Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 155: Is Your Productivity System Leaking?

Episode Date: December 13, 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: Is your productivity system leaking? [6:01]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- How do I accomplish big projects in small amounts daily effort? [12:50]- How do I make more money as I become more efficient? [17:28]- What’s the best way to add structure to chaotic non-profit? [21:22]- How do I build an autopilot schedule for unpredictable work? [27:10]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- How do I modify your student advice for a part-time student? [33:32]- How do I filter news? [40:31]- Where should start in planning for the future? [43:22]- Why does the FIRE movement get so much attention? [47:19]- How do I convince myself to execute my plans? [53:41]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.

This podcast is sponsored by Chili Sleep. Science tells us that the best way to achieve and maintain consistent deep sleep is by lowering your core body temperature. That temperature-controlled sleep will restore testosterone levels, repair muscles after a hard day work, even improve cognitive function. I don't need, however, science to tell me this because I am a hot sleeper and therefore I know from first, hand experience how much better I feel when I can actually have it be cool when I'm sleeping. This is why I am so excited about chili sleep. They have luxury mattress pads that are hydro-powered and temperature controlled. You can put these on your existing mattress and precisely control its temperature.

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Episode 155. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my producer Jesse. Jesse, I have some good news about today's episode. Fire away. I am back to having a good old-fashioned deep dive to. open things up with. And when I say old-fashioned, I mean hardcore productivity. Let's get in the weeds and fix up things that are broken with your productivity system. I just had an itch to get back to the basics a little bit. So I have one of those coming up. Yes, sir. That's great.

I go through a lot of your questions, you know, to get ready for the episodes each week and people ask about that stuff. So I'm looking forward to it as well. I get a little fired up in it. So I'll just put a warning out. When I was recording it, I recorded it last night. I was feeling a little bit feisty about this topic. I get fired up about to-do list and task capture and organizations in a way that I think, you know, a sports fan

gets fired up for their team making the playoffs. It's a really sad thing. I was at a restaurant the other day and at the bar there was somebody with a notebook and they were time blocking and I had another friend there. I'm like, he's time blocking. Was it a time block

planner? It was not. And I asked him a couple questions to get into if he followed your stuff, but I don't want to dig too deep, so I was just talking to my buddy who is a fan and listens to the podcast and we were both. And that man was Bill Gates.

The correct thing that Jesse was to walk up and knock that notebook to the ground and said, I cannot in good conscience allow you to use that garbage. One second further, you need to go to timeblockplanter.com to find out today,

about the Cal Newport officially branded time block planner. In exactly those words. I'll do that next time. That's how people talk. Yeah. All right, one question for you before we get going. We're December 10th when we're recording this. So we're a fair way into the holiday season, but there's a fair bit left.

Should we decorate the Deep Work HQ? Yeah. I'm thinking the hardware store next store, they've got these mini trees and maybe some lights. By the way, that's an unbelievable hardware store It goes on and on and on It's like you're walking into the abyss It's awesome Shout out the Ace Hardware in Tacoma Park

You know what that building used to be In the 1950s It was a car dealership I guess that makes sense Because it's so the cars would be in the back And it's like Because even when you park in the lot behind it You can see how deep the building goes

Yeah Just like wow, there's a lot of stuff in that store There's a lot of stuff that's great You don't have a proper small town unless it has a really functional hardware store. That's that. You need some sort of supermarket or place to get food. You need a place to a hardware store that's good.

You need a good option for coffee and like a good option for booze. If you have those things, that's the core. I think that makes up a good small town. So I think Tacoma Park has what it needs. Agreed. There's some good little pizza shops that looks like around too. Some good pizza shops. Yeah.

So, okay, I think we're going to do it. All right. So we're going to decorate the Deep Work HQ. It's been an ambitialial. of mine. I didn't do it last year. It seemed like it would have been sad because I was alone here, you know, and I don't know. It just seemed like the sad scene in the Charlie Brown Christmas. If I had a little tree and I was just here by myself and it was sort of decorated and my tears would be dropping into eggnog or something like that. But now we have people here. You're here. We have different people coming in and out. I have a computer science colleague coming in a couple of days to do some work at the whiteboard. We've got some guest scheduled to come in. So, We finally have an excuse, I think, to actually decorate the HQ. So I'm excited about that. Good stuff.

You'll be all ready to do your next TikTok video and share it with your audience. Exactly. Should I wear a Santa hat for the videos too? Probably. Yeah, I think probably. I'm going to wear a sand, dancing Santa productivity. Oh, my. All right.

Well, anyways, let's roll that deep dive. The topic of today's deep dive is the following question. Is your productivity system leaking? The reason why this question is on my mind is because just last week, I realized that in my own life, the answer to that question was yes. Now, what does that look like for me? Two things. The first sign of leaking is that I begin to use my email inbox as a place for reminders and notes. If there's something important coming up, I will send an email to myself.

don't forget the interview. Don't forget the meeting at 3. I would email that to myself. I would also start to put notes into my inbox. Let's say I was working on a New Yorker piece and I had some insights about how the piece could be structured. Where would I put those when my system is leaking into an email and send it to myself? Why? Because I know I have to look at my email inbox every day so it gave me some comfort those items, be them a reminder or information. be forgotten. The other thing I would start to do when my productivity system is leaking is leave physical notes.

