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Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal’s particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.
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How do I improve my discipline my problem is that I have a problem with sticking to my longterm plans well Toby I think about discipline really more as an identity that you develop than I do an approach to a particular challenge if you can convince yourself that you are a disciplined
Person that that is part of your conception of your identity then you will be able to with discipline pursue many different important objectives in your life so the question is how do you get to an identity where you see yourself as a disciplined person well let me tell you
What not to do don’t just pick out a random ambitious goal and say you know what I’m G to do this I’m gonna I’m gonna White Knuckle go after this really hard goal and because I need to be more disciplined that’s what you’re trying to do that’s not working I’m not surprised
It’s not working if you’ve not yet convinced yourself you’re a disciplined person taking on ad hoc large discipline requiring challenges is not going to be a route toward success so what should you do instead well I think this is where actually the Deep life procedure I
Talk about the the sort of self- awar overly pragmatic approach to building a foundation for a deep life that we’ve been talking about on the show for over two years is perfect for developing a self-identity as discipline so remember there’s two parts to this number one you identify the
Areas of your life that are important to you we typically call these the Deep life buckets they differ between different people but our starter set of these buckets tends to be craft what you do what you create Constitution that’s going to be your Health Community that’s going to be your connections to other
People be it your family your neighborhood the people in the organizations where you work at your Rel religious institutions uh they’ll often throw in contemplation we’re trying to capture philosophy Theology and ethics these are all important areas most people’s lives your list might vary for each of these areas the first thing to
Do is to identify a keystone habit something in each of these buckets that you do every day something that is not trivial but is also tractable and you track your completion of these habits every day if you use something like my time block planner there’s a metric
Tracking space at the top of the daily planning pages on every day you just track those Keystone habits right there so for example for constitution you wouldn’t have something there like I’m going to do a 45 minute intense workout because that’s too hard to expect you to be able to do that
Every day that’s not really tractable but you also don’t want to say you know I will do one jumping jack when I get out of bed in the morning like that’s not going to get you anywhere so instead you might want to do something like I
Want to hit this many steps in a day require a little bit of planning like I walk my kids to school I’ll probably have to do one more walk in the afternoon in between meetings and but it’s tractable if I think about it my friend Brian Johnson uh of optimize Fame
Had this great Constitution habit where he had a fixed number of minutes that he never wanted to go beyond without doing I think he would do 10 burpees and it was like 23 minutes or 20 there was some amount of time that he had because he had Reds somewhere if you
Sit for more than this much time it starts to be bad and so it just every whatever it was 23 minutes he would do 10 burpees and was a fantastic boom now I think it helps that he doesn’t work in the bullpen of a crowded office I mean I
Maybe that would be an awesome thing to do but but it probably would draw some interesting attention he you know he he works on his own company so he works at his own house um but 10 burpees three times an hour roughly and the way he
Pitched it to me is it keeps your ability to concentration to concentrate like a like a laser because your body’s always moving it never gets into a sedentary but anyways for someone who works in their own home works from home on their own business very tractable very tractable Keystone haveit takes 15
Seconds or whatever every time you do it the fact that I think tin burpees takes 15 seconds shows that I don’t know I don’t know a lot about burpees does he still do that I don’t know we should have him on the show should we should we
Should ask him I know at one point he was training he was really into and I don’t think he will mind me telling the story because I think he’s talked about himself um he was really into Spartan Racing you know the Spartan races yeah because he was friends with Joe desna so
He knew the guy who started it and he was making a run at some point for doing them at a very high level which requires it turns out it requires a lot of training uh you have to master a lot of these individual disciplines but anyways in his his house
In the the room where he worked which I think might have been their bedroom he had installed into the ceiling of the room the uh hanging obstacles from the sparta race like so I I I guess you do like Ninja Warrior type stuff in that
Race like you have to you like SW you’re holding on to like rope knots and whatever and yeah he installed them into the ceiling of the room so that when he was doing these breaks he’s like instead of just burpees let me jump up and just like do the whatever hanging challenge
Tell you what you do that for a few months your grip strength and balance like you just own it like you don’t even and I guess that’s what you need to do to compete at a high level you could just jump up there and boom boom boom boom boom and so that’s that’s
Commitment you probably still work out too during the day I would think separately yeah yeah so he and and he had a whole thing and yeah so you still have a workout so it it was less this was less about which which again I think is an important Point like if you’re
Keystone habits are not their job is not to capture everything you need to do or it’s important for that bucket so like getting up and doing some burpees or whatever throughout the day is a great way of saying you you take motion important you take your body
Important you think there’s a Mind Body Connection but it’s not everything you need to do for exercise you probably need to be doing weights you probably need to be doing cardio so that’s it’s a good point is that your Keystone habits are not trying to take on the weight of
Everything important in that bucket they are just meant to say that you take that bucket seriously and you’re willing to take effort towards that bucket every day that’s non-trivial now it takes a while to get those Keystone habits right you have to experiment a little bit but you get to
The point where you’re knocking off you have four buckets or five buckets you’re chucking off all those all those metrics every day and you see it every day you don’t want to break the chain all right that’s step one you’ve already now leveled up discipline your identity as someone who’s disciplined is
Now leveled up you do stuff that’s optional because it reflects your value even if it’s hard now you’re at a higher level the next part of my general deep life Foundation program is then you dedicate a one to two month period to each of those buckets one by
One and overhaul that part of your life uh when you’re focusing on that particular bucket so in the the one to two months you’re focusing on Constitution now you’re getting serious about your health and fitness and you’re starting to make changes and figuring out like maybe you’re like I’m going to
Start training for this sport like I’ll tell you right now Jesse one of the things I’m doing it’s a goal is uh before my 40th birthday which is in June so it’s coming up um you might not remember what it’s like to be in your 30s of course I mean
You’ve been 40 for literally weeks at this point so you probably don’t remember but uh my birthday’s coming up as we’ve talked about I want to this is arbitrary but I want to be able to once again row uh 2,000 M on my concept 2 at
A sub two minute 500 meter pace so this just connects me back to my my my deep past when I was rowing for Dartmouth and I remember the type of splits I could pull so like seven and change something somewhere there yeah and so I like I
Want to I was like I would feel good at the age of 40 if because I got God knows what I could pull when I was 19 doing this I could pull but I’m 30 pounds heavier now so I does have an advantage like I can actually I was a lightweight
Rower so I can now actually move that thing but anyways it’s kind of arbitrary but it’s like it’s it’s hard but not impossible but like I would feel good if I can be pulling sub two minute 500 splits for for a 2,000 meter so like I’m training for that right now uh but
That’s the type of thing okay when you’re doing an overhaul of a bucket you start you figure out these challenges you get your equipment in place I not to make a full full circle connection but I got that concept too actually from Brian Johnson since me as a gift so there we
Go it all nice gift yeah he’s a nice guy known him for a very long time um so anyways that’s the type of thing you will come away from doing the intense focus on the bucket with like okay now I’m going to start training to do this
And I’ve overhauled my diet and I now am joined this team this wck you know with other dads that we play whatever and so you know when you you you give the one the two-month Focus you really are changing your life more substantially to to Really integrate that area of value
Um more deeply and there’s a lot of experimentation in that that’s why it takes one or two months you try some things it’s not really working so you change your goals or challenges or habits so you find something that’s really working you come out of that
Second step Toby you’re going to be a much more disciplined person step one you build that base with a keystone step two you overhaul tractable overhauls to experimentation all the parts are important to your life after that now if down the line you’re like oh here’s a new long-term plan that I
Believe in let me do some work towards it no problem that’s that’s what you do your discipline that’s what you’re going to do that’s what you’re going to do so once you’ve changed the identity then you can take on new challenges the only final thing I’ll say is even as a very
Self-disciplined person if your challenges don’t make sense if your mind doesn’t believe that it’s worth doing or that your plan’s actually going to accomplish the what it is uh you will still struggle with discipline so you have to be selective and careful in laying out what you do your brain is not
Dumb I feel like I’m going to be a uh Nobel prize winning novelist because I’m going to do National novel writing month three days in your mind’s like this is stupid we don’t know what we’re doing this is not a good book um I’m not going
To do this and that’s not a failure of discipline that’s a failure of planning so that’s the only other copy I’ll give even after you become a self-disciplined person uh you need goals your mind actually trust all right rolling on here we got a question from Luke Luke says could you please work
Through an example where you break down a genuinely complicated long-term goal through quarterly weekly and daily planning so Luke the biggest problem people have with long-term planning is trying to actually do too much of the planning upfront I think a better way of thinking about this is that there is a feedback
Loop approach to planning out structuring and executing longer projects like what often do is if if there’s a a longer term project like this summer I put finish book proposals onto my quarterly plan like finish them by the New Year’s that was my plan I
Just put that on there it’s a very high level and then when I got to my weekly plan I started like okay this is like one of my things I want to work on like let me get started into this and it’s really once you dive into something so
On your weekly plan you’re putting a slight time to it it’s only then that you really begin to Discover It Contours oh how is this really going where do I really need to spend time how is this going to naturally break up in the different parts and then you can go back
And refine that quarterly plan a little bit later like okay what we really want to do then is like this month get the sample chapters together it gets more specific but it gets more specific because you get specific feedback from actually putting boots on the ground so
