You're Not Lazy — Your Life Was Designed Wrong (Here’s How To Take It Back) | David Dewane

Summary

In this episode of 'Indepth', host Cal Newport welcomes college friend David Dewane, an architect known for creating the Udimonia machine, which is designed for deep work while minimizing distractions. The conversation delves into how modern office spaces can inspire deep focus and Dewane’s ongoing mission to design optimal work environments. Alongside discussing design, they also navigate Dewane's personal 'life engineering', exploring how he systematically aligns his lifestyle with his personal values, particularly through projects like developing his farm during COVID-19. Techniques like the Collins score are highlighted, where Dewane scores each day to assess personal fulfillment. This wide-ranging conversation offers insights into cultivating a life of intention and depth both in work environments and personal life projects.

Highlights

• David Dewane is noted for his 'Udimonia machine', a design promoting deep work featured in Cal Newport's book 'Deep Work'. 📚
• Dewane discusses how his designs aim to improve office environments to reduce distractions and enhance focus. 🏢
• Living intentionally, Dewane explains his transformation via innovative lifestyle choices like his Wisconsin farm. 🚜
• The discussion covers the Collins score to enhance personal life engineering by rating personal fulfillment daily. 🔢

Key Takeaways

• David Dewane's Udimonia machine revolutionizes workspace design by prioritizing deep work and minimizing distractions. 🏗️
• Dewane's life-engineering approach shows how intentional alteration of living conditions, like his farm development, enhances life satisfaction. 🌾
• The Collins score is a unique measure Dewane uses to gauge daily personal fulfillment, indicating the importance of tracking subjective experiences. 📊
• A strategic, designed life, as Dewane demonstrates, offers a balance of professional focus and personal contentment. 🎯
• The power of environment on productivity and creativity illustrates the impact of intentional space design in both personal and professional realms. 🌐

Overview

Cal Newport hosts architect David Dewane, best known for the Udimonia machine, on a mission to transform workspaces by designing environments that promote deep work. He elaborates on how such designs can significantly impact focus and productivity by minimizing distractions.

Beyond architecture, Dewane shares about his personal life design - a journey to deeper living. He recounts his transition to a country lifestyle, balancing a bustling city life during weekdays, and spending weekends on a personally-engineered farm inspired by his familial roots and a desire to slow down life's pace.

Central to Dewane’s ethos is the Collins score, a system to track daily personal fulfillment, which aids in identifying and maximizing life satisfaction. This method underlines the conversation, weaving between discussions on workspace design and personal lifestyle engineering, exploring the synergy of environment and productivity.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Guest Introduction In this chapter, Cal Newport introduces the series 'Indepth,' where he engages in conversations with fascinating individuals about living a deep and meaningful life. He expresses his enthusiasm for the guest of the day, David Dwayne, who is a long-time friend and an architect. David Dwayne is notable for his idea called the 'Udimodia Machine,' which is mentioned in Cal's book 'Deep Work.'
• 00:30 - 03:00: The Udemonia Machine and Its Impact This chapter explores the concept of the Udemonia Machine, a theoretical office space designed to optimize deep work while minimizing distractions. The idea originated from a published book and gained significant attention, inspiring someone to create a physical version. David, the creator, now collaborates with an innovative firm focused on shaping the future of office environments for knowledge workers, addressing both physical and conceptual aspects.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Life Engineering and Deep Life In this chapter, the discussion focuses on the relationship between physical spaces and mental processes, particularly how different environments can enhance or impede deep concentration and productivity. The conversation delves into the design of spaces from large offices to personal workspaces, examining how each setting influences creative and cognitive functions. Additionally, David, a guest on the show, is highlighted for his systematic approach to understanding and optimizing these spatial interactions to foster better thinking and work habits.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Sponsor Message - Dun Daily This chapter focuses on an interview with an individual who excels in 'life engineering' - the art of shaping one's life towards depth and fulfillment. The discussion delves into his current lifestyle, how he organized it, and the pivotal moments and unique tools that facilitated his journey. A notable highlight is the conversation about the 'Collins score,' a concept introduced by the interviewee, which serves as a tool for enhancing life quality.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Interview with David Dwayne Begins The chapter introduces a wide-ranging conversation with David Dwayne, focusing on gaining more focus in current spaces or adding depth to life moving forward. It highlights the presenter’s intention to offer an uninterrupted interview experience, facilitated by the sponsor, Dun Daily. Dun Daily is celebrated for aiding individuals in escaping the noise of superficial tasks, thus emphasizing the value of the upcoming dialogue.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Backstory of the Udemonia Machine The chapter 'Backstory of the Udemonia Machine' introduces the origin story of Dun Daily, a productivity enhancer created by the same team behind My Body Tutor, a renowned online coaching company. The chapter highlights the creators' expertise in providing affordable coaching through the internet and describes how they apply this experience to Dun Daily. Users of Dun Daily are paired with a personal coach who guides them using a proven productivity system, emphasizing the value of personalized coaching in achieving productivity goals.
• 10:00 - 13:00: David's Role at Genant and Office Space Design The chapter discusses the planning methodology used at Genant, where quarterly, weekly, and daily plans are created to ensure focus on important tasks. Employees are encouraged to check in daily for accountability and review their plans weekly. Although the narrator does not work for Genant, their ideas on multiscale planning have been integrated into the company’s system. The narrator expresses satisfaction with how Genant has adopted these planning concepts, emphasizing the novel implementation of online coaching.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Home Office vs. Remote Workspaces The chapter discusses the future of productivity ideas, emphasizing the role of coaches in enhancing performance. It highlights how online coaching is more affordable and accessible than traditional executive coaching. The chapter also mentions a company, Dunadaily, and directs listeners to visit their website for more information. The transcript concludes by introducing an interview with David Dwayne.
• 16:00 - 19:00: The Importance of Performance in Workspaces The chapter titled 'The Importance of Performance in Workspaces' begins with a mention of a concept called the Udemonia machine, referenced in a book titled 'Deep Work.' The speaker recalls an instance where they initially sketched the idea on a napkin at a bar, indicating a spontaneous inception of the idea. There is a mention of the speaker becoming familiar with other works or concepts, although details on how these influenced the Udemonia machine concept are not provided in the given transcript.
• 19:00 - 28:00: Virtual Reality and Workspaces of the Future This chapter delves into the intersection of virtual reality and the evolution of future workspaces. It also touches upon the concept of 'deep work,' a term popularized by Cal Newport, highlighting its relevance and application in modern professional realms. The transcript mentions personal experiences with deep work, such as how it was utilized by individuals like Brian Chappelle to enhance productivity in academic and professional settings. The transition from the idea of 'hard focus' to 'deep work' is also discussed, emphasizing a shift towards more concentrated and efficient work habits.
• 28:00 - 33:00: David's Philosophy on Planning and Productivity In this chapter, David discusses with Brian the challenges and workarounds they faced to create an ideal space for deep work. David highlights his personal struggle of needing to rent an office in a different department to minimize distractions, while Brian worked on his dissertation in his basement to achieve focus. The chapter delves into the necessity of finding or creating conducive environments for productivity and concentration.
• 33:00 - 39:00: The Concept of MITs and Time Management This chapter discusses the initial stages of a collaborative project that began with support among team members working at extremely early hours, around 4 or 5 a.m. The collaboration was spontaneous, involving sketching ideas during lunch breaks. An idea was emailed without prior discussion, leading to a meeting focused on financial considerations. The chapter captures the seriousness with which the team approached developing the concept, emphasizing the importance of clearly defining priorities. It ties into the broader theme of time management and the concept of Most Important Tasks (MITs) in effective project development.
• 39:00 - 49:00: The Importance of Intentional Scheduling This chapter discusses the development and influence of a concept described in a single-page document that proved to be highly impactful in the author's career. The concept gained significant attention, being referenced in magazines and gaining a cult following. It was even adapted into a full-sized version in Chelsea, New York, illustrating its widespread impact and recognition.
• 49:00 - 59:00: The Colin Score and Personal Productivity The chapter discusses a unique retail store organization where notable individuals, including Seth Godin and Chip Cutter from the Wall Street Journal, were present. Chip Cutter's coverage on the future of work in the Wall Street Journal led to the current CEO discovering the speaker, marking a significant career moment for them.
• 59:00 - 71:00: David's Personal Life - Farm and Family The chapter titled 'David's Personal Life - Farm and Family' starts with a discussion on David's transition from teaching architecture to applying it practically. David currently works as an architect and holds the position of Chief Experience Officer at a company named Genant. The core focus of his work is designing and building workplaces that enhance employees' experiences and efficiency. The chapter emphasizes the ongoing journey of turning architectural concepts into tangible, functional spaces that facilitate better work environments.
• 71:00 - 80:00: Lessons from Past Failures The chapter titled 'Lessons from Past Failures' discusses the critiques regarding the modern world's work environment. It emphasizes the widespread issue of constant distraction in workplaces. Initially, the focus was on physical space architecture being flawed or inadequate. However, it also acknowledges perspectives that view technology as a contributing factor to these distractions. The narrator describes their privileged position to evaluate and address these issues as part of their job.
• 80:00 - 93:00: Conclusion and Outro The chapter 'Conclusion and Outro' focuses on enabling companies to adopt a new and elevated approach, integrating different aspects to reinforce their overall strategy. It discusses the challenges and considerations faced by individuals working remotely from home, exploring how they can best utilize their physical environments for productivity. The notion of having an advantage similar to working with advanced tools or systems like a 'udeimony machine' is also contemplated, despite the non-traditional office settings many find themselves in.

