How To Slow Down Time & Get More Done - The Productivity Paradox

00:00:00.000 | So today I want to talk about an idea from my most recent book, Slow Productivity.

00:00:07.000 | This is an idea that proved controversial.

00:00:10.000 | I'm going to argue that a lot of the negative reaction to this idea captures something crucially wrong

00:00:19.000 | about the way we think about knowledge work in our current digital moment.

00:00:22.000 | I will then use these insights to offer advice for how we might correct this wrong

00:00:26.000 | and how you might yourself find a little less burnout in your own professional existence.

00:00:32.000 | All right, so what is the piece of advice that we're going to base this deep dive on?

00:00:37.000 | I'm going to bring up an article on the screen here for those who are watching.

00:00:41.000 | This was from my book, Slow Productivity, but I wrote about it in multiple venues

00:00:45.000 | after the book came out, including the New York Times.

00:00:48.000 | Here is an article about it that was published at CNBC.

00:00:53.000 | Let me read you the headline of this article.

00:00:55.000 | Want to boost your productivity? Hit the movies during work, expert says.

00:01:01.000 | A spoiler alert, that expert is me. Let me read the opening to the article here.

00:01:06.000 | Want to get more done? Try stepping back, way back, and maybe out to the movie theater during the workday.

00:01:13.000 | At least that's one productivity tip from Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor and author of Slow Productivity.

00:01:21.000 | Okay, so I offered this advice. I lived this advice.

00:01:25.000 | In fact, and this is true, earlier the week that we are recording this,

00:01:30.000 | I did exactly this advice, more or less. I didn't go to a movie theater, but I did watch a movie during the day.

00:01:36.000 | Here was the setup, just to contextualize this advice.

00:01:39.000 | I had some deadlines I was working on.

00:01:42.000 | Two separate articles that were kind of both trying to get moved on to production,

00:01:47.000 | and I've been working really hard on this during my writing hours.

00:01:49.000 | I write for the first half of most days, and I had to work on Sunday on this,

00:01:54.000 | because deadlines are coming up. Really worked hard on it.

00:01:58.000 | Monday, really worked hard on it. Tuesday, got everything in Tuesday.

00:02:02.000 | Wednesday morning, did like the final tweaks, and I said to myself, you know what I'm going to do?

00:02:07.000 | I'm not, as my plan for the week says, now move on to returning to my book today and writing.

00:02:15.000 | I'm going to watch a movie instead, and I did.

00:02:18.000 | I got that locked in, and I watched, and I am not embarrassed to admit it,

00:02:22.000 | because I put this off for a long time.

00:02:24.000 | The 2016, I believe, M. Night Shyamalan movie split.

00:02:30.000 | The second movie in his post-After Earth comeback, a comeback that began with 2015's The Visit.

00:02:37.000 | I was interested. I was on a Shyamalan kick. I forgot why.

00:02:41.000 | I was reading about him for something. I forget why.

00:02:44.000 | And then I went back and was like, what did I miss from Shyamalan during this period in which I was having young kids?

00:02:49.000 | And so I went back and I watched it with James McAvoy, and it was fantastic,

00:02:53.000 | and I really enjoyed it and have a lot of thoughts about it, but it was great.

00:02:58.000 | And then today, so we're recording this on Thursday, back to my book writing.

00:03:02.000 | So I went and watched the movie. I took a break during the middle of the day,

00:03:06.000 | because I had judged I need to take my foot temporarily off the gas pedal here.

00:03:11.000 | I need to regroup and recharge, and I was able to come back with more energy today.

00:03:15.000 | So that's like what I'm talking about when I say see a movie during the day,

00:03:19.000 | and I really detailed this with more gory details in my book Solar Productivity.

00:03:25.000 | All right, so there was pushback to this idea.

00:03:29.000 | I'm going to paraphrase here a common piece of pushback.

00:03:33.000 | If you work for a company, you are agreeing to give them eight hours of your labor per day.

00:03:38.000 | If you step out for two hours, you're essentially stealing.

00:03:42.000 | All right, so this was sort of the nature of the pushback I was getting on this idea.

00:03:47.000 | I couldn't imagine if one of my employees was gone for two hours,

00:03:50.000 | they would fire that employee, a lot of that sort of pushback.

00:03:55.000 | I think this is an important pushback, because if we look deeper at what is the source of this objection,

00:04:01.000 | what we are going to find is two different models for thinking about work.

00:04:07.000 | The first model that's implicitly at play here is what I call cranking.

00:04:13.000 | I'm taking this from the phrase cranking widgets,

00:04:17.000 | and it describes the industrial-era practice of using humans as part of a complex production machinery.

00:04:26.000 | So starting with mills and then with factories as the Industrial Revolution picked up steam,

00:04:32.000 | you would build these production processes to whatever it is you were doing, milling, cotton, producing cars.

00:04:39.000 | And for the parts of this process that you couldn't really build a mechanical way of doing it,

00:04:44.000 | you would stick a human in there.

00:04:47.000 | So we have a semi-automated loom, but we still need a human to move whatever the thing is that runs across the loom.

00:04:55.000 | They have to move that manually.

00:04:57.000 | There's a lot of parts of building the car that kind of happen automatically,

00:05:00.000 | but we still need someone to turn the bolt that connects the steering wheel,

00:05:04.000 | because you kind of have to get in there and do that.

00:05:07.000 | Look, when it comes to cranking, the owners of these factories or mills

00:05:12.000 | would prefer to replace the people with machinery if they could.

00:05:14.000 | They're just using the people where they just don't have machinery to do it.

00:05:18.000 | And then over time, as machinery has gotten better, we've needed less and less people in these procedures.

00:05:24.000 | From the cranking perspective, the critiques of seeing a movie occasionally during the workday makes a lot of sense.

00:05:32.000 | When you see employees as crankers, them being there is critical to what you're doing.

00:05:39.000 | If the guy who attaches the steering wheel to the Model Ts leaves the factory during the day to go watch a Charlie Chaplin movie,

00:05:47.000 | that's a really big problem, because all the Model Ts are going to come off the line without steering wheels,

00:05:52.000 | and the whole assembly line is going to have to stop while we wait for that guy to get back.

00:05:56.000 | So from a cranking mindset, yes, you can't. Taking breaks during the workday is a problem.

00:06:03.000 | There's another way to think about work, though, and this has been around for a long time as well,

00:06:07.000 | and it's what I call creating. So we're going from cranking to creating.

00:06:10.000 | Creating means that you are autonomously applying skill and decision-making over time to create something valuable.

00:06:16.000 | There's even a more formal definition that says, you know, add value to materials.

00:06:20.000 | You take in some material and you do something to it, and in the end you have something more valuable,

00:06:24.000 | whether it is you're carving something out of wood or producing written information

00:06:29.000 | that has become more valuable because you've applied your brain to it.

00:06:34.000 | This could be an individual, not necessarily a solo act.

00:06:38.000 | Creating can also be a group of people working together to create something as well.

00:06:42.000 | So at Ford's factories, you were cranking on assembly lines, but at the Oldsmobile Benz,

00:06:48.000 | the original Benz car factory, it wasn't a factory.

00:06:52.000 | It was a group of craftsmen that would just sit around and produce a car from scratch,

00:06:56.000 | and they were doing more creating than they were cranking.

00:06:59.000 | So here's a key point. When you're looking at creating, it's not a big deal that you have your foot going off

00:07:05.000 | and on the gas pedal, right? I know a fine woodworker, for example.

00:07:10.000 | His name is Gary. I wrote about him in Digital Minimalism.

00:07:13.000 | It takes him a couple weeks to finish a commission. Builds really beautiful stuff out of wood.

00:07:17.000 | If on Thursday from 10 to 12.30 he watches Split, it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter.

00:07:24.000 | What matters is over this multi-week period, he's able to have enough concentrated, skilled work

00:07:30.000 | that he produces the table. It doesn't really matter exactly when those hours happen or that they're contiguous.

00:07:35.000 | It's like, are you producing good tables in a reasonable amount of time?

00:07:38.000 | So for creators, this advice of seeing the movie in the afternoon is not a problem.

00:07:44.000 | All right. So here's what's happened in our economy writ large.

00:07:48.000 | The Industrial Revolution came along and turned more and more jobs into cranking jobs.

00:07:52.000 | We had a huge amount of cranking jobs. It used to be you had farmers and artisan crafts people,

00:07:57.000 | and then the Industrial Revolution came along, and more and more of work was actually cranking.

00:08:01.000 | You were working as a human gear in a complicated production process.

00:08:06.000 | Then the knowledge economy became big in the 20th century, right?

00:08:10.000 | So we coined the term "knowledge work" in the 1950s, and by the time we get to the turn of the millennium,

00:08:15.000 | this is something like 50% or more of the U.S. economy is coming out of knowledge work.

00:08:20.000 | And in knowledge work, where you have a lot of sort of well-educated white-collar workers,

00:08:24.000 | more and more of what they're doing is much closer to creating, right?

00:08:28.000 | Whether you're creating computer code or marketing campaigns or lectures for the classroom,

00:08:33.000 | or diagnoses as a doctor or white paper reports on an industrial sector,

00:08:39.000 | it is creating more than it is cranking.

00:08:42.000 | There is no well-defined production process that you're a part of.

00:08:47.000 | So these are the people I'm really writing for in slow productivity,

00:08:50.000 | is the sort of knowledge workers who are creating.

00:08:54.000 | And this is who I'm offering this advice about seeing the movie as a larger metaphor

00:08:57.000 | for being able to titrate up and down the intensity of your work

00:09:02.000 | and make sure that things are sustainable over time,

00:09:04.000 | that you're not just going all out all the time every day,

00:09:06.000 | and that for this type of complicated work, you need a little bit more give and pull.

00:09:10.000 | Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video,

00:09:15.000 | then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity,

00:09:19.000 | The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:09:23.000 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:09:29.000 | I have a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:09:34.000 | I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video.

00:09:38.000 | So once we understand these two groups and who I'm writing for,

00:09:41.000 | now we can see the problem that's facing our knowledge economy today.

00:09:48.000 | The people who are complaining about my advice are a symptom of this underlying problem

00:09:54.000 | that in the knowledge economy, we're treating creators as crankers.

00:10:01.000 | And I get into this in my book, Slow Productivity, how did this come to happen?

00:10:05.000 | It's because it's hard to manage people in knowledge work.

