Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 112: LISTENER CALLS: The Productivity Baby Steps

Episode Date: July 8, 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. - Breaking up big projects into small tasks. [4:19]- The productivity baby steps (epic answer alert). [8:58]- Taming late night meetings. [26:02]- Best book of mine for college students. [34:45]- Shutdown routines with unpredictable schedules. [38:28]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. My main quick announcement today is that we are once again running semi-parallously low on listener calls for these mini-episode. So now is your chance to submit a listener call that might have a good chance of making it into the show. If you go to CalNewport.com slash podcast, I have the instructions. instructions there for how to submit your listener calls. It's quite easy. There's just a link you click on. It takes you to a website called SpeakPipe. And right from your browser or right from your phone, you just hit record, do your call. Boom, it comes right to me. And I can get them into the episode. So thank you in advance for submitting your calls. Now looking ahead,

we have five good questions ahead of us, including one about late night meetings. And another about unpredictable shutdown due to the unpredictable napping behavior of a kid's recommendations for which of my books to give graduates and even my attempt to pretend to be Dave Ramsey. And all of this, of course, will also be accompanied by several very good superfluous references to Greek mythology. So it's a good episode. Before we dive in, we'll do a quick ad read to pay the brills, and then we will jump right to the questions.

I want to take a moment to talk about our friends at Blinkist. You've heard me say before in our current cultural moment, ideas are power, and the best, highest quality source of ideas are books. The problem, of course, is that it takes time to complete reading a full book. So the question is, how do you figure out which books are worth your investment? Well, that is where Blinkist can enter the picture. Blinkist is a subscription network that gives you access to 15-minute summaries of all of the key takeaways from thousands of non-fiction bestsellers spanning over 27 different categories. You can read these 15-minute descriptions right there in the Blinkist app or on their website, or you can listen to them.

So while you're washing dishes or finishing up your walk, you can be getting the main take. from some of the most important nonfiction books of our time. Now here's the way I like to use it. I like to use it to triage. If there's a particular topic I want to know more about, maybe I will start with consuming the blinks of many books in that topic or in that category. Now I know the main takeaways, I know the vocabulary,

I know the conceptual lay of the land, and with that background I can figure out, okay, this is the book that I really want to dive deep in, and then I can choose which books to actually buy and read deeper. So it is reading made smarter, reading made more efficient. For example, I'm looking now at some of the popular

titles on the Blinkist website. You're wondering what blockchains are? Get the 15-minute summary of the new book, Blockchain Revolution, and at the very least, get the lay of the land here, and figure out if it's worth you diving in more. Are you interested if Yuval Harare's 21 lessons of the 21st century is worth your time? Get the blink.

Get the main ideas from those lessons. us feel like the type of thing that really interest you? If so, then you can know to buy the book. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com slash deep. All right, with that, let's get started with the mini episode. Our first listener call has to do with breaking up big projects into small tasks.

Hi, Cal, Jeff from Northern Virginia. Love the podcast. I'm an independent consultant in my work involves long-term research projects. I have plenty of time for deep work each day, but I'm having trouble structuring this deep work. In a recent deep questions episode, you advised a part-time PhD student that two hours of deep work a day was enough time to complete a thesis. I'd love to be so efficient with my time. I'm having trouble breaking down projects into discrete tasks so that I'm always moving forward towards the end goal. Can you elaborate on how you structure your deep work blocks so that you're moving efficiently toward a final

outcome without going down non-productive rabbit holes? Well, Jeff, first of all, I want to emphasize that this is an art. I mean, taking long-term, cognitively demanding, projects that really push your skills to the limits. You're trying to produce something at a high level, and in particular a high level for your own skills. It's not obvious how to break these in the small projects. You get better at it. There's a feel you develop over time about what these chunks should look like,

and you're going to get it wrong quite a bit when you're new to something. So I want to lay down that foundational caveat. This is very hard and gets better with practice. There's nothing wrong with you or your work if you're finding early on, oh, I get stuck a lot. or I feel as if I'm going through the motions on some deep work session, and I know deep down it's not really getting me anywhere. So it'll come with practice.

