So it's mid-summer. This means people have a little breathing room in their professional schedule. They're a little bit more relaxed and open than normal. So I thought this would be a good moment to revisit some of the biggest ideas about the biggest topic that we cover on this show, productivity, right?

Look, in a world in which digital distractions and diversions are constantly grabbing at your attention or fragmenting your schedule or driving you crazy with relentless, frenetic, shallow activity, it has never been harder to take control of your time and attention and aim it at what really matters. I can help you with this.

So what I thought I would do here would be to review five of the biggest ideas I've had about finding productivity in a distracted world. You've heard these in bits and pieces and I mention them all the time, but I'm bringing them all together into one consolidated productivity primer.

Let's get us all back on the same stage about how to gain back some sort of deep control of our life in a distracted world. And this I thought would be a perfect time to do it. All right, so before I get to my five core strategies to suggest, let's just start with a quick foundational question because I think it's important to calibrate everything we're doing here.

What do we mean by productivity? Now, in the context of knowledge work, which is the vast majority of my audience, productivity can be a tricky topic to talk about. It's because this term has become more, I wouldn't say taboo, but more of a source of distrust or discomfort, especially in certain online cultures.

So why? Why are people upset about the idea of productivity? We have to answer this before we try to pursue it ourselves. I think there's two reasons, two different reasons why people are wary about this term right now. Reason number one, in the context of office work, office workers often confuse the term productivity with what I call pseudoproductivity.

Now, pseudoproductivity is a concept from my new book, which is called slow productivity. So I'm using the word productivity a lot here, but in my new work, Slow Productivity, I introduced this notion of pseudoproductivity. Pseudoproductivity is this rough heuristic we use to sort of approximate useful effort in office work, where we say busyness, that is visible activity, will be our proxy for useful effort.

This rough heuristic reigns supreme in office work. So when a lot of office workers think about productivity, what they're really thinking about is pseudoproductivity. And the problem with pseudoproductivity is that it's performative and it's grueling. To increase your pseudoproductivity, you just have to be busier. Answer emails faster, answer Slack better, do more virtual meetings, chime in on these conversations at night, on the weekends, in the morning.

It is exhausting. The only way to increase your pseudoproductivity is to make your life itself more exhausting. So when people think you're saying, "Yeah, we wanna improve pseudoproductivity," of course they get upset because that is performative and grueling. It is not, however, what we're gonna be talking about today.

The second reason why people get upset about productivity is the cultural critics in particular associate it very closely with the mathematical concept of optimization, which they take to mean in the context of work, fitting as many things as possible into your life and doing those things at the absolute highest level possible.

So optimizing what you can fit and optimizing the performance of what you do. Cultural critics say, look, an obsession with optimization is itself also exhausting. As Oliver Berkman points out, it's also ultimately gonna be futile because the vast majority of things you can't do anyways. So why obsess about fitting in more?

What's the difference? Why not just relax a little bit? I think this anti-optimization critique of productivity really got a sort of intellectual jolt in the arm in 2019 from Ginny O'Dell's work, in particular her book, "How to Do Nothing." Ginny O'Dell was drawing from the work of an Italian communist philosopher, found a way of actually bringing labor critique concepts from communism and Marxism over to critiques of knowledge work and things such as like our phones, computers, and social media.

So she introduced a lot of this sort of modernized Marxist terminology to critiquing optimization, especially digital optimization, a lot of terminology about internalizing narratives of capitalist production and efficiency and then playing those out in our own lives. Cultural critics love this stuff. And so a lot of that terminology has spread through the discussions of productivity.

So that's the other reason why people are suspicious. They think of it as optimization, fit as much as possible, do that stuff increasingly at higher and higher levels, which yeah, that can be tiring as well. So what do we mean? Well, not quite either of those things. When I talk about personal productivity, I typically have two goals in mind.

The first is the ability to control your time and attention so you can be intentional about what receives your energy. This allows you to better shape your life towards deeper objectives. The second goal I have for personal productivity, separate your results from exhaustion. Be smart about how you tackle specific work so that you can produce good results without wasting large amounts of time and energy or falling towards burnout.

If what you're doing isn't sustainable, then you're not doing it right. Okay, so the second element of personal productivity, find a way to do whatever you wanna do that's sustainable. That's very unique to me, I would say. I am very sensitive to tiredness. I'm very sensitive to stress. So this has been a big undercurrent in my professional discussion of productivity is how do we avoid those things?

I do not like the idea of hustling. I do not like the idea of burning the midnight oil and just getting after it and waking up at five and working harder than the other person. I'm not well wired for it. So this is unique to my flavor of personal productivity is the key is sustainability.

It's not gonna exhaust you. You have flexibility. That's important to me. This first part though, gets to the key of what we really mean by personal productivity, which is you can control what you're doing when you do it, why you're doing it. So to me, here's the choice. If you wanna pursue this definition of productivity, you gain control over what you do, and you're trying to be very careful about avoiding burnout producing patterns.

To not do this means you're in danger of falling to the opposite, being not in control of your time and attention and not being particularly careful about trying to avoid burnout or unsustainable work habits. You're much more likely to be overloaded or frenetic or exhausted. So what do you do with these skills?

So if you do gain this definition of personal productivity, what do you do with them? Well, look, it's up to you. Like, I think it's fine, for example, to put these skills to use for a while, to kind of do the old school optimization that the cultural critics worry about and say, you know, I'm gonna try to get after it and get really good at these skills or be a huge standout at my job for the, you know, during my 20s as a way of like building up autonomy and career capital and really setting myself up on the right foundation.

There's a time for that, and these skills could of course help you with that. But you can use the exact same skills we're gonna talk about here to minimize the time needed to do a good enough job at your job that no one is gonna notice you. So if you're at a time in your life where you need more flexibility or just a break, maybe you have new kids or you're caring for a sick relative, or you're really looking to invest in other parts of your life, your personal transformation and important involvement in your community, these same tools can be used to help you take your work and squeeze that footprint down small in a way that people like, hey, Cal's doing great.

It doesn't catch our attention. And yet you've spread out and can compress this work in such a way you have a lot of free time. You can also deploy the type of ideas we're gonna talk about here to systematically transform your life outside of work. We talk a lot on the show about the deep life, a life lived intentionally and on purpose.

I'm actually writing the book about this right now. And the very first part of the book is about preparing before you start to change. 'Cause if you can't gain control of your life, you can't hope to transform it. So these same ideas can be used to help you transform your life towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

So I think there's a lot of potential uses of productivity beyond just these much more simplistic ideas that it's all about pseudo productivity or just trying to optimize everything you do. All right, enough preamble. Let's get five pieces of advice here. The first idea I wanna talk about is multi-scale planning.

This is my answer to the question of what should I do next? This is the fundamental question in controlling your time and attention is, what do I do right now? What am I gonna do after that? This is a tricky question to answer because what you're trying to do here is not just find something useful to do next, but somehow have your answer to this question connect to your interest and objectives and systems on many different timescales, right?

That somehow when you're deciding what to do next, you have to navigate between the reactive and urgent in the moment and things that could be completely non-urgent and completely optional, but is maybe a project that you wanna make progress on over the course of the year that's gonna be important to you.

All of these concerns have to get integrated into deciding what do I do next? The problem, however, is we don't have the time or energy to take into account everything on our plate, all of our different goals and objectives and what's going on in our systems and how our projects are unfolding and where things are and what needs to be done.

We cannot take this all into account every time we have a new moment to say, what do I do next? We would just collapse into planning paralysis. This is where multiscale planning enters the scene, right? Here's the idea. You plan at multiple timescales. Each timescale is informed by the one before it.

So you have what I call a strategic plan or a quarterly plan. This is a bigger picture plan about your big objectives. You should have one for your work. You should have one for your life outside of work. So you're figuring out this is what I'm up to this year.

And in this season, in order to make progress on this big goal, here's what I'm doing. I'm gonna finally pick up this skill or this project that's been put on my plate. I'm gonna nail this project above and beyond this winter because that's gonna really open up big possibilities.

Or this is the spring in which I'm gonna completely overhaul my fitness and my personal life. I think my health is bad and this is gonna be the time where I'm gonna make this major change. It's gonna take a few months, but this is where I'm gonna kickstart a new way of living.

So the strategic or quarterly plans is where you have these big picture visions for your life and your life outside of work. You update these definitely once a year, but you kind of check back in with them every season. Okay, each week then you build a plan for the week ahead of you.

This is what we call the weekly plan. When you build your weekly plan, you go back and you check the strategic plan. That is when you consult it. And so when you're looking at the week ahead, you can have these questions about, okay, what for my strategic plan do I wanna try to remind myself or integrate into my week?

When you're doing your weekly plan, this is also where you can survey your calendar, identify the good spots for getting certain types of work done. This is where you see like, oh, Monday actually is a pretty clear afternoon. So Monday at three, I'm gonna cut off work there to go to the whatever.

