Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 16: Habit Tune-Up: Why Relaxation is Overrated and the Importance of Facing the Productivity Dragon

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Does capturing thoughts diminish deep work? [2:09]* Trouble relaxing after periods of intense focus. [7:37]* Should you list specific tasks on time block schedules? [14:23]* Time blocking for jobs with regular unexpected emergencies. [18:46]* What administrators can do to help teachers work deeply. [26:08]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Time blocking is very helpful to me. However, because I'm a litigator, my schedule is unpredictable. Specifically, with some frequency, something genuinely unexpected frequently pops up that will throw off a whole day or a couple of days. I'm Cald Newport, and this is a deep questions, have it tune up, mini episode. Now in this format, we take audio questions from listeners about the specific topic of tuning up their productivity habits so they can get more done and better work done in a period where our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. One administrative note before we get started today, I am now considering bringing on some advertisers to the deep question podcast so that I can make this whole project something that. is at the very least revenue neutral.

I enjoy doing the podcast, but I don't necessarily enjoy all of the expenses piling up week after week. I think with a few advertisers, we could make this into a self-sustaining project. So if you are a potential advertiser who is interested in reaching my audience, which are tend to be highly trained professionals who are good at what they do and very interested in productivity and self-improvement. If this sounds interesting to you, send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com.

I'm essentially testing the waters here to see if this plan might make sense. If you want to contribute your own audio question to the habit tune up many episodes, you can go to speakpipe.com slash calnewport. You can record your question right out of your browser. It is quite simple. and if you want to help spread the word about the Deep Questions podcast, the two best things you can do is subscribe and or leave a rating and a review. I read all of those and I really appreciate them.

All right, so let's get started. Our first question today is about the tension between capture and depth. Hi, Cal. My name is Thomas, and I'm a high school teacher from Cleveland, Ohio. But my productivity question actually centers around what I do. outside the classroom. And when I'm just trying to have 90-minute or so blocks of deep work, I'm wondering if the small habit fixers that you recommend, such as having a moleskin notebook next to you or having a blank text edit document on your computer, could possibly inhibit

one's desire to work deeply. What I mean by that is if I'm in the middle of reading a book, shouldn't I want to continue to train my mind and do that kind of mental weightlifting and just avoid that urge to turn and write whatever down and just be in the moment and continue to read? Well, Thomas, I think there are two different types of note-taking-related interruptions that are relevant here, and the answer for each might be a little bit different. So one interruption while you're doing something deep like reading might be to, take notes or capture ideas relevant to the deep work you're doing. So for example, maybe you are studying a hard text and you come across a good idea.

You say, I want to write that down. I want to capture that idea or I want to capture this article that's cited because I might want to use that later and so on. That type of interruption is not really an interruption. That's just part of the deep work activity. In this deep work activity, you're in this set cognitive context, a cognitive context in this case of the book that you're reading. And the activities you're doing in this context include reading, thinking, and trying to capture your thoughts in notes. So staying in the moment is less

important to me as staying in the cognitive context. When you switch your context to something unrelated, so you're working on reading a book and then you jump over and check a social media feed, that's where you really get the penalty from network switching, where you begin to actually switch what networks in your brain are inhibited and which ones are amplified and then there's a collision of these amplification and inhibition processes as you try to switch back and you get a tension residue and the quality of your thought diminishes. That's where you pay that penalty is when you completely change in context. But I think it's perfectly fine for within deep work for there to be multiple different activities happening during that session. Now the other type of interruption that

might happen during deep work is you have an unrelated idea. And it could be something really mundane. like, oh, shoot, I have to pick up my dry cleaning. Or I forgot that if I don't mow the yard tomorrow, I'm not going to have a chance before we go on our trip, something like that. Now, what do you do in that case? Because that is a different context. And this is a place where you could use something like a working memory. Dot text file on your desktop, or if you have a capture notebook,

or if like me, when you do time block planning in a notebook, you have on the right hand page the time block. plan, the left-hand page capture for tasks that pop up during today. Whatever your situation is there, I think you need to stop and write it down. Once you have that open loop in your head, here's something that needs to get done. Until it gets written down in a trusted system to use David Allen speak, it's going to stay there. It's going to use up resources.

