Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 18: Habit Tune-Up: Outsourcing Chores, Mitigating Unavoidable Distractions, and Productivity Beyond Basic Lists

Episode Date: August 13, 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: *  outsourcing household work [1:46]* mitigating the damage caused by unavoidable distractions [6:45]* the utility of fancy flashcard software [12:43] * tips for becoming a professor [24:04] * productivity beyond basic lists [34:01] 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.

But I want to make good use of this transition to having almost complete control over my time and dig into some long-term projects that I have never had time for before. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini-episode. The idea with these mini-episodes is straightforward. I take recorded voice questions from my listeners on the topic of how to tune up their productivity habits. in this current moment where our professional world is increasingly disrupted. If you want to submit your own voice questions for these habit tune up mini episodes, you can do so easily straight from your web browser at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport.

This is my second episode that I am recording from my brand new Deep Work World Headquarters into Coma Park, Maryland. I have not yet done any additional soundproofing, shaping, dampening, but I'm getting there, and I do continue to still enjoy having a separate place to go to record. So you can't see the smile on my face, but it is there. All right, as always, if you want to help other people's find this podcast, if you subscribe, leave a review, or leave a rating, all three of those things actually do make a difference,

and I, of course, really appreciate it. So let's kick things off with a simple question, one that asks about using outsourcing to reduce the impact of household tasks on your schedule. Hey, Cal, so I had a question with regards to outsourcing mundane activities. I heard you talk about that you have various tasks around the house, and I don't know whether you do, whether your wife do your own cooking and cleaning. I'm struggling with this. I would love to outsource pretty much everything around the house, but then I don't really want to have a stranger running around constantly. I would just be curious how you are handling this.

You have such a high workload. How do you manage these types of mundane activities and how much do you outsource and how much do you do on your own? Well, this is a good question. I mean, it is technically about non-work-related activities. like household tasks, but as you point out, obviously these types of activities have a big impact on your professional productivity. Because if they take up a lot of time, if they take up a lot of cognitive space or energy, then that will pull down your performance on the efforts you do

for your job. So I think it's appropriate that we're tackling it here and inhabit tune up mini episode. So let me start actually with a book recommendation that talks a lot more about this than I do from someone who has a lot more expertise on this topic than I do. And this is a book called 168 hours. The subtitle is something like, You Have More Time Than You Think, and it is written by Laura Vandercam. Now, in this book, one of Laura's points is that

aggressively outsourcing household tasks is a good idea. if you are quite busy, and I believe she has four kids, so she trumps my three kids situation. But if you have a lot on your plate, a place to free up a lot of time is outsourcing these non-urgent, non-professional activities. So she talks about in this book, basically what you're talking about, outsourcing almost everything, including things even like laundry, what that looks like and how it impacts your schedule. So if you want the expert take on what aggressive household outsourcing looks like, 168 hours is a must read. Now, in terms of what my wife and I do, we do a fair amount of outsourcing of household task. You are right. Neither of us have a lot of time to spend on a voluminous amount of household work.

You know, I can't exactly spend my afternoon fixing the proverbial fences around the ranch or whatever. you might imagine, because I just don't have those hours to do it. So I would say, I'm just thinking on the fly here, what do we outsource? Almost everything that has to do with the maintenance of the house, outsider inside, we outsource. I mean, we have a landscaping service that will rake our leaves and do mulching and weeding and things I just don't have time for. I'll mow the yard, but that's about it outside.

We have firms that come and do our gutter cleaning as another example. We have another group that power washes our porch. We have a wood frame front porch that collects grime throughout the year. And you have to clean that off with power washing. Inside the house, I'll do some handyman stuff. A lot of that's pretty time-consuming. So we have a stable of contractor handyman types that will just batch bunch of these things together. So any one of the things might be small, but if we have four or five

is worth their time to come out, things like, whatever, you know, screwing around with lights or hanging heavy things or whatever, things I don't really want to bother with. We also have a house cleaner. So we have that on a regular basis to keep the house clean. And I guess that's about, that's about it for our list. But yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think, look, if you have a, if you have a hard job in a lot of kids, the reality is, and Laura makes this point really well, you can't do a ton of housework. Even if you're capable of doing some of these individual tasks,

there just really isn't a ton of time available. So I think it is fine to outsource. I do not find these outsourcing activities create a situation which we, as you fear, constantly have people in our house. I mean, even with a lot of different work being outsourced, unless you're hiring a Downton Abbey-style Butler staff,

you're not going to have people hanging around your house all the time. And so I think it's perfectly fine to think about outsourcing. I think it's a strategy that a lot of people use to make this modern form of work-centric life,

especially in our current COVID moment of incredibly reduced child care and education opportunities. I think it makes this lifestyle more tractable when possible. All right, so let's transition now from the household. to the hospital.

