Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 132: LISTENER CALLS: Managing Non-Work Tasks

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

OPENING RANT: Facebook Knows It's Hurting Teenagers [3:22]LISTENER CALLS: - Interfacing with the hive mind. [17:45] - The relationship between tasks and daily plans. [24:58] - My weekly planning ritual. [31:04] - Discovering books. [39:42] - How I manage my non-work tasks. [46:25] 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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I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 132. I have a bit of an ignoble admission to make. As I'm recording this, I just rushed to my studios from the campus at Georgetown where I was teaching undergraduates discrete mathematics. Because of this, I believe this is the first appearance or recording or any other type of official media production I have done in my studio in which I am fully dressed in professional clothes. Now, of course, I have looked professional on camera from my studio before. I've done Good Morning America. I've done Christina Amapur show.

I've done a bunch of video podcasts, etc., where I look nice. But because those are all from the waist up, almost always I had shorts on or if it was the winner sweatpants on. So there's really been no reason for me to have on nice shoes, for me to have on nice pants. And so it really took me having to actually do. formal things in person, which has happened this fall now that I'm teaching again back at Georgetown for me to actually get to this first mark a year or more after opening the studio where I'm actually fully dressed like a civilized, adult, professional human being as I produce content.

So there's my ignoble admission for this episode. Before we get to your listener calls, I wanted to briefly talk about a big new ex-posé article that many of you have been sending me. It came out right around the time I'm recording this episode. It was published in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seatham. And the article is titled, Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, comma, company documents, show. So here's the idea behind this article.

I'll briefly summarize it because it's a topic I've been intertwined with. my path has been intertwined with for a while now, basically ever since I started working on the book Digital Minimalism. Essentially, these reporters got access to an internal slide deck from Facebook talking about Instagram, which is a Facebook-owned company now. And on these slides, it sort of matter-of-factly summarizes research conducted by Facebook's own internal researchers that are showing there are clear, negative impacts of Instagram on teenage girls. So for example, here's a quote from the slide. 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

Another slide said, we make body image issues worse for one and three teen girls. Another slide said teens blame Instagram for increase in the rate of anxiety and depression. Among teens who reported social. suicidal thoughts, 13 of British users and 6% of American users trace the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. I said another one of these leaked presentation slides. So let me try to put this in context. I did a semi-deep dive into the research literature on social media use and harm, and in particular self-harm. I ended up reading a lot of papers.

Even more interestingly, there's this annotated bibliology. that is being maintained by Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge. And it has a bunch of relevant papers about this issue, but more importantly, it has discussion. So different researchers will come in and add commentary and say, okay, here's a problem with this paper. And then other people come back. So yeah, but this is what I think you're missing. So you can actually see the commentary between researchers. and Jonathan Haidt was nice enough to let me have access to this.

So I was able to see that discussion. So I've read a bunch of these papers, seen these annotated bibliographies, looked at some of this discussion, talked to a bunch of scientists, talked to a bunch of parents, talked to a bunch of teenagers. A lot of this was for an article that I never hasn't yet come together. But I was just doing this work because I thought it was interesting. And what you see is when you look at this literature, that two things. One, there is the demographic correlative data. So this is like Gene's work. She's an expert on studying demographic trends and how they change between generations.

So in looking at one cohort versus another generational cohort, she's very good at trying to tease out what's real and what's not real. And in her book, Igen, which sort of helped really kick off this concern, she was finding, look, forget about now for reasons. but there's all of these disconcerting trends happening in this particular generation. This is a generation that comes after, I think it comes largely after the millennials, and there is issues with anxiety and depression, but also with severe decreases in time spent to actually socializing in person and other types of issues that she was noticing. And in her book, she said, look, I can't tell you exactly what's causing this, but I will say we looked at many different potential explanations,

and only one of them had timing that fit really well. Well, this cohort that's showing all these big, somewhat concerning changes was the first cohort to have social media tools like Facebook be ubiquitous as they reach their preteen years. That fit exactly, right, when you started to see these issues demographically. Okay, but again, correlation is not causation. So then we get after that a lot of social psych papers and a lot of behavioral sociology papers and psych papers where you go out and measure populations and try to. to tease out, you know, what is causing a particular dependent variable that is making us nervous and you do various type of regression analysis, et cetera. There's a bunch of these that we're finding social media use was an issue.

Now, if you dive real closely, it's in particular heavy social media use and teenage girls popped out as a real big disconcerting association between that particular demographic pairing. and in this case self-harm or hospitalization for self-harm. In particular, teenage girls in heavy social media, you seem to be kind of dangerous. Okay, this generated a lot of pushback. In these fields of psychology, there's a lot of attention and there's a lot of value in contrarianism to come in and say, you know, everyone thinks this is a problem, but it's just they're blowing it out of proportion. It's not.

