By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.

How I Manage My Time - The Weekly Productivity Template To Achieve More | Cal Newport

Cal Newport talks about weekly templates in episode 316 of the Deep Questions podcast.

Cal Newporthost

Sep 2, 20241h 16mWatch on YouTube

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

Great conversations run long. Their best ideas don't have to.

uListen is free on iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and Claude.

CHAPTERS

Jump to publisher timestamps

Chapter summaries

The Weekly Template and Multiscale Planning
Cal introduces the weekly template, a tool he just used to prepare for the fall quarter. He reviews how multiscale planning works across quarterly, weekly and daily plans and where the template fits as supporting infrastructure.
- •The weekly template is a set of guidelines set at the start of a quarter and applied when making each weekly plan
- •Multiscale planning runs from quarterly plan to weekly plan to daily time-block plan
- •The template bridges the quarterly and weekly levels
- •It makes sure each week is viable for moving toward your goals
Protected Time and Exception Handling
The first template element is protected time, such as Cal's mornings reserved for writing. He also explains an advanced tweak: building exception routines for the unavoidable conflicts.
- •Preemptively protect recurring blocks for the whole quarter, like morning writing or lunchtime exercise
- •Cal is willing to be a pain about protecting his mornings
- •His unavoidable exceptions are monthly Friday faculty meetings and morning events at his kids' school
- •Each exception has a set compensation, such as ninety minutes at the campus library or a coffee shop straight away
Daily Themes
The second element is assigning different types of activity to different days. Cal gives examples such as meeting and non-meeting days, class and research days, and lighter Fridays.
- •Keep Mondays free of meetings as a standing rule
- •Theme days by role, such as one role's meetings on Tuesdays and another's on Wednesdays
- •Class days hold student meetings and administrative work, leaving research days with more unbroken time
- •Fridays can be lighter, such as no meetings in the afternoon
Rules and Limits
The third element is standing rules and limits on what comes at you. Cal describes processing buffers after calls, speaking bans, and quotas like his one podcast per week.
- •Add 15 minutes after each meeting or call to process it
- •Cal sets a rule of no speaking gigs in some quarters and one podcast a week this fall
- •Limits can apply to committees, peer reviews, or recurring requests
- •Having rules in place makes it easy to react to incoming requests
Autopilot Scheduling and Office Hours
The fourth element is deciding in advance when recurring activities will happen. Cal highlights office hours as a way to compress back-and-forth interactions, and distinguishes autopilot from protected time.
- •Decide at the start of the quarter when recurring work happens, such as a class on Monday and Wednesday mornings
- •Office hours handle short interactions that need back and forth, such as a 45-second conversation replacing an email chain
- •Autopilot blocks are specific recurring hours, while protected time is broader
- •There is some overlap between autopilot scheduling and time protection
Using and Adjusting the Template Over a Quarter
Cal explains why the quarter is the right timescale, why you should expect to adjust the template, and how end-of-quarter reflection reveals what works in your job. He sums up the four elements and urges listeners to try it.
- •Place the template at the top of your quarterly plan so you see it every week
- •You will need to adjust it when ambitious plans keep failing
- •Reviewing it at quarter end gives deeper insight than reviewing single days
- •Failed template goals can show that your role or its meeting pace needs to change
- •A good template can make the job feel completely different without changing your role
Cal's Writing Schedule and Template Format
In a back-and-forth, a questioner asks about Cal's writing routine and what the template looks like. Cal says he aims for two morning hours five days a week, with a sixth day as needed, and keeps his template as a bulleted list at the top of his quarterly plan.
- •Writing usually starts around 8:30, and earlier if he skips the bus stop walk
- •Ideally two hours, five days a week, with a Sunday session as needed
- •A kids' robotics team that meets Sunday mornings took away his Sunday writing time
- •The template is categories and bullet points, not a calendar
Evening Writing Sessions and Shutdown Routines
Answering Aaron, Cal explains that he now ends work earlier to use exercise as his transition. He describes how evening writing sessions fit after the shutdown routine rather than being overflow work.
- •Exercise serves as his transition from work to non-work
- •Evening writing comes after the shutdown routine and is not time-blocked
- •He dislikes using evenings for overflow work, since that suggests a plan that was too ambitious
