Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 130: LISTENER CALLS: Leadership vs. Availability

Episode Date: September 16, 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.- Balancing availability and depth as a leader. [5:12]- Being available to students without being overwhelmed. [12:08]- Rapid fire questions (each answer under 1 minute). [18:18]     -- Working eight hours in a row.     -- Quarterly plan format.     -- Reading metrics.- Sticking to a schedule once made. [26:36]- Keeping up with an academic literature. [30:24]- Taking breaks between big projects. [35:20]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.

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Be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. MagicSpoon is so confident in their product, it's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. So remember, get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cal and use that code Cal to save $5 off. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 130. So this is a listener calls episode. That means I will be answering voice calls with questions directly from you, my listeners.

Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own voice calls. Good collection of questions. I'm opening up with a pair of questions about availability, the degree to which if you're, let's say, a leader or an educator, the need to be available and how that can get in the way of other types of objectives and how to balance that. There's some good questions here. I'm looking at my list keeping up with literature, sticking the schedules. I'm trying something a little bit new this episode, a little experiment. I'm replacing one of the questions with three rapid fire questions.

I'm going to try at some point to do three questions really quick and give answers to each under a minute. because why not? I don't know. It sounded interesting. So it's a good show. Before we get into the questions, though, I want to mention briefly a cool opportunity to do a one-on-one episode of deep questions with me, aka a call with me where you can ask any questions you want.

I'm involved in a silent auction for an organization called Authors for Voices of Color. this is a organization that among other things helps amplify underrepresented voices in the publishing industry. So among authors, among editors, among agents. A good organization was brought to my attention by my literary agent. So they're doing a silent auction. And the silent auction is a bunch of authors offering something, some sort of experience, a sign book, a character. I don't know, lots of different things, but authors offering things that you can bid on. money goes to help the nonprofit.

So I donated a one-on-one episode of Deep Questions. So if you win that silent auction, we get on the phone and I answer your questions one-on-one. To find out more about that, go to Authors for Black Voices.org. That's all one word. Authors for Blackvoices.org. That was the original name of the organization. Then they changed it to voices of color, but they did not yet change the URL in case you're wondering about that.

But you go to Authors for Black Voices.org and you will see the auction and you go to the list of things on the auction. There you will find my prize, the 101 episode. There's other cool stuff too. You can, for example, bid on getting a personal reading recommendation from Gio Tolentino from the New Yorker. You can bid on getting a one-hour writing consultation with Roxanne Gay. That would also be, I think, a great prize. And there's many others. So check that out, Authors for Black Voices.org.

All right, enough preamble. Let's get started with our first question in today's listener calls mini episode. Hi, Kyle. My name is Henrik, and I have recently changed jobs from being a postdoc, leading a team of research scientists. And my question concerns the dichotomy between deepness and leadership. On the one hand, I'm a big believer in deep work, and my previous life has been organized around large chunks of uninterrupted. time. On the other hand, in the leadership position, I want to serve my people as best I can, and that includes being available to them whenever they need me. So as a professor, do you have any experience handling that issue? Well, Henrik, I think the issue, the real issue behind this question is where you said at some point in the actual question you were asking, leadership means being available to your people whenever they need you. That is the true.

That is the trap that time and again across especially the knowledge industry we have seen leaders become less capable leaders, more overwhelmed, less visionary, less effective. Being available all the time is not a goal. It is one particular implementation, one particular strategy for solving the actual big goals, which is making sure that your team has what they need, are being aimed in clear directions, are being properly motivated to accomplish what needs to get accomplished. Those are the actual objectives. Being available all the time is just one possible way of trying to help reach those objectives,

and it's one that I think is not worth the actual cost. I get into this in my book, A World Without Email. So I might recommend going back and doing more of a close reading of that book because you'll get a more detailed answer than I can give you now. But I talk about in that book, and this is in Chapter 1, the chapter on email making us less productive, I tell the story of George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff in World War II under Roosevelt, the man who essentially ran the U.S. war effort.

