How do I improve my discipline? My problem is that I have a problem with sticking to my long term plans. Well, Toby, I think about discipline really more as an identity that you develop, then I do an approach to a particular challenge, if you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined person, that that is part of your conception of your identity.

Then you will be able to, with discipline, pursue many different important objectives in your life. So the question is, how do you get to an identity where you see yourself as a disciplined person? Well, let me tell you what not to do. Don't just pick out a random ambitious goal and say, you know what?

I'm going to do this. I'm going to, I'm going to white knuckle, go after this really hard goal. And because I need to be more disciplined, that's what you're trying to do. That's not working. I'm not surprised it's not working. If you've not yet convinced yourself, you're a disciplined person, taking on ad hoc, large discipline, requiring challenges is not going to be a route towards success.

So what should you do instead? Well, I think this is where actually the deep life procedure I talk about, the, the sort of self-awarely overly pragmatic approach to building a foundation for a deep life that we've been talking about on the show for over two years is perfect for developing a self-identity as discipline.

So remember, there's two parts to this. Number one, you identify the areas of your life that are important to you. We typically call these the deep life buckets. They differ between different people, but our starter set of these buckets tends to be craft, what you do, what you create, constitution.

That's going to be your health community. That's going to be your connections to other people, be it your family, your neighborhood, the people in the organizations where you work at your religious institutions. Uh, they'll often throw in contemplation. We're trying to capture philosophy, theology, and ethics. These are all important areas.

Most people's lives, your list might vary. For each of these areas, the first thing to do is to identify a keystone habit, something in each of these buckets that you do every day, something that is not trivial, but is also tractable and you track your completion of these habits every day.

If you use something like my time block planner, there's a metric tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day. You just track those keystone habits right there. So for example, for constitution, you wouldn't have something there. Like I'm going to do a 45 minute intense workout because that's too hard to expect you to be able to do that every day.

That's not really tractable, but you also don't want to say, you know, I will do one jumping jack when I get out of bed in the morning, like that's not going to get you anywhere. So instead you might want to do something like I want to hit this many steps in a day.

Require a little bit of planning. Like I walk my kids to school. I'll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between meetings and, but it's tractable. If I think about it, my friend, Brian Johnson, uh, of optimize fame had this great constitution habit where he had a fixed number of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing, I think he would do 10 burpees.

And it was like 23 minutes or 20. There was some amount of time that he had because he had read somewhere. If you sit for more than this much time, it starts to be bad. And so it was just every, whatever it was, 23 minutes, he would do 10 burpees.

And was it a fantastic boom? Now I think it helps that he doesn't work in the bullpen of a crowded office. I mean, I, maybe that would be an awesome thing to do, but, but it probably would draw some interesting attention. He, you know, he, he works in his own company, so he works at his own house.

Um, but 10 burpees, three times an hour, roughly. And the way he pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to concentration, to concentrate like an, like a laser because your body's always moving, it never gets into a sedentary, but anyways, for someone who works in their own home, works from home on their own business, very tractable, very tractable, Keystone habit takes 15 seconds or whatever.

Every time you do it, the fact that I think 10 burpees takes 15 seconds shows that I don't know. I don't know a lot about burpees. Does he still do that? I don't know. We should have him on the show. He should, we should, we should ask him. I know at one point he was training, he was really into, and I don't think he'll mind me telling this story because I think he's talked about it himself.

Um, he was really into Spartan racing, the Spartan races because he, yeah, because he was friends with Joe DeSena. So he knew the guy who started it and he was making a run at some point for doing them at a very high level, which requires, it turns out it requires a lot of training.

Uh, you have to master a lot of these individual disciplines, but anyways, in his, his house, in the room where he worked, which I think might've been their bedroom, he had installed into the ceiling of the room. The, uh, hanging obstacles from the Sparta race. Like, so I guess you do like Ninja warrior type stuff in that race where like, you have to like switch you're holding on to like.

Rope knots and whatever. And yeah, he installed them into the ceiling of the room so that when he was doing these breaks, he's like, instead of just burpees, let me jump up and just like do the, whatever hanging challenge. I'll tell you what you do that for a few months, your grip, strength and balance, like you just own it, but you don't even, and I guess that's what you need to do to compete at a high level.

You could just jump up there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so that's, that's commitment. He'd probably still work out too during the day. I would think separately. Yeah. Yeah. So he, and he had a whole thing and yeah, so you still have a workout. So it was less, this was less about, which, which again is, I think is an important point.

Like if your keystone habits are not, their job is not to capture everything you need to do, or it's important for that bucket, it's like getting up and doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day is a great way of saying you, you take motion important. You take your body important.

You think there's a mind body connection, but it's not everything you need to do for exercise. You probably need to be doing weights. You probably need to be doing cardio. So that's, it's a good point is that your keystone habits are not trying to take on the weight of everything important in that bucket.

They are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously and you're willing to take effort towards that bucket every day. That's non-trivial. Now it takes a while to get those keystone habits, right? You have to experiment a little bit, but you get to the point where you're knocking off, you have four buckets or five buckets.

You're checking off all those, all those metrics every day. You see it every day. You don't want to break the chain. Right. That's step one. You've already now leveled up discipline. Your identity as someone who's disciplined is now leveled up. You do stuff that's optional because it reflects your values, even if it's hard.

Now you're at a higher level. The next part of my general deep life foundation program is then you dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by one. And overhaul that part of your life when you're focusing on that particular bucket. So in the one to two months, you're focusing on constitution.

Now you're getting serious about your health and fitness, and you're starting to make changes and figuring out like, maybe you're like, I'm going to start training for this sport. Like I'll tell you right now, Jesse, one of the things I'm doing. It's a goal is, uh, before my 40th birthday, which is in June.

So it's coming up. Um, you might not remember what it's like to be in your thirties. Of course. I mean, you've been 40 for literally weeks at this point. So you probably don't remember, but, uh, my birthday is coming up as we've talked about. I want to, this is arbitrary, but I want to be able to once again, row, uh, 2000 meters on my concept to at a sub two minute, 500 meter pace.

So this just connects me back to my, my, my deep past when I was rowing for Dartmouth. I remember the type of splits I could pull. So like seven and change. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, I want to, I was like, I would feel good at the age of 40.

If, because I got, God knows what I could pull when I was 19 doing this, I could pull, but I'm 30 pounds heavier now. So it does have an advantage. Like I can actually, I was a lightweight rower, so I can now actually move that thing. But anyways, it's kind of arbitrary, but it's like, it's, it's hard, but not impossible, but like, I would feel good if I can be polling sub two minute, 500 splits for, for a 2000 meters, like I'm training for that right now.

Uh, but that's the type of thing. Okay. When you're doing an overhaul of a bucket, you start, you figure out these challenges, you get your equipment in place, I mean, not to make a full, full circle connection, but I got that concept too, actually from Brian Johnson sent it to me as a gift.

So there we go. Nice gift. Yeah. He's a nice guy known for a very long time. Um, so anyways, that's the type of thing you will come away from doing the intense focus on the bucket with like, okay, now I'm going to start training to do this and I've overhauled my diet and I now am joined this team, this rec, you know, with other dads that we play, whatever.

And so when you, you, you, you give the one to two month focus, you really are changing your life more substantially to really integrate that area of value, um, more deeply. And there's a lot of experimentation in that. That's why it takes one or two months. You try some things, it's not really working.

So you change your goals or challenges or habits. So you find something that's really working. You come out of that second step, Toby, you're going to be a much more disciplined person. Step one, you build that base with the keystone step two, you overhaul tractable overhauls to experimentation. All the parts are important to your life.

After that. Now if down the line, you're like, oh, here's a new long-term plan that I believe in, let me do some work towards it. No problem. That's that's what you do. You're disciplined. That's what you're gonna do. That's what you're going to do. So once you've changed the identity, then you can take on new challenges.

The only final thing I'll say is even as a very self-disciplined person, if your challenges don't make sense, if your mind doesn't believe that it's worth doing or that your plan's actually going to accomplish what it is, you will still struggle with discipline. So you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do.

Your brain is not dumb. If you're like, I'm going to be a Nobel prize winning novelist because I'm going to do national novel writing month, three days in your mind's like, this is stupid. We don't know what we're doing. This is not a good book. Um, I'm not going to do this.