It's going to mess with your prefrontal cortex's efforts to keep your. your networks focused at the task at hand, so it'll diminish the quality of your work. I mean, it would be best to have no interruptions like that, but I think to keep the open loop alive in your head is probably worse than just taking a brief moment and closing the loop. So it's like something kind of bad happened from a cognitive performance standpoint that you had an idea pop up that has to be taken care of into a different context.

But it's just going to get worse if you try to ignore it. Now, the one silver lining I'll say is that, you know, as you train deep work, you will have less of those interruptions because those interruptions really come from unrelated networks in your brain that are still running and still kind of thinking in the background and the one that's relevant to lawn mowing,

remember, it's like, oh, we got to mow the yard. But as you get better at concentrating, those networks get more severely inhibited. You actually are going to have less of those thoughts pop up while your work. You will get lost in what you're doing. So, Thomas, I would say, focus on the standard things I recommend

to make deep work sessions deeper, have a fixed amount of time, have a ritual you do before and after the session to help your mind shift in the deep work mode. Make sure you have a very clear target during that session. It cannot just be generically work or read or think. It's, I'm trying to get through this chapter and get a summary written up. I'm trying to get a draft of this lesson plan put together or whatever it is. Have a clear target that you are working towards that has a clear artifact that indicates successful completion.

So you have this concreteness to the efforts you're trying to do. Put these standard efforts in place. your depth will get deeper and deeper. You'll probably have less interruptions. But just to summarize, doing other activities related to the deep work is fine, taking notes, etc. If you have unrelated thoughts

that are going to become an open loop, take the time to write them down. All right, thank you for that question. Thomas, we want to move on now to a question about what to do after you leave these moments of deep concentration. Hello, Kyle. I am Dahlia,

and fourth year medical student and my problem is how to relax properly after a long period of focus and that applies to on a daily level and also during breaks like summer breaks so after long period of focus like in exams i find it disorienting when i when i first get into the mind break and And it takes me a long time to properly relax and tune in to myself to reflect how my question is how to do it more effectively, how to transition into a break and make the most out of it. Well, Dahlia, I think you might be putting too much importance on relaxation. It's something we fetishize in this culture is what we really need is this most. moment of being in a hammock, no worries on our mind, no thoughts on our mind, just staring out over the ocean and there'll be something restorative about this lack of activity.

But I don't actually know that that's true. Let's take myself as an example. Early in my married life, my wife and I, we used to go on vacations that involved traveling places internationally. And so the vacations were very active. you would be sleep deprived and driving rental cars around Europe and every day had a big itinerary. They're very busy or active trips. But then when we had kids, the types of vacations we would do shifted.

Now because we would have a baby and a slightly older kid or whatever the situation was, now we're renting houses by the beach, that type of thing. And so this was a change. It's the first time I had really been exposed to relaxation, vacations, and as we learned, I'm terrible at it. It would really stress me out. It would really make me anxious. Just being there, being at the house, being at the beach, I would just not feel happy. I would feel off. And we finally realized, oh, I see, to make these type of, quote-unquote, relaxation-centric vacations work, I have to bring work with me. The key was,

it should be different than the work I was doing before. So get away from the stuff that I don't like, like email. So I shouldn't have to do any email on vacation and get rid of the time sensitive work or the stressful work. But I would bring with me typically speculative, interesting, but non-time-sensitive projects. Like, let me read and think about a new book I want to write. You know, I remember when my oldest was a baby. We rented a house on the Bay, the Delaware Bay,

and I brought with me a whole stack of books, and that became the research foundation of deep work. I also remember at that trip I was working on, specifically I can remember the math problem I was working on, which ended up leading to a few publications. But there's not like there was some deadline. I just wanted to think about this math problem. It was a vacation a few years ago.