So we can all argue that this is a – we can all agree, rather, that this is a complex, demanding high-stakes leadership role with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of different people that you were managing. Marshall was not available all the time. Marshall ended his workday at 530 every day. In fact, when he came into the role, and I document this in the book, when he came into the role, he made a lot of changes that arguably made him less accessible. He reorganized the entire War Department to significantly minimize who was directly under him. So to significantly minimize who could actually have direct access to them. He then put in place really rigid ways in which interactions happen. There's a very particular way that you got on the docket for a meeting and a very particular way those meetings unfold.

folded, you better have your act together before you walked into his door. So you knew exactly where this is where we are. This is where we need help making a decision. Here's why. What do you think? And if you weren't prepared, he'd kick you right out of there. It was very fast in and out. I mean, he did a lot of work to streamline how communication happened, who he communicated with,

what was delegated. And it was incredibly effective. He was a much better leader than if they had ran the war department in the old way. So it breaks this connection between availability and being a good leader. Now, I think the concern you are rightly pointing out is that if you go to another extreme and are hard to consistently reach, this is bad leadership. If I send emails to you because I don't know how else to get your attention and you always seem frenzied and I don't know if that email will get responded to or not and I have to keep sending you a lot of emails or if I don't grab you in the hallway, I'm never going to get an answer. That, of course, is bad leadership. And I think that's what you're worried about.

If I can't get answers to questions, if I can't get the guidance I need to act, you're not leading me properly. The issue is, I think you're setting up that particular scenario as the alternative to being fully available. I think this is the dichotomy you have set up. Either you are fully accessible and therefore a good leader or you're inconsistently or hard to reach and you're a bad leader. And the reason why I like the Marshall example is that it says that's not the only two options. So we can summarize the Marshall option as structured availability. Everything is structured there. Okay, I want to make sure the right people get the right information and the right guidance.

Here is how it works. It doesn't work with just grab me when you can. That is the way the war department ran before Marshall came in. There was hundreds of people that reported to the chief of staff. Yes, he was very accessible, but it was very bad leadership. It did not run very well. Structured availability means I have no doubt about how I get in touch with you, how that interaction works, how and when I'm going to get the information I need. And it might not be tomorrow and it might not be I can just send you an email.

And it might be, look, I have to get on this meeting docket that I do through your assistant. And if I don't have my act together and really know what I'm asking and really done the thinking, you're going to kick me out of the office. Yeah, it might be hard for me, but I know I can get that information. That's actually a sweet spot. Structured accessibility, structured availability. So here are our systems. Here's how we identify new work. Here's how we assign new work.

Here's how we communicate about new work. Here's how we check in on how that's going. Here's how we unlock new resources. Here's where we deal with questions that happen. And you think that all through intentionally. You come up with a structured implementation of how you get people what they need that doesn't just involve grab me at any time. Now you might be saying, why not just grab me at any time?

It makes you a worse leader. Now, I talk about this research in a world without email. There's a great study where they actually looked at managers and they measured their activities and subjectively quantified, you know, is this, what was the terminology? Leadership activity, some more visionary, pushing the team forward, motivating people, et cetera, and what they called productivity activities. So sort of small task management, moving things around. Then they looked at the managers in the samples inboxes and their inbox volume.

As email accessibility and communication went up, leadership activities decline, productivity activities increase. If you're a leader who is fully accessible, you will feel very busy, you will be very frenzied, but most of what you're doing is productivity activities. Very small, moving things back and forth, very small task, answering small queries, setting up small meetings. And the stuff that really makes a great leader great, the stuff that allows you to win World War II against the odds, that type of stuff does not happen in that mode. So stop thinking about I'm fully accessible or I'm a bad leader. Think about being fully accessible makes you a bad leader. Being not at all or inconsistent accessible also makes you a bad leader. You have to do the work to structure that availability.