00:10:10.000 | Pre-industrial creating was autonomous. It was you're an individual.

00:10:15.000 | You know, Shakespeare's dad made gloves. It was just him, right?

00:10:21.000 | And he had a shop above. They lived above a shop, and he made gloves.

00:10:26.000 | Knowledge work now, you have a thousand people working in the same office,

00:10:30.000 | and we have managers above them,

00:10:32.000 | and then we have to connect what they're doing to initiatives and resources.

00:10:36.000 | And so we have to manage a bunch of creators now, and it was complicated to do.

00:10:41.000 | It's much easier to manage cranking, so we decided we would treat creators like crankers.

00:10:46.000 | This gave rise to what I call in the book pseudo productivity,

00:10:49.000 | which is the idea of using visible activity as your proxy for useful effort.

00:10:53.000 | From this mindset, to see someone not giving effort or to take a break from giving effort is a problem.

00:11:00.000 | It's the steering wheel guy going out to see the Charlie Chaplin movie.

00:11:04.000 | This is a problem, however, at a larger scale because it's a mismatch.

00:11:08.000 | We are managing creators as if they're crankers.

00:11:12.000 | This makes the managers' jobs easier, but it makes the creators miserable.

00:11:16.000 | Creating is best served by a mixture of autonomy with accountability.

00:11:21.000 | I know what I'm going to do, see what I did and see if it's good,

00:11:26.000 | but also leave me alone to get it done.

00:11:29.000 | That's how creating happens best.

00:11:31.000 | And as I get into with example after example and slow productivity,

00:11:34.000 | one of the things this requires is, again, the careful titration of energy,

00:11:39.000 | that you're really focused on something and then you have to pull back a little bit to recharge

00:11:43.000 | or try to figure out a new angle of attack, and then you put the energy back up again.

00:11:47.000 | The effort over time is a sort of jagged, unpredictable graph.

00:11:51.000 | It's not just a clear step function. I'm working, it's up, I'm done working, and it's down.

00:11:56.000 | When we treat people who are trying to do this creating as crankers,

00:11:59.000 | I want to see you work at all times.

00:12:01.000 | In fact, I'm going to throw a lot more kind of cranky, friendly stuff at you

00:12:04.000 | while you're trying to create emails to answers and meetings to attend.

00:12:07.000 | It's exhausting.

00:12:09.000 | You're taking something that is supposed to be more up and down and variable

00:12:12.000 | and say just work all out all the time, and it exhausts people and it burns people out.

00:12:17.000 | So what I'm arguing here is that we need more clarity in the knowledge economy.

00:12:21.000 | When you're dealing with creators,

00:12:24.000 | that is people that you want to apply skill to create valuable things,

00:12:27.000 | treat them like creators.

00:12:29.000 | Give them autonomy, give them freedom.

00:12:32.000 | Do this without excessive surveillance or interruption.

00:12:35.000 | And on the other end, hold them accountable.

00:12:39.000 | So we're going to let you go and build the stuff we want you to build us.

00:12:42.000 | Now, if the stuff is not good, then we have a problem.

00:12:44.000 | If you can't show me the value you're creating,

00:12:46.000 | then I might have to show you to a different role or to a different job.

00:12:50.000 | But I'm not going to look over your shoulder like the supervisor at the Ford plant.

00:12:54.000 | I'm not going to get upset if I can't see visible activity at all times.

00:12:58.000 | I'm not going to demand that you do a hundred other things as well.

00:13:02.000 | When you have a pseudo productivity mindset,

00:13:04.000 | I don't care if I'm bombarding you with emails and meetings.

00:13:06.000 | You're going to be here for eight hours doing effort,

00:13:09.000 | you know, putting those proverbial steering wheels on at a really fast pace.

00:13:12.000 | So who cares how much stuff I throw at you?

00:13:14.000 | You're going to be here doing stuff anyways.

00:13:16.000 | But when I have a creator mindset, it's like, no, no, that's getting in the way.

00:13:19.000 | Don't go bother Gary the woodworker with a bunch of administrative questions.

00:13:23.000 | He's trying to build a table.

00:13:26.000 | So that's what I think we need to do.

00:13:28.000 | And if you want people to be crankers, be clear that's what you want them to do.

00:13:32.000 | And don't expect them to also be creators.

00:13:35.000 | Make it clear this is what the role is.

00:13:37.000 | Give them the right support for it.

00:13:39.000 | Let's put the right controls around it.

00:13:40.000 | But when we kind of mix these two things together,

00:13:43.000 | we take largely creator jobs, but we manage them as if they're cranking jobs.

00:13:47.000 | That is one of the key sources of exhaustion and burnout and frustration

00:13:50.000 | that we see in the modern knowledge economy.

00:13:53.000 | So in the reactions to the simple piece of advice,

00:13:56.000 | every once in a while I'll go see a movie during the day.

00:13:58.000 | In the reactions to that simple piece of advice,

00:14:00.000 | we see a complicated problem.

00:14:03.000 | And it's a problem that we can only solve by being clear about what it is

00:14:06.000 | we're actually trying to do and evolve the way we actually manage people

00:14:12.000 | to reflect what's actually going to work.

00:14:16.000 | There we go, Jesse.

00:14:17.000 | You got to see a movie.

00:14:19.000 | Yeah.

00:14:20.000 | You see "Split"?

00:14:22.000 | No, I haven't.

00:14:24.000 | Yeah, it's interesting.

00:14:25.000 | So Shyamalan was put in movie jail

00:14:29.000 | because he had two flops in a row.

00:14:32.000 | And to get out of movie jail--

00:14:34.000 | So he did "The Last Airbender" and "After Earth,"

00:14:39.000 | Will Smith's sort of ill-conceived "Avatar" competitor.

00:14:44.000 | To get out of movie jail, he borrowed $5 million--

00:14:49.000 | Really?

00:14:50.000 | --by mortgaging his house and said,

00:14:52.000 | "I'm just going to do this low-budget comedy thriller.

00:14:56.000 | I'm going to film it myself."

00:14:58.000 | He filmed it himself, his own $5 million,

00:15:01.000 | and then went to find someone to distribute it.

00:15:03.000 | And no one--they're like, "No, you're in movie jail."

00:15:05.000 | No one's going to distribute this thing.

00:15:07.000 | But then finally, Jason Blum from Blumhouse saw it

00:15:09.000 | and was like--they did "Paranormal Activity."

00:15:12.000 | They're the kings of a $5 million movie

00:15:15.000 | that makes $100 million is a very profitable thing.

00:15:18.000 | And they're like, "All right, we'll distribute it."

00:15:20.000 | And it was very successful. It made like $100 million,

00:15:22.000 | but they spent nothing on it, so that was like all profit.

00:15:24.000 | And then the second movie of his comeback was "Split."

00:15:28.000 | Okay.

00:15:29.000 | Which it's--but also $9 million.

00:15:32.000 | He filmed it on the cheap, made like $257 million.

00:15:36.000 | It's a cool movie.

00:15:38.000 | I don't want to say too much about it.

00:15:40.000 | I really like it.

00:15:41.000 | There's a third movie now I have to see.

00:15:43.000 | So if you've seen that movie, you know what I'm talking about,

00:15:45.000 | but I'm not going to spoil it for people.

00:15:47.000 | But the point is, it was really fun--just to be able to spend

00:15:50.000 | a couple hours, like, reading reviews of this

00:15:52.000 | and watching this movie in the middle of the morning

00:15:54.000 | on a Wednesday made such a huge psychological difference for me.

00:15:58.000 | Oh, so you read a lot of the reviews, too.

00:16:00.000 | Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:16:01.000 | I read a lot about the movies I watch.

00:16:03.000 | Sometimes I watch and read about it.

00:16:04.000 | Sometimes I read--like, I'll take breaks and read

00:16:06.000 | and then keep watching some more.

00:16:08.000 | Yeah, I love doing that simultaneously.

00:16:11.000 | Interesting.

00:16:12.000 | Yeah.

00:16:13.000 | I thought about some of them.

00:16:14.000 | Anyways, we've got some good questions to get to,

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00:19:55.000 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:19:58.000 | First question is from Adam.

00:20:00.000 | "I work as the head of AI in a chaotic startup.

00:20:03.000 | "I've had to be on top of at least 15 simultaneous projects.

00:20:07.000 | "There's always last-minute requests.

00:20:09.000 | "Do you think there's hope for me being able to carve out time

00:20:12.000 | "for deep work to contribute technically to these projects?"

00:20:15.000 | Well, look, we've got to face the productivity dragon here.

00:20:18.000 | Fifteen simultaneous projects are going to create 15 times

00:20:22.000 | whatever amount of work managing one product will require.

00:20:26.000 | So this is going to be the meetings to check-ins

00:20:29.000 | and some level of interruptions.

00:20:31.000 | You multiply that by 15, it's probably every minute of your day.

00:20:36.000 | All right?

00:20:38.000 | You can make this more sustainable, right?

00:20:41.000 | So if you're managing a bunch of things,

00:20:43.000 | you can make it more sustainable.

00:20:45.000 | And my best advice for that would come from my book

00:20:48.000 | "A World Without Email."

00:20:50.000 | This book really gets into how collaboration should happen

00:20:53.000 | in a way that is more friendly for your brain.

00:20:55.000 | And that book would say, "Look, if you have all these things going on,

00:20:58.000 | "you really have to start seeing unscheduled messages

00:21:01.000 | "that require responses.

00:21:03.000 | "You have to start seeing that as a productivity poison to kill.

00:21:06.000 | "That's what's getting you having to just jump back and forth

00:21:09.000 | "and context shift all day."

00:21:11.000 | So you can manage these projects better by having structured ways

00:21:14.000 | that you communicate with people, that you see the status of things,

00:21:17.000 | that you hold on to things until you have time to talk about it,

00:21:20.000 | more real-time conversation, less asynchronous back and forth.

00:21:23.000 | You can make this work more palatable,

00:21:25.000 | but it's still going to take up all your time.

00:21:28.000 | So if you want to do deep work,

00:21:31.000 | which we'll think of that as more of a creating activity

00:21:34.000 | where managing these products is more of a cranking activity,

00:21:37.000 | that's a separate role.

00:21:39.000 | And if you want that role, you have to be explicit about it

00:21:42.000 | and you have to essentially get hired into that new role.

