Why You Never Have Enough Time - 3 Time Management Skills To Master

00:00:00.000 | So one of the biggest complaints I hear from people

00:00:03.120 | when it comes to the struggle to live and work deeply

00:00:06.440 | in an increasingly distracted world

00:00:08.460 | is that they don't feel like they have enough time

00:00:11.880 | to accomplish the things that are really important to them.

00:00:16.200 | Maybe for example, you want to master

00:00:19.480 | some sort of difficult new skill in work,

00:00:21.800 | which would then allow you to switch over to freelance work,

00:00:24.240 | which would then allow you to work eight months a year

00:00:26.200 | and take the other four months and travel the world

00:00:29.040 | and surf, or maybe you're trying to get back

00:00:31.280 | in your non-professional life into excellent shape.

00:00:34.040 | You want to start competing again

00:00:35.280 | in amateur athletic competitions,

00:00:37.400 | but you just don't have the time,

00:00:39.720 | these key moves that could really unlock a deeper life.

00:00:42.420 | You just never feel like you have the time

00:00:43.900 | to actually get them done.

00:00:45.420 | Today, I want to talk about how to fix that problem.

00:00:48.120 | All right, so what I'm going to do is identify three,

00:00:50.740 | what I call time destroyers.

00:00:53.480 | So forces you might not be aware of

00:00:55.800 | that is sapping your ability to find time

00:00:58.320 | for important priorities in your schedule each week.

00:01:00.360 | We'll explain how they work

00:01:01.440 | and then offer concrete advice for how to combat them.

00:01:05.560 | All right, let me just say before we get going,

00:01:08.720 | a lot of these ideas actually come from my new book,

00:01:11.280 | "Slow Productivity."

00:01:13.840 | If you haven't gotten this book,

00:01:15.800 | you probably should because it goes into more detail

00:01:19.520 | on a lot of the stuff we're talking about.

00:01:21.000 | All right, time destroyer number one, overhead tax.

00:01:26.920 | See, one of the biggest things

00:01:28.440 | that's making your schedule difficult

00:01:30.320 | is not the work you're doing

00:01:33.520 | on your projects and commitments.

00:01:35.580 | It's the administrative overhead

00:01:38.320 | generated by those projects and commitments.

00:01:41.600 | Now, what I mean by administrative overhead is the emails,

00:01:44.280 | it's the instant messages, it's the meetings,

00:01:46.800 | it's the quick check-ins that surround your work

00:01:50.420 | on your projects and initiatives.

00:01:52.360 | These are the things that grab your time

00:01:55.160 | in a way that is much more destructive

00:01:56.920 | than just say concurrent hours spent cranking

00:01:59.720 | on a particular problem.

00:02:02.260 | So when you have enough overhead tax,

00:02:05.400 | so you're working on enough things

00:02:07.240 | that you should read overhead tax.

00:02:08.320 | When you have enough overhead tax

00:02:09.840 | that it crosses a certain threshold of your day,

00:02:12.760 | so a certain percentage of your time now

00:02:14.560 | is just servicing projects instead of working on them.

00:02:17.580 | There's a threshold I call

00:02:18.680 | the excessive overhead threshold.

00:02:20.360 | When you pass that, disaster follows.

00:02:24.280 | Your work becomes mind numbing,

00:02:25.600 | it becomes fatiguing and it becomes exhausting.

00:02:28.180 | So if you have a sufficient amount of overhead tax

00:02:31.440 | in your day and you pass the excessive overhead threshold,

00:02:34.080 | it becomes very difficult to make progress

00:02:35.880 | on non-urgent but important priorities.

00:02:38.360 | All right, so we have to make sure

00:02:40.040 | that you do not cross the excessive overhead threshold.

00:02:44.840 | A lot of ideas about what you can do about this.

00:02:46.840 | I'll go through this really quickly.

00:02:48.560 | Number one, say no to more things.

00:02:52.220 | Everything you say yes to brings with it

00:02:53.820 | some overhead tax.

00:02:55.400 | This aggregates.

00:02:56.640 | If you do not want this sum

00:02:57.920 | to get past that excessive threshold,

00:03:00.160 | you can't add as many things onto your plate.

00:03:02.240 | So you have to be more confident saying no to things.

00:03:05.440 | I think we often overestimate in our mind

00:03:07.600 | what's gonna happen when we say no.

00:03:09.360 | We often, in our mind's eye,

00:03:11.240 | imagine that this colleague who just came to us

00:03:13.360 | to ask if we would jump on this committee or whatever

00:03:15.760 | had just spent the last six hours

00:03:17.640 | desperately wanting, thinking about it,

00:03:19.560 | desperately saying like, what's gonna happen?

00:03:21.200 | I hope Cal says yes.

00:03:22.160 | My whole life depends on this.

00:03:24.240 | That when he left work for that work this morning,

00:03:26.560 | he said to his wife, wish me luck,

00:03:28.160 | or we really need Cal to say yes to this,

00:03:30.580 | that on the way to work, everyone he saw was like,

00:03:32.720 | hey, good luck today getting Cal to say yes to this.

00:03:34.640 | So if you say no, it's gonna be some disaster.

00:03:36.880 | The reality is he remembered to ask you

00:03:38.920 | that two minutes before,

00:03:39.880 | and will forget you said no two minutes after.

00:03:42.080 | So say no to more things.

00:03:44.040 | Two, have quotas.

00:03:45.680 | For certain types of work that's important that you do

00:03:47.880 | and it comes up again and again, have quotas.

00:03:49.920 | I do this, but I don't do more than this many.

00:03:52.480 | I speak, but I don't do more

00:03:53.960 | than one speaking event a month.

00:03:56.680 | I do reviews, but I don't review

00:03:58.280 | more than four papers a semester.

00:04:00.680 | I can join working groups at my company,

00:04:04.760 | but I only can be on one working group at a time.

00:04:07.320 | So you set quotas.

00:04:08.200 | So you're still doing the things that are important,

00:04:11.680 | but you're not doing too many of them.

00:04:13.080 | Because it's very easy,

00:04:13.960 | if you say one of these activities is important,

00:04:17.240 | it's easy then to never say no.

00:04:19.080 | 'Cause you say, well, wait a second,

00:04:20.040 | it's important that I sit on working groups.

00:04:21.880 | It's important that I review papers.

00:04:23.680 | So how can I say no?

00:04:25.040 | And then you say yes to so many

00:04:26.480 | that the overhead tax overwhelms you.

00:04:27.880 | So quotas is a way to still do the things

00:04:29.720 | that are important,

00:04:30.560 | but do it at a level that is reasonable.

00:04:33.360 | A big idea we've talked about several times now on the show,

00:04:36.920 | and I really detail in "Slow Productivity"

00:04:39.000 | is differentiate between projects

00:04:40.640 | that you're actively working on

00:04:42.160 | versus projects that you're waiting to work on.

00:04:45.040 | So these are the things you've said yes to.

00:04:47.320 | But among the things you've said yes to,

00:04:49.360 | only designate two or three

00:04:52.080 | to be actively receiving your attention,

00:04:54.000 | everything else you're waiting on.

00:04:55.920 | Only tolerate overhead tax for the active projects.

00:04:58.960 | You'll do emails and meetings and calls and make progress.

00:05:02.440 | The other things are waiting.

00:05:04.600 | And when you finish one of these projects

00:05:06.160 | that you're actively working on,

00:05:07.400 | you pull in something new from the waiting list.

00:05:10.520 | So you may have said yes to 10 projects,

00:05:12.680 | but only two or three of them

00:05:14.000 | are generating overhead tax at the same time.

00:05:16.040 | So you don't have to say no to people,

00:05:18.440 | but you can prevent tripping

00:05:19.480 | over the excessive overhead threshold.

00:05:22.080 | Now, the key is,

00:05:22.920 | if someone tries to generate some administrative overhead

00:05:25.440 | for something that's in the waiting queue,

00:05:26.680 | you just say to them,

00:05:28.520 | "Oh, I'm not working on that yet."

00:05:30.200 | In fact, you can point them towards your queue,

00:05:32.280 | put it in a shared document.

00:05:33.360 | Here's the things I'm actively working on.

00:05:34.920 | Here's the ordered queue of things I'm waiting to work on.

00:05:38.240 | You can see exactly where you are in that order.

00:05:40.200 | And as soon as it gets to the top of the list,

00:05:41.920 | I'll pull it over and I'll let you know.

00:05:43.320 | We can have calls and meetings, we'll take care of it,

00:05:45.000 | but I only do overhead on the stuff I'm actively working on.

00:05:48.440 | So it's a way that if you can't say no,

00:05:49.960 | you can still reduce overhead tax.

00:05:52.080 | Finally, here's a new idea.

00:05:54.400 | Consider dedicating different roles to different days.

00:05:58.580 | A lot of people in their job

00:06:00.900 | implicitly have multiple roles that they do.

00:06:04.800 | There's maybe some managerial role,

00:06:06.580 | there's a project lead role,

00:06:07.840 | there's a role they do with an unrelated responsibility

00:06:11.440 | around client management.

00:06:13.240 | You have multiple roles at your job.

00:06:14.920 | Professors often have roles as researchers, teachers,

00:06:18.020 | and service-oriented department members.

00:06:21.880 | These are like different roles with different types of work.

00:06:24.860 | Consider dedicating different days to different roles.

00:06:27.880 | Wednesday is my day, I work on this role.

00:06:31.760 | So I'm only dealing with administrative overhead

00:06:34.640 | related to that role on this day.

00:06:36.640 | A lot of professors, for example,

00:06:38.000 | will make the days they teach,

00:06:39.360 | days that they dedicate entirely to the teaching role.

00:06:42.000 | So they'll answer emails and have meetings and get into it,

00:06:44.560 | but they don't engage in administrative overhead

00:06:47.280 | related to their courses on the other days.

00:06:49.380 | So by just consolidating administrative overhead

00:06:52.300 | to particular days,

00:06:53.920 | you prevent any one day

00:06:55.140 | from having everything fall on your head.

00:06:57.240 | Again, you're kind of hacking

00:06:58.360 | the excessive overhead threshold here.

00:07:00.360 | You're not reducing the number of things

00:07:02.720 | that are generating overhead,

00:07:04.040 | but you're preventing all this overhead

00:07:06.220 | from hitting you all at once.

00:07:07.720 | All right, time destroyer number two.

00:07:11.520 | Schedule fragmentation.

00:07:13.780 | So we often think that the key resource

00:07:16.840 | for getting things done,

00:07:18.080 | for making progress on things that are important to us,

00:07:19.940 | is the amount of time we have available to do it, right?

00:07:23.000 | So you would think what matters is when I look at my week

00:07:25.680 | and I've already got a bunch of stuff scheduled,

00:07:27.040 | I should just count up the minutes that are unscheduled.

00:07:29.320 | And if, as long as I have enough time there,

00:07:30.760 | I can dedicate that to making progress on non-urgent,

00:07:33.280 | but important priorities,

00:07:34.400 | the stuff that you need to make your deep life deep.

00:07:36.880 | That's not the right metric though.

00:07:39.160 | Once you understand how the human mind works,

00:07:41.240 | you realize the right metric is actually

00:07:43.880 | non-trivially length blocks of undistracted time.

00:07:48.080 | That is the key unit that transforms the useful progress.

00:07:52.260 | You give me an hour of uninterrupted time,

00:07:55.080 | I can make progress on something.

00:07:57.000 | You give me six, 10 minute blocks that are highly distracted

00:08:00.880 | and in between other things going on, that's useless to me.

00:08:03.820 | That doesn't add up to the same

00:08:05.320 | as having 60 uninterrupted minutes

00:08:07.080 | to actually work on something.

00:08:08.240 | So the actual, the fragmentation of your schedule matters

00:08:13.240 | just as much as the amount of free time

00:08:17.120 | that you actually find in that schedule.

00:08:20.500 | So the problem,

00:08:21.340 | why do we end up with schedules that are fragmented?

00:08:23.580 | Well, we tend to have no constraints

00:08:27.680 | on how we schedule things.

00:08:29.560 | If there's an incoming request,

00:08:32.000 | we typically think about this as here's the game.

00:08:35.620 | There's an incoming request.

00:08:36.720 | The game is won if we can find a time

00:08:38.160 | that works for both of us.

00:08:39.920 | So any time that is currently free

00:08:41.880 | when an incoming request comes in

00:08:44.440 | is fair game for scheduling that request.

00:08:46.480 | As a result, you're essentially simulating

00:08:50.120 | a random distribution of meetings and appointments

00:08:53.360 | on your free time throughout the week.