I think that is the sweet spot for leadership. All right, I like this general theme. So let's do another question in this same orbit. Hi, Cal. My name is Andrew and I'm a tenured English professor at a community college in Connecticut. I'm wondering if you could talk more about how and how much you make yourself available to your students. As community college faculty, teaching as our primary responsibility, and our students often need additional support in developing both hard and soft skills.

During the pandemic, I was creating a Microsoft team for each of my classes, which basically allowed students to text me as needed. I think this added line of connection was warranted during the pandemic, but I'm not sure I want to continue with it in the fall when we're back to normal on-campus operations. First of all, I appreciate the bird sounds. We've had a good run in recent, listener calls episodes of bird sounds in the background of the questions and it's very aspirational for me. I like this idea. I like to imagine people on this patio overlooking a sun dappled field as birds flit to the bird feeder nearby and you sip your morning cup of coffee. So it's very aspirational when I hear from people with bird sounds in the background. All right, well,

let's get to your question because I think it's a good case study of what we talked about in our answer to the last question. In the last question, I said, leadership. requires structured availability. That's what you need to do the best serve those that you lead. Full accessibility makes you worse as a leader, inconsistent or no accessibility makes you worse as a leader. So let's apply this to the leadership role of being a professor. Not knowing all of the details of your circumstances,

my instinct would be to disagree with the notion that students having constant text message availability of you was warranted. I think that is too unstructured. Now, here's the thing when it comes to students. They're younger. Young people in general are used to a on-demand, always on text-based communication culture amongst themselves. I can just throw out a text message. Someone will respond to it.

It's this ongoing constant background hum of conversation. You do not probably want as a professor to be brought into that world. Once the expectation is this is like anyone else that's on my long list of what. WhatsApp or text message friends, someone that I can just grab whenever. Once you're in that world of expectations, it's impossible to meet them. Or if you do want to meet them, it's going to be constant communication. And you can't prep classes, give classes, think, recharge after the hard work of teaching properly. If you have to constantly be context shifting, you know, it's hard enough with your own kids. You don't have to add another hundred kids that you have to constantly

be accessible to in that way. So I think that probably wasn't warranted. What is warranted, I think, is especially during the pandemic when it was virtual, a larger volume of well-defined office hours. I think professors have this figured out pretty well, if anything other fields should borrow from what professors do here. So let's not give up the advantage we have of professors have already having instituted office hours as a institutional expectation. Here's an evening time, here's two morning times,

and here's one afternoon time. And if it's during virtual learning, okay, it's a Zoom room that's always open. if it's now that we're back on campus, okay, you're at your office in those times. You're not always going to have people there if you have a lot of office hours. That's fine.

This is also when you just do generic admin work while you're waiting for students to come by. So give students lots of opportunities to come talk to you, but just make those opportunities well structured. When you're outside of those opportunities, you can't. This is what I do when I feel like there is a period that requires more questions or interactions, I'll expand the number of office hours, but I won't give up on the structure.

Now, once you're back in person, and you are now, I should say, by the way, this question was submitted a month ago. So when you said things will change when I'm back on campus this fall, the question asker here says, Henrik, if I remember me the name right, is talking about right now. The other thing you can do when you're in person is I try to actually discourage email questions. I like to talk to my students. I think when I can, I want to know the students. I want to recognize them. And so the other thing I encourage is right before class, right after class, come ask your small questions. But you could just shoot it off on an email, but let's make this.

I want to see you. I want to know you. I like that connection. So I also really encourage, just come grab me if you have a small question. Like, you know, Professor Newport, I don't remember what you said about problem set submission. How late is it if I'm a day off? And so I really try to create a culture now that we're back in person at Georgetown. I try to create a culture of let's talk.

and if you can't make it or don't want to make it all the way to my office for office hours, then just grab me before and after. Right. So I actually want as much communication to be synchronous as possible. I'm right now, this is just getting technical, because right now we're in this moment where we're on campus and everything, but there's still some hesitation. You know, Georgetown right now there's a lot of flu going around, so people are a little bit wary. Some students are still wary. Some professors are still wary.

