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This is the Bigger Pocket's podcast show for forty nine.

To maintain all of these ongoing asynchronous back and forth conversations that are digital, you have to constantly monitor these inboxes. You have to constantly monitor these chat channels. And this constant monitoring is killing us. Our brain cannot network switch that much. Every time we glance at that inbox is full of all these messages from people we care about, most of which we cannot resolve right there in the moment. It's a cognitive catastrophe.

You're listening to a bigger block. It's radio simplifying real estate for investors, large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from bigger pockets. Dotcom, your home for real estate, investing online.

What's going on about? It's Brendan Turner, host hosting the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host David. So good you can't ignore him. Green. What's up, man? How you doing?

Nice and nice Segway there. That's one of my thank you looks and probably one of the best things someone could say about you.

That is one of my favorite books as well. So good to know you by a guy named Cal Newport, who we have on the show today.

And so that actually leads us to today's quick tip. Our guest today is named Cal Newport.

He is one of my favorite authors of all time. He's written several books, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was I mean, all the three of those books are some of my favorite books of all time. But the quick tip is simple. Read those books especially start with so good they can't ignore you. It's so good. You can't ignore it. So check it out. And I know David made a big impact on you as well.

We interviewed Callback in Episode three thirty of the Bigger Pockets podcast and where we talked more about that book today. We're talking about a little bit different topics. So we're going to talk about just some of the overwhelm in the world with technology that we have today, specifically about email and communication and how that's causing us to slow down and be less successful. And so he goes through a lot of what it actually takes to be focused and successful today. It's almost like a deeper dive into deep work.

And so I think, again, I love Carl. I love everything he has to say. I think you're going to love this interview. So hang tight for all of that.

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Anything you want to say, David, before we get into the interview with Carl, I think Carl is probably one of my favorite guests that we've ever had.

He's brilliant. And you got to listen closely to what he's saying because he's sort of just says it. So matter of factly. It's very easy to just say, oh, that's the case. But it's incredibly smart. It's very well researched. Carl is the person who's sort of in my mind, what are the front runners of being successful and productive, just not wasting your time. So what am I favorite points that he makes is he's basically saying what you and I say, like what you did with the Lapps funnel leads Analise pursue success.

You isolated the things that matter most in becoming successful. It's getting leads. It's analyzing them and then pursuing them. It's really. Three things you're doing to become a real estate investor and all the other questions people have of what should I do? They center around one of those three things called really hits that point for us. He highlights how there's certain actions in a pursuit of a goal that really, really matter and that there's a lot of fluff that you fill in and training your brain to recognize what really matters is what successful people kind of do.

So I just hope that all the listeners, as they're listening to this, don't just apply it to real estate investing. I hope they apply it to all the other goals that they have in their life and sort of get that clarity that Calloway's tends to bring for me. There we go. I love it. All right.

With that said, let's get to our interview with the associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport.

All right, Cal, welcome back to the Bigger Pocket's podcast. Man, it is awesome to have you here. Well, thanks for having me back. And by the way, thanks for location shaming me. You know, I'm in a windowless little studio in reigning in Washington, D.C., having to look at Maui and Cabo. So thanks for making me feel terrible.

Yeah, any time we really our goal in life is make people feel as bad as possible before they come on the show. So that's good. All right. Let's let's dive, dive and do. The last time you were on the show, we talked a lot about digital minimalism. We talked about deep work. Two of my if I had said, I'd say to two of my top ten favorite books of all time, and I'm not just saying that to butter you up, I really love both of them an immense amount because like my life, I just deal with constant digital overwhelm.

And so we talked a lot about how to get through that stuff. But today, I know you wrote another book and this one's more targeted towards another huge pain point in my life, and that is email. So I'd love to dive into that a little bit today. Can you tell us a quick what's the book called? And then even though it's not obvious, what's it about?

Well, the book the book is titled A World Without Email, Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. And essentially what I do is two things. One, I look at the question of how did we get to this place where we are today, where knowledge workers so often just constant, constant back and forth on email or slack or messenger, but just constant back and forth messaging. I really get into why this is terrible for both our happiness and our ability to produce work.

And then the second thing I do, the second part of the book is I make the argument that we're going to move away from that. It's inevitable. We're going move away from that. There's massive productivity and economic growth on the line here. And the only question is whether you're going to be out of front of that trend or not. And I get into some of the principles about what this world without email is going to look like.

So maybe we can start there. Why don't we start with why? Like email and like messages, text messages, all that is designed to make our life better.

It's designed to make communication easier. We are able to, you know, and all of sudden we can all point to examples where it does just that. Right. Like I'm stuck somewhere and I need something done. I can text somebody or I can shoot an email to my assistant. You can take care of something. But why does that make us what is it that makes us unhappy and unproductive?

So the real villain in this story is actually a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind.

So what happened is once email spread and it spread very rapidly in the early 1990s, it brought with it sort of as an accidental side effect, this new way of working where the primary way we collaborate or work together on things is just back and forth messaging. Let's just rock and roll online, just send messages ad hoc, unstructured in tools like email and tools like Slack. Now, as just a protocol, email is great. If you need to send information or a file, it's better than a fax machine is better than a voicemail.

There's nothing wrong with the tool in isolation.

But this hyperactive hive mind workflow where we said now because we can we will do most of our coordination with just these back and forth ad hoc messages. That's what's causing the problem in the two big culprits. Here is, number one, to maintain all of these ongoing asynchronous back and forth conversations that are digital, you have to constantly monitor these inboxes. You have to constantly monitor these chat channels. And this constant monitoring is killing us. Our brain cannot network switch that much.

Every time we glance at that inbox is full of all these messages from people we care about, most of which we cannot resolve right there in the moment. It's a cognitive catastrophe. We begin to fire up all these networks and inhibit all these other networks, and we try to bring our attention back to the main thing we're doing. And we're at a fraction of our capability, which is why by like noon or one o'clock, we're just exhausted and just give up and just start scrolling through our inbox to try to find the messages that are easy to answer.

It's not because we like Will, it's because we literally exhausted our cognitive resources with all this this context, which and then also psychologically this notion that there's this ever filling inbox for communication from people we know and need things from us, we can't keep up with it.

And it's always there that presses all of our psychological buttons, especially in our social instincts, and it makes us miserable. So it makes us less productive and it makes us miserable overall. And so we have a problem on our hands here.

That makes sense. When you say that, it reminds me. What's that? I'm in a butcher, the name is like the Zere Minsky effect or something like that, it was based on that like that, I don't know. Psychologists who who saw the waiter would remember everything right. When they're I think this is like one hundred years ago, whatever. They would remember all the customers meals, but the second that customer left paid their bill and left, they would forget everything.

Right. Because our minds, like, keep stuff until we're finished with it. Right. And that's kind of the idea here is like because there's so much that's unfinished, whether it's in our inbox or these always text messages, every one of those just is staying in our head and just wearing us down. A computer is losing our. Is that kind of the idea there?

Well, that definitely happens. We have a couple of different effects here. So that's definitely in effect. Right. So when you see this inbox, you're basically opening up many unresolved tasks and your mind sticks with them. And we all have this sensation.

That's really weird if you think about it in the abstract. But we're all used to writing and responding to emails in our head, you know, when we're like bored or in the shower or something like this, because our mind is held on to look. People need us. We have to answer them. It has a hard time releasing it. And then there's just a context which cost like you see an email from your producer about an issue with whatever the recording software, you see it.

They're like, I can't answer that right now. I need to get back to like an interview I'm doing.

