Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 261: Control Your Time

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

In celebration of the newly released *second* edition of the Time Block Planner, Cal provides some additional expert tips for getting the most out of a time blocking discipline before answering listener questions on the general topic of time management. He closes by discussing the recent claim that phones are ruining peoples’ ability to watch movies.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Today’s Deep Question: How can I double what I accomplish each week by better controlling my time? [16:54]  - How do I deal with the guilt of missing time blocks? [44:17] - How does Cal reconcile slow productivity with the urgency of time blocking? [49:22] - How do I block enough time to keep up with all the internet content I want to read? [52:40] - How do I stick to my block schedule if no one is forcing me to? [1:02:11] - How can Cal be both a computer science professor and yet still be so bad at technology? [1:07:00]  Something Interesting: Have Phones Ruined Movies? [1:15:45]  Links:  washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/08/05/barbenheimer-bad-movie-behavior/  Thanks to our Sponsors:  moshlife.com/deep mintmobile.com/deep expressvpn.com/deep 80000hours.org/deep  Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So I'm recording up here in my Deep Work HQ North in Hanover, New Hampshire, joined by my producer, Jesse, holding down the fort in the Deep Work HQ South in Tacoma Park, Maryland. Jesse, I have good news that is going to assuage the fears of many of the listeners who have, have been sending me increasingly worried emails. I did finally go to see Oppenheimer. I saw it with just two days left before it left the theater here in Hanover, New Hampshire. So, you know, listeners can rest assured. I have seen it. Jesse, have you seen it yet? I have not seen it. Okay. So I've heard a lot about it on different programs and stuff. So listeners, you need to turn your urgent emails towards Jesse now and get on him for not having seen this movie. It held up.

to my expectations. Look, Nolan is doing something right now with his writing and directing. The stylistic swings he's taking, I think, is just on another level than any other writer-director right now. So if you see this movie, so you'll see this, Jesse, when you go to see it,

he's taking, first of all, two different perspectives, right? So he has two different perspectives. So these are two separate timelines. Each of these perspectives is largely being unwound in a flashback. with non-linear timing. So you have two perspectives with non-linear timing,

jumping back and forth in those timelines, those non-linear timelines then intertwined with each other, occasionally actually intersecting, where you'll see the same thing from both perspectives, the same scene. So two non-linear timelines interleaved with each other, somehow with a sound editing and film editing approach that makes this three-hour movie paste like a thriller.

So it is tight, propulsive editing, in sound. So it's just move, move, move, move, move. It's almost fragmented or cubist up front. You're getting all these different views of the two main characters to be followed from all these different points. And then somehow in the end, both of the strands, both of the nonlinear timelines come together in a way that gives you a much more convergent understanding of the reality, especially if Oppenheimer is a character. I mean, that's just virtuosic screenwriting. No one's trying to take those risks. It's virtuosic directing. I mean, just look at the buildup to the Trinity test scene alone. So I thought that, I thought that.

That was pretty amazing. My read on the movie, to me, what this movie is about is great talent and ambition and just the complexities of trying to shape a legacy if you're in that position. And the complexities, the shifting motivations, the moral quandaries, just the psychological reality of being a, having a great talent and this great ambition and how that shapes character. I think that's what this movie is about. I think that's what Nolan personally resonates with, you know, as a director who ever since his first big movie, Momento has been seen as a sort of almost Kubrick-esque talent. And so I think that really resonates with them. And to me, that's what that movie is about. I've been around people off and on in my career, especially at MIT, who are in similar situations, the sort of the burden and complexities of great talent and ambition.

So I think it's really interesting. I also think it's a very elitist topic because it's relevant to, you know, a hundred people. It is in some sense from a relevant standpoint at the opposite end of the scale of Greta Gerwurwigs Barbie, right? Greta Gerwig's Barbie is trying to resonate with essentially 50% of the population. And it's much more generally applicable. A huge wide audiences can actually relate with the themes that she's playing with. Nolan is relevant for, you know, like three guys at MIT. This, like, you have this weird freak math brain and this ambition to do something with it and the shape yourself and your legacy and the complexities of it.

So it's a very elitist, very elitist movie. But anyways, it connects. And I just want to connect this to my current situation. There is a tenuous thread between what I'm doing now in Hanover and the Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer. So I'm doing this Montgomery Fellowship, right? So it's this thing at Dartmouth where there's a house they own. own. It's been around for 50 years. And they bring visiting academics and intellectuals come and stay at the house and do stuff on campus. Right. So the whole point of this program when it was found that in

the 70s was there wasn't housing for distinguished visiting professors. So they were having a hard time getting distinguished visiting professors. And when Kenneth Montgomery was talking to the president of Dartmouth at the time, Kimini, and said, I have this money. What should I do with it? I want to give to Dartmouth. He said, don't endow a chair, buy a house. Because this is our big problem. We can't get people to come stay because there's nowhere for them to stay for the long term. So that's the whole point of this program. Anyways, there's a, as mentioned, a bookshelf where all of the past fellows who have books will put a signed version of at least one of their books on this shelves. And one of the books I found after seeing Oppenheimer was Freeman

Dyson's autobiography. And so Freeman, Dyson was a Montgomery fellow in the 1990s. I think right around 1994, he was here staying in the same house. He's from that same circle of the Los Alamos era theoretical physicist. He wasn't at Los Alamos. He was a little too young for it, but his advisor was Hans Beth. And he took him to Cornell. The Cornell is where a lot of these people like Richard Feynman gathered after Los Alamos. So he was at Cornell with a lot of these people and began working closely with Richard Feynman, who, of course, was there at Los Alamos, is in the Nolan movie, has no speaking lines, but he's the young guy playing de Bongoes. That's supposed to be Richard Feynman. And so he's working, so Freeman Dyson was working with Feynman, and he saw, not to get too technical, but Feynman eventually, he developed this thing called Feynman diagrams, which was invented at first by him just to simplify doing certain calculations about quantum mechanics.

Oppenheimer was not very impressed by these. Dyson saw that, wait a second, this is more than just a useful tool. Actually, this is capturing, if anything, almost a physical law of quantum dynamics. This is very powerful. So he convinced Oppenheimer. Dyson convinced Oppenheimer, you're wrong. What Feynman is doing here is important. Dyson was right.

Feynman went on to win the Nobel Prize for that work. And Oppenheimer says, okay, you proved me wrong. And because of that, I want to give you a lifetime appointment at the Institute for advanced studies where Oppenheimer was put in charge after the war. So Dyson was here, and he was part of all of that circle, and he was also in this house. And when I'm flipping through his biography, what I'm seeing is, and this is common to a lot of the autobiographies of people from that era, these physicists that basically ushered in the quantum age, they really downplay the exceptionality of their abilities, right?

It's always, well, I chose to go to Cambridge and sort of met Hans Beth and was working on. He brought me over to Cornell and me and Feynman were working on some things. And what they don't really do a great job of capturing is the fact that these people, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Beth, Teller, Dyson, had this weird, exceptional cognitive horsepower capability from even the youngest age. they were the intellectual equivalent of the freak athlete who at a very young age can do a standing jump over a car. You see this freakish athletic ability. You know this person is going to be a superstar in whatever sport they chose. They had this. It's these weird, exceptional individuals, exceptional just in the peer.

I'm talking about intellectual horsepower sense of the word. And it is a weird burden to have. And it creates these ambitions, but also these frustrations, and you sense this ability. And a lot of these physicists from that era will look back and say, I miss Los Alamos, where at least all of this talent was being pushed towards a common goal. And I was around people who could challenge me. And then they missed that later on when that was over. Anyways, this is a very elitist concern in the sense that is very narrow. But I've been around people like this before in my career.

And there's this interesting thread. And I was thinking about that reading Freeman Dyson's biography, that there's this thread of, I have the intellectual ability of, you know, the intellectual equivalent of just being able to naturally run a four-minute mile that just naturally hit a fastball over the fence without having to think too much about it. And there's a lot that comes with it that's good. And there's a lot that comes with that that is complicated. It's a mixed blessing. And Oppenheimer, I think, is exploring, exploring that type of mixed mixed. blessing. I have to say that, Jesse, I feel almost embarrassed. I'm just imagining now next to Freeman Dyson's book on the shelf, you know, is how to become a high school superstar.

