Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 285: The Productivity Paradox

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

One of the more interesting realities of people who live remarkable lives is that they are often much less busy than the rest of us. In this episode, Cal explores three ideas that help explain why this is true, then explains how we can use these ideas to reduce our own workloads.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: The Productivity Paradox [7:31]- How does a weekly plan work? [32:26]- Do errands or reading count toward fixed schedule productivity? [36:55]- How should a graduate embrace slow productivity? [40:11]- If I embrace slow productivity, how can I be sure I’m doing enough? [41:54]- Did Cal follow Slow Productivity in his 20’s? [47:45]- CALL: Uprooting a good planning system? [53:23]CASE STUDY: Playing video games with intention [58:05] CAL REACTS:  How to Have a Productive Year [1:06:34]Links:calnewport.com/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/newyorker.com/culture/office-space/how-to-have-a-more-productive-yearFREE Download  for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slow Thanks to our Sponsors: mauinuivenison.com/deepquestionsblinkist.com/deepmoshlife.com/deeppolicygenius.com/deepquestionsThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 if you're new here, I'm a computer science professor and digital theorist who writes about the ways that technology intersects, how we live, how we work, and how we relate to each other. Here on this show, I give concrete advice inspired by the big ideas that I write about. So we got a good show coming up. I have a deep dive I'm interested in. We got some questions and a final segment about a new New Yorker article of mine. First, however, I wanted to talk about my new book. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ with my producer, Jesse.

Jesse, my new book, Slow Productivity, which comes out in March, March 5th, is available for pre-order. Yeah, exciting. If you were thinking about buying this book anyways, and if you're not, If you're on the fence, let me tell you, if you like this show, you'll like the book, right? It's my eighth book. I've done this before. I think you'll like it. If you're on the fence, I just wanted to make a direct plea or a direct ask, I should say,

is I consider pre-ordering it for technical reasons that's useful for the book. A lot of the big retailers look at the pre-order numbers to figure out how many orders to copy and how many orders they copy sets the tone for how much they promote it. Also, the pre-order numbers really help with the best. seller list. So if you're thinking about buying it, I guess that's my ask, is consider preordering it. There's a few bonuses if you do away from me to thank you. So if you pre-order the book, you're going to get access to a audio commentary that I'm putting together. Every chapter of the book has an original audio commentary for me where I go deeper into the ideas of that chapter, tell you a little bit about

how I wrote it, what didn't make it into the book, but I still think it's important. So that will be delivered to you if you pre-order the book. That will be delivered to you on March 5th. There's also two bonuses you'll get instant access to if you pre-order the book. The first is a crash course in slow productivity, a video course where I walk you through the core ideas of the book and the three principles that are in the book. And for each of those principles give you some concrete advice that you can put into action right now. It's a way to start injecting some slow productivity into your life right now while waiting for the book to come out. There's also a guide of my canonical writing on the topic presented with commentary from me

in chronological order. So you could also do a deep textual dive in the slow productivity. So to claim those pre-order bonuses, buy the book wherever you normally would, whatever format or region where you live, and then go to calnewport.com slash slow. And there's a special email address on there. You can just forward your receipt to that address, and the team will process. it and they will write back to you and give you access to your bonuses. That's calnewport.com slash slow to learn more about the pre-order bonuses and thank you in advance

for helping me spread the word on this book. I should say, Jesse, it's a relief to be podcasting because all of last week, I was recording the audio version of this book. Yeah. So if you're thinking about getting the audio version, you will hear the dulcet tones of Dr. Cal Newport in your ear as you read it. I got to tell you, man, podcasting feels like a vacation compared to audiobook recording. How many hours?

Three full days. Three, eight hour days? Eight hour days. Wow. Yeah. Small booth. It's like a mic and someone listening to every sounds you make. I'm like, nope, go back.

Go back. I thought podcasting would be useful. Like, yeah, we talk on mics all the time. It turns out it's very different. How so? So in podcasting, it's an. Exaggerated conversational, right? So this comes out of radio. So in order to keep this interesting, podcasters will have high dynamic range. So I'll go loud, the soft dynamic range in speeds as well and with pauses because it's interesting.

Like I just pause there for a little bit and maybe I'll speed up when I'm making this point. It's exaggerated conversational as that's what we're used to from a podcast. Book on tape reading is very steady pace, very articulate. And it can, can't be attention-catching. So it all has to be delivered in like the same professional meter. Like I'll give you an example. So if on podcasting, I might say, like we just said, like, hey, podcasting, use much more dynamic range with pacing and volume to try to make it conversational. Here's the book on tape version. In podcasting, you would use a much more dynamic range in terms of pacing and volumes. The goal here is to keep things less unusual. That's a book on tape voice. It's like very, because when people are listening to books,

they want it to be very regular and clear, like very, very clear. Podcasting, they don't want that. It's interesting. Oh, wow. If I podcasted like a book on tape, it just wouldn't work. I'd be like, what would it be like? Okay. If you're new to the show, I am a computer science professor and digital theorist who also writes about the impact of technology on the way we live and the way we work. So I use my hand a lot because otherwise my pauses are too long because of podcasting. So I'm in the booth and you can't see this because the videos, we don't videotape this, but Jesse can see it. I would pull my hand across space that prevent myself from getting staccato. So the director would say staccato, staccato, staccato. So I would use a hand motion. So instead of saying

the show about living and working in a distracted world. Too much of a pause. So I'd pull my hand across living and working in a distracted world. So you had a lot of arm pulls for 24 hours last week. Oh, yeah. Did you have to switch hands? No, it was okay. Did it all righty.

But I think it's good. I think people will, if you're an audiobook person, you'll like it. I mean, because it's my voice and not someone else. So I think it's good. I did chapters three through five in my French accent. Now, I don't know if that was like the right choice, but I just figured, yeah, in the room, in the room at the time, that felt, that felt correct. Yeah. So we'll see.

That might have been a pipe. That might have been a mistake. It's about four hours of the audiobook is in my French accent. But, you know, I just thought that was the right thing to do. Sometimes you got to just, you got to trust you. You know what I'm saying? You got to trust you. Can't let these suits, these corporate suits, tell you that you.

can't use an exaggerated accent or that 10 minute intervals of you just smoking quietly into the microphone doesn't sell. I'm doing scarecoats, everyone. You can't see it. We don't videotape the intro, but. All right. Anyways, I don't have that nonsense. Slow productivity,

calnewport. com slash slow. Let us, let's get rolling just this is all nonsense. Let's get going with our deep dive. So today, I want to talk about a curious paradox. often some of the most interesting, remarkable people that we can think of, the people who seem for many of us to personify the deep life we want to pursue aren't that busy.