00:08:55.760 | It's as if, for example,

00:08:57.000 | you put up a big calendar on your wall

00:09:00.240 | with a space for every free hour

00:09:02.200 | and you started throwing darts at it.

00:09:03.600 | And where those darts hit is where you're putting meetings.

00:09:05.520 | You're getting a sort of uniform distribution

00:09:07.400 | to use a statistical term.

00:09:08.900 | Well, the thing about uniform distributions

00:09:10.560 | is you're unlikely to have lots of long swaths

00:09:13.540 | of uninterrupted time, right?

00:09:15.980 | Because things are gonna be more evenly spread out.

00:09:18.360 | So if you have no constraints about how you schedule things,

00:09:20.600 | you're gonna really fragment your schedule.

00:09:22.840 | And so the free time you do have

00:09:25.240 | is gonna be highly unusable.

00:09:27.220 | So what's the solutions here?

00:09:30.460 | One, you have to constrain that spray.

00:09:32.680 | Do not make every free minute equally available

00:09:35.280 | for scheduling meetings.

00:09:36.360 | You need more constraints on it.

00:09:37.520 | There's lots of ways to do this.

00:09:38.680 | Here's one way.

00:09:39.620 | I don't schedule meetings

00:09:40.560 | during the first two and a half hours of the day.

00:09:42.440 | Okay, now you know that time will always be free

00:09:44.720 | for making progress on things.

00:09:46.040 | Here's another way.

00:09:46.880 | I don't do meetings on Mondays.

00:09:48.200 | So now you know your Mondays are gonna be free.

00:09:51.140 | Here's another thing.

00:09:51.980 | This type of scheduling,

00:09:53.840 | like this type of meeting I'm commonly asked to do,

00:09:56.040 | I only do these on these afternoons.

00:09:57.800 | This type of thing I'm often asked to do,

00:09:59.920 | I only do them on these days, right?

00:10:03.420 | Another way to constrain spray,

00:10:05.640 | and this is another idea from slow productivity,

00:10:07.580 | is the one for you, one for me model.

00:10:10.000 | For every hour of time I schedule for a given week,

00:10:14.400 | I will immediately find another hour to schedule to protect.

00:10:17.740 | Therefore, there can't be any more than a 50/50 ratio

00:10:20.400 | of free time to schedule time.

00:10:23.440 | And more importantly,

00:10:25.580 | because you're scheduling free time blocks

00:10:28.260 | of equal duration to the meetings you just scheduled,

00:10:31.260 | they're not fragmented.

00:10:33.060 | If I schedule a 90-minute meeting,

00:10:34.580 | I'm protecting a 90-minute uninterrupted free time block.

00:10:38.580 | So it right away gets rid of the fragmentation.

00:10:40.880 | You can, of course, adjust that ratio.

00:10:43.000 | You know, for every hour of meeting,

00:10:44.220 | I do 30 minutes of protected time,

00:10:46.380 | or you could go the other way.

00:10:47.260 | For every hour of meetings,

00:10:48.280 | I do two hours of protected time.

00:10:49.540 | It just depends on how much free time you need for your job.

00:10:53.620 | The final thing I'd recommend here

00:10:55.260 | is post-meeting processing blocks.

00:10:59.700 | So it's not just about, is the time,

00:11:02.900 | a large block of time free?

00:11:04.220 | It's also how undistracted are you during that time?

00:11:07.380 | A big source of distraction is,

00:11:08.940 | I have this meeting till three o'clock.

00:11:11.140 | I have another meeting at four,

00:11:13.420 | and I'm trying to work on a non-urgent

00:11:16.220 | but important priority in between.

00:11:18.040 | A common problem is,

00:11:19.180 | I go straight from that three o'clock meeting

00:11:22.140 | into that free time to try to work,

00:11:24.340 | but there was a lot of things discussed in that meeting

00:11:26.540 | that need to be processed.

00:11:27.760 | There's things I committed to do.

00:11:29.620 | There's tasks I need to get on my task list.

00:11:31.500 | There's follow-up emails I need to make,

00:11:33.380 | and that's just sitting in my head,

00:11:35.500 | pulling at my attention while I'm trying to work

00:11:39.740 | in this one free hour I have

00:11:41.700 | on something that's non-urgent but important.

00:11:44.140 | Even worse, let's say you stack

00:11:46.180 | three of these meetings in a row, back to back to back,

00:11:50.300 | and then you have some free time

00:11:51.540 | and you're gonna make progress on a important project there.

00:11:54.540 | Well, if you stack these meetings back to back,

00:11:57.260 | the commitments and information from the first meeting

00:11:59.620 | stays in your head as you move to the second meeting,

00:12:01.580 | which those commitments then mix with those first ones

00:12:03.660 | as you move to the third meeting,

00:12:04.980 | and now by the time you're leaving these meetings,

00:12:07.160 | your brain is calling uncle.

00:12:08.420 | It's like, "Oh my God, there's all of these things

00:12:09.900 | "we're trying to keep track of.

00:12:11.220 | "I'm so stressed."

00:12:12.260 | And you know what you're gonna do?

00:12:13.100 | Your brain's gonna be like, "Let's just go check email."

00:12:15.300 | So the easiest thing you can do

00:12:16.460 | to reduce the distraction impact of meetings

00:12:20.700 | is to add 10 to 15 minutes on your calendar

00:12:23.340 | to the end of every meeting.

00:12:25.020 | So typically you don't need a full hour for meetings.

00:12:27.340 | Just tell people let's do 45 minutes,

00:12:29.220 | make the last 15 minutes a processing block

00:12:31.140 | so you can just easily schedule the full hour.

00:12:33.380 | In the last 15 minutes, that processing block,

00:12:36.140 | take care of everything you just discussed.

00:12:38.340 | Any follow-up messaging you need to do, do it right then.

00:12:41.180 | Any tasks that need to get scheduled,

00:12:42.560 | put them into your task system.

00:12:44.260 | Any new deadlines this has generated,

00:12:46.260 | put them on your calendar.

00:12:47.440 | You wanna close every open loop spawned by that meeting

00:12:51.540 | before that scheduled time is done.

00:12:53.760 | This greatly reduces the distraction impact

00:12:56.980 | of these meetings and allows you

00:12:58.180 | to make better use of the time that remains.

00:13:01.220 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:13:02.060 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say

00:13:03.980 | that if you're enjoying this video,

00:13:06.020 | then you need to check out my new book,

00:13:08.220 | "Slow Productivity,

00:13:10.020 | "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

00:13:13.900 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas

00:13:16.600 | we talk about here in these videos.

00:13:19.340 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:13:24.340 | I know you're gonna like it.

00:13:26.380 | Check it out.

00:13:27.400 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:13:29.480 | All right, time destroyer number three,

00:13:31.840 | hive mind collaboration.

00:13:33.320 | So one of the biggest generators of non-focus,

00:13:39.520 | so one of the biggest generators of distraction

00:13:42.920 | is the need to keep checking in on ongoing conversations.

00:13:48.000 | That I have five different collaborative projects underway

00:13:53.000 | where we're trying to figure things out.

00:13:55.120 | It's relatively time-sensitive,

00:13:57.420 | and we're figuring this out

00:13:58.620 | with back-and-forth email messages

00:14:00.180 | or back-and-forth Slack messages.

00:14:02.620 | Once I have an ongoing time-sensitive

00:14:05.020 | back-and-forth digital message exchange,

00:14:07.960 | I now have to check those channels all the time

00:14:10.800 | because I need to see your next message in time

00:14:12.920 | to respond to it.

00:14:13.760 | So you can respond to that,

00:14:14.580 | and I can respond to that,

00:14:15.420 | and we can finish this issue before the day is over.

00:14:18.160 | And now you've destroyed your ability

00:14:19.440 | to make work on important things

00:14:21.100 | because every time you have to check

00:14:22.440 | that chat channel or inbox,

00:14:24.160 | you're inducing a context shift.

00:14:25.780 | You're seeing distractions

00:14:26.960 | that are unrelated to what you're working on.

00:14:28.640 | Your brain is going to go in 10 or 15 different directions.

00:14:31.680 | It's gonna run out of steam quickly.

00:14:33.480 | All right, so we can reduce some of this

00:14:37.320 | with our first idea,

00:14:38.800 | which was reduce the number of things you're working on.

00:14:41.240 | So there's just less of these less things

00:14:43.160 | generating email, sure.

00:14:45.000 | We can protect time like we just talked about.

00:14:47.180 | But three, for the things that remain,

00:14:49.880 | the work that we are doing,

00:14:51.400 | it is ongoing, it is an active project.

00:14:53.860 | Find better ways to collaborate

00:14:56.780 | that don't require unscheduled messages

00:14:58.480 | that you have to read and respond to quickly.

00:15:00.820 | You have to think about unscheduled messages

00:15:02.960 | that require responses as a productivity poison.

00:15:06.520 | It's the same as someone coming in

00:15:08.940 | and making you take a shot of whiskey

00:15:10.380 | in terms of what is the impact going to be over time

00:15:12.660 | on your ability to actually concentrate

00:15:14.040 | and do good work.

00:15:15.680 | You really have to think about it that way.

00:15:17.560 | All right, so how do we get rid of

00:15:19.280 | unscheduled messages that require urgent responses

00:15:22.240 | for the products that we have to work on?

00:15:24.840 | Well, here's a few ideas.

00:15:25.680 | Number one, I talk about this all the time.

00:15:27.200 | You need office hours, you need regular time most days.

00:15:30.720 | Your phone is on, you have a Zoom room open,

00:15:32.880 | your office door is open.

00:15:34.920 | Anything that requires a moderate amount of back and forth,

00:15:38.040 | something that's gonna generate like four messages

00:15:40.020 | that you're gonna have to exchange back and forth that day.

00:15:42.640 | Just tell the person,

00:15:44.320 | grab me whenever it's convenient at my next office hours,

00:15:46.720 | I'm here and we'll figure it out, right?

00:15:49.420 | This is not about reducing the total amount of time

00:15:51.920 | you spend talking about things, right?

00:15:54.000 | 'Cause you have a whole hour,

00:15:55.000 | let's say put aside for office hours

00:15:57.640 | and you have, let's say four conversations

00:15:59.800 | that are tackled in those office hours,

00:16:01.480 | the total amount of time it would have taken

00:16:03.040 | to maybe send emails back and forth for those four things

00:16:05.720 | might be like 10 minutes,

00:16:06.560 | but now you're putting aside a full hour,

00:16:08.160 | but that trade-off is absolutely worth it

00:16:10.020 | because the cost is not how long does it take you

00:16:12.200 | to write the four email messages that was required

00:16:14.820 | to coordinate this without office hours,

00:16:16.440 | the real cost is the context shifts required

00:16:19.200 | surrounding those emails.

00:16:21.080 | The 25 times you had to check your inbox

00:16:23.040 | waiting for the message to come back.

00:16:25.280 | The 20 minutes it takes to get your concentration back

00:16:27.760 | after each of those checks.

00:16:29.640 | This adds up for much, much more time

00:16:32.480 | than just having a concentrated hour

00:16:33.960 | where you take care of a lot of back and forth all at once.

00:16:36.320 | If you work in a team, have docket clearing meetings,

00:16:38.840 | two or three times a week, 30 to 45 minutes,

00:16:42.240 | the whole team comes together.

00:16:44.560 | You say, we have this shared document,

00:16:47.140 | which since the last meeting,

00:16:48.680 | when anything came up that was relevant to this team,

00:16:51.280 | questions, who's working on this?

00:16:52.840 | Oh my God, I'm worried about this.

00:16:54.000 | Hey, a client wrote about this, what are we gonna do?

00:16:56.080 | You add it to the shared document that I call a docket.

00:16:58.640 | At the docket clearing meeting, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom

00:17:01.080 | you just go through this document, everything.

00:17:02.880 | Can we handle it right now?

00:17:04.600 | Let's do it.

00:17:05.560 | Can we ignore this?

00:17:06.400 | Let's ignore this.

00:17:07.220 | Does someone need to take this?

00:17:08.080 | All right, put it on your task list right now, done.

00:17:10.560 | You go through until that docket is clear

00:17:12.280 | and then the meeting's over.

00:17:13.680 | This is not a generic standing meeting.

00:17:15.520 | This is not a generic check-in meeting.

00:17:16.960 | This is not of like, hey, how's everyone's kids doing?

00:17:19.820 | Let's like drink some coffee.

