Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 12: Habit Tune-Up: Office Hours, Rabbit Holes, Perfectionism, Phones as Escape, and Making Deep Work Deeper

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.Here are the topics we cover: * Advice on using "office hours" to reduce email [1:51] * Random thoughts and internet rabbit holes [11:18]* Fear of mistakes crippling productivity [16:27]* Escaping to phone when tried at work [22:11]* The secret to making deep work deeper [25:10]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing. Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You know, when you're working and you've been working for an hour or so, you get tired. And at least for me, that's when there's the temptation to pull out my phone and to kind of, you know, browse or serve the internet. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions habit tune up mini episode. Now, the format here is straightforward. I take a handful of audio questions from listeners that are focused quite narrowly on the topic of needing advice on how to tune up their productivity habits so they can still get things done in a professional environment that at least in recent times has been increasingly disrupted. So that's our goal.

The next normal full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast will then release as usual on Monday. Now, before we get started, one quick administrative note, I was doing some research over the weekend about how Apple podcast decides which podcast to promote or how to put them in rankings or how to highlight them for their listeners. And what I discovered is that subscriptions

are almost certainly the key thing they look at, not just the total number of subscriptions, but how many subscriptions there has been recently, which is all to say, if you've been liking this podcast, please consider subscribing on Apple. This seems to be, as far as I can tell, one of the best ways to actually bring this weird world we have of deep life productivity and technology discussions to a wider audience that might be hungry for it. All right. Enough with that. Let's get started and we'll jump right in with our first habit tune up question. Hi, Cal. My name is Chris. I'm a pastor at a church of around 300 people. I'm trying to move more work.

off of email and to office hours, so I had a question about managing those office hours. First of all, do you set yours up for the same time every week? And how much time do you typically devote to office hours each week? How do you handle segmenting the hours, especially if you're using video calls during these times of restricted physical gathering? For example, if I am literally sitting in my office and someone comes in and needs to talk about something sensitive, I can just close the door and have everyone else wait until that meeting is over. That same dynamic really isn't true if you just have an open time for a Zoom call, for

example. So I would assume that you wouldn't need to give fairly well-defined segments and time slots for Zoom calls. So if that's the case, how long do you typically a lot for video calls to last? Thank you. Well, Chris, first of all, I'm glad that you are considering using office hours. as a quick reminder to other listeners, office hours within the knowledge work context is something I've been advocating for at least five years now. And the basic idea is back and forth messaging, especially over an asynchronous medium like email, does not scale, especially pass very simple questions that can just be answered with a few sentences.

So if you have, let's say, as a pastor, multiple parishioners, each with semi-complex issues to discuss with you, which are in turn going to require, let's say, one to two dozen back and forth messages. That adds up to a lot of messages. Now, those four parishioners might be generating a hundred messages during your week. There are 100 messages that you're not just answering all at once. There are 100 messages that are going to be dripped out bit by bit at unpredictable time. So you also have to factor into the cost here. All the times you have to keep checking your inbox because you're expecting their reply to your latest message and you have to sort of keep this moving. You can't wait a long time before answering because that's going to slow down the conversations

too much. And so when you put all this together, something that seems really innocent at first. Like I can just answer people's questions over email or discuss over email. Maybe it seems innocent. Maybe it seems simpler in the moment can end up actually being devastating for your schedule because now it has completely fractured your time and attention. It's fratural. you in making any sort of sustained concentration impossible. So office hours, as Chris recognizes, is an alternative where you say, hey, I would rather take those four practitioners, or I should say, parishioners in Chris's example and talk to them in real time, in Zoom or on the phone or, you know, in my office.

Because in real time, you can take the 12 to 25 back and forth messages spread out over three or four days and you can have that same interaction in 10 minutes. highly efficient high throughput. I get into this, by the way, if people are interested in this comparison of synchronous communication like an office hours versus asynchronous communication like back and forth email, I had an article in The New Yorker, I believe last year. The time is sort of all blend together for me recently. Since we've been second home, I think it was last year.

