Cal Newport

How to take trivial, possibly made up facts and turn them into influential emails

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“So what did you learn today?”

My ex (still living together) was sitting on the couch, arms crossed, looking at me sternly.

“Err…” I said, my eyes darting around as I tried to remember some new fact. “Today I learned that… supposedly you’ll be twice as productive if you block off your time for specific tasks.”

Background:

Last week, I was listening to an interview with Codie Sanchez. Codie is a newsletter operator and boring business investor. But at this point in the interview, Codie was not talking about either of those topics.

Rather, she was talking about how she makes her marriage work.

One of Codie’s tricks is that, each day, she and her husband share one thing that they’ve learned that day.

I mentioned this to my ex (still living together). She liked the idea so much that now she grills me at unexpected times about what I’ve learned during the day. I then have to think up something in a panic.

Yesterday, when she asked me this, I had been watching a video by Cal Newport of Deep Work fame. Newport now sells a notebook for planning your workday and blocking off time for various tasks.

​​Newport says — and he’s an authority so why question him — that if you block off your time for specific work tasks, you’ll be twice as productive.

I told my ex this. She again liked the idea. And it developed into a conversation about day planners and productivity and places in Barcelona to go shopping for notebooks.

Here’s the point of all this:

That thing about [time blocking = 2x productivity] is a small, trivial bit of information. I’m not even sure if it’s true. But it was enough of a kernel to start a natural and free-flowing conversation there on the couch. I guess that’s why Codie Sanchez recommends the practice.

It’s not just marriages or exes that this works with.

If you’re ever struggling for daily email ideas, then just ask yourself, “What did I learn today?” ​​Pick something small, concrete, even trivial. Then secrete a bit of personal context or opinion around that, like an oyster around a grain of sand, and within a few minutes, you’ll have something that your audience will enjoy reading and might even get value from.

That’s kind of a micro class in influential email writing.

For the macro version, you’ll have to get my Influential Emails training, which I’ll make available later this week, starting Thursday.

​​You’ll have to be on my email list to have a chance to get Influential Emails. If you’d like to learn something new on Thursday, click here to get on my list.

The 400-Hour Workweek: Embrace the men in gray, multiply what you do, and join me for Influential Emails

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“Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. The men in gray knew this better than anyone. Nobody knew the value of an hour or a minute, or even of a single second, as well as they. They were experts on time just as leeches are experts on blood, and they acted accordingly.”

Michael Ende, the guy who wrote the 80s hit Neverending Story, also wrote a kids’ book called Momo. That’s where I got the quote above. It’s a story about a little girl, Momo, who stands up to the mysterious, cigar-smoking men in gray.

The men in gray show up in Momo’s town and open the Timesaving Bank. “Deposit your current time,” they promise, “and you’ll get it back with interest in the future.” All the townspeople jump at the offer and lose themselves in the process. Momo is the only one who resists.

I’ll get back to Momo in a second. But first let me tell you about something interesting I read today. It’s an article by Cal Newport, the guy who wrote Deep Work. Newport’s article is titled Revisiting “The 4-Hour Workweek.”

In the article, Newport says that we as a society missed the real message of Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book. Instead of learning to improve our productivity, reduce our working time, and live a happier life, we focused on Ferriss’s hacks. So we could get done more. So we could strive more. So we could be more busy.

But Newport is hopeful. Now, with work-from-home, and corona, and a different economic situation than in 2007, he thinks we have a real chance to rethink our relationship to work.

I have my doubts.

In Michael Ende’s book, the men in gray don’t just roll over and give up control of the Timesaving Bank. It takes Momo to take them on and defeat them.

Something similar will have to happen in our world. The men in gray will fight hard for the 40-, 60-, and 100-hour workweek. They won’t just sit on the edges of their seats, nervously sucking on their cigars, watching to see if we’d maybe like to run them out of town. It will take a fight, and a big one.

But it will be even harder in our world than it was in Momo’s.