Go back to my original plan of writing book proposals I submitted those last week so my original plan of do it the new year was just the throwing a dart generally in the direction of the dart board but I couldn’t really make a good prediction of how long it was going to
Take and how I was going to get it done and how it was going to break down in the different pieces until I was actually doing it so that’s the main thing I’m going to say Luke is when you first start a long-term plan you should be doing shockingly little thinking about that
Plan just get going once you’re convinced this is something important to do start putting aside time during your weekly planning and that Weekly planning will influence your daily planning and let that feedback help you refine and improve those plans and don’t be mad at yourself when you get the timing wrong
Because it’s impossible to do you don’t get a gold medal for guessing how long a hard project is going to take all right you get a gold medal for continuingly to follow the multiscale planning process to let the feedback refine your plans to execute good weekly plans based on your
Quarterly plans and the realities of your schedule doing good time block plans based on your weekly plans that is the thing you want to do trust that process how long things actually take to happen well I don’t know did your family get covid did you have a giant project
Dropped on your lap you weren’t expecting did something blow up two months in that you thought was going to be easy to complete and you had to go over and start over like who knows you can’t predict that why would you expect you could follow the multiscale process
Refine your long-term plans as as you unfold your work on them do that and you should be happy with what you’re doing all right well that’s a lot of me talking why don’t we take a call Jesse do we have a do we have a call cop that
We can go to here yeah we sure do it’s from Laura she’s got a question about a book that you read hi Cal I’ve been reading your book digital minimalism I’m about over halfway through right now and I’m looking forward to decluttering my technology life I also saw a book that
Just came out called stolen Focus why you can’t pay attention and how to think deeply again it’s by Johan Hari I think it just came out this month in January and I was wondering if you’ve read it and what you think about it it seems like something that could definitely help with
Productivity thank you well Laura I like Johan’s work so that’s that’s the third book of his that I know about um let me not bury the lead I have not read it I have not read stolen Focus not because there’s something I dislike about it but because
When you write a book on a topic and you’re done with that book it’s not uncommon that you’re you’re kind of done with the topic in the sense that it’s actually very difficult to get motivated to read a similar book this is very common among writers especially writers
Even writers who read very widely like I do I just don’t want to read something that is covering very similar ground to something I’ve written about too because I’ve spent a lot of time on those topics I’m probably I’m going to guess I know the same people he’s quoting I know the
Same stories I’ve spent years in that world so it’s it’s that’s entirely a function of just I’m up to my ears in that topic now here’s what I like about Hari though I will say this um his approach the books he has a certain formula that I appreciate which is the
The big inversion formula you thought X about this big topic but the reality is why and the reality why is often something that’s going to be a little bit aspiration like oh now that I understand that that gives me hope that gives me a plan I love that type of
Writing that that’s Johan’s approach so he had this book out called chasing the scream years ago that was about drug addiction and that was an interesting book because uh what he was what he was arguing there his big inversion in that book if if I understand it correctly
It’s been a while is that we have this redu chemical only cultural understanding of drug addiction right so his thing is okay the way we are taught about drug addiction is that if the the mad scientist kidnapped you and strapped you down it’s like I’m going to put heroin
Into your veins every day you would be released when he finally released you from his evil layer um you would be a heroin addict that is the way we understand it like that these drugs chemically build these dependencies in our brain um and then we can’t shake
Them but he said if that was the case there should be a lot of heroin addicted grandmothers in the UK because in the UK the standard drug they give for painkilling for hip replacement is dial which is just medical heroin so we have all these grandmothers in UK uh getting
Basically a few weeks worth of heroin as their standard treatment for their hip and they come away just fine they don’t come away uh addicted to it or looking for heroin and he said the the the missing factor in chasing the scream was there’s also a socio psycho component to
It so it’s not just the chemical going into your body it’s when the chemical is going into your body as a means of escaping from something in your life from pain from post-traumatic stress from trauma it is the combination of that potent chemical which gets right into your brain plus the psychoemotional
Usage of that to escape that creates the like impossible to shake addiction Loop so that was chasing the screen so like this kind of interesting inversion um and inject heroin the mad scientist injects into you every day you’re not going to be addicted you start taking
The the pain pills they gave you for your hip after your hip feels better because you’re depressed about losing your job and it’s like this helps I need this to not feel depressed about losing my job then suddenly you can have a a life destroying addiction so that was
Chasing the scream then he wrote a book called Lost connections that was talking about depression and again he was he was uh arguing that there is this biochemical model of depression that’s too reductive this idea that depression is just caused by something goes wrong with neurotransmitters it’s entirely
Chemical and you can we can take pills to try to fix it it’s all you can do and he’s like though there’s a chemical component I think his big argument in Lost connections is again there’s a a socio psycho component as well like also uh a big source of depression is the
Things that are making you feel bad like someone close to you died like you’re really sad about it like you you’re you feel hopeless about your work situation that you you you’ve lost some jobs you can’t get another jobs you’re feeling worthless he’s like the socio psych psychological aspect of depression
Really matter too and if we just say like don’t worry don’t worry it’s just your chemicals we’ll give you a pill to fix it and don’t also say what’s going on in your life can we also let’s let’s make your wife better he’s like you’re leaving most of the tools on the table
So that’s like classic Yan Harari so in stolen Focus he’s applying this to distraction and the attention economy I don’t know the book The Thesis really well because again it’s too close to home so I don’t really want to get into it but I think he’s he’s uh I think his
Inversion there if I understand vaguely is uh you think you’re more distracted because you’re like lazy there’s all these new shiny distractions out there and you can’t help yourself he’s like that’s not the case um the attention economy has put billions of dollars to steal your focus away like that there
Was this this Apollo Mission size effort to distract you and you had no chance that’s what I think you’re saying and if it is I agree because I’ve written a lot about that so anyways he’s a he’s an entertaining writer I like chasing the scream in Lost connections and uh people
Who read I get a lot of notes about lost Focus um so obviously lots of people are sending it to me to read but people aren’t telling me what they think about it so let me know if you read it let me know uh let me know what you think all
Right number one pre-block important or timely work on your calendar so what happens with time block planning is when you make your time block plan for the day you look at your weekly plan you look at your calendar because you’re going to transfer from your calendar any meetings or
Appointments you have onto your time block plan what I suggest is if something is timely or important go once you know about this thing on your radar consider going ahead in your calendar and actually adding non-appointment non- meeting blocks onto your calendar for when you’re going to
Get that work done you know it’s it’s uh right now for example I’m reviewing copy edits for my upcoming book slow productivity this is it’s very important and very timely I I have a very short amount of time to turn these around so what I did
Is when I knew what date these were coming back I actually went in advance and took three big blocks of time and just scheduled it on my calendar like a meeting and now when I got to those days I just transfer that work over to my time block plan for the day so
Pre-blocking time once you’re in a Time block discipline mindset pre-blocking time is a great way to make sure that you don’t for example over your schedule in times when a lot is due all right my second that’s a little different than autopilot right it’s different than autopilot was a good
Question autopilot is your prescheduling work that uh occurs on a regular basis right so if you know I always have to file a report on the last Friday of the month you can figure out when and how you do that work and just set that repeating on your calendar into
Perpetuity with pre-blocking it’s for oneoff projects got it so you’re not finding a regular time to work on copy editing because it only happens once every few years but you know that’s really important and it’s going to have a short turnaround so you go protect that time in advance and then because
You time block you know when you get there that’ll be safe all right second tip time block relaxation into your workday right so at first you might just be putting in a half hour uh break it’s in your time block plan and when you get there you know
Okay I’m going to just completely turn off work but once you’re in the habit of time blocking relaxation you’ll tend to get more aggressive about this because see this is the the advantage of time blocking from a sustainability point of view uh a critique which I think is flawed of this
Approach is that people say well this is all about just optimizing every minute of your day but time blocking can actually help you much better do the opposite once you’re in the habit of I put breaks into my day and you have control over your time now as your
Workload gets under control you can get more aggressive about that and you can say things like you know what on Wednesday I’m going to make very efficient use of the morning and then block off three and a half hours to go see Oppenheimer in the afternoon you can
Now do that with confidence because you’re controlling all of your time so when you can control your time not only can you get more work into your time into your day you can also get more relaxation in the day without it causing trouble so just introduce the habit of
Of many days during the week I put little breaks into it once you have that habit as you get to periods where your work a little less you can lean into completely guilt-free unnoticeable larger breaks and that type of variation of work pacing is something that’s going to make work much more
Sustainable so you’re not just trying to fit in work use time blocks to also fit in relaxation because you can trust that that relaxation is fine it’s scheduled you know when the other work’s going to happen nothing bad is going to happen if you turn off for a
While all right another Advanced tip is when doing admin blocks so I’m a big believer of admin blocks I talk about this in the introductory material of the time block planner for task you want to have one block in which you execute multiple things consolidate tasks right that’s Standard Time blocking what I’ve
Been experimenting with recently is having smaller admin blocks theming the admin work by cognitive context so what I mean by that is if you have uh five different tasks to do that are all related to different projects or different types of work it can be more
Difficult than you think to go 1 2 3 4 5 and execute those and the reason why it’s difficult is because as you switch from one task type to another your brain has to switch its cognitive context oh we’re thinking about this type of project now we have to think about like
