Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 126: LISTENER CALLS: A Tour of My Home Offices

Episode Date: September 2, 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.- My home office setup. [3:59]- Working while tired. [12:29]- Writing three hours a day. [17:19]- Details of my strategic plans. [26:09]- Ignoring strategic plans. [31:08]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.

The Deep Questions podcast is brought to you in part by Element, L-M-N-T, a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt, but no sugar. Now, I am a big element fan. I drink element because I get dehydrated. Why do I get dehydrated? Because I talk for a living and live to quote Leslie Knope from Part and wreck in a stupid swamp town.

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you try Element 2. Maybe take a look at their brand new flavor watermelon salt, which I have tried and it's delicious. Of course, this is all totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you can just share it with a salty friend, an element will give you your money back. No questions asked. So to find

out more about Element and to get some watermelon salt electrolyte mix today, go to drinkelement dot com. That's drinklm-n-t.com. Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, listener calls mini episode. Now, I'm broadcasting from what was as recently as an hour ago, the newly completed Deep Questions Broadcast Studio as of last night. We had finally finished getting in the studio

lights. We now have two cameras so we can have two people in here, and I can switch in real time. My black magic ATM switcher back and forth between the cameras. We can have interviews and see the interviews. I can film my questions with appropriate lighting and I've got the key and the fill and the hair light and it's all set up. And we're all ready to go. Recorded my first questions that we're going to post online for people to watch. And so I was excited to say that, yes, this is the first podcast from the newly concluded studio. But then when recording Monday's episode, which I just finished about 20 minutes ago. Lightning hit and the audio processor for my main mic began humming wildly.

I'm now recording this on my secondary mic. So now I might have to order another one of these DBX 286 audio processors. I might have fried it. Lesson Learn have not only a surge protector, but really a more serious power conditioner. So I had for a little bit a completed studio. Now it is incomplete once again. but it'll be up and running soon, and so I look forward to actually getting you more videos of me talking and more videos of me talking to other people. All right, well, we got a good listener questions, listener calls mini episode ahead of us.

I'm going to stop calling these mini episodes because I'm cutting down the length of the main episode, so there'll be equal length. Let's just call it a Lister calls episode. I have two pairs here. So of the five questions, two of them are going to come in pairs where it's looking at the same. general issue from different angles. So we have a nice little dialectical approach here to getting to wisdom, a little bit of Socratic podcasting happening. So that'll be cool.

So I'll do one question off the bat that's unrelated to the other ones. And then we'll do a couple question pairs so that we can really go deep on some of these deep questions. And we'll get started with a question about my home office. Hello, cow. My name is Heschum, and I'm a student who has been a big fan of your work for many years now. In previous podcast episodes, you've provided thorough advice on designing home offices that are highly conducive to deep work. However, I'm curious, what's your home office like? Can you provide us a mental image?

Personally, I'm interested in what computers you use and the general layout of the area. A mental image would be fantastic. Thanks in advance and keep up the great work. Well, this is a fair question and one that's actually a little tricky to answer because it is changing. and will continue to change over time. So my original home office was in my house here in Tacoma Park, and one of the reasons why we like this house is that it had this great, I guess we can call it a study.

It's a big room on the first floor of the house that all of the walls are windows and it's tall ceiling with really cool molding and it has a fireplace in it. And what we did there originally is we had a couch in front of the fireplace place and then on one side of it, one side of the couch, we had essentially a game table. And on the other side, we have my bookcases with my books. And I built this custom-built library-style table like you would see at a university. And it was next to the bookcases and up against the windows overlooking the street from up high a little bit because our house is on a hill. And I had some library-style brass lamps on there. That was my home office till recently, critically

no computers. We have a household office and an alcove at the top of our stairs where we have a modern IKEA desk and our laptops are there. We have an IMac that's kind of old and doesn't really work anymore, but it's still there because, you know, laziness. And that's where our filing cabinets are. And that's where our printer is. And that's where I go to work on the taxes. That's where I go to work on the budgets. That's where I go to work on paperwork and file paperwork. That's where our supply closet is. That's where you're going to find our staplers. And it's like in an alcove, but it's an administrative office. The study downstairs is for reading, it's for thinking, it's for writing. I wrote a lot of digital minimalism and a lot of a world without email down there. I wrote a lot of

