Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 149: How Do I Tame Email?

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: How do I tame email? [9:51]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- How to accomplish deep work in the context of meeting overload? [29:09]- What is difference between the productivity funnel and capture/configure/control? [36:06]- Do you (Cal) have a filing system for emails? [40:18]- What time blocking granularity is best? [42:53]- How do you (Cal) manage projects vs tasks on your board system? [44:52]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- How does one get a sense of satisfaction from goals that continue ad infinitum? [50:33]- How soon after the birth of a child is it realistic to start employing time blocking? [55:29]- How should one combine having young children and pursuing newfound ambitions? [59:24]- How should I think about career capital when taking time off to be a stay-at-home parent? [1:03:19]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, 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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our exclusive discount and wake up refreshed every day. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 149. I'm here in the Deep Work HQ accompanied by my producer Jesse. Jesse, good morning. Good morning. How you doing? Doing well.

Thanks for coming in on a Sunday. I don't normally record on the weekend but had an opportunity show up, which will remain unspecified for now, top secret, but a cool bucket list interview opportunity. So we had to hastily rescheduled this. But, Jesse, you came in on a Sunday. Did you see the farmer's market we had going on outside? Yeah, it's a nice Sunday morning, weather of trees, everything looks good.

It's funny because I didn't think you ever worked on Sundays either, but then when I started getting to know you, do some writing on Sundays. And then when you sent the email about working on Sunday, I'm fine working on Sundays, but I just found it amusing. Yeah, it's true. Well, look, I was doing, so I used Sunday mornings. I use Sunday mornings. And I had been in a strict alternation.

So my New Yorker column is every other week. So every other Sunday, the way my writing schedule worked out, every other Sunday would be dedicated to part of my writing schedule for the New Yorker. And then the other Sundays fall on the off weekends, I would podcast on Sunday morning back when I was doing this myself. But now that I have your help and don't need to spend. a lot of my sort of bad tech skill induced overhead trying to figure out how to make this work. I've now cleared up every other Sunday. So every other Sunday I have clear.

But today we had to violate the sanctity of the Sunday rule. Interesting, by the way, tidbit about that deep cut Cal Newport tidbit about that farmer's market. Features a Smith Meadows tent. Smith Meadows is the farm run by Forrest Pritchard. Forrest Pritchard is the farmer featured in Deep Work, who I talk to about trying to figure out what tools are important or not important and not just buying a tool because it has any benefit. And he's often there. So if you're in the Tacoma Park area and see a tall, skinny, flannel wearing bearded man at the Smith Meadows, go say hi, that's Forrest of Deepark fame. Cool guy. He has an awesome farm.

So news, Jesse, we made, I made my Netflix debut last week. I'm not sure if you've seen this yet. I haven't. How to go? So there's some controversy here, some household controversy. It was for a show, there's a series on Netflix called Explained, which is, I don't know, I think Vox produces it. And each episode takes a topic, and then they kind of deep dive on the topic and do a lot of fancy animations. And so they did one.

The season two dropped in the first episode is on how to focus. So I'm sort of one of the people in that episode narrated by Julianne Moore, who I now refer to as my good friend, Julianne Moore. I'm one of the people. But here's the controversy. All right, which I didn't think about. So Mia Colpa. We filmed them I study at my house. And I have this nice study.

It's one of the reasons I like that house. But then when COVID hit, we had to get all my nice furniture out of there. and we turned into a classroom because the schools were closed. And when they came to film, I forgot when this was. It might have been the summer or something. I was like, oh, this is great because we had emptied all the furniture out of this study to make it into a classroom. We have space because, you know, it takes a lot of space. So Netflix sends this crew, you have two cameras and you know technical equipment better than me, but they're like the big cameras and monitors and sound guys or whatever.

And so my mind was like, oh, this is great. have space in here to fit everyone and they have enough distance for the lens to get a good shot or whatever. So we shot in there and there's a lot of footage of me in this episode. That's all I thought about. So then I show this to my wife and her immediate thought was, Cal, it's so messy in there. Never crossed my mind. We have, because it was, there's like a whole stack of empty cardboard boxes from these art

kits we were doing with the kids. And I had taken all my books out of the bookshelves to bring here to the HQ and there's just like random containers overflowing. flowing with art supplies and stacks of things. And there's a pile of throw pillows that we like that have been thrown into a pile mismatched. And my son was so proud to be like, hey, there's my Rubik's Cube because it's just, you know, it's a messy room. It had my nice custom-built library desk. But next to it, like an IKEA desk, we had brought in there for the kids.

It never crossed my mind. But that's the remaining thing is that this looks terrible. And then you cut to the other two people in the episode and it's, you know, artfully, artfully arranged books on a white shelf in a room that, you know, that is like. Christine. One orchid set up just right. And there I am. So, anyways, that's my controversy. But as I told her, it was all a metaphor for the messiness of the mind.

So what I'm trying to do there was like a meta. That was a meta type move on my part. That's a good way to turn around. Did you have any similar experiences with the Netflix producers with that Larry David had when he was doing his episode one and season 11? That was great. Yeah, it was exactly like that. It was exactly like that. We sat in a room and they had the people on the side.

No, it wasn't like that. Actually, what Netflix was doing, because this was more heavier in the pandemic, the producer wasn't so much coming on site. And then what they do is they hire local crews. So actually, the crew was really interesting. They did a lot of work for National Geographic, which is based out of D.C. and the guy had just won an Emmy for a National Geographic thing. He directed, I think.

And so it was like a really cool grizzled crew of, you know, documentary film in the trenches extra. But here's my, by the way, Jesse, here's my technical question. What are they getting out of those really big cameras that you want to get out of, I don't know,

the much smaller cameras? Whenever I do like podcasting, we're with like big name podcasters and big studios, it's small cameras. the Netflix crew has big things. Why do they have big things? I think the bigger cameras are just higher quality and they give those outside shots that come in

and they're more expensive. They're harder to get a hold of. Is it more resolution? It's got to be, right? And the lenses are big. That's a thing, I'm assuming. Yeah. Like a big lens.