And that's not a failure of discipline. That's a failure of planning. So that's the only other copy I'll give. Even after you become a self-disciplined person, uh, you need goals your mind actually trust. All right. Rolling on here. We've got a question from Luke. Luke says, could you please work through an example where you break down a genuinely complicated long-term goal through quarterly, weekly, and daily planning?

So Luke, the biggest problem people have with long-term planning is trying to actually do too much of the planning up front. I think a better way of thinking about this is that there is a feedback loop approach to planning out, structuring and executing longer projects. Like what I'll often do is if there's a longer term project, like the summer, I put finish book proposals onto my quarterly plan, like finish them by the new year, so that was my plan.

I just put that on there, the very high level. And then when I got to my weekly plan, I started like, okay, this is like one of my things I want to work on. Like, let me get started into this. And it's really, once you dive into something, so on your weekly plan, you're putting a slight time to it.

It's only then that you really begin to discover its contours. Oh, how is this really going? Where do I really need to spend time? How is this going to naturally break up at the different parts? And then you can go back and refine that quarterly plan a little bit later.

It's like, okay, what we really want to do then is like this month, get the sample chapters together. It gets more specific, but it gets more specific because you get specific feedback from actually putting boots on the ground. So go back to my original plan of writing book proposals.

I submitted those last week. So my original plan of do it by the new year was just throwing a dart generally in the direction of the dartboard, but I couldn't really make a good prediction of how long it was going to take and how it was going to get it done and how it was going to break down into different pieces until I was actually doing it.

So that's the main thing I'm going to say, Luke, is when you first start a long-term plan, you should be doing shockingly little thinking about that plan. Just get going. Once you're convinced this is something important to do, start putting aside time during your weekly planning and that weekly planning will influence your daily planning.

And let that feedback help you refine and improve those plans. And don't be mad at yourself when you get the timing wrong, because it's impossible to do. You don't get a gold medal for guessing how long a hard project is going to take. All right. You get a gold medal for continuingly to follow the multi-scale planning process, to let the feedback, refine your plans, to execute good weekly plans based on your quarterly plans and the realities of your schedule.

Doing good time-block plans based on your weekly plans. That is the thing you want to do. Trust that process, how long things actually take to happen. Well, I don't know. Did your family get COVID? Did you have a giant project dropped on your lap? You weren't expecting. Did something blow up two months in that you thought was going to be easy to complete and you had to go over and start over like, who knows?

You can't predict that. Why would you expect you could follow the multi-scale process, refine your long-term plans as, as you unfold your work on them, do that. And you should be happy with what you're doing. All right. Well, that's a lot of me talking. Why don't we take a call, Jesse?

Do we have a, do we have a call queued up that we can go to here? Yeah, we sure do. It's from Laura. We've got a question about a book that you read. Hi, Cal. I've been reading your book, Digital Minimalism. I'm about over halfway through right now, and I'm looking forward to decluttering my technology life.

I also saw a book that just came out called Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. It's by Johan Hari. I think it just came out this month in January. And I was wondering if you've read it and what you think about it.

It seems like something that could definitely help with productivity. Thank you. Well, Laura, I like Johan's work. So that's, that's the third book of his that I know about. Um, let me not bury the lead. I have not read it. I have not read Stolen Focus, not because there's something I dislike about it, but because when you write a book on a topic and you're done with that book, it's not uncommon that you're, you're kind of done with the topic in the sense that it's actually very difficult to get motivated to read a similar book.

This is very common among writers, especially writers, even writers who read very widely like I do. I just don't want to read something that is covering very similar ground to something I've written about too, because I've spent a lot of time on those topics. I'm probably, I'm going to guess.

I know the same people he's quoting. I know the same stories I've spent years in that world. So it's, it's, that's entirely a function of just, I'm up to my ears in that topic. Now, here's what I like about Hari though. I will say this, um, his approach to books, he has a certain formula that I appreciate, which is the, the big inversion formula.

You thought X about this big topic, but the reality is Y. And the reality Y is often something that's going to be a little bit aspiration. Like, Oh, now that I understand that, that gives me hope. That gives me a plan. I love that type of writing. Uh, that that's a Johan's approach.

So he had this book out called chasing the scream years ago that was about drug addiction. And that was an interesting book because, uh, what he was, what he was arguing there, his big inversion in that book. If, if I understand it correctly, it's been a while is that we have this reductive chemical only cultural understanding of drug addiction, right?

So his thing is, okay, the way we are taught about drug addiction is that if the, the mad scientist kidnapped you and strapped you down, it was like, I'm going to put heroin into your veins every day, you would be released when he finally released you from his evil layer.

Um, you would be a heroin addict. That is the way we understand it. Like the, these drugs chemically build these dependencies in our brain, um, and then we can't shake them. But he said, if that was the case, there should be a lot of heroin addicted grandmothers in the UK, because in the UK, the standard drug they give for pain, killing for hip replacement is Demerol, which is just medical heroin.

So we have all these grandmothers in the UK, uh, getting basically a few weeks worth of heroin as their standard treatment for their hip. And they come away just fine. They don't come away, uh, addicted to it or looking for heroin. And he said that the missing factor in chasing the scream was there's also a socio-psycho component to it.

So it's not just the chemical going into your body. It's when the chemical is going into your body as a means of escaping from something in your life, from pain, from post-traumatic stress, from trauma. It is the combination of that potent chemical, which gets right into your brain, plus the psycho-emotional usage of that to escape that creates the like impossible to shake addiction loop.

So that was chasing the scream. So like this kind of interesting version, um, inject heroin, the mad scientist injects into you every day. You're not going to be addicted. You start taking the, the pain pills they gave you for your hip after your hip feels better because you're depressed about losing your job.

And it's like, this helps, I need this to not feel depressed about losing my job. Then suddenly you can have a life destroying addiction. So that was chasing the scream. Then he wrote a book called lost connections that was talking about depression. And again, he was, he was arguing that there is this biochemical model of depression that's too reductive.

This idea that depression is just caused by something goes wrong with neurotransmitters. It's entirely chemical and you can, we can take pills to try to fix it. It's all you can do. And he's like, no, there's a chemical component. I think his big argument and lost connections is again, there's a socio-psycho component as well.

Like also, uh, a big source of depression is the things that are making you feel bad. Like someone close to you died, like you're really sad about it. Like you, you're, you feel hopeless about your work situation that you, you, you've lost some jobs. You can't get into their jobs.

You're feeling worthless. He's like the socio-psycho psychological aspect of depression really matter too. And if we just say like, don't worry, don't worry. It's just your chemicals. We'll give you a pill to fix it. And don't also say what's going on in your life. We also let's, let's make your wife better.

He's like, you're leaving most of the tools on the table. So that's like classic Yohan Harari. So in stolen focus, he's applying this to distraction and the attention economy. I don't know the book, the thesis really well, because again, it's too close to home, so I don't really want to get into it, but I think he's, he's, uh, I think his inversion there, if I understand vaguely is, uh, you think you're more distracted because you're like lazy, there's all these new shiny distractions out there and you can't help yourself.

He's like, that's not the case. Um, the attention economy has put billions of dollars to steal your focus away. Like there was this, this Apollo mission size effort to distract you and you had no chance. That's what I think he's saying. And if it is, I agree because I've written a lot about that.

So anyways, he's a, he's an entertaining writer. I like chasing the stream and lost connections and, uh, people who read, I get a lot of notes about lost focus. Um, so obviously lots of people are sending it to me to read, but people aren't telling me what they think about it.

So let me know if you read it, let me know. Uh, let me know what you think. All right. Number one, pre-block important or timely work on your calendar. So what happens with time block planning is when you make your time block plan for the day, you look at your weekly plan.

You look at your calendar because you're going to transfer from your calendar, any meetings or appointments you have onto your time block plan. What I suggest is if something is timely or important, you go, once you know about this thing on your radar, consider going ahead in your calendar and actually adding non appointment, non meeting blocks onto your calendar for when you're going to get that work done.

You know, it's, uh, right now, for example, I'm reviewing copy edits for my upcoming book, slow productivity. This isn't, it's very important and very timely. I have a very short amount of time to turn these around. So what I did is when I knew what date these were coming back, I actually went in advance and took three big blocks of time and just scheduled it on my calendar, like a meeting.

And now when I got to those days, I just transfer that work over to my time block plan for the day. So pre-blocking time, once you're in a time block discipline mindset, pre-blocking time is a great way to make sure that you don't, for example, over clutter your schedule in times when a lot is due.

