Why You Never Have Enough Time - 3 Time Management Skills To Master | Cal Newport

Cal Newport 0:00 So one of the biggest complaints I hear from people when it comes to the struggle to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world is that they don't feel like they have enough time to accomplish the things that are really important to them. Maybe, for example, you want to master some sort of difficult new skill in work, which would then allow you to switch over to freelance work, which would then allow you to work eight months a year and take the, the other four months and travel the world and surf. Or maybe you're trying to get back in your non-professional life into excellent shape. You want to start competing again in amateur athletic competitions, but you just don't have the time. These key moves that could really unlock a deeper life, you just never feel like you have the time to actually get them done. Today, I want to talk about how to fix that problem. All right. So what I'm gonna do is identify three what I call time destroyers, so forces you might not be aware of that is sapping your ability to find time for important priorities in your schedule each week. We'll explain how they work and then offer concrete advice for how to combat them. All right. Let me just say before we get going, um, a lot of these ideas actually come from my new book, Slow Productivity. Uh, if you haven't gotten this book, you probably should because it goes into more detail on a lot of the stuff we're talking about. All right, time destroyer number one, overhead tax. See, one of the biggest things that's making your schedule difficult is not the work you're doing on your projects and commitments. It's the administrative overhead generated by those projects and commitments. Now, what I mean by administrative overhead is the emails, it's the instant messages, it's the meetings, it's the quick check-ins that surround your work on your projects and initiatives. These are the things that grab your time in a way that is much more destructive than just, say, concurrent hours spent cranking on a particular problem. So when you have enough overhead tax, so the, the... You're working on enough things to generate overhead tax. When you have enough overhead tax that it crosses a certain threshold of your day, so a certain percentage of your time now is just servicing projects instead of working on them. There's a threshold I call the excessive overhead threshold. When you pass that, disaster follows. Your work becomes mind-numbing, it becomes fatiguing, and it becomes exhausting. So if you have a sufficient amount of overhead tax in your day and you pass the excessive overhead threshold, it becomes very difficult to make progress on non-urgent but important priorities. All right? So we have to make sure that you do not cross the excessive overhead threshold. A lot of ideas about what you can do about this. I'll go through this really quickly. Um, number one, say no to more things. Everything you say yes to brings with it some overhead tax. This aggregates. If you do not want this sum to get past that excessive threshold, you can't add as many things onto your plate, so you have to be more confident saying no to things. I think we often overestimate in our mind what's gonna happen when we say no. We often, in our mind's eye, imagine that this colleague who just came to us to ask if we would jump on this committee or whatever had just spent the last six hours desperately wanting, thinking about it, desperately saying like, "What's gonna happen? I hope Cal says yes. My whole life depends on this." That like when he left work for that work this morning, he said to his wife like, "Wish me luck," or, "We really need Cal to say yes to this." That like on the way to work, everyone he saw was like, "Hey, good luck today getting Cal to say yes to this." So if you say no, it's gonna be some disaster. The reality is he like remembered to ask you that two minutes before and will forget you said no two minutes after. So say no to more things. Two, have quotas. For certain types of work that's important that you do and it comes up again and again, have quotas. I do this, but I don't do more than this many. I speak, but I don't do more than one speaking event a month. I do reviews, but I don't review more than four papers a semester. I can join working groups, uh, at my company, but I only can be on one working group at a time. So you set quotas. So you're still doing the things that are important, but you're not doing too many of them because it's very easy. If you say one of these activities is important, it's easy then to never say no. You just say, "Well, wait a second. It's important that I sit on working groups. It's important that I review papers. So how can I say no?" And then you say yes to so many that the overhead tax overwhelms you. So quotas is a way to still do the things that are important, but do it at a level that is reasonable. Uh, a big idea we've talked about several t- idea- times now on the show and I really detail in Slow Productivity is differentiate between projects that you're actively working on versus projects that you're waiting to work on. So these are the things you've said yes to. But among the things you've said yes to, only designate two or three to be actively receiving your attention. Everything else you're waiting on. Only, uh, tolerate overhead tax for the active projects. You'll do emails and meetings and calls and make progress. The other things are waiting, and when you finish one of these projects that you're actively working on, you pull in something new from the waiting list. So you may have said yes to ten projects, but only two or three of them are generating overhead tax at the same time. So you don't have to say no to people, but you can prevent tripping over the excessive overhead threshold. Now, the key is if someone tries to generate some administrative overhead for something that's in the waiting queue, you just say to them, "Oh, I'm not working on that yet." In fact, you can point them towards your queue. Put it in a shared document. Here's the things I'm actively working on. Here's the ordered queue of things I'm waiting to work on. Um, uh, you can see exactly where you are in that order, and as soon as it gets to the top of the list, I'll pull it over, and I'll let you know, and we can have calls and meetings, and we'll take care of it. But I only do overhead on the stuff I'm actively working on. So it's a way that if you can't say no, you can still reduce overhead tax. Finally, here's a new idea. Consider dedicating different roles to different days. A lot of people in their job implicitly have multiple roles that they do. There's maybe some managerial role, there's a project lead role, there's a role they do, uh, with an unrelated responsibility around client management that you have multiple roles at your job. Professors often have roles as researchers, teachers, and, um, service-oriented department members. These are, like, different roles with different types of work. Consider dedicating different days to different roles. Oh, Wednesday is my day I work on this role, so I'm only dealing with administrative overhead related to that role on this day. A lot of professors, for example, will make the days they teach days that they dedicate entirely to the teaching role. So they'll answer emails and have meetings and get into it, but they don't engage in administrative overhead related to their courses on the other days. So by just consolidating administrative overhead to particular days, you prevent any one day from having everything fall on your head. Again, you're kind of hacking the excessive overhead threshold here. You're not reducing the number of, uh, things that are generating overhead, but you're preventing all this overhead from hitting you all at once. All right. Time destroyer number two, schedule fragmentation. So we often think that the key resource for getting things done, for making progress on things that are important to us, is the amount of time we have available to do it, right? So you would think what matters is when I look at my week and I've already got a bunch of stuff scheduled, so I should just count up the minutes that are unscheduled, and if as long as I have enough time there, I can dedicate that to making progress on non-urgent but important priorities, the stuff that you need to make your deep life deep. That's not the right metric though. Once you understand how the human mind works, you realize the right metric is actually non-trivially length blocks of undistracted time. That is the key unit that transforms to useful progress. You give me an hour of uninterrupted time, I can make progress on something. You give me six 10-minute blocks that are highly distracted and in between other things going on, that's useless to me. That doesn't add up to the same as having 60 uninterrupted minutes to actually work on something. So the actual, uh, s- the, the, the, the fragmentation of your schedule matters just as much as the amount of free time that you actually find in that schedule. So the problem, why do we end up with schedules that are fragmented? Well, we, we tend to have no constraints on how we schedule things. If there's an incoming request, we typically, uh, think about this as here's the game. There's an incoming request. The game is won if we can find a time that works for both of us. So any time that is currently free when an incoming request comes in is fair game for scheduling that request. As a result, you're essentially simulating a random distribution of meetings and appointments on your free time throughout the week. It's, it's as if, for example, you put up a, um, a big calendar on your wall with a, a space for every free hour, and you started throwing darts at it, and where those darts hit is where you're putting meetings. You're getting a sort of uniform distribution to use a statistical term. Well, the thing about uniform distributions is you're unlikely to have lots of long swaths of uninterrupted time, right, because things are gonna be more evenly spread out. So if you have no constraints about how you schedule things, you're gonna really fragment your schedule, and so the free time you do have is going to be highly unusable. So what's the solutions here? One, you have to constrain that spray. Do not make every free minute equally available for scheduling meetings. You need more constraints on it. There's lots of ways to do this. Here's one way. I don't schedule meetings during the first two and a half hours of the day. Okay, now you know that time will always be free for making progress on things. Here's another way. I don't do meetings on Mondays, so now you know your Mondays are going to be free. Uh, here's another thing. This type of scheduling, like this type of meeting I'm commonly asked to do, I only do these on these afternoons. This type of thing I'm often asked to do, um, I only do them on these days, right? Uh, another way to constrain spray, and this is another idea from slow productivity, is the, the one for you, one for me model. For every hour of time I schedule for a given week, I will immediately find another hour to schedule to protect. Therefore, there can't be any more than a 50/50 ratio of free time to schedule time, and more importantly, because you're scheduling free time blocks of equal duration to the meetings you just scheduled, they're not fragmented. If I schedule a 90-minute meeting, I'm protecting a 90-minute uninterrupted free time block, so it right away gets rid of the fragmentation. You can of course adjust that ratio. You know, for every hour of meeting, I do 30 minutes of protected time, or you could go the other way. For every hour of meetings, I do two hours of protected time. It just depends on how much free time you need for your job. The final thing I'd recommend here is post-meeting processing blocks. So it's not just about is the time of a large block of time free, it's also how undistracted are you during that time. A big source of distraction is I had this meeting till 3:00. I have another meeting at 4:00, and I'm trying to work on a non-urgent but important priority in between. A common problem is I go straight from that 3:00 meeting into that free time to try to work, but there was a lot of things discussed in that meeting that need to be processed. There's things I committed to do. There's tasks I need to get on my task list. There's follow-up emails I need to make, and that's just sitting in my head, pulling at my attention while I'm trying to work in this one free hour I have on something that's, uh, non-urgent but important. Even worse, let's say you stack three of these meetings in a row back to back to back, and then you have some free time and you're gonna make progress on a, a important project there. Well, if you stack these meetings back to back, the commitments and information from the first meeting stays in your head as you move to the second meeting, which those commitments then mix with those first ones as you move to the third meeting, and now by the time you're leaving these meetings, your brain is calling uncle. It's like, oh my God, there's all of these things we're trying to keep track of. I'm so stressed. And you know what you're gonna do? Your brain's going, let's just go check email. So the easiest thing you can do to reduce the distraction impact of meetings is to add ten to fifteen minutes on your calendar to the end of every meeting. So you know, typically you don't need a full hour for meetings. Just tell people, "Let's do forty-five minutes." Make the last fifteen minutes a processing block so you can just easily schedule the full hour. In the last fifteen minutes, that, that processing block, take care of everything you just discussed. Any follow-up messaging you need to do, do it right then. Any tasks that need to get scheduled, put them into your task system. Any new deadlines this has generated, put them on your calendar. You wanna close every open loop spawned by that meeting before that scheduled time is done. This greatly reduces the distraction impact of these meetings and allows you to make better use of the time that remains. 