I have a giant errand I wanna do that's gonna be connected to a big lifestyle goal I'm doing. I'm gonna go to the gym supply store to finally buy like a barbell and barbell weights. It's gonna take an hour and a half. Here's the right time to do it.

Friday morning is open. That's when I'm gonna really like write the draft of this book proposal I'm working on. So you're sort of looking at the whole week at once and seeing where you have the right times for working on things. This is also where you can make some changes where you say, you know what?

My Thursday would be perfect for me to spend the whole day working on this project except for I have this stupid call at two. So let's move that call 'cause that's in the way of this day being perfect for my bigger picture plan. When you're doing your weekly plan, you might add some stuff onto your calendar.

Great, here's some big rocks I wanna make sure I get done. Let me put them on my calendar now like an appointment so that time is protected. You should also write out some sort of plan for your week long hand as well. You could type this, you can write it into like my time block planner has a weekly plan page.

And this reminders to yourself, remember we're doing this every day. Here's what we're doing like with workouts. The main professional push this week is going to be trying to get this report done. So let's try to get a couple hours every morning on this before we switch over to admin.

It's notes to yourself about how you're going through this week. So now you have a plan for your week that takes into account the reality of your week and maybe even alter that reality a little bit. Big things are on your calendar. You have notes to yourself as well about what to keep in mind as the week unfolds.

This will reflect what you saw in your strategic or quarterly plans. Now we go to the final timescale, the finest timescale, which is every day. As every day starts, you're gonna build a time block plan for your work day. You're gonna block off the hours of your day and give every block a job.

Okay, during this two hours, I'm working specifically on this. The half hour that follows, I'm checking my email, catching up on as much as possible in that half hour. Then I have lunch, then there's 30 minutes free, and then there is this meeting. So I put the meeting, I'm gonna put 20 minutes after the meeting for actually consolidating my notes on the meeting.

And in that 30 minutes between lunch and the meeting, I have this list here of five small chores that I'm gonna try to get done. These five small tasks, submitting this form, calling the IT department. Let me get that done in this space. You're giving your time a job.

So you're figuring out a good way to make use of your work time in advance, as opposed to just going through your day and continually asking, "Hey, what do I wanna work on?" Next, here's the key. Before you build your time block day for a specific day, your time block plan, rather, you look at your weekly plan.

'Cause your weekly plan is gonna inform what happens in your time block plan. First of all, of course, you have to copy over everything that's on your calendar, but you might have these reminders in your weekly plan. Hey, we're trying to write every morning. Make sure that we do this at the end of the day.

So you're making sure those notes from your weekly plan get integrated to your plan for the day, and then you execute your time block plan. So now when we get to a particular moment in a particular day, how do you answer the question of what I should do next?

It's whatever time block you're in will tell you. But that time block is influenced by your weekly plan. And that weekly plan itself is influenced by your quarterly or strategic plan. So now you're wasting very little energy in the moment deciding what I do next, but that decision connects to your priorities at multiple different timescales.

So time block planning is how you not only get more out of your day, but how you ensure progress is made on things that matter, even if these things aren't all urgent, do the next day, or right there in your face. So multi-scale planning, critical key to controlling your time and attention.

Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, "Slow Productivity, "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right, idea number two, office hours, meeting windows, and project protocols. These are three things that are all trying to solve the same problem. So if you read my 2021 book, "A World Without Email," I identify what I think is the number one productivity poison in the knowledge work sector.

And it's not necessarily what people think. The number one productivity poison is context switching. Every time you change your attention from one target to another, you instigate an expensive neurological process where your brain is trying to actually switch which networks are activated and inhibit other networks that are no longer relevant.

This is an expensive operation. It takes time. It can take 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes for your brain to completely switch its semantic context from one target to another. So what happens when you keep context switching rapidly throughout your work, where you're trying to work on, let's say, a report, but every few minutes you jump over to check Slack, you jump over to check email, maybe you send a couple of emails, you come back to what you're working on, then jump over to check what's going on with the Olympics, and back to what you're working on.

Every time you switch your attention, you instigate this expensive change. But of course, you don't sit around in your email inbox or Slack or on the Olympics website for 20, 30 minutes, giving yourself enough time to completely change this new context. You actually halt that change after it begins, and then try to wrench your attention back to what you're originally working on.

And now you have that cognitive context tries to come back, but before it could get completely back, you switch to something else. This creates a train wreck, cognitively speaking, inside your head, which makes it very difficult to focus. This is why you find your sort of intellectual energy begins to plummet.

It's like, "Oh man, I just feel sort of like fatigued. "I feel like I can't think straight." It's a terrible type of state in which to try to do interesting work. So you gotta minimize those context shifts. Well, what's the number one source of context shifts? Ongoing back and forth, unscheduled conversation.

So if I have multiple conversations that are unfolding with back and forth emails, I have multiple conversations that are sort of unfolding unpredictably on a Slack channel, I have to keep tending to those communication channels because I don't know when the reply to my message is gonna come in, but I have to see that pretty quickly because I have to bounce it back to their side of the proverbial court so they can bounce it back to me, and then I can bounce it back to them.

So we all have to start checking these inboxes and channels all the time to keep these ongoing conversations actually moving forward. This is the number one source of context shifts. These context shifts are productivity poison. So office hours, meeting windows, and project protocols are three ways to tame this source of context shifts.

Office hours says have set times most days where your door is open. Maybe you have a virtual meeting room like a Zoom or Teams room activated, your phone is on. As much as possible, when someone tries to instigate a back and forth discussion with you over email and Slack, defer them to the office hours.

Yeah, that's important. We should get into it. Just grab me at my next office hours next time you're able. Now, what you're doing here is taking these conversations that would have generated lots of back and forth messages, which means lots even more checks of your inbox away for these messages, and it pushes them all to this one consolidated time where you can just in real time go back and forth and solve them.

If you can take three or four such conversations in a given day and push it to one, one hour office hours meeting, and therefore leave the rest of your day relatively uninterrupted, it is a significant, significant win in terms of your exhaustion and ability to actually do work. Meeting windows are similar.

People are constantly in our modern world saying, when can we have a meeting? When can we have a meeting? Here's an invite, here's an invite. It's Zoom, it's Teams, all these virtual meetings. Now that the friction involved in meetings is so low, we are inundated with requests for meetings.

Now this can be a problem in part because scheduling these meetings requires back and forth messages, creates context shifting, and the meetings begin to fall pretty haphazardly onto your schedule. So it's very difficult to get through any extended period of your day without having some meeting that completely scrambles your brain and changes what you're thinking about.

Simplify this by having, here's the standard windows each day when I do meetings. Right? Yeah, let's have a meeting. I usually do these, you know, one to four, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, you know, are all great for me. Let me know if there's a slot in there coming up. So you kind of consolidate, you take the options away of when the meetings happen, that simplifies scheduling, and the meetings themselves are consolidated.

So like your mornings are free in this scenario. Your Mondays and Fridays are free in this scenario. You're less, your context shifting less. If you think you can get away with it, use some sort of meeting planning software like Calendly. So you're gonna say, yeah, we should definitely meet.

Here's the link, grab any time that works for you. So now you've completely eliminated back and forth planning and you have full control over when you want these meetings to happen. So they don't just fall haphazardly in your schedule. The final advice here for reducing context switching is project protocols.

If you have an ongoing project you're gonna be working on for a while, take 20 minutes upfront to figure out how are we gonna communicate and collaborate here? Don't just rock and roll on email and throwing random meetings at each other and just sort of hope it works out.

Figure out your protocol for this project. Oh, we got to produce this report. Let's take 20 minutes to figure out how that's gonna unfold. If you build a protocol, you can save yourself a lot of unscheduled messaging. So for example, if you're working with someone else to produce report, a protocol might say something like, okay, I will write a rough draft of this report in a shared document and I'll get that done by Thursday.

All right, I'll get it done by Thursday at close of business, right? So that'll just, you can expect it starting Friday morning, it is available. Take a look on Friday, add any edits or suggestions that you have throughout Friday. On my Monday office hours, which are from three to four, swing by my office and we'll talk it through.

I will read your comments before those office hours. I'm putting that on my calendar now and then we can have a real time discussion about it. Then during that discussion on office hours, we can figure out what the final edits are. And then I'll put aside time on like that Wednesday to make my pass on those final edits.

I'll have it done by 12, starting at 12, you can grab the document, you finalize it, send it to the designer, CC me when you do it. As long as we get to him by the end of day Wednesday, we should be fine. Look, this sounds like a bit of a pain.

The sit down and take 15 minutes to figure out a protocol like that for this particular project. But think about what you just saved. With that style of project protocol in place, there are no unscheduled emails, no unscheduled Slack chats. No like, hey, what's going on, going back and forth.

You just know when to work and when it's gonna happen. You have saved yourself from context switches. So project protocol, spending 15 minutes up front to figure out how something's gonna unfold, saves you so much context switching and unscheduled communication down the line. So office hours, meeting windows and project protocols, they go a long way towards saving your brain.

