All right, so what are we starting off with today? All right, so we got a call. The first call is basically about the different types of people and how they go about planning. Hi, Cal. My name is Johan van der Putte. I'm a Belgian psychologist. And I've been thinking that there's probably a continuum.

At one end of it, you have people who are skilled at planning, or they have become skilled at it. And then you have people who, a bit like me, aren't so skilled at it. I guess planning involves dividing up life into tasks and then allocating these tasks to pockets of time.

I guess it requires some special skill. I think I'm not very good at it. It is hard for me to do. And it makes me sometimes stressed and a bit anxious when I try to do it. You have any suggestions of how people who maybe aren't so talented at it, how they could move in this direction without attempting to become very good planners in the short time?

Thank you. Well, I think it's an important question. And I am going to give you what I think of as planning baby steps, like a way to ease yourself into something that looks more like my time management philosophy. And for those who are interested about that, we did a core idea video about my time management philosophy that you can find at the YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia YouTube page.

You can find that core idea video on time management. So I do have some baby steps to help you get into that. But let me just first emphasize that, yes, planning is anxiety producing. And that that shouldn't come across if this happens to you. Should not come across as if there's something wrong.

It's just the reality of planning is that it's anxiety producing. And the reason is because you are confronting. You are confronting this typically too large stack of things that you have been committed to doing. You can't easily imagine how they're going to get done. The planning centers of your brain short circuit when they're faced with this type of overload scenario, that short circuiting causes anxiety.

I'm simplifying this. There's a lot of other things going on. But that's a simplified way of understanding what's happening. So in particular, when you do weekly planning, this is my experience. When I am looking over all of my to-do lists, when I'm looking over my calendar, when I'm looking over my strategic plans, and I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do this week, I get very anxious.

It is a natural reaction. It's similar to having your heart rate increase when you're running on a treadmill. So don't fear that. Don't think that's a problem. That anxiety then fades once you're done planning. When you go day to day and do your daily time block planning, if you follow my system, that's much less stressful.

Because now your weekly plan has already confronted the productivity dragon. It's already confronted the short circuit inducing overload of tasks and come up with an idea for your week that makes sense. And now you can just look at that idea for your week when you do your daily planning.

It should be less stressful. So let's start with that. What is supposed to cause anxiety? Now what I'm going to suggest is for your baby steps is essentially have low granularity plans, plans that don't get into a lot of detail, but are more structured than just what's next in my inbox, what do I feel like doing next.

So if we're talking about daily planning, I want you to do some time blocking. This is when I'm working. When I'm working, I want to have some say in advance about what I want to do with my time. Get you out of the mindset of the list reactive method, where you just react to things that come in and occasionally glance at to-do lists.

But to get started with time blocking, make your time blocks very large and quite generic. Here are my meetings. Well, I might as well copy those down into my time block plan. Let me take this big chunk of time here, not get too specific about it, but just say catch up on email and small tasks.

And let me just find one block in that day I'm going to say work on something specific. All right, this is where I'm going to work on that report. And any other time, you might just say whatever, email and small tasks. So when you're starting off, you're really trying to have maybe one block each day where you specifically say, even though it's not on my calendar, even though no one's forcing me to do it, even though I might want to do something else, I'm going to work on a long-term, cognitively demanding task during that time.

And the rest is by default, let's do shallows. Let's do email. Let's do tasks. Then you might get a little bit better. The way you get a little bit better is add in a focused admin block. So you do this for a couple of weeks. Now you say, this block right here, I'm going to go run those errands.

I have an hour between this meeting and this meeting, so I'm going to eat lunch, and then I'm going to swing by the drugstore and the bank. So now you're getting used to, let me be a little bit more conscientious about admin, certain times being better for certain tasks.

And then just do that for a while. I have a simple time block plan. There's one big block in there somewhere for focusing on something deeply. There's one block in there for a specific type of admin task. And everything else is like, whatever, list reactive, email, looking at to-do list.

You'll just get used to that after a while. And then you can begin to add more granularity. And I get into a lot of details about this. In the front of my time block planner in particular, I actually have a chapter all about-- there's like a book chapter at the front of my planner that's just all about the mechanics of doing time blocking at a much higher level of detail and getting really good at it.

So you can find out about that planner at timeblockplanner.com. And I really get into it, but that's how I would start. And the same thing with your weekly plan. Do a weekly plan, and feel the anxiety, and trust that's going to go away. But you can make that weekly plan kind of bad at first.

It's like, I'm looking at my calendar. Let me just write down a few notes about this week. I need to get started this week on this report that's doing two weeks because next week is busy or something like this. Or Friday is going to be a good day for catching up on something.

Just make a couple decisions. And maybe have a reminder for some habits. Like, don't do anything that complicated, but get in the habit of doing it. And that's the main advice I'm going to give here is the binary from doing none of this planning to doing some of this planning bad is the key binary.

That's the hard shift. I do a weekly plan. I don't care if it's terrible. I do it. I do a daily time block plan. I don't care if it's pretty terrible. There's only a few meaningful blocks. I do it. That's the shift that matters. Going from that to doing those things well, that'll come later.

It's not too hard. You'll get used to it. You'll feel that impulse. Like, after you've done this for a while, it's like, well, I might as well make this better. That's not a big deal. It's going from zero to one. That's the flip that's going to matter. And don't mind-- again, don't mind that anxiety around weekly plans.

That's just your brain doing what your brain is supposed to do. So let's say-- I don't know how much I can talk about it, Jesse, but we are deep in discussions about version 2.0 of my time block planner and what it's going to be like. I have a lot of upgrades in mind.

Because as I told people, the time block planner, you're not buying a single thing. You're buying into a system. Because you have to get new ones when it fills up. And over time, it's going to keep improving. And probably the longest cycle of improvement is this one we just went through, because we printed a bunch up front.

So it's like, OK, until we sell-- we have to sell the ones we have before we do new ones. And we've done that. So now we're working on the next one. And as we print them in smaller batches, making tweaks going forward will be cool. So I can't talk about any specifics yet.

Because I got to tell you, in a global supply chain crisis moment, it's surprisingly hard to design new paper product type things, stuff you wouldn't even think about being potentially scarce, like glue can be. So it's been a bit of a journey. But I should have announcements to make soon about new and improved time block planners.

Exciting stuff. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. (upbeat music)