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. All right. Time destroyer number three, hive mind collaboration. So one of the biggest generators of non-focus, so one of the biggest generators of distraction, is the need to keep checking in on ongoing conversations, that I have five different collaborative projects underway where we're trying to figure things out, it's relatively time sensitive, and we're figuring this out with back and forth email messages or back and forth Slack messages. Once I have an ongoing time sensitive back and forth digital message exchange, I now have to check those channels all the time because I need to see your next message in time to respond to it, so you can respond to that, and I can respond to that, and we can finish this issue before the day is over. And now you've destroyed your ability to make work on important things because every time you have to check that chat channel or inbox, you're inducing a context shift, you're seeing distractions that are unrelated to what you're working on. Your brain is going to go in ten or fifteen different directions. It's gonna run out of steam quickly. All right? So, uh, we can reduce some of this with our first idea, which was reduce the number of things you're working on, so there's just less of these, less things generating email. Sure. We can protect time like we just talked about. But three, for the things that remain, the work that we are doing, it is ongoing, it is an active project. Find better ways to collaborate that don't require unscheduled messages that you have to read and respond to quickly. You have to think about unscheduled messages that require responses as a productivity poison. It's the same as someone coming in and making you take a shot of whiskey in terms of what is the impact going to be over time on your ability to actually concentrate and do good work. You really have to think about it that way. All right. So how do we get rid of unscheduled messages that require urgent responses for the projects that we have to work on? Well, here's a few ideas. Number one, I talk about this all the time. You need office hours. You need regular time most days. Your phone is on. You have a Zoom room open. Your office door is open. Anything that requires a moderate amount of back and forth, something that's gonna generate like four messages that you're gonna have to exchange back and forth that day, just tell the person, "Grab me whenever it's convenient at my next office hours. I'm here, and we'll figure it out." Right? This is not about reducing the total amount of time you spend talking about things, right? Because you have a whole hour, let's say, put aside for office hours, and you have, let's say, four conversations that are tackled in those office hours. The total amount of time it would have taken to maybe send emails back and forth for those four things might be like ten minutes, but now you're putting aside a full hour. But that trade-off is absolutely worth it because the cost is not how long does it take you to write the four email messages that was required to coordinate this without office hours. The real cost is the context shifts required surrounding those emails, the twenty-five times you had to check your inbox waiting for the message to come back, the twenty minutes it takes to get your concentration back after each of those checks. This adds up for much, much more time than just having a concentrated hour where you take care of a lot of back and forths all at once. If you work in a team, have docket clearing meetings two or three times a week, thirty to forty-five minutes. The whole team comes together. You say, "We have this shared document, which since the last meeting, when anything came up that was relevant to this team, questions, who's working on this, oh my God, I'm worried about this, hey, a client wrote about this, what are we gonna do?" You add it to the shared document that I call a docket. At the docket clearing meeting, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You just go through this document, everything. Can we handle it right now? Let's do it. Can we ignore this? Let's ignore this. Does someone need to take this? All right, put it on your task list right now. Done. You go through until that docket is clear, and then the meeting's over. This is not a generic standing meeting. This is not a generic check-in meeting. This is a not of like, "Hey, how's everyone's kids doing? Let's, like, drink some coffee." It's let's clear this docket as fast as possible. This now allows you everything that you put onto that docket and handled in a docket clearing meeting would have otherwise generated a non-trivial number of these unscheduled back and forth messages that require responses. So again, we're, we're squashing that productivity poison. Finally, this is an idea that goes all the way back to my book, Deep Work, process centric emailing. Right? When you, when you have something you need to do with someone else, you need something from someone else, the temptation in the moment is what's the quickest thing I can do right now to get this off my plate? And that's typically writing like a pretty vague, fast email that, yes, in the moment temporarily takes that off your plate but does not solve the problem. Like there's a report, uh, that you need to submit to a client. You're gonna need to get some feedback from someone else. In the moment, you're like, "I just wanna... I have so many things I'm doing. I wanna get this off my plate." You might just be like, "Hey, can you help give me feedback on this? Send." Well, there's a lot more emails to come Right? And they'll be like, "Well, yeah, what do you need?" And you're like, "Okay, well, what do you think about this?" And they won't write back. And like, "Hey, what's going on with this?" And they're like, "Here's some thoughts." Like, "What about over here?" We're now like 10 or 15 emails back and forth, but this, this thing has to go out by Friday and it's Monday, so you're gonna have to, like, check your inbox pretty furiously to make sure it gets done. The alternative is process-centric emailing. Take a beat and say, "I'm gonna figure out how we should collaborate on this, and I am gonna describe in my initial email to you, this is how we are gonna collaborate on this, and it's gonna be a process that I'm gonna design to try to minimize unscheduled messages." Takes more time to write and send that message, but you might save yourself 50 to 60 inbox checks down the line because of it, which is a, a huge cognitive burden. So, so, like, let's go back to this report example. A process-centric email might be like, "Okay, here's what's going on. There's this report I gotta get to the client. I gotta get to it by Friday. There's these sections that I don't know all the details, so I'm gonna need to... need your help on this. Here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to write a draft of this report, um, and I will, uh, email you this drafted report by Tuesday, close of business. I have time on my calendar when I'm gonna write it. You don't need to reply to the email. You, you just have it by Tuesday, close of business. Go through and here are the type of edits I'm looking for, X, Y, and Z. Okay? For this type of edit, here's what I need from you, the replacement numbers. For this type of edit, what I need from you is, like, a definitive word. Don't say... Don't cut this, don't put this in. And finally, uh, I need whatever. If I'm missing a key point that you know about, um, I need you to just add that text directly to the document. Okay? Uh, work on this Wednesday, work on this Thursday. I'm going to assume what- whatever version of this document is in this, uh, put in the shared folder, I'm gonna grab that at the, the close of business Thursday, and I'm gonna do my final edit, uh, I'll polish and submit. Okay? That's the plan. I think this will work well. I've spelled this out step by step with bol head- bold headers. Um, if there's anything, like, if there's something about this not gonna work or whatever, just give me a call." Boom, send. So now you have specified a process by which you're gonna get the information you need, um, the, the coordination of, like, when this is ready, when people are gonna get it. This is all just worked out with timelines and schedules, so there's no actual messaging that has to be done, and you are now gonna get from here to that report being submitted without having to receive a single message. This process is now gonna generate zero inbox checks except for, you know, you're sending the file in this, to the other person in this case. That's process-centric emailing. And the key is, uh, make it easier to just run with the project than it is for them to change it. So that's why you, you give a, a higher friction, uh, release valve. Like, "Well, you can call me, uh, you can call me or call me during these times if you need to change things." And most people will be like, "Oh, no. Okay, shoot. What do I have to do? All right, fine. Let me just do that." Right? Process-centric emailing. Again, we often count the wrong things. We count the time required to write that message and say, "I don't want to spend that time," but we don't count the massive cost of having to check our inbox 15 times for an ongoing conversation that will happen if we don't write that message. So we have to think about unscheduled messages that require responses as a productivity poison. All right, so here's how you get your time back. Let's just summarize these real quick. Um, A, you got to minimize overhead tax. If you have... your overhead tax crosses an excessive threshold, your ability to do anything but react and be stressed is impossible. This is a critical, critical threshold, so you have to reduce what you're working on, consolidate what you're working on to keep that tax under the threshold. Two, you have to defragment your schedule. If your schedule is too fragmented, you just don't have enough undistracted time to actually make progress on what matters, so you have to start protecting time, and we talked about a lot of different strategies for doing that. Uh, and you got to clean up time by doing things like post-meeting processing. And finally, you have to resist the hyperactive hive mind style of collaboration. Ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messaging is a terrible way to coordinate or collaborate. You want to avoid that like poison. So office hours, doc clearing meeting, process-centric emails. You should be willing to do almost anything. Maybe I have to walk across fire and fight an alligator. If that's what I have to do to prevent this from having to just be emails back and forth all day, you should seriously consider doing that. That's how, that's how much you should fear having to have unscheduled emails be something that you have to deal with all day long. All right, so that's how you find time, right? It's not, it's not always a dramatic change has to happen to your circumstances. Your same job with your same responsibilities can have a vastly different subjective impact on your sense of free time to make progress on non-urgent things, depending on how you approach it. Work on those three time destroyers, and that schedule's gonna feel way more expansive. There we go. Time destroyers, Jesse.