My kids’s little league and some social event well that’s a completely different type of context and you will notice the difficulty of this context switching you will notice it subjectively as a feeling of resistance of mental fatigue so if you instead theme tasks so they’re in the same cognitive context what you’ll
Realize is you get through them much faster so if I’m doing four things related to social planning for the family those four things if I do them one in a row is going to go much more smoother because once I switch into that context now I can do the three four five
Other tasks and it’s going to come without that subjective resistance and then maybe I have another small block later with a bunch of things surrounding uh a particular type of project I’m doing for work oh I have a lot of things result surrounding a conference I’m organizing let me put a 20-minute block
Over here where I’m just going through a bunch of those in a row so shorter blocks of themed admin tasks is way more comfortable than having bigger blocks where you mix together different types of admin task this is why the single hardest batched admin task that most
People do on a regular basis is cleaning their email inbox because if you’re just going through your inbox one by one why is that so hard because you are switching context from message to message so even your email inbox you can break out in the themes and say okay during this
Admin block I’m doing some family related tasks and I’m responding to all emails related to family related tasks and then later in the day when I’m doing tasks that are just related to this conference I’m organizing I will then go through my inbox and handle all the emails related to that conference and
What you’re going to find is those encounters with your inbox are going to go so much more smoothly because you are not behind the scenes trying to keep switching your cognitive context all right my fourth bit of advanced time blocking advice is whenever you put a meeting of any
Significant length or complexity onto your time block plan add a short block after it for just postmortem organizing what you learned making a plan for what to handle getting the information from that meeting into your systems never let a interaction-based Time block be immediately followed by another time block focused on something
Different you have to close down to work of meetings you need 15 to 30 minutes to do this okay the meeting is over but I have 15 to 30 protected minutes to go transform my notes in the tasks and to put reminders on the calendars and if
There’s follow-up emails let me just do them right now now I can completely shut down that thing I don’t have a ton of open Loops hanging in my head as I jump from this meeting to the next I don’t have a ton of open Loops in my head as I
Jump from this meeting right into trying to do deep work so that should just be instinct when you write a meeting time block that you put another block under it and you can even just I’ll sometimes just uh shade it in this little shaded in Block under each of my meetings and
That’s the catch your breath process everything that just happened in that meeting again it’s going to make the whole day go smoother that that that extra 15 or 20 minutes after every meeting makes the whole rest of the day actually makes sense all right that’s the same concept that’s the same concept that’s
The same concept that you always suggested with students and answering all their questions like after a lecture and stuff pretty oh yeah that’s a good point right I used to recommend the same thing for students that when you’re taking notes in lecture you clearly Mark everything you didn’t fully understand
And as soon as lecture is over you see how many of these things can I resolve I mean I guess the first I so my this is from my book How to Become a Straight A Student and I say there’s multiple lines of defense for filling in these question
Marks the first line of defense is you ask questions right away wait I didn’t get that can you say that again the second line of defense is you go up to the professor right after class I’d understand this can you explain it to me the third line of defense is some
Combination of Tas textbooks office hours and asking classmates and the key is do that as soon as possible do not let the questions uh don’t let the questions just sit there as I don’t understand this math technique I guess I’ll deal with that when I’m studying
For the test a month from now close that down you want to try to close down and consolidate your understanding of lectures as soon as possible after you encounter the lectur so this is kind of similar if you have a meeting yeah process everything related to it right
Away don’t just let that sit and maybe tomorrow I’ll remember what to do about it closing Loops I think is really important for having sustainable cognitive work all right so that’s time block planning good to revisit it enjoy the time block planner if you want to find
Out more I have a website timeblock planner.com um that has a video where I really go through and show you a lot of examples of exactly how time blocking works you can go watch that video there and it has links to where to buy the second edition from Amazon but I’m just
Look whether or not anyone buys it and a lot of people are but whether or not anyone buys this I am so happy to have it because it it is just a perfected tool for exactly this method of time management that I have so long sworn by
All right let’s move on to some questions uh Jesse I think all the questions we’ve chosen today have at least a tangential connection to time blocking or time management so let’s get our productivity Geeks hats out and put on and get rolling here so what’s our first
Question here we go first question is from pumi I live my day using time blocking combined with autopilot scheduling for my mornings every morning I do two hours of my work on my research sometimes however I have to stay up late and I miss my morning blocks I want to
Know how to deal with these setbacks I feel guilty for the whole day for not executing my autopilot schedule because I slept in well we have two different related Concepts to differentiate here and I think that’s going to help you find a solution so autopilot scheduling which
Is what you referenced in your uh question here is where for regularly occurring work you have a set time on a set day and typically a set location for which you do that work the whole idea is to uh take the decision of working on this out of your day-to-day
Decision-making process it’s just there on your calendar Tuesdays at 10 I go to this library and work on my problem set that’s just when I do that so that’s autopilot scheduling now what you’re doing is maybe not exactly autopilot scheduling what you’re trying to do is start each morning with two hours of
Research so that feels like an autopilot schedule because like oh it’s it’s work I I do on the the same uh same time every day but I would say what you’re really doing instead is what we might call a heuristic autopilot so a heuristic autopilot is not a calendar
Appointment that is set to show up on a regular basis and you treat like any other calendar appointment like a dentist appointment or a meeting a heuristic autopilot is a rule it’s something you’re going to write down on the top of your weekly plan for example a a rule that you think about
When you’re creating your schedule for each day so I think what you’re really doing here is you have theistic autopilot that says when possible spend the first hour or two of each day working on Research so some days that’s not possible because you uh you’re up late
And you have to sleep in uh but you’re not violating an appointment on your schedule so if this was an actual appointment on your schedule if this was a true autopilot schedule you would treat this like a real appointment like a meeting with your boss and you
Wouldn’t say to your boss yeah sorry I didn’t show up I slept in you would have to go to that but what you’re doing here is more flexible so that’s why I call it a heuristic it’s a general rule for how you get a certain thing done like
Another example of a heuristic autopilot is sometimes when I’m deep in the problem solving phase of a theoretical computer science paper I’ll have a heris that says okay the drive to work every day for the next week to the extent possible use that to think about the
Problem it’s not something that’s on my calendar when I actually drive to work might differ ba based on the days but it’s a heuristic keep this rule in mind each day when you’re planning out your day another heuristic autopilot sometimes we have a lot of tasks that are floating around for
Something that’s coming up I’ll say 20 minutes every day dedicated only to working through task related to this upcoming thing that’s a heuristic autopilot and then when I get to each day I’ll say Okay I I have to find where this is going to fit but I’m going to
Try to find 20 minutes where I can work on task and try to do that every day this week so I think that’s going to help you here you really have a heris not a hard autopilot schedule and once you know that you shouldn’t be so worried that occasionally you don’t get
To do research in the morning what matters is you’re following theistic rule of when there’s time in the morning you do now if you find that you’re almost never actually applying this rule that almost always you’re sleeping in too late to get this research done well then you need to change something right
That’s no longer a good heuristic you need to change where the research happens or you need to change your habit so you’re not sleeping in that’s possible but if what we’re talking about here is once a week you don’t do morning research the other four days you do I
Think it’s a perfectly fine example of a heuristic autopilot schedule all right what we next is that similar is that similar to when you were writing your when you were in writing mode last summer you would write is that was that heris or was that a little
Different no I I think that’s a fair point uh last summer when I was writing slow productivity it was you know try to write first thing before we go out and do activities you know try to write first thing every day if possible and when we were on vacation so last summer
We were up uh in Vermont the Mad River Valley some days it was look we got to get going early in the morning because we’re taking the family out to see something it’s it’s a couple hours away and I just want it right that day but it
Was okay the default is try to just right every morning uh and and Julie was understood that schedule so she’s a lot of mornings like yeah we might go do something something in the morning I might take the boys to do something brief before we do our larger trip and
You’re right it was a heuristic and I couldn’t do it every day but most days I tried to write first things so that was a heuristic autopilot schedule um and again yeah it’s very different than these days these hours this location I’m always doing this work I want to react
To something that has been going around the internet recently so I’m actually gonna share something on the screen here so again this is the deeplife decom or youtube.com/ Newport media to watch this episode episode 262 I’m loaded up a YouTube video I won’t have the audio on but I have close
Captioning on all right so this is a video from better ideas a popular channel it’s 2 million subscribers and the title of this video is how over stimulation is ruining your life and we see there’s a a young man on screen here in the woods looking
Earnestly at the camera and I have the close captioning on so I’m going to play this and read you a little bit of what he saying he’s saying During certain periods of my life oh that remember when I said the volume was off uh the volume
Was very much on let me turn that off here sorry about that all right during various periods of my life I have a very difficult time focusing on pretty much anything important or difficult during these periods it seems almost impossible to break out of the social media limbo where you’re just constantly switching
Between tabs refreshing Pages kind of waiting for something interesting to happen like for someone to post a cool photo or Instagram or something you’re kind of waiting to be entertained but if you actually have to apply yourself it’s extremely difficult borderline painful to do so and I’m pretty sure almost
Everyone can relate to this problem I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of videos on YouTube giving you little tips and tricks as to how to better focus including my own channel but they are very few videos kind of diving in talking about why it’s so difficult to focus on hard