I think the most expensive part of those cameras are the lenses. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And the bigger ones you have require bigger backends on them to mount. I don't know too too much about like the specifics of camera equipment, but that would be my guess. I mean,

you look at like NFL games and stuff like that. They all have like the huge ones. Because I told them like, oh, just come to my HQ. I have a studio. And they're like, no,

you don't understand. We need, you know, 40 square feet of room. We can't. I mean, people haven't seen the studio. Jesse Aaron here now.

And that's basically all the room we have. We're barely, we're barely fitting in here. So anyways, that's my news. So check that out. Explained, explained on Netflix.

It confused my kids because they don't know what I do. Like they're used to seeing my name, like they can read. So they're used to see my name on books, places, but they don't really know what that is. But Netflix, they know because Netflix is where all their shows are that they watch. So to see their house on Netflix was a really, I think, disruptive moment for their mental stability. I don't understand that Netflix is a thing where there's Bayblade cartoons. You know, I don't understand. Or in Lego Jurassic Park cartoons.

Why is our house on the same thing? I don't think they get it. They'll also, once they digest a little bit more, they'll share it with their friends and stuff. It'll be pretty cool. But I'm going to check it out tonight for sure. Yeah, it was a good episode. Highly produced.

They put a lot of money into it. All right. So anyways, enough of that. Just thanks for, thanks for jumping on the mic. But I guess we should probably get going with a deep dive. In today's deep dive, I want to tackle the question. How do I change? email. Now, this continues the trend I started last week of trying to do more practical topics in

the deep dive. I want to get my hands dirty with actual advice that you can put into action and help your life today. This doesn't mean I'm not going to get back to my more philosophical rants or cultural critiques, but let's do a few of these deep dives that are more practical. All right, so here's the question. You hate your inbox, let's say. You open it. It's full of stuff. It stresses you out. Why does it stress you out and what can we do about it? To answer this question, I think it is really important to look at all of that junk sitting there in your inbox and divide it up into categories.

This is a key thing that's often missing when we give advice about email is that the different types of messages merit different responses. So roughly speaking, I can divide the messages you see in that stress-inducing inbox. into three categories. Number one, broadcast. Information being broadcast to you that does not require a response. It may or may not be interesting to you. So this could be newsletters like my newsletter, which, of course, you should subscribe to at Kelnewport.com.

It could be announcements from the HR department at your organization, or it could be those annoying sales emails that any store that you've ever given your email address to for any reason bombard you with as if what really matters to you right now is that the 15% sale at Levi's is going to end next week. So those are broadcast messages. Then you have questions. This is my term for emails that have something that require a response to you, but probably just one response. Hey, Cal, can you let me know what my grade is in the class right now?

Can you remind me again of when our next meeting is? what do you think, who do you think we should nominate for the steering committee that we're putting together? So, you know, someone needs information from you. You can give that information an email response. It's probably just going to be one response. The third category messages are conversational. These are messages that are part of a longer back and forth conversation. So now maybe you're trying to figure out when you are going to meet with a client tomorrow.

And you're going back and forth. what about in the afternoon? They say, no, you're like, okay, I can do the morning, but probably not nine. And like, well, how close to nine? You know what I mean? Back and forth. So it's a message that's part of many messages that are going back and forth, that's sort of haphazard, unscheduled manner.

So the gap between each message and the next is unpredictable as part of an ongoing conversation. So when you look at your inbox and you feel that stress, you're seeing a mix of all three different types of messages in there. Now, having these three types is useful because the response to each is different. Let's start with the low-hanging fruit, which are broadcast. You hear a lot of advice, especially for more tech-oriented individuals who like having tool-based solution surrounding broadcast. Oh, my God, I get too many of these emails.

I wish I could tame it. This is not a major problem. It's annoying if you have a bunch of broadcast messages in there that most of them you don't care about because it's visual clutter and you have to get around them. But it's not super stress-inducing. A, you can ignore them or B, you can just quickly delete or archive them, which honestly is actually kind of fulfilling. Is there anything better that when you see a really full inbox to be able to make progress, get 50% of those messages out of there in just two minutes by just deleting lots of things? That being said, there are any number of ways you can tame broadcast. The best feature right now is probably what you'll see in a product like Gmail where Gmail has really good AI powered filters.

It's very good at figuring out what are promotional messages. I basically never see promotional messages from retailers at all anymore because it all gets pushed into a promotional folder. From what I understand, I don't use social media, but from what I understand, those Gmail AI-based filters are very good at social media notifications of putting them in another folder. So you don't have to see them if you don't want to. Beyond that, obviously, unsubscribe. You know, every time you're about to archive a message or delete a message from a newsletter or some other type of news source that, once again you're not going to read and have it read in a while, take five extra seconds to try to unsubscribe. Gmail has a feature now you can click. It'll try to do that for you automatically.

One caveat, if you try to unsubscribe from calnewport.com, you and your family will be struck with bad luck for three generations, so don't do that. But any other one, unsubscribe, liberally, that really can help. You might also try having a dedicated email address for just this type of information. This is more possible if you're a freelancer, an individual, so you're not getting messages from your employer. But you can have a sign up address, sign up at whatever.com that you give

when everyone needs an email address, when the retailer needs an email address, when the person at the store wants you to give an email address, and you have some address. Sign up at Calnewport.com. You create some address. It could be a Gmail. Signup.

Your original Gmail name at gmail.com. Just make a new account. account, whatever, and just use that, right? That's one thing you can do. And then you have a different account. Hey, I can go check this occasionally for my newsletters or what have you. So there's strategies here, but I'm not worried about broadcast. All right, let's talk about question emails. Now, here's the thing about question emails. If you take an individual question email in isolation and bring it to me and say, oh, Cal, thank you for coming. I have this thing I need you to answer, here you go.

It's usually no sweat. It's like, oh, that's an interesting question. Yeah, who should we nominate for this committee? Let me think about that for a minute. Yeah, it should be, you know, Bob. That makes a good idea. Or when is that meeting? Oh, let me just check.

Yeah, it's Thursday. Thursday at four. Boom, you give the answer. So in isolation, a question email is not bad. It's why when someone sends a question email to you, they don't feel guilty about it. It's like, this is a question. It's valid. It won't take them long to answer.