Hi, Cal. My name is Rachel, and I'm a physician scientist currently completing my residency in internal medicine. My question is about productivity in an environment with constant interruptions. So in my field and my profession, my day is filled with constant interruptions, some of which are relatively benign, some of which are downright emergencies. And what I find is that oftentimes particular tasks or reminders will slip through the cracks because I'm in the process of working on them or I think of them and am immediately interrupted. So my question is about how to, one, improve the ability to not allow things to fall through the cracks, and that's kind of a systems question.

The other question is, are there any tactics to improve one's ability to do the kind of cognitive switching that those kinds of interruptions demand? I like this question because it turns on its head the typical scenario I'm dealing with. So my most common advice is on how to reduce interruptions and therefore minimize cognitive context switching. But your question is saying, look, I have a job in which I have to have interruptions and I have to have the accompanying cognitive context switching. So how do I minimize the damage of these unavoidable distractions? So I think that's an interesting twist on a topic that we talk a lot about.

So here's my suggestion for you. I am going to recommend that you augment your working memory with something more stable. Now, this might sound at first like there's something very cool in high tech. I'm about to suggest some sort of Elon Musk-style neurolink cyborg hookup. Unfortunately, what I am going to suggest is much more boring. If your work is typically being done on a computer, then I'm going to suggest that this working memory extension take place in a plain text file. And if your work that is getting interrupted is happening away from a computer, maybe it's clinical duties,

then I'm going to suggest an old-fashioned paper notebook. Now what do you do when you have this text file or text-based notebook? What I'm going to recommend is that when you're working on something, you capture right away. Okay, here's what I'm working on. You know, I'm working on this task. As you're working on, the task you might use this notebook or text file to capture ideas to come up or reminders to try to structure your work like okay i need to do a b and c so let me write down what a is what b is what c is let me cross out a because i got that done let me throw a couple of bullets under b as i'm working on it in other words you're literally taking the type of information that's in your working memory as you're working on something in the moment and you're capturing it in this other

medium where you can elaborate it. Now, why is this important? Well, now let's say the interruption comes. Like, the nurse pages you, there's a clinical emergency, you have to drop everything and go. What you're working on remain stable. Where you were, the points that you had to get to, the points already got to, sits in that notebook or sits in that plain text file on your computer until you're able to come back. And now it's there, so it's easier to switch back into that context. Let's say you come back, but now there's something else urgent you have to do. Well, you can start, you basically block off that, like on hold and then start a new thing below it, like in progress and start your new task. And you can even build a stack or collection of ongoing

tasks, some of them incomplete, but all of their partially completed information is captured in this stable augmentation to your working memory. And then when you get some time, you get some time to catch a break, take a breath. you can look at this augmented working memory and say, okay, what do I need to do here? All right, this is where I was with this. Maybe I'm not going to get back to it today, but I have all the information I need to now move this back into my stable planning system. You know, return to this task in this file. You know, the copy over all the details here's where I am.

You could, one of the things you might do with these augmented working memories is that while you're dealing with the emergency, you might have a few other ideas or thoughts or I need to get back to this. You throw it all into the same file or into the same notebook. So when you come back to process, you can see, oh yeah, I remembered when I was in the middle of this interruption, that I also have to send this memo and I also have to update my licensing paperwork or whatever. Right. So it's like a glorified capture system where you're not just capturing tasks,

but you're actually capturing what's in your brain during work you're actually doing. And then you just have to make peace with the fact that, yeah, the overhead of the interruptions is a pain, but at least you're minimizing it. And at least you have the confidence that if I'm wrenched away from my desk right now, I'm not going to forget anything. When I come back, it'll all be their black and white on this text file in this notebook. When I next get a chance, I can either pick it up or shut it down for another day, but know exactly where I am when I do that.