Things you know like what’s the deal why can’t we just sit down and do something important with very little strain all right so that’s the start of that video on better ideas and he goes on to get into some of the Neuroscience of why we’re distracted so easily when
We’re trying to work on something hard and it’s a neuroscience explanation you may have heard before but essentially our dopamine system which generates that urge to do something that’s going to generate a reward keep in mind we often get that a little bit wrong I think in in common
Parlament we often think about dopamine as being a source of reward the dopamine itself is what makes you feel a lot of pleasure now dopamine is what gives you that urge to do the thing that you think is going to give you the reward it’s when you have an addiction it’s the
Dopamine that makes it so irresistible to grab that cigarette because it wants the the other rewards you’re going to get when you actually smoke the cigarette right so what it’s talked about in this video is this common Neuroscience explanation that the dopamine system is firing up to get
Those quick hit rewards of seeing the video that’s really interesting seeing the post that’s a little bit scandalous seeing the like number jump on something you did earlier which gives you this big burst of people like me they really like me and the dopamine system likes rewards
It wants rewards now the internet has many rewards lined up that system kicks in the play in the play and you feel this irresistible desire to click click click you do not get a similar dopamine push for I’m working for our 900 of 10,000 it’s going to take me to finish
This really big project because the reward is not approximate and so what’s going to win then the complicated Deep thing part of your slow productivity push to do something big over a long period of time or Instagram or Tik Tok and he said yeah your brain is wired to go for that
And that’s a very hard that’s a very hard challenge to win now what I learned from this video is that yes uh he is right there are lots of videos that talk about this same thing quote unquote over stimulation people are really feeling it and I think young people are feeling it
Harder because they have more targets for their dopamine systems they’ve more acclimatized their mind to all of these various rewards and they’re very good at these various rewards there’s so much pulling at them that young people in particular are really finding yes this is ring my life I can’t do
Anything long-term deep cognitively useful getting bad grades at school I I can’t advance in my job I can’t produce something that I really want to produce those of us my age or older maybe say I distract myself too much and it slows down me doing important work young
People really do feel like it’s ruining their lives so what should we do about it well I thought well I can offer my own advice here I mean this is something I’ve studied and written about for a long time kind of wrote The Definitive book
On the power of focus and why you should cultivate it I’ve been thinking and writing articles and books about this for a long time so I figured let me uh let me review here on the podcast my own very complicated multi-part system for combating online over stimulation so get
A pad of paper ready because you don’t want to miss step nine or 10 there’s a very complicated explanation for how you’re going to have to uh very carefully navigate the online world all right so going be very complicated are you ready okay here it goes here’s my
Solution don’t use things that cause overstimulation all right now I’m being a little bit factious here but but honestly the answer is as simple as that dopamine system is powerful so don’t give it the targets that it’s going to fire up for you have to actually remove most of these sources
Of over stimulation from your life if you really want to start thinking and producing original thoughts at a high level there’s not these complex habits and careful ways of navigating your notifications and when you use this and when you don’t use this I’m telling you this as someone who thinks for a living
And studies people who thinks for a living the more sources of overs stimulation you eliminate from your life the easier and we of course know this type of exension approach is effective because we see it with other things that historically have hijacked the dopamine system and caused a lot of
Trouble we do not tell people who have an issue with smoking okay we need to build a complex system of where you have cigarettes and where you don’t and you don’t want to have it in the car but you will have it here and we’re going to
Have an app that that keeps track of how many cigarettes you’ve had and then try to rest then during certain periods there’s a a time lock that locks off the cigarettes and you can’t have it during that period but you can’t have it on
This period and uh we do a week on but you don’t smoke on Saturdays no we just say you got to quit smoking it’s the same with a lot of other addictions like this that people have trouble with but we resist applying that type of clarity and exension to online
Overstimulation so let me get a little bit more granular about this U social media this is a big source of it you got to just basically get this out of your life if you have to have some social media for professional reasons it should
Not be on your phone it should be on a boring computer it’s something you should do on a schedule hire someone to do on your behalf it should never ever be something you go to when you’re bored should never be a source of distraction it should be on an author
And I I set up my Instagram post in a shared document on Google Drive here’s the photos here’s a text and I have someone who posts it Fridays and Mondays or if I have to do that I log in the thing on my computer I post it and then
I I I shut it back down again all right so if you have to use it professionally it’s on a computer it’s boring you never never use it as a source of entertainment you don’t Scroll Online news look you’re not a you’re not a editor at Gawker you just get out of
That that world of online news and discussion you don’t have to be a part of it how do you keep up with stuff in the world we talked about this earlier in this episode where I gave advice to reading guy uh you know subscribe to some email newsletters that you read
When you can that gives you interesting perspectives listen to podcasts maybe listen to a daily news Roundup podcast if you want to be kept up with more current events right or listen to something like uh Sager and crystals their breaking points podcast where they go through you know tin stories about
What’s going on in the world podcasts are fine right because it’s it’s something you have to turn on and listen to It’s not a knee-jerk uh it’s not a knee-jerk distraction that your dopamine system is going to kick into no one is like trying to write and halfway through
Writing like a and quickly turn on a podcast Tik Tok can do that online news can do that Twitter can do that podcast fine newsletters are fine maybe even print out the Articles you like and read them when you get a chance that’s fine you’ll be informed got to get rid of all
That online news what about YouTube YouTube is tricky why is YouTube tricky because I think video is the future of independent content creation but the recommendations sidebar on YouTube can make it into one of these dopamine inflaming sources of distraction so when it comes to something like YouTube you have to use
It one way and not another so this is maybe the the place where I come closest to the navigation lines that you hear in a lot of these online videos but I do think YouTube is a source of information YouTube is a become more a source of entertainment high quality entertainment
That uh Rivals what you would get on TV but it’s also a giant source of distraction so how do we how do we make sense of YouTube well here’s my here’s my YouTube strategy so in order to preserve YouTube as a way to look up instructions for
Things which I think is a great use of YouTube how do I change the oil in a Honda Odyssey you look it up on YouTube you can see a video of someone doing it it’s better than trying to find an article to preserve that use of YouTube
Without it making a a dopamine inflaming system get one of these plugins for your browser that you use YouTube on that gets rid of the recommendations so what you can do is you can search for something you can see the search results you can click on a
Search result you can watch it but there’s no here’s what’s coming up next or what about this what about that so that one type of plugin alone makes YouTube into a fantastic Library without it being something that you can use as a source of knee-jerk distraction because again when you’re working on
Something hard if you have blocked YouTube you go let’s go to youtube.com you don’t see anything you have to search for something and find something it’s not a it’s not a highly Salient source of distraction now what about entertainment on YouTube because again I think this is actually important I’m a believer that
Video Trump’s audio the future of independent content is going to be video I mean this is like radio became a big thing until television was around and then television just smashed the market share of radio it was just so much bigger because humans like to see faces
Humans like to see visuals and I increasing believe uh watching a highquality interview show on YouTube is better than 99% of the stuff that’s on television or that’s on a non unscripted stream services and I think that gap’s going to close more so how do you for
Example watch a show like mine or maybe you’re you’re a Lex fridman fan you want to watch his interviews how do you watch these type of programming as a substitute for lower quality television with again not having YouTube be a rabbit hole and my answer here is television
Sets I learned this from our YouTube guy Jeremy that increasingly televisions are becoming one of the most common devices on on which this style of YouTube video is watched so if you’re going to look something up you have a browser with a plugin that blocks the recommendations
If you’re going to watch quote unquote Independent high quality content on YouTube you have it on the YouTube app in your Apple TV or fire stick on your television and you watch it like you would any other television show in the same circumstances where you would watch
Television I’m sitting down with a a lunch break I take out my remote I turn on the TV I go to the YouTube app I search for the latest episode or whatever and I put it on the TV there’s a lot of friction in using a television there’s also a lot of routine
And ritual built into televisions where that’s not part of your dopamine cycle when you’re in your home office trying to write something you don’t rush downstairs and turn on the TV and go to Netflix and select a show and turn it on that’s too much overhead the television
You think about oh I’m going to have a meal uh I’m taking a break it’s a big production to get it going so you move high quality Independent Media consumption to the T television and looking up to a browser protected a a plug-in protected browser now you don’t have to worry uh
About something like YouTube being in your life being a source of distraction also throw in place better less dopamine susceptible entertainment sources to fill the Gap that the highly Salient uh distracting content is probably filling right now listen to get back into music go see good movies and
Read about them before and after read much more books high quality streaming content high quality podcast right get your mind used to other sorts of much higher quality content for the entertainment and distraction the lower quality stuff will begin to seem less palatable same thing happens with food
You eat a lot of junk food is really addictive my God I just need chips and cookies and this makes me feel better and what else would I want to eat you stop doing for a while you start eating better food you start cooking yourself you go to the farmers market you’re
Using high quality ingredients everyone will tell you this you start eating well a Snickers bar or a chips of Hoy seems weird it’s cardboard it’s fake it’s too sugary you don’t crave it anymore right so you don’t break this connection to junk food by just white knuckling and eating less you replace it
With better food so that’s the final part of solving over stimulation is in introducing flooding The Zone with much more quality stimulation so that you lose your taste for a Tik Tok video you lose your taste for an inflammatory online article that someone tweeted and that you’re scrolling through and then
