This is more about what they did with the time that was outside of work is what impacted how they felt about their schedule, not that in order to do salsa dancing, they were working on average three hours less or something like this. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

Here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm excited. We have a guest coming up. Yeah. Later in the program, I will be joined by Laura Vanderkam, who a lot of you know. She's the author of nine books. She's another one of these nonfiction writers like me who emerged from that early 2000s era where blogs were king and a lot of us came out of that world into the world of professional writing.

She focuses on time management with a particular focus on making time for the things that matter, even when there are multiple things that matter that are in conflict. So she's known in particular, really, for thinking about you have your career, you have your family, you're trying to make both of these things work.

Very pragmatic, very evidence based. I know we have a lot of fans of Laura in this audience. So later in the show, she's going to join me. We're going to do a bunch of questions together. I pulled a lot of questions that felt like they would be in her wheelhouse and we will discuss them.

She'll give her thoughts. I'll give mine. We'll see where we differ. We'll see where we agree. I think that's going to be, I think it's going to be fun. Before we bring Laura on, though, Jesse, I got to say it's a little bit sad. This may be for a while, one of the last recordings in this studio, at least for the summer period.

Yeah, you're moving up to the HQ North. Moving to HQ North. We've talked about this off and on on the show, but just to just to provide some more details around the time this episode is airing, I am going to be going up to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in the summer quarter.

I am the Montgomery Fellow on campus, which means I'll be up there teaching a course. So I'm teaching a course called Writing About Technology. Jesse, I've never written, I've never taught a writing course. I've always only taught computer science courses. So this is going to be interesting. Oh, this will be fun.

It'll be fun. It's theory and practice. So we're going to read a bunch of different technology writing and really try to understand and deconstruct from a functional perspective, the different types of styles and tones and voices and approaches you use to persuasively write about technology. And we're going to write.

Any examples of stuff you're going to read? Oh, I have it broken into a lot of categories. So, for example, the first week, the category of writing we're going to look at is the personal encounters with technology. Right. So the form where the author is a character in the writing and then that I've split.

We have it's too long lecture, too long class periods per week. So the first time we're going to look at the subgenre of personal encounters with technologies focused on going to places and doing things. So this is the classic genre in which the writer goes and hits the road or goes to the factory and tries the tool.

This is Kevin Kelly at Magic Leap. This is the Neil Stevenson tracing the fiber optic cable that diggers the earth. So it's interactive journalism. And then in the second class that week, we're going to look at personal encounters with technology that are based off of your own experiences and reflection.

So this is more the personal essay approach to dealing with technology. So this is more Gia Tolentino and her, you know, new kind of new classic piece on Instagram face where it's less about. I am going and doing something, and it's more you're reflecting on your own thoughts and experience with the technology, your proxy for the audience.

So you're trying to get at some truth about the psychological impact of technology by revealing your inner psychological state. So we're going to read a bunch of stuff. Then we're going to write. So we're going to they're going to writing as well. We're going to do a lot of the work in class itself and work through a few different op ed length technology pieces.

So it's going to be a bit of learning the tools, practicing the tools. That's cool. Yeah, I think it'll be fun. So if you're a sophomore at Dartmouth, so Dartmouth, the sophomores are on campus during the summer. Oh, really? All the sophomores are there. So if you're a sophomore, that's what I'll be teaching.

So if you're a sophomore, sign up for the class. We would love to have you. So I'll be fun. So anyways, that means I'll be recording remotely. I'll be up there. Jesse will be down here. We might have another studio recording. I'm coming back for a little bit of time, so we might be able to squeeze in a HQ South recording somewhere in there.

But for the most part, if the podcast looks or sounds a little bit different in July and August, that's because I'm I'm up doing. Fellowship stuff, so it should be fun. Yeah, we'll see. I'm going to hike. There's a nice trail right next to the house where we're staying.

Oh, yeah, it's the cross country trail. It goes across along the river. So I have a lot of big thoughts. So looking forward to that before we get to Laura. I also wanted to revisit our discussion from last week about the deep life stack. Was that last week, Jesse?

Yeah, I always track a time. That seems like it was forever ago, but it really wasn't. Yeah, it was last week. Yeah. So I got a lot of good feedback. So the deep life stack, I was I was proposing a more elaborated understanding of my philosophy of how to cultivate a deep life.

And I introduced this notion of a deep life stack where you build these layers sequentially one after another, as opposed to just jumping right into rejiggering parts of your life. In fact, I'll bring up on the screen now the version of the stack I drew in last week's episode.

So if you're listening and want to see what's on the screen, this is episode 253. So go to YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia and search for episode 253 or go to the deep life.com and look for episode 253. So what you'll see on the screen was the stack I drew on Monday, Monday.

I don't know when it was last week. So we had discipline, values, calm and plan. The idea was you worked your way up the stack en route to cultivating a deeper life and then you iterate. It's a process we keep iterating. All right, I sent this out for feedback to you, my listeners.

I got a lot of good feedback. So one of the things I want to try, the change I want to try today, one of many iterations I'm sure will be coming in the months ahead, is tweaking the description of these stacks away from just a single word to something with a verb.

So I want to try relabeling each of the layers here with a verb, an actual action, as opposed to just a noun and see if this maybe clarifies things even more. So I have this on the screen now. I'm going to start with the very bottom layer, which is discipline.

I'm erasing the word discipline. All right, and I'm going to rewrite. There's so many cables in here. All right. I don't want to mess with our feed here. All right, there we go. All right, let's rewrite here. I'm changing the label with my brilliantly neat handwriting. So it used to say discipline.

Now it says establish or in parentheses reestablish discipline. Right? So there's a verb here now. It's what are you trying to do as you work through the first layer of the Deep Life stack is you're trying to either re-get in touch with or establish from scratch a sense of I am someone who is able to do something hard in the moment towards something that is meaningful or important in the long term.

So this is where, as we talked about last time, you're going to, first of all, set up your central repository where you keep track of all of your commitments in this journey. And you're going to initiate that central repository with a few seed disciplines, a small number of things that are important, that are hard, but not impossible.

That you are pursuing regularly just to reset your sense of self, just to reset your energy towards, okay, I am someone who can make progress towards hard things. I am a disciplined person. Now I'm going to take the next layer, which was originally called values. And I erased a little bit of the box there.

So I'll put that back. And I'm going to replace that with a verb. So again, if you're watching episode 253, you'll actually see my penmanship in action. All right, I'm writing in a new description for this layer. So where it used to just say values, I now say build a foundation of values.

So I've just added an active verb here. You're building a foundation. That's the goal. Now, what is this foundation? It's going to be something that clarifies what in this part of your life your values are. This is going to include your code. It's going to include rituals. It's going to include routines.

But what's active here is you're building the foundation on which everything else will be built. A lot of people ask, why not do that first? Why is discipline coming first? Because discipline is changing your sense of self so that everything else is possible. It's setting up the central repository where you're going to write down everything you commit to doing.

But more importantly, it's where you change your rhythm of life towards one where I'm doing this with my exercise. I'm doing this with reading. There's something I'm doing. There's a couple of things I'm doing that are hard and I'm proud of. And that's what leads me to believe that everything else is possible too.

So that's why I'm maintaining discipline first. All right, moving up. Calm. I am going to replace calm with create calm through control. So the active word here is that you're creating calm. You're seeking to create calm in your life, to have breathing room to pursue interesting things, to have the ability to do things really well if that becomes a big part of the plans that are coming next.

How are you going to create this calm? You're going to gain control. You're going to gain control over your time. You're going to gain control over all the different obligations on your plate. So it's not just haphazard. You're going to get control over your workload, professional and personal as well.

You're going to start doing some essentialism here. I'm going to cut this. I'm going to cut that out. I need to make some breathing room. So through control, you're going to create calm in your life. That's what brings us to the top layer of the stack. Last week, I simply just said plan.

And that is a verb. So we'll keep that. But now I'm going to say plan for the remarkable. So what type of plans are you making here? This is where you take different parts of your life, piece by piece, one by one, the buckets that are important to you and say, how am I going to overhaul this area of my life?

All of this, of course, is going to generate new commitments or systems or ideas that go into that central repository you set up, right? But what is your goal with this planning? I wanted that in here. And this is why I say plan for the remarkable. And I don't mean remarkable in the hyperbolic sense of, oh, my God, it's, you know, every part of your life you've overhauled into some sort of crazy over-the-top expression.

It's not just you're exercising a lot, but that you're rich roll doing the five Ironmans in five days or something like this. I actually mean remarkable more in the literal sense. When you overhaul, you make a plan to overhaul a part of your life, it becomes worthy of remark to other people in your life.

Other people in your life will say, you know, I noticed what you're doing with fitness or what you're doing with your connection to life of the mind, what you're doing with how you're integrating your life into the community that people are important to you. I have noticed how intentional you are about it, how rewarding that seems, how impressive that seems.

So when I say plan for the remarkable, I mean, you're overhauling the different areas of your life one by one with the goal of making those areas of your life worthy of remark. Now, maybe in one of these areas, you want to push it to remarkable in the hyperbolic sense.

I can do something huge that people are going to hear about and be impressed by it, even if they don't know me, but you don't have to do that everywhere. But you do want the different parts of your life to be overhauled with enough intention that people notice. I notice what you're doing there.

That's interesting. That's appealing. That's impressive. So I put plan for the remarkable. All right. So this is what's called this. I'm going to label the top here, the deep life stack. I'm going to add version 2.0. All right. So we have continued to make progress here and thinking about the deep life stack.