I would put them most commonly by my bathroom mirror. Let me just put this reminder. I got a really important television taping tomorrow. Let me write it down and put it by my mirror where I will for sure see it when I'm brushing my teeth the next morning. To me, those are signs that my system is leaking. Why? Because it means I do not trust my system.

I do not trust my system to keep track of what is going on, what I'm thinking, my ideas, and be there for when I need them. Now, it is easy to fall into the state. The thing that pushes you into the state is what pushed me into the state recently, which is overload. I was going to a busy period. It's the end of the semester, traditionally a busy period for professors. I'm involved in some really interesting committees right now at Georgetown, but we had a lot of work going on. and there's a lot of other work happening in my life outside of Georgetown, my writing life, and it added up to be a little bit too much.

So I began to cheat a little bit. I'm not going to do the shutdown. I'm not going to look at my weekly plan in the morning. I might wait until Tuesday to build my weekly plan, and I'll do it haphazardly without actually doing pure multiscale. Let's look at the strategic plan, which is inspired by my value plan. Let me just jot down some notes. I began to wing it.

And when you're winging it, even if it's just a little bit, even if it's just 20% of your time, you no longer trust that a task can go into your task system and you'll see it, that an important event will go into your calendar, you'll definitely see it. That ideas will be captured an idea system where you will then review them as needed. You no longer trust that and you begin using these heuristics. And once you start using the heuristics, your system is leaking. And it was causing me a lot of stress and it will cause you a lot of stress too. If you find yourself trying to put reminders and notes and information in places where you can't possibly miss it, that means you're missing out on an actual structured system. So what I did is I put aside an hour.

It only took me an hour, but it was a very critical hour. And this was recently to say, no, I am plugging those leaks. I got all of those notes out of my inbox and said, let me go back to my commitment of every morning, first thing I do is I look at my weekly, plan and I look at my calendar and I look at my capture notebook and this was critical. I bought a brand new capture notebook. This is where I write down anything on my mind. I don't send myself an email.

I write it down on this notebook. It follows me wherever I go in the day. I process that all in the morning. Then I build my time block plan for the day. When I do my shutdown at the end of the day, I process anything else that has fallen onto that notebook. I look at my plan. I make sure that I'm on track for it.

I commit it again that when I, build my weekly plan, I'm going to look at everything in my Trello task list. And I got those Trello task lists completely back up the speed. And when I build my weekly plan, I'm going to look at my strategic plans, my semester plans, to make sure that those ideas for the next three months really get reflected in what I'm doing each week. And I introduced a new metric to track, to track in the metric tracking space in my time block planner, SD for shutdown times two. I meant I did the shutdown in the morning. I actually looked at things.

And in the evening, when my workday was done, I looked at things. And finally, I said, I am prepared for bad things to happen. I am prepared to miss the important TV interview, to forget the meeting, to have that brilliant idea that's lost. I don't think it's going to happen, but I'm willing for that to happen so that I can stick within my existing productivity systems that prove to myself they work. You know what?

That took an hour. I plugged the leaks and everything is better. And now I'm back to my systems working the way they're supposed to work. And when the systems work the way you're supposed to work, the difference between that and being in a state of a leaky system in terms of your anxiety and in terms of your stress is 5X. It is a huge difference. I know it seems in the moment when you're running late to get this thing done,

that's overdue and there's three other things you can't do to say I'm going to stop and do a formal shutdown and put that in the Trello and write that down on my Capture Notebook and process those things or I'm going to take 30 minutes on Monday morning and going to do this weekly plan right in the moment it seems like a waste your time is limited why waste that time but it makes all the difference so as we enter this new year period and you're reflecting back on the year so far if you find that your productivity system is leaking that you do not trust your system to keep track of what needs to be done. You do not trust your system to keep track of the ideas that are critical.

Plug the leaks. Remind yourself what the system's supposed to be. Write it down. Have a metric you track every day to say, did I stick to the new system? Get back to it. The effort is worth it. It seems like more time in the moment. But the positive impact in the big picture is massive. I'm someone who writes and thinks about productivity for a career and I have to plug

leaks probably once every three or four months. I'd do this for a living. So you should be doing the same. Step one is creating a productivity system. Step two through 70 is tuning it up again and again and again. That's just the way it works and it's an effort worth making. All right. Let's move on to some questions.

We will start as always with some queries about deep work. Our first comes from Richard. Richard asks, How can I find peace to work on long-term projects only for a short time each day? As he elaborates, I work on an important and non-urgent project with full focus for one hour each morning

before I walk my dog. This approach has helped me make significant progress on several different projects. However, I often become stressed about the sheer amount of work left to complete in the project and don't have the patience to stick to the plan. Well, Richard, I am a big believer in the slow but steady approach when we're talking about important but non-urgent projects.

So there's not a boss that needs this thing right away. It's not at the key intersection of your business thriving or folding, something that take your time. You're writing the novel. No one is expecting it next week. So might as well write a little bit each day. I'm a big fan of that that falls under my rubric of slow productivity. So one of the big ideas in my slow productivity philosophy is that you should shift your focus, your time scale in which you're focusing away from days and weeks and towards months and years. That is, instead of asking, what did I accomplish over the last few days or weeks, you said, what do I accomplish?