It's going to seem somehow mismatch. You know what I'm saying? He's talking about, well, this is when, you know, this is when I won my MacArthur and was working with Oppenheimer and Fine Men on the fundamental. He also did a lot of number theory. Just these brains are so big. He did fundamental physics, and Dyson also did fundamental work in number theory, and then you flip to the book next to it. Admissions officers care more about the quality of your activities than the quantity. So that's interesting. But I will say this. My final point about this, and this gave me some encouragement, you look at Dyson's book, he did a lot of public-facing stuff too. So maybe I can be a cheap knock-off version of that mindset with my own career. He would do brilliant number theory.

And then he would turn around, you know, he worked with NASA on Project Orion. Is it possible to power spaceships with nuclear bombs? And then he would turn around and help figure out the full implications of Feynman diagrams to quantum electrodynamics. And then turn around and say, hey, I did a thought experiment about Dyson sphere. So how might a future civilization build a sphere around an entire star to as efficiently as possible extract power from it? So he did a lot of public-facing work and advocacy and thought experiments. And he went back and forth between that and peer academic work. So maybe I'm just, I can think of myself as a much dumber version of Freeman Dyson.

I got a couple of quick questions, actually. So with Feynman, I just looked it up. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Oppenheimer died in 1954, right? Yeah. Oh, he did the Feynman diagrams very early. So Nobel Prize is super lag the work. Yeah.

So Feynman did the Feynman diagrams right after the war. So he got his approval by Oppenheimer during that period during that nine-year stretch before he died after the war. So pretty soon after the war, Oppenheimer was put in charge of the Institute for Advanced Study. So he was there. I mean, the thing about Oppenheimer smoked 80 cigarettes a day. So if you do the math on 80 cigarettes a day, that's lighting one with the, I guess one burns down, you're lighting the next, basically your entire waking hours. So he wasn't going to survive very long. I think often, there was no way.

But he was also, he was also dejected, right, in the last five years of his life. I mean, it took a cup. Yeah. Now, well, if you, if you watched the movie, there was, he was. So, so not to give too much away, but yeah, there, there was, um, there was. A period later, so after the war, he fashioned himself into an incredibly influential scientist on nuclear policy. And then there was a point where the establishment turned on him and they revoked his security clearance because of his communist ties. But then he sort of had a moment of after that, he was re-embraced again.

And Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And then he died because he just smoked all the time. So, you know, he got a throat cancer in the end, I think. But I think he was, because Mad Dog got Kai on on Monday and he was talking about how he basically like retreated to like a beach little cabin for the remaining years of his life and was just there with his wife and you know definitely a big step down from where he was at so I'm sure that contributed to his death as well because he was not right you're sad and smoking all day yeah and drinking a lot i don't i don't think Oppenheimer ate food i think he just smoked cigarettes all day and like had

martinis you know what he was done with his work i mean let's just say this these guys were yeah guys like that were skinny They never ate. Ian Fleming of James Bond fame was the same. So he smoked 80 cigarettes a day, drunk heavily. And we talked about this maybe in an earlier episode. You can read all about this in the great book, Golden Eye, which I've recommended on the show before and is about James Bond. Not James Bond.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, the house he built in Jamaica, where he did all of his writing. But it was a similar thing. In his early 50 years of doctors were saying, you're going to die. You got to stop smoking all day and drinking all day. And Fleming said, I appreciate your advice, but no thank you. and then two years later. You know. The other thing real quick that when you were talking about just, you know, super athletes or whatever,

one time somebody was asking Dustin Johnson, the pro golfer, like, so what do you do when you hit this fade? He's like, well, I just go up to it and hit a fade. Every golfer in the world, like size and frustration. There's a, not to go too far down this, but there, and I feel, I can't remember his name offhand. So I apologize for this. But there was in the baseball draft this year, someone who went very high. But there's a chance that this guy was potentially going to go even number one because he was cheaper.

It might have been cheaper for Pittsburgh to draft. And he played for Florida, I believe. But anyways, here's the crazy thing about it. Like number five pick overall basically picked up baseball in college, which is just crazy. Yeah. So he has this super high ceiling. He was a football player. He was a tight end.

Right? He's these huge legs, right? He's a tight end. He's like, let me just do baseball. He can just naturally hit the ball, you know, the space. He's just all power. And he's rusty, right? He hasn't been, you know, he's rusty in the field.

But he has this high ceiling. Isn't that crazy? You pick up baseball in college and before you graduate, you're the number five overall pick. So like Oppenheimer was that for brain stuff. That whole generation. So Beth, A. Teller, Feynman. Oppenheimer, I mean, obviously like Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. I mean, they were from a past generation. They were just like, they were just like that. Interestingly, Einstein was, it was different. You know, Einstein, is not that he developed later, but because Einstein, which I sort of share this with him, we share many things in common, wasn't great at math. So it didn't have that. He sort of emerged, his creativity didn't blossom actually until after his graduate work. And when he was, um, trying to find an academic appointment.

And then he really started. So it's a very, this is a rare late, semi late bloomer story, at least by the standard of physicist. Einstein was not like some of these other guys. Like Feynman was just, you know, growing up in New York,

they just went to, they identified this kid early on. My God, his brain can just, it's just above everyone else. You know, it just is doing stuff. It's like John Nash is,

middle of nowhere, West Virginia. They're like, this guy's brain is crazy. They pull him into MIT and he just sort of easily, uh, goes through. Einstein was a little bit of a late bloomer.

It was creative, but was not, because he didn't, until he learned a math he needed to express his thoughts, people didn't realize that he was so brilliant. So me and Einstein are both, you know,

those are similarities. We're both a little shaky on math by at least like professional theoretician standards. But the thing is, between Einstein and me, we have one Nobel Prize and several of the most important papers ever written. So between me and Einstein,

we really changed our understanding of the universe. You know, yeah, general relativity, but I had how to become a high school superstar. So, you know, we got similar things. All right, enough Oppenheimer. I want to shift gears and move on with what I wanted to talk about in the first segment of the show today. And it's not Oppenheimer.

Actually, I want to shift towards the more practical world of controlling your time. And the occasion of me talking about this is. is the recent publication of the second edition of my time block planner. So if you're watching this, this is episode 261 at the deeplife.com where you can find it at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. I am holding up to the camera, the new and improved second edition of my time block planner. So I thought this was a good occasion to do a refresher on time blocking. It is at the core of my ability to fit in seven jobs without working past 530s on most days. Time block planning will double the amount you're able to get done in a day or alternatively

cut in half the time. It requires you to accomplish the work you're already doing. So to celebrate the new addition of my planner being available, I want to do a quick review of time block planning and why it works. Then I'll show you the new features of this planner. And then I have four new pieces of advanced time blocking advice that I will share. So for all of you veteran time blockers out there, I have four new pieces of advice to offer to up your time blocking game. All right. So what is time blocking?

Time blocking is my approach to managing my time on the scale of days. So if we're going to think about our deep life stack concept, this is really right in core of that control layer, that layer of controlling your time so you have the space to think and figure out what you want to do. How it works, and this is pretty straightforward, is during your working hours, you give every minute a job. So you are blocking off the actual hours of your day into blocks that are dedicated to specific activities. Now, I'm going to pull up a screenshot here for those who are watching online. This is actually, this is taken from the website for my planner, timeblockplanner.com. So if you're listening, you can at your leisure go to this website

and you'll see what I'm talking about. Okay, so I'm at this website and I'm scrolling up here. I want to show you a sample time block plan that's on this website. Okay, so you should see this on the screen. So what you'll see if you're looking on the screen over here on the right is a schedule that's been blocked out. So you see from 9 to 1030, I've blocked off, drawn a block for that 90-minute interval, and it says finish report. From 1030 to 11, the number one is written to that block. And then over here on the right, that number one is replicated because it's actually representing a list of small things to do and those things are listed under it. Then we have an hour blocked off for client research and 90 minutes blocked off for lunch with Sam and a half-hour blocked off for email, etc.