What should you keep in mind as you practice? The scope of what you're working on at the moment should be appropriate. I like to think about a good deep work chunk as something that could take one to maybe three or four days, but not more than a week. So the scope in which you're working on this current deep thing is relatively short. So you can get all into it. And if you can be sequential about these deep work tasks, that's all the better. Let me work on this until I'm done with this chunk at a stopping point.

And then I'll swap in the next. And so you can really swap it in and make it the thing you're working on for a day or two, trying to make some discrete push on progress, maybe two or three days, if it's a little bit longer. And then you get to a stopping point and you can swap it out. I think that's about right. for scope. In terms of structure of the actual task you're working on, there really needs to be an unambiguous artifact that you're working towards. So when this is done, I will have a good draft of the business plan written up. I will have a chapter completely polished. I will have a

outline that I have sent off to someone for review. So an artifact is some combination of what you physically have and where it is. So sending it to someone for review or submitting it, etc. So you're aiming at something concrete and when you're done, you're done. It's something that can be completed and be evaluated once completed. I think that's really important. And then it's just a matter of choosing what is this artifact I'm going towards, this goal I'm trying to get towards, to be tractable for the time and your skills and what information or preparation you have. So It's got to be realistic. If I say, okay, my artifact is I'm going to write a book chapter.

I'm going to do it in two days. It's going to be a completed book chapter that I've submitted to my editor to take a look at. But I've done no research for this chapter yet. I don't really know how it's going to go. That's unrealistic. It's not going to happen. But if instead I say, okay, what I'm doing this week is I'm building out the research folder for this chapter in Scrivener. I want to really get all the different sources I think I might need to write this chapter,

get them in the Scrivener, get them into that right folder. So in a separate deep work chunk, when I'm actually writing this chapter, that will all be there. And so that's going to require that I do some brainstorming on the chapter and I pull in these different sources and do some more brainstorming, pull in some more. And I could probably do this. If I really work on it, give it some good time for the next three days, I can be done. That's a really good example of a deep work block. So there's a real art to it, but those are the things to keep in mind. At the level of scope, it should be on the matter of days about how long the work takes to do.

You should have a clear artifact where it's really clear about this is what it is. This is what done means that this thing is produced and if relevant, this person has it. And then make sure what you're actually doing in that time fits what you have prepared for and fits what you're actually able to execute. You will get better with this with practice. All right. This next question has me trying to break down my productivity advice into a Dave Ramsey-style step system. Hi, Cal. So a few years ago when I was in my last semester of college, I found myself in a situation where,

my life was spiraling out of control. I felt like there was so much I couldn't control and I gravitated towards controlling my money. I found Dave Ramsey. I started budgeting and I felt confident about getting out of debt. But the problem was I didn't know of a way to manage my time. There wasn't something as simple like start here on step one and go to step seven. I think a lot of people find themselves in what you may call time debt. So my question is if you had to set up a system like Dave Ramsey's seven baby steps for productivity, learning how to be a productive person and live the deep life. What would that look like? Well, this is an appropriate question, in part because this listener calls mini episode format was inspired by Dave Ramsey. I had listened to his radio show,

and I had noticed that it was pretty compelling to hear person after person call in and describe some issue about their personal finances and have Dave give them advice. And critically, he's coming back to the same basic advice again and again, but it doesn't stop that show from being very compelling to listen to and a really successful radio program. Now, as you mentioned, he has seven steps. He calls them his baby steps. So all of his personal finance advice always comes back to, well, which baby step are you on? All right. Well, what are my rules for how you execute that step to get to the next one. My productivity advice, though, I do come back to the same ideas again and again. I don't quite have my productivity advice down to a fixed sequence that everything comes back to,

but I thought, inspired by your question, it might be fun to take a swing at such a reduction. So I'm going to take a swing here at giving you seven baby steps, just like Dave Ramsey has for personal finance, except for these are baby steps for getting mastery. over your professional productivity. The idea is if you go through these steps in order, it will take you in a systematic way from complete disorganization to mastery of everything on your plate. Now you've got to give me a little bit of rope here

