Hi, Cal. This is Suzanne. I'm interested in your ideas about the autopilot schedule. I've used an autopilot because I think it's important or maybe foundational to an ordered day and week. But I'm more like Persephone, caught in the underworld of chaotic routines that sometimes are fit in and sometimes aren't.

Please tell me how you hack out time for regularly occurring obligations and how you fit them into a set part of your day. Maybe it'll create a way for me to find Demeter, the archetypal grounded mother, and get back into the late summer light of sanity. Well, I will say, like Orpheus, I will venture down into Hades underworld in search of my own productivity uridities.

There we go. Good Greek references. I actually just recently went to see Hades Town at the Kennedy Center. So I particularly appreciate those specific references. So way to go. For those who are uninitiated, autopilot schedule is actually an idea from pretty early study hacks days, back from when my newsletter was just a blog.

By the way, PSA, calnewport.com, you should sign up for my newsletter. If you don't, you'll get my weekly essay that I've been writing there on topics like autopilot schedule since 2007. The basic idea on the autopilot schedule is you find things that are regularly occurring, and you find set times and days to do them.

And so it's on your calendar, just repeated, and you don't even have to think about it. When you get to those times, you just do it. The more regularly occurring work that you can autopilot, the less mental energy you have to generate, and the lower the chances that you fall into a scheduling roadblock where you spent too much time or this or that, and you get to the end of the week and realize you never got that done, or this is important, and you don't have any more time to do it.

So you're much more consistently going to make progress on the things that matter if you're autopiloting them. And you're just going to use a lot less energy because you're not trying to answer the question again and again, what should I do next? What should I do next? That is a draining thing to do, and you're not going to have optimal answers to that question a lot of the time if you have to keep asking it.

So the balancing act you're talking about is a key one. If you over autopilot, so you make too many things recurring always at this time, always at this place, you have no give, you have no give for the unexpected that pops up, and then you're going to be frustrated.

You're going to be frustrated as you violate the autopilot schedule and now have to scramble to find time for it. This is just a balancing act. There is no set answer. It depends on the type of things we're talking about and what your schedule is like. I introduced this idea originally in the context, for example, of college students.

College students can autopilot the hell out of their work. I mean, here's your classes, these are the assignments, you have this club or this sport that practices at this time or meets at this time, you know what your day is like, that's it. You don't have a kid who's going to come home sick from school.

You're not going to have to go to the proctologist office to deal with whatever, I don't know what they deal with, I was going to say kidney stones, but that'd be a nephrologist or what have you, right? The type of stuff adults have to care about. You can autopilot the hell out of it.

And I tell students to do that. I'm like, every single class, what are the assignments? When are you going to do them? Do it the same time, same days, every week. And I used to call this also the student workday. You don't even have to basically think about productivity if you're a college student, if you do it right.

It's Tuesday at 12, I go to this library, do my lab report. You don't even have to think about it. For an adult with all sorts of adult things going on, with a job that's way less predictable than being a student where you just have to go to these classes and do these assignments, okay, you're not as flexible.

So it's a balancing act. I like to autopilot, I don't know, 25% of my time. Maybe that's a win. I mean, right now I'm really reflecting on my own schedule right now, if that's useful. I autopilot a lot of the things if I'm really being reflective about it surrounding my classes, 'cause that's very regular.

When are problem sets going to get written? When are course lectures going to be prepped? When am I going to meet with my TAs about grading? When am I going to meet with students who have questions? I autopilot all of that because that's very predictable in a way that other things I might not be able to autopilot as easily, like work on a committee where it could be very unpredictable what's going to come up or when we're going to need to do a lot of effort.

I also autopilot my writing. In particular, this fall, when I'm doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker, I'm pretty structured about these are the days and times in which I do that writing. It doesn't always work because sometimes I get stuck or something's harder than I think, but it's a backbone to when the writing gets done so I don't have to think about it and it's really reduced the stress on it.

So good question. There's no set answer. It's a balancing act. Autopilot the things that seem amenable to it, but give yourself a lot of leeway because if you're a grownup with a grownup job, there's only so much that's going to be predictable. (upbeat music)