Ep. 257: Refusing Overwork

00:00:00.000 | Alright, so let's get started then with today's deep question.

00:00:02.600 | I'll word it this way.

00:00:04.800 | How does fixed schedule productivity work and how has Cal's thoughts on it changed over

00:00:11.000 | the years?

00:00:19.040 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in

00:00:25.200 | a distracted world.

00:00:27.780 | I am here in the Summer HQ up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

00:00:33.400 | I am joined down in the Southern Deep Work HQ in Washington, DC by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:40.240 | Jesse, do you think I've done a pretty good job setting up my Northern HQ to look not

00:00:45.960 | unlike our studio down in DC itself actually looks?

00:00:51.020 | I never had a doubt.

00:00:52.020 | I knew you were going to pull it off.

00:00:54.000 | It looks great.

00:00:55.000 | Now, we still have some kinks we're working out.

00:00:57.240 | You might hear a small hiss that should be gone by the next episode.

00:01:01.800 | I'm still playing with the lights, but there's nothing more fun than messing around with

00:01:05.040 | AV equipment when what you really should be doing is actual deep work.

00:01:09.720 | So I think there's irony there.

00:01:12.000 | Working on a podcast about avoiding distraction has been in recent days a wonderful source

00:01:18.680 | of distraction for me.

00:01:20.880 | But I am happy to be up here.

00:01:22.680 | I'm happy that we are still rolling with the show.

00:01:26.560 | Even as I'm up North, I'll tell you what I wanted to talk about today came from you,

00:01:33.080 | my listeners.

00:01:34.520 | Someone sent me a question about an article that I had published back in 2008.

00:01:41.480 | That's one of my classic articles.

00:01:42.800 | I think one of my most cited articles on hardcore productivity.

00:01:48.480 | Let me read the title.

00:01:49.480 | I have it here.

00:01:50.480 | I love that 2008 article I wrote is as follows.

00:01:55.120 | "Fixed Schedule Productivity.

00:01:57.560 | How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours."

00:02:03.960 | I thought it would be fun to revisit this article.

00:02:07.880 | To talk through some of the main ideas, discuss what I still agree with, and what I have evolved

00:02:14.640 | or changed in the many years that have passed since I first wrote that.

00:02:19.920 | Just to calibrate where this falls on the "deep life" stack we use to roughly keep

00:02:24.600 | track of efforts to find more depth in our life, this would be a core, calm layer strategy.

00:02:32.720 | Fixed Schedule Productivity that I write about in this article will discuss really is all

00:02:36.560 | about how do you keep a control of your obligations so that you have breathing room and time to

00:02:42.040 | actually push other things towards the remarkable, reflect, etc.

00:02:44.960 | So that's going to be the plan.

00:02:46.520 | We're going to talk about that topic, get into the weeds here a little bit.

00:02:49.600 | Then I've pulled some questions that are all relevant.

00:02:53.320 | Now some of the questions we're going to answer in this second segment are specifically

00:02:57.480 | related to Fixed Schedule Productivity, and some are related to the type of more smaller

00:03:03.680 | or finer-tuned tactics you would need to succeed with Fixed Schedule Productivity.

00:03:08.640 | So we'll do that in the second segment.

00:03:11.600 | And for the third segment, we'll talk books.

00:03:13.820 | This is coming to you, we're now at mid-July, so we might as well go back and talk about

00:03:17.240 | what books I read back in June.

00:03:20.600 | All right, so let's get started then with today's deep question.

00:03:24.200 | I'll word it this way.

00:03:26.440 | How does Fixed Schedule Productivity work and how has Cal's thoughts on it changed over

00:03:33.320 | the years?

00:03:34.320 | I'm going to start by reading the introduction of my original article here.

00:03:38.920 | Here's the introduction.

00:03:39.920 | Remember, this is February of 2008 when I wrote this.

00:03:43.160 | I was a PhD student at MIT at the time.

00:03:46.880 | Here's what I wrote.

00:03:47.880 | "I should have an overwhelming, Malox-guzzling, stress-saturated schedule.

00:03:54.320 | Here's why.

00:03:55.320 | I am a graduate student in a demanding program.

00:03:57.960 | I'm working on several research papers while also attempting to nail down some key ideas

00:04:01.960 | for my dissertation.

00:04:03.320 | I'm TAing and taking courses.

00:04:05.440 | I maintain this blog.

00:04:07.200 | I'm a staff writer for Flack Magazine.

00:04:10.920 | And to keep things interesting, I'm working on background research for a potential new

00:04:15.080 | book project.

00:04:16.240 | It would be reasonable to assume that I must get on average 7-8 minutes of sleep at night.

00:04:20.240 | It would also be wrong.

00:04:22.600 | Let me explain."

00:04:23.600 | Alright, well, anyways, first of all, let me just react to that before we get into the

00:04:27.920 | guts of what I talk about in that article.

00:04:30.960 | It's very nostalgic how naive I was to think that a grad student schedule was somehow demanding

00:04:36.920 | or Malox-guzzling or whatever I said there.

00:04:41.400 | Here's what I didn't say.

00:04:42.520 | Here's the thing of being a grad program.

00:04:43.760 | Yeah, I'm working on several research papers and TAing.

00:04:47.120 | That doesn't take that much time.

00:04:49.120 | You TA a class twice a week.

00:04:50.840 | You can work on the research paper some days.

00:04:53.680 | I'm also interested to see Flack Magazine reference.

00:04:57.240 | I do not believe that magazine is still around.

00:04:59.960 | It was, however, a key part of my development as a writer.

00:05:04.000 | After I wrote the book, How to Become a Straight A Student, I began, as I've talked about on

00:05:08.280 | the show before, to systematically train my writing ability so that I could do more general

00:05:13.760 | journalism, general idea nonfiction writing like I do today.

00:05:18.720 | Flack Magazine was a big part of that training.

00:05:22.680 | It was a kind of M+1 style clone, sort of like hipster Brooklyn style publication, online

00:05:28.480 | only, and pretty competitive.

00:05:30.880 | They had a good editor, right?

00:05:32.360 | It was hard to get them to accept an article.

00:05:34.240 | And so I used Flack Magazine commissions to push my writing away from pure pragmatic nonfiction

00:05:41.560 | and to be a little bit more journalistic or general nonfiction.

00:05:45.080 | So it's cool to see that Flack Magazine reference.

00:05:47.720 | Alright, so how did I explain how I avoided stress in that situation?

00:05:52.520 | Well, I go on to write in the article, "Here is my actual schedule.

00:05:57.440 | I work from 9-5 on weekdays, in the morning on Sunday.

00:06:02.000 | That's it.

00:06:03.000 | I'm bored.

00:06:04.000 | I have no need to ever turn on a computer after 5 during the week or any time on Saturday.

00:06:07.880 | I fill these times instead doing, well, whatever I want.

00:06:11.760 | How do I balance an ambitious workload with an ambitiously sparse schedule?

00:06:14.840 | It's a simple idea I call fixed schedule productivity.

00:06:18.560 | The system works as follows.

00:06:20.240 | One, choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort

00:06:25.200 | and relaxation.

00:06:26.760 | Two, do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

00:06:33.480 | Alright so there it is.

00:06:34.520 | I'm introducing for the first time back in 2008 my now fabled fixed schedule productivity

00:06:42.080 | system.

00:06:43.080 | You fix the hours and then you say, "That's what I'm going to work."

00:06:48.840 | Then you figure out how to make that happen.

00:06:50.600 | And it's in that second part, figuring out how am I going to satisfy this commitment

00:06:56.040 | to myself, it's in that second part that the productivity innovation, the workload

00:07:00.560 | management innovation, all of that will then emerge as a natural consequence.

00:07:06.560 | Now again, a little bit of backstory here.

00:07:09.500 | This idea of fixing the schedule to 9 to 5 was quite novel for a grad student.

00:07:14.060 | So for me this seemed really very novel.

00:07:16.880 | Grad students usually roll into work 10, 11 a.m. and they often will stay there until

00:07:21.600 | late at night, especially if something is due the next day.

00:07:25.360 | Because I got married early, I had always just fixed my graduate student hours to my

00:07:30.840 | wife's work hours.

00:07:32.120 | And so I had this unusual structure early on in my grad student career.

00:07:36.040 | I'm going to stick to normal work hours.

00:07:38.080 | I want to be done work when she gets done with work.

00:07:40.560 | And so this is the backstory of what led me to experimenting with fixed hours and working

00:07:45.040 | backwards to satisfy it.

00:07:46.440 | Now again, as I say, this is not hard to satisfy for most graduate student positions, but it

00:07:51.360 | was great training wheels for me to get used to this idea of working backwards from limits

00:07:57.060 | and letting that induce innovations.

00:08:01.520 | So as I go on to say in the original article, here is a simple truth.

00:08:06.200 | To stick to your ideal schedule, you will require some drastic actions.

00:08:10.720 | For example, you may have to dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are

00:08:14.160 | working on, ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule, risk mildly annoying

00:08:20.440 | or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom, and stop procrastinating.

00:08:27.040 | In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do, but when you have the focus

00:08:30.600 | of a specific goal, such as "I do not want to work past 5 on weekdays," you'd be surprised

00:08:36.400 | by how much easier it becomes to deploy these strategies in your daily life.

00:08:40.160 | I then go on to talk about what in 2008, what strategies I put in place to satisfy my fixed

00:08:49.480 | schedule.

00:08:50.480 | I mention serializing projects.

00:08:52.640 | I keep two project queues, one for my student projects and one for my writing projects.

00:08:57.120 | At any one moment, I'm only working on the top project from each queue.

00:09:00.720 | When I finish, I move on to the next.

00:09:04.040 | A little bit of an aside, that wasn't really true.

00:09:06.160 | I was often working on multiple research papers at the same time, but I think that sounded

00:09:10.240 | better.

00:09:11.240 | Number two, I'm ultra clear about when to expect results from me, and it's not always

00:09:14.840 | soon.

00:09:15.840 | Number three, I refuse if my queue is too crowded for a potential project to get done

00:09:21.000 | in time.

00:09:22.000 | Number four, I drop projects and quit.

00:09:26.720 | If a project is out of control and starts to set up too much time for my schedule, I

00:09:29.680 | drop it.