Speaker 23:22 You're big into schedule fragmentation in terms of s- dedicating writing time in the mornings, right?

Cal Newport 23:28 Yeah, that's a big thing I do, uh, is I protect writing time in the morning. I just, I just don't do things in the morning. And then once you have a, once you have a rule, it's pretty simple. Now, here's the thing. Um, we imagine, like when it comes to things like constraints on when we schedule meetings, we imagine two things that are false. First, people like to imagine the scenario in which everyone else says yes to every suggestion. That everyone else you work with, when the boss says, "Hey, can you meet on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon?" They always say yes, and that you're this huge outlier because you say, "Well, that time doesn't work, but how about these times?" Here's the reality. People say no all the time. They have busy schedules, right? Finding a meeting time often requires several different options. So it is not unusual or noteworthy that you're saying, "Well, that time doesn't work, but these times do." It doesn't seem obstinate. It doesn't seem like you're not available. No one's noticing. All right, two, the other scenario that people invent in their mind is that the various people who are trying to schedule things on your calendar throughout the week, like, "Hey, can we meet? Can we jump on a call?" All get together And they have a big whiteboard with a picture of you on it, and there's yarn going from it to other things, and they're tracking really carefully like, "When did you get, when did you get a no from Cal? What about you?" And they're staring at this, and they're smoking pipes. And they're like, "I don't think he's doing meetings in the morning." And then, uh, one of the people stands up and says, "How dare he?" And then, like, another person in the corner sort of like Quint from, from Jaws, when he's sitting in the corner says, "I say we go get him." And then they're all gonna come and get you. That no one is tracking. No one knows. They're like there all day long. There's meetings, and yes, no, and trying to make things work. They don't know. They don't see the patterns in your nos. They don't care about how you organize yourself. Now, the flip side of this is don't tell people. No one, no one cares. Don't make them care. Don't... Oh, for God, God forbid, don't write a Tim Ferriss autoresponder. Don't try to explain your scheduling philosophy to everyone that comes to you. Don't preemptively, defensively be like, "I don't meet on mornings, and here's why, because you bastards are taking up all my time." Then you're giving someone something to react to. Don't explain it, just do it. No one's paying attention to you. As long as you're offering plenty of times to have meetings, they don't, they're not gonna notice patterns about the times that you say no. All right, well, we got some good questions about this type of stuff, but first, let's hear from a sponsor. [whooshing sound] This message is sponsored by Greenlight. 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It's the one I trust. Uh, it's easy once you s- You can set up on any of your devices. You just turn it on and just use all your apps and web browsers like normal. It's just happening seamlessly in the background. They have servers around the world, so wherever you are, there's probably a server nearby that you can connect to. They have a lot of throughput bandwidth, so the connections are fast. You don't even know that you're using it. Uh, they're very highly rated because it works well. All right, so you gotta use a VPN, and I suggest that you use ExpressVPN. Again, your phone, laptop, tablet, and more it'll work on. Number one. It is rated number one by reviewers like CNET and The Verge. So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S vpn.com/deep, and you can get an extra three months free. Expressvpn.com/deep. All right, let's do some questions.

Speaker 31:04 First question is from the Newportian Scrum Master. In episode 318, you discuss how knowledge workers should consider taking breaks during the week because they're paid for creating rather than cranking. Do you have any insight on how these principles might apply to a Scrum Agile development team? In these frameworks, the team as a whole sets goals for the end of a sprint.