All right, that's two ideas. Let's do idea number three of five. Deep to shallow work ratios. All right, this is the foundational idea from my book, "Deep Work." When you're trying to do something cognitively demanding, the best way to do this is in a state that I call deep work, which says you're giving it your full attention and you're not context switching at all.

This is getting your sustained attention until you're done. So when you're thinking about your workday, you have to separate and treat separately deep work from non-deep work, which we often call shallow work just for simplicity. All right, shallow work, you're doing emails, meetings, you're jumping back and forth between documents, you're seeing a lot of different information.

Deep work, you're completely locked in, completely uninterrupted. Treat these two things separately. Now, once you treat these two things separately, you can ask the question of how much deep work am I doing? I argue that most knowledge work jobs should identify an ideal deep to shallow work ratio for say a standard work week.

How many hours of my work in a standard week should be deep versus shallow? This ratio might differ depending on your job, and that's fine. This is one of the misnomers about deep work is that people think the argument is that deep work is all that matters and all you should be doing is deep work.

This is true for basically no one except maybe professional literary novelist, right? No, the goal is these are two different things that are both important, but you need to be very intentional about how much deep work you should be doing in order to sort of be as valuable as possible in your job.

So you should know your ideal deep to shallow work ratio. You should measure how many hours were deep and non-deep this week and see how far you are from your ideal ratio. If you're far off of it, now you make changes. Now you have a target to aim towards.

And what types of changes do you make? Well, now you're gonna start doing things like pre-scheduling deep work time, constraining meetings to meeting windows so that you have enough time left for deep work, having meeting days and non-meeting days, like all sorts of innovations can come out of this.

I highly suggest having this conversation with your supervisor, get them on board with your ideal deep to shallow work ratio so they too can get involved in helping to figure out how you can actually hit those numbers during a particular week. Sometimes you need a supervisor to come in and say, for example, Cal doesn't do meetings before noon.

We're trying to hit his 50/50 ratio and this is the only way we can do it. Use this as a core metric in a world of sort of non-entry level knowledge work. Use this ratio as a core metric that you're measuring and aiming towards. The key thing here for all of this is you have to measure in increments of an hour.

There's no such thing as I did 10 minutes of deep work. And the hour does not count if there's any context shifting. If you have to take a call, if you have to jump in on an inbox, if you have to keep a conversation going on Slack, that doesn't count as a deep work hour.

You really have to respect deep work hours as completely uninterrupted focus. That is the state that produces real value. It is notably better than spending that same time sort of working on the deep thing, but having an occasional context shift. So have an ideal deep to shallow work ratio, measure it and fight to hit that metric.

That alone could 5X the value you're producing, right? When we're just kind of stumbling through our workday, if like I'm just doing stuff, I believe in pseudo productivity, I'm busy, I respond to things, there's a lot going on, I feel very active and involved. So much of your time there is either administrative or you struggling through the after effects of context switching that the actual amount of cognitive value produced could be pretty low.

Once you start caring about deep to shallow work ratios, it's like a superpower. Look at what happened to Cal, like he's killing it. Like look at these code updates he's putting in, look at these new marketing strategies, look at the papers that he's producing, makes a big difference. All right, idea number four, work in progress limits, WIP limits as a terminology that I've taken from Kanban project management philosophies.

All right, I really pushed this in my new book, Slow Productivity, and I really think it is critical. You need a limit on how many non-trivial projects you're actively working on at any given time. And that limit should be between one and three. All right, this doesn't necessarily mean once you're actively working on a very big project that you have to stick with that big project until it's completely done.

You can break big projects down into more tractable milestones, but you should only have one to three of these tractable milestones that you're working on actively at a time. So I might not put write a book as an active project that that's what I'm working on until I'm done, but I might put write chapter four of a book as a tractable milestone.

Okay, and so I'm gonna work, that's what I'm actually working on right now. Here's the key. You keep this list of active projects or project milestones transparent. Other people can see it. Here's what I'm actively working on. Here's what's queued up for me to work on next. And for the things that you're not actively work on, you don't do administrative overhead related to them.

You don't have meetings about them. You don't do email conversations about them. They are just waiting, putting no footprint on your schedule, no footprint on your attention until they move over to the active slot. At which point now you're all in, you're working on it every day. You're talking to people about it.

You're having meetings. So when people say like, hey, what's going on with this thing? You're like, can we have a meeting about it? Let's chat about it. You're like, here's where it is. It's in position three of my queue. As soon as it moves over to active, I'll ping you and let's get a phone call.

Let's chat about it. I'm gonna get after it as soon as it gets to active. I'm not actively working on it now. Now, this seems kind of like precious. Like why bother? You know, why not just be more flexible? Kind of like work on what you wanna work on, keep everything sort of up there.

The reason is administrative overhead aggregates. Everything that you're actively working on brings along with it its own administrative overhead. This is conversations, this is email, this is Slack, this is meetings, this is just brain cycles. So the more things you're actively working on, the more administrative overhead that enters your life.

This stuff adds up, it aggregates, right? So the more administrative overhead you have to handle, the less of your schedule is actually free to actually make work done. And eventually you pass a threshold in which mainly what you're doing is just juggling administrative overhead frenetically, unable to basically make progress on any actual work.

So on the other hand, if you say, no, no, no, only these two things am I actively working on. These are the only two things generate administrative overhead in your life. That's very tractable. So now you can really focus on these things, get them done fast, get them done well, and bring something new over to the active slot.

The pace at which you complete things goes up when you reduce the number of things you're willing to work on concurrently at the same time. All right? Key distinction here, you're not saying no to a bunch of things. These are all things you're saying yes to. It's just of the things you said yes to, you're distinguishing between this is getting my active attention or this is cued to get my attention.

I'm a huge believer of this. I mean, there's a huge chapter on this in my book, "Slow Productivity." This really, along with what I talked about before with office hours, meeting windows, and project protocols, that plus work and progress limits utterly transforms the psychological experience of knowledge work. It can really change it from this sense of frenetic exhaustion where nothing ever gets done and it seems hopeless to something where it's calm, it's even measured, and to the outside world it just looks like you're crushing it.

Thing after thing, you're just knocking out. It looks great, the work is really good. All right, final idea. One of the older ideas, actually, shutdown rituals. When you are done with your workday, you need a distinctive way of indicating that you're finished, some sort of ritual so that your brain can unload from all of its concerns and ruminations and machinations about your professional life so you can get a breather so that you can also find pleasure and be able to focus on other things in your life.

That's where shutdown rituals enter the scene. Now, here's the idea. When you're done with your workday, you need to go through and police your open loops. What is anything right now that is open and unresolved that just exists in my head? I need to police all of these. Make sure they get written down, they're in my calendar, they got put to my to-do list, it's written on my list of things to handle during my first administrative block in the morning.

You get them all out of your head. All right, now once you got those all of your head, then you look at your calendar, you look at your inbox, you look at your weekly plan, you're like, okay, now what's my plan for the days ahead? You convince yourself I'm not missing something, I've got a good plan, I have a sense of what I'm working on tomorrow, this keeps me on track for my bigger goals.

I checked my calendar, I'm not missing some urgent early morning meeting. I looked at my inbox, there's not some bombshell that landed at the end of the day. Okay, everything is good. It's completely safe for me now to turn my attention away from work. And then you just need some sort of ritualistic way of indicating that you're doing so.

This could be a phrase. I used to use the phrase, shut down complete or schedule shut down complete. It could be something physical. So if you use my time block planner, you'll notice every day on the daily pages, there's a checkbox and it says shut down complete next to it.

That's how I do my shutdown ritual today, after I do this policing of open loops and checking in on my plan, I check the checkbox next to shut down complete. Now, the key thing is, after you do this, if your mind, as your mind probably will try to do from time and again, if your mind is like, hey, let's just think a little bit more about work.

Hey, what about this thing coming up? Hey, let's kind of think through this email we might write to the boss tomorrow. Do we really have a plan for whatever? I'm worried about that. Instead of engaging in a conversation with this professional rumination, you say, wait a second, I did my shutdown ritual and I said the phrase or I checked the box.

I would not have done that if I had not systematically gone through all my open loops and my plan and my inbox and was completely convinced it was fine to shut down for the day. So you know what rumination? I'm not interested. I'm going to go back and do something else.

So you can respond to the rumination without having to get into the details of work that the rumination wants you to get into. And as a result, you avoid falling down those anxiety producing internal narrative anxiety spirals. You do the shutdown ritual enough, your mind just learns like, okay, this particular rumination gets no foothold and you get less of them and your enjoyment and presence outside of work increases.

All right, so there's a ton of other tactical things I talk about when it comes to productivity. Like some things I didn't mention here was like how to organize your obligations using role specific task boards. There's things like tactics like working memory.txt that I think are important. There's the philosophy of full capture, which I think matters as well.

There's sort of evidence-based planning for projects. There's the role of deliberate practice and career capital acquisition. There's all sorts of ideas we talk about, but I think these five are kind of the basics that get you back in control of your life, especially knowledge work, right? So we have multi-scale planning, number one.

