Alright, so let's get started then with today's deep question. I'll word it this way. How does fixed schedule productivity work and how has Cal's thoughts on it changed over the years? I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

I am here in the Summer HQ up in Hanover, New Hampshire. I am joined down in the Southern Deep Work HQ in Washington, DC by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, do you think I've done a pretty good job setting up my Northern HQ to look not unlike our studio down in DC itself actually looks?

I never had a doubt. I knew you were going to pull it off. It looks great. Now, we still have some kinks we're working out. You might hear a small hiss that should be gone by the next episode. I'm still playing with the lights, but there's nothing more fun than messing around with AV equipment when what you really should be doing is actual deep work.

So I think there's irony there. Working on a podcast about avoiding distraction has been in recent days a wonderful source of distraction for me. But I am happy to be up here. I'm happy that we are still rolling with the show. Even as I'm up North, I'll tell you what I wanted to talk about today came from you, my listeners.

Someone sent me a question about an article that I had published back in 2008. That's one of my classic articles. I think one of my most cited articles on hardcore productivity. Let me read the title. I have it here. I love that 2008 article I wrote is as follows.

"Fixed Schedule Productivity. How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours." I thought it would be fun to revisit this article. To talk through some of the main ideas, discuss what I still agree with, and what I have evolved or changed in the many years that have passed since I first wrote that.

Just to calibrate where this falls on the "deep life" stack we use to roughly keep track of efforts to find more depth in our life, this would be a core, calm layer strategy. Fixed Schedule Productivity that I write about in this article will discuss really is all about how do you keep a control of your obligations so that you have breathing room and time to actually push other things towards the remarkable, reflect, etc.

So that's going to be the plan. We're going to talk about that topic, get into the weeds here a little bit. Then I've pulled some questions that are all relevant. Now some of the questions we're going to answer in this second segment are specifically related to Fixed Schedule Productivity, and some are related to the type of more smaller or finer-tuned tactics you would need to succeed with Fixed Schedule Productivity.

So we'll do that in the second segment. And for the third segment, we'll talk books. This is coming to you, we're now at mid-July, so we might as well go back and talk about what books I read back in June. All right, so let's get started then with today's deep question.

I'll word it this way. How does Fixed Schedule Productivity work and how has Cal's thoughts on it changed over the years? I'm going to start by reading the introduction of my original article here. Here's the introduction. Remember, this is February of 2008 when I wrote this. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time.

Here's what I wrote. "I should have an overwhelming, Malox-guzzling, stress-saturated schedule. Here's why. I am a graduate student in a demanding program. I'm working on several research papers while also attempting to nail down some key ideas for my dissertation. I'm TAing and taking courses. I maintain this blog. I'm a staff writer for Flack Magazine.

And to keep things interesting, I'm working on background research for a potential new book project. It would be reasonable to assume that I must get on average 7-8 minutes of sleep at night. It would also be wrong. Let me explain." Alright, well, anyways, first of all, let me just react to that before we get into the guts of what I talk about in that article.

It's very nostalgic how naive I was to think that a grad student schedule was somehow demanding or Malox-guzzling or whatever I said there. Here's what I didn't say. Here's the thing of being a grad program. Yeah, I'm working on several research papers and TAing. That doesn't take that much time.

You TA a class twice a week. You can work on the research paper some days. I'm also interested to see Flack Magazine reference. I do not believe that magazine is still around. It was, however, a key part of my development as a writer. After I wrote the book, How to Become a Straight A Student, I began, as I've talked about on the show before, to systematically train my writing ability so that I could do more general journalism, general idea nonfiction writing like I do today.

Flack Magazine was a big part of that training. It was a kind of M+1 style clone, sort of like hipster Brooklyn style publication, online only, and pretty competitive. They had a good editor, right? It was hard to get them to accept an article. And so I used Flack Magazine commissions to push my writing away from pure pragmatic nonfiction and to be a little bit more journalistic or general nonfiction.

So it's cool to see that Flack Magazine reference. Alright, so how did I explain how I avoided stress in that situation? Well, I go on to write in the article, "Here is my actual schedule. I work from 9-5 on weekdays, in the morning on Sunday. That's it. I'm bored.

I have no need to ever turn on a computer after 5 during the week or any time on Saturday. I fill these times instead doing, well, whatever I want. How do I balance an ambitious workload with an ambitiously sparse schedule? It's a simple idea I call fixed schedule productivity.

The system works as follows. One, choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation. Two, do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule. Alright so there it is. I'm introducing for the first time back in 2008 my now fabled fixed schedule productivity system.

You fix the hours and then you say, "That's what I'm going to work." Then you figure out how to make that happen. And it's in that second part, figuring out how am I going to satisfy this commitment to myself, it's in that second part that the productivity innovation, the workload management innovation, all of that will then emerge as a natural consequence.

Now again, a little bit of backstory here. This idea of fixing the schedule to 9 to 5 was quite novel for a grad student. So for me this seemed really very novel. Grad students usually roll into work 10, 11 a.m. and they often will stay there until late at night, especially if something is due the next day.

Because I got married early, I had always just fixed my graduate student hours to my wife's work hours. And so I had this unusual structure early on in my grad student career. I'm going to stick to normal work hours. I want to be done work when she gets done with work.

And so this is the backstory of what led me to experimenting with fixed hours and working backwards to satisfy it. Now again, as I say, this is not hard to satisfy for most graduate student positions, but it was great training wheels for me to get used to this idea of working backwards from limits and letting that induce innovations.

So as I go on to say in the original article, here is a simple truth. To stick to your ideal schedule, you will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on, ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule, risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom, and stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do, but when you have the focus of a specific goal, such as "I do not want to work past 5 on weekdays," you'd be surprised by how much easier it becomes to deploy these strategies in your daily life. I then go on to talk about what in 2008, what strategies I put in place to satisfy my fixed schedule.

I mention serializing projects. I keep two project queues, one for my student projects and one for my writing projects. At any one moment, I'm only working on the top project from each queue. When I finish, I move on to the next. A little bit of an aside, that wasn't really true.

