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

1. 0:00 – 25:40

   Weekly Templates

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      So I want to talk to you today about a piece of my own productivity toolkit that I don't think I have talked much about before, but it's key to my operation. It's also an exercise I just went through preparing for the fall quarter that is just beginning, so I thought this was a great time to talk about it because I could use examples from my own life as I just went through this. So what is this tool we're going to talk about? I call it the weekly template. All right. To understand the weekly template, we have to briefly zoom out and remind ourselves about how my multiscale planning framework works because weekly templates fit into this framework. All right. Quick review for the new listeners. In multiscale planning, you start at the timescale of the current quarter. So like right now you'd be thinking about the fall, and you have a strategic plan or quarterly plan for that period of time. What are the big things I'm working on? What are the goals I have for this quarter? What do I want to keep in mind that is important to me in this quarter? This is where you keep, uh, yourself oriented towards the big picture of your ideal lifestyle. Every week, at the beginning of the week, you look at your quarterly plan to help you create your weekly plan for the week ahead, right? This is where you actually look at what's going to happen in the days. You're going to spend a lot of time here with your calendar. You're going to spend a lot of time here with whatever task capture system you use. You're going to put aside time when you're working on your weekly plan, uh, on your calendar for the week to make progress on important initiatives, uh, to protect that time. This is where you might also make adjustments to your current plans. You know what? I'm going to cancel this meeting and move this meeting over here because that's going to free up a lot of time here, and I need a lot of time to get this bigger initiative done. You then look at your weekly plan every morning when you create your daily plan, and there I suggest time blocking, give every minute of your day a job, end with a clear shutdown. So in this way, your big picture vision, as captured in your quarterly plan, is influencing everything you're doing throughout the day without requiring you to think about your big picture plan at every moment throughout your day. All right. So here's where the weekly template comes in. It is a piece of supporting infrastructure to span from your quarterly plan to your weekly plan. So the way I want you to think about your weekly template is a, uh, a collection of guidelines that you put in place at the beginning of a quarter that you consistently plan when you're working on your weekly plan. So it's a way to, uh, at a scale somewhat larger than each week, make sure that your weeks are going to be viable to move you where you want to go. That's pretty vague, so what I want to do is go through one, two, three, four, um, four types of things that you would put in a weekly template, and then hopefully this, this mechanism becomes more clear. All right. The first element that might be in a weekly template is protected time. That's where you decide for this whole quarter there is certain time each week that I am preemptively protecting. So for myself, for example, in my current weekly template for the fall, I don't have any teaching in the mornings, and my plan is mornings are for writing, uh, at least until ten thirty, but later on days when I can go later. That's part of my weekly template. I, I've actually gone through and just protected that time on my calendar for the entire fall, right? So part of my weekly template is I'm writing in the morning. You might, for example, have regular protected time for, um, I exercise every day at my lunch hour. You might have regular protected time for, you know, you're working on a self-education project to open up new career capital opportunities. This is when I do my learning. So just, uh, fixing in advance, this time I'm always using for, um, this particular type of activity. That's a big element of a weekly template. Now I'm going to give you an advanced gloss on that tip. Hard thing about having a simple rule about this time is always dedicated to this activity is that you will have exceptions. Let me use myself as an example here. I want to write every morning, and I'm willing to be a pain about this, by the way. I'm willing in the moment to be a pain and say, "No, I'm sorry. I know it would be convenient for everyone if, uh, I could meet at nine thirty. I can't do things in the morning." Like, I'm willing to protect this. But there's, there's two things I can't get around. Once a month, we have a faculty meeting. Faculty meetings have always been on Friday mornings. I can't miss the faculty meetings. The other thing I can't get around is that my kids' school, when they have events at school where parents come in to see kids work, the way they do it, and I appreciate this, is like, "Let's just do this first thing in the morning as soon as school starts so parents can then go on to their workdays without having missed too much." So clearly when those things happen, that will interrupt my plan of writing first thing in the morning. So I have these two exceptions I know I can't get around. So what I have is a, uh, exception handling routine where I say, "Great. When those two things happen, I have a very specific thing I do to compensate for that lost time." So the faculty meeting, as soon as that's over, I'm going to this library on campus, ninety minutes writing. If I have to go in, uh, to my kids' school, I'm going straight from the school to this coffee shop, um, writing right away. So I have a, a exception handling routine there as part of my protected time in my template. All right. Second common element of a weekly template, daily themes. You start thinking, "Okay, for the quarter ahead, maybe I want to dedicate different days of the week for different types of activities." This is something you want to figure out, um, ahead of time. For example, you might have meeting days and non-meeting days. You know, okay, I, I, uh, I want to keep Mondays free of meetings, so I can really get into the week, get my arms around things, make progress on things. Um, Mondays are non-meeting days. That's a weekly template decision. Every week you apply that to your week when you're making your plan. You might say, for example, "I want to theme what type of roles I work on on different days." So maybe I need to do meetings every day of the week, but I'm going to put meetings on this particular role on Tuesdays, uh, and meetings for this particular role on Wednesdays, right? These are regular rules that you keep in mind when it comes time to actually schedule. Uh, in my own academic career, I often have, for example, class days. Versus non-class days. Class days are days where I'm teaching. I treat those days differently in my weekly template when I think about what I do there versus non-class days. I like to meet with students on class days. I like to do Georgetown related administrative work on class days. If I have meetings with an administrator, an advising dean, or something like this, let's do this on class days. Let's make the theme of class days the, the non-research part of being a professor. And then on a research day, well, I'm gonna schedule much fewer of those things, so I could have more unbroken time to actually, uh, work on thinking deeply. You can also have, for example, Fridays as a lighter day, or your theme for Fridays is, uh, no meetings in the afternoon, finish at 3:00. Um, so theming days. That's a weekly template. I'm always doing this on these particular days. The third, wait, on the third element that could go into a weekly template, regular rules and limits, right? So this is not about particular time, but more about particular rules or limits to the things that are coming towards you, that you're gonna enforce for the particular quarter. So for example, a rule example might be every time a meeting or call is scheduled on my calendar, I am gonna make sure there is 15 minutes at the end of that calendar event for processing that meeting or call. Now, this either means, uh, I put aside an hour and make it clear that this call or meeting is for 45 minutes, or I'm adding 15 minutes to the other end of, uh, of the, uh, hour-long meeting or call, however you wanna do it. But this is, like, a very useful rule. It's a case study. It's an example. Um, this way you can process things discussed in a meeting, get things into your systems, clear your head before you move on, right? This is, like, a, a, a useful type of, um, rule. Limits might be things like I'm not speaking this semester. This is very specific to