So why is this? Because most of us who feel like we have not gotten close to living a remarkable lives are often overwhelmed and busy all the time. How is it possible that the people who are most impressive are also often the least busy among the people we know? I want to tackle that paradox today because I think there are some lessons for any of us trying to be more remarkable. So I have three ideas I want to present. The first idea, I'm going to actually pull from an article I wrote in 2011. So this is a classic essay for my newsletter blog. It was very popular at the time, but it has a seed that I want to plant here because it's going to help grow into my bigger point.

So for those who are watching, you will see this on the screen now. And I should say if you're listening to this podcast, this is episode 285. So just go to the deeplife.com slash listen, find episode 285, and you can get the video. All right. So here's the article. It's called, if you're busy, you're doing something wrong, the surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers. Now, this article is getting into what is now a oversighted, overreference, oversimplified study from the journal psychological. review that at the time when I was writing this was still new and still interesting.

This was a study where they looked at violin professional violin players. They looked at their training habits. If this sounds familiar, it's because Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in Outliers. It was one of the canonical examples about the reality of deliberate practice, deliberate practice being the main way that people get better at demanding skills. They have to practice in a way that's deliberately designed to stretch their abilities past where they're comfortable. So in the study, they're watching how these elite musicians actually practice. So I have a few bolded lines from this article I'm going to read now.

All right. First line. The time diaries reveal that both groups. spent on average the same number of hours on music per week. So this is looking at elite musicians and good, but not elite musicians in comparing them. The elite players were spending almost, oh, I see. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice.

All right. So this is the setup. Average players, elite players practice a lot. The elite players do almost entirely deliberate practice. So that means they're not just playing stuff they already know. They're specifically doing exercises to get them better. So they're, for example, taking a section of song that they can't quite play full speed and increasing the speed they're practicing at to be a little bit more than where they're comfortable to sort of stretch their ability.

All right. The average players, they discovered, spread their work throughout the day. The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. The elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players. The elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players. So this is interesting. The elite players do really hard practice, but not, they don't do the other stuff. They also don't practice all day. They consolidate their practice into two concentrated chunks. And outside of that practice, they were more relaxed and had more sleep than the average players.

So I'm going to read here in my summary. So I said, this provides the study provides empirical evidence that there's a difference between hard work and hard to do work. Hard work is deliberate practice. It's not fun while you're doing it, but you don't have to do too much of it in any one given day. hard to do work by contrast is draining it has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you just like the average players from the study feeling tired and stressed i then conclude if your goal is to build a remarkable life then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy all right so this is really interesting like what we're finding here

is this idea that what it takes to get good at something really good at something is hard, but not hard to do. It's hard in the moment, but there's only so much of it you can do per day. And what happens with the rest of your time is irrelevant to whether you become really good. The three to four hours that these professional musicians practice every day, that's it. That's what's important for them. There's not more they can do. That's about the limit.

So the rest of that day is free. So getting good, getting really good, can be unrelated to being busy. And at the highest levels, like these elite musicians, busyness actually gets in the way of getting good. Because it distracts you from the practice activities that matter. It exhausts you and takes away energy that you could later put into the actual activities that are going to make you better. All right.

So what's my second idea here? Building on that, I'm going to say rare skills, fuel, remarkability. So what I mean by that is, okay, why get really good at something? Well, getting really good at something gives you leverage over your professional life. It gives you options and opportunities. It is the primary fuel you have for crafting your life to be more remarkable. And my book's so good they can't ignore you, which actually came out soon after that article we just read, right? So these ideas are actually replicated in my book so good they can't ignore you.

In that book, I introduced this term called Career Capital that captures this reality. So Career Capital is a metaphorical substance that captures your rare and valuable skills. The more rare and valuable skills you have, the more career capital you have. Your career capital is what you invest into your working life to make it better. The more career capital you have, the more investments you can make. into taking control of your life. Where you live, how much you work, the impact of your work, the conditions under what you work, the pace and rhythm of what you work, the specific projects you work on or not, the better

you are at something, the more control you have over that. The more ability you have to craft those type of professional lives that seem to the outside world to be quite remarkable. So as you get better at something, you get more options to make your life remarkable. not to make more money, not necessarily just to be straight up more successful, but more remarkable. So idea three is to put these two things together.

Let's follow this syllogism through to his conclusion. So if rare and valuable skills doesn't require busyness to develop, but rare and valuable skills fuel remarkability, we put those together and we get remarkable lots, lives don't require busyness. A implies B, B, implies C, A implies C. Little propositional logic there for discrete mathematics fans. This then is why we see people whose lives often hit us remarkable aren't busy.

Because the core of that remarkability is their rare and valuable skills. And actually, busyness is orthogonal. Use some linear algebra here as long as we're using math terms, is orthogonal to busyness. busyness is not needed to get good and it can even get in the way. Right? So this seems like a pretty interesting connection. You don't need busyness to have remarkable life. The problem is, however, there's two traps that are lurking here.

So we can think of this as our fourth idea. There's two traps here that are lurking. Right. One, as you get better at things, you will be given more interesting opportunities that will bring with them the requirement that you become more busy. There's a trap here. Great, remarkability. I've got to get that by being good at things.

But as you get good at things, a lot of outside forces will try to hijack your life from your streamlined platonic remarkability that you had in mind. An example I think about here sometimes is the YouTuber and engineer Mark Roberer, who if you don't know, because maybe you don't have kids of a certain age,

he does these really elaborate engineering-based projects and then does very catchy YouTube videos about it. This is the guy that built those glitter bombs that catch porch pirates. You know, you steal the box off the porch and he had all these elaborate traps built into them. He's done a lot of other things. They do these engineering videos. One of the things I've noticed is as he got more successful, so his YouTube channel's very big, he became friends with the host of ABC's late night show.

I'm blinking on that name. Who is that, Jesse, from way back when he was on The Man Show. well whatever yeah i'll look it up yeah look it up okay but anyways he became friends with him and kept going on to i'm going to recognize this name so hard when you say it we're not going to get invited on his show ABC late night show we're doing it right now jimmy kimmel yeah i know that all right jimmy kimmel so he started going on jimmy kimball uh and got really successful it seems to me that mark rober who is doing really well with these videos you can just crunch the numbers because the overhead was low.

It would take three months to make one of these videos, but it would be like him and his brother typically. And then you could calculate the money he was making on the 20, 30 million views or whatever. He was doing very well, right? He got busier. And I don't know this for a fact. I don't know anything about him. But, you know, he bought this big warehouse space for filming fine.