00:17:21.000 | It's, let's clear this docket as fast as possible.

00:17:24.480 | This now allows you, everything that you put

00:17:26.320 | under that docket and handle in a docket clearing meeting

00:17:29.080 | would have otherwise generated a non-trivial number

00:17:31.920 | of these unscheduled back and forth messages

00:17:33.640 | that require responses.

00:17:34.520 | So again, we're squashing that productivity poison.

00:17:38.200 | Finally, this is an idea that goes all the way back

00:17:40.920 | to my book, "Deep Work," process-centric emailing, right?

00:17:45.320 | When you have something you need to do with someone else,

00:17:47.880 | you need something from someone else.

00:17:50.520 | The temptation in the moment is what's the quickest thing

00:17:53.680 | I can do right now to get this off my plate?

00:17:56.440 | And that's typically writing like a pretty vague,

00:17:59.080 | fast email that yes, in the moment,

00:18:01.080 | temporarily takes that off your plate

00:18:02.680 | but does not solve the problem.

00:18:04.280 | Like there's a report that you need to submit to a client.

00:18:09.800 | You're gonna need to get some feedback from someone else.

00:18:13.200 | In the moment, you're like, I just wanna,

00:18:14.880 | I have so many things I'm doing.

00:18:15.840 | I wanna get this off my plate.

00:18:16.980 | You might just be like, hey, can you help give me feedback

00:18:19.220 | on this send?

00:18:20.060 | Well, there's a lot more emails to come, right?

00:18:23.820 | And they'll be like, well, yeah, what do you need?

00:18:25.520 | And you're like, okay, well, what do you think about this?

00:18:27.640 | And they won't write back.

00:18:28.520 | I'm like, hey, what's going on with this?

00:18:29.880 | And they're like, here's some thoughts.

00:18:30.840 | Like, what about over here?

00:18:32.040 | We're now like 10 or 15 emails back and forth,

00:18:34.440 | but this thing has to go out by Friday and it's Monday.

00:18:36.920 | So you're gonna have to like check your inbox

00:18:38.240 | pretty furiously to make sure it gets done.

00:18:40.160 | The alternative is process-centric emailing.

00:18:42.200 | Take a beat and say, I'm gonna figure out

00:18:45.120 | how we should collaborate on this.

00:18:47.760 | And I am gonna describe in my initial email to you,

00:18:51.540 | this is how we are gonna collaborate on this.

00:18:54.800 | And it's gonna be a process that I'm gonna design

00:18:56.960 | to try to minimize unscheduled messages.

00:19:00.160 | Takes more time to write and send that message,

00:19:02.760 | but you might save yourself 50 to 60 inbox checks

00:19:07.520 | down the line because of it,

00:19:08.640 | which is a huge cognitive burden.

00:19:10.240 | So like, let's go back to this report example.

00:19:12.640 | A process-centric email might be like,

00:19:14.160 | okay, here's what's going on.

00:19:16.240 | There's this report, I gotta get to the client,

00:19:18.000 | I gotta get to it by Friday.

00:19:19.600 | There's these sections that I don't know all the details,

00:19:22.360 | so I'm gonna need your help on this.

00:19:24.320 | Here's what we're gonna do.

00:19:26.440 | I'm gonna write a draft of this report,

00:19:29.720 | and I will email you this draft report

00:19:32.880 | by Tuesday close of business.

00:19:34.920 | I have time on my calendar when I'm gonna write it.

00:19:36.800 | You don't need to reply to the email.

00:19:38.080 | You just have it by Tuesday close of business.

00:19:40.680 | Go through and here are the type of edits I'm looking for,

00:19:43.800 | X, Y, and Z, okay?

00:19:45.920 | For this type of edit, here's what I need from you,

00:19:48.720 | the replacement numbers.

00:19:49.760 | For this type of edit, what I need from you

00:19:51.280 | is like a definitive word, don't cut this,

00:19:54.160 | don't put this in, and finally, I need whatever.

00:19:57.800 | If I'm missing a key point that you know about,

00:20:00.760 | I need you to just add that text directly to the document.

00:20:03.660 | Work on this Wednesday, work on this Thursday.

00:20:08.320 | I'm gonna assume whatever version of this document

00:20:12.240 | is put in the shared folder,

00:20:14.100 | I'm gonna grab that at the close of business Thursday,

00:20:18.020 | and I'm gonna do my final edit.

00:20:19.800 | I'll polish and submit, okay?

00:20:21.860 | That's the plan.

00:20:22.700 | I think this will work well.

00:20:23.740 | I've spelled this out step-by-step with bold headers.

00:20:27.280 | If there's anything like,

00:20:29.840 | if there's something about this not gonna work or whatever,

00:20:31.500 | just give me a call, boom, sent.

00:20:33.140 | So now you have specified a process

00:20:36.260 | by which you're gonna get the information you need,

00:20:38.900 | the coordination of like when this is ready,

00:20:41.700 | when people are gonna get it,

00:20:42.960 | this is all just worked out with timelines and schedules,

00:20:44.980 | so there's no actual messaging that has to be done,

00:20:47.420 | and you're now gonna get from here to that report

00:20:49.300 | being submitted without having to receive a single message.

00:20:52.420 | This process is now gonna generate zero inbox checks,

00:20:55.580 | except for you're sending the file

00:20:58.540 | to the other person in this case.

00:21:00.240 | That's process-centric emailing.

00:21:02.260 | And the key is make it easier to just run with the project

00:21:07.100 | than it is for them to change it.

00:21:08.840 | So that's why you give a higher friction release valve.

00:21:12.700 | Like, well, you can call me.

00:21:14.140 | You can call me or call me during these times

00:21:16.900 | if you need to change things.

00:21:17.740 | And most people will be like, oh, no, okay, shoot.

00:21:20.880 | What do I have to do?

00:21:21.720 | All right, fine, let me just do that.

00:21:23.660 | Right, process-centric emailing.

00:21:25.460 | Again, we often count the wrong things.

00:21:29.520 | We count the time required to write that message

00:21:31.580 | and say, I don't wanna spend that time,

00:21:32.740 | but we don't count the massive cost

00:21:34.780 | of having to check our inbox 15 times

00:21:36.540 | for an ongoing conversation that will happen

00:21:38.140 | if we don't write that message.

00:21:39.180 | So we have to think about unscheduled messages

00:21:41.780 | that require responses as a productivity poison.

00:21:45.040 | All right, so here's how you get your time back.

00:21:47.780 | Let's just summarize these real quick.

00:21:50.060 | A, you gotta minimize overhead tax.

00:21:52.480 | If your overhead tax crosses an excessive threshold,

00:21:56.080 | your ability to do anything but react

00:21:58.160 | and be stressed is impossible.

00:21:59.460 | This is a critical, critical threshold.

00:22:01.080 | So you have to reduce what you're working on,

00:22:03.080 | consolidate what you're working on

00:22:04.600 | to keep that tax under the threshold.

00:22:07.280 | Two, you have to defragment your schedule.

00:22:10.140 | If your schedule is too fragmented,

00:22:12.080 | you just don't have enough undistracted time

00:22:14.240 | to actually make progress on what matters.

00:22:16.520 | So you have to start protecting time.

00:22:17.960 | And we talked about a lot of different strategies

00:22:19.440 | for doing that.

00:22:20.440 | And you gotta clean up time

00:22:21.780 | by doing things like post-meeting processing.

00:22:23.960 | And finally, you have to resist

00:22:25.520 | the hyperactive hivemind style of collaboration.

00:22:28.060 | Ad hoc, back and forth, unscheduled messaging

00:22:30.200 | is a terrible way to coordinate or collaborate.

00:22:32.760 | You want to avoid that like poison.

00:22:34.740 | So office hours, doc clearing, process-centric emails.

00:22:38.240 | You should be willing to do almost anything.

00:22:40.440 | You don't have to walk across fire and fight an alligator.

00:22:44.120 | If that's what I have to do to prevent this

00:22:46.900 | from having to just be emails back and forth all day,

00:22:49.160 | you should seriously consider doing that.

00:22:51.000 | That's how much you should fear

00:22:53.760 | having to have unscheduled emails

00:22:55.440 | be something that you have to deal with all day long.

00:22:57.920 | All right, so that's how you find time, right?

00:22:59.680 | It's not always a dramatic change

00:23:02.920 | has to happen to your circumstances.

00:23:04.680 | Your same job with your same responsibilities

00:23:06.780 | can have a vastly different subjective impact

00:23:09.460 | on your sense of free time

00:23:10.560 | to make progress on non-urgent things,

00:23:12.520 | depending on how you approach it.

00:23:14.640 | Work on those three time destroyers,

00:23:17.120 | and that schedule is going to feel way more expansive.

00:23:20.560 | There we go, time destroyers, Jesse.

00:23:22.320 | - You're big into schedule fragmentation

00:23:24.720 | in terms of dedicating writing time in the mornings, right?

00:23:28.520 | - Yeah, that's a big thing I do

00:23:30.360 | is I protect writing time in the morning.

00:23:31.880 | I just don't do things in the morning.

00:23:34.000 | And then once you have a rule, it's pretty simple.

00:23:36.280 | Now here's the thing.

00:23:38.000 | We imagine, like when it comes to things

00:23:39.960 | like constraints on when we schedule meetings,

00:23:43.040 | we imagine two things that are false.

00:23:45.180 | First, people like to imagine the scenario

00:23:47.880 | in which everyone else says yes to every suggestion.

00:23:51.280 | That everyone else you work with,

00:23:52.480 | when the boss says,

00:23:53.320 | "Hey, can you meet on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon?"

00:23:55.840 | They always say yes.

00:23:57.160 | And that you're this huge outlier because you say,

00:23:59.280 | "Well, that time doesn't work, but how about these times?"

00:24:01.720 | Here's the reality.

00:24:03.320 | People say no all the time.

00:24:04.360 | They have busy schedules, right?

00:24:06.040 | Finding a meeting time

00:24:07.320 | often requires several different options.

00:24:09.760 | So it is not unusual or noteworthy that you're saying,

00:24:12.520 | "Well, that time doesn't work, but these times do."

00:24:14.800 | It doesn't seem obstinate.

00:24:16.060 | It doesn't seem like you're non-available.

00:24:17.320 | No one's noticing.

00:24:18.440 | All right, two, the other scenario

00:24:20.440 | that people invent in their mind

00:24:22.640 | is that the various people

00:24:24.160 | who are trying to schedule things on your calendar

00:24:25.920 | throughout the week, like,

00:24:26.760 | "Hey, can we meet? Can we jump on a call?"

00:24:28.560 | All get together.

00:24:30.360 | And they have a big whiteboard with a picture of you on it.

00:24:32.760 | And there's yarn going from it to other things.

00:24:34.760 | And they're tracking really carefully,

00:24:36.260 | like when did you get a no from Cal?

00:24:39.520 | What about you?

00:24:40.360 | And they're staring at this and they're smoking pipes.

00:24:42.560 | And they're like,

00:24:43.400 | "I think he's doing meetings in the morning."

00:24:45.600 | And then one of the people stands up and says,

00:24:47.620 | "How dare he?"

00:24:49.200 | And then like another person in the corner

00:24:50.920 | sort of like Quint from "Jaws"

00:24:53.600 | when he's sitting in the corner says,

00:24:55.640 | "I say we go get 'em."

00:24:57.200 | And then they're all gonna come and get you.

00:24:59.000 | That no one is tracking, no one knows.

00:25:00.920 | They're like, they're all day long.

00:25:02.000 | There's meetings and yes, no,

00:25:03.480 | and trying to make things work.

00:25:04.420 | They don't know.

00:25:05.500 | They don't see the patterns in your nose.

00:25:09.480 | They don't care about how you organize yourself.

00:25:11.340 | Now, the flip side of this is don't tell people.

00:25:12.920 | No one, no one cares.

00:25:14.600 | Don't make them care.

00:25:15.760 | Don't, oh, for God, God forbid,

00:25:19.460 | don't write a Tim Ferriss autoresponder.

00:25:21.760 | Don't try to explain your scheduling philosophy

00:25:24.160 | to everyone that comes through.

00:25:25.200 | Don't preemptively defensively be like,

00:25:26.660 | "I don't meet on mornings and here's why,

00:25:28.280 | "because you bastards are taking up all my time."

00:25:30.600 | Then you're giving someone something to react to.

00:25:33.120 | Don't explain it, just do it.

00:25:34.320 | No one's paying attention to you.

