How To Not Waste Your Time - 5 Keys To Master Productivity & Reinvent Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So it's mid-summer.

00:00:01.660 | This means people have a little breathing room

00:00:04.700 | in their professional schedule.

00:00:06.060 | They're a little bit more relaxed and open than normal.

00:00:08.900 | So I thought this would be a good moment

00:00:10.940 | to revisit some of the biggest ideas

00:00:14.940 | about the biggest topic that we cover on this show,

00:00:18.400 | productivity, right?

00:00:20.900 | Look, in a world in which digital distractions

00:00:23.260 | and diversions are constantly grabbing at your attention

00:00:26.140 | or fragmenting your schedule or driving you crazy

00:00:29.260 | with relentless, frenetic, shallow activity,

00:00:31.660 | it has never been harder to take control

00:00:35.340 | of your time and attention

00:00:36.600 | and aim it at what really matters.

00:00:40.600 | I can help you with this.

00:00:42.500 | So what I thought I would do here

00:00:43.840 | would be to review five of the biggest ideas I've had

00:00:48.240 | about finding productivity in a distracted world.

00:00:52.260 | You've heard these in bits and pieces

00:00:54.100 | and I mention them all the time,

00:00:55.100 | but I'm bringing them all together

00:00:56.800 | into one consolidated productivity primer.

00:01:00.700 | Let's get us all back on the same stage

00:01:02.540 | about how to gain back some sort of deep control

00:01:05.940 | of our life in a distracted world.

00:01:07.240 | And this I thought would be a perfect time to do it.

00:01:10.600 | All right, so before I get to my five core strategies

00:01:13.940 | to suggest, let's just start

00:01:15.940 | with a quick foundational question

00:01:17.400 | because I think it's important

00:01:18.340 | to calibrate everything we're doing here.

00:01:20.800 | What do we mean by productivity?

00:01:24.940 | Now, in the context of knowledge work,

00:01:27.840 | which is the vast majority of my audience,

00:01:29.840 | productivity can be a tricky topic to talk about.

00:01:33.800 | It's because this term has become more,

00:01:38.800 | I wouldn't say taboo,

00:01:40.440 | but more of a source of distrust or discomfort,

00:01:44.000 | especially in certain online cultures.

00:01:46.480 | So why?

00:01:48.080 | Why are people upset about the idea of productivity?

00:01:50.900 | We have to answer this

00:01:51.740 | before we try to pursue it ourselves.

00:01:53.300 | I think there's two reasons,

00:01:54.900 | two different reasons why people are wary

00:01:57.040 | about this term right now.

00:01:59.200 | Reason number one, in the context of office work,

00:02:02.300 | office workers often confuse the term productivity

00:02:05.580 | with what I call pseudoproductivity.

00:02:09.340 | Now, pseudoproductivity is a concept from my new book,

00:02:12.440 | which is called slow productivity.

00:02:14.000 | So I'm using the word productivity a lot here,

00:02:15.840 | but in my new work, Slow Productivity,

00:02:17.540 | I introduced this notion of pseudoproductivity.

00:02:20.340 | Pseudoproductivity is this rough heuristic

00:02:22.340 | we use to sort of approximate useful effort in office work,

00:02:26.740 | where we say busyness, that is visible activity,

00:02:30.980 | will be our proxy for useful effort.

00:02:33.640 | This rough heuristic reigns supreme in office work.

00:02:39.540 | So when a lot of office workers think about productivity,

00:02:42.440 | what they're really thinking about is pseudoproductivity.

00:02:44.880 | And the problem with pseudoproductivity

00:02:46.640 | is that it's performative and it's grueling.

00:02:48.840 | To increase your pseudoproductivity,

00:02:51.440 | you just have to be busier.

00:02:53.640 | Answer emails faster, answer Slack better,

00:02:56.200 | do more virtual meetings,

00:02:58.080 | chime in on these conversations at night,

00:03:00.000 | on the weekends, in the morning.

00:03:01.640 | It is exhausting.

00:03:02.740 | The only way to increase your pseudoproductivity

00:03:04.840 | is to make your life itself more exhausting.

00:03:08.200 | So when people think you're saying,

00:03:10.340 | "Yeah, we wanna improve pseudoproductivity,"

00:03:12.840 | of course they get upset

00:03:13.700 | because that is performative and grueling.

00:03:15.440 | It is not, however,

00:03:16.280 | what we're gonna be talking about today.

00:03:17.920 | The second reason why people get upset about productivity

00:03:21.600 | is the cultural critics in particular

00:03:24.640 | associate it very closely

00:03:26.960 | with the mathematical concept of optimization,

00:03:30.020 | which they take to mean in the context of work,

00:03:35.120 | fitting as many things as possible into your life

00:03:37.600 | and doing those things

00:03:38.680 | at the absolute highest level possible.

00:03:41.140 | So optimizing what you can fit

00:03:42.880 | and optimizing the performance of what you do.

00:03:46.480 | Cultural critics say, look, an obsession with optimization

00:03:49.160 | is itself also exhausting.

00:03:52.400 | As Oliver Berkman points out,

00:03:54.040 | it's also ultimately gonna be futile

00:03:56.260 | because the vast majority of things you can't do anyways.

00:03:59.520 | So why obsess about fitting in more?

00:04:01.560 | What's the difference?

00:04:02.400 | Why not just relax a little bit?

00:04:04.160 | I think this anti-optimization critique of productivity

00:04:07.900 | really got a sort of intellectual jolt in the arm in 2019

00:04:11.320 | from Ginny O'Dell's work,

00:04:12.560 | in particular her book, "How to Do Nothing."

00:04:15.160 | Ginny O'Dell was drawing from the work

00:04:16.920 | of an Italian communist philosopher,

00:04:18.720 | found a way of actually bringing labor critique concepts

00:04:21.760 | from communism and Marxism

00:04:23.940 | over to critiques of knowledge work

00:04:27.020 | and things such as like our phones,

00:04:28.480 | computers, and social media.

00:04:29.880 | So she introduced a lot of this sort of

00:04:32.320 | modernized Marxist terminology to critiquing optimization,

00:04:36.800 | especially digital optimization,

00:04:38.640 | a lot of terminology about internalizing narratives

00:04:43.080 | of capitalist production and efficiency

00:04:44.840 | and then playing those out in our own lives.

00:04:47.240 | Cultural critics love this stuff.

00:04:48.640 | And so a lot of that terminology has spread

00:04:51.000 | through the discussions of productivity.

00:04:52.640 | So that's the other reason why people are suspicious.

00:04:55.360 | They think of it as optimization,

00:04:57.200 | fit as much as possible,

00:04:58.440 | do that stuff increasingly at higher and higher levels,

00:05:01.580 | which yeah, that can be tiring as well.

00:05:05.040 | So what do we mean?

00:05:07.440 | Well, not quite either of those things.

00:05:09.640 | When I talk about personal productivity,

00:05:11.160 | I typically have two goals in mind.

00:05:13.720 | The first is the ability to control your time and attention

00:05:16.720 | so you can be intentional about what receives your energy.

00:05:20.720 | This allows you to better shape your life

00:05:22.320 | towards deeper objectives.

00:05:25.120 | The second goal I have for personal productivity,

00:05:29.240 | separate your results from exhaustion.

00:05:33.060 | Be smart about how you tackle specific work

00:05:35.120 | so that you can produce good results

00:05:36.360 | without wasting large amounts of time and energy

00:05:38.320 | or falling towards burnout.

00:05:40.680 | If what you're doing isn't sustainable,

00:05:42.640 | then you're not doing it right.

00:05:44.200 | Okay, so the second element of personal productivity,

00:05:48.040 | find a way to do whatever you wanna do that's sustainable.

00:05:51.240 | That's very unique to me, I would say.

00:05:53.520 | I am very sensitive to tiredness.

00:05:55.440 | I'm very sensitive to stress.

00:05:56.900 | So this has been a big undercurrent

00:05:59.920 | in my professional discussion of productivity

00:06:02.300 | is how do we avoid those things?

00:06:03.560 | I do not like the idea of hustling.

00:06:05.820 | I do not like the idea of burning the midnight oil

00:06:07.920 | and just getting after it and waking up at five

00:06:09.800 | and working harder than the other person.

00:06:12.400 | I'm not well wired for it.

00:06:13.940 | So this is unique to my flavor of personal productivity

00:06:17.000 | is the key is sustainability.

00:06:19.000 | It's not gonna exhaust you.

00:06:20.000 | You have flexibility.

00:06:21.000 | That's important to me.

00:06:22.800 | This first part though, gets to the key

00:06:24.360 | of what we really mean by personal productivity,

00:06:26.280 | which is you can control what you're doing when you do it,

00:06:29.400 | why you're doing it.

00:06:30.400 | So to me, here's the choice.

00:06:34.820 | If you wanna pursue this definition of productivity,

00:06:37.960 | you gain control over what you do,

00:06:39.640 | and you're trying to be very careful

00:06:40.840 | about avoiding burnout producing patterns.

00:06:43.460 | To not do this means you're in danger

00:06:47.200 | of falling to the opposite,

00:06:48.080 | being not in control of your time and attention

00:06:50.120 | and not being particularly careful

00:06:52.360 | about trying to avoid burnout or unsustainable work habits.

00:06:55.080 | You're much more likely to be overloaded

00:06:56.700 | or frenetic or exhausted.

00:06:58.560 | So what do you do with these skills?

00:06:59.960 | So if you do gain this definition of personal productivity,

00:07:02.740 | what do you do with them?

00:07:03.580 | Well, look, it's up to you.

00:07:04.900 | Like, I think it's fine, for example,

00:07:08.240 | to put these skills to use for a while,

00:07:11.760 | to kind of do the old school optimization

00:07:13.880 | that the cultural critics worry about and say,

00:07:15.480 | you know, I'm gonna try to get after it

00:07:17.100 | and get really good at these skills

00:07:18.600 | or be a huge standout at my job for the, you know,

00:07:22.320 | during my 20s as a way of like building up autonomy

00:07:25.140 | and career capital and really setting myself up

00:07:27.640 | on the right foundation.

00:07:28.480 | There's a time for that,

00:07:29.300 | and these skills could of course help you with that.

00:07:31.140 | But you can use the exact same skills

00:07:32.680 | we're gonna talk about here to minimize the time needed

00:07:36.680 | to do a good enough job at your job

00:07:39.520 | that no one is gonna notice you.

00:07:41.280 | So if you're at a time in your life

00:07:42.520 | where you need more flexibility or just a break,

00:07:45.040 | maybe you have new kids

00:07:46.520 | or you're caring for a sick relative,

00:07:48.220 | or you're really looking to invest

00:07:49.660 | in other parts of your life,

00:07:51.100 | your personal transformation

00:07:54.240 | and important involvement in your community,

00:07:56.300 | these same tools can be used to help you take your work

00:07:58.880 | and squeeze that footprint down small

00:08:01.520 | in a way that people like, hey, Cal's doing great.

00:08:04.880 | It doesn't catch our attention.

00:08:06.080 | And yet you've spread out and can compress this work

00:08:09.680 | in such a way you have a lot of free time.

00:08:11.960 | You can also deploy the type of ideas

00:08:14.160 | we're gonna talk about here

00:08:15.000 | to systematically transform your life outside of work.

00:08:17.700 | We talk a lot on the show about the deep life,

00:08:19.580 | a life lived intentionally and on purpose.

00:08:23.280 | I'm actually writing the book about this right now.

00:08:25.160 | And the very first part of the book

00:08:26.700 | is about preparing before you start to change.

00:08:29.820 | 'Cause if you can't gain control of your life,

00:08:33.320 | you can't hope to transform it.

00:08:34.740 | So these same ideas can be used to help you

00:08:37.960 | transform your life towards things that resonate

00:08:39.960 | and away from things that don't.

00:08:40.880 | So I think there's a lot of potential uses of productivity

00:08:43.600 | beyond just these much more simplistic ideas

00:08:46.520 | that it's all about pseudo productivity

00:08:48.040 | or just trying to optimize everything you do.

00:08:50.280 | All right, enough preamble.

00:08:51.400 | Let's get five pieces of advice here.

00:08:53.880 | The first idea I wanna talk about is multi-scale planning.

00:08:59.880 | This is my answer to the question of what should I do next?

00:09:05.420 | This is the fundamental question

00:09:06.720 | in controlling your time and attention is,

00:09:08.380 | what do I do right now?

00:09:09.880 | What am I gonna do after that?

00:09:12.100 | This is a tricky question to answer

00:09:14.140 | because what you're trying to do here

00:09:17.000 | is not just find something useful to do next,

00:09:20.600 | but somehow have your answer to this question

00:09:23.200 | connect to your interest and objectives

00:09:26.080 | and systems on many different timescales, right?

00:09:30.200 | That somehow when you're deciding what to do next,

00:09:32.360 | you have to navigate between the reactive

00:09:35.880 | and urgent in the moment

00:09:37.560 | and things that could be completely non-urgent

00:09:39.960 | and completely optional,

00:09:41.440 | but is maybe a project that you wanna make progress on

00:09:44.440 | over the course of the year

00:09:45.420 | that's gonna be important to you.

00:09:46.440 | All of these concerns have to get integrated

00:09:48.720 | into deciding what do I do next?

00:09:50.120 | The problem, however, is we don't have the time or energy

00:09:53.240 | to take into account everything on our plate,

00:09:56.440 | all of our different goals and objectives

00:09:58.000 | and what's going on in our systems

00:09:59.360 | and how our projects are unfolding

00:10:00.640 | and where things are and what needs to be done.

00:10:02.560 | We cannot take this all into account

00:10:04.440 | every time we have a new moment to say,

00:10:06.680 | what do I do next?

00:10:07.520 | We would just collapse into planning paralysis.

00:10:10.920 | This is where multiscale planning enters the scene, right?

00:10:14.680 | Here's the idea.

00:10:15.520 | You plan at multiple timescales.

00:10:17.040 | Each timescale is informed by the one before it.

00:10:20.960 | So you have what I call a strategic plan

00:10:22.500 | or a quarterly plan.

00:10:23.380 | This is a bigger picture plan about your big objectives.

00:10:26.840 | You should have one for your work.

00:10:28.040 | You should have one for your life outside of work.

00:10:30.680 | So you're figuring out this is what I'm up to this year.

00:10:32.760 | And in this season, in order to make progress

00:10:35.040 | on this big goal, here's what I'm doing.

00:10:37.440 | I'm gonna finally pick up this skill

00:10:39.840 | or this project that's been put on my plate.

00:10:42.000 | I'm gonna nail this project above and beyond this winter

00:10:45.300 | because that's gonna really open up big possibilities.

00:10:47.720 | Or this is the spring in which I'm gonna completely

00:10:50.560 | overhaul my fitness and my personal life.

00:10:52.520 | I think my health is bad and this is gonna be the time

00:10:55.680 | where I'm gonna make this major change.

00:10:57.000 | It's gonna take a few months,

00:10:57.900 | but this is where I'm gonna kickstart a new way of living.

00:11:00.280 | So the strategic or quarterly plans

00:11:02.620 | is where you have these big picture visions

00:11:04.080 | for your life and your life outside of work.

00:11:06.000 | You update these definitely once a year,

00:11:09.040 | but you kind of check back in with them every season.

00:11:12.080 | Okay, each week then you build a plan

00:11:16.480 | for the week ahead of you.

00:11:17.960 | This is what we call the weekly plan.

00:11:19.920 | When you build your weekly plan,

00:11:21.440 | you go back and you check the strategic plan.

00:11:23.660 | That is when you consult it.

00:11:26.000 | And so when you're looking at the week ahead,

00:11:27.560 | you can have these questions about,

00:11:28.800 | okay, what for my strategic plan do I wanna try

00:11:30.840 | to remind myself or integrate into my week?

00:11:33.360 | When you're doing your weekly plan,

00:11:36.060 | this is also where you can survey your calendar,

00:11:38.840 | identify the good spots

00:11:40.660 | for getting certain types of work done.

