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Ep. 342- The Good Life Algorithm

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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  • Rest and Recovery
    • Prioritize rest during recovery more than your brain thinks is reasonable.
    • It is okay to take your foot off the gas temporarily, rest more than you think you should. Transcript: Cal Newport Next question is from Rebecca. I’m recovering from a health setback and struggle with creating a schedule for my projects. Since I may need to adjust for rest and recovery, what approaches do you recommend for developing a schedule that balances productivity with flexibility? Rebecca, I was just there and I’m like coming out of a relatively still happening, but better rehab about a bunch of stuff that got messed up after I went through this sort of injury and Surgery recovery. And here’s what I basically learned was start with like, OK, here’s the schedule I think that gives me some more rest. You know, so it’s a little bit like I’m taking my foot off the gas a little bit. Right. So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to tell my boss or my supervisor, like, here’s how I want to do it to try to prioritize rest a little bit more. Then take the amount of rest in that schedule and then multiply that by two. Like your initial reaction about what to do here is not going to be enough rest. It’s going to be the sort of minimum possible change because you’re very worried. It seems like in the moment your brain interprets these changes that you’re making to accommodate rest or rehab. It interprets these as a permanent change. And it begins to predict the future and say, my God, if I only work this much, you know, for the next 20 years, I’m going to really fall behind. I’m going to get fired. I’m not going to be able to keep up with my job. But the reality is you’re probably talking three months or six months or one month or whatever it is. It’s not actually that much time. And all the time, people have to take their foot off the gas for three months or four months and then come back to it again. So if you’re going to take your foot off the gas, take your foot off the gas enough to really rehab and recover. So that’s my main advice is you probably need to rest more than your brain thinks is reasonable. One of the things I actually like to do is collect just internally. (Time 0:29:08)
  • Historical Figures and Rest
    • Cal Newport shares stories of historical figures like Darwin and Franklin who had periods of inactivity.
    • He uses these examples to show that productivity ebbs and flows naturally. Transcript: Cal Newport I like to collect stories that I encounter of real historical figures who are super accomplished. And they all have these like long periods where they were barely working. You know, they were sick. They were dealing with this. If you go back far enough, like in American history, I’m sort of a fan of colonial history and early post-colonial history. You read these biographies of like founding fathers. It would be, oh, for that month, they were just traveling from here to there. Like just to get from here to there, that was like a month of time that was just like they weren’t doing anything. Like you read about, you know, Ben Franklin, there would just be these like six to two months, six weeks to two month gaps where it’s like, well, he was traveling to London and he just can’t Do anything. You’re just like on a ship and you’re sick or you read about Darwin. And for like a year, he’s basically just throwing up on the Beagle, just like really seasick, right? And so I find this, and I talk about this in slow productivity. So if you want to get into these examples, get my book Slow Productivity. Principle two is work at a natural pace. And I really go through a lot of case studies here of people that we look back at the end of their lives. We look back at these historical figures and say, wow, they produced all this stuff and it was awesome. And I was like, yeah. And they had all sorts of ups and downs and big, long, extended periods where they were doing nothing and then periods where they’re really productive. That is just the natural pace with which people produce things. Like here’s another story. I have so many of these. Galileo. I believe this was Galileo. He went at some point to stay with friends who had basically like a vacation home and it was up in the the italian mountains and they had had this clever system if i understand this correctly That in their villa they built a series of chutes that take air from deep in a cave in the mountainside and bring it up into the villa because that air was cool. It was like air conditioner, right? So it’s pretty cool. Like they built an air conditioning system. It was pretty cool, literally cool, and also cool, you know, pragmatically, except for there was some sort of poisonous gas that was being vented into this cave. And so Galileo is sleeping in this room with his villa with his friends on like vacation and it poisons everybody and it kills like two of the people in the room and he barely survives and Is basically like debilitated for a really long time and never fully recovers from it we don’t know any of that like yeah Galileo we he we know the work he did it was fantastic so like people Have this John F. (Time 0:30:51)
  • Company Reboot
    • Define clear North Stars for company transformation, like minimizing context switching.