And so that's my suggestion. Use a stable augmentation to your working memory. Keep track of what you're doing, elaborate what you're doing on this augmentation, and keep coming back to it again and again. When you take away the stress of having to keep things only in your head, you are going to gain back not just a lot of relief, but you're going to gain back a lot of cognitive resources that are otherwise lost to trying to keep what David Allen calls

these open loops fresh and unforgotten in your head. So you'll actually feel that you're better at dealing with what's interrupting you when you don't have to worry about forgetting what was going on before you were interrupted. Okay, so let's keep this medical-themed advice trend going. We'll take a question now, not about life as a doctor, but life as a student training to become a doctor. Hi, Dr. Newport, I would like to hear about your take on Onki. I'm a pre-med student, and I know many people in the medical community use Anki to space out their repetition.

However, while I like parts of Onki, I feel like it is hard to use in a way where the concept is the first and foremost thing trying to be retained, and the depth of learning seems to be on the shallower side. One of the reasons people use Anki very heavily in medicine is due to the obscure words which we have to memorize to do well. If you agree that Anki is too limited to make a main study technique, how do you suggest I combine conceptual understanding with spacer repetition and memorizing strange anatomical or microbiological terms without using an app similar to Anki? Thank you. Ah, good. This is an excuse for me to return to the type of really in the weed study advice

that used to dominate my writing back when I was writing books for students and back when study hacks, my blog, was actually dedicated exclusively to study advice. This was my bread and butter trying to figure out exactly these types of questions. So first, we should just clarify for the listener that Anki is a piece of software that basically does flashcards on your screen. it claims to use some sort of psychologically optimal repetition or spacing out between showing you the same card twice or some such to maximize retention. And so it's very popular among students who are of a more sort of technical or geeky mindset because it offers this promise that it's somehow using technology to give you an edge or speed up your studying.

Now, to return to the question at hand, I think the big issue here is the importance of recognizing that different types of studying or material preparation requires different types of techniques if you want to be efficient. So flashcard-based techniques are good for one type of studying that might be relevant to a medical student, but it might be a really bad fit as you hinted in your question for other, let's say, more conceptual types of studies. And so what I want to go through here is a few different study techniques that I've written quite a lot about back in those older days. And then you can mix and match these techniques depending on the particular type of material that you're working on. So let's start with flashcards. Where is that relevant? Well, that's relevant when, as you point out, you're doing literal memorization of terms or dates or titles or whatever it is. but it's just literal memorization. I need to remember this term. I need to know this term.

I need to know the date that this painting was painted. I need to know the artist for this painting. I'm giving these examples, by the way, because I was a art history minor in college, and memorizing dates, artist, and painting titles was a big part of that education. So I definitely empathize. So flashcards are great for that.

I need to just straight up memorizing. information, no conceptual understanding required. Just what is that thing called? What's that part of a cell called? What's that painting called? Now, you can use Anki if you want. Honestly, I'm a big fan of just index cards. I don't know that all of this optimal repetition spacing is necessarily worth the overhead.

What I would always just do is I would have the things I need to memorize on index cards in piles that were grouped in some sort of relevant way. and then you would go through a stack you'd put aside the ones you got and then in a separate pile you would put the cards you didn't get and then you would come back later and work on just the cards you didn't get and now just putting aside the ones from there that you still didn't get and so on until there's none left that you didn't get

so you do this hopefully geometrically decreasing pile size but what happens when you use this approach of okay which cards did I not get let me just focus on those now which cards that I don't get Which cards did I still not get? Let me just focus on those. It's a much more optimal deployment of your cognitive resources because it means the things you're having the hardest time memorizing get the most attention.

And the things that you had an easy time memorizing get less attention. And so the same amount of energy expended can get you farther in your memorization. Now, the only trick to doing flashcard memorizing is that you have to give your working memory time to clear out. So you might do one stack, put aside the ones you didn't get, then move on to an unrelated stack

and do the same thing. Now return to the first stack in the cards you didn't get. So at this point, you've cleared out your working memory. So you really are testing, do I actually have this memorized versus, well, I just looked at the answer when I missed it 30 seconds ago, and that's still floating around in my working memory. Obviously, that's not going to help you. What you need is the information embedded in a deeper part of your memory.

So for that type of straight memorization, you can use Anki. I like using this targeted old-fashioned flash card approach. But whichever works for you is fine. All right, but what about other types of information? So as you talked about, you might have a more conceptual topic that you need to master that's more than just straight memorization, and flashcards aren't good for that. So there's a technique I used to write about on my blog. I called it focused question clusters.

