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Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Ep. 283: How To Organize Your Life

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is the correct first step in transforming your life into something deeper? Traditional advice says to start with a clear vision of what you value. Cal has been arguing that it’s instead more important to develop a foundation of discipline. In this episode, he explores a more specific variation of this idea: perhaps the best way to prepare to pursue the big is to first learn how to control the small.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo

Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia


Deep Dive: How to organize your life [2:31]

- How do I “stay deep” when facing major changes? [36:37]

- How do I relax when I’m always so busy? [39:13]

- What is the difference between rituals and routines? [43:09]

- Can playing video games be part of a deep life? [51:27]

- Can deep life buckets connect to strategic plans? [57:39]

- CALL: Juggling multiple priorities to live a deep life [1:01:39]

CASE STUDY: Becoming organized to prevent overwhelm [1:07:32]

CAL REACTS: How many books did you read in 2023? [1:13:47]


Links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/05/how-many-books-did-you-read-2023-see-how-you-stack-up/

FREE download for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slow

Thanks to our Sponsors:

drinklmnt.com/deep

mintmobile.com/deep

cozyearth.com (promo code CAL)

mybodytutor.com


Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted

0:18.8

world.

0:20.1

So if you're new to this strange little world we enjoy here. I'm a computer

0:29.4

science professor at Georgetown University and a digital theorist who writes about the way technology

0:35.7

impacts how we live, how we work, and how we relate to each other.

0:39.3

On this show, I give concrete advice about the ideas I tackle in my writing.

0:46.2

I'm here in my deep work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse.

0:53.8

Jesse, I want to point out something that gives me hope

0:57.4

for the more quick internet age generations out there. know as a semi public figure I get a

1:05.1

fair amount of hate mail that makes its way to me a lot of people who sort of just

1:11.3

sit there really mad and just think if I could just get this person.

1:14.0

Well anyways I had an interesting hate mail message the other day.

1:18.0

That gave me some hope.

1:20.0

It was a mean message, you're terrible, blah blah blah blah but he signed it with a very

1:24.8

creative salutation you know at the end you would put like sincerely or best he

1:29.8

signed it with malice and then his name.

1:34.0

And I thought that was pretty clever.

1:36.0

You know, it just, there's a, he has a formality for the game of being mean to someone,

1:42.0

that you, at least you respect good communication

1:45.0

skill so I enjoy that I want to sign more letters that way so you read the whole

1:48.4

message well I skimmed it yeah you know these people, it's all in an age of text message, it's all caps,

1:56.4

incoherent, so it's really nice to have a well-trained grammatically correct hater.

...

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