Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 108: LISTENER CALLS: Becoming Productive

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast. - The hyperactive hive mind and the return to the office. [2:57]- Becoming productive. [12:23]- Time tracking apps. [24:51]- Scheduling continuous projects. [27:19]- Struggling with time blocking. [36:51]- Working on problems past when it's useful. [41:47]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, listener calls mini episode. Now, my ambitious plan for this episode is to do six listener calls instead of my normal four or five. So with that in mind, let's skip the quick announcements. We'll do a quick sponsor read and get right into the calls. The Deep Questions podcast is brought you in part by our good friends at Blinkist. as I like to say, ideas are one of the most powerful currency in our current culture and the best place to get ideas from are books. Not on Twitter, not in the comment section of Instagram, God forbid, not on TikTok. Books actually represent someone who has thought deeply about a topic or researched that topic, probably has worked with that topic for years, if not their entire career, then putting down their thoughts as clearly as possible. So books are where the best ideas come from.

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one I want to read in more depth? Blinkist will get you to the books, which will get you to the ideas that matter more than ever. Now, right now, Blinkus has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkist.com slash deep. Let's kick off this episode with a call about the hyperactive hive mind and what it

will do when we return to work in person. Hi, Cal. This is Rebecca. I really enjoyed your new book, A World Without Email. However, it had an unexpected side effect. I've become very concerned about the well-being of my sheep, that is, my cognitive sheep. You see, I know they'd love to spend all day over on that email pasture, but I know that it's productivity poison. And on top of that, I've got to keep my eye out for Odysseus,

who thinks that sheep are great camouflage when he's escaping from the cyclops. So in all seriousness, I'm a writer who's soon to be heading back to the office once I'm fully vaccinated after nearly a, well, let's see, more than a year of working from home. And I'm just concerned that when I get back to the office, the hyperactive hive mind is going to be even more addictive because I'll have colleagues who can easily knock on my door or ambush me in the hallway and say, didn't you see my email? Well, Rebecca, first of all, I want to say I normally cut down these questions to be pretty quick. But in your case, I really appreciate the effort you went through in order to end up your opening at a very solid reference to the Odyssey.

So I kept that in there as a case study for other question askers to aspire to. when working in superfluous references to Greek mythology. So well done on that. All right, let's talk about the hyperactive hive mind and the return to the office. I think things will actually be better. Now, let me put some meat on the bones here. Yeah, it is true that at first when we return to the office, there will be an uptick in casual socializing.

I think that's what we're going to see more of than we did before we left just because we miss each other. and we miss humans and we're going to want to stop by and catch up and what's going on and you want to go for lunch. There might be a month or two in which we're way more social than we have been before but looking beyond that, which by the way I think is going to be a good thing, we really should learn how to interact with other humans

not on a screen, not on a Zoom window. So this will be good. But beyond that, I actually think in the office in general, the hyperactive hive mind is a little bit more subdued. Now this is the argument I made in the New Yorker piece I wrote early in the pandemic about remote work. The argument I made is that when you move an office that operates with the hyperactive hive mind remote, the hyperactive hive mind gets more hyperactive.

The corollary of that is that when you then go back to in the office, you should expect the hyperactive hive mind to actually calm down a little bit. So what's going on here? In the office, this is my contention in that article. In the office, there is these informal, we can think of them as productivity, heuristics that put a governor on the hive mind. It doesn't make it good, but it made it bearable. Like things could still operate. And when we went fully remote and that governor was removed, a lot of workplaces just spiraled completely out of control. So what are these

informal productivity heuristics enabled by being in person? Well, part of it is the ability to do quick synchronous interaction with very low overhead. So we might say, oh, what a pain that someone might just grab me and ask me something, right? Because that's an interruption that I can't control. But them grabbing you to ask you something, let's say you talk for two minutes. That two-minute conversation in the moment, rather, would have required, let's say, five back and forth asynchronous unscheduled emails to resolve if you were completely remote and you're doing this completely just with email. Now, let's say this was a relatively urgent matter. It involved, let's say a project presentation that was happening later in the day.

