All right, I'm thinking, I've been talking for a while, Jesse, maybe we should do another call. Let's see if we have someone who can ask us a question here. We got a call from Dave. He's an architect. He's also a manager and he's having trouble scheduling deep work because he doesn't have any time block space for it.

Hi, Cale. My name is Dave Birlkamp. I'm an architect working on an in-house design team for a large hospital system. I've had great success adopting many of your principles from so good they can't ignore you, to deep work, and most recently, a world without email. Your tools have really helped me manage a role with complex responsibilities.

In the past year or so, I found my role evolving away from an individual contributor to more of a design manager. While my position does not have me managing a team of direct reports, I ultimately manage projects and oversee consulting teams, requiring much of my time in collaborative meetings with larger project teams, providing direction and working through design challenges.

I've started to wonder whether having days with large blocks of deep work is too lofty of a goal for a manager. In both reading on the topic as well as talking to other peers in similar manager roles, it seems the common mentality is that a manager is subject to endless meetings and face time with those they're responsible for.

I can only imagine how much more demanding having a team of direct reports would be. This all seems at odds with a deep work philosophy and my own personal values on work and productivity. What's your advice for managers trying to incorporate deep work practices with potentially limited deep work time blocks?

Thanks, Cal. >> Dave, it's a good question. So in A World Without Email, my book, A World Without Email, I go into more detail about managers in general and how you deal with issues like focus and distraction when you're dealing with managers. So I'm going to summarize four points here, four points about the deep approach to being a manager.

One, I think you're correct to note that a schedule built around long periods of uninterrupted concentration is often going to be incompatible with the responsibilities of a manager. That's not really what they're asking you to do in a lot of cases. It's like we're not asking that you on your own create new value from scratch by adding value to information.

We're actually asking you to manage other people who are doing this. So yes, I think that's completely relevant to say long stretches of uninterrupted time might not be reasonable. That's fine for a manager. Two, the key thing you want to do as a manager, as you would any other position, is prevent context switching to the extent possible, which means you want to be one thing at a time, full attention, so you move on to the next.

Very important as a manager that you're not multitasking. I'm trying to work on this person's problem while also answering Slack messages about this and switching over to that problem. That's a huge cognitive drag. You're going to make worst decisions and you're going to get exhausted quicker. I actually cite research about this in my book, A World Without Email.

There's a very relevant study to this discussion where they studied the actual behaviors of managers and they correlated it with the amount of email they were receiving. And essentially when managers had more and more email that they were trying to deal with, their activities shifted away from what they called leadership type activities and towards much more small productivity focused activities.

So if you're bouncing back and forth between a lot of things, your managerial scope goes from clear, big picture thinking and directing and towards just more frenetic, small, let me just get the obligation hot potato and get it out of here. Let me solve this question, answer this, move this over here as a much less effective way of being a manager.

So you want to do one thing at a time before you move on to the next. To make that possible, we get to point three and four. So point three is you want to avoid a sense of overload. So if you have more going on, more on your plate, more things that represent an obligation to you that you can really easily even imagine making sense of, you are going to find that the cognitive stress of having such a crowded plate is going to make it quite difficult to really focus on one thing at a time and the resulting overhead of each of these obligations is going to pile up in a way that's going to make it impossible for you to do one thing at a time because there's always the next Zoom meeting, there's always the next email.

So this is what we've talked about, the overhead spiral. We've talked about this before on the show. Everything on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead, meetings that have to happen, emails that have to be answered. So if you have too many things on your plate as a manager, just that overhead, the checking in, the emails, the meetings will eat up your whole schedule.

And now it's impossible for you to actually give each thing on your plate, each decision that you need to make, each advising you have to give, each reassignment or helping of an employee. You can no longer just give these things the attention they deserve one after another because there's so much Zoom, there's so much conference calls, there's so much email, this overhead of what's on your plate becomes too big.

So you have to keep that smaller. You got to keep that list of what's on my plate smaller. And it's gonna mean a lot of like, nope, nope, we're not doing that. I'm not doing that. We're full right now. We're focused. Here's what we're working on. You have to start protecting how big that list is.

Don't let people put those things on your plate. You say, I can't deal with that right now. You can bring that to me later. Don't put that on my plate. It's critical for actually having the blue space, the blue water, the free space to give things attention one at a time.

The final and fourth point is through automation and process, you can give yourself more breathing room. So obligations that maybe right now you just deal with as they come up. One of your reports just emails you and is like, I need approval of this. And you're like, Oh God, okay, that's something I have to do.

And you have to give approval to this pretty soon. And it's sitting there on your plate and is a cognitive weight. You can take things like those. And if you automate them, this is how this type of work always gets done. Here's the, here's the process. You put things for approval into this drop box.

Monday after lunch, I go through the drop box and I mark approvals on it. Things that are automated, no longer weigh on your mind as an obligation that needs your attention. And so you can, in some sense, expand how many things you can have on your plate at a time before you cross that threshold of overload.

If you take a lot of things from those plates and you put them into automated systems that do not require you to make planning decisions that do not require you at some point to specifically put aside time on an ad hoc, individualized basis to get this thing done. So these automation based processes gives you much more breathing room.

So the stuff you do that happens automatically happens every week happens every month. Find systems for that, that means you don't have to keep track of it. It's not waiting for you to put aside time to proactively put aside time to execute it. You know how that gets done.

All right, so that can be really important as well. This is where hacks like office hours play a big role. Small questions, don't just let these pile up. Here's my office hours every single day, this hour, come by my office, call me. I have a zoom window open, whatever.

That's where all the small questions go. And then that's not piling up on your plate. That goes a long way right there as well. When building these processes, as I talk about, and as you know, Dave in a world without email, minimize the amount of unscheduled messages they require.

So you want these processes where you can execute commonly occurring work without having there to be ad hoc messages flying back and forth. It'll keep you back in your inbox. That will help as well. So if you want to look at the particular story in that book that really gets at these ideas, look at the story.

I believe this is in chapter one of general George Marshall and how he completely reorganized the war department, the U S war department during world war two, when he took over as the army chief of staff. Cause he reorganized the whole thing so he could work on one thing at a time, the stuff that mattered, give it his full attention.

And you know what? He would end at five o'clock every day. He was managing the U S army during world war two and would finish by five every day. He had a heart troubles, didn't want to have a heart attack. So that was his hard fix. Hitler productivity line.

I don't work past five and he made it happen by using these type of ideas. So go back and read that story. If you a listener out there have not read a world without email, you should, and you'll like that story that's right there in chapter one. But just to summarize again, Dave, forget long unbroken periods of intense concentration.

That's not your job, but to working on things one at a time with your full attention before you move on to the next is how you're going to Excel as a manager to make that possible. You have to avoid overload by saying no to things and by automating as many things as you can.

They're already on your plate. You do all those things. You can like George Marshall win the proverbial war while getting home by five every day.