Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 152: LISTENER CALLS: The Magic of Autopilot Scheduling

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.OPENING CHAT: YouTube vs. Social MediaLISTENER CALLS:- The magic of autopilot scheduling [16:35]- Tips for finding a non-hyperactive good boss [23:18]- Alternatives to email-based workflows [27:24]- Taming Trello [35:07]- Study tactics [38:58] 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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Episode 152. I'm here as always in the Deep Work HQ. Joined by my producer Jesse. Jesse, how are you today? Doing great. How are you doing? It been pretty well. I want to pick your brain.

I am curious about YouTube because. because we're about to start releasing a bunch of videos. I in general just instinctually, I'm very positive and bullish about the idea of the democratization of video and the fact that people are able to create high-quality video content. To me, that's all really interesting. But I'm also known for being a huge skeptic of social media platforms like Facebook, like Instagram. So it occurs to me, I don't know much about YouTube or how people actually use it.

you have been doing stuff on YouTube for a while. So it's going to pick your brain. Let me start with this. What is the experience like for the average user using YouTube? And how is that different from, let's say, how they might engage with Instagram or Facebook? I think your audience uses YouTube a little bit differently than, for instance, some of the kids, the high school kids that I coach in various sports that I coach, whether it's basketball or cross. because I actually started implementing a lot of your tools into my YouTube experience when I started listening to your podcast in terms of that extension they have

where you don't see other, like when you go to the homepage, you don't see other things that you can't fall down the rabbit hole. I don't have it on my phone. But in terms of using it from the strategies that you've always talked about, like searching for certain things, it's awesome. Like for instance, I search a lot of Adobe, premiere stuff because I need tutorials on how to do certain things with editing and whatnot because that can be complicated.

I know a lot of athletes use it for motivation to find certain workouts. Is that what height means? Like when it's, you see the description on a YouTube video like hype video or something. And it'll be like the music going and probably. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. So have you ever seen those Jock Willink hype videos?

Not really because I don't get them on my. have to search and I don't have that thing where I see the other I've seen his good video which is great we show that to our team that's what I'm thinking about a couple years ago that was good yeah so our team used that kind of as like a mantra for the I think the 2018 season

if I did the good video word for word but the video was me and let's say I was in like a sleeveless shirt or something so you could really see the contrast that I'm not jaco would it just be comical let's be honest I think it would be great that's going to be comical I think if you're not literally terrified of the person talking,

you're just going to be annoyed at him. He's the only person who could pull that off. You guys are actually pretty similar. I think you guys would get along. I like Jocko, yeah. He would like you too. 100%. Yeah.

I have some Navy SEAL friends who scare me because they invite me. Shout out to Mark Devine. He'll mention, like, oh, you got to come out and do, he does this thing. Sorry, Mark, I forgot the name, but they basically replicate Hell Week for like business executives. I'm like, Mark, I would make it like two minutes before I would be throwing up.

It'd be like, I got to go work or something like that. Like, it would be terrible. I hate being tired. Anyways, yeah, you get no sleep in those things. Yeah, so enough for comparing myself to Jocko. But we're on the record. Jesse says in all ways, including physical. I'm very similar to Jocko.

But, all right, so back to the discussion, though. How do the kids use it, though? The kids these days. So you say the kids you coach would use it differently. What is YouTube for a 15-year-old? old. That is completely different, I think, because those kids are just watching tons of videos in a deep haze just going through, you know, whether on the bus going to a game or after practice, like on the kill time, they're killing time on their phone. They're probably going between

YouTube and social media doing that sort of thing. So is there any way we can make sense of a bifurcated philosophy of be skeptical of TikTok and Instagram, but YouTube is interesting. You've always given great advice for YouTube. You actually simplify as it. Great. You just do the strategies that you've always talked about, and that's what I've done. It's been perfect. Like, it works like a charm. Yeah.