What did I accomplish over the last six months over the last two years? that is a really cool scale in which to produce big things because you can produce things at a very human pace. When you are working to have a big project done in a year, you can have a two-week period in there where you're not doing much. You can have a two-week period where you're doing a lot. You can have a vacation where you're really crunching away on it and then a three-day period where you're at a conference and doing nothing on it.

You get the seasonality. You're able to ebb and flow your energy in ways that makes sense for your current circumstances. It's a great scale at which to get worked on, and that's the scale you're working. So all of that is preamble to say, I like what you're doing. I will give you two potential adjustments. One, you might consider 90 minutes versus 60. That sounds like a small thing, but 60 is really on the border of getting a reasonable return on your time investment because you're probably losing up to 15 minutes context switching fully into what you're working on.

So now that's really leaving you with only 45 minutes where you're at full power. There's also a tail effect at the end of work periods where you're beginning to wrap up what you're doing, clean up loose ends, make sure you've captured loose thoughts. So that's not actually peak production time. So if we take five to ten minutes for that tail off period at the end of each work session, we put those together. You now have 20 to 25 minutes that you're not just peak producing. So if you're only working for an hour, you're maybe only going to be able to, getting 30 to 40 minutes of production, that is not a lot.

Now, if you do 90 minutes, the way I think about it is that you're going to get at least a solid hour of full high-end production, but that's a small enough amount of time that you could probably do it even on low energy days or days where you're a little bit sick. So that would be one thing I would say, start a little earlier, do 90 minutes. And then the second thing I would say is throw in dashes. And I mean dash like a sprint. when you get to a milestone looming, you know, I could finish the final draft of the final chapter

and have something I could send to someone to look at. You see that thing looming, an important milestone. Make a much harder sprint at that point. All right, I'm going to take Friday off from work for the next two weeks. I'm going to go to the cabin. I'm going to start work at 10 a.m. and get three hours a day, and I'm going to go for it and push through to milestones. That typically is the back and forth rhythm I like for important.

but non-urgent projects. The good 90 minutes, most days, making progress, making progress, then a really hard push when you get to a milestone. You sometimes need those hard pushes to get the final hard thing done so you don't spin your wheels.

Do those two things and I'm fine. I'm fine with what you're doing here. Take on the slow productivity mindset. It's months and years is a scale at which you care about production, not days and weeks. Really cool things you're proud of will get done.

That's a completely reasonable pace. So keep at what you're doing. do those adjustments but otherwise put in those hours again and again and again diligently. You'll look up one day and say, huh, I produce something pretty cool. All right. Our next question is from Vinny. Vinny asks, how should I adjust my approach to hourly billing after becoming mini-fold more efficient after instituting deep work? He elaborates.

ideally freelance projects would be either flat fee based or an appropriate rate per hour. He says, I don't always however have this ideal situation. Take this contrived example. I'm billing $100 an hour with an existing client working six hours a day for $600 after becoming a proficient deep worker and get the same amount of work done in two hours. Explaining this to an existing client would be tough. Would it be reasonable to continue billing for six hours after working two in an environment

where rates can't be raised and clients won't pay by value. Well, no, Vinnie, you can't bill for hours that you didn't actually work. That's not going to be the solution. The two things you said that can't happen are ultimately the two things you need to happen. So you may need different clients. You may need a different structure to your work. But the traditional way you deal with getting better at your work is you raise your rates or you work less.

That is the economic levers you have. So if you become a more proficient deep worker, it's not just that you get work done quicker, you're probably doing it at a higher level of quality. So the standard approach there is keep raising the rates you charge, and now for less and less work you're making the same amount of money, or you switch to the value-based billing that you talked about here, and you can double or triple the amount of clients that you're servicing

in the same amount of time. Those are the two options you have. Those are the two classic options as you get better at a freelancer. I'm going to point you towards a book that I talk about a lot on this show. Company of One by Paul Jarvis. He really gets into this.

He really gets into if you have a business that's basically just you. And you're not really looking to grow this into some sort of massive concern with tons of employees that you one day sell for tens of millions of dollars. What's the right thing to do?

and he really gets into exactly these issues. How do you get more from your time? How do you get paid more for your time? How do you figure out that balance of how much you want to work and don't want to work? How do you figure out, should I take my increasing skill and efficiency to work less hours?

Or should I take my increasing skill and efficiency to make more money for the hours they work? He really gets into those questions. It's the questions you should be asking now. My only advice here is don't be so quick to say, I can't raise my rates. I can't switch to a value-based approach. I think the reality here is that you have an existing client that's a pain and doesn't like those type of things.

Think beyond that client. Think about the future clients you could sell. Think about the future services you could sell. Think about just being super clear. This is how I work. This is how I do it. Take it or leave it. I'll give you one more book that gets into that latter bit as long as we're talking books.

Ginny Blake has a new book coming out called Free Time. I'm actually I interviewed Jenny Blake. There's going to be an interview with her on this podcast. has soon. In that conversation, which is coming out soon, and in her book, which is available now for pre-order, but comes out in the winter, she also gets into how she had to radically change her agreement with her clients. I don't do this anymore.

