17 years ago, the popular productivity blogger Merlin Mann gave a talk at Google where he popularized the term Inbox Zero, which he used to refer to the goal of regularly emptying your email inbox to zero messages. Soon after that, he was offered a deal to write a book about his concept of Inbox Zero.

The project eventually led him into an existential crisis about productivity more generally. He began the question, why do we even care about this? He never finished a book, and he shut down his popular productivity blog. In the 17 years since, I think many have had a philosophically similar reaction to the idea of Inbox Zero.

People embrace its promise, but then give up, realizing that it is quixotic. They fall into a state of despair, saying, I never will be able to tame my inbox. I want to return to this topic today, 17 years later. First, I'm going to go back and look at the advice that Merlin Mann gave and explain why it doesn't work, why it particularly isn't going to work today.

I'm then going to describe a method that might actually work. I do go down to Inbox Zero in my various inboxes on a semi-regular basis. I can explain what I do, and it's a little bit different than what Merlin was talking about. In the end, I'll justify why we should care.

Why is it important to try to get your inbox empty? Is this just a goal that we set for the sake of having a goal, or does it actually make our life better? All right, so that is our game plan, Jesse. Let's get into Inbox Zero. All right, so what I want to start with is going back to Merlin Mann's talk.

I'm going to play just a clip from this. We'll put it on the screen for people who are watching instead of just listening, and I'm just going to put it on the screen and play a little bit of Merlin talking, and then it'll give us an overview of what Merlin's method was from 17 years ago.

All right. Like I say, last time I'll say this, this may not be your trip. You're going to have to figure out what your—I think these are actually pretty sound. I think 80% of the DNA for most email systems is probably somewhere in here, but you need to figure this out for yourself.

You have your own workflow. You've got your own life. You've got your own weird, peculiar habits you picked up in college. Honor that with my blessing. All right, so what we have on the screen—so Merlin has on the screen five steps. Here, let's bring that video back just a little bit, Jesse, to the five steps on the screen.

All right, there we go. The five steps he has on the screen, labeled choose one, delete, delegate—oh, I think it's still playing here—delete, delegate, respond, defer, do. All right, so what he's saying is to go through your inbox, you have to choose one of these five actions. He calls them verbs.

You have to choose one of these five actions for each of the emails in your inbox. Delete it, delegate it, meaning send it to someone else, respond to it right there, defer it to get back to it another time, or just do whatever it is that's being requested of you.

All right, we can take this off the screen now. Why does this not work for most modern inboxes? Well, I think there are two real issues with this. One, the key steps there that are different than simply just deleting it or doing it, responding when it's a quick response.

I want to put those type of messages aside. Some messages you can just delete. It makes sense just to do that. Some messages you can do what I call a quick response. So without thinking about it much, it's a question that you know the answer to. And so you can just respond to come back.

Someone says, hey, remind me again what day the client is coming. You can just respond to that email. It's Thursday. Right? Put aside those messages and those reactions. Many of these other steps, the first issue is they take too long. So the inbox, like that email in your inbox might look innocent, but often to delegate it or to give a meaningful response or to actually try to make progress on what's being asked is a non-trivial investment of time.

Emails are typically connected to some sort of back and forth discussion. The task at hand is multifaceted. The information needed for someone to act on it might be voluminous. Right? So now for me to respond to this message, I'm like, okay, wait a second. Let me think about this for a second.

I got to give the context of this project. I need to explain the backstory. And there's like three options here. And there's a different option. Depending on which option you go with, there's different next actions you'll have to take. I mean, I'm thinking about some of like the recent emails I have sent.

Like, for example, I recently sent an email to the former director of undergraduate studies. I had a question about a student request. That's a complicated question I'm asking that's going to require quite a bit of details and maybe even some back and forth to explain. Right? So actually acting on many messages can take four, five, maybe six minutes.

Now, this doesn't sound like a lot back in the day where you might have a few emails to answer. But the modern load of people's inboxes is so large that you can multiply that across 20 or 30 messages. And now you realize, wait a second, this could take hours.

And it does. And I think people have this experience of trying to actually act on everything in their inbox. It's taking them hours to try to get through everything. And people don't necessarily have hours. The second issue here is brain strain. Hard to say that. Brain strain. Because here's what happens as you jump from message to message in your inbox.

How are these messages sorted? They're sorted by time. What time did a message arrive? Which means you're going to likely be jumping from message to message from one completely unrelated topic to another. One cognitive context to a different one. It takes time. We talk about this all the time on this show.

It takes time to switch your cognitive context. If I want to be thinking about an administrative issue involving our undergraduates, that's a completely different cognitive context than if I want to be dealing with a research collaborator on a problem we're working on. And if I jump from responding to a message about the first thing to a message about the second, my brain is still in that first cognitive context.

So it's going to strain to try to answer the other one. You're going to feel this as a sort of grit in the gears of your brain because your brain has the wrong networks activated. The networks you might need are inhibited. And until it can shift your attention, which is a high-energy procedure, you're going to struggle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, research. What's going on here? You're trying to load things up. And what often happens is you struggle out a response, it's difficult, and you jump to the next message, completely different context. So now before you've gotten to the new context, you begin shifting to the third context, and your mind really feels that strain.

That's a big ask for your brain. And you feel it as a sort of mental fatigue and exhaustion, which we often feel around our inbox. The brain strain from switching context in our inbox really creates that type of inbox fatigue that we're all used to, where you say, I can't really answer thoughtfully anymore.

And you just begin jumping around looking for messages that you can delete or give a quick response to. It's because you exhausted your brain from jumping between those contexts. So the Merlin-Man approach of let's just go message by message and apply a systematic set of rules to each message until we're done could take a really long time, and it'll probably exhaust your brain before you finish.

All right, so how do we solve these? What's an approach to emptying your inbox that might actually work? Well, let's look first at this issue of it taking too long to actually respond to or deal with each of the messages. My argument, and this is what I do, is that your goal when you're processing your inbox is not to act on every message.

It's to get every message stored in a better system. Let me walk this through. As I go through, you know, inbox messages, delete the stuff you can delete, sure. Respond to the stuff that you can respond to right away. The client's coming on Thursday, sure. For the other things, I want them to go on to the, a pointer to those to go on to the appropriate task list.

