How Can I Organize My House for Better Productivity?

00:00:00.000 | Next one's a little different. It's a question about designing

00:00:08.320 | household space for better productivity. Nice.

00:00:11.080 | Hey, Cal, big fan of the show. Calling in today with a question

00:00:14.800 | about household space and productivity. My fiance and I

00:00:18.640 | just moved into a two bedroom apartment. There's plenty of

00:00:23.120 | space. But what we're finding our trouble is, is how we set up

00:00:28.240 | what areas are for what we're trying to keep the bedroom is

00:00:31.200 | certainly no technology. Our living room, we're trying to

00:00:34.560 | keep that the same way. And our other bedroom we're using as an

00:00:39.200 | office space as well as a workout space with a stationary

00:00:42.720 | bike and some other equipment. What we're finding troubling is

00:00:46.720 | how do I determine how to separate my work time from my

00:00:51.280 | workout time? If I'm at the desk doing work for my career versus

00:00:56.400 | having to do some paying bills and all that, we really don't

00:01:00.440 | want to bring the laptops out into the kitchen or the living

00:01:03.880 | room area, but are also having trouble not when sitting at the

00:01:07.720 | desk thinking about work. Any clues or tips you might have on

00:01:11.400 | that would be appreciated. Thanks, Cal.

00:01:13.080 | Okay, good question. So first of all, I think this is obvious,

00:01:17.840 | you need to take one of those bedrooms. And that needs to be

00:01:20.400 | dedicated to Cal Newport related material is where you want to

00:01:24.880 | have a whole wall for my books, you want to have a whole wall

00:01:27.560 | for my planners, a really good stereo system for playing the

00:01:31.360 | podcast with a chair that's just aimed at it. Like that should be

00:01:34.680 | priority one and then everything else can fit into your main

00:01:36.960 | bedroom. Now assuming you don't want to do that, which would be

00:01:41.520 | my suggestion. I have a couple things I'll say here. All right,

00:01:47.280 | so you're basically putting everything work and exercise

00:01:51.560 | related into one room. That's not a bad idea. Maybe you could

00:01:56.000 | think about exercise as something that you also interleave

00:01:59.280 | throughout the workday, you know, if you're working from

00:02:01.520 | home anyways, with your equipment, there are 20 minute

00:02:04.560 | rides, some push ups, like going back and forth between

00:02:08.240 | exercising and work is actually a pretty good rhythm for work. So

00:02:11.320 | you might not actually want to separate those as much as you

00:02:13.400 | think. When it comes to breaking up household work from other

00:02:17.880 | type of work. Small, I think it's the right way to say the

00:02:22.640 | small changes to the environment. So small contextual

00:02:27.920 | changes can go a long way when it comes to trying to change

00:02:32.800 | your mindset. And so what I mean about this is that you can have

00:02:36.520 | a slightly different setup for bills or what have you, then

00:02:42.960 | what you do in the same room for your normal work. And that

00:02:47.320 | little change in context can make a big difference where you

00:02:49.880 | can do the bills or what have you without falling back into

00:02:52.920 | that mindset of regular work. So like one thing you could do is

00:02:56.680 | have a very small desk or table that is separate from your main

00:03:00.440 | desk, right? So you can imagine a setup where against one wall,

00:03:02.960 | you've built a long desk that both you and your fiance can

00:03:05.920 | both sit and you bring your computers there and you have all

00:03:08.360 | your files there. And then over in another corner is a very

00:03:11.000 | small desk. Kind of like they used to use if you look at the

00:03:14.600 | Victorian age where they'd have those stationary desks, where

00:03:17.040 | it was like very tall, with a very narrow desk in front of it,

00:03:20.480 | you'd go and you would write your correspondence on or

00:03:23.400 | something. So these are shallow desks. You have something like

00:03:26.320 | that in a different corner of the room. And right next to it

00:03:29.200 | is the filing cabinet for your household stuff. It seems like

00:03:34.000 | it's the same room, but that context makes a difference. I'm

00:03:36.560 | at this desk on my laptop doing email. Now it's Sunday

00:03:39.440 | afternoon. I want to pay some bills and take care of some of

00:03:43.560 | that type of work. I don't want to think about email and I don't

00:03:45.960 | want to think about my job, you go in that same room, but you're

00:03:48.200 | going over to that other little desk. It makes all the

00:03:50.440 | difference in the world. That's the bill desk that's different

00:03:52.800 | than the work desk. So I think you do that. You can get a lot

00:03:57.720 | out of the same space. The other contextual cues you can do is

00:04:01.200 | with lighting and music. Okay, when I'm doing deep work in this

00:04:05.400 | desk, I have the lights low except for one bright spot on my

00:04:08.200 | desk. When I'm doing email, I have the lights higher. When I'm

00:04:11.160 | doing exercising, we do something different, right? Those

00:04:13.840 | type of cues can matter as well. So small cues, give your mind

00:04:16.560 | what they need to know that this is a different context than this

00:04:19.040 | even if you're in the same physical space. So I think

00:04:21.600 | that's a good idea. The final thing I would suggest is be in

00:04:25.800 | the habit of using that office is where your phones go. So I'm

00:04:29.400 | a big proponent of what I call the phone for your method, which

00:04:33.080 | says when you're at home, you do not keep your phone with you in

00:04:36.680 | your pocket. Just like 25 years ago, you didn't just pick up

00:04:41.320 | your old fashioned telephone with a very wide, long wire,

00:04:45.440 | just walk with you wherever you went in the house carrying this

00:04:47.800 | phone with you, that'd be eccentric. But we do that with

00:04:49.520 | our portable phones. And so it's always there for distraction. So

00:04:52.120 | I say, when you come home, your phone's going to a set place,

00:04:54.680 | you plug them in, and you charge them. If you need to make a call,