00:25:36.000 | As long as you're offering plenty of times to have meetings,

00:25:38.320 | they don't, they're not gonna notice patterns

00:25:40.280 | about the times that you say no.

00:25:42.720 | All right, well, we got some good questions

00:25:44.320 | about this type of stuff,

00:25:45.200 | but first, let's hear from a sponsor.

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00:31:01.420 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:31:03.020 | - First question is from the Newportian Scrum Master.

00:31:08.320 | In episode 318, you discuss how knowledge workers

00:31:11.240 | should consider taking breaks during the week

00:31:13.180 | because they're paid for creating rather than cranking.

00:31:15.980 | Do you have any insight on how these principles

00:31:17.860 | might apply to a Scrum Agile development team?

00:31:20.820 | In these frameworks,

00:31:21.860 | the team as a whole sets goals for the end of a sprint.

00:31:25.580 | - Well, if run correctly,

00:31:27.860 | Agile should be very compatible

00:31:30.820 | with these ideas of having some variation in your day,

00:31:34.140 | even being able to take a multi-hour break

00:31:36.580 | without it being a problem, right?

00:31:38.820 | The reason is when you're doing a sprint

00:31:41.500 | in an Agile methodology like Scrum,

00:31:44.220 | you're focused on one thing.

00:31:46.060 | Hey, we're working on adding this feature to the software

00:31:49.020 | and that's what we're doing.

00:31:50.160 | This means you don't have the seven or eight

00:31:53.380 | ongoing initiatives that are each generating

00:31:56.220 | their own hyperactive hive mind collaboration,

00:31:58.180 | which often ties people to need to be

00:32:00.380 | connected all the time.

00:32:01.540 | No, no, you're just working on one thing.

00:32:03.380 | So you're not tied to I need to be in like my inbox

00:32:05.900 | or chat channel all the time dealing with 10 things.

00:32:09.700 | But if you're just working on one thing,

00:32:11.300 | how many hours a day can you actually

00:32:13.460 | like really be working hard on that thing?

00:32:15.860 | And it's not eight.

00:32:17.040 | In my book, I think this was in my book,

00:32:19.620 | "A World Without Email",

00:32:21.100 | I talked about this methodology called extreme programming

00:32:24.060 | where you pair program,

00:32:25.260 | you sit two people at the same monitor

00:32:27.020 | and it's full out concentration.

00:32:29.500 | And they can only get like five hours of work max.

00:32:32.900 | And at first they talk about these organizations,

00:32:35.520 | how their new employees have to go home and take a nap.

00:32:37.900 | It's that mentally exhausting.

00:32:39.060 | Like if you're really giving something your full insight,

00:32:40.820 | it's really mentally exhausting.

00:32:42.700 | So this idea that like from nine to five,

00:32:45.100 | you're sitting there locked in writing great code

00:32:47.060 | is just not realistic.

00:32:48.900 | So if you're sprinting,

00:32:49.820 | so you're only working on one thing

00:32:51.460 | and this thing is hard,

00:32:52.540 | you're gonna have to take some breaks

00:32:53.860 | to titrate your concentration.

00:32:55.900 | It really shouldn't matter if like two hours in here,

00:32:58.060 | you're not working on it.

00:32:59.860 | Now, if your sprints are so tight

00:33:01.340 | that there's no time to do that,

00:33:02.660 | then your sprints are too tight.

00:33:04.260 | Like a good sprint, we're all working on this thing,

00:33:09.060 | we're working on it hard.

00:33:10.180 | It's not taking up every hour of the day

00:33:11.340 | 'cause that's impossible.

00:33:12.380 | Then we get it done and we move on to the next thing.

00:33:14.000 | So I think agile done right should be very compatible

00:33:17.220 | with some of these slow productivity ideas.

00:33:19.620 | - All right, what do we got next?

00:33:21.820 | - Next question is from Joe.

00:33:23.580 | I'm working on my thesis,

00:33:24.780 | holding a student job and learning the local language

00:33:27.140 | as I'm not a native.

00:33:28.360 | I also have to do household tasks.

00:33:30.020 | I find planning my days a major challenge.

00:33:32.260 | My supervisors are scattered and so things can be unplanned.

00:33:36.100 | I also find that after 6 p.m.,

00:33:37.740 | I'm usually too drained to study or focus

00:33:39.900 | on any additional tasks, including cooking dinner.

00:33:42.940 | How can I better structure my days?

00:33:45.260 | - Well, Joe, you need to move your thesis work

00:33:47.020 | to first thing.

00:33:47.860 | This tends to work very well.

00:33:49.860 | Do two to three hours first thing.

00:33:51.820 | This might have to be early

00:33:53.980 | if you have a student job that starts

00:33:55.780 | somewhat in the morning,

00:33:57.300 | but just two to three hours every day.

00:33:59.060 | You want the compound interest of persistent effort

00:34:03.900 | is what you're looking for here.

00:34:05.380 | You wanna avoid the typical sort of

00:34:07.500 | pre-graduate student mentality of work

00:34:09.740 | is something that happens in big inspired burst at night.

00:34:13.380 | That's not gonna work.

00:34:14.220 | You're not an undergraduate anymore.

00:34:16.340 | So three hours, first thing in the morning,

00:34:18.020 | even if this means you have to do 6.30 to 9.30 a.m.

00:34:22.380 | All right, make very persistent progress.

00:34:26.340 | With your disorganized supervisor,

00:34:28.660 | have a weekly meeting set up

00:34:29.940 | and you take the reins of organizing these meetings.

00:34:32.460 | You come to your advisor.

00:34:34.300 | Here's what I'm working on now.

00:34:35.780 | I'm gonna deliver you this draft by this meeting.

00:34:38.980 | And then here's the notes I need from you

00:34:40.700 | for the next meeting.

00:34:41.540 | You basically just have to organize their life for them.

00:34:43.700 | This is common with academics.

00:34:45.060 | Like sometimes you have to just organize their life for them

00:34:47.420 | because they themselves are too disorganized.

00:34:50.100 | So you wanna take out the critical path

00:34:53.380 | just waiting for the supervisor to be more organized.

00:34:56.500 | So you're working in the morning, you have your job,

00:34:59.180 | then you need a really crystal clear

00:35:00.740 | schedule shutdown complete, shutdown ritual.

00:35:03.300 | Work is done.

00:35:04.460 | Now I'm in non-work time.

00:35:07.580 | You gotta treat that psychologically very different.

00:35:09.860 | I invented the shutdown ritual

00:35:13.020 | in response to working on my doctoral dissertation

00:35:16.140 | because it really has a way just being in the middle

00:35:19.060 | of such a complicated long project.

00:35:21.700 | It really gets its hooks into your mind

00:35:23.580 | and all your mind wants to do is keep thinking about it.

00:35:25.140 | So it's really important to have the shutdown ritual.

00:35:28.100 | Now your evenings are just non-work time.

00:35:30.700 | And what do you wanna do with your non-work time?

00:35:32.940 | Well, I guess you could just like sit around and do nothing.

00:35:34.820 | But what you're gonna find

00:35:35.660 | is that if you've really shut down your work,

00:35:37.020 | like, I don't know,

00:35:37.860 | like I'll make an interesting dinner today

00:35:39.620 | or I'm gonna go like for a walk

00:35:41.460 | or I'm gonna like tackle this task today.

00:35:43.220 | You get kind of like a clean slate

00:35:45.060 | when you psychologically transition

00:35:46.540 | from work to non-work time.

00:35:48.780 | There's a classic book about this,

00:35:50.900 | Arnold Bennett's "How to Live in 24 Hours a Day"

00:35:53.380 | which came out in the early 20th century.

00:35:55.660 | Where he basically argues,

00:35:57.340 | you have eight hours of work,

00:35:58.220 | you have eight hours of sleep,

00:35:59.260 | treat your eight hours in between

00:36:01.300 | as like you, a different life.

00:36:04.540 | Like that you're a gentleman patrician

00:36:06.900 | that just has landed, you're a landed gentry

00:36:09.940 | and you just have to, you can control

00:36:11.700 | what you wanna do with your time.

00:36:13.020 | And like treat it not as recovery from work,

00:36:15.500 | but as like your time to whatever, read poetry.

00:36:19.220 | You know, he had pretty kind of elitist ideas

00:36:21.380 | what to do with that time.

00:36:22.340 | But you treat that time,

00:36:23.260 | if you can shut down your work,

00:36:24.260 | that's like really interesting time.

00:36:25.500 | You could do some chores,

00:36:26.700 | you can do some restorative stuff,

00:36:28.140 | you can do some exploration

00:36:29.540 | and really keep, I would say,

00:36:30.820 | balance those two things really well in the evening.

00:36:33.300 | Chores plus things that are restorative and interesting.

00:36:36.820 | And that begins to like really change your sense

00:36:38.980 | of the evenings to like something again,

00:36:40.700 | that's like regenerating and rejuvenating you

00:36:42.740 | and not just psychologically

00:36:44.460 | as this time to recuperate.

00:36:47.380 | Because honestly, work on your dissertation,

00:36:50.500 | student job, this is not the salt mines.

00:36:55.060 | It's also not, you're not like in one,

00:36:58.340 | the Apollo mission trying to save Apollo 13.

00:37:01.340 | Your mind will be okay.

00:37:02.740 | You're not exhausted beyond all repair if you do that.

00:37:07.260 | The final thing I wanna warn you against

00:37:10.380 | is do not descend down the rabbit hole

00:37:12.500 | of what I call a dissertation hell mindset.

00:37:14.860 | There's a whole sort of online sub-community

00:37:16.940 | for various reasons that I have a lot of theories on

00:37:19.540 | but I don't wanna get into.

00:37:20.660 | For various reasons, they want to recast the process

00:37:24.940 | of working on a doctoral dissertation

00:37:26.700 | as some sort of almost like impossibly demanding,

00:37:30.580 | traumatic, terrible experience.

00:37:32.700 | And they egg each other on online

00:37:35.980 | about how terrible it is.

00:37:37.620 | And this is death for motivation.

00:37:41.700 | And it's also misguided.

00:37:43.900 | It's not that hard, all right?

00:37:45.900 | Trust me, there's much harder things in life.

00:37:47.700 | There's much harder jobs.

00:37:48.860 | So avoid the whole dissertation hell

00:37:51.180 | sort of subculture out there.

00:37:52.980 | It's like, you're working on this, it's a few hours a day.

00:37:56.340 | Take your time.

00:37:57.660 | You don't have to finish it this month.

00:38:00.220 | It's gonna take the time it's gonna take.

00:38:01.700 | Compound interest of accomplishment.

00:38:03.740 | Get that done first, do your job, shut it off.

00:38:06.260 | Treat your evening as like a completely different life.

00:38:08.500 | Balance restorative and regenerative and fun with chores.

00:38:12.140 | I think you'll be fine.

00:38:13.540 | I think you'll be fine.

00:38:14.700 | I used to, Jesse, I used to go down that rabbit hole

00:38:17.900 | back when I was writing just for students.

00:38:20.580 | And there was this really strong

00:38:22.060 | online dissertation hell community.

00:38:23.900 | And there's so many weird things going on

00:38:25.620 | psychologically with these people.

00:38:26.900 | I mean, they had to somehow cast this thing.

00:38:31.020 | And most of these were people

00:38:32.020 | who were like full-time doctoral students

00:38:34.140 | writing a dissertation

00:38:36.260 | on like no particular deadlines or timescales.

00:38:38.660 | I mean, this is like probably the easiest year

00:38:41.980 | of all their life to follow

00:38:43.860 | compared with the difficulties of like a real job,

00:38:45.980 | a family, health issues, whatever.

00:38:48.420 | And it would just insistently try to recast this

00:38:52.380 | as if they just arrived at the gulag.

00:38:54.660 | And like it's survival every day.

00:38:58.060 | Or like they're trying to, again,

00:39:00.460 | save the Apollo 13 from,

00:39:02.860 | if they don't figure out how to like

00:39:05.660 | get the carbon dioxide scrubbed,

00:39:08.460 | Jim Lovell's gonna die or whatever, right?

00:39:10.260 | I mean, it was a whole crazy subculture.

00:39:12.620 | - So these had to be on blog 'cause it was-

00:39:14.540 | - It was all blogs.

00:39:15.380 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:39:16.220 | So I'm assuming, I don't use social media, so I don't know.

00:39:18.820 | I'm assuming if this- - It's worse.

00:39:20.260 | - It's probably worse.

00:39:21.420 | And it's probably on TikTok, which is probably worse.

00:39:24.780 | But yeah, back then it was blogs.

