Let's start get back to basics a little bit do a habit tune up. So this is where I go and I take a particular strategy or tactic relevant to living a deeper more productive life and we we get into the weeds. This one is based off of my recent experience of coming back from a long vacation and that dreaded first weekday back after vacation where you you you face everything that has piled up you go through your inboxes you confront your calendar again you go to your long neglected quarterly plans and you realize okay I'm completely overwhelmed how am I ever going to get my arms around this it's never my favorite thing but I went through it but as I was going through this the Monday after I got back from my vacation it got me thinking about a bigger effect that I wanted to discuss.

So here's the phenomenon that I think is common you have a big let's call it task list right you you go through your calendars your inbox you have all these various things you're writing out that need to get done you're looking at this list of all this wide variety of different types of things and you freeze it just seems impossible to even get started it's not that any one particular task is impossible to do or incredibly daunting it's just somehow seeing the combination of them seems to mentally speaking freeze you in place and it's very difficult to make progress you go online and you have to check baseball trade rumors and you go back and check your inbox again and you look at social media and you do anything you can but try to tackle this list something about something about it freezes you.

So let me give you an example so we're going for those who are watching this on YouTube youtube.com/calendarportmedia I'm bringing up on the screen now a sample list let me scroll this slightly all right so if you're looking if you're looking at this on YouTube on the left here I have a list of just the types of things you would drop onto a list as you're trying to catch up after vacation so for those listing I have on here transfer money next step on dinner party new copy for Karen budget reply to Jennifer reply to mom add reminder to calendar for bill laundry notes to Alex order new cable update Amazon bio writing plan for rest of week a lot of these actually by the way came from my processing of everything not so long ago so when you face a task list like this it's common to freeze you feel significant resistance to action now what's actually going on here is there's a there's a neuroscientific explanation for this freezing if you get into the details of how the human brain actually plans and then motivates you to do non-simple physical action it gets pretty complicated but there's a whole what we call there's a sort of a plan execute reward loop where if there's something you want to do you set this target of what you're trying to accomplish this loop then accesses the hippocampus so it can look at memories and pull up memories of you executing this thing in the past so that you can simulate different plans and find one that works then there's a very complicated connection from here to the ventral striatum is a sort of complicated uniquely human part of the brain that's very involved in motivation for non-simple physical activity so I have to get up and get started working on the budget so it's not a simple physical activity such as I need to reach over here to grab this apple but something more abstract and complicated they all work together the motivation is generated and you start working when you see a list that's this long and this diverse so it's many different things and they are semantically unrelated what's involved in getting new copy to Karen is very different than what's involved in working on your household budget that apparatus can't function that apparatus is meant for this is the thing you want to do let's make a plan here's your motivation go and do it now you're done here's a dopamine yay it can't handle the idea of these 10 or 15 different things that all have to be done because it can't literally have the bandwidth to try to make a plan to envision a plan to pull out memories from your hippocampus and simulate your plan for 15 things at once so that feeling of task freeze that feeling of task freeze that we see when we have a long and diverse list is actually the neuroscientific correlate of our planning apparatus freezing itself it can't deal with it so it doesn't generate the needed motivation so this way of work and organization that's so common in modern life where we have a lot of very varied things that have to be done all mixed together all at once really is incompatible with our brain so I was facing the same thing I had a list like this longer but actually a lot of these things are from that list so what do you do here well if you understand if you understand what's happening in your brain you can work with that and what I do what I did the other day what I commonly do in these situations is I will begin sorting these lists and combining like tasks tasks that are a similar type of behavior using a similar part of your brain and I will sort them into standalone groups or piles so if you look on the screen here so again if you're watching if you're watching on YouTube you'll see I have one group where I have reply to Jennifer reply to mom next step dinner party and I've elaborated that task to say email restaurant because that's actually what the next step is I have to email the person at the restaurant those three things are together why because it's all the same type of thing I'm in email I'm composing messages to people that's a group then I have a separate group below that where I put add calendar reminder order new cable update calendar I should say update Amazon bio and start laundry by the way a lot of those are actually real Jesse so the new cable is I ordered an Ethernet cable for the HQ because we were having some connection issues with the NPR recording so I'm just going to hardwire this be straight to the straight to the modem update the bio my agent wrote me it was like you realize your bio on Amazon your author bio was written right when so good they can't ignore you came out in 2012 so it's a little bit out of date so these are actually real things but why are those four things together in this group because in my mind those are all what I would think