So that's a time block plan. You're blocking off the hours of your day and giving specific tasks the specific times. Now, if you'll notice in this example I have on the screen, starting at 11, the plan is crossed out. And in the column next to it, a new plan is written from that point down. So that's the other key of time blocking is that if you fall off your plan, which you will, because it's hard to estimate exactly how long things take. you just wait until you have a moment free and you create a new time block plan for the time that remains. So in my planners, for example, I currently have one, two, three, four columns. So you can

march over and make a corrected time block plan three different times after your original plan. So the goal is not to predict perfectly at the beginning of your day exactly how long things are going to take. It is instead to have some sort of intention behind what you're doing with your time at any moment during the day. So that's time block planning. You make a plan for every hour of your day. You have a clear shutdown for when that plan is done. And then you switch from time blocking mode into a much more relaxed mode.

So why does time blocking work so well? And again, my claim with time blocking is it's 2X more efficient. You give me an amount of work. How much time does it take you to get that work done without time blocking? Cut that in half if you're using time blocking. So why does it work? Well, there's three things that are going on here. One, you make a better use of your available time in a given day, right?

Because you actually see the whole picture. I have a meeting here, a meeting there. Oh, there's a, this block of time in the morning maybe is more valuable than I would have realized if I wasn't time blocking. Let me get started here. Oh, I have these slivers of time between these meetings. Let me consolidate my task. That's the best usage of it.

So when you're considering your whole schedule for the day as a whole and you're holistically saying of the different things I'm going to try to get done today, what's the right way to assign this work to the various free time, you just make better use of that free time. Then the alternative of just saying, I don't know, I'm going through my day, I have a to-do list, I have my email, I'm just sort of thinking what should I work on next? You're going to, with that alternative default approach, you're going to make much less efficient use of the time that's available. The second reason why time blocking works so well is that it helps you focus.

when you know, okay, at this moment, I am in a block to be working on this. And this block last one hour, that clarity allows you to focus. That's what I'm doing during this hour as I'm working on this report. And then you focus on that. If you're working alternatively in a more ad hoc or haphazard fashion, what happens instead is you say, okay, I'm more or less working on this report. But why not also check email? Or why not also jump over here and work on this other thing for a while and I'll come back to it? You're making a decision moment to moment of should I keep working on this?

Should I stop? Should I take a break? Time blocking takes all those decisions out of the question. This is what I'm doing in this current block. Let's execute. And the final reason why time blocking works so well is that if you do it for a while, you gain a much more realistic understanding of how long things actually take. And this is usually hard-won wisdom because at first, some sort of reoccurring task that shows

up in your life quite a bit, you'll probably not be giving it enough time. And you'll have to have that painful feedback of redrawing your plan as you blow past your plan every time this piece of work comes up. So over time, this feedback mechanism means you learn, oh, this really takes three hours, not one. Oh, cleaning my inbox or checking my inbox, I need a whole hour for that. I can't put that in a half hour block with five other tasks. So you learn to experience with clear feedback how long things actually take. And once you know how long things actually take, you can much better control your workload because you have a much more accurate assessment of how much work is really on your plate and you will start things at appropriate, appropriate times.

You'll say, this is harder than I think. I'm going to start at a week in advance. So by gaining this knowledge of how long things actually take, you become much more efficient at managing and scheduling your workload. All right. So that's time block planning and that's why it works. So where should you actually do time block planning? Well, for the last few years, I have been selling a time block planner that implements exactly the format in which I do time planning. Available now for the first time is this second edition of the time block planner. So if you're buying this on Amazon, make sure you're looking at the second edition, which has the spiral binding. The first edition is still going to be available until that sells out.

So you want to make sure you're buying the right addition. Let me do a quick overview of what we change because this just took a lot of time. I have six different dummy planners we went through trying to get this just right. Here's the quick reviews of what we have updated. It is a slightly smaller trim size. So it is smaller than eight and a half by 11. So it's a little bit more handheld, a little bit more portable. You can fit it into more things. I think it feels a little thicker and it's just a better size. This felt more planner size to be. Number two, and probably the most important difference, high quality double wire spiral binding. So this beast just lays completely flat open.

You can lie it right there next to where you're working and have it there to reference. Just have it open to add things to your taskless. Have it open to see what's going on your time block plan. This was the biggest request people have and it's fantastic. I have loved having this feature. We have a new cover with the spiral binding. Sort of a nice thick material. No more of the bending of the cover.

that happened with the first edition over time. This is a good substantial cover that just lies flat, keeps this thing really solid, really solidly closed. On the interior, the paper was updated. I love the paper in the new planner. It is optimized for my pin of choice. So I hate to be selfish about it, but I optimize the paper for the pin I use, which is the Unibol Micro 0.055 millimeter ballpoint pin.

the paper has a little bit more absorbency than the last one. It soaks the ink up nicely, but at this flow rate does not blot. It's fantastic paper. I love the paper. The final thing we did is I changed how weekends are handled. The first edition of the time block planner had full time block spreads, full time block grids and capture for Saturday and Sunday. However, I typically advise people not to time block your weekends. Time blocking is hard. You can't be in time block mode all the time. So to reflect that in the new planner, we now have something called weekend pages or what you'll see, and it's a little bit hard to see on the screen, but I'll hold it up. It'll probably be reversed because it's the camera. But you'll see there's just a, there's a open space for

Saturday and Sunday on the same page. It's enough space to have a quick schedule of what you're doing those days and the metric track if you track metrics. And then a big capture for things to come up during weekend that you can then process when you get the Monday. This is right across from the weekly plan page. So now you have the weekly plan page right next to your weekend planners. So when you plan your week for the week ahead, you can process anything off of here and that weekly plan is ready to go. Not only is this better match how we use the planner. It saved a lot of pages. So now there is four months worth of planning in here instead of three. So it's a full semester. You only need three of these per year. It can match the academic calendar, sort of fall, winter, early spring, spring,

summer, if that's the way you choose to do it. So anyways, if you want a time block plan, you can do it however you want to do it. I used to do this in black and black and red notebooks, or red and black notebooks, whatever they're called. But this is basically my version of time block planning. This was built for me. It's exactly the format I use, the exact right paper, the exact right trim size, all of it right here. You can hold this thing substantially as analog thing. You can bring with you at your computer screen away from your computer screen. You can leave it open on your dresser at home. So if you have ideas or remember stuff, you can just jot it down on the next day's capture page and no, you're not going to forget it. I love it. I love the new format.

So you can buy that at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. But remember, it's the second edition. All right. So that's out. I want to get four new advanced time block. tips. So you'll see in my planners, I have this big, long introduction in the beginning that explains time blocking and has some tips. I'm adding four to it. Right. Number one, pre-block important or timely work on your calendar. So what happens with time block planning is when you make your time block plan for the day, you look at your weekly plan, you look at your calendar, because you're going to transfer from your calendar any meetings or appointments you have onto your time block plan. What I suggest is if something is timely or important, once you know about this thing on

your radar, consider going ahead in your calendar and actually adding non-appointment, non-meeting blocks onto your calendar for when you're going to get that work done. You know, it's right now, for example, I'm reviewing copy edits for my upcoming book, slow productivity. This is, it's very important and very timely. I have a very short amount of time to turn these around. So what I did is when I knew what date these were coming back, I actually went in advance and took three big blocks of time and just scheduled it on my calendar like a meeting. And now when I got to those days, I just transfer that work over to my time block plan for the day. So pre-blocking time, once you're in a time-block discipline mindset, pre-blocking time is a great way to make sure that you don't, for example, over-clutter your schedule in times when a lot is due. All right.

My second tip. So that's a little different than auto. It's different than autopilot. It was a good question. Autopilot is your pre-scheduling work that occurs on a regular basis. So if you know I always have to file a report on the last Friday of the month, you can figure out when and how you do that work and just set that repeating on your calendar into perpetuity. With pre-blocking, it's for one-off projects. So you're not finding a regular time to work on copy editing because it only happens once every few years. But you know that's really important and it's going to have a short turnaround.

So you go protect that time in advance. And then because you time block, you know when you get there, that'll be safe. All right. Second tip, time block relaxation into your workday. Right. So at first you might just be putting in a half hour break. It's in your time block plan. And when you get there, you know, okay, I'm going to just completely turn off work.