00:39:26.620 | All right, who do we got next?

00:39:27.780 | Next question's from Rafael.

00:39:29.700 | "I have two questions about the calendar.

00:39:31.460 | First, what is the best frequency to check it?

00:39:34.020 | And second, what is the best tool to do it?

00:39:36.140 | Desktop screen, phone, or print it out?"

00:39:39.140 | - I mean, use an electronic calendar.

00:39:41.100 | When you check it, you just look at it.

00:39:42.540 | Like there's nothing tricky here.

00:39:43.740 | Tool's not gonna help.

00:39:45.500 | You're checking your calendar.

00:39:46.980 | There's two major occasions

00:39:48.380 | on which you're checking your calendar.

00:39:50.060 | The first and most frequent

00:39:51.340 | is when you're building your daily plan.

00:39:53.540 | So if you subscribe to multi-scale planning,

00:39:55.860 | you are every day, you're building a plan for your day.

00:39:58.420 | I suggest doing time block planning

00:40:00.100 | where you're actually giving every minute of your day a job

00:40:02.260 | as opposed to going through your day in a reactive methods.

00:40:04.820 | Hey, what's next or what do I wanna work on next?

00:40:07.540 | I keep my daily time block plan on paper.

00:40:10.460 | I mean, I sell my own time block planner.

00:40:13.300 | I use that.

00:40:14.140 | I have boxes full of them, okay?

00:40:15.980 | But you can do it on whatever format you wanna use it on.

00:40:19.060 | So when you create your daily time block plan,

00:40:21.020 | you are transferring things on your calendar

00:40:23.580 | onto that plan.

00:40:25.540 | So any meetings or appointments that are on your calendar,

00:40:29.620 | you are drawing physically onto your time block plan

00:40:32.180 | and then you're blocking all the remaining time as well.

00:40:34.020 | So you're checking your calendar when you do that.

00:40:36.140 | Also, when you're doing your daily plan,

00:40:37.740 | the other thing you're gonna check for on your calendar

00:40:39.780 | is deadlines.

00:40:41.460 | I'm often a heavy user.

00:40:42.700 | I use Google Calendar of making use of all day events,

00:40:45.620 | which just show up at the top of your day,

00:40:48.300 | not as like on a particular time.

00:40:50.260 | I use those for deadlines and reminders.

00:40:52.740 | Hey, deadline for getting this done today.

00:40:54.980 | I have like a book quote due today.

00:40:58.620 | Make sure the deadline for filing

00:41:00.380 | the reimbursement forms is today.

00:41:02.020 | So when I'm building my daily time block plan,

00:41:03.900 | I see those deadlines on my calendar.

00:41:07.500 | So I make sure in my daily time block plan,

00:41:09.660 | I've blocked off time to deal with them.

00:41:11.980 | I don't need to see my calendar again

00:41:14.460 | for the rest of that day

00:41:15.460 | 'cause I now run my day off of the daily time block plan.

00:41:18.420 | The exception, of course, if during the course of your day,

00:41:21.340 | let's say you have a block, you're checking your email

00:41:23.820 | and you're trying to set up a meeting with someone,

00:41:25.300 | well, yeah, then you'll go to your calendar

00:41:26.420 | to find what time's available.

00:41:28.220 | But I transfer from my calendar

00:41:30.460 | to my daily time block plan, I run my day off of that.

00:41:33.700 | The other context in which you're gonna check your calendar

00:41:35.940 | is every week.

00:41:37.740 | When you make your weekly plan,

00:41:39.020 | you look at your calendar for the whole week

00:41:40.860 | to get a sense of what time is free.

00:41:43.220 | During your weekly plan, one of your primary goals

00:41:48.740 | is to try to put aside time on your calendar

00:41:51.180 | for important initiatives that aren't already on there.

00:41:54.740 | So you're like, okay, I really wanna make progress

00:41:56.460 | this week on my book.

00:41:57.820 | Where do I have free time to work on my book?

00:42:00.300 | Why don't I protect that now on my calendar

00:42:02.140 | by putting pre-scheduled appointments to work on my book?

00:42:05.340 | Now that time is protected, and when I get to those days

00:42:08.100 | and build my daily time block plan,

00:42:09.380 | I'll see them and integrate them automatically.

00:42:11.900 | During your weekly plan, you'll probably be frustrated

00:42:14.220 | that your schedule's too fragmented,

00:42:15.540 | so it's also a good time to try to defragment your schedule.

00:42:20.180 | So as you look at your calendar for the week ahead,

00:42:22.060 | you might be like, you know what?

00:42:24.060 | Thursday morning is great.

00:42:27.260 | I don't have stuff until noon,

00:42:29.540 | and it would be a great time to tackle

00:42:31.220 | this big important project, except I have this coffee

00:42:35.260 | out of office across town at 10 a.m.

00:42:38.060 | That one thing is making Thursday morning unusable.

00:42:41.700 | I'm just gonna move that coffee.

00:42:43.540 | I'm gonna move that coffee to drinks

00:42:44.820 | because now I've unlocked four consecutive hours,

00:42:47.420 | and I can get this important thing

00:42:48.740 | that's in my strategic plan, get this done, right?

00:42:51.300 | Or you say, I got these three meetings.

00:42:55.780 | I could probably consolidate those

00:42:57.740 | because it's the same people.

00:42:59.300 | We set them up at different times,

00:43:01.860 | but it's the same people, and it's eating up this afternoon.

00:43:05.140 | Why don't I just tell the people,

00:43:06.580 | let's just make the first meeting a little bit longer,

00:43:08.660 | and that's gonna free up a two-hour block there.

00:43:10.580 | I kinda need that because I wanna fit

00:43:11.860 | this other thing in there.

00:43:12.900 | So your weekly plan,

00:43:14.260 | you're not only surveying your calendar,

00:43:15.700 | but now you're kinda playing with it a little bit,

00:43:17.220 | trying to make it better.

00:43:19.060 | So you're definitely gonna see your calendar

00:43:20.060 | at your weekly plan.

00:43:21.140 | You're gonna see your calendar every day

00:43:22.340 | when you build your daily plan,

00:43:24.420 | and you'll see your calendar

00:43:25.260 | when you're trying to schedule things, all right?

00:43:27.180 | In terms of checking it, how you check it,

00:43:28.940 | there's no magic here.

00:43:29.780 | It's a Google calendar, you look at it.

00:43:32.380 | Yeah, that's not a big deal.

00:43:33.780 | All right, what do we got next?

00:43:37.020 | - Next question's from Bob.

00:43:38.980 | I'm motivated by your monthly book updates to read more.

00:43:42.180 | I have multiple jobs and sometimes

00:43:43.780 | just don't have hardly any free time in a given day.

00:43:46.340 | On these days, is reading for 20 to 30 minutes

00:43:49.180 | actually do anything?

00:43:50.980 | - Well, I mean, first I'll say reading is good.

00:43:53.500 | So read, have a reading habit.

00:43:55.020 | That's what's important.

00:43:56.220 | What that actually means in terms of number of pages read

00:44:00.780 | or number of books finished,

00:44:01.900 | that depends on a lot of things.

00:44:03.100 | That depends, for example, on how much free time you have.

00:44:07.980 | It also depends on what you're reading, right?

00:44:10.860 | Like I read at a much slower rate

00:44:13.860 | than like the typical sort of book club reader

00:44:18.220 | that reads primarily like what is the,

00:44:20.940 | this is like a major driver of books in this country.

00:44:23.180 | Like what novel is like making waves

00:44:25.980 | and being recommended as a good novel, right?

00:44:28.300 | So like what I call book club readers,

00:44:29.660 | it's like everyone in all the book clubs in the country

00:44:32.140 | are all gonna read "The Vaster Wilds"

00:44:35.580 | because it's been told this is a good book.

00:44:37.420 | Like fiction is often much faster.

00:44:39.740 | And you could go through a lot of those books.

00:44:40.820 | I read a lot of nonfiction.

00:44:42.540 | This is slower.

00:44:43.900 | I'm reading a book right now on settler colonialism.

00:44:46.380 | This goes slower than reading like the,

00:44:50.500 | I don't actually know these,

00:44:51.780 | the Emil Henry, Emily Henry book or whatever, right?

00:44:54.740 | So don't get too caught up in the number of books.

00:44:57.420 | Get caught up in, am I a reader or am I not?

00:44:59.660 | That being said, here's what I wanna say.

00:45:01.180 | Like I'm a busy, I'm busy, right?

00:45:03.420 | I have a few jobs, have a bunch of kids, et cetera.

00:45:07.060 | A lot of volunteer positions.

00:45:08.180 | I do a lot of stuff.

00:45:10.740 | I read five books a month, right?

00:45:13.580 | I don't think much about it.

00:45:15.060 | I'm not doing heroic or exceptional efforts

00:45:18.740 | to find time to read those books.

00:45:20.100 | What are the two things that seem to matter the most

00:45:22.260 | for reading quantity for me?

00:45:24.260 | Pick books in the moment I'm super psyched about.

00:45:28.300 | I have a very eclectic reading list.

00:45:29.860 | You hear it every month on the show.

00:45:31.500 | It's because in the moment I say, this is a book,

00:45:35.140 | right now I'm like excited about this idea.

00:45:37.820 | So I wanna read this right now.

00:45:39.900 | I wanna know more about this.

00:45:40.980 | I'm jazzed about, I'm gonna read this.

00:45:42.900 | When you're excited about a book, you read it more.

00:45:45.620 | And this is different again,

00:45:46.460 | I think than like the book club model,

00:45:48.100 | which is everyone says this is the new good novel.

00:45:52.220 | So we all have to read this now.

00:45:54.060 | Like that's a different,

00:45:55.220 | that's a fine relationship with books,

00:45:56.740 | but it's different than the way I do it.

00:45:58.140 | I read primarily non-fiction

00:45:59.780 | and it's because I'm interested in this idea right now.

00:46:02.420 | Oh, wouldn't it be cool to know more about it?

00:46:03.940 | It's relevant to the things I'm working on.

00:46:05.220 | I'm excited about the book, okay?

00:46:07.940 | Two, I don't use social media, right?

00:46:11.820 | I know that sounds like it really shouldn't be related,

00:46:13.940 | but people vastly underestimate the amount of time

00:46:17.540 | that is free that gets devoured

00:46:20.820 | trying to help the valuation

00:46:23.460 | of Mark Zuckerberg's stock holdings.

00:46:25.380 | People underestimate how much time gets eaten up by that.

00:46:29.340 | When your default for boredom is like,

00:46:30.980 | let me see what's on the screen and it's hyper palatable,

00:46:33.820 | that eats up all the book time.

00:46:36.500 | I don't entertain myself that much on my phone.

00:46:38.700 | I mean, I punish myself with my phone,

00:46:41.700 | at least in recent days,

00:46:42.780 | because I follow the Washington Nationals

00:46:46.300 | losing four games in a row.

00:46:48.580 | And it makes me wanna throw my phone out a window.

00:46:50.340 | I don't know why I punish myself that way.

00:46:53.060 | All right, guys hit a ball.

00:46:54.660 | But I don't have social media on there.

00:46:58.020 | I don't watch YouTube on my phone, right?

00:46:59.740 | So my phone is pretty boring.

00:47:01.380 | You have more time than you think then.

00:47:03.140 | Like, I'm just gonna read a little bit

00:47:04.340 | while I wait for my wife to get ready.

00:47:07.380 | We're gonna go out.

00:47:08.220 | There's like 20 minutes.

00:47:09.220 | I'm just gonna like read a little bit.

00:47:10.780 | That adds up.

00:47:11.900 | At night, it adds up.

00:47:12.740 | If you're looking at your phone at night,

00:47:14.180 | that's like two books a month right there.

00:47:16.900 | So read stuff that you're psyched about,

00:47:19.340 | not that like people say you're supposed to read

00:47:21.780 | and don't use your phone for entertainment.

00:47:24.700 | Like, you'd be surprised.

00:47:25.580 | You might get a lot more reading out of your time.

00:47:28.660 | It's true.

00:47:29.500 | The only thing I do

00:47:30.340 | in terms of like thinking about my five books a month

00:47:33.380 | is I don't like to finish too fast.

00:47:36.660 | Like if I'm kind of done early,

00:47:39.220 | I'll slow down or maybe switch to a bigger book to slow down.

00:47:43.660 | Like the only thing I do is actually slow myself down.

