Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 144: LISTENER CALLS: Is Overload Necessary?

Episode Date: November 4, 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.DEEP DIVE: Is Overload Necessary? (Epic rant alert) [3:53]LISTENER CALLS: - Beyond the most important task of the day. [27:00]  - "Pseudo-blocking" household admin. [31:53]  - A doctor struggling to find leisure time. [36:47] - Defanging the internet with strategic browser plug-ins. [44:26] - Applying sprints outside of the tech sector. [49:35]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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Episode 144. Today we're going to do a listener calls episode. I pulled a good collection of your calls, and I'm excited to dive into your queries. I'm recording this episode on a Friday. So at the end of a week, the end of a week in which I had too much to do. I am very attuned to my time availability.

As you know, long-time listeners, I am very much in control of my time and my obligations. And so I know when I have more to do than even I contain with my systems, I feel it very acutely, probably more acutely than the standard person, because I'm so focused on controlling my time, separating work from non-work. And so I had too much to do more than I could control, made me unhappy. So what does Cal Newport do when he feels like he has too much on his plate? Well, I do predictably Cal Newportian things. First, I, of course, took time to draft a whole crash emergency plan for the next two months for November and December about how I'm going forward, going to drastically reduce what's on my plate, better tame what's on my plate, make sure the key things keep getting progress, but get that breathing room back that I did not have this week that I can feel is being squeezed out of him. my schedule. So I always respond. I respond to hardship with plans and processes because I'm just wired that way. And two, even more Newportian, I began thinking about a more general analysis,

a more general bit of cultural critique about why does overload like this happen? Is it inevitable? Is this a underlying flaw in our work? Or is it just what work should be? Because I like making theories. So I figure what I do is take this theory I have begun to work on in earnest in response to being overloaded last week and put into its own deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is the following. Is overload necessary? Something I really enjoy as a writer who, among other things, covers the world of work

is when you can come across a topic that that takes a behavior that we have so internalized that we just think of it as inevitable and point out that it's not inevitable and that there's alternatives and that the alternatives might actually make our lives much better because I love that sense of surprise and relief when you realize this thing that has been dragging on you is not some sort of unavoidable obstacle but actually arbitrary, something we can get around. This is what, in some sense, I was doing in my book, Deep Work, I introduced this notion that, wait a second, deep work is different than shallow work. And you can actually prioritize how much of each of these you want to do and calibrate how much of each of these is in your work life. It's not just busyness versus non-busy, hustle versus non-hustle. This is what I tried to do in my more recent book, a world without email, when I argued that this way that we collaborate today in which we are constantly communicating with each other is not some. anonymous with work. It is just one of many ways that we might collaborate. I gave it a name.

I call it the hyperactive hive mind. I analyzed it. Turns out, hey, this is a terrible way to work because it completely contrasts with the way the human brain operates. And I looked at its history and said, this is not planned. This was not solving some problem. It's just emergent and arbitrary. We could do something different.

I like those type of inversions. Well, I have a new one that I've just begun thinking about that I want to try out today. All these thoughts are rough. but I figure I'm among friends here. So we can take some half-formed ideas out for a spin without hopefully crashing or getting too much trouble. And in particular, what I wanted to look at more critically is in the context of knowledge work, workload,

how much work we actually have on our plate, do we have a responsibility to actually execute? The dominant way in which workloads are generated in most knowledge work environments today is what we can call a push model. If I have something that I need you to do or I need your help on, I push it onto your plate. Then we expect the individual

to just manage all the different stuff on their plate. Okay, you have all this different stuff on your plate, do productivity stuff. Listen to Cal Newport, read David Allen, read Stephen Covey, buy a bullet journal, whatever. But you have all this stuff on your plate that different stakeholders, if you'll excuse terrible business jargon,

different stakeholders are pushing onto your plate, your colleagues, your peers, your department chair, the HR department, whatever, right? And it all kind of comes in on your plane. You try to make sense of it and figure out, what am I working on, what am I working on today? How do I make progress on this?

The type of advice I give all the time, especially in these listener calls episodes, it's about how do I deal with this always growing mountain of stuff on your plate. Now, this push model has become so ubiquitous. We just assume this is what it means to work. in a semi-autonomous knowledge work setting. How else would you work, you might say?

If someone needs something from me, they tell me, and then I try to figure it out. There are, however, and I think we need to acknowledge this, issues with this approach. This, as I think we all have felt in our real life, is an approach that is not actually super compatible with the way the human brain functions. For one thing, having that much stuff on your plate,

and by that much stuff, about most people in a non-entry-level knowledge work position probably have way too much that has been pushed onto their plate than they could ever even really conceivably think about how they're going to get it done. It's not, you know, the farmer that has six things that needs to get done this week. I need to fix the fence. I need to plow the field. They can kind of imagine when and what days they're going to do it. It's way more than you can ever imagine getting done. You're always sort of in a crisis mode.

