How I Manage My Time - The Weekly Productivity Template To Achieve More

00:00:00.000 | So I want to talk to you today about a piece of my own productivity toolkit that I don't

00:00:05.200 | think I have talked much about before, but it's key to my operation.

00:00:10.600 | It's also an exercise I just went through preparing for the fall quarter that is just

00:00:15.920 | beginning.

00:00:16.920 | So I thought this was a great time to talk about it because I could use examples for

00:00:20.320 | my own life as I just went through this.

00:00:22.740 | So what is this tool we're going to talk about?

00:00:24.720 | I call it the weekly template.

00:00:27.000 | To understand the weekly template, we have to briefly zoom out and remind ourselves about

00:00:33.380 | how my multiscale planning framework works because weekly templates fit into this framework.

00:00:40.000 | All right, quick review for the new listeners.

00:00:42.240 | In multiscale planning, you start at the timescale of the current quarter.

00:00:46.060 | It's like right now you'd be thinking about the fall and you have a strategic plan or

00:00:49.640 | quarterly plan for that period of time.

00:00:51.960 | What are the big things I'm working on?

00:00:54.160 | What are the goals I have for this quarter?

00:00:56.180 | What do I want to keep in mind that is important to me in this quarter?

00:00:58.980 | This is where you keep yourself oriented towards the big picture of your ideal lifestyle.

00:01:05.440 | Every week at the beginning of the week, you look at your quarterly plan to help you create

00:01:11.760 | your weekly plan for the week ahead, right?

00:01:14.000 | This is where you actually look at what's going to happen in the days.

00:01:16.520 | You're going to spend a lot of time here with your calendar.

00:01:18.840 | You're going to spend a lot of time here with whatever task capture system you use.

00:01:23.020 | You're going to put aside time when you're working on your weekly plan on your calendar

00:01:26.720 | for the week to make progress on important initiatives to protect that time.

00:01:30.600 | This is where you might also make adjustments to your current plans.

00:01:34.840 | You know what, I'm going to cancel this meeting and move this meeting over here because that's

00:01:37.680 | going to free up a lot of time here and I need a lot of time to get this bigger initiative

00:01:40.600 | done.

00:01:41.660 | You then look at your weekly plan every morning when you create your daily plan.

00:01:46.440 | And there I suggest time blocking, give every minute of your day a job, end with a clear

00:01:51.120 | shutdown.

00:01:52.420 | So in this way, your big picture vision as capturing your quarterly plan is influencing

00:01:56.480 | everything you're doing throughout the day without requiring you to think about your

00:01:59.960 | big picture plan at every moment throughout your day.

00:02:02.800 | All right, so here's where the weekly template comes in.

00:02:05.880 | It is a piece of supporting infrastructure to span from your quarterly plan to your weekly

00:02:12.280 | plan.

00:02:13.760 | So the way I want you to think about your weekly template is a collection of guidelines

00:02:20.140 | that you put in place at the beginning of a quarter that you consistently plan when

00:02:24.400 | you're working on your weekly plan.

00:02:27.140 | So it's a way to, at a scale somewhat larger than each week, make sure that your weeks

00:02:31.700 | are going to be viable to move you where you want to go.

00:02:34.980 | That's pretty vague.

00:02:35.980 | So what I want to do is go through one, two, three, four, four types of things that you

00:02:42.700 | would put in a weekly template and then hopefully this mechanism becomes more clear.

00:02:46.900 | All right, the first element that might be in a weekly template is protected time.

00:02:53.340 | That's where you decide for this whole quarter, there is a certain time each week that I am

00:02:58.220 | preemptively protecting.

00:03:00.740 | So for myself, for example, in my current weekly template for the fall, I don't have

00:03:05.740 | any teaching in the mornings and my plan is mornings are for writing at least until 1030,

00:03:13.140 | but later on days when I can go later.

00:03:16.060 | That's part of my weekly template.

00:03:17.660 | I've actually gone through and just protected that time on my calendar for the entire fall.

00:03:23.580 | So part of my weekly template is I'm writing in the morning.

00:03:27.660 | You might, for example, have regular protected time for I exercise every day at my lunch

00:03:32.700 | hour.

00:03:33.700 | You might have regular protected time for you're working on a self-education project

00:03:37.340 | to open up new career capital opportunities.

00:03:39.260 | This is when I do my learning.

00:03:41.100 | So just fixing in advance, this time I'm always using for this particular type of activity.

00:03:46.860 | That's a big element of a weekly template.

00:03:49.100 | Now I'm going to give you an advanced gloss on that tip.

00:03:53.500 | Hard thing about having a simple rule about this time is always dedicated to this activity

00:03:58.820 | is that you will have exceptions.

00:04:01.040 | Let me use myself as an example here.

00:04:02.460 | I want to write every morning and I'm willing to be a pain about this, by the way.

00:04:06.200 | I'm willing in the moment to be a pain and say, no, I'm sorry, I know it would be convenient

00:04:09.940 | for everyone if I could meet at 930.

00:04:12.780 | I can't do things in the morning.

00:04:14.220 | Like I'm willing to protect this, but there's, there's two things I can't get around.

00:04:18.060 | Once a month, we have a faculty meeting.

00:04:19.700 | Faculty meetings have always been on Friday mornings.

00:04:22.660 | I can't miss the faculty meetings.

00:04:24.500 | The other thing I can't get around is that my kid's school, when they have events at

00:04:29.260 | school where parents come in to see kids work the way they do it, and I appreciate this

00:04:33.380 | is like, let's just do this first thing in the morning, as soon as school starts.

00:04:37.740 | So parents can then go on to their work days without having missed too much.

00:04:41.220 | So clearly when those things happen, that will interrupt my plan of writing first thing

00:04:45.220 | in the morning.

00:04:46.220 | So I have these two exceptions I know I can't get around.

00:04:48.420 | So what I have is a exception handling routine where I say, great, when those two things

00:04:53.380 | happen, I have a very specific thing I do to compensate for that lost time.

00:04:58.680 | So the faculty meeting, as soon as that's over, I'm going to this library on campus,

00:05:02.300 | 90 minutes writing.

00:05:04.520 | If I have to go in to my kid's school, I'm going straight from the school to this coffee

00:05:08.060 | shop writing right away.

00:05:10.300 | So I have an exception handling routine there as part of my protected time in my template.

00:05:15.380 | All right, second common element of a weekly template, daily themes.

00:05:20.740 | You start thinking, okay, for the quarter ahead, maybe I want to dedicate different

00:05:25.700 | days of the week for different types of activities.

00:05:28.780 | This is something you want to figure out ahead of time.

00:05:32.620 | For example, you might have meeting days and non-meeting days.

00:05:36.940 | You know, okay, I want to keep Mondays free of meetings.

00:05:40.740 | So I can really get into the week and get my arms around things, make progress on things.

00:05:45.740 | Mondays are non-meeting days.

00:05:46.780 | That's a weekly template decision.

00:05:48.260 | Every week you apply that to your week when you're making your plan.

00:05:52.180 | You might say, for example, I want to theme what type of roles I work on on different

00:05:57.580 | days.

00:05:58.580 | So maybe I need to do meetings every day of the week, but I'm going to put meetings on

00:06:01.580 | this particular role on Tuesdays and meetings for this particular role on Wednesdays, right?

00:06:07.660 | These are regular rules that you keep in mind when it comes time to actually schedule.

00:06:12.660 | In my own academic career, I often have, for example, class days versus non-class days.

00:06:18.420 | Class days are days where I'm teaching.

00:06:20.500 | I treat those days differently in my weekly template when I think about what I do there

00:06:24.740 | versus non-class days.

00:06:27.020 | I like to meet with students on class days.

00:06:28.820 | I like to do Georgetown-related administrative work on class days.

00:06:32.620 | If I have meetings with an administrator or an advising dean or something like this, let's

00:06:36.340 | do this on class days.

00:06:37.420 | Let's make the theme of class days the non-research part of being a professor.

00:06:42.820 | And then on a research day, well, I'm going to schedule most few of those things.

00:06:45.820 | So I can have more unbroken time to actually work on thinking deeply.

00:06:51.220 | You can also have, for example, Fridays as a lighter day, or your theme for Fridays is

00:06:56.180 | no meetings in the afternoon, finish at three, so theming days.

00:07:00.540 | That's a weekly template.

00:07:01.540 | I'm always doing this on these particular days.

00:07:05.820 | The third way on the third element that could go into a weekly template, regular rules and

00:07:11.780 | limits.

00:07:12.780 | Right?

00:07:13.780 | So this is not about particular time, but more about particular rules or limits to the

00:07:18.900 | things that are coming towards you that you're going to enforce for the particular quarter.

00:07:25.120 | So for example, a rule example might be, every time a meeting or call is scheduled on my

00:07:30.980 | calendar, I am going to make sure there is 15 minutes at the end of that calendar event

00:07:35.860 | for processing that meeting or call.

00:07:37.780 | Now, this either means I put aside an hour and make it clear that this call or meeting

00:07:43.860 | is for 45 minutes, or I'm adding 15 minutes to the other end of the hour-long meeting

00:07:49.500 | or call, however you want to do it.

00:07:50.700 | But this is like a very useful rule.

00:07:52.060 | It's a case study.

00:07:53.060 | It's an example.

00:07:54.340 | This way you can process things discussed in a meeting, get things into your systems,

00:07:58.740 | clear your head before you move on.

00:08:00.140 | Right?

00:08:01.140 | This is like a useful type of rule.

00:08:04.960 | Limits might be things like, I'm not speaking this semester.

00:08:09.700 | This is very specific to me as a writer, but there's certainly quarters where, let's say,

00:08:14.020 | I'm deep in the trying to finish a book manuscript, or I'm on a book tour for a book manuscript

00:08:19.540 | where I will just have a simple rule, I'm taking on no speaking gigs.

00:08:22.660 | Right?

00:08:23.660 | I just have a simple rule like that.

00:08:25.140 | These could also be quotas.

00:08:27.660 | I am only doing one podcast a week.

00:08:30.700 | That's an actual quota I have in place right now.

00:08:34.160 | This fall, I was on a book tour in the spring.

00:08:37.540 | Now I'm not on a book tour.

00:08:38.540 | I don't want to stop completely spreading the word about my new book, Slow Productivity.

00:08:43.580 | But I also do not want to be in that five to 10 podcasts a week like it was during book

00:08:49.180 | tour.

00:08:50.180 | I really need to be focusing on other things now.

00:08:51.180 | So I have a simple rule, one podcast per week.

00:08:52.740 | If that week has this podcast, I just don't make it available.

00:08:56.500 | Having these rules in place makes it so easy to react to the incoming.

00:09:00.860 | You might have a similar rule, for example, with committees you're joining.

00:09:04.500 | Okay, I'm just going to do two committees.

00:09:07.060 | That's it.