But once you're in the habit of time blocking relaxation, you'll tend to get more aggressive about this. Because see, this is the advantage of time blocking from a sustainability point of view. A critique, which I think is flawed of this approach, is that people say, well, this is all about just optimizing every minute of your day, but time blocking

can actually help you much better do the opposite. Once you're in the habit of I put breaks into my day and you have control over your time, now as your workload gets under control, you can get more aggressive about that. And you can say things like, you know what, on Wednesday,

I'm going to make very efficient use of the morning and then block off three and a half hours to go see Oppenheimer in the afternoon. You can now do that with confidence because you're controlling all of your time. So when you can control your time, not only can you get more work into your time, into your day, you can also get more relaxation in the day without it causing trouble. So just introduce the habit of many days during the week. I put little breaks into it. Once you have that habit, as you get the periods where your workloads a little less, you can lean into completely guilt-free, unnoticed, larger brakes. And that type of variation of work pacing is something that's going to make work much more sustainable. So you're not just trying to fit in work. Use time blocks to also fit in

relaxation because you can trust that relaxation is fine. It's scheduled. You know when the other work's going to happen. Nothing bad is going to happen if you turn off for a while. All right. Another advanced tip is when doing admin blocks. So I'm a big believer of admin blocks. I talk about this in the introductory material of the time block planner. For tasks, you want to have one block in which you execute multiple things. Consolidate tasks, right? That's standard time blocking. What I've been experimenting with recently is having smaller admin blocks

deeming the admin work by cognitive context. So what I mean by that is if you have five different tasks to do. that are all related to different projects or different types of work, it can be more difficult than you think to go one, two, three, four, five, and execute those. And the reason why it's difficult is because as you switch from one task type to another, your brain has to switch its cognitive context. Oh, we're thinking about this type of project. Now we have to think about like my kid's little league and some social event. Well, that's a completely different type of context. And you will notice the difficulty of this context switching. You will notice it

subjectively as a feeling of resistance, of mental fatigue. So if you instead theme tasks, so they're in the same cognitive context, what you'll realize is you get through them much faster. So if I'm doing four things related to social planning for the family, those four things, if I do them one in a row, is going to go much more smoother because once I switch into that context, now I can do the three, four, five other task and it's going to come without that subjective resistance. And then maybe I have another small block later with a bunch of things.

surrounding a particular type of project I'm doing for work. Oh, I have a lot of things surrounding a conference I'm organizing. Let me put a 20-minute block over here where I'm just going through a bunch of those in a row. So shorter blocks of themed admin tasks is way more comfortable than having bigger blocks. You mix together different types of admin tasks. This is why the single hardest batched admin tasks that most people do on a regular basis is cleaning their email inbox. Because if you're just going through your inbox one by one, why is that so hard? Because you are switching context from message to message. So even your email inbox, you can break out in the themes and say, okay, during this admin block, I'm doing some family related tasks,

and I'm responding to all emails related to the family related tasks. And then later in the day, when I'm doing tasks that are just related to this conference I'm organizing, I will then go through my inbox and handle all the emails related to that conference. And what you're going to find is those encounters with your inbox are going to go so much more smoothly because you are not behind the scenes trying to keep switching your cognitive context. All right. My fourth bit of advanced time blocking advice is whenever you put a meeting of any significant length or complexity onto your time block plan, add a short block after it for just postmortem, organizing what you learned, making a plan for what to handle, getting the information for that

meeting into your systems. Never let a interaction-based time block be immediately followed by another time block focused on something different. You have to close down to work of meetings. You need 15 to 30 minutes to do this. Okay, the meeting is over, but I have 15 to 30 protected minutes to go transform my notes into tasks and put reminders on the calendars. And if there's follow-up emails. Let me just do them right now. Now I can completely shut down that thing. I don't have a ton of open loops hanging in my head as I jump from this meeting to the next. I don't have a ton of open loops in my head as I jump from this meeting right into trying to do deep work. So that should just be instinct. When you write a meeting time block, that you put another block

under it, and you can even just, I'll sometimes just shade it in, this little shaded in block under each of my meetings. And that's the catch your breath, process everything to just happen in that meeting, again, it's going to make the whole day go smoother. That extra 15 or 20 minutes after every meeting makes the whole rest of the day actually makes sense. All right. So that's my review. That's the same concept. That's the same concept that you always suggested with students and answering all their questions like after a lecture. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Right. I used to recommend the same thing for students that when you're taking notes and lecture, you clearly mark everything you didn't fully understand.

And as soon as lecture is over, you see how many of these things can I resolve? I mean, I guess the first, so this is from my book, How to Become a Stradia student. And I say there's multiple lines of defense for filling in these question marks. The first line of the fence is you ask questions right away. Wait, I didn't get that. Can you say that again? The second line of defense is you go up to the professor right after class. I don't understand this.

Can you explain it to me? The third line of defense is some combination of T.A.'s textbook. office hours and asking classmates. And the key is do that as soon as possible. Do not let the questions, don't let the questions just sit there. As I don't understand this math technique, I guess I'll deal with that when I'm studying for the test a month from now. Close that down. You want to try to close down and consolidate your understanding of lectures as soon as possible after you encounter the lectures. This is kind of similar. If you have a meeting, process everything related to it right away. Don't just let that sit. And maybe tomorrow I'll remember what to do about it.

closing loops, I think is really important for having sustainable cognitive work. All right. So that's time block planning. Good to revisit it. Enjoy the time block planner. If you want to find out more, I have a website, timeblock planner.com. That has a video where I really go through and show you a lot of examples of exactly how time blocking works.

You can go watch that video there and it has links to where to buy the second edition from Amazon. But I'm just, look, whether or not anyone buys it, and a lot of people are, but whether or not anyone buys this, I am so happy to have it because it is just a perfected tool for exactly this method of time management that I have so long sworn by. All right, so here's our plan for the rest of the episode. I have a bunch of questions to get to that one way or the other all have some relation to time block planning and time management.

And then after that, we have a something interesting segment where it's actually going to react to a news article that, believe it or not, somehow connects Oppenheimer. to digital distraction. So stay tuned for that. I think that is going to be interesting. But first I want to mention a brand new sponsor of the Deep Questions podcast. And that is our friends at Mosh, M-O-S-H. And in particular, I want to talk about the Mosh bar.

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they taste really good. It's a mixture of soft and crunchy, which I love, and the flavors, the flavors are really great. The way I think about these type of bars is if I am in a busy time block day, I'm going from thing to thing, taking advantage of my time block schedule, and I know that I need a little bit of energy recharge to keep myself from crashing, the mosh bar is exactly the type of thing I want to grab. It tastes great, a bunch of protein, no sugar to crash you.

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I also want to talk about our longtime friends at 80,000. hours. 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people find careers that aim at solving the world's most pressing problems. People know my longtime readers and listeners know I'm not a big fan of simply telling people follow your passion. If you just follow your passion, you'll love your job and you'll live happily ever after. Careers are more complicated than that. And the philosophy of 80,000 hours is what you could do with your working life instead of just following your passion is actually use the 80,000 hours, the average person is going to spend at work to make as much positive impact as possible on the world. This is what 80,000 hours does.