Cal Newport 31:25 Well, if run correctly, Agile should be very compatible with these ideas of, of having some variation in your day, even being able to take a, a, a multi-hour break without it being a problem, right? The reason is, when you're doing a sprint in an Agile methodology like Scrum, you're focused on one thing. "Okay, we're working on adding this feature to the software, and that's what we're doing." This means you don't have the, the seven or eight ongoing initiatives that are each generating their own hyperactive hive mind collaboration, which often ties people that need to be connected all the time. No, no, you're just working on one thing, so you, so you're not tied to, "I need to be in, like, my inbox or chat channel, um, all the time dealing with 10 things." But if you're just working on one thing, how many hours a day can you actually, like, really be working hard on that thing? And it's, that's not eight. In my book, I think this was in my book A World Without Email, I talked about this methodology called extreme programming where you pair program, you sit two people at the same monitor, and it's full-out concentration, um, and they can only get, like, five hours of work max. And at first, they talk about, uh, these organizations, how their, their new employees have to go home and take a nap. It's that mentally exhausting. Like, if you're really giving something your full insight, it's really, uh, mentally exhausting. So this idea that, like, from 9:00 to 5:00 you're sitting there locked in writing great code is just not realistic. So if you're sprinting, so you're only working on one thing, and this thing is hard, you're gonna have to take some breaks to titrate your concentration. It really shouldn't matter if, like, two hours in here you're not working on it. Now, if your sprints are so tight that, that there's no time to do that, then your, your sprints are too tight. Like, a, a good sprint, we should... We're all working on this thing. We're working on it hard. It's not taking up every hour of the day 'cause that's impossible. Then we get it done, and we move on to the next thing. So, um, I think Agile done right should be very compatible with some of these slow productivity ideas. All right, what do we got next?

Speaker 33:21 Next question is from Joe. I'm working

Speaker 33:24 on my thesis, holding a student job, and learning the local language as I'm not a native. I also have to do household tasks. I find planning my days a major challenge. My supervisors are scattered, and so things can be unplanned. I also find that after 6:00 PM, I'm usually too drained to study or focus on any additional task, including cooking dinner. How can I better structure my days?

Cal Newport 33:45 Well, Joe, you need to move your thesis work to first thing. This tends to work very well. Uh, do two to three hours first thing. This might have to be early if you have a student job that starts somewhat in the morning, but just two to three hours every day. You want the, the compound interest of persistent effort is what you're looking for here. You want to avoid the typical sort of pre-graduate student mentality of work is something that happens in big inspired bursts at night. Like, that's not gonna work. You're not an undergraduate anymore. So three hours first thing in the morning, even if this means you have to s- you know, do s- 6:30 to 9:30 AM. All right? Make very persistent progress. With your un- uh, your disorganized supervisor, have a weekly meeting set up, and you take the reins of organizing these meetings. You come to your advisor, uh, "Here's what I'm working on now. I'm gonna deliver you this draft, uh, by this meeting, and then here's the notes I need from you for the next meeting." You basically just have to organize their life for them. This is common with academics. Like, sometimes you have to just organize their life for them because they themselves are too disorganized. Um, so y- y- you wanna take, you don't want, uh, you wanna take out the critical path just waiting for the supervisor to be more organized. So you're, you're, you're working in the morning. You have your job. Then you need a really crystal clear schedule shutdown complete, shutdown ritual. Work is done. Now I'm in non-work time. You gotta, you gotta treat that psychologically very different. I invented the shutdown ritual in response to working on my doctoral dissertation because, uh, that really has a way, just being in the middle of such a, um, a complicated long project, it really gets its hooks into your mind, and all your mind wants to do is keep thinking about it, so it's really important to have the shutdown ritual. Now your evenings are just non-work time. And what do you wanna do with your non-work time? Well, I guess you could just, like, sit around and do nothing, but what you're gonna find is if you've really shut down your work, like, I don't know, like, I'll make an interesting dinner today, or I'm gonna go, like, for a walk, or I'm gonna, like, tackle this task today. You get kind of like a clean slate when you psychologically transition from work to non-work time. There's a, there's a classic book about this, Arnold Bennett's How to Live in Twenty-Four Hours a day, which came out in the early 20th century, where he basically argues you have eight hours of work, you have eight hours of sleep. Treat your eight hours in between as, like, you, uh, a different life, like that you're a, a gentleman patrician that, that just has landed, you're a landed gentry and you just have to... You can control what you wanna do with your time and, and, like, treat it not as recovery from work but as, like, your time to whatever. Read poetry. You know, he had, he had pretty, uh, kind of elitist ideas of what to do with that time. But you, you treat that time, if you can shut down your work, that's, like, a really interesting time. You could do some chores. You can do some restorative stuff. You can do some exploration. And really keep, I would say, balance those two things really well in the evening. Chores plus things that are restorative and interesting. And that begins to, like, really change your sense of the evenings to, like, something, again, that's, like, regenerating and rejuvenating you and not just, uh, psychologically as this time to, to, to recuperate. Because honestly, working on your dissertation, student job, this is not the salt mines. It's also not, uh, you're not, like, in one, uh, uh, the Apollo mission trying to save Apollo 13. Like, your mind will be okay. [laughs] You're, you're not exhausted beyond all repair if you do that. The final thing I want to warn you against is do not descend down the rabbit hole of what I call a dissertation hell mindset. There, there's a whole sort of online subcommunity for, that for various reasons that I have a lot of theories on, but I don't want to get into. For various reasons, they, they want to recast the process of working on a doctoral dissertation as some sort of, um, uh, almost, like, impossibly demanding, traumatic, terrible experience. And they, and they, uh, egg each other on online about how terrible it is. And this is, uh, this is death for motivation. And it, it's also misguided. It's not that hard. All right? Trust me. There's much harder things in life. There's much harder jobs. So avoid the whole dissertation hell sort of subculture out there. It's like this is... You're, you're working on this. It's a few hours a day. Take your time. You don't have to finish it this month. You know, it's gonna take the time it's gonna take. Compound interest of accomplishment. Get that done first. Do your job. Shut it off. Treat your evening as, like, a completely different life. Balance restorative and regenerative and fun with chores. I think you'll be fine. I think you'll be fine. I used to... Jesse, I used to go down that rabbit hole back when I was writing just for students. Um, and there was this really strong online dissertation hell community, and there's so many weird things going on psychologically with these people. I mean, I, I... They had to somehow cast this thing, and most of these were people who were, like, full-time doctoral students writing a dissertation on, like, no particular deadlines or timescales. I mean, this is, like, probably the easiest year of all their life to follow compared with the difficulties of, like, a real job, a family, health issues, whatever. And it would just, um, insistently try to recast this as if they just arrived at the gulag-

Speaker 38:54 [laughs]

Cal Newport 38:55 ... you know, and, like, it's survival every day, or like they're trying to, you know, again, save the Apollo 13 from cr- if they don't figure out how to, like, get the carbon dioxide scrubbed, Jim Lovell's gonna die or whatever, right? I mean, it's, it was a, a whole crazy subculture.

Speaker 39:12 So these had to be on blogs 'cause it was-

Cal Newport 39:14 It was all blogs.

Speaker 39:15 Yeah.

Cal Newport 39:15 Yeah. So I'm assuming... You know, I don't use social media, so I don't know. I'm assuming that this-

Speaker 39:20 It's worse.

Cal Newport 39:20 It's probably worse.

Speaker 39:21 Yeah. [laughs] God.

Cal Newport 39:21 And it's probably on TikTok, um, which is probably worse, but yeah, back then it was blogs.

Cal Newport 39:26 All right, who do we got next?

Speaker 39:27 Next question is from Raphael. "I have two questions about the calendar. First, what is the best frequency to check it, and second, what is the best tool to do it, desktop, screen, phone, or print it out?"