00:09:08.060 | I have to choose two committees I'm going to be on.

00:09:09.060 | There's only five peer review papers I'm going to do.

00:09:13.020 | Maybe there's a particular type of thing you get pulled into in your company and you say,

00:09:16.180 | I'm not going to do that more than once a month.

00:09:18.820 | Once I've done it once for a month, I'll say no, not till the next month.

00:09:21.300 | So rules and limits are a part of a weekly template.

00:09:23.660 | Finally, autopilot scheduling.

00:09:26.740 | Looking at things that you know occur regularly or will recur regularly throughout the quarter

00:09:31.260 | and say, when do I want to do it?

00:09:33.300 | I just want to figure that out in advance.

00:09:34.660 | I don't want to be each week when I sit down to do my weekly planning, asking myself, when

00:09:40.740 | am I going to find time for this?

00:09:41.900 | I'm going to make that decision at the beginning of the quarter.

00:09:45.220 | Friday afternoons is when I do this type of work.

00:09:48.100 | The online class I'm taking, that's first thing in the morning, Monday and Wednesdays.

00:09:52.460 | I don't want to have to think about it.

00:09:53.620 | That's just when it is.

00:09:54.620 | That's just when I do it.

00:09:55.620 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:09:56.620 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:10:01.180 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:10:08.660 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:14.080 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:19.460 | I know you're going to like it.

00:10:21.260 | Check it out.

00:10:22.260 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:24.580 | One of the more interesting things and one of the more effective things you can add as

00:10:27.460 | part of your autopiloting for your weekly schedule is office hours, all right?

00:10:32.880 | When do I want to regularly have time to handle short things that are going to require back

00:10:37.780 | and forth interaction and get it out of my inbox?

00:10:39.660 | I'll give you an example of that from today.

00:10:43.880 | I won't get too specific.

00:10:45.760 | It's like a Georgetown administrative example.

00:10:50.040 | Someone wrote me from the department.

00:10:51.040 | There's a couple of things.

00:10:52.840 | None of it that complicated.

00:10:53.840 | It had to do with class registration and this class is too full.

00:10:57.680 | This one might not be enough people.

00:11:00.960 | Nothing super complicated, but it was a little ambiguous, like, "Well, so how can I be useful

00:11:06.040 | here?

00:11:07.040 | What's really the issue?"

00:11:08.040 | So my first instinct was, "Let me just send back an email now so I can get this out of

00:11:12.760 | my inbox and that's just going to be kind of clarifying, we'll kind of go back and forth

00:11:15.820 | and figure this out."

00:11:16.820 | I said, "No, no, no, no, no.

00:11:18.160 | We could do this in 45 seconds of talking."

00:11:21.080 | So I said, "Let's just talk it.

00:11:23.640 | We were going to see each other later."

00:11:24.800 | It took 45 seconds.

00:11:25.800 | Like, "So what'd you mean by this?

00:11:27.360 | Oh, okay.

00:11:28.360 | Do you need this from me?

00:11:29.360 | No.

00:11:30.360 | What about that?

00:11:31.360 | Great.

00:11:32.360 | Oh, one exception.

00:11:33.360 | Great.

00:11:34.360 | Okay, good."

00:11:35.360 | 45 seconds, we were done.

00:11:36.360 | Office hours allows you to get that compression on a regular basis.

00:11:37.360 | And then at the same time, you can push in interactions that require more than like one

00:11:41.520 | message back in response, right?

00:11:43.120 | So just autopiloting, where is the regular stuff actually going to happen?

00:11:49.500 | There's clearly some overlap between autopiloting and time protection.

00:11:52.800 | Time protection is more like my mornings are for writing.

00:11:57.060 | The exact details of that might depend on the day, right?

00:12:00.360 | Time protection might be Friday afternoons, I go to the cabin in the woods and just do

00:12:07.760 | brainstorming, right?

00:12:09.800 | Autopilot is more like this hour on this day is when I prep my course.

00:12:14.680 | This is when I go through my batch.

00:12:16.420 | So it's much more like specific time blocks that you know are going to happen on a regular

00:12:20.680 | basis.

00:12:21.680 | So there's some overlap there.

00:12:22.680 | Anyway, so these type of things go into a weekly template.

00:12:25.600 | So your weekly template, I have a fall weekly template, just goes in your quarterly plan.

00:12:29.400 | It's right there on the top.

00:12:30.400 | Like, here's my general template I want to follow each week.

00:12:32.680 | When I'm scheduling my week, think about what's in the template.

00:12:36.120 | It really does make a difference.

00:12:38.720 | Because you don't have to go through all of the thought processes required to figure out

00:12:42.680 | these elements of your weekly template.

00:12:44.240 | You don't have to go through those from scratch each week.

00:12:48.340 | Some weeks when you're creating your weekly plan, you have a good cup of coffee, you got

00:12:52.480 | a good night's sleep.

00:12:53.480 | And you're really like, I'm thinking about this, I'm innovative.

00:12:55.780 | Other times, like, oh my god, I'm just trying to figure out roughly how I want to get things

00:12:59.240 | done.

00:13:00.360 | So you want the template there to support you.

00:13:03.040 | It's like you're, I call it a template because you think of it as like, here's my template

00:13:06.400 | for the ideal week would have these elements.

00:13:08.120 | I'm right in the morning.

00:13:09.120 | I'm not doing too many of these.

00:13:10.680 | These are meeting days.

00:13:11.680 | These are non-meeting days.

00:13:12.680 | Like it's the, it gives you the recipe or the template for what you think for that quarter

00:13:16.520 | is going to be an effective week.

00:13:19.040 | Quarter is the right timeframe to work on this.

00:13:21.440 | Because things change.

00:13:22.440 | Like what's relevant for me in the fall will be different than what's relevant to me in

00:13:25.480 | the winter.

00:13:26.480 | And that's true for a lot of other period people as well.

00:13:28.560 | So your, your, your quarterly plan check is like the right timescale in which to look

00:13:32.360 | at these templates.

00:13:33.360 | Two, you're gonna have to adjust it a bunch, you get super ambitious.

00:13:37.860 | I'm going to every afternoon, you know, work in the woods and it turns out like that almost

00:13:43.700 | never works.

00:13:44.700 | There's like all these little things I can't avoid that keeps messing up that plan.

00:13:47.320 | I need to adjust this weekly template.

00:13:48.880 | That's great.

00:13:50.160 | Adjust as needed.

00:13:51.560 | Finally, at the end of a quarter, these are a good focuser for reflection.

00:13:58.480 | If you think back, what about these weekly templates that I like?

00:14:02.360 | What about them frustrated me?

00:14:04.160 | Like I really wanted to do this and I just could not make that work.

00:14:07.880 | Gives you, I think, deeper insight about what's working and not working in your job.

00:14:12.400 | Much deeper insight than just like a typical day.

00:14:14.320 | You can have busy days.

00:14:15.320 | You can have non-busy days.

00:14:16.320 | There could be a deadline where you're overwhelmed and other times you're bored.

00:14:19.320 | But when you think back about your lower timescale, your larger timescale weekly template adjustments,

00:14:25.000 | I think you get a deeper insight about what you're looking for in your working life, what's

00:14:28.240 | working and what's not.

00:14:31.080 | You love the like, my mornings were for writing.

00:14:34.200 | Maybe this was like super effective.

00:14:35.400 | Now you're having some insight of like, you know what?

00:14:37.080 | Maybe I'm well suited for like a more self paced, more like what matters is what you

00:14:42.840 | produce type job.

00:14:44.580 | Maybe you're really frustrated that you couldn't make something like that work and it's telling

00:14:47.680 | you about, you know, the meeting pace of my job is really incompatible.

00:14:51.640 | That's what I have to find a way to change.

00:14:53.040 | That might be changing my role and changing my expectations.

00:14:55.440 | I think there's great insight that comes from your grappling with your vision of the ideal

00:15:00.800 | week.

00:15:01.800 | It kind of lives in this nice sweet spot between the idiosyncratic difficulties of a particular

00:15:08.320 | day and the very aspirational big picture visions of like, where do I want to be five

00:15:12.700 | years from now?

00:15:13.700 | It kind of gets that more, what's happening, what's not happening.

00:15:16.240 | It's getting the trends of your job, not individual days, but also not the two area of images.

00:15:22.160 | So it's the fall now.

00:15:24.240 | Figure out your weekly template just to summarize again, the elements that might go into that

00:15:28.920 | regularly protected time themes for various days, rules and limits and autopilot scheduling.

00:15:35.740 | Get one of these figured out for your, your fall ahead.

00:15:38.240 | It's really good.

00:15:39.240 | You're going to feel like your weeks are much better, much less exhausting, much more productive

00:15:44.280 | in the sense of making progress on the things you care about.

00:15:46.560 | You're going to be less frustrated.

00:15:48.400 | It really can make you feel like it has a different job versus the alternative of just

00:15:52.280 | like now I'm facing this week.

00:15:54.480 | It's full of all this stuff.

00:15:56.140 | I guess this seems fine.

00:15:57.760 | Let's just go day to day and time block and make the most of it, right?

00:16:00.040 | It is going to feel like a completely different job, even though you haven't actually officially

00:16:03.960 | changed anything about your role.

00:16:06.540 | So give your weekly template a try.

00:16:09.360 | I have one specific question and a broader one.

00:16:12.000 | I guess I'll go with a specific one first.

00:16:14.480 | When you start your writing, is it usually around 830?

00:16:19.240 | Usually it's 830, sometimes it's earlier.

00:16:22.840 | So ideally two hours?

00:16:24.960 | Ideally two hours.

00:16:25.960 | So if I know I'm ending on the earlier side, I might start earlier, right?

00:16:30.180 | So we leave, we leave the house to walk the kids to the bus stop at 730.

00:16:37.000 | And typically my wife and I both walked into the bus stop together because we like to walk

00:16:40.840 | back.

00:16:41.840 | We like to catch up.

00:16:44.040 | But if she has something early, then I'll just take them.

00:16:46.440 | If I have something, like if I know I have an 11 or a 1030 meeting, I might just bow

00:16:51.120 | out the walking that day and then I could start my writing right at 730 and get that

00:16:55.280 | extra hour.

00:16:56.680 | So it just sort of depends on what's going on.

00:16:58.880 | And then ideally six days a week or five days a week?

00:17:02.080 | Five days a week.

00:17:03.080 | Six day is needed.

00:17:04.080 | Okay.

00:17:05.080 | Right.

00:17:06.080 | Sunday session is needed.

00:17:07.080 | Occasionally evening sessions, but I won't get too much in that now because I think we

00:17:09.120 | have a question.

00:17:10.120 | Yeah.

00:17:11.120 | We have a question.

00:17:12.120 | We have a question.

00:17:13.120 | So I don't, I don't make right now.

00:17:14.120 | I'm trying to at least not making the six day regular.

