I've seen a lot of people talk about monk mode. Does this actually work? Monk mode meaning you sort of, I first heard this from Greg McKeown where he like I'm disappearing. I'm going to like a shed for a month and all I'm doing is writing. Adam Grant. So I wrote about this in deep work.

I called it the monastic mode of deep work. Or maybe called the bimodal mode. I confused these up, but I was thinking about Adam Grant where he would have periods of the year where he would just disappear to work on research, be out of touch and other periods where he was back.

So monk mode I guess is spreading online again. I think you might have the same take on this as I do, which is it's less about monk mode working to me than it is the way the hyperactive hive mind constantly context switching that we call normal work today, how bad that is.

Like monk mode is just escaping from that. So like me and you, I know neither of us disappear to cabins for six months the right. But I think we're just much more careful in general in making our day-to-day work something that we don't have to escape so dramatically from.

Trying to just in general see, I don't want to just constantly be context switching between a lot of things. So we don't have as much to escape from. I don't know. What do you say? You don't escape to a cabin, right? I think of you as being pretty careful about how you work.

Yeah. I mean, I think, so again, I think I don't place so much emphasis on the retreat into the wilderness. Not that that's always bad, but just to me, sometimes that can also be a little bit of a fantasy distracting from what the real problem is. Like, well, the problem is that I'm in this physical location, like sometimes, but usually the problem is in your head, right?

Usually the problem is not like, well, that you couldn't do any deep work here, but that it's hard and it's like easier to like open your phone and do that kind of thing. And so I do think it's not necessarily monk mode, but one thing that I noticed, especially when I embark on like bigger, cognitively challenging projects, and maybe you can attest to this Cal, is that, you know, right now, for instance, I am in the kind of promotional mode for my books.

I'm like emailing every old friend and being like, hey, you know, like I've got a new book. Can I send it to you? And it's, it is like a hive mind kind of thing. I open my email and there's lots of little communications and like, who do I have to message?

You know, it's very extroverted, socially focused, this kind of thing. But when I'm writing the book, I find that the challenge is that, okay, I've got like this 30 page dense paper to read that I think is important for me to read, but it's a little boring. You know, it's not like this is, this isn't a Harry Potter book or something like, you know, murder mystery novel or something like, I'm not just churning through the pages.

I'm like, wait, what's that word? And I'm going to look up keywords and like, oh, maybe this citation, this kind of thing. And so I think the real challenge that we have in doing, you know, work that, that requires cognitive demands is that you're sitting and maybe you want to like read for three hours straight.

But after like 15 minutes, your brain is telling you, you know what, maybe go on Twitter, maybe, maybe check that email inbox. Maybe there's some distraction that would be like a, like a break from doing this kind of work. And so I think what, what this kind of monk mode or something akin to that can be helpful for is that you have to sort of shift yourself into a mode where you are getting used to doing that kind of work.

It's a little bit like training for a marathon. Like if you don't run ever and then you run for 20 minutes, your lungs are screaming, your body's tired. It's like, okay, I've got to stop. Now. I don't think that past a certain point, it's so much that your physical fitness is increasing.

It's just, you're learning to switch off that part of your brain. That's like, do something else, do something else, do something else. And so I think when you get into this or like, I need to do a lot of deep work mode, I think it is helpful to kind of create some constraints around your work so that you're prioritizing this deep work.

You're able to get longer stretches in, you're able to just like, okay, I just sat and I read all day and it wasn't like agony that does take a little bit of building up to get to. And so I think, you know, that that's where this can be helpful is if like, if you're in the cabin in the woods, you don't have the friends, this kind of thing, maybe it's sometimes easier to, to, to transition to doing that.

But I think the transition to doing that is, is what's really important. I love the practice message. Yeah. I love what you're saying, right? So what supports it? I'm in slow productivity. I talk about rituals and location, have a separate location where you do the monk mode work. It doesn't have to be a dramatically different location, but it's okay.

Instead of being at the home office desk, I go to the screened in porch, you know, but it's a place that I only associate and then have rituals. You know, I go for a walk, I make a certain amount of tea that helps, but I love this idea. The more you practice, the better you get.