Everything we talk about on the show comes back one way or the other to probably one of these layers or at least most things we talk about. I would say when Laura joins us here in a second, I'm looking at the questions I've polled. Those are going to deal mainly with the calm and plan layers that create calm through control.

We have some questions definitely about getting your handle on obligations, time and workload. Also, there's going to have some questions there that really cover this plan for the remarkable as well. I want to take this part of my life and make it better, but I'm struggling to do it or I want a clear vision for how to do that.

So we'll be lurking in these two layers primarily in the questions that we do today. But over time, of course, we'll keep hitting on all of these layers. All right. That's 2.0. Jesse, what do you think? Better? Worse? Unnecessary? Do you like the verbs? I like the verbs. Yeah.

I think it explains it a little bit better. Yeah. Verbs for me always help, I guess, because then you can imagine you doing something. Yeah. As opposed to just a label. What's that label mean? So we'll see if that helps. This will keep evolving. Maybe this will be my summer project when I'm podcasting.

I'll keep we'll keep coming back to this, thinking through the stack a little bit more, clarifying this. So we have some sort of framework for all the specific advice we talk about. So we're talking about some system or some case study or talking to an author about some idea from their book.

You can place it mentally in where does this fall into this approach to cultivating a deep life? Oh, we're in the case study about establishing discipline today. Oh, no, this is a system about organizing your time. Where's that fit into the idea of having a deep life? Oh, we're at the calm, create calm through control layer, working on that.

Oh, we're talking about someone who created a really cool life living on an island somewhere. Oh, we're in the plan for the remarkable. We can have some clarity about where we are. We'll see. All right. So I'm excited. I want to bring Laura into the conversation here in a second.

First, let me just mention one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. That is our friends at Roan, R-H-O-N-E. I was actually thinking about Roan recently as I'm moving up north to do a summer semester at Dartmouth. I don't normally teach or do events in the summer. I'm going to be doing a lot of events up at Dartmouth.

And Jesse, to the point where I'm almost worried about this. So this fellowship has a full time scheduler who manages my calendar while I'm up there, because there's so many events on campus and public that come along with this fellowship. Right. Which I don't normally do during the summer.

So now I care about clothes that are going to look nice, but also be flexible and lightweight and breathable and allow me to go through long summer days from the classroom up to giving a speech up to doing a panel. And this has got me thinking about Roan because they have exactly the clothing collection that would make that possible.

And that is their commuter collection, the most comfortable, breathable and flexible set of products known to mankind. Right. They help you get ready for any occasion with the commuter collection. We're talking pants, we're talking dress shirts, we're talking forth zips and polos. They have everything you need for your outfit.

What is the right word I'm thinking about? Your closet, your collection of clothes. Is there a word for that? Yeah. Wardrobe. Yeah. Man, fire today, Jesse. It's four way stretch fabric. I do like this about the commuter collection. So it's breathable and flexible. It's also very lightweight. I love this about the commuter collection.

It breathes. A very lightweight shirt is flexible. You don't feel like you're overheating, even if you're very active in the day. It also looks great. It has wrinkle release technology, so it looks good. It doesn't get wrinkly throughout the day. In fact, the wrinkles disappear as you wear it more.

It also has gold fusion anti-odor technology. So if you're having that long day in the summer, you're not going to smell like it. So the commuter collection can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. Head to Rhone.com/Cal and use that promo code Cal and you will get 20% off your entire order.

That's 20% off your entire order. When you head to Rhone.com/Cal and use that code Cal, it's time to find your corner office comfort. I think my plan to wear the commuter collection, Jesse, is better than my other plan of wearing a full 19th century woollen academic regalia. I can picture you in one of those hats.

You know, I have, I wore the hat recently. I don't know if you ever met Alex, my PhD student, but he graduated and I hooded him. And so I had to wear the full regalia with the floppy hat. So that was my original plan for this summer. It was just that I wanted to sort of impress people with my academic credentials.

So I figured what better way than to wear my full woollen knee length academic regalia with the hat and the, and the hood and the giant sleeves that looks like Dumbledore. So I was just going to wear that around. Yeah, you can wear that on your walks. Because I'll tell you something, this is insider baseball for academia, but different universities have different color schemes for their regalia.

And typically it's, you know, it's black, but there'll be a detail on the shoulders. MIT, right, since I have my doctorate from MIT, that's my, my regalia university. It's very noticeable because it's gray with maroon. So you really can flex. I'm going to walk around in my MIT regalia.

That was my original plan. But I figured, I don't know, middle of the summer, July, maybe that's not the most reasonable, flexible thing. So plan B, Roan commuter collection. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. That'd be good. We'll see how that goes. Maybe Roan should make, use their four-way stretch fabric to make performance regalia.

From the academic hooding ceremony onto the golf course without even having to stop in between Roan regalia for the incredibly pompous academic in your life. All right. I also want to talk about our friends at Ladder. You know, you need life insurance. If you don't have it and you're anxious about this, the reason that the explanation for that is probably you don't know where to begin.

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Just go to LadderLife.com/deep today to see if you are instantly approved. That is LADDERLife.com/deep. LadderLife.com/deep. All right. So let's go on to our question segment, which we will be joined today by Laura Vanderkam. Jesse, let's get Laura on the line. Sounds good. All right, Laura, thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I am. I've been I've been looking forward to this for a while now. So as I've been in recent episodes looking at questions, pulling questions for the episodes, I'd had a special mark for, oh, this might be a good one to talk to Laura about.

So I actually finally get a I actually find it finally get to use those. Let's get a couple. There's a couple of things I want to ask about you just to orient our our listeners some. Though our listeners seem to know you well, because they will often tell me you should ask Laura about that when they don't like one of my answers.

So I don't know how many people this will actually be edifying. But what's your your book count these days? Are you eight or nine? Where are you? Something like that. Yeah. I mean, I have have six full length time management books, so that tends to be what people know me for.

Yes. But I wrote some stuff before then, have written some other things during there that are on different topics, more just because I like a lot of different things. And some fiction, which I admire as well. I've written a few novels. Probably your listeners have not read those. But the time management ones.

Yes. Six, six books on that right now. How was the experience writing a novel coming from someone who was primarily writing pragmatic nonfiction? Well, I've kind of gone in and out of both over the years. And so I don't know that I would even have thought that, you know, that I trained as a nonfiction writer or anything like that.

It's just something I've I've always done on the side to write fiction as well. There's a little bit less of a commercial market for a lot of it, unless you're, you know, the really big name type people. But yeah, I find that writing is writing. And a lot of the same ideas hold for both.

It really helps to know what you're saying. Maybe some people can wing it. But I find it's better to know where you're going with something that you're writing. The more you have a detailed outline, the better it's going to be to write it. The process of writing. So with nonfiction, it's generally that you have the chapter outline.

You have the research you're talking about, the people you've interviewed. That's all there for fiction. It's more that, OK, here are all the chapters. Here's what's going to happen in each of the chapters and writing an actual outline of each of those. And so then you can go in and fill them in.

And as with both, it gets better. The more times you go through it, the more times you edit it, the more feedback you get on it from people who know what they're talking about. And generally just try to do the same thing for both. That's good to hear. That's good to hear.

So then. So when I describe I'm trying to describe you to other people, tell me if I get this right. So so in your nonfiction, you focus on time management, but within time management, really there's an emphasis on making time for the things that matter, even when there's multiple answers to that question that are not compatible with each other.

The classic example being career matters, family matters, but not just that. That being a canonical example of how do I support and make time for things that really matter when I have multiple different things that matter, each of which would like to consume all of my time if possible, each of which would consume all my time if I'm not intentional about it or not wary about it.

Is that is that a good description? Am I capturing the Laura Vanderkam oeuvre? Probably. I think we're getting at it there. I mean, I have that pithy phrase on my website of, you know, spend more time on what matters and less on what doesn't. So that's always what I have is my branding statement that I'm hoping to help people do.

I, you know, am definitely interested in the intersection of things like work and life or whatever people want to do that is apart from sort of career responsibilities. You know, many people are deeply involved in their communities or have whatever else that they wish to do in their personal lives.

And I find that we often create these ideas that the two are in opposition. You know, people talk about work life balance like they are on opposite sides of the scale. So when one goes up, the other inevitably has to go down because that's that's the way a scale works, you know.

But I'm not even sure that's the best metaphor. And I don't really like it because I think in many cases they aren't in opposition to nearly the degree that people think they are. And so I'm always trying to get people to think more broadly about how they spend their time to consider all the possibilities of how they are spending their time.

And perhaps on a fundamental level, to think about time in a broader way, like one hundred sixty eight hours, which is the number of hours in a week instead of twenty four hours in a day. I mean, people think about twenty four hours in a day. They are inevitably going to limit whatever they can get to because it's a shorter amount of time.

But you look over a week, maybe more possibilities open up. The other way I describe you sometimes is evidence based time management writer, because you have this particular research methodology built around having people keep track of how they spend their time, get data on how they spend their time and then using that information.

How many of your books have used that the time diaries as one of the key sources of data? Because it's multiple books. Right. I mean, I first encountered this in one sixty eight hours, but you've used this in other books. Right. Yeah. So one hundred sixty eight hours. Definitely.