Well, now in the remote scenario, you have these five back and forth emails, and let's say you receive three of those and two of them you sent. So there's three unscheduled emails that you have to respond to quickly, because this issue has to be resolved before the afternoon. So each of those three emails, you need to keep monitoring that inbox now, waiting for it to come in, because if you wait two hours, that could be the death of this conversation. If you wait two hours between every one of these messages, it won't finish.

And if the conversation doesn't finish, you're screwed when it comes time to do the presentation, right? So now you have to check your email a lot. So now you maybe have to check your email five to ten times for each of those three messages, because you want to catch it just when it comes in. And now what you have is, what, 15 to 30, 15 to 30 inbox checks spread throughout just a few hours of your day, each one of which creating a context shift, a context shift, shift in your brain that significantly reduces your ability to concentrate, gives you mental fatigue, and generates anxiety. So you basically, with just that one, just that one five-minute conversation

you could have done in person in the hallway, you have now basically hosed your entire morning. You've caused 15 to 30 concentration busting, anxiety, increasing cognitive context shifts. You look at it that way, you say, man, I'm glad that we now have the capability for someone to grab me. And now let's be even clearer about this. These informal low overhead synchronous conversations, they don't just happen completely randomly, right? I mean, it's not you're in your office on the phone and your colleague comes smashing through the drop ceiling to the floor on a rope and it's like, Rebecca, now, right? Typically, you're watching. Is this person walking to get coffee? Let me grab them now. Is their door open and I can see they put the phone down and they're

just transitioning to something else? Let me grab them now. We actually are. able to aim the interruption towards relatively good time for these interruptions. A lot of these discussions happen at the beginning and end of meetings. We completely underestimated how much low overhead synchronous collaboration happens in the five minutes before or after a meeting ends. And again, every one of these things is now 15 to 30 inbox checks in a short period of time if it all happens completely remotely where we're all just abstractions at the other end of Slack channels, we're just abstract addresses at the other end of email inboxes.

So that really helps. The other thing that really helps in the office is the friction goes up when it comes to placing time demands on other people's plates. One way it goes up is you have to see the person. This induces a social capital cost. If I'm going to see you in the hallway and have to look you in the eye several times today, I'm going to think twice before throwing some terribly ambiguous obligation hot potato task item onto your list through a quick email. Now I have to see you.

And even though this is subconscious, that increases the social capital costs. I'm going to be a little bit more careful about what I put on your plate and how careful I am putting on your plate. Again, when we're all just abstractions, you were just an email address I can send things to. You were just a Slack channel I can drop things to. I'm much more likely to be like, can you get into this? Question mark, thanks, exclamation point,

crazy emoji, send. And whatever, it's more work for you, but it's off my plate, it's all I care about. No consequence. I have to see you in the hallway. Little consequence, I might not do it

or I might be more clear. That makes a difference. And finally, meetings have a physical cost. If I call a meeting, everyone has to leave from where they are, they have to get coffee,

I have to see them all come into the room. There's a little bit of a stage fright aspect. there's this whole semi-good-natured accusatory atmosphere of like, okay, we've all come here. We've all come to be where you are. There better be a good reason for this. A lot of that friction goes away when it's just clicking send on a Zoom invite. You know, we're in Zoom all the time, we're in and out of screens and who cares.

So, again, the slightly increased friction cost in the aggregate reduces things that come on your plate, reduces friction. there's even a signaling of busyness that can happen in the office is very hard to do online where I just see you look hairy I see you look hairy

because I can see you we're in the office so I'm going to back off and give this to someone else or maybe I'm not going to do this work. So these type of informal productivity heuristics doesn't make the high practice hive mind good.

I mean still in the office there's tons of slack and tons of email and it's a real problem but there's governor helps and when you go fully remote you lose it So don't underestimate Rebecca the advantages you are going to regain when those informal productivity heuristics are once again enabled because you are all in person. That being said, the hive mind is still terrible. In office or not, we need to replace it.