We have office hours, meeting windows and project protocols as number two. We have deep to shallow work ratios as your like primary management metric as number three. We have work in progress limits as number four. And our final idea is implement shutdown rituals. You do these five things, you got control.

And you're not gonna burn out. And what you do with that control is up to you. Again, you could try to crush it and make sure your startup becomes the best in the world, or you can be like secretly getting away working a couple hours a day while you work on your stamp collecting hobby and your boss never knows.

You do you, but none of these options are on the table if your life is chaotic, if you don't control your time and attention. These five things will get you a lot closer to that. - I have two quick follow-up questions and then one longer one. - Okay. - The quick ones.

How many hours are in your workday for your time block? - I mean, for me, it's like roughly nine to five. - So eight, okay. - Yeah, roughly. It might be 8.30 to five or nine to 5.30, but I keep my work within there. - And then what's your ratio of deep to shallow?

- 50/50 is good for me, if possible. - So ideal four and four? - Yeah, that's like a standard. I think in the summer I can do better and I wanna do better, but like that's the average I'm going for. I say average because it depends on the day.

So like a teaching day, if I'm teaching two classes, if I count, what I'll often do is not to get like in the professor weeds here. I often, I will count the lecturing as deep work for ratio purposes, because it is really hard, right? I mean, you're like producing a cognitive output that has value.

Now it's not like value that's scalable, like an article or a book, but still that's like deep work. If I count the teaching itself as deep work, then like I can definitely hit the 50/50. - Yeah, and then, okay, next final question. With your active projects and your multiple jobs, how do you do the work in progress limits?

- Yeah, no, that is a good question. So I kind of have work in progress limits per role, because like the way I sort of multiplex these jobs, which by the way, should show you the power of these tools, right? Like I sort of have these multiple related jobs.

I just multiplex, meaning it's like, I divide my time up. This is servicing this job. This is servicing that job. Well, imagine if you only had one of these jobs, you could be doing it. Like my footprint would be relatively small. If I was only doing one of these things, I would have quite a bit of time free.

So I use that as sort of an advertisement for controlling your time and attention. You could do what I do and like, great, now I can fit three jobs. Or you could do the opposite and say, great, now I can have my one job take up a third of my time.

I think there's a lot of power there. I keep the WIPs basically per role, but I keep them very small per role, right? Because they do add up. - So like for writing, you're working on a chapter, for the podcast, you record an episode a week, and then for the teaching, whatever.

- Yeah, so for the podcast, those aren't projects to me, it's automated, right? It's autopilot scheduling. Like the podcast, we have a half day a week, and I just think of it as like, there's a half day a week where we do the podcast, right? So there's not a project in progress.

It's an autopilot schedule, the same way that my workouts are scheduled. In writing, I have a very strict, I try to have a very strict WIP that I keep towards one as much as possible, right? So it'll be like, I am doing this draft of a New Yorker article.

Okay, I'm done. I'm doing a draft of this book chapter. Okay, now I'm done. Okay, now I'm going back and doing a draft of a new New Yorker article. So I try to keep that one. It goes to two when I have academic writings I'm working on. So like, okay, I'm working on this academic paper, that will overlap with like a non-academic writing, but I'll rarely be actively working on more than one thing at a time.

- That's actually technically two different jobs though, right? - Yeah, it's technically two different jobs, yeah. But like I could, like if I was only doing, I mean, now I'm not as much a pure computer scientist anymore, more digital ethicist and technology theorist. But back when I was doing pure computer science and writing books, if I was just doing one of those, I would probably, I could be like, hey, I'm working on these three academic papers at the same time.

But because I had this, I might be working on a book or a New Yorker thing at the same time, I would reduce that to like, I really should just be working on one, maybe two academic papers at the same time. - Yeah, okay, it makes perfect sense. - They do influence each other a little bit.

Work in progress limit, by the way, is like the thing. I'm thinking about like, if I was a manager or if I could wave a wand and add like new practices to managers and knowledge work, like what would be the most effective? Work in progress limits, I think would make a big difference.

If bosses were like, you got to write down what you're actively working on. Everyone can see what everyone's actually working on. It's on a board. You can have like two things up there. You can't bother someone about something that's not on that board. Like that would make a huge difference.

And I think normalizing office hours and meeting windows would also make a huge difference. Those would be the two things. If I ran a company that I would be most interested in making sort of policies. All right, so there we go. It's a little productivity primer. We got some great in the weeds productivity questions, but first let's hear from some sponsors.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So look, we just talked a lot about productivity, which is about controlling your time and your attention so you don't burn out and get things done. But there's a flip side to this, a non-technical side of productivity, which is just the stress and anxiety that comes from all these things you have to do.

Work is chaotic. Our lives are chaotic. You work in an office job. It's not like it used to be where what I do is I rivet engines on a plane. You have an unlimited amount of things you could be doing. You have to navigate this yourself. You have to somehow balance your job versus the needs of your family and your other types of communities.

This is a source of anxiety. This is a source of stress. So just as much as we talk about productivity in this new distracted world, we also should be talking about mental health 'cause none of this is gonna matter if you're struggling with your own head, if you're struggling with your own thoughts.

You yourself can be the biggest obstacle to actually sort of like a deeper life. So this is where therapy can enter the scene. Right, I hear this from our listeners all the time. Having a professional help you improve the relationship with your brain is really an important first step towards doing other interesting things with your brain.

So therapy really should be in the toolkit when we're thinking about productivity and crafting a deep life more generally. So if you're thinking of starting therapy, you should give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire and you will get matched with a licensed therapist.

You can switch therapists at any time for no additional cost if you don't like who you're paired up with. So it's a very easy way to add this crucial tool to your toolkit. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions today to get 10% off your first month.

That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com/deepquestions. Also wanna talk about our friends and longtime sponsors at Element, L-M-N-T. For years, I have been talking about the Element drink mix. You can add your water to get those electrolytes you need, especially after days of sweat, be it like hard exercise or like I do, a day of lecturing and giving interviews where you dehydrate yourself a lot by talking or teaching.

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Every time I work out, I'm often drinking it in the morning if I feel unusually dehydrated. So we're big fans of Element here on the show. They have a new product, which I'm excited about, Element Sparkling, which delivers the same zero sugar electrolyte formulation you already know and trust, but now in a bold 16-ounce cans of sparkling water, you can just grab it cold from the fridge when you need that high quality hydration.

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So check that out. You can get an early preview of Element Sparkling, but the Element Drink Mix is there and available, and I highly recommend it. So you can get a free sample pack with any Drink Mix purchase if you go to drinkelement.com/deep. That's drinkelementlmnt.com/deep to get a free sample pack with any Drink Mix purchase.

And remember, if you're an Element Insider, you'll have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. All right, Jesse, let's move on to some questions. - All right, first question is from Luke. I've been using weekly and time block planning to organize my professional life for some time now, and it's working great.

I have a second child on the way and still wanna be able to make modest progress on my non-professional pursuits. Would time blocking be suitable here? - Well, I got a couple different thoughts here, Luke. First, I wanna just give you some, a parenting thought. So I'm a big believer from a productivity perspective in what I call simulated paternity leave.

So, I mean, if you have paternity leave, take paternity leave. But if you don't, like a lot of people don't, you want to simulate this. And what I mean by simulate this is you want to first of all reduce your work efforts back down to towards what I call the unnoticeable bare minimum.

So like down to this minimum where no one's really noticing. It's not like people, you're actively saying I'm working less right now, but you're really keeping that work footprint as small as possible for about three months. If you master the type of tools we talked about in the deep dive, you'll have a lot of control over this.

You can turn that dial down. Outside of work during this simulated paternity leave, you also want to redirect most of your non-professional energy towards family. So like maybe you're still working, but now it's like, I'm working a bare minimum, I'm home early, like my energy is on like, you know, whatever, what my wife needs.

Probably in this case as a second child, it's gonna be a lot of like taking care of the first child. And just be in that head space for the first three months or so, okay? You don't want when there's like a new child and it's really disruptive, but also really meaningful, it's not the right time to be trying to make sure you get your, you know, 10K run in because you're training for whatever.

A lot of people, especially a lot of guys sometimes react to the disruption and the sort of like existential shake up of a child arriving by trying to double down on like these things that are important to me, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna lose them. You don't have to lose them in the big picture, but maybe for a few months, like that's not what you're all about.

Okay, so then beyond that, you're returning now, you can put your non-professional energy, you can put it towards some other outlets now. Should you time block to try to make good progress on the things that are important to you, the leisure activities are important to you? I typically say no.

So here's how I talk about managing leisure activities. They matter. So you should have them in your strategic or quarterly plans like these things that are important to you, I'm trying to become whatever. More knowledgeable about movies, I'm training for an athletic event, whatever it is, have those in your strategic plans.

Visit those then in your weekly plans, right? We talked about multi-scale planning, the deep dive. When you're making your weekly plan, you're looking at these higher scale plans, you know, this is the time to integrate it. Maybe there's some thing you have to go do that is gonna require a bunch of time, you wanna pre-block that on your calendar, like, okay, I need to go like buy this new athletic equipment.

