Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 118: LISTENER CALLS: A Primer On My Planning Philosophy

Episode Date: August 5, 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.- Stopping excess emails from students. [8:39]- Finding ideas for books. [16:46]- The nuances of weekly planning. [19:58]- A primer on my value-driven planning philosophy. [29:46]- Deep work for politicians. [43:47]- Inefficient workflows. [49:53]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 question's listener calls mini episode. As mentioned in Monday's episode, I'm just back from a long trip. This is the first listener calls episode, therefore, that I have recorded in close to a month. So I'm excited to get back to hearing your voices. As you'll see, I think I'm going to do a few extra questions. I right now ambitiously have seven different questions I want to answer in today's episode. I guess I'm just eager to get back into the swing of Q&A. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how to submit your own voice

questions for these many episodes. We were in trouble for a little while where I was running a little low on the voice questions. Now you've answered my call and I have a buffer of about 100 extra voice questions right now, but I go through them. I go through them and I only use some. So please, if you have a voice question, it's easy to submit. Go to calenuport.com. podcast to learn how. Two quick unsolicited self-promotion endorsements here while you're at Calnewport.com, sign up for my email list. You can join 55,000 subscribers who get my essay sent right to their inbox.

I often write them every week in the summer or the early semester. I sometimes write them every other week, but I've been doing these essays since 2007. A lot of the ideas that are on this podcast are also introduced or dissected in detail on that email list. So go to calnewport.com and sign up for that. Also, if you're looking for something else useful to do, I will give you my once a month request to subscribe rate or leave a review for the podcast. It helps other people find it.

I want other people to find the show. At least I think it helps other people find it. You know, it's possible that this is one of these group think type things where maybe at some point in 2009 reviews and ratings and subscriptions really helped you in the iTunes podcast, you know, algorithm or something like this. And it's long since been the case that's no longer true. But once we're used to saying it, we all just say it. So it's possible that all those podcasters who are always begging for subscriptions and ratings and reviews are spinning our wheels, but I don't know. I think it helps. I don't really know how else to tell people about

a podcast. That's the only thing I know to request to help spread this word. All right. So as mentioned, we have a good show. I'm going to try to get through seven questions. So to do so, I will try to be relatively quick when I can be. Good luck with that. Some people may have noticed in Monday's episode and today's there's four ads instead of three. Don't worry, that's not yet a new trend in advertising volume. I just have to make up for an ad I missed while I was away. So it's a temporary increase in ad volume. So thank you for bearing with me on that. All right. So let's see. hear from two of those sponsors before we then get started with our questions. So let's talk for a moment here about Blinkist. As you've heard me say, in our current culture, ideas are power. Where do you get the best ideas? You get them from books. Books are where you have authors who have spent years thinking about something, learning about

something, and then carefully structuring their thoughts into long-form prose. This is where you get deep understanding of ideas, not from tweets, not from TikToks, but from books. Here's the problem, though. There's a lot of books out there. Books take a long time to read. It's a non-trivial expense to buy a book. So how do you know what books about a general topic to buy?

That is where Blinkist can come into the picture. So what they do with Blinkist is that they take thousands of top nonfiction books and produce short summaries of the main ideas from the books. They call these blinks. You can read a blink or you can listen to a blink. have a great app that lets you do both easily. They take just 15 minutes to consume. So in 15 minutes, you can get up to speed on the big ideas of a given book. You know, they're even doing this for podcasts now. They call it shortcast. So if there's a long podcast,

you want to get the gist of it, get a shortcast, 15 minutes. Here's the big ideas. Now, why is this important? Well, once you know the big ideas, you can make an informed decision about whether or not that's a book you want to buy and invest much more of your time into. A lot of different reasons to use Blinkist, this is the way I like to use it to get the lay of the land quick on an important topic area to figure out what the big ideas are and which books seem to be critical to further in my understanding. Read five blinks by two books. Read six blinks by one book.

It's a really efficient way to navigate the world of ideas that you find in books. For example, let's say you've heard about Yuval Harari. Right? Okay, 21 lessons for the 21st century. Do I want to buy that book? Well, let me listen to the blink. Oh, now I know. What's Homo Deos about?

Well, let me get the summary and see if that's worth reading. What about blockchain? Well, one of their top red blinks right now is on the book blockchain. They have another blink on the blockchain revolution. Again, get the main ideas. Which of those should I buy? It's a fantastic way to quickly navigate this world. Now, here's the good news right now.

Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to blinkus.com slash deep to start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. And 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, Blinkist.com slash deep. I also want to talk about a new podcast partner that I'm excited about, and that is Element.

What is Element? It is a tasty electrolyte drink mix. with everything you need and nothing you don't. So what that means is lots of salt, but no sugar, like you would get in those other types of athletic drinks. So Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs. It's perfectly suited to folks following a keto or low carb or paleoidite, but really, anytime you feel run down because you're dehydrated,

this gets you back in the game with its science-backed electrolyte ratio of 100 milligram sodium 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams magnesium. None of the junk, no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers, no BS, just that electrolyte mix you need. Not surprisingly, this is the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting. So the Olympics are going on right now. This is helping our weightlifters. There's a lot of professional NFL, NBA, NHL athletes that use element.