It is a nonprofit that aims to help you find a career that is both fulfilling but also makes a big positive difference. They have done over 10 years of research along academics at Oxford University into how to find a fulfilling career that does a maximum amount of good. I've known these guys for a long time. 80,000 hours got started right around the time I published my career book so good they can't ignore you. So we've, we've had conversations. I've known the philosophers there at Oxford and the people 80,000 hours. I've known them for a decade now and they really are locked in. How can you use your career to do as much good as possible? Now, there's a few different things. If you go to there, there's a few different things you can get by going to their website,

which is 80,000 hours.org slash deep. So 80,000, which is spelled out as the numbers, 8000000 hours.org slash deep. If you go to your website, they have all sorts of articles about how to find the most impactful job, things to look at, how that actually works. You'll also learn there about their newsletter. Fantastic way to get this information sent to your inbox. You can find out they have a job board there. You can help you directly find impactful jobs, and you can learn about their podcast in which

they bring on some of the world's smartest thinkers and get into really deep conversations. I really recommend their podcast a lot. So just go to 80,000hours.org slash deep. That's 80,000 hours.org slash deep. They'll learn more about how to use your career to make a big difference. All right. Let's move on to some questions. Jesse, I think all the questions we've chosen today have at least a tangential

connection to time blocking or time management. So let's get our productivity geeks hats out and put on and get rolling here. So what's our first question? Here we go. First question is from Piumi. I live my day using time blocking combined with autopilot scheduling for my mornings. Every morning I do two hours of my work on my research. Sometimes, however, I have to stay up late and I miss my morning blocks. I want to know how to deal with these setbacks. I feel good. I feel good. I feel guilty for the whole day for not executing my autopilot schedule because I slept in. Well, we have two different related concepts to differentiate here. I think that's going to help you find a solution. So autopilot scheduling, which is what you referenced in your question here,

is where for regularly occurring work, you have a set time on a set day and typically a set location for which you do that works. The whole idea is to take the decision of working on this out of your day-to-day decision-making process. It's just there on your calendar. Tuesdays at 10, I go to this library and work on my problem set. That's just when I do that. So that's autopilot scheduling. Now, what you're doing is maybe not exactly autopilot scheduling. What you're trying to do is start each morning with two hours of research. So that feels like an autopilot schedule because it's Oh, it's work I do on the same time every day. But I would say what you're really doing instead is what we might call a heuristic autopilot.

So a heuristic autopilot is not a calendar appointment that is set to show up on a regular basis and you treat like any other calendar appointment, like a dentist appointment or a meeting. A heuristic autopilot is a rule. It's something you're going to write down on the top of your. your weekly plan, for example, a rule that you think about when you're creating your schedule for each day. So I think what you're really doing here is you have the heuristic autopilot that says, when possible, spend the first hour or two of each day working on research. So some days, that's not possible because you're up late and you have to sleep in. But you're not violating an appointment on your schedule. So if this was an actual appointment on your schedule,

If this was a true autopilot schedule, you would treat this like a real appointment, like a meeting with your boss. And you wouldn't say to your boss, yeah, sorry, I didn't show up. I slept in. You would have to go to that. But what you're doing here is more flexible. So that's why I call it a heuristic. It's a general rule for how you get a certain thing done. Like another example of a heuristic autopilot is sometimes when I'm deep in the problem-solving phase of a theoretical computer science paper, I'll have a heuristic that says, okay, the drive to work every day for the next week.

to the extent possible, use that to think about the problem. It's not something that's on my calendar. When I actually drive to work might differ based on the days, but it's a heuristic. Keep this rule in mind each day when you're planning out your day. Another heuristic autopilot. Sometimes I have a lot of tasks that are floating around for something that's coming up. I'll say 20 minutes every day dedicated only to working through tasks related to this upcoming thing. That's a heuristic autopilot.

And then when I get to each day, I'll say, okay, I, I have to find where this is going to fit, but I'm going to try to find 20 minutes where I can work on task and try to do that every day this week. So I think that's going to help you here. You really have a heuristic, not a hard autopilot schedule. And once you know that, you shouldn't be so worried that occasionally you don't get to do research in the morning. What matters is you're following a heuristic rule of when there's time in the morning you do. Now, if you find that you're almost never actually applying this rule, that almost always you're sleeping in too late to get this research done, well, then you need to change. something right that's no longer a good heuristic you need to change where the research happens or you need to change your habits so you're not sleeping in that's possible but if what we're talking about here

is once a week you don't do morning research the other four days you do i think it's a perfectly fine example of a heuristic autopilot schedule all right what do we got next oh go ahead is that similar is that similar to when you were writing your when you were in writing mode last summer you would write is that was that heuristic was no i think that's a fair point uh last summer when i was writing slow productivity. It was, you know, try to write first thing before we go out and do activities, you know, try to write first thing every day if possible. And we were on vacation. So last summer, we were up in Vermont, the Mad River Valley. Some days it was, look, we got to get going early in the morning because we're taking the family out to see something. It's a couple hours away. And I just

want it right that day. But it was, okay, the default is try to just write every morning. And Julie was understood that schedule. So she's a lot of mornings. We're like, yeah, we might go do something in the morning. I might take the boys to do something brief before we do our larger trip. And you're right. It was a heuristic. And I couldn't do it every day. Okay. But most days, I tried to write first thing. So that was a heuristic autopilot schedule. And again, yeah, it's very different than these days, these hours, this location, I'm always doing this work. Okay. All right. Moving on. What do we have next? Next question is from Moritz. You say that defining, you say that a defining feature of slow productivity

is that no one day or hours critical. How do you reconcile that with the urgency implicit in time blocking? Well, I think it is a good question. It seems like a contradiction, but it's actually really core to thinking about slow productivity and multi-scale planning. So time blocking, I mean, Moritz is absolutely right here,

generates urgency. I have a time-block schedule. I need to stick to this schedule. If this is the block I'm in, and this is how much time I have, I want to try to focus intensely to get this work done in the time I have. This is why time blocking leads to such a large increase in efficiency because it's really focusing your attention. And it does feel very urgent.

Meanwhile, the defining feature of slow productivity, as Mauret says, is this sense of if I was sick tomorrow, it's not a big deal. No one day is urgent. What matters is I'm making regular progress on something important. and that will add up over time to a really big accomplishment. It doesn't matter if this week I was doing something else, so long as most weeks I am making progress on it. It sounds like a contradiction, but I actually think they fit together quite well because what this is saying is when you choose to work,

do that work with urgent efficiency. So from the slow productivity scale, that means, okay, if I'm going to write today, when you write, block that off and write intensely. Give it your full concentration. Then when you're done, be done. If I'm not going to write today because something came up or I'm not feeling well, which is slow productivity says it's perfectly fine, then you're just not putting aside any time to write. And that's fine as well. So really what the urgency of time blocking is saying is not that you should always be urgent, but that if you're going to work, work with focus. If you're going to work, work with urgency. Do it all out. Be done when you're done. Now, when you work and how much you work and what you work on, those are all decisions that slow productivity can help you make more sustainably.

And this is why, for example, I say time block relaxation, have some days be shorter than others, don't time block your weekends. Because when you're executing a time block schedule, you're executing with intensity and urgency. And that can get draining after a while. So you want to use this tool. You want to use it carefully and make sure that it's balanced off with non-time blocking time. But I don't think there's any scenario. So if we flip this around, I don't think there's any scenario where it makes sense to say when you work, do so haphazardly and without intention. that's not going to make you feel more relaxed.

It's going to make your work take longer. It's going to make your work feel more stressful because you can't get your arm around everything. It is not going to make you more relaxed to have a more relaxed attitude to the execution of work. And then maybe that's paradoxical, but it's not really. So being very structured and intentional about when you work, when you work, actually can support much better at larger scales, a more natural pacing, up, downs, and up periods and down periods, busy weeks, non-busy weeks, busy days, non-busy days. So the urgency in the moment, I think, allows for more peace and relaxation over the long haul. All right.

What do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from John. How would you suggest consuming Internet articles mindfully as a busy working parent? I don't use social media and I try to time block my consumption to 1.5 hours in the evenings, three evenings a week. there is so much high value content coming in every day. I can't keep up with these blocks and the growing list of unread articles in my cue stresses me out. Well, John, maybe this won't surprise you. I think Jesse knows probably what I'm going to say. I'm going to say you don't need to spend four to five hours a week reading internet articles. And what I would suggest is let's take a 30-day

exercise here. A third-day exercise where you essentially read no internet articles. All right. It's an experiment I'm going to suggest that you do. So if you want to keep up with the news, listen to a new summary podcast. That's fine. And you can keep listening to podcasts. That's fine. Like when you're driving somewhere walking, you can listen to interesting podcasts like ours. That's fine. But don't read any articles. No social media posts that have gone viral. no New York Times piece that a lot of people are emailing around. Just I'm not reading internet content. Listening to podcasts when I have free time.

And put that energy instead towards reading stuff that's less current, reading books, spending time and going slower with deeper ideas that have been more thought through. Here's what I think you're going to find after 30 days. You are absolutely fine having not read out those four hours or five hours a week of online time. That you're informed enough and you don't need a all these other takes, that you're less stressed, that you're more relaxed, and that your brain actually feels much more improved, having spent time instead with the slow consumption of media, spending a whole week just reading one book and just enjoying one idea and thinking it through.

