Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 22: Habit Tune-Up: Seeking Depth When Working from Home, Academia's Email Problem, and Sequencing Projects

Episode Date: August 27, 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: * Seeking depth when working from home [2:22]* Feeling guilty about long afternoon naps [11:17]* Rant Alert: Fixing academia's email overload problem [18:15]* Advice for someone returning to school later in life [28:56]* Tackling projects one at a time versus in parallel [36:46]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.

I get obsessed with my projects and find it difficult to see the wider picture, so things can take me a long time to complete. Having read your earlier student books, as well as your recent work, I think I have what you call a right mentality. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, habit tune-up mini-episode. The idea, of course, with this format is that I take audio questions from listeners about how to tune up their professional habits, a time when the world of work is increasingly disrupted. Now, if you want to submit your own audio question for the Habit Tuneup mini episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. And I encourage you to do so.

Let me give you a little bit of a peek behind a curtain. The text questions that I submit or request that rather for the main deep questions podcast. I get a lot of those. I think since we've started this podcast in May, we've had something like 2,000 questions submitted. I get much fewer of the voice questions because it takes a little bit longer to record. Now, it's still pretty easy. You can do it right in your browser, but there's just enough friction that it really cuts down the number I get. So this is my hint. You do have a much better chance of ending up on air if you submit a voice question for these many episodes. And again, you do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. If you want to help spread the work,

word, ratings and reviews matter. You know, I just went and checked those numbers on Apple. So on Apple, the podcast has something like 330 ratings, which is good. But I think we're doing well over 100,000 downloads a month. So there's probably a lot more out of you who like the show. So if you get a chance to leave a rating or a review, I read the reviews and I appreciate them. And I think that is, if I understand Apple correctly, that is how people who stumble across the podcast because they see us in the like technology category rankings, how they decide

whether or not they want to try it. So if we want to encourage more people to get into our idiosyncratic world of depth and discussions about everything surrounding depth, that's probably the best way to do it. All right. We got a good batch of questions here that cover a variety of topics. And so let's get started right now. Hi, Cal. Like many people in 2020, I'm working from home. and my home office is in my bedroom. Do you have any advice for separating deep work from relaxation when you do them both in the same space? Well, this is obviously a relevant question for our current times,

and I'm going to give you actually three pieces of advice that you can try. The first piece of advice is do more deep work outside of your home office. Now, I don't know anything about your situation. I don't know where you live. I don't know what your health status is. But I have definitely noticed from a lot of my readers and listeners that there's many who are still in what I would call a shelter-in-place lockdown mentality. They have locked into this mentality of it is somehow a failure or a risk to leave your house.

It's just a psychology that they got comfortable with and that's where they are. They say, I work, I work in my bedroom, I work in my home office in the garage, and I really shouldn't leave the house. And so one thing I'd recommend, if you're at all able, get outside your house to do some deep work. Go outside, for example, you know, go walking. You might want to get into my suggested practice of productive meditation where you actually work on problems in your head while you're walking. I detail this in my book, Deep Work, where I say, it's hard at first. First, you're going to find it very difficult to sustain focus on a single cognitive topic or target.

Your mind's going to want to wander. It's going to think about emails. It's going to want to think about, look at that car that just passed. But if you practice, if you practice like a mindfulness meditator where you notice, oh, my attention wandered, bring it back. Oh, my attention wandered, bring it back. You will actually get a lot better at this. I spent two years practicing productive meditation when I was a postdoc at MIT because I

lived right across the Charles, right across the Longfellow Bridge and Beacon Hill is about a mile away from the status center where I worked. And so I had a lot of walking to do. And I would use productive meditations on one of those walks. And it was really, really hard. And then I got better. So just get outside. You go to a park. That's great. If you go to a park that has a stream and you can kind of hike in a little bit and sit by that stream. That works really well as well. Be willing to be a little bit adventurous here. Back when I used to give student advice. I had this idea called adventure studying. I tried to help students get out of the rut of I've been in my library and I've been in my dorm room too much. And the walls are closing

in and I don't know if I can study another inch. I was trying to help students reclaim some academic energy, some cognitive excitement. I had this idea called adventure studying. I used to post pictures on my blog back when I was only writing about student issues and students would send me their pictures. Like here's a waterfall. They try to one up each other. Here's a waterfall that I hike to, and I brought my physics problem set to work on it here. Here's an art museum that has a really scenic cafe that overlooks the river, and I brought my literature reading there. One student essentially broke onto the roof of one of her buildings and would go up there at night with a lantern. It was a rural college.