There's a lot of street cred in that. So there's this whole wave of pushback that said, you know, look, you analyze this data a different way. You don't see that problem. This largely came out of the UK. There's various reasons for why that is. There's one particular research group in particular that's been really pushing this. It's an interesting group because they have a lot of industry ties. So there's a whole other subtext here that I'm not qualified to go into too much.

But there is the expected contrarian push, which is not a bad thing, right? That dialectic of this is not a problem versus, I think, is a big problem, usually in this type of field that helps move things forward. Here's the issue in general. When you're trying to measure causation of social phenomenon, it's basically impossible to do. It's just there's too many confounders in how you measure it. There's too many confounders in how you isolate variables and how you group together different groups. And if you read all these papers, what you see is, look, you can keep turning knobs and find different things, right?

So how do we break this log jam? It's where we end up is there's the people who are, and honestly, the people who are concerned about the harm among teenage girls in particular and heavy social media use, they're doing reasonable analyses, right? They don't have like a dog in this fight, like I will get attention for this. They're concerned and it's pretty good analyses, but then the other people come along and say, we did different analyses and, you know, change social media use, to internet use, and move this variable and we didn't find it.

So how do we really get to the core here, if we're, We're trying to measure something that's hard to measure precisely. Well, this is what brings me to this Facebook internal leaked documents. What I have been saying, at least privately, for a while now, is that the thing we have with this particular phenomenon that we don't have when, for example, we're looking at is smoking causing lung cancer. Is BPA and plastic causing, you know, some hormonal problems? What we have here is self-reports. Every teenager I have talked to when I was working on digital minimalism or after when I was promoting digital minimalism will tell me,

yes, this behavior being on this phone is causing me problems, X, Y, and Z. It is making me anxious. I'm not going out and socializing as much. It's making me more fragile. It's making me sad. It's distracting me. I'm not sleeping. They will just tell you this is a problem.

They are self-reporting. That was the angle of this Facebook research, is they're asking the teenagers themselves. And the teenagers are saying, yes, this is exactly why I'm anxious. Yes, if I'm one of the 13% of British teenage girls who considered suicide last year, I will tell you it was Instagram that got me started down that path. The researchers are ignoring the self-reports too much. Common sense is being put on the shelf, right?

Which is what I think you would have to do. you would have to put common sense on the shelf to come to where you have such consistent self-reporting that this behavior I'm doing is making me feel this bad way. And you say, no, no, I don't think you, I don't think that's true because, look, I changed the parameters in my regression analysis and found that I could, in this data set, make the trend diminish in terms of, you know, self-harm. these teenage girls don't care about whether you're doing multi or single variant regression. They don't care about what thresholds you have for your kai square significance testing. They're saying this thing makes me miserable. I don't know what to do about it. Help.

And that is why I have fallen down on the side of, look, if you hear a hoof print, you hear the hoof beats. What's the saying? You hear the hoof beats. Don't think zebras think horses. It's probably the obvious thing. And let's look at all of these pieces together. You get to the first generation that has access to widespread ubiquitous social media use. Anxiety goes up, depression goes up, suicidal ideation, self-harm, any of that stuff goes up.

It goes up particularly high among the subgroup of young people that we think are using these tools the most and in potentially the most socially destructive way, which is teenage girls. Okay, so that pops off the charts. We start to look at data sets, and a lot of good scientists look at data sets and say it's not hard to find that signal. There's perfectly reasonable ways to analyze it to find a signal. We don't even have to try that hard. Yes, other people can come and change the code. There are scripts and get different results. But, you know, we looked at and found that pretty easily.

And then you just talk to the people, survey them or talk to them informally, and this main group says, yes, 100%. This is making me anxious. This is making me sad. All right. I think those hoof beats are coming from horses. And I know there's a lot of attention that's game. by saying we're, you know, we're overblowing it. I'm smarter.

I did a smarter statistical analysis and I think it doesn't really exist. Sure. I know there's a lot. It makes you feel good to come in and feel like you're the more sophisticated person in the group and say, look, that seems like a simplistic thing to say. So let me say why it might not be so complicated. Sure, that's always the case, almost tautologically show. So.