Now, what's interesting about this technique is that it wasn't in my book how to become a straight-student. But I began getting a lot of questions after that book came out from students, often in a program like your own, like in a pre-med program or in a medical school program, who are saying the techniques you have in your book, which were really based on my experience in a liberal art school. So here's how to study for math classes. Here's how to study for, you know, essay writing classes. And they say, we're somewhere in between. We have to learn about a lot of experiments and techniques, and it's pretty technical, but it's more complicated than just. just straight memberization. So I came up with this focused question clusters idea and I published it on my blog. It was a missing chapter in some sense from my book, How to Become a Straight A Student. So I have the

article pulled up here. It's from the September of 2007. And here's the basic idea. Okay, step one, reduce your notes to rapid fire questions. Short specific questions that can be answered in a few words or at most a sentence. For example, School of Thought justified by the skin or rat maze. The five parts of the auditory system. Step two, make sure your rapid-fired questions for each lecture cover all of the information presented. Significant compression is possible here if you choose your questions carefully. One short question that asks for you to list five things, for example, might cover a page full of your notes. Step three, arrange to wrap.

rapid-fire questions into focused clusters, such that all of the questions in a cluster cover the same topic, such as early behaviorism experiments as a topic. Have one page for each cluster, put the questions in list format at the top of the page, put the answers in list format in the same order at the bottom of the page. Now, step four, consider also adding one or two background questions to each focused cluster that asks for a general explanation of the topic. for example for going with our behaviorism case study here your your background question might be what were the other movements around when behaviorism came along and what made behaviorism different all right step five now when you study do quiz and recall on these clusters now as readers of my old student books know quiz and recall is the technique that we just talked about where you're trying you're given a prompt and without

looking at the answer or your notes, you try to answer that question out loud as if you were looking or teaching a class. So it's this activity of active recall where you actually have to produce the information and complete articulate sentences out loud that really pushes your brain and test if you have real understanding. It's much better than just passively reading information. It's much better than just glancing at notes and saying, do I understand it? You have to actually actively recall with the information only coming from your brain if you really want to cement it. So you do this sort of quiz and recall on your cluster. So what this means is you shoot through the rapid-fire questions.

And then for each lecture out loud, here's the answer. And here's the answer and here's the answer. And for the background questions, maybe give a little lecture. Like, well, here was the following our case study, you know, well, here were the other movements that were around and how we understand behaviorism. The whole thing out loud, the whole thing without looking at your answers, mark anything you got wrong, study the right answers, go do something else

and then come back and just focus on the questions from the cluster that you got wrong. The ones you still get long, you mark, do something else, come back and then just focused on those. Do this with each of your focus question clusters until you have known that are wrong. If you do this right, it won't take too long.

If you're doing the active recall, these answers will be submitted in your brain. You're not going to forget them. All right. So that was my advice for people in your situation in like a technical class, which there's memorization involved, but it's a little bit more complicated than the stratum memorization. Use something like focused question clusters. Now of course, of the broader point here, which is how you study matters. There's good ways of studying, there's bad ways of studying, there's okay ways of studying, there's ways of studying that are

incredibly effective. And so that's the meta point. I want anyone to come away with who has something they have to learn or something they're going to be graded on. Don't just use study as a generic verb. I'm going to go study. Say, this is my exact system I am going to use to study. Here is why I think it's going to be the most effective way of doing it. And when you're done studying, and I talked about this in Monday's episode of deep questions, when you're done studying, do a post-exam post-mortem.

We actually go back and say, how did I do on this test? What could have I done differently? How could I have improved my system where I would have done better? What was I wasting my time with with this system? And go back and evolve this system. How you study matters. Pay a lot of attention to that. Constantly be evolving it.

And the advantage you gain compared to your peers, who are almost certainly just using study as a generic verb, and just throwing hours at it, and just hoping it works, the gap you're going to open between them is going to get significant. So I appreciate that question. It gave me a chance to geek out on study habits in a way that I haven't done in many years. So my thanks.

All right. So speaking of academia, let's do a question on becoming a professor. Hey, Cal. My name is Vinicius. I'm from Brazil and I'm soon to start a PhD program in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. My question to you is, do you have any tips around my goal, of eventually becoming a professor. I'm fully aware of the many difficulties and the fact that vacancies are few and far between.