I had people track their time for that with my book. I know how she does it, which came out about seven, eight years ago now. It was a time diary study that particularly looked at women who had big jobs and who also had kids at home and tracked how they spent time for one hundred sixty eight hours for each of them.

And so I could look at questions of, you know, how much do people work? When do they work? What other things do they do in their lives? And so I could get some actual data on that question that I think a lot of people approach with far more. I don't know.

Not data. Let's just put it that way. And then Off the Clock was another book of mine where I had many hundreds of people record a day. And I looked at the difference between people who had a more abundant perspective on time and the people who had sort of a more scarcity mindset about time as measured on various dimensions.

You know, what are people doing differently? Like, right. What can I draw conclusions from this? Right now, we need to hear these conclusions. Wait. So go back. So I know how she did it. How were the women with the big jobs and families doing it? What was the punch line there?

Well, the punch line. Well, I mean, again, the truth is there is one hundred sixty eight hours in a week. And while big jobs. So everyone in the study was earning six figures. Right. That was my my dividing line. And not that you can't have a big job with a lot of responsibilities and earn less than that.

And not that some six figure jobs aren't total coasting kind of things. It's just you need some thing for doing any sort of research. So they had six figure jobs. They had kids at home. In many cases, they weren't working around the clock. I mean, that's a common misperception that, you know, big, high paying jobs require you to work all the time.

Yeah. In many cases, they do not. People definitely work longer than 40 hours, but they're not working 80 hours. And there's a huge difference between working like, I don't know, 45 hours a week and working 75 hours a week. And if you think you need to work 75 hours a week, that's going to suggest very different things.

And if you find out like, oh, hey, most people in these big jobs work somewhere between 40 and 50 hours a week. Is that continuous or is it how does that spread out? It was not necessarily continuous. And that was the other interesting thing, you know, because even if you say, well, OK, they're going to be working 50 hours a week.

I've seen people say, well, then you have to leave the house at 7 a.m. for your hour long commute, work eight to six and then be home at 7 p.m. And so you'll never see your family or whatever, like that sort of thing. But that isn't the way most people worked.

And I'm sure many of your listeners who have jobs and families and particularly young children have sort of figured this out on their own. But it turns out that many people do this of ending work more on the early side, hanging out with your family for a couple hours, maybe doing some more work at night after kids go to bed or there are cousins of this version that getting up early and doing work or, you know, doing a shift on the weekend or something like that, but in order to spread it around so that you are there when young kids are awake and moving some of that work that could be done whenever two times that are sort of lower opportunity cost.

And then, OK, then for off the clock, what was the differences you observed behind between the self-reported time abundant versus time scarcity groups? Yeah, well, there are a couple of things. I mean, one was making time for sort of more reflective activities. That was something that came out quite pronounced in the data that the people who had the most abundant perspective on time were spending time on things like journaling, meditating, yoga, you know, any sort of thing along those lines, spiritual disciplines, whatever would have you think about life, like that you built in space to think about life.

And the people who had a more scarce perspective did almost none of that. And, you know, who knows? It could be correlation, causation. But I thought it was interesting to see something so profound as that. People who had a more abundant perspective on time spent more time interacting with people.

Right. Like they spent more time engaged with friends and family than the people who had a more scarce view of time. And that on some level doesn't make sense because obviously people take time. But, you know, what my saying that came out of that is that people are a good use of time.

Right. Because those that active engagement with fellow humans that you are enjoying is what makes time feel richer and more full. And probably is a slower perception of time. So an hour spent doing, let's say, interacting with people in your mind, it probably feels more expansive than an hour spent on your phone.

So reflect when you reflect back, you say, oh, I had a lot of time that day where I was doing other things. There's a different subjective experience. Yeah. It just changes the story you tell yourself. And I mean, just one more thing with with what they found differently. I found that the people who had a more abundant perspective on time, their lives looked more interesting.

Like I had people recording like a Monday, I think is what it was that they you know, everyone did the same day. But people did something like go to salsa dancing lessons on a Monday night. You know, the people who were in that top group were highly likely to have something that was just like, oh, that's like an actual thing.

Right. Like it's not, you know, I went to work, I came home, I ate dinner, I watched TV, I went to bed. You know, it was just that they had put something of some more excitement, something different, interesting, out of the ordinary into their lives, making more memories, more memories.

Again, like interacting with other people makes. Now, is the number is the number of work hours, though, more or less the same between these groups? Is that that's this is more about what they did with the time that was outside of work is what impacted how they felt about their schedule.

Not that in order to do salsa dancing, they were working on average three hours less or something like this. It wasn't as profound a difference as you might think. I think the people who had a I'm trying to remember this correctly here because it was five years ago now.

But from what I remember, the people who had a more scarce perspective on time were working a little bit more than the people who had the most abundant perspective. But we're talking like minutes. It wasn't three hours a day. You know, that was not the primary explanation for the difference.

That's interesting. So, you know, I pulled new questions to go over with you today, but this makes me want to revisit a question I did last week on the show. I want to get your take on this. I don't remember the exact wording, but the set of this question is basically someone that the person asking the question said, look, I am from a dual income family with two.

You know, me and my spouse both work. We're middle class, upper middle class or a knowledge work, dual income family. And they said it's impossible really to do anything. They called it what I call a deep life, but sort of any type of activities like a salsa dancing exercise reading.

They said that's clearly would be impossible to do without a huge amount of paid help, because the way they said is all we're doing is sort of like wrangling our kids and we're tired and, you know, there's no time. And so is any sort of self-focused or focus on interesting elements, prioritization of things, your life beyond just work and the care of your family?

Their question was, is that impossible if you don't have and they listed off a huge sort of list of staff, I guess. I don't know people. I didn't know you could hire these people. Right. But it's sort of Gatsby. You have like a staff that's like taking care, taking care of everything.

It's like my yard takes a long time and my kids, I have to drive around and we have to make dinner and I'm tired. All right, so how do you think about something like that, because you've actually spent your time, you spent a lot of time looking at the time of a lot of real people.

So how do you think about that situation, or at least that that claim that there is no time to do anything else in a sort of standard dual income family unless you have a household manager, unless you have a yard crew, unless you have a nanny to pick kids up from schools, etc.

Now, I don't agree with that fundamentally, partly because I've seen so many people manage to make space for interesting things in their lives. I mean, the first key thing is that there's two of them. Right. There's two adults in this house. So that right there creates a little bit more space and capacity than many people are dealing with.

So, you know, in families like this, one of the best habits you can get into is following one of my favorite time management rules, which is to take one night for you and each adult gets one night. And so it's a quid pro quo. You know, you take Tuesday.

I cover for you. You take Thursday. I cover for you. So each each parent does one night solo with the kids. And as a result, each parent gets one night on their own to do what they wish. And I always encourage people to choose something that is out of the home, fun for you and involves a commitment to other people.

And the reason for those three things is that, you know, people like, well, I want more time to myself. I'm going to take better care of myself, have self care. I'm going to go take more bubble baths or something like that. But but of course, that can be done whenever.

And so it tends to get pushed around if life gets busy, if something happens. Whereas if you are playing on a softball team on Thursday nights, like they're planning on you being there. Right. Like that's part of the lineup. You've got to show up. So even if you're busy, even if things are a little chaotic at home, you will go.

And that's not going to push happens. Yeah. Yeah. I can push it to some other time because you can't like everyone else is there. And it touches on those two things you saw before in your data, other people and novel, novel activity, novel activity. You will the same amount of time spent doing it.

You're going to think of it as, wow, I spent a lot of time doing this interesting thing. It just feels it feels more expansive. Yeah. And many cases this night for you doesn't have to take like much time. And I've seen people feel like their lives are totally transformed by the equivalent of two hours spent playing tennis with friends on Tuesday, you know, and their whole week feels different now that they have this thing they are looking forward to.

And it is two hours out of the entire hundred sixty eight hours that, you know, if you have a partner, your partner is with your kids. Right. It's not you didn't have to outsource this, you know, great. And now obviously you can. Like if if one parent is has a job that involves a ton of travel or late hours or, you know, somebody's deployed or, you know, if you are a single parent and you maybe work out something else, whether that's hiring a babysitter or trading off with a neighbor or friend or other relative.

But the point is, you can take one night. You can't tell me you can't take one. There are six others that you're there for. But one you can do. You had a good example. And I think it was in your book Tranquility by Tuesday. So I remember talking about it on the show and it was a professor and she was having a hard time finding time to do her research.

And she had given you and I don't have the details. You might remember this. She had come up with some plan that was just these little slivers of time. If I can I can take 30 minutes in between this being done before whatever. And if I remember that one of the things that really unlocked it was that it was the deployment of a babysitter, maybe like two afternoons or one afternoon a week on a non-teaching day.

And if she thought about if I have a babysitter, pick the kids up from school at three and be with them till five thirty. It's a minor thing. Right. That's not that many hours. She doesn't teach that day. She could be aggressive about starting at noon and working from noon to five and she could even leave her office to go to a library.

I might have added that part, but get like five hours twice a week to just do research. And it completely changed things for her. And what she was trying to do instead was I can't change anything. I can't can't rearrange everything. I just have to look at my existing busy schedule and try to find these slivers.

And it was just terrible. I'll get up at five and then I'll have like 30 minutes over here to do it. That made no sense. So I remember that that small thing you suggested. It's two hours of a babysitter twice a week or something like this. Unlocked ten hours, ten hours of I'm in the consistently working on research.