But the reality here is, you know, maybe we should just give the contrarians a pat on the back and tell them we think they're really smart. So it'll be satisfied. And let's look at helping people because I don't know how. we can ignore this and pretend like this is not a problem. The self-reports are the most important thing I think we have. Everything else, of course, circumstantially backs this up, but I take the self-reports very seriously. This is people saying this thing makes me feel bad. What do I do? Help. So I think it's a big deal that Facebook knows this. Now, what's Facebook saying in response

to this? They're saying we're proud of that research we did. We know it's a problem. We don't think it's widespread, but we know it's serious for the people who suffer from it, and we're doing what we can. So look, at least they're being forced to acknowledge it. Great, but I don't need Facebook to solve this problem. I don't trust Facebook to solve this problem. I don't think there is a bill you can pass that is going to solve this problem. You solve this problem the same way that we solved the very high levels and increasing levels of teenage smoking that we began to have to really tackle. We got real serious about in the 1990s. We solved it by changing the culture. We changed the culture such that smoking lost a lot of its allure. It lost a lot of

its sophisticated essence of this is something that you want to do because it's cool. And once we changed the culture, a lot less teenagers were interested in smoking. I think we have to change the culture around social media. We have to change the zeitgeist. Why am I on this phone in a basically a glorified data factory so that some 37-year-old nerd can make another billion dollars, I'm going to go do something more authentic. I'm going to go do something more real.

I'm going to do something that's more enjoyable IRL for me. I think that is not a hard cultural shift to make. I think it's why Facebook is terrified because it can happen overnight. That huge basis of their Instagram users that are teenage girls is suddenly gone. They say enough of this.

So anyways, I think there's a real problem. I think we need to stop pretending like it's a not, those of us who are pretending like it's not. And I think the solution ultimately for this particular techno-cultural issue is going to be cultural change. Look at how quickly young people left Facebook to go to Instagram. It happened almost overnight. They can leave Instagram to non-social media sources of entertainment or to distributed Internet, more grassroots, emergent Internet tools, or into other types of trends that have nothing to do with the Internet. This could happen overnight.

And that's where we need to be nudging along are these tipping point style cultural transformations that makes the need to be on this phone every day go from essential to somehow seeming exploitative and square. I think that can happen. I think it keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. I think these slides probably keep them up even more. Anyways, this is all off the cuff. I'm just riffing here, literally having read this just five minutes ago, but I thought that this was a good opportunity for me to do a quick rant. All right. With that being said, let's move on to your listener calls. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how to record your own calls for the show. Now, what I've done here with the calls today is I'm going to do the first half are going to be work related. Get in the weeds briefly about some of the organizational and planning strategies we'd like to talk about here on the show. And then the second half of the questions will leave the work weeds and go to the mountaintop of.

personal satisfaction improvement, the deep life more generally. So we'll start with work and then we'll move on to life. That in mind will do question number one, which has to do with how a team within a company that is well structured can survive, having to interact with a rest of an organization that is drowning in the hive mind. Hi, Cal. My name is Jason. I manage a team of software engineers and a larger company. The team uses the scrum method. We have two-week sprints. We have a task board.

We use Jira. Every engineer has a story assigned to them, and we use the story's comment feature to communicate about the story, and it works really well. But my problem is the rest of the company is using the hyperactive hive mind and we're constantly getting bombarded with emails and interruptions,

and it's like they're not even aware of this process or don't seem to care. So I'm just wondering, how would you recommend managing this hyperactive hive mind that's trying to interfere with the well-oiled machine of a scrum process? Well, Jason, thanks for this question. I was going to cut some of your explanation about scrum and how your team uses scrum because it was a little bit beside the point of how does a structured team interact with a non-structured organization surrounding it. But I kept it in because I wanted people who aren't from a software development background to get more of a flavor of the type of things that emerge when you look at teams that think about how work should be allocated and organized from an intentional perspective. I've been writing some about this for the New Yorker recently,

and I think for a lot of people who aren't in software development, it's really foreign. It's really foreign to think about what would work be without the hyperactive hive mind. And people in this situation often drift towards, well, is there a different tool? Like, instead of using email, we would use another tool. Is that what's going on? Is it like Monday.com instead of email, and that's what my life would be like. And what I like about you summarizing how you guys use scrum is that people say,

oh, wow, there's a whole methodology. This is the type of thing that you get when you start to get intentional. You have scrum boards and stories and things are assigned and you get points for executing. And look, I know this is hard to do. And there's a lot of complaints. I usually get these from hacker news about, well, here's a problem with scrum and this and that. And nothing's perfect. But I just wanted to give people a taste of you could actually have really structured ways that work is assigned and tracked and how you figure out what to work on and how you're rewarded for it, etc.

there's a lot of room here to play. To simply just be on Slack or email and rock and roll and send out Zoom invites, spraing Zoom invites like a infected individual sprays COVID particles around just infecting people in this case with attention devouring, attention consuming superfluous meetings. It's not the only way to work. So that's why I kept that short scrum description in there just to give people a taste of what it's like to have, what it looks. like when you have a lot more structure. All right, let's do your actual problem, though. Your team has moved past the hive mine. The company where you work has not.

