The Second Principle of Slow Productivity | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | All right.

00:00:00.500 | Let's do some habit tune-ups, Jesse.

00:00:02.700 | Sounds good.

00:00:03.800 | So for those who don't know, a habit tune-up is a segment in which I take a

00:00:08.820 | piece of advice for my advice, Canon and walk you through it.

00:00:14.400 | So today I want to talk about what I sometimes call multi-scale seasonality.

00:00:21.300 | So I've been reading a lot recently about what I sometimes think of as natural

00:00:27.960 | productivity, and what I mean by that is the way as human beings, we are wired to

00:00:34.240 | work so clearly through most of our history before culture could rapidly

00:00:38.400 | intercede with what our day-to-day lives were like, we had time for our brains

00:00:43.720 | and bodies to evolve for whatever it was we had to do to survive day to day.

00:00:48.840 | And I'm really interested in what that is because it gives us some, I'm

00:00:51.520 | approaching this with care, but it gives us some notion of what our natural

00:00:55.160 | inclinations for work actually are.

00:00:58.360 | So actually, as we finished recording this, Jesse, the, my research

00:01:03.640 | assistant, Caleb's coming over.

00:01:04.880 | He's bringing a big stack of research he's been doing on my behalf on this topic.

00:01:10.800 | So a couple hours from now, I'm about to really increase my knowledge of how, how

00:01:15.960 | did we think about work in the paleolithic?

00:01:18.800 | So one of the things though, that seems to be clear from the work I've done so far

00:01:22.480 | is that our minds are not used to this idea of being pegged at all out work

00:01:28.600 | relentlessly day after day, week after week, month after month, our natural sense

00:01:34.640 | of productivity is way more rhythmic on different scales.

00:01:37.880 | There's intense periods and recharge periods.

00:01:40.240 | There's up and down periods.

00:01:41.600 | There's a variability to what work means.

00:01:43.960 | We get frazzled.

00:01:45.520 | We get this chronic background hum of anxiety when it's every single day.

00:01:50.720 | Wall to wall, email, zoom, email, zoom, email, zoom, Slack, Slack, Slack, email,

00:01:54.080 | email, email, quick break, dinner, go to sleep, repeat again and again.

00:01:59.120 | And again, we can handle intense situations.

00:02:01.200 | We're not meant to live in that all of the time.

00:02:03.600 | So one of the things I have been recommending, one of the things I've been

00:02:07.280 | experimenting with is what I call multi-scale seasonality, which is about

00:02:11.480 | inducing more breaks into your working life at different scales to give yourself

00:02:18.360 | some freedom from the sense of I'm always on.

00:02:21.600 | Now at the scale of a year, most people will take vacation.

00:02:25.400 | So that's good.

00:02:26.320 | One or two weeks, maybe twice a year, people will take off work and that's good.

00:02:32.560 | But what I want to recommend with multi-scale seasonality is that we

00:02:35.560 | replicate this at shorter timeframes.

00:02:38.640 | So if possible, I would say take one day off every two months or so.

00:02:47.880 | So if you, if you're in a job where you build up like a federal government job,

00:02:52.160 | where you build up a bunch of personal days and vacation days, use one once

00:02:56.440 | every two months, take that day off and don't work, do something kind of over

00:03:02.320 | the top that signals to yourself that this is a self-care relaxation type of day.

00:03:06.760 | Next, again, if possible in your job, take one half day off every two weeks or so.

00:03:16.240 | Now this I would recommend if you're in a knowledge work job, just doing unofficially.

00:03:21.120 | Let you follow my advice.

00:03:23.680 | You're on top of things.

00:03:24.640 | You're organized, your time block planning, your multi-scale

00:03:27.200 | planning, you get your stuff done.

00:03:29.280 | You can set things up so that on Friday, you're really clocking out of work at

00:03:34.320 | one 30 instead of going all the way to five, you can figure out how to basically

00:03:38.040 | do that if you're working from home, you can literally go somewhere else.

00:03:40.480 | If you're working in an office, you can kind of informally shut down.

00:03:45.800 | And kind of be relaxed and working something else and then leave the office

00:03:48.360 | early, a little bit earlier than normal.

00:03:50.720 | So you can do this a little bit unofficially.

00:03:52.520 | That's like a half day where I'm going to see a movie.

00:03:55.720 | I'm going to, you know, catch a day game at the baseball stadium.

00:04:00.000 | Do that every, every two weeks or so.

00:04:01.600 | Look, if you're an organized person, this will have zero

00:04:03.640 | impact on how much you produce.

00:04:04.800 | But it is really good for your psychology.

00:04:07.600 | It's not that this adds up to a ton of time off, but psychologically, it adds

00:04:12.280 | up to regular breaks from what's going on.

00:04:15.120 | You're never too far away from a half day that you're taking off out of the

00:04:18.560 | normal where you normally be working.

00:04:19.880 | You're never more than a month or so away from taking a full

00:04:21.960 | day off and doing something else.

00:04:23.480 | You're never six months away from taking two weeks off for a vacation.

00:04:27.120 | So having breaks on multiple scales serves a really useful psychological

00:04:33.000 | trick and it gets your brain into a mode of we worked and we're off and it can

00:04:37.320 | really help short circuit that background hum of anxiety that happens if you

00:04:41.800 | feel like you're constantly pegged.

00:04:43.080 | Now in the big picture, I think multi-scale seasonality can be

00:04:45.680 | way more aggressive than that.

00:04:46.720 | I have a lot of thoughts about that.

00:04:47.920 | I think work should be way more varied than that.

00:04:50.280 | We'll get to that whole chapter.

00:04:53.040 | My new book's going to be about that, but for now, this is a simple thing

00:04:56.680 | that you can do right away that will make a big difference to your psychology.

00:05:01.040 | So do you practice that?

00:05:04.400 | Yeah, I practice.

00:05:05.600 | Well, I practice more extreme versions, but, but I, but again, I have a very

00:05:08.640 | flexible job, I have seasons that are different than other seasons.

00:05:12.640 | I'm in writing mode for three months now.

00:05:14.280 | Like that's a big change.

00:05:15.720 | Uh, yeah, I do weeks off and not weeks off days off on a very regular basis.

00:05:20.880 | I'll do that.

00:05:21.400 | Protect days way out in advance.

00:05:23.440 | Um, makes a big difference.

00:05:25.160 | But you still write six days a week.

00:05:27.360 | Yeah.

00:05:28.620 | Yeah.

00:05:29.420 | So, I mean, when I'm talking about days off, it's usually from Georgetown stuff.

00:05:32.520 | Yeah.

00:05:33.260 | Yeah.

00:05:33.980 | Yeah.

00:05:34.740 | Writing's on a different type of scale.

00:05:36.440 | I'm working on a book for the six months and then the next six months I'm doing

00:05:40.520 | nothing.

00:05:41.020 | So like writing goes back and forth on that scale.

00:05:43.320 | Uh, but I'm coming to it.

00:05:45.760 | This is the working at a natural pace piece of slow productivity.

00:05:50.560 | This is what this is starting to get to is work should not necessarily be.

00:05:54.320 | I'm just pegged seven, you know, eight, nine hours a day with a few extra checks

00:05:59.480 | after it, just, there's always stuff piled up, always stuff I'm working on anytime.

00:06:02.560 | You know, I barely get away if I am, it's an issue.

00:06:04.280 | We're not wired for that.

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The Second Principle of Slow Productivity | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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