Mark Devine, my friend Mark Devine, former Navy SEAL. This is the hydration mix they use in their SEAL fit program. So this stuff gets the job done. Here's what's cool about it. They sent me a bunch of this. Early on, we were talking about whether or not they be an advertiser. And my wife and I use it all. All.

And we're not in the NBA. And I'm not an Olympic weightlifter. And I am not a Navy SEAL. But here's the thing, just in our day-to-day life in sweaty Washington, D.C., we were surprised by how often, for example, you know, I woke up, I probably wasn't drinking enough water the day before. We were out late or something or just busy with the kids and I just feel run down. That's what I would turn to. It made a huge difference.

Or I'm exercising and it's D.C., which means it's roughly 7,060% humidity and I'm just feeling run down because I'm dehydrated. I'd go to the element. We found ourselves using that all the time and we went right through it. So now we're ordering more. And you should consider ordering some as well. you can do so at drink element.com. That's element spelled LMNT. So that's drinklminti.com.

To order your pack today, if you're not sure what flavor to get, get citrus salt to start. That's my favorite. There's a lot of other good flavors. Drink element.com. All right, let's get started with our questions. Our first one here is about taming email

when there are many people trying to get your attention. Hey, Cal, this is Jenna. I listen to your podcast every workday as part of my fake commute ritual before I start my deep work for the day while working from home. My 9-year-old son is also a fan, and he'll be submitting his own question. I am a biology PhD student at Texas Tech University. I'm also the anatomy lab coordinator,

and I oversee 20 lab sections with over 600 students, taught by 12 graduate TAs and assisted by 30, undergraduate TAs. The graduate and undergraduate TAs are supposed to come to me with questions and issues throughout the semester, which is usually through email, and that is fine. My problem is during the first half of the semester, the 600 students contact me instead of their TAs with questions like, I have a headache and can't come to class, or where is our lab located? They have my email because I am the one that sends out class-wide announcements. I tell them to contact their TA's, but many times we'll still answer their questions. With 600 students, this floods my inbox

for the first half of the semester. By the midway point in the semester, they have learned to contact their TA, but the next semester, I have a new set of 600 students, and the cycle starts all over again. So my question is this. What do you do when you have to train 600 new students each semester, not to email you? Well, Jenna, first of all, I love that your nine-year-old son also submitted a question, I will definitely answer that next, just because I think that's cool. But to get to your specific issue here, I think the problem is that you are using a email address associated with your name as your primary means for communicating with these 600 students. The reason this is a problem is that when an email address is attached to a name, so it's gina at school.edu, we tend to

think about that address as just a virtual stand-in for a person for you. And so our mind thinks, okay, sending a message to Jenna at school.edu is like grabbing, you know, waving you down as you walk by and say, hey, Jen, I have a question or stop in your office like, Jen, I want to ask you something. And it brings with it all of the cultural baggage that we attach to one-on-one interpersonal communication, which is, yes, I mean, you will do me the respect of answering. It would be very weird if I poke my head in your office and ask you a question and you just look down and ignore me. That would be like a really big deal.

People are generally very generous in one-on-one interpersonal conversations. We take this type of interaction seriously. So when everyone is getting emails from that personal address, internally in their minds, they conceptualize this like you're there in the room telling them something. And it's the most natural thing in the world to be like, well, let me just ask you a follow up here. We have to break that connection. It's one of the unfortunate side effects of this sort of arbitrary decision that email addresses should be largely attached to names. In my book, A World Without Email, I get into the history of why we do that. And it's basically arbitrary.

It has to go back to the account. It goes back to the account system on the original timeshare servers on which the original email clients were produced. And I think it's kind of an unfortunate tradition that we put in place for exactly this reason. is because when we see email addresses associated with names, we just think of that as being a stand-in for the person. That doesn't scale, though. It doesn't scale to 600 people who have that address. 600 people who feel like you're just standing there in the room

and they can just ask you a quick question, and of course you'll respond. That's fine if there's three people in the room, but if there are 600 people in the room, it wouldn't scale, right? So that is the issue with this particular convention we'd use. So what you need to do here, Jenna, is get any of this sort of personalized communication channel out of your interaction with this anatomy lab students.

Now you have a couple options here, for example. You can have the IT department and your university or tech savvy TA set up a different email account for communicating with these students. This should be an account that does not have a name associated with it. It should be announcements at anatomylap.com school.edu or info at anatomylab.com slash. that you do or whatever, but not a name. So now when you're sending out information to these people, it seems generic. Like someone just posted something on the bulletin board. There is not this implicit internal, culturally mediated assumption that if I send a message

to this address, I should of course get an answer because it's no longer Jenna talking to me. It is a generic announcement channel. Now, you can use like, you probably should be using anyways mailing list software to manage such a big mailing list anyway, so just get a different address. Your other option, of course, is just to move away from email as the main way that you communicate with these students. Use one of these educational software systems like Blackboard. I'm sure your school subscribes to one of these. Maybe you should be running the lab through one of these

course management sites where there's an announcement page where you put your announcements, and that's where people go to see the announcements. And they can subscribe to them typically so they can get emails from the software, not from you that says, oh, there's new announcements on the page, right? Again, we want to depersonalized communication when we're dealing with lots of people because personalized communication does not scale. Finally, give these students really clear instructions on how to ask questions and frequently asked information that could prevent those questions from being asked in the first place. So, you know, every announcement you do can say, hey, questions or comments, go here.