But then he launched a company, a subscription box company, which is a cool company. My kids do it, crunch box. where you know you get the box of stuff and build it but that's a really time consuming thing to do is to run a company that sells a physical product that has to be boxed and sent out and then he signed this deal with max HBO Max to do all these shows for them i mean it just seems like his life is very very busy now in a way we're just five years ago like i make these videos it's me and my brother and like someone edits them and i do really well and i can focus on what's really

good because opportunities arise. Hey, we can build this company. You can do shows on this network. Opportunities arise as you get better, which can pull you away from a really remarkable life and into just a more standard, like very successful, but probably very busy life. The other trap is that as you get better, you get opportunities for larger and more time-consuming instantiations of the thing you're doing. So even if you are careful to avoid the Mark Rover trap of let me add this company and add another, I can do TV in addition to videos, even if you avoid that trap, as you get better, the time required to do things, the things you've always been doing can also get up, could also go up.

So we see this. It's Oscar season. We see this with directors. I think about like Greta Gerwig, how much more time was involved trying to direct Barbie versus probably like Francis Ha. just because of the scope, the giant sets and all the actors and everything that was involved in it and the marketing that's involved in that. She's doing the same thing, making really good movies, but now it takes a lot more time. Or Chris Nolan and Oppenheimer versus Chris Nolan with a crew of four making Memento.

They're doing the same thing, but as you get better, the stakes increase. I mean, even my own life is like this. what goes into me publishing a book today is way more time consuming than what it was when I was publishing, you know, even so good they can't ignore you. And certainly my student books. I was like, yeah, I'll do a few interviews when it comes out. Hey, books out. All right, back to work. I don't like that anymore.

It's months of, months of stuff because I got better at what I was doing. So I didn't change what I'm doing. But the size and therefore busyness induced by the standard thing you've always always. been doing gets bigger as you get as you get better. So how do we avoid those traps if we don't want to be busy? We want to be remarkable but not busy. The first trap, I think you just have to try to avoid it or be really, really open about the tradeoff you're making.

I think we should just have more willingness as a more willingness to say, I know I could do that show on HBO, but I'm not. Like this is working well. I just want to keep doing this well. That should be an option that's more on the table. More sophisticated hack you can do here is like, okay, maybe an opportunity arises. You want to explore. Give it a tight time gate.

I'm going to stay within these time bounds on this. So I can explore something without it taking over my life. I think this is the way I think about the new media aspects of what I do. I thought podcasting, for example, and everything that surrounds it, I was like, this is important. I think this is the way to talk to an audience. But what I've done, and Jesse can attest to this, is I have a half-day limit. Like, I spend a half-day a week.

It has to live in there. That's where all this stuff has to live in a half-day a week, the show we actually do. And so if we want to add something new to it, either I have to make time forward or find someone who can do that for us. Like, we release this on YouTube now. But I wasn't going to spend a lot more time for that. We had to find a good partner and figure out how we were going to do this. So that's the other way you can do it. Okay, I do have to expand some.

Let me put very careful boxes around where that exploration happens. And it's going to stay in there. For the second trap, that's unavoidable. As you get better at things, you're going to have opportunities to do it at a bigger scale. It's going to take more time. Greta Gerwig is happy that she gets to do Barbie, in part because I think she had good profit participation. And the movie did $1.5 billion. So she's probably very happy about that.

So that's harder to avoid, but you have to be really careful about it. So I'm going to pull an idea out of my book, Slow Productivity Here, and you have to have real variations in intensity. Movie directors do this very well. All right, I'm working on my big movie, and there's going to be an eight-month period where it's just all in. But the eight months to follow everything being done, I'm doing nothing. I'm just sitting and thinking and trying to figure out what I want to do next. So we see that with creatives like movie directors. It's very intense when they're working on a movie,

but they'll also take a lot of time off. Chris Nolan worked really hard on Oppenheimer, but also he doesn't have a smartphone and doesn't use email. So he's like, okay, I'll do this hard thing, but it's really the only hard thing I do. And then I can take a complete break from that before I work on my next project. So this natural variation and intensity,

that's an idea for my book's slow productivity. That's a way of dealing with. As you get better and your projects get harder, you also at that same point have the leverage to say, great, but then I'm going to take time off after this. Or I'm not going to do anything else unrelated, so I can just do this one really hard thing as well as I can. So there's our paradox. That's the explanation. Why do people with remarkable lives sometimes seem less busy than us? Because busyness is unrelated and sometimes even an obstacle to being really good.

And being really good is where remarkability almost always comes from. So if you find yourself adding more and more onto your plate in the pursuit of a remarkable life, you're doing it wrong. If you're busy, there could be other psychological advantages to that, but you're not deploying a useful strategy for building a remarkable life. Remarkability is not something that alchemizes from an abundance of action. It's something that is instead crafted by the main tool of skill. and skill and busyness do not play well together. So that's how we can separate those two things. Jesse, I have this phantom article on this topic that is referenced in the very earliest essays I ever wrote for my newsletter and blog, but I can't find the actual article.

So I know at some point I wrote this thing called the paradox of the relaxed road scholar. And it was back when I was writing student books, it was about this idea that like road scholars who you have to be very accomplished are often way more relaxed than like the average student on the dean's list. And it's because to do something really impressive impressive enough to become a road scholar,

you have to be really good at something which really requires a focus. And so they're not busy in the way that other people are. I can't find the article. In fact, I can find, it's like the third or fourth post at the very beginning of my blog says, as we discussed last week in the paradox of the RELass Road Scholar, and it references case studies, like Daniel, a coast, blah, blah, blah, can't find it.

I don't know where the article is. It's like disappeared into the gaps to the internet. Or like it maybe I emailed it, but never added it to the blog. And I don't know, but it's lost. It exists out there somewhere. I'm sure a fan will find it. I still remember that phrase, though, the paradox of the relaxed road scholar. It's a phrase I use all the time, but I can't find.

There's nothing for me to cite there. All right, anyways, that's all we have for our deep dive. I want to move on here to questions. But before we do, let's talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Let's start with our friends, a new sponsor, and one I'm excited about our friends at Maui-Nui-Vinison. that's Maui from Hawaii in UI Maui Nui, venison. I was just talking to them the other day.

This is a really cool idea. So here's basically, here's the whole story. On the island of Maui and Hawaii, they have this invasive species of deer, the axis deer that are, there's too many of them, and they're eating all of the vegetation.

And this is causing all sorts of problems. It's deforesting the vegetation, which is causing topsoil to wear off. It's pushing native. animals out of their habitats. It's also preventing the groundwater tables from rising naturally because the water without the vegetation is pouring off. It's a big problem. Hawaiian government is trying to get rid of as many axes deer as possible. At the same time, these access deer are delicious because not only they wild, but they're eating a variety of Hawaiian plants all day long. So it's this

really varied vegetation diet that makes the meat really, really good. So Maui-Nui-Vinison, And what they do is they harvest through hunting these invasive axes deer that need to be cold anyways. And instead of just throwing away the bodies, they are taking the meat and making really good venison in jerky form as well as in ground form and as well as in steak form. It's fantastic. They sent me a box. I actually just ate one of the jerky sticks on the way over here just to get my energy up. It's very healthy. They all these tests.