me as a, as a writer, but there's certainly, uh, quarters where, let's say, I'm deep into trying to finish a book manuscript, or I'm on a book tour for a book manuscript where I will just have a simple rule, I'm taking on no speaking gigs, right? So you just have a simple rule like that. These could also be quotas. Uh, I am only doing one podcast a week. That's an actual quota I have in place right now. This fall, uh, I was on a book tour in the spring. Now I'm not on a book tour. I don't want to stop completely spreading the word about my new book, Slow Productivity, but I also do not wanna be in that five to 10 podcast a week like I was during book tour. I really need to be focused on other things now, so I have a simple rule, one podcast per week. If that week has its podcast, I just don't make it available. Having these rules in place makes it so easy to react to the incoming. Uh, you might have a similar rule, for example, with committees you're joining. Okay, I'm just gonna do, um, two committees. That's it. I have to choose two committees I'm gonna be on. There's only five peer review papers I'm going to do. Um, maybe there's a particular type of thing you get pulled into in your company, and you say, "I, I'm not gonna do that more than once a month. Once I've done it once for a month, I'll say no, not till the next month." So rules and limits are a part of a weekly template. Finally, autopilot scheduling. Looking at things that you know occur regularly or will recur regularly throughout the quarter and say, "When do I wanna do them?" I just wanna figure that out in advance. I don't wanna be, each week when I sit down to do my weekly planning, asking myself, "When am I gonna find time for this?" I'm gonna make that decision at the beginning of the quarter. Friday afternoons is when I do this type of work. The, the online class I'm taking, that's first thing in the morning Monday and Wednesdays. I don't even... I don't wanna have to think about it. That's just when it is. That's just when I do it. 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/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. One of the more interesting things, and one of the more effective things you can add as part of your autopiloting for your weekly schedule, is office hours. All right? Uh, when do I want to regularly have time to handle short things that are gonna require back and forth interaction and get it out of my inbox? I'll give you an example of that from today. I won't get too specific. It's, like, a Georgetown administrative example. Um, someone wrote me from the department, like, uh, there's, like, a couple things. None of it that complicated. It had to do with, like, class registration, and the, the, the... This class is too full. This one might not be enough people. Like, it was, um, nothing super complicated, but it was, it was, like, a little ambiguous. Like, well, so what... How can I be useful here, or what's really the issue? And my first instinct was, let me just send back an email now, so I can get this out of my inbox, and that's just gonna be kind of clarifying. We'll kind of go back and forth and figure this out. I said, "No, no, no, no, no. We could do this in 45 seconds of talking." So I said, "Let's just talk at," you know, we were gonna see each other later. Took 45 seconds. Like, "So what'd you mean by this?" "Oh, okay. Do you need this from me?" "No." "What about that?" "Great." "Oh, one exception." "Great." "Okay, good." Forty-five seconds, we were done. Office hours allows you to get that, uh, get that compression on a regular basis, so, so time you can push in interactions that require more than, like, one message back in response, right? So just autopiloting. Where is stuff, uh, where is the regular stuff actually going to happen? There's clearly some overlap between autopiloting and time protection. Time protection is more like my mornings are for writing. The exact details of that might depend on the day, right? Time protection might be, uh, Friday afternoons I go to the, the cabin in the woods and, um, just do brainstorming, right? Autopilot is more like this hour on this day is when I prep my course. Um, this is when I go through my batch. So it, it's much more like specific time blocks that you know are gonna happen on a regular basis. So there's some overlap there. Um, anyway, so this... These type of things go into a weekly template. So your weekly template, I have a fall weekly template, just goes in your quarterly plan. It's right there on the top. Like, here's my general template I wanna follow each week. When I'm scheduling my week, think about what's in the template. It really does make a difference because you don't have to go through all of the thought processes required to figure out these elements of your weekly template. You don't have to go through those from scratch each week. Some weeks when you're creating your weekly plan, you're... have a good cup of coffee, you got a good night's sleep, and you're really like, "Let's, I'm thinking about this. I'm innovative." Other times you're like, "Oh my God, I'm just trying to figure out roughly how I wanna get things done." Um, so you want the template there to, to support you. It's, it's like you're... I call it a template because you think of it as like, "Here's my template for the ideal week would have these elements. I'm writing in the morning. I'm not doing too many of these. These are meeting days. These are non-meeting days." Like, it's the... It gives you the recipe or the template for what you think for that quarter is gonna be an effective week. Quarter is the right timeframe to work on this, uh, because things change. Like, what's relevant for me in the fall will be d- different than what's relevant to me in the winter, and that's true for a lot of other period people as well. So your, your, your quarterly plan check is, like, the right timescale in which to look at these templates. Two, you're gonna have to adjust it a bunch. You get super ambitious, "I'm gonna every afternoon, you know, work in the woods." It turns out, like, that almost never works. There's, like, all these little things I can't avoid that keeps messing up that plan. I need to adjust this weekly template. That's great. Adjust as needed. Finally, at the end of a quarter, these are a good focuser for reflection. If you think back, what about these weekly templates did I like? What about them frustrated me? Like, I really wanted to do this, and I just could not make that work. Gives you, I think, deeper insight about what's working and not working in your job. Much deeper insight than just, like, a typical day. You could have busy days. You could have non-busy days. There could be a deadline where you're overwhelmed, and other times you're bored. But when you think back about your lower timescale, your larger timescale weekly template adjustments, I think you get a deeper insight about what you're looking for in your working life, what's working and what's not. You loved the, like, my mornings were for writing. Maybe this was, like, super effective. Now you're having some insight of, like, you know what? Maybe I'm well suited for, like, a, um, a more self-paced, more like what matters is what you produce type job. Maybe you're really frustrated that you couldn't make something like that work, and it's telling you about, you know, the meeting pace of my job is really incompatible. I h- that's what I have to find a way to change. That might be changing my role and changing my expectations. I think there's great insight that comes from your grappling with your vision of the ideal week. It kind of lives in this nice sweet spot between the idiosyncratic difficulties of a particular day and the very aspirational big picture visions of, like, where do I wanna be five years from now? It kind of gets at more what's happening, what's not happening. It's getting the trends of your job, not individual days, but also not the too airy of images. So it's the fall now. Figure out your weekly template. Just to summarize again the elements that might go into that. Regularly protected time, themes for various days, rules and limits, and autopilot scheduling. Get one of these figured out for your, your fall ahead. It's, it's really gon- You're gonna feel like your weeks are much better, much less exhausting, much more, uh, productive in the sense of making progress on the things you care about. You're gonna be less frustrated. Uh, it really can make you feel like it has a different job versus the alternative of just, like, now I'm facing this week. It's full of all this stuff. I guess this seems fine. Let's just go day-to-day and time block and make the most of it, right? It is gonna feel like an, a, a completely different job even though you haven't actually officially changed anything about your role. So give your weekly template a try.