This is where people end up because there is no governing on how much can come onto your plate. Anyone can push. So, of course, people are just going to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. it's unlikely they're going to push the exact amount of work that you have time to handle, so you'll end up with too much. This is very stressful. The human brain does not like having more obligations than it can easily understand how they're going to be executed. So we're in a constant state of persistent, low-grade anxiety and stress

because our brain hates this idea that we have more on our plate than we know how to handle. Two, we are not a piece of factory equipment, and our to-do list is like a hopper full. of parts and they just come one by one and we assemble things. And so it doesn't really matter how full the hopper is. We're just assembling whatever's in front of us right now. And so by filling the hopper to the top and in a machine context might be fine. So we never have the machine be idle. But in the human context, it doesn't work that way because there's a cost to everything that's on the plate. Not just a general stress we just talked about, but there is a specific overhead cost. Once something is on your plate, it takes up a little bit of cognitive energy just

to think about it and worry about it so you don't forget about it. And two, it usually has some sort of actual concrete overhead that it requires. Even if it's just reassuring people, sorry, I'll get to this. Yeah, yeah, I'm on it. Or you do one of those fake ping pong email questions so you can think to yourself, well, temporarily this is off my plate. I'm waiting for this person to get back to me. So there's a non-trivial amount of cognitive overhead and actual work you have to do

persistently for everything that's on your plate. So when you get too much stuff on your plate, too much stuff has been pushed onto your plate, the overhead cost alone eats up all your resources. You have used up so much mental energy trying to juggle these. You have very little left to actually do work. You've spent so much energy just pushing the ball to someone else's cord or knocking the ball back across the net or answering people's questions who are wondering where the work is. There's not much time left to actually think about it. You're doing so many Zoom meetings and jumping on calls and doing conferences to make sure that progress is being made

on these things. There's no time left for anything else to happen. So there's a concrete overhead. So again, it's very different than a piece of machinery where the hopper apart, no matter how making it full or twice as full, makes no difference. It falls out in front of the machine at a constant rate. It's not the case for humans. We have to pay for every single part that sits there in their hopper waiting for us to execute. So the push model is very stressful and it's very inefficient because the overhead of having too many things means you have very little time left for the things you actually want to execute. I was very, as mentioned, or at the top of the show, I was stressed out this week because I had too much to do.

That's where that stress comes from. Is it a really disagreeable state of affairs? We're used to it. But if we view it objectively, it's a very disagreeable state of affairs to be in this place where you have too much on your plate in which you're overloaded. Now the question is, is there an alternative? I think most people just say this is what work is. You ask people for help and assign them and people do work.

Could there be an alternative? I think there could be. Let me throw out one such alternative. What if instead of a push model of workload management, we had a poll model? What I mean by that very generally is that instead of people being able to just push things on your plate and it's up to you, you instead look at your schedule, say, okay, now I have time ahead of me. Let me pull something from other people to work on. And then I work on that until I'm done.

Now let me pull something else. Now I'm in time that's well suited for this type of work. let me pull something else for that. You do not keep track of all the different things that you could be working on. That has kept track of somewhere else. You pull things in to fill the time you have in front of you in the moment. There's a lot of details about how you might do that. Let's put that aside for now.

This would be a poll model. A couple points about a poll model. Again, we're talking about this abstractly, but let's just be abstract because the details get us in the trouble. We run into hard edges when we get into details and we give up on it. So let's stay for now in the honeymoon people. period for this idea in which everything still seems possible. Everything is still pleasingly generic. If you were successfully able to execute a poll model,

the stress that comes from having more on your plate than you can imagine doing goes away. Because you have no plate. You just have something you're working on right now. When you're not working, you're not working. Two, all of that little concrete overhead of let me talk to this person out there and keep track of that and move things around on my to-do list, all the overhead of just keeping track of all these things, that goes away. So you can actually give full attention to the thing you're doing in the moment. Three, in theory, the exact same amount of work should be getting done, right?

Because you're still filling all your work time. You're just, instead of spending extra time keeping track of things, another system is doing that, and you're just sort of executing what's in front of you. All right, well, here is where we run into a couple problems. problem number one is that if you are a manager or a business owner listening to this idea, you're probably starting to sweat a little bit. And I think this is important to understand why. You're probably sweating a little bit because what you're realizing is that, well, if for some reason we could figure out how to make a poll model work,

and again, forget all the details. Yeah, it's complicated. We'll get them in a second. But if we could get the poll model to work, what you're probably thinking is, oh, man, would get a lot less done. Well, why is that? I mean, in both cases, we're filling our day with work. Well, the reason is that in a push model, one of the advantage of the advantage of the advantage of, manages for companies they get out of a push model is that in order to try to keep up with the stress and the cost of all the overhead of these huge schedules is that we work a lot more for free.