I mean, it's very healthy red meat. Very low fat. You know, like ground meat from the supermarket is 20% fat typically. Ground meat from these venison, it's 1% or less. Huge amount of protein. It's like the healthiest red meat you're going to eat. And it's sustainable. It's part of actually helping this Maui ecosystem recover.

It's so sustainable that the guy who I was talking to was telling me, They have a lot of vegans that said, ethical vegans, who said, oh, I can eat meat again. Because this meat, actually,

from an ethical perspective, makes sense. Low stress lives, low stress deaths, and, you know, carefully, well done,

rendered. They're giving a lot of this meat back, by the way, to residents of Maui, the wildfires, who have been, their homes destroyed by the wildfires,

it's wildfires, rather, which I think is really cool. There's like some large percent they just have in these public freezers for people in Maui to eat. Anyways,

really cool. company, fantastic food, great for you, taste great. And what you do is it's a subscription service and you can subscribe to get these boxes. So, you know, we just sip it to you in bulk and you get these boxes with a variety of the product. And you can get this at Maui-newievenison.com slash deep questions and use the discount code deep questions one word to get 20% off your first order of fresh venison jerky broth in Ohana with the Ahana subscription. Oh, first order of fresh venison turkey broth and Ohana subscription. I said that wrong.

So that's Maui Nui, M-A-U-I-N-U-I-V-N-U-I-Vinnessin.com slash deep questions. You get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door. Their campaign has been almost too successful. People really want this product. So if they're out of stock, when you go to the website, just keep a careful eye on it. They're increasing capacity, and this is fantastic and it's worth waiting for. That's Maui-Newievenison.com slash deep questions to get 20% off.

We also want to talk about our sponsor, M-O-S-H. So here's the thing, as I get older, I don't really always need the big three-square meals, especially if I'm on the go and drink a lot of coffee. Sometimes I need just a little bit of a gap bridger. And when I do that, I like to eat Mosh bars as a quick way just to give me a little bit more energy

in between other things that I have going on. It's a high-protein snack that I can feel good actually eating, and it tastes great. The company was founded by Maria Shriver and her son, Patrick Schwarzenegger, should sound familiar, with a simple mission to create a conversation about brain health through food, education, and research. This was inspired in part by Maria's father's long bout with Alzheimer's. So they've really thought a lot about brain health. Each mash bar has 12 grams of protein and is made with ingredients that support brain health like Ashwaganda,

Lionsman collagen, and omega-3s. They also have a line of plant-based protein bars if that is what you're looking for. They taste really good. It tastes really good. I go through these boxes fast because it's high-protein, good ingredients. I eat one of these and it holds me over until whatever I'm working on next. and I like that there's a mission behind it that Maria and Patrick have a reason why they're interested in this topic. Mosh donates a portion of all proceeds without a mind towards gender-based brain health research through the woman's Alzheimer's movement.

Why women's in particular? Because two-thirds of Alzheimer's patients are women. So it's working, among other things, to help close the gap between women and men's health research on this topic. So if you want to find ways to give back to others and fuel your body and your brain, Mosh bars are the perfect choice for you. Head to MoshLife.com slash deep to save 20% off plus free shipping on either the bestsellers trial pack or the plant-based trial pack. That's 20% off plus free shipping on either the best sellers or plant-based trial pack

at M-O-S-H-L-I-F-E dot com slash deep. All right, Jesse. I think it's time to do some questions. Sounds good. First questions from a world without baseball. Good name. I really like, well, depending on you look at it. I like this name. I really like a lot of the parts of your productivity system, the time block daily plan, the quarterly plan, the core value is in Trello. I am confused about the weekly plan. How does this interact with other parts of your system? well, I'm hoping a world without baseball is wistful, right? Like we're temporarily in a world without baseball because it's the off season. If he's promoting a world without baseball is a good thing, well, then we got other problems, my friend. Got other problems.

All right, good question. People ask a lot about the weekly plan and how it fits into my multi-planning methodology. So let's talk about that briefly. A quick plug, by the way, in the final segment, of this episode, I'm going to be talking about a new article of mine where I go into detail in multi-scale planning. So, you know, stay tuned for that for a deeper dive. But let's just get specific here. So what does a weekly plan do? Well, you build it every week, probably on Monday or maybe at Friday before the week is done. When you build your weekly plan, you reference at a higher

scale, your strategic plan, your plan that you update once every quarter or season with your bigger goals at that time scale. So when you build your weekly plan, you want to look up a scale and say, what are the big projects that I'm working on this quarter or season? Then you want to look at your calendar for the week ahead and say, okay, where is there time for me to make effort on these big objectives that aren't reflected by an urgent email or there's no one pushed me to do it? And you look to find time.

I suggest you probably want to actually block off some of the time. you find for working on these big objectives, add it to your calendar like any other meeting or appointment so it's protected and it gets done. This is also a time when you can rearrange your calendar. This is a hidden magic of weekly planning is you look at your calendar and you realize, man, all these days have just enough stuff that I can't really make progress on this big project. But if I look at Tuesday, the first thing is optional.

I could cancel that. And the second thing I can move to be right after this meeting on Thursday because it's with the same people. And if I do that, I free up four hours and now I can make progress on the technical report I'm writing. It's part of the magic of weekly planning is not just finding time for big objectives, but also making time for big objectives. And you'll never do this if you're just reactive. Hey, what do I need to work on next? Let me look at my inbox and calendar. Oh, there's another meeting.

You're never going to free up that time if you're just going moment to moment. The final thing you can do during weekly planning is look at your task systems. Remind yourself of what's important. This is a good time during your weekly planning to update and clean up your task systems. If you use a structured system like I recommend with roles and statuses, you can move things around. Okay, this I heard back from. Let me move that. Let me clarify this.

You're kind of cleaning up your task system and identifying if there's any really important tasks that definitely need to get done. I'll often write a reminder about those in my weekly plan. So I'll go back to my task system just during a normal task block just to knock off a bunch of stuff. But if there's a few big things in that system that are really important, I'll jot it down. I might even find time on my calendar when I'm going to do those specific tasks and protect it in advance. So you can work with your task system as well. So you look up to your strategic plan, reflect those objectives into your weekly. into your week, moving things if needed.

Then you look, I guess we could say, sideways to your task system and clean that up and see what are your priorities and make sure that you've made a note of that somewhere. Now you're ready to tackle your week. Weekly plans. So your task systems, your Trello. For me, it's Trello, yeah. One board per role, one column per status. And people ask, like, oh, so are the tasks leaving your task system and going on to your weekly plan? No, they live in your task system.

you can remind yourself in your weekly plan. You can actually schedule time for a task on your calendar for the week, but think of that as a reminder as well. It lives in your task system until done, and then you remove it. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Mario. What counts as work in fixed schedule productivity?