00:17:16.160 | Yeah.

00:17:17.160 | I would like not to have to do it on the sixth day.

00:17:19.600 | So I'm going to see if this metronome regular relentless every single morning you're making

00:17:25.960 | progress.

00:17:26.960 | Like I have a sense that's going to add up to in a slow productivity sense that will

00:17:30.480 | keep me on pace.

00:17:31.480 | Well, that's what you do when you wrote slow productivity, right?

00:17:34.080 | Yeah.

00:17:35.080 | I mean, I, I think I was thinking about using Sundays more.

00:17:39.760 | Oh, okay.

00:17:40.760 | So then I helped start at my kid's school, a robotics team and we, we meet on Sunday

00:17:46.560 | mornings.

00:17:47.840 | So like that kind of took out the time I was very, that's, I would often write on Sunday

00:17:51.780 | mornings that ate up that time.

00:17:54.760 | So then last year, like I wasn't writing as much on Sundays as I usually do.

00:17:59.560 | And so now I'm going to kind of see how that goes, make that more permanent.

00:18:03.560 | And then my broad question is, does a template look more like a calendar in your weekly plan?

00:18:07.040 | Is it more like a bulleted list?

00:18:08.720 | The bulleted list.

00:18:09.880 | Okay.

00:18:10.880 | Yeah.

00:18:11.880 | So, so my fall template, I call it, um, it's categories and bullet points.

00:18:15.280 | Okay.

00:18:16.280 | Yeah.

00:18:17.280 | So it's like, here are my elements of, uh, here are the elements.

00:18:19.520 | I think I used a wording of like, here's my, the elements of my ideal week for this quarter.

00:18:23.640 | I mean, I used the word semester cause I'm a professor, but same idea.

00:18:27.000 | Yeah.

00:18:28.000 | And just put it right at the top of, uh, your quarterly plan because you're looking at that

00:18:31.320 | every week.

00:18:32.400 | And that's exactly when you want to remind yourself of, of your, of your template.

00:18:36.280 | All right.

00:18:37.280 | Cool.

00:18:38.280 | So we've got a bunch of questions that are kind of similarly tactical again, we're following

00:18:41.240 | our theme here of back to, back to school, back to work.

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00:22:58.800 | Speaking of questions, Jesse, let's move on to our questions.

00:23:05.320 | All right.

00:23:06.320 | Who do we have first?

00:23:07.480 | All right.

00:23:08.480 | First question's from Aaron.

00:23:09.480 | "In your podcast with Andrew Huberman, you mentioned the importance of a fixed schedule

00:23:13.560 | and that you usually like to stop working around 5.30.

00:23:16.600 | You also mentioned that you occasionally have a 90-minute writing session in the evening

00:23:20.000 | when you need to get something written on deadline.

00:23:22.400 | Is that something you time block in your day ahead of time, or is it the result of overflow

00:23:26.120 | work just not getting done during the day?

00:23:28.080 | Do you wait until after it's over to do your shutdown routine?"

00:23:31.320 | All right, Aaron.

00:23:32.440 | Good questions.

00:23:33.440 | I'm actually, these days, in my weekly template, I typically aim, actually, now I'm finishing

00:23:40.720 | before 5.30 because I'm using exercise as my transition.

00:23:47.480 | After I do my shutdown routine, I'm using exercise almost every day as my transition

00:23:52.480 | from work to non-work.

00:23:53.840 | I find that really helps to have a difficult physical strain, helps reset your body physiologically,

00:24:01.320 | not to mention your brain psychologically for life outside of work.

00:24:05.200 | These workouts I'm doing, though, can require 45, 50 minutes, so I'm ending work a little

00:24:12.280 | earlier now.

00:24:13.280 | I like to get going in the exercise when possible before 5, so I'm ending a little earlier.

00:24:17.960 | All right, so let's get to the meat of your question.

00:24:21.320 | I do sometimes write in the evening.

00:24:23.200 | Okay, so how does that fit within my daily time block plan?

00:24:27.940 | It's after the shutdown, right, because the shutdown routine is where you're closing all

00:24:32.320 | the open loops of your day, you're reviewing your plan for the week ahead, you're convincing

00:24:37.680 | yourself that it is fine to stop working, you're not forgetting anything, there's nothing

00:24:41.920 | that is urgent that you need to deal with before the next day, and then you either check

00:24:46.420 | your shutdown complete checkbox in my time block planner, or you have some sort of catchphrase

00:24:52.000 | you say to signal to yourself, "I have reviewed everything, I'm comfortable shutting down,

00:24:56.300 | we don't have to think about work again."

00:24:58.400 | That is still worth doing at the end of your workday, because an evening writing session

00:25:02.280 | doesn't require you to have all those open loops open.

00:25:05.640 | An evening writing session is not checking your email, it's not planning, it's not working

00:25:09.080 | on projects, it's not thinking ahead, it's just a singular activity.

00:25:12.640 | I'm just sitting here and trying to write.

00:25:13.720 | So I do my normal shutdown.

00:25:15.680 | The evening writing is like something separate then, right?

00:25:18.760 | I don't time block it, because I don't time block after shutdown.

00:25:21.320 | I don't time block my non-work time.

00:25:23.640 | I just note, when I do a shutdown for the day, in my time block planner, I just write

00:25:28.520 | "evening."

00:25:29.520 | I kind of like bullet point below it, like roughly what I remember I want to try to get

00:25:33.560 | done that evening.

00:25:34.560 | I don't time block it.

00:25:35.560 | So I just note like, "Okay, I'm going to do an evening writing block," and I'll usually

00:25:38.640 | coordinate them with my wife and be like, "Okay, so if this works, here's what I'm going

00:25:41.720 | to do.

00:25:42.720 | I'll go to my office or head over to the coffee shop for like an hour, and here's what I'm

00:25:47.920 | going to do it."

00:25:48.920 | And so it's roughly time blocking, since I know I worked out with her when I'm going

00:25:52.080 | to do it, but I don't actually draw a time block, because I don't actually do time blocking

00:25:55.760 | in any formal sense on weekends or after shutdowns.

00:25:59.960 | For me, evening writing blocks are not overflow.

00:26:03.200 | I don't like this idea that if you don't finish your plan, just keep working.

00:26:08.960 | That means your plan was probably too ambitious, or you weren't being sufficiently focused

00:26:12.480 | during your day.

00:26:13.480 | I don't like using evenings for overflow, if at all possible.

00:26:16.440 | I typically use evening writing sessions because I'm trying to break a complicated story.

00:26:21.580 | So this will typically happen with my New Yorker writing.

00:26:24.480 | Those are hard articles to get into because the writing caliber is hard.

00:26:29.080 | The thinking has to be super sharp, but the writing, just the craft, has to be very high.

00:26:34.000 | It's a high bar of entry sometimes to get into them, so sometimes I like to make a running

00:26:38.100 | start at them by writing in a new location at a new time.

00:26:41.580 | So I'm going to BevCo, that's our coffee shop, going in the evening and coming at this

00:26:48.280 | in a new environment to try to harness some inspiration just to break into the piece.

00:26:53.460 | Once a piece is going, then it's more workmanlike and you can just schedule it.

00:26:57.000 | So typically that's what I'm doing with my afternoon writing sessions.

00:27:00.060 | If I am behind on a deadline, the thing I'll usually aim for is a long weekend writing

00:27:07.080 | session.

00:27:08.200 | That's more like, "Okay, I need to throw five hours at this thing, so maybe I'm going to

00:27:12.680 | stay home and work on this while the family's doing something else, or we'll go to my in-law's

00:27:17.560 | house and they have an outbuilding on their property sometimes, so great, I will go out

00:27:21.560 | there and write while you visit with your parents, etc."

00:27:26.200 | So that's the way I think about that, but good question.

00:27:28.080 | All right, what do we got next?

00:27:29.940 | Next question's from Mark.

00:27:30.940 | "I'm a new high school teacher.

00:27:32.660 | I also play in a successful band, so I currently have two sources of income.

00:27:36.560 | My passion is to start my own business.

00:27:38.480 | What is the best approach for me to leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur?"

00:27:42.920 | Well, Mark, I'm suspicious of your use of the word "passion" here.

00:27:47.280 | When someone says, "My passion is to start my own business," what that really means is,

00:27:51.160 | "I like the idea of starting my own business, and I'm going to call it my passion so that

00:27:56.540 | you have to go along with it."

00:27:58.000 | But you're not wired.

00:28:00.300 | This is my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:28:02.880 | You don't have some genetic predisposition for a particular job that exists in the 21st

00:28:07.560 | century freelance knowledge economy.

00:28:09.560 | When you say, "It's my passion," you're just saying, "I'm interested in starting a business."

00:28:13.600 | Okay, I'm glad you're interested in that.

00:28:16.200 | That by itself doesn't mean much to me, right?

00:28:18.000 | So I don't hear the word "passion" and have that sort of reaction of career genuflection,

00:28:25.360 | "Oh my God, you got to do that.

00:28:27.360 | We got to make that work."

00:28:28.640 | The word's kind of meaningless to me.

00:28:30.120 | So what should we do?

00:28:32.520 | Lifestyle-centric planning.

00:28:35.120 | We need to have this vision of your ideal lifestyle in a few years, and then 10 years

00:28:39.880 | or more out.

00:28:40.880 | We'll work on those two timeframes.

00:28:43.320 | This vision has to be holistic.

00:28:44.760 | It has to capture all the different areas of your life, like what type of place you're

00:28:48.040 | living in.

00:28:49.040 | What's the rhythm of your day?

00:28:50.040 | Who are you around?

00:28:51.800 | What do you smell?

00:28:52.800 | What do you taste?

00:28:53.800 | What do you see?

00:28:54.800 | What do you hear?

00:28:55.800 | You want to build this aspirational vision of the rhythms and realities of your day.

00:29:00.200 | What is it that you're trying to get towards?

00:29:02.480 | And then we can assess career capital you have or career capital that you could obtain

00:29:05.880 | and see how it would fit into that lifestyle vision.

00:29:10.000 | Maybe entrepreneurship works well in here, right?

00:29:11.920 | You're like, "Oh, you know what?

00:29:13.080 | If I do this, I could see a path towards this lifestyle I have that the teaching's not going

00:29:19.040 | to get there.

00:29:20.040 | This is more constrained," or whatever, fine.

00:29:22.200 | It could play a role in that.

00:29:23.280 | But I want you working backwards from an ideal lifestyle, not working forwards from something

00:29:26.460 | that you've just labeled a passion, because that's rough and it's crude, and it's often

00:29:31.960 | working off of a halcyon incomplete vision of what this thing really means.

00:29:35.480 | I want you working backwards from a lifestyle.

00:29:37.920 | That's how you do a real career capital analysis.

00:29:41.040 | You know exactly what you want to invest that career capital in, and now you're saying,

00:29:45.680 | "Can I get enough career capital?"