So I was wondering if do you have any tips other than doing the best research you can and reading and understanding the state of the art in the field that you're trying to do research? if you have any habits or practices that you have developed during your PhD program that helped you to eventually become a professor. Now, assuming we're talking about a research university, which is where my expertise lies, listeners have heard me say many times, and I think it's worth reiterating,

publications in competitive venues, is priority one, two, three, and four if you want to get a professorship. If you're a professional baseball player, you might look at your batting average, or I guess in the modern Sabra metrics era, maybe you're on base percentage, but whatever. You would have a number, how many hits am I getting? And that would be everything. And everything you would be doing in your training and your mindset and your research

would all be focused on how do I hit the ball more? In academia, good papers and good venues, that's hitting the ball. And I think it's important to have that clarity because especially given the open-ended nature of a PhD program, where a lot of your work is self-directed, especially if you're not in the lab sciences, and where you're not getting a lot of feedback and there's not a lot of structure on your day, it's easy to invent behaviors or activities that you want to be important. But ultimately, the thing that's going to matter is publications in good places, publications in good places. You should almost have like a scoreboard above your desk that has how many publications you have so far in good places. And you stare at that thing when you come in in the morning and say, what am I doing today

that's going to help increase that number? What can I take off my plate that's going to get a different? in the way of increasing that number. I think this type of clarity is really important because, again, without structure, without feedback, without guidance, you're going to have this impulse potentially to try to fill your time with other types of initiatives and activities and behaviors and tell yourself stories about why it's very important

and part of your education and part of your experience and all that could be fine. There's nothing to do with you getting a job. Publications in good places. The scoreboard is there. How do I move it? All right. So that's my tough love act. Now let's talk a little bit about how you do it. I think one thing that is underrated sometimes in this discussion is mentorship.

And what I mean by mentorship is that the people who publish papers in really good journals or conferences in their field tend to be the people who study under advisors who publish really good papers in the best journals. or conferences in their field. Now, you might say, well, that's just because the top professors at the top programs get the top graduate students. And I think that might be true. But honestly, I think there's a lot less variance among graduate student talent than we imagine. I think we actually underestimate the role of simply apprenticing around someone who's doing a certain type of high-level work. If you're a biologist and you're around someone who publishes in nature or publishes in science, you learn what's really required to get a paper into nature or science.

And it's not at all obvious. It might be harder than you expected, or there might be focuses on things you never would have thought about or like, hey, this type of thing. You have to obsess on this because if this is not right, you'll never get in, whatever it is. You pick that up when you're around people who are doing it. And then when you write your own papers,

you know what's involved in writing a paper that gets into nature and science. Where, on the other hand, if you're in a research group that doesn't publish at that caliber of venues, no matter how talented you are, you're unlikely to actually get a paper published there. So you really want to surround yourself to the extent possible, collaborate to the extent possible with people who are publishing at the level that you one day want to publish and learn how they do it. What do they focus on? How much time do they spend? How do they push the quality bar to where it needs to go? What do they obsess about? What do they not waste time on?

I think this type of pragmatic mentorship is really critical for learning how to publish in good places because again, this is an art form. There's details that matter. It's not just about being smart. It's not just about throwing effort at it. The other habits I'd recommend as I've talked about before is read, read, read, attend, attend to tend to tend.

Breakthroughs are found at the adjacent possible in your field. The adjacent possible is right beyond cutting edge to observe the adjacent possible you have to get yourself to the cutting edge how do you do that you read papers and you attend seminars lectures and talks by cutting edge researchers there's a reason why university programs have so many people come through and give talks why there's colloquium programs why there's seminar series because progress in these fields depends on i got to hear from someone what are they doing why is it important how do they do that breakthrough So you need to be reading papers in your field, and going to the talks in your field,

and then reading the papers that you learned about from the talks in the field. This should be a non-trivial portion of your time. Once you decide this is my general area I want to get good at, try to push yourself to the cutting edge so you can see the adjacent possible. So you put those two things together. I collaborate as early as possible with people who are publishing good papers so I can learn how they do it. And two, I'm putting in a lot of time, maybe up the 40 or 50 percent of your time at first. pushing myself to the cutting edge of my field so I can actually find really good topics to write on.