Does it include errands like getting groceries and going to the pharmacy? Does it include mentally demanding things but not related to your job, such as reading books? Well, just as a reminder, fixed schedule productivity is the meta productivity strategy where you fix in advance. These are the hours I'm going to work. And then you do whatever you need to to make your work fit into there. Now, I call it a meta productivity strategy because it's going to force you to innovate different strategies for how you agree to work and schedule work and how efficiently you tackle work because you have this back pressure coming from the need to fit all your work into a given country. constraint. This is also the, yeah, so you have the given, I was thinking about a variation on this, but I'm not going to go there right now. Let's keep this simple. So you fix, so we'll just summarize,

you fix the time in advance and you work backwards to do whatever you can to make your work fit. So you'll invent a lot of tactics for how you do that. And it also just forces you to be more reasonable about how many things you have on your play at the same time because it has to fit. it's really a good strategy because of the Parkinson law style effect of schedules. In an age where work is always available because of mobile computing, your phone, your laptop, your tablet, and there's always more work to do, right? There's a new email, a new idea, new request. There's always something to do.

Work can fill any space that you give it. So especially in today's world, it's not a bad idea to say, this is when I want to work. How do I work backwards and be successful within those constructs? and you'd be surprised by how effective you can be without having to work a huge amount of hours. So Mario is asking, what about non-professional tasks like errands going to the grocery store, going to the pharmacy, or things like reading? Fixed skill of productivity is work hours. That's what is for.

This is when I'm working. I don't work beyond there. So it has nothing to say about what you do outside of work. That's a different type of thinking. if you want to do a non-professional task during your fixed schedule hours, well, it's just taking some of the time, right? So that's just less time you have to get the work done, but that schedule doesn't shift. So if you say, look, I work from 9 to 4, and I have to make it fit.

So I've got to triage things and have systems for checking with clients so they don't expect to call it 5 or whatever. You can go to the grocery store in the middle of that, but you still only have 10 to 4 to get your work done. So it just depends on how you want to do that. One thing I used to do when I had a dog and I was a postdoc is my fixed schedule was in two blocks. And I had a midday portion where I didn't work. I would go for a run with my dog and do some errands. So that's one thing you might do here is a fixed schedule doesn't have to be one big block a time. It can be block, unblocked, block.

And then you can move more of the non-professional stuff in between those blocks. But the basic idea is simple. This is the time when I work, I don't work beyond it. That's the non-negotiable that you're starting with. All right. Who do we got next? Next questions from Amit. With respect to slow productivity, should I as a grad student perform my limited amount of tasks sequentially

or spend every day doing new research for a couple hours? My tasks include managing my time between new research, paper reviews, and coursework. The things that are most important you want to do most often. So as a grad student, assuming you're a doctoral student, your research is the most important thing you do, so you should work on it regularly. All the other stuff, you figure out how to spread out on the time that remains. So that might mean for you, nine to noon. That's research.

And then noon to four is like the other stuff, course work, paper reviews, administrative stuff. And you kind of figure that out and rotate through and you do one thing one day and nothing, day, however you want to do that, but the research always gets done. It's like me with my writing. I just always write. I don't say, okay, I'm going to write till I'm done, and now I'm going to work on a course. Now when I'm done doing that, I'm going to work on a research paper. I'm just always writing. That's the non-negotiable because it's the core engine of what I do best. And then I make the other stuff fit however I need to in the time that remains. So as a grad student,

I meet research every day. That would be my recommendation. So your weekly plan has just writing daily on it? Yeah. If I'm writing a book, it's basically every day. Yeah.

And even if I'm not, because of my New Yorker tempo, it usually is non-teaching days. I'm just writing. And on those days as well, sometimes as well. Yeah. So some stuff can be sequential.

The core stuff you should do as much as possible. All right. Who we got next? Next question is from Lisa. With slow productivity, how do I gauge if I'm doing enough on a short-term scale? Business and exhaustion are no longer markers of productivity, if anything, they indicate the opposite. But I don't have enough experience and success with a slow productivity approach to trust that my quarterly plan is good and on track.

All right, Jesse, I'm thinking we should name this question. Our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week. So we want to make sure at least one question a week is related to my new book, Slow Productivity. Find out more about the book, read an excerpt, get a bunch of pre-order bonuses at calduport.com slash slow. All right, good question here. Lisa wants to know if I'm not using busyness and exhaustion is my marker of doing enough. How do I know if what I'm doing is good? This question is important for two reasons.

One, the specifics of my answer, but two, the setup. One of the core ideas in my book is a look at how we currently implicitly think about productivity in the knowledge work space. And what we do now, even if we don't know this terminology, what we do now is we embrace a concept I call pseudo-productivity. Souter productivity is exactly what Lisa mentions here. It's the idea that we should use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more you're doing, the more useful you are. Now, this isn't an accurate measure of the value you're producing, but it's like a reasonable heuristic that we fall back on.

More is better than less. Activities better than non-activity. So how do you as a knowledge worker, therefore, feel like you're doing all you can for your organization? Because you're busy all the time. You're doing a lot of activity to the point where it feels like too much, and then you get some sort of psychological piece of, well, at least I'm not slacking off. Now, I think it's a terrible way to actually manage work because, A, busyness can be completely unrelated from producing stuff that matters.

And B, in an age of ubiquitous wireless internet and mobile computing, there's never any end to how much work you can do and when you can do it. So the footprint of work in the pseudo-productivity regime combined with modern technology, the footprint is unending. You always feel guilty when you're not working. you're always going to do more work than you should be doing. You always are going to be in the zero-sum internal tug-a-war between the demands of pseudo-productivity and the demands of being a human. And it's a terrible internal turmoil that we're all quietly suffering through because we have this insufferable definition of productivity.

So slow productivity says, forget that. Souter productivity does not work anymore. That's not how we should measure it. Here's an alternative way of thinking about producing great stuff in a way that doesn't burn you out. do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. So then Lisa says, okay, but this is hard. Psychologically, this is hard.

Because if I am going to be doing fewer things and I can't fall back on stress as a way to assuage my fear that I'm being lazy, what do I do with that anxiety? And partially Lisa, I'm going to say, sit with it for a little bit. Do this for a couple quarters and you'll get that feedback. Oh, I'm doing fine. Yeah, I'm doing fewer things following the systems I talk about in my book, which allows you to do that without, you know, blowing up your job or walking into your boss's office and saying, I quiet quit. No, it's way more nuanced than that, a way more subtle than that. But you can, if you're careful about, drastically reduce how much you're working on.