You could see the stars. I put a picture of this up on my blog. And so I love this idea of adventure study. You changed the context. Get out of your dorm room, get out of the library. you could be doing the same thing. And again, be adventurous. So by adventurous, what do I mean?

I mean, use your cell phone hotspot and your laptop and put it in a backpack and maybe you hike a mile into a trail. So there's not that many people. And you find a rock that's in the shade and is by a stream. And you write a strategy memo there. I think this is a time when these type of adventurous ideas should be emphasized because it really is hard like you're saying to try to squeeze all of life into the same building. outdoor cafes are great. I don't think there's any place in our country right now. Maybe Wohan in Hawaii.

I think there's very little place in our country where you can't go sit outside at a cafe. Now, a lot of these places might not let you bring laptops right now. I know that's true around here because the seating is kind of limited. And with the work from home, people will be squatted at those tables all day long. But I've been going to nearby cafes. Let me give a shout out to Bevco, Tacoma Bevco. And I'll sit out at the tables,

my notebook in just 20 minutes. So it's just a fresh piece of scenery. Let me try to get some new thinking going. So again, that's what I'm saying. I would say, if you have this sort of lockdown mentality that it's somehow, I don't know, a public health failure that you're not in your house, you need to lose that mentality. Obviously, stay safe, follow guidelines,

social distance, go to establishments that are following the proper protocols like most are. But you get out there and get adventurous about how can I change my context? How can I spur deeper work? I think it's going to be a huge competitive advantage for those who are willing to do that right now in this otherwise currently unusual moment. The other two pieces of advice I'll give and these are real quick. Two, definitely time block plan. Obviously, I talk about this all the time and not just because of my time block planner that's coming out in November. I talk about all the time because it works. And it's particularly

important if you're working from home because you have to have this clear separation. This is work time. This is non-work time. And a time block scheduler gives every minute of your day a job. This is when I'm doing deep work. This is what I'm doing email. This one I'm working on this project. And this, crucially, this is when I'm done work.

I think that's so important. If you're working in the same place that you're living, you cannot just be casual. Back when we would just go to the office, you remember those days. days. According to my calculations, that was roughly 74 years ago. Was that roughly? I'm just trying to, judging by my own internal subjective feelings, I think it's about about 74 years since we've gone to, since we've gone into an office for some of us who live in some of these larger cities. But if you remember, in the office, you could get away with like, yeah, look, when I'm in the office, I'm just kind of working. I'm doing email

and talking to people and I'm in meetings and oh, maybe I'll try to get something off of my task list. And I look at my email and when we shoot the breeze. And I get in my car and I go, home and then I'm somewhere different. That doesn't work when you're at home because it all just bleeds into each other. So plan every minute of your day. This is what I'm working. This is what I'm working on. And this is when I'm done.

Finally, I've been telling people who are working from home. And I think I had this actually in my New Yorker piece from a few months ago about remote work. I think it made it to the final article. But I'm suggesting that you replicate the sandwalk that Darwin had made at his estate outside of London. And the sandwalk was a path that he had made to the most scenic portions

of the downhouse, the name of his ancestral estate outside of London. He covered it in sands. They called the sandpath, and he would walk a set number of circuits that this shift his brain into work mode. Because he worked at his house.

He worked from home. If you were a gentleman scholar in the 19th century, you did not have a high-rise, that you commuted to. There was no break room. You would go to talk about baseball. There was no conference rooms.