I'm doing a hybrid thing with my office hours, not to get too in the weeds. but usually the second half of any of my office hour sessions will include, I'm in my office, but also my Zoom is open. Right. So you can always join that from your dorm or wherever. And I just treat it like someone in line because someone in line out in the hallway. So if I'm going to shift over and talk to someone in Zoom,

it's like, okay, that's the person I'm talking to now and the people in the hallway wait for their turn. So that's a little bit in the weeds and of the moment. But that allows me to extend the amount of people I can reach. So anyways, this is a specific case study of the more general point. Structured availability is usually the optimal leadership. It's better than unrestricted availability. Don't give your students your text message, phone number, or handle on some tool, but maybe give them another extra or two extra periods where they know they can come and find you online or in person

and actually get the guidance and get the leadership they need. All right, guys, I am now ready to try this new feature, which is the rapid fire. I am going to do three questions, one after another, and try to keep my answers to each under a minute. Hey, Carl. My name is Perman. And I have graduated the university recently. And my question is, how do you work for eight hours in a row deeply without being burned out too soon? Well, the answer is you don't. Eight hours is too much in a row to do intense deep work. You need to either reduce what is on your plate or if this is all from one. one project, you need to spread that work out better. Keep in mind the heuristic that every hour of intense deep work in a day, you should try to pair with an hour of relaxation or recharging in that same day. You're not going to get there if you're doing eight hours. Hi, Cal, I've reviewed a number of

your materials over the years. I'm a big fan. And I haven't been able to find a clear outline of how to do a quarterly plan. At the top of your quarterly plan is a vision. Here's my long-term vision for where I want to get in this part of my life. That will change less frequently, maybe once a year, maybe even less frequently than that. Below that is your current notes on how you want to make progress on that vision in the current quarter. This is what you update every quarter or semester. If you're doing a semester plan and you're an academic, this is freestyle. Whatever format you think is effective, whatever information you think is effective, typically this is going to include milestones. Like these are big milestones I want to make, progress I want to make on some of

the big projects that are pushing my vision, they could also include, however, heuristics, new heuristics you were going to try this quarter to make progress on your big goal. So, for example, if you're trying to finish a dissertation, this is where you might have, I am writing from 7 to 930 every morning before I get the campus. No set format here. Whatever makes clearest to you, a plan you believe that's going to help you make progress on your vision is the right thing to do here. Hi, Cal, this is Sean from Miami.

I have a question for you about reading as a metric. Your influence has directly and substantially increased my time spent reading. For that, thank you. I'm wondering, do you count research papers towards your reading metric or towards deep work? Well, the way I do it, and this is somewhat arbitrary, is my reading metrics are based on books. My goal, at least in the last six months or so, has been to read five books per month. So, no, I wouldn't count research articles. Now, some of those books are non-professional, just books I'm interested in novels, but some of the books I read as part of those five books per month metrics are professional.

It's a book I want to draw from in a New Yorker piece or in a book proposal I'm working on. So the distinction between my reading metrics and work is hazy and I bounce back and forth on it. I want it sweat to details. I just like to constantly be pushing myself to read more because I get so much more out of it, be it professional or personal or some mix, having some sort of good metric is probably more important. important, then caring too much about exactly where you categorize different individual acts of reading. All right. Hey, we did it. I think I stayed roughly within a minute for each of those answers. You know, if I just did this for all of my answers, my podcast would only be nine minutes long, and it would take me an hour to record each week's episode. So maybe I'm on to something here.

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That coupon code will give you 10% off if you decide after your 14 day trial that you want to subscribe. So you can get the full optimized subscription experience for 10% less if you use that coupon code deep when you go to optimize. stop me slash deep. All right, let's get back to our calls here. This is one that deals with a perennial problem among those who are new to the intentional management of their time.

Hello, Cal, my name is Waget. I work as a software developer. And my question for you is, how do we stick to the plans that we create, like the creator's time blocking schedule for a day? do I like not forget to do that? You know, what happens is that when I wake up, I read to the some of the items that I need to do. I do them.