All right. My second little different than autopilot, right? It's different than autopilot. It was a good question. Autopilot is your pre-scheduling work that occurs on a regular basis, right? So if you know, I always have to file a report on the last Friday of the month, you can figure out when and how you do that work and just set that repeating your calendar into perpetuity with pre-blocking is for one-off projects.

Got it. So you're not finding a regular time to work on copy editing because it only happens once every few years, but you know, that's really important and it's going to have a short turnaround. So you go protect that time in advance. And then because you time block, you know, when you get there, that'll be safe.

All right. The second tip time block relaxation into your work day. Right. So at first you might just be putting in a half hour. Uh, break it's in your time block plan. And when you get there, you know, okay, I'm going to just completely turn off work. But once you're in the habit of time blocking relaxation, you'll tend to get more aggressive about this because see, this is the, the advantage of time blocking from a sustainability point of view, uh, a critique, which I think is flawed of this approach is that people say, well, this is all about just optimizing every minute of your day, but time blocking can actually help you much better do the opposite.

Once you're in the habit of, I put breaks into my day and you have control over your time. Now, as your workload gets under control, you can get more aggressive about that. And you can say things like, you know what? On Wednesday, I'm going to make very efficient use of the morning and then block off three and a half hours to go see Oppenheimer in the afternoon.

You can now do that with confidence because you're controlling all of your time. So when you can control your time, not only can you get more work into your time, into your day, you can also get more relaxation the day without it causing trouble, so just introduce the habit of many days during the week.

I put little breaks into it. Once you have that habit, as you get to periods where your workload's a little less, you can lean into completely guilt-free, unnoticeable, larger breaks. And that type of variation of work pacing is something that's going to make work much more sustainable. So you're not just trying to fit in work, use time blocks to also fit in relaxation.

Because you can trust that that relaxation is fine, it's scheduled. You know when the other work's going to happen, nothing bad's going to happen if you turn off for a while. All right. Another advanced tip is when doing admin blocks. So I'm a big believer of admin blocks. I talk about this in the introductory material of the time block planner.

For tasks, you want to have one block in which you execute multiple things. Consolidate tasks, right? That's standard time blocking. What I've been experimenting with recently is having smaller admin blocks, theming the admin work by cognitive context. So what I mean by that is if you have five different tasks to do that are all related to different projects or different types of work, it can be more difficult than you think to go one, two, three, four, five, and execute those.

And the reason why it's difficult is because as you switch from one task type to another, your brain has to switch its cognitive context. Oh, we're thinking about this type of project. Now we have to think about like my kid's little league and some social event. Well, that's a completely different type of context.

And you will notice the difficulty of this context switching. You will notice it subjectively as a feeling of resistance, of mental fatigue. So if you instead theme tasks, so they're in the same cognitive context, what you'll realize is you get through a much faster. So if I'm doing four things related to social planning for the family, those four things, if I do them one in a row is going to go much more smoother because once I switch into that context, now I can do the three, four, five other tasks.

And it's going to come without that subjective resistance. And then maybe I have another small block later with a bunch of things surrounding a particular type of project I'm doing for work. Oh, I have a lot of things result surrounding a conference. I'm organizing, let me put a 20 minute block over here where I'm just going through a bunch of those in a row.

So shorter blocks of themed admin tasks is way more comfortable than having bigger blocks where you mix together different types of admin tasks. This is why the single hardest batched admin tasks that most people do on a regular basis is cleaning their email inbox. Because if you're just going through your inbox one by one, why is that so hard?

Because you are switching context from message to message. So even your email inbox, you can break out in the themes and say, okay, during this admin block, I'm doing some family related tasks and I'm responding to all emails related to family related tasks. And then later in the day, when I'm doing tasks that are just related to this conference I'm organizing, I will then go through my inbox and handle all the emails related to that conference.

And what you're going to find is those encounters with your inbox are going to go so much more smoothly because you are not behind the scenes trying to keep switching your cognitive context. All right. My fourth bit of advanced time blocking advice is whenever you put a meeting of any significant length or complexity onto your time block plan at a short block after it for just post-mortem organizing, what you learned, making a plan for what to handle, getting the information for that meeting into your systems.

Never let a interaction based time block be immediately followed by another time block focused on something different. You have to close down to work of meetings. You need 15 to 30 minutes to do this. Okay. The meeting is over, but I have 15 to 30 protected minutes to go transform my notes and the tasks and the put reminders on the calendars.

And if there's followup emails, let me just do them right now. Now I can completely shut down that thing. I don't have a ton of open loops hanging in my head as I jumped from this meeting to the next. I don't have a ton of open loops in my head as I jumped from this meeting right into trying to do deep work.

So that should just be instinct when you write a meeting time block that you put another block under it. And you can even just, I'll sometimes just a shaded in this little shaded in block under each of my meetings. And that's the catch your breath, process everything to just happen in that meeting.

Again, it's going to make the whole day go smoother. That, that, that extra 15 or 20 minutes after every meeting makes the whole rest of the day actually makes sense. All right. So that's the same concept. No, that's the same concept. That's the same concept that you always suggested with students and answering all their questions, like after a lecture and stuff, pretty much.

Yeah. That's a good point. Right. I used to recommend the same thing for students that when you're taking notes in lecture, you clearly Mark everything you didn't fully understand. And as soon as lecture is over, you see how many of these things can I resolve? I mean, I guess the first I, so this is from my book, how to become a straight A student.

And I say, there's, there's multiple lines of defense for filling in these question marks. The first line of defense is you ask questions right away. Wait, I didn't get that. Can you say that again? The second line of defense is you go up to the professor right after class.

I'd understand this. Can you explain it to me? The third line of defense is some combination of TAs, textbooks, office hours, and asking classmates. And the key is do that as soon as possible. Do not let the questions. Uh, don't let the questions just sit there as I don't understand this math technique.

I guess I'll deal with that when I'm studying for the test a month from now. Close that down. You want to try to close down and consolidate your understanding of lectures as soon as possible after you encounter the lectures. So this is kind of similar. If you have a meeting process, everything related to it right away.

Don't just let that sit. And maybe tomorrow I'll remember what to do about it. Closing loops. I think is really important for having sustainable cognitive work. All right. So that's time block planning. Good to revisit it. Enjoy the time block planner. If you want to find out more, I have a website, timeblockplanner.com.

Um, that has a video where I really go through and show you a lot of examples of exactly how time blocking works. You can go watch that video there. And it has links to where to buy the second edition from Amazon, but I'm just, look, whether or not anyone buys it.

And a lot of people are, but whether or not anyone buys this, I'm so happy to have it because it is just a perfected tool for exactly this method of time management that I have so long sworn by. All right, let's move on to some questions. Uh, Jesse, I think all the questions we've chosen today have at least a tangential connection to time blocking or time management.

So let's get our productivity geeks hats out and put on and get rolling here. So what's our first question. Here we go. First question is from Pumi. I live my day using time blocking combined with autopilot scheduling for my mornings. Every morning I do two hours of my work on my research.

Sometimes, however, I have to stay up late and I miss my morning blocks. I want to know how to deal with these setbacks. I feel guilty for the whole day for not executing my autopilot schedule because I slept in. Well, we have two different related concepts to differentiate here.

I think that's going to help you find a solution. So autopilot scheduling, which is what you referenced in your question here is where for regularly occurring work, you have a set time on a set day and typically a set location for which you do that works. The whole idea is to, uh, take the decision of working on this out of your day-to-day decision-making process.

It's just there on your calendar. Tuesdays at 10, I go to this library and work on my problem set. That's just when I do that. So that's autopilot scheduling. Now what you're doing is maybe not exactly autopilot scheduling. What you're trying to do is start each morning with two hours of research.

So it feels like an autopilot schedule because like, oh, it's, it's work. I do on the same, uh, same time every day, but I would say what you're really doing instead is what we might call a heuristic autopilot. So a heuristic autopilot is not a calendar appointment that is set to show up on a regular basis and you treat like any other calendar appointment, like a dentist appointment or a meeting.

A heuristic autopilot is a rule. It's something you're going to write down on the top of your weekly plan. For example, a, a rule that you think about when you're creating your schedule for each day. So I think what you're really doing here is you have the heuristic autopilot that says when possible, spin the first hour or two of each day working on research.

So some days that's not possible because you, uh, you're up late and you have to sleep in, uh, but you're not violating an appointment on your schedule. So if this was an actual appointment on your schedule, if this was a true autopilot schedule, you would treat this like a real appointment, like a meeting with your boss and you wouldn't say to your boss, yeah, sorry, I didn't show up.