There's a part of your mind that started switching over to all of the semantic networks that are related to their production software and your producer and what's going on. And halfway through that, you wrench your attention back to the main thing you're doing. And now you have this jumbled mismatch of networks are fired up and inhibited. You're trying to switch. And we can look at this in the neuroscience literature that can actually show you exactly what's happening. But the point is, is we can't do that well.

And so we're in this constant brain fog because of all this constant checking.

It makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. So what's the I mean, the solution can't just be like no email can end. I mean, like your books A World Without Emails, that literally what you mean is we can get by without email at all or the like tips and tricks and hacks. And here's how to get less email. Like where do we go from there.

Yeah. Well I mean it's neither of those things actually. So the real title of the book should be A World Without the hyperactive hive mind workflow. It's a little bit a little bit less sexy, I guess.

But what I'm arguing for is this workflow where we just figure things out on the fly with digital messaging, like it makes complete sense if there's two of you. Right, because this is the way that we naturally coordinate. It just doesn't scale. It doesn't scale when you have six team members and seven clients and nine vendors and you know, it doesn't scale. Right. And so what we need to do is when we realize this is the problem, the problem is the hyperactive hive mind.

The problem is that unscheduled messaging is the main way we handle things. The solution is not going to be in your inbox itself. It's not going to be tips about batching. It's not going to be turning off notifications. It's not going to be auto responders or better norms about response times or anything like this. You actually have to go and look at here are the underlying processes that make up all the things I do in my work. You might not have ever named them before.

Right. But but we should name them.

There's the like deal with client issue process. There's the produce, get an episode ready for production process. There's the whatever come up with new ad copy ideas process. And you can look at each of these things, say right now for most of these, the way that we typically coordinate and execute these processes is just hive mind, which is rock and roll, go back and forth. But what can we do instead? And you go process by process and say, is there a system we can put in place here that is going to reduce the amount of unscheduled back and forth messaging required to actually get this thing done?

And so you fix the underlying processes so that you're not talking over email, that emails it's for sending information is for broadcasting stuff. It's for sending files. But interactions not happening with just these asynchronous messaging. You just start doing this process by process. It takes the pressure out of your inbox. You don't need better tips for dealing with your inbox. If you don't have the motivation, you need to be there in the first place. And so I like to go.

We got to go under under the inbox itself and radically rethink how we actually structure all this different collaboration in our organizations.

So how do we do that? Like what are some of the things that you've found work in your life or with people you've worked with?

Well, there's a couple of different templates, maybe for solutions that you see come up time and again. All right. So one thing that was common when I was studying teams that that have gone through this is gaining some sort of transparency about who's working on what. So when you're just doing the hive mind, OK, it's just all spread over our inboxes, right? Like, yeah, I emailed you about this. You emailed me about this. I'll just I'll check with you with a message.

But a common solution for people getting away from that is we have a Trello board or a flow board or using a or something like this, but a task board where we can see all the things the team is working on. We can all see it. We can see the status of all the things we're working on, all the information related to the things we're working on. It's right there, like maybe attached to these virtual cards. And we can see it all right here in one place.

It's not spread over inboxes. It's not informal. We're all on the same page. And these are often these tools are often coupled with some notion of like a regular, short, highly structured status.

All right, let's look at the board, what did you do yesterday? What are you working on today? What do you need what do you need from everyone else in order to get that done? Great. Do it. Everything you needs on this board. Update the board when you're done. Right. So that's common. Another thing that's common, I call communication protocols where people begin thinking through, all right, here's regularly occurring things that requires us to do some back and forth.

What are some protocols for doing this that doesn't just involve I'll shoot you a message and you get back. And so that's where you see things like office hours emerge twice a week during this time, always available. Doors open. Zoom is on my phone. You know, my bringers on grab me if you need me. And all throughout the week, any time something pops up or someone kind of needs you where it could generate and spawn a back and forth email exchange like a TaskRabbit and a half stars, I'll be there.

Right. So these type of protocols are also also coming. So there's a bunch of different templates we see. And the right answer depends on the type of business you're in.

But this is the kind of flavor of things you see that all day might be a little bit more work, a little bit less flexible, but really reduce. The interaction that happens in email reduce the interaction that happens on slack, and that's where all the windows are found. That's I love the way you phrase that and I love you right up, Asana, because this is what my company, my real estate company would call the open door capital. And we originally were all based on email, like everything would send an email to this person, send an email to that person.

Everything was back and forth. And it's so easy for things to get lost and jumbled, which is where we moved over to Asthana. And now I'm I'll do anything in my inbox. I would even realize that other than the asado messages that come in my inbox, which I honestly just delete everyone, not even open them, like everything we have is run through a which is our project management. We just manage our workflow. All the leads that come in on our properties, they go in Azana, everything gets filtered through that way.

And so it's it's much it's much different than just relying on somebody waiting for an email to come through. Now, we still do the occasional email. Well, you know, usually it's like somebody sent me an email I forwarded to my team and then they first thing I usually do is they throw in Casana does it get it out of email? Because email is where things tend to die in my business. I'm curious, David, in your life, have you found the same thing?

I know like as a real estate agent email. You have CRM. Do you have your tools for that right to manage your your business?

Like, how does that work for you guys have so much flying through my head listening Michael talk right now that I'm trying to make sense of as we're going through this. I know the one thing I'm thinking about is that we typically say, I don't have time, I don't have time. And I've realized I, I almost always have time. I can figure out a way to make it more efficient. But what I don't have is energy. I do 100 percent run out of like the mental stamina of wanting to do this thing.

And so for me, it's when my phone feels like it weighs five hundred pounds, just one more freaking phone call or email. And I'm like, I'm going to scream. It's what Cal's talking about. I'm trying to figure out how this works. What I do to in our world is exactly what Carl is saying is I don't look at like what's in front of me. I say, what do I have to do to accomplish the task? So like to put a person in contract, we have to get a client to feel comfortable writing an offer that's going to win.

Now, there's a bunch of things that have to happen. And if you focus on those things, you find that you become much more efficient. So we've used systems like email and CRM as sort of like a choke point where you have all this stuff flying around in the world that wants to get done and you want to get it in one centralized location. But I've put a person in charge of monitoring that choke point who actually has to make judgment calls on what should be done, who should do it.

And then we focus on on being effective. That's the only way I've been able to manage the mortgage company, the real estate company, the books for writing the podcast, you know, pretty much everything that goes on. I'm curious what advice would be for, like, how we're doing this and if we're on the right path?

Yeah, well well, first of all, well, both of you were doing this fantastic. Like, what you are working on is basically the vision of a world without email that I'm trying to actually solidify with underlying principles. And science in this book is you're thinking about the actual collaboration that has to happen, the actual interactions that have to happen, the actual executions, and asking what's the best way to do this, given the reality of the human brain?

Like just because you could everything you guys have just mentioned, you could just do, as you said, just rock and roll, like, let's just go for it. It could happen in email, but you just don't have the cognitive capacity. So like what David was talking about, that's the third template that's common when you look at people getting away from the hive mind, which is this automatic process template, whereas, OK, here's something that's repeatable.

It's this step followed by this step, followed by this step. So if we have to get a competitive offer together, there's there's like whatever. I don't know how it works. There's three things that happens. We have to get the right comps. There's a conversation we have to have with the client. There's then there's like a lot of logistical steps that we have to gather this information to put into the contract. Right. If you know there's something that happens again and again, this comes up a lot, too.

If like, OK, we're going to figure out how to get from one to two to three to four to five in a way that minimizes as much unscheduled messaging as possible. And so there you go. There's like the the assistant pulls this information and schedules the meeting. There's a template for the meeting that prepares the client. That information goes into the system that then gets filled in to this and then you're adobe whatever with the e-signature thing gets put together.