Where you would have meetings, you just, you know, you were vaguely rich and had land passed down, and that's where you worked, right? So he had this problem, and so he made that sandpath, and he would walk these circuits and would help change his mind to deep work mode. I recommend it in that New Yorker piece

that if you live in, I don't know, suburbia somewhere, you can do the same. Just plan a rally. through your neighborhood. And you walk that same route every time before you do deep work. So you leave your house, walk to route,

come back, do deep work. And then maybe even have a recovery route you walk afterwards to shift back out of deep work mode. That sounds trivial. It's not. Psychology is weird. Deep work is unnatural.

It is not easy to do. Your brain needs all the help it can get. And those little rituals make a difference. So that's my advice. You've got to leave a lockdown mentality. You need a creative adventurous mentality, and you're going to be able to squeeze out a lot more effective deep work than right now, as you sit sort of stuck in that same room where you've been for the last 12 hours and you were there for 12 hours yesterday the day before, right now it

might be hard to imagine. But when you break out and get creative and adventurous, I think you're going to find that there is a lot more potential for high value cogitation out there than you realized. All right, that's a good question. Let's move on to one about nappy. Hi, Cal, I'm Ebony College student and stuck at home in Florida. I have noticed this summer I take long naps after lunch because I'm tired and can't do deep work due to the noise level in the house. So my question is, how do I cope with my guilt of taking a three-hour break in the middle of the day?

Well, Ebony, I appreciate this question. It has a lot of overlaps, actually, with the question. question we just answered, so that's useful. We can kind of pick up on the momentum that we've already built up. So I would say my starting point, not knowing other details of your situation, my starting point would be to say a three-hour nap in the afternoon is probably a problem. I mean, I wouldn't focus on feeling less guilty about taking a three-hour nap. I would ask a bigger question, why am I taking three-hour naps in the middle of the day? Now, there's a few physiological, psychological, potential explanations that we should address or rule out.

So the obvious one is depression. So there's a term for this hypersomnia that you sleep a lot, sleep excessively. You know, again, I know nothing about your situation. But if you feel like you might actually be suffering from depression, which is causing the hypersomnia, that's a problem to get after. Now, you mentioned you're a college student. Most colleges offer mental health support to their students. during this time of COVID,

most of them have shifted it to a remote format. So again, I have no idea if that's the issue in your case, but this is just a good excuse to put out that general PSA, especially for college students. I saw a report in Bloomberg yesterday about a survey that found 45% of the young people that they interviewed. I don't know exactly what the range here of young people was, but certainly college students were in the core of this range,

45% have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression since March. Right? So it's not a crazy stab in the dark. So let's just put that out there. Depression could be one option. That's something that you can treat, that you can improve. And so I just want to put that out there. Another physiological option we want to think about is sleep.

Another obvious reasons why you might be taking three-hour naps is because you are getting three hours too little sleep. Now again, I don't know your situation. All I know is that you're a college student and you're a college student at home and that you're probably bored. And I am going to bet that you are probably on your phone quite a bit in bed at night. It's terrible for sleep. And so if you think sleep is an issue, I would say you need to practice.

If not the full-out, I know you're not going to probably do the full-out phone FOIA method that I recommend to grown-ups and in particular parents where your phone stays by the front door, and it's not with you in your house, and if you need it, you go to the front door. I know that might be difficult, given the digital social dynamics, especially in a time where you can't actually see many of your friends. But you should do a modification of the phone for your method where that phone does not come into your bedroom. So, okay, if you're out, you know, watching a movie with your family, and it's not that exciting, and you're texting your friends, fine. But if it's two in the morning,

and you're up because of Instagram, you're up with your friends. That could be a problem. It's taking it out of you the next day. So just leave the phone out of the room. I'm telling you that alone will probably make a massive difference on your sleep. If sleep is the issue here. The final physiological thing to think about is food and nutrition. Wait, what are you eating for that lunch?

I'll tell you what I subscribe to. I subscribe to the simple plan of I want to automate what goes into my mouth, food and drink wise, until dinner time. I figured if I automate every single thing I eat and drink for my whole life, that's boring and there's interesting things to eat and interesting restaurants to go to and interesting drinks to drink, and that would be a little bit, I'm a colonarily monastic. But from when I wake up till I've done with work, well, I'm busy anyways. I don't think that much about it.

