How Can People Who Lack Planning Skills Improve Without Discouagement?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.640 | All right, so what are we starting off with today?

00:00:07.840 | All right, so we got a call.

00:00:08.880 | The first call is basically about the different types of people

00:00:12.320 | and how they go about planning.

00:00:15.600 | Hi, Cal.

00:00:16.800 | My name is Johan van der Putte.

00:00:19.440 | I'm a Belgian psychologist.

00:00:21.600 | And I've been thinking that there's probably a continuum.

00:00:26.280 | At one end of it, you have people who are skilled at planning,

00:00:31.720 | or they have become skilled at it.

00:00:33.320 | And then you have people who, a bit like me,

00:00:36.360 | aren't so skilled at it.

00:00:39.040 | I guess planning involves dividing up life into tasks

00:00:45.520 | and then allocating these tasks to pockets of time.

00:00:52.240 | I guess it requires some special skill.

00:00:58.480 | I think I'm not very good at it.

00:01:01.000 | It is hard for me to do.

00:01:03.920 | And it makes me sometimes stressed and a bit anxious

00:01:08.440 | when I try to do it.

00:01:10.840 | You have any suggestions of how people who maybe aren't so

00:01:16.480 | talented at it, how they could move in this direction

00:01:25.200 | without attempting to become very good planners

00:01:33.560 | in the short time?

00:01:35.720 | Thank you.

00:01:38.000 | Well, I think it's an important question.

00:01:40.320 | And I am going to give you what I think

00:01:43.200 | of as planning baby steps, like a way

00:01:45.360 | to ease yourself into something that looks more like my time

00:01:50.000 | management philosophy.

00:01:51.480 | And for those who are interested about that,

00:01:53.320 | we did a core idea video about my time management philosophy

00:01:58.880 | that you can find at the YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia

00:02:04.360 | YouTube page.

00:02:04.960 | You can find that core idea video on time management.

00:02:07.200 | So I do have some baby steps to help you get into that.

00:02:09.520 | But let me just first emphasize that, yes, planning

00:02:13.520 | is anxiety producing.

00:02:16.080 | And that that shouldn't come across if this happens to you.

00:02:21.000 | Should not come across as if there's something wrong.

00:02:24.080 | It's just the reality of planning

00:02:25.920 | is that it's anxiety producing.

00:02:27.240 | And the reason is because you are confronting.

00:02:29.680 | You are confronting this typically too large stack

00:02:33.880 | of things that you have been committed to doing.

00:02:36.160 | You can't easily imagine how they're going to get done.

00:02:39.520 | The planning centers of your brain

00:02:41.400 | short circuit when they're faced with this type of overload

00:02:44.640 | scenario, that short circuiting causes anxiety.

00:02:47.120 | I'm simplifying this.

00:02:48.160 | There's a lot of other things going on.

00:02:49.320 | But that's a simplified way of understanding what's happening.

00:02:51.920 | So in particular, when you do weekly planning,

00:02:53.840 | this is my experience.

00:02:55.120 | When I am looking over all of my to-do lists,

00:02:57.520 | when I'm looking over my calendar,

00:02:58.720 | when I'm looking over my strategic plans,

00:03:00.320 | and I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do this week,

00:03:02.880 | I get very anxious.

00:03:04.280 | It is a natural reaction.

00:03:06.120 | It's similar to having your heart rate increase

00:03:09.040 | when you're running on a treadmill.

00:03:10.480 | So don't fear that.

00:03:11.240 | Don't think that's a problem.

00:03:12.640 | That anxiety then fades once you're done planning.

00:03:15.640 | When you go day to day and do your daily time block planning,

00:03:18.360 | if you follow my system, that's much less stressful.

00:03:21.240 | Because now your weekly plan has already confronted

00:03:23.520 | the productivity dragon.

00:03:24.960 | It's already confronted the short circuit inducing

00:03:28.440 | overload of tasks and come up with an idea for your week

00:03:32.560 | that makes sense.