   2. SPSpeaker16:09

      I have, uh, one specific question and then a broader one.

   3. CNCal Newport16:12

      All right.

   4. SPSpeaker16:12

      I guess I'll go with the specific one first. When you start your writing, is it usually around 8:30?

   5. CNCal Newport16:17

      Um, usually it's 8:30. Sometimes it's earlier. So-

   6. SPSpeaker16:22

      So ideally two hours?

   7. CNCal Newport16:24

      Ideally two hours. So i- if I know I'm ending on the earlier side, I might start earlier, right? So we leave, uh, we leave the house to walk the kids to the bus stop at 7:30. And, and typically my wife and I both walk them to the bus stop together because we like the walk back. It's like a time to catch up. Um, but if she has something early, then I'll just take them. If I have something, like if I know I have an 11:00 or a 10:30 meeting, I might just bow out the walking that day, and then I can start my writing right at 7:30 and get that extra hour.

   8. SPSpeaker16:56

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CNCal Newport16:56

      So we'll... It, it just, it just sort of depends on what's going on.

   10. SPSpeaker16:58

       And then ideally six days a week or five days a week?

   11. CNCal Newport17:01

       Um, five days a week. Sixth day as needed.

   12. SPSpeaker17:03

       Okay.

   13. CNCal Newport17:04

       Right. Sunday session as needed. Uh, occasionally evening sessions, but I won't get too much into that now because I think we have a question.

   14. SPSpeaker17:10

       Yeah.

   15. CNCal Newport17:10

       Yeah, so, so we'll get into that as well. Um, I don't make... Right now I'm trying to at least not making the sixth day regular.

   16. SPSpeaker17:17

       Yeah.

   17. CNCal Newport17:17

       I would like not to have to do it on the sixth day. So I'm, I'm gonna see if this metronome regular relentless every single morning you're making progress. Like, I have a sense that's gonna add up to, in a slow productivity sense, that will keep me on pace.

   18. SPSpeaker17:31

       Well, that's what you did when you wrote Slow Productivity, right?

   19. CNCal Newport17:33

       Yeah. I, I mean, I, I think I was thinking about using Sundays more.

   20. SPSpeaker17:39

       Oh, okay.

   21. CNCal Newport17:40

       Right? But then I, I helped start at my kid's school a robotics team, and we, we meet on Sunday mornings. So, like, that kind of took out the time I was very... That's... I, I would often write on Sunday mornings, um, that ate up that time.

   22. SPSpeaker17:54

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CNCal Newport17:54

       So then last year, like, I wasn't writing as much on Sundays as, as I usually do. And so now I'm gonna kind of see how that goes, make that more permanent.

   24. SPSpeaker18:03

       And then my broad question is does the template look more like a calendar in your weekly plan, or is it more like a bulleted list?

   25. CNCal Newport18:08

       It's a bulleted list.

   26. SPSpeaker18:10

       Okay.

   27. CNCal Newport18:10

       Yeah. So, so my fall template I call it, um, it's categories and bullet points.

   28. SPSpeaker18:15

       Okay.

   29. CNCal Newport18:16

       Yeah. So it's like here are my elements of, uh, here are the elements. I think I used the wording of, like, here's my, the elements of my ideal week for this quarter.

   30. SPSpeaker18:24

       Mm-hmm.
2. 25:40 – 27:00

   How does Cal schedule his evening writing sessions?

   1. CNCal Newport25:40

      "Okay, so here's... If this works, like here's what I'm gonna do. Um, I'll, I'll go to my office or head over to the coffee shop and for like an hour and here's when I'm gonna do it." And so w- it's roughly time blocked in the sense I know I work out with her when I'm gonna do it, but I don't actually dr- draw a time block because I don't actually do time blocking in any formal sense on weekends or after shutdowns. Um, for me, evening writing blocks are not overflow, right? I don't like this idea that if like you don't finish your plan, just keep working. You know, that's, that means your plan was probably too ambitious or you weren't being sufficiently focused during your day. I don't like using evenings for overflow, if at all possible. I typically use evening writing sessions because I'm trying to, uh, uh, break a complicated story. So this'll typically happen with my New Yorker writing. Those are hard articles to get into because the, the writing caliber is hard, right? It's the, the, the thinking has to be super sharp, but the, the writing, just the craft has to be very high. Um, it's a high bar of entry sometimes to get into them. So sometimes I like to sort of make a running start at them by writing in a new location at a new time. So like I'm going to BevCo, like in the, that's our coffee shop, going in the evening and, um, like coming at this in like a new environment to try to like harness some inspiration just to kind of break into the piece. And then like once a piece is going, then it's more workmanlike and you can just schedule it. So typically that's what I'm doing with my afternoon writing sessions.

3. 27:00 – 32:09

   How can I leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur?

   1. CNCal Newport27:00

      If I am behind on a d- a deadline, the thing I'll usually, uh, aim for is like a long, a long weekend writing session. That's more like, okay, I need to throw five hours at this thing. And, um, so maybe I'm gonna stay home f- and work on this while like the family's doing something else, or we'll go to like my in-laws' house and they have like a outbuilding on their property that sometimes I'll be like, "Great, I will go out there and write while, uh, you know, you visit with your parents," et cetera. So that's, that's the way I think about that. But good question. All right, what do we got next? Next question's from Mark. "I'm a new high school teacher. I also play in a successful band, so I currently have two sources of income. My passion is to start my own business. What is the best approach for me to leverage my current career capital to become an entrepreneur?" Well, Mark, I'm suspicious of your use of the word passion here. Like when someone says, "My passion is to start my own business," what that really means is, "I like the idea of starting my own business, and I'm gonna call it my passion so that like, uh, you have to go along with it." But there, you, you're not wired, uh, the... This is my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. You don't have some genetic predisposition for a particular job that exists in 21st century, like freelance knowledge economy. When you say it's my passion, you're just saying like, "I'm interested in starting a business." Okay, I'm glad you're interested in that. That by itself doesn't mean much to me, right? So I don't hear the word passion and have that r- that, that, that sort of re- reaction of, uh, career genuflection. Oh my God, you gotta do that. Like we gotta make that work. Like the, the word's kind of meaningless to me. So what should we do? Lifestyle-centric planning. Okay? We need to have this vision of your ideal lifestyle in a few years and then t- 10 years or more out. Like we'll, we'll work on those two time frames. This vision has to be holistic. It has to capture all the different areas of your life, like what type of place you're living in, what's the rhythm of your day, who are you around? Like what, what do you smell? What do you taste? What do you see? What do you hear? You, you, you wanna build this aspirational vision of sort of like the rhythms and realities of your day. Like what is it that you're trying to get towards? And then we can assess career capital you have or career capital that you could obtain and see how it would fit into that lifestyle vision. Maybe entrepreneurship works well in here, right? You're like, "Oh, you know what? If I do this, I could, I could see a path towards this lifestyle I have that like the teaching's not gonna get there. This is more constrained," or, or whatever, fine. It could play a role in that, but I want you working backwards from an ideal lifestyle, not working forwards from something that you've just labeled a passion, because that is really, that's rough and it's crude and it's often, um, working off of like a halcyon, incomplete vision of like what this thing really means. I want you working backwards from a lifestyle. That's how you do a real career capital analysis is you, you, you know exactly what you want to invest that career capital in, and now you're saying, "Uh, can I get enough career capital?" I mean, you're being much more, you're being much more systematic about this. When you're doing lifestyle-centric planning in your situation, Mark, um, a big thing I want you to do is be very realistic about finances. And so figure out, okay, for this vision I have, like how much does it cost? Like how much am I, how much am I spending? Like what would the spend be there? What would... Get real numbers here, right? I mean, this is really empowering for people. I'm sort of thinking about this chapter for my Deep Life book I'm working on now, that getting concrete numbers as well as this sense of like complete understanding control over your money right now and these concrete evidence-based numbers for, well, if I lived here, it would cost this much and I would need this much and, and here's how much I can earn doing this and that. Um, working with real numbers is important because then you can start saying, for example, "Okay, if I wanted a small business-" To support me because then I could be more flexible and live this lifestyle where I'm in the woods all the time or whatever it is. Now you have numbers. And now you could say, "Okay, so I need a small business to generate this much money." And now you can be like, "Okay, i- is that reasonable? Like, who's making that much money in these small businesses and why?" And then you can start doing, uh, an idea that, that I talk about in So Good They Can't Ignore You, called using money as a neutral indicator of value. Start seeing on the side, "Okay, well, well how much money am I making money n- I'm selling this product. Am I making money? Am I selling it?" Right? "Is, is no one buying it? Okay, this is a problem. Oh, people are buying it, that means there's some value here. So I could imagine I would have to 3X this for this plan." So you're getting really detailed about, uh, the financial realities, all of it working backwards from an ideal lifestyle vision. All right? So I, I love hearing people talk about, uh, use the phrase lifestyle or ideal lifestyle when thinking about their careers. I get nervous when I hear them say passion. Passion just means I wanna, and I don't want you to say anything about it. But I'm not, I'm not convinced by that. So you know, look, uh, some sort of entrepreneurial push here might be a big part of achieving your vision that does give you lots of autonomy, uh, lifestyle. You know, jobs are a way of scaling up income that separate income from time. There's a lot of cool options there, but it's also really hard, so you wanna get realistic about that. Also very cool that you play in a band. I think that, uh, I love that. You know, Derek Sivers, so I talk about him in that book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. He talks about leaving his job to be a musician full-time, and then leaving his job as a m- musician to run a small

4. 32:09 – 35:45

   How do I find time for non-urgent but interesting deep work?