The real pain point generated by question emails is in the context switching. This is what I talked about last week when I did the deep dive on the productive pause. I got into this a little bit more detail, but the real pain is switching your context so rapidly. So when you go from an email on when a meeting is to an email on who should be on the steering committee to an email on, remind me again what we thought we were going to do for this client to an email for what do you want me to do next on this project. it's the context shift from one to the other that is incredibly fatiguing. So when you have 20 emails in a row that are largely questions, like, let me just go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's not so easy because your mind has to completely switch context again and again, but it doesn't have time to do that because that can take five to 15 minutes. We've talked about that before.

So what do you end up with is like a huge literal headache. And it's why the friction builds, the resistant growth, like, I'm done with this. I've got to get out of this inbox. It's the context switching cost. So what do we do about question emails? Well, like I talked about in my productive pause deep dive, one thing you can do is get these things out of your inbox, write them down in a text file, you're transcribing them into a text file, line after line after line, sort them by category.

By category, I mean shares a similar context, scheduling things, this project I'm working on things, etc. then tackle each group by itself with a non-trivial pause in between so that you take the time to get the context loaded for those questions. Then you can go through real easily. The friction's gone. Then walk away and do something else. Then come back and give yourself time to open up a new context for the new category and tackle those. So you're trying to really avoid the friction of the record, scratch, screeching tires on pavement, 90-degree turn from one topic to another that really is going to strain your mind.

Big picture, however, you want to reduce the question emails to the extent possible. So really pay attention. What are these emails I'm seeing? How could I get this information to the person who needs it without having to actually, on my own, initiate a context shift to the context relevant to this question and giving an answer? This can be a lot of different things depending on what you do. I mean, I can tell you, for example, as a professor, I really think through my process for how problem sets are written and assigned and graded and handed back and how students are kept up

the speed on what their grade is in the course and how we graded the things that we graded. And I actually put in a lot of time. There's a lot of overhead in my systems, but you know what? All of those systems are geared towards is preventing the students from having to just all the time send ad hoc questions, which they don't like. Because now they have to think of it. They have to remember it. They have to talk to the professor. They have to wait for the answer.

And it prevents me from having a nonstop incoming stream of questions that don't require a lot of context shifts. You can do this in almost any other area in your life. If you're a freelancer, there might be cinder filters like I talk about in deep work where you direct people, okay, if you want to know about this, here's the answer. If you want to do a meeting with me, go right here and set it up automatically. If you want to quote, here are the 10 projects I do in the quote types, right? Like you upfront, you put into work to get enough information to that person that the question

doesn't have to arrive ambiguously sitting there pregnant. on your doorstep for you to have to deliver an answer. So I'm a big believer in whatever processes, FAQs, or systems you can put in place to minimize the number of question emails to better. Because again, in isolation, they look innocent. What's the big deal about answering this question? The question is not the problem.

It is switching my context to the context of that question, and it's one of 15 questions in a row I have to answer, each of which needs to switch. That's where you get the cognitive resistance. That's where email becomes a burden. All right, let's get to the final type of email. You're going to see in that inbox, which is conversational. This is one of the core arguments in my recent book,

A World Without Email. You need to read that book if you use email Slack or any other communication tool in your work. It's critical issue. But one of the big points I make in that book is that knowledge work is being strangled by the extent to which we are using back and forth ad hoc unscheduled messaging to have conversations unfold. It makes a lot of sense in the moment because the overhead in the moment

could not possibly be lowered if I could just say, hey, Cal, should we get together about the Johnson memo, send? Boom, I'm done. Seven seconds out of here. So in the moment, it seems like the easiest thing to do. But what have you just kicked off there? You may have just kicked off 10 back and forth messages.

these messages are going to arrive at unpredictable times, but must be serviced quickly because we need to figure out what did me do about the Johnson memo by tomorrow because Johnson himself is coming to the office and we got to have that figured out. So if we're going to get through 10 messages back and forth today, we're going to have to have a minimal latency between each message and its response. Now, because I don't know when you're going to see the message and get back to me, I better keep checking my message. my inbox to see, okay, did I hear back about the Johnson memo?

Did I hear back about the Johnson memo? Now, let's say on average, I check the inbox about 10 times for each of the messages that comes in. Because I got to make sure I get it back. Johnson's coming. All right. Well, those 10 back and forth messages have just generated 100 context shifts. Each one of those context shifts has a cognitive tax, creates fatigue, reduces your capacity. That's one conversation.

Now let's say there are seven different conversations this week that I have going back and forth with various people. 700 context shifts have just been generated by that. Again, in the moment, you say seven seconds. Hey, what about the Johnson memo? Should we meet sin? Boom, this is great. But this is part of what could be hundreds and hundreds of mind-sapping context shifts that you have just accidentally initiated. So one of the big ideas in a world without email is that you need.

Other ways of having these coordinating conversations happen that does not require unscheduled messages that need response. You should be willing. You should be willing to have a large amount of overhead and annoyance and upfront time invested if that gets rid of unscheduled messages that require response. It is worth it. I don't care if we have, you know, this setup where here's how it works. If we need to meet about memos, you have to go to the roof of my office building, and that access door is shut. So you have to get the ladder off the balcony on the third floor and scale three more floors on the outside of the building and get to the roof. And there on the roof, you need to start a fire and the smoke from that fire I will see.

And that's how I will know to also get on that ladder on the third floor balcony, climb up to that roof and come find you so we can figure out there together when we're going to meet about the Johnson menu. that overhead is worth it. I would rather spend an hour doing that than do 100 context shifts spread out evenly over the next few days. Now, I'm being a little bit facetious there, but I'm trying to hit the point. Time in the moment I could care less about. What I care about is context shifts. How often do I have to check an inbox to keep this conversation going? And I will pay very large prices to make that number be very, very small.

I get all into this in a world without email. There's three major types of different ways. You can get these conversations out of back and forth conversations. I'll just tease them. There's deferring those conversations using things like scheduling tools or office hours. There's automating those conversations by taking repeatable processes and figuring out a set system for how they get done. So I don't have to wait to hear from you to do things. And there's externalizing.

Information goes to set places like task boards. Discussions happen and set. times with set formats like status meetings, etc, etc. Point being, conversations are killers. It seems innocent. It's not. Go to the roof and start a fire if you can. It's still much better than having to keep clicking there, waiting, waiting until you finally

get the message that says, nah, Wednesday is no good. How about Thursday? Come on. All right. So if we're going to tame email, let me just quickly summarize. You've got to know what you're taming. It's a collection of broadcast questions. and conversational messages.