And that's all that was it. That was the whole game that was going to make that doable for her. So, yeah, that particular professor, I mean, you know, she was in the tenure window trying to get her research and her publications, as you're well aware. You know, it takes time and, you know, and she had to teach and she had to deal with in her particular case.

She was a professor of education and she was helping to train young teachers, which, as you can imagine, as she's supervising them, there's a million things that can go wrong with that. So there's a lot of a lot of back and forth. So it was hard to find that deep work time.

And, you know, she suggested these very small slivers a couple of times a week. And I'm like, yeah, I don't I don't think you're getting tenure in that. But. She, you know, this gets at something which is interesting, because I think I'm not sure how many, you know, men and women difference here, but I'm not sure how many men who are in the tenure window at major universities would be thinking that they should be picking up their kids from school every day at three o'clock.

Like that strikes me as sort of the kind of thing that maybe many of those men wouldn't be considering should be on their plate. And so it was kind of interesting to me that she thought it should be on her plate every day. And obviously, yeah, just doing it most days, but just not a couple of days.

Right. You're saying a man of that situation might have just said, well, this is not going to work. I can't do this every day. So we have to either hire someone or figure out how to how to swap this. They would be more likely to just. Advocate for, hey, there's got to be I want I need that time.

Yeah. And so she needed somebody to point that out to her, because I think she just didn't have it in her mind that since she, you know, it's a flexible job, unless you're teaching, you could go do something. And so it just needed to be pointed out that just because you can do something doesn't always mean you should.

Yeah. And then also, I believe she did. The other element of this is just working out with her husband. It was like Saturday morning or Sunday morning. We just had consistently this three hours, which he didn't mind at all. Like, yeah, that's great. Just great routine with the kids on, like, Saturday morning.

We go do something. But that was another consistent block. Yeah. And part of the upside, then, of having multiple blocks is when something inevitably goes wrong. I mean, one of her student teachers had some disaster that she has to then deal with. She wouldn't lose all her research time.

I mean, the problem is people carve out like one four hour block for research. And, you know, it doesn't take a genius to figure out something's going to go wrong at least some of the weeks. And so if you only have one slot, it won't happen maybe at least a third of the time.

But if you have two slots, if you have three slots, the odds that all three disappear are pretty low. All right. So that let's get in the questions then, because I'm looking at the questions we have here from my listeners. The first question is actually from a professor who's a mom who's struggling with this.

I think we've we've queued it up. It wasn't my plan. But now that I'm looking at this. All right. This is a this is a long question. So I might try to edit here a little bit on the fly. This is from someone who says calls herself Professor Mommy.

All right. My academic career is currently going well, but things are complicated. I had a two point five year old when I started my faculty position and I've had two additional babies in the past three years. My kids are now six, three and nine months. I'm assuming, by the way, she means six and three years old and nine months.

I always I always like the ambiguous modifiers. Three years. Nine months. Yes. I was I was about to be very impressed. OK. Childcare is not an issue. My oldest is in elementary school and the little ones are in daycare. I also have the most supportive husband in the world.

But I feel like two kids was manageable, but three is utterly chaotic. I felt like we went from having two kids to having 30. We just go through cycle after cycle of illness. My husband and I basically take turns working and taking care of the sick kids. My PhD advisor told me when I was a graduate student that I would need to accept being a mediocre professor and mother if I were to pursue both.

I now totally understand what she meant. I feel like I suck at both jobs. I can't do high quality work in academia because the kids require so much time and energy. I'm drained. I'm stressed out. I'm sleep deprived and irritable, which makes me feel terrible. What should I do?

I assume, Laura, you're going to say wake up at 4 a.m. and work harder. But you can correct me if I'm wrong. I'm going to go ahead and correct you here. I mean, I would say, OK, the first thing, a couple of things come to mind is like, boy, your your advisor had her own issues.

So I can't believe that anyone who is in a mentoring capacity would decide to say this to an ambitious young woman in her care. But we'll leave that aside. And by the way, the vast majority of female professors have families. And there is many anyways. It's a it's a it's a very absolute statement which doesn't seem to match the reality of think of any famous female academic that comes to mind.

Almost certainly they also have a family. So. All right. All right. All right. So let's roll forward from there. Yes, I would tell this woman. And first of all, I would not draw any harsh conclusions about life when you have a child under the age of one, because this is you're in the thick of it.

Like you just had a baby nine months ago. The baby is most likely not reliably sleeping through the night. She may still be nursing. Like there's just all sorts of things that are challenging in the first year or so of life that will get better. And you can see that, you know, you're like, oh, three is so much harder than two.

No, the older two were older. Right. And that's what made it feel like it was manageable. And now you've added an infant back into the mix. And so you're going through the chaos again. And I'm telling you that in another two years or so, it will be calmed down.

You'll be like, oh, these people are wonderful. I don't know. Maybe you'll decide to have a fourth at that point because you will forgotten. But, you know, it's going to be easier in the future. The other thing that struck out to me, she did say that child care is not an issue, but on some level it is.

Because kids get really sick in daycare. And it's not that the daycare is doing anything wrong. It's just when you have, you know, eight toddlers in a class together, they're all touching the same things and putting them in their mouth. And there's nothing you can do about it. It's going to give them great immune systems later in their life.

And I'm reading here three year old, three year old in twenty, twenty three. It's likely that this year might have been the first time this three year old has been so because you had covid before that or. And so I wouldn't be surprised if you have a completely untrained, a new immune system thrown for the first time in the daycare is it's like in a zombie movie.

It's just everyone is like collapsed on the ground with blood coming out of their eyes. It's just impossible. Right. So that's what I saw with three year old is this may be an unusually bad. And also this year was very bad in general nationwide because of the the immunity debt thing with covid.

So everyone had more sicknesses than normal. So there's a there's a bad combination going here, probably that this might be unusually bad with the sickness. Yeah. And so one thing that occurred to me, I mean, I again, I don't know what her husband does and sort of where she is in the professor world in terms of what she might be earning.

But. All right, so we we got cut off there temporarily, if you're listening at home, but we are we are now back connected, I think, right around the time we were disconnected, I was just making the point that I saw the age of three, that one of the one of the question askers kids was three.

And probably that means they were in a daycare situation probably for the first time this year. And it was already a year that was really bad with sickness, which was all just underscoring Laura's point. Sicknesses with kids is a big issue, but there's also periods in which it is essentially unmanageably high volume.

And it's not like that all the time. It's not going to be like that every single year going forward. Yeah. But I mean, one one thing I do wind up talking with a lot of families about is potentially switching the child care option. If you have multiple kids, you have two parents earning reasonable incomes, you might look into hiring a nanny as opposed to doing daycare.

And if you already have two kids in daycare and maybe you're paying for aftercare for a child in elementary school, it might not be that different of a cost by the time you have all those factored in. The upside of that is that, you know, they won't be getting the illnesses in the daycare if kids are sick and it's not, you know, really, really serious.

Then a paid caregiver can stay with them. So that will just reduce the number of sick days that you two have to take. And if the kids are getting sick less often, then that helps with some of the sleep at night as well, because you don't have the kids who are awake because they are sick at night.

And then you have another adult who has the ability to do things around your house, whether that is, you know, you're getting your groceries delivered and that puts them away or they throw a load of laundry into the washer. You know, there's just things that they can take care of that might make life a little bit easier for you guys.

So, you know, I thought maybe that's something to consider as well. If you do think that both of you will be sort of working and building your careers for a long term, it might be worth investing in. What do you think? This was an idea I had. I want to get your thought on it in terms of advice here.

Another thing that seemed relevant was at this stage in her academic career, similar to the advice you gave to the professor in your book, it might be good to say, I'm going to figure out my plan for some fixed research hours each week and how that time is going to be protected and when it happens.

And I want at this stage, whatever, eight hours a week, six hours a week, whatever seems reasonable and really building a plan to protect that and working with your husband as opposed to just going into the chaos of your normal week right now and saying, I don't know, do I have time today to do this?

I don't find myself in a lot of time to research. This might be a good time to say, here's my six hours and we defend this. We defend this hill to the death. And it's these two sessions or these three sessions. And at least you would then have that sense of I'm making progress on the stuff that matters.

Maybe I'm not at 100 percent because I don't know how you can be. You know, we have a baby at home and two other kids. I remember that. I remember when we had our third. You're not going to be at 100 percent, but you're not at zero and you can give a give a baseline.

So I don't know what your take is on that, but maybe you need to be more aggressive and defensive of. Deep work time right now, even if it's not a lot, but so the baseline is not zero. Absolutely. And people have to figure out how to build their academic careers.

I mean, it's hopefully your advisors are telling you things about this, like what matters and what doesn't. And, you know, but it sounds like this particular person's advisor was not a real winner in this regard. So hopefully other people are telling you, too, about what is important. And for many people, it is that research and publications.

And yes, you want to be a good teacher and you want to be a good colleague and all that. But those are often not the things that are quite as highly prized. So you want to make sure that you are putting the effort that you can muster at this point in your life into the things that are going to have that payoff.

And then there will be you know, you can maybe catch up on the rest of the stuff. And in a year or two, as your sleep gets better. And then my other thought is at least for a while, be a worse colleague. I mean, I think guys do this very naturally when they have, you know, we have kids.

It's no, I'm not going to do that. I have a kid at home. It's terrible. Like I had to wake up early. Like I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. And people kind of get it like, OK, whatever. Like, you know, he's overwhelmed. And I don't know if that's the situation here, but being a worse colleague for a while, which is maybe a wrong way to put it.

