Before we get to the questions though, I want to do a deep dive. The big question I want to address in today's deep dive is the following. How does Cal organize his life? I've talked about this before, but I'm going to get granular today. And let me tell you why.

Because of a recent experience I had just a couple days before recording this episode. I got very stressed/anxious to the point where I actually lost a lot of sleep. So yesterday I was very tired. I was having a hard time sleeping because once my mind got fired up, I had a hard time falling asleep.

Here was the thing that was making me stressed and anxious. The fall semester is beginning. I usually go a little bit lax. We'll talk about this. I go a little bit lax on my systems in the summer. I'm a professor/writer. So in the summer, I have very little to do but write.

I lean into that. I take the foot off the gas, put a little bit of my organizational systems. And then I have to get things locked back in for the fall because things get more busy. Well, in the summer, I had accreted all of these ancillary new or miscellaneous disciplines and systems and ideas and projects that I wanted to tackle.

And I had these notes about all these different things I was working on spread out over many different digital media and many different notebooks. And a couple days ago, I was like, okay, I have to actually get this stuff all wrangled and get my systems all ready for the fall.

And I couldn't make it work. Some of them were redundant with other things. Some things didn't quite make sense. Some things seemed like it was just too much. I was asking myself, there's too many initiatives I was trying to get going. And it really stressed me out to the point where I had a hard time sleeping.

And yesterday morning, I had an epiphany. And I'm going to put quotation marks around epiphany here because it is the exact same epiphany I have every single fall. Which is that the planning system that I have been perfecting over a decade, I've been using this for a decade, is what works for me.

And every time I try to reinvent the wheel or add new components onto this, I get stressed out. And so I said, you know, I need to do forget this like I do every fall, go back to my standard planning system, get all of the pieces of that standard system up and running, and I feel much better.

I feel much better. This happens to me every summer. I think I'm going to come up with some new exciting thing that's going to really jumpstart some sort of ambition of mine. And I always go back to my same old tried and true three-part planning system that has performed.

Everything I have done as a professional in the last decade, which is most of my books, most of my academic work, happens because of this planning system. So in honor of it, and in honor of it being the fall and back to school, and work ramping up again for a lot of people, I thought I would go through briefly, but clearly through the planning system I do to organize the stuff in my life and figure out what to do with my time.

So I have a document. I call this the root document of the core document, where I just describe the system. This, I think, is an important place to start. I call this rooted productivity, where you have somewhere a core document from which everything you do actually comes out of it.

Because to me, it's important that everything is written down, you know where to find it. So I like to have one core document that just summarizes, here's the pieces of your system. So I just have that somewhere. It's not floating in my head. So the start, I actually had Jesse load up here the actual document I use.

This is the actual document I use that just summarizes the high level of my planning system. The exact wording I use, you'll notice as we go through this here, it's not perfectly written. It's not perfectly clear. It's for me, but I will go through it. All right, so let's start with this.

All right, for those of you who are watching on the YouTube channel, you can see this. For those who are listening, I'll narrate it. At the top of this document is a title core systems. Here's what I say. Below are summaries of the three main categories that contain the elements of my core systems.

Core documents, productivity, and discipline. So I've broken this document into those three sections. Everything related to my core planning system falls under one of those three categories. All right, so we start with category number one, core documents. There's two. Two types of core documents I maintain for my system.

One is values, a document that, as I say here, describes my roles and values by which I try to live. And you'll see, like, if you're looking at this online, it's important, the wording's kind of weird. Because again, it's for me. It's not like an essay I'm publishing. It's not polished.

It doesn't have to be polished. I know what it means. All right, the other type of documents I keep are my career and personal strategic plans. This is me reading the words here. I have one plan for each of these two parts of my life that lays out my current thoughts, experimental systems, and plans for living true to my values.

So what I'm trying to say there, again, because the writing's not perfect here, is like, just what's my plan for pursuing those parts of my life in a way that is true to my values? I then have a note that says, sometimes I'll have extended plans that I'll link to from those documents.

So if there's a particular big project or initiative I'm working on, I might describe that in its own document and link to it from, let's say, the professional strategic plan. All right, so those are the three documents at the core of my system. My values, here are my values, the roles of my life, the values by which I live those roles, and then my career and non-career strategic plans.

I have this subcategory here called maintenance, and it talks about how I update these documents. And there's three things here, and I'll just summarize this at the high level. Once a week, I look at my values and create what I call a values plan. This is where I emphasize particular values I maybe need to be focusing on or I've fallen off of them.

Sometimes I'll have some habits in mind to help emphasize a particular value. Community connection is important. Maybe I need to try for this week calling someone every day, that type of thing. So I put this into a kind of a separate, what I call a value plan. So it's sort of clarifying and calling out what's important in my values for that week.