And it was called was email a mistake. And I actually get into some of the theory that happened in my academic field, looking at synchronous versus asynchronous communication for computer systems. And I try to apply some of those insights into why just shifting conversations to email may have a lot more overhead than you expected first. So Chris already knows that, but I just wanted to bring everyone else in the audience here up the speed about why office hours can be really efficient. So now let's get into his technical questions about how you succeed with office hours.

The first one's pretty straightforward. he's just asking privacy-wise, how can I simulate having a closed door if I instead just have, let's say, an open Zoom meeting that's at the same time every week for office hours? And, you know, services like Zoom, Chris, have this functionality built in. There's just a waiting room functionality where when people join the meeting, they go to a waiting room, you get a notice as the owner of the meeting that someone has entered the waiting room. You let them in. we all figured this out and by we i mean professors we all figured that it's out this spring when we had to

move all of our academic office hours online we realize oh we have to use this functionality for exactly that reason so easily solve problem that works well you also asked do you schedule office hours at the same time every week or schedule them at different times but doesn't really matter I mean, I think when you're in a congregate setting, like a pastor with a church, it's maybe easy to have a well-known time. Tuesdays and Thursdays, there's these two hours. It's open-door Tuesdays, open-door Thursdays, open-door Thursdays. You know, Pastor Chris is always available in those times. You can jump into the office hours and chat about anything on your mind.

I think it's a really good idea, not just for dealing with logistical issues, but also for dealing with people that maybe just have something they will. want to talk about or just get off their chest, the type of psychological balm that they might have normally gotten through ad hoc in-person interactions to make that available to people without a lot of overhead, I think is a great idea. Then the final question is, you know, how do you, segment off different length office hours, like how long should they be? Should there be multiple different types of office hours or meetings? I think what I would recommend what I've seen be successful, Chris, is that you have your standard office hours for standard times on standard days that have a clever name and all your parishioners know about it. But I also want you to

be in the office hour mentality for lots of other types of interactions. In general, if you're in a leadership slash logistical oversight type position like a pastor, you not only have to lead people and lead staff, but oversee lots of logistical or administrative details, you should be in the mindset of if I can't answer this question or deliver this information in just a couple sentences, then I want to do it real time in Zoom or on the phone. And that means a lot more meetings. And so here I'm going to recommend a lightweight and a heavyweight answer. The lightweight answer would be to start using a software-based scheduling service like Calendly or Acuity or X.com.A.I. Where you can specify time frame.

in which you're available, you can make available different types of meeting durations. And then you can just send this link to someone. So, yeah, let's chat about this in person here, schedule some time. And then they can click on how much time they want to spend, how much time they need. And then they can pick a time from your available times. It'll show up automatically on your calendar. So you can just say, like, yeah, I think this would be, this is a quick thing. Schedule a 10-minute conversation with me.

Here's the link. Oh, this is a deeper conversation. Okay, great. Schedule a one-hour conversations with me. Here's the link. So you can just tell the person that you're sending the link to what appointment type to select. And there you can variegate on appointment durations and these can get scheduled very easily without a lot of back and forth on your part. I think that is highly worth it. The heavyweight solution I would say here would be to get an assistant involved. If you already have an assistant at your church, then you. This does not take up a lot of time. It's very useful if there's someone who can basically, they're going to just ask, like, what type of, what's going on here, how much time do you think you need? And they'll schedule it on your calendar for you.

In the periods where I have worked with assistants, typically I still set up the whole calendarly or acuity style interface. It's just that the assistant sees that interface. And then when the assistant is talking to outside people, she can be more sort of flexible and natural language in the conversation. but then she uses that interface to schedule the meeting. So I can just easily use the tool to keep track of when I'm available. The assistant can automatically see when I'm available.