You're Not Lazy — Your Life Was Designed Wrong (Here’s How To Take It Back) | David Dewane Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 i'm Cal Newport and this is Indepth a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life i'm excited about today's guest it's my longtime friend David Dwayne now if you've read Deep Work you might recognize this name david who is an architect is featured in that book for his idea of what he called the udimodia machine a design for a
• 00:30 - 01:00 theoretical office that maximizes deep work over distraction so after my book came out this idea this design of the Udodia machine became a bit of a sensation as David talks about in our interview he got a lot of press about it eventually someone even built a version of his udeimmonium machine so it had a life of its own since then David has gone on to make these type of buildings a reality he works with a cutting edge firm that tries to design the offices of the future for knowledge work so keeping in mind not just the physical spaces but
• 01:00 - 01:30 how they interact with how people think and distractions probably one of the most creative thinkers out there about the interaction of space and the ability to do things with your mind so we talk about this in my interview we get into it that this the sort of interaction between offices and spaces from a massive office to how you design your home office to be more conducive to deep work but the other reason why I have David on the show is that among the people I know few spend as much time as he does systematically thinking about
• 01:30 - 02:00 what he wants in his life and how to make his life deeper he is very good at life engineering and engineering his life towards depth so we get into that journey as well in this interview we talk about his current life right now which is really cool the way he has it set up and how he got there including key turning points and the specific tools he used and has invented to help make his life better keep a particular eye out for our discussion of the Collins score which is something I learned from him and he uses to great
• 02:00 - 02:30 effect in his life so anyways if you're interested in either more focus in your current spaces or more depth in your life going forward I think you're going to love this wide-ranging conversation that I had with David Dwayne but before we get into it I want to mention our presenting sponsor who is making it possible for us to present this interview with no commercial interruptions and that is our friends at Dun Daily done daily helps you break free from the noise of shallow tasks and
• 02:30 - 03:00 focus on the deep meaningful work that really matters now I know the people who created Dun Daily they were behind another company called My Body Tutor which uh has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast they're experts at online coaching so having real people coach you but using the internet to try to keep things affordable and that's what they're bringing to the world of productivity with Dun Daily you're assigned a coach to work with but this coach is going to work with a proven productivity system so they will help
• 03:00 - 03:30 you build a quarterly plan lay out your weekly plan and then organize a daily plan to stay on top of what matters most you check in on your plan daily with them for accountability and then debrief on your plan every week to see how things are going i don't work for this company but they they know my ideas and a lot of the type of ideas I talk about on this show like multiscale planning are integrated into their system and I was happy for them to do that because I I've known them for a long time and I think it's really cool to bring the idea of online coaching to the types of
• 03:30 - 04:00 productivity ideas we talk about here i think that's probably the future especially for very high performers is to have a coach on board and online coaching is much more affordable than trying to have like an executive coach actually show up at your office so anyways um I thought this was a cool company i've known these guys i said "Look I want to tell people about it." So uh dunaily just go to dunddaily.com doue.com to find out more all right with that let's get into our interview with David Dwayne all right I'm here with David Dwayne david I think you're best
• 04:00 - 04:30 known to my audience as I mentioned in the introduction for your idea of the Udemonia machine which was in my book Deep Work now my memory is correct me if I'm wrong that began as a architect sketch you literally sketched this no cliche on a napkin at a bar at a bar yeah circle what's the backtory there so the backstory is that you know I found out about your stuff at
• 04:30 - 05:00 between so good they can't ignore you and deep work and if I remember right you were blogging chapters out to deep work right or like you were you were talking about the concept in some way shape or form i used to use the term hard focus and then at some point I evolved that over to the word deep work yeah so a mutual friend of ours Brian Chappelle was deep working to accelerate his dissertation and he turned me on to the concept of deep work because I was teaching architecture at the time and I was trying to accelerate my paper output
• 05:00 - 05:30 and so Brian and I were just having lunch one day and he's like "Well you're architect like what would be the ultimate space for deep working you know cuz we were each doing all these workarounds." Like I don't know if I described this to you before but I actually had to get a office in a different school on campus so that I could focus like I got an office in the religious studies department even though it had nothing to do with me and nobody knew who I was just to get away from distraction exactly and Brian was writing his dissertation in his basement right and he had that like super minute
• 05:30 - 06:00 5 a.m i think 4 a.m something crazy yeah and so we were we were kind of in like a little bit of a support loop and then I just sketched it out at lunch and he had the idea i think he emailed to you without even telling me and then you you you replied and you're like yeah let's get together and talk about money and um and I remember like really distinctly taking this seriously and being like "Okay here is here's like a
• 06:00 - 06:30 description of how this should work you know and I put it on one page and sent it to you." And that was like it was very impactful in my in my whole vector since then i mean it it showed up in a lot of places it it would come up in magazines or I would see it and you reference like I don't know that world well but it seems like it had a bit of a it had a little cult following there um yeah uh somebody built a version of it in Chelsea in New York i didn't realize this okay in Chelsea okay yeah full size
• 06:30 - 07:00 it was it was a store it was like a retail store but it was reorganized like it was organized along these lines and then um yeah it was there that you know a couple of pe like Seth Goden was there chip cutter from the Wall Street Journal was there and that was a consequential one because he wrote up in the future of uh work the Wall Street Journal does this every year they have their future work kind of section and that's where my current CEO read about it and he's like boom here's my guy so you would say now I think it's what's interesting is back
• 07:00 - 07:30 then it was a sketch you were teaching architecture now your day job in some sense is making these type of spaces a reality do I have that more or less right yes so I'm an architect uh and the the chief experience officer of a company called Genant and what we do is uh we try to build workplaces that help people um have great experiences and do their jobs better you know I like the whole project grew out of I think your your
• 07:30 - 08:00 critique was that the whole world of work is in a in a way suffering because we're so distracted all the time i was looking at it purely from the slice of the experience of the physical space architect and thinking like the space is damaged and the um or the space is faulty or whatever lacking and there are other people looking at it from like the technology standpoint and so now like we're I'm I'm privileged to be in a position where like that's my job is to
• 08:00 - 08:30 try to figure out how to enable companies to take a totally different approach like a totally elevated evolved approach and it it keys together like it reinforces in ton of ways your your whole gestalt you know a question I'm often asked is people who are doing a lot of remote work so they're setting up their own space at home they're wondering okay if I wanted to get take advantage of my physical space have something like the udeimony machine type of advantage but it's not an office for a lot of people it's how I think about
• 08:30 - 09:00 the physical spaces when I work when I'm at my own home have you thought about this like if you really wanted to go not radical but you really wanted to get into it with someone who is working from home into changing the various spaces you work in having multiple spaces what's possible here okay so I think about this every day you know I think about it a lot um I think that we've become so used to languishing
• 09:00 - 09:30 you know flourishing is the highest state of well-being depression is the opposite languishing is the middle i'm just getting by you know and I think that the open office kind of just generic world out there is largely about languishing and so when you compare that to my house I like where would I rather languish in my house or here it's just easier to languish at home i don't think a lot of people are flourishing at home because I think in order to flourish you have to be exposed to other people you
• 09:30 - 10:00 have to have resources you have to like you have to or for a lot of knowledge workers I think you really need to engage in some sort of reciprocal like energizing dialogue and Zoom is a poor proxy for this the reason I'm sitting in the HQ right now talking to you in person Yeah is because if this was on Zoom I don't think the conversation quality would be as good yeah wait so where you're going here is actually the key is to making the non-home office better that we'll we'll
• 10:00 - 10:30 prefer remote work if all we're doing at the office is we're in a cubicle on email i'm like I might as well be at home because I don't have to commute and I have other I can go to do my Pelaton over lunch but if you build an office if you want to make something remarkable Yeah with other people Yeah i think you have to do it in an environment that is set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity you know and that kind of that's that triggers the right kinds of relationships so this is
• 10:30 - 11:00 the whole switch from functional to performative you know like if there's one kind of just switch I want to flip in your head yeah is that like and I'm stealing this from Rem Kulas the greatest loving architect probably Dutch guy um is that like almost anything can function as a let's say a school a trailer can function as a school yeah right if your school's too crowded you can put people outside but like what performs as a school you know what what what gets the students in the right mindset what like connects you to like
• 11:00 - 11:30 history this is like the Georgetown campus with it it's it's ornate buildings and the greens with the old trees they don't need it georgetown could function on any in in a commercial office building downtown you could put every single student every single professor in a tower downtown yeah and they could function but like what if you want to get break into that next tier it's about performance you know and like what performs as a workplace you know what gets us in the right state of mind what puts us in the right kind of relationship and that is it's a tricky
• 11:30 - 12:00 thing like a great experience is a tricky thing to build it's like a spell like you you kind of conjure it it's like a bubble or something and it's easy to break it it's like concentration yeah like as soon as your phone buzzes or uh somebody taps you on the shoulder gone here's a Okay so here's a followup going on a rabbit hole here but it's it's a fascinating one to me does this make sense to you by the way absolutely does yeah so my follow-up is I I had this idea I wrote about in the early days of virtual reality where I had done the first demos one of my students had
• 12:00 - 12:30 brought an early vibe to Georgetown and I wrote this article on what I called immersive single tasking and my idea was because of exactly this theory you're talking about i said "Space matters." I was thinking about Cambridge think about Oxford i mean space matters the the symmetry of those greens the the fireplace and the wood panled offices you know CS Lewis is in there it matters for certain creative production well that's like the Seinfeld thing about space you know it's cataclysmically relevant yeah you you remember that so I was saying okay so at home I was like maybe something virtual reality is going
• 12:30 - 13:00 to bring to us is workspaces that are inspiring in that way that you're single i call it immersive single tasking because you'd be working on a single thing and I think my example was you know you're in like the Hogwarts dining hall which is based off King's College or whatever with a whiteboard you can draw on with like the virtual reality and you're working on a proof there is gonna be a completely different mindset than at your kitchen table and people built these things right i mean I said "Okay here's the limitations." It was resolution i was like "You need a good enough resolution