I was often working on multiple research papers at the same time, but I think that sounded better. Number two, I'm ultra clear about when to expect results from me, and it's not always soon. Number three, I refuse if my queue is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time.

Number four, I drop projects and quit. If a project is out of control and starts to set up too much time for my schedule, I drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along and it conflicts with something else in my queue, I drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time, I quit.

Here's a secret, no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end, you're judged on your large scale list of important completions. Again a backstory there, I remember very specifically a student organization I joined because I thought it would be interesting about the dialogue between science and religion.

And then I soon realized, I don't have time to do this. I mean this is going to, I'm going to have to add extra work hours, I'm already at roughly my capacity, and I quickly backed back out of it. I'm sure that's what I had in mind when I wrote that there.

This is number one, two, three, number five, I'm not available. I often work in hidden nooks of the various libraries on campus. That's quite relevant in grad school, if you're in your office, people can find you. Number six, I batch and habitize. Habit-itize, I think I made up that word.

Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit. And number, what is this, seven, I start early, sometimes real early. On certain projects that I know are important, I don't tolerate procrastination. It doesn't interest me. If I need to start something two or three weeks in advance so that my queue proceeds as needed, I do so.

All right, so we get a little bit of chest beating there. All right, so let's react to this. That was 2008 Cal, explaining not just what fixed schedule productivity is, but how I actually implemented it. And what I'd point out is, I was surprised by how similar a lot of that is to what I still do today.

I probably had forgotten that that particular schedule, nine to five in the mornings on Sundays, was something that I was doing in 2008. I mean, I was doing in my twenties. I didn't realize that went back that far. All those ideas about being very careful about what I say yes to, spreading things out over time so that I don't have project deadlines piling up and requiring really long days or weeks, that's something I still do quite a bit.

Being in different locations where I'm hard to find, yes. Risking mildly annoying people in the short term to get long-term, bigger gains, yes, that is something else I do as well. So a lot about this article holds up. But I did want to look back and say, what is it that's new?

So what's my new take? Or my new additions to this thinking? Well the first thing I want to add to it, 2023 Cal wants to add to this article, is I don't think I fully understood back then why fixed schedule productivity was so effective. The way I talk about it in that article is that, oh, it is just a source of innovation.

If you have a simple goal that you can commit to, I don't want to work past five, that will lead you to innovate lots of smaller productivity habits. You're going to track your time better. You're going to be more careful about managing your project queues. You're going to have systems to automate certain things that can be automated.

So I saw it back in 2008. This strategy was really about innovation. I used to call it a meta productivity strategy because it induced many different concrete productivity innovations. 2023 Cal sees, OK, part of why this is so effective is actually not just that it induces you to come up with good ideas, but because it is substituting for something that is missing in modern knowledge work, which is workload management.

In modern knowledge work, and this is an idea I've been writing about, let's say, in the New Yorker in recent years, one of the big issues is that we don't have clear ways to actually manage individual workloads. We allow workloads to be distributed in an ad hoc fashion. People send you emails, grab you on Slack or in the hallway, hey, what about this?

Can you help me with this? Can you join this? It is up to you to figure out how much to bring on your plate. It's up to you to figure out when to push back. This is a very difficult burden to place onto an individual knowledge worker. So what do we tend to do?

We fall back on what I talk about all the time on the show as the 20% rule. We wait until we have about 20% too much work on our plate. At that point, we are so stressed out and anxious about our work that our psychological distress gives us emotional cover to say no.

We're feeling so bad that we finally feel justified to start limiting new stuff on our schedule. And what this really looks like in practice is oscillation. Things get way out of control. From a place of anxiety and burnout, we begin pushing back on new work. Eventually we crest the other direction.

Now we have too little on our plate. We've been saying no for a while. We finished the things that were stressing us out. Now we have too little on our plate. So we start saying yes again. Then we go right up to the peak again before we fall back down to the valley.

Fixed schedule productivity, though I did not know it at the time when I introduced it, is a workload management strategy. By saying my work has to fit into these hours, you have a better metric to use to control your workload than stress and anxiety. Your metric is I'm not going to be able to easily fit this within 9-5, so now I have too much on my plate.

I have to say no or improve how I'm working on what's already there. That is a much more reasonable metric than waiting until you're 20% more stressed. Trying to fit your work into 9-5, that's actually a reasonable amount of work. So what you're implicitly doing with fixed schedule productivity is saying here is a reasonable workload.

I can do a lot of good work with this workload, but it is sustainable and it can fit into a broader, deeper life that has other concerns than just work. And I'm going to work backwards now and make sure what do I need to do to keep my workload to fit within those limits.

So it's replacing the 20% rule with something much more humane and sustainable. I did not have that vocabulary in 2008. In part because life as a grad student and a writer is very autonomous, most of the work you do you bring on into your own life, so workload management just wasn't something I was thinking about, I had full control over my workload.

2023 calcities, that's really one of the key elements for why fixed schedule productivity I think has persevered. What about the details? What has changed since 2008 in terms of how I actually implement fixed schedule productivity? Because I still do, that's still roughly, I talk about it all the time on the show.

Work hours, 9-5ish, usually a focus block on Sunday morning. So what has changed? A lot of the things I talk about in the article I still do, but what else has changed? A couple things. First of all, as you know, I now have a much more sophisticated, multi-scale planning philosophy to organize my obligations and find time to actually execute them.

My time management was not so sophisticated as a grad student because it didn't need to be. As someone who today has 7 jobs and yet still is trying to satisfy fixed schedule productivity, strategic planning, weekly planning, daily time block planning, all working together and coordinating with a good task management capture system is critical.

I have to have that type of control today in a way that maybe I didn't back then. So my time management to make my 9-5 goal work is much more complicated. Process-centric communication has also become more complicated in my life. This is what I talk about in a world without email, really thinking through collaboration, really thinking through how are we going to communicate to get something done.