Maybe the right way to put it is you're protecting your time a bit more. Yeah. Yeah. You're temporarily pulling back from a normal load of service or collegiality that maybe you had before. And you're going to have again in the future, because right now you have a nine month old and your three month three year old has been sick.

Yeah. Roughly what? Ninety eight percent of the days. You're right. I get that. So being a worse colleague and a I'm sorry. Like, yeah, I would love to help with this. And in general, I would. But like I'm dealing with a baby at home and it's hard and I'm a little short on time and I would normally join this editorial board.

I can't. I would normally. Yeah, I have a smaller quota for journal reviews right now because I really just don't have the time I used to. But it will be better again in a year or two and maybe I'll take on more. I think in general, people get that.

Right. I mean, they're not going to say that's wrong. Your baby is not hard and you should be doing this. And, you know, people don't care so much. They're just trying to find someone to help them. And when you're clear and say no, they're already just thinking, well, what about this person?

They've just moved on. They're not they're not sitting there. There's not a board somewhere with your pictures up on it. And these professors and regalia are sitting there and staring at it and being like, you know, she said no to this committee yesterday. And they're like, hmm. Yes. I don't like this.

I don't like what's going on at all. I don't like this one bit. Don't want everyone's too busy. No one cares. No one's going to even notice if you're being a worst colleague for a year or two. But it could make a huge difference for her. Yeah, especially if you are cranking out the good research.

I think that goes a long way toward covering everything else. All right. So I got this question is different, but it overlaps one of the techniques we just talked about. So I thought it'd be worth doing real quick. So this is from Mr. Headache, a 31 year old engineer who says he's an overworked site manager for a construction company.

Construction company. I recently came across your article, the most important piece of career advice you never heard. And it got me to sit and actually think about what kind of lifestyle I want. So as a person who is big on family and spending time outdoors, I have decided to switch to a new role with better work hours and less stress.

This requires me to refresh myself on construction management, structural design. I would really like your help now on how I can carve out time to study in those areas. Laura, should he be doing the same thing you advise that professor in your book? This is a matter of identifying those times and being willing to make some changes or deploy some research resources or get some of the partner involved.

Is this one of these situations as well? Learning new things is going to help your job. It's similar to doing the deep work on things that are important. What's the situation here? Is that is that about right? Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say is that potentially being an on site construction supervisor might have a lot less flexibility than a professor.

So there's there's probably less of the sort of during the day thing he can do. I mean, it's possible that he might have, you know, 45 minutes of downtime while he's waiting for a subcontractor to show up, but probably not. So I think it's you know, he needs to do what I recommend to people in general, though, when you're trying to figure out where are the pockets of time I can use in my life, which is to track your time, track your time, ideally for a week.

So you get the parameters of what work looks like, what the rest of your life looks like. And then sort of figure out where are times that you are mentally alert, but you could use this time. And so for him, I mean, theoretically, mornings are a good time for most people that they could do work for an hour, the studying for an hour and then go to their job.

And the way you get that time is not by being sleep deprived. It's by going to bed earlier. So, you know, you go to bed earlier, wake up an hour earlier. Most people are not spending the hour before bed on particularly awesome things. You just sort of scrolling around, watching TV, puttering around the house.

So cut it off, go to bed earlier, wake up earlier, turn unproductive evening hours into productive morning hours. The one issue there is that, again, construction tends to be a very early in the day sort of thing. So he may not be able to do that in the way that other people may.

He may already be going to bed at nine and waking up at five to be on site at six. So if that is an option for most people, if you are looking for study time and you are working a full time job in his case, maybe he can figure out a way to sort of manage his energy that two days a week he can.

After he punches out at four o'clock or whatever it is, go study for an hour in the library and then go home and deal with the family. All right. If you can get permission from your spouse to do that, that might be the kind of thing that you could do.

Another thing that tends to work really well is one thing we did talk about with that professor is trading off with your spouse on the weekends. And this is an option that, you know, any sort of two parent family has. But many people don't think about doing it because it requires you to think about your weekends ahead of time.

And, you know, we're tired during the week. So we don't do this. But, you know, he could have, let's say, you know, eight to noon on Saturday to study. And then the trade off is that he gives his wife noon to four on Saturday and she can go do whatever she wants.

She can go hang out with friends. She can go, you know, sleep. She can go relax, whatever she wants to do. But she can know that is her time that was then purchased at the price of him having those four hours to study in the morning. And, you know, the kids get time with both parents individually.

So, you know, there's no change there. Each of them can plan their own adventures with the kids and, you know, he will have the time to study. I like that. I like that. One idea I had as we're talking as well, I don't know if this applies to him or not, but if you're doing the time tracking that you talked about, you might discover, oh, there's a certain activity that's taking a lot of my time.

I didn't realize that when I see how much time it is taking. I begin to think, is there a different way to do this? It would be less time consuming. And suddenly that's a couple hours a week freed up. And where I've seen this before, it's been process oriented.

There's something you're doing in an ad hoc fashion. So people are stopping by all the time to bother you with, I don't know, material requisition forms. It's like one of the things you have to do is the site manager. And it's it takes a lot of time and break things up.

If you notice that you say, oh, we could just have a system. Here's a box I put out and it's like they put them in the boxes and it's on Wednesday, whatever. Every morning I come and take these out of the boxes and there's a box above it for approved ones.

And another one that says come discuss. And there's sort of office hours where people discuss. I don't know, construction management, but, you know, something like that. And now suddenly this takes up these very predictable amounts of your time and your schedule's freed up. So there's an extra side effect there.

Benefit maybe of tracking is you find find inefficiencies you didn't even know. Yeah, well, that's I mean, that's like any data collection. Right. And when we're most people don't have a really good sense of where their time goes, because time does keep passing no matter what you're doing. So it's kind of hard to get your mind around it.

But when you keep track of it, then you can see and you're working from much better data at that point. And people say, oh, I want to spend my time better. But if you don't know how you're spending your time now, how do you even know if you're changing the right thing?

Because, I mean, maybe something you thought was a problem really isn't. Right. That happens to people all the time. And then maybe something you haven't considered, like in this case, might be taking more time than you imagined. And so, you know, make sure you've got the data and then you can make wise choices.

So for this question, I have a sort of not controversial, but a big swing theory. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. This is someone else also named Cal. Not me. A different Cal. This is a different engineer from the UK in his early 30s. I work for a major technology firm and often feel overwhelmed and like I'm surrounded by younger guys who have much more skill and knowledge than I do.

Also, because we often work remotely, I fall prey to distractions and I'm not proud of the work I put out. I moved into this, quote unquote, secure career so that I could provide for my young family. But now I feel like I'm drowning. My wife suggested I look for another programming job.

But the idea of doing so fills me with dread. Am I too late to start again? All right. So here's my controversial take, Laura. I'm going to say I think the issue Cal has here is not with the specific nature of his job. I think he's having an issue with work and how work fits into his life and how he organizes and approaches work, how he fits it into his life.

His problem is with work and he's hoping that the solution will be just make some sort of big change. Agree or disagree on that one? Well, at first I was kind of stopped by the idea that at his early 30s he was so too late to start a new job.

That doesn't sound very promising. Not for us. Not for you and I. Yeah. Wait a second. No, no, no. Yeah, no. I mean, I feel like this is definitely more of a psychological issue than any sort of issue with this particular job or situation or working from home or whatever else it is that's going on here.

Whenever people start talking about their careers and they're talking about dread and feeling paralyzed, that suggests that there's something else going on there. Yeah. Which I don't know what it is because the straightforward question he asked, like, am I too late to start again is absolutely not. Yeah, of course not.

And if you think another programming job would make you happier or would have structures in place that you work better with, like it's a more in the office kind of thing and you think you'd thrive with that, then absolutely. There are millions of jobs out there. People are generally not optimized on any dimension.

People are like, oh, well, I worry if I find a new job I'll have to trade something off. I'll be earning less or I'll be less flexible or whatever else. No, well, it's entirely possible that you will find a job that is better paying and more flexible or whatever else you're looking for.

So why not look? Just add it as a project to your week to see what's out there. You might find something that you are thrilled with. So, yes, that is the straightforward question. Yeah. I think that there is something deeper there. And you're probably getting at that with, you know, he's needing to provide for his family, which means that he needs to take his work seriously.

And this may not be something that he's done in the past. And he may be grappling with this whole idea of needing to be the responsible breadwinner in this family and what that entails. And he is not sure about it yet. Yep. Feels like he's adrift. Cal, I would say go back and listen to Episode 252.

This might help where I talked about the deep life stack. So this sequence of layers to consider to go from my life is chaotic and unanchored to, OK, I feel as if my life is intentional under control and aiming it where I want it to go. You probably, Cal, would find some benefit in this, starting with just a couple disciplines just to change your self-identity.

Look, I'm someone who can do something hard even in the short term for long term gains. You move up to the values layer after that. Let me lock in what I'm all about, build a foundation there. On top of that is finding calm through control. Now you're reading Laura's books.

Now you're reading my books. You're taking control of your time. You're taking control of your tasks. You're taking control of your workload. You have systems in place. You have breathing room. And then you get to the final set, the layer here where you're planning for the remarkable and different parts of your life.

And it's only then, really, Cal, that you should be saying, what do I want to do with the working part of my life? Is there a change I want to make? If so, what change am I trying to get? When you're making those decisions on top of that stack and not where you are now, which is at the bottom.