So you can, so YouTube, the thing it has going for it that other platforms don't is that unless you're a content creator, which I guess most people aren't, it's very, it's passive consumption. which somehow seems way more control that's just what TV was you know we're kind of used to that like okay if I'm I mean it follows us now so it's a problem the TV didn't follow us but if you were just at home and you're bored you just turn on the TV but it was passive

where there's that extra layer in an Instagram or a TikTok where it's not just passive it's also people reacting to you and you did a thing and what are people thinking about the thing and is there social approval or disapproval for what you're doing like there's

other people talking about that you know talking about what they were doing and that's a party you weren't invited to and the personalized approach of the content and tell me if this makes sense

I might just be making this up there's a personalization of the content in certain social media platforms that seem to just ratchet up that addictiveness but also negative impact

on your mental health dial much higher than where YouTube the biggest thing is just you could fall down a rabbit hole and just be slathing black-jod, but you're probably not going to be, feel really bad about yourself. I mean, unless you're me watching Jocko, but, but you know what I mean?

It's not going to, you're not going to find out about a party you were missing or have someone yelling at you, like you might on Twitter or you might on Instagram. It depends because if you start reading the comments on certain videos that you post on your Lord. YouTube, you could fall into a deep travel. I know that Rogan talks about that all the time. When he first started doing video stuff, he would just don't read the comments. And he always tells that to his guest, too.

if don't read the comments, which is 100% true if you just don't read the comments. And I agree with what you're saying. It would be that scenario. But if you do, then it can be similar to the social media stuff. But most people don't, there's a lot of people who use YouTube on a regular basis.

This is true probably. Very few of them post YouTube videos. True. But you wouldn't say the same about Twitter or Instagram or I don't know TikTok as well. But at least I know on those platforms also heavily used. Most people are on a regular basis

putting things about themselves out into the world. And, okay, here's the other thing. On YouTube, most YouTube users, if you're not, you know, famous, the people you're seeing videos of are not people you know. Like, there's an abstractions like TV.

It's, you know, it's an athlete, it's Jocko, it's a celebrity, it's someone who's building cool things in their garage. You don't know. Like, it's completely divorced from you in your life or social media, it seems like at its worst. When you look at those studies,

for example, to talk about psychological harm of Instagram for teenage girls. That's all about the intertwining of the platform into the actual existing social structures in which they exist. They are seeing their friends do this. They're seeing this person that they know

looking better. They're seeing someone else having more fun. They're being piled on Twitter. It's a sort of digital Mean Girls thing is going on where there's all of these, you know, whatever coming at them. And you don't have that on YouTube. I mean, you're just watching it's like TV, it's TV, except for it follows you everywhere and the production values are lower.

So there's issues, but. Yeah, at least you're probably seeing more of it because, I mean, that's intertwined in, you know, Instagram, for instance, you're going to see your friends and you're also going to see celebrities, whatnot too. But I see what you're saying and I agree. Yeah, you're definitely going to not see as much of that on YouTube. Yeah, there's more friction to post a video on YouTube for sure. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, that's where I end up. I'm near, to get people to see it.

I'm nervous about some aspects of YouTube. but I'm kind of excited by some aspects because, you know, I think the democratization of different modes of media is important, right? So my theory is the web revolution, the original web revolution, in particular the Web 2.0 revolution, which was where posting content and interacting with content got easier, was democratizing text. And it was a really big deal, right? So now Ezra Klein in his dorm at USC could be blogging. And with the right talent and the right spark and the right drive, you know, he has an audience. And eventually the Washington Post buys the blog, right? You couldn't have done that 10 years ago.

So I think democratizing of text is important. This is how I really got started with my audience. When I was first starting, the only wisdom in book writing was, well, you got to go give all these talks to sell books. And I just had this instinct. I think I should be on the internet. and I was blogging, and it's how I had my original audience built. So that was important, right? Audio being democratized.

We're obviously seeing a revolution. Podcasting democratized audio, you don't have to be at a radio station, a radio station gatekeeper to actually have audio like we're doing right now. I think that was, obviously we're seeing this being a really big deal. I think it's been pretty impactful. democratizing audio is important. Video is the same way. I think democratizing the ability to produce video is really important.

as with these other mediums, it seems to me where it gets really important is where the production values get within the uncanny valley of actual professional production values. So podcasting got there pretty quickly. We've got good mics here. We're in a pretty reasonable room. We're going through some pretty reasonable sound processors. We've got a pretty good sound engineer that'll compress this up nicely. And it'll sound more or less like the radio. I mean, it's not as good as NPR, but it's not going to hit your ear like we're on a Fisher Price cassette recorder, right?