00:21:47.000 | So either if you want to be doing deep work,

00:21:49.000 | you either say, "I don't want to be a manager,"

00:21:51.000 | or you say, "I have this second role I want to take on.

00:21:54.000 | "I want to be hired into this second role

00:21:56.000 | "of technically contributing to these two projects.

00:21:58.000 | "And here's how much time this requires

00:22:00.000 | "and here's what I'm going to do it, and that time is now protected

00:22:03.000 | "and we've figured out how the other stuff should work."

00:22:06.000 | But if you're just thinking, "I have all this stuff going on

00:22:09.000 | "and I'm just hoping on my own to now fit deep work into there,"

00:22:12.000 | you're not facing the dragon.

00:22:14.000 | You have 15 projects worth of management to do. There's no time.

00:22:18.000 | So make that work less onerous

00:22:22.000 | by getting rid of all the unscheduled interruptions,

00:22:24.000 | but it doesn't make the work go away.

00:22:26.000 | If you want to do deep work, you've got to see,

00:22:28.000 | "How many hours do I have?" You have to treat it like a second job.

00:22:31.000 | You have to say, "When am I going to do that second job?"

00:22:33.000 | You have to have a schedule that protects it.

00:22:35.000 | You've got to get permission from this, from the people who are above.

00:22:37.000 | Don't take it lightly and don't think

00:22:39.000 | that it's something you can just casually do.

00:22:41.000 | This sort of goes back a little bit to what I was talking about in the deep dive,

00:22:44.000 | which is we sort of mix together cranking and creating,

00:22:47.000 | and these are two separate things, and we can't just casually do both,

00:22:50.000 | and we can't just casually think of ourselves as both.

00:22:53.000 | What we do to optimize one is different

00:22:55.000 | than what we would do to do the other thing well.

00:22:58.000 | Managing 15 projects well is a very different state to be in

00:23:02.000 | than making really good technical contributions to one thing.

00:23:05.000 | All right? So let's keep those separations clear.

00:23:08.000 | Let's keep the work sustainable,

00:23:10.000 | and then ask the question of, "Do I want to try to add in a second role

00:23:13.000 | and not take lightly what that would actually require?"

00:23:16.000 | I think we talked about this in old episodes, Jesse.

00:23:18.000 | This might have even been before your time.

00:23:20.000 | I used to talk about if you have a real split role,

00:23:24.000 | like professors have this.

00:23:26.000 | You have all these service administrative roles,

00:23:29.000 | and you've got this really clear, deep role of producing research.

00:23:32.000 | You treat them like two different part-time jobs

00:23:34.000 | that have different scheduled hours,

00:23:36.000 | and you have different productivity systems for each,

00:23:38.000 | and you don't mix them at all.

00:23:40.000 | It's like, "This is when I'm working at the GAP,

00:23:43.000 | and this is when I'm working at the banana stand,"

00:23:45.000 | and they're in two different places, and they're two different jobs,

00:23:48.000 | and I don't do both at the same time,

00:23:50.000 | and I wear a different uniform here than I do over there, right?

00:23:53.000 | And so we had this whole philosophy I talked about in the early episodes

00:23:56.000 | about if you have two jobs, treat them like two jobs,

00:23:59.000 | different systems, different times.

00:24:01.000 | When you're working on one, you're only working on one.

00:24:03.000 | When you're working on another, you're only working on another.

00:24:05.000 | What I fear for this question here, for Adam here,

00:24:08.000 | is he's at the GAP so long, there's no time for the banana stand,

00:24:12.000 | but he's still kind of deluding himself into thinking that there is.

00:24:16.000 | All right, what do we got next?

00:24:18.000 | Next question is from Axel.

00:24:20.000 | "I'm not a believer of zero inbox.

00:24:22.000 | I'd rather handle it as an unprocessed task list.

00:24:25.000 | However, the number of unwanted messages that come in is overwhelming.

00:24:29.000 | I currently have 20,000 unread emails and counting,

00:24:33.000 | and I'm beginning to miss some important emails.

00:24:36.000 | Can I use my inbox as a task list?"

00:24:38.000 | I mean, Axel, when you say, like, "I'm not a believer of, you know,

00:24:42.000 | cleaning out my inbox," it's like saying,

00:24:45.000 | "I'm not a believer that humans can't fly,

00:24:47.000 | so I'm going to go jump off this cliff."

00:24:49.000 | It doesn't matter what you believe or not, the truth is the truth.

00:24:52.000 | And the truth in this case is your inbox is a terrible task list,

00:24:55.000 | and you can't use it as your task list.

00:24:57.000 | You see why. You have 20,000 unread emails.

00:25:01.000 | That's a terrible task list. That's not working.

00:25:05.000 | You're going to have to process things out of your email.

00:25:08.000 | If you have any sort of non-trivial type modern digital era knowledge work job,

00:25:12.000 | your email has to be seen like your physical mailbox would have been seen 25 years ago.

00:25:19.000 | You wouldn't use your physical mailbox at your office 25 years ago

00:25:23.000 | as how you keep track of things, just letting stuff pile up in there.

00:25:27.000 | And just a few times a day, you go to the mail room

00:25:30.000 | and start just looking through all the stuff in your mailbox and like,

00:25:33.000 | "Oh, there's a memo. I'm pulling something out. I'm working on that."

00:25:36.000 | Your inbox is the same way. I know there's more stuff that comes faster,

00:25:39.000 | so it's more of a pain to keep on top of, but you absolutely have to.

00:25:43.000 | What I suggest doing is role-based status list.

00:25:47.000 | So you have a different board or list for every role you have in your work.

00:25:52.000 | Each of these boards or lists are divided into different statuses,

00:25:56.000 | stuff I don't know what to do with, I need to clarify,

00:26:00.000 | stuff that's on the back burner that I've committed to but don't have a timeline,

00:26:03.000 | stuff I'm working on this week,

00:26:05.000 | stuff to discuss at our weekly meeting with this person,

00:26:09.000 | stuff I'm waiting to hear back from someone about and what I should do once I hear back.

00:26:13.000 | You got to have these statuses.

00:26:15.000 | Everything that comes in your inbox has to move on to one of these lists.

00:26:20.000 | You can copy text out of your inbox and paste it if you're using a digital tool

00:26:23.000 | like Trello or a Google document.

00:26:26.000 | You can carve this into clay with a chisel.

00:26:28.000 | I don't care about what tools you're using,

00:26:30.000 | but the information has to get associated with a role,

00:26:33.000 | and within that role, it needs a particular status.

00:26:36.000 | And once you process something, you erase it from your inbox,

00:26:39.000 | and that is a perfect indicator.

00:26:41.000 | If it's in your inbox, that means you haven't got to it yet,

00:26:44.000 | and when you get to it, that's how you're processing it.

00:26:47.000 | It's a pain, but it's the job.

00:26:50.000 | It's what you have to do.

00:26:53.000 | You are having a firehose of information coming at you.

00:26:56.000 | It doesn't go away if you organize it poorly.

00:26:59.000 | It's not easier to execute if you ignore it.

00:27:03.000 | Your day does not become less stressful

00:27:05.000 | if you pretend like those 20,000 things don't exist.

00:27:10.000 | You got to process the information so you know what to do with it.

00:27:13.000 | So something like a role-based status list is the thing to do.

00:27:17.000 | Now this means your email checking becomes more consolidated

00:27:21.000 | because you're processing stuff,

00:27:23.000 | so you can spend an hour here and an hour there.

00:27:25.000 | It's not like a background activity.

00:27:27.000 | If you're going to start doing this,

00:27:29.000 | it's also going to push you to move more interaction out of your inbox

00:27:33.000 | because you're like, "No, no, no, no.

00:27:34.000 | I don't want to be in my inbox so much anymore.

00:27:36.000 | I'm trying to keep it empty," and that's good

00:27:38.000 | because that will give you pressure to have better collaboration strategies

00:27:41.000 | that aren't happening with back-and-forth unscheduled messages.

00:27:44.000 | I've written whole books about it, but you can't use your inbox.

00:27:47.000 | Here's the summary.

00:27:48.000 | You can't use your inbox as a to-do list.

00:27:50.000 | It's not a good to-do list.

00:27:52.000 | All right, who have we got?

00:27:54.000 | Next question is from Mandy.

00:27:56.000 | "How do you look at travel within your plans for a deep life?

00:27:59.000 | We have found travel to be some of our most memorable experiences

00:28:02.000 | but also quite disruptive and expensive,

00:28:04.000 | plus a whole new ballgame now that we have a toddler.

00:28:07.000 | We sometimes have trouble determining when we should go somewhere and where,

00:28:10.000 | and there seems to be so many factors to weigh."

00:28:13.000 | Mandy, I think this really gets into our deep life discussion

00:28:16.000 | and in particular the difference between working backwards from a lifestyle vision

00:28:20.000 | and working forwards towards a goal.

00:28:23.000 | I'm a big advocate of you have this clear vision for your lifestyle.

00:28:26.000 | What's important to us?

00:28:28.000 | What do we want our life to be like now and in five years from now

00:28:30.000 | and in 10 years from now?

00:28:32.000 | And then you work backwards from that vision saying,

00:28:34.000 | "Given our circumstances and opportunities and obstacles right now,

00:28:38.000 | how do we move closer to this vision?"

00:28:41.000 | This allows for sort of flexible, interesting thinking

00:28:43.000 | that reacts to the realities of your situation on the ground.

00:28:47.000 | So you like travel, but that means there's elements of that

00:28:51.000 | that are probably part of your lifestyle vision.

00:28:53.000 | We like to go to interesting places or be exposed to interesting people

00:28:56.000 | or experience awe in nature.

00:28:58.000 | The specific things you're getting out of travel can show up in that vision.

00:29:02.000 | How you get there just depends on what's going on.

00:29:04.000 | You have a toddler right now.

00:29:06.000 | So when you're figuring out how do we get closer to this lifestyle vision

00:29:08.000 | in the next few years, it's not going to involve

00:29:12.000 | we need to go to the Himalayas and spend three weeks

00:29:15.000 | because that doesn't make sense with a little kid.

00:29:17.000 | That's not going to go well.

00:29:19.000 | So what I think might be happening here is instead of working backwards

00:29:22.000 | from your lifestyle vision, you're working forwards

00:29:24.000 | by committing to a more specific goal or activity

00:29:27.000 | that vaguely seems positive to you.