But after a certain time, I simply forget about them. Well, in time block planning, the commitment to follow your time block plan and fix it next time you get an opportunity whenever you get knocked off your plan, we call this the keystone habit. So if you're going to do time block planning, what you're really doing is you're saying, I'm committing to that keystone habit. If you're not committed to that habit, you're not time block planning. Now, what you're doing could still be useful. I mean, I think it is a useful exercise for anyone to take a look at their day, to run through a sample schedule of like how much can I fit in here and where would I fit it in, just to get a good sense of what you should be working on, what's more urgent than others.

And then going on and just executing your day and being a little bit reactive and drifting from that schedule, that's still better. That's still better than just saying I rock and roll in my inbox all day and see where I get. It's just not time block planning. The core time block planning is I'm following a time block plan to the best of my ability and fixing it when I get knocked off next time I get a chance. So part of this is just a mindset shift. If you want a time block plan, what you're saying is I want to commit to that keystone habit. Now, if you're going to commit to that keystone habit, there's two things that help ritual and artifact. So you need a ritual around it.

Okay, I build my time block plan first thing each morning and I do my shutdown at the end of each day and I check in on lunch. You get very used to building the time block plan and fixing the time block plan. You have the ritual around it, right? Artifact can help make that ritual concrete. This is why I invented my own time block planner is because I wanted an object that is dedicated to time block planning that is distinctive looking and sits on my desk next to me when I'm. I'm working. So if the first thing you do every day is you get up and you build your time block plan and it's in a time block planner or some sort of dedicated notebook, whatever it is that you

only use for this type of planning, and it is sitting right there next to your desk, you have a constant reminder of the keystone habit. There is my planner. My plan is in it. So when you veer from it, when you decide that you are going to abdicate the keystone habit of time block planning, you were confronting the fact that you were doing that explicitly in the moment. I am abandoning this big blue book standing right here.

When you have to face up to that decision, you might be less likely to actually go along with it because you say, now that's the one thing I committed to do is I actually want to try for a week, really trying to follow my time block plan and fixing it next time I get a chance when I get off of it. And so, no, I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. I'm going to get back to this block. Or, okay, this plan is falling apart. Everyone step back, take a beat.

I'm going to fix this plan. Let's be reasonable. I need 90 minutes now just to slack and email and get back on top of this crisis. And I need to take this thing. That was never going to happen. I got to cancel this meeting. Okay, whatever. I'm going to fix my plan, make it more reasonable.

So that's what I would suggest. If you want a time block plan, that's what it means. It's less about the mechanics of drawing boxes and more about the psychology of letting those boxes guide what you do. Have rituals for when you do it. Have some sort of artifact in front of you to confront you moment by moment that this is what I'm trying to do. This is my keystone habit. I am committing to it. All right, let's do a quick one here about keeping up with the literature.

Hi, Cal. My name's Sarah. I'm a postdoc in psychology. And I haven't got into a good practice of keeping up with new articles that come out in my field of expertise. And I was just wondering if you have certain practices that you do regularly to help you keep up to date with new articles in your area of research. Thanks. This is actually a pretty hard challenge. There's this idea, I think, for a lot of young researchers that you can, you can and should just be keeping up with interesting new articles appearing in the journals that you follow.

And by doing this, you will have a semi-comprehensive knowledge of all the latest trends in the field that's going to help you do more cutting-edge research. I call this the Dr. House strategy because in that show House, this is what you. he was always doing. He was always reading journals, always reading case studies. Because of that, he was able to make these nuanced differential diagnoses because he was always up with the literature. This is very hard to do in most fields. There's two reasons why. A, there's a lot of literature. Any sort of mainstream academic field has a ton of papers coming out. And two, in most fields, the literature is very difficult. It's a time-consuming, cognitively demanding process to really try to understand a paper.