Cal Newport 39:39 Uh, I mean, use an electronic calendar. When you check it, you just look at it. Like, there's nothing tricky here. Tool's not gonna help. Um, you're checking your calendar. There's, there's two major occasions on which you're checking your calendar. The first and most frequent is when you're building your daily plan. So if you subscribe to multiscale planning, you are, every day, you are building a plan for your day. I suggest doing time block planning, where you're actually giving every minute of your day a job as opposed to going through your day in a reactive methods. "Hey, what's next?" or, "What do I want to work on next?" Um, I, I keep my daily time block plan on paper. I mean, I, I sell my own time block planner. I use that. I have boxes full of them, okay? Uh, but you can do it on whatever format you want to use it on. Um, so when you create your daily time block plan, you are transferring things on your calendar onto that plan. So any meetings or appointments that are on your calendar, you are drawing physically onto your time block plan, and then you're blocking all the remaining time as well. So you're checking your calendar when you do that. Also, when you're doing your daily plan, the other thing you're gonna check for on your calendar is deadlines. I'm often a heavy user, I use Google Calendar, of making use of all-day events which just show up at the top of your day, not as, like, on a particular time. I use those for deadlines and reminders. "Hey, deadline for getting this done today. Uh, I have, like, a book quote due today. Um, make sure the deadline for filing the reimbursement forms is today." So when I'm building my daily time block plan, I see those deadlines on my calendar, so I make sure in my daily time block plan I've blocked off time to deal with them. Um, I don't need to see my calendar again for the rest of that day because I now run my day off of the daily time block plan. The exception, of course, if during the course of your day, let's say you're checking your, your, you have a block or you're checking your email and you're trying to set up a meeting with someone. Well, yeah, then you'll go to your calendar to find what time's available. But I, I transfer from my calendar to my daily time block plan. I run my day off of that. The other context in which you're gonna check your calendar is, uh, every week. When you make your weekly plan, you look at your calendar for the whole week to get a sense of what time is free. Um, during your weekly plan, one of your primary goals is to try to put aside time on your calendar for, uh, important initiatives that aren't already on there. So you're like, "Okay, I really want to make progress this week on my book. Where do I have free time to work on my book? Why don't I protect that now on my calendar by putting pre-scheduled appointments to work on my book?" Now that time is protected, and when I get to those days and build my daily time block plan, I'll see them and integrate them automatically. During your weekly plan, you'll probably be frustrated that your schedule's too fragmented, so it's also a good time to try to defragment your schedule. So as you look at your calendar for the week ahead, you might be like, "You know what? Thursday morning is great. Like, I don't have stuff until noon. It would be a great time to, like, tackle this big, important project, except I have this, like, coffee out of office across town at 10:00 AM." That one thing is, is making Thursday morning unusable. I'm just gonna move that coffee I'm gonna move that coffee to drinks because now I've unlocked four consecutive hours and I can get this important thing that's in my, my, my strategic plan, get this done, right? Um, or you say, "I got these three meetings. I could probably consolidate those because it's the same people. We set them up at different times, but it's the same people and it's eating up this afternoon. Why don't I just tell the people, let's just make the first meeting a little bit longer, and that's gonna free up a two-hour block there. I kinda need that because I wanna fit this other thing in there." So in your weekly plan, you're not only surveying your calendar, but now you're kind of playing with it a little bit trying to make it better. So you're definitely gonna see your calendar at your weekly plan, you're gonna see your calendar every day when you build your, uh, daily plan, and you'll see your calendar when you're trying to schedule things. All right? In terms of checking it, how you check it, there's no magic here. It's, it's, yeah, Google Calendar, you look at it. You know, that's not a big deal. All right. What do we got next?

Speaker 43:37 Next question's from Bob. "I'm motivated by your monthly book updates to read more. I have multiple jobs and sometimes just don't hard- hardly any free time in a given day. On these days, does reading for 20 to 30 minutes actually do anything?"

Cal Newport 43:51 Well, I mean, first I'll say reading is good. So read. Have a reading habit. That's what's important. What that actually means in terms of number of pages read or number of books finished, that depends on a lot of things. That depends, uh, for example, on how much free time you have. It also depends on what you're reading, right? Like, I read at a much slower rate than, you know, like the, the, the typical sort of book club reader that reads primarily, like, what is the, uh... This is, like, a major driver of books in this country. Like, what novel is, like, making waves and being recommended as a good novel? Right? So, like, what I call book club readers. It's the, it's the, like, everyone in the, all the book clubs in the country are all gonna read, um, The Vastor Wilds because it's been told this is a good book. Like, fiction is often much faster, and you could go through a lot of those books. I read a lot of non-fiction. This is slower. I'm reading a book right now on settler colonialism. This goes slower than reading, like, the, the, I don't actually know these r- the Emil Henry, Emily Henry book or whatever, right? So don't get too caught up in the number of books. Get caught up in, am I a reader, am I not? That being said, here's what I want to say. Like, I, I'm a busy, I'm busy, right? I have, I have a few jobs, I have a bunch of kids, et cetera. A lot of volunteer positions. I do a lot of stuff. Um, I read five books a month, right? I don't think much about it. I'm not doing heroic or exceptional efforts to find time to read those books. What are the two things that seem to matter the most for reading quantity for me? Pick books in the moment I'm super, super psyched about. I have a very eclectic reading list. You hear it every month on the show. It's because in the moment I say, "This is a book, right now I'm, like, excited about this idea, so I wanna read this right now," or, "I wanna know more about this. I'm jazzed about it. I'm gonna read this." Uh, when you're excited about a book, you read it more. And this is different, again, I think, than, like, the book club model, which is everyone says this is the new good novel, so we all have to read this now. Like, that's a, like, that's a different, that's a fine relationship with books. But it's different than the way I do it. I read primarily non-fiction, and it's because I'm interested in this idea right now. Ooh, wouldn't it be cool to know more about it? It's relevant to other things I'm working on. I'm excited about the book. Okay? Two, uh, I don't use social media, right? I know that sounds like it really shouldn't be related, but people vastly underestimate the amount of time that is free that gets devoured trying to help the, the valuation of Mark Zuckerberg's stock holdings. People underestimate how much time gets eaten up by that. When your default for boredom is like, "Let me see what's on this screen," and it's hyper-palatable, that, that eats up all the, all the book time. I don't entertain myself that much on my phone. I mean, I punish myself with my phone, at least in recent days, because I, I follow the Washington Nationals losing four games in a row, and it makes me want to throw my phone out a window. I don't know why I punish myself that way. All right? Guys hit a ball. Uh, but I, you know, I don't have social media on there. I d- I don't watch YouTube on my phone, right? So my phone is pretty boring. You have more time than you think then. You're like, "Ah, I'm just gonna read a little bit while I wait for, like, w- my wife to get ready. We're gonna go out. There's, like, 20 minutes. Ah, just gonna, like, read a little bit." That adds up. At night it adds up. If you're looking at your phone at night, that's like two books a month right there. So read stuff that you're psyched about, not that, like, people say you're supposed to read. Uh, and don't use your phone for entertainment. [laughs] Like, you'd be surprised. You might get a lot more reading out of your, out of your time. It's true. The only thing I do in terms of, like, thinking about my five books a month is, uh, I don't like to finish too fa- Like, if I'm, if I'm kinda done early, I'll slow down or maybe, uh, switch to a bigger book to slow down. Like, the only thing I do is actually slow myself down. 'Cause I, you know, s- uh, sometimes in the summer I'll read six or seven books, but I don't wanna kinda get in the habit of that because I worry that I'm just gonna raise, like, my expectations for how much I'll read.