00:03:33.640 | And now you can just look at that idea for your week

00:03:35.520 | when you do your daily planning.

00:03:36.820 | It should be less stressful.

00:03:38.680 | So let's start with that.

00:03:39.760 | What is supposed to cause anxiety?

00:03:42.240 | Now what I'm going to suggest is for your baby steps

00:03:44.680 | is essentially have low granularity plans,

00:03:51.000 | plans that don't get into a lot of detail,

00:03:54.240 | but are more structured than just what's next in my inbox,

00:03:57.040 | what do I feel like doing next.

00:03:59.840 | So if we're talking about daily planning,

00:04:01.880 | I want you to do some time blocking.

00:04:04.160 | This is when I'm working.

00:04:06.280 | When I'm working, I want to have some say in advance about what

00:04:08.900 | I want to do with my time.

00:04:10.280 | Get you out of the mindset of the list reactive method,

00:04:12.680 | where you just react to things that come in and occasionally

00:04:15.040 | glance at to-do lists.

00:04:16.200 | But to get started with time blocking,

00:04:17.880 | make your time blocks very large and quite generic.

00:04:21.880 | Here are my meetings.

00:04:23.200 | Well, I might as well copy those down into my time block plan.

00:04:26.200 | Let me take this big chunk of time

00:04:27.620 | here, not get too specific about it,

00:04:29.200 | but just say catch up on email and small tasks.

00:04:33.760 | And let me just find one block in that day

00:04:35.720 | I'm going to say work on something specific.

00:04:38.520 | All right, this is where I'm going to work on that report.

00:04:41.000 | And any other time, you might just say whatever,

00:04:43.800 | email and small tasks.

00:04:44.880 | So when you're starting off, you're

00:04:47.200 | really trying to have maybe one block each day where

00:04:49.880 | you specifically say, even though it's not on my calendar,

00:04:53.040 | even though no one's forcing me to do it,

00:04:54.680 | even though I might want to do something else,

00:04:55.960 | I'm going to work on a long-term,

00:04:57.440 | cognitively demanding task during that time.

00:04:59.240 | And the rest is by default, let's do shallows.

00:05:04.000 | Let's do email.

00:05:04.640 | Let's do tasks.

00:05:05.720 | Then you might get a little bit better.

00:05:07.360 | The way you get a little bit better

00:05:08.780 | is add in a focused admin block.

00:05:10.480 | So you do this for a couple of weeks.

00:05:12.020 | Now you say, this block right here,

00:05:15.160 | I'm going to go run those errands.

00:05:18.240 | I have an hour between this meeting and this meeting,

00:05:20.240 | so I'm going to eat lunch, and then I'm

00:05:21.860 | going to swing by the drugstore and the bank.

00:05:24.840 | So now you're getting used to, let

00:05:26.560 | me be a little bit more conscientious about admin,

00:05:30.360 | certain times being better for certain tasks.

00:05:32.200 | And then just do that for a while.

00:05:35.080 | I have a simple time block plan.

00:05:36.400 | There's one big block in there somewhere

00:05:39.720 | for focusing on something deeply.

00:05:42.080 | There's one block in there for a specific type of admin task.

00:05:44.920 | And everything else is like, whatever,

00:05:46.560 | list reactive, email, looking at to-do list.

00:05:50.400 | You'll just get used to that after a while.

00:05:52.840 | And then you can begin to add more granularity.

00:05:55.160 | And I get into a lot of details about this.

00:05:56.920 | In the front of my time block planner in particular,

00:06:00.480 | I actually have a chapter all about--

00:06:02.520 | there's like a book chapter at the front of my planner

00:06:04.720 | that's just all about the mechanics of doing

00:06:07.760 | time blocking at a much higher level of detail

00:06:10.400 | and getting really good at it.

00:06:12.160 | So you can find out about that planner at timeblockplanner.com.

00:06:15.120 | And I really get into it, but that's how I would start.