This wasn't very relevant in 2008 for me. In 2023, this very much matters, that I cannot just be going back and forth, ad hoc, unscheduled communication in Slack and email for all of my different ongoing projects. That would require me to check my inbox all the time. The cost of the resulting context shifts would in turn really make it difficult for me to keep my same workload within 9-5.

So that's another thing I think a lot about today that I did not back then. How do I communicate and collaborate in a way that minimizes context shifts, that moves away from the hyperactive hive mind and towards something that's much more psychologically and neurologically sustainable. So those are the two things that have developed.

They're much more sophisticated takes on time and attention. But that has allowed me to really increase the number of things I am still juggling within that same window of time that I set back when I was, whatever this would have been, 25 or 26. An interesting aside I want to add here before we wrap this up is I recognized, I was remembering this the other day.

I recognized as I was finishing up grad school that I had things easy from a workload management perspective, that fixed schedule productivity wasn't too hard to implement and that it would get harder. And that if I became a professor and I kept writing books, I was looking ahead to my life today and I knew that would be much harder.

And I actually did during my postdoc years, I spent two years as a postdoc after grad school to train for my life right now, to train specifically for satisfying fixed schedule productivity with a busier professional demands. I added artificial constraints to my schedule as a postdoc. I took two hours out of every day in the middle of the day that I took away from work.

It's where I would, I'd bring my dog to the office and then midday we would go for a run. Didn't matter how cold it was, I had all the gear to run in Boston, even when it was really cold. We'd go for a run. I would do a Navy Seal style calisthenics workout on a floating dock out there in the Charles River off the Esplanade.

And I would just swipe away, shovel away the snow to make room for sit-ups. Then I would go home, bring the dog home. I would eat lunch. I would watch a show. I'd take a shower. I'd go down, maybe get a coffee at the Starbucks on Charles Street and take the T1 stop to the Kendall MIT.

I'd stay up two hours every day. I'd relax. I was going to ask you about that actually. Yeah. So you probably remember me talking about that. Oh, a hundred percent. I was going to one of the questions I was going to ask you about because I was like thinking really nine to five, you're going to have like six.

Well, and that was the point. I mean, I did that on purpose because my work was too easy. And I said, okay, let me take two hours away because now if I take two hours away to fit my work as a postdoc into nine to five, it's going to be harder and I'll innovate more rules.

Because when I become a professor, I'm going to have a lot more work to do. And so I want to be used to being much more efficient. I actually just worried I was out of shape from a productivity standpoint. My life was too easy. So I took two hours out of every day as a postdoc just to make my life from an organizational perspective harder so that when I became a professor, I would be ready.

And I think it worked. I mean, you know, I was ready for the initial obligations as a professor. It was fine. Kids were much more, I would say, of a bigger challenge than becoming a professor. But this was all training. So anyways, I fixed productivity. That's sort of the story.

That's where it came from. That's how I used to think about it. This is what I added to it over the years. This is where it is in my life right now. So my summary here is I think it is very effective. If you have a normal knowledge work job, you need some way of managing your workload.

This is much better than the default of just waiting until you're too stressed out. I know it's scary. I know you worry. Like, what if I say no to people? Yeah, you have to figure out how to do it well. It takes experimentation. But I do not give up.

Do not say, look, my work just requires me to work all the time. Do the effort required to try to make this work. Get organized. Get systematic about your collaboration. Get clear about your workload cues so that you can be much more clear when you say no and say, well, I would love to say yes, but I have too many things on here right now and my cue is full and I keep track of this really carefully.

Earn people's respect that you're an organized person that does what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. So they will grant you the ability to have more flexibility in your workload management because they trust that you know what you're doing. They trust that you're on top of things.

All this is hard work. But the single commitment, these are the hours I work and I will do whatever I can to make this happen. That will drive all of that effort. That will drive all of that improvement. And if after all of that, your job still makes it impossible, then it's a very good signal to say maybe it's not the right job.

If your lifestyle vision is not completely centered on your professional aspirations and you can't make fixed schedule productivity work, even when you're on top of all the different things that might work here, then I think that's just a big red flag. This life is not compatible with the deep life writ large.

It's a perfectly useful signal to say maybe I need to make a change. So I continue to embrace this and I continue to want to spread the word. So I would say my final assessment, I think the article holds up. I would write it differently today. I would add a much more sophistication to it, but I'm still happy about it.

So I'll say, Jesse, that we'll keep that in our pantheon of Cal Newport classics, ideas that we keep coming back to. Yeah. I have one follow up question. Do you get the, do you ever wish you had more time, like in a given day to work? No, I often wish I had less to do.

I think that's much more common because I want to fit my time into my work hours. I don't like when that's always very crowded. I mean, it's okay for me if there are certain points, certain days where my nine to five is very crowded. But what I always pine for is having less to do more flexibility in those hours, not more time so I can do more things.

I still have a fundamental aversion to overload. I still have a fundamental aversion to having too much on my plate. I don't like it. My dream remains, you know, the guy who lives on the farm and writes one book a year, six months out of the year and kind of takes a break in between.

I mean, I don't know if I really have the attention span for that. Maybe I'd get antsy, but that still remains in my lifestyle vision. I'm based off of that still remains strong. I hate having too much to do. I don't want more time. I want to have too much time for a very small list of obligations.

Yeah, we talked about in episode 256 as well about how that's such a similar theme to your student advice with telling students to, you know, not do all the extracurricular activities and focus on their classes and have time to do that. Yeah, it's a weird, there's probably a evolutionary argument to be made here or anthropological argument to be made here about the, I don't know, the physiological rareness of having this sort of overload of different things that need to be done and more things than you can imagine getting done easily in your mind.

And that's very rare, probably for humans. That's an unusual, uncomfortable state for us to be in. In knowledge work, we push ourself into that state all the time. But I think there's an argument to be made that that's not good. In some sense, my new book, Slow Productivity, which is coming out in March, for which by the way, we'll have a cover to release soon, which I'm excited about, is getting at that.

It's getting at a much more human notion of productivity. By human, I mean actually aligned with the way we're wired, a way of doing good work that gets us away from this, man, I am just buzzing with activity as I scramble to try to keep on top of everything I need to keep on top of.