because I just threw these down as I was recording the episode. This is not my final word on it, but I thought this would be fun. The Cal Newport Productivity Baby Steps. Here we go. All right, baby step number one, where you begin your process from disorganization to mastery, time block plan. This is the jolt that is going to change your mindset from one of reactivity and

disorganization to intention and possibility. Start building a time block plan for each day where you give every minute a job. Do your best to follow that plan. If you get knocked off that plan, when you next get a chance, correct it and build a plan for the time remaining in the day. Baby step two, set up task boards. So I'm going to recommend for each of your primary professional roles, have a virtual task board on which you can keep track of the obligations you have on your plate

with respect to those roles and their status. So you set up different columns for different statuses and you have a unique card for every obligation on your plate for that role. you put it in that column that represents its status. You should have, among other things, a column for what you're working on this week. You should have a column for ambiguous needs to be clarified. You can throw things in there that you don't quite have your arms around what it means, but you don't want to forget it. You should have a column for major projects so that all of the tasks associated with a major project can fit under one column. I like to have a waiting to hear back column.

So if there's some key bit of feedback or key bit of information or a proposal that I'm waiting to hear back on. I can actually have a card under a waiting to hear back column. So there's a placeholder there so I know. Oh yeah, this is something I'm waiting to hear on. You can use a tool like Trello. You can use a tool like Flow. You can use a tool like Asana. Whatever you want to use, I'm a little bit agnostic, but do take advantage of the ability to put information on these cards. You can type in copious notes. You can attach files. Do that. You really want the obligations for each role and most of the relevant information all living on these task boards. All right, baby step three, full capture. So the goal with this baby step is that by the end of each day, so when you get to the

end of your time block plan, the last plan block, and you're going to shut down your plan for the day, you're going to leave your time block plan. By the end of the day, every professional obligation on your plate is out of your head and into a trust. system. A place where it's clearly recorded and you don't have to fear that it will be ignored or forgotten. Now this is pure David Allen read his classic getting things done for a deeper dive on why this is important. But let me just give a little bit more detail about what I mean by a trusted system. For you it should really be three things right now. It should be your email inbox. There are some people who would argue, well, your inbox itself

should be processed down to zero every day and the task inside of it should be transferred into a other trusted system. I think that's too ambitious. We get too many emails. If it's in your inbox, it's a trusted system. Your calendar.

So, hey, here's an appointment. Here's a meeting. Here's something I have to do. Here's a deadline. If it's on your calendar, you can get it out of your head because you look at your calendar. Everyone looks at their calendar.

So you can trust it. And then your task board. So if it's not on your calendar, it's not an email in your inbox, it should go on your taskboard on a card under the right roll. If it's really ambiguous, that's why we have that ambiguous need to clarify column. You can just throw it in there. Like, oh, yeah, you know, my boss told me that we got to get rolling on next week's strategic plan.

I have no idea what that means, but it's kind of on my plate. We've got to figure it out. But so I don't forget it. Let me just write exactly that down. Put it on a card under the ambiguous to clarify column. So at the end of each day, when you're done with your time block plan, you're ready to close up that plan and move on to the non-professional part of your day. Everything that is on your plate professionally should be out of your head.

Now, if you use my time block planner, which you can find out about at timeblock planner.com, you actually have a little check box. You can check when you have completed your shutdown for the day. So that's a good way of reminding yourself, okay, let me process everything, make sure everything is out of my head. Everything's in trust the system. Is it good? Now I check that box. Baby step number four, weekly plan.

All right, so now that you are used to wrangling your task and making a plan for each day, it's time to, at the beginning of each week, build out a plan for that week. Now, when you build out this plan, you should look at your calendar, you should look at your task boards. This is why long term you are going to trust that when things go on those task boards, it can really leave your calendar. head and then that it's not going to be forgotten because you know every week you look at all the task boards when thinking about your weekly plan. There is not a fixed format for a weekly plan is why in my time block planner the weekly plan pages are blank. The format depends on what type of plan you're doing, what type of plan you're doing might

depend on what's going on that week. But you want to look at the whole picture. What are we working on this week? What should we keep our heads, head open for? this is a good time where you might want to start blocking out some time on your calendar for critical things. If you know there's a paper review, you need to do this, it's going to take three hours, and you have a sense your week's going to fill up with requests. You might want to just block that on your calendar now to make sure that it's safe.