We begin working early in the morning. We check in on the weekends. We come back and do another shift at night because we have to because of the stress of this push model. So what do you get out of your workers if you have a push model? You get a lot of free work, a lot of off the books hours. And if you were in a poll model where now you actually had to say explicitly, 9 to 5 is when work happens. people work on one thing at a time and when they're done they pull in something else you lose those morning hours you lose those evening hours you lose those weekend hours you are getting them

for free the gravy train in so that is true but you know what i am not a fan of obfuscation if people are doing that work secretly it's better that they're doing it non-secretly if you want people to work in the evenings make that explicit i want you working in the evenings if you think people need to be working on the weekends make that explicit just want you to work on the weekends. We see you worked on the weekends. We approved the work block on the weekends. You pulled in a task on the weekend. No one should have to deal with obfuscation to deal with these issues. You know, I said the same thing about email that one of the advantages of the hyperactive hive mind is that it allows people to offuscate, you know, workloads in the sense that if

there's a lot going on in your life, you can, you can sort of downshift work by just sending and answering a lot of emails on the fly while you're doing something unrelated to work and that that might be a valuable tool, but then I said, look, it's better just to have a concrete mechanism for dealing with I need to downshift today, as opposed to just outperformatively try to just informally do it by playing an email game. So I don't like obfuscation. The other issue here is that we've got to be careful we don't fall into the realm of productivity prong. As I've talked about before on the show, the whole idea behind productivity prong was this promise that your systems could figure out for you what you need to do and you could just become an execution machine.

So we need to make sure that what I'm suggesting here with a poll model is not some sort of productivity prom pipe dream. The reason why it's not is that once we begin elaborating how you might implement this, you see, this is not about you as an individual putting the stuff that was pushed on your plate into a tech system that figures out for you where the work's going to get done. No, no, this stuff is not going to be on your plate. Not going to be on your plate at all. It's going to be an organizational issue. Okay, so let's get into these details. And here we're getting into really foggy territory. So I have a flashlight that I'm swinging around here that doesn't really illuminate too much about what's ahead of us.

But let's just try to make progress through this metaphorical more of workflow brainstorming. So one thing we might imagine about how you would implement a poll model is that we take a page from Conbon. If you look at the way that the software development industry in particular borrowed ideas from the industrial process of Conbon, what they do here is they keep track of things that need to be done on some sort of task. board. Here's their status. Here's the information. Whatever. They all see it on there.

Individuals have a strict WIP, work in progress limit. I'm working on one thing at a time or two things at a time. And you have a consistent collaborative method for how you move something from these columns of things that need to be done onto an empty slot in your, I'm doing right now satisfies my works in progress limit portion of the board. Right. So imagine something like this, thought experiment time.

Once in the morning, once midday, you and your team have these highly structured con bond review style meetings where you say, okay, what should I work on next? And the team can be a part of this. Look, here's all the different things going on. Spend your next part of the day, you know, you should really try to see if we can get this milestone done on the Johnson report. Okay. And then we'll meet back again midday. Like, okay, here's where I am. I'm still working on it. Oh, I got that done. What should I work for in the afternoon of the day?

So you have your whole team collaboratively involved and who should be working on what. There's also accountability there. Hey, what happened to the Johnson report? What do you mean you didn't do it? That's all you're supposed to be doing this morning. So that works out. Two, everyone is there. So now, from a hyperactive hive mind dispersion point of view, you can figure out right then and there.

What do I need from different people here to get that done? Instead of a bunch of emails kind of going out and a bunch of slack happening, everyone's there. Okay, if I'm going to work on the Johnson report, I'm going to need these numbers and this. All right, you get that to me by this time in the morning, put it in this drop box. I want you to take a look at this. It'll be ready for you to take a look at at 11 a.m. And it'll be in the Google Drive. And here, let me give you the link right now.

And then you know what? That's you. You publish it when you're done. Like you just figure out right there, okay, if this is what I'm going to do, what do we need to do this? Now, let's say you need to discuss with people. What about meetings? Well, you could have a habit of immediately following these very quick assignment meetings, morning, midday. Right after that is when any needed discussion or meeting.

meetings happens in breakout rooms. Okay, great. We got to brainstorm how to do this. I need to do that with Bob and I need to do that with Susie. So, guys, right after this meeting, let's do our 20 minutes and figure that out and then we'll go work. And then you work and you get to the next meeting. You're just polling. But it's not just you polling from, you know, a KGTD productivity prong personal productivity setup.

It's your team as a whole deciding what should you be working on, who should be working on what do you need from each other. let's get that information. Let's figure out how it's going to be executed. All that great stuff I talked about the world with that email, and then you go off and execute. So all of the different things that have to be done in your team in this model are not stored in your system. No one can say, hey, Cal, I want you to do this. Hey, Cal, can you handle this project? Hey, Cal, can you work on this thing?

No, no, that goes into a team system where once it's approved, we'll figure out when the time comes when it's appropriate to pull that in there. All right, let me give you another thought experiment here. Now imagine when we're talking about administrative work. The stuff that really fragments our time and eats up our inbox is that I need you to fill out this form. I need you to update your tax thing. I need you to do this training. Administrative stuff. I need you to do a tech check or whatever.