I actually had exactly this case study in my book, A World Without Email. I think it got cut for space at some point. I'm trying to remember if it was still in there. But I was interviewing someone, I think Aaron is what I called him in the book. And he is exactly the same situation. He had a team of developers within a larger company. that was not a technology company, and they were very structured. They used task boards and agile-inspired systems.

I think they had GERA that implemented from a digital perspective. And the company around them did not. And it was for this chapter I had or this section I had about how you do that interfacing. And I remember, I think what I came away with from talking to Aaron is that they had interfaces for how the rest of the company interacted with them. but they were light touch interfaces. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Well, by interface, I mean they worked out internally. How do we want to interact with the rest of the company?

So this was a, their team built software products for internal use at this much larger company. So there's a lot of people that would bother them, hey, what about this or ideas or this thing you're working on? And there's a bit of an IT component to what they do to. Hey, the system you built is not working, etc. And so they figured out internally how they wanted to deal with these things. where the request would go, how they would track them, they'd put them on boards, they would assign them to people, try to figure out, you know, what to do with them.

They had these internal processes. They didn't, however, give everyone else in the company very stringent communication hoops they had to jump through. It wasn't, okay, you have to wait until 5 p.m. on Mondays and go fill out this form with what your request is and then print it out and take it to this, the wooden door at the top of the mountain and stick it through the slot when the moon comes through these two, when they come through these. two holes in these rocks at exactly the right point to light up the crystal of doom. They weren't going to make it too heavy-handed for the company around them because they didn't think their supervisors in particular the higher-ups would tolerate this. So they did light-touch interfaces. So email was actually their entry point.

But they made those email addresses, not individuals. It wasn't, hey, I know this guy, Jason, who's on that team. So I'll just send him an email and, hey, what about this? And there's just a social compact when you talk to a person-to-person response. There's email addresses for questions. There's email addresses for projects, if I remember this correctly. Then those emails that would come in internally would get sucked into a ticketing system. So internally, those will get sucked into a ticketing system where they could be categorized and put into the correct category with a certain priority.

And they internally would look through this ticketing system and assign things just like you would do in an IT shop. And then if you were working on a few tickets and you know, you got stuck, you could put your notes right there. earned a ticket, handed off to someone else, they would automatically see that's been assigned to them. They did these daily scrums style standing meeting so they could, you know, nothing was going to be forgotten who's working on what. And then they had the system set up to sort of automatically send back email updates to the people who emailed them. Like, yeah, this has been worked on.

Progress has been made. So they had a very clear interface. This is how information comes in, how we categorize it, how we work on it. But we make the interface that the outside world uses very easy to use. They can just shoot an email to one of these addresses. So they have to change a little bit. The outside world outside of this team had to change a little bit. These are the different addresses to reach us.

But you can just use email or whatever you're comfortable with, and we'll get back to an email. Internally, they thought a lot about how do we structure this. So they just built processes for the incoming from the outside world, just like you build processes for any of your internal work. How do I identify what needs to get done? How do we coordinate with each other to get it done? How do we get the right information to get it done?

How do we make sure that it's actually executed? Answer those questions in a way that minimizes context shifts. And they did that. So just take the same approach, Jason, that you're using for your internal processes. Put it onto the processes for external communication, light touch interfaces so people don't get too mad, but you can give them a little bit of homework. You can make things better. All right.

Let's do a question now about the relationship between task boards and your daily plan. In your book, Dictum Mineralism, you present us with the idea of compound boards, and you refer to an interesting video of a professor. in supply change management with a lot of color-coded boards or cards and whatnot. And it may be a think that you often refer to campaign boards and you have these task boards with a with treadle. But how is it good combined with task with the daily planners? Well, this is a good question. First, to clarify, I think the book you were referencing is a world without.

email, not digital minimalism. And I really also like that example in a world without email of that supply chain management theorist who had created this over the top complex con bond personal con bond task management system where you had post-it notes all over a whiteboard, different colors representing type of works. He had a work in progress limit of three and it was right there in the middle of the board and these cues of different tasks that he had prioritized by categories. and he would look at his completed task,

which he would stack up in buckets at the other end of his whiteboard and used a color coding to quickly assess what is the ratio of tasks to different types that I'm accomplishing? Is there a type of work that is getting a disproportionately small amount of my attention? This represents an extreme, one extreme of how you might translate from taskboards to execution. He built his entire approach to work off of his task boards. I tend to pursue something that's a little bit less heavy-handed. So let's talk about how this taskboard interface with the work you do each day.