I got time Friday afternoon, let me block that on my calendar. So you can block off time for specific time-consuming appointments or things involved with your leisure activity. You can have reminders to yourself in your weekly plan, like, hey, here's what I wanna make progress on this week. You know, I'm gonna try to exercise most mornings or whatever it is, right?

But beyond that, don't time block. Like that's where I would put the end to the planning. So now what happens when you get to a particular day? Well, when your time block work schedule is over, you can then implement what I often think of as like non-urgent productivity, which is like do your best to choose interesting things to do with whatever free time you have, but don't sweat how much time that is or how much you fit in, right?

So it's like, okay, I know what I'm working on. I've blocked off times for stuff that really need to be on my calendar. And then otherwise like, oh, it's the afternoon now, I have some free time. Great, this is what I'm working on. Let me go for a run.

Let me go like find a book on this thing that I'm trying to learn more about, right? But if I don't have a lot of free time, that's also not a big deal. I don't have some sort of like hard schedule plan of like I need to get this many hours done on this or that.

So I'm a big believer in having a little bit more looseness around your non-professional pursuits. All right, so the idea here is you're avoiding the stress of trying to follow a schedule. Like time block planning is pretty stressful. It's very effective, but it requires a lot of sort of concentration.

It's pretty urgent. Like what's happening now? I need to get this done. We wanna avoid that footprint as possible for your time outside of work so your mind can recharge. On the other hand, for a lot of people, straight up free time's not the best. Like we think having nothing to do is gonna somehow be what we need or that's gonna be rejuvenating and recharging, but for a lot of people, it's not.

So you do want to the extent possible, you are gonna feel better filling the time you have doing interesting, useful stuff. So that's where this like non-urgent productivity approach comes in. You have a great queue of things to do, but you're not sweating exactly how much you're gonna do and when you're gonna do it.

It's just like, hey, as I have time, let me do stuff. I like doing stuff versus not doing stuff and I've got a pretty good plan of stuff to do. And if it's 10 hours versus three hours versus 20 hours, like it is what it is. You're just filling the time you happen to have.

So Luke, that's what I would suggest. You don't wanna have nothing to do, but you don't wanna be over-scheduling the time you do have available as well. All right, who got next, Jesse? - Next question is from April. I'm a college student and I find it hard to fit all my activities and responsibilities into the 11 hours allotted by the time block planner.

So I often find myself scrambling with ad hoc work in the evenings. How do I schedule a longer day? - Well, college students do have a sort of unique scheduling challenge because their work spreads out over a larger footprint than most jobs, right? So like most jobs, you can typically have something roughly like a nine to five in the which you can constrain most of your work, but college students, it might be an evening block is a big part of your plan, or maybe you have an early morning class, you have activities in the afternoon, and you can really have a bigger spread of active time.

So this is a good question, this is a relevant question. What I try to do, like what I tried to do when I was a college student was to avoid the idea of the evenings and the late evenings were like your good open water to get things done. I felt like there was a lot of usable time throughout the entire day that if you took advantage of that properly, you didn't have to lean too heavily on the like nine to midnight hours, the sort of wait to get work done.

In fact, I usually aim to be done with work by eight, which then gives you a schedule that does fit into like a reasonable time block plan. Now, how is that possible? I mean, if you just said tomorrow, I don't wanna work past eight, you might be out of luck.

You're like, well, I have to have all this work that has to get done and three things are due tomorrow. But long-term, how do you constrain your college work? Here's what matters. One, and this is big picture, keep your course load and activity load reasonable. The number one source of stress for college students is they have too many courses, they're too hard, they have too many activities going on.

If you're a college student, there's nobody in your future who is going to scrutinize the difficulty of your schedule. That's something you felt like was relevant when you were applying to college. It's not relevant for grad school, it's not relevant for jobs. They wanna know where you went to school, what you majored in, what's your grades.

And for a lot of jobs, if you have other relevant experience, like you know how to program. They do not know or care that your junior fall, you were taking five really hard courses. Like that could have killed you work-wise. No one knows, no one cares. What'd you major in, what's your grades, where'd you go to school?

So take advantage of that reality by keeping your course loads reasonable, don't overload courses, mix hard courses with easy courses, mix quantitative courses with other types of courses. If you have credits that can reduce your course load for certain semesters, take advantage of everything you have there. So keep your course load reasonable.

Number two, use autopilot scheduling for all your regular work. I have a problem set due every week. When and where do I do the work for this problem set? I have an essay I have to respond right every other week for my English class. When and where do I do the work on this essay?

Start figuring out in advance where this work fits onto your schedule so you don't have to make scheduling decisions. You're just executing this autopilot schedule and the stuff gets done. When you do autopilot scheduling, this work gets done, a couple of things happen. One, it starts to get done more in advance.

So it's not just what's due tomorrow. Oh, I have a problem set. Let me go work on that problem set tonight. It gets done farther in advance so the work gets spread out more so it doesn't need to sit so much in the evening. It also tends to get done earlier.

When you're trying to find, when do I want to work on my biweekly essay for English class? That's where you realize like I have this hour gap between 11 and my noon class. And if I use that gap on Tuesday and Wednesday, I could get my essay done. And so now suddenly work is getting done earlier in the day.

Whereas again, if you're just saying what do I want to work on next? Most students wait till they have the clear water of night to even start. So you're better able to take advantage of the time that is available earlier in the day. Adding onto that, time block plan your mornings and afternoons.

Do not waste the time that's in the morning and the afternoons between classes. That's the good time. That's when you want to be getting as much done as possible to minimize what needs to be done later. When you do work, study in quiet places and don't do it without your phone.

And do it without your phone rather. Here's where I do this work. I go to this library. It's very austere. I don't bring my phone with me. So it is full non-context switching focus. Full non-context switching focus in a quiet place accomplishes work at roughly two times the speed of working with your phone nearby.

There's another big key to reducing the footprint of your student work is to work in full focus. It makes a huge difference. Trust me, your friends will survive if you're not answering their WhatsApp immediately. Where am I at? One, two, three, four, okay. Okay, number five, last piece of advice.

Make paper and exam studying plans. This is an idea for my book, How to Become a Straight A Student. It's coming up on its 20th anniversary, which is hard to believe. 20th anniversary. - That's amazing. - Yeah, I know. I know these things. It's, you know, we've started looking through, started looking through my old student books and finding all the references that now there's references in these books that just don't make sense in like our current period.

Like just technologies that we don't use, like things we don't use anymore. Just the world has changed so much that now we have to go back and start like making these sort of edits so that like the book is legible. - So 20 years ago, there was, I didn't have a telephone 20 years ago.

Actually I did, it was 2004. I just got one. - But there's no smartphones. - Yeah. - A lot of students didn't have laptops. A lot of talking about like newspapers and going to the bookstore to find your textbook, like stuff that's like a lot more rare now. It's interesting.

So we might go back and update some of those references. Anyways, one of the ideas I had in How to Become a Straight A Student is at the beginning of your semester, get your syllabi and figure out where's my exams and where's my major papers and all my classes.

Let's get those on the calendar. For each of those, go back and schedule on your calendar when you're gonna work on it. So at the very beginning of the semester, you say there's gonna be a paper that's due in two months. When am I gonna work on this paper?

And now you start rewinding in time. Well, two weeks in advance is when I really probably have to get all my research done and let me schedule out some time there to work on this. And then one week in advance, I need to get my rough draft writing. So again, you're spreading out work where there's space for it to fit reasonably.

So you don't have to say, I have an exam tomorrow, let me go study. It's like, no, I just follow my calendar. I actually started preparing for this exam three weeks ago in like reasonable bursts where time happened to be free. And now as I get closer and closer to the actual exam day, there's not so much left for me to do.

These type of systems, these type of ideas and plans can keep your student workday much more constrained, give you something where you rarely have to work past eight and now you can just throw standard professional office job style time block planning on the actual like morning and afternoon. And this all sort of works out well, right?

So that's usually what I recommend for students is some sort of mixture of that type of advice. All right, who have we got next? - Next question is from Alexander. I'm a head of one of the departments in a game development company, which by design means cross project work and a lot of switching between different projects.

I follow much of your advice. I multi-scale plan. I don't multitask. I keep my phone away. I say no often, but most of the days after work, I feel such mental fatigue, I can barely do anything. Is there a way to better regain my energy after work? - Well, there's the easy answer and the hard answer.

So the easy answer is more tactical. Okay, I want more energy after work, I'm too tired. Two things matter there that can help some. One, you want to make sure drawing from the advice from the deep dive in this episode that you have a good shutdown ritual. A good shutdown ritual at the end of your day really does free up more mental resources.

The more your brain is actually holding on to things from the workday itself and kind of worrying about this and writing the email you need to send here and rehashing what's going on and stressing about the timeline for some sort of project that's going up. The more your brain is doing that, the more your brain is going to be exhausted.

The less energy, cognitive energy will be left over for other types of things. So have a good shutdown ritual will help a little. Another thing that really matters here is getting as healthy as possible. Physical health really matters when it comes to mental energy. How you eat, how you exercise.