So I just sort of automate it, and here's what I eat and here's what I drink, and it's optimized for my energy and it's optimized for health because I don't care anyways. I'm this overcaffeinated, it's dressed and busy anyways. I don't really think about food. So that's an easy thing to suggest. You sort of automate what you do in breakfast through up till dinner. You can automate for very healthy energy-producing foods. That might reduce this instinct towards sombulance.

All right, with those things out of the way, let's talk about improving the quality of your deep work when you're stuck at home and your home is noisy. The two things to recommend there is one. Just like I recommended to the last listener, unless there is some sort of exceptional circumstance around your health or your location, get out of your house more.

Go to work other places. Talked about before. You go outside, you go to parks, go to cafes, go to things that are open or open with the... I mean, I don't know how many times you have to give these same caveats, but, you know, don't work at the underground rave being held down by the docks. So for a lot of reasons,

for a lot of reasons, do not bring your schoolwork to an illegal rave being held down by the docks with a thousand people and flashing lights. That probably would not be conducive to deep work or deep health.

But obviously you don't need these copy. It's places that are open and safe, etc. But you know, get out of your house. Be adventurous, be creative. Adventure studying does work. It puts your mind at a new mindset. It gives you cognitive excitement again,

so I recommend that. I mean, I get it if you live in Arizona or something where it's, and again, I'm just roughly estimating from what I've heard from my friend Jamie in Arizona, but it's roughly 197 degrees there right now. So, okay, I get it. If you live in Arizona, you're probably just not going to go for a walk at noon. But this is general advice. I think for most people in the Northern Hemisphere, this time of year, you can be outside.

All right, so I'd recommend that. And then finally, I would recommend training your brain to work with music, get big headphones, you know, the ones that fully cover your ears. Find non-lyrical music. The same song every time or the same album every time. Practice working with that music on, turned up loud enough to actually block out the noise of your household. It may take about a week until you get used to it, but then once you get used to it,

it will fade to the background. You'll be able to concentrate again. All right, so Ebony, good questions. I enjoy a nap as much as the next person. Three hours is probably too much, so hopefully this advice here will give you. you something to think about. All right, so let's turn to the other side of the desk. We were just talking to a college student. Now let's talk to a college professor looking for a tune-up. Hi, Cal. My name is John. I work at a medium-sized university, and like many colleges and universities

these days, there are expectations about email, Slack, teens, et cetera, that prohibit deep work. As you've noted in the past, universities are the one of the few institutions left that still value deep work, but the corporatization of academia is chipping away at that. What recommendations do you have for university administrators, faculty, and staff for pushing back? Maybe you could write a series of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Ed and get everyone talking about it. Please, will you? Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. John, I did write an article about this, and it was for the Chronicle of Higher Education. And a lot of people did talk about it. Come on, man, where have you been?

So the piece came out last year. It was called Is Email Making Professor Stupid? Now, in fairness, it was actually for the Chronicle of Higher Education's magazine, the Chronicle Review. But, all right, same idea. And it was one of their most read articles of the year. So I feel like I've held up my end of the bargain here, right? All right, let me quickly summarize my thesis in that. article. And I agreed with you. It's a huge problem. I think professors have it really bad in terms of

just this metric of the degree to which there are many parties without any checks or supervision laying claim to their time and attention to the point where it becomes almost impossible for them to do the work that they were actually hired to do, which is teaching and research. And then make matters worse, it's quite inequitable how this burden is felt because it's entirely haphazard. It's entirely unsupervised and it's entirely unchecked how professors' time and attention is requested or allocated. And so what happens is a couple things. One, if you are really unpleasant, people won't bother you.