And video is getting there too. That came later, but I think now you can get really good cameras and really good lenses editing and light. I mean, you look at, I was reading somewhere about the comedian Andrew Schultz during the pandemic. And we were talking about this before. He filmed and put out a Netflix special where it was just him and a few of his friends who knew nothing about any of this technology. They bought some cameras which are not particularly expensive. they hand-built a stage, bought some lights,

and just watched a bunch of YouTube videos about Adobe Premiere. And if you watch his special on Netflix, you would not know that this wasn't something that was $150,000 and took a crew of five to work on, you know,

over a bunch of days or something like that. So there's this like, uncanny Valley is getting smaller where increasingly you can produce video content. It looks like what you might see

on the Discovery Channel. That's a big deal. YouTube, by guess is the only game in town right now for actually getting that democratized video out there. So I think that's why I'm excited. I think the democratization of video is huge. I'm trepidacious because there's only one

company that you can use right now. So I don't know. Podcasting is great because that's not the case. You know, our show is on a server. I don't know where it is, but it's just a private server company. There's not like someone who owns podcasting. You can get it through 15 different services. It's, you know, it's ours. We own it. A little nervous about that aspect of YouTube, but I think

I'm excited about video. So I don't know. am I splitting? I'm probably splitting hairs here, but that's how I'm justifying us, videoing up while still being skeptical about social technology. Yeah, I would say, just don't read the comments. And then in terms of YouTube being such a big avenue or, you know, media road, it is, I think, the second largest search engine in the world. So that's a pretty big thing, too. So, yeah. And then in terms of the web 2.0 comment that you talked about,

did you hear Tim Ferriss's podcast with Naval talking about the web 3.0? No. That's pretty good. You got to check that out because that's like... What's the summary? Crypto and NFTs. Could have guessed.

Yeah. Yeah. So... I've done crypto rants on this show before. And then the one last thing that I wanted to mention was Lex, your boy Lex, had a interview with Neil. as I refer to him.

Yeah. Also, by the way, I refer to because the narrator of that Netflix episode I was in was Julianne Moore, I now referred to her as my good friend Julianne Moore. So my boy, Lex Friedman, and my good friend Julianne Moore. Yeah. So Lex was interviewing Neil Stevenson, the fiction writer, who the writer is just, you know, awesome. But they were talking about, Lex asked him a question if he could, you know, he would get stressed out with having so many books read. But he's like, then I started thinking about how you could just revisit one.

book and just read it over and over if you had a good one and Neil gave some good examples of a couple. But then he also said a video, you know, you could get lost in a really good YouTube video or something like that and just watch it over and over like you're, you were talking about with that analogy with the people making that Netflix special. You can learn a lot of stuff. So if you get to a good YouTube video that has, you know, high quality stuff, I mean, it's free and you can just watch it over and over rewind it, pause it, work on stuff. So I mean, the messages of videos that you all have coming out are all good content. I mean, I think it would be awesome.

Yeah. I like that idea that it's a search engine for a lot of people. So when someone now is going to be searching some question that overlaps what we talk about here, now I could have an answer. Maybe you'll get one of my videos and get it out there. Also, I just want to be able to share. I don't know how else to have people share specific things we talk about. I mean, we put in the episode notes, you can jump to the timestamp, sure.

but if there's an answer where you say, you know, my cousin and I were just talking about that. I don't know how else you could share that other than if there's a video of that particular answer, then you're like, boom, I can just send them that clip. Yeah, the other way has way too much friction because even sometimes I listen to a certain podcast on different speeds so like the time spans get all messed up

if you try to tell somebody to go to this one, but if they're listening on a different speed, they can't find it and then they're just going back and forth, whereas you can send the link of the video, then they can just watch it right away 100%. All right. Then I feel better about YouTube. Don't read the comments.