• 13:00 - 13:30 that you can actually read and see text and be able to write." And people have built these things it really uh has not caught on so is this just we're not there yet or is there something about the physicality so I think we're not there yet okay i I would my I was totally blown away when I did my first demo of the Vision Pro the Apple Vision Pro yeah i'm like "Oh my god." You know um there's a Have you done it uh I haven't done Division Pro though i've done other AR yeah i mean you know I'm
• 13:30 - 14:00 on the record it makes it It makes old ARs to me in my view look like uh toys you know but what' you do in it okay so there's a couple simulations that you walk through which are kind of like okay and then there's this whole deep experience they do at the end where they're like basically play like a reel of like Um uh it starts like fades out of black and like Alicia Keys is standing from me away like singing to you you know and it
• 14:00 - 14:30 was so shocking to me that I made the guy play like three times but this is just like a virtual reality demo at this point this is with the pass through completely turned off and now it's in virtual reality well what's weird about the Vision Pro too is that your peripheral vision is intact so you can kind of look to the side and see real world stuff but then there's like it takes you to like a you know Greek um ruins in Turkey and then it takes you to like little kids playing soccer in in Nairobi or something and I've been to Greek ruins in Turkey and I've seen little kids play soccer in Africa and
• 14:30 - 15:00 that's exactly what it feels like it you don't have the dusty bus ride to get you there but it's like 80 90% of the way so like immediately after I get I had that demo I emailed a guy I know who runs like a software company for architects and I'm like you got to do captures of like all the great buildings in the world and sell them to architecture schools you know because like now you don't have to go to you know uh the Hagi of Sophia in Istanbul like you could get most of it you know uh just like sitting
• 15:00 - 15:30 in your couch in your living room or something now why isn't it caught on yet and like the sports stuff is actually awesome too like you'd really appreciate the baseball one where you're sitting on like the first baseline i did watching it at bat i did one recently of the SNL 50th anniversary show they put a 3D uh 360°ree camera yeah and you could sit next to the cameraman while they were doing one of the skits and like they were here and you could look over and the cameraman was right there and you could look behind you in the audience yeah but do you buy this my my argument
• 15:30 - 16:00 has been the way into this world this is what I've observed or reported on it is going to be screens so the number one productivity app in the Oculus store during the pandemic was this company called Immersed and what they found was everyone else was trying to jump straight into a full virtual experience typically with like group meetings we'll all meet at the ruins of whatever and it was friction was the problem people like I don't want to go through the I don't want to put on my thing and log into a room and like I could just do Zoom on the computer I'm already at so what Immerse did is they said you know you're in a virtual world
• 16:00 - 16:30 but here's what you care about we give you monitors and at at home you only own one extra monitor but in the virtual world we give you four and so it's like a more useful workspace right you have more monitor so I'm working from home and I can have three big monitors because I don't own three big monitors but they're virtual but you're surrounded by on top of a mountain or this or that and they found this got people into the virtual world because it was convenient it's a better screen than they physically have at home but then they were in a virtual world and then
• 16:30 - 17:00 other things could could happen my personal test for these kinds of things is when you forget and you're there's like a slip in your mind and you forget that you're in a Apple store or whatever and you think you're in Turkey you know and I guess it'll be exciting when that's readily available to everybody but man the the bar is so high for making all that content and stuff and it's it's it's the adoption is got a really be
• 17:00 - 17:30 agonizing for Apple and the companies that are invested in this because you know no you you haven't even tried it the when I think about these things instead when I think about great experiences you know I am like maybe oddly satisfied with the real world you know and uh like my favorite digital experience is the the Apple Pay i didn't ask for it it's invisible it was free it just showed up one day and
• 17:30 - 18:00 it makes my life easier you know so I don't have to think about extra stuff i can focus more on you know uh what I care about that day like what I set out to do that day did you read um Rick Rubin's creativity book some of it it's not a book you really read through yeah he modeled it on the D chin kind of so you can kind of pick it up and put it down whenever you want but there's one part in there that I thought you'd like a lot where he he encourages you to plan your day with a
• 18:00 - 18:30 concentration that you're like landing an airplane you know and so like yeah the first 15 minutes of my day when I'm like time blocking and stuff and going through like my kind of core daily metrics it like I have it written right next to it in my planner like take the same seriousness as 15 minutes as though you're landing an airplane what does that mean what does it mean to be serious about planning um be really uh focused on like the two or three really important like for me in the my
• 18:30 - 19:00 rhythm in my daily life right now I can probably achieve two or three really important things in a day you know and so I just need two and I I like carefully segment creative time out from normal time y a shallow work time and so I really carefully budget because if you don't do it the world sweeps in and steals your time i'll tell you something interesting about it because I was just writing about exactly this idea this morning so I'm working on
• 19:00 - 19:30 a chapter of my new book and it's about organizing your time as a prerequisite for changing your life and I was writing about exactly this idea and I was looking back historically where did this idea of MIT's most important tasks like make sure that you figured out the most important thing and get that done first right it seems like a timeless idea it arose early 2000s right so there's like just that phrase that phrase but not just that phrase that phrase came a little bit later i think that was uh Gina Tapani at Lifehacker okay invented
• 19:30 - 20:00 MITs but it was you had Brian Tracy eat that frog was sort of getting around that idea if you eat the frog eat a frog first thing in the day everything else won't seem so bad and his his idea was do your most important thing first then Julie Morgan Stern in the early 2000s wrote "Never check your email in the morning." And her idea was before you do anything else spend one hour on the most important thing because you're going to you're not going to get to it and then the bloggers took over leo Babuda that's where I first came across it is is in
• 20:00 - 20:30 habits and then I wrote about it this by the way is like one of the issues I'm having now when I'm using AI asking about the origins of different productivity ideas my articles keep coming back so it's become oddly circular i wrote about this back then but it this idea emerged sort of concurrently with email culture and I I wonder if it wasn't as relevant in 19 1992 it was I have time i have I have two meetings today and my problem is like filling my day but you get to the early 2000s we introduce this idea of
• 20:30 - 21:00 make sure that you do the thing that matters first because that might be your only chance to get to it yeah no I could see that i like I like uh Ferris's kind of idea of make before you manage i just think that the the the sort of situation I've carved out for myself is that I have the I have decent amount of control over my time especially like I know the hours of the
• 21:00 - 21:30 day where I'm pretty productive and I try to really focus on taking things off my master task list like I don't have to go looking for stuff to do it's all there like I've captured it or configured it or whatever and uh like I kind of tee it up and I go for it um but man I look at other like because people share their calendars and stuff you know and I mean you your job now you you get a lot of communicate like you're you're in it right like there's emails there's meetings all the time or whatever yeah yeah yeah but I have to I look at other
• 21:30 - 22:00 people's calendars and it's just like jammed all the way and I'm like man how do you get anything done you know um but how do you resist that um I try to not I personally try to just focus on doing fewer things but doing them well and I try not to I I try not to show up or like volunteer
• 22:00 - 22:30 to show up to meetings where I'm not contributing yeah um unless there's something like there's there's a series of meetings that are within my company that I'm not participating other people are like presenting forecasts and stuff like that that I love because I can feel like the policy of the company and stuff but um I just I I don't have a lot of meetings that aren't mission critical and and most of my meetings are external to like with you know um people that control workplaces for other companies that I'm trying to sell my uh services to so uh you
• 22:30 - 23:00 Don't like I think the the biggest thing that helped me have a under scheduled calendar is just ex like just killing the pseudo productivity dragon and be like don't like don't assume that you're more valuable to the company because your calendar's full yeah i I just met last weekend he just retired but he was a president of a relatively large company
• 23:00 - 23:30 and had been for most of his professional career and the story he told me is he said "Look my calendar was filled because of exactly what you're saying this is what makes me useful is people want to talk to me and I can talk to them and give them guidance or help them make decisions this is why I'm useful." Then he hired a new CFO and a really high level executive assistant and they they kind of put their heads together and came back and said "You have too many meetings and here's what we're going to do we're going to block off a non-trivial amount of time every day and the executive assistant is like I'm going to protect that like you're at
• 23:30 - 24:00 your daughter's wedding so this is time that I'm not gonna we're not going to let meetings go into and he's really worried like but that's like three or four meetings and and he said after that change it was you know night and day he felt like he was 5x more useful not productive but useful he had time to sit and think and strategize and it turned out that there was this back pressure in meetings that would fill every minute anyway there's no Yeah into it right so it's not like those three extra meetings was the difference between success or
• 24:00 - 24:30 not and then the story I told back I tell this in a world without email is that uh General Marshall chief of staff of the army during World War II the the the uh person in charge of the entire war effort essentially right back here in DC didn't work past 5 during World War II because he had a heart condition and like back then the doctor's advice was don't work past five so you don't have a heart attack so he ran World War II fixed schedule not it was fixed schedule he had to get congressional approval that completely changed the
• 24:30 - 25:00 lines of communication within the War Department he said "There's too many people reporting to me here's what we're going to do i'm going to talk to these five people and then these people will handle these people and if you're going to have a meeting with me you're going to bring all of this stuff in advance that meeting is going to be 10 minutes and most of this stuff I'm not going to do anymore." And it turned out it was all a knob you could turn and you could turn that knob to fill every minute of your day you could turn the knob to work till 5 and it was just as effective there is just a element of intentionality i mean you sort of just have me now on a workflow tangent i still want to get to the main thing I want to talk to you about but all right so the main thing I want to talk to you
• 25:00 - 25:30 about is I do think about you as someone who's very intentional about your life thank you and I I want to break down some of the things you've done to get there because I think it's useful for my listeners who care about the deep life but I want to paint the picture a little bit more we've talked about your job we know you're an architect now you have this job where you're helping to design sort of the workspace of the future that's like a Disney Epcot term but you know right but you also have Tell us about the farm epcot was pretty radical by the way um okay so yeah one of the things that I
• 25:30 - 26:00 feel happy about in this conversation is that I do kind of feel like a representative of the audience like I'm not a famous person nobody like I don't have a I'm not an author of some other book that's coming here to kind of do that like I and I'll give you your flowers just once really quickly that I attribute a lot of the things that make me a kind of um an intentional person to the fact that I've like I've taken a lot of your