    • Prioritize deep work on revenue-generating tasks and eliminate pseudo-productivity. Transcript: Cal Newport I had the opportunity to lead the reboot of a once successful aerospace company of about 100 people. I’ve got full autonomy to set everything from building to culture. I’m going to attempt to use many of the ideas in deep work, including office layout and workflow management. The site is performing poorly and is best described as the most shallow workplace ever. So much busy, so little production. Any suggestions on how I can implement this transformation? Well, don’t take a book out of Elon Musk’s strategy. I actually went through, this is a bit of a side, but for that New Yorker piece I was talking about, I went through and cataloged what happened in the first few months after he took over Twitter in 2022. It just reminded me of this question. And it was, I would call it haphazard random chaos that led nowhere good. So don’t do that. That was just like, I’m going to start sporadically making declarations, losing interest in that declaration, then make another declaration and then kind of lose interest in that And then do this and lose interest in that and then just fire half the people for no reason. So don’t do that. What should you do? I took a couple notes, but here’s the big picture organizational principle for these notes I’m about to give you. You need a small number of clearly identified, we’ll call them North Stars, for the journey you’re about to take with this company that you’ve taken over that you want to be really clear And transparent about. Right? Everything we’re going to do is what you should be telling your company. Everything we’re going to do is aiming us at these North Stars. So you know why we’re doing it and what our goals are. And I’ll give you a few sample North Stars, but I think this general approach is really important because otherwise you could end up in that sort of must taking over Twitter in 2022 territory, Which was more like, I am going to haphazardly do things and you don’t know why. Haphazardness can really be a problem, right? That really can be a problem where it’s like, I don’t know why you’re doing this or what’s going on. Okay. What then, what might these North Stars be? Well, based on my books, I would mention three ideas you can start with. One, North Star number one, context switching is productivity poison. This is the thing we’re really worried about. We are willing to go to a pretty extreme extent to try to minimize the times during a typical day where you have to switch your cognitive context from one target to another, because we Know every time we do that, there’s this huge cognitive cost. We’re basically siphoning cognitive fuel out of your brain. And there’s only so many times we can siphon it before you’re just burnt down and can’t do anything else for the day. That’s what we want to try to minimize is cognitive context switches. I would emphasize here, this is very different than what other people implicitly try to optimize or minimize, which tends to be things like friction or response time, or they try to Maximize the velocity of information. You say, no, this is a business run on brains. We want our brains to run well. We’re spending a lot of money on these brains. Context shifts is putting sand in the gears. Priority one, how do we rethink about how we do work and communicate, et cetera, to minimize context shifts. North star number two, I would suggest make it very clear, deep work on things that move the needle, that is bring in new revenue. That’s the priority. We are going to make changes, bend, transform how we do things, whatever is needed to protect that priority. This is what we’re going to measure. This is what we are going to reward. This is what we are going to defer to, even if deferring to this makes other parts of our lives less convenient. Even if deferring to this means the HR department has a much harder time getting the information they need for payroll because they can’t just blast email everyone and say answer in Six hours with this information so we can fill out these charts and it’s going to make our job in the HR department much easier. Our goal is not to make the lives of the HR department as easy as possible. It’s to produce aerospace products that make money. So if someone is doing that, we’re going to let them cook, right? To reference our episode from a couple weeks back about let Brandon cook, our reference to Brandon Sanderson. This is what matters. We protect this. So if you’re able to prove to me, I am producing something with my brain that is directly valuable. But in order to do this, you have to stop. I can’t go to these meetings people keep sending me, or I need to take these things off my plate. If you can make a case, this is going to produce more cognitive output that is directly valuable. I will listen to that case. I will always listen to that case. You got to come back to what ultimately actually makes the difference. As soon as we lose sight of that, we are going to end up in a productivity thunderdome where everyone is just trying to optimize their own lives and make their own lives easier. And that’s not our business. We’re in the business of making aerospace. And the stuff that matters matters, right? Meritocracy in that way. North Star number three, no more pseudo productivity. Visible activity is meaningless to me. Results matter. What are you working on? Did it go well? Good. What are you going to work on next? To this end, teams should be tracking work in a more transparent fashion so that no one gets overloaded. Teams should have, like I talk about a lot of my books, slow productivity. Here’s the things we are working on. Here’s the things we need to work on. We have a whole list and it doesn’t exist distributed haphazardly through different team members, email inboxes. It is on this digital board or this physical bulletin board, a card for everything that we need to do. Over here, we’re tracking who’s working on what right now. And you can only have so many cards under your name, like one or two, maybe that’s it. So we don’t take all these things we need to do and just sort of spread them around everyone’s plate and just start talking to each other all the time about all of these things. Hey, what about this? What about that? That goes back to our first North Star. That violates minimize context shifting. It also violates our second North Star. Prioritize deep work on the stuff that really matters. So why don’t we track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded? You’re not allowed to work on 10 things. Work on two things. Do those things well. I don’t want want to overload you. If I give you 10 things, you’re going to have to have meetings and emails about all 10 of those things, which means most of your day will be having meetings and emails, which means when Are you doing the deep work on the stuff that really moves the needle? That’s no good. So let’s track at the team scale workloads in a transparent fashion so no one has to take on too much. We can allow people to be more efficient. This in turn will allow you to structure communication because now you can check in on this. You can have daily standups at the team scale. Okay. Who’s working on what? I know that actually it’s on the board. What do you need to get this done? All right. You’ve been working on this since Monday. What is the, what is the roadblock? Oh, you need these information. You need this information from, you know, Bob. Bob, you’re right here in the daily standup. When can you get that information over to Cal? You can get it, okay, by 11? Get it to him by 11. We’re making, we all agree on this? Great. And then you’re going to work on this for the four hours after that. You’re going to get that done? Great. Now just go work. Don’t look at your inbox. Go work. So those would be my three North Stars if I was taking over a 100-person (Time 0:35:08)
  • Combating Pseudo-Productivity
    • Trade clarity for responsiveness: Be clear about your work to reduce the need for constant updates.