You know, I don't know the details, but you can imagine there's this process, this follows this follows this.

The thing that unifies everything you both are doing and I think is the key idea for someone else who wants to just get started with this is that the poison here is this unscheduled back and forth messaging, the degree to which you have to you're going to send something. Then someone will send something back and then you'll send it back to them. They'll send it back again. You can do about two or three of those conversations in an inbox. Fine. You get the thirty in your host.

And I think that's a really key point because often people are thinking like, well, wait, I want to, like, minimize friction in the moment or I want to I want to minimize complexity or I want to minimize the time I have to spend. So if something takes more time upfront, I don't want to do it. None of those are the right metrics. It's the back and forth. How much back and forth do I have to do each additional unscheduled message I'm going to have to wait for and respond to?

You want to think about it like they're there. They're turning up the current on the electrode, that is, you know. An inopportune part of your body, text or message is making things all the more like, oh, my God, this is where, like, you should have that same fear of that. That is the thing we're minimizing. And I've hundreds of pages of science that says this stuff is terrible. It's the back and forth.

Let me just wait till they email me. I'll email them back. Is that is what is killing us more than anything else. So I'm very impressed. Both of you are great case studies, essentially.

Well, thank you. That's the goal in life.

Be a good case study for one of your books. Seriously, you know where I see this cow? I'll have agents on my team that are responding to emails from the other agent on a deal we're never going to get. And they're going back and forth and they're like working till 10, 30 and then say, working. And then I'm like, well, what were you doing? I was talking to this agent. You mean that house that's getting 20 offers and we're not even close and we've already told our client we're not going to get it.

You're still answering. There's this belief that, like, you have to engage in it, that you're wrong if you don't, or that if the other person's feelings get hurt, that you're at fault. And I think that's what leads to that. And you see I see people spun out, burned out. They constantly say, I'm so busy, I'm overwhelmed. And I'm like, you sold four houses last year. How on earth did that happen?

And I think what you're talking about is exactly what leads to that.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think there's this this equivalency of busyness to productivity. That's this killer.

I think one of the reasons why you see you often see these innovations in small businesses where there's a clear entrepreneurial leader is because if you're a clear entrepreneurial leader of like a real estate company or something like this, you're really focused probably on results like what works, what doesn't. This isn't working. Let's move. It's why most of my case studies in this book are relatively small companies with entrepreneurial leaders who are willing to to move with it. It's very common, especially when you move to big organizations, a, that type of think is harder.

And B, there's there's a certain fool's gold comfort if you're an employee and embracing this sort of full business because it's very predictable. It's very you know, I get it. If I'm just doing a lot of email, I feel like I'm busy. I'm demonstrating that I'm busy. I understand it. I know it's very easy to do, too. I mean, I'm just on here doing stuff. I never really have to think that hard.

And there's some comfort in that. Like, I know what it means to do well. But if you run a company like I don't care how I feel, I don't busyness means nothing. No one pays me to be busy. How sales matter, that's all that matters.

So if this is not if this is not moving houses, I'm not going to be able to make payroll or something like this. And I say it's a fool's gold because what happens is when you fall into this trap of like, I'm busy and at least I know what's going on, you're not producing and you don't produce long enough. You know, no matter how quickly you're responding to emails like eventually that trap door is going to open because where is the actual numbers?

Where you actually producing?

That's a really good point, I think, in real estate investing as well. There's all these things that people, when they're trying to buy rental properties, trying to buy their first duplex, China, whatever that thing is, there's so many ways to be I don't know, the word is busy. There's so many ways to be busy with things. You're trying to do stuff, but none of it actually matters. Have you found any, I guess, in your in your research, your study?

Like, how does somebody really hone in on that? Like to know like what are the vital tasks that actually have to get done that I'm not just busy, but I'm doing the most important things.

Have any suggestions for people trying to figure that out like a hack that works pretty well here is actually use your email inbox, help you figure out what are my processes, and then we can do this trio.

So what you do is you're like, I'm going to for one day, every email I answer, I'm going to ask, OK, actually, what underlying process is this email pushing forward, you know, and name it, write it down every email that that you answer and they're going to list out like, OK, these are all of the processes that I'm actually involved with. This has to do with bidding. This has to do with whatever. Right.

And that's a good way to actually see. Here's the thing from actually doing lots of interaction on then triage.

Right. So before you jump to the step of like now, let me try to optimize all these processes to the degree that you're able. And if you're like an entrepreneur or something like this, a solar panel, especially if you work by yourself, you have a lot of autonomy, be radical. Like what are the things here, Proteau, principle wise that are really moving the needle? Right. Great. Everything else let's get rid of or drastically minimize it, even if there's little bits of value here and there, there's a little bit of opportunities you'll move like I don't care about little bits, opportunities.

If this is going to double my house sales, let's do that. Right. So you triage and then once you triage, like you just have to have this conversation, work it out. Like, how do I. Execute this process. How do I get in the information, coordinate with the people I need to coordinate with and produce the desired outcome for this process, if you haven't named it or thought about it before, the answer is almost certainly the hyperactive hive mind.

So that's that's going to be the answer. See it and know it and own it and then go through each of these and you can do one at a time but say, what can I do now to get rid of the hive mind and again, be willing to be radical, be willing to spend money. Right. I mean, be willing to say I'm hiring someone. I can consolidate these three things with one full time person, I'm going to buy this software or whatever, and we're going to put in this workflow process, be willing to be radical there and write down definitively.

This is how we do this. This is how we do that all the time, trying to minimize how many unscheduled back and forth messages have to happen for this for this process to execute.

You know, where we saw this was when covid changed what was considered the norm. The soapies all changed. So in the real estate world of being an agent, it was always expected. You have to go to a house, you give a presentation, you look at the house, you get the agreement signed. That was just what everybody did. And then covid comes and you can't go to the house anymore. And I didn't have a hard time adapting to this at all is like, listen, guys, all we need is a piece of paper that says we have the right to sell this house.

How we get there is completely up to us. It is, yes, very easy to go to their house and meet them. It builds comfort. It builds rapport. But we can do that on Zoome. We can do that on a phone call. We can do other things to set up that trust that we need to get to this point. And I feel like the people that did exactly what you're saying, that adapted and adjusted and they didn't just say, well, status quo is you have to do this.

We're the ones that came out on top and that went for the world of real estate investing and everything else. I mean, I don't know if this book could have come out at a better time because we're all now trying to rapidly transition and say, like, what I used to do doesn't work anymore. And how do I get on board with the way that is going to work? We're definitely seeing that because two things happen with the forced remote transition that happen during a pandemic.

One, anyone using a hyperactive hive mind found it got more hyperactive, right. When you push everyone remote, suddenly the amount of messaging that goes back and forth, if that's how you normally coordinate things, just exploded. So it made the pain point higher. But to it exposed people to this idea of, oh, we can radically change things and it's OK.

So like you said, with the realization this is happening all over the industry, it's like, oh, I guess we don't have to have an in-person meeting for this. I guess we don't have to have an editor do this right. I guess we can work from all over the country and it does actually function. So it puts you in the mindset of we can do different things at the same time that the pain point of what we're doing right now gets larger and larger.

So I think it's a huge opportunity right now to make these moves as long as everything else is being changed before we just go back and read ossifying to the ways before while everyone is open to doing things differently, now is the time to say, forget busyness. That's nothing. Forget the hive mind. I don't care about flexibility. How do we actually what do we do? How do we do it? What do we do? How do we do it?