That's what a world without email is about. I hope that change is coming. I know that change is coming. So rest assured, all of this is a relatively short-term issue we have to deal with. but for those of you who are dreading the return to the office for many reasons, here's at least one little thing to look forward to. All right, for our next question, here's an interesting one. It's someone who is just confronting for the first time

the challenge of actually trying to be productive. Hi, Cal. My name is Nehi. I encountered your work a while ago, very briefly, and I'm returning to it based on a faculty mentor's recommendation. I'm in the dissertation proposal phase, in my doctoral program. I'm also the pastor of a church and a mom among many other things. So I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by the necessity of this productivity thing, but feel like it's important. There's so many options in terms of apps and platforms. So wondering here at the very beginning if there is a steep

learning curve to learning how to get organized. How did you figure out which platform worked best for you? How much time do you spend on the actual work of getting slash being organized? Do you use different apps for different sort of projects? Anything you have to offer would be really great. Thanks. Well, this is really exciting. I always enjoy when I get to talk to someone who is brand new to the idea of organizing and optimizing your work, because there is so much cool stuff ahead of you.

There is so much positive you are going to get out of. starting to think about productivity that, again, it just makes me excited. So this is a great opportunity for me. Now, the first thing I'm going to point out is it sounds like you are thinking about productivity from a tool or platform perspective. This is common, but it's misguided. I think it's common to think about, oh, productivity means what tool do I use? Is it a bullet journal? Is it a to-doist? If I get a platform or a tool, and I am therefore organized, it's not the right way to think about it. tools come later. Tools come later actually have the whole thing figured out. Then you can

figure out, oh, what tools do I want to use to help implement the systems I put in place? So tools should come later. So let's not think about what tool you use. Let's think about what systems and approaches and rules you're going to use. And then we can plug in and tools later. We can swap out different tools. That's kind of not the important part. There's different ways to conceive of what goes into being productive. More recently, I've been focusing on what I call the productivity funnel. It has three parts. So above the funnel is this cloud of all the possible things that you could potentially do or should be doing. The first layer of the funnel is activity selection. Now this is whatever you use, whatever philosophy system or rules you use

to actually figure out which of these possible things are you actually going to commit to doing. Next, as we get narrower on the funnel, we get organization. How do you clarify and organize and keep track of all the different things that you need to be doing, what their status is, what your plans are for them going forward. That's the organization part of the funnel. And then at the bottom, at the narrowest part, is execution. Just looking at what's ahead of you right now, how do you actually execute in the moment the things that you have decided to need to get done?

So this productivity funnel gets you at the very top from this big cloud of everything you could or can be doing, and at the very bottom is you doing something right now. It's what mediates between those two things. Now, before we go briefly into these three pieces, I also want to emphasize this is very different than the other way that people think about the term productivity. So there's a anti-productivity backlash

that's out there right now in certain sort of elite discourses, but their productivity is being used as a shorthand for some sort of culture of, I guess, production speed or production maximization. It's sort of a rough adoption of an industrial notion of productivity and trying to apply it to the non-industrial space. It's a critique of productivity in these discourses is really a critique of this idea that

maximizing the amount of stuff you do is itself a good. This is largely a straw man. I know very few people that talk so simplistically, but I agree that is bad. but that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is there is a cloud of stuff you could be doing. There's only one thing you're going to be doing now. One way or the other, you have to get between those two. You could be thoughtful about it or you could be haphazard. I think it's better to be thoughtful. All right, so let's go through this real briefly. Activity selection, you have a lot of things on your plate. Activity selection, this piece of the funnel is going to force you to actually confront that and be realistic.