    • Limit concurrent workload and use quotas to manage tasks effectively. Transcript: Cal Newport We want to highlight at least one question each week that is related to that. Wow. We’re running out of time on that though, Jesse. We said one year, right? Yeah. When did my, my book came out pretty early in March last year i think it was like march 5th oh technically the last one technically this would be the last the last episode with a slow productivity Corner so so go buy the book slow productivity we’ll find a we’ll find a reason to play this theme music we’ll find a reason All right, what’s our slow productivity corner question of The week? All right, it’s from Daniel. Are there perceived benefits to pseudo-productivity in the workplace? Am I company being responsive at all times on email and instant messaging leads someone to being seen as dedicated to work and visible to leaders, which leads to advancement? How do I advance if I don’t do this? Well, yeah, I mean, this is the dangerous nature of pseudo-productivity is that as long as this becomes the implicit heuristic by which your company measures value, it’s hard to escape. So again, we talked about in the last question, but just to reemphasize, pseudo productivity is using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So the more visibly active you are, the more useful you will be assumed to be. In a digital world, this is a problem because mobile computing means you can be demonstrating effort at any location at any time. And mobile communications like email and Slack means you can be demonstrating effort at this incredibly fine granularity, at the granularity of like answering individual emails, Being involved in back and forth conversations. So it leads to a sort of overload of work. You work too many hours, and it leads to a style of work that is very draining, doesn’t produce much, that’s actually valuable. I hate pseudoproductivity. I think it is a cancer on employee well-being in the knowledge sector. It’s why I wrote the book Slow Productivity to say, do this instead. Part one, here’s why this is bad. Part two, do this instead. First of all, just recognize the problem. All right. So what can you do if you are in an organization that still worships at the altar of pseudo productivity? Well, most of the advice in my book is geared at least in part towards this situation. You’re behind enemy lines and you’re trying to make your way towards safety. So there are still things you can do. One is trade clarity for responsiveness. Be really clear what you’re working on, its status, when it’s going to get done and deliver it when you say you’re going to deliver it. If you’re trusted, if you have this clarity, the need for you to be responsive goes down, right? Because why do people want answers typically right away to like messages? It’s because they don’t know what’s going on. They have an open loop in their head. Oh yeah, this project, I forgot about that. What is Jesse up to with that? And it’s just an open loop in their head. And until you respond, they have to keep track of it. And it’s a source of stress. But if you have some other system, they could be like, oh, Jesse’s on the ball. You’re like, yep, I’m working on it. It’s in position five in my queue. Here’s what it is. I think I should have it done by Tuesday. And I’ll tell you if that’s going to shift. And they trust if they don’t hear from you, it’s going to come on Tuesday. They don’t have to worry about it. So a lot of responsiveness is driven from uncertainty. So if you’re very clear, you can reduce the demands of responsiveness. Two, it’s a big thing in the book. You have to have some way of limiting concurrent workload. The kiss of death and pseudo-productivity is working on too many things at the same time because everything you’re working on brings with it its own administrative overhead. So if you’re working on too many things, that administrative overhead aggregates until most of your schedule is servicing tasks instead