And then the assistant can help schedule times for people who need to talk with you. So all of that points towards this idea that in your position, the more you can talk to people in real time, it's almost certainly going to be the better for you and your ability to get other things done. And again, just use that simple rule. If I can't do this in one, email or one sentence or two, let's schedule a meeting. You might ask how am I going to get anything

else done if I have meetings all the time. Well, the beauty of the system is you specify when you're available. You specify when your office hours are. So leave your mornings open. Your afternoons are for meetings. Your mornings are where you get big thinking done, where you make decisions or write out the important memo or write your sermons. And there's a lot of clarity there. I think that's going to go a long way to helping you feel like you are not only serving your parishioners and your church, but that you're doing so in a way that's highly effective and doing so in a way that still allows you to get other important work done. All right. So let's move on now to a habit tune-up question from a student. My name is Vivian and I'm a high school student. I have random thoughts in my head.

These include things I want to know more about such as Asian American history or podcast shows. This compulsion causes me to search something on Google. I end up reading an article and then I click on another article on the search results page. Sometimes this behavior causes delays in my schedule and interrupts my focus. Well, Vivian, you've basically just described how every knowledge worker spends most of their day. So, you know, congratulations. You're precociously ahead of the curve since you're just a high school student on what you can expect in your professional life to follow. I'm being a little bit facetious, of course.

The listeners of this podcast don't do that, which means that we have good habit tune up advice to offer you. So in your case, what I'm going to recommend is that you need to introduce some sort of separation between having an idea about this seems interesting. I want to know more about it and looking up information on that idea. We need to put a circuit breaker between those two actions. you need to be able to have the ideas without having to immediately go look at it because that's what's going to create the impromptu rabbit holes,

which in turn are going to really destabilize your schedule. So here's a really simple strategy. You need a notebook. I call these idea notebooks. I've been using the standard small-sized moleskin lined notebook for this purpose since 2004. I talk about this often on my blog. but I famously randomly to sort of impulse bought my first Moleskin idea notebook at the MIT co-op, the bookstore, basically as I arrived in Boston to start my grad student experience at MIT. And now I have a teetering stack of these things all stored away in my closet.

I like it because it's small and it's portable and I like that it has an elastic band that holds it shut and a ribbon that marks what page you're at. it doesn't really matter what notebook you use, just something you can keep with you. And then the idea is, when I have ideas, I can write it down in that notebook and trust that I'm not going to forget it so that my attention can then immediately go back to the work at hand. Now, for this to work,

you have to have some sort of discipline of on a regular basis reviewing what you've written most recently in this notebook. At that point, after a cooling down period, you can think, okay, which of these ideas is something that I'm still interested in learning more about, and you can have time put aside to actually do those investigations. Time where digging rabbit holes does not take you away from your schedule in the moment, but is itself actually the scheduled activity?

Now, this works really well. So it means you can not only still have ideas, but you're probably going to actually do a better job of exposing yourselves to interesting things because when you have these periods of time put aside to do nothing but review ideas you've written down, think about them and investigate them, you tend to get a lot farther than when you just sort of give happy. hazard investigations on the fly while you're doing other things. But by interrupting the connection between ideas and investigations, you've also eliminated the ability of this otherwise very

natural and very good behavior for a student from being a destabilizing force in your schedule. So Vivian, the good news is that you're interested in things and you're curious. And that's fantastic. And in fact, I'll even point you towards, as this is the cliche of my show, by the way, is there's very few topics that doesn't end with me saying, I wrote a book about this nine years ago and you should read it. Well, Vivian, I wrote a book about this about nine years ago and you should read it. In particular, I wrote this book called How to Become a High School superstar or maybe it was How to Be a High School superstar.

Interesting book. I mean, it's basically like what if Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book on college admissions. It's a really cool kind of interesting book. There's a whole chapter in there on what I call interestingness. And it's about how do young people become interesting? And I really get into some of these habits of exposing yourself to ideas, following threads, allowing organic growth of true fascinations, and how this is not only really great for you as a person, really great for you as for your soul,

but it also, and I'll say this in Soto Voice, is really good for college admissions as well. So if you really want to dive deeper into this notion of exploring ideas becoming more interesting, I spend a lot of pages deep diving in that in that book I wrote. But the simple answer is have an idea notebook, write things down, get back to work, review that notebook at separate times. And when you do gleefully fall down those rabbit holes, because that's where often some of the most interesting intellectual treasures are found. Okay, this next question is interesting because it's about a behavior that's actually really common