00:29:29.000 | So like, "We like travel. We should travel a lot."

00:29:32.000 | That's working forward to a goal,

00:29:34.000 | hoping doing this thing will make our life better,

00:29:36.000 | as opposed to working backwards from where you're trying to get.

00:29:40.000 | And when it's, you know, if it's awe in nature or something,

00:29:43.000 | and before you had your kid, you were getting that by traveling

00:29:47.000 | to distance exotic locations.

00:29:49.000 | Well, when you have your kid, you're like, "Okay, well, that's not

00:29:51.000 | a reasonable thing to do right now until they get a little bit older,

00:29:54.000 | but how can we get on nature right now with a toddler?"

00:29:58.000 | Well, it's going to be more local.

00:30:00.000 | Actually, what we're going to do is you start to get creative.

00:30:04.000 | Now, we live in D.C., but we're going to rent for this year

00:30:07.000 | this cabin up in like the Canaan Valley in West Virginia.

00:30:11.000 | It's like an hour and a half away or two hours away or something.

00:30:13.000 | We're going to start going there on the weekends.

00:30:15.000 | We have a kid yet that doesn't have activities, and we're bored.

00:30:19.000 | We're stuck at home with the kid.

00:30:20.000 | So what if we had this cabin that we kind of rent?

00:30:22.000 | We're not going to buy it. We're just going to rent it.

00:30:24.000 | It's like a seasonal rental. We're going to keep going up there.

00:30:26.000 | We have an Airbnb we do a lot.

00:30:28.000 | We're going to go up like twice a month and just really get to know

00:30:30.000 | this one beautiful area, and the Canaan Valley is a very beautiful area.

00:30:34.000 | Just don't go in the winter because it's, you know,

00:30:37.000 | roughly 10 times colder than Antarctica.

00:30:40.000 | But it's otherwise like a really nice area, and think about it.

00:30:43.000 | You're like we're up there. We're getting to know it.

00:30:45.000 | There's these paths we do with the pack, and like you're obtaining

00:30:49.000 | the thing that's important to you, but in a way that makes sense

00:30:52.000 | for your current life because what's important was that thing

00:30:55.000 | that was important to you, not the particular idea you had in mind

00:30:58.000 | for how to do it, which was, you know, maybe we travel, we fly to,

00:31:01.000 | you know, we go down to Patagonia and do stuff like that.

00:31:05.000 | So, OK, let's say the thing you like.

00:31:07.000 | I'm just running through some experiments here.

00:31:08.000 | Let's say the thing you liked about travel,

00:31:10.000 | the actual lifestyle component you liked was going to interesting places

00:31:15.000 | and meeting interesting people.

00:31:17.000 | You have a toddler at home now.

00:31:19.000 | OK, so how do we prioritize that?

00:31:21.000 | Well, maybe we live near this city.

00:31:23.000 | So let's really get to know these different neighborhoods in the city

00:31:28.000 | or the restaurants over here or what's going on with--

00:31:31.000 | There's this kids' theater down at the Kennedy Center now,

00:31:35.000 | and we're going to get a subscription there and go there every summer.

00:31:38.000 | We're going to go there every weekend and, like, see these shows,

00:31:40.000 | and you can find ways to satisfy that vision

00:31:44.000 | given your current constraints, opportunities, and obstacles.

00:31:47.000 | That's lifestyle-centric planning.

00:31:49.000 | So this type of thing happens all the time

00:31:52.000 | where when we work forward instead of backwards, we get stuck.

00:31:56.000 | We get stuck on, like, this particular thing is important

00:31:59.000 | even if it doesn't work anymore, and it's causing more trouble than harm.

00:32:03.000 | We're dragging a toddler on these long flights,

00:32:06.000 | and it's costing us a lot of money, and it's disrupting to our schedules,

00:32:09.000 | and we end up unhappy about it.

00:32:11.000 | That's what happens when you focus on, like,

00:32:13.000 | this activity or goal is going to save me

00:32:15.000 | as opposed to this is what being safe looks like.

00:32:17.000 | What's our best way to get there right now?

00:32:19.000 | That's at the essence of lifestyle-centric planning.

00:32:21.000 | I would also say if you're frustrated about, you know,

00:32:25.000 | there's certain things that you would--

00:32:28.000 | visions you'd like to get to that you can't get to right now with a toddler,

00:32:32.000 | this is a great time to do really forward thinking, right?

00:32:36.000 | Now you start thinking, like, you know what, we're really missing--

00:32:39.000 | maybe you really miss being overseas in certain places,

00:32:42.000 | or, like, you're in love with Scandinavia.

00:32:44.000 | You're like, "Yeah, it's hard with a toddler," or something like that.

00:32:46.000 | Now you can start thinking, "Hey, this is being clarified for us.

00:32:50.000 | This piece of our vision is being clarified.

00:32:53.000 | How could we get to a life 5 years from now, 10 years from now,

00:32:56.000 | maybe, like, when our kid is in middle school

00:32:58.000 | or, like, even thinking to, like, when our kid goes to college

00:33:01.000 | where this is a much bigger part of our life

00:33:03.000 | because it's being clarified to us that this is important right now?"

00:33:06.000 | And now you start to think more creatively.

00:33:08.000 | Well, you know, if you moved over to consulting

00:33:11.000 | and I was able to make this fully remote--

00:33:13.000 | I can't do that now, but let's think about how that could work.

00:33:16.000 | There might be a situation here where we could spend 4 months out of the year,

00:33:19.000 | you know, living on this glacier.

00:33:21.000 | Like, it could open up some really interesting long-term thinking as well.

00:33:25.000 | So all this comes down to make your lifestyle vision clear,

00:33:30.000 | work backwards flexibly and creatively towards,

00:33:34.000 | "How do I get closer to this given what I have available to me right now?"

00:33:37.000 | And it's going to open up lots of cool options.

00:33:40.000 | "How can I find the most interestingness and happiness

00:33:42.000 | and subjective well-being right now?"

00:33:44.000 | It'll also clarify some of, like, more radical longer-term things you might do as well.

00:33:48.000 | So it's an opportunity, Mandy. This is not, I would say, a problem.

00:33:52.000 | All right, moving right along.

00:33:56.000 | Next up is Lisa.

00:33:58.000 | "How can I communicate that I've heard enough of my partner's work issues

00:34:01.000 | without sounding like a jerk?

00:34:03.000 | I feel like I'm an unpaid staff that is always available for event session."

00:34:08.000 | I would say probably like a taser.

00:34:11.000 | You know what I'm saying? It's like if it gets past a certain threshold,

00:34:14.000 | just right down it goes. Boom.

00:34:17.000 | I think it's like a Pavlovian thing there.

00:34:19.000 | So, like, over time, then he'll sort of pull it back.

00:34:22.000 | So, Lisa, actually, I think what's interesting here

00:34:25.000 | is probably what's going on with your partner.

00:34:29.000 | If he or she is venting a lot,

00:34:32.000 | so clearly they must be venting a lot.

00:34:35.000 | Everyone vents a little bit, like, "Oh, man, so-and-so was a pain at work today."

00:34:39.000 | But if they're venting to the place where, like,

00:34:41.000 | you're thinking about my taser solution,

00:34:44.000 | their relationship to their job's no good.

00:34:47.000 | Like, you need to get them listening to my podcast.

00:34:49.000 | In particular, here's what I would worry that's going on.

00:34:52.000 | When I hear someone who's an over-venter,

00:34:55.000 | like, all they can think about is the negatives of their job,

00:34:57.000 | and you're talking about it all the time,

00:34:59.000 | it typically means, like, they're feeling as if

00:35:01.000 | they have a lack of autonomy or efficacy.

00:35:04.000 | I don't really have control over what I do.

00:35:06.000 | I don't feel like I'm able to do anything of any real value.

00:35:10.000 | You know, I'm a widget cranker, and it feels nihilistic.

00:35:14.000 | I'm the Ron Livingston character in office space.

00:35:17.000 | And in that situation, where you have no autonomy or efficacy,

00:35:20.000 | everything is a problem.

00:35:22.000 | And so you just see everything going on around you

00:35:24.000 | as a problem that is frustrating.

00:35:26.000 | This is corrosive over time.

00:35:28.000 | It's sort of corrosive to your soul.

00:35:30.000 | So how do you get out of this trap

00:35:32.000 | of feeling like you don't have autonomy or efficacy?

00:35:34.000 | You follow the advice from my book,

00:35:36.000 | "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:35:38.000 | You build career capital.

00:35:40.000 | You invest career capital to move your work

00:35:42.000 | towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

00:35:45.000 | The process alone of acquiring career capital,

00:35:48.000 | which means getting good at things

00:35:50.000 | that are unambiguously rare and valuable in your field,

00:35:53.000 | that process alone of seeking mastery,

00:35:55.000 | already you're going to feel like you have autonomy.

00:35:58.000 | Like, "I'm getting better. I have a plan."

00:36:00.000 | And then when you begin investing this career capital,

00:36:03.000 | which means just using your skills as leverage

00:36:05.000 | to kind of control what your work and existence is like,

00:36:08.000 | things get even better.

00:36:10.000 | You push it towards the stuff you like

00:36:12.000 | and away from the other stuff.

00:36:14.000 | And it's not that so much

00:36:16.000 | that there's some magical configuration for your job

00:36:19.000 | that is going to make everything better.

00:36:21.000 | It's the fact that you have control over your job

00:36:23.000 | that's going to make things feel better.

00:36:25.000 | It's that autonomy, that efficacy.

00:36:27.000 | "I'm getting better. People think I'm good.

00:36:29.000 | "I'm using this to change how I do it.

00:36:31.000 | "I'm respected for what I'm doing.

00:36:33.000 | "I'm recognized for what I'm doing.

00:36:35.000 | "I use this as leverage to change the structure of my job,

00:36:38.000 | "so I don't do this and I do this,"

00:36:40.000 | or whatever it is that you do.

00:36:42.000 | That's the sweet spot where it's not that the things

00:36:44.000 | seem so much as a threat.

00:36:46.000 | They're a nuisance. They're amusing.

00:36:48.000 | They're like, "Yeah, so-and-so's crazy. Who cares?

00:36:50.000 | "Yeah, the management is, you know, blah, blah, blah.

00:36:52.000 | "Doesn't matter. I'm getting after it.

00:36:54.000 | "As I get this skill, I'm about to go full remote.