of as small non-demanding task I have to add something on the calendar I could jump over to Amazon and order something I have to copy this bio for my website and log in so it's it's online minor semi-tedious but requires very little thinking type tasks next group notes for Alex notes for Karen now I put these together because these are things that are going to require time and non-trivial thinking these both actually came from my real list the other day notes for Alex Alex is my my doctoral student it's notes I owed him on his doctoral dissertation proposal Karen Karen is actually the the web designer and consultant that keeps Cal Newport calm up and running we're doing a revamp at Cal Newport calm and actually order some notes on the latest design so those are things that require thinking I got to sit down I got to load up a non-trivial cognitive context I have to give it non-trivial thought I put those together and finally I have budget transfer money writing plan in its own group budget transfer money these are kind of similar things you're thinking about your finances family finances you're in a planning type mode I felt like that was a good mode where you would also maybe want to work on a writing plan so I have I have grouped together like with like the final piece of the strategy is that you tackle one group at a time when you're doing that group that's what you're all in doing that group and then you step back you reset your rest you go get the new coffee you go for a walk then you come back and tackle another group take a break you know I'm going to go chat over here check in on whatever going on online then tackle another group this ends up being a much more effective way of getting through this work because what you will immediately notice is that when you are focusing on here is a group of similar tasks that I've grouped together and all I want to do is tackle this group your planning apparatus can deal with that oh it's email time all right let's get in that we can do that I get that we're going to go in here and send emails that we're going to be done that makes sense that's coherent here's the plan let's execute here's the motivation a little bit of oh you got it done when you're done when you group like by like your brain can get in the game and you get rid of the task freeze and you can actually make progress now why do you take a break between the groups because you have to let that cognitive context begin to dissipate so you're not stuck in the email context you're not stuck in the doing difficult notes to students and web consultant context let the context dissipate let your brain catch a breather and load up that whole planning apparatus for the next group so I think the name for this habit tune up I was I was used in my notes is task list are inhumane and what I meant by that is just staring at a task list like the one I had up on the screen on the left there where it's 15 different unrelated things is literally in human in the sense that it does not match the way the human brain works and so we have to work with our actual cognitive apparatus grouping like by like tackling groups with rest in between that's the way to tackle long diverse task list at least that's the way I did it and it got me through catching up when I got back from my trip so is that test list and you're working memory dot working memory dot txt exactly I don't want frills I want to just type as fast as I can to a text file then it's then it's so easy in a text file to copy and paste and move things around and just put a bunch of equal signs to put little dividers between them I love the simplicity of it and then also when I'm tackling individual task and I have my working memory dot txt plain text file open I always just have a buffer section where I can copy text and write text and put notes to myself just to extend my working memory and help me tackle the task in front of me so yeah when I'm going through a list like this and organizing it grouping it and executing it the number one tool that ties that all together is that plain text file plain text tile on my desktop is organizing extending my brain organizing all this work so all of this stuff I did in a text file on my desktop and then when you when you're on vacation you have certain things that come up you just write it down your moleskin right and then transfer that over when you get back to a computer yeah whatever capture you want to use yeah or I had a paper notebook the bigger spiral bound notebook but yeah you capture wherever and then you just when you need to deal with it transfer it all into the text file go through your calendar to see what's coming up transfer the relevant things to your text file go through your inboxes transfer the relevant things your text file just dump the whole thing you'll have task freeze this list is just completely freeze your mind but don't stop there sort get it into the groups and then you can actually you can actually start executing it's all brain hacking it's all brain hacking and it's it's almost miraculous how it works because it's it's a weird effects task freeze is a weird effect it's why can't I do the first thing in this list it's easy I have to send one email why can't I do it it's because your brain is looking at the whole list and says I can't handle that if I can't handle it I cannot get the proper whatever elements of the cortex the ventral striatum operating properly and if that doesn't operate properly you don't get motivation you need the brain for motivation it's chemicals it's neurons it's not some dualistic you have your soul that that is motivated independently of your of your hardware as a human it all goes together so if you're getting back from vacation I would suggest that I'll say just my wife knows me well she said I'm clearing my schedule I'm clearing your schedule I I'm going to take the kids I don't have anything to do with you on Monday the Monday after vacation because she knows how like upset and cranky I get when I have to that I mean these lists get long for me when I'm away for two weeks there's a lot of things that build up and she's like it always stresses you out and it always takes you longer than you think and so like I'm taking the kids to the pool and I have no expectation of seeing you until the evening and she was right took all day.