- •Evening sessions help him break into hard New Yorker pieces by writing in a new place
- •For deadlines, he prefers a long weekend writing session
Leveraging Career Capital to Become an Entrepreneur
Cal responds to Mark, a teacher and band member who calls entrepreneurship his passion. He is skeptical of the word and recommends lifestyle-centric planning that works backwards from an ideal lifestyle with real financial numbers.
- •Passion is not a meaningful guide by itself
- •Build a holistic vision of your ideal lifestyle and work backwards
- •Use concrete numbers for costs and income needs
- •Use money as a neutral indicator of value
- •Derek Sivers left his job for music, then music for his company, each time once the side income covered his expenses
Protecting Time for Creative Writing
Susan struggles to fit creative writing around academic writing. Cal says to pre-protect that time through the weekly template, with rituals, and to treat failure to find time as a sign of a real workload problem.
- •Schedule creative writing far in advance instead of deciding daily
- •Use rituals and a fixed place so the sessions run like clockwork
- •Example: academic writing in the morning, creative writing in evening sessions and one weekend day
- •If the time can't be found, you face the productivity dragon and something must change
- •The weekly scale reveals consistent truths about your job that a single day does not
Making Afternoon Deep Work Possible
Ari has calls from 7:30 AM until noon and can't do deep work afterward. Cal suggests a half-day shutdown, a physical and location change, a chemical cue, and a modest session of 90 minutes to two hours.
- •Afternoon deep work is harder than morning deep work and needs ritual and location
- •Do a half-day shutdown routine after calls to close open loops
- •Use a physical interruption such as a set walk or hard exercise, as Darwin did with his sand walk
- •Change location and have a special drink to mark the start
- •Keep sessions to 90 minutes to two hours, and perhaps end calls early one day a week
Slow Productivity for Interview Prep: Relentless and Deliberate
In the Slow Productivity Corner, Fanindra asks how to balance a part-time job with prep for a big tech interview. Cal recasts slow but steady as relentless and deliberate, with daily, focused practice rather than vague effort.
- •Slow but steady means doing a reasonable amount of work consistently
- •Relentless means truly every day, not a loose sense of doing it regularly
- •Deliberate means designing sessions that stretch you where you are weak, as in deliberate practice
- •Use something like LeetCode exercises rather than reading Reddit
- •Forty-five minutes to an hour a day, five days a week, can be enough, and builds career capital over time
Avoiding Reactivity in a Busy Season
Kyle, who works on a football podcast, asks how to avoid being a mile wide and an inch deep during the busy season. Cal says the weekly template is the tool for regaining autonomy, moving from being organized to being in control.
- •Plan for busy seasons as carefully as for easy ones
- •The weekly template lets you consolidate meetings and treat days differently
- •Being organized is necessary but you can still feel out of control if you only juggle what's thrown at you
- •The template limits how many balls you take each day
Case Study: Productivity in the Peace Corps
Colton shares how he uses time blocking and autopilot schedules as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, finishing remote cancer lab work by 1 PM so he can build projects in his village. Cal uses it to argue that productivity skills serve an ideal life rather than output maximization.
- •Colton uses time blocking, an autopilot schedule, and a project list to work on one task at a time
- •He finishes his remote lab work by 1 PM and builds a medical waste incinerator for the clinic
- •Cal says it counters the idea that caring about productivity is just internalized capitalism
- •The point is productivity in service of an ideal life, not the highest possible production rate
Books Cal Read in August 2024
In the final segment, Cal reviews the five books he read in August, from a fairy fantasy novel to a book on nuclear war, a disappointing posthumous Crichton, a thriller, and a book on midlife athletics. He also shows off listener-gifted VBLCCP hats.
- •Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies: he liked the academic fairy-study premise but not the later world-building
- •Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War is a compelling, detailed walkthrough of a thermonuclear exchange, with two nitpicks about subs and a helicopter
- •Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson was poorly written
- •Diablo Mesa by Lincoln Child was a good thriller
- •Gwendolyn Bounds' Not Too Late is about taking up obstacle racing in midlife

Publisher timestamps

Get more out of YouTube videos.

Read along on your phone, search it beside the video, or ask your favorite AI app what was said.