00:09:30.960 | If something demonstrably more important comes along and it conflicts with something else

00:09:34.160 | in my queue, I drop the less important project.

00:09:36.900 | If an obligation is taking up too much time, I quit.

00:09:39.400 | Here's a secret, no one really cares what you do on the small scale.

00:09:42.040 | In the end, you're judged on your large scale list of important completions.

00:09:46.040 | Again a backstory there, I remember very specifically a student organization I joined because I

00:09:51.480 | thought it would be interesting about the dialogue between science and religion.

00:09:55.920 | And then I soon realized, I don't have time to do this.

00:09:59.640 | I mean this is going to, I'm going to have to add extra work hours, I'm already at roughly

00:10:03.300 | my capacity, and I quickly backed back out of it.

00:10:06.220 | I'm sure that's what I had in mind when I wrote that there.

00:10:09.600 | This is number one, two, three, number five, I'm not available.

00:10:13.640 | I often work in hidden nooks of the various libraries on campus.

00:10:16.600 | That's quite relevant in grad school, if you're in your office, people can find you.

00:10:20.480 | Number six, I batch and habitize.

00:10:22.480 | Habit-itize, I think I made up that word.

00:10:26.340 | Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit.

00:10:28.940 | And number, what is this, seven, I start early, sometimes real early.

00:10:33.760 | On certain projects that I know are important, I don't tolerate procrastination.

00:10:37.380 | It doesn't interest me.

00:10:38.380 | If I need to start something two or three weeks in advance so that my queue proceeds

00:10:41.300 | as needed, I do so.

00:10:43.520 | All right, so we get a little bit of chest beating there.

00:10:46.960 | All right, so let's react to this.

00:10:48.240 | That was 2008 Cal, explaining not just what fixed schedule productivity is, but how I

00:10:55.540 | actually implemented it.

00:10:58.080 | And what I'd point out is, I was surprised by how similar a lot of that is to what I

00:11:04.280 | still do today.

00:11:05.280 | I probably had forgotten that that particular schedule, nine to five in the mornings on

00:11:09.140 | Sundays, was something that I was doing in 2008.

00:11:13.240 | I mean, I was doing in my twenties.

00:11:15.080 | I didn't realize that went back that far.

00:11:18.120 | All those ideas about being very careful about what I say yes to, spreading things out over

00:11:23.000 | time so that I don't have project deadlines piling up and requiring really long days or

00:11:29.080 | weeks, that's something I still do quite a bit.

00:11:32.560 | Being in different locations where I'm hard to find, yes.

00:11:35.640 | Risking mildly annoying people in the short term to get long-term, bigger gains, yes,

00:11:40.720 | that is something else I do as well.

00:11:43.120 | So a lot about this article holds up.

00:11:46.520 | But I did want to look back and say, what is it that's new?

00:11:52.200 | So what's my new take?

00:11:53.200 | Or my new additions to this thinking?

00:11:56.440 | Well the first thing I want to add to it, 2023 Cal wants to add to this article, is

00:12:01.320 | I don't think I fully understood back then why fixed schedule productivity was so effective.

00:12:08.040 | The way I talk about it in that article is that, oh, it is just a source of innovation.

00:12:15.480 | If you have a simple goal that you can commit to, I don't want to work past five, that will

00:12:20.800 | lead you to innovate lots of smaller productivity habits.

00:12:23.680 | You're going to track your time better.

00:12:24.960 | You're going to be more careful about managing your project queues.

00:12:27.800 | You're going to have systems to automate certain things that can be automated.

00:12:30.520 | So I saw it back in 2008.

00:12:32.760 | This strategy was really about innovation.

00:12:35.320 | I used to call it a meta productivity strategy because it induced many different concrete

00:12:41.140 | productivity innovations.

00:12:43.240 | 2023 Cal sees, OK, part of why this is so effective is actually not just that it induces

00:12:51.480 | you to come up with good ideas, but because it is substituting for something that is missing

00:12:56.560 | in modern knowledge work, which is workload management.

00:13:01.600 | In modern knowledge work, and this is an idea I've been writing about, let's say, in the

00:13:04.480 | New Yorker in recent years, one of the big issues is that we don't have clear ways to

00:13:10.960 | actually manage individual workloads.

00:13:13.760 | We allow workloads to be distributed in an ad hoc fashion.

00:13:17.580 | People send you emails, grab you on Slack or in the hallway, hey, what about this?

00:13:21.400 | Can you help me with this?

00:13:22.400 | Can you join this?

00:13:23.400 | It is up to you to figure out how much to bring on your plate.

00:13:26.420 | It's up to you to figure out when to push back.

00:13:29.480 | This is a very difficult burden to place onto an individual knowledge worker.

00:13:33.720 | So what do we tend to do?

00:13:35.840 | We fall back on what I talk about all the time on the show as the 20% rule.

00:13:41.120 | We wait until we have about 20% too much work on our plate.

00:13:45.240 | At that point, we are so stressed out and anxious about our work that our psychological

00:13:50.240 | distress gives us emotional cover to say no.

00:13:55.800 | We're feeling so bad that we finally feel justified to start limiting new stuff on our

00:14:01.520 | schedule.

00:14:02.520 | And what this really looks like in practice is oscillation.

00:14:05.280 | Things get way out of control.

00:14:07.200 | From a place of anxiety and burnout, we begin pushing back on new work.

00:14:13.800 | Eventually we crest the other direction.

00:14:15.140 | Now we have too little on our plate.

00:14:16.520 | We've been saying no for a while.

00:14:17.760 | We finished the things that were stressing us out.

00:14:19.600 | Now we have too little on our plate.

00:14:20.920 | So we start saying yes again.

00:14:21.920 | Then we go right up to the peak again before we fall back down to the valley.

00:14:26.000 | Fixed schedule productivity, though I did not know it at the time when I introduced

00:14:29.800 | it, is a workload management strategy.

00:14:34.080 | By saying my work has to fit into these hours, you have a better metric to use to control

00:14:42.160 | your workload than stress and anxiety.

00:14:44.400 | Your metric is I'm not going to be able to easily fit this within 9-5, so now I have

00:14:48.600 | too much on my plate.

00:14:49.600 | I have to say no or improve how I'm working on what's already there.

00:14:52.880 | That is a much more reasonable metric than waiting until you're 20% more stressed.

00:14:59.240 | Trying to fit your work into 9-5, that's actually a reasonable amount of work.

00:15:02.360 | So what you're implicitly doing with fixed schedule productivity is saying here is a

00:15:05.560 | reasonable workload.

00:15:07.120 | I can do a lot of good work with this workload, but it is sustainable and it can fit into

00:15:12.040 | a broader, deeper life that has other concerns than just work.

00:15:15.400 | And I'm going to work backwards now and make sure what do I need to do to keep my workload

00:15:18.640 | to fit within those limits.

00:15:19.880 | So it's replacing the 20% rule with something much more humane and sustainable.

00:15:24.360 | I did not have that vocabulary in 2008.

00:15:28.440 | In part because life as a grad student and a writer is very autonomous, most of the work

00:15:32.560 | you do you bring on into your own life, so workload management just wasn't something

00:15:37.560 | I was thinking about, I had full control over my workload.

00:15:40.560 | 2023 calcities, that's really one of the key elements for why fixed schedule productivity

00:15:45.600 | I think has persevered.

00:15:49.400 | What about the details?

00:15:50.760 | What has changed since 2008 in terms of how I actually implement fixed schedule productivity?

00:15:57.400 | Because I still do, that's still roughly, I talk about it all the time on the show.

00:16:01.360 | Work hours, 9-5ish, usually a focus block on Sunday morning.

00:16:07.320 | So what has changed?

00:16:08.760 | A lot of the things I talk about in the article I still do, but what else has changed?

00:16:12.000 | A couple things.

00:16:13.060 | First of all, as you know, I now have a much more sophisticated, multi-scale planning philosophy

00:16:18.660 | to organize my obligations and find time to actually execute them.

00:16:23.040 | My time management was not so sophisticated as a grad student because it didn't need to

00:16:27.440 | be.

00:16:28.880 | As someone who today has 7 jobs and yet still is trying to satisfy fixed schedule productivity,

00:16:35.080 | strategic planning, weekly planning, daily time block planning, all working together

00:16:39.040 | and coordinating with a good task management capture system is critical.

00:16:45.600 | I have to have that type of control today in a way that maybe I didn't back then.

00:16:49.760 | So my time management to make my 9-5 goal work is much more complicated.

00:16:57.200 | Process-centric communication has also become more complicated in my life.

00:17:02.980 | This is what I talk about in a world without email, really thinking through collaboration,

00:17:09.060 | really thinking through how are we going to communicate to get something done.

00:17:13.940 | This wasn't very relevant in 2008 for me.

00:17:17.100 | In 2023, this very much matters, that I cannot just be going back and forth, ad hoc, unscheduled

00:17:25.540 | communication in Slack and email for all of my different ongoing projects.

00:17:29.260 | That would require me to check my inbox all the time.

00:17:31.700 | The cost of the resulting context shifts would in turn really make it difficult for me to

00:17:37.420 | keep my same workload within 9-5.

00:17:39.020 | So that's another thing I think a lot about today that I did not back then.

00:17:43.860 | How do I communicate and collaborate in a way that minimizes context shifts, that moves

00:17:49.540 | away from the hyperactive hive mind and towards something that's much more psychologically

00:17:54.420 | and neurologically sustainable.

00:17:56.080 | So those are the two things that have developed.

00:17:58.080 | They're much more sophisticated takes on time and attention.

00:18:02.300 | But that has allowed me to really increase the number of things I am still juggling within

00:18:06.740 | that same window of time that I set back when I was, whatever this would have been, 25 or

00:18:14.740 | 26.

00:18:15.740 | An interesting aside I want to add here before we wrap this up is I recognized, I was remembering

00:18:23.740 | this the other day.

00:18:24.740 | I recognized as I was finishing up grad school that I had things easy from a workload management

00:18:31.300 | perspective, that fixed schedule productivity wasn't too hard to implement and that it would

00:18:34.900 | get harder.

00:18:35.980 | And that if I became a professor and I kept writing books, I was looking ahead to my life

00:18:39.820 | today and I knew that would be much harder.