Alright, well we got some questions that are relevant to this. Before we get there, I do want to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is going to be our friends at Mint Mobile. From the gas pump to the grocery store, your utility bills and favorite streaming services, you've been noticing that inflation is everywhere.

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All right, let us, let's move on some questions, Jesse. What do we got here today? Sounds good. First question is from Alex. Limiting your workload to a fixed amount of time each day makes sense to me. But how do you decide what kinds of activities fall within your fixed schedule?

For example, does reading have to happen inside your fixed schedule deadline? That is a good question, Alex. You know, what needs to be within the nine to five if you're an FSP or Fixed Schedule Productivity Aficionado? What doesn't? A couple points I want to make here. Personal and leisure activities, community activities, family activities.

So basically anything that's non-professional does not have to, of course, fall within your fixed schedule. However, it can. So I think this is an important point I want to make. You can put non-work activities during your fixed schedule. In fact, that's often a kind of a nice way to do it.

I go out to the gym during my lunch hour. It might actually be the right way to do that, especially if you have kids coming home after work. So non-professional activities do not have to be within the fixed schedule, but they can be in there. All right, so they can be in there if you want them to be.

It's OK to also have some exceptions to the fixed schedule. So I want to be clear about this. I call them autopilot exceptions. A small number of things that happen outside your fixed schedule that are professional, but they happen at the same times, on the same days, in the same place, in a heavily ritualized fashion, right?

So it's not haphazard. It's not, I just need to spend more time on email. I'm working and I didn't get as much done today as I wanted to, so I'm just going to work some more after my fixed schedule is over. It is not that. It is autopiloted exceptions to same work, same place, same time, same ritual every week.

So for example, for a long time, I would write my weekly blog post in the evening. And I had a ritual around where I would do it and I would write it in the big leather chair, which old time Cal Newport fans know about. And I put on a record on the record player.

There's a whole particular ritual. I also have this Sunday morning writing ritual. Now I was actually surprised to see in my 2008 post, I just said Sunday morning is part of the fixed schedule. But I often think about that as just an exception, but I only do writing during that time.

And so the key for these autopiloted exceptions to your fixed schedule is that it has to be a specific work. It has to be a focused work and it cannot be general purpose. You cannot just say, yeah, on Sunday morning, I just do more email and just generic work.

On a weekday night, I just do email and generic work. That's going to throw you out of your leisure mode. It's going to ruin your shutdown. It's going to open up a lot of loops and then it's going to be pretty dangerous. So you can have these exceptions that happen at the same time on the same days, but it should be for the same work and that work should be focused and it should not be general purpose.

It should not induce generic, highly varied context shifts as well. All right, what do we got next? Next question is from Catherine. How do you keep your work hours reasonable when people are constantly asking to do things and it's hard to say no without creating negative impacts on your career?

This is often the big issue I hear, the most common issue I hear about fixed schedule productivity is I'm going to have to say no to things. The amount of things coming onto my plate is so furious that to fit nine to five, I'm going to have to say no to more things than I currently do today.

Now, I have a couple of points I want to make about this because I think no as a skill is something we don't discuss with enough nuance. First I want to make the point, it was just Catherine, right? Yeah, so Catherine, first I want to make the point, you're already saying no.

You're already saying no. It is highly unlikely that if you're like the standard knowledge worker who is roughly nine to five or nine to six, but kind of does second shifts a lot of night as well for an hour or two extra to try to keep up with things.

So maybe you're working, you have sort of 55 hours a week, 55 to 60 hours a week that you're actually working. It's highly unlikely that the incoming volume of work towards you, all the requests and emails and Slack and meetings, exactly requires 55 to 60 hours a week. Highly unlikely.

What's really happening is, again, you're following the 20% rule. Once you get the intuition that your workload is no longer going to fit into this like 55 to 60 hours stretch week, you are saying no. Whether it's explicit or not, you're pulling back from things, you're pushing things off your plate.

You're already saying no. It's just you've fixed where you're saying no at a place that I guess generates enough psychic pain that it feels like you're justifying it. So all we're talking about is fixed productivity. You're still saying no. You're just saying it a little bit earlier in your workload.

So really this is the fundamental psychological Rubicon people have to pass. What is the reasonable amount of work to have on my plate before I say no? Most knowledge workers set that to be too big. 60 hours, right? Which again is 50 to 60 hours, about 20 to 30% more than a 40-hour workweek.

It's too much for most people. But for most people, they feel like it's hard enough that they're justified still saying no. You pull that back to something like 40 hours, it becomes much more sustainable for you. From the perspective of the outside world, the difference is small. You're doing a lot of work, you're saying no to a lot of work.

They don't know the difference. They don't know if it's 40 hours or if it's 60 hours. That difference can be small. So that's the first point I want to make, Catherine. You're already saying no. We're just talking about exactly where that boundary, that phase transition from acceptance to rejection happens in your career.

The second thing I'm going to say, and let's get tactical here, is how do you say no? This really matters. So people often struggle with what I call the naked no, where technically you do have more time and you're just saying, "No, I don't want to do that." Silence.

That is very difficult. People have a hard time with that. That can be interpreted as aggressive or it can be interpreted as you are non-cooperative or not a team player. It is very difficult to give the naked no. So what's much more effective is to have workload systems that help dictate when you say no so that you can fall back on the logic of those systems to help justify your answers.

So one thing you could do, I'm going to give you two ideas here. One thing you could do is quotas. This is something I talked about briefly in my 2008 article. It's a common strategy among professors. For certain types of work that you know you're going to have a lot of incoming, you set your quotas per whatever, quarter, per month, per year, whatever the scale that makes sense to say, "This is how much I do during each time period.

This is a reasonable amount. It allows me to be very useful to other people in my community, but prevents this from getting out of control." When you have filled your quota for that time period, you then say no to new work and you justify it by saying, "I have a quota where I do this many types of projects, this many journal reviews, travel to this many conferences, do this many client meetings per week.