00:29:47.200 | You're being much more systematic about this.

00:29:51.120 | When you're doing lifestyle-centric planning in your situation, Mark, a big thing I want

00:29:56.000 | you to do is be very realistic about finances.

00:29:58.680 | Figure out, "For this vision I have, how much does it cost?

00:30:06.520 | How much am I spending?

00:30:07.960 | What would the spend be there?

00:30:08.960 | What would it get?"

00:30:09.960 | Real numbers here, right?

00:30:10.960 | This is really empowering for people.

00:30:12.760 | I'm sort of thinking about this chapter from my Deep Life book I'm working on now, that

00:30:16.320 | getting concrete numbers as well as this sense of complete understanding and control over

00:30:21.440 | your money right now, and these concrete evidence-based numbers for, "Well, if I lived here, it would

00:30:26.400 | cost this much, and I would need this much, and here's how much I can earn doing this

00:30:30.040 | and that."

00:30:31.400 | Working with real numbers is important because then you can start saying, for example, "Okay,

00:30:35.040 | if I wanted a small business to support me because then I could be more flexible and

00:30:40.280 | live this lifestyle where I'm in the woods all the time," or whatever it is.

00:30:43.280 | Now you have numbers, and now you could say, "Okay, so I need a small business to generate

00:30:46.760 | this much money."

00:30:47.760 | Now you can be like, "Okay, is that reasonable?

00:30:50.840 | Who's making that much money in these small businesses and why?"

00:30:53.600 | And then you can start doing an idea that I talk about in So Good They Can't Ignore

00:30:58.280 | You, called using money as a neutral indicator of value.

00:31:01.560 | Start seeing on the side, "Okay, well, how much money am I making money?

00:31:04.840 | I'm selling this product.

00:31:06.040 | Am I making money?

00:31:07.040 | Am I selling it?

00:31:08.040 | Right?

00:31:09.040 | Is no one buying it?

00:31:10.040 | Okay, this is a problem.

00:31:11.040 | Oh, people are buying it.

00:31:12.040 | That means there's some value here.

00:31:13.040 | So I could imagine I would have to 3x this for this plan."

00:31:14.040 | So you're getting really detailed about the financial realities, all of it working backwards

00:31:18.800 | from an ideal lifestyle vision.

00:31:21.240 | So I love hearing people talk about, use the phrase "lifestyle" or "ideal lifestyle" when

00:31:28.160 | thinking about their careers.

00:31:29.160 | I get nervous when I hear them say "passion."

00:31:32.240 | Passion just means I want to, and I don't want you to say anything about it.

00:31:35.720 | But I'm not convinced by that.

00:31:37.800 | So look, some sort of entrepreneurial push here might be a big part of achieving your

00:31:42.160 | vision that does give you lots of autonomy, jobs are a way of scaling up income that separate

00:31:47.760 | income from time.

00:31:48.760 | There's a lot of cool options there, but it's also really hard.

00:31:50.840 | So you want to get realistic about that.

00:31:52.520 | Also very cool that you play in a band.

00:31:54.600 | I love that.

00:31:55.600 | You know, Derek Sivers, so I talk about him in that book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:32:01.360 | He talks about leaving his job to be a musician full-time, and then leaving his job as a musician

00:32:07.960 | to run a small business.

00:32:10.280 | So that's my homework for you, Mark.

00:32:12.920 | Read So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:32:14.760 | Find in particular that chapter about using money as a neutral indicator of value.

00:32:20.480 | Read Derek Sivers' story because he made exactly these decisions.

00:32:25.280 | And I'll give you the TLDR.

00:32:27.360 | He left his job to be a full-time musician once he was making enough money already being

00:32:32.840 | a musician on the side to cover his expenses.

00:32:35.280 | He stopped his performing to work on his company full-time once his company was making him

00:32:41.440 | enough money on the side that he could live off of those expenses.

00:32:44.560 | So he let the money, not his sense of what would be cool, be the indicator of when he

00:32:49.920 | was ready to make a jump.

00:32:51.280 | He then sold that company for like $20-something million.

00:32:54.000 | So worked out well.

00:32:55.280 | Interesting guy.

00:32:56.280 | All right.

00:32:57.280 | Who do we got next?

00:32:58.280 | Next question's from Susan.

00:32:59.840 | I have academic writing that needs to be done for my career.

00:33:02.800 | I also have creating writing projects.

00:33:05.260 | Whenever I try to schedule my creative writing, the academic writing takes precedence, and

00:33:09.280 | I have time myself that I'll fit the creative writing stuff in whenever I find extra time.

00:33:13.720 | I do find extra time, but never enough to make real progress.

00:33:17.440 | I find time blocking for my creative/fun projects is stressful.

00:33:22.400 | This is where your weekly template's going to be useful because you need to probably

00:33:27.760 | pre-protect this time.

00:33:29.120 | You got to have it figured out, this is when I do academic writing, and I have enough time

00:33:33.560 | put aside to feel very comfortable about my academic writing.

00:33:37.480 | And that's going to be a lot of time.

00:33:39.960 | And then you're going to say, I'm going to put aside and regularly schedule my time for

00:33:43.920 | my fun writing, and it's going to be in a different place.

00:33:47.560 | And that's where this time is put aside, and that's when I work on my fun writing.

00:33:50.200 | And there will be less of that because it's not your full job right now.

00:33:54.000 | What you should not do is what you're doing now, which is approaching your day and saying,

00:34:00.160 | okay, I'm going to time block my day.

00:34:03.560 | Do I have time here?

00:34:04.920 | What should I do next?

00:34:05.920 | Should I do creative writing?

00:34:06.920 | Should I do academic writing?

00:34:07.920 | Oh my God, I don't think I've done enough academic writing.

00:34:10.600 | And once I finish my academic writing, I'm busy, I don't have time for my creative writing.

00:34:13.460 | This time has to be protected way in advance.

00:34:16.440 | And you've got to have rituals around it, and it's got to be, here's where I go to do

00:34:19.680 | this writing, and it's like clockwork, and I feel bad.

00:34:23.280 | If I ever miss it, it makes me feel like something's incomplete in my life, and probably it's going

00:34:27.640 | to be like first thing in the morning, you're doing academic writing, and then two evenings

00:34:30.760 | and one weekend day a week, you have these late afternoon/evening sessions at a coffee

00:34:34.960 | shop where you do your creative writing.

00:34:36.920 | You've got to figure out how to make this regular and ritualized, but protect that time.

00:34:41.400 | If you don't have that, if you're like, "Okay, but I don't have enough time when I try to

00:34:44.240 | do that.

00:34:45.240 | Like I can't, I don't have, for example, enough time to regularly work on my academic writing

00:34:50.320 | and my creative writing."

00:34:51.320 | When you try to figure out that time and you can't, there's just not enough consistently

00:34:55.200 | free time in your schedule for that to happen, well, now you're confronting reality.

00:35:00.200 | What we call facing the productivity dragon, "Oh, I'm not fooling myself.

00:35:04.520 | My schedule doesn't have enough time to do both.

00:35:06.480 | Okay, something has to change.

00:35:08.960 | Either I have to put off the creative writing until I have like a sabbatical to just do

00:35:12.880 | that, or I have to loosen something else on my schedule."

00:35:14.680 | So again, the weekly template, this sort of thinking about like, "When this quarter do

00:35:19.760 | I want to work most weeks on academic writing?

00:35:23.200 | When this quarter am I going to work most weeks on creative writing?"

00:35:26.640 | Forces you to confront the reality of your workload at a scale that tells you something

00:35:32.640 | deep about your job.

00:35:34.760 | On a daily scale, it doesn't tell you much.

00:35:36.440 | No matter what your job is, you're going to have a busy day.

00:35:39.920 | But on the scale of like, "I'm trying to find a consistent schedule to do this writing."

00:35:45.300 | When you fail to do that, that's telling you something that is consistently true about

00:35:49.520 | your job.

00:35:50.520 | It's a very useful scale to interrogate what's working and what's not working.

00:35:53.960 | So that's what I would do.

00:35:55.200 | You should never be thinking, in my ideal world, you never will be thinking on a typical

00:35:59.960 | day, "Should I do this writing today?" or "When should I do this writing today?"

00:36:06.600 | That answer should have been long since established and recorded, and it's like autopilot at this

00:36:11.520 | point.

00:36:12.520 | All right, who do we got next?

00:36:15.640 | Next question is from Ari.

00:36:16.760 | "At my current job, I'm struggling to fit in deep work sessions.

00:36:20.720 | I have calls starting at 7.30 a.m., which can stretch until 12 p.m.

00:36:24.840 | I've tried shifting my deep work sessions to after lunch, but I've been unable because

00:36:28.600 | I'm already exhausted."

00:36:30.800 | Well I can already tell this is like a time zone thing probably, because if he's starting

00:36:36.000 | at 7.30 a.m., he's probably like West Coast, maybe working with East Coasters.

00:36:42.340 | So Ari, you're going to have to lean heavily into location and rituals to make afternoon

00:36:48.840 | deep work more effective for you.

00:36:50.840 | It is hard for a lot of people.

00:36:51.880 | I have a hard time with it.

00:36:53.760 | Most people, here's a reality, most people, if you say, "Hey, first thing in the day,

00:36:58.400 | get some coffee and work deeply," can do it.

00:37:01.080 | Like, "Okay, yeah."

00:37:02.320 | I don't have too much other stuff in my head from work.

00:37:05.760 | We're just getting started, so my cognitive context is focused, my attention residue is

00:37:10.520 | minimal.

00:37:11.520 | I have energy in the morning, I'm having my first caffeine of the day, great, let's do

00:37:15.000 | deep work in the morning.

00:37:16.000 | Most people can just do that without too much support.

00:37:19.080 | The afternoon's a different story, and I include myself in this.

00:37:23.080 | After we record this podcast, like Jesse, if I just after this podcast were like, "You

00:37:26.360 | know what, I think I'm going to go do some writing," and just took out my computer, that

00:37:29.400 | would be difficult.

00:37:31.840 | I would need ritual and location built around getting good deep work occurring in the afternoon.

00:37:38.440 | So Ari, it's not unusual that that's the case for you as well.

00:37:41.200 | All right, so what might this mean?

00:37:43.520 | I have a bunch of ideas for this.

00:37:46.020 | First of all, I would suggest a half-day shutdown routine after your calls end at noon.

00:37:51.460 | So give yourself a half hours to close up all of the open loops that were created by

00:37:55.500 | these calls.

00:37:56.500 | Make sure the stuff that needs to be on your calendar is on your calendar, the stuff that

00:37:59.240 | needs to go into your capture system is in your task management capture systems, the

00:38:02.600 | follow ups are happening, that there's not loose ends from these calls that are still

00:38:06.240 | floating around.