Each of these requires a different response. You should be working on responses to all three of these things if you want to reduce that heavy, annoying, cognitively manding footprint of email on your professional life. This podcast is sponsored by Four Sigmaic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmaics Mushroom Coffee is real organic fair. trade single origin Arabica coffee with Lyons Main Mushroom for Productivity and Shaga Mushroom

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Let's move on to questions. We will start, as always, with questions about deep work. And our first question comes from Allison. Allison asks, A recent corporate trend is to limit meetings to 30, minutes, which means you have twice as many meetings in one day, all with different people on different subjects. It's exhausting.

How can I get deep work done in between these short but taxing meetings, or should I even be trying? Well, Allison, I think we have two issues here. Our first issue is just that the abundance of meetings, the increased abundance of meetings being an issue in work today. And then the second issue is what right now you can do about. that reality given that you can't change it tomorrow. So there's this bigger picture point here is that we have too many meetings.

Why do we have too many meetings? Well, I think there's a couple things going on here, but one of the most important is that we don't have a lot of good systems in place for how we accomplish the work that happens regularly in our teams. So a meeting becomes a proxy for more well-developed productivity systems. Something falls on your plate. we have to figure out a new strategy for client acquisition. The easiest thing you can do is say, let's get everyone in a meeting.

Because now what has happened? You have put something on your calendar. You know everyone will show up. You know you will see it. You know progress will be made because, as I say, there's only two productivity systems that every knowledge worker actually absolutely trust they will see, their email inbox and their calendar, so you know you will see that. You know everyone will show up.

You'll know some sort of progress is made. The issue is, if there's lots of projects going on, each of which needs to keep making progress, we get a lot of meetings. So let's all just get together. Let's all just talk and we feel like some sort of progress has been made. So to solve this bigger problem, if we apply the type of solutions I talk about in my book, a world without email, where we actually break down the work we do into its constituent processes, and we ask for each, how do we actually want to implement this process? Where does the information come in? How do we assign and track work? When and how do we talk about this work?

What steps can be basically automated? It always happens A, B, and C, and what steps actually need discussion. Can we batch this discussion with other things? Can we have a lot of structure to that discussion? Can then happen at the same time? When you begin to structure these processes, you get away from just throwing meetings at a problem, which turns out to be just a very high, overhead, low-effectivity way of actually trying to get things done. So I think that's the big picture solution.

in the small picture. Alison, you're facing a ton of meetings today and that's not going to change tomorrow. What can you do? There's two things I would recommend. One, add 15 to 30 minutes to the end of every meeting that you schedule. So if someone schedules a half hour meeting, you put aside the full hour. And what do you do in that second 15 to 30 minutes? That's where you make sense of organized act on and otherwise take action on what was

discussed in that meeting. So while it's still fresh in your head, you clarify it. Okay, so what's really going on here? What do I really need to do? What can I do right now if there's a few small things just to get that done? Is there some big thing I now have to do? Let me figure out maybe when I'm going to do that, get that on my calendar, get this stuff into my systems, make sure that I have full closure on what's happening in that meeting.

There is nothing worse than finishing a meeting that opens up seven or eight loops. And before you can close those loops, you have to jump into another meeting, which generates more loops, which conflicts with them. So add 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting. Now you can get closure cognitively on each of these meetings. So that's the first thing I would suggest. Two, start scheduling meetings with yourself. Use the same calendar that you use for your other meetings.

Treat and respect those meetings like you would, any other. Once that time is blocked, that time is block. But they are meetings with yourself that you actually use as time dedicated to a specific task that it's going to benefit from unbroken concentration. You probably can't block off all of your time and say, great, seven hours a day, I am, seven hours a day, I'm just going to be doing deep work, and there's only 30 minutes left,

and it's only at this one time. But you can say, I'm going to give myself a two-hour meeting today and two one-hour meetings on Wednesday, and these are meetings with myself. So the time is blocked on my calendar. I will not over-schedule it with something else, and it makes sure that progress gets done on things that actually require concentration.

So those two things, add the 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting schedule to get closure, plus scheduling meetings with yourself for making progress on things that require unbroken concentration. That will release the burden. I'm going to add a bonus suggestion here that I had first brought up in a recent episode. So let me just remind you of this bonus suggestion,

which was this notion of one for you, one for me. Okay. So an issue I talked about it, this might have been last week or the week before, An issue I talked about when it came to trying to protect a large amount of your time for no meetings, for unbroken concentration, is that even if you are in a role in which that is reasonable, it's hard to figure out when that time should be in advance. So let's say, for example, you are in development and four out of eight hours a day you really should be programming. Sometimes it's hard to say, I'm just going to block off the entire afternoon because that might be the only time that two out of three. people in the executive committee that needs you to meet with them to talk about a new hiring

policy. That's the only time they can meet is the afternoon. And it's actually a real issue if you blocked off in advance the entire afternoon. There's not enough flexibility. If you're going to block off a lot of time, there's not enough flexibility in your schedule to do that in advance. So the suggestion I gave a couple weeks ago was don't block off that deep work time completely in advance. Do a one for you, one for me strategy. If I book a 90-minute meeting on the Tuesday. At that point, I will then put aside 90 minutes somewhere else in the day for deep work. And then if someone comes around and says, okay, here's a 30 minute meeting we need to do. Great. Book that. And at that point, take another 30 minutes somewhere else in the day for your deep work.

So you fill in that time or undistracted work throughout the day. As you fill it in with more meetings, you take more and more time. So you leave more flexibility. All right. So I said I'd give you two suggestions, Allison, I'm tired of meetings. I gave you three. Quick summary, add time to your meetings to get closure. Two, at the very least, schedule meetings with yourself. And three, if you want to block off significant amounts of time to be meeting free, instead of doing that all in advance, do the one for you, one for me method so you can have more flexibility in scheduling meetings with other people, but still end up with a fair amount of time blocked off. All right, Let's move on now.

Our next question is from Gary. Gary says, what is the difference between the productivity funnel and the capture configure control method? All right. Well, now we're getting into the weeds, which I appreciate. These are two different productivity-related frameworks or systems I have discussed at various times on this podcast. So for those who don't remember the productivity funnel, this was my way of trying to give a framework for professional productivity in general. I said any approach to professional productivity can be understood as implementing the three layers of a funnel.