Now it might seem at first like, well, this is the last thing I want to do because this is another energy consuming time obligation I'm adding into my life that's going to make things worse. It'll actually make things better. If you're eating really well, you're getting in like a morning, like run or row or Peloton before the day gets started.

And then, and I highly recommend this, this is what I do during the school year. You have a pretty intense resistance weight-based workout as your transition from work to non-work. That does really well. It kind of like resets your brain and your body. You would think it would tire you, but it also kind of like switches you out of brain mode into body mode and it helps keep you strong and your muscles working in a way that just sort of keeps you more alert.

So it's like getting way more serious about your health, not just like a little bit, but a lot, that makes a difference. I mean, super high performing people do this, right? Like executives at these sort of, these high-end executives, hedge fund managers, where there's millions of dollars in the line, they're often pretty obsessive about their health because it matters.

Like it matters for, it matters for their energy, right? So you should care about that a lot more than you probably are. The hard answer is some jobs are hard by design. Like this might be a job, big company, department head, it's a prestigious job. It might just be by design.

This is a really hard job. That's what you're signing up for. You got a lot of things you got to manage. A lot's coming at you. You got to be locked in like you are in all the types of stuff I talk about, to organize, control your time and attention.

Otherwise you're going to drown. But even with all those things, it's a lot and it's exhausting, right? That could just be the reality of your job. Now, hopefully they're compensating you fairly for what they're asking. This is typically the case. Law partners are like this. That's a very demanding job.

But to say, hey, look, no surprises here. We're paying you well. You know what you're getting into, but this is what it is. Consulting can be like that. Clearly like startup founders can be like that. C-suite jobs for companies can be like that. Like these are very hard jobs.

We pay you fairly for that hardness, but these are very hard jobs. They cannot be made into a low stress, not so hard job. All right. So if that's the reality here, which it probably is, there's some deeper questions to ask. Is this the right job? The right way to approach this, of course, is with lifestyle-centric planning.

Don't just have some idea of a radical change and fall in love with change for the sake of change. Get in touch with what is my vision of an ideal lifestyle? Like, what do I want my typical day to be like? Like where, what's the location where I'm living?

What's the rhythm of the day? What does it look like? Where am I? What's happening? What's the feel of my work and my non-work? Am I walking my dog around a quiet lake? Or am I going to see a cool new filmmaker's opening in the city that night after going to, like whatever.

You just get this sort of concrete image of like what your ideal lifestyle looks like in the next five years or so. Like the rhythms of the day, the feel of the day, the aesthetics of the day. And you say, okay, how do I move closer to there? This gives you a much better way of assessing your job, right?

And it might be when you do this, you say, what I'm really looking for, like what I want my life to feel like, this job is in the way of all of that, right? It's a completely different rhythm. It keeps me stuck in this location. It prevents me from all these other things that are part of this vision.

I just don't have the time or energy to get there. Now you have a strategic way to change that. And it might be changing my job in such a way to find one that maximizes my access to these things I care about. And it might mean switching to a job maybe within the same company that is less prestigious, maybe it's less money, way more solo and autonomous.

But that might unlock everything. Well, I can do that remotely. We can move here. This fits much more controllable. So this might be a good time in your life for some very careful lifestyle centric planning. If you can wait a couple of years, I have a book coming out about this.

But in the meantime, you can go back and listen to our podcast about it. This is a perfect case where you might find like, this job I took because it was what the prestigious thing to do was. It's hard and I got it and I'm proud. But it also makes everything else I care about difficult.

So lifestyle centric planning might be the hard answer to this question, but one worth paying some hard attention to. All right, who do we got next? - Next question is from Jim. I'm 27 and a management consultant and also pursuing my master's. I use the time block planner, but struggle to enter deep work mode.

Each day I break my to-do list down into task size chunks and then allocate these tasks to time blocks on my planner. Herein lies a problem, actually doing the deep work. I feel like I have the correct systems in place, but still struggle with focus and procrastination. - Okay, so first of all, there's a little bit of concern here because there's some terminology creep.

You talk about deep work mode, but now what you're talking about you struggling to do is tasks from your to-do list, right? So I think you're just like, you might be vaguely using the term deep work just to mean like doing stuff or being productive. Deep work has a very clear meaning.

It's a particular cognitive state in which you're giving full attention without context shifts to a cognitively demanding task. It's a state that is optimal for producing high-end output at a reasonable amount of time for demanding tasks. It's a cognitive state. You're talking about more, I think, just you have a lot on your plate.

Your motivation is low. You're having a hard time actually executing what's on your plan. Whether it's a deep work block or a shallow block that's full of what you call task size chunks from your to-do list. So I'm gonna put that deep work terminology off to the side. What we have here is more of just like a time block planning execution issue.

So why do people struggle to execute whatever it is they have planned? There's a couple of things that could be at play here. One, they don't buy the plan, right? Like they made the plan, but another part of their mind is like, what are we doing here? This is work for the sake of work.

Like our mind is very good at predicting the future, evaluating the future, trying to figure out if the action in the moment is moving you towards something that is worthwhile. We did a podcast about this a couple of episodes ago where I talked about how the planning systems of the brain work and its connection to discipline.

So that's probably an important episode to listen to. So for example, if you're just throwing a lot of work on your schedule and your mind's like, why are we doing this? Like this doesn't feel like it's really gonna prepare us for these tests or even like, why are we doing this master's degree in general?

It's gonna withhold motivation. So you're gonna find motivation issues come when your mind is not on board with either the goal you're pursuing or the process with which you're pursuing that goal. So it can help often to get much more specific about, okay, for my master's program, let me really get detailed about like the best way to study and to organize work and make sure that like, I really trust my systems and my mind's on board with it.

So that's one thing that can happen. Another thing that can happen is just a, what I call deep procrastination. I used to call that in my old student focused newsletter post. It could be that your mind is just calling uncle on the plan in general. So if what you're doing is hard and your mind doesn't feel on board with it, which typically is like an intrinsic, extrinsic motivation situation, the locus of control is cited externally from you.

It's like, I don't know, my parents wanted me to do this, or it just seemed like I would be an impressive thing to work on, but it's not really on board with the goal. That mismatch can create what's called deep procrastination where like you really have a hard time executing work, even if you know like I'm committed to this work and I need to do it.

So deep procrastination requires more of a thorough investigation of like, why are you doing what you're doing? And when I hear something like I'm a master student at the same time that I'm a management consultant, and I hear I'm having a hard time actually executing my work, it might be because this really hard thing you're trying to do, which is two jobs at the same time, might not be as well planned out as you thought, and your brain is figuring this out.

And then it's like, why are we doing this like online master's degree? I don't know, it just felt vaguely like something interesting to do. Like your mind is beginning to see the weaknesses in the plan. And that might require a change to what it is you're actually trying to do.

All right, so those two things I want you to keep in mind, your goals or plan aren't well-developed, or your mind's not on board with what it is you're trying to do. It's this hard thing, it's just not really worth it. In terms of tactical solutions, make sure you're consolidating shallow task in the shallow blocks.

Make sure that your most cognitive demanding deep work blocks are earlier in the day when your energy is higher. I would also recommend designating each day to be either a primary consultant or primary student day. So if it's a primary consultant day, you're doing barely any work on your student work.

If it's a primary student day, you're doing bare minimum work for the consultant job, and most of your time is going to the student work. So maybe you have two primary student days per week, as well as like a big Sunday block on that as well. And the other days are primary consultant week.

So you're not trying to really thoroughly mix two completely different activities throughout your day, going back and forth. That's too much context shifting. So that might help as well. Right, so there's a lot of different things going on here from your like fundamental sense of motivation to just tactically how you're organizing the work.

So hopefully some combination of those will help. All right, what do we have next, Jesse? - We have our slow productivity corner. - Oh, that's exciting. So as longtime listeners know, each week we try to have one question that deals with the topics from my new book, "Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment "Without Burnout." If you like what you hear on the show, you need to read that book.

It's sort of like a Bible of sorts for a lot of our concepts. So definitely check that out. All right, so we've got our slow productivity corner of the day. Jesse, let's get that slow productivity corner theme music. (soft guitar music) Now we're ready. All right, what do we got?

- Hi, Robin has this to say. I'm an early career academic. I focus on high impact publications and often say no to less meaningful tasks. At the same time, I feel a great dissonance with academic evaluations and how we are measured. Most evaluations leading to promotions will unfortunately be based on the number of author publications and to a lesser extent, taking into account the impact of these.

Am I shortchanging myself by obsessing over quality and not just publishing mediocre papers? - Well, Robin, I think at most high end R1 institutions, you gotta do both. - Right. - You need a sufficient quantity of publications that are also in really good places. So it's not necessarily a trade-off, it's just like a really hard goal.

My general advice here is working towards promotion in academia, you need to just work kind of relentlessly towards what it is that is valuable right now. Don't worry about if that makes sense or not. Don't get upset about it. Don't convince yourself it's somehow unfair or it's not measuring the right things.