Let's optimize, optimize, optimize. And it's a mindset, by the way, that created massive wealth in the industrial sector. The entire essentially wealth on which the developed world was built was this increase in productivity that happened in the 20th century in industrial manufacturing because they began to obsess about how do we actually build things, what's the right way to do it? Is there a better way? Let's let's really think through what's the best way to build a car?

I mean, there's a better way to build a car. Maybe we should have, you know, a lot of innovation. We haven't even started that thinking for the most part at a large scale and knowledge work. So the potential here is massive and I think now's the perfect time to do it.

How does this apply to meetings like does if you try to get more away from the email and more into these more process driven or whatever you want to phrase that? Does that just mean we have more, more and more meetings, or does that lead to less meetings? How do you how do you view meetings and all this? Yeah, so there's a double edged sword with meetings. Right. So the the positive edge of that sword is that real time communication is incredibly more efficient than asynchronous communication.

And I go deeply into this in the book, but essentially, especially if there's voice involved because there's a whole other information channel here than if it's just linguistic. Just text. So mean you're talking with five minutes can do the equivalent of twenty five emails, twenty five emails that are going to be sent back and forth over a week. Each email, which is going to require 10 times we check waiting for it to come in for 250 disruptive email checks.

Avoid it. Right. So that's a positive sign. If we can just talk and work things out, we can do things very quickly. On the negative side of meetings is that there's there's a plague in organizations right now. If what I call productivity by proxy, you basically say, I know we've got to make this is important that there's a project or a milestone. I don't really trust myself to, you know, get this on a list to make a plan for it and execute the thing.

I do trust myself to do those.

If there's a meeting on my calendar, I'll go. Yeah. So here's what we'll do. We'll set up a meeting or we'll set up a recurring meeting. Now, I don't have to worry about it. It's off my mind because, hey, when I get to that day, I'll see there's a meeting and I always attend meetings because I look at my calendar as the one productivity thing I do and therefore I feel good that progress will be made.

And you multiply that by six or seven projects and now all you're ever doing is being in meetings. Once you take this process centric approach. However, here's what happens once we're thinking in general, like how do we execute this thing that happens all the time? If you think that through, you're not going to need three hours of meetings a week where, hey, let's just what's going on with this? How's it going? Because once you start having real systems in place, you're not going to use meetings as a proxy for productivity.

Now, you are going to have probably real time interaction, but it can be structured. It's going to be fast. It's going to not have a very big footprint because you're you know, you're really thinking things through. So so we can we can solve the problems of meetings once we adopt this mindset of just being really explicit about how do we actually want to do this.

So we probably will have more real time conversation with real time conversation.

And we see this in the case studies in the book. It's usually like two very focused 20 minute meetings a day, on top of which many processes are quickly synchronized, plus maybe like a couple general office hours that people hold that takes care of everything else that pops up. Right. So real time communication, fantastic. But a relatively limited amount of that can do a lot of work if you're very careful about it.

Makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. So, Brandon, you've got a family, you're running several different businesses, you're in several different parts. You're writing books, you're you're doing a lot and you have a ton of communication that has to happen. But at the same time, you're someone that I really respect because you've committed I'm only going to put this much time in a day towards work. You have to be efficient. Do you mind sharing with our listeners some of the ways you're applying what Carl is talking about?

And then maybe we can see if Cal will give you some coaching right here on how you could do that better?

Sure. Yeah. And I love that the reason I ask about the meeting thing, because I, I feel this this dichotomy, this problem of like like a phrase that I say a lot is we will move at the speed at which we meet. If I meet with my team once a month, we'll move very, very slowly. If I met with them every single day, twice a day to say what's the next thing that we going to do?

We would move very, very, very quickly at the same time. So it's exactly you said, Cal, that there's that meetings do help, but we move very quickly. We identify the problems. Meetings also become very routine and very boring and very much like you just put it on your schedule because people don't want to make a decision. A lot of meetings are simply because people are afraid to step up and take ownership of a problem. And just to answer something, I found that in my in my life.

And so the way that we have solved this is I guess it's exactly what you just said. We implemented a system called EOS. I've talked about it a number of times here on the show. It's based on a book called Traction by Gina Whitman, came out a few years ago. And it's basically an operating system for your entrepreneurial business. Right. So the whole idea is like this is how you do. It's all like this is how you do the process of hiring.

This is how do you bring on your core values. This is what when you meet, this is how you meet. This is what your meeting is. This is how it's done. And so what I found is that. By meeting more intentionally with my team, and literally it's one time a week now we meet, we I've got down to a meeting one time a week now. My team meets on their own several times with different departments. But we have one company meeting once a week.

And in that one hour call, because we are very deliberate on how the meeting is run, it eliminated probably 10 hours of meetings that I was in beside that, because now we have the right kind of meeting, the right kind of structure. And so that's how I've been able to run. A lot of my life is off like one meeting a week. Like I probably meet once a week for bigger pockets. I meet once a week for open or capital stuff, and because we run them correctly, we're able to get through.

So now as much as like the whole idea of we will move at the speed at which we meet, which is still true to a degree today, I like to say there's a lot of freedom in limited structure, meaning like it's structure, but it's limited to like a set amount of time and location and place. And so we meet every Thursday, 9:00 a.m. we knock out our call and we move on. So that's kind of how I've done that.

How does that jive with your with your thoughts? Well, it's perfect.

I mean, I get into that in the book, like the structured structured meetings, structured meetings that are part of a structured process. Is that is that is the secret sauce. Right. And there's there's various structures that have been successful, like, for example, these agile methodology inspired processes. They have this whole structure of of the standing status meeting. Its standing is kind of a you're supposed to stand up. It's a very quick but it's incredibly structured.

What happened yesterday? What are you working on today? What do you need? Right. That's the structure there. Boom, boom, boom. I cite this interesting paper in the book about a professor, a professor at University of Maryland, a computer scientist who brought this over to his research group. And he gathered a lot of data because he's a nerd like me. Right? So he's like, what works? What then it work. And tuning that just right made all the difference.

If that meeting got fifteen minutes more slack, it fell apart.

And they really it was like getting it just right. It's the right frequency, the right structure. They really take it seriously just just like you're doing. The other example is like what we see the sort of background research meeting protocols you would see like Jeff Bezos famously did in the book. I talk about George Marshall, who was in charge of all the US armed forces during World War Two, who finished work by 5:00 every day. By the way, he did this as well, which is like, OK, if you're going to meet with me, you know, here's how it's going to happen.

You're going to have completely thought through what's going on.

You're going to prepared an understanding of, OK, here's the issue and how we're going to solve the issue. You're going to a very clear like, OK, this is the question I have or where I need your input. And if you weren't completely prepared, Marshall is going to kick you out of there. Bezos actually made you put this in writing. You had to submit it to him in writing in advance of this meeting, everything explained. Here's the background.

Here's the point of the meeting. Here's the decision point we can't make without input. Here's the thing. Here's the actual input we need to make this decision. If that didn't pass muster, he wasn't walking into the room. Right. And so that's another way of structuring meetings. But structure is everything with meetings. And you don't have structure until you're thinking in terms of processes, which is why I love more generally the iOS idea, which again, I get into traction is a great book.

I get in the Sam Carpenter, you know, Michael Gerber talks about this and the impact of all of these. This idea comes up again and again in entrepreneurial circles. And I'm trying to push it in the broader circles, including like your own life, your own life as an employee. It's incredibly systems focused. And I think people get nervous about this sometimes. Right, because they think knowledge work is creative. You know, you've got to have autonomy.

We can't take this, you know, writing computer code and make it into an assembly line. And this is really true. And my big point is we have to separate execution from all the workflows that surround the work that's executed. When you have knowledge workers, lots of autonomy on how you write the computer code, how you come up with the whatever ad copy. Great. That's creative work. You're skilled. This is what makes knowledge work satisfying.

