Jessica says, "I should start with the fact that I am neurodivergent and a very anxious person, which might answer part of the question. But I wonder how I can make myself stick to a simple productivity system instead of revamping everything pretty much every week. I always feel like if I could just find the perfect system, it would fix everything." Well, Jessica, I don't think your concerns here are specifically due to neurodivergence or anxiety.

It's common among people who get serious about how they organize their digital era knowledge work. Part of the problem is a lot of people put, I would say, too much faith in what their productivity system can accomplish for them. But here's the thing, productivity systems, they cannot do your work for you.

They cannot in themselves make you successful at your job. They certainly cannot fix everything. In the world of digital knowledge work, what do productivity systems actually do? Two things. They can help you make consistent and smart decisions about what to work on. So it gets you out of that, free you from that mode of reactivity of just, "Oh my God, something's due.

Someone just emailed me. I'm just trying to answer these incoming pings and put out the rapidly growing fires." They can also help you avoid unnecessarily wasting your time and attention. So I'm going to be more careful about how I deal with my brain. I don't want to context switch too much.

I'm going to sort of build my scheduling and approach to work and my processes around one thing at a time, consolidating context switching, et cetera. So smart decisions, planning, and help you avoid unnecessary drags on your time and attention so you get more out of your brain. And this is more of scheduling and processes.

If you have ideas for both of those goals that are working for you, then you're getting most of the benefits a productivity system can get. Now if you tune up the system, it'll be useful, but it's not going to be night or day. Night or day is having something in place, planning that's smart for making decisions, and scheduling and process things in place to help you not waste unnecessary time and attention.

So going from zero to that is a huge win. Beyond that, you know, it's like two users taste. It can kind of make a difference. It's not going to be night or day. So if you have something in place for both of these, and given that you're a longtime listener of the show you do, you're getting 80% of the benefits.

Now what about those other 20? Tune in once a quarter. Once a quarter, be like, "Hey, what's working? What's not?" And make some tune-ups. Don't have high expectations, but you do want to check in semi-regularly because you want to prune things out of these two points that aren't really working or wasting your time.

Or if there's a new type of challenge within these two points that has emerged that's not being addressed by your current systems or processes, you might want to tweak something or add something new, and this will help. But I would see this more like the key thing is, I'm going to use a horticultural metaphor here.

The key thing is you plant a tree, the tree that yields the fruit of consistent smart decisions and unnecessary wasting of time and attention. That's the big deal is planting the tree, having the tree, having those fruits. Now over time, you want to prune it. If you don't prune it, it's going to grow wild, and maybe it's going to no longer produce any fruit.

So you can't just put something in there and let that go for the next five years. But if you're just semi-regularly pruning this, the tree will keep growing and it'll keep delivering your fruits in some years better than others. That's the way to think about this. Don't put so much on the details of your system.

Yes, you need a system, but those are the two things that can do. It can't do your job for you, it can't make work easy, it can't be I start turning this crank and on the other end, I'm the president. It's not the way it works. Work is hard.

In the end, you still have to give concentrated cognitive effort to things that are difficult to produce things that are valuable. That's going to feel the same no matter what productivity system you have. That's going to be hard no matter what productivity system you have. You basically just want to try to clear out some of the biggest obvious obstacles to doing that in a sustainable fashion.

All right, our next question is from DK. DK writes, "I often have a large block at 90 to 120 minutes of time at the start of my day. I want to use this time more efficiently, but it often gets eaten up by setting up the rest of the day.

Even if I've completed a weekly and/or daily plan, I end up preparing for meetings, triaging my messages, or getting caught up on Slack threads. How can I be more effective at the start of my day?" Well, DK, I have three ideas for you. One, prepare the day before for what you're going to do at the start of your day.