When you do your weekly plan is where you might come up with a productivity heuristic for that week, such as every morning, first thing, half hour, you know, process a different client question. Because I said I would go through, it was my job this week to handle the incoming client question, so that's when I'm going to do it. So it's a heuristic you're going to deploy for that week. Your weekly plan is where you would write that down, etc. Now your weekly plan is going to interface with your time block plan. Every day when you build your time block plan, which we started doing a baby step one,

you should look at your weekly plan. And so your weekly plan helps influence each day your time block plan. All right. This brings us to baby step five strategic plan. So now we want to start doing bigger picture planning. There are two parts to these type of strategic plans. There's the vision, the vision for your professional life, the best vision you have right now. You know, I am in this entry-level position and marketing.

My goal is within five years to try to get up to a junior account executive level. And so what I'm trying to do is, A, be really accountable, get things done that I say I'm going to get done. But then once I have my arms around that, I'm going to start doing pitches, internal pitches for small projects to try to show that I have skill and to make a name for myself or whatever. But you have this vision. You want to lay out that vision. Your professor, you're an assistant professor. You're trying to lay out your vision for what you need to do for 10 year and how you see that unfolding with grants and papers, et cetera. The other part of the strategic plan is, okay, what are my big picture objectives?

for this quarter or semester. These are not huge visions in the sense of what am I doing over the next five years, but it's like, what am I doing this fall? What are the things to keep in mind? The strategic plan interacts with your weekly plan. How is it interact with your weekly plan? When you build your weekly plan, you should now start looking at your strategic plan as well. So your weekly plan is going to be influenced by your strategic plan.

This is when you see in your strategic plan, oh, I'm working on this. journal review. I really want to get this journal review done by December or something like this. And then when you're building your weekly plan, you see that. So you say, yeah, I got to put aside some time for working on the journal review this week. Let me look at my week. You know what, that's what Friday morning is going to be about. In fact, let me block that off now on my calendar. Your strategic plan influences your weekly plan. Your weekly plan then influences your daily time block plan. All right. So now we're really starting to get somewhere. We're not only controlling and organizing what's in our life

or not only attacking our time in the short term with intention, we're attacking our time at various scales with intention as well. This brings us to baby step six, which is automate and eliminate. This is where you can do the hardcore productivity geekery. This is the stuff that a lot of people who are interested in the idea of productivity where a lot of people get started because it's fun,

but I put it almost at the end of my baby. steps because it's basically meaningless if you're not doing these other things first. Automate and eliminate is where you get hardcore about tweaking how certain things happen in your work life. Automate is where you find things you do on a regular basis and you put in place some system rules and guides for how you do that work to try to streamline what is involved. This could be about reducing the time involved to get that work done, but even more importantly, it could be about reducing the amount of context switches required to get it done. If there's some weekly report you have to generate,

and the way you have been doing it is just emailing back and forth with the various people you need information from until you have it all and then writing the report and then bothering someone to look at it, that might not take a lot of time in aggregate, but it's a lot of context shifts. You have to keep sending and receiving messages. So an alternative where there is some set time where everyone gathers for 10 minutes or some set shared folder

where everyone puts in their notes by a certain time, and then you take it and write it, and by the end of the day you have a draft report, and then everyone has 24 hours to give you feedback, using the comments feature of Google Docs, where you wrote the report, and then on the morning of the next day, you take those comments, polish and post.

That might actually, in the moment, feel like it takes more time, but it's less context-shifting. That is a better way of executing that. Automation might also mean handing things off to other people or doing some delegation or outsourcing. Elimination. This is getting things off your plate.