Don't follow the recommendations to heavily treat it more like a reference library or a search engine. But if you're doing that, it feels good to me. So stay tuned for a lot more of me on that particular platform. All right. Well, speaking of a lot more of me, let's get started and do some listener calls here. Our first call is about autopilot schedules. Hi Cal, this is Suzanne. I'm interested in your ideas about the autopilot schedule. I've used an autopilot because I think it's important or maybe foundational to an ordered day and week. But I'm more like Persephone caught in the underworld of chaotic routines that sometimes are fit in and sometimes aren't. Please tell me how you hack out. time for regularly occurring obligations and how you fit them into a set part of your day.

Maybe it'll create a way for me to find Demeter, the arctypal grounded mother, and get back into the late summer light of sanity. Well, I will say, like Orpheus, I will venture down into Hades underworld in search of my own productivity Eurydides. There we go. Good Greek references. I actually just recently went to see

Haiti's town at the Kennedy Center, so I particularly appreciate those specific references. A way to go. For those who are uninitiated, autopilot schedule is actually an idea from pretty early study hacks days,

back from when my newsletter was just a blog. By the way, PSA, Calnewport.com, you should sign up for my newsletter. If you don't, You'll get my weekly essay that I've been writing there on topics like autopilot schedule since 2007. The basic idea on the autopilot schedule is you find things that are regularly occurring and you find set times and days to do them.

And so it's on your calendar, just repeated and you don't even have to think about it. When you get to those times, you just do it. The more regularly occurring work that you can autopilot, the less mental energy you have to generate. and they'll lower the chances that you fall into a scheduling roadblock where you spent too much time or this or that and you get to the end of the week and realize you never got that done or this is important and you don't have any more time to do it. So you're much more consistently going to make progress on the things that matter if you're autopileting them. And you're just going to use a lot less energy because you're not trying to answer the question again and again, what should I do next? What should I do next? That is a draining thing to do and you're not going to have optimal answers to that question.

a lot of the time if you have to keep asking it. So the balancing act you're talking about is a key one. If you over autopilot, so you make too many things recurring, always at this time, always at this place, you have no give. You have no give for the unexpected that pops up. And then you're going to be frustrated. You're going to be frustrated as you violate the autopilot schedule and now have to scramble to find time for it. This is just a balancing act. There is no set answer.

It depends on the type of things we're talking about and what your schedule is like. I introduced this idea originally in the context, for example, of college students. College students can autopilot the hell out of their work. I mean, here's your classes. These are the assignments. You have this club or this sport that practices at this time or meets at this time. You know what your day is like. That's it.

You don't have a kid who's going to come home sick from school. You're not going to have to go to the, you know, proctologist office to deal with a whatever. I don't know what they deal with. I was going to say kidney stones, but that would be a nephrologist or what have you, right? The type of stuff adults have to care about. You can autopilot the hell out of it. And I tell students to do that.

I'm like every single class, what are the assignments, when are you going to do them, do it the same time, same days every week? And I used to call us also the student work day. You don't even have to basically think about productivity if you're a college student if you do it right.

It's Tuesday at 12. I go to this library and do my lab report. You don't even have to think about it. For an adult with all sorts of adult things going on, with a job that's a way less predictable than being a student where you just have to go to these classes and do these assignments. Okay, you're not as flexible.

So it's a balancing act. I like the autopilot, I don't know, 25% of my time. Maybe that's a win. I mean, right now I'm really reflecting on my own schedule right now if that's useful. I autopilot a lot of the things if I'm really being reflective about it surrounding my classes because that's very regular. When our problem set is going to get written? When our course lecture is going to be prepped?

When am I going to meet with my TAs about grading? When am I going to meet with students who have questions? I autopilot all of that because that's very predictable in a way that other things I might not be able to autopilot as easily, like work on a committee where it could be very unpredictable what's going to come up or when we're going to need to do a lot of effort. I also autopilot my writing, in particular this fall when I'm doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker. I'm pretty structured about these are the days and times in which I do that writing. It doesn't always work because sometimes I get stuck. or something's harder than I think, but it's a backbone to when the writing gets done,

so I don't have to think about it, and it's really reduced distress on it. So good question. There's no set answer. It's a balancing act. Autopilot the things that seem amenable to it, but give yourself a lot of leeway because if you're a grown-up with a grown-up job,

there's only so much that's going to be predictable. This show is sponsored by PolicyGenius. PolicyGenius is a service that, can help you find home and auto insurance coverage, similar to what you have now, but at a lower price. We all could use a little bit of extra money in our pocket, and PolicyGenius makes it easy for you to reclaim those savings. Here's how it works. You head to PolicyGenius.com and answer a few questions about yourself and your property. PolicyGenius will then show you price estimates for policies that fit your search and help you understand your, options. The PolicyGenius team can then look for ways for you to save even more money.