And you know, the way I do things, I talk about it on the show, is I use Trello. I have a different Trello board for each of the roles I play in my life, and then each of those boards is broken up into columns based on different possible statuses and messages.

Stuff I still need to process, stuff on the back burner, stuff I'm waiting to hear a response on. Stuff that I should talk to certain people next time I see them in a regular meeting, stuff I'm working on right away. I have different statuses in each board. I want to eventually get those emails, as I empty them, either deleted, responded to, or a corresponding action on the corresponding card in a corresponding column of a corresponding board.

Now, just copying from an email inbox and directly adding new tasks to something like Trello or Todoist or whatever you're using, even that is too slow for me. Here's what I do instead. I have a blank text file open next to my inbox. I call it workingmemory.txt, plain text file, not even any rich text formatting.

I'm going from my inbox to notes in that text file because I can type really fast. And in a text file, I don't have to click any buttons. I don't have to create any new cards. I don't have to type any new categories. I can just type, all right, remember to do blah, blah, blah, get back to so-and-so about this.

If there's details in the email that I need to be able to act on whatever, I'll copy them in, or sometimes I'll just copy the subject line so I know what to search for in Gmail if I want to find that message again. Copying things, either deleting, responding to, or adding a note.

Okay, here's an obligation. This message responds. Archive the message. And my text file grows with these notes. Then what I do is I look at what's in that text file, and I can remix, reorganize, reconsider, and consolidate. So when you see all these things listed in your own words, they're not emails in your inbox anymore, but you've honed them down to, like, need to figure out this for so-and-so, so-and-so needs this information, get back to, you know, so-and-so with these grades or whatever.

When you see them all together, you can begin very quickly in a text file messing around with this information. Well, let me batch together things that are similar. Let me consolidate. Now that I look at it, there's four different requests in here that comes from the same person. Okay, I'm going to put these all together.

I'm going to change this to set up, you know, stop by so-and-so's office to discuss issues, and I'll put these all below it so I can consolidate all of that. Some things you'll, the reconsider step, some things, once you look at everything in the light of, the harsh light of your text file, you're like, I don't really need to do that.

I'm not going to do that. You kind of, like, take some things off your plate. So it really cleans up all this information. And then you can go from that text file, start adding things into your system from the text file itself. All right. It's quicker. It is much quicker to type things in a text file than to actually try to act on these.

It's much quicker than trying to, like, create different things. And typically, there's a fair amount of reorganization and consolidation and reconsideration that happens between the text file and actually going into your task systems. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com slash slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. The second issue that we pointed out with Merlin's system was the brain strain of switching context back and forth.

Well, this we can solve as well. This is a method I've mentioned before on the show, but I think it's really important. It's to organize your messages when you're processing them by context. This could be really simple. In Gmail, I'll have a label, and you could just call it context or processing or something like this.

And I'll go through my inbox, and I'm going to find every message that's related to that. So maybe it's Director of Undergraduate Studies and another one for my class or it's writing related. Like whatever the context is, I'll go through and I'll find all the messages for that context.

In Gmail, I'll click all their checkboxes, and then I'll apply a bulk action, label them with the processing label. Then I can jump over to the processing label and just see those messages. And like, great, let me go through those. And now I am only processing messages that are from the same cognitive context.

It goes faster because your mind is just thinking about this stuff, even just copying them to the text file, making decisions about what you really need to do or don't do. All of that gets much faster if you're within the same context and the strain is much less. Then you go back to your inbox and choose a new context, then grab all those messages, put those together, deal with them in a row.

It feels really different. And at first, it seems almost miraculous. Why is this going much easier? It's because your brain isn't switching context. It's like, yeah, we're just in the mood. We're doing class-related emails. You kind of get into the mood of it. This happened to me the other day, right?

Processing a bunch of backlog emails from my class. I processed them all together in the same context. A lot of the messages were students with questions about grades because I had handed back a problem set recently. Well, when I'm just looking at that context, I'm like, great, let me sort all those together.

I'll put all these grading questions over here. And I can just have like a session later of just like going through and doing grading questions. A lot of them I could answer really quickly because it's like, oh, I've seen the same question a bunch of times. So I can just answer those now, et cetera, right?

I've done the same thing with like my director of undergraduate studies duties, right? I pull out just those messages and like, okay, what do I really have here? Well, there's like three students I'm working with on some external course approvals. And all these messages are from them back and forth.

Let me just load in that context. Okay, where are they? Let me update, look at the notes, and I can make a clear next action for each of these students. I can make those decisions better when I'm just in one context. When you process context by context, it's going to go much easier.

All right, so why should you do this? Why is it worth trying to go through the trouble of once or twice a week getting your various inboxes emptying into your task systems? It's because your inbox is a terrible place to store obligations. If you don't do this, what you're implicitly doing is saying my inbox has now become one of my primary systems for keeping track of things I need to do.

Right? We've got to keep track of the things you need to do or you're going to be stressed as your mind tries to do it for itself. There's no structure in your inbox. This is problem number one with using it as a task management system. There's no structure in your inbox.

So now the various things you have to do are just all jumbled and mixed together. They're very difficult when you're trying to figure out like, okay, what am I going to work on today or what am I going to work on next? It's very difficult to jump into an unstructured inbox and just see all this different stuff.

Two, tasks are obfuscated in an inbox. What do you see in an inbox? Not the well-labeled task in your task system. You see subject lines. And the subject line for a key task that has to do or the actual task is, you know, getting in touch with the advising dean to clarify a question about online course credits.

What you actually see there is re, colon, re, colon, forward, colon, summer course or something like this. And it's not clear what that means. So now you have to try to recreate from obfuscated subject lines what the actual tasks are. So it's very hard to get a sense of the various things you have to do.

And there's a bunch of junk in your inbox, stuff that should just be deleted. There's junk mail in your inbox, other sorts of things in there that obfuscate. So it's like the worst possible task list. It's a task list where you are camouflaging the actual task with fake decoy tasks and then changing the title of your task so they're hard to read and then mixing them all together.