And this is how it works. Very scary. You assume that everyone's going to run away and that you're going to be homeless within six or seven days. Doesn't usually happen. If you know what you're doing, if you know what you're about, if you're delivering good work, you have more leverage. We've got to get your confidence up to apply this leverage.

at those two books and think, how can I actually take advantage of my increased efficiency and effectiveness? All right. We have a question now from Martin. Martin asks, what is the best way to start proper organizational structure in a nonprofit that has been running for 20 years with little such structure? He elaborates, we are a faith-based nonprofit. it. All the staff are super passionate about the mission.

They have a budget, I'm paraphrasing here, they have a budget of around $3 million. It's all donations, but they have a lot of challenges, donor retention, etc. A challenge with the implementation of Newportonian ideas, good use of the term Newportonian, I always appreciate that, is that we operate in a 7 to 11 hour time difference from our donors. So much of our communication happens late or in the middle of the night. I came across your work a few months ago from your interview with Brett McKay on the art of manliness. And from then on I've been hooked. We're at a critical junction of our activities with a huge breakthrough on the way.

I feel that you are having sent. Thank you so much for making this role to a better place. All right. So, I mean, what it sounds like here is that you were a very small organization that was just rock and rolling. We're on email. We're on Slack. People want to give donations to us. Let's get it.

Let's get those donations out. We'll figure things out on the fly. And you are now big enough and it's now complicated enough that this is not working. you want to structure these efforts. This is where I think a process-oriented mindset is going to be your savior. And I'm realizing now that maybe that is an inopportune choice of words, given that you're a faith-based nonprofit, but you know what I mean. So by process-based approach, it's time, I think, for you to write down,

here are the things we as a small organization do on a regular basis. These are the things that we come back to again and again that have to be executed in order for us to serve our mission. There's donor outreach, there's donor management, there's fund distribution, there's accounting of the funds, there's HR type various HR related tasks for the people involved in the organization, etc. Things that happen again and again.

As an organization, you need to write these all down. Here they are. This is what we are, a group of people that do these things again and again. then you have to ask how do we implement each of these things what are the steps where does the information go when and how do we talk about these things what is our standard operating procedure for each of these processes that we do again and again and makes up what we do as an organization it's once you get specific that you can get optimal if you're just rock and rolling it's very hard to optimize

that just throw out randomly some ideas such as oh maybe we should should, maybe we should have different hours or we should use Trello or what have you. None of that's going to work very well if it's just ad hoc back and forth. Let's just go after it, right? But once you've said we do X, Y, and Z, what's the way that we want to implement X? Once the way we want to implement Y, that's where real optimization can come in. This is where you can begin identifying information systems that you're going to use. This is where you can put in the place protocols.

Like, okay, all the potential clients have a summary brief. brief that's written here and goes into this folder. And we have a meeting on Friday mornings. And that's where we go through all of the new ones and update their status and assign them to different outreach people. And over here on this Trello board is where we keep track of the current status of each of the people that we've done outreach to. We can move them from column to column as they advance through our approaches. And it's Friday morning. We check in on all this.

And this is what we do during the week is that type of outreach. And here's how we communicate with our donors. We send them these letters once a week that has these. various information and updates so we don't have to just call them in the middle of the night, etc, etc. You begin to work out how do we want to do this. And that's where you can do the trade-offs. Like this might be a little bit less convenient, but it means that we avoid this pain.

This is what the donor really wants so we could do even better than we have been doing. If they really want updates, why don't we send them a daily digest? You can begin to do these types of balancing. That's the mindset. That's the mindset for starting to structure your organization and figuring out a way to do what you do better, but also to avoid the descent into a hellish flurry of just frenetic back and forth in chaos. You are at that precipice.

You're getting big enough. There's enough going on that you could fall into this becoming a stress generation machine. So now is the time to take that process-centric approach. And you can make this a well-oiled machine that serves the mission, serves you as the employees of it in a way that it's a sustainable, meaningful job to have

and does so in a way that's very intentional. So I'm glad you're asking this question right now. I think you probably have a lot of room for improvement that's going to happen really fast once you start having these conversations. If you want books, I would point you towards a world without email. My latest book, you're going to get a lot of ideas there about communication structure. Also, those two books I mentioned earlier in the show, Company of One by Paul Jarvis and Jenny Blake's Free Time.

Those both have excellent sections in it about. system-oriented thinking, automating your work. One more book I'll recommend is Sam Carpenter's work to system. It's an underground classic about building out standard operating procedures

for especially very repeatable, automatable part of your work, which I think you probably have, processing donations, etc. Look at that book as well. It really gets into building these really effective standard operating procedures

so you can work on your business not in it. Look at those books. There's a lot of wisdom here. I think you're on your way to a much better setup for your organization. All right, let's do one more question here. This one comes from David. David asks, how do you deal with unpredictable autopilot schedules?

He elaborates, I'm a graduate student in mechanical engineering. Sometimes my professors do not post or assign homework on the same time every week, which gets in the way of my attempts to automate my coursework so I can focus on research. How can I construct an autopilot schedule that takes into account the unreliabilities of my professors? Well, David, first of all, you have plenty of time because you're a graduate student. And when you're a graduate student, you feel like it's the hardest thing that has ever happened. And as soon as you graduate from being a graduate student, you have any type of real job, you look back and say, that is the easiest possible job you can have. So everything seems hard

while you're there, but you have a ton of autonomy and a ton of time. So I'm not too worried. I'm not too worried about your situation here. This is what I would suggest. Have two core blocks every day and these get split between research and coursework and you can make assignment changes as needed throughout the week.