I think we were down in the Bahamas, where I got the idea for digital minimalism. You know, I was like, I want to work on book ideas. I want to work on. You know, I need things to work on. And then that makes me happy. Then the vacation works. Non-stressful, interesting, non-urgent work, but work nonetheless is going to make me

much happier than just being in the hammock or trying to have a completely clear mind. So you might be in a similar situation. Complete relaxation, like having nothing on your mind, not working on anything, might not be a state, Dalia, that's going to make you very happy. So what are the guidelines here to make sure that you don't accidentally burn yourself out? Well, if we look to Arnold Bennett, we look to his early 20th century self-help book, How to Live in 24 hours a day. His essential argument is that the mind needs sleep and the mind needs a diversity of activity.

But it doesn't need non-activity. It doesn't need to just sit and look at the sunrise for hours at a time or equivalently sit and watch Netflix for hours. at a time are sort of modern digital equivalent of the sunrise. It wants to do things. And he talked about reading poetry and books and philosophy and whatever. He had a particular list of activities. But his whole point was the mind doesn't need the rest. It just needs a rest from the type of work you were doing during the workday.

Diversity of activities. And then, of course, sleep is what the mind needs. Now, I would add, from my experience, a third element that the mind also needs, which is regular and sustained freedom from, stress, where stress, at least the type of stress I'm thinking about, is almost always caused by time pressure. It's something I learned from when I was working with students and helping students specifically with stress issues, that feeling of stress almost always comes from, at least in the

work context. This is due and this is also due, and I don't know if I can be able to get it done in time. It's not great to be bathed in the relevant hormones that come along with the stress reaction for sustain periods of time. So seeking to have regular periods free from that type of urgency driven stress is also good for you. So we get here, I think, a much more approachable set of benchmarks for what relaxation after a hard period should be. It means you should work on things that are different than the hard work you were doing before. It means that you should you know, keep getting sleep, and that you should have no stress.

So you should, whatever you are working on does not have like a tight time deadline that you're worried about hitting. That could be just as restorative as the hammock with the Pinacolada and not a thought on your mind for days and days at a time. Now, other people really like that. They get a lot out of that. They really want to shut down their brain completely. But all I'm saying, Dalia, some people don't. And you might be one of those people. So I would, I would worry less.

about if you're properly relaxing or if you're getting relaxed enough and just follow those simple guidelines. And I think you will find that you will have plenty of restoration to your cognitive state, to your psychological state, to your energy, all without having to completely shut down. So I've been hearing a lot of questions and chatter recently about time block planning. So I figured we should take a couple of questions on this topic. Hi, Cal. I have a question about time blocking. When time blocking and filling in each chunk of time for your day, do you recommend writing down a category of tasks like make phone calls or specific tasks like call Bob or a mixture of the two?

Thank you very much. Well, Brett, what I recommend is getting specific. So if you want to spend a block on smaller tasks, you should block out that time in your schedule. I typically label it admin or tasks. I actually have, and this is just an aside, I have some visual heuristics I use for my blocks, so it's easy when I glance at my schedule to know what type of work each block is, so I can get the gestalt of what balance of meetings, shallow and deep, I'm doing during the day. And so for my blocks that are assigned to shallow work

tasks, I tend to do a double line. So I'll draw the block, then I'll draw a slightly smaller block inside. You think of it as like a hollow border. Then I'll write something like admin or whatever. Now for my deep work blocks, I tend to do the same thing, but then I'll color in that block. I'll shade it in. So there's like a thick line around it. So that's how I know it's a deep work block. And then for blocks that are meetings, I put a little star next to it. There's no real rhyme or reason to that particular notation. It's just something I fell into the habit of. I used to put stars next to appointments or meetings so that I would be sure not to forget them. And now it's just a visual heuristic I'm used to. But again, this is just an aside. I do like

to use these visual heuristics so that I can get a glance, at a glance, get a sense for my day. All right, let's go back to the admin blocks. You have a block put aside. You've labeled it admin. If you're following my discipline, you probably then have an arrow going from that block. to some free space over in the upper right of your time block schedule where you list out those specific tasks you are going to tackle during that admin block. And so what I recommend, as I hinted earlier, is that in the morning, when you're building the time block schedule for the day, look at your task list and actually put down here at the specific tasks I want to get done in this block.