But everything that surrounds it, like how we figure out what ads we're working on, how we get reproval, how we move the assets around, we better believe that we're going to systematize and process, you know, that six ways to Sunday. Because that is where you get the sort of huge returns, that's where you're able to take these human brains and get the most out of them because they're not stuck in this morass of informal ad hoc on the fly type organizing.

So this is great, but you don't need to read the book.

I think both of you guys basically should just be you should just be a chapter in the book itself.

Well, thank you. I still I probably I'm showing my my highlight reel here. I still spend way too much time on email and on completely shallow work. I spend the majority of my time on so but thank you very kind of you to say so.

Let's relate this a little bit to people who maybe aren't in like I don't say not knowledge work. And I think most people are going to be in some type of knowledge work, especially with real estate investing. It's largely I mean, it's almost entirely knowledge work unless you're out there actually fixing toilets and stuff. But how does this apply to the person who's maybe like, well, I don't have a big team of people. I'm just trying to you know, I'm working with a real estate agent.

I got a contractor. We're just trying to, like, buy houses occasionally and fix them up. Like, does this stuff apply to them as well? On a smaller scale, maybe? Yeah, I think everyone could be doing this and you can be doing this just in your own life. And one of the places that comes up is when you talk about employees at big companies, for example, where their boss is not on board. Right.

They're not Cal Newport fans.

It's like no, answer my email. Right.

Even in those situations, if you identify still I'm going to my inbox and every email what process this associated with, write them all down. Here's my processes. OK, let me try to optimize each of these to minimize the back and forth. If you asymmetrically optimize these, just given what I can control, I can't control anyone else. Just given what I can control, how can I reduce or minimize the amount of back and forth messaging required for each of these processes?

Even in that context, it's a huge win. So if you're an independent, you're just getting started in real time investing. Maybe you're doing it on the side. Do this from the ground up. Here's my processes. Write them down. Here's my iOS. They're used to working in terminology. And just keep in mind, the metric is I want to minimize back and forth. In fact, this becomes even more important for people who are side hustling this at the moment because they have to minimize that cognitive footprint to some degree.

Right. I mean, there at the insurance agency all day and doing zoom meetings with the H.R. department or whatever, they only have so much time available.

So if you actually want to supercharge a side hustle for something like this, start with that process thinking. I tell the story in the book about I ran a company when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I ran a tech company and I was in high school.

And this was before smartphones and this was before laptops. I was literally unreachable. There was no way I was in school and there's no way you could reach me. But we're running a company. We had a team in India that was doing the development work. We had clients that were paying like reasonable like five, five figure style contracts, which were big for high school student at the time.

And we had to figure that out. And so we got aggressively process focus. We have to figure out every process here so that these clients will be completely comfortable even though they can't reach us, and even though that's what they're used to with other people. I can just call you up on the phone or I can just shoot you an email. And so we just sort of process the hell out of that. Right. It's like, okay, here's our extranet.

You're going to log in. There's a work blogs. You can see what the team was working on. So you won't be worried about that. There's clear milestones. Every document is posted in there once you sign it. We have these clear we had this creative brief process to make sure that everyone was on the same page of what we're doing. We process the hell out of it, and we were able to run a business with basically no back and forth communication.

I think about that today when I think about Site Hustle's because it's kind of the same idea.

If you're careful about these processes to minimize the back and forth you need with messaging, you can really keep the footprint very reasonable and not have it be something that is competing with your attention and draining your energy throughout your whole day when you're trying to do everything else.

That's so good. That's so good. It reminds me even like somebody who's just trying to flip a house, try to flip their first house or second house or the house flipper there, got a big rehab going on like a lot of what takes place, the going back and forth with a contractor, the back and forth with a oh, it's all systematised, like every single bit of it. I mean, I have friends. I've never done this than I should.

But like who would have? They have a workbook that has upsides of, like, every single item at Home Depot that they would buy and alternates if they're out of the first thing. And so it's like, oh, yeah, this is the paint we use. This is the brand we use. This is the final look. Here's a picture of it. And they do their entire rehab. And so guys like I mean, Yarber is a friend of mine.

He lives out here in Maui or at least staying in Maui right now. And he he flips lots of houses. And yet he like he told me that he's like, yeah, I never even stepped foot in them anymore. I got he's in Maui for six months. At least now he doesn't walk through the flips that he's doing. Why? Because it's all systematize and processed. And again, it could be a person on their own, their very first thing.

But just thinking that way, which is why this interview is so important, is once we our minds are going that way of what are these process that we can build, everything just becomes easier, because at the end of the day, I, I love to say that. Almost everything that we think we're making like a judgment call on in our heads, like, oh, should I, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter, should I date that person?

Should I paint that building blue or red? Everything is actually a like a computer program or running in our head. It's an algorithm that we're we're we're running so we can take that out of our head and put it on a piece of paper or into a workflow or into a Sarna. Now, all of a sudden, everything is easier. One example would be repairs with rental properties. When you own rental properties, you've got to account for some kind of repairs that happen on a regular basis.

So how much do you account for? Is it five percent of the rent? Is it 10 percent of the rent? Is it 20 percent? So every investors like we're making this up every time on our own. When we're analyzing a property, we're just trying to, like, win it. But when we really sit down and go, well, what am I actually doing? What is the process I'm doing right now? Like, I realize and I put this actually in a future book that doesn't come out for another six months or so.

I'm writing a book on multifamily, but I took that whole thing and I was like, let's just make that an algorithm that we can say, what are all the factors, the age of the property, the condition of the property, this, this, this, this. Now we can put out a piece of paper and now I can have a 15 year old assistant, high school kid. They can run my deal analysis because I just took what was in my head and put it on paper.

So, I mean, that's just a long, drawn out way of explaining, of explaining. I like what you're doing. That's good stuff.

Well, yeah. And so so part of what happens here and why people don't do this enough is, well, they think what they're trying to optimize is time. Right. And so it takes time up front the build out and figure out one of these systems. Whereas in the moment it doesn't take much time to send that one email you're sending in the moment as part of a dozen is going to be sent like it's quick for me to be like, no, I don't like that paint color.

Make it look like that's just real quick. I sent an email, whereas I have to sit down and copy the pieces, one that's going to take time, but that's the wrong metric. But you're not trying to minimize it seems like what people are really trying to minimize is like, OK, take the longest amount of time contiguously I ever spend on this. I want to minimize that. Yeah. That'll lead you to do in emails all the time.

But we're really trying to minimize is the what's the cognitive footprint, how much like back and forth, how much am I going to have to monitor and be responsive to this thing that's happening here on my email or on slack before this gets done? That's the real cost. And I think the real estate analogy here is it's like some sort of repair based carrying cost because we're used to that in real estate. Right. OK, yeah, it costs a little bit more money up front what I'm doing.

But if that reduces my monthly outlay very quickly, I'm going to be in the black on this decision. Well, this is just like a cognitive carrying cost, right? You do the work up front to figure out how to make these systems workouts more up front. But you're reducing this carry every month. And by Kerry, I just you know, again, in this context, I mean, how much I have to be responsive and talk to people and do unscheduled back and forth.

And you're going to end up way, way in the black. So don't think about my message to the audience is like you're not optimizing time. Yeah. You're optimizing back and forth interactions. And that if you can get that low, I mean, I'll put a lot of time in up front if you can guarantee me that I don't have to answer an email for the next month. After that, I said, hey, let's take a quick break from this episode.