00:36:57.000 | "We're going to move to that whatever,

00:36:59.000 | "that glacier in Finland."

00:37:01.000 | Like, there's an excitement to it.

00:37:03.000 | So that's what I would say is really going on here.

00:37:05.000 | If they're venting all the time,

00:37:07.000 | they got to change their relationship to their work.

00:37:10.000 | And so, "Okay, get them listening to my podcast.

00:37:12.000 | "Get them a copy, if so good, they can't ignore you."

00:37:14.000 | Maybe what you should do for the near future

00:37:16.000 | is every time they vent past a certain threshold,

00:37:18.000 | just smack them with, "So good, they can't ignore you,"

00:37:20.000 | and eventually there'll be like an osmosis thing

00:37:22.000 | where some of those ideas will just begin to seep through.

00:37:25.000 | But work, it shouldn't be a source of constant venting,

00:37:28.000 | and that typically is less about who you're working with,

00:37:31.000 | what you're doing, and more about

00:37:33.000 | your relationship to your job.

00:37:35.000 | All right, what do we got next, Jesse?

00:37:37.000 | - We have our corner.

00:37:39.000 | - Woo, Slow Productivity Corner, let's hear that theme music.

00:37:42.000 | (slow guitar music)

00:37:45.000 | For those who are new, we have one question every week

00:37:49.000 | that specifically relates to my most recent book,

00:37:51.000 | "Slow Productivity," we call it the Slow Productivity Corner.

00:37:54.000 | If you have not bought and read "Slow Productivity" yet,

00:37:57.000 | you need to, it's like the Bible for, I would guess,

00:38:00.000 | 50% of what we talk about on this show.

00:38:02.000 | All right, Jesse, what's our Slow Productivity Corner

00:38:04.000 | question of the week?

00:38:06.000 | Question's from Dan, "I've owned an e-commerce business

00:38:09.000 | "for 23 years and spend nearly all my time on the computer.

00:38:12.000 | "How can I adhere to the slow productivity principles

00:38:15.000 | "with health issues that constantly interfere?"

00:38:18.000 | - Well, Dan, I would add an extra word to there,

00:38:22.000 | and I would say, you know, how could I possibly

00:38:25.000 | not adhere to the slow productivity principles

00:38:29.000 | with health issues that constantly interfere?

00:38:31.000 | In other words, you're exactly in a situation, probably,

00:38:34.000 | where you need slow productivity.

00:38:37.000 | Because what is the opposite of slow productivity?

00:38:39.000 | If you don't have slow productivity,

00:38:41.000 | what are you probably facing? Pseudoproductivity.

00:38:44.000 | As we talked about in the deep dive of this episode,

00:38:46.000 | what is pseudoproductivity?

00:38:48.000 | It's the equation of visible effort for usefulness.

00:38:52.000 | So in a pseudoproductivity regime, you have to just be

00:38:54.000 | rock and rolling, visibly and busily,

00:38:57.000 | all day long, every day, up to here.

00:39:00.000 | Like, you gotta have the thing pegged to 10 all the time,

00:39:02.000 | or you're seen as being unuseful or unproductive.

00:39:04.000 | That is a really hard state if you, for example,

00:39:07.000 | have health issues that means,

00:39:08.000 | "I can't have 100% energy all the time."

00:39:11.000 | You know, sometimes I can, sometimes I can't.

00:39:14.000 | Maybe I have appointments I have to go to,

00:39:16.000 | or whatever it is, right?

00:39:17.000 | Pseudoproductivity is a disaster for anyone

00:39:19.000 | who doesn't have the privilege of being in a situation

00:39:22.000 | where you can just sort of crank it at 10 all day long.

00:39:25.000 | Why not?

00:39:26.000 | Pseudoproductivity is a game for, you know,

00:39:28.000 | 24-year-olds without families and plenty of energy

00:39:32.000 | who can just like exist off of Red Bull.

00:39:34.000 | Slow productivity could be your savior here.

00:39:36.000 | Slow productivity says what matters is what you produce,

00:39:38.000 | not how you do it.

00:39:40.000 | It's about sustainability.

00:39:41.000 | It's about keeping your workload reasonable,

00:39:43.000 | being able to have some balance back and forth

00:39:45.000 | in your energy depending on what's demanded of the moment.

00:39:48.000 | And then over time, saying,

00:39:49.000 | "Judge the quality of what I do, not the quantity."

00:39:52.000 | That in particular is good if you have sort of

00:39:54.000 | a non-traditional energy reserves or time availability.

00:39:59.000 | Because it means as you get better,

00:40:02.000 | as you get better, as your quality goes up,

00:40:05.000 | you get more and more flexibility, right?

00:40:08.000 | One way to think about this is if you can barely

00:40:11.000 | make things work in your current situation

00:40:13.000 | at your current level of skill, like,

00:40:15.000 | "Okay, I have the amount of money I make for this,"

00:40:18.000 | or whatever, like, "It works, but it's very hard

00:40:20.000 | for me to produce this much stuff."

00:40:22.000 | You know, if you get twice as good,

00:40:24.000 | one of the options you have is to essentially, like,

00:40:26.000 | have the time you have to spend while keeping yourself

00:40:28.000 | in the same job position or earning situation, right?

00:40:32.000 | And that might be much better, right?

00:40:34.000 | In other words, quality is one of the things

00:40:37.000 | you can trade quality for is much less actual

00:40:40.000 | total hours needed to work.

00:40:42.000 | And for people who are in situations

00:40:44.000 | where they have huge time demands or health issues,

00:40:46.000 | having greatly reduced hours

00:40:48.000 | compared to someone else is important.

00:40:49.000 | And how do you do that without getting, like,

00:40:51.000 | part-time pay?

00:40:52.000 | You get really, really good,

00:40:53.000 | and instead of cashing in that skill to get more money,

00:40:55.000 | you cash in to get more flexibility.

00:40:57.000 | That's a key slow productivity principle.

00:41:00.000 | So I think slow productivity, you know,

00:41:02.000 | it's one of the advantages of this idea

00:41:04.000 | is that we can't all succeed

00:41:06.000 | in the pseudo-productivity regime.

00:41:09.000 | We can't all just show up in the parking lot early,

00:41:12.000 | leave later, answer to every email chain

00:41:15.000 | as quickly as possible,

00:41:16.000 | always be there for the meeting in person.

00:41:18.000 | Not all of us can have that option

00:41:20.000 | as a means of sort of, like,

00:41:21.000 | getting ahead in the workplace.

00:41:23.000 | Slow productivity opens this up

00:41:25.000 | for so many more people,

00:41:26.000 | and it makes work sustainable.

00:41:28.000 | It makes work not a drag on your emotional life.

00:41:30.000 | It makes work not a drag on your

00:41:32.000 | sort of, like, physical well-being.

00:41:34.000 | So, you know, Dan,

00:41:35.000 | I'm glad you found slow productivity.

00:41:37.000 | I think embracing those ideas

00:41:39.000 | might really be a positive thing for you.

00:41:42.000 | So I don't know if I explicitly made

00:41:45.000 | the connection between slow productivity

00:41:47.000 | and sort of accessibility more generally

00:41:49.000 | in the book, but I should have,

00:41:50.000 | because in the eight months

00:41:52.000 | since that book has come out,

00:41:53.000 | this connection has been made to me quite a bit.

00:41:56.000 | All right, do we have a call this week, Jesse?

00:41:58.000 | - We do. - Ooh, let's hear it.

00:42:00.000 | - Okay.

00:42:01.000 | - Hi, this is Sarah. I'm a psychologist.

00:42:09.000 | I'm very eager to apply the principles

00:42:11.000 | of deep work to my life.

00:42:13.000 | The strategies offered and the how-tos

00:42:15.000 | have been very helpful.

00:42:17.000 | However, I'm struggling with making a decision

00:42:19.000 | about what to choose.

00:42:21.000 | I'm in my 30s, and I work part-time.

00:42:24.000 | I've always had an inclination towards the arts,

00:42:27.000 | and now that I have the time,

00:42:29.000 | I would like to invest in it as a serious hobby

00:42:32.000 | and potentially turning it into

00:42:34.000 | a more serious endeavor.

00:42:36.000 | I'm torn between music and visual arts,

00:42:39.000 | particularly photography.

00:42:41.000 | I took lessons in playing classical music

00:42:43.000 | for a few years before I stopped practicing

00:42:46.000 | due to the demands of graduate school.

00:42:49.000 | While I have more passion for music,

00:42:51.000 | I feel hopeless about becoming

00:42:53.000 | impressively good at it given my age,

00:42:56.000 | but I see more opportunities

00:42:58.000 | in engaging with visual arts.

00:43:00.000 | Right now, I'm doing both,

00:43:02.000 | but my time is fragmented.

00:43:04.000 | I want to immerse myself in one

00:43:06.000 | and get really good at it.

00:43:08.000 | I would appreciate your guidance on this.

00:43:11.000 | All right, that's a good question.

00:43:13.000 | Let's generalize this question to be,

00:43:15.000 | "How can I—" not later in life,

00:43:17.000 | but I'm in my 30s, right?

00:43:19.000 | I'm not just getting started.

00:43:21.000 | "How can I transform an interesting side hobby

00:43:25.000 | into a bigger part of my life?"

00:43:27.000 | In this case, a creative pursuit.

00:43:29.000 | I've got three things I want to suggest here

00:43:31.000 | that I think are going to be useful.

00:43:34.000 | One, I would—

00:43:36.000 | and I think you're picking this up in your question—

00:43:39.000 | avoid things that are notably winner-take-all

00:43:43.000 | in terms of their dynamics.

00:43:45.000 | Professional music, let's say classical music,

00:43:48.000 | that's very winner-take-all in their dynamics

00:43:50.000 | in the sense that there are formal positions

00:43:53.000 | and orchestras that you can play these instruments.

00:43:56.000 | It is incredibly competitive,

00:43:58.000 | and the best players get to do it.

00:44:00.000 | Sports are very winner-take-all as well.

00:44:02.000 | You want to be an athlete, it's like,

00:44:04.000 | "Here are the teams. There's a ton of people

00:44:06.000 | who want these spots. The very best people

00:44:08.000 | want these spots."

00:44:09.000 | That's for obvious reasons.

00:44:11.000 | These are difficult targets to go towards

00:44:13.000 | a little later in life.