Clicking the other links all right so again this is how I think you solve over stimulation if you’re serious about it you get rid of most of the sources of over stimulation you stop using social media you stop doing online news surfing you put in a
Lot of high quality content and in the few places where you might need to encounter these worlds uh YouTube looking things up or high quality Independent Media you have to do some limited social media for your work you do so in a way that makes it so far from
Being a source of knee-jerk distraction that your dopamine system forgets about it so anyways I appreciated that video over stimulation is a problem I’m glad people care about it but let’s just get blunt stop doing the thing that’s ruining your life stop smoking stop eating the junk food
Replace it with something better let’s not get too cute about this let’s not get too fine grained life without the over stimulation really is a Deeper Life it really is a more intellectually engaged life it really is going to be a more successful life you’re going to produce ideas that Astound you next
Question is from Gerald do you think that if you don’t have at least an informal plan for every hour of the day you are losing part of your day to ineffectiveness even if it’s Recreation or family time or do you think having intentions for every part of your day leads to
Burnout well Gerald I mean I do stand by time blocking at the level of intensity that I recommend for the professional day will burn you out if you don’t have a break from it so if you’re locked in what’s next oh my God I have a limited
Amount of time to get this done I’m going to let the pressure of that time boundaries actually motivate me to focus even more I mean that’s a very effective way of producing a lot of cognitive output in a fixed amount of time but if you’re doing that all hours of the day
You will burn out it’s just it’s just too much on the other hand I think you are right if you come to your evenings and say all right I’m done with work time to relax and maybe get some stuff done uh you’re not going to end up as relaxed as you
Think stuff is not going to get done but more importantly you’re not going to actually commit to the type of activities that maybe would give you satisfaction or meaning you’re going to drift from thing to thing your phone is for sure going to insert itself into your time there and really dominate your
Attention and your head’s going to hit the pillow you’re not going to be particularly happy so we need a middle ground between I’m looking at my planner and I got seven minutes to get these three things done and I’ve just been on my phone for the last four hours and I
Guess I need to go get you know a napkin because my eyes are bleeding from staring at memes on my screen we need something in between um so I recommend sketching a plan I use that terminology a lot sketch a plan for your evening sketch a plan for your weekend and what
That means can vary depending on the specificity so it might look okay at this exact time tonight someone’s coming over I want to watch this show and so some stuff might have time um other stuff might be more lower grain like try to like take care of the tax stuff right
After work and um let’s try to exercise here’s what we’re going to do for dinner tonight you know let’s I want to get in some reading time on my book so most of it’s not attached to times it’s relatively loose but it gives you some
Sense of I want to do this and that that and here’s what’s happening tonight and you you’re sketching a plan for a reasonable night and then you do your best to more oress follow that and if you miss time something you added a little bit too much to it and something
Took more time that doesn’t really matter at all what matters is I had some intentionality with my time I thought through like what do I want to do tonight and I uh more or less followed that the best I could that’s the win here not I got through this many things
Or I’m on top of things it’s it like I wasn’t a drift and these sketch plans can have plenty of downtime but it’s downtime on your terms said well downtime I could just sort of look at my phone while I’m eating dinner or you
Know if I we ate early I could go for a walk on this nature trail and listen to this this novel I’m really enjoying and really get downtime that I really enjoy and is really relaxing and it feels really intentional or if I think about it why don’t we start bedtime 45 minutes
Earlier like I can actually read a book with each of the kids and you know that’s actually going be really enjoyable but I had to think about that if we were just going through the motions and just looked up and that it’s bedtime we wouldn’t be able to do it so
I’m a big believer in sketching a plan for nonprofessional time intention is what matters but don’t care so much about how much you’re fitting to that plan or whether you get everything done I just want you to avoid wandering haphazardly during your time and there’s a difference there is a difference on
The Spectrum from wandering halfhazard Le to being incredibly locked in there is a gap in between there which is where I think evenings and weekends can comfortably exist all right what do we got next all I like this question it’s from Ricky there is one area of my personal
Productivity system that I haven’t found a good way to handle ongoing activities usually these are things that can sometimes be broken up into projects but the overall area is something that you’ve you’re never done with like getting better at hockey a hobby of mine any suggestions on how to handle staying
On top of these so Ricky there’s a a different category of organizational commitment that becomes relevant here and this is what we can call systems habits or routines so it’s things that have been worked into your schedule that you do on a regular basis at infinum this is just what I do I
Exercise on Monday Wednesday and Fridays and I do it after work and I and I do it in the basement gym and that’s just what I do on those days or I play hockey with this adult league on Saturday mornings and I do Rink time on uh Monday evenings
And then I I run two days a week for exercise I just do that it’s not a task that I’m done and I take it off my list it’s just part of my routine so we all have some systems routines and habits where in our lives where we just get
Used to doing it so how do we in install these things well well typically uh you put them on your calendar Andor you do some sort of metric tracking on it so you have something to check off each day did I really do this so you instill The
Habit there’s a lot that’s been written on how to instill a habit um and then once it’s there it will become more of a background part of your life it generates a sense of identity positive feedback and then it’s more likely to stick in the issue is you can only fit
So many of these so if you don’t have any that’s a problem because it’s a very powerful weapon when you when you when you work something into a background routine in your life it just happens every week you can just look up a year later and typically really cool
Stuff has happened it’s a proverbial exercise routine you make it a routine you stop thinking about it you just do it but then a couple years later you say actually I’m in pretty good shape like this paid off over time I’m glad this is a a part of my life um another example
Would be like my five books per month routine I just do that and now I don’t think much about it it’s just that this is what I do I read five books a month we talk about them on the podcast and that’s really positive over time in my
Life but I don’t have to think about it it’s it’s something I’ve instilled but there’s a limited number of things you could do maybe a fitness thing a a high quality Leisure thing there’s a few of these you can do where you you’re able to regularly put aside and protect time
For a habit routine or ritual and so you want to choose them very carefully if you’re not doing any you’re leaving a powerful weapon in the Armory right and that’s a that’s an issue but if you have five or six different things they’re going to collide and you’re going to
Have to fail in your commitment to execute again and again that destabilizes your commitment and it eventually will dissolve so when it comes to these sort of serus I do it all the time five is probably the limit depending on how big we’re talking about and maybe three is more
Reasonable so it’s almost like you want to have these slots written up on your wall uh it’s a draft who you know what do I want to draft I have three slots for like major routines I can have in my life outside of work what are they going
To be and if something hasn’t earned that place like I’m going to take that out and replace it with something that’s even more valuable so you do want to take those seriously um because you only have a limited capacity if you really want to stick with them but you do want
To be using these so sports or athletic Pursuit could be one everyone should have something here that has to do with Fitness probably just doing it again and again relating to Fitness I like really like the idea of having some sort of intellectual high quality leisure in
Here something you do on a very regular basis above the normal Baseline that the average person would do that’s pushing your mind that’s that’s uh helping you psychologically or philosophically or theologically in some sort of regular way I think that’s really important Beyond there it just kind of comes to
Your interest maybe it’s cooking or maybe it’s a craft like with woodworking or diding I don’t know there’s different things you could you could have in there uh maybe it’s programming or microelectronics but they have three maybe four of these things that get serviced with rituals that you instill
As I just do this on these days I just always do that I think that’s part of a deep life so that’s what I would do with hockey if I was you Ricky golf golf sure yeah um tennis tennis tennis and golf just read a book about
Tennis um how a few not too many not too few yeah I like those all right let’s do uh we had a longer deep dip let’s do another we’ll do one more question all right sounds good we got a question from John I’d like to calculate my implicit
Hourly rate to determine if I should Outsource Outsource a task instead of doing it myself I struggle though when it comes to personal tasks that would take place outside of work hours like yard work Home Improvement stuff like that for these types of tasks it’s unlikely I would use the time save from
Outs Outsourcing the task to do more work that would earn my hourly rate because it’s a weekend and I don’t want to work then anyway yeah so I’ve heard about this approach this is the approach where you take your salary and you divide it by the number of hours you
Work and then you say this is implicitly my hourly rate and the idea is in a professional context when you’re considering whether to do a particular annoying task I’m gonna format a presentation or uh whatever fly a better flight that’s going to save me time that’s more expensive or
Something like this you say well how much would it cost uh for me to hire someone how much would it cost for me to take the better flight and then say uh is that more or less than what it would cost me in terms of my hourly rate
So if my hourly rate is $500 and it would take me 3 hours to do this annoying task ask but I could hire someone for 300 bucks to do it you should hire someone for 300 bucks because you’re not out 300 bucks you’re actually saving $1,200 like that’s
That’s the mentality uh it’s a hack or heuristic that people sometimes use in work John is asking about trying to use this with chores outside of work and he says uh the analogy kind of breaks down because it’s not as if the three hours I spend doing yard work is three hours I
Could be earning $1,500 working because if I wasn’t doing the yard work on Saturday I wouldn’t be working anyways and I agree with that John I don’t think the monetary framework is necessarily what you want to use for evaluating the worth of activities outside of work at least in a very
Specific way there’s another way where I think money does matter here but let’s put that aside for now instead the cost I want you to think about is in footprint on your schedule and stress and so you look at how big of a footprint on my schedule is this
Particular household thing going to have if it’s highly disruptive it eats up the the core of the weekend day that you otherwise as a family could be doing lots of other things that’s a heavy cost if it’s something that’s very stressful for you that’s also a heavy cost this