00:11:42.320 | This is where you see like, oh, Monday actually

00:11:45.440 | is a pretty clear afternoon.

00:11:47.800 | So Monday at three, I'm gonna cut off work there

00:11:50.280 | to go to the whatever.

00:11:53.480 | I have a giant errand I wanna do

00:11:55.280 | that's gonna be connected to a big lifestyle goal I'm doing.

00:11:58.200 | I'm gonna go to the gym supply store

00:11:59.680 | to finally buy like a barbell and barbell weights.

00:12:02.880 | It's gonna take an hour and a half.

00:12:03.960 | Here's the right time to do it.

00:12:05.160 | Friday morning is open.

00:12:07.320 | That's when I'm gonna really like write the draft

00:12:10.720 | of this book proposal I'm working on.

00:12:12.080 | So you're sort of looking at the whole week at once

00:12:15.360 | and seeing where you have the right times

00:12:18.140 | for working on things.

00:12:19.200 | This is also where you can make some changes

00:12:21.040 | where you say, you know what?

00:12:21.880 | My Thursday would be perfect for me

00:12:23.800 | to spend the whole day working on this project

00:12:26.320 | except for I have this stupid call at two.

00:12:28.120 | So let's move that call

00:12:29.720 | 'cause that's in the way of this day being perfect

00:12:32.440 | for my bigger picture plan.

00:12:34.160 | When you're doing your weekly plan,

00:12:35.320 | you might add some stuff onto your calendar.

00:12:37.040 | Great, here's some big rocks I wanna make sure I get done.

00:12:39.920 | Let me put them on my calendar now like an appointment

00:12:41.960 | so that time is protected.

00:12:44.240 | You should also write out some sort of plan

00:12:46.120 | for your week long hand as well.

00:12:48.440 | You could type this, you can write it

00:12:49.800 | into like my time block planner has a weekly plan page.

00:12:52.460 | And this reminders to yourself,

00:12:53.700 | remember we're doing this every day.

00:12:55.980 | Here's what we're doing like with workouts.

00:12:57.900 | The main professional push this week

00:12:59.820 | is going to be trying to get this report done.

00:13:01.860 | So let's try to get a couple hours every morning on this

00:13:04.300 | before we switch over to admin.

00:13:05.880 | It's notes to yourself

00:13:07.100 | about how you're going through this week.

00:13:09.260 | So now you have a plan for your week

00:13:11.700 | that takes into account the reality of your week

00:13:13.460 | and maybe even alter that reality a little bit.

00:13:16.120 | Big things are on your calendar.

00:13:18.300 | You have notes to yourself as well

00:13:20.140 | about what to keep in mind as the week unfolds.

00:13:22.140 | This will reflect what you saw

00:13:25.200 | in your strategic or quarterly plans.

00:13:27.740 | Now we go to the final timescale,

00:13:28.940 | the finest timescale, which is every day.

00:13:31.220 | As every day starts,

00:13:32.100 | you're gonna build a time block plan for your work day.

00:13:35.900 | You're gonna block off the hours of your day

00:13:37.620 | and give every block a job.

00:13:38.860 | Okay, during this two hours,

00:13:39.940 | I'm working specifically on this.

00:13:41.340 | The half hour that follows, I'm checking my email,

00:13:43.860 | catching up on as much as possible in that half hour.

00:13:46.640 | Then I have lunch, then there's 30 minutes free,

00:13:49.980 | and then there is this meeting.

00:13:51.660 | So I put the meeting,

00:13:52.800 | I'm gonna put 20 minutes after the meeting

00:13:54.460 | for actually consolidating my notes on the meeting.

00:13:56.860 | And in that 30 minutes between lunch and the meeting,

00:13:58.700 | I have this list here of five small chores

00:14:01.140 | that I'm gonna try to get done.

00:14:01.980 | These five small tasks, submitting this form,

00:14:04.100 | calling the IT department.

00:14:06.460 | Let me get that done in this space.

00:14:07.740 | You're giving your time a job.

00:14:09.700 | So you're figuring out a good way

00:14:11.700 | to make use of your work time in advance,

00:14:13.700 | as opposed to just going through your day

00:14:15.180 | and continually asking, "Hey, what do I wanna work on?"

00:14:17.780 | Next, here's the key.

00:14:20.300 | Before you build your time block day for a specific day,

00:14:23.300 | your time block plan, rather,

00:14:24.780 | you look at your weekly plan.

00:14:26.220 | 'Cause your weekly plan is gonna inform

00:14:28.340 | what happens in your time block plan.

00:14:30.620 | First of all, of course, you have to copy over

00:14:32.300 | everything that's on your calendar,

00:14:33.700 | but you might have these reminders in your weekly plan.

00:14:35.460 | Hey, we're trying to write every morning.

00:14:37.540 | Make sure that we do this at the end of the day.

00:14:40.100 | So you're making sure those notes from your weekly plan

00:14:42.740 | get integrated to your plan for the day,

00:14:44.340 | and then you execute your time block plan.

00:14:47.660 | So now when we get to a particular moment

00:14:49.500 | in a particular day,

00:14:51.500 | how do you answer the question of what I should do next?

00:14:53.780 | It's whatever time block you're in will tell you.

00:14:56.180 | But that time block is influenced by your weekly plan.

00:14:58.780 | And that weekly plan itself is influenced

00:15:00.700 | by your quarterly or strategic plan.

00:15:02.180 | So now you're wasting very little energy

00:15:04.820 | in the moment deciding what I do next,

00:15:06.700 | but that decision connects to your priorities

00:15:09.220 | at multiple different timescales.

00:15:10.860 | So time block planning is how

00:15:13.940 | you not only get more out of your day,

00:15:15.860 | but how you ensure progress is made on things that matter,

00:15:19.980 | even if these things aren't all urgent,

00:15:23.060 | do the next day, or right there in your face.

00:15:25.820 | So multi-scale planning,

00:15:28.060 | critical key to controlling your time and attention.

00:15:31.140 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:15:31.980 | I wanted to interrupt briefly

00:15:33.580 | to say that if you're enjoying this video,

00:15:35.940 | then you need to check out my new book,

00:15:38.140 | "Slow Productivity,

00:15:39.940 | "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."

00:15:43.820 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas

00:15:46.540 | we talk about here in these videos.

00:15:49.260 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:15:54.260 | I know you're gonna like it.

00:15:56.300 | Check it out.

00:15:57.340 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:15:59.580 | All right, idea number two,

00:16:01.060 | office hours, meeting windows, and project protocols.

00:16:04.920 | These are three things that are all trying

00:16:06.500 | to solve the same problem.

00:16:09.480 | So if you read my 2021 book, "A World Without Email,"

00:16:13.840 | I identify what I think is the number one productivity poison

00:16:18.800 | in the knowledge work sector.

00:16:20.560 | And it's not necessarily what people think.

00:16:22.680 | The number one productivity poison is context switching.

00:16:26.180 | Every time you change your attention

00:16:29.560 | from one target to another,

00:16:31.840 | you instigate an expensive neurological process

00:16:35.200 | where your brain is trying to actually switch

00:16:37.240 | which networks are activated

00:16:39.440 | and inhibit other networks that are no longer relevant.

00:16:42.520 | This is an expensive operation.

00:16:44.160 | It takes time.

00:16:45.000 | It can take 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes

00:16:46.760 | for your brain to completely switch

00:16:48.440 | its semantic context from one target to another.

00:16:52.000 | So what happens when you keep context switching rapidly

00:16:55.360 | throughout your work,

00:16:56.240 | where you're trying to work on, let's say, a report,

00:16:59.300 | but every few minutes you jump over to check Slack,

00:17:01.360 | you jump over to check email,

00:17:02.440 | maybe you send a couple of emails,

00:17:03.480 | you come back to what you're working on,

00:17:04.720 | then jump over to check what's going on with the Olympics,

00:17:06.680 | and back to what you're working on.

00:17:08.120 | Every time you switch your attention,

00:17:09.920 | you instigate this expensive change.

00:17:12.640 | But of course, you don't sit around in your email inbox

00:17:14.680 | or Slack or on the Olympics website for 20, 30 minutes,

00:17:17.240 | giving yourself enough time

00:17:18.240 | to completely change this new context.

00:17:20.280 | You actually halt that change after it begins,

00:17:23.800 | and then try to wrench your attention back

00:17:25.520 | to what you're originally working on.

00:17:26.920 | And now you have that cognitive context tries to come back,

00:17:30.160 | but before it could get completely back,

00:17:31.560 | you switch to something else.

00:17:33.840 | This creates a train wreck, cognitively speaking,

00:17:37.720 | inside your head, which makes it very difficult to focus.

00:17:41.040 | This is why you find your sort of intellectual energy

00:17:43.280 | begins to plummet.

00:17:44.280 | It's like, "Oh man, I just feel sort of like fatigued.

00:17:46.920 | "I feel like I can't think straight."

00:17:48.960 | It's a terrible type of state

00:17:50.600 | in which to try to do interesting work.

00:17:53.080 | So you gotta minimize those context shifts.

00:17:55.320 | Well, what's the number one source of context shifts?

00:17:58.040 | Ongoing back and forth, unscheduled conversation.

00:18:01.800 | So if I have multiple conversations

00:18:04.280 | that are unfolding with back and forth emails,

00:18:06.960 | I have multiple conversations

00:18:09.080 | that are sort of unfolding unpredictably

00:18:12.440 | on a Slack channel,

00:18:13.760 | I have to keep tending to those communication channels

00:18:17.480 | because I don't know when the reply to my message

00:18:19.280 | is gonna come in,

00:18:21.040 | but I have to see that pretty quickly

00:18:22.360 | because I have to bounce it back

00:18:23.400 | to their side of the proverbial court

00:18:24.760 | so they can bounce it back to me,

00:18:25.760 | and then I can bounce it back to them.

00:18:27.080 | So we all have to start checking these inboxes

00:18:29.320 | and channels all the time

00:18:30.240 | to keep these ongoing conversations

00:18:31.800 | actually moving forward.

00:18:33.280 | This is the number one source of context shifts.

00:18:35.600 | These context shifts are productivity poison.

00:18:38.480 | So office hours, meeting windows,

00:18:40.080 | and project protocols are three ways

00:18:42.520 | to tame this source of context shifts.

00:18:44.760 | Office hours says have set times most days

00:18:48.120 | where your door is open.

00:18:49.800 | Maybe you have a virtual meeting room

00:18:51.720 | like a Zoom or Teams room activated,

00:18:53.520 | your phone is on.

00:18:54.400 | As much as possible,

00:18:57.520 | when someone tries to instigate

00:19:00.040 | a back and forth discussion with you over email and Slack,

00:19:03.400 | defer them to the office hours.

00:19:05.720 | Yeah, that's important.

00:19:06.560 | We should get into it.

00:19:07.680 | Just grab me at my next office hours

00:19:09.240 | next time you're able.

00:19:10.360 | Now, what you're doing here

00:19:12.440 | is taking these conversations

00:19:13.680 | that would have generated lots of back and forth messages,

00:19:17.360 | which means lots even more checks of your inbox

00:19:19.800 | away for these messages,

00:19:21.280 | and it pushes them all to this one consolidated time

00:19:23.720 | where you can just in real time

00:19:24.760 | go back and forth and solve them.

00:19:26.360 | If you can take three or four such conversations

00:19:28.560 | in a given day and push it to one,

00:19:30.240 | one hour office hours meeting,

00:19:31.880 | and therefore leave the rest of your day

00:19:33.640 | relatively uninterrupted,

00:19:35.240 | it is a significant, significant win

00:19:38.120 | in terms of your exhaustion

00:19:39.240 | and ability to actually do work.

00:19:41.120 | Meeting windows are similar.

00:19:42.520 | People are constantly in our modern world saying,

00:19:45.320 | when can we have a meeting?

00:19:46.160 | When can we have a meeting?

00:19:47.360 | Here's an invite, here's an invite.

00:19:48.640 | It's Zoom, it's Teams, all these virtual meetings.

00:19:50.800 | Now that the friction involved in meetings is so low,

00:19:53.340 | we are inundated with requests for meetings.

00:19:57.020 | Now this can be a problem in part

00:19:58.380 | because scheduling these meetings

00:20:00.340 | requires back and forth messages,

00:20:01.740 | creates context shifting,

00:20:02.940 | and the meetings begin to fall

00:20:04.360 | pretty haphazardly onto your schedule.

00:20:06.380 | So it's very difficult to get through

00:20:07.940 | any extended period of your day

00:20:09.400 | without having some meeting

00:20:10.500 | that completely scrambles your brain

00:20:12.040 | and changes what you're thinking about.

00:20:13.860 | Simplify this by having,

00:20:14.940 | here's the standard windows each day when I do meetings.

00:20:18.380 | Right?

00:20:19.220 | Yeah, let's have a meeting.

00:20:20.420 | I usually do these, you know,

00:20:21.500 | one to four, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays,

00:20:24.260 | you know, are all great for me.

00:20:25.420 | Let me know if there's a slot in there coming up.

00:20:27.420 | So you kind of consolidate,

00:20:28.380 | you take the options away of when the meetings happen,

00:20:30.300 | that simplifies scheduling,

00:20:31.980 | and the meetings themselves are consolidated.

00:20:33.820 | So like your mornings are free in this scenario.

00:20:35.620 | Your Mondays and Fridays are free in this scenario.

00:20:37.500 | You're less, your context shifting less.

00:20:39.940 | If you think you can get away with it,

00:20:43.580 | use some sort of meeting planning software like Calendly.

00:20:46.900 | So you're gonna say, yeah, we should definitely meet.

00:20:48.820 | Here's the link, grab any time that works for you.

00:20:51.960 | So now you've completely eliminated back and forth planning

00:20:54.920 | and you have full control over

00:20:56.200 | when you want these meetings to happen.

00:20:57.720 | So they don't just fall haphazardly in your schedule.

00:21:00.200 | The final advice here for reducing context switching

00:21:02.520 | is project protocols.

00:21:04.560 | If you have an ongoing project

00:21:05.600 | you're gonna be working on for a while,

00:21:07.180 | take 20 minutes upfront to figure out

00:21:08.900 | how are we gonna communicate and collaborate here?

00:21:11.000 | Don't just rock and roll on email

00:21:13.040 | and throwing random meetings at each other

00:21:14.620 | and just sort of hope it works out.

00:21:16.080 | Figure out your protocol for this project.

00:21:19.000 | Oh, we got to produce this report.

00:21:20.580 | Let's take 20 minutes to figure out

00:21:22.580 | how that's gonna unfold.

00:21:23.940 | If you build a protocol,

00:21:25.040 | you can save yourself a lot of unscheduled messaging.

00:21:28.320 | So for example, if you're working with someone else

00:21:30.280 | to produce report, a protocol might say something like,

00:21:33.640 | okay, I will write a rough draft of this report

00:21:37.840 | in a shared document and I'll get that done by Thursday.

00:21:42.580 | All right, I'll get it done by Thursday

00:21:44.080 | at close of business, right?

00:21:45.400 | So that'll just, you can expect it

00:21:46.600 | starting Friday morning, it is available.

00:21:48.720 | Take a look on Friday, add any edits or suggestions

00:21:51.680 | that you have throughout Friday.

00:21:55.080 | On my Monday office hours, which are from three to four,

00:21:58.160 | swing by my office and we'll talk it through.

00:22:00.400 | I will read your comments before those office hours.

00:22:03.400 | I'm putting that on my calendar now

00:22:04.620 | and then we can have a real time discussion about it.

00:22:06.520 | Then during that discussion on office hours,

00:22:09.240 | we can figure out what the final edits are.

00:22:11.240 | And then I'll put aside time on like that Wednesday

00:22:15.560 | to make my pass on those final edits.

00:22:17.480 | I'll have it done by 12, starting at 12,

00:22:20.400 | you can grab the document, you finalize it,

00:22:22.520 | send it to the designer, CC me when you do it.

00:22:24.680 | As long as we get to him by the end of day Wednesday,

00:22:26.400 | we should be fine.