my New Yorker pieces down there. I read a lot of books down there. So that was our situation. And then the pandemic came and the schools around us in Maryland basically said, I guess we don't have the idea of school no longer exist. And they just shut down and stayed shut down. So we homeschooled. We had our kids on homeschooled. We needed a place. We needed a place. place for this to happen. Well, where do we have room in our house? The study. And so we had to take most of that stuff out of there, right? The couch went to my brother-in-law, the table we kept in there, the nice carpet we got out of there because we thought the kids would ruin it. We brought in school supply type stuff, sort of some cheap IKEA low bookcases with globes on it and school

supplies and posters went up on the walls and it became a school and no longer my no longer my home office. All right. So once that happened, I needed another alternative. I at this point had started my podcast. My wife pretty quickly said, you can't do this in the house. I can't keep three kids quiet. Like this is madness. And fortunately, the podcast was making some money at that point. So I put all that money into leasing the Deep Work HQ. So that was the summer of 2020 I began leasing this deep work HQ paid for by the podcast ads. Here's the quick rundown on the layout of this HQ. It's three offices and a bathroom.

So it's an office suite. There's one big room. It doesn't have doors. It's like a big common room for the office suite. I made that my new basically office. I brought in the rug for my study at home. It's a big area rug, a sort of 1940s Afghanistan rug. It's really cool.

I brought all my books, all of my books. all of my books out of the classroom and into bookcases in that office. I have a big leather chair. I have a large whiteboard on which I can do CS work. Against one long wall is a very long sort of library simulated table with three library lamps. And that's where I go now to think and to write. And if I'm doing professional reading, I can also do collaborative work in there. Tomorrow I have a couple profs I know coming to spend the day in the HQ. We're going to work on a computer science. problem that we're trying to crack. Okay. The other office of the three is the studio. That's where I am right now. It's a small office. If you were in here right now, you would see the walls. Three walls are covered with black curtains. There's a wooden round table in the middle. On that round table or two mics next to the round table are two cameras hanging off stands to film the guest. And over to the side of the table is a bunch of a computer screen and a bunch of mixing boards and sound processors. and I come here obviously just to record this podcast,

but I do interviews from here. You know, in the past couple of weeks, I've done Good Morning America from in here. I've done Christina Amampore show from in here. I've done countless paid lectures from in here. So it gets a lot of use. There's a lot of time I have to be on mic or on screen, and so it's been really nice to have a professional studio.

And then the other office, it's a storage room right now, but my older sons and I are in the process of transforming it into a maker lab. inspired by Adam Savage and his cave. We want this to be a place where we can during the school year, come in the evenings and work on really cool projects. We did a little bit of that last year. We want to get more hardcore about it this year. All right. So that's the Deep Work H.Q.

But I want to say a lot of my work happens also not in a set indoor office environment. I still do probably 50 plus percent of my riding outside. I'll sit on my front porch. I'll sit on my back porch. I like to ride outside because I associate that just with writing. It helps unlock. It's a setting slash ritual that unlocks writing. I also still do a lot of my proof work or strategic thinking for my businesses on foot.

So I consider the streets of Tacoma Park a part of my office, even though it's not an indoor space that I actually own. So these are all the different places that I work. In terms of computers, we own a lot of computers, but I use very few. I have a laptop I use for my writing and almost everything I do. I have a big IMac here in the studio, but that's just for running the streaming and recording the podcast and using OBS to mix video signals with audio signals for live streaming talks and all that sort of technological nonsense. It's just used for that. And then at our house, my wife has a laptop. We have an old IMA that basically doesn't work.

So it's just expensive decorations. And then we have a few old depreciated laptops that sort of lurk around, one of which I turned into a mom. Minecraft server, for example. So that's what's going on with my various workspaces. Quick note on the future, now that our kids have a school again that they can go to,

the idea of school seems to exist once again. The study is no longer a classroom. Hooray. And we're actually taking advantage of the fact that we emptied it all out for the school to do some renovation. So we're building in bookcases. Really cool built-in bookcases on one side. We're

having a new custom library table built to be in the middle of all those bookcases. We're bringing back to couch and the rugs. We're getting a better game table. We're basically upgrading that study. And my plan is going forward is going to be the study is for writing and reading. That's why I work on my New Yorker articles. It's where I work on books. It's where I read interesting books. That's what the study is going to be for. And the Deep Work HQ library is going to be for computer science. I come there of with my whiteboards and maybe when I move all my books back to my house, I will reclaim that space in the Deep Brook HQ to bring in even more whiteboards. And I just want to start

associating that library with working on proofs, working on papers, having colleagues come and work with me. And so then the HQ will be about computer science at home and recording my podcast. We'll see how that goes. But look, as someone who makes a living off of ideas, that's what I do. I produce ideas and I sell ideas and get paid to do ideas. I take all of these environmental things very seriously. All right, that's probably more than anyone ever needs to know about my office work set up. So let's do a pair of questions now about the topic of working while physically tired. Hi, Cal.