And it can be a page. And that webpage says, okay, here's the five most commonly asked questions. Here are the answers. This probably will solve it. If these don't solve it, here's what your fallback is. It's to contact your graduate student, TA. Here's how you find their contact information. So now your students have a crystal clear place to go that answers their common questions

and tells them what to do if those don't apply. You're giving them clear instructions. So now if they want to try to go around those instructions, they know that's what they're doing. They are seen it in black and white and they're deciding to still go around it, which brings us to the third and final point is if they still find your address. If they still try to answer you directly, you have to tough love it. There's 600 of them. It might make it a little bit more efficient for them in the moment, but if you try to make 600 students' lives a little bit more inefficient in the moment, every one of those compromises makes your life a little bit less efficient, and it scales to 600 inefficiencies, and now your life.

as you've experienced is basically unworkable. So just tough love there. Either ignore those messages or just respond with, please see here for Q&A. I think the ignoring is probably fine. And you just in your weekly announcement say, just as a reminder, if you have any questions or any comments,

go here to figure out how to answer, ask those questions or get those answers. So the kind of generalizable point, I like to draw out generalizable points for all my answers, is be very wary about email addresses associated with your name, because that is going to bring with it all of the cultural baggage of interpersonal communication, which means if there's a lot of people with access to that, you could be in some trouble from a cognitive capacity standpoint.

You might be in a world of constant communication and real quick expectations for real quick responses. So the more you can move communication away from these direct stand-ins for individuals, and two email addresses associated with projects or question types or processes, the more you can move people to other types of websites for information or more generic ways of submitting questions, the ticketing systems, the forms. All of this is a little bit more work up front, but there is a huge advantage to be gained by breaking that expectation of this is a person I'm talking to, why the heck aren't they answering me?

All right, Jenna, so stand strong and get your email address out of the hands of those students. All right, let's see now if we can find that question that you're, son submitted. My cow, my name is Tristan, and I'm nine years old. I want to be a fictional writer when I grow up, but I can't get ideas. So my question is, how do you get ideas for your books? Well, Tristan, I really like this question. And let me start by saying, I think it's really cool that at your age you're so interested

in writing. As a writer myself, I can tell you, it is a really cool thing to pursue. So good for you for knowing even early on that this is something that you want to spend some time on. I have two pieces of advice to give you. Number one, probably the most important thing you can do as a writer is to read, to read as much as possible, to read all the time, to read fiction, to read nonfiction. It doesn't really matter what it is. Just choose things that you love that's interesting, the stuff that kind of keeps you up because you're so interested in what's going on in the book. Because as you're reading all this other writing, your mind is going to start extracting all of

these really interesting ideas. Ideas for characters, ideas for styles, ideas for different types of adventures, different types of writing. It's going to file this away in your brain. And it's like having a giant cabinet full of tools so that when it comes time to build your own writing, to build your own book or your own short story, you have all these great tools to pull from. And it really opens up the possibilities for what you can construct.

So reading all the time is absolutely necessary if you're going to train as a writer. to start writing. And don't care too much up front about you have the best ideas, the most interesting idea, is just getting used to actually writing, what it feels like to form sentences, what it feels like to take an idea that is somewhat vague in your head and make it concrete on paper and what works and what doesn't.

That feedback will then help you come up with news stories. And that feedback will help you get even better at coming up with new ones. You begin to learn about the relationship between your brain and the written word. Now, I remember, for example, when I was about your age, when I was eight years old, I spent a lot of time writing a relatively epic story about fruit that had come alive. It was like a banana and an orange and an apple and they could walk and they could talk for some reason,

and they came alive and had some adventures. And it's kind of a weird idea, but I had fun writing it and I illustrated it myself. And I still remember that today, right? But it was a great exercise to record the thoughts and write it down and try to form a story. And after that, I just kept writing, kept writing, nonfiction, fiction. I've really been doing it most of my life. So to summarize, read everything you can and just write at this early stage. You just want to get used to what that feels like.

You want to get used to the mental process. You want to start working on your skills. And I got to tell you, Tristan, if you're doing this at such an early age, by the time you get a little bit older, by the time you're heading off the college, by the time maybe you're out of college in the world of work, you're going to have a pretty fearsome writing ability, and you're probably going to produce some pretty cool writing. So I look forward to reading that in the years ahead.

All right, let's try to slip in here a more hardcore productivity question. This one's about the always tricky weekly plan. Hello, Carl. Shubham here from India. As an undergraduate student, I have been a big fan of your study advice books. My question is, how do we make the weekly plan? what are the things that needs to keep in mind while making the weekly plan? On many Sundays, I just end up making to-do list under the name of weekly planning.