• 26:00 - 26:30 lessons really seriously and applied them over a long period of time like a decade this is why I'm having you on we want to hear the story yeah yeah right so um so where do you want to start the farm right now tell me yeah tell us about the farm okay like where you you live normally in the farm and then and then I'm gonna wind you back like how we ended up there so I'm from a small town in Wisconsin and uh but I live in Chicago and my wife and I are from the same small town and we decided during
• 26:30 - 27:00 co that you know and we've been thinking about it for like a while but we wanted a a country spot that is a kind of a complement to our city spot because our jobs depend on being in the city and so and your city spot's really a city spot rowhouse like you know all the people you have courtyard yeah I live in a great neighborhood right close to university hide park outside of Chicago it's kind of like Tacoma Park or Georgetown um but yeah it's great and it's like a workingass neighborhood and
• 27:00 - 27:30 um but we found a we we we were looking and looking for like a a country spot and we finally found a a really interesting one um that is like 5 acres right in Lake Michigan you know like uh 10 minutes outside my hometown and so an orchard nonetheless no it didn't have an orchard oh you planted that yeah we planted it was just 5 acres when you got it so we um Yeah we we bought it and it wasn't expensive it was like I think we paid 170 grand yeah cuz it the the house
• 27:30 - 28:00 was it was an old barn yeah an old barn from the 1870s and then it had a twocar garage attached to it and so we converted the the garage into a thing but we had to put in a well we had to put in gas we had to put electric and those weren't bugs for me those were features yeah cuz I got like we got to design everything i like building stuff and so it was cheaper like I could never have afforded to hire a contractor to do all that stuff and so um and how far is it from your house in Chicago two and a half hours so we can migrate there on
• 28:00 - 28:30 the weekends and stuff and the pragmatically the way that we did it is that we will like we'll Airbnb it when we're not there and um that worked out perfectly you know we kind of have a push down pop-up system where if there's a big event in Chicago we can Airbnb our place in Chicago and go to the farm and it works out so like we're not rich people you know very middle middle income folks and um like but we really wanted this to work and we came up with like an
• 28:30 - 29:00 imminently practical solution but now it's like uh every like I joke around like with you probably but like every day I'm there is a plus two you know every day I'm working there for sure is a plus two well you have you have the writing stuff what do you call it now the writing my writer cottage cottage yeah or star i love this part of it yeah yeah so um I we have three little kids and
• 29:00 - 29:30 um it's a lot of noise and when I'm there you know sometimes you want to get away from that so I copied Mark Twain's writer's cottage and like other people have had these you know like we've probably joked around about uh Frederick Douglas had one you know these other writers have them and so and I I do like writing i'm working on a book project that I will get to uh at some point here yeah I think the writer's cottage like building a writer's cottage was the ultimate act of procrastination on this book project u but well the the ultimate move is what Michael Polland did where he wrote a book about writing building
• 29:30 - 30:00 his writer's cottage that's the meta move right there yeah touche um so anyway no it's a it's like a octagon building about the size of this room and it sits in the field like beyond the orchard looks right like Michigan and it is like my favorite place in the world you know and I it cost $2,000 in materials from Lowe's and you built Craigslist you know
• 30:00 - 30:30 it's so it's not like these things are not but it took a lot of time it took a lot of hours but again that's a feature you know it was fun to build so your schedule is like most weekends most weekends you would head out there yeah and then sometimes if there was something going on in Chicago you would fail Airbnb and go out there longer yeah and we just got comfortable Airbnb in our house too you know so I was like a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows at that but hey man whatever like makes it possible you know and it's really great for the kids it's it's like
• 30:30 - 31:00 my life is this really beautiful kind of two alternating currents where on Friday I can get out of the city i have a couple afternoon calls that I can take on the road yep and then I pull up to the farm it's like I get out and it's just quiet and uh you know I can notice little changes in the landscape like I'm so attuned to that landscape now that day to day especially in spring it's like I can see things changing and that's really exciting to me and then
• 31:00 - 31:30 like Sunday evening I you know pack up go back to Chicago and I turn I 94 or whatever and I see the skyline and I feel like 7 feet tall and I'm like "All right let's get back into this," you know and it's so it's such a great way to live at least at this stage in my life um but there's one other thing uh in the in my drawer at the writer's cottage i don't know if I told you about this but um I hacked
• 31:30 - 32:00 your uh time block planner and I have my own like uh version of it but I built a lifetime block planner so you mean like on a year scale yes oo interesting so it goes a 100 It goes from now till I'm 100 years old yeah and each spread's like a year yeah and so there are projects that I have that I know I don't have the bandwidth to work on them now but I don't want them rattling around in my head so I put them in my lifeb block planner years out you know and you look at it yeah I look at it all the time
• 32:00 - 32:30 yeah yeah interesting well from a lifestylecentric planning perspective what was so the farm is a solution to a vision that because we talk about this a lot on the show that in lifestyle planning you're you don't work towards a particular you don't start with the goal like I want to buy something here you start with the vision of the lifestyle like here's what I want in my life that we don't have and then you look for creative solutions that gets that there so what was what was the goal that eventually the farm became the solution
• 32:30 - 33:00 to i think just like what were you what were you thinking when envisioning your lifestyle this is what's missing from the pace you know like years go by like that you know and I think that there was something else about like returning to our like our roots you know like because your hometown was nearby well not just that yeah like my hometown was nearby my parents are kind of aging and they're
• 33:00 - 33:30 there um I want my kids to have a relationship with them but I was I was you know tucking my middle kid in when we were at the farm one day and I was telling her I'm like you know when our people immigrated here they came right to this county and she's like what really do we have a photograph and it's kind of like right after Civil War potato famine Irish people and I'm like yeah we got a picture and she's like I want to go put a picture on the guy's grave tomorrow huh and so we found the picture made a copy of it put in a little frame and it took it out to the
• 33:30 - 34:00 cemetery and found the guy's grave and so your relatives there's a cemetery nearby that has like your relatives are there the first guy from Ireland so was born temporary now there he is you know and so every successive generation has kind of come up there and so I mean that's different than when you're in Chicago and it's kind of like anonymous in a way you're absorbed into this larger thing what like what when you when you first were thinking about those general goals I want to slow things down i want some connection you're probably thinking generally like the country have
• 34:00 - 34:30 some part of our life that's slower back to our roots was there I'm imagining there I was like okay let's look at the obvious options like the orchard was also a really big deal that you planted the orchard yeah and they're cider apples they're hard cider apples was that part of the original plan well so my wife and I uh she did a we lived in Paris briefly when she was doing a study abroad and um we we discovered like in the French countryside you know like they have this like Normandy has this
• 34:30 - 35:00 champagne like apple cider and we're like "Oh my god we should make this." How How long ago was this uh 2010 so it had been it had been lurking oh yeah it been like a detail that became a part of your life romantic you and your wife are buming around rural France and you're like "We should get a country spot and plant an apple orchard." Yeah you know meanwhile you're in DC then you're in Chicago and you're buzzing around and you're getting jobs and getting promoted and all stuff but then eventually it's like we got to get serious and so we as
• 35:00 - 35:30 a kind of forcing mechanism we used our 20th anniversary as like that's we're going to have a reunion or like a kind of a reunion of the people that came to our wedding you know and we're going to do it at this farm and we did we did it i heard it was awesome yeah well but when you first So practically speaking I'm assuming when you first like okay we have this deadline we know we want country connection to roots yeah orchard probably the first thing you did was what we'll fire up Zillow and you're looking at vacation homes for sale and
• 35:30 - 36:00 and it's like super expensive and that might be a place where we were even looking when we were here you know we looked at an orchard actually in like a by Rowan Oak or something u but like Yeah like you you look in a non-serious way for a while and then you kind of get more serious about it and co was sort of like okay and then also it's like [ __ ] you know we're running out of time what are we going to do and so but you got you got creative right because a lot of people might have got stuck with like okay I'm looking up like nice houses on
• 36:00 - 36:30 the lake and they're all $800,000 and I don't have $800,000 so I guess that plan's not going to work but you kept working we found it the day it came on and we put an offer in like a week later and also I mean like from the financial standpoint I just traded my 401k for that basically i cash on my 401k early yeah absorbed all the penalties and stuff and it didn't really hurt my feelings too much because I want to work i love working yeah so I want to work till I die anyway yeah um but it like and plus like it's a good investment too
• 36:30 - 37:00 even though I immediately don't want to sell it or anything but um you're thinking about the next 20 years i had I had to make a non-trivial choice about like should I should I risk this thing on that and uh it's best decision I ever made in my life yeah one of them you know you I don't want anybody you're prioritizing the next 20 years like making those totally making those as good as possible as opposed to just maximizing 30 years or whatever that
• 37:00 - 37:30 period of life yeah um tell me about the Colin score how do you Yeah i threw out this thing that like every day at my farm's a plus two you know that was a subtle note you got I talked about it briefly on the show about an hour ago but but it's it's worth bring the the up to speed again yep so uh about six years ago uh Ferris interviewed Tim Ferrris interviewed uh Jim Collins the guy the author of Good to Great and uh a handful of other like landmark books i consider
• 37:30 - 38:00 him like the Peter Ducker of the 21st century yeah I told you I got I met him at some point after that he gave me some advice nice guy he's a super like I don't know how I got in touch with him he's hard to get in touch with yeah I know i have I'm not really a star chaser like that you know uh but I if I I look I look forward someday to hopefully meeting him um we have a lot of things in common if you go to his website and you go to his further reading he's like the only person I've ever met who's listen to more great courses series than I have you know so
• 38:00 - 38:30 we can have a fun laugh about that but um he he said something on uh you know uh Ferris's show that really stuck with me or caught my attention and then I implemented it right away which is he he tracks every day three things he brings up a spreadsheet and he he does a little bullet points of like the things that happened that day and then the second column he records the amount of creative time what he calls creative time you would probably call deep work you can send me high call flow whatever uh like heads down focused work and then the
• 38:30 - 39:00 third column is a rating uh like a daily rating like a grade and it's highly subjective it's just a body feeling how did my day go and it's on this very specific scale which I think is the probably the the most genius part of it which is -21 0 plus one plus two so you have like zero is languishing like it's Yeah zero is literally languishing and I think like well I'll ask you what do you think that score is actually measuring
• 39:00 - 39:30 subjective assessment of your subjective field of the day like did you you like a zero to me I think it's measuring Jim Collins individual flourishing yeah but like zero would be pretty consistent for people i would imagine zero is I don't even really know what happened today it wasn't bad like I wasn't sad i wasn't like stressed out but like nothing also got me all that fired up i you know I had some emails i had some meetings i think people's if you're not paying attention if you're not measuring this I think that the default it hovers around