Speaker 47:54 [laughs]

Cal Newport 47:54 So I'll slow myself down. But I, I really don't think a lot about... I just kinda get there.

Speaker 47:59 I guess a lot of the books go by pretty quickly, too. For instance, that atomic, the nuclear war book, that's-

Cal Newport 48:06 That's a fast book

Speaker 48:07 ... it seems like.

Cal Newport 48:07 Did you read it?

Speaker 48:08 I'm in the process.

Cal Newport 48:09 It's a fast read, isn't it?

Speaker 48:10 Yeah, so.

Cal Newport 48:10 I read that in one day.

Speaker 48:11 Yeah.

Cal Newport 48:12 Yeah. Yeah, so some of these books do go fast. Some of the more intellectual ones go slow. Uh, we'll talk about it in, whenever we do the next book update. But there was a, I've been working on this for six months. A, a 600-page, no, it's a 550-page, um, ethics book. And it's just, like-

Speaker 48:31 Ethics as in...

Cal Newport 48:32 Just, like, literally... Yeah, I'll get into it later. But anyways, this was all, like, read 10 pages a night, six months later. Like, as a meditative act. And, like, six months later, I was done with that. So some of these books go a little bit, go a little bit slower, but yeah.

Speaker 48:45 Neil Stevenson fiction books, those take me a while.

Cal Newport 48:48 Yeah, they're fast. The pages read fast. But there's so many damn pages in the book. [laughs] He does not... That guy likes to write. [laughs] Man, he gets into them. Yeah, those take a while. All right. Let's see here. What do we got next?

Speaker 49:03 Slow Productivity Corner.

Cal Newport 49:04 Ooh. All right, everyone. Slow Productivity Corner is where we have one question per week based on ideas from my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Um, mainly this is just an excuse for us to play our much-loved Slow Productivity Corner theme music. Let's hear that music now, Jesse. [slow productivity corner theme plays]

Cal Newport 49:30 All right. Who do we have today? I gotta talk in my Slow Productivity voice after the theme music. Who do we have today, Jesse?

Speaker 49:36 All right. Question's from Krishna. "As a creative, I really embrace the principle of working at a natural pace from Slow Productivity, but I'm afraid that's keeping me from pushing a little harder on getting things done. How can I find the uncomfortable but not drained out spot?"

Cal Newport 49:51 All right. Well, Krishna, you gotta keep reading, right? Because w- what are the three principles, uh, in Slow Productivity, and what's the order in which they're presented? Principle number one, do fewer things. Okay. So yeah, this is, this is about reducing overhead tax. Less concurrent projects means less distraction. You can do more quality work. Uh, what's principle number two in the book? Work at a natural pace, which you mention here. Like, okay, stretch out how long your expectations for how long things take. Be comfortable with variations in intensity on different timescales. Busy days, less busy days. Busy seasons versus less busy seasons. Kinda slow down, give things the time they require. Don't try to be pegged at 10, eight hours a day, you know, five days a week. If you stop there, as you note here, you could feel like you are actually gonna be, uh, reducing, reducing your production. Like, i- if you stop here, the relationship you're gonna develop with work feels sort of antagonistic. It's something to reduce. It's something to slow down. You'll be focused on the, the negative aspects of work. Now, you need to do these things, 'cause otherwise you're gonna burn out. But if you stop there, you're gonna grow to have this antagonistic relationship with work, which you're very, uh, I think sagely concerned about in this question. And where does this end? Well, you're gonna end up like one of these Substackers who after a while you're just convinced that, like, any, any boss in the world is, you know, secretly some sorta like Orwellian Hitler, and we all have to just fume until we can overthrow capitalism. You don't end up in good places. So if you keep reading, you get to the solution to this, uh, this problem, which is principle number three, which is obsess over quality. And I say in the book, this principle, obsess over quality, is what makes the other two work. It's what prevents you from falling into a, a, a dead-end psychological cul-de-sac of bitterness. It's what prevents you from seeing work as this sort of, um, amorphous, antagonistic force against which you're constantly fighting. It's also what's gonna make you much more successful at implementing the ideas from the first two. So when you obsess over quality, the busyness that you're reducing with principle one self-evidently needs to be reduced because it's getting in the way of you killing it. You have, like, this, this awesome stuff you're trying to produce. The busyness is getting in your way. I'm reducing busyness so I can be better. That's different than I'm reducing busyness because my boss is an Orwellian Hitler. Principle number two, okay, working at a natural pace. When you're obsessing over quality, that becomes self-evident. You say, "Yeah, what matters is I'm trying to produce something awesome. I need to give that the time it deserves, and it doesn't matter if I'm super busy eight hours a day sh- performing busyness is unrelated to whether I really do this thing really well, and I need to be sustainable in my efforts here because it's gonna be a long haul to, to, to really become a master at what I'm doing. So yeah, of course I'm gonna kinda take breaks." Become self-evident. You're, you're working at a natural pace not because, um, there's a mustache-twisting sort of like Henry Ford character that's, like, forcing you and you're trying to fight back against it, but because this is gonna make it easier for you over time to produce stuff you really care about. And finally, when you obsess over quality, your work becomes more meaningful. Humans love mastery. It's one of the key components of Ryan and Deci's self-determination theory. Humans need mastery. It makes humans motivated. It makes humans happier. So your work itself is gonna become more meaningful. At the same time, as you produce things that are better and better, you gain more autonomy over your career, which means it's easier to work on fewer things, 'cause you have leverage. It's easier to work at a natural pace, to, to have busy seasons, less busy seasons, because you're really good at what you do and you have leverage. So it's the engine. It's the glue. It's the connecting fibers to the slow productivity mindset. What makes it sustainable, what makes it possible, what makes it actually succeed over time is if you obsess over the quality of what you do best. So if you get to that chapter, I think your concern about, like, am I just taking my foot off the accelerator? Is this gonna make me, like, worse at my job? Uh, those concerns should vanish. I thought about putting that principle first because it's so important, but I really, I think I needed to get at the things, I needed to get at the slowing down ideas first before getting to, like, the do this sustainably and the succeed in doing these ideas you need to do this other piece. I think if I started with the obsess over quality, it would take too long before we got to the actual slowing down. Um, but the flip side of that is you really gotta make it through the whole book before the whole thing makes sense. So once you get to principle three, principles one and two become much more effective. I think that deserves, Jesse, hearing the theme music one more time. [slow productivity corner theme plays] All right. Do we have a call this week?

Speaker 54:50 Yes, we do.

Cal Newport 54:51 All right.

Speaker 54:54 Hi, Cal. This is Emily from Seattle. I'm a big fan of your work. Thanks for everything that you do. Um, I'm curious your perspective on different types of deep work in the same day or in the same week. Um, so in my situation, uh, during the day, I'm an organization development and change consultant, so I'm dealing with leaders and teams in some kind of large scale change, and there's a good amount of deep work with that, whether it's sort of dealing with conflict or, you know, some kind of really intense situation, um, or whether it's just, you know, thinking really hard about what the next step in the plan is. Um, and then in the evening, um, I write and play music, and that's a really important part of my life as well. And in my experience, some days I'm able to do a really nice shutdown routine for my day job and, you know, maybe eat something, um, or do a little bit of exercise and then get straight into the creative work, and I can do a good amount of deep work there as well. But other days, you know, I just feel like, um, I've done so much at my day job, by the time I'm finished and do a shutdown routine, I'm just exhausted, um, and I don't have any capacity for that music. And I try to balance it and kinda give myself, you know, permission and space to, um, you know, take a break if I need it. But I'm curious your perspective on, you know, our capacity, I guess, as humans to manage certain amounts of deep work, and because they're very different types of deep work, if you have any tips or, uh, you know, things that might help me to make time and space for both of them. Thanks so much.