So could you please explain the process of making weekly plan or students with multiple roles? Well, this is a useful question. The weekly plan, I think, is probably the trickiest element for a lot of people when it comes to my multi-scale planning philosophy. of quarterly, weekly, daily planning. Remember, at the really big picture, you have these quarterly or semester plans. Those inform each week your weekly plan, and then your weekly plan informs each day your daily plan.

And if you follow my advice, that daily plan should probably be a time block plan. Time blocking people get, and that's sort of big picture, strategic quarterly plan. I think people kind of get as well. You'll lay out your vision for the big things you're trying to get done.

So what really happens in that weekly planning? Well, it's as tricky in part because I recommend a lot of flexibility in weekly plans. I don't have a strict structure. I expect different people to have different types of weekly plans. I expect the same person to have different types of weekly plans depending on what week it is. This is why in my time block planner, though I have pages for weekly plans, they're blank. I'm not trying to structure how you build your weekly plan. So this is both a blessing and a curse.

It's a blessing because it gives you flexibility. It's a curse because you say, well, what am I supposed to do here? So what I'll do now is I'll go over three of the most common things I do with my weekly plan. And I think people who practice this discipline in general do with their weekly plans. The first I think is really the secret sauce of this whole discipline, which is figuring out what are the big things that are important, perhaps urgent, perhaps non-urgent, that I'm going to try to fit into this week. Now there's two places where these big things can come from. One is just looking at your calendar and seeing deadlines. Okay, this thing is due.

I have a journal review due, you know, next week, so I need to do it this week. So, okay, that has to get scheduled this week. And a journal review might take two sessions and four total hours. Some of these might come from your quarterly plan, right? And this is where the non-urgent big things might come up. As part of your quarterly plan, you're trying to make progress on writing a book proposal. And you say, you know what? I want to make a step towards that this week.

So let me try to schedule some good progress on this non-urgent, important thing that I encountered on my quarterly plan. So your calendar deadlines and your quarterly plan will bring to your attention big things, some urgent, some non-urgent that you want to try to get done. How many of these should you try to fit in? Well, as you do your weekly plan, you're looking at your calendar for the week and saying what is reasonable. So these decisions are very concretely cited in your actual free.

time that week. If you have a ton of meetings, if it's the first semester of an academic year and you're teaching and have faculty meetings, then you might be looking at your quarterly plan and saying, look, there's very little things I'm going to make progress on this week. It's all hands on deck. On the other hand, let's say it's the first week of August and you're a professor, you're like, ooh, I got a lot of free time. So let's really, let's really go deep on this list of big plans for my quarterly plan, try to make progress on a lot of things. Right. So you're looking at your actual available time and saying, okay, what is my reasonable list of big things I'm going to try to get done this week?

That's a key part of the weekly planning. Now, list those in your weekly planning. These are the big things I want to get done. So you can cross them off as the week goes on and feel good about it. But I would suggest also finding the time for them on your calendar and scheduling that time. This is where this really becomes the secret sauce of the discipline is that you get a accurate understanding of how many big things you can fit into your week. you have a good mix of urgent and non-urgent.

Remember, most people do almost no non-urgent because they don't do its discipline, and you actually find the time for this work, and you block it off on your calendar. I use Google Calendar, so I can have multiple different colored calendars with different names showing up on the same weekly grid, and I have a special calendar, I call it Logistics, that I use for blocking out work plans. Like this morning is writing the journal review. This afternoon is working on the book proposal. And it's a lighter color than my normal appointments.

So it sort of shows up real clearly when I'm looking at the calendar. Oh, the dark blue things are appointments. The light green things is part of my plan for how to spend the other time. And it protects that time. It also makes it really easy when it comes time to time block planning. Like, oh, I know what I'm supposed to be doing during those hours. All right. So that's a big thing people often do with weekly plans.

That's what helps you stay on top of things. Checking in on tasks is another thing that happens during weekly planning. I mean, this is where I really recommend going through all of your different tasks, however you store them, organizing them, clarifying them, doing any mind sweeping that needs to happen, things that didn't really make it into your task list but are on your mind, get them written down now, stuff you threw on there hastily, you want to clean up their description, organize things, change their statuses, move them around, delete things you no longer need, break things into different task, if you realize it's bigger than you thought, you just really get a hold on your task,

get re-familiar with what's on your plate. the weekly planning is a great time to do that. Now, when you're thinking about tasks you're going to execute, these smaller tasks you're going to execute in the week, you have two schools of thought here. Sometimes I will, and a lot of people will put in in sort of generic admin blocks just as a part of their daily time block plan. And when they get to an admin block,

they're like, I will go to my task list and pull off some things and execute. It's like a very David Allen approach to things. So you kind of got up to speed during your weekly plan on what's on your plate. And then just as you go through your days, you put aside some admin blocks. And you just try to make progress on tasks during those admin blocks.