00:47:45.660 | 'Cause sometimes in the summer,

00:47:47.620 | I'll read six or seven books,

00:47:48.620 | but I don't wanna kind of get in the habit of that

00:47:50.140 | because I worry that I'm just gonna raise

00:47:52.340 | like my expectations for how much I'll read.

00:47:53.940 | So I'll slow myself down,

00:47:55.780 | but I really don't think a lot about,

00:47:58.180 | I just kind of get there.

00:47:59.740 | - I guess a lot of the books go by pretty quickly too

00:48:03.340 | for instance, that atomic, the nuclear war book,

00:48:05.660 | that's--

00:48:06.500 | - That's a fast book.

00:48:07.340 | - It seems like-- - Did you read it?

00:48:08.220 | - I'm in the process.

00:48:09.220 | - It's fast to read, isn't it?

00:48:10.140 | - Yeah. - I read that in one day.

00:48:11.500 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:48:12.940 | Yeah, so some of these books do go fast.

00:48:14.500 | Some of the more intellectual ones go slow.

00:48:16.820 | We'll talk about it in whenever we do the next book update,

00:48:20.300 | but there was a, I've been working on this for six months,

00:48:24.060 | a 600 page, no, it's 550 page ethics book.

00:48:29.060 | And it's just like--

00:48:31.460 | - Ethics as in?

00:48:32.420 | - Just like literally, I'll get into it later.

00:48:34.500 | But anyways, this was all like read 10 pages a night

00:48:37.420 | six months later, like as a meditative act.

00:48:40.100 | And like six months later, I was done with that.

00:48:41.700 | So some of these books go a little bit,

00:48:43.500 | go a little bit slower, but--

00:48:45.580 | - Neil Stevenson fiction books, those take me a while.

00:48:48.380 | - Yeah, they're fast.

00:48:49.220 | The pages read fast,

00:48:51.420 | but there's so many damn pages in the book.

00:48:53.340 | Just not, that guy likes to write.

00:48:55.780 | Man, he gets into them.

00:48:59.100 | Yeah, those take a while.

00:49:00.860 | All right, let's see here.

00:49:01.700 | What do we got next?

00:49:03.260 | - Slow Productivity Corner.

00:49:04.700 | - Ooh, all right, everyone.

00:49:05.820 | Slow Productivity Corner is where we have

00:49:07.620 | one question per week based on ideas for my new book,

00:49:11.500 | "Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment

00:49:14.220 | "Without Burnout."

00:49:16.340 | Mainly, this is just an excuse for us to play

00:49:18.940 | our much loved Slow Productivity Corner theme music.

00:49:21.380 | Let's hear that music now, Jesse.

00:49:22.940 | (slow music)

00:49:25.340 | All right, who do we have today?

00:49:31.580 | I gotta talk in my slow productivity voice

00:49:33.580 | after the theme music.

00:49:35.060 | Who do we have today, Jesse?

00:49:36.740 | - Hi, questions from Krishna.

00:49:38.860 | As a creative, I really embrace the principle

00:49:41.140 | of working at a natural pace from slow productivity,

00:49:43.740 | but I'm afraid that's keeping me from pushing

00:49:45.580 | a little harder on getting things done.

00:49:47.540 | How can I find the uncomfortable but not drained out spot?

00:49:51.540 | - All right, well, Krishna, you gotta keep reading, right?

00:49:54.220 | Because what are the three principles in slow productivity

00:49:57.260 | and what's the order in which they're presented?

00:49:58.780 | Principle number one, do fewer things.

00:50:02.060 | Okay, so yeah, this is about reducing overhead tax,

00:50:05.060 | less concurrent projects means less distraction.

00:50:08.020 | You can do more quality work.

00:50:10.180 | What's principle number two in the book?

00:50:12.620 | Work at a natural pace, which you mentioned here.

00:50:14.460 | Like, okay, stretch out how long your expectations

00:50:18.060 | for how long things take.

00:50:19.740 | Be comfortable with variations in intensity

00:50:22.180 | on different time scales.

00:50:23.460 | Busy days, less busy days.

00:50:25.140 | Busy seasons versus less busy seasons.

00:50:27.260 | Kind of slow down, give things the time they require.

00:50:29.780 | Don't try to be pegged at 10, eight hours a day,

00:50:33.220 | you know, five days a week.

00:50:34.780 | If you stop there, as you note here,

00:50:39.300 | you could feel like you are actually gonna be

00:50:42.140 | reducing your production.

00:50:46.140 | Like, if you stop here,

00:50:49.660 | the relationship you're gonna develop with work

00:50:52.420 | feels sort of antagonistic.

00:50:54.660 | It's something to reduce, it's something to slow down.

00:50:57.660 | You'll be focused on the negative aspects of work.

00:51:01.420 | Now, you need to do these things

00:51:03.100 | 'cause otherwise you're gonna burn out.

00:51:04.220 | But if you stop there, you're gonna grow

00:51:05.820 | to have this antagonistic relationship with work,

00:51:08.100 | which you're very, I think, sagely concerned about

00:51:12.260 | in this question.

00:51:13.660 | And where does this end?

00:51:14.740 | Well, you're gonna end up like one of these substackers

00:51:17.940 | who, after a while, you're just convinced

00:51:20.660 | that like any boss in the world is, you know,

00:51:24.820 | secretly some sort of like Orwellian Hitler

00:51:27.100 | and we all have to just fume

00:51:28.900 | until we can overthrow capitalism.

00:51:31.060 | You don't end up in good places.

00:51:33.420 | So if you keep reading,

00:51:35.140 | you get to the solution to this problem,

00:51:37.620 | which is principle number three,

00:51:39.220 | which is obsess over quality.

00:51:41.140 | And I say in the book,

00:51:44.140 | this principle, obsess over quality,

00:51:46.180 | is what makes the other two work.

00:51:48.300 | It's what prevents you from falling

00:51:50.380 | into a dead-end psychological cul-de-sac of bitterness.

00:51:55.140 | It's what prevents you from seeing work

00:51:57.180 | as this sort of amorphous antagonistic force

00:52:01.540 | against which you're constantly fighting.

00:52:03.660 | It's also what's gonna make you much more successful

00:52:06.180 | at implementing the ideas from the first two.

00:52:08.380 | So when you obsess over quality,

00:52:10.020 | the busyness that you're reducing with principle one

00:52:14.580 | self-evidently needs to be reduced

00:52:16.180 | because it's getting in the way of you killing it.

00:52:17.780 | You have like this awesome stuff you're trying to produce,

00:52:20.380 | the busyness is getting in your way.

00:52:21.900 | I'm reducing busyness so I can be better.

00:52:24.420 | That's different than I'm reducing busyness

00:52:26.020 | because my boss is an Aurelian Hitler.

00:52:27.940 | Principle number two, okay, working at a natural pace.

00:52:31.220 | When you're obsessing over quality,

00:52:32.820 | that becomes self-evident.

00:52:34.140 | You say, yeah, what matters is

00:52:35.140 | I'm trying to produce something awesome.

00:52:37.300 | I need to give that the time it deserves.

00:52:39.100 | And it doesn't matter if I'm super busy eight hours a day,

00:52:42.300 | performing busyness is unrelated

00:52:45.100 | to whether I really do this thing really well

00:52:47.260 | and I need to be sustainable in my efforts here

00:52:49.220 | because it's gonna be a long haul

00:52:50.380 | to really become a master of what I'm doing.

00:52:52.780 | So yeah, of course, I'm gonna kind of take breaks,

00:52:54.660 | become self-evident.

00:52:56.020 | You're working at a natural pace,

00:52:57.220 | not because there's a mustache twisting

00:53:00.300 | sort of like Henry Ford character that's like forcing you

00:53:02.500 | and you're trying to fight back against it,

00:53:03.740 | but because this is gonna make it easier for you

00:53:06.460 | over time to produce stuff you really care about.

00:53:08.260 | And finally, when you obsess over quality,

00:53:10.340 | your work becomes more meaningful.

00:53:12.820 | Humans love mastery.

00:53:14.820 | It's one of the key components

00:53:15.860 | of Ryan and Decky's self-determination theory.

00:53:18.860 | Humans need mastery.

00:53:20.340 | It makes humans motivated.

00:53:21.820 | It makes humans happier.

00:53:24.100 | So your work itself is gonna become more meaningful.

00:53:26.860 | At the same time,

00:53:28.140 | as you produce things that are better and better,

00:53:29.900 | you gain more autonomy over your career,

00:53:31.780 | which means it's easier to work on fewer things

00:53:34.500 | 'cause you have leverage.

00:53:35.740 | It's easier to work at a natural pace,

00:53:39.060 | to have busy seasons, less busy seasons,

00:53:41.220 | because you're really good at what you do

00:53:42.260 | and you have leverage.

00:53:44.100 | So it's the engine, it's the glue,

00:53:45.740 | it's the connecting fibers to the slow productivity mindset,

00:53:48.860 | what makes it sustainable, what makes it possible,

00:53:50.900 | what makes it actually succeed over time

00:53:53.100 | is if you obsess over the quality of what you do best.

00:53:56.300 | So if you get to that chapter,

00:53:58.420 | I think your concern about like,

00:53:59.860 | am I just taking my foot off the accelerator?

00:54:01.780 | Is this gonna make me like worse at my job?

00:54:04.260 | Those concerns should vanish.

00:54:06.340 | I thought about putting that principle first

00:54:08.220 | because it's so important,

00:54:09.380 | but I really, I think I needed to get at the things,

00:54:12.500 | I need to get at the slowing down ideas first

00:54:16.340 | before getting to like the do this sustainably

00:54:18.980 | and the succeed in doing these ideas,

00:54:20.260 | you need to do this other piece.

00:54:21.260 | I think if I started with the obsess over quality,

00:54:23.380 | it would take too long

00:54:24.220 | before we got to the actual slowing down.

00:54:26.900 | But the flip side of that is you really gotta make it

00:54:28.940 | through the whole book before the whole thing makes sense.

00:54:31.500 | So once you get the principle three,

00:54:33.340 | principles one and two become much more effective.

00:54:35.840 | I think that deserves, Jesse,

00:54:38.620 | hearing the theme music one more time.

00:54:40.860 | (upbeat music)

00:54:43.440 | - All right, do we have a call this week?

00:54:50.460 | - Yes, we do.

00:54:51.300 | - All right.

00:54:52.120 | - Hi, Cal, this is Emily from Seattle.

00:54:55.700 | I'm a big fan of your work.

00:54:56.820 | Thanks for everything that you do.

00:54:58.500 | I'm curious your perspective on different types of deep work

00:55:02.220 | in the same day or in the same week.

00:55:04.980 | So in my situation during the day,

00:55:06.980 | I'm an organization development and change consultant.

00:55:09.780 | So I'm dealing with leaders and teams

00:55:11.420 | in some kind of large-scale change.

00:55:13.820 | And there's a good amount of deep work with that,

00:55:15.420 | whether it's sort of dealing with conflict

00:55:17.020 | or some kind of really intense situation,

00:55:19.860 | or whether it's just thinking really hard

00:55:21.540 | about what the next step in the plan is.

00:55:23.740 | And then in the evening, I write and play music,

00:55:26.580 | and that's a really important part of my life as well.

00:55:29.160 | And in my experience, some days I'm able to do

00:55:32.060 | a really nice shutdown routine from my day job

00:55:34.820 | and maybe eat something or do a little bit of exercise

00:55:38.020 | and then get straight into the creative work,

00:55:39.740 | and I can do a good amount of deep work there as well.

00:55:42.980 | But other days, I just feel like I've done so much

00:55:46.640 | of my day job, by the time I'm finished

00:55:48.460 | and do a shutdown routine, I'm just exhausted,

00:55:50.220 | and I don't have any capacity for that music.

00:55:52.300 | And I try to balance it and kind of give myself

00:55:55.140 | permission and space to take a break if I need it.

00:55:58.380 | But I'm curious your perspective on our capacity,

00:56:01.360 | I guess, as humans to manage certain amounts of deep work,

00:56:04.220 | and because they're very different types of deep work,

00:56:06.620 | if you have any tips or things that might help me

00:56:09.780 | to make time and space for both of them.

00:56:12.580 | Thanks so much.

00:56:13.740 | - Well, it's a good question,

00:56:15.060 | because it pushes back against Arnold Bennett's model.

00:56:18.920 | I talked about earlier in the show,

00:56:20.940 | Arnold Bennett, the cultural critic,

00:56:23.180 | late 19th century, early 20th century,

00:56:25.260 | wrote this book called "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day."

00:56:28.980 | And he argued, look, you work for eight hours, right?

