I'm Cal Newport, and this is In-Depth, 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 Duane.

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 Utamodia Machine,

a design for a theoretical office that maximizes deep work over distraction.

So after my book came out, this idea, this design of the utomodian 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 its utommonium 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 keep it in mind not just the physical spaces, but 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, 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,

you spend as much time as he does systematically thinking about 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.

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