The other school of thought is, well, you should really pull out, if there's tasks you really want to get done this week. Look at how much time is available. You see what's on your calendar. You see the big things you put on there. How much time is available? And you might actually list out in your weekly plan

task like a task list for the week. It sounds like you do that, and I think that's absolutely fine. I will tell you, I do a mix of the two, typically. I mean, I'm looking at my weekly plan for this current week. I have pulled out quite a few smaller tasks that are relatively time sensitive. Some of them are due this week. Some of them aren't due this week, but if I don't get them done this week, it's going to be a problem next week. I'm listing them out. So every day when I see my weekly plan, it reminds

myself, hey, focus on these to the extent you can. I also will be using admin blocks this week. Because there's other lots of little small things. In general, for example, one of the ways I stay on top of household admin is I like to have just a half hour block that is just dedicated to do as much as you can. I just kind of get into lists and I clean out our mail sorter and it's like, hey, you got to stay busy for this half hour. And I've talked about it on the show before, but you have a half hour to fill with

useful household admin and do no other planning except for when I get there I have to fill this time. You'd be surprised by how much it helps you to stay on top of things. Like the little things you might not already do. and you don't have to sit there and painstakingly plan in advance. Like, oh, on Wednesday, I'm going to print out the new insurance cards for our car and send out the form to update our parking secrets. Just kind of get the Wednesday and like, oh, what are some things to do?

And you look at your task list and you grab some things. So it's often I will do a mix of the two. So task list, review, planning. This happens during weekly planning. The third thing that you can do is heuristics for the week. All right. So sometimes this is relevant and sometimes this is. not, but sometimes there's going to be a particular heuristic you want to apply for scheduling

that week, and you can write it down in your weekly plan. Like, it might be, for example, every day I want to start the first hour reviewing another conference paper because I'm on a program committee and I have 20 papers to get through in the next three weeks. And so I'm just going to get in the habit of this the first thing I do every morning. And that weekly plan is a place to figure that out. As you look at what's on your plate, it's where you see that you have these papers do. You want to figure out how I'm going to schedule them.

And you say, I'll just have a heuristic. Do it first thing every morning. Or this might be where, like I'm talking about my household heuristic, 30 minutes every morning at 9, just do household stuff. That's a heuristic. You write it in your weekly plan. You might also put reminders here. Hey, remember we're trying to stick with this new habit this week or we're trying to eat better or whatever. Those reminders can go in your weekly plan too.

The key thing is this is mix and match. You don't have to do all of these things. Some weeks you might do some. Some weeks you might do other. Some you might really focus on. Some you might ignore. You can personalize your weekly plan. but these are the type of things that often come up in my weekly plans.

They often come up in the plans of adept weekly planners. So again, it's figuring out the big things you can fit and get them on your calendar, checking it on your task list, perhaps listing out some tasks you want to get done or perhaps not. And finally, heuristics and reminders. This will take a little while. Look, I just did a weekly plan this morning after three weeks of vacation. It took me two and a half hours and I hated every minute of it, but man, it was necessary. A normal week, it takes me about an hour.

because I usually also clean out anything left in my inbox when I do these weekly plans so it can take a little bit of time. It is 100% worth it. This is the secret sauce to stand on top of the small, the big, the important, the non-urgent, and making the most of your time. All right. So as long as we're talking about plans, let's do a question about another element of my planning philosophy, which is the value plan. Hi, Cal. This is Tyler. I'm a R1 professor in the social sciences.

I had a question about how the value plan is different than the constitution or contemplation part of your personal strategic plan. I have attempted to implement some of the core systems you talked about in a previous episode. And I don't know if I'm missing something, but the value plan doesn't seem to be as important. or as unique from the other parts of the strategic plan? All right. I'm glad you asked this question because it gives me a chance to clarify some of my confusing or conflicting terminology. So let us start with multi-scale planning. This is what we were just talking about in our last answer, which had to do with weekly plans.

So in my multi-scale planning methodology, you have a document that I give many different. names. Quarterly plan, semester plan, strategic plan. All three of those terms talk about the same thing. It is a plan that operationalizes your values into a vision with a focus then on what you're doing in the upcoming quarter or semester depending on how you break up your time to make progress on that vision. So in such a plan, you're probably going to have two parts. You're going to have a part it lays out the vision, and then you're going to have the part that says, and here's what we're doing in this quarter or semester

to make progress on that vision. You can have different versions of these plans for different roles in your life. As I talk about on this show, sometimes I have one for my personal life that I keep separate from one I have for my professional life. In theory, I could probably break that up if I wanted to even more.

Maybe I have one for my writing versus my Georgetown life, maybe my personal life. I want to break that into roles. I mean, you can do it how you want to do it. So there's not necessarily just one, but you have this document that says, here's my vision, and here's my current plan

for the current semester or quarter for realizing that vision. Then in multi-scale planning, every week, you look at those plans to come up with your weekly plan. See my answer to the previous question for the nuances on constructing a good weekly plan. That weekly plan is now in line.

It's sort of making concrete this bigger scale plan. for your semester or quarter, and then every day you look at just your weekly plan to build your daily time block plan. All right. So these strategic slash quarter slash semester plans have a vision and your thoughts for making that vision concrete in this current season of time. All right. Now we can get to values.