My name is Amy. I am a graduate student studying dance. My days are occupied with a mix of activities such as academic reading and writing, teaching courses, hours of physically dancing, as well as creating and rehearsing dances. due to scheduling constraints, I have to complete most of my knowledge work in the evenings after becoming physically tired from dance activity, which makes it difficult for me to focus on my reading and writing tasks required for my thesis study. My question is, do you suggest a specific deep work ritual for recouping from physical exhaustion,

or do you have any suggestions for improving focus when the body is tired? Thank you. Well, this is a good question. Now, I think the thing I want you to avoid doing is just treating your day as if you have two completely unrelated work days. You have this first workday that takes place during the daylight hours and it's physically demanding and there's dance and other things going on. And then you get to the evening and say, let me do a completely unrelated full work day for my dissertation work. And I'll just sort of slowly get warmed up and read a little bit and check some email and do some writing and kind of do that later into the night. that plan won't work.

You have a pretty limited window of high-quality cognitive activity open to you after a physically demanding day. You can probably get in one good session, 60 to 90 minutes. That's probably it. You need a rest for your body, for your mind, time to recharge your soul, right? You need time not doing any work. And also your mind just is not going to have the physical energy to go much longer if you have a really demanding day. So there's two things to do here. One, I think you could probably get 60 to 90 minutes of high quality reading with high quality note taking.

So reading that's very productive towards your dissertation done early in the day. If you're creative. So maybe it's the first thing you do in the morning with that first cup of coffee before your first thing of the day. It's you sit in that comfy armchair and you read and you're taking notes in whatever careful way you do it. So they're very useful and you're capturing them and your mind is strong. or maybe there's a break you have between two sessions in the morning and you go to this corner of the library that's halfway between your studio and your class and you sit there in the same carol with the books. But I want you to get in this habit of getting in 60 to 90 minutes, a productive reading and note taking just happens pretty early in the day when your mind is still fresh. Okay.

Then when you get to the evening, you have another 60 to 90 minutes, and this might be cleaning up my notes or I'm writing. I'm actually doing the efforts that are going to produce the dissertation. Do this work really well. During the session, full concentration, all the tools are there. I want to be very proud of what I produce, but you're not doing much of it. And so what you're going to have to adopt here to make this work is a slow productivity mindset. A mindset that says, don't be stressed out about what you are producing at the rate of days and weeks. be instead interested in what you're producing at the rate of many months or years.

With that slow productivity mindset, you are going to be satisfied with this because you're encountering with full energy lots of books, but maybe at a slower pace. And you're crafting these thoughts and writing about them at a really high level of quality, but maybe at a slower pace. And you might be frustrated that I only got through one book this week and only wrote half a chapter this week. But when you look back six months later, you say, man, I wrote four chapters and they're great. And so, yes, it's going to take you longer to get through your dissertation work because you have all this other stuff going on. And we can't, this is a theme that's come up a lot in my recent podcast. We can't wish away reality. If you're doing a really intense dance study, then you don't have as much time to do dissertation work as someone who's doing it full time.

Your dissertation will take you longer. Everyone needs to know this. And everyone needs to be on board with this most of all yourself. But you can still do fantastic work. It's just at a slower rate. And you know what, though? here's the bonus, this slow productivity-induced slower rate

is probably how we should all be working on things anyways. First of real intensity and quality, lots of space in between in time to recharge, pride about what we produced this year, not what we produced this week. That's what we're wired for anyways as human, so you're actually going to have a more humane approach to your work, but just be on board with this idea that,

A, you're going to move slower. B, you want to try to fit something in earlier in the day when your energy is highest and see over time, in addition to being really good at dance, you're going to produce some dissertation work that you're proud of. All right, let's do a related question here. This is also about trying to squeeze out that work when you're really low on energy. Hi, Kyle. My name is Karen.

I'm a full-time college student and a fiction writer wanting to get published. I've implemented many of your techniques like time blocking for my college work, which I do in the mornings. and for writing I block three hours every weeknight when I have more energy for creative things and I don't have to worry about anything else. At that period of time for writing, I block the whole internet with an app. The problem is that I find myself only being able to focus for one hour or so before I need to take a break and my focus starts to go down.