00:22:27.520 | Look, this sounds like a bit of a pain.

00:22:30.160 | The sit down and take 15 minutes

00:22:31.640 | to figure out a protocol like that

00:22:33.000 | for this particular project.

00:22:35.040 | But think about what you just saved.

00:22:37.500 | With that style of project protocol in place,

00:22:41.000 | there are no unscheduled emails, no unscheduled Slack chats.

00:22:44.960 | No like, hey, what's going on, going back and forth.

00:22:48.280 | You just know when to work and when it's gonna happen.

00:22:50.520 | You have saved yourself from context switches.

00:22:52.520 | So project protocol, spending 15 minutes up front

00:22:55.320 | to figure out how something's gonna unfold,

00:22:57.360 | saves you so much context switching

00:22:59.640 | and unscheduled communication down the line.

00:23:02.040 | So office hours, meeting windows and project protocols,

00:23:04.840 | they go a long way towards saving your brain.

00:23:07.080 | All right, that's two ideas.

00:23:09.300 | Let's do idea number three of five.

00:23:12.320 | Deep to shallow work ratios.

00:23:15.240 | All right, this is the foundational idea

00:23:17.000 | from my book, "Deep Work."

00:23:19.880 | When you're trying to do something cognitively demanding,

00:23:22.320 | the best way to do this is in a state that I call deep work,

00:23:24.920 | which says you're giving it your full attention

00:23:26.960 | and you're not context switching at all.

00:23:28.520 | This is getting your sustained attention until you're done.

00:23:31.280 | So when you're thinking about your workday,

00:23:33.320 | you have to separate and treat separately deep work

00:23:36.960 | from non-deep work, which we often call shallow work

00:23:39.320 | just for simplicity.

00:23:41.400 | All right, shallow work, you're doing emails, meetings,

00:23:44.040 | you're jumping back and forth between documents,

00:23:45.840 | you're seeing a lot of different information.

00:23:47.260 | Deep work, you're completely locked in,

00:23:48.680 | completely uninterrupted.

00:23:50.520 | Treat these two things separately.

00:23:52.220 | Now, once you treat these two things separately,

00:23:55.240 | you can ask the question of how much deep work am I doing?

00:23:59.660 | I argue that most knowledge work jobs should identify

00:24:02.520 | an ideal deep to shallow work ratio

00:24:04.620 | for say a standard work week.

00:24:07.040 | How many hours of my work in a standard week

00:24:11.140 | should be deep versus shallow?

00:24:14.000 | This ratio might differ depending on your job,

00:24:16.360 | and that's fine.

00:24:17.960 | This is one of the misnomers about deep work

00:24:19.880 | is that people think the argument

00:24:21.120 | is that deep work is all that matters

00:24:22.500 | and all you should be doing is deep work.

00:24:24.400 | This is true for basically no one

00:24:26.040 | except maybe professional literary novelist, right?

00:24:29.760 | No, the goal is these are two different things

00:24:31.900 | that are both important,

00:24:32.740 | but you need to be very intentional

00:24:34.040 | about how much deep work you should be doing

00:24:36.400 | in order to sort of be as valuable as possible in your job.

00:24:40.080 | So you should know your ideal deep to shallow work ratio.

00:24:42.600 | You should measure how many hours were deep

00:24:45.800 | and non-deep this week

00:24:47.920 | and see how far you are from your ideal ratio.

00:24:51.160 | If you're far off of it, now you make changes.

00:24:53.760 | Now you have a target to aim towards.

00:24:55.480 | And what types of changes do you make?

00:24:56.800 | Well, now you're gonna start doing things

00:24:58.000 | like pre-scheduling deep work time,

00:25:00.500 | constraining meetings to meeting windows

00:25:02.400 | so that you have enough time left for deep work,

00:25:05.680 | having meeting days and non-meeting days,

00:25:08.520 | like all sorts of innovations can come out of this.

00:25:10.880 | I highly suggest having this conversation

00:25:13.240 | with your supervisor,

00:25:14.560 | get them on board with your ideal deep to shallow work ratio

00:25:19.240 | so they too can get involved in helping to figure out

00:25:22.520 | how you can actually hit those numbers

00:25:24.040 | during a particular week.

00:25:25.040 | Sometimes you need a supervisor to come in and say,

00:25:27.360 | for example, Cal doesn't do meetings before noon.

00:25:30.320 | We're trying to hit his 50/50 ratio

00:25:31.960 | and this is the only way we can do it.

00:25:33.680 | Use this as a core metric

00:25:35.480 | in a world of sort of non-entry level knowledge work.

00:25:38.240 | Use this ratio as a core metric

00:25:40.000 | that you're measuring and aiming towards.

00:25:43.300 | The key thing here for all of this

00:25:45.160 | is you have to measure in increments of an hour.

00:25:48.240 | There's no such thing as I did 10 minutes of deep work.

00:25:51.040 | And the hour does not count if there's any context shifting.

00:25:54.180 | If you have to take a call,

00:25:56.120 | if you have to jump in on an inbox,

00:25:57.560 | if you have to keep a conversation going on Slack,

00:25:59.880 | that doesn't count as a deep work hour.

00:26:01.800 | You really have to respect deep work hours

00:26:04.640 | as completely uninterrupted focus.

00:26:06.580 | That is the state that produces real value.

00:26:09.200 | It is notably better

00:26:11.600 | than spending that same time

00:26:13.840 | sort of working on the deep thing,

00:26:15.280 | but having an occasional context shift.

00:26:17.540 | So have an ideal deep to shallow work ratio,

00:26:20.240 | measure it and fight to hit that metric.

00:26:23.040 | That alone could 5X the value you're producing, right?

00:26:28.040 | When we're just kind of stumbling through our workday,

00:26:30.960 | if like I'm just doing stuff,

00:26:32.780 | I believe in pseudo productivity,

00:26:34.280 | I'm busy, I respond to things,

00:26:35.680 | there's a lot going on, I feel very active and involved.

00:26:38.500 | So much of your time there is either administrative

00:26:41.280 | or you struggling through the after effects

00:26:43.200 | of context switching that the actual amount

00:26:45.040 | of cognitive value produced could be pretty low.

00:26:47.620 | Once you start caring about deep to shallow work ratios,

00:26:49.740 | it's like a superpower.

00:26:51.560 | Look at what happened to Cal, like he's killing it.

00:26:54.480 | Like look at these code updates he's putting in,

00:26:56.080 | look at these new marketing strategies,

00:26:57.400 | look at the papers that he's producing,

00:26:59.220 | makes a big difference.

00:27:01.280 | All right, idea number four, work in progress limits,

00:27:05.680 | WIP limits as a terminology that I've taken

00:27:08.800 | from Kanban project management philosophies.

00:27:13.240 | All right, I really pushed this in my new book,

00:27:14.800 | Slow Productivity, and I really think it is critical.

00:27:17.640 | You need a limit on how many non-trivial projects

00:27:21.180 | you're actively working on at any given time.

00:27:24.280 | And that limit should be between one and three.

00:27:27.240 | All right, this doesn't necessarily mean

00:27:29.560 | once you're actively working on a very big project

00:27:32.160 | that you have to stick with that big project

00:27:34.400 | until it's completely done.

00:27:35.520 | You can break big projects down

00:27:37.080 | into more tractable milestones,

00:27:40.280 | but you should only have one to three

00:27:41.780 | of these tractable milestones

00:27:43.040 | that you're working on actively at a time.

00:27:45.980 | So I might not put write a book as an active project

00:27:49.960 | that that's what I'm working on until I'm done,

00:27:51.400 | but I might put write chapter four of a book

00:27:55.440 | as a tractable milestone.

00:27:58.100 | Okay, and so I'm gonna work,

00:27:59.360 | that's what I'm actually working on right now.

00:28:00.960 | Here's the key.

00:28:02.360 | You keep this list of active projects

00:28:04.280 | or project milestones transparent.

00:28:05.840 | Other people can see it.

00:28:06.680 | Here's what I'm actively working on.

00:28:07.880 | Here's what's queued up for me to work on next.

00:28:11.240 | And for the things that you're not actively work on,

00:28:13.680 | you don't do administrative overhead related to them.

00:28:16.640 | You don't have meetings about them.

00:28:17.760 | You don't do email conversations about them.

00:28:20.720 | They are just waiting,

00:28:22.800 | putting no footprint on your schedule,

00:28:25.020 | no footprint on your attention

00:28:26.280 | until they move over to the active slot.

00:28:28.040 | At which point now you're all in,

00:28:29.160 | you're working on it every day.

00:28:30.120 | You're talking to people about it.

00:28:31.040 | You're having meetings.

00:28:32.560 | So when people say like,

00:28:33.400 | hey, what's going on with this thing?

00:28:34.480 | You're like, can we have a meeting about it?

00:28:35.920 | Let's chat about it.

00:28:36.760 | You're like, here's where it is.

00:28:37.840 | It's in position three of my queue.

00:28:39.040 | As soon as it moves over to active,

00:28:40.520 | I'll ping you and let's get a phone call.

00:28:42.780 | Let's chat about it.

00:28:43.620 | I'm gonna get after it as soon as it gets to active.

00:28:46.120 | I'm not actively working on it now.

00:28:47.880 | Now, this seems kind of like precious.

00:28:50.640 | Like why bother?

00:28:52.160 | You know, why not just be more flexible?

00:28:53.480 | Kind of like work on what you wanna work on,

00:28:55.140 | keep everything sort of up there.

00:28:56.560 | The reason is administrative overhead aggregates.

00:28:59.520 | Everything that you're actively working on

00:29:01.360 | brings along with it its own administrative overhead.

00:29:04.040 | This is conversations, this is email, this is Slack,

00:29:06.360 | this is meetings, this is just brain cycles.

00:29:08.560 | So the more things you're actively working on,

00:29:12.280 | the more administrative overhead that enters your life.

00:29:16.680 | This stuff adds up, it aggregates, right?

00:29:18.620 | So the more administrative overhead you have to handle,

00:29:21.680 | the less of your schedule is actually free

00:29:23.260 | to actually make work done.

00:29:24.320 | And eventually you pass a threshold

00:29:25.620 | in which mainly what you're doing

00:29:27.000 | is just juggling administrative overhead frenetically,

00:29:30.180 | unable to basically make progress on any actual work.

00:29:33.900 | So on the other hand, if you say, no, no, no,

00:29:35.160 | only these two things am I actively working on.

00:29:38.240 | These are the only two things

00:29:39.200 | generate administrative overhead in your life.

00:29:40.760 | That's very tractable.

00:29:42.360 | So now you can really focus on these things,

00:29:44.080 | get them done fast, get them done well,

00:29:45.600 | and bring something new over to the active slot.

00:29:47.880 | The pace at which you complete things goes up

00:29:50.320 | when you reduce the number of things

00:29:52.720 | you're willing to work on concurrently at the same time.

00:29:56.180 | All right?

00:29:57.020 | Key distinction here,

00:29:57.860 | you're not saying no to a bunch of things.

00:30:00.220 | These are all things you're saying yes to.

00:30:02.060 | It's just of the things you said yes to,

00:30:03.660 | you're distinguishing between

00:30:04.900 | this is getting my active attention

00:30:06.660 | or this is cued to get my attention.

00:30:08.740 | I'm a huge believer of this.

00:30:09.860 | I mean, there's a huge chapter on this

00:30:11.220 | in my book, "Slow Productivity."

00:30:12.940 | This really, along with what I talked about before

00:30:17.940 | with office hours, meeting windows, and project protocols,

00:30:21.300 | that plus work and progress limits

00:30:24.040 | utterly transforms the psychological experience

00:30:26.160 | of knowledge work.

00:30:27.760 | It can really change it from this sense

00:30:29.720 | of frenetic exhaustion where nothing ever gets done

00:30:31.720 | and it seems hopeless to something where it's calm,

00:30:35.100 | it's even measured, and to the outside world

00:30:37.880 | it just looks like you're crushing it.

00:30:39.000 | Thing after thing, you're just knocking out.

00:30:41.280 | It looks great, the work is really good.

00:30:43.280 | All right, final idea.

00:30:45.460 | One of the older ideas, actually, shutdown rituals.

00:30:51.280 | When you are done with your workday,

00:30:52.880 | you need a distinctive way of indicating

00:30:55.300 | that you're finished, some sort of ritual

00:30:58.020 | so that your brain can unload from all of its concerns

00:31:02.200 | and ruminations and machinations

00:31:04.120 | about your professional life so you can get a breather

00:31:06.280 | so that you can also find pleasure

00:31:08.500 | and be able to focus on other things in your life.

00:31:11.000 | That's where shutdown rituals enter the scene.

00:31:13.880 | Now, here's the idea.

00:31:14.720 | When you're done with your workday,

00:31:16.480 | you need to go through and police your open loops.

00:31:19.660 | What is anything right now that is open and unresolved

00:31:23.320 | that just exists in my head?

00:31:24.840 | I need to police all of these.

00:31:26.780 | Make sure they get written down, they're in my calendar,

00:31:29.720 | they got put to my to-do list,

00:31:31.200 | it's written on my list of things to handle

00:31:33.320 | during my first administrative block in the morning.

00:31:36.100 | You get them all out of your head.

00:31:37.800 | All right, now once you got those all of your head,

00:31:40.360 | then you look at your calendar, you look at your inbox,

00:31:42.780 | you look at your weekly plan, you're like,

00:31:44.000 | okay, now what's my plan for the days ahead?

00:31:46.600 | You convince yourself I'm not missing something,

00:31:48.920 | I've got a good plan,

00:31:49.860 | I have a sense of what I'm working on tomorrow,

00:31:51.340 | this keeps me on track for my bigger goals.

00:31:53.340 | I checked my calendar,

00:31:54.460 | I'm not missing some urgent early morning meeting.

00:31:57.360 | I looked at my inbox,

00:31:58.360 | there's not some bombshell that landed at the end of the day.

00:32:00.540 | Okay, everything is good.

00:32:02.460 | It's completely safe for me now

00:32:03.780 | to turn my attention away from work.

00:32:05.580 | And then you just need some sort of ritualistic way

00:32:07.860 | of indicating that you're doing so.

00:32:09.620 | This could be a phrase.

00:32:11.940 | I used to use the phrase, shut down complete

00:32:15.660 | or schedule shut down complete.

00:32:17.480 | It could be something physical.

00:32:19.820 | So if you use my time block planner,

00:32:21.260 | you'll notice every day on the daily pages,

00:32:23.020 | there's a checkbox

00:32:23.860 | and it says shut down complete next to it.

00:32:25.900 | That's how I do my shutdown ritual today,

00:32:27.680 | after I do this policing of open loops

00:32:29.400 | and checking in on my plan,

00:32:31.200 | I check the checkbox next to shut down complete.

00:32:34.420 | Now, the key thing is, after you do this,

00:32:38.260 | if your mind, as your mind probably will try to do

00:32:40.540 | from time and again, if your mind is like,

00:32:42.900 | hey, let's just think a little bit more about work.

00:32:45.220 | Hey, what about this thing coming up?

00:32:46.660 | Hey, let's kind of think through this email

00:32:48.180 | we might write to the boss tomorrow.

00:32:49.980 | Do we really have a plan for whatever?

00:32:51.520 | I'm worried about that.

00:32:52.720 | Instead of engaging in a conversation

00:32:55.500 | with this professional rumination, you say, wait a second,

00:32:58.260 | I did my shutdown ritual and I said the phrase

00:33:00.700 | or I checked the box.

00:33:01.580 | I would not have done that

00:33:02.620 | if I had not systematically gone through all my open loops

00:33:06.240 | and my plan and my inbox and was completely convinced

00:33:09.380 | it was fine to shut down for the day.

00:33:10.860 | So you know what rumination?

00:33:12.260 | I'm not interested.

00:33:14.820 | I'm going to go back and do something else.

00:33:16.820 | So you can respond to the rumination

00:33:18.900 | without having to get into the details of work

00:33:21.060 | that the rumination wants you to get into.