You're a mom, you're a minister. You're working on your dissertation. So you probably have to be pretty careful about how much can I fit. And maybe in this current moment, there's places I have to pull back because otherwise I will be overloaded. Maybe as a mom, there's a lot of parenting type optional activities I could be doing that in this season I'm not going to be doing. I'm not going to go overboard with these various extra activities or this is not the time to sort of do a deep spring clean and organize the house or do a renovation. or I'm going to really pare down those activities because I'm in this busy period while I work on my dissertation. As a minister, there's a couple different initiatives that we're going to put a pause on while I'm doing my dissertation. We'll bring them back, right?

And on my dissertation, that work, I have to be pretty careful about just working on the proposal and not saying yes to that review and not saying yes to that departmental committee because I'm seeing the whole picture. I'm trying to be very careful about what I do and don't do, how much work is reasonable given what's going on in my life. So all of those decisions are being made at the activity selection piece of this funnel. Think that through. Have a philosophy. Write it down. Next comes the meat of the productivity funnel, which is how you organize and make plans for all the things you need to do. There are lots of different philosophies for how to do this. For each of these philosophies, there's many different tools that can help you implement the philosophy. But again, let's put the tools aside for now.

That's a secondary issue. The philosophies I often preach, and again, this is not comprehensive, but the philosophy, I often preach at the organization level of the productivity funnel is full capture. A David Allen notion from his book getting things done. Everything that you are committed to doing should be written down somewhere in a trusted system that you regularly review. Nothing should be kept track of only in your head. Your obligation should not be spread out over many different inboxes and piles. Somewhere you have the list. Everything from I need to go shopping and get more bananas to I owe a chapter to my dissertation advisor by next month.

Everything should be written down in a trust-em system that you regularly review. I don't care what it is. It's a legal pad. It's a Google Doc. It's a Word Doc. It doesn't matter to me. I don't really care so much about tools. All right, that's number one.

Number two, I'm a big believer in quarterly planning. So when you're looking at the quarter ahead, like right now you'd be looking at the summer. And in September, you'd be looking at the fall. And in December, you'd be looking at the winter. And in March, you'd be looking at the spring. When you're looking at the quarter ahead, you sit down and you review what's going on, what's on my plate, what are all the things I've committed to doing, what are the deadlines coming up, what are the big projects going on? What is my plan for this quarter? What are the big things I want to make progress on?

What are the rules I want to try out? Maybe I really have to do a lot of dissertation writing. So what I'm going to try this quarter is writing every morning. this is where you would write it down. So you're building out this quarterly plans. It's your plan for, here's how I'm doing the different types of work that needs to get done this quarter.

I'm seeing the big picture. Again, write this down. I use a Google Doc. You can put in a notebook. You can put it in a Moleskin. You can put in a text file. I don't care. Again, I'm not that interested in tools.

All right, now let's move down to the execution piece of the funnel. I'm going to look at execution starting at the scale of the week. I recommend, not everyone does this, but I recommend every week making a plan for that week. I call it a weekly plan. What you do when you make your weekly plan is you look at three things. You look at that quarterly plan. Okay, what is my plan for this quarter?

So what does that mean about what I need to do this week? You look at all of that capture stuff. So all these things you've written down about everything on your plate. This is where it gets reviewed. So you trust this is being reviewed. And maybe you're pulling out of there. Okay, these are the things I want to do this week. and your calendar.

So typically I think about your calendar as being a separate capture system than your list. Things that are tied to particular days and times are in your calendar. Things that aren't are in that list. So look at your calendar, look at the week,

what are your appointments, what's due this week, you know, when is the cable guy coming and you have to be home? You're getting the full picture and then you make a plan for your week. And again, this could be free form text.

I just do this free form text, right? Okay, here's what's going on this week. I'm going to write every morning, because I need to get this draft of my chapter done and my mornings are clear, except for on Friday. But Friday afternoon is all clear, so I can have a big push on Friday afternoon to do that. Wednesday afternoon, the cable guy's here, so that's, let's just remember, that's all whatever, and I have this meeting here. Like, you're basically just narratively figuring out at a rough granularity, how you're going to tackle the various days of your week,

to stay on track with your quarterly plan and to stay on track of the things that need to get done. I often talk about this as moving the chess pieces around on the chess board that is your time to try to find a really good configuration. The final part of execution is you get to the day. It's Wednesday. What happens today? I'm a big believer in time block planning. Look at the hours you're going to work. Give every minute a job. Here's what I'm doing from 8 to 930.