I have this quota about what's optimal. I do three of those, four of those, 20 of those. I've already filled it for this time period, so I'm going to have to say no now, but keep me in mind for future time periods because I do a lot of this." Quotas work well because they're hard to say push back against.

If I push back against you having a quota, what I'm pushing back against is your quota size and that makes me feel like a jerk. If you say, "I can't do this review. Look, I have a quota of five per semester, sort of the right balance, and I already have five on my plate." I'm not going to say, "No, six is the right answer.

You're dumb. It should be six. Take this on." Because that's weird and specific and sort of aggressive. So quotas, they're very useful because it has a very specific workload management system that you can cite, hard to argue with. The other thing you can try is pre-planning non-trivial work on your calendar.

This is again, something I get into more detail in my new book coming out in March, Slow Productivity. I get into this idea, I've been thinking more about it. But when a project comes in, you say, "I'm actually going to find time on my calendar for when I'm going to do this project.

Maybe it's five different long sessions I'm going to have to find." And you go and you have to find it and block off that time before you accept it. The reason why this is a really useful strategy is that it actually gives you a concrete understanding of how much available time you have outside of just the immediate future.

So if you struggle to find time, "OK, I need five two-hour sessions to write this report. I can't find five two-hour sessions I can fit on the schedule for another three months." That is really useful feedback. That then allows you to say to the person, "Basically, I'm looking for this time.

I track my time very carefully. I don't really have time. I'm assuming this would be about 10 hours. I can't see myself really doing that until March." And they might say, "OK, whatever, that's too late. I'll ask someone else to do it." Or they'll say, "Yeah, great, do it then." But what you're getting here is a concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually have.

This is much better than just saying in the moment, "Could I imagine myself in the abstract writing this report? Yeah, I've written these before. I don't want to disappoint this guy. Yeah, I'll do it." And then you don't really have time, so now it's going to have to happen at night.

Now it's going to have to happen early in the morning or on the weekends. By actually planning non-trivial work on your calendar, it's a pain, but it gives you a really concrete feedback signal about how much time you actually have available. Then you can make much more reasonable decisions about what you say yes or no to, citing this careful tracking when you say no.

So again, what's the pushback here? You did it wrong. You do have time. You're dumb. They're not going to say that. Or they'll say, "You should just make more time available. You should work late at night or in the morning." People want you to do that, but they're not going to specifically ask you to do that in most jobs.

So again, that becomes really effective. Now one of the ideas I elaborate in slow productivity is this is a pain. To try to schedule everything on your calendar is a pain, especially because things take longer than you think. It's like time block planning on a massive scale. It's not something you want to do all the time, but what I do suggest is if you do this for a few months, for example, you learn.

You learn and internalize a much more accurate understanding of how long things take and how full your schedule really is. And then you can go forward after two or three months of this exercise, stop doing that detailed planning, but still possess that much more finely honed intuition about your workload capacities.

And so you're able to then just more intuitively say yes or no, because you've taught yourself the reality of your schedule. All right. So anyways, I like this. To make any of this work, to move past the naked no, to instead reference particular workload management systems as the logic for you saying no, you have to have a reputation as an organized, reliable person.

You have to have a reputation as someone who's very careful about keeping track of their time that talks about Cal Newport to an uncomfortable degree. People are kind of tired of hearing about it. That has a time block planner on your desk and spends way too much time with Trello.

You have pinup posters of the Atlantean who owns Trello's CEO on your wall. You got to be that person. You got to be that person. And if you are that person, they're like, okay, they probably know what they're talking about. They're really organized. They get things done. They deliver when they say.

So if they say, I'm very careful with my workload. I can't fit this till March. I don't think this is appropriate for me. You get the benefit of the doubt. If you're unreliable, if you let things drop, you're like, you're probably just making excuses. I don't like this. This is the first thing I'm telling you to do.

Do it right away. I don't trust you. So you got to be reliable. You got to be organized to get away with this stuff. But replacing the naked no with references to workload management logics, this I think Catherine is a good way to go. I've met that CEO actually, Jesse.

He's Australian. Yeah. You've mentioned that on the podcast a few times. Australian accents makes everyone seem more interesting. So what I'm trying to say here, Jesse, is can you do the rest of the show with an Australian accent? I may. So what you're saying is yes. As long as every question comes back to you saying, I may, that will be okay.

I'm just saying if we had accents, I think people would, if you had an Australian accent and I had a really good Oxford refined English accent, I think we would get. Well, you have the good pipe smoking French accent that we use. That accent is perfectly accurate. Exactly as the Frenchman speak.

Unfortunately, that's not what people want to hear to think that you're very, very smart. They want to hear a really refined English accent. So then they'll think I'm very smart. And if you do an Australian accent, they'll think you're exciting and fun. So I think that's our key. Much more accents.

All right. In the meantime, though, let's move on. Next question. All right. Next question is from Andy. Why don't you put your weekly plan in your calendar? In my workplace, we use Outlook calendars heavily. So if I plan to use two hours on Thursday to write a memo, I need to block that time anyway.

And a calendar is very visual way of planning your week. So why don't you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar? So why do you write your plan out instead of blocking it on your calendar? Well, my calendar does get heavy use as I go through my weekly planning discipline.

So I will lay this as the foundation for my answer. Weekly planning itself is, think about it as the discipline of reviewing everything that's on your plate, reviewing your quarterly or strategic plans. What am I working on? Reviewing your calendar, reviewing your task systems, and trying to pull that all together to figure out a reasonable plan for what you want to do for the week ahead.

That's the core of weekly planning. What you then do with that information can vary. It can vary between individuals. It can vary within different periods for the same individual. So that's what I want to talk about is my own weekly planning approach. There are periods of my year in which I will translate a lot of the results of my weekly planning session to calendar events.

This is particularly the case in busy periods, academic busy periods. I'm teaching, I'm on some committees, there's some deadline coming up, and there's a lot of moving pieces that I have to find time for. In those periods, I will often put quite a lot of things that I identify I need to do during my weekly planning session onto my calendar.