00:33:23.160 | And as a result, you avoid falling down

00:33:26.180 | those anxiety producing internal narrative anxiety spirals.

00:33:30.520 | You do the shutdown ritual enough,

00:33:33.020 | your mind just learns like, okay,

00:33:34.700 | this particular rumination gets no foothold

00:33:38.020 | and you get less of them

00:33:39.620 | and your enjoyment and presence outside of work increases.

00:33:42.420 | All right, so there's a ton of other tactical things

00:33:45.660 | I talk about when it comes to productivity.

00:33:47.840 | Like some things I didn't mention here

00:33:49.220 | was like how to organize your obligations

00:33:51.300 | using role specific task boards.

00:33:54.740 | There's things like tactics like working memory.txt

00:33:58.740 | that I think are important.

00:34:00.800 | There's the philosophy of full capture,

00:34:02.700 | which I think matters as well.

00:34:05.440 | There's sort of evidence-based planning for projects.

00:34:08.660 | There's the role of deliberate practice

00:34:10.140 | and career capital acquisition.

00:34:11.220 | There's all sorts of ideas we talk about,

00:34:12.660 | but I think these five are kind of the basics

00:34:16.460 | that get you back in control of your life,

00:34:19.100 | especially knowledge work, right?

00:34:20.140 | So we have multi-scale planning, number one.

00:34:22.200 | We have office hours, meeting windows

00:34:23.620 | and project protocols as number two.

00:34:26.000 | We have deep to shallow work ratios

00:34:28.420 | as your like primary management metric as number three.

00:34:31.880 | We have work in progress limits as number four.

00:34:33.900 | And our final idea is implement shutdown rituals.

00:34:36.720 | You do these five things, you got control.

00:34:41.140 | And you're not gonna burn out.

00:34:42.540 | And what you do with that control is up to you.

00:34:44.260 | Again, you could try to crush it

00:34:46.580 | and make sure your startup becomes the best in the world,

00:34:49.280 | or you can be like secretly getting away

00:34:51.260 | working a couple hours a day

00:34:53.300 | while you work on your stamp collecting hobby

00:34:55.780 | and your boss never knows.

00:34:56.860 | You do you, but none of these options are on the table

00:34:59.860 | if your life is chaotic,

00:35:00.860 | if you don't control your time and attention.

00:35:03.300 | These five things will get you a lot closer to that.

00:35:08.020 | - I have two quick follow-up questions

00:35:10.420 | and then one longer one.

00:35:12.260 | - Okay.

00:35:13.660 | - The quick ones.

00:35:14.940 | How many hours are in your workday for your time block?

00:35:18.260 | - I mean, for me, it's like roughly nine to five.

00:35:21.260 | - So eight, okay.

00:35:22.140 | - Yeah, roughly.

00:35:22.960 | It might be 8.30 to five or nine to 5.30,

00:35:24.980 | but I keep my work within there.

00:35:26.580 | - And then what's your ratio of deep to shallow?

00:35:29.580 | - 50/50 is good for me, if possible.

00:35:33.820 | - So ideal four and four?

00:35:35.340 | - Yeah, that's like a standard.

00:35:37.260 | I think in the summer I can do better

00:35:39.060 | and I wanna do better,

00:35:39.880 | but like that's the average I'm going for.

00:35:42.820 | I say average because it depends on the day.

00:35:46.220 | So like a teaching day, if I'm teaching two classes,

00:35:49.460 | if I count, what I'll often do is not to get like

00:35:51.820 | in the professor weeds here.

00:35:53.400 | I often, I will count the lecturing as deep work

00:35:57.140 | for ratio purposes, because it is really hard, right?

00:35:59.780 | I mean, you're like producing a cognitive output

00:36:02.300 | that has value.

00:36:03.420 | Now it's not like value that's scalable,

00:36:05.340 | like an article or a book,

00:36:07.300 | but still that's like deep work.

00:36:09.380 | If I count the teaching itself as deep work,

00:36:12.220 | then like I can definitely hit the 50/50.

00:36:15.700 | - Yeah, and then, okay, next final question.

00:36:19.740 | With your active projects and your multiple jobs,

00:36:23.180 | how do you do the work in progress limits?

00:36:26.520 | - Yeah, no, that is a good question.

00:36:28.940 | So I kind of have work in progress limits per role,

00:36:34.500 | because like the way I sort of multiplex these jobs,

00:36:37.680 | which by the way,

00:36:41.260 | should show you the power of these tools, right?

00:36:43.560 | Like I sort of have these multiple related jobs.

00:36:46.180 | I just multiplex, meaning it's like, I divide my time up.

00:36:49.740 | This is servicing this job.

00:36:51.080 | This is servicing that job.

00:36:53.220 | Well, imagine if you only had one of these jobs,

00:36:55.940 | you could be doing it.

00:36:57.140 | Like my footprint would be relatively small.

00:36:59.540 | If I was only doing one of these things,

00:37:01.380 | I would have quite a bit of time free.

00:37:03.760 | So I use that as sort of an advertisement

00:37:05.680 | for controlling your time and attention.

00:37:08.540 | You could do what I do and like, great,

00:37:10.080 | now I can fit three jobs.

00:37:11.620 | Or you could do the opposite and say, great,

00:37:13.580 | now I can have my one job take up a third of my time.

00:37:17.500 | I think there's a lot of power there.

00:37:19.020 | I keep the WIPs basically per role,

00:37:21.980 | but I keep them very small per role, right?

00:37:25.100 | Because they do add up.

00:37:27.180 | - So like for writing, you're working on a chapter,

00:37:29.140 | for the podcast, you record an episode a week,

00:37:31.620 | and then for the teaching, whatever.

00:37:33.460 | - Yeah, so for the podcast, those aren't projects to me,

00:37:37.140 | it's automated, right?

00:37:37.980 | It's autopilot scheduling.

00:37:38.940 | Like the podcast, we have a half day a week,

00:37:42.180 | and I just think of it as like,

00:37:43.060 | there's a half day a week where we do the podcast, right?

00:37:45.580 | So there's not a project in progress.

00:37:48.620 | It's an autopilot schedule,

00:37:49.940 | the same way that my workouts are scheduled.

00:37:52.940 | In writing, I have a very strict,

00:37:55.660 | I try to have a very strict WIP

00:37:57.420 | that I keep towards one as much as possible, right?

00:38:00.980 | So it'll be like, I am doing this draft

00:38:02.820 | of a New Yorker article.

00:38:04.500 | Okay, I'm done.

00:38:05.780 | I'm doing a draft of this book chapter.

00:38:07.500 | Okay, now I'm done.

00:38:08.380 | Okay, now I'm going back and doing a draft

00:38:10.220 | of a new New Yorker article.

00:38:11.140 | So I try to keep that one.

00:38:12.980 | It goes to two when I have academic writings I'm working on.

00:38:17.420 | So like, okay, I'm working on this academic paper,

00:38:19.760 | that will overlap with like a non-academic writing,

00:38:23.380 | but I'll rarely be actively working

00:38:25.620 | on more than one thing at a time.

00:38:27.100 | - That's actually technically two different jobs though,

00:38:29.300 | right?

00:38:30.140 | - Yeah, it's technically two different jobs, yeah.

00:38:31.340 | But like I could, like if I was only doing,

00:38:33.980 | I mean, now I'm not as much a pure computer scientist

00:38:36.040 | anymore, more digital ethicist and technology theorist.

00:38:40.720 | But back when I was doing pure computer science

00:38:44.180 | and writing books, if I was just doing one of those,

00:38:47.180 | I would probably, I could be like, hey,

00:38:48.620 | I'm working on these three academic papers

00:38:51.140 | at the same time.

00:38:52.220 | But because I had this, I might be working on a book

00:38:54.380 | or a New Yorker thing at the same time,

00:38:56.260 | I would reduce that to like,

00:38:57.100 | I really should just be working on one,

00:38:58.420 | maybe two academic papers at the same time.

00:39:00.220 | - Yeah, okay, it makes perfect sense.

00:39:01.380 | - They do influence each other a little bit.

00:39:03.300 | Work in progress limit, by the way, is like the thing.

00:39:07.020 | I'm thinking about like, if I was a manager

00:39:09.540 | or if I could wave a wand and add like new practices

00:39:13.540 | to managers and knowledge work,

00:39:14.940 | like what would be the most effective?

00:39:17.700 | Work in progress limits, I think would make a big difference.

00:39:20.300 | If bosses were like, you got to write down

00:39:23.100 | what you're actively working on.

00:39:24.420 | Everyone can see what everyone's actually working on.

00:39:26.100 | It's on a board.

00:39:27.100 | You can have like two things up there.

00:39:28.780 | You can't bother someone about something

00:39:30.580 | that's not on that board.

00:39:31.860 | Like that would make a huge difference.

00:39:33.940 | And I think normalizing office hours

00:39:36.260 | and meeting windows would also make a huge difference.

00:39:39.460 | Those would be the two things.

00:39:40.300 | If I ran a company that I would be most interested

00:39:43.380 | in making sort of policies.

00:39:45.180 | All right, so there we go.

00:39:47.380 | It's a little productivity primer.

00:39:49.340 | We got some great in the weeds productivity questions,

00:39:51.420 | but first let's hear from some sponsors.

00:39:56.020 | This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:40:00.660 | So look, we just talked a lot about productivity,

00:40:04.420 | which is about controlling your time and your attention

00:40:07.500 | so you don't burn out and get things done.

00:40:09.980 | But there's a flip side to this,

00:40:11.260 | a non-technical side of productivity,

00:40:12.980 | which is just the stress and anxiety

00:40:14.980 | that comes from all these things you have to do.

00:40:17.460 | Work is chaotic.

00:40:18.820 | Our lives are chaotic.

00:40:20.900 | You work in an office job.

00:40:22.260 | It's not like it used to be where what I do

00:40:24.700 | is I rivet engines on a plane.

00:40:26.500 | You have an unlimited amount of things you could be doing.

00:40:28.940 | You have to navigate this yourself.

00:40:30.940 | You have to somehow balance your job

00:40:33.300 | versus the needs of your family

00:40:34.820 | and your other types of communities.

00:40:36.080 | This is a source of anxiety.

00:40:37.340 | This is a source of stress.

00:40:39.780 | So just as much as we talk about productivity

00:40:42.240 | in this new distracted world,

00:40:43.540 | we also should be talking about mental health

00:40:46.860 | 'cause none of this is gonna matter

00:40:49.260 | if you're struggling with your own head,

00:40:51.100 | if you're struggling with your own thoughts.

00:40:53.600 | You yourself can be the biggest obstacle

00:40:56.580 | to actually sort of like a deeper life.

00:40:59.260 | So this is where therapy can enter the scene.

00:41:02.860 | Right, I hear this from our listeners all the time.

00:41:05.840 | Having a professional help you improve the relationship

00:41:08.740 | with your brain is really an important first step

00:41:11.740 | towards doing other interesting things with your brain.

00:41:14.700 | So therapy really should be in the toolkit

00:41:16.960 | when we're thinking about productivity

00:41:19.040 | and crafting a deep life more generally.

00:41:22.380 | So if you're thinking of starting therapy,

00:41:24.380 | you should give BetterHelp a try.

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00:44:01.280 | All right, Jesse, let's move on to some questions.

00:44:03.740 | - All right, first question is from Luke.

00:44:07.820 | I've been using weekly and time block planning

00:44:10.380 | to organize my professional life for some time now,

00:44:12.540 | and it's working great.

00:44:13.900 | I have a second child on the way

00:44:15.380 | and still wanna be able to make modest progress

00:44:17.780 | on my non-professional pursuits.

00:44:19.980 | Would time blocking be suitable here?

00:44:22.900 | - Well, I got a couple different thoughts here, Luke.

00:44:25.220 | First, I wanna just give you some, a parenting thought.

00:44:28.860 | So I'm a big believer from a productivity perspective

00:44:33.060 | in what I call simulated paternity leave.

00:44:36.040 | So, I mean, if you have paternity leave, take paternity leave.

00:44:38.740 | But if you don't, like a lot of people don't,

00:44:41.780 | you want to simulate this.

00:44:43.100 | And what I mean by simulate this

00:44:45.300 | is you want to first of all reduce your work efforts

00:44:49.300 | back down to towards what I call

00:44:51.380 | the unnoticeable bare minimum.

00:44:53.240 | So like down to this minimum

00:44:54.700 | where no one's really noticing.

00:44:55.860 | It's not like people,

00:44:56.940 | you're actively saying I'm working less right now,

00:45:00.080 | but you're really keeping that work footprint

00:45:01.860 | as small as possible for about three months.

00:45:04.780 | If you master the type of tools

00:45:07.460 | we talked about in the deep dive,

00:45:08.580 | you'll have a lot of control over this.

00:45:10.020 | You can turn that dial down.

00:45:11.740 | Outside of work during this simulated paternity leave,

00:45:15.380 | you also want to redirect

00:45:17.940 | most of your non-professional energy towards family.

00:45:21.260 | So like maybe you're still working,

00:45:23.620 | but now it's like, I'm working a bare minimum,

00:45:25.820 | I'm home early, like my energy is on like,

00:45:27.940 | you know, whatever, what my wife needs.

00:45:29.940 | Probably in this case as a second child,

00:45:31.580 | it's gonna be a lot of like taking care of the first child.

00:45:33.620 | And just be in that head space

00:45:35.040 | for the first three months or so, okay?

00:45:37.340 | You don't want when there's like a new child

00:45:39.140 | and it's really disruptive, but also really meaningful,

00:45:41.180 | it's not the right time to be trying to make sure

00:45:44.260 | you get your, you know, 10K run in

00:45:46.780 | because you're training for whatever.

00:45:48.600 | A lot of people, especially a lot of guys

00:45:50.300 | sometimes react to the disruption

00:45:53.460 | and the sort of like existential shake up

00:45:56.400 | of a child arriving by trying to double down

00:45:58.500 | on like these things that are important to me,

00:45:59.980 | I'm gonna, I'm not gonna lose them.

00:46:01.780 | You don't have to lose them in the big picture,

00:46:05.620 | but maybe for a few months,

00:46:06.700 | like that's not what you're all about.

00:46:07.900 | Okay, so then beyond that, you're returning now,

00:46:11.420 | you can put your non-professional energy,

00:46:14.620 | you can put it towards some other outlets now.

00:46:16.940 | Should you time block to try to make good progress

00:46:19.380 | on the things that are important to you,

00:46:21.320 | the leisure activities are important to you?

00:46:23.060 | I typically say no.

00:46:24.320 | So here's how I talk about managing leisure activities.

00:46:29.300 | They matter.

00:46:30.340 | So you should have them in your strategic or quarterly plans

00:46:33.820 | like these things that are important to you,

00:46:35.100 | I'm trying to become whatever.

00:46:37.600 | More knowledgeable about movies,

00:46:39.140 | I'm training for an athletic event, whatever it is,

00:46:41.580 | have those in your strategic plans.

00:46:43.780 | Visit those then in your weekly plans, right?

00:46:45.700 | We talked about multi-scale planning, the deep dive.

00:46:48.140 | When you're making your weekly plan,

00:46:49.720 | you're looking at these higher scale plans,

00:46:51.220 | you know, this is the time to integrate it.

00:46:53.620 | Maybe there's some thing you have to go do

00:46:56.220 | that is gonna require a bunch of time,

00:46:58.040 | you wanna pre-block that on your calendar,

00:46:59.820 | like, okay, I need to go like

00:47:02.420 | buy this new athletic equipment.

00:47:04.420 | I got time Friday afternoon,

00:47:05.860 | let me block that on my calendar.

00:47:07.020 | So you can block off time

00:47:08.300 | for specific time-consuming appointments

00:47:11.260 | or things involved with your leisure activity.

00:47:13.880 | You can have reminders to yourself in your weekly plan,

00:47:17.460 | like, hey, here's what I wanna make progress on this week.

00:47:20.020 | You know, I'm gonna try to exercise most mornings

00:47:22.120 | or whatever it is, right?

