How Do I Filter Activities to Succeed at a New Job?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right, let's do one more question about deep work here.

00:00:08.480 | This last one comes from Noah.

00:00:12.320 | Noah says, how do I limit activities

00:00:13.920 | that aren't important for the long term at a new job?

00:00:17.560 | So he goes on to explain about how in his past job,

00:00:21.240 | he was a chemical testing engineer

00:00:23.920 | at a pharmaceutical company.

00:00:25.840 | They're very a world without email style in their approach

00:00:30.480 | to work.

00:00:31.000 | They had unified task boards to see who was working on what.

00:00:33.800 | Do you have a free slot for this?

00:00:35.480 | They prioritize the primary value producing activity,

00:00:38.040 | which for them was actually performing lab tests

00:00:40.000 | on chemicals.

00:00:40.560 | This is all that matters.

00:00:41.640 | You've got to make sure you're doing that.

00:00:42.920 | Everything else is about what you

00:00:44.040 | do with the time that remains.

00:00:45.080 | Pull things off this task board as you have free time.

00:00:47.440 | Fantastic setup.

00:00:48.960 | He says now he's a grad student in chemistry

00:00:52.840 | and it's not so organized.

00:00:55.000 | And in particular, he's working on doing--

00:00:57.120 | he's a teaching assistant.

00:00:58.240 | It says things just get thrown at him.

00:01:00.880 | And he feels like he can't ignore them

00:01:03.040 | because it's part of his job, but it's haphazard and out

00:01:06.640 | of control.

00:01:07.480 | And it's getting in his way of doing the main work.

00:01:10.240 | So what should he do about it?

00:01:12.680 | Well, who is this?

00:01:14.120 | Noah?

00:01:14.640 | Noah, yes.

00:01:15.680 | Professor types are, in general, quite disorganized.

00:01:19.120 | They will just throw stuff at you because their whole life

00:01:21.480 | is chaotic.

00:01:22.080 | And they just need to get it out of their brain

00:01:24.040 | is exploding with all these different demands

00:01:26.440 | they're placing on it.

00:01:27.720 | And you can't just ignore it.

00:01:29.480 | But what you can do, in most cases as a teaching assistant,

00:01:33.440 | is take control of the processes.

00:01:37.000 | Professor doesn't care.

00:01:38.280 | They just don't want to have to worry about these things.

00:01:40.600 | So if you say, here's how I'm working with the students.

00:01:43.400 | Here's how I think we should work with this.

00:01:45.240 | Here is the different processes to get the problem sets in,

00:01:48.240 | to get them graded, to get notes back, to get whatever.

00:01:51.160 | Come up with processes that are much more structured, much

00:01:53.720 | less haphazard, and just implement them on your own,

00:01:57.600 | and talk them through with your professor,

00:01:59.320 | and say, here's some ideas I have.

00:02:00.480 | I think we should run it this way.

00:02:01.360 | It's going to keep it simpler for you,

00:02:02.640 | and it's going to be more controlled.

00:02:04.440 | 9 out of 10 professors are like, whatever.

00:02:06.440 | That one sentence you just told me

00:02:08.000 | has already taken up more time than I have available.

00:02:09.600 | Just whatever.

00:02:10.120 | Whatever we need to do.

00:02:11.080 | They don't care.

00:02:11.760 | So leverage the fact they're too busy and hairy

00:02:13.680 | to now to control the care to shape the job.

00:02:16.600 | That's my main advice for teaching assistants,

00:02:18.600 | is that you have more control here

00:02:21.440 | than you think about how you want your job to unfold.

00:02:23.600 | The professors don't care.

00:02:24.680 | They're happy for you to take the reins

00:02:26.160 | and make this more structured.

00:02:27.560 | They're not going to do it because they're

00:02:29.320 | terrible at this stuff.

00:02:31.080 | They weren't terrible at this stuff.

00:02:32.640 | They probably would have left academia

00:02:33.800 | and made a lot of money anyway.

00:02:35.800 | So OK.

00:02:36.560 | I'm going to get yelled at now by professors

00:02:39.080 | and Zettelkasten people.

00:02:40.880 | Great.

00:02:42.280 | But this is what I would say.

00:02:43.440 | I remember-- I vividly remember having this revelation

00:02:46.920 | as a graduate student.

00:02:48.480 | I was TAing-- didn't do a ton of TAing at MIT,

00:02:52.960 | but I TAed a few courses, distributed algorithms

00:02:56.120 | with my advisor.

00:02:56.800 | I also TAed a security course with Ron Rivest,

00:02:59.720 | who is the R in RSA.

00:03:02.000 | He invented RSA, public key encryption.

00:03:04.920 | That was interesting.

00:03:06.880 | And I remember at some point in one of these TAing,

00:03:09.040 | I think that when I was TAing first for my advisor,

00:03:11.440 | just having this insight of like,

00:03:14.320 | this is kind of haphazard how we're doing this.