00:18:42.260 | And I actually did during my postdoc years, I spent two years as a postdoc after grad

00:18:47.420 | school to train for my life right now, to train specifically for satisfying fixed schedule

00:18:55.180 | productivity with a busier professional demands.

00:18:59.500 | I added artificial constraints to my schedule as a postdoc.

00:19:04.460 | I took two hours out of every day in the middle of the day that I took away from work.

00:19:09.780 | It's where I would, I'd bring my dog to the office and then midday we would go for a run.

00:19:16.580 | Didn't matter how cold it was, I had all the gear to run in Boston, even when it was really

00:19:20.540 | cold.

00:19:21.540 | We'd go for a run.

00:19:22.820 | I would do a Navy Seal style calisthenics workout on a floating dock out there in the

00:19:28.420 | Charles River off the Esplanade.

00:19:31.060 | And I would just swipe away, shovel away the snow to make room for sit-ups.

00:19:35.460 | Then I would go home, bring the dog home.

00:19:37.420 | I would eat lunch.

00:19:38.420 | I would watch a show.

00:19:39.420 | I'd take a shower.

00:19:40.420 | I'd go down, maybe get a coffee at the Starbucks on Charles Street and take the T1 stop to

00:19:45.140 | the Kendall MIT.

00:19:46.140 | I'd stay up two hours every day.

00:19:48.260 | I'd relax.

00:19:49.260 | I was going to ask you about that actually.

00:19:51.060 | Yeah.

00:19:52.060 | So you probably remember me talking about that.

00:19:53.700 | Oh, a hundred percent.

00:19:54.700 | I was going to one of the questions I was going to ask you about because I was like

00:19:58.500 | thinking really nine to five, you're going to have like six.

00:20:00.940 | Well, and that was the point.

00:20:01.940 | I mean, I did that on purpose because my work was too easy.

00:20:06.500 | And I said, okay, let me take two hours away because now if I take two hours away to fit

00:20:11.540 | my work as a postdoc into nine to five, it's going to be harder and I'll innovate more

00:20:15.780 | rules.

00:20:16.780 | Because when I become a professor, I'm going to have a lot more work to do.

00:20:20.420 | And so I want to be used to being much more efficient.

00:20:22.860 | I actually just worried I was out of shape from a productivity standpoint.

00:20:26.500 | My life was too easy.

00:20:27.500 | So I took two hours out of every day as a postdoc just to make my life from an organizational

00:20:32.300 | perspective harder so that when I became a professor, I would be ready.

00:20:37.880 | And I think it worked.

00:20:38.880 | I mean, you know, I was ready for the initial obligations as a professor.

00:20:42.660 | It was fine.

00:20:44.460 | Kids were much more, I would say, of a bigger challenge than becoming a professor.

00:20:49.240 | But this was all training.

00:20:50.940 | So anyways, I fixed productivity.

00:20:52.660 | That's sort of the story.

00:20:54.380 | That's where it came from.

00:20:55.380 | That's how I used to think about it.

00:20:56.380 | This is what I added to it over the years.

00:20:58.820 | This is where it is in my life right now.

00:21:00.780 | So my summary here is I think it is very effective.

00:21:04.700 | If you have a normal knowledge work job, you need some way of managing your workload.

00:21:09.080 | This is much better than the default of just waiting until you're too stressed out.

00:21:12.480 | I know it's scary.

00:21:14.360 | I know you worry.

00:21:15.360 | Like, what if I say no to people?

00:21:17.280 | Yeah, you have to figure out how to do it well.

00:21:20.500 | It takes experimentation.

00:21:22.780 | But I do not give up.

00:21:24.520 | Do not say, look, my work just requires me to work all the time.

00:21:28.080 | Do the effort required to try to make this work.

00:21:30.880 | Get organized.

00:21:32.500 | Get systematic about your collaboration.

00:21:34.680 | Get clear about your workload cues so that you can be much more clear when you say no

00:21:38.680 | and say, well, I would love to say yes, but I have too many things on here right now and

00:21:42.600 | my cue is full and I keep track of this really carefully.

00:21:46.000 | Earn people's respect that you're an organized person that does what you say you're going

00:21:49.080 | to do when you say you're going to do it.

00:21:50.560 | So they will grant you the ability to have more flexibility in your workload management

00:21:55.920 | because they trust that you know what you're doing.

00:21:57.720 | They trust that you're on top of things.

00:21:59.480 | All this is hard work.

00:22:00.840 | But the single commitment, these are the hours I work and I will do whatever I can to make

00:22:05.920 | this happen.

00:22:07.520 | That will drive all of that effort.

00:22:09.120 | That will drive all of that improvement.

00:22:10.540 | And if after all of that, your job still makes it impossible, then it's a very good signal

00:22:16.800 | to say maybe it's not the right job.

00:22:18.520 | If your lifestyle vision is not completely centered on your professional aspirations

00:22:23.880 | and you can't make fixed schedule productivity work, even when you're on top of all the different

00:22:27.160 | things that might work here, then I think that's just a big red flag.

00:22:31.600 | This life is not compatible with the deep life writ large.

00:22:35.000 | It's a perfectly useful signal to say maybe I need to make a change.

00:22:37.840 | So I continue to embrace this and I continue to want to spread the word.

00:22:42.040 | So I would say my final assessment, I think the article holds up.

00:22:45.000 | I would write it differently today.

00:22:46.960 | I would add a much more sophistication to it, but I'm still happy about it.

00:22:50.920 | So I'll say, Jesse, that we'll keep that in our pantheon of Cal Newport classics, ideas

00:22:56.880 | that we keep coming back to.

00:22:58.240 | Yeah.

00:22:59.240 | I have one follow up question.

00:23:01.920 | Do you get the, do you ever wish you had more time, like in a given day to work?

00:23:07.200 | No, I often wish I had less to do.

00:23:10.360 | I think that's much more common because I want to fit my time into my work hours.

00:23:14.040 | I don't like when that's always very crowded.

00:23:15.920 | I mean, it's okay for me if there are certain points, certain days where my nine to five

00:23:19.600 | is very crowded.

00:23:20.600 | But what I always pine for is having less to do more flexibility in those hours, not

00:23:25.440 | more time so I can do more things.

00:23:27.220 | I still have a fundamental aversion to overload.

00:23:30.280 | I still have a fundamental aversion to having too much on my plate.

00:23:33.500 | I don't like it.

00:23:35.580 | My dream remains, you know, the guy who lives on the farm and writes one book a year, six

00:23:41.840 | months out of the year and kind of takes a break in between.

00:23:44.560 | I mean, I don't know if I really have the attention span for that.

00:23:48.060 | Maybe I'd get antsy, but that still remains in my lifestyle vision.

00:23:51.920 | I'm based off of that still remains strong.

00:23:53.380 | I hate having too much to do.

00:23:54.720 | I don't want more time.

00:23:55.720 | I want to have too much time for a very small list of obligations.

00:23:59.880 | Yeah, we talked about in episode 256 as well about how that's such a similar theme to your

00:24:07.160 | student advice with telling students to, you know, not do all the extracurricular activities

00:24:12.820 | and focus on their classes and have time to do that.

00:24:15.800 | Yeah, it's a weird, there's probably a evolutionary argument to be made here or anthropological

00:24:20.840 | argument to be made here about the, I don't know, the physiological rareness of having

00:24:26.280 | this sort of overload of different things that need to be done and more things than

00:24:30.360 | you can imagine getting done easily in your mind.

00:24:33.400 | And that's very rare, probably for humans.

00:24:35.400 | That's an unusual, uncomfortable state for us to be in.

00:24:39.400 | In knowledge work, we push ourself into that state all the time.

00:24:42.480 | But I think there's an argument to be made that that's not good.

00:24:45.980 | In some sense, my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, for which by

00:24:51.140 | the way, we'll have a cover to release soon, which I'm excited about, is getting at that.

00:24:55.220 | It's getting at a much more human notion of productivity.

00:24:59.340 | By human, I mean actually aligned with the way we're wired, a way of doing good work

00:25:04.100 | that gets us away from this, man, I am just buzzing with activity as I scramble to try

00:25:11.460 | to keep on top of everything I need to keep on top of.

00:25:15.980 | Alright, well we got some questions that are relevant to this.

00:25:18.960 | Before we get there, I do want to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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00:26:27.620 | of my smartphone while preserving the ability to text my wife or call the police.

00:26:33.860 | So I was figuring out how I was going to do this.

00:26:34.860 | Am I going to add this to my AT&T plan?

00:26:37.540 | How am I going to make this happen?

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00:27:49.140 | Also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist.

00:27:52.700 | As I always say, ideas are power and the best source of ideas is books.

00:27:57.660 | The problem is figuring out which books you should actually bother buying and trying to

00:28:01.700 | read.

00:28:02.740 | This is where Blinkist enters the scene.

00:28:04.620 | It is a subscription service that gives you short summaries of thousands of best-selling

00:28:11.220 | non-fiction books.

00:28:12.900 | These short summaries called Blinks you can either read or listen to using the Blinkist

00:28:17.140 | app.

00:28:18.140 | It takes about 15 minutes to read or listen to and you get all the big ideas of all of

00:28:21.860 | the big new non-fiction books.

00:28:25.920 | The way that Jesse and I use Blinkist is as a triage service for our lives as readers.

00:28:33.240 | If we're interested in a particular book we've heard about, we download.

00:28:36.820 | I usually read the Blinks.

00:28:38.180 | Jesse likes to listen to them or maybe I have that backwards.

00:28:40.140 | Maybe Jesse reads them.

00:28:42.320 | I usually read them.

00:28:43.320 | I sometimes listen to them.

00:28:44.320 | I read them more than I read them.

00:28:45.580 | You read them.

00:28:46.580 | I read them more.

00:28:47.580 | That's right.

00:28:48.580 | You read them.

00:28:49.580 | I sometimes listen to them.

00:28:50.580 | I sometimes read them.

00:28:51.580 | I sometimes listen as well.

00:28:52.580 | But anyways, the point is, what we do is in that 15 minutes you get the main ideas of

00:28:56.700 | the book almost always tells you, "Oh yes, I want to buy this."

00:29:01.540 | Or "Oh no, that'd be a waste.

00:29:03.780 | It's not what I thought it was."

00:29:05.380 | Or it is what I thought it was, but honestly this 15 minutes tells me I know all I need

00:29:08.980 | to know about this book.