When I do come back to writing, even after a while, the most I can do in a day is two hours of intense focus in two sessions where I write, where I write like 1,500 to 2,000 words, which is what many full-time authors do, as I would like to be one eventually. But I feel like I should do more writing, maybe three hours a day, because I do have quite a lot of free time since I minimize all my distractions, like social media. And I also want to focus for longer periods of time in one session. As many writers say, it's better for the creative flow as opposed to smaller ones. Well, I admire the discipline here. I would say my understanding is that, you know, serious professional writers, and I guess I have to count myself as one of those, they're rarely going to do more than, let's say, three hours, maybe four in a day, if it's all they're doing.

And they've been doing it their whole life. This is what they're used to doing. So the idea that you're going to get three good hours of writing in after an entire full day of another job being a student, I think is probably asking too much of yourself. you're not going to be producing at the pace of a professional writer before you get to the professional status, and that's 100% fine. Again, we're back to the slow productivity notion of caring about what I produce this year, not what I produce this week. So I might be frustrated that I'm not producing writing as quickly as I'd want to, but if the stuff I'm producing is something I'm proud of and it takes me twice as long, who cares? Who knows the difference between six months and a year? If a good book comes out of it, a good book comes out of it.

So if I was you, I'd really be thinking 90 minutes, maybe two hours is a good block for someone who has a full-time job, who's doing something else full-time, who's being a student full-time using their brain full-time. And I agree, do it together. Either do it first thing in the morning, which is when I would do it, maybe even get up a little earlier. This is how I wrote how to win at college when I was a senior at Dartmouth. I just woke up before anyone else. And I did about an hour, sometimes a little bit more each morning at the desk. I can still envision the desks next to the bed in the house I was sharing with some roommates. I have a really clear image of that.

The radiator would shake and hiss out water. Very cold in New Hampshire. And the radiators were very old. I would get up and just go straight to that desk and write every morning and how to win a college came out of that. So that's how I would do it. If you prefer to do it at the end of the day, do it at the end of the day. But just I would get there, get it done, maybe have a location you go to, maybe a little bit of a recharge ritual. I mean, to me, I don't know.

The idea of trying to do writing at the end of the day, I do it sometimes, but it's hard. I would have to have some sort of ritual someplace like go, you know, go to the coffee shop, go to the bar where you can sit by the fireplace and, you know, pretend that you're C.S. Louis or something. I probably need some sort of ritual, but that's fine if that works better for you. Once a day, 90 minutes, maybe two hours. Do what you do well when you're doing it. Don't care about the word count. It's about I had a really good session. this amount of time where I was giving it my full.

And don't worry about what accreets this week. Worry about what accretes this year. And if you keep this up, good stuff will come out. The other advice I want to give you those, if you're going to be a professional writer, make sure I've said this before that you have advice from other professional writers in the genre you want to get good at about how you do that. Do not invent your own storylines about how people become pro. Get the real truth, even if you're afraid you might not like what you hear.

all right because what you want to do is be aiming this great disciplined energy that you have and that impresses me you want to be aiming it at the things that are giving you the biggest return so just make sure that the type of writer you're trying to become at the stage that you're currently at make sure that the best thing for you to be doing is to just be sitting there in writing because it might not be it might actually be something else to be getting shorter commissions to be working on short stories maybe if it's for literary fiction writing you really need to go through an mfay program to build up those chops, right? You know, I just want to make sure that you're not executing a plan that you want to be the

right plan as opposed to the plan that actually will get you quickest to where you want to get. That's the key to professional riding is doing the things that actually matter to be a professional writer, not what you want to do. I don't know if you're doing that, but I just want to throw that out there just in case. So make sure you're doing the right activities, 60 to 90 minutes a day, slow productivity, the long run is what matters here, and you'll get there. And we'll get soon to some more listener calls, but first let's hear from some of those other sponsors that makes this podcast possible.

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If you're serious about getting fit, is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the Deep Questions podcast when you join. And if you do join, say hi to Adam for me. All right, let's get back to our listener calls. We have one now about the nuances of strategic planning. Hey, Kyle. My name is Christiana.

I'm a registered dietitian based in Minneapolis. I am curious to hear more about your strategic planning process. I am really invigorated by the practicality of the flow of work from the strategic plan to the weekly plan to the daily plan. And I was really happy to see weekly pages in the time block planner. But I'm struggling a little bit in figuring out the best format for my strategic plan. I've been able to really hone in on my goals and my disciplines and my values. But I'm just really curious to hear how much detail you put into your strategic plans. Are they on paper?