Now you used the term value plan, but let's put a pin in that particular term. And the term I think is more relevant here is a values document. So what I do is I have summary document that keeps track of my core values. You can format this however you want. I break it up into the different roles in my life and what my values are in those roles. But you can do this however you want to list it. Values are the foundation on which you come up with your vision for the different parts of your life. So if you look at a vision, let's say you have a strategic plan.

And I'm going to stop saying, by the way, strategic quarterly semester. I'll just use the word strategic to describe that plan for the rest of this answer. If you take, let's say, the strategic plan for your working life, the vision is going to be pretty concrete, right? I want this to happen in my career. This is what I want my working life to be like. This is what I'm aiming towards. Your values help influence what that vision is. Because otherwise, how are you coming up with this vision?

Right. This vision should be something that is built upon your values. So it's sort of the nucleus at which we keep having bigger and bigger orbits or some sons. I don't know how you want to visualize this, but the nucleus of all this planning is going to be that values plan. Now, as we move from daily to weekly, the strategic to values, the timescale at which you're looking at these documents and updating these documents gets slower and slower, right? So your strategic plan, you're going to update your vision for the current season every season. but the vision, the vision is probably going to be updated less frequently, maybe once a year, every couple of years. I mean, the vision might be very slow changing depending on how much your vision for your career changes.

When you update these visions, you should for sure be looking at that values document. Values document will help remind you, here's what matters in my life, and I want to make sure my vision is not only congruent with those values, but basically about making those values manifest in my life concretely. Okay, so these are four separate types of things going on. Now here's where we get to the value plan, which at least in my discipline is different than the values document. You see, in the way I've described multi-scale planning so far, you would only be looking at your values doc or updating it when it came time to update one of your visions,

and that might be very infrequently. But I actually think you should be looking at and reviewing and reminding yourselves of these values every single week. because moment to moment behavior to behavior decision by decision, you want your values to be there and refreshed and held closely in your mind. And so I like to review that values document every week when I do my weekly plan. And when you review that values document, this can introduce the practice of the values plan. This is sort of like an advanced tactic that you don't have to do, but I've done for years.

where you maybe come up with some exercises or reminders or challenges for the upcoming week designed to do nothing but help you improve living true to your values. You know, I'm not connecting with people enough, and so I'm going to challenge myself this week. I'm going to call someone every day because I value, like, connecting to the people I care about, and so my values plan, I might give myself that challenge. Or I'm slipping on this thing over here. I'm gossiping too much, and it really goes against one of my values, and so I'm going to have a reminder in my values plan,

a zero gossip. Even if you're in that conversation, like, ooh, I have a really kind of sick burn to say about that person. I'm just not going to do it. You know, so you can do this value plan's discipline.

It's like value practice. What am I going to practice this week with regards to my values? And I think that's really useful. And you could just put that in your weekly plan. That's what I do. It's just like in my weekly plan, there's a section for my value plans. What reminders or challenges or exercises am I doing this week to keep those values up

up to date? Now, in your question, I cut this off in the audio that I put in this episode, but you had a more extended question. And in your more extended version of the question, you said, look, I'm religious. I go to church every week. So I feel like I've got the values piece kind of taken care of. And that's great. Articulate that in your values document. You know, okay?

If your values really come from the philosophy of your religion, great. Articulate that in black and white and look at them every week and come up with a value plan every week that challenges you. challenges you that in the values mediated by your religion that you're not doing as well if you want to improve on, what are you going to do this week to get better? What reminders you need in mind? It's an active engagement with your values. Now, let's say you're not religious. You're philosophical.

You're a Ryan Holiday type. You have a particular philosophical school that really inspires your life. Well, great. Then you're articulating your best possible understanding of what values you've extracted from that school in black and white every week value plan practice. Somewhere you have to write down what you're all about. and I like the idea of trying to practice or remind yourself about it every week. So that's what I call the value plan.

All right, so let's very quickly put together all of these pieces. At the very top, you have this values document. You look at it every week to remind yourself of these values. This might evolve slowly or it might evolve suddenly. Let's say, you know, you discover religion, you discover stoicism and whatever. So it might change slowly until it doesn't. But you have this values document and you look at it every week to remind yourself what you're all about. If you want to be advanced, you have a value plan every week that you add to your weekly plan about here's reminders and specific practices for this week to help me live truer to my values.

That values document then also informs whenever you update your vision in your strategic plans. That vision should be about making your values manifest concretely in your life. That vision then every season, be it a semester or a quarter, influences your plan for how you want to make progress for it in that current season. that strategic plan gets looked at every week when you build your weekly plan and then every day you look at that weekly plan to build your daily time block plan as you look at that weekly plan you'll see your value plan added there as well as a reminder of what you're practicing for your values that's how all these pieces hook together maybe this is a little bit complex I'm just saying this is basically the

framework the multi the value driven multi scale planning framework that I've used basically as long as I as long as I can remember all right so I appreciate this opportunity to help elucidate and enumerate to all of these pieces and their connections. Let's take a quick break from the questions to tell you about another sponsor that makes this show possible, and that is Grammarly. I have long argued that clear expression in your writing is like a superpower in our current knowledge economy. people take you more seriously and you will understand yourself even better if you can express yourself clearly. Now, if you're a professional writer, you can have an editor teach you how to write more clearly. They can take apart your writing like happened to me throughout my 20s when I was

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their delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmaics mushroom coffee is real organic fair trade single origin arabica coffee with, and this is the key part, lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. As I've talked about before on this podcast, I like to integrate four-sigmatic coffee into my deep work initiation rituals. Drink a lot of coffee, but I drink this type of coffee, this mushroom coffee, in particular, before deep work sessions. Why?