00:29:10.580 | So it is a great accompaniment to the reading life and reading, of course, is so critical

00:29:17.060 | to the deep life.

00:29:18.980 | A couple other things to point out about it.

00:29:21.860 | They have these collections online, which I appreciate.

00:29:25.380 | Well-known writers, including writers who are friends of the show, like Adam Grant or

00:29:30.020 | Dan Pink, will have collections where they curate a collection of books they like.

00:29:34.180 | And then you can just go listen to the Blinks and figure out which of those you want to

00:29:39.380 | actually purchase.

00:29:40.380 | They also have a, for a limited time, a service called Blinkist Connect, a feature called

00:29:43.860 | Blinkist Connect, that allows you to share your premium account with a friend.

00:29:47.940 | So you get two accounts for the price of one.

00:29:50.980 | So listen, if you read, you need Blinkist.

00:29:54.580 | So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

00:29:56.980 | Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your 7-day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkist Premium

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00:30:08.180 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off on a 7-day free trial.

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00:30:13.180 | And remember, now for a limited time, you can even use Blinkist Connect to share your

00:30:18.100 | premium account.

00:30:19.380 | You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one.

00:30:24.420 | All right, let us, let's move on some questions, Jesse.

00:30:29.140 | What do we got here today?

00:30:31.060 | Sounds good.

00:30:32.340 | First question is from Alex.

00:30:34.540 | Limiting your workload to a fixed amount of time each day makes sense to me.

00:30:38.860 | But how do you decide what kinds of activities fall within your fixed schedule?

00:30:42.300 | For example, does reading have to happen inside your fixed schedule deadline?

00:30:47.100 | That is a good question, Alex.

00:30:48.300 | You know, what needs to be within the nine to five if you're an FSP or Fixed Schedule

00:30:52.220 | Productivity Aficionado?

00:30:53.940 | What doesn't?

00:30:54.940 | A couple points I want to make here.

00:30:57.300 | Personal and leisure activities, community activities, family activities.

00:31:01.180 | So basically anything that's non-professional does not have to, of course, fall within your

00:31:06.660 | fixed schedule.

00:31:07.660 | However, it can.

00:31:10.020 | So I think this is an important point I want to make.

00:31:13.760 | You can put non-work activities during your fixed schedule.

00:31:16.860 | In fact, that's often a kind of a nice way to do it.

00:31:19.060 | I go out to the gym during my lunch hour.

00:31:21.980 | It might actually be the right way to do that, especially if you have kids coming home after

00:31:26.700 | work.

00:31:27.700 | So non-professional activities do not have to be within the fixed schedule, but they

00:31:31.620 | can be in there.

00:31:33.020 | All right, so they can be in there if you want them to be.

00:31:36.540 | It's OK to also have some exceptions to the fixed schedule.

00:31:39.720 | So I want to be clear about this.

00:31:40.780 | I call them autopilot exceptions.

00:31:43.180 | A small number of things that happen outside your fixed schedule that are professional,

00:31:48.740 | but they happen at the same times, on the same days, in the same place, in a heavily

00:31:53.220 | ritualized fashion, right?

00:31:54.660 | So it's not haphazard.

00:31:56.780 | It's not, I just need to spend more time on email.

00:32:00.300 | I'm working and I didn't get as much done today as I wanted to, so I'm just going to

00:32:03.740 | work some more after my fixed schedule is over.

00:32:05.980 | It is not that.

00:32:08.040 | It is autopiloted exceptions to same work, same place, same time, same ritual every week.

00:32:13.760 | So for example, for a long time, I would write my weekly blog post in the evening.

00:32:21.020 | And I had a ritual around where I would do it and I would write it in the big leather

00:32:23.700 | chair, which old time Cal Newport fans know about.

00:32:26.820 | And I put on a record on the record player.

00:32:28.380 | There's a whole particular ritual.

00:32:29.980 | I also have this Sunday morning writing ritual.

00:32:33.460 | Now I was actually surprised to see in my 2008 post, I just said Sunday morning is part

00:32:37.520 | of the fixed schedule.

00:32:38.520 | But I often think about that as just an exception, but I only do writing during that time.

00:32:44.140 | And so the key for these autopiloted exceptions to your fixed schedule is that it has to be

00:32:50.300 | a specific work.

00:32:51.300 | It has to be a focused work and it cannot be general purpose.

00:32:55.460 | You cannot just say, yeah, on Sunday morning, I just do more email and just generic work.

00:32:59.580 | On a weekday night, I just do email and generic work.

00:33:02.340 | That's going to throw you out of your leisure mode.

00:33:05.000 | It's going to ruin your shutdown.

00:33:06.380 | It's going to open up a lot of loops and then it's going to be pretty dangerous.

00:33:09.300 | So you can have these exceptions that happen at the same time on the same days, but it

00:33:13.700 | should be for the same work and that work should be focused and it should not be general

00:33:17.100 | purpose.

00:33:18.100 | It should not induce generic, highly varied context shifts as well.

00:33:23.420 | All right, what do we got next?

00:33:28.940 | Next question is from Catherine.

00:33:31.060 | How do you keep your work hours reasonable when people are constantly asking to do things

00:33:35.300 | and it's hard to say no without creating negative impacts on your career?

00:33:40.020 | This is often the big issue I hear, the most common issue I hear about fixed schedule productivity

00:33:46.460 | is I'm going to have to say no to things.

00:33:49.860 | The amount of things coming onto my plate is so furious that to fit nine to five, I'm

00:33:56.820 | going to have to say no to more things than I currently do today.

00:33:59.740 | Now, I have a couple of points I want to make about this because I think no as a skill is

00:34:04.740 | something we don't discuss with enough nuance.

00:34:07.780 | First I want to make the point, it was just Catherine, right?

00:34:10.900 | Yeah, so Catherine, first I want to make the point, you're already saying no.

00:34:15.540 | You're already saying no.

00:34:16.620 | It is highly unlikely that if you're like the standard knowledge worker who is roughly

00:34:23.100 | nine to five or nine to six, but kind of does second shifts a lot of night as well for an

00:34:27.260 | hour or two extra to try to keep up with things.

00:34:30.200 | So maybe you're working, you have sort of 55 hours a week, 55 to 60 hours a week that

00:34:36.340 | you're actually working.

00:34:37.340 | It's highly unlikely that the incoming volume of work towards you, all the requests and

00:34:41.900 | emails and Slack and meetings, exactly requires 55 to 60 hours a week.

00:34:47.040 | Highly unlikely.

00:34:48.040 | What's really happening is, again, you're following the 20% rule.

00:34:52.220 | Once you get the intuition that your workload is no longer going to fit into this like 55

00:34:57.220 | to 60 hours stretch week, you are saying no.

00:35:00.520 | Whether it's explicit or not, you're pulling back from things, you're pushing things off

00:35:03.400 | your plate.

00:35:04.400 | You're already saying no.

00:35:05.400 | It's just you've fixed where you're saying no at a place that I guess generates enough

00:35:10.040 | psychic pain that it feels like you're justifying it.

00:35:13.120 | So all we're talking about is fixed productivity.

00:35:14.760 | You're still saying no.

00:35:15.760 | You're just saying it a little bit earlier in your workload.

00:35:19.160 | So really this is the fundamental psychological Rubicon people have to pass.

00:35:24.520 | What is the reasonable amount of work to have on my plate before I say no?

00:35:28.480 | Most knowledge workers set that to be too big.

00:35:31.220 | 60 hours, right?

00:35:33.340 | Which again is 50 to 60 hours, about 20 to 30% more than a 40-hour workweek.

00:35:39.180 | It's too much for most people.

00:35:41.820 | But for most people, they feel like it's hard enough that they're justified still saying

00:35:44.580 | no.

00:35:45.580 | You pull that back to something like 40 hours, it becomes much more sustainable for you.

00:35:50.220 | From the perspective of the outside world, the difference is small.

00:35:53.080 | You're doing a lot of work, you're saying no to a lot of work.

00:35:55.180 | They don't know the difference.

00:35:56.180 | They don't know if it's 40 hours or if it's 60 hours.

00:35:58.740 | That difference can be small.

00:35:59.740 | So that's the first point I want to make, Catherine.

00:36:01.140 | You're already saying no.

00:36:02.140 | We're just talking about exactly where that boundary, that phase transition from acceptance

00:36:07.220 | to rejection happens in your career.

00:36:10.420 | The second thing I'm going to say, and let's get tactical here, is how do you say no?

00:36:15.180 | This really matters.

00:36:17.340 | So people often struggle with what I call the naked no, where technically you do have

00:36:23.940 | more time and you're just saying, "No, I don't want to do that."

00:36:27.980 | Silence.

00:36:29.820 | That is very difficult.

00:36:30.820 | People have a hard time with that.

00:36:31.980 | That can be interpreted as aggressive or it can be interpreted as you are non-cooperative

00:36:38.340 | or not a team player.

00:36:39.620 | It is very difficult to give the naked no.

00:36:43.420 | So what's much more effective is to have workload systems that help dictate when you say no

00:36:49.780 | so that you can fall back on the logic of those systems to help justify your answers.

00:36:57.060 | So one thing you could do, I'm going to give you two ideas here.

00:36:58.700 | One thing you could do is quotas.

00:36:59.900 | This is something I talked about briefly in my 2008 article.

00:37:04.140 | It's a common strategy among professors.

00:37:06.500 | For certain types of work that you know you're going to have a lot of incoming, you set your

00:37:12.100 | quotas per whatever, quarter, per month, per year, whatever the scale that makes sense

00:37:17.100 | to say, "This is how much I do during each time period.

00:37:20.780 | This is a reasonable amount.

00:37:22.140 | It allows me to be very useful to other people in my community, but prevents this from getting

00:37:26.740 | out of control."

00:37:28.140 | When you have filled your quota for that time period, you then say no to new work and you

00:37:33.300 | justify it by saying, "I have a quota where I do this many types of projects, this many

00:37:38.520 | journal reviews, travel to this many conferences, do this many client meetings per week.

00:37:43.140 | I have this quota about what's optimal.

00:37:44.660 | I do three of those, four of those, 20 of those.

00:37:46.580 | I've already filled it for this time period, so I'm going to have to say no now, but keep

00:37:50.940 | me in mind for future time periods because I do a lot of this."