Are they digital? Do you update them throughout the quarter? So any details you can share on that would be really helpful. Thank you. I love all your work. All right. Let's do some rapid fire details sharing here about my strategic plans. I hope this is useful.

I have two strategic plans, one for work, one for my life outside of work. I keep these in Google documents. I don't handwrite them because I can type much faster than I can write. I change them often. I like to use tables. I like to use highlights. I like to use underlines. And so typing is much more flexible for me.

Both of these strategic plans have at their very top a vision for that part of my life. The vision in there right now in my professional strategic plan is way down the line in general. Right now the vision at the top of my personal life strategic plan is looking forward to when I turn 40, which is a little less than a year from now. So it's much more short term. This is what I want my life to be like when I turn 40. I really do like using birthdays as anchor points for making changes in your life. What comes below those visions, the plan for the. current semester to make progress towards that vision. This can drastically change over time. The formats

have been all over the place depending on what year we're talking about. I'm completely freeform with this. I wouldn't overthink it too much. Right now in my personal strategic plan is pretty simple. I have that vision. I have my metrics. I call my disciplines, the things that I track and my time block planner every day. And then I'd have to look at it now. And then there's a plan below it. I don't remember what I call it. I don't have it in front of me here, but then I have a plan for some things I'm focusing on right now in my personal life and some some heuristics, et cetera.

My professional strategic plan is a lot more complicated right now. I actually had to add an addendum document. So linked out of my professional plan, I have like these thoughts in it about how I'm organizing my work and how I'm trying to get more depth and less busyness and more intensity. and there's all these general thoughts about how I'm organizing my work right now. And then I have, like for computer science a little bit more straightforward. Here's the papers on the backburner. Here's the papers I'm working on now.

Here's their status. And where I'm trying to get, you know, this semester, which papers I'm trying to get out. So it's much more straightforward. But then for the writing and writing business side of my life, I actually had to create a separate business plan document. I now link to out of the strategic plan because, you know, I'm doing some more financial planning, doing some more real business thinking. how much revenue do I expect from different avenues of revenue

and how much do I need for various visions of where we're going to go? Things are just more complex. So I've had to branch out of the single strategic plan document to actually have this separate business plan document that I can reference less frequently, but when we do business planning. So it's a mess. It's simple and it's complicated.

It makes a lot of sense to me, but it changes. I update these drastically, you know, once a year they get a drastic overhaul, then they get tweaked every semester. And sometimes things get changed during the semester, but not so often because I'm usually just so locked in and busy that I'm just executing blind execution at that point. And so that's what works for me. Work with whatever works for you. My biggest point here is have the vision at the top. So your plan is always connected to that. How do I make progress on that? Never forget the vision. And two, be free form. Whatever works for you this semester or this quarter, go with it. Okay. And if next year it's something completely different, go with that. And if you want to have a radical plan. okay, before I turn 38, I want it completely up in my life and you have all these thoughts on it and all these steps, that's great. And if your plan becomes really large, then your plan becomes really large, okay? And then if the next year it's really short, then it's really short.

Don't worry about it. What you need is the discipline of having the plan, checking the plan, connecting actions to semesters, I mean divisions, and having to be the foundation, the foundation of your planning chain. All right, that's a good question. Here's another. We'll do one more question here, and this one is related. Hello, Cal. This is Martin again with another question for you. You talk a lot about the semester plan and the weekly plan and daily plans and whatnot. And one of the things I have the hardest time really implementing in my own life is the transformation from the semester plan to the weekly plan.

It's like I have a CEO who makes a strategy in terms of the semester plan. plan. And then I have the ground troops who really doesn't understand what they should do with this plan. Well, you might have a nice strategy, Mr. CEO, but how are we to do this in practice? I like this question. And first, let me just apologize to the new listener about the very terminology I have introduced for the same thing. So in this question, we're referring to semester plans. and the last question we referred to strategic plans, these are the same things, okay? So let's just get that out there.