Cal Newport 56:13 Well, it, it's a good question because it, it pushes back against Arnold Bennett's model. I talked about earlier in the show, Arnold Bennett, the, the cultural critic, you know, late 19th century, early 20th century, wrote this book called, uh, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. And he argued, look, you work for eight hours, right? He was writing this at the beginning of something like the, the London, the birth of sort of like the London, uh, white collar commuter class. Like, it was kind of the first time in history you had people who lived in the London suburbs and would take the train in. They would work in buildings and take the train back. And he was saying, "Okay, that takes eight hours. Then you have eight more hours that are yours, and you can treat those eight hours as if you were the landed gentry, who, you know, would come up with things they wanted to do with their time and read poetry and fox hunt or whatever." And he's like, "You're as free as them during that time. Take advantage of it." Now, put aside, it didn't cross his mind that there could be, like, domestic work to do here because he was writing for men and figured that would all be taken care of. But put that aside, his argument was you should be able to, uh, do in your second eight hours a lot of really deep, interesting, personal creative work unrelated to the eight hours you did at the office. And he, he pushed back on the myth that, like, the office work was gonna exhaust you. He's like, "No, no, your brain wants to do stuff. It doesn't wanna not do stuff." I think what he was missing is that jobs weren't so deep back then, right? You would take the train. You would go to your office. I don't know. I don't know what you were doing in, like, 1920s London white collar work, but you were probably, uh, writing on paper some things, and there were some meetings, and it was pr- I mean, it would seem glacial compared to today's pace. And the amount of actual, like, deep thinking that was probably happening in these jobs was minimal, right? It was like, "I'm looking at these spending reports and with my fountain pen, like, crossing things off, and I'm gonna pass it off to Willoughby, and we're gonna have sherry with lunch." So I think there was a, a lot more mental reserves than we have today in a job like yours, which is really hard. All right, so I'm in a very similar situation, so I kinda have good news, bad news for you. I'm in a similar situation in that I have kinda multiple things I do that require deep work that I, that I try to balance through, all right? Um, I do exactly what you do. Like, I have found when I have non-professional deep work, the very best way to transition from work to non, non-work is psychologically shut down routine, batten down all the hatches, close all the loops, followed by physical, some sort of big exercise. So you have psychological transition, physical ex- uh, transition. That's like the best you can do, and I try to do that almost every day. Um, I exercise at the end of my workday. That's when I do it. It's a, it's a, it's a, the best transition I know, okay? Clear the chemicals out of my body. I re-energize my body. I change my mindset. It's, it's a, um, a trans- transition type of ceremony. Works fantastic after doing a really clear shutdown, shutdown routine. Um, so I do the exact same thing you do. Here's the bad news. I also have the same issue where sometimes I just don't have it, and, and I just need to take the foot off the accelerator for the evening. So again, you, you said like you know that's just okay. I wanna reiterate, that's just okay. My theory is often what's going on here is not cognitive fatigue. I mean, often what it really is, is, is there's, you know, you have vi- I think there's like sicknesses. Your body is always kinda fighting stuff off, and it's kinda successful, but like some days it's less successful or your sleep wasn't, wasn't great. Like, often I think if you do the right routine and you don't have the energy for the music, it's not because it was, like, extra hard deep work at work, but, like, these other things were going on as well. Um, like I'll, if I have, like, what feels like too much deep work during the day, what's really happening, what's really affecting my evening is that it, it, I couldn't get my arm around enough of the shallow work because of that, and I do my best to close the loops, but I feel sorta behind, and that's kinda stressful, and that drains me. So there's all sorts of subtle reasons that can pull your ability to do a second shift of deep work. So I think you're doing absolutely the right thing. Be organized during your workday, close loops, do exercise, uh, and then do your best with the time that comes after. And it's okay if some days that's deeper than others. It's all about the long game. Things are adding up. So it's like good news, bad news. Good news is I know exactly what you're talking about. Bad news is I don't necessarily have, um, a magical answer. All right, we have a case study here. It's where people write

Cal Newport 1:00:43 into the show to talk about their personal experience putting the type of things we talk about here into action in their own lives. If you have a case study to share, you can send them directly to Jesse at jesse@calnewport.com. Today's case study comes from Omar. Omar says, "I am a high school teacher and would like to share how much the shutdown ritual has been helping me." This is relevant to our call. "I usually time block my days and already know what to work on during the time I am not teaching. During the day, I collect tasks or ideas in Cal's Time Block Planner or on my workingmemory.txt file. I actually use Apple Notes Quick Note so that I can quickly jot down notes on my computer and get it out of my way. Every day I protect 15 minutes at the end of the day to do a shutdown ritual. I cannot express how many times my brain is trying to tell me to keep working at home, or that I should start planning for the next day's lessons. By shutting down, I know I have everything under control, and it gives me a huge sense of relief. I know all my tasks on Trello are accounted for, know if I have anything urgent come up, and know exactly how much time I have in the week to prepare lessons. It has helped me immensely to be able to enjoy my evenings better." Omar, I appreciate that case study. Shutdown rituals make a difference. It is exhausting to have work in the back of your head while you're trying to do other things, and do not overestimate how exhausting that is. To really close all the open loops, to trust there's nothing you're keeping track of only in your head, and that your plan for the rest of the week will work, and it's written down, and you'll get back to it in the morning, and to be able to say, "Shutdown complete" or check that Shutdown Complete checkbox in my Time Block Planner, it makes a huge psychological difference. I absolutely swear by it, right? So, uh, this is a great case study. Shutdown rituals matter. My new thing is what we just talked about in the call, is if possible, add a physical element to it as well so that the shutdown routine gives you first a psychological cleansing, and then you can get a physical, uh, chemical cleansing by going for a run, uh, working out at the home gym, working out at your, like, the gym near your office before you come home, even just going for a long walk, like, right when you get home. Give yourself that physical cleansing as well, and then you're really ready as much as you can be for the evening. All right, we have a final segment coming up here. I want to react to something I found on the internet this week, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. [whooshing sound] I want to talk in particular about our friends at Shopify. Look, if you are selling things online or in a store, the technology used to do these sales absolutely matters. This is where Shopify is so important. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. It's the number one checkout on the planet. Let's think about businesses you may have heard of that use it. Cotopaxi, they use it. Feastables, you know, they use it. Um, Thrive Causemetics, they use it. Like these are major brands, but you know who else uses it? Uh, like really small businesses, big businesses, medium-sized businesses. Uh, I came across it just the other day. I was ordering because, like, I, I guess I need to own this. I, I finally bought my own set of academic regalia, the, the things you wear. I, I, um, I have to go to fall convocation this year. The site I ordered it from used Shopify. It's such an easy checkout experience. I recognized it right away. Um, so Shopify is what you should be using if you are selling something. Uh, they have their Shop Pay feature boost conversions by up to fifty percent because it makes it so easy for people to check out. The information is remembered across sites. It's fantastic. That means way less carts go abandoned and you make more sales. So if you're growing, uh, into your business or your commerce platf- your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and everywhere in between. I just made that up off the fly there.

Speaker 1:04:42 I like it.

