Cal Newport's Tips To Cultivating More Consistent Discipline

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:00:02.000 | - Okay, next question's from Jacob,

00:00:05.720 | a 20 year old from Colorado.

00:00:08.480 | "I seem to have contracted a case

00:00:10.160 | of what I call seasonal discipline,

00:00:12.520 | where I'll be very actively disciplined

00:00:14.460 | on following my habits and systems

00:00:16.080 | for a few months at a time,

00:00:17.600 | and then fall off really hard for a few months

00:00:19.620 | in an endless agonizing loop.

00:00:21.900 | I'm wondering if you have any tips

00:00:23.160 | for cultivating a more consistent commitment to discipline?"

00:00:27.360 | - You got a lot of young people today, Jesse.

00:00:28.520 | - I know, I was thinking the same thing.

00:00:29.880 | - Makes us feel old.

00:00:31.880 | - You know, when you were doing the Henson Reed,

00:00:34.560 | I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved in two days,

00:00:36.360 | and I was like, "Mine, I go back and forth a lot,

00:00:38.640 | but mine's white now."

00:00:40.200 | - Oh, mine is too.

00:00:41.040 | - Yeah, yeah. - I don't mind it.

00:00:42.400 | - I don't mind it, but my beard is,

00:00:43.960 | well, it's salt and pepper, but it's definitely white.

00:00:46.480 | And I can see it at my sideburns as well, yeah.

00:00:50.200 | My hair is still mainly brown, but...

00:00:54.600 | Oh, that's coming, that's coming.

00:00:56.280 | We need to balance these 20 year old questions,

00:00:58.040 | I'm telling you, Jesse.

00:00:58.860 | People get, I don't know, a 41 year old question

00:01:00.560 | is gonna be like a combination of wanting to know

00:01:04.120 | about tax filing.

00:01:06.580 | You know, I'm doing my Schedule C deductions

00:01:09.460 | and wondering if this is the right line item

00:01:12.160 | to put that deduction.

00:01:13.000 | Some mixture of talking about, yeah, tax filings,

00:01:17.760 | and then also, I don't know, what else does?

00:01:20.560 | - Potential hair surgery.

00:01:21.680 | - And like, yeah, hair surgery.

00:01:23.520 | I am, I'm thinking like, this hair surgery

00:01:25.720 | for this hair surgery, and I have a kind of a tax question.

00:01:28.960 | And also I'm tired all the time.

00:01:32.380 | And I need to, should I get like testosterone treatment?

00:01:36.060 | Yeah.

00:01:37.100 | Meanwhile, these young kids are, yeah.

00:01:39.180 | I was up 12 hours, 20 hours straight

00:01:42.220 | working on my screenplay.

00:01:43.960 | And we're like, I only get two hours of working

00:01:46.860 | in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap.

00:01:49.420 | All right, Jacob, I'm sorry, let's get back

00:01:52.820 | to your question.

00:01:53.660 | So, I'm gonna have, again, two solutions here.

00:01:55.360 | Where this is gonna overlap with what I talked about

00:01:57.160 | with Fahad is just the mindset training piece.

00:02:01.160 | So the very same thing I recommended Fahad

00:02:03.120 | that I recommended at the beginning of the show,

00:02:04.760 | I'm gonna recommend as a starting point for you as well.

00:02:07.360 | That discipline layer, that very first layer

00:02:09.240 | of the deep life stack.

00:02:11.200 | Two to three, non-trivial and tractable,

00:02:14.240 | non-trivial but tractable daily discipline

00:02:16.640 | and then the last one, the mindset training piece.

00:02:19.640 | So, I'm gonna have, again, two solutions here.

00:02:21.800 | Non-trivial but tractable daily disciplines

00:02:24.180 | covering multiple areas of your life

00:02:25.580 | that you track every single day

00:02:26.820 | and put most of your productivity, intentionality, focus,

00:02:29.480 | all that willpower on just doing those every day,

00:02:32.220 | not breaking the chain.

00:02:33.160 | You wanna mark it every day on a calendar.

00:02:35.420 | It's a good tune up just to get your mind back in shape

00:02:38.020 | as I don't need external power to do things.

00:02:41.280 | I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited

00:02:43.940 | or things are going well to make progress

00:02:46.380 | on important things.

00:02:47.220 | I can also make progress in the hard seasons,

00:02:49.820 | in the proverbial winters when other things are going on

00:02:52.500 | or the work itself is not going so well.