00:38:07.240 | So you really want to sort of shut those things down, take the next step, schedule when things

00:38:10.360 | are going to happen, get that out of your head.

00:38:13.640 | Any deep work attempt with a bunch of open loops from the morning still open is going

00:38:17.160 | to be otherwise very difficult.

00:38:20.340 | I would then suggest having a physical interruption.

00:38:25.580 | So this could be like going on a long walk on a set route.

00:38:29.200 | Our canonical example here is Darwin, that is a state outside of London, built the sand

00:38:35.880 | walk, a very specific sandline path that went through the most scenic parts of his property.

00:38:41.100 | And he would do a set number of circuits on that path to prepare himself for writing.

00:38:44.760 | So it could be this, I'm walking doing this particular walk, maybe to a coffee shop and

00:38:49.140 | back or if you live near the woods on a particular wooded trail, exercise, I've become a big

00:38:53.940 | believer in this.

00:38:54.940 | If you have some schedule here, go do some hard exercise midday, it really does reset

00:38:58.660 | your energy levels and your brain.

00:39:01.300 | Now you're ready to switch over to try deep work.

00:39:04.540 | Keep the deep work period reasonable most days.

00:39:07.580 | It is hard to be on calls from 730 to 12, like you are using a lot of energy.

00:39:14.500 | You cannot on a regular basis and say great, I'll do 1230 to 530, you know, writing the

00:39:19.180 | great American novel, you've used a lot of energy.

00:39:21.400 | So let's go with the slow productivity principle here of slow but steady.

00:39:26.060 | Deep work done really well, every single day, reasonable amount of time that will add up

00:39:31.620 | to something good.

00:39:33.580 | And maybe it takes a little bit longer to add up to something good.

00:39:36.540 | But my schedule will be if I keep my schedule sustainable, I can keep doing this and over

00:39:40.100 | time I'm going to produce lots of cool stuff.

00:39:43.220 | For chemical interruptions as well.

00:39:44.940 | So I get this special cup of coffee or I make my Monta tea or like something you do right

00:39:50.060 | at the beginning of the afternoon deep work session.

00:39:53.700 | Have a location interruption, go somewhere different than where you did your calls to

00:39:57.100 | do deep work.

00:39:58.100 | I think this is worth potentially even spending non trivial money and having notable eccentricities

00:40:04.300 | in your day.

00:40:05.300 | It really makes a big difference to say, I'm going to this shed, I'm going to this library,

00:40:10.980 | going to this like local university, I am going to my attic deep work room, I'm going

00:40:17.300 | to the cabin I built in the woods, whatever it is, change locations for this deep work.

00:40:22.840 | I've done, I've shut down, I've gone for a walk, I've made my special cup of tea and

00:40:27.700 | now I'm going to the deep work only location and then have a fixed amount of time you're

00:40:32.700 | working.

00:40:33.700 | As I said, this is probably not going to be too long most days.

00:40:35.480 | You should be happy with 90 minutes to two hours.

00:40:37.820 | That's probably all the energy you have left.

00:40:40.700 | If this seems insufficient, choose one day at first where you end your calls earlier.

00:40:45.980 | Just when these calls are being set up, you're like on this day, I'm actually only available

00:40:49.380 | till 11 or 1030, right?

00:40:51.680 | People like whatever, you're just clear about it.

00:40:53.020 | Like you're available, we're always doing calls, there's one day where like you're not

00:40:55.920 | available for a couple hours at the end, so we just work around it.

00:41:00.060 | You can do that one day a week, maybe two and have a longer deep work session, but don't

00:41:03.500 | try to be a hero here.

00:41:05.820 | Your brain can only do so much work, especially when is you have this kind of really mixed

00:41:10.460 | up demanding multi-role knowledge work type of things going on, right?

00:41:15.960 | Do those things, regular afternoon deep work as possible.

00:41:18.780 | Just trust that 90 minutes to two hours, five days a week, four weeks a month will produce

00:41:23.620 | really good stuff.

00:41:24.620 | Even if it's not as fast as you would like to go, it's better that you have a sustainable

00:41:28.300 | pace you can slowly move on that over time gets you to the finish line than it is that

00:41:33.380 | in the short term, you're trying to go heroic.

00:41:37.100 | To close the loop here, when you're done with this deep work session, then have like your

00:41:40.980 | final end of the day session where you do your real shutdown.

00:41:44.420 | This is where you can have like, okay, I have admin tasks I need to do, I would do that

00:41:48.620 | after the deep work, non-trivial admin tasks, like I got to fill out this form, it's going

00:41:52.620 | to take 20 minutes.

00:41:53.620 | You have your hour and 90 minutes at the end of the deep work session to just shut down

00:41:57.420 | your day.

00:41:58.420 | I would leave that type of stuff, the non-trivial admin to the other end of deep work if possible

00:42:02.260 | so that you can get to it before it's too late.

00:42:04.420 | Again, adjust as needed.

00:42:07.580 | Different people have different preferences, different rhythms work better, but that's

00:42:10.740 | probably how I would do it.

00:42:12.020 | All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

00:42:14.920 | - Our next question's our corner.

00:42:16.660 | - Ooh, slow productivity corner.

00:42:18.860 | You've missed me saying this for the last two weeks, but we like to have one question

00:42:22.440 | a week that's relevant to my new book, "Slow Productivity, the Art with the Lost Art of

00:42:29.180 | Accomplishment."

00:42:30.180 | I haven't said it in a while, Jesse.

00:42:31.180 | - I know.

00:42:32.180 | - "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Overload."

00:42:34.220 | It really is like a source book to, God, 75% of the stuff we talk about on the show.

00:42:39.580 | If you haven't read "Slow Productivity" yet, you got to go get it.

00:42:43.740 | Just go get it, read it, recommend it because we talk about the book so often on the show.

00:42:48.060 | Anyways, here's our "Slow Productivity" question corner, "Slow Productivity" corner question

00:42:52.200 | of the week.

00:42:56.460 | "Hi, the question comes from Fenindra.

00:43:05.140 | I got laid off recently and currently have a part-time job.

00:43:07.900 | I spend about four to five hours on that to keep up with the bills and rent.

00:43:11.420 | I have an interview with a big tech company coming up in a few weeks and I need to prepare.

00:43:15.620 | Is there a way to use the principles of slow productivity to strike a balance between my

00:43:19.380 | part-time job and interview prep?"

00:43:23.140 | Well, let's go back to the principle we mentioned for Ari, a key idea from slow productivity,

00:43:28.660 | which is trusting slow but steady.

00:43:33.020 | So doing a reasonable amount of work on a regular basis, trusting that can get you where

00:43:38.500 | you need to go.

00:43:39.500 | This is like one of the most important heuristics from the slow productivity mindset is getting

00:43:43.780 | out of the idea of how busy or exhausted I am today is what matters.

00:43:48.640 | How overloaded I am is what matters.

00:43:50.300 | And instead saying, I want to produce at the bigger scale, stuff I'm proud of.

00:43:57.220 | How can I do that in a way that's sustainable, that's compatible with a richer life, and

00:44:01.100 | it's not going to make me completely fatigued.

00:44:02.900 | Slow but steady is the way.

00:44:04.060 | It's like how I write books.

00:44:06.300 | I write a little bit most days, I let it add up over a year, right?

00:44:09.500 | Slow but steady.

00:44:10.500 | I want to drill in on this a little bit though, right?

00:44:12.900 | Because the details matter here for you because you don't have a ton of time.

00:44:16.580 | You have a few weeks, so you can't get this wrong.

00:44:19.580 | You don't have the ability, looking at this, you're working four to five hours a day.

00:44:22.580 | You don't have the ability to just say, I'm going to take a week and just do nothing but

00:44:25.700 | prepare for the interview.

00:44:26.700 | I mean, it's not a bad idea, I guess, if you could take time off your part-time job, but

00:44:30.420 | it's a part-time job, so you probably can't.

00:44:32.820 | But you don't have a lot of room for error here.

00:44:34.820 | If like you're slow but steady, if you get off to, if it's not very effective, you're

00:44:39.020 | in trouble.

00:44:40.020 | You won't be prepared for this interview.

00:44:41.020 | You don't have a lot of time to course correct.

00:44:42.180 | So let me dive a little bit deeper.

00:44:45.220 | Another way to say slow but steady is relentless and deliberate.

00:44:50.020 | Now, I use this more specific terms to capture the following two important elements to doing

00:44:55.860 | the strategy properly in your situation.

00:44:57.780 | When I say relentless, like it really has to be every day.

00:45:01.780 | A lot of people have a loose definition of what it means to do something regularly, right?

00:45:08.380 | We can convince ourselves, yeah, man, I'm practicing my guitar on a regular basis.

00:45:14.120 | But if you actually went through and measured it, you're like, well, I only really played

00:45:18.020 | twice this week.

00:45:19.020 | And the first time, you know, I was just sort of like jamming along to a song.

00:45:22.540 | And really, if I do the math, I had about 15 minutes of actual practicing in that week.

00:45:27.820 | But in your mind, you're like, I picked it up on several occasions, right?

00:45:30.780 | We're easily deluded.

00:45:31.980 | We can easily delude ourselves into thinking we're doing something all the time.

00:45:36.020 | So you have to defeat that by being relentless.

00:45:38.140 | No, no, I do this every single day.

00:45:39.900 | Here's the time I do it, tired or not tired, you know, whatever it takes, like this is

00:45:44.480 | I do it every single day.

00:45:45.480 | So you have to be relentless.

00:45:46.480 | Otherwise, you're not going to have enough results to aggregate.

00:45:50.500 | The second term I introduced there was deliberate.

00:45:52.880 | And I'm drawing here from the phrase deliberate practice, right?

00:45:56.520 | Our best framework for understanding how people get good at complex activities is attributed

00:46:02.680 | to the late Anders Ericsson.

00:46:04.400 | Deliberate practice says, okay, if you want to get better at something, you have to stretch

00:46:08.760 | yourself past where you're comfortable in a very specific targeted way.

00:46:12.800 | What is the thing that I need to do better?

00:46:14.840 | Let me design an activity to do right now that does nothing but push me on that so that

00:46:18.520 | I'm stretching my ability to do that piece.

00:46:21.520 | This is particularly important for learning, which is what you're trying to do and preparing

00:46:24.700 | for the interviews.

00:46:25.840 | You cannot waste any of these sessions.

00:46:27.840 | They have to be designed to deliberately improve you exactly in the areas you need to improve.

00:46:33.320 | Do not waste an hour interview prep session kind of reading stuff on Reddit.

00:46:37.000 | You need to actually be on the LeetCode website, doing the exercises right now of a type that

00:46:42.800 | you're not quite comfortable with, giving it your full attention, trying to figure out

00:46:46.520 | how to make them work.

00:46:47.520 | If you don't have that sense of cognitive discomfort or stretch, you're wasting the

00:46:51.280 | time.