I'm not going to do this. I'm going to fire that client. This service my company offers, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm going to leave this committee. I'm going to step away from two of the four projects I'm doing for my boss. Now, elimination is key. If you are not eliminating things from your plate, you probably have too much on it. Because it's a whole dance to figure out the optimal mix of you're doing important stuff,

but you're not so overloaded, you can't do things well. But if you come to eliminate too early, if you come to eliminate in a position of stress and overload, before you have even started on these baby steps, you're going to be lashing out and just trying to cancel things left and right, and you're going to be doing so from a position which you don't have much standing to do so. The people around you, the people who need you to do this work,

are not going to look great at you saying, I'm too busy, I don't want to do it, if you're not delivering. Look, you're not shipping something. stuff, you're not getting stuff done, you don't really have standing to tell me no. In fact, I'm going to have to ride you now to really get stuff done. I'm going to bother you all the time, and I'm going to want quick responses to my emails. It's going to be very hard to eliminate successfully when you're overwhelmed. So I put it almost at the end here, because it's only after you have full control over thing. You see exactly how much time you're spending on things,

what your days look like, your weeks, how much on your strategic plan you are getting done or not, how crowded that strategic plan is, how many tasks you have on these different roles, because you're seeing these task boards every week. You're looking at all this. They can be incredibly surgical in how and why you remove things. And people can sense that. And they can sense that foundation of this guy has his act together. This woman has her act together.

Yeah, I trust it when they say, I need to take this and this off my plate because I'm going to kill it on this other thing. And they have been killing it. You'll let him do it. All right, baby step seven, our final baby step, go for it. So once you have all of these concepts, philosophies, and systems implemented, really are moving the chess pieces around the chess board of professional execution. What you're working on, why you're working on, how you work on it, when it gets done,

how you execute it, what time you execute it with clear shutdowns, full capture, your brain is clear, take advantage of this. And take advantage of this by saying, I want to put these, I want to put these powers. to use for the good of my career and start taking some big swings. Take on that really ambitious project or do the really ambitious side project, which might completely change what's happening in the main part of your life. Do the thing that's so good it can't be ignored. This is one of the primary things you get out of getting through the first six babysat.

From going from disorganized to having your act together, mastering the art of keeping on top of the stuff you have to do, is now you can build up that proverbial career capital by being so good you can't be ignored and then cashing that capital to control your working life and to push it towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. That seventh baby step is where everything you have developed

pays off. It's where your career becomes cool. It's where you enter the driver seat. It's where you get options and begin to cash those options in. All right, so this is preliminary. You know, I don't know if this is really the exact, set of seven baby steps I would always recommend, but I did enjoy this exercise.

And I think if you did something like this, time block plan, set up task boards, full capture, weekly plan, strategic plan, automate and eliminate, then go for it. You do that in that order. It is unavoidable that your life,

your professional life will feel much more in control. You will feel much less stressed. Your mind will be much clear. And you will be producing much better work probably at a much higher quantity. So not so bad for a list I just jotted down at the last moment here. So if you're looking to get started from scratch, why don't we give that a try? And in honor of Ramsey, if you want to ask me how I'm doing, I will answer better than I deserve.

All right, that was a pretty epic question. Let's do a short question here as a bit of a palate cleanser. Hello, Carol. My name is Jorge. I'm a wildlife conservation scientist. and I work at an international organization, which sometimes requires me to attend meetings or calls late at night, colleagues working in Australia, Singapore,

and other countries on the other side of the world. Some of these meetings I decline, but others I attend because they're crucial to my work, networking and technical meetings and so forth. My normal schedule consists of focus work in the mornings and meetings and responding emails in the afternoons, mixing with some short segments of deep work. By the end of the day, I'm pretty tired and have difficulty focusing at some of these late-night meetings.

Also, this is something that happens frequently enough so that my relaxed time at night starts merging with work. Is there anything you suggest to manage these late-night activities better? Well, first of all, I should say I empathize. Just last night, for example, I had a later-at-night meeting because, On a paper, I'm writing, I have a collaborator in Singapore and a collaborator in Australia, and that is a difficult time zone matching game to navigate when you're on the East Coast, so 8 p.m. at night tends to be the magic number. So I empathize.