If I came to you and said this is my plan for a productivity app, you are not going to invest in that. But that's what happens if you're using your inbox. When you instead have your task stored by role and within role by status, it's much, much easier to deal with.

Now, when it's time to deal with stuff related to your class, you just go to that board and it's all organized. Like, here's the stuff I need to do. I maybe have a column for like pending grading questions. OK, I'm going to this afternoon put aside time just to go through all those in order.

And I'm going to get back. I have these more complicated, you know, accommodation requests. I'm going to ping those people. I see I have like six of these built up. And I think I need to just go over to the academic resource center and have a conversation. Why don't I send them all a message when I'm doing my next teaching block and just be like, hey, just want to let you know I see this is here.

And I am having a meeting. Then I'll get some answers to you. And then I'm going to move those over to a waiting to hear back. And it's like, OK, after I have this meeting, get back to all these people. You're just dealing with things. You're seeing things. Their status is clear.

You can make intelligent decisions. Working off structured task storage is just way more calming and effective and efficient and stress reducing than working from a camouflage obfuscated task list, which is what an inbox actually is. So I think inbox zero is possible. You don't have to be there all the time.

But to try to get back there once a week, I think, is not a bad standard. And if you fall behind, OK, then you can do it the next week. It takes a while. You know, it's hard for me to say how long it takes me because I have five inboxes.

So it depends on the inbox. But, you know, I'm going to I just got back from this trip. So I'm going to have to process my plan today is to process my Georgetown inbox back to zero. That one I try to keep to zero twice a week because it's urgent stuff.

It's my job in my writing life. I think people recognize. I don't always am. I'm not always able to get back. I have a bunch of jobs, but I'm, you know, I'm an independent writer. You know, give me a little grace. But my job as a professor, I like to be much more prompt.

I'll empty it like twice a week. It maybe takes 20 to 45 minutes to get stuff in the task list when I do it this way. All right. Two other things I'll throw out there. I don't want to go into detail, but two things that makes this a little bit easier.

This is like more standard advice. One, and these both have to do with reducing the messages to process that you have to process in the first place. One, do a junk mail sort of confrontation day once or twice a month where you go through and say, like, what messages am I getting?

You know, the junk that builds up. How did I get on this list? This is like promotional. Google is not filtering this for me. Once or twice a month when you're clearing your inbox, add extra time to try to unsubscribe or filter from all of those things. So like, okay, instead of just deleting, you know, it's the message from Whole Foods and the message from I bought something from this store three years ago, and now I get six emails a week from them.

I'll actually take a time to try to prevent these from ever coming to my inbox again. And you can, if you can auto unsubscribe, do it. If you can't, you can do like filter messages like these in Gmail and just have it go straight to trash or archive. If you do that once or twice a month, that prevents the junk messages from, from getting too out of control.

It's not that big of a deal to delete junk messages, but it can be psychologically difficult, like a bit of a hurdle to see like 300 messages in your inbox. Even if you can erase 200 of those almost right away, it's much easier if they just don't show up in the first place.

The bigger thing you can do is try to move more back and forth collaboration out of asynchronous messaging and into other forms. I wrote a whole book about this called The World Without Email, read that book, but the very short version of it is you do not want unscheduled messaging back and forth to be the way that you make decisions about things.

Use office hours, use like a standing group clearing the docket meeting, grab people in the hallway or after meetings, have lists of things to go over with people, but do what you can to avoid having back and forth messaging be how you figure something out because that becomes a big driver of not just the number of messages in your inbox, but the number of messages that require non-trivial answers and time-sensitive answers.

So if you can reduce those from showing up in your inbox in the first place, processing your inbox to zero does become easier. So there we go. Maybe we need a new term for it, Jesse. Inbox zero has kind of been, people are, they think that's impossible, but I don't know.

It's a good one. I don't know what else to call it. Do you do that with your personal email too? Yeah. But not with, I have not been doing it with the podcast email. It's been taken over. So I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to take some time.

I mean, people mainly know just to bother you. So that helps, but the calnewport.com address has gotten on too many like PR and marketing firms list. And so I have to spend some time to go through and like hide and unsubscribe to all of those because it'll be just hundreds of messages a day now.

And it's all like press releases and this and that. So that one I lost control of. I have to get control back of that one. But like my New Yorker address is blissfully, because that address isn't really out there in the world. It's like blissfully spam free. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like Dave Remnick, like announcements for the staff or something. Like that's it. Like I'm like, this is what email is great. That email address is like what email was like in 1999. I'll like load up that inbox. There'll be like four relevant announcements about, you know, from like Condé Nast and hey, there's, we're like celebrating this tonight.

You know, you can meet us here. Hey, I want to congratulate so-and-so for like doing well. And then maybe there'll be like a question for me, you know, like, hey, you need to do your like IT training for Condé Nast or something. And it's like three messages and they're all kind of relevant.

It's great. It's like what email used to be. So when you're, say you have like a thread for Georgetown related stuff and you want to remember what that said like six months ago, do you keep like a description file or something and just a folder so you can go back and check?

No, because everything in, you know, we use Gmail on our show. We use it at Georgetown. Everything's archived. Well, so you just archive it with the subject title. So I just, in my, my task will just have the subject. I usually just copy the title and it'll say like search for.

Yeah, and then I can just search for that, the exact title of the message and it comes back. A listener wrote in, I mentioned this recently and a listener wrote in and said, actually in Gmail, it's possible to get a link. If you're using the web-based inbox, there's, you can actually like copy a link.

It'll take you straight to the email, but I don't really know how to do that. But it say the task is complete. Do you archive your task too on Trello? I think it does. Yeah. So I think. I always delete them, but I think you can archive. I click archive.

I always click archive. Yeah. So in Trello, when you get rid of a card, you can delete it or you can archive it. And I've just been clicking archive. So yeah, in theory, it's all in there because I'll copy information into it. So don't be afraid, by the way, when you're working with your text file, there's no, you're not charged by the word, right?

The copy a lot of text from an email and just like drop it in that text file. And then when you create a Trello card, just paste all that text on the back of the card. Like you can, if you want to put like all the relevant information in your Trello card, you can go ahead and do that.

