All right, let's do one more question about deep work here. This last one comes from Noah. Noah says, how do I limit activities that aren't important for the long term at a new job? So he goes on to explain about how in his past job, he was a chemical testing engineer at a pharmaceutical company.

They're very a world without email style in their approach to work. They had unified task boards to see who was working on what. Do you have a free slot for this? They prioritize the primary value producing activity, which for them was actually performing lab tests on chemicals. This is all that matters.

You've got to make sure you're doing that. Everything else is about what you do with the time that remains. Pull things off this task board as you have free time. Fantastic setup. He says now he's a grad student in chemistry and it's not so organized. And in particular, he's working on doing-- he's a teaching assistant.

It says things just get thrown at him. And he feels like he can't ignore them because it's part of his job, but it's haphazard and out of control. And it's getting in his way of doing the main work. So what should he do about it? Well, who is this?

Noah? Noah, yes. Professor types are, in general, quite disorganized. They will just throw stuff at you because their whole life is chaotic. And they just need to get it out of their brain is exploding with all these different demands they're placing on it. And you can't just ignore it.

But what you can do, in most cases as a teaching assistant, is take control of the processes. Professor doesn't care. They just don't want to have to worry about these things. So if you say, here's how I'm working with the students. Here's how I think we should work with this.

Here is the different processes to get the problem sets in, to get them graded, to get notes back, to get whatever. Come up with processes that are much more structured, much less haphazard, and just implement them on your own, and talk them through with your professor, and say, here's some ideas I have.

I think we should run it this way. It's going to keep it simpler for you, and it's going to be more controlled. 9 out of 10 professors are like, whatever. That one sentence you just told me has already taken up more time than I have available. Just whatever. Whatever we need to do.

They don't care. So leverage the fact they're too busy and hairy to now to control the care to shape the job. That's my main advice for teaching assistants, is that you have more control here than you think about how you want your job to unfold. The professors don't care.

They're happy for you to take the reins and make this more structured. They're not going to do it because they're terrible at this stuff. They weren't terrible at this stuff. They probably would have left academia and made a lot of money anyway. So OK. I'm going to get yelled at now by professors and Zettelkasten people.

Great. But this is what I would say. I remember-- I vividly remember having this revelation as a graduate student. I was TAing-- didn't do a ton of TAing at MIT, but I TAed a few courses, distributed algorithms with my advisor. I also TAed a security course with Ron Rivest, who is the R in RSA.

He invented RSA, public key encryption. That was interesting. And I remember at some point in one of these TAing, I think that when I was TAing first for my advisor, just having this insight of like, this is kind of haphazard how we're doing this. And there's a lot of structure we could bring to this that would have basically zero impact on the students or the advisor.

It's not going to make their life harder. They don't care. The professor doesn't care. But it's going to make my life significantly easier. Like, oh, if I do it this way, it's going to make life much easier. Just no one's thinking about it because no one cares, because it doesn't directly affect them.

And I remember I really began to structure, here's our systems for how you hand in problem sets, and how we grade them, and how we hand things back. And it made a big difference. I don't remember all the details here, but I vaguely remember that it was just like a casual idea my advisor had, which made sense on paper, which was, we should Xerox copy the problem set submissions.

So that if we lose one, we have a copy. And because I guess it happened like once. We lost the problem set. We're like, ah, we can't grade it. But if we have a copy backup, that would help. It sounds good on paper. It's impossibly time consuming, because these are all coming in in different types of papers.

They're mainly stapled. They're mainly stapled, so it's impossible to-- you have to take staples out. And it was hours just Xeroxing these things. And I think at some point-- and again, I don't remember the exact details, but I just remember thinking, how often does this happen? It happened once four years ago.

Let's just-- we'll give you all the points if we lose it. And we're going to save ourselves all this time. And it costs no time. I made that case. She was like, fine, that sounds fine. But I was just thinking through, what can we do here? I also remember-- and again, I don't have the details here, Noah, so I'm sorry I don't have more specifics.

But I also remember realizing at some point, the big class and lots of problem sets when we had graders and everything, having the students alphabetize when they hand it in made a big difference. So OK, here's the stack. When you come up to hand your problem set, find where your name actually is in alphabetical order and put it there.

10 extra seconds when you submit it saves a huge amount of time for us on the back end. It made it much easier for us to split it up. Other things I remember figuring out is dealing with the undergraduate graders, is just automating some of the process. These come to me already in alphabetical order.

I just put them in a mail sorter outside of my office. I split them in half in the middle of the names or whatever. And you come and grab them. And there's stuff I told the students about format, like make sure that they're in this format, which again, had little impact on the students.

It was very easier than the change to format. Just like, what do you want me to do? Fine. But it made a huge difference in how we could consistently grade it. So these type of things made a big difference. So know how to do that. Put in place your own processes, and people will be fine with it.

And more generally, even if you're not a teaching assistant, there's a teachable moment here, which is add processes. Even if the work is coming from someone else, people often don't care. They're too busy. All right, so that's it for questions about deep work. We're running a little long here, but let's put in a few questions here, as always, about the deep life.

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