   1. CNCal Newport32:09

      business.

   2. SPSpeaker32:09

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CNCal Newport32:10

      So that's my homework for you, Mark. Read So Good They Can't Ignore You. Uh, find in particular that chapter about using money as a neutral indicator of value. Read Derek Siver's story because he was, uh, you know, he made exactly these decisions. Um, and I'll give you the TLDR. He left his job to be a full-time musician once he was making enough money already being a musician on the side to cover his expenses. He stopped his performing to work on his company full-time once his company was making him enough money on the side that he could live off of those expenses. So he, he let the money, not his sense of what would be cool, be the indicator of when he was ready to make a jump. He then sold that company for like 20-something million dollars, so worked out well.

   4. SPSpeaker32:55

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CNCal Newport32:55

      Interesting math. All right, who do we got next?

   6. SPSpeaker32:58

      Next question's from Susan. "I have academic writing that needs to be done for my career. I also have creating writing projects. Whenever I try to schedule my creative writing, the academic writing takes precedence, and I end up telling myself that I'll fit the creative writing stuff in whenever I find extra time. I do find extra time, but never enough to make real progress. I find time blocking for my creative/fun projects is stressful."

   7. CNCal Newport33:22

      This is where your weekly template's gonna be useful because you need to probably, um, pre-protect this time. Like you g- you gotta have it figured out, this is when I do academic writing, and I have enough time put aside to feel very comfortable about my academic writing, and that's gonna be a lot of time. And then you're gonna say, "I'm gonna put aside and regularly schedule my time for my fun writing, and it's gonna be in a different place. And that's where this time is put aside, and that's when I work on my fun writing." And there will be less of that because it's not your full job right now. What you should not do is what you're doing now, which is c- approaching your day and saying, "Okay, I'm gonna time block my day. Um, do I have time here? What should I do next? Should I do creative writing? Should I do academic writing? Oh my God, I don't really think I've done enough academic writing. I... And once I finish my academic writing, I'm busy. I don't have time for my creative writing." This time has to be protected way in advance. And you gotta have rituals around it, and it's gotta be, "Here's where I go to do this writing, and it's like clockwork, and I feel, I feel bad if I ever miss it. It makes me feel like something's incomplete in my life." And probably it's gonna be like first thing in the morning you're doing academic writing, and then two evenings and one weekend day a week you have these like late afternoon, evening sessions at a coffee shop where you do your creative writing. Like you gotta figure out how to make this regular and ritualized, but protect that time. And if you don't have the... If you're like, "Okay, but I don't have enough time I'm gonna try to do that. Like I can't... I don't have, for example, enough time to regularly work on my academic writing and my creative writing," when you try to figure out that time and you can't, there's just not enough consistently free time in your schedule for that to happen, well, now you're confronting reality. What we call facing the productivity dragon. "Oh, I'm not fooling myself. My schedule doesn't have enough time to do both. Okay, something has to change. Either I have to put off the creative writing, uh, until I have like a sabbatical to just do that, or I have to loosen something else on my schedule." So again, the weekly template, this, this sort of thinking about like, when this quarter do I wanna work most weeks on academic writing? When this quarter am I gonna work most weeks on creative writing? Forces you to confront the reality of your workload at a scale that tells you something deep about your, your job. On a daily scale, it doesn't tell you much. You could... uh, no matter what your job is, you can have a busy day. But on this, the scale of like I'm trying to find a consistent schedule to do this writing,

5. 35:45 – 42:30

   Is afternoon deep work possible?

   1. CNCal Newport35:45

      when you fail to do that, that's telling you something that is consistently true about your job. It's a very useful scale to interrogate what's working and what's not working. Um, so that's what I would do. Uh, you should never be thinking, in my ideal world, you never will be thinking on a typical day, "Should I do this writing today?" Or, "When should I do this writing today?" That answer should have been long since established and recorded, and it's like autopilot at this point. All right, who do we got next?

   2. SPSpeaker36:15

      Next question's from Ari. "At my current job, I'm struggling to fit in deep work sessions. I have calls starting at 7:30 AM, which can stretch till 12 PM. I've tried shifting my deep work sessions to after lunch, but I'm, been unable because I'm already exhausted."

   3. CNCal Newport36:30

      Well, I can already tell this is like a time, time zone thing probably.

   4. SPSpeaker36:35

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CNCal Newport36:35

      So if he's starting at 7:30 AM- He's probably like West Coast, maybe working with East Coasters. Um, so Ari, you're gonna have to lean heavily into, uh, location and rituals to make afternoon deep work more effective for you. It is hard for a lot of people. I have a hard time with it. Most people, here's a reality, most people if you say, "Hey, first thing in the day, get some coffee and work deeply," can do it. Like, okay, yeah. Like I, I don't have too much other stuff in my head from work. Like we're just getting started, so my, my cognitive context is focused, my attention residue is minimal. I have energy in the morning. I'm having my first caffeine of the day. Like great, let's do deep work in the morning. Most people can just do that without too much support. The afternoon's a different story, and I include myself in this. If I just... Like after we record this podcast, like Jesse, if I just after this podcast were like, "You know what? I think I'm gonna go do some writing," and just took out my computer, that would be difficult.