So maybe if you don't get your homework till Tuesday you're going to take one of these two blocks on Wednesday and one of the two blocks on Thursday to do the homework. And if another week you get assigned to work at the end of day Friday, then maybe you're taking the two blocks on Monday and this is

all being done with coursework. So just make a just in time binding of work type to the predetermined blocks. But the key thing is these predetermined blocks happen every day. I do this in the morning. Maybe do a block in the morning. Then I go exercise and do some other things. And then I do a block in the afternoon.

And here is where I go to do them. And here is the coffee I bring and it's automated. I don't even have to think about it. Most of those blocks are me doing research. Some of them are me working on coursework. Which is which? Well, it depends on when these devious unreliable professors decide they are going to assign them. And we are a devious

bunch. We try our hardest to make your life hard. But I think in this case, you are going to win by doing just in time binding on your autopilot schedules. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Now, if you are using the internet in public without a VPN, you are tempting fate. This is what happens when you connect to that hotspot at a coffee shop or an airport. Your computer or phone or tablet is sending little messages to the website you want to talk to in bundles called packets. Anyone else connected to that same hotspot can see those packets you're sending. They can see what website you're talking to, what you're sending to that website.

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Because I travel for conferences, I travel for computer science, I travel for book tours, and there's almost always an ExpressVPN server geographically nearby I can connect to and get that Lightning's fast secure connection. So secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash deep. That's EXPR-E-S-V-S-V-N dot com slash deep. And you can get an extra three months free. But to get that, you need to go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. This show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life.

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Go to Optimize.combe today and create your free account. All right. And with that, let's move on now to some questions. questions about the deep life. We'll start with a question from Johnny. Johnny asks, is there anything you'd add to how to be a straight-A student for someone doing a part-time evening class postgraduate degree? Well, Johnny, I'll point out that you are actually probably in the majority of readers of that

book of mine, how to become a straight-A student, in that as far as I can tell, the biggest audience for that book are non-traditional college students. By non-traditional, I mean not doing four-year residential college. There's a lot of part-time college, returning to college later in life, coming to college on the GI Bill, first-generation students. So there's a real interesting and diverse pool of people who come to that book that are all unified by this willingness to say, this is a challenge. I want to do well in this challenge. I'm looking for advice. Traditional four-year, 19-year-old residential college students aren't usually so interested in advice. As I've talked about before, college for them is also serving all these other roles.

It's a social experience. It's a developmental experience as they try to emerge into their adult situations. And they're not really thinking about how do I structure my studying. But non-traditional students say, let's get after it. Look, I'm paying money to take these courses. I want to get good grades. I want to return my investment. How do I study? Let's go. So these are my people, you are my people. All right, so here's what I would recommend to keep in mind from that book, if you're doing a degree part-time. And in your elaboration, you know that your job's pretty hard.

So it's part-time, it's at night, you're exhausted. A few things I'd keep in mind. One, slow down. To the extent possible, make sure you're not overloading the number of courses or the difficulty of courses that you're taking at once. it's real easy as you're laying out your plan for how you're going to get this degree to say let's just pile it on. Let's pile it on and just power through this thing. And it's going to be so impressive.

Our energy to get this degree will push us through. Your energy to get the degree will not push you through when you're working long shifts and you're trying to do these courses at night. So design a course schedule to the degree that's possible. That is reasonable. The number one thing you can do. I used to call this on my blog back when I was giving student advice. I would say avoid heart attack semesters. Because to me, a heart attack semester is where it is an unforced error.

You didn't have to, but you chose to build up a collection of courses that is uniquely difficult. Eight out of ten of the issues I would hear from students who were drowning in their work were avoidable if they had just had a more reasonable course load. So that's the first thing I want to emphasize. Two, you want to automate to the degree possible. here is the work that is generated on a regular basis from each of my courses. This is when I do each of these things of work and where I do it. The reading for this class happens on Tuesday nights and I do it here. I don't come straight home from work.

I go to the library that's down the street from my house. 90 minutes is enough time to get that reading done. I work on my lab reports first thing early Saturday morning before my kids' sports practices happen. Figure out to the extent possible when and where, all of the regularly occurring work happened so that you do not have to go through this thought process every day when you're tired and coming home from work, what should I do? Should I work on something? So I would suggest that if you're taking your classes at night, which it sounds like you are, consider to the extent possible connecting these work blocks to those classes. As long as you're

already in the cognitive mindset of scholarship, ride that wave. I do the class, go right from the class to the library on campus. Let's go. I get the work done right there. While the information is still fresh in my brain, that's often quite efficient. Three, really have to keep in mind the core formula from that book, which says when it comes to academic work, the total quantity of work produced is the product of the time spent and the intensity of your focus during that time. if your time is limited, the biggest knob you have to turn to get the same amount of work done in less time

is that intensity of focus. So when you're going to work, you go to a place to work and you've got a laser beam it. You cannot, in your situation where you have limited time and mental energy, you cannot, cannot, cannot do your schoolwork with a phone with you. You cannot, cannot, cannot do your schoolwork while you're also jumping over to check MLB trade rumors.