There's two things I keep in mind with late night meetings. Number one, and perhaps most importantly, to the extent that it's possible, when you are building a time block plan that includes a late-night meeting, what you need to do conceptually is imagine what that plan would look like if you took that late-night meeting and you shifted it all the way down to take place right after the last thing you scheduled in the afternoon. So let's say you have things scheduled until five and then you have an eight o'clock meeting that lasts for two hours. imagine if you instead slid that down, that two-hour meeting that start at five, so that it ran from five to seven. So now you would have a plan that ran all the way to 7 p.m.

And then look at that plan and say, huh, what I normally schedule myself for that much work, but I normally schedule my work day until 7 p.m. And probably the answer would be like, no, I try to end around 5. So that's too much work. Too much work for the day. So if you want to do that late-night meeting, what you would want to do then is end your normal. normal hour day earlier, maybe end it at 430, maybe ended at 3.30. So that when you shift down that two-hour meeting, your day in this conceptual experimental plan is ending at a reasonable

time. And the thing is, this is work time. Just because it's at a different hour does not make it bonus time. If you don't get paid overtime and your expectation is roughly speaking, you work about an eight-hour day, except for under rare circumstances, then you basically want to aim for that. So in that day early and go do something else, if you know later in night, you have to go to a late-night meeting. I mean, if these are very rare, fine. You can see it as just, okay, here's bonus work I have to do, but don't get in the habit of letting meetings just because the time happens to be late because the time zone issues suddenly count as bonus time that pushes you to work way more than you normally would. Again, if there was not a time zone issue, these same meetings would take up that

time in the middle of your day. And so the other work you're doing that day would be reduced. And so you have to let these meetings reduce the other work you do if it's at all possible. The second thing, and it sounds like you're doing this, is you have to have a pretty clear quota on this. I mean, for me, even once a week is tough. It really throws me off. I don't like late night meetings. So you have to have a reasonable quota and stick to it and then just get really strategic about how do I make the most out of it. It means you're going to have to say no to more of these meetings, but you're not saying no to all of them. So instead of thinking about all the late night meetings you're saying no to,

think about the strategic number of late night meetings you're saying yes to. Look, I do four a month. That's a lot of late night meetings. And if I'm strategic with it, I can get a lot of value out of it. And what about the other ones? Well, figure out an alternative. Guys, I can't make it. I've already hit my quote of late night meetings.

So, you know, send me an email summary of what you need from me. If you're doing it on Zoom, fine, hit that record button. I'll put aside a half hour the next day to shoot through it real quickly and see what I need to take out of it. And it turns out like, yeah, I guess it wasn't that necessary that you're there. Just because they're holding it doesn't mean you need to be there. So that's my two theories about late night meetings. Treat it like it's happening during the day and reduce your other obligations accordingly and have a clear quota. For the meetings that don't fit into that quota, there is often an alternative to basically getting the same thing done.

All right, let's do a quick word from our sponsors. then we'll be right back. I want to take a moment to talk about public goods. The one-stop shop for sustainable, high-quality, everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Everything from coffee to toilet paper to shampoo to pet food. Public goods is your new everything store thoughtfully designed for the conscious consumer. So here's the idea with public goods. rather than going out there and buying a bunch of single product brands, public goods members can buy all of these essentials from one place.

They all share a beautiful streamlined aesthetic and you know they are all sourced sustainably and using clean ingredients. I really want to emphasize the look of these things is great. They have very simple but very stylish packaging. I took the hand soap, the public goods hand soap, and I brought them here to the Deep Work HQ, because as I realized post-pandemic, people are going to actually have to come to this HQ, and I have to convince them that I'm a sophisticated,

civilized human being. I thought that beautiful looking hand soap in my bathroom here at the HQ is going to perhaps trick people into thinking I'm actually much more sophisticated than I am, which is all to say these things look great, in addition to them actually working. great. Here's the good news. I've worked out an awesome deal just for my listeners. You can receive $15 off your first public goods order with no minimum purchase. They are so confident that you will absolutely love their products and come back again and again. They are going to give you $15

to spend on your first purchase. You have nothing to lose. Just go to public goods.com slash deep or use code deep at checkout. That is P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com slash deep to receive $15 off your first order. I also want to talk about our friends at Four Sigma. A wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmaics mushroom coffee is. is real organic, fair trade, single origin arabica coffee with lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. It's a great tasting cup of coffee. It does not taste like mushrooms.