• 39:30 - 40:00 zero yeah because if you're in the negative territory too long you're probably going to want to make some changes yeah but what you people don't do is push themselves to the positive territory that's flourishing yeah and so I started tracking how long How long ago set this up how long this is a while for you right after I heard about it so six years ago and I started doing it with my mentor uh and like so we would start out our days time blocking and then we would like text each other our our schedule for the day and then uh at the end of
• 40:00 - 40:30 the day we'd text each other a rating okay and you use the column scale and we use the con score yeah like that exact rating and so a couple of things occurred to me like immediately like one uh or the first thing is that I knew what got me into negative territory okay and I deleted that way um it's going to sound strange but fighting with people you know like just beating people up on the street it was stressful i grew up in a family of Jesuit lawyers and we would just fight
• 40:30 - 41:00 for fun they can argue yeah judge everybody fights for fun uh you know and but uh and I think I used to be more aggressive like that and then I just realized it was actually emotionally draining you know like family members or people you worked with work with yeah like be more confrontational about things like push on people and stuff you know and I just realized like man that's not helping and uh the other thing was um certain people would kind of trigger
• 41:00 - 41:30 you know if I was in like meetings too long or if I expected a certain kind of feedback from somebody and I wasn't getting it like it would bring me down and so I just kind of avoid that there's like negative score people in your life kind of interesting yeah and so or like people that can kind of trigger negative score stuff if I ask them for the wrong thing anyway uh so probably two or three other negatives uh actually I like I'll tell you right now what triggers negative which is I have very specific
• 41:30 - 42:00 goals that I'm responsible for and if I look at where I spent my time that day you know look at my goals and they don't match that's a problem you know professionally yeah unless I had like a really good excuse you know like some some came to me with a problem that was urgent and they turned to me and I addressed it in a fine way so like uh maybe that was like apart from my responsibilities but I handled it and good you know so I'll give myself like a a plus for that but the other thing that
• 42:00 - 42:30 was actually probably more positive than eliminating the negatives was you know taking the things uh like setting daily realistic goals what could I do today to get to a plus one what might I stretch to to get to a plus two did you did you know what you didn't know what those were i'm assuming till you've been measuring like in other words did you have to discover what works pretty consistently for a plus two deal at the end of you know and
• 42:30 - 43:00 but like did you discover something you wanted to prioritize before totally yes like what's what what's something you discovered that would reliably deliver like a plus one or plus two day manage your just manage your expectations and then don't waste time don't just like don't allow time to just bleed away you know like I think it's like you you you you contain the leaks and and like you you do get a sense of um just a sense of accomplishment from
• 43:00 - 43:30 like knocking that one thing like I've become very I try to be very particular about the things that make it onto my master task list master task list yeah but then aggressive about getting them off you know things that linger on that list you know these are like at the project scale yeah at the project scale exactly and so um so not wasting time for you means you made non-trivial progress yeah and I will um so my quarterly or my
• 43:30 - 44:00 planner my time block planner I do it quarterly and so I set quarterly goals that I review basically every day you know because they they don't take long to review and then I just make sure that the the part that I'm actually struggling the most with is taking the time on Monday to really lay out the week i look if I like review my old ones those those week spreads are um uh
• 44:00 - 44:30 undercooked i keep trying to convince myself to do this end of day Friday which makes sense on paper right because that's it's actually the slowest part of the week and you have and you get the benefit of the weekend of being like I know what's going but it's really hard it's like you're done by Friday afternoon like that that and but the problem is Monday morning is everyone's rock and rolling and it's it's difficult to take the 90
• 44:30 - 45:00 minutes it could take a while Yeah to really get your arms around things so I've been struggling with that too i think on paper Friday end of day makes all the sense in the world but psychologically it's difficult monday makes more sense but it's hard to give the time Monday morning it's an important link in the multi-scale chain though yeah you got to get that week in there because you can't just go from quarter to day like I think that you you Yeah the week the week really unlocks you can build a lot more momentum i want to finish the Concore thing really quick yeah is that I think actually like what I'm experimenting with at work right now
• 45:00 - 45:30 is trying to promote this as a broader metric not just within my company and my work but like within the field of architecture you know and well I've told you if if people had to do this every day in a normal office job you couldn't hide from the fact like we would have to burn down the building where they make Microsoft Outlook like people like well this is just wait a second oh my god what I'm doing in this job is making me miserable there's no metrics and knowledge work i call it the metric black hole you know in deep work it's like if people were actually measuring
• 45:30 - 46:00 that they'd be like I am upset i did email and meetings all day that's not a plus one day so now I have access to within my company I have access to real researchers anthropologists and ethnographers and people with like masters and this stuff and PhDs and in social sciences and like my my personal background is in like high performance buildings from an energy and resource standpoint like zero energy buildings buildings that use very little water or have low carbon footprint that was really easy and
• 46:00 - 46:30 objective because those metrics are you can count it here's how many volts you can build a model you know but if you ask somebody build me a high performance workplace that makes my people happier more productive you can't look at a mechanical engineer and they're going to be totally worthless you know but you can ask a social scientist you know and they can give you some metrics but like I think that this con thing like if you had so this is what I'm uh I want to experiment with within my own office is get a series of my colleagues tracking
• 46:30 - 47:00 okay yeah and we have some underutilized parts of our office a couple like conference rooms in old offices that aren't really used for anything and um so I want to get a group of people tracking and then anonymize and pull the colin score and to be clear about it practically speaking you're putting down the score number and then a sentence or two without overthinking it just in the moment why did you put down that score and that he leaves vague yes right and
• 47:00 - 47:30 it's one sentence two sentences so my tracker that I'm designing is a slight modification on Collins based on my own sort of How dare you yeah I know oh it's it's funny usually I try to default towards Cons but um and he actually I think folds his personal life and his work life together that's a tough decision for me i'm trying to just separate it and just focus on work stuff well yeah but he to him it's all the same thing yeah um but uh in the morning uh the the tracker would ask you two questions one what time are you going to shut down two which is helpful because
• 47:30 - 48:00 then it reminds you to shut down and then two it uh what would you have to achieve today to get a plus one and then at that time you set it comes back to you and says how would you rate your day in your vision this is an app uh yeah on your phone uh and then how would you rate your day why would you rate it that way and then how much hours of creative time or heads down focused time did you have and so what from the research standpoint what you would get every day is two uh
• 48:00 - 48:30 quantitative metrics and one qualitative metrics and that's really the magic because the qual and the quant together create the full picture a lot of times people just track quantitative stuff yeah and you can tell like what's going on but you have no idea why the qualitative stuff tells you why what what are you going to tell a manager though let's say you do the research you're doing at someone's office and you find like look when when people look at the qualitative and quantitative when they're able to spend three hours heads down on something I think is important they're plus one days and when they
• 48:30 - 49:00 can't they're negative days you're jumping ahead ahead so like um what I want to do with my team is get everybody tracking or get like this is opt-in I'm not going to force anybody to track stuff you know and I think everybody just keeps their own data but like pulls the number anonymously yeah Um but so it's accurate that's important and so uh but then what I want to do is I want to take some of these underutilized spaces and get everybody together and say "Okay hey guys." And this is a architecture
• 49:00 - 49:30 group so we we know about designing space but I want to be really intentional and say "What how could we reallocate these spaces that give us the best chance of upping our collective talent score what would we turn these into that would make us even happier more productive and more effective architects would you then measure it that's the idea and then we just keep tracking and you can through the quality of da d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d da you should be able to point to these things and you know the the the subjectivity piece some people
• 49:30 - 50:00 view it uh I think fairly as a as a vulnerability because you're like well what if you get a nasty text from somebody you know from your spouse is that going to affect your con score that day but like the the the constant day after day after day after day like you build trends really fast you know and and so I I'll tell you I've become so effective at this that I changed my own personal scale from negative 1 0 1 1.5
• 50:00 - 50:30 and two because I'm so I I reserve twos for really exquisite days i see but I'm so regular at one that I'm trying to push it a little further you know and I've never had a negative two well so so what what have you changed in your life because of this um I think I I take on less for sure so when you were busier you had a harder time getting good scores yeah because
• 50:30 - 51:00 you always feel inadequate yeah you're always feeling like you're chasing or you're on the hamster wheel or whatever i mean or you're you're you're too ambitious about the amount of things you take responsibility for whereas if like I would rather get half the number of things done but do them as like at a really high level it's just an example of like my theory of administrative overhead aggregates so the more things you're doing the more the bigger fraction of your day has to be spent not doing things that sort of ironic cycle
• 51:00 - 51:30 yeah yeah i think that's true and like there's a I think you you would probably understand this and be able to articulate this better than me but there's an inherent risk there that if I'm doing less I'm going to be perceived as not as interesting or not as well-rounded or not as comprehensive or whatever you know whereas if you focus on the things that you're really interested in and curious about and uh you maintain like a long commitment to those they blossom into
• 51:30 - 52:00 uh something that's authentically interesting and exciting and people like uh are attracted to that a satisfaction engine yeah yeah you know like for like they take you seriously like what what's an example in your life um so for me I mean it is well even this concore thing you know like I didn't come upon that by accident i came upon that because I'm obsessed with the concept of flourishing and how to help other people flourish yeah you know and so I'm trying and like
• 52:00 - 52:30 I had developed rare and valuable skills in the high performance buildings from like an energy resources stuff standpoint yeah and now I'm trying to like take what apply what works over here over to this other place yeah you know that is that's right on the very edge of what's you know innovative in my field right now right so you're saying you're you're playing the long game on the idea you were just explaining to us for example yes but working on that and
• 52:30 - 53:00 continuing to work on that might be a big innovation in the field and that is a choice versus you could be much busier with many more smaller projects which like in the moment would make it feel like you had your finger in a lot of pies and were getting after it and etc i can take that concept i mean I've got a there are series of conferences that are influential in my field and I want to use I I have the vision for a slide to start the talks that are coming this fall that is like
• 53:00 - 53:30 0.012 and then arrow and like 1.15 and like that would be like my office's count score moving from like hovering around zero yeah to like plus ones this is like that's going from languishing to flourishing objectively you know right so if you can have that slide if I say baby we spent like we tried this in the physical space didn't it change the score then we tried this and it made a big difference yeah it's a whatever it is and it might not work yeah you know