Because again, the whole idea about time block planning is that you're being very specific. This is what I want to do with my time. it's nothing generic. I have a certain amount of minutes, and I want to try to get the most out of those minutes. And so you can look at all the different tasks you have to do and say, well, I have an hour here. What is like a good mixture of things that I need to do that would make up one hour? Can't do everything in my task list, so why don't I be intentional about what things I choose?

And I think that's useful. And I think it helps you get more out of your plan. Now, what you don't want to do is give each of those tasks its own block because now you're getting too fiddly. If you have a eight-minute block for calling Bob and then a two-minute block for printing the such-and-such article, and then a seven-minute block, you get where I'm going here, that's too fiddly. Those blocks are too small, too hard to estimate. And that's just too many blocks and it's a pain. So you know, you want to consolidate on your actual block schedule.

If you can do a lot of shallow work, do a lot of shallow work at the same time, just call it, just call it admin, but then list specifically what's going to happen in that block in a list. And look, if you don't get the whole list done, you don't get the whole list done. But at least you're being intentional about this is what I want to try to get done during this block. And if you don't get the whole list done, you don't even have to change your block schedule. I mean, you still spent the same amount of time on admin. All that differed was maybe you didn't get everything done that you hoped to during that admin block. And you can move those things down to another admin block.

Or when you're when you're done, you can see what you didn't get done and make sure that those are flagged. in your task storage system or whatever you want to do. But it's a good question, Brett, and that's what I would advise. Get specific down to the level of even what tasks you're going to work on. Control your time. Be intentional. It's always going to be a better situation than just rock and rolling. All right.

So as mentioned, I want to do another time block question. This one is about less, how do you construct the schedule and more about what do you do when those schedules keep blowing up? Hi, Cal. My name is Anna. I'm an attorney specializing in corporate litigation. I do practice deep work because I believe I can provide better service to my clients if I do so. Time blocking is very helpful to me. However, because I'm a litigator, my schedule is unpredictable. Specifically, with some frequency, something genuinely unexpected frequently pops up that will throw off a whole day or a whole couple of days. For example, a new case may come in with an urgent deadline, and then that will take up a day or a few days as they deal with it. I'm wondering how you would

think about managing these unexpected large matters that need to be dealt with right away. And I'm also wondering how you would balance them with more predictable long-term projects that also deserve time and attention. So Anna, before we get down to the details, let's step back and look at the big picture of your professional life as a litigator. Litigators have it tough, especially from a time management perspective. I think for listeners who don't know a ton about the law, if you're a litigator, these are the lawyers where famously you're walking out the door for vacation and you get the to call. It's like, no, you're not because you're driven by very urgent work that's happening in the court system. Hey, we just got sued. This motion just came back. We have 48 hours to respond

on behalf of our client or they could lose the whole case. So it's very high stakes, very urgent, and very unpredictable. So of the different elements of law, litigators are often famous for having really unpredictable and sometimes stress producing schedules. So the big picture question I want to start with is like, okay, so what do we do about this from a productivity standpoint? Now, there might be a temptation to basically throw up your hands. Okay, it's chaos. We have to drop everything.

Keep getting disrupted. We can lose whole weeks to an unexpected motion being rejected or a lawsuit that. that pops up that no one thought was going to come. This is crazy. We just have to sort of roll with what happens and just put in hours and be crazy busy and try to survive. I think that's definitely a temptation. But I would recommend at the big picture perspective, not the given, but to always face

what I call the productivity dragon. That is face the reality of what you're facing before you, even if it's difficult, even if it makes planning hard. That means therefore if something urgent drops unexpectedly on your plate, you say, okay, here's the dragon. We now have to do all this work. And yet I was working on this other project before.