It actually is a smooth, nutty flavor and a little bit less caffeine than a lot of the coffee shop coffee I've been drinking, so it makes you less jittery. The way I like to use four-sigmatic coffee is as a physiological hook to help me shift in the deep work. I drink the mushroom coffee consistently before deep work sessions because of the mushroom additive. It has a unique physiological signature so my brain can learn, oh, when I feel that, I know it's time to do this. So it's been for me a fantastic way of building up a great creative ritual around my deep work sessions. You, of course, can enjoy this delicious mushroom coffee in whatever way makes the most sense

for you. here's the good news. We've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. This is just for our listeners. You can get 40% off and free shop shipping on mushroom coffee bundles. But to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for my listeners and not available otherwise on their website. So you'll save up to 40% and get free shipping if you go right now to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep

and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. All right, back to the show. We have one of my favorite types of questions because it involves which of my books you should buy. Hi, Cal. I'm a ballet teacher. My students range from 10 to 18 years old, and I get to know most of them fairly well. Every year, if you graduate, mostly to top-tier colleges and universities, with the occasional aspiring professional ballet dancer. I would like to leave those who pursue college with some practical advice, so I wonder which one of your books should I give as a graduation present to my senior dancers. As Socrates said, the only good is knowledge,

and the only evil is ignorance. Thanks for your help. Well, first of all, I appreciate the Socrates' reference, not exactly mythological, but Greek. So we will give you that one. Now, in terms of your question, which of my books to give someone who is just going to college? It's not an easy answer,

but probably how to become a straight-A student, would top that list. And it would top that list because what it basically shows you is how to manage your time and study as a student. Some of the advice might be out of date. I don't know. I think most of it is in date, even though I wrote that book before smartphones and Google.

But more importantly, it introduces you to this notion that how you study matters, being a student is a job. If you do the job well, it is much more enjoyable and opens up much more interesting options than if you do the job poorly. If you're doing all-nighters, you're doing your job wrong. so whether or not the student ends up using exactly what I recommend in straight-A student or not is kind of immaterial. It will introduce them more generally to this idea that being a systematic student. That is, when you're doing student work, do it well so that you can, when you're done, do other things well and enjoy, etc.

I think that'd be really important. Now, there's a couple close seconds underneath that top choice. Digital minimalism is not a bad idea because, look, if you go into college completely locked into you, your devices, you're going into college with a handicap. It's like you're going into a professional running team and you're wearing a weight vest. You can still run. You might even do some reasonable times, but you're putting in a lot more effort than you need to. So digital minimalism has a big effect on young people because it introduces them to the manipulative element of why they're using these devices so much and also introduces them to the

potential of a much more intentional technological life. If it, if it actually resonates with someone going to college. And they do get drastically, drastically more intentional about their digital life. It is such a cognitive advantage. It's almost unfair. If you're doing your work without being constantly distracted, if your brain does not have to saturate and the constant performative back and forth to social media, it's like an unfair advantage. So I put it as a close second because it doesn't resonate with everyone. But if it does, it's going to be a really big advantage. And then this might be for a college student who's been there for a few time, but a third, a not too distant third choice on this list would be so good they can't

ignore you. College is probably the right time to start to disabuse this notion that we all have an inborn passion and the key to career success is to simply match that passion to our work. And if we do so, we will be happy right away. And if we don't, we'll be miserable. Incredibly damaging myth is going to become relevant as they move through college, especially as they get closer to graduation. So at some point, that book would become relevant. But if I had to choose just one, I think how to become a straight-A student is probably what you want in your hand day one as you arrive on that campus. All right. And as we're arriving closer to the end of this episode, let's try to sneak in here one more question. I'll do my best to keep my answer short.