And so now if you're really unpleasant, you have a lot more free time to work on the things that actually matter for academic advancement, which again is research and teaching. and so now you have built a system that accidentally reward smithynthrobes that's not the group that you want to reward they're not smarter, they're not better researchers,

they're just pains and so they accidentally get ahead. I mean, I wrote about in deep work how Richard Feynman bragged about this later in his career that he would do any committee work he was asked to do, he would just do it terribly.

And then he said after a while people stopped asking him to do physics work or committee work, I should say, so they could go back to his physics. Now, the point of the articles, I think it's good that Richard Feynman should be doing more physics and not a lot of committee work, but that shouldn't be the way that we actually make that happen. There's also, of course, a huge penalty if you have kids. Or if you have kids and you are the primary caregiver.

Because guess what a lot of professors do to compensate for all of this extra unsupervised, unregulated, unchecked request of their time and attention? they work early in the morning, they work at night. Guess who has other things going on in the morning and things at night is people who have kids. So anyway, so it's a big issue, right? So I agree with you. And I made this call in that article that this has to start from a commitment. It has to be a top-down commitment that our universities are going to be citadels of concentration. They should be the one place in our society where all these millions of kids who go through these doors every year,

all these millions of kids who go through high, education, the one place where they're going to expose and be exposed to what it looks like to actually give respect to the brain, to actually give respect to intellectual work, to set up a world, a sort of real world analog to the monastery in that Neil Stevenson and a Theum novel, which by the way is about kind of the, it's a metaphor for a lot of these issues. They say, this is to one place if there's any place, you're going to see, what it looks like to respect the brain and the brain's ability to think and produce value in people's lives and for the world.

In general, you should see it in a university. And university should be Citadel's a concentration from the president to the provost to the dean's down. This is what we respect you. We work backwards from that goal. We have faculty who we want to use their faculties. Just like if I ran an Olympic rowing team and my rowers got very little time on the erg, because they were doing so much request for the sort of the Olympic marketing committee for my country.

Like, no, no, no. First and foremost, these rowers need to pull a good time on the erg because we need to try to win a medal. They should be rowing. And it might be a pain for the Olympic marketing committee, but this is what we do. We row. First and foremost, we work backwards from that goal. University should do the same thing about cognitive work. Now, it's going to have to come from the top down.

And it's going to cause, I think this is the problem, John, is going to cause a ton of inconvenience. The reason why professors' times are so scattered, why there's so much demand on them, is that every one of these demands, when considered in isolation, is convenient or good for the person making the demand. The problem is universities are large. They have a lot of groups. There's a lot of bureaucracy.

There's a lot of initiatives. There's a lot of things that every time there is an issue or an idea or excitement about this. We put together a whatever. We get a vice provost responsible for X and they have two people under them and they get some office space and it never goes away. So you do that again and again and again and suddenly, you know, whatever. 70% of your staffing cost is administrative. This is not a, not a rant about administrative bloated

universities because actually higher education administration is complicated. It's much more difficult. simply like it's all bloat. There's a reason why the administrative apparatus is larger than it used to be because there's a lot more demands that actually have to be administrated. Put that all aside.

All I'm saying is we have a lot of people now greatly outnumbering the faculty themselves for whom it is convenient and useful for them in the moment if they could just get 10 minutes of your time now and a 20-minute Zoom call next week, can't you just swing by this reception next month? In isolation, each of these requests is reasonable.

In isolation, each of these requests makes someone's life easier. The problem is scale. Multiply that around 25 different units. Now the professor who's getting those 25 different in isolation reasonable request is either doing their work at midnight or pulling a Richard Feynman to get people to leave them alone.

And neither are good options. So what we have to do is say, okay, if we're going to respect cognitive work in this one place, if any place in our society, we're going to put thinking on a pedestal. It's going to be at these big universities. Okay. Then we need clarity.

Here's what is on your plate. Just like a software developer, if you go to any software development form, they can point you towards a task board and say this is exactly what Cal is working on. This is exactly what John is working on. No, he can't work on that feature right now. Look at our Canband board.

It's got two WIPs. That's it. you can put it over there in the holding tank. We'll figure out later which of those things is best for John or Cal to do next. You probably need something like that mentality and academia. Complete transparency on service is something I called for. What is your contractual obligation? Should be X hours.