00:02:54.320 | So, there's a mindset tune up

00:02:55.740 | and I think that returning to that discipline layer

00:02:58.700 | can help with that.

00:02:59.960 | And then just like with Fahad,

00:03:01.900 | but with slight differences in specifics here,

00:03:03.940 | I would say let's also think about what this,

00:03:08.120 | what you're calling here habits and systems,

00:03:10.580 | what these habits and systems are.

00:03:13.440 | So, even if you have the right internal conception

00:03:16.260 | of yourself, it is still the case

00:03:19.660 | that if the particular habits or systems you've put in place,

00:03:23.820 | if those particular habits and systems aren't sustainable

00:03:28.820 | or if they have a lot of friction,

00:03:30.840 | they work but they have overhead that don't need to be there

00:03:33.220 | and your mind senses that,

00:03:34.780 | you are going to accumulate stress fractures, right?

00:03:39.220 | You're gonna accumulate over time

00:03:40.940 | this friction and grinding of the system's not quite right.

00:03:43.380 | It's too big, it's too hard.

00:03:44.840 | It has steps we don't need to do.

00:03:46.080 | It's like the system's gonna start building up

00:03:47.760 | these stretch fractures until the whole thing

00:03:50.440 | eventually breaks apart.

00:03:51.820 | And that's maybe why you can only make a few months.

00:03:53.740 | This is very common in the world of productivity systems

00:03:57.420 | that if the system is not compatible with your life

00:04:01.300 | and streamlined and believable,

00:04:02.500 | you can last with it for a while.

00:04:03.940 | But after, it gets this clunky.

00:04:06.160 | I'm typing these notes and it goes into this note system

00:04:08.660 | that then automatically populates these types of systems.

00:04:11.060 | And every day I have a generative AI bot

00:04:14.260 | take these and generate a schedule

00:04:16.540 | and then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours.

00:04:18.800 | These type of high overhead, high friction systems,

00:04:22.360 | they begin to just accumulate too much wear and tear

00:04:24.920 | until all of the gears get jammed.

00:04:26.560 | And then you just say enough with this

00:04:28.000 | and you fall back to doing nothing

00:04:29.640 | until doing nothing after a while

00:04:31.840 | gets you so stressed out or overwhelmed

00:04:33.880 | by being disorganized that you go and build a new system

00:04:36.240 | and that starts generating friction until it's gears mesh.

00:04:39.000 | And then that could also be the source

00:04:40.280 | of what you're seeing here.

00:04:41.500 | One season up, one season down,

00:04:42.960 | one season up, one season down.

00:04:44.640 | So you also wanna really check out your systems here.

00:04:47.280 | Streamline them.

00:04:48.560 | The simplest possible thing

00:04:50.120 | that actually helps you get your work done

00:04:51.920 | sometimes is the right thing to do.

00:04:54.080 | Get rid of unnecessary things.

00:04:55.720 | Have a core document where you keep track of,

00:04:58.240 | here's what I do and how I do it.

00:05:00.080 | So you're not just trying to keep track of things

00:05:01.740 | in your mind and you can see where there's overlap

00:05:03.600 | or redundancies or your systems are sort of out of control.

00:05:06.220 | You want something that fits very naturally into your life.

00:05:09.480 | So if you're starting from scratch here,

00:05:11.600 | I would say something like multi-scale planning.

00:05:14.240 | You have a strategic plan, a weekly plan

00:05:15.880 | and do some sort of daily time block plan during work days

00:05:18.440 | but not the weekends.

00:05:19.800 | Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks

00:05:23.200 | so that you don't have to keep track of those things

00:05:25.120 | in your head.

00:05:26.480 | Put those two things together,

00:05:28.960 | maybe mixed in with some sort of

00:05:31.040 | fixed schedule productivity mindset of this is my work hours

00:05:34.220 | and everything else has to fit into it.

00:05:36.600 | That's a good start for organizing

00:05:38.300 | all the professional things in your life.

00:05:40.200 | Use very simple tech tools for implementing this.

00:05:43.800 | I'm talking, you have a paper time block planner

00:05:47.480 | and then a couple of Google Docs to keep track

00:05:49.440 | of strategic plans and weekly plans.

00:05:52.440 | You could use Trello to keep track of tasks

00:05:54.280 | or even just a long text file where you're typing things.

