Ep. 194: The Surprising Math of Doing Less

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Education, Technology, Self-improvement

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmediaDEEP DIVE: The Surprising Math of Doing Less [8:58]QUESTIONS:- How do I improve my discipline? [26:16]- How do you break down a complicated problem? [37:20] - LISTENER CALL: Has Cal read “Stolen Focus”? [40:27]The Books I Read in April 2022 [46:41]- LISTENER CALL: Playbook for writing in The New Yorker [1:12:37]Thanks to our Sponsors:Blinkist.com/DeepAthleticGreens.com/DeepPolicyGenius.comMagicSpoon.com/DeepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport, and this is DeepQuestJetvis, episode 194.
0:22.0	I'm here in my DeepQuestJetvis, joined by my producer, Jesse, Jesse, how you doing this
0:27.9	fine afternoon? Pretty good. It's good to be here. I'm a little tired, I'll admit. I've been
0:34.2	writing quite a bit on multiple projects and as the end of the semester. So that always brings
0:40.5	with it lots of work. And to make matters even more fun, we had on Monday a COVID false positive
0:49.2	from a lab that was doing shoddy work, which meant we lost basically a whole day. I had to teach
0:55.0	remotely the kids are home before we could figure out what was going on. So that just added more
0:59.8	spice to the stew of into semester tiredness. So hey, I'm glad we get a relax here by just
1:06.8	slowing down in the deep work HQ and chatting on the microphones is better than being on zoom
1:12.8	or answering emails. How many more days of class do you have left? Getting close, we're recording
1:20.4	this. Let's see, we're recording this on a Thursday Monday, which I suppose is when this episode is
1:26.4	released is my last day of class. So the week in which this is released is my last week of the
1:34.8	semester. I'm giving a final exam at the end of that week. There's some grading to be done, but
1:39.5	things wind down real rapidly once we get into May, which I'm looking forward to. So here's the
1:44.3	thing about I've mentioned this, but here's the thing people don't always get about professors at
1:49.0	R1 research institutes. Typically, you know, you're paid either a nine month or a 10 month salary.
1:56.4	Your summer is not paid by the university. Now most professors at a research institution
2:03.9	will fill in their summer salary by getting research grants. If you get a research grant from
2:09.2	the NSF or from DARPA, for example, one of the things you budget for is salary in the summer
2:15.0	when you're working on research. And some professors just take their 10 month salary and stretch
2:18.8	it over 12. What I do is, and this is more recent, I no longer ask for summer salary in research
2:27.3	grants. I pay my own salary out of writing income. And then I lean into the fact, hey, these are my
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