Was like me doing my own taxes my issue is not that I am not quantitative or mathematical enough to understand taxes the issue is I’m too mathematical and quantitative and so my mind would hone in on the inevitable ambiguities or inconsistencies in the process of trying to fill out these different tax forms
And it would drive me crazy and at some point my wife said you’re hiring someone to do the taxes because most people are like it’s fine like uh I this this is probably fine I know what this means uh fine and I’m obsessing about well wait a
Second how does this match with this and is this really and I’m trying to figure out the whole thing it’s my type of so that’s a high stress impact so very costly to me so when it comes to Outsourcing or eliminating nonwork obligations that’s the cost that you
Care about if it has a highly disruptive footprint on your schedule Outsource or eliminate if you can if it has a high impact in terms of your stress level Outsource or eliminate if you can that’s what you should be thinking about not what your time is worth or your your
Hourly rate or something like this I I I agree that that doesn’t come into it all right so money is relevant here in the sense that Outsourcing can take money and that’s fine so you also have to factor in can I afford this I do want to underscore though a point we talked
About this some in the Deep dive earlier in this episode when I was talking with Sarah Hart younger we talked about this a little bit that I think we take off the table too quickly the idea of investing in elimination of disruptive schedule Footprints and overhead we just
Take that off our list of things where it’s valid to spend money on even if we could and we spend that same money on other types of things so we’re very comfortable let’s say we’re talking about you know dual income middle class Coastal America or something like this
People are very comfortable with uh well we’ll spend more money to have a uh a nicer car or you know we the environment’s important so we’re going to have a $70,000 Tesla we will spend that’s $50,000 more than we need for the transportation but like this isn’t we
Think it’s important to us and that’s a good thing to spend money on but if on the other hand it’s uh a few hundred a month want to take out this yard work chore that just eats up your schedule and is and is annoying for your family
You say I don’t want to do that because technically I could do this and and that feels like a waste of money you know and we have these sort of inconsistencies uh happening all the time well here’s an activity you know kid’s kind of interested in this we’ll spend thousands
On this activity um but the idea that we could hire a laundry service I could do the laundry technically and so no I don’t know I I want to do that that’s somehow a failure in fact that last one is a point Laura Vander Camp talks about
A lot is many more people could and should be Outsourcing their laundry um but they don’t because it’s not in this list of psychologically appropriate things to spend money on so I think we we’re weird and we’ll spend a huge amount of money on this and on these
Things that have a cost in terms of schedule impact or stress outside of work we’re we’re very reluctant to spend money and I think we should change the the thinking about it so I think that’s one issue um the other issue and Sarah talked about this is is people don’t
Like giving that advice because anytime you talk about investing money in anything there’s this knee-jerk response of uh not everyone has the money for that it’s true of everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give the advice because for a lot of people it could be helpful so that’s what I would say John
Is look for forget your hourly rate what H what is the cost instead in terms of schedule disruption what is the cost in terms of stress and be more willing to invest in that than you might have otherwise been more willing to invest in optimizing Outsourcing that you
Otherwise might have been the final thing I want to say is often the solution here is not Financial it’s elimination so you you have some sort of uh setup in your life that actually you could just stop doing this you could step down from this position you could
Reconfigure the specific teams that your kids are on there like there’s some things you could do that might have a huge win in terms of schedule input or stress and you don’t because it’s well there’s some some advantage to this or someone might be disappointed and we don’t take elimination seriously enough
But often elimination is p is possible and people forget about it two weeks later no one cares but you’ve had this big gain as well so so Outsourcing uh is one way to get rid of these high cost outof work activities elimination is the other and they’re both things that we
Don’t think enough about and so I’m glad you brought this up John because I think it’s I think these are both strategies that when we’re thinking about organizing life outside of work we should all think about out more I love eliminating things my wife actually asked to push back on that like
Why don’t we just stop doing it why don’t we just start we just cancel this why don’t we why don’t we do nothing and yeah it’s a little more complicated than that like kids should be doing things yeah but like some sports leagues make your schedule impossible and this Sports
League they’re still playing the sport but it’s like way more reasonable like you know some sometimes those type of things having kids play hockey is pretty tough cuz like I time always so like limited late at night it’s late at night or early yeah yeah yeah hockey hockey
Can be a rough one that’s the one advantage of baseball like it can’t be played early in the morning can’t be played late at night so at least you know unfortunately it takes a very long time to play got soccer too soccer’s pretty good yeah there’s no early morning
Fields uh rowing is bad a lot of early morning all right next question is from Ruby a 35y old Banker from London I’m taking a few weeks off to recover from burnout due to a period where my responsibilities kept increasing what would you recommend to do to make the
Most of my time away from work so Ruby the productivity perspective here is that if all you do during your time off is recharge and then just go back into this environment where you were before give it six months you’ll be back in the same place what is important here this is
What I would do with my time off is figure figure out what is the productivity framework I’m going to put in place so that I have Clarity into all of the obligations entering my world none of it is being held only in my mind I am
Configuring I can see what it is what type of work do I have at different uh different parts this is the traditional facing the productivity dragon and then I control my time on different time scales here’s what I’m doing today here’s what I’m doing this week here’s how these projects
Fit now here’s the here’s the goal here not that with this productivity framework you can optimize your time enough that the the workload that burnt you out before you can now handle that’s not the goal the goal instead is Clarity clarity about what’s on your plate clarity about what is reasonable
To be on your plate clarity about proposing this this and this makes sense this this and this is too much the productivity system a good productiv ity system can give you the confidence you need to advocate for yourself now again this I think is one of the one of the Insidious side
Effects of rejecting productivity because you associate it with this optimization over culture is that ironically it is exactly what your employer wants you to do we think about it oh no the productivity is somehow part of this base super structure sort of uh early 20th century Marxist
Approach of of trying to uh exploit more labor from the the uh the the proletariat or something like this right so we have this sort of grad school blah blah blah approach to it actually knowing what you’re doing knowing what’s on your plate having a extreme clarity about exactly your
Workplace seeing the Matrix of the obligations being thrown at you with Clarity that’s actually what in a lot of these overwhelmed situations your employer wouldn’t want because it means you can come back and say I know this is crazy we need to cut this in half let me
Tell you why you know I I have my arms around everything and I’m very careful I run my schedule very carefully and I do very good work this is 50% too much and I have confidence in that conviction if you instead fall back into halfhazard busyness because you’re trying to reject
The the hustle culture Etc you are at the mercy of these employers it’s just all stuff we’re all busy you got a bunch of stuff why aren’t you doing work why are you complaining you’re either going to burn yourself out again and again or give them an excuse to fire you
So productivity can actually be what you need to prevent and push back against overload right so this is again the whole autonomy frame for productivity is having your arms around your obligations is what allows you to do so many different things and this is one of the
Things you can do is it allows you to stand up it allows you to stand up and say with a clear voice and conviction enough this is too much I know it’s too much you know that I know that now this is my this is what’s reasonable and this
Is what I’m going to do and when people know that you have your act together when it comes to these sort of productivity systems it’s much harder for them to push back against that so that’s what I would say rest and recharge but also get your systems fired
Up so that when you come back you’re no longer at the mercy of like whatever junk your employer is just throwing at you and hoping you won’t notice that is completely unreasonable yeah I like what you said at the end of the Deep dive too about having options yeah yeah productiv is
About that’s the autonomy frame yeah if you don’t have control over all the different obligations orbiting you in your professional life you are at the mercy of whim your boss’s mood your personality what you can get away with and basically will probably just be stressed out MH I mean or you could be
Okay like maybe you just whatever become kind of misanthropic and and resentful and people don’t want to deal with it and you kind of find a way to make it work but it’s all just you’re drifting towards some sort of steady state that’s probably going to be a non-optimal
Equilibrium but when you know everything that’s going on you can stand back and say this this and this is the problem and if I move this I can’t do those I got to take this off my plate and no no no of course no of course no of course
No yes I’ll do this here’s I’m going it just makes all the difference you can do so much if you have a good productivity system and you can’t do almost anything without it I mean you’re just left with like I’m burnt out or um you know quitting the workforce Y and hoping that
People subscribe to my substack there’s got to be something in between those two all right let’s keep rolling what do we have next all right next question is from R 23-year-old from India I have too many interests in my life I have so many choices it’s crippling and I end up
Doing nothing my question is how do I learn to prioritize so r i included this question because it helps show that the productivity perspective is also relevant to your life outside of work it’s also relevant to your leure life so halfhazard busyness can you like it’s happening here in your leav your
Life in the same way that it can in your professional life especially like R you’re young you’re 23 years old you have all this time and all this potential and there’s so many different things you can do that you bounce from one thing to another and nothing’s making progress your brain will
Eventually stop trying to generate motivation uh I’ve written about this before R what’s really happening here if you want my opinion is that our brain is very good at evaluating potential plans is this objective worth it and do I have reason to believe this plan is going to
Work our brain asks and answers those two questions all the time we’re very good at that this is something that is BR into our Paleolithic path those mechanisms when it doesn’t trust you really know what you’re doing when it doesn’t trust that there’s a plan here
That makes sense that’s going to lead to some sort of Mastery or uh highly fulfilling outcome it says Nope and what does it feel like when you’re plan evaluation apparatus in your brain says no it feels like procrastination you can’t summon motivation because there is a system in