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That's PolicyGenius.com. All right. Moving on, our next call is on tips when looking for a new boss. Hey, Cal. My name is Matthew, and I currently work in information secure. This is an industry right now that's rife with burnout, and certainly doesn't help that my current employer employs the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which of course has only gotten worse since the pandemic began.

So as you can imagine, there's a sabbatical on the horizon for me. But my question is, once I'm ready to get back to it, what are some tips to find companies that aren't utilizing the hyperactive hive mind? or maybe the better question would be, how do I make sure my next boss is a Cal Newport fan? Thanks. Well, yeah, I mean, you certainly should demand that of any boss that you talk to. Are you a Cal Newport fan?

And if not, may God have mercy on your soul? I think that's the way you should talk about it. Oh, it's a good question. It's a good question because is the issue here the boss or the job? There's not a lot of people right now that are aggressively trying to bypass the hyperactive hive mind as a specific goal. There's more. There's more.

I have been talking about my latest book, A World Without Email, a lot of C-suite events. There's definitely a shift going on out there, but it's still pretty rare. So if you're looking for a boss who's going to talk in terms of how do we avoid unnecessary context shifts, how do we build out better systems to avoid hyperactive hive mind style ad hoc coordination, there's not that many people talking about it. So what you might be looking for is a job description that allows you to bypass the hyperactive high-fine. And really what you're probably looking for there is autonomy. But maybe what you're looking for is a position that is more results oriented that is going to give you the leeway therefore to essentially structure your own communication protocols.

All right. I work on this. Then this. Let's touch base on Mondays. I'll deliver by Fridays or whatever it is. So having more autonomy in the job gives you the. option of engineering a work life that is free from the hyperactive hive mind, probably going to be your better bet right now.

If you're worried about the hive mind and you should be, a more autonomous type jobs is going to give you the opportunity to have more of that freedom. Your second bet is to look for a boss that is flexible and reasonable. And so what I'm looking for here is someone who maybe they're not thinking about these issues, but if you deployed some of the tricks I've talked about, deep to shallow work ratios, talking about attention residue and trying to get by it, they might change their mind or adjust. And you can usually tell that pretty quickly when you talk to a boss.

If there's a lot of ego involved, if there's a lot of, I'm really looking around to make sure that no one is threatening my sense of self or threatening my position, if you're seeing that going on as trouble, but they're reasonable, they're confident but humble, they really just want to enable their workers to get the best work done. So like a really reasonable, flexible person. And then you can probably start to have these careful conversations. Here's deep work. Here's shallow work.

Both is important. How much deep work should I be doing? Oh, geez, I can't really do that. So what changes can we make so we can hit that number we agreed on? Those type of conversations become pretty reasonable. You might literally give them a world without email just so you have a shared vocabulary. Hey, this is interesting. I don't agree with all of it, but this is interesting.

That, by the way, is the trick. That is the trick if you want to give anyone. advice from a book or an article that you want them to follow and you agree with it, just say, I don't agree with all of it. And then boom, they're right on your side. And then you have the shared vocabulary, the shared ideas. That's not a bad idea. So those are your two options. Either lean into autonomy and then build up a really non-hyperactive approach to your work, how you communicate with the world and track your efforts, or look for a reasonable boss. They might not know anything about the hive mind. They might be sending emails left and right, but they

seem like the type of person that could pretty quickly be open to the idea that maybe there's a better way. All right. Well, building on the theme of that last question, let's move on to a call now that is also about workflow alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind. Hey, Kyle, Sean here. Hey, I really enjoyed your book, A World Without Email. Appreciate that.