00:37:54.700 | Quotas work well because they're hard to say push back against.

00:37:58.420 | If I push back against you having a quota, what I'm pushing back against is your quota

00:38:01.620 | size and that makes me feel like a jerk.

00:38:05.260 | If you say, "I can't do this review.

00:38:06.640 | Look, I have a quota of five per semester, sort of the right balance, and I already have

00:38:10.720 | five on my plate."

00:38:12.160 | I'm not going to say, "No, six is the right answer.

00:38:13.800 | You're dumb.

00:38:14.800 | It should be six.

00:38:15.800 | Take this on."

00:38:16.800 | Because that's weird and specific and sort of aggressive.

00:38:18.720 | So quotas, they're very useful because it has a very specific workload management system

00:38:23.820 | that you can cite, hard to argue with.

00:38:27.080 | The other thing you can try is pre-planning non-trivial work on your calendar.

00:38:34.480 | This is again, something I get into more detail in my new book coming out in March, Slow Productivity.

00:38:39.040 | I get into this idea, I've been thinking more about it.

00:38:41.400 | But when a project comes in, you say, "I'm actually going to find time on my calendar

00:38:45.320 | for when I'm going to do this project.

00:38:47.400 | Maybe it's five different long sessions I'm going to have to find."

00:38:49.760 | And you go and you have to find it and block off that time before you accept it.

00:38:55.800 | The reason why this is a really useful strategy is that it actually gives you a concrete understanding

00:39:00.340 | of how much available time you have outside of just the immediate future.

00:39:04.720 | So if you struggle to find time, "OK, I need five two-hour sessions to write this report.

00:39:11.440 | I can't find five two-hour sessions I can fit on the schedule for another three months."

00:39:18.260 | That is really useful feedback.

00:39:20.640 | That then allows you to say to the person, "Basically, I'm looking for this time.

00:39:24.600 | I track my time very carefully.

00:39:26.240 | I don't really have time.

00:39:27.480 | I'm assuming this would be about 10 hours.

00:39:29.180 | I can't see myself really doing that until March."

00:39:32.960 | And they might say, "OK, whatever, that's too late.

00:39:34.520 | I'll ask someone else to do it."

00:39:35.520 | Or they'll say, "Yeah, great, do it then."

00:39:37.040 | But what you're getting here is a concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually

00:39:40.920 | have.

00:39:41.920 | This is much better than just saying in the moment, "Could I imagine myself in the abstract

00:39:45.680 | writing this report?

00:39:46.680 | Yeah, I've written these before.

00:39:47.680 | I don't want to disappoint this guy.

00:39:48.920 | Yeah, I'll do it."

00:39:49.920 | And then you don't really have time, so now it's going to have to happen at night.

00:39:52.760 | Now it's going to have to happen early in the morning or on the weekends.

00:39:56.400 | By actually planning non-trivial work on your calendar, it's a pain, but it gives you a

00:40:01.540 | really concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually have available.

00:40:06.140 | Then you can make much more reasonable decisions about what you say yes or no to, citing this

00:40:12.080 | careful tracking when you say no.

00:40:14.100 | So again, what's the pushback here?

00:40:17.140 | You did it wrong.

00:40:18.140 | You do have time.

00:40:19.140 | You're dumb.

00:40:20.140 | They're not going to say that.

00:40:21.140 | Or they'll say, "You should just make more time available.

00:40:23.220 | You should work late at night or in the morning."

00:40:25.020 | People want you to do that, but they're not going to specifically ask you to do that in

00:40:27.960 | most jobs.

00:40:28.960 | So again, that becomes really effective.

00:40:31.000 | Now one of the ideas I elaborate in slow productivity is this is a pain.

00:40:36.560 | To try to schedule everything on your calendar is a pain, especially because things take

00:40:40.960 | longer than you think.

00:40:42.200 | It's like time block planning on a massive scale.

00:40:45.040 | It's not something you want to do all the time, but what I do suggest is if you do this

00:40:48.080 | for a few months, for example, you learn.

00:40:51.640 | You learn and internalize a much more accurate understanding of how long things take and

00:40:56.220 | how full your schedule really is.

00:40:58.160 | And then you can go forward after two or three months of this exercise, stop doing that detailed

00:41:02.360 | planning, but still possess that much more finely honed intuition about your workload

00:41:07.600 | capacities.

00:41:09.700 | And so you're able to then just more intuitively say yes or no, because you've taught yourself

00:41:16.000 | the reality of your schedule.

00:41:17.320 | All right.

00:41:18.320 | So anyways, I like this.

00:41:20.480 | To make any of this work, to move past the naked no, to instead reference particular

00:41:26.940 | workload management systems as the logic for you saying no, you have to have a reputation

00:41:31.840 | as an organized, reliable person.

00:41:33.780 | You have to have a reputation as someone who's very careful about keeping track of their

00:41:37.160 | time that talks about Cal Newport to an uncomfortable degree.

00:41:40.920 | People are kind of tired of hearing about it.

00:41:42.640 | That has a time block planner on your desk and spends way too much time with Trello.

00:41:48.340 | You have pinup posters of the Atlantean who owns Trello's CEO on your wall.

00:41:55.080 | You got to be that person.

00:41:57.480 | You got to be that person.

00:41:59.700 | And if you are that person, they're like, okay, they probably know what they're talking

00:42:02.720 | about.

00:42:03.720 | They're really organized.

00:42:04.720 | They get things done.

00:42:05.720 | They deliver when they say.

00:42:06.720 | So if they say, I'm very careful with my workload.

00:42:07.720 | I can't fit this till March.

00:42:08.720 | I don't think this is appropriate for me.

00:42:10.560 | You get the benefit of the doubt.

00:42:11.800 | If you're unreliable, if you let things drop, you're like, you're probably just making excuses.

00:42:17.200 | I don't like this.

00:42:18.200 | This is the first thing I'm telling you to do.

00:42:19.200 | Do it right away.

00:42:20.200 | I don't trust you.

00:42:21.200 | So you got to be reliable.

00:42:23.480 | You got to be organized to get away with this stuff.

00:42:26.120 | But replacing the naked no with references to workload management logics, this I think

00:42:31.560 | Catherine is a good way to go.

00:42:34.800 | I've met that CEO actually, Jesse.

00:42:37.280 | He's Australian.

00:42:38.280 | Yeah.

00:42:39.280 | You've mentioned that on the podcast a few times.

00:42:40.880 | Australian accents makes everyone seem more interesting.

00:42:46.080 | So what I'm trying to say here, Jesse, is can you do the rest of the show with an Australian

00:42:48.840 | accent?

00:42:49.840 | I may.

00:42:53.840 | So what you're saying is yes.

00:42:55.000 | As long as every question comes back to you saying, I may, that will be okay.

00:43:00.800 | I'm just saying if we had accents, I think people would, if you had an Australian accent

00:43:06.240 | and I had a really good Oxford refined English accent, I think we would get.

00:43:12.640 | Well, you have the good pipe smoking French accent that we use.

00:43:16.320 | That accent is perfectly accurate.

00:43:20.800 | Exactly as the Frenchman speak.

00:43:23.600 | Unfortunately, that's not what people want to hear to think that you're very, very smart.

00:43:27.740 | They want to hear a really refined English accent.

00:43:29.720 | So then they'll think I'm very smart.

00:43:30.720 | And if you do an Australian accent, they'll think you're exciting and fun.

00:43:35.040 | So I think that's our key.

00:43:37.640 | Much more accents.

00:43:38.640 | All right.

00:43:39.640 | In the meantime, though, let's move on.

00:43:40.640 | Next question.

00:43:41.640 | All right.

00:43:42.640 | Next question is from Andy.

00:43:45.960 | Why don't you put your weekly plan in your calendar?

00:43:48.680 | In my workplace, we use Outlook calendars heavily.

00:43:51.820 | So if I plan to use two hours on Thursday to write a memo, I need to block that time

00:43:56.760 | anyway.

00:43:58.000 | And a calendar is very visual way of planning your week.

00:44:00.720 | So why don't you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar?

00:44:03.960 | So why do you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar?

00:44:06.560 | Well, my calendar does get heavy use as I go through my weekly planning discipline.

00:44:12.440 | So I will lay this as the foundation for my answer.

00:44:16.260 | Weekly planning itself is, think about it as the discipline of reviewing everything

00:44:21.060 | that's on your plate, reviewing your quarterly or strategic plans.

00:44:25.160 | What am I working on?

00:44:26.340 | Reviewing your calendar, reviewing your task systems, and trying to pull that all together

00:44:30.780 | to figure out a reasonable plan for what you want to do for the week ahead.

00:44:35.600 | That's the core of weekly planning.

00:44:37.800 | What you then do with that information can vary.

00:44:41.440 | It can vary between individuals.

00:44:42.940 | It can vary within different periods for the same individual.

00:44:47.520 | So that's what I want to talk about is my own weekly planning approach.

00:44:52.740 | There are periods of my year in which I will translate a lot of the results of my weekly

00:44:59.520 | planning session to calendar events.

00:45:03.000 | This is particularly the case in busy periods, academic busy periods.

00:45:08.760 | I'm teaching, I'm on some committees, there's some deadline coming up, and there's a lot

00:45:13.860 | of moving pieces that I have to find time for.

00:45:18.360 | In those periods, I will often put quite a lot of things that I identify I need to do

00:45:22.440 | during my weekly planning session onto my calendar.

00:45:26.640 | There are other periods, however, let's say during the summer, a typical summer when I'm

00:45:30.000 | not teaching or anything, where my schedule is much more deep work focused.

00:45:36.200 | And in those situations, I'm not going to load up everything I'm going to work on, all

00:45:39.840 | the thinking or writing I'm going to do.

00:45:41.320 | I'm not going to put that on my calendar.

00:45:43.040 | I'm going to leave my calendar to just have appointments and meetings.

00:45:46.800 | I got to call this person, I have to go to this doctor's appointment.

00:45:50.200 | And the rest, I'm going to just time block each day based off of a fully written weekly

00:45:53.400 | plan.

00:45:54.400 | "Hey, this week I'm working on this book chapter."

00:45:57.000 | Work on it most days.

00:45:58.000 | This is a very common weekly plan for me, by the way, in the summer.