So the key place where this interface starts is your weekly planning. When you're doing your weekly planning and creating your weekly plan, one of the core elements of the weekly planning process is reviewing all of your task boards. You're trying to remind yourself of what's on your plate, but you're also cleaning things up. Consolidating, removing redundant things, changing the status of things that you, their status has changed since you're last in there moving things around. In general, I'm reviewing everything on my plate and I'm cleaning up and reorganizing these things that are on my plate. At this point, when you're doing weekly planning, depending on what you prefer, a lot of people myself included, will pull out what I call highlighted tasks for the week. This is not the totality of every task that you need to do this week, but it's ones that you think are particularly important that you get done this week.

Can I tend to put those in my weekly plan? I've highlighted task in my weekly plan. Sometimes if a task is particularly big, like I think it's going to need 45 minutes to get done, I will at this point while doing my weekly plan, block it off on my calendar, put time aside for it. At that point,

it becomes like any other calendar event, like any other meeting or appointment. It's something I'll just execute when I get there on that day. The other things will stay in my list of highlighted task. And there's a lot of things they probably want to do they're just sitting there on my task list like normal. All right, now we go through your week. And let's say we get to a particular day and it's time to build your daily plan.

And because, you know, you're careful about your time, you're doing a daily time block plan. So what happens now? Well, there's a couple different ways that now when you're doing your daily plan is going to interface with these tests. The first is the obvious way. If during your weekly planning you had put aside a particular time on your calendar for a particular task, well, that will obviously just be put straight on your time block plan for the day. because the first thing you do in time blocking is copy your things off your calendar onto your time block plan, so you know that's going to get done.

Next, as your time blocking your day, you want to have blocks in there for administrative work, for doing tasks. I call these admin blocks. Other people call them different things. It's blocks in which you're going to do multiple different tasks. It's not deep work time. It's crank to widgets, get the small stuff done time. I have a special format for these blocks in my time block plan. I give it a double border. So I draw the blocks and I draw another box inside of it. So there's like a hollow border. So I can just look at my plan and see where the admin blocks are. And then for my deep work blocks by contrast, I fill in that border.

So it's a couple centimeters of darkness and I know those are deep work blocks. Now you have two sub options. This is why it's hard for me to say exactly, you know, what's the count of different ways you connect tasks to your planning. But you have two options here, two sub options when you're building an admin block. one, it can just be a general purpose admin block. A, it's admin time. Go find some tasks until this block is over. You could look at your highlighted task list,

but you can also just go to your task boards and look for stuff, and this is like the David Allen approach. Where am I? What do I want to do? Let's crank some widgets. The second sub option for your admin block is put a number in that block, replicate that number in the top right of your time block plan where it won't interfere with your adjusted plans throughout the day

and list specific task you want to do in that block. For me, these tend to come right off those highlighted task lists for my weekly plan, from that list of things I know I want to get done. So I have general purpose admin blocks, and I have enumerated admin blocks, where I enumerate specific tasks to get done. Some weeks I only really use enumerated task blocks, and I'm just trying to get through my highlighted task list.

Other weeks where there's a lot going on, I might lean more into just throwing a bunch of general purpose admin blocks and be like, look, if I get an hour a day, most days where I'm just cranking on list, I trust myself to get towards stuff that needs to get done and make progress on a lot of things. The key is you need to make admin progress. So some mix of scheduling task on your calendar,

enumerating highlighted task and enumerated admin blocks, and having general purpose admin blocks, some mix of these three things should keep you on top of that stuff that lives permanently on your task boards. All right, let's do one more work question. I'll try to answer this one quickly because I've talked about it before and it has to do with a weekly planning. Hi, Cal. My name is Christiana. I'm a registered dietitian based in Minneapolis. I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about your ritual for doing your weekly review and weekly plans. You give a great template of

what that could look like from week to week in the time block planner. But I wonder if you could really talk a bit more about the ritual. And, you know, do you do it in the morning? Do you do it in the evening. Is there a specific place and time that you do it? Well, I won't go into detail about what goes into my weekly plans because I've talked about this in detail in recent episodes. But I think this is a good question to talk about the ritual surrounding my weekly plan. And what I normally do is do this on Monday. I normally try to do it first thing on Monday if I can. now this semester because I'm teaching on Mondays, sometimes I get caught up just prepping my course on for Monday mid-morning

and don't get to the weekly plan until a little bit later in the day. But ideally I do this first thing Monday. I do it at my house. I usually do it in my office. I like to also integrate with this process emptying my inbox. So I try to with my admin blocks work through things in my inbox throughout the week. but I don't succeed, right? And things coming over the weekend and things kind of pile up.