And if you follow my advice properly as laid out in the book, you're going to get more stuff done. This is the thing that people miss. when you have a lot of things on your plate, it generates busyness very well. It doesn't generate productive output very well because you spend more and more of your time servicing the administrative and overhead needs of these obligations that takes away time from actually producing the stuff that matters.

So having fewer things on your plate, you move through those things at a faster rate so that the total number of things you accomplish in a given quarter is actually more than when you were quote-unquote busier. But it's going to take a quarter or two before you believe that. So just take that quarter or two. What's the worst that could happen, right? Like you feel a little anxious, like am I doing enough?

Just sit with that. Don't try to assuage that anxiety by being busy again. If you're really miscalibrating and you're not doing enough, okay, so you had a quarter where you didn't really do as much as you should and now you're going to have to adjust. That's not a bad thing. That's basically like a little vacation you probably need it anyways. Nothing terrible is going to happen. People are busy.

Don't be negligent. don't be unreliable, but no one's going to really notice. So just sit with the anxiety. Don't let it push you into overwork. Give it a quarter. Give it two. And you're saying, okay, this is working. I'm impressing my boss.

I'm getting really good stuff done. I'm no longer stressed out. This slow productivity thing, there's something to it. So it's okay to be anxious, but sit with it. Don't let it push you into too much overwork. All right. I think that was a pretty good. slow productivity corner.

Now, of course, as we talk about this topic more, we have more and more questions about it. So it's no longer this is the only question. But, you know, we choose one question per episode to actually get the theme music, even if we have more than one question about the topic of slow productivity. Speaking of which, what's our last question here, Jesse? Okay, last question is from Brian. Do you think a smart and committed young knowledge worker can succeed with a slow productivity approach if they're not also notching up bigger short-term wins along the way?

Could you have, in prior episodes you talked about your conquer the world mindset of your younger years, was that needed to be where you're at today? Well, Brian, it's a good question. First of all, though, I'm going to reject the premise of bigger short-term wins along the way. If a win is short-term, something you can produce in a non-slow productivity approach, so just by lots of activity, it's not that big of a win. how impressive can it be if it didn't require the long development of a rare and valuable skill? So I think what you're counting as bigger short-term wins is more like the effluvia of busyness. I don't know, I'm on Instagram and emails and this and that and doing these conferences and jumping over here. It's that sort of short-term feeling of like I'm doing stuff and getting these sort of pseudo-recognitions and serendipitous moments of

virality, but none of that really aggregates to anything all that impressive. There are no short-term big wins outside of the lottery. Big wins require time. They require long-term. So you're not missing out on anything deeply important if you're spending your 20s focus relentlessly on getting good at something really valuable. Now, you talked about my conquer-the-world mindset for my younger years, which I did have. But here's the thing. I did achieve a lot of my vision of conquering the world, right?

I mean, a lot of that was, so academically speaking, it was, you know, I want to get a professorship at a good university and get tenured early, like be a tenured professor and publish good stuff in my field, right? And from a writing perspective, I wanted big idea books. I always say to my agent, I want a hardcover idea book, like the ones I love, not just a student guides I'm writing now, and I wanted them to be important and sell a lot of copies. And my other dream, my agent will tell you this, early on in my career, was I wanted to write for the New Yorker. I want to be also just like writing stuff that requires real craft. And I accomplished all those things, right? I got tenured early after just four years and

got a good professorship. My books are very successful, right? And millions of copies, 40, 45 languages, and I write for the New Yorker. Here's the thing, though. all of that happened in my 30s. My mindset was in the 20s. That's when I hatched this vision. All this stuff happened in the 30s. Most of it happening in my mid-30s to my 40. That whole period in my 20s, I was relentlessly working on being a better computer

scientist and a better writer. That's what I was doing. And I wasn't doing social media and I wasn't launching companies and I wasn't giving a lot of talks and I wasn't trying to create conferences and I wasn't track. traveling a lot. I had a lot of friends who were into that back then. It was like you should have a travel budget and go to like five or six of these conferences that used to hold every year so you could just meet interesting people. I didn't do any of that. Right, right, better writer, better each book was done. How do I make the next one better? How do I get better? How do I become a better

researcher? Let me write a better paper. Let's go, you know? Let me get that H index up. Let me get those publications up. Once I had my professorship, how do I win an award? How do I get this papers better? Let's push, push, push. Very focused. I stayed focus on those same two things for well over a decade. And then I began conquering the world that I had in mind. So your 20s are an exciting period if you want a remarkable life. But they're exciting not because you're likely to unlock the remarkability and reap its benefits while still into 20s.

Your 20s is your time where you focus on your craft. Your 20s are your time where the most important thing you can do is say no. there are the time when like the the key is coming back to your core pursuit again and again even as really shiny objects are hung in front of you like nope nope nope nope it's boring i'm just coming back and there's frustration involved and you get impatient but then when you end up conquering your definition of the world later on that's when all of that seems worth it and the scale of those goals, like for me to be, like, the tenured professor with the awards and the books in New York or whatever, there's nothing I could have done in my 20s, no quote-unquote

big short-term win that would have aggregated to anything like that. It would have been a lot of nonsense, you know, I gave this show, I did this, and I had this video thing, and I did this, but, like all these little things that in the moment would have felt busy and would have added to nothing now that I'm 41. So I think slow productivity is the cool way to go. It's also psychologically more sustainable. That's a much more healthy 20, psychologically speaking, for someone who's ambitious and talented. They'd just be focusing on craft for a while

and not having to be like out there in the public eye or trying to, why is this thing not working and why I'm trying to land this or whatever? I mean, it's kind of nice. It just get to know yourself as an adult and build your skills. And so I want to worry, Brian. Slow productivity all the way. All right, Jesse, let's do an actual call.

Sounds good. We've got Warren. Warren. All right. Hi, gal. Love the pod. I'm a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and I share episodes with my students pretty often. So here's my question and situation. I'm pretty well organized already, especially at work. I've got a tiered system of planning. It includes a Higant chart for annual high-level planning, a few trellaboards for implementing my plan, and a daily task and time boxing system for my rather busy job. But the best laid plans of mice and men go off the rye and leave us nothing but grief and pain. To wit, I find myself often looking back at a week, month, or quarter, and anxiously realizing that my well-organized system wasn't well-executed at all. So my question for you is, do you have any thoughts or recommendations for improving execution without completely uprooting a pretty good system of planning that I have in place already?

Thanks, gal. All right. Thanks, Warren. I suggest that he shares my episodes with his class at Rutgers. Yep. I don't want to look this up and figure out that his class is listed as something like travesties and media, you know, or the death of good journalism. Case studies and embarrassingly bad new media productions or something like that. The Nazis Among Us. the crypto-fascist from the whatever productivity brosphere.