00:47:23.380 | But beyond that, don't time block.

00:47:25.860 | Like that's where I would put the end to the planning.

00:47:28.060 | So now what happens when you get to a particular day?

00:47:30.160 | Well, when your time block work schedule is over,

00:47:34.060 | you can then implement what I often think of

00:47:37.060 | as like non-urgent productivity,

00:47:39.260 | which is like do your best to choose interesting things

00:47:43.020 | to do with whatever free time you have,

00:47:44.940 | but don't sweat how much time that is

00:47:46.380 | or how much you fit in, right?

00:47:48.700 | So it's like, okay, I know what I'm working on.

00:47:50.580 | I've blocked off times for stuff

00:47:51.980 | that really need to be on my calendar.

00:47:53.060 | And then otherwise like, oh, it's the afternoon now,

00:47:54.540 | I have some free time.

00:47:56.180 | Great, this is what I'm working on.

00:47:57.820 | Let me go for a run.

00:47:58.820 | Let me go like find a book on this thing

00:48:01.540 | that I'm trying to learn more about, right?

00:48:03.480 | But if I don't have a lot of free time,

00:48:04.500 | that's also not a big deal.

00:48:05.540 | I don't have some sort of like hard schedule plan

00:48:07.620 | of like I need to get this many hours done on this or that.

00:48:10.180 | So I'm a big believer in having a little bit more looseness

00:48:13.220 | around your non-professional pursuits.

00:48:16.000 | All right, so the idea here is you're avoiding

00:48:20.420 | the stress of trying to follow a schedule.

00:48:24.740 | Like time block planning is pretty stressful.

00:48:26.740 | It's very effective,

00:48:27.620 | but it requires a lot of sort of concentration.

00:48:29.740 | It's pretty urgent.

00:48:30.560 | Like what's happening now?

00:48:31.620 | I need to get this done.

00:48:32.820 | We wanna avoid that footprint as possible

00:48:35.020 | for your time outside of work so your mind can recharge.

00:48:38.940 | On the other hand, for a lot of people,

00:48:40.980 | straight up free time's not the best.

00:48:44.260 | Like we think having nothing to do

00:48:47.180 | is gonna somehow be what we need

00:48:49.380 | or that's gonna be rejuvenating and recharging,

00:48:51.440 | but for a lot of people, it's not.

00:48:53.280 | So you do want to the extent possible,

00:48:55.460 | you are gonna feel better filling the time you have

00:48:57.760 | doing interesting, useful stuff.

00:48:59.520 | So that's where this like non-urgent productivity approach

00:49:01.700 | comes in.

00:49:02.540 | You have a great queue of things to do,

00:49:04.940 | but you're not sweating exactly how much you're gonna do

00:49:06.980 | and when you're gonna do it.

00:49:07.820 | It's just like, hey, as I have time, let me do stuff.

00:49:09.820 | I like doing stuff versus not doing stuff

00:49:11.660 | and I've got a pretty good plan of stuff to do.

00:49:13.740 | And if it's 10 hours versus three hours versus 20 hours,

00:49:16.420 | like it is what it is.

00:49:17.260 | You're just filling the time you happen to have.

00:49:19.260 | So Luke, that's what I would suggest.

00:49:22.260 | You don't wanna have nothing to do,

00:49:23.400 | but you don't wanna be over-scheduling

00:49:24.980 | the time you do have available as well.

00:49:26.940 | All right, who got next, Jesse?

00:49:29.900 | - Next question is from April.

00:49:31.860 | I'm a college student and I find it hard

00:49:33.900 | to fit all my activities and responsibilities

00:49:36.020 | into the 11 hours allotted by the time block planner.

00:49:39.340 | So I often find myself scrambling

00:49:41.140 | with ad hoc work in the evenings.

00:49:43.180 | How do I schedule a longer day?

00:49:44.900 | - Well, college students do have a sort of

00:49:48.520 | unique scheduling challenge

00:49:50.340 | because their work spreads out over a larger footprint

00:49:53.220 | than most jobs, right?

00:49:54.060 | So like most jobs, you can typically have something

00:49:57.020 | roughly like a nine to five

00:49:59.320 | in the which you can constrain most of your work,

00:50:01.320 | but college students, it might be an evening block

00:50:04.520 | is a big part of your plan,

00:50:06.340 | or maybe you have an early morning class,

00:50:09.260 | you have activities in the afternoon,

00:50:10.640 | and you can really have a bigger spread of active time.

00:50:14.500 | So this is a good question, this is a relevant question.

00:50:18.320 | What I try to do, like what I tried to do

00:50:20.720 | when I was a college student was to avoid the idea

00:50:25.720 | of the evenings and the late evenings

00:50:28.980 | were like your good open water to get things done.

00:50:32.400 | I felt like there was a lot of usable time

00:50:35.020 | throughout the entire day

00:50:36.240 | that if you took advantage of that properly,

00:50:38.500 | you didn't have to lean too heavily

00:50:40.560 | on the like nine to midnight hours,

00:50:43.800 | the sort of wait to get work done.

00:50:45.320 | In fact, I usually aim to be done with work by eight,

00:50:48.480 | which then gives you a schedule that does fit

00:50:50.100 | into like a reasonable time block plan.

00:50:52.760 | Now, how is that possible?

00:50:54.840 | I mean, if you just said tomorrow,

00:50:55.860 | I don't wanna work past eight, you might be out of luck.

00:50:57.960 | You're like, well, I have to have all this work

00:50:59.120 | that has to get done and three things are due tomorrow.

00:51:01.520 | But long-term, how do you constrain your college work?

00:51:05.040 | Here's what matters.

00:51:05.880 | One, and this is big picture,

00:51:07.680 | keep your course load and activity load reasonable.

00:51:11.140 | The number one source of stress for college students

00:51:14.240 | is they have too many courses, they're too hard,

00:51:16.260 | they have too many activities going on.

00:51:18.760 | If you're a college student,

00:51:19.820 | there's nobody in your future

00:51:21.280 | who is going to scrutinize the difficulty of your schedule.

00:51:24.280 | That's something you felt like was relevant

00:51:26.680 | when you were applying to college.

00:51:28.160 | It's not relevant for grad school,

00:51:29.640 | it's not relevant for jobs.

00:51:30.840 | They wanna know where you went to school,

00:51:31.960 | what you majored in, what's your grades.

00:51:34.200 | And for a lot of jobs,

00:51:35.020 | if you have other relevant experience,

00:51:36.040 | like you know how to program.

00:51:37.360 | They do not know or care that your junior fall,

00:51:40.680 | you were taking five really hard courses.

00:51:43.160 | Like that could have killed you work-wise.

00:51:46.000 | No one knows, no one cares.

00:51:47.640 | What'd you major in, what's your grades,

00:51:48.800 | where'd you go to school?

00:51:49.740 | So take advantage of that reality

00:51:51.560 | by keeping your course loads reasonable,

00:51:53.060 | don't overload courses, mix hard courses with easy courses,

00:51:55.920 | mix quantitative courses with other types of courses.

00:51:58.480 | If you have credits that can reduce your course load

00:52:00.880 | for certain semesters,

00:52:01.720 | take advantage of everything you have there.

00:52:03.260 | So keep your course load reasonable.

00:52:05.520 | Number two, use autopilot scheduling

00:52:07.340 | for all your regular work.

00:52:08.920 | I have a problem set due every week.

00:52:10.280 | When and where do I do the work for this problem set?

00:52:12.760 | I have an essay I have to respond right every other week

00:52:15.100 | for my English class.

00:52:16.200 | When and where do I do the work on this essay?

00:52:18.420 | Start figuring out in advance

00:52:20.160 | where this work fits onto your schedule

00:52:21.760 | so you don't have to make scheduling decisions.

00:52:23.700 | You're just executing this autopilot schedule

00:52:25.680 | and the stuff gets done.

00:52:26.880 | When you do autopilot scheduling,

00:52:29.320 | this work gets done, a couple of things happen.

00:52:32.600 | One, it starts to get done more in advance.

00:52:35.400 | So it's not just what's due tomorrow.

00:52:37.720 | Oh, I have a problem set.

00:52:38.560 | Let me go work on that problem set tonight.

00:52:40.320 | It gets done farther in advance

00:52:41.840 | so the work gets spread out more

00:52:43.140 | so it doesn't need to sit so much in the evening.

00:52:45.640 | It also tends to get done earlier.

00:52:49.120 | When you're trying to find,

00:52:50.000 | when do I want to work on my biweekly essay

00:52:53.200 | for English class?

00:52:54.040 | That's where you realize like I have this hour gap

00:52:56.480 | between 11 and my noon class.

00:52:59.720 | And if I use that gap on Tuesday and Wednesday,

00:53:02.280 | I could get my essay done.

00:53:03.880 | And so now suddenly work is getting done earlier in the day.

00:53:06.880 | Whereas again, if you're just saying

00:53:08.000 | what do I want to work on next?

00:53:09.160 | Most students wait till they have the clear water of night

00:53:11.200 | to even start.

00:53:12.040 | So you're better able to take advantage

00:53:14.400 | of the time that is available earlier in the day.

00:53:17.340 | Adding onto that,

00:53:19.520 | time block plan your mornings and afternoons.

00:53:21.480 | Do not waste the time

00:53:22.960 | that's in the morning and the afternoons between classes.

00:53:26.320 | That's the good time.

00:53:27.920 | That's when you want to be getting as much done as possible

00:53:30.280 | to minimize what needs to be done later.

00:53:33.600 | When you do work, study in quiet places

00:53:35.400 | and don't do it without your phone.

00:53:36.640 | And do it without your phone rather.

00:53:38.800 | Here's where I do this work.

00:53:39.900 | I go to this library.

00:53:40.800 | It's very austere.

00:53:41.640 | I don't bring my phone with me.

00:53:42.960 | So it is full non-context switching focus.

00:53:45.480 | Full non-context switching focus in a quiet place

00:53:48.440 | accomplishes work at roughly two times the speed

00:53:51.560 | of working with your phone nearby.

00:53:53.920 | There's another big key

00:53:56.440 | to reducing the footprint of your student work

00:53:58.880 | is to work in full focus.

00:54:00.040 | It makes a huge difference.

00:54:01.800 | Trust me, your friends will survive

00:54:03.040 | if you're not answering their WhatsApp immediately.

00:54:05.600 | Where am I at?

00:54:07.780 | One, two, three, four, okay.

00:54:09.920 | Okay, number five, last piece of advice.

00:54:11.880 | Make paper and exam studying plans.

00:54:13.680 | This is an idea for my book,

00:54:14.840 | How to Become a Straight A Student.

00:54:17.360 | It's coming up on its 20th anniversary,

00:54:20.240 | which is hard to believe.

00:54:21.640 | 20th anniversary.

00:54:22.480 | - That's amazing.

00:54:23.320 | - Yeah, I know.

00:54:24.140 | I know these things.

00:54:25.180 | It's, you know, we've started looking through,

00:54:28.140 | started looking through my old student books

00:54:32.520 | and finding all the references

00:54:34.000 | that now there's references in these books

00:54:35.800 | that just don't make sense in like our current period.

00:54:39.560 | Like just technologies that we don't use,

00:54:41.600 | like things we don't use anymore.

00:54:43.260 | Just the world has changed so much

00:54:46.160 | that now we have to go back

00:54:47.280 | and start like making these sort of edits

00:54:48.840 | so that like the book is legible.

00:54:51.200 | - So 20 years ago, there was,

00:54:53.000 | I didn't have a telephone 20 years ago.

00:54:54.560 | Actually I did, it was 2004.

00:54:56.320 | I just got one.

00:54:57.160 | - But there's no smartphones.

00:54:58.480 | - Yeah.

00:54:59.320 | - A lot of students didn't have laptops.

00:55:01.360 | A lot of talking about like newspapers

00:55:03.560 | and going to the bookstore to find your textbook,

00:55:05.220 | like stuff that's like a lot more rare now.

00:55:07.400 | It's interesting.

00:55:08.240 | So we might go back and update some of those references.

00:55:10.920 | Anyways, one of the ideas I had

00:55:12.800 | in How to Become a Straight A Student

00:55:14.060 | is at the beginning of your semester,

00:55:15.880 | get your syllabi and figure out where's my exams

00:55:19.040 | and where's my major papers and all my classes.

00:55:20.800 | Let's get those on the calendar.

00:55:22.960 | For each of those, go back and schedule on your calendar

00:55:27.320 | when you're gonna work on it.

00:55:29.200 | So at the very beginning of the semester,

00:55:30.680 | you say there's gonna be a paper that's due in two months.

00:55:33.960 | When am I gonna work on this paper?

00:55:36.400 | And now you start rewinding in time.

00:55:38.040 | Well, two weeks in advance

00:55:39.440 | is when I really probably have to get all my research done

00:55:41.680 | and let me schedule out some time there to work on this.

00:55:44.320 | And then one week in advance,

00:55:46.060 | I need to get my rough draft writing.

00:55:47.500 | So again, you're spreading out work

00:55:50.640 | where there's space for it to fit reasonably.

00:55:53.560 | So you don't have to say, I have an exam tomorrow,

00:55:55.960 | let me go study.

00:55:56.800 | It's like, no, I just follow my calendar.

00:55:59.200 | I actually started preparing for this exam three weeks ago

00:56:01.440 | in like reasonable bursts where time happened to be free.

00:56:03.780 | And now as I get closer and closer to the actual exam day,

00:56:06.600 | there's not so much left for me to do.

00:56:09.140 | These type of systems, these type of ideas and plans

00:56:11.620 | can keep your student workday much more constrained,

00:56:13.800 | give you something where you rarely have to work past eight

00:56:16.360 | and now you can just throw standard professional

00:56:18.600 | office job style time block planning

00:56:20.260 | on the actual like morning and afternoon.

00:56:22.760 | And this all sort of works out well, right?

00:56:24.480 | So that's usually what I recommend for students

00:56:27.060 | is some sort of mixture of that type of advice.

00:56:29.840 | All right, who have we got next?

00:56:32.680 | - Next question is from Alexander.

00:56:35.040 | I'm a head of one of the departments

00:56:36.540 | in a game development company,

00:56:38.380 | which by design means cross project work

00:56:40.520 | and a lot of switching between different projects.

00:56:42.920 | I follow much of your advice.

00:56:44.360 | I multi-scale plan.

00:56:45.640 | I don't multitask.

00:56:46.760 | I keep my phone away.

00:56:48.200 | I say no often, but most of the days after work,

00:56:51.400 | I feel such mental fatigue, I can barely do anything.

00:56:54.760 | Is there a way to better regain my energy after work?

00:56:58.560 | - Well, there's the easy answer and the hard answer.

00:57:02.680 | So the easy answer is more tactical.

00:57:04.320 | Okay, I want more energy after work, I'm too tired.

00:57:06.720 | Two things matter there that can help some.

00:57:10.440 | One, you want to make sure drawing from the advice

00:57:13.080 | from the deep dive in this episode

00:57:14.400 | that you have a good shutdown ritual.

00:57:16.200 | A good shutdown ritual at the end of your day

00:57:19.680 | really does free up more mental resources.

00:57:22.040 | The more your brain is actually holding on to things

00:57:24.680 | from the workday itself and kind of worrying about this

00:57:27.600 | and writing the email you need to send here

00:57:29.360 | and rehashing what's going on

00:57:30.880 | and stressing about the timeline

00:57:32.740 | for some sort of project that's going up.

00:57:34.640 | The more your brain is doing that,

00:57:35.740 | the more your brain is going to be exhausted.

00:57:38.360 | The less energy, cognitive energy will be left over

00:57:40.800 | for other types of things.

00:57:41.880 | So have a good shutdown ritual will help a little.

00:57:45.080 | Another thing that really matters here

00:57:46.680 | is getting as healthy as possible.

00:57:49.160 | Physical health really matters

00:57:50.820 | when it comes to mental energy.

00:57:52.760 | How you eat, how you exercise.