Where at the very top of the funnel, you have what I called activity selection. What is my philosophy or systems are figuring out what I actually work on? In the middle of the funnel, you have organization. how do I make sense of and keep track of all of the different things I have selected to do, the things that did enter onto my proverbial plate, and then the narrowest part at the bottom, the bottom level of the funnel, was execution. How do I actually execute effectively the thing that I should be executing right now in the moment? So my argument is any professional productivity system or philosophy has to have a coherent approach to each of those three layers.

Capture, Configure, Control is one element you might use in implementing in particular the organization layer. So it is an instantiation of you need some way of organizing all of these things on your plate and the time you have available. You need some way of doing it. One way you could do that is with things like Capture, Configure, Control. And so if you remember Capture Configure Control

in that system, which comes from the early days of the podcast, it talks about how you need to have a way, of capturing the things you need to do. You need a way of making sense of the things on your plate and you need to control your time. So have some control over when do I actually want to do this work? And those types of ideas roughly fall under organization. I mean, you might argue that capture maybe overlaps a little bit with activity selection, but it's really just a David Allen inspired idea that no open loops.

Configure, you know, that's what is your system for actually trying to. and keeping track of these things. And control is you should actually be doing something like time block planning, figuring out here's my time available and here's what I want to do. So I think the right way to think about Capture Configure Control is that zoom in on the organizational level of the productivity funnel. And once you're there, this is one way you might start to implement that funnel. Where this actually gets confusing is that Capture Configure Control is itself also somewhat general, right? So I don't say specifically how to configure or specifically how to control your time.

So it's a more refined framework for what you might find in that middle layer of the productivity funnel. You would then go in and actually implement those things with real systems. I'm going to use a Trello board for configure. I'm going to use a time block planner for control. Now, if this sounds really recursive and complicated, that's because these aren't really supposed to nest, Gary. These are just two alternative ways of talking about productivity. So I want to try to nest these two. I would say, look, you can think about I want a capture, configure, and control system,

or you can think about I want to implement the three layers of the productivity funnel and think about it. And they inform each other. But they're both kind of trying to do the same thing. And so maybe think of the productivity funnel as my second attempt at having a general framework for professional productivity. Because I realize that execution is important and how we even select what should be our plate or how much work we should be doing is important. So maybe you could think of the productivity funnel as being a more general swing at what I was trying to do with capture, configure, control.

But if you like one better than the other, you're perfectly fine sticking with it. All right. Let's go on with a question now from AB. Ab asks, which emails do you keep? Do you have a filing system? an email inbox is not a good information or knowledge management system. People do try to keep track. They do try to keep track of the different obligations or information relevant, the projects,

etc., in their inbox because they trust their inbox as a system. They know they always check. They trust it as one of the few productivity systems that they know is not going to just disappear. They'll forget what's in there. But I don't think it's a great idea to mix information management. with back and forth communication. So when you clear an email out of your inbox, the relevant information needs to go into your relevant long-term system.

An inbox is a terrible system. What that system is depends on the information. So if there's an email that's talking about an upcoming meeting, well, that's going to go on your calendar. And then you don't need that in your inbox anymore. If an email captures some sort of task that you are going to need to get done, well that should get transformed into let's say a card on your task board where you could even copy the whole text of the email and put it on the back of that virtual card

so the information is there but it's better for it to be on a card where the card can be under a column that captures its status and that column can be on a board that captures the particular professional role to which that task is relevant that's a way more informative way of storing that information than just here is an email buried somewhere in my inbox that I vaguely remember that it has some information in there that might be relevant. So this is what you need to do. Get it out of your inbox. Get it into a more trusted system that's part of a more systematic way of organizing your work. You want it, and this is the analogy I often give the people.

In an age of old-fashioned inner office memos and inner-office mail cubbies where you would go to the mail room, remember this, and there would be letters and memos in your mail slot that you would take out to bring back to your office. you want to just keep stuff in there to organize your professional life. Like, yeah, I just have a bunch of stuff stacked in my mailbox cubby in the mailroom at my office. And I just sort of go in there and look through it to see what's going on. You say, no, I have my own to-do list and a day planner. And I keep track of things myself.

Your email inbox is the same way. That's not the right place to keep track of what's going on in your life. All right. We got a question now from Mika, who asks, what time tracking granularity would you recommend? 30 minutes. I think the smallest granularity with which you want to do any time block planning is 30 minutes. Once you're below 30 minutes, you should just batch whatever you're doing into a collection of activities that takes 30 minutes.

Once you get below 30 minutes, you're getting too fine grain. There's no way that you're actually going to hit those blocks consistently. What's the point? So this is why you'll see in my time block planner, for example, 30 minutes is the smallest granularity that I've demarcated for actually drawing out time blocks. And that's the way to do it. Quick technical tip for accomplishing that. Because if you're time blocking on a planner, that 30 minute block might be small. Like physically small, right?

It doesn't take up much space. So if you're putting five small things into a 30 minute block, you're probably not going to be able to record those five. things in a 30 minute size block in your time block planner. So the advice I give in the front of the planner, where I have a sort of mini dissertation on time block planning, is you instead put a number in that 30 minute block. Put a number one and circle it. And then in the upper right of your time block planning grid, you draw the one up there and then right next to it you can have the list of everything that's supposed to go in that block. Oh, here's the five things. One, two, three.

And you put it up in the upper right of your time block grid because your time block plan. even as you correct it as time goes on, gets lower and lower and lower. It looks like a downwards facing slope. So the upper right of your time block grid is unlikely to actually be space that you need for corrected time block plans. You put it up there and so you can elaborate a lot of little things that are supposed to happen in a small block.

So don't go less than 30 minutes. Just put more into those 30-minute blocks. All right, let's do a question here from Gabriel. Gabriel asks, how do you manage projects versus detailed to do's on your board system? And there's a useful elaboration here because this is an important but subtle issue.

So Gabriel says, I've been using a Trello-type system to organize projects, which has been helpful to visualize their different statuses, and it helps me to choose priorities for a given quarter. However, as I've been catching up on your podcast, I've also recognized the value of a trello type. Trello type treatment of your to-does to give clarity to them.