That's still pretty important. And now I don't know what I'm going to get it done. You face it, dragon, say, well, what's the best plan we can do? And the plan might be, I can't do anything on that other project until we're done. And this is going to take five days. Or it might be, you know, I could probably take an hour every day strategically just to keep this old project moving forward so we don't lose our momentum and the rest of my time will be on this new project.

It might be, look, I'm getting up early. I'm going to have to get up early before anyone's sending those emails around before anyone's demanding answers. I'm going to have to work on that project early and it's not optimal because it can make me tired. But hey, it's the best we can do. Here's the dragon. Let's look at our resources.

Let's mount the best attack. And that's why I'm going to suggest that you keep going back to do, even if it's frustrating. So in the context of time blocking, there's no penalty for having to change your schedule. I mean, time blocking is not a contest in which you get gold stars for sticking with the schedule you made in the morning without deviation. I mean, you should obviously strive to create accurate blocks as you get better at the time block discipline.

You should take pride in the fact that when you put aside a certain amount of time for a given block, that's roughly how long that actually took. I think that's good. I mean, you don't want your schedules to be needlessly repaired due to just errors in your estimation of times as opposed to unexpected events. But if something comes in that you can't control and you have to work on it, that's not a bad thing. You don't lose your gold star.

You just have to put aside a moment the next time you have one to say, okay, what's my new time block schedule for the time that remains in the day? And then if that gets broken up again, step aside and say, okay, what's the best schedule I have for the time that now remains? The goal here is to be intentional. I mean, this is where you get the value out of time block planning is that you're trying to be as intentional as possible about how you deploy your resources,

even if that plan has to shift due to events outside of your control. And so that's the actual on-the-ground instantiation of this notion of facing a productivity dragon is that you go back and you fix your time block schedule. It might be good, might be bad, you might not like the new schedule. It might cause problems, but it's still better to have that schedule that you're looking at

and saying this is the best I can do given my reality. You know what? All litigators have the same reality. So those that actually face the hardship and say, well, what's the best we can do about this hardship as opposed to throwing up their hands and saying the fact that there are hardships means that I'm not even going to try to organize this work?

You have to actually face the drag and say, okay, this stinks. What can we do? All right, this is the best we can make of this situation. That aggregates. Those little advantages aggregate. And over time, they'll add up to really big performance differentials between you and other litigators that remove that intention and just sort of jump from thing to thing,

put in the hours and just hope to survive. I'm not saying that you are doing any of that. In fact, I think you aren't from your question. It sounds like you're on it. You're a time blocker. You prioritize deep work. So I'm talking more to the. broader audience here.

Using you as an example to talk to the broader audience is that some jobs are hard and some jobs makes it very hard to make a plan you can stick with. My advice is always to keep going back and fixing the plan. Always have intention.

Never get in, never give in, never run from the cavern because you don't want to deal with the productivity dragon. Get in there, see it, marshaly resources, make the best attack. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

intentionality, optimality, no matter how hard the circumstance is, will always trump just throwing up your hands and rolling with it. So that's my advice. When the unexpected happens in your litigator job, fix your schedule. And then when that gets changed again because something else unexpected happens, fix it again. And take pride in the fact that you keep fixing, no matter how fearsome the foe that you're facing. We have time for one more question. and let's switch from the world of lawyers to the world of teachers. Hi, Cal, I love your work, and specifically as a principal of a K-6 school,

