Hi, Kal. I have a follow-up question to two concepts you've been talking about. How does one combine the practice of four buckets, the four-bucket approach, perhaps maybe a bit for the beginners of the deep life practice with the strategic value-based planning, the multi-layered, multi-dimensional practice you've been describing you follow?

I've been struggling with finding a place for the four buckets in the strategic weekly and daily planning. I find it somehow unnatural to combine these two, and therefore your thoughts on it would be appreciated. Well, this is a good question. These two things are related, but they don't accomplish the same goal.

Let's try to isolate each of these approaches and underscore what they're meant for. So we're talking about the multi-scale planning, the values-based multi-scale planning. For those who are unaware, this is the idea where you have a list of your values. You use those values to help create a strategic plan for the current semester or quarter, depending on how you like to divide up time.

You then use that strategic plan or semester plan or quarter plan to influence your weekly plan each week. Let me look at that when I create my weekly plan. What do I need to do this week to make progress on that bigger picture plan? And then your weekly plan informs your daily time block plan.

That's value-based multi-scale planning. For me, that is the crux of how I actually intentionally deploy my time. It's what makes sure that all the different things that are important to me and my career are getting attention and that we move from the values at the highest level down to what am I doing right now on the lowest level.

All right, now let's look at the bucket-based system. The bucket-based system is an exercise that helps try to move your life closer to the ideal of the deep life. The idea here, for those who don't remember from when we talked about this a lot earlier in the podcast, is that you define what we call a bucket for each of the important areas of a life well-lived.

So you might have craft, which covers your work, or other types of creative endeavor. You have community, your connection to family, friends, and those around you. You might have constitution. In the classic four-bucket list, you'd have constitution, which is your health, and then you would have contemplation, which covers things like ethics, philosophy, and theology.

Those were the classic four. There's other ones we've talked about as well. You can break them up as you want. You don't have to make them alliterative either. I just like to do that. So in the bucket method, you have these buckets for the areas of your life that are important.

Step one, you establish a keystone habit for each of these buckets, something you do every day and track, something that's not trivial, but also something that's not impossible, as a way of signaling to yourself that you take each of these areas of your life seriously and you're willing to do non-urgent, non-forced, non-trivial activity towards the advancement of each of these different parts of your life.

They're all important. The next step of the bucket-based method is to then dedicate four to six weeks to each of these buckets to really thinking about that part of your life and big picture changes you want to make, overhauling that part of your life. So when you have those four to six weeks on constitution, you're really rethinking your health and your fitness and how that's organized in your life, et cetera.

So I see the bucket-based system as, it's almost like a one-time project-based exploration overhaul of your life. You want to make sure that you're updating your various rules and habits and systems that you run your life with to be better in tune with what is important to you, that your life is aimed closer towards that that is deep.

It's not unlike saying, "Okay, what I'm going to do is hire someone to come and overhaul my closet and get my clothing up to speed. I don't like the way I'm dressing." You know, it's like a one-time thing you're doing because you want to dress better. The bucket-based system is, "I'm going through this thing.

It's going to take me maybe five or six months. I'm going to come out of it on the other end with my life better aligned with what's important to me." So think of it that way. It's an exercise in intentional life overhauling. Value-based multi-scale planning is how you live your life.

That's actually how you organize and structure your life into perpetuity. That is the structure of how your life goes. You have the plan for the semester, which influences the weekly plan, which influences the daily time block plan. It's how your system, your regularly applied system for actually making sense of your time.

That's just the backdrop of how I actually make sense of what I should be doing next. And the bucket system is this one-time improvement or overhaul or optimization of your life. Now where do these things actually formally intersect? Well, if you're going through this exercise of keystone habits followed by one-by-one overhauling your buckets, that's going to show up in your semester or quarterly plan.

That's where those worlds actually intersect. "Hey, one of the things I'm doing this semester is I am now in the middle of the overhaul of the craft bucket. And here's my thoughts on that." So you see that when you look at your semester plan each week. And so each week you're actually making sure there's time put aside to make progress on that.

And when you get to each day, when it's relevant, you actually have the time blocked off in that day to make progress of it. So that's where they formally intersect. It's going to show up on your strategic semester quarterly plan. So that'll percolate down to your actual action. But the character of these two things is different.

I'll say it one more time. The multi-scale planning is a persistent system for making sense and organizing your available time. The bucket system is more of a one-time overhaul to align your life better with your values to make your life deeper than it was before you started the exercise.

All right, so that's a good question. All right, let's move on to another call now. This one has to do with notes and meeting preparation.