That could be varying depending on your stage of career, but it should be clear. And if someone wants to violate that, even if it's really, really useful, if you would just take this on, it's really important. Come on, John, like, can you just join this committee? you say, hey, look, you're hitting your limit. It's in the contract. If you want to move past that limit, like the dean's going to have to sign off on, it should be a big deal.

You cannot just casually load things on people's plates without acknowledging what you're doing, without comparing to other plates, without saying, is this reasonable? So I think we need service transparency. So we can actually see this is what we're asking to do. This is how much is reasonable to ask you to do. Here is where you are.

Now, again, the problem with this is now you could probably only service five out of those 25 requests that are coming in. But I'm saying that's probably a good back pressure that the system needs. These cycles just are not available. So you either have to rethink how this unit does its work or we have to rethink the unit. I don't know. But I think that's a very useful back pressure. So, John, you've got me on a bit of a rant here. But we're on the same team.

I think we agree. professors are overloaded. I don't know if everyone agrees with this sort of utopian vision that universities become citadel as a concentration. This is entirely self-serving, of course, because it would make my life better. But I think it could be important for our society as a whole, and that's how I think we have to do it.

It has to come down from the top down. Enough. We're prioritizing thinking. We're going to do so with service transparency. This is how much we want our professors working on things other than research and preparing their classes. We are going to measure it. And if you want to violate it, it's a big deal.

And it's going to require a lot of approval. And it's not something you can do casually. You can't do haphazardly. You can't do it in an inequitable fashion. Richard Feynman might be a jerk, but he has his hours that he should do. But the good news for Feynman is those hours aren't too large, so he doesn't have to worry about it. And then Feynman will be nicer.

And then everyone at Cornell in 1980 would have had a better time. So we're going to solve all the problems with this plan. So there you go, John. Read my article, but that's the idea. This is a problem in these radical solutions. Transparency is at the foundation of those solutions. All right. So I like how I've been linking question to question with some sort of thematic similarities.

So let's keep that alive right now by going to a question also about education. But now we have an adult, actually an epidemiologist, returning later in life back to school. Hi, Cal. My name's Walker. I'm about to begin my journey towards a medical education. I'm an epidemiologist by training at the moment, so I'll need to be transitioning into some postback classes that I'll need to prepare for medical school

and, of course, pass to gain entrance. I was wondering if you had any specific advice to someone who's a bit older re-entering the college life. Thanks. Walker. What are you doing to us, man? We need every epidemiologist we have right now working hard, don't we? It's not that time for epidemiologists to shift over to new careers,

especially not an epidemiologist that knows about deep work. It's not going to make you the guy who figures out how to mitigate COVID, the one epidemiologist that's not on Twitter? All right, so assuming you've completed your effort to solve the worldwide pandemic by combining your epidemiological skills with your deep work skills. And I guess it is okay for us to talk about you moving on to another career. And in particular, going back to school, taking courses and a postback as you prepare for medical school. So I do have good news, Walker. What I discovered when I used to write about

student study strategies. In particular, in my book, How to Become a Straight A Student, is that a big part of my readership who were coming back to college later in life. The students

who are coming to college right out of high school, the 18-year-olds who are going to college, they didn't really want to hear that advice. They didn't want to hear about what's the right way to study. There's other things on their mind. They were going to use their own sort of generic haphazard approach to studying. They were going to stay up late all night.

It was all part of the sort of cultural, social, hazing experience of higher education for them, and they weren't really the big audience for my book at first. It was grown-ups. People who had kids. People who had other jobs. I have a big audience in the military. Vets coming back to college on the GI Bill.

There are some organizations I do work with that help those alumni get trained. Those veterans get some training as they're coming back in the school. you know, after some deployments, it's not right out of high school a little bit later in life. And what I found is they did really well. It's like a secret that 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds don't want their parents to know. But college is not really as hard as they make it out to be,

especially for an adult who's had a real job. Because what happens? Again, I got this time and again from these readers of my straight-day student book is to they say, great, this is my job. I have this many hours. these are my working hours. This is when my kids are at daycare or whatever, or whatever the situation is.

