All right, and with that, I think we're ready to jump in. I want to start with a deep dive. I'm going to call this a world without busyness. It is inspired by the holiday break that especially in the American context, most workers get the week between Christmas and New Year's.

So we have the holiday break just started when you're listening to this podcast. I want to talk about the week before. The week before the holiday break, that is the week that I'm in right now as I record this. For me, as for a lot of people, the week before this break is a really nice week of work.

And the reason is is because it's 40% less busy than a typical work week. As people are getting ready for the holidays, people aren't starting new initiatives, people aren't scheduling as many meetings. This is particularly true in the academic context where I work, the semester is over, and people will wait till the new year to really get things ramped up.

So it's like an easier week. You're still working, but the work doesn't seem as onerous. So what I have here, I'm going to switch to the tablet. So for those who are watching this on YouTube, you're going to see me drawing on the screen here. I have a very crudely drawn calendar.

Those who are listening, you can imagine this being expertly drafted with beautiful penmanship and straight lines. Those who are watching online know that's not the case. I have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, just sort of blocked out here on this calendar. And what I wanted to do is roughly block out what my week looks like this week.

And I have three categories here, deep work, admin, and appointment. So things that are sort of scheduled on the calendar that you have to go and go somewhere else. So this week, and I looked at my calendar this morning, so this is pretty accurate. Most mornings, Monday through Thursday, actually every morning this week, not most, every morning, I can just write in the morning.

So I'm blocking that off for deep work. I'm only doing this if you're listening, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday, we're leaving to go visit my parents. So we're not doing any work at all. So we're going to cross that off, no work on Friday. So we've got four days, can do deep work every morning, working on, I'm writing.

All right, most afternoons, I'm gonna put Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, plenty of time to do another deep work session. So I'm blocking that off on my calendar. And for me this week, that's gonna be largely, I'm working on a particular new proof or computer science paper, something I'm working on with some collaborators.

All right, what about appointments? So these are scheduled things. Well, because it's a week before a break, it's pretty light. It's basically today. So I'm blocking off most of Monday. And most of my appointments today are what I'm doing right now. I'm podcasting, I'm at the studio, I'm podcasting some other things I wanna get done.

And I'm gonna put a little sliver of deep work 'cause I do wanna finish, I told Jesse has a little more writing I wanna do because I had to cut it short this morning. All right, and then on most other days, there's a little bit of admin work. If I do 30 to 60 minutes, most of these on Tuesday, on Wednesday and Thursday, that is enough to keep on top of things that are coming via email, things on my calendar, things that need to get done.

There's still a little details that have to get done. I have a doctoral student who's defending a dissertation pretty soon after the break, for example, there's some paperwork to be filed. There's a web designer working on an update to our website. I have a couple of things to send her.

So about 30 to 60 minutes on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday will keep me very much on top of administrative work, email requests, et cetera. So here we have a calendar that if you're looking online, you'll see deep work every morning, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, is sort of modest admin block. And then another deep work session in the afternoon, space in between, plenty of breathing room, go for a walk, whatever.

These days can all end at three or four o'clock. Monday is the one day where I have sort of appointments during the day after a morning deep work session, I'm not even working on Friday. And that's my holiday schedule. Now here's the thought experiment I want you to follow.

What if this was my schedule every week? What would happen to my observable productivity if I had more or less a schedule like this every week, two deep work sessions a day, 30 to 60 minutes admin, one day with appointments, and on a regular basis, maybe an entire day just taken off to do other things.

I would argue that my visible productivity and the things that people at the scale of years would notice about me, which is books, academic articles, New Yorker articles, and this podcast, the big visible things that define my impact, that productivity would not only be preserved with this schedule, it would almost certainly be increased.

More articles, books at a faster rate, higher quality probably for this podcast just because of the more than enough time to work on these things, consistency working on these things, and more than enough time for the mind to refract and reconfigure between things, I would probably be more productive.

I think a lot of people would have a similar conclusion that if they could take the pre-holiday week schedule and do that every week of the year, their observable important productivity would not diminish. If anything, it would probably increase. Now let's compare this to a normal week. Let's grab a week in mid-January.

What goes wrong with this sort of pre-holiday week schedule I put down here? Well, there's two things that change. One, the number of appointments would rapidly increase. The idea that I've just consolidated them for the half a day on one day would be unrealistic under my normal scheduling demands.

So there would be, I would say, three to four, at least three to four other non-trivial appointments scattered throughout these days. I would also say these admin blocks would have to double or sometimes triple in length. There's just way more things pulling at my attention that I have to do that are time consuming.