So if you needed to like revisit something six months later, you'd go back and check. I've never done it, but in theory, yeah, I think I could search the Trello archive and like find a task I'd already done. And like when I've done them, like I could see that being useful.

So, so I do archive those tasks. All right. Well, we've got some good questions coming up, but first let's take a brief moment here from a sponsor. I want to talk about my friends at Cozy Earth. I love Cozy Earth, especially the Cozy Earth sheets. We just got back from a trip, as I mentioned, and we were really looking forward to having the Cozy Earth sheets waiting for us.

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That's A-U-R-A frames.com. Use the promo code DEEPQuestions and support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First question is from Julia. I have a similar rating system that David Dwayne discussed in the most recent In-Depth episode. On my scale, bad days are ones and unbelievable days are fives.

I call the ones survival days. There are times when I need to perform beyond the bare minimum on survival days and don't know how to do that. Well, first of all, thanks for the shout-out to the David Dwayne episode. I liked that episode, Jesse. It was, you know, it wasn't like we were having on a famous writer or someone who was an expert in a different topic.

It's just someone who lived a really, he lives a very intentional, deep life. I've known him forever. And the fans seemed to be responding well. Like, this guy was interesting. Yeah, no, I liked it too. He had, like, interesting ideas, very intentional. I think it was inspiring for a lot of people.

And I love his method of keeping track of every day, how good it is so you can look for these trends. And so that's probably the big picture thing, Julia, is figuring out how do you have more of the unbelievable days and how do you have less of the survival days.

Short-term, what do you do on survival days? You're asking how to perform beyond the bare minimum. Well, first of all, I say don't have high expectations for those days. Life is long. Okay, so hard days, we have a fair amount of those. You don't have to try to squeeze out, unless you really have to, you don't have to try to squeeze out more productivity.

Being organized, working on things that are important, staying on top of things. We talk about that a lot on this show. You know, this services the bigger image of your bigger goal of having a deep life. But ultimately, it's trying to serve your life. So to make your life today harder, because you're like, well, if I'm more productive today, there's some abstract goal in the future that might be better, is a trade-off.

You're robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? If you're having a hard day, let's honor the fact that it's a hard day and be okay with that. Okay, I'm not doing as much today. It's like when you're sick, okay? I mean, my wife always gets, makes fun of me, because I'm sort of offended by the idea of getting sick.

Like, this is offensive to me that I can't, like, go do X, Y, and Z, and she'll say, you're sick. This is fine. So I want to first lower your expectations. The next thing I would say, okay, if you have hard days, it helps, in general, to minimize the self-initiated effort required for the stuff that kind of keeps the lights on, proverbial speaking.

So in advance of any hard days coming, I'm a big believer of trying to autopilot as many survival activities as possible. So it's just, this happens automatically or on an automatic schedule. Like, this is where, like, how we deal with, you know, bills and the client timesheets that have to go out, and, you know, this, these shopping that has to happen.

Like, the things that need to happen. Make that as autopiloted as possible. So it's either automated or it's automatically in your schedule. I just do it without thinking the first hour on Tuesdays. And I gather all the bills. And as they come in throughout the week, I gather them in this mail sorter.

And it's just the first thing I do on Tuesdays. That time is never scheduled. I get a cup of coffee. And I sit down. I go through them all. My filing cabinet's here. And I have stamps. I have whatever. And I walk to the post office and get a cinnamon roll there after I mail them to sort of reward myself for doing it.

You don't have to think about it. It's automated. Because the automated stuff, you can just execute even on hard days. Like, let me just do the automatic stuff. What's hard is self-initiated effort. Because your brain doesn't have the chemical energy it needs to be like, let me get ahead of motivational steam going here.

Hey, I know today is hard, but I really want to get going on working on this project or trying to get five things done off my to-do list. Come on. We've got to motivate ourselves. It's hard to motivate yourself on hard days. The automatic stuff, you just do. You still brush your teeth.

You still take your kids to school. You know, like the stuff that you normally do, you just sort of go through the motions. So you want to make, in general, most of the survival stuff automated or automatic. And then when a hard day comes, you can be like, great, I'm not going to motivate myself to do anything new.

I'll do the stuff that's automatic, and then I'm going to, you know, eat that cinnamon roll and be okay with that. That one took me a little while to learn, Jesse. It took me a while to be like, it's okay to have harder days. How often do you have hard days?

You know, for me, like, sickness is a big one. I get very frustrated by sickness. And then unexpected, so like family crises. Like, not me being sick, but two kids being sick at the same time. Or, you know, my wife has to go here, and this kid has to go to the doctors, or that type of stuff.

You get more used to it. So I get a little bit more used to it. Like, that's fine. Like, we'll be okay. There's a bigger question here. In addition to just automating your schedule, there's like a bigger goal, which has always been a big goal of mine, is trying to set up a work schedule where no individual day is vital.

That's a whole other conversation, but to me, I think that's an important goal, where you say, it's not vital that I work on Tuesday. But it would be a problem if I skipped every Tuesday. In other words, you have give in your schedule. You're working on important stuff. It requires a lot of hard work, but you don't have a ton of urgency.

To me, that's sort of an ideal schedule. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Natasha. My new job is shift-based and changes weekly. With my old job, I used to autopilot and use weekly templates. Now, no can-do anymore. How can I plan and gain clarity with this changing schedule?

Well, first, let me just briefly define, for listeners who don't know, what autopilots and weekly templates are. Autopilots, we just talked about in the last question. That's where you have work that happens on a regular schedule, and so you can have an automated way you deal with it. Like, oh, I always do this Tuesday mornings.

Weekly templates, we talked about this being like a general structure for your week. So when you're doing your weekly plans, you already kind of have this general structure. Like, you might say, look, for this semester, if I'm a teacher, I can have a general weekly template knowing, like, these are teaching days, and this is generally how I'm going to structure them.

And non-teaching days, I'm going to structure them this way. Like, non-teaching days, I'm going to write until noon. Teaching days, I'm going to prep before the first class and it's office hours. Like, you can kind of have a general structure for your week. For the current season. All right.