And I think Laura's right to point out early 30s means this might be you got married recently. You just started having kids. You don't know what you're anchored to. You're all over the place. I don't know. Is this good? This job, I dread. I'm working. These people are better.

What should I be doing? I think it's going to feel different. So I think he has a lot of good things ahead of him. It's just time to, I guess, a dealt up a little bit. I feel a little condescending saying that, but there's different. There's the adulting that happens when you become a grown up.

You know, you're in your young 20s. And then there's the whole separate process that happens if you start a family and you have to start over again in figuring out that role. So so maybe he's there. All right. We have one here from Kevin, another 30 year old from Denver.

Am I crazy for thinking I can work from home with a baby? My wife and I had our first son seven months ago, and I've been trying to work from home since. I have a separate office and noise canceling headphones, but I'm still so subtracted, distracted by all of his sounds and activities.

I constantly feel pulled to help my wife or play with the baby. Should I bite the bullet and rent an office space? All right, Laura, I can guess your answer, but I want to hear what you say, and I'll tell you if I'm right or not with my guess.

Well, I don't know. I mean, this is this occurred to me that, you know, I've worked from home for my whole life and with babies there. Sometimes, although this is the difference of having the baby's caregiver during the day being your spouse versus being a paid caregiver. Because in my case, what I've always been is like, well, how about you guys go have some outings during times when I have things I need to focus on?

And then, you know, we can come back and have lunch together or, you know, if I want to take a break and play with the baby. Fine. But, you know, that is my protected time. Obviously, you really cannot do this with your spouse. You cannot dictate that your spouse take the baby to the zoo in the morning because you need to work.

Like you can't dictate that your spouse do X, Y or Z. And so there's there's kind of a different constraint there. And so it might be that the simplest thing is for you to go rent an office. If you think that would allow you to focus, then maybe that is a good solution.

And you still can get the benefits of having this work from home relationship with your employer. Like, go take lunch. Like, you know, if your spouse and the baby are available, you guys could meet up for lunch and have that time together. Maybe you can be very good about limiting your hours during the sort of work day and do some work later at night when the baby's in bed, you know, so you can get home earlier and spend more of the afternoon playing with your baby.

And I'm sure your wife would appreciate the help. Like if you and work at four instead of five, then you get the witching hour with the baby instead of her. And so she can get a little time off and that might be great. And then just make up that hour at night.

But, you know, if you are finding it that is very difficult for you to do, then then probably you should listen to that. Yeah. And I'm a big believer of renting office space. Even outside of that context, you have a different cognitive context to work in. Work from your home is an idea that I'm a big advocate for.

The other thing I was I was going to predict you were going to say is also keep in mind, this is so temporary. I mean, you have a it's just it's almost like saying, you know, I don't know how I'm going to how can I get work done during this thunderstorm?

Like, it's really loud and the power keeps flickering off and on. And you're like, yeah, but the thunderstorm. The good news is that's going to pass. This takes a little bit longer, though. Maybe it feels similar when you have a kid at home, but it's really not that long of a period until this is different.

And there's daycare involved or whatever. This is the situation evolves and it's not the same as having this a baby at home and a new baby. And I would also say just practically, even if you can't afford to rent an office space. I remember when we had our first two kids.

So my wife would go to work pretty early. And then I would be with until a nanny came in because work from home wasn't popular back then. But I was a professor, so it was much more likely that I would be at home in the morning. I didn't like to go go in right away because of traffic.

So I was in a situation with our first kids where I'd be at home, the kids would be at home and the nanny would would be there. And I found myself just I was a master of locations to work that weren't paid office space. So I could the library, for example, coffee shop was another place.

I did a lot of work on foot. I had places that I would hike on these trails and bring my notebooks with me because I had this exact same issue, Kevin. And I couldn't afford office space at that point. But I had my virtual office. So it was here, here, here and here.

And I had a whole routine I would cycle through. So I I knew I knew where to go because it's exactly that same issues like they're in the other room and it's difficult. But but this is also temporary. So that's that's one way or the other in my car, like in the driveway.

Because I love it is where I could get away from everybody. And, you know, sometimes you do what you have to do if everyone's screaming and you got to be on a phone call like that. That's usually a pretty quiet place. I end up getting my office space. It was it took, I don't know, three weeks into the pandemic.

My wife kicked me out. She's like, you know, you're not going to record podcast. I'm not. No, I can't. I'm not going to keep them quiet. And I don't want to keep them quiet. And you have to get out. You have to get out of here and figure out how to.

Yeah. So. All right. Let's see here. We're doing time. We have time. We have time for a couple more. All right. We're efficient. I am very efficient with my time. I, I, I track it diligently. All right. Let's see here. Kayla. All right. Kayla says, I was wondering if you'd speak about how you've applied deep life concepts to time with kids.

We have five kids from seven months to 12 years. And I've chosen to only work part time for now, which means I am actively parent parenting from one to eight p.m. most days. Put a pin in that. I have a question about that. But let's let's keep rolling for now.

I think Laura has a question about that, too. Time with them can easily feel reactive and unstructured. I don't want to create too much structure because with all the moving parts, I imagine that would only lead to frustration. But I also feel that there could be more intentionality in the way that I spend time with them.

Oh, this is kind of interesting. OK, so deep life. I use this phrase on my podcast a lot. Being intentional about the different aspects of your life. So I guess she's she's wondering about how do you do that with kids? Now, how close is this range to yours, by the way?

You have this four kids or five like four years, three, three years ago, roughly. Your oldest is 16. My oldest is 16 now. I just turned 16. And my youngest is three. And your oldest watches the youngest. That's how it works. Right. Your oldest just watches all the other kids.

And that's that's how that works. Isn't that how it works? Well, he can. He can. And he does some. But I try not to hit my kids up for too much babysitting when they have other things that they would like to be doing with their time, like studying and such.

But, you know, it's a lot of kids. There's a lot of kids when you have five of them. I totally love this question, though, because she's correct that time with children often does feel very reactive. And even if you do have routines, it can feel very unstructured at times.

And in many cases, it doesn't feel particularly enjoyable. And clearly she's chosen to work part time because she wants to spend more time with her kids. And yet it can feel like that's not the good part of the day, because, I mean, partly the kids have their own things going on.

And, you know, five kids can be pretty chaotic. But I think approaching this with some amount of intentionality. And this goes for anyone. And sort of those hours after work and before bed. I feel like these are the hardest hours to use well in our lives, because we're tired.

We're all there. We all need to get through to the end of the day. And it could be a really cool time. But in many cases, it just isn't. But being somewhat intentional about it, like saying, you know, what is some little adventure we could have today? Like, what would I like to have done with a kid or some number of kids by the end of the day?

And it can be simple. It's just like, OK, well, you know, before we pick up the big kids at school, we're going to go to the library and get these books from this author that I learned was really good. And then we're going to read those at night. That's my intention for today.

And that would probably make it a better day than if you didn't have that intention. Or I've looked at the weather and, you know, Thursday and Friday are going to be great. So when we pick up the big kids at school, we're all going to go to this playground and the 12 year old can go read or do whatever the 12 year old does and ignore the rest of us.

And then the rest of us will play on the playground. And I've invited this other family to join us. And that's going to make it more enjoyable for me and for everyone else. Just thinking it through like that allows the time to feel like it's possible to enjoy it, as opposed to just like dealing with whatever crisis arises in the moment.

I like that. The other thing I noticed here, this 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. caught my attention because parenting multiple kids, especially if there's a seven month involved, is as draining as any job you're doing, maybe outside of if you're actively on like a SEAL team rescue mission. Right.

I mean, it is very draining. So if you're working a job till 1 and then you're taking the kids from 1 to 8, I'm going to guess I don't know the context, but I'm guessing Caleb maybe has a partner that says, well, great, since you're now home with the kids in the afternoon, I can work till I have a hard job and I can work till 8.

So the way I would see this then is you have two parents who have jobs that you're working until 8 p.m. And when you see that situation, OK, we have two very high power jobs that require that much work. Almost always the answer is you are going to have to bring in outside guns to help with that.

Right. This is the two law partner parents, the two executives. There's a lot of households like this around where I live in D.C. They end up having huge amounts of support for that. They have night nurses with the young babies. They have nannies to pick people up from school and take them there.

They have coverage in the evening. I didn't know about I don't know if you know about these like evening nannies, you know, about this, where you have like one nanny that is during the day and then you switch to another nanny who comes at 4 to make the meals and deal with the kids or whatever.

It's what what you do when you have, you know, spouses that both work jobs that require this much time. So that's the other thing that occurred to me. It's like, well, you're working a very, very long hour job. And it sounds like perhaps your partner is, too. You have to acknowledge how hard that is.

And is that really sustainable without either a lot of help or maybe saying maybe you shouldn't be working to your partner till 8 every day? It's not if that might not be necessary. He might just be thinking, oh, this is great. We don't have to worry about child care.

There's always someone here. So I can just spend time at the office or do whatever. I don't know. The 8 p.m. caught my attention. Yeah. Well, he could. I mean, maybe they're both there. Who knows? I mean, but yeah, if he's working late every night, I would I would certainly say you might want to bring in a little bit of reinforcements to help you with this.

And if he has the option of not doing that again, we do the thing where each partner gets one night off. Do that more clearly. Yeah. Tuesday, like he's home at five and you go off and do your thing. And then, you know, obviously what you're on till eight the other nights anyway.