Imagine if what you had in this thought experiment is two two hour sessions or maybe two 90 minutes sessions a week. One on Tuesday, one on Friday or something like this. this is the time in which any administrative work you need to do for your organization gets done. Where does this administrative work go when someone needs, hey, I need Cal to fill out this form, I need Cal to do this training, where does this go? It doesn't go to Cal. In this thought experiment, there is a administrative coordinator that coordinates the administrative work for a relatively large number of people, maybe a team of 10 or something like this. The coordinator runs these 90-minute blocks that happen twice a week. So, okay, welcome Cal and everyone else on your team.

We got 90 minutes to plow through a bunch of administrative work. As the administrative coordinator, I have been gathering and working on things, negotiating on your behalf. Some stuff, I said, no way, we're not going to do it. Other stuff, I've filled in what I can. Let's go through this one by one. First, I need you to sign this. I need you to fill in this information.

Okay, now in the next 15 minutes, I've set up a training, go do that training, come back when you're done. All right, I need you to, here's this thing for the parking office. So I'll need this information, this information, this information. The interface is confusing. So let's just talk this through. and then I'll go type it into the interface later. This is the time to get administrative stuff done.

Oh, here's 15 different announcements that have come towards our team in the last, you know, three days. I'll go through them with you. Okay, here's one about there's new hours for the lunch thing. Here's one about, you know, the new health procedure. Okay. And I've put these all in this drop box if you need to go look at them in more detail. 90 minutes is up. All right, I'll see you in three days.

And until you get there in three days, you don't have to think about administrative work. Now, again, this is an extreme thought experiment. But you know what? The stuff that needs to get done administratively almost certainly would get done here. The impact on workers' actual time and attention would be exponentially less. And you might say, well, it would be expensive to hire a coordinator dedicated to just 10 people. But if we use my typical 2x factor that you're going to get about 2x more work out of these people by consolidating all this administrative work and allowing them to just work on one thing at a time, you have gained basically the equivalent of 10 new employees for the cost of one.

I think that would be a fair trade. All right, but let's not get lost too much in the weeds here because the weeds is where we get in trouble. The weeds is where I get in trouble. I'm a theoretician, not a practitioner. I'm an academic, not a manager. When I get too specific, people always come back and say, well, wait a second. In my specific company, I have this one guy that demands that we do this type of work and it has to be done. I don't care about the details too much.

let's just step back and think about this inversion. We take this push model of work assignment so for granted we think that's just what work is, but it is incredibly stressing us out and it is making us allowing us to execute at a fraction of our potential. If you combine this push model of workload with the hyperactive high mind of collaboration, those two things together have been a phenomenal source of unnecessary stress and anxiety and a phenomenal dampener on our potential for actually productively producing work. I've been talking a lot about what to do about the hive mind. Maybe we should now start thinking a little bit about what to do about these workload assignment issues.

It sounds almost utopian to think about a poll model, but it also is a lot of common sense. A lot of details still need to be worked out, and maybe this is crazy, but sometimes we need a little bit of crazy thinking when what we're doing today is making us miserable. All this, of course, is just a rant because I felt overloaded this week, but sometimes some of the more interesting thoughts come out of personal frustration. This podcast is sponsored by Four Sigmaic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. For Sigmaics mushroom coffee is a real organic fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and. and shaga mushroom for immune support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work sessions. The mushrooms give it a unique physiological footprint.

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Let's get to some listener calls. Hello, Cal, it's Adrian from Celtic, Ireland here. I'd like to ask your advice on a problem. I've been having all my life for productivity. So I know logically from your books and before that one must focus on the primary task of the day, the most important task, the one that will move the needle. And I've always struggled with this. So from my list of tasks, I always have a list of smaller.

jobs, email correspondence, smaller little jobs that can be ticked off on the list. And only about 10% of the time can I focus on the primary one, the big job. And I've never been able to break that pattern. So only about 10% of the time can I really get into the deep job of the day. So I'd just like to ask your advice, have you any tips on how I can break this emotional blockage? Well, Adrian, I'm glad you brought up the MIT, most important task of the day. This is a popular productivity strategy that's based, as his name implies, on this idea that what's critical is that you figure out the most important thing you want to do each day and do that first.

This idea is often associated with me, but I am not actually a fan of it. And the reason why I'm not actually a fan of it is that at worst, it's just an obfuscated version of the list reactive method to working, which I think is really inefficient. and at best, it is a slightly better version of the list reactive way of organizing your day. So quick primer, quick reminder. The list reactive approach to productivity is where you basically just say, what should I work on next? And to answer that question, you on the fly do some sort of combination of either looking at a list, like a to-do list of things that you should get done, or looking into an email inbox or Slack channel and reacting to things in there that require.

your attention. Most people, most knowledge workers, I should say, tackle their day with the LIS reactive method in between things on their calendar. It's some combination of reacting to things and asking generically, what should I do next? The MIT strategy really plays into that. So in its best form, you actually stave off turning on the LIS reactive method until you finish something important in the morning. You know, that's better than just going right to the LIS reactive method. But then the rest of your day is the LIS reactive method. You're giving up on the rest of your day. I was just going to tackle it that way.