00:03:17.440 | And there's a lot of structure we could bring to this

00:03:19.600 | that would have basically zero impact on the students

00:03:22.520 | or the advisor.

00:03:23.080 | It's not going to make their life harder.

00:03:24.240 | They don't care.

00:03:24.880 | The professor doesn't care.

00:03:26.040 | But it's going to make my life significantly easier.

00:03:28.360 | Like, oh, if I do it this way, it's

00:03:31.040 | going to make life much easier.

00:03:32.440 | Just no one's thinking about it because no one cares,

00:03:34.800 | because it doesn't directly affect them.

00:03:36.360 | And I remember I really began to structure,

00:03:38.320 | here's our systems for how you hand in problem sets,

00:03:40.800 | and how we grade them, and how we hand things back.

00:03:43.400 | And it made a big difference.

00:03:47.400 | I don't remember all the details here,

00:03:49.000 | but I vaguely remember that it was just

00:03:51.760 | like a casual idea my advisor had,

00:03:53.680 | which made sense on paper, which was,

00:03:58.280 | we should Xerox copy the problem set submissions.

00:04:01.840 | So that if we lose one, we have a copy.

00:04:07.040 | And because I guess it happened like once.

00:04:10.240 | We lost the problem set.

00:04:11.280 | We're like, ah, we can't grade it.

00:04:12.700 | But if we have a copy backup, that would help.

00:04:15.480 | It sounds good on paper.

00:04:17.200 | It's impossibly time consuming, because these are all

00:04:20.200 | coming in in different types of papers.

00:04:22.160 | They're mainly stapled.

00:04:24.320 | They're mainly stapled, so it's impossible to-- you

00:04:27.080 | have to take staples out.

00:04:28.360 | And it was hours just Xeroxing these things.

00:04:30.560 | And I think at some point-- and again,

00:04:32.100 | I don't remember the exact details,

00:04:33.520 | but I just remember thinking, how often does this happen?

00:04:39.160 | It happened once four years ago.

00:04:42.080 | Let's just-- we'll give you all the points if we lose it.

00:04:45.400 | And we're going to save ourselves all this time.

00:04:47.440 | And it costs no time.

00:04:48.960 | I made that case.

00:04:49.920 | She was like, fine, that sounds fine.

00:04:51.760 | But I was just thinking through, what can we do here?

00:04:53.960 | I also remember-- and again, I don't have the details here,

00:04:56.080 | Noah, so I'm sorry I don't have more specifics.

00:04:58.240 | But I also remember realizing at some point,

00:05:00.320 | the big class and lots of problem sets

00:05:02.160 | when we had graders and everything,

00:05:04.240 | having the students alphabetize when they hand it in

00:05:09.480 | made a big difference.

00:05:10.480 | So OK, here's the stack.

00:05:12.160 | When you come up to hand your problem set,

00:05:14.160 | find where your name actually is in alphabetical order

00:05:16.600 | and put it there.

00:05:17.600 | 10 extra seconds when you submit it

00:05:19.720 | saves a huge amount of time for us on the back end.

00:05:21.840 | It made it much easier for us to split it up.

00:05:23.600 | Other things I remember figuring out

00:05:25.060 | is dealing with the undergraduate graders,

00:05:27.000 | is just automating some of the process.

00:05:29.440 | These come to me already in alphabetical order.

00:05:32.240 | I just put them in a mail sorter outside of my office.

00:05:34.840 | I split them in half in the middle of the names or whatever.

00:05:37.360 | And you come and grab them.

00:05:38.600 | And there's stuff I told the students about format,

00:05:41.000 | like make sure that they're in this format, which again, had

00:05:43.540 | little impact on the students.

00:05:44.720 | It was very easier than the change to format.

00:05:46.240 | Just like, what do you want me to do?

00:05:47.000 | Fine.

00:05:47.560 | But it made a huge difference in how

00:05:48.940 | we could consistently grade it.

00:05:50.040 | So these type of things made a big difference.

00:05:51.960 | So know how to do that.

00:05:54.920 | Put in place your own processes, and people will be fine with it.

00:05:57.720 | And more generally, even if you're not a teaching

00:06:00.460 | assistant, there's a teachable moment here,

00:06:03.720 | which is add processes.

00:06:06.840 | Even if the work is coming from someone else,

00:06:09.680 | people often don't care.

00:06:10.840 | They're too busy.

00:06:11.600 | All right, so that's it for questions about deep work.

00:06:17.580 | We're running a little long here,

00:06:18.900 | but let's put in a few questions here, as always,

00:06:20.900 | about the deep life.

00:06:23.460 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:06:26.720 | (upbeat music)

How Do I Filter Activities to Succeed at a New Job? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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