• 53:30 - 54:00 and I'm like a little bit probably in a kind of a petty way afraid that I'm going to try this thing and people are going to reject it or whatever but um I don't care that much like my ego has been diminished like through do you think the score keeping the score helped motivate the farm in the sense that now when you're thinking about your life in this way you're thinking this is going to be a plus two generator well I know for a fact that I was I didn't know that it would be as effective as plus two
• 54:00 - 54:30 generator as possible and like I literally I was like I remember it's funny that you mentioned this this memory kind of flashes back but um you know like chess notation mhm like how they give like exclamation points next to good moves and like if it's a really good move it gets two exclamation points it's kind of similar to plus plus two things i know this from you you explained this to me once yeah yeah and in all the chess notation I've ever seen I saw one three exclamation point move which was Bobby Fischer's game of the
• 54:30 - 55:00 century uh in like uh Ruben Fine's like uh commentary on that game but like the day we actually got the farm was the only plus three day I've ever had you mean the when you're walking through the property like we signed the contract at the bank and we went over and it's like ours you know that was plus three day you know and I was just so happy but what I didn't anticipate was that and we got it in January in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan during this a winter that was cold as hell right so it's not like a a beautiful a beautiful spring day like
• 55:00 - 55:30 the birds were chirping yeah no no no and uh so our initial wave of work to get it kind of going i was working out there when it was like 10 degrees every day every single day in that first month that I was there was a plus two did you you spent like a whole month out there yeah every day plus two and like I'd never expected or experienced anything like that it was just you know and now they're not all plus two days out there but like it was so great you know and
• 55:30 - 56:00 um uh yeah wow but uh that's not the that's not the I don't think that's the point the point isn't huge string of plus twos the the point is trying to get from trying to just live a flourishing life you know and that's why I think I think the days that are you know for a lot of people zeros are
• 56:00 - 56:30 the days where you just feel what happened where'd today go yeah you know and what happened is that you know your device stole your concentration and you spent too much time worrying about things that you can't control and reading about them in the New York Times yeah you know and letting people live rent free in your head uh instead of just getting control of your your own situation you know I mean what's interesting me to me about it is like if we look at your life for example it's not built on some radical
• 56:30 - 57:00 decision it's not built on I was miserable this is the cliche and we moved to a sailboat and whatever and it's some very like and through the radicalness of it this why I like the column score idea is I feel like it allowed you to explore the landscape of possibilities in your life more systematically and build out a flourishing life which is different necessarily than a life built around some sort of central radical decision so it's built my life is built on the ashes of a failed radical decision you know
• 57:00 - 57:30 and the uh but like it was a youthful you know indiscretion let's say where like when I was an undergrad I tried to do um a sort of a heroic uh you know design build project in Central America you know the poor community and I didn't have a sustainable skill set so even though it was like really deeply aligned with my mission and my values and even like the skills I was building I didn't have the ability to execute but
• 57:30 - 58:00 this was a thing back Right i remember this there was like the the late 90s early 2000s this idea of it's like project water it was like this follow your passion to be useful though right and it was like the idea is you would go somewhere and build a school was a big thing right project pencils and promise yeah project water like this was so I was right in the mix with all three cups of tea yeah yeah and even design for or architecture for community um so a lot of it this is actually what like the
• 58:00 - 58:30 Daly Lama calls sloppy sympathy interesting you go to a place where you you see a problem you want to help you throw a little energy at it but if you really want to be helpful you have to move there yeah and you have to like transform your whole life and and be extremely humble you know and accept a lot of failure before you probably get successful and I did not take that approach some people do take that approach and they like they're they they do really impressive work but like I
• 58:30 - 59:00 felt the sting of taking the leap before I was ready and what happens is you get alien you the failure alienates you from the thing that you really love you know so um I think the goal got confused with the thing the goal was the vision here's something that's important to me and we often confuse it with the radical goal well if I do this radical goal which was inspired by this feeling of whatever it is I want to be helpful or whatever it is but then the radical goal
• 59:00 - 59:30 becomes the thing and so when that fails you you lose the connection we talk about lifestyle planning the difference between the yeah the the properties you're looking for in your life and the particular things that might generate those things in your life yeah ex I'm with you I'll I'll give you another example that's contemporary for me but what happened finish the story though so what happened oh so what happened is that it was a the project was a failure i felt humiliated but I kind of nursed that wound for a long time but then I you
• 59:30 - 60:00 know I that's when I came across so good they can't ignore you and I like I started like connecting dots oh rare and valuable skills okay so there are rare and valuable skills you would need to be successful in that environment rather than just an architect working in Tacoma Park um oh career capital you know maybe I shouldn't have like skipped steps here maybe I should have become an effective human being first and then uh gone on to those types of things so um that that
• 60:00 - 60:30 was really uh that was really meaningful in terms of you know creating a structure where I had like greater patience a different set of expectations about what was possible and so like a big project that I'm uh gearing up to take on right now is writing a book uh on spaces of hyper creativity which I think is a good idea the architecture of hyper creativity But the reason that you think it's a good idea probably is because it checks
• 60:30 - 61:00 I've taken the time to check the other boxes about like um is writing something I can even do or like writing for editing something I can do is this an interesting idea but I could see a lot of people that are listening to this that might be nursing both projects of their own being like "Okay I'm gonna throw a ton of energy at this and then if it fails they're gonna feel shitty about it you know and that's unfortunate." And it doesn't have to kind of be that way you can take a more measured methodical approach and to like
• 61:00 - 61:30 Brad Stalberg's kind of thing it's like the consistency and like owning up to the fact that like the consistency is more important than the intensity and I would say with that early project of mine that was a failure it was intensity over consistency for sure you know um and then acknowledging upfront that every single day you sit down to write it's going to probably be painful you know and just being or sometimes it's not and if it's not uh enjoy that and ride that wave as long as you can uh but if if the
• 61:30 - 62:00 if it if it's not going well that's okay just keep grinding it's like building something yeah some days it's exactly yeah and the joints don't fit that day your cuts aren't great or it's tedious that day and it man it helps if you enjoy building stuff you know like if people look at this farm project and you know they're like "Was that fun?" And I'm like "Yeah for me it was great really fun you know so if you can figure out a way to like and my wife is different she doesn't like to do
• 62:00 - 62:30 construction stuff so it's not plus two days for her if she's swinging a hammer or sawing stuff." But for me it's great yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well so you came out of I always when I talk to you I internalize a lot yeah what do you mean i do well about about your your your approach uh I I like the intention of it but I like that you're you act on it you know you make you make
• 62:30 - 63:00 choices you make changes it's easy to get stuck in the zeros or they get stuck in this isn't quite working there's a lot of negative ones happening but it seems difficult to change and I think you're better at you're not scared of change would you say this is fair like the difference between you back then and now is you're not afraid of change it's just your change is more evidence-based now than it was before it's not on a vibe uh you have data personal data
• 63:00 - 63:30 insight data you're like "Okay this is going to be better so why wouldn't I do it?" I feel like the core skills are so strong that even if whatever I'm currently focused on was a failure I can reapply the same skill set to the next challenge and I'm like I feel like a very effective person you know I think I think the the the positive thing about a lot of the systems that you have you know invented or aggregated or whatever clarified for
• 63:30 - 64:00 people is that they get things out of your head so that you're not spending time circular thinking about something you know and you you're able to then be more present in the moment so that when you're working on something I mean you're applying your whole uh consciousness towards it so that it like and then like life is just easier man i mean how do you I think what's interesting also about your story is you
• 64:00 - 64:30 have a job that it's like a traditional knowledge work like high skill job but you still have this life that's very like intentional so how do you bring that thinking to a job where you have an email address you have a calendar often people think look if I really want to change my life in a way that's going to be like plus one plus twos all the time I have to be like a novelist i I got to leave my job i I can't also have a calendar and and Zoom and email um your job could be overwhelming and
• 64:30 - 65:00 distracting and languishing so yeah I can just look side to side and see my peers yeah so So how did how do you keep it different what's the key that David Dwayne's approach to knowledge work um I think it's about managing becoming really good at managing expectations and becoming really really good about managing time i consider like when I when I show
• 65:00 - 65:30 somebody like my time block planner Yeah i describe it as the most essential mental health tool I've ever had you know and like I think that um I think like I'm an ambitious person you know like I want to achieve something you know that's meaningful in my field but I don't so I take it seriously but like at
• 65:30 - 66:00 the same time if like I I view the effort more important than the rewards you know and this is like just classic philosophy stuff you know try to disassociate the fruits of the labors from the labor itself you know but it does it lets you slow down too right slow productivity principle is you like the project you're working on this vision you have for using these numerical scores to change architecture it's not really going to matter in the long term till I have this right it's like my Apple Pay for architecture yeah and if that happens six months from now
• 66:00 - 66:30 or a year from it doesn't matter to you it doesn't have to be done as fast as possible what matters is you're working on it gets done and like the hyper creativity book which would be great because then it would be it would put into people's path uh principles that are like they could apply you know and I think I just have this personal kind of feeling that as we go into the AI uh kind of era that creativity is going to become the
• 66:30 - 67:00 coin of the realm yeah you know human creativity is going to be really really important when it be because a lot of the a lot of the grinding work is going to be relieved and the what should we do why should we do it you know is going to be um is going to surface so like when you study the the environments around creative people and in the process of creativity itself and get that out there into the public domain like man that's that's if I could
• 67:00 - 67:30 just do that I'd be pretty happy but to be more concrete like how do you avoid for example in your position you have a team not let's say check an email every five minutes i have something like concrete I check email probably too much yeah it's it's not something I feel great about but you know the the tools are powerful the and the grip that they have on your consciousness is really powerful what about meetings um again I
• 67:30 - 68:00 I've a lot of people I I I think the thing that's kind of freed me up a little bit is not being paranoid that like my calendar looks empty to other people that are sharing my calendar with me partially because I I have a physical planner so I I don't write a lot of this i don't take the step of putting everything I do into Google calendar but also