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show. I said I had seven questions. It's actually six. There was an additional file in the directory I was looking at that was not a question and led me to say seven, but there's really six questions. So we have two more. I'm going to try to fit in. This next one is actually about deep work and politics. Seems sort of appropriate given that I live here in Washington, D.C. Hi, Cal. My name is Itch, and I work on political campaigns. I help political candidates raise money, write emails. Do I, all of the things that come up when they are running for elected office. I am a big fan of your show and a big fan of your books. And I also know that political candidates tend to be very, very

well-organized people who are also extremely busy. It's the first time that they're usually doing something like this, at least the people that I work with. And a lot of the times they're establishing completely new workflows, not just for them, but for everyone else that they work with. As a result, a lot of the time, it's very chaotic in a campaign office. I'm curious, though, because I'm a big fan of your books and your work, about whether or not it needs to be as chaotic as it often is. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what it's like to work for a political candidate or ways that political offices can make things a little more deep work-oriented.

Thank you. Well, H, this is an interesting question. My best hypothesis about this is that when we're looking at political campaigns in particular, they do, as you note, tend to be quite chaotic. I've seen this up close, but that chaos is not fundamental. I think that chaos comes from a few different places. One, it takes time to figure out workflows that contain that hyperactive hive mind style interruptive approach to work and collaboration and task assignment. It can take time to figure that out and campaigns don't have a lot of time. As you mentioned, it's often, if you're a first time candidate,

it's all of this comes together, you're in the middle of it, and then it's over. It's not an ongoing company organization that can polish these things over time. So I think you just lack enough breathing room to actually figure out processes that matters. This also requires management, experience and thinking. And I think campaigns are a little bit light on sort of process-oriented management because you want your resources to go towards people that are just frontline creating value. This person is doing our communication. We need communication.

This person is running the fundraising shop because we've got to have the dollars come in. There's just not a lot of room often in sort of an ad hoc, quick-to-come-together campaign organization for a Leo McGarry in the West Wing style. Let's sit here and figure out how we're going to run this. this, how we're going to run this operation. Okay, I'd probably third. Let me give it like a 2B or a third. Campaigns are very young.

Congressional staff in general, so even after campaigns are very young, chief of staffs are young, LDs are young, LAs are young, and just young people just don't have a ton of experience to draw from and figuring out better workflows. They don't have the confidence to do so. They're also more immersed in a sort of hyperactive, interactive type of operation anyway. So it's really not that the 32-year-old. campaign manager soon to become freshman congressman's chief of staff is probably not the right person

to figure out, let's slow things down. Let me, Leo McGarriott here. Let me have you come in and say, you know, I want this meeting to take five minutes. I will not let it take more than eight minutes. More chaos is going to rain. And we saw that, for example, in the Clinton White House. There's a younger White House, younger staffers,

and it was way more chaotic than, say, the George W. White House that followed, which was older staffers, older chief of staffs, and was sort of way more regimented in how it executed. All right, so I think all that plays a role. One piece of evidence I have for this observation is I have a good friend who I've watched up close

run for national office twice in a row, and the second time he ran was way less chaotic than the first time. Why? Because he had had time in between the two campaigns to actually say, oh, what's the right way to do this? Most people just don't have the time the first time around. So I think that's a good piece of evidence. The other thing I've noticed here in my time in D.C.

Is I've been fortunate enough to be able to go to Capitol Hill on many occasions. I have briefed multiple senators. I've had many meals in the Senate dining room. And something I've noticed about senators is their offices tend to run. They often run way more organized. I think it's, again, because they have the breathing room of a six-year term to figure things out. Also, senators tend to be longer term. There's a huge incumpancy advantage to senators.

And their offices are pretty structured. They run pretty well. As one senator I was talking to once who showed me, for example, in his office suite, he had taken over a small room and there was a desk in that room that faced the wall. And it was a deep work chamber. And he would go in there and sit at that desk. And there was very set times when he would do it to try to do the deep thinking. I have to understand this legislation. I got to come up with a strategy.

I got to figure out what we're going to do next. and he was able to inject really well-protected deep work into that life. So again, campaigns are chaotic, not because campaigns have to be chaotic. Politics are chaotic, not because politics has to be chaotic, but because to be non-caotic takes time and experience. That's something that you don't always have. Again, when it's your pulling together a campaign on a shoestring with a bunch of 26-year-olds. So I hope that answer makes sense. For everyone who doesn't live in Washington, D.C., for everyone who's not thinking about running for Congress,

I still think this question is relevant because of this underlying point of chaos will be the default until you invest a non-trivial amount of time and effort and experience to make that not be the case. Now, as I always argue, it is worth investing that, but just be prepared for the fact that if you're not really thinking about that, the way your team or your organization or wherever you work operates is probably way more inefficiently chaotic than it needs to be. All right, let's fit in one last question here. Let's continue this theme of talking about workflows.