00:56:31.200 | He was writing this at the beginning of something

00:56:33.580 | like the London, the birth of sort of like the London

00:56:37.740 | white-collar commuter class.

00:56:39.060 | Like it was kind of the first time in history

00:56:40.660 | you had people who lived in the London suburbs

00:56:42.940 | and would take the train in.

00:56:44.260 | They would work in buildings and take the train back.

00:56:47.060 | And he was saying, okay, that takes eight hours.

00:56:49.660 | Then you have eight more hours that are yours,

00:56:51.860 | and you can treat those eight hours

00:56:53.220 | as if you were the landed gentry,

00:56:54.660 | who would come up with things they wanted to do

00:56:57.460 | with their time and read poetry and fox hunt or whatever.

00:57:00.060 | And he's like, you're as free as them during that time,

00:57:02.520 | take advantage of it.

00:57:04.100 | Now put aside, it didn't cross his mind

00:57:06.460 | that there could be like domestic work to do here

00:57:08.500 | because he was writing for men

00:57:09.980 | and figured that would all be taken care of.

00:57:11.700 | But put that aside, his argument was,

00:57:14.160 | you should be able to do in your second eight hours

00:57:18.480 | a lot of really deep, interesting, personal, creative work

00:57:22.720 | unrelated to the eight hours you did at the office.

00:57:25.700 | And he pushed back on the myth

00:57:27.220 | that like the office work was going to exhaust you.

00:57:29.100 | He's like, no, no, your brain wants to do stuff.

00:57:30.580 | It doesn't want to not do stuff.

00:57:32.820 | I think what he was missing

00:57:34.260 | is that jobs weren't so deep back then, right?

00:57:37.860 | You would take the train, you would go to your office.

00:57:40.980 | I don't know, I don't know what you were doing

00:57:42.680 | in like 1920s London white collar work,

00:57:44.900 | but you were probably writing on paper or some things,

00:57:49.900 | and there was some meetings and it was,

00:57:51.820 | I mean, it would seem glacial compared to today's pace.

00:57:56.820 | And the amount of actual like deep thinking

00:57:58.900 | that was probably having these jobs was minimal, right?

00:58:00.940 | It was like, I'm looking at these spending reports

00:58:03.220 | and with my fountain pen, like crossing things off

00:58:05.660 | and I'm going to pass it off to Willoughby

00:58:07.060 | and we're going to have Sherry with lunch.

00:58:10.000 | So I think there was a lot more mental reserves

00:58:12.800 | than we have today in a job like yours,

00:58:14.240 | which is really hard.

00:58:15.180 | All right, so I'm in a very similar situation.

00:58:17.460 | So I kind of have good news, bad news for you.

00:58:18.900 | I'm in a similar situation in that I have kind of

00:58:21.580 | multiple things I do that require deep work

00:58:24.780 | that I try to balance through, all right?

00:58:28.420 | I do exactly what you do.

00:58:30.500 | Like I have found when I have non-professional deep work,

00:58:33.620 | the very best way to transition from work to non-work

00:58:36.980 | is psychologically, shut down routine,

00:58:39.860 | batten down all the hatches, close all the loops,

00:58:42.820 | followed by physical, some sort of big exercise.

00:58:46.380 | So you have psychological transition, physical transition.

00:58:48.900 | That's like the best you can do.

00:58:50.020 | And I try to do that almost every day.

00:58:52.260 | I exercise at the end of my workday.

00:58:53.780 | That's when I do it.

00:58:55.320 | It's the best transition I know.

00:58:58.580 | Okay, I clear the chemicals out of my body.

00:59:00.420 | I re-energize my body.

00:59:01.580 | I change my mindset.

00:59:02.820 | It's a transition type of ceremony.

00:59:07.180 | Works fantastic.

00:59:08.020 | After doing a really clear shut down, shut down routine.

00:59:10.980 | So I do the exact same thing you do.

00:59:12.580 | Here's the bad news.

00:59:13.660 | I also have the same issue

00:59:14.900 | where sometimes I just don't have it.

00:59:16.700 | And I just need to take the foot off the accelerator

00:59:21.140 | for the evening.

00:59:22.540 | So again, you said like, you know, that's just okay.

00:59:25.300 | I want to reiterate, that's just okay.

00:59:27.940 | My theory is often what's going on here

00:59:30.020 | is not cognitive fatigue.

00:59:31.740 | I mean, often what it really is, is there's, you know,

00:59:34.340 | you have, I think there's like sicknesses.

00:59:37.020 | Your body is always kind of fighting stuff off

00:59:39.100 | and it's kind of successful,

00:59:40.780 | but like some days it's less successful

00:59:42.660 | or your sleep wasn't great.

00:59:44.580 | Like often I think if you do the right routine

00:59:47.460 | and you don't have the energy for the music,

00:59:49.860 | it's not because it was like extra hard, deep work at work,

00:59:54.720 | but like these other things were going on as well.

00:59:57.620 | Like if I have like,

00:59:58.740 | what feels like too much deep work during the day,

01:00:00.980 | what's really happening,

01:00:01.980 | what's really affecting my evening

01:00:03.380 | is that I couldn't get my arm around enough

01:00:05.580 | of the shallow work because of that.

01:00:07.420 | And I do my best to close the loops,

01:00:08.940 | but I feel sort of behind and that's kind of stressful

01:00:10.980 | and that drains me.

01:00:11.820 | So there's all sorts of subtle reasons

01:00:13.140 | that can pull your ability to do a second shift

01:00:16.460 | of deep work.

01:00:17.300 | So I think you're doing absolutely the right thing.

01:00:19.500 | Be organized during your workday,

01:00:21.660 | close loops, do exercise,

01:00:24.300 | and then do your best with the time that comes after.

01:00:27.620 | And it's okay if some days that's deeper than others.

01:00:29.780 | It's all about the long game things are adding up.

01:00:31.460 | So it's like good news, bad news.

01:00:32.460 | Good news is I know exactly what you're talking about.

01:00:34.700 | Bad news is I don't necessarily have a magical answer.

01:00:38.600 | All right, we have a case study here.

01:00:42.180 | It's where people write into the show

01:00:43.620 | to talk about their personal experience,

01:00:45.260 | putting the type of things we talk about here

01:00:46.860 | into action in their own lives.

01:00:48.940 | If you have a case study to share,

01:00:49.960 | you can send them directly to Jesse@jesse@calnewport.com.

01:00:54.960 | Today's case study comes from Omar.

01:00:57.460 | Omar says, "I am a high school teacher

01:00:59.740 | "and would like to share how much the shutdown ritual

01:01:01.980 | "has been helping me."

01:01:03.620 | This is relevant to our call.

01:01:05.940 | "I usually time block my days

01:01:07.600 | "and already know what to work on

01:01:08.920 | "during the time I am not teaching.

01:01:10.780 | "During the day, I collect tasks or ideas

01:01:13.000 | "in Cal's time block planner

01:01:14.380 | "or on my working memory.txt file.

01:01:17.240 | "I actually use Apple Notes Quick Note

01:01:19.320 | "so that I can quickly jot down notes on my computer

01:01:21.840 | "and get it out of my way.

01:01:23.440 | "Every day, I protect 15 minutes at the end of the day

01:01:25.760 | "to do a shutdown ritual.

01:01:27.680 | "I cannot express how many times my brain

01:01:29.400 | "is trying to tell me to keep working at home

01:01:31.040 | "or that I should start planning for the next day's lessons.

01:01:33.820 | "By shutting down, I know I have everything under control

01:01:36.340 | "and it gives me a huge sense of relief.

01:01:38.720 | "I know all my tasks on Trello are accounted for,

01:01:41.560 | "know if I have anything urgent come up

01:01:43.460 | "and know exactly how much time I have in the week

01:01:45.400 | "to prepare lessons.

01:01:46.240 | "It has helped me immensely to be able

01:01:47.740 | "to enjoy my evenings better.

01:01:49.760 | "Omar, I appreciate that case study.

01:01:51.600 | "Shutdown rituals make a difference.

01:01:53.600 | "It is exhausting to have work in the back of your head

01:01:58.260 | "while you're trying to do other things

01:01:59.480 | "and do not overestimate how exhausting that is.

01:02:02.460 | "To really close all the open loops,

01:02:04.660 | "to trust there's nothing you're keeping track of

01:02:06.360 | "only in your head

01:02:07.200 | "and that your plan for the rest of the week will work

01:02:09.500 | "and it's written down

01:02:10.340 | "and you'll get back to it in the morning

01:02:11.960 | "and to be able to say shutdown complete

01:02:13.720 | "or check that shutdown complete checkbox

01:02:15.540 | "in my time block planner,

01:02:16.880 | "it makes a huge psychological difference.

01:02:19.560 | "I absolutely swear by it."

01:02:21.340 | So this is a great case study.

01:02:25.480 | Shutdown rituals matter.

01:02:27.360 | My new thing is what we just talked about on the call

01:02:30.600 | is if possible, add a physical element to it as well

01:02:33.800 | so that the shutdown routine gives you first

01:02:35.760 | a psychological cleansing

01:02:37.240 | and then you can get a physical chemical cleansing

01:02:39.640 | by going for a run,

01:02:41.620 | working out at the home gym,

01:02:43.000 | working out at the gym near your office

01:02:44.860 | before you come home,

01:02:45.700 | even just going for a long walk

01:02:47.720 | right when you get home,

01:02:49.240 | give yourself that physical cleansing as well

01:02:51.480 | and then you're really ready

01:02:52.480 | as much as you can be for the evening.

01:02:54.940 | All right, we have a final segment coming up here.

01:02:57.480 | I wanna react to something I found on the internet this week

01:02:59.680 | but first, let's hear from another sponsor.

01:03:02.220 | I wanna talk in particular about our friends at Shopify.

01:03:08.280 | Look, if you were selling things online or in a store,

01:03:13.120 | the technology used to do these sales absolutely matters.

01:03:17.660 | This is where Shopify is so important.

01:03:21.620 | Nobody does selling better than Shopify.

01:03:24.860 | It's the number one checkout on the planet.

01:03:27.780 | Let's think about businesses you may have heard of

01:03:29.860 | that use it.

01:03:31.420 | Cotopaxi, they use it.

01:03:34.700 | Feastables, they use it.

01:03:37.620 | Thrive Cosmetics, they use it.

01:03:42.020 | Like these are major brands

01:03:43.060 | but you know who else uses it?

01:03:45.340 | Like really small businesses, big businesses,

01:03:48.020 | medium-sized businesses.

01:03:49.940 | I came across it just the other day.

01:03:52.140 | I was ordering, 'cause I guess I need to own this.

01:03:54.980 | I finally bought my own set of academic regalia.

01:03:58.300 | The things you wear.

01:04:00.260 | I have to go to fall convocation this year.

01:04:02.180 | The site I ordered it from used Shopify.

01:04:03.980 | It's such an easy checkout experience.

01:04:06.300 | I recognized it right away.

01:04:07.660 | So Shopify is what you should be using

01:04:10.940 | if you are selling something.

01:04:12.780 | They have their shop pay feature boost conversions

01:04:17.180 | by up to 50% because it makes it so easy

01:04:19.500 | for people to check out.

01:04:20.540 | The information is remembered across sites.

01:04:22.180 | It's fantastic.

01:04:23.700 | That means way less carts go abandoned

01:04:25.260 | and you make more sales.

01:04:27.740 | So if you're growing into your business

01:04:31.260 | or your commerce platform better be ready to sell

01:04:34.100 | wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling

01:04:36.220 | on the web, in your store, in their feed

01:04:37.780 | and everywhere in between.

01:04:39.480 | I just made that up off the fly there.

01:04:41.980 | - I like it.

01:04:42.820 | - Yeah, I just rhyme and I'm quite good

01:04:45.860 | at just kind of coming up with these types of things.

01:04:48.340 | Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.

01:04:50.500 | So upgrade your business and get the same checkout

01:04:53.140 | that all of these other big brands

01:04:55.180 | as well as small brands use.

01:04:57.420 | Sign up for your $1 per month trial period

01:04:59.740 | at shopify.com/deep.

01:05:02.140 | But you have to type that in all lowercase

01:05:04.060 | for it to work and for you to get the deal.

01:05:06.020 | So go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today.

01:05:10.100 | shopify.com/deep.

01:05:13.820 | Let's also talk about our friends at Element.

01:05:17.220 | I'm a big fan of Element's zero sugar electrolyte mix.

01:05:22.220 | You just add the water.