You're giving it. At worst, and by at worst, I mean, probably most commonly, it just becomes an obfuscated version of it because people fall into the same trouble that you're falling into is that they don't quite get to the MIT right away. Well, they first have to check their inbox. There's a couple things in there. And I've got to get this done. And this Aaron needs to get done.

And well, now I'm going to get to the MIT. But I do have this meeting. And it often doesn't get done or the things that do get done from their MIT list are small. So what do I recommend instead? forget the most important time of the day. Every moment of your day is important. Make a plan that makes sense.

Here is what I am facing. I have a meeting here. I have a meeting there. I have a call here. I have to end my day here. Here are three things that have to do. So let me see that. Here's other things I'd like to get done.

I have a whole inbox full of things. All right, great. What am I going to do with the time I have available? What's the best possible plan for what I have? Whether or not it's a great plan or not, whether or not it actually gets a lot done. It's reality. Here's what I have. what am I going to do with it?

Well, you know, I do have an hour and a half until my first meeting, and I'm looking here at my weekly plan says this is the week to get this proposal done. So I'm going to put that time to this. Now, I only have a half hour between these two meetings. So let me go through my task list here. And here's five things I can squeeze together and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get those all done. So let me put that in here. And you make the best plan you can for the time available every moment of the time available,

not just the morning. You don't give in to say the rest of my day at any point is just whatever. As soon as you go to whatever, as soon as you default to the list reactive method, factor of two, your productivity falls. Factor of two. If you add up what gets done in all of your list reactive time and compare it to those same hours intentionally scheduled, you're going to get half as much done. All right.

So how do you actually make a plan? Well, that's time block planning. I talk about it all the time. The videos at timeblockplanner.com. Almost any episode of the show I'll talk about it. But Adrian, that is what you need to do. Forget the MIT method. Time block plan your days.

Treat every period as important. And if you're going to time block plan, you need to connect out the weekly plans. You need to connect your weekly plans to quarterly plans so that you know what you're doing. You need full capture in a way to organize your task. Use something like a task board so that everything you need to do is organized. Do those things that all work in support of saying, I want to make the most out of what I have available, not I want to maybe get something important. and then just give up or give in and let the rest of my time just be chaos. All right, good call.

Let's keep things rolling with our next listener query. Hi, Cal. My name is Stacy. I'm an administrative assistant at a local university. Thank you for helping me live a focused in deep life. My question is about time block planning. I currently time block plan my work days, and this has helped me stay focused and productive. My question, however, is about the.

evenings and weekends, the times I am not at work. Many times I've heard you say not to time block your time outside of work. However, with many home tasks to do, I find it helpful to time block my evenings and weekends to ensure I stay focused, then my task get completed, and I have time to spend with family on high-quality leisure. Do you think this is okay, or is there another method I should be using? Thanks for all you do. Well, Stacey, thank you for giving me the opportunity. to engage one of my favorite pastimes, which is inventing new terminology. So there's a subtlety here that I want to unpack. When I think about time blocking, just like I was advising Adrian in the last call, what I tend to think about is you have every minute given a job.

Here is my day. I want to face what time I have available and make the most out of it. So when I say I don't believe in time blocking your evenings or time blocking your weekends, what I mean is, having a plan for every minute of your evening. It takes you from after work to bedtime. We're having a plan for your entire weekend day. Then we'll do 90 minutes here and an hour here and then three hours doing this and 90 minutes here. And the reason being is that it just takes energy, it takes energy to be following a plan and eventually you're going to burn out.

Your mind needs some relief from this very structured application of activity and evenings and weekends can give that to you. That being said, I am also a fan of what you were talking about. When I work on my weekly plan, I think about household admin. And I've discovered in my own life, the only way that non-trivial household admin will be accomplished by me is that I need to get it on my calendar somewhere. Now, some of this actually goes during my workday. And some of it does happen on the weekend. Some of this does happen in the weekend afternoons, a weekend after work is done. And I put it on my calendar where I treat it like anything else that might show up there.

Like, oh, we're going to dinner with friends. Oh, we have baseball practice. I have to get my son to baseball practice. I put it on there because I respect the calendar, but it's not my entire evening that's being planned. It's not my entire weekend that's being planned. I'm strategically blocking off parts of my evening and parts of my weekend to make sure that important but maybe not deadly urgent household admin is accomplished. I'll give this a new name.

Let's call this pseudo-blocking. So if time blocking is giving every minute a job, pseudo-blocking is putting aside some minutes for jobs to make sure. that enough jobs get done. And so I'm a fan of pseudo-blocking. Just to elaborate slightly, the types of pseudo-blocking they might do for household admin includes one big

things, like, okay, work on the budget. It's a common thing that goes on my calendar. It takes an hour. But it might be a collection of things. Like, okay, it's getting crazy. I have a lot of small things that need to get done. And I can speak from experience here.

Here's some things that are looming over me. This one's an embarrassment. The parking path, My Tacoma Park parking passes. The thing's the sticker that allows you to park on the street in Tacoma Park. They're expired. Like way expired. Like we were about to renew them and then the pandemic hit.