I slept in. You would have to go to that, but what you're doing here is more flexible. So that's why I call it a heuristic. It's a general rule for how you get a certain thing done. Like another example of a heuristic autopilot is sometimes when I'm deep in the problem solving phase of a theoretical computer science paper, I'll have a heuristic that says, okay, the drive to work every day for the next week, to the extent possible, use that to think about the problem.

It's not something that's on my calendar. When I actually drive to work might differ based on the days, but it's a heuristic, keep this rule in mind each day when you're planning out your day. Another heuristic autopilot, sometimes I have a lot of tasks that are floating around for something that's coming up.

I'll say 20 minutes every day dedicated only to working through tasks related to this upcoming thing. That's a heuristic autopilot. And then when I get to each day, I'll say, okay, I have to find where this is going to fit, but I'm going to try to find 20 minutes where I can work on tasks and try to do that every day this week.

So I think that's going to help you here. You really have a heuristic, not a hard autopilot schedule. And once you know that you shouldn't be so worried that occasionally you don't get to do research in the morning. What matters is you're following a heuristic rule of when there's time in the morning, you do.

Now, if you find that you're almost never actually applying this rule, that almost always you're sleeping in too late to get this research done. Well, then you need to change something, right? That's no longer a good heuristic. You need to change where the research happens or you need to change your habits so you're not sleeping in.

That's possible. But if what we're talking about here is once a week, you don't do morning research, the other four days you do. I think it's a perfectly fine example of a heuristic autopilot schedule. All right. What is that similar? Is that similar to when you were writing your, when you were in writing mode last summer, you would write.

Is that, was that heuristic? Was that a little different? No, I think that's a fair point. Last summer when I was writing slow productivity, it was, you know, try to write first thing before we go out and do activities, you know, try to write first thing every day if possible.

And when we were on vacation, so last summer we were up in Vermont, the Mad River Valley, some days it was, look, we got to get going early in the morning because we're taking the family out to see something as it's a couple hours away. And I just want it right that day, but it was okay.

The default is try to just write every morning. And Julie was understood that schedule. So she's a lot of mornings be like, yeah, we might go do something in the morning. I might take the boys to do something brief before we do our larger trip. And you're right. It was a heuristic and I couldn't do it every day.

But most days I tried to write first thing. So that was a heuristic autopilot schedule. And again, yeah, it's very different than these days, these hours, this location, I'm always doing this work. I want to react to something that has been going around the internet recently. So I'm actually going to share something on the screen here.

So again, this is the deep life.com or youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode, episode 262. I'm loading up a YouTube video. I won't have the audio on, but I have closed captioning on. All right. So this is a video from better ideas, a popular channel. It's 2 million subscribers. And the title of this video is how overstimulation is ruining your life.

And we see there's a young man on screen here in the woods. Looking earnestly at the camera and I have the close captioning on. So I'm going to play this and read you a little bit of what he's saying. He's saying during certain periods of my life. Oh, that's where I said the volume was off.

Uh, the volume was very much on. Let me turn that off here. Sorry about that. All right. During various periods of my life, I have a very difficult time focusing on pretty much anything important or difficult during these periods. It seems almost impossible to break out of the social media limbo where you're just constantly switching between tabs, refreshing pages, kind of waiting for something interesting to happen.

Like for someone to post a cool photo or Instagram or something, you're kind of waiting to be entertained. But if you actually have to apply yourself, it's extremely difficult, borderline painful to do so. And I'm pretty sure almost everyone can relate to this problem. I'm sure you've seen a lot of videos on YouTube, giving you little tips and tricks as to how to better focus, including my own channel, but they are very few videos kind of diving in talking about why it's so difficult to focus on hard things, you know, like what's the deal?

Why can't we just sit down and do something important with very little strain? All right. So that's the start of that video on better ideas. And he goes on to get into some of the neuroscience of why we're distracted so easily when we're trying to work on something hard.

And it's a neuroscience explanation you may have heard before, but essentially our dopamine system, which generates that urge to do something that's going to generate a reward. Keep in mind, we often get that a little bit wrong. I think in common parlance, we often think about dopamine as being a source of rewards.

The dopamine itself is what makes you feel a lot of pleasure. Now, dopamine is what gives you that urge to do the thing that you think is going to give you the reward. It's when you have an addiction, it's the dopamine that makes it so irresistible to grab that cigarette because it wants the other rewards you're going to get when you actually smoke the cigarette, right?

So what is talked about in this video is this common neuroscience explanation that the dopamine system is firing up to get those quick hit rewards of seeing the video that's really interesting, seeing the post that's a little bit scandalous, seeing the like number jump on something you did earlier, which gives you this big burst of people like me.

They really like me. The dopamine system likes rewards. It wants rewards. Now, the internet has many rewards lined up. That system kicks in the play in the play and you feel this irresistible desire to click, click, click. You do not get a similar dopamine push for I'm working for our 900 of 10,000.

It's going to take me to finish this really big project because the reward's not proximate. And so what's going to win then the complicated deep thing, part of your slow productivity push to do something big over a long period of time or Instagram or tick tock. And he said, yeah, your brain is wired to go for that.

And that's a very hard, that's a very hard challenge to win. And now what I learned from this video is that, yes, he is right. There are lots of videos that talk about this same thing, quote unquote, over stimulation. People are really feeling it. And I think young people are feeling it harder because they have more targets for their dopamine systems.

They've more acclimatized their mind to all of these various rewards. And they're very good at these various rewards. There's so much pulling at them that young people in particular are really finding. Yes, this is ruining my life. I can't do anything longterm, deep, cognitively useful, getting bad grades at school.

I can't advance in my job. I can't produce something that I really want to produce. Those of us, my age or older, maybe say I distract myself too much and it slows down me doing important work. Young people really do feel like it's ruining their lives. So what should we do about it?

Well, I thought, well, I can offer my own advice here. I mean, this is something I've studied and written about for a long time. Kind of wrote the definitive book on the power of focus and why you should cultivate it. I've been thinking and writing articles and books about this for a long time.

So I figured, let me, let me review here on the podcast, my own very complicated multi-part system for combating online overstimulation. So get a pad of paper ready because you don't want to miss step nine or 10. There's a very complicated explanation for how you're going to have to very carefully navigate the online world.

All right. So it's gonna be very complicated. Are you ready? Okay, here it goes. Here's my solution. Don't use things that cause overstimulation. All right. Now, I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but, but honestly, the answer is as simple as that. Dopamine system is powerful. So don't give it the targets that it's going to fire up for.

You have to actually remove most of these sources of overstimulation from your life. If you really want to start thinking and producing original thoughts at a high level. There's not these complex habits and careful ways of navigating your notifications and when you use this and when you don't use this, I'm telling you this as someone who thinks for a living and studies people who thinks for a living, the more sources of overstimulation you eliminate from your life, the easier, and we of course know this type of abstention approach is effective because we see it with other things that historically have hijacked the dopamine system and caused a lot of trouble.

We do not tell people who have an issue with smoking, okay, we need to build a complex system of where you have cigarettes and where you don't, and you don't want to have it in the car, but you will have it here and we're going to have a, an app that, that keeps track of how many cigarettes you've had and then try to restrict, then during certain periods, there's a time lock that locks off the cigarettes that you can't have it during that period, but you can't have it on this period.

And, uh, we do a week on, but you don't smoke on Saturdays. No, we just say you got to quit smoking as the same with a lot of other addictions like this, that people have trouble with, but we resist applying that type of clarity and abstention to online overstimulation.

So let me get a little bit more granular about this. Uh, social media, this is a big source of it. You got to just basically get this out of your life. If you have to have some social media for professional reasons, it should not be on your phone. It should be on a boring computer.

It's something you should do on a schedule or hire someone to do on your behalf. It should never, ever be something you go to when you're bored. Should never be a source of distraction. It should be, I'm an author and I set up my Instagram post in a shared document on Google drive.

Here's the photos. Here's the text. And I have someone who posts it Fridays and Mondays, or if I have to do that, I log in the thing on my computer, I post it, and then I shut it back down again. All right. So if you have to use it professionally, it's on a computer is boring.

You never use it as a source of entertainment. You don't scroll online news. Look, you're not a, you're not a editor at Gawker. You just get out of that, that world of online news and discussion. You don't have to be a part of it. How do you keep up with stuff in the world?