This is connected to your book though, right, Scott, because what is all the, the, the key efforts in mastery that you talk about are efforts that require sustained concentration. And that's something you have to be, you get used to, right? Like the more used to your, like, I just do this on a regular basis.

There's periods of my day where I'm just locked in on something and I'm not distracted and it's kind of hard. I mean, I talk about this in deep work, right? The the more comfortable you are with that, the more comfortable you'll be with learning something hard. It's the same basic cognitive muscles are, are being stretched.

So I'm assuming that you would, you would see the same problem where if I live a full Linda stone, partial continuous attention lifestyle, I'm just constantly moving back and forth. I'm not very comfortable focusing. If I then say, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to start learning something really hard.

I'm going to struggle in just the sense that my mind is not used to the feeling of cognitive strain that is going to be involved in learning something hard. Yeah. I mean, I think, so one of the things that I find important in this regard is, uh, when you, when you're approaching this kind of task, it is helpful to like be more deliberate about, you know, we do this in our course life of focus where you are being very explicit about like, these are my deep work hours.

You put the computer away, but you kind of remove yourself physically from those distractions. It doesn't have to be a different location, but it can just be some way that you're pushing them away because I think as you build the skill, the way I think of it is it's, it's a little bit like, um, you know, it gets thrown around too much, but like addiction and this motivational hardwiring is very similar that, you know, if you were a gambling addict and you're like, Oh, I'm going to go like live right next to the casino, it would be very difficult when you're in the habit of going to the slot machines all the time to resist that.

So you might want to get yourself removed from it. Don't have any reminders. Don't have any things that's going to make you think about doing this, but then maybe once you've done it more and more, it would be fine. Okay. I just don't gamble. I don't think about that.

I don't want to go through Las Vegas and not feel as much temptation. And so similarly with deep work, I think some of the difficulty is that if you're not used to the sustained cognitive effort, maybe because it's a new role, new task, new project, this kind of thing, like it can be exhausting, but it's also what is exhausting about it is your kind of your motivational hardwiring being like, this is easier, this is more fun, this is more appealing and that actually you can, that will quiet down if you can stick to it.

And so that's sort of that, that transition can be hard, I think, for people. And you have to believe that that's going to happen. That after you do it for three months, oh, actually sitting and reading for four hours straight is doable by a normal person. You don't have to be some kind of like savant-like focused person to do it.

I like that. Shrink monk mode. Monk mode doesn't have to be this month. I'm going to monk mode. You have a little bit of monk mode every day. That's sort of, okay, these are, I have a monk hour here. I mean, you start with like a monk half hour, I have like a monkish morning.

Yeah. Monkish morning. I used that phrase somewhere. God, I've written too many things, but somewhere, somewhere I used this phrase, monk mode morning. And it was a CEO who ran his own sort of small company. It was like a 15 person thing. And I remember this was his thing, monk mode morning.

And he said, no one can schedule anything with me until I figure out what it was. But it was like 10, 30 or 11. And he's like, that's it. We just, let's just work around that. But until 10, 30 or 11, I don't plug into anything. I'm just like working on it.

And he's like, it transformed everything. That regular drumbeat of the uninterrupted allowed him to make progress on a lot of the big things that really mattered. And he got a lot better at it. And then it really made a difference for the business. And it turns out having to wait until 10, 30 or 11 before you can call or get an email response or set up a meeting with someone, people adjusted.

It wasn't a big deal, but the benefit was. So monk mode morning. I remember that. M cubed. All right. Here's a long question, but it's interesting. I think you might have a quick answer, but okay. Adam, look at this. This is our third, a name. I always interested in that.

We have three A's. - You sorted alphabetically when you were bringing the sheet here. - In my archive text-based planning system, I sorted alphabetically. All right. Adam says, in my earlier years, I thrived on structure and processes. Crossing things off was therapeutic and enabled me to get a lot done.

Fast forward to 2024, and in my work, a lot of the time, a task isn't as simple as, you know, task A complete or not complete. Task A actually involves a series of 10 or 15 steps with various blockers, context and definitions of completion. I've delved in the productivity applications, but none seem to be the all-in-one solution I'm looking for.