00:57:56.340 | Now it might seem at first like,

00:57:57.480 | well, this is the last thing I want to do

00:57:58.660 | because this is another energy consuming time obligation

00:58:02.880 | I'm adding into my life that's going to make things worse.

00:58:04.680 | It'll actually make things better.

00:58:06.800 | If you're eating really well,

00:58:09.040 | you're getting in like a morning,

00:58:10.520 | like run or row or Peloton before the day gets started.

00:58:13.920 | And then, and I highly recommend this,

00:58:15.600 | this is what I do during the school year.

00:58:18.000 | You have a pretty intense resistance weight-based workout

00:58:22.220 | as your transition from work to non-work.

00:58:24.400 | That does really well.

00:58:26.640 | It kind of like resets your brain and your body.

00:58:29.320 | You would think it would tire you,

00:58:30.400 | but it also kind of like switches you out of brain mode

00:58:32.560 | into body mode and it helps keep you strong

00:58:35.440 | and your muscles working in a way

00:58:36.880 | that just sort of keeps you more alert.

00:58:38.720 | So it's like getting way more serious about your health,

00:58:41.800 | not just like a little bit, but a lot,

00:58:44.240 | that makes a difference.

00:58:45.180 | I mean, super high performing people do this, right?

00:58:49.300 | Like executives at these sort of,

00:58:52.960 | these high-end executives, hedge fund managers,

00:58:55.080 | where there's millions of dollars in the line,

00:58:56.760 | they're often pretty obsessive about their health

00:58:58.920 | because it matters.

00:58:59.760 | Like it matters for, it matters for their energy, right?

00:59:04.080 | So you should care about that a lot more

00:59:05.600 | than you probably are.

00:59:06.520 | The hard answer is some jobs are hard by design.

00:59:10.100 | Like this might be a job,

00:59:12.520 | big company, department head, it's a prestigious job.

00:59:16.120 | It might just be by design.

00:59:17.380 | This is a really hard job.

00:59:18.340 | That's what you're signing up for.

00:59:19.400 | You got a lot of things you got to manage.

00:59:20.760 | A lot's coming at you.

00:59:21.800 | You got to be locked in like you are

00:59:23.280 | in all the types of stuff I talk about,

00:59:24.760 | to organize, control your time and attention.

00:59:26.540 | Otherwise you're going to drown.

00:59:27.780 | But even with all those things, it's a lot

00:59:29.720 | and it's exhausting, right?

00:59:32.380 | That could just be the reality of your job.

00:59:34.300 | Now, hopefully they're compensating you fairly

00:59:37.260 | for what they're asking.

00:59:38.100 | This is typically the case.

00:59:39.740 | Law partners are like this.

00:59:41.380 | That's a very demanding job.

00:59:42.700 | But to say, hey, look, no surprises here.

00:59:45.540 | We're paying you well.

00:59:46.380 | You know what you're getting into, but this is what it is.

00:59:49.660 | Consulting can be like that.

00:59:51.420 | Clearly like startup founders can be like that.

00:59:53.860 | C-suite jobs for companies can be like that.

00:59:56.200 | Like these are very hard jobs.

00:59:57.940 | We pay you fairly for that hardness,

00:59:59.260 | but these are very hard jobs.

01:00:00.700 | They cannot be made into a low stress, not so hard job.

01:00:03.680 | All right.

01:00:06.040 | So if that's the reality here, which it probably is,

01:00:07.820 | there's some deeper questions to ask.

01:00:10.380 | Is this the right job?

01:00:11.900 | The right way to approach this, of course,

01:00:13.640 | is with lifestyle-centric planning.

01:00:15.380 | Don't just have some idea of a radical change

01:00:19.180 | and fall in love with change for the sake of change.

01:00:21.380 | Get in touch with what is my vision of an ideal lifestyle?

01:00:24.900 | Like, what do I want my typical day to be like?

01:00:27.020 | Like where, what's the location where I'm living?

01:00:29.140 | What's the rhythm of the day?

01:00:30.780 | What does it look like?

01:00:31.940 | Where am I?

01:00:32.780 | What's happening?

01:00:33.620 | What's the feel of my work and my non-work?

01:00:35.860 | Am I walking my dog around a quiet lake?

01:00:39.020 | Or am I going to see a cool new filmmaker's opening

01:00:43.700 | in the city that night after going to, like whatever.

01:00:46.000 | You just get this sort of concrete image

01:00:48.460 | of like what your ideal lifestyle looks like

01:00:51.300 | in the next five years or so.

01:00:53.020 | Like the rhythms of the day, the feel of the day,

01:00:55.340 | the aesthetics of the day.

01:00:57.860 | And you say, okay, how do I move closer to there?

01:00:59.980 | This gives you a much better way of assessing your job,

01:01:02.900 | right?

01:01:03.740 | And it might be when you do this,

01:01:05.020 | you say, what I'm really looking for,

01:01:06.740 | like what I want my life to feel like,

01:01:08.080 | this job is in the way of all of that, right?

01:01:09.980 | It's a completely different rhythm.

01:01:11.260 | It keeps me stuck in this location.

01:01:12.740 | It prevents me from all these other things

01:01:14.660 | that are part of this vision.

01:01:15.500 | I just don't have the time or energy to get there.

01:01:17.580 | Now you have a strategic way to change that.

01:01:20.200 | And it might be changing my job in such a way

01:01:22.460 | to find one that maximizes my access

01:01:24.580 | to these things I care about.

01:01:25.780 | And it might mean switching to a job

01:01:27.620 | maybe within the same company that is less prestigious,

01:01:29.940 | maybe it's less money, way more solo and autonomous.

01:01:33.080 | But that might unlock everything.

01:01:35.940 | Well, I can do that remotely.

01:01:36.780 | We can move here.

01:01:37.600 | This fits much more controllable.

01:01:39.300 | So this might be a good time in your life

01:01:41.580 | for some very careful lifestyle centric planning.

01:01:44.560 | If you can wait a couple of years,

01:01:46.460 | I have a book coming out about this.

01:01:47.740 | But in the meantime,

01:01:49.580 | you can go back and listen to our podcast about it.

01:01:52.380 | This is a perfect case where you might find like,

01:01:54.460 | this job I took because it was

01:01:55.900 | what the prestigious thing to do was.

01:01:57.380 | It's hard and I got it and I'm proud.

01:01:59.400 | But it also makes everything else I care about difficult.

01:02:03.380 | So lifestyle centric planning

01:02:04.540 | might be the hard answer to this question,

01:02:06.160 | but one worth paying some hard attention to.

01:02:08.360 | All right, who do we got next?

01:02:11.500 | - Next question is from Jim.

01:02:13.300 | I'm 27 and a management consultant

01:02:15.740 | and also pursuing my master's.

01:02:18.620 | I use the time block planner,

01:02:19.980 | but struggle to enter deep work mode.

01:02:22.340 | Each day I break my to-do list down into task size chunks

01:02:26.020 | and then allocate these tasks to time blocks on my planner.

01:02:28.980 | Herein lies a problem, actually doing the deep work.

01:02:32.100 | I feel like I have the correct systems in place,

01:02:34.460 | but still struggle with focus and procrastination.

01:02:37.400 | - Okay, so first of all,

01:02:40.900 | there's a little bit of concern here

01:02:42.080 | because there's some terminology creep.

01:02:44.020 | You talk about deep work mode,

01:02:48.980 | but now what you're talking about you struggling to do

01:02:52.740 | is tasks from your to-do list, right?

01:02:57.540 | So I think you're just like,

01:02:58.620 | you might be vaguely using the term deep work

01:03:01.060 | just to mean like doing stuff or being productive.

01:03:04.860 | Deep work has a very clear meaning.

01:03:06.100 | It's a particular cognitive state

01:03:07.740 | in which you're giving full attention

01:03:09.060 | without context shifts to a cognitively demanding task.

01:03:11.380 | It's a state that is optimal for producing high-end output

01:03:14.740 | at a reasonable amount of time for demanding tasks.

01:03:17.220 | It's a cognitive state.

01:03:18.940 | You're talking about more, I think,

01:03:20.220 | just you have a lot on your plate.

01:03:22.740 | Your motivation is low.

01:03:23.980 | You're having a hard time actually executing

01:03:25.500 | what's on your plan.

01:03:26.340 | Whether it's a deep work block or a shallow block

01:03:28.940 | that's full of what you call task size chunks

01:03:31.660 | from your to-do list.

01:03:32.540 | So I'm gonna put that deep work terminology off to the side.

01:03:36.280 | What we have here is more of just like a time block

01:03:38.940 | planning execution issue.

01:03:40.600 | So why do people struggle

01:03:46.340 | to execute whatever it is they have planned?

01:03:47.940 | There's a couple of things that could be at play here.

01:03:50.900 | One, they don't buy the plan, right?

01:03:54.580 | Like they made the plan,

01:03:55.600 | but another part of their mind is like,

01:03:56.740 | what are we doing here?

01:03:58.700 | This is work for the sake of work.

01:04:00.060 | Like our mind is very good at predicting the future,

01:04:03.820 | evaluating the future,

01:04:05.200 | trying to figure out if the action in the moment

01:04:08.260 | is moving you towards something that is worthwhile.

01:04:10.640 | We did a podcast about this a couple of episodes ago

01:04:12.680 | where I talked about how the planning systems

01:04:14.300 | of the brain work and its connection to discipline.

01:04:16.940 | So that's probably an important episode to listen to.

01:04:19.860 | So for example,

01:04:20.700 | if you're just throwing a lot of work on your schedule

01:04:23.340 | and your mind's like, why are we doing this?

01:04:24.940 | Like this doesn't feel like it's really gonna prepare us

01:04:27.100 | for these tests or even like,

01:04:29.580 | why are we doing this master's degree in general?

01:04:31.540 | It's gonna withhold motivation.

01:04:32.940 | So you're gonna find motivation issues come

01:04:34.580 | when your mind is not on board

01:04:36.020 | with either the goal you're pursuing

01:04:37.820 | or the process with which you're pursuing that goal.

01:04:41.120 | So it can help often to get much more specific about,

01:04:45.180 | okay, for my master's program,

01:04:47.860 | let me really get detailed about like the best way to study

01:04:50.360 | and to organize work and make sure that like,

01:04:52.900 | I really trust my systems and my mind's on board with it.

01:04:56.460 | So that's one thing that can happen.

01:04:58.860 | Another thing that can happen is just a,

01:05:01.420 | what I call deep procrastination.

01:05:02.980 | I used to call that in my old

01:05:04.420 | student focused newsletter post.

01:05:07.580 | It could be that your mind is just calling uncle

01:05:09.340 | on the plan in general.

01:05:11.500 | So if what you're doing is hard

01:05:13.620 | and your mind doesn't feel on board with it,

01:05:18.980 | which typically is like an intrinsic,

01:05:20.500 | extrinsic motivation situation,

01:05:22.100 | the locus of control is cited externally from you.

01:05:24.220 | It's like, I don't know,

01:05:25.060 | my parents wanted me to do this,

01:05:26.580 | or it just seemed like I would be

01:05:28.580 | an impressive thing to work on,

01:05:29.980 | but it's not really on board with the goal.

01:05:32.180 | That mismatch can create what's called deep procrastination

01:05:34.780 | where like you really have a hard time executing work,

01:05:36.980 | even if you know like I'm committed to this work

01:05:38.660 | and I need to do it.

01:05:40.820 | So deep procrastination requires

01:05:42.380 | more of a thorough investigation of like,

01:05:44.780 | why are you doing what you're doing?

01:05:46.900 | And when I hear something like I'm a master student

01:05:49.340 | at the same time that I'm a management consultant,

01:05:51.780 | and I hear I'm having a hard time

01:05:52.980 | actually executing my work,

01:05:54.420 | it might be because this really hard thing

01:05:56.980 | you're trying to do,

01:05:57.820 | which is two jobs at the same time,

01:05:59.100 | might not be as well planned out as you thought,

01:06:01.500 | and your brain is figuring this out.

01:06:03.740 | And then it's like,

01:06:04.580 | why are we doing this like online master's degree?

01:06:07.260 | I don't know,

01:06:08.100 | it just felt vaguely like something interesting to do.

01:06:10.380 | Like your mind is beginning

01:06:11.580 | to see the weaknesses in the plan.

01:06:14.020 | And that might require a change

01:06:15.260 | to what it is you're actually trying to do.

01:06:17.300 | All right, so those two things I want you to keep in mind,

01:06:19.860 | your goals or plan aren't well-developed,

01:06:22.300 | or your mind's not on board

01:06:23.980 | with what it is you're trying to do.

01:06:25.540 | It's this hard thing,

01:06:26.380 | it's just not really worth it.

01:06:27.980 | In terms of tactical solutions,

01:06:30.300 | make sure you're consolidating shallow task

01:06:32.100 | in the shallow blocks.

01:06:33.740 | Make sure that your most cognitive demanding

01:06:36.420 | deep work blocks are earlier in the day

01:06:38.060 | when your energy is higher.

01:06:39.580 | I would also recommend designating each day

01:06:42.500 | to be either a primary consultant or primary student day.

01:06:46.540 | So if it's a primary consultant day,

01:06:48.700 | you're doing barely any work on your student work.

01:06:51.980 | If it's a primary student day,

01:06:53.460 | you're doing bare minimum work for the consultant job,

01:06:56.540 | and most of your time is going to the student work.

01:06:59.260 | So maybe you have two primary student days per week,

01:07:02.580 | as well as like a big Sunday block on that as well.

01:07:04.900 | And the other days are primary consultant week.

01:07:06.660 | So you're not trying to really thoroughly mix

01:07:10.660 | two completely different activities throughout your day,

01:07:13.300 | going back and forth.

01:07:14.140 | That's too much context shifting.

01:07:15.140 | So that might help as well.

01:07:16.180 | Right, so there's a lot of different things going on here

01:07:18.220 | from your like fundamental sense of motivation

01:07:20.180 | to just tactically how you're organizing the work.

01:07:22.820 | So hopefully some combination of those will help.

01:07:25.260 | All right, what do we have next, Jesse?

01:07:28.500 | - We have our slow productivity corner.

01:07:30.820 | - Oh, that's exciting.

01:07:31.660 | So as longtime listeners know,

01:07:33.900 | each week we try to have one question

01:07:35.460 | that deals with the topics from my new book,

01:07:37.220 | "Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment

01:07:39.460 | "Without Burnout."

01:07:41.060 | If you like what you hear on the show,

01:07:42.980 | you need to read that book.

01:07:44.060 | It's sort of like a Bible of sorts

01:07:45.820 | for a lot of our concepts.

01:07:47.300 | So definitely check that out.

01:07:48.940 | All right, so we've got

01:07:49.780 | our slow productivity corner of the day.

01:07:50.820 | Jesse, let's get that slow productivity corner theme music.

01:07:53.540 | (soft guitar music)

01:07:56.540 | Now we're ready.

01:08:01.220 | All right, what do we got?

01:08:02.660 | - Hi, Robin has this to say.

01:08:05.700 | I'm an early career academic.

01:08:07.820 | I focus on high impact publications

01:08:10.340 | and often say no to less meaningful tasks.

01:08:12.980 | At the same time, I feel a great dissonance

01:08:15.420 | with academic evaluations and how we are measured.

01:08:18.000 | Most evaluations leading to promotions

01:08:20.980 | will unfortunately be based

01:08:22.180 | on the number of author publications

01:08:24.020 | and to a lesser extent,

01:08:25.540 | taking into account the impact of these.

01:08:28.220 | Am I shortchanging myself by obsessing over quality

01:08:31.060 | and not just publishing mediocre papers?

01:08:34.380 | - Well, Robin, I think at most high end R1 institutions,

01:08:39.380 | you gotta do both.

01:08:41.460 | - Right.

01:08:42.300 | - You need a sufficient quantity of publications

01:08:44.740 | that are also in really good places.

01:08:47.220 | So it's not necessarily a trade-off,

01:08:49.020 | it's just like a really hard goal.