And usually by the time I'm doing my end of week, Shabbat shutdown on Friday, I've been reduced to emergency sweeps to make sure there's nothing that's really urgent in my inbox. Everything in there can sit till at least Monday and then I let it sit. So I often try to clean my inbox as well. This adds a lot of time to the weekly planning. Getting inboxes down the zero takes a lot of time. While I'm doing the weekly plan,

the core tool that I'm using is a blank text file. There's so much you have to keep in mind. Like I pass that need to be sorted, things to keep in mind for your plan, things that have to be integrated into the plan, information so that you can go to your calendar and find where things go. And I just use a blank text file. Let's not get fancy. I call it working memory.

com. It's right on my desktop on my Mac because I just expand. It's like an expansion on my working memory. Information goes on there. Information gets erased. I type a bunch of notes. I go find what I'm looking for. I erase those notes.

So it's me with this text file open, jumping back and forth between the things you need to do your weekly plan. That's tasks. That's looking at your calendar. And it's your whatever document you're writing your weekly plan in, be it analog in your time block planner or digital in a digital file. So that's what it looks like. And no big ritual beyond it other than I feel uncomfortable if I don't have a weekly plan. That's when I do it.

That's what it's like. It takes a lot of time. I just want to underscore two things. One, this is a habit you get used to. Once you get used to having a weekly plan, your discomfort without having a weekly plan grows, and you're much more likely to do it. You don't necessarily need an elaborate ritual to trick yourself into doing it. You need to just learn to enjoy it when you have it so much. You have this structure.

You kind of know what's happening each day. You have a game plan. You're balancing different objectives, especially non-urgent but important objectives quite well. and you don't want to lose that, and that's what brings you back. It's just like when you make exercise in a regular, important part of your life, you feel weird when you don't do it. That's how you get yourself to consistently do weekly plans. Two, it's very stressful. Other people may have a different reaction to weekly planning.

I find it very stressful because my mind is confronting many different things that have to be done. And even though rationally I know, these are things that are spread out over an entire week, five, eight hour days, right? That's 40 hours. It's a lot of time. My mind sees it as this is all stuff we have to get done. Until we get it done, we're unhappy. And this is too much for me to think about imagine getting done all at once right now.

And it causes a lot of stress. Don't let that stress if you feel it freak you out. That's not a sign that you don't like planning. That's not a sign that you should run away from planning. This is just simply a mismatch between our wiring, which is really meant to do. executive planning, but not in the type of planning we need in a work environment. The type of planning we need it in a paleolithic environment where there was three things we were sequencing for the day.

Let me hunt and then gather the roots, but I have to put the poison on the arrows before I hunt. That's my plan. So that type of mind does not deal well with 17 Zoom meetings, 16 long-term deadlines. You have to get the type of stuff you face in typical modern life. That's where the stress comes from. I don't like to stress, but it's not meaningful. And you feel better once the plan is done, you've moved on and done a few things. That stress goes away.

It's just keeping all those things temporarily in your mind at once fries the circuitry. So that's the other warning I want to give. All right. So nothing special. First thing Monday morning, get it done. It takes longer than you think. It causes some stress. You do it because you learn to hate not having it and stick with it.

It really, really is the glue that makes all the different pieces of my system work. It is the glue that takes all the capture and the planning, the strategic. thinking and it glues it together with what am I doing right now in my day, the time blocking, the sort of intentional time allocation. Without the weekly plan, none of this stuff really works nearly as well. So I'm glad you're asking about it and hopefully this helps. I want to take a moment to talk about Element, LMNT. This is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt, but no sugar. Element contains a science Electrolite ratio of a thousand milligrams sodium,

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I know we're running a little low on time here, so I'll try to move quickly, but I have a few I want to get to, starting with this question about discovering books. Hey, Cal, thanks for changing my life with digital minimalism. This may fit into the narrative that you often address regarding productivity tools. That is, it is not necessarily about the tools one puts into use. It is about performing the hard work itself. My question is regarding books. Is there a best practice for selecting what books to read?

The route of discovering books organically through simple browsing at a library or bookstore or by topic on Amazon has disappeared from my repertoire. Well, this might be paradoxical at first, but something that has definitely helped me in the book selection process is reading more books. I've talked about on the show how starting in April I've shifted to a goal of five plus books read per month. So far so good. I've hit that goal every month. I'm recording this now in mid-September and I'm about halfway through my fourth book. so I think I'm on good, I'm on a good pace to finish it in September 2.

