All right, let's move on to some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Jamie. Jamie says, if you work a 9 to 5 job and would like to study part-time for postgraduate studies, what time management strategies would you suggest or type of planning would you do, as well as what techniques would you use to learn the information faster?

Well, Jamie, if you're going to do academic work and you have time constraints-- like you have here, you have a 9 to 5 job and you have to fit this around-- deploying a strategy that I call the student workday is probably going to be particularly important. Now, this is an idea that I used to expound back in the early days of my blog when I was talking primarily to students who had busy schedules.

And the idea behind the student workday was to look at the classes you were taking and then identify, what is the work that I know has to happen on a repeated basis? Is it a reading assignments that have to get done every week, a lab report that has to get written up every two weeks, a problem set that has to be solved weekly, or whatever it is?

Figure out the work that you know happens repeatedly and answer the question of, when am I going to do that work? Same time, same days, every week. You actually put that on your calendar, just like you have your dentist appointment or meeting a friend for drinks. You have to figure this out.

Now, you work a 9 to 5 job, so you might not have a lot of options, but the work has to get done. So identify where that work is going to happen. Maybe you have an 8 AM to 9 AM block on a day that you work from home, and that's when you do the first draft of your problem set, and you do that on Mondays.

And then after dinner, you do a 6 to 7 30 block to finish off that problem set. Maybe you take 90 minutes out of the middle of the days on Wednesday to do your reading assignments, because again, maybe you have some flexibility, and you can find that time, and there's a conference room in your office that you can go to that's quiet and a good place to do that work.

But you figure out, this is all the work that has to get done on a regular basis. This is when I do it, this time, this day. I don't have to think about it. It's routine. Advanced tip here, throw in where that work happens. OK, as long as I'm fixing when it happens, why don't I also throw in where?

So that I can find locations I associate just with that work, and it leads to me shifting into a deep work mode quicker. So I go to this library to do this work. I have a home office in my basement for that work. You want that ritual and routine surrounding this work.

What I'm trying to do for you here, Jamie, is get rid of any on the fly decision making about what should I do today, what's due soon. That's what's going to get you in trouble. If you just fly by the seat of your pants and say, oh man, I got something due tomorrow, and I was at work, and I went to dinner, and I went to the gym, and it's 8, and it's going to take four hours, that's where you get into trouble.

So find when and where that work is going to happen. Fix on your calendar. Stop thinking about scheduling. Now what happens if you can't fit it? It's just not reasonable. You're taking up every evening, and it's taking up all your hours, and you have no give. You have no time for exercise.

You have no time for dinner. Well, now you are facing that productivity dragon. This is the reality. I don't have time. If you don't have time, you have to see you don't have time. This happens more than you would think. There's a semi-- well, famous to me-- I'll say important to me-- blog post I wrote years ago.

It must have been like 2008, maybe even 2007. And it was about a student I was advising at MIT. She didn't work a 9 to 5 job, but the number of activities that she was involved with might as well have been a 9 to 5 job. We went through this exercise.

What's everything you need to do on a regular basis? Let's find time for it on the calendar. And we couldn't fit it. We ran out of room. And I said to her-- her name was Lena-- Lena, you obviously are doing too much. I'm looking at this calendar. We cannot actually fit the work.

The work is the work. We can't fit it in. We made it as efficient as possible. We can't fit it in. But she couldn't bear say no. She couldn't sit and bear say no to things. She couldn't take things off of her plate. The next semester, she had to go on leave for mental health.

It just completely overwhelmed her. So I always say, you've got to face the productivity dragon here. Here's what I want to do. When am I going to do it? If you have time, good. And if you don't, you might want to rethink this plan. Only then, once you know when this work is going to happen and where it's going to happen, and it all fits nicely into your schedule, and you're not thinking about scheduling, and you're not making decisions on the fly, you're not staying up late all night because you forgot about your problem set until late the night before, once you've done all that, then care about your study habits themselves.

You want to make these blocks as small as possible while still getting the work done well. That comes down to how you study. I would recommend my book, How to Become a Straight A Student, for a deep dive on how the most efficient students get their work done. I will just give you two very brief hints about what you're going to find in there.

Hint number one, your work accomplished as a student is the product of the time you spend and the intensity of your focus. So if you are trying to do your schoolwork with a low intensity of focus, i.e. you're looking at your phone, you're looking at email, you're looking at Slack, you have the TV in the background, it's going to take a lot more time in that equation to get the same amount of work done, versus if when you work, you're 100% focused, that intensity of focus is maxed out, the time required to get the work done is going to go down.

You need to hack that equation if you're going to get this work done with a 9 to 5 job. Two, banish the word study from your vocabulary. That's way too vague, that's way too emotional. You got to be instead incredibly specific. For this type of work, how am I going to do it?

And what evidence do I have that this is the right way to do it? How to become a straight A student will get you all those details, it'll walk you down that path, but those are the big picture summaries of what you might find. All right, so summary, schedule all your work in advance, you know when it's going to happen.

And then two, get very serious about your work habits once that time set aside. That's your best bet to succeed with studies, with a full time job, without making your life into a joyless grind. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)