And so the degree to which you're going to be able to just do that with many papers on a regular basis becomes untenable. This is too hard and too disconnected from an immediate, useful outcome for you to keep summoning the energy to do it. So what I see a lot of in academia is hacks to force more paper reading, the force more paper reading, but in a more focused way. So reading groups, I think, is a big tactic that I see deployed often. It's also a lot at MIT. Professors would convene reading groups with their graduate students or graduate students in their group on a particular topic. All right. Among the literature, here is a topic that I think mastering is going to lead to new papers for us and we should know it. Let's do a reading group where we take turns reading papers and presenting them to the whole group.

So you only have one paper that you have to master, let's say, every month or every five weeks, but you're learning in detail about a new paper every week. Reading groups work really well. Courses, right? Especially if you're at a big R1 university, you have a lot of opportunities to teach courses that are going to be higher level, that can be largely paper-based.

This is another way. So this is part of my teaching. So it's time I'm already thinking about prepping. But now this effort can go towards trying to master a new literature. At Georgetown, for example, we teach these doctoral seminars. Just doctoral students typically pretty, far along, you know, after their qualifiers, so pretty far along in the doctoral process. And it's a good opportunity when you get a chance to teach one of these to try to master a new

literature. We read a bunch of papers. We give presentations on them. I've taught doctoral seminars in recent years, for example, on biological algorithms. I've taught one more recently on the theoretical aspects of blockchains and distributed ledger algorithms in general. A great way to, again, force the effort required to get up the speed on a literature. Then the final thing you can do is let your existing ongoing research push this effort. I'm writing on this topic. When new papers come out related to this topic, I am going to try to understand those papers because it's directly helping this work I'm doing right now.

The very top theoretical computer scientist I know in my subfield, this is a big secret to their success. They can't keep up with the entire literature. They wouldn't even try. But they really put in a lot of effort to keep up with the literature that is relevant to their work. and it is a lot of effort, but there's a proximate benefit. I could get a new technique out of this paper that's going to generate a new publication for me within the year.

And that's pretty good motivation to do the hard work or reading these papers. I know who these people are, by the way, because they are the ones that if you publish a paper relevant to their work, will within weeks send you a note about, why did you do this proof this way? Why couldn't you do that? When you get a note like that, you know that is the type of person who's going to dominate your field because they are bringing in the new abilities, the new ideas quickly, but they're very focused about how they do it.

All right, so shorter version of this answer, you can't keep up with the whole literature. It's very cognitively demanding to read papers in general, so you need hacks and heuristics and motivation. So reading groups, high-level courses, and narrowing your gaze to papers that could directly lead to new papers of your own within a one-year window.

That's probably the best you can do. That's about, that's going to fulfill your quota of how many papers you probably have the cognitive capacity to keep up with. and it'll do so in a way that you actually make progress on. It'll hack the motivation here to make sure you actually succeed. All right, let's squeeze in one more question here. I like this topic.

This is about what you do between really big projects. Hi, Cal. My question is about the transition period between big projects. I wonder if you give yourself some reward or breaks after big projects are due. I asked this question because I found myself being inefficient after big projects are due. Well, yes, you should take breaks between big projects, but I'm going to be both grander and more specific here. I'm a big believer in what I call multi-scale seasonality that is having back and forth seasons between intensity in your work and rest from that intensity that happen. at different timescales and with different magnitudes.

Okay, so let's go through the different timescales. On the daily time scale, there's going to be periods where you're working very intensely. I'm trying to read a paper. I'm in an intense creative brainstorming meeting, and you want to compensate those with periods during your same day where you are recharging and not doing that type of intense work. I mentioned in an earlier question, I think it was one of the rapid fire questions. If you're doing intense work, use a one for one. ratio. For every hour of intense work today, I want an hour of present, non-demanding