From 930 to 10, I'm working on this. From 10 to 1230 I'm working on this. Your weekly plan will give you a lot of guidance on how that time block plan will look, but you're making a specific plan. for that day, and then you execute. I'm in this block, I'm doing this thing, let me get it done. Now, if you want to find out more about time blocking, go to timeblockplanner.com. There's a video there where I get really into time blocking. Now, I say I don't really care about products, and I don't.

I sell one. I sell a time block planner that is where you can do weekly planning and time block planning, but whether or not you use my planner, and I don't really care if you do, there is a good video on that website that explains how time blocking works. Now, again, there's other philosophies people use to organize their day, having some philosophies better than not. But if you do these three things, you've thought through how you select your activities,

how much you want on your plate, what you don't want on your plate, what is the mix you're going for at the moment. You then have full capture of everything and some master list in your calendar, so nothing's in your head, and you build up plans for the quarter ahead, and then in the short term, you're doing weekly, daily planning. Try to make the most of the time you actually have.

and that will be an incredible difference. Now, what does this actually mean in terms of the touch points at which you're actually interacting with your productivity system? Once a week when you do your weekly plan is going to be when you are reviewing everything. Every day you build a daily plan, but that's pretty quick. And then you're touching that daily plan is the main thing you touch throughout the day, seeing what you should be doing. As you capture as tasks come up in the day and enter your, into your landscape of things you have to do, then you're going to enter them to your capture system. I often wait till the end of the day.

I'll jot them down on paper or whatever, and I'll go through that and just put them all into my capture system at the end of the day. So that's the other time you'll interact with it. And then once a quarter, you'll interact with your quarterly plan where you'll build a new one. Your quarterly plan is also a good place

to write out any of your philosophy about activity selection for that quarter. We're going real minimalist on this. We have to be really careful about not doing too much time on this. So that's how these things interact with your life. Once a quarter, once a week, and then throughout the day.

All right. Implement your own funnel, but have some implementation. And my two warnings is productivity has nothing to do with tools, tools just service productivity. And two, the boogeyman definition of productivity,

which is this weird idea that there's this culture that we should do as much as possible and the total quality of your output is all that matters. It's an easy straw on the tear down. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.

So put that aside for now. Having some implementation of this funnel is going to make your life exponentially better than not. All right, that was a long one. When I'm trying to do six questions here, so I've got to pick up the pace. All right, let's go to a question here about time tracking, and I will try to be a little more pithy.

Hey, cow, it's Chad from Cincinnati, and I was curious to get your thoughts on time tracking, and specifically apps like toggle or the timing app. Do you use any of those time trackers in your work at all? I know that you've used the deep work tally for years, as a way of keeping track of that one metric. But do you track time for other areas of your life in any way? Well, Chad, one of the ancillary benefits of time block planning as an execution discipline

is that you get for free a detailed record of how you are spending your time. Because you can just go back and look at your time block plan for past days and see, this is what I was doing with my time. So it would be redundant for me to use an extra app to check. my time because I'm already essentially doing that record keeping. Now, that's not the primary purpose of time block planning. The primary purpose is to make intentional use of your time during the day ahead of you. But it's a nice ancillary benefit. One thing I will recommend if you are time blocking and you do care about understanding better how you use your time is format blocks

differently depending on the category of activity. This makes it much easier to get the gestalt impression of how you're spending your time. I, for example, put really thick borders on deep work blocks. So it's very easy to flip through. And you can just see them stand out. Where are the deep work blocks? I do a bunch of vertical lines, like four or five vertical lines on the right side of the block for things that are appointments with other people, interviews, meetings, calls. So I can quickly see how much time I'm spending doing collaborative interaction meetings, calls this type of work. I really want to break that out. I do a double border, a double border for administrative or shallow work. So sort of like a hollow, I draw a box and then another