So he can he can do his thing if he wants to as well. Yeah. And one thing with five kids is it's a lot for one individual anyway. You know, if you think about the staffing ratio in a daycare, they don't let you have more than four babies per adult.

And there's something to be said for that. Granted, they've got older kids. I'm sure it's not quite the same. But if you have multiple little ones, one thing that actually I found makes parenting more pleasant is actually getting to interact with the older kids. And so sometimes I have time that I am not working.

But if my husband is gone or something like that, I'll have a sitter for the younger kids. And so then I can go do stuff with the big ones. And that can allow for a lot more enjoyment of this time. Because then you're doing something that let's say you've got a 12 year old and a nine year old and a seven year old, like that you could do something that the three of them might want to do and go to one of those bouncy house places or, you know, roller rink or, I don't know, go see a soccer team play or something.

But you could do that. And then you're not miserable chasing around a two year old and carrying your infant. Like, I mean, you know, that just makes everything so much harder. So you might find somebody who, you know, you're there with the little ones from one to the time the big kids get home.

And then you have somebody else come help a couple of days a week from, I don't know, three to six. And then you can go do things with the big kids. And that might help a lot as well. I'm a big believer in that. I know my wife and I figured that out a few years ago, too.

If someone is traveling immediately, like, great, we're getting babysitters. And for exactly that purpose for, OK, so I can take an older kid to do something or just have time for herself or time for myself to go do things where you don't have to be. It's a little while to figure that out.

But that that goes really well. Also figuring out who the high school kids are in your neighborhood who are especially the seniors who are starting to worry about money when they go to college the next year. And just we've done this so many times, setting something up like, yeah, like a couple afternoons a week, just come over and take the take the five year old or the four year old and and go do things with them.

And it really makes a difference. And I think people don't always think about it because they say, well, why would I why would I have someone come into my house if I'm here? And that's like a block people have. But it's a one to get past. Definitely. Definitely. All right.

Let's do one more question. We've got time for one more question. This is from Tim, a 26 year old from Australia. Tim says, in the past, I've definitely had a problem with over committing and piling on more stuff at the expense of some of my visions, particularly around athletic leisure and focus time with loved ones.

A lot of this has seemingly stemmed from a lack of overarching vision for my life. How do I escape this pattern? So I talk a lot about this on the show about workload and over committing. So what I'm interested in is how you think about how you think about keeping the load of things on your plate manageable and preventing it from creeping into something that becomes a source of issues.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the most important habits I have for managing my life is I plan my upcoming weeks, usually on Fridays, and I look at what is coming up. I figure out what I want to do over the next week, both professionally and personally. Like if I'm working toward any big goals, what steps would I like to take in the next week to get there?

I look at what is already there that I've committed to that I'm going to need to do and figure out time for that and sort of triage any issues that are going on. And inevitably, what happens when I plan out the week on Friday, I may have thought looking at my calendar like, oh, it's a light week.

Like there's not that much going on. But when I actually sit down and figure out what needs to happen over the next seven days, it doesn't look that light anymore. And that right there can make me say like, OK, we are we are at capacity. So anything that isn't just an amazing opportunity, it's either a no or it's call me back in a month.

Right. And so that's one thing, knowing exactly what is on your plate is often the best defense strategy for then adding new things to your plate. It's a feedback. I won't ever add new things. It's just that if if it doesn't reach like the top level of like, oh, my gosh, I'll cancel other things.

I'll move everything else around to bring this in. Then it's probably not worth it. You know, we can wind up one of the things I always tell people is when you're thinking about doing something further in the future, you always want to ask yourself if you do it tomorrow, because we tend to view our future selves as different people.

Like they'll somehow have more time and more energy than than current us has. And, you know, maybe some of the people we were talking about earlier in this episode that they have, you know, small babies like, yes, you will have more energy in another year or two. But but for many cases, this isn't true.

Like you won't be a dramatically different person in six months. So don't agree to do something in six months if you wouldn't do it now. Yes. There's no magical extra pot of hours that that's going to appear. He was talking about and I know you talk a lot about, you know, figuring out what's important to you and all that.

And as you're doing that, you might want to design a realistic, ideal week. So this is a week in your life, but your life as it is so. So now no flying cars, no dramatically different job. You know, your family has not moved off to Tahiti like you. You have your current responsibilities, but this would be a week where it's like, yeah, I'm really I'm doing it.

I'm I'm I'm awesome this week. So, you know, you're working on the things that you want to work on. You're having time for your athletic leisure pursuits and your focus time with loved ones and all those things that you want to do. Where would that happen? Like what would your standard work day look like?

What would your weekend template be in this universe? And I think it's a useful exercise in its own right, because then you're like, oh, well, now I know what a good weekend looks like. And so as I'm thinking about my upcoming weekend, I can say, does it look like that?

And if it does, great. And if it doesn't, well, maybe I can change something. So it so it does. But it may also help you determine that if I want to, you know, go to the gym on multiple days per week, then I really can't agree to also serve on the committee that's staging all these networking events, because that's always going to happen from five to seven p.m.

So, you know, that it's just not compatible. And I'm not saying that somebody else might not make an entirely different choice. But if you've decided that this is what you want to do, then then that can help you realize what won't fit. Well, I like all three of these.

I'm going to summarize what you just said. I'm going to re-summarize it because I think this is this actually a great package of solutions. Then you can tell me if I'm missing a piece of it. So one was control your times, the terminology I would use. But you're building out a plan for the week ahead.

You're building out a plan for your day. So you can actually see all the pieces out there. That's a feedback function. That's where you begin to get that uneasy feeling of this week is getting too crowded. These things aren't really fitting right. If you're not actually looking at your time on that time scale, though, you don't you're not going to get that feedback.

You're just going to be in the middle of it. So I love that. Two, don't say yes to something in six months if you would be upset to have to do it tomorrow. That is great advice. I was actually talking about that last night. I was doing Ryan Holiday's podcast and we were talking about exactly this point.

We especially get suckered into that when the thing is cool or impressive or looks good on you. Because you can in the moment when you say yes to the thing in six months or six weeks, you get all the benefits in the moment of feeling good about yourself and being impressive, being able to talk about it without having to pay any of the cost.

And you're just deferring the cost until six months from now. So you say yes, you can kind of brag, hey, I'm going to this speaking event in Hawaii. Isn't that so cool, just the idea of going to Hawaii? And then you get to the week before and you're like, oh, my God, I've got to get to Hawaii.

And you're on a plane for 11 hours. Yeah, I've got 11 hours and my kids. How is this going to work? And I have to do the time thing and you don't pay the debt until later. And then the third was, which I really love, have your ideal week in mind and then use that in making decisions, not just a heuristic of is it conceivably possible in sort of a physics sense to fit this in somewhere?

How does this fit with my ideal week? And I'll say as an example, I do this, my summer schedule as a professor, for example, it's very clear to me what I want to do is Monday, Fridays, no appointments on the calendar. Appointments do happen on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, but not until at least 1030 or 11.

Monday and Fridays, it's just I'm working on deep things. The other days I can work on deep things in the morning and then I have meetings. All days be done by four because my schedule is much less in the summer. Some typically not teaching. And then I have that ideal schedule.

Now, when stuff comes over the transom, I say, well, I'm not available Monday. I'm not available Friday. So we have to fit it to a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And it has to be between 10 and four. And and so this is why I might say, look, it's going to be three weeks.

I do want to do this, but really it's going to be three weeks on Thursday is the next time this is really going to make sense. You would never naturally do that if you were just ad hoc saying yes or no and trying to fit things. You would just put it wherever.

But if you have that ideal week in mind, then you have something to push back on. So, yeah, no, I believe Monday and Friday is clear. You're protecting your future self. And in the end, no one really for the most part, no one cares that person you're setting up this call with.

They just need the call set up. Like, great. We have a date. It's Thursday in three weeks. I don't care. It's on the calendar. Great. I've already moved on with my life. They don't care. But you have preserved the week that actually you've thought a lot about. So so I love I love all three of those techniques.

Yeah. And again, you can you can make exceptions if you decide it is worth it. Like this, you made the rule. So if the world's best opportunity came to you on Monday afternoon, you could, in fact, decide to take it. Right. It's you know, we're not cutting yourselves off.

It's just saying in the absence of a very compelling reason. And this random interview is probably not a very compelling reason. We're going to stick with this. So I have the week that I want to have. Yeah. And I figured that out the hard way. You probably have similar experience with publicity tours for books.

Don't let the the publicity assistant. Manage your calendar for you. So if they can put the things on your calendar, it is terrible. And if you go to another system where you say same amount of things, but put the pending things in a Google doc, I'll look at that every day and just give you some choices.

Do this Monday. Do this whatever. But at least you have some control over where things fall without really changing the number of things. The experience is night and day. And it's because these these ideal structures for a week make a difference. Keeping your Monday clear to have a breather can make a huge difference.

Making sure you don't schedule things first thing in the morning, making sure that if you back to back three things that you don't put. It's these subtle things when you see the whole schedule that make a big difference. And I really learned out the hard way that if you let someone else control your calendar, they don't think about any of those things.

And it makes a giant difference without even having to. It's not that they're scheduling more things. It's just the way things are being scheduled. And it really makes the difference when you don't see the picture, the whole picture and you're trying to rearrange the pieces for it to be pretty.