But I'll tell you, by increasing the amount I read, it really lowered the stakes when it came time to find books, right? Because a lot of times I'm like, look, I just need another book. And I'm taking stuff off my shelf, like stuff I didn't get to, stuff that I started four years ago and it's been on my shelf ever since then, stuff I ordered recently but haven't yet read. And I'm going back and actually clearing out books. Some of them books that I've been really excited to read, but some of them quite random. You know, a few weeks ago, I read Rabbi Joshua Heschel's 1950, I think it was 1954's book, Man Search for God. And I got this from a box of free books at a temple.

They were being deaccession from their library, $1 a book, and I had just grabbed it. This must have been four years ago. It's like, why not this one now? And I grabbed it, right? And four days later had read it. So like the stakes are lower. Just grabbing stuff you have that you meant to read, so the stakes are lower. However, while you're doing this, you're still being exposed to new books.

You're hearing interviews, you come across it in the newspaper, you see a magazine review, a friend tells you about it, you see something in the bookstore. So you're still making these very intentional selections of books, but it's not every book has to be a really intentional selection. It's every three or four books, like, ooh, now I get to get the one that I've been really meaning to read. But when that's done, you don't have to have another very intentional book lined up. You just grab some book off your shelf or a random one you grab from the library. Or you decide, let me just go try something completely different. Right now, for example, I'm reading a basically an Oxford short introduction to Carl Jung. Why not?

I don't know. I would like to know a little bit more about his theory. So you're grabbing books that are interesting. When you come across really intentional picks, you throw them in the mix and read those, the advantage is it's not that stressful. You still read a lot of cool books that are very well-chosen. listen for you, but you also are exposing yourself to a diversity of other books you might not have ever read. And I got to tell you, I'm having a blast. I haven't had this much fun reading

in a long time. I've really rediscovered the joy of reading. And the key to all of this was just crank up the volume and all of these other good benefits will necessarily follow that commitment. All right, let's do another deep life question here. This one is about a commonplace book. Hello, Carl. This is Isabel and I am from Spain. My question is about commonplace. books. I was wondering if you have a commonplace book or any other system that serves you to keep in one place, all the quotes from the books you read. But I mean only the books you read for pleasure, not for research. For those who don't know, a commonplace book is a notebook in which you collect interesting ideas, quotes that you've encountered that you like, adages that you've come up with.

It's like an external brain for organizing and tracking interesting or potentially useful information in your life. These have a long history, and I think it's a really cool habit. I don't keep a commonplace book. Typically, if I'm reading a nonfiction book for pleasure. So it's a book that I'm not reading immediately to service a specific project, like a specific article or specific book I'm writing. I'm just reading it because it could be interesting. Like the Heschel book I mentioned in my last answer, the Carl, Jung book I'm reading now.

I will mark. I will mark interesting passages using my system of marked a corner. If there's something on the page you're going to highlight and then bracket or check mark or underlying things that are interesting, I will do that. And so if I want to come back to that book later, if I have some vague memory later that there's something in there that might be relevant, I can quickly get to those quotes. But I don't pull them out and put them into a separate system. I don't pull them out and put them into a separate notebook or into a more organized cross-reference

Zettel Kasten style system. like seems to be the rage right now. I know a lot of people do. So if you go back and listen to my interview with Shreeny Rao, he talks a little bit about how he uses a digital note-taking tool called Mim to track ideas from books that he's read so that he can later pull from them. Ryan Holiday does this with old-fashioned note cards, and he's talked about this before.

You can probably find that on YouTube or on his website. So a lot of people do it. I know this idea is also popular among bullet journalers. So if you read writer Carol's book on bullet journaling, a lot of people use bullet journals in a commonplace book style. I mean, one of the idea about bullet place journaling is there's a lot of flexibility about what type of things you track. And many of the examples of bullet journaling that you'll see in writer's book or on Instagram have people tracking things like books they've read, ideas they've thought of, etc. So bullet journalers do this as well.

So in general, if you like this idea, you should do it. A lot of people do. I don't do full place, complex books. I just do page marking, but this is to each their own type of situation, whatever you think is going to be more personally and creatively fulfilling. One book recommendation to give, if you like technologies like Commonplace Books, William Power wrote this cool book years ago called Hamlet's Blackberry. And it talked about a lot of cool information management and storage and communication technologies

from a pre-electronic era. I was in commonplace books is one of the examples he gives. One of the examples he gives in the book, but it's a really cool history of really interesting technologies, hacky, intelligent, lost in the sands of timeshell technologies that in centuries past people use to help organize the information in their lives. So if this general topic interest, you check out Hamlets, Blackberry, as well. All right, let's do one more quick question here about non-work tasks.