00:46:02.120 | Work on this book chapter every day.

00:46:04.640 | Try to get a good 30 minute admin block in there somewhere just to keep track of small

00:46:09.320 | things.

00:46:10.320 | Here's a couple admin things to make sure you get done.

00:46:13.320 | That's a very typical weekly plan for me in July.

00:46:15.880 | And then when I time block plan, I look at that, I look at my calendar, my calendar might

00:46:19.600 | have one meeting I have to do that day, and I time block out a plan based off of that.

00:46:23.400 | If you look at my weekly plan in October, it might be very different.

00:46:25.940 | It might actually be most of the stuff I need to get done, it's so complicated how it's

00:46:30.940 | all going to fit together.

00:46:31.940 | I've worked it all out on my calendar, just like Andy actually does during his work.

00:46:37.600 | So you'll see it both ways.

00:46:40.440 | The other thing I want to point out, however, is that a weekly plan can contain information

00:46:43.600 | beyond simply what you're going to work on and when you are going to work on it.

00:46:47.680 | I have a list here of other things that will sometimes make it onto my written weekly plan.

00:46:53.040 | Things about disciplines or behaviors will go on there.

00:46:57.160 | Remember we're doing this thing with our diet this week.

00:47:00.680 | Remember we're trying to do a really clean shutout every day.

00:47:03.280 | Because you look at your weekly plan every morning, it's useful for more than simply

00:47:08.560 | pointing out or allocating time for what you want to get done.

00:47:12.560 | Sometimes I have more elaborated descriptions of work.

00:47:16.520 | Even if that work has an appointment on my calendar, I might have a more detailed description

00:47:22.640 | of what that means in my weekly plan.

00:47:24.360 | So the calendar might just say, "Mega Conference Task Block."

00:47:28.400 | And then my weekly plan is where I unfold what that means in a way that wouldn't fit

00:47:32.240 | just into my calendar description.

00:47:33.880 | Okay, well I've got to get on top of all the planning for this conference that I'm organizing.

00:47:38.320 | And so what I really want to get done in these three hours are these things.

00:47:41.280 | And so the weekly plan might contain an elaboration for an event that does also show up on your

00:47:46.000 | calendar.

00:47:47.640 | Heuristics show up.

00:47:48.640 | So a lot of times weekly plans are good for heuristics.

00:47:51.800 | Every day at lunch, go for a 20-minute walk.

00:47:54.240 | I don't necessarily want to write that on my calendar every day.

00:47:56.480 | I might just say, "Do a 20-minute walk."

00:47:59.440 | Or in my summer, where I say, "Do 30 minutes of tasks.

00:48:02.320 | Look in your inbox.

00:48:03.400 | Do three or four things on your task list.

00:48:05.040 | Just do this every weekday."

00:48:06.040 | That's a really useful heuristic.

00:48:08.240 | I look at that every day.

00:48:09.920 | When I time block plan, I'll add a block for it.

00:48:11.760 | I might not want to actually figure out all those times in advance.

00:48:14.240 | Because maybe I don't know how long my deep work is going to take that day.

00:48:17.080 | I just want to make sure I remember to do it every day.

00:48:20.760 | And also highlighting tasks for admin blocks.

00:48:23.120 | This is really common.

00:48:24.320 | So in a busy period, I might actually block out time for admin.

00:48:27.880 | Email, tasks, making sure that I preserve that time every day so I don't start drowning

00:48:33.320 | or don't start having to break my fixed schedule and try to do small things at the night, late

00:48:39.080 | at night or in the morning.

00:48:40.080 | What I'll often do is maybe even have admin on my calendar.

00:48:44.080 | But in my weekly plan, say, "Look, here's six things I saw when I was looking through

00:48:48.280 | my task list.

00:48:49.280 | They really have to get done this week."

00:48:51.000 | So really prioritize these whenever you get to an admin block in your daily plan.

00:48:54.560 | Make sure we're taking a few things from this list.

00:48:56.920 | So a weekly plan really can capture a lot of information beyond just the raw things

00:49:03.520 | you're going to work on and what times you're going to work on it.

00:49:06.640 | So there you go.

00:49:07.640 | If you have a really busy schedule, if you want to work out a lot of pieces on your calendar,

00:49:10.600 | go for it.

00:49:11.600 | If you don't have a busy schedule and you want to leave your calendar just for appointments

00:49:14.740 | or meetings, go for that as well.

00:49:16.140 | If you want to do something in between, go for that as well.

00:49:18.320 | The key is to sit down each week and confront what you have to do and make sure you have

00:49:22.160 | captured somewhere some sort of plan you can reference every day.

00:49:25.720 | There's got to be some written component to that.

00:49:29.240 | Even if most of it's on your calendar, there's going to be some written component.

00:49:32.200 | Sometimes that'll be larger than others.

00:49:35.800 | I will say in the new time block planner that's coming out in August, and I'm getting my advanced

00:49:41.480 | copy soon, I have a blank version of the calendar from the planner where you have to exactly

00:49:47.000 | approve all of the materials and exactly the spiral.

00:49:49.680 | And so I know exactly what it's going to look like, but a full featured version of my new

00:49:53.000 | time block planners is coming to me up here in New Hampshire soon.

00:49:56.040 | I'm excited for that.

00:49:58.000 | I've actually condensed the weekly planning pages in the new time block planner.

00:50:02.680 | There's a two page spread.

00:50:04.960 | One page is notes for the weekend.

00:50:07.000 | The other page is one page for written notes on the weekly plan for the week ahead.

00:50:12.280 | So I've actually reduced the space, recognizing in part, a lot of stuff will go on your calendar,

00:50:17.440 | but there is a place there in the planner that have some notes for your week every time.

00:50:22.280 | So anyway, weekly planning is a, man, what an art.

00:50:26.160 | It's so many different ways to do this.

00:50:27.720 | So I always appreciate a chance to actually talk about it.

00:50:30.640 | Jesse, I'm excited for that planner, by the way.

00:50:34.040 | I actually have a list of disciplines.

00:50:37.320 | I'm temporarily not tracking my daily disciplines because I'm waiting for the new planner to

00:50:41.200 | arrive.

00:50:42.200 | But I think I get it next week and it has great metric tracking places.

00:50:46.040 | So I'll show it on the show once I get it.

00:50:49.040 | The release date is still August 15th, though, you should consider pre-ordering.

00:50:54.080 | Again, they told me you should consider pre-ordering because if we sell out, it might take a minute

00:51:00.920 | to replace because of some supply chain issues.

00:51:04.720 | These printer supply chains are, they're their own thing.

00:51:09.440 | So if you're worried about it, you could consider pre-ordering.

00:51:11.560 | But we'll talk more about that as we get closer to that coming out.

00:51:16.600 | Even though you're not tracking your daily metrics, are you still doing them?

00:51:19.520 | Yeah.

00:51:20.520 | No, I haven't written down what they're supposed to be.

00:51:24.480 | So I see them every day, but it's not quite the same, you know, if I can't write it down.

00:51:29.040 | So I need that planner to get here sooner rather than later.

00:51:32.080 | All right, let's see.

00:51:33.880 | Let's do one more question.

00:51:34.880 | I have a short case study I want to do in a second.

00:51:36.600 | So let's do one more question and then I'll do my short case study.

00:51:41.760 | Sounds good.

00:51:42.760 | Next question is from Benjamin.

00:51:44.800 | What immediate actions would you suggest to do when too much work has been piling up?

00:51:49.160 | All right, that's a good question.

00:51:52.160 | So you you're at the peak of, you know, you pile up too much work, and now you need to

00:51:58.520 | pull back.

00:52:02.080 | Short term, quit, back out, upset people.

00:52:07.000 | If you're overloaded, and it's impossible to get this work done, even with using the

00:52:11.160 | time that's available, you have to actually feel the pain of needing to say, I'm sorry,

00:52:15.840 | I need to back out of this.

00:52:17.040 | I know I said I could help with this, but I have too much on my plate.

00:52:20.680 | That's better than just doing all these things bad.

00:52:22.720 | I think people are more upset that you were on the team and didn't do anything.

00:52:28.240 | They are that you said, look, when I do something, I want to do it well.

00:52:31.880 | I miscalibrated my schedule.

00:52:33.880 | I have too much on my plate.

00:52:35.960 | Once you gain back that breathing room, then I think your focus has to be how do I prevent

00:52:40.200 | this from happening again?

00:52:42.020 | We do not want the oscillations.

00:52:44.000 | There's only so many times you can go to this, I'm in over my head, I need to pull back well

00:52:49.040 | before people think of the boy who cried productivity wolf.

00:52:53.840 | So you're gonna have to do some drastic stuff now if you're completely drowning.

00:52:57.640 | But that has to motivate you to put the systems in place to prevent that from happening again.

00:53:02.200 | And this is where everything we've talked about on the show and in the deep dive today,

00:53:05.240 | the fixed schedule productivity, and all of these small habits of innovation this induces,

00:53:10.240 | this would be the time to do it.

00:53:11.520 | You pull back, you make your new commitment to a reasonable workload, and you begin using

00:53:15.520 | all the different things we talked about to manage your workload, to get away from the

00:53:19.620 | naked nose, to be much more organized with your time and your weekly plan.

00:53:23.240 | All of that, this has to be your motivation to get all of that up and running properly

00:53:28.240 | so that you do not end up in this place again and again.

00:53:32.040 | All right, so I have a short but relevant case study to share here about someone who

00:53:40.200 | has succeeded with getting these FSP inspired strategies and systems in place.

00:53:47.800 | All right, so here I'm reading this now, this was sent to us.

00:53:51.760 | I am head of a large humanities department and it is busy.

00:53:56.080 | Reading your book, a world without email, and listening to your podcast has revolutionized

00:54:01.100 | my performance.

00:54:02.920 | My calendar is half filled with autopilot appointments and I have office hours every

00:54:06.520 | day after lunch.

00:54:07.520 | With this, my performance is much better.

00:54:08.720 | I feel less stressed and I leave my office at 4pm most every day.

00:54:14.440 | All of the academics in the audience are very impressed by this idea of a department chair

00:54:21.200 | leaving the office at 4pm every day.

00:54:23.560 | I think this helps emphasize the power of fixed schedule productivity.