If you're not doing that, the same amount of time could be much more stress inducing. Yeah, I've learned that when I do four podcast interviews in a row, I'm in a little puddle on the floor at the end of them. And I'm saying really stupid things. So it's best to avoid that.

I agree. I'm actually nervous about it because I'm the summer I'm up doing this fellowship at Dartmouth and the fellowship has a lot of events to have to go with it. And there's a scheduler and I'm trying to I don't think it's a weird request to make. It's no, I want to be involved in all the scheduling decisions.

Like, well, no, my whole point is to save you from that effort. And it's where I'm trying to communicate. I don't care about the effort of being involved. I care about my schedule not being under my control because it just makes such I've been there before. It just makes a difference because if someone is scheduled on their behalf, it's like a video game where they get points for everything.

They look, I managed to fit all these things. You know, that's like the game is like I'm trying to say yes to as many people as possible. And I get rewarded for saying yes and fitting everything. That's the wrong game for the person who has to do it. That's so it's a so weird tension.

But OK, that's good. That's just a little bit of insider baseball venting, though. I think most people aren't worried about dealing with their schedulers during their book publicity tours or fellowships. But but it gets to the bigger point. All right, Laura, you've been very generous with your time. This has been very useful.

I want to recommend that people listen to your podcast. It's best of both worlds. And I sometimes add an extra word. I'm getting that right. Right. Best of both worlds. Sarah Hart, who was a guest on your show recently, is best of both worlds. And then there's another one you do, too.

Right. Yeah. I do one called Before Breakfast. And that is a short every weekday morning tip that will help you take your day from great to awesome. Yeah. And you can find out more about Laura, her books and those podcasts. It's Laura Van de Kamp dot com. Right. Your name.

Right. Laura Van de Kamp dot com. Also in the show notes. So if you like this advice, you can get a lot more of it. Laura, this was a lot of fun. If I can convince you, I'll have to have you back again sometime. Not too soon. I'm sure we'll have many more questions like this.

You could help me with. Sounds great. I'd love to be back. Thank you for having me. Great. All right. Thanks, Laura. All right. Well, that was great. I'm glad Laura could come in and help set us straight on some of these issues. All right, Jesse. So I wanted to move on for the final segment of the show.

The something interesting segment where we take an interesting thing or article or ideal that someone sends to my interesting account, Newport dot com address. And we we talk about it before we get to that. Let me just mention another sponsor that makes the show possible. So longtime friends, my body tutor.

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And if you have questions, Adam wants you to call or text. You can find his personal cell number at the top of every page on my body tutor dot com. Interesting fact about my website, Jesse. I also have a personal cell phone number at the top of every page.

But if you call it, it actually goes to Brandon Sanderson. So there you go. In his layer. In his layer. Yeah. Like, hello, it's Brandon here. The name of the wind is leave a message at the beat. It's a really cool answering machine message. If you don't know everyone, Brandon Sanderson wrote the book, Name of the Wind.

All comments on that can be sent to Jesse at CalNewport.com. I also want to talk about our friends at Blinkist, other longtime friends of this show. You know, I'm a big proponent of books as the right way to improve your understanding of the world, the right way to fill your toolbox of useful ideas.

The intellectual life requires books. The hard part is figuring out what books to read, what books to buy, which books you'll do OK with just reading the bullet points. This is where Blinkist enters the picture. They offer an app that enables you to get summaries of the most important points from over 5500 nonfiction books and podcasts.

These summaries, which are called Blinks. You can read them or you can listen to them from the app. Takes about 15 minutes to read or listen to. So in just about 15 minutes, you get the main points of thousands of nonfiction books. The way Jesse and I use this as a triage service for books we're thinking about reading, we hear about a book, we say, maybe I want to read that.

We throw it on our Blinkist playlist. You listen to the Blink while you're doing the dishes. It really does help you decide, is this something I want to engage 300 more pages in or do I have what I need to know from this? The Blinks are very effective at helping you make that triage decision.

So you're only buying the books that you really want to read. And yet you're still getting the main points from the books you don't want to read. You still have those main points. They're still there. Those ideas are still there and accessible to you. It really is like the intellectual sidekick you need to support a life in which you do a lot of effective reading.

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Blinkist.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's talk about something interesting. This is an article someone sent me from a publication called Scroll. I'm going to bring it up here on the screen. So if you're listening, you can watch this. YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia. Look for episode 253 or the deeplife.com. Look for episode 253.

Here's the title of this article. How Japan Became an Exemplar of Sustainability Over Centuries of Self-Isolation. This article is from last summer. So what this is talking about is what is known as Japan's Edo period, which took place between when Japan sealed itself off from the outside world in 1603 until we essentially forced it to reopen in 1868.

So there had been some encounters with Christian missionaries in the 17th century, and Japan said, we don't want anything to do with this. And so they had this 300-year period where they were isolated as an island empire, island nation. This was the Edo period. So they had to be very careful with resources.

This is where the sustainability descriptor comes from, the title of this article. The article gets into a lot of the way they very carefully reused everything. You would min clothes many times. They would even use the ashes of human corpses. They didn't want that to go to waste. They would use that as fertilizer.

So there's a lot of interesting lessons in there. There's one thing they did, however, as part of this Edo period that I wanted to draw our attention to in particular because it overlaps with my philosophy of slow productivity. So it says here, "The people of the Edo period lived according to what is known as the slow life, a sustainable set of lifestyle practices based around wasting as little as possible." Okay, here's the interesting part.

"Even light didn't go to waste. Daily activities started at sunrise and ended at sunset." Okay, so here's what they did because they wanted to use every hour of light. Here's what they did. They used seasonal time, meaning that the ways of measuring time shifted along with the seasons. "During the Edo period, a system was used to divide the time between sunrise and sunset into six parts.

As a result, an hour differed hugely depending on whether it was measured during summer, winter, night, or day. The idea of regulating life by unchanging time units like minutes and seconds simply didn't exist." Right, because their notion of time, they said, "We want a fixed number of units. That makes sense.

There's six hours of daylight or what have you. Daylight's what matters to us. So the length of that will just depend on what's going on in the season." Now, the connection between this and my philosophy of slow productivity is the second principle of slow productivity has to do with working at a natural pace.

So my three principles of slow productivity are do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. So this gets right to some of the ideas that undergird working at a natural pace. An argument I make in my book on slow productivity, which is coming out in March, so we still have a lot of time, though we locked in the manuscript yesterday, so that's exciting.

One of the core ideas I explore there is that it is very unnatural what we do, especially in modern knowledge work. So we took a factory model of these are fixed hours when you work, and you just do that every day if it's not a weekend. We just took that factory model and we brought it over to knowledge work.

Unlike factory work, however, we don't have labor organization to protect us here. We don't have typically labor unions to sort of fight for, well, how many hours should there be that we work, and how much are we getting paid for, and knowledge work, that all went aside. So we have this very unnatural rhythm of working every day, same pace, and the intensity of that pace is bigger than we even had in industrial work because there's no countervailing forces.

Always too much to do, do as much as you can, every day is the same. A Tuesday in March is the same as a Thursday in July is the same as a Monday in December. That's very unnatural. I go through some of the archaeopaleontology here and talk about how humans for hundreds of thousands of years had big rhythms in their lives, different seasons felt different, different times of the week felt different.

So I like what we see here is, yeah, this is in the Edo period, an hour meant something different in the summer than it did in the winter. Something similar should be true of 21st century knowledge work. Different times of years, your work intensity should feel different. The number of hours you're working should be different.

A day in December might feel very different than a day in July if we were actually working in a way that was aligned with our instincts, with what we're used to as humans. What is happening here in the Japanese Edo period is much closer to our natural mode of operation than working nine to five plus two hours in the evening at home, 50 weeks a year.

And so I like the point of that, the point to the naturalness of variation, the unnaturalness of the unvaried rhythm that we use in modern knowledge work. If we want to connect these ideas back to the Deep Life stack, which I'm trying to do more and more, we're thinking about almost any slow productivity idea, that is going to show up in the calm or control layer, the create calm through control layer.

That's where that shows up because that's the layer where you really get your arms on your work, not just organizing what's on your plate, but figuring out what you want to bring on the plate, organizing when and how you want to work on it. So that's the layer. When you get to that layer of the stack, to the calm layer, that's where you might really start thinking through ideas like slow productivity.

That's where notions like seasonality really enter. It's the type of thing you can do once you take control over your time obligations and workloads, is you can start saying, how do I want to work? How do I want July to look different? What is my 21st century laptop worker equivalent of the Edo period slow living hour variation?

All right. So I thought that was cool. A little interesting lesson to draw from times past. It's too bad this is too late for me to put in my book, actually, Jesse. It's all locked in. We pass it on the copy editing. I never knew that Japan was isolated for that long.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know it was that long either. I knew about 1868 Commodore Perry coming to Japan on like a steamship. And they basically said, you're open now. We have a lot of guns. You're open now. I didn't realize this backstory that as early as the 1600s, they had had an initial encounter with Europeans and that's what led to them wanting to isolate.

Yeah. Interesting period. They said that's when a lot of the Bushido code and samurai, a lot of this stuff emerged during that period of isolation. Interesting stuff. All right. Well, anyways, that's all we have time for today. Thanks again to Laura Vanderkam for joining us and helping us answer some questions.

Be back next week with another episode, though it may be filmed and recorded in Deep Work HQ North. So look out for that. But I will be here. Fear not. I'm not going anywhere. I will still be here weekly. So until next time, as always, stay deep.