So in your case, you're saying the structure of your job can change week to week. Neither of these things will work. Okay. What you need to really then lean into is your weekly planning. Your weekly planning is now more important because you're essentially having to create de novo. You're creating from scratch a smart plan for each week as you arrive and understand what your shift work that week is going to look like.

So you need to put more time into your weekly planning. You have to sit there and say, okay, how am I going to make sense of this week given that this is what my work is going to look like? And then you can mark up your calendar, however you want to lock in your plan.

Okay, well, I'm going to do this type of work here and I'm going to have to consolidate all of these tasks for household tasks on the Friday afternoon. You really want to make a careful plan for each week. So give yourself 20, 30 minutes at the end of each week to plan the next one and put a lot more emphasis into your weekly plan.

The key is intention. Yeah, repeatability makes this a little easier. If you could autopilot schedule, if you did have a weekly template, it's easier to weekly plan. You don't. But the key is still to have intention. And I think the weekly plan is going to prove really important if the nature of your weeks are really changing, really changing from week to week.

All right, we're rolling here. Who do we got? Next up is Bruce. Cal recently talked about the distinction between the types of AI. Can you clarify what it means to reward a computer program? In psychology, rewards are linked to effort and motivation, but a computer or a program is neutral in that respect.

Aha, we sneak in some AI content, Jesse. You thought you got away from computer science, Cal, but you did not. Bruce brings up a good point. We do use some phrases in AI that sound value-laden or sort of anthropomorphized, like rewards and you're being rewarded. We think of rewards, meaning we have a value system, what's good or bad.

What this all comes down to in the discussion I was having is just weights and neural networks. Okay, so I talked about two different types of training. I'll do this briefly. But I talked about two different types of training. There was the unsupervised or only semi-supervised training. I guess it would be semi-supervised data-driven training like a language model does where I said, look, they take a real text that a human wrote and they'll knock a word out of the text.

And they'll give the model, while training it, all of the text up to the word that you knocked out. And then you tell the model, try to predict what word should go there. And the closer it gets to the right word, the better. You kind of like reward it for that.

And the farther it gets, like, no, no, you're off base. Your thinking is off base. The other type of training we talked about was reinforcement learning. Where now, instead of specifically predicting a word, you generate an action. The model generates an action, which is evaluated by some other reward function, you would call it.

It says, how good is this action? And if it's good, you kind of zap the model like that was good. And if it was bad, you zap the model and say that was bad. What does that mean, zapping the model, rewarding it? At the core of these models are simulated neurons, right?

So they're digital neurons that are just represented by numbers. And the way to imagine it is you have these layers of these simulated neurons that have incoming connections. And each of these connections are labeled with a number. And a signal coming through each of these connections gets multiplied or attenuated by that number.

And then they get combined. And an activation function is applied to them to see if that neuron then fires. Not to get too technical, but it's typically a sigmoid function, so you can differentiate it. But don't worry about that. And then if it fires, it has outgoing connections, and those are connected to other neurons.

So this type of simulation of neurons is how the thinking happens. Inputs come into the bottom of these networks, and they pass through these simulated neurons. And at the other end of it, the signals that fire in the final layer are sort of like the outputs. The nice things about simulated neurons is that you can represent them as just tables of numbers, and you can simulate them by just multiplying tables of numbers together.

And that turns out to be exactly what modern graphic cards, GPU cards do. This is why, like, the revolution for PlayStations that make our graphic cards faster made it really fast to simulate really large networks like this. All right, so all the rewarding and zapping and all this stuff I talk about is just tweaking those numbers.

So I put some text into the bottom of this network, encoded as signals. They go through the network, and the signals at the other end of the network point to a new word. And if that word is, like, close to what it should be, we go back through and say, yeah, these numbers are pretty good.

But if it's far, like, we should tweak these numbers. These numbers weren't very good. Let's try messing around with them a little bit. That's super high level, but that's what's happening. Same thing with the reward function for reinforcement learning. If we don't like the action that the network point out, the negative zap is going to change a bunch of the numbers in the network.

Be like, let's move away from what – however you got to this conclusion, let's kind of move you in a different direction. And then if eventually it starts doing something good, we'll sort of solidify those numbers. The actual mechanisms by which this happens, this is where you'll hear fancy terms like backpropagation.

All these are ways of, like, going through and kind of changing these numbers. So all it is is rewards and training is you're just tweaking numbers in these tables of numbers to be towards things that are giving better answers and away from things that are giving worse answers. So that's what's actually going on there.

So there's no affect or value judgments actually happening. All right. What do we got next? Next up is Tanya. My boss regularly goes on 40-minute talking tangents about things not related to work. This is disruptive. My cube is next to her office, so she walks by regularly. I have morning focus blocks, but she always interrupts them.

Is there anything I can do to stop these? I'm thinking – what do you think, Jesse? Airhorn? I empathize, Tanya. That's a hard situation. What you're going to have to do there is you have to differentiate your deep work sessions more definitively. And I'm going to entreat you to be a little bit braver about this.

Two options I'm going to suggest. Option number one is the headphone option, right? You kind of tell people, yeah, I like listening to white noise or brown noise. When I'm working on something that requires concentration, it kind of helps in the office, especially the cube environment. So when you have those on, it's kind of indicating to people, I am doing deep work, versus when you have those off, indicates that you're not.

And the message kind of gets there pretty soon, right? Because now the boss has to, like, tap you on the shoulder, and you have to take off the headphones. And at first, you know, they'll want to know what those are, and you're like, yeah, when I'm really focusing, this helps me focus and get into a state of focus.

And kind of the message is planted, and it becomes a little bit harder for her to say, like, I'm just going to make you take off those headphones just so we can chat. The boss is bored. You have those headphones on. She'll learn to go to the next victim.

I shouldn't say victim, colleague, but it's going to save you. The other thing you can consider is get in the habit of having a separate location for focus. And I don't mean, like, oh, I work somewhere else. Like, you might have to be in your office, but get in the habit, and you can get approval for this, and people are typically on board with this, reserving a conference room, or maybe there's, like, another spot in the office.