Hey, Kel. My name is Yaseer, and I'm an engineering graduate student in the U.S. Do you have any processes that help identify when your workflow might be inefficient? I have particular perfectionist tendencies in the work that I produce. For example, I will try and write my homeworks using the latex document preparation system as opposed to Microsoft Word, which is what all of my peers use. Although my homeworks end up being very well laid out and easy to read, I find myself spending about an hour more on every homework assignment when compared to my peers.

This leads to bigger time blocks on my planner, which leads to me getting less done by the end of the day. This is a common problem, both with students and people outside of school. I face this directly when I went through my now famous or infamous period of experimentation during the fall of my softest. year where I began to go through every type of schoolwork I had and experiment with different systems for getting that work done. I talked about this in my book, How to Become a Straight A Student. And I tried all sorts of different systems and tactics for studying and taking notes and writing papers. And actually, one of the big reasons for discarding some of the things I tried was not that they didn't work, but they took too much time. I was an art history minor, for example,

and I wrote some custom software to help me do the date memorization. And it worked fine. But it took too much time. I could actually get that same effectiveness. Just using the default, they gave us that we had this copyright-protecting software where you could just see pictures and there was dates. And it just like clicking through there, I figured like it was good enough. It was very effective too, and it required a lot less time because I didn't have to hand type in all this information. So something taking too much time should be something you're worried about. Now, let's get a little bit more precise here.

There's two metrics we care about when looking at a system, be it for studying or any other type of workflow for producing, high value work. The time required to produce the work and the effectiveness of the method. Like what is the quality of the outcome? So if you're studying, you know, how well do you know the information? And if you're producing something, how quality is the thing you're producing. And you're trying to do dual optimization. You're trying to optimize both of these things. So if there is a system that improves both, that is a huge win. You should be looking for those type of changes. It's like in studying, if you go to active recall from passive recall, it actually cuts down the time it takes to study and increases how well you learn to material. That's a no-brainer.

Of course, you're going to do that. If you come across a system that improves one metric and keeps the other the same, that's usually something you probably want to embrace as well. So maybe, you know, you have a quicker way of getting your notes ready for studying. You take out a step, but you don't recopy your notes, you instead just come up with pointers into your notes for doing studying. It reduces the time required to get prepared for studying, but then the studying is the exact same. So it keeps the effectiveness the same, but reduces the time. Great, you probably want to do that. Or you come up with something like, okay, I'm going to say this out loud as opposed to just trying to answer in my head. It doesn't change the time, but it's

more effective. Okay, great, you should probably do that as well. Where things get complicated is where you have arrows moving in two different directions. And there you have to be very wary and very cautious. So the most common thing, it sounds like what you're coming across, is if your effectiveness is going up, but it's bringing up your time as well. So the efficiency is going down. Be very wary about that.

And say, is there a way I could raise the effectiveness without having to increase the time? Similarly, if you come up with a shortcut that means, oh, it takes a lot less time, let's say, to study, but I don't know the material as well. be very wary about that as well. You can tolerate little minor shifts, like, okay, so it can take me a little bit more time,

but I get a big win in effectiveness. Okay, maybe do that. But if they're about balanced or the negative shift is bigger, subjectively speaking than the positive, be very careful about that. So that's the lens, this dual factor optimization lens is what you want to apply when thinking about workflows like your study processes.

So if writing out all your homeworks in latex is not really increasing the effectiveness. That is your grade has not really changed much, but it's taking more time. Don't do it. You got to be really careful that way. So being ruthless, both about efficiency and about your effectiveness,

that's really the key to coming up with workflows that are very sustainable. One analogy I often use when talking about this is friction. If there's too much friction in your study systems, that friction over time is going to build up enough heat to burn the whole thing down. So I'm always looking for ways to minimize, get rid of friction without really changing the effectiveness of the study.

Do I have to recopy this? If not, let's not do it. Can I type this instead of handwriting it because I can type faster? Let's do that. Can I just use a blank sheet of paper instead of trying to type it into a flash card program? Can I use index cards because that's quicker to move than the load up software? So always be looking about reducing friction in ways that does not affect the effectiveness. That's a good analogy to keep in mind.

But in general, just this is a dual optimization problem, a dual factor optimization problem. if you were neglecting one factor for the other, you're probably going to end up with a sub-optimal solution. With that, I can see I have gone on for a very long time for a listener calls mini-episode. Again, I miss you guys. It's been a month since I've recorded a straight-up Q&A episode, so you'll have to excuse me going a little bit overboard here.

I'm happy to be back and to be answering questions again. So with that, I'll wrap up this week's episodes. Be back Monday. The next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, and until then, as always, stay deep.