Next one's a little different. It's a question about designing household space for better productivity. Nice. Hey, Cal, big fan of the show. Calling in today with a question about household space and productivity. My fiance and I just moved into a two bedroom apartment. There's plenty of space. But what we're finding our trouble is, is how we set up what areas are for what we're trying to keep the bedroom is certainly no technology.

Our living room, we're trying to keep that the same way. And our other bedroom we're using as an office space as well as a workout space with a stationary bike and some other equipment. What we're finding troubling is how do I determine how to separate my work time from my workout time?

If I'm at the desk doing work for my career versus having to do some paying bills and all that, we really don't want to bring the laptops out into the kitchen or the living room area, but are also having trouble not when sitting at the desk thinking about work.

Any clues or tips you might have on that would be appreciated. Thanks, Cal. Okay, good question. So first of all, I think this is obvious, you need to take one of those bedrooms. And that needs to be dedicated to Cal Newport related material is where you want to have a whole wall for my books, you want to have a whole wall for my planners, a really good stereo system for playing the podcast with a chair that's just aimed at it.

Like that should be priority one and then everything else can fit into your main bedroom. Now assuming you don't want to do that, which would be my suggestion. I have a couple things I'll say here. All right, so you're basically putting everything work and exercise related into one room.

That's not a bad idea. Maybe you could think about exercise as something that you also interleave throughout the workday, you know, if you're working from home anyways, with your equipment, there are 20 minute rides, some push ups, like going back and forth between exercising and work is actually a pretty good rhythm for work.

So you might not actually want to separate those as much as you think. When it comes to breaking up household work from other type of work. Small, I think it's the right way to say the small changes to the environment. So small contextual changes can go a long way when it comes to trying to change your mindset.

And so what I mean about this is that you can have a slightly different setup for bills or what have you, then what you do in the same room for your normal work. And that little change in context can make a big difference where you can do the bills or what have you without falling back into that mindset of regular work.

So like one thing you could do is have a very small desk or table that is separate from your main desk, right? So you can imagine a setup where against one wall, you've built a long desk that both you and your fiance can both sit and you bring your computers there and you have all your files there.

And then over in another corner is a very small desk. Kind of like they used to use if you look at the Victorian age where they'd have those stationary desks, where it was like very tall, with a very narrow desk in front of it, you'd go and you would write your correspondence on or something.

So these are shallow desks. You have something like that in a different corner of the room. And right next to it is the filing cabinet for your household stuff. It seems like it's the same room, but that context makes a difference. I'm at this desk on my laptop doing email.

Now it's Sunday afternoon. I want to pay some bills and take care of some of that type of work. I don't want to think about email and I don't want to think about my job, you go in that same room, but you're going over to that other little desk.

It makes all the difference in the world. That's the bill desk that's different than the work desk. So I think you do that. You can get a lot out of the same space. The other contextual cues you can do is with lighting and music. Okay, when I'm doing deep work in this desk, I have the lights low except for one bright spot on my desk.

When I'm doing email, I have the lights higher. When I'm doing exercising, we do something different, right? Those type of cues can matter as well. So small cues, give your mind what they need to know that this is a different context than this even if you're in the same physical space.

So I think that's a good idea. The final thing I would suggest is be in the habit of using that office is where your phones go. So I'm a big proponent of what I call the phone for your method, which says when you're at home, you do not keep your phone with you in your pocket.

Just like 25 years ago, you didn't just pick up your old fashioned telephone with a very wide, long wire, just walk with you wherever you went in the house carrying this phone with you, that'd be eccentric. But we do that with our portable phones. And so it's always there for distraction.

So I say, when you come home, your phone's going to a set place, you plug them in, and you charge them. If you need to make a call, you go there. If you need to text someone, you go there. If someone's calling you, you go there. If you want to see if someone texted there, you go there.

If you want to look something up, you go there. And that's where your phone is. It's not with you as a default distraction. I call it the phone for your method, because if you're in a house, you might have a foyer by your front door, it's a good place for it.

You have a two bedroom apartment, use that one apartment, that one room for it. Go in there, we plug in our phones, we can put the ringer on high, so we'll hear it, you know, if someone's calling or something. And that's where we go to use our phone. That is, I think, a great, I think that's a great setup.

We have a living room and a bedroom that you don't look at your phone and you don't do email and you don't do work in and then you have this multi purpose room, where you have exercising in there. You have your main work in there. You have your phone interaction in there.

You have your household admin like Bill Payne in there. You have your Cal Newport shrine in there that takes up most of the room. And the context is just slightly different between all of those different things. And so when you're switching from one thing to the other, your mind knows it's different.

And it doesn't invade it all into the other parts of your life. I think you do that you're going to have a great setup for your house. And you're really would be taking advantage of the way your brain actually works. All right. We should have a shrine we kind of we don't have a shrine in here, Jesse, but we do have some various things that fans have sent us that maybe to the outside eye is a little bit shriney.

Give your bookshelf. I have the bookshelf, but I only have I don't have all my books up there yet. Because I ran out of shelves and I got too lazy to buy to buy more. But we have someone sent us a like a comic book artist did a an illustration of me as a superhero.

Like heavily muscled. You've seen that out by the refrigerator. And then a class I gave a talk to they do like a lot of original illustrations about me and my life like hand-drawn illustrations, the ones I have on the wall. Yeah, yeah. In the main room. Both of those are a little out of context.

Maybe oddly shrine like, I think out of context, that might be weird. But the idea was here in the HQ, we're going to put it up in a way brings up another issue. People are asking for a look inside the HQ video. So so here's the here's what we should do.

We're going to do. Yeah. But I'm, I want to decorate the HQ better. You know this, right? I'm just bad about this. When you came, I had to buy some chairs, right? So so when you started working for me, I only had one chair. So that's what I did.

But we still are missing a lot, right? Because I've just weird with decorations. I'm lazy. And so I think we got to figure that out. We got to have a plan for it. And then I think the video should be before after like, okay, let's tour the HQ as it as it stands now.

That's a good idea. And then we we do some work or hire some people to help us do some work. And then we here's how it looks after we're done. So there would be a forcing function because we got to get stuff on the walls. We got to get we probably have to get rid of those old desks and do something cooler.

We should have better seating, we should get a good TV in there. Like there's so much we probably people want to see your board. People want to see the board. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we have the whiteboard in there. You know, I asked my listeners wants to send me suggestions for the HQ.

But I don't know, I used to call it the cave back then. And some of the suggestions were a little on the nose. Like someone wanted me to actually build a cave with plaster of Paris, stalagmites and stalactites or whatever. I was like, Okay, maybe, maybe we should not outsource this one.

But anyways, we're committing now. We're committing now on air. Jesse and I are going to Yeah, we'll put out some videos, we'll put out some videos of what it looks like in here. Yeah. And then we're gonna make it look nicer. And then we'll put out another video and you'd be like, ah, now it looks nicer.

And there'll be a huge shrine.