and can be somewhat destructive in both the academic or professional context. but it's one that I really haven't talked much about. So let's get into it. Hi, my name is Joseph, and I work as a data analyst. My question is regarding double-checking. In my field, I work in one part doing data analysis and another part writing orders so that we're basically putting together an order

to restock stores for the product. And these are typically big box retailers. And when I'm putting the order together, of what products should go where to make sure that the product's in the best position to sell, I find myself double-checking and increasingly double-checking too much to the point where I think it's kind of becoming unhelpful

and affecting the rest of my time management productivity. Joseph, I'm glad you asked about this because as I hinted before, it is common. So this type of, I can think of it broadly as perfectionism. I've seen this be an issue with college students, for example. They really have a hard time finishing, work in submitting a paper because they worry it's not quite right. I see this in professionals as well.

Maybe they have a really hard time sending off that report because, you know, they get terrified. What if there's a mistake in there? What if it's not right? What if someone gets upset at me? I've seen this even afflict people in just writing daily emails. Go back and reread and rewrite the email again and again. This drive or fear of getting something wrong can itself become quite a destructive force

in your own quest to get things done efficiently. Now, there's many different drives for this type of perfectionism. Sometimes it's fear of upsetting or disappointing other people. In some cases, like it sounds like your own, sometimes it's just a fear of getting something wrong. What would the ramifications be of a mistake? If that store, for example, doesn't get enough of whatever the product is and then it becomes a problem and that's on you

that can put you into a situation like you're experiencing now where you go back again and again. So I do have a book recommendation here to help. And for once, it's not actually a book I wrote. So, you know, bad on me, I guess, for missing this topic. But I want you to consider a book by a Tule Gwande called the Checklist Manifesto. And what he talks about is how something as simple as a checklist has actually been revolutionary in a lot of different fields. Now, he comes at this primarily from the safety perspective.

So he talks as drawing from his own medical experience about how checklist in the surgical theater has really reduced complications where it feels almost simplistic, right? Like, I got to go down this checklist. I did this. We've counted the sponges. All of the scaffolds that we started with are back in their original trays. Like it seems condescending. You say, look, I'm a neurosurgeon. For God's sakes, I'm incredibly highly trained.

But what they found is just going through this simple checklist drastically reduced. the amount of errors. It's drastically reduced the amount of times that, whoops, I guess we left a sponge inside your abdomen before we sewed it up. Checklist have been revolutionary in aviation safety. You know, again, these pilots are highly trained. You have an airliner pilot for, you know, a 787 who came out of a naval aviator background and is just a skilled, fantastic, highly professional pilot who's been doing this for 40 years,

and they go through these checklist. The same one time and time again. And again, you were like, well, it's just simplistic as a condescending, but you do this and it drastically cuts down on mistakes that can lead to tragic air accidents. So checklist seem really simple, but we shouldn't, Gwanda tells us, we should not underestimate them. I think that might be what you need. So you have a very simple checklist about, all right, here's what I do. And again, I don't know the details of your particular data analyst roles. But, you know, roughly speaking, I estimate this.

I put into the system, I double check it on, you know, this form, go back and confirm the number matches the number on my form, then I submit and I literally check off those four boxes. So just like for the surgeons, just like for the highly trained pilots, this might seem simplistic, but what it's going to give you is peace of mind because you are going to look at that checklist and said, I checked all four things. So I don't have to worry. I trust a checklist. If I did those four things,

the chances that I still made a mistake are minuscule, right? So I can move on. So I don't have to go back and replay in my head everything I did that try to convince myself that I can move on. I just have to look at this thing, this piece of paper, and say I checked four boxes. So that's a good question. That's what I would recommend.