of actually completing them, and that’s this Terrible state where almost nothing gets done and it’s incredibly stressful. So how do you do that? Well, one thing you can do is distinguish between here’s what I’m actively working on and here’s what I’m waiting to work on. Of the things I’ve accepted, active waiting. I do email meetings about the stuff I’m actively worked on, not on the stuff I’m waiting to work on. And I make this transparent and clear. It’s in a shared document. I’ll send a link right to you. Oh, you want to have a meeting to talk about it? Here’s my cue. It’s still in the waiting part. It’s in position three. You know, it should get there in about a week or so. I’ll email it as soon as it gets to active and then we’ll talk about it all day if you want. But I can only be actually working on a few number of things at time. That sort of clarity works. Also, if you have some flexibility on what you can say yes and no to, so the problem is just not yourself wanting to say no to too much, use quotas. Yeah, I do this type of thing, but only this many per quarter. Then when your quotas fill, say, yeah, of course, typically I would like to have a mentoring lunch or jump on this call or come to this committee meeting. But I’ve already passed my quota for this quarter or for this month or for this week, so I can’t do it this time. It’s a very reasonable way to moderate activities that are important so that you’re still doing things that are important but not doing too many. There’s a bunch of other ideas like that that are in the book, but those are the two big picture things to think about. Trading clarity for responsiveness and finding ways to manage your concurrent workload. You do those two things will be better. Above all else, just get really good at things that matter. That’s principle three of my books, Obsess Over Quality. If you’re doing something that’s valuable, they do not want to lose you. I’ll just make this final point because I think a lot of people have an overly character-tured antagonistic mental image of their employer or boss. And they really do see their employer or boss like a bond villain who is somehow converting rapid email responses into fuel for a laser that they’re going to use to destroy the world. And like, that’s what they care about. This thing that you really makes you miserable. They’re like twisting their mustache and they have a cat that they’re petting. And it’s like, we need you to be answering emails is what’s important because we, we use those quick responses in my volcano layer, the fuel, my, the fuel, my laser. The reality is it’s really hard to hire good people. They worry about people leaving. They don’t have enough people. If you’re doing something valuable, you’re really good at something that the company needs. You know what they’re staying up late at night thinking about? Not, hey, how quickly is he responding to my emails? They’re thinking, oh my God, what if he leaves? You got to recognize, make yourself valuable. Don’t be a jerk about it, but recognize you have value. You don’t have to make a big manifesto or a big autoresponder, but just like I work differently. And you know why? Because I deliver. I produce this code that’s awesome. I organize these events that kill. I put together these marketing campaigns that have the highest ROI of my entire team. And yeah, I’m kind of doing this Cal Newport stuff that’s a little bit weird, and I’m my project queue, and I’m not super, you know, you get here for me within 24 hours, but not within 24 Minutes when you email me. And I’m responsible, but I’m a little bit off kilter, and I say no to a lot more things. But if I go, you’re going to lose that ROI. And you do not want that person to go, so you kind of put up with it. So remember that. If you’re doing something valuable, you are really needed. You (Time 0:42:58)
  • Balancing Client Work and Company Goals
    • Treat different aspects of your job as separate jobs to balance client work and company goals.