   6. SPSpeaker37:30

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CNCal Newport37:31

      Uh, I would need ritual and location built around getting good deep work occurring, you know, in the afternoon. So Ari, it's not unusual that that's the case for you as well. All right, so what might this mean? Uh, I have a bunch of ideas for this. Uh, first of all, I would suggest a half-day shutdown routine after your calls end at noon. So give yourself a half hour to close up all of the open loops that were created by these calls. Make sure the stuff that needs to be on your calendar is on your calendar, the stuff that needs to go into your ca- capture system is in your task management capture systems, the follow-ups are happening, that there's not loose ends from these calls that are still floating around. So you really wanna sort of shut those things down, take the next steps, schedule when things are gonna happen, get that out of your head. Any deep work attempt with a bunch of open loops from the morning still open is gonna be otherwise, uh, very difficult. Um, I would then suggest having a, uh, a physical interruption. So this could be like going on a long walk on a set route. Our, our canonical example here is Darwin, that is a state, uh, outside of London, built the, the sand walk, a very specific sand lined path that went through the most scenic parts of his property, and he would do a set number of circuits on that path to prepare himself for writing. So it could be this. I'm, I'm walking, doing this particular walk, maybe to a coffee shop and back, or if you live near the woods, on a particular wooded trail. Exercise. I've become a big believer in this. If you have some schedule here, go do some hard exercise midday. It really does reset your energy levels and your brain. Now you're ready to switch over to try deep work. Keep the deep work period reasonable most days. It is hard to be on calls from 7:30 to 12:00. Like you are using a lot of energy. You cannot on a regular basis then say, "Great, I'll do 12:30 to 5:30," you know, writing the great American novel. You've used a lot of energy, so let's go with the slow productivity principle here of slow but steady. Deep work done really well every single day, reasonable amount of time, that will add up to something good. And, and maybe it takes a little bit longer to add up to something good, but my schedule will be... If I keep my schedule sustainable, I can keep doing this, and over time I'm gonna produce lots of cool stuff. Consider chemical interruptions as well. So I get this special cup of coffee, or I make my mate tea, or like something you do right at the beginning of the afternoon deep work session. Have a location interruption. Go somewhere different than where you did your calls to do deep work. I think this is worth potentially even spending nontrivial money and having, uh, notable eccentricities in your day. It really makes a big difference to say, "I'm going to this shed. I'm going to this library. I'm going to this like local university. I am going to my attic deep work room. I'm going to the, the cabin I built in the woods." Whatever it is, change locations for this deep work. I've done... I've shut down. I've gone for a walk. I've made my special cup of tea, and now I'm going to this deep work only location. And then have a fixed amount of time you're working. As I said, this is probably not gonna be too long most days. You should be happy with 90 minutes to two hours. That's probably all the energy you have left. If this seems insufficient, choose one day at first where you end your calls earlier. Just when these calls are being set up, you're like, "On this day, I'm actually only available till 11:00 or 10:30," right? People are like, "Whatever." You're just clear about it. Like you're available. We're always doing calls. There's one day where like you're not available at the, for a couple hours at the end, so we just work around it. Um, you can do that one day a week, maybe two, and have a longer deep work session, but don't try to be a hero here. Your brain can only do so much work, especially when it's, you have this kind of really mixed up, demanding multi-role knowledge work type of things going on. Right? Do those things regular afternoon deep work as possible. Just trust that 90 minutes to two hours five days a week, four weeks a month will produce really good stuff. Even if it's not as fast as you would like to go, it's better that you have a sustainable pace you can slowly move on that over time gets you to the finish line than it is that in the short term you're trying to, to go heroic. Um, the close the loop here, when you're done with this deep work session, then have like your final end of the day session where you do your real shutdown. This is where you can have like, okay, I d- I have a- admin tasks I need to do. I would do that after the deep work. Nontrivial admin tasks, like I gotta fill out this form. It's gonna take 20 minutes. You have your hour or 90 minutes at the end of the deep work session to just, um, shut down your day. I would leave that type of stuff, the nontrivial admin, to the other end of deep work if possible so that you can get to it before it's too late. Um, again, adjust as needed. Different people have different preferences. Different rhythms work better, but that's probably how I would do it. All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

   8. SPSpeaker42:14

      Our next question's our corner.

   9. CNCal Newport42:17

      Ooh, Slow Productivity Corner. Uh, you've missed me saying this for the last two weeks, but we like to have one question a week that's relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity: The, uh, the Art... The Lost Art of Accomplishment. I haven't

6. 42:30 – 48:15

   Can I use slow productivity to help prepare for a job interview?

   1. CNCal Newport42:30

      said it in a while, Jesse.

   2. SPSpeaker42:30

      I know.

   3. CNCal Newport42:31

      The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Overload. Uh, it really is like a, a source book to, God, 75% of the stuff we talk about on this show. If you haven't read Slow Productivity yet, uh- You gotta go get it. Just go get it, re- read it, recommend it, because we talk about the book so often on the show. Anyways, here's our Slow Productivity Question Corner, Slow Productivity Corner Question of the Week.

   4. SPSpeaker42:52

      [Instrumental music] Hi, the questions comes from Fanindra. "I got laid off recently and currently have a part-time job. I spend about four to five hours on that to keep up with the bills and rent. I have an interview with a big tech company coming up in a few weeks, and I need to prepare. Is there a way to use the principles of Slow Productivity to strike a balance between my part-time job and interview prep?"

   5. CNCal Newport43:23

      Well, let's go back to the principle we mentioned for Ari, uh, a key idea from Slow Productivity, which is trusting slow but steady. So doing a reasonable amount of work on a regular basis, trusting that can get you where you need to go. This is like one of the most important heuristics from the Slow Productivity mindset, is getting out of the idea of, uh, how busy or exhausted I am today is what matters. How overloaded I am is what matters. And instead saying, "I wanna produce, at the bigger scale, stuff I'm proud of. How can I do that in a way that's sustainable, that's compatible with, uh, a richer life, and it's not gonna make me completely fatigued?" Slow but steady is the way. It's like how I write books. I write a little bit most days. I let it add up over a year, right? Slow but steady. I wanna drill in on this a little bit though, right, because, uh, the details matter here for you because you don't have a ton of time. You have a few weeks, so, uh, you can't get this wrong. You don't have the ability... I'm looking at this. You're working four to five hours a day. You don't have the ability to just say, "I'm gonna take a week and just do nothing but prepare for the interview." I mean, it's not a bad idea, I guess, if you could take time off your part-time job, but it's a part-time job, so you probably can't. Um, but you don't have a lot of room for error here. If, like, you're slow but steady, if you get off to, if it's not very effective, you're in trouble. You won't be prepared for this interview. You don't have a lot of time to course-correct. So let me dive a little bit deeper. Um, another way to say slow but steady is relentless and deliberate. Now, I use this more specific terms to capture the following two important elements to doing the strategy properly in your, in your situation. When I say relentless, like, it really has to be every day. A lot of people have, uh, a loose definition of what it means to do something regularly. All right? We can convince ourselves, "Yeah, man, I'm, I'm practicing my guitar on a regular basis." But if you actually went through and measured it, you're like, "Well, I only really played twice this week, and the first time, you know, I was just sort of like jamming along to a song. And really, if I do the math, I had about 15 minutes of actual practicing in that week." But in your mind, you're like, "I picked it up on several occasions," right? We- we're easily deluded. We can easily delude ourselves into thinking we're doing something all the time. Um, so you have to defeat that by being relentless. "No, no, I do this every single day. Here's the time I do it, tired or not tired, you know, whatever it takes." Like, "This is, I do it every single day." So you have to be relentless. Uh, otherwise, you're not gonna have enough results to aggregate. The second term I introduced there was deliberate, and I'm, I'm drawing here from the phrase deliberate practice, right? Our, our best framework for understanding how people get good at complex activities. It's attributed to the late Anders Ericsson. Deliberate practice says, okay, if you want to get better at something, you have to stretch yourself past where you're comfortable in a very specific, targeted way. What is the thing that I need to do better? Let me design an activity to do right now that does nothing but push me on that so that I, I'm stretching my ability to do that piece. This is particularly important for learning, which is what you're trying to do in preparing for the interviews. You cannot waste any of these sessions. They have to be designed to deliberately improve you exactly in the areas you need to improve. Do not waste an hour interview prep session kinda reading stuff on Reddit. You need to actually, like, be on the LeetCode website, um, doing the exercises right now of a type that you're, like, not quite comfortable with, giving it your full attention, trying to figure out how to make them work. If you don't have that sense of cognitive discomfort or stretch, you're wasting the time. So relentless and deliberate every single day, not wasting a minute of those blocks. Now, now, like, the blocks don't have to be that long. It could be 45 minutes to an hour a day, five days a week. It's not that much time, and it's spread out over a few weeks. You will get really, really good. And I think this is actually going to be long-term a great experience for you because after you nail this interview, which you will if you're relentless and deliberate, and you get this other job, and now you have, uh, well, you're senior, it's a senior development job, so you have this, you know, kinda big, flashy knowledge work job. You will remember how this went, and you will start thinking, "What are all of the other things in my job now that I have this big, new fancy job where if I mastered this, it would be really useful? It would give me a huge leg up. It'd be really impressive. It would open up more options." And you'll have this confidence of, "I can learn that without having to make some major change to my schedule," that if I just devote 45 minutes a day, and maybe I just do this over lunch hour five days a week, and I'm deliberate in terms of what I do in that time, there's, there's no, uh, limit to what I can start picking up. And now quarter after quarter, you're building up all these skills. You've mastered this new API. You've mastered this new programming language. And, like, this stuff is gonna add up. Your career capital is gonna pile. You're gonna start making some investments with that capital, and your life is gonna get somewhere really cool. So I mean, this is a great general tip. If you're relentless and deliberate,