I've noted on here that I also include in my value plan best practices for mental health. So what am I doing to help keep my mind sharp and healthy and away from anxiety? I like to think through my practices, have those written down. So I try to about once a week to update this values plan.

All right, for my strategic plans, how do I maintain those? Well, once a week, I review them. We'll get into that more. And then I say here, I can tweak them or change them at any time, but I wanna make sure at the very least at the beginning of each new semester, I overhaul it.

So they're written for a semester at a time, but I can tweak them at any time I feel like I should. And then finally, I talk about my idea notebook or digital idea storage system. So I use Obsidian as well as Moleskine. And I keep ideas in there. And at the very least, when I do my semester plans or the updates to the strategic plans, I'll go through and check those ideas and see if I need to act on any of them.

All right, so that is the core documents and how I maintain them. So quick summary of a document of my values. I have a career and personal strategic plan. I look at the values once a week and pull out this values plan to just to help keep that at the center of my life.

And I update those strategic plans usually about once a semester. All right, the next category for my core systems is productivity. So how do I actually organize my time in a way where I am happy with what I'm producing? I break this down into weekly and daily planning. So weekly, each week, I build a weekly plan based on a review of my strategic plans, my calendar, my task list, and my value plan.

So I do a weekly plan. You've heard me talk about this. I don't get into detail here about what goes into the weekly plan because I play it by ear. I'm flexible. A very complicated week in the middle of an academic semester might have an intricate Jenga game of how I'm gonna make the whole week work.

A week in July in the middle of the summer might say, "Write!" And that's it. So I don't have a set format for that. But it's how I make sense of, what am I working on this week? What do I need to keep in mind? Are there any habits or heuristics I wanna have on top of mind?

Is there any particular things I need to get done this week? I need to remember to get it done. How am I even just attacking this week? All that's in the weekly plan. All right, then each day, I review my weekly plan. I review my value plan. I look at my calendar.

And if it's a weekday, I make a time block plan. So my weekly plan, I check it every day. The calendar I check every day. Look at my value plan. I gotta remember, what am I focusing on? What's important in my values? And then I make my time block plan for the day.

If it's not a weekday, then I do something looser. I don't time block plan weekends, but you might sketch a quick plan. Hey, what am I working on today? What do I need to remember? That's how my planning works. So you see how these things start to connect together.

The strategic plan influences the weekly plan. You look at that weekly plan when you're making your daily plan. Your daily plan figures out what you're doing right now. So what you're doing right now in this particular system is influenced by your big picture strategic plans, but you don't have to think about your big picture strategic plans right now.

It comes down through these different levels. All right, two other pieces to my productivity system. Clear work shutdowns with a shutdown complete ritual. So you gotta have a clear separation between work and non-work. Make a rough but intentional plan for what you wanna do with the rest of your day when you shut down.

That's my shutdown routine. And then full capture. David Allen right here. Full capture of tasks. Make sure at the very least at the shutdown each day, you process all the tasks that you've captured into the appropriate systems. Again, this is all about for me, stress management. I don't want open loops.

I wanna trust if I write something down, it will get seen, it will get processed. It'll get put on the calendar if it's an appointment or reminder. It'll get put on my task list if it's a task. It will update my weekly plan if it's a thought about what I need to change for my plan.

And there it will be seen the next day. It'll be seen in when I look at my weekly plan. It'll get reflected in my time block plan. It'll be seen when I look at the calendar to make the plan on the relevant day. The whole game here is trusting.

I don't have to keep track of things in my mind. I can have this ambitious schema for how I'm trying to advance these big picture goals that have all these moving parts that are rapidly changing in the moment. I don't wanna worry about any of it except for what I'm doing in the moment.

And if it's in the evening, then I should just be worried about whatever relaxing thing that I'm trying to do. All right, the third category here is discipline. So I maintain in my strategic plans an evolving list of core disciplines. This might be things about like exercise. It might be things about the number of deep work hours you're gonna do each day.

It might be something if you're in sales about the number of calls you make every day, whatever. But the point is, they're disciplines that I try to strictly follow to lay a foundation for a deep life. So I think it's important to have hard disciplines. I do this, I do that, and I do this other thing.

And I always do those things. These hard boundaries that you follow to help establish a foundation of a deeper life. And so that's the third part of my system is having this evolving list of disciplines. I talk about here is I often track these with metrics. Sometimes I don't.

So typically, if it's during an academic semester, I'll have a metric code for each of my disciplines where I can keep track of in my time block planner and the metric planning space. Did I do this today? Did I do this today? I like to actually see it. Other times I take a break from it, like in the summer, for example, or over a break, I might, there are periods I'll take a break for it.

So that is there, but I'm typically collecting these metrics. That's it, that's the system. That system can support massively complicated ambitions. That system can support an incredibly complicated, fast moving professional environment where it's very difficult to keep track of all the different things that have to fit together. This system will support that.