Hopefully that's not the course. So Warren, my general rule of thumb here is as you move up and scale from daily to weekly to quarterly or semester, the tightness and specificity of your plan should reduce. So when you're doing a daily time block plan, that's a very constrained plan because you're dealing with an interval of time that you actually have a, a chance of structuring and constraining. It's like eight hours. Like, what am I doing in each of the hours of my day?

Even then it's hard, right? Like, you're probably going to redo that plan once or twice as the day unfolds. Move up and scale to the weekly plan. You should be less strict, right? We talked about this earlier in the episode, but, hey, I want to make progress on this objective this week. Thursday, I got a lot of time free on Thursday. Let me just, like, protect this morning.

You know, this is when I'm going to work on this report. It's more loose. Let me write down that, like, I really want to get these two things done. when I get a chance. Then when you go up to your quarterly plan, it's even looser. It's like, okay, I want to see if I can finalize this journal article. Maybe, like, it would be a real success if I could come out of this semester, having refined a book proposal idea. Like, it's getting really high level here.

And then when it gets to the scale of multiple semesters or years, probably don't have any planning at all. Let me just get through the fall, and then I'll see what I want. to do in the winter. So what it might be happening here is you're trying to Gant chart at the highest level, multiple months and seasons, and this project's going to overlap this project. There's a reason why they stopped using Gant charts and software development. It's impossible to predict at that scale. You're much better to have a much more loose and ambiguous semester plan.

Work on this paper, try to get this proposal together that has lots of breathing room. And each week, you're like, okay, let me just remember this week that maybe go on a couple walks, think about my book proposal. And let me try to find some time the work on the paper. And you know what? I'm having a hard time. I think I'm going to make Monday and Wednesday mornings, I'm going to regularly start blocking that off for the paper

because I've had a couple weeks in a row here where I don't have enough time to get things done. So let me jump into the future and set this up for a month. You want that planning and insight at that granularity to happen. Not these six months I'm working on this. And starting one and a half months into this interval, I begin working on the second initiative, which will finish after exactly four months, you're being too precise. So loosen up your planning, be a little bit easier on yourself. This is all about aiming your

energy, not about exactly predicting how your energy will unfold. This is a line in the article we're going to talk about in the third segment, my latest New Yorker piece. I have a line about the idea that this type of planning, your goal here is not prescience, but instead just intention. You don't want your energy to just be dissipating without direction into the ether, but you're also not trying to be Nostradamus about, okay, three months from now, I will be at exactly this point on this project. That's a fool's errand. A lot of big, you know, it's why software development doesn't try to do waterfall plans anymore. It's just too hard to predict. I want to do a quick case study. This was in response to episode 283 where we talked, we were talking

about video games and living a deep life. So this case study, short one, comes from, no, nameless, no, Tom. He signed it. Okay. All right, just from Tom. I have just listened to your discussion on video games in episode 283, based on Victor's question if video games can be part of an intentional life. I practice intentional living as much as possible, and I also love games. One thing that has helped me is playing the right kind of games, intricately craft award-winning single-player stories can be an art form on par with high-quality films. Playing the stories of well-written complex characters in visually original worlds is a very different experience to the slot machine style of other mainstream video games.

Firewatch, Inside, Her Story, and Red Dead Redemption 2 are just a few examples of superb storytelling and games as an art form. I tend to block out an hour or two of my calendar to play like watching a high-quality television drama. I hope that helps, as you both said, you're unfamiliar with the gaming landscape today. Love the show. It's helped a lot. I think that's useful, Tom.

I completely agree with you. High-quality, single-player video games, whatever they call them, Class A games, where they spend, you know, $150 million developing them, is like or can be like art. Also, they're self-limiting. they're hard and they're also the goal is not addiction right the goal is just gameplay duration right this needs to be a beautiful experience for whatever is typically like 40 to 100 hours of gameplay

there's no benefit to get you to like play it more if anything if it's like super addictive you're going to finish the game too fast and that might even be a problem because you just paid $60 for it so it's not their incentives to addict you I think that's fine played an hour or two a day if you like that, I don't think it's a big deal. Be wary more of the persistent online massively multiplayer games. I think that can really be a problem. They do want you to play it as much as possible, and those can be really addictive. They can begin to become a replacement for other parts of your life, especially if

there's other players involved. You're kind of on teams. You're getting this poor granularity, this poor fidelity simulacrum of collegiality and relationships, and you're making progress, and your levels are going up. That's where you look up seven hours later and realize, you know, you soiled your chair. Be careful about those games, especially if you're a grown man, let's just put it this way. If you find yourself wearing a headset over the age of 25, a headset with a boom microphone, and you don't work for a NASCAR stock racing team, be careful about your life choices.

Or an NFL team. Or an NFL team. That's right. Yeah. If you're an O.C. If you're an O-C for an NFL team, that's also okay. You can wear a headset. But otherwise, just be wary because that can suck away your energy to do anything else

because it just presses the buttons of what drives us to do meaningful things. It presses those buttons enough that we don't feel motivated to get up. But the thing we're doing, the video games, doesn't actually fulfill those needs, and that's the problem. It's like eating really bad junk food. will in the moment address your hunger sensation. But over time, it's not really what that hunger sensation was trying to get us to do. It's trying to get us to eat food in the way that our bodies recognize from our evolution. And so you're subverting a natural instinct with something that actually doesn't give you.

It's lower what you need, and you're going to end up worse. Same thing with social media and social snacking. That's the phenomenon that social psychologist identified, where you feel in the moment, like the text messages going back and forth in your text thread or Snapchat or. comments on your social media post. In the moment, you feel like you're scratching the itch to be social. But that's not enough sociality. The information stream is too low fidelity, and you end up feeling more and more lonely.

You think in the moment, I'm doing this because I want to be connected, but this doesn't really connect you and you end up horse off. So just be careful about the highly addictive games. Red Red Redemption 2, Zelda, Breath of the Wild on the Switch, all this stuff. That's fine. Those are beautiful games, and I have no problem with you playing that. All right. We have a final segment here before we do.

I want to mention briefly another sponsor, longtime sponsor. That is our friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that gives you more than 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to each just 15 minutes long. You can access best in class actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more. You can do this on to go and be entertained at the same time. The way Jesse and I use Blinkist is to help do triage on the list of books we're thinking about reading. There's a nonfiction book I'm thinking about reading and I read, you know, a lot, 70 to 80 books a year.

How do I know that this is worth it? I'll listen to the blink. Right from the app, 15 minute summer. Oh, I see what this is about, and that's not what I thought. Or, ooh, this seems even more interesting than before. Let me definitely get it. So there's a lot of ways to use Blinkis, but that's one way we use it. It's helped triage which books we've heard about that we think are actually worth buying to read.