Our brain that generates the feelings of motivation towards action and has to believe what you’re doing so if your leisure life is crippled with or or ridden with haphazard business it’s like I’m not going to just start this whatever bu a video camera to become the next Mar because you don’t know what
You’re doing here there’s no plan here it’s is one of like 15 different things you have that is why you have this feeling of I can’t do anything I feel crippled it’s because it’s too haphazard it’s too busy so you can bring a productivity framework into your leisure
Life to get your arms around this to start to be selective to start to be intentional about what you spend your time on and in doing so you’re going to end up in a much better place so let me give you a a particular suggestion here
R just to plant a seed so one way you might structure more intentionally your life outside of work would be a forpart focus I’ve talked about this before three routines in one prog one project any one time so the three routines that just figure out how to have going in in the
Background would probably be some sort of fitness health routine uh this is eating and exercise this is foundational let’s get that going background some sort of reading routine I’m reading on a regular basis I’m moving away from just distraction my mind is learning how to actually remain focused on complex thoughts you’re going
To develop as a human being you’re going to develop as a as a thinker uh we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago on how to become a reader it was called the joys of the read life it’s probably like 238 yeah yeah episode 238 so go back and
Watch that your third routine I would say to put in place foundationally is some sort of community routine these things you do on a regular basis that keep you connected and serving your friends your family other people in the communities that you’re involved with get background routines for those three
Things going that’s just foundational you can tweak those but you should always on a regular basis those things are just woven into the fabric of your life okay and then one major project and then do that major project till you get to a great milestone and you can
Swap in another major project so just one major project at a time spend six months on it spend a year on it I don’t really care you’re young you’re 23 you have more time than you think so I this is just one particular suggestions of how you might establish a more
Intentional approach to your leisure life but but having routines for the things that are foundational to a life well lived and then pursuing one thing at a time until a a good point give that your full attention that for example works really well and it’s the type of thing that
You’re not going to get to until you get more intentional about your time all right we’re making progress here what do we got next Jesse I like this question next question is from Jonas 32-year-old uh research analyst I’m trying to decide whether to ditch postpone a side hustle idea in order not
To overwhelm myself versus adopting a slow productivity mindset and see how progress compounds over time so Jonas what you need is Extreme Clarity and this is where the productivity perspective is going to help you you have to get your arms around the job that’s making you feel busy right now
Capture configure control see where you can get that you reduce the stress take control of your time begin with the configure step to be more aggressive about workload management see where you can get that line in a place that’s allowing you to do what you need to do without feeling overwhelmed and then
Step back and say where would the side hustle fit and answer that question honestly and now Jonas knowing what I know about you because in your elaboration you talked a little bit more about your business and you have a lot of going a lot of things going on with
Your family and young kids when you step back you might say there is not time for me to execute a reasonable plan for this side hustle and you know what that’s fine don’t do the side Hustle but you’re going to get that answer with Clarity or after you capture configure control you might
Really tame your job and so you know what I could work on this two days a week 3 hours in the morning it’s my remote work days nothing really gets going until noon or whatever and uh this would allow me and here’s my plan and I could actually make pretty good progress
On this and then you might find like okay now I see exactly where I’m going to work on this and I’m looking at exactly where I’m going to work on this and this is enough time uh and this is worth it enough to me let’s do it but
You cannot get to these answers with confidence unless you really know what’s going on with your current work obligations and so that’s what I want you to do pull out capture configure control until you are a master of your job then work through what are the reasonable scenarios for me to make
Progress on the side hustle and evaluate those will it work and is it worth it is where this the achievement the side hustle would generate is it worth it for what I would have to do and be very honest with you answer it and especially at this stage of life you have young
Kids at home it’s completely fine for your answer there just be no it’s not worth it I’ve controlled my job I like having this flexibility I want to just use this to do more things on my family or a hobby I think that’s a completely reasonable solution
As well but you don’t get those options till you know what’s going on if you’re just haphazardly busy good luck you’re just going to start doing the side hustle that in a way that you don’t have time for that’s going to cause stress and you’re going to let it Peter out so
Again the productivity perspective here says once you have control you get autonomy autonomy gives you options I actually thought when I first read the question I thought that he had already started the side hustle and you know was working on it for a while and
Then you know it’s a little hard to tell I read the longer one he he talked a lot about the various things that were he was worried about like his business and there there definitely was a sense of haphazard business MH yeah but it was a little unclear if he had
Started and was feeling overwhelmed by it already or if he was pretty sure that if I just started this I’d feel overwhelmed I mean the slow productivity approach it can work with a side hustle um but you really got to evaluate it right so you could say like I at some
Point it’s too slow if it’s I’m going to work once a month I’m going to have an hour session like that’s too slow yeah I mean to me slow productivity also involves obsessing over quality it also involves the reduction of things you can give more attention to something it’s
Not just about you can fit another thing into your schedule because if you stretch it out long enough you can find little pockets of time to make progress I mean slow productivity is it’s a lot of it’s about simplification so it it it can take more of your attention you obsession over
Quality so that you can really come at it again and again I think just trying to spread something out so you touch it here and there it’s not really a slow productive approach I think it’s just a fragmented approach yep yep all right let’s try to fit in one more question
Here all right next question is from Andrew 51y old biology Professor I’m a professor because research production is not a shared goal I have difficulty getting my colleagues to think creatively about system changes even if we might benefit from it all it’s always easier to do what is easiest in the
Immediate moment other folks productivity be damned what should I do well I included this question in part just because I like Professor questions um but it’s another good example for us to apply the productivity perspective so what Andrew is talking about is the type of collaboration systems I detail and
Motivate in my book a world without email where I talk about in the knowledge work context there’s many informal collaboration styles that are built mainly around haphazard back and forth messaging that are actually unproductive for everyone involved in the long term even though in the moment it’s easier
Just to shoot off a quick email than it is to actually Implement some sort of collaboration system like whatever there’s a shared document where the thoughts go and on Monday night I review that and then I put the notes using track changes and you have tell Wednesday close a business to react to
Them and then we have a standing meeting on Thursday morning those type of systems get you away from constant back and forth messaging but there a little bit more work in the moment Andrew is saying I can’t get fellow professors to do this because we’re not all working
Towards the shared same goal it’s not everyone in my department is working on getting this new product out we’re each working on our own thing and so we’re not that interested in being uh collectively focused on improving how we collaborate so Andrew my productivity perspective here is you have to shift
The scope that you’re thinking about productivity if you are a professor at a research Institution you need to think about yourself as a standalone business and the other professors in your department and other professors that you interact with and other departments uh you know the HR department the whatever like other
Whatever you would call them groups within University or like their own businesses with which you have various professional relationships you’re Ford and you work with Firestone tires they’re two separate businesses but you know you guys have a contract and a relationship to get the tires for your your car
Manufacturing plant but you’re not the same company so you have to think of yourself almost as like a standalone Silo so when you’re thinking about systems internally is where you’re really trying to get a handle on uh what is my work what do I work on what are my
Quotas what do I not do when do I get this work done how much time do I have available how do I want to use this time and you’re keeping track of all that and have all your complex systems then when you’re interacting with the rest of the
World it’s well you have sort of interfaces with interacting with these other standal loan entities and I don’t know they’re bothering you with emails you could just do what you need to do with that just uh process Centric emailing might work there where you never formally develop a new
Collaboration system with someone else you just sort of tell them in your response yeah great we should think about this um put any thoughts you have in this Google doc that I started h i will review it if I have any questions because you’re a professor I know you
Have clearly posted office hours I will actually just come to your office hours next week and we’ll talk about it like you just sort of put a process into the communication and there it is you’re not calling it a process you’re not negotiate about it you’re just saying it
Certain types of work you’re like this is very disruptive this person just constantly wants to email things okay I’m not doing that not g to work on that person I’m gonna leave that committee you have all this autonomy this is like a company saying we’re going to get out of selling
Etel because there’s not a lot of profit there we’re going to focus more on you know selling Ford focuses whatever you think of yourself like a standalone business that interfaces with other organizations and you do your best to to keep those interfaces as non-disruptive as possible so you need to be more
Ruthless Andrew that’s I guess what I would say your department is not your team members they’re your colleagues you’re collegial to them you enjoy them but you’re all your own Standalone entities trying to figure out how to exist in the same academic sphere while still accomplishing your internal objectiv
Ives so I don’t know maybe maybe I’m being a little bit darwinian there but I think it’s the best Academia really is it’s entrepreneurial yeah you’re trying to produce original research that’s the whole game if you don’t you get fired that’s the whole game and you work with
Other people there’s other things you have to do and service you have to do but but it’s just like Ford has these other things they have to do but ultimately if they’re not selling cars they’re out of business you kind of have to keep that in
Mind hey if you like this video I think you’ll really like this one as well check it out
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1.5 hour video
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How?
