All right, let's do one more question about deep work. This one comes from Mr. S. Mr. S asks, what do you do when your boss has allocated you to a team halftime? He elaborates, I worked full-time on one team for my current employer. My boss has decided that we need to start on a new effort and has put me and one other person to work on this new effort.

We were supposed to spend half our time on this new project and the other half on our old team, but I feel like I'm still allocated 100% to both teams now. It's exhausting. All right, Mr. S, here's my suggestion. Ask your boss specifically which half of my hours do you want me working on the new team?

50% as an abstract number means nothing. Should it be the mornings? Should it be the afternoons? Should it be two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon? I want the fix down boss, the hours when I'm working on team A and the hours in which I'm working on team B, and I am going to completely segregate these two efforts.

You give a good reason for it. I'm a Cal Newport fan. Context switching is better to treat these like two separate jobs as opposed to mixing them together in one job, but then do that and then stick to that. If you want to have a meeting related to team A, it has to be scheduled in team A hours.

If you want a meeting having to do with team B, it has to be scheduled in team B hours. If you're going to work on team A, it has to be in team A hours. If you're going to work on team B, it has to be in team B hours.

It could be splitting the day in half. It could be splitting the week in half. Thursday, Friday is team B. Monday, Tuesday is team A, and we split Wednesday down the middle. But what you want here is specificity. When should this work happen? Now, there is a bigger point here I want to briefly emphasize, which is that in knowledge work writ large, a real issue we have is this push model of work allocation, where anyone can push work onto anyone else's plate, where it's up to them to figure out what to do with the mess.

This is a disaster for overload. We get way too much work on our plate because there's no one regulating this. There's no one looking at how much is on your plate. There's no one saying what is reasonable. So we end up with way too much work on our plate.

Can't make progress on all of it at the same time. So that is stressful, but it's not just stressful. Each of these things that's now on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead. Emails about that work with people checking in, weekly meetings, you've had the schedule to make sure that progress is being made.

And so when your plate gets full enough, the fixed overhead itself can take over most of your hours, squeezing out almost any of the time to actually get work done. So it's a huge problem. I'm a big believer in having a much more explicit allocation of work where we think through how much can you do?

How much are you doing? Does it make sense to give you something else? I call this a pull-based method because you're basically pulling work into time you have available. So you're never oversubscribed, as opposed to a push method where any amount of work can be pushed towards you. This is roughly what I'm getting at, Mr.

S, when I suggest that you ask your boss what hours what days do you actually want this 50% work to be done? Because what you're doing here is actually forcing work to account for when it's going to get done. Well, where are the hours where this is going to get done?

That hour is already spoken for. You want to have a meeting here, but that hours have already been put aside for this other work. So now there's no time for your meeting. You're making explicit things take time. What time do you want me to give to this? And honestly, I think there should be a bigger effort to do this with more work.

I wrote about this in a world without email, that when it comes to, for example, service work among professors, that there should be a specific budget. Here is how many hours of service work you are allowed to do max per week. And when things get assigned to you, you actually have to estimate how many hours you're going to spend on.

In fact, put those hours aside. Here they are on my calendar when I'm working on this. If you want to talk to me about this, it's on my public calendar. And when those hours are filled up, nothing else can come to you. Yes, this would create a problem at first, because there's all these people that want you to do things.

Like I know your hours are full, but this is important. But you know what? That back pressure reforms the system. And less of these requests are allowed to be generated. And more of these requests generating entities have to figure out other ways to get their work done. So I don't mean to go on a big rant here, but the unregulated allocation of work and knowledge work is a disaster.

It's convenient. It's flexible. But it is a terrible way to get work done. It's like running a car factory where, you know, everyone comes in and you just say, guys, there's a bunch of parts around here, you do you, like we're just going to kind of build cars. It's yeah, it's convenient.

It's flexible, but nothing's going to get done. Or if it does, the cars are gonna get built terribly. It's gonna take a long time. So it's time to start pushing back against the unrestricted allocation of work. Mr. S, if your boss wants you to spend 50/50, make him tell you what that 50/50 is, make him live by that decision.

They're now hours he cannot get you to do work for team A because it's team B hours, etc. And if he wants to put another thing on your plate, where are those hours coming from? It's time to get explicit. Don't just push stuff on my plate. I'll pull in what I actually have time for.

And what we don't have time for is more questions about deep work. So let's move on now to some questions about the deep life.