• 68:00 - 68:30 um like I don't equate it with value my value comes from a totally different realm and I am like laser focused on trying to create value in the way and like my the people that I report to understand what I'm trying to do and they've given me the time and I to a degree maybe I've earned the the the the permission to get control of how I do that um but that means practically saying no to more meetings periods of inaccessibility uh shut down there's so there are people
• 68:30 - 69:00 that I look at all around me that are probably in too many meetings yeah you know and if you really just buckle down and say like "Hey you know I like I can't I can't go to everything can I skip this one and just go ahead?" I don't know the when people trust you have your act together on your time they give you leeway just out of curiosity did you look at the uh planes of marathon thing which one the planes of marathon the email I sent you the other day about um because I was I was
• 69:00 - 69:30 captivated by your Elon Musk conversation with Brad Stalberg and uh Clay was the guy's name yeah clay Skipper yeah and it was about like and I think this is another thing where people I would imagine people in your audience and even me like you look at somebody like Elon Musk and you're so enamored at least pre- Twitter with like the stuff that this person was able to accomplish and that's like you kind of hold that up as this is what success looks like right and not me though it stressed me out but yeah I did this exercise
• 69:30 - 70:00 uh as a kind of like and again like this is I did a a kind of a private writing project that was a buildup to my real attempt at like uh commercial writing and but just to get in the habit of day after day after day writing and so this project was it was very personal it was a letter to my daughter and it was about the like painting a picture for her about like the really beautiful moments in my life and what I felt like to be me at these different times yeah you know and I collected a handful of maybe 20
• 70:00 - 70:30 vignettes and after that conversation where you're talking about Elon and like our our society or our cultures sense of status and sense of accomplishment and sense of success I look back at that list and they're very mundane moments there's nothing in there that's about like a huge professional accomplishment there's nothing in there that's about like brushing up against a celebrity you know
• 70:30 - 71:00 it's all just like it's like uh a moment on the farm like working in the orchard you know or like working on a building project it's about um an early morning writing session and my daughter sneaks up on me you know and I have this like nice moment with her you know when she's little and I you know um you know or like the like a child's birth or something like when you really think about like deep life for me it's
• 71:00 - 71:30 like those moments like enjoy what you have yeah don't peg so much of your sense of selfworth on like a grandiose accomplishment like on revolutionizing the electric car industry in America yeah you know and like I think if you if you connect or if you were able to peer into the lives of people that have done those things I bet
• 71:30 - 72:00 you would find that they made a lot of personal sacrifices that would be pretty grim yeah lonely yeah alienating yeah so like when I think about deep life I mean I think about like a plus one day you know uh yeah I it's engineering your life that's one way to look at it engineering your life so that you have more plus ones and it's not too hard to avoid the negatives yeah trend it's the big trend you know
• 72:00 - 72:30 and being um Yeah in like being super intentional about it yeah so so this is what this is what bugs me or you'll we can we can jointly crack on these people but there are a lot of people that look at scans at self-help you know and the this whole like advice and like productivity yeah and all like that this whole subculture you know yeah you mean like the reviewers at the New York Times Book Review perhaps they don't seem to
• 72:30 - 73:00 appreciate it i've learned yeah but um I think if you like if you really I feel like I've been on both sides of this i've been on the I've been on the um sort of hless Don Kiote style passion-driven mindset follow your passions guy um and ridden that wave um but I've also been on the like very regimented very
• 73:00 - 73:30 disciplined very patient very slow um very focused side of this and it's just better you know it's not fancy it's not um it hasn't made me rich like in terms of money but it's made me extremely rich just in terms of like my overall life satisfaction you know yeah i mean I have this argument often with with the anti-productivity crowd many members of whom I really like and respect because I think they're on to something and uh but
• 73:30 - 74:00 they they often I think the setup which I don't buy is look if there's structure in your life then you're somehow internalizing capitalist narratives or Protestant work ethic or it's some sort of exploitative relationship from a cultural superstructure to your life that's benefiting other people and that the true I can see that but like it doesn't it doesn't take a lot of thinking to to just realize that you don't deep work to do more for the man deep work to work less and to make your
• 74:00 - 74:30 work better if I could if I could go back in time I mean I went to a punishing graduate program like architecture um it was it was so the culture was so intense that I think there were 24 people in my graduating class 17 of them were medicated for anxiety and depression yeah because we were in our like studios constantly you know and the people that weren't there were sort of
• 74:30 - 75:00 like marginalized a little bit socially not serious yeah like why are you why did you even take up somebody else's somebody else could have gotten that spot and been here with us you know man if I could go back in time and uh I think I could have done better work been such a like a much healthier person and worked less time just simply by having like better
• 75:00 - 75:30 time management yeah better like concent the ability to concentrate you know and also not try like and and readjusted my expectations and not tried to like do everything yeah you know so yeah I mean people don't what they don't often get like people who will look at deep work for example and and be like well this is all about maximization right so I often get the critique of like man this is all about just like squeezing everything out of the day and what about people who
• 75:30 - 76:00 can't squeeze as much out of the day and what's often missed is like that book was the follow-up to so good they can't ignore you like it was the answer to the question so good they can't ignore you said if you have valuable skills you can create your own life and and clearly Clearly you could see the bias in that book that the visions I had of life was like yours right now i was you know you have autonomy you have control over your time i was very stressed and I remain very stressed so it was a big uh motivating factor of that book is why do I want control because I don't want a life that looks like Elon Musk right i
• 76:00 - 76:30 don't want I'm running three companies and a master of the universe and have meetings all day i want control and you can get control by being good at things that are rare and valuable and Deep Work was like well how do you do that like well okay uh focus focusing on stuff deliberate practice get better do the stuff that really matters you don't have to be busy right so it's kind of ironic that for some people deep work is seen as some sort of like hustle culture bro manifesto of of like crushing it and getting after it where to me that was the skeleton key for unlocking being able to go to the farm on the weekend
• 76:30 - 77:00 when I think about deep work I just think about udeimmonia it's another it's a synonym yeah you know And you know for those of your audience that don't know what udeimmonia is look up the Wikipedia entry but it's it's a old term that uh the Greeks had like many Greek terms i'd always say flourishing would be my translation yeah deep human flourishing but like what's also cool about udeimmonia is that it like the weak translation is happiness but like in contemporary culture happiness comes and goes like you could
• 77:00 - 77:30 be unhappy at this meeting and happy in the next meeting and then unhappy again udimmonia was not that edmononia was like u like a a it was the trend you are you on the trend the right trend and so like uh yeah I think about but it's also like the feeling it's like the flow feeling or like highly you know concentrated feeling and like if you're applying that to you know like the
• 77:30 - 78:00 what's cool about youmonia in the way that Aristotle describes it in the ethics is Even an inanimate object could express udeimmonia so like for a knife I think is the example he uses it's to be sharp cutting something yeah it's very teological yeah so it's like like the easiest way to think about that is like for you what is the best version of yourself and how are you engaged you know and so I think like you know
• 78:00 - 78:30 something like deep work it's it's not about Yeah yeah it's not about piling up more capital it's about being sharp and engaged you know so whatever yeah and that was my my program was different than yours like my grad program experience the theory group over there at MIT working too much would be bad like they had their own pathologies but if you were working too hard that might mean you're not smart and like for them the ultimate was coming up with a brilliant idea like a math insight
• 78:30 - 79:00 solving a theorem being smart being a monster mind and so it was not a it was a high stress place in the sense that huge imposttor syndrome but if you could get over that it was completely reasonable you're like yeah I'm not here i'm I I want to come in and stare at the whiteboard and like solar proof and then go play bongos or whatever like that would be like that's really impressive it had its own pathologies but I think that also laid an interesting idea in my mind it was like yeah focusing could be very valuable it's very human i mean Aristotle thought that was ultimately the theology of all people was deep
• 79:00 - 79:30 thinking because only humans can do that that must be human purpose um but they really didn't value busyness and that really stuck and I think that stuck with me as I was writing my books and thinking about things it's like I came up in a place where busyness like what values there in business like what does that have to do in their lingo what does that have to do with solving proofs like that could only get in the way and so there was something nice to see that purity it's also brutal because you were
• 79:30 - 80:00 always being judged if you were smart or not but it was simple yeah yeah I think and you know like for whatever reason this is where my mind's going when you're talking about this is that like I think a good life is where you're I mean I talked earlier about the alternating like my my sort of um my charmed life of being alternating between like city life where I feel really engaging and charged or charged up and then country life where I feel very slow i think in like a in a more day-to-day zone it's like the
• 80:00 - 80:30 ability to and the ability to concentrate on something and go kind of internal and grind and then come out of that and share it with somebody and get and feedback you know and like it's the it's the kind of rhythm between highly social highly focused yeah you know and my my long-standing critique on open office spaces is that instead of those things being intentional and putting like a
• 80:30 - 81:00 logical barrier like visual audio proximity barrier between those things you're all supposed to you're supposed to do all that stuff at the cubicle and at any second somebody could tap you on the shoulder at any second somebody could send you an email that you have to respond to yeah instantly you know and it is just it is no way to live effectively i've always thought Open Office is the physical coral to an email inbox the email inbox was like can't we just have everything come through here it always feels like a blender it takes
• 81:00 - 81:30 your brain puts in like a Vitamix or whatever and just like you but this is the cybernetic vision of like the Silicon Valley inspired office right it's like this is what email later Slack is it's like can't we just be in this hive mind and we're just all talking to each other all the time things are moving back and forth i'm answering your question you're answering me this you're sending me this file what about this and our minds will be melded together and out of that will come sort of distributed intelligence which of course misses the way this wetwware actually works in our head because we can't actually we're not bees we can't be plugged into constant unrelated
• 81:30 - 82:00 conversations at all time and also flourish or produce good thoughts or not be completely stressed out i pay a social cost at work for resisting Slack and I do like I I tell people like I only check Slack every once a day or something you know and it annoys people well it's like it like I I would have to take a different approach if I was like more in the trenches on like a project dayto-day and that's like how the team
• 82:00 - 82:30 was communicating and then I would change my behavior but for me right now it's like how many more tools do I need to do the exact same thing yeah you know like uh let's say it's email versus no email solved some problems fax machines were slow couriers were even slower voicemail was annoying so like email kind of solve those problems like okay we're good yeah um and we don't need to use constant conversation and we don't need I mean I've always argued Slack is just the they built the right tool for the wrong way to work like if this is what you're