You can be worried about that post-promotion. Pre-promotion, you have to see it almost like an arbitrary challenge. I have to do X, what's the best way to get the X? And for, again, most research institutions, X is gonna be a sufficient number of papers in sufficiently good publication venues.

You need specific numbers for each of those. Like how many is a sufficient number of papers for my field? What is the threshold for a sufficiently good venue? You get these by looking at recent successful promotion cases at your university, that's typically the best way to do it. So you have to have crystal clear targets.

Now, again, you can complain about these targets later. You can rail against like, this is looking at the wrong thing and this isn't measuring what's valuable and you can pre-reduce dissidence about struggles or whatever you wanna do, do that all later. Now we just want numbers. This many papers in these places.

It's evidence-based planning. All right, once you have those numbers, now we say, what's the most sustainable way to get there? And here's where slow productivity enters the scene. All right, I really need to do six papers in these type of journals. Now we can use slow productivity to get there in the most sustainable way possible, right?

All the principles become relevant here. Obsess over quality, super important in academia. This means something very specific. Papers that can get into venues of this level of quality. Like that's specifically what this means. And you have to figure out the reality of how does that happen? Do not write your own story.

You gotta work with collaborators who publish in those places. You have to read the papers in these places and say, what is really needed to get a paper here? You have to obsess over that. It's probably much harder than you think, right? So you have to obsess over quality when looking for a promotion.

What about doing fewer things? Also really critical here, right? These are academically demanding, cognitively demanding things you're doing. So your work in progress limits need to be really small. It's like, I'm working actively on this paper and I'm preparing this paper and that's it, right? It's like, I'm focusing really intensely on a small number of things.

As you were doing, keep doing. I'm keeping my service obligations low. I'm being a bit of a pain. I could be useful to the department after promotion. I could be useful to the university after promotion. Now I have to get these papers. You focus on a small number of things at a time and try to do them very well, critical for this period.

What about work at a natural pace? Also critical, especially in academia, you need this sort of up and down intensity so you don't burn yourself out. So what I recommend, for example, is in the two to four week period following the submission of a paper, you have a severe wind down.

Okay, I'm really like cutting back for a couple of weeks. I can do no work for a week at all, except for like my classes. And then I'm just gonna be doing some like background thinking and conversations. I am going to recharge and refresh, expose myself to ideas, get re-inspired, catch up on journal reading, finish working at three every day and go exercise instead.

Give yourself two to four weeks before you then begin like ramping up more intensely on the next paper. So academics have to really lean into that seasonality to prevent them having a sort of brain exhaustion. All right, so the three principles of slow productivity, not surprisingly, given that, you know, I'm an academic who has gone through all these levels, assistant to associate, the more recently associate the full, not surprisingly, there's a congruence between the principles of slow productivity in my book and what's necessary to be successful in academia.

So read that book, embody those rules, and make sure you're aiming towards a realistic assessment of what's needed. Once you get 10, I'll commiserate with you all day about whether it's fair or makes sense or not. But if you get obsessed on that story now, you're gonna get resentful.

Your energy is gonna go towards like reducing dissidence. I wanna just like really establish why the system is bad. So if I don't get promoted, like I don't feel bad about it, that's all just wasted energy, right? Fair or not, here's what you need to do. Let's use slow productivity to get there as sustainable as possible.

All right, Jessie, let's hear that music one more time. (upbeat music) - You know, slow productivity was selected, I don't know if it was announced yet or not. You know, the Next Big Idea Club, it's this company, it's like Gladwell and Dan Pink and Adam Grant, where you subscribe.

And every quarter they're like, "Here's the two best idea books of the quarter." And they send it to all their subscribers. And they have this like long process of like, "Here's our nominees, then here's the finalists. "And then here's like the books, "the two books we think are the best." Slow productivity was chosen for the club.

- Oh, wow. - Yeah, so all the subscribers are gonna get a copy of Slow Productivity. So there we go, those guys like that book too. You gotta read it if you have it. All right, I think we have a call, is that right? - Yep. - All right, let's hear it.

- Cal, your content has been consistently excellent, so thank you. Your book, Slow Productivity, was also outstanding. My name is Etienne Huard, I'm a Benedictine monk, from whom you've actually answered a few questions before. Thank you. I use block scheduling as fast as possible and often teach it to students under my care.

Now, recently I've been noticing AI-driven calendars, calendars like Motion and Reclaim that use, I guess, a kind of block scheduling principle, but automatically based on settings, levels of importance, time, et cetera, schedule them in appropriate places. So for example, if I cancel a one-hour meeting I was to have in the afternoon, the AI program would then fill that spot with a task that fits the timeframe and level of urgency.

I'm curious about your thoughts concerning such technology and its integration with the deep life and slow productivity. Many thanks. - All right, it's a good question. I have been following these sort of AI innovations and AI scheduling. If you are a practitioner of the type of ideas we talked about today in my deep dive, and in particular, multi-scale planning, AI-based scheduling systems are superfluous and unnecessary, right?

It doesn't take that much time to build a schedule. It doesn't take that much time to adjust your schedule when something changes. To automate all of that is saving you, at best, 25 minutes in the course of a 40-hour workweek. It's negligible. What do you lose? The AI is way worse than you, right?

I mean, think about our multi-scale planning philosophy. You have these large, bigger ideas and visions for what you wanna do. You have this weekly plan that kind of balances that and the other things that are going on in your week. You have your view of the particular day and what you're trying to fit into that day, and you have all the subjective factors, such as how you're doing, your energy, how you're feeling, what's really happening, what else is happening in the world.

All these things come together to make your brain really good at saying, "Hey, how should I fill in this block that just got freed?" Or looking at your week and being like, "What do I wanna work on this week and when I wanna get it done?" Your brain is fantastic at that, and you gain very little by trying to automate it.

And more importantly, you want to be actively involved in your scheduling. It's important for you to understand what you're working on, why you're working on it, how long things take, what your vision is. To me, this sort of AI-scheduled future sort of personifies this sort of worst vision of widget-cranking reduction of knowledge workers to sort of assembly line stations.

It's this sort of worst pseudo-productivity notion of just like, "Be busy, more is better than less." And just, you always have to have something to do. You're putting steering wheels on the Model T, you're putting the trunk door on the back of the Ford Tauruses. It kind of reduces knowledge work into this more sort of just systematic, here's a new thing, crank, here's another thing, crank.

And I see this more as like an opera. There's different acts to it. You're figuring out, this plays into my grand goal, and this is smaller, and you're playing with these pieces and trying to build this performance of your work week that is useful and beautiful and interesting and technically adept.

So I don't like this idea of having machines schedule things for you, and it doesn't solve a problem we have. If we're listing the biggest hits to productivity in the knowledge workers week, nowhere near the top of that list are you gonna see time spent thinking about what to put on your calendar.

No, it's context switching. It's the back and forth conversations over email. It's the excessive meetings. It's the administrative overhead aggregation that comes from having too many active projects on the same time. These things are huge killers of your ability to concentrate. They're burning everybody out. That's what matters. That's where, if we're gonna solve a problem with AI, solve those problems.

Learning that you like to do meetings at three on Tuesdays, like this is a solution looking for a problem. So I'm not that interested in those tools. So I appreciate the question 'cause there are a lot of those tools out there, and it's not something I would spend a lot of time thinking about if I was you.

All right, so we've got a good final segment coming up and getting to the books I read in July, but first let's hear from another sponsor. So I heard a statistic, Jesse, that was pretty surprising to me. Netflix has more than 18,000 titles in their library. But only something like 6,000 of those titles are available in the US.

So you are missing out on thousands of great shows when you are using Netflix in the US. That is unless you are using ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a product I've been talking about for a long time. It's my preferred VPN. You should be using a VPN in general. It's a way to regain some privacy over what sites and services you're accessing, whether it's like at home and your cable provider is looking at this, or you're on the road and people are sniffing these packets out of the air.

But there's this cool other benefit you get from using a VPN, which is if you connect to a VPN server in a different country, you can gain access to services or content that's only available in that country. So like, for example, on Netflix, I was messing around with this the other day.

If you connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK, there are some like really cool shows that are available on Netflix in the UK, but not in the US. For example, like "Rick and Morty". It's a really cool cartoon. It's available in the UK, not in the US. The new drama, the FX drama "Fargo", the sort of the dramatization of the Coen Brothers movie.

UK Netflix, yes. US Netflix, no. So if you just connect to a VPN server, an ExpressVPN server in UK, all that's available. So it's kind of like a cool extra benefit you can get from using a VPN. Now, as I've said, if you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN.

It's easy to use. You just fire up the app and click one button to change locations. It works on all of your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, and more. Super fast, right? They have a lot of bandwidth, fast servers. You can stream in HD through a VPN server with zero buffering.

You don't even know you're using it. It was rated number one by tech reviewers at places like CNET and The Verge. And again, you get all these privacy benefits from connecting in an encrypted tunnel through a VPN server. People nearby don't know what you're actually using. Right, so I'm a big fan of ExpressVPN, both for privacy and for cool things like finding shows that aren't available in your location.