I mean, I think the issue here, the issue here that we're combating, this is very common mindset that I think John is expressing quite clearly, this very common mindset that we need to be fast consumers of many multifaceted streams of information. And I reject that as actually being fundamental to having a fulfilling and effective intellectual life. Now, if we look to someone like Neil Postman, a cultural critic like Neil Postman, we'll see warnings about this. What does Neil Postman argue, for example, in amusing ourselves to death?

He says the dominant media technologies of a given era will change the way we conceive of cognition. It will change the way we conceive of our place in an information landscape. And this is exactly what's happening now. Social media platforms and the online attention economy more generally is built on this idea of high velocity of content. High velocity of interesting content is what keeps people engaged. It's what allows them to show more advertisements to you and to gather more data about you. And so as we shift to that media landscape, we changed our concerns. We changed our conception of what it means to be a consumer of information. We say, well, this is what it means to be a consumer of information. You have all these fragmented constant streams of information. It's like you're a

producer at a news program that has to constantly be checking on all the wire services to see what breaking news is happening, what you need to know. But you go back even 25 years, and this would be seen as idiosyncratic and eccentric. Why are you jumping around to all these articles? This is not how we consume information. We see the daily news and read books. And so keep in mind this thought that I have to keep up with all this fragment that streams information, that is an artifact of particular tools that were introduced in the last 10 to 15 years as more effective ways to sell advertisements. Ignore that.

I think you're perfectly, you're going to be perfectly happy and comfortable returning to a prior generation's understanding of information, which is slower, better, and more consolidated. I read it book. I just took in the news of the day from one source, a newspaper, a news podcast. Instead of reading 10 articles, I listen to one 90-minute podcast. So slower but better, slow media consumption is what we did until essentially a minute ago as consumers and media.

So you'll be completely fine returning to it. So do this experiment, John, and I think you'll find, oh, I don't need to be looking all this internet information anyways. are going to be more relaxed. You're going to feel less cataclysmic. You're going to feel less as if everything's falling apart. You're going to feel just your heart rate start to settle. And your brain's going to wake up to, oh, I really like devouring information carefully and slowly. This is a little bit more comfortable for my neural apparatus. So try this experiment. I think you're going to find a slower, better approach to media consumption to be something that is much better, a much better

experience for you. What about New Yorker articles? New Yorker articles are good. I like that. Read one. You follow my rule of at least one article from each week's magazine. And just hard copy or internet, it doesn't matter. You can read it line. Yeah, I mean, you can do it either way. You know, subscribe to the hard copy if you can. Otherwise, there's, you'll, so if you sign up for, if you're a subscriber, so now I'm in promotion mode, Jesse. Because I just, I just upped my contract for another year to be a contributor at the New Yorker. So now I'm sales mode. If you're a subscriber, you can sign up for an email that says this week in the magazine. And it shows you, here's the articles in the magazine, and you can all linked. So you can read them online. And the other thing

you need to follow is anytime I publish an article. And when I publish an article, you should read that and share it. And, you know, I don't want to put too much of burden on you, but share it with like seven or 800 of your closest friends and demand that they read it a couple times. from different browsers so that it registers as unique reads. I'm joking about that. I have no idea how many times each of my articles get read. It's one of the great things about The New Yorker is it's just write the best article you can that you're interested in. And we're happy that you did that.

You don't even, there's no discussion of what was your readership number. But anyways, slow media, better, slower. It really is, it's just a nicer way. I mean, could you imagine, Jesse, four hours a week of just constant short art. articles. I mean, that must be 500 articles. I don't know. Could you imagine? Because, you know, online stuff is so short and you skim it so much. It is, well, I think it, you know, when I first read that quote, I loved that question, by the way. When I first read it, I was thinking, oh, you know, I read New York or some of the New Yorker articles online and that can take an hour or whatever,

depending on how long it is. Like that Kogogoggi in one was like 20 pages. I read that hard copy, but whatever. So I didn't know he was necessarily talking about short articles because you could read, you know, a lot of long form stuff too. But it's right. I mean, it could. I mean, I think a good long form strategy. Never ends. I think the mindset that John has, which is common right now, is this breadth mindset.

I need to read everything that's interesting to me. And I like the depth mindset. So if you just choose a, let's say you choose a magazine. Like, I choose the New Yorker. You know, like, I want to read one really good article a week. this is not a strategy of, I want to make sure I've read everything good and interesting that came out this week. It's a strategy of, I want to have the experience of reading a really good article each week. It's not focused on breadth. It's focused on depth. You could pick

another, you know, magazine. Maybe you're a Harper's person or, you know, maybe you're more into fiction and, you know, so it's like McSweeney's or something, whatever, or whatever it is. But, you know, maybe you pick a publication. So I want to just take one article, I'm going to print it and, like, sit outside and spend 30 minutes and read it once a week. That's a depth strategy. I want to make sure I encounter multiple great things each week. And it's a very different mindset than I want to make sure that I read everything that could potentially be interesting. And again, social media, I think changed our culture to create that media landscape, in part because the form of social media is many things coming at you. But also in part is that the way that it subtly monetizes

information. So even if you were not a professional social media influencer, it changes your relationship to information of I want to stockpile as many interesting ideas and articles and takes as I can because that's valuable because I could be posting that and I could be getting likes for that. And it gives us this idea of you want to accumulate interesting ideas and links as you would gold as a prospector. And the slow media consumption model is very different. It says what you're prioritizing is not stockpiling as many interesting takes as possible. It's having as many experiences of deep encounters with ideas as possible. And a deep encounter with an idea might be you're reading, you know, you're reading a 7,000 word New Yorker piece and it takes you an hour.

And it's one article you read. But it's not the amount of content that matters. It's the duration of this experience of having a deep encounter with something. Yep. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Nate. I'm trying to implement time block planning.

It works to some degree, but I often find myself struggling to really stick to my plan. The reality is I have no short time deadlines or people checking out my progress, so it's hard to mentally give my plan binding force when there are no consequences for not sticking to it. Well, this is one of the other advantages of time block planning. I actually didn't list this in the opening segment, but I think it's really critical. it consolidates where you need discipline. So if you're not using time block planning, if you just have a to do list and, hey, what should I work on and try to make progress on things, you have a independent, disciplined relationship with all the different type of work you do. So maybe you're pretty successful at answering questions from your boss.

Okay, so when you're telling yourself, I want to go answer questions from my boss because it's, you know, you don't want to disappoint her. you're thinking, okay, I'm pretty disciplined in doing that, but when it comes to working on a long-term optional project that over time might really help your career, but no one's forcing you to do it, you may find that your discipline relationship with that type of work is much worse because you keep saying, look, it doesn't matter if I don't do it today, and it sort of feels good to procrastinate on it. Time block planning consolidates all of that discipline to a single decision. Do I follow my time block plan or not? that's the single decision you have to make.

Am I someone who follows my time block plan or do I not? And once you have trained yourself, and we'll get to that in a second how to do that, but once you have trained yourself to reliably follow your time block plan to the best of your abilities, you now get to apply that developed discipline on all the different type of work you do. Because blocks are agnostic. So this block might be answering emails from your boss. This block might be working on this really big project. This block might be exercising.

You just execute your blocks. You do not have to have a separate conversation with yourself, a separate negotiation with yourself for each of these different activities. The only negotiation you had is I'm a time blocker or I'm not. So it focuses your disciplined efforts. Now, when you're focusing your discipline on one thing, following a time block plan or not, it's much easier to train and develop. There's just this one habit that you're trying to actually develop.

And how do you actually train it? get a physical time block plan. You can use my planner, use a whatever, your own notebook. Have a physical artifact for your time block plans. Have a simple metric that you track every day, right there on top of your plan. So if you're using my time block planner, I'll show this on the screen. Every day has a metric tracking space at the top. Just have a simple metric like TB checkmark or something like this or TBX. We put TB checkmark if you more or less followed your time block plan and TBX if you didn't or a checkmark in a circle if you followed your time block plan and X in a circle if you didn't. And just have this simple bit of clear feedback.