Because here, the men in gray — whatever they represent — aren’t some external parasites. Rather, they are inside each of us, as much a part of being human as decency and common sense.

Maybe you find that thought repulsive. Or maybe you find me repulsive, and you wonder what I’m on about. So maybe this is where we part ways. In that case, I wish you good luck in your fight for the 4-hour workweek.

But if you’re still with me, let me tell you how you can get the equivalent of a 400-hour workweek, without working harder, longer, or even smarter.

The secret is to take advantage of the magical power of multiplying what you do, so that a bit of work can get you paid disproportionately.

Thanks to the Internet, it’s pretty easy to do these days.

It’s how I’ve been able to achieve the real promise of Tim Ferriss’s book. Escape the 9-5. Live anywhere. And join the New Rich.

I embraced the men in gray inside all of us, along with all the other weird, wonderful, and repulsive parts of being human. And for years, I’ve been using this to help clients with their “salesmanship multiplied.”

More recently, I’ve been helping myself also. Except I find that, rather than “salesmanship multiplied,” what works even better for me is “influence multiplied.”

If you’d like to find out exactly what I mean by this and how I do it… you can do so in my Influential Emails training. I will be putting it on soon.

But the deadline to sign up for it is even sooner. Only two days from now. Tik tok.

Time is life itself… and time to sign up is passing. If you know the value of an hour or a minute, and you want to multiply the value of yours, then this might be for you:

https://influentialemails.com

Let’s play master and servant

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Gary Bencivenga said that sales copy needs to only do two things to be successful. The first is to open the sale. The second is to close the sale.

In a similar vein, I think you need to only do two things to finish any copy project. The first is to sit down to work. The second is to actually write.

You might think I’m being silly, but I’m serious.

To show you how serious, let tell you about a little game I like to play. Maybe you will like to play it too. It’s called master and servant.

Each night, I get out my riding whip, and, in the role of master, I make a list of tasks for the servant to accomplish the next day.

In the morning, I put the riding whip away and, in the role of servant, I blindly begin to follow the master’s written orders.

So I sit down to work on a particular copy project. Thing 1 above is complete.

But now what? The servant is lazy. He will whine and invent excuses. Soon, he will get up and quit rather than starting to do any work.

So in the role of master again, I’ll warm up the servant with some trivial subtasks.

For example, one of today’s tasks was an email for some real estate agents. And so I told the servant, “Open up a new text document. Write SUBJECT across the top. That’s where the subject line will go one day. And then just paste in the three or four URLs you will get research from. That is all you have to do.”

The servant, who is gullible as well as lazy, does as he’s told. “I’m finished,” he says. “Can I go now?”

So the master gives him a few more easy subtasks. And a few more. Soon enough, the servant is huffing, puffing, sweating, and working, without realizing that time is passing and the project is moving forward, under his own initiative. Thing 2 above is complete.

Gene Schwartz said that you have to work hard to succeed. He then clarified. You don’t have to work long hours. You just have to work hard, with great intensity.

But how do you do that?

I subscribe to the idea, which I first read from Cal Newport, that procrastination is at bottom uncertainty. Uncertainty about what you have to do. Uncertainty that it will work. Uncertainty that such a massive project could ever get finished.

So much thinking. So much personal attachment. So much stress. No wonder you can’t get any work done.

That’s why it helps to split your personality into two. Hammer and anvil. Master and servant. It’s a lot like life.

“I’m finished. Can I go now?”

Yes, you’re free to go if you like. But if you want to give your servant some useful reading to do later, click here and subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

Positioning remarkable ideas against popular incumbents

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In 2005, Wired magazine published an article titled, “GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age.”

It was about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This was a productivity system, which Allen first described in a 2001 book of the same name.

The basic premise of GTD was that we are all flooded with more and more distractions and tasks. The old ways of dealing with all this work, such as todo lists or goal-setting, are not enough.