We talked about this earlier in this episode where I gave advice to reading guy, uh, you know, subscribe to some email newsletters that you read when you can, that gives you interesting perspectives, listen to podcasts, maybe listen to a daily news roundup podcast. If you want to be kept up with more current events, right.

Or listen to something like a saga and crystals, their breaking points podcast, where they go through 10 stories about what's going on in the world. Podcasts are fine. Right. Because it's, it's something you have to turn on and listen to. It's not a knee jerk. It's not a knee jerk distraction that your dopamine system is going to kick into.

No one is like trying to write and halfway through writing like, Oh, and quickly turn on a podcast. Tick-tock and do that. Online news can do that. Twitter can do that. Podcasts are fine. Newsletters are fine. Maybe even print out the articles you like and read them when you get a chance.

That's fine. You'll be informed. Can I get rid of all that online news? What about YouTube? YouTube is tricky. Why is YouTube tricky? Good. I think video is the future of independent content creation, but the recommendations sidebar on YouTube can make it into one of these dopamine inflaming sources of distraction.

So when it comes to something like YouTube, you have to use it one way and not another. So this is maybe the place where I come closest to the navigation lines that you hear in a lot of these online videos, but I do think YouTube is a source of information.

YouTube is a become more a source of entertainment, high quality entertainment that rivals what you would get on TV, but it's also a giant source of distraction. So how do we, how do we make sense of YouTube? Well, here's my, here's my YouTube strategy. So in order to preserve YouTube as a way to look up instructions for things, which I think is a great use of YouTube, how do I change the oil in a Honda odyssey?

You look it up on YouTube. You can see a video of someone doing it. It's better than trying to find an article to preserve that use of YouTube without it making a dopamine inflaming system, get one of these. Plugins for your browser that you use YouTube on that gets rid of the recommendations.

So what you can do is you can search for something. You can see the search results. You can click on a search result. You can watch it, but there's no, here's what's coming up next. Or what about this? And what about that? So that one type of plugin alone makes YouTube into a fantastic library without it being something that you can use as a source of knee-jerk distraction, because again, when you're working on something hard, if you have blocked YouTube, you go home, let's go to youtube.com.

You don't see anything. You have to search for something and find something. It's not a, it's not a highly salient source of distraction. Now, what about entertainment on YouTube? Because again, I think this is actually important. I'm a believer that video Trump's audio, the future of independent content is going to be video.

I mean, this is like radio became a big thing until television was around. And then television just smashed the market share of radio. It was just so much bigger because humans like to see faces. Humans like to see visuals. And I increasingly believe, uh, watching a high quality interview show on YouTube is better than 99% of the stuff that's on television.

Or that's on a non unscripted streaming services. And I think that gap's going to close more. So how do you, for example, watch a show like mine, or maybe you're, you're a Lex Fridman fan. You want to watch his interviews. How do you watch these type of programming as a substitute for lower quality television with again, not having YouTube be a rabbit hole.

And my answer here is television sets. I learned this from our YouTube guy, Jeremy, that increasingly televisions are becoming one of the most common devices on which this style of YouTube video is watched. So if you're going to look something up, you have a browser with a plugin that blocks the recommendations.

If you're going to watch quote unquote, independent, high quality content on YouTube, you have it on the YouTube app and your Apple TV or fire stick on your television, and you watch it like you would any other television show in the same circumstances where you'd watch television, I'm sitting down with a lunch break, I take out my remote.

I turn on the TV. I go to the YouTube app. I searched for the latest episode of whatever, and I put it on the TV. There's a lot of friction in using a television. There's also a lot of routine and ritual built into televisions where that's not part of your dopamine cycle.

When you're in your home office trying to write something, you don't rush downstairs and turn on the TV and go to Netflix and select a show and turn it on. That's too much overhead. The television, you think about, oh, I'm going to have a meal. I'm taking a break.

It's a big production to get it going. So you move high quality, independent media consumption to the television and looking up to a browser protected, a plugin protected browser. Now you don't have to worry about something like YouTube being in your life, being a source of distraction. Also throw in place better, less dopamine susceptible entertainment sources to fill the gap that the highly salient, uh, distracting content is probably filling right now.

Listen to get back into music, go see good movies and read about them before and after read much more books, high quality streaming content, high quality podcast, right? Get your mind used to other sorts of much higher quality content for. The entertainment and distraction, the lower quality stuff will begin to seem less palatable.

Same thing happens with food. You eat a lot of junk food is really addictive. My God, I just need chips and cookies. And this makes me feel better. And what else would I want to eat? You stop doing it for a while. You start eating better food. You start cooking yourself.

You go to the farmer's market. You're using a high quality ingredients. Everyone will tell you this. You start eating well, a Snickers bar, a chips. Ahoy seems weird. It's cardboard. It's fake. It's too sugary. You don't crave it anymore. Right? So you don't break this connection to junk food by just white knuckling and eating less, you replace it with better food.

So that's the final part of solving overstimulation is in introducing flooding the zone with much more quality stimulation so that you lose your taste for a Tik TOK video. You lose your taste for an inflammatory online article that someone tweeted and that you're scrolling through and then clicking the other links.

All right. So again, this is how I think you solve overstimulation. If you're serious about it, you get rid of most of the sources of overstimulation. You stop using social media, you stop doing online news surfing. You put in a lot of high quality content and in the few places where you might need to encounter these worlds, YouTube looking things up or high quality, independent media, you have to do some limited social media for your work.

You do so in a way that makes it so far from being a source of knee jerk distraction that your dopamine system forgets about it. So anyways, I appreciated that video. Overstimulation is a problem. I'm glad people care about it, but let's just get blunt. Stop doing the thing that's ruining your life.

Stop smoking, stop eating the junk food, replace it with something better. Let's not get too cute about this. Let's not get too fine grained life without the overstimulation really is a deeper life. It really is a more intellectually engaged life. It really is going to be a more successful life.

You are going to produce ideas that astounds you. Next question is from Gerald. Do you think that if you don't have at least an informal plan for every hour of the day, you are losing part of your day to ineffectiveness, even if it's recreation or family time? Or do you think having intentions for every part of your day leads to burnout?

Well, Gerald, I mean, I do stand by time blocking at the level of intensity that I recommend for the professional day will burn you out if you don't have a break from it. So if you're locked in, what's next? Oh, my God, I have a limited amount of time to get this done.

I'm going to let the pressure of that time boundaries actually motivate me to focus even more. I mean, that's a very effective way of producing a lot of cognitive output in a fixed amount of time. But if you're doing that all hours of the day, you will burn out.

It's just it's just too much. On the other hand, I think you are right. If you come to your evenings and say, all right, I'm done with work. Time to relax and maybe get some stuff done. You're not going to end up as relaxed as you think stuff is not going to get done.

But more importantly, you're not going to actually commit to the type of activities that maybe would give you satisfaction or meaning. You're going to drift from thing to thing. Your phone is for sure going to insert itself into your time there and really dominate your attention. Your head's going to hit the pillow.

You're not going to be particularly happy. So we need a middle ground between I'm looking at my planner and I got seven minutes to get these three things done. And I've just been on my phone for the last four hours. And I guess I need to go get, you know, a napkin because my eyes are bleeding from staring at memes on my screen.

We need something in between. So I recommend sketching a plan. I use that terminology a lot. Sketch a plan for your evening. Sketch a plan for your weekend. And what that means can vary depending on the specificity. So it might mean, look, OK, at this exact time tonight, someone's coming over.

I want to watch this show. And so some stuff might have time. Other stuff might be more lower grained, like try to like take care of the tax stuff right after work. And let's try to exercise. Here's what we're going to do for dinner tonight. You know, let's I want to get in some reading time on my book.

So most of it's not attached to times. It's relatively loose. But it gives you some sense of I want to do this and that. And here's what's happening tonight. And you're sketching a plan for a reasonable night. And then you do your best to more or less follow that.

And if you miss time, something you added a little bit too much to it and something took more time, that doesn't really matter at all. What matters is I had some intentionality with my time. I thought through, like, what do I want to do tonight? And I more or less followed that the best I could.

That's the win here. Not I got through this many things or I'm on top of things. I said, like, I wasn't adrift. And these sketch plans can have plenty of downtime, but it's downtime on your terms. So, well, downtime, I could just sort of look at my phone while I'm eating dinner or, you know, if we ate early, I could go for a walk on this nature trail and listen to this this novel I'm really enjoying and really get downtime that I really enjoy and is really relaxing and it feels really intentional.