00:44:14.000 | It's hard starting in your 30s to become

00:44:16.000 | one of the best French horn players in your city.

00:44:18.000 | It's hard in your 30s to become

00:44:20.000 | one of the best baseball players in the state.

00:44:23.000 | So you want to avoid, when you're coming

00:44:25.000 | to this a little later and transforming

00:44:27.000 | something on the side to something bigger,

00:44:29.000 | be worried about significant winner-take-all dynamics.

00:44:33.000 | It's like businesses, small businesses,

00:44:35.000 | don't have this.

00:44:36.000 | There's room for lots of different businesses

00:44:38.000 | to do lots of different things.

00:44:39.000 | Visual arts, I think you're picking up on this right.

00:44:41.000 | There's room in there for you to have

00:44:43.000 | an interesting visual art career because

00:44:45.000 | you are doing something unique.

00:44:47.000 | That there's a big enough population who likes,

00:44:50.000 | you can make an interesting living doing that.

00:44:52.000 | It's not winner-take-all.

00:44:54.000 | Two, really lean into deliberate practice.

00:44:59.000 | Your time is limited, both in terms of

00:45:01.000 | how much you have available to work

00:45:03.000 | on the side pursuit because you have

00:45:04.000 | other things going on and in how much time

00:45:06.000 | you have to get good because you're not 16 anymore.

00:45:10.000 | Deliberate practice is the most efficient

00:45:12.000 | way to get better at things.

00:45:14.000 | It means the time you spend trying to get better

00:45:16.000 | at something should be working on

00:45:19.000 | carefully designed activities that are

00:45:23.000 | designed to stretch you to get better

00:45:26.000 | at something that's critical in your field.

00:45:28.000 | It's like if you want to become a visual artist,

00:45:30.000 | don't just take a lot of photos.

00:45:32.000 | If you want to become a writer,

00:45:33.000 | don't just write your pages every day.

00:45:35.000 | You've got to find a way now to get training.

00:45:38.000 | I want every minute that I'm working on this

00:45:40.000 | right now to be stretching me to get better.

00:45:42.000 | Doing something I don't do well with guidance

00:45:44.000 | on how to do it better and then getting

00:45:45.000 | harsh feedback on whether or not I actually got there.

00:45:48.000 | You've got to join things, work with people,

00:45:50.000 | get in the writers' groups, take classes,

00:45:53.000 | difficult classes like in photography,

00:45:56.000 | try to get exhibited in amateur minor things.

00:45:59.000 | You need the pressure, you need the training,

00:46:01.000 | you need the stretch. You don't want to waste the time.

00:46:03.000 | You want the time you're spending to be really high quality.

00:46:06.000 | And the final piece of advice I'd offer here,

00:46:09.000 | and this also comes from my book,

00:46:10.000 | So Good They Can't Ignore You,

00:46:12.000 | use money as a neutral indicator of value.

00:46:16.000 | So in particular, when you're deciding like,

00:46:18.000 | should I make this side hobby into my full-time job,

00:46:23.000 | don't just guess I'm ready to do it.

00:46:27.000 | Don't just say, predict, I bet this would,

00:46:32.000 | I bet I could pull this off.

00:46:34.000 | Actually get people to give you money.

00:46:37.000 | And the reason why we use that term

00:46:39.000 | neutral indicator of value is that it means

00:46:41.000 | nothing for people to give you praise.

00:46:44.000 | People are happy to praise you.

00:46:45.000 | They're happy to say, this is great.

00:46:46.000 | You should do this. You should open a gallery.

00:46:48.000 | But people hate to give away their money

00:46:50.000 | unless they're really getting value for it.

00:46:52.000 | So if people are buying your photos,

00:46:54.000 | it's an indication they're good.

00:46:56.000 | If people are telling you, we love your photos,

00:46:57.000 | it means nothing.

00:46:59.000 | If people are buying your albums,

00:47:01.000 | your music is good.

00:47:02.000 | If they're not, it's not ready yet

00:47:03.000 | for you to do full-time.

00:47:05.000 | If you can sell your articles,

00:47:06.000 | if you've got a book deal for your book,

00:47:08.000 | then you're on to something with your writing.

00:47:10.000 | If you haven't, you haven't.

00:47:11.000 | So let money be the neutral judge finally

00:47:13.000 | that tells you, okay, this stuff

00:47:15.000 | is at a good enough level.

00:47:18.000 | In my book, this phrase comes from Derek Sivers,

00:47:21.000 | who talked about using this when he quit his job

00:47:24.000 | to become a full-time musician.

00:47:26.000 | He waited until he was making roughly his salary

00:47:28.000 | as a musician on the side to quit his job.

00:47:31.000 | And then when he started his company, CD Baby,

00:47:34.000 | he didn't go full-time to doing that company

00:47:36.000 | until the money it was making

00:47:39.000 | was more or less what he was making from his music.

00:47:41.000 | And he's like, great, now I can move over to that.

00:47:43.000 | And he introduced this phrase.

00:47:45.000 | He's like, I use money as a neutral indicator of value.

00:47:47.000 | That's how I knew something was good enough

00:47:49.000 | for me to now trust this to be my full-time thing.

00:47:53.000 | So avoid things with significant winner-take-all dynamics.

00:47:57.000 | You want to find things where there's lots of little niches

00:47:59.000 | in which you could find an interesting home.

00:48:01.000 | Deliberate practice as much as possible.

00:48:02.000 | The time you have to spend on the side thing,

00:48:04.000 | make that time useful.

00:48:06.000 | And three, if you're going to make something side

00:48:08.000 | into your full-time thing, make sure you're using money

00:48:10.000 | as your neutral indicator of value.

00:48:13.000 | Everyone will tell you that your kid really looks good,

00:48:15.000 | but if they don't hire them for the modeling contract,

00:48:18.000 | don't take them out of school.

00:48:19.000 | You know what I'm saying?

00:48:20.000 | So same thing sort of here.

00:48:22.000 | Money, people don't lie with that.

00:48:25.000 | You know, Jesse, people often misunderstand Derek's quote.

00:48:30.000 | And so they think when he says money is a neutral indicator

00:48:33.000 | of value, that it means the amount of money you have

00:48:37.000 | tells people how valuable you are as like a person

00:48:39.000 | or something, which is like the opposite.

00:48:41.000 | Derek gave away all the money he made

00:48:43.000 | when he sold the CD Baby.

00:48:44.000 | He just went, no, no, it's a neutral indicator

00:48:46.000 | of the value of what you're doing,

00:48:48.000 | so you know whether or not it's working or not.

00:48:51.000 | - Right.

00:48:52.000 | - Yeah.

00:48:53.000 | All right, we got a case study here.

00:48:54.000 | This is where people send in their own experiences

00:48:57.000 | putting the type of advice we talk about on the show

00:48:59.000 | in the practice in their own life.

00:49:02.000 | If you have a case study, you can send it

00:49:03.000 | to jesse@calnewport.com.

00:49:06.000 | Today's case study is from Filippa, who writes,

00:49:11.000 | "I was a lawyer for 20 years, but never really enjoyed it

00:49:15.000 | "for the obvious reasons.

00:49:17.000 | "I'm also a single mother of three teens.

00:49:20.000 | "Nevertheless, I put in the hours,

00:49:22.000 | "and I was eventually promoted to equity partnership.

00:49:24.000 | "I was actually able to change some of the culture

00:49:26.000 | "over a five-year period.

00:49:28.000 | "I bought lots of copies of Deep Work."

00:49:31.000 | Oh, "I actually bought lots of copies of Deep Work.

00:49:34.000 | "The next step was to apply to become CEO

00:49:36.000 | "so that I could continue educating my firm

00:49:38.000 | "about the benefits of your messages.

00:49:41.000 | "I talked about that stuff in my interview

00:49:43.000 | "while the other candidates focused on profits,

00:49:45.000 | "bonus systems, and billable hours.

00:49:47.000 | "I did get the CEO job, however,

00:49:50.000 | "and I didn't make any sudden moves.

00:49:52.000 | "A little time passed, and I was offered two consultancy jobs.

00:49:54.000 | "My law firm allowed me to work there one day per week.

00:49:57.000 | "As per your advice, I wanted to first find out

00:49:59.000 | "if there was a desire for my skills outside of law.

00:50:02.000 | "The other element which was essential to me

00:50:04.000 | "being able to take these steps

00:50:05.000 | "was having a brilliant financial planner.

00:50:07.000 | "He was able to help me manage my finances

00:50:09.000 | "to ensure that I planned out my savings and expenditures

00:50:11.000 | "with a goal in mind.

00:50:13.000 | "It turned out there was, and 18 months later,

00:50:17.000 | "I was able to hand in my notice to the law firm

00:50:19.000 | "and walk away.

00:50:20.000 | "I have now been offered the CEO role

00:50:22.000 | "of one of the firms starting in 2025.

00:50:24.000 | "This gave me 12 months to take some time with my daughters

00:50:26.000 | "and to work on a book.

00:50:27.000 | "Over the summer, I took my kids around Europe for a month,

00:50:30.000 | "something I could never have found the time for

00:50:32.000 | "nor the mental energy to do

00:50:33.000 | "when I was working all the hours as a lawyer.

00:50:36.000 | "The firm I will join is a financial advice firm

00:50:39.000 | "with a totally different culture.

00:50:40.000 | "Your sage advice has led me to a place

00:50:42.000 | "where I honestly wake up excited for the day."

00:50:45.000 | All right, there's some great examples here

00:50:47.000 | of various things we've talked about on the show,

00:50:49.000 | including in today's episode.

00:50:51.000 | One is lifestyle-centric planning.

00:50:53.000 | Working backwards from what do I want my life to be like,

00:50:57.000 | and then looking for a flexible way forward to get there.

00:51:01.000 | I can assure you, if we go back 10 years, right,

00:51:05.000 | and say to Philippa, "What do you want to do?

00:51:09.000 | "What's your strategy?"

00:51:11.000 | Where she is now is not something

00:51:12.000 | that you would just naturally come up with.

00:51:14.000 | "Well, what I'm gonna do is be the CEO

00:51:17.000 | "of a financial advising firm."

00:51:19.000 | Like, it's not like an obvious thing to do,

00:51:21.000 | but working backwards from her lifestyle vision,

00:51:23.000 | she worked her way through what was available in the moment

00:51:26.000 | to get closer and closer,

00:51:27.000 | and these opportunities were excavated as she proceeded.