As the Wired article describes, a few frustrated knowledge workers found Allen’s book. They identified themselves with the problems he described. And they adopted and promoted the GTD system with evangelical zeal.

By 2005, GTD had become a kind of cult. But this was still not the high point of Allen’s success. Interest in GTD kept building and spreading in all parts of American society for the rest of the 2000s.

Then, in 2012, a guy named Cal Newport wrote a post on his Study Hacks blog. The title was “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.”

The gist of Newport’s post was that GTD was great — if you’re a secretary or a mid-tier manager. But if you do any kind of creative, thought-intensive work, GTD will fail. In Newport’s words:

“Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires […] a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.”

Newport came out with his own solution to the problem behind GTD. He called it “deep work.”

Interest in deep work rose as interest in GTD declined. According to Google Trends, the two crossed paths, one on the way up, the other on the way down, in 2014. Today, if you check on Amazon, you will find Deep Work has knowledge workers’ attention, not GTD.

I don’t think Cal Newport did this consciously, but he hit upon an ideal way to position Deep Work. And that was in contrast to an existing, popular solution.

This is something smart marketers have been doing for years. I first heard Rich Schefren talk about this. Rich says this is one way he was able to get millions of leads and thousands of high-paying customers.

Rich’s advice is to go out into the marketplace and find a successful offer. Then, figure out how to make that offer a part of the problem — rather than a part of the solution.

You can go out and do that now. And you might have the same success as Rich Schefren or Cal Newport.

But here’s a nuanced point that might help you out even more.

After Cal Newport wrote his anti-GTD blog post, he got over 100 comments on the post. Those comments were very divided. A few said, “You might just be right.” But many more said, “You don’t understand GTD, or you’re not using it correctly.”

This corresponds to the Google Trends info. By 2012, interest in GTD had peaked. But overall, GTD was still very popular.

So if you want to position your product against an incumbent, that’s the moment to strike. Not when the incumbent is at the peak of popularity… but also, not when most people have already moved on. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“To truth only a brief celebration is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”

How to lift the fog of procrastination

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Cal Newport, a computer science professor who also writes about productivity, once had an interesting theory about procrastination. In Cal’s own words:

“The evolutionary perspective on procrastination, by contrast, says we delay because our frontal lobe doesn’t see a convincing plan behind our aspiration. The solution, therefore, is not to muster the courage to blindly charge ahead, but to instead accept what our brain is telling us: our plans need more hard work invested before they’re ready.”

(Put simply, we procrastinate when we don’t have a convincing plan.)

When I first read this theory, I thought it was flat-out stupid. I can’t remember why I disliked this idea at first. Nonetheless, it stuck in my mind, and it’s grown on me with time.

That’s because I’ve noticed it’s exactly what’s happening whenever I procrastinate. If I’m ever vague on my strategy for moving forward, I might be able to force myself to move for a while. Pretty soon though, I find I can’t get myself to move at all.

I’ve also noticed the inverse. That is, I’ve noticed that when I improve on my plan, when I clean it up and make it tighter, then suddenly I’m energized to get to work. Seemingly complex problems often resolve themselves simply by writing down what needs to be done, and then putting those tasks in some kind of sensible order.

It’s like a driver in a fog. With nothing to guide him, the driver will eventually slow down and stop, confused and disoriented about where he’s going. However, if there are nice white lines painted on the ground showing where the road goes, he can move forward — slower than in perfect weather, but forward, nonetheless.

Keep your eyes on the lines and you’re fine

Incidentally, this is how I managed to write a 15-page sales letter recently in just a few days. After about a week of research, I wrote an outline, broke it up into sections, arranged the sections into a list of alternately important and easy things to do, and chugged away down the list, without thinking too much along the way.

This is the difference between being fast and not ever finishing. If I had tried to simply sit and write, it wouldn’t have just taken me longer. Odds are, I would have gotten bogged down completely, and not moved past the first two or three pages.