01:05:24.500 | It gives you the stuff you need,

01:05:26.260 | especially after you've been dehydrated

01:05:28.300 | through like sweating or speaking a lot without the junk,

01:05:31.420 | without the sugar, without all the weird additives.

01:05:35.220 | I actually, this is true Jesse,

01:05:37.020 | yesterday used my last Element packet.

01:05:41.220 | And when I went down to the basement to get the new box,

01:05:42.980 | realized I'd used my last box.

01:05:45.060 | So I have just ordered the day I'm doing this ad read

01:05:47.900 | had to order more Element

01:05:48.820 | because I use it after my workouts.

01:05:50.540 | I use it after days where I'm giving a lot of speeches

01:05:52.420 | or doing a lot of podcasting.

01:05:54.660 | And I do it in the morning

01:05:57.060 | if I'm particularly like not dehydrated, not feeling well,

01:05:59.540 | I throw in, you know, my Element electrolyte mix.

01:06:03.420 | I really do use it.

01:06:04.260 | I really do swear by it.

01:06:05.460 | They have this new product coming out

01:06:06.820 | which I'm excited about, Element Sparkling,

01:06:09.020 | which now allows you to get that same electrolyte experience

01:06:14.100 | but in a bottle, already bottled for you in a can.

01:06:19.100 | With each can, you can take a sip against sugar

01:06:21.180 | and stimulant loaded drinks

01:06:22.260 | and turn the tide towards health.

01:06:24.780 | Element Sparkling right now

01:06:26.380 | is only available to Element Insiders.

01:06:30.340 | So you can find out if you're an Element Insider

01:06:33.180 | at their website, drinkelement.com.

01:06:36.060 | But it will be launching more broadly soon.

01:06:38.980 | So get your free sample pack.

01:06:42.740 | You'll get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase

01:06:45.500 | if you go to drinkelement.com/deep.

01:06:48.460 | That's drinkelementlmnt.com/drink.

01:06:53.020 | And if you're an Element Insider,

01:06:54.300 | you'll have first access to Element Sparkling,

01:06:56.660 | a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.

01:07:00.020 | Your free sample pack with any drink mix purchase

01:07:02.380 | at drinkelementlmnt.com/deep.

01:07:06.300 | All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment.

01:07:09.340 | All right, this is where I like to react to things

01:07:10.820 | that readers send to us.

01:07:12.980 | This article came into my interesting@calnewport.com

01:07:17.380 | email address where people send me things

01:07:19.140 | they think I'll find interesting.

01:07:20.620 | I brought it up on the screen here

01:07:22.140 | if you're watching instead of listening.

01:07:24.300 | So this is a message from Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy,

01:07:29.780 | that was being sent to all Amazon employees.

01:07:33.620 | This was on September 16th that they sent it.

01:07:36.380 | All right, so this is a look inside the CEO of Amazon

01:07:39.260 | talking about what's going well, what they need to work on.

01:07:42.920 | There was a single idea in here that I wanted to highlight.

01:07:46.980 | So a big thing he's worried about if you read this

01:07:49.980 | is that as Amazon grows, there's more managers

01:07:52.660 | and there's more managers and more layers.

01:07:54.540 | And this can kind of get in the way

01:07:56.140 | of actually taking action.

01:07:59.780 | And so what they wanna do

01:08:00.940 | is they're actually cutting back on managers.

01:08:03.860 | They're trying to re-flatten things

01:08:05.180 | so there's less hoops you have to jump through

01:08:09.420 | to get approval for things

01:08:10.500 | or to actually take action on things.

01:08:13.580 | One of the things he's doing, I'm gonna read this now,

01:08:16.260 | I wanna highlight to help support this effort

01:08:19.020 | of making the company more agile.

01:08:20.540 | All right, so here's him writing.

01:08:22.500 | "By the way, I've created a bureaucracy mailbox

01:08:26.940 | "for any examples that any of you see

01:08:30.220 | "where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary processes

01:08:33.240 | "that's crept in and that we can root out."

01:08:36.700 | All right, so it's like very easy to report.

01:08:38.540 | It's like a tip line.

01:08:39.900 | See something, say something,

01:08:41.120 | but about like unnecessary process or bureaucracy

01:08:43.580 | so they can be more relentless about getting rid of it.

01:08:47.000 | I like this idea for the following general reason,

01:08:49.120 | and then I'm gonna give a specific variation on it.

01:08:52.180 | The general idea I like here

01:08:54.620 | is knowledge work organizations in particular

01:08:58.180 | have lots of implicit processes by which work unfolds.

01:09:02.820 | But I say implicit

01:09:03.840 | because they're not written down anywhere.

01:09:05.960 | They're not named, they're not discussed.

01:09:08.380 | Like the hyperactive hive mind workflow model

01:09:10.420 | where we work work out

01:09:12.600 | through ad hoc back and forth messaging.

01:09:14.420 | That's a choice, but it's not really named and discussed.

01:09:17.500 | It's just implicit that this is how we do it.

01:09:20.460 | Informal personalized workload management.

01:09:22.660 | Just ask people what you need when you need it.

01:09:25.460 | It's up to them to push back when for whatever,

01:09:28.100 | when they finally feel like they have too much work

01:09:30.220 | and they just have to kind of do that.

01:09:31.700 | Forget all the sort of interpersonal dynamics

01:09:33.780 | or asymmetric power dynamics there.

01:09:35.540 | It's just everyone should manage their own workload.

01:09:37.420 | So you just ask what you need from people.

01:09:39.440 | Your workload is your business.

01:09:40.660 | It's up to you to say no to people

01:09:42.340 | if you don't want more work.

01:09:43.180 | That's another process that's implicit,

01:09:45.740 | but it's something that we do.

01:09:48.500 | So anything that tries to bring more transparency

01:09:51.940 | and scrutiny to process, I think is important.

01:09:55.100 | When you have to actually name, describe

01:09:57.980 | and defend the hyperactive workload hive mind,

01:10:01.840 | you begin to see there's some creaks there.

01:10:03.720 | When you have to actually name and define

01:10:05.260 | and defend personalized workload management,

01:10:08.620 | you begin to say, you know what?

01:10:09.460 | Maybe there's better ways to do this,

01:10:10.940 | but you don't get to these better ways

01:10:13.260 | until you've actually named and talked about the ways

01:10:15.100 | that are actually happening right now.

01:10:17.900 | And in the absence of naming them,

01:10:19.540 | we just think of like the way we work

01:10:20.940 | as being synonymous with work.

01:10:22.100 | We have a hard time having the professional imagination

01:10:25.340 | to see that it could be different.

01:10:27.460 | Here's the change I would make though.

01:10:29.780 | In a lot of organizations,

01:10:30.900 | especially that aren't as big as like Amazon,

01:10:33.740 | the issue is not bureaucracy.

01:10:35.860 | The issue is not the hoops they have to jump through.

01:10:38.420 | The issue I always point out is attention destruction.

01:10:41.600 | These like unnecessary context shifts.

01:10:44.900 | What are the things that happen during the day

01:10:47.140 | that require me to change my attention

01:10:49.060 | from what I'm working on to other things?

01:10:50.620 | What are the things that happened during the day

01:10:52.580 | that reduced my ability to do the,

01:10:54.380 | like the two or three things that I do

01:10:55.700 | that are most valuable to the company?

01:10:58.020 | It's like an attention destruction

01:10:59.700 | or attention poison mailbox.

01:11:01.260 | That's what I would want.

01:11:03.140 | Like, hey, CEO,

01:11:05.300 | I had seven non-urgent email conversations

01:11:09.420 | I had to kind of keep up with today

01:11:10.700 | and I could get nothing really done.

01:11:12.380 | No hard thinking could actually happen.

01:11:14.480 | Like, hey, CEO, I'm averaging four meetings a day.

01:11:19.480 | My average like uninterrupted,

01:11:23.420 | max size uninterrupted time block for day now

01:11:25.660 | is like under 60 minutes.

01:11:27.580 | And yet my primary job is to write white papers

01:11:29.660 | and it's really making that hard to do.

01:11:31.460 | That's what I would want reported.

01:11:33.860 | And I would want my CEO to see again and again,

01:11:35.980 | report after report of like, my God,

01:11:37.620 | my people's ability to just put their mind

01:11:39.460 | to the work of producing value is being heavily diluted.

01:11:42.640 | What do we do about this?

01:11:43.620 | And then solutions come in.

01:11:44.980 | You have to have this mindset

01:11:48.140 | of there's existing processes.

01:11:49.420 | Here's what they are, they're bad.

01:11:50.500 | Here's alternatives.

01:11:51.340 | If you're gonna fix this problem

01:11:52.580 | because the solutions are almost always less obvious,

01:11:55.100 | more complicated than what we do by default.

01:11:58.180 | We aren't gonna stumble into the better way

01:12:00.140 | of doing this work.

01:12:01.860 | We have to sort of move the whole,

01:12:03.940 | if I'm gonna use some physics analogies,

01:12:05.540 | we have to move the whole configuration

01:12:07.820 | of our work system to a different phase, right?

01:12:11.500 | We're gonna have to make an energy quant to shift.

01:12:13.860 | And that requires a lot of energy input

01:12:15.940 | to shift to this new stable condition.

01:12:18.700 | It's just the same.

01:12:19.660 | And I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing right now.

01:12:21.620 | It's just the same as like electron orbit levels.

01:12:25.260 | I know you're all thinking that,

01:12:27.340 | but it takes a certain amount of energy, right?

01:12:30.840 | Often non-trivially to sort of move an electron

01:12:33.060 | to a next orbit level, but then it's in a stable,

01:12:35.260 | once it's there, it doesn't take energy to maintain it.

01:12:37.660 | It's stable there.

01:12:38.660 | So like the switch from one stable configuration

01:12:40.860 | to another takes a lot of energy input.

01:12:43.060 | Most of knowledge work organizations

01:12:45.660 | are in like a particular,

01:12:46.780 | somewhat degenerate stable configuration.

01:12:51.300 | They can't just easily move out of.

01:12:53.420 | It's typically based on like low friction

01:12:55.340 | and flexibility and risk reduction.

01:12:58.260 | But there's other configurations that if you can move

01:13:00.460 | to other ways of working and collaborating and talking

01:13:02.820 | and meeting and communicating and workload management,

01:13:06.600 | there's these other configurations

01:13:07.980 | that if you could just get your organization there,

01:13:09.660 | they'll also be very easy to maintain and they're better.

01:13:12.460 | You're gonna produce better work

01:13:13.540 | and people are gonna burn out less.

01:13:14.740 | But to get there,

01:13:15.620 | someone has to put a ton of energy into that system.

01:13:18.180 | And you're not gonna do that

01:13:20.940 | unless you know exactly what you're doing right now

01:13:23.260 | and what's wrong about it.

01:13:25.380 | You're not gonna do that unless you get the 500 messages

01:13:28.180 | in your attention poison mailbox.

01:13:30.460 | You set up a CEO and you're being drowned in this.

01:13:32.740 | You realize like, oh my God,

01:13:33.940 | this is terrible what we're doing.

01:13:35.940 | You gotta know and name the problem.

01:13:37.540 | You gotta understand its magnitude

01:13:38.900 | before you're willing to put in the magnitude

01:13:40.900 | of attention and energy required to fix it.

01:13:43.100 | So I think it's a cool idea what's going on in Amazon.

01:13:45.500 | I would adapt it to focus less on bureaucracy

01:13:47.600 | and more on attention destruction.

01:13:49.760 | But I like this general approach.

01:13:51.380 | You don't know what to fix

01:13:52.940 | if you're not talking about what you're currently doing.

01:13:56.300 | All right, speaking of fixing,

01:13:57.220 | I think we can fix the fact

01:13:58.500 | that this podcast is now ready to finish.

01:14:01.460 | I don't know if that makes sense, Jesse.

01:14:03.460 | It's not as good as my improv in the Shopify ad.

01:14:06.020 | Where I just riffing, just riffing.

01:14:09.760 | I guess I burnt out on that ability there.

01:14:11.860 | Anyways, that's enough for today.

01:14:13.540 | Thank you everyone for listening or watching.

01:14:15.460 | We'll be back next week with another episode.

01:14:17.060 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:14:20.500 | Hey, if you like today's discussion about finding more time,

01:14:23.300 | I think you'll also like episode 239,

01:14:26.860 | which was titled On Stress and Time.

01:14:30.420 | You'll enjoy it, check it out.

Why You Never Have Enough Time - 3 Time Management Skills To Master | Cal Newport

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