00:46:53.080 | So relentless and deliberate.

00:46:54.800 | Every single day, not wasting a minute of those blocks.

00:46:58.320 | Now, the blocks don't have to be that long.

00:47:00.280 | It could be 45 minutes to an hour a day, five days a week.

00:47:03.040 | It's not that much time and it's spread out over a few weeks.

00:47:07.040 | You will get really, really good.

00:47:09.040 | I think this is actually going to be long-term a great experience for you because after you

00:47:14.280 | nail this interview, which you will if you're relentless and deliberate, and you get this

00:47:18.240 | other job and now you have a senior development job, so you have this kind of big flashy knowledge

00:47:25.360 | work job.

00:47:26.800 | You will remember how this went and you will start thinking, "What are all of the other

00:47:30.220 | things in my job, now that I have this big new fancy job, where if I mastered this, it

00:47:35.640 | would be really useful.

00:47:36.640 | It would give me a huge leg up.

00:47:37.880 | It'd be really impressive.

00:47:38.880 | It would open up more options."

00:47:40.120 | And you'll have this confidence of, "I can learn that without having to make some major

00:47:45.280 | change to my schedule."

00:47:47.000 | That if I just devote 45 minutes a day, and maybe I just do this over lunch hour, five

00:47:51.680 | days a week, and I'm deliberate in terms of what I do in that time, there's no limit

00:47:56.480 | to what I can start picking up.

00:47:59.040 | And now quarter after quarter, you're building up all these skills, you've mastered this

00:48:02.120 | new API, you've mastered this new programming language, and this stuff is going to add up,

00:48:06.840 | your career capital is going to pile, you're going to start making some investments with

00:48:09.380 | that capital, and your life is going to get somewhere really cool.

00:48:11.700 | So I mean, this is a great general tip.

00:48:13.740 | If you're relentless and deliberate, a small amount of time each day can add up to something

00:48:20.200 | that I think is very impressive.

00:48:22.060 | And that is a key Slow Productivity Principle.

00:48:25.360 | One I think that deserves hearing the Slow Productivity Corner music one more time.

00:48:30.240 | All right, do we have a call, Jesse?

00:48:38.960 | We do.

00:48:39.960 | Here we go.

00:48:40.960 | Hello, Cal.

00:48:41.960 | I've resonated a lot on the topic of seasonality.

00:48:48.560 | I'm a writer and a producer for a football podcast.

00:48:51.940 | So February through July looks very different in my line of work than August through January.

00:48:57.160 | And I know for a lot of people, that's similar in the academic world.

00:49:01.280 | In the offseason, I found so much joy scheduling deep work hours in the morning, spending time

00:49:07.000 | with my family, implementing shutdown rituals, and ultimately giving myself space to think

00:49:12.720 | and write.

00:49:13.720 | It was a joy.

00:49:15.120 | I gave myself some buffer over the last month.

00:49:17.460 | But how do you protect yourself in season from being reactionary and ultimately being

00:49:23.760 | a mile wide, but only one inch deep?

00:49:26.340 | Thanks, guys.

00:49:27.340 | All right.

00:49:28.340 | Well, thanks, Kyle.

00:49:29.340 | Kyle has a football podcast.

00:49:31.480 | Is this Kyle Shanahan?

00:49:32.480 | I don't think Kyle Shanahan has time for a football podcast.

00:49:36.840 | He probably goes on a podcast.

00:49:38.480 | He's not spending six months a year writing, just taking deep work time in the morning.

00:49:43.520 | He probably does a lot of deep work, but there's a lot of film breakdown and stuff.

00:49:46.620 | I've dealt with a non-trivial number of professional sports franchises.

00:49:50.040 | They care about deep work.

00:49:51.520 | But I will tell you, the busiest people I've met have been professional sports GMs.

00:49:57.920 | Really?

00:49:58.920 | Yeah.

00:49:59.920 | Because the GMs in particular have all the concerns of the product on the court or the

00:50:05.720 | field, but also management concerns, staffing concerns, budget concerns.

00:50:11.640 | Those are crazy jobs.

00:50:13.200 | I'm saying, Mike Rizzo, I feel your pain.

00:50:15.720 | And I'm still waiting for my invite to come teach deep work principles to all those, the

00:50:21.920 | Hope Road, to those young players.

00:50:23.120 | All right, Kyle, let's get into this.

00:50:25.100 | So look, I'm in the same place.

00:50:26.640 | Oh, man, I love my summers.

00:50:28.080 | I love my summer schedule.

00:50:29.280 | My summer schedule just ended, my wonderful summer schedule where I write a half day

00:50:34.600 | every day.

00:50:35.600 | I only have any scheduled appointments or meetings on my calendars Tuesday through Thursday

00:50:39.080 | afternoons.

00:50:40.080 | And man, those schedules are fantastic.

00:50:42.680 | It's painful to go back.

00:50:44.840 | You got to make sure, though, that you have just as much of a plan for your busy seasons

00:50:49.880 | as you do for your easy seasons.

00:50:51.900 | It's fun and easy to make a plan for the easy seasons because you have a lot of time and

00:50:55.440 | not a lot to do.

00:50:56.440 | And like you could just say, I want to write all day, all my meetings only on Tuesdays,

00:50:59.840 | like everything's possible.

00:51:00.840 | It's a pleasure to build those plans.

00:51:03.840 | It's way more stressful in the busy season because like your plans don't work.

00:51:07.200 | I can't do this.

00:51:08.200 | I can't write every morning and I have to do this and this.

00:51:10.880 | You see your schedule fall apart and it can be really stressful, but you got to stick

00:51:14.400 | with it.

00:51:16.080 | And in particular, what should you be, what's probably missing from your brew here is what

00:51:19.760 | we talked about in the deep dive, a weekly template.

00:51:23.400 | Like that's probably what's going to help you here.

00:51:26.160 | If you're already doing, you know, multiscale planning, et cetera, right?

00:51:28.640 | You're not running around just completely reactive.

00:51:31.240 | You have capture systems, you're doing multiscale planning.

00:51:33.840 | Your weekly templates are going to make your stand to gain back some autonomy over your

00:51:38.040 | time.

00:51:39.040 | All right.

00:51:40.040 | We're going to do this, but here's the days we record the podcast.

00:51:42.080 | I'm treating those differently than days.

00:51:43.520 | We don't.

00:51:44.520 | I'm consolidating all of these meetings.

00:51:46.360 | Like one big thing we're doing on Thursdays.

00:51:48.440 | I'm taking these two things off my plate because they're destroying my schedule and they're

00:51:51.680 | getting in the way.

00:51:52.960 | Like this is where the weekly template is, where you're able to exert some autonomy.

00:51:57.920 | I think it's really important.

00:51:59.280 | I think that aspect of this is really important because what happens is you can be organized

00:52:06.200 | but also feel out of control.

00:52:08.120 | And what I mean by that is, you know, we talk about all the time on the show, contrary to

00:52:15.280 | the interpretation of the anti-productivity crowd that think that any interest in being

00:52:20.160 | organized is all about just being co-opted by late stage capitalism, coercive influences.

00:52:25.460 | Like we say, no, no, no.

00:52:26.460 | To be non-organized, to not have your work captured in context capture systems, to be

00:52:33.360 | doing no planning on your time, to be just sort of like stumbling through your days.

00:52:37.120 | That's what puts you at the mercy of other forces.

00:52:38.760 | It's going to make you miserable.

00:52:40.040 | You're going to work harder than you want to work.

00:52:43.080 | Everything's going to be worse.

00:52:44.080 | Like the step from completely disorganized to organized is a big one, but it's not the

00:52:50.000 | full step.

00:52:51.000 | And this gets to Kyle's issue, I think, because you can be completely organized.

00:52:55.160 | I know what's on my plate.

00:52:56.720 | I plan my time carefully.

00:52:58.120 | I get the most out of my time.

00:52:59.640 | I've shut down routines.

00:53:00.640 | I don't let my work follow me home.

00:53:02.080 | Like you'd be doing all the things and be really upset because you feel like your schedule's

00:53:05.960 | not yours.

00:53:06.960 | You're juggling your time really well, but mainly what you're doing is just juggling

00:53:09.720 | all the balls that people are chucking at you.

00:53:11.920 | You're preventing them from falling, but it's way too many balls to be juggling.

00:53:15.880 | That's where the weekly template, this is where you can really gain some autonomy of

00:53:18.640 | your schedule.

00:53:19.640 | You begin saying, I'm not just going to say, my goal is to juggle every ball they're throwing

00:53:22.680 | at me.

00:53:23.680 | It's going to say, I only take two balls this day, and this day is three, and this day I'm

00:53:26.080 | not juggling at all.

00:53:27.080 | It's where you begin to get some autonomy back of your schedule.

00:53:29.120 | It's where you step from being organized to also being somewhat in control over what these

00:53:33.640 | organized days feel like.

00:53:35.360 | So Kyle, it's a pain after a light season to make a busy season work because it's so

00:53:40.280 | much harder.

00:53:41.280 | But it's worth doing and let the weekly template maybe be the main tool that you're adding

00:53:44.840 | to your toolkit this particular busy season, and I think that'll do much better.

00:53:50.920 | All right, we got a case study here.

00:53:54.080 | It's where people write in to talk about their experience, putting the type of things we

00:53:56.960 | talk about on this show into practice in their real lives.

00:54:00.720 | If you have a case study to share, you can just email it directly to jessie@calnewport.com.

00:54:04.920 | She's organizing those.

00:54:05.920 | All right, today's case study comes from Colton.

00:54:09.360 | Colton says, I have been a devout New Portonian since high school, and I followed your advice

00:54:14.880 | on time block planning, autopilot schedules, and deep work throughout college.

00:54:19.400 | Once I began my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, however, I encountered a lot of

00:54:23.440 | problems.

00:54:25.200 | Transitioning from my cushy college life and into my first real job and the harsh living

00:54:28.820 | conditions of rural Zambia was brutal.

00:54:31.800 | I have no electricity, running water, toilets, or stoves.

00:54:36.240 | It took a year for me to figure out how to get things done in this part of the world.

00:54:42.280 | Surprisingly, most of your advice about knowledge work applies to my work as a Peace Corps volunteer.

00:54:48.720 | Each morning, I read over my Google Calendar and quarterly goal project list and use them

00:54:52.780 | to build a time block plan for the day.

00:54:55.640 | I manage my recurring tasks with an autopilot schedule that blocks off specific times each

00:54:59.600 | morning to do my research and writing (I worked for a remote cancer lab back in the U.S.).

00:55:04.140 | I handle my non-recurring tasks with a project list that I can pull from each morning.

00:55:08.400 | Because I work on one task at a time without any distractions, I can finish all of my work

00:55:12.400 | by 1pm and still accomplish a ton of projects in my village, like building a medical waste

00:55:17.840 | incinerator for my local clinic and publishing a few papers in medical journals.