Or if I think about it, why don't we start bedtime 45 minutes earlier? Like I can actually read a book with each of the kids. And, you know, that's actually really enjoyable. But I had to think about that if we were just going through the motions and just looked up and said, it's bedtime, we wouldn't be able to do it.

So I'm a big believer in sketching a plan. For nonprofessional time, intention is what matters, but don't care so much about how much you're fitting to that plan or whether you get everything done. I just want you to avoid wandering haphazardly during your time. And there's a difference. There is a difference on the spectrum from wandering haphazardly to being incredibly locked in.

There is a gap in between there, which is where I think evenings and weekends can comfortably exist. All right, what do we got next? I like this question. It's from Ricky. There is one area of my personal productivity system that I haven't found a good way to handle ongoing activities.

Usually these are things that can sometimes be broken up into projects, but the overall area is something that you you're never done with, like getting better at hockey, a hobby of mine. Any suggestions on how to handle staying on top of these? So, Ricky, there's a different category of organizational commitment that becomes relevant here.

And this is what we can call systems, habits or routines. So it's things that have been worked into your schedule that you do on a regular basis ad infinitum. This is just what I do. I exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, and I do it after work and I do it in the basement gym, and that's just what I do on those days.

Or I play hockey with this adult league on Saturday mornings and I do rink time on Monday evenings, and then I run two days a week for exercise. I just do that. It's not a task that I'm done and I take it off my list. It's just part of my routine.

So we all have some systems, routines and habits in our lives where we just get used to doing it. So how do we install these things? Well, typically you put them on your calendar. And or you do some sort of metric tracking on it, so you have something to check off each day, did I really do this?

So you instill the habit. There's a lot that's been written on how to instill a habit. And then once it's there, it will become more of a background part of your life. It generates a sense of identity, positive feedback, and then it's more likely to stick in. The issue is you can only fit so many of these.

So if you don't have any, that's a problem because it's a very powerful weapon. When you when you when you work something into a background. Routine in your life, it just happens every week. You can just look up a year later and typically really cool stuff has happened. It's the proverbial exercise routine.

You make it a routine. You stop thinking about it. You just do it. But then a couple of years later, you say, actually, I'm in pretty good shape. Like this paid off over time. I'm glad this is a part of my life. Another example would be like my five books per month routine.

I just do that. And now I don't think much about it. It's just that this is what I do. I read five books a month. We talk about them on the podcast. And that's really positive over time in my life. But I don't have to think about it. It's something I've instilled.

But there's a limited number of things you could do. Maybe a fitness thing, a high quality leisure thing. There's a few of these you can do where you you're able to regularly put aside and protect time for a habit, routine or ritual. And so you want to choose them very carefully.

If you're not doing any, you're leaving a powerful weapon in the armory. Right. And that's a that's an issue. But if you have five or six different things, they're going to collide and you're going to have to fail in your commitment to execute again and again, that destabilizes your commitment and eventually will dissolve.

So when it comes to these sort of serious, I do it all the time. Five is probably the limit, depending on how big we're talking about. And maybe three is more reasonable. So it's almost like you want to have these slots written up on your wall. It's a draft.

What do I want to draft? I have three slots for like major routines I can have in my life outside of work. What are they going to be? And if something hasn't earned that place, like I'm going to take that and replace it with something that's even more valuable.

So you do want to take those seriously because you only have a limited capacity if you really want to stick with them. But you do want to be using these. So sports or athletic pursuit could be one. Everyone should have something here that has to do with fitness, probably just doing it again and again relating to fitness.

I really like the idea of having some sort of intellectual high quality leisure in here, something you do on a very regular basis above the normal baseline that the average person would do. That's pushing your mind. That's that's helping you psychologically or philosophically or theologically in some sort of regular way.

I think that's really important. Beyond there, it just kind of comes to your interest. Maybe it's cooking or maybe it's a craft like with woodworking or knitting. I don't know. There's different things you could you could have in there. Maybe it's programming or microelectronics, but they have three, maybe four of these things that get serviced with rituals that you instill as I just do this on these days.

I just always do that. I think it's part of a deep life. So that's what I do with hockey. If I was you, Ricky. Golf. Golf. Sure. Yeah, tennis, tennis and golf. Just read a book about tennis. How a few, not too many, not too few. Yeah, I like those.

All right, let's do we have a longer deep plate. Let's do another. We'll do one more question. All right. Sounds good. We've got a question from John. I'd like to calculate my implicit hourly rate to determine if I should outsource a task instead of doing it myself. I struggle, though, when it comes to personal tasks that would take place outside of work hours like yard work, home improvement, stuff like that.

For these types of tasks, it's unlikely I would use the time saved from outsourcing the tasks to do more work that would earn my hourly rate because it's a weekend and I don't want to work that anyway. Yeah, so I've heard about this approach. This is the approach where you take your salary and you divide it by the number of hours you work.

And then you say, this is implicitly my hourly rate. And the idea is in a professional context. When you're considering whether to do a particular annoying task, I'm going to format a presentation or whatever, fly a better flight that's going to save me time that's more expensive or something like this.

You say, well, how much would it cost for me to hire someone? How much would it cost for me to take the better flight and then say, is that more or less than what it would cost me in terms of my hourly rate? So if my hourly rate is five hundred dollars and it would take me three hours to do this annoying task, but I could hire someone for three hundred bucks to do it.

You should hire someone for three hundred bucks because you're not out three hundred bucks, you're actually saving twelve hundred dollars. Like that's that's the mentality. It's a hack or heuristic that people sometimes use in work. John is asking about trying to use this with chores outside of work. And he says, ah, the analogy kind of breaks down because it's not as if the three hours I spend doing yard work is three hours.

I could be earning fifteen hundred dollars working because if I wasn't doing the yard work on Saturday, I wouldn't be working anyways. And I agree with that, John. I don't think the monetary framework is necessarily what you want to use for evaluating the worth of activities outside of work, at least in a very specific way.

There is another way where I think money does matter here, but let's put that aside for now. Instead, the cost I want you to think about is in footprint on your schedule and stress. And so you look at how big of a footprint on my schedule is this particular household thing going to have if it's highly disruptive.

It eats up the the core of the weekend day that you otherwise as a family could be doing lots of other things. That's a heavy cost. If it's something that's very stressful for you, that's also a heavy cost. This was like me doing my own taxes. My issue is not that I am not quantitative or mathematical enough to understand taxes.

The issue is I'm too mathematical and quantitative. And so my mind would hone in on the inevitable ambiguities or inconsistencies in the process of trying to fill out these different tax forms. And it would drive me crazy. And at some point, my wife said, you're hiring someone to do the taxes because most people are like, it's fine.

Like, this is probably fine. I know what this means. Fine. And I'm obsessing about, well, wait a second. How does this match with this? And is this really? And I'm trying to figure out the whole thing. It's my type of. So that's a high stress impact. So it's very costly to me.

So when it comes to outsourcing or eliminating non-work obligations, that's the cost that you care about. But that has a highly disruptive footprint on your schedule. Outsource or eliminate if you can. If it has a high impact in terms of your stress level. Outsource or eliminate if you can.

That's what you should be thinking about, not what your time is worth or your hourly rate or something like this. I agree that that doesn't come into it. All right. So money is relevant here in the sense that outsourcing can take money. And that's fine. So you also have to factor in, can I afford this?

I do want to underscore, though, a point. We talked about this some in the deep dive earlier in this episode when I was talking with Sarah Hart Unger. We talked about this a little bit that. I think we take off the table too quickly, the idea of investing in elimination of disruptive schedule, footprints and overhead.

We just take that off our list of things where it's valid to spend money on, even if we could and we spend that same money on other types of things. We're very comfortable. Let's say we're talking about, you know, dual income, middle class, coastal America or something like this.

People are very comfortable with what will spend more money to have a a nicer car or, you know, we the environment's important. So we're going to have a seventy thousand dollar Tesla. We will spend that's fifty thousand dollars more than we need for the transportation. But like this isn't we think is important to us.

And that's a good thing to spend money on. But if, on the other hand, it's a few hundred dollars a month to take out this yard work chore that just eats up your schedule and is annoying for your family, you say, I don't want to do that because technically I could do this and that feels like a waste of money, you know, and we have these sort of inconsistencies happening all the time.

Well, here's an activity, you know, a kid's kind of interested in this. We'll spend thousands on this activity. But the idea that we could hire a laundry service, I could do the laundry technically. And so now I don't know, I don't want to do that. That's somehow a failure.