And in general, for anyone who is having issues with letting something go, letting a work product out into the world, letting an academic product to be submitted because you worry about it not being right or you making a mistake, consider having these checklists. Just to give you another brief example, I am going to mention a book of mine now. So ha, I found a way back to that. In my book, How to Become a Straight A student, I give a checklist style method for writing a paper where it's in multiple phases. You do this in the first phase and this in the second phase and this in the third phase. And then here's the final phase and how you do the editing. And you know what? This helped a lot of students who were having similar perfectionist issues.

Because now they could just trust. If I've gone through all these phases, the paper is going to be good. It's not going to have a lot of mistakes. I did one. I did two. I did three. I did four. Submit.

And it stopped a lot of those cycles as well. So just to give another example. So good question. Checklist, however form you want to do them can be a very powerful force. All right. Let's do a quick question here about phones, distracting you from. the work you need to get done.

Hey, Cal, you know, when you're working and you've been working for an hour or so, you get tired. And at least for me, that's when there's the temptation to pull out my phone and the kind of, you know, browse or serve the internet. Well, the answer here, in my opinion, is clear. And that is time blocking. So as long-time listeners, no. time blocking is my suggested method for controlling your schedule in which you actually block off specific

segments of time in your day and assign work to those segments, which I call time blocks. So time blocking helps with this issue because you're in a time block that has a particular thing assigned to it. So now if you pull out your phone to look at the internet, you're doing that during a time block that already has something assigned. And if by doing that, you don't get this. the assigned work done, now you're going to have to stop everything and rebuild your time block schedule for the rest of the day. That's usually enough friction to say, I think I should just keep going with what I'm supposed to be doing here until the block is over. Now, what if you do get really tired? Well, at some point, you can say, look, I'm too tired for this schedule. It's too ambitious.

I'm not going to be able to spend the next four hours trying to write this book chapter. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. This is quixotic. That's fine. And time blocking, what you do is say, great, next time I get a chance, let me stop and rebuild my schedule for the rest of the day into something that's more realistically congruent with the way that I'm actually feeling. Now, the point here is you're still building a schedule, which means that you're satisfying the key goal of time blocking, which is to stay intentional about how you want to spend the time that remains in your day. Now, if you don't do time blocking, this is why it's so hard. It's why it's so hard to be a productive office-style worker or creative worker if you don't do time blocking because your entire

day is a battle like this. Your entire day is this battle between the angel on one shoulder saying, hey, we should probably try to make some more progress on stuff. And the demon on the other shoulder saying, well, you know, we've done a lot of stuff and I'm tired. We should probably check our phone or why don't we just do email. And then these things have to battle all day. And you know what? All of that battling is cognitive energy that could be focused on actual high-quality results. and instead is being dissipated into this willpower skirmis. So this question I think highlights well why I'm such a big advocate of time blocking. Time block your schedule.

If you're so tired that it needs to change, change the schedule, but always try to have a schedule for the time that remains in your workday so that you're getting the most out of the time available. And then of course, when your workday is done, shut down ritual, time block schedule is gone and now you can really unwind your mind. All right. So I appreciate any question that allows me to rant about time blocking.

Running a little short on time here, but let me throw in one more quick question about deep work from a PhD student, and I'll do my best to give a quick answer. Hi, Cal. I'm Sophie from South Korea, and I think your podcast is incredible value for PhD students like me. Thank you for that.

And I want to ask, what are the top one to two changes that made significant impact on your deep work sessions? Well, that's a good question. So if you are struggling to get high-quality, deep work results out of these sessions, I would suggest what you want to look at is making sure that you have a lot of a clarity on the thing you're trying to produce. Like what would success look like for this session?

And B, have a lot of confidence that this thing you're trying to produce is useful. This is often where people have problems with an effective deep work habit is that they put aside the time, they do the ritual so they'll actually start, and they don't really know what to do during the deep work session. And then the whole thing feels like a failure or a waste of time. Just to give you a quick student-related anecdote, I was remembering this the other day that when I was still an undergraduate, but close to graduation. So I had been accepted into graduate school. So I knew I was going to computer science graduate school. I also knew who my advisor was going to be. And I was making the leap from more system style work about wireless networks that I'd been doing as an undergraduate over to the theory group.