00:55:21.940 | Well, Colton, I appreciate the case study and I appreciate your use of the word New

00:55:26.200 | Portonian, which I really hope to spread.

00:55:31.000 | Let me highlight something from this case study that I think is important.

00:55:33.920 | I mentioned this in the call as well.

00:55:37.440 | There is this sense out there that to care about personal productivity, again, is somehow

00:55:43.860 | a negative or maybe like a necessary evil of certain like super high-powered, like corporate

00:55:49.800 | high-paying jobs, but for the most part, it's just internalized capitalism in its worst

00:55:54.560 | sort of form and it's something that those of us who are more socially conscious and

00:55:59.480 | self-aware, we want to dirty ourselves with.

00:56:02.240 | This belies that belief.

00:56:04.340 | This is literally someone in the Peace Corps in Zambia building medical incinerators and

00:56:07.920 | working on cancer research.

00:56:09.760 | Being organized makes that possible.

00:56:11.540 | Being organized means he can, with complete focus and presence, starting at 1pm every

00:56:17.800 | day, just be working in that village while also still making progress in the morning

00:56:21.960 | on the other things.

00:56:22.960 | It's making his ability to be effective, even under really harsh circumstances, possible.

00:56:28.740 | This is what I like to see personal productivity skills deployed towards.

00:56:33.480 | It allows me to deploy the image of the ideal life that I have in mind.

00:56:40.200 | He doesn't use the word here "optimize."

00:56:42.800 | He doesn't use the word here "maximize output."

00:56:45.160 | He does not use the word here "hustle."

00:56:47.160 | He does not use the word here like "production machine."

00:56:50.560 | No, he has a vision of what would be a sustainable-feeling, meaningful vision for my life, and he realized

00:56:57.040 | if he cannot control the incoming streams of what needs to be done and information and

00:57:01.000 | task requests in his life, if he can't handle that, if he has no control over his time,

00:57:04.800 | he can't get to that vision.

00:57:06.560 | Those visions don't have to be heartless.

00:57:08.920 | Those visions don't have to be mechanistic.

00:57:11.120 | It doesn't have to be one of Blake's mills rendered in flesh in the personal individual.

00:57:18.120 | It doesn't have to be Gordon Gekko, right?

00:57:20.960 | It's more neutral than that.

00:57:21.960 | You control yourself.

00:57:22.960 | You can control your life.

00:57:23.960 | What you do with your life is up to you, and most people actually want to do more interesting

00:57:27.120 | things than just try to optimize or maximize output.

00:57:29.840 | So Colton, I love it.

00:57:31.240 | It's a great case study.

00:57:33.000 | We're productive so that we can produce our ideal lives, not the highest possible production

00:57:39.120 | rate possible.

00:57:40.120 | All right, so we got a final segment coming up, but first, let's hear from another sponsor.

00:57:45.720 | I want to talk about our friends at Notion.

00:57:48.960 | You've heard me talk about Notion before.

00:57:51.160 | It combines your notes, your docs, and your projects into one space that's simple and

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00:57:57.320 | What I like about Notion, and I've said this before, is you can build these sort of custom,

00:58:02.280 | really easily, these basically like these custom information storage and retrieval systems

00:58:06.060 | that fit exactly the type of work you're doing.

00:58:08.840 | A big proponent of customized systems to get you away from the hyperactive hive mind of

00:58:14.560 | we're just like attaching Word documents to emails and rock and rolling all day long.

00:58:20.220 | Systems allow structured collaboration, structured encounters with information.

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00:58:27.420 | And Notion, I love the way they do it.

00:58:30.680 | We've worked before with like a really cool setup with our ad agency where we could see

00:58:34.440 | using a custom Notion setup, all of the advertisers, and we could switch views of like where's

00:58:40.600 | all the times we've done reads for this ad.

00:58:43.320 | Let's put in information about this particular read.

00:58:45.200 | Now let's zoom out and see all the different reads happening this week.

00:58:47.840 | You can build fantastic things easily, whether it's for a complicated business or just organizing

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00:58:56.120 | What they've been doing more though, and I want to emphasize this in this read, is that

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00:59:04.720 | to make it even easier to use.

00:59:08.640 | Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger doing tasks that normally

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00:59:17.640 | So we're talking about things like generative AI style text creation, like, hey, can you

00:59:23.540 | write a first draft?

00:59:25.080 | Can you summarize what I am saying here?

00:59:28.000 | You can automate tedious tasks, like, okay, great.

00:59:31.320 | Summarize these meeting notes that we can enter it over here in this information, and

00:59:35.280 | it can help you find things, right?

00:59:37.480 | Because it understands your information and it makes it easier for you to find things.

00:59:41.720 | Notion is used by over half, it surprised me, half of Fortune 500 companies, right?

00:59:47.000 | I didn't know that was true, but now that I hear it, I say, of course, it makes work

00:59:50.360 | systems easy.

00:59:52.560 | Teams use Notion send less email, they cancel more meetings, they save time searching for

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01:00:01.440 | All of this helps keeps everyone on the same page.

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01:00:21.200 | That's Notion.com/cal.

01:00:22.200 | I also want to talk about our friends at Ladder, L-A-D-D-E-R, look, we've been saying follow

01:00:29.880 | us the time you get your act together, you get organized, you fix the stuff that needs to be

01:00:35.160 | fixed, you get ready for the new year, the new school year, the new post-summer vacation year.

01:00:39.400 | The one thing that you might be procrastinating on, if you're like a lot of people, is life

01:00:43.320 | insurance. If there's people who depend on you, you need life insurance, not just some life

01:00:48.120 | insurance, but enough that would actually take care of them if the unthinkable actually happened.

01:00:53.560 | So why do most people not have enough life insurance who know they need it? Because they

01:00:57.880 | don't know how to do it. Where do you go? Who do you talk to? Is it hard? Is it too expensive?

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01:01:10.840 | and no paperwork when you are applying for $3 million in coverage or less. You just answer a

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01:01:53.160 | is right now. This is also the right time for me to have dropped my ad page on the ground,

01:01:58.680 | but I picked it up. I'm going to do a good ad lib here, Jesse. Much in the way that I was able to

01:02:06.360 | pick up this page from the ground, you can pick up your need to get more life insurance for the

01:02:13.080 | people you love with Ladder. So go to ladderlife.com/deep today to see if you're instantly

01:02:19.960 | approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep, ladderlife.com/deep. All right, let's do our

01:02:30.280 | final segment. All right, this is our first podcast of September. Oh, it makes me sort of sad.

01:02:36.360 | I mean, I like the school year because my kids are in school, but my summer schedule is so nice.

01:02:42.360 | Oh man. And Jesse, I've mentioned to you, I have like an administrative role.

01:02:47.080 | I know. You told the audience too. Did I? Oh my God. It's fine. I'm building systems,

01:02:51.880 | my weekly template, man. I'm like Cal Newport Dean. The Newportonian vibes is strong, my friend. My

01:02:58.440 | Trellos are smoking because they're being used so much. I'm on it, but man, I miss the summer.

01:03:04.360 | All right. So it's first episode of September. So we'll talk about the books I read in August. Hey,

01:03:08.040 | before we do though, a listener, was it Zach? Yeah.

01:03:12.520 | Sent us, me and Jesse, custom hats for the show. So I figured we'd do this final segment

01:03:17.240 | in the hats. If you're a listening set of watch, you can check this out on YouTube.

01:03:20.440 | There we go. There we go. Looks good. Yeah. Looking great here. All right. So for those

01:03:32.600 | who are listening, we have on stylish VBLCCP trucker hats. Of course, we know what that means.

01:03:39.320 | Value-based lifestyle centric career planning. That is the way that we hear

01:03:44.040 | the deep questions podcast. Think about career choices. These hats are awesome.

01:03:49.640 | Yeah. I mean,

01:03:50.280 | I'm not a fashion guru, but I think these look pretty sharp. It does. It kind of seems

01:03:58.520 | like we're probably, you know, these hats are from our time spent running like a state committee in

01:04:03.960 | the old Soviet union. Just looking at these abbreviations that this is probably some sort

01:04:09.560 | of like Russian abbreviation for like the state crop distribution, socialist republic, you know,

01:04:15.240 | advisory committee, but that's cool. It's kind of like a retroness to that. All right. So we're

01:04:20.760 | going to, we're going to harness as VBLCCP energy as we do the books I read in August, 2024. All

01:04:27.400 | right. This first one's a little weird, Jesse. I'm just going to preface this by saying I, my wife,

01:04:31.560 | right. We're on vacation. She was reading it. We were in the woods somewhere. I was like,

01:04:34.760 | I'll read that. It was a Emily Wilde's encyclopedia of fairies written by Heather

01:04:42.040 | Fawcett. It's a fantasy book, I guess, maybe like a little bit of a romance book, but not,

01:04:47.480 | I don't really know these genres very well. I actually liked the first two thirds in particular,

01:04:53.240 | like the, it's a alternative timeline world. I couldn't really tell when this took place.

01:04:58.600 | I finally found some clues that it must've been 20th century or equivalent because they mentioned

01:05:02.280 | movies at some point, but it's kind of like a timeless, uh, it's a professor. It posits a world

01:05:07.560 | where fairies exist and it follows a professor who is like, who studies fairies. Like they,

01:05:13.560 | this is just a subject that people study. And she goes to like this small, uh, town in a country

01:05:19.640 | that doesn't really exist up in Scandinavia somewhere like in, in, um, stuff ensues.

01:05:25.000 | I actually kind of liked the world building because I'm a professor of there being a whole

01:05:28.760 | academic discipline that studies like these beans and it's a little bit dark and a little bit,

01:05:32.600 | whatever. Um, I thought it went a little bit, look, I'm not a big novel reader. So take this

01:05:36.600 | with a grain of salt. Uh, once it actually got past, like, you know, we're, we, we see hints

01:05:43.720 | of this. We're kind of studying this once they're actually like, we're in a fairy world. I felt like

01:05:48.120 | it was just whatever, anything goes and everything's magic and whatever. Right. Like, you know, then

01:05:52.200 | that, that kind of lost me, right. That world building lost me, but I thought it was, I enjoyed

01:05:56.760 | it. I don't read a lot of books like this. I didn't realize all these books always have like

01:06:00.120 | a romance core too. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Um, so she's her fellow professor who spoiler alert

01:06:08.440 | is part magic or something. They, you know, uh, I love her. I thought it was good though. I thought

01:06:13.800 | it was good. All right. Then I read any, uh, Annie Jacobson's book, nuclear war, man, there's a book

01:06:19.400 | right there. I love when nonfiction writers do something different with form and format and what

01:06:26.120 | Jacobson did is a compelling book. It's a hard to put down book. She basically did a bunch of

01:06:31.960 | research, a nonfiction book. I think Amazon, I think Amazon chose that, you know, they have their

01:06:37.640 | best of the best books of the year so far. And you know, slow productivity was chosen as the

01:06:42.040 | best business and leadership book of 2024 so far. I think this was chosen as the best just overall

01:06:47.720 | nonfiction book of 2024 so far. What she did is a lot of research on, uh, what is the U S is actual

01:06:56.440 | like nuclear war plans and procedures and protocols. Like how does this work? Who makes the

01:07:02.200 | decisions? Where are the various people? What happens if this gets blown up? Where are the

01:07:05.960 | missiles? And then the book just walks through, it takes place largely in like 12 minutes. It

01:07:11.960 | walks through global thermonuclear war breaking out from the point of view of like the American.