There are other periods, however, let's say during the summer, a typical summer when I'm not teaching or anything, where my schedule is much more deep work focused. And in those situations, I'm not going to load up everything I'm going to work on, all the thinking or writing I'm going to do.

I'm not going to put that on my calendar. I'm going to leave my calendar to just have appointments and meetings. I got to call this person, I have to go to this doctor's appointment. And the rest, I'm going to just time block each day based off of a fully written weekly plan.

"Hey, this week I'm working on this book chapter." Work on it most days. This is a very common weekly plan for me, by the way, in the summer. Work on this book chapter every day. Try to get a good 30 minute admin block in there somewhere just to keep track of small things.

Here's a couple admin things to make sure you get done. That's a very typical weekly plan for me in July. And then when I time block plan, I look at that, I look at my calendar, my calendar might have one meeting I have to do that day, and I time block out a plan based off of that.

If you look at my weekly plan in October, it might be very different. It might actually be most of the stuff I need to get done, it's so complicated how it's all going to fit together. I've worked it all out on my calendar, just like Andy actually does during his work.

So you'll see it both ways. The other thing I want to point out, however, is that a weekly plan can contain information beyond simply what you're going to work on and when you are going to work on it. I have a list here of other things that will sometimes make it onto my written weekly plan.

Things about disciplines or behaviors will go on there. Remember we're doing this thing with our diet this week. Remember we're trying to do a really clean shutout every day. Because you look at your weekly plan every morning, it's useful for more than simply pointing out or allocating time for what you want to get done.

Sometimes I have more elaborated descriptions of work. Even if that work has an appointment on my calendar, I might have a more detailed description of what that means in my weekly plan. So the calendar might just say, "Mega Conference Task Block." And then my weekly plan is where I unfold what that means in a way that wouldn't fit just into my calendar description.

Okay, well I've got to get on top of all the planning for this conference that I'm organizing. And so what I really want to get done in these three hours are these things. And so the weekly plan might contain an elaboration for an event that does also show up on your calendar.

Heuristics show up. So a lot of times weekly plans are good for heuristics. Every day at lunch, go for a 20-minute walk. I don't necessarily want to write that on my calendar every day. I might just say, "Do a 20-minute walk." Or in my summer, where I say, "Do 30 minutes of tasks.

Look in your inbox. Do three or four things on your task list. Just do this every weekday." That's a really useful heuristic. I look at that every day. When I time block plan, I'll add a block for it. I might not want to actually figure out all those times in advance.

Because maybe I don't know how long my deep work is going to take that day. I just want to make sure I remember to do it every day. And also highlighting tasks for admin blocks. This is really common. So in a busy period, I might actually block out time for admin.

Email, tasks, making sure that I preserve that time every day so I don't start drowning or don't start having to break my fixed schedule and try to do small things at the night, late at night or in the morning. What I'll often do is maybe even have admin on my calendar.

But in my weekly plan, say, "Look, here's six things I saw when I was looking through my task list. They really have to get done this week." So really prioritize these whenever you get to an admin block in your daily plan. Make sure we're taking a few things from this list.

So a weekly plan really can capture a lot of information beyond just the raw things you're going to work on and what times you're going to work on it. So there you go. If you have a really busy schedule, if you want to work out a lot of pieces on your calendar, go for it.

If you don't have a busy schedule and you want to leave your calendar just for appointments or meetings, go for that as well. If you want to do something in between, go for that as well. The key is to sit down each week and confront what you have to do and make sure you have captured somewhere some sort of plan you can reference every day.

There's got to be some written component to that. Even if most of it's on your calendar, there's going to be some written component. Sometimes that'll be larger than others. I will say in the new time block planner that's coming out in August, and I'm getting my advanced copy soon, I have a blank version of the calendar from the planner where you have to exactly approve all of the materials and exactly the spiral.

And so I know exactly what it's going to look like, but a full featured version of my new time block planners is coming to me up here in New Hampshire soon. I'm excited for that. I've actually condensed the weekly planning pages in the new time block planner. There's a two page spread.

One page is notes for the weekend. The other page is one page for written notes on the weekly plan for the week ahead. So I've actually reduced the space, recognizing in part, a lot of stuff will go on your calendar, but there is a place there in the planner that have some notes for your week every time.

So anyway, weekly planning is a, man, what an art. It's so many different ways to do this. So I always appreciate a chance to actually talk about it. Jesse, I'm excited for that planner, by the way. I actually have a list of disciplines. I'm temporarily not tracking my daily disciplines because I'm waiting for the new planner to arrive.

But I think I get it next week and it has great metric tracking places. So I'll show it on the show once I get it. The release date is still August 15th, though, you should consider pre-ordering. Again, they told me you should consider pre-ordering because if we sell out, it might take a minute to replace because of some supply chain issues.

These printer supply chains are, they're their own thing. So if you're worried about it, you could consider pre-ordering. But we'll talk more about that as we get closer to that coming out. Even though you're not tracking your daily metrics, are you still doing them? Yeah. No, I haven't written down what they're supposed to be.

So I see them every day, but it's not quite the same, you know, if I can't write it down. So I need that planner to get here sooner rather than later. All right, let's see. Let's do one more question. I have a short case study I want to do in a second.

So let's do one more question and then I'll do my short case study. Sounds good. Next question is from Benjamin. What immediate actions would you suggest to do when too much work has been piling up? All right, that's a good question. So you you're at the peak of, you know, you pile up too much work, and now you need to pull back.

Short term, quit, back out, upset people. If you're overloaded, and it's impossible to get this work done, even with using the time that's available, you have to actually feel the pain of needing to say, I'm sorry, I need to back out of this. I know I said I could help with this, but I have too much on my plate.

That's better than just doing all these things bad. I think people are more upset that you were on the team and didn't do anything. They are that you said, look, when I do something, I want to do it well. I miscalibrated my schedule. I have too much on my plate.

Once you gain back that breathing room, then I think your focus has to be how do I prevent this from happening again? We do not want the oscillations. There's only so many times you can go to this, I'm in over my head, I need to pull back well before people think of the boy who cried productivity wolf.

