(upbeat music) - All right, what do we got? - Next question. We have a question about time blocking, tips on, your tips on time blocking and how he can factor that into taking some time off work and writing his dissertation. - Hi Cal, my name is Carson, long time fan, first time caller.

I've taken some time away from work to finish my dissertation after a long hiatus and I'm using time blocking. My question is this, do you have any tips for, like when you have a tendency to not do what you schedule yourself to do? I basically have three buckets related to the dissertation work, research, writing and revision.

And I'll often, you know, when it's time to write, do more research or maybe even pay the bills. I have a feeling this may be, I'm not alone here. Curious for your tips and thanks for all you do. - All right, Carson. Well, first of all, I think we're gonna now refer to time blocking as, as seen on NBC's "The Today Show", time block planning.

That's just a little bit of branding strategy there. Second of all, you have a fantastic voice. So you should sell things. You should team up with Kobe from earlier in this episode, who was trying to sell the stock investing tip lessons. Because Carson, if it was you reading these lessons, I think we'd all be all in, you know, you'd be like, I want you to mortgage your house, invest that money into crypto.

And everyone would be like, yeah, makes sense. Man knows what he's talking about. I'm gonna, let me just mortgage that house over there. So great voice, use that, use that to your advantage. I have two things to suggest for what you're talking about here. Again, very common problem. Time blocking is hard.

Blowing past blocks or ignoring blocks is something that happens all the time. A lot of it has to do with what's happening in your head, the pain of context shifting, et cetera. I think one, schedule less. You're probably being too ambitious. You have multiple buckets of different type of work you want to be doing on your dissertation.

It sounds like you're trying to do all this work every day. I think you're being too ambitious. Your brain might be just crying uncle when it switches to the bills or becomes more linguid in its pace on the research and lets it overlap into the other. So think about doing less.

Be very regular. Gonna work on this every day, but I'm gonna be less ambitious about how much I'm gonna work on. Maybe I'm doing one thing every day. So I just do that thing and I have some flexibility around it if it runs long and that's it for the dissertation.

Two, I'm gonna say you want to ritualize this better. So this has to be, when I say ritual, I mean in terms of timing, setting, and activity. So for something like this, I am working on a hard long-term project. You're gonna want to use the same times if possible, probably first thing in the morning.

In deep work, I have a couple examples, especially one in particular I'm thinking of, of Brian, who did his dissertation at 5 a.m. It's like 5 a.m. to 6.30 a.m., heavily ritualized every morning. He had a full-time job. 5 a.m. to 6.30 a.m. dissertation. And that just, the same time, same day, was heavily ritualized.

And then setting, so where do you do this work? Same time, same place. Brian had this dank office in the basement that he used, but it was perfect because he only used it for that. And then activity. Again, using that same example of Brian from deep work, he was down to a specific time he would make coffee and how he would make the coffee and when he would drink the coffee.

I believe he even had the bathroom break programmed in, so it was very ritualized activity. All of this, all of this, what it does is break down the context-switching cost in your brain. It makes it much easier for your brain to, A, not have to negotiate with itself, should we work now?

It's a hard argument, waste energy, you might lose it, so just take that off the table. And B, the rituals get you into that mode quicker so you don't have as much of an expensive context-shift operation happening. So you waste less energy on that, you get into it quicker, you get into it easier.

So do less and to be much more ritualized about the work you do. It's a core principle of slow productivity is change the scale at which you're looking for accomplishment to be longer. So it's not what did I get done today? It's am I happy with the chapter I produced this month?

You're going to a larger time scale. And then it's just about clean, deep, reasonable, sustainable work again and again. Head down, the wheel is grinding, you look up three months later and say, hey, this first part of my dissertation looks pretty good. All right, what do we have for our fourth call, Jesse?

- Before we get to the fourth call, I loved how Carson was first time caller. You get that a lot in sports talk radio. - I know, well, which again, we should do live calls at some point. I mean, maybe we would regret that. - I just love the first time caller, first time long time, you hear it all the time.

I feel I've heard a few times, like listening to some of your listener calls. I love it. - I do enjoy it. And also the thing I want to do is we should do one of these live, do it actually live and we should do it the morning after an important Nationals game and just let it devolve into sports talk radio.

We would be swimming in fans if it just became calls, long discussions, long discussions about the Nationals. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)