recharging type time. All right. So that's seasonality on the daily scale. Let's shift up to the weekly scale. I think some days should be harder than others. Obviously weekends you should lean into trying to get relaxation out of there. I practice a Friday sundown, the Saturday sundown work Shabbat. I try to stay away from email and news and really anything work related, but even during the week. Some days should be easier than others. Not every day should be fully filled to the brim with your time block plan of really intense things. You do need days like that, but then you need to compensate. So to use myself again as an example, days when I'm on campus teaching tend to be pretty intense because I want to take advantage of

the fact that I'm on campus to meet with people, et cetera. So I'll boom, boom, boom, boom, Right. Things are lined up. I'm up. I'm prepping. I'm teaching and boom, boom, meeting, meeting meetings, coming home during traffic. And those days can be pretty intense. So I like to find another day during the week where I'm not on campus to be less intense. Keep the morning open, a couple meetings. I end a little bit early. So on the weekly scale, some days are intense. You compensate with some days that are structured and intentional, but you're just pulling back off the, pulling back from the line a little bit, taking your foot a little bit up off the accelerator. All right. Then we move up to the monthly scale. Some parts of the month might be more busy than others. We could sometimes merge this with the semester scales, let's say, like three month or four month period. And you might have some months or parts of the month are really busy and other ones you sort of pull back a little bit. We're in fall right now. I think this is a great example. September, I tend to really have the foot down on the accelerator for a lot of obvious reasons.

As we get towards late November, sort of that Thanksgiving time into the holiday season in December, I like to be able to bring that foot back off the accelerator, shift towards family stuff. Two of my kids have birthdays around then. There's Thanksgiving is around then. There's the holidays around then. Georgetown's class schedule usually ends relatively early in December as well. So you have a lot of time with more flexibility.

That's when I tend to recharge from the intensity of the months before. So now we're on the monthly scale or the semester scale. We have seasonality. Now let's go to the annual scale. Whole times of year can be less intense than other. For professors, for example, you can make your summer less intense than your fall and spring. You can be thinking about seasonality on that scale as well. This is where we're really going to get towards the type of thing you're talking about between projects.

Let's say you spend a year writing a book. You might take the next season really light on writing. That's something I do. So it's releasing between projects, slowing things down, then picking them back up again. All right. So I think at every scale we need seasonality. And this is just human nature. Humans are not wired to be constantly in a state of locked in high intensity, stress-driven, fill every productive minute of an extended workday with work mode.

It exhausts us. It exhaust us. It's not natural. It makes us trust. It makes us anxious. It burns us out. Significantly increases the number of sick days we have. So it's a problem.

We need season. It is one of the issues, by the way, with the modern mindset surrounding knowledge work, where we don't bake this into the picture. It's just, I'm suspicious if I feel like you're not working right now, and that applies to every moment. It's really not a natural way to do this. The seasonality is important. Of course, it's complicated because you have to trust people and there's autonomy issues. Results-only work-type environments tend to be better at this. it's much more clear

are you delivering value or not and if you are then I don't care that you took today off to go to the movies or that you're not doing as much in December because you did a lot more in November so I think a shift away

from this informal just throw work at people be performative on the hyperactive hive mind standard they replace with that that's something much more results only you know if you're shipping we don't care how you do it

and if you're not it's a problem no matter how much you send slack messages that's probably something that supports seasonality look at my New Yorker piece about how to create sustainable remote work. I believe that's the title, and I get into some of that

about what those environments are like and how to get there. Look into my New Yorker piece more recently titled, why do we work too much? And I touch on some of these issues as well. But that is my big picture answer. Take breaks between projects, yes.

But take breaks and all the other scales as well. You want that graph of intensity, like a fractal. Let's get nerdy for a second. If I'm graphing your intensity per time is on the x-axis, intensity is on the y-axis. On all the different scales you come in and out of that graph, I want to see jagged peaks.

I want to see ups and downs, ups and downs. I don't want to see straight lines on basically any scale. All right, I think that's enough questions for today. Thanks for the calls. Go to calduport.com slash podcast to get the instructions for submitting your own listener calls. We'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode, the Deep Questions podcast, and until then, as always, stay deep.

Thank you.