This system will support a life outside of work that you can be present and intentional and interesting and pursue things that are interesting to you and develop yourself and develop your mind, develop your relationships, not get lost in work and not get completely overwhelmed with anxiety and stress. This system will support your pursuit of living truer to your values, living a good life, trying to actually practice and implement the things that make a good life good.

All of these things are important. This simple system that I describe in these three categories of notes, in this one document, handles everything. And it has in my life for over a decade. So all this extra type of stuff I was trying to do in the last few weeks, I realized that all fits in here.

I know this, I trust this, it's not perfect. Some of this stuff is redundant. Not all of it makes perfect sense. Why is the value plan a separate thing? Shouldn't that be part of the weekly planning? There's all these little legacy incongruities. Did I say that right, Jesse? Incongruities.

Yeah, you said it right, incongruities. Let me write that down in my disciplines. Say words correctly. But it all can be captured here. And it's a system that can flex. When you're doing complicated things, these documents can get big. Your strategic plans get big. Your task lists get really big.

Your calendar is full. You have extended plans that you're linking to from your strategic plans. Your weekly plans look like epic essays. And other periods, you're burnt out, you're going through a hard time. The system can contract. Really just down to the basics, here's my values. Gotta get this core things done in my life.

A lot of like trying to get out of the despair, get out of the depths. The system contracts to that as well. So it's really a flexible system. So this is my public apology to my system. Sorry for thinking I could do a little better. You've always been what I need in my life.

This then is my call to you out there in my audience. If you don't already have a pretty effective system that captures all of the parts of your life, the things that matter to you, professional, non-professional, and goes from, captures everything from those big thoughts all the way down to what you're doing today, what you're doing tomorrow.

If you don't have a system like that, try this one. Try this one for a month. I don't know why it works so well, but it does. These parts and the way they mingle and the daily, weekly, and the flexibility, it's a decade's worth of experimentation. It does work.

Give it a try. At first, it feels like a lot of moving pieces. You get in the rhythm and it actually makes you feel freer. And actually makes you feel more relaxed. Hey, trust it, the system's got me. And in the end, it does produce stuff that matters. So that's how I do it.

I don't know. You've heard me talk about this system before. - Yeah. - It's not too complicated, right? I mean, I'm used to it because I've done it for a decade. It's like muscle memory for me, but I don't know. When I read it from scratch, I'm like, do these pieces click?

- I think for people who hear it for the first couple of times, they just gotta watch this video and then hear you say it a couple of times 'cause it does make a lot of sense after. And I've been doing it for a couple of years since you started your podcast.

- Yeah, it's worked for you, right? - Yeah, it's great. And then in terms of the discipline stuff, I was thinking about your buddy, Ryan, is writing a new book called "Discipline." Have you already read it? - Not yet. "Discipline" is something. - Yeah. - I forgot the word is.

Yeah, because Ryan's doing a book on each of the four cardinal virtues. - Yeah. - Yeah. Yeah, he has a whole book. I'm excited for it. - I don't know if he gave you like an advanced copy or something. - He will. I mean, we share an editor. - Yeah.

- So we tend to see each other's work. I talk to him quite a bit. That was the last thing, by the way, that was added to my, if you look at a decade, the last thing that was added to my system was being explicit about what are the disciplines?

What are the, I do these seven things. And just being clear about that. I was kind of informally doing things, like exercise or whatever. But for me, if it's not written down, other people don't have this issue, but for me, if it's not written down, I don't fully trust it and then I get anxious.

So I have to have it written down and it all has to connect back. It all has to connect back to this root document. So there we go. - I was listening to an interview with Sisson and Rogan and he, it was actually from 2021. - I listened to that one.

- Yeah. I just listened to it like yesterday. I just stumbled across it. But he was talking about, they were talking about discipline and then Rogan was talking about his 15, like his 25 minute session in the sauna and then 15 minutes, like the last 10 minutes, he's got this breathing routine.

If he thinks about anything else, he adds like an extra breath. - But you got, if you ever heard Joe Rogan talk to Laird Hamilton, I don't know, he was on the show a couple of years ago. You know Laird Hamilton, right? - Yeah. - Laird Hamilton fan. And Rogan, I guess, was talking about his, like I do this like hardcore sauna thing.

And Laird was like, hold my beer. Laird is like insane. That guy is so interesting. - He swims with like dumbbells. - He swims with dumbbells. He has a giant sauna. And so Rogan's like, man, I stay in my sauna for like 15 minutes. - 25 minutes. - 25 minutes, yeah.

Laird Hamilton brings an assault bike into the sauna, which for people who don't know, is like the hardest single piece of, right? Exercise equipment. It's like you do your arms and your legs and resistance. You're like mountain climbing. I don't know, it's impossible, right? It's like one of the hardest single exercise you can do.

He brings one of those into a giant barrel sauna and does it and then gets into an ice bath. So, you know, his discipline document is more impressive than mine. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)