01:07:17.240 | Okay. So this person, we see this on the radar and the president goes here and then these get

01:07:22.040 | blown. Then this happens and we fire these missiles and, and, and the whole world gets

01:07:25.880 | blown up in the end. So it's like a really kind of scary book, but she's really trying to nail

01:07:29.160 | the details straight of like, here's how this would work. Here's the, you pull out this caper,

01:07:34.040 | you would type in these things. These people at this base underground here would be involved in

01:07:37.480 | this. And she works the whole thing out. Spoiler alert. It does not go well for us in Washington,

01:07:41.960 | DC. So we get hit by a thermonuclear warhead early on in the book and where we are right

01:07:47.080 | now, we're not going to do well. Our skin would catch on fire. So this would not be good for us.

01:07:53.160 | There was one, I got a nitpick. There's one nitpick where I was like, this doesn't seem,

01:08:01.240 | well, okay. I have two nitpicks. Okay. By the way, my family did terribly in this.

01:08:05.800 | So the, the first two missiles hit Washington DC where me and my two sisters live. The second

01:08:14.840 | missile hit the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in central California coast. My brother works

01:08:24.120 | at that nuclear power plant. So the first two missiles killed my whole family. We didn't do

01:08:30.120 | well. We didn't do well in that book. All right. Here's my two nitpicks. One, so it's mainly very

01:08:34.280 | well-researched, but I can tell the parts where she glossed over. One, when she went to the

01:08:41.640 | boomer class, the missile subs. So our missile subs fired missiles at the end, right?

01:08:45.480 | She, so these would be like an Ohio class, probably a missile sub. I know a lot about subs.

01:08:51.400 | My brother was on subs. She talks about when the, the order comes in for firing the missiles,

01:08:57.480 | that alarm bells start wailing on the sub. That's missile launch time. It's missile launch time.

01:09:02.600 | There's, they don't do alarm bells on subs. The whole point is that the sub is supposed to be as

01:09:07.400 | quiet as possible. They wear sneakers on these things just to try to make sure that like their

01:09:11.080 | footsteps make sound. They're not going to have a klaxon bell sound to tell the submariners it's

01:09:17.240 | time to fire missiles. They would, because the whole point is you fire these missiles and are

01:09:20.440 | supposed to go back under and not be detected. So that was not true. And the other thing I didn't

01:09:24.200 | understand is the president's on Marine 2, right? So it was on the, or Marine 1, the helicopter,

01:09:28.840 | right? And they're rushing away from the White House to try to get to Mount Storm because they

01:09:33.560 | know the, the missile's coming for the White House. And he's, there's a particular secret

01:09:38.440 | service team that's with them that's responsible for getting them there. And they're, they're doing

01:09:42.440 | the math and be like, we're not going to get, I don't think we're going to get far enough away

01:09:47.880 | from the explosion for like, at least the electromagnetic pulse is going to, might take

01:09:52.520 | out this helicopter. So what do they do? Like, we're going to put a parachute on the president

01:09:58.120 | and one of the secret service members and we'll jump, we'll parachute out over Maryland.

01:10:02.280 | Well, here's my nitpick. Why not just land a helicopter? Why not just like, what we'll do

01:10:07.080 | is we'll just land a helicopter on a field. And, uh, if it does disable us, it's better that we

01:10:12.760 | landed the helicopter than we parachuted the president out. And if it doesn't, we can take

01:10:17.080 | off again and keep going. Like, why would you parachute out of the helicopter? Because you

01:10:21.080 | were worried that, why not just land a helicopter? So I didn't, that, that part, but it was,

01:10:29.240 | I read this book in one day. So it's, it's a. I don't have to borrow it.

01:10:33.560 | Yeah. I'll, I'll lend it to you. It's a cool nonfiction experience. Um, all right. A less

01:10:37.400 | good experience. Oh, go Crichton estate. I read, I regret to inform you, Eruption by,

01:10:46.280 | I'm putting big quotation marks around this, by Michael Crichton and James Patterson.

01:10:50.920 | Michael Crichton has been dead for like 20 years now. They're still miraculously discovering books

01:10:57.000 | he started and other people are finishing. So James Patterson, uh, ended this book. This could

01:11:01.640 | have been, this would have been an awesome Michael Crichton book in his prime. It's about a, a, a

01:11:05.880 | volcano, uh, on Hawaii is going to have this big explosion and like they're dealing with

01:11:10.440 | the volcano science and supposedly Crichton had started working, like interviews using the

01:11:14.920 | interviewing volcanologist. Like he really was trying to understand it, but in the hands of

01:11:18.760 | James Patterson, which means in the hands of the people that James Patterson has anonymously,

01:11:22.680 | right. His books, it was just terrible. Really? Oh, just terrible. The science was incoherent.

01:11:29.160 | The space was incoherent. You couldn't understand what was going on. It didn't matter. Nothing made

01:11:35.000 | sense. I didn't know who the characters were. I didn't care. It was, uh, some of the most like

01:11:40.040 | wooden, like old fashioned, like weirdly, like paternalistic, misogynistic characters. It's

01:11:45.080 | like all the women just love this guy for no real reason. It was just a really poorly written book.

01:11:50.520 | Now I have to read it because I'm a Crichton completist. And I, I decided long ago that, um,

01:11:55.880 | his post, uh, post-death books, uh, posthumous books, I would count those as trying to read

01:12:01.800 | every Crichton book because I thought there would be like two. They keep finding these things.

01:12:05.960 | They keep finding, I read the pirate book. No one else read the pirate book that he supposedly

01:12:11.960 | started writing. Like they're not, anyways, it was not a good book. Do you ever go on like

01:12:15.480 | Reddit threads about this? I should. I'm thinking about, I don't know if I mentioned this to you.

01:12:19.240 | I'm thinking about putting on the wall as we renovate the maker lab portion of the HQ, um,

01:12:24.360 | putting first edition Crichtons on the wall. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. It's like motivation.

01:12:28.200 | All right. So I had to get the taste of that out of my mouth. So I picked up literally at a,

01:12:32.200 | uh, grocery store book rack in upstate New York. I grabbed the latest Lincoln child, uh,

01:12:39.880 | thriller Diablo Mesa, because they know what they're doing. Lincoln and child together.

01:12:43.640 | They write it's, it's just good thrillers, right? Not necessarily innovative, but just good

01:12:48.200 | thrillers. Diablo Mesa was great. It was like, this is just what I wanted. Well-constructed

01:12:52.360 | took the bad taste of eruption out of my mouth. Um, and then I finished by reading, uh, Gwendolyn

01:12:56.920 | bounds is book. Not too late. There's a book. Uh, it's good for us, Jesse. It's about, she got

01:13:03.160 | heavily into, um, adventure obstacle course racing starting in her mid forties.

01:13:09.960 | And it's now like podium places in our age group, like is really good at it. And the book is about

01:13:16.520 | like this, like middle age is not, is not too late to actually get like heavily involved in like a

01:13:22.120 | really involving potentially even physical activity. Golf. Yeah. And not as rare as obstacle

01:13:30.680 | racing. I liked it though. I know I liked it because it's like written for me. Right. She's

01:13:35.160 | like a couple of years older than us when she started this. She's in her fifties now. I was

01:13:38.600 | like, yeah, I should, I should, uh, cause you know, a partial, like anyways, I, I thought it was

01:13:44.440 | good. She's a good writer. Um, and, uh, it was inspiring. Like, yeah, you should. Yeah. I have a

01:13:51.400 | good buddy who got really into that too. Um, he's a little older than us, but younger than her got

01:13:57.960 | really into obstacle racing. Right. Um, because it's something you can kind of get into if you

01:14:03.240 | really train, like they have age groups. Um, it's not so professionalized too, that it's like the

01:14:08.920 | genetic freaks are going to win it. Right. Like it's, you have a chance. And he built all the

01:14:12.520 | obstacles on his property and had installed in his office, the, um, the grip related hanging

01:14:19.080 | things on his ceiling. So he could just practice. He got really good too, but then had like a gnarly

01:14:23.160 | injury. Like, I don't know what he sent me the photos. Don't send me this, uh, compound fracture,

01:14:27.800 | like just, uh, gnarly. And I think he's not, he didn't, he never got back to it. He fell off

01:14:31.960 | something and who knows? I'm reading a book about rowing right now. So I'm, I'm, I'm flirting with,

01:14:38.200 | maybe that's a good midlife move. I just saw boys in the boat. Yeah. George Clooney directed that.

01:14:44.360 | Oh, he did. Yeah. Uh, I'm reading David Halberstam's the amateurs about the Olympic hopeful

01:14:50.600 | American scholars in the 84 Olympics. Um, reminds me of my halcyon days as a Dartmouth rower,

01:14:58.920 | except for these guys are in better shape than I am. All right. Anyways. Uh, that's all the time

01:15:06.440 | we have for today. Thank you, Zach, for these awesome hats. I'm going to, I might wear this

01:15:10.360 | a couple of places. You think it's too declarative? Like people are gonna be like, well, if it was

01:15:14.760 | smaller, you, it might be more willing to wear it more often, but it was just declarative. You're

01:15:19.240 | kind of putting in people's faces. I think it's kind of what you say about the Russian, you know,

01:15:24.040 | it does corn farmers, right? Because the, the CCP or the final letters of the, the Russian name for

01:15:32.040 | the Soviet reunion, Soviet union. Yeah. I still appreciate it. Thank you, Zach. All right. We'll

01:15:36.840 | be back next week with another normal episode of this podcast. Summer's over. We're back in it.

01:15:41.400 | Um, we will see you then. And until then, as always stay deep. Hey, if you like today's

01:15:46.280 | discussion of the weekly template, check out episode two 99, which is about our love hate

01:15:52.680 | relationship with personal productivity. I think it's a great addition to this conversation.

01:15:57.640 | Check it out. So eight books and around 3 million sales later, I wanted to look back at what I've

01:16:03.240 | observed up close over this period about our culture's changing relationship with the topic

01:16:09.480 | of personal productivity.

How I Manage My Time - The Weekly Productivity Template To Achieve More | Cal Newport

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