01:08:50.620 | My general advice here

01:08:52.060 | is working towards promotion in academia,

01:08:56.860 | you need to just work kind of relentlessly

01:09:00.340 | towards what it is that is valuable right now.

01:09:03.340 | Don't worry about if that makes sense or not.

01:09:06.340 | Don't get upset about it.

01:09:08.020 | Don't convince yourself it's somehow unfair

01:09:10.900 | or it's not measuring the right things.

01:09:12.580 | You can be worried about that post-promotion.

01:09:14.980 | Pre-promotion, you have to see it

01:09:16.420 | almost like an arbitrary challenge.

01:09:18.060 | I have to do X, what's the best way to get the X?

01:09:21.140 | And for, again, most research institutions,

01:09:23.620 | X is gonna be a sufficient number of papers

01:09:26.380 | in sufficiently good publication venues.

01:09:30.300 | You need specific numbers for each of those.

01:09:33.700 | Like how many is a sufficient number of papers for my field?

01:09:36.780 | What is the threshold for a sufficiently good venue?

01:09:41.020 | You get these by looking at recent successful promotion

01:09:43.180 | cases at your university,

01:09:44.340 | that's typically the best way to do it.

01:09:45.780 | So you have to have crystal clear targets.

01:09:47.140 | Now, again, you can complain about these targets later.

01:09:50.660 | You can rail against like,

01:09:51.740 | this is looking at the wrong thing

01:09:53.380 | and this isn't measuring what's valuable

01:09:56.140 | and you can pre-reduce dissidence about struggles

01:09:58.820 | or whatever you wanna do, do that all later.

01:10:01.940 | Now we just want numbers.

01:10:02.980 | This many papers in these places.

01:10:06.300 | It's evidence-based planning.

01:10:08.820 | All right, once you have those numbers,

01:10:10.420 | now we say, what's the most sustainable way to get there?

01:10:12.820 | And here's where slow productivity enters the scene.

01:10:15.420 | All right, I really need to do six papers

01:10:17.140 | in these type of journals.

01:10:18.420 | Now we can use slow productivity to get there

01:10:21.300 | in the most sustainable way possible, right?

01:10:23.380 | All the principles become relevant here.

01:10:25.500 | Obsess over quality, super important in academia.

01:10:29.580 | This means something very specific.

01:10:32.620 | Papers that can get into venues of this level of quality.

01:10:36.220 | Like that's specifically what this means.

01:10:38.500 | And you have to figure out the reality

01:10:40.140 | of how does that happen?

01:10:41.180 | Do not write your own story.

01:10:42.300 | You gotta work with collaborators

01:10:44.140 | who publish in those places.

01:10:45.660 | You have to read the papers in these places

01:10:48.380 | and say, what is really needed to get a paper here?

01:10:50.780 | You have to obsess over that.

01:10:52.820 | It's probably much harder than you think, right?

01:10:54.580 | So you have to obsess over quality

01:10:56.740 | when looking for a promotion.

01:10:58.620 | What about doing fewer things?

01:11:00.580 | Also really critical here, right?

01:11:03.260 | These are academically demanding,

01:11:04.900 | cognitively demanding things you're doing.

01:11:06.300 | So your work in progress limits need to be really small.

01:11:08.420 | It's like, I'm working actively on this paper

01:11:10.740 | and I'm preparing this paper and that's it, right?

01:11:13.900 | It's like, I'm focusing really intensely

01:11:15.900 | on a small number of things.

01:11:18.020 | As you were doing, keep doing.

01:11:19.580 | I'm keeping my service obligations low.

01:11:21.260 | I'm being a bit of a pain.

01:11:22.620 | I could be useful to the department after promotion.

01:11:25.540 | I could be useful to the university after promotion.

01:11:27.420 | Now I have to get these papers.

01:11:29.180 | You focus on a small number of things at a time

01:11:30.940 | and try to do them very well, critical for this period.

01:11:34.340 | What about work at a natural pace?

01:11:36.340 | Also critical, especially in academia,

01:11:38.460 | you need this sort of up and down intensity

01:11:40.940 | so you don't burn yourself out.

01:11:43.300 | So what I recommend, for example,

01:11:44.660 | is in the two to four week period

01:11:47.140 | following the submission of a paper,

01:11:51.180 | you have a severe wind down.

01:11:53.140 | Okay, I'm really like cutting back for a couple of weeks.

01:11:56.100 | I can do no work for a week at all,

01:11:57.740 | except for like my classes.

01:11:58.980 | And then I'm just gonna be doing

01:11:59.820 | some like background thinking and conversations.

01:12:01.620 | I am going to recharge and refresh,

01:12:03.780 | expose myself to ideas, get re-inspired,

01:12:06.460 | catch up on journal reading,

01:12:07.740 | finish working at three every day and go exercise instead.

01:12:11.740 | Give yourself two to four weeks

01:12:13.100 | before you then begin like ramping up

01:12:14.780 | more intensely on the next paper.

01:12:16.700 | So academics have to really lean into that seasonality

01:12:19.260 | to prevent them having a sort of brain exhaustion.

01:12:23.020 | All right, so the three principles of slow productivity,

01:12:25.220 | not surprisingly, given that, you know,

01:12:27.140 | I'm an academic who has gone through all these levels,

01:12:29.820 | assistant to associate,

01:12:30.860 | the more recently associate the full,

01:12:32.660 | not surprisingly, there's a congruence

01:12:34.500 | between the principles of slow productivity in my book

01:12:36.980 | and what's necessary to be successful in academia.

01:12:39.820 | So read that book, embody those rules,

01:12:42.500 | and make sure you're aiming

01:12:43.540 | towards a realistic assessment of what's needed.

01:12:46.340 | Once you get 10, I'll commiserate with you all day

01:12:49.020 | about whether it's fair or makes sense or not.

01:12:50.740 | But if you get obsessed on that story now,

01:12:53.060 | you're gonna get resentful.

01:12:56.060 | Your energy is gonna go towards like reducing dissidence.

01:12:59.380 | I wanna just like really establish why the system is bad.

01:13:01.900 | So if I don't get promoted, like I don't feel bad about it,

01:13:04.460 | that's all just wasted energy, right?

01:13:07.060 | Fair or not, here's what you need to do.

01:13:09.580 | Let's use slow productivity to get there

01:13:11.020 | as sustainable as possible.

01:13:13.940 | All right, Jessie, let's hear that music one more time.

01:13:16.860 | (upbeat music)

01:13:19.460 | - You know, slow productivity was selected,

01:13:27.460 | I don't know if it was announced yet or not.

01:13:29.220 | You know, the Next Big Idea Club,

01:13:32.620 | it's this company, it's like Gladwell and Dan Pink

01:13:35.100 | and Adam Grant, where you subscribe.

01:13:37.300 | And every quarter they're like,

01:13:38.340 | "Here's the two best idea books of the quarter."

01:13:40.140 | And they send it to all their subscribers.

01:13:42.100 | And they have this like long process of like,

01:13:43.940 | "Here's our nominees, then here's the finalists.

01:13:47.580 | "And then here's like the books,

01:13:48.900 | "the two books we think are the best."

01:13:50.420 | Slow productivity was chosen for the club.

01:13:53.700 | - Oh, wow.

01:13:54.540 | - Yeah, so all the subscribers are gonna get

01:13:55.740 | a copy of Slow Productivity.

01:13:57.620 | So there we go, those guys like that book too.

01:14:00.540 | You gotta read it if you have it.

01:14:01.900 | All right, I think we have a call, is that right?

01:14:03.700 | - Yep. - All right, let's hear it.

01:14:05.340 | - Cal, your content has been consistently excellent,

01:14:11.300 | so thank you.

01:14:12.380 | Your book, Slow Productivity, was also outstanding.

01:14:16.020 | My name is Etienne Huard, I'm a Benedictine monk,

01:14:20.220 | from whom you've actually answered a few questions before.

01:14:22.700 | Thank you.

01:14:23.540 | I use block scheduling as fast as possible

01:14:26.540 | and often teach it to students under my care.

01:14:29.740 | Now, recently I've been noticing AI-driven calendars,

01:14:34.060 | calendars like Motion and Reclaim

01:14:36.580 | that use, I guess, a kind of block scheduling principle,

01:14:40.940 | but automatically based on settings,

01:14:44.060 | levels of importance, time, et cetera,

01:14:46.620 | schedule them in appropriate places.

01:14:49.020 | So for example, if I cancel a one-hour meeting

01:14:52.060 | I was to have in the afternoon,

01:14:54.180 | the AI program would then fill that spot

01:14:57.340 | with a task that fits the timeframe and level of urgency.

01:15:01.660 | I'm curious about your thoughts concerning such technology

01:15:07.300 | and its integration with the deep life

01:15:09.700 | and slow productivity.

01:15:12.140 | Many thanks.

01:15:13.060 | - All right, it's a good question.

01:15:16.700 | I have been following these sort of AI innovations

01:15:19.660 | and AI scheduling.

01:15:20.940 | If you are a practitioner of the type of ideas

01:15:25.940 | we talked about today in my deep dive,

01:15:27.500 | and in particular, multi-scale planning,

01:15:29.500 | AI-based scheduling systems

01:15:32.260 | are superfluous and unnecessary, right?

01:15:36.220 | It doesn't take that much time to build a schedule.

01:15:40.020 | It doesn't take that much time to adjust your schedule

01:15:43.420 | when something changes.

01:15:44.580 | To automate all of that is saving you, at best,

01:15:48.660 | 25 minutes in the course of a 40-hour workweek.

01:15:52.780 | It's negligible.

01:15:53.860 | What do you lose?

01:15:56.100 | The AI is way worse than you, right?

01:15:58.420 | I mean, think about our multi-scale planning philosophy.

01:16:00.980 | You have these large, bigger ideas

01:16:04.180 | and visions for what you wanna do.

01:16:06.340 | You have this weekly plan that kind of balances that

01:16:08.700 | and the other things that are going on in your week.

01:16:11.420 | You have your view of the particular day

01:16:13.260 | and what you're trying to fit into that day,

01:16:14.620 | and you have all the subjective factors,

01:16:18.140 | such as how you're doing, your energy,

01:16:19.380 | how you're feeling, what's really happening,

01:16:20.820 | what else is happening in the world.

01:16:22.260 | All these things come together

01:16:23.460 | to make your brain really good at saying,

01:16:26.300 | "Hey, how should I fill in this block that just got freed?"

01:16:29.420 | Or looking at your week and being like,

01:16:30.700 | "What do I wanna work on this week

01:16:31.820 | and when I wanna get it done?"

01:16:33.620 | Your brain is fantastic at that,

01:16:35.780 | and you gain very little by trying to automate it.

01:16:38.820 | And more importantly,

01:16:40.460 | you want to be actively involved in your scheduling.

01:16:44.220 | It's important for you to understand

01:16:46.700 | what you're working on, why you're working on it,

01:16:48.220 | how long things take, what your vision is.

01:16:50.460 | To me, this sort of AI-scheduled future

01:16:52.940 | sort of personifies this sort of worst vision

01:16:55.900 | of widget-cranking reduction of knowledge workers

01:16:58.740 | to sort of assembly line stations.

01:17:03.740 | It's this sort of worst pseudo-productivity notion

01:17:06.420 | of just like, "Be busy, more is better than less."

01:17:08.460 | And just, you always have to have something to do.

01:17:10.540 | You're putting steering wheels on the Model T,

01:17:12.380 | you're putting the trunk door

01:17:14.820 | on the back of the Ford Tauruses.

01:17:16.540 | It kind of reduces knowledge work

01:17:18.020 | into this more sort of just systematic,

01:17:19.980 | here's a new thing, crank, here's another thing, crank.

01:17:22.100 | And I see this more as like an opera.

01:17:25.140 | There's different acts to it.

01:17:26.460 | You're figuring out, this plays into my grand goal,

01:17:30.060 | and this is smaller, and you're playing with these pieces

01:17:32.580 | and trying to build this performance of your work week

01:17:35.660 | that is useful and beautiful and interesting

01:17:38.180 | and technically adept.

01:17:39.860 | So I don't like this idea

01:17:40.900 | of having machines schedule things for you,

01:17:42.580 | and it doesn't solve a problem we have.

01:17:44.860 | If we're listing the biggest hits

01:17:47.380 | to productivity in the knowledge workers week,

01:17:51.700 | nowhere near the top of that list

01:17:53.220 | are you gonna see time spent thinking about

01:17:55.020 | what to put on your calendar.

01:17:56.540 | No, it's context switching.

01:17:58.700 | It's the back and forth conversations over email.

01:18:00.900 | It's the excessive meetings.

01:18:02.500 | It's the administrative overhead aggregation

01:18:04.540 | that comes from having too many active projects

01:18:06.460 | on the same time.

01:18:07.300 | These things are huge killers

01:18:08.340 | of your ability to concentrate.

01:18:09.420 | They're burning everybody out.

01:18:10.860 | That's what matters.

01:18:11.820 | That's where, if we're gonna solve a problem with AI,

01:18:13.940 | solve those problems.

01:18:15.340 | Learning that you like to do meetings at three on Tuesdays,

01:18:21.780 | like this is a solution looking for a problem.

01:18:25.260 | So I'm not that interested in those tools.

01:18:26.700 | So I appreciate the question

01:18:28.100 | 'cause there are a lot of those tools out there,

01:18:30.580 | and it's not something I would spend a lot of time

01:18:31.900 | thinking about if I was you.

01:18:34.100 | All right, so we've got a good final segment coming up

01:18:37.580 | and getting to the books I read in July,

01:18:38.980 | but first let's hear from another sponsor.

01:18:41.340 | So I heard a statistic, Jesse,

01:18:44.260 | that was pretty surprising to me.

01:18:46.340 | Netflix has more than 18,000 titles in their library.

01:18:52.180 | But only something like 6,000 of those titles

01:18:55.060 | are available in the US.

01:18:59.020 | So you are missing out on thousands of great shows

01:19:03.060 | when you are using Netflix in the US.

01:19:06.580 | That is unless you are using ExpressVPN.

01:19:09.540 | ExpressVPN is a product I've been talking about

01:19:11.860 | for a long time.

01:19:12.700 | It's my preferred VPN.

01:19:14.300 | You should be using a VPN in general.

01:19:16.300 | It's a way to regain some privacy

01:19:19.700 | over what sites and services you're accessing,

01:19:21.820 | whether it's like at home

01:19:23.180 | and your cable provider is looking at this,

01:19:24.820 | or you're on the road

01:19:25.700 | and people are sniffing these packets out of the air.

01:19:27.860 | But there's this cool other benefit you get

01:19:29.780 | from using a VPN,

01:19:31.100 | which is if you connect to a VPN server

01:19:33.980 | in a different country,

01:19:35.180 | you can gain access to services or content

01:19:39.660 | that's only available in that country.

01:19:42.020 | So like, for example, on Netflix,

01:19:43.580 | I was messing around with this the other day.

01:19:45.740 | If you connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK,

01:19:50.380 | there are some like really cool shows

01:19:52.340 | that are available on Netflix in the UK,

01:19:54.060 | but not in the US.

01:19:55.100 | For example, like "Rick and Morty".

01:19:57.460 | It's a really cool cartoon.

01:19:58.300 | It's available in the UK, not in the US.

01:20:00.420 | The new drama, the FX drama "Fargo",

01:20:02.780 | the sort of the dramatization of the Coen Brothers movie.

01:20:06.860 | UK Netflix, yes.

01:20:08.060 | US Netflix, no.

01:20:08.980 | So if you just connect to a VPN server,

01:20:10.820 | an ExpressVPN server in UK,

01:20:12.940 | all that's available.

01:20:13.780 | So it's kind of like a cool extra benefit

01:20:16.700 | you can get from using a VPN.

01:20:19.060 | Now, as I've said, if you're going to use a VPN,

01:20:23.500 | I recommend ExpressVPN.

01:20:25.620 | It's easy to use.

01:20:26.460 | You just fire up the app

01:20:27.300 | and click one button to change locations.

01:20:29.020 | It works on all of your devices,

01:20:30.780 | phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, and more.