Like, yeah, that's where I go when I'm really trying to concentrate on something. It helps me to have a different environment. And it just literally takes you away from her. It's also useful for you, though, beyond trying to avoid talking tangents. For your own mind, it gives you these really clear distinctions between am I focusing or not.

And you begin to crave, like, ooh, headphone time or conference room time, and you're more likely to do more of that. You're also going to get more value out of it. Because, like, if I'm going through all the trouble of going to a conference room or putting on my headphones, I don't want to open my inbox.

Like, why don't I actually just do the work I really want to do? So it's going to make you more effective as well. But, yeah, I definitely empathize. Definitely empathize with that. All right. Call. Okay. We've got a call. Let's hear it. We have two, actually. But we'll play the first one first.

Double call. I'm liking it. Hi, Cal and Jesse. This is Yvonne from London in the UK. I've been listening for about two years. And I found you via Sarah Hart Unger and Laura Vanderkam. And as someone who works full time outside the home, has little kids, volunteers, runs a side hustle, I've definitely benefited from hearing you talk about time blocking and autopilot scheduling.

It's really fun to hear how someone else with lots of different jobs makes it work. And just so that you get a chance to play the theme music, I will mention that I have read Slow Productivity, along with a couple of your earlier books, too. So my question today is about David Allen's book, Getting Things Done.

You and Sarah both mention him a lot, and I can definitely see the links with Full Capture. But a lot of that book is about identifying the next actions on every project and keeping a big list or several lists sorted by context so that when you have some time, you can just dip into them.

I hear you talk about Trello boards and not context switching, but I don't think I've ever heard you specifically mention a list of next actions. So I'd be interested in your thoughts on that part of the GTD methodology and how you approach that or something similar. Thanks. Hello, Cal.

All right. Well, she did mention Slow Productivity. So do we get the theme? Is that still loaded? Yeah. All right. Let's get in the right mindset by hearing that Slow Productivity theme music. Now we're in the mindset. First of all, let's just relax. It's not that big of a deal.

GTD. Getting things done. Okay. Next action. So this is a big focus of Alan. He thinks he has a couple ideas, some of which I really agree with. But one of his big ideas is tasks paralyze us when we think about them too abstractly. And really what tasks actually are is a physical action you can do.

And when you reduce some of the next actions, they're much easier to deal with. And work becomes easier because work becomes less about grappling with these big, weird, abstract monsters like client visit, exclamation point. And it becomes something much simpler, such as call the caterer to get a quote for client visit.

Like that's something you can actually do. So I do think there is insight into getting to clear, more clarity about like what actual actions are. There's a couple of places I differ with Alan though. One is I think a lot of work is not reducible to a concrete short next action.

You know, I think a lot of work has to do with longer deep work sessions. It's think to come up with a business strategy, right for a couple hours. That's going to be, you know, two hours among a thousand that eventually it's going to take to finish this book that you're writing brainstorm, right?

Like there's certain things that it's not like a concrete action you can just crank through. It's, it's a cognitive activity that's going to take time. I think more in terms of activity sometimes than I do actions, right? Some things are actions to send this email, some are activities, go research this topic and try to come up with like a plan for what to do next.

And they, they, they resist being sensically broken down in the small actions. So I do think it's important to be clear, but I don't obsess about it as much as Alan does. The other thing that I do differently with my Trello boards is Alan thinks that if I'm understanding his system properly, if you break down something in the next actions, you only have the very next action on your action list.

So like, let's go back to our example of client visit exclamation point. He would say, you would just take the very next thing that he would call it a project. If it requires more than one task, it's a project. The very next thing goes on your task list. And that might be call the caterer, but you don't want to forget that there's more things to do there.

So he would say, then you should have a separate list of projects where you have planned client visit. He calls those stakes in the ground. And then if I'm understanding the system properly, you're supposed to regularly review this list of projects and be like, oh, did I, am I up to speed on this project?

Yeah. What, what's the next step that makes sense? Let me go add that over to my task list. So it's like a separate process of generating new tasks from your project list, which is separate from your sort of main wheel of progress, which is just trying to grab next actions from your list and execute them.

So he really wants you not to have to think about anything, but just executing actions, unless you're specifically in a planning state where you're looking at your projects, you're trying to think what's important. I think that's a little bit much, and it's something that it's too much friction for most people.

So like typically for me, if I have a project that's going to require a lot of things, I might have one card for it and I'm gathering all the relevant information and my best understanding of what to do and what information we have on one card. But then I'll highlight on the front of the card, the next thing to do.

This is the advantage of a digital world that largely Alan wasn't grappling with in the late 90s, early 2000s when he was writing this. But with tools like Trello, that client visit, I can now have a card for client visit and all the information is on there somewhere. But on the front of the card, it might be like next step is like call caterer.

And then I'll usually put in parentheses like schedule next or S in I'll put. And so like when I put that task where it needs to go and I execute that, I have all the information right there to figure out like what the next things are going to be.

Or I'll have like three tasks on the front of it, like get through these three next steps or whatever. So I'm a little looser. I'll put a lot of steps can be captured on the same card. And sometimes I'll highlight the next one only and then update what's on the front of the card once I do it.

So I integrate projects more often if they're like medium size like that into the card itself. Obviously, if it's a big project, I'll have a dedicated column for it. Something that's going to take a few months, I might have a dedicated column of just tasks for that. But I have like projects, my tasks like right there on my list.

So hopefully that's somewhat clarifying. G2D is a little bit confusing, Jesse. There's a, they have a 16 element flow chart that's part of it. Like to really learn it, people like the confusingness because I think it makes it seem more likely to them that it's going to work. The complexity and the specificity seems well suited to the complexity of their work.

But sometimes you have to be a little bit looser. Do you put the next task in the title of the card or just like in the top parts that you can see it? It's not really titles. So if you look at a Trello card, it's not really titles. It's just like text.

It's just what you can see before you open the card. Like, so the first couple of lines. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, so there's a back. It's called like more information. So there's like, here's what's on the front of the card. It's just a text box. Yeah. You can actually make it pretty long.