7. 48:15 – 53:30

   How do I not be reactionary during my busy season?

   1. CNCal Newport48:15

      a, uh, small amount of time each day can add up to something that I think is very impressive. And that is a key Slow Productivity principle, one I think that deserves hearing the Slow Productivity Corner music one more time. [Instrumental music] All right. Do we have a call, Jesse?

   2. SPSpeaker48:39

      We do. Here we go.

   3. SPSpeaker48:42

      Hello, Cal. I've resonated a lot on the topic of seasonality. I'm a writer and a producer for a football podcast, so February through July looks very different in my line of work than August through January. And I know for a lot of people that's similar in the academic world. In the off season, I found so much joy scheduling deep work hours in the morning, spending time with my family, implementing shutdown rituals, and ultimately giving myself space to think and write. It was, it was a joy. I gave myself some buffer over the last month, but how do you protect yourself in season from being reactionary and ultimately being a mile wide, but only one inch deep? Thanks, guys.

   4. CNCal Newport49:28

      All right. Well, thanks Kyle. Kyle has a football podcast. Is this Kyle Shanahan? Is that-

   5. SPSpeaker49:33

      [laughs] I don't think Kyle Shanahan has the time for a football podcast. He probably goes on a podcast, but-

   6. CNCal Newport49:38

      He's not spending six months a year writing, just taking, like, deep work time in the morning.

   7. SPSpeaker49:43

      He probably does a lot of deep work, but it's a lot of, like, film breakdown and stuff.

   8. CNCal Newport49:46

      I've, I've dealt with a non-trivial number of, uh, professional sports franchises. They care about deep work. But, uh, I will tell you, the busiest people I've met have been professional sports GMs.

   9. SPSpeaker49:58

      Really?

   10. CNCal Newport49:58

       Yeah. There's a... Because they, the GMs in particular have the, all the concerns of, like, the product on the court or the field, but also, like, uh, management concerns, staffing concerns, budget concerns. You know-

   11. SPSpeaker50:11

       Mm-hmm

   12. CNCal Newport50:11

       ... it's, it, those are crazy jobs. I'm saying, Mike Rizzo, I feel your pain, and I'm still waiting for my invite to come teach deep work principles to, to all those, uh, the Hope Road, to those young players. All right, Kyle, let's get into this. Um, so, uh, look, I'm in the same place. Oh man, I love my summers. I love my summer schedule. My summer schedule just ended, you know, my, my, my wonderful summer schedule where I write a half day every day. I only have any scheduled appointments or meetings on my calendar is Tuesday through Thursday afternoons. And oh man, those schedules are fantastic. Uh, it's painful to go back. You gotta make sure though, that you have just as much of a plan for your busy seasons as you do for your easy seasons. It's fun and easy to make a plan for the easy seasons because you have a lot of time and not a lot to do, and, like, you could just say, "I wanna write all day. I d- all of my meetings only on Tuesdays." Like, everything's possible. It's a pleasure to build those plans. It's way more stressful in the busy season because, like, your plans don't work. Like, "I can't do this, and I can't write every morning, and that my, and I have to do this and this," and you see your schedule fall apart, and it can be really stressful, but you gotta stick with it. And in particular, what should you be... What, what's probably missing from your brew here is what we talked about in the deep dive, a weekly template. Like, that's probably what's gonna help you here if you're already doing, you know, multi-scale planning, et cetera, right? You're not running around just completely reactive. You, you have capture systems. You're doing multi-scale planning. Your weekly template is where you're gonna make, uh, your stand to gain back some autonomy over your time. All right. Okay, we gotta do this, but here's the days we record the podcast. I'm treating those differently than days we don't. Um, I'm consolidating all of these meetings to, like, one big thing we're doing on Thursdays. I'm taking these two things off my plate because they're destroying my schedule, and they're getting in the way. Like, this is where, the weekly template is where you're able to exert some autonomy. Um, and I think it's really important. I think that aspect of this is really important because what happens is you can be organized but also feel out of control. And what I mean by that is, you know, we talk about it all the time on this show, contrary to the, uh, the interpretation of the anti-productivity crowd that, that think that any th- interest in being organized is all about just being co-opted by late stage capitalism, coercive influences. Like we say, no, no, no. To be non-organized, to not have your work captured in, in, uh, context capture systems, to be doing no planning on your time, to be just sort of, like, stumbling through your days, that's what puts you at the mercy of other forces. It's gonna make you miserable. You're gonna work harder than you, you, you wanna work. It's g- e- everything's gonna be worse. Like, you... The, the step from completely disorganized to organized is a big one, but it's not the full step. And this gets to Kyle's issue, I think, because you can be completely organized. I know what's on my plate. I plan my time carefully. I get the most out of my time. I have shutdown routines. I don't let my work follow me home. Like, you can be doing all the things and be really upset because you feel like your schedule's not yours. You're scheduling your time really well, but mainly what you're doing is just juggling all the balls that people are chucking at you. You're preventing them from falling, but it's way too many balls to be juggling. That's where the weekly template, this is where you can really gain some autonomy of your schedule, where you begin saying, "I'm not just gonna say my goal is to juggle every ball that's thrown at me." It's gonna say, "I only take two balls this day, and this day is three, and this day I'm not juggling at all." It's where you begin to get some autonomy back over your schedule. It's where you step