• 82:30 - 83:00 going to do is use email which was supposed to be a voicemail fax machine replacement as like an ongoing back and forth conversation machine well that's not a great tool for doing that slack does that better if what you want to do is let's just have everyone be in touch at all times so that there's no friction and we can keep things moving email has some shortcomings so Slack will solve those shortcomings so a great tool for implementing that way of collaboration terrible way of collaborating outside of like a small team working together on something so it was it's like that's
• 83:00 - 83:30 it's a lovehate relationship I've always said because if that's the way you're collaborating like I love this it's better than email but also you hate that way of collaborating so it's like I don't know what to do you know Yeah yeah like uh yeah if we're going to use Slack then let's just get rid of our emails you know there I've heard of the architecture office one of my colleagues works in where they don't have individual email accounts they just have project email accounts i've been advocating for this yeah yeah it's a cool idea it's arbitrary the fact that it's a name at domain.com or whatever i
• 83:30 - 84:00 mean that's just just a happen stance that the original email programs the mail demon on Unix was from time share computers so in time share computers you had to have a login so they could bill you for the time you were using in the original email what it would really do is just leave text in a text file on someone else's account and then you could read it when you came into to your account and so that's where it was your username for time share computers became your deacto email addresses but there's a counterfactual I've talked about where
• 84:00 - 84:30 yeah you have emails for projects and that like completely changes by the way how the tool is used because as soon as I think about an email being your name I imagine uh interpersonal interaction that you're someone there's someone on the other end of this and I want something from that person and if you're not answering me there's a person who is slighting me and I imagine you're there and you saw it and you're ignoring me you get all the interpersonal dynamics if it's a project all that goes away like "Yeah I'm sending a request over to this project." And you know they'll get
• 84:30 - 85:00 back i'm sure multiple people are looking at this yeah yeah and then they they and they have a standard they'll get back to you by the end of the day if it comes before whatever and you don't think twice about it like all the interpersonal dynamics are gone well I'm excited man i'm excited about deep uh deep life yeah uh I'm I'm curious how is that how has actually working on that project changed your your outlook or changed your habits anyway we'll see yeah we'll see i'm I'm in the first part still which is like how to become how to get your act
• 85:00 - 85:30 together before you try to change your life i sense you being more like discerning about bigger things in your life you know yeah i And I think working on the second part which is much more about like what we're talking about today yeah we're there's changes coming probably i'm thinking about changes i think it'll probably lead to some changes i mean I it's just a stage of life where I'm going through you know how your 40s are yeah it's a different stage of life and it like but it
• 85:30 - 86:00 like it feels like uh on the vector like a logical conclusion to the vector you've been on for several books now i think so i think so yeah yeah yeah i mean you can imagine Yeah slow productivity is getting at well what does it really mean to be productive at work and this let me let me articulate my approach which is it's slower it's like you talked about let's I want results over time but my busyiness in the moment is not that important if anything that's going to be counterproductive it's going to make me
• 86:00 - 86:30 feel worse and so that book is trying to articulate that a world without email was my attempt to be like for god's sakes do we have to be communicating all the time completely failed by the way it did not world without email failed to change the world I think I was a victim of timing It's a little bit victim of timing the pandemic was not when people wanted to think about that but also it's just a victim of difficulty right i mean it's I always thought about world without email is just deep work for companies deep work for teams and maybe that's just a smaller market if it's something you can't put into place and
• 86:30 - 87:00 but I've talked to a lot of C it's just hard it's hard to move away deep work yeah all these books are kind of on these trajectory i I see I mean I'm rethink you know I'm in a different phase of life now you you've always been good at that too you always write about the phase that you're in that's the only way I know how to do it because if I don't care it doesn't come through but I mean I'm in a different phase i've talked about this it's you know after college what were my two goals writing academia and let me just focus go deep on those not be busy want to do those well and I've done those well right i'm
• 87:00 - 87:30 been in academia i'm a full professor there's no more promotions left to give published papers won the awards you know I did well there writing um I've done well there i think my you know I've sold a lot of books it's it's that number you've been in you've been in this one genre there are other genres yeah you think about um you're talking about my romance novel i assume that's what that's what people are waiting for fifty Shades of Cal fifty Shades of Cal yeah um No like do you ever think about what
• 87:30 - 88:00 Michael Kiteon would be writing about right now i wrote a piece like a Oh did you i wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple months ago about AI or something yeah yeah it was like what and he would he would be going crazy i'm sure well he would be going crazy yeah and and I wrote it was an interesting piece i was like "Okay what are the real lessons from Kiteon?" And I'll just my my takeaway was actually unexpected my my but my takeaway was because I know Kiteon well um his work well and I know a lot about him more than I probably should but it's like you know really my takeaway is what Kiteon really understood um was the issue was not so
• 88:00 - 88:30 much the people when it came to technology and I told the story in the front of that article where you know when he was trying to write the Adonomous strain it wasn't working and his editor Robert Gotly was like "Here's the problem you're trying to write like an actual novel and get into the psychology of the characters and what's going on inside their head or this or that." And he said "Stop that write it like a New Yorker piece." Like what ma the people aren't that imported outcomes from the technology write it like you're like Richard
• 88:30 - 89:00 Preston in the hot zone 30 years later like you're reporting on something that happened and then the book took off and that became his mo is that the the really what what mattered in these books was the technology and the unexpected ways they unfold not the characters right and I was saying this actually kind of relevant for today because it's it's right now we like to snag our technological story lines onto people and actors and villains and it's this person this person this is the villain in the play and this is the hero
• 89:00 - 89:30 whatever without getting and just anxiety generally yeah without getting at the actual issue right so we want to demonize Elon Musk but we don't get to introducing global conversation platforms might have been a wrong idea right cuz like Hammond was like a nice guy in Jurassic Park he was he had good intentions and he got his liver eaten out by copies at the end of that book it wasn't because he was flawed um I talked about Frankenstein i went back to the original Mary Shel and I was like "Let
• 89:30 - 90:00 me let me read I I re replicated the passage in Frankenstein where animated the monster the technology is completely unspecified it was the vitality flowed from the machine to the monster and the monster came alive the whole thing was about the people it was about the characters and the flaws and and Dr frankenstein's ambition and and how that his fatal flaw broke him and you go over to Jurassic Park Richard Hammond's a cardboard cutout what matters is the specific type of gene sequencer they were using to so anyways I thought there was a lesson there about uh the the
• 90:00 - 90:30 technologies themselves are often creating the impacts and we want to blame or care about the people but then that obscures the fact that cloning the dinosaurs is the problem even if like a better person was running Jurassic Park it might have still been a problem yeah do you know where the word sabotage comes from do we ever talk about this no so French or something the word for like the French peasant wooden shoe is called a sabat ah and so when the initial machines during the industrial revolution the agricultural machines
• 90:30 - 91:00 showed up uh like it freaked the peasants out or whatever and they took their wooden shoes and like jammed it into the gears and it would like break the machine back to work like a Ned Lud type of mythology yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so like it was literally the act of like destroying the menacing technology you know that was coming after your job or whatever so it seems like there's there's you know history rhymes right yep all right well we we have run over but I it's hard not to because I always like talking with
• 91:00 - 91:30 you um yeah I really appreciate this conversation yeah this was great so So um I think we covered a lot of interesting ground here and I would summarize it all as you know it's like architecting the deep life there's a there's a there's a lot that goes into it and it's not as simple as the one grand plan but it's there's there's a lot in here that I think is interesting also we got to nerd out about some work issues like we always do yeah there's a Buckminister Fuller quote that's useful or that I return to sometimes where he talks about or he just states "We're called to be the architects of the future not its
• 91:30 - 92:00 victims." Yeah you know I like it and I kind of think like you're called to be the architect of your life yeah not not the victim of circumstance you know and like what you have put out there in a series of tools and books and so forth is like here are like a suite of tools apply them you know and and life just gets easier yeah and they're content agnostic right i'm not going to tell you and this is how I'm writing my book right now it's not here's the five things you need for a deep life you need
• 92:00 - 92:30 this mix of friendship with this mix of adventure this or that like okay you can figure that out but how do you have the tools to act on it once you figure it out yeah so like architects and just don't don't expect immediate results yeah so architecture you have to learn Yeah how to design and build a building and then like the great architects use those tools to build falling water or whatever but you got to learn the tools first yeah like what I was going Yeah like Yeah and for architecture I mean last last word I guess is that you know
• 92:30 - 93:00 it's it's a kind of a cliche in architecture that unlike rock and roll you don't become successful when you're like 20 you become successful when you're like 50 and you just like it's again it's a expectations management game yeah takes a long time but anyway all right man all right hey David thanks for coming yeah thank you with you all right so that was my conversation with David Dwayne brought to us by dunaily.com i really enjoyed that here's the here's the context i talked to David
• 93:00 - 93:30 a lot right we've known each other for a long time i knew him back before I even wrote Deep Work he's featured in that book uh he lived in DC for a long time so we used to see each other more often but he often comes through DC he used to live in Tacoma Park and we always have these sort of interesting conversations when he's coming through town and we have these wide-ranging conversations so to be able to capture one of those conversations on air to record it to share it with other people that was kind of fun because I'm used to all these cool ideas about depth and focus and
• 93:30 - 94:00 concentration and the deep life and it's good to be able to share them with other people um I also like I I'm going to try to do this more when I have these conversations i think I did this a little bit with Michael Easter as well i like people who are doing cool things with their life and just to hear more about it as opposed to just having on experts to talk about their ideas now David had both of these things he's an expert on space design for concentration but he's also an expert on his own life being really cool and having that farm and the orchard with the the writing
• 94:00 - 94:30 gazebo that he built out there i think all that so cool and romantic so I I like this idea of like specific people living really specifically deep lives and just hearing how they did it how better to learn than to talk to real people anyways I'll probably end up putting some of this ideas in my book on the deep life because he he has too many good ideas about this topic so this was fun thanks for listening uh be back on Monday with a normal episode and until then stay deep hey if you like this video I think you'll really like this one as well check it out