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Today, you know, another area of my life that this really applies to is property management, like owning rental property, then having to manage tenants. I would say ninety nine point nine nine percent of everything involved with managing tenants is systematize Zable and can be put into a workbook like I mean, I wrote a book on managing rentals for that very reason. Like this is like everything can be written down on how you deal with this stuff. So like I don't deal with emails, I don't even do calls.

I don't deal with any of that stuff with tenants. And most most everything now is digital. It's on a website. They handle it. I even just things that you think would be a completely absurd like, hey, you know, there was a fire in my unit. Like, there's a system, there's a process that you can handle that stuff. And so it's just amazing how much can actually be systematized and then how easy that thing becomes when the system runs out rather than running it.

David, are you going to say something there? I think I cut you off.

Yeah, I wanted to ask about what advice he has for those that are hearing this message, but maybe they're not. How would I describe this? I know I didn't value this until I got super busy and I realized what a drain this was on me. And then my performance was affected because I just had no energy when I wasn't doing a lot. I didn't value energy or your time. Those emails, they're almost a welcome distraction when you don't have anything going on or you don't want to get on the phone and make phone calls or there's something that you're uncomfortable with.

What's gets to be like addicting to just say I'm answering emails and it becomes your escape out. Do you mind sharing some advice of what you found for those that don't yet maybe understand how valuable this is and why they should? Well, it's a good point.

And it's something for the last whatever, ten months the pandemic's been going on. For example, I've been talking about this a lot on my podcast. So I have this podcast where people ask questions and we go back and forth. Right. And so these type of issues come up a lot. We ended up actually coining this term the deep life where you have different buckets of your life and you're really trying to go in and optimize each focus on what matters and get rid of what doesn't matter.

So in some sense, if you have these other areas of your life that is important, like community contemplation, constitution was my term for like your health or this or that, other areas that are very important that you're taking very seriously and you're focusing on things that matter and trying to get rid of things that don't matter. It gives you a nice pressure on your work and puts you more into a mindset of I want to get done what matters and not waste time on what doesn't.

And I've been preaching this for the last ten months cause I think it's what a lot of people need right now is to get more systematic outside of the context of work. I have these buckets I've craft. It's what we call we're needlessly alliterative. But craft is the work stuff, right? But then you got community and you have contemplation, which could be like ethics and philosophy and spirituality. You have what we sometimes call it celebration, but like the stuff you enjoy doing and get real pleasure out of and gratitude for the things that you know, the non-work stuff you have real expertise in.

And you go bucket by bucket and say, I want to go in there and 80-20 this. What's the stuff that really matters? I want that to be in my life. What's the stuff that gets in the way? I want to reduce it. And when that's your mindset for your whole life, work falls into place. And if you're not doing this on any of these other buckets, then you can end up, you're right, filling your time with email or something like that, because busyness, you'll do that and you'll numb yourself on your phone.

Otherwise, write YouTube, social media and email. But that is not a sustainable strategy. I think a lot of people burnt out with this over the pandemic. You know, the resilience comes from actually thinking through. Here's what matters in my life. I want to do the stuff that matters. I will make time for it. Right. So do that whole if you do that whole overhaul in your whole life. It puts the right pressure on work, it also, by the way, probably will prevent your work from getting to that point where you're just completely overwhelmed.

You're doing this stuff out of a survival instinct and even then, you don't have time for the other things.

And I didn't used to talk about these issues, but there has been a huge interest, I would say, and pressure and trying to figure out these bigger issues of a more resilient, meaningful life. And so, again, on that podcast for the last 10 months, we get into that like we we really get into it.

And there's been a great response because you're absolutely right. The rest of your life really matters how you approach what's happening in work.

And that makes sense. A call I got a couple of questions here, I'm going to get to all of them today, I got a whole bunch for you.

But I'm curious, like in researching this book, like as you were putting together the the research and the book and reading all the articles and all that stuff, anything surprise you?

Anything in there, just be like, wow, I didn't I didn't expect that. Or, you know, that's a super interesting thing. I just think that's an interesting question to ask. Author So anything surprise you in there? Well, one of the things I didn't expect was the accidental nature of this way, of working right.

I sort of assumed this is convenient for bosses or something like this or some reason why we switch to let's do lots and lots of communication all the time, which is rock and roll on the inboxes. And I went down this whole rabbit hole in the research on a corner of the philosophy of technology known as technological determinism and technological determinism. Is this this idea of understanding society and technology that argues that a lot of cases, the mere presence of a new technology, can really impact how people behave in a way that no one unplanned, like unintentional.

Right. It's not serving a particular purpose. It's not part of an agenda. It's not because it gets this group from A to B. Just the mere presence of that technology just changes the way that we behave. And it's pretty arbitrary. And sometimes it could be in our benefit. A lot of times it's not. I'm pretty convinced. I'm pretty convinced that email is and I'm not email itself. But this way, this hyperactive hive mind working way that we did after email got here, it's an accident that the mere presence of this low friction digital communication tool stumbled us into this way of working.

And then once we're in there, we're stuck because we have this focus on autonomy and knowledge work. And that was the second surprise. I wrote a whole New Yorker article on this recently. One guy, Peter Drucker, one guy, basically coined the term knowledge work in the 1950s and spent the next 50 years convincing everyone autonomy, autonomy, autonomy, objectives matter, but don't tell anyone else how to work. And so that was also really interesting.

So we accidentally fell into this way of working. And because of one guy's influence, we were convinced it's not my business to tell my employees how they should work. It's not my business to think about what's the best way to organize. That's up to the individual. They should be a productivity book if they want to be more organized. And so we got stuck. I had no idea either those things were true until I got started. No idea that this was an accident, no idea that we're stuck because of one person convinced us that we shouldn't really monkey around with how work actually happens in organizations.

And so those were two very surprising, very fascinating threads that ended up pulling pretty hard.

That makes sense. A couple more questions. No. One, key challenges. What did you what did you face when writing this or anything? Just like either as an author or from the information? Well, it took me a long time to write this book. You know, I started writing this book immediately after deep work came out because I really wanted to understand why is it so hard to do? Why is it so hard to do deep work?

Right. And it wasn't nearly as casual as I made out in that book. Deep Work, which is like, well, whatever. We have too much email, we'll fix it once we realize focus is important. Like, nope, it is a huge, deep problem. It's the way we organize all of our work, you know. So I've been working to work on the book for a long time. I put it on pause, wrote digital minimalism, came back to keep working on it.

Right. Because to me it was such an epic topic and people were so far from it. Right. It wasn't like this was everyone was about to have this idea that I didn't feel any particular urgency. So to pull together all these threads was a real, real challenge. Right? I mean, I get into the whole history of how email spreads. I'm deep in The New York Times archives trying to trace every use of the word email through the year, the 1980s to try to figure out how it spread.

I had to figure out all about the philosophy of technology and technological determinism. I had to talk to all these researchers about what happens in our brain when you're constantly context shifting and why that happens. I got really deep into the psychology of why we get really anxious about email, and that led me to the studying Hunter-Gatherer groups in Africa that they put sensors on to try to understand the role of interaction one on one interaction. And it's evolutionary fitness and why, therefore, an overflowing inbox, why that stresses us out.

I had to go deep on understanding the Industrial Revolution and how that happened. And then pulling all this. I mean, it was it was a challenge I haven't had before in a book, the amount of completely diverse fields that had to come together to really understand. This is how we got here. This is why it's bad. This is what we need to do. What I should have done, of course, is just say, Brandon and David, because I just just ask them how they do it.

Right. We just get Brandon zoster and rock and roll.

I was going to say this is why I love authors who dive into topics like this and why I love all your books, because like you did hundreds of hours of research that I don't have to do now, like I read and I got everything I needed, so much easier, much, much easier.