00:51:32.000 | It's like people who work backwards

00:51:33.000 | from lifestyle visions end up in deep lives

00:51:37.000 | in ways they never could have predicted

00:51:39.000 | the full path of in advance.

00:51:40.000 | So I really like to see that example.

00:51:43.000 | Now, when you do this,

00:51:44.000 | when you're working backwards from a lifestyle vision,

00:51:46.000 | I said, look, I often talk in generalities.

00:51:49.000 | I said, "Yeah, you gotta work with, like,

00:51:50.000 | "what are your opportunities and obstacles

00:51:54.000 | "that you face right now, and how do you make the most,

00:51:58.000 | "given that, how do you find flexible ways forward?"

00:52:00.000 | or something like that.

00:52:01.000 | We get some specifics in here of what that might mean.

00:52:05.000 | It's like, what are a couple things that were tried here?

00:52:07.000 | Well, one thing she tried was doing this one day a week

00:52:10.000 | in a different type of work, right?

00:52:13.000 | That is an interesting move when you're trying to explore,

00:52:17.000 | "I'm trying to get closer to this lifestyle.

00:52:18.000 | "This type of work might get me there.

00:52:20.000 | "I don't know how, so let me dedicate one day a week

00:52:22.000 | "to this work and see what I learn."

00:52:24.000 | I think that's gonna open up options, and it did.

00:52:26.000 | The other thing I really wanna underscore here

00:52:29.000 | is financial planning.

00:52:31.000 | I've actually added this

00:52:32.000 | to the "Deep Life" book I'm working on now.

00:52:35.000 | I talk about lifestyle-centric planning,

00:52:37.000 | working backwards from your lifestyle,

00:52:38.000 | not forward towards a ground goal,

00:52:40.000 | and I have this chapter I'm adding where I'm like,

00:52:42.000 | "Here's three really useful things to keep in mind

00:52:46.000 | "when you're coming up with these plans working backwards,"

00:52:48.000 | and one of them is financial.

00:52:50.000 | This can open up so many interesting paths

00:52:54.000 | that would otherwise be unavailable.

00:52:56.000 | When you get careful about your money

00:52:58.000 | and transparent about your money,

00:52:59.000 | "I know how much we make and how much we spend,"

00:53:02.000 | and you can create a lot of give in there.

00:53:05.000 | "Hey, I got promoted to equity partner,

00:53:07.000 | "but we're still living what I was on

00:53:08.000 | "as a fourth-year associate," right?

00:53:10.000 | We have all this flexibility and give.

00:53:11.000 | Our lifestyle's not too inflated.

00:53:13.000 | We're careful with our investments.

00:53:15.000 | I can turn the money and expenses up and down.

00:53:18.000 | Being careful with your finances

00:53:20.000 | just really expands the options you have

00:53:22.000 | when you're trying to explore different ways

00:53:23.000 | to get closer to your lifestyle,

00:53:25.000 | and we see exactly this here.

00:53:26.000 | It allowed Philippa to take a year off

00:53:27.000 | and then to move to this other position.

00:53:29.000 | I'm sure it's probably not as well-paid

00:53:31.000 | as being an equity partner.

00:53:32.000 | So it's financial planning.

00:53:33.000 | It's like one of these tools you can use

00:53:35.000 | when you're trying to feel your way

00:53:37.000 | towards this lifestyle vision you have.

00:53:39.000 | The more control and flexibility

00:53:41.000 | you have in your finances,

00:53:42.000 | the more paths that are actually open to you.

00:53:44.000 | So I think there's a lot of cool

00:53:45.000 | on-the-ground concrete tactics

00:53:49.000 | captured in this one story.

00:53:52.000 | All right, we got a final segment coming up,

00:53:54.000 | but before we do,

00:53:55.000 | let's hear from another sponsor.

00:53:57.000 | I want to talk in particular about our friends

00:53:59.000 | at MyBodyTutor.

00:54:01.000 | I've known Adam Gilbert,

00:54:02.000 | MyBodyTutor's founder, for many years.

00:54:05.000 | He used to be the fitness advice expert

00:54:08.000 | for my blog in the early days.

00:54:10.000 | Here's the cool thing about his company,

00:54:12.000 | MyBodyTutor.

00:54:13.000 | It solves the biggest problems

00:54:16.000 | that people face when trying to get healthier,

00:54:19.000 | which is consistency.

00:54:21.000 | It's not too hard to figure out

00:54:24.000 | what it means to eat healthy.

00:54:25.000 | It's not too hard to figure out

00:54:26.000 | that you should exercise a lot.

00:54:27.000 | The knowledge is not the problem.

00:54:29.000 | The problem is actually doing all these things

00:54:31.000 | and adapting as needed

00:54:32.000 | to the unique problems in your life.

00:54:33.000 | This is where MyBodyTutor comes in.

00:54:36.000 | When you sign up, they connect you to a coach.

00:54:39.000 | And this coach helps you come up with,

00:54:42.000 | "Hey, here's what we're doing with nutrition.

00:54:43.000 | Here's what we're doing with exercise.

00:54:44.000 | And then here's the key thing."

00:54:46.000 | You check in every day.

00:54:48.000 | It's not time-consuming.

00:54:49.000 | They have this, it's an app.

00:54:50.000 | It's simple.

00:54:51.000 | You press a few buttons.

00:54:52.000 | Here's what I ate.

00:54:53.000 | Here's what I did for exercise.

00:54:54.000 | But you have the accountability

00:54:55.000 | of checking in with your coach every day.

00:54:57.000 | And that makes all the difference.

00:54:58.000 | Knowing there's someone who cares about you

00:55:00.000 | and your health

00:55:01.000 | and is gonna see what you did that day

00:55:03.000 | makes you actually consistent.

00:55:05.000 | It helps you actually act

00:55:07.000 | on the things you know you should be doing.

00:55:10.000 | And because you have this coach,

00:55:11.000 | they can also help you adapt.

00:55:12.000 | "Oh my God, I'm traveling for the holidays.

00:55:14.000 | I'm not gonna have access to my gym.

00:55:15.000 | I'm worried about the food.

00:55:16.000 | What should I do?"

00:55:17.000 | Like they can help you adapt,

00:55:18.000 | but you get that accountability.

00:55:20.000 | And because the coaches are online,

00:55:21.000 | you're connected via the internet.

00:55:23.000 | It's not a physical trainer coming to your house

00:55:25.000 | or a nutritionist coming to your house.

00:55:27.000 | It's a fraction of the cost

00:55:28.000 | of what it would be to actually do this

00:55:30.000 | the old-fashioned way with people in your house.

00:55:33.000 | So if you wanna get healthier,

00:55:34.000 | this is how you do it, MyBodyTutor.

00:55:37.000 | So the good news is,

00:55:38.000 | Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners

00:55:40.000 | $50 off their first month.

00:55:42.000 | All you have to do is mention

00:55:43.000 | the Deep Questions podcast when you sign up.

00:55:45.000 | So go to MyBodyTutor.com.

00:55:47.000 | Sign up and mention that you came

00:55:50.000 | from the Deep Questions podcast.

00:55:52.000 | I also wanna talk about

00:55:53.000 | our longtime friends at Blinkist.

00:55:56.000 | Blinkist is an app that gives you

00:55:58.000 | more than 6,500 book summaries

00:56:01.000 | and expert-led audio guides

00:56:03.000 | to read and listen to

00:56:04.000 | in just 15 minutes per title.

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00:56:12.000 | on the go and get entertained

00:56:14.000 | at the same time.

00:56:16.000 | I think reading is very important.

00:56:18.000 | I talk about it all the time on this show.

00:56:20.000 | And as I've mentioned,

00:56:22.000 | Jesse and I use Blinkist

00:56:24.000 | as part of our reading ritual.

00:56:27.000 | What we do is if there's a book

00:56:28.000 | that interests us,

00:56:29.000 | we add that to our Blinkist queue,

00:56:32.000 | and then we get a chance,

00:56:33.000 | we listen to the blink or read the blink,

00:56:34.000 | takes 15 minutes,

00:56:35.000 | and that's how we figure out,

00:56:36.000 | ooh, should I buy this book or not?

00:56:39.000 | There's other ways you can do this as well.

00:56:40.000 | The summaries are entertaining on their own.

00:56:43.000 | It's a quick way to survey a field.

00:56:45.000 | But I find it to be like a great

00:56:46.000 | sort of assistant for helping

00:56:48.000 | to triage possible books

00:56:49.000 | and figure out what it is you want to read.

00:56:52.000 | There's a good feature I want to mention right now

00:56:54.000 | called Blinkist Connect.

00:56:56.000 | So right now with Blinkist,

00:56:57.000 | you can give another person

00:56:58.000 | unlimited access for free.

00:57:00.000 | So you basically get a two for one deal.

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00:57:06.000 | All right, so let's talk deals here.

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00:57:42.000 | All right, Jesse,

00:57:43.000 | let's go to our final segment.

00:57:46.000 | I want to react today in our final segment

00:57:48.000 | to an interesting piece of news

00:57:49.000 | that someone sent to my

00:57:51.000 | interesting@calnewport.com email list.

00:57:54.000 | I have this article up on the screen

00:57:56.000 | for those who are listening instead of--

00:57:58.000 | I mean, watching instead of just listening.

00:58:01.000 | All right, this is from CNBC.

00:58:03.000 | Here is the headline of the article.

00:58:06.000 | Whole Foods CEO swears

00:58:08.000 | by one productivity-boosting strategy.

00:58:11.000 | Quote, "I don't get stuck in meeting after meeting."

00:58:15.000 | All right, I'm intrigued.

00:58:17.000 | What is the one productivity-boosting strategy

00:58:19.000 | that prevents him from getting stuck

00:58:21.000 | in meeting after meeting?

00:58:22.000 | Let's go down to the article body here.

00:58:25.000 | All right.

00:58:26.000 | And I'm going to read

00:58:28.000 | the first couple of paragraphs.

00:58:30.000 | Whole Foods Market CEO Jason Buchel

00:58:34.000 | has one primary tactic

00:58:36.000 | that keeps him productive, he says.

00:58:39.000 | Time blocking.

00:58:40.000 | "It's important that I time block my schedule

00:58:42.000 | "so I don't get stuck in meeting after meeting

00:58:44.000 | "and I can focus on Whole Foods Market's

00:58:46.000 | "longer-term vision and strategy.