box inside of it. So it's with deep work that box, I have a deep, a thick, one thick border with shallow work. I have two borders nested. Now it makes it really quick from your look at a day. How much deep work? How much shallow work? How much while I stuck in meetings and calls and interviews? And now I can just flip through and get that just tall. And I don't really need to, let's say, now quantify this and put numbers into a spreadsheet and look at graphs or trends. you can just flip through your planner. If you use something like my time block planner, you're going to have whatever it is three months.

Flip through three months real quick, you're going to get a real good sense just from that flip through on what's going on with your time. All right, moving on, here's another question I get asked about a lot. It involves ongoing projects. Hey, Cal, my name is Nick from beautiful Vancouver, Canada, and I am an entrepreneur.

My question for you today is, how do you deal with continuous projects? If we can take your podcast as an example, how do you ensure that you continue to make regular weekly progress on that? Obviously, it required a startup phase where a number of tasks needed to be completed in order to get up and running. But once it was up and running, are you putting it on a Google calendar as an employment to record a podcast,

or you put it on your weekly Trello board so that you can be sure it gets done? I'm just curious how you do that. I think this could be helpful for a lot of people who are, say, launching blogs or starting initiatives that requires some sort of startup, but also after that requires some continuous ongoing maintenance. Well, this is a good question. And let's clarify things here. So there's different categories of ongoing work that might show up professionally. So one category is highly regular ongoing work. So this is ongoing work where the time in which it's going to happen is fixed in advance. So for example, as a professor in a given semester, I'm going to teach every week. That's an ongoing project. But I know when the time is. It doesn't change. So obviously for this type of regular ongoing work, it's just on my calendar for the entire semester. So I see it like any other appointment on my calendar and work my schedule around it. when I get to that week.

A little bit less obvious with that category is sometimes when there's ongoing work that's collaborative with other people, you basically are going to put it into that regular category. So my research meetings with my students, for example, we usually figure out for the semester this is when they happen, you know, Tuesdays at one, what have you. And so again, they're going to just be on my calendar in advance. I don't have to think about it. I just treat it like any other appointment on my calendar. I schedule around it.

Then we get to the next category, which is the category you're talking. about, which is regular but unstructured ongoing work. So it's something that it's regular in the sense that it has to happen every week, but it's not necessitated to be fixed to a particular time. And in fact, maybe it would be difficult to fix it to a particular time. So for example, for me, the two big things in this category is podcast recording and my weekly blog post, my essay writing. It happens every week, so it's regular. But I don't have a fixed time. This is when I always do a blog post. This is when I always record a podcast because it changes. It depends what's going on that week when it's going to be the right time to do it. I'll put a pin in that for a second.

I'm going to talk about how I scheduled that, but let's just move on to the third category briefly. And this is going to be ongoing work that's non-regular. So, for example, I do ongoing research. I'm a computer scientist, a theoretical computer scientist. I'm working a lot on doing computer science research, but it's not regular in the sense of, oh, that means you do this each week. What it means in general is like, in general, you're doing a lot of this work, and different weeks are going to look different. It's not a one-time thing you're doing every week, and that has its own interesting struggles. So let's go to the category you're talking about, that middle category, regular unstructured work. I put that on my calendar at the beginning of

each week. When I'm building my weekly plan and I'm surveying the week ahead of me, that's when I decide, okay, now that I have a sense of this week, not just what's on my calendar, but also what I want to get done this week and wins the right time to get it done, then I make the decision of where that podcast recording should slot in and where that blog post writing should slot in. And then it goes on my calendar. And when I get to those days, it gets treated like any other appointment. So when I do my daily time block plan, it has its block already put aside. All right. Now, I don't have to remind myself to do that. I'm in the habit of it now. I know I have to do a podcast every week. I've been doing a blog post every week for 14 years now, so I'm not going to forget it. But if you're new to something, here's a new project that's regular and unstructured, put the reminder in your strategic plan. That is your quarterly or semester plan, whatever you want to call it. But the plan that you look at every week when you make your weekly plan, that's a great place to say, hey, as a reminder, this quarter, we're doing podcast recording every week. So make sure you get that on the calendar. And then you do your weekly plan. You find the time