Yeah. And then there's like a, if you click on the card and kind of flip it over, then you have more information. You can add text and you can attach files. You can do checklists. You can do like, there's a lot of stuff you can start to put on the back of the card.

So some like Trello cards will have a few things on it on the front. And then, um, but I always, uh, I always have a note usually like see back for more for next or whatever, but I like to keep information consolidated. If it's a project that's big and small enough that you can kind of keep it all in one place.

So all that stuff does help, especially if, if like, uh, this caller is talking about you have a lot of roles. All right. Do we have a second call this week? We do. All right. Well, and Jesse, uh, my name is Declan. I'm a computer science student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Unfortunately, that is not MIT. That is NJIT. Um, I'm a junior right now and undergraduate, and I'm facing a crazy job market. I've applied to countless co-ops and internships without any luck yet. And in the meantime, I know, I think what I should be doing is improving my skills.

Um, I want to be so good. They can't ignore me, but I'm struggling with the wide variety of options that I have. Um, in school, I'm learning everything from web development to computer networks, to data science, to AI, to more low level programming and hardware. And I just am having trouble finding one space where I can build true depth.

Um, I'm graduating in May of next year, and I fear feeling unsure of what direction to head in when I get there. So I guess my question is, how would you recommend choosing a technical focus and building valuable skills? If you were in my position, what strategies should I use to create the deep work environment necessary to gain traction in such a broad and competitive field?

Uh, given your credentials, I couldn't imagine a better person to ask this question. So I thank you in advance for any advice that you could offer me. I remember NJIT as a New Jersey native myself. Uh, here's a good question. I'm glad you're asking it because typically people don't confront this question until they're on the job market and it's too late.

I would say right now, go look at job listings. Go look at what are the job listings that most catch your attention? the companies you would most want to work for and say, what are they looking for? What experiences are they asking for? Then I would go to the graduating class.

Perfect time to do this. And find the students in the major who are taking, uh, impressive jobs and say, Hey, can I take you out for like a beer or coffee or whatever? I want to find out like, why did you get this job? Like, what was the market like?

What helped you stand out? And you're going to find out there, like what skills are important. You'll find out like the importance of grades. Maybe they're going to say, no, no, here's what you need to do. You need to like start contributing to some open source projects and show off your, your skills and X, Y, and Z get evidence-based information and then focus like a laser beam on improving those skills.

You also want to get good grades. I mean, this, the ship is somewhat sailed. You only have one year left, but do as well as you can. Keep your schedule simple. Just focus on the CS. Give yourself more than enough time to crush the classes. Having good grades does matter.

That's an important signal that gets past various screens at some of these institutions. But you, what you really need is like, what are the specific skills that people that I want to work for who are hiring for my school? What skills are they looking for? Let me choose one of those to get good at.

Let me also talk to grads who got good jobs and say, what was it that mattered most? And then focus like a laser beam on exactly that. So you're asking the right question, which is what is valuable? What you're not doing, and I appreciate this, is you're not writing a story about what you want to be valuable.

You're not saying, look, I want my basic programming or my scratch games to be the thing that matters. Like, no, what is it? Is it being able to work with like Python-based AI libraries? Or is it doing like 3D graphic design? Or is it doing assembly language coding? Or, you know, who knows, right?

You got to see what people are looking for right now. Build a skill that's valuable. Have a strong pitch as you get on the market. Computer science is a great field to be in. If you build the right skills, you'll find the job. But also keep in mind, you don't need the dream job out of school.

You just want to get in the industry. That's when you can really begin to become so good. When you see like what's valuable in the marketplace and you do that, that's when you begin laddering up and gaining autonomy and career capital. So you've got to find somewhere and really start shipping.

But in the meantime, investigate what's valuable for the people hiring from your school. Do not write a story that you want to be true. There's a rough job, Mark. Tech Industries, everyone's a little bit hazy right now. There's a rough job. When I graduated grad school, this was right during the financial crisis.

I got my doctorate in 2009. And so we all had to go become postdocs. No one was hiring. And so it was like we all became postdocs for a couple of years, just did more research. Like we basically just – and then it worked out fine. And then people like me who did that, we just got tenure early.

Like we just moved – we just had a two-year – like a head start when we got started with our faculty jobs or whatever. But I remember that. It was a rough job. Even coming out of MIT with like a pretty good H index, it was like no one could hire.

Everyone was paralyzed. All the universities were paralyzed. The tech companies were paralyzed. The economy was in free fall. So we had to kind of just hang out for a little bit longer in Boston. So I feel it. It happens. But, you know, markets get better. So get the best job you can and then start moving once you're there.

All right. So I think we have a good final segment where I'm going to react to something. But first, let's briefly hear from another sponsor. I'm going to talk about our friends at Kinsta. I'm a WordPress guy. My digital life has been run on WordPress sites since the very beginning, the very original calnewport.com that's on WordPress.

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I also want to talk about our friends at Udacity. We were just talking about in a recent question, the difficulty of the job market out there, especially right now. What do you need to survive in the current job market? Skills. You have to be able to build up skills.

You have to pivot and say, here's what is valuable right now. How do I learn that? How do I get up to that speed? How do I make myself more valuable? This is where Udacity enters the scene because their courses, their online learning courses can help you learn the skills that command the high salaries.

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Both Jesse and I have used Udacity. I actually went through a couple game programming courses with my son. We really enjoyed it. Jesse, you did something with marketing. Yeah, I took a marketing class. Yeah, I mean, it's a great platform. Yeah, it works well. The videos, you have the exercises, you move through in this ordered way.

There's tons of options for learning tech skills, but only Udacity is consistently ranked as the top skill development platform because it actually works. They've been at this for a long time and they've honed in on how do we make courses that actually work. You're going to have real world projects.

You can have human experts that grade what you're doing. Udacity is how you are going to get better at things that matters. And because Udacity has been around long enough, recruiters understand a Udacity certification. They'll take notice of that. They know what that means, that it's not something achieved lightly.

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All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. All right, so we're going to do a react segment. Is that right? Yeah. All right, what am I reacting to this week? What is the internet dealt up to us for me to take a look at? Craig Modd was on Tim Ferriss' show last month and he was talking about his epic walks in Japan where he— Craig Modd, the writer who walks.