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:12 🌱 Developing discipline is about building it into your identity, not just tackling ambitious goals randomly.
01:39 📝 Identify key areas of your life (Deep life buckets) and establish tractable Keystone habits for daily tracking.
06:50 🔄 Overhaul each life bucket during one to two months, focusing intensively on specific improvements, experimenting, and adapting.
09:50 🧭 Building discipline involves a two-step process: Keystone habits for foundational identity, then focused overhauls for deeper integration.
13:21 🎯 Long-term planning is a feedback loop; start with a broad quarterly plan, refine weekly plans based on feedback, and adapt daily plans accordingly.
15:50 📚 Cal Newport discusses his writing philosophy and mentions his appreciation for Johan Hari's work, highlighting Hari's inversion approach in exploring complex topics.
20:28 🗓️ Pre-block important or timely work on your calendar to ensure it gets prioritized.
22:18 🌿 Time block relaxation into your workday for sustainability and guilt-free breaks.
24:06 🗃️ Theme smaller admin blocks by cognitive context to enhance efficiency and reduce cognitive context switching.
26:42 📅 Add a short postmortem organizing block after significant meetings to process information and avoid open loops.
29:35 🕰️ Explore advanced time-blocking techniques for improved productivity and work sustainability.
36:35 🧠 The video discusses the challenge of focusing on hard tasks and explores the neuroscience behind distraction, emphasizing the role of the dopamine system in seeking quick rewards.
39:12 🎯 Overstimulation, especially from social media, affects young people significantly, hindering long-term, deep cognitive work, leading to issues like poor grades and job stagnation.
40:35 🚫 To combat overstimulation, the solution proposed is straightforward: eliminate sources causing overstimulation. This involves not using social media for entertainment and avoiding online news.
45:10 🤐 To use YouTube without falling into the distraction trap, employ browser plugins that block recommendations. This turns YouTube into a useful library for specific searches without the constant lure of suggested content.
47:50 📺 For high-quality video content, especially on YouTube, use television sets rather than browsers to maintain a ritualistic, less-distracting consumption pattern. Also, replace lower-quality content with better alternatives.
49:50 🔄 The final strategy involves flooding your environment with high-quality stimulation to replace the craving for distracting content. This shift is similar to replacing junk food with healthier alternatives.
51:28 🗓️ The speaker recommends a middle ground between intense time blocking and complete drift, suggesting a sketch plan for evenings and weekends to bring intentionality to non-professional time.
54:46 🔄 For ongoing activities like improving at a hobby, the importance lies in establishing systems, habits, or routines. These provide a structured approach to consistently engage with long-term pursuits.
54:59 🔄 Installing habits: Create routines, systems, and habits in your life by working them into your schedule, using calendars or metric tracking. Make them a background part of your life to generate a sense of identity and positive feedback.
56:19 🔄 Limited capacity for habits: Be mindful of the limited number of habits you can effectively maintain. Choose them carefully, considering fitness, high-quality leisure, intellectual pursuits, and personal interests.
57:42 🔄 Draft your life slots: Draft major routines on your wall, allocating slots for important habits. Consider fitness, intellectual pursuits, and personal interests. Limit the number to avoid commitment failures.
59:18 🔄 Implicit hourly rate for personal tasks: When considering outsourcing personal tasks, focus on the disruption to your schedule and stress impact rather than the monetary value. Factor in the footprint on your schedule and stress levels.
01:00:39 🔄 Outsourcing chores and stress: When evaluating outsourcing, prioritize tasks with high schedule disruption or stress. Consider investing in outsourcing or elimination to improve overall well-being.
01:07:31 🔄 Recovering from burnout: Use time off to establish a productivity framework for clarity. Focus on understanding and organizing obligations to gain confidence and advocate for a reasonable workload. Productivity can empower you in managing expectations and workload.
01:11:16 🔄 Autonomy through productivity: Productivity systems provide autonomy by giving you control over obligations, preventing overload. Having options and clarity about your work allows you to advocate for yourself and make informed decisions.
01:12:37 🤔 Productivity applies not only to work but also to leisure; haphazard busyness in leisure can lead to lack of motivation and progress.
01:13:30 🔄 Introduce a productivity framework to your leisure life; create routines for fitness, reading, and community, and focus on one major project at a time.
01:16:56 🤹♂️ To decide on a side hustle, gain extreme clarity on your current workload, configure it, and then evaluate where the side hustle fits, considering realistic time commitments.
01:17:52 🚀 After gaining control of your job, assess the feasibility and worthiness of a side hustle; having autonomy provides options for better decision-making.
01:21:23 🔄 Shift the perspective on productivity; in academic settings, consider each professor as a standalone business and develop internal systems to manage workload efficiently.
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The Now Habit by Neil Fiore was a lifesaver for me. Convinced me to do the "unschedule" by first putting important self-care, health activities, and family obligations on my calendar first, then schedule everything else around it (including work).
Lol, the glitch in the Matrix at 36:25
Is this a reupload? Could gave sworn ive seen this one
Coincidentally, in Brian's email today he mentioned he still does daily burpees
Your co host toby has the best smile ever
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of YouTubers mashing together clips of previous shows and re-releasing them like it’s new material. Really annoying.
Cal's advice to download Unhook really changed my productivity for the better. YouTube is the one social media site I can get lost watching for longer than I intended, and Unhook completely removes the addictive pull that sensationalized thumbnails and titles on the sidebar had on me. Now on YouTube, I have to search by topic or creator and watch one video at a time without anything else shown to me on the screen. It was super easy to install, it's free, and it works! I love it!
Cal you should check out Dr. Shawn Baker, an advocate of the carnivore diet. He is a multiple world record holder in rowing for his age group.
So the advice I’m hearing is, get rid of your smart phone. Simplify and just get a non-smart phone. You can call and text without a smart phone.
the problem with youtube is that the algorithm is better at finding stuff that you want than the actual search function on youtube.
i can search for a video, word for word the title of the video. but around certain topic you wont even see the video you are looking for.
and when searching for a specific kind of information. youtube shows you shitty search results (often really bad quality videos) but then maybe a few hours later and bam. the video you were looking for shows up in recommendation. It's super weird. and the search function used to be really good back in the day. but then they neutered it by implementing a "show news outlets first" or "for you section" in the search results.
it's so bad these days.
otherwise i have a distraction free youtube addon. but i often take it off. put videos in a new tab that i want to watch and then I put it back on.
when will you get 4k camera?
Isn't this video old?
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The strategy of breaking admin work into specific goals is very helpful, thank you Cal. I’m going to try this.
I do have multiple email addresses for different things- one for family related, two different work emails for different jobs, one just for bills, accounts, memberships. It really helps to look at them separately, and keep like things that together. Kind of like the Marie Kondo method or organizing your house, like things stay in one place.