00:54:28.640 | Because he has this, I want to leave work at a reasonable hour, and he's working backwards

00:54:33.280 | from that and willing to be innovative and aggressive in how he builds his work around

00:54:39.000 | that goal, he was able to accomplish something pretty cool.

00:54:42.120 | So let me just pull out the two things he mentioned in particular.

00:54:45.400 | One is autopilot appointments.

00:54:48.160 | So what that means is work he knows he has to do on a regular basis.

00:54:51.640 | So as a department chair, things he has to do every week or every month or every semester,

00:54:57.280 | he finds the time to do them.

00:54:59.880 | Gets it on his calendar.

00:55:02.320 | That time, that days, every week, every month, every semester, so he doesn't have to think

00:55:06.680 | about it.

00:55:07.680 | So he's protecting the time for the things he knows he has to do in advance.

00:55:12.360 | And that really makes a difference.

00:55:13.640 | It means that work will get done within his work hours, and it will be properly taken

00:55:18.880 | into account when he's trying to schedule other optional things.

00:55:22.740 | If Friday, his time has been put aside for whatever he has to do for the budgeting process,

00:55:27.820 | when he sees that, he won't schedule too long meetings for that day.

00:55:32.240 | Because that time has already been put aside.

00:55:33.880 | He'll defer those meetings or push them to a later date or take them off of his plate.

00:55:37.940 | So autopilot appointments not only relieves you from having to think on the fly, what

00:55:43.820 | do I want to work on today?

00:55:45.420 | It also makes sure that you properly respect and account for the time that this work is

00:55:49.660 | going to take.

00:55:51.260 | So in advance, it gets protected and you don't overfill those days.

00:55:54.580 | The other thing mentioned here is everyday office hours.

00:55:56.820 | Oh, how critical that is for a managerial position like department chair.

00:56:00.380 | That means every day there is a set time where you could call him, come to his office, or

00:56:04.620 | I assume load on Zoom or Slack or whatever tools they use.

00:56:09.140 | And you know he'll be there for synchronous interaction.

00:56:11.980 | I can tell you as a chair, he could probably defer 90% of the emails that are coming in

00:56:18.900 | from the administration and his faculty to those office hours.

00:56:23.880 | We're talking dozens and dozens of emails each week that would normally require an ad

00:56:27.900 | hoc back and forth conversation, seven messages over two days, each of which that requires

00:56:32.380 | ten inbox checks, so 70 inbox checks per interaction, multiplied by ten interactions, that's 700

00:56:39.220 | inbox checks, you know, huge amounts of context switching and pain that all can get erased

00:56:44.380 | with daily office hours.

00:56:46.340 | All those interactions, they can say, great, just grab me at my office hours, call me,

00:56:49.500 | jump on Zoom, we'll talk about it.

00:56:50.980 | And in two minutes back and forth, we figure out a plan, no ad hoc messaging required.

00:56:55.620 | So those two simple strategies, scheduling in advance all regular work, and then deferring

00:57:02.620 | as much interaction as possible to in-person office hours, those two strategies gave us

00:57:07.300 | a chair of a humanities department, a large humanities department working only until four.

00:57:12.300 | I think that just emphasizes the potential of fixed yield of productivity.

00:57:16.100 | When you fix a limit and are serious about it, you can get seriously inventive about

00:57:20.220 | how you satisfy it, and much more sustainable work can come out of it.

00:57:26.580 | So I appreciate that.

00:57:27.580 | I appreciate that case study.

00:57:29.060 | That's one of my goals, Jesse, is I want, at some point, office hours to be just a common

00:57:35.500 | thing in most companies.

00:57:38.260 | Come to my office hours, ask me then, we'll talk about it then, or I'll come to your next

00:57:41.980 | office hours.

00:57:42.980 | I just don't think people realize how much pain that's actually alleviating.

00:57:50.180 | And even today, when a lot of work has gone remote, it's pretty easy to do just on Zoom

00:57:54.540 | or whatever.

00:57:55.540 | Yeah, you just have Zoom with waiting rooms.

00:57:57.460 | Professors figured this out two days into the pandemic.

00:58:00.700 | You have a Zoom room open, because we did all of our actual academic office hours on

00:58:04.180 | Zoom during the early pandemic.

00:58:06.540 | You create a Zoom room that has a waiting room.

00:58:09.780 | And so people can just stop by whenever they log in, and they sit in the waiting room until

00:58:13.820 | you're ready to talk to them, and you click the button, you bring them in.

00:58:15.900 | So you're not overhearing conversations people are having with other people.

00:58:19.460 | It works fine.

00:58:20.460 | It works fine.

00:58:21.460 | All right.

00:58:22.460 | I want to get to the books.

00:58:23.460 | I want to get to the June books.

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01:00:00.780 | That is L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep ladderlife.com/deep.

01:00:07.060 | Now as long as we're talking about protection, let's talk about digital protection and how

01:00:13.980 | our friends at ExpressVPN can help you maintain your digital privacy.

01:00:21.180 | So here's the thing.

01:00:22.700 | When you are using the internet, there are people who are watching what sites and services

01:00:28.200 | you use.

01:00:29.460 | They are harvesting that information.

01:00:31.740 | They are selling that information to advertisers or other people who want to know more about

01:00:37.020 | you.

01:00:38.020 | So if you're logged into a wireless access point, for example, at a Starbucks, anyone

01:00:43.540 | can see the packets you're sending through the air.

01:00:45.940 | And even if the contents of your packets are protected, they can see what website you're

01:00:51.300 | talking to.

01:00:52.300 | What about if you're at home, plugged into the wall, your private internet cable service

01:00:58.260 | you get to the cable company?

01:01:00.220 | The cable company can look at who are you talking to, gather that information, sell

01:01:05.180 | it to people who want to know more about you.

01:01:06.580 | And they do do this as well.

01:01:08.180 | So how do you avoid people watching what you're doing on the internet?

01:01:10.780 | This is where a VPN enters the scene.

01:01:13.140 | What you do is instead of directly connecting to a site or service, you connect instead

01:01:17.180 | to a VPN server.

01:01:19.140 | You then send the VPN server an encrypted note that says, "Here's who I really want

01:01:23.020 | to talk to."

01:01:24.020 | The server talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the answer, and sends

01:01:28.100 | it back to you.

01:01:29.100 | So what does your cable company or the guy next to the Starbucks Wi-Fi access point learn

01:01:34.060 | about you?

01:01:35.420 | Nothing.

01:01:36.660 | Only that you're talking to a VPN server.

01:01:38.820 | So they can gain no useful information about your actual internet activity.

01:01:43.100 | So VPNs are great.

01:01:44.100 | The key is you need one that is easy to use and has fast connection speeds.

01:01:48.500 | That's ExpressVPN.

01:01:50.000 | That's why I use ExpressVPN.

01:01:51.540 | Their software is fantastic.

01:01:52.980 | You turn it on with a click of a button, you use your web browsers or apps as normal.

01:01:57.320 | You don't even realize this complicated dance with the VPN service is happening in the background,

01:02:01.620 | but you get all of those benefits.

01:02:03.700 | ExpressVPN has VPN servers all around the country and the world.

01:02:07.820 | So wherever you are, there's probably a nearby server to connect to, which is important because

01:02:11.500 | nearby means fast, they also have great amounts of bandwidth.

01:02:14.580 | So you don't even notice any slowdown.

01:02:18.100 | So to use the internet in the modern age, you need a VPN.

01:02:20.100 | If you're going to use a VPN, I suggest ExpressVPN.

01:02:23.940 | So if you don't like big tech tracking you and selling your data for profit, it's time

01:02:27.100 | to fight back.

01:02:28.700 | Visit ExpressVPN.com/deep right now to protect your online freedom and privacy.

01:02:36.140 | That's ExpressVPN.com/deep.

01:02:38.860 | Don't forget the slash deep so they know you came from me.

01:02:41.940 | That's ExpressVPN.com/deep.

01:02:42.940 | All right.

01:02:43.940 | So Jesse, like I like to do, let's talk about the books I read during the previous month.

01:02:54.700 | So we're in July now.

01:02:56.860 | So we should talk about June, 2023.

01:03:00.660 | Let me go through the five books I read in June, 2023.

01:03:06.360 | The first was The Wager by David Gran.

01:03:10.160 | I think this might have been mandated by law that everyone had to read this book.

01:03:14.500 | I think I maybe had a legal obligation to read this book.

01:03:17.140 | Certainly everyone has seemed to have read this book.

01:03:19.700 | It's great.

01:03:20.700 | I love David Gran, epic famous New Yorker writer who does these really long, deeply

01:03:25.420 | researched type adventure books.

01:03:27.800 | His book, The Killers of the Flower Moon, is being made into a movie, was made into

01:03:32.460 | a movie.

01:03:33.460 | It was written with Leonardo DiCaprio, directed by Scorsese.

01:03:36.940 | Scorsese and DiCaprio already bought the rights to The Wager.

01:03:40.140 | The Wager is about a shipwreck back in the 18th century off the west coast of Patagonia.

01:03:46.280 | Not a great place to have a shipwreck in the 18th century.

01:03:49.520 | And he recreates that story in vivid detail.

01:03:54.380 | Interesting tidbit about The Wager.

01:03:55.580 | I mean, Gran's a great writer.

01:03:57.260 | His MO with a lot of these books was he puts himself into the narrative.

01:04:02.300 | So if you read, for example, The Lost City of Z, you'll see he puts himself into the

01:04:05.980 | narrative.

01:04:06.980 | Well, he did the research to do that for this book.

01:04:08.940 | He went to this island, Wager Island, off the desolate coast of Patagonia, but he didn't

01:04:13.620 | like the way that the writing was working.

01:04:15.940 | And so he cut himself out in the book.

01:04:17.340 | So he's actually not in this book, even though that was the original plan.

01:04:20.840 | He spent the whole year just learning enough nautical terminology to understand the record

01:04:26.900 | so he could start doing research for this book.

01:04:29.340 | This is a classic, classic deep research.

01:04:33.780 | But Gran writes with a narrative momentum and a sense of adventure that's fantastic.

01:04:38.500 | It's a great book.

01:04:39.500 | It's selling, and I looked this up here on Bookscan, all of the copies.

01:04:45.100 | So good for David Gran.