I noticed in the last episode you talked a lot about how about 80% of work that teachers do in K-12 education is deep work, but we often pile on shallow work that takes away from students and the important work that teachers are doing. I'm wondering as a school leader how I could support teachers. to have more time to do deep work and make sure that they are doing those things that are super important to students. Well, I like this question because I think it's relevant to a lot of knowledge work jobs, but it's a problem that is particularly acute for teachers. So as I talked about in a recent podcast episode, and this is what I think Sean is referencing,

teaching in particular has a lot of required deep work. So actually teaching is, of course, an act of deep work. Planning is an act of deep work. Interacting with students is an act of deep work. And trying to understand, okay, what does the student need? What's going on with their pedagogical progress? What can we do to improve this where are their problems? all of that requires concentration that is skilled

and that benefits from freedom from distraction or network switching. So more so than a lot of jobs, teachers basically have almost a full work day filled with doing deep work. They also, as I talked about in that prior podcast episode, have an increasing amount of shallow work dropped on them. If anything, they have an amount of shallow work dropped on them

that's comparable to what you would give a standard office worker. that does very little deep work and needs to do very little deep work. And so we're dropping that standard non-deep worker quantity of shallow work on top of a job that has an astounding amount of deep work already in it.

And I think this is a problem. So Sean is asking what to do. Well, the first thing I would do is face the stark realities of what you're asking. So let's use a normal school day in a normal time when things like schools are open.

Again, something I vaguely remember. But let's keep this evergreen. Let's think about just a normal year, normal school. All right. So the teacher, let's say, is actually in the classroom for the most part, starting from the morning until, let's say, 3.30. Maybe it's a break for lunch or something. But, okay, so there's already most of a workday they're spent in deep work activities.

When they're in those deep work states, you really don't want to be context switching. That's just going to make it much more difficult. to do what they're doing. It's going to lower the quality of their primary activity, which is teaching, working with students, trying to make plans for students, trying to make plans for their classes. And so you do not want to overlap their normal school day with other shallow activities like answering emails. So now we're at 3.30. And let's say the standard workday is supposed to run until 530 here. You're only down to about two hours.

Well, also in these two hours, lesson planning has to happen. So what are we down to now? Half hour? Maybe at best? Well, don't run away from that reality. Because if you are now putting an additional two hours of shallow work demands, you've got to answer all these emails from parents, you've got to fill out these forms, you have to do this PD.

Just keep in mind, that's blowing past the work day. And you've got to confront that and see it black and white. I am actually, here's what we're asking, we're asking our teachers to work 10 hours 11 hours, whatever it is, this is what we're asking them to do and confront that reality. And if you're okay with it, you're okay with it. But if you're not okay with it, you can't run away with it. You can't run away from it. And I see this a lot in knowledge work where we basically just run away from the reality of how much time are we actually requiring from people? How much work are we actually putting on their plate? How much time would it actually take to get this

done? We just look, we don't want to get into the details. We don't do that in knowledge work. we all just chip in, we all just hustle. But I say, no, face it, how much work are you actually asking? And if you're not comfortable with the fact that you're really asking these teachers after eight hours of deep work or seven hours of deep work to do three or four more hours of shallow work, then you say, great, now we need to potentially take drastic actions to rectify this suboptimal state of affairs. You're not going to take drastic actions until you see the drastic nature of the problem. This is actually an idea I elaborated in my book coming out in March. a world without email. It's one of the ideas I elaborate in there.

Actually having work budgets. How much do you really want to assign to someone and how much have you? Again, we don't want to face that. We would just rather blow past those budgets but just never really write that down or face it. And just say they'll figure it out. They'll do it after their kids go to bed. They'll wake up early. They'll do it on the weekend.

I don't want to know about it. I just don't want this on my list anymore. I want someone else to get it done. I just think that's a problem. We have to confront reality work. Okay, so what do you do? If you look at the reality of what you're asking your teachers to do and it's too many hours,

it means they're going to be working until seven or something like that every day. Now you have to start thinking about solutions. And I'm going to suggest reduction, consolidation, and simplification. These are the three things I would keep in mind, Sean, as I'm thinking about how do I bring back the reality

of what my teacher's being assigned to something more reasonable? reduction is simple. Take things off their plate. Yes, this paperwork needs to get done. Yes, this has to be filed. But can we take that off the plate of the frontline teacher? Can we move budget resources around so that we have more support staff? They can maybe focus on doing exactly this and doing it better. Can we have support staff at least aid in this effort? So maybe what the teacher can just summarize the relevant information

