Alright, our first question comes from Shankar, who asks, "How do I avoid burnout due to deep work?" He elaborates, "It is clear to me that time blocking and deep work are useful for my career advancement, but I have found that constantly forcing myself to do hard things leads to burnout.

Instead, following my gut and working from list, as David Allen suggests, seems to be healthier. How would you advise one should avoid burnout while working with time blocking and deep work?" Well, Shankar, if you're burning out, I would say do less work as opposed to making the work you do less effective.

This is one of the key ideas in my still developing philosophy of slow productivity, which is focusing on less things but doing those things better is almost always the right formula, almost always the right formula for producing the best quality work, but also the right formula for keeping your working life as sustainable as possible.

So it is really intense. When you're time blocking, it's intense. People are going to wonder, "Why did you not respond to my text messages? How do you not know about what's going on in the world?" Because you're locked in doing one thing after another. You know what you're supposed to be doing, and that's what you do whether you feel like it or not.

When you're doing deep work, no distraction, no context shift, full concentration on the thing I'm doing, you're going to produce much better work, but it is draining. There's only so much of this you can do. So do less. Put breaks into your time block schedule. End your day earlier.

Pull back on the number of projects that you're giving intense deep work to. I think that's going to be the right formula, right? As opposed to saying, "Let me just stop tracking so carefully what I'm doing." As opposed to saying, "Let me just sort of think what do I want to do next and move from inboxes back over to random to-do list." That's going to give you a pleasing sense of generic busyness.

Urgent stuff will probably get taken care of. Big stuff will happen slower, not as well. I say do the work right and then figure out what the right amount of work is. That's going to be the better formula.