Block off that time like a meeting on your calendar and have a set place you're going to go to do that work that's different than where you do Slack, that's different than where you think about your meeting prep. Your day starts off not, "Okay, let's just rock and roll in all my channels and then get to work." No, your day starts off, "I'm going to my writing set, I'm going to the coffee shop, I'm doing my 20-minute thinking walk to get going, and I have everything right here to start working on this code, this memo, this business strategy, whatever, this big project.

It is scheduled and that's what I do." You're going to be nervous about it, "What if I'm missing things? What if in that first 90 minutes really critical things happened?" You know what? It won't and you'll be fine and then you'll stop worrying about it. People can call you if it's urgent.

They'll respect it like, "Yeah, I start with hard things, then I get after like meetings in Slack." They'll be fine and you'll be fine. So you just got to be more definitive about this. All right, second thing to suggest, do more preparation at shutdown instead of the beginning of the day.

Schedule the last half hour of your day and again, protect this on your calendar. Let that be the time where you're preparing for the next day. Shutting down open loops, "Do I have what I need for these meetings? If not, let me schedule time before the meeting to do the prep.

I like my plan for the day. Okay. What am I doing to start the next day? Great. Let me gather all my materials. Great. Schedule shutdown confirmed. Check the schedule shutdown box on my time block planner. Unload from work. Next day starts. You get right into the deep work you want to do in that day because you already went through all the process of looking at your next day.

Do it the day before, not the morning of." Third idea, do more meeting processing proximate to the meetings. I'm a big believer of when you schedule a meeting, scheduling time either before, after, or both. Time before to prep for that meeting, if you need that. Definitely time after, 15 to 30 minutes, always add that to your calendar to process everything that just happened in that meeting.

All right. Let me just stop for a second. What came out of this meeting? What decisions were made? What do I now need to do? What do I need to remember? Let me get that into my systems. Let me update what I need to update. I promised to contact these three people.

Let me contact those three people. Okay. Good. I can now shut down that meeting. If you go straight from a meeting to something else, all of that post-meeting work just sticks around in your head and causes a problem. Meetings are not just a time you're talking to other people.

It's a time you're talking to other people and the time you need to make sense of that and prepare for it. Get that on your calendar as well. Then you'll feel more sort of in control of what's going on, but mainly you just have to protect that time. You don't want to be doing slack and meeting prep during those first 90 minutes.

Don't. Figure out a way to get that done without having to use your first 90 minutes. I think the benefit will be worth it. All right. My next question is from Skeptical Sally. This is someone talking about their partner. That's always fun. Hi, Cal. My partner is a director of product management at a startup, and despite having risen through the ranks there, he has yet to be rid of a lot of the lower level work on his plate.

He also has meetings all day, almost every day. Many things cannot be done without his input, but he is predictably exhausted all the time and has no time to do the thinking and writing work compounding the issues. His most important work is to think so engineers can build the right thing, and he has no thinking time because of overhead and meeting happy colleagues.

He claims there's nothing he can offload and he can't cancel meetings because too much won't move forward, but I don't buy it. All right, Sally, I don't buy it either. I mean, here's what I do buy, and this is a common trap when people are dealing with overload and digital knowledge work.

The common trap is to say, "Can I take work in the way I have it unfolding right now and just start not doing the things that I'm not liking? Can I just start canceling meetings?" He's like, "Well, no, because these are projects that I'm supervising, and I have to supervise them, and they need meetings." Or he's like, "Can I radically reduce the projects?" Well, for a lot of people, that could be yes.

Using the system I talked about in the deep dive of today's episode, you could have active projects and waiting projects. Managers can't always do that, though. It's like, "No, these are the projects going on. I'm in charge of them, but not in charge of deciding what we do, and so no, I can't offload projects." And then they throw up their hands.

But what they don't think about is, "Can I change the structure in which this work is actually happening? Not changing what I'm doing, but changing how I'm doing it." And here we often get significant failures of imagination. So Sally, here's what I would tell your husband. Here's what you're going to do.