Hi, Cal. My name is Tyler, and I work in corporate, finance. Since I began following your productivity advice for work, I've gained a lot of clarity about what I ought to be doing and how to effectively get it done. However, I can't exactly say the same thing about non-work tasks. Capture is not an issue, as I have a notebook that I write everything down in. But when it comes to the configure and control aspects of organization, as well as the execution step in your funnel, there seems to be something missing. I know you've said in the past that you don't recommend time block planning for non-working hours.

Do you have any advice on taming the productivity dragon specifically in this non-work realm? I do treat non-work tasks more casually. I do not want to be in the high intensity, make the most of every minute mindset that I often have to apply to my work life. I do not want to be there with my life outside of work because in some sense, what's the point? There's stuff that has to get done, but there's a lot of stuff outside of work that has nothing to, do with the accomplishment of tasks. So I do not want that mindset to aggressively colonize my non-professional time. So here's what I do. First of all, I still believe in full capture for non-work tasks. You do not want to have to keep track of the fact that you need to

hand in a form for your son's school or that you need to change the oil in your car just in your head. That will cause just as much of avoidable stress as trying to keep a work task only in your head. So full capture, have lists, taskboards, whatever tool you want to use, but have those captured somewhere. Do weekly planning. When we look at the calendar, let me look at the task list for my non-work task and get a sense of what I want to try to get done this week. If you are married, for example, do this with your partner. You can look at your list, look at the calendar together. Big things should go on your calendar like a meeting or appointment, figure out where the big things are going to happen and get that time blocked off so you can plan around it when you get there

when you get to that day you can see it's there right so put the time aside for the big rocks it takes a while to drop your car off to get the oil change you don't have your car available that day you got to plan that in advance when you do the weekly planning you can also pull out from your task list a collection of highlighted task like these are things i'd really like to try to get to this week as well all right then when you get to your normal daily planning for your work You know, the first question to ask is, is there any non-work tasks that need to be integrated into the hours of your workday? Any such task is probably going to be in your highlighted task list and your weekly plan. If there's some stuff that has to happen during working hours, then you just integrate that like it.

You treat it like a work task and you integrate that into your daily planning. Sure. When you do your shutdown ritual at the end of your workday, this is a good place. Then jot down your quick plan for what's happening tonight. remind yourself, is there anything scheduled? Is there a back-to-school night tonight or anything I need to know about now that I'm leaving the comfort of my time block plan? Make sure you review that. Also look at the night ahead you and say, it's just some task I want to get done.

You know, I have some daylight left. Why don't I go weed-wack? I was going to weed-wack to curbs. Let me go do that real quick before dinner, right? So you kind of make a rough plan. Let me get through a few tasks tonight. What do I want to actually do? That's about it.

All right, that's how you stay on top of it. So just a review here, full capture, so don't keep track of this stuff in your heads. Do a good weekly plan for your night. non-work task in addition to your work task, big things on your calendar, working hour task at integrating your daily plan, shut down complete, make a quick, rough plan for your evening. You're not time block planning. You're not going to be productive every minute, but just what am I doing this night? That will keep you usually pretty reasonably on top of what has to get done.

The caveat I want to give you is go much easier on yourself when it comes to these non-work tasks as compared to work tasks. Just because you can do more, you shouldn't. In fact, if you can kind of get away with doing less, do less. Say, I'm not doing anything tonight. Let me just do this one quick task because I just want to take my kids and we're going to go watch this movie and I want to just read on the porch or something. Like, you do not want to think about your non-work hours as potential units of production that you are trying to capitalize on completely. Instead, it is, I want to make sure that the stuff that needs to get done gets done at a reasonable pace.

And if I'm convinced I'm doing that, then I'm fine. And to the extent to which I can minimize the footprint of that, the better. So do not bring a optimization of production mindset to your non-work task. It's more of a keep your head above water mindset. That oil has to get changed and this form has to go back to your son's class. So, okay, I'll find a time to do the oil change. and when it gets to Wednesday night, I'm like, okay, I got to do that form and get that back to my son's class, fine. But then I'm going to do nothing else.

In other words, that's what I'm saying. The mindset here is different. So that'll keep you on top of things and keep you from overly stressing. The caveat of you're not trying to optimize production here will also make sure that your non-work productivity does not become something that actually takes away from what is good about life outside of work itself. Speaking of which, this is probably a good time for me to stop. working by bringing this episode to a close. Thank you for the great listener calls. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions

podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.