes back to my 2012 book so Good They Can't Ignore youe in your professional endeavors. In particular, the marketplace is competitive and what's going to actually earn you more autonomy, earn you more options, earn you more reward, or earn you more interesting opportunities is doing things that are rare and valuable. And that just requires building up skill over time, getting better at what you do, being so good, you can't be ignored. So I think that also helps to remember social media and emails and communication and jumping on calls and coffees. All this stuff could be Useful logistically, but it can't alchemize into rare and valuable value. There's no shortcut to. There's a small number of things I train at to get better at where I'm going to make my mark. And then once you get serious about, here's the things I feel strongly about, it's much easier to turn down the other things because those other things aren't that. So it helps you escape the noise of opportunities and distraction and all these different things going on when you realize, yeah, but the thing I really get pride on is I'm training to do this. And in my personal life, this thing is really important to me. And when I feel good is when I get back to that. And with sort of a quiet productivity mindset, I just work on it day after day, week after week. And over time, you see the value return. I often use myself as an example with writing. I got serious about writing around the age of 20. That's when I signed with my agent and got my first book deal soon after at the age of 21. I knew early on I wanted to write big idea book hardcover books like the type I do today, but it took me about 10 years to get there. But there's a lot of focus and pride out of just I'm working on that skill week after week, month after month, year after year, writing better books, doing article commissions, honing my craft. And it's become a very meaningful part of my life. That makes it made it easier. For example, when social media came along, they say, yeah, not for me. Right. I think that's going to distract me. Look, I need to get back to training, I need to get back to writing, I need to get back to my craft. So, like, identifying those things you're working on matters. And then my final piece of advice is time block planning. When you actually make a plan about what you want to do with your hours for the day, you do better things with your hours for the day. When you instead just go through the day and say, what do I want to do next? It's much more difficult because now you have to have this argument with yourself at every moment of like, well, I could work on this, I could check news, I could go on social media, maybe I should take a break. You're constantly having this argument with yourself and the day gets a lot more fractured and the energy application gets a lot more diffuse. So actually having a plan for your day, okay, what do I actually want to work on today with my hours available in the short term, that Will also really help the sort of focusing on what matters, not getting too caught up with what doesn't.

Awesome, Cal. Beautiful summary. Like kind of block out the noise with really being clear about your why and choosing the values you do want to create, which makes sense from an economic perspective. Indeed, you become so good they can ignore you. Also in the practical way, you can apply any time blocks. I'm also rocking the moment. The four dimensions of execution. Kind of like little tally racks of deep work that's working also wonders for me. And just if I can ask you again the emotional side of it. Like, like. Because you also talk about that a deep life is a good life and. Yeah, how. How can you really understand that? Because if I go to my day, I know it rationally. But yeah, I. I would love you to.

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What would you say the main counter force is in your life right now? So what is the main activity or distraction that is your. Your impulse for depth is being dissipated by.

Well, so when I'm writing or reading, I can go completely into deep work mode. But for instance, when I'm trying to make working on my website and things like that, there's all these distractions that suck up your attention. That's one in your work side and then there's like the rest. The love side of your life where you have like all the digital distractions, all the small little interactions back and forth and things like. And rationally, I know I'm supposed to focus on one task, but my impulse is really big. It's really constant battle to fight that. Basically.

Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, the fact that you're thinking about it is 95% of the battle. Right? Okay. You have an intimation that depth is going to be more valuable. And now the question is just how do we execute it? So you're 95% of the way there and you're already tracking 40x style, your lead indicators, your deep work tally. So you're really, really close to getting there. Professionally speaking. Time block planning is going to help you. Process optimization and triage is really going to help you. Do I really need to be doing this? I really need to be doing that? No. All right. This I really do need to do. But let me figure out my system here that might be more work up front, but makes this much less of a constant source of distraction. Life outside of work. I mean, I might really point you towards digital minimalism. Right? So in my book Digital minimalism, I have this activity where you take 30 days and you really Step away from a lot of these optional personal technologies. And crucially, during those 30 days, you very aggressively, through experimentation and solitude and reflection, try to really figure out, what do I care about? What do I want to spend my time doing, what's important to me. And then when you're done, you rebuild those habits based around supporting those values. And it can completely transform your relationship with distractions and tools. The thing that doesn't work with things like distractions on your phone outside of work, what doesn't work is just saying, from a negative perspective, I want to do this less, right? Saying, I'm on Twitter too much, I want to do this less. It's very hard to get sustainable behavioral change coming from that perspective, because in the moment your brain will be like, it's not that bad. And let's just look at it on board. If you're coming at it from the positive. I want my life to look like this. And here's my plan for technology use that helps me get there. That's way more sticky and sustainable because your mind is really on board with, oh, you have this image of what things could be. I really want that image. Oh, that image means that I don't have Twitter on my phone and I don't. And Instagram, I use it once a week on my computer with this way. Oh, I'm going to stick with that because that's what's going to support this vision of the life well lived. And so there's an article that might be useful if you want to be exposed to this without having to go back through the whole book. Someone just sent me an article from the other day. It was in the San Francisco Chronicle or something. It's@sfgate.com Madeleine Wells, I think is the name of the writer. But she wrote about going through this process during the pandemic and what it was like and what was hard, but how it really, really changed her life. Sort of rebuilding her life digitally based on this period of reflection. And so it's a great. If you want to just get exposed to this concept real quick without having to sort of go back and charge for that part of the book, go find that article. It's just from a couple of days ago. It's all about intention. So these things, it just. Once you figure out what you're about and what you're trying to do and how you're going to do it, there's such a validation to that, the having that intention, you know what you're doing, why you're doing it. You do it through the hard times and the easy, and it builds you this quiet confidence over time. I'm telling you, you're 5.5percent left to really be sort of killing it with the deep life. So I'm excited about that.

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