Cal Newport on The 4-hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss

And similarly, I think whether it's internet cafes, remote work arrangements, virtual organizations, a lot of these were tested early on. And you also had people buying tools and iPhones and so on, although iPhone may have come later, with a certain density in Silicon Valley. And when you have all of those tools and you have certain cultural norms, but they're enabled by a certain pervasive technology fetish, if we look at where we are now, it's easiest way To make the point that when you can always be connected and when you don't have a single physical office, you can work all the time. And in fact, it's incredibly challenging and you need strategies and rules, maybe even technological constraints so that you don't work all the time. It bleeds over. And I think that's a byproduct of not just the culture and the narrative, although that's a big piece of it. It's also a byproduct of Silicon Valley at the time, at least being sort of ground zero for density of new tech use, which then proliferated out to other places.

Cal Newport

I like this because I think it's the alternate hypothesis, and it's a hobby horse hypothesis

Tim Ferriss

We look at where we are now, it's easiest way to make the point that when you can always be connected and when you don't have a single physical office, you can work all the time. And in fact, it's incredibly challenging and you need strategies and rules, maybe even technological constraints so that you don't work all the time. It bleeds over. And I think that's a byproduct of not just the culture and the narrative, although that's a big piece of it. It's also a byproduct of Silicon Valley at the time, at least being sort of ground zero for density of new tech use, which then proliferated out to other places.

Cal Newport

I like this because I think it's the alternate hypothesis, and it's a hobby horse hypothesis of mine, that the other way to understand people getting more busy, work seeming less sustainable, We have my original hypothesis, which is there's this culture of overwork that came out of Silicon Valley. But what you're saying here is the other, I think, competing hypothesis, which is maybe even more right. I mean, I just wrote a whole book about this. It was the tools. And that when you give people always on low friction digital communication, there's weird dynamics that occur. And I note, for example, in your 2007 sort of coming out South by Southwest talk, South by Southwest interactive I want to get to as sort of the core of this book's release. And I just re-listened to it. Email

Cal Newport

Hard to find now, but I used to have people were posting notes, their notes from your session. And the email, it's too much. Tell people you're not going to answer. All of that elimination ideas was just asterisk, exclamation point, scroble's interview with you. Let's get into the email. You definitely felt that. This is where that tipping point was happening, but no one was yet saying this was unsustainable. My whole theory on this is that when I went back and did all the research on email spread, it spreads in the early 90s because we needed more cost-effective asynchronous communication. It was replacing fax machines and voicemail, and it's cheaper, and it did it well, and it's good for that. And then we got what you said, which was, well, let's just use this as the main medium through which all collaboration happens. Hyperactive, hive-minded, back-and conversation, that doesn't scale. That fried our brains, and tech got there first. But the problem was tech was the wrong place for that to hit first because they're such techno-instrumentalists in that world. They're like, okay, it's all about user habits. If I can just get a custom Vim macro suite set up just properly, right? This was the era of Merlin Mann and Inbox Zero that like if email is a problem, it's because I don't have the right setup. I don't have the right configuration. I don't have the right processing system. And so they were going at it by saying, I'll just build better tools because the tech people, tech is quite neutral. It's all about how you use it. So they're like, we must just be using this tool wrong.

Tim Ferriss

And I think that's why even now, since you just read it last week, I mean, you can say as credibly as anyone that the resources in the four-hour workweek are out of date. And many of the examples, how to market test, how to launch what people would now call an MVP have all changed. But the book still sits in the top few hundred on Amazon generally to this day, somewhere in the top thousand. And I think it's because of the principles. It's because the principles and the stories and the pain are still present and can still be used, or in the case of the pain, minimized by kind of revisiting the fundamentals.

Cal Newport

Right. You're saying it's not go to my PC and TV Wiki fans?

Tim Ferriss

That's right. That's right. Yeah, those are no longer relevant. And this is actually a great point. If you think the latest app is going to save you, you're just going to have to repeat the drill six months later, 12 months later. There's very little durability to a tactic-based or a tool-based approach, in my experience. Right.

Tim Ferriss

And then offering alternatives like mini-retirements and sort of distributing retirement throughout life since long life is not guaranteed. And there are all sorts of other issues with assuming you'll have enough for retirement with no income, et cetera. There are others that I'm just going to mention because they may be interesting to take a closer look at. One would also be, and this is very relevant now, that, well, two things. One is that there's absolute and then relative income. So determining how much you make per hour is actually quite important in the sense that it's easy to say, so-and makes $200,000 a year, so-and makes $75,000 a year, another person makes $500,000 a year. Therefore, the last example is the most successful and no doubt they have the greatest lifestyle output for what they make. But the lifestyle or life value of each unit, each dollar is really dependent on other factors and to what degree you control them. The where, with whom, how, etc. Determines a lot of that,

Cal Newport

Let's pull on that thread, in particular a thread about today. This message was 15 years ago, work is unsustainable. Be willing to consider radical changes to what work is and what role it plays in your life. There's the mystery of why that warning shot was somewhat ignored in the semi-immediate aftermath, which I'll get back to in a second. But we fast forward to today, especially COVID post-pandemic. As someone who's writing about these topics right now, this is exactly what's on everyone's mind. This book and what you're talking about, everyone is going through, not everyone, but there's a very large fraction of, let's say, remote capable knowledge workers who had severe Disruption in what their day-to life was like due to the pandemic who are going through the thinking. You mentioned before, you're seeing the book is catching, not catching a new wave,