Do you have separate boards for these two tasks with different magnitudes? Or how do you keep track of the status of any project or store them for later focus for a given quarter? Yeah, it's a good question, Gabriel. So I use my Trello boards for tasks. I will occasionally have a column on a relevant Trello board for a project. So here is a project I'm working on that's going to generate a lot of tasks. I will give it its own column so that the task relevant to that project

are in that column. So that's somewhat common. I don't do this for every project though. Some projects I know they're ongoing because I have them in my quarterly plan and when I build my weekly plan, I see that and just figure out when and how am I going to make progress on that project

during the current week. So where this becomes relevant is there are certain projects that are not not fruitfully divided into tasks. This is one of my points of minor respectful disagreement with David Allen. I think in David Allen's system, everything goes down to cranking widgets. Everything goes down to a next action that you can just execute and he has this mind-like-water dream where you're just mindlessly executing these very clearly specified 60-second tasks.

And in the end, you look up and say, huh, there's like a really nice New Yorker piece in a new book. The problem is this is not actually how a lot of types of. of particularly demanding cognitive work happens. You can't take a book and break it down into 60 second next actions. You can't take a hard article and break it down in the 60 second next actions. There's often a mini steps, let's say, that's just ambiguously speaking, think really hard on this and see if you can make progress. Like, how do I crack this article? I don't know.

I need to think about it a lot and read stuff and just try to figure it out. How do I get this chapter written? It's going to take me just hours and hours of writing. I mean, do I put it in a task? I can't put write 10,000 words on a task because it can take five different sessions. Do I have like put session number one as a task? I guess like break it down into different tasks for different writing sessions. I guess I could do that.

But it doesn't seem congruent. It seems like not a good fit. And so for this type of demanding cognitive work, I've realized it's better to just have in your quarterly plan. I'm working on a book. And in this quarter, I want to finish two chapters. And you see that when you're building your work. weekly plan. You're looking at your week ahead and said, okay, I'm going to really go for it this week. I'm going to really try to get a draft of this chapter done this week. So I'm going to go on my

calendar right now maybe and I'm going to take the first three hours of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I just cleared the decks, no meetings, go right to the writing shed and write. And it's whatever, 10 hours, 15 hours worth of writing. Let's just see if that works and if I can make progress on it. There's no real task intermediary here. It's me seeing I have this hard project, knowing there's something hard I need to do, looking at my week, reconfiguring my week so I can do that type of, have time for that type of hard thing.

So this is why I do not have a one-to-one correspondence between my projects and columns on my Trello board. Some very tasky-oriented projects, yes, absolutely. You know, if we're doing admissions for grad students, some of the director of graduate studies, there's 15 things that have to happen. I need a place to keep track of all the information

for each of these things. and I got to keep track of who's working on what. And I'm going to have a whole list of tasks. I'm also going to have another column that is waiting to hear back from so I can keep track of. I'm waiting to hear back from the registrar's office about this and a whole column for the meetings I have every week with the graduate coordinator so I can keep track of here's the five things.

I need to talk about the next meeting. It's perfect for that. My task board has very little to do with my books. It has very little to do sometimes with working on articles. It has very little to do with trying to solve a math proof. I go straight from my quarterly plan right to my weekly plan and that influences my daily plan. No task board is involved.

The final piece here question, Gabriel, is how do you keep track of potential projects? I don't know that I really do that much. Like, to me, that's not the hard thing. It's usually pretty clear. You know, you're doing a quarterly plan. Like, what's the, what am I working on for the next three or four months? I don't really need a list of things that I could be working on.

I mean, at this level, at the David Allen 30,000 foot level, you know what you're all about. You pretty much intuitively can figure out. I think I need to do a book proposal. I'm making progress on a book. I'm working on this academic new field or something like this. I don't need a list of potential projects. Not when I'm at the scale of what do I want to do this fall.

This is more about reflecting on my career in general, my vision for my career where I am, what's been going well, what's been going bad. I'm not going to have any trouble saying here's the big rocks. I'm going to try to put into the schedule. So I don't keep track of list of projects. One day, maybe projects. At the scale of really big swing things,

you're going to come up with good ideas. That's not the hard part. The hard part is when you actually have to start executing. All right. Well, that's enough questions about deep work. Let's move on and do a few questions about the deep life. So today, when tackling our deep life queries, we actually have a theme.

Just coincidentally, we had a big cluster of questions that all had to do with parenthood and the impact of parenthood on all other aspects of the deep life. And I figured why not just put these together, get into a parenthood deep life mode and answer a bunch of questions that are all in the same general area.

So our first such question comes from Nikki. Nikki asks, how does one get a sense of satisfaction from goals that continue add infinitum? And she elaborates that she is a self-employed mom of three, ages 3.5, 2, and 3 months. So she notes that since her first child, she's been slowly transitioning what used to be yearly goals to more progress or habit-based goals due to the unpredictability of her time with young children. And she is having some issue with that.

She finds that I will blow away past a book count goal, shrug, wake up the next day and keep reading. There's always the next project for work or home, and I plan on reading and writing the rest of my life. It feels like now that all my goals have been distilled in the habits, they have lost their ability to ever really be complete. How can I inject some good old-fashioned crossed off checkmark, treat yourself goal satisfaction back into my life? Well, Nikki, I think it is good to have both types of goals. What I'm going to recommend is doing a birthday challenge. This is something I do myself, where for each year, as I arrive at my birthday, I have a collection of goals I want to accomplish by that birthday. I usually call them in my notes, project, and then the age.

So I'm 39 right now, so I have a project 40 that I'm working on. And typically, I'll have a halfway point intermediate goal. So about halfway through the year or two is my birthday, there's intermediate versions of the big goals that you want to accomplish. And the birthday tied goals will typically be themed. So it depends on what's happening in your life. Like right now you have very young kids. I remember that age well. There was a time when I had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn.

So pretty similar to your current distribution. I remember that time well. We had just moved to Tacoma Park. I had recently gotten tenure and was writing for the first time in a long time. So this is when I first started. I was working on digital minimalism. And I hadn't written since deep work because I had, as I've talked about before on the podcast, I had to batten down the hatches because it's just kids are hard. And we're going to see this theme through the various questions we're going to answer today, but kids are hard.