This has led to looking to AI as a savior, but I'm now realizing that the rudimentary large language models don't solve the problem. Am I better off going back to basics in this time of technology apps and AI growth and trusting my process, or should I pick just one program and become an expert with it?

Well, my listeners know I'm going to say, go back to basics. An app is not a substitute for a process. You have to figure out, what am I working on? How do I want to work on it? What do I have to keep track of it? And then go find the tools to implement that.

And nine times out of 10, those tools are going to be boring. It's going to be a Google Doc, maybe a Trello board, right? It's not going to be that interesting. And mainly, I mean, look, it looks like, Adam, you kind of have been up to now, you're used to like what we call productivity light, the sort of zero to one binary flip from I just am completely reactive to I keep track of things, I cross things off.

I sometimes think of this as like bullet journal productivity. It's nice. It looks good. I keep track of the books I've read and what I want to work on today, and I can illustrate the borders. When you get into these high-end knowledge work jobs, productivity light doesn't cut it anymore.

Your bullet journal can't keep up with 75 emails a day. It can't keep up with the administrative overhead of a shifting array of 12 ongoing projects. It can't keep up with a calendar that's averaging 20 to 40 events per week. The systems, you have to go from productivity light to productivity heavy.

But it's the process that rules. I don't use any complicated software. I use Google Docs. I use my calendar. I use Trello. So you figure out how do I organize and have a process for working this work, and then you find the tools. I have some concrete suggestions, but Scott, like you're, I mean, you don't have a, you don't work in a complex process-oriented knowledge work job.

So from kind of from the outside, like what's your take on this idea of like the tool, you know, is there the right tool I need that's going to solve this versus other ways of thinking about organizing effort? Well, so I'm not sure if it's Adam, right? Adam's the question.

Adam, that's right. Yeah, Adam. I'm not sure if my experience directly parallels Adam, but I'll share it anyways. But I found for me, you know, and maybe you can comment on this as well, Cal, that when I got interested in productivity, when I was like first doing it, this kind of checklist-based approach just seemed like that's what productivity was.

You write down all your tasks and then you check them off. And especially if you're a student, it's like read this chapter, complete this essay, do this kind of stuff. It really fits that mold. And now when I think about my work, two things have changed. One is that I've gotten to the somewhat enviable position that a lot of the checklist-based stuff have been delegated.

I don't have the checklist-based tasks anymore. Someone else does the like, here's the, you know, eight mechanical steps you have to do every single time you do this and they check it off. I don't do them anymore. But then what was left, what was remaining was this core of like these hard problems that is sort of like, they're not, they're not something you can just check off.

It's sort of like, okay, write a bestselling book. Okay. What's the tasks there? I mean, you could make a task list, but the thing is you're going to start working on the tasks and realize, no, that's not the right way to do it. Or you're not doing it properly.

You certainly can't approach it with the mindset of like, just check off this one and move to the next one. And then you're going to have a bestselling book or you're going to have something successful here. So for me, I think I naturally gravitated more and more as I get older, as my career matures to the kind of deep work sort of system that, you know, what I'm trying to do is ensure that there is a deep focus on important tasks and that there is a lot of flexibility in how those get executed.

And I'm, I'm not really like trying to break it down into, okay, well, I've just got to do these 10 little things. I mean, I still do that. I still have that sort of segregated somewhere else, but what I'm really trying to do is like, how can I have like six hours to just work on this book chapter and like grind through it and think through it?

And like, in the moment, I'm constantly going back and forth between research and doing this and it's problem solving. Like there's no template I can follow. But the enemy of that is, well, I'm going to just, I'm going to spend 30 minutes and write 500 words every day. Like that kind of mindset that you see so often on Twitter of like, you know, I don't know, I was reading somewhere, someone was saying like, you know, you could write a book every three months, because if you write this many words per day, then that totals a book.

And then I was just thinking, well, you know, I like, good for you if that's how you could write books. But I mean, for me, it's, it's, it's not the metric. It's not the metric. Sometimes you can write 5,000 words. Sometimes you spend days trying to figure out the opening sentence.