And then that office was closed a little bit. And then that office opened. And then a year went by. We still haven't done it. And so whenever I'm parking my car in the street, there's an expired 2019 sticker on it. It's not that hard to do. You fill out a form. You got to, all right, there's a little bit of annoyance because you have to get the registration.

and a picture of the driver's license for both me and my wife and the registration for both cars, and you have to fill some stuff out and bring it down to the police station or mail it. I don't know, 10 minutes. And it's been on my list forever. I bought some, well, whatever. I don't want to go too much into my long list. Okay, I have a long list of these kind of small things.

Sometimes when that thing gets big, non-urgent, no one's pressing it, but needs to get done, I'll pseudo-block off a dash block of we're going to do 10 of these things in a row. You know what? Enough is enough. Thursday, I'm working from home. So why I just end it for, four to five 30, boom, it's on the calendar,

five things, let's go. That's getting done. I'm getting these off my plate. So I'm a big fan of that. I think pseudo-blocking is necessary for most people to manage your household admin if you have anything but the simplest household setup. So, I mean, if you're 23 living alone in a studio apartment,

you might go weeks without really having any household admin. The rest of it, you know, it's constant. So I like blocking out time for household admin. I still don't recommend, however, treating your entire evenings, your entire weekends as things that have to be planned every minute. All right, let's keep rolling. Hello, Cal. I'm Felipe from São Paulo, Brazil. I've been following your work for a while now, and I want you to know that it has changed a lot of the way I live my life. So thanks. Here's the situation. I'm a doctor working part-time on a hospital like basic ER shifts.

And I usually just work three to four of the seven days of the week. And I then try to use the rest of the time to work on self-education, self-development, and a couple of side projects like writing and making music. And I want to treat those not like hobbies, but like serious work and do them with discipline. But what happens is that besides what I do on my shifts, I don't get to do any deep work at all because I can never get past those unimportant secondary chores and errands that piled up. Usually my day to day is basically just me trying to manage, like, paying my bills, paying my taxes, dealing with admin work, housework, finance work, cooking, cleaning their house.

And then there's always unexpected errands that pop up like, oh, I got to fix my car this week and stuff like that. So my question to you is, how did you manage when you were younger to treat like really, really, pragmatic stuff like dishes, laundry, how did you prioritize those in order to like gain the most of deep work as possible? Well, to deal with your issue, let's start with, let's start with fixing what we can call the standard work setup. And this is increasingly rare these days, but it's a good starting point for our discussion. So in the standard work setup, from roughly nine to five, you're at work. Maybe you're literally going to a building when you're at that building, what you're

supposed to be doing is work, and then when you come home from that building, you're no longer doing work. This leaves you the afternoons, the evenings after work, and the weekends free, maybe a little bit of time before work as well, and that is where household admin, self-care, and hobbies. That's when those are executed. That was the setup for a long time. It's a setup for a lot of people, and that generally leaves you enough time if you are efficient about your household admin.

You automate what can be automated. You're careful about keeping track to information and scheduling so things don't pile up. You hire people where you're able to hire people. Like generally speaking, that that is enough time to stay on top of household admin. It's pretty clear when you're supposed to do that work. And it leaves you time for hobbies. That is until you have kids and then you have no time for hobbies. But then the kids get older and then you get time for hobbies back.

And that's just the standard approach to life, right? things like deep work or what have you is kind of irrelevant here in that standard model. That's all just about what you do during the 9 to 5. So if you are a believer in deep work, you're going to configure your work during the 9 to 5 to have a bigger ratio of deep to shallow. But unrelated to household admin in the standard model, because that's just about what you do during your eight hours, you're at work. And that's what I did. I mean, when I'm thinking back when I was a young professor, for example, and we bought our first house, what I did was, I've talked to this on the show before. I like to do a morning, a morning block of household work.

It was just generically, hey, for this 45 minutes in the morning, I am doing before I go to any office, before I go to Georgetown, I'm just generically going to do household stuff. Like insurance farms and filling things out and getting in, you know, I don't know, vaccination records for preschool, whatever it was. There's always junk, right? And that's just when I did it, in part because I didn't have to be at work. work at a certain time in the morning and DC has bad traffic. So I like to work at home. I would always work at home some before going in. And I had a little window between when the nanny arrived and when I felt like I really had to get going on my Georgetown work for the day. And that's what I would do with that window. And then I would do some pseudo blocking.

If I can do a call back to the last call, Stacey's call that we just answered, you know, do some pseudo blocking. Okay, got to get to the hardware store here. We're going to the dump this weekend. We used to love going to the dump. Still love going to the dump. etc. And that worked more or less. And we had kids, so I'd no time for anything else, but fine. Right now, let's think about your situation. You're a doctor doing shift work in the ER. You have to be careful because here's the trap you might fall into.

As you say, well, look, I'm doing three shifts a week. The trap is to say, oh, I only work three days a week. So those other two days I should be able to, I have freeze, so I should do a lot of other stuff. I'm not working. so I should use that time to do hobbies and music and exercise and all these other things I have in mind. But here's what you're not factoring in. Those ER shifts are much longer than a normal workday.