And so I wasn't writing books when I was a new father. And I was just trying to get tenure. But anyways, I remember that period. Well, so the goals I would have had, my birthday goals of that period were probably different than my birthday goals for Project 40, which were. very different than my goals for Project 30 before I had any kids, for example. But the point is, it gives you a way to say, what am I focusing on this year? And these are aspirational, very focused on your life in the big picture, and it's something to go after.

And it can be very relevant to what's going on. I mean, I would really think right now with a bunch of young kids, these might be very lifestyle-focused goals. Like, I want to get to a point in our life where we have this set up, or we have figured out how to make, you know, the evenings work or that whatever it is, right, or that we do a weekly dinner with the grandparents. And so it could be really lifestyle-centric goals, but something that you have, you have figured out and accomplished with a halfway point along the way.

And if you're very overwhelmed like you probably are now, again, they can be lifestyle focused, they can be pretty modest. And as you emerge from the young kid period, as your kids go to elementary school, they're out of the house, the schedules are more routine, then these can get back. maybe they're more professionally ambitious. I mean, I certainly have in Project 40 some way more professionally ambitious goals than I would have had for project,

whatever that would have been when I was in your stage. I would have been Project 38. I was not thinking about then, let me get an HQ going, let me build out a media company. I mean, it was survival. It was survival mode back then. And now I'm in a different place.

So good question, Nikki. introduce some annual goals back, do it carefully, have them be themed, have them be lifestyle focused so that you feel really connected, like accomplishing these is going to make my life better,

our family's life better, have a halfway point for a more modest version of the goals, and I think you'll get back some of that energy. All right, we have a question here from Kendo. Kendo asks, how soon after the birth of a child, is it realistic to start seeking out routines

and employing time block strategies. I would say your child should probably be time blocking by, let's say, six weeks. I don't know if that's appropriate. You can get them a bigger font planner because I know their eyesight's not as good,

but if they're not time blocking from six weeks, I don't see how if you spool out that thread, they end up getting into Harvard. So let's be realistic, your kind of. You've got to get on that. No, I know you're talking about yourself. Okay, so it's chaos after child is born. the chaos has a different valence

dependent on which child it is and it's exactly backwards from what you would expect I mean you'd expect it well the first child because objectively speaking the first child should have the least impact because there's just one child in your life and it's this big

and it sleeps most of the day I guess you just get used to things and then like your second child is actually the footprints a little bit smaller and by your third child you know it's like text me from the hospital when the baby's here I'm in a meeting

so you just you get more used to it I don't know, just get used to the chaos. Go easy on yourself. You should not be immediately back into highly structured time control and time block planning. I do think it's pretty important within a week or two to start injecting back some sort of keystone habits or routines that are not focused on some sort of demonstrably large accomplishment but are focused on self-signaling that I still have some attention. over my time, and I can still do things that I think are important, even though there's just chaos going on in my life right now. Again, this is particularly important for your first kid, because again, my time you have

your second or third kid, if you're going to have multiple kids, there's already family routines going on. The disruption will seem a little bit less. I remember this really clearly with my first, my first, and I don't know exactly what this timing is, but it was chaos, right? We didn't know what we were doing. And there was a point, it must have been a few weeks in, maybe even more. I'd have to go back, and I kept a diary at this time.

I'd have to go back and read it. But I remember there was a point where the baby was sleeping, my wife was sleeping, and I went to another room and was just reading a book. And I have this memory. The book was I was reading, as one does, Descartes. So the famous, I forgot what it's called, but the famous Cartesian philosophy where he sort of establishes his exact. from just the fact that I think therefore I am.

And I remember thinking, oh, I can still do things that are intellectually interesting and unrelated to this child. Can't do a lot of things. I was very tired and I only read for 20 minutes. But for whatever reason that was really profound for me is when I realized, okay, there's some things I can, you can still have some things you were doing that are unrelated to the child. And I think it's really important.

And again, it can be a very small footprint. don't try to sell it to your wife that it's important that your your habit of i need to golf four days a week that's not going to fly i think your habit of it's really important that my routine of like going on a guy's trip twice a month to Vegas it's like an important keystone habit so i'll be back in four days that's not going to fly but if it's i read a little bit before bed i still do you know a walk every morning there's a little exercise that still happens maybe you're not going to gym for an hour and a half, but there's a pull-up bar in your garage and you're doing that. So having some sort of routine almost immediately by which I mean just habits that are easy

and flexible, but have nothing to do with the kid that you execute. I think that's really important. All right, we got a question here from Jonas. Jonas asks, how should one combine having young children and integrate newfound ambitions to one's life? Should both be balanced or approached in a seasonal way? So he says, hi, Cal, I'm a father of two young children, age one and three. Having them into my life made me realize some of the potential I had to me, but left untapped.

I now want to realize it, but I find myself limited by my responsibilities as a father. Should I still aim for big ambitions and find a way to balance both, or should I view the current times as seasonal and wait for them to grow up a bit before seriously getting after it? Jonas, I would say some seasonality here is probably warranted. When my kids were one and three, I would have been, there was a hard time just from a overhead and admin is trying to make the work schedules work. And it was not the easiest of times. I was trying to get tenure at that time. This was this period I've alluded to before where I had really.

taking my foot off the gas pedal in my writing career. So deep work came out. You know, I got to get this timeline right. So deep work, I finished writing deep work before my second was born. I think it maybe it came out, you know, it came out before. I'm trying to get the timeline just right here. I was working out before he was born, but obviously took me a long time to finish. Because he was born in 2014.

The book came out in 2016. but I finished it, you know, 2015, and then I kind of walked away. I mean, I was, I was, I do have memories of editing that book with a baby on my shoulder. And then I was like, okay, I need to take a break. And it wasn't until my years later that I got going again on digital minimalism and a world without email. So I remember taking my foot off the writing gas pedal. You know, deep work came out in that period.

And ultimately did become a very successful book. But it was not a big deal when it came out. I was not like I have to do today doing publicity tours. I would do some podcast from our basement, you know. And that was basically it. I wrote a couple op-eds and did some, but there was no big deal with that book coming out. It took up very little time.