So you have it. Here's where I do the time blocking. This is with me every day. It's by my desk. And every day I put an X or a checkmark. That's a real quick way. That feedback, that sensory feedback will probably be enough for you to pretty quickly develop the habit of I want to put down the check mark.

each day. It's not that hard to do. Okay, let me just follow this stupid plan. You do that for a couple of weeks. You'll probably be good at this. This is no, this technique I'm telling you here is nothing special. This is just pure James Clear atomic habits. You make it easier, right? By here's my planner. This is just for time block planning. It's always next to me. And you find a little bit of feedback. So you have some sort of tactile feedback, drawing an X or drawing a checkmark. So you get that bit of feedback. And then you just let our brains habit apparatus go loose. And you'll develop that discipline. But because you're only focusing on one thing, you're really getting a huge bang for your buck. This one, talk about atomic habits, this one habit, I time block.

If at all possible, I follow my time block plan is going to explode into so many other things. It's the habit that's going to unlock everything else you want to do because you can put these different initiatives into your time block plan and know they'll get executed. So I'm going to reject the premise, Nate, that you're just bad at sticking with plans. Train that. train that carefully. It is worth the effort because everything else good, or at least I should say, so many other good things are going to follow if you become someone who actually sticks with their time blog plan. So we call this sometimes meta-productivity habits, a single habit that leads to many other habits that are very useful.

So train that targeted discipline and a lot of good will come from it. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Sounds good. We have a question from Matt. as a software engineer utilizing dozens of tools at my fingertips all day and every day, I need clarification about the strange dichotomy displayed in your podcast. How can you be a computer science professor yet not so savvy with the technologies used for your podcast,

not to mention the fact that you use a paper planner for time blocking? Well, I included this question so that I could compare myself again to Robert Oppenheimer. So, okay, let's go back, go back and watch Oppenheimer or read. read American Prometheus, the biography. And what are you going to see? In physics, there was two big groups, right? So there was the theorist. This was Oppenheimer.

He was the leader of theoretical quantum physics. And then you had the experimentalist as personified in the movie with Josh Hartnett's portrayal of Lawrence at Berkeley, who built the first cyclotron and actually builds things. Well, computer science has that same split. There's the theorist who sit there with pencil and paper and white. boards and do theory on what's possible or not possible with computers that do theory on the expected performance of a particular algorithm. We don't use computers. We do math. We do applied mathematics. So I am the Oppenheimer side in computer science. I'm on the Oppenheimer side,

not the Lawrence side. So this is why I'm bad at technologies is I'm essentially a glorified math person. And when you train in the theory group at MIT, you use your computers to write up your papers and that's it. We don't touch compilers. We don't write code. To a computer scientist, even a systems computer scientist, and this is something people often get wrong, computer programming, for example, is to a computer science what microscopes are to a biologist. Oh, it's an useful tool. But to say, oh, computer science is about being a computer programmer. It's like going up to a biologist, be like, oh, so you're like a microscope technician. You're really good at focusing and using microscopes. Like, no, I understand how all organisms

work. So this is why I'm not great at technology because I'm a Oppenheimer style theoretical computer scientist. Again, between me and Oppenheimer, we have had a big impact on the world if you sort of average out all of our contributions. But why do I, I want to separate out, why do I use a paper planner for my time block planning? It simply works better. So as we just talked about in the last question, so moving away from computer science, just talking about time block planning. the atomic habit of productivity that's going to unlock so many others is I am a time blocking person. I follow my plan I make for the day. And if you're going to do this, it is very, very helpful to have a dedicated artifact that is only for planning.

So that you can just have this artifact with you wherever you go. You can open it at your desk. It's not an app or something on your computer that you might or might turn off like any other app or thing you might or might not turn off. It is a dedicated special purpose artifact. And if it's right there in front of you, you're signaling to yourself, this is something I do. If you're instead saying, well, you have some tool on my computer. You're like, I have a ton of tools on my computer.

And yes, I'm not using this one right now, just like I'm not using this one right now. It doesn't get to your core identity. But if you own this thing, here's a specialized notebook I use for time blocking. It signals to yourself, I am someone who time blocks. And these little psychological differences matter. And it makes you more likely to develop that atomic habit. of sticking to your time block plan, whatever it is. So there's two parts of my answer. Part number one, yeah, I'm bad at technology because I'm a theoretician. I'm Oppenheimer, more or less.

The second part of it is why time block plan with a planner, and I would say even if I was a Lawrence character, even if I was a hacker, even if I wrote compilers and wrote code all day, I would still use a paper planner for time block planning because I want to signal to myself, I take this seriously. And it's very, very important that my mind thinks of myself as a discipline time block planner because so much else is made available by that single decision. All right. So that's questions. I want to move on to a final segment here.

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All right. So I have one final segment here where I want to react. to something that a reader sent me to our interesting at caldnewport.com email address. So I'm going to bring up this article. I'm going to share it on the screen. So again, if you're listening, you can see the video for this episode at the deeplife.com. Go to watch and go to episode 261. Or you can find this, the full episode at YouTube.com slash CalNewport Media.

All right. So the article I want to talk about comes from the, Washington Post. It's written by Sophia Andrade and Jenei Kingsbury. Here is the headline, Bad Behavior at Barbenheimer reflects a worrying trend. So Barbinehiber, of course, is the media term for the last few weeks where we've had Barbie and Oppenheimer opening at the same time, bringing in record business. So it's the box office size, the security. cumulative box office size of the last month or so has been some of the biggest we've seen. I think the last time the box office was this big was when Avengers end game came out or

Infinity War, one of the big Avengers movies. So a lot of people are returning to the movies. Many more people are seeing movies in recent weeks than they have been in years, which is good. But as this article says, there have been a lot of reports of bad behavior. behavior in movie theaters as if people have forgotten how to actually see movies. Now, a lot of the examples in this article are clearly anecdotal and strange. Like the example I have up here right now on the screen is of a showing of Barbie

in which someone was just sitting in the crowd fully naked. And there's this whole thing about how the security guards were saying, dude, you cannot be naked in here. And the guy was all confused and upset that he couldn't be naked in the theater. who's getting all worked up. Look, that's a crazy example. I don't think that's representing a trend that people forgot you're not supposed to be naked in the movie theater. But I think more general here is people being on their phones all the time. And that's actually the piece I want to focus. I'm going to scroll down here to a quote about this. But I think this is the thing I want to

focus on here. All right. So here we go. The bad behavior wasn't limited to energized Barbie audiences, either. Saul Oppenheimer last night in one of the worst behave crowds I've ever been in. Multiple camera flashes throughout. People in front of us scrolling TikTok halfway through the film. User Silver Gelpin wrote this weekend on Tritter. If you don't have the attention span for a three-hour movie, don't leave the house to attend one. Others chimed in with their own experiences. Let me find one more quote from here that I liked. All right. So here is, Roxanne Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, who was saying, it's important. Okay, here we go. It's clear that the past three years have

been challenging for many people in our country. Dot, dot, dot. The combination of pandemic, inflation, mass shooting, climate-related disasters, political polarization, and so on, has taxed our capacity to cope. It is important to recognize this reality as we examine behavior this summer. All right, here's another quote here. Others are calling out cell phone culture and a constant self-centered need for stimulation. For the entire history of theaters, people are able to pay attention. The only difference now is the phones tweeted NBC News Tech and Culture Reporter Kat Tin Barge. All right, so what's going on here is a lot of people came back to the theaters.

There's a lot of bad behavior. I think a lot of this we can just chalk up to the fact that it was a cultural event to go see these movies, especially the Barbie movie, and it became a scene, the movie itself was a party and you would dress up and people were drinking and bringing wine into the theaters. That's so specific to this particular cultural event. I'm not so worried about that representing some big change. I don't think every movie going forward were going to be like this, but I think these reports of people on their phones all the time, people taking pictures of what's happening on the movie screen, people doing TikTok videos in the screenings. the fact that reports of this are up, I think, is interesting. And so we have two competing, in those quotes I read, we have two competing explanations for this.

So we have the one quote that says, well, everyone's traumatized and they just don't know how to cope. And that's why we're seeing this weird behavior. The other is saying our attention span is down because of phones. We're more narcissistic because of phones. We don't want to be away from phone information and we find documenting ourselves and getting attention online. It's more important than anyone else's experience. this latter one, this won't surprise you, this latter explanation is the one that I think probably makes the most sense.