So they're eating up in some sense that time that in the standard model, your morning and evening time that you would be doing admin, those don't exist on those three days that you're doing this shift more or less because the shift is very long. So you have to push those sort of evening – household admin self-care hobby time that would happen in the evenings on those days if you had the standard model, that has to fall onto the two days that remain. So if you're doing three long shifts, those two weekdays that remain, for example, are going to

have sort of three evenings worth of household admin type stuff piling up. And that's why you're like, I don't have nearly as much time as I would. This is very different than if, by comparison, let's say you were working nine to five. and I said, hey, you get Tuesday and Thursday off. Well, in that case, you would be able to keep up with your household admin or this or that in the evening every day. And that nine hours off would really be time off that now you could really dedicate that to, you know, building a boat or learning how to bow hunt or something like that. But this is not your case because you're missing the evenings on your shift days too. And that work all has to fall onto the days that you have free.

So you actually have something much closer to a normal standard schedule's worth of. time to work with, it's not as much as you think. So you've got to give yourself a bit of a break here. Don't have two days a week, two week days a week where you can really spend hours doing admin. You're really in no different situation than the rest of us that have a nine to five that you might be able to fit some stuff in in the evening around your other types of chores. So I just want to give you that reality checks. You feel less bad about the situation. And what can you do about it? Well, pseudoblock. Let's go back to that terminology. I mean, I'm all about the callbacks today. pseudo block out your deep work time. It might not be as much as you think,

but at least you'll get to it consistently. And maybe it's the first half of each of those days. It's three hours at the beginning of each of those days. Then it's hardcore admin and chores after that. But at least you have these blocks where you're aggressively getting it done. Maybe you have a place you go. You get really into maker lab type stuff and you sort of use some of that doctor money to buy some cheap light industrial space and build a maker lab. And I'm there for these hours and these days, it's not a lot.

But when I'm there, that's what I'm doing. So you suit a block and make time for the deeper non-urgent, non-admin stuff you want to do in your life. But be realistic about how much time you have available. Don't beat yourself up. You're not getting as much of this optional work done as you would hope because you have a lot less time free for that than you would think. You're being deceived by thinking in terms of days, but you instead need to think in terms of hours. And those shifts, when you spread them out to a nine to five job, is pretty close to a normal nine to five job. All right.

Now I think we're picking up the pace. Time is getting a little bit short here, but I want to fit in multiple more questions, so let's see if we can keep things moving along. Hi, Cole. Big, big fan of your work. I was just wondering what are your thoughts on free Chrome extensions like Be Timeful, which is B-E-T-I-M-E-F-U-L, which basically blocks the bad parts of social medias while keeping the good parts.

So, for example, when the Chrome extension realizes you're in work mode, it removes the YouTube's recommendation videos and social media news feeds while keeping the good parts such as connecting and searching any tutorials you like to watch on YouTube for educational purposes. I'm interested in these type of plugins. In particular, plugins that you can use as protection when you journey into an attention economy platform, a plugin that tries to defang the most effective strategies these platforms deploy to snag your attention and get you to addictively use the platform more. than you actually want to. In my book, Digital Minimalism, I describe these plugins as part of the toolbox deployed by a group that I informally called the attention resistance. The attention resistance is individuals that want to get value out of some of these attention economy platforms without those platforms getting their teeth into them

and sucking all the value out of them and sucking out their humanity, right? And so they deploy these type of. of plug-in so they can get in and get out, get what they want without the companies getting what they want. So in addition to the type of plugins, you mentioned a couple other examples. There's one called News Feed Eradicator. It allows you to go to Facebook without seeing the news feed. I give a lot of examples in digital minimalism of people using this because they want to

belong to a particular Facebook group that's important to them. Facebook Group has a nice interface for group interactions. There's a lot of groups, local groups, community groups, especially universities. groups that use these Facebook groups to organize their members. And so there's people who feel sucked in the Facebook because, yeah, this is a student government group I need to belong to, but I don't want to see all of the garbage in my newsfeed. So boom, newsfeed eradicated.

They go in the Facebook. All they see is the group they want to see. Platform Defanged. Distraction free tube, DF tube. This is another one I hear about a lot. So I need to go to YouTube because I need to figure out how to change the oil. in my Honda Odyssey, and there's great videos on there to show me how to do it, but I'm going to see those stupid recommendations next to that video,

and man, they're so compelling, and I'm going to click on this one, and that'll leave me to click on this one, and then I'm going to click on that one, and then I am a Nazi, I guess. Isn't that how it works? Defraction-free tube? Boom, those are wiped off the page. You can search for a video clip. You find a video clip.