8. 53:30 – 1:02:50

   Using Cal’s toolkit while working in the Peace Corps

   1. CNCal Newport53:30

      from being organized to also being somewhat in control over what these organized days feel like. So Kyle, it's a pain after a light season to make a busy season work 'cause it's so much harder, but it's worth doing. And let the weekly template maybe be the main tool that you're adding to your toolkit this, this particular busy season. And, and I think that'll do, uh, I think that'll do much better. All right, we got a case study here. This is where people write in to talk about their experience putting the type of things we talk about on this show into practice in their real lives. Uh, if you have a case study to share, you can just email it directly to jesse@calnewport.com. He's organizing those. All right, today's case study comes from Colton. Colton says, "I have been a devout Newportonian since high school, and I followed your advice on time block planning, autopilot schedules, and deep work throughout college. Once I began my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, however, I encountered a lot of problems. Transitioning from my cushy college life and into my first real job and the harsh living conditions of rural Zambia was brutal. I have no electricity, running water, toilets, or stoves. It took a year for me to figure out how to get things in this part of the world. Surprisingly... Get things done in this part of the world. Surprisingly, most of your advice about knowledge work applies to my work as a Peace Corps volunteer. Each morning, I read over my Google Calendar and quarterly goal project list and use them to build a time block plan for the day." I manage my recurring tasks with an autopilot schedule that blocks off specific times each morning to do my research and writing. I work for a remote cancer lab back in the US. I handle my non-recurring tasks with a project list that I can pull from each morning. Because I work on one task at a time and without any distractions, I can finish all of my work by one PM and still accomplish a ton of projects in my village, like building a medical waste incinerator for my local clinic and publishing a few papers in medical journals. Well, Colton, I appreciate the case study, and I appreciate your use of the word Newportonian, which I, uh, I really hope to spread. Let me highlight something from this case study that I think is important. I mentioned this in the call as well. There is this sense out there that to care about personal productivity again is somehow a negative or maybe like a, a, a necessary evil of certain like super high-powered, like corporate high-paying jobs. But, but for the most part, it's just internalized capitalism in the, its worst sort of form, and it's something that those of us who are, um, more, uh, socially conscious and self-aware, we wouldn't dirty ourselves with. This belies that belief. This is literally someone in the Peace Corps in Zambia building medical incinerators and working on cancer research. Being organized makes that possible. Being organized means he can, uh, with complete focus and presence, starting at one PM every day, just be working in that village while also still making progress in the morning on the other things. It's making his ability to be effective even under really harsh circumstances possible. This is what I like to see personal productivity skills deployed towards. It allows me to deploy the image of the ideal life that I have in mind. He doesn't use the word here optimize. He doesn't use the word here maximize output. He does not use the word here hustle. He does not use the, the word here like production machine. No, he has a vision of what would be a sustainable, filling, meaningful vision for my life, and he realized if he cannot control the incoming streams of what needs to be done and information and task and requests in his life, if he can't handle that, if he has no control over his time, he can't get to that vision. Those visions don't have to be heartless. Those visions don't have to be mechanistic. It doesn't have to be one of Blake's mills rendered in flesh in, in, in the personal, uh, individual. It doesn't have to be Gordon Gekko, right? It's more neutral than that. You control yourself, you can control your life. What you do with your life is up to you, and most people actually want to do more interesting things than just try to optimize or maximize output. So Colton, I love it. It's a great case study. We're productive so that we can produce our ideal lives, not the highest possible production rate possible. All right, so we got a final segment coming up, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. I want to talk about our friends at Notion. You've heard me talk about Notion before. Uh, it combines your notes, your docs, and your projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. What I like about Notion, I've said this before, is you can build these sort of custom really easily, these basically like these custom information storage and retrieval systems that fit exactly the type of work you're doing. A big proponent of customized systems to get you away from the hyperactive hive mind of we're just like attaching Word documents to emails and rock and rolling all day long. Systems allow structured collaboration, structured encounters with information. This allows much more sustainable, effective work. And Notion, we... I love the way they do it. We, we, uh, we've worked before with like a really cool setup with our ad agency where we could see, using a custom Notion setup, um, all of the advertisers, and we could switch views of like where's all the times we've done reads for this ad. Let's put in information about this particular read. Now let's zoom out and see all the different reads happening this week. It's a... You can build fantastic things easily, whether it's for a complicated business or just organizing your own stuff as an individual. What they've been doing more though, and I want to emphasize this in this read, is that they have been now integrating artificial intelligence into the product itself just to make it even easier to use. Notion a... Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds, right? So we're talking about things like, uh, generative AI style text creation, like, "Hey, can you write a first draft? Can you summarize what I am saying here?" Um, you can automate tedious tasks like, "Okay, great, summarize these meeting notes that we can enter it over here in this information." Um, and it can help you find things, right? Because it understands your information, and it makes it easier for you to find things. Uh, Notion is used by over half, this surprised me, half of Fortune five hundred companies, right? I didn't know that was true, but now that I hear it, I say, of course. It makes work systems easy. Um, teams use Notion send less email. They cancel more meetings. They save time searching for their work and reducing spending on, uh, having a bunch of different types of tools. Um, all of this helps keeps everyone on the same page. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal. Do this all in lowercase letters. Notion.com/cal to try the powerful easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you will be supporting our show. That's notion.com/cal. I also want to talk about our friends at Ladder, L-A-D-D-E-R. Look, we, we've been saying fall is the time you get your act together, you get organized, you, you, you fix the stuff that needs to be fixed, you get ready for the new year, the new school year, the new post-summer vacation year. The one thing that you might be procrastinating on if you're like a lot of people is life insurance. If there's people who depend on you, you need life insurance. Not just some life insurance, but enough that would actually take care of them if, uh, the unthinkable actually happened. So why do most people not have enough life insurance who know they need it? Because they don't know how to do it Where do you go? Who do you talk to? Is it hard? Is it too expensive? This is where Ladder enters the scene. Ladder is 100% digital. You need no doctors, no needles, and no paperwork when you are applying for $3 million in coverage or less. You just answer a few questions about your health in an application. You need just a few minutes and a phone or a laptop to apply, and then their smart algorithms work in real time so you'll find out if you're instantly approved. We're talking no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time, get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days. Uh, these are policies that are insured by insurers with long-proven histories of plain, uh, paying claims. We're talking those that are rated A and A+ by AM Best. Look, insurance only gets more expensive as you age, so the right time to get more, uh, life insurance is right now. This is also the right time for me to have dropped my ad page on the ground, but I picked it up. See, in the way... And I'm gonna do a good ad lib here, Jesse. Much in the way that I was able to pick up this page from the ground, you can pick up your need to get more life insurance for the people you love with Ladder. So go to ladderlife.com/deep today to see if you're instantly approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep, ladderlife.com/deep. All right. Let's do our final segment. All right. This is our first podcast of September. Oh, it makes me sort of sad. I mean, I like the school year because my kids are in school, but my summer schedule was so nice. Oh, man. And Jesse, I, I've mentioned to you I have, like, a administrative role.

   2. SPSpeaker1:02:47

      I know. You told the audience, too.

   3. CNCal Newport1:02:49

      Did I?

   4. SPSpeaker1:02:49

      Oh, my God.

9. 1:02:50 – 1:16:10

   The 5 Books Cal Read in August, 2024

   1. CNCal Newport1:02:50

      It's fine. I'm building systems, my weekly template. Man, I'm like Cal Newport dean. The Newportonian vibes is, is strong, my friend. My Trelloes are smoking because they're being used so much. I'm on it. But man, I miss the summer. All right. So it's first episode of S- uh, September, so we'll talk about the books I read in August. Hey, before we do, though, a listener... Was it Zach?

   2. SPSpeaker1:03:11

      Yeah.

   3. CNCal Newport1:03:12

      Sent us, me and Jesse, custom hats for the show, so I figured we'd do this final segment in the hats. If you're, uh, listening instead of watching, you can check this out on YouTube. There we go. There we go.

   4. SPSpeaker1:03:29

      That looks good.

   5. CNCal Newport1:03:30

      Yeah. Looking great here. All right. So for those who are listening, we have on stylish VBLCCP trucker hats. Of course, we know what that means. Value-based lifestyle-centric career planning. That is the way that we here at the Deep Questions podcast think about career choices. Uh, these hats are awesome.