00:58:50.000 | "The time blocking method involves

00:58:51.000 | "carving out specific windows of time

00:58:53.000 | "for high-priority work tasks.

00:58:56.000 | "Spending time in physical stores

00:58:57.000 | "is a big priority for Buchel, for example,

00:58:59.000 | "so he reserves time in his calendar each Friday

00:59:01.000 | "to visit at least one location."

00:59:03.000 | All right, let's stop right there.

00:59:06.000 | He's using the term time blocking,

00:59:08.000 | more or less how I use it.

00:59:10.000 | When I talk about time blocking,

00:59:11.000 | I do mean giving every minute of the day a job

00:59:14.000 | so that you're executing a plan for your time

00:59:16.000 | as opposed to just deciding as the day goes on,

00:59:20.000 | what should I work on next?

00:59:22.000 | Where we differ here a little bit

00:59:24.000 | is typically when I talk about time blocking,

00:59:26.000 | I talk about time blocking the current day.

00:59:29.000 | It's hard to build a detailed time block plan

00:59:31.000 | for more than one day at a time.

00:59:33.000 | Now, what the Whole Foods CEO here is talking about

00:59:35.000 | is time blocking out in advance.

00:59:39.000 | So how do we rectify this with my type of advice?

00:59:42.000 | I'm not sure if I would use the term time blocking,

00:59:44.000 | but what he's capturing here is a mixture

00:59:46.000 | of weekly planning and autopilot scheduling.

00:59:49.000 | All right, so in my cosmology of personal productivity,

00:59:54.000 | weekly planning is where at the beginning of the week

00:59:58.000 | you survey what's on your calendar and say,

01:00:01.000 | "What is it? What is my week?

01:00:02.000 | "What are my priorities?

01:00:03.000 | "Do I want to shift anything around?

01:00:04.000 | "Do I want to cancel anything?"

01:00:05.000 | And one of the things you do during your weekly plan

01:00:07.000 | is say, "What are my big goals?

01:00:10.000 | "Do I want to protect some time this week,

01:00:13.000 | "which I will treat like any other meeting or appointment,

01:00:15.000 | "to make progress on my big goals?"

01:00:16.000 | It makes sense to do that at the beginning of the week.

01:00:19.000 | So that's time blocking

01:00:20.000 | in the sense that you're blocking off time,

01:00:22.000 | but you're doing it at the beginning of your week.

01:00:25.000 | So let's say the CEO had some priority of like,

01:00:28.000 | "I'm really working on understanding

01:00:33.000 | "our market demographics.

01:00:34.000 | "We really have to change things around."

01:00:36.000 | He might then, when he's doing his weekly plan,

01:00:38.000 | find a couple of blocks to block off

01:00:40.000 | the focus on like reading through those reports or something.

01:00:44.000 | The other thing this is relevant to is autopilot scheduling,

01:00:47.000 | which is actually what I think he's doing

01:00:48.000 | in the specific example he gives here.

01:00:51.000 | That's where you have something you know

01:00:52.000 | you need to do on a regular basis,

01:00:54.000 | so you set it up on your calendar

01:00:55.000 | to appear on a regular basis.

01:00:57.000 | So the CEO of Whole Foods wants to spend Fridays

01:01:02.000 | going to a location.

01:01:04.000 | That's an autopilot schedule right there.

01:01:06.000 | The Fridays are all blocked off

01:01:07.000 | or certain times are blocked off in advance,

01:01:09.000 | going to locations, right?

01:01:11.000 | So stuff you know you need to do that's important

01:01:14.000 | that happens on a regular schedule,

01:01:15.000 | just get that on your schedule in advance.

01:01:19.000 | So if you're doing these things,

01:01:20.000 | weekly planning and autopilot scheduling,

01:01:22.000 | now when you get to a particular day

01:01:24.000 | and you're time blocking that day,

01:01:25.000 | there might already be quite a few things on there

01:01:28.000 | that have already been placed in advance

01:01:29.000 | that are important.

01:01:30.000 | So you might not actually have that much free time

01:01:32.000 | left to block.

01:01:34.000 | All right, now there's another little tip

01:01:36.000 | that's given in here, which I really like.

01:01:39.000 | This is a in-the-trenches tactical tip around meetings

01:01:43.000 | coming from someone who gets a lot of meetings.

01:01:45.000 | So let me read this for you here,

01:01:46.000 | 'cause I like this idea.

01:01:49.000 | "Getting calendar bombed by unproductive meetings

01:01:52.000 | can derail his day."

01:01:54.000 | He recently told LinkedIn's

01:01:55.000 | "This Is Working" podcast and video series.

01:01:57.000 | "Bugle's daily time block schedule, though,

01:01:59.000 | means he's only going to meetings

01:02:01.000 | that I really need to be there for

01:02:03.000 | and that are only as long as they need to be.

01:02:05.000 | On a typical day, Bugle can have 10 meetings or more,

01:02:08.000 | he tells Makeit.

01:02:09.000 | The company encourages staff to hold

01:02:11.000 | 20 and 50-minute meetings

01:02:13.000 | to free up 10-minute intervals in between

01:02:16.000 | during which they can work on any action items discussed.

01:02:19.000 | He uses these 10-minute windows

01:02:21.000 | for running ad hoc meetings with my direct reports

01:02:24.000 | or dealing with a pressing issue that might pop up."

01:02:27.000 | This is a fantastic idea.

01:02:29.000 | Again, it's not time block planning,

01:02:31.000 | but the post-meeting block

01:02:33.000 | is something that I regularly recommend.

01:02:36.000 | It's something that plays a big role in my book,

01:02:38.000 | "Slow Productivity."

01:02:39.000 | The idea is when you schedule a meeting,

01:02:41.000 | you have to schedule 10 or 15 minutes

01:02:43.000 | immediately following the meeting

01:02:45.000 | for processing and taking action

01:02:47.000 | on what was just discussed.

01:02:49.000 | Otherwise, if you stack meetings

01:02:51.000 | without an air gap on your schedule,

01:02:54.000 | what's going to happen is

01:02:56.000 | you're going to get a bunch of stuff

01:02:58.000 | in this meeting that needs to be done,

01:03:00.000 | you have to think through,

01:03:02.000 | new obligations are now on your plate,

01:03:04.000 | and they're going to be right there in your brain

01:03:06.000 | as you move right into the next meeting.

01:03:08.000 | Completely different context,

01:03:09.000 | completely different demands.

01:03:10.000 | And now you're trying to remember these

01:03:12.000 | while new things are coming up.

01:03:14.000 | And then you go to your next meeting.

01:03:15.000 | If there's no cognitive air gap,

01:03:16.000 | then that's going to begin piling up

01:03:18.000 | and it's exhausting and it's stressful

01:03:20.000 | and you're going to forget things.

01:03:22.000 | You have 15 minutes or 10 minutes

01:03:24.000 | after each meeting, you say, "Great.

01:03:26.000 | All right, let me figure out what this meant.

01:03:29.000 | Let me go to my role-based status list

01:03:31.000 | and put tasks on here.

01:03:32.000 | Let me update my calendar.

01:03:34.000 | Let me send out the emails that I promised.

01:03:36.000 | Like, okay, I'm going to follow up on this.

01:03:38.000 | Let me send that email now.

01:03:40.000 | Hey, Jesse, we just had a meeting about it.

01:03:42.000 | Here's what we discussed.

01:03:43.000 | We want you to be involved.

01:03:44.000 | Here's the feedback we need.

01:03:46.000 | Let me give you a bit of a process here

01:03:48.000 | because I do process-centric emailing.

01:03:50.000 | I created a shared document.

01:03:52.000 | Please put your thoughts in there.

01:03:54.000 | You can wait till Friday.

01:03:56.000 | If you have any questions,

01:03:57.000 | like grab me at my next office hours,

01:03:58.000 | let me send that off."

01:03:59.000 | You're closing all the loops from the meeting.

01:04:01.000 | So you can go to the meeting with a fresh start.

01:04:03.000 | And what I like about this particular way

01:04:05.000 | that the CEO talked about it

01:04:07.000 | is because he's in big meetings with big teams,

01:04:09.000 | he brings his direct reports with him

01:04:13.000 | to the post-meeting block.

01:04:15.000 | That's pretty clever, right?

01:04:16.000 | Now that I think about this,

01:04:19.000 | I usually do this at my faculty meetings.

01:04:20.000 | After a big faculty meeting at my department,

01:04:22.000 | you have a quick impromptu post-meeting

01:04:25.000 | with like two people from the department

01:04:27.000 | to figure out the thing that involves both of you

01:04:29.000 | or all of you, right?

01:04:30.000 | So I like this idea

01:04:31.000 | that he will bring his direct reports

01:04:33.000 | into the after-action meeting

01:04:34.000 | and together they make sense of,

01:04:35.000 | "Okay, what are we doing next, if anything,

01:04:37.000 | because of this meeting?"

01:04:39.000 | All right, so we got a couple of good ideas here.

01:04:41.000 | Plan important stuff on your calendar in advance,

01:04:44.000 | whether this is in daily time block planning,

01:04:47.000 | weekly planning, or autopilot scheduling.

01:04:50.000 | And when you're scheduling meetings,

01:04:52.000 | add an after-meeting block for you

01:04:54.000 | or you and your most closest collaborators

01:04:56.000 | to make sense of

01:04:57.000 | and close every loop about what you just discussed.

01:05:00.000 | So there we go.

01:05:01.000 | Real productivity advice from the wild.

01:05:04.000 | All right, well,

01:05:05.000 | that's all the time we have for today's episode.

01:05:07.000 | Thank you, everyone,

01:05:08.000 | who sent in your questions or calls.

01:05:10.000 | We'll be back next week.

01:05:11.000 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:05:16.000 | So if you like today's discussion

01:05:18.000 | about cranking versus creating,

01:05:21.000 | I think you might also like episode 291,

01:05:24.000 | which was titled, "Do Better, Do Less."

01:05:28.000 | Check it out,

01:05:29.000 | because it highlights a key principle

01:05:32.000 | from my book, "Slow Productivity,"

01:05:35.000 | about how to move your professional life

01:05:37.000 | away from busyness

01:05:39.000 | and toward producing results that matter.

How To Slow Down Time & Get More Done - The Productivity Paradox | Cal Newport

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