So I got to get in here. Here's my job. I got to learn this class. I can get this problem set off. And they're organized and they're scheduled. And they make a plan and they don't waste time. And they don't sit in the library until 4 in the morning because they're asleep at 4 in the morning or they're up with their baby at 4 in the morning.

They have a job to go to. And it turns out that when you're really structured and you're really organized and you treat school like a job, it's really not that hard to do well. It's like the big secret of study advice is that there is a huge amount of potential for academic performances left on the table by the standard undergraduate just because they don't treat school

professionally and they have really bad study habits. It's the entire reason why that book, the straight-A student book, which I published in 2006, sells probably more copies, will sell more copies this year than it did in 2006. It just sells and sells and sells. It's in tons of languages.

It's all around the world because it turns out it's not that hard to do well at most colleges. It's just if you get serious and you treat it like a job in that book gives some instructions for how to do it. But what I'm saying, Walker, is that you're going to find it probably to be easier than you thought it was going to be. If you just treat it like a job, it's not going to be that hard. Probably. I mean, it depends what you're doing, right? I mean, look, okay, fine. if you're taking Eric Domain's advanced algorithms graduate course at MIT,

that's probably still going to be hard. Even if you treat things like a professional, but for the most part, in a post-back program, you'll be fine. A couple really quick, very specific pieces of advice. Banished the word studying from your vocabulary. It's a meaninglessly vague verb. Always be specific.

Here is the activity that I'm going to do. I'm going to put these things on index cards. I'm going to then shuffle. and try to active recall the index cards or whatever. Studying means nothing. Be much more specific. Second, in addition to being specific, you need to be critical. Why am I putting everything on index cards?

Is this the most efficient way to learn this material? Is there a better way to learn this material? Do I need to know this particular material? I often call this method, or I used to at least call this method, studying like Darwin because it's hard to figure out in advance what's the optimal way to study for this particular professor

and this particular subject matter but if you keep specificity about how you're studying and criticalities you keep coming back is this good what could be better is this working what might work better if in particular you do

this type of self-reflection after exams after papers are handed back anytime you're given a grade you go back and do a post post-exam post-mortem. You say, what worked, what didn't? If I had to go back and study again for this test, if I had to go back again and write this paper,

what would I have spent more time on and what would I have skipped? You keep evolving, you keep studying like Darwin. You get better and better and better. And then pretty soon, you're at a set of study techniques that are so much more optimized compared to your peers

that it's like you're playing on a different field. They have a wiffle ball bat and you have an aluminum bat. It's just it's almost unfair and that's how you get there. The third quick piece of advice I would give you is just to be structured and organized about your time. This is the thing that I think people going back to school late in life are good at naturally because they already have to do this in their adult life.

But have a plan. Here's what's due. Here's how much time it takes. Here's not going to do that work. And again, adults have tighter schedule so they naturally do this. College students have all the freedom in the world. So naturally, they go to the worst possible schedules. Have a little bit of constraints here.

Actually does make your life easy. So anyways, Walker, you're going to be fine. Keep those things in mind about specificity, criticality, and structuring your time. My book, How to Become a Student, you might want to pick that up. I mean, some of it you'll find easy. Some of it you'll find obvious.

Some of it you will find to be not relevant. But hey, if you want to see, you know, what some of these techniques look like, I think you'll pick up some good ideas. But basically, given what you've, been doing, given that you're just about to solve the COVID problem. As per my request, I think you're going to find the challenge of a few posts back bio courses is not as scary as you might have supposed. All right, we have time here for one more question. Let's shift gears.