And so I think this shift towards harder, more ambiguous tasks that have complexity built into it. I think to me, that's why the kind of a little bit more using the time metric, a little bit more using this is the chunk of time that I'm devoting to this, this is what chunk of time I'm going to push everything else off of so that I'm not having interruptions, distractions has been more important to me.

But I mean, you can weigh in on this. You have a lot more like multiple job descriptions, responsibilities, counter interference. But I mean, I think it reflects your time block planning to some extent. Yeah. I mean, if we use the terminology like shallow versus deep productivity, deep being like the really complicated jobs, and I'll give you an example, I'm going to give you four, four processes that like you probably need all four of these.

And for each of these, the tech to implement it is boring, right? Okay. So just based on my experience with these type of jobs, I've been dealing with people with these type of jobs. The first of all, you need some sort of structured task management, right? So you need a place of keeping track on your different projects, what needs to be done, where you can collect relevant information.

So if someone sends you a file about that task, you're waiting to work on or sends you an email about it, you can add it to where that thing lives. So all the information lives in one place. Why I call this structured is because you can have, I use Trello for this, you can use a Google Doc for this.

You want to have categories, right? So here's like tasks for a particular projects. Here's tasks that I'm trying to work on this week. Critically, here are things I'm waiting to hear back from other people on. So you have a place for, I'm waiting to hear back from this person on this.

Once I hear back from this, then I can move on and do this, right? So you can keep track of, here's all the stuff that I know so far needs to get done for the various things I'm working on. Relevant information can live right there with the task. And I can have different categories here of just like, these are tasks for this project, but I'm not actively doing them.

Here's tasks I'm working on this week. Here's things I'm waiting on. Any sort of thing can hold this information. You could have a Google Docs for different types of projects. You can have a Trello board with different boards for different types of projects or roles. The technology is boring, but you need something like that.

You probably need to do multi-scale planning at this level of complexity, Adam, right? So for the quarter, you check in, like, what are the big things I'm working on? You check that quarterly plan every week when you make your weekly plan, all right? So which of these things am I trying to make progress on this week?

When am I doing it? Do I need to move some meetings around so I have some more open time? Do I need to add some new meetings to my calendar to make progress on it? What's my game plan this week for making progress on the things I want to make progress on?

And then you have a daily time block plan where you look at the weekly plan. So you are grappling with the things you need to do at multiple scales. The other thing I think you need, Adam, is to work with non-interruptive communication. So if you have a bunch of things going on like this, the real enemy, if we're going to get into Weed's Deep Productivity nerd stuff, the real enemy is going to be the context switches.

If you have six ongoing projects that are each generating emails and Slack messages that you pretty much have to see and respond to pretty quickly because that's how things are being worked out, you are sabotaging your ability to actually do this work. And so you need to have structured communication.

This means daily office hours. Anything that requires more than a one-message response, you say, just grab me at my office hours. We'll do a five-minute real-time conversation, figure this out. The various groups you work with have to have standing maybe twice a week meetings to just go through a lot of things at once.

You should have a docket for each of these groups. As people think up things that there's a question or something we have to figure out, you add it to the docket. And when you get to the meeting, you go through that docket one by one so you don't have to email people or Slack people when something comes up that you worry about, you throw it on the docket.

None of this stuff requires big tech, right? Office hours requires that you open up a Zoom window and keep your door open. A docket is a Google Doc or a Dropbox where you have a text file in it, right? So I'm giving you these examples, Adam, not because that's the magic collection, but these are things that work really well.

So they're representative of the type of deep productivity processes that work in these complicated knowledge work jobs. None of them require complicated tech, and they're certainly not unified in some sort of master tool that's going to do this work for you. In the end, it's still you doing planning at multiple scales and executing.

This stuff helps keep things organized, but it's still you doing this work. The tech is not that interesting. So I come back to that, Silicon Valley wants us to believe the tool is what will give us the productivity. And I wrote a New Yorker piece about this last fall.

It's the other way around, that we figure out what we need to be productive and then go and find the tools. The problem is most of those tools have already been invented and are very low cost. So this is not great for the Silicon Valley companies. Google Workspaces is not that expensive, like that plus Trello.

You don't need any more. Email, like email, you can send files back and forth and you're good, you know, monday.com isn't even needed. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.