You can play it. There's no recommendations you can see. I like the idea of the attention resistance because it is saying we are going to go behind enemy lines, but we are going to wear the proper camouflage so they don't see us, they don't capture us and put us into the attention internment or prisoner of war camp. This is becoming a sort of oddly

martial analogy here, so I should probably back up. But you know what I'm saying. So I'm a fan of that. The only thing I will say, though, is that no technological solution is going to save you on its own. Ultimately, you need to embrace a

philosophy like digital minimalism, invest in it, commit to it and take it seriously. Ultimately, you have to decide this is what I want to spend my time on. This is what's important to me. Here is the technology I'm going to deploy to help me achieve that goal. Now that I know what I'm trying to do with my life, I know how I want to use technology. And yes, maybe I will deploy attention resistant tools like these browser plugins to help me implement these very strategic uses of these tools. If I know, for example, as part of my digital minimalism plan that a Facebook group is critical, well, why don't I throw newsfeed eradicate into the mix so that I can get in there and do that without any collateral damage?

If you don't have something like a philosophy, like digital minimalism, a plan you can invest in and believe in that's aspirational that's guiding these decisions, the plugins won't save you. The reason they won't save you is that you will be bored and you will have no real direction of what you want to do with your time, and you'll say, well, this is stupid that I can only see this Honda Odyssey oil change video. Maybe Nazism is so bad. I'm going to put the recommendations back on and you'll turn off the plugin. Or you'll be on Facebook and say, yeah, I'm going to my Facebook group and it's a student government group and we're learning about the new Vindy machines they're bringing into the common room. But I don't know. What if there's pedophiles in a ring operating under this pizza parlor? I better see what's going on in my news feed just to make sure and you take off the plugin.

So the plugins aren't going to make you a more intentional person. The plugins are not going to inject humanity back into your life. the plugins are not going to force you into a life of more depth. You have to do that. And then you can deploy the plugins once you've made your decisions on how you're going to get there. All right. Well, I appreciate any question that gets me to talk about prisoner of war camps and pedophile rings all at the same time. So it's probably in my best interest to move on.

Let's do one more question here. This one has nothing to do with any of those topics. Hey, Cal. My name is Will. I'm a research economist with the federal government. I really appreciate your podcast and all your books and newsletters and blogs. Very helpful stuff. I'm very intrigued by the idea of taking the sprint concept from programming and moving it

into the research context. I think that could be really valuable to a lot of projects. But I'm wondering if you have any examples of, you know, social science or other kind of research projects where people have successfully implemented this idea. I think that would be really helpful for me to look into. Thanks. Well, I do like sprints a lot as a methodology. You probably encountered me talking about this in a world without email. But the basic idea for those who didn't read that book is that with a sprint methodology, you work on one thing at a time. You and the team, if it's a team effort,

focuses on one thing and pushes that to a finishing point, and then you finish working on it. During that sprint, you're really not exposed to any other sorts of distractions. You're not doing email. You're not on your phone. You're not interleaving. You're not working and going on Zoom and then coming away. If an organization has a culture of sprinting is understood, yeah, Cal is in a sprint for the rest of today. He's sprinting on Wednesday and Thursday.

You can't schedule them for anything. This arose in the tech sector. Sprinting is baked into agile methodologies like scrum, where you figure out, okay, what feature am I working on next? And then you do a sprint to get it done. But nothing about it is specific to tech. I mean, outside of just we're used to the culture of the hyperactive hive mind in non-tech parts of knowledge sector, does it mean that we couldn't have sprints and other types of work. And there's actually a book about this. So if you read the book Sprint, written by Jake Knapp, you'll learn about the ways that he helped to generalize the sprint methodology to different non-tech context.

That might be useful. I actually talked to Jake if my memory serves while I was doing research for a world without email. And what I think I remember asking him about was about phones. Like, are people doing email on their phone during one of these sprints? And he was pretty clear about it. No. no email, no phones. Now, he said sometimes when they're doing sprints with executives, they absolutely just won't go without their phone or email that long.

So the backup rule they did is, okay, but you can't have it in the room. You have to leave the room and go somewhere else if you need to look at a phone or look at email. So they really are pretty serious with Sprint methodology. Do one thing at a time. This is an incredibly effective way to do high quality work. So if you need to produce something at a fast pace, it's of a high quality. the neuroscience on this is clear. If you can give it your full attention until it's done,

it's going to be much better and be produced much faster than if you try to interleave other things because of the cost of the cognitive context switching. Now, whether or not all of your work can be in sprints, that's obviously much more difficult. Go back to the deep dive at the beginning of this episode about a poll model, a workflow assignment, and that gets you kind of close. That gets you into the range of a vision of a world where you're kind of doing sprints on everything. But in the short term, I think what Jake talks about is, the important things, the mission critical projects, the things that your clients depend on the things

that can determine the future of your organization for the next couple of years, think about developing a culture in which you can do those until they're done, even if that's multiple days where you're unreachable. Everyone has to be on board for sprinting to work, but once people are, just as in sprinting in the real world, you're going to cover a lot of ground fast. So I'm a big fan of it. I'm glad you asked about it. Read Jake's book.

If you apply this in an interesting way in your type of field, you've mentioned you were a government economist. Send me a note interesting at calnewport.com. I love to hear those stories. And with that, even though I would love to keep going, I think it's time to wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their calls. I'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.