There's also a new promotion they have going on right now. It's called Blinkist Connect that allows you to give another person unlimited access to your account for free. So it's basically two for the price of one. All right. So it's a way of you actually sharing the love that is Blinkist. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-N-K-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial,

Blinkist.com slash deep. And remember now for a limited time, you can use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account. You'll be getting two premium subscriptions for the price of one when you go to Blinkist.com slash deep. The other thing I want to talk about here briefly is our friends at Policy Genius. Life insurance is one of these things that if there's anyone who depends on you, you know you need, or if you have some, you know you probably need a lot more. You got to ask, how much money would those who depend on me need to be okay if the unfortunate was to happen to me?

So we all know this. So why don't we have enough life insurance? Because we don't know how to get it. Do you go to an insurance company? Do you go to a store? Like, are they going to make you do feats of endurance to see, like, whether you qualify for insurance? This is where policy genius enters the scene because they make this process easy.

their technology allows you to compare life insurance quotes from America's top insurers in just a few clicks so you can find your lowest price. You know you're paying a good price and not getting fleeced and move on on your way. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for up to $1 million of coverage. Some of these options offer same-day approval and avoid unnecessary medical experience. exams. Remember, policy genius works for you and not the insurance companies. This means they don't have an incentive to recommend one insurer over another so you can trust their guidance. So save time and money and provide your family with a financial safety net using PolicyGenius. Head to PolicyGenius.com slash deep questions or click the link in the description to get your

free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com slash deep questions. All right, let's go on to our final segment. This final segment, I often like to take something that's out there in the world of the internet or the news and react to it. So what I'm going to do is I want to load a article here that is, well, by me. So I have this on the screen. For those who are watching episode 285 at the deeplife.com or at Cal Newport Media on YouTube, I have loaded my latest article for The New Yorker. It is called How to Have a More Productive Year.

The subhead, knowledge work is always changing, and our approach to it needs to change, too. So I just want to summarize a couple points from this piece. It begins with an interesting question. I look at my bookshelf, and I see I have productivity guides on here, because I collect these, the date all the way back to 1959. The earliest modern-style business productivity guide I have is James T. McKay's book, The Management of Time. And then I have books from there covering every decade up until our current moment in my own books. And so early in this article, I actually go through each decade, and I look at all these books.

I say, okay, here's the motivating question. We've been looking at this question of how to manage your time as a professional since 19. Or before. Why don't we have it figured out? Why isn't there just this is the right way to do it? We've been writing about this forever. And so as I go through these books and answer emerges, which is the challenges of work keep changing. And if we look at the advice in 1959, it looks different than the advice that Peter Drucker gives in 1967,

which looks different than the advice that Edwin Bliss gives in the 70s, which is different than the advice that Stephen Covey gives in the 80s and 90s, which is quite different than the advice. advice that David Allen gives in the early 2000s because the demands of work and our relationship with work keeps changing. You read Peter Drucker in 1967. It's a space age optimism. Yeah, you can optimize how you work. Of course, it's get data. Keep a time log of everything you do.

Go back and study it. Look for what he calls time wasters. Eliminate those from your schedules. Optimize your time allocation. You'll be great. Space age optimism. jump ahead to the 1970s and the book Edwin C. Bliss is getting things done to ABCs of time management. All that optimism is gone.

The economic malaise with stagflation of the 1970s and the books, it's bloodless and technocratic. And it's an alphabetical list of different aspects of office life with some advice for each. But then by the 80s where we get hypercapitalism and naval gazing self-actualization, we get Stephen Covey. that's like, no, no, no, here's what we're going to do. The point of all this work is to satisfy your deepest values, and we're going to have this really complex system all built around self-actualization. Here's my roles, and they're important to me, and everything aims towards, like, fulfilling my values there.

But then you jump to David Allen, getting things done 2001, and suddenly you have a reversal. that all of that self-actualization ambition is gone again because what's happening in the world when Alan's writing this book, network computers in the office, email, and the explosion in work volume and distraction that has just begun. So Alan's way more nihilistic. He says, forget self-actualization. We just want to automate the hell out of work so that we can just find some mental peace. There's no purpose to our work. We're a machinery gadget, just cranking out widgets. And all we want to do is just try to like get some peace among this.

It doesn't even care. Like just let's just have a mind like water moments of Zen. It was just responding to the issues of the time. So then the piece says what are the issues of our current time? And I would say in the pandemic and pandemic aftermath, too much to do. Nialism about our work. Like what's all this busyness for and communication overload or the defining features? And I say, so what's the right advice for right now?

and then I give classic Cal Newport advice, right? So if you want to see classic Cal Newport advice, Trojan horsed into the New Yorker, you will find that in this article, I talk about structure task systems, Trello boards with roles and statuses and columns. I talk about multi-scale planning,

daily, weekly, quarterly, or strategic, whatever you want to call it. And I talk about communication rules, office hours, for example, things you can put in place. reverse meetings, things you can put in place to take the interactions you have to do in your job and prevent them from unfolding in these asynchronous back and force all day long. So it's like the core gospel of Cal Newport.

I sort of elaborate these ideas for a new audience. And then in the end, I do some conclusion. I don't want to give it all the way. You should read the article. But anyways, I thought this was an interesting point. We're never going to be done with the question of how to be organized in work, and it's because the target shifts. So we have to be okay with that. There is no canonical system will ever arrive at that we can say now we know how to work. We are going to have to

keep updating. The key is doing this without making that updating of our system all we ever do. So I'm going to read from my conclusion here to sort of summarize how I'm thinking about that. How do we keep reappraising the way we work without getting lost and endless tweaking and upgrading of our organizational systems. Not maintaining any type of to-do list is a bad idea, but so is the quixotic chase of a perfect system that doesn't actually exist. The challenge in cultivating a sustainable approach

to modern knowledge work is to locate the space between productivity fetishism and the knee-jerk rejection of productivity thinking as toxic or unnecessary. To achieve and hold a position and leadership in this age of innovation, a man must spend a part of every day in self-development James McKay writes in the preface to his 1959 advice guide,

he was more right than he likely realized. We're never free from the need to keep reassessing how we work, but we cannot let this become the entire story. It's a bit of med of advice for everything we do here. It is important to keep thinking about in our current technological work moment, what's the right way to work. You don't want to be haphazard. But once you have a planned it works, execute and get on with the other stuff.

check in every once in a while. Keep up with what you need to change in the world of work, but don't make thinking about how you work be your primary activity. It's easier said than done. But I think that's the challenge we all face. That's the challenge hopefully I'm helping you with on this podcast. All right, Jesse. I think we should wrap it up there.

We did about two and a half hour of podcasting right before this. I read an audio book all last week, so I don't know how much of my voice is left. Let's call it quits now, but thank you, everyone, for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, 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 to 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.