I tell people all the time that Cal is like my spirit animal that I read so good they can't ignore you. I just wanted to like I was on an airplane. I want to get up and scream like, yes, this is what the world needs. Like there's this this pain that so many people are in that they can't get what they want and they believe it's hopeless and they believe everything is set against them. And they they come up with all these elaborate explanations for why they're not happy.

And it's so simple, like you're just not that good. And that good news is you haven't even tried yet to be good, OK? Like, if you just gave the smallest effort at being better at what you did, you would find out it's really not that far away from where you're trying to go. And just to highlight, like what Cal is talking about, how this applies to us as real estate investors. When I wrote long distance real estate investing, many people said, this is crazy.

You can't buy a house without seeing it. I heard this is a no win. Objection is this is reckless. David is telling to buy people to buy a house they've never seen. And I would have to come back and say, what do you know about what you're looking at? OK, like when I pop the hood of my car, when it breaks down and, you know, like you get outside and you open it up, none of us know what we're actually trying to see there.

Nobody does. Right. We're not mechanics. And there's some things like visibly smoking. I don't know what that thing is. A mechanic is the one that has to look at it. When you're buying a house, the home inspector needs to review it and tell you and you need to let them interpret what they're doing. You don't have to be there. And then with br this whole idea that you've got to pay your down payment when you buy the house, that you can't buy it, fix it up and then finance, it was like revolutionary thinking to so many people that had said this is the way we do it.

But to those of us that were in it, it was sort of common sense. We looked at it like, well, why are we doing that? That's dumb. You're going to put all the money down, then you're going to fix it up and then you're going to rent it out. You're going to leave eighty thousand bucks in this house. But Cal is like the front runner of challenging this ineffective way of thinking that just follow the leader, just get in front of the lemming in front of me and just go where they're going.

Email comes in. I have to answer it. A person has a question. I have to reply, you know, meetings there. I have to show up on our team. We make sure before you come to a meeting, I know what the thing is that you have to get answers for that. Only I can answer. You cannot come and ask a question that you could have asked somebody else before you even came to the meeting. And to me, that was kind of common sense.

Let's make this as efficient as we can, but everyone else shows up and they wait for someone to tell them what to do. So for those that will embrace this, even if you think this doesn't apply to where you're at right now, just like start conditioning your mind to look at everything, like, why do I have to do it that way? It will open up doors that can literally change your life in such amazing ways. It's why Brandon's in Hawaii and it's why I'm in Cabo and we'll call you have like a white background behind.

You can't really see where you are, but I'm sure you get to go cool places when you want to go there.

I used to be able to, but. Yeah, but you're absolutely right, though. Yeah, but David, you're absolutely right. Right. I mean, go back to first principles like that's that's my whole thing is I go back to first principles. If there's a pain point, I go back to first principles. Why couldn't we do deep work.

Everyone had an answer, but everyone's answer is just, oh, here's the thing that's annoying me. It fit some agenda I have or it's just internally consistent. It was also superficial and it's all such a posturing at a high level. And I said, OK, maybe let's go back to first principles.

When that email first get invented, what were the first companies to use it? What did it look like in nineteen ninety versus today? Why did it change? And doing that in almost every aspect of your life I think is a good way of summarizing my work. I think it's really important. Here's like a twist on that. This is a very cool new porting twist. If you want to do more of this type of original thinking to figure out from first principles like how do I do this better, that better, I honestly think excessive social media use and of course, I was going to bring it back here, has some sort of negative influence there because we check in on social media interaction.

It's a whole different ballgame. It's more about like, what team am I on and what's going to get approved of by what I say? And it's just a completely different way of thinking that I think is counter to first principle thinking, which in business, for example, is can be very important. I think the fact that I don't use social media helps me think about things as diverse as career trajectory or email or how to run a company because it gets you out of this mindset of what important what's important is like demonstrating the right allegiance or getting the right applause for what you pointed out.

And I don't care about any of that. I'm not on any of those things. I just sat silently for five years with stacks of books in anois researchers, you know. So, yeah, of course, I'm going to bring it back to, like, maybe use less social media and your business. How will be more? I don't know how that quite works, but I always bring it back there somehow, especially clubhouse. Yeah, yeah, everyone's on that clubhouse is the perfect example of a waste of time, because why am I doing it?

Because everyone's doing it. Well, how does that help me? And then you just hear crickets.

Yeah. So I was actually going to ask you about if your your lack of social media has changed. I remember that surprised me. And a lot of people last time you were on the show is you didn't have social media and you're not a not a social media addict like the rest of us.

And now you have a podcast, though, and I feel like part of me says, well, now he's got a podcast. He obviously needs social media to promote a podcast. Right. Like a part of your life, I feel like would dictate your social media, but you sell it. You still don't. So has that changed? Have you been tempted to do that because that might help your podcast? Or is that just a limiting belief that you need to have a big social media to try to grow a podcast?

Look, if I use social media, probably in the short term, I could get more podcast listeners. I mean, I don't quite know how that works.

I actually don't either. I don't know if that actually helps. Yeah, I don't know. I don't I don't know how it works. I mean, I don't know what a clubhouse is. I don't know what a tick tock is.

I'm sure if I guess if I was if I was clubhouse in a tick tock, I mean maybe it would get me more podcast listeners, but in the long run I would stop doing the types of things, would make people want to listen to my podcast in the first place. So I don't know. I'm sure I'm leaving book sales on the table. I'm sure I'm leaving podcast subscribers because I'm not, you know, doing those things. But I am not.

I care. I mean, I don't know. I want to do interesting things. I a big ideas. Right. Interesting ideas. I started the podcast or in the pandemic because I want to do in speaking and I sort of missed interacting with people about my my work. And so the podcast was a way it's all interactive. I it's like a Dave Ramsey show. I just like callers to call in writing, like here's my here's my problem and I'm overwhelmed by email or my life is, you know, I feel like I have no meaning and and I, you know, do my Dave Ramsey impression and getting advice.

I just wanted to talk to people. And it's I don't I deserve better than I deserve. Better than I deserve. Yeah. Doing fine. And I deserve a yell at people about credit cards and. Yeah. But anyways, I don't know. Right. I prefer I call it the deep life. Like what are the big things that matter. Let me double down on those, try to get rid of the distractions. Have you seen any wonder in this pandemic, by the way, who, who has said, you know, come out of however many months and be like, I'll tell you, the one thing I did love during this pandemic was my social being on social media, definitely being on Twitter and finding out the ways in which, you know, the virus was sneaking in on my food and and is going to infect me.

All bad news. All that. All bad news. Right. No one's happy about being on Twitter. No one's happy about spending a lot of time on YouTube during the pandemic.

So, like, I don't know, it's probably helped me in that my I can I can draw a complete correlation to my happiness level in a given week and the number of hours I spend on my phone or social media. I mean, it is a direct correlation and I know that. And I still struggle with it. And it's always new social media have to be brought all the time. The big one that you mentioned, the clubhouse clubhouse is basically you just get on there and you talk with people like you're on a stage.

I think a panel at a conference. You're at a conference as a panelist. That's five panelists on stage and there's one hundred people listening. That's clubhouse. So digital, right? Just talk. And everyone that's the big thing right now is Clubhouse and Nygård. David and I both have talked about like were they like I have a profile there. I don't think David does. I'm not sure it benefits me, which goes back to like deep work and digital minimalism.

Is this idea of like instead of just saying, hey, that's a new technology, let's adopt it, it's asking the question, does this actually get me closer to the things that I want? Like you said, you want to you want to think these big thoughts. You want to write books to influence people. Does clubhouse get you? They're probably not going to get David to get more clients that as a real estate agent, probably not. So we've kind of avoided that.