00:04:58.800 | you go there. If you need to text someone, you go there. If

00:05:00.560 | someone's calling you, you go there. If you want to see if

00:05:02.360 | someone texted there, you go there. If you want to look

00:05:03.880 | something up, you go there. And that's where your phone is. It's

00:05:06.240 | not with you as a default distraction. I call it the phone

00:05:09.600 | for your method, because if you're in a house, you might

00:05:12.600 | have a foyer by your front door, it's a good place for it. You

00:05:15.280 | have a two bedroom apartment, use that one apartment, that one

00:05:17.400 | room for it. Go in there, we plug in our phones, we can put

00:05:20.480 | the ringer on high, so we'll hear it, you know, if someone's

00:05:22.720 | calling or something. And that's where we go to use our phone.

00:05:25.320 | That is, I think, a great, I think that's a great setup. We

00:05:28.360 | have a living room and a bedroom that you don't look at your

00:05:32.200 | phone and you don't do email and you don't do work in and then

00:05:34.720 | you have this multi purpose room, where you have exercising

00:05:37.880 | in there. You have your main work in there. You have your

00:05:41.240 | phone interaction in there. You have your household admin like

00:05:45.760 | Bill Payne in there. You have your Cal Newport shrine in there

00:05:48.960 | that takes up most of the room. And the context is just slightly

00:05:52.920 | different between all of those different things. And so when

00:05:55.480 | you're switching from one thing to the other, your mind knows

00:05:57.440 | it's different. And it doesn't invade it all into the other

00:05:59.880 | parts of your life. I think you do that you're going to have a

00:06:03.240 | great setup for your house. And you're really would be taking

00:06:06.080 | advantage of the way your brain actually works. All right. We

00:06:13.400 | should have a shrine we kind of we don't have a shrine in here,

00:06:15.280 | Jesse, but we do have some various things that fans have

00:06:18.400 | sent us that maybe to the outside eye is a little bit

00:06:21.880 | shriney.

00:06:23.040 | Give your bookshelf.

00:06:24.560 | I have the bookshelf, but I only have I don't have all my books

00:06:26.720 | up there yet. Because I ran out of shelves and I got too lazy to

00:06:30.040 | buy to buy more. But we have someone sent us a like a comic

00:06:34.120 | book artist did a an illustration of me as a

00:06:37.640 | superhero. Like heavily muscled. You've seen that out by the

00:06:41.080 | refrigerator. And then a class I gave a talk to they do like a

00:06:44.600 | lot of original illustrations about me and my life like

00:06:47.600 | hand-drawn illustrations, the ones I have on the wall. Yeah,

00:06:50.720 | yeah. In the main room. Both of those are a little out of

00:06:54.400 | context. Maybe oddly shrine like, I think out of context,

00:06:59.360 | that might be weird. But the idea was here in the HQ, we're

00:07:03.040 | going to put it up in a way brings up another issue. People

00:07:07.440 | are asking for a look inside the HQ video. So so here's the

00:07:12.600 | here's what we should do. We're going to do. Yeah. But I'm, I

00:07:16.600 | want to decorate the HQ better. You know this, right? I'm just

00:07:19.320 | bad about this. When you came, I had to buy some chairs, right?

00:07:22.880 | So so when you started working for me, I only had one chair. So

00:07:25.920 | that's what I did. But we still are missing a lot, right?

00:07:29.480 | Because I've just weird with decorations. I'm lazy. And so I

00:07:33.000 | think we got to figure that out. We got to have a plan for it.

00:07:37.240 | And then I think the video should be before after like,

00:07:40.280 | okay, let's tour the HQ as it as it stands now. That's a good

00:07:45.040 | idea. And then we we do some work or hire some people to

00:07:47.600 | help us do some work. And then we here's how it looks after

00:07:52.200 | we're done. So there would be a forcing function because we got

00:07:55.080 | to get stuff on the walls. We got to get we probably have to

00:07:58.200 | get rid of those old desks and do something cooler. We should

00:08:01.720 | have better seating, we should get a good TV in there. Like

00:08:04.120 | there's so much we probably people want to see your board.

00:08:07.080 | People want to see the board. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we have the

00:08:09.560 | whiteboard in there. You know, I asked my listeners wants to

00:08:14.800 | send me suggestions for the HQ. But I don't know, I used to call

00:08:19.280 | it the cave back then. And some of the suggestions were a little

00:08:22.440 | on the nose. Like someone wanted me to actually build a cave

00:08:25.600 | with plaster of Paris, stalagmites and stalactites or

00:08:29.920 | whatever. I was like, Okay, maybe, maybe we should not

00:08:34.200 | outsource this one. But anyways, we're committing now.

00:08:38.000 | We're committing now on air. Jesse and I are going to Yeah,

00:08:40.360 | we'll put out some videos, we'll put out some videos of what it

00:08:42.000 | looks like in here. Yeah. And then we're gonna make it look

00:08:43.960 | nicer. And then we'll put out another video and you'd be like,

00:08:46.720 | ah, now it looks nicer. And there'll be a huge shrine.

00:08:49.960 | [laughs]

00:08:51.340 | [outro music]

00:08:56.860 | [Music Ends]

How Can I Organize My House for Better Productivity?

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