You cannot be doing this back and forth context shift. You cannot be texting with people. Everyone in your life needs to know that during your schoolwork blocks, it is a black hole. You can't get through to Johnny unless you call the emergency number. He has his do not disturb, cranked up to 11. He's very hard to get in touch with. If you can really push that intensity of focus high, you are going to greatly reduce the time required. And the final piece of advice I'm going to give is care about how you actually do the work, banish the word study, banish the word read.

from your vocabulary, those are way too generic, those are way too ambiguous. You're preparing for a test, how are you preparing for the test? And why are you doing it that way? Be incredibly specific. I'm putting this on index cards. I'm going to review the index cards in this way. And here's what I, the criteria I have to get to before I consider myself done. Be incredibly specific about how you're going to do your work. I'm not just going to quote unquote read. I'm going to take this chapter and here's how I'm going to take the information and what format I'm going to put it to, how I'm going to capture the relevant facts into a notebook and I'm going to capture them in a format that makes it as easy as possible

to shift from there to studying. Get specific. And then when you are done with a test or a major assignment, do a post-mortem. What worked with my systems? What was a waste of time? What hurt? And upgrade. Always be upgrading and evolving those systems. Real specificity. If you do those four things, if you keep your semesters reasonable, if you try to automate when and where the work gets done, if you pump up that intensity, your phone is in another zip code when you're working on your schoolwork, and if you're incredibly focused on how you do the work and trying to improve those methods. I tell people sometimes, by the way, your goal should be to write a book on how to study when you're done with college, so that you're constantly thinking from the standpoint

of what works and what does it. If you do those four things, you're going to ace it. You're going to ace these courses. It's not going to be that bad. I am not just making this up. Again, I hear from reader after reader who in similar situations and they often come back with the response, which was this was a lot easier than I thought it was. I'm getting better grades in these younger kids and these classes and I'm working a lot less. Put these things into action, Johnny. I think you're going to do great. All right. Let's move on to a question now from Andre. Andre says, how do I filter the noise of morning news such as the stock market or politics and quickly get back into deep work without missing anything important? Here's how you filter. You don't look at it at all,

Andre. If you're a hedge fund manager or you work on the staff of the president, okay, you need to be up to speed first thing in the morning on the stock market and politics. If you are not either of those things, we'll be okay, Andre, without you being up to speed and having your take. There is not going to be some crisis that happens where they say, oh, my God, I hope Andre is on this because, you know, Amacron is coming to the stock park. moving, it's okay. You can focus on things that are going on in your life that really do require

your attention and significantly reduce the amount of time and energy you invest in news. And something I've been saying recently, and this is very specific to our current moment. I think we are in a current moment now where most of us should be and should not feel bad about doing a massive reduction in our news consumption. You know, I know an informed populace is important. This is not a general piece of advice. I don't think in general you should completely be disconnected from the world and the world of news, but I think in this current moment you should.

There is a mental health imperative that's going on right now. The news will degrade your energy. It will degrade your focus. If you're already prone to anxiety, it's just going to pump jet fuel into that anxiety. And to what end? you are not on the front line, most of you setting policy for COVID. You were not on the front line trying to get bills passed in Congress. You were not on the front line of the wildfire trying to get those fires put out.

We probably need to take a bit of a breather from this period we're coming out of of incredibly intense news. So go to extremely minimal news consumption. And that's what I would recommend. What that means can be different for different people. I get a print version of the Washington Post. I glance at it most days. That's basically my news. And then my readers or listeners will send me articles that are relevant to specific things I write or think about.

And that's interesting and that's cool. Like, hey, look at this interesting study that came out about Facebook or something like that. But I'm very much out of the news right now. And it's been great for me. And I feel a lot better. And so this is a good excuse to give that advice to everyone else. We need to take a breather from news. and again, the world will be okay temporarily

without us being completely up to speed. All right, let's move on to a question from Philip. Philip asked, where should I start with long-term planning? He elaborates, I admire your work a lot. Your advice has been useful. And on the short-to-medium term, he thinks he's doing well, but when it comes to longer-term planning on the scale of years, it is, quote, quite daunting to me,

and I have no idea where to begin, in quote. So, Philip, I don't know that I would recommend that you have detailed plans on the scale of years. The short-to-medium term you talk about, I think is the sweet spot, where you have some vision to the future. You're out of the short-term context of just reactivity, but it's still tractable.

So as you know, I have semester plans, so plans on the scale of a current season, have three of those a year. And I typically have, I've talked about this on the show, I typically have some sort of birthday project. So that's an annual plan. You know, by the time I get to my next birthday, these are some bigger picture changes I want to have happen in my life. So right now I'm 39, Project 40 is ongoing. It's a collection of major changes I want to work on by the time I turn 40. So I have a semester plan and I have an annual plan.

I don't really go much farther beyond that. I don't go much farther beyond that. So how do you think about the big picture future? Well, one, this is where having your values nailed down in those semester plan documents is really important. There you're laying out the properties of your vision of a life well-lived. But it's not specific. It's not, and I'll be in this job and I'll live in this place. and I'll have this much money and, you know, be able to run a mile at this time.

It's not that specific. It's talking about these are the values I want, the properties I want in my life. And you look at those when you think about your annual birthday goals. And you look at those when you build your semester plan to make sure you're making progress towards a life that's more like that. But it's vague and more general than these are very specific things I want to do. The other thing I typically recommend to people, especially early on, is you want to aim yourself not towards an incredibly specific outcome.

but towards a direction that's going to have a lot of options that are going to be useful to the type of things you value. You know, when I was coming out of college, for example, I'm trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I aimed myself towards graduate school and potential professoredom because I thought, at least in the short term of multiple years, this is going to give me a lot more flexibility. I can keep writing books. I'm going to have much more time affluence. I was looking at other options, including going to Microsoft. I had an offer from Microsoft.