I did not write new books. I wasn't getting after it with let's get going. When I saw the deep work had traction, I wasn't saying like, let's go. Like, we got to get some new books out of here right away. So I remember that it's been a pretty slow period. All I wanted to do was focus on getting enough research done that I could get tenure. I just really remember that's what I was focused on.

Then a couple of years later, I put my foot back on the gas pedal again. I mean, at some point, I remember having this conversation with my agent where I basically said, I'm ready to work. And that's when we turned around and wrote a proposal for digital minimalism and a world without email. I said, look, I'm going to write these beasts back to back. Let's roll. As soon as I finish the first one, I'll go into the second one. And so I think seasonality matters with kids. Professional ambitions, let's go up and down.

I think you're in a period now where you want a good steady state. It's also a great time to daydream and let me read and think and these kids are going to open up. As you noted, they're going to open up a new understanding of your world and your potential and what's important to you. Tap into all of that daydream, plan, figure out things you might do, read inspiring things, watch documentaries. But I would say wait to put the foot down on that gas pedal until maybe things are going to seem a little bit, a little bit calmer. finally, by the way, being a good dad, the two young kids, is a pretty ambitious thing to do. So it's not like you're stripping ambition from your life. It says you were focusing on a related ambitious project right now.

It just doesn't happen to involve how you make money. All right, let's do one more question. We got one more question here. This one comes from Dave. Dave says, my wife and I have a 13-month-old child and would like to have another. were both working professionals who have built substantial career capital, so they're both mid-career professionals, I find myself increasingly drawn to being a stay-at-home dad for the next five years or so while my children are young.

While acknowledging that this would cause a drastic change in my career trajectory, do you have any advice on how I can continue to stay engaged and build or maintain career capital while taking such a long time away from work. All right, that's an interesting question. I want to really sweat career capital maintenance at least at first, if you're going to shift to be a stay-at-home parent. You know, that's where your focus is. I would say in today's professional landscape,

this is much more understood than it used to be. So if you say I did this, this, this, I was at this point in my career. I have a lot of career capital. Three years I disappeared. And then I came back onto the scene to say, yeah, I disappeared for those three years because I was taking care of my kids. This is way more understood.

You don't really need a more elaborate explanation than that. Now, if you're talking about a five-year period, and by the way, I'm pulling these timelines sort of out of thin air, so don't take this too seriously. But roughly speaking, I think if you're talking about maybe a five-year period, Maybe around year three is when you bring back in or year four, maybe you bring back in the part-time consulting, the whatever it is, the limited engagements just to get your foot back in the door to pick up on the newer skills, to get your name back out there. More importantly, to help you start sniffing out the different opportunities. So you're not just trying to go for it.

If you go from zero to 60, now I need a full-time job. You might end up landing in a job that's not the right setup for what you're looking for. It allows you to sort of get your foot back in the door, see what's going on. Test the water if you do want to go back to work. And if you do, where do you want to fall on the spectrum of doing your own thing as a consultant or going back and working for a firm? You get a lot of good insight. But I think for the first three years, if it can be at home, be at home. Right.

And your focus should be on that. Also, remember the whole point of career capital. The theory laid out of my book so good they can't ignore you is that the whole point of career capital is that. It gives you something you can invest to get in return traits in your career that resonate. So you have this general vision of a lifestyle that is very appealing. Oftentimes, the things that makes lifestyles appealing are themselves valuable. So you have to have something valuable to offer in returns. You build up rare and valuable skills.

This gives you more career capital. You invest that capital to get more control and autonomy over your career. But the whole reason you do that is so that you can shape your career, towards the lifestyle that resonates. Well, if what's resonating with you right now is a lifestyle where you're home with your kids, you've jumped to where we're trying to get. Right? The career capital is a means to the end of I have autonomously shaped a lifestyle that resonates with me.

It's one of the things you can use to get there. But if this lifestyle resonates, I want to be there in my kid's life during this young period of their age and be more engaged in family life and what have you. then you are already at the end. So you don't have to worry so much about career capital. And then when it comes time to come back to work, if you want to go back to work, you should be doing this from a lifestyle perspective.

Oh, is there a lifestyle I have in mind here that work now plays a role again? But I want to be surprised in your situation where you're saying, I really like this lifestyle where I'm with my kids. And maybe now they're getting a little bit older. They're in school most of the day. And so I don't want to just be at home.

But I want to maintain a lot of the aspects I like of this lifestyle. I like to be there in the mornings. I like the fact that I can pick them up after school when they're done. And I think this is really important, but I also want something else to do. This may lead you to a very different type of career trajectory than if you were just trying to stay on the trajectory you're on now. Maybe this is a trajectory you're saying, I'm not trying to be the partner at my engineering firm. I want 10 hours a week of consulting work that is interesting to me. And because I was pretty good before I put what I was doing on pause, I get a pretty good hourly rate for it. And that's nice. And it helps.

make ends meet and makes things a little bit more flexible in the household, but it also gives me a lot of flexibility. I mean, your whole vision might be different. So what I'm trying to say here is the goal for all of this type of thinking is autonomously crafting a lifestyle that resonates, that you had an idea and you made that actually happen. That's the whole ballgame here. So in the professional world, if there's a particular trait you want in your job, I want, you know, very flexible hours or a lot of money or this or that, then career capital is really important to it, but you're playing a bigger level here,

where job fits in there here, but there's other things also going on. So work backwards from the lifestyle that resonates. I'm reading your long elaboration here. You're very good at what you do. There will be economic opportunities for you. If you want to get back to it, after three years,

start doing something so that you can get a sense of what do I really want to do. But don't really sweat career capital in the sense of this in itself, is the end. Your goal is not in life to have as much career capital as possible. Your goal in life is to have a life that is shaped as much as possible

towards what you really care about. Capital is one of many tools that you can deploy. So I say go for it, man. Get home, be there with the kids, do cool things with them, get weird hobbies that they get involved with you with, get to know the teachers at the school,

whatever it is. Go over the top and decorating for holidays. It's all the cool stuff you get to do when you actually have some time. And just enjoy that resonating for a while. And then if you need to bring work back into it, you can figure out how to bring work back to it. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today.

Jesse is shaking his head over here because I promise that I was going to hit 45 minutes on the nose and came nowhere close to that. But next time, Jesse, next time. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.