How Do I Schedule More Deep Work Reading Blocks?

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00:00:04.640 | Hey Cal, my name is John. I am a pastor at a local church plant outside of Los

00:00:10.240 | Angeles. I'm also a graduate student in theology, getting a PhD. My question is

00:00:15.920 | this. My reading load on a weekly basis is enormous, to the point that scheduling

00:00:23.360 | two blocks of deep work a day just isn't enough to get all the reading done. That

00:00:29.240 | said, I was hoping you could give me some advice about how I might schedule more

00:00:33.680 | than two significant sessions of reading per day in order to get all the work

00:00:40.000 | done. Thanks for all the help. Well, I don't think you're gonna be able to get

00:00:45.160 | much more productive deep work done in a day. If you're already doing two long

00:00:51.640 | sessions of hard reading and you have another job, I think that's probably a

00:00:56.400 | realistic limit for your time available and a realistic limit for what your mind

00:01:00.600 | can actually do. As I've talked about before, when it comes to really cognitively

00:01:05.320 | demanding deep work, so the work that's really straining you, professionals who

00:01:09.800 | do this type of work really have two sessions they do a day and that's it. So

00:01:13.760 | this came out of the study of professional violin players that was

00:01:17.400 | cited in Anders Ericsson's work and picked up and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's

00:01:21.200 | work where they were studying the best violin players at this particular

00:01:26.600 | Academy in Berlin, and among other things were trying to characterize their

00:01:30.440 | practice habits, and they would do one intense session, break, another intense

00:01:33.720 | session, and that's it. What they did not find, for example, in this study was that

00:01:38.200 | there was a dose effect where more and more and more practice led to

00:01:43.000 | more and more accomplishment with the violin, because there's only so much you

00:01:47.160 | could do at that level of intensity and you might be there. So what do we do

00:01:50.360 | about this? Well, you probably need to get more strategic about your reading. The

00:01:54.640 | very first book I wrote was called "How to Win at College" and the very first

00:01:58.120 | chapter in that book is called "Don't Do All of Your Reading." What this means is

00:02:03.640 | that at the college level, the grad school level, you have to learn how to be

00:02:07.760 | more strategic with your reading. You have to know when to go in and really go

00:02:12.760 | slow and understand the argument and where you need to skim, where you can

00:02:17.480 | skip an assignment, and where you need to dwell on an assignment. The amount of

00:02:21.760 | reading assigned in a typical program in the humanities tends to be more than

00:02:25.680 | can actually be done for most people, so you have to learn how to do some of the

00:02:29.160 | strategic slow down, speed up, go deep, go shallow. The other thing you probably

00:02:34.280 | have to do is, to the extent that's possible, be more strategic about your

00:02:38.880 | course selection. People don't think enough about this. There's a real

00:02:44.240 | masochism out there in higher education where people just put in place on paper

00:02:50.480 | the course load they want to do. "You know, I want to get this degree fast and

00:02:53.480 | these are all good courses. Let me challenge myself and yeah, this is five

00:02:56.280 | courses instead of four and these three are notoriously hard, but I want to be

00:02:59.840 | the type of person who just goes after it and gets really hard courses and

00:03:03.480 | gets things done early." And then you get to the reality of it, like, "I can't keep

00:03:06.840 | up with this amount of work." And I tend to push the other way. Keep your schedule

00:03:10.160 | as easy as possible that still keeps you on track for graduating on whatever

00:03:14.440 | schedule you want to. And if that is still too hard, then maybe you need to

00:03:17.480 | adjust that schedule and say, "I'm a full-time pastor. I'm gonna have to add

00:03:20.160 | another year to my studies here because I can't take a full course load and do

00:03:23.040 | my full-time job." That's fine too. This is not laziness. This is actually giving

00:03:27.680 | yourself the cognitive space required to actually do the work that you're doing

00:03:32.000 | well. So keep that in mind too. You may have given yourself a heroic schedule

00:03:36.200 | because you like on paper being the type of academic hero that has those hard

00:03:39.400 | schedules. But in the end, no one cares about how hard your schedule is. No one's

00:03:43.760 | going to give you a gold star for taking a fifth course instead of four. No one's

00:03:47.240 | going to pat you on the back because you took three really hard courses at the

00:03:50.160 | same time. No one is going to say, "This is why I'm going to hire you because you

00:03:53.320 | had such a hard demands on your time." People just care about what's the degree,

00:03:57.520 | what are your grades, how well did you do at the thing you did best. So keep your

00:04:01.900 | load reasonable. Be strategic about your reading. Combine those two strategies, and

00:04:06.800 | I think you'll find that you have a little bit more breathing room. Don't try

00:04:09.920 | to add a third session. Don't try to be doing seven hours of deep work a day.

00:04:13.800 | It's just not going to work out.

00:04:17.560 | [Music]

How Do I Schedule More Deep Work Reading Blocks?

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