This seemed like it would be much more structured. I had much less time. It would be much more hard charging. I had these other interests I was trying to figure out, but I didn't know exactly where they were going to go. I just thought the options of that direction would be better. I like intellectual work. I seem to be doing well intellectually with computer science.

Let's take that for a spin. I like this writing thing. I want to take that for a spin. I want some autonomy there. Let's go down the grad school path. It's the right direction towards more options. And then over time, you know, it gets refined. And like, okay, I'm definitely going to do this with my ride.

I'm definitely going to do a professor dumb. Here's the type of professordom I'm going to do. The details of my life today were not on the docket when I was 22 years old. But I pointed myself in a direction that situations like my current situation would be possible. So that's what I would say. You don't need detailed plans beyond a semester plus maybe some goals for your life for each year at your birthday. beyond that, just aim yourself towards directions that will be congruent with your values and figure things out as it unfolds. All right.

So we have a question here from Erica. Erica asks, why do you think there is a lot of attention and hype on the fire movement, but not as much attention on other career options such as part-time or contract work? You know, Erica, it's an interesting question. there has been a lot of attention on the fire community. There was, I think, a moment maybe a few years ago where this reached a peak. I think it's kind of dying back down again, and I'll talk about that in a second. But for the listener who doesn't know what we're talking about, fire stands for financial independence, retire early.

It's a movement mainly of sort of middle class, highly educated knowledge workers, so salary knowledge workers, where the whole notion is if you have a good salary, like you're a computer programmer, and you bring your expenses, you get very comfortable living cheaply, you get this double-edged advantage where, A, you can save a lot of money because you're only living on a little bit of money you earn,

and B, because you live cheaply, the amount of money you have to save to then sustain your lifestyle just off of savings, the formal definition of financial independence, becomes much lower. And basically, if you do this math, if you can live on, these numbers aren't precise, but it's roughly speaking, if you can live on 20% of what you make,

then 10 years of savings, more or less, will be enough to in perpetuity cover that 20% and you'll be financially independent. All right, so that's the fire movement. Mr. Money Mustache is a big player in that movement. I wrote about him in digital minimalism. He actually blurbed digital minimalism. Nate and Liz Thames to Frugal Woods.

They have a really interesting blog. I talked about them in a recent New Yorker piece of mine, and they're interesting examples of fire proponents. And there's a bunch of others. This is why I think a lot of attention goes to movements like fire, is extreme examples are a useful way to illustrate powerful, but much more generally applicable principles.

This is something that advice writers know. You give the big example that's out there because it purifies and clarifies what the underlying mechanism is, and it purifies the aspirational appeal of that mechanism. It's the best way to make the more general point. So the more general point that's being made by the fire movement is that you have way more flexibility than the culture makes clear to play around with this income expense equation. There's this cultural pressure that you know, you get moved to whatever city that you get pushed into because that's where the job is. And then once you're there, you take your salary and you basically spend most of it. And if you're really on the ball, you can save 15% in your 401k and that plus Social Security might take care of you when you're 65, you know. And along the way, when you're about to get married or buy a car, try to put a little bit more money aside.

And the underlying principle that the fire movement points out is you have way more control over that than you think. You don't have to just live at whatever amount of money you happen to make. You have to live just right there. That doesn't give you the return you think it does. Are you really way more happier when you're 35 than when you were when you were 22? You make a lot more money at 35. you've probably increased your spending to match that money, but you know,

you lived on a lot less money when you were 22. Were you miserable? Probably not. Like, these are the type of questions they push. What if you had stayed at that level of spending you had when you were 22 now that you're 35? Think about all the flexibility you would have with your money. What about if you move somewhere cheaper? So this was the big point I made in my recent New Yorker article about the great cubicle escape.

I talked about Bill McKibbon and his wife Sue Halperin, how they moved to the Adirondacks. he quit the New Yorker, they moved to the Adirondacks, in part because it was incredibly cheap to live there. And because it was so cheap to live there, Sue and Bill could just do freelance articles at their own leisure and live quite comfortably. And then when Bill had a hit book with the end of nature, he said, this is great. Instead of trying to go ride this wave and make as much money as possible, this will buy me the ability to basically sell any book to a publisher that I want to write. and I'll get a reasonable advance on it. And because we live cheaply, if I just write a book every two or three years on whatever I want to write about,

that'll kind of cover all of our expenses. I don't even have to do the freelancing anymore. They hack the equation. Let's bring down the expenses. Now we can get by with a lot less money. That is the general point. I think that is the appeal. So, Erica, when you talk about career options such as part-time or contract work,

this is actually where you get to. Most people, once they're exposed to fire, is thinking, I'm going to sell the 3,000 square foot house. I'm going to move over to the eastern shore. I'm leaving Fairfax to go to Chestertown or something like this. And I'm going to buy a house. It's a fraction of the price. And I'm going to live on half the money.

