You Can Be Busy Or Remarkable, But Not Both

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. You can be busy or remarkable, but not both. By Cal Newport.

Terence Tao is one of the world's best mathematicians. He won a Fields medal when he was 31. He is, we can agree, remarkable. He is not, however, busy. I should be careful about definitions.

By busy, I mean, a schedule packed with nonoptional professional responsibilities. My evidence that Tau is not overwhelmed by such obligations is the time he spends on non obligatory, non time sensitive hobbies, in particular, his blog. Since the new year, he's written 9 long posts full of mathematical equations and fun titles like matrix identities as derivatives of determinant identities. His most recent post is 37 100 words long, and that's a normal length. As a professor who also blogs, I know that posts are something you do only when you have downtime.

I conjecture, therefore, that Tau's large volume of posting implies he enjoys a large amount of downtime in his professional life. Here's why you should care. Tau's downtime is not an aberration, a quirk of a quirky prodigy. It is instead, I argue, essential to his success. Deep work is phasic.

Put another way, we're not computer processors. We can't be expected to accomplish any job anytime we have the available cycles. There are rhythms to our psychology. Certain times of the day, week, month, and even year are better suited for deep work than other times. To respect this reality, you must leave sufficient time in your schedule to handle the intense bursts of such work when they occur.

This requires that you constrain the other obligations in your life, perhaps by being reluctant to agree to things or start projects, or by ruthlessly batching and streamlining your regular obligations. When it's time to work deeply, this approach leaves you the schedule space necessary to immerse. When you shifted temporarily out of deep work mode, however, this approach leaves you with downtime. This is why people who do remarkable things can seem remarkably under committed. It's a side effect of the scheduling philosophy necessary to accommodate depth.

Returning to Tal's blog, the specific dates of his posts support my theory. As I mentioned, he posted 9 long posts since the new year. On closer inspection, it turns out that most of the posts occurred in a single month, February. We can imagine that this month was a down cycle between two periods of more intense thinking. If my theory is true, and I don't know that it is, its implication is striking.

Busyness stymies accomplishment. In other words, if you're looking for the next Tau, ignore the guy checking email while running to his next meeting, and look instead towards the quiet fellow staring off at the clouds, trying to figure out what to do with this afternoon. Post was written by Cal Newport. Cal writes a blog at calnewport.com called the study hacks blog, where he talks about learning and habits and all kinds of cool stuff. When I went to contact Cal for permission to read this article, I was greeted with this contact form.

And I wanna read it to you because I think it encompasses a couple of things we've talked about here. A consequence of my commitment to deep work and fixed schedule productivity is that I'm purposefully hard to reach. I don't have a general use email address, and I don't use any social media. The limited time I can put aside for writing, I like to dedicate fully to writing the best possible content. One of the advantages of running a blog, however, is that it exposes you to interesting opportunities.

With this in mind, if you want to interview me or have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, email me at interesting@calnewport.com. For the reasons stated above, I'll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests. Now how cool is that? Talk about a guy that's following his own advice. Right?

He's very protective of the time that he has. And maybe that's why he has such a successful blog and has written 4 books, because he doesn't allow other people to prioritize his time for him. The email inbox is like a to do list that somebody else manages for you. So I sent a very short email to interesting at calnewport.com, told him what I was doing, and asked if I could have his permission. He responded with one word.

Sure. See, Cal knows that by doing things and telling people, he's increasing his opportunity for interesting things to happen. And so he struck this balance between I want interesting things to happen, but I also need to prioritize my time. And so that's his system. Now you may be thinking that's all good and well for this professor slash author and for this genius mathematician, but That's not gonna work for me.

And trust me, I understand that because that's kinda how I feel after reading this article. But the larger, more meta point that Cal is making here is busyness is not a good thing. We wear our busyness like a badge. When people ask, hey. How's it going?

What's our response? Well, you know, it's been really busy. And then they say, oh, yeah. I hear you. And we both chuckle and then walk away.

The New York Times had a great article a while back called The Busy Trap. Just gonna read one paragraph of it for you. Even children are busy now. Scheduled down to the half hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown ups.

I was a member of the latchkey generation and had 3 hours of totally unstructured largely unsupervised time every afternoon. Time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia, to making animated films, to getting together with friends in the woods, to chuck dirt clouds directly into one another's eyes. All of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life. I'll put a link to that New York Times article in the show notes, so you can read the whole thing.

So what is it about busyness? Why do we feel like deep down, busyness is a good thing? I think partially because it makes us feel important. If we have a bunch of stuff to do and a bunch of people that need our attention, well, then we obviously must be important. Right?

I wonder if we could go so far as to say that we love feeling busy because we're proud and egotistical. I wonder if we can go that far or if that's too far. And I don't know. If being busy makes me feel important, which I think it often does, and feeling important is how I define my self worth, then I'm going to want to feel busy. Right?

And I'm gonna tell other people about how busy I am, because that reinforces the fact that I'm important. But the truth of the matter is your worth as a person is not tied to how full your calendar is, and it's delusional to think that it is. So feel free to let that go. And just briefly, I wanna talk about busyness versus hard work, because there's totally a difference. Cal Newport and this mathematician guy, Tau, are working really hard, but Cal is claiming that neither of them are busy.

So what's that all about? Because you can have a day that's super busy, but you didn't actually do any hard work. And you can have a day that was full of hard work, but you wouldn't categorize it as particularly busy. What I've noticed in my life is that a day that is full of hard work and is not very busy is generally a day that I was very focused. I was able to focus on my work.

So if there's a day where I can actually spend, like, 10 hours focused on my work, that's generally a pretty good day. But if there's a day that's shorter, let's say a day that's 8 hours long, but I spend a little bit on work, a little bit putting out fires here and there, running from meeting to meeting, responding to emails. That's a super busy day, but it's not a good day. I guess what you need to think about is what is your goal. If your goal is to feel and look important, then you need to be seen.

You need to be in a bunch of meetings. You need to be sending emails late at night and hopping on every single phone call even if it doesn't apply. But if your goal is to do great work, then you gotta be ruthless. You gotta cut all that crap out. Have to purposefully block off times to do nothing.

Why? Why do great ideas come to us in the shower? Because that's the 5 glorious minutes of the day when your brain has just a little bit of downtime and can process through all of these ideas. And suddenly it comes to you, the solution to your problem that you've been trying to figure out. Don't just relegate your downtime to when you're in the shower and your phone would get wet if you look at it.

Actually, schedule some of that in. That time is extremely valuable, and I wanna offer a challenge to you. The next time someone says, how's your week going or how's your month been? Say anything besides busy. Busy is the default.

And if you stop hearing yourself say it all the time, you might be able to stop convincing yourself that you need to be busy. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, a little bit of slope. What I mean is that how fast you learn is a lot more important than how much you know to begin with. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for The Music makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm.

And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.