   6. SPSpeaker1:03:49

      Yeah.

   7. CNCal Newport1:03:50

      I mean, uh, I'm not a fashion guru, but I think it, I think these look pretty sharp.

   8. SPSpeaker1:03:55

      [laughs]

   9. CNCal Newport1:03:56

      It does. It kinda seems like we're probably, uh... You know, these hats are from our time spent running, like, a state committee in the old Soviet Union.

   10. SPSpeaker1:04:05

       [laughs]

   11. CNCal Newport1:04:06

       Just looking at these abbreviations, that this is probably some sort of, like, Russian abbreviation for, like, the State Crop Distribution Socialist Republic, you know, advisory committee.

   12. SPSpeaker1:04:16

       [laughs]

   13. CNCal Newport1:04:17

       But that's cool.

   14. SPSpeaker1:04:18

       Yeah.

   15. CNCal Newport1:04:18

       There's kinda like a retroness to that. All right. So we're gonna, we're gonna harness this VBLCCP energy as we do the books I read in August 2024. All right. This first one's a little weird. Jesse, I'm just gonna preface this by saying I... My wife, right, we're on vacation. She was reading it, and I... We were in the woods somewhere. I was like, "I'll read that." It was, uh, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies written by Heather Fawcett. It's a fantasy book. I guess maybe, like, a little bit of a romance book, but not... I don't really know these genres very well. Um, I actually like the first two-thirds in particular. Like, the... It's a alternative timeline world. I couldn't really tell when this took place. I finally found some clues that it must have been 20th century or equivalent because they mention movies at some point.

   16. SPSpeaker1:05:03

       Mm-hmm.

   17. CNCal Newport1:05:03

       But it's kind of like a timeless... Uh, it's a professor... It posits a world where fairies exist, and it follows a professor who is like... who studies fairies. Like, they've... This is just a subject that people study. And she goes to, like, this small, uh, town in a, a country that doesn't really exist up in Scandinavia somewhere, like, and, and, um, stuff ensues. I actually kinda like the world-building because I'm a professor of there being a whole academic discipline that studies, like, these beings. And it's a little bit dark and a little bit whatever. Um, I thought it went a little bit... Look, I'm not a big novel reader, so take this with a grain of salt. Uh, once it actually got past, like, you know, we're... We, we see hints of this and we're kinda studying this, once they're actually like, "We're in a fairy world," I felt like it was just whatever, anything goes, and everything's magic and whatever, right? Like, and then that, that kinda lost me, right? That world-building lost me. But I thought it was a... I enjoyed it. I don't read a lot of books like this. I didn't realize all these books always have, like, a romance core, too.

   18. SPSpeaker1:06:01

       Oh, really?

   19. CNCal Newport1:06:02

       Yeah. Yeah. Um, so she's... Her s- fellow professor who, spoiler alert, is part magic or something. They, you know, uh, have a love affair. I thought it was good, though. I thought it was good. All right. Then I read Annie, uh, Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War. Man, there's a book right there. I love when nonfiction writers do something different with form and format. And what Jacobsen did, it is a compelling book to... It's a hard-to-put-down book. She basically did a bunch of research. It's a nonfiction book. I think Amazon y- I think Amazon chose it. You know they have their best of the... best books of the year so far. And, you know, Slow Productivity was chosen as the best business and leadership book of 2024 so far. I think this was chosen as the best just overall nonfiction book-

   20. SPSpeaker1:06:48

       Mm-hmm

   21. CNCal Newport1:06:49

       ... of 2024 so far. What she did is a lot of research on, uh, what is the US's actual, like, nuclear war plans and procedures and protocols. Like, how does this work? Who makes the decisions? Where are the various people? What happens if this gets blown up? Where are the missiles? And then the book just walks through... It takes place largely in, like, 12 minutes. It walks through global thermonuclear war breaking out from the point of view of, like, the American. Okay, so this person, we see this on the radar, and the president goes here, and then these get blown, then this happens, and we fire these missiles, and it... And, and the whole world gets blown up in the end. So it's, like, a really kind of scary book, but she's really trying to nail the details straight of, like, here's how this would work. Here's the dec- you pull out this caper, you would type in these things. These people at this base underground here would be involved in this, and she works the whole thing out. Spoiler alert, it does not go well for us in Washington, DC, so we get hit by a thermonuclear warhead early on in the book.

   22. SPSpeaker1:07:46

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CNCal Newport1:07:46

       And where we are right now, we're not gonna do well.

   24. SPSpeaker1:07:49

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CNCal Newport1:07:49

       Our skin would catch on fire. So this would not be good for us. Uh, there was one... I got a nitpick. There is one nitpick where I was like, "This doesn't seem..." Well, okay, I have two nitpicks.

   26. SPSpeaker1:08:03

       Let's hear 'em.

   27. CNCal Newport1:08:03

       Two nitpicks. Okay. By the way, my family did terribly in this. Um, [laughs] so the, the first two missiles hit Washington, DC, where me and my two sisters live. The second missile hit the, uh, Diablo Canyon nuclear facility, uh, in Central California coast. My brother works at that nuclear power plant. So the first two missiles killed my whole family. Uh, [laughs] so we did, we didn't do well. We didn't do well in that book. All right, here's my two nitpicks. One, so it's mainly very well-researched, but I can tell the parts where she ca- you know, glossed over. Um, one, when she went to the, the Boomer class, the missile subs, so our missile subs fired missiles at the end, right?

   28. SPSpeaker1:08:45

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CNCal Newport1:08:46

       Um, she... So these would be, like, an Ohio class probably, uh, missile sub. I know a lot about subs. My brother was on subs. She talks about when the, the order comes in for firing the missiles, that alarm bells start wailing on the sub. "It's missile launch time. It's missile launch time." There's... They don't do alarm bells on subs. The whole point is that the sub is supposed to be as quiet as possible. They wear sneakers on these things just to try to make sure that, like, their footsteps make sound. They're not gonna have a klaxon bell sound, uh, to tell the submariners it's time to fire missiles. They w- because the whole point is you fire these missiles, and they're supposed to go back under and not be detected, so that was not true. Then the other thing I didn't understand is the president's on Marine Two, right? So he's on the, um, or Marine One, the helicopter, right? And they're rushing away from the White House to try to get to Mount Storm because the, they know the, the missile's coming for, uh, the White House, and he's, there's a particular Secret Service team that's with him that's responsible for getting them there. And they're, they're doing the math and being like, "We're not gonna get... I don't think we're gonna get far enough away from the explosion for, like, the... At least the electromagnetic pulse is gonna, might take out this helicopter." Um, so what do they do? Like, "We're gonna put a parachute on the president and one of the Secret Service members, and we'll jump. We'll parachute out over Maryland." Well, here's my nitpick. Why not just land the helicopter? Why not just be like, "What, what we'll do is we'll just land the helicopter on a field, and, uh, if it does disable us, it's better that we landed the helicopter than we parachuted the president out. And if it doesn't, we can take off again and keep going." Like, why would you parachute out of the helicopter because you were worried that... Why not just land the helicopter? [laughs] So I di- that, that part... [laughs] But anyways, I read this book in one day, so it's, it's a, uh-

   30. SPSpeaker1:10:32

       I'm gonna have to borrow it.

Episode duration: 1:16:10