and the support staff can grab it and fill out the forms. You know, that's the number one thing you can do probably is just, how do I take things off your plate? The second idea, consolidation, says, how can we take this work we are demanding of the teachers outside of all their deep work hours and prevent it from being a steady drip that is constantly pulling out their attention

and constantly forcing context switches? meaning that the deep work that they're trying to do, it gets done slower and it gets done at a lower level of quality. How do we avoid that? You consolidate the interactions. You consolidate the efforts. So they can happen all at once, as opposed to interrupting again and again, other types of activities. This means a culture in which you just expect, I'm just going to send whatever, whenever, via email. And because it's convenient for me as an administrator, I want a response right away from the teacher.

You got to get away from that culture. Maybe there's more of an administrative office hours type thing, you know, from four to five, while the teachers are still in the school building, is a period where there is some sort of more synchronous interaction. Let's get together all the teachers from this particular grouping within the school real quick, scrum style. All right, here's what's going on, guys, and we're going to need this reports from you. We have this support staff to help you with this particular thing. Remember to fill this out. here's a new initiative. You can find the information here.

Like, let's just go through this 10, 15 minutes. Let's consolidate what might have been, I don't know, 15 emails sprinkled throughout the day and the evening. Each one creating a cognitive shift with up to 15 to 20 minutes of reduced cognitive capacity as a side effect. Let's consolidate that all. Makes a difference. Same work, but consolidated has a much smaller cognitive impact. And then finally, simplification. Again, this is a big point.

I mean, almost my entire new book coming out in March is about this. What are the processes? You know, here are things the teachers need to get done, shallow work that the teachers need to get done. And maybe we have gotten some of this off their plate. Maybe we've consolidated some of these interactions. But for what's left, can we simplify the process so that its toll on time and attention is minimized? This might be an IT solution.

It might just be a procedure that everyone agrees on that, well, if we, If we do these forms electronically and you put your information, we can maybe pull the information from a system we already have in place and that'll reduce the time this takes and maybe we can automate this piece of it. Or we can get rid of the back and forth emails by just saying you drop this off by this time and this person picks it up or there's this standing five-minute call that happens Friday morning before first bell where you report X, whatever it is. Processes can be optimized. When you optimize, you can reduce a toll on someone's time and attention.

If you instead just rock and roll, I don't know, we're all in email. I can just grab you in the hallway. Let's just get things done as best we can. Again, it's the same total number of tasks that have to get accomplished. If using an optimized process, a toll is going to be much less than if you're just going at it in an ad hoc fashion. So to summarize, Sean, what I'm saying for you and what I think is generalizable to a lot of knowledge work managers is that first of all, confront the reality of how much work

you're actually asking people to do. And if it's way past the eight-hour workday, you need to see how far past it is. Don't hide from it. Don't wish it's not true. And then to try to fight back against that reality and make it into a better reality, try to reduce what's on the plate of your knowledge workers,

try to consolidate when shallow work happens so you can minimize the cognitive context-switching footprint and simplify this work in the processes that can be optimized and therefore reduce the footprint on time and attention. But of course, the big thing here, Sean, is the fact that you asked this question in the first place. And I wish more knowledge work managers were, would ask this question, the amount of work people are doing and how they're doing this work matters. We cannot ignore it. We cannot just

say knowledge work is different than other types of work. We can't just say, look, everyone's busy, just rock and roll, hustle, try to get things done. We got to be much more, in my opinion, concrete about the reality of what we're asking these human brains to do, whether it's realistic, and what specific steps we can take to make that more realistic. So it's a good question and allow me to touch on some broader issues. That's all the time we have for this week. Thank you to everyone who contributed questions.

And if you want to ask your own questions for the habit, tune up mini episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com. We'll be back next week with more episodes of the Deep Questions Podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.