All right, so Jesse, I was thinking about trying a new segment. It's named, I mean, it's an old name. We used to call Thursday episodes this, but I was thinking about calling the segment Habit Tune Up. And the idea was I just take a piece of advice from the types of advice I give and just get into it a little bit.

So let's just take a piece of, take of advice out of my toolkit and get into it a little bit even without a question to prompt it. So we're going to give that a try. Today's Habit Tune Up is going to be about one of my longest running productivity strategies.

So in terms of strategies that I have run in my own life, this is pretty high up on the list of things I've been doing for the longest amount of time, and that is fixed schedule productivity. All right, so what is fixed schedule productivity? It's a simple idea where it says you fix the hours that you want to work.

So like on a typical day, here's the length I want for my work day. And then you work backwards and do what you have to do to make the work actually fit. So that's primary fixed schedule productivity. I work 830 to 430. I work nine to five. I work eight to six.

You fix the hours and say, that is my line in the sand. Now I have to do what I can to make that fit. There's then secondary fixed schedule productivity, which is where you take specific types of work you do on a recurring basis and give that an even smaller boundary.

In our life, my biggest example of that is probably this podcast. It exists for me in a half day. It gets a half day per week. And as Jesse knows, we will work backwards to fit whatever it takes. We will work backwards. And sometimes it takes some scrambling, but we work backwards to make things fit.

I mean, that's why, for example, now that we're going down to one episode, we had to go down to one episode to spend more time thinking about the show because the fixed schedule productivity, secondary fixed schedule productivity I'm running here says half day for the show. So if we want to spend more time prepping and record two shows, we would break that boundary.

So we had to change something else. So it forced to change. So this is one of my oldest ideas. I wrote about this way early in my blog. I'm thinking back 2007, 2008, I was writing about this idea. This works for a few reasons. One is you can consider it a meta productivity strategy because it is a high level commitment that's going to induce a lot of low level specific changes.

When you have the boundary you have to hit, to hit that boundary, you end up having to do lots of evidence based custom fit tactics that are custom fit to your particular life. You quickly sort out the stuff that works that doesn't work. It really is a great way of inducing a lot of small changes.

If instead you try to come up with a lot of ideas from scratch of what you think will help you manage your time or be more productive, you're just throwing darts. So fixed schedule productivity is a meta productivity habit and it helps lead to good low level tactics. It's also a forcing function to help keep your load sustainable.

So it'll enforce better productivity ideas in the low level. It'll also lead you to say no to more, get a better sense of what your load is. When you have these limits, that pushes back and it keeps you or makes it harder for you to overload yourself, which is likely to lead to burnout.

It also helps you better take advantage of seasonality. So you go through a period where maybe things are lighter, you're in between jobs, you're in a quiet season of the job. With fixed schedule productivity, if you're used to this, you can take advantage of that situation by collapsing in your fixed schedule.

Now that you could fit your work in less time and you get used to fitting in less time and you can take advantage of the new time that frees up. It's like me in the summer. I have less demands because I don't work for Georgetown in the summer. I'm on my own dime.

So I can bring in my working schedule and I do to be much smaller. And because I'm used to fixed schedule productivity, I do what I need to fit it in there and I'm able to take advantage of the extra flexibility in summer. It is so easy without that to just fill in your time because there's always more things possible for you to do than you have time to accomplish.

So without these boundaries, it is going to fill up. So here are some innovations that have come out of my own commitment to fixed schedule productivity. It's where all of my multi-scale planning ideas were formed. Semester planning, weekly planning, daily time block planning, all of that was forged in the fires of fixed schedule productivity.

How do I make my 75 jobs fit in the small time I work? For me, it's roughly 9 to 5, 9 to 5.30 and Sunday mornings is my roughly my main work blocks. That's where that came out of is because that's what allowed me to actually fit a reasonable amount of work in there.

Ruthless quotas and reduction in what's on my plate. Fixed schedule productivity pushes that for me and I think it helps keep me away from burnout. If I can't make it fit, even with my good productivity systems, I have to quit. I can't do this. I need to step away from this.

I need to take a break from that. I'm much more likely to have a sustainable load of work because I have this forcing function of it has to fit during these hours. It also helped me lead to more efficient processes. The type of things I talk about in my book, A World Without Email, come from the demands of I can't just be going back and forth with you all day on email because my time is really precious.

I have to get a lot in here because I have to stop work at 5.30. So we got to figure out a better way to collaborate. Again, this back pressure from these boundaries really causes a lot of good. All right. So I'm a big fan in working backwards from the hours.

The secondary and tertiary positive effects it has on your life can be quite big. You know, Jesse, I'll have to say fixed schedule productivity is at the source of the amusement and confusion I often get. We talk about this sometimes on the show, but there's a very common critique of me.

When people hear about the work I do or the type of things I talk about, it's a very common critique where they say, well, you can do that probably because of your wife. There must be some sort of unusual support, maybe someone else having to sacrifice in order for you to work on these different things and do this deep work.

So this comes up a lot. Shout out to my friend Scott, who likes to collect these references. There's one this week. I forgot who it was, but someone on a podcast, he collected a new example of someone saying like, yeah, I'd like this stuff, but I think the real hero is probably his wife.

The reason why it always baffles me in the moment is because since I've been a working adult, practice fixed schedule productivity, my work hours are just normal standard. I'm a government worker, nine to five style work hours. I just work the same work hours as like any other normal job.

So it's not like there's some weird Herculean support I need from other people beyond just the standard thing that everyone who works has to do. Like my kids need to be in school and that type of thing. So I'm always baffled. It's like, well, what do you mean? Like I work actually probably less hours than most people I know.

And what does the fact that during my normal working hours, I'm very focused, I don't see what that has to do with needing external support. But the reason why I think people fall back on that critique is that most people don't do fixed schedule productivity. And when you don't do fixed schedule productivity, the assumption is because it's what you're used to.

More things means more time. And if you're doing like a kind of like an impressive thing or an impressive number of things, there must be some impressive time commitment. You must be Einstein in the 1920s, you know, disappearing until your office till three in the morning. But the thing is with fixed schedule productivity, it does work.

You can actually get a lot of interesting stuff happening in a very normal, reasonable amount of time that does not require unusual support, does not require unusually long working hours. Fixed schedule productivity does really work because that back pressure gets you to focus. It gets you structured. It gets you organized.

It gets you to essentialize. It really is like a tonic, really is like a tonic for productivity. Do you remember what the podcast replaced before you did the podcast? Like that half day? Was it just writing or? It's a good question because I started it during the early days of the pandemic.

So you weren't going to Georgetown and stuff. I wasn't going to Georgetown. So I didn't. So it's a good point. So I didn't have the fixed schedules around the podcast at first because I started it during the summer of 2020. So I had a lot of time and we went into the fall, still a lot of time.

Georgetown was remote. And so I wasn't going in. And then I was on leave that spring. Like my book came out. So I had I had a lot of time. The half day came in once we got back to the normal schedule, which was like this fall. I got to go in.

I got to teach. I'm on committees again. And that's like, OK, I have to I have to corral this more. So yeah, it's a half day of time. There's a lot of things I could easily spend a half day of time on. I think it honestly is I went on after my last book launch.

I'm not as you know, I'm not doing a bunch of interviews right now. I'm not I'm thinking about all the time I would be doing podcast interviews or reading interviews, I do a little bit. I was on when you were away last week in Canada. Their their main morning radio show on CBC, The Current.

So I did a 30 minute. So I do a few things. I do a few things. That's probably where a lot of the time comes from is I focused in my writing life to the podcast as a half day and then I might my book and article writing. So.

Yeah. Yeah.