I think I'm finally breaking my connective thread through which I've been thematically linking questions. But whatever, this is an interesting one has to do with how to sequence multiple concurrent projects. Hi, Cal. My name is Jennifer. I've had my own design business since 2000, and my question is around something which has always been an issue for me. I get obsessed with my projects and find it difficult to see the wider picture, so things can take me a long time to complete. Having read your earlier student books, as well as your recent work, I think I have what you call grind mentality. It's easy for me to do the deep work, as I love nothing better than to work with no phone and getting stuck into certain aspects of a project, but I wonder if it is better

for me to use my energy slightly differently. What advice would you give to someone who is currently in the luxurious position of being able to structure their day pretty much as they choose? Do project A to completion, say one week, followed by project B, etc., or block three hours for project A and three hours for project B, one hour for C, etc. So I can make progress on a number of aspects concurrently. I'm particularly interested to know if my productivity would be better if I push myself to do these smaller chunks. Well, here's what I would recommend.

First of all, you want to take the projects on your plate and you want to break them into milestones that will take on average about a week. Now, I say on average because it's hard to predict. for some projects and some milestones, it's hard to predict how long it will take. If I'm solving a proof, maybe I'll solve it tomorrow, maybe it'll take two weeks. Sometimes it's hard to predict, but make your best guess.

Like, I'm breaking up these projects and the steps that should take on average about a week, maybe half to time more, half the time less. So now you have these milestone chunks of work that each require about a week. Given the autonomy you have and how you're, schedule. You have two choices. As you pointed out, you could go sequential or you could go parallel. Sequential, like you noted, would be let me do one chunk until it's done.

Let me switch to a milestone or chunk of another project and do that until it's done. And so on, one after another. And parallel would be, let me do two, maybe three concurrently. So maybe I spend three hours in the morning on one project and three hours in the afternoon on another, like you suggested. Or maybe you're alternating days. Monday I work on this project, Tuesday on that project, or whatever. So we got sequential, we got parallel. In your situation where you have a lot of autonomy, I would say do whatever feels more natural.

There's not an intrinsic productivity advantage to one of these strategies versus the other. The productivity advantage is going to come from what's going to get you to actually go deeper and concentrate harder. And that's going to be whatever feels natural. So it sounds like to you the sequential approach is working well. you work on something to a reasonable milestone, you work on that till completion, in isolation,

and then you switch to the next project. I think that's fine. In my field of academia, where most people are working on two or three academic papers at a time, the sequential method, I think, is more common. They tend to work on one until they get to a good breaking point

and work on another. My doctoral advisor was real big on that. I remember that. She really did not like, switching gears. She's like, no, I'm trying to have this project completely loaded up right now, and I want to make progress on it. It's going to be inefficient if I switch to something else. And so I think that's common. It's not uncommon to have people switch back and forth between a couple things at the same time. I mean, obviously, I have to do this because of writing and academic

research work. And that works too. But I would say probably within those individual tracks, I'm pretty sequential. You know, I'm not going to write a book at the same time as a New Yorker piece. I'll finish the chapter I'm working on, and then I'll switch and work until I'm done with a draft of a New Yorker piece, and then I'll go back and work on a whole other chapter. Now, that stream might be in parallel to another stream of working on proofs, but within each stream I have him sequential.

Though I would say, Jennifer, that it does matter. If the subject matter is really different, it's easier to be concurrent. So that's probably why I can do writing concurrently with research. they're so different. It's almost as if they're drawing on different cognitive resources, so the network switching cost is somewhat reduced. But anyways, I would say, as long as these chunks aren't out of control,

as long as these project chunks aren't, let me get started on this, and I'll switch to the next thing when I'm done, and that point is six months in the future. As long as it is on average, around a week, if you tackled it in isolation, then whatever feels natural, whatever feels natural should be fine.

All right, so that is all the questions I have for today. If you want to submit your own question for the habit, tune up mini episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash CalNewport. If you want to send me feedback, you can do so at Interesting at Calnewport.com. I can't respond to every email, but I read them. If it's positive feedback, skip the inbox altogether

and submit it as a review on iTunes. I definitely read those and appreciate them. Now, if you need me, I have some deep work to get done this afternoon, and I heard there's a nice rave going on down in an abandoned warehouse by the dock, so that's where I'll be. And until you hear for me again, as always, stay deep.