(upbeat music) All right. Let's move on now. We have time for two more questions. Okay, let's get another question. I think we have time. Who do we have here? - All right, next question we have, it's basically about the deep life during the pandemic and he's a student. So he's got some good questions.

He's got a good question for you. - There's a pandemic? That's the first I'm hearing of this. - I'm local. I'm a long time listener of your podcast. I'm a college student. Last year when the pandemic hits, I moved back to my home. Throughout the pandemic, my life become way more structured.

I took your 30 day social media challenge, removed social media completely from my life after that challenge. I really started to enjoy deep life, but now colleges are opening back again and I moved back to the university. The structure which I implemented in my life during the pandemic is completely stressed away.

I tried time blocking to add the structure again, but my classes are not properly scheduled and most of the time they are random. This left me small chunks of time, but I cannot figure out a way to use those small chunks and mostly waste that time on YouTube. This led to me a burnout feeling throughout the day.

These days I'm mostly stressed out and just looking forward to the weekend. I really want to add the structure in my life again and enjoy this deep life. Any suggestions how can I implement the structure back again to my life? - Well, your old structure is not gonna work, but you're gonna build a new structure that does.

So yes, whatever deep life structure that was working when you were at home, it's not gonna work at school, but there is plenty of options for deep life structures at school that will work. So I have a few pieces of advice for you. Number one, I want you to autopilot schedule the hell out of your schedule.

So autopilot scheduling was invented originally for college students and the idea is you look at each one of your classes and you identify what is work that has to get done every single week or every single month, what sort of work happens regularly for these classes, problem sets that have to be solved, reading assignments that have to happen, essay prompts that have to be written, and you say, when and where do I do that work every week?

And that goes on your calendar like a dentist appointment or another class, it's in time that you are not gonna violate, this is just when I do that work. And you do that for all of your classes and now you can move these around like a puzzle piece and figure out what's a pretty good sustainable schedule for my work and more importantly, you're not asking every day what should I do and when, that's all figured out.

All right, so you're gonna autopilot schedule and then you are gonna upgrade your study skills so that you're not wasting time by spinning your wheels with inefficient study habits, I don't want you spending more time than you need to. So go back and read How to Become a Straight A Student, walk through that advice to completely overhaul your study habits, the other thing you can do is go to my blog, calnewport.com/blog and read the first two years worth of posts, 2007, 2008, it's all advanced study advice for college students.

I want you to reduce the wasted time doing your schoolwork. So that's step one, now let's say you've done that and you still have no time, you say I figured out autopilot schedule, prom sets, reading assignments, prompts and my whole calendar is filled up and I still, and I have no time left except for the weekends, all right, step two, under schedule, drop stuff off your schedule, drop some classes, simplify your load, even if you're going under the load you need probably to graduate, do it for a semester or two as you're trying to get back on your feet after the pandemic, whatever you do, do not try to super overload your schedule, you need to step away from the mindset that the job market or the graduate school market a couple of years down the line is gonna say, look at how hard Mookle's semester was in the spring of 2022, that's a really hard semester, we really like them, they don't look at that, no one cares, they're like, what's your major, what are your grades?

So simplify your schedule, under schedule, cut things out of your schedule until your autopilot schedule fits with plenty of room, that means dropping classes, dropping activities, swapping classes for easier classes, you need breathing room, so if you're autopiloting with smart schedules and you're properly under scheduled, you're gonna find yourself now with some breathing room which is what you absolutely need, now I want you to reinvent your leisure time and get involved in some sort of high quality leisure activity, preferably involving other human beings, they're also on the college campus, something that you can really get into, it could be exercise related, it could be writing related or theatrical, artistic related, but something you can really get into for no other reason than you like it, that other people are involved in and that can really start to funnel your energy away from YouTube, the only YouTube I want in your life is looking at my channel so you can watch my videos and I don't mean to be strict about this, but I only want you doing that for, let's say three hours a day, no more than that, three hours a day watching my videos, maybe another two hours trying to convince people you know to subscribe, but that five hours is the only five hours I want you spending on YouTube.

The final thing I'm gonna recommend, thing number four, I want you to Google, I don't have the link off the top of my head, but there's a series I did on my blog back when I was aimed at students called the Romantic Scholar, and so you can just Google calnewport.com romantic scholar, and it was a series about how do you reconstruct your college lifestyle so that you have an intrinsically motivated deep interest in the work you're doing as a student.

How can you rewire your relationship to your schoolwork so it's not this thing that's intrinsically being imposed upon you that's causing stress and burnout, but instead something that's a deep part of your self-definition and a real source of interest and motivation, and it has a lot of advice about how you do that, and I want you to read that series and put that into action.

This is a hard transition for a lot of students. The pandemic was incredibly disruptive. Coming back to school after the pandemic is really disruptive. It's not just let's load up our schedule and get after it and do 17 majors and just grind it, and something good will happen. We have to take this transition with care.

I like that you're thinking about using this transition as a way to preserve depth in your life. That's my advice to do it. So here's a quick summary. Autopilot schedule plus smarter study habits. If you're still overloaded, underschedule. Quit, reduce course load, switch to easier courses. Once you've done that, get involved in a deep leisure activity that involves other human beings, and four, read my Romantic Scholar series on my blog and take those ideas to heart.

You do that plus five quick hours of working on my YouTube channel every day, those two things I think we're all gonna be much better off. (upbeat music)