It's my fault for introducing multiple terminology for the same thing. There's two points I would focus on when trying to deal with strengthening of the chain connection between your strategic plan and your weekly plan because this is a crucial connection. If you're not putting the strategic plan here, the semester plan here into action,

it has no purpose. So this is a crucial connection. Okay, so if you're having trouble this if your ground troops are ignoring the strategic plan CEO. There's two things to look at. One is nuts and bolts. How do you actually take a strategic plan and put it into action in a given week? I've talked about this some in recent episodes. At least I have a memory of doing that, but just as a quick reminder, when building a weekly plan and you have your strategic plan open right there, there's a few different things that can go into that week.

weekly plan. One of the things that goes into it is actually identifying the big things you want to make progress on and figuring out when you're going to do it. So you're looking at your calendar. You have meetings. You have Zoom. You've got to go to the dentist. Here's your free time. You're looking at deadlines, which might be on the calendar. Oh, I got to get this report done. It's due at the end of the week. Oh, I got to do my estimated taxes on Wednesday. They're due at the end of the week. And these are figuring out because you're seeing deadlines on your calendar. And so when am I going to do those and find time for them, block it off on your calendar? Here's tax time, here's writing time.

And then you look at your strategic plan. You say, you know, here's the thing I'm trying to make progress on according to my strategic plan. How much time do I have this week? Okay, if I'm careful and I use the slow start on Monday, and I cancel this coffee on Wednesday afternoon, which will give me a three-hour block, I can make progress on one of these things I've pointed out in my strategic plan that I'm trying to finish this semester. Let me get that on my calendar too. right so blocking off time on your calendar for the big things where these big things come from your calendar but they also come from your strategic plan that's one of the things that happens in this weekly planning process that connects you to your plan the other two things that happen is you pull out particular tasks that you want to make sure gets done and sort of built out that highlighted task list you can insert into that task list things that come out of the strategic plan right so maybe your strategic plan like mine has recently has to do with where my studio needs to get this semester because I have this vision of where I need to be with my podcast by mid-fall. Seeing that goal in my semester strategic plan might lead me for this week to say, okay, here's three or four to-dos I want to add to that highlighted to-do list I've just come up with.

I need to buy a new sound processor because mine got hit by lightning. I need to whatever get the wires set up for my cameras, et cetera. So that's another place where you can connect to your vision from the semester plan. And then the final thing is heuristics. Are there any heuristics I want to execute this week? Like every morning for the first half hour, read a chapter of this book. Those heuristics might be aiming at things that need to get done because you have a deadline or you're trying to get through some tasks on your task list, but they could be things

that are directly servicing your semester plan. Now, I'm confusing you right now because I'm going back and forth between strategic and semester plan in the same answer. So, man, I've really caused some trouble here. But you all know what I'm talking about. So what I'm saying here is when you figure out specifically how you should be building a weekly plan, each of these three elements can include things from your strategic plan. And once they're in your weekly plan, these three forms, time put aside on your calendar, highlighted task lists and heuristics, it doesn't matter where it came from. You're just an execution machine.

Your ground troops shouldn't know or care whether this big block of time was put together because of your strategic plan or put aside because of a deadline. They don't care. It's time put aside. When there's a heuristic to execute, they don't ask where did that come from? They just say, what is it? That's what we do each week. So getting your weekly plan game on point will allow you to much more easily put your strategic plan into action. The second point I will briefly mention is if you're still having trouble, maybe your ground troops are correctly pointing out that the CEO or the general here, I'm mixing metaphors. The general here that is represented by your strategic plan doesn't know what's going on.

It's an ambiguous plan. It's an unrealistic plan. It's fantasy. We're not going to waste our time. And that's actually interesting insight. Or maybe it's that we love this plan. We want to write the novel. But look at our job.

We're working 12-hour days. It's crazy. There's no way we can do that. So what's the point of looking at this quixotic strategic plan every week that says, write a chapter? And you say, I'm just trying to make it home without crazy. crashing my car off the side of the road because I fell asleep. What do you mean write a chapter? So it might just be unrealistic. And you got to face that. Face the productivity dragon.

I can't do this. Something has to give. I either have to tame in that strategic plan ambition or I have to change what's going on on the ground, the ground day-to-day reality of my working life so that these other things that are important can fit. This, though, is a great purpose of this multi-scale planning is that you are confronted with these realities and from this confrontation comes insight, from insight comes the ability to steer your life in the right direction for you. So all of this is good. All of these problems are good if you handle them properly. All right, so good questions.

By the way, I like the birds in the background. It relaxes me. I sort of imagine you're in Franciscan monk robes in a garden as butterflies flit by and a bird lands on your shoulder and you're contemplating an old codex as you think deep thoughts. So that's the fantasy image I have in mind. So if that's true, figure out your strategic plans because there's probably great monkish thinking to come from you. But what's coming from me right now is wrapping up this episode. So go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions, your own listener call questions. And I will be back on Monday with the next regular episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

And until then, as always, stay deep.