So now maybe I need on average two hours a day of admin. So you expand the admin, you throw in a lot more of these appointments, and maybe you can preserve, let's say, like the morning deep work session. But what you really lose is two things. A, a lot of those afternoon deep work sessions go away and the length of your workday increases.

When I'm in my normal schedule, the only way to actually make that all work is I have to also aggressively time block plan just to try to make every piece fit. I have to combine that with a weekly plan and a strategic plan to try to make everything fit.

In this holiday schedule that's on, that I drew on the screen I don't even have to be that on my game, productivity speaking. It's a pretty simple schedule. I work, take my time, do some admin, go for a breather, do a little more work, I'm done. So that's what we lose in a normal schedule.

A lot less deep work, a lot longer working hours, and just a lot more grinding organizational skill required even to just sort of get through the day, which is draining. And what do we gain from that? Less visible productivity in the sense of producing things that the world notices and would assess as being valuable.

That actually goes down. So in some sense, this is my question in this holiday period. And this is, I would say, probably the question in knowledge, work, productivity, the one that we're not answering, the one that we're ignoring to instead focus on the minutia. Well, is Slack more efficient than email?

What's our rules around setting up meetings? Are you a bullet journal person or a time block planner? As we look at the particular leaves on the trees, we're missing the outline of the whole forest. And this is the question that we're not asking, but I think we should. Why don't we have every week be like the week before the holiday break?

What is preventing us from doing it? What would we have to change to make that the standard? And if we did, what are organizations or universities or companies or small entrepreneurial endeavors? Would they fall apart or would they actually become better at what they do? That's the question we should be asking.

So I thought I would pose it to you, my audience, because you have a week to actually think about it. - Is there a reason why you draw the morning blocks on the bottom? - Yeah, that's an interesting question. That matches, I have kind of reversed it, haven't I?

- I just didn't know if there was some. - Yeah, 'cause in my time block planner, I go down. In Google Calendar, time also goes down. And yet in my mind, I think this is interesting. When I visualize my schedule in my mind, I think about time moving upwards.

Yeah, so this is, if you're watching this on the YouTube, you'll see an interesting artifact of the way my mind works. My mind visualizes schedules as time moving up. - Yeah, you're climbing a ladder. - You're climbing the ladder, you're piling things on top of each other. That's an interesting observation.

Yeah, so maybe I'll label this. All right, for those who are watching, I'm gonna add an expository label here. Let's do, I'll put like 9 a.m. at the bottom and then I'll make the very top here like 4 p.m. This is my ideal schedule. Now I can't complain because I actually get to do this during the summer every year.

So I get my taste of this. So it's not just the week before. For most people, it's like just one or two weeks where this is true. I get this all summer, this schedule, and I love this schedule. - So in the evenings, you'll like read or like before nine o'clock, you'll read a little bit?

- Yeah, I mean, it's kids. Well, it's exercise, kids, other stuff, kids. - Yeah. - So it's family stuff. - Well, people would probably be curious about when you read your five books on that schedule. - So typically, if I'm up, I'm reading in the morning, like this morning I was up.

So I write in the morning, I read in bed. And then yeah, we put together, we do reading sessions in the evening. So now if I, usually at least one of my books will be for work, like I need it for a New Yorker article or something like that.

And because that's work for those, I'll put aside time, you know, hey, this is what I'm gonna do in the afternoon. - Yeah. - I'm gonna put aside an hour here, an hour there. - Yeah. - We'll see. Did we talk about Thriller December last week? We did, right?

- Yeah. - Yeah, okay. So hopefully people, this is your week. The week that you're off is the week to really make progress on Thriller December. So hopefully people are going well. I'm three thrillers deep now. I'm now reading, I added to my list. I went back, I aborted from one thriller.

I'll talk about that when we do our reading roundup next month. I was like, okay, I gotta get the bad taste out of my mouth. So I went back and I'm reading Robin Cook's original novel, Coma from 1976, invented the medical. He says it invented the medical thriller genre, like him and Crichton might argue about that, but it's really good.

It's really good. They haven't even got to the thrillery parts yet. It's like third year med students at Boston Memorial Hospital. And there's two cases in a row of young, young, healthy patients going in for surgery and something happens during the surgery and they get brain dead. And you're starting to realize, and they get, but so Cook gets into the details of all the science of how anesthesia works.

And so it's like brings you into the hospital world. It's like ER in a book. You're starting to realize like there's something going afoul here. I think someone's organs are being harvested and it's cool. I'm enjoying it. All right, anyways, Thriller December, we got one more week, read. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)