Cal Newport 1:04:42 Yeah, I just, you know, I just rhyme. I'm quite, I'm quite good at just kind of coming up with these type of things. Uh, businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that all of these other big brands as well as small brands use. Sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but you have to type that in all lowercase for it to work and for you to get the deal. So go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/deep. [bell dinging] Let's also talk about our friends at LMNT. Uh, I'm a big fan of LMNT's zero sugar electrolyte mix. You just add the water. It gives you the stuff you need, especially after you've been dehydrated through like sweating or speaking a lot without the junk, without the sugar, without all the weird additives. Uh, I actually, this is true, Jesse, yesterday used my last LMNT packet, and when I went down the basement to get the new box, realized I'd used my last box. So I have just ordered, the day I'm doing this ad read, had to order more LMNT because I use it after my workouts, I use it after days where I'm giving a lot of speeches or doing a lot of podcasting, um, and I, uh, I do it in the morning if I'm particularly like not dehydrated, not feeling well. I, I throw in, you know, my LMNT electrolyte mix. I really do use it. I really do swear by it. They have this new product coming out, which I'm excited about, LMNT Sparkling, which now, uh, allows you to get that same electrolyte experience, but in a bottle, uh, already bottled for you in a can. With each can, you can take a sip against sugar and stimulant-loaded drinks and turn the tide towards health. LMNT Sparkling right now, uh, is only available to LMNT Insiders, so you can find out if you're an LMNT Insider, uh, at their website drinklmnt.com. But it will be launching more broadly soon. So get your free sample pack. You'll get a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase if you go to drinklmnt.com/deep. That's drinklmnt, L-M-N-T .com/drink. Um, and if you're an LMNT Insider, you'll have first access to LMNT Sparkling, a bold sixteen-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Your free sample pack with any drink mix purchase at drinkelement, L-M-N-T, .com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. [whooshing sound]

Cal Newport 1:07:09 All right, this is where I like to react to things that readers send to us. This, uh, article came into my interesting@calnewport.com email address, where people send me things they think I'll find interesting. I brought it up on the screen here if you're watching instead of listening. So this is a message from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that was being sent to all Amazon employees. This was on September 16th that they sent it. All right, so this is a look inside the CEO of Amazon talking about what's going well, what they need to work on. There was a single idea in here that I wanted to highlight. So a big thing he's worried about if you read this is that as Amazon grows, there's more managers, and there's more managers and more layers, and this can kinda get in the way of actually taking action. And so what they wanna do is they're actually cutting back on managers. They're trying to re-flatten things so there's less, uh, hoops you have to jump through to get approval for things or to actually take action on things. One of the things he's doing, I'm gonna read this now, uh, I wanna highlight to help support this effort of making the company more agile. All right, so here's him writing. "By the way, I've created a Bureaucracy Mailbox for any examples that any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary processes that's crept in and that we can root out." All right, so it's, like, very easy to report. It's like a tip line. See something, say something, but about, like, unnecessary process or bureaucracy so they can be more relentless about getting rid of it. I like this idea for the following general reason, and then I'm gonna give a specific variation on it. The general idea I like here is knowledge work organizations in particular have lots of implicit processes by which work unfolds, but I say implicit because they're not written down anywhere. They're not named. They're not discussed. Like the hyperactive hive mind workflow model where you, we, we work work out, uh, through ad hoc back-and-forth messaging. That's a choice, but it's not really named and discussed. It's just implicit that this is how we do it. Um, informal personalized workload management, just ask people what you need when you need it. Uh, it's up to them to push back when, for whatever, when they finally feel like they have too much work, uh, and they just have to kinda do that. Forget all the sort of interpersonal dynamics or, or asymmetric power dynamics there. It's just everyone should manage their own workload, so you just ask what you need from people. Your workload is your business. It's up to you to say no to people if you don't want more work. That's another process that's implicit, but it's something that, uh, that we do. So anything that tries to bring more transparency and scrutiny to process, I think, is important. When you have to actually name, describe, and defend the hyperactive workload, uh, hive mind, you begin to see there's some creaks there. When you have to actually name and define and defend personalized workload management, you begin to say, "You know what? Maybe there's better ways to do this." But you don't get to these better ways until you've actually named and talked about the ways that are actually happening right now. Um, and in the absence of naming them, we just think of, like, the way we work as being synonymous with work. We have a hard time having the professional imagination to see that it could be different. Here's a change I would make, though. Uh, in a lot of organizations, especially that aren't as big as, like, Amazon, the issue is not bureaucracy. The issue is not the hoops they have to jump through. The issue I always point out is attention destruction, right? These, like, unnecessary context shifts. What are the things that happen during the day that require me to change my attention from what I'm working on to other things? What are the things that happen during the day that reduce my ability to do the, the, like, the two or three things that I do that are most valuable to the company? It's like an attention destruction or attention poison mailbox. That's what I would want. Like, "Hey, CEO, I had seven non-urgent email conversations I had to kinda keep up with today, and I could get nothing really done. No, no hard thinking could actually happen." Like, uh, "Hey, CEO, um, I'm averaging four, four meetings a day. My, my average, like, uninterrupted, max size uninterrupted time block per day now is, like, under 60 minutes, and yet my primary job is to write white papers, and I... it's really making that hard to do." That's what I would want reported, and I would want my CEO to see again and again, report after report of, like, "My God, my people's ability to just put their mind to the work of producing value is being heavily diluted. What do we do about this?" And then solutions come in. You have to have this mindset of there's existing processes. Here's what they are. They're bad. Here's alternatives if you're gonna fix this problem because the solutions are almost always less obvious and more complicated than what we do by default. We aren't gonna stumble into the better way of doing this work. We have to sort of move the whole... If I'm gonna use some physics analogies, we have to move the whole configuration of our work system to a different phase, right? We're gonna have to make an, a energy quanta shift, and that requires a lot of energy input to shift to this new stable condition. It's just the same, and I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing right now, it's just the same as, like, electron orbit levels. I know you're all thinking that. But it takes a, a, a certain amount of energy, right, often non-trivially, to sort of move an electron to a next orbit level, but then it's in a stable... Once it's there, it's in, it's, it doesn't take energy to maintain it. It's stable there. So, like, the switch from one stable configuration to another takes a lot of energy input. Most of, uh, knowledge work organizations are in, like, a particular somewhat degenerate, uh, s- stable configuration they can't just, like, easily move out of. It's typically based on, like, low friction and flexibility and, and risk reduction. But there's other configurations that if you can move to, other ways of working and collaborating and talking and meeting and, and, and communicating and, and workload management, there's these other configurations that if you could just get your organization there, they'll also be very easy to maintain, and they're better. You're gonna produce better work, and people are gonna burn out less. But to get there, someone has to put a ton of energy into that system, and you're not gonna do that unless you know exactly what you're doing right now and what's wrong about it. You're not gonna do that unless you get the 500 messages in your attention poison mailbox you set up as CEO, and you're being drowned in this, and you realize, like, oh my God, this is terrible what we're doing. You gotta know and name the problem. You gotta understand its magnitude before you're willing to put in the magnitude of attention and energy required to fix it. So I think it's a cool idea what's going on in Amazon. I would adapt it to focus less on bureaucracy and more on attention destruction. Um, but I like this general approach. You don't know what to fix if you're not talking about what you're currently doing. All right, speaking of fixing, I think we can fix the fact that this podcast is now ready to finish. I don't know if that makes sense, Jesse. [snorting] It's not as good as my improv in the Shopify ad- Yeah ... where I just, you know, you know, just was riffing. Just rapping. I was just riffing, just riffing. I guess I, I, I burnt out on that ability there. Anyways, that's enough for today. Uh, thank you everyone for listening or watching. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you liked today's discussion about finding more time, I think you'll also like episode 239, which was titled On Stress and Time. You'll enjoy it. Check it out.