All right. Let's see here. We've got time for one more question. Let me do one more quick, deep work question. This one comes from Sammy. Sammy says, what are your tips for a mother of two small kids doing master's? Well, I mean, first of all, the fact that you have two small kids doing master's degrees tells me that you've got some pretty amazing genes.

So congratulations. I was trying to explain to my oldest son, who's nine, the plot of Doogie Howser, M.D., which was a show that was popular when Jesse and I were kids. It did not compute. He was like, wait a second. There's so many-- and you know what? It didn't compute not because he couldn't understand it, but because there are a lot of questions about Doogie Howser, M.D.

And the fact that this 12-year-old was being licensed to do practice clinical medicine in emergency rooms, there's a lot of questions about that show. But that's what I think about when I think about two small kids doing master's degrees. There was-- Jesse, there was at-- and I don't mean to go on the side, but MIT had some of this stuff going on.

Like MIT CS program gets some pretty interesting, weird brains. But there was a kid, when I started my PhD program, he was another incoming computer science student. And he was 14, maybe, 15, maybe, maybe 16, but I think like 15 years old. He had not only finished his undergraduate degree in computer science from University of Washington, which is a great program.

He had gone and worked at Microsoft for a while and was bored. He was like, I got to go get a PhD. So he had been in the workforce for a while before he came back to get his PhD. And he was like 15 years old. So it was a strange place.

Did you talk to him a lot? He was a systems guy, so I didn't know him well. And I don't think he actually stayed for his PhD. The problem with PhD programs like at MIT is the entire time you're there, there's literally people-- not literally, OK, the opposite of literally.

But there's people knocking at your doors with wheelbarrows full of money. In reality, it's emails from headhunters, et cetera. But basically, here is a wheelbarrow full of money. If you follow me to a job. And they pick a lot of people off. You'll just get things from headhunters. We will-- starting salary, $450,000.

Let's rock and roll. Come to my quant fund or whatever. So you lose a lot of people. They'll get their masters along the way, and then they're out the door. So it's only us suckers that actually stick it out all the way and become low-paid professors. All right, Sammy, I'm sorry.

I'm completely off your question now. All right, I was making fun of your ambiguous wording. Sorry about that. So let's start this again. Sammy says, what are your tips for a mother of two small kids doing masters? All right, it's a-- what is that, like a dangling modifier? It's the mother, not the children's doing the masters.

All right, we get that. How can she find focus time in the midst of being a wife and a mother? Let's get ages, nine-year-old and a three-year-old. I have one of each and a seven-year-old in between. So I empathize. Sammy, two things. One, acknowledge it's a really hard thing you want to do right now.

So it's important that you don't come into this with the psychology of, oh, I should just be able to do this, no big deal. Let's just rock and roll. I bought a bullet journal. We're good. Let's just go after it. I read Lean In. That's really hard. If you're-- those are hard ages.

The nine-year-old is probably in school, but the three-year-old might not be. So that's hard. Acknowledge that. Think about it like you told people I'm going to run a marathon. We're like, oh, that's so hard. And that's how you think about it. Don't think about this as an easy thing to do.

It's not. So I don't want you to feel bad about this being hard. Two, in those situations, you need to autopilot all the work. And by autopilot, this is my terminology. This goes way back to the early days of my writing on my website for students. But autopilot schedules is where all of the work that needs to be done, you figure out in advance.

This is where it always gets done, when it always gets done. You can't, in this situation, succeed by just saying, oh, what's due tomorrow? Oh, I got to do some readings and write a paper. Let me go get that work done. That barely works for 19-year-olds who are living in a dorm and only doing school.

It's not going to work for a mother of two children. So you've got to just figure out, like, this is when my reading gets done. All right, I dropped a three-year-old off at daycare, and I have this two-hour window. And that's always when I do my reading for the English class.

And Sunday afternoons is for paper writing. So every other Sunday, I work on papers. You really got to not be thinking at all about, what should I be doing today? Autopilot that all out. Figure out how much time you need, what work you have to do when it gets done.

So you can be really optimal about this and really be smart about where you try to fit that time. If it still doesn't fit, which it might not, then you have to slow down. You have to slow down the program. You have to find a way to do it on a longer timeline.

Face the productivity dragon. But if the dragon is too big, don't charge into the cave. That's a great thing about autopilot scheduling is you get to stare it in the face and say, can I make this work? And if you can, this autopilot schedule is going to give you the best possible chance of making it work.

And if you can't, you say, okay, what can I make work? And you adjust what you're doing until it fits. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)