that makes sense for that week. That's similar to. to how I also deal with the non-regular recurring work, like working on research or working on books or articles, when I make my weekly plan, I figure out how much of that makes sense to do this week and when I'm going to put that time. So it's similar to how I deal with the regular ongoing work. It's just that what that work means is less defined. So some weeks it might be very little, and other weeks it might be 20 hours of work, so it's a little bit more flexible. I'm basically to summarize, you know, what's going on here is you have ongoing work that happens at the same time every week. That's just on your calendar. Don't worry about it. Everything

else figure it out when you get to that week and you're thinking about what makes sense for your week. That's when it translates from an intention to things on your calendar that fits well with your vision for the week. Your strategic plan is the right place to keep you up to date with your reminders and the way you're currently thinking about what needs to get onto your calendar. What are these continuous projects that need to be scheduled? All right, I hope that wasn't needlessly complicating a simple question, but that's the way I think about it. I want to take a moment here to talk about Four Sigma. Now, Four Sigma is a wellness company that is best known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmaics mushroom coffee is real organic fair trade, single origin, Arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and Shaga mushroom for immune support.

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That is, P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com slash deep to receive $15 off your first order. All right, returning to our questions, let's do a quick one now that has to do with some of the nitty-gritty details of time blocking. Hi, Cal. My name is Ben, and I'm the founder and principal of a roughly $200 million long-short equity hedge fund. I really love the concepts of your podcast, especially attention capital and time blocking, but I'm really struggling to successfully implement time-blocking in my day. I own the planner and make a plan for the day, but I have trouble in two areas, actually doing what I say I'm supposed to be doing in the time block without going off schedule and to actually transitioning from block to block like I'm supposed to. Sometimes I'll set an alarm to remind me to transition or I'll set calendar alerts, but for whatever reason I say, well, I haven't gotten enough done or I don't. or I just ignore the transition for some reason because I'm unable to for some reason adhere. Well, this is a common problem, especially for people that are new to time blocking and used to a more list reactive approach to organizing their day.

There are some tactics that can help here. One, make sure that your blocks are sufficiently long and sufficiently broad in terms of their granular. So if you have really small blocks and you're breaking up your work into too many small things and therefore you have a ton of transitions from block to block, that's hard to get right and that can be fatiguing. It's better to combine things into one larger block. Make sure that you're giving things enough time. So make sure the issue here is not just, you're not giving yourself enough time and your mind knows that and says, we've got to get this done. So we got to keep working. So you often need more time than you think, especially at first. Also make use of contingency transition blocks. So here's a big block for this. Now, here's a block that could be for finishing this up. And if I'm done with it, use the rest of the time to check email and just time and to record progress. And in time, in general, just to transition to the next major block, that can really help. So if something runs a little long, it just goes into the contingency block.

And if it doesn't run long, then you can use that block for other things. So that can be useful. And third, be pretty disciplined about fixing your schedule. So you need to actually have the back pressure of, the annoyance of needing to correct your schedule when you run past the blocks. It's critical that you move on to the next column, move on to the next column. Next time you get a chance, fix your schedule. That is incredibly effective stimuli response, right?

So if your mind learns, when I break the block, I have to redraw the schedule. That's a pain or I don't like it. You are going to sublimally be more likely not to do that. So if I'm going to do anything, I'm definitely going to redraw the schedule. I'm not allowed to just give up on the schedule for the day. That back pressure really will help over time. Beyond that, though, you have to basically embrace some discipline. You know, it is hard.

