All right, Jesse, what do we got next? - All right, next question's from Overwhelmed from Toronto. I'm very thankful for your advice that podcasts should focus on research. - Postdocs. - Postdocs. - It changes the tenor of this question quite a bit. - However, I find I am in the middle of too many non-primary author projects, leading me to work on my primary projects in the evenings and on weekends.

I tried setting up autopilot, fixed schedule, but I have no time to do it all. How do prolific professors, you included, balance so many projects when I find I can't even handle four at a time? - Well, four at a time's too many projects, and we don't do that many projects at a time.

So I think what's going on here, Overwhelmed, is that you might be suffering from what I like to call the time compression fallacy, which is typical when you're surveying from a distance the resumes of someone who's very accomplished. What we tend to do when we do this is we see all in one place this list of all these different things that they have done, and then in our mind, when we imagine that person doing this work, we compress the time in which this work unfolded so that in our mind's eye, we imagine this person working on lots of these things all at the same time.

This used to come up so common when I used to write about very successful students that I had a phrase I used to say, I called it the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar. I did a study once where I interviewed a bunch of Rhodes Scholars, and a lot of this got integrated into my first book, "How to Win at College," which came out back in 2005.

What I learned from these Rhodes Scholars is that from the perspective of other students, they had all these different things they had done, and so you assume they'd be very, very busy, but when you interview them, they weren't. And the secret to this was, yeah, I did these six things which look incredibly impressive when you see the press release about me winning a Rhodes Scholarship, but I didn't do them at the same time.

This is over four years. It added up to a lot. But at any one point, I wasn't doing all of these things. So that's the time compression fallacy in action, and we see it through all sorts of different stages of people's careers, all sorts of different career fields. So if you look at my own academic life, for example, I have published a lot of peer-reviewed computer science papers.

I had to do all this math recently because I'm submitting my application for full professor. I published something like 80, 80 peer-reviewed computer science papers. They've been cited something like 4,500 times. For those who know the lingo, it's generated an H-index of 31. You read that all at once, and you think, my God, you must be just writing all sorts of papers all the time.

But if you actually go back through my timeline, through the now almost 20 years that I've been a professional academic, what you see is that, no, no, what I learned, this is the method I learned at MIT, was just constant practical progress. Always be working on a paper or two.

When you finish one, work on another. Just make that the background, that's the background hum of your life, is like you're always working on a paper. You're not working on five at once. You're working on one or two at once. But if you're always are working on things, it adds up.

This comes out, that comes out, this one comes out. And over time, it adds up to the 80 or 90 papers or whatever it is that seems really impressive. But if you zoom in on Cal in 2007 as a grad student at MIT, I didn't have that much else, much going on.

Like I worked on this one paper for a couple hours today. Now, what am I gonna do? You just repeat that over enough years though, and a lot of things add up. So overwhelmed, people don't do as much work at the same time as you think. In fact, the paradox here is if you try to do too much at the same time, you sabotage those projects.

They sabotage each other because you're pulling from too scarce of a cognitive resource and you end up producing less overall. Working on less things at a time can actually help you produce more. So you need to do less. You have too many projects. Your issue here is not that you haven't properly autopilot scheduled, that you haven't properly fixed scheduled all of this work so that it works.

Your issue is you have too much work to schedule. As a postdoc, you can't be doing four papers at once. You wanna cut that down to two, maybe one primary paper and one non-primary paper. You don't work on any more than one on a given day and you stick with a paper until it's done or at a milestone where there's gonna be a long period of time until you can return from it.

So whatever, we have to now wait two months to get back results from a lab. And then you can switch to something else. The key here is not gonna be quantity at any one time, but just making sure that you're continually working on something and as soon as something is done, you start working on something else.

That's how real piles of impressive accomplishment build up. Very impressive people are actually less overloaded than you might imagine, unless like me, they for some reason have seven jobs, but that's a different problem. Don't do that. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)