00:05:56.900 | Simple technologies that are easy to get in

00:05:58.920 | and easy to get out that you can access

00:06:00.400 | from multiple platforms, that makes a big difference.

00:06:02.760 | As you add in other structures or goals

00:06:04.960 | around your personal life, keep it simple.

00:06:08.080 | So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility.

00:06:11.360 | Let's try to minimize friction.

00:06:14.360 | Let's just make the general rhythm of your life

00:06:16.000 | something that's very sustainable.

00:06:18.000 | That'll help too.

00:06:18.840 | So I don't know in your case, Jacob,

00:06:20.240 | which is the bigger problem.

00:06:22.520 | So I don't know if it's a mindset issue,

00:06:24.840 | that your systems are fine,

00:06:25.880 | but your mindset just needs right now,

00:06:28.160 | external fuel for you to work on hard things,

00:06:30.440 | or if it's a systems problem, your mindset's fine,

00:06:32.360 | but your systems have too much friction.

00:06:34.640 | So look at both.

00:06:35.960 | But between those two things,

00:06:37.520 | I think you're gonna find the seasonality

00:06:40.280 | of following systems is going to go away.

00:06:44.180 | One epilogue I will add to this as well

00:06:47.520 | is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue.

00:06:52.480 | I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal.

00:06:55.580 | I stop being organized during some months versus others.

00:06:59.180 | I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal.

00:07:02.640 | In fact, in my new book, "Slow Productivity,"

00:07:04.480 | which is coming out in March,

00:07:05.480 | there's a whole principle is about

00:07:07.560 | working at a natural pace,

00:07:08.760 | and it really gets into seasonality

00:07:10.560 | and how natural and well-suited humans are for that.

00:07:12.960 | So I do wanna throw that in there.

00:07:14.960 | You might just be getting exhausted, right?

00:07:16.520 | Like a professor, by the time a professor

00:07:18.120 | gets to the end of spring, traditionally,

00:07:20.020 | they're exhausted because they've gone

00:07:21.240 | through a full school year.

00:07:23.080 | So to actually pull back some in the summer makes sense

00:07:25.240 | because you need to recharge.

00:07:26.360 | If you try to go all out in the summer

00:07:27.840 | after a hard spring and after a hard fall before that,

00:07:31.100 | you might just run out of steam altogether.

00:07:32.840 | So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well.

00:07:34.940 | So let's throw that in here, not just as an epilogue,

00:07:37.160 | but I'm gonna throw this in, Jacob,

00:07:38.120 | as my third part of my answer.

00:07:39.740 | Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same.

00:07:42.940 | You're still multi-scale planning,

00:07:45.200 | but when you get to some months of the year,

00:07:47.100 | the amount of stuff you're putting into your week

00:07:49.080 | and the complexity of your daily time block schedules

00:07:50.960 | are much easier, and you get that relief of,

00:07:52.740 | man, this feels great.

00:07:53.560 | I can really control my time.

00:07:55.160 | I'm taking Thursdays completely off because why not?

00:07:57.680 | I'm using planning so I can move pieces around.

00:08:00.120 | This is great.

00:08:01.840 | I can actually extract a lot more relaxation and recharging

00:08:04.080 | because I have some structure.

00:08:05.400 | So I think a seasonal workload could be excellent,

00:08:07.560 | but you don't want your systems to come and go seasonally.

00:08:10.320 | And you wanna make sure that your mindset is one

00:08:13.680 | that doesn't require external power.

00:08:15.320 | So there we go.

00:08:16.140 | I upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob,

00:08:18.660 | and hopefully you will find that useful.

00:08:21.720 | All right, let's keep going here, Jesse.

00:08:24.600 | - Yeah, and then the time management video

00:08:26.200 | on our YouTube channel is definitely

00:08:29.200 | something you should check out.

00:08:30.120 | - Yeah, so look under the,

00:08:30.960 | what's it, core ideas is the playlist?

00:08:32.740 | - Right, so youtube.com/calendarportmedia.

00:08:35.440 | Look at the playlist.

00:08:36.640 | There's a playlist called core ideas.

00:08:38.840 | There's one titled, a video titled time management,

00:08:42.280 | where I talk about that multi-scale planning.

00:08:46.920 | Yeah, shows up right in there.

00:08:48.160 | It's a good place to start.

00:08:49.320 | (upbeat music)

Cal Newport's Tips To Cultivating More Consistent Discipline

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