Yeah. Yeah, I know who this is. Yeah. So I'll play a clip. All right, this is from the Tim Ferriss' show? Yep. Okay. The news. You're not allowed to read the news. There's no social media. And by you, that means Craig. That means, yeah, if you're walking or if I'm walking, I'll always talk about me in the third person.

So you can't read the news. You can't do social media. You can't touch any of that stuff. Basically, the idea is to just be radically present, radically, radically present, and radically cultivate like a boredom, an incredible sense of boredom. And never teleport. I mean, I think one of the weirdest things about being a contemporary human is like, first of all, we're never bored because we always have this stupid black mirror slab in our pocket, right?

That's like always distracting us with some other dopamine hit. And we're constantly teleporting. If there's any millimeter of friction, if there's one millisecond of friction in your life, you just pull that stupid thing out and start sucking at the teat of whatever information, you know, cow is in there, right?

All right. I love this. First of all, Craig is an interesting guy. From what I know about him, he's a writer. He's based in Japan. And he does these epic walks. Yeah. Like very long. Very long walks. Yeah. But I didn't know this detail about it, that he's really focused on being present during the walks.

He's not on his phone. He's not looking at social media. He's got a script for his phone that he dictates into, so he can't open other things. He just has the map function, too. So that's how he can take notes. So he can take notes by scripting it. And he's got this, he uses that freedom software, too.

I love it. I've been thinking about this exact topic. You didn't know it, Jesse, but for my Deep Life book. So I'm writing, so I've been looking at some other things similar to this. Let me set the context here. So I'm writing, the first part of the book is about getting your act together before you try to change your life.

Okay. So I'm in a chapter in there about time management. And in time management, I'm like, I'm not going to give you a super detailed system you have to follow. I'm going to give you like, here's three questions. You need some sort of answers for these three questions. And the last of those questions is sort of, why are you doing it?

And it's about like having some way of thinking systematically about workload. As I'm talking about, like, how do you think more systematically about your workload and prevent it from getting out of control? One of the ideas I was just wrangling with, like yesterday, thinking about this book, was as you build more of an appreciation for, quote unquote, doing nothing.

Like I really enjoy just like quiet and presence. It gives you a back pressure against busyness because busyness feels like it's encroaching on that thing you really like. And so I have this theory that we've lost our taste for presence, for doing nothing, the long walk and just enjoying what's around us.

And because we've lost our taste for that, because we fill that time with digital distractions, we lose to back pressure against busyness. We just get busier. You know, like, yeah, why not? Why not do more things? Because we're not picturing what's being lost because we don't do that anymore.

So I love this idea of trying to purposely just be out there and be present. It's relevant to my recent trip to Boston because we were, you know, going through some of my old neighborhoods. And when I lived on Beacon Hill, I would walk every morning across the Longfellow Bridge, the campus on MIT.

And I would force myself to, I'd have my dog with me often, I would force myself to just be like Craig Maude on that walk. I have to just observe, like, what's going on? What's happening? Like, the buds are starting on this tree. What's happening with the ice on the Charles?

How is this looking today? I was doing, I was on a whole throw kick at the time. So really, like, observing the world around me. And I found it very centering, you know, just to be present and really understand every day and how the weather changed from day to day.

And then I would run home across the Harvard Bridge, the Mass Ave Bridge, and come back on the Esplanade. And you're, like, really plugged into, like, the weather and the seasons and exactly what was happening. And you would appreciate what was new. And when you get the first warm day, like, we were at Boston for the first warm day last week.

You would really appreciate that. And all this stuff, Matt, where the sun was at different times of the day. And I found that that was really nice. And I miss a lot of that. So I think what Craig is doing there is really interesting. Someone else who had this instinct with John Muir, you know, the famous naturalist, little-known part of his story.

I might cover this in more detail. I was just reading about it this morning. But just to say it briefly, it's an interesting part of his story where he was mechanically minded and got a job in Indianapolis working on contraptions. I don't know, some sort of machining job or whatever.

He's like, I like this. I'm good at this. This is what I want to do. I'm good at building things. I'm going to, like, work in one of these jobs. He got an owl, A-W-L, in his eye. And he went blind for a while. His other eye went, like, sympathetically blind.

And when he came out of this blindness, he was, like, sort of nuts to this. The world is too, you know, I'm not going to keep putting off experiencing the world. And he took a train. He headed east to something like Jefferson, Missouri, maybe, and then, like, walked from there to Florida.

So he went on this epic walk, basically, like, across the hole. It's like, I'm just going to walk and just encounter the world. And it kind of kicked off this new life as a naturalist, where his whole life was about just, he could see again. And he's like, and I want to see.

And so in some sense, I think for a lot of people, coming out of a world connected to that smartphone at every moment of distraction is like John Muir getting his vision back in his left eye. It's like, ooh, I can see again, and the world is really interesting.

So I love this idea, more time away from your phone, more time non-teleporting into other worlds or into reacting to other people's minds, more time just reacting to the world around you. It's what we are wired to do. And when you go back to it, it's like going home.

Like, this feels really natural in a way that just staring at that screen all the time didn't. So I like that. I'll have to listen to this whole episode now. Yeah, there's two of them, actually. Actually, there's two parts. Well, Ferris loves Japan, too. Yeah, they were speaking Japanese.

Yeah, and Mod lives in Japan, so that makes sense. Yeah. All right, well, speaking of walking, I'm going to walk on out of the studio. But thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. If you liked today's discussion about wrangling your inbox, you might also like episode 348, Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day, which will give you some details about how to manage the other obligations in your life.

I think you'll like it. Check it out. Anyways, this book includes a chapter. I'd forgotten this, but I saw the other day this book includes a chapter where I describe a time management system for students. And the title of that chapter is How to Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day.

This was written back 20 years ago. So I thought what would be interesting would be for me to go back and reread that chapter. Let's go back and revisit my ideas from 20 years ago about how to manage your time. Because what I'm really curious about is to see where was I on the something that remains true today and where is there advice from 20 years ago that no longer holds to today?

So what works from before and what doesn't?