And I'm really buying into the workflow concept. It's very powerful. I've got the calendaring piece down using Calendly. I've got the escalation workflow down. And just wondering if you could do an episode on or answer a question on what are the top 10 workflows that people should be focusing on to get people started. I've got two down and I'd love eight more. Thanks, Cal. Well, I will see your request for a count of workflows and I will respond with a collection of categories.

for these workflows, because I think it's a more interesting way, and a more generative way of thinking about this. So quick preamble for those who want to know what we're talking about here, for those who did not yet read my book, A World Without Email, in that book, I argue that the way we implement most of our work right now, most of the collaboration coordination around our work right now in the office context is through ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messages. That's the hyperactive hive mind workflow.

And it's a disaster because you have to keep checking these. inboxes to keep up with all these back and forth conversations. That checking creates context shifts. Those context shifts are productivity poison. So the big idea in that book is if you want to fix the problems of email overload, it's not about having better advice for dealing with your inbox. It's not about better norms or subject lines or batching. You have to actually take the things you do repeatedly in your work, what I call processes. And for each, say, here is the new workflow we will use to implement this process, here is our specific alternative to the hyperactive hive mind.

And when evaluating different alternatives for doing this collaboration, I think the metric you should be trying to minimize is the number of unscheduled messages that you will receive that requires your response. So if you were trying to measure two different ways of implementing a given process, let's say responding to client questions or producing a weekly white paper, if you're trying to measure and weigh against each other, various ways you might achieve and implement this collaboration. The thing you want to measure for both is how many unscheduled messages will this require me to see and respond to?

And the one that generates less, that's the right option. Okay, so that's what we mean by workflows. The question asker here is saying, what are 10 possible workflows you could use to replace the hyperactive hive mind for one of these processes? I'm going to instead give you three categories. After that book came out and I've talked to a lot of people, I have found that most of the things I've encountered fall into one of three categories. Category number one is deferral workflows. So here the whole idea is you take what would normally in the hyperactive hive mind require a back and forth digital message conversation and you defer that conversation into another medium where it will not generate digital messages.

office hours are an example of this. So if you have a quick question, instead of just shooting me an email and we start a back and forth exchange about this thing, you wait till my next office hours. You're deferring the conversation to another time where it will happen without unscheduled messages being generated that require responses.

Another example of deferral is what you already mentioned, which is calendar tools. So again, now you're taking what would have been a back and forth conversation about when are we going to meet tomorrow. and you defer it to a tool. So instead of going back and forth, you go to a tool and select a time on that calendar. Right off the bat, I want to emphasize that we are trying to optimize

how many unscheduled messages require responses. That's it. I don't care if an alternative workflow takes more time. I don't care if it's more of a pain. I don't care if it required a lot of overhead to get set up. Those are not the metrics that I think you should be optimizing. What you should be optimizing is minimizing unscheduled messages that require you to respond. So yes, it is a pain that you now have to wait until tomorrow afternoon when my next office hours are to talk to me.

Yes, that's a pain, but I'm not trying to minimize pain. I'm trying to minimize unscheduled messages. And if you just started that conversation with emails, it's going to generate a lot of unscheduled messages. I know it's annoying when someone sends you to a calendar link. You have that annoying hierarchical part of your social brain, say, do they think they're better than me? and there's a little bit of bad social capital loss there. I don't care. I'm not optimizing for that.

I'm optimizing for not having to do seven back and forth messages about when we're going to meet. So I just want to use those first two examples to nail home this point. Unscheduled messages that require responses are the productivity poison. Be willing to do almost any other pain if it allows you to avoid that poison.

All right, category number two of these alternative workflows is automation. So this is where this thing we do Has the same steps happening in the same orders Again and again If there's that much structure and a task Just figure out in advance your rules For how this thing execute

So that we don't have to send each other messages The example I usually give is Here's a report that we have to produce every week Here's how we're going to do it Monday morning I gather all the numbers Out of the relevant dashboards I write a draft of that report I put it in a Google Docs and a shared folder that you know about.