00:06:17.360 | And the same thing with your weekly plan.

00:06:19.040 | Do a weekly plan, and feel the anxiety,

00:06:21.000 | and trust that's going to go away.

00:06:22.440 | But you can make that weekly plan kind of bad at first.

00:06:26.520 | It's like, I'm looking at my calendar.

00:06:30.480 | Let me just write down a few notes about this week.

00:06:34.640 | I need to get started this week on this report that's

00:06:36.520 | doing two weeks because next week is

00:06:37.760 | busy or something like this.

00:06:38.920 | Or Friday is going to be a good day for catching up

00:06:40.800 | on something.

00:06:41.240 | Just make a couple decisions.

00:06:42.440 | And maybe have a reminder for some habits.

00:06:46.040 | Like, don't do anything that complicated,

00:06:47.760 | but get in the habit of doing it.

00:06:49.320 | And that's the main advice I'm going to give here

00:06:51.400 | is the binary from doing none of this planning

00:06:54.800 | to doing some of this planning bad is the key binary.

00:07:00.520 | That's the hard shift.

00:07:01.960 | I do a weekly plan.

00:07:03.600 | I don't care if it's terrible.

00:07:04.440 | I do it.

00:07:05.360 | I do a daily time block plan.

00:07:06.760 | I don't care if it's pretty terrible.

00:07:07.880 | There's only a few meaningful blocks.

00:07:09.420 | I do it.

00:07:09.920 | That's the shift that matters.

00:07:12.000 | Going from that to doing those things well,

00:07:14.040 | that'll come later.

00:07:14.880 | It's not too hard.

00:07:15.680 | You'll get used to it.

00:07:16.600 | You'll feel that impulse.

00:07:17.560 | Like, after you've done this for a while,

00:07:18.600 | it's like, well, I might as well make this better.

00:07:20.640 | That's not a big deal.

00:07:21.720 | It's going from zero to one.

00:07:22.920 | That's the flip that's going to matter.

00:07:24.560 | And don't mind-- again, don't mind that anxiety

00:07:26.920 | around weekly plans.

00:07:27.760 | That's just your brain doing what

00:07:29.140 | your brain is supposed to do.

00:07:33.440 | So let's say--

00:07:34.640 | I don't know how much I can talk about it, Jesse,

00:07:36.640 | but we are deep in discussions about version 2.0 of my time

00:07:39.920 | block planner and what it's going to be like.

00:07:44.080 | I have a lot of upgrades in mind.

00:07:45.400 | Because as I told people, the time block planner,

00:07:48.560 | you're not buying a single thing.

00:07:52.040 | You're buying into a system.

00:07:54.200 | Because you have to get new ones when it fills up.

00:07:57.280 | And over time, it's going to keep improving.

00:07:59.680 | And probably the longest cycle of improvement

00:08:02.420 | is this one we just went through,

00:08:03.840 | because we printed a bunch up front.

00:08:05.680 | So it's like, OK, until we sell--

00:08:07.280 | we have to sell the ones we have before we do new ones.

00:08:09.760 | And we've done that.

00:08:12.360 | So now we're working on the next one.

00:08:14.040 | And as we print them in smaller batches,

00:08:15.680 | making tweaks going forward will be cool.

00:08:17.000 | So I can't talk about any specifics yet.

00:08:18.640 | Because I got to tell you, in a global supply chain crisis

00:08:22.680 | moment, it's surprisingly hard to design new paper product

00:08:28.040 | type things, stuff you wouldn't even

00:08:30.080 | think about being potentially scarce, like glue can be.

00:08:33.420 | So it's been a bit of a journey.

00:08:35.260 | But I should have announcements to make soon

00:08:38.580 | about new and improved time block planners.

00:08:40.620 | Exciting stuff.

00:08:41.660 | Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

00:08:43.540 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:08:46.900 | (upbeat music)

How Can People Who Lack Planning Skills Improve Without Discouagement?

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