You put these two things together, the paper writing skills with the really good topics, now you can really start to shine. My final word of warning is, you know, earlier in this answer, I was really being very focused. I was really emphasizing, papers, papers, papers. I want you to adopt that clarity when thinking about other things you, get involved in. You need to view a skepticism, other types of involvements, extracurricular, otherwise as a graduate student that might get in the way of you being obsessively focused on getting to the cutting edge and publishing really good papers. You know, I often recommend

having a pretty good split. If you're not in a lab science, you completely control your schedule. Have a student workday align it roughly with normal working hours like nine to five. In that time, work really hard, make a lot of progress. And then when that's done, shut down and be done with graduate student work. And then in your time outside of it, you can have social commitments and activities and spend time with friends or groups that you're involved with and see movies and read or whatever the things are that you really enjoy. But you kind of have that separation.

I'd say be wary about letting your actual grad student life take on all these other jobs and roles. This is not college. Not time to join a lot of clubs. not a time to be on the sort of committee for planning out the new design of the offices being built in the new building or whatever it is. Be the fine men type character during your grad school hours that I'm trying to master my field. I'm trying to learn how to write good papers. I'm trying to write papers. And then when you're done, clock out and have deep high quality analog leisure experiences, recharge,

do all the other things that you enjoy in life. But keep that sort of monastic purity, I think you're going to have a lot easier time. as well. All right, so I hope that's useful. I hope that wasn't a little bit too stark, but like that's what's involved. I mean, you are absolutely right. When a position comes up, at Georgetown, when we have a tenure track position for computer science, there's going to be a couple hundred applicants. And they're all good. I mean, they're all from good schools. They all are in PhD programs and writing papers and know what they're doing. So it's really, really difficult. That's how you're going to stand out. Paper, paper, paper, best possible places. That advice.

hopefully should help you. And also keep in mind, all of these things being true, being a graduate student is still a really easy job compared to almost every other job because of the extreme autonomy and flexibility you have and the extreme satisfaction of being a smart person who is able to actually just try to think hard thoughts for your job. So have some gratitude for that, enjoy that. It's easy in the moment to try to convince yourself that this is a very difficult situation you're in and right now. your dissertation is impossible and you have impossible demands. Ignore that impulse.

It's a great job. Enjoy it. Get those papers written. Get that scoreboard counter turning over. And you've got a great shot at a really interesting career. All right. Let's try to slip in one more question. I will do my best to keep the answer here succinct.

So I have two questions about your advice to shift from a list system to a project. planning system. First, there are things I really trust about my list system that I hate to give up, and they don't have anything to do with deep work, but if I don't do them, I'll get in trouble somehow. So after you dump things into your working memory text file, where do you then configure things like the doctor's appointment you need to make in six months, or a reminder to get your oil changed, or something to get the next time you're at the hardware store? I guess you're could put date sensitive things on your calendar, but not everything is date sensitive. So come on, Cal, don't you keep some kinds of lists? And second, could you just walk us through

this lists to projects transition in a little more detail? I did check out Trello because of your recommendation, but so far I don't really get how it's any better for project planning than a good old pen and pad of paper, and I'm afraid it will let things slip through the cracks that my list system is very good at catching. Well, this is good. We got a meaty technical productivity nerd question here.

I'll try to tackle all the elements one after another. So first, let's get to this issue of a list based system versus an alternative. The particular type of system that I push back on is what I call the list and inbox based system.

And this is where you run your day by doing two things. Reacting, the things that come into your inbox, so go into your email inbox, what's new, what can I respond to, and then in between this reactivity, looking at a, let's say, to-do list and saying, okay, what on here do I want to do next? My argument is that this is not a very effective way to deploy cognitive resources

in that the total amount of quality work you produce will be much less if you typically run your day just using an inbox and a list. My alternative is actually time blocking. right not so much project-based or whatever the terminology you were using but would actually be time blocking now in time blocking you run your day by actually blocking off different hours of your day and saying what you're going to do in them you actually give each of the minutes in your day a job i'll check email during this half hour during this first hour and a half of the day i'm going to work on this project and so on my argument is that this type of intentional deployment of your time

allows you to architect a day that's going to get you much better returns than a more haphazard approach, where you look at emails and then occasionally say, hey, what do I want to do from my list? Now, to clarify, if you're using time blocking, that's just how you actually plan your day. So when I push back on a list-based method, I'm not pushing back on the use of lists to actually store information.