So be smart and stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting access to a fraction of their content. Get your money's worth at expressvpn.com/deep. Don't forget to use my link at expressvpn.com/deep to get an extra three months free of ExpressVPN. But I also wanna talk about my friends at ZocDoc.

Look, I'm going to the dentist tomorrow. Got me thinking, how do you do things like find a dentist? Or like, let's say you need a dermatologist. How do you find a dermatologist to go to? Let's say you need a podiatrist. Your foot's hurting you. How does one go about finding a podiatrist, right?

I think for my generation, these are all these things that fall into the categories of like adult things that our parents just seem to do. And now we have to do them and we have no idea how to go about it. Well, this is where ZocDoc enters the scene.

It's an idea that makes so much sense. I can't believe it hasn't been around longer. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network doctors, choose the right one for your needs and click to instantly book an appointment, right? We're talking about in-network appointments with more than a hundred thousand healthcare providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health, eye care to skin care, and much more.

So like, look, you're looking for a dermatologist. You can go on your ZocDoc app. I could touch that. You can go into your ZocDoc app and say, okay, give me a dermatologist near where I am. Now let me filter this search. Dermatologist near where I am who take my insurance.

Dermatologist near where I am who take my insurance and are looking for taking new patients. Now you get a couple options. Now you can read the reviews. These are real patient reviews. Oh, this one here, people really like, and there's a good chance you'll be able to then book your appointment right there using the ZocDoc technology.

It really makes finding healthcare quite simple. I wanted to point out also that ZocDoc appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even often score same day appointments. So I have multiple healthcare providers who use ZocDoc. I have found healthcare providers with ZocDoc. I have healthcare providers who use ZocDoc to help do like the, once you set up the appointment, to do like your pre-appointment paperwork.

So I'm a fan of this product and I think you should be as well. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep. All right, let's get now to our final segment. All right, so every month in the first episode of the new month, I like to review the books I read the month before.

This episode is coming out in August. So I will talk about the books I read in July, 2024. I usually try to read five books per month. I was up in my undisclosed location up North this summer during much of July, so I read seven instead of five. So I got a little bit more done than normal.

All right, here's what they are. Book number one, "The Revolutionary" by Stacey Schiff. Each year around July 4th, I like to read a book that's about the American founding or a founding father or a founding father adjacent character. So actually I started this last summer, but then returned to it and finished it this summer.

Stacey Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams. We all know about his cousin, John Adams. We know about the beer named after Sam Adams. Didn't know much about the figure himself. So I think Schiff did a great job of getting into the history of Sam Adams. Heavily, heavily involved, especially in New England based revolutionary activity.

Then I read "Blue Meridian" by Peter Matheson. All right, this is the account. Peter Matheson is a reporter who embedded on a expedition in the late 1960s to find and film great white sharks. Very little was known about great white sharks. I mean, even just sharks in general, we didn't know much about in the '50s.

So not that much before this book came out. Jacques Cousteau started going underwater with cameras and scuba gear and filming sharks underwater. And this was kind of a new thing. People were like, "Ooh, look at this." And then this particular crew, it was the son or someone from the, I guess the grandson of Gimbels from like the Gimbels department store fortune.

And some others set out to film great white sharks because very little was known about them, right? And they're like, "We're gonna get our first "like real footage of like great white sharks in action." They were sort of like the early innovators here of shark cages, like we're gonna get in water and film these things underwater.

They kind of invented some of the first shark cages. And they went out to sort of find where are great white sharks. Look, we knew very little about these back then and they wanted to find them. And so this reporter came along with it and then wrote a book about it.

And I found the vintage copy of this book, "Blue Meridian." And it's a fun summer read. Why is "Blue Meridian" kind of famous? Because it's the book and more importantly, the documentary that the book is about. This documentary is what Peter Benchley saw in the early '70s and got the idea for writing "Jaws." So he saw the documentary that this, that came out of this expedition, which was called "Blue Water, White Death." And that's how he got motivated to like, "Ooh, I should write about white sharks attacking people." So just kind of these like interesting connections.

It was a fun book, well-written. Peter Matheson's a good writer. Speaking of aquatic themes, I also read a book called "History of the World in 12 Shipwrecks" by David Gibbons. This was just an impulse buy. I don't know where I got this from. I think I got it from "Politics and Prose." He's an underwater archeologist, like a storied underwater archeologist, like has 40 years and has been involved in some of the major shipwreck dives of those 40 years.

The book is just, here's 12 shipwrecks, most of which he dived on, and he gives the history of the wrecks, but also the time period in which that wreck came from. And in doing so, you get kind of like a nice capsule history of important places and times in the history of the world.

So like, here's a Viking ship, here's an ancient Roman ship, here's, you know, up through like a World War II ship. So it was a pretty cool book. He's a dense writer, so I'll just warn you about that. He writes, he's British and academic. So man, like you have to go slow.

It is like, his sentences are like they're Byzantine, right? Like, he will, this secondary clause, tertiary clause, back to a secondary clause, back to the original clause. And also he just references things. So there's like a, even though this is a book written for a general audience, he's like constantly referencing things that he sort of just assumes you know about.

And you're like, what the, I have no idea who these people are and what's going on. So very like sort of British historian type, but really cool guy and interesting book. Another impulse read, I grabbed this on a bookstore in Vermont somewhere when I was up North. This is Peggy Ornstein's book she wrote during COVID-19 called "Unraveling," where she wanted to do all the steps of producing the yarn to knit her own sweater.

So shearing the sheep, changing the like, I don't know how you, spinning the wool, dyeing the yarn, and then sewing the sweater. I sort of was in the mood for this sort of experiment in rural living type of book. And Peggy Ornstein's a great writer. So I read it, it was good.

I thought it was really interesting. Sort of a lot of COVID era left politics in there, which kind of got a little annoying after a while, 'cause I kind of cared more about like the sheep and the country life and the reconnecting to it. And there's a lot of sort of, it was a reminder of the sort of peak COVID anxiety mixed in left-wing politics of that time, which I don't want to revisit.

So you're gonna get a big, you can get a big dose of that in that book. Then I read Brian Rafferty's book, "Best Movie Year Ever." It's a period after every word. It's a book about 1999. It was epic movie year, this famous movie year. All of these like really influential movies sort of all came out in this same year.

And so this book basically, it's one of these standard kind of like movie history books. It just goes through movie by movie and you get a story about that particular movie before it moves on to the next. So if you really want to get like a deep, not a deep dive, but just like this capsule look at, I think it was something like 15 or 16 movies he covers.

And as someone who likes movies, I was really interested. You learn a lot. You know, like what was going on with David Fincher and "Fight Club." What about the Wachowskis and "Matrix," "The Matrix," which like came out in the same time. All these other different movies that were all American beauty, like what was happening with Sam Raimi.

And so they could just fall into these different movies, these different histories. And it was good. It was good. I'm actually right now listening to kind of like the original famous book in this format, which is like the best one, which is "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls." I might have that backwards.

About the '70s in movies. That's a real, that's "Biscayne." That's a real famous one. All right, I also finished "The Coming Wave" by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind. It's kind of a wave-generating book, came out a year or so ago, where he was making his predictions about the future of AI and synthetic biology and how it was gonna have all these disruptions and what we can do about it.

And there's not really much we can do about it. So one of these kind of prognostication books, because Mustafa is the co-founder of DeepMind, he was coming from a place of authority. Anyways, in my role as someone who writes and thinks a lot about AI, it was just one of these things I needed to read.

And it's very readable. It kind of goes through and explains things and has some prognostications, a good book. Finally, a fun book. I read "Ready Player Two" by Ernst Kline. I actually bought this for one of my sons when we were dropping him off at camp. And I was like, "Well, I should read this before he gets back because I might be interested.

Also, I should make sure it's appropriate for him." And it was actually, Ernst Kline is good at these books. "Ready Player One" and "Ready Player Two," there is an interesting amount of craft in it. They're weird books, right? It's this super dense nostalgia. It's not the most richly drawn characters, and he's not a great characterization guy, and there's a lot of internal exposition.

But somehow, he gets this rhythm going. You're in this weird, fake world, literally fake world, and the stakes he sets up and how it rolls forward, plus just the complexity and the wonder of the world, and it presses a lot of nostalgia buttons, especially if you're a millennial or an old millennial like I am.

I know, it's hard to write these type of books. I appreciate techno-thrillers, and Ernst Kline has done something new in the world of techno-thrillers. So I enjoyed "Ready Player Two" more than I really thought I would. All right, so those are my seven books I read in July. All right, Jesse, I think that's all the time we have.

Thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay deep. So if you liked today's discussion about core productivity habits, you might also like episode 305, where I addressed the critique that time-block planning can seem oppressive. I think you will like this companion in today's episode.

Check it out. Anyways, with great care in tact, Berkman admitted that time-blocking does not work that well for him, and in fact, he feels like it is a little oppressive.