Two and a half hours every afternoon, maybe three, there's going to be a 30 to 60-minute office hour block right there in your afternoon. Your door is open. You have Zooms or Teams turned on with a waiting room, and your phone is on. The rest of this time, you have a Calendly, whatever type setup, 15-minute blocks, 15 or 30-minute blocks, you choose which.

It's like 90 minutes to two hours of just boom, boom, boom. You can go in there and grab any block you want. Here now is how you deal with all of your teams. Questions that just require an answer, and they can be answered in a single message. "Hey, what is my budget for this again?

What is my timeline for this again? When is it? Have you heard back yet about whatever?" Those can be emailed. Great use for email. They show up, they sit until your partner is ready to look at his emails, and he can send back answers and get the information to people.

Minimal overhead. Great. Things that require some back-and-forth. Come to my next office hours. We're never more than a few hours away from my office hours. Drop by, jump on a Zoom waiting room, 10 minutes, let's pound it out. Like, "What's going on here? What's holding you up? How can I help you?

Hmm. Hmm. Okay. This, this, this. Good. Let's go." You have an issue that's more complicated than that. "No, we really need to think." Great. You don't even have to tell me. Just do it. What do I do in the afternoons? I just go to these meetings that are scheduled.

We'll rock and roll and have the longer discussions if you don't want to just jump into office. So it's going to take more than five minutes. Schedule one of those slots. Guess what? This is going to handle 95% of what's happening in these meetings, and yet consolidate all of that to two to three hours a day, leaving your husband's entire mornings free, right?

This could make a huge difference. It's not changing what you do, managing products and talking to people about what they need for their projects, or it's not changing your workload even. It's how you do your work. It could make a huge difference. Two, because he's in charge, he's a director here, demand better meetings too.

All right. You can come to the office hours. You can grab one of these slots, but I'm going to use the Jeff Bezos or General George Marshall approach of here's what I expect if you were bringing me into a discussion that takes my time. That you have done most of the work on your own to figure out what's going on, where's the sticking point, where do I need outside help, what specific help do I need, what's all the relevant information you need.

Jeff Bezos demands that you send him all of this in a two-page memo a certain amount of time before any meeting. So the meeting can be like a laser beam. This is exactly where we need your help. You already are briefed. You already know exactly why we're asking you and what you need.

What's your decision? This cuts down the time required to meetings to be very short. It also reduces the number of meetings because a lot of people use meetings as a way, as like a crew time management tool. Like I don't really know what to do next. I don't have a lot of control over my schedule or time.

I don't really want to sit and think too much about it. But what I can do is just get a meeting. Now I put a meeting on the schedule. I'm no longer stressed about this because I'm like when we get to the meeting, that's when the work will happen.

But if you're the product, the product director of product management rather, it's not your goal to do this work with people. It's not your problem that people are uncomfortable with how am I going to remember to make progress on this project. It's not your problem that the way they want to work is just put calendar things on and then get the work done in the calendar things.

You demand I need that memo. So maybe now what you do is like, okay, before you come to office hours or schedule one of these things, like maybe office hours you can drop by, but these are five minute discussions. If you want to schedule one of these 30 minute meeting blocks, as part of that scheduling form, you're pointing me towards a shared document that has the full briefing.

And these are the exactly what we need your decision on. Here's all the information. Do I have all the information? Here's all the information you need to make this decision. Here's what needs to be discussed in the meeting. And those meetings become more efficient. I'm telling you, 95% of your interaction can now happen in two and a half to three hours a day.

Imagine now what that's going to open up for your partner in terms of the thinking he can do, the strategy, the leadership he can do. It also frees up a lot of time for the meetings that won't fit in there. When the CEO is like, we need you to come to the strategy session, when the big client presentations in town, now you have the breathing room to do those things because your day is not with these haphazard meetings that are longer than they need to be and too haphazardly scheduled.

All right. So point him towards me, Sally. I think his life could be a lot better. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.