So you're gonna have to do some drastic stuff now if you're completely drowning. But that has to motivate you to put the systems in place to prevent that from happening again. And this is where everything we've talked about on the show and in the deep dive today, the fixed schedule productivity, and all of these small habits of innovation this induces, this would be the time to do it.

You pull back, you make your new commitment to a reasonable workload, and you begin using all the different things we talked about to manage your workload, to get away from the naked nose, to be much more organized with your time and your weekly plan. All of that, this has to be your motivation to get all of that up and running properly so that you do not end up in this place again and again.

All right, so I have a short but relevant case study to share here about someone who has succeeded with getting these FSP inspired strategies and systems in place. All right, so here I'm reading this now, this was sent to us. I am head of a large humanities department and it is busy.

Reading your book, a world without email, and listening to your podcast has revolutionized my performance. My calendar is half filled with autopilot appointments and I have office hours every day after lunch. With this, my performance is much better. I feel less stressed and I leave my office at 4pm most every day.

All of the academics in the audience are very impressed by this idea of a department chair leaving the office at 4pm every day. I think this helps emphasize the power of fixed schedule productivity. Because he has this, I want to leave work at a reasonable hour, and he's working backwards from that and willing to be innovative and aggressive in how he builds his work around that goal, he was able to accomplish something pretty cool.

So let me just pull out the two things he mentioned in particular. One is autopilot appointments. So what that means is work he knows he has to do on a regular basis. So as a department chair, things he has to do every week or every month or every semester, he finds the time to do them.

Gets it on his calendar. That time, that days, every week, every month, every semester, so he doesn't have to think about it. So he's protecting the time for the things he knows he has to do in advance. And that really makes a difference. It means that work will get done within his work hours, and it will be properly taken into account when he's trying to schedule other optional things.

If Friday, his time has been put aside for whatever he has to do for the budgeting process, when he sees that, he won't schedule too long meetings for that day. Because that time has already been put aside. He'll defer those meetings or push them to a later date or take them off of his plate.

So autopilot appointments not only relieves you from having to think on the fly, what do I want to work on today? It also makes sure that you properly respect and account for the time that this work is going to take. So in advance, it gets protected and you don't overfill those days.

The other thing mentioned here is everyday office hours. Oh, how critical that is for a managerial position like department chair. That means every day there is a set time where you could call him, come to his office, or I assume load on Zoom or Slack or whatever tools they use.

And you know he'll be there for synchronous interaction. I can tell you as a chair, he could probably defer 90% of the emails that are coming in from the administration and his faculty to those office hours. We're talking dozens and dozens of emails each week that would normally require an ad hoc back and forth conversation, seven messages over two days, each of which that requires ten inbox checks, so 70 inbox checks per interaction, multiplied by ten interactions, that's 700 inbox checks, you know, huge amounts of context switching and pain that all can get erased with daily office hours.

All those interactions, they can say, great, just grab me at my office hours, call me, jump on Zoom, we'll talk about it. And in two minutes back and forth, we figure out a plan, no ad hoc messaging required. So those two simple strategies, scheduling in advance all regular work, and then deferring as much interaction as possible to in-person office hours, those two strategies gave us a chair of a humanities department, a large humanities department working only until four.

I think that just emphasizes the potential of fixed yield of productivity. When you fix a limit and are serious about it, you can get seriously inventive about how you satisfy it, and much more sustainable work can come out of it. So I appreciate that. I appreciate that case study.

That's one of my goals, Jesse, is I want, at some point, office hours to be just a common thing in most companies. Come to my office hours, ask me then, we'll talk about it then, or I'll come to your next office hours. I just don't think people realize how much pain that's actually alleviating.

And even today, when a lot of work has gone remote, it's pretty easy to do just on Zoom or whatever. Yeah, you just have Zoom with waiting rooms. Professors figured this out two days into the pandemic. You have a Zoom room open, because we did all of our actual academic office hours on Zoom during the early pandemic.

You create a Zoom room that has a waiting room. And so people can just stop by whenever they log in, and they sit in the waiting room until you're ready to talk to them, and you click the button, you bring them in. So you're not overhearing conversations people are having with other people.

It works fine. It works fine. All right. I want to get to the books. I want to get to the June books. First, let's just talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. And that is our friends at Ladder. Look, you need life insurance if there's anyone who depends on you.

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That's ExpressVPN.com/deep. All right. So Jesse, like I like to do, let's talk about the books I read during the previous month. So we're in July now. So we should talk about June, 2023. Let me go through the five books I read in June, 2023. The first was The Wager by David Gran.

I think this might have been mandated by law that everyone had to read this book. I think I maybe had a legal obligation to read this book. Certainly everyone has seemed to have read this book. It's great. I love David Gran, epic famous New Yorker writer who does these really long, deeply researched type adventure books.

His book, The Killers of the Flower Moon, is being made into a movie, was made into a movie. It was written with Leonardo DiCaprio, directed by Scorsese. Scorsese and DiCaprio already bought the rights to The Wager. The Wager is about a shipwreck back in the 18th century off the west coast of Patagonia.

Not a great place to have a shipwreck in the 18th century. And he recreates that story in vivid detail. Interesting tidbit about The Wager. I mean, Gran's a great writer. His MO with a lot of these books was he puts himself into the narrative. So if you read, for example, The Lost City of Z, you'll see he puts himself into the narrative.

Well, he did the research to do that for this book. He went to this island, Wager Island, off the desolate coast of Patagonia, but he didn't like the way that the writing was working. And so he cut himself out in the book. So he's actually not in this book, even though that was the original plan.

He spent the whole year just learning enough nautical terminology to understand the record so he could start doing research for this book. This is a classic, classic deep research. But Gran writes with a narrative momentum and a sense of adventure that's fantastic. It's a great book. It's selling, and I looked this up here on Bookscan, all of the copies.

So good for David Gran. Do you know him? I've never met him. Never met him. Epic. Do you associate with a lot of the other writers at The New Yorker? Do you ever talk to them? I know some of them. Yeah. I mean, it's not just New Yorker. I mean, I just know, I'm more likely to associate with writers, magazine writers, nonfiction writers, who are local.