In fact, that last one is a point that Laura Vanderkam talks about a lot is many more people could and should be outsourcing their laundry, but they don't because it's not in this list of psychologically appropriate things to spend money on. So I think we were weird and we'll spend a huge amount of money on this and on these things that have a cost in terms of schedule, impact or stress outside of work where we're very reluctant to spend money.

And I think we should change the thinking about it. So I think that's one issue. The other issue and Sarah talked about this is people don't like giving that advice because anytime you talk about investing money in anything, there's this knee jerk response of not everyone has the money for that.

It's true of everything. It doesn't mean we shouldn't give the advice, because for a lot of people, it could be helpful. So that's what I would say, John, is look for forget your hourly rate. What what is the cost in terms of scheduled disruption? What is the cost in terms of stress and be more willing to invest in that than you might have otherwise been more willing to invest in optimizing outsourcing that you otherwise might have been.

The final thing I want to say is often the solution here is not financial. It's elimination. So you have some sort of set up in your life that actually you could just stop doing this. You could step down from this position. You could reconfigure the specific teams that your kids are on.

They're like there's some things you could do that might have a huge win in terms of schedule, input or stress. And you don't because it's well, there's some some advantage to this or someone might be disappointed. And we don't take elimination seriously enough. But often elimination is is possible and people forget about it two weeks later.

No one cares, but you've had this big gain as well. So so outsourcing is one way to get rid of these high cost out of work activities. Elimination is the other. And they're both things that we don't think enough about. And so I'm glad you brought this up, John, because I think it's I think these are both strategies that we're thinking about organizing life outside of work, we should all think about more.

I love eliminating things. My wife actually has to push back on that, but why don't we just stop doing it? Why don't we just start? Why don't we just cancel this? Why don't we? Why don't we do nothing? And it's a little more complicated than that. Like kids should be doing things.

Yeah. But like some sports leagues make your schedule impossible. And this sports league, they're still playing the sport, but it's like way more reasonable. Like, you know, sometimes those type of things. Having kids play hockey is pretty tough because the ice time is always so like limited, it's late at night.

It's late at night or early. Yeah. Yeah. Hockey, hockey can be a rough one. That's the one advantage of baseball. Like it can't be played early in the morning, can't be played late at night. So at least, you know, unfortunately, it takes a very long time to play. Well, it's got soccer, too.

Soccer is pretty good. Yeah, there's no early morning fields. Rowing is bad. A lot of early morning. All right. Next question is from Ruby, a 35 year old banker from London. I'm taking a few weeks off to recover from burnout due to a period where my responsibilities kept increasing.

What would you recommend to do to make the most of my time away from work? So, Ruby, the productivity perspective here. Is that if all you do during your time off is recharge and then just go back into this environment where you were before, give it six months, you'll be back in the same place.

What is important here, this is what I would do with my time off, is figure out what is the productivity framework I'm going to put in place so that I have clarity into all of the obligations entering my world. None of it is being held only in my mind.

I am configuring. I can see what it is. What type of work do I have at different different parts? This is the traditional facing the productivity dragon. And then I control my time on different time scales. Here's what I'm doing today. Here's what I'm doing this week. Here's how these projects fit.

Now, here's the here's the goal here. Not that with this productivity framework, you can optimize your time enough that the the workload that burnt you out before you can now handle. That's not the goal. The goal instead is clarity. Clarity about what's on your plate. Clarity about what is reasonable to be on your plate.

Clarity about proposing this, this and this makes sense. This, this and this is too much. The productivity system, a good productivity system can give you the confidence you need to advocate for yourself. Now, again, this, I think, is one of the. One of the insidious side effects. Of rejecting productivity because you associate it with this optimization over a culture is that, ironically, it is exactly what your employer wants you to do.

We think about it. Oh, no, the productivity is somehow part of this base superstructure, sort of early 20th century Marxist approach of of trying to exploit more labor from the from the the the proletariat or something like this. Right. So we have this sort of grad school, blah, blah, blah approach to it, actually.

Knowing what you're doing. Knowing what's on your plate. Having an extreme clarity about exactly your workplace. Seeing the matrix of the obligations being thrown at you with clarity. That's actually what in a lot of these overwhelmed situations, your employer won't want. Because it means you can come back and say, I know this is crazy.

We need to cut this in half. Let me tell you why. You know, I have my arms around everything and I'm very careful. I run my schedule very careful and I do very good work. This is 50 percent too much. And I have confidence in that conviction. If you instead fall back into haphazard busyness because you're trying to reject the the hustle culture, et cetera, you are at the mercy of these employers.

It's just all stuff. We're all busy. You got a bunch of stuff. Why aren't you doing work? Why are you complaining? You're either going to burn yourself out again and again or give them an excuse to fire you. So productivity can actually be what you need to prevent and push back against overload, right?

So this is, again, the whole autonomy frame for productivity is having your arms around your obligations is what allows you to do so many different things. And this is one of the things you can do is it allows you to stand up. It allows you to stand up and say with a clear voice and conviction, enough, this is too much.

I know it's too much. You know that I know that now this is my this is what's reasonable. And this is what I'm going to do. And when people know that you have your act together when it comes to these sort of productivity systems, it's much harder for them to push back against that.

So that's what I would say. Rest and recharge, but also get your systems fired up so that when you come back, you're no longer at the mercy of like whatever junk your employer is just throwing at you and hoping you won't notice that it's completely unreasonable. Yeah, I like what you said at the end of the deep dive, too, about having options.

Yeah. Yeah. Productivity is about that's the autonomy frame. Yeah. If you don't have control over all the different obligations orbiting you in your professional life, you are at the mercy of whim, your boss's mood, your personality, what you can get away with. And basically, we'll probably just be stressed out.

I mean, or you could be OK. Like maybe you just whatever become kind of misanthropic. And and resentful and people don't want to deal with it. And you kind of find a way to make it work. But it's all just you're drifting towards some sort of steady state. That's probably going to be a non-optimal equilibrium.

But when you know everything that's going on, you can stand back and say this, this and this is the problem. And if I move this, I can't do those. I got to take this off my plate. And no, no, no. Of course, no. Of course, no. Of course, no.

Yes, I'll do this. Here's I mean, it just makes all the difference. You can do so much if you have a good productivity system and you can't do almost anything without it. I mean, you're just left with like I'm burnt out or, you know, quitting the workforce and hoping that people subscribe to my sub stack.

There's got to be something in between those two. All right. Let's keep rolling. What do we have next? All right. Next question's from Rito, 23 year old from India. I have too many interests in my life. I have so many choices. It's crippling and I end up doing nothing.

My question is, how do I learn to prioritize? So, Rito, I included this question because it helps show that the productivity perspective is also relevant to your life outside of work. It's also relevant to your leisure life. So haphazard busyness can cripple you like it's happening here in your leisure life in the same way that it can in your professional life.

Especially like Rito, you're young, you're 23 years old. You have all this time and all this potential. And there's so many different things you can do that you bounce from one thing to another and nothing's making progress. Your brain will eventually stop trying to generate motivation. I've written about this before, Rito.

What's really happening here, if you want my opinion, is that our brain is very good at evaluating potential plans. Is this objective worth it? And do I have reason to believe this plan is going to work? Our brain asks and answers those two questions all the time. We're very good at that.

This is something that is bred into our Paleolithic path. Those mechanisms, when it doesn't trust you really know what you're doing, when it doesn't trust that there's a plan here that makes sense, that's going to lead to some sort of mastery or a highly fulfilling outcome. It says, nope.

And what does it feel like when your plan evaluation apparatus in your brain says, no, it feels like procrastination? You can't summon motivation because there is a system in our brain that generates the feelings of motivation towards action. It has to believe what you're doing. So if your leisure life is crippled with or ridden with haphazard busyness, it's like, I'm not going to just start this whatever, buy a video camera to become the next Martin Scorsese, because you don't know what you're doing here.

There's no plan here. This is one of like 15 different things you have. That is why you have this feeling of I can't do anything. I feel crippled. It's because it's too haphazard. It's too busy. So you can bring a productivity framework into your leisure life to get your arms around this, to start to be selective, to start to be intentional about what you spend your time on.

And in doing so, you're going to end up in a much better place. So let me give you a particular suggestion here, Rito, just to plant a seed. So one way you might structure more intentionally your life outside of work would be a four part focus. I've talked about this before.