So what I think has happened is in general, addictive, highly salient and attractive content delivered to us on phones has in general lowered people's attention spans, has in general made it hard for people to consume long form content because they're so used to being able to TikTok switch at the start. slightest hint to boredom. Now, this hadn't affected movies as much because, especially in the last couple of years, movie viewership has been more self-selected. There's nerds like me who love movies, who, you know, I was as early as I could in the pandemic. You know, I was back in the theaters, wearing my mask at the time. Like, I want to see movies. But a lot of people just stopped going

to the movies. The people who did were really interested in movies. Well, now that we have widely attractive movies coming back again, we have Barbie, we have Oppenheimer, a lot of lot of people are coming to the theater who aren't just movie geeks and their broken attention span comes through. Now, you might say, wait a second, there have been hit movies since the pandemic, yes, but a lot of those have been superhero movies. And this is a point that was made in that Washington Post article. Superhero movies are actually made for shorter attention spans. It's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it moves through. There's a lot of IP references. It really holds on to your attention in a way that the people who are interested in superhero movies,

even with lowered attention spans, you can probably make it through without periods of boredom. But, you know, Barbie is written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It's not all, there's periods of discussion and interesting stuff and subtle commentary. Oppenheimer's three hours long. These are not superhero movies. They were really seen when we bring broad audiences back to lack of attention span. So I just want to use this to go back and emphasize a key point I made in my book, Deep Work, which is that it's really important to embrace boredom.

And the argument I made in that book is not that boredom is in itself valuable. Instead, the thing that is dangerous is teaching your brain that at the slightest hint of boredom, it immediately gets a stimuli. If your brain always has that experience, you are going to build up a Pavlovian response to boredom

that says as soon as I feel bored, where is my shiny digital treat? I need to see something on my phone to make that feeling go away. And if your brain has that connection, it can't sit through Barbie. It can't sit through Oppenheimer. It has to look at the phone. So the reason why I suggest embrace boredom is because what you're doing is breaking that cycle. So if on a regular basis you expose yourself to some sort of long form concentrated experience where you maybe feel some boredom but you don't give in, you're teaching your brain,

that's okay. So the goal is not to be bored all the time. The goal is to be bored enough that it's familiar. And so if you've done this, then when you go to see a three-hour movie, you can make it through without looking at your phone. Like, I do this a couple times a week. I'm used to this. That's okay. So I want to flip this around, though, and say, actually, movies themselves might be one of the more palatable, fun ways to train boredom.

Go to the movie theater without your phone. leave your phone in the car in the parking lot, you know, hidden in your glove compartment or turn it to airplane mode or turn it completely off, give it to your friend who's sitting with you and just sit and watch a movie. Now, you will feel boredom if you haven't been practicing, but you don't have a phone accessible to actually check. And you'll be able to power through that boredom because you're watching a movie and it's brilliantly constructed and it's really interesting. And there's a 50 foot screen in front of you, right? It's not that hard. So I actually think movies are a great tool to practice this technique of embracing boredom. If you can sit through a movie at home or at a movie theater once a week and not look at your phone,

you will see benefits and all of the sorts of things you do in your life. So I'm flipping this around. I think the fact that we're seeing people behaving poorly at movies, we say, well, movies can actually be the savior of this bad behavior we're seeing at movies. return to your theaters and use movies, see things that, you know, it's not your absolute favorite movie, see it without your phone, without your phone easily accessible. Let this be a really natural way to reengage with the ability to sustain concentration without needing a shiny treat. You know, Jesse, Julie and I used to do this all the time before we had kids because

they were big cinefiles. We would see everything. I kind of missed that period. We lived walkable to the movie theater, the big AMC on Boston Common. We would just see everything. And some movies were better than others. There's any reasonable movie out, you know, we go twice a week,

just see every movie. I'm suggesting people return to a little bit of that rhythm if they can. I just see lots of movies as a way of practicing focus without it being just complete white knuckle boredom. Also,

I want movies to do well. So there we go. By the way, I didn't see any behavior like this when I saw Oppenheimer, but I did see it at noon on a weekday in Hanover. New Hampshire.

So I think the average age of the theater was 65. I'm not sure if the people in the theater even knew how to use phones. Maybe it's not the right sample. It was an older crowd. Let's just say that. So maybe that's not the right sample. Quick, quick tidbit.

I heard that the strike might go on for like another six months because NFL season starting and it's all the conglabments and they'll have plenty of content for and money with like the NFL and stuff. So this is time for you and I. Like CBS. You and I just have to write our. strike-busting screenplay or create our strike-busting television show about intrepid podcasters that solve crimes and the other thing i heard too was that next year around the same time like

11 months from now the contract the union contract for all the construction and the costume and all those folks who do the movies that's coming up too so there'll probably be another strike back next summer that's interesting i wonder how contentious their negotiations are. So the directors guild, when their contract came up previously, they actually were pretty successful. They had a successful negotiation and didn't end up with a strike or anything, right? So it's sort of trade by trade within the entertainment industry, how it's going to go, I suppose. So the directors got some good concessions and didn't strike. But what the writer's not writing for so long, there's going to be definitely a big drop in content. I know.

No, it's interesting. It's going to really affect, I think, the tonight shows, right? Whatever you call this, the late night shows, right? Those are all in strike. You lose people. They're already holding on the people with their fingertips, those audiences, because people don't watch the late night shows as much. You're going to lose the rest of that audience.

And the other thing, so speaking of all this, is so Jess and I were both talking to our new YouTube guru, Jeremy, and he was telling us, for people doing long-form, podcast-style content on YouTube. For a lot of these people, the number two, it's not usually number one, number one is phone, but the number two most common device on which their videos are being viewed is televisions. So people are viewing, you know, Lex Friedman or Breaking Points or Andrew Huberman. They're viewing these on their giant TVs.

They're just using the YouTube app on their Firestick or Apple TV, and they're putting on this independent long form podcast-style content, they're putting it on their TV and watching it while they're eating meals or like they would any other television show. So I think that's an interesting trend. And again, this is something that the entertainment industry in general should be worried about is that, you know, as television shows are on strike, as there's less original content coming over the television shows, people are consuming that they're clicking on apps to watch television shows through streaming services, if they instead click over on, let's say, breaking points, right?

I toured their studio as part of a New Yorker article, and Soger showed me their $60,000 camera system they bought. And he said, we bought this because it's 4K and it looks great on big TVs. So you click over and watch breaking points. Is it any different from a user experience than instead clicking on Disney Plus and, you know, clicking on a Nat Geo show. It's high resolution, interesting stuff.

So I would be worried if I was entertainment industries, right? Because it's not like it used to be. Yeah, but television shows are on these big TVs and independent social media and YouTube contents on phones. And it's just a different experience. That gap is closing.

And you might find more and more people saying, well, what is new right now is, you know, I'm going to watch Fredman interview Zuckerberg. I'm going to watch, you know, Cal and Jesse talk about Oppenheimer for 20 minutes.

whatever, you know, and I'm going to have it up on my big screen and it's very specific to what I'm interested in. It's some interesting shifts going on. I think that's why I've always said video is, video is going to be the huge disruptor force of independent media, the ability for independent producers to produce high quality video. Audio podcasting was just the warning sign to the big entertainment industry. the way that that encroached on radio.

There's just a warning sign of independent media is about to close a big gap between non-independent media in a way that you might not be ready for. And that's why I said video is going to be at the core of this because ultimately the thing that's always been most powerful in all forms of media, once television and movies came along, is ultimately we like to see people's faces.

We like to see things. We're very visual. And so I think this is happening, and I think the strike might accelerate it. So for all of us independent content producers out here, keep an eye on this because it'll be interesting to see what happens. Also, Jesse, you know I'm just trying to set things up so we can justify buying a $60,000 camera system. You know that's what I secretly want. I don't want a giant studio, a giant like CNN cell soundstage with $60,000 cameras.

All right, enough of this nonsense. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back next week. Actually, I'm solo casting next week. So you'll get me all by my lonesome. and then I will be back after that in the studio, the old-fashioned original Deepark H.Q back in Tacoma Park. So I am excited to get back to my beloved equipment.

But thank you for listening. And until next time, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. Thank you.