So like who also live in DC, more so than sorting them out by like we happen to write for the same magazine. So like DC has a bunch of Atlantic writers, for example, because the Atlantic is headquartered there. There are some New Yorker writers in DC. Evan Osnos is in DC.

There's a few others. So I should have spent time. David Gran though is a cool... He's kind of a famous figure because he writes, he'll write these epic stories. There's another one. It's a New Yorker piece sort of famous for where he's hunting a giant squid. That's a great one.

The best David Gran New Yorker collection is The Devil in Sherlock Holmes. So it's just a collection of his epic New Yorker pieces. Really cool writer. Only so many people can get away with that. He's just really good. That's how he gets away with it, but cool book. All right, then I read a book called Can Science Explain Everything by John Lennox.

This was part of the Oxford Apologetics series. And so it was talking about what science can and can't explain and the role of religion in a world of scientific worldview. This was pretty good. It was much more of a Christian apologia than I realized. I thought it was more going to be more philosophical about epistemology, like what science can and can't teach us about the realm or the place for the spiritual.

It's actually much more specific about Christianity than I thought it was going to be. But I like this. These Oxford series are cool. They're basically like extended lecture, smart people write provocative books, and it was it was fine. This next book, I don't know what I don't know what scoundrel got me this one, but I read a book called Welcome to the Circus of Baseball by Ryan McGee.

This was actually a gift from our illustrious producer, Jesse to myself. Jesse, I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it. I mean, this is pure. Yeah, Mad Dog had a had him on. Yeah, Ryan McGee. Yeah. Well, this is just pure nostalgia. I mean, a book about minor league baseball in the 1990s when I was a kid.

You know, it's great. It makes you want to be like 23 again and just like hanging out and going to ballgames and living cheaply. But I enjoyed it. It was definitely good choice. Yeah, yeah. Bull Durham. Yep. Bull Durham. I mean, this was the field I guess they use for Bull Durham, Durham, or they film some of it here.

Oh, really? Yeah, there's definitely connections. They might have filmed Bull Durham here. I might I might have that wrong. This is an Asheville. This is a minor league team in Asheville, the tourist. It's a famous old field where Babe Ruth played. It's cool. Cool book. Recommend it. It's called A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away by Oscar winning film editor Paul Hirsch.

I actually listened to this one. Perfect audible book. He's just a very famous film editor. He's known for editing Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but has edited so many famous movies, starting back with I did a lot of early De Palmas, early stuff, Carrie, but also his early experimental movies.

And I don't know, keep working till today or until recently. You know, it's the book is great because it's broken up by movie. Now let me talk about editing this movie. Now let me talk about editing that movie. So it's a great audible format because each new chapter, it's like, OK, we're starting fresh.

And if you're a movie nerd like I am, you get a lot of cool backstory about what the directors or the talent or the producers were like. And I don't know, I loved it. I love episodic media books like this. So interesting guy. You learn a lot about editing.

Cool book. All right, final book I read, Drowning by T.J. Newman. So I had read, I think it was called Falling, which was her previous book. She's a thriller. So it's interesting story. I love these type of stories where people write thrillers based off of their specific non-writing related career.

So T.J. Newman, I don't know if that's a pen name or not. She was a flight attendant. And so she wrote this book called Falling about a plane being taken hostage and they were going to kidnap the pilot's family. So if the pilot didn't crash the plane into a building, they were going to kill his family.

And a lot of it's from the perspective of the flight attendants and how they deal with it. And a lot of real details because she understands how airlines work. This also takes place in a plane drowning. A plane crashes into the ocean outside of Hawaii. This fuel spills everywhere and the engine's still running and the people are going out in the life rafts and a few people on board realize, wait a second, this fuel's going to catch on fire.

The safest place to be is we got to stay inside the sort of floating fuselage because the fuel is catching fire everywhere outside of it. Long story short, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, but they're alive. It has maintained an air pocket. So now they're trapped at the bottom of the ocean in the fuselage of a plane and there's a rescue attempt to come now and try to save them.

And it turns out that the ex-wife of the main guy is a underwater welding deep sea construction expert. And so it's all about how they're going to try to save them in time. Great premise. I love that it has all these details about flying. Not a super great thriller.

If I'm going to be honest, I'm an aficionado of this genre. It was pretty good, but I would say they didn't have to work hard to earn it. They found it pretty quickly and they were down there pretty quickly. It wasn't really until the last 30 pages that they got any real serious stakes going.

The other thing that wasn't quite working is that the main character, the emotional core of the main character, his youngest kid had died. And so now that's why he had divorced his wife, who was now in charge of the rescue operation. And he was on this flight with their older daughter.

So they're both trapped down here underwater. And so this was supposed to be the emotional motivational cores. The whole core to this person was dealing with the fact that he had to deal with a death in his family. The problem with that as a core emotional driver is that everyone else on the plane had literally just witnessed hundreds of people die.

And everyone else on the plane, like, oh, my wife just burned up and died. Everyone had just died. So it was no longer a distinguishing emotional motivator because everyone had that exact same motivation. And if anything, the people who just had seen next to them, their, you know, fiance die and their parents, like they, in theory, uh, this was way worse and way more fresh than someone who had lost a child to, uh, an accident years earlier.

Right. So I think that motivation doesn't hold up. If you then put that person in a situation where everyone is facing, uh, just surrounded by death and everyone's dying and everyone just lost someone. And so I don't know. It was okay. It's okay. I'm a thriller nerd. That one's pretty good, but, uh, I liked falling, falling a little bit better.

All right, Jesse, I think that's it. I think we, uh, we've semi successfully completed, you know, our first episode from the new temporary summer HQ up in Hanover, New Hampshire. I will continue to improve on the audio and the visual here just because it's something to do, but I'm glad that we're back in action.

So thank you everyone for listening or watching today's episode. We'll be back next week with another normal episode of the show. And until then, as always stay deep. (upbeat music)