Three routines and one project in one time. So the three routines that just figure out how to have going in the background would probably be some sort of fitness health routine. Uh, this is eating and exercise. This is foundational. Let's get that going. Background, some sort of reading routine.

I'm reading on a regular basis. I'm moving away from just distraction. My mind is learning how to actually remain focused on complex thoughts. You're going to develop as a human being. You're going to develop as a, as a thinker. Uh, we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago on how to become a reader.

It was called the joys of the reading life. It's probably like two 38. Yeah. Yeah. Episode two 38. So go back and watch that. Your third routine I would say to put in place foundationally is some sort of community routine. These things you do on a regular basis that keep you connected and serving your friends, your family, other people in the communities that you're involved with.

Get background routines for those three things going. That's just foundational. You can tweak those, but you should always on a regular basis. Those things are just woven into the fabric of your life. Okay. And then one major project. And then do that major project until you get to a great milestone that you can swap in another major project.

So just one major project at a time, spend six months on it, spend a year on it. I don't really care. You're young. You're 23. You have more time than you think. So this is just one particular suggestions of how you might establish a more intentional approach to your leisure life, but, but having routines for the things that are foundational to a life well live and then pursuing one thing at a time until a good point, giving that your full attention.

That for example, works really well. And it's the type of thing that you're not going to get to until you get more intentional about your time. All right. We're making progress here. What do we got next, Jesse? I like this question. Next question is from Jonas, a 32 year old research analyst.

I'm trying to decide whether a ditch postpone a side hustle idea in order not to overwhelm myself versus adopting a slow part productivity mindset and see how progress compounds over time. So Jonas, what you need is extreme clarity, and this is where the productivity perspective is going to help you.

You have to get your arms around the job that's making you feel busy right now. Capture, configure, control, see where you can get that. You reduce the stress, take control of your time, begin with the configure step to be more aggressive about workload management. See where you can get that line in a place that's allowing you to do what you need to do without feeling overwhelmed.

And then step back and say, where would the side hustle fit? And answer that question honestly. And now, Jonas, knowing what I know about you, because in your elaboration, you talked a little bit more about your busyness and you have a lot of going, a lot of things going on with your family and young kids.

When you step back, you might say, there is not time for me to execute a reasonable plan for the side hustle. And you know what? That's fine. Don't do the side hustle. But you're going to get that answer with clarity. Or after you capture, configure, control, you might really tame your job.

And so you know what, I could work on this two days a week, three hours in the morning. It's my remote work days. Nothing really gets going until noon or whatever. And this would allow me and here's my plan. And I could actually make pretty good progress on this.

And then you might find like, OK, now I see exactly where I'm going to work on this. And I'm looking at exactly where I'm going to work on this. And this is enough time. And this is worth it enough to me. Let's do it. But you cannot get to these answers with confidence unless you really know what's going on with your current work obligations.

And so that's what I want you to do. Pull out, capture, configure, control until you are a master of your job. Then work through what are the reasonable scenarios for me to make progress on the side hustle and evaluate those. Will it work? And is it worth it? Is where the achievement the side hustle would generate?

Is it worth it for what I would have to do? And be very honest with you, answer it. And especially at this stage of life, you have young kids at home. It's completely fine for your answer there. Just be no, it's not worth it. I've controlled my job. I like having this flexibility.

I want to just use this to do more things in my family or a hobby. I think that's a completely reasonable solution as well. But you don't get those options until you know what's going on. You're just haphazardly busy. Good luck. You're just going to start doing the side hustle that in a way that you don't have time for that's going to cause stress.

And you're going to let it peter out. So, again, the productivity perspective here says once you have control, you get autonomy, autonomy gives you options. I actually thought when I first read the question, I thought that he had already started the side hustle and was working on it for a while.

And then-- You know, it's a little hard to tell. I read the longer one. He talked a lot about the various things that he was worried about, like his busyness. And there definitely was a sense of haphazard busyness. Yeah, but it was a little unclear if he had started and he was feeling overwhelmed by it already.

Or if he was pretty sure that if I just started this, I'd feel overwhelmed. I mean, the slow productivity approach, it can work with a side hustle, but you really got to evaluate it. Right. So you could say, like, at some point it's too slow. If it's I'm going to work once a month, I'm going to have an hour session like that's too slow.

Yeah. I mean, to me, slow productivity also involves obsessing over quality. It also involves the reduction of things. You can give more attention to something. It's not just about you can fit another thing into your schedule, because if you stretch it out long enough, you can find little pockets of time to make progress.

I mean, slow productivity is it's a lot of it's about simplification. So it can take more of your attention. Yeah. Obsession over quality so that you can really come at it again and again. I think just trying to spread something out. So you touch it here and there. It's not really a slow, productive approach.

I think it's just a fragmented approach. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's try to fit in one more question here. All right. Next question is from Andrew, 51 year old biology professor. I'm a professor because research production is not a shared goal. I have difficulty getting my colleagues to think creatively about system changes, even if we might benefit from it all.

It's always easier to do what is easiest in the immediate moment. Other folks productivity be damned. What should I do? Well, I included this question in part just because I like professor questions, but it's another good example for us to apply the productivity perspective. So what Andrew's talking about is the type of collaboration systems I detail and motivate in my book, A World Without Email, where I talk about in the knowledge work context.

There's many informal collaboration styles that are built mainly around haphazard back and forth messaging that are actually really unproductive for everyone involved in the long term, even though in the moment, it's easier just to shoot off a quick email than it is to actually implement some sort of collaboration system, like whatever.

There's a shared document where the thoughts go. And on Monday night, I review that. And then I put the notes using track changes. And you have till Wednesday, close a business to react to them. And then we have a standing meeting on Thursday morning. Those type of systems get you away from constant back and forth messaging, but they're a little bit more work in the moment.

Andrew is saying, I can't get fellow professors to do this because we're not all working towards the shared same goal. It's not everyone in my department is working on getting this new product out. We're each working on our own thing. And so we're not that interested in being collectively focused on improving how we collaborate.

So, Andrew, my productivity perspective here is you have to shift the scope that you're thinking about productivity. If you are a professor at a research institution, you need to think about yourself as a standalone business and the other professors in your department and other professors that you interact with and other departments, you know, the HR department, the whatever, like other, whatever you would call them, groups within university, like their own businesses with which you have various professional relationships.

You're Ford and you work with Firestone tires. They're two separate businesses, but you know, you guys have a contract and a relationship to get the tires for your car manufacturing plant, but you're not the same company. So you have to think of yourself almost as like a standalone silo.

So when you're thinking about systems internally is where you're really trying to get a handle on what is my work? What do I work on? What are my quotas? What do I not do? When do I get this work done? How much time do I have available? How do I want to use this time?

And you're keeping track of all that and have all your complex systems. Then when you're interacting with the rest of the world, it's well, you have sort of interfaces with interacting with these other standalone entities. And I don't know, they're bothering you with emails. You could just do what you need to do with that.

Just process centric emailing might work there where you never formally develop a new collaboration system with someone else. You just sort of tell them in your response. Yeah, great. We should think about this. Put any thoughts you have in this Google doc that I started. I will review it if I have any questions because you're a professor.

I know you have clearly posted office hours. I will actually just come to your office hours next week and we'll talk about it. You just sort of put a process into the communication and there it is. You're not calling it a process. You're not negotiating about it. You're just saying it.

Certain types of work like this is very disruptive. This person just constantly wants to email things. OK, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to work on that person. I'm going to leave that committee. You have all this autonomy. This is like a company saying we're going to get out of selling etsels because there's not a lot of profit there.

We're going to focus more on, you know, selling Ford focuses or whatever. You think of yourself like a standalone business that interfaces with other organizations and you do your best to keep those interfaces as non-disruptive as possible. So you need to be more ruthless, Andrew. That's, I guess, what I would say.

Your department is not your team members. They're your colleagues. You're collegial to them. You enjoy them. But you're all your own standalone entities trying to figure out how to exist in the same academic sphere while still accomplishing your internal objectives. So I don't know, maybe it maybe I'm being a little bit Darwinian there, but I think it's the best academia really is.

It's entrepreneurial. Yeah, you're trying to produce original research. That's the whole game. If you don't, you get fired. That's the whole game. And you work with other people. There's other things you have to do and service you have to do. But but it's just like Ford has these other things they have to do.

But ultimately, if they're not selling cars, they're out of business. You kind of have to keep that in mind. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.