01:04:47.540 | Do you know him?

01:04:48.540 | I've never met him.

01:04:49.540 | Never met him.

01:04:50.540 | Epic.

01:04:51.540 | Do you associate with a lot of the other writers at The New Yorker?

01:04:54.020 | Do you ever talk to them?

01:04:55.340 | I know some of them.

01:04:56.340 | Yeah.

01:04:57.340 | I mean, it's not just New Yorker.

01:04:58.460 | I mean, I just know, I'm more likely to associate with writers, magazine writers, nonfiction

01:05:04.260 | writers, who are local.

01:05:07.860 | So like who also live in DC, more so than sorting them out by like we happen to write

01:05:12.660 | for the same magazine.

01:05:13.940 | So like DC has a bunch of Atlantic writers, for example, because the Atlantic is headquartered

01:05:18.060 | there.

01:05:19.060 | There are some New Yorker writers in DC.

01:05:20.060 | Evan Osnos is in DC.

01:05:21.060 | There's a few others.

01:05:24.460 | So I should have spent time.

01:05:27.020 | David Gran though is a cool...

01:05:28.020 | He's kind of a famous figure because he writes, he'll write these epic stories.

01:05:33.340 | There's another one.

01:05:34.340 | It's a New Yorker piece sort of famous for where he's hunting a giant squid.

01:05:40.020 | That's a great one.

01:05:41.300 | The best David Gran New Yorker collection is The Devil in Sherlock Holmes.

01:05:45.060 | So it's just a collection of his epic New Yorker pieces.

01:05:47.980 | Really cool writer.

01:05:48.980 | Only so many people can get away with that.

01:05:50.340 | He's just really good.

01:05:51.340 | That's how he gets away with it, but cool book.

01:05:54.100 | All right, then I read a book called Can Science Explain Everything by John Lennox.

01:05:58.820 | This was part of the Oxford Apologetics series.

01:06:01.820 | And so it was talking about what science can and can't explain and the role of religion

01:06:06.100 | in a world of scientific worldview.

01:06:09.260 | This was pretty good.

01:06:10.260 | It was much more of a Christian apologia than I realized.

01:06:14.020 | I thought it was more going to be more philosophical about epistemology, like what science can

01:06:20.980 | and can't teach us about the realm or the place for the spiritual.

01:06:24.180 | It's actually much more specific about Christianity than I thought it was going to be.

01:06:29.180 | But I like this.

01:06:30.180 | These Oxford series are cool.

01:06:31.180 | They're basically like extended lecture, smart people write provocative books, and it was

01:06:34.740 | it was fine.

01:06:36.740 | This next book, I don't know what I don't know what scoundrel got me this one, but I

01:06:41.500 | read a book called Welcome to the Circus of Baseball by Ryan McGee.

01:06:46.540 | This was actually a gift from our illustrious producer, Jesse to myself.

01:06:52.060 | Jesse, I enjoyed this book.

01:06:54.580 | I enjoyed it.

01:06:55.580 | I mean, this is pure.

01:06:57.100 | Yeah, Mad Dog had a had him on.

01:06:59.860 | Yeah, Ryan McGee.

01:07:01.020 | Yeah.

01:07:02.020 | Well, this is just pure nostalgia.

01:07:03.020 | I mean, a book about minor league baseball in the 1990s when I was a kid.

01:07:08.700 | You know, it's great.

01:07:09.700 | It makes you want to be like 23 again and just like hanging out and going to ballgames

01:07:13.760 | and living cheaply.

01:07:16.100 | But I enjoyed it.

01:07:17.100 | It was definitely good choice.

01:07:19.140 | Yeah, yeah.

01:07:20.140 | Bull Durham.

01:07:21.140 | Yep.

01:07:22.140 | Bull Durham.

01:07:23.140 | I mean, this was the field I guess they use for Bull Durham, Durham, or they film some

01:07:27.420 | of it here.

01:07:28.420 | Oh, really?

01:07:29.420 | Yeah, there's definitely connections.

01:07:30.420 | They might have filmed Bull Durham here.

01:07:33.860 | I might I might have that wrong.

01:07:34.900 | This is an Asheville.

01:07:35.900 | This is a minor league team in Asheville, the tourist.

01:07:39.460 | It's a famous old field where Babe Ruth played.

01:07:42.740 | It's cool.

01:07:43.740 | Cool book.

01:07:44.740 | Recommend it.

01:07:45.740 | It's called A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away by Oscar winning film editor

01:07:52.460 | Paul Hirsch.

01:07:53.460 | I actually listened to this one.

01:07:55.660 | Perfect audible book.

01:07:56.660 | He's just a very famous film editor.

01:07:59.780 | He's known for editing Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but has edited so many famous

01:08:04.540 | movies, starting back with I did a lot of early De Palmas, early stuff, Carrie, but

01:08:09.740 | also his early experimental movies.

01:08:11.660 | And I don't know, keep working till today or until recently.

01:08:14.540 | You know, it's the book is great because it's broken up by movie.

01:08:18.780 | Now let me talk about editing this movie.

01:08:20.740 | Now let me talk about editing that movie.

01:08:21.980 | So it's a great audible format because each new chapter, it's like, OK, we're starting

01:08:26.260 | fresh.

01:08:27.300 | And if you're a movie nerd like I am, you get a lot of cool backstory about what the

01:08:30.820 | directors or the talent or the producers were like.

01:08:33.980 | And I don't know, I loved it.

01:08:35.460 | I love episodic media books like this.

01:08:37.380 | So interesting guy.

01:08:39.020 | You learn a lot about editing.

01:08:41.020 | Cool book.

01:08:42.020 | All right, final book I read, Drowning by T.J.

01:08:46.680 | Newman.

01:08:48.640 | So I had read, I think it was called Falling, which was her previous book.

01:08:52.880 | She's a thriller.

01:08:53.960 | So it's interesting story.

01:08:55.240 | I love these type of stories where people write thrillers based off of their specific

01:09:00.840 | non-writing related career.

01:09:03.680 | So T.J.

01:09:04.680 | Newman, I don't know if that's a pen name or not.

01:09:05.820 | She was a flight attendant.

01:09:07.320 | And so she wrote this book called Falling about a plane being taken hostage and they

01:09:13.620 | were going to kidnap the pilot's family.

01:09:16.320 | So if the pilot didn't crash the plane into a building, they were going to kill his family.

01:09:21.940 | And a lot of it's from the perspective of the flight attendants and how they deal with

01:09:25.300 | it.

01:09:26.300 | And a lot of real details because she understands how airlines work.

01:09:29.420 | This also takes place in a plane drowning.

01:09:32.040 | A plane crashes into the ocean outside of Hawaii.

01:09:37.740 | This fuel spills everywhere and the engine's still running and the people are going out

01:09:44.180 | in the life rafts and a few people on board realize, wait a second, this fuel's going

01:09:48.580 | to catch on fire.

01:09:50.500 | The safest place to be is we got to stay inside the sort of floating fuselage because the

01:09:54.100 | fuel is catching fire everywhere outside of it.

01:09:57.580 | Long story short, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, but they're alive.

01:10:01.860 | It has maintained an air pocket.

01:10:03.600 | So now they're trapped at the bottom of the ocean in the fuselage of a plane and there's

01:10:10.460 | a rescue attempt to come now and try to save them.

01:10:12.460 | And it turns out that the ex-wife of the main guy is a underwater welding deep sea construction

01:10:19.980 | expert.

01:10:20.980 | And so it's all about how they're going to try to save them in time.

01:10:23.300 | Great premise.

01:10:24.300 | I love that it has all these details about flying.

01:10:26.700 | Not a super great thriller.

01:10:27.700 | If I'm going to be honest, I'm an aficionado of this genre.

01:10:32.300 | It was pretty good, but I would say they didn't have to work hard to earn it.

01:10:39.020 | They found it pretty quickly and they were down there pretty quickly.

01:10:41.300 | It wasn't really until the last 30 pages that they got any real serious stakes going.

01:10:45.820 | The other thing that wasn't quite working is that the main character, the emotional

01:10:49.660 | core of the main character, his youngest kid had died.

01:10:56.220 | And so now that's why he had divorced his wife, who was now in charge of the rescue

01:11:00.860 | operation.

01:11:01.940 | And he was on this flight with their older daughter.

01:11:04.380 | So they're both trapped down here underwater.

01:11:06.580 | And so this was supposed to be the emotional motivational cores.

01:11:09.060 | The whole core to this person was dealing with the fact that he had to deal with a death

01:11:12.260 | in his family.

01:11:13.740 | The problem with that as a core emotional driver is that everyone else on the plane

01:11:18.460 | had literally just witnessed hundreds of people die.

01:11:21.060 | And everyone else on the plane, like, oh, my wife just burned up and died.

01:11:25.900 | Everyone had just died.

01:11:26.900 | So it was no longer a distinguishing emotional motivator because everyone had that exact

01:11:31.460 | same motivation.

01:11:32.620 | And if anything, the people who just had seen next to them, their, you know, fiance die

01:11:38.940 | and their parents, like they, in theory, uh, this was way worse and way more fresh than

01:11:43.540 | someone who had lost a child to, uh, an accident years earlier.

01:11:47.300 | Right.

01:11:48.300 | So I think that motivation doesn't hold up.

01:11:50.240 | If you then put that person in a situation where everyone is facing, uh, just surrounded

01:11:54.820 | by death and everyone's dying and everyone just lost someone.

01:11:57.660 | And so I don't know.

01:11:58.660 | It was okay.

01:11:59.660 | It's okay.

01:12:00.660 | I'm a thriller nerd.

01:12:01.660 | That one's pretty good, but, uh, I liked falling, falling a little bit better.

01:12:05.100 | All right, Jesse, I think that's it.

01:12:07.780 | I think we, uh, we've semi successfully completed, you know, our first episode from the new temporary

01:12:14.800 | summer HQ up in Hanover, New Hampshire.

01:12:16.820 | I will continue to improve on the audio and the visual here just because it's something

01:12:21.260 | to do, but I'm glad that we're back in action.

01:12:24.460 | So thank you everyone for listening or watching today's episode.

01:12:28.380 | We'll be back next week with another normal episode of the show.

01:12:31.500 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:12:33.580 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:12:36.940 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 257: Refusing Overwork

Chapters