01:20:33.740 | Super fast, right?

01:20:35.820 | They have a lot of bandwidth, fast servers.

01:20:37.340 | You can stream in HD through a VPN server

01:20:40.060 | with zero buffering.

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01:20:57.180 | Right, so I'm a big fan of ExpressVPN,

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01:21:11.020 | Get your money's worth at expressvpn.com/deep.

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01:21:24.040 | But I also wanna talk about my friends at ZocDoc.

01:21:29.580 | Look, I'm going to the dentist tomorrow.

01:21:31.660 | Got me thinking, how do you do things like find a dentist?

01:21:35.540 | Or like, let's say you need a dermatologist.

01:21:37.060 | How do you find a dermatologist to go to?

01:21:39.340 | Let's say you need a podiatrist.

01:21:40.580 | Your foot's hurting you.

01:21:41.580 | How does one go about finding a podiatrist, right?

01:21:44.260 | I think for my generation,

01:21:45.460 | these are all these things that fall into the categories

01:21:47.660 | of like adult things that our parents just seem to do.

01:21:51.800 | And now we have to do them

01:21:53.240 | and we have no idea how to go about it.

01:21:55.280 | Well, this is where ZocDoc enters the scene.

01:21:57.540 | It's an idea that makes so much sense.

01:21:59.100 | I can't believe it hasn't been around longer.

01:22:01.260 | ZocDoc is a free app and website

01:22:03.440 | where you can search and compare

01:22:05.300 | high quality in-network doctors,

01:22:08.200 | choose the right one for your needs

01:22:09.820 | and click to instantly book an appointment, right?

01:22:13.300 | We're talking about in-network appointments

01:22:15.340 | with more than a hundred thousand healthcare providers

01:22:17.620 | across every specialty from mental health

01:22:19.380 | to dental health, eye care to skin care, and much more.

01:22:23.380 | So like, look, you're looking for a dermatologist.

01:22:25.020 | You can go on your ZocDoc app.

01:22:26.900 | I could touch that.

01:22:28.240 | You can go into your ZocDoc app and say, okay,

01:22:29.960 | give me a dermatologist near where I am.

01:22:31.860 | Now let me filter this search.

01:22:33.700 | Dermatologist near where I am who take my insurance.

01:22:37.300 | Dermatologist near where I am who take my insurance

01:22:39.100 | and are looking for taking new patients.

01:22:42.860 | Now you get a couple options.

01:22:44.140 | Now you can read the reviews.

01:22:45.340 | These are real patient reviews.

01:22:46.660 | Oh, this one here, people really like,

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01:22:54.200 | It really makes finding healthcare quite simple.

01:22:58.100 | I wanted to point out also

01:22:59.200 | that ZocDoc appointments happen fast,

01:23:00.860 | typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking.

01:23:04.420 | You can even often score same day appointments.

01:23:08.020 | So I have multiple healthcare providers who use ZocDoc.

01:23:13.020 | I have found healthcare providers with ZocDoc.

01:23:14.980 | I have healthcare providers who use ZocDoc

01:23:16.940 | to help do like the, once you set up the appointment,

01:23:19.500 | to do like your pre-appointment paperwork.

01:23:21.260 | So I'm a fan of this product

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01:23:26.140 | So stop putting off those doctor's appointments

01:23:27.960 | and go to ZocDoc.com/deep

01:23:30.660 | to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today.

01:23:33.600 | That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep.

01:23:38.600 | All right, let's get now to our final segment.

01:23:43.420 | All right, so every month

01:23:45.680 | in the first episode of the new month,

01:23:46.920 | I like to review the books I read the month before.

01:23:49.840 | This episode is coming out in August.

01:23:52.120 | So I will talk about the books I read in July, 2024.

01:23:56.320 | I usually try to read five books per month.

01:23:58.720 | I was up in my undisclosed location up North this summer

01:24:01.240 | during much of July, so I read seven instead of five.

01:24:03.720 | So I got a little bit more done than normal.

01:24:06.280 | All right, here's what they are.

01:24:07.920 | Book number one, "The Revolutionary" by Stacey Schiff.

01:24:12.920 | Each year around July 4th, I like to read a book

01:24:16.160 | that's about the American founding or a founding father

01:24:19.560 | or a founding father adjacent character.

01:24:21.860 | So actually I started this last summer,

01:24:23.920 | but then returned to it and finished it this summer.

01:24:26.920 | Stacey Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams.

01:24:30.480 | We all know about his cousin, John Adams.

01:24:32.760 | We know about the beer named after Sam Adams.

01:24:35.160 | Didn't know much about the figure himself.

01:24:36.640 | So I think Schiff did a great job

01:24:38.360 | of getting into the history of Sam Adams.

01:24:42.640 | Heavily, heavily involved,

01:24:44.000 | especially in New England based revolutionary activity.

01:24:47.520 | Then I read "Blue Meridian" by Peter Matheson.

01:24:53.760 | All right, this is the account.

01:24:57.080 | Peter Matheson is a reporter who embedded

01:25:00.720 | on a expedition in the late 1960s

01:25:05.720 | to find and film great white sharks.

01:25:07.520 | Very little was known about great white sharks.

01:25:10.480 | I mean, even just sharks in general,

01:25:12.240 | we didn't know much about in the '50s.

01:25:14.720 | So not that much before this book came out.

01:25:17.480 | Jacques Cousteau started going underwater

01:25:20.520 | with cameras and scuba gear and filming sharks underwater.

01:25:22.920 | And this was kind of a new thing.

01:25:24.040 | People were like, "Ooh, look at this."

01:25:25.840 | And then this particular crew,

01:25:29.800 | it was the son or someone from the,

01:25:32.960 | I guess the grandson of Gimbels

01:25:35.080 | from like the Gimbels department store fortune.

01:25:37.360 | And some others set out to film great white sharks

01:25:39.400 | because very little was known about them, right?

01:25:42.280 | And they're like, "We're gonna get our first

01:25:44.160 | "like real footage of like great white sharks in action."

01:25:47.240 | They were sort of like the early innovators here

01:25:49.120 | of shark cages, like we're gonna get in water

01:25:51.000 | and film these things underwater.

01:25:52.280 | They kind of invented some of the first shark cages.

01:25:54.720 | And they went out to sort of find

01:25:56.680 | where are great white sharks.

01:25:57.960 | Look, we knew very little about these back then

01:26:00.920 | and they wanted to find them.

01:26:02.480 | And so this reporter came along with it

01:26:03.920 | and then wrote a book about it.

01:26:05.040 | And I found the vintage copy of this book, "Blue Meridian."

01:26:07.520 | And it's a fun summer read.

01:26:08.880 | Why is "Blue Meridian" kind of famous?

01:26:12.360 | Because it's the book and more importantly,

01:26:15.480 | the documentary that the book is about.

01:26:17.440 | This documentary is what Peter Benchley saw

01:26:19.640 | in the early '70s and got the idea for writing "Jaws."

01:26:24.080 | So he saw the documentary that this,

01:26:27.360 | that came out of this expedition,

01:26:28.720 | which was called "Blue Water, White Death."

01:26:31.480 | And that's how he got motivated to like,

01:26:33.080 | "Ooh, I should write about white sharks attacking people."

01:26:35.440 | So just kind of these like interesting connections.

01:26:37.680 | It was a fun book, well-written.

01:26:38.840 | Peter Matheson's a good writer.

01:26:40.520 | Speaking of aquatic themes,

01:26:44.080 | I also read a book called

01:26:45.320 | "History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks" by David Gibbons.

01:26:50.000 | This was just an impulse buy.

01:26:52.040 | I don't know where I got this from.

01:26:52.920 | I think I got it from "Politics and Prose."

01:26:55.840 | He's an underwater archeologist,

01:26:58.080 | like a storied underwater archeologist,

01:27:00.600 | like has 40 years and has been involved

01:27:02.840 | in some of the major shipwreck dives of those 40 years.

01:27:07.080 | The book is just, here's 12 shipwrecks,

01:27:10.720 | most of which he dived on,

01:27:12.440 | and he gives the history of the wrecks,

01:27:14.000 | but also the time period in which that wreck came from.

01:27:17.560 | And in doing so, you get kind of like a nice capsule history

01:27:20.080 | of important places and times in the history of the world.

01:27:22.960 | So like, here's a Viking ship,

01:27:24.480 | here's an ancient Roman ship,

01:27:25.800 | here's, you know, up through like a World War II ship.

01:27:28.440 | So it was a pretty cool book.

01:27:30.680 | He's a dense writer, so I'll just warn you about that.

01:27:34.080 | He writes, he's British and academic.

01:27:36.160 | So man, like you have to go slow.

01:27:39.840 | It is like, his sentences are like they're Byzantine, right?

01:27:46.560 | Like, he will, this secondary clause, tertiary clause,

01:27:51.560 | back to a secondary clause, back to the original clause.

01:27:53.960 | And also he just references things.

01:27:56.200 | So there's like a, even though this is a book

01:27:58.280 | written for a general audience,

01:27:59.640 | he's like constantly referencing things

01:28:02.160 | that he sort of just assumes you know about.

01:28:04.000 | And you're like, what the,

01:28:04.840 | I have no idea who these people are and what's going on.

01:28:06.520 | So very like sort of British historian type,

01:28:09.680 | but really cool guy and interesting book.

01:28:11.780 | Another impulse read,

01:28:14.440 | I grabbed this on a bookstore in Vermont somewhere

01:28:16.280 | when I was up North.

01:28:17.280 | This is Peggy Ornstein's book she wrote during COVID-19

01:28:20.720 | called "Unraveling," where she wanted to do all the steps

01:28:25.720 | of producing the yarn to knit her own sweater.

01:28:28.380 | So shearing the sheep, changing the like,

01:28:32.840 | I don't know how you, spinning the wool,

01:28:34.880 | dyeing the yarn, and then sewing the sweater.

01:28:38.760 | I sort of was in the mood for this sort of experiment

01:28:42.760 | in rural living type of book.

01:28:44.160 | And Peggy Ornstein's a great writer.

01:28:46.080 | So I read it, it was good.

01:28:47.840 | I thought it was really interesting.

01:28:49.840 | Sort of a lot of COVID era left politics in there,

01:28:53.920 | which kind of got a little annoying after a while,

01:28:57.440 | 'cause I kind of cared more about like the sheep

01:28:59.680 | and the country life and the reconnecting to it.

01:29:02.280 | And there's a lot of sort of,

01:29:05.000 | it was a reminder of the sort of peak COVID anxiety

01:29:10.880 | mixed in left-wing politics of that time,

01:29:14.120 | which I don't want to revisit.

01:29:15.640 | So you're gonna get a big,

01:29:17.160 | you can get a big dose of that in that book.

01:29:19.360 | Then I read Brian Rafferty's book, "Best Movie Year Ever."

01:29:25.400 | It's a period after every word.

01:29:27.720 | It's a book about 1999.

01:29:30.000 | It was epic movie year, this famous movie year.

01:29:35.080 | All of these like really influential movies

01:29:37.240 | sort of all came out in this same year.

01:29:40.060 | And so this book basically,

01:29:42.200 | it's one of these standard kind of like movie history books.

01:29:44.880 | It just goes through movie by movie

01:29:46.720 | and you get a story about that particular movie

01:29:50.840 | before it moves on to the next.

01:29:52.240 | So if you really want to get like a deep,

01:29:55.200 | not a deep dive, but just like this capsule look at,

01:29:58.200 | I think it was something like 15 or 16 movies he covers.

01:30:00.400 | And as someone who likes movies,

01:30:02.120 | I was really interested.

01:30:02.960 | You learn a lot.

01:30:04.040 | You know, like what was going on with David Fincher

01:30:06.080 | and "Fight Club."

01:30:07.920 | What about the Wachowskis and "Matrix,"

01:30:10.960 | "The Matrix," which like came out in the same time.

01:30:12.920 | All these other different movies that were all

01:30:15.560 | American beauty, like what was happening with Sam Raimi.

01:30:19.120 | And so they could just fall into these different movies,

01:30:21.760 | these different histories.

01:30:23.560 | And it was good.

01:30:24.680 | It was good.

01:30:26.160 | I'm actually right now listening to

01:30:28.120 | kind of like the original famous book in this format,

01:30:31.280 | which is like the best one,

01:30:32.440 | which is "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls."

01:30:35.520 | I might have that backwards.

01:30:36.720 | About the '70s in movies.

01:30:38.680 | That's a real, that's "Biscayne."

01:30:39.880 | That's a real famous one.

01:30:41.040 | All right, I also finished "The Coming Wave"

01:30:43.880 | by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind.

01:30:47.160 | It's kind of a wave-generating book,

01:30:49.440 | came out a year or so ago,

01:30:50.480 | where he was making his predictions

01:30:52.040 | about the future of AI and synthetic biology

01:30:54.200 | and how it was gonna have all these disruptions

01:30:55.720 | and what we can do about it.

01:30:56.840 | And there's not really much we can do about it.

01:30:58.840 | So one of these kind of prognostication books,

01:31:02.400 | because Mustafa is the co-founder of DeepMind,

01:31:05.160 | he was coming from a place of authority.

01:31:06.680 | Anyways, in my role as someone who writes

01:31:08.120 | and thinks a lot about AI,

01:31:09.120 | it was just one of these things I needed to read.

01:31:11.920 | And it's very readable.

01:31:14.200 | It kind of goes through and explains things

01:31:16.280 | and has some prognostications, a good book.

01:31:18.800 | Finally, a fun book.

01:31:19.720 | I read "Ready Player Two" by Ernst Kline.

01:31:21.960 | I actually bought this for one of my sons

01:31:26.080 | when we were dropping him off at camp.

01:31:27.720 | And I was like, "Well, I should read this

01:31:28.560 | before he gets back because I might be interested.

01:31:30.800 | Also, I should make sure it's appropriate for him."

01:31:32.280 | And it was actually, Ernst Kline is good at these books.

01:31:34.640 | "Ready Player One" and "Ready Player Two,"

01:31:36.880 | there is an interesting amount of craft in it.

01:31:38.760 | They're weird books, right?

01:31:40.120 | It's this super dense nostalgia.

01:31:43.360 | It's not the most richly drawn characters,

01:31:46.720 | and he's not a great characterization guy,

01:31:48.440 | and there's a lot of internal exposition.

01:31:50.800 | But somehow, he gets this rhythm going.

01:31:53.840 | You're in this weird, fake world, literally fake world,

01:31:57.800 | and the stakes he sets up and how it rolls forward,

01:32:01.720 | plus just the complexity and the wonder of the world,

01:32:04.240 | and it presses a lot of nostalgia buttons,

01:32:05.960 | especially if you're a millennial or an old millennial

01:32:08.560 | like I am.

01:32:09.400 | I know, it's hard to write these type of books.

01:32:12.400 | I appreciate techno-thrillers,

01:32:13.720 | and Ernst Kline has done something new

01:32:16.000 | in the world of techno-thrillers.

01:32:16.960 | So I enjoyed "Ready Player Two"

01:32:18.760 | more than I really thought I would.

01:32:20.680 | All right, so those are my seven books I read in July.

01:32:24.000 | All right, Jesse, I think that's all the time we have.

01:32:28.080 | Thank you everyone for listening.

01:32:28.920 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show,

01:32:31.240 | and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:32:35.280 | So if you liked today's discussion

01:32:36.520 | about core productivity habits,

01:32:39.000 | you might also like episode 305,

01:32:42.440 | where I addressed the critique

01:32:45.320 | that time-block planning can seem oppressive.

01:32:47.920 | I think you will like this companion

01:32:49.440 | in today's episode.

01:32:50.520 | Check it out.

01:32:51.560 | Anyways, with great care in tact,

01:32:54.120 | Berkman admitted that time-blocking

01:32:56.280 | does not work that well for him,

01:32:57.880 | and in fact, he feels like it is a little oppressive.

How To Not Waste Your Time - 5 Keys To Master Productivity & Reinvent Your Life | Cal Newport

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