It is more structure, but it is self-imposed structure, right? So it's not oppressive structure. It is self-imposed structure. You have to, at some point, just say, this is what I'm doing because I'm going to get 2x more done. And yeah, my alarm goes off and I don't want to deal with it. I kind of want to just keep doing this. There has to be another part of your brain at some point that just says, get up. Get to the proverbial pull-up bar, get after it.

Like, either we're going to work with discipline or not. And what is the scenario we want? And I have to tell you from experience, right? Working with discipline, I am sticking to these blocks. I'm fixing them when I break it. It's a pain, but it unlocks so much more freedom. You get so much more done. You get it done on your own terms, the things that matter in your business advanced,

the things that don't matter in your business, stop taking up so much time. You're able to have clear shutdowns to your days. You're able to put time in your life on other types of things. everything gets better. I think about it a lot like embracing better eating and exercising. It's a pain. Our base instinct in the moment is not to do it. But when we do it, it opens up everything else. You're healthier. You have more energy. You have more self-esteem and pride in yourself. You're able to do more. You're able to live more actively. So much good comes out of that discipline. Hard in the moment provides freedom into long term. So that's the ultimately where I'm going to land here is in that motivational pep talk is

do the tactical stuff, get your tactics squared away. But in the end, there's the jaco-will-ink phrase here, discipline is freedom. Eventually, you have to believe that because that's what is going to come down to. Nothing is going to make this easy. We can get rid of the unnecessary hard, but nothing is going to make this easy. But trust me when I say, based on my experience and experience of thousands of people,

now tens of thousands of people who use this technique and it bought that planner, it is a better way to work. All right, let's do one more quick question here. about sticking with something longer than it's useful. So you'll see this is a question that's of the same spirit of the one that we just talked about. Hi, Cal. How do I stop myself from working on problems past the productivity half-life? I was training a neural network, and after I set everything up, the data was corrupted.

But I just kept working on the problem, basically running in circles, banging my head against the wall, and not getting anything done. This happens to me a lot, and though I know that I'll have the useful insights when I'm doing something else later, I just keep going on these problems. How do I stop this self-destructive habit from ruining good days? This is definitely a tendency that the human brain has, especially when you're locked in on something that is complicated and interesting and using your skills and there's clear feedback.

Like you're looking, in your case, you're looking at that fit value of your neural net and you're like, oh, man, that got a little bit better. And if I fix just the right thing, that value might jump even better. It's an addictive scenario. And it can be very difficult to break first. what you need to do in that circumstance is abruptly break the context. And the right way to do that is to get out of Dodge, right?

You see you're at the end of the block, your time block, and you're at the, you're at the end of the block. You put aside for this. You've blown into the next block. You say, I'm out of here. Leave your office, leave your house, go for a while. Just get away. Go get some coffee. You got to just, you got to rinse your mind away from that exact physical context.

give yourself just two or three minutes in a different location, walking very fast, moving away from where you were, suddenly the spell is broken. You can take a beat and say, okay, do I want to keep doing this? Do I want to move on to something else?

So I want to do a quick shutdown to that, like record my thoughts so that we're not going to lose progress. What do I actually want to do here? If you plan on pen and paper, bring it with you, then sit down, do that, take a five-minute breather,

and now you can move on. Right? So I want to underscore that what you're facing is very addictive. It's playing with the brain, this sort of stimuli, you're getting a better and better response. It's very difficult to stop pulling that professional slot machine lever in that moment. So you've got to get out of the casino when you're in those type of circumstances.

If you do that, I think you'll find, okay, it's not as hard as I thought to break away once I've literally broken away. Psychological freedom from what you're working on can come quite easily when you're now somewhere 50 feet away in a different building or outside. Very difficult to gain that psychological freedom when you're staring at that fitness score and thinking it's going to get a little bit better. All right, well, I think this is a good place for me to break free of my current context and bring this episode to a close. Thank you for submitting your questions to find out how you can submit your own listener calls. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.