And I'm going to do contract work. And I'm going to take three months out of the 12 off every year or work three days a week. That type of engineering and flexibility that you can have more options than you think to contrive what your work life works like. You have a lot of flexibility on your expenses. You have a lot of flexibility on how you want to earn. Getting out there and actually exploring those options, that is the lesson of fire. Not this idea that you have to fully be financially independent and living on this incredibly small amount of money and it's all coming out of your savings and all of that nonsense. That is all a distraction. That's not why fire is popular.

It's not that people want to live on $18,000 a year in a trailer because they could technically be financially independent by the age of 27 is that they want to take back control and say, I have way more options to engineer my life than the culture is telling me. So, Erica, you're right to say, fire seems a little bit extreme. But that extremeness, I think, is why it's appealing. All right, we have a question here from C player. C player says, I often spend a lot of time on daily, weekly, and monthly plans, but I never follow through.

I have this issue where I know what I should be doing, but I don't do it. I'm even mindful that I'm making a bad choice. Help. Then he or she elaborates. I really admire you, David Allen, Jocko, and Ryan Holiday. By the way, that'd be a cool dinner party. It'd be a weird, interesting dinner party. I think we would, after one or two bottles of wine,

Jocko would beat up David Allen while Ryan gave us a lecture on Epictetus. and I fell asleep because, you know, I don't get enough sleep because of my kids. All right. Going on with the elaboration, you each have this great discipline and follow through. I don't. They put all my effort in the plans. I'm great at planning, but I'm poor at doing the work. All right.

So C-player, let's spend less time planning. Forget that for now. What I want you to commit to is a single thing. Metrics. We're going to have a notebook that every single day at the end of day, you write down, whatever the key metrics we're going to design for here in a second to track every day, you're going to write them down. You can use, like, my time block planner has a metric space. If you're just tracking metrics, you can get, I like the Moleskin monthly planners where it has a little bit of space for every day and you have a whole week on one two-page spread.

So there's a perfect amount of space if you're just tracking metrics. And this is the thing you want to commit to is there's a small number of metrics I track every day and I'm going to track them. If they're good, if they're bad, I don't care. I write it down. So now you only have to do one thing. Am I the person that does this one thing or not? When you put all of your energy on just one thing, that is a much easier commitment to maintain

than the amorphous ambiguous demands of, I want a fully captured, organized, multi-scale planned productivity life. That's a big complicated ask. Writing down three metrics for five seconds every night and it's right there on your dresser so you see it. That's something you can commit to. and you have to commit to something. At some point you have to commit to something,

this is what I want you to commit to. Now, what metric should you put in there? I want you to start with a really basic productivity-related metric. And it really could be as simple as this. SD is what I do in mine. SD is an acronym for shutdown. And there's going to be two hash marks you can put by this. So there's three options.

It could be SD with no hash mark by it. SD with one hash mark, SD with two hash marks. Now, what are these going to correspond to? You get it right down that first hash mark next to SD if at the beginning of your day, you do the following things. You take a notebook for jotting down

loose ideas or tasks at things to come up to mind. You take that notebook and you go through everything on it and you put it on whatever your formal list are that you keep track of on your computer. Two, you look at your computer calendar, what's on my schedule for today. And three, you jot down some type of plan for the day, even if it's just I have meetings today, do them.

Or I'm going to go to the gym first thing and run some errands. That's it. You do those things, you get the first hash mark. At the end of the day, if you do a full shutdown, so you get everything out of your head, you process the things that you've captured, you look at your calendar, you look at your week, you kind of have a sense of what you want to do the next day,

you get the second hash mark. And that's it. that's your productivity metric. That is going to go a really long way because you don't want to put down no hashes. You feel good after a couple of days putting down the both hashes, and it doesn't take long. But now you're locked in.

You're beginning your day. Things aren't loose. The stuff that was captured loosely gets looked at. You look at your calendar. You have a plan. You shut down at the end of your day. Now you are not running in an ungrounded mode. You know what's going on.

You're not keeping track of things in your head. You're doing your best to keep plans. I don't care if you fail with your plans. We're not talking about that yet. You're just making a little plan. At the end of the day, you're shutting down that plan. And then you should have a couple other metrics, maybe one about eating or fitness or exercise or one about, you know, if you're religious, did you do your prayers?

Or if you're into meditation, did you do your meditation session? You know, have three, maybe three different metrics of things that are important in your life. And just do that. Do that for the next few months. Just track that every day. Some days you won't do them. Some days you will. But every single day you write down, did I do this?

Did I not? and make one of those metrics be that SD, hash mark 1, hash mark 2. Just do that for a couple months. That will get you into the habit of, I feel much better when I start my day officially. I make a plan and I shut it down when I'm done. And once you're there and that becomes second nature, then dive into the deep end and say,

let's get rock and rolling with full multi-scale planning where my semester plan influences my weekly plan, which influences my daily time block plan and my capture systems are sophisticated, and I'm trying to figure out these complex protocols for how I organize my communication with my colleagues and all of that type of stuff you can get to, but you're not there yet.

So this is what I want to recommend you do. Metrics are the number one thing you start with. You've got to commit to something at some point. This is the easiest thing you can, but it's going to be the seed on which I think a much more lower anxiety, intentional life can grow. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode.

Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions. If you want to contribute your own questions, subscribe to my mailing list at calnewport.com. That is where I send out the question surveys. Back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.