Hey Cal, my name is John. I am a pastor at a local church plant outside of Los Angeles. I'm also a graduate student in theology, getting a PhD. My question is this. My reading load on a weekly basis is enormous, to the point that scheduling two blocks of deep work a day just isn't enough to get all the reading done.

That said, I was hoping you could give me some advice about how I might schedule more than two significant sessions of reading per day in order to get all the work done. Thanks for all the help. Well, I don't think you're gonna be able to get much more productive deep work done in a day.

If you're already doing two long sessions of hard reading and you have another job, I think that's probably a realistic limit for your time available and a realistic limit for what your mind can actually do. As I've talked about before, when it comes to really cognitively demanding deep work, so the work that's really straining you, professionals who do this type of work really have two sessions they do a day and that's it.

So this came out of the study of professional violin players that was cited in Anders Ericsson's work and picked up and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's work where they were studying the best violin players at this particular Academy in Berlin, and among other things were trying to characterize their practice habits, and they would do one intense session, break, another intense session, and that's it.

What they did not find, for example, in this study was that there was a dose effect where more and more and more practice led to more and more accomplishment with the violin, because there's only so much you could do at that level of intensity and you might be there.

So what do we do about this? Well, you probably need to get more strategic about your reading. The very first book I wrote was called "How to Win at College" and the very first chapter in that book is called "Don't Do All of Your Reading." What this means is that at the college level, the grad school level, you have to learn how to be more strategic with your reading.

You have to know when to go in and really go slow and understand the argument and where you need to skim, where you can skip an assignment, and where you need to dwell on an assignment. The amount of reading assigned in a typical program in the humanities tends to be more than can actually be done for most people, so you have to learn how to do some of the strategic slow down, speed up, go deep, go shallow.

The other thing you probably have to do is, to the extent that's possible, be more strategic about your course selection. People don't think enough about this. There's a real masochism out there in higher education where people just put in place on paper the course load they want to do.

"You know, I want to get this degree fast and these are all good courses. Let me challenge myself and yeah, this is five courses instead of four and these three are notoriously hard, but I want to be the type of person who just goes after it and gets really hard courses and gets things done early." And then you get to the reality of it, like, "I can't keep up with this amount of work." And I tend to push the other way.

Keep your schedule as easy as possible that still keeps you on track for graduating on whatever schedule you want to. And if that is still too hard, then maybe you need to adjust that schedule and say, "I'm a full-time pastor. I'm gonna have to add another year to my studies here because I can't take a full course load and do my full-time job." That's fine too.

This is not laziness. This is actually giving yourself the cognitive space required to actually do the work that you're doing well. So keep that in mind too. You may have given yourself a heroic schedule because you like on paper being the type of academic hero that has those hard schedules.

But in the end, no one cares about how hard your schedule is. No one's going to give you a gold star for taking a fifth course instead of four. No one's going to pat you on the back because you took three really hard courses at the same time. No one is going to say, "This is why I'm going to hire you because you had such a hard demands on your time." People just care about what's the degree, what are your grades, how well did you do at the thing you did best.

So keep your load reasonable. Be strategic about your reading. Combine those two strategies, and I think you'll find that you have a little bit more breathing room. Don't try to add a third session. Don't try to be doing seven hours of deep work a day. It's just not going to work out.