    • Optimize client responsiveness to minimize stress and create a sustainable system. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let’s hear it. Hi, Cal. My name is Joe, and the majority of my work centers around optimizing websites for clients. My job is remote, flexible, and I have a lot of autonomy. However, my responsibilities aren’t clearly defined since I’m on a very small team. This has sort of led me to a cycle of reacting to urgent tasks, putting in a lot of work, and then taking work easier for a while until something urgent comes up again. This has left me either overwhelmed and tired some days or feeling bad that I haven’t done enough most others. I’d love to strike a balance between client work and working on company goals, while also leveraging the sort of flexibility and autonomy at work so I can work on my personal projects Like content creation, while not quite going full quiet quit mode. While struggling with motivation is definitely one of my problems here, one of the other thorns in my side has been struggling to define what enough means for a work day or a work week. For people with more autonomous or flexible roles or even just business owners in general, how do you recommend going about defining what it means to have worked enough? Thanks. Well, we’ve got a couple of things going on here. Let’s get to your job situation in particular. I think you need to think about your job as really being two different jobs. The first job is client responsiveness, right? Your first job is working with clients with their issues of request and satisfying them. Then you have the second part of your job, which is self-initiated, less monitored and less deadline. Let’s just call that part B because what that is could depend. But you sort of have to think of as like the self-initiated part of your job and you have the client respons to this part of your job. Let’s look at both of these. Let’s do some work on both of these. And then I want to talk about overall this question of how much work is enough? How do I know if I’m working enough? I would look at the client piece first. And even though it’s reasonable, right, you’re saying it’s only sometimes there’s issues that I have to deal with. I would say, how do I make this piece as sustainable as possible, right? Like, let’s do some optimization over there. And maybe this is about how do I stop crises from occurring as much as they do? Or how do I have, more importantly, maybe a way of dealing with crises that is reassuring to the client and moves us away from just constant, immediate responsive communication, right? So in the lack of structure, if you run like a website dev company and there’s a problem that a client has had with a lack of structure for like, here’s how we stay in touch and here’s how We deal with crises, what it’s going to be is like, answer my call, answer my call, answer my call. Like, this is now a big source of stress for me and I don’t know what’s happening until you finally like tell me what’s going on. So you might want to work on that a little bit. Like here’s our crisis response. You know, we have crisis at web development company.com. You send in that email, like we will, we will be on it within two hours. We have a daily setup call. I don’t know. I don’t want to give you the details, but find a way to make sure that’s not too stressful or draining. All right. All the other days you’re working on part B of your job. And here you have a choice. You can either do a phantom part-time job. This is our word for I have like a consistent amount of sort of unstructured time that I’m going to structure for another goal, something that’s really important to me that I’m working On. And it could be building up a technical skill or something that might eventually become a side business, or it could be a self-education project or something completely unrelated, Community related, unrelated to your professional job. You could do that. Or as you suggest, build in a more sort of self-initiated sort of value growing project within your company. Like I also do this, which is going to have value within the company. So you have to make that decision. There’s something to be said for if you like the general company and the client stuff’s a little bit stressful, you have this flexibility where you could start building a secondary Pursuit within your company that you’re initiating, that you want to become so good you can’t be ignored on eventually. But there’s no actual pressure or deadlines or close monitoring in the short term with the idea of if I keep getting better at this, I can spend less time doing the client stuff and more Time doing what I want to do. So you can have a vision of like, what do I want my job at this company in an ideal world to be like and start working your way towards there with this extra time. That might not be a bad way of thinking about it. Oh, I have a vision for what I could be doing here. You know, I don’t know. Maybe it’s building back in tools that not only helps the company, but then like the company can license and sell to other people and you’re just on your own soft, you know, doing dev and No one really knows what you’re doing in a particular day, but like you’re kind of pulling out cool tools or something like that, right? That’s an example of something you could do within your company that makes you really valuable. You could point to the money you’re bringing in the door. Like we’re much better because of this. And you made 500K selling licenses for this last year. So like, obviously my salary is justified, but it’s entirely autonomous and there are no crisis days, right? So something like that might not be a bad idea. I don’t want to discourage you from spending this time on a content creation related phantom part-time job, but I will say the content creation world is really hard. I think you’d say that’s probably true, right, Jesse? Like we work pretty hard at this and I have 20 years of writing books. It helps. I mean, it’s a tough, that’s a tough world. Um, and there are traps there. There’s a lot of, a lot of this world right now is this thin stream of people making a good living. And then a lot of people that they’re, they’re saying they can use similar tools and kind of feel like you’re in this world. You have like a sub stack or you’re used to be like, you’re posting your medium post, or you’re doing your threads on X that are in the exact same format. And at the end of this last one, you say, if you want to find out more, sign up here. But a lot of that’s just like getting people to churn and be online and be monetized. You’re not making money, you’re being monetized. So be careful about that. Content creation is a rough world. But whatever, you do you with that. The final question then, regardless of how you choose to do through A and B, is how should you feel about, you know, guilt or non-guilt? Look, here’s the thing. If you’re not defrauding your company, if you are doing what they’re asking you to do and you’re doing a good job at it and they’re happy with you and they’re actually giving you a check That has money in it and that money is enough, the market is saying you are working enough as far as that employer is concerned. Right? Again, this pseudo-productive culture, pseudo-productivity culture, the thing I invade against in my book, Slow Productivity. Pseudo-productivity culture says activity is what is valuable. And this arbitrary amount of activity, which should be like 40 hours, but really like 40 plus, like you should have a couple late days, Somehow that amount of activity means you’re worthwhile. And anything less than that means you’re not, which is crazy because if you look at any sort of kind of classical (Time 0:50:18)
  • Knowledge Workers and Doing Less
    • Ariel reduced work hours from 60 to 22 by focusing on valuable tasks, but struggles with workaholism.