And so I just vaguely felt I need to get better at theory. And I don't know why I remember this, but I really vividly remember this. for some reason, maybe he was a TA or something. There was just a doctoral student at Dartmouth where I was. And I believe he was a doctoral student of Daniela Ruse, who was a roboticist, who was a professor at Dartmouth, and then she won a MacArthur Genius Grant, and then she moved on over to MIT around the same time I started there in grad school, because MIT tends to do that.

They say, oh, oh, you seem interesting. All right, you're coming to our school now, and you can't really say no. But I just remember her student, I was looking at some of the papers he had written that were a little bit more theoretical and sitting there and like, well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to read these papers and understand them and getting to this math that I just, I didn't know how to do it and going to talk to the student and saying, hey, can you help me understand this paper? And I remember him saying, and I'm paraphrasing, why are you trying to understand this paper? Now, I know now with some hindsight that in his mind, it wasn't a particularly interesting paper. the thing I was looking at was not like a particularly foundational technique or result. And for me to try to understand that wouldn't really pay off that well.

I just felt like I just need to take papers with math and understand them because I wanted to be doing something to prepare to go to graduate school. But I was being haphazard about it, and that was probably not a very good thing to do. And so I think that was a really important lesson for me. It's like it's not just having the willingness to concentrate hard on things. It's also knowing what to concentrate on, trusting that that's the right thing to concentrate on. And this is one of the things I've gotten better at at an academic, where now I'm just more patient. Okay, there might be something here in this problem area.

All right, but I don't really understand it yet. So let me talk to some people. All right, so now I kind of understand it more. Maybe what's the right paper to read? Let me get pointed towards a paper for someone who knows about this field. Now I kind of trust I should spend some time on this paper. Now let me work on this toy result. It won't be publishable by itself,

but I just want to make sure I understand these techniques. I'm getting up to speed. Okay, let me talk to this person again, make sure I got that right. All right, now I think I'm ready to start sniffing out where there might be some open water here where I could actually do some rowing, and so on and so on.

So what I'm trying to say here in this answer is don't underestimate the importance of finding the right thing to work on, where you know exactly what you're trying to produce and you really believe it's important. You don't want to be like me at Dartmouth with the random not-so-important paper, scratching my head over some calculus equations that I really didn't need to know, and it wasn't worth wasting my time trying to actually remember how to do those type of integrations.

You know, spend the time to figure out what you want to work on, what it means, and why you're working on it. Be patient about that. But then as you identify those things, go after it with intensity. You'll get better at it as you advance in your professional career, whether you're a student or a completely unrelated type of knowledge professional. But I'm glad I got a chance to quickly talk about it. Yeah, concentration by itself does not alchemize in the value. It is the combination of concentration and an incredibly valuable target for that concentration. You know, I like to think about it like starting a fire.

I think this is a good analogy. Your concentration is like the focused sunlight. You know, you're focusing the power of the sun through the magnifying glass into that sharp hot point of blazing light, but you have to have something flammable to point that out if you want fire. Same thing with deep work. It's great if you can concentrate intensely. You should be concentrating intensely.

It is a deeply human skill. We've known this since Aristotle is fundamental to our eudamonia. But that ray of sunlight is not going to do anything useful until you find that tender to point it at. So, in other words, to step away from the metaphor, that's probably your issue. if you feel like your deep work's not getting you much places is because you're not actually aiming at things worth aiming at. So be patient about it, but be diligent about it.

And when you find those targets, get that sunlight focus because that fire is exactly what you want to be producing in any type of cognitive field. Okay, so that's all the time we have for this week's Habit Tuneup mini episode. Thank you, everyone who contributed their questions. I'm actually running low on these audio questions and we'll be soliciting more soon on my mailing list. So if you want to contribute,

you can join that mailing list at calnewport.com. Remember, as requested earlier, if you have not already subscribed to this podcast, please considering doing so. We'll be back Monday with the next full-length episode of deep questions. And until then, as always, stay deep.