Adventure working: doing deep cognitive work in novel locations

Executive overview

Knowledge work has become grinding and exhausting — a mental factory of emails, meetings, and screens. Adventure working means deliberately choosing inspiring, unusual locations to do your most important cognitive tasks.

Changing where you work changes the character of the work itself. Familiar cues trigger distraction; novel environments reduce that noise and spark creative insight.

The core insight: the slowness of adventure work feels wasteful in the moment but compounds into higher-quality output over time.

What adventure working looks like

• Bring one clear, singular objective — not a general walk, not email-checking
• Capture thinking as you go: notebook, audio notes, or laptop
• Alternate between moving through the location and sitting to write
• Schedule adventure work at the end of the day, after small tasks are cleared
• Avoid anything that pulls your attention back to the inbox during the session

Why it works

• Unfamiliar environments strip away the usual distraction cues
• Visual novelty opens the brain to more original thinking
• The work itself becomes less draining when done somewhere interesting
• Creates a clear psychological separation between deep thinking and administrative work

Accessible options beyond a Scottish island

• Parks and trails with benches (walk, sit, write, repeat)
• Museum atriums and galleries — cultural stimulus at low cost
• Pubs and coffee shops for afternoon or evening writing sessions
• Any scenic outdoor spot within reasonable distance of home

Cal's personal practice

• Sligo Creek Park, Wheaton Regional Park, Patuxent Wildlife Refuge (DC area)
• Georgetown campus trails and shaded picnic tables
• London trip: St. James Park and the Thames riverfront for loose thinking
• Plans to re-engineer weekly schedule with one half-day expedition per week
• Novel travel locations (e.g., an upstate New York property with trails and a writing shack) call for inventing a new ritual on arrival

The deeper argument

• Modern knowledge work pushes toward becoming a "network router" — processing information rather than creating it
• Adventure working is a deliberately analog, un-technological act that resists this pressure
• Paradox of slow productivity: producing two hours of genuine notes in a park outperforms a day of emails and Zoom calls over a semester

Listener Q&A: rituals and habits

• Health: daily 40-minute weight training before dinner; walking as cognitive process, not just exercise
• Reading 5 books/month requires no special system — default to reading in free time, use a completionist mindset to finish books aggressively once close to the end
• Writing rituals: walk first to prime thinking; break into a novel location (coffee shop, HQ) before settling; afternoon/evening sessions need a location change to re-engage
• Daily disciplines vs. rituals: both rewire identity toward disciplined action; the distinction matters less than building comfort with non-obligatory, long-term beneficial behavior

Slow productivity corner: job hunting and the deep life

• Don't evaluate jobs abstractly (better company, worse company)
• Start from an ideal lifestyle: day-to-day rhythm, place, nature of work
• Identify which obstacles a job change would remove and which opportunities it would open
• Systematic, lifestyle-first thinking produces "bespoke" opportunities that are recognizable when they appear
• Patience is required — you cannot force the right match overnight

Pull-based project management

• Keep two lists: actively working on (2–3 items) and waiting to work on
• Active projects generate administrative overhead; limiting them limits inbox chaos
• Size projects to days or weeks, not months — "write chapter four" not "write the book"
• Delays of a few days: absorb them. Delays of a week or more: formally move the project to waiting, pull in a replacement, and inform stakeholders
• Over-commitment to concurrent active projects is the primary source of knowledge-work burnout

Family organisation as prerequisite for a deep life

• Shared digital calendar is non-negotiable for families with complex schedules
• A dedicated calendar device (tablet as permanent kitchen display) removes friction
• Digital file storage (e.g. OneDrive with scan-to-PDF) reduces physical paper
• Separate task and project tracking (Reminders for tasks, Trello for projects) helps
• Organised life is what unlocks the remarkable life — not a constraint on spontaneity

Pseudo-productivity and the Manchester United case

• Manchester United's owner cited a 20% drop in email traffic on work-from-home Fridays as proof remote work fails
• The correct reading: email traffic dropped, which is good — emails are not the product
• Equating visible activity with useful output is pseudo-productivity, the engine behind knowledge-work burnout
• Hybrid work done right: in-office days for collaboration, at-home days for zero-email deep production
• If you can't ask employees "what did you produce?" and get a clear answer, the measurement problem is the real problem