    • Cal Newport suggests lifestyle-centric planning to direct efforts outside work. Transcript: Cal Newport We can see what it looks like in practice. Today’s case study comes from Ariel who says, I worked my butt off in grad school and landed what I thought was a dream job in biotech. As these things go, the dream job, I’m putting this in scare quotes, is turning into a career with many flaws and limited growth potential, but I’ve really been able to improve my productivity Per unit time. To achieve what I used to accomplish in about 60 hours of, again, scare quotes work, showing up at an office for six days a week has turned into about 10 hours of focused work that is very Flexible, plus 12 hours of meetings. I use many of the tools you talk about as a means to be very productive, but work far less than I used to. But the workaholic thoughts are a daily struggle. Anytime I have some free time, I think things like, hey, maybe I should start a science substack in my specialty. Maybe I should write some fiction. Shouldn’t I be busier? I would love to be at peace with consuming great books and movies, but the drive to create is pretty relentless. I am torn between creating things in my free time that may benefit my career or turn into a new one or maintaining this fairly stress-free lifestyle while it lasts. My question is simply, why can’t knowledge workers be happy just doing less? If we have the means and the drive, should we all just start creating content in hopes that people will consume it? All right. Well, interesting case study. I want to really, before we get to the meat of Ariel’s embedded question, let’s get to the meat of what happened here that I think is really telling. He was working 60 hours a week. And when he stepped back and said, what actually creates value? And let me focus on that and be careful about my time. He reduced that to 10 hours of deep work and then 12 hours of performative meetings. This is true of a lot of jobs. Pseudo productivity is different than actual productivity. Visible activity is a low risk, highly replicatable way of trying to trick people into thinking that you’re valuable. But again, it is just rarely the case that actual value production requires roughly 40 to 60 hours a week. That’s like an arbitrary number. So I think this is really telling that in 10 hours of actual he did all the stuff he used to do in 60. That’s what happens when he moved from pseudo productivity to actual value production. The workaholic question is an interesting one. I’m actually going to point towards the future. If all things go well, I believe I have an in-depth episode coming out on Thursday of this week, is a conversation on exactly this question, this question of the pursuit of greatness. And is this a problem? Why does it make us uncomfortable? Why does it also motivate us? How do we navigate the conflicting constraints and the conflicting demands of trying to be really good? We get into that in the upcoming in-depth episode. So listen to that. My short take on this though, is it usually helps, right? So in like this situation, if you’re, if you’re doing something good, you like your work, you think it’s important what you’re doing. It usually helps if you are doing some lifestyle centric planning. So what you’re working towards with your time in your life is making your lifestyle closer to things to resonate and ways away from things that don’t. That might be professional. It might be like, okay, once I’ve done lifestyle centric planning, I really need to get to this point in my job. So I’m building up a new skill specifically because that’ll allow me to move from the headquarters and work remotely out of Maine because I want to live by blah, blah, blah, right? Or it could be completely unrelated to your job. It gives you like a real effort for a real purpose for energy that you’re investing outside of your job, whatever it is, like with your kids or your health or something else that’s going On. Lifestyle-centric planning is going to give you a direction for these efforts. So it’s not just maybe I’m just reading a lot of big books or maybe I’m just trying to like do more work at my job. It gives you a reason for why you’re doing that. You have a particular target you’re trying to go to. So I think that might be helpful, but also is okay to just have some seasonality. And like my job’s not that hard right now. It’s kind of nice. I don’t know. I’m exercising a lot. Spend a lot more time with my kids. I’m like involved with a, yeah, I’m writing a fiction writing group just for fun. No stakes. Something to do. That’s not the worst thing either. I really think slow productivity, the book Slow Productivity is perfectly timed for what you’re going through now because it’ll continue to have strategies to help you tighten strategies You’re already doing to keep this job load small. But the seasonality, you could really take advantage of the ideas of seasonality, the work at a natural pace principle and the obsess over quality, like do something really well for More leverage. Like that also is right where you are right now. So I think that book is really going to resonate, but I appreciate the case study. 60 hours down to 10 hours of focus work and 12 hours of meetings. And I bet in those 12 hours of meetings, 25 minutes of actual useful information, if I had to guess. (Time 0:59:03)