David, anything you want to add on that?

Because I know you're the you're the anti clubhouse guy lately, just to think of it that way, that not one person who's told me I should be on clubhouse could actually give me an objective reason how it helped me with any of my goals. But yet every one of them felt compelled to say, you have to do this. And when I said why, it was because everybody's doing it, that was the only reason. And that is the exact kind of thinking that leads to you answering every single email in your inbox.

Why are you answering that? Well, because it's there is just a remove yourself a little bit from that perspective and you'll start to see the things that really matter in accomplishing your goals.

Yeah, I always say, like, don't don't worry so much about missing out on things you don't know about. Worry instead about not spending time on the things that you already know for sure are very valuable.

That's where the big one is. There's a small number of things in each area of your life that you know for sure are big wins and important. Doubling the time you spend on those is mathematically going to give you a much bigger benefit in your life than taking that same limited time and spreading it over all of these other little unknown things, each of which generates much less value.

That's really, really a good way of looking at that. I really like that a lot. How? Well, it's a good way to kind of begin wrapping things up here. Now, we are going to go to the last segment of the show. Here it is called. Our famous father for all right, the famous for this is the same four questions we ask every guest every week, and I know we threw them at you last time. Calvet, the first question has changed since last time you're on the show.

So the question is, what is a habit or trait that you're currently trying to develop or improve in your life?

Is there anything you're focused on right now trying to improve a habit or trait that I mean. Yes, so I metric track all the time. I'm a big metric tracking guy. So I'm always, always I have a collection of metrics that I'm always evolving. And every single day I, I write down these metrics, like I could probably grab my planner right now. So that's always evolving. So I'm going to think, what have I added? Well, so I added for sure during the pandemic, a metric about news consumption that drastically, drastically reduced it.

And I was going to check that off. Yes or no every day. Did I look at news only during the set time in the subway or did I do doom school style checks throughout the day. Right. And it was either yes or no. And I didn't want to put no, and it saved me. I had such a compulsion, especially when there wasn't to like kind of bad news going on, but like maybe I'll see something out there that's saying it's not as bad as you think.

It'll make me feel better. It was a huge waste. So like a metric just for that. And it was either yes or no. And not wanting to put down no was like actually really, actually really helped me reshape that during the pandemic. I also decided I need to be outside for close to ten to fifteen thousand steps a day outside every single day. And I tracked that down to the step. Made a huge difference. Right. And just being out there, getting the sunlight moving, that was new.

I hadn't I hadn't prioritized that as much before. So I think that was a big one. But more generally, I track all this stuff and I'm constantly changing when I track.

Yeah, it's a good man. I love that. I track everything as well and very similar where I'm checking all the stuff. So I made a big impact. On my cool side note for you.

Do you still write your books in your head while you're outside doing those walks?

Yes, I do. I do a lot of work, a lot of article, writing, book writing and math, proof solving in my head on foot. I'm still seen as the crazy professor at Takoma Park because I just I'm walking without a dog. And I'm going to ask just a quick aside, by the way, I was a little bit worried.

I've been worried recently because my route goes past a well known congressman's house and he has police protection right now. So there's always Capitol policemen parked outside of of his house because he was helping to run the impeachment or something like this.

I literally got worried, like I'm always walking, walking by here. It's a nice road I like they're going to arrest me at some point. This is going to be this is going to be. It is. They're going to be like, all right, for sure. You're up to something no good. I literally be worried about most of your muttering to yourselves.

That's good. OK, you mentioned a couple of the iOS books. Do you have a favorite business book you can share?

OK, so it's a good question. I have a hard time. I have a hard time. Just with favorites are hard for me because I there's so many different categories. But when it comes to iOS type stuff, I really like work the system, this sort of underground self published book. Sam Carpenter is the writer and I think it's just right to it.

Like here is how you systematise things and why you need the systematise things. And so, like in that particular space, I liked it. In time management. It's a tie between Covey and Allen. Right. I mean, Allen's notion of the psychological impact of task, game changer. So getting things done is is a crucial book. Covey, however, had this crucial idea of productivity fits within a larger scheme of building a deeper life. And he had his quadrants.

And and so like in the productivity space, those two books, those two books are really close to me. I don't know the entrepeneur. When I was a little kid, I read this old biography of Bill Gates. The author's name was Mayne's M.A. in. Yes. And that completely threw me down a trajectory. I started a business I went into I went into computer science and so I can give category favorite.

So. So those are a few. That's great. That's very helpful. Actually, I like the way you answer that question. Now, people have some stuff they can go pursue. What about some hobbies?

You know, I have too many kids, so I don't have three kids. I don't have a ton of time that I'm not doing family stuff. Even though my work I mainly constrained to nine to five. I'm just wrangling kids all the time. And I would say, you know, most of the time I spend when I'm not wrangling kids or working or just trying to keep reasonably in shape, as I read all the time. And so so reading is probably my my main hobby.

If I had I look forward to, by the way, having more time for hobbies, I just get these kids a little bit older.

I think they'll be a new golden age. So I'm looking forward to learning how to, I don't know, build a canoe or something.

I know I'm in the I'm in the same phase right now. I like the four year old and a one year old. And I look at people like David. I'm like, you have so much time of your life.

It's amazing. It was I remember it was like back then, it was glorious, some day it will return to us one day. All right, last question for me. What do you think separates successful, if you like, really boil it down? What separates successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?

I think first principles matter. So whether you like the answer or not, figuring out this is what moves the needle here, this is what's required here, knowing what moves the needle and being able to then get more of your energy on the things that actually matter, that what seems to distinguish success from not success. Right.

Also, it helps you move navigate properly. OK, OK. This is what would actually be required if I don't know, real estate. Well, but I could imagine. You're getting on the first principles. You know, you're reading David and Brandon's books like you're getting down to. You're figuring out how this stuff really works. And like, OK, I want to I want to make money in real estate once you really understand how it works and what's required and it's like, oh, I could I could I could do multifamily properties and I could manage this money and I can do it long distance.

I didn't realize that. So let me put my energy there. But this idea I had of, you know, I want skyscrapers or something, right? You're like, oh, I see. That's going to require a hundred dollars billion in capital. And that to get there, you have to go this route. And and that's not I'm not well suited for that or that's not really open to me. So it also helps you navigate away from the shoals you can't pass and towards the things you can't.

So I think that is key is getting down to not what you want to matter, not the things that feel like it's kind of hard, but not too hard. Not the not the the glamour stuff. Like I want to I want to do this because it'll be fun to write my hundred words a day and then I'll be an author type stuff and get down to like what would really be required, what works, what energy does it take, what's that path look like?

You just get the real story. Yeah. And then once you have the real story now you can do everything.

Phenomenal answer a really really, really like that. Well that said. Got to get out of here. David Greene, you want to close up shop? Oh, you got to close up shop with the last question. That's exactly what I meant. Yeah.

Where can people find out more about you? Well, I'll be on clubhouse for the next six hours, so just you can get the address on my Tick-Tock account and I'll dance. All right.

So so. So Cal Newport Dotcom I that's where my weekly newsletter is. I've been writing for a long time since 2007. My podcast has deep questions and that's about it, right? It's fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been phenomenal, as always. I love learning from you. I love reading your stuff. And I just tell everyone about all your books all the time. So keep it up, keep writing. And everyone go check out Cal's newest book, Its World Without Email Them. I say that correct. A world without email. Yep. All right.

Well, thank you, David. You want to get us out of here? Thank you, Carl. You're out here doing God's work. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Thank you. This is David Greene for Brandon, all kids and no time Turner signing off.

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