It will be there by Close a Business Monday. That's what I agree to. You then have all day Tuesday in the morning to look at it, make additions, make changes. I have office hours at 2 o'clock on Tuesdays. So if there's any questions that are complicated, come to my office hours and we can figure it out together. I then have told the designer that what he sees in that Google Doc at Close a Business Tuesday is our final version. he takes that at some point Wednesday, puts it into the nice PDF format,

uploads it into the content management system so that it will show up where it needs to be by the end of the day on Wednesday. We make that agreement together once. It's a pain, it's annoying, takes an afternoon. But now that we've made that agreement, this report will be produced week after week with zero unscheduled messages

that require response. And that's all I care about. All right, final category of these alternative workflows is what I think I usually call it, externalization. So you take the information and conversations about a project out of digital communication tools and put them somewhere else. Most of these examples use something like a task board. Trello, Asana, flow, a lot of these things. But the task relevant to a given project are in a shared board where everyone can see it. They don't exist in chat transcripts in Slack. They

don't exist spread out among random messages in your crowded inbox. They are isolated and clear with all of the associated material attached to them in some sort of system like a taskboard where it's clear and conversation about where are we where do we need to go who's working on what next and what do they need you externalize that into let's say a well-structured status meeting that happens at certain times so those are three big categories that can each generate dozens of specific alternative workflows but again they all share that same property How do we reduce the number of times I have to keep checking an inbox until I see an unscheduled message that requires my response? If you were minimizing that, you are maximizing how effective you're going to be in almost any knowledge work job.

For our next call, we are going to geek out on Trello. Hello, my name is Dave Curlin. I'm a real estate salesperson. My question is in regard to the capture and review parts of your productivity system. I know you use Trello and I personally have adopted using it myself, but as a number of Trello cards get bigger and bigger, the list gets longer, I find it difficult to effectively look at them and make decisions about what to do and not to do. You have alluded to David Allen's system in the past and I'm familiar with his method of capturing things in context categories.

Is there a reason you don't create more columns in Trello and use this method? It seems like it would be a more efficient way to review these tasks. when doing daily and weekly planning and dealing with a really big list of possible activities and projects. Love your podcast. It's been so helpful. And the time blocking method has helped me immensely. Thanks. So I would do with Trello with card overload, three things. One, more boards. So I'm a big believer in different boards for different roles. You can even have different boards for different projects if it's a major project, but there's something about having a fixed and specific context for the task you're looking at that actually makes it much easier to grok

what's on your plate. And so to have a role for teaching, to have a role for research, to have a role for writing, to have a role for media stuff like podcasting, to have a role for a particular heavy service road, like I'm the director of graduate studies. All those can be different boards. So that helps. Two is more columns. I think it's it's fine if you want more columns. I don't like there to be too many because I don't want to fiddle too much. I prefer sort of generic columns things can go into. I've talked about this before on the show. I don't always do a column for each project, for example, but maybe I will if it's a big project that has a lot of tasks. So you can use more columns if that helps. If you have 30

columns, you're going to have a different problem. But if you want to go to seven columns instead of four and that makes a big difference, fine. Third, and this goes against Allen orthodoxy, but I do it, is consolidate more on the individual cards. So a Trello card can actually capture a lot of information. If you're in an Allen mindset by contrast, every item in your list is a very specific action that requires no further thinking. You can just execute that action.

I will often have a card that maybe on the back has a 10-element action list. and three of those things are already crossed out. So the card is just saying, whatever it is, working on getting podcast, you know, uploaded to all the relevant platforms, registered with the relevant platforms. That might be a card. Now, on the back, there might be 10 different platforms listed, and in the notes section, I'm beginning to capture notes about the URL and the instructions for doing it for each of those platforms.

And maybe some of those platforms I've already done, and some of them are still exposed and all of that gets visually compressed to a single card. And I know what that means when I see it during a review. Like, oh, yeah, I'm working on that. Maybe I should put aside some time to get a couple more of those done. So that really, I think, makes your deck a lot more shallow when a lot of things can get consolidated into a single card. So I would do those three things.

If you're still overloaded, that might be another issue. Then maybe you're doing way too many things. And there's a whole essentialism conversation to have. go see Greg McEwen's book essentialism for more on that. But until then, do those three things. More boards, more columns, more on the back of each individual card. That makes a big difference. I think we have time for one more call.