Hi, Cal. My name's Abby, and I am a self-employed brand photographer here in the D.C. area. Go Nationals. Your podcast has become my daily productivity vitamin that I use to keep me diligent about stewarding my time well. So thank you so much for this. I'd love to ask about how to ensure that you bring closure to each workday with a shutdown routine when the exact end time for your workday is unpredictable. My son is just under two and while he's at nursery school in the mornings, my workday ends when he wakes up from his afternoon nap, which is usually around 2.30 or 3. But sometimes it's 145 or 215. I find myself feeling like Orpheus, fighting the temptation to look at the monitor to see if my sun is awake yet as I scramble to get the last item or two checked off in my time block planner.

Well, first of all, go Nats indeed. I think what we need to do now is actually spend some time just dissecting the Nationals June surge. I've been to two games so far. I was there when Parra came back, seeing that first baby shark double. I also got to see at least one. No, I saw three. That was the three home run game. I saw three swore bombs in the same game, which is all to say, I'm wondering if I need a third podcast each week where all we do is dissect Nationals Baseball. I am considering it. Number two, I appreciate the Orpheus reference. Very good. All right, number three, I guess, is the actual question itself. This is a common one. You have an unpredictable end to your day, but it's not super unpredictable.

Roughly speaking, it sounds like there's a hour to hour, 15 minute window in which the day ends, but you don't know where in that window it's going to end. Here is what you do. You actually schedule your shutdown routine for before that window, so maybe you're doing at 1 or 1.30, and you really do a full shutdown. You do the sweep. You look at your plan for the next day. And then you have a post-shutdown block to execute

as far as you can after that shutdown routine. So you've done the full shutdown. Then you have this block that can last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes. And you don't expect to necessarily get through it all. It's not a big deal if you don't. So a common thing to do here, for example, is to have a list of tasks. You can see how far you can get through it. It might be wondering, but what about the tasks that are left?

I've already done my shutdown routine. Well, you can just put a note when you do that shutdown routine of, you know, here is a list of things. You have all these tasks on the list. You just kind of put a note like some of these might get done. Or, you know, don't put a note. Just keep them on your task list in your Trello board or whatever. And if you get them done, you're not going to do them again, right?

Or maybe you have, I'm going to do some research on something. You're just like, I'll go as far as I can taking notes until I can't do it anymore. It's a psychological thing here. So you get all the benefit of shutdown. I think, yeah, I'm going to work until I can until the kid wakes up. Some days it's more. Some days it's less. but it's not keeping me away from the shutdown.

It's not leaving all these open loops. It's not generating all this stress. I'm seeing this post-shutdown block is a best effort block. Best effort blocks, I think, are very useful. There's a lot of different ways you can use best effort blocks. I use them, for example, when I know I'm going to have an unpredictable amount of downtime. So the other night, for example, I had a film crew at my house because I was doing a thing for a Netflix show. And it takes a lot of time.

when you have these professional film crews come through, this setup takes a long time, the breakdown takes down a long time. So you have a lot of downtime. You can kind of chat with them a little bit, but you can also get things done, and then there's your time on camera. For better or for worse, I've been through this a lot of time, so I'm used to that.

But it's hard to predict. So you have a best effort block. Like, I'm going to do this, this, this, this, and this. And how many of these I get through will see. But I'd already shut down my day before they got here. It was an evening shoot, and I got through some of those things. I didn't feel bad about it because it was a best effort block. It wasn't a block that I thought I was definitely going to get.

through. Right? So it shows up in those types of occasions. Airports is another one. Give yourself a best effort block to kind of make the most out of your time before flight. You don't know how long it's going to be, how long it's going to take you to get through security, but you have a best effort block. It sounds like semantics, but it's not. Knowing that the whole point of this block is get what you can done, makes it feel a lot better when you just get some of it done. But definitely do that shutdown earlier in your day because there is a huge benefit to closing those loops, checking in on your plan, checking your shutdown complete box, knowing that you are set, that You can do, no matter how much gets done in that best effort block, you are set for the next day.

And that's what I would recommend doing. And, of course, making sure that you are done in plenty of time to listen to the Nats. All right, with that, I think I need to go find some baseball sound effects for my new podcast. So I should probably wrap up this episode today. Thank you for submitting your questions. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can leave me a listener call. I need more of them, so please do that. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast.

and until then. As always, go Nats and stay deep.