I'm just pushing back on the idea of allowing a list in your inbox to be the primary things you reference to figure out what do during the day. I use list. You know, for some types of tasks like household task, I use a straight up to do list style program. For work tasks, I structure these lists more using a tool like Trello, and I'll get into the advantage of that in a second because I know you asked about it, but I have list. What I'm pushing back against again is using just a list by themselves to figure out what to do. I think you need another layer, which is something like time block planning to decide what to do. Now, when you're when you're deciding what to do, you might reference your list and look at what you have to do and say, okay, great.

I see that I have, you know, whatever, a bunch of things I need to get from the hardware store. So I'm going to put a block in here from 3 to 330 to go to the hardware store. And I'll write next to that block the things I need to pick up. So your list help inform the schedules you make. But you have schedules that are more detailed than just saying, okay, what do I want to do next and making those decisions on the fly? Now you mentioned briefly time dependent task like appointments. That should all go on your calendar. And then when you create your time block plan, you look at your calendar.

Those are the first blocks you put on your time block plan. Things are already scheduled like your doctor's appointment, etc. So hopefully that answers that question. Now you're also asking then, okay, well, what's the use of Trello versus just a list? Well, we're Trello or other similar what I call virtual task board software packages. So there's one called flow that does something similar. There's one called Asana that does something similar. It's a little bit more computer programmer focused.

There's a lot of different products that have the same interface of virtual cards mounted under named columns on a board. So why is that different than a list? Well, that's important when statuses of task is relevant and where you might also have a lot of information associated with executing a task. So what do I mean by statuses? Well, if your task are just straight up David Allen-style next actions that are just clear and static until you do them, like buy this from the hardware store, call this person and ask this

question, then it doesn't really matter if you store them in a list or in Trello. But let's say instead you're working on a complex objective that's going to have multiple back and forth steps to it and evolving status, well, now having different columns might matter. So you might have, for example, a column of, here are things where I have sent out a message and I'm waiting to hear back. And so you can put the card for those tasks in that column

and know, okay, here are all things I can see at a glance that I'm waiting to hear back from. And if it's been a while that I know to check up, here might be things that I want to discuss at the next meeting I have with my supervisor. So now when it comes time to have that next meeting with your supervisor, you have this column, you can see all the things there. Here are things that are urgent.

They have to get done right away. Here's things that I haven't yet really processed. Like this is just a stakeholder. I don't even really know what's involved in making progress on this as my boss came in and said, you know, hey, we need to do something about getting their ad revenue up. You're like, I don't even know what that means. So I have a column for like to be processed and I put it there. It makes a really big difference to A, have clear statuses for different tasks.

And B, to be able to see that in a visually. coherent way. When all of those tasks are just in a long list, even if the list descriptions somewhere in there have their status, it's overwhelming in a way that seeing these things neatly arranged by their status gives you this sort of productivity gestalt. It makes it easier to deal with your day. And then as I also mention, you know, as these tasks unfold, there might be more and more information relevant to them, information that comes in via email, information you pick up from

meetings. in a virtual taskboard, you can add that all to the virtual back of the card. You can also attach files. Here's a relevant report that I'm supposed to be writing. Here's the instructions for the format. So everything is there, as opposed to just seeing on a task list work on this, and then you have to go dig through your inbox. You have to dig through your computer files trying to find the relevant files.

So those are the circumstances where task boards, this notion of structure and this notion of information. augmentation, that's when these task boards become more valuable than a list. These are all good questions. So let me just very briefly and succinctly summarize my answers. To reject a list and inbox-based productivity approach doesn't mean that you don't use inboxes and you don't use lists. You just don't allow those tools to be the main driver of what you do during the day.

Tasks that have a time to them should be stored on the calendar. And finally, it makes sense to move your information from a list to a task board if you have complex obligations that can go through various statuses and maybe has a lot of augmenting information that goes along with them, you're going to find yourself a lot less stressed to have it better structure. All right, that's a good question. I always love geeking out on some of these finer points of productivity, so I hope you find that useful.

Thank you to everyone who contributed their questions this week. If you want to submit questions for future Habit Tuneup mini episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. If you want to help spread the word, subscribe, rate, or review. I know you hear that a lot, but those things actually do really make a difference. If all goes well, I will be back on Monday

from the World Headquarters, the Deep Work World Headquarters, with the next episode of the full Deep Question podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.