For our last call, for old time's sake, let's do one coming from a student. Hi, call. This is Omar listening from Taiwan. I am a current undergraduate international student doing electrical engineering here in Taiwan. I have read your book How to Become a Straight A Student, but I have found that some tactics do not really apply to me here because my lecturers are in full Chinese. Therefore, for example, I cannot rely on lectures to learn. I need to find other resources to be able to get the same material that I am required to understand. My question is, how could I use or modify your tactics in your book, how to become a straight-A student to apply for me?

Or more generally, how could I become better at becoming a straight-A student? Thank you. The general idea from which you get that entire book is a phrase that I used to call on my blog, study like Darwin. it. This was the motivating philosophy that led to all of the study habits that you see and how to become a straight A student. And it is a philosophy in which you say, I want to systematically experiment with adapt and improve how I study. I refuse to treat study as a useful verb on its own. I refuse to just do what comes naturally and assume that's the right way to prepare and assume that the only knob I have to turn to control results. is the amount of time I spend. I'm going to see this as a fitness landscape of possible strategies that I can systematically explore.

So what that means is, A, specificity, this is how I am going to try right now for the next part of my semester to take notes and prepare for exams, very specifically. Then two, how did it work? After the exam is over, after the semester is over. What worked, what didn't it? What was a waste of time in what I was doing? It just felt like friction and overhead I don't need. What would have been more effective?

What should I do more of next time? So you adapt. You conduct what I used to call a post-exam post-mortem. Those two things. Be incredibly specific. This is my metaphorical genotype for my study strategies right now. And then be very ruthless in adaptation. Okay, these are the variations, the descendants that are going to survive and those that don't.

And now I have a modified improved genotype. let me repeat, that sort of evolutionary process of being specific, adapt, be specific, adapt. What you will end up with is a fantastically evolved, optimized strategy for exactly whatever the idiosyncratic nature is of your particular situation. And so experiment. I don't know what's going to be best in your situation. If you can't understand there's an issue with the lectures, they're being delivered in Chinese, maybe you can't follow them, then you're going to try things. Maybe what you try is getting the topic list. Okay, here's all the topics covered.

And then you have two or three resources that are the best resources for the particular material that you're covering. And you go through and you capture notes from those or review or one sample project problem first subject. And then you do that sample problem. And now you have notes. I don't know how you want to do it, but be specific. And then see after the fact how well did it work.

What's my grade? How much time did this take? What was wasted? What was good? How could I make this better next time around? I'm telling you, you will evolve quickly. This is what I did.

This is what I did. The story you've read it is at the front of how to become a straight-day student, but for those who don't know it, my freshman year in college, I was fine but not great as a student. I just did whatever seemed natural like everyone else was doing. I'm not great at all-nighter, so that didn't help. But I just did the normal student thing.

Then at the beginning of my sophomore quarter, my sophomore fall quarter, I said, you know what? I'm going to get more serious about this. I am going to experiment with what works and what doesn't and then evolve my study habits based on that feedback. The results were immediate and profound. I went on to get a 4-0 in every quarter from my sophomore fall until my senior spring in which finally that street got broken because I had A-A-minus.

That is 1-A-minus in three years at an Ivy League school. I graduated in the top 2% of my class at Dartmouth, one of the highest EPAs in the class. And I did this while studying by the end of my Dartmouth experience significantly less than anyone else I knew. It was because of the amazing effectiveness of applying a Darwinian natural selection style evolution to how I studied.

And I ended up with a perfectly suited suite of study habits, approaches to preparing for exams, approaches to papers, and approaches to problem sets that worked fantastic. well for me and for what I'm doing. How to Become a Straight A Student has a lot of those systems that were evolved in similar ways by me and other students, but the main thing is they were evolved. So apply that general mindset to your particular situation there in Taiwan. I'm telling you in one to two semesters, you are going to be a fantastic student and the time required is going to seem embarrassingly small compared to what you're seeing around you and all the work you see your friends doing.

All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who called in with their questions. But at calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you, too, can leave me a call for me to answer on air. We'll be back next week with the new episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.